The Satanic Verses

marry her. He was too surprised to reply, and had to pass the telephone to a colleague who explained that the cat had got Mr Johnson’s tongue, and accepted Mishal’s offer on the dumbstruck lawyer’s behalf. So everybody was recovering from the tragedy; even Anahita, who had been obliged to live with a stiflingly old-fashioned aunt, managed to look pleased at the wedding, perhaps because Mishal had promised her her own rooms in the renovated Shaandaar Hotel. Mishal had asked Saladin to be her chief witness in recognition of his attempt to save her parents’ life, and on their way to the registry office in Pinkwalla’s van (all charges against the DJ and his boss, John Maslama, had been dropped for lack of evidence) Chamcha told the bride: ‘Today feels like a new start for me, too; perhaps for all of us.’ In his own case there had been by-pass surgery, and the difficulty of coming to terms with so many deaths, and nightmare visions of being metamorphosed once more into some sort of sulphurous, cloven-hoof demon. He was also, for a time, professionally crippled by a shame so profound that, when clients finally did begin to book him once more and ask for one of his voices, for example the voice of a frozen pea or a glove-puppet packet of sausages, he felt the memory of his telephonic crimes welling up in his throat and strangling the impersonations at birth. At Mishal’s wedding, however, he suddenly felt free. It was quite a ceremony, largely because the young couple could not refrain from kissing one another throughout the procedure, and had to be urged by the registrar (a pleasant young woman who also exhorted the guests not to drink too much that day if they planned to drive) to hurry up and get through the words before it was time for the next wedding party to arrive. Afterwards at the Shaandaar the kissing continued, the kisses becoming gradually longer and more explicit, until finally the guests had the feeling that they were intruding on a private moment, and slipped quietly away leaving Hanif and Mishal to enjoy a passion so engulfing thatthey did not even notice their friends’ departure; they remained oblivious, too, of the small crowd of children that gathered outside the windows of the Shaandaar Café to watch them. Chamcha, the last guest to leave, did the newlyweds the favour of pulling down the blinds, much to the children’s annoyance; and strolled off down the rebuilt High Street feeling so light on his feet that he actually gave a kind of embarrassed skip.
    Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy … These broodings were interrupted by a lusty snore from the seat beside him. Mr Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand, was asleep.
    The producer was evidently a hit with the stewardesses. They fussed around his sleeping person, detaching the glass from his fingers and removing it to a place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half, and trilling admiringly over his snoring head: ‘Doesn’t he look poochie? Just a little cuteso, I swear!’ Chamcha was reminded unexpectedly of the society ladies of Bombay patting him on the head during his mother’s little soirées, and fought back tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly obscene; he had removed his spectacles before falling asleep, and their absence gave him an oddly naked appearance. To Chamcha’s eyes he resembled nothing so much as an outsize Shiva lingam. Maybe that accounted for his popularity with the ladies.
    Flicking through the magazines and newspapers he was offered by the stewardesses, Saladin chanced upon an old acquaintance in trouble. Hal Valance’s sanitized
Aliens Show
had flopped badly in the United States and was being taken off the air. Worse still, his advertising agency and its subsidiaries had been swallowed by an American leviathan, and it was probable that Hal was on the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon he had set out to tame. It was hard to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed and down to his last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs Torture and her pals, relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with busted entrepreneur-boffins and insider-dealing financiersand renegade ex-ministers; but Chamcha, flying to his father’s deathbed, was in so heightened an