Free The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie Page A

there was something the matter with some of his own
chromosomes, two sticks too long, or too short, he couldn't remember. His
genetic inheritance; apparently he was lucky to exist, lucky not to be some
sort of deformed freak. Was it his mother or his father from whom? The doctors
couldn't say; he blamed, it's easy to guess which one, after all, it wouldn't
do to think badly of the dead.
               
They hadn't been getting along lately.
               
He told himself that afterwards, but not during.
               
Afterwards, he told himself, we were on the rocks, maybe it was the missing
babies, maybe we just grew away from each other, maybe this, maybe that.
               
During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the
fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came
back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit
of joy.
               
He tried to invent a happy future for them, to make it come true by making it
up and then believing in it. On his way to India he was thinking how lucky he
was to have her, I'm lucky yes I am don't argue I'm the luckiest bastard in the
world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him the stretching, shady
avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the presence of her gentleness.
               
He had worked so hard and come so close to convincing himself of the truth of
these paltry fictions that when he went to bed with Zeeny Vakil within
forty-eight hours of arriving in Bombay, the first thing he did, even before
they made love, was to faint, to pass out cold, because the messages reaching
his brain were in such serious disagreement with one another, as if his right
eye saw the world moving to the left while his left eye saw it sliding to the
right.
               
* * * * *
               
Zeeny was the first Indian woman he had ever made love to. She barged into his
dressing-room after the first night of The Millionairess , with her
operatic arms and her gravel voice, as if it hadn't been years. Years .
"Yaar, what a disappointment, I swear, I sat through the whole thing just
to hear you singing "Goodness Gracious Me" like Peter Sellers or
what, I thought, let's find out if the guy learned to hit a note, you remember
when you did Elvis impersonations with your squash racket, darling, too
hilarious, completely cracked. But what is this? Song is not in drama. The
hell. Listen, can you escape from all these palefaces and come out with us
wogs? Maybe you forgot what that is like."
               
He remembered her as a stick-figure of a teenager in a lopsided Quant hairstyle
and an equal-but-oppositely lopsided smile. A rash, bad girl. Once for the hell
of it she walked into a notorious adda, a dive, on Falkland Road, and sat there
smoking a cigarette and drinking Coke until the pimps who ran the joint
threatened to cut her face, no freelances permitted. She stared them down,
finished her cigarette, left. Fearless. Maybe crazy. Now in her middle thirties
she was a qualified doctor with a consultancy at Breach Candy Hospital, who
worked with the city's homeless, who had gone to Bhopal the moment the news
broke of the invisible American cloud that ate people's eyes and lungs. She was
an art critic whose book on the confining myth of authenticity, that
folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of
historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire national culture
based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan,
Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest?―had created a
predictable stink, especially because of its title. She had called it The
Only Good Indian . "Meaning, is a dead," she told Chamcha when she
gave him a copy. "Why should there be a good, right way of being a wog?
That's Hindu fundamentalism. Actually, we're all bad Indians. Some worse