There was a knocking at the door. Open, please. Police. Kasturba had called them, after all.
Gibreel took the lid off the wonderful lamp of Changez Chamchawala and let it fall clattering to the floor.
He’s hidden a gun inside, Salahuddin realized. ‘Watch out,’ he shouted. ‘There’s an armed man in here.’ The knocking stopped, and now Gibreel rubbed his hand along the side of the magic lamp: once, twice, thrice.
The revolver jumped up, into his other hand.
A fearsome jinnee of monstrous stature appeared, Salahuddin remembered. ‘What is your wish? I am the slave of him who holds the lamp.’ What a limiting thing is a weapon, Salahuddin thought, feeling oddly detached from events. – Like Gibreel when the sickness came. – Yes, indeed; a most confining manner of thing. – For how few the choices were, now that Gibreel was the armed man and he, the unarmed; how the universe had shrunk! The true djinns of old had the power to open the gates of the Infinite, to make all things possible, to render all wonders capable of being attained; how banal, in comparison, was this modern spook, this degraded descendant of mighty ancestors, this feeble slave of a twentieth-century lamp.
“I told you a long time back,’ Gibreel Farishta quietly said, ‘that if I thought the sickness would never leave me, that it would always return, I would not be able to bear up to it.’ Then, very quickly, before Salahuddin could move a finger, Gibreel put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth; and pulled the trigger; and was free.
He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water’s shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.
‘Come along,’ Zeenat Vakil’s voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt – in spite of his humanity – he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one’s good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. ‘My place,’ Zeeny offered. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘I’m coming,’ he answered her, and turned away from the view.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The quotations from the Quran in this book are composites of the English versions of N. J. Dawood in the Penguin edition and of Maulana Muhammad Ali (Lahore, 1973), with a few touches of my own; that from Faiz Ahmad Faiz is a variant of the translation by Mahmood Jamal in the Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry. For the description of the Manticore, I’m indebted to Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings, while the material on Argentina derives, in part, from the writings of W. H. Hudson, especially Far Away and Long Ago. I should like to thank Pauline Melville for untangling my plaits from my dreadlocks; and to confess that the ‘Gagari’ poems of ‘Bhupen Gandhi’ are, in fact, echoes of Arun Kolatkar’s collection Jejuri. The verses by Kenneth Tynan in the novel’s final section have been taken from Tynan Right and Left (copyright © Kenneth Tynan, 1967).
The identities of many of the authors from whom I’ve learned will, I hope, be clear from the text; others must remain anonymous, but I thank them, too.
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of nine novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers”), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown—and one collection of short stories, East, West. He has also published five works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, Mirrorwork, and Step Across This Line.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
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