The Satanic Verses

there was Ridley, the most terrifying of the regular cast, who looked like a Francis Bacon painting of a mouthful of teeth waving at the end of a sightless pod, and who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney Weaver. The stars of the show, its Kermit and Miss Piggy, were the very fashionable, slinkily attired, stunningly hair-styled duo, Maxim and Mamma Alien, who yearned to be – what else? – television personalities. They were played by Saladin Chamcha and Mimi Mamoulian, and they changed their voices along with their clothes, to say nothing of their hair, which could go from purple to vermilion between shots, which could stand diagonally three feet up from their heads or vanish altogether; or their features and limbs, because they were capable of changing all of them, switching legs, arms, noses, ears, eyes, and every switch conjured up a different accent from their legendary, protean gullets. What made the show a hit was its use of the latest computer-generated imagery. The backgrounds were all simulated: spaceship, other-world landscapes, intergalactic game-show studios; and the actors, too, were processed through machines, obliged to spend four hours every day being buried under the latest in prosthetic make-up which – once the video-computers had gone to work – made them look just like simulations, too. Maxim Alien, space playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic wrestling champion and universal all-comers pasta queen, were overnight sensations. Prime-time beckoned; America, Eurovision, the world.
    As
The Aliens Show
got bigger it began to attract political criticism. Conservatives attacked it for being too frightening, too sexually explicit (Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard about Miss Weaver), too
weird
. Radical commentators began to attack its stereotyping, its reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of positive images. Chamcha came under pressure to quit the show; refused; became a target.‘Trouble waiting when I go home,’ he told Zeeny. ‘The damn show isn’t an allegory. It’s an entertainment. It aims to please.’
    ‘To please whom?’ she wanted to know. ‘Besides, even now they only let you on the air after they cover your face with rubber and give you a red wig. Big deal deluxe, say I.’
    ‘The point is,’ she said when they awoke the next morning, ‘Salad darling, you really are good looking, no quesch. Skin like milk, England returned. Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you could be next in line. I’m serious, yaar. They need a new face. Come home and you could be the next, bigger than Bachchan was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn’t as funny as theirs.’
    When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one ‘moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden. ‘It isn’t easy to tell you this, but I’m married now, and not just to wife but life.’
The accent slippage again. ‘I
really came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn’t the play. He’s in his late seventies now, and I won’t have many more chances. He hasn’t been to the show; Muhammad must go to the mountain.’
    My father, Changez Chamchawala, owner of a magic lamp
. ‘Changez Chamchawala, are you kidding, don’t think you can leave me behind,’ she clapped her hands. ‘I want to check out the hair and toenails.’ His father, the famous recluse. Bombay was a culture of re-makes. Its architecture mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented
The Magnificent Seven
and
Love Story
, obliging all its heroes to save at least one village from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at least once in their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too, had taken to importing their lives. Changez’s invisibility was an Indian dream of the crorepati penthoused wretch of Las Vegas; but a dream was not a photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her own eyes. ‘He makes faces at people if he’s in a bad mood,’ Saladin warned her. ‘Nobody believes it till it happens, but it’s true. Suchfaces! Gargoyles. Also, he’s a prude and he’ll call you a tart and anyway I’ll probably have a fight with him, it’s on the cards.’
    What Saladin Chamcha had come to India for: forgiveness. That