The Satanic Verses

tea, newspapers and mail; he never failed, on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for a visit of at least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon three floors below. He brought Saladin little presents: propitiatory offerings of books, old theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to put her foot down, he argued against her with an innocent, but also mulish passion: ‘We can’t behave as if the man’s invisible. He’s here, isn’t he? Then we must involve him in our lives.’ Pamela replied sourly: ‘Why don’t you just ask him to come down and join us in bed?’ To which Jumpy, seriously, replied: ‘I didn’t think you’d approve.’
    In spite of his inability to relax and take for granted Chamcha’s residence upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this unusual way, his predecessor’s blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives of love and friendship, he cheered up a good deal, and found the idea of fatherhood growing on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him weep, the next morning, in delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was running down an avenue of overarching trees, helping a small boy to ride a bicycle. ‘Aren’t you pleased with me?’ the boy cried in his elation. ‘Look: aren’t you pleased?’

    Pamela and Jumpy had both become involved in the campaign mounted to protest against the arrest of Dr Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper Murders. This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin. ‘The whole thing’s completely trumped-up,based on circumstantial evidence and insinuations. Hanif reckons he can drive a truck through the holes in the prosecution case. It’s just a straightforward malicious fit-up; the only question is how far they’ll go. They’ll verbal him for sure. Maybe there will even be witnesses saying they saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly they want to get him. Pretty badly, I’d say; he’s been a loud voice around town for some while.’ Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan’s loathing for Simba, he said: ‘The fellow has – has he not? – a record of violence towards women …’ Jumpy turned his palms outward. ‘In his personal life,’ he owned, ‘the guy’s frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn’t mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don’t have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you’re black.’ Chamcha let this pass. ‘The point is, this isn’t personal, it’s political,’ Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, ‘Um, there’s a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you’d like, if you’d be interested, that is, come along if you want.’
    ‘You asked him to go with us?’ Pamela was incredulous. She had started to feel nauseous most of the time, and it did nothing for her mood. ‘You actually did that without consulting me?’ Jumpy looked crestfallen. ‘Doesn’t matter, anyhow,’ she let him off the hook. ‘Catch
him
going to anything like
that
.’
    In the morning, however, Saladin presented himself in the hall, wearing a smart brown suit, a camel coat with a silk collar, and a rather natty brown homburg hat. ‘Where are you off to?’ Pamela, in turban, army-surplus leather jacket and tracksuit bottoms that revealed the incipient thickening of her middle, wanted to know. ‘Bloody Ascot?’ ‘I believe I was invited to a meeting,’ Saladin answered in his least combative manner, and Pamela freaked. ‘You want to be careful,’ she warned him. ‘The way you look, you’ll probably get fucking mugged.’

    What drew him back into the otherworld, into that undercity whose existence he had so long denied? – What, or rather who,forced him by the simple fact of its (her) existence, to emerge from that cocoon-den in which he was being – or so he believed – restored to his former self, and plunge once more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and of himself? ‘I’ll be able to fit in the meeting,’ Jumpy Joshi had told Saladin, ‘before my karate class.’ – Where his star pupil waited: long, rainbow-haired and, Jumpy added, just past her eighteenth birthday. – Not knowing that Jumpy, too, was suffering some of the same illicit longings, Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.

    He had expected the meeting to be small, envisaging a back