The Satanic Verses

elated child shouted back: ‘Look at me! See how quickly I learned! Aren’t you pleased with me? Aren’t you pleased?’ It was a dream to weep at; for when he awoke, there was no bicycle and no child.
    ‘What will you do now?’ Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage of the Hot Wax nightclub, and he’d answered, too lightly: ‘Me? I think I’ll come back to life.’ Easier said than done; it was life, after all, that had rewarded his love of a dream-child with childlessness; his love of a woman, with her estrangement from him and her insemination by his old college friend; his love of a city, by hurling him down towards it from Himalayan heights; and his love of a civilization, by having him bedevilled, humiliated, broken upon its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he was whole again, and there was, too, the example of Niccolò Machiavelli to consider (a wronged man, his name, like that of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a synonym for evil; whereas in fact his staunch republicanism had earned him the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel? – enough, at any rate, to make most men confess to raping their grandmothers, or anything else, just to make the pain go away; – yet he had confessed to nothing, having committed no crimes while serving the Florentine republic, that all-too-brief interruption in the power of the Medici family); if Niccolò could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror-of-princes literature then so much in vogue,
Il Principe
, following it with the magisterial
Discorsi
, then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then; roll back that boulder from the cave’s dark mouth, and to hell with the legal problems.
    Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla – in whose eyes Chamcha’s metamorphoses had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of special-effects fantasy-movies
(Labyrinth
,
Legend, Howard the Duck)
entered the Real – drove Saladin over to Pamela’s place in the DJ’s van; this time, though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. ‘Good luck,’ said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. ‘No, thanks,’ Saladin replied. ‘When you’ve fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?’ He waved goodbye. ‘Good for you,’ Mishal said, and they had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids, with whom his relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One of them, an evil-looking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed an imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: ‘Fast forward!’ His was a generation that believed in skipping life’s boring, troublesome, unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax to the next.
Welcome home
, Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.
    Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. ‘I didn’t think people did that any more,’ he said. ‘Not since
Dr Strangelove
.’ Her pregnancy wasn’t visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but confirmed that it was going well. ‘So far so good.’ She was naturally off balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she ‘stuck with’ her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby); but in point of fact Chamcha felt
one down
(there had been a period in which he’d been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter’s amusing little books) throughout this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had denied him at least thrice; but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason for Chamcha’s discomfiture – and he had not, let’s recall, arrived in this awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood – was that he had realized, on seeing Pamela, with her too-bright brightness, her face like asaintly mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising