I
The Angel Gibreel
1
1
"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a
clear sky.
"I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now."
Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke,
bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohé, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch." At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, "Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. _Dharrraaammm!_ Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat."Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet _Bostan_, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and
premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of
the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea. Who am I?Who else is there?
The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also -- for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast
its everreasonable 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 mothertongues, 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, seventeenhundred 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 swaminto 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. "Youcouldn'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. Asuchmuch 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
Reincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel,for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he "miraculously" defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about again
he would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a trick, _into thin air_.
The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group of speedy, trusted athletes,
because a man who makes up to eleven movies "sy- multaneous" needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his childhood among the fabled lunch-runners of Bombay (of
which more later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. "A career in the Bombay talkies," he told
his loyal crew, "is more like a wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route."After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . . and then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the sets. Wheelchairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's unexplained hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio
gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach.
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 andthe creation of historical soap operas and contemporary crusading housewives by the television network, there was but a single name which, when set above a picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire, cent-per-cent guarantee of an Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said name had departed, up, down or sideways, but certainly and unarguably vamoosed . . .
All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and trawlers dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no avail, epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of Rama Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest chilli-and-spices bombshell -- _she's no flibberti- gibberti mamzel!, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite_ -- clad in temple--dancer veiled undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of copulating Tantric figures from
the Chandela period, -- and perceiving that her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces -- offered up a spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians
smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's sake," she cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, chhichhi, 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 recreating at this exalted altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines
yelled, but had he gone up or down or sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, heard a note that eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the roof of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas.His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with hint innuendo and
nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level. Why tarnish her reputation now?
Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in ball- bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets _klims_ and _kleens_ and the ancient artefacts were _anti-queues_. Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her
long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong personality, drank _like a fish_ from Lalique crystal and hung her hat _shameless_ on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it, fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate."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 wascoming. 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 moviemagazines 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 tobe strong, the ears were long-lobed like young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual of faces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much- metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too.
Or, but, then again . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, British Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai; even
towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, _star of the faith_; he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's.
Afterwards, when the aircraft _Bostan_ was in the
grip of the hijackers, and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been his way of making ahomage to the memory of his dead mother, "my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me,
_farishta_, because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as goddamn gold."
Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city, his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay. And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps.
Gibreel, captive aboard AI-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners' coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable system by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one hundred thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got mislaid, we were
illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret
tongue._Bostan_ circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights in the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy illuminated the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the journey, the inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled lugubriously into the aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows moving, projected by the nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply defined of them was this spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel in a Gandhi cap, running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla skipped nimbly through the shadow- crowd, because he was used to such conditions, think, Spoono, picture, 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 theaffections 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 B T C A protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the
Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. "You see, he is a grown fellow," she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, "Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt." Yes, a grown fellow, "we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him." "Then damn it to hell," the Babasaheb exploded, "why do you do it to me?" Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. "But you are everything to me," she wept, "you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and mysuckling 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 protégé, 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 greentinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested in knowing what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would not wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he 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 havediscussed. 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 stayawake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to.
His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were
willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, _Ganpati Baba_, and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears
on. After six movies playing the elephantheaded god he was permitted to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a
certain cheap television series emanating from HongKong 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 manwho 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 Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne she leaned against marbled walls andfelt 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 theworld 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 NTR never pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've eaten for breakfast, on _toast_, and had he ever, even once, lost his temper? Well, then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel? -- They fired him
anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case.
But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel.
After the star had been flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come upwith 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 Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large that the
police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and tear- gas, which they used even though every one of the half-million mourners was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves.Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball-- bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul.
He recovered.
The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A 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 astartling degree, because he had lost his faith.
On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as
well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams
and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.
During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself thestrength 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," Gibrecl 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 hishopes 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 forforeign cities: kitchy--con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty- eye kitchy-ople kitchy-cople kitchyCon-stanti-nople. And his favourite game was the version ofgrandmother'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 dhotiopen 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 slowlydownwards to earth, then faster, then faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down towards the city, Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb.
o o o
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.
o o o
By then five and a half years had passed since young Salahuddin, garlanded and warned, boarded
a Douglas D C-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. _I 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 doublebreasted 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 therewas 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.
o o o
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 -- thesame 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 of fish 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 theexterminating angel, khali--pili khalaas, as Bombay-- talk has it, finished off for no reason, gone for good.
o o o
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 dandies 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 strangerswho 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."
o o o
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 _TheMillionairess_ 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.
o o o
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 herout 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.o o o
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 heawoke 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 notIndian 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."
o o o
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 GREATINDIAN 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, NeverNever, 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. Bhupcn 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."
o o o
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, theyboth 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 Ali 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 horrorcould 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 flungacross 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 see 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.
o o o
"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 garlicflavoured 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 belltower, 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 spraypainters 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 nothingof 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 videocomputers had gone to work -- made them
look just like simulations, too. Maxim Alien, space playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic wrestling champion and universal all--corners 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. Charncha 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.
o o o
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. "Crazee."The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez's empire ofdung, was to be investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government commission, but Zeeny wasn't interested in that. "Now," she said, "I'll get to find out what you're really like."
Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide, drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness. _I'm not myself
today_, he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves. None of us are
_like this_.
These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within, sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring sound to admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut-tree in which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began to shake. He hid behind the neutrality of facts. "In Kashmir," he told Zeeny, "your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes
of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it's a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?"The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two of them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by a composed and ancient bearer in white, brass- buttoned livery, whose shock of white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, as the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its major-domo in the Olden Days. "My God, Vallabhbhai," he managed, and embraced the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. "I grow so old, baba, I was thinking you would not recognize." He led them down the crystal-heavy corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of change was excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained to him, that when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house would be her memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she died, paintings, furniture, soap--dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls and china ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same magazines on the same tables, the same crumpled
balls of paper in the wastebaskets, as though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. "Mummified," Zeeny said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. "God, but it's spooky, no?" It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the double doors leading into the blue drawingroom, that Saladin Chamcha saw his mother's ghost.He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. "There," he pointed towards the far, darkened end
of the hallway, "no question, that blasted newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she, she," but now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless bird, you see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife, only my wife. _My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I grew up and went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses_. "Please, baba, nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib donated to my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a so-generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand." Chamcha, recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. "For God's sake, Vallabh," he muttered. "For God's sake. Obviously I don't object." An old stiffness re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted him to reprove, "Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme."
"See how he's sweating," Zeeny stage-whispered. "He looks scared stiff." Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said: "Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I bet." Chamcha tried to be reasonable. "They stay herealone 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-forearms and Bluto-belly, he seemed to be roaming about inside his clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite managed to identify. He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose and lips curled,
by the withering sorcery of the years, into a feeble simulacrum of his former ogre--face. Chamcha had barely begun to understand that his father was no longer capable of frightening anybody, that his spell had been broken and he was just an old geezer heading for the grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment that Changez Chamchawala's hair was conservatively short, and since he was wearing highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn't seem likely that the eleveninch toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned, smoking a cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress, towards a blue velour- covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman well advanced in years.No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez skipped past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny Vakil, her eyes sparkling with scandalpoints of light, hissed at Chamcha: "Close your mouth, dear. It looks bad." And in the doorway, the bearer Vallabh, pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer of many long years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife.
When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as
satanic, the child will frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: "And my stepmother, father dear? She is keeping well?"The old man addressed Zeeny. "He is not such a goody with you, I hope so. Or what a sad time you must have." Then to his son in harsher tones. "You have an interest in my wife these days? But she has none in you. She won't meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or, maybe, by now, to me."
_I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn't fight. But this, this is intolerable_. "In my mother's house," Chamcha cried melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. "The state thinks your business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what you've done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it take? To poison their lives. You're a sick man." He stood before his father, blazing with righteous rage.
Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. "Baba, with respect, excuse me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to judge us." Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was staring into the inferno. "It is true he pays us," Vallabh went on. "For our work, and also for what you see. For this." Changez
Chamchawala tightened his grip on the ayah's unresisting shoulders."How much?" Chamcha shouted. "Vallabh, how much did you two men decide upon? How much to prostitute your wife?"
"What a fool," Kasturba said contemptuously. "Englandeducated and what-all, but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big--big, _in your mother's house_ etcetera, but maybe you didn't love her so much. But we loved her, we all. We three.
And in this manner we may keep her spirit alive."
"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 l 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."
o o o
Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child-self, rainbow-pot- stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have become. Of making-a-man of. Of whatwill- I-tell-my-friends. Of irreparable sunderings and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to Allah- worship with new wife and also to blasphemous
worship of late spouse. Above all, of magic-lampism, of being an open-sesamist. Everything had come easily to him, charm, women, wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie, wish, at once master, hey presto. He was a father who had promised, and then withheld, a magic lamp.
o o o
Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained
motionless and silent until Saladin Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. "Such violence of the spirit after so long," Changez said after a silence."So sad. A quarter of a century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son. You must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I? Finished. I'm not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don't explain you any more."
Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of
a fortyyear-old walnut-tree. "Cut it down," he said to his father. "Cut it, sell it, send me the cash."
Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also rising, took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and Kasturba diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed pumpkin-time. "Your book," he said to Zeeny. "I have something you'd like to see."
The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment's floundering, stamped petulantly in their wake. "Sourpuss," Zeeny called gaily over her shoulder. "Come on, snap out of it, grow up."
The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included a large group of the legendary _Hamza-nama_ cloths, members of that sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from
the life of a hero who may or may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad's uncle whose liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hindas 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-1, 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. Ihave 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.
o o o
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.o o o
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 presencebehind 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 shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self.
The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr. Chamcha on that flight was that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams.
4
The dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of_Bostan_ he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil's departure he had fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long way away. The dream-woman had been 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 thespianimpropriety. The woman holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players, of turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay "rail roko" demonstration was being broken up by police lathicharges. The newspaper's reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed. The police had issued a "note". _Neither the reporter nor any other person was assaulted intentionally_. Chamcha drifted into airline sleep.
The city of lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second. surprise of that macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He was bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him anyway: here, travelling incognito in the economy class of Flight A 1--420,
was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself."Sleep okay?" He realized the question was addressed to him, and turned away from the apparition of the great movie actor to stare at the equally extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in baseball cap, metal--rim spectacles and a neon--green bush--shirt across which there writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer possible.
"Eugene Dumsday at your service," the dragon man stuck out a huge red hand. "At yours, and at that of the Christian guard."
Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. "You are a military man?"
"Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the army of Guard Almighty." Oh,
_almighty_ guard, why didn't you say. "I am a man of science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add my privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious devilment ever got folks' brains by the balls."
"I don't follow."Dumsday lowered his voice. "I'm talking monkey- crap here, sir. Darwinism. The evolutionary heresy of Mr. Charles Darwin." His tones made it plain that the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as that of any other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. "I have been warning your fellow-men," Dumsday confided, "against Mr. Darwin and his works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide presentation. I spoke most recently, sir, at the World Understanding Day banquet of the Rotary Club, Cochin, Kerala. I spoke of my own country, of its young people. I see them lost, sir. The young people of America: I see them in their despair, turning to narcotics, even, for I'm a plain--speaking man, to pre-marital sexual relations. And I said this
then and I say it now to you. If I believed my great- granddaddy was a chimpanzee, why, I'd be pretty depressed myself."
Gibreel Farishta was seated across the way, staring out of the window. The inflight movie was starting up, and the aircraft lights were being dimmed. The woman with the baby was still on her feet, walking up and down, perhaps to keep the baby quiet. "How did it go down?" Chamcha asked, sensing that some contribution from him was being required.
