The Satanic Verses

inform his loving wife that he was not dead, not blown to bits in mid-air but right here, on solid ground, if he were to do this eminently sensible thing, the person who answered the phone would not recognize his name. Or thirdly: that the sound of footsteps ringing in his ears, distant footsteps, but coming closer, was not some temporary tinnitus caused by his fall, but the noise of some approaching doom, drawing closer, letter by letter, ellowen, deeowen, London.
Here I am, in Grandmother’s house. Her big eyes, hands, teeth
.
    There was a telephone extension on his bedside table. There, he admonished himself. Pick it up, dial, and your equilibrium will be restored. Such maunderings: they aren’t like you, not worthy of you. Think of her grief; call her now.
    It was night-time. He didn’t know the hour. There wasn’t a clock in the room and his wristwatch had disappeared somewhere along the line. Should he shouldn’t he? – He dialled the nine numbers. A man’s voice answered on the fourth ring.
    ‘What the hell?’ Sleepy, unidentifiable, familiar.
    ‘Sorry,’ Saladin Chamcha said. ‘Excuse, please. Wrong number.’
    Staring at the telephone, he found himself remembering a drama production seen in Bombay, based on an English original, a story by, by, he couldn’t put his finger on the name, Tennyson? No, no. Somerset Maugham? – To hell with it. – In the original and now authorless text, a man, long thought dead, returns after an absence of many years, like a living phantom, to his former haunts. He visits his former home at night, surreptitiously, and looks in through an open window. He finds that his wife, believing herself widowed, has re-married. On the window-sill hesees a child’s toy. He spends a period of time standing in the darkness, wrestling with his feelings; then picks the toy off the ledge; and departs forever, without making his presence known. In the Indian version, the story had been rather different. The wife had married her husband’s best friend. The returning husband arrived at the door and marched in, expecting nothing. Seeing his wife and his old friend sitting together, he failed to understand that they were married. He thanked his friend for comforting his wife; but he was home now, and so all was well. The married couple did not know how to tell him the truth; it was, finally, a servant who gave the game away. The husband, whose long absence was apparently due to a bout of amnesia, reacted to the news of the marriage by announcing that he, too, must surely have re-married at some point during his long absence from home; unfortunately, however, now that the memory of his former life had returned he had forgotten what had happened during the years of his disappearance. He went off to ask the police to trace his new wife, even though he could remember nothing about her, not her eyes, not the simple fact of her existence.
    The curtain fell.
    Saladin Chamcha, alone in an unknown bedroom in unfamiliar red-and-white striped pyjamas, lay face downwards on a narrow bed and wept. ‘Damn all Indians,’ he cried into the muffling bedclothes, his fists punching at frilly-edged pillowcases from Harrods in Buenos Aires so fiercely that the fifty-year-old fabric was ripped to shreds.
‘What the hell
. The vulgarity of it, the
sod it sod it
indelicacy.
What the hell
. That bastard, those bastards, their lack of
bastard
taste.’
    It was at this moment that the police arrived to arrest him.

    On the night after she had taken the two of them in from the beach, Rosa Diamond stood once again at the nocturnal window of her old woman’s insomnia, contemplating the nine-hundred-year-old sea. The smelly one had been sleeping ever since they put him to bed, with hot-water bottles packed in tightly aroundhim, best thing for him, let him get his strength. She had put them upstairs, Chamcha in the spare room and Gibreel in her late husband’s old study, and as she watched the great shining plain of the sea she could hear him moving up there, amid the ornithological prints and bird-call whistles of the former Henry Diamond, the bolas and bullwhip and aerial photographs of the Los Alamos estancia far away and long ago, a man’s footsteps in that room, how reassuring they felt. Farishta was pacing up and down, avoiding sleep, for reasons of his own. And below his footfall Rosa, looking up at the ceiling, called him in a whisper by a long-unspoken name. Martin she said. His last name the same as