The Satanic Verses

were absent, and neither Anahita nor her mother gave Chamcha a greeting that could be described as warm. Only Haji Sufyan was welcoming: ‘Come, come, sit; you’re looking good.’ The café was oddly empty, and even Gibreel’s presence failed to create much of a stir. It took Chamcha a few seconds to understand what was up; then he saw the quartet of white youths sitting at a corner table, spoiling for a fight.
    The young Bengali waiter (whom Hind had been obliged to employ after her elder daughter’s departure) came over and took their order – aubergines, sikh kababs, rice – while staring angrily in the direction of the troublesome quartet, who were, as Saladin now perceived, very drunk indeed. The waiter, Amin, was as annoyed with Sufyan as the drunks. ‘Should never have let them sit,’ he mumbled to Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘Now I’m obliged to serve. It’s okay for the seth; he’s not the front line, see.’
    The drunks got their food at the same time as Chamcha and Gibreel. When they started complaining about the cooking, the atmosphere in the room grew even more highly charged. Finally they stood up. ‘We’re not eating this shit, you cunts,’ yelled the leader, a tiny, runty fellow with sandy hair, a pale thin face, and spots. ‘It’s
shit
. You can go fuck yourselves, fucking cunts.’ His three companions, giggling and swearing, left the café. The leader lingered for a moment. ‘Enjoying your food?’ he screamed at Chamcha and Gibreel. ‘It’s fucking shit. Is that what you eat at home, is it? Cunts.’ Gibreel was wearing an expression that said, loud and clear: so this is what the British, that great nation of conquerors, have become in the end. He did not respond. The little rat-faced speaker came over. ‘I asked you a fucking question,’ hesaid. ‘I said. Are you fucking enjoying your fucking
shit dinner
?’ And Saladin Chamcha, perhaps out of his annoyance that Gibreel had not been confronted by the man he’d all but killed – catching him off guard from behind, the coward’s way – found himself answering: ‘We would be, if it wasn’t for you.’ Ratboy, swaying on his feet, digested this information; and then did a very surprising thing. Taking a deep breath, he drew himself up to his full five foot five; then leaned forward, and spat violently and copiously all over the food.
    ‘Baba, if that’s in your top ten,’ Gibreel said in the taxi home, ‘don’t take me to the places you don’t like so much.’
    ‘ “Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,” ’ Chamcha replied. ‘It means, “My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.” Nabokov.’
    ‘Him again,’ Gibreel complained. ‘What bloody language?’
    ‘He made it up. It’s what Kinbote’s Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In
Pale Fire
.’
    ‘Perndirstan,’
Farishta repeated. ‘Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?’
    They were almost back at Allie’s flat overlooking Brickhall Fields. ‘The playwright Strindberg,’ Chamcha said, absently, as if following some profound train of thought, ‘after two unhappy marriages, wedded a famous and lovely twenty-year-old actress called Harriet Bosse. In the
Dream
she was a great Puck. He wrote for her, too: the part of Eleanora in
Easter
. An “angel of peace”. The young men went crazy for her, and Strindberg, well, he got so jealous he almost lost his mind. He tried to keep her locked up at home, far from the eyes of men. She wanted to travel; he brought her travel books. It was like the old Cliff Richard song:
Gonna lock her up in a trunk/so no big hunk/can steal her away from me
.’
    Farishta’s heavy head nodded in recognition. He had fallen into a kind of reverie. ‘What happened?’ he inquired as they reached their destination. ‘She left him,’ Chamcha innocently declared. ‘She said she could not reconcile him with the human race.’

    Alleluia Cone read, as she walked home from the Tube, her mother’s deliriously happy letter from Stanford, Calif. ‘If people tell you happiness is unattainable,’ Alicja wrote in large, looping, back-leaning, left-handed letters, ‘kindly point them in my direction. I’ll put them straight. I found it twice, the first time with your father, as you know, the second with this kind, broad man whose face is the exact colour of the oranges that grow all over these parts. Contentment, Allie. It beats