The Satanic Verses Read Online Free PDF

been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary
film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for appearance
only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we have
discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight
and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit."
               
"But, uncle,"
               
"Boy like you is too damn good-looking to carry tiffins on his head all
his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five
minutes back."
               
"But, uncle,"
               
"I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars."
               
He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star,
serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He
remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent
lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of
industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the
four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth.
               
On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can't see
that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor
relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them
the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him,
teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to
him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he
lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women
looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and
desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the
metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who
became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of
Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic verses
in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after
his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which
butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and
children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail
of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious
stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the
small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had
never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In
his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he
preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general
knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a
larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer
it to.
               
His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the
formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of
songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got
his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on
the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were
willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel
jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, Ganpati Baba , and suddenly
he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies
playing the elephant-headed god he was permitted to remove the thick,
pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play
Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a
certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the
Ramayana. This series proved so popular that