The Satanic Verses (12 page)

           
"I didn't want you to stay for me," she said. "For some reason,
I wanted it for you."

           
A few days earlier, he had been to see an Indian dramatization of a story by
Sartre on the subject of shame. In the original, a husband suspects his wife of
infidelity and sets a trap to catch her out. He pretends to leave on a business
trip, but returns a few hours later to spy on her. He is kneeling to look
through the keyhole of their front door. Then he feels a presence behind him,
turns without rising, and there she is, looking down at him with revulsion and
disgust. This tableau, he kneeling, she looking down, is the Sartrean
archetype. But in the Indian version the kneeling husband felt no presence
behind him; was surprised by the wife; stood to face her on equal terms;
blustered and shouted; until she wept, he embraced her, and they were
reconciled.

           
"You say I should be ashamed," Chamcha said bitterly to Zeenat.
"You, who are without shame. As a matter of fact, this may be a national
characteristic. I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral
refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand
the idea of shame."

           
Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. "Okay, you don't have to say any
more." She held up her hands. "I surrender. I'm going. Mr. Saladin
Chamcha. I thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but I
was wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time."

           
And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. "Don't let
people get too close to you, Mr. Saladin. Let people through your defences and
the bastards go and knife you in the heart."

           
After that there had been nothing to stay for. The aeroplane lifted and banked
over the city. Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a servant as his
dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the city centre solid. Politicians
were trying to build careers by going on padyatras, pilgrimages on foot across
the country. There were graffiti that read:
Advice to politicos. Only step
to take: padyatra to hell
. Or, sometimes:
to Assam
.

           
Actors were getting mixed up in politics: MGR, N.T. Rama Rao, Bachchan. Durga
Khote complained that an actors' association was a "red front".
Saladin Chamcha, on Flight 420, closed his eyes; and felt, with deep relief,
the tell-tale shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his
voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self.

           
The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr. Chamcha on that flight was that
he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams.

           
The dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but the
instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of
Bostan
he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil's departure he had fallen into
a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the vision of a woman
bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented voice whose depth and
melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long way away. The dream-woman
had been so loaded down with explosives that she was not so much the bomber as
the bomb; the woman walking the aisles held a baby that seemed to be sleeping
noiselessly, a baby so skillfully swaddled and held so close to the breast that
Chamcha could not see so much as a lock of new-born hair. Under the influence
of the remembered dream he conceived the notion that the baby was in fact a
bundle of dynamite sticks, or some sort of ticking device, and he was on the
verge of crying out when he came to his senses and admonished himself severely.
This was precisely the type of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. He
was a neat man in a buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, contented
life. He was a member of the real world.

           
He travelled alone, shunning the company of the other members of the Prospero
Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin wearing
Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the manner of
natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking too much cheap
airline champagne and importuning the scorn-laden stewardesses who, being
Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type persons; and behaving, in short,
with normal thespian impropriety. The woman holding the baby had a way of
looking through the paleface players, of turning them into wisps of smoke,
heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of
Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate. He turned to
his newspaper in which a Bombay "rail roko" demonstration was being
broken up by police lathicharges. The newspaper's reporter suffered a broken
arm; his camera, too, was smashed. The police had issued a "note".
Neither
the reporter nor any other person was assaulted intentionally
. Chamcha
drifted into airline sleep. The city of lost histories, felled trees and
unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. When he opened his eyes a
little later he had his second. surprise of that macabre journey. A man was
passing him on the way to the toilet. He was bearded and wore cheap tinted
spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him anyway: here, travelling incognito in
the economy class of Flight A 1-420, was the vanished superstar, the living
legend, Gibreel Farishta himself.

           
"Sleep okay?" He realized the question was addressed to him, and
turned away from the apparition of the great movie actor to stare at the
equally extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in
baseball cap, metal-rim spectacles and a neon-green bush-shirt across which
there writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese
dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an
attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer
possible.

           
"Eugene Dumsday at your service," the dragon man stuck out a huge red
hand. "At yours, and at that of the Christian guard."

           
Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. "You are a military man?"

           
"Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the army
of Guard Almighty." Oh,
almighty
guard, why didn't you say. "I
am a man of science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add
my privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious devilment
ever got folks' brains by the balls."

           
"I don't follow."

           
Dumsday lowered his voice. "I'm talking monkey-crap here, sir. Darwinism.
The evolutionary heresy of Mr. Charles Darwin." His tones made it plain
that the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as that of any
other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. "I have been
warning your fellow-men," Dumsday confided, "against Mr. Darwin and
his works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide presentation. I
spoke most recently, sir, at the World Understanding Day banquet of the Rotary
Club, Cochin, Kerala. I spoke of my own country, of its young people. I see
them lost, sir. The young people of America: I see them in their despair,
turning to narcotics, even, for I'm a plain-speaking man, to pre-marital sexual
relations. And I said this then and I say it now to you. If I believed my
great-granddaddy was a chimpanzee, why, I'd be pretty depressed myself."

