Free The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

that
changed."
               
The letters didn't come any more. Years passed; and then Saladin Chamcha,
actor, self-made man, returned to Bombay with the Prospero Players, to
interpret the role of the Indian doctor in The Millionairess by George
Bernard Shaw. On stage, he tailored his voice to the requirements of the part,
but those long-suppressed locutions, those discarded vowels and consonants,
began to leak out of his mouth out of the theatre as well. His voice was
betraying him; and he discovered his component parts to be capable of other
treasons, too.
               
* * * * *
               
A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role,
according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an
abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him,
heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive.
Or, consider him sociopolitically: most migrants learn, and can become
disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us,
concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.
               
A man who Invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove he's
managed it. Playing God again, you could say. Or you could come down a few
notches, and think of Tinkerbell; fairies don't exist if children don't clap
their hands. Or you might simply say: it's just like being a man.
               
Not only the need to be believed in, but to believe in another. You've got it:
Love.
               
Saladin Chamcha met Pamela Lovelace five and a half days before the end of the
1960s, when women still wore bandannas in their hair. She stood at the centre
of a room full of Trotskyist actresses and fixed him with eyes so bright, so
bright. He monopolized her all evening and she never stopped smiling and she
left with another man. He went home to dream of her eyes and smile, the
slenderness of her, her skin. He pursued her for two years. England yields her
treasures with reluctance. He was astonished by his own perseverance, and
understood that she had become the custodian of his destiny, that if she did
not relent then his entire attempt at metamorphosis would fail. "Let
me," he begged her, wrestling politely on her white rug that left him, at
his midnight bus stops, covered in guilty fluff. "Believe me. I'm the
one."
               
One night, out of the blue , she let him, she said she believed. He
married her before she could change her mind, but never learned to read her
thoughts. When she was unhappy she would lock herself in the bedroom until she felt
better. "It's none of your business," she told him. "I don't
want anybody to see me when I'm like that." He used to call her a clam.
"Open up," he hammered on all the locked doors of their lives
together, basement first, then maisonette, then mansion. "I love you, let
me in." He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence,
that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile,
the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why
she hid when she couldn't manage to beam. Only when it was too late did she
tell him that her parents had committed suicide together when she had just
begun to menstruate, over their heads in gambling debts, leaving her with the
aristocratic bellow of a voice that marked her out as a golden girl, a woman to
envy, whereas in fact she was abandoned, lost, her parents couldn't even be
bothered to wait and watch her grow up, that's how much she was loved,
so of course she had no confidence at all, and every moment she spent in the
world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she
locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a
monkey without a nut.
               
They never managed to have children; she blamed herself. After ten years
Saladin discovered that