Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses
Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled
condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in
consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid
waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that
he is ... without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest
the sole of his foot upon.
Daniel Defoe, The History of the Devil
F?r Marianne
I. The Angel Gibreel
1
'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the
heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the
bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to
ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's
love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born
again...' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or
thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great
height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English
Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear
sky.
'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,' and thusly
and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the
night, 'To the devil with your tunes,' the words hanging
crystalline in the iced white night, 'in the movies you only mimed
to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now.'
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Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight
as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke,
breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself
against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic
postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now
he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba,
it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a
fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the
jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the
improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a
nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a
second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those
bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning
or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. Dharrraaammm! Wham,
na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat.'
Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A
universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time... the
jumbo jet Bostan , Flight A I-420, blew apart without any warning,
high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated
city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already
named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet,
winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a
brief and premature su...

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