The Satanic Verses

proving insufficient, whose fault, please, was this? His, personally, or some other Personage? – Children were playing in the garden of his doubting, among the midge-clouds and rosebushes and despair. Grandmother’s footsteps, ghostbusters, tag. Ellowen deeowen, London. The fall of angels, Gibreel reflected, was not the same kettle as the Tumble of Woman and Man. In the case of human persons, the issue had been morality. Of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they shouldst not eat, and ate. Woman first, and at her suggestion man, acquired the verboten ethical standards, tastily apple-flavoured: the serpent brought them a value system. Enabling them, among other things, to judge the Deity Itself, making possible in good time all the awkward inquiries: why evil? Why suffering? Why death? – So, out they went. It didn’t want Its pretty creatures getting above their station. – Children giggled in his face:
something straaange in the neighbourhood
. Armed with zapguns, they made as if to busthim like some common, lowdown spook.
Come away from there
, a woman commanded, a tightly groomed woman, white, a redhead, with a broad stripe of freckles across the middle of her face; her voice was full of distaste.
Did you hear me? Now! –
Whereas the angels’ crash was a simple matter of power: a straightforward piece of celestial police work, punishment for rebellion, good and tough ‘pour encourager les autres’. – Then how unconfident of Itself this Deity was, Who didn’t want Its finest creations to know right from wrong; and Who reigned by terror, insisting upon the unqualified submission of even Its closest associates, packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of Hell … he checked himself. These were satanic thoughts, put into his head by Iblis-Beelzebub-Shaitan. If the Entity were still punishing him for his earlier lapse of faith, this was no way to earn remission. He must simply continue until, purified, he felt his full potency restored. Emptying his mind, he sat in the gathering darkness and watched the children (now at some distance) play.
Ip-dip-sky-blue who’s-there-not-you not-because-you’re-dirty not-because-you’re-clean
, and here, he was sure, one of the boys, a grave eleven-year-old with outsize eyes, stared straight at him:
my-mother-says you’re-the-fairy-queen
.
    Rekha Merchant materialized, all jewels and finery. ‘Bachchas are making rude rhymes about you now. Angel of the Lord,’ she gibed. ‘Even that little ticket-girl back there, she isn’t so impressed. Still doing badly, baba, looks like to me.’

    On this occasion, however, the spirit of the suicide Rekha Merchant had not come merely to mock. To his astonishment she claimed that his many tribulations had been of her making: ‘You imagine there is only your One Thing in charge?’ she cried. ‘Well, lover-boy, let me put you wise.’ Her smart-alec Bombay English speared him with a sudden nostalgia for his lost city, but she wasn’t waiting for him to regain his composure. ‘Remember that I died for love of you, you creepo; this gives me rights. In particular, to be revenged upon you, by totally bungling up yourlife. A man must suffer for causing a lover’s leap; don’t you think so? That’s the rule, anyway. For so long now I’ve turned you inside out; now I’m just fell up. Don’t forget how I was so good at forgiving! You liked it also, na? Therefore I have come to say that compromise solution is always possible. You want to discuss it, or you prefer to go on being lost in this craziness, becoming not an angel but a down-and-out hobo, a stupid joke?’
    Gibreel asked: ‘What compromise?’
    ‘What else?’ she replied, her manner transformed, all gentleness, with a shine in her eyes. ‘My farishta, a so small thing.’
    If he would only say he loved her:
    If he would only say it, and, once a week, when she came to lie with him, show his love:
    If on a night of his choice it could be as it was during the ball-bearings-man’s absences on business:
    ‘Then I will terminate the insanities of the city, with which I am persecuting you; nor will you be possessed, any longer, by this crazy notion of changing,
redeeming
the city like something left in a pawnshop; it’ll all be calm-calm; you can even live with your paleface mame and be the greatest film star in the world; how could I be jealous, Gibreel, when I’m already dead, I don’t want you to say I’m as