Saitanic verses I-The Angel Gibreel part 3

69 The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez's empire ofdung, was to be investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government commission, but Zeeny wasn't interested in that. "Now," she said, "I'll get to find out what you're really like." Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide, drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness. _I'm not myself today_, he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves. None of us are _like this_. These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within, sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring sound to admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut-tree in which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began to shake. He hid behind the neutrality of facts. "In Kashmir," he told Zeeny, "your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it's a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?" The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two of them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by a composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery, whose shock of white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, as the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its major-domo in the Olden Days. "My God, Vallabhbhai," he managed, and embraced the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. "I grow so old, baba, I was thinking you would not recognize." He led them down the crystal-heavy corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of change was excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained to him, that when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house would be her memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she died, 70 paintings, furniture, soap--dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls and china ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same magazines on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of paper in the wastebaskets, as though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. "Mummified," Zeeny said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. "God, but it's spooky, no?" It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the double doors leading into the blue drawingroom, that Saladin Chamcha saw his mother's ghost. He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. "There," he pointed towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, "no question, that blasted newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she, she," but now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless bird, you see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife, only my wife. _My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I grew up and went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses_. "Please, baba, nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib donated to my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a so-generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand." Chamcha, recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. "For God's sake, Vallabh," he muttered. "For God's sake. Obviously I don't object." An old stiffness re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted him to reprove, "Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme." "See how he's sweating," Zeeny stage-whispered. "He looks scared stiff." Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said: "Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I bet." Chamcha tried to be reasonable. "They stay here alone most of the time, probably sleep in 71 the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it must get to feeling like their place." But he was thinking how strikingly, in that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother. "Stayed away so long," his father's voice spoke behind him, "that now you can't tell a living ayah from your departed ma." Saladin turned around to take in the melancholy sight of a father who had shrivelled like an old apple, but who insisted nevertheless on wearing the expensive Italian suits of his opulently fleshy years. Now that he had lost both Popeye-forearms and Bluto-belly, he seemed to be roaming about inside his clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite managed to identify. He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose and lips curled, by the withering sorcery of the years, into a feeble simulacrum of his former ogre--face. Chamcha had barely begun to understand that his father was no longer capable of frightening anybody, that his spell had been broken and he was just an old geezer heading for the grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment that Changez Chamchawala's hair was conservatively short, and since he was wearing highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn't seem likely that the eleveninch toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned, smoking a cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress, towards a blue velour-covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman well advanced in years. No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez skipped past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny Vakil, her eyes sparkling with scandalpoints of light, hissed at Chamcha: "Close your mouth, dear. It looks bad." And in the doorway, the bearer Vallabh, pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer of many long