Thus the novel’s narrator alerted, anyone wishing to recreate himself was practically assuming the position of God. As such, he was acting unnaturally, blasphemously, and truly becoming utterly loathsome. Yet the narrator also saw heroism in this ungodly attempt at identity reconstruction, which might come to a tragic end. After all, survival of mutants’ was risky business, a matter of chance.
To the extent that Saladin’s heroic attempt at identity reconstruction was devilish, there was a comparable precedent in his father, Changez. After Saladin’s mother Nasreen had died, his father had married another woman, also named Nasreen. On that occasion, Changez had enjoined his son to be glad because of the rebirth of the deceased. And Saladin, albeit secularized, had retorted in traditional terms that were relevant to his reclusive father, who—according to rumor—had lately become preoccupied with the supernatural;10 he had accused him of devilment and possession. Then years after, when Saladin visited his father’s mansion, he saw another woman, his former nanny, wearing his deceased mother’s clothes, which he for a moment took to be her ghost. For the narrator, their reunion amounted to an unholy trinity of the father, his son, and mistress.
As Saladin’s begetter, his originator, was satanic, Saladin logically represented a continuation of the same traits, but the narrator momentarily highlighted another dimension, this time psychological, which denied the biological influence of the father over the son. By pointing out a usually prudish reaction against satanic fathers by their sons, the narrator briefly distinguished between Saladin and Changez on moral grounds. Indeed Saladin had blamed his father for worshiping his deceased wife and the erotic role-play involved in the process, as they clearly evoked blasphemy. But in return, his father had accused him of devilry, due to his immigrant attempt at identity construction. For him, someone who betrayed himself was a walking falsehood, a creature that corresponded to the devil’s most perfect fabrication.
To save his son, Changez urged him to return to his origins. He claimed to have safely preserved Saladin’s immortal soul and asked him to abandon his form, which was devil-possessed. This precondition met, Saladin could retrieve his true essence. But any possibility for a return to his homeland after approximately a quarter century in England actually depended on Saladin’s ability to resolve his conflict with Changez.11 Truly, Saladin’s attempt at transformation to an Englishman was a direct reaction to childhood scars caused by his domineering father, although miscommunication rather than lack of love seemed to have lain at the root of the problem. It was his father who had sent Saladin to study in England at the age of thirteen, but the outcome had defied his expectations. After university, Saladin had settled in London and become an actor, despite his father’s strong objections. Uncoincidentally, Saladin was first attracted to show business through his mother’s social circles in Bombay.
On the surface of it, Saladin was fully committed to his anglicized new life and was absolutely not yearning for a return to the past. If anything, he was slavishly committed to his identity-transformation project. For example, he had substituted the funny-sounding and salad-like Saladin for his original name Salahuddin, which corresponded to that of a historic Muslim warrior who had defied Christian crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem.12 In addition, Saladin had shortened his original last name Chamchawala to Chamcha, which literally meant spoon in Hindu/Urdu, although it was slang for lackey. Even as a child, once when England had played India in cricket, he had prayed for England. By the same token, in adulthood, during their celestial free fall, when Gibreel sang a song that celebrated Indian eclecticism, he had retorted with “Rule, Brittania!”
Nevertheless, Saladin’s story in The Satanic Verses began at a moment when an identity crisis was looming for him. He was visiting Bombay for the first time in fifteen years, on tour with his theater troupe from London, but his real purpose was to see his father, who was now in his late seventies. Before arrival, during the flight, he had noticed traces of his Indian accent coming back, like evolutionary retrogression, and he had dreamt of a bizarre stranger with glass skin begging to be liberated from his skin prison. The dream had terminated in blood, screams, and detached flesh as the stranger battered his own glass skin with a rock. And Saladin’s identity crisis loomed larger. Accordingly, on the way back to England, in the immediate aftermath of his flight’s airborne explosion, he was driven by an absolute and irresistible will to life that had expressly condemned his strategy for integration, which amounted to complete cultural self-denial, as a pathetic act of mimicry. In other words, something in him had finally rebelled against his slavish quest for assimilation.
During his stay in Bombay, Saladin had failed to resolve his conflict with his father. Therefore, the mental and psychological conditions that would allow him to contemplate a permanent return did not materialize. But his erotic encounter with Zeeny (Zenaat) Vakil did open a window to the charms of the homeland. Zeeny was a childhood friend, who had become a medical doctor and an independent and attractive woman. More importantly, she was an art critic who had published a sensational book in favor of Indian cultural eclecticism. For her, authenticity was a restrictive fable, a narrowing tale. She was attempting to exchange it with the ethos of traditionally proven eclecticism. After all, Indian cultural heritage had been generated through selectively borrowing whatever suited best, be it Aryan, Mughal, or British. Although Zeeny practically took aim at Hindu fundamentalism, her thought was equally a challenge to Saladin’s slavish yearning for pure Englishness.
Interestingly, the centerpiece of Saladin’s proud claim to have transformed himself into an Englishman, or the most convincing evidence of what he took to be his conquest of England, was his marriage to Pamela Lovelace, who was white, blond, and of aristocratic stock.13 Initially, Saladin had not known that Pamela’s aristocratic parents had gone broke and committed suicide during her childhood and that she had never forgiven them for their abandonment. Thus while Pamela’s purebred Englishness gave much-needed existential affirmation or comfort to Saladin, she was basically a self-hating Englishwoman who, precisely for that reason, had married an immigrant from India.
Saladin’s looming identity crisis and erotic encounter with Zeeny were triggered by his declining marriage. This was a symbolically portentous development that he could not yet openly admit to himself. But more easily discernible, his marriage was sterile, due to his faulty genetic inheritance. Hence Saladin’s inauthentic attempt at identity construction, based on Indian self-hatred and advanced through slavish mimicry of Englishness, was bound to hit a dead end.
On the face of it, Saladin was a triumphant immigrant. He was a naturalized Briton, married to a blond aristocrat, and flush with money from show business. This was no easy feat but with insurmountable and humiliating limitations. After much effort and deliberation, he had changed his voice, face, and name—in fact, his embarrassing last name change was first proposed by his agent for commercial reasons. He was now known to possess a 1,001 voices, and his voice-over career was outstanding. Extraordinarily talented, he ruled the British radio waves, but his big break on British TV had come with The Aliens Show, where he was cast as Maxim Alien and buried under prosthetic makeup. Thus he and stage partner, an Armenian-Jew, were severely handicapped icons, hidden celebrities. They were bound to remain unseen. Their invisibility and vocality were two sides of the same coin. Unsurprisingly, on tour back in Bombay, he was acting the part of an Indian doctor in Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess.
Chapter I.4
In concluding the first part of the novel, chapter I.4 chronicled the events leading up to doomed flight Bostan’s explosion over the English Channel. Above all, however, it had to be of interpretative interest for its treatment of two figures with possible prophetic features. These were Saladin and Tavleen, a religiously motivated Sikh female terrorist. Tavleen’s flaws and virtues were presented in pointed contrast to those of Mahound, ultimately adding to his fame and glory. In addition, chapter I.4 was noteworthy for Rushdie’s attack against Western irrationalism and religious bigotry, with particular reference to American Christianity.
The chapter began with Saladin. For all his success in anglicizing himself
