The Satanic Verses

Or, or. As if he’s the guy who’s awake and this is the bloody nightmare. His bloody dream: us. Here. All of it.’ Chamcha stared at him. ‘Crazy, right,’ he said. ‘Who knows if angels even sleep, never mind dream. I sound crazy. Am I right or what?’
    ‘Yes. You sound crazy.’
    ‘Then what the hell,’ he wailed, ‘is going on in my head?’

    The longer he spent without going to sleep the more talkative he became, he began to regale the hostages, the hijackers, as well as the dilapidated crew of Flight 420, those formerly scornful stewardesses and shining flight-deck personnel who were now looking mournfully moth-eaten in a corner of the plane and even losing their earlier enthusiasm for endless games of rummy, – with his increasingly eccentric reincarnation theories, comparing their sojourn on that airstrip by the oasis of Al-Zamzam to a second period of gestation, telling everybody that they were all dead to the world and in the process of being regenerated, made anew. This idea seemed to cheer him up somewhat, even though it made many of the hostages want to string him up, and he leapt up on to a seat to explain that the day of their release would be the day of their rebirth, a piece of optimism that calmed his audience down. ‘Strange but true!’ he cried. ‘That will be day zero, arid because we will all share the birthday we will all be exactly the same age from that day on, for the rest of our lives. How do you call it when fifty kids come out of the same mother? God knows. Fiftuplets. Damn!’
    Reincarnation, for frenzied Gibreel, was a term beneath whose shield many notions gathered a-babeling: phoenix-from-ashes, theresurrection of Christ, the transmigration, at the instant of death, of the soul of the Dalai Lama into the body of a new-born child … such matters got mixed up with the avatars of Vishnu, the metamorphoses of Jupiter, who had imitated Vishnu by adopting the form of a bull; and so on, including of course the progress of human beings through successive cycles of life, now as cockroaches, now as kings, towards the bliss of no-more-returns.
To be born again, first you have to die
. Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; the new flesh had been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. ‘The old must die, you get my message, or the new cannot be whatnot.’
    Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his exhaustion-beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on Chamcha’s shoulder, while Saladin – prolonged captivity erodes certain reluctances among the captives – would stroke his face and kiss the top of his head,
There, there, there
. On other occasions Chamcha’s irritation would get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old Gramsci chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that’s what’s happening to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is trying to be born into your flesh.

    ‘You want to hear something really crazy?’ Gibreel after a hundred and one days offered Chamcha more confidences. ‘You want to know why I’m here?’ And told him anyway: ‘For a woman. Yes, boss. For the bloody love of my bloody life. With whom I have spent a sum total of days three point five. Doesn’t that prove I really am cracked? QED, Spoono, old Chumch.’
    And: ‘How to explain it to you? Three and a half days of it, how long do you need to know that the best thing has happened, the deepest thing, the has-to-be-it? I swear: when I kissed her there were mother-fucking sparks, yaar, believe don’t believe, she said it was static electricity in the carpet but I’ve kissed chicks inhotel rooms before and this was a definite first, a definite one-and-only. Bloody electric shocks, man, I had to jump back with pain.’
    He had no words to express her, his woman of mountain ice, to express how it had been in that moment when his life had been in pieces at his feet and she had become its meaning. ‘You don’t see,’ he gave up. ‘Maybe you never met a person for whom you’d cross the world, for whom you’d leave everything, walk out and take a plane. She climbed Everest, man. Twenty-nine thousand and two feet, or maybe twenty-nine one four one. Straight to the top. You think I can’t get on a