The Satanic Verses

framed; up that side-street he’d find the scene of the murder of the Jamaican, Ulysses E. Lee, and in that public house the stain on the carpet marking where Jatinder Singh Mehtabreathed his last. ‘Thatcherism has its effect,’ she declaimed, while Chamcha, who no longer had the will or the words to argue with her, to speak of justice and the rule of law, watched Anahita’s mounting rage. – ‘No pitched battles these days,’ Mishal elucidated. ‘The emphasis is on small-scale enterprises and the cult of the individual, right? In other words, five or six white bastards murdering us, one individual at a time.’ These days the posses roamed the nocturnal Street, ready for aggravation. ‘It’s our turf,’ said Mishal Sufyan of that Street without a blade of grass in sight. ‘Let ’em come and get it if they can.’
    ‘Look at her,’ Anahita burst out. ‘So ladylike, in’she? So refined. Imagine what Mum’d say if she knew.’ – ‘If she knew what, you little grass –?’ But Anahita wasn’t to be cowed: ‘O, yes,’ she wailed. ‘O, yes, we know, don’t think we don’t. How she goes to the bhangra beat shows on Sunday mornings and changes in the ladies into those tarty-farty clothes – who she wiggles with and jiggles with at the Hot Wax daytime disco that she thinks I never heard of before – what went on at that bluesdance she crept off to with Mister You-know-who Cocky-bugger – some big sister,’ she produced her grandstand finish, ‘she’ll probably wind up dead of wossname
ignorance
.’ Meaning, as Chamcha and Mishal well knew, – those cinema commercials, expressionist tombstones rising from earth and sea, had left the residue of their slogan well implanted, no doubt of that –
Aids
.
    Mishal fell upon her sister, pulling her hair, – Anahita, in pain, was nevertheless able to get in another dig, ‘Least I didn’t cut my hair into any weirdo pincushion, must be a nutter who fancies
that,’
and the two departed, leaving Chamcha to wonder at Anahita’s sudden and absolute espousal of her mother’s ethic of femininity.
Trouble brewing
, he concluded.
    Trouble came: soon enough.

    More and more, when he was alone, he felt the slow heaviness pushing him down, until he fell out of consciousness, runningdown like a wind-up toy, and in those passages of stasis that always ended just before the arrival of visitors his body would emit alarming noises, the howlings of infernal wahwah pedals, the snare-drum cracking of satanic bones. These were the periods in which, little by little, he grew. And as he grew, so too did the rumours of his presence; you can’t keep a devil locked up in the attic and expect to keep it to yourself forever.
    How the news got out (for the people in the know remained tight-lipped, the Sufyans because they feared loss of business, the temporary beings because their feelings of evanescence had rendered them unable, for the moment, to act, – and all parties because of the fear of the arrival of the police, never exactly reluctant to enter such establishments, bump accidentally into a little furniture and step by chance on a few arms legs necks): he began to appear to the locals in their dreams. The mullahs at the Jamme Masjid which used to be the Machzikel HaDath synagogue which had in its turn replaced the Huguenots’ Calvinist church; – and Dr Uhuru Simba the man-mountain in African pill-box hat and red-yellow-black poncho who had led the successful protest against
The Aliens Show
and whom Mishal Sufyan hated more than any other black man on account of his tendency to punch uppity women in the mouth, herself for example, in public, at a meeting, plenty of witnesses, but it didn’t stop the Doctor,
he’s a crazy bastard, that one
, she told Chamcha when she pointed him out from the attic one day,
capable of anything; he could’ve killed me, and all because I told everybody he wasn’t no African, I knew him when he was plain Sylvester Roberts from down New Cross way; fucking witch doctor, if you ask me; –
and Mishal herself, and Jumpy, and Hanif; – and the Bus Conductor, too, they all dreamed him, rising up in the Street like Apocalypse and burning the town like toast. And in every one of the thousand and one dreams he, Saladin Chamcha, gigantic of limb and horn-turbaned of head, was singing, in a voice so diabolically ghastly and guttural that it proved impossible to identify the verses, even though the dreams turned out to have the