years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife. 72 When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as satanic, the child will frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: "And my stepmother, father dear? She is keeping well?" The old man addressed Zeeny. "He is not such a goody with you, I hope so. Or what a sad time you must have." Then to his son in harsher tones. "You have an interest in my wife these days? But she has none in you. She won't meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or, maybe, by now, to me." _I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn't fight. But this, this is intolerable_. "In my mother's house," Chamcha cried melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. "The state thinks your business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what you've done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it take? To poison their lives. You're a sick man." He stood before his father, blazing with righteous rage. Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. "Baba, with respect, excuse me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to judge us." Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was staring into the inferno. "It is true he pays us," Vallabh went on. "For our work, and also for what you see. For this." Changez Chamchawala tightened his grip on the ayah's unresisting shoulders. "How much?" Chamcha shouted. "Vallabh, how much did you two men decide upon? How much to prostitute your wife?" "What a fool," Kasturba said contemptuously. "Englandeducated and what-all, but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big--big, _in your mother's house_ etcetera, but maybe you didn't love her so much. But we loved her, we all. We three. And in this manner we may keep her spirit alive." 73 "It is pooja, you could say," came Vallabh's quiet voice. "An act of worship." "And you," Changez Chamchawala spoke as softly as his servant, "you come here to this temple. With your unbelief. Mister, you've got a nerve." And finally, the treason of Zeenat Vakil. "Come off it, Salad," she said, moving to sit on the arm of the Chesterfield next to the old man. "Why be such a sourpuss? You're no angel, baby, and these people seem to have worked things out okay." Saladin's mouth opened and shut. Changez patted Zeeny on the knee. "He came to accuse, dear. He came to avenge his youth, but we have turned the tables and he is confused. Now we must let him have his chance, and you must referee. I will not be sentenced by him, but I will accept the worst from you." _The bastard. Old bastard. He wanted me off-balance, and here 1 am, knocked sideways. I won't speak, why should I, not like this, the humiliation_. "There was," said Saladin Chamcha, "a wallet of pounds, and there was a roasted chicken." Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child-self, rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have become. Of making-a-man of. Of whatwill-I-tell-my- friends. Of irreparable sunderings and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to Allah-worship with new wife and also to blasphemous worship of late spouse. Above all, of magic-lampism, of being an open- sesamist. Everything had come easily to him, charm, women, wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie, wish, at once master, hey presto. He was a father who had promised, and then withheld, a magic lamp. 74 Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained motionless and silent until Saladin Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. "Such violence of the spirit after so long," Changez said after a silence. "So sad. A quarter of a century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son. You must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I? Finished. I'm not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don't explain you any more." Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of a fortyyear-old walnut-tree. "Cut it down," he said to his father. "Cut it, sell it, send me the cash." Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also rising, took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and Kasturba diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed pumpkin-time. "Your book," he said to Zeeny. "I have something you'd like to see." The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment's floundering, stamped petulantly in their wake. "Sourpuss," Zeeny called gaily over her shoulder. "Come on, snap out of it, grow up." The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included a large group of the legendary _Hamza-nama_ cloths, members of that sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may or may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad's uncle whose liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hind as he lay dead on the battlefield of Uhud. "I like these pictures," Changez Chamchawala told Zeeny, "because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be rescued from his troubles." The pictures also provided eloquent proof of Zeeny Vakil's thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition. The Mughals had 75 brought artists from every part of India to work on the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many- brushed Overartist who, literally, _was_ Indian painting. One hand would draw the mosaic floors, a second the figures, a third would paint the Chinese-looking cloudy skies. On the backs of the cloths were the stories that accompanied the scenes. The pictures would be shown like a movie: held up while someone