Saitanic verses III. Ellowen Deeowen Part 4

196 "Inner voices," Hanif said solemnly. "Upstairs on his desk there's a piece of paper with some verses written on it. And a title: _The River of Blood_." Jumpy jumped, knocking over his empty cup. "I'll kill you," he shouted at Hanif, who skipped quickly across the room, singing out, "We got a poet in our midst, Sufyan Sahib. Treat with respect. Handle with care. He says a street is a river and we are the flow; humanity is a river of blood, that's the poet's point. Also the individual human being," he broke off to run around to the far side of an eight--seater table as Jumpy came after him, blushing furiously, flapping his arms. "In our very bodies, does the river of blood not flow?" _Like the Roman_, the ferrety Enoch Powell had said, _I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood_. Reclaim the metaphor, Jumpy Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use. "This is like rape," he pleaded with Hanif. "For God's sake, stop." "Voices that one hears are outside, but," the cafe proprietor was musing. "Joan of Arc, na. Or that what's his name with the cat: Turn- again Whittington. But with such voices one becomes great, or rich at least. This one however is not great, and poor." "Enough." Jumpy held both arms above his head, grinning without really wanting to. "I surrender." For three days after that, in spite of all the efforts of Mr. Sufyan, Mrs. Sufyan, their daughters Mishal and Anahita, and the lawyer Hanif Johnson, Jumpy Joshi was not really himself, "More a Dumpy than a Jumpy," as Sufyan said. He went about his business, at the youth clubs, at the offices of the film co-operative to which he belonged, and in the streets, distributing leaflets, selling certain newspapers, hanging out; but his step was heavy as he went his way. Then, on the fourth evening, the telephone rang behind the counter of the Shaandaar Cafe. 197 "Mr. Jamshed Joshi," Anahita Sufyan carolled, doing her imitation of an upper—class English accent. "Will Mr. Joshi please come to the instrument? There is a personal call." Her father took one look at the joy bursting out on Jumpy's face and murmured softly to his wife, "Mrs, the voice this boy is wanting to hear is not inner by any manner of means." The impossible thing came between Pamela and Jamshed after they had spent seven days making love to one another with inexhaustible enthusiasm, infinite tenderness and such freshness of spirit that you'd have thought the procedure had only just been invented. For seven days they remained undressed with the central heating turned high, and pretended to be tropical lovers in some hot bright country to the south. Jamshed, who had always been clumsy with women, told Pamela that he had not felt so wonderful since the day in his eighteenth year when he had finally learned how to ride a bicycle. The moment the words were out he became afraid that he had spoiled everything, that this comparison of the great love of his life to the rickety bike of his student days would be taken for the insult it undeniably was; but he needn't have worried, because Pamela kissed him on the mouth and thanked him for saying the most beautiful thing any man had ever said to any woman. At this point he understood that he could do no wrong, and for the first time in his life he began to. feel genuinely safe, safe as houses, safe as a human being who is loved; and so did Pamela Chamcha. On the seventh night they were awakened from dreamless sleep by the unmistakable sound of somebody trying to break into the house. "I've got a hockey-stick under my bed," Pamela whispered, terrified. "Give it to me," Jumpy, who was equally scared, hissed back. "I'm coming with you," quaked Pamela, and Jumpy quavered, "Oh, no you don't." In the end they both crept downstairs, each wearing one of Pamela's frilly 198 dressing-gowns, each with a hand on the hockey-stick that neither felt brave enough to use. Suppose it's a man with a shotgun, Pamela found herself thinking, a man with a shotgun saying, Go back upstairs . . . They reached the foot of the stairs. Somebody turned on the lights. Pamela and Jumpy screamed in unison, dropped the hockeystick and ran upstairs as fast as they could go; while down in the front hail, standing brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed in order to turn the knob of the tongue-and-groove lock (Pamela in the throes of her passion had forgotten to use the security locks), was a figure out of a nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice and blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of a giant goat, a man's torso covered in goat's hair, human arms, and a horned but otherwise human head covered in muck and grime and the beginnings of a beard. Alone and unobserved, the impossible thing pitched forward on to the floor and lay still. Upstairs, at the very top of the house, that is to say in Saladin's "den", Mrs. Pamela Chamcha was writhing in her lover's arms, crying her heart out, and bawling at the top of her voice: "It isn't true. My husband exploded. No