The Satanic Verses (62 page)

           
On
Gardeners' World
he was shown how to achieve something called a
"chimeran graft" (the very same, as chance would have it, that had
been the pride of Otto Cone's garden); and although his inattention caused him
to miss the names of the two trees that had been bred into one―Mulberry? Laburnum?
Broom?―the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it palpably
was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a
piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric
place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another,
incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too,
could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual images of
hybrid tragedies―the uselessness of mermen, the failures of plastic
surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-Colonization
of the planet―he was given this one gift. It was enough. He switched off
the set.

           
Gradually, his animosity towards Gibreel lessened. Nor did horns, goat-hoofs,
etc. show any signs of manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a cure was in
progress. In point of fact, with the passage of the days not only Gibreel, but
everything which had befallen Saladin of late that was irreconcilable with the
prosiness of everyday life came to seem somehow irrelevant, as even the most
stubborn of nightmares will once you've splashed your face, brushed your teeth
and had a strong, hot drink. He began to make journeys into the outside
world―to those professional advisers, lawyer accountant agent, whom
Pamela used to call "the Goons", and when sitting in the panelled,
book- and ledgerlined stability of those offices in which miracles could
plainly never happen he took to speaking of his "breakdown",―"the
shock of the accident",―and so on, explaining his disappearance as
though he had never tumbled from the sky, singing "Rule, Britannia"
while Gibreel yowled an air from the movie
Shree 420
. He made a
conscious effort to resume his old life of delicate sensibilities, taking himself
off to concerts and art galleries and plays, and if his responses were rather
dull;―if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in the state
of exaltation which was the return he expected from all high art;―then he
insisted to himself that the thrill would soon return; he had had "a bad
experience", and needed a little time.

           
In his den, seated in the Parker-Knoll armchair, surrounded by his familiar
objects―the china pierrots, the mirror in the shape of a cartoonist's
heart, Eros holding up the globe of an antique lamp―he congratulated
himself on being the sort of person who had found hatred impossible to sustain
for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love
changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted. Towards Pamela, for
example, he was now sure he felt nothing but the most altruistic affections.
Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon the smooth glass of the sensitive
soul; a mere grease-mark, which disappeared if left alone. Gibreel? Pooh! He
was forgotten; he no longer existed. There; to surrender animosity was to
become free.

           
Saladin's optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to life proved
more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their time about
unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela. Nor was work
easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the phone:
"Clients get funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort of
unclean: as "if they were robbing a grave." Charlie, who still
sounded in her early fifties like a disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing
of the best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with
the clients' point of view. "Wait it out," she advised. "They'll
come round. After all, it isn't as if you were Dracula, for heaven's
sake." Thank you, Charlie.

           
Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some cruel and
appropriate revenge,―these were things of the past, aspects of a reality
incompatible with his passionate desire to re-establish ordinary life. Not even
the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could deflect him. What he
was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as
monstrous
.
Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the
world―mass-murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny Ripper. (Here
he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate of the
Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned neat.) You
only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed homosexual
Irishmen stuffing babies' mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally, had been of the
view that "monster" was too―what?―
judgmental
a
term for such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as
casualties of the age. Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their
victims as the casualties. "There's nothing to be done with you," she
had said in her most patrician voice. "You actually do think in cheap
debating points."

           
And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money, power,
sex, death, love. Angels and devils―who needed them? "Why demons,
when man himself is a demon?" the Nobel Laureate Singer's "last
demon" asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of
balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: "And
why angels, when man is angelic too?" (If this wasn't true, how to
explain, for instance, the Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a
powdered wig?)―But, it had to be conceded, and this was his original
point, that the circumstances of the age required no diabolic explanations.

           
* * * * *

           
I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the
time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you
set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where's
the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix
the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don't
plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't wanted to butt in; I have,
plenty of times. And once, it's true, I did. I sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and
spoke to the superstar, Gibreel.
Ooparvala or Neechayvala
, he wanted to
know, and I didn't enlighten him; I certainly don't intend to blab to this
confused Chamcha instead.

           
I'm leaving now. The man's going to sleep.

           
* * * * *

           
His reborn, fledgling, still-fallible optimism was hardest to maintain at
night; because at night that otherworld of horns and hoofs was not so easily
denied. There was the matter, too, of the two women who had started haunting
his dreams. The first―it was hard to admit this, even to
himself―was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal
ally in that nightmare time which he was now trying so mightily to conceal
behind banalities and mists, the aficionada of the martial arts, Hanif
Johnson's lover, Mishal Sufyan.

           
The second―whom he'd left in Bombay with the knife of his departure
sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead―was Zeeny Vakil.

