No offence

Mishal and Anahita arrived with breakfast on a tray and excitement all over their faces. Chamcha devoured cornflakes and Nescafé while the girls, after a few moments of shyness, gabbled at him, simultaneously, non--stop. "Well, you've set the place buzzing and no mistake." -- "You haven't gone and changed back in the night or anything?" -- "Listen, it's not a trick, is it? I mean, it's not make-up or something theatrical? -- I mean, Jumpy says you're an actor, and I only thought, -- I mean," and here young Anahita dried up, because Chamcha, spewing cornflakes, howled angrily: "Make--up? Theatrical? _Trick?_" "No offence," Mishal said anxiously on her sister's behalf. "It's just we've been thinking, know what I mean, and well it'd just be awful if you weren't, but you are, "course you are, so that's all right," she finished hastily as Chamcha glared at her again. -- "Thing is," Anahita resumed, and then, faltering, "Mean to say, well, we just think it's great." -- "You, she means," Mishal corrected. "We think you're, you know." -- "Brilliant," Anahita said and dazzled the bewildered Chamcha with a smile. "Magic. You know. _Extreme_." "We didn't sleep all night," Mishal said. "We've got ideas." "What we reckoned," Anahita trembled with the thrill of it, "as you've turned into, -- what you are, -- then maybe, well, probably, actually, even if you haven't tried it out, it could be, you could..." And the older girl finished the thought: "You could've developed -- you know -- _powers_." "We thought, anyway," Anahita added, weakly, seeing the clouds gathering on Chamcha's brow. And, backing towards the door, added: "But we're probably wrong. -- Yeh. We're wrong all right. Enjoy your meal." -- Mishal, before she fled, took a small bottle full of green fluid out of a pocket of her red-andblack-check donkey jacket, put it on the floor by the door, and delivered the following parting shot. "O, excuse me, but Mum says, can you use this, it's mouthwash, for your breath." o o o That Mishal and Anahita should adore the disfiguration which he loathed with all his heart convinced him that "his people" were as crazily wrong-headed as he'd long suspected. That the two of them should respond to his bitterness -- when, on his second attic morning, they brought him a masala dosa instead of packet cereal complete with toy silver spacemen, and he cried out, ungratefully: "Now I'm supposed to eat this filthy foreign food?" -- with expressions of sympathy, made matters even worse. "Sawful muck," Mishal agreed with him. "No bangers in here, worse luck." Conscious of having insulted their hospitality, he tried to explain that he thought of himself, nowadays, as, well, British. . . "What about us?" Anahita wanted to know. "What do you think we are?" -- And Mishal confided: "Bangladesh in't nothing to me. Just some place Dad and Mum keep banging on about." -- And Anahita, conclusively: "Bungleditch." -- With a satisfied nod. -- "What I call it, anyhow."