read out the hero's tale. In the _Hamza- nama_ you could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their characteristically late--Mughal synthesis. A giant was trapped in a pit and his human tormentors were spearing him in the forehead. A man sliced vertically from the top of his head to his groin still held his sword as he fell. Everywhere, bubbling spillages of blood. Saladin Chamcha took a grip on himself. "The savagery," he said loudly in his English voice. "The sheer barbaric love of pain." Changez Chamchawala ignored his son, had eyes only for Zeeny; who gazed straight back into his own. "Ours is a government of philistines, young lady, don't you agree? I have offered this whole collection free gratis, did you know? Let them only house it properly, let them build a place. Condition of cloths is not A-l, you see . . . they won't do it. No interest. Meanwhile I get offers every month from Amrika. Offers of what-what size! You wouldn't believe. I don't sell. Our heritage, my dear, every day the U S A is taking it away. Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell ourselves, isn't it? They drop their wallets on the ground and we kneel at their feet. Our Nandi bulls end up in some gazebo in Texas. But you know all this. You know India is a free country today." He stopped, but Zeeny waited; there was more to come. It came: "One day I will also take the dollars. Not for the money. For the pleasure of being a whore. Of becoming nothing. Less than nothing." And now, at last, the real storm, the words behind the words, _less than nothing_. "When I die," Changez Chamchawala said 76 co Zeeny, "what will I be? A pair of emptied shoes. That is my fate, that he has made for me. This actor. This pretender. He has made himself into an imitator of non-existing men. I have nobody to follow me, to give what I have made. This is his revenge: he steals from me my posterity." He smiled, patted her hand, released her into the care of his son. "I have told her," he said to Saladin. "You are still carrying your take-away chicken. I have told her my complaint. Now she must judge. That was the arrangement." Zeenat Vakil walked up to the old man in his outsize suit, put her hands on his cheeks, and kissed him on the lips. After Zeenat betrayed him in the house of his father's perversions, Saladin Chamcha refused to see her or answer the messages she left at the hotel desk. _The Millionairess_ came to the end of its run; the tour was over. Time to go home. After the closing-night party Chamcha headed for bed. In the elevator a young and clearly honeymooning couple were listening to music on headphones. The young man murmured to his wife: "Listen, tell me. Do I still seem a stranger to you sometimes?" The girl, smiling fondly, shook her head, _can't hear_, removed the headphones. He repeated, gravely: "A stranger, to you, don't I still sometimes seem?" She, with unfaltering smile, laid her cheek for an instant on his high scrawny shoulder. "Yes, once or twice," she said, and put the headphones on again. He did the same, seeming fully satisfied by her answer. Their bodies took on, once again, the rhythms of the playback music. Chamcha got out of the lift. Zeeny was sitting on the floor with her back against his door. Inside the room, she poured herself a large whisky and soda. "Behaving like a baby," she said. "You should be ashamed." 77 That afternoon he had received a package from his father. Inside it was a small piece of wood and a large number of notes, not rupees but sterling pounds: the ashes, so to speak, of a walnut-tree. He was full of inchoate feeling and because Zeenat had turned up she became the target. "You think I love you?" he said, speaking with deliberate viciousness. "You think I'll stay with you? I'm a married man." "I didn't want you to stay for me," she said. "For some reason, I wanted it for you." A few days earlier, he had been to see an Indian dramatization of a story by Sartre on the subject of shame. In the original, a husband suspects his wife of infidelity and sets a trap to catch her out. He pretends to leave on a business trip, but returns a few hours later to spy on her. He is kneeling to look through the keyhole of their front door. Then he feels a presence behind him, turns without rising, and there she is, looking down at him with revulsion and disgust. This tableau, he kneeling, she looking down, is the Sartrean archetype. But in the Indian version the kneeling husband felt no presence behind him; was surprised by the wife; stood to face her on equal terms; blustered and shouted; until she wept, he embraced her, and they were reconciled. "You say I should be ashamed," Chamcha said bitterly to Zeenat. "You, who are without shame. As a matter of fact, this may be a national characteristic. I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand the idea of shame." Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. "Okay, you don't have to say any more." She held up her hands. "I surrender. I'm going. Mr. Saladin Chamcha. I thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but I was wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time." 78 And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. "Don't let people get too close to you, Mr. Saladin. Let people through your defences and the bastards go and knife you in the heart." After that there had been nothing to stay for. The aeroplane lifted and banked over the city. Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a servant as his dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the city centre solid. Politicians were trying to build careers by going on padyatras, pilgrimages on foot across the country. There were graffiti that read: _Advice to politicos. Only step to take: padyatra to hell_. Or, sometimes: _to Assam_. Actors were getting mixed up in politics: MGR, N.T. Rama Rao, Bachchan. Durga Khote complained that an actors' association was a "red front". Saladin Chamcha, on Flight 420, closed his eyes; and felt, with deep relief, the tell--tale shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self. The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr. Chamcha on that flight was that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams. The dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of _Bostan_ he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil's departure he had fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long way away. The dream-woman had been 79 so loaded down with explosives that she was not so much the bomber as the bomb; the woman walking the aisles held a baby that seemed to be sleeping noiselessly, a baby so skilfully swaddled and held so close to the breast that Chamcha could not see so much as a lock of new-born hair. Under the influence of the remembered dream he conceived the notion that the baby was in fact a bundle of dynamite sticks, or some sort of ticking device, and he was on the verge of crying out when he came to his senses and admonished himself severely. This was precisely the type of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. He was a neat man in a buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, contented life. He was a member of the real world. He travelled alone, shunning the company of the other members of the Prospero Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin wearing Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the manner of natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking too much cheap airline champagne and importuning the scorn--laden stewardesses who, being Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type persons; and behaving, in short, with normal thespian impropriety. The woman holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players, of turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay "rail roko" demonstration was being broken up by police lathicharges. The newspaper's reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed. The police had issued a "note". _Neither the reporter nor any other person was assaulted intentionally_. Chamcha drifted into airline sleep. The city of lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second, surprise of that macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He was bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him anyway: here, travelling incognito in the 80 economy class of Flight A 1--420, was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself. "Sleep okay?" He realized the question was addressed to him, and turned away from the apparition of the great movie actor to stare at the equally extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in baseball cap, metal--rim spectacles and a neon--green bush--shirt across which there writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer possible. "Eugene Dumsday at your service," the dragon man stuck out a huge red hand. "At yours, and at that of the Christian guard." Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. "You are a military man?" "Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the army of Guard Almighty." Oh, _almighty_ guard, why didn't you say. "I am a man of science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add my privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious devilment ever got folks' brains by the balls." "I don't follow." Dumsday lowered his voice. "I'm talking monkey-crap here, sir. Darwinism. The evolutionary heresy of Mr. Charles Darwin." His tones made it plain that the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as that of any other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. "I have been warning your fellow-men," Dumsday confided, "against Mr. Darwin and his works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide presentation. I spoke most recently, sir, at the World Understanding Day banquet of the Rotary Club, Cochin, Kerala. I spoke of my own country, of its young people. I see them lost, sir. The young people of America: I see them in their despair, turning to narcotics, even, for I'm a plain--speaking man, to pre-marital sexual relations. And I said this then and I say it now to you. If I believed my great-granddaddy was a chimpanzee, why, I'd be pretty depressed myself." Gibreel Farishta was seated across the way, staring out of the window. The inflight movie was starting up, and the aircraft lights were being dimmed. The woman with the baby was still on her feet, walking up and down, perhaps to keep the baby quiet. "How did it go down?" Chamcha asked, sensing that some contribution from him was being required. A hesitancy came over his neighbour. "I believe there was a glitch in the sound system," he said finally. "That would be my best guess. I can't see how those good people would've set to talking amongst themselves if they hadn't've thought I was through." Chamcha felt a little abashed. He had been thinking that in a country of fervent believers the notion that science was the enemy of God would have an easy appeal; but the boredom of the Rotarians of Cochin had shown him up. In the flickering light of the inflight movie, Dumsday continued, in his voice of an innocent ox, to tell stories against himself without the faintest indication of knowing what he was doing. He had been accosted, at the end of a cruise around the magnificent natural harbour of Cochin, to which Vasco da Gama had come in search of spices and so set in motion the whole ambiguous history of east-and- west, by an urchin full of pssts and hey-mister--okays. "Hi there, yes! You want hashish, sahib? Hey, misteramerica. Yes, unclesam, you want opium, best quality, top price? Okay, you want _cocaine?