The Satanic Verses

by no means the only possible explanation for the screams of a black man in the hands of the custodial authorities. In his concluding remarks, afterwards termed ‘inflammatory and unprofessional’ by Inspector Kinch, Hanif linked the community liaison officer’s words to those of the notorious racist John Kingsley Read, who had once responded to news of a black man’s death with the slogan, ‘One down; one million to go.’ The crowd murmured and bubbled; it was a hot and malicious day. ‘Stay hot,’ Simba’s brother Walcott cried out to the assembly. ‘Don’t anybody cool off Maintain your rage.’
    As Simba had in effect already been tried and convicted in what he had once called the ‘rainbow press – red as rags, yellow as streaks, blue as movies, green as slime’, his end struck many white people as rough justice, a murderous monster’s retributive fall. But in another court, silent and black, he had received an entirely more favourable judgment, and these differing estimations of the deceased moved, in the aftermath of his death, on to the city streets, and fermented in the unending tropical heat. The ‘rainbow press’ was full of Simba’s support for Qazhafi, Khomeini, Louis Farrakhan; while in the streets of Brickhall, young men and women maintained, and fanned, the slow flame of their anger, a shadow-flame, but one capable of blotting out the light.
    Two nights later, behind the Charringtons Brewery in Tower Hamlets, the ‘Granny Ripper’ struck again. And the night afterthat, an old woman was murdered near the adventure playground in Victoria Park, Hackney; once again, the Ripper’s hideous ‘signature’ – the ritual arrangement of the internal organs around the victim’s body, whose precise configuration had never been made public – had been added to the crime. When Inspector Kinch, looking somewhat ragged at the edges, appeared on television to propound the extraordinary theory that a ‘copycat killer’ had somehow discovered the trademark which had been so carefully concealed for so long, and had therefore taken up the mantle which the late Uhuru Simba had let drop, – then the Commissioner of Police also deemed it wise, as a precautionary measure, to quadruple the police presence on the streets of Brickhall, and to hold such large numbers of police in reserve that it proved necessary to cancel the capital’s football programme for the weekend. And, in truth, tempers were fraying all over Uhuru Simba’s old patch; Hanif Johnson issued a statement to the effect that the increased police presence was ‘provocative and incendiary’, and at the Shaandaar and the Pagal Khana there began to assemble groups of young blacks and Asians determined to confront the cruising panda cars. At the Hot Wax, the effigy chosen for
meltdown
was none other than the perspiring and already deliquescent figure of the community liaison officer. And the temperature continued, inexorably, to rise.
    Violent incidents began to occur more frequently: attacks on black families on council estates, harassment of black schoolchildren on their way home, brawls in pubs. At the Pagal Khana a rat-faced youth and three of his cronies spat over many people’s food; as a result of the ensuing affray three Bengali waiters were charged with assault and the causing of actual bodily harm; the expectorating quartet was not, however, detained. Stories of police brutality, of black youths hauled swiftly into unmarked cars and vans belonging to the special patrol groups and flung out, equally discreetly, covered in cuts and bruises, spread throughout the communities. Self-defence patrols of young Sikh, Bengali and Afro-Caribbean males – described by their political opponents as
vigilante groups –
began to roam the borough, on foot and in oldFord Zodiacs and Cortinas, determined not to ‘take it lying down’. Hanif Johnson told his live-in lover, Mishal Sufyan, that in his opinion one more Ripper killing would light the fuse. ‘That killer’s not just crowing about being free,’ he said. ‘He’s laughing about Simba’s death as well, and that’s what the people can’t stomach.’
    Down these simmering streets, one unseasonally humid night, came Gibreel Farishta, blowing his golden horn.

    At eight o’clock that evening, a Saturday, Pamela Chamcha stood with Jumpy Joshi – who had refused to let her go unaccompanied – next to the Photo-Me machine in a corner of the main concourse of Euston station,