Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jumbo jet blows apart
high above the English Channel. Through the debris of limbs, drinks
trolleys, memories, blankets, and oxygen masks, two figures fall toward the
sea: Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha,
the man of a thousand voices, self-made self and Anglophile supreme.
Clinging to each other, singing rival songs, they plunge downward, and are
finally washed up, alive, on the snow-covered sands of an English beach.
Their survival is a miracle, but an ambiguous one, as Gibreel acquires
a halo, while, to Saladin's dismay, his own legs grow hairier, his feet turn
into hooves, and hornlike appendages appear at his temples.
Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen (by whom?) as opponents in the
eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But which is which? Can
demons be angelic? Can angels be devils in disguise? As the two men tumble
through time and space toward their final confrontation, we are witness to a
cycle of tales of love and passion, of betrayal and faith: the story of
Ayesha, the butterfly-shrouded visionary who leads an Indian village on an
impossible pilgrimage; of Alleluia Cone, the mountain climber haunted by a
ghost who urges her to attempt the ultimate feat-a solo ascent of Everest;
and, centrally, the story of Mahound, the Prophet of Jahilia, the city of
sand- Mahound, the recipient of the revelation in which satanic verses
mingle with the divine.
In this great wheel of a book, where the past and the future chase each
other furiously, Salman Rushdie takes us on an epic journey of tears and
laughter, of bewitching stories and astonishing flights of the imagination,
a journey toward the evil and good that lie entwined within the hearts of
women and of men.
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of the novels
Grimus, Midnight's Children
(winner of the 1981 Booker Prize), and
Shame
(winner of the French Prix du
Meilleur Livre Etranger), and of
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey.
Born in Bombay in 1947, he now lives in London. His books have been
translated into twenty languages.
Jacket outline illustration shows a detail from
Rustam Killing the
White Demon
from a Clive Album in the Victoria and Albert Museum
By the same author
FICTION
Grimus
Midnight's children
Shame
NON-FICTION
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Story
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street,
New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street,
Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 164
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190, Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First American Edition
Published in 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc.
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Copyright (c) Salman Rushdie, 1988
All rights reserved
Page 549 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Rushdie, Salman. The satanic verses.
I. Title.
PR9499.3.R8S28 1989 823 88-40266
ISBN 0-670-82537-9
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Bembo
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission
of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Contents
I
The Angel Gibreel 1
II
Mahound 89
III
Ellowen Deeowen 127
IV
Ayesha 203
V
A City Visible but Unseen 241
VI
Return to Jahilia 357
VII
The Angel Azraeel 395
VIII
The Parting of the Arabian Sea 471
IX
A Wonderful Lamp 509
Fоr Marianne
Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled
condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence
of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this
is certainly part of his punishment, that he is ... without any fixed place,
or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.
Daniel Defoe,
The History of the Devil
The
Angel Gibreel
o be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the I heavens,
'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first
one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you
won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if
you want to get born again . . .' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New
Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a
great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English
Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.
'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,' and thusly and so
beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, 'To the
devil with your tunes,' the words hanging crystalline in the iced white
night, 'in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these
infernal noises now.'
Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he
sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke,
bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the
almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant,
couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the
sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.'
At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit
with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted
the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's
face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince,
'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know
what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air,
baby.
Dharrraaammm!
Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat.'
Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal
beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet
Bostan,
Flight A I-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great,
rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon,
Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper
London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at
Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January
air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of
bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness
of the sea.
Who am I?
Who else is there?
The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg
yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr.
Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar.
Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats,
stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles,
disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups,
blankets, oxygen masks. Also - for there had been more than a few migrants
aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable,
doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon
their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy
the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts - mingling with
the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated
the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed
mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished
futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words,
land,
belonging, home.
Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin
plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and
because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for
babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at
the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while
Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing,
overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered,
awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve,
the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation.
'O, my shoes are Japanese,' Gibreel sang, translating the old song into
English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, 'These
trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's
Indian for all that.' The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps
it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus,
the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or
perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the
performance), or their blast-delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of
the imminent. . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin
Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish
fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their
transmutation began.
Mutation?
Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft,
imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which,
thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining
locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and
power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory,
discontinuous, metamorphic, - because when you throw everything up in the
air anything becomes possible - wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place
in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck:
under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.
What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a
rush? So then, neither does revelation . . . take a look at the pair of
them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so
new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew
too close to the sun, is that it?
That's not it. Listen:
Mr. Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel
Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard
wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr.
James Thomson, seventeen-hundred to seventeen-forty-eight. '. . . at
Heaven's command,' Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically
redwhiteblue by the cold, 'arooooose from out the aaaazure main.' Farishta,
horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats,
inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild
recital: 'And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain.'
Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another,
much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the
planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this,
too: they did.
Downdown they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and
threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from
their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of
the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the
terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were
drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds.
They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha,
prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple
bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and
would have shouted, 'Keep away, get away from me,' except that something
prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his
intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and
Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the
force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their
geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to
Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of
cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders,
men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic
flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats,
centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion
that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic,
hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between
his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck.
This person had, however, no time for such 'high falutions'; was,
indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the
swirl of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a
brocade sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer
defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these
altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. 'Rekha Merchant,'
Gibreel greeted her. 'You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?'
Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting
condition may be offered in mitigation . . . Chamcha, clutching his legs,
made an uncomprehending query: 'What the hell?'
'You don't see her?' Gibreel shouted. 'You don't see her goddamn
Bokhara rug?'
No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to
confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what
do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death
comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names.
Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to
Chamcha: 'Spoono? You see her or you don't?'
Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced
her alone. 'You shouldn't have done it,' he admonished her. 'No, sir. A sin.
A suchmuch thing.'
O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high
moral tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded
his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight,
who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love.
He became afraid. 'What do you want? No, don't tell, just go.'
When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I
could not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished,
you used it as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and
also her, the icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to
forgive. I curse you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because
that's where you sent me, damn you, where you came from, devil, where you're
going, sucker, enjoy the bloody dip. Rekha's curse; and after that, verses
in a language he did not understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which
he thought he made out, but maybe not, the repeated name
Al-Lat.
He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds.
Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note.
The roof of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes
opened. A scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when
Gibreel swam across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight
pierced his open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the
transformations of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a
fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit
Chamcha it released more than noise:
'Fly,' Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. 'Start flying, now.' And added,
without knowing its source, the second command: 'And sing.'
How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?
How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises,
what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off
the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?
Is birth always a fall?
Do angels have wings? Can men fly?
When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English
Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he
understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were
once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to
ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his
perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's,
to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him
over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first
thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his
pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices,
it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it,
yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body,
because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning
his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt
like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was
both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered
him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and
once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed
Gibreel Farishta by the balls.
'Fly,' it commanded Gibreel. 'Sing.'
Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and
then with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder
he flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of
the spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a
tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike
Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying
that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would
have been for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that
they would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into
pieces on making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they
began to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and
flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them
were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze.
They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from
Bostan
and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more voluble of
the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they
had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore;
but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied
this. 'God, we were lucky,' he said. 'How lucky can you get?'
I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to
omnipresence and -potence, I'm making no claims at present, but I can manage
this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed.
Which was the miracle worker?
Of what type - angelic, satanic - was Farishta's song?
Who am I?
Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?
These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the
snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear:
'Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to
you.'
Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as
befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears.
2
eincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the
biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he
'miraculously' defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe
would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to
forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about again he would
sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life
forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a
trick,
into thin air.
The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his
film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit
of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this
group of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven
movies 'sy-multaneous' needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex
coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his
childhood among the fabled lunch-runners of Bombay (of which more later),
the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and
unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take
Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed
towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. 'A
career in the Bombay talkies,' he told his loyal crew, 'is more like a
wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route.'
After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he
had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . .
and then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among
the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the
sets. Wheel-chairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when
movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has
always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great
artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for
their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's
unexplained hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected
from studio gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust
beneath the painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach.
Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked
expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links - only nine holes
nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant
weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn
corpse of the old city lay - there, right there, upper-echelon executives,
missing the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn
from senior heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of
the producers was easy to understand, because in those days of declining
audiences and the creation of historical soap operas and contemporary
crusading housewives by the television network, there was but a single name
which, when set above a picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire,
cent-per-cent guarantee of an Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said
name had departed, up, down or sideways, but certainly and unarguably
vamoosed . . .
All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and
trawlers dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no
avail, epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of
Rama Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest
chilli-and-spices bombshell -
she's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a
whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite -
clad in temple-dancer veiled
undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of
copulating Tantric figures from the Chandela period, - and perceiving that
her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces - offered up a
spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians
smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all
elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. 'God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's
sake,' she cried. 'I mean today it was the love scene, chhi chhi, I was just
dying inside, thinking how to go near to that fatmouth with his breath of
rotting cockroach dung.' Bell-heavy anklets jingled as she stamped. 'Damn
good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get one job as a leper
even.' Here Pimple's soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of obscenities
that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to
compare Pimple's vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan
Devi whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists' pencils to
rubber in a trice.
Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor.
Rhinestones fell from her navel as she went, mirroring her tears... in the
matter of Farishta's halitosis she was not, however, altogether wrong; if
anything, she had a little understated the case. Gibreel's exhalations,
those ochre clouds of sulphur and brimstone, had always given him - when
taken together with his pronounced widow's peak and crowblack hair - an air
more saturnine than haloed, in spite of his archangelic name. It was said
after he disappeared that he ought to have been easy to find, all it took
was a halfway decent nose . . . and one week after he took off, an exit more
tragic than Pimple Billimoria's did much to intensify the devilish odour
that was beginning to attach itself to that forsolong sweet-smelling name.
You could say that he had stepped out of the screen into the world, and in
life, unlike the cinema, people know it if you stink.
We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In
flight. Goodbye.
The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel
Farishta's penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas
skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the
highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which
you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that
way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to
prolong their cacophonies. FARISHTA DIVES UNDERGROUND, opined
Blitz
in
somewhat macabre fashion, while Busybee in
The Daily
preferred GIBREEL FLIES
COOP. Many photographs were published of that fabled residence in which
French interior decorators bearing letters of commendation from Reza Pahlevi
for the work they had done at Persepolis had spent a million dollars
re-creating at this exalted altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another
illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines yelled,
but had he gone up or down or sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of
tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable.
But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the papers, listening to all the radio
broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned
something from Farishta's message, heard a note that eluded everyone else,
and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the roof of her
high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas.
His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath
his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course
the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with
hint innuendo and nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level.
Why tarnish her reputation now?
Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a
tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big
in ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at
their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets
klims
and
kleens
and the
ancient artefacts were
anti-queues.
Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in
the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes,
her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce from the
impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong
personality, drank
like a fish
from Lalique crystal and hung her hat
shameless
on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it,
fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha
Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a
letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose
heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate.
'Many years ago,' her letter read, 'I married out of cowardice.
Now, finally, I'm doing something brave.' She left a newspaper on her
bed with Gibreel's message circled in red and heavily underscored - three
harsh lines, one of them ripping the page in fury. So naturally the
bitch-journals went to town and it was all LOVELY'S LOVELORN LEAP, and
BROKEN-hearted BEAUTY TAKES LAST DIVE. But:
Perhaps she, too, had the rebirth bug, and Gibreel, not understanding
the terrible power of metaphor, had recommended flight.
To be born again,
first you have to
and she was a creature of the sky, she drank Lalique
champagne, she lived on Everest, and one of her fellow-Olympians had flown;
and if he could, then she, too, could be winged, and rooted in dreams.
She didn't make it. The lala who was employed as gatekeeper of the
Everest Vilas compound offered the world his blunt testimony. 'I was
walking, here here, in the compound only, when there came a thud,
tharaap.
I
turned. It was the body of the oldest daughter. Her skull was completely
crushed. I looked up and saw the boy falling, and after him the younger
girl. What to say, they almost hit me where I stood. I put my hand on my
mouth and came to them. The young girl was whining softly. Then I looked up
a further time and the Begum was coming. Her sari was floating out like a
big balloon and all her hair was loose. I took my eyes away from her because
she was falling and it was not respectful to look up inside her clothes.'
Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. The whispers
blamed Gibreel. Let's leave it at that for the moment.
Oh: don't forget: he saw her after she died. He saw her several times.
It was a long time before people understood how sick the great man was.
Gibreel, the star. Gibreel, who vanquished the Nameless Ailment. Gibreel,
who feared sleep.
After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On
the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the
populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further
and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by
the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a
wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of
Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list.
Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered,
snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired
the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his
images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of
Celebrity
and
Society
and
Illustrated Weekly
went blank at the bookstalls
and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink.
Even on the silver screen itself, high above his worshippers in the dark,
that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to putrefy, blister and bleach;
projectors jammed unaccountably every time he passed through the gate, his
films ground to a halt, and the lamp-heat of the malfunctioning projectors
burned his celluloid memory away: a star gone supernova, with the consuming
fire spreading outwards, as was fitting, from his lips.
It was the death of God. Or something very like it; for had not that
outsize face, suspended over its devotees in the artificial cinematic night,
shone like that of some supernal Entity that had its being at least halfway
between the mortal and the divine? More than halfway, many would have
argued, for Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career
incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the
subcontinent in the popular genre movies known as 'theologicals'. It was
part of the magic of his persona that he succeeded in crossing religious
boundaries without giving offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute
in hand, amongst the beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with
upturned palms, serene, he meditated (as Gautama) upon humanity's suffering
beneath a studio-rickety bodhi-tree. On those infrequent occasions when he
descended from the heavens he never went too far, playing, for example, both
the Grand Mughal and his famously wily minister in the classic
Akbar and
Birbal.
For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of
millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human
population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most
acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his
fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased
to exist.
The fans, yes, and? How about Gibreel?
That face. In real life, reduced to life-size, set amongst ordinary
mortals, it stood revealed as oddly un-starry. Those low-slung eyelids could
give him an exhausted look. There was, too, something coarse about the nose,
the mouth was too well fleshed to be strong, the ears were long-lobed like
young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual
effaces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined
by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and
debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness,
perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any
rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for
Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about
avatars,
like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's
God stuff, too.
Or, but, thenagain . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations,
too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Naj-muddin in Poona, British
Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune,
Vadodara, Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after
the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin,
star of the
faith;
he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's.
Afterwards, when the aircraft
Bostan
was in the grip of the hijackers,
and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their
pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had
been his way of making a homage to the memory of his dead mother, 'my
mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started
the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called
me, farishta,
because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as
goddamn gold.'
Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city,
his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers
of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay.
And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps.
Gibreel, captive aboard A1-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing
Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners'
coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his
mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable system
by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one hundred
thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got mislaid,
we were illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret tongue.
Bostan
circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights
in the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy
illuminated the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the
journey, the inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled
lugubriously into the aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows
moving, projected by the nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply
defined of them was this spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel
in a Gandhi cap, running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla
skipped nimbly through the shadow-crowd, because he was used to such
conditions, think, Spoono, picture, thirty-forty tiffins in a long wooden
tray on your head, and when the local train stops you have maybe one minute
to push on or off, and then running in the streets, flat out, yaar, with the
trucks buses scooters cycles and what-all, one-two, one-two, lunch, lunch,
the dabbas must get through, and in the monsoon running down the railway
line when the train broke down, or waist-deep in water in some flooded
street, and there were gangs, Salad baba, truly, organized gangs of
dabba-stealers, it's a hungry city, baby, what to tell you, but we could
handle them, we were everywhere, knew everything, what thieves could escape
our eyes and ears, we never went to any policia, we looked after our own.
At night father and son would return exhausted to their shack by the
airport runway at Santacruz and when Ismail's mother saw him approaching,
illuminated by the green red yellow of the departing jet-planes, she would
say that simply to lay eyes on him made all her dreams come true, which was
the first indication that there was something peculiar about Gibreel,
because from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfil people's most secret
desires without having any idea of how he did it. His father Najmuddin
Senior never seemed to mind that his wife had eyes only for her son, that
the boy's feet received nightly pressings while the father's went unstroked.
A son is a blessing and a blessing requires the gratitude of the blest.
Naima Najmuddin died. A bus hit her and that was that, Gibreel wasn't
around to answer her prayers for life. Neither father nor son ever spoke of
grief. Silently, as though it were customary and expected, they buried their
sadness beneath extra work, engaging in an inarticulate contest, who could
carry the most dabbas on his head, who could acquire the most new contracts
per month, who could run faster, as though the greater labour would indicate
the greater love. When he saw his father at night, the knotted veins bulging
in his neck and at his temples, Ismail Najmuddin would understand how much
the older man had resented him, and how important it was for the father to
defeat the son and regain, thereby, his usurped primacy in the affections of
his dead wife. Once he realized this, the youth eased off, but his father's
zeal remained unrelenting, and pretty soon he was getting promotion, no
longer a mere runner but one of the organizing muqaddams. When Gibreel was
nineteen, Najmuddin Senior became a member of the lunch-runners' guild, the
Bombay Tiffin Carriers' Association, and when Gibreel was twenty, his father
was dead, stopped in his tracks by a stroke that almost blew him apart. 'He
just ran himself into the ground,' said the guild's General Secretary,
Babasaheb Mhatre himself. 'That poor bastard, he just ran out of steam.' But
the orphan knew better. He knew that his father had finally run hard enough
and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run
clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved,
once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to
depart.
Babasaheb Mhatre sat in a blue office behind a green door above a
labyrinthine bazaar, an awesome figure, buddha-fat, one of the great moving
forces of the metropolis, possessing the occult gift of remaining absolutely
still, never shifting from his room, and yet being everywhere important and
meeting everyone who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail's father
ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man
into his presence. 'So? Upset or what?' The reply, with downcast eyes: ji,
thank you, Babaji, I am okay. 'Shut your face,' said Babasaheb Mhatre. 'From
today you live with me.' Butbut, Babaji . . . 'But me no buts. Already I
have informed my goodwife. I have spoken.' Please excuse Babaji but how what
why? 'I have
spoken.'
Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take
pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after
a while he began to have an idea. Mrs Mhatre was a thin woman, like a pencil
beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that
she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put
sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the
household could hear the great General Secretary of the BTCA protesting, Let
me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with
large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair.
They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the
Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did
not treat the young man as a child. 'You see, he is a grown fellow,' she
told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, 'Give the boy the blasted spoon
of malt.' Yes, a grown fellow, 'we must make a man of him, husband, no
babying for him.' 'Then damn it to hell,' the Babasaheb exploded, 'why do
you do it to me?' Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. 'But you are everything to
me,' she wept, 'you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord
and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life.'
Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt.
He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To
console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about
the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already
being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had
been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who
started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just
reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs
and a bringer of spirits into glasses. 'But I gave that up,' he told his
protege, with many suitably melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns,
'after I got the fright of my bloody life.'
Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most
co-operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to
ask him some big questions.
Is there a God,
and that glass which had been
running round like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a
twitch, completely phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won't answer
that try this one instead, and I came right out with it, Is
there a Devil.
After that the glass - baprebap! - began to shake - catch your ears! -
slowslow at first, then faster-faster, like a jelly, until it jumped!
-ai-hai! - up from the table, into the air, fell down on its side, and -
o-ho! - into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don't believe,
Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but thenandthere I learned my lesson:
don't meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.
This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young
listener, because even before his mother's death he had become convinced of
the existence of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around
him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the
visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be
sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he
had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy
air: people, motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their
reality concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would
fade, but the sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God,
angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were
bullock-carts or lamp-posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight
that he had never seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic
optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles
which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able
to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.
From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the
Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't
interested in knowing what they were. 'What a man!' he thought. 'What angel
would not wish to speak to him?' Sometimes, though, he caught himself in the
act of forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as
he drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent
fancy began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the
time when, having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success
of his job as the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended
up marrying her as well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on
a rose-strewn dais, simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had
placed demurely over his face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre,
reached lovingly towards him to remove the fabric, and gaze at his features
in a mirror placed in his lap. This dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought
him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that he began to worry about
the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions.
Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him
that required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb
Mhatre took him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not
alone in the world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not
entirely surprised when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the
morning of his twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being
prepared to listen to an appeal.
'You're fired,' Mhatre emphasized, beaming. 'Cashiered, had your chips.
Dis
-miss.'
'But, uncle,'
'Shut your face.'
Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life,
informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the
legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. 'It is for appearance
only,' the Babasaheb said. 'Rama is my good friend and we have discussed. A
small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight and stop
pulling such humble faces, it does not suit.'
'But, uncle,'
'Boy like you is too damn goodlooking to carry tiffins on his head all
his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five
minutes back.'
'But, uncle,'
'I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars.'
He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a
star, serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic
parts. He remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and
his apparent lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most
self-seeking of industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both.
And throughout the four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on
the mouth.
On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and
can't see that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle,
the poor relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook,
none of them the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked
him, slapped him, teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid,
looked at him or sang to him or danced around him with cinematic love in
their eyes. Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios
and tried to imagine what women looked like without clothes on. To get his
mind off the subject of love and desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous
autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars
of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe,
everything; and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and
the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and
the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and
the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young
girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces,
and young boys dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for
instance in a golden fortress filled with precious stones. He filled himself
up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his
insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used,
that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he
was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred
to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general
knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a
larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to
offer it to.
His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once
the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual
mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the
pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a
production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office
names of the time were willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an
elephant's head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit,
Ganpati Baba,
and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and
ears on. After six movies playing the elephant-headed god he was permitted
to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy
tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure
movies that owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from
Hong Kong than it did to the Ramayana. This series proved so popular that
monkey-tails became de rigueur for the city's young bucks at the kind of
parties frequented by convent girls known as 'firecrackers' because of their
readiness to go off with a bang.
After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success
deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more
regrettable development.
(I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha's beans.)
Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become
irresistibly attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so
great that several of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the
Ganesh-mask on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the
dignity of the god. Owing to the innocence of his upbringing he could not at
that time differentiate between quantity and quality and accordingly felt
the need to make up for lost time. He had so many sexual partners that it
was not uncommon for him to forget their names even before they had left his
room. Not only did he become a philanderer of the worst type, but he also
learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man who plays gods must be
above reproach. So skilfully did he conceal his life of scandal and debauch
that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his deathbed a decade after
he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of illusion, black-money and
lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a man. 'God-sake, mister,'
the Babasaheb pleaded, 'when I told you back then to go and be a homo I
never thought you would take me seriously, there is a limit to respecting
one's elders, after all.' Gibreel threw up his hands and swore that he was
no such disgraceful thing, and that when the right girl came along he would
of course undergo nuptials with a will. 'What you waiting? Some goddess from
heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali, who?' cried the old man, coughing blood, but
Gibreel left him with the enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without
having his mind set entirely at rest.
The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to
bury his greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost
forever, his talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without
holding back, the rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to
employ. By the time of his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he
used to experience owing to his longing for love, which had twisted and
turned in him like a sorcerer's knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic
night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by
dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart.
'Your trouble,' Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of
the clouds, 'is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always got
let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for what
you did.' He couldn't argue. 'God's gift,' she screamed at him, 'God knows
where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the gutter, God knows
what diseases you brought.'
But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the
vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would
understand that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody
blamed him for leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness,
how many abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud-hole, how many broken
hearts. In all those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity
of women, but he was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made
possible the deepest and sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he
was doing nothing wrong.
Rekha: she entered his life when he bought the penthouse at Everest
Vilas and she offered, as a neighbour and businesswoman, to show him her
carpets and antiques. Her husband was at a world-wide congress of
ball-bearings manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she
invited Gibreel into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and
carved wooden handrails from Keralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or
cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne
she leaned against marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone
against her back. When he sipped the champagne she teased him, surely gods
should not partake of alcohol, and he answered with a line he had once read
in an interview with the Aga Khan, O, you know, this champagne is only for
outward show, the moment it touches my lips it turns to water. After that it
didn't take long for her to touch his lips and deliquesce into his arms. By
the time her children returned from school with the ayah she was
immaculately dressed and coiffed, and sat with him in the drawing-room,
revealing the secrets of the carpet business, confessing that art silk stood
for artificial not artistic, telling him not to be fooled by her brochure in
which a rug was seductively described as being made of wool plucked from the
throats of baby lambs, which means, you see, only
low-grade wool,
advertising, what to do, this is how it is.
He did not love her, was not faithful to her, forgot her birthdays,
failed to return her phone calls, turned up when it was most inconvenient
owing to the presence in her home of dinner guests from the world of the
ball-bearing, and like everyone else she forgave him. But her forgiveness
was not the silent, mousy let-off he got from the others. Rekha complained
like crazy, she gave him hell, she bawled him out and cursed him for a
useless lafanga and haramzada and salah and even, in extremis, for being
guilty of the impossible feat of fucking the sister he did not have. She
spared him nothing, accusing him of being a creature of surfaces, like a
movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave him anyway and allowed him
to unhook her blouse. Gibreel could not resist the operatic forgiveness of
Rekha Merchant, which was all the more moving on account of the flaw in her
own position, her infidelity to the ball-bearing king, which Gibreel forbore
to mention, taking his verbal beatings like a man. So that whereas the
pardons he got from the rest of his women left him cold and he forgot them
the moment they were uttered, he kept coming back to Rekha, so that she
could abuse him and then console him as only she knew how.
Then he almost died.
He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia,
taking part in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems
that three oceans are truly smashing into one another. Three sets of waves
rolled in from the west east south and collided in a mighty clapping of
watery hands just as Gibreel took a punch on the jaw, perfect timing, and he
passed out on the spot, falling backwards into tri-oceanic spume. He did not
get up.
To begin with everybody blamed the giant English stunt-man Eustace
Brown, who had delivered the punch. He protested vehemently. Was he not the
same fellow who had performed opposite Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao in his
many theological movie roles? Had he not perfected the art of making the old
man look good in combat without hurting him? Had he ever complained that N T
R never pulled
his
punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black
and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've
eaten for breakfast, on
toast,
and had he ever, even once, lost his temper?
Well, then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel? -They
fired him anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case.
But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had
been flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made
available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come up with almost
nothing; and while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood-count that had
fallen from his normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital
spokesman faced the national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. 'It
is a freak mystery,' he gave out. 'Call it, if you so please, an act of
God.'
Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no
apparent reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At
the worst moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis,
and it seemed that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his
nose and ears and out of the corners of his eyes. For seven days he bled,
and received transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical
science, including a concentrated form of rat poison, and although the
treatment resulted in a marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for
lost.
The whole of India was at Gibrecl's bedside. His condition was the lead
item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on
the national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road
was so large that the police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and
tear-gas, which they used even though every one of the half-million mourners
was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her
appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in
Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled
over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution
against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the
rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the
mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for
the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves.
Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no
telephone call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home
cooking? While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb
pasandas, who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected
by her ball-bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her
heart, and went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her
children, chit-chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when
required, and never, not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul.
He recovered.
The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too,
was called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A
national holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land.
But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed,
and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith.
On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort
through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance
as well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all
the pursuing vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one
minutes, and by the end of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be
done. He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left
or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table
groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with
all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the
rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief
and the pig's trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle
of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, he began to eat as
fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon
rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.
During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling
upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding
do not abandon me now after watching over me so long. Ya Allah show me some
sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength
to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my
time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was
being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but
after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why
must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The
anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in
its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he
was talking to
thin air,
that there was nobody there at all, and then he
felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the
emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing,
nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to
be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and
his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now
stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling
out of his face.
He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was
so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and
translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away.
'Don't you get it?' he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments
from the corners of his mouth. 'No thunderbolt. That's the point.'
She came back to stand in front of him. 'You're alive,' she told him.
'You got your life back.
That's
the point.'
He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I
fell in love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of
Everest, blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge,
change your life, or did
you get it back for nothing,
I couldn't resist.
'You and your reincarnation junk,' Rekha cajoled him. 'Such a nonsense
head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes to
your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there
she is, hey presto, the blonde mame. Don't think I don't know what you're
like, Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?'
No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept,
face-down, on the floor); and never entered it again.
Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie
got into an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a
do-not-disturb sign, but in the end they agreed that the world was real,
what was possible was possible and what was impossible was im-, brief
encounter, ships that pass, love in a transit lounge. After she left,
Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her challenge, resolved to get his
life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his belief it didn't mean he
couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of the ham-eating
photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his name, he signed
movie contracts and went back to work.
And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A
bearded passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London.
The 747 was named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but
Bostan.
'To be born again,' Gibreel Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much
later, 'first you have to die. Me, I only half-expired, but I did it on two
occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my
friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a
new man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?'
Why did he leave?
Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of
the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was
insisting on its right to become.
And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a
nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams.
3
Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of
crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the
narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching the
city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved
expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a
somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like
those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes
that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha
had constructed this face with care - it had taken him several years to get
it just right - and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as
his own -
indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it.
Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice
whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the
sawn-off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was
a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home town, his first such
visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel
Farishta's film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments.
It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and,
subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down.
It started - Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping,
in some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone
unobserved by his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a
delicate shudder of horror - on his flight east some weeks ago. He had
fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf,
and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin,
who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane
covering his entire body and begged Saladin to help him, to release him from
the prison of his skin. Chamcha picked up a stone and began to batter at the
glass. At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked surface
of the stranger's body, and when Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards
the other began to scream, because chunks of his flesh were coming away with
the glass. At this point an air stewardess bent over the sleeping Chamcha
and demanded, with the pitiless hospitality of her tribe:
Something to
drink, sir? A drink?,
and Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech
unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and
so long ago!) unmade. 'Achha, means what?' he mumbled. 'Alcoholic beverage
or what?' And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir,
all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: 'So,
okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only.'
What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly
in his chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in
transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting
coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between
thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver
arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What
further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a
mistake to
go home,
after so long, how could it be other than a regression;
it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the
whole thing was bound to be a disaster.
I'm not myself,
he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the
vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly.
After all, 'les acteurs ne sont pas des gens', as the great ham Frederick
had explained in
Les Enfants du Paradis.
Masks beneath masks until suddenly
the bare bloodless skull.
The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air
turbulence, they dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about
beneath them and the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at
his giant transistor radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man
had not fastened his belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice
back to its haughtiest English pitch. 'Look here, why don't you . . .' he
indicated, but the sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag
which Saladin had handed him just in time, shook his head, shrugged,
replied: 'Sahib, for what? If Allah wishes me to die, I shall die. If he
does not, I shall not. Then of what use is the safety?'
Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his
seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your
hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back.
Once upon a time -
it was and it was not so,
as the old stories used to
say,
it happened and it never did -
maybe, then, or maybe not, a
ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the
street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just
descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed
between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their
noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from
raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling
faintly nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the
black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent
down excitedly and grabbed, - opened, -and found, to his delight, that it
was full of cash, - and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on
black markets and international exchanges, - pounds! Pounds sterling, from
Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and
far away. Dazzled by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his
eyes to make sure he had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to
him that a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like
an angel's breath, like an answered prayer, coming to an end in the very
spot on which he stood. His fingers trembled as they reached into the
wallet, towards the fabulous hoard.
'Give it.' It seemed to him in later life that his father had been
spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala
was a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public
standing, he still always had the lightness of foot and also the inclination
to sneak up behind his son and spoil whatever he was doing, whipping the
young Salahuddin's bedsheet off at night to reveal the shameful penis in the
clutching, red hand. And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles
away, even through the stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung
around him owing to his being the country's largest manufacturer of
agricultural sprays and fluids and artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala,
philanthropist, philanderer, living legend, leading light of the nationalist
movement, sprang from the gateway of his home to pluck a bulging wallet from
his son's frustrated hand. 'Tch tch,' he admonished, pocketing the pounds
sterling, 'you should not pick things up from the street. The ground is
dirty, and money is dirtier, anyway.'
On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a
ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the
Arabian Nights,
which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the
deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of
the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot
unread, there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper-and-brass
avatar of Aladdin's very own genie-container: a lamp begging to be rubbed.
But Changez neither rubbed it nor permitted it to be rubbed by, for example,
his son. 'One day,' he assured the boy, 'you'll have it for yourself. Then
rub and rub as much as you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now,
but, it is mine.' The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin
with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost
desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then
there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked
for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen
the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would
smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became
desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and
himself.
Salahuddin Chamchawala had understood by his thirteenth year that he
was destined for that cool Vilayet full of the crisp promises of pounds
sterling at which the magic billfold had hinted, and he grew increasingly
impatient of that Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts,
transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers and the rumoured singing
whores of Grant Road who had begun as devotees of the Yellamma cult in
Karnataka but ended up here as dancers in the more prosaic temples of the
flesh. He was fed up of textile factories and local trains and all the
confusion and superabundance of the place, and longed for that dream-Vilayet
of poise and moderation that had come to obsess him by night and day. His
favourite playground rhymes were those that yearned for foreign cities:
kitchy-con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty-eye kitchy-ople kitchy-cople
kitchy-Con-stanti-nople. And his favourite game was the version of
grandmother's footsteps in which, when he was
it,
he would turn his back on
upcreeping playmates to gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six
letters of his dream-city,
ellowen deeowen.
In his secret heart, he crept
silently up on London, letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to
him.
Ellowen deeowen London.
The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it
will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the
lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the
Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's creators
to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be
maintained. (But the games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed
somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator versus
imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)
In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at
Scandal Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And
one day (it was so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that
ample, crumbling, salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and
shutters and little balconies, and through the garden that was his father's
pride and joy and which in a certain evening light could give the impression
of being infinite (and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because
nobody, not his father, not the gardener, could tell him the names of most
of the plants and trees), and out through the main gateway, a grandiose
folly, a reproduction of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and
across the wild insanity of the street, and over the sea wall, and so at
last on to the broad expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy
pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood
silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a hollow of black stone
Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the
man beckoned him with a single finger which he then laid across his lips.
Shh,
and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was
a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what might have been ivory. His
finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down
the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand
between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The dhoti open
to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he did what he was
forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him and let him go.
After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did
he tell anyone what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would
unleash in his mother and suspecting that his father would say it was his
own fault. It seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had
come to revile about his home town, had come together in the stranger's bony
embrace, and now that he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also escape
Bombay, or die. He began to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his
will upon it at all times, eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that
he could make the miracle happen even without his father's lamp to help him
out. He dreamed of flying out of his bedroom window to discover that there,
below him, was - not Bombay - but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsonscolumn
Lordstavern Bloodytower Queen. But as he floated out over the great
metropolis he felt himself beginning to lose height, and no matter how hard
he struggled kicked swam-in-air he continued to spiral slowly downwards to
earth, then faster, then faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down
towards the city, Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedle-street, zeroing in
on London like a bomb.
When the impossible happened, and his father, out of the blue, offered
him an English education,
to get me out of the way,
he thought,
otherwise
why, it's obvious, but don't look a gift horse andsoforth,
his mother
Nasreen Chamchawala refused to cry, and volunteered, instead, the benefit of
her advice. 'Don't go dirty like those English,' she warned him. 'They wipe
their bee tee ems with paper only. Also, they get into each other's dirty
bathwater.' These vile slanders proved to Salahuddin that his mother was
doing her damnedest to prevent him from leaving, and in spite of their
mutual love he replied, 'It is inconceivable, Ammi, what you say. England is
a great civilization, what are you talking, bunk.'
She smiled her little nervy smile and did not argue. And, later, stood
dry-eyed beneath the triumphal arch of a gateway and would not go to
Santacruz airport to see him off. Her only child. She heaped garlands around
his neck until he grew dizzy with the cloying perfumes of mother-love.
Nasreen Chamchawala was the slightest, most fragile of women, her bones
like tinkas, like minute slivers of wood. To make up for her physical
insignificance she took at an early age to dressing with a certain
outrageous, excessive verve. Her sari-patterns were dazzling, even garish:
lemon silk adorned with huge brocade diamonds, dizzy black-and-white Op Art
swirls, gigantic lipstick kisses on a bright white ground. People forgave
her her lurid taste because she wore the blinding garments with such
innocence; because the voice emanating from that textile cacophony was so
tiny and hesitant and proper. And because of her soirees.
Each Friday of her married life, Nasreen would fill the halls of the
Chamchawala residence, those usually tenebrous chambers like great hollow
burial vaults, with bright light and brittle friends. When Salahuddin was a
little boy he had insisted on playing doorman, and would greet the jewelled
and lacquered guests with great gravity, permitting them to pat him on the
head and call him
cuteso
and
chweetie-pie.
On Fridays the house was full of
noise; there were musicians, singers, dancers, the latest Western hits as
heard on Radio Ceylon, raucous puppet-shows in which painted clay rajahs
rode puppet-stallions, decapitating enemy marionettes with imprecations and
wooden swords. During the rest of the week, however, Nasreen would stalk the
house warily, a pigeon of a woman walking on tiptoed feet through the gloom,
as if she were afraid to disturb the shadowed silence; and her son, walking
in her footsteps, also learned to lighten his footfall lest he rouse
whatever goblin or afreet might be lying in wait.
But: Nasreen Chamchawala's caution failed to save her life. The horror
seized and murdered her when she believed herself most safe, clad in a sari
covered in cheap newspaper photos and headlines, bathed in chandelier-light,
surrounded by her friends.
By then five and a half years had passed since young Salahuddin,
garlanded and warned, boarded a Douglas DC-8 and journeyed into the west.
Ahead of him, England; beside him, his father, Changez Chamchawala; below
him, home and beauty. Like Nasreen, the future Saladin had never found it
easy to cry.
On that first aeroplane he read science fiction tales of interplanetary
migration: Asimov's
Foundation,
Ray Bradbury's
Martian Chronicles.
He
imagined the DC-8 was the mother ship, bearing the Chosen, the Elect of God
and man, across unthinkable distances, travelling for generations, breeding
eugenically, that their seed might one day take root somewhere in a brave
new world beneath a yellow sun. He corrected himself: not the mother but the
father ship, because there he was, after all, the great man, Abbu, Dad.
Thirteen-year-old Salahuddin, setting aside recent doubts and grievances,
entered once again his childish adoration of his father, because he had,
had, had worshipped him, he was a great father until you started growing a
mind of your own, and then to argue with him was called a betrayal of his
love, but never mind that now,
I accuse him of becoming my supreme being, so
that what happened was like a loss of faith . . .
yes, the father ship, an
aircraft was not a flying womb but a metal phallus, and the passengers were
spermatozoa waiting to be spilt.
Five and a half hours of time zones; turn your watch upside down in
Bombay and you see the time in London.
My father,
Chamcha would think, years
later, in the midst of his bitterness. /
accuse him of inverting Time.
How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from
Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not very far at
all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance
between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to
town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.
What Changez Chamchawala did when the aeroplane took off: trying not to
let his son see him doing it, he crossed two pairs of fingers on each hand,
and rotated both his thumbs.
And when they were installed in a hotel within a few feet of the
ancient location of the Tyburn tree, Changez said to his son: 'Take. This
belongs to you.' And held out, at arm's length, a black billfold about whose
identity there could be no mistake. 'You are a man now. Take.'
The return of the confiscated wallet, complete with all its currency,
proved to be one of Changez Chamchawala's little traps. Salahuddin had been
deceived by these all his life. Whenever his father wanted to punish him, he
would offer him a present, a bar of imported chocolate or a tin of Kraft
cheese, and would then grab him when he came to get it. 'Donkey,' Changez
scorned his infant son. 'Always, always, the carrot leads you to my stick.'
Salahuddin in London took the proffered wallet, accepting the gift of
manhood; whereupon his father said: 'Now that you are a man, it is for you
to look after your old father while we are in London town. You pay all the
bills.'
January, 1961. A year you could turn upside down and it would still,
unlike your watch, tell the same time. It was winter; but when Salahuddin
Chamchawala began to shiver in his hotel room, it was because he was scared
halfway out of his wits; his crock of gold had turned, suddenly, into a
sorcerer's curse.
Those two weeks in London before he went to his boarding school turned
into a nightmare of cash-tills and calculations, because Changez had meant
exactly what he said and never put his hand into his own pocket once.
Salahuddin had to buy his own clothes, such as a double-breasted blue serge
mackintosh and seven blue-and-white striped Van Heusen shirts with
detachable semi-stiff collars which Changez made him wear every day, to get
used to the studs, and Salahuddin felt as if a blunt knife were being pushed
in just beneath his newly broken Adam's-apple; and he had to make sure there
would be enough for the hotel room, and everything, so that he was too
nervous to ask his father if they could go to a movie, not even one, not
even
The Pure Hell of St Trinians,
or to eat out, not a single Chinese meal,
and in later years he would remember nothing of his first fortnight in his
beloved Ellowen Deeowen except pounds shillings pence, like the disciple of
the philosopher-king Chanakya who asked the great man what he meant by
saying one could live in the world and also not live in it, and who was told
to carry a brim-full pitcher of water through a holiday crowd without
spilling a drop, on pain of death, so that when he returned he was unable to
describe the day's festivities, having been like a blind man, seeing only
the jug on his head.
Changez Chamchawala became very still in those days, seeming not to
care if he ate or drank or did any damn thing, he was happy sitting in the
hotel room watching television, especially when the Flintstones were on,
because, he told his son, that Wilma bibi reminded him of Nasreen.
Salahuddin tried to prove he was a man by fasting right along with his
father, trying to outlast him, but he never managed it, and when the pangs
got too strong he went out of the hotel to the cheap joint nearby where you
could buy take-away roast chickens that hung greasily in the window, turning
slowly on their spits. When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he
became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see, so he stuffed it inside
double-breasted serge and went up in the lift reeking of spit-roast, his
mackintosh bulging, his face turning red. Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze
of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth of that implacable rage which
would burn within him, undiminished, for over a quarter of a century; which
would boil away his childhood father-worship and make him a secular man, who
would do his best, thereafter, to live without a god of any type; which
would fuel, perhaps, his determination to become the thing his father
was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman. Yes, an
English, even if his mother had been right all along, even if there was only
paper in the toilets and tepid, used water full of mud and soap to step into
after taking exercise, even if it meant a lifetime spent amongst
winter-naked trees whose fingers clutched despairingly at the few, pale
hours of watery, filtered light. On winter nights he, who had never slept
beneath more than a sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and felt like a
figure in an ancient myth, condemned by the gods to have a boulder pressing
down upon his chest; but never mind, he would be English, even if his
classmates giggled at his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because
these exclusions only increased his determination, and that was when he
began to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface
masks, clown-masks, until he fooled them into thinking he was
okay,
he was
people-like-us.
He fooled them the way a sensitive human being can persuade
gorillas to accept him into their family, to fondle and caress and stuff
bananas in his mouth.
(After he had settled up the last bill, and the wallet he had once
found at a rainbow's end was empty, his father said to him: 'See now. You
pay your way. I've made a man of you.' But what man? That's what fathers
never know. Not in advance; not until it's too late.)
One day soon after he started at the school he came down to breakfast
to find a kipper on his plate. He sat there staring at it, not knowing where
to begin. Then he cut into it, and got a mouthful of tiny bones. And after
extracting them all, another mouthful, more bones. His fellow-pupils watched
him suffer in silence; not one of them said, here, let me show you, you eat
it in this way. It took him ninety minutes to eat the fish and he was not
permitted to rise from the table until it was done. By that time he was
shaking, and if he had been able to cry he would have done so. Then the
thought occurred to him that he had been taught an important lesson. England
was a peculiar-tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones, and nobody
would ever tell him how to eat it. He discovered that he was a bloody-minded
person. I'll show them all,' he swore. 'You see if I don't.' The eaten
kipper was his first victory, the first step in his conquest of England.
William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of
English sand.
Five years later he was back home after leaving school, waiting until
the English university term began, and his transmutation into a Vilayeti was
well advanced. 'See how well he complains,' Nasreen teased him in front of
his father. 'About everything he has such big-big criticisms, the fans are
fixed too loosely to the roof and will fall to slice our heads off in our
sleep, he says, and the food is too fattening, why we don't cook some things
without frying, he wants to know, the top-floor balconies are unsafe and the
paint is peeled, why can't we take pride in our surroundings, isn't it, and
the garden is overgrown, we are just junglee people, he thinks so, and look
how coarse our movies are, now he doesn't enjoy, and so much disease you
can't even drink water from the tap, my god, he really got an education,
husband, our little Sallu, England-returned, and talking so fine and all.'
They were walking on the lawn in the evening, watching the sun dive
into the sea, wandering in the shade of those great spreading trees, some
snaky some bearded, which Salahuddin (who now called himself Saladin after
the fashion of the English school, but would remain Chamchawala for a while
yet, until a theatrical agent shortened his name for commercial reasons) had
begun to be able to name, jackfruit, banyan, jacaranda, flame of the forest,
plane. Small chhooi-mooi touch-me-not plants grew at the foot of the tree of
his own life, the walnut-tree that Changez had planted with his own hands on
the day of the coming of the son. Father and son at the birth-tree were both
awkward, unable to respond properly to Nasreen's gentle fun. Saladin had
been seized by the melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place
before he knew its names, that something had been lost which he would never
be able to regain. And Changez Chamchawala found that he could no longer
look his son in the eye, because the bitterness he saw came close to
freezing his heart. When he spoke, turning roughly away from the
eighteen-year-old walnut in which, at times during their long separations,
he had imagined his only son's soul to reside, the words came out
incorrectly and made him sound like the rigid, cold figure he had hoped he
would never become, and feared he could not avoid.
'Tell your son,' Changez boomed at Nasreen, 'that if he went abroad to
learn contempt for his own kind, then his own kind can feel nothing but
scorn for him. What is he? A fauntleroy, a grand panjandrum? Is this my
fate: to lose a son and find a freak?'
'Whatever I am, father dear,' Saladin told the older man, 'I owe it all
to you.'
It was their last family chat. All that summer feelings continued to
run high, for all Nasreen's attempts at mediation,
you must apologize to
your father, darling, poor man is suffering like the devil but his pride
won't let him hug you.
Even the ayah Kasturba and the old bearer Vallabh,
her husband, attempted to mediate but neither father nor son would bend.
'Same material is the problem,' Kasturba told Nasreen. 'Daddy and sonny,
same material, same to same.'
When the war with Pakistan began that September Nasreen decided, with a
kind of defiance, that she would not cancel her Friday parties, 'to show
that Hindus-Muslims can love as well as hate,' she pointed out. Changez saw
a look in her eyes and did not attempt to argue, but set the servants to
putting blackout curtains over all the windows instead. That night, for the
last time, Saladin Chamchawala played his old role of doorman, dressed up in
an English dinner-jacket, and when the guests came - the same old guests,
dusted with the grey powders of age but otherwise the same - they bestowed
upon him the same old pats and kisses, the nostalgic benedictions of his
youth. 'Look how grown,' they were saying. 'Just a darling, what to say.'
They were all trying to hide their fear of the war,
danger of air-raids,
the
radio said, and when they ruffled Saladin's hair their hands were a little
too shaky, or alternatively a little too rough.
Late that evening the sirens sang and the guests ran for cover, hiding
under beds, in cupboards, anywhere. Nasreen Chamchawala found herself alone
by a food-laden table, and attempted to reassure the company by standing
there in her newsprint sari, munching a piece offish as if nothing were the
matter. So it was that when she started choking on the fishbone of her death
there was nobody to help her, they were all crouching in corners with their
eyes shut; even Saladin, conqueror of kippers, Saladin of the
England-returned upper lip, had lost his nerve. Nasreen Chamchawala fell,
twitched, gasped, died, and when the all-clear sounded the guests emerged
sheepishly to find their hostess extinct in the middle of the dining-room,
stolen away by the exterminating angel, khali-pili khalaas, as Bombay-talk
has it, finished off for no reason, gone for good.
Less than a year after the death of Nasreen Chamchawala from her
inability to triumph over fishbones in the manner of her foreign-educated
son, Changez married again without a word of warning to anyone. Saladin in
his English college received a letter from his father commanding him, in the
irritatingly orotund and obsolescent phraseology that Changez always used in
correspondence, to be happy. 'Rejoice,' the letter said, 'for what is lost
is reborn.' The explanation for this somewhat cryptic sentence came lower
down in the aerogramme, and when Saladin learned that his new stepmother was
also called Nasreen, something went wrong in his head, and he wrote his
father a letter full of cruelty and anger, whose violence was of the type
that exists only between fathers and sons, and which differs from that
between daughters and mothers in that there lurks behind it the possibility
of actual, jaw-breaking fisticuffs. Changez wrote back by return of post; a
brief letter, four lines of archaic abuse, cad rotter bounder scoundrel
varlet whoreson rogue. 'Kindly consider all family connections irreparably
sundered,' it concluded. 'Consequences your responsibility.'
After a year of silence, Saladin received a further communication, a
letter of forgiveness that was in all particulars harder to take than the
earlier, excommunicatory thunderbolt. 'When you become a father, O my son,'
Changez Chamchawala confided, 'then shall you know those moments - ah! Too
sweet!
- when, for love, one dandles the bonny babe upon one's knee;
whereupon, without warning or provocation, the blessed creature - may I be
frank? - it
wets
one. Perhaps for a moment one feels the gorge rising, a
tide of anger swells within the blood but then it dies away, as quickly as
it came. For do we not, as adults, understand that the little one is not to
blame? He knows not what he does.'
Deeply offended at being compared to a urinating baby, Saladin
maintained what he hoped was a dignified silence. By the time of his
graduation he had acquired a British passport, because he had arrived in the
country just before the laws tightened up, so he was able to inform Changez
in a brief note that he intended to settle down in London and look for work
as an actor. Changez Chamchawala's reply came by express mail. 'Might as
well be a confounded gigolo. It's my belief some devil has got into you and
turned your wits. You who have been given so much: do you not feel you owe
anything to anyone? To your country? To the memory of your dear mother? To
your own mind? Will you spend your life jiggling and preening under bright
lights, kissing blonde women under the gaze of strangers who have paid to
watch your shame? You are no son of mine, but a
ghoul,
a
hoosh,
a demon up
from hell. An actor! Answer me this: what am I to tell my friends?'
And beneath a signature, the pathetic, petulant postscript. 'Now that
you have your own bad djinni, do not think you will inherit the magic lamp.'
After that, Changez Chamchawala wrote to his son at irregular
intervals, and in every letter he returned to the theme of demons and
possession: 'A man untrue to himself becomes a two-legged lie, and such
beasts are Shaitan's best work,' he wrote, and also, in more sentimental
vein: 'I have your soul kept safe, my son, here in this walnut-tree. The
devil has only your body. When you are free of him, return and claim your
immortal spirit. It flourishes in the garden.'
The handwriting in these letters altered over the years, changing from
the florid confidence that had made it instantly identifiable and becoming
narrower, undecorated, purified. Eventually the letters stopped, but Saladin
heard from other sources that his father's preoccupation with the
supernatural had continued to deepen, until finally he had become a recluse,
perhaps in order to escape this world in which demons could steal his own
son's body, a world unsafe for a man of true religious faith.
His father's transformation disconcerted Saladin, even at such a great
distance. His parents had been Muslims in the lackadaisical, light manner of
Bombayites; Changez Chamchawala had seemed far more godlike to his infant
son than any Allah. That this father, this profane deity (albeit now
discredited), had dropped to his knees in his old age and started bowing
towards Mecca was hard for his godless son to accept.
'I blame that witch,' he told himself, falling for rhetorical purposes
into the same language of spells and goblins that his father had commenced
to employ. 'That Nasreen Two. Is it I who have been the subject of
devilment, am I the one possessed? It's not my handwriting that changed.'
The letters didn't come any more. Years passed; and then Saladin
Chamcha, actor, self-made man, returned to Bombay with the Prospero Players,
to interpret the role of the Indian doctor in
The Millionairess
by George
Bernard Shaw. On stage, he tailored his voice to the requirements of the
part, but those long-suppressed locutions, those discarded vowels and
consonants, began to leak out of his mouth out of the theatre as well. His
voice was betraying him; and he discovered his component parts to be capable
of other treasons, too.
A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role,
according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an
abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in
him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants
survive. Or, consider him sociopolitically: most migrants learn, and can
become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods
invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.
A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove
he's managed it. Playing God again, you could say. Or you could come down a
few notches, and think of Tinkerbell; fairies don't exist if children don't
clap their hands. Or you might simply say: it's just like being a man.
Not only the need to be believed in, but to believe in another. You've
got it: Love.
Saladin Chamcha met Pamela Lovelace five and a half days before the end
of the 1960s, when women still wore bandannas in their hair. She stood at
the centre of a room full of Trotskyist actresses and fixed him with eyes so
bright, so bright. He monopolized her all evening and she never stopped
smiling and she left with another man. He went home to dream of her eyes and
smile, the slenderness of her, her skin. He pursued her for two years.
England yields her treasures with reluctance. He was astonished by his own
perseverance, and understood that she had become the custodian of his
destiny, that if she did not relent then his entire attempt at metamorphosis
would fail. 'Let me,' he begged her, wrestling politely on her white rug
that left him, at his midnight bus stops, covered in guilty fluff. 'Believe
me. I'm the one.'
One night,
out of the blue,
she let him, she said she believed. He
married her before she could change her mind, but never learned to read her
thoughts. When she was unhappy she would lock herself in the bedroom until
she felt better. 'It's none of your business,' she told him. 'I don't want
anybody to see me when I'm like that.' He used to call her a clam. 'Open
up,' he hammered on all the locked doors of their lives together, basement
first, then maisonette, then mansion. 'I love you, let me in.' He needed her
so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never
comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in
the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid
when she couldn't manage to beam. Only when it was too late did she tell him
that her parents had committed suicide together when she had just begun to
menstruate, over their heads in gambling debts, leaving her with the
aristocratic bellow of a voice that marked her out as a golden girl, a woman
to envy, whereas in fact she was abandoned, lost, her parents couldn't even
be bothered to wait and watch her grow up, that's how much
she
was loved, so
of course she had no confidence at all, and every moment she spent in the
world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she
locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell,
a monkey without a nut.
They never managed to have children; she blamed herself. After ten
years Saladin discovered that there was something the matter with some of
his own chromosomes, two sticks too long, or too short, he couldn't
remember. His genetic inheritance; apparently he was lucky to exist, lucky
not to be some sort of deformed freak. Was it his mother or his father from
whom? The doctors couldn't say; he blamed, it's easy to guess which one,
after all, it wouldn't do to think badly of the dead.
They hadn't been getting along lately.
He told himself that afterwards, but not during.
Afterwards, he told himself, we were on the rocks, maybe it was the
missing babies, maybe we just grew away from each other, maybe this, maybe
that.
During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all
the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her
smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant
counterfeit of joy.
He tried to invent a happy future for them, to make it come true by
making it up and then believing in it. On his way to India he was thinking
how lucky he was to have her, I'm lucky yes I am don't argue I'm the
luckiest bastard in the world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him
the stretching, shady avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the
presence of her gentleness.
He had worked so hard and come so close to convincing himself of the
truth of these paltry fictions that when he went to bed with Zeeny Vakil
within forty-eight hours of arriving in Bombay, the first thing he did, even
before they made love, was to faint, to pass out cold, because the messages
reaching his brain were in such serious disagreement with one another, as if
his right eye saw the world moving to the left while his left eye saw it
sliding to the right.
Zeeny was the first Indian woman he had ever made love to. She barged
into his dressing-room after the first night of
The Millionairess,
with her
operatic arms and her gravel voice, as if it hadn't been years.
Years.
'Yaar, what a disappointment, I swear, I sat through the whole thing just to
hear you singing 'Goodness Gracious Me' like Peter Sellers or what, I
thought, let's find out if the guy learned to hit a note, you remember when
you did Elvis impersonations with your squash racket, darling, too
hilarious, completely cracked. But what is this? Song is not in drama. The
hell. Listen, can you escape from all these palefaces and come out with us
wogs? Maybe you forgot what that is like.' He remembered her as a
stick-figure of a teenager in a lopsided Quant hairstyle and an
equal-but-oppositely lopsided smile. A rash, bad girl. Once for the hell of
it she walked into a notorious adda, a dive, on Falkland Road, and sat there
smoking a cigarette and drinking Coke until the pimps who ran the joint
threatened to cut her face, no freelances permitted. She stared them down,
finished her cigarette, left. Fearless. Maybe crazy. Now in her middle
thirties she was a qualified doctor with a consultancy at Breach Candy
Hospital, who worked with the city's homeless, who had gone to Bhopal the
moment the news broke of the invisible American cloud that ate people's eyes
and lungs. She was an art critic whose book on the confining myth of
authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by
an ethic of historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire
national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed
to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest? - had
created a predictable stink, especially because of its title. She had called
it
The Only Good Indian.
'Meaning, is a dead,' she told Chamcha when she
gave him a copy. 'Why should there be a good, right way of being a wog?
That's Hindu fundamentalism. Actually, we're all bad Indians. Some worse
than others.'
She had come into the fullness of her beauty, long hair left loose, and
she was no stick-figure these days. Five hours after she entered his
dressing-room they were in bed, and he passed out. When he awoke she
explained 'I slipped you a mickey finn.' He never worked out whether or not
she had been telling the truth.
Zeenat Vakil made Saladin her project. 'The reclamation of,' she
explained. 'Mister, we're going to get you back.' At times he thought she
intended to achieve this by eating him alive. She made love like a cannibal
and he was her long pork. 'Did you know,' he asked her, 'of the
well-established connection between vegetarianism and the man-eating
impulse?' Zeeny, lunching on his naked thigh, shook her head. 'In certain
extreme cases,' he went on, 'too much vegetable consumption can release into
the system biochemicals that induce cannibal fantasies.' She looked up and
smiled her slanting smile. Zeeny, the beautiful vampire. 'Come off it,' she
said. 'We are a nation of vegetarians, and ours is a peaceful, mystical
culture, everybody knows.'
He, for his part, was required to handle with care. The first time he
touched her breasts she spouted hot astounding tears the colour and
consistency of buffalo milk. She had watched her mother die like a bird
being carved for dinner, first the left breast then the right, and still the
cancer had spread. Her fear of repeating her mother's death placed her chest
off limits. Fearless Zeeny's secret terror. She had never had a child but
her eyes wept milk.
After their first lovemaking she started right in on him, the tears
forgotten now. 'You know what you are, I'll tell you. A deserter is what,
more English than, your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and
don't think it's so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache.'
'There's something strange going on,' he wanted to say, 'my voice,' but
he didn't know how to put it, and held his tongue.
'People like you,' she snorted, kissing his shoulder. 'You come back
after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves. Well, baby, we got a
lower opinion of you.' Her smile was brighter than Pamela's. 'I see,' he
said to her, 'Zeeny, you didn't lose your Binaca smile.'
Binaca.
Where had that come from, the long forgotten toothpaste
advertisement? And the vowel sounds, distinctly unreliable. Watch out,
Chamcha, look out for your shadow. That black fellow creeping up behind.
On the second night she arrived at the theatre with two friends in tow,
a young Marxist film-maker called George Miranda, a shambling whale of a man
with rolled-up kurta sleeves, a flapping waistcoat bearing ancient stains,
and a surprisingly military moustache with waxed points; and Bhupen Gandhi,
poet and journalist, who had gone prematurely grey but whose face was
baby-innocent until he unleashed his sly, giggling laugh. 'Come on, Salad
baba,' Zeeny announced. 'We're going to show you the town.' She turned to
her companions. 'These
Asians
from foreign got no shame,' she declared.
'Saladin, like a bloody lettuce, I ask you.'
'There was a TV reporter here some days back,' George Miranda said.
'Pink hair. She said her name was Kerleeda. I couldn't work it out.'
'Listen, George is too unworldly,' Zeeny interrupted, 'He doesn't know
what freaks you guys turn into. That Miss Singh, outrageous. I told her, the
name's Khalida, dearie, rhymes with Dalda, that's a cooking medium. But she
couldn't say it. Her own name. Take me to your kerleader. You types got no
culture. Just wogs now. Ain't it the truth?' she added, suddenly gay and
round-eyed, afraid she'd gone too far. 'Stop bullying him, Zeenat,' Bhupen
Gandhi said in his quiet voice. And George, awkwardly, mumbled: 'No offence,
man. Joke-shoke.'
Chamcha decided to grin and then fight back. 'Zeeny,' he said, 'the
earth is full of Indians, you know that, we get everywhere, we become
tinkers in Australia and our heads end up in Idi Amin's fridge. Columbus was
right, maybe; the world's made up of Indies, East, West, North. Damn it, you
should be proud of us, our enterprise, the way we push against frontiers.
Only thing is, we're not Indian like you. You better get used to us. What
was the name of that book you wrote?'
'Listen,' Zeeny put her arm. through his. 'Listen to my Salad. Suddenly
he wants to be Indian after spending his life trying to turn white. All is
not lost, you see. Something in there still alive.' And Chamcha felt himself
flushing, felt the confusion mounting. India; it jumbled things up.
'For Pete's sake,' she added, knifing him with a kiss.
'Chamcha.
I
mean, fuck it. You name yourself Mister Toady and you expect us not to
laugh.'
In Zeeny's beaten-up Hindustan, a car built for a servant culture, the
back seat better upholstered than the front, he felt the night closing in on
him like a crowd. India, measuring him against her forgotten immensity, her
sheer presence, the old despised disorder. An Amazonic hijra got up like an
Indian Wonder Woman, complete with silver trident, held up the traffic with
one imperious arm, sauntered in front of them. Chamcha stared into herhis
glaring eyes. Gibreel Farishta, the movie star who had unaccountably
vanished from view, rotted on the hoardings. Rubble, litter, noise.
Cigarette advertisements smoking past: SCISSORS - FOR THE MAN OF ACTION,
SATISFACTION. And, more improbably: PANAMA - PART OF THE GREAT INDIAN SCENE.
'Where are we going?' The night had acquired the quality of green neon
strip-lighting. Zeeny parked the car. 'You're lost,' she accused him. 'What
do you know about Bombay? Your own city, only it never was. To you, it's a
dream of childhood. Growing up on Scandal Point is like living on the moon.
No bustees there, no sirree, only servants' quarters. Did Shiv Sena elements
come there to make communal trouble? Were your neighbours starving in the
textile strike? Did Datta Samant stage a rally in front of your bungalows?
How old were you when you met a trade unionist? How old the first time you
got on a local train instead of a car with driver? That wasn't Bombay,
darling, excuse me. That was Wonderland, Peristan, Never-Never, Oz.'
'And you?' Saladin reminded her. 'Where were you back then?'
'Same place,' she said fiercely. 'With all the other bloody Munchkins.'
Back streets. A Jain temple was being re-painted and all the saints
were in plastic bags to protect them from the drips. A pavement magazine
vendor displayed newspapers full of horror: a railway disaster. Bhupen
Gandhi began to speak in his mild whisper. After the accident, he said, the
surviving passengers swam to the shore (the train had plunged off a bridge)
and were met by local villagers, who pushed them under the water until they
drowned and then looted their bodies.
'Shut your face,' Zeeny shouted at him. 'Why are you telling him such
things? Already he thinks we're savages, a lower form.'
A shop was selling sandalwood to burn in a nearby Krishna temple and
sets of enamelled pink-and-white Krishna-eyes that saw everything. 'Too damn
much to see,' Bhupen said. 'That is fact of matter.' In a crowded dhaba that
George had started frequenting when he was making contact, for movie
purposes, with the dadas or bosses who ran the city's flesh trade, dark rum
was consumed at aluminium tables and George and Bhupen started, a little
boozily, to quarrel. Zeeny drank Thums Up Cola and denounced her friends to
Chamcha. 'Drinking problems, both of them, broke as old pots, they both
mistreat their wives, sit in dives, waste their stinking lives. No wonder I
fell for you, sugar, when the local product is so low grade you get to like
goods from foreign.'
George had gone with Zeeny to Bhopal and was becoming noisy on the
subject of the catastrophe, interpreting it ideologically. 'What is Amrika
for us?' he demanded. 'It's not a real place. Power in its purest form,
disembodied, invisible. We can't see it but it screws us totally, no
escape.' He compared the Union Carbide company to the Trojan Horse. 'We
invited the bastards in.' It was like the story of the forty thieves, he
said. Hiding in their amphoras and waiting for the night. 'We had no AH
Baba, misfortunately,' he cried. 'Who did we have? Mr. Rajiv G.'
At this point Bhupen Gandhi stood up abruptly, unsteadily, and began,
as though possessed, as though a spirit were upon him, to
testify.
'For me,'
he said, 'the issue cannot be foreign intervention. We always forgive
ourselves by blaming outsiders, America, Pakistan, any damn place. Excuse
me, George, but for me it all goes back to Assam, we have to start with
that.' The massacre of the innocents. Photographs of children's corpses,
arranged neatly in lines like soldiers on parade. They had been clubbed to
death, pelted with stones, their necks cut in half by knives. Those neat
ranks of death, Chamcha remembered. As if only horror could sting India into
orderliness.
Bhupen spoke for twenty-nine minutes without hesitations or pauses. 'We
are all guilty of Assam,' he said. 'Each person of us. Unless and until we
face it, that the children's deaths were our fault, we cannot call ourselves
a civilized people.' He drank rum quickly as he spoke, and his voice got
louder, and his body began to lean dangerously, but although the room fell
silent nobody moved towards him, nobody tried to stop him talking, nobody
called him a drunk. In the middle of a sentence,
everyday blindings, or
shootings, or corruptions, who do we think we,
he sat down heavily and
stared into his glass.
Now a young man stood up in a far corner of the joint and argued back.
Assam had to be understood politically, he cried, there were economic
reasons, and yet another fellow came to his feet to reply, cash matters do
not explain why a grown man clubs a little girl to death, and then another
fellow said, if you think that, you have never been hungry, salah, how
bloody romantic to suppose economics cannot make men into beasts. Chamcha
clutched at his glass as the noise level rose, and the air seemed to
thicken, gold teeth flashed in his face, shoulders rubbed against his,
elbows nudged, the air was turning into soup, and in his chest the irregular
palpitations had begun. George grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him out
into the street. 'You okay, man? You were turning green.' Saladin nodded his
thanks, gasped in lungfuls of the night, calmed down. 'Rum and exhaustion,'
he said. 'I have the peculiar habit of getting my nerves after the show.
Quite often I get wobbly. Should have known,' Zeeny was looking at him, and
there was more in her eyes than sympathy. A glittering look, triumphant,
hard.
Something got through to you,
her expression gloated.
About bloody
time.
After you recover from typhoid, Chamcha reflected, you remain immune to
the disease for ten years or so. But nothing is forever; eventually the
antibodies vanish from your blood. He had to accept the fact that his blood
no longer contained the immunizing agents that would have enabled him to
suffer India's reality. Rum, heart palpitations, a sickness of the spirit.
Time for bed.
She wouldn't take him to her place. Always and only the hotel, with the
gold-medallioned young Arabs strutting in the midnight corridors holding
bottles of contraband whisky. He lay on the bed with his shoes on, his
collar and tie loose, his right arm flung across his eyes; she, in the
hotel's white bathrobe, bent over him and kissed his chin. I'll tell you
what happened to you tonight,' she said. 'You could say we cracked your
shell.'
He sat up, angry. 'Well, this is what's inside,' he blazed at her. 'An
Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days,
people look polite. This is me.' Caught in the aspic of his adopted
language, he had begun to hear, in India's Babel, an ominous warning: don't
come back again. When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step
back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.
'I was so proud of Bhupen tonight,' Zeeny said, getting into bed. 'In
how many countries could you go into some bar and start up a debate like
that? The passion, the seriousness, the respect. You keep your civilization,
Toadji; I like this one plenty fine.'
'Give up on me,' he begged her. 'I don't like people dropping in to sec
me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven-tiles and kabaddi, I
can't recite my prayers, I don't know what should happen at a nikah
ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I'm on my own. This
isn't home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It
makes my heart tremble and my head spin.'
'You're a stupid,' she shouted at him. 'A stupid. Change back! Damn
fool! Of course you can.' She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back to
his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost, and he would not
become a phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he
was going to use it.
'You never married,' he said when they both lay sleepless in the small
hours. Zeeny snorted. 'You've really been gone too long. Can't you see me?
I'm a blackie.' Arching her back and throwing off the sheet to show off her
lavishness. When the bandit queen Phoolan Devi came out of the ravines to
surrender and be photographed, the newspapers at once uncreated their own
myth of her
legendary beauty.
She became
plain, a common creature,
unappetizing
where she had been
toothsome.
Dark skin in north India. 'I
don't buy it,' Saladin said. 'You don't expect me to believe that.'
She laughed. 'Good, you're not a complete idiot yet. Who needs to
marry? I had work to do.'
And after a pause, she threw his question back at him.
So, then. And
you?
Not only married, but rich. 'So tell, na. How you live, you and the
mame.' In a five-storey mansion in Notting Hill. He had started feeling
insecure there of late, because the most recent batch of burglars had taken
not only the usual video and stereo but also the wolfhound guard dog. It was
not possible, he had begun to feel, to live in a place where the criminal
elements kidnapped the animals. Pamela told him it was an old local custom.
In the Olden Days, she said (history, for Pamela, was divided into the
Ancient Era, the Dark Ages, the Olden Days, the British Empire, the Modern
Age and the Present), petnapping was good business. The poor would steal the
canines of the rich, train them to forget their names, and sell them back to
their grieving, helpless owners in shops on Portobello Road. Pamela's local
history was always detailed and frequently unreliable. 'But, my God,' Zeeny
Vakil said, 'you must sell up pronto and move. I know those English, all the
same, riff-raff and nawabs. You can't fight their bloody traditions.'
My wife, Pamela Lovelace, frail as porcelain, graceful as gazelles,
he
remembered.
I put down roots in the women I love.
The banalities of
infidelity. He put them away and talked about his work.
When Zeeny Vakil found out how Saladin Chamcha made his money, she let
fly a series of shrieks that made one of the medallioned Arabs knock at the
door to make sure everything was all right. He saw a beautiful woman sitting
up in bed with what looked like buffalo milk running down her face and
dripping off the point of her chin, and, apologizing to Chamcha for the
intrusion, he withdrew hastily,
sorry, sport, hey, you're some lucky guy.
'You poor potato,' Zeeny gasped between peals of laughter. 'Those
Angrez bastards. They really screwed you up.'
So now his work was funny. 'I have a gift for accents,' he said
haughtily. 'Why I shouldn't employ?'
' "
Why I should not employ?"
' she mimicked him, kicking her legs in
the air. 'Mister actor, your moustache just slipped again.'
Oh my God.
What's happening to me?
What the devil?
Help.
Because he did have that gift, truly he did, he was the Man of a
Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle
should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal
voice for your packet of garlic-flavoured crisps, he was your very man. He
made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity
impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas. On the radio he could convince an
audience that he was Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United
States. Once, in a radio play for thirty-seven voices, he interpreted every
single part under a variety of pseudonyms and nobody ever worked it out.
With his female equivalent, Mimi Mamoulian, he ruled the airwaves of
Britain. They had such a large slice of the voiceover racket that, as Mimi
said, 'People better not mention the Monopolies Commission around us, not
even in fun.' Her range was astonishing; she could do any age, anywhere in
the world, any point on the vocal register, angelic Juliet to fiendish Mae
West. 'We should get married sometime, when you're free,' Mimi once
suggested to him. 'You and me, we could be the United Nations.'
'You're Jewish,' he pointed out. 'I was brought up to have views on
Jews.'
'So I'm Jewish,' she shrugged. 'You're the one who's circumcised.
Nobody's perfect.'
Mimi was tiny with tight dark curls and looked like a Michelin poster.
In Bombay, Zeenat Vakil stretched and yawned and drove other women from his
thoughts. 'Too much,' she laughed at him. 'They pay you to imitate them, as
long as they don't have to look at you. Your voice becomes famous but they
hide your face. Got any ideas why? Warts on your nose, cross-eyes, what?
Anything come to mind, baby? You goddamn lettuce brain, I swear.'
It was true, he thought. Saladin and Mimi were legends of a sort, but
crippled legends, dark stars. The gravitational field of their abilities
drew work towards them, but they remained invisible, shedding bodies to put
on voices. On the radio, Mimi could become the Botticelli Venus, she could
be Olympia, Monroe, any damn woman she pleased. She didn't give a damn about
the way she looked; she had become her voice, she was worth a mint, and
three young women were hopelessly in love with her. Also, she bought
property. 'Neurotic behaviour,' she would confess unashamedly. 'Excessive
need for rooting owing to upheavals of Armenian-Jewish history. Some
desperation owing to advancing years and small polyps detected in the
throat. Property is so soothing, I do recommend it.' She owned a Norfolk
vicarage, a farmhouse in Normandy, a Tuscan bell-tower, a sea-coast in
Bohemia. 'All haunted,' she explained. 'Clanks, howls, blood on the rugs,
women in nighties, the works. Nobody gives up land without a fight.'
Nobody except me, Chamcha thought, a melancholy clutching at him as he
lay beside Zeenat Vakil. Maybe I'm a ghost already. But at least a ghost
with an airline ticket, success, money, wife. A shade, but living in the
tangible, material world. With
assets.
Yes, sir.
Zeeny stroked the hairs curling over his ears. 'Sometimes, when you're
quiet,' she murmured, 'when you aren't doing funny voices or acting grand,
and when you forget people are watching, you look just like a blank. You
know? An empty slate, nobody home. It makes me mad, sometimes, I want to
slap you. To sting you back into life. But I also get sad about it. Such a
fool, you, the big star whose face is the wrong colour for their colour T
Vs, who has to travel to wogland with some two-bit company, playing the babu
part on top of it, just to get into a play. They kick you around and still
you stay, you love them, bloody slave mentality, I swear. Chamcha,' she
grabbed his shoulders and shook him, sitting astride him with her forbidden
breasts a few inches from his face, 'Salad baba, whatever you call yourself,
for Pete's sake
come home.'
His big break, the one that could soon make money lose its meaning, had
started small: children's television, a thing called
The Aliens Show,
by
The
Munsters
out of
Star Wars
by way of
Sesame Street.
It was a situation comedy
about a group of extraterrestrials ranging from cute to psycho, from animal
to vegetable, and also mineral, because it featured an artistic space-rock
that could quarry itself for its raw material, and then regenerate itself in
time for the next week's episode; this rock was named Pygmalien, and owing
to the stunted sense of humour of the show's producers there was also a
coarse, belching creature like a puking cactus that came from a desert
planet at the end of time: this was Matilda, the Australien, and there were
the three grotesquely pneumatic, singing space sirens known as the Alien
Korns, maybe because you could lie down among them, and there was a team of
Venusian hip-hoppers and subway spray-painters and soul-brothers who called
themselves the Alien Nation, and under a bed in the spaceship that was the
programme's main location there lived Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the
Crab Nebula who had run away from his father, and in a fish-tank you could
find Brains the super-intelligent giant abalone who liked eating Chinese,
and then there was Ridley, the most terrifying of the regular cast, who
looked like a Francis Bacon painting of a mouthful of teeth waving at the
end of a sightless pod, and who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney
Weaver. The stars of the show, its Kermit and Miss Piggy, were the very
fashionable, slinkily attired, stunningly hairstyled duo, Maxim and Mamma
Alien, who yearned to be -what else? - television personalities. They were
played by Saladin Chamcha and Mimi Mamoulian, and they changed their voices
along with their clothes, to say nothing of their hair, which could go from
purple to vermilion between shots, which could stand diagonally three feet
up from their heads or vanish altogether; or their features and limbs,
because they were capable of changing all of them, switching legs, arms,
noses, ears, eyes, and every switch conjured up a different accent from
their legendary, protean gullets. What made the show a hit was its use of
the latest computer-generated imagery. The backgrounds were all simulated:
spaceship, other-world landscapes, intergalactic game-show studios; and the
actors, too, were processed through machines, obliged to spend four hours
every day being buried under the latest in prosthetic make-up which - once
the video-computers had gone to work - made them look just like simulations,
too. Maxim Alien, space playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic wrestling
champion and universal all-comers pasta queen, were overnight sensations.
Prime-time beckoned; America, Eurovision, the world.
As
The Aliens Show
got bigger it began to attract political criticism.
Conservatives attacked it for being too frightening, too sexually explicit
(Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard about Miss
Weaver), too
weird.
Radical commentators began to attack its stereotyping,
its reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of positive
images. Chamcha came under pressure to quit the show; refused; became a
target. 'Trouble waiting when I go home,' he told Zeeny. 'The damn show
isn't an allegory. It's an entertainment. It aims to please.'
'To please whom?' she wanted to know. 'Besides, even now they only let
you on the air after they cover your face with rubber and give you a red
wig. Big deal deluxe, say I.'
'The point is,' she said when they awoke the next morning, 'Salad
darling, you really are good looking, no quesch. Skin like milk, England
returned. Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you could be next in line. I'm
serious, yaar. They need a new face. Come home and you could be the next,
bigger than Bachchan was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn't as funny as
theirs.'
When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he
tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't
matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin
by another. Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of
the possible had begun to harden. 'It isn't easy to tell you this, but I'm
married now, and not just to wife but life.'
The accent slippage again.
'I
really came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn't the play. He's in his
late seventies now, and I won't have many more chances. He hasn't been to
the show; Muhammad must go to the mountain.'
My father, Changez Chamchawala, owner of a magic lamp.
'Changez
Chamchawala, are you kidding, don't think you can leave me behind,' she
clapped her hands. 'I want to check out the hair and toenails.' His father,
the famous recluse. Bombay was a culture of re-makes. Its architecture
mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented
The Magnificent
Seven
and
Love Story,
obliging all its heroes to save at least one village
from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at least
once in their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too, had
taken to importing their lives. Changez's invisibility was an Indian dream
of the crorepati penthoused wretch of Las Vegas; but a dream was not a
photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her own eyes. 'He makes
faces at people if he's in a bad mood,' Saladin warned her. 'Nobody believes
it till it happens, but it's true. Such faces! Gargoyles. Also, he's a prude
and he'll call you a tart and anyway I'll probably have a fight with him,
it's on the cards.'
What Saladin Chamcha had come to India for: forgiveness. That was his
business in his old home town. But whether to give or to receive, he was not
able to say.
Bizarre aspects of the present circumstances of Mr. Changez
Chamchawala: with his new wife, Nasreen the Second, he lived for five days
every week in a high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort in the Pali Hill
district beloved of movie stars; but every weekend he returned without his
wife to the old house at Scandal Point, to spend his days of rest in the
lost world of the past, in the company of the first, and dead, Nasreen.
Furthermore: it was said that his second wife refused to set foot in the old
place. 'Or isn't allowed to,' Zeeny hypothesized in the back of the
black-glass-windowed Mercedes limousine which Changez had sent to collect
his son. As Saladin finished filling in the background, Zeenat Vakil
whistled appreciatively. 'Cra
zee
.'
The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez's empire of dung, was to
be investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government
commission, but Zeeny wasn't interested in that. 'Now,' she said, 'I'il get
to find out what you're really like.'
Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like
a tide, drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness.
I'm not
myself today,
he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None
of us are ourselves. None of us are
like this.
These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from
within, sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow
whirring sound to admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw
the walnut-tree in which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his
hands began to shake. He hid behind the neutrality of facts. 'In Kashmir,'
he told Zeeny, 'your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a
child comes of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance
policy; it's a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a
start in life. The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self.
The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?'
The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the
two of them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were
greeted by a composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery,
whose shock of white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it
back into black, as the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the
house as its major-domo in the Olden Days. 'My God, Vallabhbhai,' he
managed, and embraced the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. 'I
grow so old, baba, I was thinking you would not recognize.' He led them down
the crystal-heavy corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the
lack of change was excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh
explained to him, that when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the
house would be her memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day
she died, paintings, furniture, soap-dishes, the red-glass figures of
fighting bulls and china ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact
positions, the same magazines on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of
paper in the waste-baskets, as though the house had died, too, and been
embalmed. 'Mummified,' Zeeny said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. 'God,
but it's spooky, no?' It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was
opening the double doors leading into the blue drawing-room, that Saladin
Chamcha saw his mother's ghost.
He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. There,' he pointed
towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, 'no question, that blasted
newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she, she,' but
now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless bird, you
see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife, only my
wife. My
ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I grew up and
went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses.
'Please, baba,
nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib donated to my
wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a so-generous
woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand.' Chamcha, recovering
his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. 'For God's sake, Vallabh,' he
muttered. 'For God's sake. Obviously I don't object.' An old stiffness
re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted
him to reprove, 'Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme.'
'See how he's sweating,' Zeeny stage-whispered. 'He looks scared
stiff.' Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was
warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring
beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once
said: 'Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds
herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I bet.'
Chamcha tried to be reasonable. They stay here alone most of the time,
probably sleep in the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it must
get to feeling like their place.' But he was thinking how strikingly, in
that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother.
'Stayed away so long,' his father's voice spoke behind him, 'that now
you can't tell a living ayah from your departed ma.'
Saladin turned around to take in the melancholy sight of a father who
had shrivelled like an old apple, but who insisted nevertheless on wearing
the expensive Italian suits of his opulently fleshy years. Now that he had
lost both Popeye-forearrns and Bluto-belly, he seemed to be roaming about
inside his clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite
managed to identify. He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose
and lips curled, by the withering sorcery of the years, into a feeble
simulacrum of his former ogre-face. Chamcha had barely begun to understand
that his father was no longer capable of frightening anybody, that his spell
had been broken and he was just an old geezer heading for the grave; while
Zeeny had noted with some disappointment that Changez Chamchawala's hair was
conservatively short, and since he was wearing highly polished Oxford
lace-ups it didn't seem likely that the eleven-inch toenail story was true
either; when the ayah Kasturba returned, smoking a cigarette, and strolled
past the three of them, father son mistress, towards a blue velour-covered
button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she arranged her body as
sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman well advanced in
years.
No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez
skipped past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny
Vakil, her eyes sparkling with scandal-points of light, hissed at Chamcha:
'Close your mouth, dear. It looks bad.' And in the doorway, the bearer
Vallabh, pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer
of many long years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife.
When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as satanic, the child will
frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: 'And my stepmother,
father dear? She is keeping well?'
The old man addressed Zeeny. 'He is not such a goody with you, I hope
so. Or what a sad time you must have.' Then to his son in harsher tones.
'You have an interest in my wife these days? But she has none in you. She
won't meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or,
maybe, by now, to me.'
I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn't fight. But
this, this is intolerable.
'In my mother's house,' Chamcha cried
melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. The state thinks your
business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what
you've done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it
take? To poison their lives. You're a sick man.' He stood before his father,
blazing with righteous rage.
Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. 'Baba, with respect,
excuse me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to
judge us.' Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was
staring into the inferno. 'It is true he pays us,' Vallabh went on. 'For our
work, and also for what you see. For this.' Changez Chamchawala tightened
his grip on the ayah's unresisting shoulders.
'How much?' Chamcha shouted. 'Vallabh, how much did you two men decide
upon? How much to prostitute your wife?'
'What a fool,' Kasturba said contemptuously. 'England-educated and
what-all, but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big-big,
in
your mother's house
etcetera, but maybe you didn't love her so much. But we
loved her, we all. We three. And in this manner we may keep her spirit
alive.'
'It is pooja, you could say,' came Vallabh's quiet voice. 'An act of
worship.'
'And you,' Changez Chamchawala spoke as softly as his servant, 'you
come here to this temple. With your unbelief. Mister, you've got a nerve.'
And finally, the treason of Zeenat Vakil. 'Come off it, Salad,' she
said, moving to sit on the arm of the Chesterfield next to the old man. 'Why
be such a sourpuss? You're no angel, baby, and these people seem to have
worked things out okay.'
Saladin's mouth opened and shut. Changez patted Zeeny on the knee. 'He
came to accuse, dear. He came to avenge his youth, but we have turned the
tables and he is confused. Now we must let him have his chance, and you must
referee. I will not be sentenced by him, but I will accept the worst from
you.'
The bastard. Old bastard. He wanted me off-balance, and here I am,
knocked sideways. I won't speak, why should I, not like this, the
humiliation.
'There was,' said Saladin Chamcha, 'a wallet of pounds, and
there was a roasted chicken.'
Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on
child-self, rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might
not have become. Of making-a-man of. Of what-will-I-tell-my-friends. Of
irreparable sunderings and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to
Allah-worship with new wife and also to blasphemous worship of late spouse.
Above all, of magic-lampism, of being an open-sesamist. Everything had come
easily to him, charm, women, wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie,
wish, at once master, hey presto. He was a father who had promised, and then
withheld, a magic lamp.
Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained motionless and silent until
Saladin Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. 'Such violence of the
spirit after so long,' Changez said after a silence. 'So sad. A quarter of a
century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son.
You must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I?
Finished. I'm not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don't explain
you any more.'
Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of a forty-year-old
walnut-tree. 'Cut it down,' he said to his father. 'Cut it, sell it, send me
the cash.'
Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also
rising, took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and
Kasturba diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed
pumpkin-time. 'Your book,' he said to Zeeny, 'I have something you'd like to
see.'
The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment's
floundering, stamped petulantly in their wake. 'Sourpuss,' Zeeny called
gaily over her shoulder. 'Come on, snap out of it, grow up.'
The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included
a large group of the legendary
Hamza-nama
cloths, members of that
sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may
or may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad's uncle
whose liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hind as he lay dead on the
battlefield of Uhud. 'I like these pictures,' Changez Chamchawala told
Zeeny, 'because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be
rescued from his troubles.' The pictures also provided eloquent proof of
Zeeny Vakil's thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian
artistic tradition. The Mughals had brought artists from every part of India
to work on the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a
many-headed, many-brushed Overartist who, literally,
was
Indian painting.
One hand would draw the mosaic floors, a second the figures, a third would
paint the Chinese-looking cloudy skies. On the backs of the cloths were the
stories that accompanied the scenes. The pictures would be shown like a
movie: held up while someone read out the hero's tale. In the
Hamza-nama
you
could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting
styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their
characteristically late-Mughal synthesis.
A giant was trapped in a pit and his human tormentors were spearing him
in the forehead. A man sliced vertically from the top of his head to his
groin still held his sword as he fell. Everywhere, bubbling spillages of
blood. Saladin Chamcha took a grip on himself. 'The savagery,' he said
loudly in his English voice. 'The sheer barbaric love of pain.'
Changez Chamchawala ignored his son, had eyes only for Zeeny; who gazed
straight back into his own. 'Ours is a government of philistines, young
lady, don't you agree? I have offered this whole collection free gratis, did
you know? Let them only house it properly, let them build a place. Condition
of cloths is not A-I, you see . . . they won't do it. No interest. Meanwhile
I get offers every month from Amrika. Offers of what-what size! You wouldn't
believe. I don't sell. Our heritage, my dear, every day the U S A is taking
it away. Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell
ourselves, isn't it? They drop their wallets on the ground and we kneel at
their feet. Our Nandi bulls end up in some gazebo in Texas. But you know all
this. You know India is a free country today.' He stopped, but Zeeny waited;
there was more to come. It came: 'One day I will also take the dollars. Not
for the money. For the pleasure of being a whore. Of becoming nothing. Less
than nothing.' And now, at last, the real storm, the words behind the words,
less than nothing.
'When I die,' Changez Chamchawala said to Zeeny, 'what
will I be? A pair of emptied shoes. That is my fate, that he has made for
me. This actor. This pretender. He has made himself into an imitator of
non-existing men. I have nobody to follow me, to give what I have made. This
is his revenge: he steals from me my posterity.' He smiled, patted her hand,
released her into the care of his son. 'I have told her,' he said to
Saladin. 'You are still carrying your take-away chicken. I have told her my
complaint. Now she must judge. That was the arrangement.'
Zeenat Vakil walked up to the old man in his outsize suit, put her
hands on his cheeks, and kissed him on the lips.
After Zeenat betrayed him in the house of his father's perversions,
Saladin Chamcha refused to see her or answer the messages she left at the
hotel desk.
The Millionairess
came to the end of its run; the tour was over.
Time to go home. After the closing-night party Chamcha headed for bed. In
the elevator a young and clearly honeymooning couple were listening to music
on headphones. The young man murmured to his wife: 'Listen, tell me. Do I
still seem a stranger to you sometimes?' The girl, smiling fondly, shook her
head,
can't hear,
removed the headphones. He repeated, gravely: 'A stranger,
to you, don't I still sometimes seem?' She, with unfaltering smile, laid her
cheek for an instant on his high scrawny shoulder. 'Yes, once or twice,' she
said, and put the headphones on again. He did the same, seeming fully
satisfied by her answer. Their bodies took on, once again, the rhythms of
the playback music. Chamcha got out of the lift. Zeeny was sitting on the
floor with her back against his door. Inside the room, she poured herself a
large whisky and soda. 'Behaving like a baby,' she said. 'You should be
ashamed.'
That afternoon he had received a package from his father. Inside it was
a small piece of wood and a large number of notes, not rupees but sterling
pounds: the ashes, so to speak, of a walnut-tree. He was full of inchoate
feeling and because Zeenat had turned up she became the target. 'You think I
love you?' he said, speaking with deliberate viciousness. 'You think I'll
stay with you? I'm a married man.'
'I didn't want you to stay for me,' she said. 'For some reason, I
wanted it for you.'
A few days earlier, he had been to see an Indian dramatization of a
story by Sartre on the subject of shame. In the original, a husband suspects
his wife of infidelity and sets a trap to catch her out. He pretends to
leave on a business trip, but returns a few hours later to spy on her. He is
kneeling to look through the keyhole of their front door. Then he feels a
presence behind him, turns without rising, and there she is, looking down at
him with revulsion and disgust. This tableau, he kneeling, she looking down,
is the Sartrean archetype. But in the Indian version the kneeling husband
felt no presence behind him; was surprised by the wife; stood to face her on
equal terms; blustered and shouted; until she wept, he embraced her, and
they were reconciled.
'You say I should be ashamed,' Chamcha said bitterly to Zeenat. 'You,
who are without shame. As a matter of fact, this may be a national
characteristic. I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral
refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really
understand the idea of shame.'
Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. 'Okay, you don't have to say any
more.' She held up her hands. 'I surrender. I'm going. Mr Saladin Chamcha. I
thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but I was
wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time.'
