The Satanic Verses

she whispered into his ear: ‘You in with the rest?’ and he understood that she was involved in the great conspiracy, too. ‘If you are,’ he heard himself saying, ‘then you can count me in.’ She nodded, looking pleased. Chamcha felt a warmth filling him up, and he began to wonder about taking hold of one of the physiotherapist’s exceedingly dainty, albeit powerful, little fists; but just then a shout came from the direction of the blind man: ‘My stick, I’ve lost my stick.’
    ‘Poor old bugger,’ said Hyacinth, and hopping off Chamcha she darted across to the sightless fellow, picked up the fallen stick, restored it to its owner, and came back to Saladin. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you this pm; okay, no problems?’
    He wanted her to stay, but she acted brisk. ‘I’m a busy woman, Mr Chamcha. Things to do, people to see.’
    When she had gone he lay back and smiled for the first time in a long while. It did not occur to him that his metamorphosis must be continuing, because he was actually entertaining romantic notions about a black woman; and before he had time to think such complex thoughts, the blind man next door began, once again, to speak.
    ‘I have noticed you,’ Chamcha heard him say, ‘I have noticed you, and come to appreciate your kindness and understanding.’ Saladin realized that he was making a formal speech of thanks to the empty space where he clearly believed the physiotherapist was still standing. ‘I am not a man who forgets a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment, please know that it is remembered, and fondly, too …’ Chamcha did not have the courage to call out,
she isn’t there, old man, she left some
time back
. He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: ‘I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?’ Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden. And finally, after an unbearable pause, bathos: ‘Oh,’ the soliloquist bellowed, ‘oh, if ever a body suffered …!’
    We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him.
Once I was lighter, happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins
.
    Still no Pamela.
What the hell
. That night, he told the manticore and the wolf that he was with them, all the way.

    The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin’s lungs had been all but emptied of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth Phillips. It turned out to be a well-organized affair on a pretty large scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the
detenus
, as the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in the Detention Centre nearby. Not being one of the grand strategists of the escape, Chamcha simply waited by his bed as instructed until Hyacinth brought him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former guards. There were many shadowy figures running through the glowing night, and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could never have imagined, men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on occasion, built partly of brick or stone; there were men with rhinoceros horns instead of noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly, silently, to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by the large holes they had bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out, free, going their separate ways, without hope, but alsowithout shame. Saladin Chamcha and Hyacinth Phillips ran side by side, his goat-hoofs clip-clopping on the hard pavements:
east
she told him, as he heard his own footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran, taking the low roads to London town.

4

    J umpy Joshi had become Pamela Chamcha’s lover by what she afterwards called ‘sheer chance’ on the night she learned of her husband’s death in the
Bostan
explosion, so that the sound of his old college friend Saladin’s voice speaking from beyond the grave in the middle of the night, uttering the five gnomic words
sorry, excuse please, wrong number, –
speaking, moreover, less than two hours after Jumpy and Pamela had made, with the assistance of two bottles of whisky, the two-backed