survivors. Do you hear me? I am the widow Chamcha whose spouse is beastly dead." Mr. Gibreel Farishta on the railway train to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by driving him insane. He had seated himself by the window in a first-class non-smoking compartment, with his back to the engine because unfortunately another fellow was already in the other place, and jamming his trilby down on his head he sat with his 199 fists deep in scarlet--lined gabardine and panicked. The terror of losing his mind to a paradox, of being unmade by what he no longer believed existed, of turning in his madness into the avatar of a chimerical archangel, was so big in him that it was impossible to look at it for long; yet how else was he to account for the miracles, metamorphoses and apparitions of recent days? "It's a straight choice," he trembled silently. "It's A, I'm off my head, or B, baba, somebody went and changed the rules." Now, however, there was the comforting cocoon of this railway compartment in which the miraculous was reassuringly absent, the arm- rests were frayed, the reading light over his shoulder didn't work, the mirror was missing from its frame, and then there were the regulations: the little circular red--and-- white signs forbidding smoking, the stickers penalizing the improper use of the chain, the arrows indicating the points to which -- and not beyond! -- it was permitted to open the little sliding windows. Gibreel paid a visit to the toilet and here, too, a small series of prohibitions and instructions gladdened his heart. By the time the conductor arrived with the authority of his crescent- cutting ticket-punch, Gibreel had been somewhat soothed by these manifestations of law, and began to perk up and invent rationalizations. He had had a lucky escape from death, a subsequent delirium of some sort, and now, restored to himself, could expect the threads of his old life -- that is, his old new life, the new life he had planned before the er interruption -- to be picked up again. As the train carried him further and further away from the twilight zone of his arrival and subsequent mysterious captivity, bearing him along the happy predictability of parallel metal lines, he felt the pull of the great city beginning to work its magic on him, and his old gift of hope reasserted itself, his talent for embracing renewal, for blinding himself to past hardships so that the future could come into view. He sprang up from his seat and thumped down on the opposite side of the compartment, with his face symbolically towards London, even though 200 it meant giving up the window. What did he care for windows? All the London he wanted was right there, in his mind's eye. He spoke her name aloud: "Alleluia." "Alleluia, brother," the compartment's only other occupant affirmed. "Hosanna, my good sir, and amen." "Although I must add, sir, that my beliefs are strictly non- denominational," the stranger continued. "Had you said 'La--ilaha', I would gladly have responded with a full-throated 'illallah'." Gibreel realized that his move across the compartment and his inadvertent taking of Allie's unusual name had been mistaken by his companion for overtures both social and theological. "John Maslama," the fellow cried, snapping a card out of a little crocodile-skin case and pressing it upon Gibreel. "Personally, I follow my own variant of the universal faith invented by the Emperor Akbar. God, I would say, is something akin to the Music of the Spheres." It was plain that Mr. Maslama was bursting with words, and that, now that he had popped, there was nothing for it but to sit it out, to permit the torrent to run its orotund course. As the fellow had the build of a prize-fighter, it seemed inadvisable to irritate him. In his eyes Farishta spotted the glint of the True Believer, a light which, until recently, he had seen in his own shaving-mirror every day. "I have done well for myself, sir," Maslama was boasting in his well- modulated Oxford drawl. "For a brown man, exceptionally well, considering the quiddity of the circumstances in which we live; as I hope you will allow." With a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand, he indicated the opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin-stripe, the gold watch with its fob and chain, the 201 Italian shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled links at his starched white cuffs. Above this costume of an English milord there stood a head of startling size, covered with thick, slicked-down hair, and sprouting implausibly luxuriant eyebrows beneath which blazed the ferocious eyes of which Gibreel had already taken careful note. "Pretty fancy," Gibreel now conceded, some response being clearly required. Maslama nodded. "I have always tended," he admitted, "towards the ornate." He had made what he called his _first pile_ producing advertising jingles, "that ol" devil music", leading women into lingerie and lip- gloss and men into temptation. Now he owned record stores all over town, a successful nightclub called Hot Wax, and a store full