And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. 'Don't let
people get too close to you, Mr. Saladin. Let people through your defences
and the bastards go and knife you in the heart.'
After that there had been nothing to stay for. The aeroplane lifted and
banked over the city. Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a
servant as his dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the city centre
solid. Politicians were trying to build careers by going on padyatras,
pilgrimages on foot across the country. There were graffiti that read:
Advice to politicos. Only step to take: padyatra to hell.
Or, sometimes:
to
Assam.
Actors were getting mixed up in politics: MGR, N.T. Rama Rao, Bachchan.
Durga Khote complained that an actors' association was a 'red front'.
Saladin Chamcha, on Flight 420, closed his eyes; and felt, with deep relief,
the tell-tale stuffings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his
voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self.
The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr Chamcha on that flight
was that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his
dreams.
4
he dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one,
but the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of
Bostan
he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil's departure he had
fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the
vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented
voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long
way away. The dream-woman had been so loaded down with explosives that she
was not so much the bomber as the bomb; the woman walking the aisles held a
baby that seemed to be sleeping noiselessly, a baby so skilfully swaddled
and held so close to the breast that Chamcha could not see so much as a lock
of new-born hair. Under the influence of the remembered dream he conceived
the notion that the baby was in fact a bundle of dynamite sticks, or some
sort of ticking device, and he was on the verge of crying out when he came
to his senses and admonished himself severely. This was precisely the type
of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. He was a neat man in a
buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, contented life. He was a
member of the real world.
He travelled alone, shunning the company of the other members of the
Prospero Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin
wearing Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the
manner of natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking
too much cheap airline champagne and importuning the scorn-laden
stewardesses who, being Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type
persons; and behaving, in short, with normal thespian impropriety. The woman
holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players, of
turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like
Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too
painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay 'rail
roko' demonstration was being broken up by police lathi-charges. The
newspaper's reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed.
The police had issued a 'note'.
Neither the reporter nor any other person
was assaulted intentionally.
Chamcha drifted into airline sleep. The city of
lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his
thoughts. When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second surprise
of that macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He
was bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him
anyway: here, travelling incognito in the economy class of Flight A1-420,
was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself.
'Sleep okay?' He realized the question was addressed to him, and turned
away from the apparition of the great movie actor to stare at the equally
extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in baseball
cap, metal-rim spectacles and a neon-green bush-shirt across which there
writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese
dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an
attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer
possible.
'Eugene Dumsday at your service,' the dragon man stuck out a huge red
hand. 'At yours, and at that of the Christian guard.'
Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. 'You are a military man?'
'Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the
army of Guard Almighty.' Oh,
almighty
guard, why didn't you say. 'I am a man
of science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add my
privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious
devilment ever got folks' brains by the balls.'
'I don't follow.'
Dumsday lowered his voice. I'm talking monkey-crap here, sir.
Darwinism. The evolutionary heresy of Mr. Charles Darwin.' His tones made it
plain that the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as
that of any other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. 'I
have been warning your fellow-men,' Dumsday confided, 'against Mr Darwin and
his works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide
presentation. I spoke most recently, sir, at the World Understanding Day
banquet of the Rotary Club, Cochin, Kerala. I spoke of my own country, of
its young people. I see them lost, sir. The young people of America: I see
them in their despair, turning to narcotics, even, for I'm a plain-speaking
man, to pre-marital sexual relations. And I said this then and I say it now
to you. If I believed my great-granddaddy was a chimpanzee, why, I'd be
pretty depressed myself.'
Gibreel Farishta was seated across the way, staring out of the window.
The inflight movie was starting up, and the aircraft lights were being
dimmed. The woman with the baby was still on her feet, walking up and down,
perhaps to keep the baby quiet. 'How did it go down?' Chamcha asked, sensing
that some contribution from him was being required.
A hesitancy came over his neighbour. 'I believe there was a glitch in
the sound system,' he said finally. 'That would be my best guess. I can't
see how those good people would've set to talking amongst themselves if they
hadn't've thought I was through.'
Chamcha felt a little abashed. He had been thinking that in a country
of fervent believers the notion that science was the enemy of God would have
an easy appeal; but the boredom of the Rotarians of Cochin had shown him up.
In the flickering light of the inflight movie, Dumsday continued, in his
voice of an innocent ox, to tell stories against himself without the
faintest indication of knowing what he was doing. He had been accosted, at
the end of a cruise around the magnificent natural harbour of Cochin, to
which Vasco da Gama had come in search of spices and so set in motion the
whole ambiguous history of east-and-west, by an urchin full of pssts and
hey-mister-okays. 'Hi there, yes! You want hashish, sahib? Hey,
mistcramerica. Yes, unclesam, you want opium, best quality, top price? Okay,
you want
cocaine?'
Saladin began, helplessly, to giggle. The incident struck him as
Darwin's revenge: if Dumsday held poor, Victorian, starchy Charles
responsible for American drug culture, how delicious that he should himself
be seen, across the globe, as representing the very ethic he battled so
fervently against. Dumsday fixed him with a look of pained reproof. It was a
hard fate to be an American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so
disliked.
After the involuntary giggle had escaped Saladin's lips, Dumsday sank
into a sullen, injured drowse, leaving Chamcha to his own thoughts. Should
the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of
the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or
were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies
eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to
contemplate; it was a vision of Hell . . . Chamcha was drifting back into
sleep when the cabin lights came on; the movie stopped; and the illusion of
the cinema was replaced by one of watching the television news, as four
armed, shouting figures came running down the aisles.
The passengers were held on the hijacked aircraft for one hundred and
eleven days, marooned on a shimmering runway around which there crashed the
great sand-waves of the desert, because once the four hijackers, three men
one woman, had forced the pilot to land nobody could make up their minds
what to do with them. They had come down not at an international airport but
at the absurd folly of a jumbo-sized landing strip which had been built for
the pleasure of the local sheikh at his favourite desert oasis, to which
there now also led a six-lane highway very popular among single young men
and women, who would cruise along its vast emptiness in slow cars ogling one
another through the windows . . . once 420 had landed here, however, the
highway was full of armoured cars, troop transports, limousines waving
flags. And while diplomats haggled over the airliner's fate, to storm or not
to storm, while they tried to decide whether to concede or to stand firm at
the expense of other people's lives, a great stillness settled around the
airliner and it wasn't long before the mirages began.
In the beginning there had been a constant flow of event, the hijacking
quartet full of electricity, jumpy, trigger-happy. These are the worst
moments, Chamcha thought while children screamed and fear spread like a
stain, here's where we could all go west. Then they were in control, three
men one woman, all tall, none of them masked, all handsome, they were
actors, too, they were stars now, shootingstars or falling, and they had
their own stage-names. Dara Singh Buta Singh Man Singh. The woman was
Tavleen. The woman in the dream had been anonymous, as if Chamcha's sleeping
fancy had no time for pseudonyms; but, like her, Tavleen spoke with a
Canadian accent, smooth-edged, with those give-away rounded O's. After the
plane landed at the oasis of Al-Zamzam it became plain to the passengers,
who were observing their captors with the obsessive attention paid to a
cobra by a transfixed mongoose, that there was something posturing in the
beauty of the three men, some amateurish love of risk and death in them that
made them appear frequently at the open doors of the airplane and flaunt
their bodies at the professional snipers who must have been hiding amid the
palm-trees of the oasis. The woman held herself aloof from such silliness
and seemed to be restraining herself from scolding her three colleagues. She
seemed insensible to her own beauty, which made her the most dangerous of
the four. It struck Saladin Chamcha that the young men were too squeamish,
too narcissistic, to want blood on their hands. They would find it difficult
to kill; they were here to be on television. But Tavleen was here on
business. He kept his eyes on her. The men do not
know,
he thought. They
want to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies and
on TV; they are reality aping a crude image of itself, they are worms
swallowing their tails. But she, the woman,
knows . . .
while Dara, Buta,
Man Singh strutted and pranced, she became quiet, her eyes turned inwards,
and she scared the passengers stiff.
What did they want? Nothing new. An independent homeland, religious
freedom, release of political detainees, justice, ransom money, a
safe-conduct to a country of their choice. Many of the passengers came to
sympathize with them, even though they were under constant threat of
execution. If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to
see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to
their will.
After they landed the hijackers released all but fifty of the
passengers, having decided that fifty was the largest number they could
comfortably supervise. Women, children, Sikhs were all released. It turned
out that Saladin Chamcha was the only member of Prospero Players who was not
given his freedom; he found himself succumbing to the perverse logic of the
situation, and instead of feeling upset at having been retained he was glad
to have seen the back of his badly behaved colleagues; good riddance to bad
rubbish, he thought.
The creationist scientist Eugene Dumsday was unable to bear the
realization that the hijackers did not intend to release him. He rose to his
feet, swaying at his great height like a skyscraper in a hurricane, and
began shouting hysterical incoherences. A stream of dribble ran out of the
corner of his mouth; he licked at it feverishly with his tongue.
Now just
hold hard here, busters, now goddamn it enough is ENOUGH, whaddya wheredya
get the idea you can
and so forth, in the grip of his waking nightmare he
drivelled on and on until one of the four, obviously it was the woman, came
up, swung her rifle butt and broke his flapping jaw. And worse: because
slobbering Dumsday had been licking his lips as his jaw slammed shut, the
tip of his tongue sheared off and landed in Saladin Chamcha's lap; followed
in quick time by its former owner. Eugene Dumsday fell tongueless and
insensate into the actor's arms.
Eugene Dumsday gained his freedom by losing his tongue; the persuader
succeeded in persuading his captors by surrendering his instrument of
persuasion. They didn't want to look after a wounded man, risk of gangrene
and so on, and so he joined the exodus from the plane. In those first wild
hours Saladin Chamcha's mind kept throwing up questions of detail, are those
automatic rifles or sub-machine guns, how did they smuggle all that metal on
board, in which parts of the body is it possible to be shot and still
survive, how scared they must be, the four of them, how full of their own
deaths . . . once Dumsday had gone, he had expected to sit alone, but a man
came and sat in the creationist's old seat, saying you don't mind, yaar, in
such circs a guy needs company. It was the movie star, Gibreel.
After the first nervous days on the ground, during which the three
turbaned young hijackers went perilously close to the edges of insanity,
screaming into the desert night
you bastards, come and get us,
or,
alternatively,
o god o god they're going to send in the fucking commandos,
the motherfucking Americans, yaar, the sisterfucking British, -
moments
during which the remaining hostages closed their eyes and prayed, because
they were always most afraid when the hijackers showed signs of weakness, -
everything settled down into what began to feel like normality. Twice a day
a solitary vehicle carried food and drink to
Bostan
and left it on the
tarmac. The hostages had to bring in the cartons while the hijackers watched
them from the safety of the plane. Apart from this daily visit there was no
contact with the outside world. The radio had gone dead. It was as if the
incident had been forgotten, as if it were so embarrassing that it had
simply been erased from the record. The bastards are leaving us to rot,'
screamed Man Singh, and the hostages joined in with a will. 'Hijras!
Chootias! Shits!'
They were wrapped in heat and silence and now the spectres began to
shimmer out of the corners of their eyes. The most highly strung of the
hostages, a young man with a goatee beard and close-cropped curly hair,
awoke at dawn, shrieking with fear because he had seen a skeleton riding a
camel across the dunes. Other hostages saw coloured globes hanging in the
sky, or heard the beating of gigantic wings. The three male hijackers fell
into a deep, fatalistic gloom. One day Tavleen summoned them to a conference
at the far end of the plane; the hostages heard angry voices. 'She's telling
them they have to issue an ultimatum,' Gibreel Farishta said to Chamcha.
'One of us has to die, or such.' But when the men returned Tavleen wasn't
with them and the dejection in their eyes was tinged, now, with shame. 'They
lost their guts,' Gibreel whispered. 'No can do. Now what is left for our
Tavleen bibi? Zero. Story funtoosh.'
What she did:
In order to prove to her captives, and also to her fellow-captors, that
the idea of failure, or surrender, would never weaken her resolve, she
emerged from her momentary retreat in the first-class cocktail lounge to
stand before them like a stewardess demonstrating safety procedures. But
instead of putting on a lifejacket and holding up blow-tube whistle
etcetera, she quickly lifted the loose black djellabah that was her only
garment and stood before them stark naked, so that they could all see the
arsenal of her body, the grenades like extra breasts nestling in her
cleavage, the gelignite taped around her thighs, just the way it had been in
Chamcha's dream. Then she slipped her robe back on and spoke in her faint
oceanic voice. 'When a great idea comes into the world, a great cause,
certain crucial questions are asked of it,' she murmured. 'History asks us:
what manner of cause are we? Are we uncompromising, absolute, strong, or
will we show ourselves to be timeservers, who compromise, trim and yield?'
Her body had provided her answer.
The days continued to pass. The enclosed, boiling circumstances of his
captivity, at once intimate and distant, made Saladin Chamcha want to argue
with the woman, unbendingness can also be monomania, he wanted to say, it
can be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can
also be humane, and strong enough to last. But he didn't say anything, of
course, he fell into the torpor of the days. Gibreel Farishta discovered in
the seat pocket in front of him a pamphlet written by the departed Dumsday.
By this time Chamcha had noticed the determination with which the movie star
resisted the onset of sleep, so it wasn't surprising to see him reciting and
memorizing the lines of the creationist's leaflet, while his already heavy
eyelids drooped lower and lower until he forced them to open wide again. The
leaflet argued that even the scientists were busily re-inventing God, that
once they had proved the existence of a single unified force of which
electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces of the new physics
were all merely aspects, avatars, one might say, or angels, then what would
we have but the oldest thing of all, a supreme entity controlling all
creation . . . 'You see, what our friend says is, if you have to choose
between some type of disembodied force-field and the actual living God,
which one would you go for? Good point, na? You can't pray to an electric
current. No point asking a wave-form for the key to Paradise.' He closed his
eyes, then snapped them open again. 'All bloody bunk,' he said fiercely.
'Makes me sick.'
After the first days Chamcha no longer noticed Gibreel's bad breath,
because nobody in that world of sweat and apprehension was smelling any
better. But his face was impossible to ignore, as the great purple welts of
his wakefulness spread outwards like oil-slicks from his eyes. Then at last
his resistance ended and he collapsed on to Saladin's shoulder and slept for
four days without waking once.
When he returned to his senses he found that Chamcha, with the help of
the mouse-like, goateed hostage, a certain Jalandri, had moved him to an
empty row of seats in the centre block. He went to the toilet to urinate for
eleven minutes and returned with a look of real terror in his eyes. He sat
down by Chamcha again, but wouldn't say a word. Two nights later, Chamcha
heard him fighting, once again, against the onset of sleep. Or, as it turned
out: of dreams.
'Tenth highest peak in the world,' Chamcha heard him mutter, 'is
Xixabangma Feng, eight oh one three metres. An-napurna ninth, eighty
seventy-eight.' Or he would begin at the other end: 'One, Chomolungma, eight
eight four eight. Two, K2, eighty-six eleven. Kanchenjunga, eighty-five
ninety-eight, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu. Nanga Parbat, metres eight
thousand one hundred and twenty-six.'
'You count eight thousand metre peaks to fall asleep?' Chamcha asked
him. Bigger than sheep, but not so numerous.
Gibreel Farishta glared at him; then bowed his head; came to a
decision. 'Not to sleep, my friend. To stay awake.'
That was when Saladin Chamcha found out why Gibreel Farishta had begun
to fear sleep. Everybody needs somebody to talk to and Gibreel had spoken to
nobody about what had happened after he ate the unclean pigs. The dreams had
begun that very night. In these visions he was always present, not as
himself but as his namesake, and I don't mean interpreting a role, Spoono, I
am him, he is me, I am the bloody archangel, Gibreel himself, large as
bloody life.
Spoono.
Like Zeenat Vakil, Gibreel had reacted with mirth to Saladin's
abbreviated name. 'Bhai, wow. I'm tickled, truly. Tickled pink. So if you
are an English
chamcha
these days, let it be. Mr Sally Spoon. It will be our
little joke.' Gibreel Farishta had a way of failing to notice when he made
people angry.
Spoon, Spoono, my old Chumch:
Saladin hated them all. But
could do nothing. Except hate.
Maybe it was because of the nicknames, maybe not, but Saladin found
Gibreel's revelations pathetic, anticlimactic, what was so strange if his
dreams characterized him as the angel, dreams do every damn thing, did it
really display more than a banal kind of egomania? But Gibreel was sweating
from fear: 'Point is, Spoono,' he pleaded, 'every time I go to sleep the
dream starts up from where it stopped. Same dream in the same place. As if
somebody just paused the video while I went out of the room. Or, or. As if
he's the guy who's awake and this is the bloody nightmare. His bloody dream:
us. Here. All of it.' Chamcha stared at him. 'Crazy, right,' he said. 'Who
knows if angels even sleep, never mind dream. I sound crazy. Am I right or
what?'
'Yes. You sound crazy.'
'Then what the hell,' he wailed, 'is going on in my head?'
The longer he spent without going to sleep the more talkative he
became, he began to regale the hostages, the hijackers, as well as the
dilapidated crew of Flight 420, those formerly scornful stewardesses and
shining flight-deck personnel who were now looking mournfully moth-eaten in
a corner of the plane and even losing their earlier enthusiasm for endless
games of rummy, - with his increasingly eccentric reincarnation theories,
comparing their sojourn on that airstrip by the oasis of Al-Zamzam to a
second period of gestation, telling everybody that they were all dead to the
world and in the process of being regenerated, made anew. This idea seemed
to cheer him up somewhat, even though it made many of the hostages want to
string him up, and he leapt up on to a seat to explain that the day of their
release would be the day of their rebirth, a piece of optimism that calmed
his audience down. 'Strange but true!' he cried. 'That will be day zero, and
because we will all share the birthday we will all be exactly the same age
from that day on, for the rest of our lives. How do you call it when fifty
kids come out of the same mother? God knows. Fiftuplets. Damn!'
Reincarnation, for frenzied Gibreel, was a term beneath whose shield
many notions gathered a-babeling: phoenix-from-ashes, the resurrection of
Christ, the transmigration, at the instant of death, of the soul of the
Dalai Lama into the body of a new-born child . . . such matters got mixed up
with the avatars of Vishnu, the metamorphoses of Jupiter, who had imitated
Vishnu by adopting the form of a bull; and so on, including of course the
progress of human beings through successive cycles of life, now as
cockroaches, now as kings, towards the bliss of no-more-returns.
To be born
again, first you have to die.
Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most
of the examples Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not
required a death; the new flesh had been entered into through other gates.
Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no
interruptions. 'The old must die, you get my message, or the new cannot be
whatnot.'
Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his
exhaustion-beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head
on Chamcha's shoulder, while Saladin - prolonged captivity erodes certain
reluctances among the captives - would stroke his face and kiss the top of
his head,
There, there, there.
On other occasions Chamcha's irritation would
get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old Gramsci
chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that's what's happening
to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is
trying to be born into your flesh.
'You want to hear something really crazy?' Gibreel after a hundred and
one days offered Chamcha more confidences. 'You want to know why I'm here?'
And told him anyway: 'For a woman. Yes, boss. For the bloody love of my
bloody life. With whom I have spent a sum total of days three point five.
Doesn't that prove I really am cracked? QED, Spoono, old Chumch.'
And: 'How to explain it to you? Three and a half days of it, how long
do you need to know that the best thing has happened, the deepest thing, the
has-to-be-it? I swear: when I kissed her there were mother-fucking sparks,
yaar, believe don't believe, she said it was static electricity in the
carpet but I've kissed chicks in hotel rooms before and this was a definite
first, a definite one-and-only. Bloody electric shocks, man, I had to jump
back with pain.'
He had no words to express her, his woman of mountain ice, to express
how it had been in that moment when his life had been in pieces at his feet
and she had become its meaning. 'You don't see,' he gave up. 'Maybe you
never met a person for whom you'd cross the world, for whom you'd leave
everything, walk out and take a plane. She climbed Everest, man. Twenty-nine
thousand and two feet, or maybe twenty-nine one four one. Straight to the
top. You think I can't get on a jumbo-jet for a woman like that?'
The harder Gibreel Farishta tried to explain his obsession with the
mountain-climber Alleluia Cone, the more Saladin tried to conjure up the
memory of Pamela, but she wouldn't come. At first it would be Zeeny who
visited him, her shade, and then after a time there was nobody at all.
Gibreel's passion began to drive Chamcha wild with anger and frustration,
but Farishta didn't notice it, slapped him on the back,
cheer up, Spoono,
won't be long now.
On the hundred and tenth day Tavleen walked up to the little goateed
hostage, Jalandri, and motioned with her finger. Our patience has been
exhausted, she announced, we have sent repeated ultimatums with no response,
it is time for the first sacrifice. She used that word: sacrifice. She
looked straight into Jalandri's eyes and pronounced his death sentence. 'You
first. Apostate traitor bastard.' She ordered the crew to prepare for
take-off, she wasn't going to risk a storming of the plane after the
execution, and with the point of her gun she pushed Jalandri towards the
open door at the front, while he screamed and begged for mercy. 'She's got
sharp eyes,' Gibreel said to Chamcha. 'He's a cut-sird.' Jalandri had become
the first target because of his decision to give up the turban and cut his
hair, which made him a traitor to his faith, a shorn Sirdarji.
Cut-Sird.
A
seven-letter condemnation; no appeal.
Jalandri had fallen to his knees, stains were spreading on the seat of
his trousers, she was dragging him to the door by his hair. Nobody moved.
Dara Buta Man Singh turned away from the tableau. He was kneeling with his
back to the open door; she made him turn round, shot him in the back of the
head, and he toppled out on to the tarmac. Tavleen shut the door.
Man Singh, youngest and jumpiest of the quartet, screamed at her: 'Now
where do we go? In any damn place they'll send the commandos in for sure.
We're gone geese now.'
'Martyrdom is a privilege,' she said softly. 'We shall be like stars;
like the sun.'
Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white,
transforming carpet, its ghost-white shining up through the night. The Alps,
France, the coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened
meadowlands. Mr. Saladin Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. The
world had rediscovered Flight AI-420, the Boeing 747
Bostan.
Radar tracked
it; radio messages crackled.
Do you want permission to land?
But no
permission was requested.
Bostan
circled over England's shore like a
gigantic sea-bird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero.
When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise,
because this time the three male hijackers didn't argue with Tavleen, there
were no fierce whispers about
the fuel
about
what the fuck you're doing
but
just a mute stand-off, they wouldn't even talk to one another, as if they
had given up hope, and then it was Man Singh who cracked and went for her.
The hostages watched the fight to the death, unable to feel involved,
because a curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft, a kind
of inconsequential casualness, a fatalism, one might say. They fell to the
floor and her knife went up through his stomach. That was all, the brevity
of it adding to its seeming unimportance. Then in the instant when she rose
up it was as if everybody awoke, it became clear to them all that she really
meant business, she was going through with it, all the way, she was holding
in her hand the wire that connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath
her gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara
rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down.
No, not death: birth.
II
Mahound
Gibreel when he submits to the inevitable, when he slides heavy-lidded
towards visions of his angeling, passes his loving mother who has a
different name for him, Shaitan, she calls him, just like Shaitan, same to
same, because he has been fooling around with the tiffins to be carried into
the city for the office workers' lunch, mischeevious imp, she slices the air
with her hand, rascal has been putting Muslim meat compartments into Hindu
non-veg tiffin-carriers, customers are up in arms. Little devil, she scolds,
but then folds him in her arms, my little farishta, boys will be boys, and
he falls past her into sleep, growing bigger as he falls and the falling
begins to feel like flight, his mother's voice wafts distantly up to him,
baba, look how you grew, enor
mouse,
wah-wah, applause. He is gigantic,
wingless, standing with his feet upon the horizon and his arms around the
sun. In the early dreams he sees beginnings, Shaitan cast down from the sky,
making a grab for a branch of the highest Thing, the lote-tree of the
uttermost end that stands beneath the Throne, Shaitan missing, plummeting,
splat. But he lived on, was not couldn't be dead, sang from hellbelow his
soft seductive verses. O the sweet songs that he knew. With his daughters as
his fiendish backing group, yes, the three of them, Lat Manat Uzza,
motherless girls laughing with their Abba, giggling behind their hands at
Gibreel, what a trick we got in store for you, they giggle, for you and for
that businessman on the hill. But before the businessman there are other
stories, here he is, Archangel Gibreel, revealing the spring of Zamzam to
Hagar the Egyptian so that, abandoned by the prophet Ibrahim with their
child in the desert, she might drink the cool spring waters and so live. And
later, after the Jurhum filled up Zamzam with mud and golden gazelles, so
that it was lost for a time, here he is again, pointing it out to that one,
Muttalib of the scarlet tents, father of the child with the silver hair who
fathered, in turn, the businessman. The businessman: here he comes.
Sometimes when he sleeps Gibreel becomes aware, without the dream, of
himself sleeping, of himself dreaming his own awareness of his dream, and
then a panic begins, O God, he cries out, O allgood allahgod, I've had my
bloody chips, me. Got bugs in the brain, full mad, a looney tune and a gone
baboon. Just as he, the businessman, felt when he first saw the archangel:
thought he was cracked, wanted to throw himself down from a rock, from a
high rock, from a rock on which there grew a stunted lote-tree, a rock as
high as the roof of the world.
He's coming: making his way up Cone Mountain to the cave. Happy
birthday: he's forty-four today. But though the city behind and below him
throngs with festival, up he climbs, alone. No new birthday suit for him,
neatly pressed and folded at the foot of his bed. A man of ascetic tastes.
(What strange manner of businessman is this?)
Question: What is the opposite of faith?
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.
Doubt.
The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod
and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day
they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things:
antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old
antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la
god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, of the
salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of
protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn
them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are
tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of
behind-their-own eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind
closed peepers . . . angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To
will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.
I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel.
Me?
The businessman: looks as he should, high forehead, caglenose, broad in
the shoulders, narrow in the hip. Average height, brooding, dressed in two
pieces of plain cloth, each four ells in length, one draped around his body,
the other over his shoulder. Large eyes; long lashes like a girl's. His
strides can seem too long for his legs, but he's a light-footed man. Orphans
learn to be moving targets, develop a rapid walk, quick reactions,
hold-your-tongue caution. Up through the thorn-bushes and opobalsam trees he
comes, scrabbling on boulders, this is a fit man, no soft-bellied usurer he.
And yes, to state it again: takes an odd sort of business wallah to cut off
into the wilds, up Mount Cone, sometimes for a month at a stretch, just to
be alone.
His name: a dream-name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it
means he-for-whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won't answer to that here;
nor, though he's well aware of what they call him, to his nickname in
Jahilia down below -
he-who-goes-up-and-down-old-Coney.
Here he is neither
Mahomet nor MoeHammcred; has adopted, instead, the demon-tag the farangis
hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks
all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise,
our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval
baby-frightener, the Devil's synonym: Mahound.
That's him. Mahound the businessman, climbing his hot mountain in the
Hijaz. The mirage of a city shines below him in the sun.
The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of
the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated,
the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick
of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very
stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting,
treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric
of their newly invented permanence. These people are a mere three or four
generations removed from their nomadic past, when they were as rootless as
the dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was
home.
- Whereas the migrant can do without the journey altogether; it's no
more than a necessary evil; the point is to arrive. -
Quite recently, then, and like the shrewd businessmen they were, the
Jahilians settled down at the intersection-point of the routes of the great
caravans, and yoked the dunes to their will. Now the sand serves the mighty
urban merchants. Beaten into cobbles, it paves Jahilia's tortuous streets;
by night, golden flames blaze out from braziers of burnished sand. There is
glass in the windows, in the long, slitlike windows set in the infinitely
high sand-walls of the merchant palaces; in the alleys of Jahilia,
donkey-carts roll forward on smooth silicon wheels. I, in my wickedness,
sometimes imagine the coming of a great wave, a high wall of foaming water
roaring across the desert, a liquid catastrophe full of snapping boats and
drowning arms, a tidal wave that would reduce these vain sandcastles to the
nothingness, to the grains from which they came. But there are no waves
here. Water is the enemy in Jahilia. Carried in earthen pots, it must never
be spilled (the penal code deals fiercely with offenders), for where it
drops the city erodes alarmingly. Holes appear in roads, houses tilt and
sway. The water-carriers of Jahilia are loathed necessities, pariahs who
cannot be ignored and therefore can never be forgiven. It never rains in
Jahilia; there are no fountains in the silicon gardens. A few palms stand in
enclosed courtyards, their roots travelling far and wide below the earth in
search of moisture. The city's water comes from underground streams and
springs, one such being the fabled Zamzam, at the heart of the concentric
sand-city, next to the House of the Black Stone. Here, at Zamzam, is a
beheshti, a despised water-carrier, drawing up the vital, dangerous fluid.
He has a name: Khalid.
A city of businessmen, Jahilia. The name of the tribe is
Shark.
In this city, the businessman-turned-prophet, Mahound, is founding one
of the world's great religions; and has arrived, on this day, his birthday,
at the crisis of his life. There is a voice whispering in his ear:
What kind
of idea are you? Man-or-mouse?
We know that voice. We've heard it once before.
While Mahound climbs Coney, Jahilia celebrates a different anniversary.
In ancient time the patriarch Ibrahim came into this valley with Hagar and
Ismail, their son. Here, in this waterless wilderness, he abandoned her. She
asked him, can this be God's will? He replied, it is. And left, the bastard.
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in
mysterious ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me.
- But I'll keep to the point; Hagar wasn't a witch. She was trusting:
then
surely He will not let me perish.
After Ibrahim left her, she fed the baby
at her breast until her milk ran out. Then she climbed two hills, first Safa
then Marwah, running from one to the other in her desperation, trying to
sight a tent, a camel, a human being. She saw nothing. That was when he came
to her, Gibreel, and showed her the waters of Zamzam. So Hagar survived; but
why now do the pilgrims congregate? To celebrate her survival? No, no. They
are celebrating the honour done the valley by the visit of, you've guessed
it, Ibrahim. In that loving consort's name, they gather, worship and, above
all, spend.
Jahilia today is all perfume. The scents of Araby, of
Arabia Odorifera,
hang in the air: balsam, cassia, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh. The pilgrims
drink the wine of the date-palm and wander in the great fair of the feast of
Ibrahim. And, among them, one wanders whose furrowed brow sets him apart
from the cheerful crowd: a tall man in loose white robes, he'd stand almost
a full head higher than Mahound. His beard is shaped close to his slanting,
high-boned face; his gait contains the lilt, the deadly elegance of power.
What's he called? - The vision yields his name eventually; it, too, is
changed by the dream. Here he is, Karim Abu Simbel, Grandee of Jahilia,
husband to the ferocious, beautiful Hind. Head of the ruling council of the
city, rich beyond numbering, owner of the lucrative temples at the city
gates, wealthy in camels, comptroller of caravans, his wife the greatest
beauty in the land: what could shake the certainties of such a man? And yet,
for Abu Simbel, too, a crisis is approaching. A name gnaws at him, and you
can guess what it is, Mahound Mahound Mahound.
O the splendour of the fairgrounds of Jahilia! Here in vast scented
tents are arrays of spices, of senna leaves, of fragrant woods; here the
perfume vendors can be found, competing for the pilgrims' noses, and for
their wallets, too. Abu Simbel pushes his way through the crowds. Merchants,
Jewish, Monophysite, Nabataean, buy and sell pieces of silver and gold,
weighing them, biting coins with knowing teeth. There is linen from Egypt
and silk from China; from Basra, arms and grain. There is gambling, and
drinking, and dance. There are slaves for sale, Nubian, Anatolian, Aethiop.
The four factions of the tribe of Shark control separate zones of the fair,
the scents and spices in the Scarlet Tents, while in the Black Tents the
cloth and leather. The Silver-Haired grouping is in charge of precious
metals and swords. Entertainment - dice, belly-dancers, palm-wine, the
smoking of hashish and afeem - is the prerogative of the fourth quarter of
the tribe, the Owners of the Dappled Camels, who also run the slave trade.
Abu Simbel looks into a dance tent. Pilgrims sit clutching money-bags in
their left hands; every so often a coin is moved from bag to right-hand
palm. The dancers shake and sweat, and their eyes never leave the pilgrims'
fingertips; when the coin transfer ceases, the dance also ends. The great
man makes a face and lets the tent-flap fall.
Jahilia has been built in a series of rough circles, its houses
spreading outwards from the House of the Black Stone, approximately in order
of wealth and rank. Abu Simbel's palace is in the first circle, the
innermost ring; he makes his way down one of the rambling, windy radial
roads, past the city's many seers who, in return for pilgrim money, are
chirping, cooing, hissing, possessed variously by djinnis of birds, beasts,
snakes. A sorceress, failing for a moment to look up, squats in his path:
'Want to capture a girlie's heart, my dear? Want an enemy under your thumb?
Try me out; try my little knots!' And raises, dangles a knotty rope,
ensnarer of human lives - but, seeing now to whom she speaks, lets fall her
disappointed arm and slinks away, mumbling, into sand.
Everywhere, noise and elbows. Poets stand on boxes and declaim while
pilgrims throw coins at their feet. Some bards speak rajaz verses, their
four-syllable metre suggested, according to legend, by the walking pace of
the camel; others speak the qas-idah, poems of wayward mistresses, desert
adventure, the hunting of the onager. In a day or so it will be time for the
annual poetry competition, after which the seven best verses will be nailed
up on the walls of the House of the Black Stone. The poets are getting into
shape for their big day; Abu Simbel laughs at minstrels singing vicious
satires, vitriolic odes commissioned by one chief against another, by one
tribe against its neighbour. And nods in recognition as one of the poets
falls into step beside him, a sharp narrow youth with frenzied fingers. This
young lampoonist already has the most feared tongue in all Jahilia, but to
Abu Simbel he is almost deferential. 'Why so preoccupied, Grandee? If you
were not losing your hair I'd tell you to let it down.' Abu Simbel grins his
sloping grin. 'Such a reputation,' he muses. 'Such fame, even before your
milk-teeth have fallen out. Look out or we'll have to draw those teeth for
you.' He is teasing, speaking lightly, but even this lightness is laced with
menace, because of the extent of his power. The boy is unabashed. Matching
Abu Simbel stride for stride, he replies: 'For every one you pull out, a
stronger one will grow, biting deeper, drawing hotter spurts of blood.' The
Grandee, vaguely, nods. 'You like the taste of blood,' he says. The boy
shrugs. 'A poet's work,' he answers. 'To name the unnamable, to point at
frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from
going to sleep.' And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses
inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist, Baal.
A curtained litter passes by; some fine lady of the city, out to see
the fair, borne on the shoulders of eight Anatolian slaves. Abu Simbel takes
the young Baal by the elbow, under the pretext of steering him out of the
road; murmurs, 'I hoped to find you; if you will, a word.' Baal marvels at
the skill of the Grandee. Searching for a man, he can make his quarry think
he has hunted the hunter. Abu Simbel's grip tightens; by the elbow, he
steers his companion towards the holy of holies at the centre of the town.
'I have a commission for you,' the Grandee says. 'A literary matter. I
know my limitations; the skills of rhymed malice, the arts of metrical
slander, are quite beyond my powers. You understand.'
But Baal, the proud, arrogant fellow, stiffens, stands on his dignity.
'It isn't right for the artist to become the servant of the state.' Simbel's
voice falls lower, acquires silkier rhythms. 'Ah, yes. Whereas to place
yourself at the disposal of assassins is an entirely honourable thing.' A
cult of the dead has been raging in Jahilia. When a man dies, paid mourners
beat themselves, scratch their breasts, tear hair. A hamstrung camel is left
on the grave to die. And if the man has been murdered his closest relative
takes ascetic vows and pursues the murderer until the blood has been avenged
by blood; whereupon it is customary to compose a poem of celebration, but
few revengers are gifted in rhyme. Many poets make a living by writing
assassination songs, and there is general agreement that the finest of these
blood-praising versifiers is the precocious polemicist, Baal. Whose
professional pride prevents him from being bruised, now, by the Grandee's
little taunt. 'That is a cultural matter,' he replies Abu Simbel sinks
deeper still into silkiness. 'Maybe so,' he whispers at the gates of the
House of the Black Stone, 'but, Baal, concede: don't I have some small claim
upon you? We both serve, or so I thought, the same mistress.'
Now the blood leaves Baal's cheeks; his confidence cracks, falls from
him like a shell. The Grandee, seemingly oblivious to the alteration, sweeps
the satirist forward into the House.
They say in Jahilia that this valley is the navel of the earth; that
the planet, when it was being made, went spinning round this point. Adam
came here and saw a miracle: four emerald pillars bearing aloft a giant
glowing ruby, and beneath this canopy a huge white stone, also glowing with
its own light, like a vision of his soul. He built strong walls around the
vision to bind it forever to the earth. This was the first House. It was
rebuilt many times - once by Ibrahim, after Hagar's and Ismail's
angel-assisted survival - and gradually the countless touchings of the white
stone by the pilgrims of the centuries darkened its colour to black. Then
the time of the idols began; by the time of Mahound, three hundred and sixty
stone gods clustered around God's own stone.
What would old Adam have thought? His own sons are here now: the
colossus of Hubal, sent by the Amalekites from Hit, stands above the
treasury well, Hubal the shepherd, the waxing crescent moon; also,
glowering, dangerous Kain. He is the waning crescent, blacksmith and
musician; he, too, has his devotees.
Hubal and Kain look down on Grandee and poet as they stroll. And the
Nabataean proto-Dionysus, He-Of-Shara; the morning star, Astarte, and
saturnine Nakruh. Here is the sun god, Manaf! Look, there flaps the giant
Nasr, the god in eagle-form! See Quzah, who holds the rainbow ... is this
not a glut of gods, a stone flood, to feed the glutton hunger of the
pilgrims, to quench their unholy thirst. The deities, to entice the
travellers, come - like the pilgrims - from far and wide. The idols, too,
are delegates to a kind of international fair.
There is a god here called Allah (means simply, the god). Ask the
Jahilians and they'll acknowledge that this fellow has some sort of overall
authority, but he isn't very popular: an all-rounder in an age of specialist
statues.
Abu Simbel and newly perspiring Baal have arrived at the shrines,
placed side by side, of the three best-beloved goddesses in Jahilia. They
bow before all three: Uzza of the radiant visage, goddess of beauty and
love; dark, obscure Manat, her face averted, her purposes mysterious,
sifting sand between her fingers - she's in charge of destiny - she's Fate;
and lastly the highest of the three, the mother-goddess, whom the Greeks
called Lato. Llat, they call her here, or, more frequently, Al-Lat.
The
goddess.
Even her name makes her Allah's opposite and equal. Lat the
omnipotent. His face showing sudden relief, Baal flings himself to the
ground and prostrates himself before her. Abu Simbel stays on his feet.
The family of the Grandee, Abu Simbel - or, to be more precise, of his
wife Hind - controls the famous temple of Lat at the city's southern gate.
(They also draw the revenues from the Manat temple at the east gate, and the
temple of Uzza in the north.) These concessions arc the foundations of the
Grandee's wealth, so he is of course, Baal understands, the servant of Lat.
And the satirist's devotion to this goddess is well known throughout
Jahilia. So that was all he meant! Trembling with relief, Baal remains
prostrate, giving thanks to his patron Lady. Who looks upon him benignly;
but a goddess's expresson is not to be relied upon. Baal has made a serious
mistake.
Without warning, the Grandee kicks the poet in the kidney. Attacked
just when he has decided he's safe, Baal squeals, rolls over, and Abu Simbel
follows him, continuing to kick. There is the sound of a cracking rib.
'Runt,' the Grandee remarks, his voice remaining low and good natured.
'High-voiced pimp with small testicles. Did you think that the master of
Lat's temple would claim comradeship with you just because of your
adolescent passion for her?' And more kicks, regular, methodical. Baal weeps
at Abu Simbel's feet. The House of the Black Stone is far from empty, but
who would come between the Grandee and his wrath? Abruptly, Baal's tormentor
squats down, grabs the poet by the hair, jerks his head up, whispers into
his ear: 'Baal, she wasn't the mistress I meant,' and then Baal lets out a
howl of hideous self-pity, because he knows his life is about to end, to end
when he has so much still to achieve, the poor guy. The Grandee's lips brush
his car. 'Shit of a frightened camel,' Abu Simbel breathes, 'I know you fuck
my wife.' He observes, with interest, that Baal has acquired a prominent
erection, an ironic monument to his fear.
Abu Simbel, the cuckolded Grandee, stands up, commands, 'On your feet',
and Baal, bewildered, follows him outside.
The graves of Ismail and his mother Hagar the Egyptian lie by the
north-west face of the House of the Black Stone, in an enclosure surrounded
by a low wall. Abu Simbel approaches this area, halts a little way off. In
the enclosure is a small group of men. The water-carrier Khalid is there,
and some sort of bum from Persia by the outlandish name of Salman, and to
complete this trinity of scum there is the slave Bilal, the one Mahound
freed, an enormous black monster, this one, with a voice to match his size.
The three idlers sit on the enclosure wall. 'That bunch of riff-raff,' Abu
Simbel says. 'Those are your targets. Write about them; and their leader,
too.' Baal, for all his terror, cannot conceal his disbelief. 'Grandee,
those
goons -
those fucking
clowns?
You don't have to worry about them. What
do you think? That Mahound's one God will bankrupt your temples? Three-sixty
versus one, and the one wins? Can't happen.' He giggles, close to hysteria.
Abu Simbel remains calm: 'Keep your insults for your verses.' Giggling Baal
can't stop. 'A revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves . . .
wow, Grandee. I'm really scared.' Abu Simbel looks carefully at the
tittering poet. 'Yes,' he answers, 'that's right, you should be afraid. Get
writing, please, and I expect these verses to be your masterpieces.' Baal
crumples, whines. 'But they are a waste of my, my small talent . . .' He
sees that he has said too much.
'Do as you're told,' are Abu Simbel's last words to him. 'You have no
choice.'
The Grandee lolls in his bedroom while concubines attend to his needs.
Coconut-oil for his thinning hair, wine for his palate, tongues for his
delight.
The boy was right. Why do I fear Mahound?
He begins, idly, to count
the concubines, gives up at fifteen with a flap of his hand.
The boy. Hind
will go on seeing him, obviously; what chance does he have against her will?
It is a weakness in him, he knows, that he sees too much, tolerates too
much. He has his appetites, why should she not have hers? As long as she is
discreet; and as long as he knows. He must know; knowledge is his narcotic,
his addiction. He cannot tolerate what he does not know and for that reason,
if for no other, Mahound is his enemy, Mahound with his raggle-taggle gang,
the boy was right to laugh. He, the Grandee, laughs less easily. Like his
opponent he is a cautious man, he walks on the balls of his feet. He
remembers the big one, the slave, Bilal: how his master asked him, outside
the Lat temple, to enumerate the gods. 'One,' he answered in that huge
musical voice. Blasphemy, punishable by death. They stretched him out in the
fairground with a boulder on his chest.
How many did you say?
One, he
repeated, one. A second boulder was added to the first.
One one one.
Mahound
paid his owner a large price and set him free.
No, Abu Simbel reflects, the boy Baal was wrong, these men are worth
our time. Why do I fear Mahound? For that: one one one, his terrifying
singularity. Whereas I am always divided, always two or three or fifteen. I
can even see his point of view; he is as wealthy and successful as any of
us, as any of the councillors, but because he lacks the right sort of family
connections, we haven't offered him a place amongst our group. Excluded by
his orphaning from the mercantile elite, he feels he has been cheated, he
has not had his due. He always was an ambitious fellow. Ambitious, but also
solitary. You don't rise to the top by climbing up a hill all by yourself.
Unless, maybe, you meet an angel there . . . yes, that's it. I see what he's
up to. He wouldn't understand me, though.
What kind of idea am I?
I bend. I
sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive. That is why
I won't accuse Hind of adultery. We are a good pair, ice and fire. Her
family shield, the fabled red lion, the many-toothed manticore. Let her play
with her satirist; between us it was never sex. I'll finish him when she's
finished with. Here's a great lie, thinks the Grandee of Jahilia drifting
into sleep: the pen is mightier than the sword.
The fortunes of the city of Jahilia were built on the supremacy of sand
over water. In the old days it had been thought safer to transport goods
across the desert than over the seas, where monsoons could strike at any
time. In those days before meteorology such matters were impossible to
predict. For this reason the caravanserais prospered. The produce of the
world came up from Zafar to Sheba, and thence to Jahilia and the oasis of
Yathrib and on to Midian where Moses lived; thence to Aqabah and Egypt. From
Jahilia other trails began: to the east and north-east, towards Mesopotamia
and the great Persian empire. To Petra and to Palmyra, where once Solomon
loved the Queen of Sheba. Those were fatted days. But now the fleets plying
the waters around the peninsula have grown hardier, their crews more
skilful, their navigational instruments more accurate. The camel trains are
losing business to the boats. Desert-ship and sea-ship, the old rivalry,
sees a tilt in the balance of power. Jahilia's rulers fret, but there is
little they can do. Sometimes Abu Simbel suspects that only the pilgrimage
stands between the city and its ruin. The council searches the world for
statues of alien gods, to attract new pilgrims to the city of sand; but in
this, too, they have competitors. Down in Sheba a great temple has been
built, a shrine to rival the House of the Black Stone. Many pilgrims have
been tempted south, and the numbers at the Jahilia fairgrounds are falling.
At the recommendation of Abu Simbel, the rulers of Jahilia have added
to their religious practices the tempting spices of profanity. The city has
become famous for its licentiousness, as a gambling den, a whorehouse, a
place of bawdy songs and wild, loud music. On one occasion some members of
the tribe of Shark went too far in their greed for pilgrim money. The
gatekeepers at the House began demanding bribes from weary voyagers; four of
them, piqued at receiving no more than a pittance, pushed two travellers to
their deaths down the great, steep flight of stairs. This practice
backfired, discouraging return visits. . . Today, female pilgrims are often
kidnapped for ransom, or sold into concubinage. Gangs of young Sharks patrol
the city, keeping their own kind of law. It is said that Abu Simbel meets
secretly with the gangleaders and organizes them all. This is the world into
which Mahound has brought his message: one one one. Amid such multiplicity,
it sounds like a dangerous word.
The Grandee sits up and at once concubines approach to resume their
oilings and smoothings. He waves them away, claps his hands. The eunuch
enters. 'Send a messenger to the house of the kahin Mahound,' Abu Simbel
commands.
We will set him a little test. A fair contest: three against one.
Water-carrier immigrant slave: Mahound's three disciples are washing at
the well of Zamzam. In the sand-city, their obsession with water makes them
freakish. Ablutions, always ablutions, the legs up to the knees, the arms
down to the elbows, the head down to the neck. Dry-torsoed, wet-limbed and
damp-headed, what eccentrics they look! Splish, splosh, washing and praying.
On their knees, pushing arms, legs, heads back into the ubiquitous sand, and
then beginning again the cycle of water and prayer. These are easy targets
for Baal's pen. Their water-loving is a treason of a sort; the people of
Jahilia accept the omnipotence of sand. It lodges between their fingers and
toes, cakes their lashes and hair, clogs their pores. They open themselves
to the desert: come, sand, wash us in aridity. That is the Jahilian way from
the highest citizen to the lowest of the low. They are people of silicon,
and water-lovers have come among them.
Baal circles them from a safe distance - Bilal is not a man to trifle
with - and yells gibes. 'If Mahound's ideas were worth anything, do you
think they'd only be popular with trash like you?' Salman restrains Bilal:
'We should be honoured that the mighty Baal has chosen to attack us,' he
smiles, and Bilal relaxes, subsides. Khalid the water-carrier is jumpy, and
when he sees the heavy figure of Mahound's uncle Hamza approaching he runs
towards him anxiously. Hamza at sixty is still the city's most renowned
fighter and lion-hunter. Though the truth is less glorious than the
eulogies: Hamza has many times been defeated in combat, saved by friends or
lucky chances, rescued from lions' jaws. He has the money to keep such items
out of the news. And age, and survival, bestow a sort of validation upon a
martial legend. Bilal and Salman, forgetting Baal, follow Khalid. All three
are nervous, young.
He's still not home, Hamza reports. And Khalid, worried: But it's been
hours, what is that bastard doing to him, torture, thumbscrews, whips?
Salman, once again, is the calmest: That isn't Simbel's style, he says, it's
something sneaky, depend upon it. And Bilal bellows loyally: Sneaky or not,
I have faith in him, in the Prophet. He won't break. Hamza offers only a
gentle rebuke: Oh, Bilal, how many times must he tell you? Keep your faith
for God. The Messenger is only a man. The tension bursts out of Khalid: he
squares up to old Hamza, demands, Are you saying that the Messenger is weak?
You may be his uncle . . . Hamza clouts the water-carrier on the side of the
head. Don't let him see your fear, he says, not even when you're scared half
to death.
The four of them are washing once more when Mahound arrives; they
cluster around him, whowhatwhy. Hamza stands back. 'Nephew, this is no damn
good,' he snaps in his soldier's bark. 'When you come down from Coney
there's a brightness on you. Today it's something dark.'
Mahound sits on the edge of the well and grins. 'I've been offered a
deal.'
By Abu Simbel?
Khalid shouts.
Unthinkable. Refuse.
Faithful Bilal
admonishes him: Do not lecture the Messenger. Of course, he has refused.
Salman the Persian asks: What sort of deal. Mahound smiles again. 'At least
one of you wants to know.'
'It's a small matter,' he begins again. 'A grain of sand. Abu Simbel
asks Allah to grant him one little favour.' Hamza sees the exhaustion in
him. As if he had been wrestling with a demon. The water-carrier is
shouting: 'Nothing! Not a jot!' Hamza shuts him up.
'If our great God could find it in his heart to concede - he used that
word,
concede -
that three, only three of the three hundred and sixty idols
in the house are worthy of worship . . .'
'There is no god but God!' Bilal shouts. And his fellows join in: 'Ya
Allah!' Mahound looks angry. 'Will the faithful hear the Messenger?' They
fall silent, scuffing their feet in the dust.
'He asks for Allah's approval of Lat, Uzza and Manat. In return, he
gives his guarantee that we will be tolerated, even officially recognized;
as a mark of which, I am to be elected to the council of Jahilia. That's the
offer.'
Salman the Persian says: 'It's a trap. If you go up Coney and come down
with such a Message, he'll ask, how could you make Gibreel provide just the
right revelation? He'll be able to call you a charlatan, a fake.' Mahound
shakes his head. 'You know, Salman, that I have learned how to
listen.
This
listening
is not of the ordinary kind; it's also a kind of asking. Often,
when Gibreel comes, it's as if he knows what's in my heart. It feels to me,
most times, as if he comes from within my heart: from within my deepest
places, from my soul.'
'Or it's a different trap,' Salman persists. 'How long have we been
reciting the creed you brought us? There is no god but God. What are we if
we abandon it now? This weakens us, renders us absurd. We cease to be
dangerous. Nobody will ever take us seriously again.'
Mahound laughs, genuinely amused. 'Maybe you haven't been here long
enough,' he says kindly. 'Haven't you noticed? The people do not take us
seriously. Never more than fifty in the audience when I speak, and half of
those are tourists. Don't you read the lampoons that Baal pins up all over
town?' He recites:
Messenger, do please lend a
careful ear. Your monophilia,
your one one one, ain't for Jahilia.
Return to sender.
'They mock us everywhere, and you call us dangerous,' he cried.
Now Hamza looks worried. 'You never worried about their opinions
before. Why now? Why after speaking to Simbel?'
Mahound shakes his head. 'Sometimes I think I must make it easier for
the people to believe.'
An uneasy silence covers the disciples; they exchange looks, shift
their weight. Mahound cries out again. 'You all know what has been
happening. Our failure to win converts. The people will not give up their
gods. They will not, not.' He stands up, strides away from them, washes by
himself on the far side of the Zamzam well, kneels to pray.
'The people are sunk in darkness,' says Bilal, unhappily. 'But they
will see. They will hear. God is one.' Misery infects the four of them; even
Hamza is brought low. Mahound has been shaken, and his followers quake.
He stands, bows, sighs, comes round to rejoin them. 'Listen to me, all
of you,' he says, putting one arm around Bilal's shoulders, the other around
his uncle's. 'Listen: it is an interesting offer.'
Unembraced Khalid interrupts bitterly: 'It is a
tempting
deal.' The
others look horrified. Hamza speaks very gently to the water-carrier.
'Wasn't it you, Khalid, who wanted to fight me just now because you wrongly
assumed that, when I called the Messenger a man, I was really calling him a
weakling? Now what? Is it my turn to challenge you to a fight?'
Mahound begs for peace. 'If we quarrel, there's no hope.' He tries to
raise the discussion to the theological level. 'It is not suggested that
Allah accept the three as his equals. Not even Lat. Only that they be given
some sort of intermediary, lesser status.'
'Like devils,' Bilal bursts out.
'No,' Salman the Persian gets the point. 'Like archangels. The
Grandee's a clever man.'
'Angels and devils,' Mahound says. 'Shaitan and Gibreel. We all,
already, accept their existence, halfway between God and man. Abu Simbel
asks that we admit just three more to this great company. Just three, and,
he indicates, all Jahilia's souls will be ours.'
'And the House will be cleansed of statues?' Salman asks. Mahound
replies that this was not specified. Salman shakes his head. 'This is being
done to destroy you.' And Bilal adds: 'God cannot be four.' And Khalid,
close to tears: 'Messenger, what are you saying? Lat, Manat, Uzza - they're
all
females!
For pity's sake! Are we to have goddesses now? Those old
cranes, herons, hags?'
Misery strain fatigue, etched deeply into the Prophet's face. Which
Hamza, like a soldier on a battlefield comforting a wounded friend, cups
between his hands. 'We can't sort this out for you, nephew,' he says. 'Climb
the mountain. Go ask Gibreel.'
Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the
camera and at other moments, spectator. When he's a camera the pee oh vee is
always on the move, he hates static shots, so he's floating up on a high
crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he's
swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to
achieve a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he'll try a dolly
shot, tracking along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or hand-held
with the help of a steadicam he'll probe the secrets of the Grandee's
bedchamber. But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in
the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up
the action like any movie fan, enjoys the fights infidelities moral crises,
but there aren't enough girls for a real hit, man, and where are the goddamn
songs? They should have built up that fairground scene, maybe a cameo role
for Pimple Billimoria in a show-tent, wiggling her famous bazooms.
And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: 'Go ask Gibreel,' and
he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in alarm, who, me?
I'm
supposed to
know the answers here? I'm sitting here watching this picture and now this
actor points his finger out at me, who ever heard the like, who asks the
bloody audience of a 'theological' to solve the bloody plot? - But as the
dream shifts, it's always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere
spectator but the central player, the star. With his old weakness for taking
too many roles: yes, yes, he's not just playing the archangel but also him,
the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, coming up the mountain when he
conies. Nifty cutting is required to pull off this double role, the two of
them can never be seen in the same shot, each must speak to empty air, to
the imagined incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the
missing vision, with scissors and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the
help of a travelling mat. Not to be confused ha ha with any magic carpet.
He has understood: that he is afraid of the other, the businessman,
isn't it crazy? The archangel quaking before the mortal man. It's true, but:
the kind of fear you feel when you're on a film set for the very first time
and there, about to make his entrance, is one of the living legends of the
cinema; you think, I'll disgrace myself, I'll dry, I'll corpse, you want
like mad to be
worthy.
You will be sucked along in the slipstream of his
genius, he can make you look good, like a high flier, but you will know if
you aren't pulling your weight and even worse so will he ... Gibreel's fear,
the fear of the self his dream creates, makes him struggle against Mahound's
arrival, to try and put it off, but he's coming now, no quesch, and the
archangel holds his breath.
Those dreams of being pushed out on stage when you've no business being
there, you don't know the story haven't learned any lines, but there's a
full house watching, watching: feels like that. Or the true story of the
white actress playing a black woman in Shakespeare. She went on stage and
then realized she still had her glasses on, eek, but she had forgotten to
blacken her hands so she couldn't reach up to take the specs off, double
eek: like that also.
Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose
between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot
actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to
tell you, help. Help.
To reach Mount Cone from Jahilia one must walk into dark ravines where
the sand is not white, not the pure sand filtered long ago through the
bodies of sea-cucumbers, but black and dour, sucking light from the sun.
Coney crouches over you like an imaginary beast. You ascend along its spine.
Leaving behind the last trees, white-flowered with thick, milky leaves, you
climb among the boulders, which get larger as you get higher, until they
resemble huge walls and start blotting out the sun. The lizards arc blue as
shadows. Then you are on the peak, Jahilia behind you, the featureless
desert ahead. You descend on the desert side, and about five hundred feet
down you reach the cave, which is high enough to stand upright in, and whose
floor is covered in miraculous albino sand. As you climb you hear the desert
doves calling your name, and the rocks greet you, too, in your own language,
crying
Mahound, Mahound.
When you reach the cave you are tired, you lie
down, you fall asleep.
But when he has rested he enters a different sort of sleep, a sort of
not-sleep, the condition that he calls his
listening,
and he feels a
dragging pain in the gut, like something trying to be born, and now Gibrcel,
who has been hovering-above-looking-down, feels a confusion,
who am I,
in
these moments it begins to seem that the archangel is actually
inside the
Prophet,
I am the dragging in the gut, I am the angel being extruded from
the sleeper's navel, I emerge, Gibreel Farishta, while my other self,
Mahound, lies
listening,
entranced, I am bound to him, navel to navel, by a
shining cord of light, not possible to say which of us is dreaming the
other. We flow in both directions along the umbilical cord.
Today, as well as the overwhelming intensity of Mahound, Gibrcel feels
his despair: his doubts. Also, that he is in great need, but Gibreel still
doesn't know his lines ... he listens to the
listening-which-is-also-an-asking. Mahound
asks:
They were shown miracles
but they didn't believe. They saw you come to me, in full view of the city,
and open my breast, they saw you wash my heart in the waters of Zamzam and
replace it inside my body. Many of them saw this, but still they worship
stones. And when you came at night and flew me to Jerusalem and I hovered
above the holy city, didn't I return and describe it exactly as it is,
accurate down to the last detail? So that there could be no doubting the
miracle, and still they went to Lat. Haven't I already done my best to make
things simple for them? When you carried me up to the Throne itself, and
Allah laid upon the faithful the great burden of forty prayers a day. On the
return journey I met Moses and he said, the burden is too heavy, go back and
plead for less. Four times I went back, four times Moses said, still too
many, go back again. But by the fourth time Allah had reduced the duty to
five prayers and I refused to return. I felt ashamed to beg any more. In his
bounty he asks for five instead of forty, and still they love Manat, they
want Uzza. What can I do? What shall I recite?
Gibreel remains silent, empty of answers, for Pete's sake, bhai, don't
go asking me. Mahound's anguish is awful. He
asks:
is it possible that they
are
angels? Lat, Manat, Uzza . . . can I call them angelic? Gibreel, have
you got sisters? Are these the daughters of God? And he castigates himself,
O my vanity, I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just a dream of
power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council? Is this sensible and
wise or is it hollow and self-loving? I don't even know if the Grandee is
sincere. Docs he know? Perhaps not even he. I am weak and he's strong, the
offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to gain. The
souls of the city, of the world, surely they are worth three angels? Is
Allah so unbending that he will not embrace three more to save the human
race? - I don't know anything. - Should God be proud or humble, majestic or
simple, yielding or un-?
What kind of idea is he? What kind am I?
Halfway into sleep, or halfway back to wakefulness, Gibreel Farishta is
often filled with resentment by the non-appearance, in his persecuting
visions, of the One who is supposed to have the answers,
He
never turns up,
the one who kept away when I was dying, when I needed needed him. The one
it's all about, Allah Ishvar God. Absent as ever while we writhe and suffer
in his name.
The Supreme Being keeps away; what keeps returning is this scene, the
entranced Prophet, the extrusion, the cord of light, and then Gibreel in his
dual role is both above-looking-down and below-staring-up. And both of them
scared out of their minds by the transcendence of it. Gibrcel feels
paralysed by the presence of the Prophet, by his greatness, thinks I can't
make a sound I'd seem such a goddamn fool. Hamza's advice: never show your
fear: archangels need such advice as well as watercarriers. An archangel
must look composed, what would the Prophet think if God's Exalted began to
gibber with stage fright?
It happens: revelation. Like this: Mahound, still in his notsleep,
becomes rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his centre. No, no,
nothing like an epileptic fit, it can't be explained away that easily; what
epileptic fit ever caused day to turn to night, caused clouds to mass
overhead, caused the air to thicken into soup while an angel hung, scared
silly, in the sky above the sufferer, held up like a kite on a golden
thread? The dragging again the dragging and now the miracle starts in his my
our guts, he is straining with all his might at something, forcing
something, and Gibreel begins to feel that strength that force, here it is
at my own jaw
working it, opening shutting; and the power, starting within
Mahound, reaching up to
my vocal cords
and the voice comes.
Not my voice
I'd never know such words I'm no classy speaker never was
never will be but this isn't my voice it's a Voice.
Mahound's eyes open wide, he's seeing some kind of vision, staring at
it, oh, that's right, Gibreel remembers, me. He's seeing me. My lips moving,
being moved by. What, whom? Don't know, can't say. Nevertheless, here they
are, coming out of my mouth, up my throat, past my teeth: the Words.
Being God's postman is no fun, yaar.
Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture.
God knows whose postman I've been.
In Jahilia they are waiting for Mahound by the well. Khalid the
water-carrier, as ever the most impatient, runs off to the city gate to keep
a look-out. Hamza, like all old soldiers accustomed to keeping his own
company, squats down in the dust and plays a game with pebbles. There is no
sense of urgency; sometimes he is away for days, even weeks. And today the
city is all but deserted; everybody has gone to the great tents at the
fairground to hear the poets compete. In the silence, there is only the
noise of Hamza's pebbles, and the gurgles of a pair of rock-doves, visitors
from Mount Cone. Then they hear the running feet.
Khalid arrives, out of breath, looking unhappy. The Messenger has
returned, but he isn't coming to Zamzam. Now they are all on their feet,
perplexed by this departure from established practice. Those who have been
waiting with palm-fronds and steles ask Hamza: Then there will be no
Message? But Khalid, still catching his breath, shakes his head. 'I think
there will be. He looks the way he does when the Word has been given. But he
didn't speak to me and walked towards the fairground instead.'
Hamza takes command, forestalling discussion, and leads the way. The
disciples - about twenty have gathered - follow him to the fleshpots of the
city, wearing expressions of pious disgust, Hamza alone seems to be looking
forward to the fair.
Outside the tents of the Owners of the Dappled Camels they find
Mahound, standing with his eyes closed, steeling himself to the task. They
ask anxious questions; he doesn't answer. After a few moments, he enters the
poetry tent.
Inside the tent, the audience reacts to the arrival of the unpopular
Prophet and his wretched followers with derision. But as Mahound walks
forward, his eyes firmly closed, the boos and catcalls die away and a
silence falls. Mahound does not open his eyes for an instant, but his steps
are sure, and he reaches the stage without stumblings or collisions. He
climbs the few steps up into the light; still his eyes stay shut. The
assembled lyric poets, composers of assassination eulogies, narrative
versifiers and satirists - Baal is here, of course - gaze with amusement,
but also with a little unease, at the sleepwalking Mahound. In the crowd his
disciples jostle for room. The scribes fight to be near him, to take down
whatever he might say.
The Grandee Abu Simbel rests against bolsters on a silken carpet
positioned beside the stage. With him, resplendent in golden Egyptian
neckwear, is his wife Hind, that famous Grecian profile with the black hair
that is as long as her body. Abu Simbel rises and calls to Mahound,
'Welcome.' He is all urbanity. 'Welcome, Mahound, the seer, the kahin.' It's
a public declaration of respect, and it impresses the assembled crowd. The
Prophet's disciples are no longer shoved aside, but allowed to pass.
Bewildered, half-pleased, they come to the front. Mahound speaks without
opening his eyes.
'This is a gathering of many poets,' he says clearly, 'and I cannot
claim to be one of them. But I am the Messenger, and I bring verses from a
greater One than any here assembled.'
The audience is losing patience. Religion is for the temple; Jahilians
and pilgrims alike are here for entertainment. Silence the fellow! Throw him
out! - But Abu Simbel speaks again. 'If your God has really spoken to you,'
he says, 'then all the world must hear it.' And in an instant the silence in
the great tent is complete,
'The Star,'
Mahound cries out, and the scribes begin to write.
'In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful!
'By the Pleiades when they set: Your companion is not in error; neither
is he deviating.
'Nor does he speak from his own desires. It is a revelation that has
been revealed: one mighty in power has taught him.
'He stood on the high horizon: the lord of strength. Then he came
close, closer than the length of two bows, and revealed to his servant that
which is revealed.
'The servant's heart was true when seeing what he saw. Do you, then,
dare to question what was seen?
'I saw him also at the lote-tree of the uttermost end, near which lies
the Garden of Repose. When that tree was covered by its covering, my eye was
not averted, neither did my gaze wander; and I saw some of the greatest
signs of the Lord.'
At this point, without any trace of hesitation or doubt, he recites two
further verses.
'Have you thought upon Lat and Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?'
- After the first verse, Hind gets to her feet; the Grandee of Jahilia is
already standing very straight. And Mahound, with silenced eyes, recites:
'They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.'
As the noise - shouts, cheers, scandal, cries of devotion to the
goddess Al-Lat - swells and bursts within the marquee, the already
astonished congregation beholds the doubly sensational spectacle of the
Grandee Abu Simbel placing his thumbs upon the lobes of his ears, fanning
out the fingers of both hands and uttering in a loud voice the formula:
'Allahu Akbar.' After which he falls to his knees and presses a deliberate
forehead to the ground. His wife, Hind, immediately follows his lead.
The water-carrier Khalid has remained by the open tent-flap throughout
these events. Now he stares in horror as everyone gathered there, both the
crowd in the tent and the overflow of men and women outside it, begins to
kneel, row by row, the movement rippling outwards from Hind and the Grandee
as though they were pebbles thrown into a lake; until the entire gathering,
outside the tent as well as in, kneels bottom-in-air before the shuteye
Prophet who has recognized the patron deities of the town. The Messenger
himself remains standing, as if loth to join the assembly in its devotions.
Bursting into tears, the water-carrier flees into the empty heart of the
city of the sands. His teardrops, as he runs, burn holes in the earth, as if
they contain some harsh corrosive acid.
Mahound remains motionless. No trace of moisture can be detected on the
lashes of his unopened eyes.
On that night of the desolating triumph of the businessman in the tent
of the unbelievers, there take place certain murders for which the first
lady of Jahilia will wait years to take her terrible revenge.
The Prophet's uncle Hamza has been walking home alone, his head bowed
and grey in the twilight of that melancholy victory, when he hears a roar
and looks up, to see a gigantic scarlet lion poised to leap at him from the
high battlements of the city. He knows this beast, this fable.
The
iridescence of its scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the
desert sands. Through its nostrils it exhales the horror of the lonely
places of the earth. It spits out pestilence, and when armies venture into
the desert, it consumes them utterly.
Through the blue last light of evening
he shouts at the beast, preparing, unarmed as he is, to meet his death.
'Jump, you bastard, manticore. I've strangled big cats with my bare hands,
in my time.' When I was younger. When I was young.
There is laughter behind him, and distant laughter echoing, or so it
seems, from the battlements. He looks around him; the manticore has vanished
from the ramparts. He is surrounded by a group of Jahilians in fancy dress,
returning from the fair and giggling. 'Now that these mystics have embraced
our Lat, they are seeing new gods round every corner, no?' Hamza,
understanding that the night will be full of terrors, returns home and calls
for his battle sword. 'More than anything in the world,' he growls at the
papery valet who has served him in war and peace for forty-four years, 'I
hate admitting that my enemies have a point. Damn sight better to kill the
bastards, I've always thought. Neatest bloody solution.' The sword has
remained sheathed in its leather scabbard since the day of his conversion by
his nephew, but tonight, he confides to the valet, 'The lion is loose. Peace
will have to wait.'
It is the last night of the festival of Ibrahim. Jahilia is masquerade
and madness. The oiled fatty bodies of the wrestlers have completed their
writhings and the seven poems have been nailed to the walls of the House of
the Black Stone. Now singing whores replace the poets, and dancing whores,
also with oiled bodies, are at work as well; night-wrestling replaces the
daytime variety. The courtesans dance and sing in golden, bird-beaked masks,
and the gold is reflected in their clients' shining eyes. Gold, gold
everywhere, in the palms of the profiteering Jahilians and their libidinous
guests, in the flaming sand-braziers, in the glowing walls of the night
city. Hamza walks dolorously through the streets of gold, past pilgrims who
lie unconscious while cutpurses earn their living. He hears the wine-blurred
carousing through every golden-gleaming doorway, and feels the song and
howling laughter and coin-chinkings hurting him like mortal insults. But he
doesn't find what he's looking for, not here, so he moves away from the
illuminated revelry of gold and begins to stalk the shadows, hunting the
apparition of the lion.
And finds, after hours of searching, what he knew would be waiting, in
a dark corner of the city's outer walls, the thing of his vision, the red
manticore with the triple row of teeth. The manticore has blue eyes and a
mannish face and its voice is half-trumpet and half-flute. It is fast as the
wind, its nails are corkscrew talons and its tail hurls poisoned quills. It
loves to feed on human flesh ... a brawl is taking place. Knives hissing in
the silence, at times the clash of metal against metal. Hamza recognizes the
men under attack: Khalid, Salman, Bilal. A lion himself now, Hamza draws his
sword, roars the silence into shreds, runs forward as fast as sixty-year-old
legs will go. His friends' assailants are unrecognizable behind their masks.
It has been a night of masks. Walking the debauched Jahilian streets,
his heart full of bile, Hamza has seen men and women in the guise of eagles,
jackals, horses, gryphons, salamanders, wart-hogs, rocs; welling up from the
murk of the alleys have come two-headed amphisbaenae and the winged bulls
known as Assyrian sphinxes. Djinns, houris, demons populate the city on this
night of phantasmagoria and lust. But only now, in this dark place, does he
see the red masks he's been looking for. The man-lion masks: he rushes
towards his fate.
In the grip of a self-destructive unhappiness the three disciples had
started drinking, and owing to their unfamiliarity with alcohol they were
soon not just intoxicated but stupid-drunk. They stood in a small piazza and
started abusing the passers-by, and after a while the water-carrier Khalid
brandished his water-skin, boasting. He could destroy the city, he carried
the ultimate weapon. Water: it would cleanse Jahilia the filthy, wash it
away, so that a new start could be made from the purified white sand. That
was when the lion-men started chasing them, and after a long pursuit they
were cornered, the booziness draining out of them on account of their fear,
they were staring into the red masks of death when Hamza arrived just in
time.
. . . Gibrccl floats above the city watching the fight. It's quickly
over once Hamza gets to the scene. Two masked assailants run away, two lie
dead. Bilal, Khalid and Salman have been cut, but not too badly. Graver than
their wounds is the news behind the lion-masks of the dead. 'Hind's
brothers,' Hamza recognizes. 'Things arc finishing for us now.'
Slayers of manticores, water-terrorists, the followers of Mahound sit
and weep in the shadow of the city wall.
As for him, Prophet Messenger Businessman: his eyes are open now. He
paces the inner courtyard of his house, his wife's house, and will not go in
to her. She is almost seventy and feels these days more like a mother than
a. She, the rich woman, who employed him to manage her caravans long ago.
His management skills were the first things she liked about him. And after a
time, they were in love. It isn't easy to be a brilliant, successful woman
in a city where the gods are female but the females are merely goods. Men
had either been afraid of her, or had thought her so strong that she didn't
need their consideration. He hadn't been afraid, and had given her the
feeling of constancy she needed. While he, the orphan, found in her many
women in one: mother sister lover sibyl friend. When he thought himself
crazy she was the one who believed in his visions. 'It is the archangel,'
she told him, 'not some fog out of your head. It is Gibreel, and you are the
Messenger of God.'
He can't won't see her now. She watches him through a stone-latticed
window. He can't stop walking, moves around the courtyard in a random
sequence of unconscious geometries, his footsteps tracing out a series of
ellipses, trapeziums, rhomboids, ovals, rings. While she remembers how he
would return from the caravan trails full of stories heard at wayside oases.
A prophet, Isa, born to a woman named Maryam, born of no man under a
palm-tree in the desert. Stories that made his eyes shine, then fade into a
distantness. She recalls his excitability: the passion with which he'd
argue, all night if necessary, that the old nomadic times had been better
than this city of gold where people exposed their baby daughters in the
wilderness. In the old tribes even the poorest orphan would be cared for.
God is in the desert, he'd say, not here in this miscarriage of a place. And
she'd reply, Nobody's arguing, my love, it's late, and tomorrow there are
the accounts.
She has long ears; has already heard what he said about Lat, Uzza,
Manat. So what? In the old days he wanted to protect the baby daughters of
Jahilia; why shouldn't he take the daughters of Allah under his wing as
well? But after asking herself this question she shakes her head and leans
heavily on the cool wall beside her stone-screened window. While below her,
her husband walks in pentagons, parallelograms, six-pointed stars, and then
in abstract and increasingly labyrinthine patterns for which there are no
names, as though unable to find a simple line.
When she looks into the courtyard some moments later, however, he has
gone.
The Prophet wakes between silk sheets, with a bursting headache, in a
room he has never seen. Outside the window the sun is near its savage
zenith, and silhouetted against the whiteness is a tall figure in a black
hooded cloak, singing softly in a strong, low voice. The song is one that
the women of Jahilia chorus as they drum the men to war.
Advance and we embrace you,
embrace you, embrace you,
advance and we embrace you
and soft carpets spread.
Turn back and we desert you,
we leave you, desert you,
retreat and we'll not love you,
not in love's bed.
He recognizes Hind's voice, sits up, and finds himself naked beneath
the creamy sheet. He calls to her: 'Was I attacked?' Hind turns to him,
smiling her Hind smile. 'Attacked?' she mimics him, and claps her hands for
breakfast. Minions enter, bring, serve, remove, scurry off. Mahound is
helped into a silken robe of black and gold; Hind, exaggeratedly, averts her
eyes. 'My head,' he asks again. 'Was I struck?' She stands at the window,
her head hung low, playing the demure maid. 'Oh, Messenger, Messenger,' she
mocks him. 'What an ungallant Messenger it is. Couldn't you have come to my
room consciously, of your own will? No, of course not, I repel you, I'm
sure.' He will not play her game. 'Am I a prisoner?' he asks, and again she
laughs at him. 'Don't be a fool.' And then, shrugging, relents: 'I was
walking the city streets last night, masked, to see the festivities, and
what should I stumble over but your unconscious body? Like a drunk in the
gutter, Mahound. I sent my servants for a litter and brought you home. Say
thank you.'
'Thank you.'
'I don't think you were recognized,' she says. 'Or you'd be dead,
maybe. You know how the city was last night. People overdo it. My own
brothers haven't come home yet.'
It comes back to him now, his wild anguished walk in the corrupt city,
staring at the souls he had supposedly saved, looking at the
simurgh-effigies, the devil-masks, the behemoths and hippogriffs. The
fatigue of that long day on which he climbed down from Mount Cone, walked to
the town, underwent the strain of the events in the poetry marquee, - and
afterwards, the anger of the disciples, the doubt, - the whole of it had
overwhelmed him. 'I fainted,' he remembers.
She comes and sits close to him on the bed, extends a finger, finds the
gap in his robe, strokes his chest. 'Fainted,' she murmurs. 'That's
weakness, Mahound. Are you becoming weak?'
She places the stroking finger over his lips before he can reply.
'Don't say anything, Mahound. I am the Grandee's wife, and neither of us is
your friend. My husband, however, is a weak man. In Jahilia they think he's
cunning, but I know better. He knows I take lovers and he does nothing about
it, because the temples are in my family's care. Lat's, Uzza's, Manat's. The
- shall I call them
mosques'? -
of your new angels.' She offers him melon
cubes from a dish, tries to feed him with her fingers. He will not let her
put the fruit into his mouth, takes the pieces with his own hand, eats. She
goes on. 'My last lover was the boy, Baal.' She sees the rage on his face.
'Yes,' she says contentedly. 'I heard he had got under your skin. But he
doesn't matter. Neither he nor Abu Simbel is your equal. But I am.'
'I must go,' he says. 'Soon enough,' she replies, returning to the
window. At the perimeter of the city they are packing away the tents, the
long camel-trains are preparing to depart, convoys of carts are already
heading away across the desert; the carnival is over. She turns to him
again.
'I am your equal,' she repeats, 'and also your opposite. I don't want
you to become weak. You shouldn't have done what you did.'
'But you will profit,' Mahound replies bitterly. 'There's no threat now
to your temple revenues.'
'You miss the point,' she says softly, coming closer to him, bringing
her face very close to his. 'If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she
doesn't believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is
implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce.
And what a truce! Yours is a patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn't
the slightest wish to be his daughter. She is his equal, as I am yours. Ask
Baal: he knows her. As he knows me.'
'So the Grandee will betray his pledge,' Mahound says.
'Who knows?' scoffs Hind. 'He doesn't even know himself. He has to work
out the odds. Weak, as I told you. But you know I'm telling the truth.
Between Allah and the Three there can be no peace. I don't want it. I want
the fight. To the death; that is the kind of idea I am. What kind are you?'
'You are sand and I am water,' Mahound says. 'Water washes sand away.'
'And the desert soaks up water,' Hind answers him. 'Look around you.'
Soon after his departure the wounded men arrive at the Grandee's
palace, having screwed up their courage to inform Hind that old Hamza has
killed her brothers. But by then the Messenger is nowhere to be found; is
heading, once again, slowly towards Mount Cone.
Gibreel, when he's tired, wants to murder his mother for giving him
such a damn fool nickname,
angel,
what a word, he begs
what? whom?
to be
spared the dream-city of crumbling sandcastles and lions with three-tiered
teeth, no more heart-washing of prophets or instructions to recite or
promises of paradise, let there be an end to revelations, finito,
khattam-shud. What he longs for: black, dreamless sleep. Mother-fucking
dreams, cause of all the trouble in the human race, movies, too, if I was
God I'd cut the imagination right out of people and then maybe poor bastards
like me could get a good night's rest. Fighting against sleep, he forces his
eyes to stay open, unblinking, until the visual purple fades off the retinas
and sends him blind, but he's only human, in the end he falls down the
rabbit-hole and there he is again, in Wonderland, up the mountain, and the
businessman is waking up, and once again his wanting, his need, goes to
work, not on my jaws and voice this time, but on my whole body; he
diminishes me to his own size and pulls me in towards him, his gravitational
field is unbelievable, as powerful as a goddamn megastar . . . and then
Gibreel and the Prophet are wrestling, both naked, rolling over and over, in
the cave of the fine white sand that rises around them like a veil.
As if
he's learning me, searching me, as if I'm the one undergoing the test.
In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound
wrestles the archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let me tell you
he's getting in
everywhere,
his tongue in my ear his fist around my balls,
there was never a person with such a rage in him, he has to has to know he
has to KNOW and I have nothing to tell him, he's twice as physically fit as
I am and four times as knowledgeable, minimum, we may both have taught
ourselves by listening a lot but as is plaintosee he's even a better
listener than me; so we roll kick scratch, he's getting cut up quite a bit
but of course my skin stays smooth as a baby, you can't snag an angel on a
bloody thorn-bush, you can't bruise him on a rock. And they have an
audience, there are djinns and afreets and all sorts of spooks sitting on
the boulders to watch the fight, and in the sky are the three winged
creatures, looking like herons or swans or just women depending on the
tricks of the light . . . Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight.
After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down
beneath the angel, it's what he wanted, it was his will filling me up and
giving me the strength to hold him down, because archangels can't lose such
fights, it wouldn't be right, it's only devils who get beaten in such circs,
so the moment I got on top he started weeping for joy and then he did his
old trick, forcing my mouth open and making the voice, the Voice, pour out
of me once again, made it pour all over him, like sick.
At the end of his wrestling match with the Archangel Gibreel, the
Prophet Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, post-revelatory sleep,
but on this occasion he revives more quickly than usual. When he comes to
his senses in that high wilderness there is nobody to be seen, no winged
creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency
of his news. 'It was the Devil,' he says aloud to the empty air, making it
true by giving it voice. 'The last time, it was Shaitan.' This is what he
has
heard
in his
listening,
that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to
him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones
he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic
opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he
can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to
strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in
just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox
interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel,
hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail,
just one tiny thing that's a bit of a problem here, namely that
it was me
both times, baba, me first and second also me.
From my mouth, both the
statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses,
the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.
'First it was the Devil,' Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia. 'But
this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the ground.'
The disciples stop him in the ravines near the foot of Mount Cone to
warn him of the fury of Hind, who is wearing white mourning garments and has
loosened her black hair, letting it fly about her like a storm, or trail in
the dust, erasing her footsteps so that she seems like an incarnation of the
spirit of vengeance itself. They have all fled the city, and Hamza, too, is
lying low; but the word is that Abu Simbel has not, as yet, acceded to his
wife's pleas for the blood that washes away blood. He is still calculating
the odds in the matter of Mahound and the goddesses . . . Mahound, against
his followers' advice, returns to Jahilia, going straight to the House of
the Black Stone. The disciples follow him in spite of their fear. A crowd
gathers in the hope of further scandal or dismemberment or some such
entertainment. Mahound does not disappoint them.
He stands in front of the statues of the Three and announces the
abrogation of the verses which Shaitan whispered in his ear. These verses
are banished from the true recitation,
al-qur'an.
New verses are thundered
in their place.
'Shall He have daughters and you sons?' Mahound recites. 'That would be
a fine division!
'These are but names you have dreamed of, you and your fathers. Allah
vests no authority in them.'
He leaves the dumbfounded House before it occurs to anybody to pick up,
or throw, the first stone.
After the repudiation of the Satanic verses, the Prophet Mahound
returns home to find a kind of punishment awaiting him. A kind of vengeance
- whose? Light or dark? Goodguy badguy? -wrought, as is not unusual, upon
the innocent. The Prophet's wife, seventy years old, sits by the foot of a
stone-latticed window, sits upright with her back to the wall, dead.
Mahound in the grip of his misery keeps himself to himself, hardly says
a word for weeks. The Grandee of Jahilia institutes a policy of persecution
that advances too slowly for Hind. The name of the new religion is
Submission;
now Abu Simbel decrees that its adherents must submit to being
sequestered in the most wretched, hovel-filled quarter of the city; to a
curfew; to a ban on employment. And there are many physical assaults, women
spat upon in shops, the manhandling of the faithful by the gangs of young
turks whom the Grandee secretly controls, fire thrown at night through a
window to land amongst unwary sleepers. And, by one of the familiar
paradoxes of history, the numbers of the faithful multiply, like a crop that
miraculously flourishes as conditions of soil and climate grow worse and
worse.
An offer is received, from the citizens of the oasis-settlement of
Yathrib to the north: Yathrib will shelter those-who-submit, if they wish to
leave Jahilia. Hamza is of the opinion that they must go. 'You'll never
finish your Message here, nephew, take my word. Hind won't be happy till
she's ripped out your tongue, to say nothing of my balls, excuse me.'
Mahound, alone and full of echoes in the house of his bereavement, gives his
consent, and the faithful depart to make their plans. Khalid the
water-carrier hangs back and the hollow-eyed Prophet waits for him to speak.
Awkwardly, he says: 'Messenger, I doubted you. But you were wiser than we
knew. First we said, Mahound will never compromise, and you compromised.
Then we said, Mahound has betrayed us, but you were bringing us a deeper
truth. You brought us the Devil himself, so that we could witness the
workings of the Evil One, and his overthrow by the Right. You have enriched
our faith. I am sorry for what I thought.'
Mahound moves away from the sunlight falling through the window. 'Yes.'
Bitterness, cynicism. 'It was a wonderful thing I did. Deeper truth.
Bringing you the Devil. Yes, that sounds like me.'
From the peak of Mount Cone, Gibreel watches the faithful escaping
Jahilia, leaving the city of aridity for the place of cool palms and water,
water, water. In small groups, almost empty-handed, they move across the
empire of the sun, on this first day of the first year at the new beginning
of Time, which has itself been born again, as the old dies behind them and
the new waits ahead. And one day Mahound himself slips away. When his escape
is discovered, Baal composes a valedictory ode:
What kind of idea
does 'Submission' seem today?
One full of fear.
An idea that runs away.
Mahound has reached his oasis; Gibreel is not so lucky. Often, now, he
finds himself alone on the summit of Mount Cone, washed by the cold, falling
stars, and then they fall upon him from the night sky, the three winged
creatures, Lat Uzza Manat, flapping around his head, clawing at his eyes,
biting, whipping him with their hair, their wings. He puts up his hands to
protect himself, but their revenge is tireless, continuing whenever he
rests, whenever he drops his guard. He struggles against them, but they are
faster, nimbler, winged.
He has no devil to repudiate. Dreaming, he cannot wish them away.
Ellowen Deeowen
I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently. Her name was
Rosa Diamond; she was eighty-eight years old; and she was squinting beakily
through her salt-caked bedroom windows, watching the full moon's sea. And I
know what it isn't, too, she nodded further, it isn't a scarification or a
flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all
that
bunkum. What's a ghost?
Unfinished business, is what. - At which the old lady, six feet tall,
straight-backed, her hair hacked short as any man's, jerked the corners of
her mouth downwards in a satisfied, tragedy-mask pout, - pulled a knitted
blue shawl tight around bony shoulders, - and closed, for a moment, her
sleepless eyes, to pray for the past's return. Come on, you Norman ships,
she begged: let's have you, Willie-the-Conk.
Nine hundred years ago all this was under water, this portioned shore,
this private beach, its shingle rising steeply towards the little row of
flaky-paint villas with their peeling boathouses crammed full of deckchairs,
empty picture frames, ancient tuckboxes stuffed with bundles of letters tied
up in ribbons, mothballed silk-and-lace lingerie, the tearstained reading
matter of once-young girls, lacrosse sticks, stamp albums, and all the
buried treasure-chests of memories and lost time. The coastline had changed,
had moved a mile or more out to sea, leaving the first Norman castle
stranded far from water, lapped now by marshy land that afflicted with all
manner of dank and boggy agues the poor who lived there on their
whatstheword
estates.
She, the old lady, saw the castle as the ruin of a
fish betrayed by an antique ebbing tide, as a sea-monster petrified by time.
Nine hundred years! Nine centuries past, the Norman fleet had sailed right
through this Englishwoman's home. On clear nights when the moon was full,
she waited for its shining, revenant ghost.
Best place to see 'em come, she reassured herself, grandstand view.
Repetition had become a comfort in her antiquity; the well-worn phrases,
unfinished business, grandstand view,
made her feel solid, unchanging,
sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself
to be. - When the full moon sets, the dark before the dawn, that's their
moment. Billow of sail, flash of oars, and the Conqueror himself at the
flagship's prow, sailing up the beach between the barnacled wooden
breakwaters and a few inverted sculls. - O, I've seen things in my time,
always had the gift, the phantom-sight. - The Conqueror in his pointy
metal-nosed hat, passing through her front door, gliding betwixt the
cakestands and antimacassared sofas, like an echo resounding faintly through
that house of remembrances and yearnings; then falling silent;
as the grave.
-
Once as a girl on Battle Hill, she was fond of recounting, always in
the same time-polished words, - once as a solitary child, I found myself,
quite suddenly and with no sense of strangeness, in the middle of a war.
Longbows, maces, pikes. The flaxen-Saxon boys, cut down in their sweet
youth. Harold Arroweye and William with his mouth full of sand. Yes, always
the gift, the phantom-sight. - The story of the day on which the child Rosa
had seen a vision of the battle of Hastings had become, for the old woman,
one of the defining landmarks of her being, though it had been told so often
that nobody, not even the teller, could confidently swear that it was true.
I long for them sometimes,
ran Rosa's practised thoughts.
Les beaux jours:
the dear, dead days.
She closed, once more, her reminiscent eyes. When she
opened them, she saw, down by the water's edge, no denying it, something
beginning to move.
What she said aloud in her excitement: 'I don't believe it!' - It isn't
true!' - 'He's never
here!' -
On unsteady feet, with bumping chest, Rosa
went for her hat, cloak, stick. While, on the winter seashore, Gibreel
Farishta awoke with a mouth full of, no, not sand.
Snow.
Ptui!
Gibreel spat; leapt up, as if propelled by expectorated slush; wished
Chamcha - as has been reported - many happy returns of the day; and
commenced to beat the snow from sodden purple sleeves. 'God, yaar,' he
shouted, hopping from foot to foot, 'no wonder these people grow hearts of
bloody ice.'
Then, however, the pure delight of being surrounded by such a quantity
of snow quite overcame his first cynicism - for he was a tropical man - and
he started capering about, saturnine and soggy, making snowballs and hurling
them at his prone companion, envisioning a snowman, and singing a wild,
swooping rendition of the carol 'Jingle Bells'. The first hint of light was
in the sky, and on this cosy sea-coast danced Lucifer, the morning's star.
His breath, it should be mentioned, had somehow or other wholly ceased
to smell . . .
'Come on, baby,' cried invincible Gibreel, in whose behaviour the
reader may, not unreasonably, perceive the delirious, dislocating effects of
his recent fall. 'Rise 'n' shine! Let's take this place by storm.' Turning
his back on the sea, blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for
the next things, passionate as always for newness, he would have planted
(had he owned one) a flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white
country, his new-found land. 'Spoono,' he pleaded, 'shift, baba, or are you
bloody dead?' Which being uttered brought the speaker to (or at least
towards) his senses. He bent over the other's prostrate form, did not dare
to touch. 'Not now, old Chumch,' he urged. 'Not when we came so far.'
