The Satanic Verses

panicked. The terror of losing his mind to a paradox, of being unmade by what he no longer believed existed, of turning in his madness into the avatar of a chimerical archangel, was so big in him that it was impossible to look at it for long; yet how else was he to account for the miracles, metamorphoses and apparitions of recent days? ‘It’s a straight choice,’ he trembled silently. ‘It’s A, I’m off my head, or B, baba, somebody went and changed the rules.’
    Now, however, there was the comforting cocoon of this railway compartment in which the miraculous was reassuringly absent, the arm-rests were frayed, the reading light over his shoulder didn’t work, the mirror was missing from its frame, and then there were the regulations: the little circular red-and-white signs forbidding smoking, the stickers penalizing the improper use of the chain, the arrows indicating the points to which – and notbeyond! – it was permitted to open the little sliding windows. Gibreel paid a visit to the toilet and here, too, a small series of prohibitions and instructions gladdened his heart. By the time the conductor arrived with the authority of his crescent-cutting ticket-punch, Gibreel had been somewhat soothed by these manifestations of law, and began to perk up and invent rationalizations. He had had a lucky escape from death, a subsequent delirium of some sort, and now, restored to himself, could expect the threads of his old life – that is, his old new life, the new life he had planned before the er interruption – to be picked up again. As the train carried him further and further away from the twilight zone of his arrival and subsequent mysterious captivity, bearing him along the happy predictability of parallel metal lines, he felt the pull of the great city beginning to work its magic on him, and his old gift of hope reasserted itself, his talent for embracing renewal, for blinding himself to past hardships so that the future could come into view. He sprang up from his seat and thumped down on the opposite side of the compartment, with his face symbolically towards London, even though it meant giving up the window. What did he care for windows? All the London he wanted was right there, in his mind’s eye. He spoke her name aloud: ‘Alleluia.’
    ‘Alleluia, brother,’ the compartment’s only other occupant affirmed. ‘Hosanna, my good sir, and amen.’

    ‘Although I must add, sir, that my beliefs are strictly non-denominational,’ the stranger continued. ‘Had you said “La-ilaha”, I would gladly have responded with a full-throated “illallah”.’
    Gibreel realized that his move across the compartment and his inadvertent taking of Allie’s unusual name had been mistaken by his companion for overtures both social and theological. ‘John Maslama,’ the fellow cried, snapping a card out of a little crocodileskin case and pressing it upon Gibreel. ‘Personally, I follow my own variant of the universal faith invented by the Emperor Akbar. God, I would say, is something akin to the Music of the Spheres.’
    It was plain that Mr Maslama was bursting with words, and that, now that he had popped, there was nothing for it but to sit it out, to permit the torrent to run its orotund course. As the fellow had the build of a prize-fighter, it seemed inadvisable to irritate him. In his eyes Farishta spotted the glint of the True Believer, a light which, until recently, he had seen in his own shaving-mirror every day.
    ‘I have done well for myself, sir,’ Maslama was boasting in his well-modulated Oxford drawl. ‘For a brown man, exceptionally well, considering the quiddity of the circumstances in which we live; as I hope you will allow.’ With a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand, he indicated the opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin-stripe, the gold watch with its fob and chain, the Italian shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled links at his starched white cuffs. Above this costume of an English milord there stood a head of startling size, covered with thick, slicked-down hair, and sprouting implausibly luxuriant eyebrows beneath which blazed the ferocious eyes of which Gibreel had already taken careful note. ‘Pretty fancy,’ Gibreel now conceded, some response being clearly required. Maslama nodded. ‘I have always tended,’ he admitted, ‘towards the ornate.’
    He had made what he called his
first pile
producing advertising jingles,