The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie Read Free Book Online Page B

playmates to gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six letters of his dream-city,
ellowen deeowen
. In his secret heart, he crept silently up on London, letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to him.
Ellowen deeowen London
.
    The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the Brabourne Stadium,he prayed for an England victory, for the game’s creators to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be maintained. (But the games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator versus imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)
    In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And one day (it was so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that ample, crumbling, salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and shutters and little balconies, and through the garden that was his father’s pride and joy and which in a certain evening light could give the impression of being infinite (and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because nobody, not his father, not the gardener, could tell him the names of most of the plants and trees), and out through the main gateway, a grandiose folly, a reproduction of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and across the wild insanity of the street, and over the sea wall, and so at last on to the broad expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a single finger which he then laid across his lips.
Shh
, and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The dhoti open to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he did what he was forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him and let him go.
    After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did he tell anyone what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would unleash in his mother and suspecting thathis father would say it was his own fault. It seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had come to revile about his home town, had come together in the stranger’s bony embrace, and now that he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also escape Bombay, or die. He began to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his will upon it at all times, eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that he could make the miracle happen even without his father’s lamp to help him out. He dreamed of flying out of his bedroom window to discover that there, below him, was – not Bombay – but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsons-column Lordstavern Bloodytower Queen. But as he floated out over the great metropolis he felt himself beginning to lose height, and no matter how hard he struggled kicked swam-in-air he continued to spiral slowly downwards to earth, then faster, then faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down towards the city, Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb.

    When the impossible happened, and his father, out of the blue, offered him an English education,
to get me out of the way
, he thought,
otherwise why, it’s obvious, but don’t look a gift horse andsoforth
, his mother