Saladin: was not dead, but weeping. The tears of shock freezing on his
face. And all his body cased in a fine skin of ice, smooth as glass, like a
bad dream come true. In the miasmic semi-consciousness induced by his low
body temperature he was possessed by the nightmare-fear of cracking, of
seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks, of his flesh coming away
with the shards. He was full of questions, did we truly, I mean, with your
handsflapping, and then the waters, you don't mean to tell me they
actually,
like in the movies, when Charlton Heston stretched out his staff, so that we
could, across the ocean-floor, it never happened, couldn't have, but if not
then how, or did we in some way underwater, escorted by the mermaids, the
sea passing through us as if we were fish or ghosts, was that the truth, yes
or no, I need to have to ... but when his eyes opened the questions acquired
the indistinctness of dreams, so that he could no longer grasp them, their
tails flicked before him and vanished like submarine fins. He was looking up
at the sky, and noticed that it was the wrong colour entirely, blood-orange
flecked with green, and the snow was blue as ink. He blinked hard but the
colours refused to change, giving rise to the notion that he had fallen out
of the sky into some wrongness, some other place, not England or perhaps
not-England, some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he
considered briefly: Hell? No, no, he reassured himself as unconsciousness
threatened, that can't be it, not yet, you aren't dead yet; but dying.
Well then: a transit lounge.
He began to shiver; the vibration grew so intense that it occurred to
him that he might break up under the stress, like a, like a, plane.
Then nothing existed. He was in a void, and if he were to survive he
would have to construct everything from scratch, would have to invent the
ground beneath his feet before he could take a step, only there was no need
now to worry about such matters, because here in front of him was the
inevitable: the tall, bony figure of Death, in a wide-brimmed straw hat,
with a dark cloak flapping in the breeze. Death, leaning on a silver-headed
cane, wearing olive-green Wellington boots.
'What do you imagine yourselves to be doing here?' Death wanted to
know. 'This is private property. There's a sign.' Said in a woman's voice
that was somewhat tremulous and more than somewhat thrilled.
A few moments later, Death bent over him -
to kiss me,
he panicked
silently. To
suck the breath from my body.
He made small, futile movements
of protest.
'He's alive all right,' Death remarked to, who was it, Gibreel. 'But,
my dear. His breath: what a
pong.
When did he last clean his teeth?'
One man's breath was sweetened, while another's, by an equal and
opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of
the sky: did they imagine there would be no side-effects? Higher Powers had
taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers
(I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton
attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let's be clear: great falls
change people. You think
they
fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I
yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im-. From clouds to
ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heavenlight to hellfire . . .
under the stress of a long plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be
expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price
to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming
new,
and at their age at
that.
What? I should enumerate the changes?
Good breath/bad breath.
And around the edges of Gibreel Farishta's head, as he stood with his
back to the dawn, it seemed to Rosa Diamond that she discerned a faint, but
distinctly golden,
glow.
And were those bumps, at Chamcha's temples, under his sodden and
still-in-place bowler hat?
And, and, and.
When she laid eyes on the bizarre, satyrical figure of Gibreel Farishta
prancing and dionysiac in the snow, Rosa Diamond did not think of
say it
angels. Sighting him from her window, through salt-cloudy glass and
age-clouded eyes, she felt her heart kick out, twice, so painfully that she
feared it might stop; because in that indistinct form she seemed to discern
the incarnation of her soul's most deeply buried desire. She forgot the
Norman invaders as if they had never been, and struggled down a slope of
treacherous pebbles, too quickly for the safety of her
not-quite-nonagenarian limbs, so that she could pretend to scold the
impossible stranger for trespassing on her land.
Usually she was implacable in defence of her beloved fragment of the
coast, and when summer weekenders strayed above the high tide line she
descended upon them
like a wolf on the fold,
her phrase for it, to explain
and to demand: - This is my garden, do you see. - And if they grew brazen, -
getoutofitsillyoldmoo, itsthesoddingbeach, - she would return home to bring
out a long green garden hose and turn it remorselessly upon their tartan
blankets and plastic cricket bats and bottles of sun-tan lotion, she would
smash their children's sandcastles and soak their liver-sausage sandwiches,
smiling sweetly all the while:
You won't mind if I just water my lawn?
. . .
O, she was a One, known in the village, they couldn't lock her away in any
old folks' home, sent her whole family packing when they dared to suggest
it, never darken her doorstep, she told them, cut the whole lot off without
a penny or a by your leave. All on her own now, she was, never a visitor
from week to blessed week, not even Dora Shufflebotham who went in and did
for her all those years, Dora passed over September last, may she rest,
still it's a wonder at her age how the old trout manages, all those stairs,
she may be a bit of a bee but give the devil her due, there's many's'd go
barmy being that alone.
For Gibreel there was neither a hosepipe nor the
sharp end
of her
tongue. Rosa uttered token words of reproof, held her nostrils while
examining the fallen and newly sulphurous Saladin (who had not, at this
point, removed his bowler hat), and then, with an access of shyness which
she greeted with nostalgic astonishment, stammered an invitation, yyou
bbetter bring your ffriend in out of the cccold, and stamped back up the
shingle to put the kettle on, grateful to the bite of the winter air for
reddening her cheeks and
saving,
in the old comforting phrase,
her blushes.
As a young man Saladin Chamcha had possessed a face of quite
exceptional innocence, a face that did not seem ever to have encountered
disillusion or evil, with skin as soft and smooth as a princess's palm. It
had served him well in his dealings with women, and had, in point of fact,
been one of the first reasons his future wife Pamela Lovelace had given for
falling in love with him. 'So round and cherubic,' she marvelled, cupping
her hands under his chin. 'Like a rubber ball.'
He was offended. 'I've got bones,' he protested. 'Bone
structure.'
'Somewhere in there,' she conceded. 'Everybody does.'
After that he was haunted for a time by the notion that he looked like
a featureless jellyfish, and it was in large part to assuage this feeling
that he set about developing the narrow, haughty demeanour that was now
second nature to him. It was, therefore, a matter of some consequence when,
on arising from a long slumber racked by a series of intolerable dreams,
prominent among which were images of Zeeny Vakil, transformed into a
mermaid, singing to him from an iceberg in tones of agonizing sweetness,
lamenting her inability to join him on dry land, calling him, calling; - but
when he went to her she shut him up fast in the heart of her ice-mountain,
and her song changed to one of triumph and revenge ... it was, I say, a
serious matter when Saladin Chamcha woke up, looked into a mirror framed in
blue-and-gold Japonaiserie lacquer, and found that old cherubic face staring
out at him once again; while, at his temples, he observed a brace of
fearfully discoloured swellings, indications that he must have suffered, at
some point in his recent adventures, a couple of mighty blows.
Looking into the mirror at his altered face, Chamcha attempted to
remind himself of himself. I am a real man, he told the mirror, with a real
history and a planned-out future. I am a man to whom certain things are of
importance: rigour, self-discipline, reason, the pursuit of what is noble
without recourse to that old crutch, God. The ideal of beauty, the
possibility of exaltation, the mind. I am: a married man. But in spite of
his litany, perverse thoughts insisted on visiting him. As for instance:
that the world did not exist beyond that beach down there, and, now, this
house. That if he weren't careful, if he rushed matters, he would fall off
the edge, into clouds. Things had to be
made.
Or again: that if he were to
telephone his home, right now, as he should, if he were to inform his loving
wife that he was not dead, not blown to bits in mid-air but right here, on
solid ground, if he were to do this eminently sensible thing, the person who
answered the phone would not recognize his name. Or thirdly: that the sound
of footsteps ringing in his ears, distant footsteps, but coming closer, was
not some temporary tinnitus caused by his fall, but the noise of some
approaching doom, drawing closer, letter by letter, ellowen, deeowen,
London.
Here I am, in Grandmother's house. Her big eyes, hands, teeth.
There was a telephone extension on his bedside table. There, he
admonished himself. Pick it up, dial, and your equilibrium will be restored.
Such maunderings: they aren't like you, not worthy of you. Think of her
grief; call her now.
It was night-time. He didn't know the hour. There wasn't a clock in the
room and his wristwatch had disappeared somewhere along the line. Should he
shouldn't he? - He dialled the nine numbers. A man's voice answered on the
fourth ring.
'What the hell?' Sleepy, unidentifiable, familiar.
'Sorry,' Saladin Chamcha said. 'Excuse, please. Wrong number.'
Staring at the telephone, he found himself remembering a drama
production seen in Bombay, based on an English original, a story by, by, he
couldn't put his finger on the name, Tennyson? No, no. Somerset Maugham? -
To hell with it. - In the original and now authorless text, a man, long
thought dead, returns after an absence of many years, like a living phantom,
to his former haunts. He visits his former home at night, surreptitiously,
and looks in through an open window. He finds that his wife, believing
herself widowed, has re-married. On the window-sill he sees a child's toy.
He spends a period of time standing in the darkness, wrestling with his
feelings; then picks the toy off the ledge; and departs forever, without
making his presence known. In the Indian version, the story had been rather
different. The wife had married her husband's best friend. The returning
husband arrived at the door and marched in, expecting nothing. Seeing his
wife and his old friend sitting together, he failed to understand that they
were married. He thanked his friend for comforting his wife; but he was home
now, and so all was well. The married couple did not know how to tell him
the truth; it was, finally, a servant who gave the game away. The husband,
whose long absence was apparently due to a bout of amnesia, reacted to the
news of the marriage by announcing that he, too, must surely have re-married
at some point during his long absence from home; unfortunately, however, now
that the memory of his former life had returned he had forgotten what had
happened during the years of his disappearance. He went off to ask the
police to trace his new wife, even though he could remember nothing about
her, not her eyes, not the simple fact of her existence.
The curtain fell.
Saladin Chamcha, alone in an unknown bedroom in unfamiliar
red-and-white striped pyjamas, lay face downwards on a narrow bed and wept.
'Damn all Indians,' he cried into the muffling bedclothes, his fists
punching at frilly-edged pillowcases from Harrods in Buenos Aires so
fiercely that the fifty-year-old fabric was ripped to shreds.
'What the
hell.
The vulgarity of it, the
sod it sod it
indelicacy.
What the hell.
That
bastard, those bastards, their lack
of bastard
taste.'
It was at this moment that the police arrived to arrest him.
On the night after she had taken the two of them in from the beach,
Rosa Diamond stood once again at the nocturnal window of her old woman's
insomnia, contemplating the nine-hundred-year-old sea. The smelly one had
been sleeping ever since they put him to bed, with hot-water bottles packed
in tightly around him, best thing for him, let him get his strength. She had
put them upstairs, Chamcha in the spare room and Gibreel in her late
husband's old study, and as she watched the great shining plain of the sea
she could hear him moving up there, amid the ornithological prints and
bird-call whistles of the former Henry Diamond, the bolas and bullwhip and
aerial photographs of the Los Alamos estancia far away and long ago, a man's
footsteps in that room, how reassuring they felt. Farishta was pacing up and
down, avoiding sleep, for reasons of his own. And below his footfall Rosa,
looking up at the ceiling, called him in a whisper by a long-unspoken name.
Martin she said. His last name the same as that of his country's deadliest
snake, the viper. The vibora,
de la Cruz.
At once she saw the shapes moving on the beach, as if the forbidden
name had conjured up the dead. Not again, she thought, and went for her
opera-glasses. She returned to find the beach full of shadows, and this time
she was afraid, because whereas the Norman fleet came sailing, when it came,
proudly and openly and without recourse to subterfuge, these shades were
sneaky, emitting stifled imprecations and alarming, muted yaps and barks,
they seemed headless, crouching, arms and legs a-dangle like giant,
unshelled crabs. Scuttling, sidelong, heavy boots crunching on shingle. Lots
of them. She saw them reach her boathouse on which the fading image of an
eyepatched pirate grinned and brandished a cutlass, and that was too much,
I'm not having it,
she decided, and, stumbling downstairs for warm clothing,
she fetched the chosen weapon of her retribution: a long coil of green
garden hose. At her front door she called out in a clear voice. 'I can see
you quite plainly. Come out, come out, whoever you are.'
They switched on seven suns and blinded her, and then she panicked,
illuminated by the seven blue-white floodlights around which, like fireflies
or satellites, there buzzed a host of smaller lights: lanterns torches
cigarettes. Her head was spinning, and for a moment she lost her ability to
distinguish between
then
and
now,
in her consternation she began to say Put
out that light, don't you know there's a blackout, you'll be having Jerry
down on us if you carry on so. 'I'm raving,' she realized disgustedly, and
banged the tip of her stick into her doormat. Whereupon, as if by magic,
policemen materialized in the dazzling circle of light.
It turned out that somebody had reported a suspicious person on the
beach, remember when they used to come in fishing-boats, the illegals, and
thanks to that single anonymous telephone call there were now fifty-seven
uniformed constables combing the beach, their flashlights swinging crazily
in the dark, constables from as far away as Hastings Eastbourne
Bexhill-upon-Sea, even a deputation from Brighton because nobody wanted to
miss the fun, the thrill of the chase. Fifty-seven beachcombers were
accompanied by thirteen dogs, all sniffing the sea air and lifting excited
legs. While up at the house away from the great posse of men and dogs, Rosa
Diamond found herself gazing at the five constables guarding the exits,
front door, ground-floor windows, scullery door, in case the putative
miscreant attempted an alleged escape; and at the three men in plain
clothes, plain coats and plain hats with faces to match; and in front of the
lot of them, not daring to look her in the eye, young Inspector Lime,
shuffling his feet and rubbing his nose and looking older and more bloodshot
than his forty years. She tapped him on the chest with the end of her stick,
at this time of night, Frank, what's the meaning of,
but he wasn't going to
allow her to boss him around, not tonight, not with the men from the
immigration watching his every move, so he drew himself up and pulled in his
chins.
'Begging your pardon, Mrs. D. - certain allegations, - information laid
before us, - reason to believe, - merit investigation, - necessary to search
your, - a warrant has been obtained.'
'Don't be absurd, Frank dear,' Rosa began to say, but just then the
three men with the plain faces drew themselves up and seemed to stiffen,
each of them with one leg slightly raised, like pointer dogs; the first
began to emit an unusual hiss of what sounded like pleasure, while a soft
moan escaped from the lips of the second, and the third commenced to roll
his eyes in an oddly contented way. Then they all pointed past Rosa Diamond,
into her floodlit hallway, where Mr. Saladin Chamcha stood, his left hand
holding up his pyjamas because a button had come off when he hurled himself
on to his bed. With his right hand he was rubbing at an eye.
'Bingo,' said the hissing man, while the moaner clasped his hands
beneath his chin to indicate that all his prayers had been answered, and the
roller of eyes shouldered past Rosa Diamond, without standing on ceremony,
except that he did mutter, 'Madam, pardon
me.'
Then there was a flood, and Rosa was jammed into a corner of her own
sitting-room by that bobbing sea of police helmets, so that she could no
longer make out Saladin Chamcha or hear what he was saying. She never heard
him explain about the detonation of the
Bostan -
there's been a mistake, he
cried, I'm not one of your fishing-boat sneakers-in, not one of your
ugando-kenyattas, me. The policemen began to grin, I see, sir, at thirty
thousand feet, and then you swam ashore. You have the right to remain
silent, they tittered, but quite soon they burst out into uproarious
guffaws, we've got a right one here and no mistake. But Rosa couldn't make
out Saladin's protests, the laughing policemen got in the way, you've got to
believe me, I'm a British, he was saying, with right of abode, too, but when
he couldn't produce a passport or any other identifying document they began
to weep with mirth, the tears streaming down even the blank faces of the
plain-clothes men from the immigration service. Of course, don't tell me,
they giggled, they fell out of your jacket during your tumble, or did the
mermaids pick your pocket in the sea? Rosa couldn't see, in that
laughter-heaving surge of men and dogs, what uniformed arms might be doing
to Chamcha's arms, or fists to his stomach, or boots to his shins; nor could
she be sure if it was his voice crying out or just the howling of the dogs.
But she did, finally, hear his voice rise in a last, despairing shout:
'Don't any of you watch TV? Don't you see? I'm Maxim. Maxim Alien.'
'So you are,' said the popeyed officer. 'And I am Kermit the Frog.'
What Saladin Chamcha never said, not even when it was clear that
something had gone badly wrong: 'Here is a London number,' he neglected to
inform the arresting policemen. 'At the other end of the line you will find,
to vouch for me, for the truth of what I'm saying, my lovely, white, English
wife.' No, sir.
What the hell.
Rosa Diamond gathered her strength. 'Just one moment, Frank Lime,' she
sang out. 'You look here,' but the three plain men had begun their bizarre
routine of hiss moan roll-eye once again, and in the sudden silence of that
room the eye-roller pointed a trembling finger at Chamcha and said, 'Lady,
if it's proof you're after, you couldn't do better than
those.'
Saladin Chamcha, following the line of Popeye's pointing finger, raised
his hands to his forehead, and then he knew that he had woken into the most
fearsome of nightmares, a nightmare that had only just begun, because there
at his temples, growing longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw
blood, were two new, goaty, unarguable horns.
Before the army of policemen took Saladin Chamcha away into his new
life, there was one more unexpected occurrence. Gibreel Farishta, seeing the
blaze of lights and hearing the delirious laughter of the law-enforcement
officers, came downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket and jodhpurs, chosen
from Henry Diamond's wardrobe. Smelling faintly of mothballs, he stood on
the first-floor landing and observed the proceedings without comment. He
stood there unnoticed until Chamcha, handcuffed and on his way out to the
Black Maria, barefoot, still clutching his pyjamas, caught sight of him and
cried out, 'Gibreel, for the love of God tell them what's what.'
Hisser Moaner Popeye turned eagerly towards Gibreel. 'And who might
this be?' inquired Inspector Lime. 'Another sky-diver?'
But the words died on his lips, because at that moment the floodlights
were switched off, the order to do so having been given when Chamcha was
handcuffed and taken in charge, and in the aftermath of the seven suns it
became clear to everyone there that a pale, golden light was emanating from
the direction of the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly
outwards from a point immediately behind his head. Inspector Lime never
referred to that light again, and if he had been asked about it would have
denied ever having seen such a thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century,
pull the other one.
But at any rate, when Gibreel asked, 'What do these men want?', every
man there was seized by the desire to answer his question in literal,
detailed terms, to reveal their secrets, as if he were, as if, but no,
ridiculous, they would shake their heads for weeks, until they had all
persuaded themselves that they had done as they did for purely logical
reasons, he was Mrs. Diamond's old friend, the two of them had found the
rogue Chamcha half-drowned on the beach and taken him in for humanitarian
reasons, no call to harass either Rosa or Mr. Farishta any further, a more
reputable looking gentleman you couldn't wish to see, in his smoking jacket
and his, his, well, eccentricity never was a crime, anyhow.
'Gibreel,' said Saladin Chamcha, 'help.'
But Gibreel's eye had been caught by Rosa Diamond. He looked at her,
and could not look away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No attempt
was made to stop him.
When Chamcha reached the Black Maria, he saw the traitor, Gibreel
Farishta, looking down at him from the little balcony outside Rosa's
bedroom, and there wasn't any light shining around the bastard's head.
2
an ma kan/Fi qadim azzaman
... It was so, it was not, in a time long
forgot, that there lived in the silver-land of Argentina a certain Don
Enrique Diamond, who knew much about birds and little about women, and his
wife, Rosa, who knew nothing about men but a good deal about love. One day
it so happened that when the senora was out riding, sitting sidesaddle and
wearing a hat with a feather in it, she arrived at the Diamond estancia's
great stone gates, which stood insanely in the middle of the empty pampas,
to find an ostrich running at her as hard as it could, running for its life,
with all the tricks and variations it could think of; for the ostrich is a
crafty bird, difficult to catch. A little way behind the ostrich was a cloud
of dust full of the noises of hunting men, and when the ostrich was within
six feet of her the cloud sent bolas to wrap around its legs and bring it
crashing to the ground at her grey mare's feet. The man who dismounted to
kill the bird never took his eyes off Rosa's face. He took a silver-hafted
knife from a scabbard at his belt and plunged it into the bird's throat, all
the way up to the hilt, and he did it without once looking at the dying
ostrich, staring into Rosa Diamond's eyes while he knelt on the wide yellow
earth. His name was Martin de la Cruz.
After Chamcha had been taken away, Gibreel Farishta often wondered
about his own behaviour. In that dreamlike moment when he had been trapped
by the eyes of the old Englishwoman it had seemed to him that his will was
no longer his own to command, that somebody else's needs were in charge.
Owing to the bewildering nature of recent events, and also to his
determination to stay awake as much as possible, it was a few days before he
connected what was going on to the world behind his eyelids, and only then
did he understand that he had to get away, because the universe of his
nightmares had begun to leak into his waking life, and if he was not careful
he would never manage to begin again, to be reborn with her, through her,
Alleluia, who had seen the roof of the world.
He was shocked to realize that he had made no attempt to contact Allie
at all; or to help Chamcha in his time of need. Nor had he been at all
perturbed by the appearance on Saladin's head of a pair of fine new horns, a
thing that should surely have occasioned some concern. He had been in some
sort of trance, and when he asked the old dame what she thought of it all
she smiled weirdly and told him that there was nothing new under the sun,
she had seen things, the apparitions of men with horned helmets, in an
ancient land like England there was no room for new stories, every blade of
turf had already been walked over a hundred thousand times. For long periods
of the day her talk became rambling and confused, but at other times she
insisted on cooking him huge heavy meals, shepherd's pies, rhubarb crumble
with thick custard, thick-gravied hotpots, all manner of weighty soups. And
at all times she wore an air of inexplicable contentment, as if his presence
had satisfied her in some deep, unlooked-for way. He went shopping in the
village with her; people stared; she ignored them, waving her imperious
stick. The days passed. Gibreel did not leave.
'Blasted English mame,' he told himself. 'Some type of extinct species.
What the hell am I doing here?' But stayed, held by unseen chains. While
she, at every opportunity, sang an old song, in Spanish, he couldn't
understand a word. Some sorcery there? Some ancient Morgan Le Fay singing a
young Merlin into her crystal cave? Gibreel headed for the door; Rosa piped
up; he stopped in his tracks. 'Why not, after all,' he shrugged. 'The old
woman needs company. Faded grandeur, I swear! Look what she's come to here.
Anyhow, I need the rest. Gather my forces. Just a coupla days.'
In the evenings they would sit in that drawing-room stuffed with silver
ornaments, including on the wall a certain silver-hafted knife, beneath the
plaster bust of Henry Diamond that stared down from the top of the corner
cabinet, and when the grandfather clock struck six he would pour two glasses
of sherry and she would begin to talk, but not before she said, as
predictably as clockwork,
Grandfather is always four minutes late, for good
manners, he doesn't like to be too punctual.
Then she began without
bothering with onceuponatime, and whether it was all true or all false he
could see the fierce energy that was going into the telling, the last
desperate reserves of her will that she was putting into her story,
the only
bright time I can remember,
she told him, so that he perceived that this
memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her
self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the
room, and that the silver land of the past was her preferred abode, not this
dilapidated house in which she was constantly bumping into things, -
knocking over coffee-tables, - bruising herself on doorknobs - bursting into
tears, and crying out:
Everything shrinks.
When she sailed to Argentina in 1935 as the bride of the
Anglo-Argentine Don Enrique of Los Alamos, he pointed to the ocean and said,
that's the pampa. You can't tell how big it is by looking at it. You have to
travel through it, the unchangingness, day after day. In some parts the wind
is strong as a fist, but it's completely silent, it'll knock you flat but
you'll never hear a thing. No trees is why: not an ombu, not a poplar, nada.
And you have to watch out for ombu leaves, by the way. Deadly poison. The
wind won't kill you but the leaf-juice can. She clapped her hands like a
child: Honestly, Henry, silent winds, poisonous leaves. You make it sound
like a fairy-story. Henry, fairhaired, soft-bodied, wide-eyed and ponderous,
looked appalled.
Oh, no,
he said.
It's not so bad as that.
She arrived in that immensity, beneath that infinite blue vault of sky,
because Henry popped the question and she gave the only answer that a
forty-year-old spinster could. But when she arrived she asked herself a
bigger question: of what was she capable in all that space? What did she
have the courage for, how could she
expand?
To be good or bad, she told
herself: but to be
new.
Our neighbour Doctor Jorge Babington, she told
Gibreel, never liked me, you know, he would tell me tales of the British in
South America, always such gay blades, he said contemptuously, spies and
brigands and looters.
Are you such exotics in your cold England?
he asked
her, and answered his own question,
senora, I don't think so. Crammed into
that coffin of an island, you must find wider horizons to express these
secret selves.
Rosa Diamond's secret was a capacity for love so great that it soon
became plain that her poor prosaic Henry would never fulfil it, because
whatever romance there was in that jellied frame was reserved for birds.
Marsh hawks, screamers, snipe. In a small rowing boat on the local lagunas
he spent his happiest days amid the bulrushes with his field-glasses to his
eyes. Once on the train to Buenos Aires he embarrassed Rosa by demonstrating
his favourite bird-calls in the dining-car, cupping his hands around his
mouth: sleepyhead bird, vanduria ibis, trupial. Why can't you love me this
way, she wanted to ask. But never did, because for Henry she was a good
sort, and passion was an eccentricity of other races. She became the
generalissimo of the homestead, and tried to stifle her wicked longings. At
night she took to walking out into the pampa and lying on her back to look
at the galaxy above, and sometimes, under the influence of that bright flow
of beauty, she would begin to tremble all over, to shudder with a deep
delight, and to hum an unknown tune, and this star-music was as close as she
came to joy.
Gibreel Farishta: felt her stories winding round him like a web,
holding him in that lost world where
fifty sat down to dinner every day,
what men they were, our gauchos, nothing servile there, very fierce and
proud, very. Pure carnivores; you can see it in the pictures.
During the
long nights of their insomnia she told him about the heat-haze that would
come over the pampa so that the few trees stood out like islands and a rider
looked like a mythological being, galloping across the surface of the ocean.
It was like the ghost of the sea.
She told him campfire stories, for example
about the atheist gaucho who disproved Paradise, when his mother died, by
calling upon her spirit to return, every night for seven nights. On the
eighth night he announced that she had obviously not heard him, or she would
certainly have come to console her beloved son; therefore, death must be the
end. She snared him in descriptions of the days when the Peron people came
in their white suits and slicked down hair and the peons chased them off,
she told him how the railroads were built by the Anglos to service their
estancias, and the dams, too, the story, for example, of her friend
Claudette, 'a real heartbreaker, my dear, married an engineer chap name of
Granger, disappointed half the Hurlingham. Off they went to some dam he was
building, and next thing they heard, the rebels were coming to blow it up.
Granger went with the men to guard the dam, leaving Claudette alone with the
maid, and wouldn't you know, a few hours later, the maid came running,
senora, ees one hombre at the door, ees as beeg as a house. What else? A
rebel captain. - 'And your spouse, madame?' - 'Waiting for you at the dam,
as he should be.' - 'Then since he has not seen fit to protect you, the
revolution will.' And he left guards outside the house, my dear, quite a
thing. But in the fighting both men were killed, husband and captain and
Claudette insisted on a joint funeral, watched the two coffins going side by
side into the ground, mourned for them both. After that we knew she was a
dangerous lot,
trop fatale,
eh? What?
Trop
jolly
fatale.'
In the tall story
of the beautiful Claudette, Gibreel heard the music of Rosa's own longings.
At such moments he would catch sight of her looking at him from the corners
of her eyes, and he would feel a tugging in the region of his navel, as if
something were trying to come out. Then she looked away, and the sensation
faded. Perhaps it was only a side-effect of stress.
He asked her one night if she had seen the horns growing on Chamcha's
head, but she went deaf and, instead of answering, told him how she would
sit on a camp stool by the galpon or bull-pen at Los Alamos and the prize
bulls would come up and lay their horned heads in her lap. One afternoon a
girl named Aurora del Sol, who was the fiancee of Martin de la Cruz, let
fall a saucy remark: I thought they only did that in the laps of virgins,
she stage-whispered to her giggling friends, and Rosa turned to her sweetly
and replied, Then perhaps, my dear, you would like to try? From that time
Aurora del Sol, the best dancer at the estancia and the most desirable of
all the peon women, became the deadly enemy of the too-tall, too-bony woman
from over the sea.
'You look just like him,' Rosa Diamond said as they stood at her
night-time window, side by side, looking out to sea. 'His double. Martin de
la Cruz.' At the mention of the cowboy's name Gibreel felt so violent a pain
in his navel, a pulling pain, as if somebody had stuck a hook in his
stomach, that a cry escaped his lips. Rosa Diamond appeared not to hear.
'Look,' she cried happily, 'over there.'
Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower
and the holiday camp, - running along the water's edge so that the incoming
tide washed away its footprints, - swerving and feinting, running for its
life, there came a full-grown, large-as-life ostrich. Down the beach it
fled, and Gibreel's eyes followed it in wonder, until he could no longer
make it out in the dark.
The next thing that happened took place in the village. They had gone
into town to collect a cake and a bottle of champagne, because Rosa had
remembered that it was her eighty-ninth birthday. Her family had been
expelled from her life, so there had been no cards or telephone calls.
Gibreel insisted that they should hold some sort of celebration, and showed
her the secret inside his shirt, a fat money-belt full of pounds sterling
acquired on the black market before leaving Bombay. 'Also credit cards
galore,' he said. 'I am no indigent fellow. Come, let us go. My treat.' He
was now so deeply in thrall to Rosa's narrative sorcery that he hardly
remembered from day to day that he had a life to go to, a woman to surprise
by the simple fact of his being alive, or any such thing. Trailing behind
her meekly, he carried Mrs Diamond's shopping-bags.
He was loafing around on a street corner while Rosa chatted to the
baker when he felt, once again, that dragging hook in his stomach, and he
fell against a lamp-post and gasped for air. He heard a clip-clopping noise,
and then around the corner came an archaic pony-trap, full of young people
in what seemed at first sight to be fancy dress: the men in tight black
trousers studded at the calf with silver buttons, their white shirts open
almost to the waist; the women in wide skirts of frills and layers and
bright colours, scarlet, emerald, gold. They were singing in a foreign
language and their gaiety made the street look dim and tawdry, but Gibreel
realized that something weird was afoot, because nobody else in the street
took the slightest notice of the pony-trap. Then Rosa emerged from the
baker's with the cake-box dangling by its ribbon from the index finger of
her left hand, and exclaimed: 'Oh, there they are, arriving for the dance.
We always had dances, you know, they like it, it's in their blood.' And,
after a pause: 'That was the dance at which he killed the vulture.'
That was the dance at which a certain Juan Julia, nicknamed The Vulture
on account of his cadaverous appearance, drank too much and insulted the
honour of Aurora del Sol, and didn't stop until Martin had no option but to
fight,
hey Martin, why you enjoy fucking with this one, I thought she was
pretty dull.
'Let us go away from the dancing,' Martin said, and in the
darkness, silhouetted against the fairy-lights hung from the trees around
the dance-floor, the two men wrapped ponchas around their forearms, drew
their knives, circled, fought. Juan died. Martin de la Cruz picked up the
dead man's hat and threw it at the feet of Aurora del Sol. She picked up the
hat and watched him walk away.
Rosa Diamond at eighty-nine in a long silver sheath dress with a
cigarette holder in one gloved hand and a silver turban on her head drank
gin-and-sin from a green glass triangle and told stories of the good old
days. 'I want to dance,' she announced suddenly. 'It's my birthday and I
haven't danced once.'
The exertions of that night on which Rosa and Gibreel danced until dawn
proved too much for the old lady, who collapsed into bed the next day with a
low fever that induced ever more delirious apparitions: Gibreel saw Martin
de la Cruz and Aurora del Sol dancing flamenco on the tiled and gabled roof
of the Diamond house, and Peronistas in white suits stood on the boat-house
to address a gathering of peons about the future: 'Under Peron these lands
will be expropriated and distributed among the people. The British railroads
also will become the property of the state. Let's chuck them out, these
brigands, these privateers . . .' The plaster bust of Henry Diamond hung in
mid-air, observing the scene, and a white-suited agitator pointed a finger
at him and cried, That's him, your oppressor; there is the enemy. Gibreel's
stomach ached so badly that he feared for his life, but at the very moment
that his rational mind was considering the possibility of an ulcer or
appendicitis, the rest of his brain whispered the truth, which was that he
was being held prisoner and manipulated by the force of Rosa's will, just as
the Angel Gibreel had been obliged to speak by the overwhelming need of the
Prophet, Mahound.
'She's dying,' he realized. 'Not long to go, either.' Tossing in her
bed in the fever's grip Rosa Diamond muttered about ombu poison and the
enmity of her neighbour Doctor Babington, who asked Henry, is your wife
perhaps quiet enough for the pastoral life, and who gave her (as a present
for recovering from typhus) a copy of Amerigo Vespucci's account of his
voyages. 'The man was a notorious fantasist, of course,' Babington smiled,
'but fantasy can be stronger than fact; after all, he had continents named
after him.' As she grew weaker she poured more and more of her remaining
strength into her own dream of Argentina, and Gibreel's navel felt as if it
had been set on fire. He lay slumped in an armchair at her bedside and the
apparitions multiplied by the hour. Woodwind music filled the air, and, most
wonderful of all, a small white island appeared just off the shore, bobbing
on the waves like a raft; it was white as snow, with white sand sloping up
to a clump of albino trees, which were white, chalk-white, paper-white, to
the very tips of their leaves.
After the arrival of the white island Gibreel was overcome by a deep
lethargy. Slumped in an armchair in the bedroom of the dying woman, his
eyelids drooping, he felt the weight of his body increase until all movement
became impossible. Then he was in another bedroom, in tight black trousers,
with silver buttons along the calves and a heavy silver buckle at the waist.
You sent for me, Don Enrique,
he was saying to the soft, heavy man with a
face like a white plaster bust, but he knew who had asked for him, and he
never took his eyes from her face, even when he saw the colour rising from
the white frill around her neck.
Henry Diamond had refused to permit the authorities to become involved
in the matter of Martin de la Cruz,
these people are my responsibility,
he
told Rosa,
it is a question of honour.
Instead he had gone to some lengths
to demonstrate his continuing trust in the killer, de la Cruz, for example
by making him the captain of the estancia polo team. But Don Enrique was
never really the same once Martin had killed the Vulture. He was more and
more easily exhausted, and became listless, uninterested even in birds.
Things began to come apart at Los Alamos, imperceptibly at first, then more
obviously. The men in the white suits returned and were not chased away.
When Rosa Diamond contracted typhus, there were many at the estancia who
took it for an allegory of the old estate's decline.
What am I doing here,
Gibreel thought in great alarm, as he stood
before Don Enrique in the rancher's study, while Dona Rosa blushed in the
background,
this is someone else's place. -
Great confidence in you, Henry
was saying, not in English but Gibreel could still understand. - My wife is
to undertake a motor tour, for her convalescence, and you will accompany . .
. Responsibilities at Los Alamos prevent me from going along.
Now I must
speak, what to say,
but when his mouth opened the alien words emerged, it
will be my honour, Don Enrique, click of heels, swivel, exit.
Rosa Diamond in her eighty-nine-year-old weakness had begun to dream
her story of stones, which she had guarded for more than half a century, and
Gibreel was on a horse behind her Hispano-Suiza, driving from estancia to
estancia, through a wood of arayana trees, beneath the high cordillera,
arriving at grotesque homesteads built in the style of Scottish castles or
Indian palaces, visiting the land of Mr. Cadwallader Evans, he of the seven
wives who were happy enough to have only one night of duty each per week,
and the territory of the notorious MacSween who had become enamoured of the
ideas arriving in Argentina from Germany, and had started flying, from his
estancia's flagpole, a red flag at whose heart a crooked black cross danced
in a white circle. It was on the MacSween estancia that they came across the
lagoon, and Rosa saw for the first time the white island of her fate, and
insisted on rowing out for a picnic luncheon, accompanied neither by maid
nor by chauffeur, taking only Martin de la Cruz to row the boat and to
spread a scarlet cloth upon the white sand and to serve her with meat and
wine.
As white as snow and as red as blood and as black as ebony.
As she
reclined in black skirt and white blouse, lying upon scarlet which itself
lay over white, while he (also wearing black and white) poured red wine into
the glass in her white-gloved hand, - and then, to his own astonishment,
bloody goddamn,
as he caught at her hand and began to kiss, - something
happened, the scene grew blurred, one minute they were lying on the scarlet
cloth, rolling all over it so that cheeses and cold cuts and salads and
pates were crushed beneath the weight of their desire, and when they
returned to the Hispano-Suiza it was impossible to conceal anything from
chauffeur or maid on account of the foodstains all over their clothes, -
while the next minute she was recoiling from him, not cruelly but in
sadness, drawing her hand away and making a tiny gesture of the head,
no,
and he stood, bowed, retreated, leaving her with virtue and lunch intact, -
the two possibilities kept alternating, while dying Rosa tossed on her bed,
did-she-didn't-she, making the last version of the story of her life, unable
to decide what she wanted to be true.
'I'm going crazy,' Gibreel thought. 'She's dying, but I'm losing my
mind.' The moon was out, and Rosa's breathing was the only sound in the
room: snoring as she breathed in and exhaling heavily, with small grunting
noises. Gibreel tried to rise from his chair, and found he could not. Even
in these intervals between the visions his body remained impossibly heavy.
As if a boulder had been placed upon his chest. And the images, when they
came, continued to be confused, so that at one moment he was in a hayloft at
Los Alamos, making love to her while she murmured his name, over and over,
Martin of the Cross, -
and the next moment she was ignoring him in broad
daylight beneath the watching eyes of a certain Aurora del Sol, - so that it
was not possible to distinguish memory from wishes, or guilty
reconstructions from confessional truths, - because even on her deathbed
Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye.
Moonlight streamed into the room. As it struck Rosa's face it appeared
to pass right through her, and indeed Gibreel was beginning to be able to
make out the pattern of the lace embroidery on her pillowcase. Then he saw
Don Enrique and his friend, the puritanical and disapproving Dr Babington,
standing on the balcony, as solid as you could wish. It occurred to him that
as the apparitions increased in clarity Rosa grew fainter and fainter,
fading away, exchanging places, one might say, with the ghosts. And because
he had also understood that the manifestations depended on him, his
stomach-ache, his stone-like weightiness, he began to fear for his own life
as well.
'You wanted me to falsify Juan Julia's death certificate,' Dr Babington
was saying. 'I did so out of our old friendship. But it was wrong to do so;
and I see the result before me. You have sheltered a killer and it is,
perhaps, your conscience that is eating you away. Go home, Enrique. Go home,
and take that wife of yours, before something worse happens.'
'I am home,' Henry Diamond said. 'And I take exception to your mention
of my wife.'
'Wherever the English settle, they never leave England,' Dr Babington
said as he faded into the moonlight. 'Unless, like Dona Rosa, they fall in
love.'
A cloud passed across the moonlight, and now that the balcony was empty
Gibreel Farishta finally managed to force himself out of the chair and on to
his feet. Walking was like dragging a ball and chain across the floor, but
he reached the window. In every direction, and as far as he could see, there
were giant thistles waving in the breeze. Where the sea had been there was
now an ocean of thistles, extending as far as the horizon, thistles as high
as a full-grown man. He heard the disembodied voice of Dr Babington mutter
in his ear: 'The first plague of thistles for fifty years. The past, it
seems, returns.' He saw a woman running through the thick, rippling growth,
barefoot, with loose dark hair. 'She did it,' Rosa's voice said clearly
behind him. 'After betraying him with the Vulture and making him into a
murderer. He wouldn't look at her after that. Oh, she did it all right. Very
dangerous one, that one. Very.' Gibreel lost sight of Aurora del Sol in the
thistles; one mirage obscured another.
He felt something grab him from behind, spin him around and fling him
flat on his back. There was nobody to be seen, but Rosa Diamond was sitting
bolt upright in bed, staring at him wide-eyed, making him understand that
she had given up hope of clinging on to life, and needed him to help her
complete the last revelation. As with the businessman of his dreams, he felt
helpless, ignorant . . . she seemed to know, however, how to draw the images
from him. Linking the two of them, navel to navel, he saw a shining cord.
Now he was by a pond in the infinity of the thistles, allowing his
horse to drink, and she came riding up on her mare. Now he was embracing
her, loosening her garments and her hair, and now they were making love. Now
she was whispering, how can you like me, I am so much older than you, and he
spoke comforting words.
Now she rose, dressed, rode away, while he remained there, his body
languid and warm, failing to notice the moment when a woman's hand stole out
of the thistles and took hold of his silver-hafted knife . . .
No! No! No, this way!
Now she rode up to him by the pond, and the moment she dismounted,
looking nervously at him, he fell upon her, he told her he couldn't bear her
rejections any longer, they fell to the ground together, she screamed, he
tore at her clothes, and her hands, clawing at his body, came upon the
handle of a knife . . .
No! No, never, no! This way: here!
Now the two of them were making love, tenderly, with many slow
caresses; and now a third rider entered the clearing by the pool, and the
lovers rushed apart; now Don Enrique drew his small pistol and aimed at his
rival's heart, -
- and he felt Aurora stabbing him in the heart, over and over, this is
for Juan, and this is for abandoning me, and this is for your grand English
whore, -
- and he felt his victim's knife entering his heart, as Rosa stabbed
him, once, twice, and again, -
- and after Henry's bullet had killed him the Englishman took the dead
man's knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound.
Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point.
When he regained his senses the old woman in the bed was speaking to
herself, so softly that he could barely make out the words. 'The pampero
came, the south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That's when they found
him, or was it before.' The last of the story. How Aurora del Sol spat in
Rosa Diamond's face at the funeral of Martin de la Cruz. How it was arranged
that nobody was to be charged for the murder, on condition that Don Enrique
took Dona Rosa and returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the
train at the Los Alamos station and the men in white suits stood on the
platform, wearing borsalino hats, making sure they really left. How, once
the train had started moving, Rosa Diamond opened the holdall on the seat
beside her, and said defiantly,
I brought something. A little souvenir.
And
unwrapped a cloth bundle to reveal a gaucho's silver-hafted knife.
'Henry died the first winter home. Then nothing happened. The war. The
end.' She paused. 'To diminish into this, after being in that vastness. It
isn't to be borne.' And, after a further silence: 'Everything shrinks.'
There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt a weight lifting
from him, so rapidly that he thought he might float up towards the ceiling.
Rosa Diamond lay still, eyes closed, her arms resting on the patchwork
counterpane. She looked:
normal.
Gibreel realized that there was nothing to
prevent him from walking out of the door.
He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady;
found the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to Henry Diamond,
and the grey felt trilby inside which Don Enrique's name had been sewn by
his wife's own hand; and left, without looking back. The moment he got
outside a wind snatched his hat and sent it skipping down the beach. He
chased it, caught it, jammed it back on.
London shareef, here I come.
He had
the city in his pocket: Geographers' London, the whole dog-eared metropolis,
A to Z.
'What to do?' he was thinking. 'Phone or not phone? No, just turn up,
ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea bed to your bed,
takes more than a plane crash to keep me away from you. - Okay, maybe not
quite, but words to that effect. - Yes. Surprise is the best policy. Allie
Bibi, boo to you.'
Then he heard the singing. It was coming from the old boat-house with
the one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and the song was foreign, but
familiar: a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was
familiar, although a little different, less quavery;
younger.
The boathouse
door was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in the wind. He went towards
the song.
'Take your coat off,' she said. She was dressed as she had been on the
day of the white island: black skirt and boots, white silk blouse, hatless.
He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing
in the confined, moonlit space. She lay down amid the random clutter of an
English life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding
table, trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side.
'How can you like me?' she murmured. 'I am so much older than you.'
3
hen they pulled his pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he
saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha
broke down for the second time that night; this time, however, he began to
giggle hysterically, infected, perhaps, by the continuing hilarity of his
captors. The three immigration officers were in particularly high spirits,
and it was one of these - the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was
Stein - who had 'de-bagged' Saladin with a merry cry of, 'Opening time,
Packy; let's see what you're made of!' Red-and-white stripes were dragged
off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the van with
two stout policemen holding each arm and a fifth constable's boot placed
firmly upon his chest, and whose protests went unheard in the general
mirthful din. His horns kept banging against things, the wheel-arch, the
uncarpeted floor or a policeman's shin - on these last occasions he was
soundly buffeted about the face by the understandably irate law-enforcement
officer - and he was, in sum, in as miserably low spirits as he could
recall. Nevertheless, when he saw what lay beneath his borrowed pyjamas, he
could not prevent that disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth.
His thighs had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as well as hairy.
Below the knee the hairiness came to a halt, and his legs narrowed into
tough, bony, almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven
hoofs, such as one might find on any billy-goat. Saladin was also taken
aback by the sight of his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly
erect, an organ that he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his
own. 'What's this, then?' joked Novak - the former 'Hisser' - giving it a
playful tweak. 'Fancy one of us, maybe?' Whereupon the 'moaning' immigration
officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in the ribs, and shouted,
'Nah, that ain't it. Seems like we really got his goat.' 'I get it,' Novak
shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged
testicles. 'Hey! Hey!' howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. 'Listen, here's
an even better ... no wonder he's so fucking
horny.'
At which the three of them, repeating many times 'Got his goat . . .
horny . . .' fell into one another's arms and howled with delight. Chamcha
wanted to speak, but was afraid that he would find his voice mutated into
goat-bleats, and, besides, the policeman's boot had begun to press harder
than ever on his chest, and it was hard to form any words. What puzzled
Chamcha was that a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and
unprecedented - that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp - was
being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter
they could imagine. 'This isn't England,' he thought, not for the first or
last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and
common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior
such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced towards
the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding aeroplane and that
everything that followed had been some sort of after-life. If that were the
case, his long-standing rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look
pretty foolish. - But where, in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being,
whether benevolent or malign? Why did Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this
place might be, look so much like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which
every schoolboy knew? - Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had not actually
perished in the
Bostan
disaster, but was lying gravely ill in some hospital
ward, plagued by delirious dreams? This explanation appealed to him, not
least because it unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call,
and a man's voice that he was trying, unsuccessfully, to forget . . . He
felt a sharp kick land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him
doubt the truth of all such hallucination-theories. He returned his
attention to the actual, to this present comprising a sealed police van
containing three immigration officers and five policemen that was, for the
moment at any rate, all the universe he possessed. It was a universe of
fear.
Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. 'Animal,' Stein
cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in:
'You're all the same. Can't expect animals to observe civilized standards.
Eh?' And Novak took up the thread: 'We're talking about fucking personal
hygiene here, you little fuck.'
Chamcha was mystified. Then he noticed that a large number of soft,
pellety objects had appeared on the floor of the Black Maria. He felt
consumed by bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his natural processes
were goatish now. The humiliation of it! He was - had gone to some lengths
to become
-
a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well
for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of
Gujranwala, but he was cut from different cloth! 'My good fellows,' he
began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off
from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart
and a soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, 'my good fellows, you
had best understand your mistake before it's too late.'
Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. 'What's that? What was that noise?'
he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, 'Search me.' 'Tell you what
it sounded like,' Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth
he bellowed: 'Maa-aa-aa!' Then the three of them all laughed once more, so
that Saladin had no way of telling if they were simply insulting him or if
his vocal cords had truly been infected, as he feared, by this macabre
demoniasis that had overcome him without the slightest warning. He had begun
to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.
The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at
least the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the
pellety refuse rolling around the floor of the moving van. 'In this
country,' he informed Saladin, 'we clean up our messes.'
The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him into a kneeling
position. 'That's right,' said Novak, 'clean it up.' Joe Bruno placed a
large hand behind Chamcha's neck and pushed his head down towards the
pellet-littered floor. 'Off you go,' he said, in a conversational voice.
'Sooner you start, sooner you'll polish it off.'
Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest
ritual of his unwarranted humiliation, - or, to put it another way, as the
circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and
outre - Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers
no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing,
they no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom
his colleagues called 'Mack' or 'Jockey', turned out to be a large, burly
man with a thick roller-coaster of a nose; his accent, it now transpired,
was exaggeratedly Scottish. 'Tha's the ticket,' he remarked approvingly as
Chamcha munched miserably on. 'An actor, was it? I'm partial to watchin' a
guid man perform.'
This observation prompted Officer Novak - that is, 'Kim' - who had
acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an ascetically bony face that
reminded one of medieval icons, and a frown suggesting some deep inner
torment, to burst into a short peroration about his favourite television
soap-opera stars and game-show hosts, while Officer Bruno, who struck
Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny
with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting
dramatically with the darker hair on his head, - Bruno, the youngest of the
three, asked lasciviously, what about watchin' girls, then, that's my game.
This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed
anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five
policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the
constables in their places. 'Little children,' Mr. Stein admonished them,
'should be seen an' no hearrud.'
By this time Chamcha was gagging violently on his meal, forcing himself
not to vomit, knowing that such an error would only prolong his misery. He
was crawling about on the floor of the van, seeking out the pellets of his
torture as they rolled from side to side, and the policemen, needing an
outlet for the frustration engendered by the immigration officer's rebuke,
began to abuse Saladin roundly and pull the hair on his rump to increase
both his discomfort and his discomfiture. Then the five policemen defiantly
started up their own version of the immigration officers' conversation, and
set to analysing the merits of divers movie stars, darts players,
professional wrestlers and the like; but because they had been put into a
bad humour by the loftiness of 'Jockey' Stein, they were unable to maintain
the abstract and intellectual tone of their superiors, and fell to
quarrelling over the relative merits of the Tottenham Hotspur 'double' team
of the early 1960s and the mighty Liverpool side of the present day, - in
which the Liverpool supporters incensed the Spurs fans by alleging that the
great Danny Blanchflower was a 'luxury' player, a cream puff, flower by
name, pansy by nature; - whereupon the offended claque responded by shouting
that in the case of Liverpool it was the supporters who were the bum-boys,
the Spurs mob could take them apart with their arms tied behind their backs.
Of course all the constables were familiar with the techniques of football
hooligans, having spent many Saturdays with their backs to the game watching
the spectators in the various stadiums up and down the country, and as their
argument grew heated they reached the point of wishing to demonstrate, to
their opposing colleagues, exactly what they meant by 'tearing apart',
'bollocking', 'bottling' and the like. The angry factions glared at one
another and then, all together, they turned to gaze upon the person of
Saladin Chamcha.
Well, the ruckus in that police van grew noisier and noisier, - and
it's true to say that Chamcha was partly to blame, because he had started
squealing like a pig, - and the young bobbies were thumping and gouging
various parts of his anatomy, using him both as a guinea-pig and a
safety-valve, remaining careful, in spite of their excitation, to confine
their blows to his softer, more fleshy parts, to minimize the risk of
breakages and bruises; and when Jockey, Kim and Joey saw what their juniors
were getting up to, they chose to be tolerant, because boys would have their
fun.
Besides, all this talk of watching had brought Stein, Bruno and Novak
round to an examination of weightier matters, and now, with solemn faces and
judicious voices, they were speaking of the need, in this day and age, for
an increase in observation, not merely in the sense of 'spectating', but in
that of 'watchfulness', and 'surveillance'. The young constables' experience
was extremely relevant, Stein intoned: watch the crowd, not the game.
'Eternal vigilance is the price o' liberty,' he proclaimed.
'Eek,' cried Chamcha, unable to avoid interrupting. 'Aargh, unnhh,
owoo.'
After a time a curious mood of detachment fell upon Saladin. He no
longer had any idea of how long they had been travelling in the Black Maria
of his hard fall from grace, nor could he have hazarded a guess as to the
proximity of their ultimate destination, even though the tinnitus in his
ears was growing gradually louder, those phantasmal grandmother's footsteps,
ellowen, deeowen, London. The blows raining down on him now felt as soft as
a lover's caresses; the grotesque sight of his own metamorphosed body no
longer appalled him; even the last pellets of goat-excrement failed to stir
his much-abused stomach. Numbly, he crouched down in his little world,
trying to make himself smaller and smaller, in the hope that he might
eventually disappear altogether, and so regain his freedom.
The talk of surveillance techniques had reunited immigration officers
and policemen, healing the breach caused by Jockey Stein's words of
puritanical reproof. Chamcha, the insect on the floor of the van, heard, as
if through a telephone scrambler, the faraway voices of his captors speaking
eagerly of the need for more video equipment at public events and of the
benefits of computerized information, and, in what appeared to be a complete
contradiction, of the efficacy of placing too rich a mixture in the nosebags
of police horses on the night before a big match, because when equine
stomach-upsets led to the marchers being showered with shit it always
provoked them into violence,
an' then we can really get amongst them, can't
we just.
Unable to find a way of making this universe of soap operas,
matchoftheday, cloaks and daggers cohere into any recognizable whole,
Chamcha closed his ears to the chatter and listened to the footsteps in his
ears.
Then the penny dropped. 'Ask the Computer!'
Three immigration officers and five policemen fell silent as the
foul-smelling creature sat up and hollered at them. 'What's he on about?'
asked the youngest policeman - one of the Tottenham supporters, as it
happened - doubtfully. 'Shall I fetch him another whack?'
'My name is Salahuddin Chamchawala, professional name Saladin Chamcha,'
the demi-goat gibbered. 'I am a member of Actors' Equity, the Automobile
Association and the Garrick Club. My car registration number is suchandsuch.
Ask the Computer. Please.'
'Who're you trying to kid?' inquired one of the Liverpool fans, but he,
too, sounded uncertain. 'Look at yourself. You're a fucking Packy billy.
Sally-who? - What kind of name is that for an Englishman?'
Chamcha found a scrap of anger from somewhere. 'And what about them?'
he demanded, jerking his head at the immigration officers. 'They don't sound
so Anglo-Saxon to me.'
For a moment it seemed that they might all fall upon him and tear him
limb from limb for such temerity, but at length the skull-faced Officer
Novak merely slapped his face a few times while replying, 'I'm from
Weybridge, you cunt. Get it straight:
Wey
bridge, where the fucking
Beatles
used to live.'
Stein said: 'Better check him out.' Three and a half minutes later the
Black Maria came to a halt and three immigration officers, five constables
and one police driver held a crisis conference -
here's a pretty effing
pickle -
and Chamcha noted that in their new mood all nine had begun to look
alike, rendered equal and identical by their tension and fear. Nor was it
long before he understood that the call to the Police National Computer,
which had promptly identified him as a British Citizen first class, had not
improved his situation, but had placed him, if anything, in greater danger
than before.
- We could say, - one of the nine suggested, - that he was lying
unconscious on the beach. - Won't work, - came the reply, on account of the
old lady and the other geezer. - Then he resisted arrest and turned nasty
and in the ensuing altercation he kind of fainted. - Or the old bag was
ga-ga, made no sense to any of us, and the other guy wossname never spoke
up, and as for this bugger, you only have to clock the bleeder, looks like
the very devil, what were we supposed to think? - And then he went and
passed out on us, so what could we do, in all fairness, I ask you, your
honour, but bring him in to the medical facility at the Detention Centre,
for proper care followed by observation and questioning, using our
reason-to-believe guidelines; what do you reckon on something of that
nature? - It's nine against one, but the old biddy and the second bloke make
it a bit of a bastard. - Look, we can fix the tale later, first thing like I
keep saying is to get him unconscious. - Right.
Chamcha woke up in a hospital bed with green slime coming up from his
lungs. His bones felt as if somebody had put them in the icebox for a long
while. He began to cough, and when the fit ended nineteen and a half minutes
later he fell back into a shallow, sickly sleep without having taken in any
aspect of his present whereabouts. When he surfaced again a friendly woman's
face was looking down at him, smiling reassuringly. 'You goin to be fine,'
she said, patting him on the shoulder. 'A lickle pneumonia is all you got.'
She introduced herself as his physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. And added,
'I never judge a person by appearances. No, sir. Don't you go thinking I
do.'
With that, she rolled him over on to his side, placed a small cardboard
box by his lips, hitched up her white housecoat, kicked off her shoes, and
leaped athletically on to the bed to sit astride him, for all the world as
if he were a horse that she meant to ride right through the screens
surrounding his bed and out into goodness knew what manner of transmogrified
landscape. 'Doctor's orders,' she explained. 'Thirty-minute sessions, twice
a day.' Without further preamble, she began pummelling him briskly about the
middle body, with lightly clenched, but evidently expert, fists.
For poor Saladin, fresh from his beating in the police van, this new
assault was the last straw. He began to struggle beneath her pounding fists,
crying loudly, 'Let me out of here; has anybody informed my wife?' The
effort of shouting out induced a second coughing spasm that lasted seventeen
and three-quarter minutes and earned him a telling off from the
physiotherapist, Hyacinth. 'You wastin my time,' she said. 'I should be done
with your right lung by now and instead I hardly get started. You go behave
or not?' She had remained on the bed, straddling him, bouncing up and down
as his body convulsed, like a rodeo rider hanging on for the nine-second
bell. He subsided in defeat, and allowed her to beat the green fluid out of
his inflamed lungs. When she finished he was obliged to admit that he felt a
good deal better. She removed the little box which was now half-full of
slime and said cheerily, 'You be standin up firm in no time,' and then,
colouring in confusion, apologized, 'Excuse
me,'
and fled without
remembering to pull back the encircling screens.
'Time to take stock of the situation,' he told himself. A quick
physical examination informed him that his new, mutant condition had
remained unchanged. This cast his spirits down, and he realized that he had
been half-hoping that the nightmare would have ended while he slept. He was
dressed in a new pair of alien pyjamas, this time of an undifferentiated
pale green colour, which matched both the fabric of the screens and what he
could see of the walls and ceiling of that cryptic and anonymous ward. His
legs still ended in those distressing hoofs, and the horns on his head were
as sharp as before ... he was distracted from this morose inventory by a
man's voice from nearby, crying out in heart-rending distress: 'Oh, if ever
a body suffered . . . !'
'What on earth?' Chamcha thought, and determined to investigate. But
now he was becoming aware of many other sounds, as unsettling as the first.
It seemed to him that he could hear all sorts of animal noises: the snorting
of bulls, the chattering of monkeys, even the pretty-polly mimic-squawks of
parrots or talking budgerigars. Then, from another direction, he heard a
woman grunting and shrieking, at what sounded like the end of a painful
labour; followed by the yowling of a new-born baby. However, the woman's
cries did not subside when the baby's began; if anything, they redoubled in
their intensity, and perhaps fifteen minutes later Chamcha distinctly heard
a second infant's voice joining the first. Still the woman's birth-agony
refused to end, and at intervals ranging from fifteen to thirty minutes for
what seemed like an endless time she continued to add new babies to the
already improbable numbers marching, like conquering armies, from her womb.
His nose informed him that the sanatorium, or whatever the place called
itself, was also beginning to stink to the heavens; jungle and farmyard
odours mingled with a rich aroma similar to that of exotic spices sizzling
in clarified butter - coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves.
'This is too much,' he thought firmly. 'Time to get a few things sorted
out.' He swung his legs out of bed, tried to stand up, and promptly fell to
the floor, being utterly unaccustomed to his new legs. It took him around an
hour to overcome this problem - learning to walk by holding on to the bed
and stumbling around it until his confidence grew. At length, and not a
little unsteadily, he made his way to the nearest screen; whereupon the face
of the immigration officer Stein appeared, Cheshire-Cat-like, between two of
the screens to his left, followed rapidly by the rest of the fellow, who
drew the screens together behind him with suspicious rapidity. 'Doing all
right?' Stein asked, his smile remaining wide. 'When can I see the doctor?
When can I go to the toilet? When can I leave?' Chamcha asked in a rush.
Stein answered equably: the doctor would be round presently; Nurse Phillips
would bring him a bedpan; he could leave as soon as he was well. 'Damn
decent of you to come down with the lung thing,' Stein added, with the
gratitude of an author whose character had unexpectedly solved a ticklish
technical problem. 'Makes the story much more convincing. Seems you were
that sick, you did pass out on us after all. Nine of us remember it well.
Thanks.' Chamcha could not find any words. 'And another thing,' Stein went
on. 'The old burd, Mrs. Diamond. Turns out to be dead in her bed, cold as
mutton, and the other gentleman vanished clear away. The possibility of foul
play has no as yet been eliminated.'
'In conclusion,' he said before disappearing forever from Saladin's new
life, 'I suggest, Mr. Citizen Saladin, that you dinna trouble with a
complaint. You'll forgive me for speaking plain, but with your wee horns and
your great hoofs you wouldna look the most reliable of witnesses. Good day
to you now.'
Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and when he opened them his tormentor
had turned into the nurse and physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. 'Why you
wan go walking?' she asked. 'Whatever your heart desires, you jus ask me,
Hyacinth, and we'll see what we can fix.'
'Ssst.'
That night, in the greeny light of the mysterious institution, Saladin
was. awakened by a hiss out of an Indian bazaar.
'Ssst. You, Beelzebub. Wake up.'
Standing in front of him was a figure so impossible that Chamcha wanted
to bury his head under the sheets; yet could not, for was not he himself. .
. ? 'That's right,' the creature said. 'You see, you're not alone.'
It had an entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious
tiger, with three rows of teeth. 'The night guards often doze off,' it
explained. That's how we manage to get to talk.'
Just then a voice from one of the other beds - each bed, as Chamcha now
knew, was protected by its own ring of screens -wailed loudly: 'Oh, if ever
a body suffered!' and the man-tiger, or manticore, as it called itself, gave
an exasperated growl. That Moaner Lisa,' it exclaimed. 'All they did to him
was make him blind.'
'Who did what?' Chamcha was confused.
'The point is,' the manticore continued, 'are you going to put up with
it?'
Saladin was still puzzled. The other seemed to be suggesting that these
mutations were the responsibility of - of whom? How could they be? - 'I
don't see,' he ventured, 'who can be blamed...'
The manticore ground its three rows of teeth in evident frustration.
'There's a woman over that way,' it said, 'who is now mostly water-buffalo.
There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a
group of holiday makers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing
planes when they were turned into slippery snakes. I myself am in the rag
trade; for some years now I have been a highly paid male model, based in
Bombay, wearing a wide range of suitings and shirtings also. But who will
employ me now?' he burst into sudden and unexpected tears. 'There, there,'
said Saladin Chamcha, automatically. 'Everything will be all right, I'm sure
of it. Have courage.'
The creature composed itself. 'The point is,' it said fiercely, 'some
of us aren't going to stand for it. We're going to bust out of here before
they turn us into anything worse. Every night I feel a different piece of me
beginning to change. I've started, for example, to break wind continually
... I beg your pardon . . . you see what I mean? By the way, try these,' he
slipped Chamcha a packet of extra-strength peppermints. 'They'll help your
breath. I've bribed one of the guards to bring in a supply.'
'But how do they do it?' Chamcha wanted to know.
'They describe us,' the other whispered solemnly. 'That's all. They
have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they
construct.'
'It's hard to believe,' Chamcha argued. 'I've lived here for many years
and it never happened before . . .' His words dried up because he saw the
manticore looking at him through narrow, distrustful eyes. 'Many years?' it
asked. 'How could that be? - Maybe you're an informer? - Yes, that's it, a
spy?'
Just then a wail came from a far corner of the ward. 'Lemme go,' a
woman's voice howled. 'O Jesus I want to go. Jesus Mary I gotta go, lemme
go, O God, O Jesus God.' A very lecherous-looking wolf put its head through
Saladin's screens and spoke urgently to the manticore. 'The guards'll be
here soon,' it hissed. 'It's her again, Glass Bertha.'
'Glass . . . ?' Saladin began. 'Her skin turned to glass,' the
manticore explained impatiently, not knowing that he was bringing Chamcha's
worst dream to life. 'And the bastards smashed it up for her. Now she can't
even walk to the toilet.'
A new voice hissed out across the greeny night. 'For God's sake, woman.
Go in the fucking bedpan.'
The wolf was pulling the manticore away. 'Is he with us or not?' it
wanted to know. The manticore shrugged. 'He can't make up his mind,' it
answered. 'Can't believe his own eyes, that's his trouble.'
They fled, hearing the approaching crunch of the guards' heavy boots.
The next day there was no sign of a doctor, or of Pamela, and Chamcha
in his utter bewilderment woke and slept as if the two conditions no longer
required to be thought of as opposites, but as states that flowed into and
out of one another to create a kind of unending delirium of the senses... he
found himself dreaming of the Queen, of making tender love to the Monarch.
She was the body of Britain, the avatar of the State, and he had chosen her,
joined with her; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight.
Hyacinth came at the appointed times to ride and pummel him, and he
submitted without any fuss. But when she finished she whispered into his
ear: 'You in with the rest?' and he understood that she was involved in the
great conspiracy, too. 'If you are,' he heard himself saying, 'then you can
count me in.' She nodded, looking pleased. Chamcha felt a warmth filling him
up, and he began to wonder about taking hold of one of the physiotherapist's
exceedingly dainty, albeit powerful, little fists; but just then a shout
came from the direction of the blind man: 'My stick, I've lost my stick.'
'Poor old bugger,' said Hyacinth, and hopping off Chamcha she darted
across to the sightless fellow, picked up the fallen stick, restored it to
its owner, and came back to Saladin. 'Now,' she said. I'll see you this pm;
okay, no problems?'
He wanted her to stay, but she acted brisk, 'I'm a busy woman, Mr.
Chamcha. Things to do, people to see.'
When she had gone he lay back and smiled for the first time in a long
while. It did not occur to him that his metamorphosis must be continuing,
because he was actually entertaining romantic notions about a black woman;
and before he had time to think such complex thoughts, the blind man next
door began, once again, to speak.
'I have noticed you,' Chamcha heard him say, 'I have noticed you, and
come to appreciate your kindness and understanding.' Saladin realized that
he was making a formal speech of thanks to the empty space where he clearly
believed the physiotherapist was still standing. 'I am not a man who forgets
a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment,
please know that it is remembered, and fondly, too . . .' Chamcha did not
have the courage to call out,
she isn't there, old man, she left some time
back.
He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air
a question: 'I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On
occasion?' Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting
down, heavily, all of a sudden. And finally, after an unbearable pause,
bathos: 'Oh,' the soliloquist bellowed, 'oh, if ever a body suffered . . .
!'
We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought;
clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him.
Once I was lighter,
happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins.
Still no Pamela.
What the hell.
That night, he told the manticore and
the wolf that he was with them, all the way.
The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin's lungs had
been all but emptied of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth
Phillips. It turned out to be a well-organized affair on a pretty large
scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the
detenus,
as the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in the
Detention Centre nearby. Not being one of the grand strategists of the
escape, Chamcha simply waited by his bed as instructed until Hyacinth
brought him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the
clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former
guards. There were many shadowy figures running through the glowing night,
and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could never have imagined, men and women who
were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on occasion, built
partly of brick or stone; there were men with rhinoceros horns instead of
noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly,
silently, to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore
and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by the large holes they had
bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out,
free, going their separate ways, without hope, but also without shame.
Saladin Chamcha and Hyacinth Phillips ran side by side, his goat-hoofs
clip-clopping on the hard pavements:
east
she told him, as he heard his own
footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran, taking
the low roads to London town.
4
umpy Joshi had become Pamela Chamcha's lover by what she afterwards
called 'sheer chance' on the night she learned of her husband's death in the
Bostan
explosion, so that the sound of his old college friend Saladin's
voice speaking from beyond the grave in the middle of the night, uttering
the five gnomic words
sorry, excuse please, wrong number, -
speaking,
moreover, less than two hours after Jumpy and Pamela had made, with the
assistance of two bottles of whisky, the two-backed beast, - put him in a
tight spot. 'Who was
that?'
Pamela, still mostly asleep, with a blackout
mask over her eyes, rolled over to inquire, and he decided to reply, 'Just a
breather, don't worry about it,' which was all very well, except then he had
to do the worrying all by himself, sitting up in bed, naked, and sucking,
for comfort, as he had all his life, the thumb on his right hand.
He was a small person with wire coathanger shoulders and an enormous
capacity for nervous agitation, evidenced by his pale, sunken-eyed face; his
thinning hair - still entirely black and curly - which had been ruffled so
often by his frenzied hands that it no longer took the slightest notice of
brushes or combs, but stuck out every which way and gave its owner the
perpetual air of having just woken up, late, and in a hurry; and his
endearingly high, shy and self-deprecating, but also hiccoughy and
over-excited, giggle; all of which had helped turn his name, Jamshed, into
this
Jumpy
that everybody, even first-time acquaintances, now automatically
used; everybody, that is, except Pamela Chamcha. Saladin's wife, he thought,
sucking away feverishly. - Or widow? - Or, God help me, wife, after all. He
found himself resenting Chamcha. A return from a watery grave: so operatic
an event, in this day and age, seemed almost indecent, an act of bad faith.
He had rushed over to Pamela's place the moment he heard the news, and
found her dry-eyed and composed. She led him into her clutter-lover's study
on whose walls watercolours of rose-gardens hung between clenched-fist
posters reading
Partido Socialista,
photographs of friends and a cluster of
African masks, and as he picked his way across the floor between ashtrays
and the
Voice
newspaper and feminist science-fiction novels she said,
flatly, 'The surprising thing is that when they told me I thought, well,
shrug, his death will actually make a pretty small hole in my life.' Jumpy,
who was close to tears, and bursting with memories, stopped in his tracks
and flapped his arms, looking, in his great shapeless black coat, and with
his pallid, terror-stricken face, like a vampire caught in the unexpected
and hideous light of day. Then he saw the empty whisky bottles. Pamela had
started drinking, she said, some hours back, and since then she had been
going at it steadily, rhythmically, with the dedication of a long-distance
runner. He sat down beside her on her low, squashy sofa-bed, and offered to
act as a pacemaker. 'Whatever you want,' she said, and passed him the
bottle.
Now, sitting up in bed with a thumb instead of a bottle, his secret and
his hangover banging equally painfully inside his head (he had never been a
drinking or a secretive man), Jumpy felt tears coming on once again, and
decided to get up and walk himself around. Where he went was upstairs, to
what Saladin had insisted on calling his 'den', a large loft-space with
skylights and windows looking down on an expanse of communal gardens dotted
with comfortable trees, oak, larch, even the last of the elms, a survivor of
the plague years.
First the elms, now us,
Jumpy reflected.
Maybe the trees
were a warning.
He shook himself to banish such small-hour morbidities, and
perched on the edge of his friend's mahogany desk. Once at a college party
he had perched, just so, on a table soggy with spilled wine and beer next to
an emaciated girl in black lace minidress, purple feather boa and eyelids
like silver helmets, unable to pluck up the courage to say hello. Finally he
did turn to her and stutter out some banality or other; she gave him a look
of absolute contempt and said without moving her black-lacquer lips,
conversation's dead, man.
He had been pretty upset, so upset that he blurted
out,
tell me, why are all the girls in this town so rude?,
and she answered,
without pausing to think,
because most of the boys are like you.
A few
moments later Chamcha came up, reeking of patchouli, wearing a white kurta,
everybody's goddamn cartoon of the mysteries of the East, and the girl left
with him five minutes later. The bastard, Jumpy Joshi thought as the old
bitterness surged back, he had no shame, he was ready to be anything they
wanted to buy, that read-your-palm bedspread-jacket Hare-Krishna dharma-bum,
you wouldn't have caught me dead. That stopped him, that word right there.
Dead. Face it, Jamshed, the girls never went for you, that's the truth, and
the rest is envy. Well, maybe so, he half-conceded, and then again. Maybe
dead, he added, and then again, maybe not.
Chamcha's room struck the sleepless intruder as contrived, and
therefore sad: the caricature of an actor's room full of signed photographs
of colleagues, handbills, framed programmes, production stills, citations,
awards, volumes of movie-star memoirs, a room bought off the peg, by the
yard, an imitation of life, a mask's mask. Novelty items on every surface:
ashtrays in the shape of pianos, china pierrots peeping out from behind a
shelf of books. And everywhere, on the walls, in the movie posters, in the
glow of the lamp borne by bronze Eros, in the mirror shaped like a heart,
oozing up through the blood-red carpet, dripping from the ceiling, Saladin's
need for love. In the theatre everybody gets kissed and everybody is
darling. The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love;
a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.
The desperation there was in him, Jumpy recognized, he'd do anything, put on
any damnfool costume, change into any shape, if it earned him a loving word.
Saladin, who wasn't by any means unsuccessful with women, see above. The
poor stumblebum. Even Pamela, with all her beauty and brightness, hadn't
been enough.
It was clear he'd been getting to be a long way from enough for her.
Somewhere around the bottom of the second whisky bottle she leaned her head
on his shoulder and said boozily, 'You can't imagine the relief of being
with someone with whom I don't have to have a fight every time I express an
opinion. Someone on the side of the goddamn angels.' He waited; after a
pause, there was more. 'Him and his Royal Family, you wouldn't believe.
Cricket, the Houses of Parliament, the Queen. The place never stopped being
a picture postcard to him. You couldn't get him to look at what was really
real.' She closed her eyes and allowed her hand, by accident, to rest on
his. 'He was a real Saladin,' Jumpy said. 'A man with a holy land to
conquer, his England, the one he believed in. You were part of it, too.' She
rolled away from him and stretched out on top of magazines, crumpled balls
of waste paper, mess. 'Part of it? I was bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince
pies, common-sense and me. But I'm really real, too, J.J.; I really really
am.' She reached over to him, pulled him across to where her mouth was
waiting, kissed him with a great un-Pamela-like slurp. 'See what I mean?'
Yes, he saw.
'You should have heard him on the Falklands war,' she said later,
disengaging herself and fiddling with her hair. ' "Pamela, suppose you heard
a noise downstairs in the middle of the night and went to investigate and
found a huge man in the living-room with a shotgun, and he said, Go back
upstairs, what would you do?" I'd go upstairs, I said. "Well, it's like
that. Intruders in the home. It won't do." ' Jumpy noticed her fists had
clenched and her knuckles were bone-white. 'I said, if you must use these
blasted cosy metaphors, then get them right. What it's
like
is if two people
claim they own a house, and one of them is squatting the place, and
then
the
other turns up with the shotgun. That's what it's
like.'
'That's what's
really real,' Jumpy nodded, seriously.
'Right,'
she slapped his knee.
'That's really right, Mr. Real Jam . . . it's really truly like that.
Actually. Another drink.'
She leaned over to the tape deck and pushed a button. Jesus, Jumpy
thought,
Boney M
? Give me a break. For all her tough, race-professional
attitudes, the lady still had a lot to learn about music. Here it came,
boomchickaboom. Then, without warning, he was crying, provoked into real
tears by counterfeit emotion, by a disco-beat imitation of pain. It was the
one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm, 'Super flumina'. King David calling
out across the centuries. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange
land.
'I had to learn the psalms at school,' Pamela Chamcha said, sitting on
the floor, her head leaning against the sofa-bed, her eyes shut tight. By
the river of Babylon, where we sat down, oh oh we wept
... she stopped the
tape, leaned back again, began to recite. 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its cunning; if I do not remember thee, let my
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my
mirth.'
Later, asleep in bed, she dreamed of her convent school, of matins and
evensong, of the chanting of psalms, when Jumpy rushed in and shook her
awake, shouting, 'It's no good, I've got to tell you. He isn't dead.
Saladin: he's bloody well alive.'
She came wide awake at once, plunging her hands into her thick, curly,
hennaed hair, in which the first strands of white were just beginning to be
noticeable; she knelt on the bed, naked, with her hands in her hair, unable
to move, until Jumpy had finished speaking, and then, without warning, she
began to hit out at him, punching him on the chest and arms and shoulders
and even his face, as hard as she could hit. He sat down on the bed beside
her, looking ridiculous in her frilly dressing-gown, while she beat him; he
allowed his body to go loose, to receive the blows, to submit. When she ran
out of punches her body was covered in perspiration and he thought she might
have broken one of his arms. She sat down beside him, panting, and they were
silent.
Her dog entered the bedroom, looking worried, and padded over to offer
her his paw, and to lick at her left leg. Jumpy stirred, cautiously. 'I
thought he got stolen,' he said eventually. Pamela jerked her head for
yes,
but.
The thieves got in touch. I paid the ransom. He now answers to the name
of Glenn. That's okay; I could never pronounce Sher Khan properly, anyway.'
After a while, Jumpy found that he wanted to talk. 'What you did, just
now,' he began.
'Oh, God.'
'No. It's like a thing I once did. Maybe the most sensible thing I ever
did.' In the summer of 1967, he had bullied the 'apolitical' twenty-year-old
Saladin along on an anti-war demonstration. 'Once in your life, Mister
Snoot, I'm going to drag you down to my level.' Harold Wilson was coming to
town, and because of the Labour Government's support of US involvement in
Vietnam, a mass protest had been planned. Chamcha went along, 'out of
curiosity,' he said. 'I want to see how allegedly intelligent people turn
themselves into a mob.'
That day it rained an ocean. The demonstrators in Market Square were
soaked through. Jumpy and Chamcha, swept along by the crowd, found
themselves pushed up against the steps of the town hall;
grandstand view,
Chamcha said with heavy irony. Next to them stood two students disguised as
Russian assassins, in black fedoras, greatcoats and dark glasses, carrying
shoeboxes filled with ink-dipped tomatoes and labelled in large block
letters,
bombs.
Shortly before the Prime Minister's arrival, one of them
tapped a policeman on the shoulder and said: 'Excuse, please. When Mr.
Wilson, self-styled Prime Meenster, conies in long car, kindly request to
wind down weendow so my friend can throw with him the bombs.' The policeman
answered, 'Ho, ho, sir. Very good. Now I'll tell you what. You can throw
eggs at him, sir, 'cause that's all right with me. And you can throw
tomatoes at him, sir, like what you've got there in that box, painted black,
labelled
bombs,
'cause that's all right with me. You throw anything hard at
him, sir, and my mate here'll get you with his gun.' O days of innocence
when the world was young . . . when the car arrived there was a surge in the
crowd and Chamcha and Jumpy were separated. Then Jumpy appeared, climbed on
to the bonnet of Harold Wilson's limousine, and began to jump up and down on
the bonnet, creating large dents, leaping like a wild man to the rhythm of
the crowd's chanting:
We shall fight, we shall win, long live Ho Chi Minh.
'Saladin started yelling at me to get off, partly because the crowd was
full of Special Branch types converging on the limo, but mainly because he
was so damn embarrassed.' But he kept leaping, up higher and down harder,
drenched to the bone, long hair flying: Jumpy the jumper, leaping into the
mythology of those antique years. And Wilson and Marcia cowered in the back
seat.
Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!
At the last possible moment Jumpy took a deep
breath, and dived head-first into a sea of wet and friendly faces; and
vanished. They never caught him: fuzz pigs filth. 'Saladin wouldn't speak to
me for over a week,' Jumpy remembered. 'And when he did, all he said was, "I
hope you realize those cops could have shot you to pieces, but they
didn't.'"
They were still sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. Jumpy
touched Pamela on the forearm. 'I just mean I know how it feels. Wham, bam.
It felt incredible. It felt necessary.'
'Oh, my God,' she said, turning to him. 'Oh, my God, I'm sorry, but
yes, it did.'
In the morning it took an hour to get through to the airline on account
of the volume of calls still being generated by the catastrophe, and then
another twenty-five minutes of insistence -
but he telephoned, it was his
voice -
while at the other end of the phone a woman's voice, professionally
trained to deal with human beings in crisis, understood how she felt and
sympathized with her in this awful moment and remained very patient, but
clearly didn't believe a word she said.
I'm sorry, madam, I don't mean to be
brutal, but the plane broke up in mid-air at thirty thousand feet.
By the
end of the call Pamela Chamcha, normally the most controlled of women, who
locked herself in a bathroom when she wanted to cry, was shrieking down the
line, for God's sake, woman, will you shut up with your little
good-samaritan speeches and listen to what I'm saying? Finally she slammed
down the receiver and rounded on Jumpy Joshi, who saw the expression in her
eyes and spilled the coffee he had been bringing her because his limbs began
to tremble in fright. 'You fucking creep,' she cursed him. 'Still alive, is
he? I suppose he flew down from the sky on fucking
wings
and headed straight
for the nearest phone booth to change out of his fucking Superman costume
and ring the little wife.' They were in the kitchen and Jumpy noticed a
group of kitchen knives attached to a magnetic strip on the wall next to
Pamela's left arm. He opened his mouth to speak, but she wouldn't let him.
'Get out before I do something,' she said. 'I can't believe I fell for it.
You and voices on the phone: I should have fucking known.'
In the early 1970s Jumpy had run a travelling disco out of the back of
his yellow mini-van. He called it Finn's Thumb in honour of the legendary
sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool, another sucker, as Chamcha used to
say. One day Saladin had played a practical joke on Jumpy, by ringing him
up, putting on a vaguely Mediterranean accent, and requesting the services
of the musical Thumb on the island of Skorpios, on behalf of Mrs. Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis, offering a fee of ten thousand dollars and transportation
to Greece, in a private aircraft, for up to six persons. This was a terrible
thing to do to a man as innocent and upright as Jamshed Joshi. 'I need an
hour to think,' he had said, and then fallen into an agony of the soul. When
Saladin rang back an hour later and heard that Jumpy was turning down Mrs.
Onassis's offer for political reasons, he understood that his friend was in
training to be a saint, and it was no good trying to pull his leg. 'Mrs.
Onassis will be broken in the heart for sure,' he had concluded, and Jumpy
had worriedly replied, 'Please tell her it's nothing personal, as a matter
of fact personally I admire her a great deal.'
We have all known one another too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left.
We can hurt each other with memories two decades old.
On the subject of mistakes with voices, she thought as she drove much
too fast down the M4 that afternoon in the old MG hardtop from which she got
a degree of pleasure that was, as she had always cheerfully confessed,
'quite ideologically unsound', -on that subject, I really ought to be more
charitable.
Pamela Chamcha, nee Lovelace, was the possessor of a voice for which,
in many ways, the rest of her life had been an effort to compensate. It was
a voice composed of tweeds, headscarves, summer pudding, hockey-sticks,
thatched houses, saddle-soap, house-parties, nuns, family pews, large dogs
and philistinism, and in spite of all her attempts to reduce its volume it
was loud as a dinner-jacketed drunk throwing bread rolls in a Club. It had
been the tragedy of her younger days that thanks to this voice she had been
endlessly pursued by the gentlemen farmers and debs' delights and somethings
in the city whom she despised with all her heart, while the greenies and
peacemarchers and world-changers with whom she instinctively felt at home
treated her with deep suspicion, bordering on resentment. How could one be
on the side of the angels
when one sounded like a no-goodnik every time one
moved one's lips? Accelerating past Reading, Pamela gritted her teeth. One
of the reasons she had decided to
admit it
end her marriage before fate did
it for her was that she had woken up one day and realized that Chamcha was
not in love with her at all, but with that voice stinking of Yorkshire
pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty, rubicund voice of ye olde
dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit. It had been a
marriage of crossed purposes, each of them rushing towards the very thing
from which the other was in flight.
No survivors.
And in the middle of the night, Jumpy the idiot and his
stupid false alarm. She was so shaken up by it that she hadn't even got
round to being shaken up by having gone to bed with Jumpy and made love in
what
admit it
had been a pretty satisfying fashion,
spare me your
nonchalance,
she rebuked herself,
when did you last have so much fun.
She
had a lot to deal with and so here she was, dealing with it by running away
as fast as she could go. A few days of pampering oneself in an expensive
country hotel and the world may begin to seem less like a fucking hellhole.
Therapy by luxury: okayokay, she allowed, I know: I'm
reverting to class.
Fuck it; watch me go. If you've got any objections, blow them out of your
ass. Arse. Ass.
One hundred miles an hour past Swindon, and the weather turned nasty.
Sudden, dark clouds, lightning, heavy rain; she kept her foot on the
accelerator.
No survivors.
People were always dying on her, leaving her with
a mouth full of words and nobody to spit them at. Her father the classical
scholar who could make puns in ancient Greek and from whom she inherited the
Voice, her legacy and curse; and her mother who pined for him during the
War, when he was a Pathfinder pilot, obliged to fly home from Germany one
hundred and eleven times in a slow aeroplane through a night which his own
flares had just illuminated for the benefit of the bombers, - and who vowed,
when he returned with the noise of the ack-ack in his ears, that she would
never leave him, - and so followed him everywhere, into the slow hollow of
depression from which he never really emerged, - and into debt, because he
didn't have the face for poker and used her money when he ran out of his
own, - and at last to the top of a tall building, where they found their way
at last. Pamela never forgave them, especially for making it impossible for
her to tell them of her unforgiveness. To get her own back, she set about
rejecting everything of them that remained within her. Her brains, for
example: she refused to go to college. And because she could not shake off
her voice, she made it speak ideas which her conservative suicides of
parents would have anathematized. She married an Indian. And, because he
turned out to be too much like them, would have left him. Had decided to
leave. When, once again, she was cheated by a death.
She was overtaking a frozen-food road train, blinded by the spray
kicked up by its wheels, when she hit the expanse of water that had been
waiting for her in a slight declivity, and then the MG was aquaplaning at
terrifying speed, swerving out of the fast lane and spinning round so that
she saw the headlights of the road train staring at her like the eyes of the
exterminating angel, Azrael. 'Curtains,' she thought; but her car swung and
skidded out of the path of the juggernaut, slewing right across all three
lanes of the motorway, all of them miraculously empty, and coming to rest
with rather less of a thump than one might have expected against the crash
barrier at the edge of the hard shoulder, after spinning through a further
one hundred and eighty degrees to face, once again, into the west, where
with all the corny timing of real life, the sun was breaking up the storm.
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one. That night, in
an oak-panelled dining-room decorated with medieval flags, Pamela Chamcha in
her most dazzling gown ate venison and drank a bottle of Chateau Talbot at a
table heavy with silver and crystal, celebrating a new beginning, an escape
from the jaws of, a fresh start, to be born again first you have to: well,
almost, anyway. Under the lascivious eyes of Americans and salesmen she ate
and drank alone, retiring early to a princess's bedroom in a stone tower to
take a long bath and watch old movies on television. In the aftermath of her
brush with death she felt the past dropping away from her: her adolescence,
for example, in the care of her wicked uncle Harry Higham, who lived in a
seventeenth-century manor house once owned by a distant relative, Matthew
Hopkins, the Witchfinder-General, who had named it
Gremlins
in, no doubt, a
macabre attempt at humour. Remembering Mr. Justice Higham in order to forget
him, she murmured to the absent Jumpy that she, too, had her Vietnam story.
After the first big Grosvenor Square demonstration at which many people
threw marbles under the feet of charging police horses, there occurred the
one and only instance in British law in which the marble was deemed to be a
lethal weapon, and young persons were jailed, even deported, for possessing
the small glass spheres. The presiding judge in the case of the Grosvenor
Marbles was this same Henry (thereafter known as 'Hang'em') Higham, and to
be his niece had been a further burden for a young woman already weighed
down by her right-wing voice. Now, warm in bed in her temporary castle,
Pamela Chamcha rid herself of this old demon,
goodbye, Hang'em, I've no more
time for you;
and of her parents' ghosts; and prepared to be free of the
most recent ghost of all.
Sipping cognac, Pamela watched vampires on TV and allowed herself to
take pleasure in, well, in herself. Had she not invented herself in her own
image? I am that I am, she toasted herself in Napoleon brandy. I work in a
community relations council in the borough of Brickhall, London, NEI; deputy
community relations officer and damn good at it, ifisaysomyself. Cheers! We
just elected our first black Chair and all the votes cast against him were
white. Down the hatch! Last week a respected Asian street trader, for whom
MPs of all parties had interceded, was deported after eighteen years in
Britain because, fifteen years ago, he posted a certain form forty-eight
hours late. Chin-chin! Next week in Brickhall Magistrates' Court the police
will be trying to fit up a fifty-year-old Nigerian woman, accusing her of
assault, having previously beaten her senseless. Skol! This is my head: see
it? What I call my job: bashing my head against Brickhall.
Saladin was dead and she was alive.
She drank to that. There were things I was waiting to tell you,
Saladin. Some big things: about the new high-rise office building in
Brickhall High Street, across from McDonald's; - they built it to be
perfectly sound-proof, but the workers were so disturbed by the silence that
now they play tapes of white noise on the tannoy system. - You'd have liked
that, eh? - And about this Parsi woman I know, Bapsy, that's her name, she
lived in Germany for a while and fell in love with a Turk. - Trouble was,
the only language they had in common was German; now Bapsy has forgotten
almost all she knew, while his gets better and better; he writes her
increasingly poetic letters and she can hardly reply in nursery rhyme. -
Love dying, because of an inequality of language, what do you think of that?
- Love dying. There's a subject for us, eh? Saladin? What do you say?
And a couple of tiny little things. There's a killer on the loose in my
patch, specializes in killing old women; so don't worry, I'm safe. Plenty
older than me.
One more thing: I'm leaving you. It's over. We're through.
I could never say anything to you, not really, not the least thing. If
I said you were putting on weight you'd yell for an hour, as if it would
change what you saw in the mirror, what the tightness of your own trousers
was telling you. You interrupted me in public. People noticed it, what you
thought of me. I forgave you, that was my fault; I could see the centre of
you, that question so frightful that you had to protect it with all that
posturing certainty. That empty space.
Goodbye, Saladin. She drained her glass and set it down beside her. The
returning rain knocked at her leaded windows; she drew her curtains shut and
turned out the light.
Lying there, drifting towards sleep, she thought of the last thing she
needed to tell her late husband. 'In bed,' the words came, 'you never seemed
interested in me; not in my pleasure, what I needed, not really ever. I came
to think you wanted, not a lover. A servant.' There. Now rest in peace.
She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. 'Things are ending,'
he told her. 'This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been
quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of
the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls.'
She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed,
that there was no point telling him now.
After Pamela Chamcha threw him out, Jumpy Joshi went over to Mr
Sufyan's Shaandaar Cafe in Brickhall High Street and sat there trying to
decide if he was a fool. It was early in the day, so the place was almost
empty, apart from a fat lady buying a box of pista barfi and jalebis, a
couple of bachelor garment workers drinking chaloo chai and an elderly
Polish woman from the old days when it was the Jews who ran the sweatshops
round here, who sat all day in a corner with two vegetable samosas, one puri
and a glass of milk, announcing to everyone who came in that she was only
there because 'it was next best to kosher and today you must do the best you
can'. Jumpy sat down with his coffee beneath the lurid painting of a
bare-breasted myth-woman with several heads and wisps of clouds obscuring
her nipples, done life-size in salmon pink, neon-green and gold, and because
the rush hadn't started yet Mr. Sufyan noticed he was down in the dumps.
'Hey, Saint Jumpy,' he sang out, 'why you bringing your bad weather
into my place? This country isn't full enough of clouds?'
