The Satanic Verses

two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century B C , that the word
shaitan
is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’ This speech was one of which the ‘real’ Rekha would plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition and never having evinced the faintest interest in comparative religion or, of all things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever since he fell from
Bostan
was, Gibreel knew, not real in any objective, psychologically or corporeally consistent manner. – What, then, was she? It would be easy to imagine her as a thing of his own making – his own accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would account for her ease with the arcana. – But how had he himself come by such knowledge? Had he truly, in days gone by, possessed it and then lost it, as his memory now informed him? (He had a nagging notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix his thoughts upon his ‘dark age’, that is to say the period during which he had unaccountably come to disbelieve in his angelhood, he was faced with a thick bank of clouds, through which, peer and blink as he might, he could make out little more than shadows.) – Or could it be that the material now filling his thoughts, the echo, to give but a single example, of how his lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon had found the adversary
squat like a toad
by Eve’s ear in Eden, using his wiles ‘to reach/The organs of her fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams’, had in fact been planted in his head by that same ambiguous Creature, that Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia’s boudoir, and awoken him fromhis long waking sleep? – Then Rekha, too, was perhaps an emissary of this God, an external, divine antagonist and not an inner, guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.
    His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully. He had never been able to tolerate pain. ‘Always a cry-baby,’ Rekha laughed in his face. Shaitan had understood more:
    Lives there who loves his pain
?
Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell
,
Though thither doomed? Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt
,
And boldly venture to whatever place

Farthest from pain, where thou mightst hope to change

Torment with ease …

    He couldn’t have put it better. A person who found himself in an inferno would do anything, rape, extortion, murder, felo de se, whatever it took to get out … he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose as Rekha, still present on her flying rug, and intuiting his ascent (descent?) into the realm of metaphysical speculation, attempted to get things back on to more familiar ground. ‘You should have stuck with me,’ she opined. ‘You could have loved me, good and proper. I knew how to love. Not everybody has the capacity for it; I do, I mean did. Not like that self-centred blonde bombshell thinking secretly about having a child and not even mentioning same to you. Not like your God, either; it’s not like the old days, when such Persons took proper interest.’
    This needed contesting on several grounds. ‘You were married, start to finish,’ he replied. ‘Ball-bearings. I was your side dish. Nor will I, who waited so long for Him to manifest Himself, now speak poorly of Him post facto, after the personal appearance. Finally, what’s all this baby-talk? You’ll go to any extreme, seems like.’
    ‘You don’t know what hell is,’ she snapped back, dropping the mask of her imperturbability. ‘But, buster, you sure will. If you’d ever said, I’d have thrown over that ball-bearings bore in two secs,but you kept mum. Now I’ll see you down there: Neechayvala’s Hotel.’
    ‘You’d never have left your children,’ he insisted. ‘Poor fellows, you even threw them down first when you jumped.’ That set her off. ‘Don’t you talk! To dare to talk! Mister, I’ll cook your goose! I’ll fry your heart and eat it up on toast! – And as to your Snow White princess, she is of the opinion that a child is a mother’s property only, because men may come and men may go but she goes on forever, isn’t it? You’re only the seed, excuse me, she is the garden. Who asks a seed permission to plant? What do you know, damn fool Bombay boy messing with the