Terrorists hijack Flight AI-420 and hold passengers hostage for over three months on a remote airstrip.

Terrorist Tavleen murders a hostage named Jalandri, then detonates her bomb and destroys the plane.

Gibreel and Saladin fall from the exploding plane, transforming mid-air—Gibreel glowing like an angel while Saladin grows horns.

Gibreel and Saladin survive the fall and wash up on a snow-covered beach in England.

Police arrest Saladin as a suspected illegal immigrant, beat him, and transfer him to a hospital ward.

Saladin escapes the hospital and returns to London, finding his wife Pamela in bed with Jumpy Joshi.

Alleluia Cone discovers Gibreel collapsed unconscious on a park bench and takes him back to her home.

Gibreel falls into a trance during a film industry meeting, fully convinced he is a real archangel.

Saladin encounters the heavily medicated Gibreel at a party and is consumed by furious envy and rage.

Saladin anonymously calls Alleluia using professionally disguised voices to humiliate her and deliberately provoke Gibreel's jealousy.

Dr. Uhuru Simba dies in police custody, and the discovery triggers violent riots across London.

Gibreel wanders through London blowing his trumpet Azraeel as real fires break out across the city.

Gibreel rescues Saladin from the burning Shaandaar Café while Pamela and Joshi perish in the fires.

Saladin returns to India, reconciles with his dying father, and inherits his estate including the magic lamp.

Gibreel murders Alleluia Cone and film producer S. S. Sisodia, then confesses his crimes to Saladin and shoots himself.

The Satanic Verses centers on Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, two Indian actors who survive a terrorist bomb and wash up transformed on an English beach. Saladin is arrested, beaten, and sent to a hospital ward, while Gibreel freely reconnects with his lover Alleluia Cone. After Saladin escapes and discovers his wife's affair, his hatred for Gibreel hardens into calculated obsession. Saladin engineers the destruction of Gibreel's relationship with Alleluia, setting off a chain of consequences neither man can control. Gibreel descends into madness, wandering London as fires break out before rescuing Saladin from the burning Shaandaar Café. The novel ends in India, where Saladin finds peace with his dying father while a shattered Gibreel confesses his murders and takes his own life.

The core story of two men transformed by a plane explosion and its deadly consequences.

Gibreel becomes India's most famous actor playing gods in films, then falls gravely ill and loses his faith.

After recovering, Gibreel feasts on pork to defy Allah and meets Alleluia Cone, falling immediately in love.

Saladin's father sends him to boarding school in England, where Saladin adopts an English accent and identity.

Saladin's mother Nasreen dies choking on a fishbone, and Saladin returns to England to settle permanently.

Rosa Diamond finds Gibreel and Saladin on the beach and welcomes both men into her home.

Rosa dies after Gibreel takes her dancing on her birthday, and Gibreel travels onward to London.

Jumpy Joshi visits Pamela to comfort her after the plane attack, and the two begin an affair.

Joshi arranges for Saladin to rent a room at the Shaandaar Café owned by Muhammad Sufyan.

Saladin learns he has been permanently replaced on his television show while Gibreel plans a film comeback.

Saladin grows to enormous size and his terrifying demonic appearance forces him to leave the Sufyan home.

Saladin's terrifying image spreads through the immigrant community as a dream-devil and becomes a political symbol.

Saladin moves back into the family home in Notting Hill and informs Pamela he intends to divorce her.

Alleluia invites Saladin to join her and Gibreel in Scotland while Gibreel recovers under heavy medication.

The real Granny Ripper is caught by Sikh men; police suppress evidence linking officers to Simba's death.

Saladin receives the magic lamp in his father's will and begins a romantic relationship with Zeenat Vakil.

Before the fateful plane journey, both Gibreel and Saladin are shaped by formative experiences—serious illness, lost faith, cultural exile, and broken family bonds. After the crash, their lives are rebuilt among London's immigrant communities, where Saladin hides at the Shaandaar Café and wrestles with his monstrous physical transformation. The secondary characters who surround them—Rosa Diamond, the Sufyan family, Jumpy Joshi, and Pamela—all undergo changes of their own as the story unfolds. Saladin's gradual return to human form mirrors his growing self-awareness, while Gibreel's fragile comeback in the film industry masks his rapidly deteriorating mental state. The community's campaign to free Dr. Uhuru Simba links personal stories to wider political tensions in London. These events provide the texture and context that make the main characters' eventual catastrophic collision inevitable.

The backstories, immigrant struggles, and supporting relationships that shape the characters' fates.

A young Saladin is sexually assaulted on a Bombay beach and resolves to escape India forever.

Gibreel abandons Rekha Merchant without explanation; she kills herself and her children by jumping from their building.

As the men plummet from the plane, the ghost of Rekha Merchant appears on a flying carpet beside Gibreel.

Mahound accepts Abu Simnel's deal and receives permission to incorporate three local goddesses into his new religion.

Mahound announces the verses permitting the goddesses were whispered by Shaitan and strikes them from his religion.

Hind's men murder Mahound's wife and Mahound and his followers are expelled from the town of Jahilia.

The Imam in London summons archangel Gibreel, uses him to overthrow Empress Ayesha, and orders him to kill the goddess Al-Lat.

Ayesha of Titlipur announces that Mishal Akhtar has inoperable cancer and that the entire village must pilgrimage to Mecca.

Gibreel meets a stranger named John Maslama on a London train and impulsively claims to be a divine messenger.

Former follower Salman reveals he secretly altered Mahound's sacred transcriptions for months without the prophet ever noticing.

Mahound orders a crackdown on vice in Jahilia; poet Baal and the brothel prostitutes are arrested and executed.

Mahound dies of a mysterious illness; the goddess Al-Lat appears at his deathbed declaring herself the cause.

Ayesha declares a baby found in a mosque is Satanic and permits the pilgrims to stone it to death.

The pilgrims follow Ayesha into the Arabian Sea and hundreds drown while Mirza Saeed watches helplessly before returning home to die.

Gibreel finds a gun hidden inside the magic lamp just as police arrive to arrest him for murder.

The Satanic Verses is built around moments of sudden revelation and irreversible choice, in both the waking world and in Gibreel's vivid dreams. In those dreams, the story of Mahound traces a prophet forced to choose between compromise and purity, while the pilgrimage led by Ayesha tests the lethal boundary between faith and self-destruction. In waking life, hidden truths accumulate—Salman's secret alterations to sacred texts, the gun concealed inside a magic lamp, and a ghost on a flying carpet—revealing that the supernatural and the psychological are inseparable. Each turning point accelerates the characters' downfall, from Mahound's rejection of the satanic verses to Gibreel's impulsive self-presentation as a divine messenger. These moments of discovery and decision define the moral and spiritual stakes of the novel, showing how the desire to escape guilt only deepens it.

The key decisions, hidden truths, and irreversible reversals that alter the course of the narrative.