           
Gibreel Farishta was seated across the way, staring out of the window. The
inflight movie was starting up, and the aircraft lights were being dimmed. The
woman with the baby was still on her feet, walking up and down, perhaps to keep
the baby quiet. "How did it go down?" Chamcha asked, sensing that
some contribution from him was being required.

           
A hesitancy came over his neighbour. "I believe there was a glitch in the
sound system," he said finally. "That would be my best guess. I can't
see how those good people would've set to talking amongst themselves if they
hadn't've thought I was through."

           
Chamcha felt a little abashed. He had been thinking that in a country of
fervent believers the notion that science was the enemy of God would have an
easy appeal; but the boredom of the Rotarians of Cochin had shown him up. In
the flickering light of the inflight movie, Dumsday continued, in his voice of
an innocent ox, to tell stories against himself without the faintest indication
of knowing what he was doing. He had been accosted, at the end of a cruise
around the magnificent natural harbour of Cochin, to which Vasco da Gama had
come in search of spices and so set in motion the whole ambiguous history of
east-and-west, by an urchin full of pssts and hey-mister-okays. "Hi there,
yes! You want hashish, sahib? Hey, misteramerica. Yes, unclesam, you want
opium, best quality, top price? Okay, you want
cocaine?
"

           
Saladin began, helplessly, to giggle. The incident struck him as Darwin's
revenge: if Dumsday held poor, Victorian, starchy Charles responsible for
American drug culture, how delicious that he should himself be seen, across the
globe, as representing the very ethic he battled so fervently against. Dumsday
fixed him with a look of pained reproof. It was a hard fate to be an American
abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked.

           
After the involuntary giggle had escaped Saladin's lips, Dumsday sank into a
sullen, injured drowse, leaving Chamcha to his own thoughts. Should the inflight
movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one
that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the
future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring
Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of
Hell . . . Chamcha was drifting back into sleep when the cabin lights came on;
the movie stopped; and the illusion of the cinema was replaced by one of
watching the television news, as four armed, shouting figures came running down
the aisles.

           
* * * * *

           
The passengers were held on the hijacked aircraft for one hundred and eleven
days, marooned on a shimmering runway around which there crashed the great
sand-waves of the desert, because once the four hijackers, three men one woman,
had forced the pilot to land nobody could make up their minds what to do with
them. They had come down not at an international airport but at the absurd
folly of a jumbo-sized landing strip which had been built for the pleasure of
the local sheikh at his favourite desert oasis, to which there now also led a
six-lane highway very popular among single young men and women, who would
cruise along its vast emptiness in slow cars ogling one another through the
windows . . . once 420 had landed here, however, the highway was full of
armoured cars, troop transports, limousines waving flags. And while diplomats
haggled over the airliner's fate, to storm or not to storm, while they tried to
decide whether to concede or to stand firm at the expense of other people's
lives, a great stillness settled around the airliner and it wasn't long before
the mirages began.

           
In the beginning there had been a constant flow of event, the hijacking quartet
full of electricity, jumpy, trigger-happy. These are the worst moments, Chamcha
thought while children screamed and fear spread like a stain, here's where we
could all go west. Then they were in control, three men one woman, all tall,
none of them masked, all handsome, they were actors, too, they were stars now,
shootingstars or falling, and they had their own stage-names. Dara Singh Buta
Singh Man Singh. The woman was Tavleen. The woman in the dream had been
anonymous, as if Chamcha's sleeping fancy had no time for pseudonyms; but, like
her, Tavleen spoke with a Canadian accent, smooth-edged, with those give-away
rounded O's. After the plane landed at the oasis of Al-Zamzam it became plain
to the passengers, who were observing their captors with the obsessive
attention paid to a cobra by a transfixed mongoose, that there was something
posturing in the beauty of the three men, some amateurish love of risk and
death in them that made them appear frequently at the open doors of the
airplane and flaunt their bodies at the professional snipers who must have been
hiding amid the palm-trees of the oasis. The woman held herself aloof from such
silliness and seemed to be restraining herself from scolding her three
colleagues. She seemed insensible to her own beauty, which made her the most
dangerous of the four. It struck Saladin Chamcha that the young men were too
squeamish, too narcissistic, to want blood on their hands. They would find it
difficult to kill; they were here to be on television. But Tavleen was here on
business. He kept his eyes on her. The men do not know, he thought. They want
to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies and on TV;
they are reality aping a crude image of itself, they are worms swallowing their
tails. But she, the woman,
knows
. . . while Dara, Buta, Man Singh
strutted and pranced, she became quiet, her eyes turned inwards, and she scared
the passengers stiff.

           
What did they want? Nothing new. An independent homeland, religious freedom,
release of political detainees, justice, ransom money, a safe-conduct to a
country of their choice. Many of the passengers came to sympathize with them,
even though they were under constant threat of execution. If you live in the
twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more
desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.