SatanicVerses excerpt

From The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie  'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you don't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh, Baba, if you want to get born again ...' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English channel, without the benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. 'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,' and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry cross the night, 'To the devil with your tunes,' the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, 'in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, to spare me these infernal noises now.' 'Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Oh&eacute;, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumcha.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Her we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightening or vengeance of God. Out of this air, baby. Dharrraaammm! Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat.' Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time ... the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea. Who am I?     Who else is there? The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, Gibreel and buttony, pursed mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. 

© Salman Rushdie