The Satanic Verses

closer to ecstasy; he came to see himself as that pair of hands, he could almost feel her coolness, her responses, almost hear her cries. – He controlled himself. His desire disgusted him. She was unattainable; this was pure voyeurism, and he would not succumb to it. – But the desire Gibreel’s revelations had aroused would not go away.
    Gibreel’s sexual obsession, Chamcha reminded himself, actually made things easier. ‘She’s certainly a very attractive woman,’ he murmured by way of an experiment, and was gratified to receive a furious, strung-out glare in return. After which Gibreel, making a show of controlling himself, put his arm around Saladin and boomed: ‘Apologies, Spoono, I’m a bad-tempered bugger where she’s concerned. But you and me! We’re bhai-bhai! Been through the worst and come out smiling; come on now, enough of this little nowhere park. Let’s hit town.’
    There is the moment before evil; then the moment of; then the time after, when the step has been taken, and each subsequent stride becomes progressively easier. ‘Fine with me,’ Chamcha replied. ‘It’s good to see you looking so well.’
    A boy of six or seven cycled past them on a BMX bike. Chamcha, turning his head to follow the boy’s progress, saw that he was moving smoothly away down an avenue of overarching trees, through which the hot sunlight managed here and there to drip. The shock of discovering the location of his dream disoriented Chamcha briefly, and left him with a bad taste in his mouth: the sour flavour of might-have-beens. Gibreel hailed a taxi; and requested Trafalgar Square.
    O, he was in a high good humour that day, rubbishing London and the English with much of his old brio. Where Chamcha saw attractively faded grandeur, Gibreel saw a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances. Under the gaze ofstone lions he chased pigeons, shouting: ‘I swear, Spoono, back home these fatties wouldn’t last one day; let’s take one home for dinner.’ Chamcha’s Englished soul cringed for shame. Later, in Covent Garden, he described for Gibreel’s benefit the day the old fruit and vegetable market moved to Nine Elms. The authorities, worried about rats, had sealed the sewers and killed tens of thousands; but hundreds more survived. ‘That day, starving rats swarmed out on to the pavements,’ he recalled. ‘All the way down the Strand and over Waterloo Bridge, in and out of the shops, desperate for food.’ Gibreel snorted. ‘Now I know this is a sinking ship,’ he cried, and Chamcha felt furious at having given him the opening. ‘Even the bloody rats are off.’ And, after a pause: ‘What they needed was a pied piper, no? Leading them to destruction with a tune.’
    When he wasn’t insulting the English or describing Allie’s body from the roots of her hair to the soft triangle of ‘the love-place, the goddamn yoni,’ he seemed to wish to make lists: what were Spoono’s ten favourite books, he wanted to know; also movies, female film stars, food. Chamcha offered conventional cosmopolitan answers. His movie-list included
Potemkin, Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador
. ‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ Gibreel scoffed. ‘All this Western art-house crap.’ His top ten of everything came from ‘back home’, and was aggressively lowbrow.
Mother India, Mr India, Shree Charsawbees
: no Ray, no Mrinal Sen, no Aravindan or Ghatak. ‘Your head’s so full of junk,’ he advised Saladin, ‘you forgot everything worth knowing.’
    His mounting excitement, his babbling determination to turn the world into a cluster of hit parades, his fierce walking pace – they must have walked twenty miles by the end of their travels – suggested to Chamcha that it wouldn’t take much, now, to push him over the edge.
It seems I turned out to be a confidence man, too, Mimi. The art of the assassin is to draw the victim close; makes him easier to knife
. ‘I’m getting hungry,’ Gibreel imperiously announced. ‘Take me to one of your top-ten eateries.’
    In the taxicab, Gibreel needled Chamcha, who had notinformed him of the destination. ‘Some Frenchy joint, na? Or Japanese, with raw fishes and octopuses. God, why I trust your taste.’
    They arrived at the Shaandaar Café.

    Jumpy wasn’t there.
    Nor, apparently, had Mishal Sufyan patched things up with her mother; Mishal and Hanif