_" Saladin began, helplessly, to giggle. The incident struck him as Darwin's revenge: if Dumsday held poor, Victorian, starchy Charles responsible for American drug culture, how delicious that he should himself be seen, across the globe, as representing the very ethic he 82 battled so fervently against. Dumsday fixed him with a look of pained reproof. It was a hard fate to be an American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked. After the involuntary giggle had escaped Saladin's lips, Dumsday sank into a sullen, injured drowse, leaving Chamcha to his own thoughts. Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell . . . Chamcha was drifting back into sleep when the cabin lights came on; the movie stopped; and the illusion of the cinema was replaced by one of watching the television news, as four armed, shouting figures came running down the aisles. The passengers were held on the hijacked aircraft for one hundred and eleven days, marooned on a shimmering runway around which there crashed the great sand-waves of the desert, because once the four hijackers, three men one woman, had forced the pilot to land nobody could make up their minds what to do with them. They had come down not at an international airport but at the absurd folly of a jumbo-sized landing strip which had been built for the pleasure of the local sheikh at his favourite desert oasis, to which there now also led a six-lane highway very popular among single young men and women, who would cruise along its vast emptiness in slow cars ogling one another through the windows . . . once 420 had landed here, however, the highway was full of armoured cars, troop transports, limousines waving flags. And while diplomats haggled over the airliner's fate, to storm or not to storm, while they tried to decide whether to concede or to stand firm at the expense of other people's lives, a great stillness settled around the airliner and it wasn't long before the mirages began. 83 In the beginning there had been a constant flow of event, the hijacking quartet full of electricity, jumpy, trigger-happy. These are the worst moments, Chamcha thought while children screamed and fear spread like a stain, here's where we could all go west. Then they were in control, three men one woman, all tall, none of them masked, all handsome, they were actors, too, they were stars now, shootingstars or falling, and they had their own stage-names. Dara Singh Buta Singh Man Singh. The woman was Tavleen. The woman in the dream had been anonymous, as if Chamcha's sleeping fancy had no time for pseudonyms; but, like her, Tavleen spoke with a Canadian accent, smooth-edged, with those give-away rounded O's. After the plane landed at the oasis of Al-Zamzam it became plain to the passengers, who were observing their captors with the obsessive attention paid to a cobra by a transfixed mongoose, that there was something posturing in the beauty of the three men, some amateurish love of risk and death in them that made them appear frequently at the open doors of the airplane and flaunt their bodies at the professional snipers who must have been hiding amid the palm-trees of the oasis. The woman held herself aloof from such silliness and seemed to be restraining herself from scolding her three colleagues. She seemed insensible to her own beauty, which made her the most dangerous of the four. It struck Saladin Chamcha that the young men were too squeamish, too narcissistic, to want blood on their hands. They would find it difficult to kill; they were here to be on television. But Tavleen was here on business. He kept his eyes on her. The men do not know, he thought. They want to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies and on TV; they arc reality aping a crude image of itself, they are worms swallowing their tails. But she, the woman, _knows_ . . . while Dara, Buta, Man Singh strutted and pranced, she became quiet, her eyes turned inwards, and she scared the passengers stiff. What did they want? Nothing new. An independent homeland, religious freedom, release of political detainees, justice, ransom money, a safe- 84 conduct to a country of their choice. Many of the passengers came to sympathize with them, even though they were under constant threat of execution. If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will. After they landed the hijackers released all but fifty of the passengers, having decided that fifty was the largest number they could comfortably supervise. Women, children, Sikhs were all released. It turned out that Saladin Chamcha was the only member of Prospero Players who was not given his freedom; he found himself succumbing to the perverse logic of the situation, and instead of feeling upset at having been retained he was glad to have seen the back of his badly behaved colleagues; good riddance to bad rubbish, he thought. The creationist scientist Eugene Dumsday was unable to bear the realization that the hijackers did not intend to release him. He rose to his feet, swaying at his great height like a skyscraper in a hurricane, and began shouting hysterical incoherences. A