The Satanic Verses

poor.’
    ‘Enough.’ Jumpy held both arms above his head, grinning without really wanting to. ‘I surrender.’
    For three days after that, in spite of all the efforts of Mr Sufyan, Mrs Sufyan, their daughters Mishal and Anahita, and the lawyer Hanif Johnson, Jumpy Joshi was not really himself, ‘More a Dumpy than a Jumpy,’ as Sufyan said. He went about his business, at the youth clubs, at the offices of the film co-operative to which he belonged, and in the streets, distributing leaflets, selling certain newspapers, hanging out; but his step was heavy as he went his way. Then, on the fourth evening, the telephone rang behind the counter of the Shaandaar Café.
    ‘Mr Jamshed Joshi,’ Anahita Sufyan carolled, doing her imitation of an upper-class English accent. ‘Will Mr Joshi please come to the instrument? There is a personal call.’
    Her father took one look at the joy bursting out on Jumpy’s face and murmured softly to his wife, ‘Mrs, the voice this boy is wanting to hear is not inner by any manner of means.’

    The impossible thing came between Pamela and Jamshed after they had spent seven days making love to one another with inexhaustible enthusiasm, infinite tenderness and such freshness of spirit that you’d have thought the procedure had only just been invented. For seven days they remained undressed with the central heating turned high, and pretended to be tropical lovers in some hot bright country to the south. Jamshed, who had always been clumsy with women, told Pamela that he had not felt so wonderful since the day in his eighteenth year when he had finally learned how to ride a bicycle. The moment the words were out he became afraid that he had spoiled everything, that this comparison of the great love of his life to the rickety bike of his student days would be taken for the insult it undeniably was; but he needn’t have worried, because Pamela kissed him on the mouth and thanked him for saying the most beautiful thing any man had ever said to any woman. At this point he understood that he coulddo no wrong, and for the first time in his life he began to feel genuinely safe, safe as houses, safe as a human being who is loved; and so did Pamela Chamcha.
    On the seventh night they were awakened from dreamless sleep by the unmistakable sound of somebody trying to break into the house. ‘I’ve got a hockey-stick under my bed,’ Pamela whispered, terrified. ‘Give it to me,’ Jumpy, who was equally scared, hissed back. ‘I’m coming with you,’ quaked Pamela, and Jumpy quavered, ‘Oh, no you don’t.’ In the end they both crept downstairs, each wearing one of Pamela’s frilly dressing-gowns, each with a hand on the hockey-stick that neither felt brave enough to use. Suppose it’s a man with a shotgun, Pamela found herself thinking, a man with a shotgun saying, Go back upstairs … They reached the foot of the stairs. Somebody turned on the lights.
    Pamela and Jumpy screamed in unison, dropped the hockey-stick and ran upstairs as fast as they could go; while down in the front hall, standing brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed in order to turn the knob of the tongue-and-groove lock (Pamela in the throes of her passion had forgotten to use the security locks), was a figure out of a nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice and blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of a giant goat, a man’s torso covered in goat’s hair, human arms, and a horned but otherwise human head covered in muck and grime and the beginnings of a beard. Alone and unobserved, the impossible thing pitched forward on to the floor and lay still.
    Upstairs, at the very top of the house, that is to say in Saladin’s ‘den’, Mrs Pamela Chamcha was writhing in her lover’s arms, crying her heart out, and bawling at the top of her voice: ‘It isn’t true. My husband exploded. No survivors. Do you hear me? I am the widow Chamcha whose spouse is beastly dead.’

5

    M r Gibreel Farishta on the railway train to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by driving him insane. He had seated himself by the window in a first-class non-smoking compartment, with his back to the engine because unfortunately another fellow was already in the other place, and jamming his trilby down on his head he sat with his fists deep in scarlet-lined gabardine and