The Satanic Verses

your civilization, Toadji; I like this one plenty fine.’
    ‘Give up on me,’ he begged her. ‘I don’t like people dropping in to see me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven-tiles and kabaddi, I can’t recite my prayers, I don’t know what should happen at a nikah ceremony, and in this city where I grewup I get lost if I’m on my own. This isn’t home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes my heart tremble and my head spin.’
    ‘You’re a stupid,’ she shouted at him. ‘A stupid. Change back! Damn fool! Of course you can.’ She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back to his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost, and he would not become a phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he was going to use it.

    ‘You never married,’ he said when they both lay sleepless in the small hours. Zeeny snorted. ‘You’ve really been gone too long. Can’t you see me? I’m a blackie.’ Arching her back and throwing off the sheet to show off her lavishness. When the bandit queen Phoolan Devi came out of the ravines to surrender and be photographed, the newspapers at once uncreated their own myth of her
legendary beauty
. She became
plain, a common creature, unappetizing
where she had been
toothsome
. Dark skin in north India. ‘I don’t buy it,’ Saladin said. ‘You don’t expect me to believe that.’
    She laughed. ‘Good, you’re not a complete idiot yet. Who needs to marry? I had work to do.’
    And after a pause, she threw his question back at him.
So, then. And you
?
    Not only married, but rich. ‘So tell, na. How you live, you and the mame.’ In a five-storey mansion in Notting Hill. He had started feeling insecure there of late, because the most recent batch of burglars had taken not only the usual video and stereo but also the wolfhound guard dog. It was not possible, he had begun to feel, to live in a place where the criminal elements kidnapped the animals. Pamela told him it was an old local custom. In the Olden Days, she said (history, for Pamela, was divided into the Ancient Era, the Dark Ages, the Olden Days, the British Empire, the Modern Age and the Present), petnapping was good business. The poor would steal the canines of the rich, train them to forget their names, and sell them back to their grieving, helpless owners inshops on Portobello Road. Pamela’s local history was always detailed and frequently unreliable. ‘But, my God,’ Zeeny Vakil said, ‘you must sell up pronto and move. I know those English, all the same, riff-raff and nawabs. You can’t fight their bloody traditions.’
    My wife, Pamela Lovelace, frail as porcelain, graceful as gazelles
, he remembered.
I put down roots in the women I love
. The banalities of infidelity. He put them away and talked about his work.
    When Zeeny Vakil found out how Saladin Chamcha made his money, she let fly a series of shrieks that made one of the medallioned Arabs knock at the door to make sure everything was all right. He saw a beautiful woman sitting up in bed with what looked like buffalo milk running down her face and dripping off the point of her chin, and, apologizing to Chamcha for the intrusion, he withdrew hastily,
sorry, sport, hey, you’re some lucky guy
.
    ‘You poor potato,’ Zeeny gasped between peals of laughter. ‘Those Angrez bastards. They really screwed you up.’
    So now his work was funny. ‘I have a gift for accents,’ he said haughtily. ‘Why I shouldn’t employ?’
    ‘ “
Why I should not employ
?” ’ she mimicked him, kicking her legs in the air. ‘Mister actor, your moustache just slipped again.’
    Oh my God.
    What’s happening to me?
    What the devil?
    Help.
    Because he did have that gift, truly he did, he was the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for your packet of garlicflavoured crisps, he was your very man. He made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas. On the radio he could convince an audience that he was Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United States. Once, in a radio play for thirty-seven voices, he interpreted every single part under a variety of pseudonyms and nobody everworked it out. With his female equivalent, Mimi Mamoulian, he ruled the airwaves of Britain. They had such a large slice of