Jumpy blushed as Sufyan bounced over to him, his little white cap of
devotion pinned in place as usual, the moustache-less beard hennaed red
after its owner's recent pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad Sufyan was a burly,
thick-forearmed fellow with a belly on him, as godly and as unfanatic a
believer as you could meet, and Joshi thought of him as a sort of elder
relative. 'Listen, Uncle,' he said when the cafe proprietor was standing
over him, 'you think I'm a real idiot or what?'
'You ever make any money?' Sufyan asked.
'Not me, Uncle.'
'Ever do any business? Import-export? Off-licence? Corner shop?'
'I never understood figures.'
'And where your family members are?'
'I've got no family, Uncle. There's only me.'
'Then you must be praying to God continually for guidance in your
loneliness?'
'You know me, Uncle. I don't pray.'
'No question about it,' Sufyan concluded. 'You're an even bigger fool
than you know.'
'Thanks, Uncle,' Jumpy said, finishing his coffee. 'You've been a great
help.'
Sufyan, knowing that the affection in his teasing was cheering the
other man up in spite of his long face, called across to the light-skinned,
blue-eyed Asian man who had just come in wearing a snappy check overcoat
with extra-wide lapels. 'You, Hanif Johnson,' he called out, 'come here and
solve a mystery. 'Johnson, a smart lawyer and local boy made good, who
maintained an office above the Shaandaar Cafe, tore himself away from
Sufyan's two beautiful daughters and headed over to Jumpy's table. 'You
explain this fellow,' Sufyan said. 'Beats me. Doesn't drink, thinks of money
like a disease, owns maybe two shirts and no VCR, forty years old and isn't
married, works for two pice in the sports centre teaching martial arts and
what-all, lives on air, behaves like a rishi or pir but doesn't have any
faith, going nowhere but looks like he knows some secret. All this and a
college education, you work it out.'
Hanif Johnson punched Jumpy on the shoulder. 'He hears voices,' he
said. Sufyan threw up his hands in mock amazement. 'Voices, oop-baba! Voices
from where? Telephone? Sky? Sony Walkman hidden in his coat?'
'Inner voices,' Hanif said solemnly. 'Upstairs on his desk there's a
piece of paper with some verses written on it. And a title:
The River of
Blood.'
Jumpy jumped, knocking over his empty cup. 'I'll kill you,' he shouted
at Hanif, who skipped quickly across the room, singing out, 'We got a poet
in our midst, Sufyan Sahib. Treat with respect. Handle with care. He says a
street is a river and we are the flow; humanity is a river of blood, that's
the poet's point. Also the individual human being,' he broke off to run
around to the far side of an eight-seater table as Jumpy came after him,
blushing furiously, flapping his arms. 'In our very bodies, does the river
of blood not flow?'
Like the Roman,
the ferrety Enoch Powell had said, J
seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood.
Reclaim the metaphor,
Jumpy Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use. 'This is
like rape,' he pleaded with Hanif. 'For God's sake, stop.'
'Voices that one hears are outside, but,' the cafe proprietor was
musing. 'Joan of Arc, na. Or that what's his name with the cat: Turn-again
Whittington. But with such voices one becomes great, or rich at least. This
one however is not great, and poor.'
'Enough.' Jumpy held both arms above his head, grinning without really
wanting to. 'I surrender.'
For three days after that, in spite of all the efforts of Mr. Sufyan,
Mrs. Sufyan, their daughters Mishal and Anahita, and the lawyer Hanif
Johnson, Jumpy Joshi was not really himself, 'More a Dumpy than a Jumpy,' as
Sufyan said. He went about his business, at the youth clubs, at the offices
of the film co-operative to which he belonged, and in the streets,
distributing leaflets, selling certain newspapers, hanging out; but his step
was heavy as he went his way. Then, on the fourth evening, the telephone
rang behind the counter of the Shaandaar Cafe.
'Mr. Jamshed Joshi,' Anahita Sufyan carolled, doing her imitation of an
upper-class English accent. 'Will Mr. Joshi please come to the instrument?
There is a personal call.'
Her father took one look at the joy bursting out on Jumpy's face and
murmured softly to his wife, 'Mrs, the voice this boy is wanting to hear is
not inner by any manner of means.'
The impossible thing came between Pamela and Jamshed after they had
spent seven days making love to one another with inexhaustible enthusiasm,
infinite tenderness and such freshness of spirit that you'd have thought the
procedure had only just been invented. For seven days they remained
undressed with the central heating turned high, and pretended to be tropical
lovers in some hot bright country to the south. Jamshed, who had always been
clumsy with women, told Pamela that he had not felt so wonderful since the
day in his eighteenth year when he had finally learned how to ride a
bicycle. The moment the words were out he became afraid that he had spoiled
everything, that this comparison of the great love of his life to the
rickety bike of his student days would be taken for the insult it undeniably
was; but he needn't have worried, because Pamela kissed him on the mouth and
thanked him for saying the most beautiful thing any man had ever said to any
woman. At this point he understood that he could do no wrong, and for the
first time in his life he began to feel genuinely safe, safe as houses, safe
as a human being who is loved; and so did Pamela Chamcha.
On the seventh night they were awakened from dreamless sleep by the
unmistakable sound of somebody trying to break into the house. 'I've got a
hockey-stick under my bed,' Pamela whispered, terrified. 'Give it to me,'
Jumpy, who was equally scared, hissed back. 'I'm coming with you,' quaked
Pamela, and Jumpy quavered, 'Oh, no you don't.' In the end they both crept
downstairs, each wearing one of Pamela's frilly dressing-gowns, each with a
hand on the hockey-stick that neither felt brave enough to use. Suppose it's
a man with a shotgun, Pamela found herself thinking, a man with a shotgun
saying, Go back upstairs . . . They reached the foot of the stairs. Somebody
turned on the lights.
Pamela and Jumpy screamed in unison, dropped the hockey-stick and ran
upstairs as fast as they could go; while down in the front hall, standing
brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed
in order to turn the knob of the tongue-and-groove lock (Pamela in the
throes of her passion had forgotten to use the security locks), was a figure
out of a nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice
and blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of
a giant goat, a man's torso covered in goat's hair, human arms, and a horned
but otherwise human head covered in muck and grime and the beginnings of a
beard. Alone and unobserved, the impossible thing pitched forward on to the
floor and lay still.
Upstairs, at the very top of the house, that is to say in Saladin's
'den', Mrs. Pamela Chamcha was writhing in her lover's arms, crying her
heart out, and bawling at the top of her voice: 'It isn't true. My husband
exploded. No survivors. Do you hear me? I am the widow Chamcha whose spouse
is beastly dead.'
5
r. Gibreel Farishta on the railway train to London was once again
seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him
for his loss of faith by driving him insane. He had seated himself by the
window in a first-class non-smoking compartment, with his back to the engine
because unfortunately another fellow was already in the other place, and
jamming his trilby down on his head he sat with his fists deep in
scarlet-lined gabardine and panicked. The terror of losing his mind to a
paradox, of being unmade by what he no longer believed existed, of turning
in his madness into the avatar of a chimerical archangel, was so big in him
that it was impossible to look at it for long; yet how else was he to
account for the miracles, metamorphoses and apparitions of recent days?
'It's a straight choice,' he trembled silently. 'It's A, I'm off my head, or
B, baba, somebody went and changed the rules.'
Now, however, there was the comforting cocoon of this railway
compartment in which the miraculous was reassuringly absent, the arm-rests
were frayed, the reading light over his shoulder didn't work, the mirror was
missing from its frame, and then there were the regulations: the little
circular red-and-white signs forbidding smoking, the stickers penalizing the
improper use of the chain, the arrows indicating the points to which - and
not beyond! - it was permitted to open the little sliding windows. Gibreel
paid a visit to the toilet and here, too, a small series of prohibitions and
instructions gladdened his heart. By the time the conductor arrived with the
authority of his crescent-cutting ticket-punch, Gibreel had been somewhat
soothed by these manifestations of law, and began to perk up and invent
rationalizations. He had had a lucky escape from death, a subsequent
delirium of some sort, and now, restored to himself, could expect the
threads of his old life - that is, his old new life, the new life he had
planned before the er interruption - to be picked up again. As the train
carried him further and further away from the twilight zone of his arrival
and subsequent mysterious captivity, bearing him along the happy
predictability of parallel metal lines, he felt the pull of the great city
beginning to work its magic on him, and his old gift of hope reasserted
itself, his talent for embracing renewal, for blinding himself to past
hardships so that the future could come into view. He sprang up from his
seat and thumped down on the opposite side of the compartment, with his face
symbolically towards London, even though it meant giving up the window. What
did he care for windows? All the London he wanted was right there, in his
mind's eye. He spoke her name aloud: 'Alleluia.'
'Alleluia, brother,' the compartment's only other occupant affirmed.
'Hosanna, my good sir, and amen.'
'Although I must add, sir, that my beliefs are strictly
non-denominational,' the stranger continued. 'Had you said "Lailaha", I
would gladly have responded with a full-throated "illallah".'
Gibreel realized that his move across the compartment and his
inadvertent taking of Allie's unusual name had been mistaken by his
companion for overtures both social and theological. 'John Maslama,' the
fellow cried, snapping a card out of a little crocodile-skin case and
pressing it upon Gibreel. 'Personally, I follow my own variant of the
universal faith invented by the Emperor Akbar. God, I would say, is
something akin to the Music of the Spheres.'
It was plain that Mr. Maslama was bursting with words, and that, now
that he had popped, there was nothing for it but to sit it out, to permit
the torrent to run its orotund course. As the fellow had the build of a
prize-fighter, it seemed inadvisable to irritate him. In his eyes Farishta
spotted the glint of the True Believer, a light which, until recently, he
had seen in his own shaving-mirror every day.
'I have done well for myself, sir,' Maslama was boasting in his
well-modulated Oxford drawl. 'For a brown man, exceptionally well,
considering the quiddity of the circumstances in which we live; as I hope
you will allow.' With a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand,
he indicated the opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his
three-piece pin-stripe, the gold watch with its fob and chain, the Italian
shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled links at his starched white cuffs.
Above this costume of an English milord there stood a head of startling
size, covered with thick, slicked-down hair, and sprouting implausibly
luxuriant eyebrows beneath which blazed the ferocious eyes of which Gibreel
had already taken careful note. 'Pretty fancy,' Gibreel now conceded, some
response being clearly required. Maslama nodded. 'I have always tended,' he
admitted, 'towards the ornate.'
He had made what he called his
first pile
producing advertising
jingles, 'that ol' devil music', leading women into lingerie and lip-gloss
and men into temptation. Now he owned record stores all over town, a
successful nightclub called Hot Wax, and a store full of gleaming musical
instruments that was his special pride and joy. He was an Indian from
Guyana, 'but there's nothing left in that place, sir. People are leaving it
faster than planes can fly.' He had made good in quick time, 'by the grace
of God Almighty. I'm a regular Sunday man, sir; I confess to a weakness for
the English Hymnal, and I sing to raise the roof.'
The autobiography was concluded with a brief mention of the existence
of a wife and some dozen children. Gibreel offered his congratulations and
hoped for silence, but now Maslama dropped his bombshell. 'You don't need to
tell me about yourself,' he said jovially. 'Naturally I know who you are,
even if one does not expect to see such a personage on the
Eastbourne-Victoria line.' He winked leeringly and placed a finger alongside
his nose. 'Mum's the word. I respect a man's privacy, no question about it;
no question at all.'
'I? Who am I?' Gibreel was startled into absurdity. The other nodded
weightily, his eyebrows waving like soft antlers. 'The prize question, in my
opinion. These are problematic times, sir, for a moral man. When a man is
unsure of his essence, how may he know if he be good or bad? But you are
finding me tedious. I answer my own questions by my faith in It, sir,' -
here Maslama pointed to the ceiling of the railway compartment - 'and of
course you are not in the least confused about your identity, for you are
the famous, the may I say legendary Mr. Gibreel Farishta, star of screen
and, increasingly, I'm sorry to add, of pirate video; my twelve children,
one wife and I are all long-standing, unreserved admirers of your divine
heroics.' He grabbed, and pumped Gibreel's right hand.
'Tending as I do towards the pantheistic view,' Maslama thundered on,
'my own sympathy for your work arises out of your willingness to portray
deities of every conceivable water. You, sir, are a rainbow coalition of the
celestial; a walking United Nations of gods! You are, in short, the future.
Permit me to salute you.' He was beginning to give off the unmistakable
odour of the genuine crazy, and even though he had not yet said or done
anything beyond the merely idiosyncratic, Gibreel was getting alarmed and
measuring the distance to the door with anxious little glances. 'I incline,
sir,' Maslama was saying, 'towards the opinion that whatever name one calls
It by is no more than a code; a cypher, Mr. Farishta, behind which the true
name lies concealed.'
Gibreel remained silent, and Maslama, making no attempt to hide his
disappointment, was obliged to speak for him. 'What is that true name, I
hear you inquire,' he said, and then Gibreel knew he was right; the man was
a full-fledged lunatic, and his autobiography was very likely as much of a
concoction as his 'faith'. Fictions were walking around wherever he went,
Gibreel reflected, fictions masquerading as real human beings. 'I have
brought him upon me,' he accused himself. 'By fearing for my own sanity I
have brought forth, from God knows what dark recess, this voluble and maybe
dangerous nut.'
'You don't know it!' Maslama yelled suddenly, jumping to his feet.
'Charlatan! Poser! Fake! You claim to be the screen immortal, avatar of a
hundred and one gods, and you haven't a
foggy!
How is it possible that I, a
poor boy made good from Bartica on the Essequibo, can know such things while
Gibreel Farishta does not? Phoney! Phooey to you!'
Gibreel got to his feet, but the other was filling almost all the
available standing room, and he, Gibreel, had to lean over awkwardly to one
side to escape Maslama's windmilling arms, one of which knocked off his grey
trilby. At once Maslama's mouth fell open. He seemed to shrink several
inches, and after a few frozen moments, he fell to his knees with a thud.
What's he doing down there, Gibreel wondered, picking up my hat? But
the madman was begging for forgiveness. 'I never doubted you would come,' he
was saying. 'Pardon my clumsy rage.' The train entered a tunnel, and Gibreel
saw that they were surrounded by a warm golden light that was coming from a
point just behind his head. In the glass of the sliding door, he saw the
reflection of the halo around his hair.
Maslama was struggling with his shoelaces. 'All my life, sir, I knew I
had been chosen,' he was saying in a voice as humble as it had earlier been
menacing. 'Even as a child in Bartica, I knew.' He pulled off his right shoe
and began to roll down his sock. 'I was given,' he said, 'a sign.' The sock
was removed, revealing what looked to be a perfectly ordinary, if outsize,
foot. Then Gibreel counted and counted again, from one to six. 'The same on
the other foot,' Maslama said proudly. 'I never doubted the meaning for a
minute.' He was the self-appointed helpmate of the Lord, the sixth toe on
the foot of the Universal Thing. Something was badly amiss with the
spiritual life of the planet, thought Gibreel Farishta. Too many demons
inside people claiming to believe in God.
The train emerged from the tunnel. Gibreel took a decision. 'Stand,
six-toed John,' he intoned in his best Hindi movie manner. 'Maslama, arise.'
The other scrambled to his feet and stood pulling at his fingers, his
head bowed. 'What I want to know, sir,' he mumbled, 'is, which is it to be?
Annihilation or salvation? Why have you returned?'
Gibreel thought rapidly. 'It is for judging,' he finally answered.
'Facts in the case must be sifted, due weight given pro and contra. Here it
is the human race that is the undertrial, and it is a defendant with a
rotten record: a history-sheeter, a bad egg. Careful evaluations must be
made. For the present, verdict is reserved; will be promulgated in due
course. In the meantime, my presence must remain a secret, for vital
security reasons.' He put his hat back on his head, feeling pleased with
himself.
Maslama was nodding furiously. 'You can depend on me,' he promised.
'I'm a man who respects a person's privacy. Mum' -for the second time! - 'is
the word.'
Gibreel fled the compartment with the lunatic's hymns in hot pursuit.
As he rushed to the far end of the train Maslama's paeans remained faintly
audible behind him. 'Alleluia! Alleluia!' Apparently his new disciple had
launched into selections from Handel's
Messiah.
However: Gibreel wasn't followed, and there was, fortunately, a
first-class carriage at the rear of the train, too. This one was of
open-plan design, with comfortable orange seats arranged in fours around
tables, and Gibreel settled down by a window, staring towards London, with
his chest thumping and his hat jammed down on his head. He was trying to
come to terms with the undeniable fact of the halo, and failing to do so,
because what with the derangement of John Maslama behind him and the
excitement of Alleluia Cone ahead it was hard to get his thoughts straight.
Then to his despair Mrs. Rekha Merchant floated up alongside his window,
sitting on her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to the snowstorm that
was building up out there and making England look like a television set
after the day's programmes end. She gave him a little wave and he felt hope
ebbing from him. Retribution on a levitating rug: he closed his eyes and
concentrated on trying not to shake.
'I know what a ghost is,' Allie Cone said to a classroom of teenage
girls whose faces were illuminated by the soft inner light of worship. 'In
the high Himalayas it is often the case that climbers find themselves being
accompanied by the ghosts of those who failed in the attempt, or the sadder,
but also prouder, ghosts of those who succeeded in reaching the summit, only
to perish on the way down.'
Outside, in the Fields, the snow was settling on the high, bare trees,
and on the flat expanse of the park. Between the low, dark snow-clouds and
the white-carpeted city the light was a dirty yellow colour, a narrow, foggy
light that dulled the heart and made it impossible to dream. Up
there,
Allie
remembered, up there at eight thousand metres, the light was of such clarity
that it seemed to resonate, to sing, like music. Here on the flat earth the
light, too, was flat and earthbound. Here nothing flew, the sedge was
withered, and no birds sang. Soon it would be dark.
'Ms Cone?' The girls' hands, waving in the air, drew her back into the
classroom. 'Ghosts, miss? Straight up?' 'You're pulling our legs, right?'
Scepticism wrestled with adoration in their faces. She knew the question
they really wanted to ask, and probably would not: the question of the
miracle of her skin. She had heard them whispering excitedly as she entered
the classroom, 's true, look, how
pale,
's incredible. Alleluia Cone, whose
iciness could resist the heat of the eight-thousand-metre sun. Allie the
snow maiden, the icequeen.
Miss, how come you never get a tan?
When she went
up Everest with the triumphant Collingwood expedition, the papers called
them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though she was no Disneyish cutie, her
full lips pale rather than rose-red, her hair ice-blonde instead of black,
her eyes not innocently wide but narrowed, out of habit, against the high
snow-glare. A memory of Gibreel Farishta welled up, catching her unawares:
Gibreel at some point during their three and a half days, booming with his
usual foot-in-mouth lack of restraint, 'Baby, you're no iceberg, whatever
they say. You're a passionate lady, bibi. Hot, like a kachori.' He had
pretended to blow on scalded fingertips, and shook his hand for emphasis:
O,
too hot. O, throw water.
Gibreel Farishta. She controlled herself: Hi ho,
it's off to work.
'Ghosts,' she repeated firmly. 'On the Everest climb, after I came
through the ice-fall, I saw a man sitting on an outcrop in the lotus
position, with his eyes shut and a tartan tam-o'-shanter on his head,
chanting the old mantra: om mani padme hum.' She had guessed at once, from
his archaic clothing and surprising behaviour, that this was the spectre of
Maurice Wilson, the yogi who had prepared for a solo ascent of Everest, back
in 1934, by starving himself for three weeks in order to cement so deep a
union between his body and soul that the mountain would be too weak to tear
them apart. He had gone up in a light aircraft as high as it would take him,
crash-landed deliberately in a snow-field, headed upwards, and never
returned. Wilson opened his eyes as Allie approached, and nodded lightly in
greeting. He strolled beside her for the rest of that day, or hung in the
air while she worked her way up a face. Once he belly-flopped into the snow
of a sharp incline and glided upwards as if he were riding on an invisible
anti-gravity toboggan. Allie had found herself behaving quite naturally, as
if she'd just bumped into an old acquaintance, for reasons afterwards
obscure to her.
Wilson chattered on a fair bit - 'Don't get a lot of company these
days, one way and another' - and expressed, among other things, his deep
irritation at having had his body discovered by the Chinese expedition of
1960. 'Little yellow buggers actually had the gall, the sheer face, to film
my corpse.' Alleluia Cone was struck by the bright, yellow-and-black tartan
of his immaculate knickerbockers. All this she told the girls at Brickhall
Fields Girls' School, who had written so many letters pleading for her to
address them that she had not been able to refuse. 'You've got to,' they
pleaded in writing. 'You even live here.' From the window of the classroom
she could see her flat across the park, just visible through the thickening
fall of snow.
What she did not tell the class was this: as Maurice Wilson's ghost
described, in patient detail, his own ascent, and also his posthumous
discoveries, for example the slow, circuitous, infinitely delicate and
invariably unproductive mating ritual of the yeti, which he had witnessed
recently on the South Col, - so it occurred to her that her vision of the
eccentric of 1934, the first human being ever to attempt to scale Everest on
his own, a sort of abominable snowman himself, had been no accident, but a
kind of signpost, a declaration of kinship. A prophecy of the future,
perhaps, for it was at that moment that her secret dream was born, the
impossible thing: the dream of the unaccompanied climb. It was possible,
also, that Maurice Wilson was the angel of her death.
'I wanted to talk about ghosts,' she was saying, 'because most
mountaineers, when they come down from the peaks, grow embarrassed and leave
these stories out of their accounts. But they do exist, I have to admit it,
even though I'm the type who's always kept her feet on solid ground.'
That was a laugh. Her feet. Even before the ascent of Everest she had
begun to suffer from shooting pains, and was informed by her general
practitioner, a no-nonsense Bombay woman called Dr Mistry, that she was
suffering from fallen arches. 'In common parlance, flat feet.' Her arches,
always weak, had been further weakened by years of wearing sneakers and
other unsuitable shoes. Dr Mistry couldn't recommend much: toe-clenching
exercises, running upstairs barefoot, sensible footwear. 'You're young
enough,' she said. 'If you take care, you'll live. If not, you'll be a
cripple at forty.' When Gibreel - damn it! - heard that she had climbed
Everest with spears in her feet he took to calling her his silkie. He had
read a Bumper Book of fairy-tales in which he found the story of the
sea-woman who left the ocean and took on human form for the sake of the man
she loved. She had feet instead of fins, but every step she took was an
agony, as if she were walking over broken glass; yet she went on walking,
forward, away from the sea and over land. You did it for a bloody mountain,
he said. Would you do it for a man?
She had concealed her foot-ache from her fellow-mountaineers because
the lure of Everest had been so overwhelming. But these days the pain was
still there, and growing, if anything, worse. Chance, a congenital weakness,
was proving to be her footbinder. Adventure's end, Allie thought; betrayed
by my feet. The image of footbinding stayed with her.
Goddamn Chinese,
she
mused, echoing Wilson's ghost.
'Life is so easy for some people,' she had wept into Gibreel Farishta's
arms. 'Why don't
their
blasted feet give out?' He had kissed her forehead.
For you, it may always be a struggle,' he said. 'You want it too damn much.'
The class was waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of
phantoms. They wanted
the
story, her story. They wanted to stand on the
mountain-top.
Do you know how it feels,
she wanted to ask them,
to have the
whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long? Do you
know what it's like when the only direction is down?
'I was in the second
pair with Sherpa Pemba,' she said. The weather was perfect, perfect. So
clear you felt you could look right through the sky into whatever lay
beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to Pemba.
Conditions are holding and we can go. Pemba grew very serious, quite a
change, because he was one of the expedition clowns. He had never been to
the summit before, either. At that stage I had no plans to go without
oxygen, but when I saw that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay, me too. It
was a stupid whim, unprofessional, really, but I suddenly wanted to be a
woman sitting on top of that bastard mountain, a human being, not a
breathing machine. Pemba said, Allie Bibi, don't do, but I just started up.
In a while we passed the others coming down and I could see the wonderful
thing in their eyes. They were so high, possessed of such an exaltation,
that they didn't even notice I wasn't wearing the oxygen equipment. Be
careful, they shouted over to us, Look out for the angels. Pemba had fallen
into a good breathing pattern and I fell into step with it, breathing in
with his in, out with his out. I could feel something lifting off the top of
my head and I was grinning, just grinning from ear to ear, and when Pemba
looked my way I could see he was doing the same. It looked like a grimace,
like pain, but it was just foolish joy.' She was a woman who had been
brought to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul, by the hard physical
labour of hauling herself up an icebound height of rock. 'At that moment,'
she told the girls, who were climbing beside her every step of the way, 'I
believed it all: that the universe has a sound, that you can lift a veil and
see the face of God, everything. I saw the Himalayas stretching below me and
that was God's face, too. Pemba must have seen something in my expression
that bothered him because he called across, Look out, Allie Bibi, the
height. I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up to the top,
and then we were there, with the ground falling away on every side. Such
light; the universe purified into light. I wanted to tear off my clothes and
let it soak into my skin.' Not a titter from the class; they were dancing
naked with her on the roof of the world. 'Then the visions began, the
rainbows looping and dancing in the sky, the radiance pouring down like a
waterfall from the sun, and there were angels, the others hadn't been
joking. I saw them and so did Sherpa Pemba. We were on our knees by then.
His pupils looked pure white and so did mine, I'm sure. We would probably
have died there, I'm sure, snow-blind and mountain-foolish, but then I heard
a noise, a loud, sharp report, like a gun. That snapped me out of it. I had
to yell at Pem until he, too, shook himself and we started down. The weather
was changing rapidly; a blizzard was on the way. The air was heavy now,
heaviness instead of that light, that lightness. We just made it to the
meeting point and the four of us piled into the little tent at Camp Six,
twenty-seven thousand feet. You don't talk much up there. We all had our
Everests to re-climb, over and over, all night. But at some point I asked:
'What was that noise? Did anyone fire a gun?' They looked at me as if I was
touched. Who'd do such a damnfool thing at this altitude, they said, and
anyway, Allie, you know damn well there isn't a gun anywhere on the
mountain. They were right, of course, but I heard it, I know that much: wham
bam, shot and echo. That's it,' she ended abruptly. 'The end. Story of my
life.' She picked up a silver-headed cane and prepared to depart. The
teacher, Mrs. Bury, came forward to utter the usual platitudes. But the
girls were not to be denied. 'So what was it, then, Allie?' they insisted;
and she, looking suddenly ten years older than her thirty-three, shrugged.
'Can't say,' she told them. 'Maybe it was Maurice Wilson's ghost.'
She left the classroom, leaning heavily on her stick.
The city - Proper London, yaar, no bloody
less! -
was dressed in white,
like a mourner at a funeral. - Whose bloody funeral, mister, Gibreel
Farishta asked himself wildly, not mine, I bloody
hope
and
trust.
When the
train pulled into Victoria station he plunged out without waiting for it to
come to a complete halt, turned his ankle and went sprawling beneath the
baggage trolleys and sneers of the waiting Londoners, clinging, as he fell,
on to his increasingly battered hat. Rekha Merchant was nowhere to be seen,
and seizing the moment Gibreel ran through the scattering crowd like a man
possessed, only to find her by the ticket barrier, floating patiently on her
carpet, invisible to all eyes but his own, three feet off the ground.
'What do you want,' he burst out, 'what's your business with me?' To
watch you fall,' she instantly replied. 'Look around,' she added, 'I've
already made you look like a pretty big fool.'
People were clearing a space around Gibreel, the wild man in an outsize
overcoat and trampy hat,
that man's talking to himself,
a child's voice
said, and its mother answered
shh, dear, it's wicked to mock the afflicted.
Welcome to London. Gibreel Farishta rushed towards the stairs leading down
towards the Tube. Rekha on her carpet let him go.
But when he arrived in a great rush at the northbound platform of the
Victoria Line he saw her again. This time she was a colour photograph in a
48-sheet advertising poster on the wall across the track, advertising the
merits of the international direct-dialling system.
Send your voice on a
magic-carpet ride to India,
she advised.
No djinns or lamps required.
He
gave a loud cry, once again causing his fellow-travellers to doubt his
sanity, and fled over to the southbound platform, where a train was just
pulling in. He leapt aboard, and there was Rekha Merchant facing him with
her carpet rolled up and lying across her knees. The doors closed behind him
with a bang.
That day Gibreel Farishta fled in every direction around the
Underground of the city of London and Rekha Merchant found him wherever he
went; she sat beside him on the endless up-escalator at Oxford Circus and in
the tightly packed elevators of Tufnell Park she rubbed up against him from
behind in a manner that she would have thought quite outrageous during her
lifetime. On the outer reaches of the Metropolitan Line she hurled the
phantoms of her children from the tops of claw-like trees, and when he came
up for air outside the Bank of England she flung herself histrionically from
the apex of its neo-classical pediment. And even though he did not have any
idea of the true shape of that most protean and chameleon of cities he grew
convinced that it kept changing shape as he ran around beneath it, so that
the stations on the Underground changed lines and followed one another in
apparently random sequence. More than once he emerged, suffocating, from
that subterranean world in which the laws of space and time had ceased to
operate, and tried to hail a taxi; not one was willing to stop, however, so
he was obliged to plunge back into that hellish maze, that labyrinth without
a solution, and continue his epic flight. At last, exhausted beyond hope, he
surrendered to the fatal logic of his insanity and got out arbitrarily at
what he conceded must be the last, meaningless station of his prolonged and
futile journey in search of the chimera of renewal. He came out into the
heartbreaking indifference of a litter-blown street by a lorry-infested
roundabout. Darkness had already fallen as he walked unsteadily, using the
last reserves of his optimism, into an unknown park made spectral by the
ectoplasmic quality of the tungsten lamps. As he sank to his knees in the
isolation of the winter night he saw the figure of a woman moving slowly
towards him across the snow-shrouded grass, and surmised that it must be his
nemesis, Rekha Merchant, coming to deliver her death-kiss, to drag him down
into a deeper underworld than the one in which she had broken his wounded
spirit. He no longer cared, and by the time the woman reached him he had
fallen forward on to his forearms, his coat dangling loosely about him and
giving him the look of a large, dying beetle who was wearing, for obscure
reasons, a dirty grey trilby hat.
As if from a great distance he heard a shocked cry escape the woman's
lips, a gasp in which disbelief, joy and a strange resentment were all mixed
up, and just before his senses left him he understood that Rekha had
permitted him, for the time being, to reach the illusion of a safe haven, so
that her triumph over him could be the sweeter when it came at the last.
'You're alive,' the woman said, repeating the first words she had ever
spoken to his face. 'You got your life back. That's the point.'
Smiling, he fell asleep at Allie's flat feet in the falling snow.
Ayesha
ven the serial visions have migrated now; they know the city better
than he. And in the aftermath of Rosa and Rekha the dream-worlds of his
archangelic other self begin to seem as tangible as the shifting realities
he inhabits while he's awake. This, for instance, has started coming: a
mansion block built in the Dutch style in a part of London which he will
subsequently identify as Kensington, to which the dream flies him at high
speed past Barkers department store and the small grey house with double bay
windows where Thackeray wrote
Vanity Fair
and the square with the convent
where the little girls in uniform are always going in, but never come out,
and the house where Talleyrand lived in his old age when after a thousand
and one chameleon changes of allegiance and principle he took on the outward
form of the French ambassador to London, and arrives at a seven-storey
corner block with green wrought-iron balconies up to the fourth, and now the
dream rushes him up the outer wall of the house and on the fourth floor it
pushes aside the heavy curtains at the living-room window and finally there
he sits, unsleeping as usual, eyes wide in the dim yellow light, staring
into the future, the bearded and turbaned Imam.
Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run
into, all the other words that people throw around: emigre, expatriate,
refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a dream of glorious return.
Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless
paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled
high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a
photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he
awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and
the earth reclaim its own. These are the things the Imam thinks. His home is
a rented flat. It is a waiting-room, a photograph, air.
The thick wallpaper, olive stripes on a cream ground, has faded a
little, enough to emphasize the brighter rectangles and ovals that indicate
where pictures used to hang. The Imam is the enemy of images. When he moved
in the pictures slid noiselessly from the walls and slunk from the room,
removing themselves from the rage of his unspoken disapproval. Some
representations, however, are permitted to remain. On the mantelpiece he
keeps a small group of postcards bearing conventional images of his
homeland, which he calls simply Desh: a mountain looming over a city; a
picturesque village scene beneath a mighty tree; a mosque. But in his
bedroom, on the wall facing the hard cot where he lies, there hangs a more
potent icon, the portrait of a woman of exceptional force, famous for her
profile of a Grecian statue and the black hair that is as long as she is
high. A powerful woman, his enemy, his other: he keeps her close. Just as,
far away in the palaces of her omnipotence she will be clutching his
portrait beneath her royal cloak or hiding it in a locket at her throat. She
is the Empress, and her name is - what else? - Ayesha. On this island, the
exiled Imam, and at home in Desh, She. They plot each other's deaths.
The curtains, thick golden velvet, are kept shut all day, because
otherwise the evil thing might creep into the apartment: foreign-ness,
Abroad, the alien nation. The harsh fact that he is here and not There, upon
which all his thoughts are fixed. On those rare occasions when the Imam goes
out to take the Kensington air, at the centre of a square formed by eight
young men in sunglasses and bulging suits, he folds his hands before him and
fixes his gaze upon them, so that no element or particle of this hated city,
- this sink of iniquities which humiliates him by giving him sanctuary, so
that he must be beholden to it in spite of the lustfulness, greed and vanity
of its ways, - can lodge itself, like a dust-speck, in his eyes. When he
leaves this loathed exile to return in triumph to that other city beneath
the postcard-mountain, it will be a point of pride to be able to say that he
remained in complete ignorance of the Sodom in which he had been obliged to
wait; ignorant, and therefore unsullied, unaltered, pure.
And another reason for the drawn curtains is that of course there are
eyes and ears around him, not all of them friendly. The orange buildings are
not neutral. Somewhere across the street there will be zoom lenses, video
equipment, jumbo mikes; and always the risk of snipers. Above and below and
beside the Imam are the safe apartments occupied by his guards, who stroll
the Kensington streets disguised as women in shrouds and silvery beaks; but
it is as well to be too careful. Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite
of survival.
A fable, which he heard from one of his favourites, the American
convert, formerly a successful singer, now known as Bilal X. In a certain
nightclub to which the Imam is in the habit of sending his lieutenants to
listen in to certain other persons belonging to certain opposed factions,
Bilal met a young man from Desh, also a singer of sorts, so they fell to
talking. It turned out that this Mahmood was a badly scared individual. He
had recently
shacked up
with a gori, a long red woman with a big figure, and
then it turned out that the previous lover of his beloved Renata was the
exiled boss of the S A V A K torture organization of the Shah of Iran. The
number one Grand Panjandrum himself, not some minor sadist with a talent for
extracting toenails or setting fire to eyelids, but the great haramzada in
person. The day after Mahmood and Renata moved in to their new apartment a
letter arrived for Mahmood.
Okay, shit-eater, you're fucking my woman, I
just wanted to say hello.
The next day a second letter arrived. By
the way,
prick, I forgot to mention, here is your new telephone number.
At that point
Mahmood and Renata had asked for an ex-directory listing but had not as yet
been given their new number by the telephone company. When it came through
two days later and was exactly the same as the one on the letter, Mahmood's
hair fell out all at once. Then, seeing it lying on the pillow, he joined
his hands together in front of Renata and begged, 'Baby, I love you, but
you're too hot for me, please go somewhere, far far.' When the Imam was told
this story he shook his head and said, that whore, who will touch her now,
in spite of her lust-creating body? She put a stain on herself worse than
leprosy; thus do human beings mutilate themselves. But the true moral of the
fable was the need for eternal vigilance. London was a city in which the
ex-boss of SAVAK had great connections in the telephone company and the
Shah's ex-chef ran a thriving restaurant in Hounslow. Such a welcoming city,
such a refuge, they take all types. Keep the curtains drawn.
Floors three to five of this block of mansion flats are, for the
moment, all the homeland the Imam possesses. Here there are rifles and
short-wave radios and rooms in which the sharp young men in suits sit and
speak urgently into several telephones. There is no alcohol here, nor are
playing cards or dice anywhere in evidence, and the only woman is the one
hanging on the old man's bedroom wall. In this surrogate homeland, which the
insomniac saint thinks of as his waiting-room or transit lounge, the central
heating is at full blast night and day, and the windows are tightly shut.
The exile cannot forget, and must therefore simulate, the dry heat of Desh,
the once and future land where even the moon is hot and dripping like a
fresh, buttered chapati. O that longed-for part of the world where the sun
and moon are male but their hot sweet light is named with female names. At
night the exile parts his curtains and the alien moonlight sidles into the
room, its coldness striking his eyeballs like a nail. He winces, narrows his
eyes. Loose-robed, frowning, ominous, awake: this is the Imam.
Exile is a soulless country. In exile, the furniture is ugly,
expensive, all bought at the same time in the same store and in too much of
a hurry: shiny silver sofas with fins like old Buicks DeSotos Oldsmobiles,
glass-fronted bookcases containing not books but clippings files. In exile
the shower goes scalding hot whenever anybody turns on a kitchen tap, so
that when the Imam goes to bathe his entire retinue must remember not to
fill a kettle or rinse a dirty plate, and when the Imam goes to the toilet
his disciples leap scalded from the shower. In exile no food is ever cooked;
the dark-spectacled bodyguards go out for takeaway. In exile all attempts to
put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of defeat.
The Imam is the centre of a wheel.
Movement radiates from him, around the clock. His son, Khalid, enters
his sanctum bearing a glass of water, holding it in his right hand with his
left palm under the glass. The Imam drinks water constantly, one glass every
five minutes, to keep himself clean; the water itself is cleansed of
impurities, before he sips, in an American filtration machine. All the young
men surrounding him are well aware of his famous Monograph on Water, whose
purity, the Imam believes, communicates itself to the drinker, its thinness
and simplicity, the ascetic pleasures of its taste. 'The Empress,' he points
out, 'drinks wine.' Burgundies, clarets, hocks mingle their intoxicating
corruptions within that body both fair and foul. The sin is enough to
condemn her for all time without hope of redemption. The picture on his
bedroom wall shows the Empress Ayesha holding, in both hands, a human skull
filled with a dark red fluid. The Empress drinks blood, but the Imam is a
water man. 'Not for nothing do the peoples of our hot lands offer it
reverence,' the Monograph proclaims. 'Water, preserver of life. No civilized
individual can refuse it to another. A grandmother, be her limbs ever so
arthritically stiff, will rise at once and go to the tap if a small child
should come to her and ask, pani, nani. Beware all those who blaspheme
against it. Who pollutes it, dilutes his soul.'
The Imam has often vented his rage upon the memory of the late Aga
Khan, as a result of being shown the text of an interview in which the head
of the Ismailis was observed drinking vintage champagne. O,
sir, this
champagne is only for outward show. The instant it touches my lips, it turns
to water.
Fiend, the Imam is wont to thunder. Apostate, blasphemer, fraud.
When the future comes such individuals will be judged, he tells his men.
Water will have its day and blood will flow like wine. Such is the
miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the
impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. Who has
not dreamed this dream, of being a king for a day? - But the Imam dreams of
more than a day; feels, emanating from his fingertips, the arachnid strings
with which he will control the movement of history.
No: not history.
His is a stranger dream.
His son, water-carrying Khalid, bows before his father like a pilgrim
at a shrine, informs him that the guard on duty outside the sanctum is
Salman Farsi. Bilal is at the radio transmitter, broadcasting the day's
message, on the agreed frequency, to Desh.
The Imam is a massive stillness, an immobility. He is living stone. His
great gnarled hands, granite-grey, rest heavily on the wings of his
high-backed chair. His head, looking too large for the body beneath, lolls
ponderously on the surprisingly scrawny neck that can be glimpsed through
the grey-black wisps of beard. The Imam's eyes are clouded; his lips do not
move. He is pure force, an elemental being; he moves without motion, acts
without doing, speaks without uttering a sound. He is the conjurer and
history is his trick.
No, not history: something stranger.
The explanation of this conundrum is to be heard, at this very moment,
on certain surreptitious radio waves, on which the voice of the American
convert Bilal is singing the Imam's holy song. Bilal the muezzin: his voice
enters a ham radio in Kensington and emerges in dreamed-of Desh, transmuted
into the thunderous speech of the Imam himself. Beginning with ritual abuse
of the Empress, with lists of her crimes, murders, bribes, sexual relations
with lizards, and so on, he proceeds eventually to issue in ringing tones
the Imam's nightly call to his people to rise up against the evil of her
State. 'We will make a revolution,' the Imam proclaims through him, 'that is
a revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history.' For there is an
enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood-wine
that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and
possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies -
progress, science, rights - against which the Imam has set his face. History
is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of
knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound.
'We will unmake the veil of history,' Bilal declaims into the listening
night, 'and when it is unravelled, we will see Paradise standing there, in
all its glory and light.' The Imam chose Bilal for this task on account of
the beauty of his voice, which in its previous incarnation succeeded in
climbing the Everest of the hit parade, not once but a dozen times, to the
very top. The voice is rich and authoritative, a voice in the habit of being
listened to; well-nourished, highly trained, the voice of American
confidence, a weapon of the West turned against its makers, whose might
upholds the Empress and her tyranny. In the early days Bilal X protested at
such a description of his voice. He, too, belonged to an oppressed people,
he insisted, so that it was unjust to equate him with the Yankee
imperialists. The Imam answered, not without gentleness: Bilal, your
suffering is ours as well. But to be raised in the house of power is to
learn its ways, to soak them up, through that very skin that is the cause of
your oppression. The habit of power, its timbre, its posture, its way of
being with others. It is a disease, Bilal, infecting all who come too near
it. If the powerful trample over you, you are infected by the soles of their
feet.
Bilal continues to address the darkness. 'Death to the tyranny of the
Empress Ayesha, of calendars, of America, of time! We seek the eternity, the
timelessness, of God. His still waters, not her flowing wines.' Burn the
books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word, as it was
revealed by the Angel Gibreel to the Messenger Mahound and explicated by
your interpreter and Imam. 'Ameen,' Bilal said, concluding the night's
proceedings. While, in his sanctum, the Imam sends a message of his own: and
summons, conjures up, the archangel, Gibreel.
He sees himself in the dream: no angel to look at, just a man in his
ordinary street clothes, Henry Diamond's posthumous hand-me-downs: gabardine
and trilby over outsize trousers held up by braces, a fisherman's woollen
pullover, billowy white shirt. This dream-Gibreel, so like the waking one,
stands quaking in the sanctum of the Imam, whose eyes are white as clouds.
Gibreel speaks querulously, to hide his fear.
'Why insist on archangels? Those days, you should know, are gone.'
The Imam closes his eyes, sighs. The carpet extrudes long hairy
tendrils, which wrap themselves around Gibreel, holding him fast.
'You don't need me,' Gibreel emphasizes. 'The revelation is complete.
Let me go.'
The other shakes his head, and speaks, except that his lips do not
move, and it is Bilal's voice that fills Gibreel's ears, even though the
broadcaster is nowhere to be seen,
tonight's the night,
the voice says,
and
you must fly me to Jerusalem.
Then the apartment dissolves and they are standing on the roof beside
the water-tank, because the Imam, when he wishes to move, can remain still
and move the world around him. His beard is blowing in the wind. It is
longer now; if it were not for the wind that catches at it as if it were a
flowing chiffon scarf, it would touch the ground by his feet; he has red
eyes, and his voice hangs around him in the sky.
Take me.
Gibreel argues,
Seems you can do it easily by yourself: but the Imam, in a single movement
of astonishing rapidity, slings his beard over his shoulder, hoists up his
skirts to reveal two spindly legs with an almost monstrous covering of hair,
and leaps high into the night air, twirls himself about, and settles on
Gibreel's shoulders, clutching on to him with fingernails that have grown
into long, curved claws. Gibreel feels himself rising into the sky, bearing
the old man of the sea, the Imam with hair that grows longer by the minute,
streaming in every direction, his eyebrows like pennants in the wind.
Jerusalem, he wonders, which way is that? - And then, it's a slippery
word, Jerusalem, it can be an idea as well as a place: a goal, an
exaltation. Where is the Imam's Jerusalem? 'The fall of the harlot,' the
disembodied voice resounds in his ears. 'Her crash, the Babylonian whore.'
They zoom through the night. The moon is heating up, beginning to
bubble like cheese under a grill; he, Gibreel, sees pieces of it falling off
from time to time, moon-drips that hiss and bubble on the sizzling griddle
of the sky. Land appears below them. The heat grows intense.
It is an immense landscape, reddish, with flat-topped trees. They fly
over mountains that are also flat-topped; even the stones, here, are
flattened by the heat. Then they come to a high mountain of almost perfectly
conical dimensions, a mountain that also sits postcarded on a mantelpiece
far away; and in the shadow of the mountain, a city, sprawling at its feet
like a supplicant, and on the mountain's lower slopes, a palace, the palace,
her place: the Empress, whom radio messages have unmade. This is a
revolution of radio hams.
Gibreel, with the Imam riding him like a carpet, swoops lower, and in
the steaming night it looks as if the streets are alive, they seem to be
writhing, like snakes; while in front of the palace of the Empress's defeat
a new hill seems to be growing,
while we watch, baba, what's going on here?
The Imam's voice hangs in the sky: 'Come down. I will show you Love.'
They are at rooftop-level when Gibreel realizes that the streets are
swarming with people. Human beings, packed so densely into those snaking
paths that they have blended into a larger, composite entity, relentless,
serpentine. The people move slowly, at an even pace, down alleys into lanes,
down lanes into side streets, down side streets into highways, all of them
converging upon the grand avenue, twelve lanes wide and lined with giant
eucalyptus trees, that leads to the palace gates. The avenue is packed with
humanity; it is the central organ of the new, many-headed being. Seventy
abreast, the people walk gravely towards the Empress's gates. In front of
which her household guards are waiting in three ranks, lying, kneeling and
standing, with machine-guns at the ready. The people are walking up the
slope towards the guns; seventy at a time, they come into range; the guns
babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the
dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of the dead grows higher.
Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark doorways of
the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons
into the parade,
go, be a martyr, do the needful, die,
'You see how they
love me,' says the disembodied voice. 'No tyranny on earth can withstand the
power of this slow, walking love.'
'This isn't love,' Gibreel, weeping, replies. 'It's hate. She has
driven them into your arms.' The explanation sounds thin, superficial.
'They love me,' the Imam's voice says, 'because I am water. I am
fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks.
Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the
sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the
timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am
eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or tock. She looks in her mirror every day
and is terrorized by the idea of age, of time passing. Thus she is the
prisoner of her own nature; she, too, is in the chains of Time. After the
revolution there will be no clocks; we'll smash the lot. The word
clock
will
be expunged from our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no
birthdays. We shall all be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in
the eye of Almighty God.'
He falls silent, now, because below us the great moment has come: the
people have reached the guns. Which are silenced in their turn, as the
endless serpent of the people, the gigantic python of the risen masses,
embraces the guards, suffocating them, and silences the lethal chuckling of
their weapons. The Imam sighs heavily. 'Done.'
The lights of the palace are extinguished as the people walk towards
it, at the same measured pace as before. Then, from within the darkened
palace, there rises a hideous sound, beginning as a high, thin, piercing
wail, then deepening into a howl, an ululation loud enough to fill every
cranny of the city with its rage. Then the golden dome of the palace bursts
open like an egg, and rising from it, glowing with blackness, is a
mythological apparition with vast black wings, her hair streaming loose, as
long and black as the Imam's is long and white: Al-Lat, Gibreel understands,
bursting out of Ayesha's shell.
'Kill her,' the Imam commands.
Gibreel sets him down on the palace's ceremonial balcony, his arms
outstretched to encompass the joy of the people, a sound that drowns even
the howls of the goddess and rises up like a song. And then he is being
propelled into the air, having no option, he is a marionette going to war;
and she, seeing him coming, turns, crouches in air, and, moaning dreadfully,
comes at him with all her might. Gibreel understands that the Imam, fighting
by proxy as usual, will sacrifice him as readily as he did the hill of
corpses at the palace gate, that he is a suicide soldier in the service of
the cleric's cause. I am weak, he thinks, I am no match for her, but she,
too, has been weakened by her defeat. The Imam's strength moves Gibreel,
places thunderbolts in his hands, and the battle is joined; he hurls
lightning spears into her feet and she plunges comets into his groin,
we are
killing each other,
he thinks,
we will die and there will be two new
constellations in space: Al-Lat, and Gibreel.
Like exhausted warriors on a
corpse-littered field, they totter and slash. Both are failing fast.
She falls.
Down she tumbles, Al-Lat queen of the night; crashes upside-down to
earth, crushing her head to bits; and lies, a headless black angel, with her
wings ripped off, by a little wicket gate in the palace gardens, all in a
crumpled heap. - And Gibreel, looking away from her in horror, sees the Imam
grown monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open
at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole.
The body of Al-Lat has shrivelled on the grass, leaving behind only a
dark stain; and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime,
and goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty-four, beyond one
thousand and one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond
measuring, the hour of the exile's return, of the victory of water over
wine, of the commencement of the Untime of the Imam.
When the nocturnal story changes, when, without warning, the progress
of events in Jahilia and Yathrib gives way to the struggle of Imam and
Empress, Gibreel briefly hopes that the curse has ended, that his dreams
have been restored to the random eccentricity of ordinary life; but then, as
the new story, too, falls into the old pattern, continuing each time he
drops off from the precise point at which it was interrupted, and as his own
image, translated into an avatar of the archangel, re-enters the frame, so
his hope dies, and he succumbs once more to the inexorable. Things have
reached the point at which some of his night-sagas seem more bearable than
others, and after the apocalypse of the Imam he feels almost pleased when
the next narrative begins, extending his internal repertory, because at
least it suggests that the deity whom he, Gibreel, has tried unsuccessfully
to kill can be a God of love, as well as one of vengeance, power, duty,
rules and hate; and it is, too, a nostalgic sort of tale, of a lost
homeland; it feels like a return to the past . . . what story is this?
Coming right up. To begin at the beginning: On the morning of his fortieth
birthday, in a room full of butterflies, Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched his
sleeping wife . . .
On the fateful morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of
butterflies, the zamindar Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched over his sleeping wife,
and felt his heart fill up to the bursting-point with love. He had awoken
early for once, rising before dawn with a bad dream souring his mouth, his
recurring dream of the end of the world, in which the catastrophe was
invariably his fault. He had been reading Nietzsche the night before - 'the
pitiless end of that small, overextended species called Man' - and had
fallen asleep with the book resting face downwards on his chest. Waking to
the rustle of butterfly wings in the cool, shadowy bedroom, he was angry
with himself for being so foolish in his choice of bedside reading matter.
He was, however, wide awake now. Getting up quietly, he slipped his feet
into chappals and strolled idly along the verandas of the great mansion,
still in darkness on account of their lowered blinds, and the butterflies
bobbed like courtiers at his back. In the far distance, someone was playing
a flute. Mirza Saeed drew up the chick blinds and fastened their cords. The
gardens were deep in mist, through which the butterfly clouds were swirling,
one mist intersecting another. This remote region had always been renowned
for its lepidoptera, for these miraculous squadrons that filled the air by
day and night, butterflies with the gift of chameleons, whose wings changed
colour as they settled on vermilion flowers, ochre curtains, obsidian
goblets or amber finger-rings. In the zamindar's mansion, and also in the
nearby village, the miracle of the butterflies had become so familiar as to
seem mundane, but in fact they had only returned nineteen years ago, as the
servant women would recall. They had been the familiar spirits, or so the
legend ran, of a local saint, the holy woman known only as Bibiji, who had
lived to the age of two hundred and forty-two and whose grave, until its
location was forgotten, had the property of curing impotence and warts.
Since the death of Bibiji one hundred and twenty years ago the butterflies
had vanished into the same realm of the legendary as Bibiji herself, so that
when they came back exactly one hundred and one years after their departure
it looked, at first, like an omen of some imminent, wonderful thing. After
Bibiji's death - it should quickly be said - the village had continued to
prosper, the potato crops remained plentiful, but there had been a gap in
many hearts, even though the villagers of the present had no memory of the
time of the old saint. So the return of the butterflies lifted many spirits,
but when the expected wonders failed to materialize the locals sank back,
little by little, into the insufficiency of the day-to-day. The name of the
zamindar's mansion,
Peristan,
may have had its origins in the magical
creatures' fairy wings, and the village's name,
Titlipur,
certainly did. But
names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their
etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the
dust of habit. The human inhabitants of Titlipur, and its butterfly hordes,
moved amongst one another with a kind of mutual disdain. The villagers and
the zamindar's family had long ago abandoned the attempt to exclude the
butterflies from their homes, so that now whenever a trunk was opened, a
batch of wings would fly out of it like Pandora's imps, changing colour as
they rose; there were butterflies under the closed lids of the thunderboxes
in the toilets of Peristan, and inside every wardrobe, and between the pages
of books. When you awoke you found the butterflies sleeping on your cheeks.
The commonplace eventually becomes invisible, and Mirza Saeed had not
really noticed the butterflies for a number of years. On the morning of his
fortieth birthday, however, as the first light of dawn touched the house and
the butterflies began instantly to glow, the beauty of the moment took his
breath away. He ran at once to the bedroom in the zenana wing in which his
wife Mishal lay sleeping, veiled in a mosquito-net. The magic butterflies
were resting on her exposed toes, and a mosquito had evidently found its way
inside as well, because there was a line of little bites along the raised
edge of her collar-bone. He wanted to lift the net, crawl inside and kiss
the bites until they faded away. How inflamed they looked! How, when she
awoke, they would itch! But he held himself back, preferring to enjoy the
innocence of her sleeping form. She had soft, red-brown hair, white white
skin, and her eyes, behind the closed lids, were silky grey. Her father was
a director of the state bank, so it had been an irresistible match, an
arranged marriage which restored the fortunes of the Mirza's ancient,
decaying family and then ripened, over time and in spite of their failure to
have children, into a union of real love. Full of emotion, Mirza Saeed
watched Mishal sleep and chased the last shreds of his nightmare from his
mind. 'How can the world be done for,' he reasoned contentedly to himself,
'if it can offer up such instances of perfection as this lovely dawn?'
Continuing down the line of these happy thoughts, he formulated a
silent speech to his resting wife. 'Mishal, I'm forty years old and as
contented as a forty-day babe. I see now that I've been falling deeper and
deeper into our love over the years, and now I swim, like some fish, in that
warm sea.' How much she gave him, he marvelled; how much he needed her!
Their marriage transcended mere sensuality, was so intimate that a
separation was unthinkable. 'Growing old beside you,' he told her while she
slept, 'will be, Mishal, a privilege.' He permitted himself the
sentimentality of blowing a kiss in her direction and then tiptoeing from
the room. Out once more on the main veranda of his private quarters on the
mansion's upper storey, he glanced across to the gardens, which were coming
into view as the dawn lifted the mist, and saw the sight that would destroy
his peace of mind forever, smashing it beyond hope of repair at the very
instant in which he had become certain of its invulnerability to the ravages
of fate.
A young woman was squatting on the lawn, holding out her left palm.
Butterflies were settling on this surface while, with her right hand, she
picked them up and put them in her mouth. Slowly, methodically, she
breakfasted on the acquiescent wings.
Her lips, cheeks, chin were heavily stained by the many different
colours that had rubbed off the dying butterflies.
When Mirza Saeed Akhtar saw the young woman eating her gossamer
breakfast on his lawn, he felt a surge of lust so powerful that he instantly
felt ashamed. 'It's impossible,' he scolded himself, 'I am not an animal,
after all.' The young woman wore a saffron yellow sari wrapped around her
nakedness, after the fashion of the poor women of that region, and as she
stooped over the butterflies the sari, hanging loosely forwards, bared her
small breasts to the gaze of the transfixed zamindar. Mirza Saeed stretched
out his hands to grip the balcony railing, and the slight movement of his
white kurta must have caught her eye, because she lifted her head quickly
and looked right into his face.
And did not immediately look down again. Nor did she get up and run
away, as he had half expected.
What she did: waited for a few seconds, as though to see if he intended
to speak. When he did not, she simply resumed her strange meal without
taking her eyes from his face. The strangest aspect of it was that the
butterflies seemed to be funnelling downwards from the brightening air,
going willingly towards her outstretched palms and their own deaths. She
held them by the wingtips, threw her head back and flicked them into her
mouth with the tip of her narrow tongue. Once she kept her mouth open, the
dark lips parted defiantly, and Mirza Saeed trembled to see the butterfly
fluttering within the dark cavern of its death, yet making no attempt to
escape. When she was satisfied that he had seen this, she brought her lips
together and began to chew. They remained thus, peasant woman below,
landowner above, until her eyes unexpectedly rolled upwards in their sockets
and she fell heavily, twitching violently, on to her left side.
After a few seconds of transfixed panic, the Mirza shouted, 'Ohe,
house! Ohe, wake up, emergency!' At the same time he ran towards the stately
mahogany staircase from England, brought here from some unimaginable
Warwickshire, some fantastic location in which, in a damp and lightless
priory, King Charles I had ascended these same steps, before losing his
head, in the seventeenth century of another system of time. Down these
stairs hurtled Mirza Saeed Akhtar, last of his line, trampling over the
ghostly impressions of beheaded feet as he sped towards the lawn.
The girl was having convulsions, crushing butterflies beneath her
rolling, kicking body. Mirza Saeed got to her first, although the servants
and Mishal, awakened by his cry, were not far behind. He grasped the girl by
the jaw and forced it open, inserting a nearby twig, which she at once bit
in half. Blood trickled from her cut mouth, and he feared for her tongue,
but the sickness left her just then, she became calm, and slept. Mishal had
her carried to her own bedroom, and now Mirza Saeed was obliged to gaze on a
second sleeping beauty in that bed, and was stricken for a second time by
what seemed too rich and deep a sensation to be called by the crude name,
lust.
He found that he was at once sickened by his own impure designs and
also elated by the feelings that were coursing within him, fresh feelings
whose newness excited him greatly. Mishal came to stand beside her husband.
'Do you know her?' Saeed asked, and she nodded. 'An orphan girl. She makes
small enamel animals and sells them at the trunk road. She has had the
falling sickness since she was very little.' Mirza Saeed was awed, not for
the first time, by his wife's gift of involvement with other human beings.
He himself could hardly recognize more than a handful of the villagers, but
she knew each person's pet names, family histories and incomes. They even
told her their dreams, although few of them dreamed more than once a month
on account of being too poor to afford such luxuries. The overflowing
fondness he had felt at dawn returned, and he placed his arm around her
shoulders. She leaned her head against him and said softly: 'Happy
birthday.' He kissed the top of her hair. They stood embracing, watching the
sleeping girl. Ayesha: his wife told him the name.
After the orphan girl Ayesha arrived at puberty and became, on account
of her distracted beauty and her air of staring into another world, the
object of many young men's desires, it began to be said that she was looking
for a lover from heaven, because she thought herself too good for mortal
men. Her rejected suitors complained that in practical terms she had no
business acting so choosy, in the first place because she was an orphan, and
in the second, because she was possessed by the demon of epilepsy, who would
certainly put off any heavenly spirits who might otherwise have been
interested. Some embittered youths went so far as to suggest that as
Ayesha's defects would prevent her from ever finding a husband she might as
well start taking lovers, so as not to waste that beauty, which ought in all
fairness to have been given to a less problematic individual. In spite of
these attempts by the young men of Titlipur to turn her into their whore,
Ayesha remained chaste, her defence being a look of such fierce
concentration on patches of air immediately above people's left shoulders
that it was regularly mistaken for contempt. Then people heard about her new
habit of swallowing butterflies and they revised their opinion of her,
convinced that she was touched in the head and therefore dangerous to lie
with in case the demons crossed over into her lovers. After this the lustful
males of her village left her alone in her hovel, alone with her toy animals
and her peculiar fluttering diet. One young man, however, took to sitting a
little distance from her doorway, facing discreetly in the opposite
direction, as if he were on guard, even though she no longer had any need of
protectors. He was a former untouchable from the neighbouring village of
Chatnapatna who had been converted to Islam and taken the name of Osman.
Ayesha never acknowledged Osman's presence, nor did he ask for such
acknowledgement. The leafy branches of the village waved over their heads in
the breeze.
The village of Titlipur had grown up in the shade of an immense
banyan-tree, a single monarch that ruled, with its multiple roots, over an
area more than half a mile in diameter. By now the growth of tree into
village and village into tree had become so intricate that it was impossible
to differentiate between the two. Certain districts of the tree had become
well-known lovers' nooks; others were chicken runs. Some of the poorer
labourers had constructed rough-and-ready shelters in the angles of stout
branches, and actually lived inside the dense foliage. There were branches
that were used as pathways across the village, and children's swings made
out of the old tree's beards, and in places where the tree stooped low down
towards the earth its leaves formed roofs for many a hutment that seemed to
hang from the greenery like the nest of a weaver bird. When the village
pan-chayat assembled, it sat on the mightiest branch of all. The villagers
had grown accustomed to referring to the tree by the name of the village,
and to the village simply as 'the tree'. The banyan's non-human inhabitants
- honey ants, squirrels, owls -were accorded the respect due to
fellow-citizens. Only the butterflies were ignored, like hopes long since
shown to be false.
It was a Muslim village, which was why the convert Osman had come here
with his clown's outfit and his 'boom-boom' bullock after he had embraced
the faith in an act of desperation, hoping that changing to a Muslim name
would do him more good than earlier re-namings, for example when
untouchables were renamed 'children of God'. As a child of God in
Chatnapatna he had not been permitted to draw water from the town well,
because the touch of an outcaste would have polluted the drinking water . .
. Landless and, like Ayesha, an orphan, Osman earned his living as a clown.
His bullock wore bright red paper cones over its horns and much tinselly
drapery over its nose and back. He went from village to village performing
an act, at marriages and other celebrations, in which the bullock was his
essential partner and foil, nodding in answer to his questions, one nod for
no, twice for yes.
'Isn't this a nice village we've come to?' Osman would ask.
Boom, the bullock disagreed.
'It isn't? Oh yes it is. Look: aren't the people good?'
Boom.
'What? Then it's a village full of sinners?'
Boom, boom.
'Baapu-re! Then, will everybody go to hell?'
Boom, boom.
'But, bhaijan. Is there any hope for them?'
Boom, boom, the bullock offered salvation. Excitedly, Osman bent down,
placing his ear by the bullock's mouth. 'Tell, quickly. What should they do
to be saved?' At this point the bullock plucked Osman's cap off his head and
carried it around the crowd, asking for money, and Osman would nod, happily:
Boom, boom.
Osman the convert and his boom-boom bullock were well liked in
Titlipur, but the young man only wanted the approval of one person, and she
would not give it. He had admitted to her that his conversion to Islam had
been largely tactical, 'Just so I could get a drink, bibi, what's a man to
do?' She had been outraged by his confession, informed him that he was no
Muslim at all, his soul was in peril and he could go back to Chatnapatna and
die of thirst for all she cared. Her face coloured, as she spoke, with an
unaccountably strong disappointment in him, and it was the vehemence of this
disappointment that gave him the optimism to remain squatting a dozen paces
from her home, day after day, but she continued to stalk past him, nose in
air, without so much as a good morning or hope-you're-well.
Once a week, the potato carts of Titlipur trundled down the rutted,
narrow, four-hour track to Chatnapatna, which stood at the point at which
the track met the grand trunk road. In Chatnapatna stood the high, gleaming
aluminium silos of the potato wholesalers, but this had nothing to do with
Ayesha's regular visits to the town. She would hitch a ride on a potato
cart, clutching a little sackcloth bundle, to take her toys to market.
Chatnapatna was known throughout the region for its kiddies' knick-knacks,
carved wooden toys and enamelled figurines. Osman and his bullock stood at
the edge of the banyan-tree, watching her bounce about on top of the potato
sacks until she had diminished to a dot.
In Chatnapatna she made her way to the premises of Sri Srinivas, owner
of the biggest toy factory in town. On its walls were the political graffiti
of the day:
Vote for Hand.
Or, more politely:
Please to vote for CP (M)
.
Above these exhortations was the proud announcement:
Srinivas's Toy Univas.
Our Moto: Sinceriety & Creativity.
Srinivas was inside: a large jelly of a
man, his head a hairless sun, a fiftyish fellow whom a lifetime of selling
toys had failed to sour. Ayesha owed him her livelihood. He had been so
taken with the artistry of her whittling that he had agreed to buy as many
as she could produce. But in spite of his habitual bonhomie his expression
darkened when Ayesha undid her bundle to show him two dozen figures of a
young man in a clown hat, accompanied by a decorated bullock that could dip
its tinselled head. Understanding that Ayesha had forgiven Osman his
conversion, Sri Srinivas cried, 'That man is a traitor to his birth, as you
well know. What kind of a person will change gods as easily as his dhotis?
God knows what got into you, daughter, but I don't want these dolls.' On the
wall behind his desk hung a framed certificate which read, in elaborately
cur-licued print:
This is to certify that MR SRI S. SRINIVAS is an Expert on
the Geological History of the Planet Earth, having flown through Grand
Canyon with SCENIC AIRLINES.
Srinivas closed his eyes and folded his arms,
an unlaughing Buddha with the indisputable authority of one who had flown.
'That boy is a devil/ he said with finality, and Ayesha folded the dolls
into her piece of sackcloth and turned to leave, without arguing. Srinivas's
eyes flew open. 'Damn you,' he shouted, 'aren't you going to give me a hard
time? You think I don't know you need the money? Why you did such a damn
stupid thing? What are you going to do now? Just go and make some FP dolls,
double quick, and I will buy at best rate plus, because I am generous to a
fault.' Mr Srinivas's personal invention was the Family Planning doll, a
socially responsible variant of the old Russian-doll notion. Inside a
suited-and-booted Abba-doll was a demure, sari-clad Amma, and inside her a
daughter containing a son. Two children are plenty: that was the message of
the dolls. 'Make quickly quickly,' Srinivas called after the departing
Ayesha. 'FP dolls have high turnover.' Ayesha turned, and smiled. 'Don't
worry about me, Srinivasji,' she said, and left.
Ayesha the orphan was nineteen years old when she began her walk back
to Titlipur along the rutted potato track, but by the time she turned up in
her village some forty-eight hours later she had attained a kind of
agelessness, because her hair had turned as white as snow while her skin had
regained the luminous perfection of a new-born child's, and although she was
completely naked the butterflies had settled upon her body in such thick
swarms that she seemed to be wearing a dress of the most delicate material
in the universe. The clown Osman was practising routines with the boom-boom
bullock near the track, because even though he had been worried sick by her
extended absence, and had spent the whole of the previous night searching
for her, it was still necessary to earn a living. When he laid eyes on her,
that young man who had never respected God because of having been born
untouchable was filled with holy terror, and did not dare to approach the
girl with whom he was so helplessly in love.
She went into her hut and slept for a day and a night without waking
up. Then she went to see the village headman, Sarpanch Muhammad Din, and
informed him matter-of-factly that the Archangel Gibreel had appeared to her
in a vision and had lain down beside her to rest. 'Greatness has come among
us,' she informed the alarmed Sarpanch, who had until then been more
concerned with potato quotas than transcendence. 'Everything will be
required of us, and everything will be given to us also.'
In another part of the tree, the Sarpanch's wife Khadija was consoling
a weeping clown, who was finding it hard to accept that he had lost his
beloved Ayesha to a higher being, for when an archangel lies with a woman
she is lost to men forever. Khadija was old and forgetful and frequently
clumsy when she tried to be loving, and she gave Osman cold comfort: 'The
sun always sets when there is fear of tigers,' she quoted the old saying:
bad news always comes all at once.
Soon after the story of the miracle got out, the girl Ayesha was
summoned to the big house, and in the following days she spent long hours
closeted with the zamindar's wife, Begum Mishal Akhtar, whose mother had
also arrived on a visit, and fallen for the archangel's white-haired wife.
The dreamer, dreaming, wants (but is unable) to protest: I never laid a
finger on her, what do you think this is, some kind of wet dream or what?
Damn me if I know from where that girl was getting her
information/inspiration. Not from this quarter, that's for sure.
This happened: she was walking back to her village, but then she seemed
to grow weary all of a sudden, and went off the path to lie in the shade of
a tamarind-tree and rest. The moment her eyes closed he was there beside
her, dreaming Gibreel in coat and hat, sweltering in the heat. She looked at
him but he couldn't say what she saw, wings maybe, haloes, the works. Then
he was lying there and finding he could not get up, his limbs had become
heavier than iron bars, it seemed as if his body might be crushed by its own
weight into the earth. When she finished looking at him she nodded, gravely,
as if he had spoken, and then she took off her scrap of a sari and stretched
out beside him, nude. Then in the dream he fell asleep, out cold as if
somebody pulled out the plug, and when dreamed himself awake again she was
standing in front of him with that loose white hair and the butterflies
clothing her: transformed. She was still nodding, with a rapt expression on
her face, receiving a message from somewhere that she called Gibreel. Then
she left him lying there and returned to the village to make her entrance.
So now I have a dream-wife, the dreamer becomes conscious enough to
think. What the hell to do with her? - But it isn't up to him. Ayesha and
Mishal Akhtar are together in the big house.
Ever since his birthday Mirza Saeed had been full of passionate
desires, 'as if life really does begin at forty', his wife marvelled. Their
marriage became so energetic that the servants had to change the bedsheets
three times per day. Mishal hoped secretly that this heightening of her
husband's libido would lead her to conceive, because she was of the firm
opinion that enthusiasm mattered, whatever doctors might say to the
contrary, and that the years of taking her temperature every morning before
getting out of bed, and then plotting the results on graph paper in order to
establish her pattern of ovulation, had actually dissuaded the babies from
being born, partly because it was difficult to be properly ardent when
science got into bed along with you, and partly, too, in her view, because
no self-respecting foetus would wish to enter the womb of so mechanically
programmed a mother; Mishal still prayed for a child, although she no longer
mentioned the fact to Saeed so as to spare him the sense of having failed
her in this respect. Eyes shut, feigning sleep, she would call on God for a
sign, and when Saeed became so loving, so frequently, she wondered if maybe
this might not be it. As a result, his strange request that from now on,
whenever they came to stay at Peristan, she should adopt the 'old ways' and
retreat into purdah, was not treated by her with the contempt it deserved.
In the city, where they kept a large and hospitable house, the zamindar and
his wife were known as one of the most 'modern' and 'go-go' couples on the
scene; they collected contemporary art and threw wild parties and invited
friends round for fumbles in the dark on sofas while watching soft-porno
VCRs. So when Mirza Saeed said, 'Would it not be sort of delicious, Mishu,
if we tailored our behaviour to fit this old house,' she should have laughed
in his face. Instead she replied, 'What you like, Saeed,' because he gave
her to understand that it was a sort of erotic game. He even hinted that his
passion for her had become so overwhelming that he might need to express it
at any moment, and if she were out in the open at the time it might
embarrass the staff; certainly her presence would make it impossible for him
to concentrate on any of his tasks, and besides, in the city, 'we will still
be completely up-to-date'. From this she understood that the city was full
of distractions for the Mirza, so that her chances of conceiving were
greatest right here in Titlipur. She resolved to stay put. This was when she
invited her mother to come and stay, because if she were to confine herself
to the zenana she would need company. Mrs. Qureishi arrived wobbling with
plump fury, determined to scold her son-in-law until he gave up this purdah
foolishness, but Mishal amazed her mother by begging: 'Please don't.' Mrs.
Qureishi, the wife of the state bank director, was quite a sophisticate
herself. 'In fact, all your teenage, Mishu, you were the grey goose and I
was the hipster. I thought you dragged yourself out of that ditch but I see
he pushed you back in there again.' The financier's wife had always been of
the opinion that her son-in-law was a secret cheapskate, an opinion which
had survived intact in spite of being starved of any scrap of supporting
evidence. Ignoring her daughter's veto, she sought out Mirza Saeed in the
formal garden and launched into him, wobbling, as was her wont, for
emphasis. 'What type of life are you living?' she demanded. 'My daughter is
not for locking up, but for taking out! What is all your fortune for, if you
keep it also under lock and key? My son, unlock both wallet and wife! Take
her away, renew your love, on some enjoyable
outing!'
Mirza Saeed opened his
mouth, found no reply, shut it again. Dazzled by her own oratory, which had
given rise, quite on the spur of the moment, to the idea of a holiday, Mrs.
Qureishi warmed to her theme. 'Just get set, and go!' she urged. 'Go, man,
go! Go away with her, or will you lock her up until she goes away,' - here
she jabbed an ominous finger at the sky
- 'forever?'
Guiltily, Mirza Saeed promised to consider the idea.
'What are you waiting for?' she cried in triumph. 'You big softo? You .
. . you
Hamlet?'
His mother-in-law's attack brought on one of the periodic bouts of
self-reproach which had been plaguing Mirza Saeed ever since he persuaded
Mishal to take the veil. To console himself he settled down to read Tagore's
story
Ghare-Baire
in which a zamindar persuades his wife to come
out
of
purdah, whereupon she takes up with a firebrand politico involved in the
'swadeshi' campaign, and the zamindar winds up dead. The novel cheered him
up momentarily, but then his suspicions returned. Had he been sincere in the
reasons he gave his wife, or was he simply finding a way of leaving the
coast clear for his pursuit of the madonna of the butterflies, the
epileptic, Ayesha? 'Some coast,' he thought, remembering Mrs Qureishi with
her eyes of an accusative hawk, 'some clear.' His mother-in-law's presence,
he argued to himself, was further proof of his bona fides. Had he not
positively encouraged Mishal to send for her, even though he knew perfectly
well that the old fatty couldn't stand him and would suspect him of every
damn slyness under the sun? 'Would I have been so keen for her to come if I
was planning on hanky panky?' he asked himself. But the nagging inner voices
continued: 'All this recent sexology, this renewed interest in your lady
wife, is simple transference. Really, you are longing for your peasant
floozy to come and flooze with you.'
Guilt had the effect of making the zamindar feel entirely worthless.
His mother-in-law's insults came to seem, in his unhappiness, like the
literal truth. 'Softo,' she called him, and sitting in his study, surrounded
by bookcases in which worms were munching contentedly upon priceless
Sanskrit texts such as were not to be found even in the national archives,
and also, less upliftingly, on the complete works of Percy Westerman, G. A.
Henty and Dornford Yates, Mirza Saeed admitted, yes, spot on, I am soft. The
house was seven generations old and for seven generations the softening had
been going on. He walked down the corridor in which his ancestors hung in
baleful, gilded frames, and contemplated the mirror which he kept hanging in
the last space as a reminder that one day he, too, must step up on to this
wall. He was a man without sharp corners or rough edges; even his elbows
were covered by little pads of flesh. In the mirror he saw the thin
moustache, the weak chin, the lips stained by paan. Cheeks, nose, forehead:
all soft, soft, soft. 'Who would see anything in a type like me?' he cried,
and when he realized that he had been so agitated that he had spoken aloud
he knew he must be in love, that he was sick as a dog with love, and that
the object of his affections was no longer his loving wife.
'Then what a damn, shallow, tricksy and self-deceiving fellow I am,' he
sighed to himself, 'to change so much, so fast. I deserve to be finished off
without ceremony.' But he was not the type to fall on his sword. Instead, he
strolled a while around the corridors of Peristan, and pretty soon the house
worked its magic and restored him to something like a good mood once again.
The house: in spite of its faery name, it was a solid, rather prosy
building, rendered exotic only by being in the wrong country. It had been
built seven generations ago by a certain Perowne, an English architect much
favoured by the colonial authorities, whose only style was that of the
neo-classical English country house. In those days the great zamindars were
crazy for European architecture. Saeed's great-great-great-great-grandfather
had hired the fellow five minutes after meeting him at the Viceroy's
reception, to indicate publicly that not all Indian Muslims had supported
the action of the Meerut soldiers or been in sympathy with the subsequent
uprisings, no, not by any means;
-
and then given him carte blanche; - so
here Peristan now stood, in the middle of near-tropical potato fields and
beside the great banyan-tree, covered in bougainvillaea creeper, with snakes
in the kitchens and butterfly skeletons in the cupboards. Some said its name
owed more to the Englishman's than to anything more fanciful: it was a mere
contraction of
Perownistan.
After seven generations it was at last beginning to look as if it
belonged in this landscape of bullock carts and palm-trees and high, clear,
star-heavy skies. Even the stained-glass window looking down on the
staircase of King Charles the Headless had been, in an indefinable manner,
naturalized. Very few of these old zamindar houses had survived the
egalitarian depredations of the present, and accordingly there hung over
Peristan something of the musty air of a museum, even though - or perhaps
because - Mirza Saeed took great pride in the old place and had spent
lavishly to keep it in trim. He slept under a high canopy of worked and
beaten brass in a ship-like bed that had been occupied by three Viceroys. In
the grand salon he liked to sit with Mishal and Mrs. Qureishi in the unusual
three-way love seat. At one end of this room a colossal Shiraz carpet stood
rolled up, on wooden blocks, awaiting the glamorous reception which would
merit its unfurling, and which never came. In the dining-room there were
stout classical columns with ornate Corinthian tops, and there were
peacocks, both real and stone, strolling on the main steps to the house, and
Venetian chandeliers tinkling in the hall. The original punkahs were still
in full working order, all their operating cords travelling by way of
pulleys and holes in walls and floors to a little, airless boot-room where
the punkah-wallah sat and tugged the lot together, trapped in the irony of
the foetid air of that tiny windowless room while he despatched cool breezes
to all other parts of the house. The servants, too, went back seven
generations and had therefore lost the art of complaining. The old ways
ruled: even the Titlipur sweet-vendor was required to seek the zamindar's
approval before commencing to sell any innovative sweetmeat he might have
invented. Life in Peristan was as soft as it was hard under the tree; but,
even into such cushioned existences, heavy blows can fall.
The discovery that his wife was spending most of her time closeted with
Ayesha filled the Mirza with an insupportable irritation, an eczema of the
spirit that maddened him because there was no way of scratching it. Mishal
was hoping that the archangel, Ayesha's husband, would grant her a baby, but
because she couldn't tell that to her husband she grew sullen and shrugged
petulantly when he asked her why she wasted so much time with the village's
craziest girl. Mishal's new reticence worsened the itch in Mirza Saeed's
heart, and made him jealous, too, although he wasn't sure if he was jealous
of Ayesha, or Mishal. He noticed for the first time that the mistress of the
butterflies had eyes of the same lustrous grey shade as his wife, and for
some reason this made him cross, too, as if it proved that the women were
ganging up on him, whispering God knew what secrets; maybe they were
chittering and chattering about
him!
This zenana business seemed to have
backfired; even that old jelly Mrs. Qureishi had been taken in by Ayesha.
Quite a threesome, thought Mirza Saeed; when mumbo-jumbo gets in through
your door, good sense leaves by the window.
As for Ayesha: when she encountered the Mirza on the balcony, or in the
garden as he wandered reading Urdu love-poetry, she was invariably
deferential and shy; but her good behaviour, coupled with the total absence
of any spark of erotic interest, drove Saeed further and further into the
helplessness of his despair. So it was that when, one day, he spied Ayesha
entering his wife's quarters and heard, a few minutes later, his
mother-in-law's voice rise in a melodramatic shriek, he was seized by a mood
of mulish vengefulness and deliberately waited a full three minutes before
going to investigate. He found Mrs Qureishi tearing her hair and sobbing
like a movie queen, while Mishal and Ayesha sat cross-legged on the bed,
facing each other, grey eyes staring into grey, and Mishal's face was
cradled between Ayesha's outstretched palms.
It turned out that the archangel had informed Ayesha that the
zamindar's wife was dying of cancer, that her breasts were full of the
malign nodules of death, and that she had no more than a few months to live.
The location of the cancer had proved to Mishal the cruelty of God, because
only a vicious deity would place death in the breast of a woman whose only
dream was to suckle new life. When Saeed entered, Ayesha had been whispering
urgently to Mishal: 'You mustn't think that way. God will save you. This is
a test of faith.'
Mrs. Qureishi told Mirza Saeed the bad news with many shrieks and
howls, and for the confused zamindar it was the last straw. He flew into a
temper and started yelling loudly and trembling as if he might at any moment
start smashing up the furniture in the room and its occupants as well.
'To hell with your spook cancer,' he screamed at Ayesha in his
exasperation. 'You have come into my house with your craziness and angels
and dripped poison into my family's ears. Get out of here with your visions
and your invisible spouse. This is the modern world, and it is medical
doctors and not ghosts in potato fields who tell us when we are ill. You
have created this bloody hullabaloo for nothing. Get out and never come on
to my land again.'
Ayesha heard him out without removing her eyes or hands from Mishal.
When Saeed stopped for breath, clenching and unclenching his fists, she said
softly to his wife: 'Everything will be required of us, and everything will
be given.' When he heard this formula, which people all over the village
were beginning to parrot as if they knew what it meant, Mirza Saeed Akhtar
went briefly out of his mind, raised his hand and knocked Ayesha senseless.
She fell to the floor, bleeding from the mouth, a tooth loosened by his
fist, and as she lay there Mrs Qureishi hurled abuse at her son-in-law. 'O
God, I have put my daughter in the care of a killer. O God, a woman hitter.
Go on, hit me also, get some practice. Defiler of saints, blasphemer, devil,
unclean.' Saeed left the room without saying a word.
The next day Mishal Akhtar insisted on returning to the city for a
complete medical check-up. Saeed took a stand. 'If you want to indulge in
superstition, go, but don't expect me to come along. It's eight hours' drive
each way; so, to hell with it.' Mishal left that afternoon with her mother
and the driver, and as a result Mirza Saeed was not where he should have
been, that is, at his wife's side, when the results of the tests were
communicated to her: positive, inoperable, too far advanced, the claws of
the cancer dug in deeply throughout her chest. A few months, six if she was
lucky, and before that, coming soon, the pain. Mishal returned to Peristan
and went straight to her rooms in the zenana, where she wrote her husband a
formal note on lavender stationery, telling him of the doctor's diagnosis.
When he read her death sentence, written in her own hand, he wanted very
badly to burst into tears, but his eyes remained obstinately dry. He had had
no time for the Supreme Being for many years, but now a couple of Ayesha's
phrases popped back into his mind.
God will save you. Everything will be
given.
A bitter, superstitious notion occurred to him: 'It is a curse,' he
thought. 'Because I lusted after Ayesha, she has murdered my wife.'
When he went to the zenana, Mishal refused to see him, but her mother,
barring the doorway, handed Saeed a second note on scented blue notepaper.
'I want to see Ayesha,' it read. 'Kindly permit this.' Bowing his head,
Mirza Saeed gave his assent, and crept away in shame.
With Mahound, there is always a struggle; with the Imam, slavery; but
with this girl, there is nothing. Gibreel is inert, usually asleep in the
dream as he is in life. She comes upon him under a tree, or in a ditch,
hears what he isn't saying, takes what she needs, and leaves. What does he
know about cancer, for example? Not a solitary thing.
All around him, he thinks as he half-dreams, half-wakes, are people
hearing voices, being seduced by words. But not his; never his original
material. - Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling them to
move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease?
He can't work it out.
The day after Mishal Akhtar's return to Titlipur, the girl Ayesha, whom
people were beginning to call a kahin, a pir, disappeared completely for a
week. Her hapless admirer, Osman the clown, who had been following her at a
distance along the dusty potato track to Chatnapatna, told the villagers
that a breeze got up and blew dust into his eyes; when he got it out again
she had 'just gone'. Usually, when Osman and his bullock started telling
their tall tales about djinnis and magic lamps and open-sesames, the
villagers looked tolerant and teased him, okay, Osman, save it for those
idiots in Chatnapatna; they may fall for that stuff but here in Titlipur we
know which way is up and that palaces do not appear unless a thousand and
one labourers build them, nor do they disappear unless the same workers
knock them down. On this occasion, however, nobody laughed at the clown,
because where Ayesha was concerned the villagers were willing to believe
anything. They had grown convinced that the snow-haired girl was the true
successor to old Bibiji, because had the butterflies not reappeared in the
year of her birth, and did they not follow her around like a cloak? Ayesha
was the vindication of the long-soured hope engendered by the butterflies'
return, and the evidence that great things were still possible in this life,
even for the weakest and poorest in the land.
'The angel has taken her away,' marvelled the Sarpanch's wife Khadija,
and Osman burst into tears. 'But no, it is a wonderful thing,' old Khadija
uncomprehendingly explained. The villagers teased the Sarpanch: 'How you got
to be village headman with such a tactless spouse, beats us.'
'You chose me,' he dourly replied.
On the seventh day after her disappearance Ayesha was sighted walking
towards the village, naked again and dressed in golden butterflies, her
silver hair streaming behind her in the breeze. She went directly to the
home of Sarpanch Muhammad Din and asked that the Titlipur panchayat be
convened for an immediate emergency meeting. 'The greatest event in the
history of the tree has come upon us,' she confided. Muhammad Din, unable to
refuse her, fixed the time of the meeting for that evening, after dark.
That night the panchayat members took their places on the usual branch
of the tree, while Ayesha the kahin stood before them on the ground. 'I have
flown with the angel into the highest heights,' she said. 'Yes, even to the
lote-tree of the uttermost end. The archangel, Gibreel: he has brought us a
message which is also a command. Everything is required of us, and
everything will be given.'
Nothing in the life of the Sarpanch Muhammad Din had prepared him for
the choice he was about to face. 'What does the angel ask, Ayesha,
daughter?' he asked, fighting to steady his voice.
'It is the angel's will that all of us, every man, and woman and child
in the village, begin at once to prepare for a pilgrimage. We are commanded
to walk from this place to Mecca Sharif, to kiss the Black Stone in the
Ka'aba at the centre of the Haram Sharif, the sacred mosque. There we must
surely go.'
Now the panchayat's quintet began to debate heatedly. There were the
crops to consider, and the impossibility of abandoning their homes en masse.
'It is not to be conceived of, child,' the Sarpanch told her. 'It is well
known that Allah excuses haj and umra to those who are genuinely unable to
go for reasons of poverty or health.' But Ayesha remained silent and the
elders continued to argue. Then it was as if her silence infected everyone
else and for a long moment, in which the question was settled -although by
what means nobody ever managed to comprehend -there were no words spoken at
all.
It was Osman the clown who spoke up at last, Osman the convert, for
whom his new faith had been no more than a drink of water. 'It's almost two
hundred miles from here to the sea,' he cried. 'There are old ladies here,
and babies. However can we go?'
'God will give us the strength,' Ayesha serenely replied.
'Hasn't it occurred to you,' Osman shouted, refusing to give up, 'that
there's a mighty ocean between us and Mecca Sharif? How will we ever cross?
We have no money for the pilgrim boats. Maybe the angel will grow us wings,
so we can fly?'
Many villagers rounded angrily upon the blasphemer Osman. 'Be quiet
now,' Sarpanch Muhammad Din rebuked him. 'You haven't been long in our faith
or our village. Keep your trap shut and learn our ways.'
Osman, however, answered cheekily, 'So this is how you welcome new
settlers. Not as equals, but as people who must do as they are told.' A knot
of red-faced men began to tighten around Osman, but before anything else
could happen the kahin Ayesha changed the mood entirely by answering the
clown's questions.
'This, too, the angel has explained,' she said quietly. 'We will walk
two hundred miles, and when we reach the shores of the sea, we will put our
feet into the foam, and the waters will open for us. The waves shall be
parted, and we shall walk across the ocean-floor to Mecca.'
The next morning Mirza Saeed Akhtar awoke in a house that had fallen
unusually silent, and when he called for the servants there was no reply.
The stillness had spread into the potato fields, too; but under the broad,
spreading roof of the Titlipur tree all was hustle and bustle. The panchayat
had voted unanimously to obey the command of the Archangel Gibreel, and the
villagers had begun to prepare for departure. At first the Sarpanch had
wanted the carpenter Isa to construct litters that could be pulled by oxen
and on which the old and infirm could ride, but that idea had been knocked
on the head by his own wife, who told him, 'You don't listen, Sarpanch
sahibji! Didn't the angel say we must walk? Well then, that is what we must
do.' Only the youngest of infants were to be excused the foot-pilgrimage,
and they would be carried (it had been decided) on the backs of all the
adults, in rotation. The villagers had pooled all their resources, and heaps
of potatoes, lentils, rice, bitter gourds, chillies, aubergines and other
vegetables were piling up next to the panchayat bough. The weight of the
provisions was to be evenly divided between the walkers. Cooking utensils,
too, were being gathered together, and whatever bedding could be found.
Beasts of burden were to be taken, and a couple of carts carrying live
chickens and such, but in general the pilgrims were under the Sarpanch's
instructions to keep personal belongings to a minimum. Preparations had been
under way since before dawn, so that by the time an incensed Mirza Saeed
strode into the village, things were well advanced. For forty-five minutes
the zamindar slowed things up by making angry speeches and shaking
individual villagers by the shoulders, but then, fortunately, he gave up and
left, so that the work could be continued at its former, rapid pace. As the
Mirza departed he smacked his head repeatedly and called people names, such
as
loonies, simpletons,
very bad words, but he had always been a godless
man, the weak end of a strong line, and he had to be left to find his own
fate; there was no arguing with men like him.
By sunset the villagers were ready to depart, and the Sarpanch told
everyone to rise for prayers in the small hours so that they could leave
immediately afterwards and thus avoid the worst heat of the day. That night,
lying down on his mat beside old Khadija, he murmured, 'At last. I've always
wanted to see the Ka'aba, to circle it before I die.' She reached out from
her mat to take his hand. 'I, too, have hoped for it, against hope,' she
said. 'We'll walk through the waters together.'
Mirza Saeed, driven into an impotent frenzy by the spectacle of the
packing village, burst in on his wife without ceremony. 'You should see
what's going on, Mishu,' he exclaimed, gesticulating absurdly. 'The whole of
Titlipur has taken leave of its brains, and is off to the seaside. What is
to happen to their homes, their fields? There is ruination in store. Must be
political agitators involved. Someone has been bribing someone. - Do you
think if I offered cash they would stay here like sane persons?' His voice
dried. Ayesha was in the room.
