The Satanic Verses

series of suggestions – the visitors’ gallery must be packed, the dispensers of justice must know that they were being watched; the court must be picketed, and a rota should be organized; there was the need for a financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: ‘Nobody mentions his history of sexual aggression.’ Jumpy shrugged. ‘Some of the women he’s attacked are in this room. Mishal, for example, is over there, look, in the corner by the stage. But this isn’t the time or place for that. Simba’s bull craziness is, you could say, a trouble in the family. What we have here is trouble with the Man.’ In other circumstances, Saladin would have had a good deal to say in response to such a statement. – He would have objected, for one thing, that a man’s record of violence could not be set aside so easily when he was accused of murder. – Also that he didn’t like the use of such American terms as ‘the Man’ in the very different British situation, where there was no history of slavery; it sounded like an attempt to borrow the glamour of other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt about the organizers’ decision to punctuate the speeches with such meaning-loaded songs as
We Shall Overcome
, and even, for Pete’s sake,
Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika
. As if all causes were the same, all histories interchangeable. – But he said none of these things, because his head had begun to spin and his senses to reel, owing to his having been given, for the first time in his life, a stupefying premonition of his death.
    – Hanif Johnson was finishing his speech.
As Dr Simba has written, newness will enter this society by collective, not individual
,
actions
. He was quoting what Chamcha recognized as one of Camus’s most popular slogans.
The passage from speech to moral action
, Hanif was saying,
has a name: to become human. –
And now a pretty young British Asian woman with a slightly-too-bulbous nose and a dirty, bluesy voice was launching into Bob Dylan’s song,
I Pity the Poor Immigrant
. Another false and imported note, this: the song actually seemed rather hostile towards immigrants, though there were lines that struck chords, about the immigrant’s visions shattering like glass, about how he was obliged to ‘build his town with blood’. Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image of the rivers of blood, would appreciate that. – All these things Saladin experienced and thought as if from a considerable distance. – What had happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan’s presence at the Friends Meeting House, Saladin Chamcha, looking in her direction, saw a blazing fire burning in the centre of her forehead; and felt, in the same moment, the beating, and the icy shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings. – He experienced the kind of blurring associated with double vision, seeming to look into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed meeting hall, but the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and a girl’s forehead could burn with ominous flames. –
She’s death to me, that’s what it means
, Chamcha thought in one of the two worlds, while in the other he told himself not to be foolish; the room was full of people wearing those inane tribal badges that had latterly grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted with fluorescent paint; Mishal probably had on some piece of space-age junk jewellery. – But his other self took over again,
she’s off limits to you
, it said,
not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim. –
Whereupon his heart got in on the act, bababoom, boomba, dabadoom.
    Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing concern. ‘I’m the one with the bun in the oven,’ she said with a gruff remnant of affection. ‘What business have you got to pass out?’ Jumpy insisted: ‘You’d best come with me tomy class; just sit quietly, and afterwards I’ll take you home.’ – But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was required.
No, no, I’ll go with Jumpy, I’ll be fine. It was just hot in there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing
.
    There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning against a movie poster. The film was
Mephisto
, the story of an actor seduced into a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor – played by