stream of dribble ran out of the corner of his mouth; he licked at it feverishly with his tongue. _Now just hold hard here, busters, now goddamn it enough is ENO UGH, whaddya wheredya get the idea you can_ and so forth, in the grip of his waking nightmare he drivelled on and on until one of the four, obviously it was the woman, came up, swung her rifle butt and broke his flapping jaw. And worse: because slobbering Dumsday had been licking his lips as his jaw slammed shut, the tip of his tongue sheared off and landed in Saladin Chamcha's lap; followed in quick time by its former owner. Eugene Dumsday fell tongueless and insensate into the actor's arms. Eugene Dumsday gained his freedom by losing his tongue; the persuader succeeded in persuading his captors by surrendering his instrument of persuasion. They didn't want to look after a wounded man, risk of gangrene and so on, and so he joined the exodus from the 85 plane. In those first wild hours Saladin Chamcha's mind kept throwing up questions of detail, are those automatic rifles or sub-machine guns, how did they smuggle all that metal on board, in which parts of the body is it possible to be shot and still survive, how scared they must be, the four of them, how full of their own deaths. . . once Dumsday had gone, he had expected to sit alone, but a man came and sat in the creationist's old seat, saying you don't mind, yaar, in such circs a guy needs company. It was the movie star, Gibreel. After the first nervous days on the ground, during which the three turbaned young hijackers went perilously close to the edges of insanity, screaming into the desert night _you bastards, come and get us_, or, alternatively, _o god o god they're going to send in the fucking commandos, the motherfucking Americans, yaar, the sisterfucking British_, -- moments during which the remaining hostages closed their eyes and prayed, because they were always most afraid when the hijackers showed signs of weakness, -- everything settled down into what began to feel like normality. Twice a day a solitary vehicle carried food and drink to _Bostan_ and left it on the tarmac. The hostages had to bring in the cartons while the hijackers watched them from the safety of the plane. Apart from this daily visit there was no contact with the outside world. The radio had gone dead. It was as if the incident had been forgotten, as if it were so embarrassing that it had simply been erased from the record. "The bastards are leaving us to rot," screamed Man Singh, and the hostages joined in with a will. "Hijras! Chootias! Shits!" They were wrapped in heat and silence and now the spectres began to shimmer out of the corners of their eyes. The most highly strung of the hostages, a young man with a goatee beard and close-cropped curly hair, awoke at dawn, shrieking with fear because he had seen a skeleton riding a camel across the dunes. Other hostages saw coloured globes 86 hanging in the sky, or heard the beating of gigantic wings. The three male hijackers fell into a deep, fatalistic gloom. One day Tavleen summoned them to a conference at the far end of the plane; the hostages heard angry voices. "She's telling them they have to issue an ultimatum," Gibreel Farishta said to Chamcha. "One of us has to die, or such." But when the men returned Tavleen wasn't with them and the dejection in their eyes was tinged, now, with shame. "They lost their guts," Gibreel whispered. "No can do. Now what is left for our Tavleen bibi? Zero. Story funtoosh." What she did: In order to prove to her captives, and also to her fellow-captors, that the idea of failure, or surrender, would never weaken her resolve, she emerged from her momentary retreat in the first--class cocktail lounge to stand before them like a stewardess demonstrating safety procedures. But instead of putting on a lifejacket and holding up blow--tube whistle etcetera, she quickly lifted the loose black djellabah that was her only garment and stood before them stark naked, so that they could all see the arsenal of her body, the grenades like extra breasts nestling in her cleavage, the gelignite taped around her thighs, just the way it had been in Chamcha's dream. Then she slipped her robe back on and spoke in her faint oceanic voice. "When a great idea comes into the world, a great cause, certain crucial questions are asked of it," she murmured. "History asks us: what manner of cause are we? Are we uncompromising, absolute, strong, or will we show ourselves to be timeservers, who compromise, trim and yield?" Her body had provided her answer. The days continued to pass. The enclosed, boiling circumstances of his captivity, at once intimate and distant, made Saladin Chamcha want to argue with the woman, unbendingness can also be monomania, he wanted to say, it can be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last. But he didn't 87 say anything, of course, he fell into the torpor of the days. Gibreel Farishta discovered in the seat pocket in front of him a pamphlet written by the departed Dumsday. By this time Chamcha had noticed the determination with which the movie star resisted the onset of sleep, so it wasn't surprising to see him reciting and memorizing the lines of the creationist's leaflet, while his already heavy eyelids drooped lower and lower until he forced them to open wide again. The leaflet argued that even the scientists were busily re--inventing God, that once they had proved the existence of a single unified force of which electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces of the new physics were all merely aspects, avatars, one might