The Satanic Verses

important as her, no, just a second-rank love will do for me, a side-dish amour; the foot in the other boot. How about it, Gibreel, just three-little-words, what do you say?’
    Give me time
.
    ‘It isn’t even as if I’m asking for something new, something you haven’t already agreed to, done, indulged in. Lying with a phantom is not such a bad-bad thing. What about down at that old Mrs Diamond’s – in the boathouse, that night? Quite a tamasha, you don’t think so? So: who do you think put it on? Listen: I can take for you any form you prefer; one of the advantages of my condition. You wish her again, that boathouse mame from the stone age? Hey presto. You want the mirror image of your own mountain-climber sweaty tomboy iceberg? Also, allakazoo, allakazam. Who do you think it was, waiting for you after the old lady died?’
    All that night he walked the city streets, which remained stable, banal, as if restored to the hegemony of natural laws; while Rekha – floating before him on her carpet like an artiste on a stage, just above head-height – serenaded him with the sweetest of love songs, accompanying herself on an old ivory-sided harmonium, singing everything from the gazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz to the best old film music, such as the defiant air sung by the dancer Anarkali in the presence of the Grand Mughal Akbar in the fifties classic
Mughal-e-Azam, –
in which she declares and exults in her impossible, forbidden love for the Prince, Salim, – ‘Pyaar kiya to darna kya?’ – That is to say, more or less,
why be afraid of love
? and Gibreel, whom she had accosted in the garden of his doubt, felt the music attaching strings to his heart and leading him towards her, because what she asked was, just as she said, such a little thing, after all.
    He reached the river; and another bench, cast-iron camels supporting the wooden slats, beneath Cleopatra’s Needle. Sitting, he closed his eyes. Rekha sang Faiz:
    Do not ask of me, my love
,
that love I once had for you …

How lovely you are still, my love
,
but I am helpless too;

for the world has other sorrows than love
,
and other pleasures too
.
Do not ask of me, my love
,
that love I once had for you
.

    Gibreel saw a man behind his closed eyes: not Faiz, but another poet, well past his heyday, a decrepit sort of fellow. – Yes, that was his name: Baal. What was he doing here? What did he have to say for himself? – Because he was certainly trying to say something; his speech, thick and slurry, made understanding difficult …
Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions. The first is asked when it’s weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to
society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world
.
    ‘What’s the second question?’ Gibreel asked aloud.
    Answer the first one first
.

    Gibreel, opening his eyes at dawn, found Rekha unable to sing, silenced by expectations and uncertainties. He let her have it straight off. ‘It’s a trick. There is no God but God. You are neither the Entity nor Its adversary, but only some caterwauling mist. No compromises; I won’t do deals with fogs.’ He saw, then, the emeralds and brocades fall from her body, followed by the flesh, until only the skeleton remained, after which that, too, crumbled away; finally, there was a piteous, piercing shriek, as whatever was left of Rekha flew with vanquished fury into the sun.
    And did not return: except at – or near – the end.
    Convinced that he had passed a test, Gibreel realized that a great weight had lifted from him; his spirits grew lighter by the second, until by the time the sun was in the sky he was literally delirious with joy. Now it could really begin: the tyranny of his enemies, of Rekha and Alleluia Cone and all the women who wished to bind him in the chains of desires and songs, was broken for good; now he could feel light streaming out, once more, from the unseen point just behind his head; and his weight, too, began to diminish. – Yes, he was losing the last traces of his humanity, the gift of flight was being restored to him, as he became ethereal, woven of illumined air. – He could simply step, this minute, off this