'You bitch,' he cursed her. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed
while Mishal and her mother squatted on the floor, sorting through their
belongings and working out how little they could manage with on the
pilgrimage.
'You're not going,' Mirza Saeed ranted. 'I forbid it, the devil alone
knows what germ this whore has infected the villagers with, but you are my
wife and I refuse to let you embark upon this suicidal venture.'
'Good words,' Mishal laughed bitterly. 'Saeed, good choice of words.
You know I can't live but you talk about suicide. Saeed, a thing is
happening here, and you with your imported European atheism don't know what
it is. Or maybe you would if you looked beneath your English suitings and
tried to locate your heart.'
'It's incredible,' Saeed cried. 'Mishal, Mishu, is this you? All of a
sudden you've turned into this God-bothered type from ancient history?'
Mrs. Qureishi said, 'Go away, son. No room for unbelievers here. The
angel has told Ayesha that when Mishal completes the pilgrimage to Mecca her
cancer will have disappeared. Everything is required and everything will be
given.'
Mirza Saeed Akhtar put his palms against a wall of his wife's bedroom
and pressed his forehead against the plaster. After a long pause he said:
'If it is a question of performing umra then for God's sake let's go to town
and catch a plane. We can be in Mecca within a couple of days.'
Mishal answered, 'We are commanded to walk.'
Saeed lost control of himself. 'Mishal? Mishal?' he shrieked.
'Commanded? Archangels, Mishu?
Gibreel?
God with a long beard and angels
with wings? Heaven and hell, Mishal? The Devil with a pointy tail and cloven
hoofs? How far are you going with this? Do women have souls, what do you
say? Or the other way: do souls have gender? Is God black or white? When the
waters of the ocean part, where will the extra water go? Will it stand up
sideways like walls? Mishal? Answer me. Are there miracles? Do you believe
in Paradise? Will I be forgiven my sins?' He began to cry, and fell on to
his knees, with his forehead still pressed against the wall. His dying wife
came up and embraced him from behind. 'Go with the pilgrimage, then,' he
said, dully. 'But at least take the Mercedes station wagon. It's got
air-conditioning and you can take the icebox full of Cokes.'
'No,' she said, gently. 'We'll go like everybody else. We're pilgrims,
Saeed. This isn't a picnic at the beach.'
'I don't know what to do,' Mirza Saeed Akhtar wept. 'Mishu, I can't
handle this by myself
Ayesha spoke from the bed. 'Mirza sahib, come with us,' she said. 'Your
ideas are finished with. Come and save your soul.'
Saeed stood up, red-eyed. 'A bloody outing you wanted,' he said
viciously to Mrs. Qureishi. 'That chicken certainly came home to roost. Your
outing will finish off the lot of us, seven generations, the whole bang
shoot.'
Mishal leaned her cheek against his back. 'Come with us, Saeed. Just
come.'
He turned to face Ayesha. 'There is no God,' he said firmly.
'There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet,' she replied.
'The mystical experience is a subjective, not an objective truth,' he
went on. 'The waters will not open.'
'The sea will part at the angel's command,' Ayesha answered.
'You are leading these people into certain disaster.'
'I am taking them into the bosom of God.'
'I don't believe in you,' Mirza Saeed insisted. 'But I'm going to come,
and will try to end this insanity with every step I take.'
'God chooses many means,' Ayesha rejoiced, 'many roads by which the
doubtful may be brought into his certainty.'
'Go to hell,' shouted Mirza Saeed Akhtar, and ran, scattering
butterflies, from the room.
'Who is the madder,' Osman the clown whispered into his bullock's ear
as he groomed it in its small byre, 'the madwoman, or the fool who loves the
madwoman?' The bullock didn't reply. 'Maybe we should have stayed
untouchable,' Osman continued. 'A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a
forbidden well.' And the bullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.
A
City Visible out Unseen
1
Once I'm an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into
myself?'
Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, prop. Shaan-daar Cafe and landlord of the
rooming-house above, mentor to the variegated, transient and particoloured
inhabitants of both, seen-it-all type, least doctrinaire of hajis and most
unashamed of VCR addicts, ex-schoolteacher, self-taught in classical texts
of many cultures, dismissed from post in Dhaka owing to cultural differences
with certain generals in the old days when Bangladesh was merely an East
Wing, and therefore, in his own words, 'not so much an immig as an emig
runt' - this last a good-natured allusion to his lack of inches, for though
he was a wide man, thick of arm and waist, he stood no more than sixty-one
inches off the ground, blinked in his bedroom doorway, awakened by Jumpy
Joshi's urgent midnight knock, polished his half-rimmed spectacles on the
edge of Bengali-style kurta (drawstrings tied at the neck in a neat bow),
squeezed lids tightly shut open shut over myopic eyes, replaced glasses,
opened eyes, stroked moustacheless hennaed beard, sucked teeth, and
responded to the now-indisputable horns on the brow of the shivering fellow
whom Jumpy, like the cat, appeared to have dragged in, with the above
impromptu quip, stolen, with commendable mental alacrity for one aroused
from his slumbers, from Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, Moroccan priest, AD
120-180 approx., colonial of an earlier Empire, a person who denied the
accusation of having bewitched a rich widow yet confessed, somewhat
perversely, that at an early stage in his career he had been transformed, by
witchcraft, into (not an owl, but) an ass. 'Yes, yes,' Sufyan continued,
stepping out into the passage and blowing a white mist of winter breath into
his cupped hands, 'Poor misfortunate, but no point wallowing. Constructive
attitude must be adopted. I will wake my wife.'
Chamcha was beard-fuzz and grime. He wore a blanket like a toga below
which there protruded the comic deformity of goats' hoofs, while above it
could be seen the sad comedy of a sheepskin jacket borrowed from Jumpy, its
collar turned up, so that sheepish curls nestled only inches from pointy
billy-goat horns. He seemed incapable of speech, sluggish of body, dull of
eye; even though Jumpy attempted to encourage him - 'There, you see, we'll
have this well sorted in a flash' - he, Saladin, remained the most limp and
passive of - what? - let us say: satyrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, offered further
Apuleian sympathy. 'In the case of the ass, reverse metamorphosis required
personal intervention of goddess Isis,' he beamed. 'But old times are for
old fogies. In your instance, young mister, first step would possibly be a
bowl of good hot soup.'
At this point his kindly tones were quite drowned by the intervention
of a second voice, raised high in operatic terror; moments after which, his
small form was being jostled and shoved by the mountainous, fleshy figure of
a woman, who seemed unable to decide whether to push him out of her way or
keep him before her as a protective shield. Crouching behind Sufyan, this
new being extended a trembling arm at whose end was a quivering, pudgy,
scarlet-nailed index finger. 'That over there,' she howled. 'What thing is
come upon us?'
'It is a friend of Joshi's,' Sufyan said mildly, and continued, turning
to Chamcha, 'Please forgive, - the unexpectedness et cet, isn't it? -
Anyhow, may I present my Mrs.; - my Begum Sahiba, - Hind.'
'What friend? How friend?' the croucher cried. 'Ya Allah, eyes aren't
next to your nose?'
The passageway, - bare-board floor, torn floral paper on the walls, -
was starting to fill up with sleepy residents. Prominent among whom were two
teenage girls, one spike-haired, the other pony-tailed, and both relishing
the opportunity to demonstrate their skills (learned from Jumpy) in the
martial arts of karate and Wing Chun: Sufyan's daughters, Mishal (seventeen)
and fifteen-year-old Anahita, leapt from their bedroom in fighting gear,
Bruce Lee pajamas worn loosely over T-shirts bearing the image of the new
Madonna; - caught sight of unhappy Saladin; - and shook their heads in
wide-eyed delight.
'Radical,' said Mishal, approvingly. And her sister nodded assent:
'Crucial. Fucking
A.'
Her mother did not, however, reproach her for her
language; Hind's mind was elsewhere, and she wailed louder than ever: 'Look
at this husband of mine. What sort of haji is this? Here is Shaitan himself
walking in through our door, and I am made to offer him hot chicken yakhni,
cooked by my own right hand.'
Useless, now, for Jumpy Joshi to plead with Hind for tolerance, to
attempt explanations and demand solidarity. 'If he's not the devil on
earth,' the heaving-chested lady pointed out unanswerably, 'from where that
plague-breath comes that he's breathing? From, maybe, the Perfumed Garden?'
'Not Gulistan, but Bostan,' said Chamcha, suddenly. 'A I Flight 420.'
On hearing his voice, however, Hind squealed frightfully, and plunged past
him, heading for the kitchen.
'Mister,' Mishal said to Saladin as her mother fled downstairs, 'anyone
who scares her that way has got to be seriously
bad.'
'Wicked,' Anahita agreed. 'Welcome aboard.'
This Hind, now so firmly entrenched in exclamatory mode, had once been
- strangebuttrue! - the most blushing of brides, the soul of gentleness, the
very incarnation of tolerant good humour. As the wife of the erudite
schoolteacher of Dhaka, she had entered into her duties with a will, the
perfect helpmeet, bringing her husband cardamom-scented tea when he stayed
up late marking examination papers, ingratiating herself with the school
principal at the termly Staff Families Outing, struggling with the novels of
Bibhutibhushan Banerji and the metaphysics of Tagore in an attempt to be
more worthy of a spouse who could quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda as well
as Quran-Sharif, from the military accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the
Revelations of St John the Divine. In those days she had admired his
pluralistic openness of mind, and struggled, in her kitchen, towards a
parallel eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India
as well as the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her espousal of the
cause of gastronomic pluralism grew into a grand passion, and while
secularist Sufyan swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent - 'and
let us not pretend that Western culture is not present; after these
centuries, how could it not also be part of our heritage?' - his wife
cooked, and ate in increasing quantities, its food. As she devoured the
highly spiced dishes of Hyderabad and the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of
Lucknow her body began to alter, because all that food had to find a home
somewhere, and she began to resemble the wide rolling land mass itself, the
subcontinent without frontiers, because food passes across any boundary you
care to mention.
Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, however, gained no weight: not a
tola,
not an
ounce.
His refusal to fatten was the beginning of the trouble. When she
reproached him - 'You don't like my cooking? For whom I'm doing it all and
blowing up like a balloon?'
-
he answered, mildly, looking up at her (she
was the taller of the two) over the top of half-rimmed specs: 'Restraint is
also part of our traditions, Begum. Eating two mouthfuls less than one's
hunger: self-denial, the ascetic path.' What a man: all the answers, but you
couldn't get him to give you a decent fight.
Restraint was not for Hind. Maybe, if Sufyan had ever complained; if
just once he'd said,
I thought I was marrying one woman but these days
you're big enough for two;
if he'd ever given her the incentive! - then
maybe she'd have desisted, why not, of course she would; so it was his
fault, for having no aggression, what kind of a male was it who didn't know
how to insult his fat lady wife? - In truth, it was entirely possible that
Hind would have failed to control her eating binges even if Sufyan had come
up with the required imprecations and entreaties; but, since he did not, she
munched on, content to dump the whole blame for her figure on him.
As a matter of fact, once she had started blaming him for things, she
found that there were a number of other matters she could hold against him;
and found, too, her tongue, so that the schoolteacher's humble apartment
resounded regularly to the kinds of tickings-off he was too much of a mouse
to hand out to his pupils. Above all, he was berated for his excessively
high principles, thanks to which, Hind told him, she knew he would never
permit her to become a rich man's wife; - for what could one say about a man
who, finding that his bank had inadvertently credited his salary to his
account twice in the same month, promptly
drew the institution's notice
to
the error and handed back the cash?; - what hope was there for a teacher
who, when approached by the wealthiest of the schoolchildren's parents,
flatly refused to contemplate accepting the usual remunerations in return
for services rendered when marking the little fellows' examination papers?
'But all of that I could forgive,' she would mutter darkly at him,
leaving unspoken the rest of the sentence, which was
if it hadn't been for
your two real offences: your sexual, and political, crimes.
Ever since their marriage, the two of them had performed the sexual act
infrequently, in total darkness, pin-drop silence and almost complete
immobility. It would not have occurred to Hind to wiggle or wobble, and
since Sufyan appeared to get through it all with an absolute minimum of
motion, she took it - had always taken it - that the two of them were of the
same mind on this matter, viz., that it was a dirty business, not to be
discussed before or after, and not to be drawn attention to during, either.
That the children took their time in coming she took as God's punishment for
He only knew what misdeeds of her earlier life; that they both turned out to
be girls she refused to blame on Allah, preferring, instead, to blame the
weakling seed implanted in her by her unmanly spouse, an attitude she did
not refrain from expressing, with great emphasis, and to the horror of the
midwife, at the very moment of little Anahita's birth. 'Another girl,' she
gasped in disgust. 'Well, considering who made the baby, I should think
myself lucky it's not a cockroach, or a mouse.' After this second daughter
she told Sufyan that enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into
the hall. He accepted without any argument her refusal to have more
children; but then she discovered that the lecher thought he could still,
from time to time, enter her darkened room and enact that strange rite of
silence and near-motionlessness to which she had only submitted in the name
of reproduction. 'What do you think,' she shouted at him the first time he
tried it, 'I do this thing for
fun?'
Once he had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no
more hanky-panky, no sir, she was a decent woman, not a lust-crazed
libertine, he began to stay out late at night. It was during this period -
she had thought, mistakenly, that he was visiting prostitutes - that he
became involved with politics, and not just any old politics, either, oh no,
Mister Brainbox had to go and join the devils themselves, the Communist
Party, no less, so much for those principles of his; demons, that's what
they were, worse by far than whores. It was because of this dabbling in the
occult that she had to pack up her bags at such short notice and leave for
England with two small babies in tow; because of this ideological witchcraft
that she had had to endure all the privations and humiliations of the
process of immigration; and on account of this diabolism of his that she was
stuck forever in this England and would never see her village again.
'England,' she once said to him, 'is your revenge upon me for preventing you
from performing your obscene acts upon my body.' He had not given an answer;
and silence denotes assent.
And what was it that made them a living in this Vilayet of her exile,
this Yuke of her sex-obsessed husband's vindic-tiveness? What? His book
learning? His
Gitanjali, Eclogues,
or that play
Othello
that he explained
was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn't spell, what sort
of writer was that, anyway?
It was: her cooking. 'Shaandaar,' it was praised. 'Outstanding,
brilliant, delicious.' People came from all over London to eat her samosas,
her Bombay chaat, her gulab jamans straight from Paradise. What was there
for Sufyan to do? Take the money, serve the tea, run from here to there,
behave like a servant for all his education. O, yes, of course the customers
liked his personality, he always had an appealing character, but when you're
running an eatery it isn't the conversation they pay for on the bill.
Jalebis, barfi, Special of the Day. How life had turned out! She was the
mistress now. Victory!
And yet it was also a fact that she, cook and breadwinner, chiefest
architect of the success of the Shaandaar Cafe, which had finally enabled
them to buy the whole four-storey building and start renting out its rooms,
-
she
was the one around whom there hung, like bad breath, the miasma of
defeat. While Sufyan twinkled on, she looked extinguished, like a lightbulb
with a broken filament, like a fizzled star, like a flame. - Why? - Why,
when Sufyan, who had been deprived of vocation, pupils and respect, bounded
about like a young lamb, and even began to put on weight, fattening up in
Proper London as he had never done back home; why, when power had been
removed from his hands and delivered into hers, did she act - as her husband
put it - the 'sad sack', the 'glum chum' and the 'moochy pooch'? Simple: not
in spite of, but on account of. Everything she valued had been upset by the
change; had in this process of translation, been lost.
Her language: obliged, now, to emit these alien sounds that made her
tongue feel tired, was she not entitled to moan? Her familiar place: what
matter that they had lived, in Dhaka, in a teacher's humble flat, and now,
owing to entrepreneurial good sense, savings and skill with spices, occupied
this four-storey terraced house? Where now was the city she knew? Where the
village of her youth and the green waterways of home? The customs around
which she had built her life were lost, too, or at least were hard to find.
Nobody in this Vilayet had time for the slow courtesies of life back home,
or for the many observances of faith. Furthermore: was she not forced to put
up with a husband of no account, whereas before she could bask in his
dignified position? Where was the pride in being made to work for her
living, for his living, whereas before she could sit at home in
much-befitting pomp? - And she knew, how could she not, the sadness beneath
his bonhomie, and that, too, was a defeat; never before had she felt so
inadequate as a wife, for what kind of a Mrs. is it that cannot cheer up her
man, but must observe the counterfeit of happiness and make do, as if it
were the genuine McCoy? - Plus also: they had come into a demon city in
which anything could happen, your windows shattered in the middle of the
night without any cause, you were knocked over in the street by invisible
hands, in the shops you heard such abuse you felt like your ears would drop
off but when you turned in the direction of the words you saw only empty air
and smiling faces, and every day you heard about this boy, that girl, beaten
up by ghosts. - Yes, a land of phantom imps, how to explain; best thing was
to stay home, not go out for so much as to post a letter, stay in, lock the
door, say your prayers, and the goblins would (maybe) stay away. - Reasons
for defeat? Baba, who could count them? Not only was she a shopkeeper's wife
and a kitchen slave, but even her own people could not be relied on; - there
were men she thought of as respectable types, sharif, giving telephone
divorces to wives back home and running off with some haramzadi female, and
girls killed for dowry (some things could be brought through the foreign
customs without duty); - and worst of all, the poison of this devil-island
had infected her baby girls, who were growing up refusing to speak their
mother-tongue, even though they understood every word, they did it just to
hurt; and why else had Mishal cut off all her hair and put rainbows into it;
and every day it was fight, quarrel, disobey, -and worst of all, there was
not one new thing about her complaints, this is how it was for women like
her, so now she was no longer just one, just herself, just Hind wife of
teacher Sufyan; she had sunk into the anonymity, the characterless
plurality, of being merely one-of-the-women-like-her. This was history's
lesson: nothing for women-like-her to do but suffer, remember, and die.
What she did: to deny her husband's weakness, she treated him, for the
most part, like a lord, like a monarch, for in her lost world her glory had
lain in his; to deny the ghosts outside the cafe, she stayed indoors,
sending others out for kitchen provisions and household necessities, and
also for the endless supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on VCR through which
(along with her ever-increasing hoard of Indian movie magazines) she could
stay in touch with events in the 'real world', such as the bizarre
disappearance of the incomparable Gibreel Farishta and the subsequent tragic
announcement of his death in an airline accident; and to give her feelings
of defeated, exhausted despair some outlet, she shouted at her daughters.
The elder of whom, to get her own back, hacked off her hair and permitted
her nipples to poke through shirts worn provocatively tight.
The arrival of a fully developed devil, a horned goat-man, was, in the
light of the foregoing, something very like the last, or at any rate the
penultimate, straw.
Shaandaar residents gathered in the night-kitchen for an impromptu
crisis summit. While Hind hurled imprecations into chicken soup, Sufyan
placed Chamcha at a table, drawing up, for the poor fellow's use, an
aluminium chair with a blue plastic seat, and initiated the night's
proceedings. The theories of Lamarck, I am pleased to report, were quoted by
the exiled schoolteacher, who spoke in his best didactic voice. When Jumpy
had recounted the unlikely story of Chamcha's fall from the sky - the
protagonist himself being too immersed in chicken soup and misery to speak
for himself- Sufyan, sucking teeth, made reference to the last edition of
The Origin of Species.
'In which even great Charles accepted the notion of
mutation in extremis, to ensure survival of species; so what if his
followers - always more Darwinian than man himself! - repudiated,
posthumously, such Lamarckian heresy, insisting on natural selection and
nothing but, - however, I am bound to admit, such theory is not extended to
survival of individual specimen but only to species as a whole; - in
addition, regarding nature of mutation, problem is to comprehend actual
utility of the change.'
'Da-ad,' Anahita Sufyan, eyes lifting to heaven, cheek lying ho-hum
against palm, interrupted these cogitations. 'Give over. Point is, how'd he
turn into such a, such a,' - admiringly - 'freak?'
Upon which, the devil himself, looking up from chicken soup, cried out,
'No, I'm not. I'm not a freak, O no, certainly I am not.' His voice, seeming
to rise from an unfathomable abyss of grief, touched and alarmed the younger
girl, who rushed over to where he sat, and, impetuously caressing a shoulder
of the unhappy beast, said, in an attempt to make amends: 'Of course you
aren't, I'm sorry, of course I don't think you're a freak; it's just that
you look like one.'
Saladin Chamcha burst into tears.
Mrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, had been horrified by the sight of her younger
daughter actually laying hands on the creature, and turning to the gallery
of nightgowned residents she waved a soup-ladle at them and pleaded for
support. 'How to tolerate? -Honour, safety of young girls cannot be assured.
- That in my own house, such a thing . . . !'
Mishal Sufyan lost patience. 'Jesus, Mum.'
'Jesus?'
'Dju think it's temporary?' Mishal, turning her back on scandalized
Hind, inquired of Sufyan and Jumpy. 'Some sort of possession thing - could
we maybe get it you know
exorcized?
Omens, shinings, ghoulies, nightmares on
Elm Street, stood excitedly in her eyes, and her father, as much the VCR
aficionado as any teenager, appeared to consider the possibility seriously.
'In
Der Steppenwolf,'
he began, but Jumpy wasn't having any more of that.
'The central requirement,' he announced, 'is to take an ideological view of
the situation.'
That silenced everyone.
'Objectively,' he said, with a small self-deprecating smile, 'what has
happened here? A: Wrongful arrest, intimidation, violence. Two: Illegal
detention, unknown medical experimentation in hospital,' - murmurs of assent
here,-as memories of intra-vaginal inspections, Depo-Provera scandals,
unauthorized post-partum sterilizations, and, further back, the knowledge of
Third World drug-dumping arose in every person present to give substance to
the speaker's insinuations, - because what you believe depends on what
you've seen, - not only what is visible, but what you are prepared to look
in the face, - and anyhow, something had to explain horns and hoofs; in
those policed medical wards, anything could happen - 'And thirdly,' Jumpy
continued, 'psychological breakdown, loss of sense of self, inability to
cope. We've seen it all before.'
Nobody argued, not even Hind; there were some truths from which it was
impossible to dissent. 'Ideologically,'Jumpy said, 'I refuse to accept the
position of victim. Certainly, he has been
victimized,
but we know that all
abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused; our passiveness
colludes with, permits such crimes.' Whereupon, having scolded the gathering
into shamefaced submission, he requested Sufyan to make available the small
attic room that was presently unoccupied, and Sufyan, in his turn, was
rendered entirely unable, by feelings of solidarity and guilt, to ask for a
single p in rent. Hind did, it is true, mumble: 'Now I know the world is
mad, when a devil becomes my house guest,' but she did so under her breath,
and nobody except her elder daughter Mishal heard what she said.
Sufyan, taking his cue from his younger daughter, went up to where
Chamcha, huddled in his blanket, was drinking enormous quantities of Hind's
unrivalled chicken yakhni, squatted down, and placed an arm around the
still-shivering unfortunate. 'Best place for you is here,' he said, speaking
as if to a simpleton or small child. 'Where else would you go to heal your
disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us,
among your own people, your own kind?'
Only when Saladin Chamcha was alone in the attic room at the very end
of his strength did he answer Sufyan's rhetorical question. 'I'm not your
kind,' he said distinctly into the night. 'You're not my people. I've spent
half my life trying to get away from you.'
His heart began to misbehave, to kick and stumble as if it, too, wanted
to metamorphose into some new, diabolic form, to substitute the complex
unpredictability of tabla improvisations for its old metronomic beat. Lying
sleepless in a narrow bed, snagging his horns in bedsheets and pillowcases
as he tossed and turned, he suffered the renewal of coronary eccentricity
with a kind of fatalistic acceptance: if everything else, then why not this,
too? Badoomboom, went the heart, and his torso jerked.
Watch it or I'll
really let you have it. Doomboombadoom.
Yes: this was Hell, all right. The
city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim.
Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren't they the ones with the pitchforks?
Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the
treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable
consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping,
grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush.
First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup
of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the
deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from
a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar
of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but
narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of
huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and
from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming
birds.
The sun rose, unwrapping the misty city like a gift. Saladin Chamcha
slept.
Which afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other
night-street down which, in the company of the physiotherapist Hyacinth
Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and
reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth's
face and body had seemed to change. He saw the gap opening and widening
between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited
itself into medusas, and the strange triangularity of her profile, which
sloped outwards from her hairline to the tip of her nose, swung about and
headed in an unbroken line inwards to her neck. He saw in the yellow light
that her skin was growing darker by the minute, and her teeth more
prominent, and her body as long as a child's stick-figure drawing. At the
same time she was casting him glances of an ever more explicit lechery, and
grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a
skeleton had seized him and was trying to drag him down into a grave; he
could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it, on her breath,
on her lips . . . revulsion seized him. How could he ever have thought her
attractive, even desired her, even gone so far as to fantasize, while she
straddled him and pummelled fluid from his lungs, that they were lovers in
the violent throes of sexual congress? . . . The city thickened around them
like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair.
'No light can get in here,' she whispered to him. 'It's black; all black.'
She made as if to lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but
he shouted, 'Quick, the church,' and plunged into an unprepossessing
box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however,
the pews were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless
blue two-piece suits, false pearls, and little pill-box hats decked out with
bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable
form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly,
Fix me, Jesus;
until they saw Chamcha,
quit their spiritualling, and commenced to bawl in a most unspiritual
manner,
Satan, the Goat, the Goat,
and suchlike stuff. Now it became clear
that the Hyacinth with whom he'd entered was looking at him with new eyes,
just the way he'd looked at her in the street; that she, too, had started
seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust
on that hideously pointy and clouded face he just let rip.
'Hubshees,'
he
cursed them in, for some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers
and savages, he called them. 'I feel sorry for you,' he pronounced. 'Every
morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see, staring back,
the darkness: the stain, the proof that you're the lowest of the low.' They
rounded upon him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now
lost among them, indistinguishable, no longer an individual but a
woman-like-them, and he was being beaten frightfully, emitting a piteous
bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized
that his assailants' fear was greater than their wrath, and he rose up to
his full height, spread his arms, and screamed devil-sounds at them, sending
them scurrying for cover, cowering behind pews, as he strode bloody but
unbowed from the battlefield.
Dreams put things in their own way; but Chamcha, coming briefly awake
as his heartbeat skipped into a new burst of syncopations, was bitterly
aware that the nightmare had not been so very far from the truth; the
spirit, at least, was right. - That was the last of Hyacinth, he thought,
and faded away again. - To find himself shivering in the hall of his own
home while, on a higher plane, Jumpy Joshi argued fiercely with Pamela.
With
my wife.
And when dream-Pamela, echoing the real one word for word, had rejected
her husband a hundred and one times,
he doesn't exist, it, such things are
not so,
it was Jamshed the virtuous who, setting aside love and desire,
helped. Leaving behind a weeping Pamela -
Don't you dare bring that back
here,
she shouted from the top floor - from Saladin's den - Jumpy, wrapping
Chamcha in sheepskin and blanket, led enfeebled through the shadows to the
Shaandaar Cafe, promising with empty kindness: 'It'll be all right. You'll
see. It'll all be fine.'
When Saladin Chamcha awoke, the memory of these words filled him with a
bitter anger. Where's Farishta, he found himself thinking. That bastard: I
bet he's doing okay. - It was a thought to which he would return, with
extraordinary results; for the moment, however, he had other fish to fry.
I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it
had happened, it could not be denied. I am
no longer myself,
or not only. I
am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.
Why? Why me?
What evil had he done - what vile thing could he, would he do?
For what was he - he couldn't avoid the notion - being punished? And,
come to that,
by whom?
(I held my tongue.)
Had he not pursued his own idea
of the good,
sought to become that
which he most admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession
to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, avoided trouble,
striven to become new? Assiduity, fastidiousness, moderation, restraint,
self-reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral
code? Was it his fault that Pamela and he were childless? Were genetics his
responsibility? Could it be, in this inverted age, that he was being
victimized by - the fates, he agreed with himself to call the persecuting
agency - precisely
because
of his pursuit of 'the good'? - That nowadays
such a pursuit was considered wrong-headed, even evil? - Then how cruel
these fates were, to instigate his rejection by the very world he had so
determinedly courted; how desolating, to be cast from the gates of the city
one believed oneself to have taken long ago! - What mean small-mindedness
was this, to cast him back into the bosom
of his people,
from whom he'd felt
so distant for so long! - Here thoughts of Zeeny Vakil welled up, and
guiltily, nervously, he forced them down again.
His heart kicked him violently, and he sat up, doubled over, gasped for
breath.
Calm down, or it's curtains. No place for such stressful
cogitations: not any more.
He took deep breaths; lay back; emptied his mind.
The traitor in his chest resumed normal service.
No more of that, Saladin Chamcha told himself firmly. No more of
thinking myself evil. Appearances deceive; the cover is not the best guide
to the book. Devil, Goat, Shaitan? Not I.
Not I: another.
Who?
Mishal and Anahita arrived with breakfast on a tray and excitement all
over their faces. Chamcha devoured cornflakes and Nescafe while the girls,
after a few moments of shyness, gabbled at him, simultaneously, non-stop.
'Well, you've set the place buzzing and no mistake.' - 'You haven't gone and
changed back in the night or anything?' - 'Listen, it's not a trick, is it?
I mean, it's not make-up or something theatrical? - I mean, Jumpy says
you're an actor, and I only thought, - I mean,' and here young Anahita dried
up, because Chamcha, spewing cornflakes, howled angrily: 'Make-up?
Theatrical?
Trick?'
'No offence,' Mishal said anxiously on her sister's behalf. 'It's just
we've been thinking, know what I mean, and well it'd just be awful if you
weren't, but you are, 'course you are, so that's all right,' she finished
hastily as Chamcha glared at her again. -'Thing is,' Anahita resumed, and
then, faltering, 'Mean to say, well, we just think it's great.' - 'You, she
means,' Mishal corrected. 'We think you're, you know.' - 'Brilliant,'
Anahita said and dazzled the bewildered Chamcha with a smile. 'Magic. You
know.
Extreme.'
'We didn't sleep all night,' Mishal said. 'We've got ideas.'
'What we reckoned,' Anahita trembled with the thrill of it, 'as you've
turned into, - what you are, - then maybe, well, probably, actually, even if
you haven't tried it out, it could be, you could . . .' And the older girl
finished the thought: 'You could've developed - you know -
powers'
'We thought, anyway,' Anahita added, weakly, seeing the clouds
gathering on Chamcha's brow. And, backing towards the door, added: 'But
we're probably wrong. - Yeh. We're wrong all right. Enjoy your meal.' -
Mishal, before she fled, took a small bottle full of green fluid out of a
pocket of her red-and-black-check donkey jacket, put it on the floor by the
door, and delivered the following parting shot. 'O, excuse me, but Mum says,
can you use this, it's mouthwash, for your breath.'
That Mishal and Anahita should adore the disfiguration which he loathed
with all his heart convinced him that 'his people' were as crazily
wrong-headed as he'd long suspected. That the two of them should respond to
his bitterness - when, on his second attic morning, they brought him a
masala dosa instead of packet cereal complete with toy silver spacemen, and
he cried out, ungratefully: 'Now I'm supposed to eat this filthy foreign
food?' - with expressions of sympathy, made matters even worse. 'Sawful
muck,' Mishal agreed with him. 'No bangers in here, worse luck.' Conscious
of having insulted their hospitality, he tried to explain that he thought of
himself, nowadays, as, well, British . . . 'What about us?' Anahita wanted
to know. 'What do you think we are?' - And Mishal confided: 'Bangladesh in't
nothing to me. Just some place Dad and Mum keep banging on about.' - And
Anahita, conclusively: 'Bungleditch.' - With a satisfied nod. - 'What I call
it, anyhow.'
But they weren't British, he wanted to tell them: not
really,
not in
any way he could recognize. And yet his old certainties were slipping away
by the moment, along with his old life . . . 'Where's the telephone?' he
demanded. 'I've got to make some calls.'
It was in the hall; Anahita, raiding her savings, lent him the coins.
His head wrapped in a borrowed turban, his body concealed in borrowed
trousers (Jumpy's) and Mishal's shoes, Chamcha dialled the past.
'Chamcha,' said the voice of Mimi Mamoulian. 'You're dead.'
This happened while he was away: Mimi blacked out and lost her teeth.
'A whiteout is what it was,' she told him, speaking more harshly than usual
because of difficulty with her jaw. 'A reason why? Don't ask. Who can ask
for reason in these times? What's your number?' she added as the pips went.
'I'll call you right back.' But it was a full five minutes before she did.
'I took a leak. You have a reason why you're alive? Why the waters parted
for you and the other guy but closed over the rest? Don't tell me you were
worthier. People don't buy that nowadays, not even you, Chamcha. I was
walking down Oxford Street looking for crocodile shoes when it happened: out
cold in mid-stride and I fell forward like a tree, landed on the point of my
chin and all the teeth fell out on the sidewalk in front of the man doing
find-the-lady. People can be thoughtful, Chamcha. When I came to I found my
teeth in a little pile next to my face. I opened my eyes and saw the little
bastards staring at me, wasn't that nice? First thing I thought, thank God,
I've got the money. I had them stitched back in, privately of course, great
job, better than before. So I've been taking a break for a while. The
voiceover business is in bad shape, let me tell you, what with you dying and
my teeth, we just have no sense of responsibility. Standards have been
lowered, Chamcha. Turn on the T V, listen to radio, you should hear how
corny the pizza commercials, the beer ads with the Cherman accents from
Central Casting, the Martians eating potato powder and sounding like they
came from the Moon. They fired us from
The Aliens Show.
Get well soon.
Incidentally, you might say the same for me.'
So he had lost work as well as wife, home, a grip on life. 'It's not
just the dentals that go wrong,' Mimi powered on. 'The fucking plosives
scare me stupid. I keep thinking I'll spray the old bones on the street
again. Age, Chamcha: it's all humiliations. You get born, you get beaten up
and bruised all over and finally you break and they shovel you into an urn.
Anyway, if I never work again I'll die comfortable. Did you know I'm with
Billy Battuta now? That's right, how could you, you've been swimming. Yeah,
I gave up waiting for you so I cradlesnatched one of your ethnic co-persons.
You can take it as a compliment. Now I gots to run. Nice talking to the
dead, Chamcha. Next time dive from the low board. Toodle oo.'
I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected
phone. I have struggled, in my fashion, to find my way towards an
appreciation of the high things, towards a small measure of fineness. On
good days I felt it was within my grasp, somewhere within me, somewhere
within. But it eluded me. I have become embroiled, in things, in the world
and its messes, and I cannot resist. The grotesque has me, as before the
quotidian had me, in its thrall. The sea gave me up; the land drags me down.
He was sliding down a grey slope, the black water lapping at his heart.
Why did rebirth, the second chance granted to Gibreel Farishta and himself,
feel so much, in his case, like a perpetual ending? He had been reborn into
the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of
things-never-the-same, of noway-back, made him afraid. When you lose the
past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on
if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in
the grey slope as you slide.
Billy Battuta: that worthless piece of shit. Playboy Pakistani, turned
an unremarkable holiday business -
Battuta's Travels -
into a fleet of
supertankers. A con-man, basically, famous for his romances with leading
ladies of the Hindi screen and, according to gossip, for his predilection
for white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom he 'treated
badly', as the euphemism had it, and 'rewarded handsomely'. What did Mimi
want with bad Billy, his sexual instruments and his Maserati Biturbo? For
boys like Battuta, white women - never mind fat, Jewish, non-deferential
white women - were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in whites -
love of brown sugar - one must also hate when it turns up, inverted, in
black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.
Mimi telephoned the next evening from New York. Anahita called him to
the phone in her best damnyankee tones, and he struggled into his disguise.
When he got there she had rung off, but she rang back. 'Nobody pays
transatlantic prices for hanging on.' 'Mimi,' he said, with desperation
patent in his voice, 'you didn't say you were leaving.' 'You didn't even
tell me your damn address,' she responded. 'So we both have secrets.' He
wanted to say, Mimi, come home, you're going to get kicked. 'I introduced
him to the family,' she said, too jokily. 'You can imagine. Yassir Arafat
meets the Begins. Never mind. We'll all live.' He wanted to say, Mimi,
you're all I've got. He managed, however, only to piss her off. 'I wanted to
warn you about Billy,' was what he said.
She went icy. 'Chamcha, listen up. I'll discuss this with you one time
because behind all your bullshit you do maybe care for me a little. So
comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read
Finnegans
Wake
and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that
we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a "flattened" world. When I
become the voice of a bottle of bubble bath, I am entering Flatland
knowingly, understanding what I'm doing and why. Viz., I am earning cash.
And as an intelligent woman, able to do fifteen minutes on Stoicism and more
on Japanese cinema, I say to you, Chamcha, that I am fully aware of Billy
boy's rep. Don't teach me about exploitation. We had exploitation when
you-plural were running round in skins. Try being Jewish, female and ugly
sometime. You'll beg to be black. Excuse my French: brown.' 'You concede,
then, that he's exploiting you,' Chamcha
interposed, but the torrent swept him away. 'What's the fuckin' diff?'
she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. 'Billy's a funny boy, a natural scam
artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is? I'll tell you
some notions I do not require: patriotism, God and love. Definitely not
wanted on the voyage. I like Billy because he knows the score.'
'Mimi,' he said, 'something's happened to me,' but she was still
protesting too much and missed it. He put the receiver down without giving
her his address.
She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken
precedents had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts,
and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart,
it was time to wave goodbye. It was still all Billy with Mimi: his plans to
make Hindi movies in England and America, importing the top stars, Vinod
Khanna, Sridevi, to cavort in front of Bradford Town Hall and the Golden
Gate Bridge - 'it's some sort of tax dodge, obviously,' Mimi carolled gaily.
In fact, things were heating up for Billy; Chamcha had seen his name in the
papers, coupled with the terms
fraud squad
and
tax evasion,
but once a scam
man, always a ditto, Mimi said. 'So he says to me, do you want a mink? I
say, Billy, don't buy me things, but he says, who's talking about buying?
Have a mink. It's business.' They had been in New York again, and Billy had
hired a stretched Mercedes limousine 'and a stretched chauffeur also'.
Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi
tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy's lead. At length he
said, You like that one? It's nice. Billy, she whispered, it's
forty
thousand,
but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday
afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. 'Well, by
now they
know
he's an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat,
and he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the
coat, and says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here's the
receipt, will you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend
ahead.' - Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang
the first, where all the alarm bells went off in the manager's brain, and
five minutes later the police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud
cheque, and he and Mimi spent the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the
banks opened and it turned out that Billy's account was in credit to the
tune of forty-two thousand, one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque
had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intention to sue
them for two million dollars damages, defamation of character, open and shut
case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on
the nail. 'Don't you love him?' Mimi asked Chamcha. 'The boy's a genius. I
mean, this was
class.'
I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an
amoral, survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita Sufyan, who
still unaccountably treated him like a kind of soul-mate, in spite of all
his attempts to dissuade them, were beings who plainly admired such
creatures as moonlighters, shoplifters, filchers: scam artists in general.
He corrected himself: not admired, that wasn't it. Neither girl would ever
steal a pin. But they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of
how-it-was. As an experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the
mink coat. Their eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with
delight: wickedness unpunished made them laugh. Thus, Chamcha realized,
people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws,
Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly, Phoolan Devi, and of course that other Billy:
William Bonney, also a Kid.
'Scrapheap Youths' Criminal Idols,' Mishal read his mind and then,
laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while
arranging her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body into similarly
exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having
stirred him, she prettily added: 'Kissy kissy?'
Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal's pose,
with less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some annoyance, she
spoke sulkily. 'Trouble is, we've got good prospects, us. Family business,
no brothers, bob's your uncle. This place makes a packet, dunnit? Well
then.' The Shaandaar rooming-house was categorized as a Bed and Breakfast
establishment, of the type that borough councils were using more and more
owing to the crisis in public housing, lodging five-person families in
single rooms, turning blind eyes to health and safety regulations, and
claiming 'temporary accommodation' allowances from the central government.
'Ten quid per night per person,' Anahita informed Chamcha in his attic.
'Three hundred and fifty nicker per room per week, it comes to, as often as
not. Six occupied rooms: you work it out. Right now, we're losing three
hundred pounds a month on this attic, so I hope you feel really bad.' For
that kind of money, it struck Chamcha, you could rent pretty reasonable
family-sized apartments in the private sector. But that wouldn't be
classified as temporary accommodation; no central funding for such
solutions. Which would also be opposed by local politicians committed to
fighting the 'cuts'.
La lutte continue;
meanwhile, Hind and her daughters
raked in the cash, unworldly Sufyan went to Mecca and came home to dispense
homely wisdom, kindliness and smiles. And behind six doors that opened a
crack every time Chamcha went to make a phone call or use the toilet, maybe
thirty temporary human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent.
The real world.
'You needn't look so fish-faced and holy, anyway,' Mishal Sufyan
pointed out. 'Look where all your law abiding got you.'
'Your universe is shrinking.' A busy man, Hal Valance, creator of
The
Aliens Show
and sole owner of the property, took exactly seventeen seconds
to congratulate Chamcha on being alive before beginning to explain why this
fact did not affect the show's decision to dispense with his services.
Valance had started out in advertising and his vocabulary had never
recovered from the blow. Chamcha could keep up, however. All those years in
the voiceover business taught you a little bad language. In marketing
parlance,
a universe
was the total potential market for a given product or
service: the chocolate universe, the slimming universe. The dental universe
was everybody with teeth; the others were the denture cosmos. 'I'm talking,'
Valance breathed down the phone in his best Deep Throat voice, 'about the
ethnic universe.'
My people again:
Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his
ill-fitting drag, hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of
impermanent women and children gleamed through barely opened doors; and
wondered what his people had done to him now. 'No capeesh,' he said,
remembering Valance's fondness for Italian-American argot - this was, after
all, the author of the fast food slogan
Getta pizza da action.
On this
occasion, however, Valance wasn't playing. 'Audience surveys show,' he
breathed, 'that ethnics don't watch ethnic shows. They don't want 'em,
Chamcha. They want fucking
Dynasty,
like everyone else. Your profile's
wrong, if you follow: with you in the show it's just too damn racial.
The
Aliens Show
is too big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension. The
merchandising possibilities alone, but I don't have to tell you this.'
Chamcha saw himself reflected in the small cracked mirror above the
phone box. He looked like a marooned genie in search of a magic lamp. 'It's
a point of view,' he answered Valance, knowing argument to be useless. With
Hal, all explanations were post facto rationalizations. He was strictly a
seat-of-the-pants man, who took for his motto the advice given by Deep
Throat to Bob Woodward:
Follow the money.
He had the phrase set in large
sans-serif type and pinned up in his office over a still from
All the
President's Men:
Hal Holbrook (another Hal!) in the car park, standing in
the shadows. Follow the money: it explained, as he was fond of saying, his
five wives, all independently wealthy, from each of whom he had received a
handsome divorce settlement. He was presently married to a wasted child
maybe one-third his age, with waist-length auburn hair and a spectral look
that would have made her a great beauty a quarter of a century earlier.
'This one doesn't have a bean; she's taking me for all I've got and when
she's taken it she'll bugger off,' Valance had told Chamcha once, in happier
days. 'What the hell. I'm human, too. This time it's love.' More
cradlesnatching. No escape from it in these times. Chamcha on the telephone
found he couldn't remember the infant's name. 'You know my motto,' Valance
was saying. 'Yes,' Chamcha said neutrally. 'It's the right line for the
product.' The product, you bastard, being you.
By the time he met Hal Valance (how many years ago? Five, maybe six),
over lunch at the White Tower, the man was already a monster: pure,
self-created image, a set of attributes plastered thickly over a body that
was, in Hal's own words, 'in training to be Orson Welles'. He smoked absurd,
caricature cigars, refusing all Cuban brands, however, on account of his
uncompromisingly capitalistic stance. He owned a Union Jack waistcoat and
insisted on flying the flag over his agency and also above the door of his
Highgate home; was prone to dress up as Maurice Chevalier and sing, at major
presentations, to his amazed clients, with the help of straw boater and
silver-headed cane; claimed to own the first Loire chateau to be fitted with
telex and fax machines; and made much of his 'intimate' association with the
Prime Minister he referred to affectionately as 'Mrs. Torture'. The
personification of philistine triumphalism, midatlantic-accented Hal was one
of the glories of the age, the creative half of the city's hottest agency,
the Valance & Lang Partnership. Like Billy Battuta he liked big cars driven
by big chauffeurs. It was said that once, while being driven at high speed
down a Cornish lane in order to 'heat up' a particularly glacial seven-foot
Finnish model, there had been an accident: no injuries, but when the other
driver emerged furiously from his wrecked vehicle he turned out to be even
larger than Hal's minder. As this colossus bore down on him, Hal lowered his
push-button window and breathed, with a sweet smile: 'I strongly advise you
to turn around and walk swiftly away; because, sir, if you do not do so
within the next fifteen seconds, I am going to have you killed.' Other
advertising geniuses were famous for their work: Mary Wells for her pink
Braniff planes, David Ogilvy for his eyepatch, Jerry della Femina for 'From
those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor'. Valance, whose agency went
in for cheap and cheerful vulgarity, all bums and honky-tonk, was renowned
in the business for this (probably apocryphal) 'I'm going to have you
killed', a turn of phrase which proved, to those in the know, that the guy
really was a genius. Chamcha had long suspected he'd made up the story, with
its perfect ad-land components - Scandinavian icequeen, two thugs, expensive
cars, Valance in the Blofeld role and 007 nowhere on the scene - and put it
about himself, knowing it to be good for business.
The lunch was by way of thanking Chamcha for his part in a recent,
smash-hit campaign for Slimbix diet foods. Saladin had been the voice of a
cutesy cartoon blob:
Hi. I'm Cal, and I'm one sad calorie.
Four courses and
plenty of champagne as a reward for persuading people to starve.
How's a
poor calorie to earn a salary? Thanks to Slimbix, I'm out of work.
Chamcha
hadn't known what to expect from Valance. What he got was, at least,
unvarnished. 'You've done well,' Hal congratulated him, 'for a person of the
tinted persuasion.' And proceeded, without taking his eyes off Chamcha's
face: 'Let me tell you some facts. Within the last three months, we re-shot
a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in
the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because T'Chairman
thought the singer sounded black, even though he was white as a sodding
sheet, and even though, the year before, we'd used a black boy who, luckily
for him, didn't suffer from an excess of soul. We were told by a major
airline that we couldn't use any blacks in their ads, even though they were
actually employees of the airline. A black actor came to audition for me and
he was wearing a Racial Equality button badge, a black hand shaking a white
one. I said this: don't think you're getting special treatment from me,
chum. You follow me? You follow what I'm telling you?' It's a goddamn
audition, Saladin realized. 'I've never felt I belonged to a race,' he
replied. Which was perhaps why, when Hal Valance set up his production
company, Chamcha was on his 'A list'; and why, eventually, Maxim Alien came
his way.
When
The Aliens Show
started coming in for stick from black radicals,
they gave Chamcha a nickname. On account of his private-school education and
closeness to the hated Valance, he was known as 'Brown Uncle Tom'.
Apparently the political pressure on the show had increased in
Chamcha's absence, orchestrated by a certain Dr Uhuru Simba. 'Doctor of
what, beats me,' Valance deepthroated down the phone. 'Our ah researchers
haven't come up with anything yet.' Mass pickets, an embarrassing appearance
on
Right to Reply.
'The guy's built like a fucking tank.' Chamcha envisaged
the pair of them, Valance and Simba, as one another's antitheses. It seemed
that the protests had succeeded: Valance was 'de-politicizing' the show, by
firing Chamcha and putting a huge blond Teuton with pectorals and a quiff
inside the prosthetic make-up and computer-generated imagery. A
latex-and-Quantel Schwarzenegger, a synthetic, hip-talking version of Rutger
Hauer in
Blade Runner.
The Jews were out, too: instead of Mimi, the new show
would have a voluptuous shiksa doll. 'I sent word to Dr Simba: stick that up
your fucking pee aitch dee. No reply has been received. He'll have to work
harder than that if he's going to take over
this
little country. I,' Hal
Valance announced, 'love this fucking country. That's why I'm going to sell
it to the whole goddamn world, Japan, America, fucking Argentina. I'm going
to sell the arse off it. That's what I've been selling all my fucking life:
the fucking nation. The
flag.'
He didn't hear what he was saying. When he
got going on this stuff, he went puce and often wept. He had done just that
at the White Tower, that first time, while stuffing himself full of Greek
food. The date came back to Chamcha now: just after the Falklands war.
People had a tendency to swear loyalty oaths in those days, to hum 'Pomp and
Circumstance' on the buses. So when Valance, over a large balloon of
Armagnac, started up - Til tell you why I love this country' -Chamcha,
pro-Falklands himself, thought he knew what was coming next. But Valance
began to describe the research programme of a British aerospace company, a
client of his, which had just revolutionized the construction of missile
guidance systems by studying the flight pattern of the common housefly.
'Inflight course corrections,' he whispered theatrically. 'Traditionally
done in the line of flight: adjust the angle up a bit, down a touch, left or
right a nadge. Scientists studying high-speed film of the humble fly,
however, have discovered that the little buggers always, but always, make
corrections
in right angles.'
He demonstrated with his hand stretched out,
palm flat, fingers together. 'Bzzt! Bzzt! The bastards actually fly
vertically up, down or sideways. Much more accurate. Much more fuel
efficient. Try to do it with an engine that depends on nose-to-tail airflow,
and what happens? The sodding thing can't breathe, stalls, falls out of the
sky, lands on your fucking allies. Bad karma. You follow. You follow what
I'm saying. So these guys, they invent an engine with three-way airflow:
nose to tail, plus top to bottom, plus side to side. And bingo: a missile
that flies like a goddamn fly, and can hit a fifty p coin travelling at a
ground speed of one hundred miles an hour at a distance of three miles. What
I love about this country is that: its genius. Greatest inventors in the
world. It's beautiful: am I right or am I right?' He had been deadly
serious. Chamcha answered: 'You're right.' 'You're damn right I'm right,' he
confirmed.
They met for the last time just before Chamcha took off for Bombay:
Sunday lunch at the flag-waving Highgate mansion. Rosewood panelling, a
terrace with stone urns, a view down a wooded hill. Valance complaining
about a new development that would louse up the scenery. Lunch was
predictably jingoistic:
rosbif, boudin Yorkshire, choux de bruxelles.
Baby,
the nymphet wife, didn't join them, but ate hot pastrami on rye while
shooting pool in a nearby room. Servants, a thunderous Burgundy, more
Armagnac, cigars. The self-made man's paradise, Chamcha reflected, and
recognized the envy in the thought.
After lunch, a surprise. Valance led him into a room in which there
stood two clavichords of great delicacy and lightness. 'I make 'em,' his
host confessed. To relax. Baby wants me to make her a fucking guitar.' Hal
Valance's talent as a cabinet-maker was undeniable, and somehow at odds with
the rest of the man. 'My father was in the trade,' he admitted under
Chamcha's probing, and Saladin understood that he had been granted a
privileged glimpse into the only piece that remained of Valance's original
self, the Harold that derived from history and blood and not from his own
frenetic brain.
When they left the secret chamber of the clavichords, the familiar Hal
Valance instantly reappeared. Leaning on the balustrade of his terrace, he
confided: 'The thing that's so amazing about her is the size of what she's
trying to do.' Her? Baby? Chamcha was confused. 'I'm talking about
you-know-who,' Valance explained helpfully. 'Torture. Maggie the Bitch.' Oh.
'She's radical all right. What she wants - what she actually thinks she can
fucking
achieve
- is literally to invent a whole goddamn new middle class in
this country. Get rid of the old woolly incompetent buggers from fucking
Surrey and Hampshire, and bring in the new. People without background,
without history. Hungry people. People who really
want,
and who know that
with her, they can bloody well
get.
Nobody's ever tried to replace a whole
fucking
class
before, and the amazing thing is she might just do it if they
don't get her first. The old class. The dead men. You follow what I'm
saying.' 'I think so,' Chamcha lied. 'And it's not just the businessmen,'
Valance said slurrily. 'The intellectuals, too. Out with the whole faggoty
crew. In with the hungry guys with the wrong education. New professors, new
painters, the lot. It's a bloody revolution. Newness coming into this
country that's stuffed full of fucking old
corpses.
It's going to be
something to see. It already is.'
Baby wandered out to meet them, looking bored. 'Time you were off,
Chamcha,' her husband commanded. 'On Sunday afternoons we go to bed and
watch pornography on video. It's a whole new world, Saladin. Everybody has
to join sometime.'
No compromises. You're in or you're dead. It hadn't been Chamcha's way;
not his, nor that of the England he had idolized and come to conquer. He
should have understood then and there: he was being given, had been given,
fair warning.
And now the coup de grace. 'No hard feelings,' Valance was murmuring
into his ear. 'See you around, eh? Okay, right.'
'Hal,' he made himself object, 'I've got a contract.'
Like a goat to the slaughter. The voice in his ear was now openly
amused. 'Don't be silly,' it told him. 'Of course you haven't. Read the
small print. Get a
lawyer
to read the small print. Take me to court. Do what
you have to do. It's nothing to me. Don't you get it? You're history.'
Dialling tone.
Abandoned by one alien England, marooned within another, Mr. Saladin
Chamcha in his great dejection received news of an old companion who was
evidently enjoying better fortunes. The shriek of his landlady -
'Tint
benche achen!' -
warned him that something was up. Hind was billowing along
the corridors of the Shaandaar B and B, waving, it turned out, a current
copy of the imported Indian fanzine
Cine-Blitz.
Doors opened; temporary
beings popped out, looking puzzled and alarmed. Mishal Sufyan emerged from
her room with yards of midriff showing between shortie tank-top and 501s.
From the office he maintained across the hall, Hanif Johnson emerged in the
incongruity of a sharp three-piece suit, was hit by the midriff and covered
his face. 'Lord have mercy,' he prayed. Mishal ignored him and yelled after
her mother: 'What's up? Who's alive?'
'Shameless from somewhere,' Hind shouted back along the passage, 'cover
your nakedness.'
'Fuck off,' Mishal muttered under her breath, fixing mutinous eyes on
Hanif Johnson. 'What about the michelins sticking out between her sari and
her choli, I want to know.' Down at the other end of the passage, Hind could
be seen in the half-light, thrusting
Cine-Blitz
at the tenants, repeating,
he's alive. With all the fervour of those Greeks who, after the
disappearance of the politician Lambrakis, covered the country with the
whitewashed letter
Z. Zi: he lives.
'Who?' Mishal demanded again.
'Gibreel,'
came the cry of impermanent children.
'Farishta benche
achen.'
Hind, disappearing downstairs, did not observe her elder daughter
returning to her room, - leaving the door ajar; - and being followed, when
he was sure the coast was clear, by the well-known lawyer Hanif Johnson,
suited and booted, who maintained this office to keep in touch with the
grass roots, who was also doing well in a smart uptown practice, who was
well connected with the local Labour Party and was accused by the sitting M
P of scheming to take his place when reselection came around.
When was Mishal Sufyan's eighteenth birthday? - Not for a few weeks
yet. And where was her sister, her roommate, sidekick, shadow, echo and
foil? Where was the potential chaperone? She was: out.
But to continue:
The news from
Cine-Blitz
was that a new, London-based film production
outfit headed by the whiz-kid tycoon Billy Battuta, whose interest in cinema
was well known, had entered into an association with the reputable,
independent Indian producer Mr. S. S. Sisodia for the purpose of producing a
comeback vehicle for the legendary Gibreel, now exclusively revealed to have
escaped the jaws of death for a second time. 'It is true I was booked on the
plane under the name of Naj-muddin,' the star was quoted as saying. 'I know
that when the investigating sleuths identified this as my incognito - in
fact, my real name - it caused great grief back home, and for this I do
sincerely apologize to my fans. You see, the truth is, that grace of God I
somehow missed the flight, and as I had wished in any case to go to ground,
excuse, please, no pun intended, I permitted the fiction of my demise to
stand uncorrected and took a later flight. Such luck: truly, an angel must
have been watching over me.' After a time of reflection, however, he had
concluded that it was wrong to deprive his public, in this unsportsmanlike
and hurtful way, of the true data and also his presence on the screen.
'Therefore I have accepted this project with full commitment and joy.' The
film was to be - what else - a theological, but of a new type. It would be
set in an imaginary and fabulous city made of sand, and would recount the
story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel; also the
temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that
of base compromise. 'It is a film,' the producer, Sisodia, informed
Cine-Blitz,
'about how newness enters the world.' - But would it not be seen
as blasphemous, a crime against ... - 'Certainly not,' Billy Battuta
insisted. 'Fiction is fiction; facts are facts. Our purpose is not to make
some farrago like that movie
The Message
in which, whenever Prophet Muhammad
(on whose name be peace!) was heard to speak, you saw only the head of his
camel, moving its mouth.
That -
excuse me for pointing out - had no class.
We are making a high-taste, quality picture. A moral tale: like - what do
you call them? - fables.'
'Like a dream,' Mr. Sisodia said.
When the news was brought to Chamcha's attic later that day by Anahita
and Mishal Sufyan, he flew into the vilest rage either of them had ever
witnessed, a fury under whose fearful influence his voice rose so high that
it seemed to tear, as if his throat had grown knives and ripped his cries to
shreds; his pestilential breath all but blasted them from the room, and with
arms raised high and goat-legs dancing he looked, at last, like the very
devil whose image he had become. 'Liar,' he shrieked at the absent Gibreel.
'Traitor, deserter, scum. Missed the plane, did you? -Then whose head, in my
own lap, with my own hands . . . ? -who received caresses, spoke of
nightmares, and fell at last singing from the sky?'
'There, there,' pleaded terrified Mishal. 'Calm down. You'll have Mum
up here in a minute.'
Saladin subsided, a pathetic goaty heap once again, no threat to
anyone. 'It's not true,' he wailed. 'What happened, happened to us both.'
'Course it did,' Anahita encouraged him. 'Nobody believes those movie
magazines, anyway. They'll say anything, them.'
Sisters backed out of the room, holding their breath, leaving Chamcha
to his misery, failing to observe something quite remarkable. For which they
must not be blamed; Chamcha's antics were sufficient to have distracted the
keenest eyes. It should also, in fairness, be stated that Saladin failed to
notice the change himself.
What happened? This: during Chamcha's brief but violent outburst
against Gibreel, the horns on his head (which, one may as well point out,
had grown several inches while he languished in the attic of the Shaandaar B
and B) definitely, unmistakably, - by about three-quarters of an inch, -
diminished.
In the interest of the strictest accuracy, one should add that, lower
down his transformed body, - inside borrowed pantaloons (delicacy forbids
the publication of explicit details), - something else, let us leave it at
that, got a little smaller, too.
Be that as it may: it transpired that the optimism of the report in the
imported movie magazine had been ill founded, because within days of its
publication the local papers carried news of Billy Battuta's arrest, in a
midtown New York sushi bar, along with a female companion, Mildred
Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years of age. The story was that
he had approached numbers of society matrons, 'movers and shakers', asking
for 'very substantial' sums of money which he had claimed to need in order
to buy his freedom from a sect of devil worshippers. Once a confidence man,
always a confidence man: it was what Mimi Mamoulian would no doubt have
described as a beautiful sting. Penetrating the heart of American
religiosity, pleading to be saved - 'when you sell your soul you can't
expect to buy back cheap' - Billy had banked, the investigators alleged,
'six figure sums'. The world community of the faithful longed, in the late
1980s, for
direct contact with the supernal,
and Billy, claiming to have
raised (and therefore to need rescuing from) infernal fiends, was on to a
winner, especially as the Devil he offered was so democratically responsive
to the dictates of the Almighty Dollar. What Billy offered the West Side
matrons in return for their fat cheques was verification: yes, there is a
Devil; I've seen him with my own eyes - God, it was frightful! - and if
Lucifer existed, so must Gabriel; if Hellfire had been seen to burn, then
somewhere, over the rainbow, Paradise must surely shine. Mimi Mamoulian had,
it was alleged, played a full part in the deceptions, weeping and pleading
for all she was worth. They were undone by over-confidence, spotted at
Takesushi (whooping it up and cracking jokes with the chef) by a Mrs. Aileen
Struwelpeter who had, only the previous afternoon, handed the
then-distraught and terrified couple a five-thousand-dollar cheque. Mrs.
Struwelpeter was not without influence in the New York Police Department,
and the boys in blue arrived before Mimi had finished her tempura. They both
went quietly. Mimi was wearing, in the newspaper photographs, what Chamcha
guessed was a forty-thousand-dollar mink coat, and an expression on her face
that could only be read one way.
The hell with you all.
Nothing further was heard, for some while, about Farishta's film.
It was so, it was not,
that as Saladin Chamcha's incarceration in the
body of a devil and the attic of the Shaandaar B and B lengthened into weeks
and months, it became impossible not to notice that his condition was
worsening steadily. His horns (notwithstanding their single, momentary and
unobserved diminution) had grown both thicker and longer, twirling
themselves into fanciful arabesques, wreathing his head in a turban of
darkening bone. He had grown a thick, long beard, a disorienting development
in one whose round, moony face had never boasted much hair before; indeed,
he was growing hairier all over his body, and had even sprouted, from the
base of his spine, a fine tail that lengthened by the day and had already
obliged him to abandon the wearing of trousers; he tucked the new limb,
instead, inside baggy salwar pantaloons filched by Anahita Sufyan from her
mother's generously tailored collection. The distress engendered in him by
his continuing metamorphosis into some species of bottled djinn will readily
be imagined. Even his appetites were altering. Always fussy about his food,
he was appalled to find his palate coarsening, so that all foodstuffs began
to taste much the same, and on occasion he would find himself nibbling
absently at his bedsheets or old newspapers, and come to his senses with a
start, guilty and shamefaced at this further evidence of his progress away
from manhood and towards - yes - goatishness. Increasing quantities of green
mouthwash were required to keep his breath within acceptable limits. It
really was too grievous to be borne.
His presence in the house was a continual thorn in the side of Hind, in
whom regret for the lost income mingled with the remnants of her initial
terror, although it's true to say that the soothing processes of habituation
had worked their sorceries on her, helping her to see Saladin's condition as
some kind of Elephant Man illness, a thing to feel disgusted by but not
necessarily to fear. 'Let him keep out of my way and I'll keep out of his,'
she told her daughters. 'And you, the children of my despair, why you spend
your time sitting up there with a sick person while your youth is flying by,
who can say, but in this Vilayet it seems everything I used to know is a
lie, such as the idea that young girls should help their mothers, think of
marriage, attend to studies, and not go sitting with goats, whose throats,
on Big Eid, it is our old custom to slit.'
Her husband remained solicitous, however, even after the strange
incident that took place when he ascended to the attic and suggested to
Saladin that the girls might not have been so wrong, that perhaps the, how
could one put it, possession of his body could be terminated by the
intercession of a mullah? At the mention of a priest Chamcha reared up on
his feet, raising both arms above his head, and somehow or other the room
filled up with dense and sulphurous smoke while a high-pitched vibrato
screech with a kind of tearing quality pierced Sufyan's hearing like a
spike. The smoke cleared quickly enough, because Chamcha flung open a window
and fanned feverishly at the fumes, while apologizing to Sufyan in tones of
acute embarrassment: 'I really can't say what came over me, - but at times I
fear I am changing into something, - something one must call
bad.'
Sufyan, kindly fellow that he was, went over to where Chamcha sat
clutching at his horns, patted him on the shoulder, and tried to bring what
good cheer he could. 'Question of mutability of the essence of the self,' he
began, awkwardly, 'has long been subject of profound debate. For example,
great Lucretius tells us, in
De Rerum Natura,
this following thing:
quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit
ante.
Which being translated, forgive my clumsiness, is "Whatever by its
changing goes out of its frontiers," - that is, bursts its banks, - or,
maybe, breaks out of its limitations, - so to speak, disregards its own
rules, but that is too free, I am thinking . . . "that thing", at any rate,
Lucretius holds, "by doing so brings immediate death to its old self".
However,' up went the ex-schoolmaster's finger, 'poet Ovid, in the
Metamorphoses,
takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: "As yielding
wax" -heated, you see, possibly for the sealing of documents or such, - "is
stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet
is indeed the same, even so our souls," - you hear, good sir? Our spirits!
Our immortal essences! - "Are still the same forever, but adopt In their
migrations ever-varying forms."'
He was hopping, now, from foot to foot, full of the thrill of the old
words. 'For me it is always Ovid over Lucretius,' he stated. 'Your soul, my
good poor dear sir, is the same. Only in its migration it has adopted this
presently varying form.'
'This is pretty cold comfort,' Chamcha managed a trace of his old
dryness. 'Either I accept Lucretius and conclude that some demonic and
irreversible mutation is taking place in my inmost depths, or I go with Ovid
and concede that everything now emerging is no more than a manifestation of
what was already there.'
'I have put my argument badly,' Sufyan miserably apologized. 'I meant
only to reassure.'
'What consolation can there be,' Chamcha answered with bitter rhetoric,
his irony crumbling beneath the weight of his unhappiness, 'for a man whose
old friend and rescuer is also the nightly lover of his wife, thus
encouraging - as your old books would doubtless affirm - the growth of
cuckold's horns?'
The old friend, Jumpy Joshi, was unable for a single moment of his
waking hours to rid himself of the knowledge that, for the first time in as
long as he could remember, he had lost the will to lead his life according
to his own standards of morality. At the sports centre where he taught
martial arts techniques to ever-greater numbers of students, emphasizing the
spiritual aspects of the disciplines, much to their amusement ('Ah so,
Grasshopper,' his star pupil Mishal Sufyan would tease him, 'when honolable
fascist swine jump at you flom dark alleyway, offer him teaching of Buddha
before you kick him in honolable balls'), - he began to display such
passionate intensity
that his pupils, realizing that some inner anguish was
being expressed, grew alarmed. When Mishal asked him about it at the end of
a session that had left them both bruised and panting for breath, in which
the two of them, teacher and star, had hurled themselves at one another like
the hungriest of lovers, he threw her question back at her with an
uncharacteristic lack of openness. 'Talk about pot and kettle,' he said.
'Question of mote and beam.' They were standing by the vending machines. She
shrugged. 'Okay,' she said. 'I confess, but keep the secret.' He reached for
his Coke: 'What secret?' Innocent Jumpy. Mishal whispered in his ear: 'I'm
getting laid. By your friend: Mister Hanif Johnson, Bar At Law.'
He was shocked, which irritated her. 'O, come
on.
It's not like I'm
fifteen.'
He replied, weakly, 'If your mother ever,' and once again she was
impatient. 'If you want to know,' petulantly, 'the one I'm worried about is
Anahita. She wants whatever I've got. And she, by the way, really is
fifteen.' Jumpy noticed that he'd knocked over his paper-cup and there was
Coke on his shoes. 'Out with it,' Mishal was insisting. 'I owned up. Your
turn.' But Jumpy couldn't say; was still shaking his head about Hanif. 'It'd
be the finish of him,' he said. That did it. Mishal put her nose in the air.
'O, I get it,' she said. 'Not good enough for him, you reckon.' And over her
departing shoulder: 'Here, Grasshopper. Don't holy men ever fuck?'
Not so holy. He wasn't cut out for sainthood, any more than the David
Carradine character in the old
Kung Fu
programmes: like Grasshopper, like
Jumpy. Every day he wore himself out trying to stay away from the big house
in Netting Hill, and every evening he ended up at Pamela's door, thumb in
mouth, biting the skin around the edges of the nail, fending off the dog and
his own guilt, heading without wasting any time for the bedroom. Where they
would fall upon one another, mouths searching out the places in which they
had chosen, or learned, to begin: first his lips around her nipples, then
hers moving along his lower thumb.
She had come to love in him this quality of impatience, because it was
followed by a patience such as she had never experienced, the patience of a
man who had never been 'attractive' and was therefore prepared to value what
was offered, or so she had thought at first; but then she learned to
appreciate his consciousness of and solicitude for her own internal
tensions, his sense of the difficulty with which her slender, bony,
small-breasted body found, learned and finally surrendered to a rhythm, his
knowledge of time. She loved in him, too, his overcoming of himself; loved,
knowing it to be a wrong reason, his willingness to overcome his scruples so
that they might be together: loved the desire in him that rode over all that
had been imperative in him. Loved it, without being willing to see, in this
love, the beginning of an end.
Near the end of their lovemaking, she became noisy. 'Yow!' she shouted,
all the aristocracy in her voice crowding into the meaningless syllables of
her abandonment. 'Whoop! Hi!
Hah.'
She was still drinking heavily, scotch bourbon rye, a stripe of redness
spreading across the centre of her face. Under the influence of alcohol her
right eye narrowed to half the size of the left, and she began, to his
horror, to disgust him. No discussion of her boozing was permitted, however:
the one time he tried he found himself on the street with his shoes clutched
in his right hand and his overcoat over his left arm. Even after that he
came back: and she opened the door and went straight upstairs as though
nothing had happened. Pamela's taboos: jokes about her background, mentions
of whisky-bottle 'dead soldiers', and any suggestion that her late husband,
the actor Saladin Chamcha, was still alive, living across town in a bed and
breakfast joint, in the shape of a supernatural beast.
These days, Jumpy - who had, at first, badgered her incessantly about
Saladin, telling her she should go ahead and divorce him, but this pretence
of widowhood was intolerable: what about the man's assets, his rights to a
share of the property, and so forth? Surely she would not leave him
destitute? - no longer protested about her unreasonable behaviour. 'I've got
a confirmed report of his death,' she told him on the only occasion on which
she was prepared to say anything at all. 'And what have you got? A
billy-goat, a circus freak, nothing to do with me.' And this, too, like her
drinking, had begun to come between them. Jumpy's martial arts sessions
increased in vehemence as these problems loomed larger in his mind.
Ironically, while Pamela refused point-blank to face the facts about
her estranged husband, she had become embroiled, through her job at the
community relations committee, in an investigation into allegations of the
spread of witchcraft among the officers at the local police station. Various
stations did from time to time gain the reputation of being 'out of control'
- Notting Hill, Kentish Town, Islington - but witchcraft? Jumpy was
sceptical. 'The trouble with you,' Pamela told him in her loftiest
shooting-stick voice, 'is that you still think of normality as being normal.
My God: look at what's happening in this country. A few bent coppers taking
their clothes off and drinking urine out of helmets isn't so weird. Call it
working-class Freemasonry, if you want. I've got black people coming in
every day, scared out of their heads, talking about obeah, chicken entrails,
the lot. The goddamn bastards are
enjoying
this: scare the coons with their
own ooga booga and have a few naughty nights into the bargain. Unlikely?
Bloody
wake up.'
Witchfinding, it seemed, ran in the family: from Matthew
Hopkins to Pamela Lovelace. In Pamela's voice, speaking at public meetings,
on local radio, even on regional news programmes on television, could be
heard all the zeal and authority of the old Witchfinder-General, and it was
only on account of that voice of a twentieth-century Gloriana that her
campaign was not laughed instantly into extinction.
New Broomstick Needed to
Sweep Out Witches.
There was talk of an official inquiry. What drove Jumpy
wild, however, was Pamela's refusal to connect her arguments in the question
of the occult policemen to the matter of her own husband: because, after
all, the transformation of Saladin Chamcha had precisely to do with the idea
that normality was no longer composed (if it had ever been) of banal,
'normal' elements. 'Nothing to do with it,' she said flatly when he tried to
make the point: imperious, he thought, as any hanging judge.
After Mishal Sufyan told him about her illegal sexual relations with
Hanif Johnson, Jumpy on his way over to Pamela Chamcha's had to stifle a
number of bigoted thoughts, such as
if his father hadn't been white he'd
never have done it;
Hanif, he raged, that immature bastard who probably cut
notches in his cock to keep count of his conquests, this Johnson with
aspirations to represent his people who couldn't wait until they were of age
before he started shafting them! . . . couldn't he see that Mishal with her
omniscient body was just a, just a, child? -
No she wasn't.
- Damn him,
then, damn him for (and here Jumpy shocked himself) being the first.
Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his
resentments of Hanif,
his friend Hanif,
were primarily - how to put it? -
linguistic.
Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered:
sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic,
oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power.
But you bastard you rummage
in my drawers and laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how
to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its
poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all
that you haven't got a clue.
How hard that struggle, how inevitable the
defeat.
Nobody's going to elect me to anything. No power-baset no
constituency: just the battle with the words.
But he, Jumpy, also had to
admit that his envy of Hanif was as much as anything rooted in the other's
greater control of the languages of desire. Mishal Sufyan was quite
something, an elongated, tubular beauty, but he wouldn't have known how,
even if he'd thought of, he'd never have dared. Language is courage: the
ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
When Pamela Chamcha answered the door he found that her hair had gone
snow-white overnight, and that her response to this inexplicable calamity
had been to shave her head right down to the scalp and then conceal it
inside an absurd burgundy turban which she refused to remove.
'It just happened,' she said. 'One must not rule out the possibility
that I have been bewitched.'
He wasn't standing for that. 'Or the notion of a reaction, however
delayed, to the news of your husband's altered, but extant, state.'
She swung to face him, halfway up the stairs to the bedroom, and
pointed dramatically towards the open sitting-room door. 'In that case,' she
triumphed, 'why did it also happen to the dog?' He might have told her, that
night, that he wanted to end it, that his conscience no longer permitted, -
he might have been willing to face her rage, and to live with the paradox
that a decision could be simultaneously conscientious and immoral (because
cruel, unilateral, selfish); but when he entered the bedroom she grabbed his
face with both hands, and watching closely to see how he took the news she
confessed to having lied about contraceptive precautions. She was pregnant.
It turned out she was better at making unilateral decisions than he, and had
simply taken from him the child Saladin Chamcha had been unable to provide.
'I wanted it,' she cried defiantly, and at close range. 'And now I'm going
to have it.'
Her selfishness had pre-empted his. He discovered that he felt
relieved; absolved of the responsibility for making and acting upon moral
choices, - because how could he leave her now? - he put such notions out of
his head and allowed her, gently but with unmistakable intent, to push him
backwards on to the bed.
Whether the slowly transmogrifying Saladin Chamcha was turning into
some sort of science-fiction or horror-video
mutey,
some random mutation
shortly to be naturally selected out of existence, - or whether he was
evolving into an avatar of the Master of Hell, - or whatever was the case,
the fact is (and it will be as well in the present matter to proceed
cautiously, stepping from established fact to established fact, leaping to
no conclusion until our yellowbrick lane of things-incontrovertibly-so has
led us to within an inch or two of our destination) that the two daughters
of Haji Sufyan had taken him under their wing, caring for the Beast as only
Beauties can; and that, as time passed, he came to be extremely fond of the
pair of them himself. For a long while Mishal and Anahita struck him as
inseparable, fist and shadow, shot and echo, the younger girl seeking always
to emulate her tall, feisty sibling, practising karate kicks and Wing Chun
forearm smashes in flattering imitation of Mishal's uncompromising ways.
More recently, however, he had noted the growth of a saddening hostility
between the sisters. One evening at his attic window Mishal was pointing out
some of the Street's characters, - there, a Sikh ancient shocked by a racial
attack into complete silence; he had not spoken, it was said, for nigh on
seven years, before which he had been one of the city's few 'black' justices
of the peace . . . now, however, he pronounced no sentences, and was
accompanied everywhere by a crotchety wife who treated him with dismissive
exasperation,
O, ignore him, he never says a dicky bird; -
and over there, a
perfectly ordinary-looking 'accountant type' (Mishal's term) on his way home
with briefcase and box of sweetmeats; this one was known in the Street to
have developed the strange need to rearrange his sitting-room furniture for
half an hour each evening, placing chairs in rows interrupted by an aisle
and pretending to be the conductor of a single-decker bus on its way to
Bangladesh, an obsessive fantasy in which all his family were obliged to
participate,
and after half an hour precisely he snaps out of it, and the
rest of the time he's the dullest guy you could meet; -
and after some
moments of this, fifteen-year-old Anahita broke in spitefully: 'What she
means is, you're not the only casualty, round here the freaks are two a
penny, you only have to look.'
Mishal had developed the habit of talking about the Street as if it
were a mythological battleground and she, on high at Chamcha's attic window,
the recording angel and the exterminator, too. From her Chamcha learned the
fables of the new Kurus and Pandavas, the white racists and black
'self-help' or vigilante posses starring in this modern
Mahabharata,
or,
more accurately,
Mahavilayet.
Up there, under the railway bridge, the
National Front used to do battle with the fearless radicals of the Socialist
Workers Party, 'every Sunday from closing time to opening time,' she
sneered, 'leaving us lot to clear up the wreckage the rest of the sodding
week.' - Down that alley was where the Brickhall Three were done over by the
police and then fitted up, verballed, framed; up that side-street he'd find
the scene of the murder of the Jamaican, Ulysses E. Lee, and in that public
house the stain on the carpet marking where Jatinder Singh Mehta breathed
his last. 'Thatcherism has its effect,' she declaimed, while Chamcha, who no
longer had the will or the words to argue with her, to speak of justice and
the rule of law, watched Anahita's mounting rage. - 'No pitched battles
these days,' Mishal elucidated. 'The emphasis is on small-scale enterprises
and the cult of the individual, right? In other words, five or six white
bastards murdering us, one individual at a time.' These days the posses
roamed the nocturnal Street, ready for aggravation. 'It's our turf,' said
Mishal Sufyan of that Street without a blade of grass in sight. 'Let 'em
come and get it if they can.'
'Look at her,' Anahita burst out. 'So ladylike, in'she? So refined.
Imagine what Mum'd say if she knew.' - 'If she knew what, you little grass -
?' But Anahita wasn't to be cowed: 'O, yes,' she wailed. 'O, yes, we know,
don't think we don't. How she goes to the bhangra beat shows on Sunday
mornings and changes in the ladies into those tarty-farty clothes - who she
wiggles with and jiggles with at the Hot Wax daytime disco that she thinks I
never heard of before - what went on at that bluesdance she crept off to
with Mister You-know-who Cocky-bugger - some big sister,' she produced her
grandstand finish, 'she'll probably wind up dead of wossname
ignorance.'
Meaning, as Chamcha and Mishal well knew, - those cinema commercials,
expressionist tombstones rising from earth and sea, had left the residue of
their slogan well implanted, no doubt of that -
Aids.
Mishal fell upon her sister, pulling her hair, - Anahita, in pain, was
nevertheless able to get in another dig, 'Least I didn't cut my hair into
any weirdo pincushion, must be a nutter who fancies
that,'
and the two
departed, leaving Chamcha to wonder at Anahita's sudden and absolute
espousal of her mother's ethic of femininity.
Trouble brewing,
he concluded.
Trouble came: soon enough.
More and more, when he was alone, he felt the slow heaviness pushing
him down, until he fell out of consciousness, running down like a wind-up
toy, and in those passages of stasis that always ended just before the
arrival of visitors his body would emit alarming noises, the howlings of
infernal wahwah pedals, the snare-drum cracking of satanic bones. These were
the periods in which, little by little, he grew. And as he grew, so too did
the rumours of his presence; you can't keep a devil locked up in the attic
and expect to keep it to yourself forever.
How the news got out (for the people in the know remained tight-lipped,
the Sufyans because they feared loss of business, the temporary beings
because their feeling of evanescence had rendered them unable, for the
moment, to act, - and all parties because of the fear of the arrival of the
police, never exactly reluctant to enter such establishments, bump
accidentally into a little furniture and step by chance on a few arms legs
necks): he began to appear to the locals in their dreams. The mullahs at the
Jamme Masjid which used to be the Machzikel HaDath synagogue which had in
its turn replaced the Huguenots' Calvinist church; - and Dr Uhuru Simba the
man-mountain in African pill-box hat and red-yellow-black poncho who had led
the successful protest against
The Aliens Show
and whom Mishal Sufyan hated
more than any other black man on account of his tendency to punch uppity
women in the mouth, herself for example, in public, at a meeting, plenty of
witnesses, but it didn't stop the Doctor,
he's a crazy bastard, that one,
she told Chamcha when she pointed him out from the attic one day,
capable of
anything; he could've killed me, and all because I told everybody he wasn't
no African, I knew him when he was plain Sylvester Roberts from down New
Cross way; fucking witch doctor, if you ask me; -
and Mishal herself, and
Jumpy, and Hanif; - and the Bus Conductor, too, they all dreamed him, rising
up in the Street like Apocalypse and burning the town like toast. And in
every one of the thousand and one dreams he, Saladin Chamcha, gigantic of
limb and horn-turbaned of head, was singing, in a voice so diabolically
ghastly and guttural that it proved impossible to identify the verses, even
though the dreams turned out to have the terrifying quality of being serial,
each one following on from the one the night before, and so on, night after
night, until even the Silent Man, that former justice of the peace who had
not spoken since the night in an Indian restaurant when a young drunk stuck
a knife under his nose, threatened to cut him, and then committed the far
more shocking offence of spitting all over his food, - until this mild
gentleman astounded his wife by sitting upright in his sleep, ducking his
neck forwards like a pigeon's, clapping the insides of his wrists together
beside his right ear, and roaring out a song at the top of his voice, which
sounded so alien and full of static that she couldn't make out a word.
Very quickly, because nothing takes a long time any more, the image of
the dream-devil started catching on, becoming popular, it should be said,
only amongst what Hal Valance had described as the
tinted persuasion.
While
non-tint neo-Georgians dreamed of a sulphurous enemy crushing their
perfectly restored residences beneath his smoking heel, nocturnal
browns-and-blacks found themselves cheering, in their sleep, this
what-else-after-all-but-black-man, maybe a little twisted up by fate class
race history, all that, but getting off his behind, bad and mad, to kick a
little ass.
At first these dreams were private matters, but pretty soon they
started leaking into the waking hours, as Asian retailers and manufacturers
of button-badges sweatshirts posters understood the power of the dream, and
then all of a sudden he was everywhere, on the chests of young girls and in
the windows protected against bricks by metal grilles, he was a defiance and
a warning. Sympathy for the Devil: a new lease of life for an old tune. The
kids in the Street started wearing rubber devil-horns on their heads, the
way they used to wear pink-and-green balls jiggling on the ends of stiff
wires a few years previously, when they preferred to imitate spacemen. The
symbol of the Goatman, his fist raised in might, began to crop up on banners
at political demonstrations, Save the Six, Free the Four, Eat the Heinz
Fifty-Seven.
Pleasechu meechu,
the radios sang,
hopeyu guessma nayym.
Police
community relations officers pointed to the 'growing devil-cult among young
blacks and Asians' as a 'deplorable tendency', using this 'Satanist revival'
to fight back against the allegations of Ms Pamela Chamcha and the local
CRC: 'Who are the witches now?' 'Chamcha,' Mishal said excitedly, 'you're a
hero. I mean, people can really identify with you. It's an image white
society has rejected for so long that we can really take it, you know,
occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own. It's time you
considered action.'
'Go away,' cried Saladin, in his bewilderment. 'This isn't what I
wanted. This is not what I meant, at all.'
'You're growing out of the attic, anyhow,' rejoined Mishal, miffed. 'It
won't be big enough for you in not too long a while.'
Things were certainly coming to a head.
'Another old lady get slice las' night,' announced Hanif Johnson,
affecting a Trinidadian accent in the way he had. 'No mo soshaal security
for she.' Anahita Sufyan, on duty behind the counter of the Shaandaar Cafe,
banged cups and plates. 'I don't know why you do that,' she complained.
'Sends me spare.' Hanif ignored her, sat down beside Jumpy, who muttered
absently: 'What're they saying?' - Approaching fatherhood was weighing on
Jumpy Joshi, but Hanif slapped him on the back. 'The ol' poetry not goin
great, bra,' he commiserated. 'Look like that river of blood get coagulate.'
A look from Jumpy changed his tune. 'They sayin what they say,' he answered.
'Look out for coloureds cruisin in cars. Now if she was black, man, it'd be
"No grounds to suspec racial motive." I tell you,' he went on, dropping the
accent, 'sometimes the level of aggression bubbling just under the skin of
this town gets me really scared. It's not just the damn Granny Ripper. It's
everywhere. You bump into a guy's newspaper in a rush-hour train and you can
get your face broken. Everybody's so goddamn
angry,
seems like to me.
Including, old friend, you,' he finished, noticing. Jumpy stood, excused
himself, and walked out without an explanation. Hanif spread his arms, gave
Anahita his most winsome smile: 'What'd I do?'
Anahita smiled back sweetly. 'Dju ever think, Hanif, that maybe people
don't like you very much?'
When it became known that the Granny Ripper had struck again,
suggestions that the solution to the hideous killings of old women by a
'human fiend', - who invariably arranged his victims' internal organs neatly
around their corpses, one lung by each ear, and the heart, for obvious
reasons, in the mouth, - would most likely be found by investigating the new
occultism among the city's blacks which was giving the authorities so much
cause for concern,
-
began to be heard with growing frequency. The detention
and interrogation of 'tints' intensified accordingly, as did the incidence
of snap raids on establishments 'suspected of harbouring underground
occultist cells'. What was happening, although nobody admitted it or even,
at first, understood, was that everyone, black brown white, had started
thinking of the dream-figure as
real,
as a being who had crossed the
frontier, evading the normal controls, and was now roaming loose about the
city. Illegal migrant, outlaw king, foul criminal or race-hero, Saladin
Chamcha was getting to be true. Stories rushed across the city in every
direction: a physiotherapist sold a shaggy-dog tale to the Sundays, was not
believed, but
no smoke without fire,
people said; it was a precarious state
of affairs, and it couldn't be long before the raid on the Shaandaar Cafe
that would send the whole thing higher than the sky. Priests became
involved, adding another unstable element - the linkage between the term
black
and the sin
blasphemy-
to the mix. In his attic, slowly, Saladin
Chamcha grew.
He chose Lucretius over Ovid. The inconstant soul, the mutability of
everything, das Ich, every last speck. A being going through life can become
so other to himself as to
be another,
discrete, severed from history. He
thought, at times, of Zeeny Vakil on that other planet, Bombay, at the far
rim of the galaxy: Zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity. The optimism of those
ideas! The certainty on which they rested: of will, of choice! But, Zeeny
mine, life just happens to you: like an accident. No: it happens to you as a
result of your condition. Not choice, but - at best - process, and, at
worst, shocking, total change. Newness: he had sought a different kind, but
this was what he got.
Bitterness, too, and hatred, all these coarse things. He would enter
into his new self; he would be what he had become: loud, stenchy, hideous,
outsize, grotesque, inhuman, powerful. He had the sense of being able to
stretch out a little finger and topple church spires with the force growing
in him, the anger, the anger, the anger.
Powers.
He was looking for someone to blame. He, too, dreamed; and in his
dreams, a shape, a face, was floating closer, ghostly still, unclear, but
one day soon he would be able to call it by its name.
/
am,
he accepted,
that I am.
Submission.
His cocooned life at the Shaandaar B and B blew apart the evening Hanif
Johnson came in shouting that they had arrested Uhuru Simba for the Granny
Ripper murders, and the word was they were going to lay the Black Magic
thing on him too, he was going to be the voodoo-priest baron-samedi fall
guy, and the reprisals - beatings-up, attacks on property, the usual - were
already beginning. 'Lock your doors,' Hanif told Sufyan and Hind. 'There's a
bad night ahead.'
Hanif was standing slap in the centre of the cafe, confident of the
effect of the news he was bringing, so when Hind came across to him and hit
him in the face with all her strength he was so unprepared for the blow that
he actually fainted, more from surprise than pain. He was revived by Jumpy,
who threw a glass of water at him the way he had been taught to do by the
movies, but by then Hind was hurling his office equipment down into the
street from upstairs; typewriter ribbons and red ribbons, too, the sort used
for securing legal documents, made festive streamers in the air. Anahita
Sufyan, unable any more to resist the demonic proddings of her jealousy, had
told Hind about Mishal's relations with the up-and-coming lawyer-politico,
and after that there had been no holding Hind, all the years of her
humiliation had come pouring out of her, it wasn't enough that she was stuck
in this country full of jews and strangers who lumped her in with the
negroes, it wasn't enough that her husband was a weakling who performed the
Haj but couldn't be bothered with godliness in his own home, but this had to
happen to her also; she went at Mishal with a kitchen knife and her daughter
responded by unleashing a painful series of kicks and jabs, self-defence
only, otherwise it would have been matricide for sure. - Hanif regained
consciousness and Haji Sufyan looked down on him, moving his hands in small
helpless circles by his sides, weeping openly, unable to find consolation in
learning, because whereas for most Muslims a journey to Mecca was the great
blessing, in his case it had turned out to be the beginning of a curse; -
'Go,' he said, 'Hanif, my friend, get out,' - but Hanif wasn't going without
having his say,
I've kept my mouth shut for too long,
he cried,
you people
who call yourself so moral while you make fortunes off the misery of your
own race,
whereupon it became clear that Haji Sufyan had never known of the
prices being charged by his wife, who had not told him, swearing her
daughters to secrecy with terrible and binding oaths, knowing that if he
discovered he'd find a way of giving the money back so that they could go on
rotting in poverty; - and he, the twinkling familiar spirit of the Shaandaar
Cafe, after that lost all love of life. - And now Mishal arrived in the
cafe, O the shame of a family's inner life being enacted thus, like a cheap
drama, before the eyes of paying customers, - although in point of fact the
last tea-drinker was hurrying from the scene as fast as her old legs would
carry her. Mishal was carrying bags. 'I'm leaving, too,' she announced. 'Try
and stop me. It's only eleven days.'
When Hind saw her elder daughter on the verge of walking out of her
life forever, she understood the price one pays for harbouring the Prince of
Darkness under one's roof. She begged her husband to see reason, to realize
that his good-hearted generosity had brought them into this hell, and that
if only that devil, Chamcha, could be removed from the premises, then maybe
they could become once again the happy and industrious family of old. As she
finished speaking, however, the house above her head began to rumble and
shake, and there was the noise of something coming down the stairs, growling
and - or so it seemed - singing, in a voice so vilely hoarse that it was
impossible to understand the words.