A hesitancy came over his neighbour. "I believe there was a glitch in the sound system," he said finally. "That would be my best guess. I can't see how those good people would've set to talking amongst themselves if they hadn't've thought I was through."Chamcha felt a little abashed. He had been thinking that in a country of fervent believers the notion that science was the enemy of God would have an easy appeal; but the boredom of the Rotarians of Cochin had shown him up. In the flickering light of the inflight movie, Dumsday continued, in his voice of
an innocent ox, to tell stories against himself without the faintest indication of knowing what he was doing. He had been accosted, at the end of a cruise around the magnificent natural harbour of Cochin, to which Vasco da Gama had come in search of spices and so set in motion the whole ambiguous history of east-and-west, by an urchin full of pssts and hey-mister--okays. "Hi there, yes! You want hashish, sahib? Hey, misteramerica. Yes, unclesam, you want opium, best quality, top price? Okay, you want _cocaine?_"
Saladin began, helplessly, to giggle. The incident struck him as Darwin's revenge: if Dumsday held poor, Victorian, starchy Charles responsible for American drug culture, how delicious that he should
himself be seen, across the globe, as representing the very ethic he 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.
o o o
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 emptinessin 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 alooffrom such silliness and seemed to be restraining herself from scolding her three colleagues. She seemed insensible to her own beauty, which made her the most dangerous of the four. It struck Saladin Chamcha that the young men were too squeamish, too narcissistic, to want blood on their hands. They would find it difficult to kill; they were here to be on television. But Tavleen was here on business. He kept his eyes on her. The men do not know, he thought. They want to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies and on TV; they arc reality aping a crude image of itself, they are worms swallowing their tails. But she, the woman, _knows_ . . . while Dara, Buta, Man Singh strutted and pranced, she became quiet,
her eyes turned inwards, and she scared the passengers stiff.What did they want? Nothing new. An independent homeland, religious freedom, release of political detainees, justice, ransom money, a safe-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, nowgoddamn it enough is ENO UGH, whaddya wheredya get the idea you can_ and so forth, in the grip of his waking nightmare he drivelled on and on until one of the four, obviously it was the woman, came up, swung her rifle butt and broke his flapping jaw. And worse: because slobbering Dumsday had been
licking his lips as his jaw slammed shut, the tip of his tongue sheared off and landed in Saladin Chamcha's lap; followed in quick time by its former owner. Eugene Dumsday fell tongueless and insensate into the actor's arms.
Eugene Dumsday gained his freedom by losing his tongue; the persuader succeeded in persuading his captors by surrendering his instrument of persuasion. They didn't want to look after a wounded man, risk of gangrene and so on, and so he joined the exodus from the 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.
o o o
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, whocompromise, 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 droopedlower 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. Annapurna ninth, eighty seventy- eight." Or he would begin at the other end: "One, Chomolungma, eight eight four eight. Two, K2,
eighty-six eleven. Kanchenjunga, eighty-five ninety- eight, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu. Nanga Parbat, metres eight thousand one hundred and twenty-six."
"You count eight thousand metre peaks to fall asleep?" Chamcha asked him. Bigger than sheep, but not so numerous.
Gibreel Farishta glared at him; then bowed his head; came to a decision. "Not to sleep, my friend. To stay awake."
That was when Saladin Chamcha found out why Gibreel Farishta had begun to fear sleep. Everybody needs somebody to talk to and Gibreel had spokento 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?"
o o o
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-morereturns. _To be born again, first you have to die_. Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; the new flesh had been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. "The old must die, you get my message, or the new
cannot be whatnot."
Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his exhaustion-beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on Chamcha's shoulder, while Saladin -- prolonged captivity erodes certain reluctances among the captives -- would stroke his face and kiss the top of his head, _There, there, there_. On other occasions Chamcha's irritation would get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old
Gramsci chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that's what's happening to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is trying to be born into your flesh.
o o o
"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_.
o o oOn 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."
o o o
Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white, transforming carpet, its ghost-white shining up through the night. The Alps, France, the coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened meadowlands. Mr. Saladin Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. The world had rediscovered Flight A 1-420, the Boeing 747 _Bostan_. Radar tracked it; radio messages crackled. _Do you want permission to land?_ But no permission was requested. _Bostan_ circled over England's shore like a gigantic sea-bird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero.
When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise, because this time the three male hijackers didn't argue with Tavleen, there were 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.
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