The Satanic Verses

own home something like that
    I like butter I like toast
    Verses Spoono who do you think makes such damn things up
    So I called down the wrath of God I pointed my finger I shot him in the heart but she bitch I thought bitch cool as ice
    stood and waited just waited and then I don’t know I can’t be sure we weren’t alone
    Something like this
    Rekha was there floating on her carpet you remember her Spoono
    you remember Rekha on her carpet when we fell and someone else mad looking guy Scottish get-up
gora
type
    didn’t catch the name
    She saw them or she didn’t see them I can’t be sure she just stood there
    It was Rekha’s idea take her upstairs summit of Everest once you’ve been there the only way is down
    I pointed my finger at her we went up
    I didn’t push her
    Rekha pushed her
    I wouldn’t have pushed her
    Spoono
    Understand me Spoono
    Bloody hell
    I loved that girl.

    Salahuddin was thinking how Sisodia, with his remarkable gift for the chance encounter (Gibreel stepping out in front of London traffic, Salahuddin himself panicking before an open aircraft door, and now, it seemed, Alleluia Cone in her hotel lobby) had finally bumped accidentally into death; – and thinking, too, about Allie, less lucky a faller than himself, making (instead of her longed-for solo ascent of Everest) this ignominiously fatal descent, – and about how he was going to die for his verses, but could not find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.
    There was a knocking at the door.
Open, please. Police
. Kasturba had called them, after all.
    Gibreel took the lid off the wonderful lamp of Changez Chamchawala and let it fall clattering to the floor.
    He’s hidden a gun inside
, Salahuddin realized. ‘Watch out,’ he shouted. ‘There’s an armed man in here.’ The knocking stopped, and now Gibreel rubbed his hand along the side of the magic lamp: once, twice, thrice.
    The revolver jumped up, into his other hand.
    A fearsome jinnee of monstrous stature appeared
, Salahuddin remembered.
‘What is your wish? I am the slave of him who holds the lamp
.’ What a limiting thing is a weapon, Salahuddin thought, feeling oddly detached from events. – Like Gibreel when the sickness came. – Yes, indeed; a most confining manner of thing. – For how few the choices were, now that Gibreel was the
armed man
and he, the
unarmed;
how the universe had shrunk! The true djinns of old had the power to open the gates of the Infinite, to make all things possible, to render all wonders capable of being attained; how banal, in comparison, was this modern spook, this degraded descendant of mighty ancestors, this feeble slave of a twentieth-century lamp.
    “I told you a long time back,’ Gibreel Farishta quietly said, ‘that if I thought the sickness would never leave me, that it would always return, I would not be able to bear up to it.’ Then, very quickly, before Salahuddin could move a finger, Gibreel put thebarrel of the gun into his own mouth; and pulled the trigger; and was free.
    He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water’s shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.
    ‘Come along,’ Zeenat Vakil’s voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt – in spite of his humanity – he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one’s good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. ‘My place,’ Zeeny offered. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
    ‘I’m coming,’ he answered her, and turned away from the view.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The quotations from the Quran in this book are composites of the English versions of N. J. Dawood in the Penguin edition and of Maulana Muhammad Ali (Lahore, 1973), with a few touches of my own; that from Faiz Ahmad Faiz is a variant of the translation by Mahmood Jamal in the
Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry
. For the description of the Manticore, I’m indebted to Jorge Luis Borges’
Book of Imaginary Beings
, while the material on