It was Mishal who went up to meet him in the end, Mishal with Hanif
Johnson holding her hand, while the treacherous Anahita watched from the
foot of the stairs. Chamcha had grown to a height of over eight feet, and
from his nostrils there emerged smoke of two different colours, yellow from
the left, and from the right, black. He was no longer wearing clothes. His
bodily hair had grown thick and long, his tail was swishing angrily, his
eyes were a pale but luminous red, and he had succeeded in terrifying the
entire temporary population of the bed and breakfast establishment to the
point of incoherence. Mishal, however, was not too scared to talk. 'Where do
you think you're going?' she asked him. 'You think you'd last five minutes
out there, looking like you do?' Chamcha paused, looked himself over,
observed the sizeable erection emerging from his loins, and shrugged. 'I am
considering action,'
he told her, using her own phrase, although in that
voice of lava and thunder it didn't seem to belong to her any more. 'There
is a person I wish to find.'
'Hold your horses,' Mishal told him. 'We'll work something out.'
What is to be found here, one mile from the Shaandaar, here where the
beat meets the street, at Club Hot Wax, formerly the Blak-An-Tan? On this
star-crossed and moonless night, let us follow the figures - some strutting,
decked out, hot-to-trot, others surreptitious, shadow-hugging, shy
-
converging from all quarters of the neighbourhood to dive, abruptly,
underground, and through this unmarked door. What's within? Lights, fluids,
powders, bodies shaking themselves, singly, in pairs, in threes, moving
towards possibilities. But what, then, are these other figures, obscure in
the on-off rainbow brilliance of the
space,
these forms frozen in their
attitudes amid the frenzied dancers? What are these that hip-hop and
hindi-pop but never move an inch? - 'You lookin good, Hot Wax posse!' Our
host speaks: ranter, toaster, deejay nonpareil - the prancing Pinkwalla, his
suit of lights blushing to the beat. - Truly, he is exceptional, a
seven-foot albino, his hair the palest rose, the whites of his eyes
likewise, his features unmistakably Indian, the haughty nose, long thin
lips, a face from a
Hamza-nama
cloth. An Indian who has never seen India,
East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. A star.
Still the motionless figures dance between the shimmying of sisters,
the jouncing and bouncing of youth. What are they? -Why, waxworks, nothing
more. - Who are they? - History. See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as much
in the Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady, but, being dark, could scarce
be seen for the flame of Florence's candle; - and, over there!, one Abdul
Karim, aka The Munshi, whom Queen Victoria sought to promote, but who was
done down by colour-barring ministers. They're all here, dancing
motionlessly in hot wax: the black clown of Septimius Severus, to the right;
to the left, George IV's barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw
Gronniosaw, the African prince who was sold for six feet of cloth, dances
according to his ancient fashion with the slave's son Ignatius Sancho, who
became in 1782 the first African writer to be published in England. - The
migrants of the past, as much the living dancers' ancestors as their own
flesh and blood, gyrate stilly while Pink walla rants toasts raps up on the
stage,
Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-dem-make-insinuation-we-no-part-a-de-nation-an-mi-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-Occupation,
and from a different part of the crowded room, bathed in evil green light,
wax villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward Long, all the local
avatars of Legree. And now a murmur begins in the belly of the Club,
mounting, becoming a single word, chanted over and over: 'Meltdown,' the
customers demand. 'Meltdown, meltdown, melt.'
Pinkwalla takes his cue from the crowd,
So-it-meltdown-time-when-de-men-of-crime-gonna-get-in-line-for-some-hell-fire-fryin,
after which he turns to the crowd, arms wide, feet with the beat, to ask,
Who's-it-gonna-be? Who-you-wanna-see?
Names are shouted, compete, coalesce,
until the assembled company is united once more, chanting a single word.
Pinkwalla claps his hands. Curtains part behind him, allowing female
attendants in shiny pink shorts and singlets to wheel out a fearsome
cabinet: man-sized, glass-fronted, internally-illuminated - the microwave
oven, complete with Hot Seat, known to Club regulars as: Hell's Kitchen.
'All
right,'
cries Pinkwalla. 'Now we really cookin.'
Attendants move towards the tableau of hate-figures, pounce upon the
night's sacrificial offering, the one most often selected, if truth be told;
at least three times a week. Her permawaved coiffure, her pearls, her suit
of blue.
Maggie-maggie-maggie,
bays the crowd.
Burn-burn-burn.
The doll, -
the guy, - is strapped into the Hot Seat. Pinkwalla throws the switch. And O
how prettily she melts, from the inside out, crumpling into formlessness.
Then she is a puddle, and the crowd sighs its ecstasy:
done.
'The fire this
time,' Pinkwalla tells them. Music regains the night.
When Pinkwalla the deejay saw what was climbing under cover of darkness
into the back of his panel van, which his friends Hanif and Mishal had
persuaded him to bring round the back of the Shaandaar, the fear of obeah
filled his heart; but there was also the contrary exhilaration of realizing
that the potent hero of his many dreams was a flesh-and-blood actuality. He
stood across the street, shivering under a lamp-post though it wasn't
particularly cold, and stayed there for half an hour while Mishal and Hanif
spoke urgently to him,
he needs somewhere to go, we have to think about his
future.
Then he shrugged, walked over to the van, and started up the engine.
Hanif sat beside him in the cab; Mishal travelled with Saladin, hidden from
view.
It was almost four in the morning when they bedded Chamcha down in the
empty, locked-up nightclub. Pinkwalla - his real name, Sewsunker, was never
used - had unearthed a couple of sleeping-bags from a back room, and they
sufficed. Hanif Johnson, saying goodnight to the fearsome entity of whom his
lover Mishal seemed entirely unafraid, tried to talk to him seriously,
'You've got to realize how important you could be for us, there's more at
stake here than your personal needs,' but mutant Saladin only snorted,
yellow and black, and Hanif backed quickly away. When he was alone with the
waxworks Chamcha was able to fix his thoughts once again on the face that
had finally coalesced in his mind's eye, radiant, the light streaming out
around him from a point just behind his head, Mister Perfecto, portrayer of
gods, who always landed on his feet, was always forgiven his sins, loved,
praised, adored . . . the face he had been trying to identify in his dreams,
Mr Gibreel Farishta, transformed into the simulacrum of an angel as surely
as he was the Devil's mirror-self.
Who should the Devil blame but the Archangel, Gibreel?
The creature on the sleeping-bags opened its eyes; smoke began to issue
from its pores. The face on every one of the waxwork dummies was the same
now, Gibreel's face with its widow's peak and its long thin saturnine good
looks. The creature bared its teeth and let out a long, foul breath, and the
waxworks dissolved into puddles and empty clothes, all of them, every one.
The creature lay back, satisfied. And fixed its mind upon its foe.
Whereupon it felt within itself the most inexplicable sensations of
compression, suction, withdrawal; it was racked by terrible, squeezing
pains, and emitted piercing squeals that nobody, not even Mishal who was
staying with Hanif in Pinkwalla's apartment above the Club, dared to
investigate. The pains mounted in intensity, and the creature thrashed and
tossed around the dance-floor, wailing most piteously; until, at length,
granted respite, it fell asleep.
When Mishal, Hanif and Pinkwalla ventured into the club-room several
hours later, they observed a scene of frightful devastation, tables sent
flying, chairs broken in half, and, of course, every waxwork - good and evil
- Topsy and Legree - melted like tigers into butter; and at the centre of
the carnage, sleeping like a baby, no mythological creature at all, no
iconic Thing of horns and hellsbreath, but Mr Saladin Chamcha himself,
apparently restored to his old shape, mother-naked but of entirely human
aspect and proportions,
humanized -
is there any option but to conclude? -
by the fearsome concentration of his hate.
He opened his eyes; which still glowed pale and red.
2
lleluia Cone, coming down from Everest, saw a city of ice to the west
of Camp Six, across the Rock Band, glittering in the sunlight below the
massif of Cho Oyu.
Shangri-La,
she momentarily thought; however, this was no
green vale of immortality but a metropolis of gigantic ice-needles, thin,
sharp and cold. Her attention was distracted by Sherpa Pemba warning her to
maintain her concentration, and the city had gone when she looked back. She
was still at twenty-seven thousand feet, but the apparition of the
impossible city threw her back across space and time to the Bayswater study
of old dark wooden furniture and heavy velvet curtains in which her father
Otto Cone, the art historian and biographer of Picabia, had spoken to her in
her fourteenth and his final year of 'the most dangerous of all the lies we
are fed in our lives', which was, in his opinion, the idea of the continuum.
'Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of
planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that
it all
adds up,
you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor,' he advised
her, managing to give the impression of having visited more planets than one
before coming to his conclusions. 'The world is incompatible, just never
forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one
spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can't ask
for a wilder place.' Ice cities on the roof of the world wouldn't have fazed
Otto. Like his wife Alicja, Allie's mother, he was a Polish emigre, a
survivor of a wartime prison camp whose name was never mentioned throughout
Allie's childhood. 'He wanted to make it as if it had not been,' Alicja told
her daughter later. 'He was unrealistic in many ways. But a good man; the
best I knew.' She smiled an inward smile as she spoke, tolerating him in
memory as she had not always managed to during his life, when he was
frequently appalling. For example: he developed a hatred of communism which
drove him to embarrassing extremes of behaviour, notably at Christmas, when
this Jewish man insisted on celebrating with his Jewish family and others
what he described as 'an English rite', as a mark of respect to their new
'host nation' - and then spoiled it all (in his wife's eyes) by bursting
into the salon where the assembled company was relaxing in the glow of log
fire, Christmas tree lights and brandy, got up in pantomime Chinee, with
droopy moustaches and all, crying: 'Father Christmas is dead! I have killed
him! I am The Mao: no presents for anyone! Hee! Hee! Hee!' Allie on Everest,
remembering, winced - her mother's wince, she realized, transferred to her
frosted face.
The incompatibility of life's elements: in a tent at Camp Four, 27,600
feet, the idea which seemed at times to be her father's daemon sounded
banal, emptied of meaning, of
atmosphere,
by the altitude. 'Everest silences
you,' she confessed to Gibreel Farishta in a bed above which parachute silk
formed a canopy of hollow Himalayas. 'When you come down, nothing seems
worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like
a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. The world rushes in
soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of
perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect
sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it
fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're
to continue.' They spent most of their time in bed during their first weeks
together: the appetite of each for the other seemingly inexhaustible, they
made love six or seven times a day. 'You opened me up,' she told him. 'You
with the ham in your mouth. It was exactly as if you were speaking to me, as
if I could read your thoughts. Not as if,' she amended. 'I did read them,
right?' He nodded: it was true. 'I read your thoughts and the right words
just came out of my mouth,' she marvelled. 'Just flowed out. Bingo: love. In
the beginning was the word.'
Her mother took a fatalistic view of this dramatic turn of events in
Allie's life, the return of a lover from beyond the grave. 'I'll tell you
what I honestly thought when you gave me the news,' she said over lunchtime
soup and kreplach at the White-chapel Bloom's. 'I thought, oh dear, it's
grand passion; poor Allie has to go through this now, the unfortunate
child.' Alicja's strategy was to keep her emotions strictly under control.
She was a tall, ample woman with a sensual mouth but, as she put it, 'I've
never been a noise-maker.' She was frank with Allie about her sexual
passivity, and revealed that Otto had been, 'Let's say, otherwise inclined.
He had a weakness for grand passion, but it always made him so miserable I
could not get worked up about it.' She had been reassured by her knowledge
that the women with whom her little, bald, jumpy husband consorted were 'her
type', big and buxom, 'except they were brassy, too: they did what he
wanted, shouting things out to spur him on, pretending for all they were
worth; it was his enthusiasm they responded to, I think, and maybe his
chequebook, too. He was of the old school and gave generous gifts.'
Otto had called Alleluia his 'pearl without price', and dreamed for her
a great future, as maybe a concert pianist or, failing that, a Muse. 'Your
sister, frankly, is a disappointment to me,' he said three weeks before his
death in that study of Great Books and Picabian bric-a-brac - a stuffed
monkey which he claimed was a 'first draft' of the notorious
Portrait of
Cezanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir,
numerous mechanical
contraptions including sexual stimulators that delivered small electric
shocks, and a first edition of Jarry's
Ubu Roi.
'Elena has wants where she
should have thoughts.' He Anglicized the name - Yelyena into Ellaynah - just
as it had been his idea to reduce 'Alleluia' to Allie and bowdlerize
himself, Cohen from Warsaw, into Cone. Echoes of the past distressed him; he
read no Polish literature, turning his back on Herbert, on Milosz, on
'younger fellows' like Baranczak, because for him the language was
irredeemably polluted by history. 'I am English now,' he would say proudly
in his thick East European accent. 'Silly mid-off! Pish-Tush! Widow of
Windsor! Bugger all.' In spite of his reticences he seemed content enough
being a pantomime member of the English gentry. In retrospect, though, it
looked likely that he'd been only too aware of the fragility of the
performance, keeping the heavy drapes almost permanently drawn in case the
inconsistency of things caused him to see monsters out there, or moonscapes
instead of the familiar Moscow Road.
'He was strictly a melting-pot man,' Alicja said while attacking a
large helping of tsimmis. 'When he changed our name I told him, Otto, it
isn't required, this isn't America, it's London W-two; but he wanted to wipe
the slate clean, even his Jewishness, excuse me but I know. The fights with
the Board of Deputies! All very civilized, parliamentary language
throughout, but bareknuckle stuff none the less.' After his death she went
straight back to Cohen, the synagogue, Chanukah and Bloom's. 'No more
imitation of life,' she munched, and waved a sudden, distracted fork. 'That
picture. I was crazy for it. Lana Turner, am I right? And Mahalia Jackson
singing in a church.'
Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into an empty lift-shaft and
died. Now there was a subject which Alicja, who would readily discuss most
taboo matters, refused to touch upon: why does a survivor of the camps live
forty years and then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does
great evil eventually triumph, no matter how strenuously it is resisted?
Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it
hits the heart? Or, worse: can a man's death be incompatible with his life?
Allie, whose first response on learning of her father's death had been fury,
flung such questions as these at her mother. Who, stonefaced beneath a wide
black hat, said only: 'You have inherited his lack of restraint, my dear.'
After Otto's death Alicja ditched the elegant high style of dress and
gesture which had been her offering on the altar of his lust for
integration, her attempt to be his Cecil Beaton grande dame. 'Phoo,' she
confided in Allie, 'what a relief, my dear, to be shapeless for a change.'
She now wore her grey hair in a straggly bun, put on a succession of
identical floral-print supermarket dresses, abandoned make-up, got herself a
painful set of false teeth, planted vegetables in what Otto had insisted
should be an English floral garden (neat flowerbeds around the central,
symbolic tree, a 'chimeran graft' of laburnum and broom) and gave, instead
of dinners full of cerebral chat, a series of lunches - heavy stews and a
minimum of three outrageous puddings - at which dissident Hungarian poets
told convoluted jokes to Gurdjieffian mystics, or (if things didn't quite
work out) the guests sat on cushions on the floor, staring gloomily at their
loaded plates, and something very like total silence reigned for what felt
like weeks. Allie eventually turned away from these Sunday afternoon
rituals, sulking in her room until she was old enough to move out, with
Alicja's ready assent, and from the path chosen for her by the father whose
betrayal of his own act of survival had angered her so much. She turned
towards action; and found she had mountains to climb.
Alicja Cohen, who had found Allie's change of course perfectly
comprehensible, even laudable, and rooted for her all the way, could not
(she admitted over coffee) quite see her daughter's point in the matter of
Gibreel Farishta, the revenant Indian movie star. 'To hear you talk, dear,
the man's not in your league,' she said, using a phrase she believed to be
synonymous with
not your type,
and which she would have been horrified to
hear described as a racial, or religious, slur: which was inevitably the
sense in which her daughter understood it. 'That's just fine by me,' Allie
riposted with spirit, and rose. 'The fact is, I don't even
like
my league.'
Her feet ached, obliging her to limp, rather than storm, from the
restaurant. 'Grand passion,' she could hear her mother behind her back
announcing loudly to the room at large. 'The gift of tongues; means a girl
can babble out any blasted thing.'
Certain aspects of her education had been unaccountably neglected. One
Sunday not long after her father's death she was buying the Sunday papers
from the corner kiosk when the vendor announced: 'It's the last week this
week. Twenty-three years I've been on this corner and the Pakis have finally
driven me out of business.' She heard the word
p-a-c-h-y,
and had a bizarre
vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news
vendors. 'What's a pachy?' she foolishly asked and the reply was stinging:
'A brown Jew.' She went on thinking of the proprietors of the local 'CTN'
(confectioner-tobacconist-newsagent) as
pachyderms
for quite a while: as
people set apart - rendered objectionable - by the nature of their skin. She
told Gibreel this story, too. 'Oh,' he responded, crushingly, 'an elephant
joke.' He wasn't an easy man.
But there he was in her bed, this big vulgar fellow for whom she could
open as she had never opened before; he could reach right into her chest and
caress her heart. Not for many years had she entered the sexual arena with
such celerity, and never before had so swift a liaison remained wholly
untainted by regret or self-disgust. His extended silence (she took it for
that until she learned that his name was on the Boston's passenger list) had
been sharply painful, suggesting a difference in his estimation of their
encounter; but to have been mistaken about his desire, about such an
abandoned, hurtling thing, was surely impossible? The news of his death
accordingly provoked a double response: on the one hand, there was a kind of
grateful, relieved joy to be had from the knowledge that he had been racing
across the world to surprise her, that he had given up his entire life in
order to construct a new one with her; while, on the other, there was the
hollow grief of being deprived of him in the very moment of knowing that she
truly had been loved. Later, she became aware of a further, less generous,
reaction. What had he thought he was doing, planning to arrive without a
word of warning on her doorstep, assuming that she'd be waiting with open
arms, an unencumbered life, and no doubt a large enough apartment for them
both? It was the kind of behaviour one would expect of a spoiled movie actor
who expects his desires simply to fall like ripe fruits into his lap ... in
short, she had felt invaded, or potentially invaded. But then she had
rebuked herself, pushing such notions back down into the pit where they
belonged, because after all Gibreel had paid heavily for his presumption, if
presumption it was. A dead lover deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Then there he lay at her feet, unconscious in the snow, taking her
breath away with the impossibility of his being there at all, leading her
momentarily to wonder if he might not be another in the series of visual
aberrations - she preferred the neutral phrase to the more loaded
visions -
by which she'd been plagued ever since her decision to scorn oxygen
cylinders and conquer Chomolungma on lung power alone. The effort of raising
him, slinging his arm around her shoulders and half-carrying him to her flat
- more than half, if the truth be told - fully persuaded her that he was no
chimera, but heavy flesh and blood. Her feet stung her all the way home, and
the pain reawakened all the resentments she'd stifled when she thought him
dead. What was she supposed to do with him now, the lummox, sprawled out
across her bed? God, but she'd forgotten what a sprawler the man was, how
during the night he colonized your side of the bed and denuded you entirely
of bedclothes. But other sentiments, too, had re-emerged, and these won the
day; for here he was, sleeping beneath her protection, the abandoned hope:
at long last, love.
He slept almost round the clock for a week, waking up only to satisfy
the minimum requirements of hunger and hygiene, saying almost nothing. His
sleep was tormented: he thrashed about the bed, and words occasionally
escaped his
lips: Jahilia, Al-Lat, Hind.
In his waking moments he appeared
to wish to resist sleep, but it claimed him, waves of it rolling over him
and drowning him while he, almost piteously, waved a feeble arm. She was
unable to guess what traumatic events might have given rise to such
behaviour, and, feeling a little alarmed, telephoned her mother. Alicja
arrived to inspect the sleeping Gibreel, pursed her lips, and pronounced:
'He's a man possessed.' She had receded more and more into a kind of Singer
Brothers dybbukery, and her mysticism never failed to exasperate her
pragmatic, mountain-climbing daughter. 'Use maybe a suction pump on his
ear,' Alicja recommended. 'That's the exit these creatures prefer.' Allie
shepherded her mother out of the door. 'Thanks a lot,' she said. 'I'll let
you know.'
On the seventh day he came wide awake, eyes popping open like a doll's,
and instantly reached for her. The crudity of the approach made her laugh
almost as much as its unexpectedness, but once again there was that feeling
of naturalness, of Tightness; she grinned, 'Okay, you asked for it,' and
slipped out of the baggy, elasticated maroon pantaloons and loose jacket -
she disliked clothes that revealed the contours of her body - and that was
the beginning of the sexual marathon that left them both sore, happy and
exhausted when it finally ground to a halt.
He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and
believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory
possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught
her. 'Okay,' she said, exhaling. 'I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother,
all right?' The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the
anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of
days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars
in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the -stars raining
diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could
happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and
bounced. There was a scene about that in Fran9ois Truffaut's movie
L'Argent
du Poche, . .
She focused her thoughts. 'Sometimes,' she decided to say,
'wonderful things happen to me, too.'
She told him then what she had never told any living being: about the
visions on Everest, the angels and the ice-city. 'It wasn't only on Everest,
either,' she said, and continued after a hesitation. When she got back to
London, she went for a walk along the Embankment to try and get him, as well
as the mountain, out of her blood. It was early in the morning and there was
the ghost of a mist and the thick snow made everything vague. Then the
icebergs came.
There were ten of them, moving in stately single file upriver. The mist
was thicker around them, so it wasn't until they sailed right up to her that
she understood their shapes, the precisely miniaturized configurations of
the ten highest mountains in the world, in ascending order, with her
mountain,
the
mountain bringing up the rear. She was trying to work out how
the icebergs had managed to pass under the bridges across the river when the
mist thickened, and then, a few instants later, dissolved entirely, taking
the icebergs with it. 'But they were there,' she insisted to Gibreel. 'Nanga
Parbat, Dhaulagiri, Xixabangma Feng.' He didn't argue. 'If you say it, then
I know it truly was so.'
An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a
Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it
is grounded flight, the earth mutated - nearly - into air, and become, in
the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain,
Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. Her apartment was full
of Himalayas. Representations of Everest in cork, in plastic, in tile,
stone, acrylics, brick jostled for space; there was even one sculpted
entirely out of ice, a tiny berg which she kept in the freezer and brought
out from time to time to show off to friends. Why so many?
Because -
no
other possible answer -
they were there.
'Look,' she said, stretching out a
hand without leaving the bed and picking up, from her bedside table, her
newest acquisition, a simple Everest in weathered pine. 'A gift from the
sherpas of Namche Bazar.' Gibreel took it, turned it in his hands. Pemba had
offered it to her shyly when they said goodbye, insisting it was from all
the sherpas as a group, although it was evident that he'd whittled it
himself. It was a detailed model, complete with the ice fall and the Hillary
Step that is the last great obstacle on the way to the top, and the route
they had taken to the summit was scored deeply into the wood. When Gibreel
turned it upside down he found a message, scratched into the base in
painstaking English. To
Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again.
What Allie did not tell Gibreel was that the sherpa's prohibition had
scared her, convincing her that if she ever set her foot again upon the
goddess-mountain, she would surely die, because it is not permitted to
mortals to look more than once upon the face of the divine; but the mountain
was diabolic as well as transcendent, or, rather, its diabolism and its
transcendence were one, so that even the contemplation of Pemba's ban made
her feel a pang of need so deep that it made her groan aloud, as if in
sexual ecstasy or despair. 'The Himalayas,' she told Gibreel so as not to
say what was really on her mind, 'are emotional peaks as well as physical
ones: like opera. That's what makes them so awesome. Nothing but the
giddiest heights. A hard trick to pull off, though.' Allie had a way of
switching from the concrete to the abstract, a trope so casually achieved as
to leave the listener half-wondering if she knew the difference between the
two; or, very often, unsure as to whether, finally, such a difference could
be said to exist.
Allie kept to herself the knowledge that she must placate the mountain
or die, that in spite of the flat feet which made any serious mountaineering
out of the question she was still infected by Everest, and that in her heart
of hearts she kept hidden an impossible scheme, the fatal vision of Maurice
Wilson, never achieved to this day. That is: the solo ascent.
What she did not confess: that she had seen Maurice Wilson since her
return to London, sitting among the chimneypots, a beckoning goblin in
plus-fours and tam-o'-shanter hat. - Nor did Gibreel Farishta tell her about
his pursuit by the spectre of Rekha Merchant. There were still closed doors
between them for all their physical intimacy: each kept secret a dangerous
ghost. - And Gibreel, on hearing of Allie's other visions, concealed a great
agitation behind his neutral words -
if you say it, then I know -
an
agitation born of this further evidence that the world of dreams was leaking
into that of the waking hours, that the seals dividing the two were
breaking, and that at any moment the two firmaments could be joined, - that
is to say, the end of all things was near. One morning Allie, awaking from
spent and dreamless sleep, found him immersed in her long-unopened copy of
Blake's
Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
in which her younger self,
disrespectful of books, had made a number of marks: underlinings, ticks in
the margins, exclamations, multiple queries. Seeing that she had awoken, he
read out a selection of these passages with a wicked grin. 'From the
Proverbs of Hell,' he began.
'The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.'
She blushed furiously. 'And what is more,' he continued,
'The ancient
tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand
years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
Then, lower down the page:
This
will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
Tell me, who is
this? I found her pressed in the pages.' He handed her a dead woman's
photograph: her sister, Elena, buried here and forgotten. Another addict of
visions; and a casualty of the habit. 'We don't talk about her much.' She
was kneeling unclothed on the bed, her pale hair hiding her face. 'Put her
back where you found her.'
I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my
senses discover'd the infinite in every thing.
He riffled on through the
book, and replaced Elena Cone next to the image of the Regenerated Man,
sitting naked and splay-legged on a hill with the sun shining out of his
rear end.
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the only wise.
Allie put her hands up and covered her face.
Gibreel tried to cheer her up. 'You have written in the flyleaf: "Creation
of world ace. Archbish. Usher, 4004 BC. Estim'd date of apocalypse, ..,
1996." So time for improvement of sensual enjoyment still remains.' She
shook her head: stop. He stopped. 'Tell me,' he said, putting away the book.
Elena at twenty had taken London by storm. Her feral six-foot body
winking through a golden chain-mail Rabanne. She had always carried herself
with uncanny assurance, proclaiming her ownership of the earth. The city was
her medium, she could swim in it like a fish. She was dead at twenty-one,
drowned in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can
one drown in one's element, Allie had wondered long ago. If fish can drown
in water, can human beings suffocate in air? In those days Allie,
eighteen-nineteen, had envied Elena her certainties. What was
her
element?
In what periodic table of the spirit could it be found? - Now, flat-footed,
Himalayan veteran, she mourned its loss. When you have earned the high
horizon it isn't easy to go back into your box, into a narrow island, an
eternity of anticlimax. But her feet were traitors and the mountain would
kill.
Mythological Elena, the cover girl, wrapped in couture plastics, had
been sure of her immortality. Allie, visiting her in her World's End
crashpad,
refused a proffered sugar-lump, mumbled something about brain
damage, feeling inadequate, as usual in Elena's company. Her sister's face,
the eyes too wide apart, the chin too sharp, the effect overwhelming, stared
mockingly back. 'No shortage of brain cells,' Elena said. 'You can spare a
few.' The spare capacity of the brain was Elena's capital. She spent her
cells like money, searching for her own heights; trying, in the idiom of the
day, to fly. Death, like life, came to her coated in sugar.
She had tried to 'improve' the younger Alleluia. 'Hey, you're a great
looking kid, why hide it in those dungarees? I mean, God, darling, you've
got all the equipment in there.' One night she dressed Allie up, in an
olive-green item composed of frills and absences that barely covered her
body-stockinged groin:
sugaring me like candy,
was Allie's puritanical
thought,
my own sister putting me on display in the shop-window, thanks a
lot.
They went to a gaming club full of ecstatic lordlings, and Allie had
left fast when Elena's attention was elsewhere. A week later, ashamed of
herself for being such a coward, for rejecting her sister's attempt at
intimacy, she sat on a beanbag at World's End and confessed to Elena that
she was no longer a virgin. Whereupon her elder sister slapped her in the
mouth and called her ancient names: tramp, slut, tart. 'Elena Cone never
allows a man to lay a
finger,'
she yelled, revealing her ability to think of
herself as a third person, 'not a goddamn finger
nail
. I know what I'm worth,
darling, I know how the mystery dies the moment they put their willies in, I
should have known you'd turn out to be a whore. Some fucking communist, I
suppose,' she wound down. She had inherited her father's prejudices in such
matters. Allie, as Elena knew, had not.
They hadn't met much after that, Elena remaining until her death the
virgin queen of the city - the post-mortem confirmed her as
virgo intacta -
while Allie gave up wearing underwear, took odd jobs on small, angry
magazines, and because her sister was untouchable she became the other
thing, every sexual act a slap in her sibling's glowering, whitelipped face.
Three abortions in two years and the belated knowledge that her days on the
contraceptive pill had put her, as far as cancer was concerned, in one of
the highest-risk categories of all.
She heard about her sister's end from a newsstand billboard, MODEL'S
'ACID BATH' DEATH. You're not even safe from puns when you die, was her
first reaction. Then she found she was unable to weep.
'I kept seeing her in magazines for months,' she told Gibreel. 'On
account of the glossies' long lead times.' Elena's corpse danced across
Moroccan deserts, clad only in diaphanous veils; or it was sighted in the
Sea of Shadows on the moon, naked except for spaceman's helmet and half a
dozen silk ties knotted around breasts and groin. Allie took to drawing
moustaches on the pictures, to the outrage of newsagents; she ripped her
late sister out of the journals of her zombie-like undeath and crumpled her
up. Haunted by Elena's periodical ghost, Allie reflected on the dangers of
attempting to
fly;
what flaming falls, what macabre hells were reserved for
such Icarus types! She came to think of Elena as a soul in torment, to
believe that this captivity in an immobile world of girlie calendars in
which she wore black breasts of moulded plastic, three sizes larger than her
own; of pseudo-erotic snarls; of advertising messages printed across her
navel, was no less than Elena's personal hell. Allie began to see the scream
in her sister's eyes, the anguish of being trapped forever in those fashion
spreads. Elena was being tortured by demons, consumed in fires, and she
couldn't even move . . . after a time Allie had to avoid the shops in which
her sister could be found staring from the racks. She lost the ability to
open magazines, and hid all the pictures of Elena she owned. 'Goodbye, Yel,'
she told her sister's memory, using her old nursery name. 'I've got to look
away from you.'
'But I turned out to be like her, after all.' Mountains had begun to
sing to her; whereupon she, too, had risked brain cells in search of
exaltation. Eminent physicians expert in the problems facing mountaineers
had frequently proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that human beings could not
survive without breathing apparatus much above eight thousand metres. The
eyes would haemorrhage beyond hope of repair, and the brain, too, would
start to explode, losing cells by the billion, too many and too fast,
resulting in the permanent damage known as High Altitude Deterioration,
followed in quick time by death. Blind corpses would remain preserved in the
permafrost of those highest slopes. But Allie and Sherpa Pemba went up and
came down to tell the tale. Cells from the brain's deposit boxes replaced
the current-account casualties. Nor did her eyes blow out. Why had the
scientists been wrong? 'Prejudice, mostly,' Allie said, lying curled around
Gibreel beneath parachute silk. 'They can't quantify the will, so they leave
it out of their calculations. But it's will that gets you up Everest, will
and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least
in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don't push your luck,
anyway.'
There had been some damage. She had been suffering unaccountable lapses
of memory: small, unpredictable things. Once at the fishmonger's she had
forgotten the word
fish.
Another morning she found herself in her bathroom
picking up a toothbrush blankly, quite unable to work out its purpose. And
one morning, waking up beside the sleeping Gibreel, she had been on the
verge of shaking him awake to demand, 'Who the hell are you? How did you get
in my bed?' - when, just in time, the memory returned. 'I'm hoping it's
temporary,' she told him. But kept to herself, even now, the appearances of
Maurice Wilson's ghost on the rooftops surrounding the Fields, waving his
inviting arm.
She was a competent woman, formidable in many ways: very much the
professional sportswoman of the 1980s, a client of the giant MacMurray
public relations agency, sponsored to the gills. Nowadays she, too, appeared
in advertisements, promoting her own range of outdoor products and
leisurewear, aimed at holidaymakers and amateurs more than pro climbers, to
maximize what Hal Valance would have called the universe. She was the golden
girl from the roof of the world, the survivor of 'my Teutonic twosome', as
Otto Cone had been fond of calling his daughters.
Once again
,
Yel, I follow
in your footsteps.
To be an attractive woman in a sport dominated by, well,
hairy men was to be saleable, and the 'icequeen' image didn't hurt either.
There was money in it, and now that she was old enough to compromise her
old, fiery ideals with no more than a shrug and a laugh, she was ready to
make it, ready, even, to appear on T V talk-shows to fend off, with risque
hints, the inevitable and unchanging questions about life with the boys at
twenty-odd thousand feet. Such high-profile capers sat uneasily alongside
the view of herself to which she still fiercely clung: the idea that she was
a natural solitary, the most private of women, and that the demands of her
business life were ripping her in half. She had her first fight with Gibreel
over this, because he said, in his unvarnished way: 'I guess it's okay to
run from the cameras as long as you know they're chasing after you. But
suppose they stop? My guess is you'd turn and run the other way.' Later,
when they'd made up, she teased him with her growing stardom (since she
became the first sexually attractive blonde to conquer Everest, the noise
had increased considerably, she received photographs of gorgeous hunks in
the mail, also invitations to high life soirees and a quantity of insane
abuse): 'I could be in movies myself now that you've retired. Who knows?
Maybe I will.' To which he responded, shocking her by the force of his
words, 'Over my goddamn dead body.'
In spite of her pragmatic willingness to enter the polluted waters of
the real and swim in the general direction of the current, she never lost
the sense that some awful disaster was lurking just around the corner - a
legacy, this, of her father's and sister's sudden deaths. This hairs-on-neck
prickliness had made her a cautious climber, a 'real percentage man', as the
lads would have it, and as admired friends died on various mountains her
caution increased. Away from mountaineering, it gave her, at times, an
unrelaxed look, a jumpiness; she acquired the heavily defended air of a
fortress preparing for an inevitable assault. This added to her reputation
as a frosty berg of a woman; people kept their distance, and, to hear her
tell it, she accepted loneliness as the price of solitude. - But there were
more contradictions here, for she had, after all, only recently thrown
caution overboard when she chose to make the final assault on Everest
without oxygen. 'Aside from all the other implications,' the agency assured
her in its formal letter of congratulations, 'this humanizes you, it shows
you've got that what-the-hell streak, and that's a positive new dimension.'
They were working on it. In the meantime, Allie thought, smiling at Gibreel
in tired encouragement as he slipped down towards her lower depths, There's
now you. Almost a total stranger and here you've gone and moved right in.
God, I even carried you across the threshold, near as makes no difference.
Can't blame you for accepting the lift.
He wasn't housetrained. Used to servants, he left clothes, crumbs, used
tea-bags where they fell. Worse: he
dropped
them, actually let them fall
where they would need picking up; perfectly, richly unconscious of what he
was doing, he went on proving to himself that he, the poor boy from the
streets, no longer needed to tidy up after himself. It wasn't the only thing
about him that drove her crazy. She'd pour glasses of wine; he'd drink his
fast and then, when she wasn't looking, grab hers, placating her with an
angelic-faced, ultra-innocent 'Plenty more, isn't it?' His bad behaviour
around the house. He liked to fart. He complained -actually complained,
after she'd literally scooped him out of the snow! - about the smallness of
the accommodations. 'Every time I take two steps my face hits a wall.' He
was rude to telephone callers,
really
rude, without bothering to find out
who they were: automatically, the way film stars were in Bombay when, by
some chance, there wasn't a flunkey available to protect them from such
intrusions. After Alicja had weathered one such volley of obscene abuse, she
said (when her daughter finally got on the end of the phone): 'Excuse me for
mentioning, darling, but your boyfriend is in my opinion a case.'
'A case, mother?' This drew out Alicja's grandest voice. She was still
capable of grandeur, had a gift for it, in spite of her post-Otto decision
to disguise herself as a bag-lady. 'A case,' she announced, taking into
consideration the fact that Gibreel was an Indian import, 'of cashew and
monkey nuts.'
Allie didn't argue with her mother, being by no means certain that she
could continue to live with Gibreel, even if he had crossed the earth, even
if he had fallen from the sky. The long term was hard to predict; even the
medium term looked cloudy. For the moment, she concentrated on trying to get
to know this man who had just assumed, right off, that he was the great love
of her life, with a lack of doubt that meant he was either right or off his
head. There were plenty of difficult moments. She didn't know what he knew,
what she could take for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's
doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there
were certain combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him, as a
way of explaining by analogy her own (in fact somewhat different) sense of
impending catastrophe (which had to do not with recurring patterns but with
the inescapability of the unforeseeable), but he fixed her with a hurt stare
that told her he'd never heard of the writer, let alone
The Defence.
Conversely, he surprised her by asking, out of the blue, 'Why Picabia?'
Adding that it was peculiar, was it not, for Otto Cohen, a veteran of the
terror camps, to go in for all that neo-Fascistic love of machinery, brute
power, dehu-manization glorified. 'Anybody who's spent any time with
machines at all,' he added, 'and baby, that's us all, knows first and
foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle.
They go wrong.' Where did you find out about, she began, and faltered
because she didn't like the patronizing note she was striking, but he
answered without vanity. The first time he'd heard about Marinetti, he said,
he'd got the wrong end of the stick and thought Futurism was something to do
with puppets. 'Marionettes, kathputli, at that time I was keen to use
advanced puppetry techniques in a picture, maybe to depict demons or other
supernormal beings. So I got a book.'
I got a book:
Gibreel the autodidact
made it sound like an injection. To a girl from a house that revered books -
her father had made them all kiss any volume that fell by chance to the
floor - and who had reacted by treating them badly, ripping out pages she
wanted or didn't like, scribbling and scratching at them to show them who
was boss, Gibreel's form of irreverence, non-abusive, taking books for what
they offered without feeling the need to genuflect or destroy, was something
new; and, she accepted, pleasing. She learned from him. He, however, seemed
impervious to any wisdom she might wish to impart, about, for example, the
correct place in which to dispose of dirty socks. When she attempted to
suggest he 'did his share', he went into a profound, injured sulk, expecting
to be cajoled back into a good humour. Which, to her disgust, she found
herself willing, for the moment at any rate, to do.
The worst thing about him, she tentatively concluded, was his genius
for thinking himself slighted, belittled, under attack. It became almost
impossible to mention anything to him, no matter how reasonable, no matter
how gently put. 'Go, go, eat air,' he'd shout, and retire into the tent of
his wounded pride. - And the most seductive thing about him was the way he
knew instinctively what she wanted, how when he chose he could become the
agent of her secret heart. As a result, their sex was literally electric.
That first tiny spark, on the occasion of their inaugural kiss, wasn't any
one-off. It went on happening, and sometimes while they made love she was
convinced she could hear the crackle of electricity all around them; she
felt, at times, her hair standing on end. 'It reminds me of the electric
dildo in my father's study,' she told Gibreel, and they laughed. 'Am I the
love of your life?' she asked quickly, and he answered, just as quickly: 'Of
course.'
She admitted to him early on that the rumours about her
unattainability, even frigidity, had some basis in fact. 'After Yel died, I
took on that side of her as well.' She hadn't needed, any more, to hurl
lovers into her sister's face. 'Plus I really wasn't enjoying it any more.
It was mostly revolutionary socialists at the time, making do with me while
they dreamed about the heroic women they'd seen on their three-week trips to
Cuba. Never touched
them,
of course; the combat fatigues and ideological
purity scared them silly. They came home humming "Guantanamera" and rang me
up.' She opted out. 'I thought, let the best minds of my generation
soliloquize about power over some other poor woman's body, I'm off.' She
began climbing mountains, she used to say when she began, 'because I knew
they'd never follow me up there. But then I thought, bullshit, I didn't do
it for them; I did it for me.'
For an hour every evening she would run barefoot up and down the stairs
to the street, on her toes, for the sake of her fallen arches. Then she'd
collapse into a heap of cushions, looking enraged, and he'd flap helplessly
around, usually ending up pouring her a stiff drink: Irish whiskey, mostly.
She had begun drinking a fair bit as the reality of her foot problem sank
in. ('For Christ's sake keep the feet quiet,' a voice from the PR agency
told her surreally on the phone. 'If they get out it's finite, curtains,
sayonara, go home, goodnight.') On their twenty-first night together, when
she had worked her way through five doubles of Jameson's, she said: 'Why I
really went up there. Don't laugh: to escape from good and evil.' He didn't
laugh. 'Are mountains above morality, in your estimation?' he asked
seriously. 'This's what I learned in the revolution,' she went on. 'This
thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't
say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that got
abolsh, abo
lished.
Since then we've been living in a fairy-story. Got me?
Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's
going on. So how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what
it
is.
So what I thought was, you can either break your heart trying to work
it all out, or you can go sit on a mountain, because that's where all the
truth went, believe it or not, it just upped and ran away from these cities
where even the stuff under our feet is all made up, a lie, and it hid up
there in the thin thin air where the liars don't dare come after it in case
their brains explode. It's up there all right. I've been there. Ask me.' She
fell asleep; he carried her to the bed.
After the news of his death in the plane crash reached her, she had
tormented herself by inventing him: by speculating, that is to say, about
her lost lover. He had been the first man she'd slept with in more than five
years: no small figure in her life. She had turned away from her sexuality,
her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed
by it; that it was for her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark
continent to map, and she wasn't prepared to go that way, be that explorer,
chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet. But she'd never shaken
off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might
be like to be wholly possessed by that archetypal, capitalized djinn, the
yearning towards, the blurring of the boundaries of the self, the
unbuttoning, until you were open from your adam's-apple to your crotch: just
words, because she didn't know the thing. Suppose he had come to me, she
dreamed. I could have learned him, step by step, climbed him to the very
summit. Denied mountains by my weak-boned feet, I'd have looked for the
mountain in him: establishing base camp, sussing out routes, negotiating
ice-falls, crevasses, overhangs. I'd have assaulted the peak and seen the
angels dance. O, but he's dead, and at the bottom of the sea.
Then she found him. - And maybe he'd invented her, too, a little bit,
invented someone worth rushing out of one's old life to love. - Nothing so
remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on,
rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions,
moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together: or not. It
works out or it doesn't. But to suppose that Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia
Cone could have gone along so familiar a path is to make the mistake of
thinking their relationship ordinary. It wasn't; didn't have so much as a
shot at ordinariness.
It was a relationship with serious flaws.
('The modern city,' Otto Cone on his hobbyhorse had lectured his bored
family at table, 'is the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives
that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the
omnibus. One universe, on a zebra crossing, is caught for an instant,
blinking like a rabbit, in the headlamps of a motor-vehicle in which an
entirely alien and contradictory continuum is to be found. And as long as
that's all, they pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their
hats in some hotel corridor, it's not so bad. But if they meet! It's uranium
and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom.' - 'As a matter of
fact, dearest,' Alicja said dryly, 'I often feel a little incompatible
myself.')
The flaws in the grand passion of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta
were as follows: her secret fear of her secret desire, that is, love; -
owing to which she was wont to retreat from, even hit violently out at, the
very person whose devotion she sought most; - and the deeper the intimacy,
the harder she kicked; - so that the other, having been brought to a place
of absolute trust, and having lowered all his defences, received the full
force of the blow, and was devastated; - which, indeed, is what befell
Gibreel Farishta, when after three weeks of the most ecstatic lovemaking
either of them had ever known he was told without ceremony that he had
better find himself somewhere to live, pretty sharpish, because she, Allie,
required more elbow-room than was presently available; -
- and his overweening possessiveness and jealousy, of which he himself
had been wholly unaware, owing to his never previously having thought of a
woman as a treasure that had to be guarded at all costs against the
piratical hordes who would naturally be trying to purloin her; - and of
which more will be said almost instantly; -
- and the fatal flaw, namely, Gibreel Farishta's imminent realization -
or, if you will,
insane idea, -
that he truly was nothing less than an
archangel in human form, and not just any archangel, but the Angel of the
Recitation, the most exalted (now that Shaitan had fallen) of them all.
They had spent their days in such isolation, wrapped up in the sheets
of their desires, that his wild, uncontrollable jealousy, which, as Iago
warned, 'doth mock the meat it feeds on', did not instantly come to light.
It first manifested itself in the absurd matter of the trio of cartoons
which Allie had hung in a group by her front door, mounted in cream and
framed in old gold, all bearing the same message, scrawled across the lower
right-hand corner of the cream mounts:
To A., in hopes, from Brunei.
When
Gibreel noticed these inscriptions he demanded an explanation, pointing
furiously at the cartoons with fully extended arm, while with his free hand
he clutched a bedsheet around him (he was attired in this informal manner
because he'd decided the time was ripe for him to make a full inspection of
the premises,
can't spend one's whole life on one's back, or even yours,
he'd said); Allie, forgivably, laughed. 'You look like Brutus, all murder
and dignity,' she teased him. 'The picture of an honourable man.' He shocked
her by shouting violently: 'Tell me at once who the bastard is.'
'You can't be serious,' she said. Jack Brunei worked as an animator,
was in his late fifties and had known her father. She had never had the
faintest interest in him, but he had taken to courting her by the
strangulated, wordless method of sending her, from time to time, these
graphic gifts.
'Why you didn't throw them in the wpb?' Gibreel howled. Allie, still
not fully understanding the size of his rage, continued lightly. She had
kept the pictures because she liked them. The first was an old
Punch
cartoon
in which Leonardo da Vinci stood in his atelier, surrounded by pupils, and
hurled the Mona Lisa like a frisbee across the room.
'Mark my words,'
he
said in the caption,
'one day men shall fly to Padua in such as these.'
In
the second frame there was a page from
Toff,
a British boys' comic dating
from World War II. It had been thought necessary in a time when so many
children became evacuees to create, by way of explanation, a comic-strip
version of events in the adult world. Here, therefore, was one of the weekly
encounters between the home team - the Toff (an appalling monocled child in
Etonian bum-freezer and pin-striped trousers) and cloth-capped, scuff-kneed
Bert - and the dastardly foe, Hawful Hadolf and the Nastiparts (a bunch of
thuggish fiends, each of whom had one extremely nasty part, e.g. a steel
hook instead of a hand, feet like claws, teeth that could bite through your
arm). The British team invariably came out on top. Gibreel, glancing at the
framed comic, was scornful. 'You bloody
Angrez.
You really think like this;
this is what the war was really like for you.' Allie decided not to mention
her father, or to tell Gibreel that one of the
Toff
artists, a virulently
anti-Nazi Berlin man named Wolf, had been arrested one day and led away for
internment along with all the other Germans in Britain, and, according to
Brunei, his colleagues hadn't lifted a finger to save him. 'Heartlessness,'
Jack had reflected. 'Only thing a cartoonist really needs. What an artist
Disney would have been if he hadn't had a heart. It was his fatal flaw.'
Brunel ran a small animation studio named Scarecrow Productions, after the
character in
The Wizard of Oz.
The third frame contained the last drawing from one of the films of the
great Japanese animator Yoji Kuri, whose uniquely cynical output perfectly
exemplified Brunei's unsentimental view of the cartoonist's art. In this
film, a man fell off a skyscraper; a fire engine rushed to the scene and
positioned itself beneath the falling man. The roof slid back, permitting a
huge steel spike to emerge, and, in the still on Allie's wall, the man
arrived head first and the spike rammed into his brain. 'Sick,' Gibreel
Farishta pronounced.
These lavish gifts having failed to get results, Brunei was obliged to
break cover and show up in person. He presented himself at Allie's apartment
one night, unannounced and already considerably the worse for alcohol, and
produced a bottle of dark rum from his battered briefcase. At three the next
morning he had drunk the rum but showed no signs of leaving. Allie, going
ostentatiously off to the bathroom to brush her teeth, returned to find the
animator standing stark naked in the centre of her living-room rug,
revealing a surprisingly shapely body covered by an inordinate amount of
thick grey hair. When he saw her he spread his arms and cried: 'Take me! Do
what you will!' She made him dress, as kindly as she could, and put him and
his briefcase gently out of the door. He never returned.
Allie told Gibreel the story, in an open, giggling manner that
suggested she was entirely unprepared for the storm it would unleash. It is
possible, however (things had been rather strained between them in recent
days) that her innocent air was a little disingenuous, that she was almost
hoping for him to begin the bad behaviour, so that what followed would be
his responsibility, not hers ... at any rate, Gibreel blew sky-high,
accusing Allie of having falsified the story's ending, suggesting that poor
Brunei was still waiting by his telephone and that she intended to ring him
the moment his, Farishta's, back was turned. Ravings, in short, jealousy of
the past, the worst kind of all. As this terrible emotion took charge of
him, he found himself improvising a whole series of lovers for her,
imagining them to be waiting around every corner. She had used the Brunei
story to taunt him, he shouted, it was a deliberate and cruel threat. 'You
want men down on their knees,' he screamed, every scrap of his self-control
long gone, 'Me, I do not kneel.'
That's it,' she said. 'Out.'
His anger redoubled. Clutching his toga around him, he stalked into the
bedroom to dress, putting on the only clothes he possessed, including the
scarlet-lined gabardine overcoat and grey felt trilby of Don Enrique
Diamond; Allie stood in the doorway and watched. 'Don't think I'm coming
back,' he yelled, knowing his rage was more than sufficient to get him out
of the door, waiting for her to begin to calm him down, to speak softly, to
give him a way of staying. But she shrugged and walked away, and it was
then, at that precise moment of his greatest wrath, that the boundaries of
the earth broke, he heard a noise like the bursting of a dam, and as the
spirits of the world of dreams flooded through the breach into the universe
of the quotidian, Gibreel Farishta saw God.
For Blake's Isaiah, God had simply been an immanence, an incorporeal
indignation; but Gibreel's vision of the Supreme Being was not abstract in
the least. He saw, sitting on the bed, a man of about the same age as
himself, of medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard
cropped close to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the
apparition was balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and wore glasses.
This was not the Almighty he had expected. 'Who are you?' he asked with
interest. (Of no interest to him now was Alleluia Cone, who had stopped in
her tracks on hearing him begin to talk to himself, and who was now
observing him with an expression of genuine panic.)
'Ooparvala,' the apparition answered. 'The Fellow Upstairs.'
'How do I know you're not the other One,' Gibreel asked craftily,
'Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath?'
A daring question, eliciting a snappish reply. This Deity might look
like a myopic scrivener, but It could certainly mobilize the traditional
apparatus of divine rage. Clouds massed outside the window; wind and thunder
shook the room. Trees fell in the Fields. 'We're losing patience with you,
Gibreel Farishta. You've doubted Us just about long enough.' Gibreel hung
his head, blasted by the wrath of God. 'We are not obliged to explain Our
nature to you,' the dressing-down continued. 'Whether We be multiform,
plural, representing the union-by-hybridization of such opposites as
Oopar
and
Neechay,
or whether We be pure, stark, extreme, will not be resolved
here.' The disarranged bed on which his Visitor had rested Its posterior
(which, Gibreel now observed, was glowing faintly, like the rest of the
Person) was granted a highly disapproving glance. 'The point is, there will
be no more dilly-dallying. You wanted clear signs of Our existence? We sent
Revelation to fill your dreams: in which not only Our nature, but yours
also, was clarified. But you fought against it, struggling against the very
sleep in which We were awakening you. Your fear of the truth has finally
obliged Us to expose Ourself, at some personal inconvenience, in this
woman's residence at an advanced hour of the night. It is time, now, to
shape up. Did We pluck you from the skies so that you could boff and spat
with some (no doubt remarkable) flatfoot blonde? There's work to be done.'
'I am ready,' Gibreel said humbly. 'I was just going, anyway.'
'Look,' Allie Cone was saying, 'Gibreel, goddamn it, never mind the
fight. Listen: I love you.'
There were only the two of them in the apartment now. 'I have to go,'
Gibreel said, quietly. She hung upon his arm. 'Truly, I don't think you're
really well.' He stood upon his dignity. 'Having commanded my exit, you no
longer have jurisdiction
re
my health.' He made his escape. Alleluia, trying
to follow him, was afflicted by such piercing pains in both feet that,
having no option, she fell weeping to the floor: like an actress in a masala
movie; or Rekha Merchant on the day Gibreel walked out on her for the last
time. Like, anyhow, a character in a story of a kind in which she could
never have imagined she belonged.
The meteorological turbulence engendered by God's anger with his
servant had given way to a clear, balmy night presided over by a fat and
creamy moon. Only the fallen trees remained to bear witness to the might of
the now-departed Being. Gibreel, trilby jammed down on his head, money-belt
firmly around his waist, hands deep in gabardine - the right hand feeling,
in there, the shape of a paperback book - was giving silent thanks for his
escape. Certain now of his archangelic status, he banished from his thoughts
all remorse for his time of doubting, replacing it with a new resolve: to
bring this metropolis of the ungodly, this latter-day 'Ad or Thamoud, back
to the knowledge of God, to shower upon it the blessings of the Recitation,
the sacred Word. He felt his old self drop from him, and dismissed it with a
shrug, but chose to retain, for the time being, his human scale. This was
not the time to grow until he filled the sky from horizon to horizon -
though that, too, would surely come before long.
The city's streets coiled around him, writhing like serpents. London
had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented
nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and
wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of
masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected
burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future.
He wandered its streets through that night, and the next day, and the next
night, and on until the light and dark ceased to matter. He no longer seemed
to need food or rest, but only to move constantly through that tortured
metropolis whose fabric was now utterly transformed, the houses in the rich
quarters being built of solidified fear, the government buildings partly of
vainglory and partly of scorn, and the residences of the poor of confusion
and material dreams. When you looked through an angel's eyes you saw
essences instead of surfaces, you saw the decay of the soul blistering and
bubbling on the skins of people in the street, you saw the generosity of
certain spirits resting on their shoulders in the form of birds. As he
roamed the metamorphosed city he saw bat-winged imps sitting on the corners
of buildings made of deceits and glimpsed goblins oozing wormily through the
broken tilework of public urinals for men. As once the thirteenth-century
German monk Richalmus would shut his eyes and instantly see clouds of
minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on earth, dancing like
dust-specks in the sunlight, so now Gibreel with open eyes and by the light
of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his
adversary, his - to give the old word back its original meaning -
shaitan.
Long before the Flood, he remembered - now that he had reassumed the
role of archangel, the full range of archangelic memory and wisdom was
apparently being restored to him, little by little - a number of angels (the
names Semjaza and Azazel came first to mind) had been flung out of Heaven
because they had been
lusting after the daughters of men,
who in due course
gave birth to an evil race of giants. He began to understand the degree of
the danger from which he had been saved when he departed from the vicinity
of Alleluia Cone. O most false of creatures! O princess of the powers of the
air! - When the Prophet, on whose name be peace, had first received the
wahi, the Revelation, had he not feared for his sanity? - And who had
offered him the reassuring certainty he needed? - Why, Khadija, his wife.
She it was who convinced him that he was not some raving crazy but the
Messenger of God. - Whereas what had Alleluia done for him?
You're not
yourself, I don't think you're really well. -
O bringer of tribulation,
creatrix of strife, of soreness of the heart! Siren, temptress, fiend in
human form! That snowlike body with its pale, pale hair: how she had used it
to fog his soul, and how hard he had found it, in the weakness of his flesh,
to resist . . . enmeshed by her in the web of a love so complex as to be
beyond comprehension, he had come to the very edge of the ultimate Fall. How
beneficent, then, the Over-Entity had been to him! - He saw now that the
choice was simple: the infernal love of the daughters of men, or the
celestial adoration of God. He had found it possible to choose the latter;
in the nick of time.
He drew out of the right-hand pocket of his overcoat the book that had
been there ever since his departure from Rosa's house a millennium ago: the
book of the city he had come to save, Proper London, capital of Vilayet,
laid out for his benefit in exhaustive detail, the whole bang shoot. He
would redeem this city: Geographers' London, all the way from A to Z.
On a street corner in a part of town once known for its population of
artists, radicals and men in search of prostitutes, and now given over to
advertising personnel and minor film producers, the Archangel Gibreel
chanced to see a lost soul. It was young, male, tall, and of extreme beauty,
with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair oiled down and parted
in the centre; its teeth were made of gold. The lost soul stood at the very
edge of the pavement, its back to the road, leaning forwards at a slight
angle and clutching, in its right hand, something it evidently held very
dear. Its behaviour was striking: first it would stare fiercely at the thing
it held in its hand, and then look around, whipping its head from right to
left, scrutinizing with blazing concentration the faces of the passers-by.
Reluctant to approach too quickly, Gibreel on a first pass saw that the
object the lost soul was clutching was a small passport-sized photograph. On
his second pass he went right up to the stranger and offered his help. The
other eyed him suspiciously, then thrust the photograph under his nose.
'This man,' he said, jabbing at the picture with a long index finger. 'Do
you know this man?'
When Gibreel saw, staring out of the photograph, a young man of extreme
beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair, oiled, with
a central parting, he knew that his instincts had been correct, that here,
standing on a busy street corner watching the crowd in case he saw himself
going by, was a Soul in search of its mislaid body, a spectre in desperate
need of its lost physical casing - for it is known to archangels that the
soul or ka cannot exist (once the golden cord of light linking it to the
body is severed) for more than a night and a day. 'I can help you,' he
promised, and the young soul looked at him in wild disbelief. Gibreel leaned
forward, grasped the ka's face between his hands, and kissed it firmly upon
the mouth, for the spirit that is kissed by an archangel regains, at once,
its lost sense of direction, and is set upon the true and righteous path. -
The lost soul, however, had a most surprising reaction to being favoured by
an archangelic kiss. 'Sod you,' it shouted, 'I may be desperate, mate, but
I'm not that desperate,' - after which, manifesting a solidity most unusual
in a disembodied spirit, it struck the Archangel of the Lord a resounding
blow upon the nose with the very fist in which its image was clasped; - with
disorienting, and bloody, results.
When his vision cleared, the lost soul had gone but there, floating on
her carpet a couple of feet off the ground, was Rekha Merchant, mocking his
discomfiture. 'Not such a great start,' she snorted. 'Archangel my foot.
Gibreel janab, you're off your head, take it from me. You played too many
winged types for your own good. I wouldn't trust that Deity of yours either,
if I were you,' she added in a more conspiratorial tone, though Gibreel
suspected that her intentions remained satirical. 'He hinted as much
himself, fudging the answer to your Oopar-Neechay question like he did. This
notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may
be straightforward enough in Islam -
O, children of Adam, let not the Devil
seduce you, as he expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from
them their clothing that he might show them their shame -
but go back a bit
and you see that it's a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century BC,
asks: "Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?" Also
Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: "I form
the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do
all these things." It isn't until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth
century BC, that the word
shaitan
is used to mean a being, and not only an
attribute of God.' This speech was one of which the 'real' Rekha would
plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition
and never having evinced the faintest interest in comparative religion or,
of all things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever
since he fell from
Bostan
was, Gibreel knew, not real in any objective,
psychologically or corporeally consistent manner. - What, then, was she? It
would be easy to imagine her as a thing of his own making - his own
accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would account for her ease with
the arcana. - But how had he himself come by such knowledge? Had he truly,
in days gone by, possessed it and then lost it, as his memory now informed
him? (He had a nagging notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix
his thoughts upon his 'dark age', that is to say the period during which he
had unaccountably come to disbelieve in his angelhood, he was faced with a
thick bank of clouds, through which, peer and blink as he might, he could
make out little more than shadows.) - Or could it be that the material now
filling his thoughts, the echo, to give but a single example, of how his
lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon had found the adversary
squat like a
toad
by Eve's ear in Eden, using his wiles 'to reach/The organs of her
fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams', had
in fact been planted in his head by that same ambiguous Creature, that
Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia's boudoir, and
awoken him from his long waking sleep? - Then Rekha, too, was perhaps an
emissary of this God, an external, divine antagonist and not an inner,
guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.
His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully. He had never been
able to tolerate pain. 'Always a cry-baby,' Rekha laughed in his face,
Shaitan had understood more:
Lives there who loves his pain?
Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell,
Though thither doomed? Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt,
And boldly venture to whatever place
Farthest from pain, where thou mightst hope to change
Torment with ease .
. .
He couldn't have put it better. A person who found himself in an
inferno would do anything, rape, extortion, murder, felo de se, whatever it
took to get out ... he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose as Rekha, still
present on her flying rug, and intuiting his ascent (descent?) into the
realm of metaphysical speculation, attempted to get things back on to more
familiar ground. 'You should have stuck with me,' she opined. 'You could
have loved me, good and proper. I knew how to love. Not everybody has the
capacity for it; I do, I mean did. Not like that self-centred blonde
bombshell thinking secretly about having a child and not even mentioning
same to you. Not like your God, either; it's not like the old days, when
such Persons took proper interest.'
This needed contesting on several grounds. 'You were married, start to
finish,' he replied. 'Ball-bearings. I was your side dish. Nor will I, who
waited so long for Him to manifest Himself, now speak poorly of Him post
facto, after the personal appearance. Finally, what's all this baby-talk?
You'll go to any extreme, seems like.'
'You don't know what hell is,' she snapped back, dropping the mask of
her imperturbability. 'But, buster, you sure will. If you'd ever said, I'd
have thrown over that ball-bearings bore in two sees, but you kept mum. Now
I'll see you down there: Neechayvala's Hotel.'
'You'd never have left your children,' he insisted. 'Poor fellows, you
even threw them down first when you jumped.' That set her off. 'Don't you
talk! To dare to talk! Mister, I'll cook your goose! I'll fry your heart and
eat it up on toast! - And as to your Snow White princess, she is of the
opinion that a child is a mother's property only, because men may come and
men may go but she goes on forever, isn't it? You're only the seed, excuse
me, she is the garden. Who asks a seed permission to plant? What do you
know, damn fool Bombay boy messing with the modern ideas of mames.'
'And you,' he came back strongly. 'Did you, for example, ask their
Daddyji's permission before you threw his kiddies off the roof?'
She vanished in fury and yellow smoke, with an explosion that made him
stagger and knocked the hat off his head (it lay upturned on the pavement at
his feet). She unleashed, too, an olfactory effect of such nauseous potency
as to make him gag and retch. Emptily: for he was perfectly void of all
foodstuffs and liquids, having partaken of no nourishment for many days. Ah,
immortality, he thought: ah, noble release from the tyranny of the body. He
noticed that there were two individuals watching him curiously, one a
violent-looking youth in studs and leather, with a rainbow Mohican haircut
and a streak of face-paint lightning zig-zagging down his nose, the other a
kindly middle-aged woman in a headscarf. Very well then: seize the day.
'Repent,' he cried passionately. 'For I am the Archangel of the Lord.'
'Poor bastard,' said the Mohican and threw a coin into Farishta's
fallen hat. He walked on; the kindly, twinkling lady, however, leaned
confidentially towards Gibreel and passed him a leaflet. 'You'll be
interested in this.' He quickly identified it as a racist text demanding the
'repatriation' of the country's black citizenry. She took him, he deduced,
for a white angel. So angels were not exempt from such categories, he
wonderingly learned. 'Look at it this way,' the woman was saying, taking his
silence for uncertainty - and revealing, by slipping into an
over-articulated, over-loud mode of delivery, that she thought him not quite
pukka, a Levantine angel, maybe, Cypriot or Greek, in need of her best
talking-to-the-afflicted voice. 'If they came over and filled up wherever
you come from, well! You wouldn't like
that.'
Punched in the nose, taunted by phantoms, given alms instead of
reverence, and in divers ways shewn the depths to which the denizens of the
city had sunk, the intransigence of the evil manifest there, Gibreel became
more determined than ever to commence the doing of good, to initiate the
great work of rolling back the frontiers of the adversary's dominion. The
atlas in his pocket was his master-plan. He would redeem the city square by
square, from Hockley Farm in the north-west corner of the charted area to
Chance Wood in the south-east; after which, perhaps, he would celebrate the
conclusion of his labours by playing a round of golf at the aptly named
course situated at the very edge of the map: Wildernesse.
And somewhere along the way the adversary himself would be waiting.
Shaitan, Iblis, or whatever name he had adopted -and in point of fact that
name was on the tip of Gibreel's tongue - just as the face of the adversary,
horned and malevolent, was still somewhat out of focus . . . well, it would
take shape soon enough, and the name would come back, Gibreel was sure of
it, for were not his powers growing every day, was he not the one who,
restored to his glory, would hurl the adversary down, once more, into the
Darkest Deeps? - That name: what was it? Tch-something? Tchu Tche Tchin
Tchow. No matter. All in good time.
But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the
cartographers, changing shape at will and without warning, making it
impossible for Gibreel to approach his quest in the systematic manner he
would have preferred. Some days he would turn a corner at the end of a grand
colonnade built of human flesh and covered in skin that bled when scratched,
and find himself in an uncharted wasteland, at whose distant rim he could
see tall familiar buildings, Wren's dome, the high metallic spark-plug of
the Telecom Tower, crumbling in the wind like sandcastles. He would stumble
across bewildering and anonymous parks and emerge into the crowded streets
of the West End, upon which, to the consternation of the motorists, acid had
begun to drip from the sky, burning great holes in the surfaces of the
roads. In this pandemonium of mirages he often heard laughter: the city was
mocking his impotence, awaiting his surrender, his recognition that what
existed here was beyond his powers to comprehend, let alone to change. He
shouted curses at his still-faceless adversary, pleaded with the Deity for a
further sign, feared that his energies might, in truth, never be equal to
the task. In brief, he was becoming the most wretched and bedraggled of
archangels, his garments filthy, his hair lank and greasy, his chin
sprouting hair in uncontrollable tufts. It was in this sorry condition that
he arrived at the Angel Underground.
It must have been early in the morning, because the station staff
drifted up as he watched, to unlock and then roll back the metal grille of
night. He followed them in, shuffling along, head low, hands deep in pockets
(the street atlas had been discarded long ago); and raising his eyes at
last, found himself looking into a face on the verge of dissolving into
tears.
'Good morning,' he ventured, and the young woman in the ticket office
responded bitterly, 'What's good about it, that's what I want to know,' and
now her tears did come, plump, globular and plenteous. 'There, there,
child,' he said, and she gave him a disbelieving look. 'You're no priest,'
she opined. He answered, a little tentatively: 'I am the Angel, Gibreel.'
She began to laugh, as abruptly as she had wept. 'Only angels roun here hang
from the lamp-posts at Christmas. Illuminations. Only the Council swing them
by their necks.' He was not to be put off. 'I am Gibreel,' he repeated,
fixing her with his eye. 'Recite.' And, to her own emphatically expressed
astonishment,
I cyaan believe I doin this, emptyin my heart to some tramp, I
not like this, you know,
the ticket clerk began to speak.
Her name was Orphia Phillips, twenty years old, both parents alive and
dependent on her, especially now that her fool sister Hyacinth had lost her
job as a physiotherapist by 'gettin up to she nonsense'. The young man's
name, for of course there was a young man, was Uriah Moseley. The station
had recently installed two gleaming new elevators and Orphia and Uriah were
their operators. During rush-hours, when both lifts were working, they had
little time for conversation; but for the rest of the day, only one lift was
used. Orphia took up her position at the ticket-collection point just along
from the elevator-shaft, and Uri managed to spend a good deal of time down
there with her, leaning against the door-jamb of his gleaming lift and
picking his teeth with the silver toothpick his great-grandfather had
liberated from some old-time plantation boss. It was true love. 'But I jus
get carry away,' Orphia wailed at Gibreel. 'I always too hasty for sense.'
One afternoon, during a lull, she had deserted her post and stepped up right
in front of him as he leaned and picked teeth, and seeing the look in her
eye he put away the pick. After that he came to work with a spring in his
step; she, too, was in heaven as she descended each day into the bowels of
the earth. Their kisses grew longer and more passionate. Sometimes she would
not detach himself when the buzzer rang for the lift; Uriah would have to
push her back, with a cry of, 'Cool off, girl, the public.' Uriah had a
vocational attitude to his work. He spoke to her of his pride in his
uniform, of his satisfaction at being in the public service, giving his life
to society. She thought he sounded a shade pompous, and wanted to say, 'Uri,
man, you jus a elevator boy here,' but intuiting that such realism would not
be well received, she held her troublesome tongue, or, rather, pushed it
into his mouth.
Their embraces in the tunnel became wars. Now he was trying to get
away, straightening his tunic, while she bit his ear and pushed her hand
down inside his trousers. 'You crazy,' he said, but she, continuing,
inquired: 'So? You vex?'
They were, inevitably, caught: a complaint was lodged by a kindly lady
in headscarf and tweeds. They had been lucky to keep their jobs. Orphia had
been 'grounded', deprived of elevator-shafts and boxed into the ticket
booth. Worse still, her place had been taken by the station beauty, Rochelle
Watkins. 'I know what goin on,' she cried angrily. 'I see Rochelle
expression when she come up, fixin up her hair an all o' dat.' Uriah,
nowadays, avoided Orphia's eyes.
'Can't figure out how you get me to tell you me business,' she
concluded, uncertainly. 'You not no angel. That is for sure.' But she was
unable, try as she might, to break away from his transfixing gaze. 'I know,'
he told her, 'what is in your heart.'
He reached in through the booth's window and took her unresisting hand.
- Yes, this was it, the force of her desires filling him up, enabling him to
translate them back to her, making action possible, allowing her to say and
do what she most profoundly required; this was what he remembered, this
quality of being joined to the one to whom he appeared, so that what
followed was the product of their joining. At last, he thought, the
archangelic functions return. - Inside the ticket booth, the clerk Orphia
Phillips had her eyes closed, her body had slumped down in her chair,
looking slow and heavy, and her lips were moving. - And his own, in unison
with hers. - There. It was done.
At this moment the station manager, a little angry man with nine long
hairs, fetched from ear-level, plastered across his baldness, burst like a
cuckoo from his little door. 'What's your game?' he shouted at Gibreel. 'Get
out of it before I call the police.' Gibrcel stayed where he was. The
station manager saw Orphia emerging from her trance and began to shriek.
'You, Phillips. Never saw the like. Anything in trousers, but this is
ridiculous. All my born days. And nodding
off
on the job, the idea.' Orphia
stood up, put on her raincoat, picked up her folding umbrella, emerged from
ticket booth. 'Leaving public property unattended. You get back in there
this minute, or it's your job, sure as eggsis.' Orphia headed for the spiral
stairs and moved towards the lower depths. Deprived of his employee, the
manager swung round to face Gibreel. 'Go on,' he said. 'Eff off. Go crawl
back under your stone.'
'I am waiting,' replied Gibreel with dignity, 'for the lift.'
When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Orphia Phillips turning a
corner saw Uriah Moseley leaning against the ticket-collection booth in that
way he had, and Rochelle Watkins simpering with delight. But Orphia knew
what to do. 'You let 'Chelle feel you toothpick yet, Uri?' she sang out.
'She'd surely love to hold it.'
They both straightened up, stung. Uriah began blustering: 'Don't be so
common now, Orphia,' but her eyes stopped him in his tracks. Then he began
to walk towards her, dreamily, leaving Rochelle flat. 'Thas right, Uri,' she
said softly, never looking away from him for an instant. 'Come along now.
Come to momma.'
Now walk backwards to the lift and just suck him right in
there, and after that it's up and away we go. -
But something was wrong
here. He wasn't walking any more. Rochelle Watkins was standing beside him,
too damn close, and he'd come to a halt. 'You tell her, Uriah,' Rochelle
said. 'Her stupid obeah
don't signify down here.' Uriah was putting an arm around Rochelle
Watkins. This wasn't the way she'd dreamed it, the way she'd suddenly been
certain-sure it would be, after that Gibreel took her hand, just like that,
as if they were
intended;
wee-yurd, she thought; what was happening to her?
She advanced. - 'Get her offa me, Uriah,' Rochelle shouted. 'She mashin up
me uniform and all.' - Now Uriah, holding the struggling ticket clerk by
both wrists, gave out the news: 'I aks her to get marry!' - Whereupon the
fight went out of Orphia. Beaded plaits no longer whirled and clicked. 'So
you out of order, Orphia Phillips,' Uriah continued, puffing somewhat. 'And
like the lady say, no obeah na change nutten.' Orphia, also breathing
heavily, her clothes disarranged, flopped down on the floor with her back to
the curved tunnel wall. The noise of a train pulling in came up towards
them; the affianced couple hurried to their posts, tidying themselves up,
leaving Orphia where she sat. 'Girl,' Uriah Moseley offered by way of
farewell, 'you too damn outrageous for me.' Rochelle Watkins blew Uriah a
kiss from her ticket-collection booth; he, lounging against his lift, picked
his teeth. 'Home cooking,' Rochelle promised him. 'And no surprises.'
'You filthy bum,' Orphia Phillips screamed at Gibreel after walking up
the two hundred and forty-seven steps of the spiral staircase of defeat.
'You no good devil bum. Who ask you to mash up me life so?'
Even the halo has gone out, like a broken bulb, and I don't know
where's the store.
Gibreel on a bench in the small park near the station
meditated over the futility of his efforts to date. And found blasphemies
surfacing once again: if the dabba had the wrong markings and so went to
incorrect recipient, was the dabbawalla to blame? If special effect -
travelling mat, or such - didn't work, and you saw the blue outline
shimmering at the edge of the flying fellow, how to blame the actor?
Bythe-sametoken, if his angeling was proving insufficient, whose fault,
please, was this? His, personally, or some other Personage? - Children were
playing in the garden of his doubting, among the midge-clouds and rosebushes
and despair. Grandmother's footsteps, ghostbusters, tag. Ellowen deeowen,
London. The fall of angels, Gibreel reflected, was not the same kettle as
the Tumble of Woman and Man. In the case of human persons, the issue had
been morality. Of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
they shouldst not eat, and ate. Woman first, and at her suggestion man,
acquired the verboten ethical standards, tastily apple-flavoured: the
serpent brought them a value system. Enabling them, among other things, to
judge the Deity Itself, making possible in good time all the awkward
inquiries: why evil? Why suffering? Why death? - So, out they went. It
didn't want Its pretty creatures getting above their station. - Children
giggled in his face:
something straaange in the neighbourhood.
Armed with
zapguns, they made as if to bust him like some common, lowdown spook.
Come
away from there,
a woman commanded, a tightly groomed woman, white, a
redhead, with a broad stripe of freckles across the middle of her face; her
voice was full of distaste.
Did you hear me? Now! -
Whereas the angels'
crash was a simple matter of power: a straightforward piece of celestial
police work, punishment for rebellion, good and tough 'pour encourager les
autres'. - Then how unconfident of Itself this Deity was, Who didn't want
Its finest creations to know right from wrong; and Who reigned by terror,
insisting upon the unqualified submission of even Its closest associates,
packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of
Hell... he checked himself. These were satanic thoughts, put into his head
by Iblis-Beelzebub-Shaitan. If the Entity were still punishing him for his
earlier lapse of faith, this was no way to earn remission. He must simply
continue until, purified, he felt his full potency restored. Emptying his
mind, he sat in the gathering darkness and watched the children (now at some
distance) play.
Ip-dip-sky-blue who's-there-not-you not-because-you're-dirty
not-because-you're-clean,
and here, he was sure, one of the boys, a grave
eleven-year-old with outsize eyes, stared straight at him:
my-mother-says
you're-the-fairy-queen.
Rekha Merchant materialized, all jewels and finery. 'Bachchas are
making rude rhymes about you now, Angel of the Lord,' she gibed. 'Even that
little ticket-girl back there, she isn't so impressed. Still doing badly,
baba, looks like to me.'
On this occasion, however, the spirit of the suicide Rekha Merchant had
not come merely to mock. To his astonishment she claimed that his many
tribulations had been of her making: 'You imagine there is only your One
Thing in charge?' she cried. 'Well, lover-boy, let me put you wise.' Her
smart-alec Bombay English speared him with a sudden nostalgia for his lost
city, but she wasn't waiting for him to regain his composure. 'Remember that
I died for love of you, you creepo; this gives me rights. In particular, to
be revenged upon you, by totally bungling up your life. A man must suffer
for causing a lover's leap; don't you think so? That's the rule, anyway. For
so long now I've turned you inside out; now I'm just fed up. Don't forget
how I was so good at forgiving! You liked it also, na? Therefore I have come
to say that compromise solution is always possible. You want to discuss it,
or you prefer to go on being lost in this craziness, becoming not an angel
but a down-and-out hobo, a stupid joke?'
Gibreel asked: 'What compromise?'
'What else?' she replied, her manner transformed, all gentleness, with
a shine in her eyes. 'My farishta, a so small thing.'
If he would only say he loved her:
If he would only say it, and, once a week, when she came to lie with
him, show his love:
If on a night of his choice it could be as it was during the
ballbearings-man's absences on business:
'Then I will terminate the insanities of the city, with which I am
persecuting you; nor will you be possessed, any longer, by this crazy notion
of changing,
redeeming
the city like something left in a pawnshop; it'll all
be calm-calm; you can even live with your paleface mame and be the greatest
film star in the world; how could I be jealous, Gibreel, when I'm already
dead, I don't want you to say I'm as important as her, no, just a
second-rank love will do for me, a side-dish amour; the foot in the other
boot. How about it, Gibreel, just three-little-words, what do you say?'
Give me time.
'It isn't even as if I'm asking for something new, something you
haven't already agreed to, done, indulged in. Lying with a phantom is not
such a bad-bad thing. What about down at that old Mrs. Diamond's - in the
boathouse, that night? Quite a tamasha, you don't think so? So: who do you
think put it on? Listen: I can take for you any form you prefer; one of the
advantages of my condition. You wish her again, that boathouse mame from the
stone age? Hey presto. You want the mirror image of your own
mountain-climber sweaty tomboy iceberg? Also, allakazoo, allakazam. Who do
you think it was, waiting for you after the old lady died?'
All that night he walked the city streets, which remained stable,
banal, as if restored to the hegemony of natural laws; while Rekha -
floating before him on her carpet like an artiste on a stage, just above
head-height - serenaded him with the sweetest of love songs, accompanying
herself on an old ivory-sided harmonium, singing everything from the gazals
of Faiz Ahmed Faiz to the best old film music, such as the defiant air sung
by the dancer Anarkali in the presence of the Grand Mughal Akbar in the
fifties classic
Mughal-e-Azam, -
in which she declares and exults in her
impossible, forbidden love for the Prince, Salim, -'Pyaar kiya to darna
kya?' - That is to say, more or less,
why be afraid of love?
and Gibreel,
whom she had accosted in the garden of his doubt, felt the music attaching
strings to his heart and leading him towards her, because what she asked
was, just as she said, such a little thing, after all.
He reached the river; and another bench, cast-iron camels supporting
the wooden slats, beneath Cleopatra's Needle. Sitting, he closed his eyes.
Rekha sang Faiz:
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you
. . .
How lovely you are still, my love,
but I am helpless too;
for the world has other sorrows than love,
and other pleasures too. Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you.
Gibreel saw a man behind his closed eyes: not Faiz, but another poet,
well past his heyday, a decrepit sort of fellow. - Yes, that was his name:
Baal. What was he doing here? What did he have to say for himself? - Because
he was certainly trying to say something; his speech, thick and slurry, made
understanding difficult . . .
Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions.
The first is asked when it's weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the
kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to
find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded,
ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with
the breeze? - The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of
a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the
world.
'What's the second question?' Gibreel asked aloud.
Answer the first one first.
Gibreel, opening his eyes at dawn, found Rekha unable to sing, silenced
by expectations and uncertainties. He let her have it straight off. 'It's a
trick. There is no God but God. You are neither the Entity nor Its
adversary, but only some caterwauling mist. No compromises; I won't do deals
with fogs.' He saw, then, the emeralds and brocades fall from her body,
followed by the flesh, until only the skeleton remained, after which that,
too, crumbled away; finally, there was a piteous, piercing shriek, as
whatever was left of Rekha flew with vanquished fury into the sun.
And did not return: except at - or near - the end.
Convinced that he had passed a test, Gibreel realized that a great
weight had lifted from him; his spirits grew lighter by the second, until by
the time the sun was in the sky he was literally delirious with joy. Now it
could really begin: the tyranny of his enemies, of Rekha and Alleluia Cone
and all the women who wished to bind him in the chains of desires and songs,
was broken for good; now he could feel light streaming out, once more, from
the unseen point just behind his head; and his weight, too, began to
diminish. - Yes, he was losing the last traces of his humanity, the gift of
flight was being restored to him, as he became ethereal, woven of illumined
air. - He could simply step, this minute, off this blackened parapet and
soar away above the old grey river; - or leap from any of its bridges and
never touch land again. So: it was time to show the city a great sight, for
when it perceived the Archangel Gibreel standing in all his majesty upon the
western horizon, bathed in the rays of the rising sun, then surely its
people would be sore afraid and repent them of their sins.
He began to enlarge his person.
How astonishing, then, that of all the drivers streaming along the
Embankment - it was, after all, rush-hour - not one should so much as look
in his direction, or acknowledge him! This was in truth a people who had
forgotten how to see. And because the relationship between men and angels is
an ambiguous one - in which the angels, or mala'ikah, are both the
controllers of nature and the intermediaries between the Deity and the human
race; but at the same time, as the Quran clearly states,
we said unto the
angels, be submissive unto Adam,
the point being to symbolize man's ability
to master, through knowledge, the forces of nature which the angels
represented - there really wasn't much that the ignored and infuriated malak
Gibreel could do about it. Archangels could only speak when men chose to
listen. What a bunch! Hadn't he warned the Over-Entity at the very beginning
about this crew of criminals and evildoers? 'Wilt thou place in the earth
such as make mischief in it and shed blood?' he had asked, and the Being, as
usual, replied only that he knew better. Well, there they were, the masters
of the earth, canned like tuna on wheels and blind as bats, their heads full
of mischief and their newspapers of blood.
It really was incredible. Here appeared a celestial being, all
radiance, effulgence and goodness, larger than Big Ben, capable of
straddling the Thames colossus-style, and these little ants remained
immersed in drive-time radio and quarrels with fellow-motorists. 'I am
Gibreel,' he shouted in a voice that shook every building on the riverbank:
nobody noticed. Not one person came running out of those quaking edifices to
escape the earthquake. Blind, deaf and asleep.
He decided to force the issue.
The stream of traffic flowed past him. He took a mighty breath, lifted
one gigantic foot, and stepped out to face the cars.
Gibreel Farishta was returned to Allie's doorstep, badly bruised, with
many grazes on his arms and face, and jolted into sanity, by a tiny shining
gentleman with an advanced stammer who introduced himself with some
difficulty as the film producer S.S. Sisodia, 'known as Whiwhisky because
I'm papa partial to a titi tipple; mamadam, my caca card.' (When they knew
each other better, Sisodia would send Allie into convulsions of laughter by
rolling up his right trouser-leg, exposing the knee, and pronouncing, while
he held his enormous wraparound movie-man glasses to his shin: 'Self pawpaw
portrait.' He was longsighted to a degree: 'Don't need help to see moomovies
but real life gets too damn cloclose up.') It was Sisodia's rented limo that
hit Gibreel, a slow-motion accident luckily, owing to traffic congestion;
the actor ended up on the bonnet, mouthing the oldest line in the movies:
Where am I,
and Sisodia, seeing the legendary features of the vanished
demigod squashed up against the limousine's windshield, was tempted to
answer:
Baback where you bibi belong: on the iska iska iscreen.
- 'No
bobobones broken,' Sisodia told Allie. 'A mimi miracle. He ista ista
istepped right in fafa front of the wee wee wehicle.'
So you're back,
Allie greeted Gibreel silently.
Seems this is where you
always land up after you fall.
'Also Scotch-and-Sisodia,' the film producer reverted to the question
of his sobriquets. Tor hoohoo humorous reasons. My fafavourite pup pup
poison.'
'It is very kind of you to bring Gibreel home,' Allie belatedly got the
point. 'You must allow us to offer you a drink.'
'Sure! Sure!' Sisodia actually clapped his hands. 'For me, for whowhole
of heehee Hindi cinema, today is a baba banner day.'
'You have not heard perhaps the story of the paranoid schizophrenic
who, believing himself to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, agreed to
undergo a lie-detector test?' Alicja Cohen, eating gefilte fish hungrily,
waved one of Bloom's forks under her daughter's nose. 'The question they
asked him: are you Napoleon? And the answer he gave, smiling wickedly, no
doubt: No. So they watch the machine, which indicates with all the insight
of modern science that the lunatic is lying.' Blake again, Allie thought.
Then I asked: does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He -
i.e. Isaiah -
replied. All poets believe that it does. & in ages of
imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable
of a firm perswasion of any thing.
'Are you listening to me, young woman?
I'm serious here. That gentleman you have in your bed: he requires not your
nightly attentions -excuse me but I'll speak plainly, seeing I must - but,
to be frank, a padded cell.'
'You'd do that, wouldn't you,' Allie hit back. 'You'd throw away the
key. Maybe you'd even plug him in. Burn the devils out of his brain: strange
how our prejudices never change.'
'Hmm,' Alicja ruminated, adopting her vaguest and most innocent
expression in order to infuriate her daughter. 'What can it harm? Yes, maybe
a little voltage, a little dose of the juice . . .'
'What he needs is what he's getting, mother. Proper medical
supervision, plenty of rest, and something you maybe forgot about.' She
dried suddenly, her tongue knotted, and it was in quite a different, low
voice, staring at her untouched salad, that she got out the last word.
'Love.'
'Ah, the power of love,' Alicja patted her daughter's (at once
withdrawn) hand. 'No, it's not what I forgot, Alleluia. It's what you just
begun for the first time in your beautiful life to learn. And who do you
pick?' She returned to the attack. 'An out-to-lunch! A
ninety-pennies-in-the-pound! A butterflies-in-the-brainbox! I mean,
angels,
darling, I never heard the like. Men are always claiming special privileges,
but this one is a first.'
'Mother . . .' Allie began, but Alicja's mood had changed again, and
this time, when she spoke, Allie was not listening to the words, but hearing
the pain they both revealed and concealed, the pain of a woman to whom
history had most brutally happened, who had already lost a husband and seen
one daughter precede her to what she once, with unforgettable black humour,
referred to (she must have read the sports pages, by some chance, to come
across the phrase) as an
early bath.
'Allie, my baby,' Alicja Cohen said,
'we're going to have to take good care of you.'
One reason why Allie was able to spot that panic-anguish in her
mother's face was her recent sighting of the same combination on the
features of Gibreel Farishta. After Sisodia returned him to her care, it
became plain that Gibreel had been shaken to the very marrow, and there was
a haunted look to him, a scarified popeyed quality, that quite pierced her
heart. He faced the fact of his mental illness with courage, refusing to
play it down or call it by a false name, but his recognition of it had,
understandably, cowed him. No longer (for the present, anyway) the ebullient
vulgarian for whom she had conceived her 'grand passion', he became for her,
in this newly vulnerable incarnation, more lovable than ever. She grew
determined to lead him back to sanity, to stick it out; to wait out the
storm, and conquer the peak. And he was, for the moment, the easiest and
most malleable of patients, somewhat dopey as a result of the heavy-duty
medication he was being given by the specialists at the Maudsley Hospital,
sleeping long hours, and acquiescing, when awake, in all her requests,
without a murmur of protest. In alert moments he filled in for her the full
background to his illness: the strange serial dreams, and before that the
near-fatal breakdown in India. 'I am no longer afraid of sleep,' he told
her. 'Because what's happened in my waking time is now so much worse.' His
greatest fear reminded her of Charles II's terror, after his Restoration, of
being sent 'on his travels' again: Td give anything only to know it won't
happen any more,' he told her, meek as a lamb.
Lives there who loves his pain?
'It won't happen,' she reassured him.
'You've got the best help there is.' He quizzed her about money, and, when
she tried to deflect the questions, insisted that she withdraw the
psychiatric fees from the small fortune stashed in his money-belt. His
spirits remained low. 'Doesn't matter what you say,' he mumbled in response
to her cheery optimisms. 'The craziness is in here and it drives me wild to
think it could get out any minute, right now, and
he
would be in charge
again.' He had begun to characterize his 'possessed', 'angel' self as
another person: in the Beckettian formula,
Not I. He.
His very own Mr. Hyde.
Allie attempted to argue against such descriptions. 'It isn't
he,
it's you,
and when you're well, it won't be you any more.'
It didn't work. For a time, however, it looked as though the treatment
was going to. Gibreel seemed calmer, more in control; the serial dreams were
still there - he would still speak, at night, verses in Arabic, a language
he did not know:
tilk al-gharaniq al-'ula wa inna shafa'ata-hunna
la-turtaja,
for example, which turned out to mean (Allie, woken by his
sleeptalk, wrote it down phonetically and went with her scrap of paper to
the Brickhall mosque, where her recitation made a mullah's hair stand on end
under his turban): 'These are exalted females whose intercession is to be
desired' - but he seemed able to think of these nightshows as separate from
himself, which gave both Allie and the Maudsley psychiatrists the feeling
that Gibreel was slowly reconstructing the boundary wall between dreams and
reality, and was on the road to recovery; whereas in fact, as it turned out,
this separation was related to, was the same phenomenon as, his splitting of
his sense of himself into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to
suppress, but which he also, by characterizing it as other than himself,
preserved, nourished, and secretly made strong.
As for Allie, she lost, for a while, the prickly,
wrong
feeling of
being stranded in a false milieu, an alien narrative; caring for Gibreel,
investing in his brain, as she put it to herself, fighting to salvage him so
that they could resume the great, exciting struggle of their love - because
they would probably quarrel all the way to the grave, she mused tolerantly,
they'd be two old codgers flapping feebly at one another with rolled-up
newspapers as they sat upon the evening verandas of their lives - she felt
more closely joined to him each day; rooted, so to speak, in his earth. It
was some time since Maurice Wilson had been seen sitting among the
chimneypots, calling her to her death.