           
* * * * *

           
The jumpiness of Jumpy Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had returned,
in human form, to reoccupy the upper storeys of the house in Notting Hill, was
frightful to behold, and incensed Pamela more than she could say. On the first
night―she had decided not to tell him until they were safely in bed―he
leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear of the bed and stood on
the pale blue carpet, stark naked and quaking with his thumb stuck in his
mouth.

           
"Come back here and stop being foolish," she commanded, but he shook
his head wildly, and removed his thumb long enough to gibber: "But if he's
here!
In this
house!
Then how can
I
. . .
?"―With which he snatched up his clothes in an untidy bundle, and
fled from her presence; she heard thumps and crashes which suggested that his
shoes, possibly accompanied by himself, had fallen down the stairs.
"Good," she screamed after him. "Chicken, break your neck."

           
Some moments later, however, Saladin was visited by the purple-faced figure of
his estranged and naked-headed wife, who spoke thickly through clamped teeth.
"J.J. is standing outside in the street. The damn fool says he can't come
in unless you say it's okay with you." She had, as usual, been drinking.
Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: "What about you,
you want him to come in?" Which Pamela interpreted as his way of rubbing
salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded with
humiliated ferocity.
Yes
.

           
So it was that on his first night home, Saladin Chamcha went
outside―"Hey, hombre! You're really
well!
" Jumpy greeted
him in terror, making as if to slap palms, to conceal his fear―and
persuaded his wife's lover to share her bed. Then he retreated upstairs,
because Jumpy's mortification now prevented him from entering the house until
Chamcha was safely out of the way.

           
"What a man!" Jumpy wept at Pamela. "He's a
prince
, a
saint!
"

           
"If you don't pack it in," Pamela Chamcha warned apoplectically,
"I'll set the fucking dog on you."

           
* * * * *

           
Jumpy continued to find Chamcha's presence distracting, envisaging him (or so
it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be
constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her
surprise and relief, to be quite a Mughlai chef) he insisted on asking Chamcha
down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred, took him up a tray, explaining
to Pamela that to do otherwise would be rude, and also provocative. "Look
what he permits under his own roof! He's a
giant
; least we can do is
have good manners." Pamela, with mounting rage, was obliged to put up with
a series of such acts and their accompanying homilies. "I'd never have
believed you were so conventional," she fumed, and Jumpy replied: "It's
just a question of respect."

           
In the name of respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers and mail;
he never failed, on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for a visit of at
least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his sense of politeness,
while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon three floors below. He
brought Saladin little presents: propitiatory offerings of books, old theatre
handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to put her foot down, he argued against
her with an innocent, but also mulish passion: "We can't behave as if the
man's invisible. He's here, isn't he? Then we must involve him in our
lives." Pamela replied sourly: "Why don't you just ask him to come
down and join us in bed?" To which Jumpy, seriously, replied: "I
didn't think you'd approve."

           
In spite of his inability to relax and take for granted Chamcha's residence
upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this unusual way,
his predecessor's blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives of love and
friendship, he cheered up a good deal, and found the idea of fatherhood growing
on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him weep, the next morning, in
delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was running down an avenue
of overarching trees, helping a small boy to ride a bicycle. "Aren't you
pleased with me?" the boy cried in his elation. "Look: aren't you
pleased?"

           
* * * * *

           
Pamela and Jumpy had both become involved in the campaign mounted to protest
against the arrest of Dr. Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper Murders.
This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin. "The whole thing's
completely trumped-up, based on circumstantial evidence and insinuations. Hanif
reckons he can drive a truck through the holes in the prosecution case. It's
just a straightforward malicious fit-up; the only question is how far they'll
go. They'll verbal him for sure. Maybe there will even be witnesses saying they
saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly they want to get him. Pretty badly,
I'd say; he's been a loud voice around town for some while." Charncha
recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan's loathing for Simba, he said: "The
fellow has―has he not?―a record of violence towards women . .
." Jumpy turned his palms outward. "In his personal life," he
owned, "the guy's frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn't mean he
disembowels senior citizens; you don't have to be an angel to be innocent.
Unless, of course, you're black." Chamcha let this pass. "The point
is, this isn't personal, it's political," Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he
got up to leave, "Urn, there's a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela
and I have to go; please, I mean if you'd like, if you'd be interested, that
is, come along if you want."

           
"You asked him to go with us?" Pamela was incredulous. She had
started to feel nauseous most of the time, and it did nothing for her mood.
"You actually did that without consulting me?" Jumpy looked
crestfallen. "Doesn't matter, anyhow," she let him off the hook.
"Catch
him
going to anything like
that
."