The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie Page B

the hotel to the cheap joint nearby where you could buy takeaway roast chickens that hung greasily in the window, turning slowly on their spits. When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see, so he stuffed it inside double-breasted serge and went up in the lift reeking of spit-roast, his mackintosh bulging, his face turning red. Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth of that implacable rage which would burn within him, undiminished, for over a quarter of a century; which would boil away his childhood father-worship and make him a secular man, who would do his best, thereafter, to live without a god of any type; which would fuel, perhaps, his determination to become the thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodand-proper Englishman. Yes, an English, even if his mother had been right all along, even if there was only paper in the toilets and tepid, used water full of mud and soap to step into after taking exercise, even if it meant a lifetime spent amongst winter-naked trees whose fingers clutched despairingly at the few, pale hours of watery, filtered light. On winter nights he, who had never slept beneath more than a sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and felt like a figure in an ancient myth, 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 excludedhim 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 hehas 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 junglee people, he thinks so, and look how coarse our movies are, now he doesn’t enjoy, and