 |
Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms |
|
|
|
|
|
Salman Rushdi's Satanic Verses At aboutislam.netfirms.comWe did not post the book in one part so that you don't download it since if you like what you are reading we think you should support the author of this book by buying it, it is a great book that took years to write, the author deserves the money |
|
| Note: If you do not see a next and previous button at the bottom click here for the page by page links, (LinkList) | ||
Why did he leave?
Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to become.
And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams.
*
Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care—it had taken him several years to get it just right—and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as his own -- indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the sawn—off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home town, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel Farishta’s film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down.
It started—Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping, in some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone unobserved by his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a delicate shudder of horror—on his flight east some weeks ago. He had fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire