Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jumbo jet blows apart
high  above the  English  Channel.  Through  the  debris  of  limbs,  drinks
trolleys, memories, blankets, and oxygen  masks, two figures fall toward the
sea: Gibreel  Farishta, India's legendary  movie  star, and Saladin Chamcha,
the  man  of  a thousand  voices,  self-made  self and  Anglophile  supreme.
Clinging  to each  other, singing rival songs, they plunge downward, and are
finally washed up, alive, on the snow-covered sands of an English beach.
     Their survival is a miracle, but an ambiguous  one, as Gibreel acquires
a halo, while, to Saladin's dismay, his own legs grow hairier, his feet turn
into hooves, and hornlike appendages appear at his temples.
     Gibreel  and Saladin have been chosen (by whom?)  as  opponents in  the
eternal  wrestling match  between  Good  and Evil. But which  is which?  Can
demons be angelic? Can angels  be devils in disguise? As  the two men tumble
through time and space toward their final confrontation, we are witness to a
cycle of tales of love and  passion,  of  betrayal and faith:  the story  of
Ayesha, the  butterfly-shrouded visionary who leads an Indian village  on an
impossible pilgrimage; of Alleluia  Cone,  the mountain climber haunted by a
ghost who urges her to attempt the ultimate  feat-a solo  ascent of Everest;
and, centrally,  the story of Mahound, the Prophet of  Jahilia,  the city of
sand-  Mahound,  the  recipient of the  revelation  in  which satanic verses
mingle with the divine.
     In this great wheel of a book, where the past and the future chase each
other  furiously,  Salman Rushdie takes us on an epic journey of  tears  and
laughter, of bewitching stories and astonishing flights of the  imagination,
a journey  toward the evil and good  that lie entwined within the  hearts of
women and of men.
     SALMAN RUSHDIE is  the author of the novels 

Grimus, Midnight's Children

(winner of the 1981 Booker Prize), and 

Shame

 (winner of the  French Prix  du
Meilleur  Livre  Etranger),  and of 

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan  Journey.

Born in  Bombay  in  1947,  he  now lives  in  London. His books  have  been
translated into twenty languages.
     
Jacket  outline illustration  shows  a  detail from  

Rustam Killing the
White Demon

 from a Clive Album in the Victoria and Albert Museum
     

By the same author

FICTION

Grimus
     Midnight's children
     Shame

NON-FICTION

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Story

VIKING
     Published by the Penguin Group
     Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street,
     New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.
     Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
     London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
     Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street,
     Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 164
     Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190, Wairau Road,
     Auckland 10, New Zealand
     Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
     Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
     First American Edition
     Published in 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc.
     
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
     Copyright (c) Salman Rushdie, 1988
     All rights reserved
     Page 549 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
     
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
     Rushdie, Salman. The satanic verses.
     I. Title.
     PR9499.3.R8S28 1989 823 88-40266
     ISBN 0-670-82537-9
     Printed in the United States of America
     Set in Bembo
     Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no  part of
this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise),  without the prior written permission
of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
     

Contents

I
     The Angel Gibreel 1
     II
     Mahound 89
     III
     Ellowen Deeowen 127
     IV
     Ayesha 203
     V
     A City Visible but Unseen 241
     VI
     Return to Jahilia 357
     VII
     The Angel Azraeel 395
     VIII
     The Parting of the Arabian Sea 471
     IX
     A Wonderful Lamp 509
     Fоr Marianne
     Satan,  being  thus  confined  to  a  vagabond,   wandering,  unsettled
condition, is without any  certain abode;  for though he has, in consequence
of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this
is certainly part of his punishment, that he is ... without any fixed place,
or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.
     Daniel Defoe, 

The History of the Devil



The
     Angel Gibreel


     o be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta  tumbling  from the I  heavens,
'first you have  to die. Ho  ji! Ho ji! 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  A  I-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  angelicdevilish
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 - wayupthere, 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
redwhiteblue 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.
     Downdown 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 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.
     

2


     eincarnation 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  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. Wheel-chairmen, 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.
     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 mamzell,  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  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  million  dollars
re-creating  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.
     '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.
     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  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
effaces. 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, thenagain . . .  not always. There are secular reincarnations,
too. Gibreel  Farishta had  been  born Ismail Naj-muddin  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 A1-420, 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, 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 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, 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 BTCA 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  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 green-tinged 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 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  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  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 elephant-headed 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.
     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
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 Keralan 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 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.
     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 N T
R 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 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 Gibrecl'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
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 over  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
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  mame.  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-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.
     

3

     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 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 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 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  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.  'Tch  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.
     Salahuddin Chamchawala  had understood by his  thirteenth year that  he
was  destined  for that cool  Vilayet  full of  the crisp promises of pounds
sterling  at which the  magic billfold had hinted, and he  grew increasingly
impatient  of  that  Bombay  of   dust,  vulgarity,   policemen  in  shorts,
transvestites, movie  fanzines, pavement sleepers and the  rumoured  singing
whores of  Grant  Road who had  begun  as devotees of  the  Yellamma cult in
Karnataka but ended up here as  dancers  in the  more prosaic temples of the
flesh. He was  fed  up  of textile  factories  and local trains  and all the
confusion and superabundance of the place, and longed for that dream-Vilayet
of poise  and moderation that  had come to obsess him by night  and day. His
favourite playground  rhymes were  those  that  yearned  for foreign cities:
kitchy-con   kitchy-ki   kitchy-con   stanty-eye   kitchy-ople  kitchy-cople
kitchy-Con-stanti-nople.  And  his  favourite   game   was  the  version  of
grandmother's footsteps in  which, when he was 

it,

 he would turn his back on
upcreeping  playmates to gabble  out,  like a mantra, like a spell, the  six
letters of his dream-city,  

ellowen  deeowen.

  In his secret heart, he crept
silently up  on London, letter by  letter,  just as his friends crept  up to
him. 

Ellowen deeowen London.

     The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala  into  Saladin Chamcha began, it
will  be seen,  in old  Bombay, long before he  got close enough to hear the
lions of Trafalgar  roar. When the England cricket  team played India at the
Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's creators
to  defeat  the local  upstarts,  for  the  proper  order  of things  to  be
maintained. (But the games were  invariably drawn, owing  to  the featherbed
somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium  wicket; the great issue, creator versus
imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)
     In his  thirteenth  year he was old  enough  to  play on  the  rocks at
Scandal Point without  having to be watched over by his  ayah, Kasturba. And
one day (it was  so,  it  was not so),  he  strolled out of the house,  that
ample, crumbling, salt-caked building  in  the  Parsi style, all columns and
shutters and little balconies, and through the garden  that was his father's
pride and joy and which in a certain evening light could give the impression
of being infinite (and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because
nobody, not his father, not the gardener, could  tell him the  names of most
of the plants and  trees), and  out  through the  main  gateway, a grandiose
folly, a  reproduction of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and
across the  wild  insanity of the street,  and over the sea wall, and  so at
last on to the broad  expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy
pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks,  men  with furled  umbrellas stood
silent  and  fixed upon  the  blue  horizon. In  a  hollow  of  black  stone
Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the
man beckoned  him with a  single finger which he  then laid across his lips.

Shh,

 and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was
a  creature of bone. Spectacles framed  in what  might have been ivory.  His
finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down
the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand
between old and fleshless  legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The dhoti open
to the winds. Salahuddin had never known  how  to  fight; he did what he was
forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him and let him go.
     After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did
he tell  anyone  what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would
unleash in  his mother  and suspecting that  his father would say it was his
own  fault. It seemed  to  him  that everything loathsome, everything he had
come to revile about his home town, had come together in the stranger's bony
embrace, and now that he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also  escape
Bombay,  or die. He began to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his
will upon it at all times, eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that
he could  make the miracle happen even without his father's lamp to help him
out.  He dreamed of flying out of his bedroom window to discover that there,
below him, was - not Bombay - but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsonscolumn
Lordstavern  Bloodytower  Queen.  But  as  he  floated  out over  the  great
metropolis he felt himself beginning  to lose height, and no matter how hard
he struggled  kicked swam-in-air  he continued to spiral slowly downwards to
earth, then faster, then faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down
towards the city, Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedle-street,  zeroing  in
on London like a bomb.
     When the  impossible happened, and his father, out of the blue, offered
him  an English education, 

to  get me out of the way,

 he thought,  

otherwise
why, it's obvious,  but  don't  look a  gift  horse  andsoforth,

 his  mother
Nasreen Chamchawala refused to cry, and volunteered, instead, the benefit of
her advice. 'Don't go dirty like those English,' she warned him.  'They wipe
their bee  tee  ems with paper only. Also, they get into each other's  dirty
bathwater.' These vile  slanders proved to Salahuddin  that  his  mother was
doing  her  damnedest  to prevent  him from leaving, and  in spite  of their
mutual love he replied, 'It is inconceivable, Ammi, what you say. England is
a great civilization, what are you talking, bunk.'
     She smiled  her little nervy smile and did not argue. And, later, stood
dry-eyed  beneath  the  triumphal arch  of  a gateway and would  not  go  to
Santacruz airport to see him off. Her only child. She heaped garlands around
his neck until he grew dizzy with the cloying perfumes of mother-love.
     Nasreen Chamchawala was the slightest, most fragile of women, her bones
like  tinkas,  like  minute slivers of wood.  To  make up  for her  physical
insignificance  she  took  at an  early  age  to  dressing  with  a  certain
outrageous, excessive verve. Her  sari-patterns  were dazzling, even garish:
lemon silk adorned with huge brocade diamonds, dizzy black-and-white  Op Art
swirls, gigantic lipstick kisses  on a  bright white ground. People  forgave
her  her  lurid  taste because  she  wore  the  blinding garments with  such
innocence; because the voice  emanating from that  textile  cacophony was so
tiny and hesitant and proper. And because of her soirees.
     Each Friday of  her married life, Nasreen  would fill the halls  of the
Chamchawala residence,  those usually  tenebrous  chambers like great hollow
burial vaults,  with bright light and brittle friends. When Salahuddin was a
little boy he had insisted  on playing doorman, and would greet the jewelled
and lacquered guests with great gravity, permitting  them to pat  him on the
head and call him 

cuteso

 and  

chweetie-pie.

 On Fridays the house was full of
noise; there were musicians, singers,  dancers, the  latest Western hits  as
heard on Radio Ceylon, raucous  puppet-shows in which  painted  clay  rajahs
rode puppet-stallions, decapitating enemy marionettes  with imprecations and
wooden swords. During the rest of the week, however, Nasreen would stalk the
house warily, a pigeon of a woman walking on tiptoed feet through the gloom,
as if she were afraid to disturb the shadowed silence; and her son,  walking
in her  footsteps,  also  learned to  lighten  his  footfall  lest  he rouse
whatever goblin or afreet might be lying in wait.
     But: Nasreen  Chamchawala's caution failed to save her life. The horror
seized and murdered her when she  believed herself most safe, clad in a sari
covered in cheap newspaper photos and headlines, bathed in chandelier-light,
surrounded by her friends.
     By  then  five  and a  half  years had passed since  young  Salahuddin,
garlanded  and warned, boarded a Douglas  DC-8  and journeyed into the west.
Ahead  of him, England;  beside him, his father,  Changez Chamchawala; below
him, home and beauty.  Like Nasreen, the  future Saladin  had never found it
easy to cry.
     On that first aeroplane he read science fiction tales of interplanetary
migration:  Asimov's  

Foundation,

  Ray  Bradbury's  

Martian  Chronicles.

  He
imagined the DC-8 was the mother ship, bearing the Chosen,  the Elect of God
and  man, across unthinkable distances, travelling for generations, breeding
eugenically,  that  their seed might one day take root somewhere in  a brave
new world beneath a yellow sun. He corrected himself: not the mother but the
father ship, because there  he  was, after  all,  the  great man, Abbu, Dad.
Thirteen-year-old  Salahuddin, setting aside recent  doubts  and grievances,
entered  once again  his  childish adoration of his  father, because he had,
had, had worshipped him,  he was  a great father until you started growing a
mind of  your own, and then to argue with  him was called  a betrayal of his
love, but never mind that now, 

I accuse him of becoming my supreme being, so
that what happened  was like a loss of  faith . . .

 yes, the father ship, an
aircraft was not a flying womb but  a metal phallus, and the passengers were
spermatozoa waiting to be spilt.
     Five and a half hours  of time zones;  turn  your  watch upside down in
Bombay and you see the time in London. 

My father,

 Chamcha would think, years
later, in the midst of his bitterness. / 

accuse him of inverting Time.

     How  far did they fly?  Five and a half thousand as the  crow. Or: from
Indianness to Englishness, an  immeasurable distance.  Or, not  very  far at
all, because they rose from  one great  city, fell  to another. The distance
between cities is  always small; a villager, travelling a  hundred miles  to
town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.
     What Changez Chamchawala did when the aeroplane took off: trying not to
let his son see him doing it, he crossed two pairs of fingers on  each hand,
and rotated both his thumbs.
     And  when they were  installed  in a hotel within a  few  feet  of  the
ancient location of the  Tyburn tree,  Changez said to his  son: 'Take. This
belongs to you.' And held out, at arm's length, a black billfold about whose
identity there could be no mistake. 'You are a man now. Take.'
     The return of  the confiscated wallet, complete with  all its currency,
proved to be one of Changez Chamchawala's little traps.  Salahuddin had been
deceived by these all his life. Whenever his father wanted to punish him, he
would  offer  him a present, a  bar of imported chocolate or a  tin of Kraft
cheese, and  would  then grab him  when he came to get it. 'Donkey,' Changez
scorned his infant son. 'Always, always, the carrot leads you to my stick.'
     Salahuddin in  London took the proffered wallet,  accepting the gift of
manhood; whereupon his father said: 'Now that  you are a  man, it is for you
to look after  your  old father while we are in London town. You pay all the
bills.'
     January,  1961. A  year you  could turn upside down and it would still,
unlike your watch, tell the same time.  It  was winter; but when  Salahuddin
Chamchawala began  to shiver in his hotel room, it was because he was scared
halfway out of his wits; his  crock  of gold  had  turned, suddenly,  into a
sorcerer's curse.
     Those two  weeks in London before he went to his boarding school turned
into a nightmare of cash-tills  and calculations, because  Changez had meant
exactly what he  said  and never put his  hand into  his  own  pocket  once.
Salahuddin had to buy his own clothes,  such as a double-breasted blue serge
mackintosh  and   seven  blue-and-white  striped  Van   Heusen  shirts  with
detachable semi-stiff collars which Changez made  him wear every day, to get
used to the studs, and Salahuddin felt as if a blunt knife were being pushed
in just beneath his newly broken Adam's-apple; and he had to make sure there
would  be enough for  the hotel  room, and  everything,  so  that he was too
nervous to ask  his father if they could go to a  movie,  not even one,  not
even 

The Pure Hell of St Trinians,

 or to eat out, not a single Chinese meal,
and in later years he would remember  nothing of his  first fortnight in his
beloved Ellowen  Deeowen except pounds shillings pence, like the disciple of
the  philosopher-king  Chanakya who asked  the  great man  what he  meant by
saying one could live in the world and also not live in it, and who was told
to carry  a brim-full pitcher  of  water  through  a  holiday crowd  without
spilling a drop, on pain of death, so that when he returned he was unable to
describe the day's festivities, having  been like a  blind man,  seeing only
the jug on his head.
     Changez  Chamchawala became very  still in  those days, seeming  not to
care if he ate or  drank or did any damn  thing, he was happy sitting in the
hotel room watching  television, especially  when  the Flintstones  were on,
because,  he  told  his  son,  that  Wilma  bibi  reminded  him  of Nasreen.
Salahuddin tried  to prove he  was a  man by  fasting  right  along with his
father, trying to outlast him,  but he never  managed it, and when the pangs
got too strong he went out of the hotel to  the cheap joint nearby where you
could buy take-away roast chickens that hung greasily in the window, turning
slowly on  their spits.  When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he
became embarrassed, not wanting  the staff  to see, so he stuffed  it inside
double-breasted  serge  and went up in the lift reeking of  spit-roast,  his
mackintosh bulging, his face turning red.  Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze
of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth of  that implacable rage which
would burn within him, undiminished, for over a quarter of a century;  which
would boil away his childhood father-worship and make him a secular man, who
would do  his  best, thereafter, to live  without  a  god of any type; which
would  fuel,  perhaps,  his  determination  to become  the thing his  father
was-not-could-never-be,   that  is,  a  goodandproper  Englishman.  Yes,  an
English, even if his mother had been right all along, even if there was only
paper in the toilets and tepid, used water full of mud and soap to step into
after  taking   exercise,   even  if  it  meant  a  lifetime  spent  amongst
winter-naked  trees whose  fingers clutched  despairingly at  the few,  pale
hours of watery, filtered light. On winter  nights  he,  who had never slept
beneath more  than a  sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and  felt like  a
figure in an ancient myth, condemned  by the gods to have a boulder pressing
down upon  his  chest; but  never  mind,  he would be  English, even  if his
classmates giggled at his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because
these  exclusions only  increased  his  determination, and that was when  he
began  to act, to find  masks that these fellows would  recognize,  paleface
masks, clown-masks, until he  fooled them into thinking he  was 

okay,

 he was

people-like-us.

 He  fooled them the way a sensitive human being can persuade
gorillas  to accept  him into their family,  to  fondle and caress and stuff
bananas in his mouth.
     (After he  had  settled up the last  bill,  and the  wallet he had once
found  at a rainbow's  end was empty, his  father said to him: 'See now. You
pay your way. I've made a man of  you.' But  what  man? That's  what fathers
never know. Not in advance; not until it's too late.)
     One day soon  after he started at the school he came down to  breakfast
to find a kipper on his plate. He sat there staring at it, not knowing where
to begin.  Then he cut into it, and got a mouthful of tiny  bones. And after
extracting them all, another mouthful, more bones. His fellow-pupils watched
him suffer in silence; not one  of them said, here, let me show you, you eat
it in  this way. It took him  ninety minutes to eat the fish and  he was not
permitted to rise from  the table  until it was  done. By  that time he  was
shaking, and if  he had been able  to cry he  would  have  done so. Then the
thought occurred to him that he had been taught an important lesson. England
was  a  peculiar-tasting smoked fish full  of spikes and  bones, and  nobody
would ever tell him how to eat it. He discovered that he was a bloody-minded
person. I'll show them all,' he  swore.  'You  see if  I don't.'  The  eaten
kipper was his first victory, the first step in his conquest of England.
     William  the  Conqueror, it  is said,  began  by eating  a  mouthful of
English sand.
     Five years later he was back home  after leaving school, waiting  until
the English university term began, and his transmutation into a Vilayeti was
well advanced.  'See how well he complains,' Nasreen teased him in  front of
his father. 'About everything he has such  big-big criticisms, the  fans are
fixed  too loosely  to the roof and will  fall to slice our heads off in our
sleep, he says, and the food is too fattening, why we don't cook some things
without frying, he wants to know, the top-floor balconies are unsafe and the
paint is peeled, why can't we take  pride in our surroundings, isn't it, and
the garden is overgrown, we are just junglee people, he thinks so, and  look
how coarse  our movies are, now he  doesn't  enjoy, and  so much disease you
can't  even drink water from  the  tap, my god, he really  got an education,
husband, our little Sallu, England-returned, and talking so fine and all.'
     They were  walking on  the lawn  in the  evening, watching the sun dive
into the sea, wandering in  the  shade of those great spreading trees,  some
snaky  some bearded, which Salahuddin (who now called  himself Saladin after
the fashion  of the English school, but would remain Chamchawala for a while
yet, until a theatrical agent shortened his name for commercial reasons) had
begun to be able to name, jackfruit, banyan, jacaranda, flame of the forest,
plane. Small chhooi-mooi touch-me-not plants grew at the foot of the tree of
his own life, the walnut-tree that Changez had planted with his own hands on
the day of the coming of the son. Father and son at the birth-tree were both
awkward, unable  to  respond properly to Nasreen's  gentle fun.  Saladin had
been seized by the melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place
before he knew its names,  that something had been lost which he would never
be  able to regain. And Changez Chamchawala  found  that he could  no longer
look  his  son  in  the eye,  because  the bitterness  he  saw came close to
freezing  his  heart.  When  he  spoke,  turning   roughly   away  from  the
eighteen-year-old walnut in which, at times during  their  long separations,
he  had  imagined  his  only  son's  soul to  reside,  the  words  came  out
incorrectly and made him sound like the  rigid, cold figure he had hoped  he
would never become, and feared he could not avoid.
     'Tell your son,' Changez boomed at  Nasreen, 'that if he went abroad to
learn  contempt for  his own kind, then his own kind  can  feel nothing  but
scorn for him.  What is he? A fauntleroy,  a grand panjandrum?  Is  this  my
fate: to lose a son and find a freak?'
     'Whatever I am, father dear,' Saladin told the older man, 'I owe it all
to you.'
     It was  their last  family chat. All that  summer feelings continued to
run  high, for all  Nasreen's attempts at  mediation, 

you must  apologize to
your  father, darling,  poor man  is suffering like the  devil but his pride
won't let him  hug you.

 Even  the ayah  Kasturba and the old bearer Vallabh,
her  husband,  attempted to mediate but  neither father  nor son would bend.
'Same  material is the problem,' Kasturba told  Nasreen.  'Daddy and  sonny,
same material, same to same.'
     When the war with Pakistan began that September Nasreen decided, with a
kind of defiance, that she would  not cancel  her  Friday parties, 'to  show
that  Hindus-Muslims can love as well as hate,' she pointed out. Changez saw
a look in her eyes  and  did  not attempt to argue,  but set the servants to
putting blackout curtains over all the  windows instead. That night, for the
last time, Saladin Chamchawala played his old role of doorman, dressed up in
an English dinner-jacket, and when the guests  came  - the  same old guests,
dusted  with the  grey powders of age but otherwise the same - they bestowed
upon  him the same  old pats and kisses,  the  nostalgic benedictions of his
youth. 'Look how grown,' they  were saying. 'Just a  darling, what  to say.'
They were all trying to hide their fear of the war, 

danger of air-raids,

 the
radio  said, and when they ruffled Saladin's hair their hands were  a little
too shaky, or alternatively a little too rough.
     Late that evening the  sirens sang and the guests ran for cover, hiding
under beds, in cupboards, anywhere.  Nasreen Chamchawala found herself alone
by a  food-laden  table, and attempted to reassure  the company  by standing
there in her newsprint sari, munching a piece offish  as if nothing were the
matter. So it was that when she started choking on the fishbone of her death
there  was nobody to help her, they were all crouching in corners with their
eyes   shut;   even   Saladin,   conqueror  of   kippers,   Saladin  of  the
England-returned upper lip,  had  lost his nerve. Nasreen  Chamchawala fell,
twitched,  gasped, died, and when the all-clear sounded  the  guests emerged
sheepishly to find their  hostess  extinct in the middle of the dining-room,
stolen away  by the exterminating angel, khali-pili khalaas, as  Bombay-talk
has it, finished off for no reason, gone for good.
     Less  than  a year  after the death  of  Nasreen  Chamchawala from  her
inability to triumph over  fishbones  in  the manner of her foreign-educated
son, Changez married again without  a word of warning to  anyone. Saladin in
his English college received a letter from his father commanding him, in the
irritatingly orotund and obsolescent phraseology that Changez always used in
correspondence, to be  happy.  'Rejoice,' the letter said, 'for what is lost
is  reborn.' The explanation for  this somewhat cryptic sentence came  lower
down in the aerogramme, and when Saladin learned that his new stepmother was
also called  Nasreen,  something went  wrong  in  his head, and he wrote his
father a  letter full of  cruelty and anger, whose violence was  of the type
that  exists only between  fathers and sons,  and  which  differs from  that
between  daughters and mothers in that there lurks behind it the possibility
of actual, jaw-breaking fisticuffs.  Changez wrote back by return of post; a
brief  letter,  four  lines of  archaic  abuse, cad rotter bounder scoundrel
varlet whoreson  rogue. 'Kindly  consider all family connections irreparably
sundered,' it concluded. 'Consequences your responsibility.'
     After a year of silence,  Saladin received a  further  communication, a
letter of forgiveness that was  in all particulars harder to take  than  the
earlier, excommunicatory thunderbolt. 'When you become a father, O my  son,'
Changez Chamchawala confided, 'then shall you  know those moments - ah!  Too
sweet!
     -  when,  for  love,  one  dandles the  bonny  babe  upon  one's  knee;
whereupon, without warning  or provocation, the blessed  creature - may I be
frank? - it  

wets

 one.  Perhaps for a  moment one feels the gorge rising,  a
tide of anger swells within the blood but then it  dies away, as quickly  as
it came. For do we not, as adults,  understand that the little one is not to
blame? He knows not what he does.'
     Deeply  offended  at  being  compared  to  a  urinating  baby,  Saladin
maintained what  he hoped  was  a dignified  silence. By  the  time  of  his
graduation he had acquired a British passport, because he had arrived in the
country just before the laws tightened up, so he was  able to inform Changez
in  a brief note that he intended to settle down in London and look for work
as  an actor. Changez Chamchawala's  reply  came by express mail. 'Might  as
well be a confounded gigolo. It's my belief some devil  has got into you and
turned your wits.  You who have been given so much: do you not feel  you owe
anything to  anyone? To your country? To the memory  of your dear mother? To
your  own mind? Will you  spend your life jiggling and preening under bright
lights,  kissing blonde women under the gaze  of strangers who  have paid to
watch your shame?  You are no son of mine, but a 

ghoul,

 a 

hoosh,

 a demon  up
from hell. An actor! Answer me this: what am I to tell my friends?'
     And  beneath a signature, the  pathetic, petulant postscript. 'Now that
you have your own bad djinni, do not think you will inherit the magic lamp.'
     After  that,   Changez  Chamchawala  wrote  to  his  son  at  irregular
intervals,  and  in  every  letter  he returned to the  theme of  demons and
possession: 'A  man untrue to  himself  becomes  a two-legged lie,  and such
beasts are Shaitan's  best work,' he  wrote, and  also, in more  sentimental
vein: 'I have your soul kept safe,  my son,  here in  this walnut-tree.  The
devil has only your  body.  When  you are free of him, return and claim your
immortal spirit. It flourishes in the garden.'
     The handwriting in these letters altered over the  years, changing from
the florid  confidence that had made it  instantly identifiable and becoming
narrower, undecorated, purified. Eventually the letters stopped, but Saladin
heard  from  other  sources  that  his  father's   preoccupation  with   the
supernatural had continued to deepen, until finally he had become a recluse,
perhaps in order to escape this world  in which  demons could  steal his own
son's body, a world unsafe for a man of true religious faith.
     His father's transformation disconcerted Saladin,  even at such a great
distance. His parents had been Muslims in the lackadaisical, light manner of
Bombayites; Changez Chamchawala had seemed  far more godlike  to his  infant
son  than  any  Allah.  That  this  father,  this profane deity (albeit  now
discredited), had  dropped to his  knees in  his old  age and started bowing
towards Mecca was hard for his godless son to accept.
     'I blame  that witch,' he told himself, falling for rhetorical purposes
into the  same language of spells and goblins that his father  had commenced
to  employ.  'That  Nasreen  Two.  Is  it  I who  have  been  the subject of
devilment, am I the one possessed? It's not my handwriting that changed.'
     The  letters didn't come  any  more. Years  passed;  and  then  Saladin
Chamcha, actor, self-made man, returned to Bombay with the Prospero Players,
to  interpret  the role of the Indian doctor  in 

The Millionairess

 by George
Bernard Shaw. On stage,  he tailored his  voice to the requirements  of  the
part,  but those  long-suppressed  locutions,  those  discarded  vowels  and
consonants, began to leak out of his mouth  out of the theatre as well.  His
voice was betraying him; and he discovered his component parts to be capable
of other treasons, too.
     A man  who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role,
according  to one  way of  seeing things;  he's  unnatural, a blasphemer, an
abomination  of  abominations. From another angle,  you could see  pathos in
him, heroism  in his  struggle, in his  willingness to risk: not all mutants
survive.  Or, consider him  sociopolitically: most migrants learn,  and  can
become  disguises. Our  own  false descriptions  to counter  the  falsehoods
invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.
     A man who invents  himself needs someone to  believe in  him, to  prove
he's managed it. Playing God  again, you could say. Or you could come down a
few notches, and think of Tinkerbell; fairies don't exist if children  don't
clap their hands. Or you might simply say: it's just like being a man.
     Not only the need to be believed in, but to believe in  another. You've
got it: Love.
     Saladin Chamcha met Pamela Lovelace five and a half days before the end
of the 1960s, when women still wore bandannas in their  hair.  She  stood at
the centre of a room full of Trotskyist actresses and fixed him with eyes so
bright, so bright.  He  monopolized her  all  evening  and she never stopped
smiling and she left with another man. He went home to dream of her eyes and
smile,  the  slenderness of her,  her skin. He pursued  her  for two  years.
England yields her treasures with reluctance. He  was astonished by  his own
perseverance, and  understood  that  she  had become  the custodian  of  his
destiny, that if she did not relent then his entire attempt at metamorphosis
would fail.  'Let me,' he begged her,  wrestling politely  on her white  rug
that left him, at  his midnight bus stops, covered in guilty fluff. 'Believe
me. I'm the one.'
     One night, 

out of the  blue,

 she let  him, she  said  she  believed. He
married her before she could change her mind, but never  learned to read her
thoughts. When she  was unhappy she would lock herself  in the bedroom until
she felt better. 'It's none  of your business,' she told him.  'I don't want
anybody to see  me when  I'm like  that.' He used to call her  a clam. 'Open
up,' he hammered on all the locked doors of  their  lives together, basement
first, then maisonette, then mansion. 'I love you, let me in.' He needed her
so  badly,  to  reassure  himself  of  his  own  existence,  that  he  never
comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in
the brightness with which she faced  the  world, or  the reasons why she hid
when she couldn't manage to beam. Only when it was too late did she tell him
that her parents had committed suicide together when she  had just  begun to
menstruate,  over  their  heads  in  gambling  debts, leaving her  with  the
aristocratic bellow of a voice that marked her out as a golden girl, a woman
to envy, whereas in fact  she was abandoned, lost, her parents couldn't even
be bothered to wait and watch her grow up, that's how much 

she

 was loved, so
of course she  had no confidence at all,  and every moment she spent  in the
world was full of panic,  so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she
locked the door and shook and felt like a husk,  like an empty peanut-shell,
a monkey without a nut.
     They  never  managed to have children; she blamed  herself.  After  ten
years  Saladin discovered  that there was something the matter  with some of
his  own  chromosomes,  two sticks  too  long,  or  too  short, he  couldn't
remember. His genetic  inheritance;  apparently he was lucky to exist, lucky
not to be some sort of deformed freak. Was  it his mother or his father from
whom? The doctors  couldn't  say;  he  blamed, it's easy to guess which one,
after all, it wouldn't do to think badly of the dead.
     They hadn't been getting along lately.
     He told himself that afterwards, but not during.
     Afterwards, he told  himself, we were on the rocks,  maybe it  was  the
missing babies, maybe we  just grew away from each other, maybe this,  maybe
that.
     During, he looked away from  all  the strain, all the scratchiness, all
the  fights that never got going, he  closed  his eyes and waited  until her
smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant
counterfeit of joy.
     He  tried to  invent a happy  future for them,  to make it come true by
making it  up and then believing in it. On his way to  India he was thinking
how  lucky he  was  to have  her, I'm lucky yes  I  am  don't argue I'm  the
luckiest bastard in the world. And: how wonderful  it was to have before him
the  stretching, shady avenue of years, the prospect of growing old  in  the
presence of her gentleness.
     He  had  worked so hard and come so close to convincing  himself of the
truth of  these paltry fictions that when he went to bed  with  Zeeny  Vakil
within forty-eight hours of arriving in Bombay, the first thing he did, even
before they made love, was to faint, to pass out  cold, because the messages
reaching his brain were in such serious disagreement with one another, as if
his right eye  saw the  world moving to the left while  his left eye saw  it
sliding to the right.
     Zeeny  was the first Indian woman he had  ever made love to. She barged
into  his dressing-room after the first night of 

The Millionairess,

 with her
operatic  arms and  her  gravel voice, as  if it hadn't  been  years. 

Years.

'Yaar, what a disappointment, I swear, I sat through the whole thing just to
hear you singing  'Goodness  Gracious  Me'  like Peter  Sellers or  what,  I
thought, let's find out if  the guy learned to hit a note, you remember when
you  did  Elvis  impersonations  with   your  squash  racket,  darling,  too
hilarious,  completely cracked.  But what is this? Song is not in drama. The
hell.  Listen, can you  escape from all these palefaces and come out with us
wogs?  Maybe  you  forgot what  that  is  like.'  He  remembered  her  as  a
stick-figure  of  a  teenager   in  a   lopsided  Quant   hairstyle  and  an
equal-but-oppositely lopsided smile. A rash, bad girl. Once for the hell  of
it she walked into a notorious adda, a dive, on Falkland Road, and sat there
smoking a cigarette and drinking  Coke until  the  pimps  who  ran the joint
threatened to  cut her face, no  freelances permitted. She stared them down,
finished  her  cigarette,  left. Fearless. Maybe crazy.  Now  in her  middle
thirties  she was a qualified doctor with  a  consultancy  at  Breach  Candy
Hospital, who worked  with the city's homeless,  who had gone to Bhopal  the
moment the news broke of the invisible American cloud that ate people's eyes
and lungs.  She  was  an art critic  whose book  on  the  confining myth  of
authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket which  she sought to replace by
an ethic of  historically  validated  eclecticism,  for  was  not the entire
national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed
to  fit,  Aryan,  Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest?  -  had
created a predictable stink, especially because of its title. She had called
it 

The Only Good  Indian.

  'Meaning,  is a  dead,' she told Chamcha when she
gave him a  copy. 'Why should  there be a good,  right  way of being  a wog?
That's Hindu  fundamentalism. Actually,  we're  all bad Indians.  Some worse
than others.'
     She had come into the fullness of her beauty, long hair left loose, and
she  was  no stick-figure  these  days. Five  hours  after  she  entered his
dressing-room  they  were in bed,  and  he passed  out.  When  he awoke  she
explained 'I slipped you a mickey finn.'  He never worked out whether or not
she had been telling the truth.
     Zeenat  Vakil  made  Saladin her  project.  'The  reclamation of,'  she
explained. 'Mister, we're going to  get you back.'  At times  he thought she
intended to achieve  this by eating him alive. She made love like a cannibal
and  he  was  her  long  pork.  'Did  you  know,'  he  asked  her,  'of  the
well-established  connection   between   vegetarianism  and  the  man-eating
impulse?' Zeeny, lunching  on his naked thigh, shook  her  head. 'In certain
extreme cases,' he went on, 'too much vegetable consumption can release into
the system  biochemicals that  induce cannibal fantasies.' She looked up and
smiled her slanting smile. Zeeny, the beautiful vampire.  'Come off it,' she
said.  'We  are  a nation  of vegetarians,  and ours is a peaceful, mystical
culture, everybody knows.'
     He,  for his  part, was required to handle with care. The first time he
touched  her  breasts she  spouted  hot  astounding  tears  the  colour  and
consistency of buffalo  milk.  She had  watched her mother die  like  a bird
being carved for dinner, first the left breast then the right, and still the
cancer had spread. Her fear of repeating her mother's death placed her chest
off limits. Fearless  Zeeny's secret  terror. She had never had a child  but
her eyes wept milk.
     After their first  lovemaking she started right in on  him,  the  tears
forgotten  now. 'You know what  you are, I'll tell you. A deserter  is what,
more  English than, your  Angrez accent  wrapped around you like a flag, and
don't think it's so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache.'
     'There's something strange going on,' he wanted to say, 'my voice,' but
he didn't know how to put it, and held his tongue.
     'People like  you,' she snorted,  kissing his shoulder.  'You come back
after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves.  Well,  baby,  we got  a
lower  opinion of you.'  Her smile was  brighter than  Pamela's. 'I see,' he
said to her, 'Zeeny, you didn't lose your Binaca smile.'
     

Binaca.

  Where  had  that  come  from,  the  long  forgotten toothpaste
advertisement?  And  the  vowel  sounds, distinctly unreliable.  Watch  out,
Chamcha, look out for your shadow. That black fellow creeping up behind.
     On the second night she arrived at the theatre with two friends in tow,
a young Marxist film-maker called George Miranda, a shambling whale of a man
with rolled-up kurta sleeves,  a flapping  waistcoat bearing ancient stains,
and a surprisingly military moustache with waxed points;  and Bhupen Gandhi,
poet  and journalist,  who  had gone  prematurely grey  but  whose  face was
baby-innocent until he unleashed  his sly,  giggling  laugh. 'Come on, Salad
baba,'  Zeeny announced.  'We're going to show  you the town.' She turned to
her  companions.  'These 

Asians

 from  foreign got no  shame,'  she declared.
'Saladin, like a bloody lettuce, I ask you.'
     'There  was a TV reporter  here some days back,'  George  Miranda said.
'Pink hair. She said her name was Kerleeda. I couldn't work it out.'
     'Listen, George is  too unworldly,' Zeeny interrupted, 'He doesn't know
what freaks you guys turn into. That Miss Singh, outrageous. I told her, the
name's Khalida, dearie, rhymes  with Dalda, that's a cooking medium. But she
couldn't say it. Her own name. Take me to  your kerleader. You types  got no
culture.  Just  wogs  now.  Ain't it the truth?' she added, suddenly gay and
round-eyed,  afraid she'd gone too far.  'Stop bullying him, Zeenat,' Bhupen
Gandhi said in his quiet voice. And George, awkwardly, mumbled: 'No offence,
man. Joke-shoke.'
     Chamcha  decided  to grin and then fight  back. 'Zeeny,'  he said, 'the
earth  is  full  of  Indians, you know that,  we get everywhere,  we  become
tinkers in Australia and our heads end up in Idi Amin's fridge. Columbus was
right, maybe; the world's made up of Indies, East, West, North. Damn it, you
should be  proud of  us, our enterprise, the way  we push against frontiers.
Only thing is, we're  not Indian like you.  You better  get used to us. What
was the name of that book you wrote?'
     'Listen,' Zeeny put her arm. through his. 'Listen to my Salad. Suddenly
he wants to be Indian after spending his life  trying to turn white.  All is
not lost, you see. Something in there still alive.' And Chamcha felt himself
flushing, felt the confusion mounting. India; it jumbled things up.
     'For  Pete's  sake,' she  added, knifing him with a kiss.  

'Chamcha.

  I
mean,  fuck  it. You  name yourself  Mister Toady and you  expect us not  to
laugh.'
     In Zeeny's  beaten-up Hindustan, a car built for a servant culture, the
back seat better upholstered than the front, he felt the night closing in on
him like  a crowd. India, measuring him against her forgotten immensity, her
sheer presence, the old despised disorder. An  Amazonic hijra got up like an
Indian Wonder Woman, complete  with silver trident, held up the traffic with
one imperious  arm, sauntered in  front of them.  Chamcha stared into herhis
glaring  eyes.  Gibreel  Farishta,  the  movie star  who  had  unaccountably
vanished  from  view,  rotted  on  the  hoardings.  Rubble,  litter,  noise.
Cigarette  advertisements smoking past:  SCISSORS -  FOR THE MAN  OF ACTION,
SATISFACTION. And, more improbably: PANAMA - PART OF THE GREAT INDIAN SCENE.
     'Where are we going?' The night had  acquired the quality of green neon
strip-lighting. Zeeny parked the  car. 'You're lost,' she accused him. 'What
do you know about  Bombay? Your own city, only  it never was. To you, it's a
dream of childhood. Growing up on Scandal Point is like living on  the moon.
No bustees there, no sirree, only servants' quarters. Did Shiv Sena elements
come there to make  communal  trouble? Were your  neighbours starving in the
textile strike? Did Datta Samant stage a rally  in front of  your bungalows?
How old were you when you met a  trade unionist?  How old the first time you
got on a  local train instead  of  a  car with  driver? That  wasn't Bombay,
darling, excuse me. That was Wonderland, Peristan, Never-Never, Oz.'
     'And you?' Saladin reminded her. 'Where were you back then?'
     'Same place,' she said fiercely. 'With all the other bloody Munchkins.'
     Back  streets.  A Jain temple was  being re-painted and all  the saints
were in  plastic  bags to protect them from  the  drips. A pavement magazine
vendor displayed newspapers  full  of  horror:  a  railway disaster.  Bhupen
Gandhi began to speak in his mild  whisper. After the accident, he said, the
surviving passengers swam to the shore  (the train had plunged off a bridge)
and were met by local villagers, who pushed them under  the water until they
drowned and then looted their bodies.
     'Shut your face,' Zeeny shouted at him. 'Why are  you  telling him such
things? Already he thinks we're savages, a lower form.'
     A shop  was selling sandalwood to burn  in a nearby Krishna temple  and
sets of enamelled pink-and-white Krishna-eyes that saw everything. 'Too damn
much to see,' Bhupen said. 'That is fact of matter.' In a crowded dhaba that
George  had  started  frequenting  when he  was  making  contact, for  movie
purposes,  with the dadas or bosses who ran the city's flesh trade, dark rum
was  consumed at  aluminium tables  and George  and Bhupen started, a little
boozily, to quarrel. Zeeny drank Thums Up  Cola and denounced her friends to
Chamcha. 'Drinking  problems,  both  of  them, broke  as old pots, they both
mistreat  their wives, sit in dives, waste their stinking lives. No wonder I
fell for you, sugar, when the local product is so low grade  you get to like
goods from foreign.'
     George had  gone with Zeeny  to Bhopal  and  was becoming  noisy on the
subject of the catastrophe, interpreting  it ideologically. 'What  is Amrika
for  us?'  he demanded. 'It's not a real place.  Power in  its  purest form,
disembodied,  invisible.  We  can't  see it  but  it  screws  us totally, no
escape.'  He compared the  Union Carbide company to  the  Trojan Horse.  'We
invited the  bastards in.'  It  was like  the story of the forty thieves, he
said.  Hiding  in their amphoras and waiting  for the night.  'We had no  AH
Baba, misfortunately,' he cried. 'Who did we have? Mr. Rajiv G.'
     At this point Bhupen  Gandhi stood  up abruptly, unsteadily, and began,
as though possessed, as though a spirit were upon him, to 

testify.

 'For me,'
he said, 'the  issue cannot  be  foreign  intervention.  We  always  forgive
ourselves  by blaming outsiders,  America, Pakistan, any  damn place. Excuse
me, George, but  for  me it all goes  back  to Assam, we have  to start with
that.' The  massacre of  the innocents.  Photographs  of children's corpses,
arranged neatly in lines like  soldiers on parade. They had been clubbed  to
death,  pelted  with stones, their necks cut  in half by  knives. Those neat
ranks of death, Chamcha remembered. As if only horror could sting India into
orderliness.
     Bhupen spoke for twenty-nine minutes without hesitations or pauses. 'We
are  all guilty of Assam,' he said. 'Each person of us. Unless and  until we
face it, that the children's deaths were our fault, we cannot call ourselves
a civilized people.'  He drank rum quickly as  he  spoke, and his  voice got
louder, and his body began to lean dangerously,  but although the room  fell
silent  nobody  moved  towards him, nobody tried to stop him talking, nobody
called  him  a  drunk.  In the middle of a  sentence, 

everyday blindings, or
shootings, or  corruptions,  who  do we  think we,

  he sat down heavily  and
stared into his glass.
     Now a young man stood up in a  far corner of the joint and argued back.
Assam  had  to  be  understood politically,  he  cried, there  were economic
reasons,  and yet another fellow came to his feet  to reply, cash matters do
not explain  why a grown man clubs a little girl to death,  and then another
fellow said,  if you think  that,  you have  never been hungry,  salah,  how
bloody  romantic to  suppose economics cannot make  men into beasts. Chamcha
clutched  at  his  glass as  the noise  level  rose, and the air  seemed  to
thicken,  gold  teeth flashed in  his  face,  shoulders rubbed against  his,
elbows nudged, the air was turning into soup, and in his chest the irregular
palpitations had begun. George grabbed him by the  wrist and dragged him out
into the street. 'You okay, man? You were turning green.' Saladin nodded his
thanks, gasped in lungfuls of  the night, calmed down. 'Rum and exhaustion,'
he said. 'I  have the peculiar habit  of getting my nerves after  the  show.
Quite often I get wobbly. Should have known,' Zeeny was  looking at him, and
there was more in her  eyes  than sympathy. A  glittering look,  triumphant,
hard.  

Something  got through to  you,

  her expression gloated. 

About bloody
time.

     After you recover from typhoid, Chamcha reflected, you remain immune to
the disease  for ten years or so. But nothing  is  forever;  eventually  the
antibodies vanish from your blood.  He had to accept the fact that his blood
no longer  contained the immunizing  agents that  would have  enabled him to
suffer India's  reality. Rum, heart  palpitations, a sickness of the spirit.
Time for bed.
     She wouldn't take him to her place. Always and only the hotel, with the
gold-medallioned young Arabs  strutting  in the midnight  corridors  holding
bottles  of contraband  whisky.  He lay on the  bed with  his  shoes on, his
collar  and tie loose,  his right  arm flung across  his eyes;  she, in  the
hotel's white  bathrobe, bent over him  and kissed his chin.  I'll tell  you
what happened  to you  tonight,' she  said. 'You  could  say we cracked your
shell.'
     He sat up, angry.  'Well, this is what's inside,' he blazed at her. 'An
Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days,
people look  polite.  This  is  me.'  Caught  in  the aspic  of  his adopted
language, he had begun to hear, in  India's Babel, an ominous warning: don't
come  back again. When you have  stepped  through the looking-glass you step
back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.
     'I  was  so proud of Bhupen tonight,' Zeeny said, getting into bed. 'In
how many  countries could you go into some  bar  and start  up a debate like
that? The passion, the seriousness, the respect. You keep your civilization,
Toadji; I like this one plenty fine.'
     'Give up on me,' he begged her. 'I don't like people dropping in to sec
me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven-tiles and kabaddi, I
can't  recite  my  prayers,  I  don't know what  should  happen  at  a nikah
ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I'm on my own. This
isn't home.  It  makes me giddy because  it feels like home  and  is not. It
makes my heart tremble and my head spin.'
     'You're  a stupid,' she  shouted at  him. 'A  stupid. Change back! Damn
fool! Of  course you can.' She was  a vortex, a siren, tempting him  back to
his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow,  a  ghost,  and he would not
become a phantom. There was a return ticket to  London in his wallet, and he
was going to use it.
     'You never married,' he said when they both lay sleepless in  the small
hours. Zeeny  snorted. 'You've really been  gone too long. Can't you see me?
I'm a blackie.' Arching her back and throwing off the sheet  to show off her
lavishness.  When  the bandit queen Phoolan Devi came  out of the ravines to
surrender and be photographed, the  newspapers at once  uncreated their  own
myth  of  her  

legendary  beauty.

  She  became  

plain,  a  common  creature,
unappetizing

  where she had  been  

toothsome.

 Dark skin  in north  India. 'I
don't buy it,' Saladin said. 'You don't expect me to believe that.'
     She  laughed.  'Good,  you're  not a complete idiot  yet. Who  needs to
marry? I had work to do.'
     And after a  pause, she threw his question  back at him. 

So, then.  And
you?

     Not only married, but  rich. 'So  tell, na. How you  live, you  and the
mame.'  In  a  five-storey mansion  in Notting  Hill. He had started feeling
insecure there of late, because the most recent  batch of burglars had taken
not only the usual video and stereo but also the wolfhound guard dog. It was
not possible,  he  had  begun to feel, to live in a place where the criminal
elements kidnapped the animals. Pamela  told him it was an old local custom.
In  the  Olden  Days, she said  (history, for  Pamela, was  divided into the
Ancient  Era, the Dark Ages, the Olden  Days, the British Empire, the Modern
Age and the Present), petnapping was good business. The poor would steal the
canines of the rich, train them to forget their names, and sell them back to
their grieving, helpless owners in shops on  Portobello Road. Pamela's local
history  was always detailed and frequently unreliable. 'But, my God,' Zeeny
Vakil said, 'you must sell up pronto and move. I know those English, all the
same, riff-raff and nawabs. You can't fight their bloody traditions.'
     

My wife, Pamela  Lovelace, frail as porcelain, graceful as gazelles,

 he
remembered.  

I  put  down  roots  in  the women  I  love.

 The  banalities of
infidelity. He put them away and talked about his work.
     When Zeeny Vakil found out how  Saladin Chamcha made his money, she let
fly a series of shrieks that made one of the medallioned Arabs  knock at the
door to make sure everything was all right. He saw a beautiful woman sitting
up in bed  with  what  looked like  buffalo milk running  down her face  and
dripping off  the  point of her chin,  and, apologizing to  Chamcha  for the
intrusion, he withdrew hastily, 

sorry, sport, hey, you're some lucky guy.

     'You poor  potato,' Zeeny  gasped  between  peals  of  laughter. 'Those
Angrez bastards. They really screwed you up.'
     So  now  his work  was funny.  'I  have a gift  for accents,'  he  said
haughtily. 'Why I shouldn't employ?'
     ' " 

Why I should not employ?"

 '  she mimicked him,  kicking her legs in
the air. 'Mister actor, your moustache just slipped again.'
     Oh my God.
     What's happening to me?
     What the devil?
     Help.
     Because  he  did  have  that gift, truly  he did, he was the  Man of  a
Thousand Voices and a  Voice. If you wanted to know  how your ketchup bottle
should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal
voice for  your packet of garlic-flavoured crisps,  he was your very man. He
made  carpets  speak   in  warehouse  advertisements,   he   did   celebrity
impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas. On the radio he could  convince an
audience that he was Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United
States. Once, in a radio play for thirty-seven  voices, he interpreted every
single  part  under a variety of pseudonyms  and nobody ever worked  it out.
With  his female equivalent,  Mimi  Mamoulian,  he  ruled  the  airwaves  of
Britain. They had such a  large  slice of the voiceover racket that, as Mimi
said, 'People  better not  mention  the Monopolies Commission around us, not
even in fun.' Her range was astonishing;  she could  do any age, anywhere in
the world,  any point on the vocal  register, angelic Juliet to fiendish Mae
West.  'We  should  get  married  sometime,  when  you're  free,'  Mimi once
suggested to him. 'You and me, we could be the United Nations.'
     'You're  Jewish,'  he pointed out. 'I  was brought up to have  views on
Jews.'
     'So I'm  Jewish,'  she  shrugged. 'You're  the one  who's  circumcised.
Nobody's perfect.'
     Mimi was tiny with tight dark curls and looked like a Michelin  poster.
In Bombay, Zeenat Vakil stretched and  yawned and drove other women from his
thoughts. 'Too much,' she  laughed at him. 'They pay you to imitate them, as
long as they  don't have to look  at you. Your voice becomes famous but they
hide your  face. Got any ideas why?  Warts on  your nose, cross-eyes,  what?
Anything come to mind, baby? You goddamn lettuce brain, I swear.'
     It was  true, he thought. Saladin and Mimi were legends of  a sort, but
crippled legends,  dark stars. The gravitational  field  of their  abilities
drew work towards them, but they  remained invisible, shedding bodies to put
on voices.  On the radio, Mimi could become the Botticelli Venus,  she could
be Olympia, Monroe, any damn woman she pleased. She didn't give a damn about
the way  she  looked; she  had become  her voice, she was worth a mint,  and
three  young women were  hopelessly  in  love  with  her. Also,  she  bought
property.  'Neurotic  behaviour,' she would confess unashamedly.  'Excessive
need  for  rooting  owing to  upheavals  of  Armenian-Jewish  history.  Some
desperation  owing  to advancing years  and  small  polyps detected  in  the
throat. Property is so  soothing, I  do recommend  it.'  She owned a Norfolk
vicarage,  a farmhouse  in Normandy, a  Tuscan bell-tower,  a  sea-coast  in
Bohemia. 'All haunted,'  she explained. 'Clanks,  howls, blood on the  rugs,
women in nighties, the works. Nobody gives up land without a fight.'
     Nobody except me, Chamcha thought, a  melancholy clutching at him as he
lay  beside  Zeenat  Vakil. Maybe I'm a ghost  already. But at least a ghost
with an airline ticket, success,  money,  wife. A shade, but  living in  the
tangible, material world. With 

assets.

 Yes, sir.
     Zeeny stroked the hairs curling  over his ears. 'Sometimes, when you're
quiet,' she murmured, 'when  you aren't  doing funny voices or acting grand,
and when  you forget people are watching, you  look  just  like a blank. You
know?  An empty  slate, nobody home. It makes me mad, sometimes,  I want  to
slap you. To sting you  back into  life. But I also get sad about it. Such a
fool,  you,  the big star whose face is the wrong colour for their  colour T
Vs, who has to travel to wogland with some two-bit company, playing the babu
part  on top of it, just to get into a play. They kick you around and  still
you stay, you  love them, bloody  slave mentality,  I swear.  Chamcha,'  she
grabbed his shoulders and shook him, sitting astride him  with her forbidden
breasts a few inches from his face, 'Salad baba, whatever you call yourself,
for Pete's sake 

come home.'

     His big break, the one that could soon make money lose its meaning, had
started small: children's television, a thing called 

The Aliens Show,

 by 

The
Munsters

 out of 

Star Wars

 by way of 

Sesame Street.

 It was a situation comedy
about a group of  extraterrestrials ranging from cute to psycho, from animal
to vegetable, and  also mineral, because  it featured an artistic space-rock
that could quarry itself for its raw material, and then regenerate itself in
time for the next week's episode; this rock  was named Pygmalien, and  owing
to  the  stunted sense of  humour of the show's  producers there was also  a
coarse,  belching creature like  a puking cactus that  came  from  a  desert
planet at the end of time: this was  Matilda, the Australien, and there were
the three grotesquely pneumatic,  singing space  sirens known  as the  Alien
Korns, maybe because you could lie down among them, and there was a team  of
Venusian hip-hoppers  and subway spray-painters and soul-brothers who called
themselves the Alien Nation, and  under a bed in the  spaceship that was the
programme's  main location  there lived Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the
Crab Nebula  who had run away from his father, and in  a fish-tank you could
find Brains the  super-intelligent giant  abalone who liked eating  Chinese,
and  then there  was Ridley,  the most terrifying of the  regular cast,  who
looked like  a Francis  Bacon  painting of a mouthful of teeth waving at the
end  of a sightless pod, and who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney
Weaver.  The  stars of  the show, its Kermit and Miss Piggy,  were  the very
fashionable,  slinkily attired,  stunningly hairstyled duo, Maxim and  Mamma
Alien, who yearned to be -what else?  - television personalities. They  were
played by Saladin Chamcha and Mimi Mamoulian, and they  changed their voices
along with their clothes, to  say nothing of their hair, which could go from
purple to vermilion between  shots, which could stand diagonally  three feet
up  from their  heads or vanish altogether;  or their  features  and  limbs,
because  they  were capable of  changing all of them, switching legs,  arms,
noses,  ears, eyes, and  every switch  conjured up a  different  accent from
their legendary, protean gullets.  What made the  show  a hit was its use of
the latest computer-generated  imagery. The backgrounds  were all simulated:
spaceship, other-world landscapes, intergalactic game-show studios; and  the
actors,  too, were processed  through  machines, obliged to spend four hours
every day being buried under  the  latest in prosthetic make-up which - once
the video-computers had gone to work - made them look just like simulations,
too. Maxim Alien,  space playboy, and  Mamma, undefeated  galactic wrestling
champion and  universal all-comers pasta queen,  were  overnight sensations.
Prime-time beckoned; America, Eurovision, the world.
     As 

The Aliens  Show

 got bigger it began to attract political criticism.
Conservatives attacked it for  being too  frightening, too sexually explicit
(Ridley  could become positively erect when he thought too  hard about  Miss
Weaver), too 

weird.

  Radical commentators began to attack its  stereotyping,
its reinforcement  of  the  idea  of aliens-as-freaks, its lack  of positive
images. Chamcha  came  under pressure to  quit  the show; refused; became  a
target.  'Trouble  waiting when  I go home,'  he told Zeeny. 'The damn  show
isn't an allegory. It's an entertainment. It aims to please.'
     'To please whom?' she wanted to know. 'Besides, even  now they only let
you  on the air  after they cover your face with rubber  and  give you a red
wig. Big deal deluxe, say I.'
     'The  point  is,'  she said  when  they awoke the next morning,  'Salad
darling, you really are good  looking, no  quesch.  Skin like  milk, England
returned. Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you  could be  next in line. I'm
serious,  yaar. They need a new face. Come home and  you could be the  next,
bigger than Bachchan  was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn't as funny as
theirs.'
     When he  was young,  he told her, each phase of his life, each  self he
tried  on, had  seemed  reassuringly  temporary.  Its  imperfections  didn't
matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next,  one Saladin
by another. Now, however, change  had begun to feel painful; the arteries of
the  possible had begun to harden. 'It isn't easy to tell you this, but  I'm
married now, and not just to wife  but life.' 

The accent  slippage again.

 'I
really came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn't  the  play. He's  in his
late seventies now, and I won't have many more  chances. He hasn't  been  to
the show; Muhammad must go to the mountain.'
     

My  father,  Changez  Chamchawala,  owner  of  a magic  lamp.

  'Changez
Chamchawala, are you  kidding, don't  think  you can  leave me  behind,' she
clapped her hands. 'I want to check out the hair and toenails.'  His father,
the famous recluse.  Bombay was  a culture  of  re-makes.  Its  architecture
mimicked the  skyscraper, its  cinema  endlessly re-invented 

The Magnificent
Seven

 and 

Love Story,

 obliging  all its heroes  to save at least one village
from  murderous  dacoits and all  its heroines to die of leukaemia at  least
once in  their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too,  had
taken  to importing their lives. Changez's invisibility was  an Indian dream
of the  crorepati penthoused  wretch  of  Las Vegas; but a  dream  was not a
photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her  own eyes. 'He makes
faces at people if he's in a bad mood,' Saladin warned her. 'Nobody believes
it till it happens, but it's true. Such faces! Gargoyles. Also, he's a prude
and he'll  call you a tart  and  anyway I'll probably have a fight with him,
it's on the cards.'
     What  Saladin Chamcha had come  to India for: forgiveness. That was his
business in his old home town. But whether to give or to receive, he was not
able to say.
     Bizarre   aspects  of   the  present  circumstances   of  Mr.   Changez
Chamchawala: with his new  wife, Nasreen the Second, he lived for  five days
every week in a high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort in the Pali Hill
district beloved of movie  stars; but every weekend he returned without  his
wife  to the old  house at Scandal  Point, to spend his days of rest  in the
lost world of  the past, in  the  company of  the first, and  dead, Nasreen.
Furthermore: it was said that his second wife refused to set foot in the old
place.  'Or  isn't  allowed  to,'  Zeeny  hypothesized  in  the back of  the
black-glass-windowed Mercedes limousine  which Changez  had  sent to collect
his  son.  As  Saladin  finished  filling  in the  background,  Zeenat Vakil
whistled appreciatively. 'Cra

zee

.'
     The  Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez's empire of dung, 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'il 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,  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  waste-baskets, 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  drawing-room, 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 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-forearrns  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 eleven-inch 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 scandal-points 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.
     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. 'England-educated  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.'
     '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 I 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 what-will-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.
     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 forty-year-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 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-I, 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 to 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.'
     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.'
     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 stuffings 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.
     

4


     he 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 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  lathi-charges.  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 economy  class of Flight A1-420,
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,
mistcramerica. 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 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.
     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  are 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-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 ENOUGH, 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 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 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 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.
     'Tenth  highest  peak  in the world,' Chamcha  heard  him  mutter,  'is
Xixabangma  Feng,  eight  oh  one  three  metres. An-napurna  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 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 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-more-returns. 

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, 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 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 AI-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 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.
     

II
     Mahound

     Gibreel when he submits to the  inevitable, when he slides heavy-lidded
towards visions  of his  angeling,  passes  his  loving  mother  who  has  a
different name  for him, Shaitan, she  calls him, just like Shaitan, same to
same, because he has been fooling around with the tiffins to be carried into
the city for the office workers' lunch, mischeevious imp, she slices the air
with her  hand, rascal has been putting Muslim  meat compartments into Hindu
non-veg tiffin-carriers, customers are up in arms. Little devil, she scolds,
but then folds him  in her arms, my little farishta,  boys will be boys, and
he falls past  her  into sleep,  growing bigger as he falls and  the falling
begins to feel  like flight, his mother's  voice wafts  distantly up to him,
baba,  look  how  you  grew, enor

mouse,

 wah-wah, applause. He  is  gigantic,
wingless,  standing with  his feet upon the horizon and his arms  around the
sun. In the early dreams he sees beginnings, Shaitan cast down from the sky,
making a  grab for a  branch  of  the highest Thing,  the lote-tree  of  the
uttermost end that stands beneath the  Throne, Shaitan  missing, plummeting,
splat. But he  lived on, was  not couldn't  be dead, sang from hellbelow his
soft seductive verses. O the sweet songs that he knew. With his daughters as
his  fiendish  backing  group,  yes,  the three  of  them, Lat  Manat  Uzza,
motherless girls laughing with  their Abba, giggling  behind their hands  at
Gibreel, what a trick we got in store  for you, they giggle, for you and for
that businessman on  the  hill. But before the  businessman there  are other
stories,  here he  is, Archangel Gibreel, revealing the spring  of Zamzam to
Hagar the  Egyptian so that, abandoned  by  the  prophet Ibrahim  with their
child in the desert, she might drink the cool spring waters and so live. And
later, after the  Jurhum filled up Zamzam  with mud and golden gazelles,  so
that it  was lost for a time, here he is again, pointing it out to that one,
Muttalib of the scarlet tents, father of  the child with the silver hair who
fathered, in turn, the businessman. The businessman: here he comes.
     Sometimes when he sleeps Gibreel becomes  aware,  without the dream, of
himself sleeping, of himself  dreaming his own awareness of his  dream,  and
then a panic begins,  O God,  he cries out, O allgood  allahgod, I've had my
bloody chips, me. Got bugs in the brain, full mad, a  looney tune and a gone
baboon. Just as he, the businessman,  felt when he first  saw the archangel:
thought  he was cracked,  wanted to throw himself down from a rock,  from  a
high rock, from a  rock on which  there grew a stunted  lote-tree, a rock as
high as the roof of the world.
     He's  coming: making  his way  up Cone  Mountain  to  the  cave.  Happy
birthday: he's  forty-four  today. But though the city behind  and below him
throngs with festival, up  he climbs, alone. No  new birthday  suit for him,
neatly pressed  and folded  at the foot of his bed. A man of ascetic tastes.
(What strange manner of businessman is this?)
     Question: What is the opposite of faith?
     Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.
     Doubt.
     The human condition, but what of the angelic?  Halfway between Allahgod
and homosap, did they  ever  doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day
they  hid  muttering  beneath the  Throne,  daring to ask forbidden  things:
antiquestions.  Is it right  that. Could  it not be argued. Freedom, the old
antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills  a la
god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, of the
salvationdamnation  of man, all the usual etcetera. And  hey  presto, end of
protest, on with the haloes, back to work.  Angels are easily pacified; turn
them into instruments and  they'll play your  harpy  tune.  Human beings are
tougher nuts, can doubt  anything, even the  evidence of their own eyes.  Of
behind-their-own eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind
closed peepers . . . angels, they don't have much in  the way of  a will. To
will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.
     I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel.
     Me?
     The businessman: looks as he should, high forehead, caglenose, broad in
the shoulders, narrow  in  the hip. Average height, brooding, dressed in two
pieces of plain cloth, each four ells in length, one draped around his body,
the  other over his shoulder. Large  eyes; long  lashes  like a girl's.  His
strides can seem too long for his legs, but he's a light-footed man. Orphans
learn  to  be  moving  targets,  develop  a  rapid  walk,  quick  reactions,
hold-your-tongue caution. Up through the thorn-bushes and opobalsam trees he
comes, scrabbling on boulders, this is a fit man, no soft-bellied usurer he.
And yes, to state it  again: takes an odd sort of business wallah to cut off
into the wilds, up Mount Cone, sometimes  for a month at a stretch, just  to
be alone.
     His name: a dream-name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it
means he-for-whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won't answer  to that here;
nor,  though  he's well  aware  of  what  they call him, to his  nickname in
Jahilia down below -  

he-who-goes-up-and-down-old-Coney.

 Here he is  neither
Mahomet  nor MoeHammcred; has adopted, instead,  the demon-tag  the farangis
hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories,  Blacks
all chose to wear  with  pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise,
our mountain-climbing,  prophet-motivated  solitary  is to  be  the medieval
baby-frightener, the Devil's synonym: Mahound.
     That's him. Mahound the businessman, climbing his  hot mountain in  the
Hijaz. The mirage of a city shines below him in the sun.
     The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of
the desert whence it rises. It  is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated,
the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick
of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very
stuff  of   inconstancy,  -  the  quintessence  of  unsettlement,  shifting,
treachery, lack-of-form, -  and have turned it, by alchemy, into  the fabric
of their  newly invented permanence. These people are  a mere  three or four
generations removed from  their nomadic past, when they were  as rootless as
the dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge  that the journeying itself was
home.
     -  Whereas the migrant can do  without the  journey altogether; it's no
more than a necessary evil; the point is to arrive. -
     Quite  recently, then, and  like the shrewd  businessmen they were, the
Jahilians settled down at the intersection-point of the routes of the  great
caravans, and yoked the dunes to their will. Now the  sand serves the mighty
urban  merchants. Beaten into  cobbles, it paves Jahilia's tortuous streets;
by night, golden flames blaze out  from braziers of burnished sand. There is
glass in the windows,  in the long, slitlike windows set  in  the infinitely
high  sand-walls  of  the  merchant  palaces;  in  the  alleys  of  Jahilia,
donkey-carts roll  forward  on smooth silicon  wheels.  I, in my wickedness,
sometimes imagine the coming of a  great wave, a high  wall of foaming water
roaring across the desert, a liquid  catastrophe  full of snapping boats and
drowning arms, a tidal wave that would reduce these vain  sandcastles to the
nothingness, to  the  grains from  which they came. But  there  are no waves
here. Water is the enemy in Jahilia. Carried in earthen  pots, it must never
be spilled  (the penal  code  deals fiercely  with  offenders), for where it
drops the city erodes  alarmingly. Holes appear in  roads, houses  tilt  and
sway. The  water-carriers  of Jahilia  are loathed  necessities, pariahs who
cannot be ignored  and therefore  can never be forgiven.  It never  rains in
Jahilia; there are no fountains in the silicon gardens. A few palms stand in
enclosed courtyards, their  roots travelling far and wide below the earth in
search  of  moisture. The city's  water  comes from underground streams  and
springs, one such being the  fabled Zamzam,  at the heart of the  concentric
sand-city,  next  to the  House of the  Black Stone. Here,  at  Zamzam, is a
beheshti, a  despised water-carrier, drawing up the  vital, dangerous fluid.
He has a name: Khalid.
     A city of businessmen, Jahilia. The name of the tribe is 

Shark.

     In this city,  the businessman-turned-prophet, Mahound, is founding one
of the world's great religions; and has arrived, on this  day, his birthday,
at the crisis of his life. There is a voice whispering in his ear: 

What kind
of idea are you? Man-or-mouse?

     We know that voice. We've heard it once before.
     While Mahound climbs Coney, Jahilia celebrates a different anniversary.
In ancient time the patriarch Ibrahim  came into this  valley with Hagar and
Ismail, their son. Here, in this waterless wilderness, he abandoned her. She
asked him, can this be God's will? He replied, it is. And left, the bastard.
From the beginning men  used God  to justify the unjustifiable. He moves  in
mysterious  ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me.
- But I'll  keep to  the point; Hagar wasn't a witch. She was trusting: 

then
surely He will not  let  me perish.

 After Ibrahim left her, she fed the baby
at her breast until her milk ran out. Then she climbed two hills, first Safa
then Marwah,  running from  one  to the other in her desperation, trying  to
sight a tent, a camel, a human being. She saw nothing. That was when he came
to her, Gibreel, and showed her the waters of Zamzam. So Hagar survived; but
why now do the pilgrims congregate? To  celebrate her survival? No, no. They
are celebrating the  honour done the valley by the visit of, you've  guessed
it, Ibrahim. In that loving consort's name, they  gather, worship and, above
all, spend.
     Jahilia today is all perfume. The scents of Araby, of 

Arabia Odorifera,

hang in the air: balsam, cassia, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh. The pilgrims
drink the wine of the date-palm and wander in the great fair of the feast of
Ibrahim.  And, among  them, one wanders whose furrowed  brow  sets him apart
from the cheerful crowd: a tall man in loose white robes,  he'd stand almost
a full head  higher than Mahound. His beard is shaped close to his slanting,
high-boned face; his gait contains the lilt, the  deadly  elegance of power.
What's he  called? -  The vision yields  his name eventually;  it,  too,  is
changed by the  dream.  Here he  is, Karim Abu  Simbel,  Grandee of Jahilia,
husband to the ferocious, beautiful Hind. Head  of the ruling council of the
city, rich  beyond numbering, owner of the  lucrative  temples  at the  city
gates, wealthy  in camels,  comptroller of caravans,  his wife  the greatest
beauty in the land: what could shake the certainties of such a man? And yet,
for Abu Simbel, too, a crisis is approaching.  A name gnaws at him, and  you
can guess what it is, Mahound Mahound Mahound.
     O the  splendour of the fairgrounds of Jahilia! Here  in  vast  scented
tents are arrays of spices, of senna  leaves,  of fragrant woods;  here  the
perfume vendors can be found,  competing  for the  pilgrims'  noses, and for
their wallets, too. Abu Simbel pushes his way through the crowds. Merchants,
Jewish,  Monophysite,  Nabataean,  buy and sell pieces  of silver  and gold,
weighing them, biting  coins  with knowing teeth.  There is linen from Egypt
and silk  from China; from  Basra, arms and grain.  There is  gambling,  and
drinking, and dance. There are slaves for sale, Nubian,  Anatolian, Aethiop.
The four factions of the  tribe of Shark control separate zones of the fair,
the  scents  and spices in the  Scarlet Tents, while in the  Black Tents the
cloth and  leather.  The Silver-Haired grouping is  in  charge  of  precious
metals  and  swords.  Entertainment  - dice, belly-dancers,  palm-wine,  the
smoking of hashish and afeem - is the prerogative of  the  fourth quarter of
the tribe, the Owners  of the  Dappled Camels, who also run the slave trade.
Abu  Simbel looks into  a  dance  tent. Pilgrims sit clutching money-bags in
their  left hands;  every so often  a  coin is moved from bag to  right-hand
palm. The dancers shake and sweat, and their  eyes never leave the pilgrims'
fingertips; when  the  coin transfer ceases,  the dance also ends. The great
man makes a face and lets the tent-flap fall.
     Jahilia  has  been  built  in  a  series of rough circles,  its  houses
spreading outwards from the House of the Black Stone, approximately in order
of  wealth  and  rank. Abu  Simbel's  palace  is  in the  first  circle, the
innermost ring;  he makes his way down  one  of the  rambling,  windy radial
roads,  past the city's  many seers  who,  in return for pilgrim money,  are
chirping, cooing, hissing, possessed variously by djinnis of birds,  beasts,
snakes. A sorceress, failing for  a moment to look up,  squats in his  path:
'Want to capture a girlie's heart, my  dear? Want an enemy under your thumb?
Try me out; try  my  little  knots!'  And  raises,  dangles a  knotty  rope,
ensnarer  of human lives - but, seeing now to whom she speaks, lets fall her
disappointed arm and slinks away, mumbling, into sand.
     Everywhere, noise  and elbows. Poets stand  on boxes and declaim  while
pilgrims throw  coins  at their feet. Some bards  speak rajaz  verses, their
four-syllable  metre suggested, according to legend,  by the walking pace of
the camel; others  speak  the qas-idah, poems of wayward mistresses,  desert
adventure, the hunting of the onager. In a day or so it will be time for the
annual poetry competition, after which  the seven best verses will be nailed
up on the walls of  the House of the Black Stone. The poets are getting into
shape for their  big  day;  Abu Simbel laughs  at minstrels singing  vicious
satires,  vitriolic  odes commissioned by one chief against  another, by one
tribe  against its neighbour. And nods  in recognition as  one of the  poets
falls into step beside him, a sharp narrow youth with frenzied fingers. This
young lampoonist  already has the most feared tongue  in all Jahilia, but to
Abu  Simbel he  is  almost deferential. 'Why so preoccupied, Grandee? If you
were not losing your hair I'd tell you to let it down.' Abu Simbel grins his
sloping grin. 'Such a  reputation,' he muses. 'Such fame,  even  before your
milk-teeth have fallen out. Look out  or we'll have  to draw those teeth for
you.' He is teasing, speaking lightly, but even this lightness is laced with
menace, because of the extent of  his power. The  boy is unabashed. Matching
Abu Simbel  stride  for stride, he replies:  'For every  one you pull out, a
stronger one will grow, biting deeper, drawing hotter spurts  of blood.' The
Grandee, vaguely,  nods.  'You like  the taste of blood,' he says.  The  boy
shrugs.  'A poet's work,' he  answers. 'To name  the unnamable, to point  at
frauds, to  take  sides, start  arguments, shape the  world and stop it from
going to sleep.' And  if  rivers of  blood flow  from the  cuts  his  verses
inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist, Baal.
     A curtained  litter passes by; some fine lady of the city,  out to  see
the fair, borne on the shoulders of eight Anatolian slaves. Abu Simbel takes
the  young  Baal by the elbow, under the pretext of  steering him out of the
road; murmurs, 'I hoped to find  you; if you will,  a word.' Baal marvels at
the skill of the Grandee. Searching for a man, he can  make his quarry think
he  has  hunted  the hunter. Abu  Simbel's  grip tightens; by the elbow,  he
steers his companion towards the holy of holies at the centre of the town.
     'I have a commission  for you,' the Grandee says. 'A literary matter. I
know  my  limitations;  the skills  of rhymed malice,  the arts of  metrical
slander, are quite beyond my powers. You understand.'
     But Baal, the proud,  arrogant fellow, stiffens, stands on his dignity.
'It isn't right for the artist to become the servant of the state.' Simbel's
voice falls  lower, acquires  silkier rhythms.  'Ah, yes.  Whereas  to place
yourself at the disposal  of assassins is  an  entirely honourable thing.' A
cult of the dead has been raging  in Jahilia. When a man dies, paid mourners
beat themselves, scratch their breasts, tear hair. A hamstrung camel is left
on the  grave to die.  And if the man has been murdered his closest relative
takes ascetic vows and pursues the murderer until the blood has been avenged
by  blood; whereupon it is customary  to compose a poem of celebration,  but
few  revengers  are  gifted in rhyme.  Many poets  make a living by  writing
assassination songs, and there is general agreement that the finest of these
blood-praising  versifiers  is  the  precocious   polemicist,  Baal.   Whose
professional pride  prevents him from being bruised,  now,  by the Grandee's
little  taunt. 'That is a  cultural  matter,'  he replies  Abu  Simbel sinks
deeper  still  into  silkiness. 'Maybe so,' he whispers  at the gates of the
House of the Black Stone, 'but, Baal, concede: don't I have some small claim
upon you? We both serve, or so I thought, the same mistress.'
     Now  the blood leaves Baal's  cheeks; his confidence cracks, falls from
him like a shell. The Grandee, seemingly oblivious to the alteration, sweeps
the satirist forward into the House.
     They  say  in Jahilia that this valley is the  navel of the earth; that
the planet, when it  was being made, went spinning  round  this point.  Adam
came  here  and saw  a  miracle: four emerald pillars bearing  aloft a giant
glowing ruby, and beneath this canopy a huge white  stone, also glowing with
its own light, like a vision of  his soul. He built  strong walls around the
vision to  bind  it forever to the earth. This was  the first  House. It was
rebuilt  many   times  -  once  by  Ibrahim,  after  Hagar's   and  Ismail's
angel-assisted survival - and gradually the countless touchings of the white
stone by the pilgrims  of the centuries  darkened its colour  to black. Then
the time of the idols began; by the time of Mahound, three hundred and sixty
stone gods clustered around God's own stone.
     What would  old Adam have  thought? His own  sons  are  here  now:  the
colossus  of Hubal,  sent by  the  Amalekites  from Hit,  stands  above  the
treasury   well,  Hubal  the  shepherd,  the  waxing  crescent  moon;  also,
glowering,  dangerous Kain.  He  is  the  waning  crescent,  blacksmith  and
musician; he, too, has his devotees.
     Hubal  and  Kain look down  on Grandee and poet as they stroll. And the
Nabataean  proto-Dionysus,  He-Of-Shara;  the  morning  star,  Astarte,  and
saturnine  Nakruh. Here is the sun god,  Manaf! Look, there flaps the  giant
Nasr,  the god  in eagle-form! See Quzah, who holds  the rainbow ... is this
not a  glut  of  gods, a  stone flood, to  feed  the glutton  hunger  of the
pilgrims,  to  quench  their  unholy  thirst.  The  deities,  to entice  the
travellers,  come - like  the pilgrims - from far and wide. The  idols, too,
are delegates to a kind of international fair.
     There is a  god  here called Allah  (means  simply, the god).  Ask  the
Jahilians  and they'll acknowledge that this fellow has some sort of overall
authority, but he isn't very popular: an all-rounder in an age of specialist
statues.
     Abu Simbel  and  newly  perspiring  Baal  have arrived  at the shrines,
placed side  by  side, of the three  best-beloved goddesses in Jahilia. They
bow  before all three:  Uzza of the  radiant  visage, goddess of beauty  and
love;  dark, obscure  Manat,  her  face  averted,  her  purposes mysterious,
sifting sand between her fingers - she's  in charge of destiny - she's Fate;
and lastly  the highest  of the  three, the  mother-goddess, whom the Greeks
called  Lato.  Llat, they  call her here, or,  more frequently,  Al-Lat. 

The
goddess.

  Even  her name  makes her  Allah's opposite  and  equal.  Lat  the
omnipotent. His  face  showing  sudden  relief, Baal flings  himself to  the
ground and prostrates himself before her. Abu Simbel stays on his feet.
     The family of the Grandee, Abu Simbel -  or, to be more precise, of his
wife Hind - controls  the famous temple of Lat at the  city's southern gate.
(They also draw the revenues from the Manat temple at the east gate, and the
temple of Uzza in the north.) These  concessions arc the  foundations of the
Grandee's wealth, so he is of course, Baal understands, the servant  of Lat.
And  the  satirist's  devotion to  this  goddess  is well  known  throughout
Jahilia.  So  that was  all  he  meant! Trembling with  relief, Baal remains
prostrate, giving  thanks to his  patron Lady.  Who looks upon him benignly;
but  a goddess's expresson is not to be relied upon. Baal has made a serious
mistake.
     Without  warning,  the Grandee kicks the poet in the  kidney.  Attacked
just when he has decided he's safe, Baal squeals, rolls over, and Abu Simbel
follows him,  continuing to  kick. There  is  the sound of a  cracking  rib.
'Runt,'  the  Grandee  remarks, his  voice remaining  low  and good natured.
'High-voiced  pimp with small testicles. Did you think that  the  master  of
Lat's  temple  would  claim  comradeship  with  you  just  because  of  your
adolescent passion for her?' And more kicks, regular, methodical. Baal weeps
at  Abu  Simbel's feet. The House of the Black Stone is  far from empty, but
who would come between the Grandee and his wrath? Abruptly, Baal's tormentor
squats down, grabs the poet by the  hair, jerks  his head up,  whispers into
his ear: 'Baal,  she wasn't the mistress I meant,' and then Baal lets out  a
howl of hideous self-pity, because he knows his life is about to end, to end
when he has so much still to achieve, the poor guy. The Grandee's lips brush
his car. 'Shit of a frightened camel,' Abu Simbel breathes, 'I know you fuck
my wife.' He observes,  with interest, that  Baal  has  acquired a prominent
erection, an ironic monument to his fear.
     Abu Simbel, the cuckolded Grandee, stands up, commands, 'On your feet',
and Baal, bewildered, follows him outside.
     The  graves of  Ismail  and his  mother Hagar  the Egyptian  lie by the
north-west face of the House of the Black Stone, in an enclosure  surrounded
by  a low wall. Abu Simbel approaches this area,  halts a little way off. In
the enclosure is a  small group of  men.  The water-carrier Khalid is there,
and some  sort of bum from  Persia by the outlandish name of Salman, and  to
complete  this  trinity of  scum there is the slave  Bilal, the  one Mahound
freed, an enormous black monster, this one, with a  voice to match his size.
The  three idlers sit on  the enclosure wall. 'That bunch of riff-raff,' Abu
Simbel says.  'Those are your targets.  Write about them; and  their leader,
too.'  Baal, for all his terror,  cannot  conceal his  disbelief.  'Grandee,
those 

goons -

 those fucking 

clowns?

 You don't have to worry about them. What
do you think? That Mahound's one God will bankrupt your temples? Three-sixty
versus one, and the one wins?  Can't happen.' He giggles, close to hysteria.
Abu Simbel remains calm: 'Keep  your insults for your verses.' Giggling Baal
can't  stop. 'A  revolution  of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves  . . .
wow,  Grandee.  I'm  really  scared.'  Abu  Simbel  looks  carefully at  the
tittering poet. 'Yes,' he answers, 'that's right, you should  be afraid. Get
writing, please, and I expect  these verses to be  your masterpieces.'  Baal
crumples,  whines.  'But  they are a waste of my, my small talent  . . .' He
sees that he has said too much.
     'Do as you're told,' are Abu Simbel's last  words to him. 'You  have no
choice.'
     The Grandee lolls in his bedroom while concubines attend  to his needs.
Coconut-oil for  his  thinning hair, wine for  his palate,  tongues  for his
delight. 

The boy was right. Why do I fear Mahound?

 He begins, idly, to count
the  concubines, gives up at  fifteen with a flap of his hand. 

The boy. Hind
will go on seeing him, obviously; what chance does he have against her will?

It  is a weakness in  him,  he  knows, that he  sees too much, tolerates too
much. He has his appetites, why should she  not have hers? As long as she is
discreet; and as  long as he knows. He must know; knowledge is his narcotic,
his addiction. He cannot tolerate what he does not know and for that reason,
if for  no other, Mahound is his enemy, Mahound with his raggle-taggle gang,
the boy was right to  laugh. He,  the Grandee, laughs less easily.  Like his
opponent  he is a cautious  man,  he  walks on the  balls  of his  feet.  He
remembers  the  big one, the slave, Bilal: how his master asked him, outside
the  Lat  temple, to  enumerate the  gods.  'One,' he  answered in that huge
musical voice. Blasphemy, punishable by death. They stretched him out in the
fairground with  a  boulder  on  his chest.  

How  many did  you say?

 One, he
repeated, one. A second boulder was added to the first. 

One one one.

 Mahound
paid his owner a large price and set him free.
     No,  Abu Simbel  reflects, the  boy Baal was wrong, these men are worth
our  time.  Why do I  fear Mahound? For that: one  one  one,  his terrifying
singularity. Whereas I am always divided, always two or  three or fifteen. I
can  even see his point of view; he is as wealthy  and successful as  any of
us, as any of the councillors, but because he lacks the right sort of family
connections,  we haven't offered him a place amongst our group. Excluded  by
his orphaning from  the mercantile  elite, he feels he has  been cheated, he
has not had his  due. He always was an ambitious fellow. Ambitious, but also
solitary. You don't rise to the top by climbing up a hill all  by  yourself.
Unless, maybe, you meet an angel there . . . yes, that's it. I see what he's
up to. He  wouldn't understand me, though. 

What kind of idea am I?

 I bend. I
sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive. That  is why
I  won't  accuse Hind of adultery. We are a good  pair, ice  and  fire.  Her
family shield, the fabled red lion, the many-toothed manticore. Let her play
with her satirist; between us  it was  never sex. I'll finish him when she's
finished  with. Here's a great lie, thinks  the Grandee of  Jahilia drifting
into sleep: the pen is mightier than the sword.
     The fortunes of the city of Jahilia were built on the supremacy of sand
over water.  In  the  old days it had been thought safer to transport  goods
across the  desert than  over the  seas, where monsoons could  strike at any
time. In  those  days  before  meteorology  such matters were impossible  to
predict. For  this reason  the caravanserais  prospered.  The produce of the
world came  up from  Zafar to  Sheba, and thence to Jahilia and the oasis of
Yathrib and on to Midian where Moses lived; thence to Aqabah and Egypt. From
Jahilia other  trails began: to the east and north-east, towards Mesopotamia
and the great Persian empire.  To Petra  and to Palmyra,  where once Solomon
loved the Queen of Sheba. Those were fatted days.  But now the fleets plying
the  waters  around  the  peninsula  have grown  hardier,  their crews  more
skilful, their navigational instruments more accurate. The  camel trains are
losing  business  to the  boats.  Desert-ship and sea-ship, the old rivalry,
sees  a tilt in  the balance of power. Jahilia's rulers fret, but  there  is
little they can do.  Sometimes  Abu Simbel suspects that only the pilgrimage
stands  between the city  and its  ruin. The  council searches the world for
statues  of alien gods, to attract new pilgrims  to the city of sand; but in
this,  too,  they have  competitors.  Down in Sheba a great  temple has been
built, a shrine to  rival the  House of the Black Stone.  Many pilgrims have
been tempted south, and the numbers at the Jahilia fairgrounds are falling.
     At the recommendation of Abu  Simbel, the  rulers of Jahilia have added
to their religious practices the tempting spices of profanity. The city  has
become famous for  its  licentiousness, as a  gambling den, a whorehouse,  a
place of bawdy songs  and wild, loud music. On one  occasion some members of
the  tribe  of Shark went  too  far  in  their greed  for pilgrim money. The
gatekeepers at the House began demanding bribes from weary voyagers; four of
them, piqued at receiving no more than  a pittance, pushed two travellers to
their  deaths  down  the  great,  steep  flight  of  stairs.  This  practice
backfired, discouraging return visits. . . Today, female pilgrims are  often
kidnapped for ransom, or sold into concubinage. Gangs of young Sharks patrol
the city, keeping their own kind of  law. It  is said that Abu Simbel  meets
secretly with the gangleaders and organizes them all. This is the world into
which Mahound has brought his message:  one one one. Amid such multiplicity,
it sounds like a dangerous word.
     The Grandee sits  up and  at once concubines  approach to resume  their
oilings  and smoothings. He waves  them  away, claps his  hands.  The eunuch
enters. 'Send a messenger to the house  of the  kahin Mahound,'  Abu  Simbel
commands. 

We will set him a little test. A fair contest: three against one.

     Water-carrier immigrant slave: Mahound's three disciples are washing at
the well of Zamzam. In  the sand-city, their obsession with water makes them
freakish.  Ablutions, always ablutions, the  legs up to  the knees, the arms
down  to the elbows, the head  down to the neck. Dry-torsoed, wet-limbed and
damp-headed, what eccentrics they look! Splish, splosh, washing and praying.
On their knees, pushing arms, legs, heads back into the ubiquitous sand, and
then beginning again  the cycle of  water and prayer. These are easy targets
for Baal's  pen. Their water-loving  is a  treason of  a sort; the people of
Jahilia accept the omnipotence of sand. It lodges between  their fingers and
toes, cakes their lashes and hair, clogs their pores. They  open  themselves
to the desert: come, sand, wash us in aridity. That is the Jahilian way from
the highest  citizen to the  lowest of the  low. They are people of silicon,
and water-lovers have come among them.
     Baal  circles them from a safe distance - Bilal is not a man to  trifle
with  - and  yells gibes. 'If Mahound's  ideas were worth  anything, do  you
think they'd only be popular with trash like you?' Salman  restrains  Bilal:
'We should  be honoured that the  mighty Baal  has chosen to  attack us,' he
smiles, and Bilal relaxes,  subsides. Khalid the water-carrier is jumpy, and
when  he  sees the heavy figure of Mahound's uncle Hamza approaching he runs
towards  him  anxiously. Hamza at  sixty is still  the city's most  renowned
fighter  and  lion-hunter.  Though  the  truth  is  less  glorious than  the
eulogies: Hamza has many times been defeated in  combat, saved by friends or
lucky chances, rescued from lions' jaws. He has the money to keep such items
out of the news. And age, and survival, bestow a sort of  validation  upon a
martial legend. Bilal and Salman, forgetting  Baal, follow Khalid. All three
are nervous, young.
     He's  still not home, Hamza reports. And Khalid, worried: But it's been
hours,  what is  that bastard  doing  to  him, torture, thumbscrews,  whips?
Salman, once again, is the calmest: That isn't Simbel's style, he says, it's
something sneaky, depend upon it. And Bilal bellows loyally: Sneaky or  not,
I  have faith in him,  in  the Prophet. He won't  break. Hamza offers only a
gentle rebuke: Oh, Bilal, how many times must he tell  you? Keep  your faith
for God.  The Messenger is only a man. The tension bursts  out of Khalid: he
squares up to old Hamza, demands, Are you saying that the Messenger is weak?
You may be his uncle . . . Hamza clouts the water-carrier on the side of the
head. Don't let him see your fear, he says, not even when you're scared half
to death.
     The  four  of them  are washing  once more  when Mahound arrives;  they
cluster around him, whowhatwhy. Hamza stands back. 'Nephew, this is no  damn
good,'  he snaps  in  his soldier's bark.  'When you  come down  from  Coney
there's a brightness on you. Today it's something dark.'
     Mahound sits  on the edge of  the well  and grins. 'I've been offered a
deal.' 

By Abu  Simbel?

 Khalid shouts. 

Unthinkable.  Refuse.

  Faithful  Bilal
admonishes  him: Do  not lecture the  Messenger. Of course, he has  refused.
Salman the Persian asks: What sort of  deal. Mahound smiles again. 'At least
one of you wants to know.'
     'It's a  small matter,'  he begins again. 'A grain of sand. Abu  Simbel
asks Allah  to  grant him one little favour.' Hamza  sees the  exhaustion in
him.  As  if he  had been  wrestling with  a  demon.  The  water-carrier  is
shouting: 'Nothing! Not a jot!' Hamza shuts him up.
     'If our great God could find it in his heart  to concede - he used that
word, 

concede -

 that three,  only three of the three hundred and sixty idols
in the house are worthy of worship . . .'
     'There is no god but  God!' Bilal shouts. And his  fellows join in: 'Ya
Allah!'  Mahound looks angry. 'Will the  faithful hear the  Messenger?' They
fall silent, scuffing their feet in the dust.
     'He  asks  for Allah's  approval of Lat, Uzza and Manat. In return,  he
gives  his guarantee that  we will be tolerated, even officially recognized;
as a mark of which, I am to be elected to the council of Jahilia. That's the
offer.'
     Salman the Persian says: 'It's a trap. If you go up Coney and come down
with such a  Message, he'll ask, how could you make Gibreel provide just the
right  revelation? He'll be able to call you a charlatan,  a  fake.' Mahound
shakes his head. 'You know, Salman, that I have learned  how to 

listen.

 This

listening

 is  not of the ordinary kind; it's also  a kind of asking.  Often,
when Gibreel comes, it's as if he knows what's in my  heart. It feels to me,
most  times,  as if he comes  from within my heart:  from  within my deepest
places, from my soul.'
     'Or it's a  different trap,'  Salman persists.  'How  long have we been
reciting the  creed you brought us? There is no god  but God. What are we if
we  abandon  it  now? This weakens us,  renders  us absurd. We  cease to  be
dangerous. Nobody will ever take us seriously again.'
     Mahound  laughs, genuinely amused.  'Maybe you  haven't  been here long
enough,'  he says kindly.  'Haven't you noticed? The  people do not  take us
seriously. Never more than fifty  in the audience when  I speak, and half of
those are tourists. Don't you read  the lampoons that Baal pins  up all over
town?' He recites:
     

Messenger, do please lend a
     careful ear. Your monophilia,
     your one one one, ain't for Jahilia.
     Return to sender.

     'They mock us everywhere, and you call us dangerous,' he cried.
     Now  Hamza looks  worried.  'You  never  worried about  their  opinions
before. Why now? Why after speaking to Simbel?'
     Mahound shakes his head. 'Sometimes I think  I must make it  easier for
the people to believe.'
     An uneasy  silence covers  the  disciples; they  exchange  looks, shift
their  weight.  Mahound  cries  out again.  'You  all  know  what  has  been
happening. Our failure to win converts. The people  will not  give up  their
gods. They will not, not.' He stands up, strides away from them,  washes  by
himself on the far side of the Zamzam well, kneels to pray.
     'The  people  are sunk in darkness,'  says  Bilal, unhappily. 'But they
will see. They will hear. God is one.' Misery infects the four of them; even
Hamza is brought low. Mahound has been shaken, and his followers quake.
     He stands, bows, sighs, comes round  to rejoin them. 'Listen to me, all
of you,' he says, putting one arm around Bilal's shoulders, the other around
his uncle's. 'Listen: it is an interesting offer.'
     Unembraced  Khalid interrupts  bitterly:  'It is  a 

tempting

 deal.' The
others  look  horrified. Hamza  speaks  very gently  to  the  water-carrier.
'Wasn't it you, Khalid, who wanted to fight me just now because you  wrongly
assumed that, when I  called the Messenger a man, I was really calling him a
weakling? Now what? Is it my turn to challenge you to a fight?'
     Mahound begs  for peace.  'If we quarrel, there's no hope.' He tries to
raise the  discussion to  the theological level. 'It is  not suggested  that
Allah accept the three as his equals. Not even Lat. Only that  they be given
some sort of intermediary, lesser status.'
     'Like devils,' Bilal bursts out.
     'No,'  Salman  the  Persian  gets  the  point.  'Like  archangels.  The
Grandee's a clever man.'
     'Angels  and  devils,'  Mahound says.  'Shaitan  and  Gibreel.  We all,
already, accept their existence, halfway  between God  and man.  Abu  Simbel
asks that we  admit just three more to this great company.  Just three, and,
he indicates, all Jahilia's souls will be ours.'
     'And  the  House  will  be cleansed  of statues?' Salman  asks. Mahound
replies that this was not specified. Salman shakes  his head. 'This is being
done to destroy  you.' And  Bilal adds: 'God  cannot be four.'  And  Khalid,
close to tears: 'Messenger,  what are you saying? Lat, Manat, Uzza - they're
all 

females!

  For  pity's  sake! Are we  to  have goddesses  now? Those  old
cranes, herons, hags?'
     Misery strain  fatigue,  etched deeply  into the Prophet's  face. Which
Hamza,  like a soldier on a  battlefield  comforting a wounded friend,  cups
between his hands. 'We can't sort this out for you, nephew,' he says. 'Climb
the mountain. Go ask Gibreel.'
     Gibreel:  the dreamer,  whose point  of  view  is sometimes that of the
camera and at other moments, spectator. When he's a camera the pee oh vee is
always on the move, he hates  static shots,  so he's  floating up on a  high
crane  looking down at  the foreshortened  figures  of the  actors, or  he's
swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to
achieve a  three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan,  or maybe he'll  try  a dolly
shot,  tracking along beside  Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or hand-held
with the help of  a  steadicam he'll  probe  the secrets  of  the  Grandee's
bedchamber. But  mostly he sits  up on Mount Cone like a paying customer  in
the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up
the action like any movie fan, enjoys the fights infidelities moral  crises,
but there aren't enough girls for a real hit, man, and where are the goddamn
songs? They should have built up that fairground  scene, maybe  a cameo role
for Pimple Billimoria in a show-tent, wiggling her famous bazooms.
     And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: 'Go ask Gibreel,' and
he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in  alarm, who, me? 

I'm

 supposed to
know  the answers here? I'm  sitting here watching this picture and now this
actor  points  his finger out at me, who ever heard  the like, who  asks the
bloody audience of a  'theological'  to solve the bloody plot?  - But as the
dream shifts, it's always changing  form, he, Gibreel,  is no longer  a mere
spectator but the central player, the star. With his old weakness for taking
too many roles: yes, yes, he's not just  playing the archangel but also him,
the  businessman, the Messenger,  Mahound,  coming up  the mountain when  he
conies. Nifty  cutting is  required to pull off this double role, the two of
them can never  be  seen in the same shot, each must  speak to empty air, to
the imagined incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the
missing vision, with scissors  and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the
help of a travelling mat. Not to be confused ha ha with any magic carpet.
     He has understood:  that he  is afraid of the  other, the  businessman,
isn't it crazy? The archangel quaking before the mortal man. It's true, but:
the  kind of fear you feel when you're on a film set for the very first time
and  there, about to make his entrance, is  one of the living legends of the
cinema; you  think,  I'll disgrace myself,  I'll dry, I'll corpse,  you want
like  mad to  be 

worthy.

  You will be  sucked along in the slipstream of his
genius, he can make you look good,  like a high flier, but  you will know if
you aren't pulling your weight and even worse so will he ... Gibreel's fear,
the fear of the self his dream creates, makes him struggle against Mahound's
arrival,  to  try  and put it  off, but he's coming  now, no quesch, and the
archangel holds his breath.
     Those dreams of being pushed out on stage when you've no business being
there,  you don't know the story haven't  learned any  lines,  but there's a
full house  watching, watching: feels like  that. Or the true  story  of the
white actress playing a  black woman  in  Shakespeare. She went on stage and
then realized she  still had her glasses on, eek, but  she  had forgotten to
blacken  her hands so  she couldn't reach up to take the  specs  off, double
eek: like that also. 

Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose
between  monotheist and  henotheist alternatives,  and  I'm just some  idiot
actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do  I know, yaar,  what to
tell you, help. Help.

     To reach Mount Cone from Jahilia  one must walk into dark ravines where
the  sand  is not  white, not  the pure sand filtered long  ago  through the
bodies of sea-cucumbers, but  black and dour, sucking  light  from  the sun.
Coney crouches over you like an imaginary beast. You ascend along its spine.
Leaving behind the last trees,  white-flowered with thick, milky leaves, you
climb among  the  boulders, which get larger  as  you get higher, until they
resemble  huge walls and start blotting out the sun. The lizards arc blue as
shadows. Then  you are on  the  peak,  Jahilia  behind you,  the featureless
desert ahead. You descend  on the desert side, and  about five  hundred feet
down you reach the cave, which is high enough to stand upright in, and whose
floor is covered in miraculous albino sand. As you climb you hear the desert
doves calling your name, and the rocks greet you, too, in your own language,
crying  

Mahound, Mahound.

 When  you  reach the  cave you are  tired, you lie
down, you fall asleep.
     But when he has rested he enters a different sort  of  sleep, a sort of
not-sleep, the  condition  that  he  calls  his 

listening,

  and he  feels  a
dragging pain in the gut, like something trying to be born, and now Gibrcel,
who has been  hovering-above-looking-down, feels a confusion, 

who  am  I,

 in
these moments it begins to  seem that the archangel  is actually 

inside  the
Prophet,

 I am the  dragging in the gut, I am the angel being  extruded  from
the sleeper's  navel, I  emerge,  Gibreel  Farishta,  while my  other  self,
Mahound, lies 

listening,

  entranced, I am bound to him, navel to navel, by a
shining cord  of  light, not  possible  to  say which of us  is dreaming the
other. We flow in both directions along the umbilical cord.
     Today, as well as  the overwhelming intensity of Mahound, Gibrcel feels
his despair:  his doubts.  Also, that he is in great need, but Gibreel still
doesn't     know     his     lines     ...     he     listens     to     the
listening-which-is-also-an-asking.  Mahound  

asks:

  They were shown miracles
but they didn't believe. They saw you come to  me, in full view of the city,
and open my breast, they saw you wash my heart in the  waters of  Zamzam and
replace it  inside my body. Many of  them saw this, but  still  they worship
stones. And when you  came at night and flew me  to Jerusalem and I  hovered
above the holy city,  didn't  I return  and describe it exactly  as  it  is,
accurate down  to the  last detail? So that there could be no  doubting  the
miracle, and still they went  to Lat. Haven't I already done my best to make
things simple  for  them?  When you carried  me up to the Throne itself, and
Allah laid upon the faithful the great burden of forty prayers a day. On the
return journey I met Moses and he said, the burden is too heavy, go back and
plead for  less.  Four times  I went back, four times Moses said,  still too
many, go back again.  But by the fourth time Allah  had reduced the  duty to
five prayers and I refused to return. I felt ashamed to beg any more. In his
bounty  he asks for five instead of forty, and  still they  love Manat, they
want Uzza. What can I do? What shall I recite?
     Gibreel remains silent, empty of answers, for Pete's sake, bhai,  don't
go asking me. Mahound's anguish is awful. He 

asks:

  is it possible that they

are

 angels?  Lat, Manat, Uzza . .  . can I call them  angelic? Gibreel, have
you got sisters? Are these  the daughters of God? And he castigates himself,
O my vanity,  I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just  a dream of
power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council?  Is this sensible and
wise  or  is  it hollow and self-loving? I don't even know if the Grandee is
sincere. Docs he know? Perhaps not  even he. I  am weak and he's strong, the
offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to  gain. The
souls of the  city,  of  the world, surely  they are worth three  angels? Is
Allah  so unbending that  he will not embrace three  more  to save the human
race? - I don't know anything. - Should God be proud or  humble, majestic or
simple, yielding or un-? 

What kind of idea is he? What kind am I?

     Halfway into sleep, or halfway back to wakefulness, Gibreel Farishta is
often filled with resentment  by  the  non-appearance,  in  his  persecuting
visions, of  the One who is supposed to have the answers, 

He

 never turns up,
the one  who kept away when  I was dying, when  I needed needed him. The one
it's all about, Allah  Ishvar God. Absent as ever while we writhe and suffer
in his name.
     The Supreme  Being keeps away;  what keeps returning is this scene, the
entranced Prophet, the extrusion, the cord of light, and then Gibreel in his
dual role is both above-looking-down and below-staring-up. And both of  them
scared  out of  their  minds  by  the  transcendence of  it.  Gibrcel  feels
paralysed by the presence of the Prophet,  by his greatness, thinks  I can't
make a  sound I'd seem such a goddamn fool. Hamza's advice: never  show your
fear:  archangels need such advice  as well as watercarriers.  An  archangel
must look composed, what  would the Prophet think if God's Exalted began  to
gibber with stage fright?
     It  happens: revelation.  Like  this: Mahound, still in  his  notsleep,
becomes rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his  centre. No,  no,
nothing like an epileptic fit, it can't be explained away that easily;  what
epileptic  fit ever  caused day  to turn to  night,  caused  clouds  to mass
overhead,  caused the  air to  thicken into soup while an angel hung, scared
silly,  in the  sky above the  sufferer, held up like a  kite  on  a  golden
thread? The dragging again the dragging and now the miracle starts in his my
our  guts,  he  is  straining with  all  his  might  at  something,  forcing
something, and Gibreel begins to feel that strength  that force,  here it is

at my own jaw

 working  it, opening shutting;  and the power, starting within
Mahound, reaching up to 

my vocal cords

 and the voice comes.
     

Not my voice

 I'd never know  such words I'm no classy speaker never was
never will be but this isn't my voice it's a Voice.
     Mahound's  eyes open wide, he's seeing some kind  of vision, staring at
it, oh, that's right, Gibreel remembers, me. He's seeing me. My lips moving,
being moved  by.  What, whom? Don't know, can't say. Nevertheless, here they
are, coming out of my mouth, up my throat, past my teeth: the Words.
     Being God's postman is no fun, yaar.
     Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture.
     God knows whose postman I've been.
     In  Jahilia  they  are  waiting for  Mahound  by  the well. Khalid  the
water-carrier, as ever the most impatient, runs off to the city gate to keep
a  look-out.  Hamza,  like  all old soldiers  accustomed  to keeping his own
company, squats down in  the dust and plays a game with pebbles. There is no
sense of urgency; sometimes he is away for  days, even weeks.  And today the
city  is  all  but deserted; everybody  has gone to the  great  tents at the
fairground to  hear  the  poets  compete. In the  silence, there is only the
noise of Hamza's pebbles, and the gurgles  of a pair of rock-doves, visitors
from Mount Cone. Then they hear the running feet.
     Khalid arrives, out  of  breath,  looking unhappy.  The  Messenger  has
returned, but he isn't  coming to Zamzam.  Now they  are all on their  feet,
perplexed by  this  departure from established practice. Those who have been
waiting  with  palm-fronds and  steles  ask  Hamza:  Then there  will  be no
Message? But Khalid, still catching his  breath,  shakes  his head. 'I think
there will be. He looks the way he does when the Word has been given. But he
didn't speak to me and walked towards the fairground instead.'
     Hamza takes command,  forestalling  discussion, and leads the  way. The
disciples - about twenty have gathered - follow  him to the fleshpots of the
city, wearing expressions of pious disgust, Hamza alone seems to be  looking
forward to the fair.
     Outside  the  tents of  the  Owners  of  the Dappled  Camels they  find
Mahound, standing  with his  eyes closed, steeling himself to the task. They
ask anxious questions; he doesn't answer. After a few moments, he enters the
poetry tent.
     Inside the  tent, the audience reacts to  the arrival  of the unpopular
Prophet  and  his wretched followers  with derision.  But as  Mahound  walks
forward, his  eyes firmly  closed, the  boos and catcalls  die  away  and  a
silence falls. Mahound does not open his eyes for an instant, but his  steps
are sure,  and he reaches the  stage  without  stumblings  or collisions. He
climbs  the  few  steps up  into  the  light;  still his eyes stay shut. The
assembled  lyric  poets,  composers  of  assassination  eulogies,  narrative
versifiers  and satirists - Baal is here,  of course - gaze with  amusement,
but also with a little unease, at the sleepwalking Mahound. In the crowd his
disciples jostle for room.  The scribes  fight to be near  him, to take down
whatever he might say.
     The  Grandee Abu Simbel  rests against  bolsters  on  a  silken  carpet
positioned  beside the  stage.  With  him, resplendent  in  golden  Egyptian
neckwear, is his wife Hind,  that famous Grecian profile with the black hair
that  is  as long  as  her  body.  Abu  Simbel  rises and calls  to Mahound,
'Welcome.' He is all urbanity. 'Welcome, Mahound, the seer, the kahin.' It's
a public  declaration of respect,  and it impresses the assembled crowd. The
Prophet's  disciples  are  no  longer  shoved  aside,  but allowed  to pass.
Bewildered, half-pleased,  they  come  to the front.  Mahound speaks without
opening his eyes.
     'This is  a  gathering of many  poets,'  he says clearly, 'and I cannot
claim to be one of them. But I am the  Messenger, and  I bring verses from a
greater One than any here assembled.'
     The audience is losing patience. Religion is for the temple;  Jahilians
and pilgrims alike are here for entertainment. Silence the fellow! Throw him
out! - But Abu Simbel speaks  again. 'If your God has really spoken to you,'
he says, 'then all the world must hear it.' And in an instant the silence in
the great tent is complete,
     

'The Star,'

 Mahound cries out, and the scribes begin to write.
     'In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful!
     'By the Pleiades when they set: Your companion is not in error; neither
is he deviating.
     'Nor does he speak from his own  desires. It  is a revelation  that has
been revealed: one mighty in power has taught him.
     'He stood  on the high  horizon:  the lord  of  strength.  Then he came
close, closer than the length of two bows,  and revealed to his servant that
which is revealed.
     'The servant's heart was  true  when seeing what he saw.  Do you, then,
dare to question what was seen?
     'I saw him also at the lote-tree  of the uttermost end, near which lies
the Garden of Repose. When that tree was covered by its covering, my eye was
not  averted, neither  did my gaze  wander;  and I  saw some of the greatest
signs of the Lord.'
     At this point, without any trace of hesitation or doubt, he recites two
further verses.
     'Have you thought  upon Lat and Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?'
- After the first verse,  Hind gets to  her feet;  the Grandee of Jahilia is
already standing  very straight.  And Mahound, with silenced  eyes, recites:
'They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.'
     As  the  noise -  shouts, cheers,  scandal, cries  of  devotion to  the
goddess  Al-Lat  -  swells  and  bursts  within  the  marquee,  the  already
astonished  congregation beholds  the  doubly  sensational spectacle of  the
Grandee Abu  Simbel placing his  thumbs  upon the lobes of his ears, fanning
out the  fingers of both  hands  and uttering in  a loud  voice the formula:
'Allahu Akbar.' After  which he falls  to his knees and presses a deliberate
forehead to the ground. His wife, Hind, immediately follows his lead.
     The water-carrier Khalid has remained by the  open tent-flap throughout
these  events. Now  he stares in horror as everyone gathered there, both the
crowd in the  tent and the  overflow of men and women outside it,  begins to
kneel, row by row, the movement rippling  outwards from Hind and the Grandee
as though they were pebbles  thrown into a lake; until the entire gathering,
outside the  tent as well  as in,  kneels  bottom-in-air before  the shuteye
Prophet who has recognized the patron deities  of the  town.  The  Messenger
himself remains standing, as if loth to join the  assembly in its devotions.
Bursting  into  tears,  the water-carrier flees into the empty heart  of the
city of the sands. His teardrops, as he runs, burn holes in the earth, as if
they contain some harsh corrosive acid.
     Mahound remains motionless. No trace of moisture can be detected on the
lashes of his unopened eyes.
     On that night of the desolating triumph  of the businessman in the tent
of the unbelievers,  there  take place certain murders  for  which the first
lady of Jahilia will wait years to take her terrible revenge.
     The Prophet's uncle Hamza has been walking home  alone, his head  bowed
and grey  in the twilight of  that melancholy victory, when  he hears a roar
and looks up, to see a  gigantic scarlet lion poised to leap at him from the
high battlements  of  the  city.  He  knows  this  beast,  this  fable.  

The
iridescence of its scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the
desert  sands.  Through its nostrils  it exhales  the horror  of  the lonely
places  of the earth. It spits out pestilence, and when armies venture  into
the desert, it consumes them utterly.

 Through the blue last light of evening
he shouts at  the beast,  preparing,  unarmed as he is,  to  meet his death.
'Jump, you bastard, manticore.  I've strangled big cats with my bare  hands,
in my time.' When I was younger. When I was young.
     There  is laughter  behind him, and distant laughter echoing,  or so it
seems, from the battlements. He looks around him; the manticore has vanished
from the ramparts. He is surrounded by a group of Jahilians in  fancy dress,
returning  from the fair and giggling. 'Now that these mystics have embraced
our  Lat,  they  are  seeing  new  gods  round  every  corner,  no?'  Hamza,
understanding that the night will be full of terrors, returns home and calls
for his  battle sword. 'More than anything in  the world,' he  growls at the
papery valet who  has served him in war and  peace for  forty-four years, 'I
hate admitting that my enemies have a point. Damn sight  better  to kill the
bastards,  I've  always  thought. Neatest bloody  solution.'  The sword  has
remained sheathed in its leather scabbard since the day of his conversion by
his nephew, but tonight, he confides to the valet, 'The lion is loose. Peace
will have to wait.'
     It is the last  night of the festival of Ibrahim. Jahilia is masquerade
and madness.  The oiled  fatty bodies of the wrestlers  have completed their
writhings and the seven poems have been nailed to the walls  of the House of
the Black  Stone. Now singing whores replace the  poets, and dancing whores,
also with oiled bodies, are at work  as  well; night-wrestling replaces  the
daytime variety. The courtesans dance and sing in golden, bird-beaked masks,
and the  gold is  reflected  in their  clients'  shining  eyes.  Gold,  gold
everywhere, in  the palms of the profiteering Jahilians and their libidinous
guests,  in  the  flaming  sand-braziers, in  the glowing walls of the night
city. Hamza walks dolorously through the streets of gold,  past pilgrims who
lie unconscious while cutpurses earn their living. He hears the wine-blurred
carousing  through every  golden-gleaming doorway, and  feels the  song  and
howling laughter and  coin-chinkings hurting him like mortal insults. But he
doesn't  find what he's looking  for, not here, so he  moves  away  from the
illuminated revelry of gold  and  begins to  stalk the shadows, hunting  the
apparition of the lion.
     And finds, after hours of searching, what he knew would be  waiting, in
a dark  corner of the city's  outer walls, the thing of his  vision, the red
manticore  with the triple row of teeth. The manticore has  blue  eyes and a
mannish face and its voice is half-trumpet and half-flute. It is fast as the
wind, its nails are corkscrew talons and its tail  hurls poisoned quills. It
loves to feed on human  flesh ... a brawl is taking place. Knives hissing in
the silence, at times the clash of metal against metal. Hamza recognizes the
men under attack: Khalid, Salman, Bilal. A lion himself now, Hamza draws his
sword, roars the silence into shreds, runs forward as fast as sixty-year-old
legs will go. His friends' assailants are unrecognizable behind their masks.
     It  has been a night of masks. Walking  the debauched Jahilian streets,
his heart full of bile, Hamza has seen men and women in the guise of eagles,
jackals, horses, gryphons, salamanders, wart-hogs, rocs; welling up from the
murk of  the alleys have come two-headed amphisbaenae  and  the winged bulls
known as Assyrian sphinxes. Djinns, houris, demons populate the city on this
night of phantasmagoria and lust. But only  now, in this dark place, does he
see the  red  masks he's  been  looking  for. The man-lion  masks: he rushes
towards his fate.
     In the  grip of a self-destructive unhappiness the three  disciples had
started  drinking, and owing  to their unfamiliarity with alcohol they  were
soon not just intoxicated but stupid-drunk. They stood in a small piazza and
started abusing the passers-by, and  after a while the  water-carrier Khalid
brandished  his water-skin, boasting.  He could destroy the city, he carried
the ultimate weapon. Water: it  would cleanse Jahilia  the filthy,  wash  it
away, so that a new  start could be made from the purified white sand.  That
was when the lion-men started  chasing  them, and after  a long pursuit they
were cornered,  the booziness draining out of them on account of their fear,
they were staring  into the red masks  of death  when Hamza  arrived just in
time.
     . . . Gibrccl floats above the  city watching the  fight. It's  quickly
over  once Hamza gets  to the scene. Two masked assailants run away, two lie
dead. Bilal, Khalid and Salman have been cut, but not too badly. Graver than
their  wounds  is  the  news  behind the  lion-masks  of the  dead.  'Hind's
brothers,' Hamza recognizes. 'Things arc finishing for us now.'
     Slayers of manticores,  water-terrorists, the followers of Mahound  sit
and weep in the shadow of the city wall.
     As for  him, Prophet Messenger Businessman:  his eyes are open now.  He
paces the inner courtyard of his house, his wife's house, and will not go in
to her. She is almost seventy and feels these days more like  a  mother than
a. She, the rich woman,  who employed him  to manage her  caravans long ago.
His management skills were the first things she liked about him. And after a
time, they were in  love. It isn't easy to be a brilliant, successful  woman
in a city where the gods are female but  the females  are merely  goods. Men
had either been afraid of her, or had thought her so strong  that she didn't
need  their consideration. He  hadn't  been  afraid,  and had given  her the
feeling  of constancy she  needed.  While he, the  orphan, found in her many
women in  one:  mother  sister  lover sibyl friend. When  he thought himself
crazy she  was the one who believed  in his visions. 'It is the  archangel,'
she told him, 'not some fog out of your head. It is Gibreel, and you are the
Messenger of God.'
     He  can't won't  see her  now. She watches him through a stone-latticed
window. He  can't stop  walking, moves  around  the  courtyard  in  a random
sequence of unconscious geometries, his  footsteps  tracing out a  series of
ellipses,  trapeziums, rhomboids, ovals, rings. While she remembers  how  he
would return from the caravan trails full of stories heard at wayside oases.
A  prophet,  Isa,  born to  a woman named  Maryam, born of  no man  under  a
palm-tree in the desert. Stories that  made his eyes shine, then fade into a
distantness.  She  recalls  his  excitability: the passion  with which  he'd
argue,  all  night if necessary, that the  old nomadic times had been better
than  this city  of  gold where people  exposed their baby daughters in  the
wilderness. In the old  tribes  even the poorest orphan would  be cared for.
God is in the desert, he'd say, not here in this miscarriage of a place. And
she'd reply,  Nobody's arguing, my  love, it's late,  and tomorrow there are
the accounts.
     She has long ears;  has already  heard what he  said about  Lat,  Uzza,
Manat. So what? In the old days he wanted to  protect the baby daughters  of
Jahilia;  why shouldn't  he  take the  daughters  of Allah under his wing as
well?  But after asking herself this question she shakes her head and  leans
heavily on the  cool wall beside her stone-screened window. While below her,
her husband walks in pentagons, parallelograms, six-pointed stars, and  then
in abstract  and  increasingly labyrinthine patterns for which there are  no
names, as though unable to find a simple line.
     When  she looks into the courtyard some  moments later, however, he has
gone.
     The Prophet  wakes  between silk sheets, with a bursting headache, in a
room he has never  seen.  Outside  the  window the sun  is  near  its savage
zenith, and silhouetted against the whiteness is  a tall figure in  a  black
hooded  cloak,  singing softly in a strong, low voice. The song  is one that
the women of Jahilia chorus as they drum the men to war.
     

