The Satanic Verses

who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail’s father ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man into his presence. ‘So? Upset or what?’ The reply, with downcast eyes: ji, thank you, Babaji, I am okay. ‘Shut your face,’ said Babasaheb Mhatre. ‘From today you live with me.’ Butbut, Babaji … ‘But me no buts. Already I have informed my goodwife. I have spoken.’ Please excuse Babaji but how what why? ‘I have
spoken
.’
    Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after a while he began to have an idea. Mrs Mhatre was a thin woman, like a pencil beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the household could hear the great General Secretary of the BTCA protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treatthe young man as a child. ‘You see, he is a grown fellow,’ she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, ‘Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt.’ Yes, a grown fellow, ‘we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him.’ ‘Then damn it to hell,’ the Babasaheb exploded, ‘why do you do it to me?’ Mrs Mhatre burst into tears. ‘But you are everything to me,’ she wept, ‘you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life.’
    Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt.
    He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses. ‘But I gave that up,’ he told his protégé, with many suitably melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns, ‘after I got the fright of my bloody life.’
    Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most co-operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to ask him some big questions.
Is there a God
, and that glass which had been running round like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a twitch, completely phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won’t answer that try this one instead, and I came right out with it,
Is there a Devil
. After that the glass – baprebap! – began to shake – catch your ears! – slowslow at first, then faster-faster, like a jelly, until it jumped! – ai-hai! – up from the table, into the air, fell down on its side, and – o-ho! – into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don’t believe, Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don’t meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.
    This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young listener, because even before his mother’s death he hadbecome convinced of the existence of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people, motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would fade, but the sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God, angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or lamp-posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight that he had never seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged