The Satanic Verses

maybe people don’t like you very much?’
    When it became known that the Granny Ripper had struck again, suggestions that the solution to the hideous killings of old women by a ‘human fiend’, – who invariably arranged his victims’ internal organs neatly around their corpses, one lung by each ear, and the heart, for obvious reasons, in the mouth, – would most likely be found by investigating the new occultism among the city’s blacks which was giving the authorities so much cause for concern, – began to be heard with growing frequency. The detention and interrogation of ‘tints’ intensified accordingly, as did the incidence of snap raids on establishments ‘suspected of harbouring underground occultist cells’. What was happening, although nobody admitted it or even, at first, understood, was that everyone, black brown white, had started thinking of the dream-figure as
real
, as a being who had crossed the frontier, evading the normal controls, and was now roaming loose about the city. Illegal migrant, outlaw king, foul criminal or race-hero, Saladin Chamcha was getting to be true. Stories rushed across the city in every direction: a physiotherapist sold a shaggy-dog tale to the Sundays, was not believed, but
no smoke without fire
, people said; it was a precarious state of affairs, and it couldn’t be long before the raid on the Shaandaar Café that would send the whole thing higher than the sky. Priests became involved, adding another unstable element – the linkage between the term
black
and the sin
blasphemy –
to the mix. In his attic, slowly, Saladin Chamcha grew.

    He chose Lucretius over Ovid. The inconstant soul, the mutability of everything, das Ich, every last speck. A being going through life can become so other to himself as to
be another
, discrete, severed from history. He thought, at times, of Zeeny Vakil on that other planet, Bombay, at the far rim of the galaxy: Zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity. The optimism of those ideas! The certainty on which they rested: of will, of choice! But, Zeeny mine, life just happens to you: like an accident. No: it happens to you as a result of your condition. Not choice, but – at best – process, and, atworst, shocking, total change. Newness: he had sought a different kind, but this was what he got.
    Bitterness, too, and hatred, all these coarse things. He would enter into his new self; he would be what he had become: loud, stenchy, hideous, outsize, grotesque, inhuman, powerful. He had the sense of being able to stretch out a little finger and topple church spires with the force growing in him, the anger, the anger, the anger.
Powers
.
    He was looking for someone to blame. He, too, dreamed; and in his dreams, a shape, a face, was floating closer, ghostly still, unclear, but one day soon he would be able to call it by its name.
    I am
, he accepted,
that I am
.
    Submission.

    His cocooned life at the Shaandaar B and B blew apart the evening Hanif Johnson came in shouting that they had arrested Uhuru Simba for the Granny Ripper murders, and the word was they were going to lay the Black Magic thing on him too, he was going to be the voodoo-priest baron-samedi fall guy, and the reprisals – beatings-up, attacks on property, the usual – were already beginning. ‘Lock your doors,’ Hanif told Sufyan and Hind. ‘There’s a bad night ahead.’
    Hanif was standing slap in the centre of the café, confident of the effect of the news he was bringing, so when Hind came across to him and hit him in the face with all her strength he was so unprepared for the blow that he actually fainted, more from surprise than pain. He was revived by Jumpy, who threw a glass of water at him the way he had been taught to do by the movies, but by then Hind was hurling his office equipment down into the street from upstairs; typewriter ribbons and red ribbons, too, the sort used for securing legal documents, made festive streamers in the air. Anahita Sufyan, unable any more to resist the demonic proddings of her jealousy, had told Hind about Mishal’s relations with the up-and-coming lawyer-politico, and after that there hadbeen no holding Hind, all the years of her humiliation had come pouring out of her, it wasn’t enough that she was stuck in this country full of jews and strangers who lumped her in with the negroes, it wasn’t enough that her husband was a weakling who performed the Haj but couldn’t be bothered with godliness in his own home, but this had to