Advance and we embrace you,
     embrace you, embrace you,
     advance and we embrace you
     and soft carpets spread.


Turn back and we desert you,
     we leave you, desert you,
     retreat and we'll not love you,
     not in love's bed.

     He  recognizes Hind's  voice, sits up,  and finds himself naked beneath
the creamy sheet.  He  calls to  her: 'Was  I attacked?' Hind turns to  him,
smiling her Hind smile. 'Attacked?' she mimics him,  and claps her hands for
breakfast.  Minions  enter,  bring, serve, remove,  scurry  off.  Mahound is
helped into a silken robe of black and gold; Hind, exaggeratedly, averts her
eyes.  'My  head,' he asks again. 'Was I struck?' She stands  at the window,
her head hung low, playing the  demure maid. 'Oh, Messenger, Messenger,' she
mocks him. 'What an ungallant Messenger  it is. Couldn't you have come to my
room  consciously, of your own  will? No, of  course not, I  repel  you, I'm
sure.' He will not play her game. 'Am I a prisoner?'  he asks, and again she
laughs at  him. 'Don't  be a fool.' And  then,  shrugging,  relents: 'I  was
walking the city  streets last night,  masked, to see the  festivities,  and
what should I  stumble over but your unconscious body?  Like a  drunk in the
gutter, Mahound. I sent  my servants for a  litter and brought you home. Say
thank you.'
     'Thank you.'
     'I don't  think you  were  recognized,'  she says.  'Or you'd be  dead,
maybe.  You know  how  the city  was  last  night. People  overdo it. My own
brothers haven't come home yet.'
     It comes back to him now, his wild anguished walk in  the corrupt city,
staring   at   the  souls   he   had   supposedly  saved,  looking   at  the
simurgh-effigies,  the  devil-masks,  the  behemoths  and  hippogriffs.  The
fatigue of that long day on which he climbed down from Mount Cone, walked to
the  town, underwent the  strain of the  events in the poetry marquee, - and
afterwards, the anger of the disciples,  the doubt, -  the  whole of  it had
overwhelmed him. 'I fainted,' he remembers.
     She comes and sits close to him on the bed, extends a finger, finds the
gap  in  his  robe, strokes  his  chest.  'Fainted,'  she  murmurs.  'That's
weakness, Mahound. Are you becoming weak?'
     She  places the  stroking finger  over  his lips before  he can  reply.
'Don't say anything, Mahound. I am the Grandee's wife, and neither  of us is
your friend. My husband,  however, is a weak man. In Jahilia they think he's
cunning, but I know better. He knows I take lovers and he does nothing about
it, because the temples are in my family's care. Lat's, Uzza's, Manat's. The
-  shall I  call them 

mosques'? -

  of your new angels.' She offers him melon
cubes from a dish, tries to feed  him with her  fingers. He will not let her
put the fruit into his mouth, takes  the pieces with his own hand, eats. She
goes  on. 'My last lover was the boy, Baal.' She sees the rage  on his face.
'Yes,'  she says contentedly. 'I heard he  had got  under  your skin. But he
doesn't matter. Neither he nor Abu Simbel is your equal. But I am.'
     'I  must go,'  he  says. 'Soon enough,'  she replies,  returning to the
window.  At the perimeter of the city they  are packing  away the tents, the
long  camel-trains  are  preparing to  depart,  convoys of carts are already
heading  away across the desert;  the  carnival  is over.  She turns to  him
again.
     'I am your equal,' she repeats,  'and also  your opposite. I don't want
you to become weak. You shouldn't have done what you did.'
     'But you will profit,' Mahound replies bitterly. 'There's no threat now
to your temple revenues.'
     'You miss the point,'  she says softly, coming  closer to him, bringing
her face very close to  his. 'If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she
doesn't  believe your  God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him  is
implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us  cannot end in truce.
And what a truce! Yours is a  patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn't
the slightest wish to be his daughter. She is  his equal, as I am yours. Ask
Baal: he knows her. As he knows me.'
     'So the Grandee will betray his pledge,' Mahound says.
     'Who knows?' scoffs Hind. 'He doesn't even know himself. He has to work
out  the odds.  Weak,  as  I told you. But  you know I'm  telling the truth.
Between Allah and the Three there can  be no peace.  I don't want it. I want
the fight. To the death; that is the kind of idea I am. What kind are you?'
     'You are sand and I am water,' Mahound says. 'Water washes sand away.'
     'And the desert soaks up water,' Hind answers him. 'Look around you.'
     Soon  after  his departure  the  wounded men  arrive  at the  Grandee's
palace,  having screwed up  their courage to inform Hind that old  Hamza has
killed her brothers. But by then the  Messenger  is nowhere to be found;  is
heading, once again, slowly towards Mount Cone.
     Gibreel, when  he's  tired, wants to  murder his mother for giving  him
such a damn fool nickname,  

angel,

 what  a word, he begs  

what?  whom?

 to be
spared the dream-city of crumbling sandcastles  and  lions with three-tiered
teeth,  no  more heart-washing  of prophets  or  instructions  to recite  or
promises   of  paradise,  let  there  be  an  end  to  revelations,  finito,
khattam-shud.  What he  longs for: black,  dreamless  sleep.  Mother-fucking
dreams,  cause of  all the trouble in the human race,  movies, too, if I was
God I'd cut the imagination right out of people and then maybe poor bastards
like me could get a good night's rest. Fighting against sleep, he forces his
eyes to stay open, unblinking, until the visual purple fades off the retinas
and sends  him blind, but he's only  human,  in  the end  he falls down  the
rabbit-hole and there he is again, in  Wonderland, up the mountain,  and the
businessman  is  waking  up, and once again his  wanting, his need,  goes to
work,  not  on my  jaws  and  voice this  time, but  on  my whole  body;  he
diminishes me to his own size and pulls me in towards him, his gravitational
field  is unbelievable,  as powerful  as a  goddamn megastar . .  . and then
Gibreel and the Prophet are wrestling, both naked, rolling over and over, in
the cave of the fine white sand  that rises around them like a veil.  

As  if
he's learning me, searching me, as if I'm the one undergoing the test.

     In  a cave five  hundred feet below the  summit of Mount  Cone, Mahound
wrestles the  archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let  me tell you
he's getting in  

everywhere,

 his tongue in my ear  his fist around my balls,
there was never a  person with such a rage in him, he has to  has to know he
has to KNOW and I have  nothing to tell him, he's twice as physically fit as
I  am  and four  times as  knowledgeable, minimum, we may  both have  taught
ourselves  by listening  a lot  but  as  is  plaintosee  he's even a  better
listener than me; so  we roll kick scratch, he's getting cut up quite  a bit
but  of course my skin stays smooth as a baby, you can't snag  an angel on a
bloody thorn-bush,  you  can't  bruise  him  on  a rock. And  they  have  an
audience, there are  djinns  and  afreets and all sorts of spooks sitting on
the  boulders to watch the  fight,  and  in  the  sky  are  the three winged
creatures, looking like  herons  or  swans  or  just women  depending on the
tricks of the light . . . Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight.
     After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down
beneath the angel,  it's what he wanted, it was his will  filling me  up and
giving me the strength to hold him down, because archangels  can't lose such
fights, it wouldn't be right, it's only devils who get beaten in such circs,
so the  moment I got on top he started weeping for  joy and then  he did his
old trick, forcing my mouth open  and making the  voice, the Voice, pour out
of me once again, made it pour all over him, like sick.
     At  the  end  of his wrestling  match  with  the Archangel Gibreel, the
Prophet Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, post-revelatory  sleep,
but on  this occasion  he revives more quickly than usual. When he comes  to
his senses in that high wilderness  there is nobody to  be  seen, no  winged
creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency
of his  news. 'It was  the Devil,' he says aloud to the empty air, making it
true  by giving it voice. 'The last time, it  was Shaitan.' This is  what he
has 

heard

 in his 

listening,

 that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to
him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones
he recited  in  the  poetry  tent, were not the real  thing but its diabolic
opposite,  not  godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly  as he
can,  to expunge the  foul verses that  reek of brimstone  and  sulphur,  to
strike them from the record  for ever and ever, so that they will survive in
just  one  or two unreliable  collections of  old  traditions  and  orthodox
interpreters   will   try   and   unwrite   their   story,   but    Gibreel,
hovering-watching from  his highest  camera  angle, knows one  small detail,
just one tiny thing  that's a bit  of a problem  here, namely that 

it was me
both  times,  baba, me  first and  second also me.

 From my mouth,  both  the
statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses,
the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.
     'First it was the Devil,' Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia. 'But
this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the ground.'
     The  disciples stop him in  the  ravines near the foot of Mount Cone to
warn him of the fury of Hind, who is wearing white mourning garments and has
loosened her black hair, letting it fly about her like a  storm, or trail in
the dust, erasing her footsteps so that she seems like an incarnation of the
spirit of vengeance  itself. They have all fled the city, and Hamza, too, is
lying low;  but the word is that Abu Simbel has not, as yet, acceded  to his
wife's pleas for the blood that washes away  blood. He  is still calculating
the odds in the matter of Mahound and the goddesses .  .  . Mahound, against
his followers' advice, returns to Jahilia,  going straight  to  the House of
the Black Stone. The disciples follow  him in spite  of their  fear. A crowd
gathers in  the hope  of  further  scandal  or  dismemberment  or some  such
entertainment. Mahound does not disappoint them.
     He  stands  in  front  of  the  statues of  the Three and announces the
abrogation of the  verses  which Shaitan  whispered in his ear. These verses
are banished from  the true recitation, 

al-qur'an.

 New  verses are thundered
in their place.
     'Shall He have daughters and you sons?' Mahound recites. 'That would be
a fine division!
     'These are but names you have  dreamed of, you and your fathers.  Allah
vests no authority in them.'
     He leaves the dumbfounded House before it occurs to anybody to pick up,
or throw, the first stone.
     After the  repudiation  of  the Satanic  verses,  the  Prophet  Mahound
returns home to find a kind of punishment awaiting him.  A kind of vengeance
- whose? Light or dark? Goodguy badguy?  -wrought, as  is not  unusual, upon
the innocent. The Prophet's  wife, seventy years  old, sits by the foot of a
stone-latticed window, sits upright with her back to the wall, dead.
     Mahound in the grip of his misery keeps himself to himself, hardly says
a word for weeks. The Grandee of  Jahilia institutes a policy of persecution
that  advances  too  slowly  for  Hind.  The  name  of the  new religion  is

Submission;

 now Abu Simbel decrees that its  adherents must submit  to being
sequestered  in  the most wretched, hovel-filled  quarter of the  city; to a
curfew; to a ban on  employment. And there are many physical assaults, women
spat upon in  shops,  the manhandling of the faithful by  the gangs of young
turks whom  the Grandee  secretly  controls, fire thrown  at night through a
window  to land  amongst  unwary  sleepers. And,  by  one  of  the  familiar
paradoxes of history, the numbers of the faithful multiply, like a crop that
miraculously  flourishes as  conditions of soil and climate  grow worse  and
worse.
     An  offer is  received, from the citizens  of  the oasis-settlement  of
Yathrib to the north: Yathrib will shelter those-who-submit, if they wish to
leave  Jahilia. Hamza is of  the  opinion  that they must go.  'You'll never
finish  your  Message  here,  nephew, take my word. Hind won't be happy till
she's  ripped  out your tongue,  to say nothing  of  my  balls, excuse  me.'
Mahound, alone and full of echoes in the house of his bereavement, gives his
consent,   and  the  faithful   depart  to  make  their  plans.  Khalid  the
water-carrier hangs back and the hollow-eyed Prophet waits for him to speak.
Awkwardly, he says: 'Messenger, I  doubted you.  But you were wiser than  we
knew. First  we said,  Mahound will  never  compromise, and you compromised.
Then  we said, Mahound has betrayed us,  but  you were bringing us a  deeper
truth.  You brought us  the  Devil himself,  so that  we  could  witness the
workings of the  Evil One, and his overthrow by the Right. You have enriched
our faith. I am sorry for what I thought.'
     Mahound moves away from the sunlight falling through the window. 'Yes.'
Bitterness, cynicism.  'It  was  a wonderful  thing  I  did.  Deeper  truth.
Bringing you the Devil. Yes, that sounds like me.'
     From the  peak of  Mount Cone, Gibreel watches  the  faithful  escaping
Jahilia, leaving the city of aridity for the place of  cool palms and water,
water,  water. In small groups,  almost  empty-handed, they move across  the
empire of the sun, on this first day of  the first year at the new beginning
of Time, which has itself been born again, as the old dies behind  them  and
the new waits ahead. And one day Mahound himself slips away. When his escape
is discovered, Baal composes a valedictory ode:
     

What kind of idea


does 'Submission' seem today?


One full of fear.


An idea that runs away.

     Mahound has reached his oasis; Gibreel is not so lucky.  Often, now, he
finds himself alone on the summit of Mount Cone, washed by the cold, falling
stars, and  then they  fall upon  him  from the night sky, the three  winged
creatures, Lat Uzza  Manat, flapping around his head,  clawing at  his eyes,
biting, whipping him with  their hair, their  wings. He puts up his hands to
protect himself,  but  their  revenge  is  tireless, continuing  whenever he
rests, whenever he drops his guard. He struggles against them,  but they are
faster, nimbler, winged.
     He has no devil to repudiate. Dreaming, he cannot wish them away.

     Ellowen Deeowen

     I know what  a ghost is, the old woman affirmed  silently. Her name was
Rosa Diamond; she  was eighty-eight years old; and she was squinting beakily
through her salt-caked bedroom windows, watching the full moon's sea.  And I
know  what it isn't, too,  she nodded further, it isn't a scarification or a
flapping sheet, so pooh  and  pish  to  all  

that

  bunkum. What's  a  ghost?
Unfinished business,  is what.  -  At which  the old lady,  six  feet  tall,
straight-backed, her hair hacked short as any man's,  jerked  the corners of
her mouth downwards  in a satisfied, tragedy-mask  pout, -  pulled a knitted
blue  shawl  tight around  bony shoulders, - and closed,  for a  moment, her
sleepless eyes, to pray for  the  past's  return. Come on, you Norman ships,
she begged: let's have you, Willie-the-Conk.
     Nine hundred years ago all this  was under water, this portioned shore,
this private beach, its  shingle rising steeply  towards the little  row  of
flaky-paint villas with their peeling boathouses crammed full of deckchairs,
empty picture frames, ancient tuckboxes stuffed with bundles of letters tied
up in ribbons, mothballed silk-and-lace lingerie,  the  tearstained  reading
matter  of once-young  girls,  lacrosse sticks, stamp  albums, and  all  the
buried treasure-chests of memories and lost time. The coastline had changed,
had  moved a  mile or  more out  to  sea, leaving  the first  Norman  castle
stranded  far from water, lapped now by marshy land that afflicted with  all
manner  of  dank  and  boggy  agues  the  poor  who  lived  there  on  their
whatstheword 

estates.

 She,  the old  lady, saw  the  castle as the ruin of a
fish betrayed by an antique ebbing tide, as a sea-monster petrified by time.
Nine hundred  years! Nine  centuries past, the Norman fleet had sailed right
through this Englishwoman's home. On  clear  nights  when the moon was full,
she waited for its shining, revenant ghost.
     Best place  to see 'em come, she  reassured  herself,  grandstand view.
Repetition had become  a comfort in  her antiquity; the  well-worn  phrases,

unfinished  business, grandstand  view,

 made  her  feel  solid,  unchanging,
sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself
to  be. - When the full moon sets, the dark  before  the dawn,  that's their
moment.  Billow of  sail,  flash of oars,  and the Conqueror  himself at the
flagship's   prow,  sailing  up  the  beach  between  the  barnacled  wooden
breakwaters and a  few inverted sculls.  -  O, I've seen things in  my time,
always had the  gift,  the  phantom-sight. -  The  Conqueror  in  his pointy
metal-nosed  hat,  passing  through  her  front  door, gliding  betwixt  the
cakestands and antimacassared sofas, like an echo resounding faintly through
that house of remembrances and yearnings; then falling silent; 

as the grave.


-

 Once as a girl on Battle Hill, she was fond of recounting, always  in
the same  time-polished words, - once as  a  solitary child, I found myself,
quite  suddenly and with  no sense of strangeness,  in the middle of a  war.
Longbows,  maces,  pikes.  The flaxen-Saxon boys, cut down  in  their  sweet
youth. Harold Arroweye  and William with his mouth full of sand. Yes, always
the gift, the phantom-sight. - The story of the day  on which the child Rosa
had seen a vision  of  the battle of Hastings had become, for the old woman,
one of the defining landmarks of her being, though it had been told so often
that nobody, not even the teller, could  confidently swear that it was true.

I long  for them sometimes,

 ran Rosa's practised thoughts. 

Les beaux  jours:
the dear, dead  days.

 She closed, once more, her reminiscent  eyes. When she
opened them, she saw, down by the  water's  edge, no  denying  it, something
beginning to move.
     What she said aloud in her excitement: 'I don't believe it!' - It isn't
true!'  - 'He's  never 

here!' -

 On unsteady feet, with  bumping chest,  Rosa
went for her  hat, cloak, stick.  While,  on  the winter  seashore,  Gibreel
Farishta awoke with a mouth full of, no, not sand.
     Snow.
     Ptui!
     Gibreel spat; leapt up, as if propelled by  expectorated slush;  wished
Chamcha  - as has  been  reported  - many  happy  returns of  the  day;  and
commenced  to beat the  snow from sodden  purple  sleeves.  'God,  yaar,' he
shouted, hopping from foot to foot, 'no  wonder these people  grow hearts of
bloody ice.'
     Then, however, the pure delight of  being surrounded by such a quantity
of snow quite overcame his first cynicism - for he was a tropical man -  and
he started capering about, saturnine and soggy, making snowballs and hurling
them at  his prone  companion, envisioning  a snowman,  and  singing a wild,
swooping rendition of the carol  'Jingle Bells'. The first hint of light was
in the sky, and on this cosy sea-coast danced Lucifer, the morning's star.
     His breath, it should be mentioned,  had somehow or other wholly ceased
to smell . . .
     'Come  on, baby,'  cried  invincible Gibreel, in  whose  behaviour  the
reader may, not unreasonably, perceive the delirious, dislocating effects of
his recent fall. 'Rise 'n' shine! Let's take this  place by  storm.' Turning
his back on the sea, blotting out  the  bad memory in order to make room for
the next  things, passionate as  always for newness,  he would have  planted
(had he owned one) a flag, to claim in  the name of whoknowswho  this  white
country, his new-found land. 'Spoono,' he pleaded, 'shift, baba, or  are you
bloody  dead?'  Which  being  uttered brought the speaker to  (or  at  least
towards) his senses. He bent over  the other's prostrate form,  did not dare
to touch. 'Not now, old Chumch,' he urged. 'Not when we came so far.'
     Saladin: was not dead, but weeping. The tears of shock freezing  on his
face. And all his body  cased in a fine skin of ice, smooth as glass, like a
bad dream  come true.  In the  miasmic semi-consciousness induced by his low
body  temperature  he  was possessed  by  the nightmare-fear of cracking, of
seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks,  of  his flesh coming away
with the shards.  He was full of questions,  did we truly, I mean, with your
handsflapping, and then the waters, you don't mean to tell me they 

actually,

like in the movies, when Charlton Heston stretched out his staff, so that we
could, across the ocean-floor, it never  happened, couldn't have, but if not
then  how, or  did we in some way underwater, escorted by the mermaids,  the
sea passing through us as if we were fish or ghosts, was that the truth, yes
or no, I need to have to ... but when his eyes opened the questions acquired
the indistinctness of dreams, so that he could  no longer  grasp them, their
tails flicked before him and vanished like submarine fins. He was looking up
at the sky, and noticed that it was the  wrong colour entirely, blood-orange
flecked with green, and the snow was blue  as ink. He  blinked  hard but the
colours refused to change, giving rise to the notion that  he had fallen out
of  the sky  into some wrongness,  some  other place, not England or perhaps
not-England, some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he
considered briefly: Hell? No,  no, he  reassured himself as  unconsciousness
threatened, that can't be it, not yet, you aren't dead yet; but dying.
     Well then: a transit lounge.
     He began  to shiver; the vibration grew so intense that  it occurred to
him that he might break up under the stress, like a, like a, plane.
     Then  nothing existed. He was  in a void, and if he were to survive  he
would  have to  construct everything from scratch, would  have to invent the
ground beneath his feet before he could take a step, only there  was no need
now  to  worry  about such  matters, because here  in front of  him was  the
inevitable:  the tall, bony  figure of Death, in  a wide-brimmed straw  hat,
with a dark cloak  flapping in the breeze. Death, leaning on a silver-headed
cane, wearing olive-green Wellington boots.
     'What  do you imagine  yourselves to be doing  here?'  Death wanted  to
know.  'This is private property. There's  a sign.' Said  in a woman's voice
that was somewhat tremulous and more than somewhat thrilled.
     A few  moments  later,  Death bent over him - 

to kiss  me,

  he panicked
silently. To 

suck the  breath from my body.

 He made small,  futile movements
of protest.
     'He's alive  all right,' Death remarked to, who was it,  Gibreel. 'But,
my dear. His breath: what a 

pong.

 When did he last clean his teeth?'
     One  man's breath was  sweetened,  while  another's,  by  an  equal and
opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of
the  sky: did they imagine there would be no side-effects? Higher Powers had
taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers
(I am, of course, speaking of  myself)  have a mischievous, almost a  wanton
attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let's be  clear:  great falls
change people. You  think 

they

 fell a long  way? In the matter of tumbles, I
yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or  im-. From clouds to
ashes, down the chimney you might  say, from heavenlight to hellfire .  .  .
under  the  stress  of  a  long plunge,  I was saying,  mutations are  to be
expected,  not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price
to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming 

new,

 and at their age at
that.
     What? I should enumerate the changes?
     Good breath/bad breath.
     And around the edges of Gibreel  Farishta's  head, as he stood with his
back to the dawn, it seemed to Rosa Diamond that  she discerned a faint, but
distinctly golden, 

glow.

     And  were  those bumps, at  Chamcha's  temples,  under  his  sodden and
still-in-place bowler hat?
     And, and, and.
     When she laid eyes on the bizarre, satyrical figure of Gibreel Farishta
prancing  and dionysiac in the  snow, Rosa Diamond did not  think of  

say it

angels.  Sighting  him  from  her  window,  through  salt-cloudy  glass  and
age-clouded eyes, she felt her heart kick out, twice, so  painfully that she
feared it might stop; because  in that indistinct form she seemed to discern
the incarnation  of  her  soul's  most deeply  buried desire. She forgot the
Norman invaders as  if  they had never been,  and struggled down a slope  of
treacherous    pebbles,    too   quickly    for    the    safety    of   her
not-quite-nonagenarian limbs,  so  that  she  could  pretend  to  scold  the
impossible stranger for trespassing on her land.
     Usually she was  implacable  in defence of her beloved fragment  of the
coast, and when  summer weekenders strayed  above  the high  tide  line  she
descended upon  them 

like a wolf  on the fold,

 her phrase for it, to explain
and to demand: - This is my garden, do you see. - And if they grew brazen, -
getoutofitsillyoldmoo, itsthesoddingbeach, - she would return home to  bring
out a long  green garden hose and turn it remorselessly  upon  their  tartan
blankets  and plastic cricket bats and bottles of sun-tan  lotion, she would
smash their  children's sandcastles and soak their liver-sausage sandwiches,
smiling sweetly all the while: 

You won't mind if I just water my lawn?

 . . .
O, she was a One, known  in the village,  they couldn't lock her away in any
old  folks' home,  sent her  whole family packing when they dared to suggest
it, never darken her doorstep, she  told them, cut the whole lot off without
a penny or a by your  leave. All on her own  now, she  was, never  a visitor
from week to  blessed week, not even Dora Shufflebotham who  went in and did
for  her all  those years,  Dora  passed over September last,  may she rest,
still it's a  wonder at her age how the old trout manages, all those stairs,
she may be a bit of a bee  but give  the devil her due, there's many's'd  go
barmy being that alone.
     For  Gibreel there  was  neither a hosepipe  nor  the 

sharp end

 of  her
tongue.  Rosa  uttered  token  words of  reproof,  held  her  nostrils while
examining the fallen and  newly sulphurous Saladin (who  had  not,  at  this
point,  removed his bowler hat), and then,  with an access of  shyness which
she  greeted  with  nostalgic  astonishment,  stammered an invitation,  yyou
bbetter bring  your ffriend in out of  the cccold,  and stamped back up  the
shingle to put  the  kettle  on, grateful to the bite of the winter air  for
reddening her cheeks and 

saving,

 in the old comforting phrase, 

her blushes.

     As  a  young  man  Saladin  Chamcha  had  possessed  a  face  of  quite
exceptional innocence,  a face that  did not  seem ever  to have encountered
disillusion or evil, with skin  as soft  and smooth as a princess's palm. It
had served  him well in his dealings with women, and  had, in point of fact,
been one of the first reasons his future wife Pamela Lovelace had  given for
falling in love with him. 'So  round and  cherubic,'  she marvelled, cupping
her hands under his chin. 'Like a rubber ball.'
     He was offended. 'I've got bones,' he protested. 'Bone 

structure.'

     'Somewhere in there,' she conceded. 'Everybody does.'
     After that he  was haunted for a time by the notion that he looked like
a featureless  jellyfish, and it was in large part  to assuage this  feeling
that he  set about  developing the narrow, haughty  demeanour  that  was now
second nature  to him. It was, therefore, a matter of some consequence when,
on  arising from a long slumber  racked by  a series  of intolerable dreams,
prominent  among  which  were  images  of  Zeeny  Vakil,  transformed into a
mermaid, singing  to  him from an iceberg  in  tones of agonizing sweetness,
lamenting her inability to join him on dry land, calling him, calling; - but
when he went to her she shut him up fast in  the  heart of her ice-mountain,
and  her song changed  to one of  triumph and revenge  ... it was,  I say, a
serious matter when Saladin Chamcha woke up, looked  into a mirror framed in
blue-and-gold Japonaiserie lacquer, and found that old cherubic face staring
out  at him  once  again; while,  at his  temples,  he  observed a brace  of
fearfully discoloured  swellings, indications that he must have suffered, at
some point in his recent adventures, a couple of mighty blows.
     Looking  into  the  mirror at  his altered face, Chamcha  attempted  to
remind himself of  himself. I am a real man, he told the mirror, with a real
history and a planned-out future.  I am  a man to whom certain things are of
importance:  rigour, self-discipline,  reason, the pursuit of  what is noble
without  recourse  to  that  old  crutch,  God.  The  ideal  of beauty,  the
possibility of  exaltation, the mind. I am: a married  man. But in  spite of
his litany, perverse  thoughts insisted  on visiting him.  As for  instance:
that the  world did not exist  beyond that beach down there,  and, now, this
house. That if  he  weren't careful, if he rushed matters, he would fall off
the edge, into clouds. Things had to be  

made.

 Or again: that if he  were to
telephone his home, right now, as he should, if he were to inform his loving
wife that he was not dead, not blown to bits in mid-air but  right  here, on
solid ground, if he were to do this eminently sensible thing, the person who
answered the phone would not recognize his name.  Or thirdly: that the sound
of footsteps ringing in his ears, distant footsteps, but coming closer,  was
not  some temporary  tinnitus  caused  by his  fall,  but the noise  of some
approaching doom,  drawing  closer,  letter  by  letter,  ellowen,  deeowen,
London. 

Here I am, in Grandmother's house. Her big eyes, hands, teeth.

     There  was  a  telephone  extension on  his  bedside  table. There,  he
admonished himself. Pick it up, dial, and your equilibrium will be restored.
Such maunderings: they  aren't like  you,  not worthy of you.  Think  of her
grief; call her now.
     It was night-time. He didn't know the hour. There wasn't a clock in the
room and his wristwatch had disappeared somewhere along the line. Should  he
shouldn't he? - He  dialled the nine numbers. A man's voice answered  on the
fourth ring.
     'What the hell?' Sleepy, unidentifiable, familiar.
     'Sorry,' Saladin Chamcha said. 'Excuse, please. Wrong number.'
     Staring  at  the  telephone,  he  found  himself  remembering  a  drama
production seen in Bombay, based on an English original, a story  by, by, he
couldn't put  his finger on the name, Tennyson?  No, no. Somerset Maugham? -
To hell with it. - In  the  original  and  now authorless  text, a man, long
thought dead, returns after an absence of many years, like a living phantom,
to  his former haunts. He visits his former home at  night, surreptitiously,
and looks in through  an open  window.  He  finds that  his  wife, believing
herself widowed, has re-married. On the  window-sill he sees  a child's toy.
He spends a  period  of time standing in  the darkness,  wrestling with  his
feelings; then picks  the  toy  off the ledge; and  departs forever, without
making his presence known. In the Indian version, the story  had been rather
different. The wife  had married her  husband's best  friend. The  returning
husband  arrived at the door and  marched in, expecting  nothing. Seeing his
wife and his old friend sitting together, he  failed to understand that they
were married. He thanked his friend for comforting his wife; but he was home
now, and so all was  well. The married couple did not know how  to  tell him
the  truth; it was, finally,  a servant who gave the game away. The husband,
whose long absence  was apparently due to  a bout of amnesia, reacted to the
news of the marriage by announcing that he, too, must surely have re-married
at some point during his long absence from home; unfortunately, however, now
that the memory of  his  former life had returned he  had forgotten what had
happened  during  the years  of his  disappearance. He  went off to  ask the
police to trace his  new  wife, even though he  could remember nothing about
her, not her eyes, not the simple fact of her existence.
     The curtain fell.
     Saladin   Chamcha,   alone   in   an  unknown   bedroom  in  unfamiliar
red-and-white striped pyjamas, lay face downwards  on a narrow bed and wept.
'Damn  all  Indians,'  he cried  into  the  muffling bedclothes,  his  fists
punching at  frilly-edged  pillowcases  from  Harrods  in  Buenos  Aires  so
fiercely  that  the  fifty-year-old fabric was ripped  to  shreds. 

'What the
hell.

 The vulgarity of it, the 

sod it sod it

 indelicacy. 

What the hell.

 That
bastard, those bastards, their lack 

of bastard

 taste.'
     It was at this moment that the police arrived to arrest him.
     On the night  after she had  taken the two  of them in from the  beach,
Rosa Diamond stood once again  at the nocturnal  window of  her  old woman's
insomnia,  contemplating  the  nine-hundred-year-old sea. The smelly one had
been sleeping ever since they put  him to bed, with hot-water bottles packed
in tightly around him, best thing for him, let him get his strength. She had
put  them upstairs, Chamcha  in  the  spare  room  and  Gibreel in her  late
husband's  old study,  and as she watched the great shining plain of the sea
she  could hear him moving up  there,  amid  the  ornithological  prints and
bird-call whistles of the former Henry Diamond,  the bolas and bullwhip  and
aerial photographs of the Los Alamos estancia far away and long ago, a man's
footsteps in that room, how reassuring they felt. Farishta was pacing up and
down, avoiding sleep, for reasons  of his own. And below  his footfall Rosa,
looking up at the ceiling, called him in a whisper by a  long-unspoken name.
Martin  she said. His last name the same as  that of his country's deadliest
snake, the viper. The vibora, 

de la Cruz.

     At once  she saw the  shapes moving on the  beach, as if the  forbidden
name  had conjured  up  the dead. Not again, she  thought,  and went for her
opera-glasses. She returned to find the beach full of shadows, and this time
she was afraid, because whereas the Norman fleet came sailing, when it came,
proudly  and openly and  without  recourse  to subterfuge, these shades were
sneaky, emitting stifled  imprecations and alarming, muted  yaps  and barks,
they  seemed  headless,  crouching,  arms  and  legs  a-dangle  like  giant,
unshelled crabs. Scuttling, sidelong, heavy boots crunching on shingle. Lots
of them.  She saw them reach her boathouse on which the fading image  of  an
eyepatched pirate grinned  and brandished a cutlass, and that was  too much,

I'm not having it,

 she decided, and, stumbling downstairs for warm clothing,
she fetched  the  chosen  weapon of  her retribution:  a long coil  of green
garden hose. At  her  front door she called out in a clear voice. 'I can see
you quite plainly. Come out, come out, whoever you are.'
     They switched on seven suns  and blinded  her,  and then she  panicked,
illuminated by the seven blue-white floodlights around which, like fireflies
or  satellites,  there  buzzed  a host of smaller  lights: lanterns  torches
cigarettes. Her head was spinning, and for a moment she lost her ability  to
distinguish between 

then

 and 

now,

 in her consternation  she began to say Put
out that light, don't you  know there's a  blackout,  you'll be having Jerry
down on us if you carry on so. 'I'm  raving,' she realized  disgustedly, and
banged the tip  of  her  stick into her doormat. Whereupon, as  if by magic,
policemen materialized in the dazzling circle of light.
     It turned  out that somebody  had reported a suspicious  person  on the
beach, remember when  they used to come in  fishing-boats, the illegals, and
thanks  to that single anonymous telephone  call there were  now fifty-seven
uniformed constables combing the  beach,  their flashlights swinging crazily
in   the  dark,  constables  from  as   far  away  as   Hastings  Eastbourne
Bexhill-upon-Sea, even a deputation from Brighton  because  nobody wanted to
miss  the  fun,  the  thrill  of  the chase.  Fifty-seven beachcombers  were
accompanied by thirteen dogs, all sniffing the sea air  and lifting  excited
legs. While up at  the house away from the great posse of men and dogs, Rosa
Diamond  found  herself gazing  at  the five  constables guarding the exits,
front  door,  ground-floor  windows,  scullery door,  in case  the  putative
miscreant  attempted  an alleged  escape;  and  at the  three  men  in plain
clothes, plain coats and plain hats with faces to match; and in front of the
lot of them, not  daring  to  look her  in the  eye, young  Inspector  Lime,
shuffling his feet and rubbing his nose and looking older and more bloodshot
than his forty years. She tapped him on the chest with the end of her stick,

at this time of night, Frank, what's the meaning of,

 but he  wasn't going to
allow her  to  boss  him around,  not tonight,  not with  the  men from  the
immigration watching his every move, so he drew himself up and pulled in his
chins.
     'Begging your pardon, Mrs. D. - certain allegations, - information laid
before us, - reason to believe, - merit investigation, - necessary to search
your, - a warrant has been obtained.'
     'Don't be  absurd,  Frank dear,' Rosa began  to say,  but just then the
three  men with the plain faces  drew themselves up  and seemed to  stiffen,
each of  them with  one leg  slightly  raised, like pointer dogs;  the first
began to emit an  unusual hiss  of what sounded  like pleasure, while a soft
moan  escaped  from the lips of the second, and the third commenced to  roll
his eyes in an oddly contented way. Then they all pointed past Rosa Diamond,
into her floodlit hallway,  where Mr.  Saladin  Chamcha stood, his left hand
holding up  his pyjamas because a button had come off when he hurled himself
on to his bed. With his right hand he was rubbing at an eye.
     'Bingo,' said  the  hissing  man, while  the  moaner  clasped his hands
beneath his chin to indicate that all his prayers had been answered, and the
roller  of eyes shouldered past Rosa Diamond, without standing  on ceremony,
except that he did mutter, 'Madam, pardon 

me.'

     Then  there was a flood, and Rosa was  jammed into a corner of  her own
sitting-room  by that  bobbing  sea of police helmets, so that she  could no
longer make out Saladin Chamcha or  hear what he was saying. She never heard
him explain about the detonation of the 

Bostan -

 there's been a mistake,  he
cried,  I'm  not one of  your  fishing-boat  sneakers-in,  not  one of  your
ugando-kenyattas,  me. The policemen  began to grin, I  see, sir, at  thirty
thousand feet, and then you swam  ashore.  You  have  the  right  to  remain
silent,  they  tittered,  but  quite soon they  burst  out  into  uproarious
guffaws,  we've got a right one here and no mistake. But  Rosa couldn't make
out Saladin's protests, the laughing policemen got in the way, you've got to
believe me, I'm a British, he was saying, with right of abode, too, but when
he couldn't produce a passport or any other identifying document they  began
to  weep with mirth, the tears streaming down  even  the blank faces  of the
plain-clothes men from the  immigration service.  Of course, don't  tell me,
they giggled, they  fell out of your  jacket  during your tumble, or did the
mermaids  pick   your  pocket  in  the  sea?  Rosa  couldn't  see,  in  that
laughter-heaving surge of men and dogs, what  uniformed  arms might be doing
to Chamcha's arms, or fists to his stomach, or boots to his shins; nor could
she be sure if it was his voice crying out or just the howling of  the dogs.
But  she  did, finally, hear his  voice  rise in  a last, despairing  shout:
'Don't any of you watch TV? Don't you see? I'm Maxim. Maxim Alien.'
     'So you are,' said the popeyed officer. 'And I am Kermit the Frog.'
     What  Saladin  Chamcha never said,  not  even  when  it was clear  that
something had gone badly wrong: 'Here is  a London number,' he  neglected to
inform the arresting policemen. 'At the other end of the line you will find,
to vouch for me, for the truth of what I'm saying, my lovely, white, English
wife.' No, sir. 

What the hell.

     Rosa Diamond  gathered her strength. 'Just one moment, Frank Lime,' she
sang out. 'You look here,' but  the three plain  men had begun their bizarre
routine of hiss moan roll-eye  once again, and in the sudden silence of that
room  the  eye-roller pointed a trembling finger at Chamcha and said, 'Lady,
if it's proof you're after, you couldn't do better than 

those.'

     Saladin Chamcha, following the line of Popeye's pointing finger, raised
his hands to his forehead, and then he knew that he had woken into the  most
fearsome of nightmares,  a nightmare that had only just begun, because there
at his temples,  growing longer  by the  moment,  and sharp  enough to  draw
blood, were two new, goaty, unarguable horns.
     Before  the  army of policemen  took  Saladin Chamcha away into his new
life, there was one more unexpected occurrence. Gibreel Farishta, seeing the
blaze of lights and  hearing  the delirious laughter of  the law-enforcement
officers, came downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket  and  jodhpurs,  chosen
from  Henry Diamond's wardrobe. Smelling faintly  of mothballs,  he stood on
the  first-floor landing  and observed the proceedings  without  comment. He
stood there  unnoticed until Chamcha, handcuffed and on his  way out to  the
Black Maria, barefoot,  still clutching his pyjamas, caught sight of him and
cried out, 'Gibreel, for the love of God tell them what's what.'
     Hisser Moaner  Popeye turned eagerly towards Gibreel.  'And  who  might
this be?' inquired Inspector Lime. 'Another sky-diver?'
     But the words died on his lips, because at that moment  the floodlights
were switched off, the  order to  do  so having been  given when Chamcha was
handcuffed and taken in  charge, and in  the aftermath of the  seven suns it
became clear to everyone there that  a pale, golden light was emanating from
the direction of the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly
outwards from  a point  immediately behind  his head. Inspector  Lime  never
referred to that light again,  and if he had been asked  about it would have
denied ever having seen such a thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century,
pull the other one.
     But at any  rate, when Gibreel asked, 'What do these  men want?', every
man  there  was seized  by  the  desire  to answer his question  in literal,
detailed terms, to reveal their  secrets,  as if  he  were, as  if,  but no,
ridiculous, they  would  shake their  heads  for weeks,  until they had  all
persuaded  themselves  that  they had done  as they did  for purely  logical
reasons, he  was  Mrs. Diamond's  old friend, the two of them  had found the
rogue Chamcha half-drowned on the  beach and  taken him in for  humanitarian
reasons, no call to harass either Rosa or  Mr. Farishta  any further, a more
reputable looking gentleman you couldn't wish to see,  in his smoking jacket
and his, his, well, eccentricity never was a crime, anyhow.
     'Gibreel,' said Saladin Chamcha, 'help.'
     But Gibreel's  eye had  been  caught by Rosa Diamond. He looked at her,
and could not look away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No  attempt
was made to stop him.
     When Chamcha reached  the  Black Maria,  he  saw  the traitor,  Gibreel
Farishta,  looking down at  him  from  the  little  balcony  outside  Rosa's
bedroom, and there wasn't any light shining around the bastard's head.
     

2

     an ma kan/Fi qadim azzaman

  ... It was  so, it was not, in a  time long
forgot, that  there  lived in the  silver-land of  Argentina  a certain  Don
Enrique Diamond,  who  knew much about birds and little about women, and his
wife, Rosa,  who knew nothing about men but a good deal about love.  One day
it so  happened that when the senora was  out riding, sitting sidesaddle and
wearing a hat with a feather  in it,  she arrived at the  Diamond estancia's
great stone  gates, which stood insanely in the middle  of the empty pampas,
to find an ostrich running at her as hard as it could, running for its life,
with all the tricks and variations it  could think of; for the  ostrich is a
crafty bird, difficult to catch. A little way behind the ostrich was a cloud
of dust full of the noises of hunting  men, and  when the ostrich was within
six feet of her the cloud  sent bolas to wrap  around its legs and bring  it
crashing to  the ground at  her grey mare's feet. The man  who dismounted to
kill the bird  never took his eyes  off Rosa's face. He took a silver-hafted
knife from a scabbard at his belt and plunged it into the bird's throat, all
the way  up to the hilt, and  he did it without  once looking  at the  dying
ostrich, staring into Rosa Diamond's eyes while he  knelt on the wide yellow
earth. His name was Martin de la Cruz.
     After  Chamcha had been  taken  away, Gibreel  Farishta  often wondered
about his own behaviour. In  that dreamlike moment when he had  been trapped
by the eyes  of the old Englishwoman it had seemed to him that his  will was
no longer his  own to command,  that somebody  else's needs  were in charge.
Owing  to  the  bewildering  nature  of  recent  events,  and  also  to  his
determination to stay awake as much as possible, it was a few days before he
connected what was  going on to  the world behind his eyelids, and only then
did he  understand that  he had  to get  away, because the universe  of  his
nightmares had begun to leak into his waking life, and if he was not careful
he would never manage to begin  again, to be reborn with  her,  through her,
Alleluia, who had seen the roof of the world.
     He was shocked to realize that he had made no attempt to contact  Allie
at  all;  or  to help Chamcha in  his time of need.  Nor  had he been at all
perturbed by the appearance on Saladin's head of a pair of fine new horns, a
thing that should surely have occasioned some concern. He  had been  in some
sort of trance, and  when he asked  the old dame what she thought of it  all
she smiled weirdly  and  told him that there  was nothing new under the sun,
she had seen  things, the  apparitions  of  men with horned  helmets, in  an
ancient land like England there was no room for new stories, every blade  of
turf had already been walked over a hundred thousand times. For long periods
of the day  her  talk became  rambling  and confused, but at other times she
insisted  on  cooking him huge heavy meals, shepherd's pies, rhubarb crumble
with thick custard, thick-gravied hotpots, all manner  of weighty soups. And
at all times she wore an air of inexplicable contentment, as if his presence
had satisfied  her in some deep, unlooked-for way.  He  went shopping in the
village with her;  people  stared; she  ignored them,  waving her  imperious
stick. The days passed. Gibreel did not leave.
     'Blasted English mame,' he told himself. 'Some type of extinct species.
What  the  hell am I doing here?' But stayed,  held by  unseen chains. While
she, at every  opportunity,  sang  an  old  song,  in  Spanish,  he couldn't
understand a word. Some sorcery there?  Some ancient Morgan Le Fay singing a
young Merlin into her crystal cave? Gibreel headed for  the door; Rosa piped
up;  he stopped in his  tracks. 'Why not,  after all,' he shrugged. 'The old
woman needs company. Faded grandeur, I  swear! Look what she's come to here.
Anyhow, I need the rest. Gather my forces. Just a coupla days.'
     In the evenings they would sit in that drawing-room stuffed with silver
ornaments,  including on the wall a certain silver-hafted knife, beneath the
plaster bust of Henry Diamond that stared  down  from  the top of the corner
cabinet, and when the grandfather clock struck six he would pour two glasses
of sherry and  she  would  begin  to  talk,  but  not  before  she said,  as
predictably as  clockwork, 

Grandfather is always four minutes late, for good
manners,  he  doesn't  like  to  be  too  punctual.

  Then she began  without
bothering with onceuponatime,  and whether it was all  true or  all false he
could  see  the fierce energy that  was  going into  the  telling, the  last
desperate reserves of her will that she was putting into her story, 

the only
bright time I  can remember,

 she  told him,  so that  he perceived that this
memory-jumbled rag-bag of  material was in fact the very  heart of  her, her
self-portrait, the  way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the
room, and that the silver land of the past was her preferred abode, not this
dilapidated  house  in  which  she  was constantly bumping  into  things,  -
knocking over coffee-tables, - bruising herself on doorknobs - bursting into
tears, and crying out: 

Everything shrinks.

     When   she  sailed   to  Argentina  in  1935  as  the  bride   of   the
Anglo-Argentine Don Enrique of Los Alamos, he pointed to the ocean and said,
that's the pampa. You can't tell how big it is by looking at it. You have to
travel through it, the unchangingness, day after day. In some parts the wind
is strong as a fist, but it's completely  silent, it'll knock  you  flat but
you'll never hear a thing. No trees is why: not an ombu, not a poplar, nada.
And you have  to watch out  for ombu leaves, by the  way. Deadly poison. The
wind won't  kill you  but the leaf-juice can. She  clapped her hands  like a
child: Honestly, Henry, silent  winds, poisonous  leaves. You  make it sound
like a fairy-story. Henry, fairhaired, soft-bodied, wide-eyed and ponderous,
looked appalled. 

Oh, no,

 he said. 

It's not so bad as that.

     She arrived in that immensity, beneath that infinite blue vault of sky,
because Henry  popped  the question  and she  gave  the  only  answer that a
forty-year-old  spinster could.  But  when she arrived she  asked herself  a
bigger  question: of  what  was she capable  in all that space? What did she
have the  courage  for, how could she 

expand?

 To be good or  bad,  she  told
herself: but  to be  

new.

 Our  neighbour  Doctor Jorge Babington,  she  told
Gibreel, never liked me, you know, he would tell me tales of the British  in
South America,  always such gay  blades,  he said  contemptuously, spies and
brigands  and looters. 

Are you  such exotics in your cold  England?

 he asked
her, and answered his own  question, 

senora, I don't think so.  Crammed into
that coffin  of an island, you  must find  wider  horizons  to express these
secret selves.

     Rosa  Diamond's secret  was a capacity for love so  great  that it soon
became  plain that her  poor prosaic Henry would  never fulfil  it,  because
whatever  romance there  was in  that jellied  frame was reserved for birds.
Marsh hawks, screamers, snipe. In a small rowing boat on the  local  lagunas
he spent his happiest  days amid the bulrushes with his field-glasses to his
eyes. Once on the train to Buenos Aires he embarrassed Rosa by demonstrating
his favourite  bird-calls  in the dining-car, cupping  his hands around  his
mouth: sleepyhead bird, vanduria  ibis, trupial. Why can't  you love me this
way,  she wanted  to ask. But  never did,  because  for Henry she was a good
sort, and  passion was  an  eccentricity  of  other  races.  She  became the
generalissimo of the homestead, and tried to stifle her wicked longings.  At
night she took to walking out  into the pampa and lying on her  back to look
at the galaxy  above, and sometimes, under the influence of that bright flow
of  beauty,  she  would begin to tremble  all over, to  shudder  with a deep
delight, and to hum an unknown tune, and this star-music was as close as she
came to joy.
     Gibreel  Farishta: felt  her  stories  winding  round him like  a  web,
holding him in that  lost  world where  

fifty sat down to dinner every  day,
what  men they were, our gauchos,  nothing  servile there,  very  fierce and
proud,  very. Pure carnivores; you can see it  in  the  pictures.

 During the
long nights of their insomnia she told  him  about the heat-haze that  would
come over the pampa so that the few trees stood out like islands and a rider
looked like a mythological being, galloping across the surface of the ocean.

It was like the ghost of the sea.

 She told him campfire stories, for example
about  the atheist  gaucho who disproved Paradise, when his mother  died, by
calling upon  her spirit to return,  every night for seven  nights.  On  the
eighth night he announced that she had obviously not heard him, or she would
certainly have come to console her beloved son; therefore, death must be the
end. She snared him in  descriptions of  the days when the Peron people came
in their white  suits  and slicked down hair and the  peons chased them off,
she told  him how the  railroads  were built by the Anglos to service  their
estancias,  and  the  dams,  too,  the  story,  for example, of  her  friend
Claudette,  'a real heartbreaker, my dear, married an engineer chap  name of
Granger, disappointed half the Hurlingham. Off they went to some dam he  was
building, and next  thing they heard, the rebels were coming  to blow it up.
Granger went with the men to guard the dam, leaving Claudette alone with the
maid, and wouldn't you know, a  few hours  later,  the  maid  came  running,
senora,  ees one hombre at  the  door, ees as  beeg as a house. What else? A
rebel captain. - 'And your spouse, madame?' - 'Waiting for  you at  the dam,
as he should  be.'  - 'Then since he has not  seen  fit  to protect you, the
revolution will.' And he  left  guards outside the house,  my  dear, quite a
thing.  But in the fighting both men were  killed,  husband and  captain and
Claudette insisted on a joint funeral, watched the two coffins going side by
side into the ground,  mourned for  them both. After that we knew she  was a
dangerous lot, 

trop fatale,

 eh? What? 

Trop

 jolly  

fatale.'

 In the tall story
of  the beautiful Claudette, Gibreel heard the music of Rosa's own longings.
At such moments he would catch sight of her looking at him from  the corners
of  her eyes, and  he would feel a tugging in the region of his navel, as if
something were trying to come  out.  Then she looked away, and the sensation
faded. Perhaps it was only a side-effect of stress.
     He asked her one night if she had  seen  the horns growing on Chamcha's
head, but she  went  deaf and, instead of answering, told  him how she would
sit  on a camp stool by  the galpon or bull-pen at  Los Alamos and the prize
bulls would come up and lay their horned heads in her lap.  One afternoon  a
girl  named Aurora  del Sol, who was the fiancee of  Martin  de la Cruz, let
fall a saucy remark: I thought they only  did that in  the laps of  virgins,
she stage-whispered to her giggling friends, and Rosa turned to her  sweetly
and  replied, Then perhaps, my dear, you  would like to  try? From that time
Aurora del Sol, the best dancer at the  estancia  and  the most desirable of
all the  peon women, became the deadly enemy of the too-tall, too-bony woman
from over the sea.
     'You  look  just like  him,' Rosa  Diamond said  as they  stood at  her
night-time window, side  by side, looking out to sea. 'His double. Martin de
la Cruz.' At the mention of the cowboy's name Gibreel felt so violent a pain
in his navel,  a  pulling  pain,  as if somebody  had stuck a  hook  in  his
stomach, that  a  cry  escaped his lips. Rosa  Diamond appeared not to hear.
'Look,' she cried happily, 'over there.'
     Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower
and the holiday camp, - running along the water's edge so that the  incoming
tide washed  away its footprints, - swerving and  feinting, running  for its
life, there  came  a  full-grown, large-as-life  ostrich. Down the beach  it
fled, and  Gibreel's eyes followed it in  wonder, until  he could no  longer
make it out in the dark.
     The  next thing that happened took place in the  village. They had gone
into town  to  collect a cake  and  a bottle of champagne, because  Rosa had
remembered  that  it  was her eighty-ninth  birthday.  Her family  had  been
expelled  from  her life, so there  had been  no  cards or  telephone calls.
Gibreel insisted that they should  hold some sort of celebration, and showed
her the secret  inside his  shirt, a fat money-belt full of  pounds sterling
acquired  on  the black  market  before  leaving  Bombay. 'Also credit cards
galore,' he said. 'I am no  indigent  fellow. Come, let us go. My treat.' He
was  now so deeply in  thrall  to  Rosa's narrative  sorcery that he  hardly
remembered  from day to day that he had a life to go to, a woman to surprise
by the simple fact of  his being alive, or any  such thing.  Trailing behind
her meekly, he carried Mrs Diamond's shopping-bags.
     He was  loafing around  on a street  corner while  Rosa chatted  to the
baker when  he felt, once again, that  dragging hook in his stomach, and  he
fell against a lamp-post and gasped for air. He heard a clip-clopping noise,
and  then around the corner came an archaic  pony-trap, full of young people
in what  seemed  at first  sight  to be fancy dress:  the men in tight black
trousers  studded at the calf  with silver buttons, their white  shirts open
almost to  the  waist;  the women in wide skirts  of frills  and layers  and
bright colours,  scarlet, emerald,  gold.  They  were singing in  a  foreign
language  and their gaiety made the street look  dim and tawdry, but Gibreel
realized  that something weird was afoot, because  nobody else in the street
took  the  slightest notice  of  the  pony-trap. Then  Rosa emerged from the
baker's with  the cake-box dangling by its ribbon  from the index  finger of
her left  hand, and exclaimed: 'Oh, there they are, arriving  for the dance.
We  always  had dances, you  know,  they like it, it's in their blood.' And,
after a pause: 'That was the dance at which he killed the vulture.'
     That was the dance at which a certain Juan Julia, nicknamed The Vulture
on account  of his cadaverous appearance,  drank too  much  and insulted the
honour of Aurora del Sol, and didn't stop until Martin had no  option but to
fight, 

hey Martin, why you enjoy fucking with this one,  I thought  she  was
pretty dull.

 'Let  us  go  away  from the dancing,' Martin said, and in  the
darkness, silhouetted  against  the fairy-lights hung  from the trees around
the  dance-floor, the  two men wrapped  ponchas around their forearms,  drew
their knives, circled, fought. Juan died. Martin de la  Cruz picked  up  the
dead man's hat and threw it at the feet of Aurora del Sol. She picked up the
hat and watched him walk away.
     Rosa Diamond at  eighty-nine  in  a  long silver  sheath dress  with  a
cigarette holder in  one gloved hand and a silver turban  on her  head drank
gin-and-sin  from  a green glass triangle and  told stories of the good  old
days. 'I want to dance,' she  announced  suddenly.  'It's  my birthday and I
haven't danced once.'
     The exertions of that night on which Rosa and Gibreel danced until dawn
proved too much for the old lady, who collapsed into bed the next day with a
low fever that induced ever more delirious apparitions:  Gibreel saw  Martin
de la Cruz and Aurora del Sol dancing flamenco on the tiled and gabled  roof
of the Diamond house, and Peronistas in white suits stood  on the boat-house
to address a  gathering of peons about the future:  'Under Peron these lands
will be expropriated and distributed among the people. The British railroads
also  will become the property  of  the  state. Let's chuck them out,  these
brigands, these privateers . .  .' The plaster bust of Henry Diamond hung in
mid-air, observing the scene,  and a white-suited agitator  pointed a finger
at him  and cried, That's him, your oppressor; there is the enemy. Gibreel's
stomach ached  so badly that he feared for  his life, but at the very moment
that his  rational  mind  was  considering the  possibility of an  ulcer  or
appendicitis, the rest  of his  brain whispered the truth, which was that he
was being held prisoner and manipulated by the force of Rosa's will, just as
the Angel Gibreel had been obliged  to speak by the overwhelming need of the
Prophet, Mahound.
     'She's  dying,' he  realized. 'Not long  to go, either.' Tossing in her
bed in  the  fever's grip  Rosa Diamond muttered about  ombu poison  and the
enmity of her  neighbour Doctor  Babington,  who asked Henry,  is your  wife
perhaps quiet enough for the pastoral life, and who  gave her (as a  present
for  recovering from typhus)  a copy  of Amerigo  Vespucci's  account of his
voyages. 'The man was  a notorious fantasist, of  course,' Babington smiled,
'but fantasy  can be stronger than fact; after all, he  had continents named
after him.' As  she grew weaker she  poured more  and more  of her remaining
strength into her own dream of Argentina, and Gibreel's navel felt as  if it
had been set on fire. He lay slumped in an armchair at her  bedside  and the
apparitions multiplied by the hour. Woodwind music filled the air, and, most
wonderful of all, a small  white island appeared just off the shore, bobbing
on the waves like  a raft; it was white  as snow, with white sand sloping up
to  a clump of albino trees,  which were white, chalk-white, paper-white, to
the very tips of their leaves.
     After the  arrival of the  white island Gibreel was overcome by a  deep
lethargy.  Slumped  in an armchair  in  the bedroom of the dying woman,  his
eyelids drooping, he felt the weight of his body increase until all movement
became impossible. Then he was in another  bedroom, in tight black trousers,
with silver buttons along the calves and a heavy silver buckle at the waist.

You  sent for me, Don Enrique,

  he was saying to the soft, heavy man  with a
face like a  white plaster bust,  but he knew who  had asked for him, and he
never took  his  eyes from her face, even when he saw the colour rising from
the white frill around her neck.
     Henry Diamond had refused to permit the authorities to  become involved
in the matter of Martin de la  Cruz, 

these  people are my responsibility,

 he
told Rosa, 

it  is a question of honour.

 Instead he had gone  to some lengths
to  demonstrate his continuing trust in the killer, de  la Cruz, for example
by  making him  the captain of  the estancia polo team. But Don Enrique  was
never really  the same  once Martin had  killed the Vulture. He was more and
more easily  exhausted,  and  became  listless, uninterested even  in birds.
Things began to come apart at Los Alamos, imperceptibly at first,  then more
obviously. The  men  in the  white suits returned  and were not chased away.
When Rosa Diamond  contracted typhus, there  were  many at the estancia  who
took it for an allegory of the old estate's decline.
     

What am  I  doing here,

 Gibreel  thought in great  alarm,  as  he stood
before Don Enrique in  the  rancher's study,  while Dona Rosa blushed in the
background, 

this is  someone else's place.  -

Great confidence in  you, Henry
was saying,  not in English but Gibreel could still understand. - My wife is
to undertake a motor tour, for her convalescence, and you will accompany . .
. Responsibilities at Los  Alamos prevent me from  going  along.  

Now I must
speak, what to  say,

 but when his mouth  opened  the alien words emerged, it
will be my honour, Don Enrique, click of heels, swivel, exit.
     Rosa  Diamond in her  eighty-nine-year-old weakness had begun  to dream
her story of stones, which she had guarded for more than half a century, and
Gibreel was  on  a horse  behind her Hispano-Suiza, driving from estancia to
estancia, through  a wood of arayana  trees, beneath  the  high  cordillera,
arriving at grotesque homesteads built in  the style  of Scottish castles or
Indian palaces, visiting the land of  Mr. Cadwallader Evans, he of the seven
wives  who were happy enough to have only  one night of duty each  per week,
and the territory of the notorious MacSween who had  become enamoured of the
ideas arriving in  Argentina from  Germany, and had started flying, from his
estancia's flagpole, a red flag at whose  heart a crooked black cross danced
in a white circle. It was on the MacSween estancia that they came across the
lagoon, and  Rosa saw for the  first time the white  island of her fate, and
insisted  on  rowing out for a picnic  luncheon, accompanied neither by maid
nor  by  chauffeur, taking only Martin  de la  Cruz to row the  boat  and to
spread a  scarlet cloth upon the white sand and  to serve her with meat  and
wine. 

As  white  as snow and  as red as blood and as black as ebony.

 As  she
reclined  in  black skirt  and white blouse, lying upon scarlet which itself
lay over white, while he (also wearing black and white) poured red wine into
the glass in her white-gloved hand,  -  and  then,  to his own astonishment,

bloody  goddamn,

 as he caught  at  her hand and  began  to kiss, - something
happened, the scene  grew blurred, one minute they were lying on the scarlet
cloth, rolling all over  it  so  that  cheeses and cold  cuts and salads and
pates  were  crushed  beneath the  weight of  their  desire,  and when  they
returned to  the  Hispano-Suiza  it was impossible to  conceal anything from
chauffeur or  maid  on  account of the foodstains  all over their clothes, -
while  the  next  minute she  was  recoiling  from him,  not cruelly but  in
sadness, drawing her hand away and  making a  tiny  gesture of the head, 

no,

and he stood, bowed,  retreated, leaving her with virtue and lunch intact, -
the two possibilities kept alternating, while  dying Rosa tossed on her bed,
did-she-didn't-she, making the last version of the story of her life, unable
to decide what she wanted to be true.
     'I'm going  crazy,'  Gibreel thought. 'She's  dying, but  I'm losing my
mind.'  The moon  was out, and Rosa's breathing  was  the  only sound in the
room: snoring as she breathed in and  exhaling heavily, with  small grunting
noises. Gibreel tried to rise from his chair, and found he  could not.  Even
in these  intervals between the  visions his body remained impossibly heavy.
As if a boulder had  been  placed upon his chest. And the images, when  they
came, continued to be confused, so that at one moment he was in a hayloft at
Los Alamos, making  love to her while  she murmured his name, over and over,

Martin of the  Cross,  -

 and the next moment  she was ignoring him  in broad
daylight beneath the watching eyes of a certain Aurora del Sol, - so that it
was   not  possible   to   distinguish  memory   from   wishes,   or  guilty
reconstructions from  confessional truths,  -  because  even on her deathbed
Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye.
     Moonlight streamed into the room. As it struck Rosa's face it  appeared
to pass right  through  her, and indeed  Gibreel was beginning to be able to
make  out the pattern of the lace embroidery  on her pillowcase. Then he saw
Don Enrique and his friend, the  puritanical  and disapproving Dr Babington,
standing on the balcony, as solid as you could wish. It occurred to him that
as the  apparitions increased  in  clarity  Rosa  grew fainter and  fainter,
fading away, exchanging places, one  might say, with the ghosts. And because
he  had  also  understood that  the  manifestations  depended  on  him,  his
stomach-ache, his stone-like weightiness, he began to fear for  his own life
as well.
     'You wanted me to falsify Juan Julia's death certificate,' Dr Babington
was  saying. 'I did so out of our old friendship. But it was wrong to do so;
and I see the result before  me.  You have  sheltered a  killer and  it  is,
perhaps, your conscience that is eating you away. Go home, Enrique. Go home,
and take that wife of yours, before something worse happens.'
     'I am home,' Henry Diamond said. 'And I take exception  to your mention
of my wife.'
     'Wherever the English  settle, they never  leave England,' Dr Babington
said as  he faded into the moonlight. 'Unless,  like Dona Rosa, they fall in
love.'
     A cloud passed across the moonlight, and now that the balcony was empty
Gibreel Farishta finally managed to force himself out of the chair and on to
his  feet. Walking was like dragging a ball and chain across the floor,  but
he reached the window. In every direction, and as far as he could see, there
were giant  thistles waving in the breeze. Where the sea had been there  was
now an ocean of thistles,  extending as far as the horizon, thistles as high
as a full-grown  man. He heard the disembodied voice of Dr  Babington mutter
in  his  ear:  'The first plague of  thistles for fifty years.  The past, it
seems, returns.' He saw a woman  running through the thick, rippling growth,
barefoot,  with  loose dark  hair. 'She did it,' Rosa's  voice  said clearly
behind him.  'After  betraying him  with  the Vulture and making him into  a
murderer. He wouldn't look at her after that. Oh, she did it all right. Very
dangerous one, that one. Very.' Gibreel lost  sight of Aurora del Sol in the
thistles; one mirage obscured another.
     He felt something grab him  from behind, spin him  around and fling him
flat on his  back. There was nobody to be seen, but Rosa Diamond was sitting
bolt  upright in bed,  staring at him wide-eyed, making him understand  that
she had given up  hope of  clinging on  to life, and needed him to help  her
complete the last revelation. As with the businessman of his dreams, he felt
helpless, ignorant . . . she seemed to know, however, how to draw the images
from him. Linking the two of them, navel to navel, he saw a shining cord.
     Now he was by  a pond in the  infinity of  the  thistles,  allowing his
horse to  drink,  and  she came  riding up on her mare. Now he was embracing
her, loosening her garments and her hair, and now they were making love. Now
she was whispering, how can you like me, I am so much older than you, and he
spoke comforting words.
     Now  she  rose, dressed,  rode away,  while he remained there, his body
languid and warm, failing to notice the moment when a woman's hand stole out
of the thistles and took hold of his silver-hafted knife . . .
     No! No! No, this way!
     Now  she  rode  up to him by  the pond, and  the moment she dismounted,
looking nervously at him, he fell upon her, he told her he couldn't bear her
rejections any longer,  they fell to the ground together, she  screamed,  he
tore  at her  clothes, and  her  hands, clawing  at his  body, came upon the
handle of a knife . . .
     No! No, never, no! This way: here!
     Now the  two  of them  were  making  love,  tenderly,  with  many  slow
caresses;  and now a third rider entered the clearing  by the pool,  and the
lovers rushed  apart; now Don Enrique drew his small pistol and aimed at his
rival's heart, -
     -  and he felt Aurora stabbing him in the heart, over and over, this is
for Juan,  and this is for abandoning me, and this is for your grand English
whore, -
     - and he  felt his victim's knife entering  his  heart, as Rosa stabbed
him, once, twice, and again, -
     - and after Henry's bullet had killed him the Englishman took  the dead
man's knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound.
     Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point.
     When he regained his senses  the old  woman in the  bed was speaking to
herself, so  softly that he  could barely make  out the words. 'The  pampero
came,  the south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That's when they  found
him,  or was it before.'  The last of the story. How Aurora del  Sol spat in
Rosa Diamond's face at the funeral of Martin de la Cruz. How it was arranged
that nobody was to be charged for the murder,  on condition that Don Enrique
took  Dona Rosa and returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the
train at  the Los  Alamos station and  the men  in white suits stood on  the
platform, wearing borsalino hats, making sure  they really left.  How,  once
the train  had started  moving, Rosa Diamond  opened the holdall on the seat
beside her, and said defiantly, 

I brought something.  A little souvenir.

 And
unwrapped a cloth bundle to reveal a gaucho's silver-hafted knife.
     'Henry died the first  winter home. Then nothing happened. The war. The
end.' She paused. 'To diminish into  this,  after being in that vastness. It
isn't to be borne.' And, after a further silence: 'Everything shrinks.'
     There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt  a weight lifting
from him, so rapidly that he thought he might float  up towards the ceiling.
Rosa  Diamond  lay  still,  eyes closed, her  arms  resting on the patchwork
counterpane. She looked: 

normal.

 Gibreel realized that there was nothing  to
prevent him from walking out of the door.
     He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady;
found the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to  Henry Diamond,
and  the grey felt  trilby inside which Don Enrique's  name had been sewn by
his wife's own  hand;  and left,  without looking back.  The  moment he  got
outside  a  wind snatched  his hat and sent it skipping down  the beach.  He
chased it, caught it, jammed it back on. 

London shareef, here I come.

 He had
the city in his pocket: Geographers' London, the whole dog-eared metropolis,
A to Z.
     'What to do?' he was thinking.  'Phone  or not phone? No, just turn up,
ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea  bed to your bed,
takes  more than a plane  crash to keep me away from you. -  Okay, maybe not
quite, but words to that effect. - Yes. Surprise is  the best policy.  Allie
Bibi, boo to you.'
     Then he  heard the singing. It was coming from the old boat-house  with
the one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and  the  song was  foreign, but
familiar: a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was
familiar, although  a little different, less quavery; 

younger.

 The boathouse
door was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in  the wind. He  went  towards
the song.
     'Take your coat  off,' she said. She was dressed as she had been on the
day of the white island: black skirt  and boots, white silk blouse, hatless.
He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing
in the confined, moonlit space.  She  lay down amid the random clutter of an
English life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding
table, trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side.
     'How can you like me?' she murmured. 'I am so much older than you.'
     

3


     hen they pulled  his  pyjamas down in the windowless  police van and he
saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha
broke down for  the second time that night; this time, however,  he began to
giggle  hysterically, infected, perhaps, by  the continuing hilarity  of his
captors. The three  immigration officers were in particularly high  spirits,
and it was one  of these - the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was
Stein  - who had 'de-bagged'  Saladin  with  a merry cry of, 'Opening  time,
Packy; let's see what  you're made of!'  Red-and-white stripes  were dragged
off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the  van  with
two  stout  policemen holding  each arm and a fifth  constable's boot placed
firmly  upon  his chest,  and  whose  protests went  unheard  in the general
mirthful din. His horns kept  banging  against things,  the  wheel-arch, the
uncarpeted  floor or  a policeman's  shin  - on these last occasions he  was
soundly buffeted about the face  by the understandably irate law-enforcement
officer  - and he was, in  sum,  in as miserably  low  spirits  as  he could
recall. Nevertheless, when he saw what lay beneath his borrowed  pyjamas, he
could not prevent that disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth.
     His thighs had grown uncommonly  wide and powerful, as well  as  hairy.
Below  the knee  the  hairiness came to a halt,  and his legs narrowed  into
tough, bony, almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven
hoofs, such as  one might  find on  any  billy-goat.  Saladin was also taken
aback  by  the  sight of  his phallus,  greatly enlarged and  embarrassingly
erect, an organ that  he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his
own. 'What's  this, then?' joked Novak - the former 'Hisser' -  giving  it a
playful tweak. 'Fancy one of us, maybe?' Whereupon the 'moaning' immigration
officer, Joe  Bruno,  slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and shouted,
'Nah,  that ain't it. Seems like we really got his goat.'  'I get it,' Novak
shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged
testicles. 'Hey! Hey!' howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. 'Listen, here's
an even better ... no wonder he's so fucking 

horny.'

     At  which the three of  them, repeating many times 'Got  his goat . . .
horny . . .' fell into one another's arms and  howled with  delight. Chamcha
wanted to speak,  but was afraid that he would  find  his voice mutated into
goat-bleats, and,  besides, the policeman's boot had begun  to  press harder
than  ever on his  chest, and  it was hard to  form any  words. What puzzled
Chamcha  was that a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and
unprecedented - that is,  his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp - was
being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter
they could imagine.  'This isn't England,' he  thought, not for the first or
last  time.  How  could it be, after all; where  in  all  that  moderate and
common-sensical land was there  room for such a police van in whose interior
such events as these might plausibly  transpire? He was being forced towards
the conclusion that he had indeed  died in the exploding aeroplane and  that
everything that followed had been  some sort of after-life. If that were the
case, his long-standing rejection  of  the  Eternal  was beginning  to  look
pretty foolish.  - But where,  in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being,
whether benevolent or malign? Why  did  Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this
place might be, look  so much  like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which
every  schoolboy knew? -  Perhaps, it occurred to  him, he had not  actually
perished in the 

Bostan

 disaster, but was  lying gravely ill in some hospital
ward, plagued by  delirious dreams? This  explanation  appealed to  him, not
least because it  unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call,
and a  man's voice  that he was trying,  unsuccessfully, to forget . .  . He
felt a sharp kick land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him
doubt  the  truth  of  all  such  hallucination-theories.  He  returned  his
attention  to  the actual,  to this  present comprising  a sealed police van
containing three immigration  officers and  five policemen that was, for the
moment  at any  rate, all the  universe he  possessed. It  was a universe of
fear.
     Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. 'Animal,' Stein
cursed  him  as he administered  a series  of kicks,  and Bruno  joined  in:
'You're all the  same. Can't expect animals to observe  civilized standards.
Eh?' And Novak took up the  thread:  'We're talking about  fucking  personal
hygiene here, you little fuck.'
     Chamcha was  mystified. Then he noticed that a large  number  of  soft,
pellety objects had appeared  on  the  floor  of the Black  Maria.  He  felt
consumed by bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his  natural processes
were goatish now.  The humiliation of it!  He was - had gone to some lengths
to become  

-

 a  sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all  very well
for riff-raff  from  villages  in  Sylhet  or the  bicycle-repair  shops  of
Gujranwala, but  he was  cut from  different  cloth! 'My  good  fellows,' he
began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off
from that  undignified position on  his back  with his hoofy legs wide apart
and a  soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, 'my good fellows, you
had best understand your mistake before it's too late.'
     Novak cupped a  hand behind an ear. 'What's that? What was that noise?'
he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, 'Search me.'  'Tell you what
it sounded like,' Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth
he  bellowed: 'Maa-aa-aa!' Then the three of them all laughed once  more, so
that Saladin had  no way of telling if  they were simply insulting him or if
his vocal  cords had  truly  been  infected, as he  feared, by this  macabre
demoniasis that had overcome him without the slightest warning. He had begun
to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.
     The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at
least  the primus  inter pares,  returned  abruptly to  the subject  of  the
pellety  refuse  rolling  around  the  floor  of  the  moving van.  'In this
country,' he informed Saladin, 'we clean up our messes.'
     The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him  into  a kneeling
position.  'That's  right,' said Novak,  'clean  it up.' Joe  Bruno placed a
large hand  behind  Chamcha's neck  and  pushed his  head  down  towards the
pellet-littered floor. 'Off you go,'  he  said, in  a  conversational voice.
'Sooner you start, sooner you'll polish it off.'
     Even  as  he was  performing (having no  option) the latest and  basest
ritual of his  unwarranted humiliation, - or, to  put it another way, as the
circumstances  of his  miraculously  spared life grew ever more infernal and
outre - Saladin Chamcha began to notice  that the three immigration officers
no longer looked or acted nearly as  strangely as  at  first. For one thing,
they no longer  resembled one another in  the slightest. Officer Stein, whom
his colleagues called 'Mack' or  'Jockey',  turned out to  be a large, burly
man with a thick  roller-coaster  of a nose;  his accent, it now transpired,
was exaggeratedly Scottish. 'Tha's the ticket,'  he remarked  approvingly as
Chamcha  munched miserably on. 'An actor, was it?  I'm partial to watchin' a
guid man perform.'
     This observation prompted  Officer Novak  - that  is, 'Kim'  - who  had
acquired an  alarmingly  pallid  colouring, an ascetically  bony  face  that
reminded  one  of medieval  icons, and a  frown suggesting some  deep  inner
torment, to burst into a  short peroration  about  his favourite  television
soap-opera  stars and  game-show hosts,  while  Officer  Bruno,  who  struck
Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny
with  styling  gel  and  centrally  divided,  his  blond  beard  contrasting
dramatically with the darker hair on his head, - Bruno, the  youngest of the
three, asked  lasciviously, what about watchin' girls, then, that's my game.
This new notion  set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed
anecdotes  pregnant  with suggestions  of a  certain type, but when the five
policemen attempted to  join  in they  joined ranks, grew stern, and put the
constables  in their  places. 'Little  children,' Mr. Stein admonished them,
'should be seen an' no hearrud.'
     By this time Chamcha was gagging violently on his meal, forcing himself
not to vomit, knowing  that  such an error would only prolong his misery. He
was crawling about on the floor of  the van, seeking  out the pellets of his
torture as they rolled from  side to side,  and the  policemen,  needing  an
outlet for the  frustration engendered by  the immigration officer's rebuke,
began to  abuse Saladin roundly  and pull  the hair on his rump to  increase
both his discomfort and his discomfiture. Then the five  policemen defiantly
started up their own version of  the immigration officers' conversation, and
set  to  analysing  the  merits   of  divers  movie  stars,  darts  players,
professional  wrestlers and  the like;  but because they had been put into a
bad humour by the loftiness of  'Jockey' Stein, they were unable to maintain
the  abstract  and  intellectual  tone  of  their  superiors,  and  fell  to
quarrelling over  the relative merits of the Tottenham Hotspur 'double' team
of  the early  1960s  and the mighty Liverpool side of the present day, - in
which the Liverpool  supporters incensed the Spurs fans by alleging that the
great Danny Blanchflower was  a  'luxury' player,  a  cream puff, flower  by
name, pansy by nature; - whereupon the offended claque responded by shouting
that in the case of Liverpool  it was  the supporters who were the bum-boys,
the Spurs mob could take them apart with their arms tied behind their backs.
Of course all the constables  were familiar  with the techniques of football
hooligans, having spent many Saturdays with their backs to the game watching
the spectators in the various stadiums up and down the country, and as their
argument grew heated  they reached the point of  wishing to  demonstrate, to
their  opposing  colleagues,  exactly what  they  meant by  'tearing apart',
'bollocking',  'bottling' and the  like.  The angry  factions glared at  one
another and then, all together,  they  turned  to  gaze upon  the  person of
Saladin Chamcha.
     Well, the ruckus in that police  van  grew  noisier  and noisier, - and
it's true  to say that Chamcha was  partly to blame, because he  had started
squealing like  a pig,  - and  the young bobbies were  thumping and  gouging
various  parts of  his  anatomy, using  him  both  as  a  guinea-pig  and  a
safety-valve,  remaining  careful, in  spite of their excitation, to confine
their  blows  to his softer,  more  fleshy parts, to  minimize  the risk  of
breakages and bruises; and when  Jockey, Kim and Joey saw what their juniors
were getting up to, they chose to be tolerant, because boys would have their
fun.
     Besides,  all this talk of watching had brought Stein,  Bruno and Novak
round to an examination of weightier matters, and now, with solemn faces and
judicious voices, they were speaking  of the  need, in this day and age, for
an increase in observation, not merely in  the sense of 'spectating', but in
that of 'watchfulness', and 'surveillance'. The young constables' experience
was  extremely relevant,  Stein  intoned:  watch the  crowd,  not the  game.
'Eternal vigilance is the price o' liberty,' he proclaimed.
     'Eek,'  cried  Chamcha,  unable  to  avoid interrupting. 'Aargh, unnhh,
owoo.'
     After a time  a curious  mood  of  detachment fell upon Saladin. He  no
longer had any  idea of how long they had been travelling in the Black Maria
of his hard fall  from grace,  nor could  he have hazarded a guess as to the
proximity of  their ultimate  destination, even though  the tinnitus in  his
ears was growing gradually louder, those phantasmal grandmother's footsteps,
ellowen,  deeowen, London. The blows raining down on him now felt as soft as
a  lover's  caresses;  the  grotesque sight of his own metamorphosed body no
longer appalled him;  even the last pellets of goat-excrement failed to stir
his much-abused  stomach.  Numbly,  he  crouched  down in his  little world,
trying  to make himself smaller  and  smaller,  in the  hope that  he  might
eventually disappear altogether, and so regain his freedom.
     The talk  of surveillance techniques had  reunited immigration officers
and  policemen,  healing  the  breach  caused  by Jockey  Stein's  words  of
puritanical reproof. Chamcha, the  insect on the floor of the van, heard, as
if through a telephone scrambler, the faraway voices of his captors speaking
eagerly of the  need for more video equipment at  public events and  of  the
benefits of computerized information, and, in what appeared to be a complete
contradiction, of the efficacy of placing too rich a mixture in the nosebags
of  police  horses  on  the  night before a big match,  because when  equine
stomach-upsets  led to the  marchers  being  showered  with  shit it  always
provoked them into violence, 

an' then we can really get  amongst them, can't
we just.

  Unable  to find a  way  of making  this  universe  of soap operas,
matchoftheday,  cloaks and  daggers  cohere  into  any  recognizable  whole,
Chamcha closed his ears to the chatter  and listened to the footsteps in his
ears.
     Then the penny dropped. 'Ask the Computer!'
     Three  immigration  officers  and  five  policemen fell  silent as  the
foul-smelling creature sat  up and hollered  at  them. 'What's he on about?'
asked the  youngest policeman -  one of  the  Tottenham  supporters,  as  it
happened - doubtfully. 'Shall I fetch him another whack?'
     'My name is Salahuddin Chamchawala, professional name Saladin Chamcha,'
the  demi-goat gibbered.  'I am a member  of Actors' Equity,  the Automobile
Association and the Garrick Club. My car registration number is suchandsuch.
Ask the Computer. Please.'
     'Who're you trying to kid?' inquired one of the Liverpool fans, but he,
too, sounded uncertain.  'Look at  yourself. You're a  fucking  Packy billy.
Sally-who? - What kind of name is that for an Englishman?'
     Chamcha found a scrap of  anger  from somewhere. 'And what about them?'
he demanded, jerking his head at the immigration officers. 'They don't sound
so Anglo-Saxon to me.'
     For a moment  it  seemed that they might all fall upon him and tear him
limb from limb for such  temerity,  but  at length  the  skull-faced Officer
Novak  merely  slapped  his  face  a few  times  while replying,  'I'm  from
Weybridge, you cunt.  Get  it straight: 

Wey

bridge, where the fucking 

Beatles

used to live.'
     Stein said: 'Better check him out.' Three and a half  minutes later the
Black Maria  came to a halt and three immigration officers,  five constables
and one  police  driver held a crisis  conference  - 

here's a pretty  effing
pickle -

 and Chamcha noted that in their new mood all nine had begun to look
alike, rendered equal and  identical by their  tension and fear. Nor was  it
long before he  understood  that the call to the Police  National  Computer,
which had promptly identified him as  a British Citizen first class, had not
improved his situation, but had placed  him,  if anything, in greater danger
than before.
     -  We  could say,  - one  of the nine  suggested, - that  he was  lying
unconscious on the beach. - Won't work, - came the reply, on  account of the
old  lady  and the other geezer. -  Then he resisted arrest and turned nasty
and  in the  ensuing altercation  he  kind of fainted. - Or  the old bag was
ga-ga, made no sense to  any of us, and the other guy  wossname never  spoke
up,  and as for this bugger, you only have to clock  the bleeder, looks like
the  very devil,  what  were we supposed to  think? - And  then he went  and
passed out  on us,  so what  could  we do, in all fairness, I ask you,  your
honour, but  bring  him in to the  medical facility at the Detention Centre,
for  proper  care  followed  by  observation  and  questioning,   using  our
reason-to-believe  guidelines;  what  do  you  reckon on  something  of that
nature? - It's nine against one, but the old biddy and the second bloke make
it a bit of a bastard. - Look, we can fix the tale later, first thing like I
keep saying is to get him unconscious. - Right.
     Chamcha woke up in  a hospital bed  with green slime coming up from his
lungs. His bones felt as  if somebody had put them in  the icebox for a long
while. He began to cough, and when the fit ended nineteen and a half minutes
later he fell back into a shallow,  sickly sleep without having taken in any
aspect of his present whereabouts. When he surfaced again a friendly woman's
face was looking  down at him, smiling reassuringly. 'You goin to  be fine,'
she said, patting him on the shoulder. 'A lickle pneumonia is  all you got.'
She introduced herself as his physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. And added,
'I never  judge  a person by appearances. No, sir.  Don't you go thinking  I
do.'
     With that, she rolled him over on to his side, placed a small cardboard
box by his lips, hitched up her white housecoat, kicked off  her  shoes, and
leaped athletically on to the bed  to  sit astride him, for all the world as
if  he were a  horse  that  she meant to  ride  right  through  the  screens
surrounding his bed and out into goodness knew what manner of transmogrified
landscape. 'Doctor's orders,' she explained. 'Thirty-minute sessions,  twice
a day.' Without further preamble, she began pummelling him briskly about the
middle body, with lightly clenched, but evidently expert, fists.
     For poor Saladin, fresh from  his beating  in the police  van, this new
assault was the last straw. He began to struggle beneath her pounding fists,
crying  loudly, 'Let  me  out of  here;  has anybody informed  my wife?' The
effort of shouting out induced a second coughing spasm that lasted seventeen
and  three-quarter   minutes  and  earned  him   a  telling  off   from  the
physiotherapist, Hyacinth. 'You wastin my time,' she said. 'I should be done
with your right lung by now and instead I  hardly get started. You go behave
or not?' She had  remained on the  bed, straddling him, bouncing up and down
as  his body convulsed,  like a  rodeo rider hanging on for the  nine-second
bell. He subsided in defeat, and allowed her to beat the green  fluid out of
his inflamed lungs. When she finished he was obliged to admit that he felt a
good deal better.  She removed the  little box which  was  now half-full  of
slime  and said  cheerily, 'You be standin  up  firm in no  time,' and then,
colouring   in  confusion,  apologized,   'Excuse  

me,'

  and   fled  without
remembering to pull back the encircling screens.
     'Time  to  take  stock  of the  situation,' he  told  himself.  A quick
physical  examination  informed  him  that  his new,  mutant  condition  had
remained unchanged. This cast his  spirits down, and he realized that he had
been  half-hoping that the nightmare would have ended while he slept. He was
dressed  in a new pair of alien  pyjamas, this  time of an  undifferentiated
pale green colour, which matched both the fabric of the  screens and what he
could see of the walls and ceiling of that  cryptic and anonymous  ward. His
legs still  ended in those distressing hoofs, and the horns on his head were
as sharp  as before ...  he was distracted from this  morose inventory  by a
man's voice from nearby, crying out in heart-rending  distress: 'Oh, if ever
a body suffered . . . !'
     'What on earth?' Chamcha  thought,  and  determined to investigate. But
now he was becoming aware of many other sounds, as unsettling as the  first.
It seemed to him that he could hear all sorts of animal noises: the snorting
of  bulls, the chattering of monkeys, even the pretty-polly mimic-squawks of
parrots  or talking budgerigars.  Then, from another direction, he  heard  a
woman  grunting and  shrieking,  at  what sounded  like the end of a painful
labour; followed by  the yowling  of a  new-born baby. However,  the woman's
cries did not subside when the baby's  began; if anything, they redoubled in
their intensity, and perhaps fifteen  minutes later Chamcha distinctly heard
a second  infant's  voice joining  the first.  Still the woman's birth-agony
refused to end, and at intervals ranging from fifteen  to thirty minutes for
what seemed  like an endless time she continued  to  add  new babies to  the
already improbable numbers marching, like conquering armies, from her womb.
     His nose informed him that the sanatorium, or whatever the place called
itself,  was also  beginning  to  stink to the  heavens; jungle and farmyard
odours mingled with a rich  aroma similar to that  of exotic spices sizzling
in  clarified  butter -  coriander,  turmeric,  cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves.
'This  is too much,' he thought  firmly.  'Time to  get a  few things sorted
out.' He swung his legs out of bed, tried  to stand up, and promptly fell to
the floor, being utterly unaccustomed to his new legs. It took him around an
hour  to overcome this  problem - learning to  walk by holding on to the bed
and  stumbling around it  until his confidence grew.  At  length, and not  a
little unsteadily, he made his way to the nearest screen; whereupon the face
of the immigration officer Stein appeared, Cheshire-Cat-like, between two of
the screens to his  left,  followed rapidly  by the rest of the fellow,  who
drew the  screens together  behind  him with suspicious rapidity. 'Doing all
right?'  Stein asked, his smile remaining wide. 'When  can I see the doctor?
When can I  go to  the toilet? When can  I leave?' Chamcha asked in  a rush.
Stein answered equably: the doctor  would be round presently; Nurse Phillips
would  bring him  a  bedpan; he could  leave  as soon  as he was well. 'Damn
decent of you  to  come down with the  lung thing,'  Stein  added,  with the
gratitude of an author  whose  character had  unexpectedly solved a ticklish
technical problem. 'Makes  the  story much more convincing. Seems  you  were
that sick, you did pass out on us after all.  Nine of us  remember  it well.
Thanks.' Chamcha  could not find  any words. 'And another thing,' Stein went
on. 'The old  burd, Mrs. Diamond. Turns out to be dead in  her bed,  cold as
mutton, and the other gentleman vanished clear away. The possibility of foul
play has no as yet been eliminated.'
     'In conclusion,' he said before disappearing forever from Saladin's new
life,  'I  suggest,  Mr.  Citizen  Saladin,  that you  dinna trouble  with a
complaint. You'll forgive me for speaking plain, but with your wee horns and
your great hoofs you wouldna look  the most reliable of witnesses. Good  day
to you now.'
     Saladin Chamcha closed his  eyes  and when he opened them his tormentor
had  turned into the nurse and physiotherapist, Hyacinth  Phillips. 'Why you
wan  go walking?' she  asked. 'Whatever your  heart desires, you jus ask me,
Hyacinth, and we'll see what we can fix.'
     'Ssst.'
     That night, in  the greeny light of the mysterious institution, Saladin
was. awakened by a hiss out of an Indian bazaar.
     'Ssst. You, Beelzebub. Wake up.'
     Standing in front of him was a figure so impossible that Chamcha wanted
to bury his head under the  sheets; yet could not, for was not he himself. .
. ? 'That's right,' the creature said. 'You see, you're not alone.'
     It had  an  entirely human body,  but its  head was that of a ferocious
tiger, with  three rows of teeth.  'The night guards  often  doze  off,'  it
explained. That's how we manage to get to talk.'
     Just then a voice from one of the other beds - each bed, as Chamcha now
knew, was protected by its own ring  of screens -wailed loudly: 'Oh, if ever
a body suffered!' and the man-tiger, or manticore, as it called itself, gave
an exasperated growl. That Moaner Lisa,' it exclaimed. 'All they did to  him
was make him blind.'
     'Who did what?' Chamcha was confused.
     'The point is,' the manticore continued, 'are you going to put up  with
it?'
     Saladin was still puzzled. The other seemed to be suggesting that these
mutations  were the responsibility of - of whom? How could  they  be?  -  'I
don't see,' he ventured, 'who can be blamed...'
     The manticore ground its  three rows of teeth  in evident  frustration.
'There's a woman over  that way,' it said, 'who is now mostly water-buffalo.
There  are businessmen  from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a
group  of holiday makers from Senegal who  were doing no  more than changing
planes  when they were turned  into slippery snakes.  I myself am in the rag
trade; for  some  years  now I have been a highly  paid male model, based in
Bombay, wearing a wide range  of suitings and shirtings  also.  But who will
employ  me now?' he burst into sudden and unexpected tears. 'There,  there,'
said Saladin Chamcha, automatically. 'Everything will be all right, I'm sure
of it. Have courage.'
     The creature composed itself. 'The  point  is,' it said fiercely, 'some
of us aren't going to stand for it. We're going to bust  out of  here before
they turn us into anything worse. Every night I feel a different piece of me
beginning to change.  I've started, for example, to  break  wind continually
... I beg your pardon . . . you see what I mean? By the way, try  these,' he
slipped Chamcha a packet of  extra-strength peppermints. 'They'll  help your
breath. I've bribed one of the guards to bring in a supply.'
     'But how do they do it?' Chamcha wanted to know.
     'They describe  us,'  the other whispered  solemnly. 'That's  all. They
have  the  power  of  description,  and  we succumb  to  the  pictures  they
construct.'
     'It's hard to believe,' Chamcha argued. 'I've lived here for many years
and it  never happened before . . .' His words dried up because he  saw  the
manticore looking at  him through narrow, distrustful eyes. 'Many years?' it
asked. 'How  could that be? - Maybe you're an informer? - Yes, that's it,  a
spy?'
     Just  then a wail  came from a  far  corner of the ward.  'Lemme go,' a
woman's voice howled. 'O Jesus I want  to go.  Jesus Mary I  gotta go, lemme
go, O God, O  Jesus God.' A very lecherous-looking wolf put its head through
Saladin's screens and  spoke urgently to  the manticore. 'The  guards'll  be
here soon,' it hissed. 'It's her again, Glass Bertha.'
     'Glass  .  .  .  ?'  Saladin  began.  'Her skin  turned to  glass,' the
manticore explained impatiently, not knowing  that he was bringing Chamcha's
worst dream to life. 'And the bastards smashed it up for her. Now  she can't
even walk to the toilet.'
     A new voice hissed out across the greeny night. 'For God's sake, woman.
Go in the fucking bedpan.'
     The wolf was pulling the  manticore away. 'Is  he with  us or  not?' it
wanted  to  know. The  manticore shrugged.  'He  can't make up his mind,' it
answered. 'Can't believe his own eyes, that's his trouble.'
     They fled, hearing the approaching crunch of the guards' heavy boots.
     The  next day there was no sign of a  doctor, or of Pamela, and Chamcha
in his utter bewilderment woke and slept as if the two  conditions no longer
required to be thought of as opposites, but as  states  that flowed into and
out of one another to create a kind of unending delirium of the senses... he
found himself dreaming  of the Queen, of making tender love to  the Monarch.
She was the body of Britain, the avatar of the State, and he had chosen her,
joined with her; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight.
     Hyacinth came  at the appointed times to  ride and pummel  him, and  he
submitted  without any fuss.  But when she finished she  whispered  into his
ear: 'You in with the rest?' and he understood that she was involved in  the
great conspiracy, too.  'If you are,' he heard himself saying, 'then you can
count me in.' She nodded, looking pleased. Chamcha felt a warmth filling him
up, and he began to wonder about taking hold of one of the physiotherapist's
exceedingly dainty,  albeit powerful, little fists; but just  then  a  shout
came from the direction of the blind man: 'My stick, I've lost my stick.'
     'Poor  old  bugger,' said  Hyacinth, and hopping off Chamcha she darted
across  to the sightless fellow, picked up the fallen  stick, restored it to
its owner, and came  back to Saladin. 'Now,' she said. I'll see you this pm;
okay, no problems?'
     He wanted her  to stay, but  she  acted brisk, 'I'm  a busy  woman, Mr.
Chamcha. Things to do, people to see.'
     When she had gone he lay back and smiled  for the first  time in a long
while. It did  not occur to  him that his metamorphosis  must be continuing,
because he was  actually entertaining romantic  notions about a black woman;
and before  he had time to think such complex  thoughts, the blind  man next
door began, once again, to speak.
     'I have  noticed you,' Chamcha heard him say, 'I have noticed  you, and
come to appreciate  your kindness and understanding.' Saladin realized  that
he was making a formal speech of thanks to the empty  space where he clearly
believed the physiotherapist was still standing. 'I am not a man who forgets
a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment,
please know  that it is  remembered, and fondly, too . . .'  Chamcha did not
have  the courage to call out,  

she isn't there, old man, she left some time
back.

 He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air
a question:  'I hope,  perhaps,  you  may  also  remember me?  A  little? On
occasion?'  Then came a silence;  a  dry laugh; the  sound of a man  sitting
down, heavily, all  of a  sudden.  And finally, after  an  unbearable pause,
bathos: 'Oh,' the soliloquist bellowed,  'oh, if ever a body suffered .  . .
!'
     We  strive for the heights but our natures betray  us, Chamcha thought;
clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him. 

Once I was lighter,
happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins.

     Still no  Pamela. 

What the hell.

 That night, he  told the manticore and
the wolf that he was with them, all the way.
     The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin's lungs had
been  all but emptied  of  slime  by  the  ministrations  of  Miss  Hyacinth
Phillips.  It turned  out  to  be a well-organized  affair on a pretty large
scale,  involving not only  the  inmates  of the  sanatorium  but  also  the

detenus,

  as the manticore  called  them,  held  behind wire  fences  in the
Detention Centre  nearby. Not being  one  of  the grand  strategists of  the
escape, Chamcha  simply  waited  by  his  bed as  instructed  until Hyacinth
brought  him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the
clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former
guards. There were  many shadowy  figures running through the glowing night,
and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could  never have imagined, men and women who
were also partially plants, or  giant insects,  or  even, on occasion, built
partly of brick  or  stone;  there were men with rhinoceros horns instead of
noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly,
silently,  to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore
and other sharp-toothed mutants were  waiting  by  the large holes  they had
bitten  into the  fabric of  the containing fence, and then  they were  out,
free, going their  separate  ways,  without  hope,  but also without  shame.
Saladin  Chamcha and Hyacinth  Phillips  ran side  by  side, his  goat-hoofs
clip-clopping  on the hard pavements: 

east

 she told him, as he heard his own
footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran,  taking
the low roads to London town.
     

4


     umpy  Joshi had  become  Pamela Chamcha's lover by what  she afterwards
called 'sheer chance' on the night she learned of her husband's death in the

Bostan

 explosion,  so that  the sound of his old  college  friend  Saladin's
voice speaking from beyond  the grave  in the middle of the night,  uttering
the five  gnomic  words  

sorry,  excuse please,  wrong  number, -

  speaking,
moreover, less  than two hours  after Jumpy  and  Pamela had made, with  the
assistance of  two  bottles of whisky, the two-backed  beast, - put him in a
tight  spot. 'Who  was 

that?'

 Pamela, still  mostly asleep, with a  blackout
mask over her eyes, rolled over to inquire, and he decided to reply, 'Just a
breather, don't worry about it,' which was all very well, except then he had
to  do the worrying all by  himself, sitting up in bed,  naked, and sucking,
for comfort, as he had all his life, the thumb on his right hand.
     He was a  small person with wire coathanger shoulders  and  an enormous
capacity for nervous agitation, evidenced by his pale, sunken-eyed face; his
thinning  hair - still entirely black and curly -  which had been ruffled so
often by his frenzied hands  that it no  longer took the slightest notice of
brushes  or combs,  but stuck  out every  which  way and gave its  owner the
perpetual  air of having  just  woken  up,  late, and  in  a hurry; and  his
endearingly   high,  shy   and  self-deprecating,  but  also  hiccoughy  and
over-excited, giggle; all  of which  had helped turn his name, Jamshed, into
this  

Jumpy

 that everybody, even first-time acquaintances, now automatically
used; everybody, that is, except Pamela Chamcha. Saladin's wife, he thought,
sucking away feverishly. - Or widow? - Or, God help me, wife, after  all. He
found  himself resenting Chamcha. A return from a watery  grave: so operatic
an event, in this day and age, seemed almost indecent, an act of bad faith.
     He had rushed over to  Pamela's place the moment he heard the news, and
found her dry-eyed and composed. She led him into her  clutter-lover's study
on  whose  walls watercolours of  rose-gardens  hung  between  clenched-fist
posters reading 

Partido Socialista,

 photographs of friends  and a cluster of
African masks,  and as  he picked his way  across the floor between ashtrays
and  the  

Voice

 newspaper  and  feminist  science-fiction  novels she  said,
flatly, 'The  surprising  thing is that when  they  told me I thought, well,
shrug, his death will actually make  a pretty small hole in my life.' Jumpy,
who  was close to tears, and bursting with  memories, stopped in his  tracks
and flapped his arms, looking, in his great  shapeless  black coat, and with
his  pallid, terror-stricken face,  like a  vampire caught in the unexpected
and  hideous light of day. Then he saw  the empty whisky bottles. Pamela had
started  drinking, she said, some hours  back, and since then she  had  been
going at  it steadily,  rhythmically, with the dedication of a long-distance
runner. He sat down beside her on her low, squashy sofa-bed,  and offered to
act as a  pacemaker.  'Whatever  you  want,' she said,  and  passed  him the
bottle.
     Now, sitting up in bed with a thumb instead of a bottle, his secret and
his hangover banging equally painfully inside  his head (he had never been a
drinking or a secretive  man), Jumpy  felt tears coming on  once  again, and
decided  to get up and walk himself around. Where he  went  was upstairs, to
what  Saladin had insisted on  calling  his 'den', a  large loft-space  with
skylights and windows looking down on an expanse of  communal gardens dotted
with comfortable trees, oak, larch, even the last of the elms, a survivor of
the plague years.  

First the elms, now us,

  Jumpy reflected. 

Maybe the trees
were a warning.

 He shook himself to banish  such small-hour morbidities, and
perched  on the edge of his friend's mahogany desk. Once  at a college party
he had perched, just so, on a table soggy with spilled wine and beer next to
an emaciated girl in black lace minidress,  purple  feather boa and  eyelids
like silver helmets, unable to pluck up the courage to say hello. Finally he
did turn to her and stutter out some banality or other; she gave him a  look
of  absolute  contempt  and  said  without  moving  her  black-lacquer lips,

conversation's dead, man.

 He had been pretty upset, so upset that he blurted
out, 

tell me, why are all the girls in this town so rude?,

 and she answered,
without  pausing to think,  

because most  of the boys are  like you.

  A  few
moments later Chamcha  came up, reeking of patchouli, wearing a white kurta,
everybody's goddamn  cartoon of the mysteries of the East, and the girl left
with  him  five minutes  later. The bastard, Jumpy Joshi thought  as the old
bitterness surged back,  he had no shame, he  was ready to be anything  they
wanted to buy, that read-your-palm bedspread-jacket Hare-Krishna dharma-bum,
you  wouldn't have  caught me dead. That stopped him, that word right there.
Dead. Face it, Jamshed, the  girls never went for you, that's the truth, and
the  rest  is  envy. Well, maybe so, he half-conceded, and then again. Maybe
dead, he added, and then again, maybe not.
     Chamcha's  room  struck  the  sleepless  intruder  as   contrived,  and
therefore sad: the caricature  of an actor's room full of signed photographs
of colleagues, handbills, framed programmes,  production  stills, citations,
awards,  volumes of movie-star memoirs, a room bought off  the  peg, by  the
yard, an imitation  of life, a mask's mask.  Novelty items on every surface:
ashtrays in the shape of  pianos, china  pierrots peeping out from  behind a
shelf of books. And everywhere, on the walls,  in  the movie posters, in the
glow  of the  lamp borne by bronze Eros, in the mirror shaped like a  heart,
oozing up through the blood-red carpet, dripping from the ceiling, Saladin's
need  for love.  In  the  theatre everybody gets  kissed  and  everybody  is
darling. The actor's life offers, on a  daily basis, the simulacrum of love;
a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.
The desperation there was in him, Jumpy recognized, he'd do anything, put on
any damnfool costume, change into any shape, if it earned him a loving word.
Saladin, who wasn't  by  any means unsuccessful with  women,  see above. The
poor stumblebum.  Even Pamela, with all  her beauty and  brightness,  hadn't
been enough.
     It was clear he'd  been  getting to be a long way from enough  for her.
Somewhere around the bottom of  the second whisky bottle she leaned her head
on  his shoulder  and said boozily, 'You can't imagine  the  relief of being
with someone with whom I don't have to have a fight every time I express  an
opinion. Someone on the  side  of the goddamn angels.'  He  waited; after  a
pause,  there was  more. 'Him  and  his Royal  Family, you wouldn't believe.
Cricket, the Houses of Parliament, the Queen. The place never  stopped being
a picture postcard  to  him. You couldn't get him to look at what was really
real.'  She closed her eyes and  allowed her hand, by  accident, to rest  on
his. 'He  was  a  real  Saladin,'  Jumpy  said.  'A man with a holy  land to
conquer, his England, the one he believed in. You were part of it, too.' She
rolled  away from him and stretched out  on top of magazines, crumpled balls
of waste paper,  mess. 'Part of it? I was bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince
pies, common-sense and me.  But  I'm really real, too, J.J.; I really really
am.' She  reached  over  to  him, pulled him  across  to where her mouth was
waiting, kissed him with a great un-Pamela-like  slurp.  'See  what I mean?'
Yes, he saw.
     'You  should have  heard him on the  Falklands  war,'  she  said later,
disengaging herself and fiddling with her hair. ' "Pamela, suppose you heard
a noise downstairs  in  the middle of the night and went to investigate  and
found a huge man  in the  living-room with a  shotgun, and he said, Go  back
upstairs, what  would you do?" I'd  go upstairs, I  said. "Well,  it's  like
that. Intruders in the  home. It won't do."  '  Jumpy noticed  her fists had
clenched and her knuckles were bone-white.  'I said,  if  you must use these
blasted cosy metaphors, then get them right. What it's 

like

 is if two people
claim they own a house, and one of them is squatting the place, and 

then

 the
other  turns  up with the shotgun.  That's  what it's 

like.'

  'That's what's
really  real,'  Jumpy  nodded,  seriously. 

'Right,'

  she  slapped his  knee.
'That's really right,  Mr. Real  Jam  .  .  .  it's really truly like  that.
Actually. Another drink.'
     She  leaned  over  to the tape deck and pushed  a button. Jesus,  Jumpy
thought, 

Boney  M

?  Give me a  break. For  all her tough,  race-professional
attitudes,  the lady  still had a lot to learn  about  music. Here  it came,
boomchickaboom. Then,  without warning,  he was  crying, provoked into  real
tears by counterfeit emotion, by a disco-beat imitation of pain. It was  the
one hundred  and thirty-seventh psalm, 'Super flumina'.  King  David calling
out across the  centuries.  How shall we sing the Lord's  song  in a strange
land.
     'I  had to learn the psalms at school,' Pamela Chamcha said, sitting on
the floor, her head leaning against the sofa-bed,  her eyes  shut tight.  By

the river of Babylon, where  we sat down, oh oh we wept

... she  stopped  the
tape,  leaned back again, began  to recite. 'If I forget  thee, O Jerusalem,
let  my right  hand  forget its cunning; if I  do not remember thee, let  my
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; yea,  if I prefer not Jerusalem in my
mirth.'
     Later, asleep in bed, she dreamed of her convent school,  of matins and
evensong,  of  the  chanting of psalms, when  Jumpy rushed in  and shook her
awake,  shouting,  'It's  no  good,  I've got  to tell you.  He isn't  dead.
Saladin: he's bloody well alive.'
     She came wide awake at once, plunging her hands into her thick,  curly,
hennaed hair, in which the first strands of white were just beginning  to be
noticeable; she knelt on the bed, naked, with her hands in  her hair, unable
to  move, until Jumpy  had finished speaking, and then, without warning, she
began to hit out at  him, punching him on the chest  and arms and  shoulders
and even his  face,  as hard as she could hit. He sat down on the bed beside
her, looking ridiculous  in her frilly dressing-gown, while she beat him; he
allowed his body to go  loose, to receive the blows, to submit. When she ran
out of punches her body was covered in perspiration and he thought she might
have broken one of his arms. She sat down beside him, panting, and they were
silent.
     Her dog entered the  bedroom, looking worried, and padded over to offer
her his paw, and  to  lick at  her left leg.  Jumpy stirred, cautiously.  'I
thought he got stolen,'  he said eventually. Pamela jerked her head for 

yes,
but.

 The thieves got in touch. I paid the ransom. He now answers to the name
of Glenn. That's okay; I could never pronounce Sher Khan properly, anyway.'
     After a while, Jumpy found that he wanted to talk.  'What you did, just
now,' he began.
     'Oh, God.'
     'No. It's like a thing I once did. Maybe the most sensible thing I ever
did.' In the summer of 1967, he had bullied the 'apolitical' twenty-year-old
Saladin  along on an  anti-war  demonstration. 'Once in  your  life,  Mister
Snoot, I'm going to drag you down to  my level.' Harold Wilson was coming to
town,  and because of the  Labour Government's  support of US involvement in
Vietnam, a  mass  protest  had been planned.  Chamcha  went  along, 'out  of
curiosity,' he  said. 'I want to see how  allegedly  intelligent people turn
themselves into a mob.'
     That day it rained  an  ocean. The  demonstrators in Market Square were
soaked  through.  Jumpy  and  Chamcha,  swept  along  by  the  crowd,  found
themselves pushed  up against the steps  of the town  hall; 

grandstand view,

Chamcha said with  heavy irony. Next to them stood two students disguised as
Russian assassins,  in black  fedoras, greatcoats and dark glasses, carrying
shoeboxes  filled  with ink-dipped  tomatoes  and  labelled in  large  block
letters, 

bombs.

 Shortly  before  the Prime Minister's  arrival,  one of them
tapped  a policeman on  the  shoulder  and  said: 'Excuse,  please. When Mr.
Wilson, self-styled  Prime Meenster, conies  in  long car, kindly request to
wind down  weendow so my friend can throw with him the bombs.' The policeman
answered, 'Ho, ho, sir. Very  good. Now I'll tell you  what.  You  can throw
eggs at him, sir,  'cause  that's  all right with  me.  And  you  can  throw
tomatoes at him, sir, like what you've got there in that box, painted black,
labelled 

bombs,

 'cause that's all right with me. You  throw anything hard at
him, sir,  and  my mate here'll get you  with his gun.' O  days of innocence
when the world was young . . . when the car arrived there was a surge in the
crowd and Chamcha and  Jumpy were separated. Then Jumpy appeared, climbed on
to the bonnet of Harold Wilson's limousine, and began to jump up and down on
the bonnet, creating large dents,  leaping like a wild man to the  rhythm of
the crowd's chanting: 

We shall fight, we shall win, long live Ho Chi Minh.

     'Saladin started yelling at me to get off, partly because the crowd was
full of Special Branch  types converging on the  limo, but mainly because he
was so  damn  embarrassed.' But he kept leaping, up higher  and down harder,
drenched to the bone, long  hair flying: Jumpy the jumper, leaping  into the
mythology of those antique years.  And Wilson and Marcia cowered in the back
seat.  

Ho! Ho! Ho  Chi Minh!

  At the last possible moment  Jumpy took a deep
breath, and dived head-first  into a  sea of  wet  and  friendly faces;  and
vanished. They never caught him: fuzz pigs filth. 'Saladin wouldn't speak to
me for over a week,' Jumpy remembered. 'And when he did, all he said was, "I
hope  you  realize those  cops could  have  shot  you  to  pieces, but  they
didn't.'"
     They  were still  sitting side by side  on the edge of  the bed.  Jumpy
touched Pamela on the forearm. 'I just  mean I know how it feels. Wham, bam.
It felt incredible. It felt necessary.'
     'Oh, my God,'  she  said, turning to  him. 'Oh, my God, I'm  sorry, but
yes, it did.'
     In the morning it took an hour to get through to the airline on account
of the  volume of calls still being  generated  by the catastrophe, and then
another twenty-five minutes of  insistence - 

but  he telephoned, it  was his
voice -

 while at the other end of the  phone a woman's voice, professionally
trained to  deal with human  beings in crisis,  understood how she  felt and
sympathized with her  in  this awful moment  and remained very patient,  but
clearly didn't believe a word she said. 

I'm sorry, madam, I don't mean to be
brutal, but the plane  broke  up in mid-air at  thirty thousand feet.

 By the
end of the call  Pamela Chamcha,  normally the most controlled of women, who
locked herself  in a bathroom when she wanted to cry, was shrieking down the
line,   for  God's  sake,  woman,  will  you   shut  up  with   your  little
good-samaritan speeches and  listen to  what I'm saying? Finally she slammed
down the receiver  and rounded on Jumpy Joshi, who saw the expression in her
eyes and spilled the coffee he had been bringing her because his limbs began
to tremble  in fright. 'You fucking creep,' she cursed him. 'Still alive, is
he? I suppose he flew down from the sky on fucking 

wings

 and headed straight
for the nearest phone booth to  change out  of his fucking  Superman costume
and  ring the little wife.' They were in  the  kitchen  and Jumpy  noticed a
group  of kitchen  knives  attached to  a magnetic strip on the wall next to
Pamela's left  arm. He opened his mouth to  speak, but she wouldn't let him.
'Get out before  I do something,' she said. 'I can't believe I  fell for it.
You and voices on the phone: I should have fucking known.'
     In the early 1970s Jumpy had  run a travelling disco out of the back of
his yellow mini-van.  He  called  it Finn's Thumb in honour of the legendary
sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool, another sucker, as Chamcha  used to
say.  One day  Saladin had played a practical joke on Jumpy,  by ringing him
up, putting on a vaguely Mediterranean accent, and requesting  the  services
of the musical Thumb on the island of Skorpios, on behalf of Mrs. Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis, offering  a fee of  ten thousand dollars and transportation
to Greece, in a private aircraft, for up to six persons. This was a terrible
thing to do to a man as innocent  and upright  as Jamshed Joshi. 'I need  an
hour to think,' he had said, and then fallen into an agony of the soul. When
Saladin rang back an  hour later and heard that Jumpy was turning  down Mrs.
Onassis's offer for political reasons, he understood  that his friend was in
training  to be a  saint, and it  was no good trying  to pull his leg. 'Mrs.
Onassis will  be broken in the heart  for sure,' he had concluded, and Jumpy
had  worriedly replied, 'Please tell her  it's nothing personal, as a matter
of fact personally I admire her a great deal.'
     We have all  known one another  too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left.
We can hurt each other with memories two decades old.
     On the subject  of mistakes with voices, she thought  as she drove much
too fast down the M4 that afternoon in the old MG hardtop from which she got
a  degree of  pleasure  that was, as she  had  always  cheerfully confessed,
'quite  ideologically unsound', -on that subject, I really  ought to be more
charitable.
     Pamela Chamcha, nee Lovelace, was  the possessor of a voice  for which,
in many ways, the rest of her  life had been an effort to compensate. It was
a  voice composed  of tweeds,  headscarves,  summer pudding,  hockey-sticks,
thatched houses, saddle-soap,  house-parties, nuns, family pews, large  dogs
and philistinism, and in spite of all her  attempts to reduce its volume  it
was  loud  as a dinner-jacketed drunk throwing bread rolls in a Club. It had
been  the tragedy of her younger days that thanks to this voice she had been
endlessly pursued by the gentlemen farmers and debs' delights and somethings
in  the city whom she despised  with all  her heart, while  the greenies and
peacemarchers and world-changers  with  whom she instinctively felt  at home
treated her  with deep suspicion, bordering on resentment. How  could one be

on the side  of the angels

 when one sounded like a no-goodnik every time one
moved one's lips? Accelerating past Reading,  Pamela gritted her  teeth. One
of the reasons she had decided to 

admit  it

 end her marriage before fate did
it for her was that she had woken up  one day and realized  that Chamcha was
not in love  with  her  at all,  but with that  voice stinking of  Yorkshire
pudding  and  hearts  of  oak,  that  hearty,  rubicund  voice  of  ye  olde
dream-England  which he  so  desperately wanted  to inhabit.  It had been  a
marriage of crossed purposes, each  of  them rushing towards the very  thing
from which the other was in flight.
     

No survivors.

  And in the middle of the  night, Jumpy the idiot and his
stupid false alarm.  She was so  shaken up  by it  that she hadn't  even got
round to being shaken up by having gone to bed with  Jumpy  and made love in
what  

admit  it

  had  been  a  pretty  satisfying  fashion,  

spare  me  your
nonchalance,

 she rebuked  herself, 

when  did you last  have so much fun.

 She
had a lot to deal with and so here she  was, dealing with it by running away
as fast as  she could go. A few days of  pampering oneself  in  an expensive
country hotel and the world  may begin to seem less like a fucking hellhole.
Therapy by luxury:  okayokay, she allowed, I know: I'm  

reverting to  class.

Fuck it; watch me go. If  you've got any objections,  blow them  out of your
ass. Arse. Ass.
     One hundred  miles an hour past Swindon,  and the weather turned nasty.
Sudden,  dark  clouds,  lightning,  heavy rain; she  kept  her  foot on  the
accelerator. 

No survivors.

 People were always dying on her, leaving her with
a mouth full of words and nobody to spit them at.  Her  father the classical
scholar who could make puns in ancient Greek and from whom she inherited the
Voice, her  legacy and curse; and her  mother who pined  for him during  the
War, when he  was a Pathfinder  pilot, obliged to fly home  from Germany one
hundred  and eleven  times in a slow aeroplane through a night which his own
flares had just illuminated for the benefit of the bombers, - and who vowed,
when he returned with the  noise of  the ack-ack in his ears, that she would
never leave  him, - and so followed him everywhere, into  the slow hollow of
depression from which he  never really emerged, - and into debt,  because he
didn't have the face for poker and  used her money when he  ran out  of  his
own, - and at last to the top of a tall building, where they found their way
at last. Pamela never  forgave them, especially for making it impossible for
her to tell them  of  her unforgiveness. To get her own back,  she set about
rejecting  everything of  them that  remained within  her. Her  brains,  for
example: she refused to go  to college. And because she could not shake  off
her  voice,  she made it  speak  ideas  which her conservative  suicides  of
parents would have anathematized. She married an  Indian.  And,  because  he
turned out  to  be too  much like them, would have left him. Had decided  to
leave. When, once again, she was cheated by a death.
     She was  overtaking  a  frozen-food road  train, blinded by  the  spray
kicked  up by  its wheels, when  she hit the expanse of  water that had been
waiting for her in a slight declivity, and then the MG  was  aquaplaning  at
terrifying speed, swerving out of the fast  lane and spinning  round so that
she saw the headlights of the road train staring at her like the eyes of the
exterminating angel, Azrael. 'Curtains,' she thought;  but her car swung and
skidded out of  the path of the juggernaut, slewing right across  all  three
lanes of the motorway, all of  them  miraculously empty,  and coming to rest
with rather less of a  thump than one might have expected  against the crash
barrier at the  edge of the hard shoulder, after spinning through  a further
one  hundred  and eighty degrees  to face, once again,  into the west, where
with  all the corny timing of real  life, the sun was breaking up the storm.
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one. That night, in
an oak-panelled dining-room decorated with medieval flags, Pamela Chamcha in
her most dazzling gown ate venison and drank a bottle of Chateau Talbot at a
table heavy with silver and crystal, celebrating a new  beginning, an escape
from the jaws of,  a fresh start, to  be born again first you have to: well,
almost, anyway. Under the lascivious eyes  of Americans and salesmen she ate
and drank alone, retiring early to  a princess's bedroom in a stone tower to
take a long bath and watch old movies on television. In the aftermath of her
brush with death she felt the past dropping  away from her: her adolescence,
for  example,  in the  care of her wicked uncle Harry Higham, who lived in a
seventeenth-century manor  house  once owned by  a distant relative, Matthew
Hopkins, the Witchfinder-General, who had named it  

Gremlins

 in, no doubt, a
macabre attempt at humour. Remembering Mr. Justice Higham in order to forget
him, she murmured to the absent Jumpy that she, too, had her  Vietnam story.
After the  first  big Grosvenor  Square demonstration  at which many  people
threw marbles under the feet of  charging police horses, there  occurred the
one and only instance in British  law in which the marble was deemed to be a
lethal weapon, and young persons were jailed, even deported, for  possessing
the  small  glass spheres.  The presiding judge in the case of the Grosvenor
Marbles was this same Henry  (thereafter known as 'Hang'em') Higham, and  to
be  his niece had been a further  burden for  a young woman already  weighed
down  by  her right-wing voice. Now, warm in  bed in  her  temporary castle,
Pamela Chamcha rid herself of this old demon, 

goodbye, Hang'em, I've no more
time  for you;

 and of her  parents' ghosts;  and prepared to  be free of the
most recent ghost of all.
     Sipping cognac, Pamela  watched vampires on TV and  allowed herself  to
take pleasure in,  well, in herself. Had she not invented herself in her own
image? I am that I am, she toasted herself in  Napoleon  brandy. I work in a
community relations council in the borough of Brickhall, London, NEI; deputy
community relations officer and damn good at it, ifisaysomyself. Cheers!  We
just elected our first black Chair and all the votes cast  against him  were
white. Down the hatch!  Last week  a respected Asian street trader, for whom
MPs  of all  parties  had  interceded, was deported after eighteen  years in
Britain because, fifteen years  ago, he  posted a certain  form  forty-eight
hours late. Chin-chin!  Next week in Brickhall Magistrates' Court the police
will be  trying  to fit up  a fifty-year-old Nigerian woman, accusing her of
assault, having previously beaten her senseless. Skol! This is my  head: see
it? What I call my job: bashing my head against Brickhall.
     Saladin was dead and she was alive.
     She  drank to that.  There  were things  I was  waiting  to  tell  you,
Saladin.  Some  big  things:  about  the  new high-rise  office  building in
Brickhall High  Street,  across  from  McDonald's; -  they  built it  to  be
perfectly sound-proof, but the workers were so disturbed by the silence that
now they play tapes of white noise on the tannoy system. - You'd  have liked
that, eh?  - And about this Parsi woman I know, Bapsy,  that's her name, she
lived in Germany for a while and fell  in love with a Turk. -  Trouble  was,
the only  language  they had in common was German; now  Bapsy  has forgotten
almost  all she knew,  while his  gets  better  and better;  he  writes  her
increasingly poetic letters and she can  hardly  reply  in nursery rhyme.  -
Love dying, because of an inequality of language, what do you think of that?
- Love dying. There's a subject for us, eh? Saladin? What do you say?
     And a couple of tiny little things. There's a killer on the loose in my
patch,  specializes in  killing  old women; so don't worry, I'm safe. Plenty
older than me.
     One more thing: I'm leaving you. It's over. We're through.
     I could never say anything  to you, not really, not the least thing. If
I said  you  were putting on weight you'd yell for an hour,  as if it  would
change what  you saw in the mirror, what the  tightness of your own trousers
was telling you. You interrupted me in  public. People  noticed it, what you
thought of me.  I forgave  you, that was my fault; I could see the centre of
you,  that  question so frightful that you had  to protect it  with all that
posturing certainty. That empty space.
     Goodbye, Saladin. She drained her glass and set it down beside her. The
returning rain knocked at her leaded windows; she drew her curtains shut and
turned out the light.
     Lying there, drifting towards sleep, she thought of the last thing  she
needed to tell her late husband. 'In bed,' the words came, 'you never seemed
interested in me; not in my pleasure, what I needed, not really ever. I came
to think you wanted, not a lover. A servant.' There. Now rest in peace.
     She dreamed of him,  his  face, filling the dream. 'Things are ending,'
he  told  her. 'This civilization; things are closing in on it. It  has been
quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal  and  Christian, the glory  of
the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls.'
     She didn't agree, not  even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed,
that there was no point telling him now.
     After  Pamela  Chamcha  threw  him out,  Jumpy  Joshi  went over  to Mr
Sufyan's  Shaandaar Cafe  in  Brickhall  High Street and sat there trying to
decide if he was  a fool. It  was early in the day, so the place  was almost
empty,  apart from a  fat lady buying a box  of pista  barfi  and jalebis, a
couple  of  bachelor garment  workers drinking chaloo  chai  and an  elderly
Polish woman from the old days when it was the Jews who  ran the  sweatshops
round here, who sat all day in a corner with two vegetable samosas, one puri
and a glass of milk,  announcing to everyone who  came in that she  was only
there because 'it was next best to kosher and today you must do the best you
can'.  Jumpy  sat  down with  his coffee  beneath the  lurid  painting  of a
bare-breasted myth-woman  with several  heads and wisps of clouds  obscuring
her nipples, done life-size in salmon pink, neon-green and gold, and because
the rush hadn't started yet Mr. Sufyan noticed he was down in the dumps.
     'Hey,  Saint  Jumpy,' he sang  out, 'why you  bringing your bad weather
into my place? This country isn't full enough of clouds?'
     Jumpy blushed as  Sufyan bounced over  to him,  his little white cap of
devotion pinned  in place  as usual, the moustache-less  beard  hennaed  red
after its  owner's recent pilgrimage to Mecca.  Muhammad Sufyan was a burly,
thick-forearmed  fellow with  a belly on  him, as  godly  and as unfanatic a
believer  as you could meet, and Joshi thought of him  as  a  sort  of elder
relative.  'Listen,  Uncle,' he said when  the  cafe proprietor was standing
over him, 'you think I'm a real idiot or what?'
     'You ever make any money?' Sufyan asked.
     'Not me, Uncle.'
     'Ever do any business? Import-export? Off-licence? Corner shop?'
     'I never understood figures.'
     'And where your family members are?'
     'I've got no family, Uncle. There's only me.'
     'Then you  must be  praying to  God  continually for  guidance  in your
loneliness?'
     'You know me, Uncle. I don't pray.'
     'No question  about it,' Sufyan concluded. 'You're an even bigger  fool
than you know.'
     'Thanks, Uncle,' Jumpy said, finishing his coffee. 'You've been a great
help.'
     Sufyan,  knowing  that the affection  in  his teasing was  cheering the
other man up in spite of his  long face, called across to the light-skinned,
blue-eyed  Asian man who had  just come in wearing a snappy  check  overcoat
with extra-wide lapels. 'You, Hanif  Johnson,' he called out, 'come here and
solve a  mystery.  'Johnson, a smart lawyer  and  local boy  made  good, who
maintained an  office  above  the Shaandaar  Cafe,  tore himself  away  from
Sufyan's two  beautiful  daughters  and headed  over  to Jumpy's table. 'You
explain this fellow,' Sufyan said. 'Beats me. Doesn't drink, thinks of money
like a disease, owns maybe two shirts and no VCR, forty years old and  isn't
married, works for two pice in the sports centre  teaching martial  arts and
what-all,  lives on air, behaves like a rishi or  pir  but  doesn't have any
faith, going  nowhere  but looks like he knows some  secret. All this  and a
college education, you work it out.'
     Hanif Johnson punched  Jumpy  on  the  shoulder.  'He hears voices,' he
said. Sufyan threw up his hands in mock amazement. 'Voices, oop-baba! Voices
from where? Telephone? Sky? Sony Walkman hidden in his coat?'
     '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, J

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.
     '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 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 hockey-stick and ran
upstairs as  fast  as  they could go; while down in the front hall, 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.'
     

5


     r.  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 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 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  "Lailaha", 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  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 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 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.'
     The other scrambled to his feet  and stood  pulling at his fingers, his
head bowed. 'What I want to know, sir,' he mumbled, 'is, which is it to  be?
Annihilation or salvation? Why have you returned?'
     Gibreel  thought  rapidly.  'It is  for judging,'  he finally answered.
'Facts in the case must be sifted, due weight given  pro and contra. Here it
is  the human race  that is  the undertrial, and  it is a  defendant with  a
rotten  record:  a history-sheeter, a bad  egg.  Careful evaluations must be
made.  For the  present,  verdict is  reserved;  will be  promulgated in due
course.  In  the  meantime,  my  presence must  remain a secret,  for  vital
security reasons.'  He put  his hat back on his  head, feeling  pleased with
himself.
     Maslama was  nodding furiously.  'You can  depend on me,' he  promised.
'I'm a man who respects a person's privacy. Mum' -for the second time! - 'is
the word.'
     Gibreel  fled the compartment with the lunatic's hymns  in hot pursuit.
As he rushed to the far end  of the train  Maslama's paeans remained faintly
audible  behind  him. 'Alleluia! Alleluia!' Apparently his new disciple  had
launched into selections from Handel's 

Messiah.

     However:  Gibreel  wasn't  followed,  and  there  was,  fortunately,  a
first-class  carriage  at  the  rear of the train,  too.  This  one  was  of
open-plan  design,  with comfortable orange  seats arranged  in fours around
tables, and  Gibreel  settled down by a window, staring towards London, with
his  chest  thumping and his hat jammed down on his  head. He was trying  to
come to terms with the undeniable fact of the halo, and  failing  to  do so,
because  what  with the  derangement  of John Maslama  behind  him  and  the
excitement of Alleluia Cone  ahead it was hard to get his thoughts straight.
Then  to his despair Mrs.  Rekha Merchant floated up  alongside  his window,
sitting on  her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to  the snowstorm  that
was  building up out  there and making England look like  a  television  set
after the day's programmes  end. She gave him a little wave and he felt hope
ebbing  from him. Retribution on a levitating rug:  he  closed his  eyes and
concentrated on trying not to shake.
     'I know what  a  ghost is,' Allie  Cone said  to a classroom of teenage
girls whose faces were  illuminated by the soft inner  light of worship. 'In
the high Himalayas it is often the  case that climbers find themselves being
accompanied by the ghosts of those who failed in the attempt, or the sadder,
but also prouder, ghosts of those who succeeded in reaching the summit, only
to perish on the way down.'
     Outside, in the Fields, the  snow was settling on the high, bare trees,
and on  the flat expanse of the park.  Between the low, dark snow-clouds and
the white-carpeted city the light was a dirty yellow colour, a narrow, foggy
light that dulled the heart and made it impossible to dream. Up 

there,

 Allie
remembered, up there at eight thousand metres, the light was of such clarity
that it seemed to resonate, to sing,  like music. Here on the flat earth the
light,  too,  was flat and  earthbound.  Here  nothing  flew, the sedge  was
withered, and no birds sang. Soon it would be dark.
     'Ms Cone?' The girls' hands,  waving in the air, drew her back into the
classroom.  'Ghosts, miss? Straight up?' 'You're  pulling our legs,  right?'
Scepticism wrestled with adoration  in their  faces.  She knew the  question
they  really  wanted to ask, and probably  would  not: the question  of  the
miracle  of her skin. She had heard them whispering excitedly as she entered
the classroom, 's true, look, how 

pale,

  's incredible. Alleluia Cone, whose
iciness could resist the  heat of  the  eight-thousand-metre sun. Allie  the
snow maiden, the icequeen. 

Miss, how come you never get a tan?

 When she went
up  Everest  with the triumphant Collingwood  expedition, the  papers called
them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though she was no Disneyish cutie, her
full lips pale rather than  rose-red,  her hair ice-blonde instead of black,
her  eyes not innocently wide  but narrowed, out of habit, against the  high
snow-glare. A memory  of  Gibreel Farishta welled up, catching her unawares:
Gibreel at some  point during their three and a  half days, booming with his
usual  foot-in-mouth lack of restraint, 'Baby, you're  no iceberg,  whatever
they say. You're a passionate lady,  bibi.  Hot,  like a  kachori.'  He  had
pretended to blow on scalded fingertips, and shook his hand for emphasis: 

O,
too hot.  O, throw water.

 Gibreel  Farishta.  She controlled herself: Hi ho,
it's off to work.
     'Ghosts,'  she  repeated  firmly. 'On  the Everest climb, after  I came
through the  ice-fall, I  saw a  man  sitting on  an outcrop  in  the  lotus
position, with his eyes  shut  and  a tartan  tam-o'-shanter  on  his  head,
chanting  the old  mantra: om mani padme hum.' She had guessed at once, from
his archaic clothing  and surprising behaviour, that this was the spectre of
Maurice Wilson, the yogi who had prepared for a solo ascent of Everest, back
in 1934, by starving himself for three weeks in order  to cement  so deep  a
union  between his body and soul that the mountain would be too weak to tear
them apart. He had gone up in a light aircraft as high as it would take him,
crash-landed  deliberately  in  a  snow-field,  headed  upwards,  and  never
returned. Wilson opened his  eyes as Allie approached, and nodded lightly in
greeting.  He  strolled beside her for the  rest of that day, or hung in the
air while she worked  her way up a face. Once he belly-flopped into the snow
of a sharp  incline and glided upwards as if he were riding on  an invisible
anti-gravity toboggan. Allie  had found herself behaving quite naturally, as
if  she'd just  bumped  into  an  old acquaintance, for  reasons  afterwards
obscure to her.
     Wilson  chattered on  a  fair bit  -  'Don't get a lot of company these
days, one way  and another'  -  and expressed, among other things,  his deep
irritation  at having had his body discovered by the  Chinese  expedition of
1960. 'Little yellow buggers actually  had the gall, the sheer face, to film
my corpse.' Alleluia Cone was struck by the bright,  yellow-and-black tartan
of  his immaculate knickerbockers. All this  she told the girls at Brickhall
Fields  Girls' School,  who had written so many letters  pleading for her to
address  them that she had not been  able  to refuse. 'You've got to,'  they
pleaded in writing. 'You  even live  here.' From the window of the classroom
she could see  her flat across the park, just visible through the thickening
fall of snow.
     What she  did not  tell the class  was this: as  Maurice Wilson's ghost
described,  in  patient  detail,  his  own ascent, and  also his  posthumous
discoveries, for  example  the slow,  circuitous,  infinitely  delicate  and
invariably unproductive mating ritual of  the  yeti, which he had  witnessed
recently on the South  Col, - so it occurred  to her that her vision of  the
eccentric of 1934, the first human being ever to attempt to scale Everest on
his own, a sort of abominable snowman himself,  had been no accident,  but a
kind  of  signpost,  a  declaration  of kinship.  A prophecy of  the future,
perhaps,  for  it was  at that moment that her  secret dream  was born,  the
impossible thing:  the  dream  of the unaccompanied  climb. It was possible,
also, that Maurice Wilson was the angel of her death.
     'I  wanted  to  talk  about  ghosts,'  she  was saying,  'because  most
mountaineers, when they come down from the peaks, grow embarrassed and leave
these stories out of their accounts. But they do  exist, I have to admit it,
even though I'm the type who's always kept her feet on solid ground.'
     That was a  laugh. Her feet. Even before the ascent of  Everest she had
begun  to  suffer  from  shooting pains, and  was  informed by  her  general
practitioner,  a  no-nonsense  Bombay woman called  Dr Mistry, that she  was
suffering from  fallen arches. 'In common parlance, flat  feet.' Her arches,
always weak,  had  been further weakened by  years of  wearing  sneakers and
other  unsuitable  shoes. Dr Mistry couldn't  recommend much:  toe-clenching
exercises,  running  upstairs barefoot,  sensible  footwear.  'You're  young
enough,'  she said. 'If you take  care, you'll  live.  If not,  you'll  be a
cripple  at forty.' When  Gibreel - damn  it!  - heard that she had  climbed
Everest  with spears in her feet he took to calling her his  silkie. He  had
read  a  Bumper  Book of  fairy-tales in  which  he found the  story of  the
sea-woman who left the ocean and took on human form  for the sake of the man
she loved.  She had  feet instead of fins,  but every  step she took  was an
agony, as if she were walking  over broken  glass; yet she  went on walking,
forward, away from the sea and over land. You did it  for a bloody mountain,
he said. Would you do it for a man?
     She had concealed  her  foot-ache from her  fellow-mountaineers because
the lure of  Everest had been so overwhelming.  But these days the pain  was
still there, and growing, if anything, worse. Chance, a congenital weakness,
was proving to  be her footbinder. Adventure's end,  Allie thought; betrayed
by  my feet. The image of footbinding stayed with her. 

Goddamn  Chinese,

 she
mused, echoing Wilson's ghost.
     'Life is so easy for some people,' she had wept into Gibreel Farishta's
arms. 'Why don't 

their

 blasted feet give  out?' He had  kissed her forehead.
For you, it may always be a struggle,' he said. 'You want it too damn much.'
     The class was  waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of
phantoms.  They wanted 

the

 story, her story.  They wanted  to  stand  on the
mountain-top. 

Do you know how  it feels,

 she wanted to ask them, 

to have the
whole of your life  concentrated into  one moment, a few hours  long? Do you
know what it's like when the only  direction is  down?

 'I  was in the second
pair  with  Sherpa  Pemba,' she said.  The weather was  perfect, perfect. So
clear  you  felt you  could look  right  through the  sky into  whatever lay
beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to Pemba.
Conditions  are holding and  we  can  go. Pemba grew  very  serious, quite a
change, because  he  was one of the expedition clowns. He  had never been to
the  summit  before, either.  At that  stage I had no  plans to  go  without
oxygen, but when I saw  that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay,  me too. It
was  a  stupid whim, unprofessional, really, but I  suddenly wanted  to be a
woman  sitting  on  top of that  bastard  mountain,  a  human being,  not  a
breathing machine. Pemba  said, Allie Bibi, don't do, but I just started up.
In a while we passed the  others coming down and  I  could see the wonderful
thing  in their eyes. They were  so high, possessed of  such  an exaltation,
that they didn't even  notice  I  wasn't  wearing  the oxygen  equipment. Be
careful, they shouted over to us,  Look out for the angels. Pemba had fallen
into  a good breathing pattern and I fell  into  step with it, breathing  in
with his in, out with his out. I could feel something lifting off the top of
my  head and I was grinning,  just grinning from ear to ear, and when  Pemba
looked my way I  could see he was doing  the same. It looked like a grimace,
like  pain,  but  it  was  just  foolish  joy.' She was a woman who had been
brought to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul, by  the hard physical
labour of hauling herself up  an icebound height of  rock. 'At that moment,'
she told the girls, who were climbing beside her every  step of the  way, 'I
believed it all: that the universe has a sound, that you can lift a veil and
see the face of God, everything. I saw the Himalayas stretching below me and
that  was God's  face, too. Pemba must have seen  something in my expression
that bothered  him because  he  called across,  Look out,  Allie  Bibi,  the
height. I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up  to the top,
and  then we  were there, with the ground falling  away on  every side. Such
light; the universe purified into light. I wanted to tear off my clothes and
let  it soak  into  my skin.' Not a titter from the class; they were dancing
naked  with  her  on  the roof of the  world.  'Then the  visions began, the
rainbows looping and dancing  in the sky,  the radiance pouring down like  a
waterfall  from the  sun, and  there  were  angels, the  others hadn't  been
joking. I  saw them and so did  Sherpa Pemba. We were on our knees  by then.
His  pupils looked  pure white and so did mine,  I'm sure. We would probably
have died there, I'm sure, snow-blind and mountain-foolish, but then I heard
a noise, a loud, sharp report, like a gun.  That snapped me out of it. I had
to yell at Pem until he, too, shook himself and we started down. The weather
was  changing rapidly;  a blizzard  was on the  way.  The air was heavy now,
heaviness instead of that  light, that lightness.  We just  made  it  to the
meeting point and  the four  of us piled  into the little tent at Camp  Six,
twenty-seven thousand feet.  You don't talk much up  there.  We  all had our
Everests to  re-climb, over and over, all  night. But at some point I asked:
'What was that noise?  Did anyone fire a gun?' They looked at me as if I was
touched. Who'd do  such a damnfool  thing at  this altitude,  they said, and
anyway,  Allie,  you  know damn well  there  isn't  a  gun  anywhere on  the
mountain. They were right, of course, but I heard it, I know that much: wham
bam, shot and echo. That's it,' she  ended abruptly.  'The end. Story of  my
life.'  She picked  up a  silver-headed cane  and prepared  to  depart.  The
teacher,  Mrs.  Bury, came forward to utter the usual  platitudes.  But  the
girls  were  not to be denied. 'So what was it, then, Allie?' they insisted;
and she, looking suddenly ten years older than  her thirty-three,  shrugged.
'Can't say,' she told them. 'Maybe it was Maurice Wilson's ghost.'
     She left the classroom, leaning heavily on her stick.
     The city - Proper London, yaar, no bloody 

less! -

 was dressed in white,
like  a  mourner  at a  funeral.  - Whose bloody  funeral,  mister,  Gibreel
Farishta  asked himself wildly, not mine, I  bloody 

hope

 and 

trust.

 When the
train pulled  into Victoria station he plunged out without waiting for it to
come to  a complete halt, turned  his ankle and  went sprawling beneath  the
baggage trolleys and sneers of the waiting Londoners,  clinging, as he fell,
on to his increasingly  battered hat. Rekha Merchant was nowhere to be seen,
and seizing  the moment Gibreel ran  through the scattering crowd like a man
possessed, only to find her by the ticket barrier, floating patiently on her
carpet, invisible to all eyes but his own, three feet off the ground.
     'What  do you want,' he burst out, 'what's your business  with  me?' To
watch you fall,' she  instantly  replied. 'Look  around,'  she added,  'I've
already made you look like a pretty big fool.'
     People were clearing a space around Gibreel, the wild man in an outsize
overcoat  and trampy hat, 

that man's  talking to  himself,

  a child's  voice
said,  and its mother answered 

shh, dear, it's wicked to mock the afflicted.

Welcome to  London. Gibreel Farishta rushed towards the stairs leading  down
towards the Tube. Rekha on her carpet let him go.
     But when he  arrived in a great rush at the  northbound platform of the
Victoria Line he saw her again. This time  she was a colour photograph in  a
48-sheet advertising poster on the wall across  the  track,  advertising the
merits of  the  international direct-dialling system. 

Send  your voice on  a
magic-carpet  ride  to India,

  she  advised. 

No djinns or lamps required.

 He
gave  a loud  cry, once  again causing  his fellow-travellers  to doubt  his
sanity,  and  fled over to the  southbound  platform, where a train was just
pulling in. He leapt  aboard, and there  was Rekha Merchant facing him  with
her carpet rolled up and lying across her knees. The doors closed behind him
with a bang.
     That  day  Gibreel  Farishta  fled   in  every   direction  around  the
Underground  of the city of London  and Rekha Merchant found him wherever he
went; she sat beside him on the endless up-escalator at Oxford Circus and in
the tightly packed elevators of Tufnell Park she  rubbed up against him from
behind in a manner that  she would have  thought quite outrageous during her
lifetime. On  the outer  reaches of  the  Metropolitan  Line she  hurled the
phantoms of her children from the tops of  claw-like trees, and when he came
up for air outside the Bank of England she flung herself histrionically from
the apex of its neo-classical pediment. And even though he  did not have any
idea of the true shape of that most protean and chameleon of  cities he grew
convinced that  it kept changing shape as he ran around beneath  it, so that
the stations  on the Underground changed lines and followed one  another  in
apparently random  sequence.  More  than once he emerged, suffocating,  from
that subterranean world in which  the  laws of space and time had ceased  to
operate, and tried to hail a taxi; not one  was willing to stop, however, so
he was obliged to plunge back into that hellish maze, that labyrinth without
a solution, and continue his epic flight. At last, exhausted beyond hope, he
surrendered  to the fatal  logic of his insanity and got out  arbitrarily at
what he conceded must be the last, meaningless station  of his prolonged and
futile journey  in search of the chimera  of  renewal. He came out into  the
heartbreaking  indifference  of  a  litter-blown street  by a lorry-infested
roundabout. Darkness had  already fallen as he walked unsteadily,  using the
last  reserves of his optimism,  into  an unknown park  made spectral by the
ectoplasmic quality of the  tungsten lamps. As he  sank  to his knees in the
isolation  of the winter night he saw  the figure of a woman  moving  slowly
towards him across the snow-shrouded grass, and surmised that it must be his
nemesis, Rekha Merchant, coming to deliver  her death-kiss, to drag him down
into a deeper  underworld than  the one in which she had  broken his wounded
spirit. He no longer cared,  and  by the  time the woman reached  him he had
fallen forward  on to his forearms, his coat dangling loosely about  him and
giving him the look of  a  large,  dying beetle who was wearing, for obscure
reasons, a dirty grey trilby hat.
     As if from a great distance he  heard a shocked cry escape  the woman's
lips, a gasp in which disbelief, joy and a strange resentment were all mixed
up, and  just  before  his senses  left  him he understood  that  Rekha  had
permitted him, for the time being, to reach the illusion of a safe haven, so
that her triumph over him could be the sweeter when it came at the last.
     'You're alive,' the woman said,  repeating the first words she had ever
spoken to his face. 'You got your life back. That's the point.'
     Smiling, he fell asleep at Allie's flat feet in the falling snow.

     Ayesha

     ven the  serial visions have  migrated  now; they know  the city better
than  he. And in the aftermath  of Rosa  and Rekha  the  dream-worlds of his
archangelic  other self begin to seem as tangible  as the shifting realities
he inhabits  while he's  awake. This, for instance, has  started  coming:  a
mansion block built in  the  Dutch  style in a part of London  which he will
subsequently  identify as  Kensington, to  which the dream flies him at high
speed past Barkers department store and the small grey house with double bay
windows  where Thackeray wrote 

Vanity Fair

 and the square with  the  convent
where the  little girls in uniform are always going in, but  never come out,
and the house where Talleyrand lived in his  old  age when  after a thousand
and one chameleon changes of allegiance and principle he took on the outward
form  of the  French ambassador  to  London,  and arrives at a  seven-storey
corner block with green wrought-iron balconies up to the fourth, and now the
dream  rushes him up the outer wall of the house and on the fourth  floor it
pushes aside the heavy curtains  at the living-room window and finally there
he  sits,  unsleeping as usual, eyes  wide in  the dim yellow light, staring
into the future, the bearded and turbaned Imam.
     Who is he? An exile.  Which must  not be confused with,  allowed to run
into,  all the  other words that  people throw  around: emigre,  expatriate,
refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile  is a dream  of glorious return.
Exile  is a  vision  of revolution: Elba, not St Helena.  It  is an  endless
paradox: looking forward by  always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled
high  into the air.  He  hangs  there,  frozen  in  time,  translated into a
photograph; denied motion,  suspended impossibly above his native earth,  he
awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and
the earth reclaim its own. These are the things the Imam thinks. His home is
a rented flat. It is a waiting-room, a photograph, air.
     The thick wallpaper,  olive  stripes  on a  cream ground,  has  faded a
little, enough to emphasize the brighter rectangles and ovals  that indicate
where pictures used to hang. The Imam is the enemy of images.  When he moved
in  the  pictures slid  noiselessly from  the walls and slunk from the room,
removing  themselves  from  the  rage  of  his  unspoken  disapproval.  Some
representations,  however, are  permitted to remain. On  the  mantelpiece he
keeps  a  small  group  of postcards  bearing  conventional  images  of  his
homeland,  which he calls  simply Desh: a  mountain looming over  a  city; a
picturesque village  scene beneath a  mighty  tree;  a  mosque.  But  in his
bedroom, on  the wall facing the hard  cot where he lies, there hangs a more
potent icon, the  portrait of a woman  of exceptional force, famous  for her
profile of  a Grecian  statue  and the black hair that is as long as  she is
high.  A powerful woman, his enemy, his other:  he keeps her close. Just as,
far away  in  the palaces of  her  omnipotence  she  will  be clutching  his
portrait beneath her royal cloak or hiding it in a locket at her throat. She
is the Empress, and her name  is - what  else? - Ayesha. On this island, the
exiled Imam, and at home in Desh, She. They plot each other's deaths.
     The  curtains,  thick golden velvet,  are kept  shut  all day,  because
otherwise the  evil  thing  might  creep into the  apartment:  foreign-ness,
Abroad, the alien nation. The harsh fact that he is here and not There, upon
which all his thoughts are fixed. On those rare occasions when the Imam goes
out  to take the Kensington  air,  at the centre of a square formed by eight
young men in sunglasses and bulging suits, he folds his hands before him and
fixes his gaze upon them, so that no element or particle of this hated city,
- this sink of iniquities which  humiliates him by giving him sanctuary,  so
that he must be beholden to it in spite of the lustfulness, greed and vanity
of  its ways,  - can lodge  itself,  like a dust-speck, in his eyes. When he
leaves  this loathed exile to return in triumph  to that other city  beneath
the postcard-mountain, it will be a point of pride to be able to say that he
remained in complete ignorance of the Sodom in  which he had been obliged to
wait; ignorant, and therefore unsullied, unaltered, pure.
     And another reason  for the drawn curtains is that  of course there are
eyes and ears around him, not all of them friendly. The orange buildings are
not neutral.  Somewhere across the street there will  be zoom lenses,  video
equipment, jumbo mikes;  and always the risk of snipers. Above and below and
beside the Imam are the safe apartments  occupied by his  guards, who stroll
the Kensington streets disguised as women  in shrouds and silvery beaks; but
it is as  well to be too careful. Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite
of survival.
     A  fable, which  he heard  from one  of  his  favourites,  the American
convert, formerly a successful singer, now known as  Bilal X.  In a  certain
nightclub to which  the  Imam is in the  habit of sending his lieutenants to
listen in to  certain  other  persons belonging to certain opposed factions,
Bilal  met a young man  from  Desh, also a singer of sorts, so they fell  to
talking. It turned out that this  Mahmood was a badly scared individual.  He
had recently 

shacked up

 with a gori, a long red woman with a big figure, and
then  it turned out that  the  previous lover of his beloved Renata  was the
exiled  boss of the S A V A K torture organization of the Shah of  Iran. The
number one Grand Panjandrum himself, not some minor sadist with a talent for
extracting toenails or setting fire  to eyelids, but  the great haramzada in
person. The  day after Mahmood and Renata moved in to their new apartment  a
letter arrived for Mahmood. 

Okay,  shit-eater, you're  fucking my  woman,  I
just wanted to say hello.

 The next day a second letter arrived.  By 

the way,
prick, I forgot to mention, here is your new telephone number.

 At that point
Mahmood and Renata  had asked for an ex-directory listing but had not as yet
been given  their new number by the telephone company. When it came  through
two days  later and was exactly the same as the one on the letter, Mahmood's
hair  fell out all at once.  Then, seeing it lying on  the pillow, he joined
his hands together in front  of Renata and  begged, 'Baby,  I  love you, but
you're too hot for me, please go somewhere, far far.' When the Imam was told
this  story he shook his head and said, that whore, who will touch her  now,
in spite of her lust-creating body? She put  a  stain on herself  worse than
leprosy; thus do human beings mutilate themselves. But the true moral of the
fable was the  need for eternal  vigilance. London  was a  city in which the
ex-boss  of  SAVAK had  great connections in the telephone  company  and the
Shah's ex-chef ran a thriving restaurant in Hounslow. Such a welcoming city,
such a refuge, they take all types. Keep the curtains drawn.
     Floors three to five  of  this block  of mansion  flats  are,  for  the
moment, all  the  homeland  the Imam  possesses. Here there  are rifles  and
short-wave radios and rooms in which  the sharp  young men  in suits sit and
speak urgently into several telephones.  There  is no alcohol  here, nor are
playing cards or dice anywhere in evidence,  and  the only  woman is the one
hanging on the old man's bedroom wall. In this surrogate homeland, which the
insomniac saint thinks of as his waiting-room or transit lounge, the central
heating is  at  full blast night and day, and the windows are tightly  shut.
The  exile cannot forget, and must therefore simulate, the dry heat of Desh,
the  once and  future  land where even the moon is hot  and dripping like  a
fresh, buttered chapati.  O that longed-for part of the world  where the sun
and moon are  male but their hot sweet light  is named with female names. At
night the  exile parts his  curtains and the alien moonlight sidles into the
room, its coldness striking his eyeballs like a nail. He winces, narrows his
eyes. Loose-robed, frowning, ominous, awake: this is the Imam.
     Exile  is  a  soulless  country.  In  exile,  the  furniture  is  ugly,
expensive, all bought at the same time  in the same store and in too much of
a hurry:  shiny silver sofas with fins like  old Buicks DeSotos Oldsmobiles,
glass-fronted  bookcases containing not books but  clippings files. In exile
the shower goes scalding  hot whenever  anybody turns on a  kitchen tap,  so
that when  the Imam goes  to bathe his  entire retinue must remember  not to
fill a kettle or rinse  a dirty  plate, and when the Imam goes to the toilet
his disciples leap scalded from the shower. In exile no food is ever cooked;
the dark-spectacled bodyguards go out for takeaway. In exile all attempts to
put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of defeat.
     The Imam is the centre of a wheel.
     Movement radiates from him, around the clock. His  son,  Khalid, enters
his sanctum bearing a glass of water, holding it in his  right hand with his
left palm under the glass. The Imam drinks water constantly, one glass every
five  minutes, to keep  himself  clean;  the water  itself  is  cleansed  of
impurities, before he sips, in an American filtration machine. All the young
men surrounding  him are well aware of  his famous Monograph on Water, whose
purity, the Imam believes, communicates itself  to the drinker, its thinness
and simplicity, the ascetic pleasures of its taste. 'The Empress,' he points
out, 'drinks  wine.'  Burgundies, clarets, hocks  mingle  their intoxicating
corruptions within that  body  both  fair  and foul. The sin  is  enough  to
condemn her for all  time  without hope  of redemption. The  picture on  his
bedroom wall shows the Empress Ayesha holding, in  both hands, a human skull
filled with a  dark red fluid.  The Empress drinks  blood, but the Imam is a
water  man.  'Not  for  nothing  do  the  peoples of our hot lands  offer it
reverence,' the Monograph proclaims. 'Water, preserver of life. No civilized
individual  can  refuse  it to another. A grandmother, be her limbs ever  so
arthritically  stiff, will rise at once  and go to the tap if a small  child
should come  to her and  ask, pani,  nani.  Beware all those  who  blaspheme
against it. Who pollutes it, dilutes his soul.'
     The Imam  has often vented his  rage upon  the memory  of the late  Aga
Khan, as a  result of being shown the text of an interview in which the head
of  the  Ismailis  was  observed  drinking  vintage  champagne. O, 

sir, this
champagne is only for outward show. The instant it touches my lips, it turns
to water.

  Fiend, the Imam is wont to  thunder. Apostate, blasphemer, fraud.
When  the future comes such individuals will  be judged,  he tells his  men.
Water  will  have  its  day  and blood will  flow  like  wine.  Such  is the
miraculous nature of  the  future of  exiles:  what is first  uttered in the
impotence of an overheated  apartment becomes the fate of  nations. Who  has
not dreamed this dream, of being a king for a day? - But the  Imam dreams of
more than a day; feels,  emanating from his fingertips, the arachnid strings
with which he will control the movement of history.
     No: not history.
     His is a stranger dream.
     His son, water-carrying  Khalid, bows before his  father like a pilgrim
at a  shrine, informs  him  that the  guard on  duty  outside the sanctum is
Salman  Farsi. Bilal is  at  the  radio transmitter, broadcasting  the day's
message, on the agreed frequency, to Desh.
     The Imam is a massive stillness, an immobility. He is living stone. His
great  gnarled  hands, granite-grey,  rest  heavily  on  the  wings  of  his
high-backed chair.  His head, looking too large for the body  beneath, lolls
ponderously  on the surprisingly scrawny neck  that can  be glimpsed through
the grey-black wisps of beard. The Imam's eyes are clouded; his  lips do not
move. He  is  pure force, an elemental being; he moves without motion,  acts
without  doing,  speaks without  uttering  a sound.  He is the  conjurer and
history is his trick.
     No, not history: something stranger.
     The explanation of this conundrum is to be  heard, at this very moment,
on certain surreptitious radio  waves, on  which  the voice of  the American
convert Bilal is singing the Imam's  holy song. Bilal the muezzin: his voice
enters a ham radio in Kensington and emerges  in dreamed-of Desh, transmuted
into the thunderous  speech of the Imam himself. Beginning with ritual abuse
of the Empress, with lists of her crimes, murders,  bribes, sexual relations
with lizards, and  so on, he  proceeds  eventually to issue in ringing tones
the  Imam's nightly  call to  his people  to rise up against the evil of her
State. 'We will make a revolution,' the Imam proclaims through him, 'that is
a revolt not only against  a tyrant, but  against history.' For  there is an
enemy beyond Ayesha,  and it is History herself. History  is  the blood-wine
that must  no  longer  be drunk.  History  the intoxicant, the  creation and
possession  of  the Devil, of the  great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies -
progress, science, rights - against which the Imam has set his face. History
is a deviation from the Path, knowledge  is a  delusion, because  the sum of
knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound.
'We will  unmake the  veil of history,' Bilal  declaims  into the  listening
night, 'and when  it is unravelled, we will  see Paradise standing there, in
all its glory and light.' The Imam  chose Bilal for  this task on account of
the beauty  of  his voice, which in its  previous incarnation  succeeded  in
climbing  the Everest of the hit parade, not once but a dozen times, to  the
very top. The voice is rich and authoritative, a voice in the habit of being
listened   to;  well-nourished,  highly  trained,  the   voice  of  American
confidence,  a weapon of  the West turned  against its  makers, whose  might
upholds the Empress and her tyranny. In the  early days Bilal X protested at
such a description  of his voice.  He, too, belonged to an oppressed people,
he  insisted,  so  that  it  was  unjust  to  equate  him  with  the  Yankee
imperialists.  The  Imam  answered,  not  without  gentleness:  Bilal,  your
suffering  is ours  as  well. But  to be  raised in the house of power is to
learn its ways, to soak them up, through that very skin that is the cause of
your oppression.  The habit  of  power,  its timbre, its posture, its way of
being with others. It is  a disease, Bilal, infecting  all who come too near
it. If the powerful trample over you, you are infected by the soles of their
feet.
     Bilal continues  to address the darkness. 'Death to the  tyranny of the
Empress Ayesha, of calendars, of America, of time! We seek the eternity, the
timelessness, of  God.  His still waters,  not her flowing wines.'  Burn the
books and  trust  the  Book; shred the  papers and hear  the Word, as it was
revealed  by  the Angel Gibreel to  the Messenger  Mahound and explicated by
your  interpreter  and  Imam.  'Ameen,'  Bilal said, concluding the  night's
proceedings. While, in his sanctum, the Imam sends a message of his own: and
summons, conjures up, the archangel, Gibreel.
     He  sees himself in  the dream: no  angel to look at, just a man in his
ordinary street clothes, Henry Diamond's posthumous hand-me-downs: gabardine
and trilby over outsize trousers  held  up by  braces, a fisherman's woollen
pullover,  billowy white  shirt. This dream-Gibreel, so like the waking one,
stands quaking in the sanctum of the Imam, whose eyes are white as clouds.
     Gibreel speaks querulously, to hide his fear.
     'Why insist on archangels? Those days, you should know, are gone.'
     The  Imam closes his  eyes,  sighs.  The  carpet  extrudes  long  hairy
tendrils, which wrap themselves around Gibreel, holding him fast.
     'You  don't need  me,' Gibreel emphasizes. 'The revelation is complete.
Let me go.'
     The  other shakes  his  head, and speaks, except that  his  lips do not
move,  and  it  is Bilal's voice that fills Gibreel's ears,  even though the
broadcaster is nowhere to be  seen, 

tonight's the night,

 the voice says, 

and
you must fly me to Jerusalem.

     Then the apartment dissolves and they are standing on  the roof  beside
the water-tank, because the  Imam, when he wishes  to move, can remain still
and move  the  world around  him.  His beard is  blowing in the wind. It  is
longer now; if it were not for the wind that catches at  it as if it were  a
flowing chiffon scarf,  it would touch  the ground  by his feet;  he has red
eyes, and his voice hangs  around him  in the sky.  

Take me.

 Gibreel argues,
Seems you  can do it easily  by yourself: but the Imam, in a single movement
of astonishing  rapidity, slings his beard over his shoulder, hoists  up his
skirts to reveal two spindly legs with an almost monstrous covering of hair,
and leaps  high into  the  night air, twirls  himself about,  and settles on
Gibreel's  shoulders,  clutching on to him with fingernails  that have grown
into  long, curved claws. Gibreel feels himself rising into the sky, bearing
the old man  of the sea, the Imam with hair that grows longer by the minute,
streaming in every direction, his eyebrows like pennants in the wind.
     Jerusalem, he wonders, which way  is that?  - And then, it's a slippery
word, Jerusalem,  it  can  be an  idea  as  well  as  a place:  a  goal,  an
exaltation.  Where  is the  Imam's Jerusalem? 'The fall of the  harlot,' the
disembodied voice resounds in his ears. 'Her crash, the Babylonian whore.'
     They  zoom  through  the night.  The moon is heating  up,  beginning to
bubble like cheese under a grill; he, Gibreel, sees pieces of it falling off
from time to time, moon-drips that hiss  and bubble on  the sizzling griddle
of the sky. Land appears below them. The heat grows intense.
     It is an immense landscape, reddish, with  flat-topped trees. They  fly
over  mountains  that  are  also  flat-topped;  even  the  stones, here, are
flattened by the heat. Then they come to a high mountain of almost perfectly
conical dimensions,  a  mountain  that also sits postcarded on a mantelpiece
far  away;  and in the shadow of the mountain, a city, sprawling at its feet
like a supplicant, and on the mountain's lower slopes, a palace, the palace,
her  place:  the Empress,  whom  radio  messages  have  unmade.  This  is  a
revolution of radio hams.
     Gibreel, with the Imam riding him like a carpet, swoops  lower, and  in
the steaming  night it looks as  if the streets are alive, they seem  to  be
writhing, like snakes; while in front of the palace of the  Empress's defeat
a new  hill seems to be growing, 

while we watch, baba, what's going on here?

The Imam's voice hangs in the sky: 'Come down. I will show you Love.'
     They are at rooftop-level when Gibreel  realizes  that the streets  are
swarming with  people.  Human beings,  packed so densely into  those snaking
paths that they  have  blended into a larger, composite entity,  relentless,
serpentine. The people move slowly, at an even pace, down alleys into lanes,
down lanes into side streets, down side streets into  highways, all of  them
converging  upon the  grand avenue, twelve lanes wide  and lined with  giant
eucalyptus trees, that leads to  the palace gates. The avenue is packed with
humanity;  it  is  the central organ  of the new, many-headed being. Seventy
abreast, the  people walk  gravely towards the Empress's  gates. In front of
which her household guards are  waiting in three ranks, lying,  kneeling and
standing,  with machine-guns at the ready.  The people  are  walking  up the
slope towards the guns;  seventy at a  time,  they come into range; the guns
babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the
dead, the guns giggle once again, and  the  hill of the  dead grows  higher.
Those behind it  commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark  doorways of
the city there  are mothers with covered heads,  pushing their  beloved sons
into the parade,  

go, be  a martyr, do the needful, die,

  'You see how  they
love me,' says the disembodied voice. 'No tyranny on earth can withstand the
power of this slow, walking love.'
     'This  isn't  love,'  Gibreel,  weeping, replies.  'It's  hate. She has
driven them into your arms.' The explanation sounds thin, superficial.
     'They  love  me,'  the Imam's voice  says,  'because  I am  water. I am
fertility  and  she  is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks.
Human beings who turn away  from God lose love, and certainty, and also  the
sense of His boundless time, that encompasses  past, present and future; the
timeless time, that has no need  to move.  We long for the eternal, and I am
eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or tock. She looks in her mirror every day
and  is terrorized  by the idea  of age, of  time passing. Thus  she is  the
prisoner of  her own nature; she, too, is  in the chains  of Time. After the
revolution there will be no clocks; we'll smash the lot. The word 

clock

 will
be  expunged  from our dictionaries. After the revolution  there will be  no
birthdays. We shall all be born  again, all of us the same unchanging age in
the eye of Almighty God.'
     He falls silent, now, because below us the great moment  has  come: the
people  have reached  the  guns. Which  are silenced  in their turn, as  the
endless  serpent  of the  people, the gigantic python of the  risen  masses,
embraces the guards, suffocating them, and silences the lethal  chuckling of
their weapons. The Imam sighs heavily. 'Done.'
     The lights  of  the  palace are extinguished as the people walk towards
it,  at the  same  measured pace as before. Then, from  within the  darkened
palace,  there  rises a hideous sound, beginning as  a high,  thin, piercing
wail,  then  deepening into a howl,  an ululation  loud enough to fill every
cranny of the city with its rage. Then the golden dome of the  palace bursts
open  like an  egg,  and  rising  from  it,  glowing with  blackness,  is  a
mythological apparition with vast black  wings, her hair streaming loose, as
long and black as the Imam's is long and white: Al-Lat, Gibreel understands,
bursting out of Ayesha's shell.
     'Kill her,' the Imam commands.
     Gibreel  sets  him  down on  the  palace's ceremonial balcony, his arms
outstretched to encompass the joy  of the people, a  sound that drowns  even
the howls of  the goddess  and rises up like a song. And  then he  is  being
propelled  into the air, having no option, he is  a marionette going to war;
and she, seeing him coming, turns, crouches in air, and, moaning dreadfully,
comes at him with all her might. Gibreel understands that the Imam, fighting
by proxy as  usual, will  sacrifice  him as readily as  he  did the  hill of
corpses at the palace  gate, that he is a suicide soldier in the  service of
the  cleric's cause. I am  weak, he thinks, I am no match  for her, but she,
too,  has been weakened by her  defeat. The Imam's  strength  moves Gibreel,
places thunderbolts in  his  hands, and  the  battle  is  joined;  he  hurls
lightning spears into her feet and she plunges comets into his groin, 

we are
killing each  other,

 he  thinks,  

we will die  and  there will  be  two  new
constellations in  space: Al-Lat, and Gibreel.

 Like exhausted warriors on  a
corpse-littered field, they totter and slash. Both are failing fast.
     She falls.
     Down  she tumbles,  Al-Lat queen of  the  night; crashes upside-down to
earth, crushing her head to bits; and lies, a headless black angel, with her
wings  ripped off,  by a little wicket gate in the palace gardens, all in  a
crumpled heap. - And Gibreel, looking away from her in horror, sees the Imam
grown  monstrous, lying in  the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open
at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole.
     The body of Al-Lat has shrivelled on the grass,  leaving behind only  a
dark stain; and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime,
and  goes on unceasingly,  beyond  twelve,  beyond twenty-four,  beyond  one
thousand  and one, announcing  the  end of  Time, the  hour  that  is beyond
measuring, the  hour of  the exile's  return, of  the victory  of water over
wine, of the commencement of the Untime of the Imam.
     When the  nocturnal story changes, when,  without warning, the progress
of events  in Jahilia and Yathrib gives  way to  the  struggle of  Imam  and
Empress, Gibreel  briefly  hopes that the curse has  ended, that  his dreams
have been restored to the random eccentricity of ordinary life; but then, as
the new story, too,  falls  into  the  old  pattern, continuing each time he
drops off from the precise point at which it was interrupted, and as his own
image,  translated into an avatar  of the archangel, re-enters the frame, so
his  hope  dies, and he succumbs once  more to  the  inexorable. Things have
reached  the point  at which some of his night-sagas seem more bearable than
others, and after the apocalypse  of the Imam  he feels almost pleased  when
the  next  narrative begins, extending  his internal  repertory,  because at
least it suggests that the deity whom  he, Gibreel, has tried unsuccessfully
to kill can  be a  God of love,  as well as  one of vengeance, power,  duty,
rules  and  hate;  and  it is,  too,  a nostalgic sort  of  tale, of  a lost
homeland; it feels  like a  return to  the  past . . . what  story is  this?
Coming right up. To  begin at the beginning: On the morning  of his fortieth
birthday, in  a room full  of  butterflies,  Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched  his
sleeping wife . . .
     On  the  fateful morning of his fortieth  birthday, in  a room full  of
butterflies, the zamindar Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched over his sleeping wife,
and felt his heart fill  up to the bursting-point with  love. He  had awoken
early  for once, rising  before dawn with a bad dream souring his mouth, his
recurring  dream of  the  end  of  the  world, in which the catastrophe  was
invariably his fault. He had been reading Nietzsche the night before -  'the
pitiless end of  that  small, overextended species  called  Man'  -  and had
fallen asleep with the book resting  face downwards  on his chest. Waking to
the  rustle of  butterfly wings in  the cool, shadowy bedroom,  he was angry
with himself for being so  foolish  in his choice of bedside reading matter.
He  was, however, wide awake now. Getting  up  quietly, he slipped  his feet
into  chappals and  strolled idly along the  verandas of the  great mansion,
still in darkness on account  of their  lowered  blinds, and the butterflies
bobbed like courtiers at  his back. In the far distance, someone was playing
a flute. Mirza Saeed drew up the chick blinds and fastened their cords.  The
gardens were deep in mist, through which the butterfly clouds were swirling,
one mist  intersecting another. This remote region had always been  renowned
for its lepidoptera, for these miraculous  squadrons that filled  the air by
day and night,  butterflies with the gift of chameleons, whose wings changed
colour  as  they  settled  on  vermilion  flowers,  ochre curtains, obsidian
goblets or  amber  finger-rings. In the zamindar's mansion, and also  in the
nearby  village, the miracle of the butterflies had become so familiar as to
seem mundane, but in fact they had only returned nineteen years ago,  as the
servant  women would recall. They had been the familiar spirits,  or  so the
legend ran, of a local saint, the  holy woman  known only as Bibiji, who had
lived to the age  of two hundred and  forty-two and whose  grave,  until its
location  was forgotten, had  the  property  of  curing impotence and warts.
Since the  death of Bibiji one  hundred and twenty years ago the butterflies
had vanished into the same realm of the legendary as Bibiji herself, so that
when they came back exactly  one hundred and one years after their departure
it looked, at  first, like an omen of some  imminent, wonderful thing. After
Bibiji's death  -  it should quickly be said - the  village had continued to
prosper, the  potato crops remained plentiful, but  there had been a gap  in
many hearts, even  though the villagers of the present had  no memory of the
time of the old saint. So the return of the butterflies lifted many spirits,
but when  the expected  wonders failed to materialize the locals sank  back,
little by little, into the insufficiency of the day-to-day. The name  of the
zamindar's  mansion,  

Peristan,

  may have had  its  origins  in  the magical
creatures' fairy wings, and the village's name, 

Titlipur,

 certainly did. But
names, once  they  are in common  use,  quickly  become  mere sounds,  their
etymology  being  buried, like so many of  the  earth's marvels, beneath the
dust of  habit. The human inhabitants of Titlipur, and its butterfly hordes,
moved amongst one another with a kind of  mutual disdain.  The villagers and
the  zamindar's family had long  ago  abandoned the  attempt  to exclude the
butterflies from their  homes, so that  now whenever  a  trunk was opened, a
batch of wings would fly  out of  it like Pandora's imps, changing colour as
they rose; there were butterflies under the closed  lids of the thunderboxes
in the toilets of Peristan, and inside every wardrobe, and between the pages
of books. When you awoke you found the butterflies sleeping on your cheeks.
     The commonplace eventually  becomes invisible, and  Mirza Saeed had not
really noticed the butterflies for a number of years. On the morning  of his
fortieth birthday, however, as the first light of dawn touched the house and
the  butterflies  began instantly to glow, the beauty of the moment took his
breath  away. He ran at once  to the bedroom in the zenana wing in which his
wife Mishal  lay  sleeping, veiled in a mosquito-net.  The magic butterflies
were resting on her exposed toes, and a mosquito had evidently found its way
inside as well, because there  was a line  of little bites along the  raised
edge of her  collar-bone. He wanted to lift  the net, crawl inside and  kiss
the bites until  they faded  away. How inflamed they looked!  How, when  she
awoke, they would itch! But he held  himself back, preferring to  enjoy  the
innocence  of her sleeping form. She had soft, red-brown  hair, white  white
skin, and her eyes, behind the  closed lids, were silky grey. Her father was
a director of the  state  bank, so it  had  been an irresistible  match,  an
arranged  marriage which  restored the  fortunes  of  the  Mirza's  ancient,
decaying family and then ripened, over time and in spite of their failure to
have  children, into  a union  of  real love.  Full  of emotion, Mirza Saeed
watched Mishal sleep and  chased  the last shreds of his nightmare from  his
mind. 'How can the world be done for,' he reasoned  contentedly  to himself,
'if it can offer up such instances of perfection as this lovely dawn?'
     Continuing  down the  line  of  these happy thoughts,  he formulated  a
silent speech to his  resting  wife.  'Mishal,  I'm forty years  old and  as
contented as a forty-day babe. I see now that  I've been falling  deeper and
deeper into our love over the years, and now I swim, like some fish, in that
warm sea.'  How much she gave him,  he  marvelled; how much  he  needed her!
Their  marriage   transcended  mere  sensuality,  was  so  intimate  that  a
separation was unthinkable. 'Growing old beside you,' he told  her while she
slept,  'will   be,  Mishal,   a  privilege.'   He  permitted  himself   the
sentimentality of blowing a kiss in her direction  and  then  tiptoeing from
the room.  Out once more  on the main veranda of his private quarters on the
mansion's upper storey, he glanced across to the gardens, which  were coming
into view as the  dawn lifted the mist, and saw the sight that would destroy
his peace of  mind forever, smashing  it  beyond hope of repair at the  very
instant in which he had become certain of its invulnerability to the ravages
of fate.
     A young woman was  squatting on the  lawn, holding out her  left  palm.
Butterflies were settling on this surface while, with  her  right  hand, she
picked  them  up and  put them  in  her  mouth.  Slowly,  methodically,  she
breakfasted on the acquiescent wings.
     Her lips,  cheeks,  chin  were  heavily stained by  the  many different
colours that had rubbed off the dying butterflies.
     When  Mirza  Saeed  Akhtar saw  the  young  woman eating  her  gossamer
breakfast on his lawn, he felt a surge of lust so powerful that he instantly
felt ashamed. 'It's  impossible,' he scolded  himself, 'I  am not an animal,
after all.' The young  woman wore a  saffron  yellow sari wrapped around her
nakedness, after the  fashion of the  poor women of that region, and as  she
stooped over  the  butterflies the sari, hanging loosely forwards, bared her
small breasts to  the gaze of the transfixed zamindar. Mirza Saeed stretched
out his hands to grip the  balcony  railing, and the  slight movement of his
white kurta  must have caught  her  eye, because she lifted her head quickly
and looked right into his face.
     And  did  not immediately  look down again.  Nor did she get up and run
away, as he had half expected.
     What she did: waited for a few seconds, as though to see if he intended
to  speak.  When  he did  not, she  simply resumed her strange meal  without
taking  her eyes  from his  face.  The strangest aspect of it  was  that the
butterflies seemed  to  be  funnelling downwards from the  brightening  air,
going willingly  towards  her outstretched palms  and their  own deaths. She
held  them by the wingtips, threw her head  back and flicked  them  into her
mouth with the tip of her narrow tongue. Once  she kept her  mouth open, the
dark  lips parted defiantly, and Mirza Saeed trembled  to see the  butterfly
fluttering within the dark cavern of its death,  yet  making  no  attempt to
escape. When she was satisfied that he had seen  this, she  brought her lips
together  and  began  to chew.  They  remained thus,  peasant  woman  below,
landowner above, until her eyes unexpectedly rolled upwards in their sockets
and she fell heavily, twitching violently, on to her left side.
     After a  few seconds  of  transfixed  panic, the  Mirza shouted,  'Ohe,
house! Ohe, wake up, emergency!' At the same time he ran towards the stately
mahogany  staircase  from  England,  brought  here  from  some  unimaginable
Warwickshire,  some fantastic  location  in which, in  a damp and  lightless
priory, King  Charles I  had  ascended these  same  steps, before losing his
head,  in the  seventeenth century  of  another  system of time. Down  these
stairs  hurtled Mirza  Saeed Akhtar, last  of his  line, trampling over  the
ghostly impressions of beheaded feet as he sped towards the lawn.
     The  girl was  having convulsions,  crushing  butterflies  beneath  her
rolling, kicking body.  Mirza Saeed got to her first, although  the servants
and Mishal, awakened by his cry, were not far behind. He grasped the girl by
the jaw  and forced it open, inserting  a nearby twig, which she at once bit
in half. Blood trickled from her cut mouth,  and  he feared for  her tongue,
but the sickness left her just then, she became  calm, and slept. Mishal had
her carried to her own bedroom, and now Mirza Saeed was obliged to gaze on a
second sleeping  beauty  in  that bed, and was stricken for a second time by
what seemed too rich  and  deep a sensation  to be called by the crude name,

lust.

 He found that he was at once sickened by  his  own  impure designs and
also elated by  the feelings that were  coursing within him, fresh  feelings
whose newness excited  him greatly. Mishal came to stand beside her husband.
'Do you know her?' Saeed asked, and she nodded. 'An orphan  girl.  She makes
small  enamel  animals and sells them at the  trunk road.  She  has  had the
falling sickness since  she was very  little.' Mirza Saeed was awed, not for
the  first time, by his wife's  gift of involvement with other human beings.
He himself could hardly recognize more  than a handful of the villagers, but
she  knew each person's  pet names, family histories and incomes. They  even
told  her their dreams, although few of them dreamed more than once  a month
on  account of being  too  poor to  afford  such  luxuries.  The overflowing
fondness he  had felt at  dawn  returned, and he placed  his arm  around her
shoulders.  She  leaned  her  head  against  him  and  said  softly:  'Happy
birthday.' He kissed the top of her hair. They stood embracing, watching the
sleeping girl. Ayesha: his wife told him the name.
     After the orphan  girl Ayesha arrived at puberty and became, on account
of her distracted  beauty  and  her air of  staring into  another world, the
object of many young men's desires, it began to be said that she was looking
for  a lover  from heaven, because she  thought herself too good  for mortal
men. Her rejected suitors  complained  that  in practical  terms she  had no
business acting so choosy, in the first place because she was an orphan, and
in the second, because she was possessed by the demon of epilepsy, who would
certainly  put  off  any heavenly  spirits  who might  otherwise  have  been
interested.  Some embittered  youths  went so far  as  to  suggest  that  as
Ayesha's defects would  prevent her from ever finding a husband she might as
well start taking lovers, so as not to waste that beauty, which ought in all
fairness to have been given  to a less  problematic individual. In spite  of
these attempts by the young men of Titlipur to  turn her  into  their whore,
Ayesha   remained  chaste,  her  defence  being   a   look  of  such  fierce
concentration on  patches of air immediately above people's  left  shoulders
that it was regularly mistaken for contempt. Then people heard about her new
habit  of  swallowing butterflies  and  they  revised  their opinion of her,
convinced that she  was  touched in  the head and therefore dangerous to lie
with in case the demons crossed over into her lovers. After this the lustful
males of her village left her alone in her hovel, alone with her toy animals
and her peculiar fluttering diet. One young man, however,  took to sitting a
little  distance  from  her  doorway,  facing  discreetly  in  the  opposite
direction, as if he were on guard, even though she no longer had any need of
protectors.  He  was  a  former untouchable from the neighbouring village of
Chatnapatna who had  been converted  to  Islam and taken the name of  Osman.
Ayesha  never  acknowledged Osman's  presence,  nor  did  he  ask  for  such
acknowledgement. The leafy branches of the village waved over their heads in
the breeze.
     The  village  of Titlipur had  grown  up  in the shade  of  an  immense
banyan-tree, a single monarch  that ruled, with  its multiple roots, over an
area  more  than half a mile in diameter.  By now  the growth  of  tree into
village and village into tree had become so intricate that it was impossible
to differentiate  between the two. Certain  districts of the tree had become
well-known  lovers'  nooks;  others were chicken  runs.  Some of the  poorer
labourers  had constructed rough-and-ready  shelters in the  angles of stout
branches, and actually  lived inside the dense foliage. There were  branches
that  were used as  pathways across  the village, and children's swings made
out of the old tree's beards, and in places where  the tree stooped low down
towards the earth its leaves formed roofs for many a hutment  that seemed to
hang from the greenery like  the nest  of a  weaver  bird. When  the village
pan-chayat assembled, it sat on  the mightiest branch of all. The  villagers
had grown  accustomed to referring to the  tree by the name of  the village,
and to the village simply as 'the tree'. The  banyan's non-human inhabitants
-  honey   ants,  squirrels,  owls  -were  accorded   the  respect  due   to
fellow-citizens.  Only the butterflies were ignored, like hopes  long  since
shown to be false.
     It  was a Muslim village, which was why the convert Osman had come here
with his  clown's outfit  and his 'boom-boom'  bullock after he had embraced
the faith in  an act  of desperation, hoping that  changing to a Muslim name
would   do  him  more  good  than  earlier   re-namings,  for  example  when
untouchables  were  renamed  'children  of  God'.  As  a  child  of  God  in
Chatnapatna he had not  been  permitted to  draw water from the  town  well,
because the touch of an outcaste would have polluted the drinking water  . .
. Landless and, like Ayesha, an orphan, Osman earned  his living as a clown.
His  bullock wore bright  red  paper  cones over its horns and much tinselly
drapery  over its nose and  back. He went from village to village performing
an  act,  at marriages and other celebrations,  in which the bullock was his
essential partner and foil, nodding in answer to his questions, one nod  for
no, twice for yes.
     'Isn't this a nice village we've come to?' Osman would ask.
     Boom, the bullock disagreed.
     'It isn't? Oh yes it is. Look: aren't the people good?'
     Boom.
     'What? Then it's a village full of sinners?'
     Boom, boom.
     'Baapu-re! Then, will everybody go to hell?'
     Boom, boom.
     'But, bhaijan. Is there any hope for them?'
     Boom, boom, the bullock  offered salvation. Excitedly, Osman bent down,
placing his ear by  the bullock's mouth. 'Tell, quickly. What should they do
to be saved?' At this point the bullock plucked Osman's cap off his head and
carried it around the crowd, asking for money, and Osman would nod, happily:
Boom, boom.
     Osman  the convert  and  his  boom-boom  bullock  were  well  liked  in
Titlipur, but the young man  only wanted the approval of one person, and she
would not  give it. He had admitted to her that his  conversion to Islam had
been  largely tactical, 'Just so  I could get a drink, bibi, what's a man to
do?'  She had  been outraged by his  confession, informed him that he was no
Muslim at all, his soul was in peril and he could go back to Chatnapatna and
die of  thirst for all she  cared. Her face coloured, as  she spoke, with an
unaccountably strong disappointment in him, and it was the vehemence of this
disappointment that gave him the  optimism to remain squatting a dozen paces
from her home, day after day, but she continued to  stalk past him,  nose in
air, without so much as a good morning or hope-you're-well.
     Once  a week, the potato carts of Titlipur  trundled  down the  rutted,
narrow, four-hour track to Chatnapatna,  which stood at  the point  at which
the track  met the grand trunk road. In Chatnapatna stood the high, gleaming
aluminium silos of  the potato wholesalers,  but this had nothing to do with
Ayesha's  regular  visits to  the town. She  would  hitch a ride on a potato
cart,  clutching a  little  sackcloth bundle,  to  take  her toys to market.
Chatnapatna  was known throughout  the region for its kiddies' knick-knacks,
carved wooden toys and enamelled figurines. Osman and his  bullock stood  at
the  edge of the banyan-tree, watching her bounce about on top of the potato
sacks until she had diminished to a dot.
     In Chatnapatna she made her way to  the premises of Sri Srinivas, owner
of the biggest toy factory in town. On its walls were the political graffiti
of the day: 

Vote  for  Hand.

 Or, more politely: 

Please  to  vote for CP (M)

.
Above these exhortations  was the proud announcement: 

Srinivas's Toy Univas.
Our Moto: Sinceriety & Creativity.

  Srinivas was inside: a large jelly  of a
man, his head a hairless sun, a fiftyish fellow whom  a lifetime  of selling
toys  had failed  to  sour. Ayesha owed him  her livelihood. He had been  so
taken  with the artistry of  her whittling that he had agreed to buy as many
as she  could produce.  But in spite of his habitual bonhomie his expression
darkened  when Ayesha undid her bundle to show  him  two dozen figures of  a
young man in a  clown hat, accompanied by a decorated bullock that could dip
its  tinselled  head.  Understanding  that  Ayesha  had  forgiven Osman  his
conversion, Sri Srinivas cried, 'That man  is a traitor to his birth, as you
well know. What kind of a person will change gods  as easily  as his dhotis?
God knows what got into you, daughter, but I don't want these dolls.' On the
wall  behind his desk hung  a framed  certificate which read, in elaborately
cur-licued print: 

This is to certify that MR SRI S. SRINIVAS is an Expert on
the  Geological  History  of  the  Planet  Earth, having flown through Grand
Canyon with SCENIC AIRLINES.

 Srinivas closed  his eyes and  folded his arms,
an unlaughing Buddha with the indisputable authority  of  one who had flown.
'That  boy is a devil/ he  said  with finality,  and Ayesha folded the dolls
into her piece of sackcloth and turned to leave, without arguing. Srinivas's
eyes flew open. 'Damn you,' he  shouted, 'aren't you going to give me a hard
time?  You think I don't know you need  the  money? Why you did  such a damn
stupid thing? What are you going to do now? Just go and make some  FP dolls,
double quick, and I will buy  at best rate plus, because I am  generous to a
fault.'  Mr  Srinivas's personal invention was the Family Planning  doll,  a
socially  responsible  variant  of the old  Russian-doll  notion.  Inside  a
suited-and-booted Abba-doll was a demure, sari-clad Amma,  and inside her  a
daughter containing a son. Two children  are plenty: that was the message of
the  dolls.  'Make  quickly quickly,' Srinivas  called  after the  departing
Ayesha. 'FP  dolls have high turnover.'  Ayesha turned, and  smiled.  'Don't
worry about me, Srinivasji,' she said, and left.
     Ayesha  the orphan was nineteen years old when she began her walk  back
to Titlipur along the rutted  potato track, but by the time she turned up in
her  village  some  forty-eight hours  later  she  had  attained a  kind  of
agelessness, because her hair had turned as white as snow while her skin had
regained the luminous perfection of a new-born child's, and although she was
completely  naked the butterflies  had settled  upon her body  in such thick
swarms that she seemed to be wearing a dress of the most  delicate  material
in the universe. The clown Osman was practising routines with  the boom-boom
bullock near the track, because even though he had been worried  sick by her
extended absence, and had  spent  the whole of the previous  night searching
for her, it was still necessary to earn a living. When he laid  eyes on her,
that young  man  who had never  respected God because  of having  been  born
untouchable was  filled with holy terror, and did  not dare to  approach the
girl with whom he was so helplessly in love.
     She went into her hut  and slept for a day and  a night  without waking
up. Then she  went  to  see the village headman,  Sarpanch Muhammad Din, and
informed him matter-of-factly that the Archangel Gibreel had appeared to her
in a vision and had  lain down beside her to rest. 'Greatness has come among
us,' she  informed  the  alarmed  Sarpanch, who  had  until  then been  more
concerned  with  potato  quotas  than  transcendence.  'Everything  will  be
required of us, and everything will be given to us also.'
     In another part of the tree,  the Sarpanch's wife Khadija was consoling
a weeping clown,  who was finding it  hard  to  accept that he had  lost his
beloved Ayesha to a  higher being, for when an  archangel  lies with a woman
she  is lost  to  men forever. Khadija  was old and forgetful and frequently
clumsy when she tried to  be loving,  and she gave Osman cold  comfort: 'The
sun  always sets when  there is fear of tigers,' she quoted the  old saying:
bad news always comes all at once.
     Soon  after  the  story  of  the miracle got  out, the girl  Ayesha was
summoned to the big house, and in the following  days she  spent long  hours
closeted  with the zamindar's wife,  Begum  Mishal Akhtar, whose  mother had
also arrived on a visit, and fallen for the archangel's white-haired wife.
     The dreamer, dreaming, wants (but is unable) to protest: I never laid a
finger on her, what  do you think this is, some kind of wet dream  or  what?
Damn   me   if   I   know   from   where   that   girl   was   getting   her
information/inspiration. Not from this quarter, that's for sure.
     This happened: she was walking back to her village, but then she seemed
to grow weary all of a sudden, and went off the path to lie  in the shade of
a  tamarind-tree and  rest. The moment her eyes closed  he was there  beside
her, dreaming Gibreel in coat and hat, sweltering in the heat. She looked at
him but he couldn't say what she saw, wings maybe, haloes,  the works.  Then
he was  lying there and finding  he could not  get  up, his limbs had become
heavier than iron bars, it seemed as if his body might be crushed by its own
weight into the earth. When she finished looking at him she nodded, gravely,
as if he had spoken, and then she took off her scrap of a sari and stretched
out beside him,  nude. Then in  the  dream he  fell  asleep,  out cold as if
somebody  pulled out the plug, and when dreamed himself  awake again she was
standing in front  of him  with  that loose  white hair and  the butterflies
clothing her: transformed. She was still nodding, with a rapt expression  on
her face, receiving a message from somewhere that  she called Gibreel.  Then
she left him lying there and returned to the village to make her entrance.
     So now I have a dream-wife, the  dreamer becomes  conscious  enough  to
think. What the hell to  do with her? - But  it isn't up to him. Ayesha  and
Mishal Akhtar are together in the big house.
     Ever  since  his  birthday  Mirza  Saeed had  been  full  of passionate
desires, 'as if life really does begin  at forty', his wife marvelled. Their
marriage  became so  energetic that the servants had to change the bedsheets
three times per day. Mishal  hoped  secretly  that this heightening  of  her
husband's libido would  lead  her to conceive, because she was of  the  firm
opinion  that  enthusiasm  mattered,  whatever  doctors  might  say  to  the
contrary, and  that the years of taking her temperature every morning before
getting out of bed, and then plotting the results on graph paper in order to
establish her pattern of ovulation,  had actually dissuaded the  babies from
being  born,  partly  because it  was difficult to be  properly  ardent when
science got  into bed along with you, and partly, too, in  her view, because
no self-respecting  foetus would  wish to enter the womb of so  mechanically
programmed a mother; Mishal still prayed for a child, although she no longer
mentioned  the fact to Saeed so as to spare him the sense  of having  failed
her in this respect. Eyes shut, feigning sleep, she  would call on God for a
sign, and when Saeed became so loving, so frequently, she  wondered if maybe
this might  not be it. As a result, his strange  request  that from  now on,
whenever they came to stay at Peristan, she should adopt the 'old ways'  and
retreat into purdah, was not treated  by her with the contempt it  deserved.
In the city,  where they kept a large and hospitable house, the zamindar and
his wife  were known as one  of the most 'modern' and 'go-go' couples on the
scene;  they collected  contemporary art and threw  wild parties and invited
friends round for  fumbles in the  dark on sofas while  watching  soft-porno
VCRs. So when Mirza Saeed said, 'Would  it not be sort of  delicious, Mishu,
if we tailored our behaviour to fit this old house,' she should have laughed
in his  face. Instead she replied,  'What you like,  Saeed,' because he gave
her to understand that it was a sort of erotic game. He even hinted that his
passion for her had become so overwhelming that he might need  to express it
at  any  moment,  and if she  were  out in  the  open at the  time  it might
embarrass the staff; certainly her presence would make it impossible for him
to concentrate on any of his tasks, and besides, in the city, 'we will still
be completely up-to-date'.  From this she understood  that the city was full
of  distractions  for  the  Mirza,  so  that her chances of conceiving  were
greatest right here in Titlipur. She resolved to stay put. This was when she
invited her mother to come and stay, because if she  were to confine herself
to the zenana  she  would need  company. Mrs. Qureishi arrived wobbling with
plump fury, determined to  scold her son-in-law until he gave up this purdah
foolishness, but Mishal amazed her  mother by  begging: 'Please don't.' Mrs.
Qureishi,  the wife  of  the state bank director,  was quite a  sophisticate
herself. 'In fact, all your  teenage, Mishu, you  were the grey goose  and I
was the hipster. I thought you dragged yourself out of that  ditch but I see
he pushed you back in there  again.' The financier's wife had always been of
the opinion that her  son-in-law was  a secret cheapskate, an  opinion which
had survived  intact  in  spite of being  starved of any scrap of supporting
evidence. Ignoring her daughter's veto,  she  sought  out Mirza Saeed in the
formal  garden  and  launched  into him,  wobbling,  as  was  her  wont, for
emphasis. 'What type of  life are you living?' she demanded. 'My daughter is
not for locking up, but for taking out! What is all your fortune for, if you
keep  it also under lock and key? My son,  unlock both wallet and wife! Take
her away, renew your love, on some enjoyable 

outing!'

 Mirza Saeed opened his
mouth, found no reply, shut it again. Dazzled by her own oratory, which  had
given rise, quite on the spur of the  moment, to the idea of a holiday, Mrs.
Qureishi warmed to her theme. 'Just get set,  and  go!' she urged. 'Go, man,
go! Go away with her, or  will you lock her up until she goes away,'  - here
she jabbed an ominous finger at the sky 

- 'forever?'

     Guiltily, Mirza Saeed promised to consider the idea.
     'What are you waiting for?' she cried in triumph. 'You big softo? You .
. . you 

Hamlet?'

     His mother-in-law's  attack  brought on  one of the  periodic  bouts of
self-reproach  which  had been plaguing Mirza Saeed ever since  he persuaded
Mishal to take the veil. To console himself he settled down to read Tagore's
story  

Ghare-Baire

 in which a zamindar  persuades his  wife  to  come 

out

 of
purdah, whereupon she  takes up  with a firebrand politico  involved in  the
'swadeshi'  campaign, and the  zamindar winds up dead. The novel cheered him
up momentarily, but then his suspicions returned. Had he been sincere in the
reasons he  gave his wife,  or was he simply finding  a  way  of leaving the
coast  clear  for his  pursuit  of  the  madonna  of  the  butterflies,  the
epileptic, Ayesha?  'Some coast,'  he thought, remembering Mrs Qureishi with
her eyes of an accusative hawk,  'some clear.' His mother-in-law's presence,
he argued  to  himself,  was further proof  of  his bona  fides. Had he  not
positively encouraged Mishal  to send for her, even though he knew perfectly
well that the  old fatty couldn't stand him and  would suspect  him of every
damn slyness under the sun? 'Would I have been so keen for her to come  if I
was planning on hanky panky?' he asked himself. But the nagging inner voices
continued: 'All  this  recent  sexology, this renewed interest in  your lady
wife,  is simple  transference. Really, you  are longing  for  your  peasant
floozy to come and flooze with you.'
     Guilt had the effect  of  making the  zamindar feel entirely worthless.
His  mother-in-law's  insults  came to  seem, in  his unhappiness,  like the
literal truth. 'Softo,' she called him, and sitting in his study, surrounded
by  bookcases  in  which  worms  were  munching  contentedly upon  priceless
Sanskrit texts such as were not to be  found  even in the national archives,
and also,  less upliftingly, on the complete works of Percy Westerman, G. A.
Henty and Dornford Yates, Mirza Saeed admitted, yes, spot on, I am soft. The
house was seven generations old  and for seven generations the softening had
been going on.  He  walked down the corridor in which his ancestors  hung in
baleful, gilded frames, and contemplated the mirror which he kept hanging in
the last space as a reminder that one day he, too, must step up  on  to this
wall.  He was a man without sharp  corners  or  rough edges; even his elbows
were  covered  by  little  pads  of  flesh.  In  the mirror he  saw the thin
moustache, the weak chin, the lips stained by paan. Cheeks, nose,  forehead:
all soft, soft, soft. 'Who would see anything in a type like me?' he  cried,
and when he  realized that he had been so  agitated that he had spoken aloud
he knew  he must be in love, that he  was sick as a dog with love,  and that
the object of his affections was no longer his loving wife.
     'Then what a damn, shallow, tricksy and self-deceiving fellow I am,' he
sighed to himself, 'to change so much, so fast. I deserve to be finished off
without ceremony.' But he was not the type to fall on his sword. Instead, he
strolled a while around the corridors of Peristan, and pretty soon the house
worked its magic and restored him to something like a good mood once again.
     The house: in spite of  its  faery name,  it  was a solid, rather prosy
building,  rendered  exotic only by  being in the wrong country. It had been
built seven generations ago  by a certain Perowne, an English architect much
favoured by  the  colonial authorities,  whose only  style was  that  of the
neo-classical English country house. In those days the  great zamindars were
crazy for European architecture. Saeed's great-great-great-great-grandfather
had hired  the  fellow  five minutes  after  meeting  him at  the  Viceroy's
reception, to indicate publicly that  not all  Indian Muslims  had supported
the action of  the  Meerut soldiers  or been in sympathy with the subsequent
uprisings, no,  not by any means; 

-

 and then  given  him carte blanche; - so
here Peristan  now stood, in the middle  of near-tropical potato  fields and
beside the great banyan-tree, covered in bougainvillaea creeper, with snakes
in the kitchens and butterfly skeletons in the cupboards. Some said its name
owed more to  the Englishman's than to anything more fanciful: it was a mere
contraction of 

Perownistan.

     After seven generations  it  was at last  beginning to  look as  if  it
belonged in this landscape  of bullock carts and palm-trees and high, clear,
star-heavy  skies.  Even  the  stained-glass  window  looking  down  on  the
staircase of King Charles  the Headless had been,  in an indefinable manner,
naturalized.  Very  few of  these  old  zamindar  houses  had  survived  the
egalitarian  depredations of the  present,  and accordingly there  hung over
Peristan something  of the  musty air of a museum,  even though - or perhaps
because  -  Mirza  Saeed  took  great pride  in the old place  and had spent
lavishly to  keep  it in  trim. He slept  under a high canopy of worked  and
beaten brass in a ship-like bed that had been occupied by three Viceroys. In
the grand salon he liked to sit with Mishal and Mrs. Qureishi in the unusual
three-way love seat. At one end of  this room a colossal Shiraz carpet stood
rolled  up, on wooden blocks, awaiting the  glamorous reception which  would
merit  its unfurling,  and which never came.  In the  dining-room there were
stout  classical  columns  with  ornate  Corinthian  tops,  and  there  were
peacocks, both real and stone, strolling on the main steps to the house, and
Venetian chandeliers tinkling in  the hall.  The original punkahs were still
in  full working order, all  their operating  cords  travelling  by  way  of
pulleys and holes in walls and floors to a  little,  airless boot-room where
the punkah-wallah sat and  tugged the lot together, trapped in the  irony of
the foetid air of that tiny windowless room while he despatched cool breezes
to  all  other  parts  of  the house.  The  servants,  too,  went back seven
generations  and  had therefore  lost the art of complaining.  The old  ways
ruled: even  the  Titlipur sweet-vendor was required to  seek the zamindar's
approval before commencing to sell  any  innovative sweetmeat he  might have
invented. Life in Peristan was as soft  as it  was hard under the tree; but,
even into such cushioned existences, heavy blows can fall.
     The discovery that his wife was spending most of her time closeted with
Ayesha  filled the Mirza with an insupportable irritation,  an eczema of the
spirit that maddened him because there was no  way of scratching  it. Mishal
was hoping that the archangel, Ayesha's husband, would grant her a baby, but
because she couldn't  tell that to her husband she grew sullen and  shrugged
petulantly when he asked her  why she wasted so much time with the village's
craziest  girl.  Mishal's new reticence worsened the  itch in Mirza  Saeed's
heart, and  made him jealous, too, although he wasn't sure if he was jealous
of Ayesha, or Mishal. He noticed for the first time that the mistress of the
butterflies  had eyes of the same lustrous  grey shade  as his wife, and for
some reason this made him cross, too,  as  if it proved that the women  were
ganging  up  on  him, whispering  God knew  what  secrets;  maybe  they were
chittering  and chattering  about 

him!

 This zenana business  seemed to  have
backfired; even that old  jelly Mrs. Qureishi had been  taken in  by Ayesha.
Quite a  threesome,  thought  Mirza Saeed; when mumbo-jumbo  gets in through
your door, good sense leaves by the window.
     As for Ayesha: when she encountered the Mirza on the balcony, or in the
garden   as  he  wandered  reading  Urdu  love-poetry,  she  was  invariably
deferential and shy;  but her good behaviour, coupled with the total absence
of any spark of  erotic interest, drove Saeed  further and further  into the
helplessness of his  despair. So it was that when, one  day, he spied Ayesha
entering  his   wife's  quarters  and  heard,  a  few  minutes   later,  his
mother-in-law's voice rise in a melodramatic shriek, he was seized by a mood
of mulish  vengefulness and deliberately waited  a full three minutes before
going to investigate.  He  found  Mrs  Qureishi tearing her hair and sobbing
like  a movie  queen, while  Mishal and Ayesha sat cross-legged  on the bed,
facing  each  other, grey eyes  staring into  grey,  and  Mishal's  face was
cradled between Ayesha's outstretched palms.
     It  turned  out  that  the  archangel  had  informed  Ayesha  that  the
zamindar's  wife was  dying of cancer,  that  her  breasts were  full of the
malign nodules of death, and that she had no more than a few months to live.
The location of the cancer had proved  to Mishal the cruelty of God, because
only a vicious deity would place death in the  breast of a woman whose  only
dream was to suckle new life. When Saeed entered, Ayesha had been whispering
urgently to Mishal: 'You mustn't think that way. God will save you. This  is
a test of faith.'
     Mrs. Qureishi  told  Mirza Saeed the  bad news  with many  shrieks  and
howls, and for the confused  zamindar it was  the last straw. He flew into a
temper and started yelling loudly and trembling as if he might at any moment
start smashing up the furniture in the room and its occupants as well.
     'To  hell  with  your  spook cancer,'  he  screamed  at  Ayesha  in his
exasperation. 'You  have come into my house with your  craziness  and angels
and dripped poison into my family's ears. Get out of  here with your visions
and  your  invisible spouse. This  is  the  modern  world, and it is medical
doctors  and  not ghosts in potato fields  who tell us when we are  ill. You
have created this bloody hullabaloo for  nothing. Get  out and never come on
to my land again.'
     Ayesha  heard him out without removing  her eyes or hands  from Mishal.
When Saeed stopped for breath, clenching and unclenching his fists, she said
softly to his wife: 'Everything will  be required of us, and everything will
be  given.'  When  he heard this formula, which people all  over the village
were beginning to parrot as if they knew what it meant,  Mirza Saeed  Akhtar
went briefly out of  his mind, raised his hand and knocked Ayesha senseless.
She  fell  to the floor, bleeding  from the mouth,  a tooth loosened by  his
fist, and  as  she lay there Mrs Qureishi hurled abuse at her son-in-law. 'O
God, I have put my daughter in the care of a  killer. O God, a woman hitter.
Go on, hit me also, get some practice. Defiler of saints, blasphemer, devil,
unclean.' Saeed left the room without saying a word.
     The  next  day  Mishal Akhtar insisted  on returning  to the city for a
complete medical check-up. Saeed  took a stand. 'If you  want to  indulge in
superstition, go, but don't expect me to come along. It's eight hours' drive
each  way; so, to hell with it.' Mishal left that afternoon  with her mother
and the driver,  and  as a result Mirza Saeed  was  not where he should have
been,  that  is,  at  his wife's side,  when the results of the  tests  were
communicated  to  her: positive,  inoperable, too far advanced, the claws of
the cancer dug in deeply throughout her chest. A few months, six if she  was
lucky, and  before that, coming soon, the pain. Mishal returned  to Peristan
and went straight to her rooms in  the zenana, where she wrote her husband a
formal note on lavender  stationery, telling him of the doctor's  diagnosis.
When  he read  her death sentence,  written  in her own hand, he wanted very
badly to burst into tears, but his eyes remained obstinately dry. He had had
no time for the Supreme Being for many  years, but  now a couple of Ayesha's
phrases popped  back into his mind.  

God will save  you. Everything will  be
given.

 A bitter, superstitious  notion occurred to him: 'It is a curse,'  he
thought. 'Because I lusted after Ayesha, she has murdered my wife.'
     When he went to the  zenana, Mishal refused to see him, but her mother,
barring the doorway,  handed  Saeed a second note on scented blue notepaper.
'I  want  to see Ayesha,'  it  read. 'Kindly  permit this.' Bowing his head,
Mirza Saeed gave his assent, and crept away in shame.
     With Mahound, there  is always  a struggle; with the Imam, slavery; but
with this girl, there is  nothing. Gibreel is inert,  usually asleep in  the
dream as he  is  in life. She comes  upon him under a tree,  or  in a ditch,
hears what  he isn't  saying, takes what she needs, and leaves. What does he
know about cancer, for example? Not a solitary thing.
     All around him, he thinks  as  he  half-dreams, half-wakes, are  people
hearing  voices, being seduced  by  words.  But not his; never his  original
material.  - Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling  them  to
move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease?
     He can't work it out.
     The day after Mishal Akhtar's return to Titlipur, the girl Ayesha, whom
people were beginning to  call a kahin,  a pir, disappeared completely for a
week. Her hapless admirer, Osman the clown, who had been following  her at a
distance along  the dusty potato track  to Chatnapatna, told  the  villagers
that a breeze got up  and  blew dust into his eyes; when he got it out again
she had 'just gone'.  Usually,  when Osman  and  his bullock started telling
their  tall  tales  about  djinnis  and magic  lamps and  open-sesames,  the
villagers looked tolerant  and teased him,  okay, Osman, save  it for  those
idiots in Chatnapatna; they may fall for that stuff but here  in Titlipur we
know which way is up  and that palaces do not appear  unless a  thousand and
one  labourers build them, nor do  they  disappear unless  the same  workers
knock them down.  On this  occasion, however, nobody  laughed at  the clown,
because where Ayesha  was concerned  the  villagers were willing to  believe
anything.  They had grown  convinced that the  snow-haired girl was the true
successor  to old Bibiji, because had the butterflies not reappeared in  the
year of her  birth, and did they not follow  her around like a cloak? Ayesha
was  the vindication of the  long-soured hope engendered by the butterflies'
return, and the evidence that great things were still possible in this life,
even for the weakest and poorest in the land.
     'The  angel has taken her away,' marvelled the Sarpanch's wife Khadija,
and Osman burst into tears.  'But no, it is  a wonderful thing,' old Khadija
uncomprehendingly explained. The villagers teased the Sarpanch: 'How you got
to be village headman with such a tactless spouse, beats us.'
     'You chose me,' he dourly replied.
     On the seventh day  after her disappearance Ayesha was sighted  walking
towards  the village, naked  again and  dressed  in golden  butterflies, her
silver  hair streaming behind her in the  breeze. She  went  directly to the
home  of  Sarpanch  Muhammad  Din  and  asked that the Titlipur panchayat be
convened for an  immediate emergency  meeting.  'The  greatest event  in the
history of the tree has come upon us,' she confided. Muhammad Din, unable to
refuse her, fixed the time of the meeting for that evening, after dark.
     That  night the panchayat members took their places on the usual branch
of the tree, while Ayesha the kahin stood before them on the ground. 'I have
flown with the angel into  the highest heights,' she said. 'Yes, even to the
lote-tree of the uttermost end. The archangel,  Gibreel: he has brought us a
message  which  is  also  a  command.  Everything  is required  of  us,  and
everything will be given.'
     Nothing  in the  life of the Sarpanch Muhammad Din had prepared him for
the  choice  he  was  about to  face.  'What  does  the angel  ask,  Ayesha,
daughter?' he asked, fighting to steady his voice.
     'It is the angel's will that all of us, every man, and  woman and child
in the village, begin at once to prepare for a pilgrimage. We are  commanded
to  walk from this  place to Mecca Sharif,  to kiss  the  Black Stone in the
Ka'aba at the centre of the Haram Sharif,  the  sacred mosque. There we must
surely go.'
     Now the panchayat's quintet  began to  debate heatedly.  There were the
crops to consider, and the impossibility of abandoning their homes en masse.
'It is not to be conceived of, child,' the  Sarpanch told  her.  'It is well
known that Allah excuses haj  and umra to  those who are genuinely unable to
go for reasons of  poverty  or  health.' But  Ayesha remained silent and the
elders continued to argue. Then it  was as if her silence  infected everyone
else and for a long moment, in which the  question was settled  -although by
what means nobody ever managed to comprehend -there were no words  spoken at
all.
     It  was Osman the clown who spoke up at last,  Osman  the convert,  for
whom his new faith had been no  more than a drink of water. 'It's almost two
hundred  miles  from here to the sea,' he cried. 'There are old ladies here,
and babies. However can we go?'
     'God will give us the strength,' Ayesha serenely replied.
     'Hasn't it occurred to you,' Osman shouted, refusing to give up,  'that
there's a mighty ocean between us and Mecca Sharif? How will  we ever cross?
We have no money for the pilgrim boats. Maybe the angel will grow  us wings,
so we can fly?'
     Many villagers rounded  angrily upon  the  blasphemer Osman. 'Be  quiet
now,' Sarpanch Muhammad Din rebuked him. 'You haven't been long in our faith
or our village. Keep your trap shut and learn our ways.'
     Osman,  however,  answered cheekily, 'So  this  is  how you welcome new
settlers. Not as equals, but as people who must do as they are told.' A knot
of  red-faced  men began to tighten around  Osman, but before anything  else
could happen the kahin Ayesha  changed the  mood entirely  by answering  the
clown's questions.
     'This, too, the angel has  explained,' she said quietly. 'We  will walk
two hundred miles, and when we reach the shores of the sea, we will  put our
feet into the  foam, and the  waters  will open for us. The  waves  shall be
parted, and we shall walk across the ocean-floor to Mecca.'
     The next morning Mirza Saeed Akhtar  awoke in  a  house that had fallen
unusually  silent,  and when he called for  the servants there was no reply.
The  stillness had spread  into the potato fields, too; but under the broad,
spreading roof of the Titlipur tree all was hustle and bustle. The panchayat
had voted unanimously to obey the  command of the Archangel Gibreel, and the
villagers  had begun to  prepare  for departure. At first the  Sarpanch  had
wanted  the carpenter Isa to construct  litters that could be pulled by oxen
and on which the old and  infirm could ride,  but that idea had been knocked
on the head  by  his own wife,  who told  him, 'You  don't listen,  Sarpanch
sahibji! Didn't the angel  say we must walk? Well then, that is what we must
do.' Only the  youngest of infants were to  be excused the  foot-pilgrimage,
and they  would  be carried  (it had been decided)  on the backs  of all the
adults, in rotation. The villagers had pooled all their resources, and heaps
of potatoes,  lentils, rice, bitter gourds,  chillies,  aubergines and other
vegetables  were piling  up  next to the panchayat bough. The  weight of the
provisions was  to  be evenly divided between the walkers. Cooking utensils,
too,  were being  gathered together, and whatever  bedding  could be  found.
Beasts of  burden were to be taken,  and  a couple  of  carts carrying  live
chickens  and  such,  but in general the pilgrims were  under the Sarpanch's
instructions to keep personal belongings to a minimum. Preparations had been
under  way since  before dawn, so that by  the time  an incensed Mirza Saeed
strode  into the  village, things were well advanced. For forty-five minutes
the  zamindar  slowed  things  up  by  making  angry  speeches  and  shaking
individual villagers by the shoulders, but then, fortunately, he gave up and
left, so that the work could be continued at its former,  rapid pace. As the
Mirza departed he smacked his head repeatedly and called people names,  such
as 

loonies,  simpletons,

 very bad words, but  he had always  been  a godless
man, the weak end  of a  strong line, and he had to be left  to find his own
fate; there was no arguing with men like him.
     By sunset the  villagers were  ready  to depart, and the  Sarpanch told
everyone to rise  for prayers  in the small hours so  that  they could leave
immediately afterwards and thus avoid the worst heat of the day. That night,
lying down on his mat beside old Khadija, he murmured, 'At last. I've always
wanted to see the Ka'aba, to  circle it before  I die.' She reached out from
her mat to take his  hand. 'I,  too, have hoped  for it, against hope,'  she
said. 'We'll walk through the waters together.'
     Mirza Saeed,  driven  into an impotent frenzy by the  spectacle of  the
packing  village,  burst in on his  wife  without ceremony. 'You  should see
what's going on, Mishu,' he exclaimed, gesticulating absurdly. 'The whole of
Titlipur has taken leave  of its  brains, and is off to the seaside. What is
to happen to their homes, their fields? There is ruination in store. Must be
political agitators  involved. Someone has been  bribing someone.  - Do  you
think if I offered cash they would stay here like sane  persons?'  His voice
dried. Ayesha was in the room.
     'You  bitch,' he  cursed  her. She was sitting cross-legged  on the bed
while Mishal  and her  mother squatted on the floor, sorting  through  their
belongings  and  working  out how  little  they  could  manage with  on  the
pilgrimage.
     'You're not going,' Mirza Saeed ranted. 'I forbid  it,  the devil alone
knows what  germ this  whore has infected the villagers with, but you are my
wife and I refuse to let you embark upon this suicidal venture.'
     'Good  words,' Mishal laughed  bitterly. 'Saeed, good  choice of words.
You  know I  can't  live  but you  talk about suicide.  Saeed,  a  thing  is
happening here, and you  with your imported European atheism don't know what
it is. Or maybe  you would  if you looked  beneath your English suitings and
tried to locate your heart.'
     'It's  incredible,' Saeed cried. 'Mishal, Mishu, is this you? All  of a
sudden you've turned into this God-bothered type from ancient history?'
     Mrs. Qureishi said,  'Go away, son. No  room for unbelievers  here. The
angel has told Ayesha that when Mishal completes the pilgrimage to Mecca her
cancer will  have disappeared. Everything is required and everything will be
given.'
     Mirza Saeed Akhtar put  his palms against a wall of  his wife's bedroom
and pressed his forehead  against  the plaster. After  a long pause he said:
'If it is a question of performing umra then for God's sake let's go to town
and catch a plane. We can be in Mecca within a couple of days.'
     Mishal answered, 'We are commanded to walk.'
     Saeed  lost  control  of   himself.  'Mishal?   Mishal?'  he  shrieked.
'Commanded?  Archangels, Mishu?  

Gibreel?

  God  with a long beard and angels
with wings? Heaven and hell, Mishal? The Devil with a pointy tail and cloven
hoofs? How far  are you  going with this? Do  women  have souls, what do you
say? Or the other way: do souls have gender? Is God black or white? When the
waters of the ocean part,  where will  the extra water go? Will  it stand up
sideways like walls?  Mishal? Answer me. Are there  miracles? Do you believe
in Paradise? Will  I be forgiven  my sins?'  He began to cry, and fell on to
his knees,  with his forehead still pressed against the wall. His dying wife
came up and embraced  him from  behind. 'Go with the  pilgrimage,  then,' he
said,  dully. 'But  at  least  take  the Mercedes  station  wagon.  It's got
air-conditioning and you can take the icebox full of Cokes.'
     'No,' she said, gently. 'We'll go like everybody else.  We're pilgrims,
Saeed. This isn't a picnic at the beach.'
     'I don't  know  what to do,'  Mirza Saeed Akhtar  wept. 'Mishu, I can't
handle this by myself
     Ayesha spoke from the bed. 'Mirza sahib, come with us,' she said. 'Your
ideas are finished with. Come and save your soul.'
     Saeed  stood  up, red-eyed.  'A  bloody  outing  you wanted,'  he  said
viciously to Mrs. Qureishi. 'That chicken certainly came home to roost. Your
outing  will finish off  the lot of us,  seven  generations, the whole  bang
shoot.'
     Mishal leaned her cheek against  his  back. 'Come with us,  Saeed. Just
come.'
     He turned to face Ayesha. 'There is no God,' he said firmly.
     'There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet,' she replied.
     'The mystical experience is a subjective, not an  objective  truth,' he
went on. 'The waters will not open.'
     'The sea will part at the angel's command,' Ayesha answered.
     'You are leading these people into certain disaster.'
     'I am taking them into the bosom of God.'
     'I don't believe in you,' Mirza Saeed insisted. 'But I'm going to come,
and will try to end this insanity with every step I take.'
     'God chooses  many  means,'  Ayesha rejoiced, 'many roads  by which the
doubtful may be brought into his certainty.'
     'Go  to  hell,'  shouted  Mirza  Saeed   Akhtar,  and  ran,  scattering
butterflies, from the room.
     'Who is the madder,' Osman  the clown whispered  into his bullock's ear
as he groomed it in its small byre, 'the madwoman, or the fool who loves the
madwoman?'  The  bullock  didn't   reply.  'Maybe  we  should  have   stayed
untouchable,'  Osman  continued. 'A  compulsory ocean  sounds  worse  than a
forbidden well.' And the bullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.

     A 

City Visible out Unseen


1


Once I'm an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into
myself?'

  Mr. Muhammad Sufyan,  prop. Shaan-daar  Cafe and  landlord of  the
rooming-house above, mentor  to the variegated, transient  and particoloured
inhabitants  of both,  seen-it-all type, least doctrinaire of hajis and most
unashamed of VCR addicts,  ex-schoolteacher, self-taught in classical  texts
of many cultures, dismissed from post in Dhaka owing to cultural differences
with certain generals in the  old days when  Bangladesh  was merely an  East
Wing,  and therefore,  in his  own words, 'not so much  an  immig as an emig
runt' - this last a good-natured allusion to his lack  of inches, for though
he was a wide man, thick of arm  and waist,  he stood no more than sixty-one
inches  off the  ground, blinked in  his bedroom  doorway, awakened by Jumpy
Joshi's  urgent  midnight knock,  polished his half-rimmed spectacles on the
edge  of Bengali-style kurta (drawstrings  tied at the  neck in a neat bow),
squeezed lids tightly shut  open shut over  myopic  eyes,  replaced glasses,
opened  eyes,  stroked  moustacheless  hennaed  beard,  sucked   teeth,  and
responded to the now-indisputable horns on  the brow of the shivering fellow
whom Jumpy,  like  the  cat,  appeared to have dragged  in,  with  the above
impromptu quip, stolen,  with commendable mental  alacrity for  one  aroused
from his  slumbers,  from Lucius Apuleius of Madaura,  Moroccan  priest,  AD
120-180 approx., colonial  of an earlier  Empire,  a person who  denied  the
accusation  of  having  bewitched  a  rich  widow  yet  confessed,  somewhat
perversely, that at an early stage in his career he had been transformed, by
witchcraft,  into (not  an  owl, but) an ass. 'Yes,  yes,' Sufyan continued,
stepping out into the passage and blowing a white mist of winter breath into
his cupped hands,  'Poor misfortunate, but no  point wallowing. Constructive
attitude must be adopted. I will wake my wife.'
     Chamcha  was beard-fuzz and grime. He  wore a blanket like a toga below
which there protruded  the comic  deformity of  goats' hoofs, while above it
could be  seen the sad comedy of a sheepskin jacket borrowed from Jumpy, its
collar turned up,  so  that sheepish  curls nestled only  inches from pointy
billy-goat horns. He seemed incapable of speech, sluggish  of  body, dull of
eye;  even  though Jumpy attempted to encourage him - 'There, you see, we'll
have this well sorted in  a flash' - he, Saladin, remained the most limp and
passive  of - what? - let us say: satyrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, offered further
Apuleian sympathy. 'In the case of  the ass, reverse metamorphosis  required
personal intervention  of goddess Isis,'  he beamed.  'But old times are for
old  fogies. In your instance, young mister,  first step would possibly be a
bowl of good hot soup.'
     At this point his kindly tones  were quite drowned  by the intervention
of a  second voice, raised high in operatic terror; moments after which, his
small form was being jostled and shoved by the mountainous, fleshy figure of
a woman, who seemed  unable to decide whether  to push him out of her way or
keep  him before her as  a  protective shield. Crouching behind Sufyan, this
new being  extended a  trembling arm  at  whose  end was a quivering, pudgy,
scarlet-nailed index  finger. 'That  over there,' she howled. 'What thing is
come upon us?'
     'It is a friend of Joshi's,' Sufyan said mildly, and continued, turning
to Chamcha,  'Please forgive,  -  the  unexpectedness et cet,  isn't  it?  -
Anyhow, may I present my Mrs.; - my Begum Sahiba, - Hind.'
     'What friend? How  friend?' the croucher cried.  'Ya Allah, eyes aren't
next to your nose?'
     The passageway, - bare-board floor, torn  floral paper on  the walls, -
was starting to fill up with sleepy residents. Prominent among whom were two
teenage girls, one  spike-haired, the other  pony-tailed, and both relishing
the  opportunity  to demonstrate their skills (learned  from  Jumpy)  in the
martial arts of karate and Wing Chun: Sufyan's daughters, Mishal (seventeen)
and fifteen-year-old  Anahita, leapt from  their bedroom  in  fighting gear,
Bruce  Lee  pajamas worn loosely over  T-shirts bearing the image of the new
Madonna; -  caught sight  of  unhappy Saladin;  -  and  shook their heads in
wide-eyed delight.
     'Radical,'  said  Mishal,  approvingly.  And her  sister nodded assent:
'Crucial.  Fucking 

A.'

  Her mother  did not, however,  reproach her  for her
language; Hind's mind  was elsewhere, and she wailed louder than ever: 'Look
at this  husband of mine. What sort of haji is this? Here is Shaitan himself
walking in through our door, and  I am made to offer him hot chicken yakhni,
cooked by my own right hand.'
     Useless,  now, for  Jumpy Joshi to  plead  with Hind for tolerance,  to
attempt explanations  and  demand  solidarity. 'If  he's  not  the  devil on
earth,' the heaving-chested lady pointed  out unanswerably, 'from where that
plague-breath comes that he's breathing? From, maybe, the Perfumed Garden?'
     'Not Gulistan,  but Bostan,'  said Chamcha, suddenly. 'A I Flight 420.'
On hearing  his  voice, however, Hind squealed frightfully, and plunged past
him, heading for the kitchen.
     'Mister,' Mishal said to Saladin as her mother fled downstairs, 'anyone
who scares her that way has got to be seriously 

bad.'

     'Wicked,' Anahita agreed. 'Welcome aboard.'
     This Hind, now so firmly entrenched in exclamatory mode, had once  been
- strangebuttrue! - the most blushing of brides, the soul of gentleness, the
very  incarnation  of tolerant good  humour.  As  the  wife  of  the erudite
schoolteacher  of  Dhaka, she had entered into  her duties with a  will, the
perfect  helpmeet,  bringing her husband cardamom-scented tea when he stayed
up late  marking  examination papers, ingratiating  herself with the  school
principal at the termly Staff Families Outing, struggling with the novels of
Bibhutibhushan Banerji  and  the metaphysics of  Tagore in an attempt  to be
more worthy of a spouse  who could quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda  as well
as Quran-Sharif, from the military  accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the
Revelations  of  St John  the Divine. In  those  days  she  had  admired his
pluralistic  openness of  mind,  and  struggled,  in her kitchen,  towards a
parallel eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India
as  well  as  the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her  espousal of  the
cause  of  gastronomic  pluralism  grew  into  a  grand  passion,  and while
secularist Sufyan swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent - 'and
let  us  not  pretend  that  Western  culture  is  not present; after  these
centuries,  how could  it not also be  part of  our heritage?'  -  his  wife
cooked, and ate in  increasing  quantities, its  food. As  she  devoured the
highly spiced  dishes of  Hyderabad and  the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of
Lucknow  her body began  to alter, because  all that food had to find a home
somewhere, and she began to  resemble the wide rolling land mass itself, the
subcontinent without frontiers, because food passes across  any boundary you
care to mention.
     Mr.  Muhammad Sufyan, however,  gained no  weight:  not a 

tola,

 not  an

ounce.

     His refusal  to fatten  was the beginning  of  the  trouble.  When  she
reproached him - 'You don't like my cooking? For whom I'm doing  it  all and
blowing up  like a  balloon?' 

-

 he answered, mildly, looking up at her  (she
was the taller of the two) over the top of  half-rimmed specs: 'Restraint is
also  part of our  traditions, Begum. Eating two mouthfuls less  than  one's
hunger: self-denial, the ascetic path.' What a man: all the answers, but you
couldn't get him to give you a decent fight.
     Restraint was not for Hind. Maybe,  if Sufyan  had ever  complained; if
just once he'd  said,  

I  thought I  was  marrying one  woman but these days
you're  big enough for two;

  if he'd  ever  given her the  incentive! - then
maybe she'd  have  desisted, why  not, of course she would;  so  it  was his
fault, for having no aggression, what kind of a male was it  who didn't know
how to insult his fat lady wife?  -  In truth, it was entirely possible that
Hind would have failed to control  her eating binges even if Sufyan had come
up with the required imprecations and entreaties; but, since he did not, she
munched on, content to dump the whole blame for her figure on him.
     As a matter of fact, once she had  started blaming him  for things, she
found that there were a number of  other matters she could hold against him;
and found, too, her tongue,  so  that the  schoolteacher's  humble apartment
resounded  regularly to the kinds of tickings-off he was too much of a mouse
to hand out  to his pupils.  Above all,  he was berated  for his excessively
high principles, thanks  to which, Hind told  him, she knew  he  would never
permit her to become a rich man's wife; - for what could one say about a man
who, finding that  his  bank had  inadvertently  credited  his salary to his
account twice  in the same month, promptly 

drew the institution's  notice

 to
the error  and handed back the  cash?; - what hope was there  for a  teacher
who,  when approached  by  the wealthiest  of the schoolchildren's  parents,
flatly refused  to contemplate  accepting the usual remunerations  in return
for services rendered when marking the little fellows' examination papers?
     'But  all of that I  could forgive,' she  would  mutter  darkly at him,
leaving unspoken the rest of  the sentence, which was 

if it  hadn't been for
your two real offences: your sexual, and political, crimes.

     Ever since their marriage, the two of them had performed the sexual act
infrequently,  in  total  darkness,  pin-drop silence  and  almost  complete
immobility. It would not  have  occurred  to Hind to  wiggle or  wobble, and
since Sufyan appeared to  get through  it all  with an  absolute  minimum of
motion, she took it - had always taken it - that the two of them were of the
same mind on  this matter, viz.,  that it  was  a dirty business,  not to be
discussed before or after,  and not to be drawn attention to during, either.
That the children took their time in coming she took as God's punishment for
He only knew what misdeeds of her earlier life; that they both turned out to
be girls she refused to blame on Allah, preferring,  instead,  to blame  the
weakling seed implanted in  her by her unmanly spouse,  an attitude  she did
not  refrain from expressing, with great emphasis,  and to the horror of the
midwife, at the very moment  of little  Anahita's birth. 'Another girl,' she
gasped  in disgust. 'Well, considering who  made  the  baby,  I should think
myself lucky it's not a cockroach, or  a mouse.' After  this second daughter
she told Sufyan that enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into
the  hall.  He  accepted  without  any argument her  refusal  to  have  more
children; but then  she discovered that the  lecher thought he  could still,
from time to time, enter  her darkened room and  enact  that strange rite of
silence and near-motionlessness to which she  had only submitted in the name
of reproduction. 'What do you  think,' she shouted  at him the first time he
tried it, 'I do this thing for 

fun?'

     Once he  had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no
more  hanky-panky,  no  sir,  she  was a decent  woman,  not  a  lust-crazed
libertine,  he began to stay out late at night. It was during  this period -
she  had thought, mistakenly, that  he  was visiting  prostitutes  - that he
became involved with politics, and not just any old politics, either, oh no,
Mister  Brainbox had  to go  and join the devils  themselves, the  Communist
Party, no less,  so  much for those principles of his;  demons, that's  what
they were, worse by far than whores. It  was because of this dabbling in the
occult that she had to  pack up her bags at such short notice and  leave for
England with two small babies in tow; because of this ideological witchcraft
that  she had  had  to endure all  the  privations and humiliations  of  the
process of immigration; and on account of this diabolism of his that she was
stuck  forever in  this England and  would  never  see  her  village  again.
'England,' she once said to him, 'is your revenge upon me for preventing you
from performing your obscene acts upon my body.' He had not given an answer;
and silence denotes assent.
     And what was it that made them  a living  in this Vilayet of her exile,
this  Yuke of  her  sex-obsessed husband's vindic-tiveness?  What?  His book
learning? His 

Gitanjali, Eclogues,

 or that play 

Othello

  that  he  explained
was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn't spell, what sort
of writer was that, anyway?
     It  was:  her  cooking.  'Shaandaar,'  it  was  praised.  'Outstanding,
brilliant, delicious.' People came from all over London  to eat her samosas,
her  Bombay chaat, her gulab jamans  straight  from Paradise. What was there
for  Sufyan to do? Take the  money,  serve the tea,  run from here to there,
behave like a servant for all his education. O, yes, of course the customers
liked his personality, he always had an appealing character, but when you're
running  an eatery it isn't  the conversation  they  pay  for on  the  bill.
Jalebis,  barfi, Special of the Day. How life had turned  out! She  was  the
mistress now. Victory!
     And yet  it was also a fact  that she,  cook and breadwinner,  chiefest
architect  of  the success  of the Shaandaar Cafe, which had finally enabled
them to buy the whole four-storey building and start  renting out its rooms,
- 

she

  was  the one around  whom there hung, like bad breath, the miasma  of
defeat. While Sufyan twinkled on, she  looked extinguished, like a lightbulb
with  a broken filament,  like a fizzled star,  like a flame. - Why?  - Why,
when Sufyan, who had been deprived of vocation, pupils and  respect, bounded
about like a young lamb, and  even began to put  on weight, fattening  up in
Proper  London  as he  had never  done  back home; why, when  power had been
removed from his hands and delivered into hers, did she act - as her husband
put it - the 'sad sack', the 'glum chum' and the 'moochy pooch'? Simple: not
in spite of, but on account of. Everything she valued had  been upset by the
change; had in this process of translation, been lost.
     Her language: obliged,  now, to  emit  these alien sounds that made her
tongue feel tired, was  she  not entitled to  moan? Her familiar place: what
matter that they had lived, in Dhaka, in a  teacher's humble flat,  and now,
owing to entrepreneurial good sense, savings and skill with spices, occupied
this four-storey terraced house? Where now was  the city she knew? Where the
village of her youth  and the green waterways  of  home?  The customs around
which she had built  her life were lost, too, or at least were hard to find.
Nobody in this Vilayet had time  for the  slow courtesies of life back home,
or for the many observances of faith. Furthermore: was she not forced to put
up with  a  husband  of no  account, whereas before she  could bask  in  his
dignified position?  Where was  the pride  in being  made  to work  for  her
living,  for  his  living,   whereas  before  she  could  sit  at  home   in
much-befitting pomp? - And she knew, how could  she not, the sadness beneath
his bonhomie,  and that,  too, was a  defeat; never before  had  she felt so
inadequate as a wife, for what kind of a Mrs. is it that cannot cheer up her
man, but must observe  the counterfeit  of happiness  and make do, as if  it
were the  genuine McCoy?  - Plus also: they  had come into  a demon  city in
which anything could  happen, your windows  shattered in the  middle of  the
night without any cause, you  were knocked over in the  street  by invisible
hands,  in the shops you heard such abuse you felt like your ears would drop
off but when you turned in the direction of the words you saw only empty air
and smiling faces, and every day you heard about this boy, that girl, beaten
up by ghosts. - Yes, a land of  phantom imps, how to explain; best thing was
to stay  home, not go out for so much as to post a letter, stay in, lock the
door, say your  prayers, and the goblins would  (maybe) stay away. - Reasons
for defeat? Baba, who could count them? Not only was she a shopkeeper's wife
and a kitchen slave, but even her own people could not be relied on; - there
were  men she  thought of as  respectable  types, sharif,  giving  telephone
divorces to wives  back home and running off with some haramzadi female, and
girls killed  for dowry (some  things could  be brought  through the foreign
customs without  duty); - and worst of all, the poison of this  devil-island
had infected her  baby  girls,  who were growing up  refusing to speak their
mother-tongue,  even though  they understood every word, they did it just to
hurt; and why else had Mishal cut off all her hair and put rainbows into it;
and every day it  was fight, quarrel, disobey, -and worst of all,  there was
not one  new thing about her complaints, this is how  it  was for women like
her,  so now she was no  longer just one,  just  herself,  just Hind wife of
teacher   Sufyan;  she  had  sunk  into  the  anonymity,  the  characterless
plurality,  of being  merely  one-of-the-women-like-her.  This was history's
lesson: nothing for women-like-her to do but suffer, remember, and die.
     What she did: to deny her  husband's weakness, she treated him, for the
most  part, like a lord, like a monarch, for in her lost world her glory had
lain  in  his; to  deny the  ghosts outside the cafe,  she  stayed  indoors,
sending  others out for  kitchen provisions  and  household necessities, and
also for the endless supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on VCR through which
(along with her  ever-increasing hoard of  Indian movie magazines) she could
stay  in  touch  with  events  in the  'real  world',  such  as the  bizarre
disappearance of the incomparable Gibreel Farishta and the subsequent tragic
announcement of  his death in an airline accident;  and to give her feelings
of defeated,  exhausted despair  some outlet, she shouted at  her daughters.
The elder of  whom,  to get her  own back, hacked off her hair and permitted
her nipples to poke through shirts worn provocatively tight.
     The arrival of a fully developed devil, a horned goat-man, was,  in the
light of the foregoing,  something very like the  last, or at  any  rate the
penultimate, straw.
     Shaandaar  residents  gathered  in the  night-kitchen for an  impromptu
crisis  summit.  While Hind  hurled imprecations into chicken  soup,  Sufyan
placed Chamcha  at  a table,  drawing  up,  for  the  poor fellow's  use, an
aluminium  chair  with  a  blue  plastic  seat, and  initiated  the  night's
proceedings. The theories of Lamarck, I am pleased to report, were quoted by
the exiled schoolteacher, who spoke in his  best didactic voice.  When Jumpy
had  recounted  the unlikely story of  Chamcha's  fall  from the  sky -  the
protagonist himself being too immersed  in chicken soup  and misery to speak
for himself-  Sufyan, sucking teeth, made reference to the last  edition  of

The Origin of Species.

 'In which  even great Charles accepted the notion  of
mutation  in  extremis,  to  ensure  survival  of  species;  so what if  his
followers  -  always   more  Darwinian   than  man  himself!  -  repudiated,
posthumously, such  Lamarckian heresy, insisting on  natural  selection  and
nothing but, - however, I am bound to admit, such theory is not extended  to
survival of  individual  specimen but  only to  species as  a  whole;  -  in
addition, regarding  nature  of  mutation, problem is  to  comprehend actual
utility of the change.'
     'Da-ad,' Anahita  Sufyan, eyes  lifting to  heaven, cheek  lying ho-hum
against palm, interrupted these cogitations. 'Give over. Point  is, how'd he
turn into such a, such a,' - admiringly - 'freak?'
     Upon which, the devil himself, looking up from chicken soup, cried out,
'No, I'm not. I'm not a freak, O no, certainly I am not.' His voice, seeming
to rise from an unfathomable abyss of grief, touched and alarmed the younger
girl, who rushed over to where he sat, and, impetuously caressing a shoulder
of the unhappy  beast,  said, in an attempt to make  amends: 'Of  course you
aren't,  I'm sorry, of  course I don't think you're a freak; it's just  that
you look like one.'
     Saladin Chamcha burst into tears.
     Mrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, had been  horrified by the sight of her younger
daughter actually laying hands  on the creature, and  turning to the gallery
of  nightgowned residents  she  waved a soup-ladle at them  and  pleaded for
support. 'How to tolerate? -Honour, safety of young girls cannot be assured.
- That in my own house, such a thing . . . !'
     Mishal Sufyan lost patience. 'Jesus, Mum.'
     

'Jesus?'

     'Dju  think  it's temporary?' Mishal, turning  her  back on scandalized
Hind, inquired  of Sufyan and Jumpy. 'Some sort of  possession thing - could
we maybe get it you know 

exorcized?

 Omens, shinings, ghoulies, nightmares on
Elm  Street, stood excitedly in her eyes,  and  her father, as  much the VCR
aficionado as any teenager, appeared to consider the  possibility seriously.
'In 

Der  Steppenwolf,'

 he began,  but Jumpy  wasn't having any more of that.
'The central requirement,' he announced,  'is to take an ideological view of
the situation.'
     That silenced everyone.
     'Objectively,' he said, with a small self-deprecating smile,  'what has
happened  here?  A:  Wrongful arrest,  intimidation, violence. Two:  Illegal
detention, unknown medical experimentation in hospital,' - murmurs of assent
here,-as  memories  of  intra-vaginal  inspections,  Depo-Provera  scandals,
unauthorized post-partum sterilizations, and, further back, the knowledge of
Third World drug-dumping arose in every person  present to give substance to
the  speaker's  insinuations,  - because what you  believe  depends  on what
you've seen, - not only what is visible,  but what you  are prepared to look
in  the face, - and  anyhow, something had  to explain horns and  hoofs;  in
those policed medical  wards, anything could happen - 'And  thirdly,'  Jumpy
continued, 'psychological  breakdown, loss of sense of  self,  inability  to
cope. We've seen it all before.'
     Nobody argued, not even Hind; there were  some truths from which it was
impossible  to dissent. 'Ideologically,'Jumpy said, 'I refuse to  accept the
position of victim. Certainly, he has been 

victimized,

  but we know that all
abuse of power is in part the  responsibility of the abused; our passiveness
colludes with, permits such crimes.' Whereupon, having scolded the gathering
into shamefaced submission, he requested Sufyan to make available  the small
attic  room that  was presently unoccupied, and  Sufyan, in  his  turn,  was
rendered entirely unable, by  feelings of solidarity and guilt, to ask for a
single p in rent. Hind did,  it is true, mumble:  'Now I  know the  world is
mad, when a devil becomes my house guest,' but  she did so under her breath,
and nobody except her elder daughter Mishal heard what she said.
     Sufyan,  taking  his  cue  from his younger  daughter, went up to where
Chamcha, huddled in his blanket, was drinking enormous  quantities of Hind's
unrivalled chicken yakhni,  squatted  down,  and  placed an arm  around  the
still-shivering unfortunate. 'Best place for you is here,' he said, speaking
as if to a  simpleton or small child. 'Where else would you go to heal  your
disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us,
among your own people, your own kind?'
     Only when Saladin Chamcha  was alone in the  attic room at the very end
of  his  strength did  he answer Sufyan's rhetorical question. 'I'm not your
kind,' he  said distinctly into the night. 'You're not my people. I've spent
half my life trying to get away from you.'
     His heart began to misbehave, to kick and stumble as if it, too, wanted
to metamorphose into some new, diabolic  form,  to  substitute  the  complex
unpredictability of tabla improvisations for its old  metronomic beat. Lying
sleepless in a narrow  bed, snagging his horns in bedsheets and  pillowcases
as  he tossed  and turned, he suffered the  renewal of coronary eccentricity
with a kind of fatalistic acceptance: if everything else, then why not this,
too?  Badoomboom, went the heart, and his  torso jerked. 

Watch  it  or  I'll
really let you have it. Doomboombadoom.

  Yes: this  was Hell, all right. The
city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim.
     Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren't they the ones with the pitchforks?
     Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the
treacherous  city,  a  thaw  had  come,  giving the streets  the  unreliable
consistency of  wet cardboard.  Slow  masses of whiteness slid from sloping,
grey-slate roofs. The footprints of  delivery  vans  corrugated  the  slush.
First light; and the dawn chorus began,  chattering of  road-drills, chirrup
of burglar alarms, trumpeting  of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the
deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from
a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar
of the great  wakening  juggernauts rushing awesomely  down  this  long  but
narrow pathway. From  beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of
huge subterranean  worms  that devoured and regurgitated human  beings,  and
from the  skies  the thrum  of choppers  and the screech of higher, gleaming
birds.
     The sun  rose, unwrapping  the misty city like a gift. Saladin  Chamcha
slept.
     Which  afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other
night-street  down which,  in the  company  of  the physiotherapist Hyacinth
Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and
reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth's
face  and  body  had  seemed to change. He saw  the gap opening and widening
between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited
itself into  medusas, and the strange triangularity of  her  profile,  which
sloped outwards  from her hairline to the  tip of  her nose, swung about and
headed in an unbroken line inwards  to her neck. He saw in  the yellow light
that her  skin  was  growing  darker by  the  minute,  and  her  teeth  more
prominent,  and her  body as long as  a child's stick-figure drawing. At the
same time she was casting him glances of an  ever more explicit lechery, and
grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a
skeleton had seized him  and was trying to  drag him down into a  grave;  he
could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it,  on her  breath,
on her  lips . . . revulsion seized  him. How could he ever have thought her
attractive, even desired her, even gone  so  far as to fantasize,  while she
straddled him and pummelled fluid  from his lungs, that they  were lovers in
the violent throes of sexual congress? .  . . The city thickened around them
like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair.
'No light  can get in here,' she whispered to him. 'It's black;  all black.'
She made as if to  lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but
he  shouted,  'Quick, the  church,'  and  plunged  into  an  unprepossessing
box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however,
the pews  were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless
blue two-piece suits, false pearls, and little pill-box hats decked out with
bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable
form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly, 

Fix me, Jesus;

 until they saw Chamcha,
quit  their  spiritualling, and  commenced to  bawl in  a  most  unspiritual
manner, 

Satan, the Goat, the Goat,

  and suchlike  stuff. Now it became clear
that  the Hyacinth with whom he'd entered was looking at him  with new eyes,
just the way  he'd looked at her in  the street; that she,  too, had started
seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust
on that hideously  pointy and clouded face he just let  rip. 

'Hubshees,'

  he
cursed them in, for  some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers
and  savages, he called  them. 'I feel sorry for you,' he pronounced. 'Every
morning you  have to look at yourself  in the mirror  and see, staring back,
the darkness: the stain, the proof  that you're the lowest of the low.' They
rounded upon  him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now
lost   among  them,  indistinguishable,   no  longer  an  individual  but  a
woman-like-them, and he  was being beaten  frightfully,  emitting  a piteous
bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized
that his assailants' fear was greater  than  their wrath, and he rose  up to
his full height, spread his arms, and screamed devil-sounds at them, sending
them  scurrying  for cover,  cowering  behind pews, as he strode bloody  but
unbowed from the battlefield.
     Dreams put things in their  own way; but Chamcha, coming briefly  awake
as his heartbeat  skipped into  a new  burst of  syncopations, was  bitterly
aware that the  nightmare  had  not  been so  very  far from the  truth; the
spirit, at  least, was right. - That was the last  of Hyacinth, he  thought,
and  faded away again. - To find himself shivering in  the  hall of his  own
home while, on a higher plane, Jumpy Joshi argued fiercely with Pamela. 

With
my wife.

     And when dream-Pamela, echoing the real one word for word, had rejected
her husband a hundred and one  times, 

he doesn't exist,  it, such things are
not  so,

  it was  Jamshed the virtuous who,  setting aside love and  desire,
helped. Leaving  behind  a weeping Pamela - 

Don't you  dare bring that  back
here,

 she shouted from the top floor - from  Saladin's den - Jumpy, wrapping
Chamcha in sheepskin  and blanket, led enfeebled through the shadows  to the
Shaandaar Cafe, promising with  empty kindness: 'It'll be all  right. You'll
see. It'll all be fine.'
     When Saladin Chamcha awoke, the memory of these words filled him with a
bitter  anger.  Where's Farishta, he found himself thinking. That bastard: I
bet he's doing okay.  - It was  a  thought  to which  he  would return, with
extraordinary results; for the moment, however, he had other fish to fry.
     I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it
had happened, it could not be denied. I  am 

no longer myself,

 or not only. I
am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.
     Why? Why me?
     What evil had he done - what vile thing could he, would he do?
     For what was he - he  couldn't avoid the  notion - being punished? And,
come to that, 

by whom?

 (I held my tongue.)
     Had he  not  pursued his own  idea 

of  the good,

 sought to  become that
which he most  admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession
to  the  conquest of  Englishness? Had he not worked  hard, avoided trouble,
striven  to become  new?  Assiduity, fastidiousness,  moderation, restraint,
self-reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral
code? Was it his fault that Pamela and  he were childless? Were genetics his
responsibility?  Could  it  be,  in  this  inverted  age, that he was  being
victimized by - the fates, he  agreed with himself to  call  the persecuting
agency  - precisely  

because

  of his  pursuit of 'the good'? - That nowadays
such a pursuit  was considered wrong-headed,  even  evil?  -  Then how cruel
these fates were, to  instigate  his rejection by the  very world  he had so
determinedly courted; how desolating,  to be cast from the gates of the city
one believed oneself to  have taken long  ago!  - What mean small-mindedness
was this, to cast him back into the bosom 

of his people,

 from whom he'd felt
so distant for  so long!  -  Here thoughts of  Zeeny  Vakil  welled up,  and
guiltily, nervously, he forced them down again.
     His heart kicked him violently, and he sat up, doubled over, gasped for
breath.  

Calm  down,  or  it's   curtains.   No  place  for  such  stressful
cogitations: not any more.

 He took deep breaths; lay back; emptied his mind.
The traitor in his chest resumed normal service.
     No  more  of that, Saladin  Chamcha  told  himself firmly.  No  more of
thinking  myself evil. Appearances deceive; the cover is not the best  guide
to the book. Devil, Goat, Shaitan? Not I.
     Not I: another.
     Who?
     Mishal and Anahita  arrived with breakfast on a tray and excitement all
over their faces. Chamcha  devoured cornflakes and  Nescafe while the girls,
after  a  few  moments of shyness, gabbled at him, simultaneously, non-stop.
'Well, you've set the place buzzing and no mistake.' - 'You haven't gone and
changed back in the  night or anything?' - 'Listen, it's not a trick, is it?
I  mean, it's  not make-up  or  something theatrical?  - I  mean, Jumpy says
you're an actor, and I only thought, - I mean,' and here young Anahita dried
up,  because   Chamcha,  spewing   cornflakes,  howled   angrily:  'Make-up?
Theatrical? 

Trick?'

     'No offence,' Mishal said anxiously on her sister's behalf. 'It's  just
we've  been  thinking, know what I mean, and well it'd just be awful if  you
weren't, but you are, 'course you are,  so  that's all right,'  she finished
hastily as Chamcha glared at her  again. -'Thing  is,'  Anahita resumed, and
then, faltering, 'Mean to say, well, we just think it's great.'  - 'You, she
means,'  Mishal corrected.  'We  think  you're,  you  know.'  - 'Brilliant,'
Anahita said  and dazzled the bewildered Chamcha with  a smile.  'Magic. You
know. 

Extreme.'

     'We didn't sleep all night,' Mishal said. 'We've got ideas.'
     'What we reckoned,' Anahita trembled with the thrill of  it, 'as you've
turned into, - what you are, - then maybe, well, probably, actually, even if
you haven't tried it  out, it could be, you could .  . .' And the older girl
finished the thought: 'You could've developed - you know - 

powers'

     'We  thought,  anyway,'  Anahita  added,   weakly,  seeing  the  clouds
gathering on Chamcha's  brow.  And,  backing towards the  door, added:  'But
we're probably wrong. -  Yeh.  We're  wrong all  right. Enjoy  your meal.' -
Mishal, before she fled, took a small  bottle full of green fluid  out  of a
pocket of her red-and-black-check donkey jacket, put  it on the floor by the
door, and delivered the following parting shot. 'O, excuse me, but Mum says,
can you use this, it's mouthwash, for your breath.'
     That Mishal and Anahita should adore the disfiguration which he loathed
with  all  his  heart  convinced  him  that  'his people'  were  as  crazily
wrong-headed as he'd long suspected. That the two of them should  respond to
his  bitterness -  when,  on his second attic  morning, they  brought  him a
masala dosa instead of packet cereal complete with toy silver spacemen,  and
he cried out,  ungratefully: 'Now  I'm  supposed to eat  this filthy foreign
food?'  - with expressions  of  sympathy,  made  matters even worse. 'Sawful
muck,' Mishal agreed with him. 'No bangers in here, worse  luck.'  Conscious
of having insulted their hospitality, he tried to explain that he thought of
himself, nowadays, as,  well, British . . . 'What about us?'  Anahita wanted
to know. 'What do you think we are?' - And Mishal confided: 'Bangladesh in't
nothing to  me. Just  some  place Dad and Mum keep banging on about.'  - And
Anahita, conclusively: 'Bungleditch.' - With a satisfied nod. - 'What I call
it, anyhow.'
     But  they weren't British, he wanted to tell  them: not 

really,

 not  in
any way he could  recognize. And yet his  old certainties were slipping away
by the moment,  along with his  old life . . . 'Where's the  telephone?'  he
demanded. 'I've got to make some calls.'
     It was  in the hall; Anahita, raiding  her savings, lent him the coins.
His head wrapped  in a  borrowed turban,  his  body  concealed  in  borrowed
trousers (Jumpy's) and Mishal's shoes, Chamcha dialled the past.
     'Chamcha,' said the voice of Mimi Mamoulian. 'You're dead.'
     This  happened while he was  away: Mimi blacked out and lost her teeth.
'A whiteout is what it  was,' she told him, speaking more harshly than usual
because of difficulty with her jaw.  'A reason why? Don't  ask. Who can  ask
for reason in these times?  What's your number?' she added as the pips went.
'I'll call you right back.' But it  was a full five minutes  before she did.
'I took  a  leak. You have a reason why you're alive? Why  the waters parted
for you  and the other guy but closed over  the rest? Don't tell me you were
worthier.  People don't  buy that  nowadays,  not  even you, Chamcha. I  was
walking down Oxford Street looking for crocodile shoes when it happened: out
cold in mid-stride and I fell forward like a tree, landed on the point of my
chin and  all  the teeth fell out on the sidewalk in front of the man  doing
find-the-lady. People can  be thoughtful, Chamcha. When I came to I found my
teeth in a little pile next to my face. I  opened my eyes and saw the little
bastards  staring at me, wasn't that nice? First thing I thought, thank God,
I've got the money. I had them stitched back in,  privately of course, great
job, better than  before. So  I've  been  taking a  break  for a  while. The
voiceover business is in bad shape, let me tell you, what with you dying and
my teeth, we  just have  no  sense of responsibility.  Standards  have  been
lowered, Chamcha. Turn on  the  T V,  listen to radio,  you should  hear how
corny  the pizza  commercials,  the beer ads with  the Cherman accents  from
Central  Casting, the Martians  eating  potato powder and sounding like they
came  from  the Moon. They fired  us from 

The  Aliens  Show.

 Get  well soon.
Incidentally, you might say the same for me.'
     So he  had lost work as well as wife, home,  a grip on  life. 'It's not
just the  dentals that  go wrong,'  Mimi powered on.  'The  fucking plosives
scare me  stupid. I keep  thinking I'll  spray the  old bones on the  street
again. Age, Chamcha: it's all humiliations. You  get born, you get beaten up
and bruised all over and finally you break  and they shovel you into an urn.
Anyway, if  I never work again  I'll die comfortable. Did you know  I'm with
Billy  Battuta now? That's right, how could you, you've been swimming. Yeah,
I gave up waiting for you so I cradlesnatched one of your ethnic co-persons.
You  can  take it as  a  compliment. Now I gots to run. Nice talking  to the
dead, Chamcha. Next time dive from the low board. Toodle oo.'
     I  am  by  nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected
phone.  I  have  struggled,  in  my  fashion,  to  find  my way  towards  an
appreciation  of the  high things, towards  a small measure of fineness.  On
good days I felt it was  within  my grasp,  somewhere within  me,  somewhere
within. But it eluded me.  I have become  embroiled, in things, in the world
and its  messes, and I  cannot resist. The grotesque has me,  as  before the
quotidian had me, in its thrall. The sea gave me up; the land drags me down.
     He was sliding down a grey slope, the black water lapping at his heart.
Why did rebirth, the second  chance granted to Gibreel Farishta and himself,
feel so much, in his case, like a perpetual  ending? He had been reborn into
the  knowledge   of   death;  and   the   inescapability   of   change,   of
things-never-the-same, of noway-back, made  him  afraid. When  you lose  the
past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on
if you  can, he told  himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in
the grey slope as you slide.
     Billy Battuta: that worthless piece of shit. Playboy Pakistani,  turned
an  unremarkable holiday  business  -  

Battuta's  Travels -

into  a fleet  of
supertankers. A  con-man, basically, famous for  his  romances  with leading
ladies  of the Hindi  screen and, according  to gossip, for his predilection
for  white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom  he 'treated
badly',  as the euphemism had it,  and 'rewarded handsomely'. What did  Mimi
want with bad Billy,  his  sexual instruments and his  Maserati Biturbo? For
boys like Battuta,  white women -  never  mind fat,  Jewish, non-deferential
white women - were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in whites -
love  of brown  sugar - one  must also hate when it  turns up, inverted,  in
black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.
     Mimi  telephoned the next evening  from New York. Anahita called him to
the  phone in her best damnyankee tones, and he struggled into his disguise.
When  he  got  there she  had  rung off,  but  she  rang  back. 'Nobody pays
transatlantic  prices  for hanging on.' 'Mimi,'  he  said, with  desperation
patent in his voice, 'you  didn't say you were  leaving.'  'You  didn't even
tell me  your  damn address,'  she responded. 'So we both have secrets.'  He
wanted  to  say, Mimi, come  home, you're going to get kicked. 'I introduced
him to the  family,' she said,  too jokily. 'You can imagine. Yassir  Arafat
meets the  Begins. Never  mind. We'll  all live.'  He wanted to  say,  Mimi,
you're all I've got. He managed, however, only to piss her off. 'I wanted to
warn you about Billy,' was what he said.
     She went icy. 'Chamcha, listen up. I'll discuss this with  you one time
because  behind all your  bullshit you do maybe care  for  me  a little.  So
comprehend, please,  that I am an intelligent female.  I have read 

Finnegans
Wake

 and  am conversant  with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that
we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a "flattened" world. When I
become  the  voice  of  a  bottle  of bubble  bath, I  am entering  Flatland
knowingly, understanding  what I'm doing and  why.  Viz., I am earning cash.
And as an intelligent woman, able to do fifteen minutes on Stoicism and more
on Japanese cinema,  I  say to you, Chamcha, that  I am fully aware of Billy
boy's  rep. Don't  teach  me about  exploitation.  We had  exploitation when
you-plural  were running round in skins. Try  being Jewish, female  and ugly
sometime.  You'll  beg to be black.  Excuse my French: brown.' 'You concede,
then, that he's exploiting you,' Chamcha
     interposed, but the torrent swept him away. 'What's the fuckin'  diff?'
she trilled in her Tweetie Pie  voice. 'Billy's a  funny boy, a natural scam
artist, one of  the greats. Who knows for  how long this  is? I'll tell  you
some notions  I do not require:  patriotism,  God  and love.  Definitely not
wanted on the voyage. I like Billy because he knows the score.'
     'Mimi,'  he  said, 'something's  happened  to me,' but  she  was  still
protesting too much  and missed it. He put the  receiver down without giving
her his address.
     She rang him once more,  a few  weeks  later,  and by now  the unspoken
precedents had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts,
and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart,
it was time to wave goodbye. It was still all  Billy with Mimi: his plans to
make  Hindi  movies in England and America,  importing the top stars,  Vinod
Khanna, Sridevi, to  cavort in front of  Bradford Town  Hall  and the Golden
Gate Bridge - 'it's some sort of tax dodge, obviously,' Mimi carolled gaily.
In fact, things were heating up for  Billy; Chamcha had seen his name in the
papers, coupled with the terms 

fraud squad

 and 

tax  evasion,

 but once a scam
man, always a  ditto, Mimi  said. 'So he says to me, do you  want a  mink? I
say,  Billy,  don't buy me  things, but he says, who's talking about buying?
Have a  mink. It's business.' They had been in New York again, and Billy had
hired  a stretched  Mercedes limousine  'and  a  stretched  chauffeur also'.
Arriving at the furriers,  they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi
tried  on the five figure numbers, waiting  for Billy's  lead.  At length he
said, You  like  that one?  It's  nice.  Billy,  she  whispered,  it's 

forty
thousand,

  but  he  was already smooth-talking the assistant: it  was Friday
afternoon,  the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. 'Well,  by
now they 

know

 he's an  oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the  coat,
and he  takes me into another  store right around  the block,  points to the
coat, and says, I just bought  this  for forty  thousand dollars, here's the
receipt, will  you  give  me  thirty for it, I need  the  cash,  big weekend
ahead.'  - Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the  second store rang
the first, where all the alarm bells went off  in the manager's  brain,  and
five  minutes later  the police arrived, arrested Billy for  passing  a  dud
cheque, and  he  and Mimi spent  the weekend in  jail. On Monday morning the
banks  opened and  it turned out  that Billy's  account was in credit to the
tune of forty-two thousand, one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque
had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intention to sue
them for two million dollars damages, defamation of character, open and shut
case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on
the nail. 'Don't you  love  him?' Mimi asked Chamcha. 'The boy's a genius. I
mean, this was 

class.'

     I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an
amoral, survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita  Sufyan, who
still unaccountably treated him  like a kind  of soul-mate, in spite  of all
his attempts  to  dissuade  them,  were  beings  who  plainly  admired  such
creatures as  moonlighters, shoplifters,  filchers: scam artists in general.
He  corrected himself: not admired, that wasn't it.  Neither girl would ever
steal a pin. But they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of
how-it-was. As an experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the
mink coat.  Their eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with
delight:  wickedness unpunished  made them  laugh. Thus,  Chamcha  realized,
people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws,
Dick  Turpin,  Ned  Kelly, Phoolan  Devi, and of  course that  other  Billy:
William Bonney, also a Kid.
     'Scrapheap  Youths'  Criminal  Idols,' Mishal  read  his mind and then,
laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while
arranging  her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body  into similarly
exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having
stirred him, she prettily added: 'Kissy kissy?'
     Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal's pose,
with less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some annoyance, she
spoke sulkily. 'Trouble is, we've got  good  prospects, us. Family business,
no brothers,  bob's your  uncle.  This place makes  a packet,  dunnit?  Well
then.'  The Shaandaar rooming-house  was categorized  as a Bed and Breakfast
establishment, of  the type  that borough  councils were using more and more
owing  to  the  crisis in public  housing,  lodging  five-person families in
single  rooms,  turning blind  eyes  to health  and safety regulations,  and
claiming  'temporary accommodation' allowances from the  central government.
'Ten  quid per night  per person,'  Anahita  informed  Chamcha in his attic.
'Three hundred and fifty  nicker per room per week, it comes to, as often as
not.  Six occupied  rooms:  you work it  out. Right now, we're  losing three
hundred pounds  a  month on this attic, so I hope you feel really bad.'  For
that  kind  of  money, it  struck Chamcha,  you could rent pretty reasonable
family-sized  apartments  in  the  private  sector.  But  that  wouldn't  be
classified  as   temporary  accommodation;  no   central  funding  for  such
solutions. Which  would also  be  opposed by  local politicians committed to
fighting the  'cuts'. 

La lutte continue;

 meanwhile,  Hind and  her daughters
raked in the cash, unworldly Sufyan went to Mecca  and came home to dispense
homely  wisdom, kindliness and smiles. And  behind  six doors  that opened a
crack every time Chamcha went to make a phone call or use the toilet,  maybe
thirty temporary human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent.
     The real world.
     'You needn't look  so  fish-faced  and  holy,  anyway,'  Mishal  Sufyan
pointed out. 'Look where all your law abiding got you.'
     'Your universe is  shrinking.' A busy man, Hal Valance, creator of  

The
Aliens Show

 and sole owner of the  property, took exactly seventeen  seconds
to congratulate Chamcha on being alive before beginning to explain  why this
fact did  not affect the  show's decision  to  dispense with  his  services.
Valance  had  started  out  in  advertising  and his  vocabulary  had  never
recovered  from the blow. Chamcha could keep up, however. All those years in
the  voiceover  business  taught  you a  little  bad language.  In marketing
parlance,  

a universe

 was  the total potential market for a given product or
service:  the chocolate universe, the slimming universe. The dental universe
was everybody with teeth; the others were the denture cosmos. 'I'm talking,'
Valance breathed down  the phone in his  best Deep Throat  voice, 'about the
ethnic universe.'
     

My  people again:

  Chamcha, disguised in  turban and the  rest  of  his
ill-fitting  drag,  hung on a telephone in  a  passageway while the eyes  of
impermanent  women  and children gleamed  through  barely  opened doors; and
wondered  what  his people had  done  to  him now.  'No  capeesh,' he  said,
remembering Valance's fondness for Italian-American argot  - this was, after
all,  the author  of the fast food slogan  

Getta pizza  da action.

  On  this
occasion,  however, Valance  wasn't playing.  'Audience  surveys  show,'  he
breathed,  'that  ethnics don't  watch  ethnic  shows.  They don't want 'em,
Chamcha.  They  want fucking  

Dynasty,

  like everyone  else.  Your profile's
wrong, if you follow: with you  in the  show it's just too  damn racial. 

The
Aliens Show

 is too  big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension. The
merchandising possibilities alone, but I don't have to tell you this.'
     Chamcha  saw  himself reflected in the  small  cracked mirror above the
phone box. He looked like a marooned  genie in search of a magic lamp. 'It's
a point of view,' he answered  Valance, knowing argument to be useless. With
Hal,  all explanations were post facto  rationalizations.  He was strictly a
seat-of-the-pants man,  who  took  for his motto the advice  given  by  Deep
Throat to  Bob Woodward: 

Follow the  money.

 He  had the phrase  set in large
sans-serif  type  and pinned  up  in  his office  over a  still from 

All the
President's Men:

 Hal Holbrook  (another  Hal!) in the car park,  standing in
the shadows.  Follow the money: it explained, as he was fond of  saying, his
five wives, all independently wealthy, from  each  of whom he had received a
handsome  divorce settlement.  He  was presently married  to  a wasted child
maybe one-third his age,  with waist-length auburn hair and a  spectral look
that  would have  made her  a great beauty a quarter  of a  century earlier.
'This one doesn't have  a bean; she's taking me for all  I've  got and  when
she's taken it she'll bugger off,' Valance had told Chamcha once, in happier
days.  'What  the   hell.  I'm  human,  too.  This  time  it's  love.'  More
cradlesnatching. No escape  from it in these times. Chamcha on the telephone
found he  couldn't remember the infant's  name. 'You know my motto,' Valance
was  saying.  'Yes,' Chamcha said neutrally. 'It's  the  right line  for the
product.' The product, you bastard, being you.
     By the time he met Hal Valance (how many  years ago? Five, maybe  six),
over lunch  at  the  White Tower,  the  man  was  already  a  monster: pure,
self-created  image, a set of attributes plastered thickly over a body  that
was, in Hal's own words, 'in training to be Orson Welles'. He smoked absurd,
caricature  cigars, refusing  all  Cuban  brands, however, on account of his
uncompromisingly capitalistic  stance. He owned a Union  Jack  waistcoat and
insisted on flying the flag  over  his agency and also above the door of his
Highgate home; was prone to dress up as Maurice Chevalier and sing, at major
presentations,  to his  amazed clients, with the help  of straw  boater  and
silver-headed cane; claimed to own the first Loire chateau to be fitted with
telex and fax machines; and made much of his 'intimate' association with the
Prime  Minister  he  referred  to  affectionately  as  'Mrs.  Torture'.  The
personification of philistine triumphalism, midatlantic-accented Hal was one
of the glories of the  age, the creative half of the city's  hottest agency,
the Valance & Lang Partnership. Like Billy Battuta he  liked big cars driven
by big chauffeurs.  It was said that once, while being  driven at high speed
down  a Cornish lane in order to 'heat up' a particularly glacial seven-foot
Finnish model, there had been an accident: no  injuries, but when the  other
driver emerged  furiously  from his wrecked vehicle he turned out to be even
larger than Hal's minder. As this colossus bore down on him, Hal lowered his
push-button window and  breathed, with a sweet smile: 'I strongly advise you
to  turn around and  walk  swiftly away;  because, sir,  if you do not do so
within  the  next fifteen  seconds, I am  going  to have you  killed.' Other
advertising  geniuses  were famous  for their work: Mary Wells  for her pink
Braniff planes, David Ogilvy for his eyepatch, Jerry  della Femina for 'From
those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor'. Valance, whose agency went
in for cheap and cheerful vulgarity, all bums  and  honky-tonk, was renowned
in  the  business for  this (probably apocryphal)  'I'm  going to  have  you
killed', a turn of phrase  which proved, to those in the know, that  the guy
really was a genius. Chamcha had long suspected he'd made up the story, with
its perfect ad-land components - Scandinavian icequeen, two thugs, expensive
cars, Valance in the  Blofeld role and 007 nowhere on the scene - and put it
about himself, knowing it to be good for business.
     The lunch  was by  way of thanking  Chamcha for  his part in  a recent,
smash-hit campaign for Slimbix diet foods. Saladin had  been  the voice of a
cutesy cartoon blob: 

Hi. I'm Cal, and I'm  one sad calorie.

 Four courses and
plenty of champagne as a reward for  persuading  people  to starve.  

How's a
poor calorie to earn a salary?  Thanks to Slimbix, I'm  out of work.

 Chamcha
hadn't known  what  to expect  from  Valance.  What he  got  was, at  least,
unvarnished. 'You've done well,' Hal congratulated him, 'for a person of the
tinted persuasion.' And  proceeded, without taking  his eyes  off  Chamcha's
face: 'Let me tell you some facts. Within the last three months,  we re-shot
a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in
the background. We re-recorded a  building society jingle because T'Chairman
thought  the  singer  sounded black, even though  he was white  as a sodding
sheet, and even though, the year before,  we'd used a black boy who, luckily
for him, didn't suffer  from  an excess of soul. We  were told  by  a  major
airline that we couldn't use  any blacks in their ads, even though they were
actually employees of the airline. A black actor came to audition for me and
he  was wearing a Racial Equality button badge, a black hand shaking a white
one.  I said  this:  don't think  you're getting special  treatment from me,
chum.  You  follow me?  You  follow what  I'm telling  you?' It's a  goddamn
audition, Saladin realized.  'I've  never felt  I  belonged  to a  race,' he
replied. Which was  perhaps  why, when  Hal Valance  set up  his  production
company, Chamcha was on his 'A list'; and why, eventually, Maxim Alien  came
his way.
     When 

The Aliens  Show

 started coming in for stick from  black radicals,
they gave Chamcha a nickname. On account of his private-school education and
closeness to the hated Valance, he was known as 'Brown Uncle Tom'.
     Apparently  the  political  pressure  on  the  show  had  increased  in
Chamcha's  absence, orchestrated  by a  certain Dr Uhuru Simba.  'Doctor  of
what, beats  me,' Valance deepthroated down  the phone. 'Our ah  researchers
haven't come up with anything yet.' Mass pickets, an embarrassing appearance
on 

Right to Reply.

 'The  guy's built like a fucking tank.' Chamcha envisaged
the  pair of them, Valance and Simba, as one another's antitheses. It seemed
that the protests had succeeded:  Valance was 'de-politicizing' the show, by
firing Chamcha  and putting  a huge blond Teuton with  pectorals and a quiff
inside   the   prosthetic   make-up   and  computer-generated   imagery.   A
latex-and-Quantel Schwarzenegger, a synthetic, hip-talking version of Rutger
Hauer in 

Blade Runner.

 The Jews were out, too: instead of Mimi, the new show
would have a voluptuous shiksa doll. 'I sent word to Dr Simba: stick that up
your fucking  pee aitch dee. No reply has  been received. He'll have to work
harder  than that if he's  going to  take over  

this

 little country. I,' Hal
Valance announced, 'love this fucking country. That's  why I'm going to sell
it to the whole goddamn  world, Japan, America, fucking Argentina. I'm going
to sell the arse  off it. That's what I've been selling all my fucking life:
the fucking nation.  The 

flag.'

 He  didn't hear what he  was saying. When he
got going on this stuff, he went puce and often wept. He had done just  that
at the  White Tower, that  first time, while stuffing himself full  of Greek
food.  The  date  came back to Chamcha now: just  after  the Falklands  war.
People had a tendency to swear loyalty oaths in those days, to hum 'Pomp and
Circumstance'  on  the  buses. So  when Valance,  over  a  large balloon  of
Armagnac, started up  - Til  tell  you why I love  this  country'  -Chamcha,
pro-Falklands himself,  thought  he knew what  was coming next.  But Valance
began to describe the research programme of a  British aerospace company,  a
client  of his,  which  had just revolutionized the construction  of missile
guidance  systems by  studying  the  flight pattern  of the common housefly.
'Inflight  course corrections,'  he whispered  theatrically.  'Traditionally
done in the line of flight: adjust the angle up a bit, down a touch, left or
right  a  nadge.  Scientists  studying high-speed film  of  the humble  fly,
however,  have  discovered that the little buggers  always, but always, make
corrections 

in  right  angles.'

 He demonstrated with his hand stretched out,
palm  flat,  fingers  together.  'Bzzt!  Bzzt!  The  bastards  actually  fly
vertically  up,  down  or  sideways.  Much  more  accurate. Much  more  fuel
efficient. Try to do it with an engine that depends on nose-to-tail airflow,
and  what happens? The sodding thing can't breathe, stalls, falls out of the
sky,  lands  on your fucking allies. Bad karma. You  follow. You follow what
I'm saying. So these  guys,  they invent an engine with  three-way  airflow:
nose to tail, plus top to bottom, plus side  to side. And  bingo: a  missile
that flies like a  goddamn fly, and can hit  a fifty  p coin travelling at a
ground speed of one hundred miles an hour at a distance of three miles. What
I  love  about this country is that: its  genius. Greatest inventors in  the
world. It's beautiful:  am  I  right  or  am I right?'  He  had  been deadly
serious. Chamcha answered: 'You're right.' 'You're damn right I'm right,' he
confirmed.
     They  met for the last time  just before  Chamcha took off  for Bombay:
Sunday  lunch at  the  flag-waving Highgate  mansion. Rosewood panelling,  a
terrace  with stone  urns,  a view down a wooded  hill. Valance  complaining
about  a  new  development  that would  louse  up  the  scenery.  Lunch  was
predictably jingoistic:  

rosbif, boudin Yorkshire, choux de bruxelles.

 Baby,
the  nymphet  wife,  didn't  join them,  but  ate hot pastrami  on rye while
shooting pool  in a  nearby room.  Servants,  a  thunderous  Burgundy,  more
Armagnac, cigars.  The  self-made  man's paradise,  Chamcha  reflected,  and
recognized the envy in the thought.
     After lunch, a  surprise. Valance led  him into  a  room in which there
stood two clavichords of great  delicacy  and  lightness. 'I make  'em,' his
host confessed.  To  relax. Baby wants me to make her a fucking guitar.' Hal
Valance's talent as a cabinet-maker was undeniable, and somehow at odds with
the  rest  of  the man.  'My  father  was in the  trade,'  he admitted under
Chamcha's  probing,  and  Saladin understood  that  he  had  been granted  a
privileged glimpse into  the only  piece that remained of Valance's original
self, the Harold that  derived  from history and blood  and not from his own
frenetic brain.
     When they left the  secret chamber of the clavichords, the familiar Hal
Valance instantly  reappeared. Leaning on the balustrade of  his terrace, he
confided: 'The thing that's so  amazing  about her is the size of what she's
trying  to  do.'  Her?  Baby?  Chamcha  was  confused.  'I'm  talking  about
you-know-who,' Valance explained helpfully. 'Torture. Maggie the Bitch.' Oh.
'She's radical all right. What she wants  - what she actually thinks she can
fucking 

achieve

 - is literally to invent a whole goddamn new middle class in
this country. Get rid  of the old  woolly  incompetent buggers from  fucking
Surrey  and  Hampshire,  and  bring in the new.  People  without background,
without  history. Hungry people. People who really  

want,

  and who know that
with her, they can  bloody well 

get.

 Nobody's ever tried to replace a  whole
fucking 

class

 before, and the  amazing thing is she might just do it if they
don't  get her  first. The  old class.  The  dead men.  You follow what  I'm
saying.'  'I think so,'  Chamcha lied. 'And it's not just the  businessmen,'
Valance  said slurrily. 'The  intellectuals, too. Out with the whole faggoty
crew. In  with the hungry guys with the wrong education. New professors, new
painters, the  lot.  It's  a bloody  revolution.  Newness coming  into  this
country  that's  stuffed full  of  fucking old 

corpses.

  It's  going  to  be
something to see. It already is.'
     Baby wandered out to  meet  them,  looking bored. 'Time  you were  off,
Chamcha,' her  husband commanded.  'On Sunday afternoons  we  go to  bed and
watch pornography on video. It's a whole  new  world, Saladin. Everybody has
to join sometime.'
     No compromises. You're in or you're dead. It hadn't been Chamcha's way;
not  his, nor that of  the England  he had idolized and come to conquer.  He
should have understood  then and there: he was  being given, had been given,
fair warning.
     And now the  coup de  grace. 'No hard  feelings,' Valance was murmuring
into his ear. 'See you around, eh? Okay, right.'
     'Hal,' he made himself object, 'I've got a contract.'
     Like a goat  to  the  slaughter.  The  voice in his ear was  now openly
amused.  'Don't be  silly,' it told  him. 'Of course you  haven't.  Read the
small print. Get a 

lawyer

 to read the small print. Take me to court. Do what
you have to do. It's nothing to me. Don't you get it? You're history.'
     Dialling tone.
     Abandoned  by one alien  England, marooned  within another, Mr. Saladin
Chamcha in  his great dejection  received news of an old  companion who  was
evidently  enjoying better  fortunes.  The shriek of  his  landlady -  

'Tint
benche achen!' -

 warned him that something was up. Hind was billowing  along
the corridors of the Shaandaar  B  and B,  waving, it turned out,  a current
copy  of  the imported Indian  fanzine 

Cine-Blitz.

 Doors  opened;  temporary
beings popped out, looking  puzzled and alarmed. Mishal Sufyan  emerged from
her room with yards  of midriff showing between  shortie  tank-top and 501s.
From the office he  maintained across the hall, Hanif Johnson emerged in the
incongruity of  a sharp three-piece suit, was hit by the midriff and covered
his face. 'Lord have mercy,' he prayed.  Mishal ignored him and yelled after
her mother: 'What's up? Who's alive?'
     'Shameless from somewhere,' Hind shouted back along the passage, 'cover
your nakedness.'
     'Fuck off,'  Mishal muttered  under her breath, fixing mutinous eyes on
Hanif Johnson.  'What about the michelins sticking out between  her sari and
her choli, I want to know.' Down at the other end of the passage, Hind could
be  seen  in the half-light, thrusting 

Cine-Blitz

 at the tenants, repeating,
he's  alive.  With  all   the  fervour   of  those  Greeks  who,  after  the
disappearance  of  the politician Lambrakis, covered the  country  with  the
whitewashed letter 

Z. Zi: he lives.

     'Who?' Mishal demanded again.
     

'Gibreel,'

  came the  cry of  impermanent  children.  

'Farishta  benche
achen.'

 Hind, disappearing  downstairs, did  not observe her  elder daughter
returning to her room, - leaving  the door ajar;  - and being followed, when
he was sure  the coast was clear, by the  well-known  lawyer  Hanif Johnson,
suited  and booted,  who maintained  this office  to keep in touch with  the
grass  roots, who  was also  doing well in a smart uptown  practice, who was
well connected with the  local Labour Party and was accused by the sitting M
P of scheming to take his place when reselection came around.
     When  was  Mishal Sufyan's eighteenth birthday? - Not  for a few  weeks
yet. And where was her sister,  her  roommate, sidekick,  shadow,  echo  and
foil? Where was the potential chaperone? She was: out.
     But to continue:
     The news from 

Cine-Blitz

  was that a new, London-based film  production
outfit headed by the whiz-kid tycoon Billy Battuta, whose interest in cinema
was  well  known,  had  entered into  an  association  with  the  reputable,
independent Indian producer Mr. S. S. Sisodia for the purpose of producing a
comeback vehicle for the legendary Gibreel, now exclusively revealed to have
escaped the jaws of death for a second time. 'It is true I was booked on the
plane under the name of Naj-muddin,' the star was  quoted as saying. 'I know
that when  the investigating sleuths  identified this as  my  incognito - in
fact,  my real  name -  it caused great grief back  home, and  for this I do
sincerely apologize to my fans. You see, the truth is, that  grace  of God I
somehow missed the flight, and as I had wished in any  case to go to ground,
excuse, please, no pun intended, I permitted  the  fiction of  my  demise to
stand uncorrected and took a later flight.  Such  luck: truly, an angel must
have been watching over  me.'  After a time  of reflection,  however, he had
concluded that it  was wrong to deprive his public, in  this unsportsmanlike
and hurtful way, of  the  true data and  also  his  presence on  the screen.
'Therefore I  have accepted this project with  full commitment and joy.' The
film was to be - what else - a theological, but of  a new type. It would  be
set in an imaginary and fabulous city  made of sand,  and  would recount the
story  of  the  encounter  between  a  prophet and  an archangel;  also  the
temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that
of  base  compromise.  'It  is  a  film,'  the  producer, Sisodia,  informed

Cine-Blitz,

 'about how newness enters the world.' - But would it not be seen
as  blasphemous,  a crime against  ...  -  'Certainly  not,'  Billy  Battuta
insisted. 'Fiction is  fiction; facts are facts. Our purpose  is not to make
some farrago like that movie 

The Message

 in which, whenever Prophet Muhammad
(on whose  name be peace!) was heard  to speak, you saw only the head of his
camel, moving its mouth. 

That -

 excuse me for pointing  out - had no  class.
We are making a high-taste,  quality picture. A moral  tale: like -  what do
you call them? - fables.'
     'Like a dream,' Mr. Sisodia said.
     When the news  was brought to Chamcha's attic later that day by Anahita
and Mishal Sufyan,  he flew into the  vilest  rage either of them  had  ever
witnessed, a fury under whose fearful influence his voice rose so high  that
it seemed to tear, as if his throat had grown knives and ripped his cries to
shreds; his pestilential breath all but blasted them from the room, and with
arms raised high and goat-legs  dancing he looked, at  last,  like the  very
devil whose  image he had become. 'Liar,' he shrieked at the absent Gibreel.
'Traitor, deserter, scum. Missed the plane, did you? -Then whose head, in my
own  lap,  with  my  own  hands  .  .  . ? -who received  caresses, spoke of
nightmares, and fell at last singing from the sky?'
     'There, there,'  pleaded terrified Mishal. 'Calm down.  You'll have Mum
up here in a minute.'
     Saladin  subsided, a  pathetic  goaty heap  once again,  no  threat  to
anyone. 'It's not true,' he wailed. 'What happened, happened to us both.'
     'Course  it did,'  Anahita encouraged him. 'Nobody believes those movie
magazines, anyway. They'll say anything, them.'
     Sisters backed out of  the room, holding  their breath, leaving Chamcha
to his misery, failing to observe something quite remarkable. For which they
must  not be blamed; Chamcha's antics were sufficient to have distracted the
keenest eyes. It should  also, in fairness, be stated that Saladin failed to
notice the change himself.
     What  happened?  This:  during  Chamcha's  brief  but violent  outburst
against Gibreel, the horns on his head (which,  one  may as  well point out,
had grown several inches while he languished in the attic of the Shaandaar B
and  B) definitely,  unmistakably,  - by  about three-quarters of an inch, -

diminished.

     In the interest  of the  strictest accuracy, one should add that, lower
down  his transformed body, -  inside borrowed  pantaloons (delicacy forbids
the publication of explicit details), - something else,  let us leave  it at
that, got a little smaller, too.
     Be that as it may: it transpired that the optimism of the report in the
imported  movie magazine had been  ill founded, because  within days of  its
publication  the local papers carried news of Billy Battuta's  arrest,  in a
midtown  New  York  sushi  bar,  along  with  a  female  companion,  Mildred
Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years  of age. The story  was that
he had approached numbers of  society  matrons, 'movers and shakers', asking
for  'very substantial' sums of  money which he had claimed to need in order
to buy his freedom from a sect of  devil worshippers. Once a confidence man,
always a  confidence man: it  was  what  Mimi  Mamoulian would no doubt have
described   as   a  beautiful  sting.  Penetrating  the  heart  of  American
religiosity,  pleading to be  saved -  'when  you sell  your soul you  can't
expect to  buy  back cheap' - Billy had banked,  the investigators  alleged,
'six figure  sums'. The world community of the faithful  longed, in the late
1980s, for 

direct  contact with  the supernal,

  and Billy, claiming  to have
raised  (and therefore to need rescuing  from) infernal fiends, was on to  a
winner, especially as the Devil  he offered was so democratically responsive
to the dictates of  the Almighty Dollar. What  Billy  offered  the West Side
matrons in return for their fat  cheques was  verification: yes,  there is a
Devil; I've  seen him  with  my own eyes - God, it  was frightful!  - and if
Lucifer existed, so must Gabriel;  if Hellfire had been  seen to  burn, then
somewhere, over the rainbow, Paradise must surely shine. Mimi Mamoulian had,
it  was alleged, played a full part in the deceptions, weeping  and pleading
for all  she was  worth. They  were  undone by  over-confidence,  spotted at
Takesushi (whooping it up and cracking jokes with the chef) by a Mrs. Aileen
Struwelpeter   who  had,   only   the   previous   afternoon,   handed   the
then-distraught  and  terrified  couple  a five-thousand-dollar cheque. Mrs.
Struwelpeter  was not  without influence in the New York  Police Department,
and the boys in blue arrived before Mimi had finished her tempura. They both
went  quietly.  Mimi was wearing, in the newspaper photographs, what Chamcha
guessed was a forty-thousand-dollar mink coat, and an expression on her face
that could only be read one way.
     

The hell with you all.

     Nothing further was heard, for some while, about Farishta's film.
     

It was so,  it was not,

  that as Saladin Chamcha's incarceration in the
body of a devil and the attic of the Shaandaar B and B lengthened into weeks
and  months, it became  impossible  not to  notice that  his  condition  was
worsening steadily. His horns (notwithstanding  their single, momentary  and
unobserved  diminution)  had  grown  both  thicker  and   longer,   twirling
themselves into  fanciful  arabesques, wreathing  his  head  in  a turban of
darkening bone. He had grown a thick, long beard, a disorienting development
in one whose round,  moony face had never boasted much hair  before; indeed,
he  was growing hairier  all over his body,  and had even sprouted, from the
base of  his spine,  a fine tail that lengthened by the day and  had already
obliged him  to  abandon  the wearing  of trousers; he tucked  the new limb,
instead,  inside baggy salwar pantaloons filched  by Anahita Sufyan from her
mother's generously tailored collection. The distress engendered  in him  by
his continuing metamorphosis into some species of bottled djinn will readily
be imagined. Even his appetites  were altering. Always fussy about his food,
he was appalled to find  his palate coarsening, so that all foodstuffs began
to  taste  much the  same,  and on  occasion he would find  himself nibbling
absently  at his bedsheets or  old newspapers, and come to his senses with a
start, guilty  and shamefaced at this further evidence  of his progress away
from manhood and towards - yes - goatishness. Increasing quantities of green
mouthwash  were required  to keep  his breath within  acceptable limits.  It
really was too grievous to be borne.
     His presence in the house was a continual thorn in the side of Hind, in
whom regret  for the lost income  mingled  with the  remnants of her initial
terror, although it's true to say that the soothing processes of habituation
had worked their sorceries on her, helping her to see Saladin's condition as
some kind of Elephant  Man  illness, a thing  to  feel disgusted by but  not
necessarily to fear. 'Let  him keep out of my way and I'll keep out of his,'
she told her daughters. 'And  you, the children of my despair, why you spend
your time sitting up there with a sick person while your youth is flying by,
who can say, but  in this  Vilayet it seems everything  I used to  know is a
lie, such  as the idea that young girls should help their mothers,  think of
marriage, attend to studies, and not go sitting with  goats, whose  throats,
on Big Eid, it is our old custom to slit.'
     Her  husband  remained  solicitous,  however, even  after  the  strange
incident  that  took place when he ascended  to the  attic and  suggested to
Saladin  that the girls might  not have been so wrong, that perhaps the, how
could  one  put  it,  possession  of  his  body  could be terminated  by the
intercession of a mullah? At the mention  of a priest Chamcha reared  up  on
his feet, raising both arms above  his head, and  somehow or  other the room
filled  up with dense  and  sulphurous smoke  while  a  high-pitched vibrato
screech  with a  kind of  tearing quality pierced  Sufyan's  hearing  like a
spike. The smoke cleared quickly enough, because Chamcha flung open a window
and fanned feverishly at the fumes,  while apologizing to Sufyan in tones of
acute embarrassment: 'I really can't say what came over me, - but at times I
fear I am changing into something, - something one must call 

bad.'

     Sufyan, kindly  fellow that he  was,  went over  to  where  Chamcha sat
clutching at his horns, patted him on the shoulder, and tried to  bring what
good cheer he could. 'Question of mutability of the essence of the self,' he
began,  awkwardly,  'has long been subject  of profound debate. For example,
great  Lucretius tells  us,  in  

De  Rerum  Natura,

  this  following  thing:

quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit
ante.

  Which being  translated,  forgive my clumsiness, is "Whatever  by its
changing  goes out  of  its  frontiers,"  - that is, bursts its banks, - or,
maybe, breaks out  of  its limitations, - so  to  speak,  disregards its own
rules, but that is  too free, I am thinking . . . "that thing", at any rate,
Lucretius  holds, "by doing  so  brings immediate  death  to  its old self".
However,'  up  went  the  ex-schoolmaster's  finger,   'poet  Ovid,  in  the

Metamorphoses,

 takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: "As yielding
wax" -heated, you see, possibly for the sealing of  documents or such, - "is
stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet
is  indeed the same, even so our souls,"  - you hear, good sir? Our spirits!
Our immortal essences!  -  "Are still the  same forever, but adopt  In their
migrations ever-varying forms."'
     He  was hopping, now, from foot to foot, full of the thrill of the  old
words. 'For me it is always  Ovid over Lucretius,' he stated. 'Your soul, my
good poor dear sir,  is the same. Only in its migration it has  adopted this
presently varying form.'
     'This  is pretty cold  comfort,'  Chamcha  managed a trace  of his  old
dryness. 'Either  I  accept  Lucretius  and conclude that  some demonic  and
irreversible mutation is taking place in my inmost depths, or I go with Ovid
and concede that everything now emerging is no more than a  manifestation of
what was already there.'
     'I have put my argument  badly,'  Sufyan miserably apologized. 'I meant
only to reassure.'
     'What consolation can there be,' Chamcha answered with bitter rhetoric,
his irony crumbling beneath the weight of  his unhappiness, 'for a man whose
old  friend  and  rescuer  is also  the nightly  lover  of  his  wife,  thus
encouraging  - as your  old  books  would doubtless affirm -  the growth  of
cuckold's horns?'
     The  old  friend,  Jumpy Joshi, was unable  for a single moment  of his
waking hours to rid himself of the knowledge  that, for the first time in as
long as he could remember, he  had lost the will to  lead his life according
to his own  standards  of  morality. At  the  sports centre  where he taught
martial arts techniques to ever-greater numbers of students, emphasizing the
spiritual aspects  of  the  disciplines,  much to their  amusement  ('Ah so,
Grasshopper,' his star pupil  Mishal Sufyan would tease him, 'when honolable
fascist  swine jump at you flom dark  alleyway, offer him teaching of Buddha
before  you kick  him in  honolable  balls'),  - he  began  to display  such

passionate intensity

 that his pupils, realizing that some inner anguish  was
being expressed, grew  alarmed. When Mishal asked him about it at the end of
a session that had left them both bruised and panting  for breath,  in which
the two of them, teacher and star, had hurled themselves at one another like
the  hungriest  of  lovers,  he  threw  her  question back  at her  with  an
uncharacteristic  lack of openness. 'Talk  about pot and kettle,'  he  said.
'Question of mote and beam.' They were standing by the vending machines. She
shrugged. 'Okay,' she said. 'I confess, but keep the secret.' He reached for
his  Coke: 'What secret?' Innocent Jumpy. Mishal whispered in his  ear: 'I'm
getting laid. By your friend: Mister Hanif Johnson, Bar At Law.'
     He was  shocked, which irritated  her. 'O, come 

on.

 It's  not like  I'm

fifteen.'

 He replied, weakly, 'If your mother  ever,' and once again she was
impatient. 'If you want to know,' petulantly, 'the one I'm worried about  is
Anahita.  She  wants whatever  I've  got.  And she,  by  the  way, really is
fifteen.' Jumpy noticed that  he'd knocked over  his paper-cup and there was
Coke on his  shoes. 'Out with it,'  Mishal was insisting.  'I owned up. Your
turn.' But Jumpy couldn't say; was still shaking his head about Hanif. 'It'd
be the finish of him,' he said. That did it. Mishal put her nose in the air.
'O, I get it,' she said. 'Not good enough for him, you reckon.' And over her
departing shoulder: 'Here, Grasshopper. Don't holy men ever fuck?'
     Not so holy. He wasn't cut out for sainthood, any more than  the  David
Carradine character in the old 

Kung  Fu

 programmes:  like Grasshopper,  like
Jumpy. Every day he wore himself out trying to stay away  from the big house
in Netting  Hill, and  every evening he ended up at  Pamela's door, thumb in
mouth, biting the skin around the edges of the nail, fending off the dog and
his own guilt, heading without wasting any time for the  bedroom. Where they
would fall upon one another,  mouths searching out the  places in which they
had chosen, or learned, to begin: first  his lips  around  her nipples, then
hers moving along his lower thumb.
     She  had come to love in him this quality of impatience, because it was
followed by a patience such as she had  never experienced, the patience of a
man who had never been 'attractive' and was therefore prepared to value what
was  offered,  or so  she had  thought  at first; but  then she  learned  to
appreciate  his  consciousness  of  and  solicitude  for  her  own  internal
tensions, his  sense  of  the  difficulty  with  which  her  slender,  bony,
small-breasted body found, learned and finally surrendered  to a rhythm, his
knowledge of time. She loved  in him, too, his overcoming of himself; loved,
knowing it to be a wrong reason, his willingness to overcome his scruples so
that they might be together: loved the desire in him that rode over all that
had been imperative in  him. Loved it, without being willing to see, in this
love, the beginning of an end.
     Near the end of their lovemaking, she became noisy. 'Yow!' she shouted,
all the aristocracy in her  voice crowding into the meaningless syllables of
her abandonment. 'Whoop! Hi! 

Hah.'

     She was still drinking heavily, scotch bourbon rye, a stripe of redness
spreading across the centre of  her face. Under the influence of alcohol her
right eye narrowed to  half  the size of the  left,  and she began,  to  his
horror, to disgust him. No discussion of her boozing was permitted, however:
the one time he tried he found himself on the street with his shoes clutched
in his  right  hand and  his  overcoat over his left arm. Even after that he
came back:  and  she opened  the  door  and went straight upstairs as though
nothing had happened. Pamela's taboos:  jokes about her background, mentions
of whisky-bottle 'dead soldiers', and any suggestion that her  late husband,
the actor Saladin Chamcha, was still alive, living across town in a bed  and
breakfast joint, in the shape of a supernatural beast.
     These days,  Jumpy - who had, at first,  badgered her incessantly about
Saladin, telling her  she should go ahead and divorce him, but this pretence
of widowhood was intolerable: what about the man's assets, his  rights to  a
share  of the property,  and  so  forth?  Surely  she would  not  leave  him
destitute? - no longer protested about her unreasonable behaviour. 'I've got
a confirmed report of his death,' she told him on the only occasion on which
she  was  prepared to  say  anything  at  all.  'And  what have  you got?  A
billy-goat, a circus freak, nothing to do  with me.' And this, too, like her
drinking,  had  begun  to come between  them. Jumpy's  martial arts sessions
increased in vehemence as these problems loomed larger in his mind.
     Ironically,  while  Pamela refused point-blank  to face the facts about
her  estranged husband, she  had  become embroiled, through her  job  at the
community  relations committee, in an investigation  into allegations of the
spread of witchcraft among the officers at the local police station. Various
stations did from time to time gain the reputation of being 'out of control'
-  Notting  Hill,  Kentish  Town,  Islington  - but  witchcraft?  Jumpy  was
sceptical.  'The  trouble  with  you,'  Pamela  told  him  in  her  loftiest
shooting-stick voice, 'is that you still think of normality as being normal.
My God: look  at what's happening in this country. A few bent coppers taking
their clothes off and drinking urine out of helmets isn't  so weird. Call it
working-class  Freemasonry, if you  want.  I've got  black  people coming in
every day, scared out of their heads, talking about obeah, chicken entrails,
the lot.  The goddamn bastards are 

enjoying

 this: scare the coons with their
own ooga  booga and  have  a  few naughty nights into the bargain. Unlikely?
Bloody 

wake up.'

 Witchfinding,  it seemed, ran in  the family: from  Matthew
Hopkins to Pamela Lovelace. In Pamela's voice,  speaking at public meetings,
on local  radio,  even on regional  news  programmes on television, could be
heard all the zeal and authority of the old Witchfinder-General, and it  was
only  on account  of  that voice of a  twentieth-century  Gloriana  that her
campaign was not laughed instantly into extinction. 

New Broomstick Needed to
Sweep  Out Witches.

 There was talk of an  official inquiry. What drove Jumpy
wild, however, was Pamela's refusal to connect her arguments in the question
of the occult  policemen to the  matter of  her  own husband: because, after
all, the transformation of Saladin Chamcha had precisely to do with the idea
that  normality  was  no  longer composed (if  it  had  ever been) of banal,
'normal' elements. 'Nothing to do with it,' she said flatly when he tried to
make the point: imperious, he thought, as any hanging judge.
     After  Mishal Sufyan told  him about her illegal  sexual relations with
Hanif Johnson,  Jumpy on his way over to Pamela Chamcha's had  to  stifle  a
number of  bigoted  thoughts, such  as 

if his father hadn't been  white he'd
never have done it;

 Hanif, he raged, that  immature bastard who probably cut
notches in  his cock  to  keep  count  of his  conquests, this Johnson  with
aspirations to represent his people who couldn't wait until they were of age
before he started  shafting them! . . . couldn't he see that Mishal with her
omniscient body  was just a,  just a, child? -  

No she  wasn't.

 - Damn  him,
then, damn him for (and here Jumpy shocked himself) being the first.
     Jumpy en  route to  his mistress  tried  to convince  himself  that his
resentments of  Hanif, 

his friend Hanif,

 were primarily - how to put  it?  -

linguistic.

  Hanif was in  perfect control of the languages  that  mattered:
sociological,  socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic,
oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power. 

But you bastard you rummage
in  my drawers and  laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how
to bend  it  shape it, how to let  it be our  freedom, how to  repossess its
poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all
that you haven't  got a  clue.

  How hard that  struggle,  how inevitable the
defeat.  

Nobody's   going  to  elect  me  to  anything.  No  power-baset  no
constituency: just the  battle with the  words.

 But  he, Jumpy, also  had to
admit that his envy  of Hanif was as  much as anything rooted in the other's
greater  control  of  the languages  of  desire.  Mishal  Sufyan  was  quite
something,  an  elongated, tubular  beauty, but he wouldn't have known  how,
even  if he'd  thought  of, he'd  never have dared. Language is courage: the
ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
     When Pamela Chamcha answered the door he found that her  hair had  gone
snow-white overnight, and that  her  response  to this inexplicable calamity
had  been to shave  her  head  right down to the  scalp and then  conceal it
inside an absurd burgundy turban which she refused to remove.
     'It just happened,' she said. 'One  must not  rule  out the possibility
that I have been bewitched.'
     He wasn't  standing  for  that. 'Or the notion of a  reaction,  however
delayed, to the news of your husband's altered, but extant, state.'
     She  swung  to  face him, halfway  up the stairs  to  the  bedroom, and
pointed dramatically towards the open sitting-room door. 'In that case,' she
triumphed, 'why did it also happen to the dog?' He might have told her, that
night, that he wanted to end it, that his  conscience no longer permitted, -
he might have been willing  to face her rage, and to  live  with the paradox
that a  decision could be simultaneously conscientious and immoral  (because
cruel, unilateral, selfish); but when he entered the bedroom she grabbed his
face with both hands, and watching closely to  see how he took  the news she
confessed to having lied about contraceptive  precautions. She was pregnant.
It turned out she was better at making unilateral decisions than he, and had
simply taken from  him the child Saladin Chamcha had been unable to provide.
'I wanted  it,' she cried defiantly,  and at close range. 'And now I'm going
to have it.'
     Her  selfishness  had  pre-empted  his.  He  discovered  that  he  felt
relieved;  absolved of the responsibility  for making and acting  upon moral
choices, - because  how could he leave her now? - he put such notions out of
his head and allowed her, gently  but  with unmistakable intent, to push him
backwards on to the bed.
     Whether the  slowly  transmogrifying  Saladin Chamcha was  turning into
some  sort of science-fiction  or horror-video 

mutey,

  some  random mutation
shortly  to be  naturally selected out  of existence, -  or whether  he  was
evolving into an avatar of the Master of  Hell,  - or whatever was the case,
the fact  is  (and  it  will  be as well  in the present matter  to  proceed
cautiously,  stepping from established fact  to established fact, leaping to
no  conclusion until our yellowbrick lane of  things-incontrovertibly-so has
led us to within an inch or two of  our destination)  that the two daughters
of Haji Sufyan had taken him under their wing, caring for the Beast as  only
Beauties can; and that, as time passed, he came to be extremely fond of  the
pair of them himself. For  a long  while  Mishal  and Anahita  struck him as
inseparable, fist and shadow, shot and echo, the younger girl seeking always
to emulate her tall, feisty sibling, practising karate kicks  and  Wing Chun
forearm smashes  in  flattering imitation of Mishal's  uncompromising  ways.
More recently,  however, he  had noted the  growth of  a saddening hostility
between the sisters. One evening at his attic window Mishal was pointing out
some of the Street's characters, - there, a Sikh ancient shocked by a racial
attack  into complete silence; he had  not spoken, it  was said, for nigh on
seven years, before which he had been one of the city's few 'black' justices
of  the  peace  . .  . now,  however,  he  pronounced  no sentences, and was
accompanied everywhere by  a crotchety wife who  treated him with dismissive
exasperation, 

O, ignore him, he never says a dicky bird; -

 and over there, a
perfectly ordinary-looking 'accountant type' (Mishal's term) on his way home
with briefcase and  box of sweetmeats; this one  was known in  the Street to
have  developed the strange need to rearrange his sitting-room furniture for
half  an hour  each evening, placing chairs in rows  interrupted by an aisle
and  pretending  to be the  conductor of  a single-decker bus on its way  to
Bangladesh, an obsessive fantasy  in which  all his  family were obliged  to
participate, 

and  after half an hour precisely he snaps  out of it,  and the
rest  of the time he's  the dullest guy  you  could  meet; -

  and after some
moments of  this, fifteen-year-old  Anahita broke  in spitefully:  'What she
means is, you're not the only  casualty,  round here  the  freaks are two  a
penny, you only have to look.'
     Mishal  had developed the  habit of talking about  the Street  as if it
were a mythological battleground and she, on high at Chamcha's attic window,
the recording angel and the exterminator, too. From her  Chamcha learned the
fables  of  the  new  Kurus  and  Pandavas,  the  white  racists  and  black
'self-help'  or vigilante posses  starring  in this modern 

Mahabharata,

  or,
more accurately,  

Mahavilayet.

  Up  there,  under  the railway  bridge,  the
National Front used to do battle with the fearless radicals of the Socialist
Workers  Party,  'every  Sunday from  closing  time  to opening  time,'  she
sneered, 'leaving us  lot  to clear up the wreckage the rest of  the sodding
week.' - Down that alley was where the Brickhall Three were done over by the
police and then  fitted up, verballed, framed; up that side-street he'd find
the scene of the  murder of the Jamaican, Ulysses E. Lee, and in that public
house  the stain on the carpet marking where  Jatinder  Singh Mehta breathed
his last. 'Thatcherism has its effect,' she declaimed, while Chamcha, who no
longer had the will or the words to argue with her,  to speak of justice and
the rule  of  law, watched Anahita's mounting rage.  -  'No pitched  battles
these days,' Mishal elucidated.  'The emphasis is on small-scale enterprises
and the  cult of  the individual,  right? In other words, five or  six white
bastards  murdering  us, one individual at a  time.' These days  the  posses
roamed the  nocturnal  Street, ready for  aggravation. 'It's our turf,' said
Mishal  Sufyan  of that Street without a blade of  grass  in sight. 'Let 'em
come and get it if they can.'
     'Look at her,' Anahita  burst  out. 'So ladylike,  in'she? So  refined.
Imagine what Mum'd say if she knew.' - 'If she knew what, you little grass -
?' But Anahita wasn't to be cowed: 'O, yes,' she wailed.  'O, yes,  we know,
don't think we  don't.  How she goes  to  the bhangra  beat shows on  Sunday
mornings  and changes in the ladies into those tarty-farty clothes - who she
wiggles with and jiggles with at the Hot Wax daytime disco that she thinks I
never heard of before - what  went  on at that bluesdance  she crept  off to
with  Mister You-know-who Cocky-bugger - some big sister,'  she produced her
grandstand finish, 'she'll  probably  wind up  dead  of wossname 

ignorance.'

Meaning, as  Chamcha  and  Mishal  well knew,  -  those  cinema commercials,
expressionist tombstones rising from earth and sea, had left the  residue of
their slogan well implanted, no doubt of that - 

Aids.

     Mishal fell upon her sister, pulling her hair,  - Anahita, in pain, was
nevertheless able to get in another dig,  'Least  I didn't cut my  hair into
any  weirdo  pincushion, must  be  a nutter who  fancies 

that,'

 and the  two
departed,  leaving  Chamcha to  wonder  at  Anahita's  sudden  and  absolute
espousal of her mother's ethic of femininity. 

Trouble brewing,

 he concluded.
     Trouble came: soon enough.
     More and  more, when he  was alone, he felt the  slow heaviness pushing
him  down, until  he fell out of consciousness, running down like a  wind-up
toy, and  in  those passages  of  stasis that  always  ended just before the
arrival  of  visitors  his body would emit alarming noises, the  howlings of
infernal wahwah pedals, the snare-drum cracking of satanic bones. These were
the periods in which, little by little, he grew. And as he  grew, so too did
the rumours of his presence; you can't keep  a  devil locked up in the attic
and expect to keep it to yourself forever.
     How the news got out (for the people in the know remained tight-lipped,
the Sufyans  because  they  feared loss  of business,  the temporary  beings
because  their feeling of  evanescence had rendered  them  unable,  for  the
moment, to act, - and all parties because of  the fear of the arrival of the
police,  never  exactly   reluctant  to  enter  such   establishments,  bump
accidentally into a little furniture and step by chance on a  few arms  legs
necks): he began to appear to the locals in their dreams. The mullahs at the
Jamme Masjid  which  used to be the Machzikel  HaDath synagogue which had in
its turn  replaced the Huguenots' Calvinist church; - and Dr Uhuru Simba the
man-mountain in African pill-box hat and red-yellow-black poncho who had led
the successful protest against 

The Aliens Show

 and whom  Mishal Sufyan hated
more than any other black  man on account  of his  tendency to  punch uppity
women in the mouth,  herself for example, in public, at a meeting, plenty of
witnesses,  but it didn't stop the Doctor, 

he's a crazy  bastard, that  one,

she told Chamcha when she pointed him out from the attic one day, 

capable of
anything; he could've killed me, and all  because I told everybody he wasn't
no African, I  knew him  when he was  plain  Sylvester Roberts from down New
Cross way; fucking witch  doctor, if you ask me; -

  and Mishal herself,  and
Jumpy, and Hanif; - and the Bus Conductor, too, they all dreamed him, rising
up in the Street like Apocalypse and  burning the  town like  toast. And  in
every  one  of the thousand and one dreams  he, Saladin Chamcha, gigantic of
limb and  horn-turbaned  of  head, was singing, in a voice  so  diabolically
ghastly and guttural that it proved impossible to  identify the verses, even
though the dreams turned out to have the terrifying quality of being serial,
each one following on  from the one the night before, and so on, night after
night, until even  the Silent Man, that former  justice of the peace who had
not spoken  since the night in an Indian restaurant when a young drunk stuck
a knife under his  nose, threatened  to cut him, and then committed the  far
more shocking  offence of  spitting  all over  his food,  - until this  mild
gentleman  astounded his wife by sitting  upright in his sleep, ducking  his
neck forwards like a pigeon's, clapping the insides of  his wrists  together
beside his right ear, and roaring  out a song at the top of his voice, which
sounded so alien and full of static that she couldn't make out a word.
     Very quickly, because nothing takes a long time any  more, the image of
the  dream-devil started catching on,  becoming popular, it should  be said,
only  amongst what Hal Valance had described as the 

tinted persuasion.

 While
non-tint  neo-Georgians  dreamed  of  a   sulphurous  enemy  crushing  their
perfectly  restored  residences   beneath   his  smoking   heel,   nocturnal
browns-and-blacks   found  themselves   cheering,  in   their  sleep,   this
what-else-after-all-but-black-man, maybe  a little twisted up by  fate class
race  history, all that, but getting off his behind, bad and mad, to kick  a
little ass.
     At  first  these  dreams  were private  matters,  but  pretty soon they
started leaking into the waking  hours, as Asian retailers and manufacturers
of button-badges sweatshirts posters understood the power of the  dream, and
then all of a sudden he was everywhere, on the chests of  young girls and in
the windows protected against bricks by metal grilles, he was a defiance and
a warning. Sympathy for the Devil: a new  lease of life for an old tune. The
kids in the Street  started wearing rubber devil-horns  on their heads,  the
way  they used to  wear  pink-and-green balls jiggling on the ends  of stiff
wires  a few  years previously, when they preferred to imitate spacemen. The
symbol of the Goatman, his fist raised in might, began to crop up on banners
at  political demonstrations, Save  the  Six, Free the  Four, Eat  the Heinz
Fifty-Seven. 

Pleasechu meechu,

 the radios sang, 

hopeyu guessma nayym.

 Police
community relations officers pointed  to the 'growing devil-cult among young
blacks and Asians' as a 'deplorable tendency', using this 'Satanist revival'
to fight  back against the allegations of  Ms  Pamela Chamcha and the  local
CRC: 'Who  are the witches now?' 'Chamcha,' Mishal said excitedly, 'you're a
hero. I mean, people can  really identify  with  you.  It's an  image  white
society  has rejected  for so long  that we can really take  it,  you  know,
occupy  it,  inhabit  it,  reclaim  it and make  it  our own. It's time  you
considered action.'
     'Go  away,' cried  Saladin,  in  his bewilderment. 'This  isn't  what I
wanted. This is not what I meant, at all.'
     'You're growing out of the attic, anyhow,' rejoined Mishal, miffed. 'It
won't be big enough for you in not too long a while.'
     Things were certainly coming to a head.
     'Another  old  lady  get slice  las' night,' announced  Hanif  Johnson,
affecting a Trinidadian accent in the  way  he  had. 'No mo soshaal security
for she.' Anahita Sufyan, on duty behind the counter  of the Shaandaar Cafe,
banged cups and  plates. 'I  don't know  why you  do that,'  she complained.
'Sends me spare.' Hanif ignored  her, sat  down  beside Jumpy,  who muttered
absently:  'What're they saying?' - Approaching  fatherhood was weighing  on
Jumpy Joshi, but Hanif  slapped him  on the back.  'The ol' poetry not  goin
great, bra,' he commiserated. 'Look like that river of blood get coagulate.'
A look from Jumpy changed his tune. 'They sayin what they say,' he answered.
'Look out for coloureds cruisin in cars. Now if she was black,  man, it'd be
"No grounds to suspec  racial motive." I tell you,' he went on, dropping the
accent, 'sometimes the level of  aggression bubbling just  under the skin of
this town gets me really scared. It's not just the damn  Granny Ripper. It's
everywhere. You bump into a guy's newspaper in a rush-hour train and you can
get  your  face  broken. Everybody's so  goddamn  

angry,

 seems like  to  me.
Including, old  friend, you,'  he  finished, noticing. Jumpy  stood, excused
himself, and walked out without an explanation.  Hanif spread his arms, gave
Anahita his most winsome smile: 'What'd I do?'
     Anahita smiled back sweetly. 'Dju ever think, Hanif,  that maybe people
don't like you very much?'
     When  it  became  known  that  the  Granny  Ripper  had  struck  again,
suggestions that  the  solution  to  the hideous killings of old women  by a
'human fiend', - who invariably arranged his victims' internal organs neatly
around their  corpses,  one lung  by each  ear, and  the  heart, for obvious
reasons, in the mouth, - would most likely be found by investigating the new
occultism  among the city's blacks  which was giving the authorities so much
cause for concern, 

-

 began to be heard with growing frequency. The detention
and interrogation of 'tints' intensified accordingly,  as  did the incidence
of  snap  raids  on  establishments  'suspected  of  harbouring  underground
occultist cells'. What was happening, although nobody  admitted it or  even,
at  first,  understood, was that  everyone,  black brown white, had  started
thinking  of  the dream-figure  as  

real,

 as  a being who  had  crossed  the
frontier, evading the normal controls, and was now roaming loose  about  the
city. Illegal  migrant,  outlaw  king,  foul criminal or race-hero,  Saladin
Chamcha  was getting to  be  true.  Stories rushed  across the city in every
direction:  a physiotherapist sold a shaggy-dog tale to the Sundays, was not
believed, but 

no smoke without fire,

 people said; it was a precarious  state
of affairs,  and it couldn't be long before the raid  on the  Shaandaar Cafe
that  would  send  the  whole  thing  higher than  the  sky.  Priests became
involved, adding another unstable  element -  the linkage between  the  term

black

  and  the sin  

blasphemy-

  to  the mix. In his attic,  slowly, Saladin
Chamcha grew.
     He chose Lucretius  over Ovid. The inconstant soul,  the mutability  of
everything, das Ich, every last speck. A being going through life can become
so  other to himself as  to 

be another,

 discrete, severed  from  history. He
thought, at  times, of Zeeny Vakil on that other planet, Bombay,  at the far
rim  of  the  galaxy: Zeeny,  eclecticism, hybridity. The optimism  of those
ideas!  The certainty on which they rested:  of will, of choice! But,  Zeeny
mine, life just happens to you: like an accident. No: it happens to you as a
result of your condition. Not  choice,  but  -  at best  - process, and,  at
worst, shocking, total  change. Newness: he had sought a different kind, but
this was what he got.
     Bitterness, too, and  hatred, all  these coarse  things. He would enter
into his new self; he would be what  he had become:  loud, stenchy, hideous,
outsize, grotesque, inhuman,  powerful. He  had  the  sense of being able to
stretch  out a little finger and topple church spires with the force growing
in him, the anger, the anger, the anger. 

Powers.

     He  was looking  for  someone  to blame. He, too, dreamed; and  in  his
dreams,  a shape, a  face, was floating  closer, ghostly still, unclear, but
one day soon he would be able to call it by its name.
     / 

am,

 he accepted, 

that I am.

     Submission.
     His cocooned life at the Shaandaar B and B blew apart the evening Hanif
Johnson came  in shouting  that they had arrested Uhuru Simba for the Granny
Ripper murders,  and the  word was they  were  going to lay the  Black Magic
thing  on him too,  he was going to  be the voodoo-priest baron-samedi  fall
guy, and the reprisals  - beatings-up, attacks on property, the usual - were
already beginning. 'Lock your doors,' Hanif told Sufyan and Hind. 'There's a
bad night ahead.'
     Hanif  was standing slap in the centre of the  cafe,  confident  of the
effect of the news he was bringing, so  when Hind came across to him and hit
him in the face with all her strength he was so unprepared for the blow that
he actually fainted, more from surprise than pain.  He was revived by Jumpy,
who threw a  glass of  water at him the way he had been taught  to do by the
movies,  but by  then Hind was  hurling his  office equipment down  into the
street from upstairs; typewriter ribbons and red ribbons, too, the sort used
for securing  legal documents, made  festive streamers  in the air.  Anahita
Sufyan, unable any more to resist the demonic proddings of her jealousy, had
told Hind about Mishal's  relations  with the up-and-coming lawyer-politico,
and after  that  there  had  been  no holding Hind,  all the  years  of  her
humiliation had come pouring out of her, it wasn't enough that she was stuck
in  this  country full  of  jews and  strangers who lumped her  in  with the
negroes, it wasn't  enough that her husband was a weakling who performed the
Haj but couldn't be bothered with godliness in his own home, but this had to
happen to her also; she went at Mishal with a kitchen knife and her daughter
responded by unleashing  a painful  series of  kicks  and jabs, self-defence
only,  otherwise it would  have  been matricide for sure.  - Hanif  regained
consciousness and Haji Sufyan looked down on him, moving his hands in  small
helpless circles by his sides, weeping openly, unable to find consolation in
learning, because whereas for most Muslims a journey to Mecca was the  great
blessing, in his case  it had turned out to be  the beginning of a  curse; -
'Go,' he said, 'Hanif, my friend, get out,' - but Hanif wasn't going without
having his  say, 

I've kept my mouth shut for too long,

 he  cried, 

you people
who call yourself so moral while  you  make fortunes off the misery  of your
own race,

 whereupon it became clear that Haji Sufyan  had never known of the
prices being  charged  by his  wife,  who  had  not told  him, swearing  her
daughters  to  secrecy with terrible and binding  oaths, knowing that if  he
discovered he'd find a way of giving the money back so that they could go on
rotting in poverty; - and he, the twinkling familiar spirit of the Shaandaar
Cafe, after that  lost all love  of  life.  - And  now Mishal arrived in the
cafe, O the  shame of a family's inner life being enacted thus, like a cheap
drama, before the eyes of paying customers, - although in point of  fact the
last  tea-drinker was hurrying from the scene as fast as  her old legs would
carry her. Mishal was carrying bags. 'I'm leaving, too,' she announced. 'Try
and stop me. It's only eleven days.'
     When Hind saw  her elder  daughter on the verge of walking  out  of her
life forever, she understood the price one pays for harbouring the Prince of
Darkness under one's roof. She begged her husband to see reason, to  realize
that  his good-hearted generosity had  brought them into this hell, and that
if only that devil, Chamcha, could be  removed from the premises, then maybe
they could become once again the happy and industrious family of old. As she
finished speaking, however, the house above  her head began  to  rumble  and
shake, and there was the noise of something coming down the stairs, growling
and - or so it  seemed - singing,  in a voice so vilely  hoarse that  it was
impossible to understand the words.
     It was Mishal  who went up to  meet  him  in the end, Mishal with Hanif
Johnson  holding her hand, while the treacherous  Anahita watched  from  the
foot of the  stairs.  Chamcha  had grown to a height of over eight feet, and
from his nostrils there emerged smoke of two different colours,  yellow from
the  left, and from the right, black. He  was no longer wearing clothes. His
bodily hair  had grown thick and long, his  tail  was swishing angrily,  his
eyes were  a pale  but luminous red, and he had succeeded  in terrifying the
entire temporary population  of the bed and breakfast  establishment to  the
point of incoherence. Mishal, however, was not too scared to talk. 'Where do
you  think you're going?' she asked  him. 'You think you'd last five minutes
out  there,  looking  like  you do?'  Chamcha  paused, looked  himself over,
observed the  sizeable erection emerging from his loins, and shrugged. 'I am

considering action,'

 he told her, using her  own phrase,  although  in  that
voice of lava and thunder it didn't seem to  belong to her  any more. 'There
is a person I wish to find.'
     'Hold your horses,' Mishal told him. 'We'll work something out.'
     What is  to be found here, one  mile from the Shaandaar, here where the
beat meets the street,  at Club Hot Wax, formerly  the Blak-An-Tan?  On this
star-crossed and moonless night, let us follow the figures - some strutting,
decked  out,   hot-to-trot,  others  surreptitious,  shadow-hugging,  shy  

-

converging  from  all  quarters  of  the  neighbourhood to  dive,  abruptly,
underground, and through this unmarked door. What's within? Lights,  fluids,
powders, bodies  shaking  themselves,  singly, in pairs,  in  threes, moving
towards possibilities.  But what, then, are these other figures, obscure  in
the on-off rainbow brilliance of  the  

space,

 these  forms frozen  in  their
attitudes  amid the  frenzied  dancers?  What  are  these  that  hip-hop and
hindi-pop but never move an inch? -  'You lookin  good,  Hot Wax posse!' Our
host speaks: ranter, toaster, deejay nonpareil - the prancing Pinkwalla, his
suit  of  lights  blushing  to  the  beat. - Truly,  he  is  exceptional,  a
seven-foot  albino,  his  hair  the  palest  rose,  the whites  of his  eyes
likewise, his  features  unmistakably  Indian, the  haughty  nose, long thin
lips, a face from a  

Hamza-nama

 cloth. An Indian who  has never seen  India,
East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. A star.
     Still the motionless figures  dance between  the shimmying  of sisters,
the jouncing and bouncing  of youth.  What are they? -Why, waxworks, nothing
more. - Who are they? - History. See, here  is Mary Seacole, who did as much
in the  Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady,  but, being dark, could scarce
be  seen for the flame of  Florence's candle; - and, over there!, one  Abdul
Karim, aka  The  Munshi, whom Queen Victoria  sought to promote, but who was
done  down   by  colour-barring  ministers.  They're   all   here,   dancing
motionlessly in hot wax: the black clown of Septimius Severus, to the right;
to the left, George IV's barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw
Gronniosaw,  the African prince who was  sold for  six feet of cloth, dances
according to his  ancient  fashion with the slave's son Ignatius Sancho, who
became in 1782 the  first African writer to  be published in  England. - The
migrants of  the  past,  as much the living dancers'  ancestors as their own
flesh and blood, gyrate stilly while Pink walla rants  toasts raps up on the
stage,

Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-dem-make-insinuation-we-no-part-a-de-nation-an-mi-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-Occupation,

and from a different part of  the crowded room, bathed in evil green  light,
wax  villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward  Long, all the local
avatars of  Legree.  And  now a  murmur begins  in  the  belly of the  Club,
mounting, becoming  a single word, chanted over  and  over:  'Meltdown,' the
customers demand. 'Meltdown, meltdown, melt.'
     Pinkwalla      takes      his       cue       from      the      crowd,

So-it-meltdown-time-when-de-men-of-crime-gonna-get-in-line-for-some-hell-fire-fryin,

after which he turns to  the  crowd, arms  wide, feet with the beat, to ask,

Who's-it-gonna-be? Who-you-wanna-see?

  Names are shouted, compete, coalesce,
until the  assembled company is  united once more, chanting  a single  word.
Pinkwalla  claps  his  hands.  Curtains  part  behind  him,  allowing female
attendants  in  shiny pink shorts  and  singlets to  wheel  out  a  fearsome
cabinet:  man-sized, glass-fronted,  internally-illuminated - the  microwave
oven,  complete with Hot Seat, known  to Club regulars as:  Hell's  Kitchen.
'All 

right,'

 cries Pinkwalla. 'Now we really cookin.'
     Attendants  move towards the  tableau of hate-figures, pounce upon  the
night's sacrificial offering, the one most often selected, if truth be told;
at least three times a week. Her permawaved coiffure,  her  pearls, her suit
of  blue. 

Maggie-maggie-maggie,

  bays the crowd. 

Burn-burn-burn.

 The doll, -
the guy, - is strapped into the Hot Seat. Pinkwalla throws the switch. And O
how prettily she melts, from the  inside  out, crumpling into  formlessness.
Then she is a puddle, and the crowd sighs  its ecstasy: 

done.

 'The fire this
time,' Pinkwalla tells them. Music regains the night.
     When Pinkwalla the deejay saw what was climbing under cover of darkness
into the back of his  panel  van,  which his  friends  Hanif  and Mishal had
persuaded him to bring round the back of  the Shaandaar, the  fear of  obeah
filled his heart;  but there was also the contrary exhilaration of realizing
that the potent hero of his many dreams  was a flesh-and-blood actuality. He
stood across the  street,  shivering  under a  lamp-post  though  it  wasn't
particularly cold,  and stayed there for half an hour while Mishal and Hanif
spoke urgently  to him, 

he needs somewhere to go, we have to think about his
future.

 Then he shrugged, walked over to the van, and started up the engine.
Hanif sat beside him in the cab; Mishal travelled with Saladin,  hidden from
view.
     It was almost four in the morning when they  bedded Chamcha down in the
empty, locked-up nightclub. Pinkwalla - his  real name, Sewsunker, was never
used  - had  unearthed a couple of sleeping-bags  from a back room, and they
sufficed. Hanif Johnson, saying goodnight to the fearsome entity of whom his
lover  Mishal seemed  entirely unafraid, tried  to  talk  to him  seriously,
'You've  got to realize  how important you  could be for us, there's more at
stake  here than your personal needs,'  but  mutant  Saladin  only  snorted,
yellow  and black, and Hanif backed quickly away. When he was alone with the
waxworks  Chamcha was able  to fix his thoughts once  again on the face that
had  finally coalesced in his  mind's  eye, radiant, the light streaming out
around him from a point just behind his head, Mister Perfecto,  portrayer of
gods, who always  landed on his feet,  was always forgiven his  sins, loved,
praised, adored . . . the face he had been trying to identify in his dreams,
Mr Gibreel Farishta, transformed into the simulacrum of an  angel as  surely
as he was the Devil's mirror-self.
     Who should the Devil blame but the Archangel, Gibreel?
     The creature on the sleeping-bags opened its eyes; smoke began to issue
from its pores. The face on every one  of the waxwork  dummies was  the same
now,  Gibreel's  face with its widow's peak and its long thin saturnine good
looks. The creature bared its teeth and let out a long, foul breath, and the
waxworks dissolved into  puddles and  empty clothes, all of them, every one.
The creature lay back, satisfied. And fixed its mind upon its foe.
     Whereupon  it felt within  itself the most  inexplicable  sensations of
compression,  suction, withdrawal;  it  was racked  by  terrible,  squeezing
pains,  and emitted piercing  squeals that nobody,  not even Mishal who  was
staying  with  Hanif  in  Pinkwalla's  apartment above  the Club,  dared  to
investigate. The pains mounted in intensity, and  the  creature thrashed and
tossed  around the  dance-floor, wailing most piteously; until,  at  length,
granted respite, it fell asleep.
     When Mishal,  Hanif  and Pinkwalla ventured into  the club-room several
hours  later, they  observed a scene of  frightful devastation, tables  sent
flying, chairs broken in half, and, of course, every waxwork - good and evil
- Topsy and Legree -  melted like tigers  into butter; and at the centre  of
the carnage, sleeping  like  a baby, no mythological  creature  at  all,  no
iconic  Thing of  horns and  hellsbreath,  but  Mr Saladin Chamcha  himself,
apparently restored to  his  old shape,  mother-naked  but of entirely human
aspect and proportions, 

humanized  -

 is there any option but  to conclude? -
by the fearsome concentration of his hate.
     He opened his eyes; which still glowed pale and red.
     

2


     lleluia  Cone, coming down from Everest, saw a  city of ice to the west
of  Camp Six, across the  Rock Band, glittering  in  the sunlight  below the
massif of Cho Oyu. 

Shangri-La,

 she momentarily thought; however, this was no
green vale  of immortality but a metropolis  of gigantic ice-needles,  thin,
sharp and cold. Her attention  was distracted by Sherpa Pemba warning her to
maintain her concentration,  and the city had gone when she looked back. She
was  still  at  twenty-seven  thousand  feet,  but  the  apparition  of  the
impossible city threw her back  across space and time to the Bayswater study
of old dark wooden furniture and heavy  velvet curtains in which her  father
Otto Cone, the art historian and biographer of Picabia, had spoken to her in
her fourteenth and his final year of 'the most dangerous of all the  lies we
are fed in our lives', which was, in his opinion, the idea of the continuum.
'Anybody ever tries to tell you  how this most  beautiful  and most evil  of
planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that
it all 

adds up,

 you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor,' he advised
her, managing to give the impression of having visited more planets than one
before coming  to his  conclusions.  'The world  is incompatible, just never
forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints,  all alive at the same  time; in one
spot, blissful happiness, while down the  road,  the inferno. You  can't ask
for a wilder place.' Ice cities on the roof of the world wouldn't have fazed
Otto. Like  his  wife Alicja,  Allie's mother,  he  was a  Polish emigre,  a
survivor of a wartime prison camp whose name was never mentioned  throughout
Allie's childhood. 'He wanted to make it as if it had not been,' Alicja told
her daughter later.  'He was unrealistic in many ways.  But a good  man; the
best I knew.'  She smiled an  inward smile  as she spoke, tolerating  him in
memory  as she  had  not  always  managed to  during  his life, when he  was
frequently appalling. For example: he developed a hatred  of communism which
drove him to embarrassing  extremes of behaviour, notably at Christmas, when
this  Jewish man insisted on celebrating with his  Jewish family  and others
what he described as 'an English  rite', as a  mark  of respect to their new
'host nation' - and then  spoiled  it all (in his  wife's  eyes) by bursting
into the  salon where the assembled company was  relaxing in the glow of log
fire, Christmas  tree lights  and brandy,  got up in pantomime  Chinee, with
droopy moustaches and  all, crying: 'Father Christmas is dead! I have killed
him! I am The Mao: no presents for anyone! Hee! Hee! Hee!' Allie on Everest,
remembering,  winced - her mother's wince, she  realized, transferred to her
frosted face.
     The  incompatibility of life's elements: in a tent at Camp Four, 27,600
feet,  the  idea which seemed at  times to  be  her father's daemon  sounded
banal, emptied of meaning, of 

atmosphere,

 by the altitude. 'Everest silences
you,' she confessed to Gibreel Farishta in a bed above which parachute  silk
formed  a canopy  of hollow  Himalayas. 'When  you come  down, nothing seems
worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like
a  sound. Non-being. You can't  keep it up, of  course. The world rushes  in
soon  enough. What shuts you up  is,  I  think,  the  sight  you've  had  of
perfection:  why  speak  if  you  can't  manage  perfect  thoughts,  perfect
sentences? It  feels  like  a betrayal of what you've  been through. But  it
fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're
to continue.' They spent most of their  time in bed during their first weeks
together: the appetite of each for  the other seemingly inexhaustible,  they
made love  six or seven times a day. 'You  opened me up,' she told him. 'You
with the ham in your mouth. It was exactly as if you were speaking to me, as
if I  could read  your thoughts. Not as if,' she amended.  'I did read them,
right?' He nodded: it was true. 'I read your  thoughts and  the  right words
just came out of my mouth,' she marvelled. 'Just flowed out. Bingo: love. In
the beginning was the word.'
     Her  mother  took  a fatalistic view of this dramatic turn of events in
Allie's life,  the return of  a lover from beyond  the grave. 'I'll tell you
what I honestly thought  when you gave me the news,' she said over lunchtime
soup and kreplach at the White-chapel  Bloom's.  'I thought,  oh dear,  it's
grand  passion; poor  Allie  has  to go through  this  now, the  unfortunate
child.' Alicja's  strategy  was to keep her emotions strictly under control.
She was a tall, ample woman with  a  sensual mouth but, as she put it, 'I've
never  been a  noise-maker.'  She  was frank  with  Allie about  her  sexual
passivity, and revealed that Otto had been, 'Let's say, otherwise  inclined.
He had  a weakness for grand  passion, but it always made him so miserable I
could  not get  worked up about it.' She had been reassured by her knowledge
that the women with whom her little, bald, jumpy husband consorted were 'her
type',  big  and  buxom, 'except  they were  brassy, too:  they  did what he
wanted,  shouting things  out to spur him  on, pretending for all  they were
worth; it was  his  enthusiasm they  responded to,  I think, and  maybe  his
chequebook, too. He was of the old school and gave generous gifts.'
     Otto had called Alleluia his 'pearl without price', and dreamed for her
a great future, as maybe a  concert pianist or,  failing that, a Muse. 'Your
sister, frankly, is  a disappointment to me,' he said three weeks before his
death in  that  study of Great Books  and  Picabian bric-a-brac -  a stuffed
monkey  which he claimed  was a 'first  draft' of the notorious  

Portrait of
Cezanne,  Portrait of  Rembrandt,  Portrait of  Renoir,

 numerous  mechanical
contraptions including sexual  stimulators  that  delivered  small  electric
shocks, and a first edition of Jarry's 

Ubu Roi.

 'Elena has  wants where  she
should have thoughts.' He Anglicized the name - Yelyena into Ellaynah - just
as it had  been  his  idea to  reduce  'Alleluia' to  Allie  and  bowdlerize
himself, Cohen from Warsaw, into Cone. Echoes of the past distressed him; he
read  no  Polish  literature,  turning his  back on Herbert, on  Milosz,  on
'younger   fellows'  like  Baranczak,  because  for  him  the  language  was
irredeemably polluted  by history. 'I am  English now,' he would say proudly
in  his  thick  East European accent. 'Silly mid-off!  Pish-Tush!  Widow  of
Windsor!  Bugger all.' In spite of his reticences  he seemed  content enough
being a pantomime member of  the English gentry. In  retrospect,  though, it
looked  likely  that  he'd  been only  too  aware  of the  fragility  of the
performance, keeping  the heavy drapes almost permanently drawn in case  the
inconsistency of things caused him to see monsters out  there, or moonscapes
instead of the familiar Moscow Road.
     'He  was strictly  a melting-pot man,'  Alicja  said while  attacking a
large helping of  tsimmis.  'When he  changed our name I told  him, Otto, it
isn't required, this isn't America, it's London W-two; but he wanted to wipe
the slate clean, even his Jewishness, excuse me but I know. The fights  with
the   Board   of  Deputies!  All  very   civilized,  parliamentary  language
throughout,  but bareknuckle stuff  none the less.' After his death she went
straight  back  to  Cohen,  the synagogue, Chanukah  and  Bloom's.  'No more
imitation  of life,' she munched, and waved a sudden, distracted fork. 'That
picture. I was crazy  for it. Lana  Turner, am I  right? And Mahalia Jackson
singing in a church.'
     Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into  an empty lift-shaft and
died. Now there was a subject which Alicja,  who would  readily discuss most
taboo matters, refused to touch upon: why does a survivor  of the camps live
forty years and then complete the job  the  monsters  didn't get done?  Does
great evil  eventually triumph,  no  matter how strenuously it is  resisted?
Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it
hits the heart? Or, worse: can a man's death be incompatible  with his life?
Allie, whose first response on learning of her father's death had been fury,
flung such  questions as these at her mother. Who, stonefaced beneath a wide
black hat, said only: 'You have inherited his lack of restraint, my dear.'
     After  Otto's death  Alicja ditched the elegant high style of dress and
gesture  which  had  been  her  offering  on  the  altar  of  his  lust  for
integration,  her  attempt to be  his Cecil  Beaton grande dame. 'Phoo,' she
confided in Allie,  'what  a relief, my dear, to be shapeless for a change.'
She  now wore her grey  hair  in  a  straggly  bun,  put  on a succession of
identical floral-print supermarket dresses, abandoned make-up, got herself a
painful set  of  false teeth, planted  vegetables in what Otto had  insisted
should be  an  English  floral garden (neat flowerbeds around  the  central,
symbolic tree, a 'chimeran graft' of laburnum and broom) and  gave,  instead
of  dinners full  of cerebral chat, a series of  lunches - heavy stews and a
minimum  of  three outrageous puddings -  at which dissident Hungarian poets
told convoluted jokes to Gurdjieffian mystics, or (if  things  didn't  quite
work out) the guests sat on cushions on the floor, staring gloomily at their
loaded plates, and something very like total silence reigned for  what  felt
like  weeks.  Allie  eventually turned  away  from  these  Sunday  afternoon
rituals, sulking in her room until she  was  old  enough to move  out,  with
Alicja's ready assent, and from the path chosen for her by  the father whose
betrayal of  his  own act  of  survival had angered her so  much. She turned
towards action; and found she had mountains to climb.
     Alicja  Cohen,  who  had  found  Allie's  change  of  course  perfectly
comprehensible,  even  laudable,  and rooted  for her all the way, could not
(she admitted over coffee) quite see her daughter's  point in  the matter of
Gibreel Farishta, the revenant  Indian movie star.  'To hear you talk, dear,
the man's not in your league,' she  said, using a phrase she  believed to be
synonymous with 

not your type,

 and which  she would have  been  horrified to
hear  described as  a racial, or religious,  slur:  which was inevitably the
sense in which her daughter  understood it. 'That's just fine by me,'  Allie
riposted with spirit, and rose. 'The fact is, I don't even 

like

 my league.'
     Her feet  ached,  obliging  her to limp, rather  than storm,  from  the
restaurant. 'Grand  passion,' she could  hear  her  mother  behind  her back
announcing  loudly to the room at large. 'The gift of  tongues; means a girl
can babble out any blasted thing.'
     Certain aspects of her  education had been unaccountably neglected. One
Sunday  not long after her father's death she  was buying  the Sunday papers
from the  corner kiosk  when the vendor announced: 'It's  the last week this
week. Twenty-three years I've been on this corner and the Pakis have finally
driven  me out of business.' She heard the word 

p-a-c-h-y,

 and had a bizarre
vision of elephants lumbering  down  the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news
vendors. 'What's  a pachy?' she foolishly asked and  the reply was stinging:
'A brown Jew.' She went  on thinking of the proprietors  of the  local 'CTN'
(confectioner-tobacconist-newsagent)  as 

pachyderms

  for  quite  a while: as
people set apart - rendered objectionable - by the nature of their skin. She
told Gibreel  this story, too. 'Oh,' he responded,  crushingly, 'an elephant
joke.' He wasn't an easy man.
     But there he was in  her bed, this big vulgar fellow for whom she could
open as she had never opened before; he could reach right into her chest and
caress her heart. Not  for many years had she  entered the sexual arena with
such  celerity,  and never before had  so  swift a  liaison  remained wholly
untainted  by regret or self-disgust.  His extended silence (she took it for
that until she learned that his name was on the Boston's passenger list) had
been sharply painful,  suggesting a difference in his  estimation  of  their
encounter;  but  to  have  been  mistaken about  his desire, about  such  an
abandoned,  hurtling  thing, was surely impossible? The news  of  his  death
accordingly provoked a double response: on the one hand, there was a kind of
grateful, relieved joy to  be had from the knowledge that he had been racing
across the world to surprise her, that  he had given up his  entire  life in
order to construct a new  one with her; while, on the  other,  there was the
hollow grief of being deprived of him in the very moment of knowing that she
truly had been  loved. Later, she  became aware of a further, less generous,
reaction. What had he thought he was doing,  planning  to  arrive  without a
word of warning on  her doorstep,  assuming that she'd be waiting with  open
arms,  an unencumbered life, and no doubt a large enough  apartment for them
both? It was the kind of behaviour one would expect of a spoiled movie actor
who expects his desires simply to fall like ripe fruits into  his lap ... in
short, she  had  felt  invaded,  or potentially  invaded. But  then she  had
rebuked  herself, pushing  such  notions back down  into  the pit where they
belonged, because after all Gibreel had paid heavily for his presumption, if
presumption it was. A dead lover deserves the benefit of the doubt.
     Then  there he  lay at her feet,  unconscious in  the snow, taking  her
breath away  with the impossibility of  his being there  at all, leading her
momentarily to  wonder if he  might  not be another in the series  of visual
aberrations - she preferred  the neutral phrase to the more loaded 

visions -

by which  she'd  been  plagued  ever  since  her  decision  to  scorn oxygen
cylinders and conquer Chomolungma on lung power alone. The effort of raising
him, slinging his arm around her shoulders and half-carrying him to her flat
- more than half, if the truth be told  - fully persuaded her that he was no
chimera, but heavy flesh and blood. Her feet stung her all the way home, and
the pain reawakened all the  resentments she'd stifled when she thought  him
dead. What  was  she supposed to do with him  now, the  lummox, sprawled out
across her bed? God, but she'd  forgotten what a sprawler the man  was,  how
during the night  he colonized your side of the bed and denuded you entirely
of bedclothes. But  other sentiments, too, had re-emerged, and these won the
day;  for  here he was, sleeping beneath her protection, the abandoned hope:
at long last, love.
     He  slept almost round the clock for a week, waking  up only to satisfy
the  minimum requirements of hunger and hygiene, saying almost  nothing. His
sleep  was  tormented:  he thrashed about  the bed,  and  words occasionally
escaped his 

lips: Jahilia, Al-Lat,  Hind.

 In his waking moments  he appeared
to wish to resist sleep, but  it claimed  him, waves of  it rolling over him
and drowning  him while he, almost piteously, waved a  feeble  arm.  She was
unable  to guess  what  traumatic  events  might  have  given rise  to  such
behaviour,  and,  feeling a little  alarmed, telephoned  her  mother. Alicja
arrived to  inspect the  sleeping Gibreel, pursed her lips,  and pronounced:
'He's a man possessed.' She had receded more and more into a kind of  Singer
Brothers  dybbukery,  and  her  mysticism  never  failed  to  exasperate her
pragmatic, mountain-climbing daughter.  'Use maybe  a  suction pump  on  his
ear,'  Alicja recommended. 'That's the exit  these  creatures prefer.' Allie
shepherded her mother out of the door. 'Thanks a lot,'  she  said. 'I'll let
you know.'
     On the seventh day he came wide awake, eyes popping open like a doll's,
and  instantly  reached for her. The crudity  of the approach made her laugh
almost as much as its unexpectedness,  but once again there was that feeling
of  naturalness, of  Tightness; she grinned,  'Okay,  you asked for it,' and
slipped out of the baggy,  elasticated maroon pantaloons and loose jacket  -
she disliked clothes that  revealed the contours  of her body - and that was
the beginning  of the sexual marathon  that left them both sore,  happy  and
exhausted when it finally ground to a halt.
     He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and
believed him, because  of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory
possibilities  of life,  and  because,  too, of what the mountain had taught
her.  'Okay,' she said,  exhaling. 'I'll buy it. Just don't  tell my mother,
all right?' The universe  was a place of wonders, and only  habituation, the
anaesthesia  of  the everyday, dulled our  sight. She had  read, a couple of
days back, that as part of their natural processes of  combustion, the stars
in the  skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea  of  the -stars raining
diamonds  into  the void:  that sounded like a miracle,  too. If that  could
happen,  so  could  this.  Babies fell  out  of  zillionth-floor windows and
bounced. There was a scene about that in Fran9ois Truffaut's movie  

L'Argent
du Poche,  . .

 She  focused her  thoughts.  'Sometimes,' she decided to say,
'wonderful things happen to me, too.'
     She told him then  what she had never told any living  being: about the
visions on Everest, the angels and the ice-city. 'It wasn't only on Everest,
either,'  she said, and continued after a hesitation. When she  got back  to
London, she went for a walk along the Embankment to try and get him, as well
as the mountain, out of her blood. It was early in the morning and there was
the  ghost  of a mist and  the thick snow made  everything  vague.  Then the
icebergs came.
     There were ten of them, moving in stately single file upriver. The mist
was thicker around them, so it wasn't until they sailed right up to her that
she understood their shapes,  the precisely miniaturized  configurations  of
the  ten  highest  mountains  in  the world, in  ascending  order,  with her
mountain, 

the

 mountain bringing up the  rear. She was trying to work out how
the icebergs had managed to pass under the bridges across the river when the
mist thickened, and then, a few instants later,  dissolved  entirely, taking
the icebergs with it. 'But they were there,' she insisted to Gibreel. 'Nanga
Parbat, Dhaulagiri, Xixabangma Feng.' He didn't argue. 'If you say  it, then
I know it truly was so.'
     An  iceberg  is water striving to  be land;  a  mountain, especially  a
Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it
is grounded flight, the earth  mutated  - nearly - into air, and become,  in
the true  sense, exalted.  Long  before  she ever encountered the  mountain,
Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. Her apartment was full
of Himalayas.  Representations of Everest  in  cork, in  plastic,  in  tile,
stone,  acrylics, brick  jostled  for  space;  there  was even one  sculpted
entirely out of ice, a tiny  berg which she kept in  the freezer and brought
out from time to  time to show off to  friends. Why so  many? 

Because  -

  no
other possible  answer - 

they were there.

 'Look,' she said, stretching out a
hand without leaving the  bed  and picking up, from  her  bedside table, her
newest acquisition, a  simple  Everest in weathered  pine. 'A gift  from the
sherpas of Namche Bazar.' Gibreel took it, turned it in his hands. Pemba had
offered it to her  shyly when  they said goodbye, insisting it was  from all
the  sherpas as  a  group,  although it was  evident that he'd  whittled  it
himself. It was a detailed model, complete with the ice fall and the Hillary
Step that is the  last great obstacle on the  way to the top,  and the route
they had taken to  the summit was scored deeply into the wood.  When Gibreel
turned it  upside  down  he  found  a message, scratched  into  the base  in
painstaking English. To 

Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again.

     What Allie did not tell Gibreel was that the  sherpa's prohibition  had
scared her,  convincing  her  that if she ever set  her foot again  upon the
goddess-mountain,  she would  surely  die,  because  it is not permitted  to
mortals to look more than once upon the face of the divine; but the mountain
was diabolic as well  as transcendent, or,  rather,  its  diabolism and  its
transcendence were one,  so that  even the contemplation of Pemba's ban made
her feel a  pang  of need so deep that it  made her groan aloud,  as  if  in
sexual ecstasy or  despair. 'The Himalayas,' she told  Gibreel so as  not to
say  what  was really on her mind, 'are emotional peaks  as well as physical
ones:  like opera.  That's  what makes  them  so  awesome.  Nothing  but the
giddiest heights. A  hard trick to  pull  off,  though.' Allie had a  way of
switching from the concrete to the abstract, a trope so casually achieved as
to leave the  listener half-wondering if she knew the difference between the
two; or,  very often, unsure as to whether, finally, such a difference could
be said to exist.
     Allie kept to herself the knowledge that she must placate  the mountain
or die, that in spite of the flat feet which made any serious mountaineering
out of the question she was still infected by Everest, and that in her heart
of hearts  she kept hidden an impossible scheme, the fatal vision of Maurice
Wilson, never achieved to this day. That is: the solo ascent.
     What  she  did not confess: that she had seen Maurice  Wilson since her
return  to  London,  sitting among  the chimneypots, a beckoning  goblin  in
plus-fours and tam-o'-shanter hat. - Nor did Gibreel Farishta tell her about
his pursuit by  the spectre of Rekha Merchant. There were still closed doors
between them for all their physical  intimacy: each kept secret a  dangerous
ghost. - And Gibreel, on hearing of Allie's other visions, concealed a great
agitation behind  his  neutral words  - 

if  you say  it,  then I know  -

  an
agitation born of this further evidence that the world of dreams was leaking
into that  of  the  waking  hours, that  the  seals  dividing the  two  were
breaking, and  that at any moment the two firmaments could be joined, - that
is to say, the end  of all things was near. One morning  Allie, awaking from
spent and dreamless  sleep,  found him immersed in her long-unopened copy of
Blake's   

Marriage   of  Heaven  and  Hell,

  in  which  her  younger   self,
disrespectful of  books, had  made a number of marks: underlinings, ticks in
the margins, exclamations, multiple  queries. Seeing that she had awoken, he
read  out a  selection of  these  passages  with  a  wicked grin. 'From  the
Proverbs of Hell,'  he began.  

'The lust of the goat is  the bounty of God.'

She blushed furiously.  'And  what  is  more,'  he  continued, 

'The  ancient
tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand
years  is true, as I  have heard from Hell.

 Then, lower  down the page: 

This
will come to pass by  an improvement of  sensual enjoyment.

 Tell me,  who is
this?  I found her  pressed in  the pages.' He  handed  her a  dead  woman's
photograph: her sister, Elena,  buried here and forgotten. Another addict of
visions; and a casualty  of the habit. 'We don't talk  about  her much.' She
was kneeling unclothed on the bed, her  pale hair  hiding her face. 'Put her
back where you found her.'
     

I saw  no  God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my
senses  discover'd the  infinite in every  thing.

 He riffled on  through the
book,  and replaced Elena Cone  next to  the image of  the Regenerated  Man,
sitting naked and splay-legged on a hill  with  the sun shining  out of  his
rear  end. 

I have  always  found  that Angels have the  vanity  to  speak of
themselves  as the only wise.

  Allie put her  hands up and covered her face.
Gibreel tried  to cheer her  up. 'You have written in the flyleaf: "Creation
of world ace. Archbish. Usher,  4004  BC.  Estim'd  date  of apocalypse, ..,
1996." So time  for  improvement of sensual  enjoyment still  remains.'  She
shook her head: stop. He stopped. 'Tell me,' he said, putting away the book.
     Elena  at  twenty had taken  London by storm. Her  feral  six-foot body
winking through a golden  chain-mail Rabanne. She had always carried herself
with uncanny assurance, proclaiming her ownership of the earth. The city was
her medium, she could swim  in it like a  fish. She was dead  at twenty-one,
drowned in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can
one drown in one's element, Allie had  wondered  long ago. If fish can drown
in  water,  can  human  beings  suffocate  in  air?  In  those  days  Allie,
eighteen-nineteen, had  envied Elena her certainties. What  was 

her

 element?
In what periodic table of the spirit could it  be found? - Now, flat-footed,
Himalayan  veteran,  she mourned  its loss.  When you  have  earned the high
horizon it isn't easy to  go back into your  box, into a  narrow  island, an
eternity of anticlimax. But her feet  were traitors and  the mountain  would
kill.
     Mythological Elena, the  cover girl,  wrapped in  couture plastics, had
been  sure  of  her immortality.  Allie,  visiting  her  in her World's  End

crashpad,

  refused a  proffered sugar-lump, mumbled  something  about  brain
damage, feeling inadequate, as usual  in Elena's company. Her sister's face,
the eyes too wide apart, the chin too sharp, the effect overwhelming, stared
mockingly back. 'No shortage of brain cells,' Elena  said. 'You  can spare a
few.' The  spare capacity of  the brain was  Elena's  capital. She spent her
cells like money, searching for her own heights; trying, in the idiom of the
day, to fly. Death, like life, came to her coated in sugar.
     She had  tried to 'improve'  the younger Alleluia. 'Hey, you're a great
looking kid, why hide  it in those  dungarees?  I mean, God, darling, you've
got all  the  equipment  in there.' One  night she dressed  Allie up,  in an
olive-green  item composed of  frills and  absences that  barely covered her
body-stockinged  groin: 

sugaring  me  like  candy,

  was Allie's  puritanical
thought, 

my own  sister putting  me on display in the shop-window,  thanks a
lot.

 They went  to a gaming club full of ecstatic  lordlings,  and Allie had
left  fast when Elena's attention  was elsewhere.  A week later, ashamed  of
herself for  being  such  a coward, for rejecting  her  sister's attempt  at
intimacy, she sat on  a beanbag  at  World's End and confessed to Elena that
she was no longer a virgin. Whereupon  her elder sister slapped  her  in the
mouth  and called her ancient  names: tramp, slut, tart.  'Elena Cone  never
allows a man to lay a 

finger,'

 she yelled, revealing her ability to think of
herself as a third person, 'not a goddamn finger

nail

. I know what I'm worth,
darling, I know how the mystery dies the moment they put their willies in, I
should have known  you'd turn out  to be a whore. Some fucking  communist, I
suppose,' she wound down.  She had inherited her father's prejudices in such
matters. Allie, as Elena knew, had not.
     They hadn't met much after  that,  Elena  remaining until her death the
virgin queen of the city - the post-mortem confirmed her as 

virgo  intacta -

while  Allie  gave  up wearing  underwear,  took odd  jobs  on small,  angry
magazines,  and because  her  sister was untouchable  she  became  the other
thing, every sexual act a slap in her sibling's glowering, whitelipped face.
Three abortions in  two years and the belated knowledge that her days on the
contraceptive pill had put her,  as far as cancer  was concerned, in one  of
the highest-risk categories of all.
     She heard about her sister's end  from  a newsstand billboard,  MODEL'S
'ACID  BATH'  DEATH. You're  not even safe  from  puns when you die, was her
first reaction. Then she found she was unable to weep.
     'I  kept  seeing her  in magazines for  months,'  she told Gibreel. 'On
account of  the  glossies' long lead times.'  Elena's  corpse  danced across
Moroccan  deserts, clad only in diaphanous veils;  or it was  sighted in the
Sea of  Shadows on  the moon,  naked except for spaceman's helmet and half a
dozen silk  ties knotted around  breasts  and  groin.  Allie took to drawing
moustaches on the  pictures, to  the outrage of  newsagents; she  ripped her
late sister out of the journals of  her zombie-like undeath and crumpled her
up.  Haunted by Elena's periodical ghost,  Allie reflected on the dangers of
attempting to 

fly;

 what flaming falls, what macabre hells were  reserved for
such  Icarus types!  She came to think of Elena  as a soul  in  torment,  to
believe that  this  captivity in an immobile  world of girlie  calendars  in
which she wore black breasts of moulded plastic, three sizes larger than her
own; of  pseudo-erotic snarls; of advertising messages  printed  across  her
navel, was no less than Elena's personal hell. Allie began to see the scream
in her sister's eyes, the anguish of being  trapped forever in those fashion
spreads.  Elena was being tortured  by demons, consumed  in  fires, and  she
couldn't even move  . . . after a time Allie had to avoid the shops in which
her  sister could be found  staring from the racks. She lost  the ability to
open magazines, and hid all the pictures of Elena she owned. 'Goodbye, Yel,'
she  told her sister's memory, using her old nursery name. 'I've got to look
away from you.'
     'But I turned out  to  be like her, after all.'  Mountains had begun to
sing to  her;  whereupon she, too,  had  risked  brain  cells in  search  of
exaltation. Eminent physicians expert in  the  problems facing  mountaineers
had frequently proved, beyond reasonable doubt,  that human beings could not
survive  without breathing apparatus  much  above eight thousand metres. The
eyes  would haemorrhage  beyond  hope of repair, and  the brain, too,  would
start  to explode,  losing  cells  by the  billion, too many and  too  fast,
resulting  in  the  permanent damage  known as High Altitude  Deterioration,
followed in quick time by death. Blind corpses would remain preserved in the
permafrost of those  highest slopes. But Allie and Sherpa  Pemba went up and
came down to  tell the tale. Cells from  the brain's deposit boxes  replaced
the current-account  casualties.  Nor did  her  eyes blow out.  Why  had the
scientists been wrong? 'Prejudice, mostly,' Allie  said, lying curled around
Gibreel beneath parachute silk. 'They can't quantify the will, so they leave
it out of their  calculations. But it's  will that gets you up Everest, will
and anger, and it  can bend any law of nature you care to  mention, at least
in the  short  term, gravity not  excluded.  If you  don't  push  your luck,
anyway.'
     There had been some damage. She had been suffering unaccountable lapses
of memory: small, unpredictable  things. Once at  the  fishmonger's she  had
forgotten the word 

fish.

 Another morning she found herself  in  her bathroom
picking up a toothbrush  blankly, quite unable to work  out its purpose. And
one  morning, waking up  beside the  sleeping  Gibreel, she had  been on the
verge of shaking him awake to demand, 'Who the hell are you? How did you get
in my bed?'  -  when, just  in  time, the memory returned. 'I'm hoping  it's
temporary,' she told him. But kept to herself, even now,  the appearances of
Maurice Wilson's ghost  on  the rooftops surrounding  the Fields, waving his
inviting arm.
     She  was a competent  woman, formidable  in many  ways: very  much  the
professional sportswoman of  the 1980s,  a  client  of  the  giant MacMurray
public relations agency, sponsored to the gills. Nowadays she, too, appeared
in  advertisements,  promoting  her  own   range  of  outdoor  products  and
leisurewear, aimed at holidaymakers and amateurs more than  pro climbers, to
maximize what Hal Valance would have called the universe. She was the golden
girl from the roof of the world, the  survivor of 'my Teutonic  twosome', as
Otto Cone had been fond of calling his  daughters. 

Once again

, 

Yel, I follow
in your footsteps.

 To be an attractive woman in a sport dominated  by, well,
hairy men was to be saleable, and the 'icequeen' image  didn't  hurt either.
There was money  in  it, and now that she was  old enough  to compromise her
old, fiery ideals with no  more than  a shrug  and a laugh, she was ready to
make it, ready, even,  to appear on T V talk-shows  to fend off, with risque
hints, the inevitable and unchanging  questions about  life with the boys at
twenty-odd  thousand feet. Such  high-profile capers sat uneasily  alongside
the view of herself to which she still fiercely clung: the idea that she was
a  natural solitary, the most private  of women, and that the demands of her
business life were ripping her in half. She had her first fight with Gibreel
over  this, because  he said, in  his unvarnished way: 'I guess it's okay to
run  from the cameras as long  as you  know they're chasing  after  you. But
suppose they stop?  My  guess is you'd  turn  and run the other way.' Later,
when  they'd  made up, she teased him  with her growing stardom  (since  she
became the first sexually  attractive  blonde  to conquer Everest, the noise
had increased  considerably, she  received photographs of gorgeous hunks  in
the  mail,  also invitations to  high life soirees and a quantity  of insane
abuse): 'I  could  be in movies myself now that you've retired.  Who  knows?
Maybe I  will.' To which  he responded,  shocking  her by  the  force of his
words, 'Over my goddamn dead body.'
     In spite of her pragmatic willingness to enter the polluted  waters  of
the real and swim in the general  direction of the current,  she  never lost
the sense that some awful disaster  was  lurking just around  the corner - a
legacy, this, of her father's and sister's sudden deaths. This hairs-on-neck
prickliness had made her a cautious climber, a 'real percentage man', as the
lads would have it, and as  admired  friends  died on various  mountains her
caution  increased.  Away  from  mountaineering,  it gave her, at times,  an
unrelaxed  look,  a jumpiness; she  acquired  the heavily  defended air of a
fortress preparing for an inevitable  assault. This added to  her reputation
as a  frosty berg of  a woman; people  kept their distance, and, to hear her
tell it, she accepted loneliness as the price of solitude. - But  there were
more  contradictions  here,  for she  had,  after  all, only recently thrown
caution  overboard  when she chose to  make  the final  assault  on  Everest
without oxygen. 'Aside from all the other implications,'  the agency assured
her in its formal letter  of congratulations,  'this humanizes you, it shows
you've got that what-the-hell streak,  and that's a positive new dimension.'
They were working on it. In the meantime,  Allie thought, smiling at Gibreel
in tired encouragement as  he slipped down towards her lower depths, There's
now  you.  Almost a total stranger and here you've gone and moved right  in.
God, I even carried you across the threshold, near as makes  no  difference.
Can't blame you for accepting the lift.
     He wasn't housetrained. Used to servants, he left clothes, crumbs, used
tea-bags  where they fell. Worse: he 

dropped

  them,  actually  let them fall
where they would need  picking  up; perfectly, richly unconscious of what he
was doing, he went on proving  to himself  that  he,  the poor boy  from the
streets, no longer needed to tidy up after himself. It wasn't the only thing
about him that drove her crazy. She'd pour  glasses of wine; he'd  drink his
fast  and  then, when she wasn't looking,  grab hers, placating  her with an
angelic-faced,  ultra-innocent  'Plenty more, isn't it?' His  bad  behaviour
around  the  house. He liked  to fart. He  complained -actually  complained,
after  she'd literally scooped him out of the snow! - about the smallness of
the  accommodations. 'Every time I take  two steps my face  hits a wall.' He
was  rude to telephone callers, 

really

  rude,  without bothering to find out
who they  were:  automatically, the way  film stars  were in Bombay when, by
some  chance,  there wasn't  a flunkey available  to  protect them from such
intrusions. After Alicja had weathered one such volley of obscene abuse, she
said (when her daughter finally got on the end of the phone): 'Excuse me for
mentioning, darling, but your boyfriend is in my opinion a case.'
     'A case, mother?' This drew out Alicja's  grandest voice. She was still
capable of grandeur, had a gift for it, in spite of her  post-Otto  decision
to disguise herself as a  bag-lady.  'A  case,' she announced,  taking  into
consideration  the  fact that Gibreel  was  an Indian import, 'of cashew and
monkey nuts.'
     Allie didn't argue with her mother, being by no means certain  that she
could continue  to live with Gibreel, even if he had crossed the earth, even
if he had fallen from the sky. The long term  was hard  to predict; even the
medium term looked cloudy. For the moment, she concentrated on trying to get
to know this man who had just assumed, right off, that he was the great love
of her life, with a lack of  doubt that meant he was either right or off his
head. There were plenty of difficult moments. She didn't know what he  knew,
what  she  could  take  for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's
doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess  there
were certain combinations that would inevitably  arise to  defeat him, as  a
way of explaining by  analogy her own (in fact somewhat  different) sense of
impending catastrophe (which had to do  not with recurring patterns but with
the inescapability of the unforeseeable), but he fixed her with a hurt stare
that told  her he'd  never heard  of  the  writer,  let alone  

The  Defence.

Conversely, he surprised  her  by asking,  out of the  blue, 'Why  Picabia?'
Adding that  it  was  peculiar, was it not, for Otto Cohen, a veteran of the
terror  camps, to go in for  all that neo-Fascistic love of machinery, brute
power,  dehu-manization  glorified.  'Anybody  who's  spent  any  time  with
machines at  all,' he  added, 'and  baby, that's  us  all,  knows  first and
foremost there's only one  thing certain  about  them, computer or  bicycle.
They  go  wrong.' Where  did  you  find  out about, she began, and  faltered
because  she  didn't like  the patronizing  note  she  was striking,  but he
answered without vanity. The first time he'd heard about Marinetti, he said,
he'd got the wrong end of the stick and thought Futurism was something to do
with  puppets. 'Marionettes,  kathputli,  at  that  time  I  was keen to use
advanced puppetry techniques in a  picture, maybe to depict  demons or other
supernormal  beings. So I got a  book.' 

I got a book:

 Gibreel the autodidact
made it sound like an injection. To a girl from a house that revered books -
her  father  had made them  all kiss any volume  that  fell by chance to the
floor -  and  who had reacted by treating them badly, ripping  out pages she
wanted  or didn't like, scribbling and scratching at them to  show  them who
was boss, Gibreel's form of irreverence, non-abusive,  taking books for what
they offered without feeling the need to genuflect or destroy, was something
new; and, she accepted,  pleasing. She learned from him. He, however, seemed
impervious to any wisdom she might  wish to impart,  about, for example, the
correct place in  which  to dispose of  dirty socks. When  she attempted  to
suggest he 'did his share', he went into a profound, injured sulk, expecting
to be  cajoled  back  into a  good humour. Which, to her disgust,  she found
herself willing, for the moment at any rate, to do.
     The  worst thing  about him, she tentatively concluded, was his  genius
for thinking himself  slighted,  belittled,  under attack. It became  almost
impossible  to mention anything to him, no matter how reasonable,  no matter
how gently put.  'Go, go, eat  air,' he'd shout, and retire into the tent of
his wounded pride.  - And the most seductive thing about him  was the way he
knew  instinctively what she wanted, how  when he chose he could become  the
agent of her secret heart. As  a  result, their  sex was literally electric.
That first tiny spark, on  the occasion of their inaugural kiss,  wasn't any
one-off. It went on happening,  and sometimes while  they made love she  was
convinced  she  could hear the crackle of electricity  all  around them; she
felt,  at times, her  hair standing on end.  'It reminds me of the  electric
dildo in my father's study,' she told Gibreel,  and they laughed. 'Am I  the
love of your life?' she asked quickly, and he answered, just as quickly: 'Of
course.'
     She  admitted   to   him  early   on   that   the   rumours  about  her
unattainability, even frigidity, had some basis in  fact. 'After Yel died, I
took  on  that side  of her as well.' She hadn't needed, any  more, to  hurl
lovers into her sister's  face.  'Plus I really wasn't enjoying it any more.
It was  mostly revolutionary socialists at the time, making do with me while
they dreamed about the heroic women they'd seen on their three-week trips to
Cuba. Never  touched 

them,

 of course;  the  combat fatigues and  ideological
purity scared them silly. They came home humming "Guantanamera" and  rang me
up.'  She  opted out.  'I  thought,  let  the  best  minds  of my generation
soliloquize about power over  some other  poor  woman's body, I'm off.'  She
began climbing  mountains, she used to say when she began,  'because I  knew
they'd never follow me up there. But then  I thought, bullshit, I didn't  do
it for them; I did it for me.'
     For an hour every evening she would run barefoot up and down the stairs
to the street, on her  toes,  for the sake of her fallen  arches. Then she'd
collapse  into a heap of cushions, looking enraged, and he'd flap helplessly
around,  usually ending up pouring her a stiff drink: Irish whiskey, mostly.
She had begun  drinking a fair bit  as the  reality of her foot problem sank
in.  ('For Christ's sake keep  the feet quiet,' a voice from  the  PR agency
told her  surreally on the phone. 'If they  get out it's  finite,  curtains,
sayonara, go  home, goodnight.')  On their twenty-first night together, when
she had worked her way through  five doubles of  Jameson's, she said: 'Why I
really went up there.  Don't laugh: to escape from good and evil.' He didn't
laugh.  'Are  mountains  above  morality,  in  your  estimation?'  he  asked
seriously.  'This's what I learned in  the  revolution,' she went  on. 'This
thing: information got abolished  sometime in  the twentieth  century, can't
say  just when; stands to  reason, that's part of the information  that  got
abolsh,  abo

lished.

 Since then we've been  living  in a fairy-story. Got me?
Everything  happens by magic. Us  fairies  haven't  a  fucking notion what's
going on. So how do we  know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what
it 

is.

 So what I thought was, you can either break your heart trying to work
it all out, or you can go sit on a mountain,  because  that's where all  the
truth went, believe it or not, it just upped  and ran away from these cities
where even  the stuff  under our feet is  all made up, a lie, and it hid  up
there in the thin thin  air where the liars don't dare come after it in case
their brains explode. It's up there all right. I've been there. Ask me.' She
fell asleep; he carried her to the bed.
     After  the  news  of his death in the plane crash reached her, she  had
tormented herself by inventing him: by speculating, that  is  to say,  about
her lost lover. He had been the first man she'd slept with in more than five
years: no small figure in her life. She had turned away from her  sexuality,
her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed
by  it;  that it was for her, would always be, a  big subject, a  whole dark
continent to map, and she wasn't prepared to go  that way, be that explorer,
chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet. But she'd never shaken
off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what  it might
be like to  be wholly possessed  by  that archetypal, capitalized djinn, the
yearning  towards,  the  blurring   of  the  boundaries  of  the  self,  the
unbuttoning, until you were open from your adam's-apple to your crotch: just
words,  because she didn't  know the  thing. Suppose he  had come to me, she
dreamed.  I could have  learned him,  step by step, climbed  him to the very
summit. Denied  mountains  by my weak-boned feet,  I'd have  looked  for the
mountain  in him: establishing base  camp,  sussing out  routes, negotiating
ice-falls,  crevasses, overhangs. I'd  have  assaulted the peak and seen the
angels dance. O, but he's dead, and at the bottom of the sea.
     Then she found  him. - And maybe he'd  invented her, too, a little bit,
invented someone worth rushing out of  one's old life to love.  - Nothing so
remarkable in that. Happens  often  enough;  and  the two  inventors go  on,
rubbing  the  rough  edges  off  one  another,  adjusting  their inventions,
moulding imagination to actuality,  learning how to be together:  or not. It
works out or it doesn't. But  to  suppose that Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia
Cone  could  have  gone  along so familiar a path is to make the  mistake of
thinking their relationship ordinary. It wasn't;  didn't have so  much  as a
shot at ordinariness.
     It was a relationship with serious flaws.
     ('The modern city,' Otto  Cone on his hobbyhorse had lectured his bored
family  at table, 'is the  locus classicus  of incompatible realities. Lives
that  have  no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon  the
omnibus. One  universe,  on  a  zebra crossing,  is caught for  an  instant,
blinking like  a  rabbit, in the headlamps  of a motor-vehicle  in  which an
entirely alien  and contradictory continuum is to be found.  And  as long as
that's all, they pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their
hats in some hotel corridor, it's not so bad. But if they meet! It's uranium
and plutonium, each  makes the other decompose,  boom.'  -  'As  a matter of
fact,  dearest,'  Alicja said dryly,  'I  often  feel a  little incompatible
myself.')
     The flaws  in the grand passion of Alleluia Cone  and  Gibreel Farishta
were as follows: her  secret fear of  her secret  desire, that is,  love;  -
owing to which she was wont to retreat from, even hit violently out  at, the
very  person whose devotion she sought  most; - and the deeper the intimacy,
the harder  she kicked; - so that  the other, having been brought to a place
of  absolute trust,  and having lowered all his defences, received  the full
force of  the  blow, and was  devastated;  -  which, indeed, is what  befell
Gibreel  Farishta, when after  three weeks of the most  ecstatic  lovemaking
either of  them had ever known  he was  told without  ceremony that  he  had
better find himself somewhere to live, pretty sharpish,  because she, Allie,
required more elbow-room than was presently available; -
     - and his overweening possessiveness and jealousy, of which  he himself
had been wholly unaware, owing  to his never previously having  thought of a
woman  as  a  treasure that  had  to be  guarded at  all  costs against  the
piratical hordes  who would  naturally  be trying  to purloin her; - and  of
which more will be said almost instantly; -
     - and the fatal flaw, namely, Gibreel Farishta's imminent realization -
or,  if  you will, 

insane idea, -

  that he truly was nothing  less  than  an
archangel  in human form,  and not just  any archangel, but the Angel of the
Recitation, the most exalted (now that Shaitan had fallen) of them all.
     They had  spent their days in such  isolation, wrapped up in the sheets
of  their  desires,  that his wild, uncontrollable  jealousy, which, as Iago
warned, 'doth mock  the meat it feeds on', did  not instantly come to light.
It first manifested itself in  the absurd  matter  of the trio  of  cartoons
which  Allie had  hung in  a group by her  front door,  mounted in cream and
framed in old gold, all bearing  the same message, scrawled across the lower
right-hand corner  of the  cream mounts: 

To A., in  hopes, from Brunei.

 When
Gibreel noticed  these  inscriptions  he  demanded an  explanation, pointing
furiously at the cartoons with fully extended arm,  while with his free hand
he clutched a  bedsheet around him  (he was attired in  this informal manner
because he'd decided the time was ripe for him to make a full inspection  of
the premises, 

can't  spend one's whole life  on  one's  back, or even yours,

he'd said); Allie,  forgivably, laughed.  'You  look like Brutus, all murder
and dignity,' she teased him. 'The picture of an honourable man.' He shocked
her by shouting violently: 'Tell me at once who the bastard is.'
     'You can't be serious,' she said. Jack Brunei worked  as  an  animator,
was in  his late fifties and  had known her  father.  She  had never had the
faintest  interest  in  him,  but  he  had  taken to  courting  her  by  the
strangulated, wordless  method of  sending  her, from  time  to  time, these
graphic gifts.
     'Why  you  didn't  throw them in the wpb?' Gibreel howled. Allie, still
not fully understanding the  size of  his rage, continued  lightly. She  had
kept the pictures because she liked them. The first was an old 

Punch

 cartoon
in which Leonardo  da Vinci stood in his atelier, surrounded by pupils,  and
hurled the Mona  Lisa like a  frisbee across  the room.  

'Mark my words,'

 he
said in  the caption, 

'one day men shall fly to Padua in such  as these.'

 In
the second frame  there was  a page from 

Toff,

  a British boys' comic dating
from World War II. It  had been  thought necessary in a  time when  so  many
children  became evacuees  to create,  by way of explanation,  a comic-strip
version of events in the adult world. Here, therefore, was one of the weekly
encounters between the home  team - the Toff (an appalling monocled child in
Etonian bum-freezer and pin-striped trousers)  and cloth-capped, scuff-kneed
Bert -  and the dastardly foe, Hawful Hadolf and the  Nastiparts (a bunch of
thuggish fiends,  each of whom had  one extremely  nasty  part, e.g. a steel
hook instead of a  hand, feet like claws, teeth that could bite through your
arm). The British team invariably came out on top. Gibreel,  glancing at the
framed comic, was scornful. 'You bloody 

Angrez.

 You  really think like this;
this is  what the war was really like for you.' Allie decided not to mention
her  father, or  to tell Gibreel that one of the  

Toff

 artists, a virulently
anti-Nazi Berlin man named Wolf, had been arrested one day and led away  for
internment along  with  all the other  Germans in Britain, and, according to
Brunei, his colleagues hadn't lifted a finger to save  him. 'Heartlessness,'
Jack had reflected. 'Only  thing a cartoonist really needs.  What  an artist
Disney would have been  if he hadn't had a heart.  It  was his  fatal flaw.'
Brunel ran  a small animation studio named Scarecrow Productions, after  the
character in 

The Wizard of Oz.

     The third frame contained the last drawing from one of the films of the
great  Japanese animator Yoji Kuri, whose  uniquely cynical output perfectly
exemplified  Brunei's  unsentimental view of the  cartoonist's art. In  this
film, a man fell  off  a skyscraper; a  fire engine rushed to the scene  and
positioned itself beneath the falling  man. The roof slid back, permitting a
huge  steel  spike to  emerge, and,  in the still on Allie's  wall, the  man
arrived  head  first  and the  spike rammed into  his brain. 'Sick,' Gibreel
Farishta pronounced.
     These lavish gifts having failed  to get results, Brunei was obliged to
break cover and show up in person. He presented himself at Allie's apartment
one night,  unannounced and  already considerably the worse for alcohol, and
produced a bottle of dark rum from his battered briefcase. At three the next
morning he had drunk  the  rum  but showed no signs of leaving. Allie, going
ostentatiously off to  the bathroom to brush her teeth, returned to find the
animator  standing  stark  naked  in  the  centre  of  her  living-room rug,
revealing a surprisingly  shapely body  covered by an inordinate  amount  of
thick grey hair. When he saw  her he spread his arms and cried: 'Take me! Do
what you will!' She made him dress, as kindly as she  could, and put him and
his briefcase gently out of the door. He never returned.
     Allie  told  Gibreel  the story,  in  an  open,  giggling  manner  that
suggested she was entirely unprepared  for the storm it would unleash. It is
possible, however  (things had been rather strained  between them  in recent
days)  that her innocent air was a little  disingenuous, that she was almost
hoping for him  to begin  the bad behaviour, so that  what followed would be
his responsibility,  not  hers  ...  at  any rate,  Gibreel  blew  sky-high,
accusing Allie of having falsified the story's ending, suggesting  that poor
Brunei was still waiting by his telephone and that she intended  to ring him
the moment his, Farishta's, back was turned. Ravings, in short,  jealousy of
the past, the  worst  kind  of all. As this terrible  emotion took charge of
him,  he  found  himself  improvising  a  whole  series  of lovers for  her,
imagining  them to be waiting around  every  corner. She had used the Brunei
story to taunt him, he  shouted, it was a  deliberate and cruel threat. 'You
want men down on  their knees,' he screamed, every scrap of his self-control
long gone, 'Me, I do not kneel.'
     That's it,' she said. 'Out.'
     His anger redoubled. Clutching his toga around him, he stalked into the
bedroom to dress, putting on  the  only  clothes he possessed, including the
scarlet-lined  gabardine overcoat  and  grey  felt  trilby  of  Don  Enrique
Diamond; Allie  stood  in  the  doorway and watched. 'Don't think I'm coming
back,' he yelled, knowing his  rage was more than sufficient to get  him out
of the door,  waiting for her to begin to calm him down, to speak softly, to
give  him a  way of staying. But she shrugged and walked away,  and  it  was
then,  at that precise moment of his greatest wrath,  that the boundaries of
the earth broke,  he  heard a noise like  the bursting of a dam,  and as the
spirits of the world of dreams flooded through  the breach into the universe
of the quotidian, Gibreel Farishta saw God.
     For  Blake's  Isaiah, God  had simply been an immanence, an incorporeal
indignation; but Gibreel's vision of  the Supreme  Being was not abstract in
the least.  He  saw, sitting on  the  bed, a man  of about the same  age  as
himself, of medium height, fairly heavily  built, with salt-and-pepper beard
cropped close  to the line of the  jaw.  What  struck him most  was that the
apparition  was  balding, seemed to suffer from  dandruff  and wore glasses.
This was  not the Almighty  he had  expected.  'Who are you?'  he asked with
interest. (Of no interest to him now was Alleluia Cone, who  had stopped  in
her  tracks on hearing him  begin  to  talk  to himself,  and  who  was  now
observing him with an expression of genuine panic.)
     'Ooparvala,' the apparition answered. 'The Fellow Upstairs.'
     'How  do I  know you're  not  the other One,'  Gibreel  asked craftily,
'Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath?'
     A daring question, eliciting  a snappish reply.  This Deity  might look
like  a myopic  scrivener, but It  could certainly mobilize  the traditional
apparatus of divine rage. Clouds massed outside the window; wind and thunder
shook the room. Trees fell in  the Fields.  'We're losing patience with you,
Gibreel Farishta.  You've  doubted  Us just about long enough.' Gibreel hung
his head, blasted by the  wrath of God.  'We are not obliged to  explain Our
nature  to you,'  the  dressing-down  continued.  'Whether We  be multiform,
plural, representing  the union-by-hybridization of such  opposites as 

Oopar

and  

Neechay,

 or whether We be  pure,  stark, extreme,  will not be resolved
here.' The disarranged bed  on  which  his Visitor  had rested Its posterior
(which, Gibreel  now observed, was glowing faintly, like  the  rest  of  the
Person) was granted a highly disapproving glance. 'The point is, there  will
be no  more dilly-dallying. You wanted clear signs of Our existence? We sent
Revelation to fill your  dreams:  in  which  not  only Our nature, but yours
also, was clarified. But you fought against it, struggling against  the very
sleep in which We  were  awakening you. Your fear of  the truth  has finally
obliged Us  to  expose  Ourself, at  some  personal  inconvenience, in  this
woman's  residence at  an advanced hour of the night. It is  time,  now,  to
shape up. Did  We pluck you from  the skies  so that you could boff and spat
with some (no doubt remarkable) flatfoot blonde? There's work to be done.'
     'I am ready,' Gibreel said humbly. 'I was just going, anyway.'
     'Look,' Allie Cone  was  saying,  'Gibreel, goddamn it, never  mind the
fight. Listen: I love you.'
     There  were only the two of them in the apartment  now. 'I have to go,'
Gibreel said,  quietly. She hung  upon his arm. 'Truly, I don't think you're
really well.' He stood upon  his dignity. 'Having commanded my exit,  you no
longer have jurisdiction 

re

 my health.' He made his escape. Alleluia, trying
to  follow  him, was afflicted  by such piercing pains  in both  feet  that,
having no option, she fell weeping to the floor: like an actress in a masala
movie; or Rekha Merchant on the  day Gibreel walked  out on her for the last
time.  Like,  anyhow, a character in a story  of a  kind in which  she could
never have imagined she belonged.
     The meteorological  turbulence  engendered  by  God's  anger  with  his
servant had  given way to a  clear, balmy night  presided over by  a fat and
creamy moon. Only the fallen trees  remained to bear witness to the might of
the now-departed Being. Gibreel,  trilby jammed down on his head, money-belt
firmly around his waist,  hands deep in gabardine  - the right hand feeling,
in  there, the shape of  a paperback book - was giving silent thanks for his
escape. Certain now of his archangelic status, he banished from his thoughts
all remorse  for his  time of doubting, replacing it with a  new resolve: to
bring this metropolis of the ungodly, this  latter-day  'Ad or Thamoud, back
to the knowledge of  God, to shower upon it the blessings of the Recitation,
the sacred Word. He felt his old self drop from him, and dismissed it with a
shrug,  but chose to retain,  for the time being, his  human scale. This was
not  the  time to  grow  until he filled the sky from horizon  to  horizon -
though that, too, would surely come before long.
     The city's streets  coiled around him,  writhing like serpents.  London
had  grown unstable  once  again, revealing its  true, capricious, tormented
nature,  its  anguish  of  a  city that had  lost its sense  of  itself  and
wallowed, accordingly, in  the impotence  of its selfish,  angry present  of
masks and  parodies,  stifled and  twisted by the  insupportable, unrejected
burden of  its past, staring into the bleakness of its  impoverished future.
He wandered its streets through that night, and the  next day, and the  next
night, and on until the light and dark ceased to matter. He no longer seemed
to  need food  or  rest,  but only to move constantly through  that tortured
metropolis whose fabric was now utterly transformed, the  houses in the rich
quarters being built of solidified fear, the government  buildings partly of
vainglory and partly of scorn,  and the residences of the poor of  confusion
and material dreams.  When  you  looked  through  an  angel's  eyes you  saw
essences  instead of surfaces, you saw the decay of the soul blistering  and
bubbling  on the skins  of  people in the street, you saw the generosity  of
certain spirits resting on  their shoulders in the  form  of  birds.  As  he
roamed the  metamorphosed city he saw bat-winged imps sitting on the corners
of buildings made of deceits and glimpsed goblins oozing wormily through the
broken  tilework of  public urinals for men. As once  the thirteenth-century
German  monk  Richalmus  would shut  his eyes and instantly  see  clouds  of
minuscule  demons  surrounding every man and woman  on  earth, dancing  like
dust-specks in the sunlight, so  now Gibreel with open eyes and by the light
of  the moon  as well as  the sun detected  everywhere the presence  of  his
adversary, his - to give the old word back its original meaning - 

shaitan.

     Long before the Flood, he  remembered - now  that he had reassumed  the
role of archangel,  the  full  range of archangelic memory  and  wisdom  was
apparently being restored to him, little by little - a number of angels (the
names Semjaza and Azazel  came first to  mind) had been  flung out of Heaven
because they had been 

lusting after the daughters of men,

 who  in due course
gave birth to an evil  race of giants.  He began to understand the degree of
the danger  from which he had been saved when he departed from  the vicinity
of Alleluia Cone. O most false of creatures! O princess of the powers of the
air! -  When the  Prophet, on whose name be  peace, had first  received  the
wahi,  the  Revelation, had  he  not  feared  for his sanity? -  And who had
offered him the  reassuring certainty  he needed? - Why,  Khadija, his wife.
She  it was who  convinced him that  he  was not some  raving crazy but  the
Messenger  of  God.  -  Whereas what  had Alleluia done for him? 

You're  not
yourself, I  don't  think you're really well.  -

 O  bringer  of tribulation,
creatrix of  strife, of soreness of the heart!  Siren,  temptress,  fiend in
human form! That snowlike body with its pale, pale hair: how she had used it
to fog his soul, and how hard he had found it, in the weakness of his flesh,
to resist . . . enmeshed  by  her in the web of a love  so complex as  to be
beyond comprehension, he had come to the very edge of the ultimate Fall. How
beneficent, then,  the  Over-Entity had been  to him! -  He saw now that the
choice  was simple:  the  infernal love  of  the daughters  of men,  or  the
celestial adoration of God.  He had found it  possible to choose the latter;
in the nick of time.
     He drew out of the right-hand  pocket of his overcoat the book that had
been there ever since his departure from Rosa's house  a millennium ago: the
book of the city he had  come to  save, Proper London, capital  of  Vilayet,
laid  out for  his  benefit in exhaustive detail,  the whole  bang shoot. He
would redeem this city: Geographers' London, all the way from A to Z.
     On a street corner  in a  part of town once known for its population of
artists,  radicals and  men in search of prostitutes,  and now given over to
advertising  personnel  and  minor  film  producers,  the Archangel  Gibreel
chanced to see a lost soul. It was young, male, tall, and of extreme beauty,
with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair oiled down and parted
in the centre; its teeth were made of gold. The lost soul stood at  the very
edge of the  pavement,  its back  to the road,  leaning forwards at a slight
angle and  clutching, in its right  hand, something  it evidently  held very
dear. Its behaviour was striking: first it would stare fiercely at the thing
it held in its hand, and then look around, whipping  its head from right  to
left, scrutinizing  with blazing concentration the faces of  the passers-by.
Reluctant to  approach too  quickly,  Gibreel on a first pass  saw  that the
object the lost soul was clutching was a small passport-sized photograph. On
his second pass he went  right up to the stranger  and offered his help. The
other  eyed  him suspiciously, then thrust the photograph  under  his  nose.
'This man,' he  said, jabbing at the picture with  a long  index finger. 'Do
you know this man?'
     When Gibreel saw, staring out of the photograph, a young man of extreme
beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair,  oiled, with
a central  parting, he knew that his instincts had been correct,  that here,
standing on a busy street corner watching the crowd  in  case he saw himself
going by, was a Soul in  search of its mislaid body, a spectre  in desperate
need of its lost physical  casing - for it is known to archangels  that  the
soul or ka cannot exist  (once the golden cord of  light linking  it  to the
body is severed) for more  than a  night and  a  day.  'I can help  you,' he
promised, and the young soul looked at him in wild disbelief. Gibreel leaned
forward, grasped the  ka's face between his hands, and kissed it firmly upon
the mouth, for the spirit that is kissed by an  archangel regains,  at once,
its lost sense  of direction, and is set upon the true and righteous path. -
The lost soul, however, had  a most surprising reaction to being favoured by
an  archangelic kiss. 'Sod  you,' it shouted, 'I may be desperate, mate, but
I'm not that desperate,' - after which,  manifesting a solidity most unusual
in a disembodied spirit, it struck  the  Archangel of  the Lord a resounding
blow upon the nose with the very fist in which its image was clasped; - with
disorienting, and bloody, results.
     When his vision cleared,  the lost soul had gone but there, floating on
her  carpet a couple of feet off the ground, was Rekha Merchant, mocking his
discomfiture.  'Not such a  great  start,' she snorted. 'Archangel my  foot.
Gibreel janab, you're off  your head,  take it  from me. You played too many
winged types for your own good. I wouldn't trust that Deity of yours either,
if I were  you,'  she added  in a  more conspiratorial  tone, though Gibreel
suspected  that  her  intentions remained  satirical.  'He  hinted  as  much
himself, fudging the answer to your Oopar-Neechay question like he did. This
notion of  separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may
be straightforward enough in  Islam - 

O, children of Adam, let not the Devil
seduce you,  as he expelled your parents  from the garden, pulling off  from
them their clothing that he might show  them their shame -

 but go back a bit
and you  see that it's a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century BC,
asks:  "Shall there  be evil in a city and the Lord hath  not done it?" Also
Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah  two hundred  years later, remarks: "I form
the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the  Lord do
all  these things."  It  isn't until the  Book of Chronicles,  merely fourth
century  BC, that the word 

shaitan

 is used to mean a being, and not  only an
attribute of God.'  This  speech was one of  which  the  'real'  Rekha would
plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition
and never having evinced the  faintest interest in comparative  religion or,
of  all  things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever
since  he  fell from  

Bostan

 was,  Gibreel knew, not  real in any objective,
psychologically or corporeally consistent manner. - What, then,  was she? It
would be easy to  imagine her  as  a thing  of  his  own  making -  his  own
accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would  account for her ease with
the arcana. - But how had he himself come by  such knowledge? Had  he truly,
in days gone by, possessed it and then lost  it,  as his memory now informed
him? (He had  a nagging  notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix
his thoughts upon his 'dark  age', that is to say the period during which he
had unaccountably come to disbelieve in  his angelhood, he was faced  with a
thick bank  of clouds,  through which, peer and blink as he might,  he could
make out  little more than shadows.) - Or could it be  that the material now
filling his  thoughts, the echo, to give  but  a single example, of how  his
lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon  had found  the adversary 

squat like a
toad

 by  Eve's  ear in Eden, using  his wiles  'to  reach/The organs  of her
fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams',  had
in  fact been planted  in his head by  that  same ambiguous  Creature,  that
Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia's boudoir, and
awoken him from his long waking sleep? - Then  Rekha,  too,  was  perhaps an
emissary of  this  God, an external,  divine  antagonist  and not  an inner,
guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.
     His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully.  He had  never  been
able  to tolerate pain.  'Always a cry-baby,'  Rekha laughed  in  his  face,
Shaitan had understood more:
     

Lives there who loves his pain?
     Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell,
     Though thither doomed? Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt,
     And boldly venture to whatever place
     Farthest from pain, where thou mightst hope to change
     Torment with ease .

 . .
     He  couldn't  have  put it  better. A  person who found  himself in  an
inferno would do anything, rape, extortion,  murder, felo de se, whatever it
took  to get  out ... he dabbed a handkerchief  at his nose as Rekha,  still
present  on  her  flying rug,  and intuiting his ascent (descent?)  into the
realm of  metaphysical speculation, attempted to  get things back on to more
familiar  ground. 'You should  have stuck  with me,'  she opined. 'You could
have loved me,  good and proper. I knew how to  love. Not  everybody has the
capacity for  it; I  do,  I  mean did.  Not  like  that  self-centred blonde
bombshell thinking  secretly  about having a  child and not  even mentioning
same to you. Not like  your God, either; it's  not  like the old days,  when
such Persons took proper interest.'
     This needed contesting on  several grounds. 'You were married, start to
finish,'  he replied. 'Ball-bearings.  I was your side dish. Nor will I, who
waited  so  long for  Him to manifest Himself, now speak poorly  of Him post
facto,  after  the personal appearance. Finally,  what's all this baby-talk?
You'll go to any extreme, seems like.'
     'You don't know what  hell is,' she snapped back, dropping the  mask of
her imperturbability. 'But, buster, you sure will.  If you'd ever said,  I'd
have  thrown over that ball-bearings bore in two sees, but you kept mum. Now
I'll see you down there: Neechayvala's Hotel.'
     'You'd never  have left your children,' he insisted. 'Poor fellows, you
even threw them down first when you jumped.'  That set her  off. 'Don't  you
talk! To dare to talk! Mister, I'll cook your goose! I'll fry your heart and
eat it  up on toast!  - And as to your Snow  White  princess,  she is of the
opinion  that a child is a mother's property  only, because men may come and
men may go  but she goes on forever, isn't it? You're only  the seed, excuse
me,  she is the  garden. Who asks a seed  permission  to plant? What  do you
know, damn fool Bombay boy messing with the modern ideas of mames.'
     'And  you,'  he  came back strongly. 'Did you,  for example,  ask their
Daddyji's permission before you threw his kiddies off the roof?'
     She vanished  in fury and yellow smoke, with an explosion that made him
stagger and knocked the hat off his head (it lay upturned on the pavement at
his feet). She unleashed, too,  an olfactory effect of such nauseous potency
as  to  make  him gag and  retch. Emptily: for he was perfectly void of  all
foodstuffs and liquids, having partaken of no nourishment for many days. Ah,
immortality, he thought: ah, noble release from the tyranny of the  body. He
noticed  that there were two  individuals  watching  him  curiously,  one  a
violent-looking  youth in studs and leather, with  a rainbow Mohican haircut
and a streak of face-paint lightning zig-zagging down his nose,  the other a
kindly middle-aged woman  in a headscarf.  Very  well then:  seize the  day.
'Repent,' he cried passionately. 'For I am the Archangel of the Lord.'
     'Poor  bastard,'  said  the  Mohican  and threw a coin  into Farishta's
fallen  hat. He  walked  on;  the  kindly, twinkling  lady,  however, leaned
confidentially  towards  Gibreel  and  passed  him  a  leaflet.  'You'll  be
interested in this.' He quickly identified it as a racist text demanding the
'repatriation' of the  country's black citizenry. She took him, he  deduced,
for a white  angel. So  angels  were  not exempt from  such  categories,  he
wonderingly learned. 'Look at it this way,' the woman was saying, taking his
silence   for   uncertainty   -   and   revealing,  by   slipping   into  an
over-articulated, over-loud mode of delivery, that she thought him not quite
pukka,  a  Levantine  angel, maybe, Cypriot or Greek, in  need  of her  best
talking-to-the-afflicted  voice. 'If they came over and filled  up  wherever
you come from, well! You wouldn't like 

that.'

     Punched  in  the  nose,  taunted  by phantoms,  given  alms instead  of
reverence, and in divers ways shewn the depths to which  the denizens of the
city had sunk, the intransigence of the evil manifest there,  Gibreel became
more determined  than  ever to commence the doing of  good, to  initiate the
great work  of  rolling  back the frontiers of the adversary's dominion. The
atlas in his pocket was  his master-plan. He would redeem the city square by
square,  from Hockley Farm in the north-west corner  of  the charted area to
Chance  Wood in the south-east; after which, perhaps, he would celebrate the
conclusion of his  labours by  playing a  round of  golf at the  aptly named
course situated at the very edge of the map: Wildernesse.
     And  somewhere along  the way  the adversary  himself would be waiting.
Shaitan, Iblis,  or whatever name he  had adopted -and in point of fact that
name was on the tip of Gibreel's tongue - just as the face of the adversary,
horned and malevolent, was still somewhat out of focus . . . well,  it would
take shape  soon enough, and  the  name would come back, Gibreel was sure of
it, for  were not  his  powers  growing every  day, was he not the one  who,
restored to his glory,  would hurl the adversary down,  once  more, into the
Darkest  Deeps?  - That name:  what was it? Tch-something?  Tchu  Tche Tchin
Tchow. No matter. All in good time.
     But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the
cartographers, changing  shape  at  will  and  without  warning,  making  it
impossible for Gibreel  to  approach his quest  in  the systematic manner he
would have preferred. Some days he would turn a corner at the end of a grand
colonnade built of human flesh and covered in skin that bled when scratched,
and find himself in an  uncharted  wasteland, at  whose distant rim he could
see tall familiar  buildings, Wren's dome,  the high  metallic spark-plug of
the  Telecom Tower, crumbling in the wind like sandcastles. He would stumble
across bewildering and  anonymous parks and  emerge into the crowded streets
of the West End, upon which, to the consternation of the motorists, acid had
begun to  drip from the  sky, burning great  holes  in  the  surfaces of the
roads. In this  pandemonium of mirages he often heard laughter: the city was
mocking  his impotence,  awaiting  his surrender, his  recognition that what
existed here was beyond  his  powers to comprehend, let  alone to change. He
shouted curses at his still-faceless adversary, pleaded with the Deity for a
further sign, feared  that his energies might,  in  truth, never be equal to
the  task. In brief, he was becoming  the  most  wretched  and bedraggled of
archangels,  his  garments  filthy,  his  hair  lank  and greasy,  his  chin
sprouting hair in uncontrollable  tufts. It was in this sorry condition that
he arrived at the Angel Underground.
     It must  have  been early  in the morning, because  the  station  staff
drifted up as he watched, to unlock  and then roll back the metal grille  of
night. He followed them in, shuffling along, head low, hands deep in pockets
(the street atlas had  been discarded  long ago);  and raising  his  eyes at
last,  found  himself looking  into a face  on the verge  of dissolving into
tears.
     'Good morning,' he  ventured, and the young  woman in the ticket office
responded bitterly, 'What's good  about it, that's what I want to know,' and
now  her  tears  did  come,  plump,  globular and plenteous.  'There, there,
child,' he  said, and she gave him a disbelieving look.  'You're no priest,'
she opined. He  answered, a little tentatively:  'I  am the Angel, Gibreel.'
She began to laugh, as abruptly as she had wept. 'Only angels roun here hang
from the lamp-posts at Christmas. Illuminations. Only the Council swing them
by  their necks.'  He  was not to be put  off. 'I am Gibreel,'  he repeated,
fixing  her  with his eye. 'Recite.' And, to her own  emphatically expressed
astonishment, 

I cyaan believe I doin this, emptyin my heart to some tramp, I
not like this, you know,

 the ticket clerk began to speak.
     Her name was Orphia Phillips, twenty years  old, both parents alive and
dependent on her, especially now that her fool sister Hyacinth  had lost her
job as a physiotherapist  by 'gettin  up to she  nonsense'. The  young man's
name, for of course  there was a  young man, was Uriah  Moseley. The station
had recently installed two gleaming new elevators and  Orphia and Uriah were
their operators. During  rush-hours, when  both lifts were working, they had
little time for conversation; but for the rest of the day, only one lift was
used. Orphia took up her position at the ticket-collection  point just along
from the elevator-shaft,  and Uri managed  to spend a good deal of time down
there  with  her, leaning against  the  door-jamb of his gleaming  lift  and
picking  his  teeth  with  the  silver  toothpick his  great-grandfather had
liberated from  some old-time plantation boss. It was true love. 'But  I jus
get carry away,' Orphia  wailed at Gibreel. 'I always too  hasty for sense.'
One afternoon, during a lull, she had deserted her post and stepped up right
in front of him as  he leaned and picked teeth, and seeing the look  in  her
eye he  put away the pick. After that  he came to work with  a spring in his
step; she, too, was  in heaven as she descended each day  into the bowels of
the earth. Their kisses grew longer and more passionate. Sometimes she would
not detach  himself when the buzzer rang for  the lift; Uriah  would have to
push her  back, with a  cry of, 'Cool  off, girl,  the public.' Uriah had  a
vocational  attitude  to  his  work. He  spoke to her of  his  pride  in his
uniform, of his satisfaction at being in the public service, giving his life
to society. She thought he sounded a shade pompous, and wanted to say, 'Uri,
man, you jus a elevator boy here,' but intuiting that such realism would not
be  well received, she held her  troublesome tongue, or,  rather, pushed  it
into his mouth.
     Their embraces in the  tunnel became  wars.  Now  he was trying to  get
away,  straightening  his tunic, while she bit his ear  and  pushed her hand
down  inside  his  trousers.  'You  crazy,' he said,  but  she,  continuing,
inquired: 'So? You vex?'
     They were, inevitably, caught:  a complaint was lodged by a kindly lady
in  headscarf and tweeds. They had been lucky to keep their jobs. Orphia had
been  'grounded', deprived  of  elevator-shafts  and boxed  into  the ticket
booth. Worse still, her place had been taken by the station beauty, Rochelle
Watkins.  'I  know  what  goin  on,'  she  cried  angrily. 'I  see  Rochelle
expression  when  she  come  up,  fixin up her hair an  all o' dat.'  Uriah,
nowadays, avoided Orphia's eyes.
     'Can't  figure  out how  you  get  me  to  tell  you me business,'  she
concluded, uncertainly. 'You  not  no  angel. That is for sure.' But she was
unable, try as she might, to break away from his transfixing gaze. 'I know,'
he told her, 'what is in your heart.'
     He reached in through the booth's window and took her unresisting hand.
- Yes, this was it, the force of her desires filling him up, enabling him to
translate them  back to her, making action possible, allowing her to say and
do what she most  profoundly  required; this was  what  he  remembered, this
quality  of being joined  to the  one  to  whom he  appeared, so  that  what
followed was  the  product  of  their  joining. At  last,  he  thought,  the
archangelic  functions  return. - Inside  the ticket booth, the clerk Orphia
Phillips  had  her eyes  closed, her  body had  slumped down  in her  chair,
looking slow and heavy, and her lips were moving.  - And  his own, in unison
with hers. - There. It was done.
     At this moment the station  manager, a little  angry man with nine long
hairs, fetched from  ear-level,  plastered across his baldness, burst like a
cuckoo from his little door. 'What's your game?' he shouted at Gibreel. 'Get
out of it  before  I call  the  police.' Gibrcel  stayed where  he was.  The
station manager saw Orphia emerging from  her  trance and  began  to shriek.
'You,  Phillips.  Never  saw  the like.  Anything  in trousers, but this  is
ridiculous. All my born days. And nodding 

off

 on the job,  the idea.' Orphia
stood  up, put on her raincoat, picked up her folding umbrella, emerged from
ticket booth. 'Leaving  public  property unattended. You get back  in  there
this minute, or it's your job, sure as eggsis.' Orphia headed for the spiral
stairs and moved  towards the  lower depths.  Deprived of his employee,  the
manager  swung round to face Gibreel.  'Go  on,' he said. 'Eff off. Go crawl
back under your stone.'
     'I am waiting,' replied Gibreel with dignity, 'for the lift.'
     When she reached the bottom of the stairs,  Orphia Phillips  turning  a
corner saw Uriah Moseley leaning against the ticket-collection booth in that
way he  had,  and Rochelle Watkins  simpering with  delight. But Orphia knew
what to  do. 'You let 'Chelle feel  you toothpick yet, Uri?'  she  sang out.
'She'd surely love to hold it.'
     They both straightened up, stung. Uriah began blustering:  'Don't be so
common now, Orphia,'  but her eyes stopped him in  his tracks. Then he began
to walk towards her, dreamily, leaving Rochelle flat. 'Thas right, Uri,' she
said softly, never looking away  from him for an instant. 'Come  along  now.
Come to momma.' 

Now walk backwards  to the lift  and  just suck him right in
there, and after that  it's  up and  away we  go. -

 But  something was wrong
here. He wasn't  walking any more. Rochelle Watkins was standing beside him,
too damn  close, and  he'd come to a halt. 'You tell  her,  Uriah,' Rochelle
said. 'Her stupid obeah
     don't  signify down  here.' Uriah was  putting  an arm around  Rochelle
Watkins.  This wasn't the way she'd dreamed it, the  way she'd suddenly been
certain-sure it would be,  after that Gibreel took her hand, just like that,
as if they were 

intended;

 wee-yurd, she  thought; what was happening to her?
She advanced.  -  'Get her offa me, Uriah,' Rochelle shouted. 'She mashin up
me uniform  and all.' -  Now Uriah, holding  the  struggling ticket clerk by
both wrists, gave  out the news: 'I aks her to get  marry!' -  Whereupon the
fight went out of Orphia. Beaded plaits no longer  whirled and clicked.  'So
you  out of order, Orphia Phillips,' Uriah continued, puffing somewhat. 'And
like  the  lady say,  no obeah  na  change  nutten.' Orphia,  also breathing
heavily, her clothes disarranged, flopped down on the floor with her back to
the  curved  tunnel  wall. The  noise of a train pulling  in came up towards
them;  the affianced couple  hurried to their posts, tidying  themselves up,
leaving  Orphia where  she  sat.  'Girl,' Uriah Moseley  offered  by way  of
farewell, 'you  too  damn outrageous  for me.' Rochelle Watkins blew Uriah a
kiss from her ticket-collection booth; he, lounging against his lift, picked
his teeth. 'Home cooking,' Rochelle promised him. 'And no surprises.'
     'You filthy bum,' Orphia Phillips  screamed at Gibreel after walking up
the two  hundred  and  forty-seven steps of  the spiral staircase of defeat.
'You no good devil bum. Who ask you to mash up me life so?'
     

Even the  halo  has  gone out, like  a  broken bulb, and I  don't  know
where's the store.

 Gibreel on a  bench in the small  park  near the  station
meditated over  the futility  of his efforts  to date. And found blasphemies
surfacing once again: if the  dabba  had  the wrong markings and so went  to
incorrect  recipient,  was  the dabbawalla  to blame?  If special  effect  -
travelling  mat, or such  -  didn't  work,  and  you  saw the  blue  outline
shimmering at  the edge  of  the  flying  fellow, how  to blame  the  actor?
Bythe-sametoken,  if  his angeling  was  proving insufficient,  whose fault,
please, was this? His, personally, or some other  Personage? - Children were
playing in the garden of his doubting, among the midge-clouds and rosebushes
and despair.  Grandmother's footsteps, ghostbusters, tag.  Ellowen  deeowen,
London.  The fall  of angels, Gibreel reflected,  was not the same kettle as
the Tumble  of Woman and Man.  In the case of  human persons, the issue  had
been  morality.  Of the fruit of the tree of the  knowledge of good and evil
they  shouldst not  eat, and ate. Woman first,  and  at  her suggestion man,
acquired  the  verboten  ethical  standards,  tastily  apple-flavoured:  the
serpent brought them a  value system. Enabling them, among  other things, to
judge the  Deity  Itself,  making possible  in  good  time  all the  awkward
inquiries: why  evil?  Why suffering?  Why death? -  So, out  they  went. It
didn't  want  Its pretty  creatures getting above  their station. - Children
giggled in his face: 

something straaange  in the  neighbourhood.

 Armed  with
zapguns,  they made as if to bust him like some common, lowdown spook.  

Come
away  from  there,

  a woman commanded, a  tightly  groomed  woman, white,  a
redhead, with a broad stripe of freckles  across the middle of her face; her
voice was  full  of distaste. 

Did  you hear me? Now!  -

 Whereas the  angels'
crash was a  simple matter  of  power: a straightforward piece of  celestial
police  work,  punishment for rebellion, good and tough 'pour encourager les
autres'.  - Then  how unconfident of Itself  this Deity was, Who didn't want
Its finest creations to know right from  wrong;  and Who  reigned by terror,
insisting upon the unqualified submission of  even  Its  closest associates,
packing off  all dissidents  to  Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of
Hell... he checked himself. These were satanic thoughts, put into  his  head
by Iblis-Beelzebub-Shaitan. If the Entity  were  still punishing him for his
earlier lapse of  faith, this  was no way to earn remission. He  must simply
continue until,  purified, he felt his full  potency restored. Emptying  his
mind, he sat in the gathering darkness and watched the children (now at some
distance) play. 

Ip-dip-sky-blue who's-there-not-you not-because-you're-dirty
not-because-you're-clean,

 and here, he was sure,  one of the boys,  a  grave
eleven-year-old  with outsize eyes, stared straight  at  him: 

my-mother-says
you're-the-fairy-queen.

     Rekha  Merchant  materialized,  all jewels  and  finery.  'Bachchas are
making rude rhymes about you now, Angel of the Lord,'  she gibed. 'Even that
little ticket-girl back there,  she  isn't so  impressed. Still doing badly,
baba, looks like to me.'
     On this occasion, however, the spirit of the suicide Rekha Merchant had
not  come  merely  to mock.  To  his astonishment she  claimed that his many
tribulations had  been of her making:  'You imagine  there  is only your One
Thing in charge?' she cried. 'Well,  lover-boy,  let me  put you wise.'  Her
smart-alec Bombay English speared  him with a sudden nostalgia for his  lost
city, but she wasn't waiting for him to regain his composure. 'Remember that
I died for  love of you, you creepo; this gives me rights. In particular, to
be  revenged  upon you, by totally bungling up your life. A man  must suffer
for causing a lover's leap; don't you think so? That's the rule, anyway. For
so long now I've turned you  inside  out;  now I'm just fed up. Don't forget
how I was so good at forgiving! You liked it also, na? Therefore I have come
to say that compromise solution is always possible. You want to  discuss it,
or you prefer to go on being  lost in this craziness,  becoming not an angel
but a down-and-out hobo, a stupid joke?'
     Gibreel asked: 'What compromise?'
     'What else?'  she replied, her manner transformed, all gentleness, with
a shine in her eyes. 'My farishta, a so small thing.'
     If he would only say he loved her:
     If he would only say it, and,  once a week, when she came  to lie  with
him, show his love:
     If  on  a night  of  his  choice  it  could  be as  it  was during  the
ballbearings-man's absences on business:
     'Then  I will terminate  the  insanities of the city,  with which  I am
persecuting you; nor will you be possessed, any longer, by this crazy notion
of changing, 

redeeming

 the city like something left in a pawnshop; it'll all
be calm-calm; you can even live with your  paleface mame and be the greatest
film  star in the world; how could I be jealous,  Gibreel, when I'm  already
dead,  I  don't  want  you  to  say  I'm  as important  as  her, no, just  a
second-rank love  will do for me, a side-dish amour;  the foot in  the other
boot. How about it, Gibreel, just three-little-words, what do you say?'
     

Give me time.

     'It isn't even  as  if I'm  asking  for  something new,  something  you
haven't  already agreed  to, done, indulged in. Lying with a phantom is  not
such a bad-bad thing.  What  about down at that old Mrs. Diamond's - in  the
boathouse, that night? Quite  a tamasha, you don't think so?  So: who do you
think put  it on? Listen: I can take for you any form you prefer; one of the
advantages of my condition. You wish her again, that boathouse mame from the
stone   age?  Hey   presto.  You  want  the   mirror  image   of  your   own
mountain-climber  sweaty tomboy iceberg? Also,  allakazoo, allakazam. Who do
you think it was, waiting for you after the old lady died?'
     All  that  night  he  walked  the  city streets, which remained stable,
banal,  as  if  restored  to  the hegemony of  natural  laws; while  Rekha -
floating before him  on her carpet like  an artiste on  a stage, just  above
head-height  -  serenaded him  with the sweetest of love songs, accompanying
herself on an old ivory-sided harmonium,  singing everything from the gazals
of Faiz Ahmed Faiz to the  best old film music, such as the defiant air sung
by the  dancer  Anarkali in the  presence of the  Grand Mughal  Akbar in the
fifties  classic  

Mughal-e-Azam, -

 in which she  declares  and exults in her
impossible, forbidden  love for the Prince,  Salim,  -'Pyaar  kiya to  darna
kya?' -  That is  to  say, more or less, 

why be afraid of love?

 and Gibreel,
whom she  had accosted in the garden of his doubt, felt  the music attaching
strings to  his heart and  leading  him  towards her, because what she asked
was, just as she said, such a little thing, after all.
     He  reached the  river; and another bench,  cast-iron camels supporting
the wooden slats, beneath  Cleopatra's Needle. Sitting,  he closed his eyes.
Rekha sang Faiz:
     

Do not ask of me, my love,
     that love I once had for you

 . . .
     

How lovely you are still, my love,
     but I am helpless too;
     for the world has other sorrows than love,
     and other pleasures too. Do not ask of me, my love,
     that love I once had for you.

     Gibreel  saw a man behind his closed eyes: not Faiz, but  another poet,
well past his heyday, a  decrepit sort  of fellow. - Yes, that was his name:
Baal. What was he doing here? What did he have to say for himself? - Because
he was certainly trying to say something; his speech, thick and slurry, made
understanding difficult . . . 

Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions.
The first is asked when it's weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the
kind that compromises,  does deals, accommodates  itself to society, aims to
find   a  niche,  to  survive;  or  are  you  the   cussed,   bloody-minded,
ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with
the breeze? - The kind  that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of
a  hundred, be smashed  to bits; but, the  hundredth time,  will  change the
world.

     'What's the second question?' Gibreel asked aloud.
     

Answer the first one first.

     Gibreel, opening his eyes at dawn, found Rekha unable to sing, silenced
by expectations and uncertainties. He let her have it straight  off. 'It's a
trick. There  is  no  God but  God. You  are  neither  the  Entity  nor  Its
adversary, but only some caterwauling mist. No compromises; I won't do deals
with fogs.' He  saw,  then,  the emeralds and brocades fall from  her  body,
followed by  the flesh, until only  the skeleton remained, after which that,
too,  crumbled  away;  finally,  there  was a  piteous,  piercing shriek, as
whatever was left of Rekha flew with vanquished fury into the sun.
     And did not return: except at - or near - the end.
     Convinced that  he  had  passed a  test, Gibreel realized  that a great
weight had lifted from him; his spirits grew lighter by the second, until by
the time the sun was in the sky he was  literally delirious with joy. Now it
could really begin: the tyranny of his  enemies, of Rekha and Alleluia  Cone
and all the women who wished to bind him in the chains of desires and songs,
was broken for good; now he could feel light  streaming out, once more, from
the unseen  point  just  behind  his head; and  his  weight,  too, began  to
diminish. - Yes, he was losing the last traces of  his humanity, the gift of
flight was being restored to  him, as he became ethereal, woven of illumined
air. -  He  could simply step, this minute, off  this blackened parapet  and
soar away above  the  old grey river; - or leap from any of  its bridges and
never touch land again. So: it was time to show the city a  great sight, for
when it perceived the Archangel Gibreel standing in all his majesty upon the
western  horizon,  bathed in  the  rays  of the  rising sun, then surely its
people would be sore afraid and repent them of their sins.
     He began to enlarge his person.
     How  astonishing, then, that  of  all  the drivers streaming along  the
Embankment - it was,  after all,  rush-hour - not one should so much as look
in  his direction, or acknowledge him!  This was  in truth a people  who had
forgotten how to see. And because the relationship between men and angels is
an  ambiguous  one  -  in  which the  angels,  or  mala'ikah, are  both  the
controllers of nature and the intermediaries between the Deity and the human
race;  but at the same time, as the Quran clearly  states, 

we  said unto the
angels, be submissive unto Adam,

 the point being  to symbolize man's ability
to  master,  through  knowledge,  the  forces of  nature  which  the  angels
represented - there really wasn't much that the ignored and infuriated malak
Gibreel could do  about it. Archangels could  only  speak when men chose  to
listen. What a bunch! Hadn't he warned the Over-Entity at the very beginning
about  this crew of criminals and evildoers? 'Wilt  thou  place in the earth
such as make mischief in it and shed blood?' he had asked, and the Being, as
usual, replied  only that he knew better. Well, there they were, the masters
of the earth, canned like tuna on wheels and blind as bats, their heads full
of mischief and their newspapers of blood.
     It  really  was  incredible.  Here  appeared  a  celestial  being,  all
radiance,  effulgence  and  goodness,   larger  than  Big  Ben,  capable  of
straddling  the  Thames  colossus-style,  and  these  little  ants  remained
immersed  in  drive-time  radio  and quarrels with  fellow-motorists.  'I am
Gibreel,' he shouted in a voice that shook every  building on the riverbank:
nobody noticed. Not one person came running out of those quaking edifices to
escape the earthquake. Blind, deaf and asleep.
     He decided to force the issue.
     The stream of traffic flowed past him. He took a mighty  breath, lifted
one gigantic foot, and stepped out to face the cars.
     Gibreel Farishta was returned to Allie's doorstep, badly bruised,  with
many  grazes on his arms and face, and jolted into sanity, by a tiny shining
gentleman  with  an  advanced  stammer  who  introduced  himself  with  some
difficulty as  the film  producer  S.S. Sisodia, 'known as Whiwhisky because
I'm papa partial to a  titi tipple; mamadam, my caca card.' (When  they knew
each  other better, Sisodia would send Allie into convulsions of laughter by
rolling up his right trouser-leg,  exposing the knee, and pronouncing, while
he  held his enormous wraparound movie-man glasses to his shin: 'Self pawpaw
portrait.' He was longsighted to a degree: 'Don't need help to see moomovies
but real life gets too damn cloclose up.') It was Sisodia's rented limo that
hit Gibreel,  a slow-motion accident luckily,  owing  to traffic congestion;
the actor ended up on the bonnet,  mouthing the oldest  line in the  movies:

Where am  I,

  and Sisodia,  seeing  the legendary features of  the  vanished
demigod  squashed  up  against the  limousine's windshield,  was  tempted to
answer: 

Baback  where  you  bibi  belong: on the  iska iska  iscreen.

 -  'No
bobobones broken,'  Sisodia  told  Allie. 'A  mimi  miracle.  He  ista  ista
istepped right in fafa front of the wee wee wehicle.'
     

So you're back,

 Allie greeted Gibreel silently. 

Seems this is where you
always land up after you fall.

     'Also Scotch-and-Sisodia,' the film  producer  reverted to the question
of  his  sobriquets.  Tor hoohoo  humorous reasons.  My fafavourite  pup pup
poison.'
     'It is very kind of you to bring Gibreel home,' Allie belatedly got the
point. 'You must allow us to offer you a drink.'
     'Sure! Sure!' Sisodia actually clapped his hands. 'For me, for whowhole
of heehee Hindi cinema, today is a baba banner day.'
     'You  have not heard perhaps the  story of the  paranoid  schizophrenic
who,  believing  himself  to be the Emperor Napoleon  Bonaparte,  agreed  to
undergo a  lie-detector test?' Alicja Cohen,  eating gefilte fish  hungrily,
waved  one  of Bloom's forks  under  her daughter's nose. 'The question they
asked him: are  you Napoleon?  And  the answer he gave, smiling wickedly, no
doubt: No. So  they watch  the machine, which indicates with all the insight
of modern  science  that the  lunatic is lying.' Blake again, Allie thought.

Then I asked: does a firm persuasion that a thing  is  so, make it so?  He -

i.e. Isaiah  -  

replied.  All poets  believe  that  it  does. &  in  ages of
imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable
of  a firm perswasion of any thing.

  'Are you listening  to me, young woman?
I'm  serious here. That gentleman you have in your bed: he requires not your
nightly attentions -excuse  me but I'll speak plainly,  seeing I must - but,
to be frank, a padded cell.'
     'You'd do that,  wouldn't you,'  Allie hit back.  'You'd throw away the
key. Maybe you'd even plug him in. Burn the devils out of his brain: strange
how our prejudices never change.'
     'Hmm,'  Alicja  ruminated,  adopting  her  vaguest  and  most  innocent
expression in order to infuriate her daughter. 'What can it harm? Yes, maybe
a little voltage, a little dose of the juice . . .'
     'What   he   needs  is  what  he's  getting,  mother.  Proper   medical
supervision,  plenty  of rest, and something  you  maybe forgot about.'  She
dried  suddenly,  her tongue  knotted, and it  was in quite a different, low
voice, staring  at  her untouched salad,  that she  got out  the  last word.
'Love.'
     'Ah,  the  power  of love,'  Alicja  patted  her  daughter's  (at  once
withdrawn)  hand.  'No, it's not what I forgot, Alleluia. It's what you just
begun  for the  first time  in  your beautiful life to learn. And who do you
pick?'    She    returned   to    the   attack.    'An    out-to-lunch!    A
ninety-pennies-in-the-pound! A butterflies-in-the-brainbox! I mean,  

angels,

darling, I never heard the like. Men are always claiming special privileges,
but this one is a first.'
     'Mother  . .  .' Allie began, but  Alicja's mood had changed again, and
this time, when she spoke, Allie was not listening to the words, but hearing
the  pain they both  revealed and concealed, the  pain of  a  woman to  whom
history had most brutally happened, who had already lost  a husband and seen
one daughter precede her  to what she once, with unforgettable black humour,
referred  to (she must have read the sports pages, by some  chance,  to come
across the  phrase)  as an  

early bath.

 'Allie, my baby,' Alicja Cohen said,
'we're going to have to take good care of you.'
     One  reason why  Allie  was  able to  spot that  panic-anguish  in  her
mother's face  was  her  recent sighting  of  the  same  combination  on the
features  of Gibreel Farishta.  After  Sisodia  returned him to her care, it
became plain that Gibreel had  been shaken to the very marrow, and there was
a haunted look to him, a scarified  popeyed quality, that quite pierced  her
heart. He faced the fact of  his mental illness  with  courage,  refusing to
play  it down  or call it  by  a  false name, but his recognition of it had,
understandably, cowed him. No longer (for the present, anyway) the ebullient
vulgarian for whom she had conceived her 'grand passion', he became for her,
in  this  newly  vulnerable incarnation,  more  lovable than ever.  She grew
determined to lead him back to  sanity,  to stick  it  out; to wait out  the
storm, and conquer the peak.  And  he was,  for the moment, the  easiest and
most  malleable of  patients,  somewhat dopey as a result of the  heavy-duty
medication he  was being given by the specialists at the  Maudsley Hospital,
sleeping  long  hours,  and  acquiescing,  when awake, in all her  requests,
without a murmur of  protest. In alert moments he filled in for her the full
background  to his  illness: the strange serial  dreams, and before that the
near-fatal breakdown  in  India. 'I am no  longer afraid  of sleep,' he told
her. 'Because what's  happened in my waking time is now  so much worse.' His
greatest fear reminded her of Charles II's terror, after his Restoration, of
being  sent 'on  his travels' again: Td  give anything only to know it won't
happen any more,' he told her, meek as a lamb.
     

Lives  there who loves his pain?

 'It won't happen,'  she reassured him.
'You've  got the best help there  is.' He quizzed her about money, and, when
she  tried  to  deflect  the  questions,  insisted  that  she  withdraw  the
psychiatric  fees  from  the  small fortune  stashed  in his money-belt. His
spirits remained low. 'Doesn't matter what you say,'  he mumbled in response
to her  cheery optimisms. 'The craziness is in here and it drives me wild to
think  it could get  out  any minute, right now, and  

he

 would be  in charge
again.'  He  had begun  to  characterize his  'possessed', 'angel'  self  as
another person: in the Beckettian formula, 

Not I. He.

 His very own Mr. Hyde.
Allie attempted to argue  against such descriptions. 'It isn't 

he,

 it's you,
and when you're well, it won't be you any more.'
     It didn't work. For  a time, however, it looked as though the treatment
was going to. Gibreel seemed calmer, more in control; the serial dreams were
still there -  he would still speak, at  night, verses in Arabic, a language
he  did  not  know:   

tilk  al-gharaniq   al-'ula  wa  inna  shafa'ata-hunna
la-turtaja,

 for  example, which  turned  out to  mean  (Allie, woken by  his
sleeptalk,  wrote  it down phonetically  and went with her scrap of paper to
the Brickhall mosque, where her recitation made a mullah's hair stand on end
under  his  turban): 'These are exalted females whose  intercession is to be
desired' - but he seemed able to think of these nightshows as  separate from
himself, which  gave both  Allie  and the Maudsley psychiatrists the feeling
that Gibreel was slowly reconstructing  the boundary wall between dreams and
reality, and was on the road to recovery; whereas in fact, as it turned out,
this separation was related to, was the same phenomenon as, his splitting of
his sense of himself into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to
suppress, but  which he  also, by characterizing it  as other than  himself,
preserved, nourished, and secretly made strong.
     As for Allie, she lost,  for  a while, the  prickly,  

wrong

  feeling of
being stranded in  a false  milieu, an alien narrative; caring for  Gibreel,
investing in his brain, as she put it to herself, fighting to salvage him so
that they could resume the great, exciting struggle  of their love - because
they  would probably quarrel all the way to the grave, she mused tolerantly,
they'd be  two old codgers  flapping  feebly  at  one another with rolled-up
newspapers as they sat  upon the evening verandas  of their lives - she felt
more closely joined to him each  day; rooted, so to speak, in his earth.  It
was some  time  since  Maurice  Wilson  had  been  seen  sitting  among  the
chimneypots, calling her to her death.
     Mr.   'Whisky'  Sisodia,  that  gleaming   and  charm-packed  knee   in
spectacles, became a regular caller - three or  four visits a  week  -during
Gibreel's  convalescence, invariably  arriving with boxes full of goodies to
eat. Gibreel  had been literally fasting to death during his 'angel period',
and the  medical opinion was that  starvation had  contributed in  no  small
degree to his hallucinations.  'So now  we fafatten him up,' Sisodia smacked
his palms together,  and once  the invalid's stomach was up to  it, 'Whisky'
plied him with delicacies: Chinese sweet-corn and chicken soup, Bombay-style
bhel-puri  from  the  new,  chic  but  unfortunately  named  'Pagal   Khana'
restaurant  whose 'Crazy  Food' (but the  name  could  also be translated as

Madhouse)

  had  grown popular enough,  especially among  the younger  set of
British  Asians,  to  rival  even  the  long-standing  pre-eminence  of  the
Shaandaar   Cafe,  from  which  Sisodia,  not  wishing   to   show  unseemly
partisanship, also fetched eats - sweetmeats, samosas, chicken patties - for
the increasingly voracious Gibreel. He brought, too, dishes  made by his own
hand, fish curries, raitas,  sivayyan,  khir, and doled  out, along with the
edibles, name-dropping accounts of  celebrity  dinner parties: how Pavarotti
had loved  Whisky's  lassi, and O but  that poor James Mason had just adored
his spicy prawns.  Vanessa, Amitabh, Dustin, Sridevi, Christopher Reeve were
all  invoked.  'One soosoo superstar  should be aware of the tatastes of his
pipi  peers.' Sisodia was something of a legend himself, Allie learned  from
Gibreel. The most slippery  and silver-tongued  man in the  business, he had
made a  string of  'quality' pictures on  microscopic budgets, keeping going
for  over twenty years on  pure charm and  nonstop hustle. People on Sisodia
projects got paid with  the greatest difficulty, but somehow failed to mind.
He had once quelled a cast revolt -  over pay, inevitably - by whisking  the
entire unit off for  a  grand picnic  in one of the most fabulous  maharajah
palaces in  India,  a  place  that  was normally  off limits to all  but the
high-born elite, the Gwaliors and Jaipurs and Kashmirs. Nobody ever knew how
he fixed it, but most members of  that unit had since  signed up to  work on
further Sisodia ventures, the pay issue buried beneath the  grandeur of such
gestures.  'And  if  he's needed he  is  always there,' Gibreel added. 'When
Charulata, a wonderful dancer-actress  he'd  often used,  needed  the cancer
treatment, suddenly years of unpaid fees materialized overnight.'
     These days, thanks to a string of surprise box-office hits based on old
fables  drawn from the  

Katha-Sarit-Sagar

 compendium  -  the  'Ocean  of the
Streams  of   Story',  longer  than  the   Arabian  Nights  and  equally  as
fantasticated  - Sisodia was  no longer based exclusively in his tiny office
on Bombay's Readymoney  Terrace, but  had apartments in London and New York,
and Oscars in his toilets. The story was that he  carried, in his wallet,  a
photograph of the  Hong Kong-based kung-phooey  producer  Run Run  Shaw, his
supposed  hero, whose name he was quite unable to say. 'Sometimes four Runs,
sometimes a sixer,' Gibreel told Allie, who was happy to see him laugh. 'But
I can't swear. It's only a media rumour.'
     Allie was grateful  for  Sisodia's  attentiveness. The famous  producer
appeared  to have limitless  time at his disposal, whereas  Allie's schedule
had just  then grown very full. She had signed a promotional contract with a
giant  chain  of  freezer-food  centres whose  advertising  agent,  Mr.  Hal
Valance, told Allie during a power breakfast - grapefruit, dry toast, decaf,
all at  Dorchester  prices  - that her  

profile,

  'uniting  as it  does  the
positive parameters (for our  client) of "coldness" and  "cool", is right on
line. Some stars  end up being vampires,  sucking  attention  away  from the
brand name,  you understand, but this feels like real synergy.' So now there
were freezer-mart  openings  to cut  ribbons  at, and sales conferences, and
advertising shots with tubs of softscoop icecream; plus the regular meetings
with the designers and manufacturers of her autograph lines of equipment and
leisurewear; and, of course, her fitness programme. She had signed on for Mr
Joshi's  highly recommended martial arts course at the local  sports centre,
and continued, too, to force her  legs to run five  miles a  day  around the
Fields, in  spite  of  the  soles-on-broken-glass  pain.  'No  pop problem,'
Sisodia  would  send her  off with  a cheery wave.  'I  will iss  iss  issit
here-only  until you return.  To  be with  Gigibreel is for  me  a  pip  pip
privilege.' She left him regaling Farishta with his inexhaustible anecdotes,
opinions and general chitchat, and when she returned he would still be going
strong. She came to  identify several major  themes;  notably, his corpus of
statements about  The  Trouble  With  The  English.  The  trouble  with  the
Engenglish  is that their hiss hiss  history happened overseas, so they dodo
don't know  what it means.' - 'The see secret of a dinner party in London is
to  ow  ow  outnumber the  English.  If  they're outnumbered they  bebehave;
otherwise, you're in  trouble.' - 'Go  to the Che Che Chamber of Horrors and
you'll see what's rah rah  wrong with the English. That's what they rereally
like, caw corpses in bubloodbaths, mad barbers, etc. etc.  etera.  Their pay
papers  full of kinky sex  and death.  But they tell the whir world  they're
reserved, ist ist  istiff upper lip and  so on, and  we're  ist ist  istupid
enough to believe.' Gibreel  listened to  this collection of prejudices with
what  seemed like complete assent, irritating Allie  profoundly.  Were these
generalizations  really all they saw of England? 'No,' Sisodia conceded with
a shameless smile. 'But it feels googood to let this ist ist istuff out.'
     By  the  time  the  Maudsley  people felt  able  to  recommend a  major
reduction in Gibreel's dosages, Sisodia  had become so much a fixture at his
bedside,  a sort of unofficial, eccentric and  amusing layabout cousin, that
when he sprung his trap Gibreel and Allie were taken completely by surprise.
     He had been  in  touch with colleagues in  Bombay: the seven  producers
whom Gibreel had left in the lurch when he  boarded Air  India's Flight 420,

Bostan.

  'All are  eel, elated by  the  news of your  survival,' he informed
Gibreel. 'Unf  unf unfortunately, question of breach of  contract ararises.'
Various  other parties were also  interested in suing the renascent Farishta
for  plenty, in particular a  starlet named  Pimple  Billimoria, who alleged
loss of  earnings and professional damage. 'Could um amount  to  curcrores,'
Sisodia  said,  looking lugubrious. Allie was  angry. 'You stirred  up  this
hornets' nest.' she  said. 'I should  have  known: you  were  too good to be
true.'
     Sisodia became agitated. 'Damn damn damn.'
     'Ladies  present,' Gibreel,  still  a little  drug-woozy,  warned;  but
Sisodia windmilled  his arms, indicating that he  was  trying to force words
past his overexcited teeth. Finally:  'Damage limitation. My  intention. Not
betrayal,  you mumust not thithithink.' To hear Sisodia tell it, nobody back
in Bombay really wanted to sue Gibreel, to kill in court the goose that laid
the golden eggs. All parties recognized that the old projects were no longer
capable of being restarted: actors, directors,  key crew members, even sound
stages  were  otherwise  committed.  All  parties  further  recognized  that
Gibreel's return from  the dead was  an item of  a commercial  value greater
than any of the defunct  films; the question was how to  utilize it best, to
the advantage of all concerned. His  landing up in London also suggested the
possibility of an international connection, maybe overseas  funding, use  of
non-Indian locations, participation of stars 'from foreign', etc.: in short,
it was time for Gibreel to  emerge  from  retirement  and  face the  cameras
again, 'There is no chochoice,' Sisodia explained to  Gibreel, who sat up in
bed  trying to clear his head. 'If you refuse, they will move against you 

en
bloc,

 and  not  even  your  four  four  fortune  could suffice.  Bankruptcy,
jajajail, funtoosh.'
     Sisodia had talked himself into  the hot seat: all  the principals  had
agreed  to grant him executive powers in the matter, and he had put together
quite a package. The British-based  entrepreneur Billy Battuta was eager  to
invest both in sterling and in 'blocked rupees', the non-repatriable profits
made by various British film distributors in the  Indian subcontinent, which
Battuta had taken over in return for cash payments  in negotiable currencies
at a knockdown (37-point discount) rate. All the Indian producers would chip
in, and Miss  Pimple Billimoria, to guarantee her silence, was to be offered
a showcase supporting role  featuring  at least  two dance  numbers. Filming
would be spread between three  continents - Europe, India, the North African
coast. Gibreel got  above-the-title billing, and three percentage points  of
producers' net profits . . . 'Ten,' Gibreel interrupted, 'against two of the
gross.' His mind was obviously clearing. Sisodia didn't bat an  eyelid. 'Ten
against two,' he agreed. 'Pre-publicity campaign to be as fofollows . . .'
     'But what's  the  project?' Allie  Cone demanded. Mr.  'Whisky' Sisodia
beamed  from  ear  to  ear.  'Dear mamadam,'  he said.  'He  will  play  the
archangel, Gibreel.'
     The  proposal  was  for  a  series  of  films,   both   historical  and
contemporary, each  concentrating on one  incident from the angel's long and
illustrious  career: a  trilogy, at  least.  'Don't  tell  me.' Allie  said,
mocking the  small shining  mogul. 

'Gibreel in  Jahilia,  Gibreel Meets  the
Imam, Gibreel with the Butterfly Girl.'

 Sisodia wasn't one bit  embarrassed,
but nodded proudly. 'Stostorylines, draft scenarios,  cacasting options  are
already well  in haha hand.' That was too much for Allie.  'It  stinks,' she
raged  at  him, and he retreated from her, a  trembling and  placatory knee,
while  she  pursued him,  until she was  actually  chasing  him  around  the
apartment,  banging into  the furniture,  slamming  doors. 'It  exploits his
sickness,  has nothing to  do  with  his present needs, and  shows an  utter
contempt for his own wishes. He's retired; can't you people respect that? He
doesn't want to be a star. And will you please stand still. I'm not going to
eat you.'
     He stopped running, but kept a cautious  sofa between them. 'Please see
that this is  imp  imp imp,' he cried, his stammer crippling  his  tongue on
account of his anxiety. 'Can the moomoon retire? Also, excuse, there are his
seven sig  sig  sig. 

Signatures.

 Committing him absolutely. Unless and until
you decide to commit him to a papapa.' He gave up, sweating freely.
     

'A what?

     Tagal Khana.  Asylum.  That  would be another wwwway.'  Allie  lifted a
heavy brass inkwell in the shape  of Mount Everest  and prepared to hurl it.
'You really are a skunk,' she  began, but then Gibreel was standing  in  the
doorway, still rather pale, bony  and hollow-eyed. 'Alleluia,

1

 he
said, 'I am thinking  that maybe I want  this.  Maybe  1 need to  go back to
work.'
     'Gibreel  sahib! I can't tell  you how delighted.  A star  is  reborn.'
Billy  Battuta  was  a  surprise:  no  longer  the hair-gel-and-finger-rings
society column shark,  he was unshowily dressed in brass-buttoned blazer and
blue jeans, and instead of the cocksure swagger Allie had expected there was
an  attractive, almost deferential  reticence. He  had  grown a neat  goatee
beard which gave him a striking resemblance to the Christ-image on the Turin
Shroud. Welcoming the three of them (Sisodia had picked them up in his limo,
and  the  driver, Nigel, a sharp  dresser from St  Lucia, spent the  journey
telling Gibreel how many other pedestrians his  lightning reflexes had saved
from serious injury or death, punctuating these reminiscences with car-phone
conversations in which mysterious deals involving amazing sums of money were
discussed),  Billy had shaken Allie's  hand  warmly,  and  then fallen  upon
Gibreel and hugged him in pure, infectious joy. His companion Mimi Mamoulian
was rather less  low-key. 'It's all fixed,' she announced. 'Fruit, starlets,
paparazzi, talk-shows, rumours, little hints  of scandal: everything a world
figure  requires. Flowers,  personal security, zillion-pound contracts. Make
yourselves at home.'
     That was the general idea, Allie thought. Her initial opposition to the
whole scheme had  been overcome by Gibreel's own  interest, which,  in turn,
prompted his doctors to go along with it, estimating that his restoration to
his familiar milieu 

- going home,

 in a way - might indeed be beneficial. And
Sisodia's purloining of the dream-narratives he'd heard at Gibreel's bedside
could be seen as serendipitous: for  once those stories were clearly  placed
in the artificial, fabricated world of the cinema, it ought to become easier
for Gibreel to see them as  fantasies,  too. That Berlin  Wall  between  the
dreaming  and waking state might well be more  rapidly rebuilt as  a result.
The bottom line was that it was worth the try.
     Things (being things) didn't  work out  quite as  planned. Allie  found
herself resenting the extent to which Sisodia, Battuta and  Mimi moved in on
Gibreel's life, taking over his wardrobe and daily schedules, and moving him
out of Allie's apartment, declaring that the time for  a 'permanent liaison'
was not yet  ripe,  'imagewise'. After the stint at the Ritz, the movie star
was given three rooms in  Sisodia's cavernous,  designer-chic flat in an old
mansion block near  Grosvenor  Square,  all  Art  Deco  marbled  floors  and
scumbling on the walls.  Gibreel's own passive  acceptance of  these changes
was, for  Allie,  the  most  infuriating aspect of  all,  and she  began  to
comprehend  the size  of the  step  he'd taken when  he left behind what was
clearly  second nature  to  him, and came  hunting for her. Now that he  was
sinking back into that universe of armed bodyguards and maids with breakfast
trays and giggles, would he dump  her as dramatically as he  had entered her
life? Had she  helped to engineer a reverse  migration  that would leave her
high and dry? Gibreel stared out of newspapers, magazines, television  sets,
with many different  women on his arm, grinning foolishly. She hated it, but
he refused to  notice. 'What  are you  worrying?' he  dismissed  her,  while
sinking into  a leather sofa the  size of a small pick-up truck. 'It's  only
hoto opportunities: business, that's all.'
     Worst of all: 

he

  got jealous.  As he came off the  heavy drugs, and as
his work (as well as hers) began to force separations upon them, he began to
be possessed,  once again, by that irrational, out-of-control suspiciousness
which  had  precipitated  the ridiculous quarrel  over the  Brunei cartoons.
Whenever  they met  he would put  her  through the  mill,  interrogating her
minutely: where had she been, who had she seen, what did he do, did she lead
him on? She  felt as if she  were  suffocating. His  mental illness, the new
influences in  his life, and now this nightly third-degree treatment: it was
as  though her  real life,  the one she  wanted, the one  she was hanging in
there  and fighting  for,  was being  buried deeper  and  deeper  under this
avalanche of  wrong-nesses. 

What about what I need,

 she felt like screaming,

when do I get to set the terms?

 Driven to the very edge of her self-control,
she asked,  as a last resort, her mother's advice. In her father's old study
in the Moscow Road house - which Alicja had kept just the way Otto liked it,
except that  now the curtains  were  drawn back to let in what light England
could come up with, and there were flower-vases at strategic points - Alicja
at first  offered little more than world-weariness. 'So a woman's life-plans
are being smothered by a man's,' she said, not unkindly. 'So welcome to your
gender. I  see  it's  strange  for  you to  be out  of control.'  And  Allie
confessed: she wanted to leave him, but found she couldn't. Not just because
of guilt about abandoning a seriously unwell person; also  because of 'grand
passion', because of the  word that still dried her tongue when she tried to
say it. 'You  want his child,' Alicja put  her finger on it. At  first Allie
blazed: 'I  want my child,' but then, subsiding  abruptly, blowing her nose,
she nodded dumbly, and was on the verge of tears.
     'You want your head examining is what,'  Alicja comforted her. How long
since they had been like this in one another's arms? Too long. And maybe  it
would be the last time  . . . Alicja hugged her daughter, said: 'So dry your
eyes. Comes  now the good news. Your  affairs might be  shot to ribbons, but
your old mother is in better shape.'
     There was  an  American college  professor, a  certain Boniek,  big  in
genetic engineering.  'Now don't start, dear, you don't know anything,  it's
not all Frankenstein and geeps, it has many beneficial applications,' Alicja
said with  evident nervousness,  and  Allie, overcoming her surprise and her
own  red-rimmed  un-happiness,  burst  into  convulsive, liberating sobs  of
laughter; in which her mother joined. 'At your age,' Allie  wept, 'you ought
to be  ashamed.'  - 'Well, I'm  not,' the  future  Mrs. Boniek rejoined.  'A
professor,  and  in  Stanford, California, so he brings the sunshine also. I
intend to spend many hours working on my tan.'
     When she discovered  (a  report found by chance in a desk drawer at the
Sisodia palazzo) that Gibreel had started having her followed, Allie did, at
last, make the break. She scribbled a note - 

This is killing me -

 slipped it
inside the report, which she placed on the  desktop; and left without saying
goodbye.  Gibreel  never rang  her up. He was rehearsing, in those days, for
his grand public reappearance  at the latest in a successful series of stage
song-and-dance shows featuring Indian movie stars and staged by one of Billy
Battuta's companies at  Earls  Court. He was to be the unannounced, surprise
top-of-the-bill  show-stopper, and  had been rehearsing dance  routines with
the show's chorus line for weeks: also reacquainting himself with the art of
mouthing  to playback music. Rumours of the identity of  the Mystery Man  or
Dark Star were  being carefully circulated and monitored  by Battuta's promo
men, and the Valance advertising agency had been hired to devise a series of
'teaser' radio commercials and a  local 48-sheet  poster campaign. Gibreel's
arrival on  the Earls Court  stage  -  he was to  be lowered from  the flies
surrounded by clouds of cardboard and smoke - was the intended climax to the
English  segment of his  re-entry into  his superstardom; next stop, Bombay.
Deserted,  as  he called it, by  Alleluia Cone,  he  once more  'refused  to
crawl'; and immersed himself in work.
     The next  thing  that went wrong was  that  Billy Battuta  got  himself
arrested in  New York for his Satanic  sting. Allie, reading about it in the
Sunday papers, swallowed her pride and called Gibreel at the rehearsal rooms
to  warn him  against  consorting  with  such  patently  criminal  elements.
'Battuta's  a hood,'  she  insisted. 'His whole manner was a  performance, a
fake. He wanted to be sure he'd be a hit with the Manhattan dowagers,  so he
made  us  his tryout audience. That goatee! And a college blazer, for  God's
sake: how did we  fall for it?'  But Gibreel was cold and withdrawn; she had
ditched him, in his book, and he wasn't about to take advice from deserters.
Besides, Sisodia  and the  Battuta promo team  had assured him  - and he had
grilled them about it all right - that Billy's problems had no relevance  to
the  gala  night  (Filmmela,  that  was  the  name)  because  the  financial
arrangements remained solid, the monies for fees  and guarantees had already
been  allocated,  all  the  Bombay-based  stars  had  confirmed,  and  would
participate  as  planned.  'Plans  fifilling  up  fast,'  Sisodia  promised.
'Shoshow must go on.'
     The next thing that went wrong was inside Gibreel.
     Sisodia's  determination to keep people  guessing about this Dark  Star
meant that Gibreel had to enter the Earls  Court  stage-door  dressed  in  a
burqa. So  that  even his  sex remained a  mystery. He was given the largest
dressing-room - a black five-pointed star had  been stuck on the  door - and
was unceremoniously locked in by the bespectacled  genuform producer. In the
dressing-room he found his angel-costume, including a contraption that, when
tied  around his  forehead,  would  cause  lightbulbs  to  glow behind  him,
creating the  illusion  of a halo; and a closed-circuit television, on which
he would be  able  to watch  the show  -  Mithun and Kimi cavorting  for the
'disco diwane' set; Jayapradha and Rekha  (no relation: the  megastar, not a
figment  on a rug) submitting regally to on-stage interviews,  in which Jaya
divulged her views  on polygamy  while  Rekha  fantasized  about alternative
lives - 'If  I'd  been born out of India, I'd have been a painter in Paris';
he-man stunts  from Vinod  and Dharmendra;  Sridevi  getting  her sari wet -
until it  was time  for him  to  take  up his position  on a  winch-operated
'chariot' high above  the stage. There  was  a  cordless telephone, on which
Sisodia called to tell him that the  house was full -  'All sorts are here,'
he  triumphed, and  proceeded  to  offer  Gibreel  his  technique  of  crowd
analysis:  you could  tell the  Pakistanis because  they  dressed up  to the
gills, the Indians because they  dressed down, and the  Bangladeshis because
they dressed badly, 'all that pupurple and pink and gogo gold 

gota

 that they
like'  -  and  which  otherwise  remained  silent;  and,  finally,  a  large
gift-wrapped  box, a  little  present  from  his thoughtful producer,  which
turned out to contain Miss Pimple  Billimoria  wearing a winsome  expression
and a quantity of gold ribbon. The movies were in town.
     The  strange feeling began  - that is,  

returned -

 when  he was  in the
'chariot', waiting to descend. He thought of himself as moving along a route
on which,  any moment  now, a  choice would be  offered him, a choice -  the
thought formulated itself in his head without  any help from  him  - between
two realities, this world and another that was also right there, visible but
unseen.  He  felt  slow, heavy,  distanced from  his own  consciousness, and
realized that he had not the faintest idea which path he would choose, which
world he would enter. The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to treat
him for schizophrenia; the splitting was not in him, but in the universe. As
the chariot began its descent towards the immense, tidal roar that had begun
to  swell below him,  he  rehearsed  his opening  line -  

My name is Gibreel
Farishta,  and I'm back -

 and heard it, so to speak, in stereo,  because it,
too, belonged in both worlds, with a different meaning  in  each; -  and now
the lights hit him,  he  raised his arms high,  he was returning wreathed in
clouds,  - and the crowd had recognized him, and his fellow-performers, too;
people were  rising from  their  seats,  every man,  woman and child in  the
auditorium, surging towards the stage, unstoppable, like a sea. -  The first
man to reach him had  time to scream out  

Remember me, Gibreel? With the six
toes? Maslama, sir: John Maslama. I kept secret your presence  among us; but
yes, I have been  speaking out about  the  coming of the Lord,  I  have gone
before you, a voice  crying  in the wilderness, the  crooked shall  be  made
straight and the rough places plain -

 but then he had been dragged away, and
the security guards  were around  Gibreel,  

they're out  of  control, it's a
fucking riot, you'll have to -

 but he wouldn't go, because he'd seen that at
least half the crowd were wearing  bizarre  headgear, rubber  horns  to make
them  look like demons, as if they  were badges of belonging and defiance; -
and in that  instant  when he saw the adversary's sign he felt the  universe
fork and he stepped down the left-hand path.
     The official version of what followed, and the one accepted by  all the
news media, was that Gibreel Farishta had been lifted out of the danger area
in the same winch-operated  chariot in which he'd descended, and from  which
he hadn't had time  to emerge; -and that  it would therefore have  been easy
for him to make his escape, from his isolated and unwatched place high above
the melee. This  version proved resilient enough to survive the 'revelation'
in the 

Voice

  that  the  assistant stage manager in charge  of the winch had
not, repeat  not, set it in motion  after  it landed; - that,  in  fact, the
chariot remained grounded throughout  the  riot of the ecstatic film fans; -
and that substantial sums of money  had been paid to the  backstage staff to
persuade  them to collude  in the  fabrication  of  a story  which,  because
totally fictional, was realistic enough for the  newspaper-buying public  to
believe. However, the rumour that Gibreel Farishta  had  actually  levitated
away from the Earls  Court  stage and vanished into  the blue under his  own
steam spread rapidly  through  the  city's  Asian population, and was fed by
many accounts of the halo that had been seen streaming out from a point just
behind  his  head.  Within  days  of  the  second  disappearance of  Gibreel
Farishta,  vendors  of  novelties  in Brickhall,  Wembley and  Brixton  were
selling as many toy haloes (green  fluorescent  hoops were the most popular)
as headbands to which had been affixed a pair of rubber horns.
     He was  hovering high over London! - Haha, they couldn't touch him now,
the devils rushing  upon him in  that Pandemonium! - He looked down upon the
city  and saw the English. The trouble with the English  was that they  were
English:  damn cold fish! -Living underwater most of the year,  in days  the
colour of night! - Well: he  was here now,  the  great Transformer, and this
time there'd  be some changes made - the laws of nature are  the laws of its
transformation, and he was the  very person  to  utilize  the same!  -  Yes,
indeed: this time, clarity.
     He would show them - yes! - his 

power. -

 These powerless English! - Did
they not think their history would return to haunt them? - 'The native is an
oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor' (Fanon).
English women no longer bound him; the conspiracy stood exposed! - Then away
with all fogs. He would make this land anew. He was the Archangel,  Gibreel.
- 

And I'm back!

     The  face  of the  adversary  hung before him  once  again, sharpening,
clarifying. Moony with a sardonic  curl  to  the  lips: but  the  name still
eluded .  . . 

tcha,

  like tea? 

Shah,

  a king? Or like a (royal? tea?) dance:

Shatchacha. -

 Nearly there.  - And the nature of the adversary: self-hating,
constructing  a false ego,  auto-destructive. Fanon again:  'In this way the
individual' - the Fanonian 

native -

  'accepts the disintegration ordained by
God, bows down before the settler and  his lot, and by  a  kind  of interior
re-stabilization acquires  a  stony calm.'  - 

I'll  give him  stony calm!  -

Native  and  settler,  that  old  dispute, continuing now upon  these  soggy
streets,  with reversed categories. - It  occurred to  him  now that  he was
forever  joined to  the  adversary, their  arms locked  around one another's
bodies, mouth  to mouth, head to tail, as when they fell to earth: when they

settled. -

  As things begin so they continue. - Yes, he was coming closer. -
Chichi? Sasa? - 

My other, my love . . .


. .  .

  No! - He  floated over parkland and  cried out, frightening the
birds.   -   No   more   of   these   England-induced   ambiguities,   these
Biblical-Satanic  confusions!  - Clarity, clarity,  at  all costs clarity! -
This  Shaitan  was  no  fallen  angel.  -  Forget  those  son-of-the-morning
fictions; this was no good boy gone bad, but pure evil. Truth was, he wasn't
an angel at all! - 'He was of the djinn, so he transgressed.' - Quran 18:50,
there  it  was as plain  as  the day.  - How much  more straightforward this
version  was!  How  much more  practical,  down-to-earth, comprehensible!  -
Iblis/ Shaitan standing for  the darkness, Gibreel for the light. - Out, out
with  these  sentimentalities:  

joining, locking  together,  love.

  Seek and
destroy: that was all.
     . . . O most  slippery, most devilish of cities! - In which such stark,
imperative oppositions  were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of greys.  -
How right he'd been, for instance, to  banish those Satanico-Biblical doubts
of his, - those concerning God's unwillingness to  permit dissent among  his
lieutenants, -  for as  Iblis/Shaitan  was no  angel, so  there had  been no
angelic  dissidents  for  the Divinity to  repress;  -  and those concerning
forbidden fruit, and God's supposed denial of moral choice to his creations;
- for nowhere in the  entire Recitation was that Tree called (as  the  Bible
had  it) the  root of the  knowledge  of good  and  evil.  

It  was simply  a
different  Tree!

 Shaitan, tempting the Edenic  couple, called  it  only 'the
Tree of Immortality' -  and  as he was a liar, so the truth  (discovered  by
inversion)  was that  the banned fruit (apples were not specified) hung upon
the Death-Tree,  no less, the slayer of men's  souls. - What remained now of
that morality-fearing God?  Where was He to be found? - Only down below,  in
English hearts. - Which he, Gibreel, had come to transform.
     Abracadabra!
     Hocus Pocus!
     But where should he begin? - Well,  then, the trouble with the  English
was their:
     Their:
     

In a word,

 Gibreel solemnly pronounced, 

their weather.

     Gibreel  Farishta  floating on his cloud formed  the  opinion  that the
moral fuzziness  of the English was meteorologically induced.  'When the day
is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned,  'when the light is not brighter
than the  dark, when  the  land is not drier than  the sea,  then clearly  a
people  will  lose  the power to  make  distinctions, and  commence  to  see
everything - from political parties to sexual  partners to religious beliefs
- as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose,  give-or-take.  What folly! For truth
is extreme, it is 50 and not 

thus,

 it is 

him

 and not 

her;

 a partisan matter,
not  a spectator sport.  It is, in brief, 

heated.

 City,'  he cried, and  his
voice rolled over the metropolis like  thunder, 'I am  going to  tropicalize
you.'
     Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London
into a tropical city: increased moral definition,  institution of a national
siesta, development of vivid and expansive  patterns of  behaviour among the
populace,  higher-quality popular music,  new  birds in the  trees  (macaws,
peacocks, cockatoos),  new  trees  under  the  birds (coco-palms,  tamarind,
banyans with hanging beards).  Improved street-life,  outrageously  coloured
flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in  the oaks. A new
mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito
coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a
centre  for  conferences,   etc.;  better  cricketers;  higher  emphasis  on
ball-control  among  professional  footballers, the traditional and soulless
English commitment to  'high workrate' having  been rendered obsolete by the
heat.  Religious  fervour, political ferment,  renewal  of interest  in  the
intelligentsia. No  more  British reserve;  hot-water bottles to be banished
forever, replaced  in the foetid  nights by the making of slow  and  odorous
love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one
another without making appointments, closure  of old folks' homes,  emphasis
on the  extended family. Spicier food; the use of water  as well as paper in
English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of
the monsoon.
     Disadvantages:  cholera,  typhoid,  legionnaires' disease, cockroaches,
dust, noise, a culture of excess.
     Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill  the sky, Gibreel
cried: 'Let it be.'
     Three things happened, fast.
     The first was that,  as the unimaginably colossal, elemental forces  of
the transformational  process rushed out of his body (for was he  not  their

embodiment'?),

 he was temporarily overcome by a warm,  spinning heaviness, a
soporific churning (not at all unpleasant) that  made him close, just for an
instant, his eyes.
     The second was  that the moment his eyes were shut the horned and goaty
features of Mr.  Saladin Chamcha appeared, on  the screen of  his  mind,  as
sharp  and well-defined as could be; accompanied, as if it  were  sub-titled
there, by the adversary's name.
     And the third  thing was that Gibreel Farishta opened his eyes to  find
himself  collapsed,  once  again, on Alleluia Cone's  doorstep,  begging her
forgiveness, weeping 

O God, it happened, it really happened again.

     She  put him  to  bed;  he found  himself escaping into  sleep,  diving
headlong into  it, away from Proper  London and  towards  Jahma, because the
real  terror had crossed the broken boundary wall,  and  stalked  his waking
hours.
     'A homing instinct: one crazy heading for another, Alicja said when her
daughter phoned with the news. 'You must be putting  out a signal, some sort
of  bleeping  thing.'  As  usual, she  hid her  concern beneath  wisecracks.
Finally she  came out  with it: This time be sensible, Alleluia,  okay? This
time the asylum.'
     'We'll see, mother. He's asleep right now.'
     'So  he isn't going to  wake up?' Alicja  expostulated, then controlled
herself.  'All right,  I  know, it's your life.  Listen, isn t  this weather
something? They say it could  last  months: "blocked  pattern", I  heard  on
television,  rain over Moscow, while here it s a tropical heatwave. I called
Boniek at Stanford and told him: now we have weather in London, too.'

     Return to 

Jahilia


     hen Baal the  poet saw a single  teardrop the  colour of blood emerging
from the corner of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat  in the House of the
Black Stone, he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on  his way back  to
Jahilia  after  an  exile of  a  quarter-century. He belched  violently  -an
affliction of age, this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general
thickening induced by the years, a thickening of the  tongue  as well as the
body, a slow congealment of  the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a
figure  quite  unlike his quick young  self. Sometimes he felt that  the air
itself  had thickened,  resisting him, so that  even  a shortish  walk could
leave  him panting, with an ache in his arm and an irregularity in his chest
. . . and Mahound must have changed, too, returning as he was  in  splendour
and omnipotence to the place whence he fled empty-handed, without so much as
a wife. Mahound  at  sixty-five. Our names  meet, separate,  and meet again,
Baal thought,  but  the people going by the names do not remain the same. He
left Al-Lat to emerge into bright sunlight, and heard from behind his back a
little snickering laugh. He turned, weightily; nobody to be seen. The hem of
a robe vanishing around  a corner. These  days, down-at-heel Baal often made
strangers  giggle in  the street. 'Bastard!' he  shouted  at the top of  his
voice,  scandalizing the other worshippers in the House. Baal, the  decrepit
poet, behaving badly again. He shrugged and headed for home.
     The city of Jahilia  was no  longer built of sand.  That is to say, the
passage of  the years, the sorcery of the desert winds, the petrifying moon,
the  forgetfulness  of  the people  and  the inevitability  of  progress had
hardened  the  town, so  that it  had lost its  old,  shifting,  provisional
quality of  a mirage in which men  could  live, and become  a prosaic place,
quotidian and (like its poets) poor. Mahound`s arm had grown long; his power
had  encircled  Jahilia,  cutting  off  its  life-blood,  its  pilgrims  and
caravans. The fairs of Jahilia, these days, were pitiful to behold.
     Even the Grandee himself had acquired a theadbare look, his  white hair
as full of gaps as his teeth. His  concubines were dying of  old age, and he
lacked the energy - or, so  the rumours murmured in the desultory  alleys of
the city,  the need - to replace them. Some  days he forgot to shave,  which
added to his look  of  dilapidation and defeat. Only  Hind was the  same  as
ever.
     She had always had something of a reputation as a witch, who could wish
illnesses upon you if you failed to bow down before her litter as it passed,
an occultist with the power of transforming men  into desert snakes when she
had had her fill of them, and then catching them by the tail and having them
cooked  in their skins for her evening meal. Now that  she had reached sixty
the legend  of  her  necromancy was being given new  substantiation  by  her
extraordinary and unnatural  failure  to  age. While all around her hardened
into stagnation, while the old gangs of Sharks grew middle-aged and squatted
on street corners playing cards and rolling dice, while the old knot-witches
and contortionists starved to death in  the gullies, while a generation grew
up whose conservatism and unquestioning  worship of the material  world  was
born of their knowledge of the probability of unemployment and penury, while
the great  city  lost  its sense  of itself  and even the cult of  the  dead
declined in popularity to the relief of the camels of Jahilia, whose dislike
of being left with severed hamstrings on human graves was easy to comprehend
. . . while Jahilia decayed, in short, Hind remained unwrinkled, her body as
firm as any young woman's, her  hair as black  as  crow feathers,  her  eyes
sparkling like knives,  her  bearing still haughty, her voice still brooking
no opposition. Hind, not Simbel,  ruled the  city now;  or so she undeniably
believed.
     As the Grandee grew into a soft and pursy old age, Hind took to writing
a series of admonitory  and hortatory epistles or 

bulls

 to the people of the
city. These were pasted  up on every street in town. So it was that Hind and
not  Abu Simbel came to be thought of  by Jahilians as the embodiment of the
city, its living  avatar, because they found in  her physical unchangingness
and  in  the unflinching  resolve  of  her proclamations  a  description  of
themselves  far more palatable  than the  picture  they saw in the mirror of
Simbel's crumbling  face.  Hind's posters were  more  influential  than  any
poet's verses. She  was still sexually voracious, and  had slept  with every
writer in the city (though it was a  long time  since Baal  had been allowed
into her bed); now the writers were used up, discarded, and she was rampant.
With sword as  well as pen. She was Hind,  who had joined the  Jahilian army
disguised as a man, using sorcery to deflect all spears and swords,  seeking
out her brothers'  killer through the storm  of war. Hind, who butchered the
Prophet's uncle, and ate old Hamza's liver and his heart.
     Who could resist  her? For her eternal youth which was also theirs; for
her ferocity  which gave them the illusion  of being invincible; and for her
bulls,  which were refusals  of time,  of history, of  age,  which sang  the
city's undimmed magnificence  and defied the garbage and decrepitude  of the
streets, which insisted on greatness, on leadership,  on immortality, on the
status of Jahilians as custodians of the divine . . . for these writings the
people forgave her her promiscuity,  they turned a blind  eye to the stories
of Hind being weighed in  emeralds on her birthday,  they ignored rumours of
orgies,  they laughed  when  told of the  size of her wardrobe, of  the five
hundred and eighty-one nightgowns made of gold leaf and the four hundred and
twenty  pairs  of ruby slippers. The citizens  of Jahilia dragged themselves
through their  increasingly dangerous streets,  in  which murder  for  small
change  was becoming commonplace, in  which old  women were  being raped and
ritually slaughtered, in which the riots of the  starving  were brutally put
down  by Hind's personal police  force,  the Manticorps; and in spite of the
evidence  of  their  eyes, stomachs  and  wallets, they believed  what  Hind
whispered in their ears: Rule, Jahilia, glory of the world.
     Not all of them, of course. Not,  for example,  Baal. Who  looked  away
from public affairs and wrote poems of unrequited love.
     Munching  a white  radish,  he arrived home,  passing beneath  a  dingy
archway  in  a cracking  wall.  Here  there was  a  small  ruinous courtyard
littered  with  feathers, vegetable  peelings,  blood. There was no sign  of
human life: only flies, shadows, fear. These days it was  necessary to be on
one's guard. A sect of murderous hashashin roamed the city. Affluent persons
were  advised to approach their homes on the opposite side of the street, to
make sure  that the house was  not being  watched; when the coast  was clear
they  would rush for  the door and shut it  behind them  before any  lurking
criminal could  push his way in. Baal did not bother  with such precautions.
Once  he had been  affluent, but that was a  quarter of  a  century ago. Now
there was no demand for satires - the general fear of  Mahound had destroyed
the market for insults and wit. And with the decline of the cult of the dead
had come a sharp drop  in orders for epitaphs and triumphal odes of revenge.
Times were hard all around.
     Dreaming  of  long-lost  banquets,  Baal  climbed  an  unsteady  wooden
staircase to  his small upstairs room. What did he have to steal?  He wasn't
worth  the knife. Opening his door, he began to enter, when a  push sent him
tumbling to  bloody  his  nose  against  the far wall.  'Don't kill  me,' he
squealed blindly. 'O God, don't murder me, for pity's sake, O.'
     The other hand closed the door. Baal knew that no matter how  loudly he
screamed they would remain alone, sealed off from the world in that uncaring
room.  Nobody would come; he  himself, hearing his  neighbour shriek,  would
have pushed his cot against the door.
     The intruder's hooded  cloak concealed his face completely. Baal mopped
his bleeding nose, kneeling, shaking uncontrollably. 'I've got no money,' he
implored. 'I've got nothing.' Now the stranger spoke: 'If a hungry dog looks
for food, he does not look in the doghouse.' And then, after a pause: 'Baal.
There's not much left of you. I had hoped for more.'
     Now Baal felt  oddly affronted as well as terrified. Was this some kind
of  demented  fan, who  would  kill him because he no longer lived up to the
power  of his old work? Still trembling, he attempted self-deprecation.  'To
meet  a writer is,  usually,  to be disappointed,'  he  offered.  The  other
ignored this remark. 'Mahound is coming,' he said.
     This flat statement  filled Baal with the most profound terror. 'What's
that got to do with me?'  he cried.  'What does he want? It was  a long time
ago  - a lifetime - more  than a lifetime. What does he want? Are you  from,
are you sent by him?'
     'His memory is  as long as  his face,' the intruder  said, pushing back
his hood. 'No, I am not his messenger.  You and I have  something in common.
We are both afraid of him.'
     'I know you,' Baal said.
     'Yes.'
     'The way you speak. You're a foreigner.'
     '  "A  revolution  of  water-carriers,  immigrants  and  slaves,"'  the
stranger quoted. 'Your words.'
     'You're the immigrant,' Baal remembered. 'The  Persian.  Sulaiman.' The
Persian smiled his crooked smile.  'Salman,' he  corrected. 'Not  wise,  but
peaceful.'
     'You were one of the closest to him,' Baal said, perplexed.
     'The closer  you  are  to a  conjurer,' Salman  bitterly  replied, 'the
easier to spot the trick.'
     And Gibreel dreamed this:
     At  the oasis of Yathrib the  followers of  the new faith of Submission
found themselves landless, and therefore poor. For many years they  financed
themselves by acts of brigandage,  attacking the rich camel-trains  on their
way to and from Jahilia. Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman told Baal,
no  qualms about ends and means. The  faithful lived by  lawlessness, but in
those years Mahound - or should one  say the Archangel Gibreel? - should one
say Al-Lah?  -  became obsessed by  law. Amid the palm-trees  of  the  oasis
Gibreel  appeared to the Prophet and  found  himself  spouting rules, rules,
rules, until  the  faithful  could  scarcely bear the prospect of  any  more
revelation, Salman said, rules about every  damn thing, if a  man farts  let
him  turn his  face to the  wind, a rule about which  hand  to  use  for the
purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of  human existence
was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation - the 

recitation -

 told the
faithful how  much to eat, how deeply  they should  sleep,  and which sexual
positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and
the missionary  position  were  approved  of by the archangel,  whereas  the
forbidden postures included all  those  in  which  the  female was  on  top,
Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation,
and earmarked the  parts of the  body which could not be scratched no matter
how unbearably they  might itch. He vetoed the  consumption of prawns, those
bizarre other-worldly creatures  which no  member  of the faithful had  ever
seen, and  required  animals to  be killed slowly, by  bleeding,  so that by
experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an  understanding
of the  meaning  of their lives, for  it is only at the moment of death that
living creatures understand that life  has been  real,  and  not a  sort  of
dream. And  Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should
be buried, and how  his  property should  be  divided,  so  that  Salman the
Persian got to wondering  what manner of God this was  that sounded  so much
like a businessman.  This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith,
because he recalled that of course Mahound himself  had been a  businessman,
and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules
came naturally, so how excessively convenient  it was  that  he should  have
come up  with  such  a  very  businesslike  archangel, who handed  down  the
management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God.
     After that Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel's
revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's
views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence
of  Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer,  and  he  always supported
Mahound, stating beyond  any shadow of a doubt that it was impossible that a
man  should  ever walk upon  the moon,  and being equally  positive  on  the
transient nature of damnation: even the most evil of  doers would eventually
be  cleansed  by  hellfire and  find their  way into  the perfumed  gardens,
Gulistan  and Bostan. It  would  have been  different, Salman  complained to
Baal, if Mahound took  up his positions after  receiving the revelation from
Gibreel; but  no, he just laid down the law and the angel  would  confirm it
afterwards; so  I began to get a bad smell  in my  nose, and I thought, this
must be the odour of those  fabled  and legendary unclean  creatures, what's
their name, prawns.
     The  fishy  smell  began to obsess  Salman,  who  was the  most  highly
educated  of  Mahound's  intimates owing  to the superior educational system
then on offer in Persia. On account of his scholastic advancement Salman was
made Mahound's  official  scribe, so that it fell to him  to write  down the
endlessly proliferating rules. All those revelations of convenience, he told
Baal, and the longer  I did the job the worse it got. - For a time, however,
his suspicions  had to  be shelved, because the armies of Jahilia marched on
Yathrib, determined to swat  the flies who were pestering their camel-trains
and interfering with business. What followed is  well  known, no need for me
to repeat, Salman said, but  then his immodesty burst out of him  and forced
him  to  tell  Baal  how  he  personally  had  saved  Yathrib  from  certain
destruction, how he had preserved  Mahound's neck with his idea  of a ditch.
Salman  had persuaded the Prophet to  have a  huge trench  dug  all the  way
around the unwalled oasis settlement, making it too wide even for the fabled
Arab horses of the famous  Jahilian cavalry to  leap  across. A  ditch: with
sharpened stakes  at the bottom.  When the Jahilians  saw this foul piece of
unsportsmanlike hole-digging their sense of chivalry and honour obliged them
to behave as if  the ditch had not been dug, and to ride their horses at it,
full-tilt. The flower of Jahilia's army, human as  well  as equine, ended up
impaled  on the  pointed  sticks of Salman's  Persian  deviousness, trust an
immigrant not to play the game.  -And after  the defeat  of Jahilia?  Salman
lamented to Baal: You'd have  thought I'd  have  been a hero, I'm not a vain
man but where were the  public honours,  where was the gratitude of Mahound,
why didn't  the archangel mention 

me

 in despatches? Nothing, not a syllable,
it was  as  if the faithful thought of my  ditch as a  cheap trick,  too, an
outlandish thing, dishonouring, unfair; as if their manhood had been damaged
by the thing, as though I'd hurt their pride by  saving their  skins. I kept
my mouth shut and said  nothing,  but I lost a lot of friends after  that, I
can tell you, people hate you to do them a good turn.
     In spite of the ditch of  Yathrib, the faithful lost a good many men in
the war against Jahilia. On their raiding sorties they lost as many lives as
they  claimed.  And  after the  end of the  war,  hey presto, there was  the
Archangel Gibreel  instructing  the  surviving  males  to marry  the widowed
women, lest by remarrying outside the faith  they be lost to Submission. Oh,
such  a practical angel, Salman sneered to  Baal. By  now  he had produced a
bottle of toddy from the folds of  his  cloak and the two men  were drinking
steadily in the failing light. Salman grew ever more garrulous as the yellow
liquid in the bottle  went down; Baal couldn't  recall when  he'd last heard
anyone talk up such  a  storm. O,  those matter-of-fact revelations,  Salman
cried, we  were even  told it  didn't matter  if we were already married, we
could  have up  to four  marriages if  we could  afford  it,  well, you  can
imagine, the lads really went for that.
     What finally finished  Salman with  Mahound: the question of the women;
and of the Satanic verses. Listen, I'm no gossip, Salman drunkenly confided,
but after his wife's death Mahound was no angel, you understand my  meaning.
But in Yathrib he almost met  his match. Those  women up  there: they turned
his beard half-white in a year. The point about  our Prophet,  my dear Baal,
is that  he didn't like his  women to answer  back, he  went for mothers and
daughters, think of his first wife and then  Ayesha: too  old and too young,
his two loves.  He  didn't  like  to pick on someone his own  size.  But  in
Yathrib the women are different, you don't know, here in Jahilia you're used
to ordering your females about but  up there they won't put up with it. When
a  man  gets  married  he goes to  live  with  his wife's  people!  Imagine!
Shocking, isn't it? And throughout the marriage the wife keeps her own tent.
If she wants to get rid of her husband she  turns the tent round to face  in
the opposite direction, so  that when he comes  to her he finds fabric where
the door should be, and that's that, he's out, divorced,  not a thing he can
do about it. Well,  our girls were beginning to go for that type  of  thing,
getting who knows  what sort of  ideas in their heads, so at once, bang, out
comes  the rule book,  the angel starts pouring out rules  about what  women
mustn't  do,  he  starts forcing  them back  into the  docile  attitudes the
Prophet prefers,  docile or  maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting
at home being wise and waxing their chins. How  the women of Yathrib laughed
at  the faithful, I swear, but that man is a  magician,  nobody could resist
his charm; the faithful women did as he ordered them. They Submitted: he was
offering them Paradise, after all.
     'Anyway,' Salman said near the bottom of the bottle, 'finally I decided
to test him.'
     One night the Persian scribe had a dream in which he was hovering above
the figure of Mahound  at the  Prophet's cave on Mount Cone. At first Salman
took this to be no more than a nostalgic reverie of the old days in Jahilia,
but then it struck him that his point of  view, in the dream, had been  that
of the  archangel,  and at that moment the memory  of  the  incident of  the
Satanic verses came back to him as vividly as if  the thing had happened the
previous  day.  'Maybe  I  hadn't  dreamed  of  myself as  Gibreel,'  Salman
recounted. 'Maybe I was Shaitan.' The realization of  this possibility  gave
him his  diabolic idea.  After that,  when  he sat  at  the Prophet's  feet,
writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.
     'Little  things at  first. If Mahound recited a verse in  which God was
described as 

all-hearing, all-knowing,

 I would write, 

all-knowing, all-wise.

Here's the point: Mahound  did not notice  the alterations. So there I  was,
actually  writing the Book, or  rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God
with my own profane language. But, good heavens,  if my poor words could not
be  distinguished from the Revelation by God's own Messenger, then  what did
that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry? Look, I
swear, I was  shaken to my  soul. It's one thing to be a smart  bastard  and
have half-suspicions about funny business,  but it's quite another thing  to
find out  that  you're right. Listen: I changed my life for that man. I left
my  country, crossed the world, settled  among people who thought me a slimy
foreign coward for saving their, who  never appreciated  what  I, but  never
mind  that. The truth  is  that what I expected when I made that  first tiny
change, 

all-wise

 instead of 

all-hearing -

what I 

wanted

 -was to read  it back
to  the Prophet, and he'd  say, What's the matter with you, Salman,  are you
going  deaf?  And  I'd  say, Oops,  O God, bit  of a  slip, how could I, and
correct myself. But it didn't  happen; and now  I was writing the Revelation
and nobody was noticing, and I  didn't have  the courage to own  up.  I  was
scared silly, I can tell you. Also: I was sadder than I have ever been. So I
had to go on doing it. Maybe he'd  just missed  out once, I thought, anybody
can  make a  mistake. So the  next time I  changed a  bigger thing. He  said

Christian,

 I wrote down 

jew.

 He'd notice that, surely; how could he not? But
when I read  him the  chapter he nodded and thanked me politely, and I  went
out of his tent with tears in my eyes. After that  I knew my days in Yathrib
were numbered; but I had to go on doing it. I had to. There is no bitterness
like that of  a man who  finds out he has been believing in a ghost. I would
fall, I knew, but he would fall  with  me. So I went  on  with my devilment,
changing verses, until one day I read my lines to him and saw him  frown and
shake his head as if to clear  his mind, and then  nod his  approval slowly,
but with a little doubt. I knew I'd reached the edge, and that the next time
I rewrote the Book he'd know everything. That night I lay awake, holding his
fate  in my hands as well  as my own. If I allowed  myself to be destroyed I
could destroy  him, too.  I  had  to choose, on that awful night, whether  I
preferred death with revenge to  life without anything. As you see, I chose:
life.  Before dawn  I  left Yathrib on my  camel, and made my way, suffering
numerous misadventures I shall not trouble  to relate, back to Jahilia.  And
now Mahound is coming in triumph; so I shall lose my life after all. And his
power has grown too great for me to unmake him now.'
     Baal asked: 'Why are you sure he will kill you?'
     Salman the Persian answered: 'It's his Word against mine.'
     When Salman had slipped into unconsciousness on the floor, Baal lay  on
his  scratchy straw-filled mattress,  feeling the steel ring of  pain around
his forehead, the flutter of warning in his heart. Often his tiredness  with
his life had made him  wish not  to grow  old,  but, as  Salman had said, to
dream of a thing is very different from being faced with the fact of it. For
some time now he  had  been  conscious that the  world was closing in around
him. He could no  longer pretend that his eyes were what  they  ought to be,
and their dimness made his life even more shadowy, harder to grasp. All this
blurring and loss  of detail: no wonder his poetry had gone down the  drain.
His ears were getting to  be unreliable, too. At this rate he'd soon  end up
sealed off from everything by the  loss  of  his senses . . . but maybe he'd
never get  the chance. Mahound was coming. Maybe he would never kiss another
woman.  Mahound,  Mahound. Why  has  this  chatterbox drunk come  to me,  he
thought angrily. What do I have to do with his treachery? Everyone knows why
I wrote  those satires  years ago; he  must know. How the Grandee threatened
and  bullied. I  can't  be held  responsible. And anyway:  who  is  he, that
prancing sneering boy-wonder, Baal of  the cutting tongue? I don't recognize
him.  Look at me:  heavy, dull, nearsighted,  soon  to  be  deaf.  Who do  I
threaten? Not a soul.  He began to shake Salman: wake up, I don't want to be
associated with you, you'll get me into trouble.
     The Persian snored on, sitting splay-legged on the floor with his  back
to  the  wall, his head  hanging  sideways  like a doll's;  Baal, racked  by
headache,  fell back on  to his cot. His verses,  he thought,  what had they
been? 

What kind of idea

  damn it, he couldn't  even remember  them  properly

does Submission seem  today

 yes, something like that, after all this time it
was scarcely surprising  

an idea that  runs  away

 that  was the end  anyhow.
Mahound,  any new idea  is asked  two  questions. When  it's  weak:  will it
compromise? We know the answer to that one. And now, Mahound, on your return
to  Jahilia, time for  the second question: How do you behave  when you win?
When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what
then? We have all changed: all of us except Hind. Who seems, from what  this
drunkard says, more like  a woman of Yathrib than Jahilia. No wonder the two
of you didn't hit it off: she wouldn't be your mother or your child.
     As  he drifted towards  sleep, Baal  surveyed his own  uselessness, his
failed art. Now that he had abdicated all public  platforms, his verses were
full of loss: of youth, beauty,  love, health, innocence,  purpose,  energy,
certainty, hope. Loss of knowledge. Loss of money. The loss of Hind. Figures
walked away from him in his odes, and the more passionately he called out to
them  the faster  they moved.  The  landscape  of his poetry  was  still the
desert, the shifting dunes with the plumes of white  sand blowing from their
peaks. Soft mountains, uncompleted  journeys, the impermanence of tents. How
did one  map a country  that blew into a  new form every day? Such questions
made  his  language  too  abstract,  his  imagery too fluid, his  metre  too
inconstant. It  led  him to create chimeras of form,  lionheaded  goatbodied
serpenttailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment
they were set, so that the demotic  forced its  way  into lines of classical
purity and  images of love were  constantly  degraded  by  the intrusion  of
elements of farce. Nobody  goes  for that stuff, he thought for the thousand
and  first time, and as  unconsciousness arrived he concluded, comfortingly:
Nobody remembers me. Oblivion is safety. Then his heart missed a beat and he
came  wide  awake,  frightened, cold. Mahound, maybe I'll cheat you  of your
revenge. He spent  the night awake,  listening to Salman's rolling,  oceanic
snores.
     Gibreel dreamed campfires:
     A famous and unexpected figure walks, one night,  between the campfires
of Mahound's army. Perhaps on account of the dark,  - or it might be because
of  the improbability of his presence  here, - it seems that the  Grandee of
Jahilia  has  regained,  in this  final moment  of his  power, some  of  the
strength of his earlier days.  He has come alone;  and is led by  Khalid the
erstwhile water-carrier and  the  former  slave  Bilal  to  the  quarters of
Mahound.
     Next, Gibreel dreamed the Grandee's return home:
     The town is full of rumours and there's a crowd in front of the  house.
After a time the sound of Hind's voice lifted  in rage can be clearly heard.
Then at an upper  balcony Hind shows herself and demands that the crowd tear
her husband into small pieces. The Grandee appears beside her; and  receives
loud, humiliating  smacks  on  both cheeks  from his  loving wife. Hind  has
discovered that in spite of all her efforts she has not been able to prevent
the Grandee from surrendering the city to Mahound.
     Moreover: Abu Simbel has embraced the faith.
     Simbel  in his defeat has lost much of his recent wispiness. He permits
Hind to strike  him, and then speaks calmly  to  the crowd. He says: Mahound
has promised that anyone within the Grandee's walls will be spared. 'So come
in, all of you, and bring your families, too.'
     Hind speaks for the angry crowd.  'You  old fool. How many citizens can
fit inside  a  single house, even this one?  You've done a deal to save your
own neck. Let them rip you up and feed you to the ants.'
     Still the  Grandee  is mild. 'Mahound  also promises  that  all who are
found at home, behind closed doors, will be safe. If you  will not come into
my home then go to your own; and wait.'
     A third time his wife attempts to turn the crowd against him; this is a
balcony  scene  of hatred instead of  love. There  can be no compromise with
Mahound, she  shouts, he is not to be trusted, the people must repudiate Abu
Simbel and prepare to fight to the  last man, the last woman. She herself is
prepared to fight beside them and die for the freedom of  Jahilia. 'Will you
merely  lie  down  before  this  false  prophet, this Dajjal? Can  honour be
expected  of a  man  who is  preparing  to storm the city of his birth?  Can
compromise be hoped for  from the uncompromising, pity from the pitiless? We
are  the  mighty of  Jahilia,  and our goddesses,  glorious in battle,  will
prevail.' She  commands them to fight in the name of Al-Lat. But  the people
begin to leave.
     Husband and wife stand on their balcony, and the people see them plain.
For so  long the  city has used  these two as  its mirrors; and because,  of
late, Jahilians  have preferred Hind's images to  the  greying Grandee, they
are  suffering,  now,  from  profound  shock.  A  people  that  has remained
convinced of its  greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen  to believe
such a myth in  the face of all the evidence, is a people in  the grip of  a
kind of sleep, or madness.  Now the  Grandee  has  awakened  them from  that
sleep;  they  stand disoriented, rubbing  their eyes,  unable  to believe at
first - if we are so mighty, how then have we fallen so fast, so utterly?  -
and then belief comes, and shows them how their confidence has been built on
clouds, on the passion of Hind's proclamations and on very little else. They
abandon  her, and with  her,  hope.  Plunging  into  despair,  the people of
Jahilia go home to lock their doors.
     She screams at them,  pleads, loosens her  hair. 'Come to the  House of
the  Black Stone! Come and  make  sacrifice to Lat!' But they have gone. And
Hind and  the Grandee are alone on their balcony, while throughout Jahilia a
great silence falls, a  great stillness begins, and Hind  leans  against the
wall of her palace and closes her eyes.
     It is the end. The Grandee murmurs softly: 'Not many of us have as much
reason to be scared of Mahound as  you. If you eat a man's favourite uncle's
innards,  raw, without so much as salt or  garlic, don't be  surprised if he
treats you, in turn, like meat.' Then he leaves her,  and goes down into the
streets from which even the dogs have vanished, to unlock the city gates.
     Gibreel dreamed a temple:
     By the  open  gates  of Jahilia stood the temple  of Uzza.  And Mahound
spake  unto Khalid who had been a  carrier  of water  before, and  now  bore
greater weights: 'Go thou and cleanse that place.' So Khalid with a force of
men descended upon  the temple, for Mahound was loth to enter the city while
such abominations stood at its gates.
     When the guardian of the temple, who was of the tribe of Shark, saw the
approach of Khalid with  a great host of warriors, he  took up his sword and
went to the idol of the goddess. After making his final prayers he hung  his
sword  about her neck, saying,  'If thou  be truly  a  goddess, Uzza, defend
thyself and thy servant against the coming of  Mahound.' Then Khalid entered
the temple, and when the goddess did not move the guardian
     said,  'Now verily do I know that the God of Mahound  is the  true God,
and this  stone but a stone.' Then Khalid broke the temple  and the idol and
returned  to Mahound in  his tent.  And the Prophet asked: 'What  didst thou
see?'  Khalid  spread  his arms. 'Nothing,'  said  he.  'Then thou hast  not
destroyed  her,' the  Prophet cried. 'Go  again, and complete thy work.'  So
Khalid returned to the fallen temple, and there an enormous woman, all black
but for her  long  scarlet tongue, came  running at him, naked  from head to
foot, her black hair flowing to her ankles from her  head.  Nearing him, she
halted, and recited in her terrible voice of sulphur and hellfire: 'Have you
heard of  Lat, and  Manat,  and  Uzza, the  Third, the  Other?  They are the
Exalted Birds .  . .' But Khalid interrupted her, saying,  'Uzza,  those are
the  Devil's verses,  and  you the Devil's daughter, a  creature not  to  be
worshipped, but denied.' So he drew his sword and cut her down.
     And he returned to Mahound in his tent  and said what he  had seen. And
the Prophet  said,  'Now may we come into Jahilia,' and they arose, and came
into the city, and possessed it in  the Name of the Most High, the Destroyer
of Men.
     How many  idols  in the House  of the Black Stone? Don't  forget: three
hundred and sixty.  Sun-god,  eagle, rainbow.  The colossus of Hubal.  Three
hundred  and  sixty wait for Mahound, knowing they are not to be spared. And
are not: but let's not waste time there.  Statues fall; stone breaks; what's
to be done is done.
     Mahound, after the cleansing of the House, sets up his  tent on the old
fairground.  The  people crowd  around  the  tent, embracing  the victorious
faith. The Submission of Jahilia: this, too, is inevitable, and  need not be
lingered over.
     While Jahilians bow  before  him, mumbling their life-saving sentences,

there is  no God but Al-Lah,

  Mahound whispers to Khalid.  Somebody  has not
come  to  kneel before him;  somebody long  awaited. 'Salman,'  the  Prophet
wishes to know. 'Has he been found?'
     'Not yet. He's hiding; but it won't be long.'
     There is a distraction. A  veiled woman  kneels before him, kissing his
feet, 'You must stop,'  he enjoins. 'It is only God who must be worshipped.'
But what foot-kissery this is! Toe by  toe, joint by joint, the woman licks,
kisses,  sucks. And Mahound,  unnerved, repeats: 'Stop.  This is incorrect.'
Now, however, the woman is  attending to the  soles of his feet, cupping her
hands beneath his heel ... he kicks out, in his  confusion, and catches  her
in  the throat. She  falls, coughs, then prostrates herself before him,  and
says  firmly: 'There  is no  God  but  Al-Lah, and Mahound is his  Prophet.'
Mahound calms himself, apologizes, extends  a  hand. 'No  harm will come  to
you,' he  assures  her.  'All who Submit are spared.' But there is a strange
confusion  in him, and  now he  understands  why, understands the anger, the
bitter irony in her overwhelming,  excessive, sensual adoration of his feet.
The woman throws off her veil: Hind.
     'The wife  of  Abu Simbel,'  she  announces  clearly, and a hush falls.
'Hind,' Mahound says. 'I had not forgotten.'
     But,  after  a long  instant,  he nods.  'You have Submitted.  And  are
welcome in my tents.'
     The next day,  amid the continuing conversions,  Salman the Persian  is
dragged into the Prophet's presence. Khalid, holding him by the ear, holding
a knife at his throat, brings the immigrant snivelling and whimpering to the
takht. 'I  found  him, where else, with a  whore, who was  screeching at him
because he didn't have the money to pay her. He stinks of alcohol.'
     'Salman Farsi,' the Prophet begins to pronounce the sentence of  death,
but the prisoner begins to shriek the qalmah: 'La ilaha ilallah! La ilaha!'
     Mahound shakes  his head. 'Your blasphemy,  Salman, can't  be forgiven.
Did you think I wouldn't work it out? To set your words against the Words of
God.'
     Scribe,  ditch-digger, condemned  man: unable  to muster  the  smallest
scrap  of  dignity,  he  blubbers  whimpers pleads beats  his  breast abases
himself  repents. Khalid  says: 'This noise is  unbearable, Messenger. Can I
not cut off his head?' At which the noise increases sharply.  Salman  swears
renewed loyalty, begs some more, and  then, with a  gleam of desperate hope,
makes an offer. 'I can show you where your true enemies are.' This earns him
a few seconds. The  Prophet  inclines  his head.  Khalid  pulls the kneeling
Salman's  head  back by the hair: 'What enemies?'  And  Salman says a  name.
Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns.
     'Baal,' he says, and repeats, twice: 'Baal, Baal.'
     Much to Khalid's disappointment, Salman the Persian is not sentenced to
death.  Bilal intercedes  for  him, and  the  Prophet, his  mind  elsewhere,
concedes:  yes,  yes,  let   the  wretched  fellow  live.  O  generosity  of
Submission! Hind has been spared; and Salman; and  in  all of Jahilia not  a
door  has been smashed down, not an  old foe dragged out to have his gizzard
slit like  a chicken's in  the dust. This  is Mahound's answer to the second
question: 

What  happens when you win?

  But one  name haunts  Mahound,  leaps
around  him, young, sharp, pointing  a  long  painted finger, singing verses
whose cruel  brilliance  ensures  their  painfulness. That night,  when  the
supplicants have gone,  Khalid  asks  Mahound: 'You're still  thinking about
him?' The Messenger nods, but will not speak.  Khalid says: 'I  made  Salman
take me to his room,  a hovel, but he isn't there, he's hiding out.'  Again,
the  nod,  but no speech. Khalid  presses  on: 'You want me to dig him  out?
Wouldn't  take  much  doing. What  d'you want done with  him?  This?  This?'
Khalid's finger moves first across his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into
his navel. Mahound loses  his  temper.  'You're a  fool,' he shouts  at  the
former water-carrier who is now his military chief of staff. 'Can't you ever
work things out without my help?'
     Khalid bows and goes. Mahound  falls asleep: his  old gift, his way  of
dealing with bad moods.
     But  Khalid,  Mahound's  general, could  not  find  Baal.  In spite  of
door-to-door searches,  proclamations, turnings of stones,  the poet  proved
impossible to nab. And Mahound's  lips remained  closed,  would not part  to
allow his wishes to emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave
up the search. 'Just let that bastard  show his face,  just once, any time,'
he vowed in the Prophet's tent of softnesses and shadows. 'I'll slice him so
thin you'll be able to see right through each piece.'
     It  seemed to Khalid that Mahound  looked disappointed; but in the  low
light of the tent it was impossible to be sure.
     Jahilia settled down to its new life: the  call to prayers five times a
day,  no alcohol,  the locking  up  of wives.  Hind  herself retired to  her
quarters . . . but where was Baal?
     Gibreel dreamed a curtain:
     The  Curtain, 

Hijab,

  was  the name  of the  most  popular  brothel  in
Jahilia, an enormous  palazzo  of date-palms in  water-tinkling  courtyards,
surrounded by  chambers  that  interlocked  in bewildering mosaic  patterns,
permeated by labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to
look alike, each of them bearing the  same calligraphic invocations to Love,
each carpeted with identical  rugs,  each with a  large stone urn positioned
against a wall.  None  of The Curtain's clients could  ever find  their way,
without  help,  either into the  rooms  of  their favoured courtesan or back
again to the  street. In  this  way the  girls were protected from  unwanted
guests  and the business ensured payment before departure.  Large Circassian
eunuchs, dressed after the  ludicrous  fashion  of lamp-genies, escorted the
visitors to their goals and back  again, sometimes with the help of balls of
string. It was a soft  windowless universe  of draperies,  ruled over by the
ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose guttural utterances from the
secrecy  of a chair  shrouded in  black veils had  acquired, over the years,
something  of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her clients were  able  to
disobey  that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the profane  antithesis of
Mahound's sacred utterances in  a larger, more easily penetrable tent not so
very far away. So that  when the raddled poet Baal prostrated himself before
her  and  begged for help, her decision  to hide him and save his life as an
act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth he had once been
was  accepted without question; and when  Khalid's guards arrived  to search
the premises the eunuchs led  them on a dizzy journey around that overground
catacomb of contradictions  and  irreconcilable  routes, until the soldiers'
heads  were  spinning, and after  looking inside thirty-nine  stone urns and
finding  nothing but  unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never
suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been
taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like  a  thief, the quivering,
pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.
     After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the  poet's skin  until it was
blue-black, and his hair as well, and  dressing  him in the  pantaloons  and
turban of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his
lack of condition would certainly  arouse  suspicions  if  he didn't tone up
fast.
     Baal's  sojourn 'behind  The  Curtain'  by no  means  deprived  him  of
information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact, because in the
course of his  eunuchly duties he  stood guard outside the pleasure-chambers
and heard the customers' gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues,
induced by the  gay  abandon  of  the  whores' caresses and  by the clients'
knowledge  that their secrets would  be  kept, gave the eavesdropping  poet,
myopic and hard  of hearing as he  was, a  better insight into  contemporary
affairs than he could possibly have gained if he'd still been free to wander
the  newly puritanical  streets  of the  town. The  deafness  was  a problem
sometimes;  it  meant that  there  were gaps in  his  knowledge, because the
customers  frequently  lowered  their  voices  and whispered;  but  it  also
minimized the prurient element in his  listenings-in, since he was unable to
hear the murmurings that accompanied fornication, except, of course, at such
moments in which ecstatic clients or feigning workers raised their voices in
cries of real or synthetic joy.
     What Baal learned at The Curtain:
     From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the
new ban on pork the skin-deep converts  of Jahilia were flocking to his back
door to buy the  forbidden meat in secret, 'sales are up,' he murmured while
mounting his chosen lady,  'black  pork prices are high; but damn  it, these
new rules have made my work tough. A pig  is not an easy animal to slaughter
in secret, without noise,' and thereupon he began some squealing of his own,
for  reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure  rather than pain. - And the
grocer,  Musa, confessed to  another of The Curtain's horizontal  staff that
the old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening
he still  said  a  prayer or  two  to  'my  lifelong favourite,  Manat,  and
sometimes,  what  to do, Al-Lat  as  well; you can't  beat a female goddess,
they've got attributes the boys can't match,' after which he, too, fell upon
the  earthly  imitations  of  these attributes with a will.  So  it was that
faded, fading Baal learned  in his  bitterness that no imperium is absolute,
no victory complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.
     Baal had  begun to  change.  The  news of the destruction of the  great
temple of Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of
the covert pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because
even in the high days of his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been
genuine, perhaps his only genuine emotion,  and her fall revealed to him the
hollowness of a life in which the only true love had been felt for a lump of
stone that couldn't fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been
dulled, Baal became convinced that Al-Lat's fall meant that his own  end was
not far away. He lost that strange sense of safety that life at The  Curtain
had   briefly  inspired  in  him;  but   the  returning  knowledge  of   his
impermanence, of  certain  discovery  followed by equally certain death, did
not, interestingly enough, make him afraid.  After a  lifetime  of dedicated
cowardice he found to his great surprise  that the effect of the approach of
death really  did enable him to taste the sweetness of life, and he wondered
at the paradox of having his eyes  opened to  such  a truth in that house of
costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that Al-Lat was dead - had never
lived - but that didn't make Mahound a prophet. In sum, Baal  had arrived at
godlessness.  He began,  stumblingly, to move  beyond  the idea  of gods and
leaders and rules, and  to perceive that  his  story  was so mixed  up  with
Mahound's  that some  great resolution  was necessary. That this  resolution
would  in all probability mean his  death neither  shocked  nor bothered him
overmuch; and when Musa the grocer  grumbled one  day about the twelve wives
of  the Prophet, 

one rule for him,  another for us,

 Baal understood the form
his final confrontation with Submission would have to take.
     The girls  of  The Curtain  - it was  only by convention that they were
referred to  as  'girls',  as the eldest was  a woman well into her fifties,
while   the  youngest,  at   fifteen,   was  more   experienced   than  many
fifty-year-olds -  had grown fond  of this  shambling Baal, and in  point of
fact they enjoyed having a eunuch-who-wasn't,  so that out of  working hours
they would tease him deliciously, flaunting their bodies before him, placing
their breasts against his lips, twining their legs around his waist, kissing
one another passionately just an  inch  away from  his face, until  the ashy
writer was  hopelessly aroused; whereupon they  would laugh at his stiffness
and mock him into blushing, quivering de-tumescence;  or, very occasionally,
and when he had given  up all expectation of such a thing, they would depute
one of their number to satisfy, free of charge, the lust they  had awakened.
In this way, like a myopic, blinking, tame bull, the  poet  passed his days,
laying  his  head in women's laps, brooding on death and revenge,  unable to
say whether he was the most contented or the wretchedest man alive.
     It was during one  of  these playful sessions at the  end  of a working
day, when the girls were alone with their  eunuchs and their wine, that Baal
heard the  youngest talking about her client,  the grocer, Musa. 'That one!'
she  said.  'He's got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet's wives. He's so
annoyed about them that  he gets excited  just by mentioning their names. He
tells  me that I  personally am  the spitting image of Ayesha  herself,  and
she's His Nibs's favourite, as all are aware. So there.'
     The  fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. 'Listen,  those women  in that
harem, the men don't talk about anything else  these days. No wonder Mahound
secluded them, but it's only made things  worse. People fantasize more about
what they can't see.'
     Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of  the
licentious ways,  where until Mahound arrived  with his rule book the  women
dressed brightly, and all the talk  was of fucking and money, money and sex,
and not just the talk, either.
     He said to the youngest whore: 'Why don't you pretend for him?'
     'Who?'
     'Musa. If Ayesha gives  him such  a thrill, why not become his  private
and personal Ayesha?'
     'God,' the girl said. 'If  they heard you  say  that  they'd  boil your
balls in butter.'
     How  many  wives? Twelve, and one old lady,  long dead. How many whores
behind The  Curtain?  Twelve  again; and, secret on her black-tented throne,
the  ancient Madam, still defying death. Where there is no  belief, there is
no blasphemy. Baal told the  Madam  of his idea; she  settled matters in her
voice of a laryngitic frog. 'It is very dangerous,' she pronounced, 'but  it
could be damn good for business. We will go carefully; but we will go.'
     The fifteen-year-old whispered something in the grocer's ear. At once a
light  began  to shine in his eyes.  'Tell  me everything,' he begged. 'Your
childhood, your favourite toys,  Solomon's-horses and the rest, tell me  how
you played the tambourine and the Prophet came to watch.' She  told him, and
then  he asked about her deflowering at the age of twelve, and she told  him
that,  and afterwards he  paid double the normal fee, because 'it's been the
best time  of my life'. 'We'll have to be  careful of heart conditions,' the
Madam said to Baal.
     When  the  news got around Jahilia that  the whores of  The Curtain had
each  assumed  the  identity  of one of  Mahound's  wives,  the  clandestine
excitement  of  the city's males was intense;  yet, so afraid  were  they of
discovery, both because they would surely lose their lives if Mahound or his
lieutenants ever found out that they had been involved in such irreverences,
and  because of  their  desire  that the  new  service  at  The  Curtain  be
maintained, that  the secret was  kept from the authorities.  In those  days
Mahound  had  returned with his wives to  Yathrib, preferring the cool oasis
climate of the  north to Jahilia's heat. The  city had been left in the care
of  General  Khalid,  from  whom things were easily  concealed.  For  a time
Mahound had considered telling  Khalid to have  all the  brothels of Jahilia
closed down,  but Abu Simbel had  advised him against so precipitate an act.
'Jahilians are new converts,' he pointed out. 'Take things slowly.' Mahound,
most pragmatic of Prophets, had agreed to a period of transition. So, in the
Prophet's  absence, the  men  of  Jahilia  flocked  to  The  Curtain,  which
experienced  a  three hundred  per cent  increase  in business.  For obvious
reasons it was not politic to form a queue  in the  street,  and so on  many
days a  line  of  men curled around the innermost  courtyard of the brothel,
rotating about its  centrally positioned Fountain of Love  much as  pilgrims
rotated for other reasons around  the ancient Black Stone.  All customers of
The Curtain were issued  with masks, and Baal, watching the circling  masked
figures from a high balcony, was satisfied. There were more ways than one of
refusing to Submit.
     In the months that followed, the staff of The Curtain warmed to the new
task.  The fifteen-year-old  whore 'Ayesha'  was the most popular  with  the
paying public, just as  her namesake was  with  Mahound, and like the Ayesha
who was living chastely in her apartment in the harem  quarters of the great
mosque  at  Yathrib,  this  Jahilian  Ayesha  began  to  be  jealous of  her
preeminent status of Best Beloved. She resented it when any of her 'sisters'
seemed  to   be  experiencing   an   increase  in  visitors,  or   receiving
exceptionally  generous  tips. The oldest, fattest whore, who had  taken the
name of 'Sawdar', would tell her visitors - and  she had plenty, many of the
men of Jahilia seeking her out for her maternal and  also grateful  charms -
the story of how Mahound had married  her and  Ayesha, on the same day, when
Ayesha  was  just a child. 'In the two of us,' she would  say,  exciting men
terribly, 'he found the two  halves  of  his dead first wife: the child, and
the  mother, too.' The whore 'Hafsah' grew as hot-tempered as  her namesake,
and  as the twelve entered into the  spirit of their roles  the alliances in
the  brothel came to  mirror the political cliques  at  the  Yathrib mosque;
'Ayesha'  and 'Hafsah',  for  example,  engaged in constant, petty rivalries
against  the two  haughtiest  whores, who  had  always  been  thought a  bit
stuck-up  by  the  others  and  who  had  chosen  for  themselves  the  most
aristocratic   identities,  becoming  'Umm   Salamah  the  Makhzumite'  and,
snootiest  of  all, 'Ramlah', whose namesake, the eleventh wife  of Mahound,
was the daughter of  Abu Simbel  and Hind.  And there  was  a  'Zainab  bint
Jahsh', and  a 'Juwairiyah', named  after the bride captured on  a  military
expedition, and a  'Rehana  the Jew', a  'Safia' and a 'Maimunah', and, most
erotic  of  all  the  whores,  who  knew  tricks  she  refused  to teach  to
competitive 'Ayesha': the glamorous Egyptian, 'Mary the  Copt'. Strangest of
all was the whore who had taken the name of 'Zainab bint Khuzaimah', knowing
that this  wife of Mahound had recently died. The necrophilia of her lovers,
who forbade her to make any movements, was one of the more unsavoury aspects
of the new regime at The Curtain. But business was business, and this,  too,
was a need that the courtesans fulfilled.
     By  the end of the first year the twelve had grown so  skilful in their
roles that their previous selves began to fade away. Baal,  more  myopic and
deafer by the month, saw  the  shapes of the  girls  moving  past him, their
edges blurred, their images  somehow doubled, like  shadows superimposed  on
shadows.  The girls began to entertain new notions  about Baal, too. In that
age  it was customary for a whore, on entering her profession,  to take  the
kind of husband who wouldn't give her any  trouble - a mountain, maybe, or a
fountain, or a bush - so that she could adopt, for form's sake, the title of
a married woman. At The Curtain, the rule was that all the girls married the
Love  Spout  in the  central  courtyard, but  now a  kind  of rebellion  was
brewing, and the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to
announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as the wives of
the  Prophet they required  a better grade  of  husband than  some  spurting
stone, which  was almost  idolatrous,  after all; and to say  that they  had
decided that they would all become the brides of the bumbler, Baal. At first
the  Madam tried  to  talk  them out of it,  but when she saw that the girls
meant business she  conceded the  point, and told them to send the writer in
to see her. With many giggles and nudges the  twelve courtesans escorted the
shambling  poet into the  throne room.  When  Baal heard the plan his  heart
began to thump  so  erratically that he  lost  his  balance  and  fell,  and
'Ayesha' screamed in her fright: 'O God, we're going to be his widows before
we even get to be his wives.'
     But  he recovered: his heart  regained  its  composure. And, having  no
option, he agreed to  the  twelvefold proposal. The Madam then married  them
all  off  herself, and  in that  den of degeneracy,  that  anti-mosque, that
labyrinth of  profanity,  Baal became the husband of the wives of the former
businessman, Mahound.
     His  wives now made plain to him  that they expected him to  fulfil his
husbandly  duties in every particular, and worked out a  rota  system  under
which he could spend a day with  each of the  girls in turn (at The Curtain,
day and night were  inverted, the night being  for business  and the day for
rest). No sooner had  he embarked  upon  this  arduous  programme than  they
called  a  meeting  at  which he was told that he  ought to start behaving a
little more like the 'real' husband, that is, Mahound. 'Why can't you change
your name  like the rest of us?' bad-tempered 'Hafsah' demanded, but at this
Baal drew the line. 'It may not be much to be  proud  of,' he insisted, 'but
it's my name. What's more,  I don't  work with the clients  here. There's no
business reason for such a change.' 'Well, anyhow,' the voluptuous 'Mary the
Copt' shrugged, 'name or no name, we want you to start acting like him.'
     'I  don't  know much about,' Baal began  to protest, but  'Ayesha', who
really was the most attractive of them all, or  so he had  commenced to feel
of late, made a delightful moue. 'Honestly, husband,' she cajoled him. 'It's
not so tough. We just want you to, you know. Be the boss.'
     It  turned  out   that  the  whores  of  The  Curtain  were  the   most
old-fashioned and conventional women in  Jahilia. Their work, which could so
easily have made them  cynical and  disillusioned (and they were, of course,
capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors),  had turned
them  into  dreamers instead. Sequestered  from the outside  world, they had
conceived  a fantasy of  'ordinary life' in  which they  wanted nothing more
than to  be the obedient, and - yes - submissive helpmeets of a man who  was
wise, loving and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies
of men had  finally  corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of
hearts  they  wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all.
The added  spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all
into a state of high excitement, and the bemused Baal discovered what it was
to have  twelve women competing for  his favours, for the beneficence of his
smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled
his  body  and  danced  for  him,  and  in  a  thousand  ways   enacted  the
dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have.
     It  was  irresistible.  He  began to find the confidence to  order them
about, to adjudicate between  them,  to punish them when he was angry.  Once
when their quarrelling irritated him he forswore them all  for a month. When
he  went to see 'Ayesha'  after twenty-nine nights  she  teased him for  not
having been able to stay away. 'That month was  only twenty-nine days long,'
he  replied.  Once  he  was caught  with  'Mary the Copt'  by  'Hafsah',  in
'Hafsah's' quarters and  on 'Ayesha's'  day. He  begged 'Hafsah' not to tell
'Ayesha', with  whom he had fallen in love; but she told her anyway and Baal
had to stay away from 'Mary' of  the fair  skin and curly hair for  quite  a
time after that. In  short, he had fallen prey to the seductions of becoming
the  secret,  profane mirror of Mahound;  and  he had begun,  once again, to
write.
     The poetry that came was the  sweetest  he  had ever written. Sometimes
when he was with Ayesha he felt a slowness come over  him, a heaviness,  and
he had to lie down. 'It's strange,' he told her. 'It is as if  I see  myself
standing beside  myself And I can make  him, the standing one, speak; then I
get up and  write  down his verses.' These artistic slownesses  of Baal were
much admired by his wives.  Once,  tired, he dozed off in an armchair in the
chambers of  'Umm Salamah the Makhzumite'. When he  woke, hours  later,  his
body ached, his neck and shoulders  were  full of knots, and he  berated Umm
Salamah: 'Why didn't you wake me?' She answered:  'I was  afraid to, in case
the verses were coming to you.' He shook his head. 'Don't  worry about that.
The only woman in whose company the verses come is "Ayesha", not you.'
     Two years and a day after  Baal  began his life  at The Curtain, one of
Ayesha's clients recognized  him in spite of  the dyed skin, pantaloons  and
body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha's room  when  the
client emerged, pointed right at him  and shouted: 'So this is where you got
to!' Ayesha  came running,  her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, 'It's
all right. He won't make any trouble.' He invited Salman the Persian to  his
own quarters  and uncorked a  bottle of the  sweet wine made  with uncrushed
grapes which  the Jahilians had  begun to make  when  they found out that it
wasn't forbidden by what they had  started  disrespectfully calling the Rule
Book.
     'I  came because  I'm  finally leaving this infernal city/ Salman said,
'and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of shit.'
After Bilal had interceded for him in  the name of their  old friendship the
immigrant had  found work as a letter-writer and all-purpose scribe, sitting
cross-legged by the roadside in  the main street of  the financial district.
His cynicism  and  despair had been burnished by the sun.  'People  write to
tell lies,' he said, drinking  quickly. 'So  a  professional  liar  makes an
excellent living. My love letters and business  correspondence became famous
as the best in town  because  of my gift for  inventing beautiful falsehoods
that involved  only the tiniest departure from the facts. As a result I have
managed to  save enough for my trip home in just two  years. Home!  The  old
country! I'm off tomorrow, and not a minute too soon.'
     As  the  bottle emptied  Salman began once again to talk, as  Baal  had
known he  would,  about the  source  of all his ills, the Messenger  and his
message. He told Baal about a quarrel between Mahound and Ayesha, recounting
the rumour as if it were incontrovertible fact. 'That girl  couldn't stomach
it that her  husband wanted so many other women,' he said.  'He talked about
necessity, political alliances and so  on, but  she wasn't  fooled.  Who can
blame her? Finally he went into - what else? -one of his trances, and out he
came with a message from  the archangel. Gibreel  had recited verses  giving
him  full divine support. God's own permission  to fuck as many  women as he
liked. So there: what could poor Ayesha say against the verses  of God?  You
know what she did say? This: "Your  God certainly jumps to it when  you need
him to fix things  up  for you."  Well!  If it hadn't been Ayesha, who knows
what  he'd have done, but none of the others  would have dared in the  first
place.'  Baal let  him  run on without  interruption. The  sexual aspects of
Submission  exercised  the Persian a good deal: 'Unhealthy,' he  pronounced.
'All this segregation. No good will come of it.'
     At length Baal did start arguing, and Salman was astonished to hear the
poet taking  Mahound's side: 'You can see his point of view,' Baal reasoned.
'If  families  offer  him brides and he refuses  he creates  enemies,  - and
besides,  he's  a  special  man  and  one can see  the  argument for special
dispensations, - and as for locking them up, well, what a dishonour it would
be if anything bad happened  to one of them! Listen, if you  lived  in here,
you wouldn't think a little less  sexual freedom was such a bad thing, - for
the common people, I mean.'
     'Your  brain's gone,'  Salman said  flatly. 'You've been out of the sun
too long. Or maybe that costume makes you talk like a clown.'
     Baal  was pretty tipsy  by  this time, and began  some hot  retort, but
Salman raised an unsteady  hand. 'Don't want to fight,' he said. 'Lemme tell
you instead.  Hottest story in town. Whoo-whoo! And it's relevant to whatch,
whatchyou say.'
     Salman's story: Ayesha and the Prophet had gone on  an expedition to  a
far-flung village, and on the way back to Yathrib their  party had camped in
the dunes for the night. Camp was struck in the dark before the dawn. At the
last moment Ayesha was obliged by a call of nature to rush out of sight into
a hollow. While she was away her litter-bearers picked up her palanquin  and
marched off. She was a light woman, and,  failing  to notice much difference
in the weight of that heavy palanquin,  they assumed she  was inside. Ayesha
returned  after relieving herself to find  herself alone, and who knows what
might have befallen her if a young man, a certain Safwan, had not chanced to
pass by on his  camel . .  . Safwan brought Ayesha back to Yathrib safe  and
sound; at which  point tongues began to  wag, not least in the harem,  where
opportunities to weaken Ayesha's power were eagerly seized by her opponents.
The two young people had been alone in the desert for many hours, and it was
hinted, more and more loudly, that  Safwan was a  dashingly handsome fellow,
and the Prophet was  much older than the  young woman, after all, and  might
she not therefore have been  attracted to  someone  closer to  her own  age?
'Quite a scandal,' Salman commented, happily.
     'What will Mahound do?' Baal wanted to know.
     'O, he's done it,' Salman replied. 'Same as ever.  He saw  his pet, the
archangel,  and  then  informed  one  and  all  that Gibreel  had exonerated
Ayesha.'  Salman spread  his arms  in worldly  resignation. 'And  this time,
mister, the lady didn't complain about the convenience of the verses.'
     Salman the Persian left the next morning with a northbound camel-train.
When he left Baal at The Curtain,  he embraced  the poet, kissed him on both
cheeks and said: 'Maybe you're right. Maybe it's  better to keep out of  the
daylight.  I hope  it lasts.' Baal  replied: 'And I  hope you find home, and
that there is something  there to love.' Salman's face went blank. He opened
his mouth, shut it again, and left.
     'Ayesha' came to Baal's room  for reassurance. 'He  won't spill out the
secret when he's drunk?' she asked,  caressing Baal's hair. 'He gets through
a lot of wine.'
     Baal said: 'Nothing is ever going to be the same again.' Salman's visit
had wakened him from the dream  into which he had slowly subsided during his
years at The Curtain, and he couldn't go back to sleep.
     'Of course  it will,' Ayesha  urged. 'It will. You'll see.' Baal  shook
his head and  made the only prophetic remark of his life. 'Something big  is
going to happen,' he foretold. *A man can't hide behind skirts forever.'
     The next  day Mahound  returned to Jahilia  and soldiers came to inform
the Madam of The  Curtain that the period of  transition was  at an end. The
brothels  were to be closed, with  immediate effect. Enough was enough. From
behind  her  drapes, the Madam requested  that the soldiers  withdraw for an
hour in the  name of propriety to  enable the guests to  leave, and such was
the inexperience of the officer in charge of the  vice-squad that he agreed.
The Madam sent her eunuchs to inform the girls and escort the clients out by
a  back door. 'Please apologize to  them  for the interruption,' she ordered
the eunuchs, 'and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made.'
     They were her  last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once,
crowded into the throne room to see if the  worst were really true, she made
no answer to their terrified questions, are we out of work,  how do we  eat,
will we go to jail,  what's to become of us, - until 'Ayesha' screwed up her
courage  and  did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When  she  threw
back the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a
hundred  and twenty-five years old, no  more than  three feet tall,  looking
like  a big  doll, curled up  in a cushion-laden wickerwork chair, clutching
the empty poison-bottle in her fist.
     'Now that you've started,' Baal said, coming into the room, 'you may as
well  take all the curtains down.  No point trying to keep the  sun out  any
more.'
     The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather
petulant   bad  temper  when  he  found  out  about  the   suicide  of   the
brothel-keeper. 'Well, if we can't hang the boss, we'll just have to make do
with  the workers,'  he shouted,  and ordered his men to place  the  'tarts'
under close arrest,  a  task the men  performed with zeal.  The women made a
noise  and kicked out  at their  captors, but the eunuchs stood and  watched
without twitching a muscle, because  Umar had said  to them: 'They want  the
cunts to  be  put on trial, but  I've no instructions  about you.  So if you
don't  want to  lose your  heads as well  as your bails, keep out  of this.'
Eunuchs failed to defend the  women  of The  Curtain while soldiers wrestled
them to  the ground;  and among the  eunuchs was Baal, of the  dyed skin and
poetry. Just  before  the youngest 'cunt' or 'slit' was  gagged, she yelled:
'Husband, for God's sake, help us, if you are a man.' The vice-squad captain
was amused. 'Which of you is her husband?' he asked, staring  carefully into
each turban-topped face. 'Come on, own up. What's it like to watch the world
with your wife?'
     Baal  fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid 'Ayesha's' glares as  well as
Umar's narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. 'Is it you?'
     'Sir, you understand, it's just a term,' Baal lied. 'They like to joke,
the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we...'
     Without  warning,  Umar  grabbed  him  by  the  genitals  and squeezed.
'Because you can't be,' he said. 'Husbands, eh. Not bad.'
     When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the
eunuchs a word of advice on his way out. 'Get lost,' he suggested. 'Tomorrow
I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days running.'
     When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down
and  wept uncontrollably  by the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of  shame,
did not cry.
     Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:
     The  twelve whores realized, soon after  their arrest,  that  they  had
grown so  accustomed to their  new names that they couldn't remember the old
ones.  They were too frightened to give their jailers  their assumed titles,
and as a result  were unable to give any names at all. After a good  deal of
shouting and a good many threats the jailers  gave in and registered them by
numbers, as Curtain No.  1, Curtain No. 2 and so on.  Their  former clients,
terrified of the consequences of letting slip the secret  of what the whores
had  been up  to, also remained silent, so that  it is  possible that nobody
would have found out  if the poet Baal had not started pasting his verses to
the walls of the city jail.
     Two days after the arrests, the jail was  bursting with prostitutes and
pimps,  whose  numbers  had increased considerably during the two  years  in
which Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired
that  many Jahilian men  were prepared to countenance the jeers  of the town
riff-raff, to say nothing of possible prosecution  under the  new immorality
laws,  in  order to stand  below the windows of the  jail and serenade those
painted ladies whom they had grown  to love. The  women inside were entirely
unimpressed by these devotions, and gave no  encouragement whatsoever to the
suitors at their barred  gates.  On  the third day, however,  there appeared
among  these  lovelorn fools a peculiarly  woebegone  fellow  in  turban and
pantaloons,  with  dark skin that was  beginning to  look decidedly blotchy.
Many passers-by sniggered at the look of him, but when  he began to sing his
verses   the  sniggering   stopped  at  once.  Jahilians   had  always  been
connoisseurs of the art of poetry,  and the beauty of the odes being sung by
the peculiar gent stopped them in their  tracks. Baal sang his  love  poems,
and the  ache in them silenced the  other  versifiers, who  allowed  Baal to
speak for them all. At the windows  of the jail, it was possible to see  for
the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been drawn there
by the magic of the lines. When he finished  his recital  he went forward to
nail  his poetry to the wall.  The guards at  the  gates, their eyes running
with tears, made no move to stop him.
     Every evening after that,  the strange fellow would reappear and recite
a  new poem, and each set of verses  sounded lovelier than the last.  It was
perhaps this  surfeit of  loveliness which prevented  anybody from noticing,
until the twelfth evening,  when he completed  his twelfth and  final set of
verses, each of which were dedicated to a different woman, that the names of
his twelve 'wives' were the same as those of another group of twelve.
     But on the twelfth day it was noticed, and at once the large crowd that
had  taken to gathering to hear  Baal  read  changed its  mood. Feelings  of
outrage replaced those of  exaltation,  and Baal was surrounded by angry men
demanding to know  the  reasons for  this  oblique,  this  most byzantine of
insults.  At this point Baal  took  off his  absurd  turban. 'I am Baal,' he
announced. 'I recognize no  jurisdiction except that of my  Muse; or, to  be
exact, my dozen Muses.'
     Guards seized him.
     The  General, Khalid,  had wanted to  have  Baal  executed at once, but
Mahound asked  that  the poet  be brought to trial immediately following the
whores. So  when Baal's twelve wives, who had  divorced stone  to marry him,
had been sentenced to death  by stoning to punish them for the immorality of
their lives, Baal stood face to face with the Prophet,  mirror facing image,
dark facing light.  Khalid,  sitting at Mahound's right hand, offered Baal a
last chance to  explain his  vile deeds. The poet told the story of his stay
at  The Curtain, using  the simplest  language, concealing nothing, not even
his final  cowardice, for which everything  he had  done  since had been  an
attempt  at reparation.  But now an unusual thing happened. The crowd packed
into that  tent  of judgment,  knowing  that this was after all  the  famous
satirist Baal,  in his day the owner of the sharpest tongue  and keenest wit
in Jahilia, began (no  matter how hard it tried not to)  to laugh. The  more
honestly and simply Baal described his marriages to the twelve 'wives of the
Prophet',  the  more  uncontrollable  became  the  horrified  mirth  of  the
audience. By the end of  his speech the good  folk of Jahilia were literally
weeping with laughter, unable to restrain themselves even when soldiers with
bullwhips and scimitars threatened them with instant death.
     'I'm  not kidding!' Baal screeched at  the crowd,  which hooted  yelled
slapped  its thighs  in response. 'It's no joke!' Ha ha ha. Until,  at last,
silence returned; the  Prophet had  risen to his feet.  'In the old days you
mocked the  Recitation,' Mahound  said in the hush. 'Then, too, these people
enjoyed  your mockery.  Now  you return to dishonour my house,  and it seems
that  once again you  succeed in bringing the worst out of the people.' Baal
said, 'I've finished. Do what you want.' So he was sentenced to be beheaded,
within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled him out of  the tent towards the
killing ground, he shouted over his  shoulder: 'Whores and writers, Mahound.
We are the people you can't forgive.'
     Mahound replied, 'Writers and whores. I see no difference here.'
     Once upon a time there was a woman who did not change.
     After the treachery of Abu Simbel handed Jahilia to Mahound on a  plate
and replaced the idea of the city's greatness with the reality of Mahound's,
Hind sucked toes,  recited the La-ilaha, and then  retreated to a high tower
of  her palace, where news  reached  her  of the destruction of  the  Al-Lat
temple at Taif, and of  all the statues  of the  goddess that  were known to
exist. She locked herself into her tower room with  a collection  of ancient
books written  in  scripts  which  no other  human being  in  Jahilia  could
decipher; and for two years and two  months she remained there, studying her
occult texts in secret,  asking that a  plate of simple food be left outside
her door once a day and that her chamberpot be emptied at the same time. For
two years and two months she saw no other living being. Then she entered her
husband's bedroom at dawn, dressed in all her finery, with jewels glittering
at  her wrists,  ankles,  toes, ears  and throat. 'Wake up,' she  commanded,
flinging back his curtains.  'It's a day for celebrations.' He saw  that she
hadn't aged  by  so  much as  a day since he last saw her; if anything,  she
looked younger than ever, which gave credence to the rumours which suggested
that her witchcraft had persuaded time to run  backwards for her within  the
confines  of  her  tower  room. 'What have we got to celebrate?' the  former
Grandee of Jahilia asked, coughing up his usual morning blood. Hind replied:
'I may not be able to reverse the flow of history, but revenge, at least, is
sweet.'
     Within an hour the  news  arrived that the Prophet, Mahound, had fallen
into a fatal sickness, that he lay in Ayesha's bed with his head thumping as
if  it  had  been  filled  up  with  demons.  Hind  continued  to  make calm
preparations for a banquet, sending  servants to every corner of the city to
invite guests. But of course  nobody would come to  a  party on that day. In
the evening Hind sat alone  in the great hall of  her home,  amid the golden
plates and crystal glasses of her revenge, eating a simple plate of couscous
while  surrounded  by  glistening,  steaming,  aromatic   dishes  of   every
imaginable type. Abu Simbel had  refused to  join her, calling her eating an
obscenity. 'You ate his uncle's heart,' Simbel cried, 'and now you would eat
his.' She laughed in his face. When the servants began to weep she dismissed
them, too, and sat in solitary rejoicing while candles sent strange  shadows
across her absolute, uncompromising face.
     Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:
     For  when the  head of the Messenger began to ache as never before,  he
knew the time had come when he would be offered the Choice:
     Since  no  Prophet  may  die before  he has been  shown  Paradise,  and
afterward asked to choose between this world and the next:
     So that as he  lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha's lap, he closed
his eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:
     And he said unto Ayesha, 'I have been offered and made my Choice, and I
have chosen the kingdom of God.'
     Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his
eyes moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even
though  when she, Ayesha, turned to look she  saw only a lamp there, burning
upon its stand:
     'Who's there?' he called out. 'Is it Thou, Azraeel?'
     But Ayesha  heard a terrible,  sweet voice, that was  a  woman's,  make
reply: 'No, Messenger of Al-Lah, it is not Azraeel.'
     And  the lamp  blew out; and in the darkness  Mahound asked:  'Is  this
sickness then thy doing, O Al-Lat?'
     And she said:  'It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them
cut a camel's hamstrings and set it on your grave.'
     Then she went, and the lamp that had  been  snuffed out burst once more
into a great and gentle light,  and  the Messenger murmured, 'Still, I thank
Thee, Al-Lat, for this gift.'
     Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into  the next room, where
the other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began
mightily to lament:
     But Ayesha  wiped  her  eyes,  and  said:  'If  there  be  any here who
worshipped the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there
be any here who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive.'
     It was the end of the dream.


The


Angel Azraeel


1


     t all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his  den: love,
the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halevy's libretto for 

Carmen -

 one of the
prize specimens, this, in  the Allegorical Aviary  he'd assembled in lighter
days, and which included among its  winged  metaphors the Sweet (of  youth),
the Yellow (more  lucky than me), Khayyam-FitzGerald's adjectiveless Bird of
Time (which has  but a little way to fly, and  lo!  is on the Wing), and the
Obscene; this last from a letter written by Henry James, Sr, to his sons . .
. 'Every man who has reached  even  his intellectual teens begins to suspect
that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even;  that  it flowers
and fructifies on the  contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths  of the
essential  dearth  in  which its subject's  roots are  plunged. The  natural
inheritance of  everyone  who  is capable of spiritual life  is an unsubdued
forest where  the wolf howls and the obscene bird of  night chatters.'  Take

that,

  kids. -  And  in  a separate but proximate glass display-case of  the
younger,  happier Chamcha's fancy there fluttered a captive from  a piece of
hit-parade  bubblegum  music,  the Bright  Elusive  Butterfly, which  shared

l'amour

 with the 

oiseau rebelle.

     Love, a zone in which nobody desirous of compiling  a human (as opposed
to robotic, Skinnerian-android) body of experience could afford to shut down
operations, did you down, no question about it, and very probably did you in
as  well. It  even  warned  you in advance. 'Love is an infant of  Bohemia,'
sings  Carmen, herself  the very Idea of the Beloved, its  perfect  pattern,
eternal and divine, 'and if you love me, look out for you.' You couldn't ask
for fairer. For his own part, Saladin in his  time had loved widely, and was
now  (he had  come  to believe) suffering Love's revenges upon  the  foolish
lover.  Of  the  things  of  the  mind,  he  had  most  loved  the  protean,
inexhaustible  culture  of  the  English-speaking  peoples;  had  said, when
courting  Pamela, that 

Othello,

 'just that one  play',  was worth the  total
output  of  any  other  dramatist in any other  language, and  though he was
conscious  of  hyperbole,  he  didn't think  the  exaggeration  very  great.
(Pamela, of course, made incessant efforts to betray her class and race, and
so,  predictably,  professed  herself  horrified,  bracketing  Othello  with
Shylock and beating the racist Shakespeare  over the head with  the brace of
them.) He  had  been striving,  like  the  Bengali writer, Nirad  Chaudhuri,
before him - though without any of that impish, colonial intelligence's urge
to be seen as an enfant terrible - to be worthy of the challenge represented
by  the  phrase 

Civis Britannicus sum.

 Empire was no more, but still he knew
'all that  was good and living  within him' to  have been 'made, shaped  and
quickened'  by his encounter with this islet  of sensibility, surrounded  by
the cool sense of the sea. - Of material  things, he had  given his  love to
this city, London, preferring it  to the city of his birth or to any  other;
had been creeping up on  it, stealthily, with mounting excitement,  freezing
into a statue when it looked in  his direction, dreaming of being the one to
possess it  and  so, in  a  sense,  

become

  it,  as  when  in  the  game  of
grandmother's footsteps  the  child  who touches the one who's 

it

 ('on  it',
today's  young Londoners would say) takes over that  cherished identity; as,
also,  in the myth  of  the Golden Bough.  London,  its conglomerate  nature
mirroring his own,  its  reticence  also  his;  its gargoyles,  the  ghostly
footfalls in its streets of  Roman feet, the honks of  its departing migrant
geese.  Its hospitality - yes! - in spite of  immigration laws, and his  own
recent experience,  he  still insisted on the truth  of  that:  an imperfect
welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was
attested by the existence in a South London  borough of a  pub  in  which no
language  but  Ukrainian  could  be heard, and  by  the  annual reunion,  in
Wembley,  a stone's  throw  from the great  stadium  surrounded  by imperial
echoes - Empire Way, the Empire Pool - of more than a hundred delegates, all
tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village. - 'We Londoners
can  be  proud  of  our hospitality,'  he'd told Pamela,  and  she, giggling
helplessly, took him to see the Buster  Keaton  movie of that name, in which
the  comedian,  arriving  at  the  end of  an  absurd railway  line,  gets a
murderous reception. In  those days they had enjoyed  such  oppositions, and
after  hot disputes had ended up  in bed  .  . . He returned  his  wandering
thoughts to the subject of the metropolis.  Its  - he repeated stubbornly to
himself- long history  as a refuge,  a  role it  maintained in spite  of the
recalcitrant ingratitude of the  refugees' children; and  without any of the
self-congratulatory  huddled-masses rhetoric of  the  'nation of immigrants'
across the ocean, itself  far  from perfectly open-armed.  Would the  United
States, with its are-you-now-have-you-ever-beens, have permitted Ho Chi Minh
to cook in its hotel  kitchens? What would  its McCarran-Walter Act have  to
say about a  latter-day  Karl Marx,  standing bushy-bearded  at  its  gates,
waiting  to cross  its yellow lines? O Proper London! Dull would he truly be
of soul who did not prefer its faded splendours, its new hesitancies, to the
hot   certainties  of  that  transatlantic  New   Rome   with  its  Nazified
architectural gigantism,  which employed the oppressions of size to make its
human  occupants feel like worms .  . . London, in spite  of an  increase in
excrescences such as the  NatWest Tower - a corporate logo extruded into the
third dimension - preserved the human scale. 

Viva! Zindabad!

     Pamela had  always taken a caustic view of such rhapsodies. 'These  are
museum-values,'  she used to tell him. 'Sanctified, hanging in golden frames
on honorific  walls.' She  had never had any time  for what endured.  Change
everything! Rip it up! He said:  'If you succeed you will make it impossible
for  anybody like you, in one  or two generations' time, to come along.' She
celebrated  this vision of her  own obsolescence. If she  ended  up like the
dodo  - a stuffed  relic,  

Class  Traitor,  1980$  -

 that  would,  she said,
certainly suggest an improvement in the world. He begged  to  differ, but by
this  time they had begun to embrace: which surely was an improvement, so he
conceded the other point.
     (One year, the government had introduced admission  charges at museums,
and groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of  culture. When he saw
this, Chamcha had  wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man
counter-protest. Didn't these people  know what  the stuff inside was 

worth?

There they  were, cheerfully rotting their  lungs with cigarettes worth more
per  packet than the  charges  they were protesting against;  what they were
demonstrating to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural
heritage . .  . Pamela put her foot  down, 'Don't you  dare,' she  said. She
held  the  then-correct view:  that the museums were  

too valuable

 to charge
for. So: 'Don't you dare,' and to  his surprise he found he  did not. He had
not meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have
given, maybe, in the right  circumstances,  his  

life

 for what was  in those
museums. So  he could not take  seriously these objections  to a charge of a
few pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure  and ill-defended
position.)
     - 

And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you. -

     Culture,  city,  wife;  and a  fourth  and final love, of which  he had
spoken  to nobody:  the love  of  a dream. In  the old  days the  dream  had
recurred about once a  month; a  simple dream, set  in a city park, along an
avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches  turned the avenue into  a
green tunnel  into which the  sky and the  sunlight were dripping, here  and
there, through the perfect imperfections  in the  canopy of leaves. In  this
sylvan  secrecy, Saladin saw  himself,  accompanied by a small boy  of about
five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The  boy, wobbling  alarmingly
at  first,  made heroic efforts to gain and maintain  his balance,  with the
ferocity of  one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha
ran along behind his  imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the
parcel-rack  over  the  rear wheel. Then he  released it,  and  the boy (not
knowing himself to be unsupported)  kept going: balance  came like a gift of
flight,  and the two of them were gliding down the avenue,  Chamcha running,
the boy pedalling harder and harder. 'You did it!' Saladin rejoiced, and the
equally elated child shouted back: 'Look at me! See how  quickly I  learned!
Aren't you pleased with me? Aren't you pleased?'  It was a dream to weep at;
for when he awoke, there was no bicycle and no child.
     'What will you  do now?' Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage  of the
Hot Wax nightclub, and  he'd answered, too  lightly:  'Me? I think I'll come
back  to  life.'  Easier said  than done; it was life,  after  all, that had
rewarded his love of  a dream-child with childlessness; his love of a woman,
with  her  estrangement from him and  her insemination  by  his  old college
friend;  his love of a city,  by  hurling him down towards it from Himalayan
heights;  and  his  love  of  a  civilization,  by  having  him  bedevilled,
humiliated, broken upon its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he
was whole again, and there was, too, the  example of  Niccolo Machiavelli to
consider  (a  wronged man, his name, like that  of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a
synonym for evil; whereas in fact  his staunch republicanism had  earned him
the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel? - enough,
at  any  rate,  to  make  most men confess to raping their  grandmothers, or
anything else,  just to make the  pain  go away; -  yet he had confessed  to
nothing, having committed no  crimes while serving the  Florentine republic,
that  all-too-brief interruption  in the  power of  the Medici  family);  if
Niccolo  could  survive  such  tribulation  and  live to  write that perhaps
embittered,  perhaps sardonic parody  of  the sycophantic  mirror-of-princes
literature  then  so  much  in  vogue, 

Il  Principe,

 following  it with  the
magisterial 

Discorsi,

 then  he,  Chamcha, need  certainly not permit himself
the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then; roll back that boulder from
the cave's dark mouth, and to hell with the legal problems.
     Mishal,  Hanif  Johnson  and  Pinkwalla  -   in  whose  eyes  Chamcha's
metamorphoses  had  made  the  actor  a  hero,  through  whom  the magic  of
special-effects fantasy-movies 

(Labyrinth, Legend, Howard the Duck)

  entered
the Real - drove Saladin over to Pamela's place in the  DJ's van; this time,
though, he  squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was
early afternoon; Jumpy would  still be  at  the sports centre. 'Good  luck,'
said  Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked  if they  should  wait.  'No,
thanks,' Saladin replied. 'When you've  fallen  from the sky, been abandoned
by your friend, suffered  police brutality, metamorphosed  into a goat, lost
your work as well  as  your wife,  learned  the power of hatred and regained
human shape, what is  there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it,
demand your rights?' He waved goodbye. 'Good for you,' Mishal said, and they
had gone. On the street corner the  usual neighbourhood kids, with  whom his
relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One
of  them,  an  evil-looking piggy-eyed  lout  of  nine or  ten,  pointed  an
imaginary video remote control at  Chamcha and yelled:  'Fast  forward!' His
was  a generation  that  believed  in skipping  life's boring,  troublesome,
unlikable  bits, going fast-forward  from one action-packed  climax  to  the
next. 

Welcome home,

 Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.
     Pamela, when  she  saw  him, actually caught at her  throat. 'I  didn't
think people  did that any more,' he said.  'Not since  

Dr Strangelove.'

 Her
pregnancy wasn't visible yet; he  inquired after it,  and she  blushed,  but
confirmed that it was going  well.  'So far so good.' She  was naturally off
balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she
'stuck with' her whisky, drinking rapidly  in  spite of the  baby);  but  in
point of fact Chamcha felt 

one down

 (there had been  a  period in which he'd
been an avid  devotee of Stephen Potter's  amusing little  books) throughout
this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the  bad
position.  She  was the  one who had wanted to  break the marriage, who  had
denied him at  least thrice; but he  was as fumbling and abashed as she,  so
that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason
for Chamcha's  discomfiture - and he had not, let's  recall, arrived in this
awkward  spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood  - was that he had realized,
on  seeing Pamela, with her too-bright  brightness, her  face like a saintly
mask behind which  who knows  what worms  feasted  on  rotting  meat (he was
alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious),
her  shaven head under its  absurd turban, her whisky breath,  and  the hard
thing that  had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite
simply fallen out  of love, and would not want her back even should she want
(which  was  improbable but  not inconceivable) to return.  The  instant  he
became aware of this he commenced for some reason  to feel guilty, and, as a
result,  at a conversational disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling
at him, too. He recalled that he'd never really cared for pets.
     'I suppose,' she addressed her glass, sitting at the old  pine table in
the spacious kitchen, 'that what I did was unforgivable, huh?'
     That little  Americanizing 

huh

 was new: another of her infinite  series
of blows against her breeding?  Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip
little acquaintance  of his, like a disease?  (The  snarling violence again:
down  with  it.  Now  that  he   no  longer  wanted  her,  it  was  entirely
inappropriate to the situation.)  'I don't think I  can say what I'm capable
of forgiving,' he replied. 'That particular response  seems to be  out of my
control; it either operates or it doesn't  and I find out in  due course. So
let's say,  for the moment, that the jury's out.' She  didn't like that, she
wanted him to defuse the situation  so that  they could enjoy their  blasted
coffee. Pamela  had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn't his  problem
now. 'I'm moving  back in,' he said. 'It's a big house and there's plenty of
room. I'll take  the den, and  the rooms on the  floor  below, including the
spare bathroom,  so I'll be  quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen
very sparingly. I'm assuming that, as my body was  never  found,  I'm  still
officially missing-presumed-dead, that you haven't gone to court  to have me
wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn't take too long to resuscitate
me,  once  I alert  Bentine,  Milligan and  Sellers.'  (Respectively,  their
lawyer,  their accountant  and Chamcha's agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her
posture  informing him that she wouldn't be offering  any counter-arguments,
that whatever he  wanted was okay: making amends with  body language. 'After
that,' he  concluded, 'we sell up and you get your  divorce.'  He swept out,
making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just  before
they  hit  him.  Pamela, downstairs, would  be  weeping; he  had never found
crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too:
boom badoom doodoodoom.
     

To be born again, first you have to die.

     Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed,
as they  disagreed on everything, on a short-story  they'd both  read, whose
theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable.  Title and author eluded
him, but the story  came back vividly.  A man and a  woman had been intimate
friends  (never  lovers) for all  their  adult  lives. On  his  twenty-first
birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the
most horrible, cheap glass vase she  could find, its colours a garish parody
of Venetian gaiety.  Twenty years later, when  they were both successful and
greying,  she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of
a mutual friend.  In the  course  of the quarrel  her eye  fell upon the old
vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece,
and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor,  smashing  it
beyond  hope of repair. He never spoke  to her again; when she died, half  a
century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her  funeral, even
though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest  wishes.
'Tell her,'  he said  to  the emissaries,  'that  she never knew  how much I
valued  what  she broke.' The emissaries argued, pleaded,  raged. If she had
not known how much  meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she  in
all  fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts,  over  the
years, to apologize and atone? And  she  was dying, for heaven's sake; could
not  this  ancient,  childish  rift be healed at  the last? They had lost  a
lifetime's friendship;  could  they  not even  say  goodbye?  'No,' said the
unforgiving  man. - 'Really because of the vase? Or are  you concealing some
other,  darker  matter?' - 'It was  the vase,' he  answered,  'the vase, and
nothing but.'  Pamela thought the man petty  and cruel, but Chamcha had even
then  appreciated the  curious  privacy, the  inexplicable inwardness of the
issue. 'Nobody  can judge an internal injury,' he had said, 'by the size  of
the superficial wound, of the hole.'
     

Sunt  lacrimae rerum,

  as  the ex-teacher  Sufyan would  have said, and
Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears
in things. He remained at first  virtually immobile in  his den, allowing it
to grow back  around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something
of the solid comforting quality of its  old self, as it  had been before the
altering  of the universe. He watched a good deal of television with half an
eye, channel-hopping compulsively, for he was a member of the remote-control
culture  of the present as much as the piggy boy  on the street  corner; he,
too,  could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the
composite video monster his button-pushing brought into  being .  . . what a
leveller this remote-control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for  the twentieth
century; it chopped down  the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until
all the set's  emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and
one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal
weight; - and whereas the original Procrustes, citizen of what  could now be
termed a  'hands-on' culture,  had to  exercise  both  brain  and brawn, he,
Chamcha,  could lounge back in  his Parker-Knoll recliner chair and let  his
fingers do the chopping. It seemed to him,  as he idled across the channels,
that the box was full  of freaks: there were mutants  - 'Mutts' - on 

Dr Who,

bizarre creatures who appeared  to have been  crossbred with different types
of  industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers,
saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains  were called 

Mutilasians;

 children's
television  appeared  to  be exclusively  populated by humanoid  robots  and
creatures  with  metamorphic  bodies, while  the  adult programmes offered a
continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in
modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease  and war. A hospital in
Guyana had apparently preserved the body of a fully formed merman,  complete
with gills  and  scales. Lycanthropy  was on the  increase in  the  Scottish
Highlands.  The  genetic  possibility  of  centaurs  was   being   seriously
discussed.  A sex-change  operation  was  shown.  - He  was reminded  of  an
execrable piece of poetry which Jumpy Joshi had  hesitantly shown him at the
Shaandaar  B  and B.  Its name,  'I  Sing  the  Body  Eclectic',  was  fully
representative  of the whole.  - But the fellow has a whole body, after all,
Saladin  thought bitterly. He made  Pamela's baby with no trouble at all: no
broken  sticks on his damn  chromosomes ... he caught sight  of himself in a
rerun of an old 

Aliens Show

 'classic'. (In the fast-forward culture, classic
status  could be  achieved in  as  little  as  six  months;  sometimes  even
overnight.) The effect  of all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in
what remained of his  idea  of the  normal, average quality of the real; but
there were also countervailing forces at work.
     On  

Gardeners' World

 he was  shown how  to achieve  something called  a
'chimeran graft'  (the very same, as chance would have it, that had been the
pride of Otto  Cone's  garden); and  although his inattention caused  him to
miss the names of  the two trees  that had  been bred into one  -  Mulberry?
Laburnum? Broom? - the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it
palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously
out of  a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable  of taking the
metaphoric place of the one his  father had chopped down in a distant garden
in  another, incompatible  world. If  such a tree were possible, then so was
he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual
images of hybrid tragedies  

-

  the uselessness of mermen,  the  failures  of
plastic  surgery,  the  Esperanto-like  vacuity  of  much  modern  art,  the
Coca-Colonization of the planet - he was given this one gift. It was enough.
He switched off the set.
     Gradually,  his  animosity towards  Gibreel  lessened.  Nor  did horns,
goat-hoofs, etc. show any signs of  manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a
cure was  in  progress. In point of fact, with  the passage of  the days not
only  Gibreel,  but  everything which had befallen Saladin  of late that was
irreconcilable  with  the prosiness of everyday life came  to  seem  somehow
irrelevant,  as  even  the  most  stubborn  of nightmares  will once  you've
splashed your face, brushed your teeth and had a strong, hot drink. He began
to make journeys into the outside  world -  to those  professional advisers,
lawyer accountant  agent, whom  Pamela  used  to call 'the  Goons', and when
sitting in the panelled, book- and ledger-lined  stability  of those offices
in which  miracles could plainly  never  happen he  took to speaking of  his
'breakdown',  - 'the shock  of the  accident',  - and  so on, explaining his
disappearance as though he had never  tumbled  from  the sky, singing 'Rule,
Britannia'  while Gibreel yowled an air  from the movie 

Shree 420.

 He made a
conscious effort  to resume his  old  life of delicate sensibilities, taking
himself off to concerts  and art galleries  and plays,  and if his responses
were rather dull;  - if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in
the state of exaltation which was the return he expected from  all high art;

-

 then he insisted to himself that the thrill  would soon return; he had had
'a bad experience', and needed a little time.
     In  his  den, seated  in the Parker-Knoll armchair,  surrounded  by his
familiar  objects  - the  china  pierrots,  the  mirror  in  the  shape of a
cartoonist's  heart, Eros  holding up  the globe of  an antique  lamp  -  he
congratulated himself on  being the sort  of person  who  had  found  hatred
impossible to sustain for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than
hate;  even  if  love  changed,  some  shadow  of it,  some  lasting  shape,
persisted. Towards Pamela, for example, he was  now sure he felt nothing but
the most altruistic  affections. Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon
the  smooth  glass  of  the  sensitive  soul;   a  mere  grease-mark,  which
disappeared  if left alone.  Gibreel? Pooh! He  was forgotten; he  no longer
existed. There; to surrender animosity was to become free.
     Saladin's  optimism  grew, but the  red  tape surrounding his return to
life  proved more obstructive than  he expected. The banks were taking their
time about unblocking his  accounts; he was obliged to  borrow  from Pamela.
Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the
phone: 'Clients get funny. They  start talking about zombies, they feel sort
of unclean: as if they were  robbing a grave.' Charlie, who still sounded in
her early fifties like a  disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the
best county stock, gave the impression that she rather  sympathized with the
clients' point  of  view. 'Wait it out,'  she advised. 'They'll  come round.
After all,  it isn't  as if you were Dracula, for heaven's sake.' Thank you,
Charlie.
     Yes:  his  obsessive  loathing  of Gibreel,  his dream of exacting some
cruel and appropriate revenge, - these were things of the past, aspects of a
reality incompatible  with his  passionate desire  to  re-establish ordinary
life. Not even the  seditious, deconstructive  imagery  of  television could
deflect  him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as

monstrous.

  Monstrous,  indeed:  the  most absurd of ideas.  There were real
monsters in the world -  mass-murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny
Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate
of the  Metropolitan Police, the  arrest of Uhuru Simba  was just too darned
neat.) You only had to  open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed
homosexual Irishmen stuffing  babies' mouths  with earth. Pamela, naturally,
had been of  the view that 'monster' was too - what? 

-judgmental

 a term  for
such persons; compassion,  she said, required that we see them as casualties
of  the age. Compassion, he  replied, demanded that we see  their victims as
the casualties. 'There's  nothing to be done with you,' she had said  in her
most patrician voice. 'You actually do think in cheap debating points.'
     And other monsters, too, no less  real than the tabloid  fiends: money,
power, sex, death, love.  Angels  and devils - who needed them? 'Why demons,
when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked
from  his  attic  in Tishevitz. To  which  Chamcha's  sense  of balance, his
much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: 'And why angels, when
man is angelic too?' (If this wasn't true, how to explain, for instance, the
Leonardo Cartoon?  Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a powdered wig?) - But, it
had to be conceded, and this was his  original point, that the circumstances
of the age required no diabolic explanations.
     I'm saying nothing. Don't  ask me to clear things  up  one way  or  the
other;  the  time of  revelations is  long gone. The  rules of  Creation are
pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let
them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're  always intervening to give hints,
change the rules, fix  the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up
to this point and I  don't plan to spoil  things now. Don't think I  haven't
wanted to butt in; I have,  plenty  of times. And once, it's true, I  did. I
sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. 

Ooparvala or
Neechayvala,

  he wanted  to know,  and I  didn't enlighten  him; I certainly
don't intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.
     I'm leaving now. The man's going to sleep.
     His  reborn, fledgling, still-fallible optimism was hardest to maintain
at  night; because at night that otherworld  of horns and  hoofs was not  so
easily denied. There was the  matter, too, of the two women who had  started
haunting his dreams. The first - it was hard to admit this, even to himself-
was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal ally in that
nightmare time  which  he  was now  trying  so  mightily  to conceal  behind
banalities and mists,  the aficionada of  the martial arts, Hanif  Johnson's
lover, Mishal Sufyan.
     The second  - whom he'd left in Bombay with the knife  of his departure
sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead - was Zeeny Vakil.
     The jumpiness of  Jumpy  Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had
returned, in  human form, to  reoccupy  the upper storeys of  the  house  in
Notting  Hill, was frightful to behold, and  incensed  Pamela more  than she
could say. On the first night -she had decided not  to tell him  until  they
were safely in bed - he leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear
of the bed and  stood on the pale blue  carpet, stark naked and quaking with
his thumb stuck in his mouth.
     'Come back  here and stop  being foolish,' she commanded, but  he shook
his head wildly,  and removed his  thumb long enough to gibber: 'But if he's

here!

 In  this 

house!

  Then how can  

I

...?'-With which he  snatched  up  his
clothes in an untidy bundle,  and fled from her presence;  she heard  thumps
and crashes which suggested that his shoes, possibly accompanied by himself,
had fallen down the  stairs. 'Good,' she screamed after him. 'Chicken, break
your neck.'
     Some  moments  later, however, Saladin was visited by  the purple-faced
figure  of his  estranged  and naked-headed wife, who  spoke thickly through
clamped  teeth. 'J.J. is  standing outside in the street. The damn fool says
he can't come in unless you say it's okay with you.' She had, as usual, been
drinking. Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: 'What about
you,  you want  him to  come in?'  Which  Pamela interpreted as  his way  of
rubbing salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded
with humiliated ferocity. 

Yes.

     So it was that on his  first night home, Saladin Chamcha went outside -
'Hey, hombre! You're really 

well?

 Jumpy greeted him in terror,  making as if
to slap palms, to conceal his fear - and persuaded his wife's lover to share
her  bed.  Then he  retreated  upstairs, because Jumpy's  mortification  now
prevented him from  entering the house until Chamcha was  safely out  of the
way.
     'What a  man!' Jumpy wept at Pamela. 'He's a 

prince,

 a  

saint!'

 'If you
don't  pack  it in,'  Pamela Chamcha  warned apoplectically, 'I'll  set  the
fucking dog on you.'
     Jumpy continued  to find Chamcha's presence distracting, envisaging him
(or so it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be
constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her
surprise and relief,  to be  quite  a Mughlai  chef)  he  insisted on asking
Chamcha  down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred,  took him up a tray,
explaining  to  Pamela  that  to  do  otherwise  would  be  rude,  and  also
provocative. 'Look what he permits under his own roof!  He's a  

giant;

 least
we can do is have good manners.' Pamela, with mounting  rage, was obliged to
put up with  a series of  such acts and  their  accompanying  homilies. 'I'd
never have believed you were so conventional,' she fumed, and Jumpy replied:
'It's just a question of respect.'
     In  the name of  respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers
and mail; he never failed, on arriving  at the big house, to go upstairs for
a visit of at least  twenty minutes, the minimum  time commensurate with his
sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked  back bourbon
three  floors  below.  He  brought  Saladin  little  presents:  propitiatory
offerings of books, old  theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted  to
put  her foot down, he argued against her  with an innocent, but also mulish
passion: 'We can't behave as  if the man's invisible. He's here,  isn't  he?
Then we must involve  him  in our  lives.' Pamela replied sourly: 'Why don't
you just ask  him  to  come  down  and  join  us in  bed?'  To which  Jumpy,
seriously, replied: 'I didn't think you'd approve.'
     In spite  of his  inability  to relax  and  take  for granted Chamcha's
residence upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this
unusual way, his predecessor's  blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives
of love  and friendship, he cheered  up a  good deal, and  found the idea of
fatherhood growing on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him  weep,
the next morning, in delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was
running down  an avenue of overarching trees,  helping a small boy to ride a
bicycle. 'Aren't you pleased with me?' the  boy cried in his elation. 'Look:
aren't you pleased?'
     Pamela  and Jumpy had both become involved  in the campaign mounted  to
protest against the arrest of Dr Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper
Murders. This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin.  'The whole
thing's  completely   trumped-up,   based  on  circumstantial  evidence  and
insinuations. Hanif reckons he  can drive a truck through the  holes in  the
prosecution  case. It's  just  a  straightforward malicious fit-up; the only
question  is how far they'll  go. They'll verbal him for sure.  Maybe  there
will even be witnesses saying they saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly
they want to get him.  Pretty badly, I'd say;  he's been a loud voice around
town for some while.' Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan's
loathing  for Simba,  he said:  'The fellow has - has he not? -  a record of
violence  towards  women  .  . .'Jumpy turned  his  palms  outward. 'In  his
personal life,' he  owned,  'the  guy's  frankly a  piece of shit. But  that
doesn't mean he disembowels  senior citizens; you don't have to be  an angel
to  be  innocent.  Unless,  of course, you're black.' Chamcha let this pass.
'The point  is,  this  isn't  personal,  it's  political,'Jumpy  emphasized,
adding, as  he got  up to  leave, 'Urn, there's  a public meeting  about  it
tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you'd like, if you'd be
interested, that is, come along if you want.'
     'You asked him to go with us?' Pamela  was incredulous. She had started
to feel  nauseous most of the  time, and it did  nothing for her  mood. 'You
actually did that without consulting me?' Jumpy looked crestfallen. 'Doesn't
matter, anyhow,' she let him off the hook. 'Catch 

him

 going to anything like

that.'

     In the morning, however, Saladin presented himself in the hall, wearing
a  smart brown suit, a  camel coat with a silk  collar, and a  rather  natty
brown  homburg hat.  'Where are you off to?' Pamela, in turban, army-surplus
leather jacket and tracksuit bottoms that revealed  the incipient thickening
of her middle, wanted to know. 'Bloody Ascot?' 'I believe I was invited to a
meeting,'  Saladin  answered  in his  least  combative  manner,  and  Pamela
freaked. 'You want to be careful,' she warned him. 'The way you look, you'll
probably get fucking mugged.'
     What  drew  him  back  into the  otherworld, into  that undercity whose
existence he had so long denied?  - What,  or rather who, forced  him by the
simple fact of its (her) existence, to  emerge from that cocoon-den in which
he was being - or  so he believed - restored to his  former self, and plunge
once  more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and  of
himself? 'I'il be able to fit in the meeting,' Jumpy Joshi had told Saladin,
'before   my   karate  class.'  -   Where   his  star  pupil  waited:  long,
rainbow-haired  and, Jumpy  added, just past  her eighteenth birthday. - Not
knowing  that Jumpy, too, was  suffering some of  the same illicit longings,
Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.
     He  had expected  the  meeting to  be  small,  envisaging  a  back room
somewhere  full  of  suspicious types  looking  and talking like  clones  of
Malcolm  X (Chamcha could remember finding  funny a T V comic's joke - 'Then
there's the one about  the  black man who changed his name to Mr. X and sued
the 

News of the  World

 for  libel' - and provoking one of the worst quarrels
of  his marriage), with maybe  a few  angry-looking  women as  well;  he had
pictured  much fist-clenching and righteousness. What  he found was  a large
hall, the Brickhall Friends  Meeting House,  packed  wall-to-wall with every
conceivable sort of  person - old, wide women  and uniformed schoolchildren,
Rastas and restaurant workers, the staff of the small Chinese supermarket in
Plassey Street,  soberly dressed gents as well as wild boys, whites as  well
as blacks;  the  mood  of  the crowd was  far from the kind  of  evangelical
hysteria he'd imagined; it was quiet, worried, wanting to know what could be
done. There was a young black woman standing near him who gave his attire an
amused once-over; he stared back  at her, and she  laughed: 'Okay, sorry, no
offence.' She was wearing  a  lenticular badge,  the  sort that  changed its
message  as  you  moved. At some angles it read,  

Uhuru for  the  Simba;

  at
others, 

Freedom for the Lion.

 'It's on  account of the meaning of his chosen
name,' she  explained redundantly.  'In  African.'  Which language?  Saladin
wanted to know. She shrugged, and turned away to listen to  the speakers. It
was  African:  born, by  the sound of  her, in  Lewisham or  Deptford or New
Cross, that was all she needed  to know . . . Pamela hissed into his ear. 'I
see you finally  found somebody to feel superior  to.' She  could still read
him like a book.
     A  minute woman  in her middle seventies was led up on  to the stage at
the far end  of the hall by a wiry man who, Chamcha was almost  reassured to
observe, really did look  like an  American Black Power  leader,  the  young
Stokely  Carmichael, in fact  - the  same intense  spectacles  - and who was
acting as a  sort of compere.  He  turned  out to be Dr Simba's kid  brother
Walcott Roberts, and the tiny lady was their mother, Antoinette.  'God knows
how  anything as big  as Simba ever came out of  her,' Jumpy  whispered, and
Pamela frowned angrily, out of a new feeling of solidarity with all pregnant
women, past as well as present. When  Antoinette Roberts spoke, however, her
voice was big enough to fill the  room on  lung-power  alone.  She wanted to
talk about her son's day in court, at the committal proceedings, and she was
quite a performer. Hers was what  Chamcha thought  of as an  educated voice;
she spoke in the BBC accents of one who learned her English diction from the
World Service, but there was gospel in there, too, and hellfire sermonizing.
'My son filled that dock,' she told the silent room. 'Lord, he filled it 

up.

Sylvester - you will pardon me if I use the name  I gave him, not meaning to
belittle the warrior's name he took for himself, but only  out of  ingrained
habit  - Sylvester, he burst upwards from  that dock like Leviathan from the
waves. I want you  to know  how he spoke: he spoke loud, and he spoke clear.
He spoke looking his  adversary in  the eye, and could that prosecutor stare
him down? Never in a month of Sundays. And I want you to  know what he said:
"I stand here," my son  declared, "because I  have  chosen to occupy the old
and honourable role of  the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been
willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude." He was a colossus
among the dwarfs. "Make no mistake," he  said in that court, "we are here to
change things.  I  concede  at  once  that we  shall  ourselves  be changed;
African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are
other than what we would have been if we  had not crossed the oceans, if our
mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in  search of work and dignity
and a  better life for their  children.  We have been  made again: but I say
that we shall also be the ones to remake this society,  to shape it from the
bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners
of  the  new. It is  our  turn now."  I  wish you to think  on what  my son,
Sylvester Roberts, Dr Uhuru Simba, said in the place of justice. Think on it
while we decide what we must do.' Her son Walcott helped her leave the stage
amid cheers  and chants;  she  nodded judiciously  in  the direction of  the
noise.  Less  charismatic speeches  followed. Hanif Johnson, Simba's lawyer,
made a series of suggestions  -  the visitors'  gallery must be  packed, the
dispensers of justice must know that they were being watched; the court must
be picketed,  and  a rota should be  organized;  there was  the  need for  a
financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: 'Nobody mentions his history of
sexual aggression.' Jumpy shrugged. 'Some of the  women he's attacked are in
this  room. Mishal, for example, is  over there, look, in the corner by  the
stage. But this isn't the time or place for that. Simba's bull craziness is,
you could say, a trouble  in the family. What we have here  is  trouble with
the Man.' In other  circumstances, Saladin would have had a good deal to say
in  response to such  a statement. 

-

 He would have objected,  for one thing,
that a man's record of violence could not be set aside so easily when he was
accused of murder. - Also that he didn't like the use of such American terms
as 'the Man' in the  very  different  British situation, where  there was no
history  of slavery; it sounded  like an attempt  to  borrow the  glamour of
other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt about  the organizers'
decision  to punctuate  the speeches with such  meaning-loaded songs  as  

We
Shall Overcome,

 and even, for Pete's sake, 

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika.

 As if all
causes  were the same, all histories interchangeable. - But he  said none of
these things,  because his  head  had begun to spin and his senses  to reel,
owing to his having been given, for the first time in his life, a stupefying
premonition of his death.
     - Hanif  Johnson  was finishing  his  speech. 

As Dr Simba  has written,
newness will enter this  society by collective,  not individual, actions.

 He
was quoting what Chamcha recognized as one  of Camus's most popular slogans.

'1 he passage from  speech to moral action,

 Hanif was saying, 

has a name: to
become  human.  -

  And now  a  pretty  young  British  Asian  woman  with  a
slightly-too-bulbous nose and a  dirty, bluesy voice was  launching into Bob
Dylan's song, 

I Pity  the Poor  Immigrant.

 Another false  and imported note,
this:  the song  actually seemed rather  hostile towards immigrants,  though
there  were  lines   that  struck  chords,  about  the  immigrant's  visions
shattering like glass, about how he  was obliged  to 'build  his  town  with
blood'. Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image
of the rivers  of blood, would appreciate that. -  All these things  Saladin
experienced  and  thought as  if from a  considerable  distance. - What  had
happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan's presence at the
Friends  Meeting  House, Saladin Chamcha,  looking  in her  direction, saw a
blazing fire burning in the  centre of her  forehead;  and felt, in the same
moment, the beating, and the  icy  shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings. - He
experienced the kind of blurring associated with double  vision,  seeming to
look  into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit,  no-smoking-allowed
meeting hall, but the other was a world of  phantoms, in which  Azraeel, the
exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and  a girl's  forehead could
burn with ominous flames. - 

She's death to me, that's what it means,

 Chamcha
thought in one of the two worlds,  while in the other he told himself not to
be foolish; the room was full  of people  wearing  those inane tribal badges
that  had  latterly grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted
with  fluorescent paint; Mishal probably had on some piece of space-age junk
jewellery. - But his other self took over again, 

she's off limits to you,

 it
said,  

not all possibilities are open to us. The world  is finite; our hopes
spill over  its  rim. -

  Whereupon  his heart  got in on  the act, bababoom,
boomba, dabadoom.
     Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing
concern. 'I'm  the one  with  the bun  in  the oven,' she said with  a gruff
remnant  of affection.  'What  business  have you  got  to pass out?'  Jumpy
insisted:  'You'd  best come  with me  to  my class;  just  sit quietly, and
afterwards  I'll take you home.'  -But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was
required.  

No,  no, I'll  go with Jumpy,  I'll be fine. It was  just hot  in
there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing.

     There was an art cinema next to the Friends House,  and he was  leaning
against a movie poster. The film was 

Mephisto,

 the story of an actor seduced
into a collaboration with  Nazism. In the poster,  the actor - played by the
German  star  Klaus Maria Brandauer - was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face
white, body cloaked  in black, arms upraised. Lines  from 

Faust

  stood above
his head:
     - 

Who art thou, then?

     - 

Part of that Power, not understood,


Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.

     At the  sports  centre: he could  scarcely bring himself  to  glance in
Mishal's direction.  (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the
class.) - Although she was all  over him, 

you came back, I bet it was to see
me, isn't that nice,

 he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask  

were
you wearing a luminous something in the  middle of your,

 because  she wasn't
now, kicking her  legs and flexing  her long body, resplendent  in its black
leotard. - Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion
and injured pride.
     'Our other  star  hasn't turned  up  today,' Jumpy mentioned to Saladin
during a  break in the exercises. 'Miss Alleluia Cone,  the  one who climbed
Everest.  I  was  meaning to  introduce you  two. She  knows,  I mean, she's
apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your  fellow-survivor
of the crash.'
     

Things are closing  in on me.

  Gibreel was  drifting  towards him, like
India when, having come  unstuck  from the  Gondwanaland proto-continent, it
floated towards  Laurasia. (His processes of  mind,  he recognized absently,
were coming up  with  some pretty strange associations.) When they collided,
the  force would hurl  up  Himalayas. -  What is a mountain? An obstacle;  a
transcendence; above all, an 

effect.

     'Where are you going?' Jumpy was calling. 'I thought I was giving you a
lift. Are you okay?'
     

I'm fine. I need to walk, that's all.

     'Okay, but only if you're sure.'
     

Sure.

 Walk away fast, without catching Mishal's aggrieved eye.
     ...  In  the  street. Walk quickly,  out  of  this  wrong  place,  this
underworld. - God: no escape. Here's a shop-front, a  store  selling musical
instruments, trumpets  saxophones oboes,  what's the name? - 

Fair Winds,

 and
here in the window is  a cheaply  printed  handbill. Announcing the imminent
return of, that's right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation
of the earth. 

Walk. Walk away fast.


.  . .

 Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire  deference  in the driver.)
Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that
hijacking and lost the half  of his tongue. American.  They rebuilt  it,  he
says, with  flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn't fancy
a  mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the  poor bugger had no option
did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.
     Eugene  Dumsday on  the  radio discussed the gaps in the fossil  record
with  his  new, buttocky tongue. 

The  Devil tried to silence me but the good
Lord  and American surgical  techniques  knew better.

  These gaps  were  the
creationist's main selling-point:  if natural selection was the truth, where
were   all  the  random  mutations  that  got  deselected?  Where  were  the
monster-children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent.
No  three-legged  horses  there. No 

point  arguing  with these geezers,

  the
cabbie said.  

I don't  hold with  God  myself.

 No point,  one small part  of
Chamcha's consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that 'the fossil record'
wasn't some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come  a
long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species
happened  not in the  stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in
great,  radical  leaps.  The history of life was not the bumbling progress -
the very English  middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to
be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old
formulation, more revolution than evolution. - I've heard enough, the cabbie
said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music.

Ave atque vale.

     What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was that he had been living in
a  state of phoney peace, that the change  in  him  was irreversible. A new,
dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky;
no matter how assiduously he attempted to re-create his  old existence, this
was, he now  saw a fact that could not be unmade.  He seemed  to see a  road
before  him,  forking  to left and right. Closing his  eyes,  settling  back
against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left-hand path.
     

2


     he  temperature  continued to  rise; and when  the heatwave reached its
highest  point,  and  stayed  up  there  so long  that the whole  city,  its
edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil,
- then Mr. Billy Battuta and his companion Mimi Mamoulian, recently returned
to  the metropolis  after a  period as guests of the penal  authority of New
York, announced their 'grand coming-out' party. Billy's business connections
downtown had arranged for his case to be heard by a well-disposed judge; his
personal charm had  persuaded every one  of the  wealthy female 'marks' from
whom he'd extracted such generous amounts for the purpose of the re-purchase
of his soul from the Devil (including Mrs. Struwelpeter) to  sign a clemency
petition, in which the matrons stated their conviction  that Mr. Battuta had
honestly repented  him of his  error, and asked, in the light  of his vow to
concentrate  henceforth on his  startlingly brilliant entrepreneurial career
(whose social  usefulness in terms of  wealth creation and  the provision of
employment to many persons, they suggested, should also be considered by the
court in mitigation of his offences), and his  further vow to undergo a full
course of  psychiatric  treatment  to  help him overcome  his  weakness  for
criminal capers, - that the worthy judge settle upon some lighter punishment
than a prison sentence, 'the deterrent purpose underlying such incarceration
being better served here,' in the ladies' opinion,  'by a judgment of a more
Christian sort'.  Mimi,  adjudged  to  be  no  more than  Billy's love-duped
underling, was given a suspended sentence; for Billy it was deportation, and
a stiff fine, but even this was rendered  considerably  less  severe by  the
judge's consent  to Billy's  attorney's plea that his  client be allowed  to
leave the  country voluntarily, without  having the  stigma of a deportation
order  stamped into his passport, a  thing that would do great damage to his
many business interests. Twenty-four hours after the judgment Billy and Mimi
were back  in London,  whooping it up at Crockford's, and sending out  fancy
invitation  cards  to  what  promised to  be  

the

 party  of  that  strangely
sweltering season. One of these cards  found its way, with the assistance of
Mr. S. S.  Sisodia, to the residence of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel  Farishta;
another arrived, a little belatedly, at Saladin Chamcha's den, slipped under
the  door by the solicitous  Jumpy. (Mimi had called Pamela  to  invite her,
adding, with  her usual  directness: 'Any notion where that husband of yours
has  gotten  to?' - Which Pamela answered, with English  awkwardness, 

yes er
but.

  Mimi got the whole story out of her in  less than half an hour,  which
wasn't bad,  and concluded triumphantly:  'Sounds like  your life is looking
up, Pam. Bring 'em both; bring anyone. It's going to be quite a circus.')
     The  location  for  the  party was  another  of  Sisodia's inexplicable
triumphs:  the  giant sound  stage at the Shepperton film  studios  had been
procured, apparently at no cost, and the guests would be able, therefore, to
take their pleasures in the huge re-creation of Dickensian London that stood
within. A musical  adaptation of the  great writer's  last completed  novel,
renamed  

Friend!,

  with book  and  lyrics by the  celebrated  genius of  the
musical stage,  Mr. Jeremy Bentham, had proved a mammoth hit in the West End
and on Broadway, in spite of the macabre nature of some  of its scenes; now,
accordingly, 

The Chums,

 as it was known in  the  business, was receiving the
accolade  of a  big-budget movie production. 'The pipi  PR  people,' Sisodia
told Gibreel on the phone, 'think  that such a fufufuck,  

function,

 which is
to  be most  ista ista istar ista  ista istudded,  will  be  good for  their
bibuild up cacampaign.'
     The appointed night arrived: a night of dreadful heat.
     Shepperton! - Pamela and Jumpy are already here, borne on the  wings of
Pamela's MG, when Chamcha, having disdained their company, arrives in one of
the fleet of coaches the evening's hosts have made available to those guests
wishing for whatever reason to be driven rather than to drive. - And someone
else, too,  - the one with whom our Saladin  fell to  earth, - has come;  is
wandering within. -  Chamcha enters the arena; and is  amazed. 

-

 Here London
has  been altered - no, 

condensed, -

 according to the imperatives of film. -
Why, here's the Stucconia of the Veneerings, those  bran-new, spick and span
new people, lying shockingly adjacent to Portman Square, and the shady angle
containing  various  Podsnaps. - And worse: behold the  dustman's  mounds of
Boffin's Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in this
abridged  metropolis  over Fascination Fledgeby's rooms in the  Albany,  the
West  End's  very heart! -But  the guests are not disposed  to  grumble; the
reborn city, even rearranged, still takes the breath away; most particularly
in that  part of the immense studio through which the river winds, the river
with its fogs and Gaffer Hexam's boat, the ebbing Thames flowing beneath two
bridges, one of iron, one of stone. - Upon its cobbled banks the guests' gay
footsteps fall; and there  sound mournful, misty, footfalls of ominous note.
A dry ice pea-souper lifts across the set.
     Society  grandees, fashion  models, film stars, corporation  bigwigs, a
brace of minor  royal Personages,  useful politicians and suchlike riff-raff
perspire  and mingle in these  counterfeit  streets with numbers of men  and
women as  sweat-glistened  as the  'real' guests and as  counterfeit as  the
city: hired extras in period costume, as well as a selection of  the movie's
leading players. Chamcha,  who realizes in the  moment of  sighting him that
this encounter has  been the whole purpose of his journey, - which  fact  he
has succeeded in  keeping from himself until this instant, -spots Gibreel in
the increasingly riotous crowd.
     Yes:  there, on  London  Bridge Which  Is  Of Stone, without  a  doubt,
Gibreel! -  And that  must be  his Alleluia,  his  Icequeen Cone!  -  What a
distant expression he seems to be wearing, how he lists a few degrees to the
left; and how she seems to dote on him  - how everyone adores him: for he is
among the  very greatest  at  the party,  Battuta  to his  left,  Sisodia at
Allie's right, and  all about a host of faces that  would be recognized from
Peru to Timbuctoo!  - Chamcha struggles through the crowd,  which grows ever
more dense as he nears the bridge; -  but he is  resolved - Gibreel, he will
reach Gibreel! - when with a clash of cymbals loud music strikes up,  one of
Mr.  Bentham's immortal, show-stopping tunes, and the  crowd parts  like the
Red  Sea before the  children  of Israel.  - Chamcha, off-balance,  staggers
back, is crushed by the parting crowd against a fake half-timbered edifice -
what else?  - a Curiosity Shop; and, to save himself, retreats within, while
a  great  singing throng of bosomy ladies  in  mob-caps  and frilly blouses,
accompanied  by  an  over-sufficiency   of   stovepipe-hatted  gents,  comes
rollicking down the riverside street, singing for all they're worth.
     

What kind of fellow is Our Mutual Friend?
     What does he intend?


Is he the kind of fellow on whom we may depend?
     &c. &c. &c.

     'It's a funny  thing,' a woman's voice  says behind him,  'but when  we
were doing  the show at the C- Theatre,  there was an outbreak of lust among
the cast; quite unparalleled, in my experience. People started missing their
cues because of the shenanigans in the wings.'
     The   speaker,   he  observes,  is   young,  small,   buxom,  far  from
unattractive, damp  from the heat,  flushed with wine, and  evidently in the
grip of the libidinous fever of which  she  speaks. -  The 'room' has little
light,  but  he can  make out the glint  in her  eye. 'We've  got time,' she
continues  matter-of-factly.  'After  this  lot finish  there's Mr Podsnap's
solo.'  Whereupon,  arranging herself  in  an  expert  parody of the  Marine
Insurance agent's self-important posture, she launches  into her own version
of the scheduled musical Podsnappery:
     

Ours is a Copious Language,
     A Language Trying to Strangers;
     Ours is the Favoured Nation,
     Blest, and Safe from Dangers . . .

     Now,  in  Rex-Harrisonian  speech-song,  she   addresses  an  invisible
Foreigner. 'And How Do You Like London? - "Ay-normaymong rich?" - Enormously
Rich,  we say.  Our English  adverbs do Not terminate  in Mong. - And Do You
Find, Sir, Many Evidences of our British Constitution  in the Streets of the
World's Metropolis, London, Londres, London? - I would say,' she adds, still
Podsnapping,  'that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a
modesty, an independence,  a responsibility, a repose, which  one would seek
in vain among the Nations of the Earth.'
     The  creature has been approaching Chamcha while delivering herself  of
these lines; - unfastening, the while, her blouse; - and he, mongoose to her
cobra, stands there transfixed; while she, exposing  a shapely right breast,
and offering it to him, points out that she has drawn  upon it,  - as an act
of  civic pride, - the map of London, no less, in red magic-marker, with the
river all in  blue. The metropolis summons him; - but he, giving an entirely
Dickensian cry, pushes his way out of the Curiosity Shop into the madness of
the street.
     Gibreel is looking directly at him from London Bridge; their  eyes - or
so it  seems to  Chamcha - meet. Yes: Gibreel lifts, and waves, an unexcited
arm.
     What  follows is tragedy. - Or, at the least  the  echo of tragedy, the
full-blooded  original being unavailable to  modern men and  women,  so it's
said.  - A  burlesque for  our degraded,  imitative  times,  in which clowns
re-enact what was first done by heroes and by kings. - Well, then, so be it.
- The question that's asked  here remains as large as ever it was: which is,
the nature of evil, how it's born,  why  it grows,  how it takes  unilateral
possession of a many-sided human soul. Or, let's say: the enigma of lago.
     It's  not  unknown  for  literary-theatrical exegetes, defeated  by the
character, to  ascribe his actions  to  'motiveless malignity'. Evil is evil
and  will  do  evil,  and that's  that;  the  serpent's  poison is his  very
definition. - Well, such  shruggings-off  will  not  pass  muster  here.  My
Chamcha  may  be no  Ancient  of  Venice, my  Allie no smothered  Desdemona,
Farishta no match for the Moor, but they will, at least, be costumed in such
explanations as my understanding will allow. - And so, now, Gibreel waves in
greeting; Chamcha approaches; the curtain rises on a darkening stage.
     Let's observe, first,  how  isolated  this Saladin is; his only willing
companion  an inebriated and cartographically bosomed stranger, he struggles
alone through that  partying throng in  which all persons appear  to be (and
are  not) one  another's  friends;  -  while  there on  London Bridge stands
Farishta, beset by admirers, at the very centre of the crowd;
     and, next, let  us  appreciate the effect on Chamcha, who loved England
in the  form  of  his lost English wife, - of  the  golden, pale and glacial
presence by Farishta's  side  of Alleluia Cone; he snatches a glass  from  a
passing waiter's  tray,  drinks the wine  fast,  takes another; and seems to
see, in distant Allie, the entirety of his loss;
     and  in  other  ways, as well,  Gibreel  is  fast  becoming  the sum of
Saladin's  defeats;  - there with  him now, at this very moment, is  another
traitor; mutton dressed as lamb, fifty plus and  batting her  eyelashes like
an eighteen-year-old, is Chamcha's agent, the redoubtable Charlie Sellers; -
you wouldn't liken 

him

 to a Transylvanian bloodsucker, would  you,  Charlie,
the irate watcher inwardly cries; - and grabs another glass; - and  sees, at
its bottom, his own  anonymity, the other's  equal  celebrity, and the great
injustice of the division;
     most  especially -  he  bitterly reflects  - because  Gibreel, London's
conqueror, can see no value in the world now falling at his feet! - why, the
bastard always sneered  at the place, Proper London, Vilayet,  the  English,
Spoono,  what  cold  fish they  are, I swear;  -  Chamcha, moving inexorably
towards him through the crowd, seems to see, 

right now,

 that same sneer upon
Farishta's  face, that  scorn of  an inverted Podsnap, for  whom all  things
English are worthy of  derision instead  of praise; - O God, the cruelty  of
it, that he, Saladin, whose goal  and  crusade it was  to make this town his
own, should  have to  see it kneeling before  his contemptuous rival!  -  so
there is also  this: that Chamcha longs to stand  in Farishta's shoes, while
his own footwear is of no interest whatsoever to Gibreel.
     What is unforgivable?
     Chamcha, looking upon  Farishta's  face for the first time  since their
rough  parting in  Rosa Diamond's hall, seeing the strange blankness  in the
other's eyes, recalls with overwhelming force the earlier blankness, Gibreel
standing  on the stairs and doing nothing  while  he,  Chamcha,  horned  and
captive,  was dragged into the  night; and feels the return of hatred, feels
it filling  him  bottom-to-top  with  fresh  green bile,  

never  mind  about
excuses,

  it cries,  

to hell with mitigations and  what-could-he-have-dones;
what's beyond forgiveness is  beyond.  You can't judge an internal injury by
the size of the hole.

     So: Gibreel Farishta, put on trial by Chamcha, gets a rougher ride than
Mimi and Billy in New York,  and is declared guilty, for all  perpetuity, of
the Inexcusable Thing. From which what follows, follows. - But we may permit
ourselves to speculate a while about the true nature of this  Ultimate, this
Inexpiable Offence. - Is it really, can it be, simply his silence on  Rosa's
stairs?  -  Or  are there deeper resentments  here, gripes  for  which  this
so-called Primary Cause is, in truth, no more  than a substitute, a front? -
For  are  they  not  conjoined  opposites, these two, each man  the  other's
shadow? - One seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires, the
other preferring, contemptuously,  to  transform; one, a hapless fellow  who
seems to be continually punished  for uncommitted crimes, the  other, called
angelic by one and all, the type of man who  gets away with everything. - We
may describe Chamcha as being somewhat less than life-size; but loud, vulgar
Gibreel  is,  without question, a good deal  larger than  life, a  disparity
which  might  easily inspire neo-Procrustean  lusts in  Chamcha:  to stretch
himself by cutting Farishta down to size.
     What is unforgivable?
     What if not the  shivering nakedness of being 

wholly known

 to  a person
one  does  not  trust?  -  And  has  not  Gibreel  seen Saladin  Chamcha  in
circumstances - hijack, fall, arrest - in which the secrets of the self were
utterly exposed?
     Well, then. - Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these
are  two  fundamentally  different 

types

 of  self? Might we  not  agree that
Gibreel, for all his stage-name and performances; and in spite of born-again
slogans, new  beginnings,  metamorphoses; - has wished to remain, to a large
degree, 

continuous

 - that is, joined to and arising from his past; - that he
chose  neither near-fatal illness nor  transmuting fall; that,  in  point of
fact, he fears  above all things the altered states in which his dreams leak
into, and overwhelm, his waking self, making him that angelic Gibreel he has
no desire to  be;  -  so that  his is still  a self which,  for our  present
purposes, we  may  describe  as 'true' . . . whereas  Saladin Chamcha  is  a
creature of 

selected

 discontinuities, a 

willing

 re-invention;  his 

preferred

revolt against history  being what makes  him, in our chosen idiom, 'false'?
And might  we  then not go on  to say  that it is this falsity of self  that
makes possible in  Chamcha  a  worse and deeper falsity - call this 'evil' -
and that this is the truth, the door, that was opened  in him by his fall? -
While Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established  terminology, is to be
considered 'good' by virtue of 

wishing to remain,

 for all  his vicissitudes,
at bottom an untranslated man.
     -  But, and  again but:  this sounds,  does it not, dangerously like an
intentionalist fallacy? - Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea
of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, 'pure', - an utterly
fantastic notion! - cannot, must not, suffice. No! Let's rather  say an even
harder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to
say it is.  - That,  in fact, we fall  towards it  

naturally,

  that  is, 

not
against  our natures. -

 And that Saladin Chamcha  set out to destroy Gibreel
Farishta because, finally, it proved so easy to  do; the true appeal of evil
being the seductive ease with which one may embark upon that road. (And, let
us add in conclusion, the later impossibility of return.)
     Saladin  Chamcha, however,  insists  on  a simpler  line. 'It  was  his
treason at Rosa Diamond's house; his silence, nothing more.'
     He  sets  foot  upon  the  counterfeit  London  Bridge.  From  a nearby
red-and-white-striped puppeteer's booth, Mr Punch -whacking Judy - calls out
to  him:  

That's the  way  to  do it!

  After  which  Gibreel,  too, speaks a
greeting, the enthusiasm of the words undone by the incongruous listlessness
of  the  voice:  'Spoono, is it you. You bloody devil. There you are, big as
life. Come here, you Salad baba, old Chumch.'
     This happened:
     The  moment  Saladin Chamcha got  close  enough  to  Allie  Cone to  be
transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt  his reborn animosity
towards Gibreel  extending  itself  to her, with her  degree-zero go-to-hell
look, her air  of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe;
also, her  quality  of what he would afterwards  think  of as  

wilderness,

 a
hard, sparse thing, antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy
him so  much? Why, before  she'd even opened her mouth, had he characterized
her as part of the enemy?
     Perhaps because he desired her; and desired, even more, what he took to
be that inner certainty of hers; lacking which, he envied  it, and sought to
damage what he envied. If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the
beloved,  then  hatred, it must  be  said, can  be engendered  by  the  same
ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
     This  happened: Chamcha invented  an  Allie, and  became  his fiction's
antagonist... he showed none of this. He smiled, shook hands, was pleased to
meet her; and embraced  Gibreel. 

I follow him to  serve my  turn  upon  him,

Allie,  suspecting nothing,  excused herself. The two  of them must have  so
much to catch up on, she said; and, promising to return soon, departed: off,
as  she put it, to explore. He noticed that  she hobbled slightly for a step
or  two;  then paused, and strode off  strongly. Among the things he did not
know about her was her pain.
     Not knowing  that  the Gibreel standing before  him, remote of eye  and
perfunctory  in  his   greeting,   was  under  the  most  attentive  medical
supervision; - or that he was  obliged to take,  on a  daily  basis, certain
drugs  that dulled  his senses, because  of the  very real  possibility of a
recurrence of  his  no-longer-nameless  illness,  that is to  say,  paranoid
schizophrenia;  - or that he had long been kept  away,  at  Allie's absolute
insistence, from  the movie people whom she had come strongly  to  distrust,
ever  since  his   last  rampage;  -   or   that   their  presence  at   the
Battuta-Mamoulian party was a thing to  which  she  had been whole-heartedly
opposed, acquiescing only after a terrible scene in which Gibreel had roared
that he  would be  kept a prisoner no longer, and that  he was determined to
make a  further effort to re-enter his  'real life'; - or that the effort of
looking after  a disturbed lover who  was capable of seeing  small  bat-like
imps  hanging upside down  in the refrigerator  had  worn  Allie  thin as  a
worn-out  shirt, forcing upon her the roles of nurse, scapegoat and crutch -
requiring her, in sum, to act against her own complex and troubled nature; -
not knowing any of this,  failing to comprehend that  the Gibreel at whom he
was looking,  and believed  he  saw, Gibreel the  embodiment of all the good
fortune  that the Fury-haunted  Chamcha  so signally lacked, was as much the
creature  of his  fancy, as much a fiction, as his invented-resented  Allie,
that classic  drop-dead blonde or  femme fatale conjured  up by his envious,
tormented,  Oresteian imagination,  - Saladin in  his ignorance nevertheless
penetrated,  by  the  merest  chance, the  chink  in  Gibreel's  (admittedly
somewhat  quixotic)  armour, and understood  how  his hated Other might most
swiftly be unmade.
     Gibreel's  banal question  made  the  opening. Limited by sedatives  to
small-talk, he asked vaguely: 'And how, tell me, is your goodwife?' At which
Chamcha,  his  tongue  loosened by alcohol, blurted out:  'How? Knocked  up.
Enceinte.  Great with fucking child.' Soporific Gibreel missed  the violence
in this speech,  beamed absently, placed  an arm around Saladin's shoulders.
'Shabash, mubarak,' he offered congratulations. 'Spoono! Damn speedy work.'
     'Congratulate her lover,' Saladin thickly raged. 'My  old friend, Jumpy
Joshi. Now there, I admit  it, is a man. Women go wild,  it seems. God knows
why. They  want  his goddamn babies  and  they  don't even wait to  ask  his
leave.'
     'For instance who?'  Gibreel  yelled, making  heads  turn  and  Chamcha
recoil in surprise. 'Who who who?' he hooted, causing tipsy giggles. Saladin
Chamcha laughed, too: but without pleasure. 'I'll tell you who for instance.
My wife for instance, that's who. That is no lady, mister Farishta, Gibreel.
Pamela, my no-lady wife.'
     At this very moment, as luck would have it, - while Saladin in his cups
was quite  ignorant of the  effect his  words were having on Gibreel, -  for
whom  two images had explosively combined, the first being his sudden memory
of Rekha Merchant  on a flying carpet warning him of  Allie's secret wish to
have a baby without  informing the father, 

who asks the seed for  permission
to  plant,

 and the second being an  envisioning  of the body  of the martial
arts  instructor  conjoined  in high-kicking carnality  with the  same  Miss
Alleluia  Cone, -  the  figure of Jumpy Joshi was  seen crossing  'Southwark
Bridge'  in a state of some agitation,  -hunting,  in fact, for Pamela, from
whom he had  become separated during  the  same rush  of singing Dickensians
which had pushed Saladin towards the metropolitan breasts of the young woman
in the  Curiosity Shop.  'Talk  of  the devil,'  Saladin pointed. There  the
bastard goes.' He turned towards Gibreel: but Gibreel had gone.
     Allie  Cone  reappeared,  angry, frantic.  'Where is he? Jesus! Can't 1
even leave  him for a fucking 

second'?

  Couldn't you have kept  your sodding

eyes

 on him?'
     'Why,  what's the  matter -?' But now Allie had plunged into the crowd,
so that when Chamcha saw Gibreel crossing 'Southwark Bridge' she  was out of
earshot. - And here was Pamela, demanding: 'Have you seen  Jumpy?' -  And he
pointed,  'That  way,' whereupon  she,  too,  vanished  without  a  word  of
courtesy;  and  now Jumpy  was  seen,  crossing  'Southwark Bridge'  in  the
opposite  direction, curly  hair  wilder  than  ever,  coathanger  shoulders
hunched inside the greatcoat he had refused to remove, eyes searching, thumb
homing  in  on  mouth; -  and, a little  later,  Gibreel headed  across  the
simulacrum of  that bridge  Which Is  Of  Iron, going the same way  as Jumpy
went.
     In short,  events had begun to border  on the farcical; but when,  some
minutes later, the actor playing the  role of 'Gaffer Hexam', who kept watch
over that stretch  of the Dickensian Thames for floating corpses, to relieve
them of  their  valuables  before handing them  over to the police,  -  came
rowing  rapidly  down the studio  river with his stipulated ragged, grizzled
hair standing straight  up on end, the farce was  instantly terminated;  for
there in his disreputable boat lay the insensate body of Jumpy  Joshi in his
waterlogged greatcoat.  'Knocked cold,' the  boatman  cried, pointing to the
huge lump rising up at the back of Jumpy's skull, 'and  being unconscious in
the water it's a miracle he never drowned.'
     One  week after that, in response to an impassioned telephone call from
Allie Cone, who had tracked him  down via Sisodia, Battuta and finally Mimi,
and who  appeared  to  have  defrosted  quite a  bit, Saladin Chamcha  found
himself in  the passenger seat  of  a  three-year-old silver Citroen station
wagon which  the future Alicja  Boniek had presented to her  daughter before
leaving  for an  extended Californian stay. Allie had  met  him  at Carlisle
station, repeating her earlier telephonic apologies - 'I'd no right to speak
to  you like that; you knew nothing, I mean about his, well,  thank  heavens
nobody saw the  attack, and it seems  to  have been hushed up, but that poor
man, an oar on the head from behind, it's too bad; the point is, we've taken
a place up north, friends of mine are away, it just seemed best to  get  out
of  range of human  beings, and, well, he's  been asking for you;  you could
really help him, I  think, and to be frank I could do with the help myself,'
which  left Saladin  little the wiser but consumed  by curiosity -  and  now
Scotland was rushing past the Citroen windows at alarming  speed: an edge of
Hadrian's Wall, the old elopers' haven Gretna Green, and then inland towards
the Southern Uplands; Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Beattock,  Elvanfoot.  Chamcha
tended to think of all non-metropolitan locales as the deeps of interstellar
space, and journeys into  them as fraught with peril:  for  to break down in
such emptiness  would surely be to die alone and  undiscovered. He had noted
warily that one of the  Citroen's headlamps was broken,  that the fuel gauge
was in the red (it turned out to be broken,  too), the daylight was failing,
and Allie was driving as if the A74 were the track at Silverstone on a sunny
day. 'He can't get far without transport, but you never know,' she explained
grimly. 'Three days ago he stole the car keys and they found him heading the
wrong  way up an exit road on  the M6, shouting about damnation. 

Prepare for
the  vengeance of the  Lord,

  he  told the motorway cops, 

for I  shall  soon
summon  my  lieutenant,  Azraeel.

 They  wrote  it  all down  in their little
books.'  Chamcha,  his heart  still  filled with  his  own  vengeful  lusts,
affected sympathy and shock. 'And Jumpy?' he inquired, Allie took both hands
off the wheel and spread them in an I-give-up gesture, while the car wobbled
terrifyingly across the bendy road. 'The doctors say the possessive jealousy
could be part of  the same thing; at least, it can set the madness off, like
a fuse.'
     She was glad of the chance to talk; and Chamcha lent her a willing ear.
If she trusted him, it  was because Gibreel did, too; he had no intention of
damaging  that  trust. 

Once he  betrayed my trust; now let him,  for a time,
have confidence in me.

 He was a tyro puppeteer;  it was  necessary  to study
the strings, to find out  what  was connected to what ... 'I can't help it,'
Allie  was saying. 'I feel in some obscure way to  blame  for him.  Our life
isn't working  out and it's  my fault. My mother gets angry when I talk like
this.' Alicja, on the verge of catching the plane west, berated her daughter
at Terminal  Three. '1 don't understand where you  get  these notions from,'
she  cried amid  backpackers, briefcases and weeping Asian  mums. 'You could
say your father's life didn't go according to plan, either.  So he should be
blamed  for  the  camps? Study  history,  Alleluia. In  this century history
stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality.  I
mean, these days, character isn't  destiny any more.  Economics  is destiny.
Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a
grenade  care how you lived your life? Crisis comes,  death comes,  and your
pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to  do with it, only to suffer
the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how  history happens to you.'
She had returned, without warning,  to the grand style of wardrobe preferred
by Otto Cone, and, it seemed, to an  oratorical manner  that suited the  big
black hats and frilly suits. 'Enjoy California, Mother,' Allie said sharply.
'One of  us is happy,' Alicja said. 'Why shouldn't it be me?' And before her
daughter  could  answer,  she  swept  off past  the passengers-only barrier,
flourishing  passport,  boarding-pass, ticket,  heading  for  the  duty-free
bottles of 

Opium

 and Gordon's Gin, which were on sale beneath an illuminated
sign reading SAY HELLO TO THE GOOD BUYS.
     In the last light, the road rounded a spur of treeless, heather-covered
hills. Long ago, in another  country, another  twilight, Chamcha had rounded
another such  spur and  come into sight  of the remains  of Persepolis. Now,
however, he was heading for a human ruin; not to admire, and maybe even (for
the decision to do evil is never finally taken until the very instant of the
deed; there is always a last chance to withdraw) to vandalize. To scrawl his
name  in  Gibreel's flesh:  

Saladin woz ear.

 'Why stay  with him?' he  asked
Allie, and to his surprise she blushed. 'Why not spare yourself the pain?'
     'I don't really know you,  not at all, really,' she began, then  paused
and made  a choice. 'I'm not proud  of the answer, but it's the  truth,' she
said. 'It's the sex. We're unbelievable together, perfect, like nothing I've
known. Dream  lovers.  He  just seems  to, to 

know.

  To know  

me.'

 She  fell
silent; the night hid her face. Chamcha's bitterness  surged up again. Dream
lovers  were  all  around  him; he, dreamless, could only watch. He  gritted
angry teeth; and bit, by mistake, his tongue.
     Gibreel and  Allie had holed up  in  Durisdeer,  a village so  small it
didn't  have a pub, and  were living in a deconsecrated Freekirk converted -
the quasi-religious term sounded strange to Chamcha - by an architect friend
of Allie's who had made a fortune  out of such  metamorphoses of the  sacred
into  the profane. It struck Saladin as a gloomy sort  of place, for all its
white walls, recessed spotlights and wall-to-wall shag-pile carpeting. There
were gravestones  in  the  garden.  As  a  retreat for a  man suffering from
paranoid delusions of being  the  chief archangel of God, Chamcha reflected,
it wouldn't  have been his own first choice. The Freekirk  was  set a little
apart  from the  dozen or  so other  stone-and-tile houses that made up  the
community: isolated  even within this isolation. Gibreel was standing at the
door, a shadow against the illuminated hallway, when the car pulled up. 'You
got here,' he shouted. 'Yaar, too good. Welcome to bloody jail.'
     The  drugs made Gibreel clumsy. As  the  three  of them sat around  the
pitch-pine  kitchen table  beneath  the gentrified  pulldown dimmer-switched
lighting, he twice knocked over  his coffee-cup (he  was ostentatiously  off
booze;  Allie,  pouring two generous shots of Scotch, kept Chamcha company),
and, cursing,  stumbled  about  the kitchen for  paper-towels to mop  up the
mess.  'When I get sick of being  this way I  just  cut down without telling
her,' he  confessed. 'And then the shit starts happening. I  swear  to  you,
Spoono,  I can't bear the bloody idea that it will never stop, that the only
choice is drugs or bugs in the brain. I can't bloody bear it. I swear, yaar,
if I thought that was it, then, bas, I don't know, I'd, I don't know what.'
     'Shut  your face,'  Allie softly said. But  he  shouted out: 'Spoono, I
even hit her, do you know that? Bloody hell.  One day I thought she was some
rakshasa type of  demon and I just went  for her. Do you know how  strong it
is, the strength of madness?'
     'Fortunately for  me I'd been going to - oops, eek - those self-defence
classes,'  Allie  grinned. 'He's exaggerating to save  face. Actually he was
the one who ended up banging his head on the floor.' - 'Right here,' Gibreel
sheepishly  assented.  The  kitchen  floor was  made  of  large  flagstones.
'Painful,'  Chamcha  hazarded.  'Damn  right,'  Gibreel  roared,   strangely
cheerful now. 'Knocked me bilkul cold.'
     The  Freekirk's  interior had been divided into a large two-storey  (in
estate agent's  jargon, 'double volume') reception-room - the former hall of
congregation  -  and  a  more conventional half, with kitchen and  utilities
downstairs and bedrooms and bathroom above. Unable for some reason to sleep,
Chamcha wandered at midnight into the great (and cold: the heatwave might be
continuing in the south of England, but there wasn't a ripple of it up here,
where the climate was autumnal and  chill)  living-room, and wandered  among
the  ghost-voices  of  banished  preachers  while  Gibreel  and  Allie  made
high-volume  love. 

Like Pamela.

 He tried to think of Mishal, of Zeeny Vakil,
but it didn't work. Stuffing his fingers in his ears, he  fought against the
sound effects of the copulation of Farishta and Alleluia Cone.
     Theirs had been  a high-risk  conjoining  from the start, he reflected:
first, Gibreel's dramatic abandonment  of  career and rush across the earth,
and now,  Allie's uncompromising determination to 

see  it through,

 to defeat
in him this  mad, angelic divinity and  restore the  humanity she loved.  No
compromises for  them;  they were going  for broke. Whereas he, Saladin, had
declared himself content to  live  under the same  roof as  his wife and her
lover  boy.  Which  was  the better way?  Captain Ahab  drowned, he reminded
himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
     In  the morning Gibreel ordered an ascent of the local 'Top'. But Allie
declined,  although  it  was  plain  to  Chamcha  that  her  return  to  the
countryside  had caused  her to  glow  with  joy. 'Bloody  flat-foot  mame,'
Gibreel cursed her lovingly. 'Come on, Salad. Us damn city slickers can show
the Everest conqueror how to climb. What a bloody upside-down life, yaar. We
go  mountain-climbing  while  she  sits  here  and  makes  business  calls.'
Saladin's  thoughts were racing: he understood, now,  that strange hobble at
Shep-perton; understood,  too,  that this secluded  haven would  have  to be
temporary - that Allie,  by coming  here, was sacrificing her  own life, and
wouldn't  be  able  to go on  doing  so  indefinitely.  What  should he  do?
Anything? Nothing? - If revenge was to be  taken,  when and how?  'Get these
boots on,' Gibreel commanded. 'You think the rain will hold  off all fucking
day?'
     It didn't. By the time  they reached the  stone cairn at the  summit of
Gibreel's  chosen climb,  they were enveloped in a fine  drizzle. 'Damn good
show,' Gibreel panted. 'Look:  there she is, down there,  sitting  back like
the Grand Panjandrum.'  He pointed down at the Freekirk.  Chamcha, his heart
pounding,  was feeling foolish. He  must start  behaving  like a man with  a
ticker  problem.  Where was the glory  in  dying of  heart  failure  on this
nothing  of  a  Top, for  nothing,  in  the rain?  Then Gibreel got out  his
field-glasses and started  scanning the valley. There were hardly any moving
figures to be seen - two or three men and dogs, some sheep, no more. Gibreel
tracked the men with  his  binoculars.  'Now that we're  alone,' he suddenly
said, 'I can tell you why we really came away to this damn empty  hole. It's
because of her.  Yes, yes;  don't be fooled  by  my act! It's all her bloody
beauty. Men, Spoono: they chase her like goddamn flies. I swear! I see them,
slobbering  and grabbing.  It isn't right. She is a very private person, the
most private person in the world. We have to protect her from lust.'
     This speech took Saladin by surprise. You poor bastard, he thought, you
really are going off your wretched head at a rate of knots. And, hard on the
heels of  this thought, a second sentence appeared, as  if by magic, in  his
head: 

Don't imagine that means I'll let you off.

     On  the  drive back  to the Carlisle railway station, Chamcha mentioned
the depopulation of the countryside. 'There's no work,' Allie said. 'So it's
empty. Gibreel  says  he  can't get  used to  the  idea that  all this space
indicates  poverty: says it looks like luxury to him, after India's crowds.'
- 'And  your work?' Chamcha asked. 'What about that?' She smiled at him, the
ice-maiden facade long gone. 'You're a nice man to ask. I keep thinking, one
day it'll be my life in the middle, taking first place. Or, well, although I
find it hard to  use the  first person plural: our life. That sounds better,
right?'
     'Don't  let  him cut you off,' Saladin  advised. 'From Jumpy, from your
own worlds, whatever.' This was the moment at which his campaign could truly
be said to have  begun; when he  set a  foot upon that effortless, seductive
road  on which  there was only  one way to go.  'You're  right,'  Allie  was
saying. 'God, if he only knew.  His precious Sisodia, for example:  it's not
just seven-foot starlets he goes for, though he sure as hell likes those.' -
'He   made  a  pass,'  Chamcha  guessed;  and,  simultaneously,  filed   the
information  away for possible  later use. 'He's  totally shameless,'  Allie
laughed.  'It was  right  under Gibreel's  nose. He doesn't mind  rejection,
though: he just bows, and murmurs 

no offoffoffence,

 and that's that. Can you
imagine if I told Gibreel?'
     Chamcha at the railway  station wished Allie luck. 'We'll have to be in
London for a couple of  weeks,' she said through  the  car window. 'I've got
meetings. Maybe you and Gibreel can  get together then; this has really done
him good.'
     'Call any time,' he waved goodbye, and watched the Citroen until it was
out of sight.
     That  Allie Cone, the third  point of a triangle of fictions - for  had
not Gibreel and  Allie come together very largely by imagining, out of their
own needs, an 'Allie' and a 'Gibreel' with whom each could fall in love; and
was  not  Chamcha now imposing on them the requirements of his  own troubled
and  disappointed heart?  - was  to be  the  unwitting,  innocent  agent  of
Chamcha's revenge,  became  even plainer  to the plotter,  Saladin, when  he
found that Gibreel, with whom he  had arranged to spend an equatorial London
afternoon, wanted nothing so  much as to describe in embarrassing detail the
carnal  ecstasy  of sharing Allie's  bed. What  manner of people were these,
Saladin wondered  with distaste,  who enjoyed inflicting their intimacies on
non-participating others? As Gibreel (with something  like relish) described
positions, love-bites, the secret vocabularies  of  desire, they strolled in
Brickhall Fields among schoolgirls and  roller-skating  infants and  fathers
throwing boomerangs and  frisbees incompetently at scornful sons, and picked
their  way  through  broiling  horizontal  secretarial  flesh;  and  Gibreel
interrupted his erotic rhapsody to mention, madly, that 'I sometimes look at
these pink people and instead of skin, Spoono, what I see is rotting meat; I
smell their  putrefaction  here,'  he tapped his nostrils  fervently,  as if
revealing a mystery, 'in my 

nose'

 Then  once again  to Allie's inner thighs,
her cloudy eyes, the perfect valley of her lower back, the little  cries she
liked  to  make. This was a  man in imminent danger  of coming  apart at the
seams.  The  wild  energy,  the  manic  particularity  of  his  descriptions
suggested to Chamcha that he'd been cutting down on his  dosages again, that
he was rolling  upwards towards the crest of a deranged high, that condition
of febrile  excitement  that  was  like  blind  drunkenness  in one  respect
(according to Allie), namely that Gibreel  could remember nothing of what he
said or did when, as was inevitable, he came down to earth. - On and on went
the descriptions, the unusual length  of her  nipples, her dislike of having
her navel interfered with, the sensitivity of her toes. Chamcha told himself
that, madness or no madness, what all this  sex-talk revealed (because there
had  been  Allie in the Citroen  too)  was  the 

weakness

  of their so-called
'grand passion'  -  a term which  Allie  had  only half-jokingly  employed -
because,  in  a phrase,  there was nothing  else about it that was any good;
there was  simply no other aspect of their togetherness 

to

 rhapsodize about.
-  At the same time, however, he felt himself becoming aroused.  He began to
see himself standing outside her window, while she stood there naked like an
actress  on a  screen, and  a  man's hands caressed  her in a thousand ways,
bringing her  closer  and closer to ecstasy; he came to see himself as  that
pair of hands, he could almost feel her coolness, her responses, almost hear
her  cries. - He controlled  himself. His  desire  disgusted  him.  She  was
unattainable; this was pure voyeurism, and he would not succumb to it. - But
the desire Gibreel's revelations had aroused would not go away.
     Gibreel's  sexual  obsession,  Chamcha reminded himself, actually  made
things easier. 'She's certainly a very attractive woman,' he murmured by way
of an experiment, and  was gratified to receive  a furious, strung-out glare
in return. After  which Gibreel,  making a show of controlling himself,  put
his arm around  Saladin  and  boomed: 'Apologies, Spoono, I'm a bad-tempered
bugger where she's concerned. But you  and me! We're bhai-bhai! Been through
the worst and come out smiling; come on now,  enough of this .little nowhere
park. Let's hit town.'
     There  is the moment before  evil;  then the moment  of;  then the time
after, when the  step has  been  taken, and each subsequent, stride  becomes
progressively easier. 'Fine with me,' Chamcha replied. 'It's good to see you
looking so well.'
     A boy of six or seven cycled past them  on a BMX bike. Chamcha, turning
his head to follow the boy's progress, saw that he  was moving smoothly away
down an avenue of overarching trees, through which  the hot sunlight managed
here  and there to drip. The shock of discovering the location of his  dream
disoriented Chamcha briefly, and left him with a bad taste in his mouth: the
sour  flavour  of  might-have-beens.  Gibreel hailed a taxi;  and  requested
Trafalgar Square.
     O, he  was in a high good  humour that day,  rubbishing London  and the
English with much of  his  old  brio. Where Chamcha  saw attractively  faded
grandeur, Gibreel saw  a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its
past,  and  trying, with the  help of a  Man-Friday underclass,  to keep  up
appearances. Under the gaze of stone lions he chased  pigeons,  shouting: 'I
swear, Spoono, back home these fatties wouldn't last one day; let's take one
home for dinner.'  Chamcha's Englished soul  cringed  for  shame. Later,  in
Covent Garden, he described for Gibreel's benefit  the day the old fruit and
vegetable  market moved  to Nine Elms. The authorities,  worried about rats,
had sealed  the sewers and killed  tens  of  thousands;  but  hundreds  more
survived. 'That  day, starving  rats swarmed  out on  to  the pavements,' he
recalled. 'All the way down the Strand and over Waterloo  Bridge, in and out
of  the shops, desperate  for food.' Gibreel snorted. 'Now I  know this is a
sinking ship,' he cried, and Chamcha  felt furious  at  having given him the
opening. 'Even the bloody rats are off And, after a pause: 'What they needed
was a pied piper, no? Leading them to destruction with a tune.'
     When  he wasn't insulting the  English or describing  Allie's body from
the  roots  of her hair to  the soft triangle of'the love-place, the goddamn
yoni,' he seemed to wish  to make  lists: what were  Spoono's  ten favourite
books,  he  wanted to  know; also movies,  female  film stars, food. Chamcha
offered conventional cosmopolitan answers. His movie-list included 

Potemkin,
Kane,  Otto e Mezzo,  The  Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador.

'You've  been  brainwashed,'  Gibreel  scoffed. 'All this  Western art-house
crap.' His top ten of everything came from 'back home', and was aggressively
lowbrow. 

Mother India, Mr. India, Shree  Charsawbees:

 no Ray, no Mrinal Sen,
no Aravindan  or  Ghatak. 'Your head's so full of junk,' he advised Saladin,
'you forgot everything worth knowing.'
     His mounting  excitement, his babbling  determination to turn the world
into  a cluster  of  hit parades, his fierce walking  pace  -they must  have
walked twenty miles by the end  of their travels -suggested  to Chamcha that
it wouldn't take much, now, to push him over the edge. 

It seems I turned out
to  be a confidence man, too, Mimi. The art  of the assassin is  to draw the
victim close;  makes  him  easier  to  knife.

  Tm  getting hungry,'  Gibreel
imperiously announced. 'Take me to one of your top-ten eateries.'
     In  the taxicab, Gibreel needled  Chamcha, who  had not informed him of
the destination.  'Some Frenchy joint, na?  Or Japanese, with raw fishes and
octopuses. God, why I trust your taste.'
     They arrived at the Shaandaar Cafe.
     Jumpy wasn't there.
     Nor, apparently,  had Mishal Sufyan patched  things up with her mother;
Mishal  and  Hanif  were  absent, and  neither Anahita nor  her mother  gave
Chamcha a greeting that  could  be described as warm.  Only  Haji Sufyan was
welcoming: 'Come, come, sit; you're looking good.' The cafe was oddly empty,
and even Gibreel's presence failed to create much of a stir. It took Chamcha
a few seconds  to understand what was up; then  he saw the quartet  of white
youths sitting at a corner table, spoiling for a fight.
     The  young Bengali waiter  (whom Hind  had been obliged to employ after
her elder daughter's departure) came over and took their order - aubergines,
sikh  kababs,  rice  -  while  staring  angrily  in  the  direction  of  the
troublesome quartet, who were,  as Saladin now perceived, very drunk indeed.
The waiter, Amin, was  as annoyed with Sufyan  as the drunks.  'Should never
have let them sit,' he mumbled  to Chamcha and Gibreel. 'Now I'm  obliged to
serve. It's okay for the seth; he's not the front line, see.'
     The drunks got their food at the same time as Chamcha and Gibreel. When
they started complaining  about the cooking, the atmosphere in the room grew
even  more  highly charged.  Finally they stood up. 'We're  not eating  this
shit, you cunts,' yelled the leader, a tiny, runty fellow with sandy hair, a
pale  thin face, and spots.  'It's 

shit.

 You can go fuck yourselves, fucking
cunts.'  His  three companions,  giggling and  swearing, left the  cafe. The
leader lingered  for a moment.  'Enjoying your food?' he screamed at Chamcha
and  Gibreel.  'It's fucking  shit.  Is that what  you eat at  home, is  it?
Cunts.' Gibreel was wearing an expression that said, loud and clear: so this
is  what the British, that  great nation  of conquerors, have become  in the
end.  He did not respond. The  little rat-faced speaker came over. 'I  asked
you a fucking  question,' he  said. 'I said.  Are you fucking enjoying  your
fucking 

shit dinner?'

 And Saladin Chamcha, perhaps out of his annoyance that
Gibreel had not been  confronted by  the man he'd all  but killed - catching
him off guard from  behind, the coward's  way - found himself answering: 'We
would  be, if it wasn't for you.' Ratboy, swaying on his feet, digested this
information; and then did a very surprising thing. Taking a deep breath,  he
drew himself  up to his full five  foot five;  then leaned forward, and spat
violently and copiously all over the food.
     'Baba,  if  that's in  your  top ten,' Gibreel  said  in the taxi home,
'don't take me to the places you don't like so much.'
     '"Minnamin, Gut mag  alkan, Pern dirstan,'" Chamcha replied. 'It means,
"My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty." Nabokov.'
     'Him again,' Gibreel complained. 'What bloody language?'
     'He made it up. It's what Kinbote's Zemblan nurse tells him as a child.
In 

Pale Fire.'


'Perndirstan,'

  Farishta repeated. 'Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe.
I  give  up, anyway.  How are  you supposed to  read a  man who writes in  a
made-up lingo of his own?'
     They were almost back at Allie's flat overlooking Brickhall Fields. The
playwright  Strindberg,'  Chamcha  said,  absently,  as  if  following  some
profound train of thought, 'after two unhappy marriages, wedded a famous and
lovely twenty-year-old actress called Harriet Bosse. In the 

Dream

 she was  a
great Puck. He wrote for her, too: the part of Eleanora in 

Easter.

 An "angel
of peace". The young men went crazy for her, and Strindberg, well, he got so
jealous he almost lost his mind. He tried to keep her locked up at home, far
from the eyes of men. She wanted to travel; he brought her  travel books. It
was like the old  Cliff Richard song: 

Gonna lock her up in a trunk/so no big
hunk/can steal her away from me.'

     Farishta's heavy head nodded in recognition. He had fallen  into a kind
of reverie.  'What happened?' he inquired as they reached their destination.
'She  left  him,'  Chamcha  innocently  declared.  'She said she  could  not
reconcile him with the human race.
     Alleluia  Cone read,  as she walked  home from  the  Tube, her mother's
deliriously happy letter from Stanford, Calif. 'If people tell you happiness
is unattainable,'  Alicja wrote in large, looping, back-leaning, left-handed
letters, 'kindly point them in my direction. I'll put them straight. I found
it twice, the first time with your father, as you know, the second with this
kind, broad man whose face is the exact colour of  the oranges that grow all
over these parts.  Contentment,  Allie. It beats excitement.  Try it, you'll
like it.' When she looked up, Allie saw Maurice Wilson's ghost sitting  atop
a large  copper beech-tree  in his usual  woollen  attire  - tam-o'-shanter,
diamond-pattern   Pringle   jersey,   plus-fours   -  looking  uncomfortably
overdressed in  the  heat. 'I've no time for you now,' she told him,  and he
shrugged.  

I can wait.

 Her feet were bad again. She set her  jaw and marched
on.
     Saladin  Chamcha, concealed behind  the  very copper  beech  from which
Maurice Wilson's  ghost  was  surveying  Allie's painful progress,  observed
Gibreel Farishta bursting out of the  front  door of the  block of  flats in
which  he'd  been  waiting impatiently for her return; observed him red-eyed
and raving. The demons of jealousy were sitting on his shoulders, and he was
screaming   out   the   same   old   song,   wherethehell   whothe   whatthe
dontthinkyoucanpullthewool  howdareyou  bitchbitchbitch.  It  appeared  that
Strindberg had succeeded where Jumpy (because absent) had failed.
     The  watcher  in the upper branches dematerialized; the other,  with  a
satisfied nod, strolled away down an avenue of shady, spreading trees.
     The  telephone calls which  now began  to be  received,  first at their
London  residence  and  subsequently at  a  remote  address in  Dumfries and
Galloway, by both Allie and Gibreel, were not too frequent; then again, they
could  not be  termed  infrequent.  Nor were there  too  many  voices  to be
plausible; then again, there were quite enough. These were  not brief calls,
such as those made  by heavy  breathers and other abusers of  the  telephone
network, but, conversely, they  never  lasted  long  enough for the  police,
eavesdropping, to  track them to  their source.  Nor did the whole unsavoury
episode last very  long -  a mere matter of  three and a half  weeks,  after
which the callers desisted  forever; but it might also be mentioned that  it
went on  exactly  as long as  it  needed to, that  is, until it  had  driven
Gibreel Farishta to do to  Allie Cone what he had previously done to Saladin
- namely, the Unforgivable Thing.
     It  should be  said that nobody, not Allie,  not  Gibreel, not even the
professional  phone-tappers  they brought in, ever  suspected  the  calls of
being a single  man's work; but for Saladin Chamcha, once renowned (if  only
in somewhat specialist circles) as  the Man of  a  Thousand  Voices,  such a
deception was a simple  matter, entirely lacking in effort or risk.  In all,
he was obliged to select (from his thousand  voices and a voice)  a total of
no more than thirty-nine.
     When Allie answered, she heard unknown  men  murmuring intimate secrets
in her ear, strangers who  seemed to  know her body's  most remote recesses,
faceless  beings  who gave evidence  of  having learned, by experience,  her
choicest preferences among  the myriad forms  of love; and once the attempts
at  tracing the  calls had begun  her humiliation grew,  because now she was
unable simply to replace the  receiver, but  had to stand and listen, hot in
the  face and  cold along the  spine,  making  attempts (which didn't  work)
actually to prolong the calls.
     Gibreel  also  got his  share  of  voices: superb  Byronic  aristocrats
boasting of  having  'conquered Everest',  sneering  guttersnipes,  unctuous
best-friend voices mingling  warning and mock-commiseration, 

a  word to  the
wise,  how  stupid  can  you, don't you  know  yet  what  she's, anything in
trousers, you poor moron,  take it from a pal.

 But one voice stood  out from
the rest, the  high soulful voice of a poet, one of the first voices Gibreel
heard  and the  one  that  got deepest under  his skin;  a  voice that spoke
exclusively in  rhyme, reciting doggerel verses of  an understated  naivety,
even innocence, which contrasted so greatly with the masturbatory coarseness
of  most  of the other callers that Gibreel soon came to think of it as  the
most insidiously menacing of all.
     

I like coffee, I like tea,


I like things you do with me.


Tell her that,

 the voice swooned, and rang off. Another day it returned
with another jingle:
     

I like butter, I like toast,
     You're the one I love the most.


Give  her that message, too; if  you'd  be so kind.

 There was something
demonic,  Gibreel  decided,  something  profoundly  immoral  about  cloaking
corruption in this greetings-card tum-ti-tum.
     Rosy 

apple, lemon tart,
     Here's the name of my sweetheart.


A  ...  l  ...  l ...

 Gibreel,  in disgust  and fear,  banged down  the
receiver;  and trembled. After  that  the versifier stopped  calling  for  a
while;  but his was the  voice Gibreel  started  waiting  for, dreading  its
reappearance,   having  perhaps   accepted,   at  some   level  deeper  than
consciousness, that this infernal, childlike evil was what would finish  him
off for good.
     But O how easy it all turned out to be! How comfortably  evil lodged in
those supple, infinitely flexible vocal cords, those puppetmaster's strings!
How surely  it  stepped out  along the high wires of  the telephone  system,
poised as  a  barefoot  acrobat;  how  confidently  it entered the  victims'
presence, as certain of its effect as a handsome man in a perfectly tailored
suit! And how carefully it bided its time, sending forth every voice but the
voice  that  would  deliver  the  coup  de  grace  - for  Saladin, too,  had
understood the doggerel's special potency - deep voices and squeaky  voices,
slow ones, quick ones,  sad and cheerful, aggression-laden  and shy. One  by
one, they dripped into Gibreel's ears, weakening his hold on the real world,
drawing him  little  by  little into their  deceitful web, so that little by
little  their obscene,  invented  women began to coat the  real woman like a
viscous, green film, and in  spite of his protestations to  the  contrary he
started  slipping  away from her; and then it was time for the return of the
little, satanic verses that made him mad.
     Roses 

are red, violets are blue,
     Sugar never tasted sweet as you.


Pass it on.

 He returned as innocent  as ever, giving birth to a turmoil
of  butterflies in Gibreel's knotting  stomach.  After  that the rhymes came
thick and fast. They could have the smuttiness of the school playground:
     

When she's down at Waterloo
     She don't wear no yes she do
     When she's up at Leicester Square
     She don't wear no underwear;

     or, once or twice, the rhythm of a cheerleader's chant.
     

Knickerknacker, firecracker,
     Sis! Boom! Bah!
     Alleluia! Alleluia!
     Rah! Rah! Rah!

     And lastly, when they had returned to London, and Allie  was  absent at
the ceremonial opening of a freezer food mart in Hounslow, the last rhyme.
     

Violets are blue, roses are red,
     I've got her right here in my bed.


Goodbye, sucker.

     Dialling tone.
     Alleluia Cone  returned  to  find Gibreel  gone, and in the  vandalized
silence of her apartment she  determined that this time she would  not  have
him  back, no matter in  what  sorry  condition or  how wheedlingly  he came
crawling  to her, pleading for forgiveness and for  love;  because before he
left he  had wrought a terrible  vengeance upon her, destroying every one of
the  surrogate Himalayas  she  had  collected  over  the years,  thawing the
ice-Everest she kept in her freezer, pulling  down and ripping to shreds the
parachute-silk peaks that  rose above her bed,  and  hacking to pieces (he'd
used  the  small axe she  kept with  the  fire  extinguisher  in  the  broom
cupboard)  the  priceless whittled  memento  of her conquest of Chomolungma,
given her  by Pemba the shcrpa, as a  warning as well as a commemoration. 

To
All Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again.

     She flung open  sash windows and screamed abuse at the  innocent Fields
beneath. 'Die slowly! Burn in hell!'
     Then, weeping, she rang Saladin Chamcha to tell him the bad news.
     Mr.  John Maslama, owner of  the Hot Wax nightclub, the record chain of
the same name,  and of 'Fair Winds', the legendary store where you could get
yourself the finest horns - clarinets, saxophones, trombones - that a person
could find to blow in the whole of London town, was a busy  man, so he would
always ascribe to  the  intervention  of  Divine Providence the happy chance
that caused him to be present in the trumpet store when the Archangel of God
walked in  with  thunder  and lightning sitting like laurels upon  his noble
brow.  Being  a  practical businessman,  Mr. Maslama  had up to  this  point
concealed from his employees his extracurricular work as the chief herald of
the  returned  Celestial  and Semi-Godlike  Being, sticking  posters  in his
shop-windows only when he was sure he was unobserved, neglecting to sign the
display advertisements he bought in newspapers and magazines at considerable
personal expense, proclaiming the imminent Glory of the Coming of  the Lord.
He  issued  press  releases through  a public relations  subsidiary  of  the
Valance agency, asking  that his  own anonymity  be guarded carefully.  'Our
client  is  in  a position to state,' these releases - which enjoyed,  for a
time, an amused vogue among Fleet  Street diarists -  cryptically announced,
'that his eyes have seen the Glory referred to above. Gibreel is among us at
this  moment,  somewhere in the inner  city of London - probably  in Camden,
Brickhall,  Tower Hamlets  or  Hackney -  and  he will  reveal himself soon,
perhaps  within days or weeks.' - All of this was obscure to the three tall,
languid, male attendants in the  Fair Winds store (Maslama refused to employ
women  sales assistants here; 'my  motto,'  he was fond of saying, 'is  that
nobody  trusts a female to help him with his horn'); which was why  none  of
them  could  believe  their eyes  when  their  hard-nosed employer  suddenly
underwent a  complete change of  personality, and rushed over to  this wild,
unshaven  stranger as  if he were God Almighty  - with  his  two-tone patent
leather  shoes,  Armani suit  and  slicked  down Robert de  Niro  hair above
proliferating  eyebrows, Maslama  didn't look the  crawling type, but that's
what he was 

doing,

 all right, on his goddamn 

belly,

 pushing his staff aside,
I'll 

attend to the gentleman myself,

 bowing and scraping, walking backwards,
would you  believe? -Anyway, the stranger had  this 

fat money-belt

 under his
shirt and started hauling out numbers of high-denomination notes; he pointed
at a trumpet on a  high shelf, 

that's the one,

 just like that, hardly looked
at    it,    and    Mr.    Maslama     was    up    the    ladder    

pronto,

I'll-get-it-I-said-I'll-gef-it, and now the truly  amazing part, he tried to
refuse  payment, Maslama!, it was no  no 

sir

 no charge 

sir,

 but the stranger
paid anyway, stuffing the notes into Maslama's upper jacket-pocket as  if he
were some sort 

of bellhop,

 you had to be there, and last of all the customer
turns to the whole  store and yells  at the top of his voice, 

I am the right
hand  of God. -

 Straight up,  you wouldn't  credit  it,  the  bloody day  of
judgment was at hand. - Maslama was right out of it after that,  well shaken
he was, he actually fell  to his actual 

knees, -

  Then the stranger held the
trumpet up  over his head and  shouted 

I name this trumpet Azraeel, the Last
Trump,  the Exterminator of  Men! -

 and  we  just stood  there, I tell  you,
turned  to  stone,  because  all  around  the  fucking  insane,  

certifiable

bastard's head there was this bright  

glow,

 you know?, streaming  out, like,
from a point behind his head.
     A halo.
     

Say what  you  like,

 the  three shop-attendants  afterwards repeated to
anyone who would listen, 

say what you like, but we saw what we saw.


     he  death of  Dr Uhuru  Simba,  formerly  Sylvester  Roberts,  while in
custody  awaiting trial,  was  described  by  the  Brickhall  constabulary's
community  liaison  officer,  a  certain  Inspector  Stephen  Kinch,  as  'a
million-to-one  shot'. It appeared that  Dr  Simba had  been  experiencing a
nightmare so terrifying that it had  caused him to  scream piercingly in his
sleep, attracting  the immediate  attention of  the two duty officers. These
gentlemen,  rushing to his cell,  arrived in  time to see the still-sleeping
form  of the  gigantic man literally  lift  off  its bunk  under the  malign
influence of  the  dream and plunge to the  floor. A loud snap was heard  by
both officers; it was the sound of Dr Uhuru Simba's neck breaking. Death had
been instantaneous.
     The  dead man's  minuscule  mother, Antoinette  Roberts, standing  in a
cheap black  hat and dress on the back of  her younger son's pick-up  truck,
the veil  of  mourning pushed defiantly back off her face,  was not  slow to
seize  upon  Inspector  Kinch's  words and hurl  them  back into his florid,
loose-chinned,  impotent face, whose hangdog expression  bore witness to the
humiliation of being referred to by his brother officers as 

niggerjimmy

 and,
worse, 

mushroom,

 meaning that he was  kept permanently in the dark, and from
time to time - for example in the present regrettable circumstances - people
threw  shit all over him. 'I want you to understand,'  Mrs Roberts declaimed
to  the  sizeable  crowd that had gathered angrily outside  the High  Street
police  station, 'that these  people  are gambling  with our lives. They are
laying odds on our chances of survival. I want you all to consider what that
means in terms of their respect for us  as human beings.' And Hanif Johnson,
as  Uhuru  Simba's  solicitor,  added  his  own  clarification  from Walcott
Roberts's pick-up truck, pointing out that his client's alleged fatal plunge
had  been from  the lower  of the two bunks in  his cell; that  in an age of
extreme  overcrowding in  the country's lock-ups it was  unusual, to say the
least, that the other bunk should have been unoccupied,  ensuring that there
were  no  witnesses to the  death except for  prison  officers; and  that  a
nightmare was by no means the only possible explanation for the screams of a
black  man in  the  hands  of the custodial authorities.  In his  concluding
remarks, afterwards  termed 'inflammatory and unprofessional'  by  Inspector
Kinch, Hanif linked the community liaison officer's  words to those  of  the
notorious  racist John Kingsley Read,  who  had once responded to news of  a
black man's  death with the slogan, 'One down; one million to go.' The crowd
murmured  and  bubbled; it was a hot and malicious day. 'Stay hot,'  Simba's
brother Walcott cried out to the assembly. 'Don't anybody cool off. Maintain
your rage.'
     As  Simba had in effect already been tried and convicted in what he had
once  called the 'rainbow press - red as rags, yellow as  streaks,  blue  as
movies, green as slime', his end struck  many white people as rough justice,
a murderous monster's  retributive  fall. But in another court,  silent  and
black,  he  had  received an entirely  more  favourable judgment,  and these
differing estimations of the deceased moved, in the aftermath of  his death,
on to the  city  streets, and fermented in the  unending  tropical heat. The
'rainbow  press'  was full of  Simba's support for Qazhafi, Kho-meini, Louis
Farrakhan;  while   in  the  streets  of  Brickhall,  young  men  and  women
maintained,  and fanned,  the slow flame of their anger, a shadow-flame, but
one capable of blotting out the light.
     Two nights later, behind the Charringtons Brewery in Tower Hamlets, the
'Granny Ripper' struck  again. And the  night after that, an old  woman  was
murdered near  the  adventure playground  in  Victoria  Park, Hackney;  once
again, the Ripper's  hideous  'signature'  - the ritual arrangement  of  the
internal  organs around  the victim's body, whose  precise configuration had
never been made  public - had been added to the crime. When Inspector Kinch,
looking somewhat ragged at the edges, appeared on television to propound the
extraordinary  theory  that a 'copycat killer' had  somehow  discovered  the
trademark  which  had been so  carefully  concealed  for  so  long, and  had
therefore taken up the  mantle which  the late Uhuru Simba  had let  drop, -
then the  Commissioner of  Police also  deemed it wise,  as  a precautionary
measure, to quadruple the  police presence  on the streets of Brickhall, and
to  hold such large numbers of police in reserve that it proved necessary to
cancel  the  capital's  football  programme for the weekend. And,  in truth,
tempers were fraying all over Uhuru Simba's old  patch; Hanif Johnson issued
a  statement   to  the  effect  that  the  increased   police  presence  was
'provocative and incendiary', and at the Shaandaar and the Pagal Khana there
began  to assemble groups of young blacks  and Asians determined to confront
the  cruising panda cars. At the Hot Wax, the effigy chosen for 

meltdown

 was
none  other than  the  perspiring and  already  deliquescent  figure of  the
community  liaison  officer. And the temperature  continued,  inexorably, to
rise.
     Violent incidents began  to  occur  more frequently:  attacks on  black
families on council estates, harassment  of  black  school-children on their
way home, brawls in pubs. At the Pagal Khana a rat-faced  youth and three of
his cronies spat over many people's food; as a result of the ensuing  affray
three Bengali waiters  were charged with  assault  and the causing of actual
bodily  harm; the expectorating quartet  was not, however, detained. Stories
of police brutality, of black  youths hauled swiftly into unmarked  cars and
vans  belonging  to  the  special  patrol  groups  and  flung  out,  equally
discreetly, covered in cuts and bruises, spread throughout the  communities.
Self-defence  patrols  of  young  Sikh,  Bengali and  Afro-Caribbean males -
described by their political opponents as 

vigilante groups  -

 began  to roam
the borough, on foot and in old Ford Zodiacs and Cortinas, determined not to
'take  it lying down'. Hanif Johnson told his  live-in lover, Mishal Sufyan,
that  in  his  opinion one more Ripper killing  would  light the fuse. 'That
killer's not just crowing about being  free,' he said. 'He's  laughing about
Simba's death as well, and that's what the people can't stomach.'
     Down  these  simmering  streets,  one  unseasonally  humid night,  came
Gibreel Farishta, blowing his golden horn.
     At eight o'clock  that evening,  a  Saturday, Pamela Chamcha stood with
Jumpy  Joshi - who  had refused  to let her go  unaccompanied - next  to the
Photo-Me  machine  in  a corner  of  the  main  concourse of Euston station,
feeling ridiculously  conspiratorial. At eight-fifteen she was approached by
a wiry young man  who seemed  taller than she remembered  him; following him
without  a  word, she and Jumpy got into his battered blue pick-up truck and
were  driven to a tiny flat  above an off-licence  in Railton Road, Brixton,
where Walcott  Roberts introduced them to  his mother, Antoinette. The three
men whom Pamela afterwards thought of as Haitians for what she recognized to
be stereotypical reasons were not introduced. 'Have a glass of ginger wine,'
Antoinette Roberts commanded. 'Good for the baby, too.'
     When  Walcott had  done the  honours Mrs.  Roberts, looking lost  in  a
voluminous   and   threadbare   armchair   (her   surprisingly  pale   legs,
matchstick-thin, emerging from beneath her  black  dress to end in mutinous,
pink ankle-socks and sensible lace-ups, failed by some distance to reach the
floor),  got to business. 'These gentlemen  were colleagues of  my boy,' she
said. 'It turns out that the probable reason for his murder was  the work he
was doing  on a subject  which  I  am told is also of  interest to  you.  We
believe the  time has come to work  more formally, through the  channels you
represent.'  Here one of the  three  silent 'Haitians' handed  Pamela  a red
plastic briefcase. 'It contains,' Mrs. Roberts  mildly explained, 'extensive
evidence of  the existence of  witches'  covens  throughout the Metropolitan
Police.'
     Walcott stood up. 'We should go now,' he said  firmly. 'Please.' Pamela
and  Jumpy  rose. Mrs. Roberts nodded vaguely, absently, cracking the joints
of her loose-skinned hands. 'Goodbye,' Pamela said, and offered conventional
regrets. 'Girl,  don't waste breath,'  Mrs. Roberts broke  in. 'Just nail me
those warlocks. Nail them through the 

heart.'

     Walcott Roberts dropped them in Notting Hill at ten. Jumpy was coughing
badly and complaining of the pains in the head that had recurred a number of
times since his injuries  at Shepperton,  but when Pamela admitted  to being
nervous  at possessing  the  only  copy of  the  explosive documents  in the
plastic briefcase,  Jumpy once again  insisted  on  accompanying her  to the
Brickhall community relations council's  offices, where she  planned to make
photocopies to distribute to a  number of trusted friends and colleagues. So
it  was that at ten-fifteen they  were in Pamela's beloved  MG, heading east
across  the city, into the gathering storm.  An old, blue Mercedes panel van
followed them,  as it had followed Walcott's pick-up truck; that is, without
being noticed.
     Fifteen  minutes  earlier, a patrol  group  of seven  large young Sikhs
jammed into a  Vauxhall Cavalier had been driving over  the  Malaya Crescent
canal bridge in southern Brickhall. Hearing a cry from the towpath under the
bridge, and  hurrying to the scene,  they found a bland, pale man of  medium
height and build, fair hair flopping forward over hazel eyes, leaping to his
feet, scalpel in hand, and rushing away from  the body of an old woman whose
blue wig  had fallen off and lay floating like a jellyfish in the canal. The
young Sikhs easily caught up with and overpowered the running man.
     By eleven pm the news  of  the  mass murderer's  capture had penetrated
every cranny of the borough,  accompanied by  a slew  of rumours: the police
had  been reluctant  to  charge  the  maniac, the patrol  members  had  been
detained  for questioning,  a cover-up was  being  planned. Crowds began  to
gather on street corners, and as the  pubs emptied a series of  fights broke
out.  There  was  some  damage  to property: three  cars  had their  windows
smashed, a video store was  looted, a few bricks were thrown. It was at this
point,  at  half-past  eleven  on  a Saturday  night,  with  the  clubs  and
dance-halls beginning to yield up their excited, highly charged populations,
that the divisional  superintendent of police, in  consultation  with higher
authority, declared that riot conditions  now  existed in central Brickhall,
and  unleashed  the  full  might  of  the  Metropolitan  Police against  the
'rioters'.
     Also at  this  point,  Saladin Chamcha, who had been dining  with Allie
Cone at  her apartment overlooking Brickhall Fields, keeping up appearances,
sympathizing,  murmuring encouraging insincerities, emerged into the  night;
found  a 

testudo

 of helmeted men with  plastic shields  at the  ready moving
towards him  across  the Fields at  a steady, inexorable trot; witnessed the
arrival overhead of giant, locust-swarming helicopters  from which light was
falling like heavy rain;  saw the advance of the water cannons; and, obeying
an irresistible primal reflex, turned tail and ran,  not knowing that he was
going the wrong way, running full speed in the direction of the Shaandaar.
     Television cameras arrive just in time for the raid on Club Hot Wax.
     This is  what a television camera sees: less gifted than the human eye,
its night  vision  is limited  to what klieg lights will  show. A helicopter
hovers  over the nightclub,  urinating  light in  long golden  streams;  the
camera understands  this image. The machine of state bearing  down  upon its
enemies. - And now there's a camera in the sky; a news editor somewhere  has
sanctioned  the  cost of aerial  photography, and from another  helicopter a
news  team  is  

shooting down.

 No  attempt is  made to chase this helicopter
away.  The  noise  of rotor blades  drowns  the noise of  the crowd. In this
respect, again,  video recording equipment is less  sensitive than, in  this
case, the human ear.
     -  Cut.  -  A man  lit  by  a sun-gun speaks rapidly into a microphone.
Behind him there is a disorderment of  shadows. But between the reporter and
the  disordered  shadow-lands there stands  a  wall: men  in  riot  helmets,
carrying  shields. The reporter speaks  gravely; petrolbombs  plasticbullets
policeinjuries water-cannon looting, confining himself, of course, to facts.
But the camera sees what he does not say. A camera  is a thing easily broken
or  purloined; its  fragility makes  it fastidious.  A  camera requires law,
order, the thin blue line. Seeking to preserve itself, it remains behind the
shielding wall,  observing  the shadow-lands  from afar, and  of course from
above: that is, it chooses sides.
     - Cut. -  Sun-guns illuminate a  new  face, saggy-jowled, flushed. This
face is named:  sub-titled words appear across his  tunic. 

Inspector Stephen
Kinch.

  The camera sees him for what he is: a good man in an impossible job.
A father, a man who likes his  pint.  He speaks: cannot-tolerate-no-go-areas
better-pro-tection-required-for-policemen
see-the-plastic-riot-shields-catching-fire  .  He refers to organized crime,
political agitators, bomb-factories, drugs.  'We  understand  some  of these
kids  may  feel they have  grievances  but we  will  not and  cannot  be the
whipping boys of society.' Emboldened by the lights and the patient,  silent
lenses,  he goes  further. These  kids don't  know  how  lucky  they are, he
suggests.  They  should  consult  their  kith  and  kin.  Africa, Asia,  the
Caribbean: now those  are places with real problems. Those are places  where
people  might have  grievances  worth respecting. Things aren't so bad here,
not by a  long  chalk;  no slaughters here, no torture,  no military  coups.
People should value what they've  got before they lose it. Ours always was a
peaceful  land,  he  says. Our  industrious  island race.  - Behind him, the
camera sees stretchers,  ambulances, pain. - It sees strange humanoid shapes
being hauled  up  from the  bowels of the  Club Hot Wax, and  recognizes the
effigies of the mighty. Inspector Kinch explains. They  cook them in an oven
down there, they call it fun, I wouldn't call  it  that myself. - The camera
observes the wax models with distaste. - Is there not something 

witchy

 about
them,  something cannibalistic, an  unwholesome smell? Have 

black arts

  been
practised here? - The camera sees broken windows. It sees something  burning
in the middle distance: a car, a shop. It cannot understand, or demonstrate,
what any of this achieves. These people are burning their own streets.
     - Cut. -  Here  is  a brightly lit video store.  Several sets have been
left on in the windows;  the camera, most delirious  of narcissists, watches
TV,  creating,  for an instant, an  infinite  recession of  television sets,
diminishing to a  point. - Cut. -  Here is a serious head bathed in light: a
studio discussion.  The head  is talking  about 

outlaws.

 Billy  the Kid, Ned
Kelly:  these  were  men  who  stood   

for

  as   well  as  

against.

   Modern
mass-murderers,  lacking  this heroic dimension,  are  no  more  than  sick,
damaged  beings,  utterly blank as personalities, their crimes distinguished
by  an attention to procedure, to methodology - let's say  

ritual  -

 driven,
perhaps, by  the nonentity's longing to  be noticed, to rise out of the ruck
and become, for a moment, a star. - Or by a kind of transposed deathwish: to
kill the beloved  and so  destroy the self. - 

Which  is the Granny Ripper?

 a
questioner asks. 

And what about Jack?  -

 The  true outlaw, the head insists,
is  a dark mirror-image of  the hero. - 

These  rioters,  perhaps?

  comes the
challenge. 

Aren't you in danger of glamorizing, of legitimizing'? -

 The head
shakes, laments the materialism of modern youth. Looting video stores is not
what the head has been talking about. - 

But what about the old-timers, then?
Butch Cassidy,  the James brothers, Captain Moonlight,  the Kelly gang. They
all robbed - did they not? - banks. -

  Cut. - Later that  night, the  camera
will return to this shop-window. The television sets will be missing.
     -  From the air,  the camera watches the  entrance to Club Hot Wax. Now
the police have finished  with wax effigies  and are bringing out real human
beings. The camera homes  in on the arrested persons: a  tall  albino man; a
man in an Armani suit, looking like a  dark mirror-image of de Niro; a young
girl  of -what?  -  fourteen,  fifteen? -  a sullen young  man of twenty  or
thereabouts. No names are titled;  the camera  does not  know  these  faces.
Gradually, however, 

the facts

 emerge. The club DJ,  Sewsunker Ram, known  as
'Pinkwalla', and its  proprietor,  Mr. John Maslama, are to  be charged with
running a  large-scale narcotics  operation  -  crack, brown sugar, hashish,
cocaine. The man arrested with them,  an employee at Maslama's  nearby 'Fair
Winds' music store, is the registered owner of a van in which an unspecified
quantity of 'hard  drugs'  has been discovered; also numbers  of 'hot' video
recorders.  The young girl's name is  Anahita  Sufyan; she  is under-age, is
said to have been drinking heavily, and, it is hinted, having  sex  with  at
least one  of the three arrested  men.  She is  further reported  to  have a
history of truancy and  association with known criminal types: a delinquent,
clearly.  -  An illuminated journalist will offer  the nation these  titbits
many  hours after the event,  but the news is already  running  wild in  the
streets: Pinkwalla! -  And the 

Wax:

 they smashed the place up - 

totalled

 it!
- Now it's 

war.

     This happens, however - as does a great deal else - in places which the
camera cannot see.
     Gibreel:
     moves as if through a dream, because  after days  of wandering the city
without eating or sleeping, with the  trumpet named Azraeel tucked safely in
a  pocket of his greatcoat, he  no longer recognizes the distinction between
the  waking and  dreaming  states;  - he  understands now  something of what
omnipresence must  be like, because he is moving through  several stories at
once,  there  is  a Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia  Cone, and a
Gibreel hovering over the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching  in
secret over the progress of a pilgrimage to the sea,  waiting for the moment
at  which he will reveal  himself,  and a Gibreel who feels, more powerfully
every day, the will of the adversary, drawing him  ever  closer, leading him
towards their final embrace: the subtle, deceiving adversary, who  has taken
the  face of his friend, of Saladin his truest friend, in order to lull  him
into lowering his guard. And there is  a Gibreel who walks  down the streets
of London, trying to understand the will of God.
     Is he to be the agent of God's wrath?
     Or of his love?
     Is he vengeance or forgiveness? Should the fatal trumpet  remain in his
pocket, or should he take it out and blow?
     (I'm giving him no instructions. I, too, am interested in his choices -
in the  result of his  wrestling match.  Character 

vs.

 destiny: a free-style
bout. Two falls, two submissions or a knockout will decide.)
     Wrestling, through his many  stories, he proceeds. There are times when
he aches  for  her,  Alleluia, her  very  name an  exaltation; but  then  he
remembers the diabolic verses, and turns his thoughts away. The horn in  his
pocket demands to be blown; but  he restrains himself. Now is  not the time.
Searching for clues - 

what is to be done?

 - he stalks the city streets.
     Somewhere he sees a television set  through an evening window. There is
a woman's head on  the screen, a famous 'presenter', being interviewed by an
equally famous,  twinkling Irish 'host'. 

-

 What would be the worst thing you
could imagine? Oh, I think,  I'm sure, it  would be, oh, 

yes:

 to be alone on
Christmas Eve. You'd really have to face yourself, wouldn't you,  you'd look
into  a harsh  mirror  and  ask yourself,  

is this all  there is? -

 Gibreel,
alone,  not  knowing  the  date, walks  on.  In  the  mirror, the  adversary
approaches at the same pace as his own, beckoning, stretching out his arms.
     The city  sends him  messages. Here, it  says, is  where the Dutch king
decided  to live  when he came  over three centuries ago. In those days this
was out of town, a village, set  in green English  fields. But when the King
arrived to set up house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick
buildings  with  Dutch crenellations  rising  against the sky,  so that  his
courtiers  might  have  places  in  which  to  reside.  Not all migrants are
powerless, the still-standing  edifices whisper. They impose their needs  on
their  new  earth, bringing  their  own  coherence  to  the new-found  land,
imagining  it afresh. But look out, the city  warns.  Incoherence, too, must
have its  day. Riding in the parkland in which  he'd chosen to  live 

-

 which
he'd 

civilized

 - William III was thrown by his horse,  fell hard against the
recalcitrant ground, and broke his royal neck.
     Some days  he finds himself among walking corpses, great crowds of  the
dead,  all  of them  refusing to admit they're done for, corpses  mutinously
continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting,
going home to make love, smoking cigarettes. 

But you're  dead,

 he shouts  at
them. 

Zombies,  get  into  your  graves.

 They ignore him, or laugh,  or look
embarrassed, or menace him  with  their fists. He  falls silent, and hurries
on.
     The  city  becomes  vague,  amorphous.  It  is becoming  impossible  to
describe  the world. Pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge,  fade into mists,
emerge.  As does she: Allie, Al-Lat. 

She  is the exalted bird. Greatly to be
desired.

  He remembers now: she told  him, long  ago, about Jumpy's  poetry.

He's trying to make a collection. A book.

 The thumb-sucking artist with  his
infernal views. A  book is a product of  a pact  with the Devil that inverts
the Faustian contract, he'd  told  Allie. Dr  Faustus sacrificed eternity in
return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees  to the  ruination of
his  life,  and gains  (but only if  he's  lucky)  maybe  not  eternity, but
posterity, at least. Either way (this was  Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who
wins.
     What does a poet write? Verses. What jingle-jangles in Gibreel's brain?
Verses. What broke his heart? Verses and again verses.
     The trumpet,  Azraeel, calls out from a greatcoat pocket: 

Pick  me  up!
Yesyesyes:  the Trump. To  hell with it all, the whole sorry mess: just puff
up your cheeks and rooty-toot-toot. Come on, it's party time.

     How hot it  is: steamy, close,  intolerable. This  is no Proper London:
not this  improper  city.  Airstrip One, Mahagonny,  Alphaville.  He wanders
through a confusion  of  languages. Babel:  a  contraction  of  the Assyrian
'babilu'. 'The gate of God.' Babylondon.
     Where's this?
     - Yes.  -  He  meanders,  one  night,  behind  the  cathedrals  of  the
Industrial Revolution, the railway termini of north London. Anonymous King's
Cross,  the bat-like  menace  of the  St Pancras  tower,  the  red-and-black
gas-holders inflating  and deflating like giant iron  lungs. Where  once  in
battle Queen Boudicca fell, Gibreel Farishta wrestles with himself.
     The Goodsway: - but O what succulent goods lounge in doorways and under
tungsten  lamps,  what  delicacies  are  on offer  in  that way!  - Swinging
handbags,  calling out,  silver-skirted, wearing fish-net tights:  these are
not only young  goods (average age thirteen to fifteen) but also cheap. They
have short, identical histories: all have babies stashed away somewhere, all
have  been thrown  out of their homes by irate, puritanical parents, none of
them are  white. Pimps with knives take ninety per cent  of their  earnings.
Goods are only goods, after all, especially when they're trash.
     -  Gibreel Farishta in the  Goodsway is hailed  from shadows and lamps;
and  quickens,  at first,  his  pace.  

What's  this  to do  with  me? Bloody
pussies-galore.

 But then  he slows and stops, hearing something else calling
to him from  lamps and  shadows, some need,  some wordless plea, hidden just
under  the tinny voices of  ten-pound tarts. His  footsteps  slow down, then
halt.  He is  held by their desires.  

For what?

 They  are moving towards him
now, drawn to him like fishes on unseen hooks. As they near  him their walks
change, their hips lose their swagger, their faces start  looking their age,
in spite of all the make-up. When they reach him, they kneel. 

Who do you say
that  I  am?

  he asks, and wants to add:  

I know your  names. I met you once
before, elsewhere,  behind a  curtain.  Twelve of  you then as now.  Ayesha,
Hafsah, Ramlah, Sawdah,  Zainab,  Zainab,  Maimunah, Sofia,  Juwairiyah, Umm
Salamah the  Makhzumite, Rehana the  Jew, and  the beautiful Mary the  Copt.

Silently,  they  remain on their  knees. Their wishes  are made known to him
without words. 

What is an archangel but a puppet? Kathputli, marionette. The
faithful  bend  us to  their  will. We  are forces of  nature and they,  our
masters.  Mistresses, too.

  The heaviness in his limbs, the heat, and in his
ears a buzzing like bees on summer afternoons. It would be easy to faint.
     He does not faint.
     He stands among the kneeling children, waiting for the pimps.
     And when they come, he at last takes out, and presses to  his lips, his
unquiet horn: the exterminator, Azraeel.
     After  the stream  of  fire  has  emerged from the mouth of  his golden
trumpet  and  consumed the  approaching men,  wrapping them in a  cocoon  of
flame, unmaking them so completely that not even their shoes remain sizzling
on the sidewalk, Gibreel understands.
     He is  walking again,  leaving behind him the gratitude  of the whores,
heading in the direction of the borough of  Brickhall, Azraeel once  more in
his capacious pocket. Things are becoming clear.
     He  is  the Archangel  Gibreel, the angel  of the Recitation, with  the
power of revelation in his hands. He  can reach into the breasts of men  and
women, pick out  the desires of their inmost hearts, and make  them real. He
is the quencher of desires, the slaker of lusts, the fulfiller of dreams. He
is the genie of the lamp, and his master is the Roc.
     What desires, what  imperatives are  in the midnight air?  He  breathes
them  in. - And nods, so be it,  yes. - Let it be fire. This  is a city that
has cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground.
     Fire, falling fire.  This is the judgment of God in his wrath,' Gibreel
Farishta proclaims to the riotous night, 'that men  be granted their heart's
desires, and that they be by them consumed.'
     Low-cost high-rise housing  enfolds him. 

Nigger eat  white man's  shit,

suggest the  unoriginal walls.  The  buildings  have  names:  'Isandhlwana',
'Rorke's Drift'.  But a revisionist enterprise  is underway,  for two of the
four towers have been  renamed, and  bear,  now,  the  names  'Mandela'  and
'Toussaint l'Ouverture'.-The towers stand up on stilts, and  in the concrete
formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling  of  a  perpetual
wind, and  the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen  units, deflated  bicycle
tyres, shards of broken  doors, dolls' legs, vegetable refuse extracted from
plastic disposal bags by hungry  cats and  dogs, fast-food  packets, rolling
cans,  shattered  job prospects, abandoned hopes,  lost  illusions, expended
angers, accumulated bitterness, vomited  fear, and a rusting bath. He stands
motionless   while  small   groups  of  residents  rush  past  in  different
directions. Some (not all) are carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All
of  the  groups  contain white  youngsters as well  as  black. He raises his
trumpet to his lips and begins to play.
     Little  buds of  flame  spring  up  on  the  concrete, fuelled  by  the
discarded heaps of possessions  and dreams. There is  a little, rotting pile
of envy: it burns greenly in  the night.  The fires are  every colour of the
rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out
of  his  horn and they  dance upon the concrete, needing neither combustible
materials nor roots. Here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a
silver rose. -And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing
like creepers  up  the  sides of the  towers,  they reach out  towards their
neighbours, forming  hedges of  multicoloured  flame.  It is like watching a
luminous  garden, its growth accelerated many thousands  of  times, a garden
blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable,
a  garden  of dense intertwined chimeras, rivalling in its own  incandescent
fashion  the  thornwood that sprang  up  around  the palace  of the sleeping
beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.
     But  here,  there  is  no  beauty,  sleeping within. There  is  Gibreel
Farishta,  walking in a  world of  fire. In the High  Street  he sees houses
built  of flame, with  walls  of  fire, and  flames like  gathered  curtains
hanging at the windows.  - And there are  men  and  women  with fiery  skins
strolling, running, milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The street
has become red hot,  molten,  a river  the  colour of blood.  - All, all  is
ablaze  as he toots  his merry  horn, 

giving the people  what they want,

 the
hair and teeth of the citizenry are smoking and  red, glass burns, and birds
fly overhead on blazing wings.
     The  adversary  is  very  close.  The  adversary  is  a  magnet,  is  a
whirlpool's  eye,  is  the  irresistible  centre  of  a   black   hole,  his
gravitational  force  creating an event horizon from  which neither Gibreel,
nor light, can escape. 

This way,

 the adversary calls. 

I'm over here.

     Not a  palace,  but only  a  cafe. And in the rooms  above,  a bed  and
breakfast joint. No sleeping princess, but a disappointed woman, overpowered
by smoke, lies unconscious here; and beside her,  on the floor beside  their
bed,   and   likewise   unconscious,   her   husband,   the   Mecca-returned
ex-schoolteacher,  Sufyan.  -While,  elsewhere  in  the  burning  Shaandaar,
faceless persons stand at windows waving piteously  for  help,  being unable
(no mouths) to scream.
     The adversary: there he blows!
     Silhouetted against the backdrop of the ignited Shaandaar
     Cafe, see, that's the very fellow!
     Azraeel leaps unbidden into Farishta's hand.
     Even  an  archangel  may  experience  a  revelation,  and  when Gibreel
catches, for the most fleeting of instants, Saladin Chamcha's eye, - then in
that  fractional  and infinite moment the  veils are ripped  away  from  his
sight, - he sees himself walking with Chamcha in Brickhall Fields, lost in a
rhapsody,  revealing  the  most  intimate  secrets  of  his lovemaking  with
Alleluia  Cone, -  those same secrets which  afterwards were  whispered into
telephones by  a host of evil  voices,  - beneath all of  which Gibreel  now
discerns the unifying  talent of  the adversary, who  could  be guttural and
high, who insulted and ingratiated, who was both  insistent and shy, who was
prosaic, - yes! - and  versifying, too. - And now, at last, Gibreel Farishta
recognizes  for  the  first  time that the adversary  has not simply adopted
Chamcha's  features as  a disguise; - nor  is this  any  case of  paranormal
possession, of body-snatching by  an  invader up from  Hell; that, in short,
the evil is not external to Saladin, but springs from some recess of his own
true nature, that it has been spreading through  his selfhood like a cancer,
erasing  what was  good in him, wiping out his spirit, -  and doing so  with
many deceptive  feints  and dodges, seeming  at times  to  recede; while, in
fact, during the illusion of remission, under  cover  of it, so to speak, it
continued perniciously to spread; - and now, no doubt, it has filled him up;
now there is nothing left of Saladin but this, the dark  fire of evil in his
soul,  consuming  him  as  wholly  as  the  other  fire,  multicoloured  and
engulfing, is devouring the screaming  city.  Truly  these are 'most horrid,
malicious, bloody flames, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire'.
     The fire is an arch across the sky. Saladin Chamcha, the adversary, who
is  also 

Spoono, my old Chumch,

 has disappeared  into  the  doorway  of  the
Shaandaar Cafe. This is the maw of the black hole; the horizon closes around
it, all other possibilities fade, the universe shrinks to  this solitary and
irresistible point.  Blowing a great blast on  his trumpet,  Gibreel plunges
through the open door.
     The building occupied by the Brickhall community  relations council was
a  single-storey  monster  in  purple  brick  with  bulletproof  windows,  a
bunker-like creation of the 1960s, when such lines were considered sleek. It
was  not  an  easy  building  to  enter;  the door had  been fitted  with an
entryphone and opened on to a narrow  alley down  one  side of the  building
which  ended  at a  second,  also security-locked, door.  There  was  also a
burglar alarm.
     This alarm,  it afterwards  transpired, had been switched off, probably
by the two persons, one male, one female, who had effected an entry with the
assistance of a key. It was officially suggested that these persons had been
bent on an act of sabotage,  an  'inside job',  since one of them,  the dead
woman,  had in fact been an employee of the organization whose offices these
were. The reasons for the crime remained obscure, and as the  miscreants had
perished in the blaze, it was unlikely that  they would ever come  to light.
An 'own goal' remained, however, the most probable explanation.
     A tragic affair; the dead woman had been heavily pregnant.
     Inspector  Stephen  Kinch,  issuing the statement in which these  facts
were stated, made a linkage' between the fire at the  Brickhall CRC and that
at the Shaandaar Cafe, where the second dead  person, the  male, had  been a
semi-permanent resident. It  was  possible that  the man  had been the  real
firebug and the  woman, who was his  mistress although married  to and still
cohabiting with another man, had been no more than his dupe.
     Political motives -  both  parties  were  well known for their  radical
views - could not be  discounted, though such was the muddiness of the water
in  the far-left groupuscules they  frequented that it would be hard ever to
get  a clear  picture  of what  such motives might  have  been. It was  also
possible that the two crimes, even if committed by the same man,  could have
had different motivations.  Possibly the man  was simply the hired criminal,
burning  down the  Shaandaar for the  insurance  money at the behest  of the
now-deceased  owners,  and  torching  the  CRC at  the  behest of his lover,
perhaps on account of some intra-office vendetta?
     That  the  burning  of the CRC was  an act  of arson was beyond  doubt.
Quantities of petrol had  been poured  over  desks, papers, curtains.  'Many
people do not understand how quickly a petrol fire spreads,' Inspector Kinch
stated  to  scribbling journalists. The  corpses, which had  been  so  badly
burned that dental records  had  been required for  identification purposes,
had been found in the photocopying room. 'That's all we have.' The end.
     I have more.
     I  have certain questions, anyhow. -  About, for  instance, an unmarked
blue Mercedes panel van, which followed Walcott Roberts's pick-up truck, and
then Pamela Chamcha's MG.  -About the men  who emerged from this  van, their
faces  behind  Hallowe'en masks, and  forced their  way into the CRC offices
just as Pamela unlocked the outer door.  - About what really happened inside
those offices, because purple  brick and bulletproof glass cannot easily  be
penetrated by the human  eye. - And about, finally, the whereabouts of a red
plastic briefcase, and the documents it contains.
     Inspector Kinch? Are you there?
     No. He's gone. He has no answers for me.
     Here is  Mr. Saladin Chamcha,  in the camel coat  with the silk collar,
running down the High Street like some cheap crook. - The same, terrible Mr.
Chamcha  who  has just  spent his  evening in the company  of  a  distraught
Alleluia Cone, without  feeling a flicker of remorse. - 'I look down towards
his feet,' Othello  said of  lago, 'but  that's  a  fable.'  Nor  is Chamcha
fabulous any  more; his humanity is sufficient form and explanation for  his
deed. He has destroyed what  he  is not  and  cannot  be; has taken revenge,
returning  treason  for treason;  and has done so by exploiting  his enemy's
weakness, bruising his unprotected  heel. - There is satisfaction in this. -
Still,  here is Mr. Chamcha, running. The world is full of anger and  event.
Things hang in the balance. A building burns.
     

Boomba,

 pounds his heart. 

Doomba, boomba, dadoom.

     Now he sees the Shaandaar,  on fire;  and comes to a skidding  halt. He
has a constricted chest; - 

badoomba! -

  and there's a  pain in his left arm.
He doesn't notice; is staring at the burning building.
     And sees Gibreel Farishta.
     And turns; and runs inside.
     'Mishal! Sufyan! Hind!' cries evil Mr  Chamcha. The ground floor is not
as  yet  ablaze. He  flings open the  door  to the stairs, and  a  scalding,
pestilential wind  drives him back. 

Dragon's breath,

  he thinks. The landing
is on fire; the flames reach in sheets from floor to ceiling. No possibility
of advance.
     'Anybody?'  screams Saladin Chamcha. 'Is anybody there?' But the dragon
roars louder than he can shout.
     Something  invisible  kicks  him  in  the  chest,  sends  him  toppling
backwards, on to the cafe floor,  amid  the empty  tables.  Doom, sings  his
heart. 

Take this. And this.

     There is  a noise above his head like the scurrying  of a billion rats,
spectral rodents following a ghostly  piper. He looks up: the  ceiling is on
fire. He finds he cannot  stand.  As he watches, a  section of  the  ceiling
detaches itself, and he sees  the  segment of  beam falling towards him.  He
crosses his arms in feeble self-defence.
     The beam pins him to  the floor, breaking both his arms.  His  chest is
full of pain. The world recedes.  Breathing is  hard. He can't  speak. He is
the Man of a Thousand Voices, and there isn't one left.
     Gibreel Farishta, holding Azraeel, enters the Shaandaar Cafe.
     

What happens when you win?


When your  enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise
is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.

     -  'Spoono,'  Gibreel nods at the fallen  man.  'You really  fooled me,
mister; seriously, you're  quite a  guy.'  - And  Chamcha,  seeing what's in
Gibreel's  eyes, cannot deny the knowledge he sees there. 'Wha,' he  begins,
and gives up. 

What are you going to do?

 Fire is falling all around them now:
a sizzle of golden rain. 'Why'd you do it?' Gibreel asks, then dismisses the
question with  a wave of  the hand.  'Damnfool  thing to be asking. Might as
well  inquire,  what possessed  you to rush in here? Damnfool  thing  to do.
People, eh, Spoono? Crazy bastards, that's all.'
     Now  there  are  pools of  fire  all around  them.  Soon  they will  be
encircled,  marooned in a temporary island amid this lethal sea. Chamcha  is
kicked a second time in the chest, and jerks  violently. Facing three deaths
- by fire,  by 'natural causes', and  by  Gibreel  - he strains desperately,
trying to speak, but  only croaks emerge. 'Fa.  Gur. Mmm.'  

Forgive me.

 'Ha.
Pa.' 

Have  pity.

 The cafe  tables are  burning. More beams fall  from above.
Gibreel seems to  have fallen  into a trance. He  repeats,  vaguely: 'Bloody
damnfool things.'
     Is it possible that  evil is never total, that  its  victory, no matter
how overwhelming, is never absolute?
     Consider this fallen man. He sought without remorse to shatter the mind
of a  fellow  human being; and exploited, to do  so, an  entirely  blameless
woman, at  least  partly owing  to his own impossible and voyeuristic desire
for her. Yet this same man has risked  death, with  scarcely any hesitation,
in a foolhardy rescue attempt.
     What does this mean?
     The fire has closed around the two men, and smoke is everywhere. It can
only be a matter of seconds before they are overcome. There are more  urgent
questions to answer than the 

damnfool

 ones above.
     What choice will Farishta make?
     Does he have a choice?
     Gibreel lets fall his trumpet; stoops; frees Saladin from the prison of
the  fallen beam; and  lifts him in his  arms. Chamcha, with broken  ribs as
well as arms, groans feebly, sounding like the creationist Dumsday before he
got a new tongue of choicest rump. 'Ta. La.' 

It's too late.

 A little lick of
fire catches at the hem of his coat. Acrid  black  smoke fills all available
space, creeping behind  his eyes, deafening his  ears, clogging his nose and
lungs. -Now,  however,  Gibreel  Farishta begins softly to  exhale, a  long,
continuous  exhalation of extraordinary duration,  and  as his breath  blows
towards the door it slices  through the smoke and fire  like a knife;  - and
Saladin Chamcha,  gasping and fainting, with a mule inside  his chest, seems
to see  - but will ever afterwards be unsure if  it was truly  so - the fire
parting before them like the red sea it has  become, and the  smoke dividing
also, like a curtain or a veil; until there lies before them a clear pathway
to the  door;  -whereupon Gibreel Farishta  steps  quickly forward,  bearing
Saladin along the path of forgiveness into the hot night  air; so  that on a
night when the city is at war, a night heavy with enmity and  rage, there is
this small redeeming victory for love.
     Conclusions.
     Mishal  Sufyan  is outside the  Shaandaar when they emerge, weeping for
her  parents, being comforted by  Hanif  - It is GibreePs turn to  collapse;
still carrying Saladin, he passes out at Mishal's feet.
     Now Mishal and Hanif are in an ambulance with the two  unconscious men,
and while  Chamcha has an oxygen  mask  over  his  nose and  mouth  Gibreel,
suffering  nothing  worse  than  exhaustion, is  talking  in  his  sleep:  a
delirious  babble about  a magic trumpet  and  the fire that  he  blew, like
music, from its mouth.  - And Mishal, who  remembers Chamcha as a devil, and
has come to accept the  possibility of many things, wonders: 'Do you think -
?' - But Hanif is definite,  firm.  'Not a chance. This is Gibreel Farishta,
the  actor,  don't you  recognize?  Poor guy's just  playing out  some movie
scene.'  Mishal won't  let  it go. 'But, Hanif,' -  and he becomes emphatic.
Speaking  gently,  because  she  has  just  been  orphaned,  after  all,  he
absolutely  insists. 'What  has happened here  in  Brickhall  tonight  is  a
socio-political  phenomenon.  Let's not fall  into  the  trap of  some  damn
mysticism. We're talking about history: an event  in the history of Britain.
About the process of change.'
     At  once  Gibreel's  voice  changes, and his  subject-matter  also.  He
mentions 

pilgrims,

 and a 

dead  baby,

 and 

like in 'The Ten Commandments',

 and
a 

decaying  mansion,

 and  a 

tree;

 because in the aftermath of  the purifying
fire he is dreaming, for the very last time, one of his serial dreams; - and
Hanif says: 'Listen, Mishu, darling. Just make-believe, that's all.' He puts
his arm  around  her,  kisses her cheek, holding her fast. Stay 

with me. The
world is real. We have to live in it; we have to live here, to live on.

     Just then  Gibreel Farishta,  still asleep, shouts  at the  top of  his
voice.
     'Mishal!  Come back! Nothing's happening! Mishal, for pity's sake; turn
around, come back, come back.'
     Vlll
     The
     Parting of the
     Arabian Sea
     It had been the habit of Srinivas the toy merchant to threaten his wife
and children, from time to time, that one day, when  the material  world had
lost its  savour,  he would drop  everything, including  his name,  and turn
sanyasi, wandering from village to village with a  begging bowl and a stick.
Mrs. Srinivas treated these threats tolerantly, knowing  that her gelatinous
and good-humoured husband liked to be thought of as a devout man, but also a
bit  of an adventurer  (had he  not insisted on  that absurd  and scarifying
flight into the Grand Canyon in  Amrika years ago?);  the idea of becoming a
mendicant  holy man  satisfied  both needs.  Yet,  when she  saw  his  ample
posterior so comfortably ensconced  in  an armchair  on  their front  porch,
looking  out at the world  through stout wire netting, - or when she watched
him playing with their youngest daughter, five-year-old Minoo, - or when she
observed   that   his  appetite,  far  from  diminishing   to   begging-bowl
proportions,  was increasing contentedly  with the passing years - then Mrs.
Srinivas  puckered up her lips,  adopted the insouciant expression of a film
beauty (though  she  was  as  plump and  wobbling as  her  spouse) and  went
whistling indoors. As  a result,  when she found his  chair  empty, with his
glass of lime-juice unfinished on one of its arms, it took her completely by
surprise.
     To tell the truth, Srinivas himself could  never properly explain  what
made  him leave  the comfort of his morning porch and stroll across to watch
the arrival  of  the  villagers  of  Titlipur.  The  urchin  boys  who  knew
everything an hour before it happened had  been shouting in the street about
an improbable procession  of  people coming with bags and  baggage down  the
potato  track towards the  grand trunk road, led by a girl with silver hair,
with  great exclamations of butterflies  over their heads, and,  bringing up
the rear, Mirza Saeed Akhtar in his olive-green Mercedes-Benz station wagon,
looking like a mango-stone had got stuck in his throat.
     For all its potato silos and  famous toy factories, Chatnapatna was not
such a big place  that the  arrival of  one hundred and fifty  persons could
pass unnoticed.  Just before the procession arrived Srinivas  had received a
deputation from  his  factory workers, asking  for permission to close  down
operations for a couple of hours so that they could witness the great event.
Knowing  they would probably take  the  time  off anyway, he  agreed. But he
himself remained,  for  a  time, stubbornly planted on his porch, trying  to
pretend that the  butterflies of  excitement  had not  begun to stir  in his
capacious stomach. Later,  he  would confide to  Mishal  Akhtar: 'It  was  a
presentiment.  What  to say? I knew you-all  were not here for  refreshments
only. She had come for me.'
     Titlipur arrived in  Chatnapatna  in a consternation of howling babies,
shouting  children, creaking oldsters, and sour jokes from  the Osman of the
boom-boom bullock for whom Srinivas did not care one jot.  Then  the urchins
informed  the  toy  king  that  among  the  travellers  were  the  wife  and
mother-in-law of  the zamindar Mirza Saeed, and they  were on foot like  the
peasants, wearing  simple kurta-pajamas  and no jewels at all.  This was the
point  at which Srinivas lumbered  over to the roadside canteen around which
the Titlipur  pilgrims were crowding while potato bhurta  and parathas  were
handed round. He arrived at  the same time as the Chatnapatna  police  jeep.
The Inspector  was  standing  on  the  passenger  seat,  shouting  through a
megaphone that  he intended to  take  strong action  against this 'communal'
march  if  it  was  not disbanded at  once. Hindu-Muslim business,  Srinivas
thought; bad, bad.
     The  police  were treating  the  pilgrimage as  some kind of  sectarian
demonstration,  but  when Mirza Saeed  Akhtar stepped  forward and  told the
Inspector  the truth the  officer became confused. Sri Srinivas,  a Brahmin,
was obviously  not  a man  who  had ever  considered making a pilgrimage  to
Mecca, but he was impressed nevertheless. He pushed  up through the crowd to
hear what  the  zamindar was  saying: 'And  it is  the purpose of these good
people to walk to the Arabian Sea, believing as they do that the waters will
part  for  them.'  Mirza  Saeed's  voice sounded  weak,  and  the Inspector,
Chatnapatna's Station Head Officer, was unconvinced. 'Are you serious,  ji?'
Mirza Saeed said: 'Not  me. 

They,

 but,  are serious as hell. I'm planning to
change  their minds  before anything  crazy  happens.' The SHO,  all straps,
moustachioes and self-importance, shook  his head. 'But, see here, sir,  how
can I permit so many individuals to congregate on the street? Tempers can be
inflamed; incident is possible.' Just then the  crowd of pilgrims parted and
Srinivas  saw  for the first  time  the fantastic figure of the girl dressed
entirely in butterflies, with snowy hair  flowing down as far as her ankles.
'Arre  deo,' he  shouted,  'Ayesha, is  it you?'  And added, foolishly: Then
where are my Family Planning dolls?'
     His  outburst  was  ignored;  everybody  was  watching  Ayesha  as  she
approached  the puff-chested SHO. She  said nothing, but smiled and  nodded,
and the fellow seemed to grow twenty years younger, until in the manner of a
boy of  ten or eleven he said, 'Okay okay, mausi.  Sorry,  ma. No offence. I
beg your pardon, please.' That was the end of the police trouble. Later that
day, in the afternoon heat, a group  of town youths known  to  have  RSS and
Vishwa  Hindu   Parishad  connections  began  throwing  stones  from  nearby
rooftops; whereupon the Station Head Officer had  them arrested and  in jail
in two minutes flat.
     'Ayesha,  daughter,' Srinivas  said  aloud to the empty air, 'what  the
hell happened to you?'
     During the heat  of the day the pilgrims rested  in whatever shade they
could  find. Srinivas wandered among them in a kind  of daze, filled up with
emotion, realizing that a great turning-point in his life  had unaccountably
arrived. His eyes kept searching out  the transformed  figure  of Ayesha the
seer, who was resting  in the shade of a pipal-tree in the company of Mishal
Akhtar, her mother  Mrs Qureishi, and the lovesick Osman  with his  bullock.
Eventually Srinivas bumped into the zamindar Mirza Saeed, who was  stretched
out on the back seat  of his  Mercedes-Benz,  unsleeping,  a man in torment.
Srinivas spoke to him with a humbleness born of his wonderment. 'Sethji, you
don't believe in the girl?'
     'Srinivas,'  Mirza Saeed  sat up to reply, 'we are modern men. We know,
for  instance, that old people die on long journeys, that God does  not cure
cancer, and  that oceans do not part. We have to stop this idiocy. Come with
me. Plenty of room in  the car. Maybe you can help to talk  them out of  it;
that Ayesha, she's grateful to you, perhaps she'll listen.'
     'To  come  in the car?' Srinivas felt helpless, as  though mighty hands
were gripping his limbs. 'There is my business, but.'
     'This  is a suicide mission for many of  our people,' Mirza Saeed urged
him. 'I need help. Naturally I could pay.'
     'Money is no object,' Srinivas retreated,  affronted.  'Excuse, please,
Sethji. I must consider.'
     'Don't you  see?'  Mirza Saeed shouted after  him. 'We are not communal
people, you  and I. Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai! We can open  up a  secular front
against this mumbo-jumbo.'
     Srinivas turned back. 'But I am not an unbeliever,' he protested.  'The
picture of goddess Lakshmi is always on my wall.'
     'Wealth is an excellent goddess for a businessman,' Mirza Saeed said.
     'And  in my heart,'  Srinivas added.  Mirza Saeed lost his temper. 'But
goddesses, I swear. Even your own philosophers admit that these are abstract
concepts only. Embodiments of shakti which is itself an abstract notion: the
dynamic power of the gods.'
     The  toy merchant  was looking down at  Ayesha as she  slept  under her
quilt of butterflies. 'I am no  philosopher, Sethji,' he  said.  And did not
say that his heart had leapt into his mouth because he had realized that the
sleeping girl  and  the goddess in  the calendar on his factory wall had the
identical, same-to-same, face.
     When the pilgrimage  left town, Srinivas accompanied it, turning a deaf
ear to the entreaties of his wild-haired wife who picked up  Minoo and shook
her in her husband's face. He explained to Ayesha that while he did not wish
to  visit Mecca he had been seized  by a longing to walk  with her a  while,
perhaps even as far as the sea.
     As he took  his  place among the Titlipur villagers and  fell into step
with the man next to him, he observed with  a mixture of incomprehension and
awe that infinite butterfly swarm over their heads, like a gigantic umbrella
shading the pilgrims from the sun. It was  as if the butterflies of Titlipur
had taken over the functions of the great tree. Next he gave a little cry of
fear,  astonishment   and   pleasure,   because  a  few   dozen   of   those
chameleon-winged creatures had settled on his shoulders and turned, upon the
instant,  the exact shade of scarlet of his shirt. Now he recognized the man
at his side as the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, who had chosen not to walk at the
front. He and his wife  Khadija strode contentedly forward in spite of their
advanced years, and when he saw the lepidopteral blessing that had descended
on the toy merchant, Muhammad Din reached out and grasped him by the hand.
     It was becoming clear  that the rains  would fail. Lines of bony cattle
migrated across the landscape, searching for a drink. 

Love is Water,

 someone
had written in whitewash on the brick wall of a scooter factory. On the road
they  met other families heading south  with their  lives bundled up on  the
backs  of dying  donkeys,  and these,  too, were heading  hopefully  towards
water. 'But  not bloody salt water,' Mirza  Saeed  shouted at  the  Titlipur
pilgrims.  'And not to see it divide itself in two! They want to stay alive,
but you crazies want  to die.' Vultures herded  together by the roadside and
watched the pilgrims pass.
     Mirza Saeed spent the first weeks of the pilgrimage to the Arabian  Sea
in  a state of permanent, hysterical agitation. Most of the walking was done
in the mornings and late afternoons,  and  at  these times Saeed would often
leap  out of his station wagon  to plead with his dying wife. 'Come to  your
senses, Mishu. You're a sick woman. Come and lie down at least, let me press
your feet  a while.' But she refused, and her mother shooed  him away. 'See,
Saeed, you're in such a negative mood, it gets depressing. Go and drink your
Coke-shoke in your AC vehicle and leave us yatris in peace.' After the first
week  the  Air Conditioned vehicle lost its driver.  Mirza Saeed's chauffeur
resigned  and  joined the  foot-pilgrims;  the zamindar was  obliged to  get
behind the  wheel himself. After that, when his anxiety overcame him, it was
necessary to stop the  car, park,  and then rush  madly back and forth among
the  pilgrims, threatening, entreating, offering bribes. At least once a day
he  cursed Ayesha  to her face for ruining his life, but he could never keep
up the abuse because every time he looked at her he desired her so much that
he felt ashamed.  The cancer had  begun  to turn Mishal's skin grey, and Mrs
Qureishi, too, was beginning to fray at the edges; her  society chappals had
disintegrated and she was suffering from frightful foot-blisters that looked
like little  water-balloons. When Saeed  offered her the comfort of the car,
however,  she continued  to refuse  point-blank. The spell  that  Ayesha had
placed upon the pilgrims  was still holding firm. -  And at the end of these
sorties into  the  heart of  the pilgrimage Mirza Saeed,  sweating and giddy
from the heat and his growing  despair, would realize that the  marchers had
left his car  some way  behind,  and  he would have to totter back to it  by
himself, sunk in  gloom. One  day he got back to the station  wagon  to find
that  an  empty coconut-shell thrown  from  the window of a passing  bus had
smashed his  laminated windscreen, which  looked,  now, like  a spider's web
full  of diamond  flies.  He had to knock all the pieces out, and the  glass
diamonds seemed to be mocking him as they fell on  to the  road and into the
car,  they seemed to  speak of the  transience and worthlessness of  earthly
possessions, but  a secular man lives in the world of things and Mirza Saeed
did not intend  to be broken as easily as a windscreen. At night he would go
to lie beside his wife on a bedroll under the stars by the side of the grand
trunk  road.  When  he told  her  about the accident  she offered  him  cold
comfort.  'It's a sign,' she  said. 'Abandon the station wagon  and join the
rest of us at last.'
     'Abandon a Mercedes-Benz?' Saeed yelped in genuine horror.
     'So what?'  Mishal  replied  in  her grey,  exhausted  voice. 'You keep
talking about ruination. Then what difference is a Mercedes going to make?'
     'You don't understand,' Saeed wept. 'Nobody understands me.'
     Gibreel dreamed a drought:
     The land  browned under the rainless  skies.  The  corpses of buses and
ancient monuments rotting  in the fields beside the  crops. Mirza Saeed saw,
through his shattered windscreen,  the onset  of calamity:  the wild donkeys
fucking wearily and dropping  dead,  while still conjoined, in the middle of
the road, the  trees standing on  roots exposed by  soil erosion and looking
like huge wooden  claws  scrabbling for  water in the  earth,  the destitute
farmers being obliged to work for the  state as  manual labourers, digging a
reservoir by the trunk road,  an empty  container for the rain that wouldn't
fall. Wretched roadside lives: a  woman with a bundle heading for  a tent of
stick and rag, a girl condemned  to scour, each day,  this pot, this pan, in
her  patch  of filthy dust.  'Are  such lives really worth as much as ours?'
Mirza Saeed Akhtar asked himself. 'As much as  mine? As Mishal's? How little
they have experienced, how  little  they have on which to feed the soul.'  A
man in  a  dhoti and  loose yellow  pugri  stood  like a  bird on  top  of a
milestone, perched there with  one foot on the opposite knee, one hand under
the  opposite elbow,  smoking a biri.  As  Mirza Saeed Akhtar  passed him he
spat, and caught the zamindar full in the face.
     The pilgrimage advanced slowly,  three  hours' walking in the mornings,
three  more  after  the heat, walking at the pace of  the  slowest  pilgrim,
subject to infinite delays, the  sickness of children, the harassment of the
authorities, a wheel coming off one of the bullock carts; two miles a day at
best, one hundred and fifty miles  to the  sea, a journey  of  approximately
eleven  weeks. The first death happened on the eighteenth day.  Khadija, the
tactless  old  lady  who had  been  for half  a  century the  contented  and
contenting spouse  of Sarpanch  Muhammad Din, saw  an archangel in a  dream.
'Gibreel,' she whispered, 'is it you?'
     'No,' the apparition replied. 'It's  I, Azraeel, the one with the lousy
job. Excuse the disappointment.'
     The next  morning  she continued with the pilgrimage, saying nothing to
her husband about her vision. After two hours they neared the ruin of one of
the  Mughal milepost inns  that  had,  in  times long  gone, been  built  at
five-mile intervals along  the highway.  When Khadija saw the  ruin she knew
nothing of its  past, of the wayfarers robbed in their sleep  and so on, but
she  understood its present  well enough. 'I have to  go in  there  and  lie
down,' she said  to the Sarpanch,  who protested:  'But, the march!'  'Never
mind that,' she said gently. 'You can catch them up later.'
     She lay down  in  the rubble of the old ruin with  her head on a smooth
stone which the Sarpanch found for her. The old man wept, but that didn't do
any good, and she was dead  within  a minute. He  ran back to  the march and
confronted  Ayesha angrily.  'I should never have listened  to you,' he told
her. 'And now you have killed my wife.'
     The  march  stopped.  Mirza  Saeed  Akhtar,  spotting  an  opportunity,
insisted loudly that Khadija be taken to a proper  Muslim burial ground. But
Ayesha objected. 'We are ordered by the archangel to go directly to the sea,
without returns or detours.' Mirza Saeed appealed  to the pilgrims.  'She is
your Sarpanch's beloved wife,'  he  shouted. 'Will you dump her in a hole by
the side of the road?'
     When  the Titlipur  villagers  agreed that Khadija should  be buried at
once, Saeed could not believe his ears. He realized that their determination
was  even  greater  than  he  had  suspected:  even  the  bereaved  Sarpanch
acquiesced. Khadija was  buried in the  corner of a  barren field behind the
ruined way-station of the past.
     The next  day,  however, Mirza Saeed noticed that the Sarpanch had come
unstuck from the pilgrimage, and was mooching along disconsolately, a little
distance  apart  from the  rest, sniffing  the bougainvillaea bushes.  Saeed
jumped out of  the Mercedes and rushed off to Ayesha, to make another scene.
'You monster!' he shouted.  'Monster  without a heart! Why did you bring the
old woman here to die?' She ignored him,  but on his way back to the station
wagon  the Sarpanch came  over and  said: 'We  were poor people.  We knew we
could never hope to go  to Mecca Sharif, until she persuaded. She persuaded,
and now see the outcome of her deeds.'
     Ayesha  the kahin asked to speak  to the Sarpanch, but gave  him not  a
single word  of consolation. 'Harden your faith,' she  scolded him. 'She who
dies  on the great pilgrimage is assured of a home in Paradise. Your wife is
sitting now among  the  angels  and  the flowers; what is  there  for you to
regret?'
     That evening the Sarpanch Muhammad Din approached Mirza Saeed as he sat
by  a small campfire. 'Excuse, Sethji,' he said, 'but is it possible that  I
ride, as you once offered, in your motor-car?'
     Unwilling wholly  to abandon the project for which his wife  had  died,
unable  to  maintain  any longer  the absolute belief  which  the enterprise
required,  Muhammad Din entered  the station  wagon of scepticism. 'My first
convert,' Mirza Saeed rejoiced.
     By the fourth week the defection  of Sarpanch Muhammad Din had begun to
have its effect. He sat on the back seat of the Mercedes as  if  he were the
zamindar and Mirza Saeed  the  chauffeur, and little by  little the  leather
upholstery and the air-conditioning unit and the whisky-soda cabinet and the
electrically operated  mirror-glass windows began to teach him  hauteur; his
nose tilted into the air and he acquired the  supercilious expression  of  a
man who can see  without  being  seen. Mirza Saeed in the driver's seat felt
his  eyes  and nose filling up with the  dust  that came in through the hole
where  the windscreen used to  be, but in  spite  of such discomforts he was
feeling  better than  before. Now,  at  the end of  each day,  a  cluster of
pilgrims would  congregate around the  Mercedes-Benz with its gleaming star,
and  Mirza Saeed  would  try  and talk  sense  into them while  they watched
Sarpanch Muhammad Din raise and lower the mirror-glass rear windows, so that
they saw, alternately, his  features and  their own. The Sarpanch's presence
in the Mercedes lent new authority to Mirza Saeed's words.
     Ayesha didn't try to call the villagers away, and so far her confidence
had been justified; there had been no further defections to the camp  of the
faithless. But  Saeed  saw her casting numerous glances in his direction and
whether she was a  visionary or  not Mirza Saeed would have  bet good  money
that those were the bad-tempered glances of  a young girl who  was no longer
sure of getting her own way.
     Then she disappeared.
     She went off during an afternoon siesta and did not reappear for  a day
and a half, by which time  there was  pandemonium among  the pilgrims -  she
always knew how to whip  up an audience's feelings, Saeed conceded; then she
sauntered back up  to  them across the dust-clouded landscape, and this time
her silver hair was streaked with gold, and  her eyebrows, too, were golden.
She  summoned the  villagers to  her  and told them  that the  archangel was
displeased that the people of Titlipur  had been  filled up with doubts just
because of  the  ascent  of  a martyr to  Paradise. She  warned that  he was
seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, 'so that all
you'll  get at  the Arabian Sea is a salt-water  bath, and then it's back to
your  deserted potato fields  on which no  rain  will  ever fall again.' The
villagers were appalled.  'No, it can't  be,' they pleaded. 'Bibiji, forgive
us.'  It was the first time they  had used the name of the  longago saint to
describe the girl who was leading them with an  absolutism that had begun to
frighten  them as  much as it impressed. After her speech  the  Sarpanch and
Mirza Saeed were  left alone  in  the station  wagon. 'Second  round  to the
archangel,' Mirza Saeed thought.
     By  the  fifth week  the  health  of  most of the  older  pilgrims  had
deteriorated  sharply,  food  supplies were running low, water was  hard  to
find,  and the children's tear ducts  were dry. The vulture herds were never
far away.
     As the pilgrims  left  behind the rural  areas  and  came  towards more
densely  populated   zones,  the   level   of  harassment   increased.   The
long-distance buses and  trucks often refused to deviate and the pedestrians
had to  leap,  screaming and tumbling  over each other,  out  of their  way.
Cyclists,  families of  six  on Rajdoot motor-scooters,  petty  shop-keepers
hurled abuse.  'Crazies! Hicks! Muslims!'  Often they  were obliged  to keep
marching for an  entire night  because the authorities in this or that small
town didn't  want such riff-raff  sleeping  on their pavements. More  deaths
became inevitable.
     Then the bullock  of the  convert, Osman, fell  to its  knees amid  the
bicycles  and  camel-dung  of a nameless  little town.  'Get  up, idiot,' he
yelled at it impotently. 'What do you  think  you're doing, dying  on  me in
front of the fruit-stalls  of strangers?' The bullock nodded, twice for yes,
and expired.
     Butterflies covered the corpse, adopting the colour  of its  grey hide,
its horn-cones and bells. The inconsolable Osman ran to Ayesha (who  had put
on a dirty  sari  as  a concession  to urban prudery, even  though butterfly
clouds still trailed  off her like glory). 'Do  bullocks go to  Heaven?'  he
asked in a piteous  voice; she shrugged. 'Bullocks have no  souls,' she said
coolly, 'and it is souls we march to save.' Osman looked at her and realized
he no longer loved her. 'You've become a demon,' he told her in disgust.
     'I am nothing,' Ayesha said. 'I am a messenger.'
     'Then  tell  me  why  your God is  so anxious to destroy the innocent,'
Osman raged. 'What's he afraid of? Is he so un-confident that he needs us to
die to prove our love?'
     As though in response  to such blasphemy, Ayesha  imposed even stricter
disciplinary measures, insisting that all pilgrims say all five prayers, and
decreeing that Fridays would be days  of  fasting. By the end  of  the sixth
week she had  forced the marchers to leave four more bodies where they fell:
two old men, one old woman, and one six-year-old  girl. The pilgrims marched
on,  turning  their  backs  on the dead; behind them,  however,  Mirza Saeed
Akhtar gathered up the bodies and made sure they received  a decent  burial.
In this  he was  assisted by the  Sarpanch,  Muhammad  Din,  and  the former
untouchable, Osman. On  such  days they  would fall  quite  a way behind the
march, but a Mercedes-Benz station wagon doesn't take long to  catch up with
over a hundred and forty men, women and children walking wearily towards the
sea.
     The dead grew in  number,  and the groups  of unsettled pilgrims around
the  Mercedes  got  larger night by  night.  Mirza Saeed  began to tell them
stories. He told them about lemmings, and how the  enchantress Circe  turned
men into pigs; he told,  too, the story of  a pipe-player who lured a town's
children into  a mountain-crack.  When he  had  told this tale in their  own
language  he  recited  verses in  English, so that they could listen  to the
music of the poetry even though they didn't  understand the words.  'Hamelin
town's in Brunswick,'  he began. 'Near famous Hanover City. The River Weser,
deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side . . .'
     Now  he had the satisfaction of seeing the girl Ayesha advance, looking
furious, while the butterflies  glowed like the campfire behind her,  making
it appear as though flames were streaming from her body.
     'Those who listen to the Devil's verses, spoken in the Devil's tongue,'
she cried, 'will go to the Devil in the end.'
     'It's a choice, then,' Mirza Saeed answered her, 'between the devil and
the deep blue sea.'
     Eight weeks had passed, and relations between Mirza  Saeed and his wife
Mishal  had so deteriorated that they were no longer on speaking  terms.  By
now, and in spite of the cancer that had turned her as grey as  funeral ash,
Mishal  had become  Ayesha's chief lieutenant and most devoted disciple. The
doubts of other marchers had only  strengthened her own faith, and for these
doubts she unequivocally blamed her husband.
     'Also,'  she had rebuked  him in their last  conversation, 'there is no
warmth in you any more. I feel afraid to approach.'
     'No warmth?' he yelled. 'How can you  say it? No warmth? For whom did I
come running on this damnfool pilgrimage? To look after whom? Because I love
whom?  Because I am  so worried about,  so sad  about, so filled with misery
about whom? No warmth? Are you a stranger? How can you say such a thing?'
     'Listen to yourself,' she said in a voice  which had begun to fade into
a kind  of smokiness,  an opacity. 'Always anger.  Cold anger, icy,  like  a
fort.'
     'This  isn't  anger,'  he  bellowed.  'This  is  anxiety,  unhappiness,
wretchedness, injury, pain. Where can you hear anger?'
     'I hear it,' she said. 'Everyone can hear, for miles around.'
     'Come  with  me,' he  begged her. 'I'll take you to the top clinics  in
Europe, Canada, the USA. Trust  in Western technology. They can  do marvels.
You always liked gadgets, too.'
     'I am going on a pilgrimage to Mecca,' she said, and turned away.
     'You damn  stupid bitch,'  he roared at her  back. 'Just because you're
going to  die  doesn't mean you have to take all these people with you.' But
she  walked away across the roadside camp-site,  never looking back; and now
that he'd proved her point by losing control and speaking the unspeakable he
fell to his  knees  and wept.  After  that quarrel  Mishal refused to  sleep
beside him any more. She  and her.  mother rolled out their  bedding next to
the butterfly-shrouded prophetess of their Meccan quest.
     By day,  Mishal worked ceaselessly among the pilgrims, reassuring them,
bolstering their  faith, gathering  them together beneath  the  wing  of her
gentleness.  Ayesha had started retreating  deeper  and deeper into silence,
and Mishal Akhtar became,  to all  intents  and purposes, the leader of  the
pilgrims.  But there was one  pilgrim  over  whom she  lost  her  grip: Mrs.
Qureishi, her mother, the wife of the director of the state bank.
     The arrival of  Mr. Qureishi, Mishal's father, was  quite an event. The
pilgrims  had stopped in the  shade  of a line of plane-trees and  were busy
gathering brushwood and scouring cookpots when the motorcade was sighted. At
once Mrs. Qureishi, who was twenty-five pounds  lighter than she had been at
the  beginning  of  the  walk,  leaped  squeakily  to  her  feet  and  tried
frantically to brush the dirt off her clothes and to put her hair in  order.
Mishal  saw  her mother fumbling  feebly  with a molten lipstick  and asked,
'What's bugging you, ma? Relax, na.'
     Her mother pointed feebly  at the approaching  cars.  Moments later the
tall, severe figure of the  great  banker  was standing over them. 'If I had
not  seen it  I would not  have  believed,'  he said. 'They  told me,  but I
pooh-poohed.  Therefore  it took  me this long to find out. To  vanish  from
Peristan without a word: now what in tarnation?'
     Mrs. Qureishi  shook helplessly under her husband's eyes,  beginning to
cry,  feeling the  calluses on her  feet and the fatigue  that had sunk into
every pore of her body. 'O God, I  don't know, I  am sorry,'  she said. 'God
knows what came over.'
     'Don't you know I  occupy a delicate post?' Mr. Qureishi cried. 'Public
confidence is of essence. How does it look then that my wife gallivants with
bhangis?'
     Mishal,  embracing her  mother,  told  her father to  stop bullying. Mr
Akhtar saw for the first time that his daughter had the mark of death on her
forehead and deflated  instantly like an  inner tube.  Mishal told him about
the cancer, and the promise of the seer Ayesha that a miracle would occur in
Mecca, and she would be completely cured.
     'Then let me fly you to Mecca, pronto,' her father pleaded.
     'Why walk if you can go by Airbus?'
     But Mishal  was  adamant.  'You should go away,'  she told  her father.
'Only  the faithful can make this thing  come  about. Mummy will  look after
me.'
     Mr. Qureishi in his limousine helplessly joined Mirza Saeed at the rear
of  the procession,  constantly  sending one  of the two  servants  who  had
accompanied him on  motor-scooters  to ask Mishal  if she  would  like food,
medicine, Thums Up, anything  at all. Mishal turned down all his offers, and
after three days -because banking is banking - Mr. Qureishi departed for the
city, leaving behind one of the motor-scooter chaprassis to serve the women.
'He is yours to  command,' he told them. 'Don't be stupid now. Make this  as
easy as you can,'
     The day after Mr. Qureishi's  departure,  the  chaprassi  Gul  Muhammad
ditched  his scooter and  joined the foot-pilgrims, knotting a  handkerchief
around his head to indicate his devotion. Ayesha said nothing, but when  she
saw  the scooter-wallah join the pilgrimage she grinned an impish grin  that
reminded Mirza Saeed that she  was, after all,  not  only a  figure out of a
dream, but also a flesh-and-blood young girl.
     Mrs. Qureishi  began  to complain. The brief contact  with her old life
had  broken her resolve, and  now  that  it was  too late  she  had  started
thinking constantly about parties and  soft  cushions and  glasses  of  iced
fresh lime soda. It suddenly seemed wholly unreasonable to her that a person
of her breeding  should be asked to  go barefoot like a common sweeper.  She
presented herself to Mirza Saeed with a sheepish expression on her face.
     'Saeed,  son,  do  you  hate  me  completely?'  she wheedled, her plump
features arranging themselves in a parody of coquettishness.
     Saeed was appalled by her grimace. 'Of course not,' he managed to say.
     'But you do, you loathe me, and my cause is hopeless,' she flirted.
     'Ammaji,' Saeed gulped, 'what are you saying?'
     'Because I have from time to time spoken roughly to you,'
     'Please  forget it,'  Saeed  said, bemused  by her performance, but she
would  not. 'You must know it was all  for  love, isn't it?  Love,' said Mrs
Qureishi, 'it is a many-splendoured thing.'
     'Makes the world go round,' Mirza Saeed  agreed, trying  to  enter into
the spirit of the conversation.
     'Love  conquers all,' Mrs. Qureishi  confirmed. 'It  has  conquered  my
anger. This I must demonstrate to you by riding with you in your motor.'
     Mirza Saeed bowed. 'It is yours, Ammaji.'
     'Then  you will ask those  two village men to  sit  in front  with you.
Ladies must be protected, isn't it?'
     'It is,' he replied.
     The story  of  the  village that was walking to the  sea had spread all
over the country, and in the ninth week  the pilgrims were being pestered by
journalists, local politicos  in search of votes, businessmen who offered to
sponsor  the march if the  yatris would only consent to wear sandwich boards
advertising various goods  and  services,  foreign tourists looking for  the
mysteries of the East,  nostalgic Gandhians, and the kind of  human vultures
who go to motor-car races to  watch the crashes. When  they  saw the host of
chameleon butterflies and the  way  they  both clothed  the girl  Ayesha and
provided  her with  her  only solid  food,  these  visitors were amazed, and
retreated with confounded expectations,  that is to say with a hole in their
pictures  of the world that they could not paper over. Photographs of Ayesha
were appearing in all the  papers, and the pilgrims  even passed advertising
hoardings on which the lepidopteral beauty  had been painted  three times as
large as  life, beside slogans  reading 

