The migration of people and ideas, forms that change and compel change, and identities that distend or disintegrate are central themes of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and inform the immigrant world of London. The paper proposes that these multiple transformations and translations not only prompt questions about the mutability and survival of the migrant “soul” as it contends with London’s food, fogs, poets and police, but also about the viability of “the old self” of the metropolitan centre. These questions swarm in the postcolonial, multi-racial milieu of London, simultaneously locating and dissolving an imperial metropolis and its Eurocentric antecedents. The margin also invades the centre through alternative modes of narratives—in The Satanic Verses, Gibreel mediates his arrival on British shores through magic realist structures, while a fundamentalist cleric enacts a narrative of prophesy and the end of history. In Brick Lane a conventional narrative of female subject formation, that invokes tropes of liberated west and backward east, is disrupted by radical political re-imaginings. The novel also offers a London-based Bangladeshi immigrant perspective on the events of September 11 (and its aftermath) that puts pressure on the hegemonic codes of the transatlantic alliance. Postcolonial diasporic sympathies are rendered as expansive: they reshape yet exceed the nation state and make the metropolitan centre shrink.