The Satanic Verses

all tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village. – ‘We Londoners can be proud of our hospitality,’ he’d told Pamela, and she, giggling helplessly, took him to see the Buster Keaton movie of that name, in which the comedian, arriving at the end of an absurd railway line, gets a murderous reception. In those days they had enjoyed such oppositions, and after hot disputes had ended up in bed … He returned his wandering thoughts to the subject of the metropolis. Its – he repeated stubbornly to himself – long history as a refuge, a role it maintained in spite of the recalcitrant ingratitude of the refugees’ children; and without any of the self-congratulatory huddled-masses rhetoric of the ‘nation of immigrants’ across the ocean, itself far from perfectly open-armed. Would the United States, with its are-you-now-have-you-ever-beens, have permitted Ho Chi Minh to cook in its hotel kitchens? What would its McCarran–Walter Act have to say about a latter-day Karl Marx, standing bushy-bearded at its gates, waiting to cross its yellow lines? O Proper London! Dull would he truly be of soul who did not prefer its faded splendours, its new hesitancies, to the hot certainties of that transatlantic New Rome with its Nazified architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make its human occupants feel like worms … London, in spite of an increase in excrescences such as the NatWest Tower – a corporate logo extruded into the third dimension – preserved the human scale.
Viva! Zindabad
!
    Pamela had always taken a caustic view of such rhapsodies. ‘These are museum-values,’ she used to tell him. ‘Sanctified, hanging in golden frames on honorific walls.’ She had never had any time for what endured. Change everything! Rip it up! He said: ‘If you succeed you will make it impossible for anybody like you, in one or two generations’ time, to come along.’ She celebrated this vision of her own obsolescence. If she ended up likethe dodo – a stuffed relic,
Class Traitor, 1980s –
that would, she said, certainly suggest an improvement in the world. He begged to differ, but by this time they had begun to embrace: which surely was an improvement, so he conceded the other point.
    (One year, the government had introduced admission charges at museums, and groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of culture. When he saw this, Chamcha had wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man counter-protest. Didn’t these people know what the stuff inside was
worth
? There they were, cheerfully rotting their lungs with cigarettes worth more per packet than the charges they were protesting against; what they were demonstrating to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural heritage … Pamela put her foot down. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said. She held the then-correct view: that the museums were
too valuable
to charge for. So: ‘Don’t you dare,’ and to his surprise he found he did not. He had not meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have given, maybe, in the right circumstances, his
life
for what was in those museums. So he could not take seriously these objections to a charge of a few pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure and ill-defended position.)
    – And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you. —
    Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw himself, accompanied by a small boy of about five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly at first, made heroic efforts to gain and maintain his balance, with the ferocity of one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha ran along behind his imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the parcel-rack over the rear wheel. Then he released it, and the boy (notknowing himself to be unsupported) kept going: balance came like a gift of flight, and the two of them were gliding down the avenue, Chamcha running, the boy pedalling harder and harder. ‘You did it!’ Saladin rejoiced, and the equally