Mr. 'Whisky' Sisodia, that gleaming and charm-packed knee in
spectacles, became a regular caller - three or four visits a week -during
Gibreel's convalescence, invariably arriving with boxes full of goodies to
eat. Gibreel had been literally fasting to death during his 'angel period',
and the medical opinion was that starvation had contributed in no small
degree to his hallucinations. 'So now we fafatten him up,' Sisodia smacked
his palms together, and once the invalid's stomach was up to it, 'Whisky'
plied him with delicacies: Chinese sweet-corn and chicken soup, Bombay-style
bhel-puri from the new, chic but unfortunately named 'Pagal Khana'
restaurant whose 'Crazy Food' (but the name could also be translated as
Madhouse)
had grown popular enough, especially among the younger set of
British Asians, to rival even the long-standing pre-eminence of the
Shaandaar Cafe, from which Sisodia, not wishing to show unseemly
partisanship, also fetched eats - sweetmeats, samosas, chicken patties - for
the increasingly voracious Gibreel. He brought, too, dishes made by his own
hand, fish curries, raitas, sivayyan, khir, and doled out, along with the
edibles, name-dropping accounts of celebrity dinner parties: how Pavarotti
had loved Whisky's lassi, and O but that poor James Mason had just adored
his spicy prawns. Vanessa, Amitabh, Dustin, Sridevi, Christopher Reeve were
all invoked. 'One soosoo superstar should be aware of the tatastes of his
pipi peers.' Sisodia was something of a legend himself, Allie learned from
Gibreel. The most slippery and silver-tongued man in the business, he had
made a string of 'quality' pictures on microscopic budgets, keeping going
for over twenty years on pure charm and nonstop hustle. People on Sisodia
projects got paid with the greatest difficulty, but somehow failed to mind.
He had once quelled a cast revolt - over pay, inevitably - by whisking the
entire unit off for a grand picnic in one of the most fabulous maharajah
palaces in India, a place that was normally off limits to all but the
high-born elite, the Gwaliors and Jaipurs and Kashmirs. Nobody ever knew how
he fixed it, but most members of that unit had since signed up to work on
further Sisodia ventures, the pay issue buried beneath the grandeur of such
gestures. 'And if he's needed he is always there,' Gibreel added. 'When
Charulata, a wonderful dancer-actress he'd often used, needed the cancer
treatment, suddenly years of unpaid fees materialized overnight.'
These days, thanks to a string of surprise box-office hits based on old
fables drawn from the
Katha-Sarit-Sagar
compendium - the 'Ocean of the
Streams of Story', longer than the Arabian Nights and equally as
fantasticated - Sisodia was no longer based exclusively in his tiny office
on Bombay's Readymoney Terrace, but had apartments in London and New York,
and Oscars in his toilets. The story was that he carried, in his wallet, a
photograph of the Hong Kong-based kung-phooey producer Run Run Shaw, his
supposed hero, whose name he was quite unable to say. 'Sometimes four Runs,
sometimes a sixer,' Gibreel told Allie, who was happy to see him laugh. 'But
I can't swear. It's only a media rumour.'
Allie was grateful for Sisodia's attentiveness. The famous producer
appeared to have limitless time at his disposal, whereas Allie's schedule
had just then grown very full. She had signed a promotional contract with a
giant chain of freezer-food centres whose advertising agent, Mr. Hal
Valance, told Allie during a power breakfast - grapefruit, dry toast, decaf,
all at Dorchester prices - that her
profile,
'uniting as it does the
positive parameters (for our client) of "coldness" and "cool", is right on
line. Some stars end up being vampires, sucking attention away from the
brand name, you understand, but this feels like real synergy.' So now there
were freezer-mart openings to cut ribbons at, and sales conferences, and
advertising shots with tubs of softscoop icecream; plus the regular meetings
with the designers and manufacturers of her autograph lines of equipment and
leisurewear; and, of course, her fitness programme. She had signed on for Mr
Joshi's highly recommended martial arts course at the local sports centre,
and continued, too, to force her legs to run five miles a day around the
Fields, in spite of the soles-on-broken-glass pain. 'No pop problem,'
Sisodia would send her off with a cheery wave. 'I will iss iss issit
here-only until you return. To be with Gigibreel is for me a pip pip
privilege.' She left him regaling Farishta with his inexhaustible anecdotes,
opinions and general chitchat, and when she returned he would still be going
strong. She came to identify several major themes; notably, his corpus of
statements about The Trouble With The English. The trouble with the
Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo
don't know what it means.' - 'The see secret of a dinner party in London is
to ow ow outnumber the English. If they're outnumbered they bebehave;
otherwise, you're in trouble.' - 'Go to the Che Che Chamber of Horrors and
you'll see what's rah rah wrong with the English. That's what they rereally
like, caw corpses in bubloodbaths, mad barbers, etc. etc. etera. Their pay
papers full of kinky sex and death. But they tell the whir world they're
reserved, ist ist istiff upper lip and so on, and we're ist ist istupid
enough to believe.' Gibreel listened to this collection of prejudices with
what seemed like complete assent, irritating Allie profoundly. Were these
generalizations really all they saw of England? 'No,' Sisodia conceded with
a shameless smile. 'But it feels googood to let this ist ist istuff out.'
By the time the Maudsley people felt able to recommend a major
reduction in Gibreel's dosages, Sisodia had become so much a fixture at his
bedside, a sort of unofficial, eccentric and amusing layabout cousin, that
when he sprung his trap Gibreel and Allie were taken completely by surprise.
He had been in touch with colleagues in Bombay: the seven producers
whom Gibreel had left in the lurch when he boarded Air India's Flight 420,
Bostan.
'All are eel, elated by the news of your survival,' he informed
Gibreel. 'Unf unf unfortunately, question of breach of contract ararises.'
Various other parties were also interested in suing the renascent Farishta
for plenty, in particular a starlet named Pimple Billimoria, who alleged
loss of earnings and professional damage. 'Could um amount to curcrores,'
Sisodia said, looking lugubrious. Allie was angry. 'You stirred up this
hornets' nest.' she said. 'I should have known: you were too good to be
true.'
Sisodia became agitated. 'Damn damn damn.'
'Ladies present,' Gibreel, still a little drug-woozy, warned; but
Sisodia windmilled his arms, indicating that he was trying to force words
past his overexcited teeth. Finally: 'Damage limitation. My intention. Not
betrayal, you mumust not thithithink.' To hear Sisodia tell it, nobody back
in Bombay really wanted to sue Gibreel, to kill in court the goose that laid
the golden eggs. All parties recognized that the old projects were no longer
capable of being restarted: actors, directors, key crew members, even sound
stages were otherwise committed. All parties further recognized that
Gibreel's return from the dead was an item of a commercial value greater
than any of the defunct films; the question was how to utilize it best, to
the advantage of all concerned. His landing up in London also suggested the
possibility of an international connection, maybe overseas funding, use of
non-Indian locations, participation of stars 'from foreign', etc.: in short,
it was time for Gibreel to emerge from retirement and face the cameras
again, 'There is no chochoice,' Sisodia explained to Gibreel, who sat up in
bed trying to clear his head. 'If you refuse, they will move against you
en
bloc,
and not even your four four fortune could suffice. Bankruptcy,
jajajail, funtoosh.'
Sisodia had talked himself into the hot seat: all the principals had
agreed to grant him executive powers in the matter, and he had put together
quite a package. The British-based entrepreneur Billy Battuta was eager to
invest both in sterling and in 'blocked rupees', the non-repatriable profits
made by various British film distributors in the Indian subcontinent, which
Battuta had taken over in return for cash payments in negotiable currencies
at a knockdown (37-point discount) rate. All the Indian producers would chip
in, and Miss Pimple Billimoria, to guarantee her silence, was to be offered
a showcase supporting role featuring at least two dance numbers. Filming
would be spread between three continents - Europe, India, the North African
coast. Gibreel got above-the-title billing, and three percentage points of
producers' net profits . . . 'Ten,' Gibreel interrupted, 'against two of the
gross.' His mind was obviously clearing. Sisodia didn't bat an eyelid. 'Ten
against two,' he agreed. 'Pre-publicity campaign to be as fofollows . . .'
'But what's the project?' Allie Cone demanded. Mr. 'Whisky' Sisodia
beamed from ear to ear. 'Dear mamadam,' he said. 'He will play the
archangel, Gibreel.'
The proposal was for a series of films, both historical and
contemporary, each concentrating on one incident from the angel's long and
illustrious career: a trilogy, at least. 'Don't tell me.' Allie said,
mocking the small shining mogul.
'Gibreel in Jahilia, Gibreel Meets the
Imam, Gibreel with the Butterfly Girl.'
Sisodia wasn't one bit embarrassed,
but nodded proudly. 'Stostorylines, draft scenarios, cacasting options are
already well in haha hand.' That was too much for Allie. 'It stinks,' she
raged at him, and he retreated from her, a trembling and placatory knee,
while she pursued him, until she was actually chasing him around the
apartment, banging into the furniture, slamming doors. 'It exploits his
sickness, has nothing to do with his present needs, and shows an utter
contempt for his own wishes. He's retired; can't you people respect that? He
doesn't want to be a star. And will you please stand still. I'm not going to
eat you.'
He stopped running, but kept a cautious sofa between them. 'Please see
that this is imp imp imp,' he cried, his stammer crippling his tongue on
account of his anxiety. 'Can the moomoon retire? Also, excuse, there are his
seven sig sig sig.
Signatures.
Committing him absolutely. Unless and until
you decide to commit him to a papapa.' He gave up, sweating freely.
'A what?
Tagal Khana. Asylum. That would be another wwwway.' Allie lifted a
heavy brass inkwell in the shape of Mount Everest and prepared to hurl it.
'You really are a skunk,' she began, but then Gibreel was standing in the
doorway, still rather pale, bony and hollow-eyed. 'Alleluia,
1
he
said, 'I am thinking that maybe I want this. Maybe 1 need to go back to
work.'
'Gibreel sahib! I can't tell you how delighted. A star is reborn.'
Billy Battuta was a surprise: no longer the hair-gel-and-finger-rings
society column shark, he was unshowily dressed in brass-buttoned blazer and
blue jeans, and instead of the cocksure swagger Allie had expected there was
an attractive, almost deferential reticence. He had grown a neat goatee
beard which gave him a striking resemblance to the Christ-image on the Turin
Shroud. Welcoming the three of them (Sisodia had picked them up in his limo,
and the driver, Nigel, a sharp dresser from St Lucia, spent the journey
telling Gibreel how many other pedestrians his lightning reflexes had saved
from serious injury or death, punctuating these reminiscences with car-phone
conversations in which mysterious deals involving amazing sums of money were
discussed), Billy had shaken Allie's hand warmly, and then fallen upon
Gibreel and hugged him in pure, infectious joy. His companion Mimi Mamoulian
was rather less low-key. 'It's all fixed,' she announced. 'Fruit, starlets,
paparazzi, talk-shows, rumours, little hints of scandal: everything a world
figure requires. Flowers, personal security, zillion-pound contracts. Make
yourselves at home.'
That was the general idea, Allie thought. Her initial opposition to the
whole scheme had been overcome by Gibreel's own interest, which, in turn,
prompted his doctors to go along with it, estimating that his restoration to
his familiar milieu
- going home,
in a way - might indeed be beneficial. And
Sisodia's purloining of the dream-narratives he'd heard at Gibreel's bedside
could be seen as serendipitous: for once those stories were clearly placed
in the artificial, fabricated world of the cinema, it ought to become easier
for Gibreel to see them as fantasies, too. That Berlin Wall between the
dreaming and waking state might well be more rapidly rebuilt as a result.
The bottom line was that it was worth the try.
Things (being things) didn't work out quite as planned. Allie found
herself resenting the extent to which Sisodia, Battuta and Mimi moved in on
Gibreel's life, taking over his wardrobe and daily schedules, and moving him
out of Allie's apartment, declaring that the time for a 'permanent liaison'
was not yet ripe, 'imagewise'. After the stint at the Ritz, the movie star
was given three rooms in Sisodia's cavernous, designer-chic flat in an old
mansion block near Grosvenor Square, all Art Deco marbled floors and
scumbling on the walls. Gibreel's own passive acceptance of these changes
was, for Allie, the most infuriating aspect of all, and she began to
comprehend the size of the step he'd taken when he left behind what was
clearly second nature to him, and came hunting for her. Now that he was
sinking back into that universe of armed bodyguards and maids with breakfast
trays and giggles, would he dump her as dramatically as he had entered her
life? Had she helped to engineer a reverse migration that would leave her
high and dry? Gibreel stared out of newspapers, magazines, television sets,
with many different women on his arm, grinning foolishly. She hated it, but
he refused to notice. 'What are you worrying?' he dismissed her, while
sinking into a leather sofa the size of a small pick-up truck. 'It's only
hoto opportunities: business, that's all.'
Worst of all:
he
got jealous. As he came off the heavy drugs, and as
his work (as well as hers) began to force separations upon them, he began to
be possessed, once again, by that irrational, out-of-control suspiciousness
which had precipitated the ridiculous quarrel over the Brunei cartoons.
Whenever they met he would put her through the mill, interrogating her
minutely: where had she been, who had she seen, what did he do, did she lead
him on? She felt as if she were suffocating. His mental illness, the new
influences in his life, and now this nightly third-degree treatment: it was
as though her real life, the one she wanted, the one she was hanging in
there and fighting for, was being buried deeper and deeper under this
avalanche of wrong-nesses.
What about what I need,
she felt like screaming,
when do I get to set the terms?
Driven to the very edge of her self-control,
she asked, as a last resort, her mother's advice. In her father's old study
in the Moscow Road house - which Alicja had kept just the way Otto liked it,
except that now the curtains were drawn back to let in what light England
could come up with, and there were flower-vases at strategic points - Alicja
at first offered little more than world-weariness. 'So a woman's life-plans
are being smothered by a man's,' she said, not unkindly. 'So welcome to your
gender. I see it's strange for you to be out of control.' And Allie
confessed: she wanted to leave him, but found she couldn't. Not just because
of guilt about abandoning a seriously unwell person; also because of 'grand
passion', because of the word that still dried her tongue when she tried to
say it. 'You want his child,' Alicja put her finger on it. At first Allie
blazed: 'I want my child,' but then, subsiding abruptly, blowing her nose,
she nodded dumbly, and was on the verge of tears.
'You want your head examining is what,' Alicja comforted her. How long
since they had been like this in one another's arms? Too long. And maybe it
would be the last time . . . Alicja hugged her daughter, said: 'So dry your
eyes. Comes now the good news. Your affairs might be shot to ribbons, but
your old mother is in better shape.'
There was an American college professor, a certain Boniek, big in
genetic engineering. 'Now don't start, dear, you don't know anything, it's
not all Frankenstein and geeps, it has many beneficial applications,' Alicja
said with evident nervousness, and Allie, overcoming her surprise and her
own red-rimmed un-happiness, burst into convulsive, liberating sobs of
laughter; in which her mother joined. 'At your age,' Allie wept, 'you ought
to be ashamed.' - 'Well, I'm not,' the future Mrs. Boniek rejoined. 'A
professor, and in Stanford, California, so he brings the sunshine also. I
intend to spend many hours working on my tan.'
When she discovered (a report found by chance in a desk drawer at the
Sisodia palazzo) that Gibreel had started having her followed, Allie did, at
last, make the break. She scribbled a note -
This is killing me -
slipped it
inside the report, which she placed on the desktop; and left without saying
goodbye. Gibreel never rang her up. He was rehearsing, in those days, for
his grand public reappearance at the latest in a successful series of stage
song-and-dance shows featuring Indian movie stars and staged by one of Billy
Battuta's companies at Earls Court. He was to be the unannounced, surprise
top-of-the-bill show-stopper, and had been rehearsing dance routines with
the show's chorus line for weeks: also reacquainting himself with the art of
mouthing to playback music. Rumours of the identity of the Mystery Man or
Dark Star were being carefully circulated and monitored by Battuta's promo
men, and the Valance advertising agency had been hired to devise a series of
'teaser' radio commercials and a local 48-sheet poster campaign. Gibreel's
arrival on the Earls Court stage - he was to be lowered from the flies
surrounded by clouds of cardboard and smoke - was the intended climax to the
English segment of his re-entry into his superstardom; next stop, Bombay.
Deserted, as he called it, by Alleluia Cone, he once more 'refused to
crawl'; and immersed himself in work.
The next thing that went wrong was that Billy Battuta got himself
arrested in New York for his Satanic sting. Allie, reading about it in the
Sunday papers, swallowed her pride and called Gibreel at the rehearsal rooms
to warn him against consorting with such patently criminal elements.
'Battuta's a hood,' she insisted. 'His whole manner was a performance, a
fake. He wanted to be sure he'd be a hit with the Manhattan dowagers, so he
made us his tryout audience. That goatee! And a college blazer, for God's
sake: how did we fall for it?' But Gibreel was cold and withdrawn; she had
ditched him, in his book, and he wasn't about to take advice from deserters.
Besides, Sisodia and the Battuta promo team had assured him - and he had
grilled them about it all right - that Billy's problems had no relevance to
the gala night (Filmmela, that was the name) because the financial
arrangements remained solid, the monies for fees and guarantees had already
been allocated, all the Bombay-based stars had confirmed, and would
participate as planned. 'Plans fifilling up fast,' Sisodia promised.
'Shoshow must go on.'
The next thing that went wrong was inside Gibreel.
Sisodia's determination to keep people guessing about this Dark Star
meant that Gibreel had to enter the Earls Court stage-door dressed in a
burqa. So that even his sex remained a mystery. He was given the largest
dressing-room - a black five-pointed star had been stuck on the door - and
was unceremoniously locked in by the bespectacled genuform producer. In the
dressing-room he found his angel-costume, including a contraption that, when
tied around his forehead, would cause lightbulbs to glow behind him,
creating the illusion of a halo; and a closed-circuit television, on which
he would be able to watch the show - Mithun and Kimi cavorting for the
'disco diwane' set; Jayapradha and Rekha (no relation: the megastar, not a
figment on a rug) submitting regally to on-stage interviews, in which Jaya
divulged her views on polygamy while Rekha fantasized about alternative
lives - 'If I'd been born out of India, I'd have been a painter in Paris';
he-man stunts from Vinod and Dharmendra; Sridevi getting her sari wet -
until it was time for him to take up his position on a winch-operated
'chariot' high above the stage. There was a cordless telephone, on which
Sisodia called to tell him that the house was full - 'All sorts are here,'
he triumphed, and proceeded to offer Gibreel his technique of crowd
analysis: you could tell the Pakistanis because they dressed up to the
gills, the Indians because they dressed down, and the Bangladeshis because
they dressed badly, 'all that pupurple and pink and gogo gold
gota
that they
like' - and which otherwise remained silent; and, finally, a large
gift-wrapped box, a little present from his thoughtful producer, which
turned out to contain Miss Pimple Billimoria wearing a winsome expression
and a quantity of gold ribbon. The movies were in town.
The strange feeling began - that is,
returned -
when he was in the
'chariot', waiting to descend. He thought of himself as moving along a route
on which, any moment now, a choice would be offered him, a choice - the
thought formulated itself in his head without any help from him - between
two realities, this world and another that was also right there, visible but
unseen. He felt slow, heavy, distanced from his own consciousness, and
realized that he had not the faintest idea which path he would choose, which
world he would enter. The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to treat
him for schizophrenia; the splitting was not in him, but in the universe. As
the chariot began its descent towards the immense, tidal roar that had begun
to swell below him, he rehearsed his opening line -
My name is Gibreel
Farishta, and I'm back -
and heard it, so to speak, in stereo, because it,
too, belonged in both worlds, with a different meaning in each; - and now
the lights hit him, he raised his arms high, he was returning wreathed in
clouds, - and the crowd had recognized him, and his fellow-performers, too;
people were rising from their seats, every man, woman and child in the
auditorium, surging towards the stage, unstoppable, like a sea. - The first
man to reach him had time to scream out
Remember me, Gibreel? With the six
toes? Maslama, sir: John Maslama. I kept secret your presence among us; but
yes, I have been speaking out about the coming of the Lord, I have gone
before you, a voice crying in the wilderness, the crooked shall be made
straight and the rough places plain -
but then he had been dragged away, and
the security guards were around Gibreel,
they're out of control, it's a
fucking riot, you'll have to -
but he wouldn't go, because he'd seen that at
least half the crowd were wearing bizarre headgear, rubber horns to make
them look like demons, as if they were badges of belonging and defiance; -
and in that instant when he saw the adversary's sign he felt the universe
fork and he stepped down the left-hand path.
The official version of what followed, and the one accepted by all the
news media, was that Gibreel Farishta had been lifted out of the danger area
in the same winch-operated chariot in which he'd descended, and from which
he hadn't had time to emerge; -and that it would therefore have been easy
for him to make his escape, from his isolated and unwatched place high above
the melee. This version proved resilient enough to survive the 'revelation'
in the
Voice
that the assistant stage manager in charge of the winch had
not, repeat not, set it in motion after it landed; - that, in fact, the
chariot remained grounded throughout the riot of the ecstatic film fans; -
and that substantial sums of money had been paid to the backstage staff to
persuade them to collude in the fabrication of a story which, because
totally fictional, was realistic enough for the newspaper-buying public to
believe. However, the rumour that Gibreel Farishta had actually levitated
away from the Earls Court stage and vanished into the blue under his own
steam spread rapidly through the city's Asian population, and was fed by
many accounts of the halo that had been seen streaming out from a point just
behind his head. Within days of the second disappearance of Gibreel
Farishta, vendors of novelties in Brickhall, Wembley and Brixton were
selling as many toy haloes (green fluorescent hoops were the most popular)
as headbands to which had been affixed a pair of rubber horns.
He was hovering high over London! - Haha, they couldn't touch him now,
the devils rushing upon him in that Pandemonium! - He looked down upon the
city and saw the English. The trouble with the English was that they were
English: damn cold fish! -Living underwater most of the year, in days the
colour of night! - Well: he was here now, the great Transformer, and this
time there'd be some changes made - the laws of nature are the laws of its
transformation, and he was the very person to utilize the same! - Yes,
indeed: this time, clarity.
He would show them - yes! - his
power. -
These powerless English! - Did
they not think their history would return to haunt them? - 'The native is an
oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor' (Fanon).
English women no longer bound him; the conspiracy stood exposed! - Then away
with all fogs. He would make this land anew. He was the Archangel, Gibreel.
-
And I'm back!
The face of the adversary hung before him once again, sharpening,
clarifying. Moony with a sardonic curl to the lips: but the name still
eluded . . .
tcha,
like tea?
Shah,
a king? Or like a (royal? tea?) dance:
Shatchacha. -
Nearly there. - And the nature of the adversary: self-hating,
constructing a false ego, auto-destructive. Fanon again: 'In this way the
individual' - the Fanonian
native -
'accepts the disintegration ordained by
God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior
re-stabilization acquires a stony calm.' -
I'll give him stony calm! -
Native and settler, that old dispute, continuing now upon these soggy
streets, with reversed categories. - It occurred to him now that he was
forever joined to the adversary, their arms locked around one another's
bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail, as when they fell to earth: when they
settled. -
As things begin so they continue. - Yes, he was coming closer. -
Chichi? Sasa? -
My other, my love . . .
. . .
No! - He floated over parkland and cried out, frightening the
birds. - No more of these England-induced ambiguities, these
Biblical-Satanic confusions! - Clarity, clarity, at all costs clarity! -
This Shaitan was no fallen angel. - Forget those son-of-the-morning
fictions; this was no good boy gone bad, but pure evil. Truth was, he wasn't
an angel at all! - 'He was of the djinn, so he transgressed.' - Quran 18:50,
there it was as plain as the day. - How much more straightforward this
version was! How much more practical, down-to-earth, comprehensible! -
Iblis/ Shaitan standing for the darkness, Gibreel for the light. - Out, out
with these sentimentalities:
joining, locking together, love.
Seek and
destroy: that was all.
. . . O most slippery, most devilish of cities! - In which such stark,
imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of greys. -
How right he'd been, for instance, to banish those Satanico-Biblical doubts
of his, - those concerning God's unwillingness to permit dissent among his
lieutenants, - for as Iblis/Shaitan was no angel, so there had been no
angelic dissidents for the Divinity to repress; - and those concerning
forbidden fruit, and God's supposed denial of moral choice to his creations;
- for nowhere in the entire Recitation was that Tree called (as the Bible
had it) the root of the knowledge of good and evil.
It was simply a
different Tree!
Shaitan, tempting the Edenic couple, called it only 'the
Tree of Immortality' - and as he was a liar, so the truth (discovered by
inversion) was that the banned fruit (apples were not specified) hung upon
the Death-Tree, no less, the slayer of men's souls. - What remained now of
that morality-fearing God? Where was He to be found? - Only down below, in
English hearts. - Which he, Gibreel, had come to transform.
Abracadabra!
Hocus Pocus!
But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English
was their:
Their:
In a word,
Gibreel solemnly pronounced,
their weather.
Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the
moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day
is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter
than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a
people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see
everything - from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs
- as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth
is extreme, it is 50 and not
thus,
it is
him
and not
her;
a partisan matter,
not a spectator sport. It is, in brief,
heated.
City,' he cried, and his
voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize
you.'
Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London
into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national
siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the
populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws,
peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind,
banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured
flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new
mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito
coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a
centre for conferences, etc.; better cricketers; higher emphasis on
ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless
English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the
heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the
intelligentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished
forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous
love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one
another without making appointments, closure of old folks' homes, emphasis
on the extended family. Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in
English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of
the monsoon.
Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches,
dust, noise, a culture of excess.
Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel
cried: 'Let it be.'
Three things happened, fast.
The first was that, as the unimaginably colossal, elemental forces of
the transformational process rushed out of his body (for was he not their
embodiment'?),
he was temporarily overcome by a warm, spinning heaviness, a
soporific churning (not at all unpleasant) that made him close, just for an
instant, his eyes.
The second was that the moment his eyes were shut the horned and goaty
features of Mr. Saladin Chamcha appeared, on the screen of his mind, as
sharp and well-defined as could be; accompanied, as if it were sub-titled
there, by the adversary's name.
And the third thing was that Gibreel Farishta opened his eyes to find
himself collapsed, once again, on Alleluia Cone's doorstep, begging her
forgiveness, weeping
O God, it happened, it really happened again.
She put him to bed; he found himself escaping into sleep, diving
headlong into it, away from Proper London and towards Jahma, because the
real terror had crossed the broken boundary wall, and stalked his waking
hours.
'A homing instinct: one crazy heading for another, Alicja said when her
daughter phoned with the news. 'You must be putting out a signal, some sort
of bleeping thing.' As usual, she hid her concern beneath wisecracks.
Finally she came out with it: This time be sensible, Alleluia, okay? This
time the asylum.'
'We'll see, mother. He's asleep right now.'
'So he isn't going to wake up?' Alicja expostulated, then controlled
herself. 'All right, I know, it's your life. Listen, isn t this weather
something? They say it could last months: "blocked pattern", I heard on
television, rain over Moscow, while here it s a tropical heatwave. I called
Boniek at Stanford and told him: now we have weather in London, too.'
Return to
Jahilia
hen Baal the poet saw a single teardrop the colour of blood emerging
from the corner of the left eye of the statue of Al-Lat in the House of the
Black Stone, he understood that the Prophet Mahound was on his way back to
Jahilia after an exile of a quarter-century. He belched violently -an
affliction of age, this, its coarseness seeming to correspond to the general
thickening induced by the years, a thickening of the tongue as well as the
body, a slow congealment of the blood, that had turned Baal at fifty into a
figure quite unlike his quick young self. Sometimes he felt that the air
itself had thickened, resisting him, so that even a shortish walk could
leave him panting, with an ache in his arm and an irregularity in his chest
. . . and Mahound must have changed, too, returning as he was in splendour
and omnipotence to the place whence he fled empty-handed, without so much as
a wife. Mahound at sixty-five. Our names meet, separate, and meet again,
Baal thought, but the people going by the names do not remain the same. He
left Al-Lat to emerge into bright sunlight, and heard from behind his back a
little snickering laugh. He turned, weightily; nobody to be seen. The hem of
a robe vanishing around a corner. These days, down-at-heel Baal often made
strangers giggle in the street. 'Bastard!' he shouted at the top of his
voice, scandalizing the other worshippers in the House. Baal, the decrepit
poet, behaving badly again. He shrugged and headed for home.
The city of Jahilia was no longer built of sand. That is to say, the
passage of the years, the sorcery of the desert winds, the petrifying moon,
the forgetfulness of the people and the inevitability of progress had
hardened the town, so that it had lost its old, shifting, provisional
quality of a mirage in which men could live, and become a prosaic place,
quotidian and (like its poets) poor. Mahound`s arm had grown long; his power
had encircled Jahilia, cutting off its life-blood, its pilgrims and
caravans. The fairs of Jahilia, these days, were pitiful to behold.
Even the Grandee himself had acquired a theadbare look, his white hair
as full of gaps as his teeth. His concubines were dying of old age, and he
lacked the energy - or, so the rumours murmured in the desultory alleys of
the city, the need - to replace them. Some days he forgot to shave, which
added to his look of dilapidation and defeat. Only Hind was the same as
ever.
She had always had something of a reputation as a witch, who could wish
illnesses upon you if you failed to bow down before her litter as it passed,
an occultist with the power of transforming men into desert snakes when she
had had her fill of them, and then catching them by the tail and having them
cooked in their skins for her evening meal. Now that she had reached sixty
the legend of her necromancy was being given new substantiation by her
extraordinary and unnatural failure to age. While all around her hardened
into stagnation, while the old gangs of Sharks grew middle-aged and squatted
on street corners playing cards and rolling dice, while the old knot-witches
and contortionists starved to death in the gullies, while a generation grew
up whose conservatism and unquestioning worship of the material world was
born of their knowledge of the probability of unemployment and penury, while
the great city lost its sense of itself and even the cult of the dead
declined in popularity to the relief of the camels of Jahilia, whose dislike
of being left with severed hamstrings on human graves was easy to comprehend
. . . while Jahilia decayed, in short, Hind remained unwrinkled, her body as
firm as any young woman's, her hair as black as crow feathers, her eyes
sparkling like knives, her bearing still haughty, her voice still brooking
no opposition. Hind, not Simbel, ruled the city now; or so she undeniably
believed.
As the Grandee grew into a soft and pursy old age, Hind took to writing
a series of admonitory and hortatory epistles or
bulls
to the people of the
city. These were pasted up on every street in town. So it was that Hind and
not Abu Simbel came to be thought of by Jahilians as the embodiment of the
city, its living avatar, because they found in her physical unchangingness
and in the unflinching resolve of her proclamations a description of
themselves far more palatable than the picture they saw in the mirror of
Simbel's crumbling face. Hind's posters were more influential than any
poet's verses. She was still sexually voracious, and had slept with every
writer in the city (though it was a long time since Baal had been allowed
into her bed); now the writers were used up, discarded, and she was rampant.
With sword as well as pen. She was Hind, who had joined the Jahilian army
disguised as a man, using sorcery to deflect all spears and swords, seeking
out her brothers' killer through the storm of war. Hind, who butchered the
Prophet's uncle, and ate old Hamza's liver and his heart.
Who could resist her? For her eternal youth which was also theirs; for
her ferocity which gave them the illusion of being invincible; and for her
bulls, which were refusals of time, of history, of age, which sang the
city's undimmed magnificence and defied the garbage and decrepitude of the
streets, which insisted on greatness, on leadership, on immortality, on the
status of Jahilians as custodians of the divine . . . for these writings the
people forgave her her promiscuity, they turned a blind eye to the stories
of Hind being weighed in emeralds on her birthday, they ignored rumours of
orgies, they laughed when told of the size of her wardrobe, of the five
hundred and eighty-one nightgowns made of gold leaf and the four hundred and
twenty pairs of ruby slippers. The citizens of Jahilia dragged themselves
through their increasingly dangerous streets, in which murder for small
change was becoming commonplace, in which old women were being raped and
ritually slaughtered, in which the riots of the starving were brutally put
down by Hind's personal police force, the Manticorps; and in spite of the
evidence of their eyes, stomachs and wallets, they believed what Hind
whispered in their ears: Rule, Jahilia, glory of the world.
Not all of them, of course. Not, for example, Baal. Who looked away
from public affairs and wrote poems of unrequited love.
Munching a white radish, he arrived home, passing beneath a dingy
archway in a cracking wall. Here there was a small ruinous courtyard
littered with feathers, vegetable peelings, blood. There was no sign of
human life: only flies, shadows, fear. These days it was necessary to be on
one's guard. A sect of murderous hashashin roamed the city. Affluent persons
were advised to approach their homes on the opposite side of the street, to
make sure that the house was not being watched; when the coast was clear
they would rush for the door and shut it behind them before any lurking
criminal could push his way in. Baal did not bother with such precautions.
Once he had been affluent, but that was a quarter of a century ago. Now
there was no demand for satires - the general fear of Mahound had destroyed
the market for insults and wit. And with the decline of the cult of the dead
had come a sharp drop in orders for epitaphs and triumphal odes of revenge.
Times were hard all around.
Dreaming of long-lost banquets, Baal climbed an unsteady wooden
staircase to his small upstairs room. What did he have to steal? He wasn't
worth the knife. Opening his door, he began to enter, when a push sent him
tumbling to bloody his nose against the far wall. 'Don't kill me,' he
squealed blindly. 'O God, don't murder me, for pity's sake, O.'
The other hand closed the door. Baal knew that no matter how loudly he
screamed they would remain alone, sealed off from the world in that uncaring
room. Nobody would come; he himself, hearing his neighbour shriek, would
have pushed his cot against the door.
The intruder's hooded cloak concealed his face completely. Baal mopped
his bleeding nose, kneeling, shaking uncontrollably. 'I've got no money,' he
implored. 'I've got nothing.' Now the stranger spoke: 'If a hungry dog looks
for food, he does not look in the doghouse.' And then, after a pause: 'Baal.
There's not much left of you. I had hoped for more.'
Now Baal felt oddly affronted as well as terrified. Was this some kind
of demented fan, who would kill him because he no longer lived up to the
power of his old work? Still trembling, he attempted self-deprecation. 'To
meet a writer is, usually, to be disappointed,' he offered. The other
ignored this remark. 'Mahound is coming,' he said.
This flat statement filled Baal with the most profound terror. 'What's
that got to do with me?' he cried. 'What does he want? It was a long time
ago - a lifetime - more than a lifetime. What does he want? Are you from,
are you sent by him?'
'His memory is as long as his face,' the intruder said, pushing back
his hood. 'No, I am not his messenger. You and I have something in common.
We are both afraid of him.'
'I know you,' Baal said.
'Yes.'
'The way you speak. You're a foreigner.'
' "A revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves,"' the
stranger quoted. 'Your words.'
'You're the immigrant,' Baal remembered. 'The Persian. Sulaiman.' The
Persian smiled his crooked smile. 'Salman,' he corrected. 'Not wise, but
peaceful.'
'You were one of the closest to him,' Baal said, perplexed.
'The closer you are to a conjurer,' Salman bitterly replied, 'the
easier to spot the trick.'
And Gibreel dreamed this:
At the oasis of Yathrib the followers of the new faith of Submission
found themselves landless, and therefore poor. For many years they financed
themselves by acts of brigandage, attacking the rich camel-trains on their
way to and from Jahilia. Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman told Baal,
no qualms about ends and means. The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in
those years Mahound - or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? - should one
say Al-Lah? - became obsessed by law. Amid the palm-trees of the oasis
Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules,
rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more
revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let
him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the
purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence
was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation - the
recitation -
told the
faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual
positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and
the missionary position were approved of by the archangel, whereas the
forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top,
Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation,
and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter
how unbearably they might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those
bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever
seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by
experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding
of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that
living creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of
dream. And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should
be buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the
Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much
like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith,
because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman,
and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules
came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have
come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the
management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God.
After that Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel's
revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's
views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence
of Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported
Mahound, stating beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was impossible that a
man should ever walk upon the moon, and being equally positive on the
transient nature of damnation: even the most evil of doers would eventually
be cleansed by hellfire and find their way into the perfumed gardens,
Gulistan and Bostan. It would have been different, Salman complained to
Baal, if Mahound took up his positions after receiving the revelation from
Gibreel; but no, he just laid down the law and the angel would confirm it
afterwards; so I began to get a bad smell in my nose, and I thought, this
must be the odour of those fabled and legendary unclean creatures, what's
their name, prawns.
The fishy smell began to obsess Salman, who was the most highly
educated of Mahound's intimates owing to the superior educational system
then on offer in Persia. On account of his scholastic advancement Salman was
made Mahound's official scribe, so that it fell to him to write down the
endlessly proliferating rules. All those revelations of convenience, he told
Baal, and the longer I did the job the worse it got. - For a time, however,
his suspicions had to be shelved, because the armies of Jahilia marched on
Yathrib, determined to swat the flies who were pestering their camel-trains
and interfering with business. What followed is well known, no need for me
to repeat, Salman said, but then his immodesty burst out of him and forced
him to tell Baal how he personally had saved Yathrib from certain
destruction, how he had preserved Mahound's neck with his idea of a ditch.
Salman had persuaded the Prophet to have a huge trench dug all the way
around the unwalled oasis settlement, making it too wide even for the fabled
Arab horses of the famous Jahilian cavalry to leap across. A ditch: with
sharpened stakes at the bottom. When the Jahilians saw this foul piece of
unsportsmanlike hole-digging their sense of chivalry and honour obliged them
to behave as if the ditch had not been dug, and to ride their horses at it,
full-tilt. The flower of Jahilia's army, human as well as equine, ended up
impaled on the pointed sticks of Salman's Persian deviousness, trust an
immigrant not to play the game. -And after the defeat of Jahilia? Salman
lamented to Baal: You'd have thought I'd have been a hero, I'm not a vain
man but where were the public honours, where was the gratitude of Mahound,
why didn't the archangel mention
me
in despatches? Nothing, not a syllable,
it was as if the faithful thought of my ditch as a cheap trick, too, an
outlandish thing, dishonouring, unfair; as if their manhood had been damaged
by the thing, as though I'd hurt their pride by saving their skins. I kept
my mouth shut and said nothing, but I lost a lot of friends after that, I
can tell you, people hate you to do them a good turn.
In spite of the ditch of Yathrib, the faithful lost a good many men in
the war against Jahilia. On their raiding sorties they lost as many lives as
they claimed. And after the end of the war, hey presto, there was the
Archangel Gibreel instructing the surviving males to marry the widowed
women, lest by remarrying outside the faith they be lost to Submission. Oh,
such a practical angel, Salman sneered to Baal. By now he had produced a
bottle of toddy from the folds of his cloak and the two men were drinking
steadily in the failing light. Salman grew ever more garrulous as the yellow
liquid in the bottle went down; Baal couldn't recall when he'd last heard
anyone talk up such a storm. O, those matter-of-fact revelations, Salman
cried, we were even told it didn't matter if we were already married, we
could have up to four marriages if we could afford it, well, you can
imagine, the lads really went for that.
What finally finished Salman with Mahound: the question of the women;
and of the Satanic verses. Listen, I'm no gossip, Salman drunkenly confided,
but after his wife's death Mahound was no angel, you understand my meaning.
But in Yathrib he almost met his match. Those women up there: they turned
his beard half-white in a year. The point about our Prophet, my dear Baal,
is that he didn't like his women to answer back, he went for mothers and
daughters, think of his first wife and then Ayesha: too old and too young,
his two loves. He didn't like to pick on someone his own size. But in
Yathrib the women are different, you don't know, here in Jahilia you're used
to ordering your females about but up there they won't put up with it. When
a man gets married he goes to live with his wife's people! Imagine!
Shocking, isn't it? And throughout the marriage the wife keeps her own tent.
If she wants to get rid of her husband she turns the tent round to face in
the opposite direction, so that when he comes to her he finds fabric where
the door should be, and that's that, he's out, divorced, not a thing he can
do about it. Well, our girls were beginning to go for that type of thing,
getting who knows what sort of ideas in their heads, so at once, bang, out
comes the rule book, the angel starts pouring out rules about what women
mustn't do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the
Prophet prefers, docile or maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting
at home being wise and waxing their chins. How the women of Yathrib laughed
at the faithful, I swear, but that man is a magician, nobody could resist
his charm; the faithful women did as he ordered them. They Submitted: he was
offering them Paradise, after all.
'Anyway,' Salman said near the bottom of the bottle, 'finally I decided
to test him.'
One night the Persian scribe had a dream in which he was hovering above
the figure of Mahound at the Prophet's cave on Mount Cone. At first Salman
took this to be no more than a nostalgic reverie of the old days in Jahilia,
but then it struck him that his point of view, in the dream, had been that
of the archangel, and at that moment the memory of the incident of the
Satanic verses came back to him as vividly as if the thing had happened the
previous day. 'Maybe I hadn't dreamed of myself as Gibreel,' Salman
recounted. 'Maybe I was Shaitan.' The realization of this possibility gave
him his diabolic idea. After that, when he sat at the Prophet's feet,
writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.
'Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in which God was
described as
all-hearing, all-knowing,
I would write,
all-knowing, all-wise.
Here's the point: Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was,
actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God
with my own profane language. But, good heavens, if my poor words could not
be distinguished from the Revelation by God's own Messenger, then what did
that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry? Look, I
swear, I was shaken to my soul. It's one thing to be a smart bastard and
have half-suspicions about funny business, but it's quite another thing to
find out that you're right. Listen: I changed my life for that man. I left
my country, crossed the world, settled among people who thought me a slimy
foreign coward for saving their, who never appreciated what I, but never
mind that. The truth is that what I expected when I made that first tiny
change,
all-wise
instead of
all-hearing -
what I
wanted
-was to read it back
to the Prophet, and he'd say, What's the matter with you, Salman, are you
going deaf? And I'd say, Oops, O God, bit of a slip, how could I, and
correct myself. But it didn't happen; and now I was writing the Revelation
and nobody was noticing, and I didn't have the courage to own up. I was
scared silly, I can tell you. Also: I was sadder than I have ever been. So I
had to go on doing it. Maybe he'd just missed out once, I thought, anybody
can make a mistake. So the next time I changed a bigger thing. He said
Christian,
I wrote down
jew.
He'd notice that, surely; how could he not? But
when I read him the chapter he nodded and thanked me politely, and I went
out of his tent with tears in my eyes. After that I knew my days in Yathrib
were numbered; but I had to go on doing it. I had to. There is no bitterness
like that of a man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost. I would
fall, I knew, but he would fall with me. So I went on with my devilment,
changing verses, until one day I read my lines to him and saw him frown and
shake his head as if to clear his mind, and then nod his approval slowly,
but with a little doubt. I knew I'd reached the edge, and that the next time
I rewrote the Book he'd know everything. That night I lay awake, holding his
fate in my hands as well as my own. If I allowed myself to be destroyed I
could destroy him, too. I had to choose, on that awful night, whether I
preferred death with revenge to life without anything. As you see, I chose:
life. Before dawn I left Yathrib on my camel, and made my way, suffering
numerous misadventures I shall not trouble to relate, back to Jahilia. And
now Mahound is coming in triumph; so I shall lose my life after all. And his
power has grown too great for me to unmake him now.'
Baal asked: 'Why are you sure he will kill you?'
Salman the Persian answered: 'It's his Word against mine.'
When Salman had slipped into unconsciousness on the floor, Baal lay on
his scratchy straw-filled mattress, feeling the steel ring of pain around
his forehead, the flutter of warning in his heart. Often his tiredness with
his life had made him wish not to grow old, but, as Salman had said, to
dream of a thing is very different from being faced with the fact of it. For
some time now he had been conscious that the world was closing in around
him. He could no longer pretend that his eyes were what they ought to be,
and their dimness made his life even more shadowy, harder to grasp. All this
blurring and loss of detail: no wonder his poetry had gone down the drain.
His ears were getting to be unreliable, too. At this rate he'd soon end up
sealed off from everything by the loss of his senses . . . but maybe he'd
never get the chance. Mahound was coming. Maybe he would never kiss another
woman. Mahound, Mahound. Why has this chatterbox drunk come to me, he
thought angrily. What do I have to do with his treachery? Everyone knows why
I wrote those satires years ago; he must know. How the Grandee threatened
and bullied. I can't be held responsible. And anyway: who is he, that
prancing sneering boy-wonder, Baal of the cutting tongue? I don't recognize
him. Look at me: heavy, dull, nearsighted, soon to be deaf. Who do I
threaten? Not a soul. He began to shake Salman: wake up, I don't want to be
associated with you, you'll get me into trouble.
The Persian snored on, sitting splay-legged on the floor with his back
to the wall, his head hanging sideways like a doll's; Baal, racked by
headache, fell back on to his cot. His verses, he thought, what had they
been?
What kind of idea
damn it, he couldn't even remember them properly
does Submission seem today
yes, something like that, after all this time it
was scarcely surprising
an idea that runs away
that was the end anyhow.
Mahound, any new idea is asked two questions. When it's weak: will it
compromise? We know the answer to that one. And now, Mahound, on your return
to Jahilia, time for the second question: How do you behave when you win?
When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what
then? We have all changed: all of us except Hind. Who seems, from what this
drunkard says, more like a woman of Yathrib than Jahilia. No wonder the two
of you didn't hit it off: she wouldn't be your mother or your child.
As he drifted towards sleep, Baal surveyed his own uselessness, his
failed art. Now that he had abdicated all public platforms, his verses were
full of loss: of youth, beauty, love, health, innocence, purpose, energy,
certainty, hope. Loss of knowledge. Loss of money. The loss of Hind. Figures
walked away from him in his odes, and the more passionately he called out to
them the faster they moved. The landscape of his poetry was still the
desert, the shifting dunes with the plumes of white sand blowing from their
peaks. Soft mountains, uncompleted journeys, the impermanence of tents. How
did one map a country that blew into a new form every day? Such questions
made his language too abstract, his imagery too fluid, his metre too
inconstant. It led him to create chimeras of form, lionheaded goatbodied
serpenttailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment
they were set, so that the demotic forced its way into lines of classical
purity and images of love were constantly degraded by the intrusion of
elements of farce. Nobody goes for that stuff, he thought for the thousand
and first time, and as unconsciousness arrived he concluded, comfortingly:
Nobody remembers me. Oblivion is safety. Then his heart missed a beat and he
came wide awake, frightened, cold. Mahound, maybe I'll cheat you of your
revenge. He spent the night awake, listening to Salman's rolling, oceanic
snores.
Gibreel dreamed campfires:
A famous and unexpected figure walks, one night, between the campfires
of Mahound's army. Perhaps on account of the dark, - or it might be because
of the improbability of his presence here, - it seems that the Grandee of
Jahilia has regained, in this final moment of his power, some of the
strength of his earlier days. He has come alone; and is led by Khalid the
erstwhile water-carrier and the former slave Bilal to the quarters of
Mahound.
Next, Gibreel dreamed the Grandee's return home:
The town is full of rumours and there's a crowd in front of the house.
After a time the sound of Hind's voice lifted in rage can be clearly heard.
Then at an upper balcony Hind shows herself and demands that the crowd tear
her husband into small pieces. The Grandee appears beside her; and receives
loud, humiliating smacks on both cheeks from his loving wife. Hind has
discovered that in spite of all her efforts she has not been able to prevent
the Grandee from surrendering the city to Mahound.
Moreover: Abu Simbel has embraced the faith.
Simbel in his defeat has lost much of his recent wispiness. He permits
Hind to strike him, and then speaks calmly to the crowd. He says: Mahound
has promised that anyone within the Grandee's walls will be spared. 'So come
in, all of you, and bring your families, too.'
Hind speaks for the angry crowd. 'You old fool. How many citizens can
fit inside a single house, even this one? You've done a deal to save your
own neck. Let them rip you up and feed you to the ants.'
Still the Grandee is mild. 'Mahound also promises that all who are
found at home, behind closed doors, will be safe. If you will not come into
my home then go to your own; and wait.'
A third time his wife attempts to turn the crowd against him; this is a
balcony scene of hatred instead of love. There can be no compromise with
Mahound, she shouts, he is not to be trusted, the people must repudiate Abu
Simbel and prepare to fight to the last man, the last woman. She herself is
prepared to fight beside them and die for the freedom of Jahilia. 'Will you
merely lie down before this false prophet, this Dajjal? Can honour be
expected of a man who is preparing to storm the city of his birth? Can
compromise be hoped for from the uncompromising, pity from the pitiless? We
are the mighty of Jahilia, and our goddesses, glorious in battle, will
prevail.' She commands them to fight in the name of Al-Lat. But the people
begin to leave.
Husband and wife stand on their balcony, and the people see them plain.
For so long the city has used these two as its mirrors; and because, of
late, Jahilians have preferred Hind's images to the greying Grandee, they
are suffering, now, from profound shock. A people that has remained
convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe
such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a
kind of sleep, or madness. Now the Grandee has awakened them from that
sleep; they stand disoriented, rubbing their eyes, unable to believe at
first - if we are so mighty, how then have we fallen so fast, so utterly? -
and then belief comes, and shows them how their confidence has been built on
clouds, on the passion of Hind's proclamations and on very little else. They
abandon her, and with her, hope. Plunging into despair, the people of
Jahilia go home to lock their doors.
She screams at them, pleads, loosens her hair. 'Come to the House of
the Black Stone! Come and make sacrifice to Lat!' But they have gone. And
Hind and the Grandee are alone on their balcony, while throughout Jahilia a
great silence falls, a great stillness begins, and Hind leans against the
wall of her palace and closes her eyes.
It is the end. The Grandee murmurs softly: 'Not many of us have as much
reason to be scared of Mahound as you. If you eat a man's favourite uncle's
innards, raw, without so much as salt or garlic, don't be surprised if he
treats you, in turn, like meat.' Then he leaves her, and goes down into the
streets from which even the dogs have vanished, to unlock the city gates.
Gibreel dreamed a temple:
By the open gates of Jahilia stood the temple of Uzza. And Mahound
spake unto Khalid who had been a carrier of water before, and now bore
greater weights: 'Go thou and cleanse that place.' So Khalid with a force of
men descended upon the temple, for Mahound was loth to enter the city while
such abominations stood at its gates.
When the guardian of the temple, who was of the tribe of Shark, saw the
approach of Khalid with a great host of warriors, he took up his sword and
went to the idol of the goddess. After making his final prayers he hung his
sword about her neck, saying, 'If thou be truly a goddess, Uzza, defend
thyself and thy servant against the coming of Mahound.' Then Khalid entered
the temple, and when the goddess did not move the guardian
said, 'Now verily do I know that the God of Mahound is the true God,
and this stone but a stone.' Then Khalid broke the temple and the idol and
returned to Mahound in his tent. And the Prophet asked: 'What didst thou
see?' Khalid spread his arms. 'Nothing,' said he. 'Then thou hast not
destroyed her,' the Prophet cried. 'Go again, and complete thy work.' So
Khalid returned to the fallen temple, and there an enormous woman, all black
but for her long scarlet tongue, came running at him, naked from head to
foot, her black hair flowing to her ankles from her head. Nearing him, she
halted, and recited in her terrible voice of sulphur and hellfire: 'Have you
heard of Lat, and Manat, and Uzza, the Third, the Other? They are the
Exalted Birds . . .' But Khalid interrupted her, saying, 'Uzza, those are
the Devil's verses, and you the Devil's daughter, a creature not to be
worshipped, but denied.' So he drew his sword and cut her down.
And he returned to Mahound in his tent and said what he had seen. And
the Prophet said, 'Now may we come into Jahilia,' and they arose, and came
into the city, and possessed it in the Name of the Most High, the Destroyer
of Men.
How many idols in the House of the Black Stone? Don't forget: three
hundred and sixty. Sun-god, eagle, rainbow. The colossus of Hubal. Three
hundred and sixty wait for Mahound, knowing they are not to be spared. And
are not: but let's not waste time there. Statues fall; stone breaks; what's
to be done is done.
Mahound, after the cleansing of the House, sets up his tent on the old
fairground. The people crowd around the tent, embracing the victorious
faith. The Submission of Jahilia: this, too, is inevitable, and need not be
lingered over.
While Jahilians bow before him, mumbling their life-saving sentences,
there is no God but Al-Lah,
Mahound whispers to Khalid. Somebody has not
come to kneel before him; somebody long awaited. 'Salman,' the Prophet
wishes to know. 'Has he been found?'
'Not yet. He's hiding; but it won't be long.'
There is a distraction. A veiled woman kneels before him, kissing his
feet, 'You must stop,' he enjoins. 'It is only God who must be worshipped.'
But what foot-kissery this is! Toe by toe, joint by joint, the woman licks,
kisses, sucks. And Mahound, unnerved, repeats: 'Stop. This is incorrect.'
Now, however, the woman is attending to the soles of his feet, cupping her
hands beneath his heel ... he kicks out, in his confusion, and catches her
in the throat. She falls, coughs, then prostrates herself before him, and
says firmly: 'There is no God but Al-Lah, and Mahound is his Prophet.'
Mahound calms himself, apologizes, extends a hand. 'No harm will come to
you,' he assures her. 'All who Submit are spared.' But there is a strange
confusion in him, and now he understands why, understands the anger, the
bitter irony in her overwhelming, excessive, sensual adoration of his feet.
The woman throws off her veil: Hind.
'The wife of Abu Simbel,' she announces clearly, and a hush falls.
'Hind,' Mahound says. 'I had not forgotten.'
But, after a long instant, he nods. 'You have Submitted. And are
welcome in my tents.'
The next day, amid the continuing conversions, Salman the Persian is
dragged into the Prophet's presence. Khalid, holding him by the ear, holding
a knife at his throat, brings the immigrant snivelling and whimpering to the
takht. 'I found him, where else, with a whore, who was screeching at him
because he didn't have the money to pay her. He stinks of alcohol.'
'Salman Farsi,' the Prophet begins to pronounce the sentence of death,
but the prisoner begins to shriek the qalmah: 'La ilaha ilallah! La ilaha!'
Mahound shakes his head. 'Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven.
Did you think I wouldn't work it out? To set your words against the Words of
God.'
Scribe, ditch-digger, condemned man: unable to muster the smallest
scrap of dignity, he blubbers whimpers pleads beats his breast abases
himself repents. Khalid says: 'This noise is unbearable, Messenger. Can I
not cut off his head?' At which the noise increases sharply. Salman swears
renewed loyalty, begs some more, and then, with a gleam of desperate hope,
makes an offer. 'I can show you where your true enemies are.' This earns him
a few seconds. The Prophet inclines his head. Khalid pulls the kneeling
Salman's head back by the hair: 'What enemies?' And Salman says a name.
Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns.
'Baal,' he says, and repeats, twice: 'Baal, Baal.'
Much to Khalid's disappointment, Salman the Persian is not sentenced to
death. Bilal intercedes for him, and the Prophet, his mind elsewhere,
concedes: yes, yes, let the wretched fellow live. O generosity of
Submission! Hind has been spared; and Salman; and in all of Jahilia not a
door has been smashed down, not an old foe dragged out to have his gizzard
slit like a chicken's in the dust. This is Mahound's answer to the second
question:
What happens when you win?
But one name haunts Mahound, leaps
around him, young, sharp, pointing a long painted finger, singing verses
whose cruel brilliance ensures their painfulness. That night, when the
supplicants have gone, Khalid asks Mahound: 'You're still thinking about
him?' The Messenger nods, but will not speak. Khalid says: 'I made Salman
take me to his room, a hovel, but he isn't there, he's hiding out.' Again,
the nod, but no speech. Khalid presses on: 'You want me to dig him out?
Wouldn't take much doing. What d'you want done with him? This? This?'
Khalid's finger moves first across his neck and then, with a sharp jab, into
his navel. Mahound loses his temper. 'You're a fool,' he shouts at the
former water-carrier who is now his military chief of staff. 'Can't you ever
work things out without my help?'
Khalid bows and goes. Mahound falls asleep: his old gift, his way of
dealing with bad moods.
But Khalid, Mahound's general, could not find Baal. In spite of
door-to-door searches, proclamations, turnings of stones, the poet proved
impossible to nab. And Mahound's lips remained closed, would not part to
allow his wishes to emerge. Finally, and not without irritation, Khalid gave
up the search. 'Just let that bastard show his face, just once, any time,'
he vowed in the Prophet's tent of softnesses and shadows. 'I'll slice him so
thin you'll be able to see right through each piece.'
It seemed to Khalid that Mahound looked disappointed; but in the low
light of the tent it was impossible to be sure.
Jahilia settled down to its new life: the call to prayers five times a
day, no alcohol, the locking up of wives. Hind herself retired to her
quarters . . . but where was Baal?
Gibreel dreamed a curtain:
The Curtain,
Hijab,
was the name of the most popular brothel in
Jahilia, an enormous palazzo of date-palms in water-tinkling courtyards,
surrounded by chambers that interlocked in bewildering mosaic patterns,
permeated by labyrinthine corridors which had been deliberately decorated to
look alike, each of them bearing the same calligraphic invocations to Love,
each carpeted with identical rugs, each with a large stone urn positioned
against a wall. None of The Curtain's clients could ever find their way,
without help, either into the rooms of their favoured courtesan or back
again to the street. In this way the girls were protected from unwanted
guests and the business ensured payment before departure. Large Circassian
eunuchs, dressed after the ludicrous fashion of lamp-genies, escorted the
visitors to their goals and back again, sometimes with the help of balls of
string. It was a soft windowless universe of draperies, ruled over by the
ancient and nameless Madam of the Curtain whose guttural utterances from the
secrecy of a chair shrouded in black veils had acquired, over the years,
something of the oracular. Neither her staff nor her clients were able to
disobey that sibylline voice that was, in a way, the profane antithesis of
Mahound's sacred utterances in a larger, more easily penetrable tent not so
very far away. So that when the raddled poet Baal prostrated himself before
her and begged for help, her decision to hide him and save his life as an
act of nostalgia for the beautiful, lively and wicked youth he had once been
was accepted without question; and when Khalid's guards arrived to search
the premises the eunuchs led them on a dizzy journey around that overground
catacomb of contradictions and irreconcilable routes, until the soldiers'
heads were spinning, and after looking inside thirty-nine stone urns and
finding nothing but unguents and pickles they left, cursing heavily, never
suspecting that there was a fortieth corridor down which they had never been
taken, a fortieth urn inside which there hid, like a thief, the quivering,
pajama-wetting poet whom they sought.
After that the Madam had the eunuchs dye the poet's skin until it was
blue-black, and his hair as well, and dressing him in the pantaloons and
turban of a djinn she ordered him to begin a body-building course, since his
lack of condition would certainly arouse suspicions if he didn't tone up
fast.
Baal's sojourn 'behind The Curtain' by no means deprived him of
information about events outside; quite the reverse, in fact, because in the
course of his eunuchly duties he stood guard outside the pleasure-chambers
and heard the customers' gossip. The absolute indiscretion of their tongues,
induced by the gay abandon of the whores' caresses and by the clients'
knowledge that their secrets would be kept, gave the eavesdropping poet,
myopic and hard of hearing as he was, a better insight into contemporary
affairs than he could possibly have gained if he'd still been free to wander
the newly puritanical streets of the town. The deafness was a problem
sometimes; it meant that there were gaps in his knowledge, because the
customers frequently lowered their voices and whispered; but it also
minimized the prurient element in his listenings-in, since he was unable to
hear the murmurings that accompanied fornication, except, of course, at such
moments in which ecstatic clients or feigning workers raised their voices in
cries of real or synthetic joy.
What Baal learned at The Curtain:
From the disgruntled butcher Ibrahim came the news that in spite of the
new ban on pork the skin-deep converts of Jahilia were flocking to his back
door to buy the forbidden meat in secret, 'sales are up,' he murmured while
mounting his chosen lady, 'black pork prices are high; but damn it, these
new rules have made my work tough. A pig is not an easy animal to slaughter
in secret, without noise,' and thereupon he began some squealing of his own,
for reasons, it is to be presumed, of pleasure rather than pain. - And the
grocer, Musa, confessed to another of The Curtain's horizontal staff that
the old habits were hard to break, and when he was sure nobody was listening
he still said a prayer or two to 'my lifelong favourite, Manat, and
sometimes, what to do, Al-Lat as well; you can't beat a female goddess,
they've got attributes the boys can't match,' after which he, too, fell upon
the earthly imitations of these attributes with a will. So it was that
faded, fading Baal learned in his bitterness that no imperium is absolute,
no victory complete. And, slowly, the criticisms of Mahound began.
Baal had begun to change. The news of the destruction of the great
temple of Al-Lat at Taif, which came to his ears punctuated by the grunts of
the covert pig-sticker Ibrahim, had plunged him into a deep sadness, because
even in the high days of his young cynicism his love of the goddess had been
genuine, perhaps his only genuine emotion, and her fall revealed to him the
hollowness of a life in which the only true love had been felt for a lump of
stone that couldn't fight back. When the first, sharp edge of grief had been
dulled, Baal became convinced that Al-Lat's fall meant that his own end was
not far away. He lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain
had briefly inspired in him; but the returning knowledge of his
impermanence, of certain discovery followed by equally certain death, did
not, interestingly enough, make him afraid. After a lifetime of dedicated
cowardice he found to his great surprise that the effect of the approach of
death really did enable him to taste the sweetness of life, and he wondered
at the paradox of having his eyes opened to such a truth in that house of
costly lies. And what was the truth? It was that Al-Lat was dead - had never
lived - but that didn't make Mahound a prophet. In sum, Baal had arrived at
godlessness. He began, stumblingly, to move beyond the idea of gods and
leaders and rules, and to perceive that his story was so mixed up with
Mahound's that some great resolution was necessary. That this resolution
would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor bothered him
overmuch; and when Musa the grocer grumbled one day about the twelve wives
of the Prophet,
one rule for him, another for us,
Baal understood the form
his final confrontation with Submission would have to take.
The girls of The Curtain - it was only by convention that they were
referred to as 'girls', as the eldest was a woman well into her fifties,
while the youngest, at fifteen, was more experienced than many
fifty-year-olds - had grown fond of this shambling Baal, and in point of
fact they enjoyed having a eunuch-who-wasn't, so that out of working hours
they would tease him deliciously, flaunting their bodies before him, placing
their breasts against his lips, twining their legs around his waist, kissing
one another passionately just an inch away from his face, until the ashy
writer was hopelessly aroused; whereupon they would laugh at his stiffness
and mock him into blushing, quivering de-tumescence; or, very occasionally,
and when he had given up all expectation of such a thing, they would depute
one of their number to satisfy, free of charge, the lust they had awakened.
In this way, like a myopic, blinking, tame bull, the poet passed his days,
laying his head in women's laps, brooding on death and revenge, unable to
say whether he was the most contented or the wretchedest man alive.
It was during one of these playful sessions at the end of a working
day, when the girls were alone with their eunuchs and their wine, that Baal
heard the youngest talking about her client, the grocer, Musa. 'That one!'
she said. 'He's got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet's wives. He's so
annoyed about them that he gets excited just by mentioning their names. He
tells me that I personally am the spitting image of Ayesha herself, and
she's His Nibs's favourite, as all are aware. So there.'
The fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. 'Listen, those women in that
harem, the men don't talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound
secluded them, but it's only made things worse. People fantasize more about
what they can't see.'
Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of the
licentious ways, where until Mahound arrived with his rule book the women
dressed brightly, and all the talk was of fucking and money, money and sex,
and not just the talk, either.
He said to the youngest whore: 'Why don't you pretend for him?'
'Who?'
'Musa. If Ayesha gives him such a thrill, why not become his private
and personal Ayesha?'
'God,' the girl said. 'If they heard you say that they'd boil your
balls in butter.'
How many wives? Twelve, and one old lady, long dead. How many whores
behind The Curtain? Twelve again; and, secret on her black-tented throne,
the ancient Madam, still defying death. Where there is no belief, there is
no blasphemy. Baal told the Madam of his idea; she settled matters in her
voice of a laryngitic frog. 'It is very dangerous,' she pronounced, 'but it
could be damn good for business. We will go carefully; but we will go.'
The fifteen-year-old whispered something in the grocer's ear. At once a
light began to shine in his eyes. 'Tell me everything,' he begged. 'Your
childhood, your favourite toys, Solomon's-horses and the rest, tell me how
you played the tambourine and the Prophet came to watch.' She told him, and
then he asked about her deflowering at the age of twelve, and she told him
that, and afterwards he paid double the normal fee, because 'it's been the
best time of my life'. 'We'll have to be careful of heart conditions,' the
Madam said to Baal.
When the news got around Jahilia that the whores of The Curtain had
each assumed the identity of one of Mahound's wives, the clandestine
excitement of the city's males was intense; yet, so afraid were they of
discovery, both because they would surely lose their lives if Mahound or his
lieutenants ever found out that they had been involved in such irreverences,
and because of their desire that the new service at The Curtain be
maintained, that the secret was kept from the authorities. In those days
Mahound had returned with his wives to Yathrib, preferring the cool oasis
climate of the north to Jahilia's heat. The city had been left in the care
of General Khalid, from whom things were easily concealed. For a time
Mahound had considered telling Khalid to have all the brothels of Jahilia
closed down, but Abu Simbel had advised him against so precipitate an act.
'Jahilians are new converts,' he pointed out. 'Take things slowly.' Mahound,
most pragmatic of Prophets, had agreed to a period of transition. So, in the
Prophet's absence, the men of Jahilia flocked to The Curtain, which
experienced a three hundred per cent increase in business. For obvious
reasons it was not politic to form a queue in the street, and so on many
days a line of men curled around the innermost courtyard of the brothel,
rotating about its centrally positioned Fountain of Love much as pilgrims
rotated for other reasons around the ancient Black Stone. All customers of
The Curtain were issued with masks, and Baal, watching the circling masked
figures from a high balcony, was satisfied. There were more ways than one of
refusing to Submit.
In the months that followed, the staff of The Curtain warmed to the new
task. The fifteen-year-old whore 'Ayesha' was the most popular with the
paying public, just as her namesake was with Mahound, and like the Ayesha
who was living chastely in her apartment in the harem quarters of the great
mosque at Yathrib, this Jahilian Ayesha began to be jealous of her
preeminent status of Best Beloved. She resented it when any of her 'sisters'
seemed to be experiencing an increase in visitors, or receiving
exceptionally generous tips. The oldest, fattest whore, who had taken the
name of 'Sawdar', would tell her visitors - and she had plenty, many of the
men of Jahilia seeking her out for her maternal and also grateful charms -
the story of how Mahound had married her and Ayesha, on the same day, when
Ayesha was just a child. 'In the two of us,' she would say, exciting men
terribly, 'he found the two halves of his dead first wife: the child, and
the mother, too.' The whore 'Hafsah' grew as hot-tempered as her namesake,
and as the twelve entered into the spirit of their roles the alliances in
the brothel came to mirror the political cliques at the Yathrib mosque;
'Ayesha' and 'Hafsah', for example, engaged in constant, petty rivalries
against the two haughtiest whores, who had always been thought a bit
stuck-up by the others and who had chosen for themselves the most
aristocratic identities, becoming 'Umm Salamah the Makhzumite' and,
snootiest of all, 'Ramlah', whose namesake, the eleventh wife of Mahound,
was the daughter of Abu Simbel and Hind. And there was a 'Zainab bint
Jahsh', and a 'Juwairiyah', named after the bride captured on a military
expedition, and a 'Rehana the Jew', a 'Safia' and a 'Maimunah', and, most
erotic of all the whores, who knew tricks she refused to teach to
competitive 'Ayesha': the glamorous Egyptian, 'Mary the Copt'. Strangest of
all was the whore who had taken the name of 'Zainab bint Khuzaimah', knowing
that this wife of Mahound had recently died. The necrophilia of her lovers,
who forbade her to make any movements, was one of the more unsavoury aspects
of the new regime at The Curtain. But business was business, and this, too,
was a need that the courtesans fulfilled.
By the end of the first year the twelve had grown so skilful in their
roles that their previous selves began to fade away. Baal, more myopic and
deafer by the month, saw the shapes of the girls moving past him, their
edges blurred, their images somehow doubled, like shadows superimposed on
shadows. The girls began to entertain new notions about Baal, too. In that
age it was customary for a whore, on entering her profession, to take the
kind of husband who wouldn't give her any trouble - a mountain, maybe, or a
fountain, or a bush - so that she could adopt, for form's sake, the title of
a married woman. At The Curtain, the rule was that all the girls married the
Love Spout in the central courtyard, but now a kind of rebellion was
brewing, and the day came when the prostitutes went together to the Madam to
announce that now that they had begun to think of themselves as the wives of
the Prophet they required a better grade of husband than some spurting
stone, which was almost idolatrous, after all; and to say that they had
decided that they would all become the brides of the bumbler, Baal. At first
the Madam tried to talk them out of it, but when she saw that the girls
meant business she conceded the point, and told them to send the writer in
to see her. With many giggles and nudges the twelve courtesans escorted the
shambling poet into the throne room. When Baal heard the plan his heart
began to thump so erratically that he lost his balance and fell, and
'Ayesha' screamed in her fright: 'O God, we're going to be his widows before
we even get to be his wives.'
But he recovered: his heart regained its composure. And, having no
option, he agreed to the twelvefold proposal. The Madam then married them
all off herself, and in that den of degeneracy, that anti-mosque, that
labyrinth of profanity, Baal became the husband of the wives of the former
businessman, Mahound.
His wives now made plain to him that they expected him to fulfil his
husbandly duties in every particular, and worked out a rota system under
which he could spend a day with each of the girls in turn (at The Curtain,
day and night were inverted, the night being for business and the day for
rest). No sooner had he embarked upon this arduous programme than they
called a meeting at which he was told that he ought to start behaving a
little more like the 'real' husband, that is, Mahound. 'Why can't you change
your name like the rest of us?' bad-tempered 'Hafsah' demanded, but at this
Baal drew the line. 'It may not be much to be proud of,' he insisted, 'but
it's my name. What's more, I don't work with the clients here. There's no
business reason for such a change.' 'Well, anyhow,' the voluptuous 'Mary the
Copt' shrugged, 'name or no name, we want you to start acting like him.'
'I don't know much about,' Baal began to protest, but 'Ayesha', who
really was the most attractive of them all, or so he had commenced to feel
of late, made a delightful moue. 'Honestly, husband,' she cajoled him. 'It's
not so tough. We just want you to, you know. Be the boss.'
It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most
old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so
easily have made them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course,
capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned
them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had
conceived a fantasy of 'ordinary life' in which they wanted nothing more
than to be the obedient, and - yes - submissive helpmeets of a man who was
wise, loving and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies
of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of
hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all.
The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all
into a state of high excitement, and the bemused Baal discovered what it was
to have twelve women competing for his favours, for the beneficence of his
smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled
his body and danced for him, and in a thousand ways enacted the
dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have.
It was irresistible. He began to find the confidence to order them
about, to adjudicate between them, to punish them when he was angry. Once
when their quarrelling irritated him he forswore them all for a month. When
he went to see 'Ayesha' after twenty-nine nights she teased him for not
having been able to stay away. 'That month was only twenty-nine days long,'
he replied. Once he was caught with 'Mary the Copt' by 'Hafsah', in
'Hafsah's' quarters and on 'Ayesha's' day. He begged 'Hafsah' not to tell
'Ayesha', with whom he had fallen in love; but she told her anyway and Baal
had to stay away from 'Mary' of the fair skin and curly hair for quite a
time after that. In short, he had fallen prey to the seductions of becoming
the secret, profane mirror of Mahound; and he had begun, once again, to
write.
The poetry that came was the sweetest he had ever written. Sometimes
when he was with Ayesha he felt a slowness come over him, a heaviness, and
he had to lie down. 'It's strange,' he told her. 'It is as if I see myself
standing beside myself And I can make him, the standing one, speak; then I
get up and write down his verses.' These artistic slownesses of Baal were
much admired by his wives. Once, tired, he dozed off in an armchair in the
chambers of 'Umm Salamah the Makhzumite'. When he woke, hours later, his
body ached, his neck and shoulders were full of knots, and he berated Umm
Salamah: 'Why didn't you wake me?' She answered: 'I was afraid to, in case
the verses were coming to you.' He shook his head. 'Don't worry about that.
The only woman in whose company the verses come is "Ayesha", not you.'
Two years and a day after Baal began his life at The Curtain, one of
Ayesha's clients recognized him in spite of the dyed skin, pantaloons and
body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha's room when the
client emerged, pointed right at him and shouted: 'So this is where you got
to!' Ayesha came running, her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, 'It's
all right. He won't make any trouble.' He invited Salman the Persian to his
own quarters and uncorked a bottle of the sweet wine made with uncrushed
grapes which the Jahilians had begun to make when they found out that it
wasn't forbidden by what they had started disrespectfully calling the Rule
Book.
'I came because I'm finally leaving this infernal city/ Salman said,
'and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of shit.'
After Bilal had interceded for him in the name of their old friendship the
immigrant had found work as a letter-writer and all-purpose scribe, sitting
cross-legged by the roadside in the main street of the financial district.
His cynicism and despair had been burnished by the sun. 'People write to
tell lies,' he said, drinking quickly. 'So a professional liar makes an
excellent living. My love letters and business correspondence became famous
as the best in town because of my gift for inventing beautiful falsehoods
that involved only the tiniest departure from the facts. As a result I have
managed to save enough for my trip home in just two years. Home! The old
country! I'm off tomorrow, and not a minute too soon.'
As the bottle emptied Salman began once again to talk, as Baal had
known he would, about the source of all his ills, the Messenger and his
message. He told Baal about a quarrel between Mahound and Ayesha, recounting
the rumour as if it were incontrovertible fact. 'That girl couldn't stomach
it that her husband wanted so many other women,' he said. 'He talked about
necessity, political alliances and so on, but she wasn't fooled. Who can
blame her? Finally he went into - what else? -one of his trances, and out he
came with a message from the archangel. Gibreel had recited verses giving
him full divine support. God's own permission to fuck as many women as he
liked. So there: what could poor Ayesha say against the verses of God? You
know what she did say? This: "Your God certainly jumps to it when you need
him to fix things up for you." Well! If it hadn't been Ayesha, who knows
what he'd have done, but none of the others would have dared in the first
place.' Baal let him run on without interruption. The sexual aspects of
Submission exercised the Persian a good deal: 'Unhealthy,' he pronounced.
'All this segregation. No good will come of it.'
At length Baal did start arguing, and Salman was astonished to hear the
poet taking Mahound's side: 'You can see his point of view,' Baal reasoned.
'If families offer him brides and he refuses he creates enemies, - and
besides, he's a special man and one can see the argument for special
dispensations, - and as for locking them up, well, what a dishonour it would
be if anything bad happened to one of them! Listen, if you lived in here,
you wouldn't think a little less sexual freedom was such a bad thing, - for
the common people, I mean.'
'Your brain's gone,' Salman said flatly. 'You've been out of the sun
too long. Or maybe that costume makes you talk like a clown.'
Baal was pretty tipsy by this time, and began some hot retort, but
Salman raised an unsteady hand. 'Don't want to fight,' he said. 'Lemme tell
you instead. Hottest story in town. Whoo-whoo! And it's relevant to whatch,
whatchyou say.'
Salman's story: Ayesha and the Prophet had gone on an expedition to a
far-flung village, and on the way back to Yathrib their party had camped in
the dunes for the night. Camp was struck in the dark before the dawn. At the
last moment Ayesha was obliged by a call of nature to rush out of sight into
a hollow. While she was away her litter-bearers picked up her palanquin and
marched off. She was a light woman, and, failing to notice much difference
in the weight of that heavy palanquin, they assumed she was inside. Ayesha
returned after relieving herself to find herself alone, and who knows what
might have befallen her if a young man, a certain Safwan, had not chanced to
pass by on his camel . . . Safwan brought Ayesha back to Yathrib safe and
sound; at which point tongues began to wag, not least in the harem, where
opportunities to weaken Ayesha's power were eagerly seized by her opponents.
The two young people had been alone in the desert for many hours, and it was
hinted, more and more loudly, that Safwan was a dashingly handsome fellow,
and the Prophet was much older than the young woman, after all, and might
she not therefore have been attracted to someone closer to her own age?
'Quite a scandal,' Salman commented, happily.
'What will Mahound do?' Baal wanted to know.
'O, he's done it,' Salman replied. 'Same as ever. He saw his pet, the
archangel, and then informed one and all that Gibreel had exonerated
Ayesha.' Salman spread his arms in worldly resignation. 'And this time,
mister, the lady didn't complain about the convenience of the verses.'
Salman the Persian left the next morning with a northbound camel-train.
When he left Baal at The Curtain, he embraced the poet, kissed him on both
cheeks and said: 'Maybe you're right. Maybe it's better to keep out of the
daylight. I hope it lasts.' Baal replied: 'And I hope you find home, and
that there is something there to love.' Salman's face went blank. He opened
his mouth, shut it again, and left.
'Ayesha' came to Baal's room for reassurance. 'He won't spill out the
secret when he's drunk?' she asked, caressing Baal's hair. 'He gets through
a lot of wine.'
Baal said: 'Nothing is ever going to be the same again.' Salman's visit
had wakened him from the dream into which he had slowly subsided during his
years at The Curtain, and he couldn't go back to sleep.
'Of course it will,' Ayesha urged. 'It will. You'll see.' Baal shook
his head and made the only prophetic remark of his life. 'Something big is
going to happen,' he foretold. *A man can't hide behind skirts forever.'
The next day Mahound returned to Jahilia and soldiers came to inform
the Madam of The Curtain that the period of transition was at an end. The
brothels were to be closed, with immediate effect. Enough was enough. From
behind her drapes, the Madam requested that the soldiers withdraw for an
hour in the name of propriety to enable the guests to leave, and such was
the inexperience of the officer in charge of the vice-squad that he agreed.
The Madam sent her eunuchs to inform the girls and escort the clients out by
a back door. 'Please apologize to them for the interruption,' she ordered
the eunuchs, 'and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made.'
They were her last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once,
crowded into the throne room to see if the worst were really true, she made
no answer to their terrified questions, are we out of work, how do we eat,
will we go to jail, what's to become of us, - until 'Ayesha' screwed up her
courage and did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When she threw
back the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a
hundred and twenty-five years old, no more than three feet tall, looking
like a big doll, curled up in a cushion-laden wickerwork chair, clutching
the empty poison-bottle in her fist.
'Now that you've started,' Baal said, coming into the room, 'you may as
well take all the curtains down. No point trying to keep the sun out any
more.'
The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather
petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the
brothel-keeper. 'Well, if we can't hang the boss, we'll just have to make do
with the workers,' he shouted, and ordered his men to place the 'tarts'
under close arrest, a task the men performed with zeal. The women made a
noise and kicked out at their captors, but the eunuchs stood and watched
without twitching a muscle, because Umar had said to them: 'They want the
cunts to be put on trial, but I've no instructions about you. So if you
don't want to lose your heads as well as your bails, keep out of this.'
Eunuchs failed to defend the women of The Curtain while soldiers wrestled
them to the ground; and among the eunuchs was Baal, of the dyed skin and
poetry. Just before the youngest 'cunt' or 'slit' was gagged, she yelled:
'Husband, for God's sake, help us, if you are a man.' The vice-squad captain
was amused. 'Which of you is her husband?' he asked, staring carefully into
each turban-topped face. 'Come on, own up. What's it like to watch the world
with your wife?'
Baal fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid 'Ayesha's' glares as well as
Umar's narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. 'Is it you?'
'Sir, you understand, it's just a term,' Baal lied. 'They like to joke,
the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we...'
Without warning, Umar grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed.
'Because you can't be,' he said. 'Husbands, eh. Not bad.'
When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the
eunuchs a word of advice on his way out. 'Get lost,' he suggested. 'Tomorrow
I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days running.'
When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down
and wept uncontrollably by the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of shame,
did not cry.
Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:
The twelve whores realized, soon after their arrest, that they had
grown so accustomed to their new names that they couldn't remember the old
ones. They were too frightened to give their jailers their assumed titles,
and as a result were unable to give any names at all. After a good deal of
shouting and a good many threats the jailers gave in and registered them by
numbers, as Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2 and so on. Their former clients,
terrified of the consequences of letting slip the secret of what the whores
had been up to, also remained silent, so that it is possible that nobody
would have found out if the poet Baal had not started pasting his verses to
the walls of the city jail.
Two days after the arrests, the jail was bursting with prostitutes and
pimps, whose numbers had increased considerably during the two years in
which Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired
that many Jahilian men were prepared to countenance the jeers of the town
riff-raff, to say nothing of possible prosecution under the new immorality
laws, in order to stand below the windows of the jail and serenade those
painted ladies whom they had grown to love. The women inside were entirely
unimpressed by these devotions, and gave no encouragement whatsoever to the
suitors at their barred gates. On the third day, however, there appeared
among these lovelorn fools a peculiarly woebegone fellow in turban and
pantaloons, with dark skin that was beginning to look decidedly blotchy.
Many passers-by sniggered at the look of him, but when he began to sing his
verses the sniggering stopped at once. Jahilians had always been
connoisseurs of the art of poetry, and the beauty of the odes being sung by
the peculiar gent stopped them in their tracks. Baal sang his love poems,
and the ache in them silenced the other versifiers, who allowed Baal to
speak for them all. At the windows of the jail, it was possible to see for
the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been drawn there
by the magic of the lines. When he finished his recital he went forward to
nail his poetry to the wall. The guards at the gates, their eyes running
with tears, made no move to stop him.
Every evening after that, the strange fellow would reappear and recite
a new poem, and each set of verses sounded lovelier than the last. It was
perhaps this surfeit of loveliness which prevented anybody from noticing,
until the twelfth evening, when he completed his twelfth and final set of
verses, each of which were dedicated to a different woman, that the names of
his twelve 'wives' were the same as those of another group of twelve.
But on the twelfth day it was noticed, and at once the large crowd that
had taken to gathering to hear Baal read changed its mood. Feelings of
outrage replaced those of exaltation, and Baal was surrounded by angry men
demanding to know the reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of
insults. At this point Baal took off his absurd turban. 'I am Baal,' he
announced. 'I recognize no jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be
exact, my dozen Muses.'
Guards seized him.
The General, Khalid, had wanted to have Baal executed at once, but
Mahound asked that the poet be brought to trial immediately following the
whores. So when Baal's twelve wives, who had divorced stone to marry him,
had been sentenced to death by stoning to punish them for the immorality of
their lives, Baal stood face to face with the Prophet, mirror facing image,
dark facing light. Khalid, sitting at Mahound's right hand, offered Baal a
last chance to explain his vile deeds. The poet told the story of his stay
at The Curtain, using the simplest language, concealing nothing, not even
his final cowardice, for which everything he had done since had been an
attempt at reparation. But now an unusual thing happened. The crowd packed
into that tent of judgment, knowing that this was after all the famous
satirist Baal, in his day the owner of the sharpest tongue and keenest wit
in Jahilia, began (no matter how hard it tried not to) to laugh. The more
honestly and simply Baal described his marriages to the twelve 'wives of the
Prophet', the more uncontrollable became the horrified mirth of the
audience. By the end of his speech the good folk of Jahilia were literally
weeping with laughter, unable to restrain themselves even when soldiers with
bullwhips and scimitars threatened them with instant death.
'I'm not kidding!' Baal screeched at the crowd, which hooted yelled
slapped its thighs in response. 'It's no joke!' Ha ha ha. Until, at last,
silence returned; the Prophet had risen to his feet. 'In the old days you
mocked the Recitation,' Mahound said in the hush. 'Then, too, these people
enjoyed your mockery. Now you return to dishonour my house, and it seems
that once again you succeed in bringing the worst out of the people.' Baal
said, 'I've finished. Do what you want.' So he was sentenced to be beheaded,
within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled him out of the tent towards the
killing ground, he shouted over his shoulder: 'Whores and writers, Mahound.
We are the people you can't forgive.'
Mahound replied, 'Writers and whores. I see no difference here.'
Once upon a time there was a woman who did not change.
After the treachery of Abu Simbel handed Jahilia to Mahound on a plate
and replaced the idea of the city's greatness with the reality of Mahound's,
Hind sucked toes, recited the La-ilaha, and then retreated to a high tower
of her palace, where news reached her of the destruction of the Al-Lat
temple at Taif, and of all the statues of the goddess that were known to
exist. She locked herself into her tower room with a collection of ancient
books written in scripts which no other human being in Jahilia could
decipher; and for two years and two months she remained there, studying her
occult texts in secret, asking that a plate of simple food be left outside
her door once a day and that her chamberpot be emptied at the same time. For
two years and two months she saw no other living being. Then she entered her
husband's bedroom at dawn, dressed in all her finery, with jewels glittering
at her wrists, ankles, toes, ears and throat. 'Wake up,' she commanded,
flinging back his curtains. 'It's a day for celebrations.' He saw that she
hadn't aged by so much as a day since he last saw her; if anything, she
looked younger than ever, which gave credence to the rumours which suggested
that her witchcraft had persuaded time to run backwards for her within the
confines of her tower room. 'What have we got to celebrate?' the former
Grandee of Jahilia asked, coughing up his usual morning blood. Hind replied:
'I may not be able to reverse the flow of history, but revenge, at least, is
sweet.'
Within an hour the news arrived that the Prophet, Mahound, had fallen
into a fatal sickness, that he lay in Ayesha's bed with his head thumping as
if it had been filled up with demons. Hind continued to make calm
preparations for a banquet, sending servants to every corner of the city to
invite guests. But of course nobody would come to a party on that day. In
the evening Hind sat alone in the great hall of her home, amid the golden
plates and crystal glasses of her revenge, eating a simple plate of couscous
while surrounded by glistening, steaming, aromatic dishes of every
imaginable type. Abu Simbel had refused to join her, calling her eating an
obscenity. 'You ate his uncle's heart,' Simbel cried, 'and now you would eat
his.' She laughed in his face. When the servants began to weep she dismissed
them, too, and sat in solitary rejoicing while candles sent strange shadows
across her absolute, uncompromising face.
Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:
For when the head of the Messenger began to ache as never before, he
knew the time had come when he would be offered the Choice:
Since no Prophet may die before he has been shown Paradise, and
afterward asked to choose between this world and the next:
So that as he lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha's lap, he closed
his eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:
And he said unto Ayesha, 'I have been offered and made my Choice, and I
have chosen the kingdom of God.'
Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his
eyes moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even
though when she, Ayesha, turned to look she saw only a lamp there, burning
upon its stand:
'Who's there?' he called out. 'Is it Thou, Azraeel?'
But Ayesha heard a terrible, sweet voice, that was a woman's, make
reply: 'No, Messenger of Al-Lah, it is not Azraeel.'
And the lamp blew out; and in the darkness Mahound asked: 'Is this
sickness then thy doing, O Al-Lat?'
And she said: 'It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them
cut a camel's hamstrings and set it on your grave.'
Then she went, and the lamp that had been snuffed out burst once more
into a great and gentle light, and the Messenger murmured, 'Still, I thank
Thee, Al-Lat, for this gift.'
Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into the next room, where
the other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began
mightily to lament:
But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: 'If there be any here who
worshipped the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there
be any here who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive.'
It was the end of the dream.
The
Angel Azraeel
1
t all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love,
the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halevy's libretto for
Carmen -
one of the
prize specimens, this, in the Allegorical Aviary he'd assembled in lighter
days, and which included among its winged metaphors the Sweet (of youth),
the Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyam-FitzGerald's adjectiveless Bird of
Time (which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing), and the
Obscene; this last from a letter written by Henry James, Sr, to his sons . .
. 'Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect
that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers
and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the
essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural
inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued
forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.' Take
that,
kids. - And in a separate but proximate glass display-case of the
younger, happier Chamcha's fancy there fluttered a captive from a piece of
hit-parade bubblegum music, the Bright Elusive Butterfly, which shared
l'amour
with the
oiseau rebelle.
Love, a zone in which nobody desirous of compiling a human (as opposed
to robotic, Skinnerian-android) body of experience could afford to shut down
operations, did you down, no question about it, and very probably did you in
as well. It even warned you in advance. 'Love is an infant of Bohemia,'
sings Carmen, herself the very Idea of the Beloved, its perfect pattern,
eternal and divine, 'and if you love me, look out for you.' You couldn't ask
for fairer. For his own part, Saladin in his time had loved widely, and was
now (he had come to believe) suffering Love's revenges upon the foolish
lover. Of the things of the mind, he had most loved the protean,
inexhaustible culture of the English-speaking peoples; had said, when
courting Pamela, that
Othello,
'just that one play', was worth the total
output of any other dramatist in any other language, and though he was
conscious of hyperbole, he didn't think the exaggeration very great.
(Pamela, of course, made incessant efforts to betray her class and race, and
so, predictably, professed herself horrified, bracketing Othello with
Shylock and beating the racist Shakespeare over the head with the brace of
them.) He had been striving, like the Bengali writer, Nirad Chaudhuri,
before him - though without any of that impish, colonial intelligence's urge
to be seen as an enfant terrible - to be worthy of the challenge represented
by the phrase
Civis Britannicus sum.
Empire was no more, but still he knew
'all that was good and living within him' to have been 'made, shaped and
quickened' by his encounter with this islet of sensibility, surrounded by
the cool sense of the sea. - Of material things, he had given his love to
this city, London, preferring it to the city of his birth or to any other;
had been creeping up on it, stealthily, with mounting excitement, freezing
into a statue when it looked in his direction, dreaming of being the one to
possess it and so, in a sense,
become
it, as when in the game of
grandmother's footsteps the child who touches the one who's
it
('on it',
today's young Londoners would say) takes over that cherished identity; as,
also, in the myth of the Golden Bough. London, its conglomerate nature
mirroring his own, its reticence also his; its gargoyles, the ghostly
footfalls in its streets of Roman feet, the honks of its departing migrant
geese. Its hospitality - yes! - in spite of immigration laws, and his own
recent experience, he still insisted on the truth of that: an imperfect
welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was
attested by the existence in a South London borough of a pub in which no
language but Ukrainian could be heard, and by the annual reunion, in
Wembley, a stone's throw from the great stadium surrounded by imperial
echoes - Empire Way, the Empire Pool - of more than a hundred delegates, all
tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village. - 'We Londoners
can be proud of our hospitality,' he'd told Pamela, and she, giggling
helplessly, took him to see the Buster Keaton movie of that name, in which
the comedian, arriving at the end of an absurd railway line, gets a
murderous reception. In those days they had enjoyed such oppositions, and
after hot disputes had ended up in bed . . . He returned his wandering
thoughts to the subject of the metropolis. Its - he repeated stubbornly to
himself- long history as a refuge, a role it maintained in spite of the
recalcitrant ingratitude of the refugees' children; and without any of the
self-congratulatory huddled-masses rhetoric of the 'nation of immigrants'
across the ocean, itself far from perfectly open-armed. Would the United
States, with its are-you-now-have-you-ever-beens, have permitted Ho Chi Minh
to cook in its hotel kitchens? What would its McCarran-Walter Act have to
say about a latter-day Karl Marx, standing bushy-bearded at its gates,
waiting to cross its yellow lines? O Proper London! Dull would he truly be
of soul who did not prefer its faded splendours, its new hesitancies, to the
hot certainties of that transatlantic New Rome with its Nazified
architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make its
human occupants feel like worms . . . London, in spite of an increase in
excrescences such as the NatWest Tower - a corporate logo extruded into the
third dimension - preserved the human scale.
