The Satanic Verses

begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand the idea of shame.’
    Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. ‘Okay, you don’t have to say any more.’ She held up her hands. ‘I surrender. I’m going. Mr Saladin Chamcha. I thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but I was wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time.’
    And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. ‘Don’t let people get too close to you, Mr Saladin. Let people through your defences and the bastards go and knife you in the heart.’
    After that there had been nothing to stay for. The aeroplane lifted and banked over the city. Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a servant as his dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the city centre solid. Politicians were trying to buildcareers by going on padyatras, pilgrimages on foot across the country. There were graffiti that read:
Advice to políticos. Only step to take: padyatra to hell
. Or, sometimes:
to Assam
.
    Actors were getting mixed up in politics: MGR, N. T. Rama Rao, Bachchan. Durga Khote complained that an actors’ association was a ‘red front’. Saladin Chamcha, on Flight 420, closed his eyes; and felt, with deep relief, the tell-tale shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self.
    The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr Chamcha on that flight was that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams.

4

    T he dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of
Bostan
he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil’s departure he had fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long way away. The dream-woman had been so loaded down with explosives that she was not so much the bomber as the bomb; the woman walking the aisles held a baby that seemed to be sleeping noiselessly, a baby so skilfully swaddled and held so close to the breast that Chamcha could not see so much as a lock of new-born hair. Under the influence of the remembered dream he conceived the notion that the baby was in fact a bundle of dynamite sticks, or some sort of ticking device, and he was on the verge of crying out when he came to his senses and admonished himself severely. This was precisely the type of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. He was a neat man in a buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, contented life. He was a member of the real world.
    He travelled alone, shunning the company of the othermembers of the Prospero Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin wearing Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the manner of natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking too much cheap airline champagne and importuning the scorn-laden stewardesses who, being Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type persons; and behaving, in short, with normal thespian impropriety. The woman holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players, of turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay ‘rail roko’ demonstration was being broken up by police lathi-charges. The newspaper’s reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed. The police had issued a ‘note’.
Neither the reporter nor any other person was assaulted intentionally
. Chamcha drifted into airline sleep. The city of lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second surprise of that macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He was bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him anyway: here, travelling incognito in the economy class of Flight AI-420, was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself.
    ‘Sleep okay?’ He realized the question was addressed to him, and turned away from the apparition of the great movie actor to