The Satanic Verses

jumbo-jet for a woman like that?’
    The harder Gibreel Farishta tried to explain his obsession with the mountain-climber Alleluia Cone, the more Saladin tried to conjure up the memory of Pamela, but she wouldn’t come. At first it would be Zeeny who visited him, her shade, and then after a time there was nobody at all. Gibreel’s passion began to drive Chamcha wild with anger and frustration, but Farishta didn’t notice it, slapped him on the back,
cheer up, Spoono, won’t be long now
.

    On the hundred and tenth day Tavleen walked up to the little goateed hostage, Jalandri, and motioned with her finger. Our patience has been exhausted, she announced, we have sent repeated ultimatums with no response, it is time for the first sacrifice. She used that word: sacrifice. She looked straight into Jalandri’s eyes and pronounced his death sentence. ‘You first. Apostate traitor bastard.’ She ordered the crew to prepare for take-off, she wasn’t going to risk a storming of the plane after the execution, and with the point of her gun she pushed Jalandri towards the open door at the front, while he screamed and begged for mercy. ‘She’s got sharp eyes,’ Gibreel said to Chamcha. ‘He’s a cut-sird.’ Jalandri had become the first target because of his decision to give up the turban and cut his hair, which made him a traitor to his faith, a shorn Sirdarji.
Cut-Sird
. A seven-letter condemnation; no appeal.
    Jalandri had fallen to his knees, stains were spreading on the seatof his trousers, she was dragging him to the door by his hair. Nobody moved. Dara Buta Man Singh turned away from the tableau. He was kneeling with his back to the open door; she made him turn round, shot him in the back of the head, and he toppled out on to the tarmac. Tavleen shut the door.
    Man Singh, youngest and jumpiest of the quartet, screamed at her: ‘Now where do we go? In any damn place they’ll send the commandos in for sure. We’re gone geese now.’
    ‘Martyrdom is a privilege,’ she said softly. ‘We shall be like stars; like the sun.’

    Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white, transforming carpet, its ghost-white shining up through the night. The Alps, France, the coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened meadowlands. Mr Saladin Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. The world had rediscovered Flight AI-420, the Boeing 747
Bostan
. Radar tracked it; radio messages crackled.
Do you want permission to land
? But no permission was requested.
Bostan
circled over England’s shore like a gigantic seabird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero.
    When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise, because this time the three male hijackers didn’t argue with Tavleen, there were no fierce whispers about the
fuel
about
what the fuck you’re doing
but just a mute stand-off, they wouldn’t even talk to one another, as if they had given up hope, and then it was Man Singh who cracked and went for her. The hostages watched the fight to the death, unable to feel involved, because a curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft, a kind of inconsequential casualness, a fatalism, one might say. They fell to the floor and her knife went up through his stomach. That was all, the brevity of it adding to its seeming unimportance. Then in the instant when she rose up it was as if everybody awoke, it became clear to them all that she really meant business, she was going through with it, all the way, she was holding in her hand the wirethat connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath her gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down.
    No, not death: birth.



G ibreel when he submits to the inevitable, when he slides heavy-lidded towards visions of his angeling, passes his loving mother who has a different name for him, Shaitan, she calls him, just like Shaitan, same to same, because he has been fooling around with the tiffins to be carried into the city for the office workers’ lunch, mischeevious imp, she slices the air with her hand, rascal has been putting Muslim meat compartments into Hindu non-veg tiffin-carriers, customers are up in arms. Little devil, she scolds, but then folds him in her arms, my little farishta, boys will be boys, and he falls past her into sleep, growing bigger as he falls and the falling begins to feel like flight, his