“Who has the best tunes”

“Who has the best tunes?” is the narrator’s sly, unanswered question at the point where survival seems to demand an explanation. Asked after Saladin Chamcha wills and Gibreel Farishta does what is willed, it shifts attention from identifying a miracle worker to wondering whose power, song, or voice is at work. The phrase gives music a double edge: a tune may charm, persuade, or deceive, but its beauty alone cannot establish the moral or supernatural identity of the one who makes it.

The Question at the Fall

The expression follows the narrator’s insistence on a limited kind of witnessing. The narrator says they watched the whole event, while declining to claim omnipresence or omnipotence; the one certainty offered is the peculiar division of agency between Chamcha’s willing and Farishta’s action. The questions that follow widen the uncertainty: which man worked the miracle, what kind of song Farishta sang, and who the speaker is. “Who has the best tunes?” is the final, playful reformulation. Instead of settling the preceding questions, it makes the means of influence—song—another possible clue, without explaining how that clue should be read.

The beach scene keeps the riddle attached to concrete, conflicting accounts. Chamcha and Farishta are the only survivors of the Bostan wreck, found washed ashore on an English beach. One, in a purple shirt, rambles that they walked on water and that the waves carried them gently in; the other, under a soggy bowler hat, denies it and calls them lucky. Against these incompatible recollections, the narrator’s assertion of having watched the whole thing sounds confident but does not close the question of what kind of power made their survival possible. The tune-question belongs to that gap between what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be believed.

Song, Miracle, and Uncertainty

The expression does not identify its singer. Its force comes instead from placing the possible sources of the event side by side: Chamcha’s will, Farishta’s deed, an unexplained miracle, and a song whose character may be angelic or satanic. The narrator explicitly asks what type of song Farishta’s was, but supplies no verdict. The question about the best tunes therefore cannot be reduced to a simple choice between good and evil; it preserves the possibility that persuasive beauty and uncertain agency coexist.

That ambiguity also makes the line sound like a challenge to the reader. If the event is treated as supernatural, the question offers no rule for distinguishing divine authority from its counterfeit. If it is treated as an extraordinary survival followed by confused reports, the narrator’s confident claim remains part of the story’s deliberately unstable account. In either reading, musical success is not proof of truth. The phrase turns a question about who caused an event into a more elusive one about who can make an account of it compelling.

Saladin Chamcha and the Made Voice

The wider significance of the phrase becomes sharper beside Chamcha’s work as a voice performer. Before the fall, he has carefully fashioned not only his face but also a voice to accompany it; after returning to his birthplace, both begin to fail him. In a dream, he encounters a stranger imprisoned in glass skin, and afterward wakes to find his speech returning to the Bombay lilt he had worked to undo. The voice he regarded as part of his constructed self instead exposes a past he thought he had left behind. Against this reversal, the question about tunes touches a central tension in Chamcha’s story: a voice can be shaped to perform an identity, yet it can also escape its owner’s intentions.

Chamcha’s professional range makes that tension literal. Known as the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice, he supplies speech for advertisements, performs celebrity imitations, and can sound Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, or like the President of the United States. In a radio play with thirty-seven parts, he performs every role under different pseudonyms without being recognized. The voice is thus both an artistic instrument and a means of concealment: listeners hear identities that Chamcha can produce without appearing as himself. The phrase’s emphasis on tunes resonates with this skill, but does not certify that the most accomplished performer is the most trustworthy one.

The Tune as a Means of Influence

Later, Chamcha turns that vocal versatility into a means of manipulating Farishta. After Chamcha and Alleluia Cone move from their London home to a remote address in Dumfries and Galloway, calls arrive over a period of three and a half weeks. The calls are frequent enough to accumulate, but short enough to elude police tracing; neither Farishta nor Cone, nor even the professional phone-tappers, recognizes that they come from one man. Chamcha needs no more than thirty-nine voices from his repertoire to maintain the deception.

The calls work through variety and delay. Chamcha sends deep and squeaky, slow and quick, cheerful and sad voices, while holding back the particular voice that will deliver the most damaging effect. The sequence gradually weakens Farishta’s hold on the real world, and the invented women carried by the calls begin, in the narration’s image, to coat the real woman. Eventually Chamcha uses the satanic verses that drive Farishta mad, prompting him to do to Cone what he had earlier done to Chamcha: the Unforgivable Thing. Read beside this episode, “Who has the best tunes?” acquires a darker resonance. A voice’s power lies not only in its sound, but in the listener it can reach and the reality it can make harder to trust. The opening question remains unanswered, but the later use of Chamcha’s many voices shows how musical or vocal command can become an instrument of deception rather than proof of supernatural authority.