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 and contrived aristocratic poise, Saladin had retained something of a traditionalist or Eastern background. Fear could remove his nearly impeccable varnish and show remnants of a superstitious heritage. To his own embarrassment, during takeoff on his flight back to London, he had crossed two pairs of fingers and rotated his thumbs, evidently practicing an Indian superstition, which he had picked up from his father in childhood. Given that his flight was hijacked and eventually exploded by Sikh terrorists, this superstitious trick was insufficient protection. Nevertheless, the whole incident of the hijacked aircraft did actually reveal a supernatural prophetic aspect to him. Before the flight, he had dreamed of a Canadian-accented bomber, carrying her explosives under the guise of a baby held close to her breasts. And once in the cabin, he noticed the almost perfect resemblance between his nightmare vision and fellow passenger. Although he severely admonished himself for Indian superstitiousness, soon afterward the nightmare came true. The woman of his dream, Tavleen, turned out to be the leader of a Sikh terrorist quartet.14
While the rest of chapter I.4 did not provide enough material for a comparison between Saladin and Mahound, it did hint at the future possibility by presenting Saladin as someone with supernatural prophetic qualities in pursuit of rebirth. Yet this chapter did offer a compact basis for comparison between Tavleen and Mahound. To begin with, the determined Tavleen and her weak-willed male counterparts sought for an independent homeland for Sikhs, religious freedom, and justice. Hence like prophet Mahound in the subsequent chapter of The Satanic Verses, Tavleen launched her religious project with three subordinates. Also noticeable, Tavleen and fellow hijackers landed their London-bound aircraft on a six-lane highway at the Al-Zamzam oasis and held it there for 111 days. The narrator’s reference to the oasis of Al-Zamzam here pointedly served to establish another link to the Mahound story line. In that story about the foundations of Submission, a religion closely modeled on Islam, the pioneering members of the faith community congregated at Zamzam—indeed in the Islamic tradition, the Zamzam Well in Mecca was an essential destination for pilgrims. Finally, in another obvious reference to Mahound and other and spiritual visionaries in the novel, Tavleen was also preoccupied with rebirth. In this context, she murmured, unique ideas and causes had to respond to some essential enquiries upon their advent. Of historical import, they had to make known whether they were unyielding, determined, and forceful, or demonstrably easygoing, reconciliatory, and giving in.
For her part, Tavleen was unyielding. Rather than accept a weakened resolve, failure, or surrender, she exploded the hijacked aircraft over the skies of England and killed everyone, except Saladin and Gibreel who were saved miraculously. Thereby, the strong-willed amazon’s religious aspirations came to naught. Her last words on record referred to the distinctiveness of martyrs, akin to the sun and stars. In contrast to self-destructive Tavleen, who was blinded by fanaticism, Mahound knew how to combine his religious zeal with political acumen. He was therefore able to achieve his ends. Uncoincidentally, Saladin wanted to tell Tavleen that unwillingness to compromise might become a pathological obsession, sort of a dictatorship, and make for fragility when, in contrast, flexibility was a civil trait that promoted longevity.15
Although The Satanic Verses has widely been held to be critical of Islamic misogyny, Tavleen’s tragic excesses showed that Rushdie’s alleged feminism was not impeccable. To add, Rushdie’s description of suicide bomber Tavleen, sexy like a bomb, was bound to raise the ire of his feminist critics,