The Satanic Verses

emotional condition that he managed a valedictory lump in the throat even for wicked Hal.
At whose pool table
, he wondered vaguely,
is Baby playing now
?
    In India, the war between men and women showed no sign of abating. In the
Indian Express
he read an account of the latest ‘bride suicide’.
The husband, Prajapati, is absconding
. On the next page, in the weekly small-ad marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of young women proudly offered, brides of ‘wheatish’ complexions. Chamcha remembered Zeeny’s friend, the poet Bhupen Gandhi, speaking of such things with passionate bitterness. ‘How to accuse others of being prejudiced when our own hands are so dirty?’ he had declaimed. ‘Many of you in Britain speak of victimization. Well. I have not been there, I don’t know your situation, but in my personal experience I have never been able to feel comfortable about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously, I am not. Even speaking culturally, you find here all the bigotries, all the procedures associated with oppressor groups. So while many Indians are undoubtedly oppressed, I don’t think any of
us
are entitled to lay claim to such a glamorous position.’
    ‘Trouble with Bhupen’s radical critiques,’ Zeeny had remarked, ‘is that reactionaries like Salad baba here just love to lap them up.’
    An armaments scandal was raging; had the Indian government paid kickbacks to middlemen, and then gone in for a cover-up? Vast sums of money were involved, the Prime Minister’s credibility had been weakened, but Chamcha couldn’t be bothered with any of it. He was staring at the fuzzy photograph, on an inside page, of indistinct, bloated shapes floating down-river in large numbers. In a north Indian town there had been a massacre of Muslims, and their corpses had been dumped in the water, where they awaited the ministrations of some twentieth-century Gaffer Hexam. There were hundreds of bodies, swollen and rancid; the stench seemed to rise off the page. And in Kashmir a once-popular Chief Minister who had ‘made an accommodation’ with the Congress-I had shoes hurled at him during the Eidprayers by irate groups of Islamic fundamentalists. Communalism, sectarian tension, was omnipresent: as if the gods were going to war. In the eternal struggle between the world’s beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day. Sisodia’s voice intruded on these morose thoughts. The producer had woken up to see the photograph from Meerut staring up from Chamcha’s fold-out table. ‘Fact is,’ he said without any of his usual bonhomie, ‘religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.’
    KNOWN HISTORY SHEETERS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS , a government spokesman alleged, but ‘progressive elements’ rejected this analysis. CITY CONSTABULARY CONTAMINATED BY COMMUNAL AGITATORS , the counter-argument suggested. HINDU NATIONALISTS RUN AMUCK . A political fortnightly contained a photograph of signboards that had been mounted outside the Juma Masjid in Old Delhi. The Imam, a loose-bellied man with cynical eyes, who could be found most mornings in his ‘garden’ – a red-earth-and-rubble waste land in the shadow of the mosque – counting rupees donated by the faithful and rolling up each note individually, so that he seemed to be holding a handful of thin beedi-like cigarettes – and who was no stranger to communalist politics himself, was apparently determined that the Meerut horror should be turned to good account.
Quench the Fire under our Breast
, the signboards cried.
Salute with Reverence those who met Martyrdom from the Bullets of the Polis
. Also:
Alas! Alas! Alas! Awak the Prime Minister
! And finally, the call to action:
Bandh will be observed
, and the date of the strike.
    ‘Bad days,’ Sisodia went on. “For the moomoo movies also TV and economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects.’ Then he cheered up as stewardesses approached. ‘I will confess to being a mem member of the mile high cluck cluck club,” he said gaily within the attendants’ hearing. ‘And you? Should I see what I can ficfic fix?’
    O, the dissociations of which the human mind is capable, marvelled Saladin gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling andjoggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on