The Satanic Verses

no freelances permitted. She stared them down, finished her cigarette, left. Fearless. Maybe crazy. Now in her middle thirties she was a qualified doctor with a consultancy at Breach Candy Hospital, who worked with the city’s homeless, who had gone to Bhopal the moment the news broke of the invisible American cloud that ate people’s eyes and lungs. She was an art critic whose book on the confining myth of authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest? – had created a predictable stink, especially because of its title. She had called it
The Only Good Indian
. ‘Meaning, is a dead,’ she told Chamcha when she gave him a copy. ‘Why should therebe a good, right way of being a wog? That’s Hindu fundamentalism. Actually, we’re all bad Indians. Some worse than others.’
    She had come into the fullness of her beauty, long hair left loose, and she was no stick-figure these days. Five hours after she entered his dressing-room they were in bed, and he passed out. When he awoke she explained ‘I slipped you a mickey finn.’ He never worked out whether or not she had been telling the truth.
    Zeenat Vakil made Saladin her project. ‘The reclamation of,’ she explained. ‘Mister, we’re going to get you back.’ At times he thought she intended to achieve this by eating him alive. She made love like a cannibal and he was her long pork. ‘Did you know,’ he asked her, ‘of the well-established connection between vegetarianism and the man-eating impulse?’ Zeeny, lunching on his naked thigh, shook her head. ‘In certain extreme cases,’ he went on, ‘too much vegetable consumption can release into the system biochemicals that induce cannibal fantasies.’ She looked up and smiled her slanting smile. Zeeny, the beautiful vampire. ‘Come off it,’ she said. ‘We are a nation of vegetarians, and ours is a peaceful, mystical culture, everybody knows.’
    He, for his part, was required to handle with care. The first time he touched her breasts she spouted hot astounding tears the colour and consistency of buffalo milk. She had watched her mother die like a bird being carved for dinner, first the left breast then the right, and still the cancer had spread. Her fear of repeating her mother’s death placed her chest off limits. Fearless Zeeny’s secret terror. She had never had a child but her eyes wept milk.
    After their first lovemaking she started right in on him, the tears forgotten now. ‘You know what you are, I’ll tell you. A deserter is what, more English than, your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don’t think it’s so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache.’
    ‘There’s something strange going on,’ he wanted to say, ‘my voice,’ but he didn’t know how to put it, and held his tongue.
    ‘People like you,’ she snorted, kissing his shoulder. ‘You comeback after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves. Well, baby, we got a lower opinion of you.’ Her smile was brighter than Pamela’s. ‘I see,’ he said to her, ‘Zeeny, you didn’t lose your Binaca smile.’
    Binaca
. Where had that come from, the long forgotten toothpaste advertisement? And the vowel sounds, distinctly unreliable. Watch out, Chamcha, look out for your shadow. That black fellow creeping up behind.
    On the second night she arrived at the theatre with two friends in tow, a young Marxist film-maker called George Miranda, a shambling whale of a man with rolled-up kurta sleeves, a flapping waistcoat bearing ancient stains, and a surprisingly military moustache with waxed points; and Bhupen Gandhi, poet and journalist, who had gone prematurely grey but whose face was baby-innocent until he unleashed his sly, giggling laugh. ‘Come on, Salad baba,’ Zeeny announced. ‘We’re going to show you the town.’ She turned to her companions. ‘These
Asians
from foreign got no shame,’ she declared. ‘Saladin, like a bloody lettuce, I ask you.’
    ‘There was a TV reporter here some days back,’ George Miranda said. ‘Pink hair. She said her name was Kerleeda. I couldn’t work it out.’
    ‘Listen, George is too unworldly,’ Zeeny interrupted. ‘He doesn’t know what freaks you guys turn into. That Miss Singh, outrageous. I told her, the