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His heart began to misbehave, to kick and stumble as if it, too, wanted to metamorphose into some new, diabolic form, to substitute the complex unpredictability of tabla improvisations for its old metronomic beat. Lying sleepless in a narrow bed, snagging his horns in bedsheets and pillowcases as he tossed and turned, he suffered the renewal of coronary eccentricity with a kind of fatalistic acceptance: if everything else, then why not this, too? Badoomboom, went the heart, and his torso jerked. _Watch it or I'll really let you have it. Doomboombadoom_. Yes: this was Hell, all right. The city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim. Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren't they the ones with the pitchforks? Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road--drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive--green garbage eater, screaming radio--voices from a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds. The sun rose, unwrapping the misty city like a gift. Saladin Chamcha slept. Which afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other night-street down which, in the company of the physiotherapist Hyacinth Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth's face and body had seemed to change. He saw the gap opening and widening between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited itself into medusas, and the strange triangularity of her profile, which sloped outwards from her hairline to the tip of her nose, swung about and headed in an unbroken line inwards to her neck. He saw in the yellow light that her skin was growing darker by the minute, and her teeth more prominent, and her body as long as a child's stick-figure drawing. At the same time she was casting him glances of an ever more explicit lechery, and grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a skeleton had seized him and was trying to drag him down into a grave; he could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it, on her breath, on her lips . . . revulsion seized him. How could he ever have thought her attractive, even desired her, even gone so far as to fantasize, while she straddled him and pummelled fluid from his lungs, that they were lovers in the violent throes of sexual congress? . . . The city thickened around them like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair. "No light can get in here," she whispered to him. "It's black; all black." She made as if to lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but he shouted, "Quick, the church," and plunged into an unprepossessing box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however, the pews were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless blue two--piece suits, false pearls, and little pill--box hats decked out with bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly, _Fix me, Jesus_; until they saw Chamcha, quit their spir-- itualling, and commenced to bawl in a most unspiritual manner, _Satan, the Goat, the Goat_, and suchlike stuff. Now it became clear that the Hyacinth with whom he'd entered was looking at him with new eyes, just the way he'd looked at her in the street; that she, too, had started seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust on that hideously pointy and clouded face he just let rip. "_Hubshees_," he cursed them in, for some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers and savages, he called them. "I feel sorry for you," he pronounced. "Every morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see, staring back, the darkness: the stain, the proof that you're the lowest of the low." They rounded upon him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now lost among them, indistinguishable, no longer an individual but a woman-likethem, and he was being beaten frightfully, emitting a piteous bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized that his assailants' fear was greater than their wrath, and he rose up to his full height, spread his arms, and screamed devilsounds at them, sending them scurrying for cover, cowering behind pews, as he strode bloody but unbowed from the battlefield. Dreams put things in their own way; but Chamcha, coming briefly awake as his heartbeat skipped into a new burst of syncopations, was bitterly aware that the nightmare had not been so very far from the truth; the spirit, at least, was right. -- That was the last of Hyacinth, he thought, and faded away again. -- To find himself shivering in the hail of his own home while, on a higher plane, Jumpy Joshi argued fiercely with Pamela. _With my wife_. And when dream-Pamela, echoing the real one word for word, had rejected her husband a hundred and one times, _he doesn't exist, it, such things are not so_, it was Jamshed the virtuous who, setting aside love and desire, helped. Leaving behind a weeping Pamela -- _Don't you dare bring that back here_, she shouted from the top floor -- from Saladin's den -- Jumpy, wrapping Chamcha in sheepskin and blanket, led enfeebled through the shadows to the Shaandaar Café, promising with empty kindness: "It'll be all right. You'll see. It'll all be fine." When Saladin Chamcha awoke, the memory of these words filled him with a bitter anger. Where's Farishta, he found himself thinking. That bastard: I bet he's doing okay. -- It was a thought to which he would return, with extraordinary results; for the moment, however, he had other fish to fry. I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it had happened, it could not be denied. I am _no longer myself_, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of whatwe--hate, of sin. Why? Why me? What evil had he done -- what vile thing could he, would he do? For what was he -- he couldn't avoid the notion -- being punished? And, come to that, by whom? (I held my tongue.) Had he not pursued his own idea of _the good_, sought to become that which he most admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, avoided trouble, striven to become new? Assiduity, fastidiousness, moderation, restraint, self--reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral code? Was it his fault that Pamela and he were childless? Were genetics his responsibility? Could it be, in this inverted age, that he was being victimized by -- the fates, he agreed with himself to call the persecuting agency -- precisely _because of_ his pursuit of "the good"? -- That nowadays such a pursuit was considered wrong-headed, even evil? -- Then how cruel these fates were, to instigate his rejection by the very world he had so determinedly courted; how desolating, to be cast from the gates of the city one believed oneself to have taken long ago! -- What mean small-mindedness was this, to cast him back into the bosom of _his people_, from whom he'd felt so distant for so long! -- Here thoughts of Zeeny Vakil welled up, and guiltily, nervously, he forced them down again. His heart kicked him violently, and he sat up, doubled over, gasped for breath. _Calm down, or it's curtains. No place for such stressful cogitations: not any more_. He took deep breaths; lay back; emptied his mind. The traitor in his chest resumed normal service. No more of that, Saladin Chamcha told himself firmly. No more of thinking myself evil. Appearances deceive; the cover is not the best guide to the book. Devil, Goat, Shaitan? Not I. Not I: another. Who?
Par kaceyhanxu le vendredi 27 mai 2011

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