The Satanic Verses

Brickhall High Street and sat there trying to decide if he was a fool. It was early in the day, so the place was almost empty, apart from a fat lady buying a box of pista barfi and jalebis, a couple of bachelor garment workers drinking chaloo chai and an elderly Polish woman from the old days when it was the Jews who ran the sweatshops round here, who sat allday in a corner with two vegetable samosas, one puri and a glass of milk, announcing to everyone who came in that she was only there because ‘it was next best to kosher and today you must do the best you can’. Jumpy sat down with his coffee beneath the lurid painting of a bare-breasted myth-woman with several heads and wisps of clouds obscuring her nipples, done life-size in salmon pink, neon-green and gold, and because the rush hadn’t started yet Mr Sufyan noticed he was down in the dumps.
    ‘Hey, Saint Jumpy,’ he sang out, ‘why you bringing your bad weather into my place? This country isn’t full enough of clouds?’
    Jumpy blushed as Sufyan bounced over to him, his little white cap of devotion pinned in place as usual, the moustache-less beard hennaed red after its owner’s recent pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad Sufyan was a burly, thick-forearmed fellow with a belly on him, as godly and as unfanatic a believer as you could meet, and Joshi thought of him as a sort of elder relative. ‘Listen, Uncle,’ he said when the café proprietor was standing over him, ‘you think I’m a real idiot or what?’
    ‘You ever make any money?’ Sufyan asked.
    ‘Not me, Uncle.’
    ‘Ever do any business? Import-export? Off-licence? Corner shop?’
    ‘I never understood figures.’
    ‘And where your family members are?’
    ‘I’ve got no family, Uncle. There’s only me.’
    ‘Then you must be praying to God continually for guidance in your loneliness?’
    ‘You know me, Uncle. I don’t pray.’
    ‘No question about it,’ Sufyan concluded. ‘You’re an even bigger fool than you know.’
    ‘Thanks, Uncle,’ Jumpy said, finishing his coffee. ‘You’ve been a great help.’
    Sufyan, knowing that the affection in his teasing was cheering the other man up in spite of his long face, called across to the light-skinned, blue-eyed Asian man who had just come in wearing a snappy check overcoat with extra-wide lapels. ‘You,Hanif Johnson,’ he called out, ‘come here and solve a mystery.’ Johnson, a smart lawyer and local boy made good, who maintained an office above the Shaandaar Café, tore himself away from Sufyan’s two beautiful daughters and headed over to Jumpy’s table. ‘You explain this fellow,’ Sufyan said. ‘Beats me. Doesn’t drink, thinks of money like a disease, owns maybe two shirts and no VCR, forty years old and isn’t married, works for two pice in the sports centre teaching martial arts and what-all, lives on air, behaves like a rishi or pir but doesn’t have any faith, going nowhere but looks like he knows some secret. All this and a college education, you work it out.’
    Hanif Johnson punched Jumpy on the shoulder. ‘He hears voices,’ he said. Sufyan threw up his hands in mock amazement. ‘Voices, oop-baba! Voices from where? Telephone? Sky? Sony Walkman hidden in his coat?’
    ‘Inner voices,’ Hanif said solemnly. ‘Upstairs on his desk there’s a piece of paper with some verses written on it. And a title:
The River of Blood
.’
    Jumpy jumped, knocking over his empty cup. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he shouted at Hanif, who skipped quickly across the room, singing out, ‘We got a poet in our midst, Sufyan Sahib. Treat with respect. Handle with care. He says a street is a river and we are the flow; humanity is a river of blood, that’s the poet’s point. Also the individual human being,’ he broke off to run around to the far side of an eight-seater table as Jumpy came after him, blushing furiously, flapping his arms. ‘In our very bodies, does the river of blood not flow?’
Like the Roman
, the ferrety Enoch Powell had said,
I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood
. Reclaim the metaphor, Jumpy Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use. ‘This is like rape,’ he pleaded with Hanif. ‘For God’s sake, stop.’
    ‘Voices that one hears are outside, but,’ the café proprietor was musing. ‘Joan of Arc, na. Or that what’s his name with the cat: Turn-again Whittington. But with such voices one becomes great, or rich at least. This one however is not great, and