Our cloths also are as delicate as a
butterfly's wing,

 or suchlike. Then more alarming news reached them. Certain
religious extremist groupings  had issued  statements denouncing the 'Ayesha
Haj'  as  an attempt  to 'hijack' public attention and  to  'incite communal
sentiment'. Leaflets were being distributed - Mishal  picked them up off the
road - in which it was  claimed  that 'Padyatra, or foot-pilgrimage,  is  an
ancient, pre-Islamic tradition of national culture, not imported property of
Mughal immigrants.'  Also: 'Purloining of this tradition by so-called Ayesha
Bibiji  is  flagrant  and   deliberate  inflammation  of  already  sensitive
situation.'
     'There will be no trouble,' the kahin broke her silence to announce.
     Gibreel dreamed a suburb:
     As the  Ayesha  Haj  neared Sarang, the  outermost  suburb of the great
metropolis on the Arabian Sea towards which the  visionary  girl was leading
them, journalists, politicos and police officers redoubled  their visits. At
first   the  policemen  threatened  to  disband   the  march  forcibly;  the
politicians, however, advised that this would look very like a sectarian act
and could lead to outbreaks of communal violence  from top to bottom  of the
country.  Eventually the  police chiefs  agreed  to  permit the  march,  but
groused menacingly about  being 'unable to  guarantee safe passages' for the
pilgrims. Mishal Akhtar said: 'We are going on.'
     The  suburb of Sarang owed its  relative affluence  to  the presence of
substantial coal  deposits  nearby.  It turned out  that the  coal-miners of
Sarang, men  whose  lives were  spent  boring pathways  through  the earth -
'parting' it, one might say - could not stomach the notion that a girl could
do the  same, with  a  wave of her hand,  for  the  sea.  Cadres  of certain
communalist groupings had been at work, inciting the miners to violence, and
as  a result  of  the  activities of  these  agents  provocateurs a  mob was
forming, carrying banners demanding: NO ISLAMIC PADYATRA!  BUTTERFLY  WITCH,
GO HOME.
     On  the night  before  they  were due to enter Sarang, Mirza Saeed made
another  futile appeal  to the pilgrims. 'Give  up,' he implored  uselessly.
'Tomorrow we will all be killed.' Ayesha whispered  in Mishal's ear, and she
spoke up: 'Better a martyr than a coward. Are there any cowards here?'
     There was one. Sri  Srinivas, explorer of the Grand Canyon,  proprietor
of a Toy Univas, whose motto was creativity and sinceriety, sided with Mirza
Saeed.  As  a devout  follower of  the  goddess  Lakshmi, whose face was  so
perplexingly  also Ayesha's,  he felt unable  to  participate in the  coming
hostilities on either side. 'I am a weak fellow,' he confessed to  Saeed. 'I
have loved Miss Ayesha, and a man should fight for what  he loves; but, what
to do, I  require  neutral status.' Srinivas  was  the  fifth member  of the
renegade society in the Mercedes-Benz,  and now Mrs. Qureishi  had no option
but  to  share  the  back seat  with a  common  man.  Srinivas  greeted  her
unhappily, and,  seeing  her  bounce grumpily along the seat away from  him,
attempted  to  placate.  'Please to  accept a token  of  my esteem.'  -  And
produced, from an inside pocket, a Family Planning doll.
     That  night  the  deserters remained  in the  station  wagon  while the
faithful prayed in the open air. They had been allowed to camp  in a disused
goods  train  marshalling  yard,  guarded by  military police.  Mirza  Saeed
couldn't sleep.  He was thinking  about something Srinivas  had said to him,
about being  a  Gandhian in his head,  'but I'm too weak to put such notions
into practice. Excuse me,  but it's true.  I  was not cut out for suffering,
Sethji.  I  should  have  stayed  with wife and  kiddies  and cut  out  this
adventure disease that has made me land up in such a place.'
     In my family, too, Mirza Saeed  in  his insomnia  answered the sleeping
toy merchant, we have suffered from a kind of disease: one of detachment, of
being unable to  connect ourselves to things, events,  feelings. Most people
define  themselves by their work, or  where they come from, or suchlike;  we
have lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.
     Which  was to say  that  he found it hard to believe that all  this was
really happening; but it was.
     When  the Ayesha Pilgrims were ready to  set off the  next morning, the
huge  clouds of butterflies  that  had travelled with  them all the way from
Titlipur  suddenly broke  up and vanished  from view, revealing that the sky
was filling up with other, more prosaic  clouds. Even the creatures that had
been  clothing Ayesha - the elite corps, so to speak - decamped, and she had
to lead the procession dressed in the mundanity of an old cotton sari with a
block-printed  hem  of leaves.  The  disappearance of  the miracle  that had
seemed to validate  their  pilgrimage depressed all the marchers; so that in
spite  of all Mishal Akhtar's exhortations they were unable to sing as  they
moved forwards,  deprived  of the benediction  of the butterflies,  to  meet
their fate.
     The No Islamic Padyatra street mob had prepared a welcome for Ayesha in
a street lined on  both sides with the shacks of bicycle repairers. They had
blocked  the  pilgrims'  routes  with dead  bicycles, and waited behind this
barricade of broken wheels, bent handlebars and silenced bells as the Ayesha
Haj entered the northern sector of the street. Ayesha walked towards the mob
as  if it did not exist, and when  she  reached the last crossroads,  beyond
which the clubs and knives of the enemy awaited her, there was a thunderclap
like the trumpet of doom and an ocean fell down out of the  sky. The drought
had  broken  too late  to save  the  crops; afterwards many  of the pilgrims
believed  that  God  had  been saving up  the water  for just this  purpose,
letting  it  build up  in  the  sky  until  it  was as endless  as  the sea,
sacrificing  the year's harvest in  order to  save  his  prophetess and  her
people.
     The  stunning  force  of  the  downpour  unnerved  both   pilgrims  and
assailants. In  the confusion of the flood a second  doom-trumpet was heard.
This was, in point of fact, the horn of Mirza Saeed's Mercedes-Benz  station
wagon,  which he had  driven at  high  speed  through  the  suffocating side
gullies  of the suburb,  bringing down racks of shirts hanging on rails, and
pumpkin  barrows, and  trays of cheap plastic notions, until he reached  the
street of basket-workers that  intersected the street  of  bicycle repairers
just to the north of the barricade. Here he accelerated as hard as  he could
and charged towards the crossroads,  scattering pedestrians  and  wickerwork
stools  in all directions. He reached the  crossroads immediately  after the
sea fell out of the sky, and braked violently. Sri Srinivas and Osman leaped
out, seized  Mishal Akhtar and  the prophetess Ayesha, and  hauled them into
the Mercedes in a  flurry of legs,  sputum and abuse. Saeed accelerated away
from the scene before anybody had managed to  get the blinding  water out of
their eyes.
     Inside the car: bodies heaped in an angry jumble. Mishal Akhtar shouted
abuse  at her husband from  the bottom of the pile: 'Saboteur! Traitor! Scum
from somewhere! Mule!' - To which Saeed sarcastically replied, 'Martyrdom is
too easy, Mishal. Don't you want to watch the ocean open, like a flower?'
     And Mrs. Qureishi, sticking her head out through Osman's inverted legs,
added in a pink-faced gasp: 'Okay, come on, Mishu, quit. We meant well.'
     Gibreel dreamed a flood:
     When the rains  came,  the miners of Sarang  had  been waiting for  the
pilgrims with their pickaxes in their hands, but when the  bicycle barricade
was swept  away  they could not  avoid the idea  that God had taken Ayesha's
side. The town's drainage system surrendered instantly to  the  overwhelming
assault  of the water,  and the miners were soon  standing in a  muddy flood
that reached as high as their waists. Some of them tried to move towards the
pilgrims, who also  continued  to  make  efforts  to  advance. But  now  the
rainstorm redoubled  its force,  and then doubled it again, falling from the
sky in thick  slabs through which it  was getting difficult  to  breathe, as
though the earth were being engulfed, and the firmament above were reuniting
with  the firmament  below. Gibreel, dreaming,  found his vision obscured by
water.
     The rain stopped, and a watery sun  shone down  on a Venetian  scene of
devastation.  The  roads  of  Sarang  were  now canals,  along  which  there
journeyed all  manner of  flotsam.  Where only  recently  scooter-rickshaws,
camel-carts  and  repaired  bicycles had gone, there now floated newspapers,
flowers, bangles, watermelons,  umbrellas,  chappals,  sunglasses,  baskets,
excrement, medicine bottles, playing  cards, dupattas, pancakes,  lamps. The
water had an  odd,  reddish tint that made the sodden populace  imagine that
the street was flowing with blood. There was no trace of bully-boy miners or
of Ayesha  Pilgrims.  A dog swam across the  intersection  by  the collapsed
bicycle barricade, and all around  there lay the  damp silence of the flood,
whose waters  lapped at marooned buses, while children stared from the roofs
of deliquescent gullies, too shocked to come out and play.
     Then the butterflies returned.
     From  nowhere,  as if  they had been hiding  behind  the  sun;  and  to
celebrate the end of the rain they had all taken the colour of sunlight. The
arrival of this immense  carpet of  light  in the sky utterly bewildered the
people of Sarang, who were already reeling  in the  aftermath of the  storm;
fearing the  apocalypse, they  hid indoors and closed  their  shutters. On a
nearby hillside,  however,  Mirza Saeed Akhtar and  his  party  observed the
miracle's  return and  were filled,  all of them, even the  zamindar, with a
kind of awe.
     Mirza Saeed had driven hell-for-leather, in spite of being half-blinded
by  the  rain which poured through the smashed windscreen, until  on a  road
that led up  and around the bend of a hill he came to a halt at the gates of
the No.1 Sarang Coalfield. The pitheads were dimly visible through the rain.
'Brainbox,' Mishal Akhtar cursed him weakly. 'Those bums  are waiting for us
back there,  and you drive  us up  here to see their  pals.  Tip-top notion,
Saeed. Extra fine.'
     But  they had no  more  trouble  from miners. That  was the day  of the
mining disaster that left fifteen  thousand pitmen buried alive  beneath the
Sarangi hill. Saeed, Mishal, the Sarpanch, Osman, Mrs Qureishi, Srinivas and
Ayesha stood exhausted and soaked to the skin by the roadside as ambulances,
fire-engines, salvage operators and pit  bosses arrived  in large quantities
and left, much later, shaking their heads. The Sarpanch caught  his earlobes
between thumbs and forefingers. 'Life is pain,' he  said. 'Life  is pain and
loss; it is a coin of no value, worth even less than a kauri or a dam.'
     Osman of the dead bullock,  who, like the Sarpanch,  had  lost a dearly
loved companion during the pilgrimage, also wept. Mrs. Qureishi attempted to
look  on the bright side: 'Main thing is  that  we're okay,' but this got no
response. Then Ayesha closed her eyes and  recited in the sing-song voice of
prophecy, 'It is a judgment upon them for the bad attempt they made.'
     Mirza Saeed  was  angry.  'They  weren't at  the bloody  barricade,' he
shouted. 'They were working under the goddamned ground.'
     'They dug their own graves,' Ayesha replied.
     This was when they sighted the returning butterflies. Saeed watched the
golden cloud in disbelief, as it first gathered and then sent out streams of
winged light in every  direction. Ayesha wanted to return to the crossroads.
Saeed  objected: 'It's flooded down there. Our only chance  is to drive down
the  opposite side of this  hill and come out  the other side  of town.' But
Ayesha and  Mishal had already started back; the  prophetess  was supporting
the other, ashen woman, holding her around the waist,
     'Mishal, for God's sake,' Mirza Saeed called  after his wife.  'For the
love of God. What will I do with the motor-car?'
     But  she went  on down  the hill, towards the flood, leaning heavily on
Ayesha the seer, without looking round.
     This  was  how  Mirza  Saeed  Akhtar   came  to  abandon  his   beloved
Mercedes-Benz station wagon  near  the  entrance  to  the drowned  mines  of
Sarang, and join in the foot-pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea.
     The  seven  bedraggled  travellers  stood  thigh-deep in water  at  the
intersection  of the street  of  bicycle repairers  and  the  alley  of  the
basket-weavers. Slowly, slowly, the water had begun to  go down. 'Face  it,'
Mirza Saeed argued. 'The pilgrimage is finished. The villagers are who knows
where, maybe drowned, possibly murdered, certainly lost. There's nobody left
to follow you  but us.'  He stuck his  face  into  Ayesha's.  'So forget it,
sister; you're sunk.'
     'Look,' Mishal said.
     From all sides,  out of the little tinkers'  gullies, the villagers  of
Titlipur  were  returning  to the  place  of their  dispersal. They were all
coated  from neck to  ankles in golden  butterflies, and  long  lines of the
little creatures went before  them, like ropes drawing them to safety out of
a  well. The people of Sarang watched in terror  from their windows,  and as
the waters of retribution receded, the Ayesha Haj re-formed in the middle of
the road.
     'I don't believe it,' said Mirza Saeed.
     But it was true. Every single member of the pilgrimage had been tracked
down by  the  butterflies and brought back to  the main  road. And  stranger
claims  were later  made: that when  the creatures had  settled on a  broken
ankle  the injury had healed, or  that an  open  wound  had closed as if  by
magic. Many marchers  said they had awoken from  unconsciousness to find the
butterflies  fluttering about their lips. Some even believed  that they  had
been dead, drowned, and that the butterflies had brought them back to life.
     'Don't be stupid,' Mirza  Saeed cried.  'The storm saved you; it washed
away  your enemies,  so it's not surprising  few of  you are hurt. Let's  be
scientific, please.'
     'Use your eyes, Saeed,' Mishal told him, indicating the presence before
them of  over  a  hundred men,  women  and  children  enveloped  in  glowing
butterflies. 'What does your science say about this?'
     In the  last  days of the  pilgrimage,  the city was all  around  them.
Officers  from  the  Municipal  Corporation met with Mishal  and Ayesha  and
planned a route  through the metropolis. On this route were mosques in which
the pilgrims could sleep without clogging up the  streets. Excitement in the
city was intense: each day,  when the  pilgrims  set off towards their  next
resting-place,  they  were watched  by enormous  crowds, some  sneering  and
hostile, but many bringing presents of sweetmeats, medicines and food.
     Mirza Saeed, worn-out and filthy, was in a state of deep frustration on
account of his failure to convince more than  a handful of the pilgrims that
it was better to  put  one's trust in reason  than in miracles. Miracles had
been  doing  pretty  well  for  them, the  Titlipur  villagers pointed  out,
reasonably  enough.  'Those  blasted  butterflies,' Saeed  muttered  to  the
Sarpanch. 'Without them, we'd have a chance.'
     'But they have been with  us from the start,' the Sarpanch replied with
a shrug.
     Mishal Akhtar was clearly close to death; she had begun to smell of it,
and had turned a chalky white colour that frightened Saeed badly. But Mishal
wouldn't let him come near her. She had ostracized her mother, too, and when
her father took time off from banking to visit her on the pilgrimage's first
night  in a  city mosque, she told him to buzz off. 'Things have come to the
point,'  she announced, 'where  only the  pure can be  with the pure.'  When
Mirza  Saeed heard the  diction of Ayesha the prophetess  emerging from  his
wife's mouth he lost all but the tiniest speck of hope.
     Friday came, and Ayesha agreed that the pilgrimage could halt for a day
to participate in the Friday prayers. Mirza Saeed, who had forgotten  almost
all the Arabic verses that had once been stuffed into him by rote, and could
scarcely  remember when to stand with his hands held in front  of him like a
book, when to  genuflect, when to press his forehead to the ground, stumbled
through the  ceremony with growing self-disgust. At the end  of the prayers,
however, something happened that stopped the Ayesha Haj in its tracks.
     As  the pilgrims watched the congregation leaving the courtyard of  the
mosque,  a  commotion began  outside the  main  gate.  Mirza  Saeed  went to
investigate.  'What's the  hoo-hah?' he asked as  he  struggled  through the
crowd on the  mosque  steps;  then he  saw the basket sitting  on the bottom
step. - And heard, rising from the basket, the baby's cry.
     The foundling  was perhaps two weeks old, clearly illegitimate,  and it
was equally plain that its options in  life were limited. The crowd was in a
doubtful, confused mood. Then the mosque's Imam appeared at  the head of the
flight of steps, and beside him was  Ayesha the seer,  whose fame had spread
throughout the city. The crowd parted  like the sea, and Ayesha and the Imam
came down to the  basket. The  Imam  examined the baby  briefly;  rose;  and
turned to address the crowd.
     'This child was born in devilment,' he said. 'It is the Devil's child.'
He was a young man.
     The mood of the crowd shifted towards anger. Mirza Saeed Akhtar shouted
out: 'You, Ayesha, kahin. What do you say?'
     'Everything will be asked of us,' she replied.
     The crowd, needing no clearer invitation, stoned the baby to death.
     After that  the  Ayesha Pilgrims refused to move on.  The death  of the
foundling had created  an atmosphere  of  mutiny among  the weary villagers,
none of whom had lifted or thrown a stone. Mishal,  snow-white  now, was too
enfeebled by her illness to rally  the marchers; Ayesha, as ever, refused to
dispute. 'If you turn your backs on God,'  she  warned the villagers, 'don't
be surprised when he does the same to you.'
     The pilgrims were squatting in a group in a corner of the large mosque,
which was painted lime-green on the outside and bright blue within, and lit,
when necessary, by multicoloured neon 'tube lights'. After Ayesha's  warning
they turned their backs  on her  and huddled  closer together, although  the
weather  was warm and humid enough. Mirza  Saeed, spotting his  opportunity,
decided  to challenge Ayesha  directly  once  again.  'Tell  me,'  he  asked
sweetly,  'how exactly  does  the angel give you  all this information?  You
never tell us his precise words, only your interpretations of them. Why such
indirection? Why not simply quote?'
     'He speaks to me,' Ayesha answered, 'in clear and memorable forms.'
     Mirza Saeed, full of  the bitter energy of  his desire for her, and the
pain  of  his estrangement from his  dying  wife,  and  the  memory  of  the
tribulations of the march, smelled in her reticence the weakness he had been
probing  for. 'Kindly be more specific,' he insisted. 'Or why  should anyone
believe? What are these forms?'
     'The archangel sings to me,' she admitted, 'to the tunes of popular hit
songs.'
     Mirza Saeed Akhtar clapped his hands delightedly and began to laugh the
loud, echoing  laughter of  revenge,  and Osman the  bullock-boy joined  in,
beating on his  dholki and prancing  around the squatting villagers, singing
the latest filmi ganas  and making nautch-girl eyes.  'Ho ji!'  he carolled.
'This is how Gibreel recites, ho ji! Ho ji!'
     And one  after the other, pilgrim after pilgrim rose and joined in  the
dance of the  circling drummer, dancing their disillusion and disgust in the
courtyard of the  mosque,  until the  Imam  came  running  to shriek at  the
ungodliness of their deeds.
     Night  fell.  The  villagers  of  Titlipur were  grouped  around  their
Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and serious talks about returning  to  Titlipur were
under way. Perhaps a little of the harvest could be saved. Mishal Akhtar lay
dying with her head in her  mother's lap, racked by pain, with a single tear
emerging from  her left  eye. And  in a far  comer of  the  courtyard of the
greenblue mosque with  its technicolour tube-lighting, the visionary and the
zamindar  sat alone and  talked. A  moon - new, horned, cold  -  shone down.
'You're a clever man,' Ayesha said. 'You knew how to take your chance.'
     This was when Mirza Saeed made his offer of a compromise.  'My  wife is
dying,' he said. 'And she wants very much to go  to Mecca Sharif. So we have
interests in common, you and I.'
     Ayesha listened. Saeed pressed on: 'Ayesha, I'm not a bad man.  Let  me
tell  you, I've been damn impressed  by  many  things  on  this  walk;  

damn

impressed. You have given these  people a profound spiritual  experience, no
question. Don't think we modern types lack a spiritual dimension.'
     'The people have left me,' Ayesha said.
     'The people  are confused,' Saeed  replied.  'Point is, if you actually
take them to the  sea and then nothing happens,  my  God, they really  could
turn against you.  So here's the deal.  I gave a tinkle to Mishal's papa and
he agreed to underwrite half the cost. We propose to fly you and Mishal, and
let's  say  ten  - twelve! -of  the villagers, to Mecca, within  forty-eight
hours, personally. Reservations are available. We leave it to you  to select
the  individuals  best  suited  to the  trip.  Then,  truly,  you  will have
performed a miracle  for some  instead  of  for  none.  And in  my  view the
pilgrimage itself  has been a miracle, in  a way. So you will have done very
much.'
     He held his breath.
     'I must think,' Ayesha said.
     'Think, think,' Saeed encouraged  her  happily. 'Ask your archangel. If
he agrees, it must be right.'
     Mirza Saeed Akhtar knew that when  Ayesha announced that  the Archangel
Gibreel had accepted his offer her power would be destroyed forever, because
the villagers would perceive her fraudulence and her desperation, too. - But
how could  she turn him down? - What choice did she really have? 'Revenge is
sweet,' he told himself. Once  the woman was discredited, he would certainly
take Mishal to Mecca, if that were still her wish.
     The butterflies  of Titlipur had not entered the mosque. They lined its
exterior walls and onion dome, glowing greenly in the dark.
     Ayesha in the night: stalking the shadows, lying down, rising  to go on
the prowl again. There was an uncertainty about her; then the slowness came,
and she seemed  to dissolve into the shadows of the  mosque. She returned at
dawn.
     After  the morning  prayer  she asked the pilgrims if she might address
them; and they, doubtfully, agreed.
     'Last night the angel did not  sing,' she  said. 'He  told me, instead,
about doubt, and how the  Devil makes use of it. I said, but they  doubt me,
what can I do? He answered: only proof can silence doubt.'
     She  had their full attention.  Next she told them what Mirza Saeed had
suggested in the  night.  'He told  me  to go and  ask my angel,  but I know
better,' she cried. 'How could I choose between  you?  It is  all  of us, or
none.'
     'Why should we follow you,' the  Sarpanch asked, 'after all  the dying,
the baby, and all?'
     'Because when the waters part, you  will be  saved. You will enter into
the Glory of the Most High.'
     'What waters?' Mirza Saeed yelled. 'How will they divide?'
     'Follow me,' Ayesha concluded, 'and judge me by their parting.'
     His offer had contained an old question: 

What kind of idea are you?

 And
she, in turn, had offered him an old answer. 

I was tempted, but am  renewed;
am uncompromising; absolute; pure.

     The tide was in when the Ayesha Pilgrimage marched down an alley beside
the  Holiday  Inn, whose windows were full  of the mistresses  of film stars
using  their  new Polaroid  cameras, - when  the  pilgrims  felt the  city's
asphalt  turn  gritty  and  soften into sand,  - when they found  themselves
walking  through  a  thick mulch  of  rotting coconuts  abandoned  cigarette
packets  pony  turds  non-degradable  bottles  fruit peelings  jellyfish and
paper, -on to the mid-brown sand overhung by high leaning coco-palms and the
balconies of luxury sea-view apartment blocks, - past the teams of young men
whose muscles were so well-honed that they  looked like deformities, and who
were  performing  gymnastic  contortions  of all sorts,  in unison,  like  a
murderous  army of ballet dancers, -  and  through the beachcombers, clubmen
and families  who  had come to  take the  air or make  business contacts  or
scavenge a  living from  the sand, - and gazed, for the first time in  their
lives, upon the Arabian Sea.
     Mirza Saeed saw Mishal, who  was being supported by  two of the village
men, because she was no longer strong enough to stand up by  herself. Ayesha
was beside  her,  and  Saeed  had the idea that the  prophetess  had somehow
stepped out of the dying woman, that all the brightness of Mishal had hopped
out of her body and taken this  mythological shape, leaving a husk behind to
die. Then he was angry with himself for allowing Ayesha's supernaturalism to
infect him, too.
     The villagers  of  Titlipur  had agreed to  follow Ayesha after  a long
discussion in which they had  asked her not to take part. Their common sense
told them that it would be foolish to turn  back when  they  had come so far
and were  in sight of their  first goal; but the new doubts  in their  minds
sapped  their strength. It was as if they were emerging from some Shangri-La
of Ayesha's  making, because  now  that  they were simply walking behind her
rather  than following her in the true sense, they seemed to  age and sicken
with every step they took. By the time  they saw the  sea  they were a lame,
tottering,  rheumy, feverish,  red-eyed bunch, and Mirza Saeed wondered  how
many of them would manage the final few yards to the water's edge.
     The butterflies were with them, high over their heads.
     'What now,  Ayesha?' Saeed  called out to her, filled with the horrible
notion that his beloved wife might die here under  the hoofs  of  ponies for
rent and beneath  the eyes of sugarcane-juice vendors. 'You  have brought us
all to the edges of extinction, but here is an unquestionable fact: the sea.
Where is your angel now?'
     She climbed up, with the villagers' help, on  to an unused thela  lying
next to  a soft-drink stall,  and didn't answer Saeed  until  she could look
down at him  from her new perch. 'Gibreel says the  sea  is like our  souls.
When  we open them, we  can  move through  into wisdom.  If we can  open our
hearts, we can open the sea.'
     'Partition was quite a disaster here on land,' he taunted her. 'Quite a
few guys died, you  might remember. You  think it  will be different in  the
water?'
     'Shh,' said Ayesha suddenly. 'The angel's almost here.'
     It was, on the face  of it, surprising that after all the attention the
march had received the crowd at the  beach was  no better than moderate; but
the  authorities  had  taken  many  precautions,  closing  roads,  diverting
traffic; so there were perhaps  two hundred gawpers on the beach. Nothing to
worry about.
     What 

was

 strange was that  the spectators did not see the  butterflies,
or  what they did next. But  Mirza  Saeed clearly observed the great glowing
cloud fly out over  the sea; pause; hover; and form itself into the shape of
a colossal  being, a radiant giant constructed wholly of tiny beating wings,
stretching from horizon to horizon, filling the sky.
     'The  angel!' Ayesha called to  the  pilgrims.  'Now you see! He's been
with us all the way. Do you believe me  now?' Mirza Saeed saw absolute faith
return to the pilgrims. 'Yes,' they wept, begging her forgiveness. 'Gibreel!
Gibreel! Ya Allah.'
     Mirza  Saeed made  his  last  effort.  'Clouds  take  many  shapes,' he
shouted. 'Elephants, film stars, anything. Look,  it's  changing  even now.'
But nobody paid any attention to him; they were watching, full of amazement,
as the butterflies dived into the sea.
     The  villagers were  shouting  and dancing for  joy. 'The  parting! The
parting!'  they cried. Bystanders called  out to Mirza Saeed:  'Hey, mister,
what are they getting so fired up about? We can't see anything going on.'
     Ayesha  had  begun  to  walk towards the  water,  and Mishal  was being
dragged along by her  two  helpers. Saeed ran to  her and began to  struggle
with the village  men.  'Let go of my wife. At  once!  Damn you!  I  am your
zamindar.  Release  her; remove  your filthy hands!'  But  Mishal whispered:
'They won't. Go away,  Saeed. You are closed.  The sea  only opens for those
who are open.'
     'Mishal!' he screamed, but her feet were already wet.
     Once Ayesha had entered the water the villagers began to run. Those who
could not leapt upon the backs of those who could. Holding their babies, the
mothers of Titlipur  rushed into the sea; grandsons bore their  grandmothers
on  their shoulders  and rushed into the  waves. Within minutes  the  entire
village was in the water,  splashing about, falling over, getting up, moving
steadily forwards, towards the horizon, never looking  back  to shore. Mirza
Saeed was in the water, too. 'Come back,' he beseeched his wife. 'Nothing is
happening; come back.'
     At  the water's  edge  stood  Mrs  Qureishi,  Osman, the Sarpanch,  Sri
Srinivas. Mishal's mother was  sobbing  operatically: 'O  my  baby, my baby.
What  will  become?' Osman said: 'When it becomes clear  that miracles don't
happen, they will  turn back.'  'And  the butterflies?'  Srinivas asked him,
querulously. 'What were they? An accident?'
     It dawned  on them that the villagers were not  coming back. 'They must
be nearly out of  their depth,' the  Sarpanch said.  'How  many  of them can
swim?' asked blubbering Mrs. Qureishi. 'Swim?' shouted Srinivas. 'Since when
can village folk swim?' They  were all  screaming at one another  as if they
were  miles apart,  jumping from foot to  foot, their bodies willing them to
enter the water, to do  something. They looked as if they were dancing  on a
fire. The  incharge of the  police squad  that had been sent down  for crowd
control purposes came up as Saeed came running out of the water.
     'What is befalling?' the officer asked. 'What is the agitation?'
     'Stop them,' Mirza Saeed panted, pointing out to sea.
     'Are they miscreants?' the policeman asked.
     'They are going to die,' Saeed replied.
     It was too late. The villagers, whose heads could be seen bobbing about
in the distance, had reached  the  edge of the underwater  shelf. Almost all
together, making no visible attempt to save themselves, they dropped beneath
the water's surface. In moments, every one  of  the Ayesha Pilgrims had sunk
out of sight.
     None of them reappeared. Not a single gasping head or thrashing arm.
     Saeed,  Osman, Srinivas, the Sarpanch, and even  fat  Mrs. Qureishi ran
into the water, shrieking: 'God have mercy; come on, everybody, help.'
     Human beings in  danger of drowning  struggle against  the water. It is
against human nature  simply to walk forwards  meekly until the sea swallows
you  up.  But Ayesha,  Mishal Akhtar and the villagers  of Titlipur subsided
below sea-level; and were never seen again.
     Mrs. Qureishi was  pulled  to shore by  policemen,  her face  blue, her
lungs full of water, and  needed the kiss  of  life. Osman, Srinivas and the
Sarpanch were dragged out soon afterwards. Only Mirza Saeed Akhtar continued
to dive, further and further out to sea, staying under for longer and longer
periods;  until he,  too, was rescued from the Arabian Sea, spent, sick  and
fainting. The pilgrimage was over.
     Mirza Saeed awoke in a hospital ward to  find a CID man by his bedside.
The authorities were considering the feasibility  of charging the  survivors
of the Ayesha expedition with attempted illegal  emigration,  and detectives
had  been instructed to get down their stories before they had had a  chance
to confer.
     This was the testimony of the Sarpanch of Titlipur, Muhammad Din: 'Just
when my  strength had failed and I thought I would surely  die  there in the
water,  I saw it with  my own eyes;  I saw the sea divide, like  hair  being
combed; and they were all there,  far  away, walking away from me.  She  was
there also, my wife, Khadija, whom I loved.'
     This is  what Osman  the bullock-boy told the detectives, who had  been
badly shaken  by the Sarpanch's deposition: 'At first I was in great fear of
drowning  myself Still, I  was searching  searching, mainly for her, Ayesha,
whom I  knew  from before her  alteration.  And  just at the last, I  saw it
happen, the marvellous thing. The water opened, and I saw  them go along the
ocean-floor, among the dying fish.'
     Sri Srinivas, too, swore  by  the goddess Lakshmi  that he had seen the
parting of  the Arabian  Sea;  and  by the time  the detectives got to  Mrs.
Qureishi,  they  were  utterly  unnerved, because  they  knew  that  it  was
impossible  for  the  men  to have cooked  up the story  together.  Mishal's
mother, the wife of the great banker, told the same story in  her own words.
'Believe don't believe,'  she finished emphatically, 'but what my eyes  have
seen my tongue repeats.'
     Goosepimply  CID  men attempted  the third degree:  'Listen,  Sarpanch,
don't  shit  from your mouth. So many were  there, nobody saw  these things.
Already the  drowned bodies are floating to shore, swollen like balloons and
stinking like hell. If you go  on lying we will take you and stick your nose
in the truth.'
     'You can show  me whatever  you  want,'  Sarpanch Muhammad Din told his
interrogators. 'But I still saw what I saw.'
     'And you?' the CID  men assembled,  once he  awoke, to ask  Mirza Saeed
Akhtar. 'What did you see at the beach?'
     'How can  you ask?'  he  protested. 'My  wife has  drowned.  Don't come
hammering with your questions.'
     When he found  out that he was  the only survivor of the Ayesha Haj not
to  have witnessed the  parting of the waves - Sri Srinivas was  the one who
told him  what the others saw, adding  mournfully: 'It is our  shame that we
were not thought worthy to accompany. On us, Sethji, the waters closed, they
slammed in our faces like the gates of Paradise' -  Mirza  Saeed  broke down
and wept for a week  and a day, the  dry  sobs continuing  to shake his body
long after his tear ducts had run out of salt.
     Then he went home.
     Moths had  eaten  the  punkahs  of  Peristan  and the library  had been
consumed by a billion hungry worms. When he turned on the taps, snakes oozed
out  instead  of  water,  and  creepers  had  twined themselves  around  the
four-poster  bed in which Viceroys had  once slept. It  was as  if time  had
accelerated  in  his absence, and  centuries had somehow elapsed  instead of
months,  so that  when he touched the giant Persian  carpet rolled up in the
ballroom it crumbled  under his hand, and  the baths were full of frogs with
scarlet eyes. At night there  were jackals  howling on  the wind.  The great
tree was dead, or close to  death, and the fields were barren as the desert;
the gardens of Peristan,  in which, long ago, he first saw a beautiful young
girl, had long ago yellowed into  ugliness. Vultures were the  only birds in
the sky.
     He pulled a rocking-chair out on  to his veranda, sat down,  and rocked
himself gently to sleep.
     Once, only once,  he visited  the tree. The village  had crumbled  into
dust;  landless  peasants and looters had tried to seize the abandoned land,
but the  drought had driven them away.  There  had been no rain here.  Mirza
Saeed  returned to  Peristan and padlocked  the  rusty  gates.  He  was  not
interested in the fate of his fellow-survivors; he went to the telephone and
ripped it out of the wall.
     After  an uncounted  passage  of  days it occurred  to him that he  was
starving to death, because he  could  smell his body reeking of nail-varnish
remover; but as he  felt neither hungry nor thirsty, he decided there was no
point bothering  to find food. For what? Much  better to rock in this chair,
and not think, not think, not think.
     On the last night of his life he heard a noise like  a giant crushing a
forest beneath his feet, and smelled a stench like  the giant's fart, and he
realized that the tree  was burning. He got out of his chair  and  staggered
dizzily  down to  the garden to  watch the fire, whose flames were consuming
histories,  memories, genealogies, purifying  the earth, and coming  towards
him  to set him  free; -because the wind  was blowing the  fire  towards the
grounds of the mansion, so  soon enough, soon enough, it would be his  turn.
He saw the tree explode into a thousand fragments, and the trunk crack, like
a heart; then  he turned away  and reeled towards the  place  in  the garden
where  Ayesha had first caught  his eye; -  and  now he felt a slowness come
upon him, a great heaviness,  and he lay down on  the withered dust.  Before
his eyes closed he felt something brushing at  his lips, and saw the  little
cluster  of butterflies struggling  to enter his mouth. Then the  sea poured
over  him,  and  he  was  in  the  water  beside  Ayesha,  who  had  stepped
miraculously  out of his wife's body  . .  . 'Open,'  she was crying.  'Open
wide!'  Tentacles of  light were flowing  from her  navel and he  chopped at
them, chopped, using the side  of his  hand. 'Open,' she  screamed.  'You've
come  this far, now do the rest.' - How could he hear her voice? - They were
under  water, lost in the roaring of the sea, but he could hear her clearly,
they could  all  hear  her, that  voice  like a bell.  'Open,'  she said. He
closed.
     He  was  a fortress with clanging gates.  -  He was drowning. -She  was
drowning, too. He  saw the  water fill her  mouth, heard it begin to  gurgle
into her lungs.  Then  something  within him refused that, made a  different
choice, and at the instant that his heart broke, he opened.
     His  body split apart  from his adam's-apple to his groin,  so that she
could reach deep within him, and now she was open, they all were, and at the
moment of their  opening the waters parted, and they  walked to Mecca across
the bed of the Arabian Sea.

     A
     

Wonderful Lamp


1


     ighteen months after  his heart attack, Saladin Chamcha took to the air
again in  response to  the  telegraphed  news  that his father  was  in  the
terminal stages of multiple  myeloma,  a systemic cancer of  the bone marrow
that was 'one hundred  per cent fatal', as Chamcha's GP unsentimentally  put
it when he telephoned her to  check.  There had been no real contact between
father and  son since Changez Chamchawala sent Saladin the proceeds from his
felled walnut-tree  all those eternities ago.  Saladin had sent a brief note
reporting  that he  had survived the 

Bostan

 disaster, and  had  been sent an
even terser missive  in return:  'Rec.'d yr. communication. This information
already  to  hand.'  When  the bad news  telegram  arrived,  however  -  the
signatory was the unknown second wife, Nasreen II,  and  the tone was pretty
unvarnished: FATHER GOING  FAST + IF DESIROUS OF  SEEING BETTER  MOVE IT + N
CHAMCHAWALA (MRS) -  he discovered to his surprise that  after a lifetime of
tangled relationships with his father, after long years of crossed wires and
'irrevocable  sunderings',  he  was once again capable of  an  uncomplicated
reaction. Simply, overwhelmingly,  it was  imperative that  he reach  Bombay
before Changez left it for good.
     He spent the best part of a day first standing in the visa queue at the
consular  section  of India House,  and  then  trying  to persuade  a  jaded
official  of  the urgency of  his application.  He had stupidly forgotten to
bring  the telegram, and  was told, as a result, that 'it is issue of proof.
You see, anybody  could come and tell that their father is dying, isn't  it?
In order  to  expedite.' Chamcha fought  to restrain  his anger, but finally
burst,  'Do I  look like a Khalistan zealot to you?' The  official shrugged.
'I'll tell you who I am,' Chamcha bellowed, incensed by that shrug, 'I'm the
poor bastard who got blown up by  terrorists, fell thirty thousand  feet out
of the sky because of terrorists, and now because of those same terrorists I
have to  be insulted by  pen-pushers like you.' His visa application, placed
firmly at the bottom of a large pile by his adversary, was not granted until
three  days  later. The first  available flight  was  thirty-six hours after
that: and it was an Air India 747, and its name was 

Gulistan.

     Gulistan and Bostan, the twin gardens of Paradise - one blew apart, and
then there was one  . . .  Chamcha, moving  down one of  the drains  through
which Terminal Three dripped  passengers into aircraft, saw the name painted
next to the 747`s open door, and  turned a couple of shades paler.  Then  he
heard the  sari-clad  Indian  stewardess  greeting  him  in an  unmistakably
Canadian  accent,  and  lost his nerve, spinning away from the  plane  in  a
reflex of straightforward terror.  As he  stood  there, facing the irritable
throng of  passengers waiting  to  board, he was conscious of  how absurd he
must  look,  with  his  brown leather holdall  in  one  hand,  two  zippered
suit-hanger bags in  the  other, and his eyes out on stalks;  but for a long
moment he was entirely unable to move. The crowd grew restive; 

if this is an
artery,

  he found himself  thinking, 

then I'm the  blasted dot.

  'I  used to
chichi chicken  out  also,'  said a cheerful  voice.  'But now I've got  the
titrick. I fafa flap my  hands during tatake-off  and the plane  always mama
makes it into the isk isk isky.'
     'Today  the top gogo goddess  is absolutely  Lakshmi,' Sisodia confided
over whisky once they were safely aloft. (He had been  as good as his  word,
flapping his arms wildly as 

Gulistan

 rushed down  the runway, and afterwards
settled  back contentedly  in his  seat, beaming modestly. 'Wowoworks  every
time.' They  were both travelling  in  the  747's  upper deck,  reserved for
business class non-smokers,  and Sisodia had moved into the empty  seat next
to  Chamcha like air filling a vacuum. 'Call me Whisky,' he insisted.  'What
lie lie line are you in? How mum much do you earn?  How  long  you bibi been
away? You know any women in town, or you want heh heh help?') Chamcha closed
his eyes  and  fixed  his  thoughts  on  his father.  The saddest  thing, he
realized, was that he could not remember a single happy  day with Changez in
his entire life  as a  man. And the most gladdening thing was  the discovery
that even the  unforgivable crime of being  one's  father could be forgiven,
after all, in the end. 

Hang on,

 he pleaded silently. 

I'm coming as fast as I
can.

 'In these  hihighly material times,'  Sisodia  explained, 'who else but
goddess of wewealth? In Bombay  the  young businessmen  are hoho holding all
night poopoo pooja parties. Statue of  Lakshmi presides, with hands tuturned
out, and lightbulbs running down her fifi fingers, lighting in sequence, you
get me, as if the wealth is paw paw pouring down her  palms.' On the cabin's
movie screen  a stewardess was demonstrating the various  safety procedures.
In a  corner of the screen an inset  male figure  translated  her into  sign
language.  This was  progress, Chamcha recognized.  Film  instead  of  human
beings,  a small  increase  in  sophistication (the  signing)  and  a  large
increase in  cost.  High  technology at the service,  ostensibly, of safety;
while in reality air  travel  got daily more dangerous, the world's stock of
aircraft  was ageing and  nobody  could afford to  renew  it. Bits  fell off
planes every day, or so it seemed, and collisions and near-misses  were also
on the up. So  the  film was  a  kind of lie, because  by  existing it said:

Observe the lengths  we'll  go to for your  security.  We'll even make you a
movie about it.

 Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality
.  . . 'I'm planning a big bubudget picture about her,' Sisodia said.  'This
is in  strictest coco confidence. Maybe  a  Sridevi weewee wehicle, I hohope
so. Now  that  Gibreel's comeback is flaw flaw flopping,  she  is number one
supreme.'
     Chamcha had heard that Gibreel Farishta had hit the comeback trail. His
first film,  

The Parting of  the Arabian Sea,

 had  bombed badly; the special
effects looked home-made, the  girl  in the  central Ayesha role, a  certain
Pimple Billimoria, had been woefully inadequate, and Gibreel's own portrayal
of the  archangel had struck many critics as narcissistic and  megalomaniac.
The days when he could do no wrong  were gone; his second  feature, 

Mahound,

had hit every imaginable religious  reef, and sunk without  trace. 'You see,
he chochose to go with other producers,' Sisodia lamented. 'The greegreed of
the  ista ista  istar.  With me  the  if if effects always work and the good
tataste  also  you can take for gug, grunt, granted,' Saladin Chamcha closed
his eyes and leaned  back in his  seat. He had drunk his whisky too fast  on
account  of his fear  of flying,  and his head  had begun  to spin.  Sisodia
appeared not to recall his past connection to Farishta, which was fine. That
was where  the  connection  belonged:  in  the  past.  'Shh  shh  Sridevi as
Lakshmi,' Sisodia sang  out, not very  confidentially. 'Now  that is sosolid
gold. You are an ack actor. You  should work back hohome.  Call me. Maybe we
can do bubusiness. This picture: solid pap pap 

platinum.'

     Chamcha's  head whirled.  What strange meanings  words were taking  on.
Only a few days ago that 

back home

 would have rung false. But now his father
was  dying and  old emotions  were sending tentacles out to grasp him. Maybe
his tongue was twisting again,  sending his accent  East along with the rest
of him. He hardly dared open his mouth.
     Almost twenty years earlier,  when the  young and newly renamed Saladin
was scratching a  living on the margins of  the London theatre, in  order to
maintain a safe distance from his father; and when Changez was retreating in
other ways,  becoming both reclusive and religious;  back then, one day, out
of the  blue, the  father had written to the son, offering him  a house. The
property was a  rambling  mansion in the hill-station  of  Solan. 'The first
property I ever owned,' Changez wrote, 'and so it is  the first I am gifting
to you.' Saladin's instant  reaction was to see the offer as a snare,  a way
of rejoining him  to 

home,

 to the webs of  his  father's power;  and when he
learned  that the Solan  property had  long ago  been requisitioned  by  the
Indian Government in return for a peppercorn rent, and that  it had for many
years been occupied by a boys' school, the gift stood revealed as a delusion
as  well. What did Chamcha care if  the school were willing to treat him, on
any  visits  he  cared to make,  as  a  visiting Head of  State,  putting on
march-pasts and gymnastic displays? That sort of thing appealed to Changez's
enormous vanity, but  Chamcha wanted  none of  it. The point was, the school
wasn't budging;  the  gift  was  useless,  and  probably  an  administrative
headache as well. He wrote to his father refusing the offer. It was the last
time Changez Chamchawala  tried to give him anything. 

Home

 receded from  the
prodigal son.
     'I never  forget  a faface,' Sisodia  was  saying. 'You're mimi  Mimi's
friend.  The 

Bostan

 susurvivor.  Knew it the moment I saw you papa panic  at
the gaga gate. Hope you're  not feefeeling too baba bad.' Saladin, his heart
sinking,  shook  his  head,  no,  I'm  fine,  honestly.  Sisodia,  gleaming,
knee-like,  winked  hideously  at  a passing  stewardess and  summoned  more
whisky. 'Such a shashame about Gibreel and his lady,' Sisodia went on. 'Such
a  nice  name that she had, alia alia Alleluia. What a  temper on that  boy,
what  a jeajealous tata type. Hard for a momodern  gaga girl. They bus  bust
up.'  Saladin retreated, once again, into a pretence  of sleep. 

I  have only
just recovered from the past. Go, go away.

     He had formally declared his recovery complete only five weeks earlier,
at  the wedding of Mishal Sufyan  and  HanifJohnson.  After the death of her
parents  in the  Shaandaar fire Mishal  had  been  assailed  by a  terrible,
illogical  guilt  that caused her  mother  to  appear to  her in dreams  and
admonish  her:  'If only you'd passed the fire extinguisher when I asked. If
only you'd  blown  a little harder.  But you never listen to what I say  and
your lungs are so cigarette-rotten  that you could not  blow out  one candle
let alone  a burning  house.'  Under the severe eye  of  her mother's  ghost
Mishal moved  out of Hanif's apartment,  took  a  room in a place with three
other women, applied for and got Jumpy Joshi's old job at the sports centre,
and  fought  the  insurance  companies  until  they  paid up.  Only when the
Shaandaar was ready to reopen under her management did  Hind Sufyan's  ghost
agree  that  it  was time to  be  off  to the  after-life;  whereupon Mishal
telephoned Hanif and asked him to marry her. He was  too surprised to reply,
and had to pass the telephone to a colleague who  explained that the cat had
got  Mr  Johnson's  tongue, and  accepted  Mishal's offer on  the dumbstruck
lawyer's behalf. So everybody was recovering from the tragedy; even Anahita,
who had been obliged to live  with a  stiflingly old-fashioned aunt, managed
to look pleased at the wedding, perhaps  because Mishal had promised her her
own rooms in the  renovated Shaandaar Hotel. Mishal  had asked Saladin to be
her chief witness in recognition of  his attempt to  save her parents' life,
and on  their way to the  registry office in Pinkwalla's  van  (all  charges
against  the  DJ  and his boss, John Maslama, had  been  dropped for lack of
evidence) Chamcha told the bride: 'Today feels like a new start for me, too;
perhaps  for all of us.' In his own case there had been by-pass surgery, and
the difficulty of coming to terms with so many deaths, and nightmare visions
of being metamorphosed once  more  into some sort of sulphurous, cloven-hoof
demon.  He  was  also, for  a time,  professionally crippled  by  a shame so
profound that, when clients finally did begin to book him once more and  ask
for  one  of  his  voices,  for example  the  voice of  a frozen  pea  or  a
glove-puppet packet of sausages, he felt the memory of his telephonic crimes
welling up  in  his  throat and strangling the  impersonations at  birth. At
Mishal's wedding, however, he suddenly felt free.  It was quite  a ceremony,
largely because the young couple could not refrain from kissing one  another
throughout the procedure, and had to be  urged by  the registrar (a pleasant
young woman who also  exhorted the guests not to drink too  much that day if
they  planned to  drive) to hurry up and get through the words before it was
time for the next wedding party to arrive. Afterwards at  the Shaandaar  the
kissing continued, the kisses becoming gradually  longer and more  explicit,
until finally the  guests had the  feeling  that they were  intruding  on  a
private moment, and slipped quietly away leaving Hanif and Mishal to enjoy a
passion so engulfing that they did not even notice their friends' departure;
they remained oblivious, too, of  the small crowd  of children that gathered
outside  the  windows of the Shaandaar Cafe to watch them. Chamcha, the last
guest  to leave, did  the  newly weds the favour of pulling down the blinds,
much to the  children's annoyance;  and strolled off  down the rebuilt  High
Street feeling  so  light on his  feet  that  he  actually  gave  a kind  of
embarrassed skip.
     Nothing  is  forever, he thought  beyond  closed eyelids somewhere over
Asia  Minor. Maybe  unhappiness is the continuum  through which a human life
moves, and joy  just a  series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not
unhappiness, then at least melancholy . . . These broodings were interrupted
by a lusty snore from the seat beside him. Mr Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand,
was asleep.
     The producer was evidently  a hit with the  stewardesses.  They  fussed
around  his  sleeping  person,  detaching  the  glass from  his fingers  and
removing  it  to a place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half,
and trilling admiringly  over his  snoring head:  'Doesn't he  look poochie?
Just a little  cuteso, I swear!'  Chamcha was reminded  unexpectedly  of the
society ladies of Bombay patting  him on the head during his mother's little
soirees, and fought back  tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly
obscene; he had  removed his spectacles  before falling  asleep,  and  their
absence gave him an oddly naked  appearance.  To Chamcha's eyes he resembled
nothing so  much as an outsize Shiva  lingam.  Maybe that  accounted for his
popularity with the ladies.
     Flicking through the magazines  and newspapers he  was  offered by  the
stewardesses,  Saladin  chanced upon  an  old acquaintance  in  trouble. Hal
Valance's sanitized 

Aliens  Show

 had  flopped badly in the United States and
was being  taken off  the  air. Worse still, his  advertising agency and its
subsidiaries had been  swallowed  by  an  American  leviathan,  and  it  was
probable that Hal was on  the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon
he had set out  to  tame. It was hard  to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed
and down to his last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs. Torture and
her pals,  relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with
busted  entrepreneur-boffins  and  insider-dealing  financiers and  renegade
ex-ministers; but  Chamcha,  flying  to  his father's  deathbed,  was in  so
heightened an emotional condition that he managed a valedictory  lump in the
throat even  for wicked Hal. 

At  whose pool table,

 he  wondered  vaguely, 

is
Baby playing now?

     In India, the  war between men  and women showed no sign of abating. In
the 

Indian  Express

 he read an account  of  the latest  'bride suicide'. 

The
husband, Prajapati,  is absconding.

 On the next page, in the weekly small-ad
marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of
young  women  proudly  offered, brides  of 'wheatish'  complexions.  Chamcha
remembered Zeeny's friend, the  poet Bhupen  Gandhi, speaking of such things
with  passionate bitterness. 'How to accuse others of being prejudiced  when
our own hands are so dirty?' he had declaimed. 'Many of you in Britain speak
of victimization. Well. I have not been  there, I don't know your situation,
but in  my personal experience I have never  been  able to feel  comfortable
about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously, I am not. Even
speaking culturally,  you find  here all the bigotries,  all the  procedures
associated with  oppressor groups.  So while many  Indians  are  undoubtedly
oppressed,  I  don't  think  any of 

us

  are entitled to  lay claim to such a
glamorous position.'
     'Trouble with Bhupen's radical critiques,' Zeeny had remarked, 'is that
reactionaries like Salad baba here just love to lap them up.'
     An  armaments  scandal was  raging;  had  the  Indian  government  paid
kickbacks to middlemen, and then  gone in for a cover-up? Vast sums of money
were  involved,  the Prime  Minister's credibility had  been  weakened,  but
Chamcha couldn't  be  bothered  with any of it. He was  staring at the fuzzy
photograph, on  an  inside  page,  of  indistinct,  bloated  shapes floating
down-river  in large  numbers.  In a  north Indian town  there  had  been  a
massacre of Muslims, and their  corpses had been dumped  in the water, where
they awaited the ministrations of some twentieth-century Gaffer Hexam. There
were hundreds of bodies,  swollen and  rancid; the stench seemed to rise off
the  page. And  in  Kashmir a once-popular  Chief Minister  who had 'made an
accommodation'  with the Congress-I had shoes hurled at  him during the  Eid
prayers by  irate groups of  Islamic fundamentalists. Communalism, sectarian
tension, was omnipresent: as if the gods were  going  to war. In the eternal
struggle  between the world's  beauty and its cruelty,  cruelty  was gaining
ground  by the day. Sisodia's voice intruded  on  these morose thoughts. The
producer  had woken  up to see  the photograph  from  Meerut staring up from
Chamcha's  fold-out  table.  'Fact  is,' he said without any  of  his  usual
bonhomie, 'religious fafaith,  which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations
of human  race,  is now, in our  cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts,
and gogo God is the creature of evil.'
     KNOWN HISTORY SHEETERS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS, a government spokesman
alleged,   but  'progressive   elements'   rejected  this   analysis.   CITY
CONSTABULARY  CONTAMINATED  BY  COMMUNAL  AGITATORS,   the  counter-argument
suggested. HINDU NATIONALISTS RUN AMUCK. A political fortnightly contained a
photograph  of signboards that  had  been mounted outside the Juma Masjid in
Old Delhi.  The Imam, a  loose-bellied man  with cynical eyes, who  could be
found most mornings  in his  'garden' - a red-earth-and-rubble waste land in
the shadow  of the  mosque  - counting rupees donated  by the  faithful  and
rolling up each note individually, so that he seemed to be holding a handful
of  thin beedi-like cigarettes  -  and  who was no  stranger  to communalist
politics himself, was apparently determined that the Meerut horror should be
turned to  good  account.  

Quench the Fire under our Breast,

 the  signboards
cried. 

Salute with Reverence those who met Martyrdom from the Bullets of the
Polis.

 Also: 

Alas!  Alas!  Alas!  Awak the Prime Minister!

 And finally,  the
call to action: 

Bandh will be observed,

 and the date of the strike.
     'Bad  days,' Sisodia  went  on.  'For  the  moomoo  movies also  TV and
economics  have  Delhi  Delhi deleterious  effects.' Then  he cheered  up as
stewardesses approached. 'I will confess  to being a mem member of the  mile
high cluck cluck club,'  he said gaily within the  attendants' hearing. 'And
you? Should I see what I can ficfic fix?'
     O, the dissociations of  which the human  mind  is  capable,  marvelled
Saladin gloomily.  O,  the conflicting  selves jostling and  joggling within
these bags of skin.  No wonder we  are  unable to remain focused on anything
for very long;  no wonder we invent remote-control  channel-hopping devices.
If  we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd  discover  more channels
than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of ... He himself had found his
thoughts  straying, no matter how hard he tried  to fix  them on his father,
towards the question of Miss Zeenat Vakil. He had wired ahead, informing her
of  his arrival; would she meet  the flight? What  might or might not happen
between them? Had  he, by leaving her, by not returning, by losing touch for
a time, done the Unforgivable Thing? Was she - he  thought,  and was shocked
by the realization that it had simply not occurred to him earlier - married?
In love? Involved? And  as for himself: what did  he  really want? 

I'll know
when  I  see  her,

  he  thought.  The  future,  even  when  it  was  only  a
question-shrouded  glimmer,  would not be  eclipsed by the past;  even  when
death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal
rights.
     The flight passed without incident.
     Zeenat  Vakil was  not  waiting at the airport,  'Come along,'  Sisodia
waved. 'My car has come to pipi pick, so please to lelet me drop.'
     Thirty-five  minutes  later  Saladin  Chamcha  was  at  Scandal  Point,
standing  at the gates of childhood  with  holdall and suit-bags, looking at
the imported video-controlled entry  system. Anti-narcotics slogans had been
painted on the perimeter wall: DREAMS  ALL DROWN/WHEN  SUGAR IS  BROWN. And:
FUTURE IS BLACK/WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. Courage, my old, he braced himself; and
rang as directed, once, firmly, for attention.
     In the luxuriant garden the stump of the felled walnut-tree  caught his
unquiet eye. They probably used it as a picnic table now, he mused bitterly.
His father had always had a gift for the melodramatic, self-pitying gesture,
and to eat  his lunch off  a surface which packed such an emotional wallop -
with,  no doubt, many profound  sighs between the large mouthfuls - would be
right  in  character.  Was he  going  to  camp  up his  death, too,  Saladin
wondered.  What a grandstand  play for sympathy  the  old bastard could make
now! Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches
delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.
     His stepmother  emerged from the dying  man's  marbled mansion to greet
Chamcha  without a hint of rancour. 'Salahuddin. Good you came. It will lift
his  spirit, and now it is his spirit that  he must fight with, because  his
body is more or less kaput.' She was perhaps six or seven years younger than
Saladin's mother would  have been, but out of  the same birdlike  mould. His
large, expansive  father had been remarkably consistent in these matters  at
least. 'How long  does he have?' Saladin asked. Nasreen was as undeceived as
her telegram had suggested.  'It could be  any day.' The myeloma was present
throughout Changez's 'long bones' -the cancer had brought its own vocabulary
to  the house; one no  longer spoke of  

arms and legs -

  and  in his  skull.
Cancerous cells  had even been detected in  the blood around the  bones. 'We
should have spotted  it,'  Nasreen said, and Saladin  began to feel  the old
lady's power, the force of will with which she was reining  in her feelings.
'His pronounced weight-loss these past two years. Also he has  complained of
aches and pains, for  instance in the knees. You know how it is. With an old
man, you blame his age, you don't imagine that a vile, hideous disease.' She
stopped, needing to control her  voice. Kasturba, the  ex-ayah, had come out
to join them in the garden. It turned  out that her husband Vallabh had died
almost a year earlier, of old age, in his sleep: a kinder death than the one
now eating its way out of the body of his employer, the seducer of his wife.
Kasturba was still  dressing in  Nasreen I's old, loud saris:  today she had
chosen  one  of the dizziest of the Op-Art black-and-white prints. She, too,
greeted Saladin warmly: hugs kisses tears. 'As for me,' she  sobbed, 'I will
never stop praying  for a miracle while there is one breath left in his poor
lungs.'
     Nasreen II embraced Kasturba; each woman rested her head on the other's
shoulder. The intimacy between the two women was spontaneous and untarnished
by resentments; as  if the proximity of death had washed  away the  quarrels
and  jealousies of life.  The  two  old ladies comforted  one another in the
garden, each consoling the other for the imminent loss  of the most precious
of things: love. Or, rather: the beloved. 'Come on,' Nasreen finally said to
Saladin. 'He should see you, pronto.'
     'Does  he know?' Saladin asked. Nasreen answered evasively.  'He  is an
intelligent man. He keeps  asking, where has all the  blood  gone? He  says,
there are  only two illnesses in which the blood vanishes like this. One  is
tuberculosis.'  But, Saladin  pressed, he never actually  speaks  the  word?
Nasreen lowered her head. The word had not been spoken, either by Changez or
in his presence. 'Shouldn't he know?' Chamcha asked. 'Doesn't a man have the
right to prepare for his death?' He saw Nasreen's eyes blaze for an instant.

Who  do you  think you are  to tell  us our duty.  You  have  sacrificed all
rights.

  Then  they  faded,  and  when   she  spoke  her  voice  was  level,
unemotional,  low. 'Maybe you're correct.' But Kasturba wailed:  'No! How to
tell him, poor man? It will break his heart.'
     The cancer had  thickened  Changez's  blood  to the point at which  his
heart  was having the greatest difficulty pumping it  round his body. It had
also  polluted the  bloodstream  with  alien bodies, platelets,  that  would
attack any  blood with which he was transfused, even blood of his own  type.
So, 

even in this small  way, I can't help him,

 Saladin  understood.  Changez
could easily  die of these side-effects before the cancer did for him. If he
did die from the  cancer, the end would take the form either of pneumonia or
of kidney failure; the  doctors, knowing  they could do nothing for him, had
sent him home to wait for it. 'Because myeloma is systemic, chemotherapy and
radiation  treatment are  not used,' Nasreen explained. 'Only medicament  is
the drug Melphalan, which can  in  some cases prolong life, even  for years.
However,  we are informed he  is  in the category which will  not respond to
Melphalan  tablets.'  

But  he  has  not  been told,

 Saladin's  inner  voices
insisted. 

And that's wrong,  wrong, wrong.

 'Still, a miracle has  happened,'
Kasturba  cried. 'The doctors told  that normally  this  is one of the  most
painful cancers; but your father is in no pain. If one prays, then sometimes
a kindness is granted.' It was on account of  the freak absence of pain that
the cancer had taken so long to diagnose; it had been spreading in Changez's
body  for at least two years.  'I must see him now,' Saladin gently asked. A
bearer had taken his holdall and suit-bags indoors while they spoke; now, at
last, he followed his garments indoors.
     The interior of the house was unchanged - the  generosity of the second
Nasreen towards the memory  of the first seemed boundless, at  least  during
these days, the last on  earth of their mutual spouse  - except that Nasreen
II had  moved  in her  collection of stuffed birds (hoopoes and rare parrots
under  glass bell-jars, a  full-grown King Penguin  in the marble-and-mosaic
hall, its beak  swarming with  tiny  red  ants)  and her  cases  of  impaled
butterflies. Saladin moved past this colourful gallery of dead wings towards
his father's study - Changez had insisted on vacating his bedroom and having
a bed  moved downstairs  into  that  wood-panelled retreat  full  of rotting
books, so that people  didn't  have to run up and down all day to look after
him - and came, at last, to death's door.
     Early  in life Changez Chamchawala had acquired the disconcerting knack
of sleeping with his eyes wide open, 'staying on guard', as he liked to say.
Now, as Saladin quietly entered the room, the effect of those open grey eyes
staring blindly at  the  ceiling  was  positively  unnerving. For  a  moment
Saladin  thought  he  was too late; that  Changez  had died while he'd  been
chatting  in the garden.  Then the man on the  bed emitted a series of small
coughs, turned his head, and extended an uncertain arm. Saladin Chamcha went
towards his father and bowed his head beneath the old man's caressing palm.
     To  fall in love  with one's  father after the long angry decades was a
serene  and beautiful feeling; a renewing, life-giving thing, Saladin wanted
to say, but did not, because it sounded vampirish; as if by sucking this new
life  out of his father he  was making room,  in Changez's  body, for death.
Although he kept  it quiet, however, Saladin felt hourly closer to many old,
rejected selves, many alternative  Saladins  - or rather Salahuddins - which
had split  off from himself as  he made his various life choices, but  which
had  apparently continued  to exist,  perhaps in  the parallel universes  of
quantum theory. Cancer  had  stripped  Changez  Chamchawala literally to the
bone; his cheeks had collapsed into the hollows of the skull, and he  had to
place a foam-rubber pillow  under his buttocks because of the atrophying  of
his flesh. But it had also stripped him  of his faults, of all that had been
domineering,  tyrannical and cruel in  him, so that the mischievous,  loving
and brilliant man beneath lay  exposed, once again, for all to see. 

If  only
he could have been this person all his life,

 Saladin (who had begun  to find
the sound  of his  full, un-Englished  name pleasing  for the first  time in
twenty years) found  himself wishing. How  hard it  was to find one's father
just when one had no choice but to say goodbye.
     On the  morning of  his return Salahuddin Chamchawala was asked  by his
father  to give him a shave. 'These old women of mine don't know which  side
of a Philishave is the business end.'  Changez's  skin hung off his face  in
soft,  leathery jowls, and  his hair  (when Salahuddin emptied  the machine)
looked like ashes. Salahuddin could  not  remember  when he had last touched
his  father's face this way, gently drawing  the skin  tight as the cordless
shaver moved  across it,  and then stroking it to make  sure it felt smooth.
When  he had finished he continued for  a moment  to  run his fingers  along
Changez's  cheeks. 'Look at the old man,' Nasreen  said to  Kasturba as they
entered the room, 'he can't take his eyes off his  boy.' Changez Chamchawala
grinned an  exhausted  grin,  revealing  a  mouth  full of  shattered teeth,
flecked with spittle and crumbs.
     When his father fell asleep again, after  being forced by Kasturba  and
Nasreen to drink  a small quantity of  water, and gazed  up at -what? - with
his  open, dreaming eyes, which  could  see into  three worlds at once,  the
actual  world  of  his  study,  the  visionary  world  of  dreams,  and  the
approaching  after-life as  well (or  so Salahuddin,  in a  fanciful moment,
found himself imagining); - then the son went to Changez's old bedroom for a
rest. Grotesque heads in  painted terracotta glowered down  at him from  the
walls: a horned demon; a leering  Arab with a falcon on his shoulder; a bald
man rolling his eyes upwards and putting his tongue out in panic as  a  huge
black fly settled on his eyebrow.  Unable  to  sleep  beneath these figures,
which he had  known all his life and also hated, because  he had come to see
them as portraits of Changez, he moved finally to a different, neutral room.
     Waking up in the early evening, he went downstairs  to find the two old
women  outside  Changez's  room,  trying  to  work out  the details  of  his
medication. Apart  from the daily Melphalan tablet, he had been prescribed a
whole battery  of  drugs  in an attempt  to  combat  the cancer's pernicious
side-effects:  anaemia,  the  strain on  the  heart, and so  on.  Isosorbide
dimtrate, two  tablets,  four  times a day;  Furosemide, one  tablet,  three
times; Pred-nisolone, six tablets, twice daily . . . 'I'll do this,' he told
the  relieved old women. 'At least it is one thing I can do.' Agarol for his
constipation,  Spironolactone  for  goodness  knew   what,  and  a  zyloric,
Allopurinol: he suddenly remembered, crazily, an antique theatre  review  in
which  the  English  critic, Kenneth  Tynan, had  imagined  the polysyllabic
characters  in Marlowe's  

Tamburlaine  the Great

 as 'a  horde of  pills  and
wonder drugs bent on decimating one another':
     

Beard'st thou me here, thou bold Barbiturate?


Sirrah, thy grandam's dead - old Nembutal.


The spangled stars shall weep for Nembutal . . .


Is it not passing brave to be a king,


Aureomycin and Formaldehyde,


Is it not passing brave to be a king


And ride in triumph through Amphetamine?

     The  things  one's  memory  threw up!  But  perhaps this pharmaceutical

Tamburlaine

 was not such a bad  eulogy for  the fallen monarch lying here in
his bookwormed study,  staring into three worlds, waiting for the end. 'Come
on, Abba,' he marched cheerily into the presence. 'Time to save your life.'
     Still  in  its  place,  on  a  shelf  in  Changez's  study:  a  certain
copper-and-brass lamp, reputed to have the power  of wish fulfilment, but as
yet (because  never rubbed) untested. Somewhat tarnished now, it looked down
upon its dying owner; and was observed, in its  turn, by  his only  son. Who
was sorely tempted, for an instant, to get it down, rub three times, and ask
the turbanned djinni for  a magic  spell  . . . however, Salahuddin left the
lamp where it was.  There was no place for djinns or ghouls or afreets here;
no  spooks  or  fancies could be  permitted.  No  magic  formulae; just  the
impotence of  the  pills.  'Here's the  medicine man,' Salahuddin sang  out,
rattling  the little bottles,  rousing  his  father  from sleep. 'Medicine,'
Changez grimaced childishly. 'Eek, bhaak, thoo.'
     That night, Salahuddin forced Nasreen and Kasturba to sleep comfortably
in their own  beds  while he  kept watch over Changez from a mattress on the
floor. After his midnight  dose of Isosorbide, the dying man slept for three
hours, and then needed to go to the toilet. Salahuddin virtually lifted  him
to his feet, and was astonished at Changez's lightness. This had always been
a  weighty man, but now he was a living lunch for the advancing cancer cells
...  in the toilet,  Changez  refused  all help, 'He  won't let  you  do one
thing,' Kasturba had complained lovingly. 'Such a shy fellow that he is.' On
his  way back to  bed he  leaned lightly on  Salahuddin's arm, and  shuffled
along  flat-footed  in  old,  worn bedroom  slippers,  his  remaining  hairs
sticking  out  at comical  angles,  his head  stuck  beakily  forward on its
scrawny, fragile neck. Salahuddin suddenly longed to pick the old man up, to
cradle him  in his arms and sing soft, comforting songs. Instead, he blurted
out, at this least  appropriate  of moments, an  appeal  for reconciliation.
'Abba, I came because I  didn't want there to be trouble between us any more
. . .' 

Fucking idiot. The Devil damn thee  black,  thou cream-fac'd loon. In
the middle  of the bloody night! And if he  hasn't guessed  he's dying, that
little deathbed speech  will certainly have let him know.

  Changez continued
to shuffle along; his grip on his  son's  arm tightened very slightly. 'That
doesn't matter any more,' he said. 'It's forgotten, whatever it was.'
     In the morning, Nasreen and  Kasturba  arrived  in clean saris, looking
rested and complaining, 'It  was so terrible  sleeping away from him that we
didn't sleep  one  wink.' They fell upon Changez, and so  tender  were their
caresses that Salahuddin  had the same sense of spying on a  private  moment
that  he'd had  at the  wedding of  Mishal Sufyan.  He left the room quietly
while the three lovers embraced, kissed and wept.
     Death,  the  great  fact,  wove its  spell around the  house on Scandal
Point. Salahuddin surrendered to it  like everyone  else, even Changez, who,
on that second day, often smiled his old crooked smile, the one that said  I
know what's up, I'll go along with it, just don't think I'm fooled. Kasturba
and  Nasreen fussed over him constantly, brushing his  hair, coaxing him  to
eat and drink. His tongue had  grown  fat in his mouth, slurring  his speech
slightly, making it hard  to swallow; he refused anything  at all fibrous or
stringy, even  the  chicken breasts he had loved all his life. A mouthful of
soup, pureed  potatoes, a taste of custard. Baby food. When he sat up in bed
Salahuddin sat behind him; Changez leaned against  his son's  body while  he
ate.
     'Open the house,' Changez  commanded  that morning. 'I want to see some
smiling faces here, instead of your three glum mugs.' So, after a long time,
people  came: young  and old,  half-forgotten cousins, uncles, aunts;  a few
comrades  from  the  old  days  of  the  nationalist movement,  poker-backed
gentlemen with  silver hair, achkan jackets and monocles; employees  of  the
various foundations and philanthropical enterprises set up by  Changez years
ago; rival manufacturers of agricultural  sprays and artificial dung. A real
bag of allsorts, Salahuddin thought; but marvelled, also, at how beautifully
everyone behaved  in the presence of  the dying man: the young spoke  to him
intimately  about  their lives,  as  if reassuring him that life itself  was
invincible, offering him the rich consolation of being a member of the great
procession  of the human race, -  while the old  evoked the past, so that he
knew nothing  was  forgotten, nothing lost; that in  spite  of the years  of
self-imposed sequestration he remained  joined to the  world.  Death brought
out the best in people; it was good to be shown Salahuddin  realized  - that
this, too, was what human beings were like: considerate, loving, even noble.
We are still capable of exaltation, he thought in celebratory mood; in spite
of everything, we can still transcend. A pretty young woman - it occurred to
Salahuddin  that  she was probably  his  niece, and he  felt ashamed that he
didn't know her name -  was taking Polaroid  snapshots of Changez  with  his
visitors, and the  sick man was enjoying himself hugely, pulling faces, then
kissing the many proffered  cheeks with a  light in his eyes that Salahuddin
identified as nostalgia. 'It's like a birthday party,' he thought.  Or: like
Finnegan's wake. The dead man refusing  to  lie down and let the living have
all the fun.
     'We have to tell him,' Salahuddin insisted when the visitors  had left.
Nasreen bowed her head; and nodded. Kasturba burst into tears.
     They told him the  next morning,  having asked the specialist to attend
to answer any questions Changez might have. The specialist, Panikkar (a name
the English would mispronounce and giggle over, Salahuddin thought, like the
Muslim 'Fakhar'), arrived at ten, shining with  self-esteem. 'I  should tell
him,' he  said, taking  control. 'Most patients feel  ashamed to  let  their
loved  ones see  their fear.'  'The hell you will,' Salahuddin  said  with a
vehemence  that  took  him  by  surprise. 'Well,  in  that  case,'  Panikkar
shrugged, making as if to leave; which won the argument, because now Nasreen
and Kasturba pleaded with Salahuddin: 'Please, let's not fight.' Salahuddin,
defeated, ushered  the doctor into his father's presence; and shut the study
door.
     'I have a  cancer,' Changez Chamchawala  said  to Nasreen, Kasturba and
Salahuddin  after  Panikkar's departure. He spoke  clearly, enunciating  the
word  with  defiant, exaggerated care. 'It  is  very far advanced. I am  not
surprised. I said to  Panikkar: "This is what I told you the very first day.
Where  else could all the  blood have gone?"' - Outside  the study, Kasturba
said  to  Salahuddin: 'Since you  came,  there  was  a  light  in  his  eye.
Yesterday, with all the people, how happy he was!  But now  his eye is  dim.
Now he won't fight.'
     That afternoon Salahuddin found himself alone with his father while the
two women napped. He discovered that he, who had been so  determined to have
everything  out  in  the  open,  to  say  the  word,  was  now  awkward  and
inarticulate, not knowing how to speak. But Changez had something to say.
     'I want you to know,' he said to his son, 'that I have no problem about
this thing  at all. A man must die of something, and it is  not as  though I
were dying young. I  have no illusions; I know I am not going anywhere after
this.  It's the  end.  That's okay. The only thing  I'm afraid of  is  pain,
because when there is  pain a man loses his dignity.  I don't want  that  to
happen.' Salahuddin was awestruck. 

First one falls in love with one's father
all over again, and then one learns to look up to him, too.

 'The doctors say
you're  a case in a million,' he replied truthfully. 'It looks like you have
been spared the pain.'  Something in Changez relaxed at that, and Salahuddin
realized how afraid the old man had been, how much he'd needed  to be told .
. . 'Bas,' Changez Chamchawala said  gruffly. 'Then I'm  ready. And  by  the
way: you get the lamp, after all.'
     An  hour later  the diarrhoea  began: a thin  black trickle.  Nasreen's
anguished  phone calls to  the emergency  room of  the Breach Candy Hospital
established that  Panikkar  was unavailable.  'Take him  off  the  Agarol at
once,' the duty  doctor  ordered, and prescribed  Imodium instead. It didn't
help. At  seven pm the risk of dehydration  was growing, and Changez was too
weak to sit  up  for his food. He had  virtually  no  appetite, but Kasturba
managed to spoon-feed him  a few  drops of semolina with  skinned  apricots.
'Yum, yum,' he said ironically, smiling his crooked smile.
     He  fell asleep, but by one  o'clock  had been up and down three times.
'For God's sake,' Salahuddin shouted down the telephone, 'give me Panikkar's
home number.' But  that was  against hospital procedure.  'You must  judge,'
said  the duty doctor,  'if the  time  has come  to bring him down.'  Bitch,
Salahuddin Chamchawala mouthed. 'Thanks a lot.'
     At  three  o'clock Changez  was so  weak that  Salahuddin more  or less
carried him to  the  toilet. 'Get the car out,'  he  shouted at Nasreen  and
Kasturba. 'We're going to the hospital. Now.' The proof of Changez's decline
was that, this last time, he permitted his son to help him  out. 'Black shit
is bad,' he said, panting for breath. His  lungs had filled  up  alarmingly;
the breath  was  like bubbles pushing  through glue. 'Some cancers are slow,
but   I  think  this  is  very  fast.  Deterioration  is  very  rapid.'  And
Sala-huddin, the apostle of truth, told comforting lies: 

Abba, don't  worry.
You'll  be fine.

 Changez  Chamchawala shook his head.  'I'm  going, son,' he
said. His chest heaved; Salahuddin  grabbed a  large plastic mug and held it
under Changez's mouth.  The dying man  vomited up more than a pint of phlegm
mixed  up  with  blood:  and after that was  too  weak to  talk.  This  time
Salahuddin did have to carry him, to the back seat of the Mercedes, where he
sat between Nasreen and  Kasturba  while  Salahuddin drove  at top  speed to
Breach Candy Hospital, half a mile down the road. 'Shall  I open the window,
Abba?' he asked at one point, and Changez shook his  head and bubbled: 'No.'
Much later, Salahuddin realized this had been his father's last word.
     The emergency  ward. Running feet, orderlies, wheelchair, Changez being
heaved on  to a bed, curtains. A young doctor, doing  what had to  be  done,
very quickly but  without the appearance of  speed. 

I  like  him,

 Salahuddin
thought. Then the doctor looked him in the eye and said: 'I don't think he's
going  to  make it,' It felt like  being punched in the  stomach. Salahuddin
realized he'd been clinging on to a futile hope, 

they'll fix  him and  we'll
take him home;  this isn't 'it',

  and his instant  reaction  to the doctor's
words was rage. 

You're the mechanic. Don't tell me the car won't start; mend
the  damn thing.

 Changez  was flat out, drowning in his lungs. 'We can't get
at his chest in  this kurta; may we  . . .' 

Cut it off. Do what  you have to
do.

 Drips, the blip of a  weakening heartbeat on a screen, helplessness. The
young  doctor  murmuring:  'It  won't  be long now,  so  .  . .'  At  which,
Salahuddin Chamchawala did a crass thing.  He turned to Nasreen and Kasturba
and said:  'Come quickly  now. Come and say goodbye.'  'For God's sake!' the
doctor exploded . . .  the women did not  weep, but  came  up to Changez and
took a hand each. Salahuddin blushed for shame. He would never  know  if his
father heard the death-sentence dripping from the lips of his son.
     Now Salahuddin found better  words, his Urdu returning to  him  after a
long absence. 

We're all beside you, Abba. We all love you very much.

 Changez
could not  speak, but that was, -  was it not?  - yes, it must have been - a
little  nod  of  recognition.  

He  heard  me.

 Then  all of a  sudden Changez
Chamchawala  left  his face; he  was still alive, but he  had gone somewhere
else,  had  turned  inwards  to look at  whatever there was  to  sec. 

He  is
teaching me  how to die,

 Salahuddin thought. 

He does not avert his eyes, but
looks  death  right in  the  face.

  At  no  point in his dying  did  Changez
Chamchawala speak the name of God.
     'Please,'  the doctor said, 'go outside the curtain now and let us make
our effort.' Salahuddin took the two women a few steps away; and now, when a
curtain  hid  Changez from their sight, they wept. 'He swore he would  never
leave me,' Nasreen sobbed, her iron control broken at last, 'and he has gone
away.' Salahuddin  went to watch through a crack in the curtain; -  and  saw
the voltage being pumped into his father's body, the sudden green jaggedness
of  the pulse on  the monitor  screen;  saw  doctor and  nurses pounding his
father's chest; saw defeat.
     The last  thing he had  seen  in his  father's  face,  just before  the
medical staff's final, useless  effort,  was  the  dawning  of  a terror  so
profound that it chilled Salahuddin to the bone. What had he seen? What  was
it that waited  for him,  for all of us,  that brought such  fear to a brave
man's eyes? - Now, when it was over, he returned  to Changez's bedside;  and
saw his father's mouth curved upwards, in a smile.
     He caressed those sweet cheeks. 

I  didn't shave him today. He died with
stubble on his chin.

 How cold his face was already; but the brain, the brain
retained a little warmth. They had stuffed cottonwool into his nostrils. 

But
suppose  there's  been a  mistake?  What if  he  wants  to  breathe?

 Nasreen
Chamchawala was beside him. 'Let's take your father home,' she said.
     Changez  Chamchawala  returned  home  in  an  ambulance,  lying  in  an
aluminium  tray on the floor between the two women who had  loved him, while
Salahuddin followed in the car. Ambulance men laid him to rest in his study;
Nasreen turned  the air-conditioner up high. This was, after all, a tropical
death, and the sun would be up soon.
     

What did he see?

 Salahuddin kept thinking. 

Why the horror? And,  whence
that final smile?

     People came  again.  Uncles, cousins, friends  took  charge,  arranging
everything. Nasreen  and Kasturba sat  on white  sheets on the  floor of the
room in  which, once upon  a  time, Saladin  and Zeeny had visited the ogre,
Changez; women sat with them to mourn, many of them reciting the qalmah over
and over, with the help of counting beads. Salahuddin was irritated by this;
but lacked the will  to tell them to stop. - Then the mullah came, and sewed
Changez's  winding-sheet, and it was time to wash the body; and  even though
there were  many  men  present,  and there  was  no need  for him  to  help,
Salahuddin insisted. 

If he could  look his death in the eye, then I  can  do
it, too. -

  And when his  father was  being washed, his body rolled this way
and that at the mullah's command, the flesh bruised and slabby, the appendix
scar long and  brown,  Salahuddin recalled the  only other time  in his life
when he'd seen his physically demure father naked: he'd been nine years old,
blundering into a bathroom where Changez was  taking a shower, and the sight
of his  father's  penis was a shock  he'd never  forgotten. That thick squat
organ, like a club. O the power of it; and the insignificance of his own . .
.  'His eyes won't close,'  the mullah complained. 'You should  have done it
before.'  He  was  a  stocky,  pragmatic   fellow,  this  mullah  with   his
mous-tacheless  beard.  He treated the dead  body  as  a commonplace  thing,
needing washing the  way a car does,  or a window, or  a dish. 'You are from
London? Proper London? - I was there many years. I was doorman at Claridge's
Hotel.'  

Oh?  Really? How  interesting.

  The man wanted  to make small-talk!
Salahuddin  was  appalled. 

That's my  father, don't  you  understand?

 'These
garments,' the mullah asked, indicating  Changez's last kurta-pajama outfit,
the one which the hospital staff had cut open to get at his chest. 'You have
need of them?' No, 

no. Take them. Please.

 'You are very kind.'  Small pieces
of  black  cloth  were  being  stuffed  into Changez's mouth and  under  his
eyelids.  'This  cloth has been to  Mecca,' the mullah said. 

Get it  out!

 'I
don't understand. It is holy fabric.' 

You  heard me: out, out.

 'May God have
mercy on your soul.'
     And:
     The bier, strewn with flowers, like an outsize baby's cot.
     The body, wrapped  in white, with  sandalwood shavings, for  fragrance,
scattered all about it.
     More  flowers,  and  a   green  silken  covering  with  Quranic  verses
embroidered upon it in gold.
     The  ambulance,  with  the  bier  resting  in it,  awaiting the widows'
permission to depart.
     The last farewells of women.
     The  graveyard.  Male  mourners  rushing  to lift  the  bier  on  their
shoulders  trample  Salahuddin's foot, ripping off a segment of the nail  on
his big toe.
     Among the mourners, an estranged old friend of Changez's, here in spite
of double  pneumonia; -  and another old gentleman,  weeping  copiously, who
will die himself the very next day;  - and all sorts, the walking records of
a dead man's life.
     The grave. Salahuddin climbs down into it, stands at the head  end, the
gravedigger at the foot. Changez Chamchawala is lowered down.  

The weight of
my father's head, lying in my hand. I laid it down; to rest.

     The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
     Waiting for him when he returned from the graveyard: a copper-and-brass
lamp, his renewed  inheritance. He went into  Changez's study and closed the
door.  There  were  his old  slippers  by the  bed:  he had become, as  he'd
foretold, 'a pair of  emptied shoes'. The bedclothes still bore the  imprint
of  his  father's  body;  the room was full of  sickly  perfume: sandalwood,
camphor, cloves. He took the lamp from its shelf and  sat at Changez's desk.
Taking  a  handkerchief from his  pocket,  he rubbed briskly:  once,  twice,
thrice.
     The lights all went on at once.
     Zeenat Vakil entered the room.
     'O God, I'm sorry,  maybe  you wanted  them  off, but  with the  blinds
closed  it  was  just  so  sad.'  Waving her arms,  speaking  loudly  in her
beautiful croak of  a voice, her  hair woven,  for once, into a waist-length
ponytail, here she  was, his  very own  djinn. 'I feel so bad  I didn't come
before,  I  was  just trying to hurt  you, what a time to choose, so  bloody
self-indulgent, yaar, it's good to see you, you poor orphaned goose.'
     She  was the same as ever, immersed in life up  to her  neck, combining
occasional art  lectures at the university with her medical practice and her
political activities.  'I was  at the  goddamn  hospital when you came,  you
know? I was right there, but I didn't know about your dad until it was over,
and even then I didn't come to give you a  hug, what a bitch, if you want to
throw me out I will have no complaints.' This was a generous woman, the most
generous he'd known. 

When you see her, you'll know,

 he had promised himself,
and  it  turned  out  to  be  true. 'I  love you,'  he heard himself saying,
stopping  her  in her tracks. 'Okay, I won't hold you to  that,' she finally
said, looking hugely pleased. 'Balance of your mind is  obviously disturbed.
Lucky for you you aren't  in one of our great public hospitals; they put the
loonies  next to the heroin addicts, and there's so much drug traffic in the
wards that the poor schizos end up with bad habits. -
     Anyway, if you  say it again after forty days, watch out, because maybe
then I'll take it seriously. Just now it could be a disease.'
     Undefeated (and,  it  appeared, unattached), Zeeny's re-entry into  his
life completed the process  of  renewal, of  regeneration, that had been the
most  surprising  and paradoxical product of  his father's terminal illness.
His old English  life, its bizarreries,  its evils, now seemed  very remote,
even irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. 'About time,' Zeeny approved
when he told her of his  return  to 

Salahuddin.

 'Now you can  stop acting at
last.' Yes, this looked like the start of a new  phase,  in which the  world
would be solid and real, and in which there was no  longer  the broad figure
of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the  grave. An
orphaned life, like  Muhammad's;  like everyone's. A  life illuminated by  a
strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in  his mind's eye, like a
sort of magic lamp.
     I 

must think  of  myself  , from now on,  as living perpetually  in the
first instant  of  the  future,

  he  resolved  a few  days later, in Zeeny's
apartment  on  Sophia College Lane,  while  recovering  in  her bed from the
toothy enthusiasms of her lovemaking. (She had invited him home shyly, as if
she were removing a  veil after long concealment.)  But a history is  not so
easily shaken off;  he was also  living, after all, in the 

present moment of
the  past,

  and  his old life was about to surge around him  once  again, to
complete its final act.
     He became aware  that he  was a rich man. Under the  terms of Changez's
will, the dead tycoon's vast fortune  and myriad business  interests were to
be supervised by a group of distinguished trustees, the income being divided
equally between three parties: Changez's second wife Nasreen, Kasturba, whom
he  referred to in the document as 'in every true sense,  my third', and his
son, Salahuddin. After the deaths of the two women, however, the trust could
be dissolved whenever Salahuddin chose: he inherited, in short, the lot. 'On
the condition,' Changez Chamchawala had mischievously stipulated,  'that the
scoundrel accepts the  gift he previously spurned,  viz., the  requisitioned
schoolhouse situated at Solan, Himachal Pradesh.' Changez might have chopped
down a walnut-tree, but he had never attempted to cut Salahuddin  out of his
will. -  The houses at Pali Hill  and Scandal Point were excluded from these
provisions, however. The former passed to Nasreen Chamchawala outright;  the
latter became, with immediate effect, the sole property of  Kasturbabai, who
quickly  announced  her  intention  of  selling  the old house  to  property
developers. The site was worth crores, and Kasturba was wholly unsentimental
about  real estate.  Salahuddin  protested vehemently,  and was slapped down
hard. 'I have  lived my whole life here,' she informed him. 'It is therefore
for me only  to say.'  Nasreen  Chamchawala  was entirely indifferent to the
fate of the old place.  'One more high-rise, one less  piece of old Bombay,'
she  shrugged.  'What's the  difference? Cities  change.'  She  was  already
preparing to move back to Pali Hill, taking the cases of butterflies off the
walls, assembling her stuffed birds in the  hall. 'Let it go,'  Zeenat Vakil
said. 'You couldn't live in that museum, anyway.'
     She  was right, of course; no sooner had he  resolved to  set his  face
towards the future than he started mooning around and regretting childhood's
end. 'I'm off to meet George and Bhupen, you remember,' she said. 'Why don't
you come along? You need to start plugging  into  the town.' George  Miranda
had just completed a documentary film about communalism, interviewing Hindus
and Muslims  of all shades of opinion. Fundamentalists of both religions had
instantly  sought  injunctions  banning  the  film  from being  shown,  and,
although the Bombay courts had rejected this  request, the case had gone  up
to the Supreme  Court. George, even more stubbly of  chin, lank of  hair and
sprawling of stomach than Salahuddin remembered, drank rum in a  Dhobi Talao
boozer and thumped the table  with pessimistic  fists. 'This is the  Supreme
Court  of Shah Bano fame,'  he  cried, referring  to the notorious  case  in
which,  under pressure  from  Islamic extremists, the Court  had ruled  that
alimony payments were contrary to the  will  of Allah, thus  making  India's
laws even more reactionary than,  for  example, Pakistan's. 'So I don't have
much hope.'  He twisted,  disconsolately, the  waxy points of his moustache.
His new  girlfriend, a tall,  thin Bengali  woman  with  cropped  hair  that
reminded Salahuddin  a little of Mishal Sufyan,  chose this moment to attack
Bhupen Gandhi for having published a volume of  poems about his visit to the
'little temple town' of  Gagari in the  Western  Ghats. The  poems  had been
criticized  by the  Hindu  right;  one eminent  South Indian  professor  had
announced that Bhupen had 'forfeited his right to be called an Indian poet',
but in the opinion of the young woman,  Swatilekha, Bhupen had been  seduced
by  religion into  a  dangerous  ambiguity.  Grey  hair flopping  earnestly,
moon-face shining,  Bhupen defended himself. 'I have said that the only crop
of Gagari is  the stone gods being quarried from the hills. I have spoken of
herds  of legends,  with sacred cowbells tinkling, grazing on the hillsides.
These are not ambiguous images.'  Swatilekha wasn't convinced. 'These days,'
she  insisted, 'our positions  must  be  stated  with crystal  clarity.  All
metaphors are capable of misinterpretation.' She offered her theory. Society
was  orchestrated by  what she  called 

grand narratives:

 history, economics,
ethics.  In India, the development of  a corrupt  and closed state apparatus
had 'excluded  the masses of  the people from  the  ethical project'.  As  a
result,  they  sought  ethical  satisfactions  in the  oldest  of  the grand
narratives,  that  is,  religious  faith.  'But  these narratives  are being
manipulated by the  theocracy and  various political elements in an entirely
retrogressive way.' Bhupen said: 'We can't deny the ubiquity of faith. If we
write  in such a way  as to pre-judge such belief as in some way  deluded or
false, then are we not  guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the
masses?' Swatilekha  was scornful. 'Battle lines are being drawn up in India
today,' she  cried. 'Secular  versus  rational,  the light  versus the dark.
Better you choose which side you are on.'
     Bhupen got up, angrily,  to  go.  Zeeny pacified him:  'We can't afford
schisms.  There's  planning to  be done.'  He sat down again, and Swatilekha
kissed him on  the cheek. Tm sorry,' she said.  'Too much college education,
George always says.  In fact, I loved the poems. I was only arguing a case.'
Bhupen, mollified, pretended to punch her on the nose; the crisis passed.
     They  had met,  Salahuddin now  gathered, to  discuss  their part  in a
remarkable  political  demonstration:  the  formation  of  a   human  chain,
stretching  from the Gateway of India to  the  outermost northern suburbs of
the city, in support of 'national integration'. The Communist Party of India
(Marxist) had recently organized just such a  human  chain  in Kerala,  with
great  success. 'But,' George  Miranda argued,  'here in  Bombay it will  be
totally another matter. In  Kerala the CP(M) is  in power.  Here, with these
Shiv Sena bastards in control, we can expect every  type of harassment, from
police  obstructionism to out-and-out assaults  by mobs on  segments  of the
chain - especially  when it  passes,  as it will have to, through the Sena's
fortresses, in Mazagaon, etc.' In spite of these dangers, Zeeny explained to
Salahuddin, such public demonstrations  were essential. As communal violence
escalated -  and  Meerut was only  the latest  in a  long  line of murderous
incidents - it  was  imperative  that  the forces of  disintegration weren't
permitted  to have  things  all their own way. 'We must show  that there are
also counterforces at work.' Salahuddin was somewhat bemused at the rapidity
with which, once again, his life had begun  to change. 

Me,  taking part in a
CP(M) event. Wonders will never cease; I really must be in love.

     Once they  had settled  matters - how many friends  each  of them might
manage to bring along,  where to assemble, what to carry in the way of food,
drink  and first-aid equipment -  they relaxed,  drank down the  cheap, dark
rum,  and  chattered inconsequentially,  and that was when Salahuddin heard,
for the first time, the rumours  about  the odd behaviour of the  film  star
Gibreel Farishta  that had started circulating in the city, and felt his old
life  prick  him like a  hidden  thorn;  - heard  the past, like  a  distant
trumpet, ringing in his ears.
     The Gibreel Farishta who returned to Bombay from  London to pick up the
threads  of  his  film  career  was  not,  by  general consensus,  the  old,
irresistible  Gibreel.  'Guy seems  hell-bent  on  a suicide course,' George
Miranda, who knew all the  filmi gossip, declared.  'Who knows why? They say
because he was unlucky in love he's gone a little wild.' Salahuddin kept his
mouth shut,  but  felt his face heating up. Allie  Cone  had refused to have
Gibreel  back  after  the fires of Brickhall. In the matter  of forgiveness,
Salahuddin reflected, nobody  had thought to  consult the entirely  innocent
and greatly injured Alleluia; 

once again, we made her life peripheral to our
own. No wonder she's still hopping  mad.

 Gibreel  had  told Salahuddin, in a
final and somewhat strained telephone call, that he was  returning to Bombay
'in the hope that I never have to see her, or you, or this  damn cold  city,
again in what remains of  my  life'.  And  now here he was, by all accounts,
shipwrecking himself again, and on home ground, too. 'He's making some weird
movies,'  George went on.  'And this time he's had to  put  in his own cash.
After the two  flops,  producers have  been pulling out fast. So if this one
goes down, he's  broke,  done for, 

funtoosh.'

  Gibreel  had  embarked  on  a
modern-dress remake of the Ramayana story in  which the heroes and  heroines
had become  corrupt  and evil instead of  pure and free from sin. Here was a
lecherous,  drunken Rama and a flighty  Sita; while Ravana,  the demon-king,
was  depicted as  an upright and  honest  man.  'Gibreel is playing Ravana,'
George explained in fascinated horror. 'Looks like  he's trying deliberately
to set up a final confrontation with religious  sectarians, knowing he can't
win,  that  he'll  be broken into bits,'  Several members  of the  cast  had
already  walked off  the  production, and given  lurid  interviews  accusing
Gibreel of 'blasphemy', 'satanism' and other  misdemeanours. His most recent
mistress, Pimple  Billimoria, was seen  on the cover of 

Cine-Blitz,

  saying:
'It  was  like  kissing the Devil.'  Gibreel's  old  problem  of  sulphurous
halitosis had evidently returned with a vengeance.
     His erratic  behaviour had  been causing tongues to wag even  more than
his choice of subjects to film. 'Some days he's sweetness and light,' George
said. 'On  others,  he conies to work  like  lord god  almighty and actually
insists that people get  down and kneel. Personally I don't believe the film
will  be  finished  unless and until he sorts out his mental health which, I
genuinely feel, is affected. First the illness, then  the  plane crash, then
the unhappy love affair: you can understand  the guy's problems.'  And there
were  worse  rumours:  his  tax  affairs  were  under  investigation; police
officers had visited him to ask questions about the death of Rekha Merchant,
and Rekha's husband, the ball-bearings king,  had threatened to 'break every
bone  in  the  bastard's body',  so  that for a  few days Gibreel had  to be
accompanied by bodyguards when he used the Everest Vilas lifts; and worst of
all  were the  suggestions  of his nocturnal visits to the  city's red-light
district  where,  it was  hinted,  he  had  frequented  certain  Foras  Road
establishments until  the dadas threw him out because the women were getting
hurt. 'They  say some of them  were very badly damaged,' George said.  'That
big hush-money had to be paid. I don't know. People say any damn thing. That
Pimple  of course jumped  right on the bandwagon. 

The Man that Hates  Women.

She's  making herself  a  femme fatale  star out of all this.  But there  is
something  badly wrong  with Farishta.  You know the fellow, I hear,' George
finished, looking at Salahuddin; who blushed.
     'Not very well. Just because of the plane  crash and so on.' He was  in
turmoil. It seemed Gibreel had not managed to escape from  his inner demons.
He, Salahuddin, had believed  - naively, it now turned out - that the events
of  the  Brickhall  fire, when Gibreel  saved  his  life,  had in  some  way
cleansed, them both, had driven those devils out into the consuming  flames;
that, in  fact,  love  had shown that it could exert  a humanizing power  as
great as  that of hatred; that  virtue could transform men as  well as vice.
But nothing was forever; no cure, it appeared, was complete.
     'The  film industry is full of wackos,' Swatilekha was telling  George,
affectionately. 'Just look at  you, mister.'  But Bhupen  grew  serious.  'I
always  saw Gibreel as a positive force,' he said. 'An actor from a minority
playing roles from many religions,  and being accepted. If he has fallen out
of favour, it's a bad sign.'
     Two days later, Salahuddin Chamchawala  read in his Sunday  papers that
an international team of mountaineers, on their way to attempt  an ascent of
the Hidden Peak, had arrived in Bombay; and when he  saw that among the team
was the famed 'Queen of Everest', Miss Alleluia Cone, he had a strange sense
of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping
out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of
a dream.  'Now  I  know what a  ghost is,' he thought. 'Unfinished business,
that's what.'
     Allie's presence in Bombay came, in the next two days, to preoccupy him
more and more. His mind insisted on making strange connections, between, for
example,  the evident recovery of  her feet  and the  end of her affair with
Gibreel: as if he had been crippling her with his jealous love. His rational
mind knew that, in fact, her problem with the fallen arches had preceded her
relationship  with  Gibreel,  but  he had entered an oddly dreamy  mood, and
seemed  impervious to  logic. What was she really doing  here? Why  had  she
really come? Some terrible doom, he became convinced, was in store.
     Zeeny,  her  medical  surgeries,  college  lectures  and  work  for the
human-chain demonstration  leaving her  no time, at present, for  Salahuddin
and  his moods, mistakenly saw  his  introverted  silence  as expressive  of
doubts -  about his  return to Bombay, about  being  dragged  into political
activity  of a  type that  had always  been  abhorrent to him, about her. To
disguise  her fears, she  spoke to him in the  form of a lecture. 'If you're
serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into
some kind of rootless  limbo instead.  Okay? We're all here. We're right  in
front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this
place, this time. Try and embrace this city,  as  it is, not some  childhood
memory that makes  you both nostalgic and  sick. Draw it close. The actually
existing place. Make its faults  your own. Become its  creature; belong.' He
nodded, absently;  and  she,  thinking  he was  preparing to leave her  once
again, stormed out in a rage that left him utterly perplexed.
     Should he telephone Allie? Had Gibreel told her about the voices?
     Should he try to see Gibreel?
     

Something  is about to happen,

 his  inner voice warned. 

It's  going  to
happen, and  you don't know what it is, and you can't do a  damn thing about
it. Oh yes: it's something bad.

     It happened  on the  day of  the demonstration,  which, against all the
odds,  was a pretty fair success. A few minor  skirmishes were reported from
the Mazagaon district, but the event was, in general, an orderly one. CPI(M)
observers reported an unbroken chain of men and women linking hands from top
to bottom of the city, and Salahuddin, standing between Zeeny and  Bhupen on
Muhammad Ali Road, could not deny the power of the image. Many people in the
chain  were in  tears. The  order  to  join  hands  had  been given  by  the
organizers - Swatilekha prominent among them, riding  on the back of a jeep,
megaphone in  hand -  at  eight am precisely; one hour later, as  the city's
rush-hour  traffic reached its  blaring peak,  the crowd began  to disperse.
However, in spite of the thousands  involved in the  event, in spite of  its
peaceful  nature and positive message, the  formation of the human chain was
not reported on  the  Doordarshan  television news.  Nor did All-India Radio
carry  the  story.  The  majority  of  the (government-supporting) 'language
press'  also omitted any mentions. . .  one English-language daily, and  one
Sunday paper,  carried  the  story;  that  was  all.  Zeeny,  recalling  the
treatment  of the Kerala  chain, had forecast this  deafening silence as she
and  Salahuddin walked  home.  'It's a Communist show,'  she explained. 'So,
officially, it's a non-event.'
     What grabbed the evening paper headlines?
     What  screamed  at readers in inch-high letters, while the  human chain
was not permitted so much as a small-print whisper?

     DOUBLE TRAGEDY ON MALABAR HILL - GIBREEL FARISHTA
     VANISHES
     CURSE OF EVEREST VILAS STRIKES AGAIN
     The  body of  the respected movie  producer, S.  S.  Sisodia, had  been
discovered by domestic staff, lying in the centre  of the living-room rug in
the  apartment  of the celebrated actor  Mr. Gibreel  Farishta, with  a hole
through the heart. Miss Alleluia Cone, in what was believed to be a 'related
incident',  had  fallen to her  death from the roof of the  skyscraper, from
which, a  couple  of  years previously, Mrs. Rekha  Merchant had hurled  her
children and herself towards the concrete below.
     The  morning papers were less  equivocal about  Farishta's latest role.
FARISHTA, UNDER SUSPICION, ABSCONDS.
     'I'm  going  back  to  Scandal  Point,'  Salahuddin  told  Zeeny,  who,
misunderstanding this withdrawal into an inner chamber of the spirit, flared
up, 'Mister, you'd better  make up  your mind.' Leaving, he did not know how
to  reassure  her;  how  to  explain his overwhelming feeling  of guilt,  of

responsibility:

 how to tell her that these killings were the dark flowers of
seeds  he  had planted long ago? 'I  just need to  think,' he  said, weakly,
confirming her suspicions. 'Just a day or two.'
     'Salad baba,' she said harshly,  'I've got to hand it to you, man. Your
timing: really great.'
     On  the night after his participation in the making of the human chain,
Salahuddin Chamchawala was  looking  out  of  the  window of  his  childhood
bedroom at the nocturnal patterns of the  Arabian Sea, when Kasturba knocked
urgently on his door.  'A man is here to see  you,' she said, almost hissing
the words, plainly  scared.  Salahuddin had  seen  nobody coming through the
gate.  'From the servants'  entrance,'  Kasturba  said  in  response to  his
inquiry. 'And, baba,  listen, it is  that Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, who the
papers say  . .  .' her  voice trailed off and she chewed, fretfully, at the
nails on her left hand.
     'Where is he?'
     'What to do,  I  was  afraid,'  Kasturba cried.  'I  told him, in  your
father's  study, he  is waiting there only. But maybe it is better you don't
go. Should I call the police? Baapu re, that such a thing.'
     No. 

Don't call. I'll go see what he wants.

     Gibreel was sitting on Changez's bed with the old lamp in his hands. He
was wearing a dirty white kurta-pajama  outfit and looked like a man who had
been sleeping rough. His eyes  were unfocused, lightless, dead. 'Spoono,' he
said  wearily, waving  the lamp  in  the  direction of  an  armchair.  'Make
yourself at home.'
     'You  look awful,' Salahuddin ventured, eliciting from the  other man a
distant, cynical, unfamiliar smile. 'Sit  down and shut up, Spoono,' Gibreel
Farishta said. 'I'm here to tell you a story.'
     

It  was  you,  then,

  Salahuddin understood. 

You  really  did  it:  you
murdered  them both.

 But Gibreel  had closed  his  eyes, put  his fingertips
together and embarked  upon  his story,  -  which was  also the end  of many
stories, - thus:
     Kan ma kan
     Fi qadim azzaman . . .
     It was so it was not in a time long forgot
     Well, anyway goes something like this
     I can't be sure because when  they came to call I wasn't myself no yaar
not my  self at all some days are hard how to tell you what sickness is like
something like this but I can't be sure
     Always one part of me  is standing outside screaming no please don't no
but it does no good you see when the sickness comes
     I am  the angel the  god damned  angel of  god  and these days it's the
avenging angel Gibreel the avenger always vengeance why
     I can't be sure something like this for the crime of being human
     especially female but not exclusively people must pay
     Something like that
     So he brought her along he meant no harm I know that now he just wanted
us  to be together caca can't you see he said she isn't ohoh over you not by
a  longshot and  you he said  still crazy fofor her  everyone knows  all  he
wanted was for us to be to be to be
     But I heard verses
     You get me Spoono
     V e r s e s
     Rosy apple lemon tart Sis boom bah
     I like coffee I like tea
     Violets are blue roses are red remember me when I am
     dead dead dead
     That type of thing
     Couldn't get them  out of my nut and she  changed in front of my eyes I
called her names whore like that and him I knew about him
     Sisodia lecher from somewhere I knew what they were up to
     laughing at me in my own home something like that
     I like butter I like toast
     Verses Spoono who do you think makes such damn things up
     So I called down the wrath of God I pointed my finger I shot him in the
heart but she bitch I thought bitch cool as ice
     stood and waited just  waited and then I don't know I can't be sure  we
weren't alone
     Something like this
     Rekha was there floating on her carpet you remember her Spoono
     you remember  Rekha on her carpet  when we  fell and  someone else  mad
looking guy Scottish get-up 

gora

 type
     didn't catch the name
     She saw  them  or she didn't  see them I  can't be sure she  just stood
there
     It was  Rekha's  idea take her upstairs  summit of  Everest once you've
been there the only way is down
     I pointed my finger at her we went up
     I didn't push her
     Rekha pushed her
     I wouldn't have pushed her
     Spoono
     Understand me Spoono
     Bloody hell
     I loved that girl.
     Salahuddin was thinking how Sisodia, with  his remarkable  gift for the
chance  encounter  (Gibreel   stepping  out  in  front  of  London  traffic,
Salahuddin  himself  panicking before  an  open aircraft door, and  now,  it
seemed, Alleluia Cone  in  her hotel  lobby) had finally bumped accidentally
into  death; -  and thinking, too, about Allie,  less  lucky  a faller  than
himself,  making  (instead  of  her  longed-for solo ascent of Everest) this
ignominiously  fatal descent,  -  and about  how he was going to die for his
verses, but could not find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.
     There was a knocking at the door. 

Open,  please. Police.

 Kas-turba  had
called them, after all.
     Gibreel took the lid off the wonderful lamp  of Changez Chamchawala and
let it fall clattering to the floor.
     

He's hidden a gun inside,

 Salahuddin realized. 'Watch out,' he shouted.
'There's an armed man in here.' The knocking stopped, and now Gibreel rubbed
his hand along the side of the magic lamp: once, twice, thrice.
     The revolver jumped  up,  into his other  hand.  

A fearsome  jinnee  of
monstrous stature appeared,

 Salahuddin remembered. 

'What is your wish?  I am
the slave  of him who holds the lamp.'

 What a  limiting  thing is a  weapon,
Salahuddin thought, feeling oddly detached from events. -  Like Gibreel when
the sickness came. - Yes, indeed; a most  confining manner of thing.  -  For
how few the  choices  were, now that Gibreel was the  

armed  man

 and he, the

unarmed;

 how the universe had shrunk! The true djinns  of old  had the power
to open  the gates of the Infinite, to  make  all things possible, to render
all  wonders capable of being attained; how  banal,  in comparison, was this
modern spook,  this degraded  descendant  of  mighty  ancestors, this feeble
slave of a twentieth-century lamp.
     'I told you  a long time back,' Gibreel Farishta quietly said, 'that if
I thought the sickness would  never leave me, that it would always return, I
would not be able to bear up to  it.' Then,  very quickly, before Salahuddin
could  move a  finger, Gibreel put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth;
and pulled the trigger; and was free.
     He stood at  the window  of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian
Sea.  The  moon  was  almost full; moonlight, stretching  from the  rocks of
Scandal  Point  out to the  far  horizon, created  the  illusion of a silver
pathway,  like  a  parting in  the  water's  shining  hair, like  a road  to
miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales.
Childhood was over, and  the view from this window was no more than  an  old
and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let  the bulldozers come. If the
old refused to die, the new could not be born.
     'Come along,' Zeenat Vakil's voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that
in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt - in spite of his  humanity
- he was getting  another chance.  There was  no accounting  for  one's good
fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking  his elbow in its hand.
'My place,' Zeeny offered. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'
     'I'm coming,' he answered her, and turned away from the view.

     The  quotations  from the  Quran  in  this book  are composites of  the
English versions of N.  J.  Dawood in  the  Penguin  edition and of  Maulana
Muhammad  AH  (Lahore, 1973), with a few touches of  my  own; that from Faiz
Ahmad Faiz is a variant of the translation by Mahmood  Jamal in the  

Penguin
Book  of  Modem  Urdu Poetry.

  For  the description of  the  Manticore,  I'm
indebted to Jorge Luis Borges's 

Book of Imaginary Beings,

 while the material
on Argentina derives, in part, from the writings of W. H. Hudson, especially

Far Away  and  Long  Ago.

  I should  like  to  thank  Pauline  Melville  for
untangling  my plaits from  my dreadlocks; and to confess that the  'Gagari'
poems of 'Bhupen Gandhi' are, in fact, echoes  of Arun Kolatkar's collection

Jejuri.

  The verses  from 'Living  Doll'  are by Lionel Bart ((c) 1959 Peter
Maurice Music  Co. Ltd., all  rights for the U.S. and Canada administered by
Colgeins-EMI Music  Inc.) and  those  by Kenneth Tynan in the  novel's final
section have  been taken from 

Tynan  Right and  Left

  (copyright (c) Kenneth
Tynan, 1967).
     The identities of  many of the authors from whom I've  learned  will, I
hope, be clear  from  the  text; others must remain anonymous,  but  I thank
them, too.
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