Saitanic verses I - The Angel Gibreel part 1

I. The Angel Gibreel "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. "I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now." Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast- stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What- ho, old Chumch." At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, "Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. _Dharrraaammm!_ Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat." Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet _Bostan_, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea. Who am I? Who else is there? The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also -- for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever reasonable doubts -- mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, _land_, _belonging_, _home_. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation. "O, my shoes are Japanese," Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, "These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that." The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast--delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent . . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelic devilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began. Mutation? Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet- shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, -- because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible - way up there, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired. What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation . . . take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it? That's not it. Listen: Mr. Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr. James Thomson, seventeen hundred to seventeen-forty- eight. ". . . at Heaven's command," Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically red white blue by the cold, "arooooose from out the aaaazure main." Farishta, horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild recital: "And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain." Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this, too: they did. Down down they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds. They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would have shouted, "Keep away, get away from me," except that something prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck. This person had, however, no time for such "high falutions"; was, indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the swirl of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a brocade sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. "Rekha Merchant," Gibreel greeted her. "You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?" Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be offered in mitigation . . . Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: "What the hell?" "You don't see her?" Gibreel shouted. "You don't see her goddamn Bokhara rug?" No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names. Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: "Spoono? You see her or you don't?" Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her alone. "You shouldn't have done it," he admonished her. "No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing." O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love. He became afraid. "What do you want? No, don't tell, just go." When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I could not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished, you used it as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and also her, the icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to forgive. I curse you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because that's where you sent me, damn you, where you came from, devil, where you're going, sucker, enjoy the bloody dip. Rekha's curse; and after that, verses in a language he did not understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which he thought he made out, but maybe not, the repeated name _Al-Lat_. He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds. Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it released more than noise: "Fly," Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. "Start flying, now." And added, without knowing its source, the second command: "And sing." How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly? When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's, to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls. "Fly," it commanded Gibreel. "Sing." Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would have been for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that they would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze. They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from _Bostan_ and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more 10 voluble of the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore; but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied this. "God, we were lucky," he said. "How lucky can you get?" I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and -potence, I'm making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed. Which was the miracle worker? Of what type -- angelic, Satanic -- was Farishta's song? Who am I? Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes? These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: "Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you." Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears. Reincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he "miraculously" defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about 11 again he would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a trick, _into thin air_. The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven movies "sy-multaneous" needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his childhood among the fabled lunch- runners of Bombay (of which more later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. "A career in the Bombay talkies," he told his loyal crew, "is more like a wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route." After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . . and then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the sets. Wheelchairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's unexplained hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach. 12 Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links -- only nine holes nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn corpse of the old city lay -- there, right there, upper-echelon executives, missing the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn from senior heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of the producers was easy to understand, because in those days of declining audiences and the creation of historical soap operas and contemporary crusading housewives by the television network, there was but a single name which, when set above a picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire, cent-per-cent guarantee of an Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said name had departed, up, down or sideways, but certainly and unarguably vamoosed . . . All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and trawlers dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no avail, epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of Rama Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest chilli-and-spices bombshell -- _she's no flibberti- gibberti mamzel!, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite_ -- clad in temple--dancer veiled undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of copulating Tantric figures from the Chandela period, -- and perceiving that her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces -- offered up a spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's sake," she cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, chhi chhi, I was just dying inside, thinking how to go near to that fatmouth with his breath of rotting cockroach dung." Bell-heavy anklets jingled as she stamped. "Damn good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get one job as a leper even." Here Pimple's soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of 13 obscenities that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to compare Pimple's vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan Devi whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists' pencils to rubber in a trice. Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor. Rhinestones fell from her navel as she went, mirroring her tears. . . in the matter of Farishta's halitosis she was not, however, altogether wrong; if anything, she had a little understated the case. Gibreel's exhalations, those ochre clouds of sulphur and brimstone, had always given him -- when taken together with his pronounced widow's peak and crowblack hair -- an air more saturnine than haloed, in spite of his archangelic name. It was said after he disappeared that he ought to have been easy to find, all it took was a halfway decent nose . . . and one week after he took off, an exit more tragic than Pimple Billimoria's did much to intensify the devilish odour that was beginning to attach itself to that forsolong sweet-smelling name. You could .say that he had stepped out of the screen into the world, and in life, unlike the cinema, people know it if you stink. _We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye_. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta's penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies. FARISHTA DIVES UNDERGROUND, opined _Blitz_ in somewhat macabre fashion, while Busybee in _The Daily_ preferred GIBREEL FLIES coop. Many photographs were published of that fabled residence in which French interior decorators bearing letters of commendation from Reza Pahlevi for the work they had done at Persepolis had spent a 14 million dollars recreating at this exalted altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines yelled, but had he gone up or down or sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, heard a note that eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the roof of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas. His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with hint innuendo and nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level. Why tarnish her reputation now? Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets _klims_ and _kleens_ and the ancient artefacts were _anti-queues_. Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong personality, drank _like a fish_ from Lalique crystal and hung her hat _shameless_ on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it, fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate. 15 "Many years ago," her letter read, "I married out of cowardice. Now, finally, I'm doing something brave." She left a newspaper on her bed with Gibreel's message circled in red and heavily underscored -- three harsh lines, one of them ripping the page in fury. So naturally the bitch-journals went to town and it was all LOVELY"S LOVELORN LEAP, and BROKEN-HEARTED BEAUTY TAKES LAST DIVE. But: Perhaps she, too, had the rebirth bug, and Gibreel, not understanding the terrible power of metaphor, had recommended flight. _To be born again, first you have to_ and she was a creature of the sky, she drank Lalique champagne, she lived on Everest, and one of her fellow- Olympians had flown; and if he could, then she, too, could be winged, and rooted in dreams. She didn't make it. The lala who was employed as gatekeeper of the Everest Vilas compound offered the world his blunt testimony. "I was walking, here here, in the compound only, when there came a thud, _tharaap_. I turned. It was the body of the oldest daughter. Her skull was completely crushed. I looked up and saw the boy falling, and after him the younger girl. What to say, they almost hit me where I stood. I put my hand on my mouth and came to them. The young girl was whining softly. Then I looked up a further time and the Begum was coming. Her sari was floating out like a big balloon and all her hair was loose. I took my eyes away from her because she was falling and it was not respectful to look up inside her clothes." Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. The whispers blamed Gibreel. Let's leave it at that for the moment. Oh: don't forget: he saw her after she died. He saw her several times. It was a long time before people understood how sick the great man was. Gibreel, the star. Gibreel, who vanquished the Nameless Ailment. Gibreel, who feared sleep. 16 After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list. Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered, snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of _Celebrity_ and _Society_ and _Illustrated Weekly_ went blank at the bookstalls and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink. Even on the silver screen itself, high above his worshippers in the dark, that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to putrefy, blister and bleach; projectors jammed unaccountably every time he passed through the gate, his films ground to a halt, and the lamp-heat of the malfunctioning projectors burned his celluloid memory away: a star gone supernova, with the consuming fire spreading outwards, as was fitting, from his lips. It was the death of God. Or something very like it; for had not that outsize face, suspended over its devotees in the artificial cinematic night, shone like that of some supernal Entity that had its being at least halfway between the mortal and the divine? More than halfway, many would have argued, for Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre movies known as "theologicals". It was part of the magic of his persona that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute in hand, amongst the beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with upturned palms, serene, he meditated (as Gautama) upon humanity's suffering beneath a 17 studio-rickety bodhi-tree. On those infrequent occasions when he descended from the heavens he never went too far, playing, for example, both the Grand Mughal and his famously wily minister in the classic _Akbar and Birbal_. For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist. The fans, yes, and? How about Gibreel? That face. In real life, reduced to life-size, set amongst ordinary mortals, it stood revealed as oddly un-starry. Those low-slung eyelids could give him an exhausted look. There was, too, something coarse about the nose, the mouth was too well fleshed to be strong, the ears were long-lobed like young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual of faces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too. Or, but, then again . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, British Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, _star of the faith_; he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's. Afterwards, when the aircraft _Bostan_ was in the grip of the hijackers, and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been his way of making a homage to the memory of his dead mother, "my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me, _farishta_, because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as goddamn gold." Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city, his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay. And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps. Gibreel, captive aboard AI-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners' coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable system by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one hundred thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got mislaid, we were illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret tongue. _Bostan_ circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights in the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy illuminated the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the journey, the inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled lugubriously into the aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows moving, projected by the nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply defined of them was this spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel in a Gandhi cap, running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla skipped nimbly through the shadow- crowd, because he was used to such conditions, think, Spoono, picture, 19 thirty-forty tiffins in a long wooden tray on your head, and when the local train stops you have maybe one minute to push on or off, and then running in the streets, flat out, yaar, with the trucks buses scooters cycles and what-all, one-two, one-two, lunch, lunch, the dabbas must get through, and in the monsoon running down the railway line when the train broke down, or waist-deep in water in some flooded street, and there were gangs, Salad baba, truly, organized gangs of dabba-stealers, it's a hungry city, baby, what to tell you, but we could handle them, we were everywhere, knew everything, what thieves could escape our eyes and ears, we never went to any policia, we looked after our own. At night father and son would return exhausted to their shack by the airport runway at Santacruz and when Ismail's mother saw him approaching, illuminated by the green red yellow of the departing jet- planes, she would say that simply to lay eyes on him made all her dreams come true, which was the first indication that there was something peculiar about Gibreel, because from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfil people's most secret desires without having any idea of how he did it. His father Najmuddin Senior never seemed to mind that his wife had eyes only for her son, that the boy's feet received nightly pressings while the father's went unstroked. A son is a blessing and a blessing requires the gratitude of the blest. Naima Najmuddin died. A bus hit her and that was that, Gibreel wasn't around to answer her prayers for life. Neither father nor son ever spoke of grief. Silently, as though it were customary and expected, they buried their sadness beneath extra work, engaging in an inarticulate contest, who could carry the most dabbas on his head, who could acquire the most new contracts per month, who could run faster, as though the greater labour would indicate the greater love. When he saw his father at night, the knotted veins bulging in his neck and at his temples, Ismail Najmuddin would understand how much the older man had 20 resented him, and how important it was for the father to defeat the son and regain, thereby, his usurped primacy in the affections of his dead wife. Once he realized this, the youth eased off, but his father's zeal remained unrelenting, and pretty soon he was getting promotion, no longer a mere runner but one of the organizing muqaddams. When Gibreel was nineteen, Najmuddin Senior became a member of the lunch-runners' guild, the Bombay Tiffin Carriers' Association, and when Gibreel was twenty, his father was dead, stopped in his tracks by a stroke that almost blew him apart. "He just ran himself into the ground," said the guild's General Secretary, Babasaheb Mhatre himself. "That poor bastard, he just ran out of steam." But the orphan knew better. He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart. Babasaheb Mhatre sat in a blue office behind a green door above a labyrinthine bazaar, an awesome figure, buddha-fat, one of the great moving forces of the metropolis, possessing the occult gift of remaining absolutely still, never shifting from his room, and yet being everywhere important and meeting everyone who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail's father ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man into his presence. "So? Upset or what?" The reply, with downcast eyes: ji, thank you, Babaji, I am okay. "Shut your face," said Babasaheb Mhatre. "From today you live with me." Butbut, Babaji ... "But me no buts. Already I have informed my goodwife. I have spoken." Please excuse Babaji but how what why? "I have _spoken_." Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after a while he began to have an idea. Mrs. Mhatre was a thin woman, 21 like a pencil beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the household could hear the great General Secretary of the B T C A protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. "You see, he is a grown fellow," she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, "Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt." Yes, a grown fellow, "we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him." "Then damn it to hell," the Babasaheb exploded, "why do you do it to me?" Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. "But you are everything to me," she wept, "you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life." Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt. He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses. "But I gave that up," he told his protege, with many suitably melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns, "after I got the fright of my bloody life." Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most co- operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to ask him some big questions. _Is there a God_, and that glass which had 22 been running round like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a twitch, completely phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won't answer that try this one instead, and I came right out with it, _Is there a Devil_. After that the glass -- baprebap! -- began to shake -- catch your ears! -- slowslow at first, then faster--faster, like a jelly, until it jumped! -- ai-hai! -- up from the table, into the air, fell down on its side, and -- o-ho! -- into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don't believe, Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don't meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend. This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young listener, because even before his mother's death he had become convinced of the existence of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people, motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would fade, but the sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God, angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or lamp- posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight that he had never seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of greentinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath. From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested in knowing what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would not wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he 23 caught himself in the act of forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as he drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent fancy began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the time when, having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success of his job as the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended up marrying her as well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on a rose- strewn dais, simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had placed demurely over his face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre, reached lovingly towards him to remove the fabric, and gaze at his features in a mirror placed in his lap. This dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that he began to worry about the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions. Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb Mhatre took him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not alone in the world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not entirely surprised when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the morning of his twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being prepared to listen to an appeal. "You're fired," Mhatre emphasized, beaming. "Cashiered, had your chips. Dis-_miss_." "But, uncle," "Shut your face." Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for appearance only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we 24 have discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit." "But, uncle," "Boy like you is too damn goodlooking to carry tiffins on his head all his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five minutes back." "But, uncle," "I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars." He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star, serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth. On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can't see that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him, teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of 25 the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to. His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, _Ganpati Baba_, and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies playing the elephantheaded god he was permitted to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the Ramayana. This series proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigueur for the city's young bucks at the kind of parties frequented by convent girls known as "firecrackers" because of their readiness to go off with a bang. 26 After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more regrettable development. (I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha's beans.) Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become irresistibly attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so great that several of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganesh-mask on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of the god. Owing to the innocence of his upbringing he could not at that time differentiate between quantity and quality and accordingly felt the need to make up for lost time. He had so many sexual partners that it was not uncommon for him to forget their names even before they had left his room. Not only did he become a philanderer of the worst type, but he also learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man who plays gods must be above reproach. So skilfully did he conceal his life of scandal and debauch that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his deathbed a decade after he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of illusion, black-money and lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a man. "God-sake, mister," the Babasaheb pleaded, "when I told you back then to go and be a homo I never thought you would take me seriously, there is a limit to respecting one's elders, after all." Gibreel threw up his hands and swore that he was no such disgraceful thing, and that when the right girl came along he would of course undergo nuptials with a will. "What you waiting? Some goddess from heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali, who?" cried the old man, coughing blood, but Gibreel left him with the enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without having his mind set entirely at rest. The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to bury his greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost forever, his talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without 27 holding back, the rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to employ. By the time of his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he used to experience owing to his longing for love, which had twisted and turned in him like a sorcerer's knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart. "Your trouble," Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of the clouds, "is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always got let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for what you did." He couldn't argue. "God's gift," she screamed at him, "God knows where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the gutter, God knows what diseases you brought." But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody blamed him for leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness, how many abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud- hole, how many broken hearts. In all those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity of women, but he was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made possible the deepest and sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he was doing nothing wrong. Rekha: she entered his life when he bought the penthouse at Everest Vilas and she offered, as a neighbour and businesswoman, to show him her carpets and antiques. Her husband was at a world-wide congress of ball-bearings manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she invited Gibreel into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and carved wooden handrails from Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne she leaned against marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone against her back. When he sipped the champagne she 28 teased him, surely gods should not partake of alcohol, and he answered with a line he had once read in an interview with the Aga Khan, O, you know, this champagne is only for outward show, the moment it touches my lips it turns to water. After that it didn't take long for her to touch his lips and deliquesce into his arms. By the time her children returned from school with the ayah she was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and sat with him in the drawing-room, revealing the secrets of the carpet business, confessing that art silk stood for artificial not artistic, telling him not to be fooled by her brochure in which a rug was seductively described as being made of wool plucked from the throats of baby lambs, which means, you see, only _low-grade wool_, advertising, what to do, this is how it is. He did not love her, was not faithful to her, forgot her birthdays, failed to return her phone calls, turned up when it was most inconvenient owing to the presence in her home of dinner guests from the world of the ball-bearing, and like everyone else she forgave him. But her forgiveness was not the silent, mousy let-off he got from the others. Rekha complained like crazy, she gave him hell, she bawled him out and cursed him for a useless lafanga and haramzada and salah and even, in extremis, for being guilty of the impossible feat of fucking the sister he did not have. She spared him nothing, accusing him of being a creature of surfaces, like a movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave him anyway and allowed him to unhook her blouse. Gibreel could not resist the operatic forgiveness of Rekha Merchant, which was all the more moving on account of the flaw in her own position, her infidelity to the ball-bearing king, which Gibreel forbore to mention, taking his verbal beatings like a man. So that whereas the pardons he got from the rest of his women left him cold and he forgot them the moment they were uttered, he kept coming back to Rekha, so that she could abuse him and then console him as only she knew how. Then he almost died. 29 He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia, taking part in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems that three oceans are truly smashing into one another. Three sets of waves rolled in from the west east south and collided in a mighty clapping of watery hands just as Gibreel took a punch on the jaw, perfect timing, and he passed out on the spot, falling backwards into tri-oceanic spume. He did not get up. To begin with everybody blamed the giant English stunt-man Eustace Brown, who had delivered the punch. He protested vehemently. Was he not the same fellow who had performed opposite Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao in his many theological movie roles? Had he not perfected the art of making the old man look good in combat without hurting him? Had he ever complained that NTR never pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've eaten for breakfast, on _toast_, and had he ever, even once, lost his temper? Well, then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel? -- They fired him anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case. But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had been flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come up with almost nothing; and while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood- count that had fallen from his normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. "It is a freak mystery," he gave out. "Call it, if you so please, an act of God." Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no apparent reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At the worst moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis, and it seemed that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his nose and ears and out of the corners of his eyes. For seven 30 days he bled, and received transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical science, including a concentrated form of rat poison, and although the treatment resulted in a marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for lost. The whole of India was at Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large that the police had to disperse it with lathi- charges and tear-gas, which they used even though every one of the half- million mourners was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves. Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball--bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul. He recovered. The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A 31 national holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith. On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth. During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to _thin air_, that there was nobody there at all, and then he 32 felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non- existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face. He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away. "Don't you get it?" he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. "No thunderbolt. That's the point." She came back to stand in front of him. "You're alive," she told him. "You got your life back. _That's_ the point." He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest, blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge, _change your life, or did you get it back for nothing_, I couldn't resist. "You and your reincarnation junk," Rekha cajoled him. "Such a nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there she is, hey presto, the blonde mime. Don't think I don't know what you're like, Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?" No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept, face- down, on the floor); and never entered it again. Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not- 33 disturb sign, but in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible and what was impossible was im--, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his belief it didn't mean he couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work. And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but _Bostan_. "To be born again," Gibreel Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much later, "first you have to die. Me, I only half- expired, but I did it on two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?" Why did he leave? Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to become. And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams. Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching 34 the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care -- it had taken him several years to get it just right -- and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as _his own_ -- indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the sawn--off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home town, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel Farishta's film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down. It started -- Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping, in some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone unobserved by his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a delicate shudder of horror -- on his flight east some weeks ago. He had fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his skin. Chamcha picked up a stone and began to batter at the glass. At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked surface of the stranger's body, and when Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards the other began to scream, because chunks of his flesh were coming away with the glass. At this point an air stewardess bent over the sleeping Chamcha and demanded, with the pitiless hospitality of her tribe: _Something to drink, sir? A 35 drink?_, and Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago!) unmade. "Achha, means what?" he mumbled. "Alcoholic beverage or what?" And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: "So, okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only." What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly in his chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to _go home_, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster. _I'm not myself_, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly. After all, "les acteurs ne sont pas des gens", as the great ham Frederick had explained in _Les Enfants du Paradis_. Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air turbulence, they dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about beneath them and the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at his giant transistor radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man had not fastened his belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice back to its haughtiest English pitch. "Look here, why don't you. . ." he indicated, but the sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag which Saladin had handed him just in time, shook his head, shrugged, replied: "Sahib, for what? If Allah 36 wishes me to die, I shall die. If he does not, I shall not. Then of what use is the safety?" Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back. Once upon a time -- _it was and it was not so_, as the old stories used to say, _it happened and it never did_ -- maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in tI. The Angel Gibreel 1 "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. "I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now." Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast- stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What- ho, old Chumch." At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, "Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. _Dharrraaammm!_ Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat." Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet _Bostan_, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea. Who am I? Who else is there? The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also -- for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever reasonable doubts -- mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, _land_, _belonging_, _home_. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation. "O, my shoes are Japanese," Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, "These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that." The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast--delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent . . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelic devilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began. Mutation? Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet- shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, -- because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible - way up there, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired. What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation . . . take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it? That's not it. Listen: Mr. Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr. James Thomson, seventeen hundred to seventeen-forty- eight. ". . . at Heaven's command," Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically red white blue by the cold, "arooooose from out the aaaazure main." Farishta, horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild recital: "And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain." Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this, too: they did. Down down they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds. They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would have shouted, "Keep away, get away from me," except that something prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck. This person had, however, no time for such "high falutions"; was, indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the swirl of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a brocade sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. "Rekha Merchant," Gibreel greeted her. "You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?" Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be offered in mitigation . . . Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: "What the hell?" "You don't see her?" Gibreel shouted. "You don't see her goddamn Bokhara rug?" No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names. Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: "Spoono? You see her or you don't?" Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her alone. "You shouldn't have done it," he admonished her. "No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing." O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love. He became afraid. "What do you want? No, don't tell, just go." When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I could not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished, you used it as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and also her, the icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to forgive. I curse you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because that's where you sent me, damn you, where you came from, devil, where you're going, sucker, enjoy the bloody dip. Rekha's curse; and after that, verses in a language he did not understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which he thought he made out, but maybe not, the repeated name _Al-Lat_. He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds. Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it released more than noise: "Fly," Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. "Start flying, now." And added, without knowing its source, the second command: "And sing." How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly? When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's, to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls. "Fly," it commanded Gibreel. "Sing." Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would have been for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that they would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze. They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from _Bostan_ and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more 10 voluble of the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore; but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied this. "God, we were lucky," he said. "How lucky can you get?" I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and -potence, I'm making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed. Which was the miracle worker? Of what type -- angelic, Satanic -- was Farishta's song? Who am I? Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes? These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: "Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you." Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears. Reincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he "miraculously" defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about 11 again he would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a trick, _into thin air_. The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven movies "sy-multaneous" needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his childhood among the fabled lunch- runners of Bombay (of which more later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. "A career in the Bombay talkies," he told his loyal crew, "is more like a wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route." After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . . and then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the sets. Wheelchairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's unexplained hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach. 12 Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links -- only nine holes nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn corpse of the old city lay -- there, right there, upper-echelon executives, missing the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn from senior heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of the producers was easy to understand, because in those days of declining audiences and the creation of historical soap operas and contemporary crusading housewives by the television network, there was but a single name which, when set above a picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire, cent-per-cent guarantee of an Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said name had departed, up, down or sideways, but certainly and unarguably vamoosed . . . All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and trawlers dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no avail, epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of Rama Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest chilli-and-spices bombshell -- _she's no flibberti- gibberti mamzel!, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite_ -- clad in temple--dancer veiled undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of copulating Tantric figures from the Chandela period, -- and perceiving that her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces -- offered up a spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's sake," she cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, chhi chhi, I was just dying inside, thinking how to go near to that fatmouth with his breath of rotting cockroach dung." Bell-heavy anklets jingled as she stamped. "Damn good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get one job as a leper even." Here Pimple's soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of 13 obscenities that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to compare Pimple's vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan Devi whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists' pencils to rubber in a trice. Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor. Rhinestones fell from her navel as she went, mirroring her tears. . . in the matter of Farishta's halitosis she was not, however, altogether wrong; if anything, she had a little understated the case. Gibreel's exhalations, those ochre clouds of sulphur and brimstone, had always given him -- when taken together with his pronounced widow's peak and crowblack hair -- an air more saturnine than haloed, in spite of his archangelic name. It was said after he disappeared that he ought to have been easy to find, all it took was a halfway decent nose . . . and one week after he took off, an exit more tragic than Pimple Billimoria's did much to intensify the devilish odour that was beginning to attach itself to that forsolong sweet-smelling name. You could .say that he had stepped out of the screen into the world, and in life, unlike the cinema, people know it if you stink. _We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye_. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta's penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies. FARISHTA DIVES UNDERGROUND, opined _Blitz_ in somewhat macabre fashion, while Busybee in _The Daily_ preferred GIBREEL FLIES coop. Many photographs were published of that fabled residence in which French interior decorators bearing letters of commendation from Reza Pahlevi for the work they had done at Persepolis had spent a 14 million dollars recreating at this exalted altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines yelled, but had he gone up or down or sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, heard a note that eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the roof of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas. His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with hint innuendo and nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level. Why tarnish her reputation now? Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets _klims_ and _kleens_ and the ancient artefacts were _anti-queues_. Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong personality, drank _like a fish_ from Lalique crystal and hung her hat _shameless_ on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it, fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate. 15 "Many years ago," her letter read, "I married out of cowardice. Now, finally, I'm doing something brave." She left a newspaper on her bed with Gibreel's message circled in red and heavily underscored -- three harsh lines, one of them ripping the page in fury. So naturally the bitch-journals went to town and it was all LOVELY"S LOVELORN LEAP, and BROKEN-HEARTED BEAUTY TAKES LAST DIVE. But: Perhaps she, too, had the rebirth bug, and Gibreel, not understanding the terrible power of metaphor, had recommended flight. _To be born again, first you have to_ and she was a creature of the sky, she drank Lalique champagne, she lived on Everest, and one of her fellow- Olympians had flown; and if he could, then she, too, could be winged, and rooted in dreams. She didn't make it. The lala who was employed as gatekeeper of the Everest Vilas compound offered the world his blunt testimony. "I was walking, here here, in the compound only, when there came a thud, _tharaap_. I turned. It was the body of the oldest daughter. Her skull was completely crushed. I looked up and saw the boy falling, and after him the younger girl. What to say, they almost hit me where I stood. I put my hand on my mouth and came to them. The young girl was whining softly. Then I looked up a further time and the Begum was coming. Her sari was floating out like a big balloon and all her hair was loose. I took my eyes away from her because she was falling and it was not respectful to look up inside her clothes." Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. The whispers blamed Gibreel. Let's leave it at that for the moment. Oh: don't forget: he saw her after she died. He saw her several times. It was a long time before people understood how sick the great man was. Gibreel, the star. Gibreel, who vanquished the Nameless Ailment. Gibreel, who feared sleep. 