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

him to the door by his hair. Nobody moved. Dara Buta Man Singh turned away from the tableau. He was
kneeling with his back to the open door; she made him turn round, shot him in the back of the head, and
he toppled out on to the tarmac. Tavleen shut the door.
Man Singh, youngest and jumpiest of the quartet, screamed at her: "Now where do we go? In any
damn place they'll send the commandos in for sure. We're gone geese now."
"Martyrdom is a privilege," she said softly. "We shall be like stars; like the sun."
o o o
Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white, transforming carpet, its ghost-white
shining up through the night. <strong>Th</strong>e Alps, France, the coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened
meadowlands. Mr. Saladin Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. <strong>Th</strong>e world had rediscovered
Flight A 1-420, the Boeing 747 _Bostan_. Radar tracked it; radio messages crackled. _Do you want
permission to land?_ But no permission was requested. _Bostan_ circled over England's shore like a
gigantic sea-bird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero.
When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise, because this time the three male
hijackers didn't argue with Tavleen, there were no fierce whispers about the _fuel_ about _what the fuck
you're doing_ but just a mute stand-off, they wouldn't even talk to one another, as if they had given up
hope, and then it was Man Singh who cracked and went for her. <strong>Th</strong>e hostages watched the fight to the
death, unable to feel involved, because a curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft, a
kind of inconsequential casualness, a fatalism, one might say. <strong>Th</strong>ey fell to the floor and her knife went up
through his stomach. <strong>Th</strong>at was all, the brevity of it adding to its seeming unimportance. <strong>Th</strong>en in the instant
when she rose up it was as if everybody awoke, it became clear to them all that she really meant business,
she was going through with it, all the way, she was holding in her hand the wire that connected all the pins
of all the grenades beneath her gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara
rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down.
No, not death: birth.
II
Mahound
1
Gibreel when he submits to the inevitable, when he slides heavy-lidded towards visions of his angeling,
passes his loving mother who has a different name for him, Shaitan, she calls him, just like Shaitan, same
to same, because he has been fooling around with the tiffins to be carried into the city for the office
workers' lunch, mischeevious imp, she slices the air with her hand, rascal has been putting Muslim meat
compartments into Hindu non-veg tiffin-carriers, customers are up in arms. Little devil, she scolds, but then
folds him in her arms, my little farishta, boys will be boys, and he falls past her into sleep, growing bigger
as he falls and the falling begins to feel like flight, his mother's voice wafts distantly up to him, baba, look
how you grew, enor_mouse_, wah-wah, applause. He is gigantic, wingless, standing with his feet upon the
horizon and his arms around the sun. In the early dreams he sees beginnings, Shaitan cast down from the
sky, making a grab for a branch of the highest <strong>Th</strong>ing, the lote-tree of the uttermost end that stands
beneath the <strong>Th</strong>rone, Shaitan missing, plummeting, splat. But he lived on, was not couldn't be dead, sang
from heilbelow his soft seductive verses. O the sweet songs that he knew. With his daughters as his
fiendish backing group, yes, the three of them, Lat Manat Uzza, motherless girls laughing with their Abba,
giggling behind their hands at Gibreel, what a trick we got in store for you, they giggle, for you and for that
businessman on the hill. But before the businessman there are other stories, here he is, Archangel Gibreel,
revealing the spring of Zamzam to Hagar the Egyptian so that, abandoned by the prophet Ibrahim with
their child in the desert, she might drink the cool spring waters and so live. And later, after the Jurhum
filled up Zamzam with mud and golden gazelles, so that it was lost for a time, here he is again, pointing it
out to that one, Muttalib of the scarlet tents, father of the child with the silver hair who fathered, in turn,
the businessman. <strong>Th</strong>e businessman: here he comes.
Sometimes when he sleeps Gibreel becomes aware, without the dream, of himself sleeping, of himself
dreaming his own awareness of his dream, and then a panic begins, O God, he cries out, O allgood
allahgod, I've had my bloody chips, me. Got bugs in the brain, full mad, a looney tune and a gone baboon.
Just as he, the businessman, felt when he first saw the archangel: thought he was cracked, wanted to
throw himself down from a rock, from a high rock, from a rock on which there grew a stunted lote-tree, a
rock as high as the roof of the world.
He's coming: making his way up Cone Mountain to the cave. Happy birthday: he's forty-four today. But
though the city behind and below him throngs with festival, up he climbs, alone. No new birthday suit for
him, neatly pressed and folded at the foot of his bed. A man of ascetic tastes. (What strange manner of