The Satanic Verses

blackened parapet and soar away above the old grey river; – or leap from any of its bridges and never touch land again. So: it was time to show the city a great sight, for when it perceived the Archangel Gibreel standing in all his majesty upon the western horizon, bathed in the rays of the rising sun, then surely its people would be sore afraid and repent them of their sins.
    He began to enlarge his person.
    How astonishing, then, that of all the drivers streaming along the Embankment – it was, after all, rush-hour – not one should so much as look in his direction, or acknowledge him! This was in truth a people who had forgotten how to see. And because the relationship between men and angels is an ambiguous one – in which the angels, or mala’ikah, are both the controllers of nature and the intermediaries between the Deity and the human race; but at the same time, as the Quran clearly states,
we said unto the angels, be submissive unto Adam
, the point being to symbolize man’s ability to master, through knowledge, the forces of nature which the angels represented – there really wasn’t much that the ignored and infuriated malak Gibreel could do about it. Archangels could only speak when men chose to listen. What a bunch! Hadn’t he warned the Over-Entity at the very beginning about this crew of criminals and evildoers? ‘Wilt thou place in the earth such as make mischief in it and shed blood?’ he had asked, and the Being, as usual, replied only that he knew better. Well, there they were, the masters of the earth, canned like tuna on wheels and blind as bats, their heads full of mischief and their newspapers of blood.
    It really was incredible. Here appeared a celestial being, all radiance, effulgence and goodness, larger than Big Ben, capable of straddling the Thames colossus-style, and these little ants remained immersed in drive-time radio and quarrels with fellow-motorists. ‘I am Gibreel,’ he shouted in a voice that shook every building on the riverbank: nobody noticed. Not one person came running out of those quaking edifices to escape the earthquake. Blind, deaf and asleep.
    He decided to force the issue.
    The stream of traffic flowed past him. He took a mighty breath, lifted one gigantic foot, and stepped out to face the cars.

    Gibreel Farishta was returned to Allie’s doorstep, badly bruised, with many grazes on his arms and face, and jolted into sanity, by a tiny shining gentleman with an advanced stammer whointroduced himself with some difficulty as the film producer S.S. Sisodia, ‘known as Whiwhisky because I’m papa partial to a titi tipple; mamadam, my caca card.’ (When they knew each other better, Sisodia would send Allie into convulsions of laughter by rolling up his right trouser-leg, exposing the knee, and pronouncing, while he held his enormous wraparound movie-man glasses to his shin: ‘Self pawpaw portrait.’ He was longsighted to a degree: ‘Don’t need help to see moomovies but real life gets too damn cloclose up.’) It was Sisodia’s rented limo that hit Gibreel, a slow-motion accident luckily, owing to traffic congestion; the actor ended up on the bonnet, mouthing the oldest line in the movies:
Where am I
, and Sisodia, seeing the legendary features of the vanished demigod squashed up against the limousine’s windshield, was tempted to answer:
Baback where you bibi belong: on the iska iska iscreen. –
‘No bobobones broken,’ Sisodia told Allie. ‘A mimi miracle. He ista ista istepped right in fafa front of the weewee wehicle.’
    So you’re back
, Allie greeted Gibreel silently.
Seems this is where you always land up after you fall
.
    ‘Also Scotch-and-Sisodia,’ the film producer reverted to the question of his sobriquets. ‘For hoohoo humorous reasons. My fafavourite pup pup poison.’
    ‘It is very kind of you to bring Gibreel home,’ Allie belatedly got the point. ‘You must allow us to offer you a drink.’
    ‘Sure! Sure!’ Sisodia actually clapped his hands. ‘For me, for whowhole of heehee Hindi cinema, today is a baba banner day.’

    ‘You have not heard perhaps the story of the paranoid schizophrenic who, believing himself to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, agreed to undergo a lie-detector test?’ Alicja Cohen, eating gefilte fish hungrily, waved one of Bloom’s forks under her daughter’s nose. ‘The question they asked him: are you Napoleon? And the answer he gave, smiling wickedly, no doubt:
No
. So they watch the machine,