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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 |
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Actors were getting mixed up in politics: MGR, N.T. Rama Rao, Bachchan. Durga Khote complained that an actors’ association was a “red front”. Saladin Chamcha, on Flight 420, closed his eyes; and felt, with deep relief, the tell—tale shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self.
The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr. Chamcha on that flight was that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams.
*
The dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of Bostan he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil’s departure he had fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long way away. The dream-woman had been so loaded down with explosives that she was not so much the bomber as the bomb; the woman walking the aisles held a baby that seemed to be sleeping noiselessly, a baby so skilfully swaddled and held so close to the breast that Chamcha could not see so much as a lock of new-born hair. Under the influence of the remembered dream he conceived the notion that the baby was in fact a bundle of dynamite sticks, or some sort of ticking device, and he was on the verge of crying out when he came to his senses and admonished himself severely. This was precisely the type of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. He was a neat man in a buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, contented life. He was a member of the real world.
He travelled alone, shunning the company of the other members of the Prospero Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin wearing Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the manner of natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking too much cheap airline champagne and importuning the scorn—laden stewardesses who, being Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type persons; and behaving, in short, with normal thespian impropriety. The woman holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players,