Read Online The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online

condemned by the gods to have a boulder pressing down upon his
chest; but never mind, he would be English, even if his classmates giggled at
his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because these exclusions only
increased his determination, and that was when he began to act, to find masks
that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he
fooled them into thinking he was okay , he was people-like-us . He
fooled them the way a sensitive human being can persuade gorillas to accept him
into their family, to fondle and caress and stuff bananas in his mouth.
               
(After he had settled up the last bill, and the wallet he had once found at a
rainbow's end was empty, his father said to him: "See now. You pay your
way. I've made a man of you." But what man? That's what fathers never
know. Not in advance; not until it's too late.)
               
One day soon after he started at the school he came down to breakfast to find a
kipper on his plate. He sat there staring at it, not knowing where to begin.
Then he cut into it, and got a mouthful of tiny bones. And after extracting
them all, another mouthful, more bones. His fellow-pupils watched him suffer in
silence; not one of them said, here, let me show you, you eat it in this way. It
took him ninety minutes to eat the fish and he was not permitted to rise from
the table until it was done. By that time he was shaking, and if he had been
able to cry he would have done so. Then the thought occurred to him that he had
been taught an important lesson. England was a peculiar-tasting smoked fish
full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it. He
discovered that he was a bloody-minded person. "I'll show them all,"
he swore. "You see if I don't." The eaten kipper was his first
victory, the first step in his conquest of England.
               
William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.
               
* * * * *
               
Five years later he was back home after leaving school, waiting until the
English university term began, and his transmutation into a Vilayeti was well
advanced. "See how well he complains," Nasreen teased him in front of
his father. "About everything he has such big-big criticisms, the fans are
fixed too. loosely to the roof and will fall to slice our heads off in our
sleep, he says, and the food is too fattening, why we don't cook some things
without frying, he wants to know, the top-floor balconies are unsafe and the
paint is peeled, why can't we take pride in our surroundings, isn't it, and the
garden is overgrown, we are just jungle people, he thinks so, and look how
coarse our movies are, now he doesn't enjoy, and so much disease you can't even
drink water from the tap, my god, he really got an education, husband, our little
Sallu, England-returned, and talking so fine and all."
               
They were walking on the lawn in the evening, watching the sun dive into the
sea, wandering in the shade of those great spreading trees, some snaky some
bearded, which Salahuddin (who now called himself Saladin after the fashion of
the English school, but would remain Chamchawala for a while yet, until a
theatrical agent shortened his name for commercial reasons) had begun to be
able to name, jackfruit, banyan, jacaranda, flame of the forest, plane. Small
chhooi-mooi touch-me-not plants grew at the foot of the tree of his own life,
the walnut-tree that Changez had planted with his own hands on the day of the
coming of the son. Father and son at the birth-tree were both awkward, unable to
respond properly to Nasreen's gentle fun. Saladin had been seized by the
melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place before he knew its
names, that something had been lost which he would never be able to regain. And
Changez Chamchawala found that he could no longer look his son in the eye,
because the bitterness he saw came close to