say, or angels, then what would we have but the oldest thing of all, a supreme entity controlling all creation . . . "You see, what our friend says is, if you have to choose between some type of disembodied force-field and the actual living God, which one would you go for? Good point, na? You can't pray to an electric current. No point asking a wave-form for the key to Paradise." He closed his eyes, then snapped them open again. "All bloody bunk," he said fiercely. "Makes me sick." After the first days Chamcha no longer noticed Gibreel's bad breath, because nobody in that world of sweat and apprehension was smelling any better. But his face was impossible to ignore, as the great purple welts of his wakefulness spread outwards like oil--slicks from his eyes. Then at last his resistance ended and he collapsed on to Saladin's shoulder and slept for four days without waking once. When he returned to his senses he found that Chamcha, with the help of the mouse-like, goateed hostage, a certain Jalandri, had moved him to an empty row of seats in the centre block. He went to the toilet to urinate for eleven minutes and returned with a look of real terror in his eyes. He sat down by Chamcha again, but wouldn't say a word. Two nights later, Chamcha heard him fighting, once again, against the onset of sleep. Or, as it turned out: of dreams. 88 "Tenth highest peak in the world," Chamcha heard him mutter, "is Xixabangma Feng, eight oh one three metres. Annapurna ninth, eighty seventy-eight." Or he would begin at the other end: "One, Chomolungma, eight eight four eight. Two, K2, eighty-six eleven. Kanchenjunga, eighty-five ninety-eight, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu. Nanga Parbat, metres eight thousand one hundred and twenty-six." "You count eight thousand metre peaks to fall asleep?" Chamcha asked him. Bigger than sheep, but not so numerous. Gibreel Farishta glared at him; then bowed his head; came to a decision. "Not to sleep, my friend. To stay awake." That was when Saladin Chamcha found out why Gibreel Farishta had begun to fear sleep. Everybody needs somebody to talk to and Gibreel had spoken to nobody about what had happened after he ate the unclean pigs. The dreams had begun that very night. In these visions he was always present, not as himself but as his namesake, and I don't mean interpreting a role, Spoono, I am him, he is me, I am the bloody archangel, Gibreel himself, large as bloody life. _Spoono_. Like Zeenat Vakil, Gibreel had reacted with mirth to Saladin's abbreviated name. "Bhai, wow. I'm tickled, truly. Tickled pink. So if you are an English chamcha these days, let it be. Mr. Sally Spoon. It will be our little joke." Gibreel Farishta had a way of failing to notice when he made people angry. _Spoon, Spoono, my old Chumch_: Saladin hated them all. But could do nothing. Except hate. Maybe it was because of the nicknames, maybe not, but Saladin .found Gibreel's revelations pathetic, anticlimactic, what was so strange if his dreams characterized him as the angel, dreams do every damn thing, did it really display more than a banal kind of egomania? But Gibreel was sweating from fear: "Point is, Spoono," he pleaded, "every time I go to sleep the dream starts up from where it stopped. Same dream in the 89 same place. As if somebody just paused the video while I went out of the room. Or, or. As if he's the guy who's awake and this is the bloody nightmare. His bloody dream: us. Here. All of it." Chamcha stared at him. "Crazy, right," he said. "Who knows if angels even sleep, never mind dream. I sound crazy. Am I right or what?" "Yes. You sound crazy." "Then what the hell," he wailed, "is going on in my head?" The longer he spent without going to sleep the more talkative he became, he began to regale the hostages, the hijackers, as well as the dilapidated crew of Flight 420, those formerly scornful stewardesses and shining flight-deck personnel who were now looking mournfully moth-eaten in a corner of the plane and even losing their earlier enthusiasm for endless games of rummy, -- with his increasingly eccentric reincarnation theories, comparing their sojourn on that airstrip by the oasis of Al-Zamzam to a second period of gestation, telling everybody that they were all dead to the world and in the process of being regenerated, made anew. This idea seemed to cheer him up somewhat, even though it made many of the hostages want to string him up, and he leapt up on to a seat to explain that the day of their release would be the day of their rebirth, a piece of optimism that calmed his audience down. "Strange but true!" he cried. "That will be day zero, and because we will all share the birthday we will all be exactly the same age from that day on, for the rest of our lives. How do you call it when fifty kids come out of the same mother? God knows. Fiftuplets. Damn!" Reincarnation, for frenzied Gibreel, was a term beneath whose shield many notions gathered a-babeling: phoenix-from-ashes, the resurrection of Christ, the transmigration, at the instant of death, of 90 the soul of the Dalai Lama into the body of a new-born child . . . such matters got mixed up with the avatars of Vishnu, the metamorphoses of Jupiter, who had imitated Vishnu by adopting the form of a bull; and so on, including of course the progress of human beings through successive cycles of life, now as cockroaches, now as kings, towards the bliss of no-morereturns. _To be born again, first you have to die_. Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; the new flesh had been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. "The old must die, you get my message, or the new cannot be whatnot." Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his exhaustion- beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on Chamcha's shoulder, while Saladin -- prolonged captivity erodes certain reluctances among the captives -- would stroke his face and kiss the top of his head, _There, there, there_. On other occasions Chamcha's irritation would get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old Gramsci chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that's what's happening to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is trying to be born into your flesh. "You want to hear something really crazy?" Gibreel after a hundred and one days offered Chamcha more confidences. "You want to know why I'm here?" And told him anyway: "For a woman. Yes, boss. For the bloody love of my bloody life. With whom I have spent a sum total of days three point five. Doesn't that prove I really am cracked? QED, Spoono, old Chumch." And: "How to explain it to you? Three and a half days of it, how long do you need to know that the best thing has happened, the deepest thing, 91 the has-to--be-it? I swear: when I kissed her there were mother--fucking sparks, yaar, believe don't believe, she said it was static electricity in the carpet but I've kissed chicks in hotel rooms before and this was a definite first, a definite one-and-only. Bloody electric shocks, man, I had to jump back with pain." He had no words to express her, his woman of mountain ice, to express how it had been in that moment when his life had been in pieces at his feet and she had become its meaning. "You don't see," he gave up. "Maybe you never met a person for whom you'd cross the world, for whom you'd leave everything, walk out and take a plane. She climbed Everest, man. Twenty-nine thousand and two feet, or maybe twenty-nine one four one. Straight to the top. You think I can't get on a jumbo-jet for a woman like that?" The harder Gibreel Farishta tried to explain his obsession with the mountain—climber Alleluia Cone, the more Saladin tried to conjure up the memory of Pamela, but she wouldn't come. At first it would be Zeeny who visited him, her shade, and then after a time there was nobody at all. Gibreel's passion began to drive Chamcha wild with anger and frustration, but Farishta didn't notice it, slapped him on the back, _cheer up, Spoono, won't be long now_. On the hundred and tenth day Tavleen walked up to the little goateed hostage, Jalandri, and motioned with her finger. Our patience has been exhausted, she announced, we have sent repeated ultimatums with no response, it is time for the first sacrifice. She used that word: sacrifice. She looked straight into Jalandri's eyes and pronounced his death sentence. "You first. Apostate traitor bastard." She ordered the crew to prepare for take-off, she wasn't going to risk a storming of the plane after the execution, and with the point of her gun she pushed Jalandri towards the open door at the front, while he screamed and begged for 92 mercy. "She's got sharp eyes," Gibreel said to Chamcha. "He's a cut- sird." Jalandri had become the first target because of his decision to give up the turban and cut his hair, which made him a traitor to his faith, a shorn Sirdarji. _Cut-Sird_. A seven--letter condemnation; no appeal. Jalandri had fallen to his knees, stains were spreading on the seat of his trousers, she was dragging him to the door by his hair. Nobody moved. Dara Buta Man Singh turned away from the tableau. He was kneeling with his back to the open door; she made him turn round, shot him in the back of the head, and he toppled out on to the tarmac. Tavleen shut the door. Man Singh, youngest and jumpiest of the quartet, screamed at her: "Now where do we go? In any damn place they'll send the commandos in for sure. We're gone geese now." "Martyrdom is a privilege," she said softly. "We shall be like stars; like the sun." Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white, transforming carpet, its ghost-white shining up through the night. The Alps, France, the coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened meadowlands. Mr. Saladin Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. The world had rediscovered Flight A 1-420, the Boeing 747 _Bostan_. Radar tracked it; radio messages crackled. _Do you want permission to land?_ But no permission was requested. _Bostan_ circled over England's shore like a gigantic sea-bird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero. When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise, because this time the three male hijackers didn't argue with Tavleen, there were 93 no fierce whispers about the _fuel_ about _what the fuck you're doing_ but just a mute stand-off, they wouldn't even talk to one another, as if they had given up hope, and then it was Man Singh who cracked and went for her. The hostages watched the fight to the death, unable to feel involved, because a curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft, a kind of inconsequential casualness, a fatalism, one might say. They fell to the floor and her knife went up through his stomach. That was all, the brevity of it adding to its seeming unimportance. Then in the instant when she rose up it was as if everybody awoke, it became clear to them all that she really meant business, she was going through with it, all the way, she was holding in her hand the wire that connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath her gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down. No, not death: birth.