The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

shiny
black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks,
men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a
hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool.
Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a single finger which he then
laid across his lips. Shh , and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy
towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what
might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When
Salahuddin came down the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and
forced his young hand between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone
there. The dhoti open to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he
did what he was forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him
and let him go.
               
After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did he tell
anyone what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would unleash in
his mother and suspecting that his father would say it was his own fault. It
seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had come to revile about
his home town, had come together in the stranger's bony embrace, and now that
he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also escape Bombay, or die. He began
to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his will upon it at all times,
eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that he could make the miracle
happen even without his father's lamp to help him out. He dreamed of flying out
of his bedroom window to discover that there, below him, was―not
Bombay―but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsonscolumn Lordstavern
Bloodytower Queen. But as he floated out over the great metropolis he felt
himself beginning to lose height, and no matter how hard he struggled kicked
swam-in-air he continued to spiral slowly downwards to earth, then faster, then
faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down towards the city,
Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb.
               
* * * * *
               
When the impossible happened, and his father, out of the blue, offered him an
English education, to get me out of the way , he thought, otherwise
why, it's obvious, but don't look a gift horse andsoforth , his mother
Nasreen Chamchawala refused to cry, and volunteered, instead, the benefit of
her advice. "Don't go dirty like those English," she warned him.
"They wipe their bee tee ems with paper only. Also, they get into each
other's dirty bathwater." These vile slanders proved to Salahuddin that
his mother was doing her damnedest to prevent him from leaving, and in spite of
their mutual love he replied, "It is inconceivable, Ammi, what you say.
England is a great civilization, what are you talking, bunk."
               
She smiled her little nervy smile and did not argue. And, later, stood dry-eyed
beneath the triumphal arch of a gateway and would not go to Santacruz airport
to see him off. Her only child. She heaped garlands around his neck until he
grew dizzy with the cloying perfumes of mother-love.
               
Nasreen Chamchawala was the slightest, most fragile of women, her bones like
tinkas, like minute slivers of wood. To make up for her physical insignificance
she took at an early age to dressing with a certain outrageous, excessive
verve. Her sari- patterns were dazzling, even garish: lemon silk adorned with
huge brocade diamonds, dizzy black-and-white Op Art swirls, gigantic lipstick
kisses on a bright white ground. People forgave her her lurid taste because she
wore the blinding garments with such innocence; because the voice emanating
from that textile cacophony was so tiny and hesitant and proper. And because of
her soirees.
               
Each Friday of her married life, Nasreen would fill the halls of the
Chamchawala residence, those usually tenebrous