16 After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list. Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered, snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of _Celebrity_ and _Society_ and _Illustrated Weekly_ went blank at the bookstalls and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink. Even on the silver screen itself, high above his worshippers in the dark, that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to putrefy, blister and bleach; projectors jammed unaccountably every time he passed through the gate, his films ground to a halt, and the lamp-heat of the malfunctioning projectors burned his celluloid memory away: a star gone supernova, with the consuming fire spreading outwards, as was fitting, from his lips. It was the death of God. Or something very like it; for had not that outsize face, suspended over its devotees in the artificial cinematic night, shone like that of some supernal Entity that had its being at least halfway between the mortal and the divine? More than halfway, many would have argued, for Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre movies known as "theologicals". It was part of the magic of his persona that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute in hand, amongst the beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with upturned palms, serene, he meditated (as Gautama) upon humanity's suffering beneath a 17 studio-rickety bodhi-tree. On those infrequent occasions when he descended from the heavens he never went too far, playing, for example, both the Grand Mughal and his famously wily minister in the classic _Akbar and Birbal_. For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist. The fans, yes, and? How about Gibreel? That face. In real life, reduced to life-size, set amongst ordinary mortals, it stood revealed as oddly un-starry. Those low-slung eyelids could give him an exhausted look. There was, too, something coarse about the nose, the mouth was too well fleshed to be strong, the ears were long-lobed like young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual of faces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too. Or, but, then again . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, British Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, _star of the faith_; he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's. Afterwards, when the aircraft _Bostan_ was in the grip of the hijackers, and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been his way of making a homage to the memory of his dead mother, "my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me, _farishta_, because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as goddamn gold." Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city, his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay. And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps. Gibreel, captive aboard AI-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners' coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable system by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one hundred thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got mislaid, we were illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret tongue. _Bostan_ circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights in the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy illuminated the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the journey, the inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled lugubriously into the aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows moving, projected by the nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply defined of them was this spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel in a Gandhi cap, running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla skipped nimbly through the shadow- crowd, because he was used to such conditions, think, Spoono, picture, 19 thirty-forty tiffins in a long wooden tray on your head, and when the local train stops you have maybe one minute to push on or off, and then running in the streets, flat out, yaar, with the trucks buses scooters cycles and what-all, one-two, one-two, lunch, lunch, the dabbas must get through, and in the monsoon running down the railway line when the train broke down, or waist-deep in water in some flooded street, and there were gangs, Salad baba, truly, organized gangs of dabba-stealers, it's a hungry city, baby, what to tell you, but we could handle them, we were everywhere, knew everything, what thieves could escape our eyes and ears, we never went to any policia, we looked after our own. At night father and son would return exhausted to their shack by the airport runway at Santacruz and when Ismail's mother saw him approaching, illuminated by the green red yellow of the departing jet- planes, she would say that simply to lay eyes on him made all her dreams come true, which was the first indication that there was something peculiar about Gibreel, because from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfil people's most secret desires without having any idea of how he did it. His father Najmuddin Senior never seemed to mind that his wife had eyes only for her son, that the boy's feet received nightly pressings while the father's went unstroked. A son is a blessing and a blessing requires the gratitude of the blest. Naima Najmuddin died. A bus hit her and that was that, Gibreel wasn't around to answer her prayers for life. Neither father nor son ever spoke of grief. Silently, as though it were customary and expected, they buried their sadness beneath extra work, engaging in an inarticulate contest, who could carry the most dabbas on his head, who could acquire the most new contracts per month, who could run faster, as though the greater labour would indicate the greater love. When he saw his father at night, the knotted veins bulging in his neck and at his temples, Ismail Najmuddin would understand how much the older man had 20 resented him, and how important it was for the father to defeat the son and regain, thereby, his usurped primacy in the affections of his dead wife. Once he realized this, the youth eased off, but his father's zeal remained unrelenting, and pretty soon he was getting promotion, no longer a mere runner but one of the organizing muqaddams. When Gibreel was nineteen, Najmuddin Senior became a member of the lunch-runners' guild, the Bombay Tiffin Carriers' Association, and when Gibreel was twenty, his father was dead, stopped in his tracks by a stroke that almost blew him apart. "He just ran himself into the ground," said the guild's General Secretary, Babasaheb Mhatre himself. "That poor bastard, he just ran out of steam." But the orphan knew better. He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart. Babasaheb Mhatre sat in a blue office behind a green door above a labyrinthine bazaar, an awesome figure, buddha-fat, one of the great moving forces of the metropolis, possessing the occult gift of remaining absolutely still, never shifting from his room, and yet being everywhere important and meeting everyone who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail's father ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man into his presence. "So? Upset or what?" The reply, with downcast eyes: ji, thank you, Babaji, I am okay. "Shut your face," said Babasaheb Mhatre. "From today you live with me." Butbut, Babaji ... "But me no buts. Already I have informed my goodwife. I have spoken." Please excuse Babaji but how what why? "I have _spoken_." Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after a while he began to have an idea. Mrs. Mhatre was a thin woman, 21 like a pencil beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the household could hear the great General Secretary of the B T C A protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. "You see, he is a grown fellow," she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, "Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt." Yes, a grown fellow, "we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him." "Then damn it to hell," the Babasaheb exploded, "why do you do it to me?" Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. "But you are everything to me," she wept, "you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life." Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt. He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses. "But I gave that up," he told his protege, with many suitably melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns, "after I got the fright of my bloody life." Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most co- operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to ask him some big questions. _Is there a God_, and that glass which had 22 been running round like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a twitch, completely phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won't answer that try this one instead, and I came right out with it, _Is there a Devil_. After that the glass -- baprebap! -- began to shake -- catch your ears! -- slowslow at first, then faster--faster, like a jelly, until it jumped! -- ai-hai! -- up from the table, into the air, fell down on its side, and -- o-ho! -- into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don't believe, Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don't meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend. This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young listener, because even before his mother's death he had become convinced of the existence of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people, motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would fade, but the sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God, angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or lamp- posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight that he had never seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of greentinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath. From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested in knowing what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would not wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he 23 caught himself in the act of forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as he drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent fancy began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the time when, having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success of his job as the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended up marrying her as well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on a rose- strewn dais, simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had placed demurely over his face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre, reached lovingly towards him to remove the fabric, and gaze at his features in a mirror placed in his lap. This dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that he began to worry about the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions. Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb Mhatre took him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not alone in the world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not entirely surprised when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the morning of his twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being prepared to listen to an appeal. "You're fired," Mhatre emphasized, beaming. "Cashiered, had your chips. Dis-_miss_." "But, uncle," "Shut your face." Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for appearance only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we 24 have discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit." "But, uncle," "Boy like you is too damn goodlooking to carry tiffins on his head all his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five minutes back." "But, uncle," "I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars." He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star, serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth. On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can't see that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him, teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of 25 the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to. His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, _Ganpati Baba_, and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies playing the elephantheaded god he was permitted to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the Ramayana. This series proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigueur for the city's young bucks at the kind of parties frequented by convent girls known as "firecrackers" because of their readiness to go off with a bang. 26 After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more regrettable development. (I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha's beans.) Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become irresistibly attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so great that several of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganesh-mask on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of the god. Owing to the innocence of his upbringing he could not at that time differentiate between quantity and quality and accordingly felt the need to make up for lost time. He had so many sexual partners that it was not uncommon for him to forget their names even before they had left his room. Not only did he become a philanderer of the worst type, but he also learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man who plays gods must be above reproach. So skilfully did he conceal his life of scandal and debauch that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his deathbed a decade after he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of illusion, black-money and lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a man. "God-sake, mister," the Babasaheb pleaded, "when I told you back then to go and be a homo I never thought you would take me seriously, there is a limit to respecting one's elders, after all." Gibreel threw up his hands and swore that he was no such disgraceful thing, and that when the right girl came along he would of course undergo nuptials with a will. "What you waiting? Some goddess from heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali, who?" cried the old man, coughing blood, but Gibreel left him with the enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without having his mind set entirely at rest. The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to bury his greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost forever, his talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without 27 holding back, the rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to employ. By the time of his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he used to experience owing to his longing for love, which had twisted and turned in him like a sorcerer's knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart. "Your trouble," Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of the clouds, "is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always got let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for what you did." He couldn't argue. "God's gift," she screamed at him, "God knows where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the gutter, God knows what diseases you brought." But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody blamed him for leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness, how many abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud- hole, how many broken hearts. In all those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity of women, but he was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made possible the deepest and sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he was doing nothing wrong. Rekha: she entered his life when he bought the penthouse at Everest Vilas and she offered, as a neighbour and businesswoman, to show him her carpets and antiques. Her husband was at a world-wide congress of ball-bearings manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she invited Gibreel into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and carved wooden handrails from Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne she leaned against marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone against her back. When he sipped the champagne she 28 teased him, surely gods should not partake of alcohol, and he answered with a line he had once read in an interview with the Aga Khan, O, you know, this champagne is only for outward show, the moment it touches my lips it turns to water. After that it didn't take long for her to touch his lips and deliquesce into his arms. By the time her children returned from school with the ayah she was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and sat with him in the drawing-room, revealing the secrets of the carpet business, confessing that art silk stood for artificial not artistic, telling him not to be fooled by her brochure in which a rug was seductively described as being made of wool plucked from the throats of baby lambs, which means, you see, only _low-grade wool_, advertising, what to do, this is how it is. He did not love her, was not faithful to her, forgot her birthdays, failed to return her phone calls, turned up when it was most inconvenient owing to the presence in her home of dinner guests from the world of the ball-bearing, and like everyone else she forgave him. But her forgiveness was not the silent, mousy let-off he got from the others. Rekha complained like crazy, she gave him hell, she bawled him out and cursed him for a useless lafanga and haramzada and salah and even, in extremis, for being guilty of the impossible feat of fucking the sister he did not have. She spared him nothing, accusing him of being a creature of surfaces, like a movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave him anyway and allowed him to unhook her blouse. Gibreel could not resist the operatic forgiveness of Rekha Merchant, which was all the more moving on account of the flaw in her own position, her infidelity to the ball-bearing king, which Gibreel forbore to mention, taking his verbal beatings like a man. So that whereas the pardons he got from the rest of his women left him cold and he forgot them the moment they were uttered, he kept coming back to Rekha, so that she could abuse him and then console him as only she knew how. Then he almost died. 29 He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia, taking part in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems that three oceans are truly smashing into one another. Three sets of waves rolled in from the west east south and collided in a mighty clapping of watery hands just as Gibreel took a punch on the jaw, perfect timing, and he passed out on the spot, falling backwards into tri-oceanic spume. He did not get up. To begin with everybody blamed the giant English stunt-man Eustace Brown, who had delivered the punch. He protested vehemently. Was he not the same fellow who had performed opposite Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao in his many theological movie roles? Had he not perfected the art of making the old man look good in combat without hurting him? Had he ever complained that NTR never pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've eaten for breakfast, on _toast_, and had he ever, even once, lost his temper? Well, then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel? -- They fired him anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case. But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had been flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come up with almost nothing; and while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood- count that had fallen from his normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. "It is a freak mystery," he gave out. "Call it, if you so please, an act of God." Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no apparent reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At the worst moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis, and it seemed that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his nose and ears and out of the corners of his eyes. For seven 30 days he bled, and received transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical science, including a concentrated form of rat poison, and although the treatment resulted in a marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for lost. The whole of India was at Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large that the police had to disperse it with lathi- charges and tear-gas, which they used even though every one of the half- million mourners was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves. Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball--bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul. He recovered. The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A 31 national holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith. On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth. During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to _thin air_, that there was nobody there at all, and then he 32 felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non- existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face. He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away. "Don't you get it?" he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. "No thunderbolt. That's the point." She came back to stand in front of him. "You're alive," she told him. "You got your life back. _That's_ the point." He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest, blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge, _change your life, or did you get it back for nothing_, I couldn't resist. "You and your reincarnation junk," Rekha cajoled him. "Such a nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there she is, hey presto, the blonde mime. Don't think I don't know what you're like, Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?" No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept, face- down, on the floor); and never entered it again. Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not- 33 disturb sign, but in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible and what was impossible was im--, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his belief it didn't mean he couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work. And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but _Bostan_. "To be born again," Gibreel Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much later, "first you have to die. Me, I only half- expired, but I did it on two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?" Why did he leave? Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to become. And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams. Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching 34 the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care -- it had taken him several years to get it just right -- and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as _his own_ -- indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the sawn--off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home town, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel Farishta's film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down. It started -- Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping, in some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone unobserved by his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a delicate shudder of horror -- on his flight east some weeks ago. He had fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his skin. Chamcha picked up a stone and began to batter at the glass. At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked surface of the stranger's body, and when Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards the other began to scream, because chunks of his flesh were coming away with the glass. At this point an air stewardess bent over the sleeping Chamcha and demanded, with the pitiless hospitality of her tribe: _Something to drink, sir? A 35 drink?_, and Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago!) unmade. "Achha, means what?" he mumbled. "Alcoholic beverage or what?" And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: "So, okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only." What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly in his chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to _go home_, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster. _I'm not myself_, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly. After all, "les acteurs ne sont pas des gens", as the great ham Frederick had explained in _Les Enfants du Paradis_. Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air turbulence, they dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about beneath them and the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at his giant transistor radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man had not fastened his belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice back to its haughtiest English pitch. "Look here, why don't you. . ." he indicated, but the sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag which Saladin had handed him just in time, shook his head, shrugged, replied: "Sahib, for what? If Allah 36 wishes me to die, I shall die. If he does not, I shall not. Then of what use is the safety?" Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back. Once upon a time -- _it was and it was not so_, as the old stories used to say, _it happened and it never did_ -- maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the Street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling faintly nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed, -- opened, -- and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash, -- and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, -- pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away. Dazzled by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his eyes to make sure he had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to him that a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like an angel's breath, like an answered prayer, coming to an end in the very spot on which he stood. His fingers trembled as they reached into the wallet, towards the fabulous hoard. "Give it." It seemed to him in later life that his father had been spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala was a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public standing, he still always had the lightness of foot and also the inclination to sneak up behind his son and spoil whatever he was 37 doing, whipping the young Salahuddin's bedsheet off at night to reveal the shameful penis in the clutching, red hand. And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles away, even through the stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung around him owing to his being the country's largest manufacturer of agricultural sprays and fluids and artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala, philanthropist, philanderer, living legend, leading light of the nationalist movement, sprang from the gateway of his home to pluck a bulging wallet from his son's frustrated hand. "Teh tch," he admonished, pocketing the pounds sterling, "you should not pick things up from the street. The ground is dirty, and money is dirtier, anyway." On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten- volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread, there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper--and--brass avatar of Aladdin's very own genie- container: a lamp begging to be rubbed. But Changez neither rubbed it nor permitted it to be rubbed by, for example, his son. "One day," he assured the boy, "you'll have it for yourself. Then rub and rub as much as you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now, but, it is mine." The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.he Street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling faintly nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed, -- opened, -- and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash, -- and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, -- pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away. Dazzled by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his eyes to make sure he had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to him that a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like an angel's breath, like an answered prayer, coming to an end in the very spot on which he stood. His fingers trembled as they reached into the wallet, towards the fabulous hoard. "Give it." It seemed to him in later life that his father had been spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala was a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public standing, he still always had the lightness of foot and alsothe inclination to sneak up behind his son and spoil whatever he was doing, whipping the young Salahuddin's bedsheet off at night to revealthe shameful penis in the clutching, red hand. And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles away, even through the stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung around him owing to his being the country's largest manufacturer of agricultural sprays and fluids and artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala, philanthropist, philanderer, living legend, leading light of the nationalist movement, sprang from the gateway of his home to pluck a bulging wallet from his son's frustrated hand. "Teh tch," he admonished, pocketing the pounds sterling, "you should not pick things up from the street. The ground is dirty, and money is dirtier, anyway." On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten- volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread, there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper--and--brass avatar of Aladdin's very own genie- container: a lamp begging to be rubbed. But Changez neither rubbed it nor permitted it to be rubbed by, for example, his son. "One day," he assured the boy, "you'll have it for yourself. Then rub and rub as much as you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now, but, it is mine." The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.