The Satanic Verses

altered, but extant, state.’
    She swung to face him, halfway up the stairs to the bedroom, and pointed dramatically towards the open sitting-room door. ‘In that case,’ she triumphed, ‘why did it also happen to the dog?’

    He might have told her, that night, that he wanted to end it, that his conscience no longer permitted, – he might have been willingto face her rage, and to live with the paradox that a decision could be simultaneously conscientious and immoral (because cruel, unilateral, selfish); but when he entered the bedroom she grabbed his face with both hands, and watching closely to see how he took the news she confessed to having lied about contraceptive precautions. She was pregnant. It turned out she was better at making unilateral decisions than he, and had simply taken from him the child Saladin Chamcha had been unable to provide. ‘I wanted it,’ she cried defiantly, and at close range. ‘And now I’m going to have it.’
    Her selfishness had pre-empted his. He discovered that he felt relieved; absolved of the responsibility for making and acting upon moral choices, – because how could he leave her now? – he put such notions out of his head and allowed her, gently but with unmistakable intent, to push him backwards on to the bed.

    Whether the slowly transmogrifying Saladin Chamcha was turning into some sort of science-fiction or horror-video
mutey
, some random mutation shortly to be naturally selected out of existence, – or whether he was evolving into an avatar of the Master of Hell, – or whatever was the case, the fact is (and it will be as well in the present matter to proceed cautiously, stepping from established fact to established fact, leaping to no conclusion until our yellowbrick lane of things-incontrovertibly-so has led us to within an inch or two of our destination) that the two daughters of Haji Sufyan had taken him under their wing, caring for the Beast as only Beauties can; and that, as time passed, he came to be extremely fond of the pair of them himself. For a long while Mishal and Anahita struck him as inseparable, fist and shadow, shot and echo, the younger girl seeking always to emulate her tall, feisty sibling, practising karate kicks and Wing Chun forearm smashes in flattering imitation of Mishal’s uncompromising ways. More recently, however, he had noted the growth of a saddening hostility between the sisters. One evening at hisattic window Mishal was pointing out some of the Street’s characters, – there, a Sikh ancient shocked by a racial attack into complete silence; he had not spoken, it was said, for nigh on seven years, before which he had been one of the city’s few ‘black’ justices of the peace … now, however, he pronounced no sentences, and was accompanied everywhere by a crotchety wife who treated him with dismissive exasperation,
O, ignore him, he never says a dicky bird; –
and over there, a perfectly ordinary-looking ‘accountant type’ (Mishal’s term) on his way home with briefcase and box of sweetmeats; this one was known in the Street to have developed the strange need to rearrange his sitting-room furniture for half an hour each evening, placing chairs in rows interrupted by an aisle and pretending to be the conductor of a single-decker bus on its way to Bangladesh, an obsessive fantasy in which all his family were obliged to participate,
and after half an hour precisely he snaps out of it, and the rest of the time he’s the dullest guy you could meet; –
and after some moments of this, fifteen-year-old Anahita broke in spitefully: ‘What she means is, you’re not the only casualty, round here the freaks are two a penny, you only have to look.’
    Mishal had developed the habit of talking about the Street as if it were a mythological battleground and she, on high at Chamcha’s attic window, the recording angel and the exterminator, too. From her Chamcha learned the fables of the new Kurus and Pandavas, the white racists and black ‘self-help’ or vigilante posses starring in this modern
Mahabharata
, or, more accurately,
Mahavilayet
. Up there, under the railway bridge, the National Front used to do battle with the fearless radicals of the Socialist Workers Party, ‘every Sunday from closing time to opening time,’ she sneered, ‘leaving us lot to clear up the wreckage the rest of the sodding week.’ – Down that alley was where the Brickhall Three were done over by the police and then fitted up, verballed,