of gleaming musical instruments that was his special pride and joy. He was an Indian from Guyana, "but there's nothing left in that place, sir. People are leaving it faster than planes can fly." He had made good in quick time, "by the grace of God Almighty. I'm a regular Sunday man, sir; I confess to a weakness for the English Hymnal, and I sing to raise the roof." The autobiography was concluded with a brief mention of the existence of a wife and some dozen children. Gibreel offered his congratulations and hoped for silence, but now Maslama dropped his bombshell. "You don't need to tell me about yourself," he said jovially. "Naturally I know who you are, even if one does not expect to see such a personage on the Eastbourne-Victoria line." He winked leeringly and placed a finger alongside his nose. "Mum's the word. I respect a man's privacy, no question about it; no question at all." "I? Who am I?" Gibreel was startled into absurdity. The other nodded weightily, his eyebrows waving like soft antlers. "The prize question, in my opinion. These are problematic times, sir, for a moral man. When a man is unsure of his essence, how may he know if he be good or bad? But you are finding me tedious. I answer my own questions by my faith in It, sir," -- here Maslama pointed to the ceiling of the railway 202 compartment -- "and of course you are not in the least confused about your identity, for you are the famous, the may I say legendary Mr. Gibreel Farishta, star of screen and, increasingly, I'm sorry to add, of pirate video; my twelve children, one wife and I are all long-standing, unreserved admirers of your divine heroics." He grabbed, and pumped Gibreel's right hand. "Tending as I do towards the pantheistic view," Maslama thundered on, "my own sympathy for your work arises out of your willingness to portray deities of every conceivable water. You, sir, are a rainbow coalition of the celestial; a walking United Nations of gods! You are, in short, the future. Permit me to salute you." He was beginning to give off the unmistakable odour of the genuine crazy, and even though he had not yet said or done anything beyond the merely idiosyncratic, Gibreel was getting alarmed and measuring the distance to the door with anxious little glances. "I incline, sir," Maslama was saying, "towards the opinion that whatever name one calls It by is no more than a code; a cypher, Mr. Farishta, behind which the true name lies concealed." Gibreel remained silent, and Maslama, making no attempt to hide his disappointment, was obliged to speak for him. "What is that true name, I hear you inquire," he said, and then Gibreel knew he was right; the man was a full-fledged lunatic, and his autobiography was very likely as much of a concoction as his "faith". Fictions were walking around wherever he went, Gibreel reflected, fictions masquerading as real human beings. "I have brought him upon me," he accused himself. "By fearing for my own sanity I have brought forth, from God knows what dark recess, this voluble and maybe dangerous nut." "You don't know it!" Maslama yelled suddenly, jumping to his feet. "Charlatan! Poser! Fake! You claim to be the screen immortal, avatar of a hundred and one gods, and you haven't a _foggy!_ How is it possible 203 that I, a poor boy made good from Bartica on the Essequibo, can know such things while Gibreel Farishta does not? Phoney! Phooey to you!" Gibreel got to his feet, but the other was filling almost all the available standing room, and he, Gibreel, had to lean over awkwardly to one side to escape Maslama's windmilling arms, one of which knocked off his grey trilby. At once Maslama's mouth fell open. He seemed to shrink several inches, and after a few frozen moments, he fell to his knees with a thud. What's he doing down there, Gibreel wondered, picking up my hat? But the madman was begging for forgiveness. "I never doubted you would come," he was saying. "Pardon my clumsy rage." The train entered a tunnel, and Gibreel saw that they were surrounded by a warm golden light that was coming from a point just behind his head. In the glass of the sliding door, he saw the reflection of the halo around his hair. Maslama was struggling with his shoelaces. "All my life, sir, I knew I had been chosen," he was saying in a voice as humble as it had earlier been menacing. "Even as a child in Bartica, I knew." He pulled off his right shoe and began to roll down his sock. "I was given," he said, "a sign." The sock was removed, revealing what looked to be a perfectly ordinary, if outsize, foot. Then Gibreel counted and counted again, from one to six. "The same on the other foot," Maslama said proudly. "I never doubted the meaning for a minute." He was the self--appointed helpmate of the Lord, the sixth toe on the foot of the Universal Thing. Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, thought Gibreel Farishta. Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God. The train emerged from the tunnel. Gibreel took a decision. "Stand, six- toed John," he intoned in his best Hindi movie manner. "Maslama, arise."