The Satanic Verses is constructed of three more or less independent lines: A: the lives of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, two present-day Indians who divide their time between Bombay and London; B: the Koranic story dealing with the origin of Islam; C: the villagers' trek toward Mecca across the sea they believe they will cross dry-footed and in which they drown.
The three lines are taken up in sequence in the novels nine parts in the following order: A-B-A-C-A-B-A-C-A (incidentally: in music, a sequence of this kind is called a rondo: the main theme returns regularly, in alternation with several secondary themes).
This is the rhythm of the whole (I note parenthetically the approximate number of pages): A (90), B (40), A (80), C (40), A (120), B (40), A (80), C (40), A (40). It can be seen that the B and C parts are all the same length, which gives the whole a rhythmic regularity.
Line A takes up five sevenths of the novels page total, and lines B and C one seventh each. This quantitative ratio results in the dominance of line A: the novel's center of gravity is located in the present-day lives of Farishta and Chamcha.
Nonetheless, even though B and C are subordinate lines, it is in them that the aesthetic wager of the novel is concentrated, for it is these B and C parts that enable Rushdie to get at the fundamental problem of all novels (that of an individual's, a characters, identity) in a new way that goes beyond the conventions of the psychological novel: Chamcha's and Farishta's personalities cannot be apprehended through a detailed description of their states of mind; their mystery lies in the cohabitation in their psyches of two civilizations, the Indian and the European; it lies in their roots, from which they have been torn but which, nevertheless, remain alive in them.