Rushdie, Salmon - Th.. - hudson's home on the web

"You're Jewish," he pointed out. "I was brought up to have views on Jews."
"So I'm Jewish," she shrugged. "You're the one who's circumcised. Nobody's perfect."
Mimi was tiny with tight dark curls and looked like a Michelin poster. In Bombay, Zeenat Vakil stretched
and yawned and drove other women from his thoughts. "Too much," she laughed at him. "<strong>Th</strong>ey pay you to
imitate them, as long as they don't have to look at you. Your voice becomes famous but they hide your
face. Got any ideas why? Warts on your nose, cross--eyes, what? Anything come to mind, baby? You
goddamn lettuce brain, I swear."
It was true, he thought. Saladin and Mimi were legends of a sort, but crippled legends, dark stars. <strong>Th</strong>e
gravitational field of their abilities drew work towards them, but they remained invisible, shedding bodies to
put on voices. On the radio, Mimi could become the Botticelli Venus, she could be Olympia, Monroe, any
damn woman she pleased. She didn't give a damn about the way she looked; she had become her voice,
she was worth a mint, and three young women were hopelessly in love with her. Also, she bought property.
"Neurotic behaviour," she would confess unashamedly. "Excessive need for rooting owing to upheavals of
Armenian--Jewish history. Some desperation owing to advancing years and small polyps detected in the
throat. Property is so soothing, I do recommend it." She owned a Norfolk vicarage, a farmhouse in
Normandy, a Tuscan belltower, a sea--coast in Bohemia. "All haunted," she explained. "Clanks, howls,
blood on the rugs, women in nighties, the works. Nobody gives up land without a fight."
Nobody except me, Chamcha thought, a melancholy clutching at him as he lay beside Zeenat Vakil.
Maybe I'm a ghost already. But at least a ghost with an airline ticket, success, money, wife. A shade, but
living in the tangible, material world. With _assets_. Yes, sir.
Zeeny stroked the hairs curling over his ears. "Sometimes, when you're quiet," she murmured, "when
you aren't doing funny voices or acting grand, and when you forget people are watching, you look just like
a blank. You know? An empty slate, nobody <strong>home</strong>. It makes me mad, sometimes, I want to slap you. To
sting you back into life. But I also get sad about it. Such a fool, you, the big star whose face is the wrong
colour for their colour T Vs, who has to travel to wogland with some two-bit company, playing the babu
part on top of it, just to get into a play. <strong>Th</strong>ey kick you around and still you stay, you love them, bloody
slave mentality, I swear. Chamcha," she grabbed his shoulders and shook him, sitting astride him with her
forbidden breasts a few inches from his face, "Salad baba, whatever you call yourself, for Pete's sake
_come <strong>home</strong>_."
His big break, the one that could soon make money lose its meaning, had started small: children's
television, a thing called _<strong>Th</strong>e Aliens Show_, by _<strong>Th</strong>e Munsters_ out of _Star Wars_ by way of _Sesame
Street_. It was a situation comedy about a group of extraterrestrials ranging from cute to psycho, from
animal to vegetable, and also mineral, because it featured an artistic space-- rock that could quarry itself
for its raw material, and then regenerate itself in time for the next week's episode; this rock was named
Pygmalien, and owing to the stunted sense of humour of the show's producers there was also a coarse,
belching creature like a puking cactus that came from a desert planet at the end of time: this was Matilda,
the Australien, and there were the three grotesquely pneumatic, singing space sirens known as the Alien
Korns, maybe because you could lie down among them, and there was a team of Venusian hip-hoppers and
subway spraypainters and soul-brothers who called themselves the Alien Nation, and under a bed in the
spaceship that was the programme's main location there lived Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab
Nebula who had run away from his father, and in a fish-tank you could find Brains the super-intelligent
giant abalone who liked eating Chinese, and then there was Ridley, the most terrifying of the regular cast,
who looked like a Francis Bacon painting" of a mouthful of teeth waving at the end of a sightless pod, and
who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney Weaver. <strong>Th</strong>e stars of the show, its Kermit and Miss Piggy,
were the very fashionable, slinkily attired, stunningly hairstyled duo, Maxim and Mamma Alien, who
yearned to be -- what else? -- television personalities. <strong>Th</strong>ey were played by Saladin Chamcha and Mimi
Mamoulian, and they changed their voices along with their clothes, to say nothing of their hair, which could
go from purple to vermilion between shots, which could stand diagonally three feet up from their heads or
vanish altogether; or their features and limbs, because they were capable of changing all of them,
switching legs, arms, noses, ears, eyes, and every switch conjured up a different accent from their
legendary, protean gullets. What made the show a hit was its use of the latest computer-generated
imagery. <strong>Th</strong>e backgrounds were all simulated: spaceship, other--world landscapes, intergalactic game-show
studios; and the actors, too, were processed through machines, obliged to spend four hours every day
being buried under the latest in prosthetic make-up which -- once the videocomputers had gone to work --
made them look just like simulations, too. Maxim Alien, space playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic
wrestling champion and universal all--corners pasta queen, were overnight sensations. Prime-time
beckoned; America, Eurovision, the world.
As _<strong>Th</strong>e Aliens Show_ got bigger it began to attract political criticism. Conservatives attacked it for
being too frightening, too sexually explicit (Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard
about Miss Weaver), too _weird_. Radical commentators began to attack its stereotyping, its reinforcement
of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of positive images. Charncha came under pressure to quit the show;