Viva! Zindabad!
Pamela had always taken a caustic view of such rhapsodies. 'These are
museum-values,' she used to tell him. 'Sanctified, hanging in golden frames
on honorific walls.' She had never had any time for what endured. Change
everything! Rip it up! He said: 'If you succeed you will make it impossible
for anybody like you, in one or two generations' time, to come along.' She
celebrated this vision of her own obsolescence. If she ended up like the
dodo - a stuffed relic,
Class Traitor, 1980$ -
that would, she said,
certainly suggest an improvement in the world. He begged to differ, but by
this time they had begun to embrace: which surely was an improvement, so he
conceded the other point.
(One year, the government had introduced admission charges at museums,
and groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of culture. When he saw
this, Chamcha had wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man
counter-protest. Didn't these people know what the stuff inside was
worth?
There they were, cheerfully rotting their lungs with cigarettes worth more
per packet than the charges they were protesting against; what they were
demonstrating to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural
heritage . . . Pamela put her foot down, 'Don't you dare,' she said. She
held the then-correct view: that the museums were
too valuable
to charge
for. So: 'Don't you dare,' and to his surprise he found he did not. He had
not meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have
given, maybe, in the right circumstances, his
life
for what was in those
museums. So he could not take seriously these objections to a charge of a
few pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure and ill-defended
position.)
-
And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you. -
Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had
spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had
recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an
avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a
green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and
there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this
sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw himself, accompanied by a small boy of about
five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly
at first, made heroic efforts to gain and maintain his balance, with the
ferocity of one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha
ran along behind his imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the
parcel-rack over the rear wheel. Then he released it, and the boy (not
knowing himself to be unsupported) kept going: balance came like a gift of
flight, and the two of them were gliding down the avenue, Chamcha running,
the boy pedalling harder and harder. 'You did it!' Saladin rejoiced, and the
equally elated child shouted back: 'Look at me! See how quickly I learned!
Aren't you pleased with me? Aren't you pleased?' It was a dream to weep at;
for when he awoke, there was no bicycle and no child.
'What will you do now?' Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage of the
Hot Wax nightclub, and he'd answered, too lightly: 'Me? I think I'll come
back to life.' Easier said than done; it was life, after all, that had
rewarded his love of a dream-child with childlessness; his love of a woman,
with her estrangement from him and her insemination by his old college
friend; his love of a city, by hurling him down towards it from Himalayan
heights; and his love of a civilization, by having him bedevilled,
humiliated, broken upon its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he
was whole again, and there was, too, the example of Niccolo Machiavelli to
consider (a wronged man, his name, like that of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a
synonym for evil; whereas in fact his staunch republicanism had earned him
the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel? - enough,
at any rate, to make most men confess to raping their grandmothers, or
anything else, just to make the pain go away; - yet he had confessed to
nothing, having committed no crimes while serving the Florentine republic,
that all-too-brief interruption in the power of the Medici family); if
Niccolo could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps
embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror-of-princes
literature then so much in vogue,
Il Principe,
following it with the
magisterial
Discorsi,
then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself
the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then; roll back that boulder from
the cave's dark mouth, and to hell with the legal problems.
Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla - in whose eyes Chamcha's
metamorphoses had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of
special-effects fantasy-movies
(Labyrinth, Legend, Howard the Duck)
entered
the Real - drove Saladin over to Pamela's place in the DJ's van; this time,
though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was
early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. 'Good luck,'
said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. 'No,
thanks,' Saladin replied. 'When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned
by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost
your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained
human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it,
demand your rights?' He waved goodbye. 'Good for you,' Mishal said, and they
had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids, with whom his
relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One
of them, an evil-looking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed an
imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: 'Fast forward!' His
was a generation that believed in skipping life's boring, troublesome,
unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax to the
next.
Welcome home,
Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.
Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. 'I didn't
think people did that any more,' he said. 'Not since
Dr Strangelove.'
Her
pregnancy wasn't visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but
confirmed that it was going well. 'So far so good.' She was naturally off
balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she
'stuck with' her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby); but in
point of fact Chamcha felt
one down
(there had been a period in which he'd
been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter's amusing little books) throughout
this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad
position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had
denied him at least thrice; but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so
that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason
for Chamcha's discomfiture - and he had not, let's recall, arrived in this
awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood - was that he had realized,
on seeing Pamela, with her too-bright brightness, her face like a saintly
mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was
alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious),
her shaven head under its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard
thing that had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite
simply fallen out of love, and would not want her back even should she want
(which was improbable but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he
became aware of this he commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a
result, at a conversational disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling
at him, too. He recalled that he'd never really cared for pets.
'I suppose,' she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table in
the spacious kitchen, 'that what I did was unforgivable, huh?'
That little Americanizing
huh
was new: another of her infinite series
of blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip
little acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling violence again:
down with it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely
inappropriate to the situation.) 'I don't think I can say what I'm capable
of forgiving,' he replied. 'That particular response seems to be out of my
control; it either operates or it doesn't and I find out in due course. So
let's say, for the moment, that the jury's out.' She didn't like that, she
wanted him to defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted
coffee. Pamela had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn't his problem
now. 'I'm moving back in,' he said. 'It's a big house and there's plenty of
room. I'll take the den, and the rooms on the floor below, including the
spare bathroom, so I'll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen
very sparingly. I'm assuming that, as my body was never found, I'm still
officially missing-presumed-dead, that you haven't gone to court to have me
wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn't take too long to resuscitate
me, once I alert Bentine, Milligan and Sellers.' (Respectively, their
lawyer, their accountant and Chamcha's agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her
posture informing him that she wouldn't be offering any counter-arguments,
that whatever he wanted was okay: making amends with body language. 'After
that,' he concluded, 'we sell up and you get your divorce.' He swept out,
making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just before
they hit him. Pamela, downstairs, would be weeping; he had never found
crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too:
boom badoom doodoodoom.
To be born again, first you have to die.
Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed,
as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they'd both read, whose
theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded
him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate
friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first
birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the
most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody
of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and
greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of
a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old
vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece,
and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it
beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a
century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even
though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes.
'Tell her,' he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I
valued what she broke.' The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had
not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in
all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the
years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven's sake; could
not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a
lifetime's friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,' said the
unforgiving man. - 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some
other, darker matter?' - 'It was the vase,' he answered, 'the vase, and
nothing but.' Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even
then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the
issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,' he had said, 'by the size of
the superficial wound, of the hole.'
Sunt lacrimae rerum,
as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said, and
Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears
in things. He remained at first virtually immobile in his den, allowing it
to grow back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something
of the solid comforting quality of its old self, as it had been before the
altering of the universe. He watched a good deal of television with half an
eye, channel-hopping compulsively, for he was a member of the remote-control
culture of the present as much as the piggy boy on the street corner; he,
too, could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the
composite video monster his button-pushing brought into being . . . what a
leveller this remote-control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth
century; it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until
all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and
one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal
weight; - and whereas the original Procrustes, citizen of what could now be
termed a 'hands-on' culture, had to exercise both brain and brawn, he,
Chamcha, could lounge back in his Parker-Knoll recliner chair and let his
fingers do the chopping. It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels,
that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants - 'Mutts' - on
Dr Who,
bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types
of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers,
saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called
Mutilasians;
children's
television appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and
creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a
continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in
modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war. A hospital in
Guyana had apparently preserved the body of a fully formed merman, complete
with gills and scales. Lycanthropy was on the increase in the Scottish
Highlands. The genetic possibility of centaurs was being seriously
discussed. A sex-change operation was shown. - He was reminded of an
execrable piece of poetry which Jumpy Joshi had hesitantly shown him at the
Shaandaar B and B. Its name, 'I Sing the Body Eclectic', was fully
representative of the whole. - But the fellow has a whole body, after all,
Saladin thought bitterly. He made Pamela's baby with no trouble at all: no
broken sticks on his damn chromosomes ... he caught sight of himself in a
rerun of an old
Aliens Show
'classic'. (In the fast-forward culture, classic
status could be achieved in as little as six months; sometimes even
overnight.) The effect of all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in
what remained of his idea of the normal, average quality of the real; but
there were also countervailing forces at work.
On
Gardeners' World
he was shown how to achieve something called a
'chimeran graft' (the very same, as chance would have it, that had been the
pride of Otto Cone's garden); and although his inattention caused him to
miss the names of the two trees that had been bred into one - Mulberry?
Laburnum? Broom? - the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it
palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously
out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the
metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden
in another, incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was
he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual
images of hybrid tragedies
-
the uselessness of mermen, the failures of
plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the
Coca-Colonization of the planet - he was given this one gift. It was enough.
He switched off the set.
Gradually, his animosity towards Gibreel lessened. Nor did horns,
goat-hoofs, etc. show any signs of manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a
cure was in progress. In point of fact, with the passage of the days not
only Gibreel, but everything which had befallen Saladin of late that was
irreconcilable with the prosiness of everyday life came to seem somehow
irrelevant, as even the most stubborn of nightmares will once you've
splashed your face, brushed your teeth and had a strong, hot drink. He began
to make journeys into the outside world - to those professional advisers,
lawyer accountant agent, whom Pamela used to call 'the Goons', and when
sitting in the panelled, book- and ledger-lined stability of those offices
in which miracles could plainly never happen he took to speaking of his
'breakdown', - 'the shock of the accident', - and so on, explaining his
disappearance as though he had never tumbled from the sky, singing 'Rule,
Britannia' while Gibreel yowled an air from the movie
Shree 420.
He made a
conscious effort to resume his old life of delicate sensibilities, taking
himself off to concerts and art galleries and plays, and if his responses
were rather dull; - if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in
the state of exaltation which was the return he expected from all high art;
-
then he insisted to himself that the thrill would soon return; he had had
'a bad experience', and needed a little time.
In his den, seated in the Parker-Knoll armchair, surrounded by his
familiar objects - the china pierrots, the mirror in the shape of a
cartoonist's heart, Eros holding up the globe of an antique lamp - he
congratulated himself on being the sort of person who had found hatred
impossible to sustain for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than
hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape,
persisted. Towards Pamela, for example, he was now sure he felt nothing but
the most altruistic affections. Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon
the smooth glass of the sensitive soul; a mere grease-mark, which
disappeared if left alone. Gibreel? Pooh! He was forgotten; he no longer
existed. There; to surrender animosity was to become free.
Saladin's optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to
life proved more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their
time about unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela.
Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the
phone: 'Clients get funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort
of unclean: as if they were robbing a grave.' Charlie, who still sounded in
her early fifties like a disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the
best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with the
clients' point of view. 'Wait it out,' she advised. 'They'll come round.
After all, it isn't as if you were Dracula, for heaven's sake.' Thank you,
Charlie.
Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some
cruel and appropriate revenge, - these were things of the past, aspects of a
reality incompatible with his passionate desire to re-establish ordinary
life. Not even the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could
deflect him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as
monstrous.
Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real
monsters in the world - mass-murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny
Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate
of the Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned
neat.) You only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed
homosexual Irishmen stuffing babies' mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally,
had been of the view that 'monster' was too - what?
-judgmental
a term for
such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as casualties
of the age. Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their victims as
the casualties. 'There's nothing to be done with you,' she had said in her
most patrician voice. 'You actually do think in cheap debating points.'
And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money,
power, sex, death, love. Angels and devils - who needed them? 'Why demons,
when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked
from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his
much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: 'And why angels, when
man is angelic too?' (If this wasn't true, how to explain, for instance, the
Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a powdered wig?) - But, it
had to be conceded, and this was his original point, that the circumstances
of the age required no diabolic explanations.
I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the
other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are
pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let
them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints,
change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up
to this point and I don't plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't
wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it's true, I did. I
sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel.
Ooparvala or
Neechayvala,
he wanted to know, and I didn't enlighten him; I certainly
don't intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.
I'm leaving now. The man's going to sleep.
His reborn, fledgling, still-fallible optimism was hardest to maintain
at night; because at night that otherworld of horns and hoofs was not so
easily denied. There was the matter, too, of the two women who had started
haunting his dreams. The first - it was hard to admit this, even to himself-
was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal ally in that
nightmare time which he was now trying so mightily to conceal behind
banalities and mists, the aficionada of the martial arts, Hanif Johnson's
lover, Mishal Sufyan.
The second - whom he'd left in Bombay with the knife of his departure
sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead - was Zeeny Vakil.
The jumpiness of Jumpy Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had
returned, in human form, to reoccupy the upper storeys of the house in
Notting Hill, was frightful to behold, and incensed Pamela more than she
could say. On the first night -she had decided not to tell him until they
were safely in bed - he leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear
of the bed and stood on the pale blue carpet, stark naked and quaking with
his thumb stuck in his mouth.
'Come back here and stop being foolish,' she commanded, but he shook
his head wildly, and removed his thumb long enough to gibber: 'But if he's
here!
In this
house!
Then how can
I
...?'-With which he snatched up his
clothes in an untidy bundle, and fled from her presence; she heard thumps
and crashes which suggested that his shoes, possibly accompanied by himself,
had fallen down the stairs. 'Good,' she screamed after him. 'Chicken, break
your neck.'
Some moments later, however, Saladin was visited by the purple-faced
figure of his estranged and naked-headed wife, who spoke thickly through
clamped teeth. 'J.J. is standing outside in the street. The damn fool says
he can't come in unless you say it's okay with you.' She had, as usual, been
drinking. Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: 'What about
you, you want him to come in?' Which Pamela interpreted as his way of
rubbing salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded
with humiliated ferocity.
Yes.
So it was that on his first night home, Saladin Chamcha went outside -
'Hey, hombre! You're really
well?
Jumpy greeted him in terror, making as if
to slap palms, to conceal his fear - and persuaded his wife's lover to share
her bed. Then he retreated upstairs, because Jumpy's mortification now
prevented him from entering the house until Chamcha was safely out of the
way.
'What a man!' Jumpy wept at Pamela. 'He's a
prince,
a
saint!'
'If you
don't pack it in,' Pamela Chamcha warned apoplectically, 'I'll set the
fucking dog on you.'
Jumpy continued to find Chamcha's presence distracting, envisaging him
(or so it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be
constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her
surprise and relief, to be quite a Mughlai chef) he insisted on asking
Chamcha down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred, took him up a tray,
explaining to Pamela that to do otherwise would be rude, and also
provocative. 'Look what he permits under his own roof! He's a
giant;
least
we can do is have good manners.' Pamela, with mounting rage, was obliged to
put up with a series of such acts and their accompanying homilies. 'I'd
never have believed you were so conventional,' she fumed, and Jumpy replied:
'It's just a question of respect.'
In the name of respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers
and mail; he never failed, on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for
a visit of at least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his
sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon
three floors below. He brought Saladin little presents: propitiatory
offerings of books, old theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to
put her foot down, he argued against her with an innocent, but also mulish
passion: 'We can't behave as if the man's invisible. He's here, isn't he?
Then we must involve him in our lives.' Pamela replied sourly: 'Why don't
you just ask him to come down and join us in bed?' To which Jumpy,
seriously, replied: 'I didn't think you'd approve.'
In spite of his inability to relax and take for granted Chamcha's
residence upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this
unusual way, his predecessor's blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives
of love and friendship, he cheered up a good deal, and found the idea of
fatherhood growing on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him weep,
the next morning, in delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was
running down an avenue of overarching trees, helping a small boy to ride a
bicycle. 'Aren't you pleased with me?' the boy cried in his elation. 'Look:
aren't you pleased?'
Pamela and Jumpy had both become involved in the campaign mounted to
protest against the arrest of Dr Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper
Murders. This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin. 'The whole
thing's completely trumped-up, based on circumstantial evidence and
insinuations. Hanif reckons he can drive a truck through the holes in the
prosecution case. It's just a straightforward malicious fit-up; the only
question is how far they'll go. They'll verbal him for sure. Maybe there
will even be witnesses saying they saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly
they want to get him. Pretty badly, I'd say; he's been a loud voice around
town for some while.' Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan's
loathing for Simba, he said: 'The fellow has - has he not? - a record of
violence towards women . . .'Jumpy turned his palms outward. 'In his
personal life,' he owned, 'the guy's frankly a piece of shit. But that
doesn't mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don't have to be an angel
to be innocent. Unless, of course, you're black.' Chamcha let this pass.
'The point is, this isn't personal, it's political,'Jumpy emphasized,
adding, as he got up to leave, 'Urn, there's a public meeting about it
tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you'd like, if you'd be
interested, that is, come along if you want.'
'You asked him to go with us?' Pamela was incredulous. She had started
to feel nauseous most of the time, and it did nothing for her mood. 'You
actually did that without consulting me?' Jumpy looked crestfallen. 'Doesn't
matter, anyhow,' she let him off the hook. 'Catch
him
going to anything like
that.'
In the morning, however, Saladin presented himself in the hall, wearing
a smart brown suit, a camel coat with a silk collar, and a rather natty
brown homburg hat. 'Where are you off to?' Pamela, in turban, army-surplus
leather jacket and tracksuit bottoms that revealed the incipient thickening
of her middle, wanted to know. 'Bloody Ascot?' 'I believe I was invited to a
meeting,' Saladin answered in his least combative manner, and Pamela
freaked. 'You want to be careful,' she warned him. 'The way you look, you'll
probably get fucking mugged.'
What drew him back into the otherworld, into that undercity whose
existence he had so long denied? - What, or rather who, forced him by the
simple fact of its (her) existence, to emerge from that cocoon-den in which
he was being - or so he believed - restored to his former self, and plunge
once more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and of
himself? 'I'il be able to fit in the meeting,' Jumpy Joshi had told Saladin,
'before my karate class.' - Where his star pupil waited: long,
rainbow-haired and, Jumpy added, just past her eighteenth birthday. - Not
knowing that Jumpy, too, was suffering some of the same illicit longings,
Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.
He had expected the meeting to be small, envisaging a back room
somewhere full of suspicious types looking and talking like clones of
Malcolm X (Chamcha could remember finding funny a T V comic's joke - 'Then
there's the one about the black man who changed his name to Mr. X and sued
the
News of the World
for libel' - and provoking one of the worst quarrels
of his marriage), with maybe a few angry-looking women as well; he had
pictured much fist-clenching and righteousness. What he found was a large
hall, the Brickhall Friends Meeting House, packed wall-to-wall with every
conceivable sort of person - old, wide women and uniformed schoolchildren,
Rastas and restaurant workers, the staff of the small Chinese supermarket in
Plassey Street, soberly dressed gents as well as wild boys, whites as well
as blacks; the mood of the crowd was far from the kind of evangelical
hysteria he'd imagined; it was quiet, worried, wanting to know what could be
done. There was a young black woman standing near him who gave his attire an
amused once-over; he stared back at her, and she laughed: 'Okay, sorry, no
offence.' She was wearing a lenticular badge, the sort that changed its
message as you moved. At some angles it read,
Uhuru for the Simba;
at
others,
Freedom for the Lion.
'It's on account of the meaning of his chosen
name,' she explained redundantly. 'In African.' Which language? Saladin
wanted to know. She shrugged, and turned away to listen to the speakers. It
was African: born, by the sound of her, in Lewisham or Deptford or New
Cross, that was all she needed to know . . . Pamela hissed into his ear. 'I
see you finally found somebody to feel superior to.' She could still read
him like a book.
A minute woman in her middle seventies was led up on to the stage at
the far end of the hall by a wiry man who, Chamcha was almost reassured to
observe, really did look like an American Black Power leader, the young
Stokely Carmichael, in fact - the same intense spectacles - and who was
acting as a sort of compere. He turned out to be Dr Simba's kid brother
Walcott Roberts, and the tiny lady was their mother, Antoinette. 'God knows
how anything as big as Simba ever came out of her,' Jumpy whispered, and
Pamela frowned angrily, out of a new feeling of solidarity with all pregnant
women, past as well as present. When Antoinette Roberts spoke, however, her
voice was big enough to fill the room on lung-power alone. She wanted to
talk about her son's day in court, at the committal proceedings, and she was
quite a performer. Hers was what Chamcha thought of as an educated voice;
she spoke in the BBC accents of one who learned her English diction from the
World Service, but there was gospel in there, too, and hellfire sermonizing.
'My son filled that dock,' she told the silent room. 'Lord, he filled it
up.
Sylvester - you will pardon me if I use the name I gave him, not meaning to
belittle the warrior's name he took for himself, but only out of ingrained
habit - Sylvester, he burst upwards from that dock like Leviathan from the
waves. I want you to know how he spoke: he spoke loud, and he spoke clear.
He spoke looking his adversary in the eye, and could that prosecutor stare
him down? Never in a month of Sundays. And I want you to know what he said:
"I stand here," my son declared, "because I have chosen to occupy the old
and honourable role of the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been
willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude." He was a colossus
among the dwarfs. "Make no mistake," he said in that court, "we are here to
change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed;
African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are
other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our
mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity
and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say
that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the
bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners
of the new. It is our turn now." I wish you to think on what my son,
Sylvester Roberts, Dr Uhuru Simba, said in the place of justice. Think on it
while we decide what we must do.' Her son Walcott helped her leave the stage
amid cheers and chants; she nodded judiciously in the direction of the
noise. Less charismatic speeches followed. Hanif Johnson, Simba's lawyer,
made a series of suggestions - the visitors' gallery must be packed, the
dispensers of justice must know that they were being watched; the court must
be picketed, and a rota should be organized; there was the need for a
financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: 'Nobody mentions his history of
sexual aggression.' Jumpy shrugged. 'Some of the women he's attacked are in
this room. Mishal, for example, is over there, look, in the corner by the
stage. But this isn't the time or place for that. Simba's bull craziness is,
you could say, a trouble in the family. What we have here is trouble with
the Man.' In other circumstances, Saladin would have had a good deal to say
in response to such a statement.
-
He would have objected, for one thing,
that a man's record of violence could not be set aside so easily when he was
accused of murder. - Also that he didn't like the use of such American terms
as 'the Man' in the very different British situation, where there was no
history of slavery; it sounded like an attempt to borrow the glamour of
other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt about the organizers'
decision to punctuate the speeches with such meaning-loaded songs as
We
Shall Overcome,
and even, for Pete's sake,
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika.
As if all
causes were the same, all histories interchangeable. - But he said none of
these things, because his head had begun to spin and his senses to reel,
owing to his having been given, for the first time in his life, a stupefying
premonition of his death.
- Hanif Johnson was finishing his speech.
As Dr Simba has written,
newness will enter this society by collective, not individual, actions.
He
was quoting what Chamcha recognized as one of Camus's most popular slogans.
'1 he passage from speech to moral action,
Hanif was saying,
has a name: to
become human. -
And now a pretty young British Asian woman with a
slightly-too-bulbous nose and a dirty, bluesy voice was launching into Bob
Dylan's song,
I Pity the Poor Immigrant.
Another false and imported note,
this: the song actually seemed rather hostile towards immigrants, though
there were lines that struck chords, about the immigrant's visions
shattering like glass, about how he was obliged to 'build his town with
blood'. Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image
of the rivers of blood, would appreciate that. - All these things Saladin
experienced and thought as if from a considerable distance. - What had
happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan's presence at the
Friends Meeting House, Saladin Chamcha, looking in her direction, saw a
blazing fire burning in the centre of her forehead; and felt, in the same
moment, the beating, and the icy shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings. - He
experienced the kind of blurring associated with double vision, seeming to
look into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed
meeting hall, but the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the
exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and a girl's forehead could
burn with ominous flames. -
She's death to me, that's what it means,
Chamcha
thought in one of the two worlds, while in the other he told himself not to
be foolish; the room was full of people wearing those inane tribal badges
that had latterly grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted
with fluorescent paint; Mishal probably had on some piece of space-age junk
jewellery. - But his other self took over again,
she's off limits to you,
it
said,
not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes
spill over its rim. -
Whereupon his heart got in on the act, bababoom,
boomba, dabadoom.
Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing
concern. 'I'm the one with the bun in the oven,' she said with a gruff
remnant of affection. 'What business have you got to pass out?' Jumpy
insisted: 'You'd best come with me to my class; just sit quietly, and
afterwards I'll take you home.' -But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was
required.
No, no, I'll go with Jumpy, I'll be fine. It was just hot in
there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing.
There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning
against a movie poster. The film was
Mephisto,
the story of an actor seduced
into a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor - played by the
German star Klaus Maria Brandauer - was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face
white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from
Faust
stood above
his head:
-
Who art thou, then?
-
Part of that Power, not understood,
Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.
At the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in
Mishal's direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the
class.) - Although she was all over him,
you came back, I bet it was to see
me, isn't that nice,
he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask
were
you wearing a luminous something in the middle of your,
because she wasn't
now, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black
leotard. - Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion
and injured pride.
'Our other star hasn't turned up today,' Jumpy mentioned to Saladin
during a break in the exercises. 'Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed
Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she's
apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow-survivor
of the crash.'
Things are closing in on me.
Gibreel was drifting towards him, like
India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland proto-continent, it
floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently,
were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided,
the force would hurl up Himalayas. - What is a mountain? An obstacle; a
transcendence; above all, an
effect.
'Where are you going?' Jumpy was calling. 'I thought I was giving you a
lift. Are you okay?'
I'm fine. I need to walk, that's all.
'Okay, but only if you're sure.'
Sure.
Walk away fast, without catching Mishal's aggrieved eye.
... In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this
underworld. - God: no escape. Here's a shop-front, a store selling musical
instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what's the name? -
Fair Winds,
and
here in the window is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent
return of, that's right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation
of the earth.
Walk. Walk away fast.
. . .
Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.)
Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that
hijacking and lost the half of his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he
says, with flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn't fancy
a mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option
did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.
Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record
with his new, buttocky tongue.
The Devil tried to silence me but the good
Lord and American surgical techniques knew better.
These gaps were the
creationist's main selling-point: if natural selection was the truth, where
were all the random mutations that got deselected? Where were the
monster-children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent.
No three-legged horses there. No
point arguing with these geezers,
the
cabbie said.
I don't hold with God myself.
No point, one small part of
Chamcha's consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that 'the fossil record'
wasn't some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a
long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species
happened not in the stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in
great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress -
the very English middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to
be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old
formulation, more revolution than evolution. - I've heard enough, the cabbie
said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music.
Ave atque vale.
What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was that he had been living in
a state of phoney peace, that the change in him was irreversible. A new,
dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky;
no matter how assiduously he attempted to re-create his old existence, this
was, he now saw a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road
before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back
against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left-hand path.
2
he temperature continued to rise; and when the heatwave reached its
highest point, and stayed up there so long that the whole city, its
edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil,
- then Mr. Billy Battuta and his companion Mimi Mamoulian, recently returned
to the metropolis after a period as guests of the penal authority of New
York, announced their 'grand coming-out' party. Billy's business connections
downtown had arranged for his case to be heard by a well-disposed judge; his
personal charm had persuaded every one of the wealthy female 'marks' from
whom he'd extracted such generous amounts for the purpose of the re-purchase
of his soul from the Devil (including Mrs. Struwelpeter) to sign a clemency
petition, in which the matrons stated their conviction that Mr. Battuta had
honestly repented him of his error, and asked, in the light of his vow to
concentrate henceforth on his startlingly brilliant entrepreneurial career
(whose social usefulness in terms of wealth creation and the provision of
employment to many persons, they suggested, should also be considered by the
court in mitigation of his offences), and his further vow to undergo a full
course of psychiatric treatment to help him overcome his weakness for
criminal capers, - that the worthy judge settle upon some lighter punishment
than a prison sentence, 'the deterrent purpose underlying such incarceration
being better served here,' in the ladies' opinion, 'by a judgment of a more
Christian sort'. Mimi, adjudged to be no more than Billy's love-duped
underling, was given a suspended sentence; for Billy it was deportation, and
a stiff fine, but even this was rendered considerably less severe by the
judge's consent to Billy's attorney's plea that his client be allowed to
leave the country voluntarily, without having the stigma of a deportation
order stamped into his passport, a thing that would do great damage to his
many business interests. Twenty-four hours after the judgment Billy and Mimi
were back in London, whooping it up at Crockford's, and sending out fancy
invitation cards to what promised to be
the
party of that strangely
sweltering season. One of these cards found its way, with the assistance of
Mr. S. S. Sisodia, to the residence of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta;
another arrived, a little belatedly, at Saladin Chamcha's den, slipped under
the door by the solicitous Jumpy. (Mimi had called Pamela to invite her,
adding, with her usual directness: 'Any notion where that husband of yours
has gotten to?' - Which Pamela answered, with English awkwardness,
yes er
but.
Mimi got the whole story out of her in less than half an hour, which
wasn't bad, and concluded triumphantly: 'Sounds like your life is looking
up, Pam. Bring 'em both; bring anyone. It's going to be quite a circus.')
The location for the party was another of Sisodia's inexplicable
triumphs: the giant sound stage at the Shepperton film studios had been
procured, apparently at no cost, and the guests would be able, therefore, to
take their pleasures in the huge re-creation of Dickensian London that stood
within. A musical adaptation of the great writer's last completed novel,
renamed
Friend!,
with book and lyrics by the celebrated genius of the
musical stage, Mr. Jeremy Bentham, had proved a mammoth hit in the West End
and on Broadway, in spite of the macabre nature of some of its scenes; now,
accordingly,
The Chums,
as it was known in the business, was receiving the
accolade of a big-budget movie production. 'The pipi PR people,' Sisodia
told Gibreel on the phone, 'think that such a fufufuck,
function,
which is
to be most ista ista istar ista ista istudded, will be good for their
bibuild up cacampaign.'
The appointed night arrived: a night of dreadful heat.
Shepperton! - Pamela and Jumpy are already here, borne on the wings of
Pamela's MG, when Chamcha, having disdained their company, arrives in one of
the fleet of coaches the evening's hosts have made available to those guests
wishing for whatever reason to be driven rather than to drive. - And someone
else, too, - the one with whom our Saladin fell to earth, - has come; is
wandering within. - Chamcha enters the arena; and is amazed.
-
Here London
has been altered - no,
condensed, -
according to the imperatives of film. -
Why, here's the Stucconia of the Veneerings, those bran-new, spick and span
new people, lying shockingly adjacent to Portman Square, and the shady angle
containing various Podsnaps. - And worse: behold the dustman's mounds of
Boffin's Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in this
abridged metropolis over Fascination Fledgeby's rooms in the Albany, the
West End's very heart! -But the guests are not disposed to grumble; the
reborn city, even rearranged, still takes the breath away; most particularly
in that part of the immense studio through which the river winds, the river
with its fogs and Gaffer Hexam's boat, the ebbing Thames flowing beneath two
bridges, one of iron, one of stone. - Upon its cobbled banks the guests' gay
footsteps fall; and there sound mournful, misty, footfalls of ominous note.
A dry ice pea-souper lifts across the set.
Society grandees, fashion models, film stars, corporation bigwigs, a
brace of minor royal Personages, useful politicians and suchlike riff-raff
perspire and mingle in these counterfeit streets with numbers of men and
women as sweat-glistened as the 'real' guests and as counterfeit as the
city: hired extras in period costume, as well as a selection of the movie's
leading players. Chamcha, who realizes in the moment of sighting him that
this encounter has been the whole purpose of his journey, - which fact he
has succeeded in keeping from himself until this instant, -spots Gibreel in
the increasingly riotous crowd.
Yes: there, on London Bridge Which Is Of Stone, without a doubt,
Gibreel! - And that must be his Alleluia, his Icequeen Cone! - What a
distant expression he seems to be wearing, how he lists a few degrees to the
left; and how she seems to dote on him - how everyone adores him: for he is
among the very greatest at the party, Battuta to his left, Sisodia at
Allie's right, and all about a host of faces that would be recognized from
Peru to Timbuctoo! - Chamcha struggles through the crowd, which grows ever
more dense as he nears the bridge; - but he is resolved - Gibreel, he will
reach Gibreel! - when with a clash of cymbals loud music strikes up, one of
Mr. Bentham's immortal, show-stopping tunes, and the crowd parts like the
Red Sea before the children of Israel. - Chamcha, off-balance, staggers
back, is crushed by the parting crowd against a fake half-timbered edifice -
what else? - a Curiosity Shop; and, to save himself, retreats within, while
a great singing throng of bosomy ladies in mob-caps and frilly blouses,
accompanied by an over-sufficiency of stovepipe-hatted gents, comes
rollicking down the riverside street, singing for all they're worth.
What kind of fellow is Our Mutual Friend?
What does he intend?
Is he the kind of fellow on whom we may depend?
&c. &c. &c.
'It's a funny thing,' a woman's voice says behind him, 'but when we
were doing the show at the C- Theatre, there was an outbreak of lust among
the cast; quite unparalleled, in my experience. People started missing their
cues because of the shenanigans in the wings.'
The speaker, he observes, is young, small, buxom, far from
unattractive, damp from the heat, flushed with wine, and evidently in the
grip of the libidinous fever of which she speaks. - The 'room' has little
light, but he can make out the glint in her eye. 'We've got time,' she
continues matter-of-factly. 'After this lot finish there's Mr Podsnap's
solo.' Whereupon, arranging herself in an expert parody of the Marine
Insurance agent's self-important posture, she launches into her own version
of the scheduled musical Podsnappery:
Ours is a Copious Language,
A Language Trying to Strangers;
Ours is the Favoured Nation,
Blest, and Safe from Dangers . . .
Now, in Rex-Harrisonian speech-song, she addresses an invisible
Foreigner. 'And How Do You Like London? - "Ay-normaymong rich?" - Enormously
Rich, we say. Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong. - And Do You
Find, Sir, Many Evidences of our British Constitution in the Streets of the
World's Metropolis, London, Londres, London? - I would say,' she adds, still
Podsnapping, 'that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a
modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, which one would seek
in vain among the Nations of the Earth.'
The creature has been approaching Chamcha while delivering herself of
these lines; - unfastening, the while, her blouse; - and he, mongoose to her
cobra, stands there transfixed; while she, exposing a shapely right breast,
and offering it to him, points out that she has drawn upon it, - as an act
of civic pride, - the map of London, no less, in red magic-marker, with the
river all in blue. The metropolis summons him; - but he, giving an entirely
Dickensian cry, pushes his way out of the Curiosity Shop into the madness of
the street.
Gibreel is looking directly at him from London Bridge; their eyes - or
so it seems to Chamcha - meet. Yes: Gibreel lifts, and waves, an unexcited
arm.
What follows is tragedy. - Or, at the least the echo of tragedy, the
full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it's
said. - A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns
re-enact what was first done by heroes and by kings. - Well, then, so be it.
- The question that's asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is,
the nature of evil, how it's born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral
possession of a many-sided human soul. Or, let's say: the enigma of lago.
It's not unknown for literary-theatrical exegetes, defeated by the
character, to ascribe his actions to 'motiveless malignity'. Evil is evil
and will do evil, and that's that; the serpent's poison is his very
definition. - Well, such shruggings-off will not pass muster here. My
Chamcha may be no Ancient of Venice, my Allie no smothered Desdemona,
Farishta no match for the Moor, but they will, at least, be costumed in such
explanations as my understanding will allow. - And so, now, Gibreel waves in
greeting; Chamcha approaches; the curtain rises on a darkening stage.
Let's observe, first, how isolated this Saladin is; his only willing
companion an inebriated and cartographically bosomed stranger, he struggles
alone through that partying throng in which all persons appear to be (and
are not) one another's friends; - while there on London Bridge stands
Farishta, beset by admirers, at the very centre of the crowd;
and, next, let us appreciate the effect on Chamcha, who loved England
in the form of his lost English wife, - of the golden, pale and glacial
presence by Farishta's side of Alleluia Cone; he snatches a glass from a
passing waiter's tray, drinks the wine fast, takes another; and seems to
see, in distant Allie, the entirety of his loss;
and in other ways, as well, Gibreel is fast becoming the sum of
Saladin's defeats; - there with him now, at this very moment, is another
traitor; mutton dressed as lamb, fifty plus and batting her eyelashes like
an eighteen-year-old, is Chamcha's agent, the redoubtable Charlie Sellers; -
you wouldn't liken
him
to a Transylvanian bloodsucker, would you, Charlie,
the irate watcher inwardly cries; - and grabs another glass; - and sees, at
its bottom, his own anonymity, the other's equal celebrity, and the great
injustice of the division;
most especially - he bitterly reflects - because Gibreel, London's
conqueror, can see no value in the world now falling at his feet! - why, the
bastard always sneered at the place, Proper London, Vilayet, the English,
Spoono, what cold fish they are, I swear; - Chamcha, moving inexorably
towards him through the crowd, seems to see,
right now,
that same sneer upon
Farishta's face, that scorn of an inverted Podsnap, for whom all things
English are worthy of derision instead of praise; - O God, the cruelty of
it, that he, Saladin, whose goal and crusade it was to make this town his
own, should have to see it kneeling before his contemptuous rival! - so
there is also this: that Chamcha longs to stand in Farishta's shoes, while
his own footwear is of no interest whatsoever to Gibreel.
What is unforgivable?
Chamcha, looking upon Farishta's face for the first time since their
rough parting in Rosa Diamond's hall, seeing the strange blankness in the
other's eyes, recalls with overwhelming force the earlier blankness, Gibreel
standing on the stairs and doing nothing while he, Chamcha, horned and
captive, was dragged into the night; and feels the return of hatred, feels
it filling him bottom-to-top with fresh green bile,
never mind about
excuses,
it cries,
to hell with mitigations and what-could-he-have-dones;
what's beyond forgiveness is beyond. You can't judge an internal injury by
the size of the hole.
So: Gibreel Farishta, put on trial by Chamcha, gets a rougher ride than
Mimi and Billy in New York, and is declared guilty, for all perpetuity, of
the Inexcusable Thing. From which what follows, follows. - But we may permit
ourselves to speculate a while about the true nature of this Ultimate, this
Inexpiable Offence. - Is it really, can it be, simply his silence on Rosa's
stairs? - Or are there deeper resentments here, gripes for which this
so-called Primary Cause is, in truth, no more than a substitute, a front? -
For are they not conjoined opposites, these two, each man the other's
shadow? - One seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires, the
other preferring, contemptuously, to transform; one, a hapless fellow who
seems to be continually punished for uncommitted crimes, the other, called
angelic by one and all, the type of man who gets away with everything. - We
may describe Chamcha as being somewhat less than life-size; but loud, vulgar
Gibreel is, without question, a good deal larger than life, a disparity
which might easily inspire neo-Procrustean lusts in Chamcha: to stretch
himself by cutting Farishta down to size.
What is unforgivable?
What if not the shivering nakedness of being
wholly known
to a person
one does not trust? - And has not Gibreel seen Saladin Chamcha in
circumstances - hijack, fall, arrest - in which the secrets of the self were
utterly exposed?
Well, then. - Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these
are two fundamentally different
types
of self? Might we not agree that
Gibreel, for all his stage-name and performances; and in spite of born-again
slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses; - has wished to remain, to a large
degree,
continuous
- that is, joined to and arising from his past; - that he
chose neither near-fatal illness nor transmuting fall; that, in point of
fact, he fears above all things the altered states in which his dreams leak
into, and overwhelm, his waking self, making him that angelic Gibreel he has
no desire to be; - so that his is still a self which, for our present
purposes, we may describe as 'true' . . . whereas Saladin Chamcha is a
creature of
selected
discontinuities, a
willing
re-invention; his
preferred
revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, 'false'?
And might we then not go on to say that it is this falsity of self that
makes possible in Chamcha a worse and deeper falsity - call this 'evil' -
and that this is the truth, the door, that was opened in him by his fall? -
While Gibreel, to follow the logic of our established terminology, is to be
considered 'good' by virtue of
wishing to remain,
for all his vicissitudes,
at bottom an untranslated man.
- But, and again but: this sounds, does it not, dangerously like an
intentionalist fallacy? - Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea
of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, 'pure', - an utterly
fantastic notion! - cannot, must not, suffice. No! Let's rather say an even
harder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to
say it is. - That, in fact, we fall towards it
naturally,
that is,
not
against our natures. -
And that Saladin Chamcha set out to destroy Gibreel
Farishta because, finally, it proved so easy to do; the true appeal of evil
being the seductive ease with which one may embark upon that road. (And, let
us add in conclusion, the later impossibility of return.)
Saladin Chamcha, however, insists on a simpler line. 'It was his
treason at Rosa Diamond's house; his silence, nothing more.'
He sets foot upon the counterfeit London Bridge. From a nearby
red-and-white-striped puppeteer's booth, Mr Punch -whacking Judy - calls out
to him:
That's the way to do it!
After which Gibreel, too, speaks a
greeting, the enthusiasm of the words undone by the incongruous listlessness
of the voice: 'Spoono, is it you. You bloody devil. There you are, big as
life. Come here, you Salad baba, old Chumch.'
This happened:
The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be
transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity
towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell
look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe;
also, her quality of what he would afterwards think of as
wilderness,
a
hard, sparse thing, antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy
him so much? Why, before she'd even opened her mouth, had he characterized
her as part of the enemy?
Perhaps because he desired her; and desired, even more, what he took to
be that inner certainty of hers; lacking which, he envied it, and sought to
damage what he envied. If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the
beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same
ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
This happened: Chamcha invented an Allie, and became his fiction's
antagonist... he showed none of this. He smiled, shook hands, was pleased to
meet her; and embraced Gibreel.
I follow him to serve my turn upon him,
Allie, suspecting nothing, excused herself. The two of them must have so
much to catch up on, she said; and, promising to return soon, departed: off,
as she put it, to explore. He noticed that she hobbled slightly for a step
or two; then paused, and strode off strongly. Among the things he did not
know about her was her pain.
Not knowing that the Gibreel standing before him, remote of eye and
perfunctory in his greeting, was under the most attentive medical
supervision; - or that he was obliged to take, on a daily basis, certain
drugs that dulled his senses, because of the very real possibility of a
recurrence of his no-longer-nameless illness, that is to say, paranoid
schizophrenia; - or that he had long been kept away, at Allie's absolute
insistence, from the movie people whom she had come strongly to distrust,
ever since his last rampage; - or that their presence at the
Battuta-Mamoulian party was a thing to which she had been whole-heartedly
opposed, acquiescing only after a terrible scene in which Gibreel had roared
that he would be kept a prisoner no longer, and that he was determined to
make a further effort to re-enter his 'real life'; - or that the effort of
looking after a disturbed lover who was capable of seeing small bat-like
imps hanging upside down in the refrigerator had worn Allie thin as a
worn-out shirt, forcing upon her the roles of nurse, scapegoat and crutch -
requiring her, in sum, to act against her own complex and troubled nature; -
not knowing any of this, failing to comprehend that the Gibreel at whom he
was looking, and believed he saw, Gibreel the embodiment of all the good
fortune that the Fury-haunted Chamcha so signally lacked, was as much the
creature of his fancy, as much a fiction, as his invented-resented Allie,
that classic drop-dead blonde or femme fatale conjured up by his envious,
tormented, Oresteian imagination, - Saladin in his ignorance nevertheless
penetrated, by the merest chance, the chink in Gibreel's (admittedly
somewhat quixotic) armour, and understood how his hated Other might most
swiftly be unmade.
Gibreel's banal question made the opening. Limited by sedatives to
small-talk, he asked vaguely: 'And how, tell me, is your goodwife?' At which
Chamcha, his tongue loosened by alcohol, blurted out: 'How? Knocked up.
Enceinte. Great with fucking child.' Soporific Gibreel missed the violence
in this speech, beamed absently, placed an arm around Saladin's shoulders.
'Shabash, mubarak,' he offered congratulations. 'Spoono! Damn speedy work.'
'Congratulate her lover,' Saladin thickly raged. 'My old friend, Jumpy
Joshi. Now there, I admit it, is a man. Women go wild, it seems. God knows
why. They want his goddamn babies and they don't even wait to ask his
leave.'
'For instance who?' Gibreel yelled, making heads turn and Chamcha
recoil in surprise. 'Who who who?' he hooted, causing tipsy giggles. Saladin
Chamcha laughed, too: but without pleasure. 'I'll tell you who for instance.
My wife for instance, that's who. That is no lady, mister Farishta, Gibreel.
Pamela, my no-lady wife.'
At this very moment, as luck would have it, - while Saladin in his cups
was quite ignorant of the effect his words were having on Gibreel, - for
whom two images had explosively combined, the first being his sudden memory
of Rekha Merchant on a flying carpet warning him of Allie's secret wish to
have a baby without informing the father,
who asks the seed for permission
to plant,
and the second being an envisioning of the body of the martial
arts instructor conjoined in high-kicking carnality with the same Miss
Alleluia Cone, - the figure of Jumpy Joshi was seen crossing 'Southwark
Bridge' in a state of some agitation, -hunting, in fact, for Pamela, from
whom he had become separated during the same rush of singing Dickensians
which had pushed Saladin towards the metropolitan breasts of the young woman
in the Curiosity Shop. 'Talk of the devil,' Saladin pointed. There the
bastard goes.' He turned towards Gibreel: but Gibreel had gone.
Allie Cone reappeared, angry, frantic. 'Where is he? Jesus! Can't 1
even leave him for a fucking
second'?
Couldn't you have kept your sodding
eyes
on him?'
'Why, what's the matter -?' But now Allie had plunged into the crowd,
so that when Chamcha saw Gibreel crossing 'Southwark Bridge' she was out of
earshot. - And here was Pamela, demanding: 'Have you seen Jumpy?' - And he
pointed, 'That way,' whereupon she, too, vanished without a word of
courtesy; and now Jumpy was seen, crossing 'Southwark Bridge' in the
opposite direction, curly hair wilder than ever, coathanger shoulders
hunched inside the greatcoat he had refused to remove, eyes searching, thumb
homing in on mouth; - and, a little later, Gibreel headed across the
simulacrum of that bridge Which Is Of Iron, going the same way as Jumpy
went.
In short, events had begun to border on the farcical; but when, some
minutes later, the actor playing the role of 'Gaffer Hexam', who kept watch
over that stretch of the Dickensian Thames for floating corpses, to relieve
them of their valuables before handing them over to the police, - came
rowing rapidly down the studio river with his stipulated ragged, grizzled
hair standing straight up on end, the farce was instantly terminated; for
there in his disreputable boat lay the insensate body of Jumpy Joshi in his
waterlogged greatcoat. 'Knocked cold,' the boatman cried, pointing to the
huge lump rising up at the back of Jumpy's skull, 'and being unconscious in
the water it's a miracle he never drowned.'
One week after that, in response to an impassioned telephone call from
Allie Cone, who had tracked him down via Sisodia, Battuta and finally Mimi,
and who appeared to have defrosted quite a bit, Saladin Chamcha found
himself in the passenger seat of a three-year-old silver Citroen station
wagon which the future Alicja Boniek had presented to her daughter before
leaving for an extended Californian stay. Allie had met him at Carlisle
station, repeating her earlier telephonic apologies - 'I'd no right to speak
to you like that; you knew nothing, I mean about his, well, thank heavens
nobody saw the attack, and it seems to have been hushed up, but that poor
man, an oar on the head from behind, it's too bad; the point is, we've taken
a place up north, friends of mine are away, it just seemed best to get out
of range of human beings, and, well, he's been asking for you; you could
really help him, I think, and to be frank I could do with the help myself,'
which left Saladin little the wiser but consumed by curiosity - and now
Scotland was rushing past the Citroen windows at alarming speed: an edge of
Hadrian's Wall, the old elopers' haven Gretna Green, and then inland towards
the Southern Uplands; Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Beattock, Elvanfoot. Chamcha
tended to think of all non-metropolitan locales as the deeps of interstellar
space, and journeys into them as fraught with peril: for to break down in
such emptiness would surely be to die alone and undiscovered. He had noted
warily that one of the Citroen's headlamps was broken, that the fuel gauge
was in the red (it turned out to be broken, too), the daylight was failing,
and Allie was driving as if the A74 were the track at Silverstone on a sunny
day. 'He can't get far without transport, but you never know,' she explained
grimly. 'Three days ago he stole the car keys and they found him heading the
wrong way up an exit road on the M6, shouting about damnation.
Prepare for
the vengeance of the Lord,
he told the motorway cops,
for I shall soon
summon my lieutenant, Azraeel.
They wrote it all down in their little
books.' Chamcha, his heart still filled with his own vengeful lusts,
affected sympathy and shock. 'And Jumpy?' he inquired, Allie took both hands
off the wheel and spread them in an I-give-up gesture, while the car wobbled
terrifyingly across the bendy road. 'The doctors say the possessive jealousy
could be part of the same thing; at least, it can set the madness off, like
a fuse.'
She was glad of the chance to talk; and Chamcha lent her a willing ear.
If she trusted him, it was because Gibreel did, too; he had no intention of
damaging that trust.
Once he betrayed my trust; now let him, for a time,
have confidence in me.
He was a tyro puppeteer; it was necessary to study
the strings, to find out what was connected to what ... 'I can't help it,'
Allie was saying. 'I feel in some obscure way to blame for him. Our life
isn't working out and it's my fault. My mother gets angry when I talk like
this.' Alicja, on the verge of catching the plane west, berated her daughter
at Terminal Three. '1 don't understand where you get these notions from,'
she cried amid backpackers, briefcases and weeping Asian mums. 'You could
say your father's life didn't go according to plan, either. So he should be
blamed for the camps? Study history, Alleluia. In this century history
stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I
mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny.
Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a
grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your
pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer
the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you.'
She had returned, without warning, to the grand style of wardrobe preferred
by Otto Cone, and, it seemed, to an oratorical manner that suited the big
black hats and frilly suits. 'Enjoy California, Mother,' Allie said sharply.
'One of us is happy,' Alicja said. 'Why shouldn't it be me?' And before her
daughter could answer, she swept off past the passengers-only barrier,
flourishing passport, boarding-pass, ticket, heading for the duty-free
bottles of
Opium
and Gordon's Gin, which were on sale beneath an illuminated
sign reading SAY HELLO TO THE GOOD BUYS.
In the last light, the road rounded a spur of treeless, heather-covered
hills. Long ago, in another country, another twilight, Chamcha had rounded
another such spur and come into sight of the remains of Persepolis. Now,
however, he was heading for a human ruin; not to admire, and maybe even (for
the decision to do evil is never finally taken until the very instant of the
deed; there is always a last chance to withdraw) to vandalize. To scrawl his
name in Gibreel's flesh:
Saladin woz ear.
'Why stay with him?' he asked
Allie, and to his surprise she blushed. 'Why not spare yourself the pain?'
'I don't really know you, not at all, really,' she began, then paused
and made a choice. 'I'm not proud of the answer, but it's the truth,' she
said. 'It's the sex. We're unbelievable together, perfect, like nothing I've
known. Dream lovers. He just seems to, to
know.
To know
me.'
She fell
silent; the night hid her face. Chamcha's bitterness surged up again. Dream
lovers were all around him; he, dreamless, could only watch. He gritted
angry teeth; and bit, by mistake, his tongue.
Gibreel and Allie had holed up in Durisdeer, a village so small it
didn't have a pub, and were living in a deconsecrated Freekirk converted -
the quasi-religious term sounded strange to Chamcha - by an architect friend
of Allie's who had made a fortune out of such metamorphoses of the sacred
into the profane. It struck Saladin as a gloomy sort of place, for all its
white walls, recessed spotlights and wall-to-wall shag-pile carpeting. There
were gravestones in the garden. As a retreat for a man suffering from
paranoid delusions of being the chief archangel of God, Chamcha reflected,
it wouldn't have been his own first choice. The Freekirk was set a little
apart from the dozen or so other stone-and-tile houses that made up the
community: isolated even within this isolation. Gibreel was standing at the
door, a shadow against the illuminated hallway, when the car pulled up. 'You
got here,' he shouted. 'Yaar, too good. Welcome to bloody jail.'
The drugs made Gibreel clumsy. As the three of them sat around the
pitch-pine kitchen table beneath the gentrified pulldown dimmer-switched
lighting, he twice knocked over his coffee-cup (he was ostentatiously off
booze; Allie, pouring two generous shots of Scotch, kept Chamcha company),
and, cursing, stumbled about the kitchen for paper-towels to mop up the
mess. 'When I get sick of being this way I just cut down without telling
her,' he confessed. 'And then the shit starts happening. I swear to you,
Spoono, I can't bear the bloody idea that it will never stop, that the only
choice is drugs or bugs in the brain. I can't bloody bear it. I swear, yaar,
if I thought that was it, then, bas, I don't know, I'd, I don't know what.'
'Shut your face,' Allie softly said. But he shouted out: 'Spoono, I
even hit her, do you know that? Bloody hell. One day I thought she was some
rakshasa type of demon and I just went for her. Do you know how strong it
is, the strength of madness?'
'Fortunately for me I'd been going to - oops, eek - those self-defence
classes,' Allie grinned. 'He's exaggerating to save face. Actually he was
the one who ended up banging his head on the floor.' - 'Right here,' Gibreel
sheepishly assented. The kitchen floor was made of large flagstones.
'Painful,' Chamcha hazarded. 'Damn right,' Gibreel roared, strangely
cheerful now. 'Knocked me bilkul cold.'
The Freekirk's interior had been divided into a large two-storey (in
estate agent's jargon, 'double volume') reception-room - the former hall of
congregation - and a more conventional half, with kitchen and utilities
downstairs and bedrooms and bathroom above. Unable for some reason to sleep,
Chamcha wandered at midnight into the great (and cold: the heatwave might be
continuing in the south of England, but there wasn't a ripple of it up here,
where the climate was autumnal and chill) living-room, and wandered among
the ghost-voices of banished preachers while Gibreel and Allie made
high-volume love.
Like Pamela.
He tried to think of Mishal, of Zeeny Vakil,
but it didn't work. Stuffing his fingers in his ears, he fought against the
sound effects of the copulation of Farishta and Alleluia Cone.
Theirs had been a high-risk conjoining from the start, he reflected:
first, Gibreel's dramatic abandonment of career and rush across the earth,
and now, Allie's uncompromising determination to
see it through,
to defeat
in him this mad, angelic divinity and restore the humanity she loved. No
compromises for them; they were going for broke. Whereas he, Saladin, had
declared himself content to live under the same roof as his wife and her
lover boy. Which was the better way? Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded
himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
In the morning Gibreel ordered an ascent of the local 'Top'. But Allie
declined, although it was plain to Chamcha that her return to the
countryside had caused her to glow with joy. 'Bloody flat-foot mame,'
Gibreel cursed her lovingly. 'Come on, Salad. Us damn city slickers can show
the Everest conqueror how to climb. What a bloody upside-down life, yaar. We
go mountain-climbing while she sits here and makes business calls.'
Saladin's thoughts were racing: he understood, now, that strange hobble at
Shep-perton; understood, too, that this secluded haven would have to be
temporary - that Allie, by coming here, was sacrificing her own life, and
wouldn't be able to go on doing so indefinitely. What should he do?
Anything? Nothing? - If revenge was to be taken, when and how? 'Get these
boots on,' Gibreel commanded. 'You think the rain will hold off all fucking
day?'
It didn't. By the time they reached the stone cairn at the summit of
Gibreel's chosen climb, they were enveloped in a fine drizzle. 'Damn good
show,' Gibreel panted. 'Look: there she is, down there, sitting back like
the Grand Panjandrum.' He pointed down at the Freekirk. Chamcha, his heart
pounding, was feeling foolish. He must start behaving like a man with a
ticker problem. Where was the glory in dying of heart failure on this
nothing of a Top, for nothing, in the rain? Then Gibreel got out his
field-glasses and started scanning the valley. There were hardly any moving
figures to be seen - two or three men and dogs, some sheep, no more. Gibreel
tracked the men with his binoculars. 'Now that we're alone,' he suddenly
said, 'I can tell you why we really came away to this damn empty hole. It's
because of her. Yes, yes; don't be fooled by my act! It's all her bloody
beauty. Men, Spoono: they chase her like goddamn flies. I swear! I see them,
slobbering and grabbing. It isn't right. She is a very private person, the
most private person in the world. We have to protect her from lust.'
This speech took Saladin by surprise. You poor bastard, he thought, you
really are going off your wretched head at a rate of knots. And, hard on the
heels of this thought, a second sentence appeared, as if by magic, in his
head:
Don't imagine that means I'll let you off.
On the drive back to the Carlisle railway station, Chamcha mentioned
the depopulation of the countryside. 'There's no work,' Allie said. 'So it's
empty. Gibreel says he can't get used to the idea that all this space
indicates poverty: says it looks like luxury to him, after India's crowds.'
- 'And your work?' Chamcha asked. 'What about that?' She smiled at him, the
ice-maiden facade long gone. 'You're a nice man to ask. I keep thinking, one
day it'll be my life in the middle, taking first place. Or, well, although I
find it hard to use the first person plural: our life. That sounds better,
right?'
'Don't let him cut you off,' Saladin advised. 'From Jumpy, from your
own worlds, whatever.' This was the moment at which his campaign could truly
be said to have begun; when he set a foot upon that effortless, seductive
road on which there was only one way to go. 'You're right,' Allie was
saying. 'God, if he only knew. His precious Sisodia, for example: it's not
just seven-foot starlets he goes for, though he sure as hell likes those.' -
'He made a pass,' Chamcha guessed; and, simultaneously, filed the
information away for possible later use. 'He's totally shameless,' Allie
laughed. 'It was right under Gibreel's nose. He doesn't mind rejection,
though: he just bows, and murmurs
no offoffoffence,
and that's that. Can you
imagine if I told Gibreel?'
Chamcha at the railway station wished Allie luck. 'We'll have to be in
London for a couple of weeks,' she said through the car window. 'I've got
meetings. Maybe you and Gibreel can get together then; this has really done
him good.'
'Call any time,' he waved goodbye, and watched the Citroen until it was
out of sight.
That Allie Cone, the third point of a triangle of fictions - for had
not Gibreel and Allie come together very largely by imagining, out of their
own needs, an 'Allie' and a 'Gibreel' with whom each could fall in love; and
was not Chamcha now imposing on them the requirements of his own troubled
and disappointed heart? - was to be the unwitting, innocent agent of
Chamcha's revenge, became even plainer to the plotter, Saladin, when he
found that Gibreel, with whom he had arranged to spend an equatorial London
afternoon, wanted nothing so much as to describe in embarrassing detail the
carnal ecstasy of sharing Allie's bed. What manner of people were these,
Saladin wondered with distaste, who enjoyed inflicting their intimacies on
non-participating others? As Gibreel (with something like relish) described
positions, love-bites, the secret vocabularies of desire, they strolled in
Brickhall Fields among schoolgirls and roller-skating infants and fathers
throwing boomerangs and frisbees incompetently at scornful sons, and picked
their way through broiling horizontal secretarial flesh; and Gibreel
interrupted his erotic rhapsody to mention, madly, that 'I sometimes look at
these pink people and instead of skin, Spoono, what I see is rotting meat; I
smell their putrefaction here,' he tapped his nostrils fervently, as if
revealing a mystery, 'in my
nose'
Then once again to Allie's inner thighs,
her cloudy eyes, the perfect valley of her lower back, the little cries she
liked to make. This was a man in imminent danger of coming apart at the
seams. The wild energy, the manic particularity of his descriptions
suggested to Chamcha that he'd been cutting down on his dosages again, that
he was rolling upwards towards the crest of a deranged high, that condition
of febrile excitement that was like blind drunkenness in one respect
(according to Allie), namely that Gibreel could remember nothing of what he
said or did when, as was inevitable, he came down to earth. - On and on went
the descriptions, the unusual length of her nipples, her dislike of having
her navel interfered with, the sensitivity of her toes. Chamcha told himself
that, madness or no madness, what all this sex-talk revealed (because there
had been Allie in the Citroen too) was the
weakness
of their so-called
'grand passion' - a term which Allie had only half-jokingly employed -
because, in a phrase, there was nothing else about it that was any good;
there was simply no other aspect of their togetherness
to
rhapsodize about.
- At the same time, however, he felt himself becoming aroused. He began to
see himself standing outside her window, while she stood there naked like an
actress on a screen, and a man's hands caressed her in a thousand ways,
bringing her closer and closer to ecstasy; he came to see himself as that
pair of hands, he could almost feel her coolness, her responses, almost hear
her cries. - He controlled himself. His desire disgusted him. She was
unattainable; this was pure voyeurism, and he would not succumb to it. - But
the desire Gibreel's revelations had aroused would not go away.
Gibreel's sexual obsession, Chamcha reminded himself, actually made
things easier. 'She's certainly a very attractive woman,' he murmured by way
of an experiment, and was gratified to receive a furious, strung-out glare
in return. After which Gibreel, making a show of controlling himself, put
his arm around Saladin and boomed: 'Apologies, Spoono, I'm a bad-tempered
bugger where she's concerned. But you and me! We're bhai-bhai! Been through
the worst and come out smiling; come on now, enough of this .little nowhere
park. Let's hit town.'
There is the moment before evil; then the moment of; then the time
after, when the step has been taken, and each subsequent, stride becomes
progressively easier. 'Fine with me,' Chamcha replied. 'It's good to see you
looking so well.'
A boy of six or seven cycled past them on a BMX bike. Chamcha, turning
his head to follow the boy's progress, saw that he was moving smoothly away
down an avenue of overarching trees, through which the hot sunlight managed
here and there to drip. The shock of discovering the location of his dream
disoriented Chamcha briefly, and left him with a bad taste in his mouth: the
sour flavour of might-have-beens. Gibreel hailed a taxi; and requested
Trafalgar Square.
O, he was in a high good humour that day, rubbishing London and the
English with much of his old brio. Where Chamcha saw attractively faded
grandeur, Gibreel saw a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its
past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up
appearances. Under the gaze of stone lions he chased pigeons, shouting: 'I
swear, Spoono, back home these fatties wouldn't last one day; let's take one
home for dinner.' Chamcha's Englished soul cringed for shame. Later, in
Covent Garden, he described for Gibreel's benefit the day the old fruit and
vegetable market moved to Nine Elms. The authorities, worried about rats,
had sealed the sewers and killed tens of thousands; but hundreds more
survived. 'That day, starving rats swarmed out on to the pavements,' he
recalled. 'All the way down the Strand and over Waterloo Bridge, in and out
of the shops, desperate for food.' Gibreel snorted. 'Now I know this is a
sinking ship,' he cried, and Chamcha felt furious at having given him the
opening. 'Even the bloody rats are off And, after a pause: 'What they needed
was a pied piper, no? Leading them to destruction with a tune.'
When he wasn't insulting the English or describing Allie's body from
the roots of her hair to the soft triangle of'the love-place, the goddamn
yoni,' he seemed to wish to make lists: what were Spoono's ten favourite
books, he wanted to know; also movies, female film stars, food. Chamcha
offered conventional cosmopolitan answers. His movie-list included
Potemkin,
Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador.
'You've been brainwashed,' Gibreel scoffed. 'All this Western art-house
crap.' His top ten of everything came from 'back home', and was aggressively
lowbrow.
Mother India, Mr. India, Shree Charsawbees:
no Ray, no Mrinal Sen,
no Aravindan or Ghatak. 'Your head's so full of junk,' he advised Saladin,
'you forgot everything worth knowing.'
His mounting excitement, his babbling determination to turn the world
into a cluster of hit parades, his fierce walking pace -they must have
walked twenty miles by the end of their travels -suggested to Chamcha that
it wouldn't take much, now, to push him over the edge.
It seems I turned out
to be a confidence man, too, Mimi. The art of the assassin is to draw the
victim close; makes him easier to knife.
Tm getting hungry,' Gibreel
imperiously announced. 'Take me to one of your top-ten eateries.'
In the taxicab, Gibreel needled Chamcha, who had not informed him of
the destination. 'Some Frenchy joint, na? Or Japanese, with raw fishes and
octopuses. God, why I trust your taste.'
They arrived at the Shaandaar Cafe.
Jumpy wasn't there.
Nor, apparently, had Mishal Sufyan patched things up with her mother;
Mishal and Hanif were absent, and neither Anahita nor her mother gave
Chamcha a greeting that could be described as warm. Only Haji Sufyan was
welcoming: 'Come, come, sit; you're looking good.' The cafe was oddly empty,
and even Gibreel's presence failed to create much of a stir. It took Chamcha
a few seconds to understand what was up; then he saw the quartet of white
youths sitting at a corner table, spoiling for a fight.
The young Bengali waiter (whom Hind had been obliged to employ after
her elder daughter's departure) came over and took their order - aubergines,
sikh kababs, rice - while staring angrily in the direction of the
troublesome quartet, who were, as Saladin now perceived, very drunk indeed.
The waiter, Amin, was as annoyed with Sufyan as the drunks. 'Should never
have let them sit,' he mumbled to Chamcha and Gibreel. 'Now I'm obliged to
serve. It's okay for the seth; he's not the front line, see.'
The drunks got their food at the same time as Chamcha and Gibreel. When
they started complaining about the cooking, the atmosphere in the room grew
even more highly charged. Finally they stood up. 'We're not eating this
shit, you cunts,' yelled the leader, a tiny, runty fellow with sandy hair, a
pale thin face, and spots. 'It's
shit.
You can go fuck yourselves, fucking
cunts.' His three companions, giggling and swearing, left the cafe. The
leader lingered for a moment. 'Enjoying your food?' he screamed at Chamcha
and Gibreel. 'It's fucking shit. Is that what you eat at home, is it?
Cunts.' Gibreel was wearing an expression that said, loud and clear: so this
is what the British, that great nation of conquerors, have become in the
end. He did not respond. The little rat-faced speaker came over. 'I asked
you a fucking question,' he said. 'I said. Are you fucking enjoying your
fucking
shit dinner?'
And Saladin Chamcha, perhaps out of his annoyance that
Gibreel had not been confronted by the man he'd all but killed - catching
him off guard from behind, the coward's way - found himself answering: 'We
would be, if it wasn't for you.' Ratboy, swaying on his feet, digested this
information; and then did a very surprising thing. Taking a deep breath, he
drew himself up to his full five foot five; then leaned forward, and spat
violently and copiously all over the food.
'Baba, if that's in your top ten,' Gibreel said in the taxi home,
'don't take me to the places you don't like so much.'
'"Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,'" Chamcha replied. 'It means,
"My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty." Nabokov.'
'Him again,' Gibreel complained. 'What bloody language?'
'He made it up. It's what Kinbote's Zemblan nurse tells him as a child.
In
Pale Fire.'
'Perndirstan,'
Farishta repeated. 'Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe.
I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a
made-up lingo of his own?'
They were almost back at Allie's flat overlooking Brickhall Fields. The
playwright Strindberg,' Chamcha said, absently, as if following some
profound train of thought, 'after two unhappy marriages, wedded a famous and
lovely twenty-year-old actress called Harriet Bosse. In the
Dream
she was a
great Puck. He wrote for her, too: the part of Eleanora in
Easter.
An "angel
of peace". The young men went crazy for her, and Strindberg, well, he got so
jealous he almost lost his mind. He tried to keep her locked up at home, far
from the eyes of men. She wanted to travel; he brought her travel books. It
was like the old Cliff Richard song:
Gonna lock her up in a trunk/so no big
hunk/can steal her away from me.'
Farishta's heavy head nodded in recognition. He had fallen into a kind
of reverie. 'What happened?' he inquired as they reached their destination.
'She left him,' Chamcha innocently declared. 'She said she could not
reconcile him with the human race.
Alleluia Cone read, as she walked home from the Tube, her mother's
deliriously happy letter from Stanford, Calif. 'If people tell you happiness
is unattainable,' Alicja wrote in large, looping, back-leaning, left-handed
letters, 'kindly point them in my direction. I'll put them straight. I found
it twice, the first time with your father, as you know, the second with this
kind, broad man whose face is the exact colour of the oranges that grow all
over these parts. Contentment, Allie. It beats excitement. Try it, you'll
like it.' When she looked up, Allie saw Maurice Wilson's ghost sitting atop
a large copper beech-tree in his usual woollen attire - tam-o'-shanter,
diamond-pattern Pringle jersey, plus-fours - looking uncomfortably
overdressed in the heat. 'I've no time for you now,' she told him, and he
shrugged.
I can wait.
Her feet were bad again. She set her jaw and marched
on.
Saladin Chamcha, concealed behind the very copper beech from which
Maurice Wilson's ghost was surveying Allie's painful progress, observed
Gibreel Farishta bursting out of the front door of the block of flats in
which he'd been waiting impatiently for her return; observed him red-eyed
and raving. The demons of jealousy were sitting on his shoulders, and he was
screaming out the same old song, wherethehell whothe whatthe
dontthinkyoucanpullthewool howdareyou bitchbitchbitch. It appeared that
Strindberg had succeeded where Jumpy (because absent) had failed.
The watcher in the upper branches dematerialized; the other, with a
satisfied nod, strolled away down an avenue of shady, spreading trees.
The telephone calls which now began to be received, first at their
London residence and subsequently at a remote address in Dumfries and
Galloway, by both Allie and Gibreel, were not too frequent; then again, they
could not be termed infrequent. Nor were there too many voices to be
plausible; then again, there were quite enough. These were not brief calls,
such as those made by heavy breathers and other abusers of the telephone
network, but, conversely, they never lasted long enough for the police,
eavesdropping, to track them to their source. Nor did the whole unsavoury
episode last very long - a mere matter of three and a half weeks, after
which the callers desisted forever; but it might also be mentioned that it
went on exactly as long as it needed to, that is, until it had driven
Gibreel Farishta to do to Allie Cone what he had previously done to Saladin
- namely, the Unforgivable Thing.
It should be said that nobody, not Allie, not Gibreel, not even the
professional phone-tappers they brought in, ever suspected the calls of
being a single man's work; but for Saladin Chamcha, once renowned (if only
in somewhat specialist circles) as the Man of a Thousand Voices, such a
deception was a simple matter, entirely lacking in effort or risk. In all,
he was obliged to select (from his thousand voices and a voice) a total of
no more than thirty-nine.
When Allie answered, she heard unknown men murmuring intimate secrets
in her ear, strangers who seemed to know her body's most remote recesses,
faceless beings who gave evidence of having learned, by experience, her
choicest preferences among the myriad forms of love; and once the attempts
at tracing the calls had begun her humiliation grew, because now she was
unable simply to replace the receiver, but had to stand and listen, hot in
the face and cold along the spine, making attempts (which didn't work)
actually to prolong the calls.
Gibreel also got his share of voices: superb Byronic aristocrats
boasting of having 'conquered Everest', sneering guttersnipes, unctuous
best-friend voices mingling warning and mock-commiseration,
a word to the
wise, how stupid can you, don't you know yet what she's, anything in
trousers, you poor moron, take it from a pal.
But one voice stood out from
the rest, the high soulful voice of a poet, one of the first voices Gibreel
heard and the one that got deepest under his skin; a voice that spoke
exclusively in rhyme, reciting doggerel verses of an understated naivety,
even innocence, which contrasted so greatly with the masturbatory coarseness
of most of the other callers that Gibreel soon came to think of it as the
most insidiously menacing of all.
I like coffee, I like tea,
I like things you do with me.
Tell her that,
the voice swooned, and rang off. Another day it returned
with another jingle:
I like butter, I like toast,
You're the one I love the most.
Give her that message, too; if you'd be so kind.
There was something
demonic, Gibreel decided, something profoundly immoral about cloaking
corruption in this greetings-card tum-ti-tum.
Rosy
apple, lemon tart,
Here's the name of my sweetheart.
A ... l ... l ...
Gibreel, in disgust and fear, banged down the
receiver; and trembled. After that the versifier stopped calling for a
while; but his was the voice Gibreel started waiting for, dreading its
reappearance, having perhaps accepted, at some level deeper than
consciousness, that this infernal, childlike evil was what would finish him
off for good.
But O how easy it all turned out to be! How comfortably evil lodged in
those supple, infinitely flexible vocal cords, those puppetmaster's strings!
How surely it stepped out along the high wires of the telephone system,
poised as a barefoot acrobat; how confidently it entered the victims'
presence, as certain of its effect as a handsome man in a perfectly tailored
suit! And how carefully it bided its time, sending forth every voice but the
voice that would deliver the coup de grace - for Saladin, too, had
understood the doggerel's special potency - deep voices and squeaky voices,
slow ones, quick ones, sad and cheerful, aggression-laden and shy. One by
one, they dripped into Gibreel's ears, weakening his hold on the real world,
drawing him little by little into their deceitful web, so that little by
little their obscene, invented women began to coat the real woman like a
viscous, green film, and in spite of his protestations to the contrary he
started slipping away from her; and then it was time for the return of the
little, satanic verses that made him mad.
Roses
are red, violets are blue,
Sugar never tasted sweet as you.
Pass it on.
He returned as innocent as ever, giving birth to a turmoil
of butterflies in Gibreel's knotting stomach. After that the rhymes came
thick and fast. They could have the smuttiness of the school playground:
When she's down at Waterloo
She don't wear no yes she do
When she's up at Leicester Square
She don't wear no underwear;
or, once or twice, the rhythm of a cheerleader's chant.
Knickerknacker, firecracker,
Sis! Boom! Bah!
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
And lastly, when they had returned to London, and Allie was absent at
the ceremonial opening of a freezer food mart in Hounslow, the last rhyme.
Violets are blue, roses are red,
I've got her right here in my bed.
Goodbye, sucker.
Dialling tone.
Alleluia Cone returned to find Gibreel gone, and in the vandalized
silence of her apartment she determined that this time she would not have
him back, no matter in what sorry condition or how wheedlingly he came
crawling to her, pleading for forgiveness and for love; because before he
left he had wrought a terrible vengeance upon her, destroying every one of
the surrogate Himalayas she had collected over the years, thawing the
ice-Everest she kept in her freezer, pulling down and ripping to shreds the
parachute-silk peaks that rose above her bed, and hacking to pieces (he'd
used the small axe she kept with the fire extinguisher in the broom
cupboard) the priceless whittled memento of her conquest of Chomolungma,
given her by Pemba the shcrpa, as a warning as well as a commemoration.
To
All Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again.
She flung open sash windows and screamed abuse at the innocent Fields
beneath. 'Die slowly! Burn in hell!'
Then, weeping, she rang Saladin Chamcha to tell him the bad news.
Mr. John Maslama, owner of the Hot Wax nightclub, the record chain of
the same name, and of 'Fair Winds', the legendary store where you could get
yourself the finest horns - clarinets, saxophones, trombones - that a person
could find to blow in the whole of London town, was a busy man, so he would
always ascribe to the intervention of Divine Providence the happy chance
that caused him to be present in the trumpet store when the Archangel of God
walked in with thunder and lightning sitting like laurels upon his noble
brow. Being a practical businessman, Mr. Maslama had up to this point
concealed from his employees his extracurricular work as the chief herald of
the returned Celestial and Semi-Godlike Being, sticking posters in his
shop-windows only when he was sure he was unobserved, neglecting to sign the
display advertisements he bought in newspapers and magazines at considerable
personal expense, proclaiming the imminent Glory of the Coming of the Lord.
He issued press releases through a public relations subsidiary of the
Valance agency, asking that his own anonymity be guarded carefully. 'Our
client is in a position to state,' these releases - which enjoyed, for a
time, an amused vogue among Fleet Street diarists - cryptically announced,
'that his eyes have seen the Glory referred to above. Gibreel is among us at
this moment, somewhere in the inner city of London - probably in Camden,
Brickhall, Tower Hamlets or Hackney - and he will reveal himself soon,
perhaps within days or weeks.' - All of this was obscure to the three tall,
languid, male attendants in the Fair Winds store (Maslama refused to employ
women sales assistants here; 'my motto,' he was fond of saying, 'is that
nobody trusts a female to help him with his horn'); which was why none of
them could believe their eyes when their hard-nosed employer suddenly
underwent a complete change of personality, and rushed over to this wild,
unshaven stranger as if he were God Almighty - with his two-tone patent
leather shoes, Armani suit and slicked down Robert de Niro hair above
proliferating eyebrows, Maslama didn't look the crawling type, but that's
what he was
doing,
all right, on his goddamn
belly,
pushing his staff aside,
I'll
attend to the gentleman myself,
bowing and scraping, walking backwards,
would you believe? -Anyway, the stranger had this
fat money-belt
under his
shirt and started hauling out numbers of high-denomination notes; he pointed
at a trumpet on a high shelf,
that's the one,
just like that, hardly looked
at it, and Mr. Maslama was up the ladder
pronto,
I'll-get-it-I-said-I'll-gef-it, and now the truly amazing part, he tried to
refuse payment, Maslama!, it was no no
sir
no charge
sir,
but the stranger
paid anyway, stuffing the notes into Maslama's upper jacket-pocket as if he
were some sort
of bellhop,
you had to be there, and last of all the customer
turns to the whole store and yells at the top of his voice,
I am the right
hand of God. -
Straight up, you wouldn't credit it, the bloody day of
judgment was at hand. - Maslama was right out of it after that, well shaken
he was, he actually fell to his actual
knees, -
Then the stranger held the
trumpet up over his head and shouted
I name this trumpet Azraeel, the Last
Trump, the Exterminator of Men! -
and we just stood there, I tell you,
turned to stone, because all around the fucking insane,
certifiable
bastard's head there was this bright
glow,
you know?, streaming out, like,
from a point behind his head.
A halo.
Say what you like,
the three shop-attendants afterwards repeated to
anyone who would listen,
say what you like, but we saw what we saw.
he death of Dr Uhuru Simba, formerly Sylvester Roberts, while in
custody awaiting trial, was described by the Brickhall constabulary's
community liaison officer, a certain Inspector Stephen Kinch, as 'a
million-to-one shot'. It appeared that Dr Simba had been experiencing a
nightmare so terrifying that it had caused him to scream piercingly in his
sleep, attracting the immediate attention of the two duty officers. These
gentlemen, rushing to his cell, arrived in time to see the still-sleeping
form of the gigantic man literally lift off its bunk under the malign
influence of the dream and plunge to the floor. A loud snap was heard by
both officers; it was the sound of Dr Uhuru Simba's neck breaking. Death had
been instantaneous.
The dead man's minuscule mother, Antoinette Roberts, standing in a
cheap black hat and dress on the back of her younger son's pick-up truck,
the veil of mourning pushed defiantly back off her face, was not slow to
seize upon Inspector Kinch's words and hurl them back into his florid,
loose-chinned, impotent face, whose hangdog expression bore witness to the
humiliation of being referred to by his brother officers as
niggerjimmy
and,
worse,
mushroom,
meaning that he was kept permanently in the dark, and from
time to time - for example in the present regrettable circumstances - people
threw shit all over him. 'I want you to understand,' Mrs Roberts declaimed
to the sizeable crowd that had gathered angrily outside the High Street
police station, 'that these people are gambling with our lives. They are
laying odds on our chances of survival. I want you all to consider what that
means in terms of their respect for us as human beings.' And Hanif Johnson,
as Uhuru Simba's solicitor, added his own clarification from Walcott
Roberts's pick-up truck, pointing out that his client's alleged fatal plunge
had been from the lower of the two bunks in his cell; that in an age of
extreme overcrowding in the country's lock-ups it was unusual, to say the
least, that the other bunk should have been unoccupied, ensuring that there
were no witnesses to the death except for prison officers; and that a
nightmare was by no means the only possible explanation for the screams of a
black man in the hands of the custodial authorities. In his concluding
remarks, afterwards termed 'inflammatory and unprofessional' by Inspector
Kinch, Hanif linked the community liaison officer's words to those of the
notorious racist John Kingsley Read, who had once responded to news of a
black man's death with the slogan, 'One down; one million to go.' The crowd
murmured and bubbled; it was a hot and malicious day. 'Stay hot,' Simba's
brother Walcott cried out to the assembly. 'Don't anybody cool off. Maintain
your rage.'
As Simba had in effect already been tried and convicted in what he had
once called the 'rainbow press - red as rags, yellow as streaks, blue as
movies, green as slime', his end struck many white people as rough justice,
a murderous monster's retributive fall. But in another court, silent and
black, he had received an entirely more favourable judgment, and these
differing estimations of the deceased moved, in the aftermath of his death,
on to the city streets, and fermented in the unending tropical heat. The
'rainbow press' was full of Simba's support for Qazhafi, Kho-meini, Louis
Farrakhan; while in the streets of Brickhall, young men and women
maintained, and fanned, the slow flame of their anger, a shadow-flame, but
one capable of blotting out the light.
Two nights later, behind the Charringtons Brewery in Tower Hamlets, the
'Granny Ripper' struck again. And the night after that, an old woman was
murdered near the adventure playground in Victoria Park, Hackney; once
again, the Ripper's hideous 'signature' - the ritual arrangement of the
internal organs around the victim's body, whose precise configuration had
never been made public - had been added to the crime. When Inspector Kinch,
looking somewhat ragged at the edges, appeared on television to propound the
extraordinary theory that a 'copycat killer' had somehow discovered the
trademark which had been so carefully concealed for so long, and had
therefore taken up the mantle which the late Uhuru Simba had let drop, -
then the Commissioner of Police also deemed it wise, as a precautionary
measure, to quadruple the police presence on the streets of Brickhall, and
to hold such large numbers of police in reserve that it proved necessary to
cancel the capital's football programme for the weekend. And, in truth,
tempers were fraying all over Uhuru Simba's old patch; Hanif Johnson issued
a statement to the effect that the increased police presence was
'provocative and incendiary', and at the Shaandaar and the Pagal Khana there
began to assemble groups of young blacks and Asians determined to confront
the cruising panda cars. At the Hot Wax, the effigy chosen for
meltdown
was
none other than the perspiring and already deliquescent figure of the
community liaison officer. And the temperature continued, inexorably, to
rise.
Violent incidents began to occur more frequently: attacks on black
families on council estates, harassment of black school-children on their
way home, brawls in pubs. At the Pagal Khana a rat-faced youth and three of
his cronies spat over many people's food; as a result of the ensuing affray
three Bengali waiters were charged with assault and the causing of actual
bodily harm; the expectorating quartet was not, however, detained. Stories
of police brutality, of black youths hauled swiftly into unmarked cars and
vans belonging to the special patrol groups and flung out, equally
discreetly, covered in cuts and bruises, spread throughout the communities.
Self-defence patrols of young Sikh, Bengali and Afro-Caribbean males -
described by their political opponents as
vigilante groups -
began to roam
the borough, on foot and in old Ford Zodiacs and Cortinas, determined not to
'take it lying down'. Hanif Johnson told his live-in lover, Mishal Sufyan,
that in his opinion one more Ripper killing would light the fuse. 'That
killer's not just crowing about being free,' he said. 'He's laughing about
Simba's death as well, and that's what the people can't stomach.'
Down these simmering streets, one unseasonally humid night, came
Gibreel Farishta, blowing his golden horn.
At eight o'clock that evening, a Saturday, Pamela Chamcha stood with
Jumpy Joshi - who had refused to let her go unaccompanied - next to the
Photo-Me machine in a corner of the main concourse of Euston station,
feeling ridiculously conspiratorial. At eight-fifteen she was approached by
a wiry young man who seemed taller than she remembered him; following him
without a word, she and Jumpy got into his battered blue pick-up truck and
were driven to a tiny flat above an off-licence in Railton Road, Brixton,
where Walcott Roberts introduced them to his mother, Antoinette. The three
men whom Pamela afterwards thought of as Haitians for what she recognized to
be stereotypical reasons were not introduced. 'Have a glass of ginger wine,'
Antoinette Roberts commanded. 'Good for the baby, too.'
When Walcott had done the honours Mrs. Roberts, looking lost in a
voluminous and threadbare armchair (her surprisingly pale legs,
matchstick-thin, emerging from beneath her black dress to end in mutinous,
pink ankle-socks and sensible lace-ups, failed by some distance to reach the
floor), got to business. 'These gentlemen were colleagues of my boy,' she
said. 'It turns out that the probable reason for his murder was the work he
was doing on a subject which I am told is also of interest to you. We
believe the time has come to work more formally, through the channels you
represent.' Here one of the three silent 'Haitians' handed Pamela a red
plastic briefcase. 'It contains,' Mrs. Roberts mildly explained, 'extensive
evidence of the existence of witches' covens throughout the Metropolitan
Police.'
Walcott stood up. 'We should go now,' he said firmly. 'Please.' Pamela
and Jumpy rose. Mrs. Roberts nodded vaguely, absently, cracking the joints
of her loose-skinned hands. 'Goodbye,' Pamela said, and offered conventional
regrets. 'Girl, don't waste breath,' Mrs. Roberts broke in. 'Just nail me
those warlocks. Nail them through the
heart.'
Walcott Roberts dropped them in Notting Hill at ten. Jumpy was coughing
badly and complaining of the pains in the head that had recurred a number of
times since his injuries at Shepperton, but when Pamela admitted to being
nervous at possessing the only copy of the explosive documents in the
plastic briefcase, Jumpy once again insisted on accompanying her to the
Brickhall community relations council's offices, where she planned to make
photocopies to distribute to a number of trusted friends and colleagues. So
it was that at ten-fifteen they were in Pamela's beloved MG, heading east
across the city, into the gathering storm. An old, blue Mercedes panel van
followed them, as it had followed Walcott's pick-up truck; that is, without
being noticed.
Fifteen minutes earlier, a patrol group of seven large young Sikhs
jammed into a Vauxhall Cavalier had been driving over the Malaya Crescent
canal bridge in southern Brickhall. Hearing a cry from the towpath under the
bridge, and hurrying to the scene, they found a bland, pale man of medium
height and build, fair hair flopping forward over hazel eyes, leaping to his
feet, scalpel in hand, and rushing away from the body of an old woman whose
blue wig had fallen off and lay floating like a jellyfish in the canal. The
young Sikhs easily caught up with and overpowered the running man.
By eleven pm the news of the mass murderer's capture had penetrated
every cranny of the borough, accompanied by a slew of rumours: the police
had been reluctant to charge the maniac, the patrol members had been
detained for questioning, a cover-up was being planned. Crowds began to
gather on street corners, and as the pubs emptied a series of fights broke
out. There was some damage to property: three cars had their windows
smashed, a video store was looted, a few bricks were thrown. It was at this
point, at half-past eleven on a Saturday night, with the clubs and
dance-halls beginning to yield up their excited, highly charged populations,
that the divisional superintendent of police, in consultation with higher
authority, declared that riot conditions now existed in central Brickhall,
and unleashed the full might of the Metropolitan Police against the
'rioters'.
Also at this point, Saladin Chamcha, who had been dining with Allie
Cone at her apartment overlooking Brickhall Fields, keeping up appearances,
sympathizing, murmuring encouraging insincerities, emerged into the night;
found a
testudo
of helmeted men with plastic shields at the ready moving
towards him across the Fields at a steady, inexorable trot; witnessed the
arrival overhead of giant, locust-swarming helicopters from which light was
falling like heavy rain; saw the advance of the water cannons; and, obeying
an irresistible primal reflex, turned tail and ran, not knowing that he was
going the wrong way, running full speed in the direction of the Shaandaar.
Television cameras arrive just in time for the raid on Club Hot Wax.
This is what a television camera sees: less gifted than the human eye,
its night vision is limited to what klieg lights will show. A helicopter
hovers over the nightclub, urinating light in long golden streams; the
camera understands this image. The machine of state bearing down upon its
enemies. - And now there's a camera in the sky; a news editor somewhere has
sanctioned the cost of aerial photography, and from another helicopter a
news team is
shooting down.
No attempt is made to chase this helicopter
away. The noise of rotor blades drowns the noise of the crowd. In this
respect, again, video recording equipment is less sensitive than, in this
case, the human ear.
- Cut. - A man lit by a sun-gun speaks rapidly into a microphone.
Behind him there is a disorderment of shadows. But between the reporter and
the disordered shadow-lands there stands a wall: men in riot helmets,
carrying shields. The reporter speaks gravely; petrolbombs plasticbullets
policeinjuries water-cannon looting, confining himself, of course, to facts.
But the camera sees what he does not say. A camera is a thing easily broken
or purloined; its fragility makes it fastidious. A camera requires law,
order, the thin blue line. Seeking to preserve itself, it remains behind the
shielding wall, observing the shadow-lands from afar, and of course from
above: that is, it chooses sides.
- Cut. - Sun-guns illuminate a new face, saggy-jowled, flushed. This
face is named: sub-titled words appear across his tunic.
Inspector Stephen
Kinch.
The camera sees him for what he is: a good man in an impossible job.
A father, a man who likes his pint. He speaks: cannot-tolerate-no-go-areas
better-pro-tection-required-for-policemen
see-the-plastic-riot-shields-catching-fire . He refers to organized crime,
political agitators, bomb-factories, drugs. 'We understand some of these
kids may feel they have grievances but we will not and cannot be the
whipping boys of society.' Emboldened by the lights and the patient, silent
lenses, he goes further. These kids don't know how lucky they are, he
suggests. They should consult their kith and kin. Africa, Asia, the
Caribbean: now those are places with real problems. Those are places where
people might have grievances worth respecting. Things aren't so bad here,
not by a long chalk; no slaughters here, no torture, no military coups.
People should value what they've got before they lose it. Ours always was a
peaceful land, he says. Our industrious island race. - Behind him, the
camera sees stretchers, ambulances, pain. - It sees strange humanoid shapes
being hauled up from the bowels of the Club Hot Wax, and recognizes the
effigies of the mighty. Inspector Kinch explains. They cook them in an oven
down there, they call it fun, I wouldn't call it that myself. - The camera
observes the wax models with distaste. - Is there not something
witchy
about
them, something cannibalistic, an unwholesome smell? Have
black arts
been
practised here? - The camera sees broken windows. It sees something burning
in the middle distance: a car, a shop. It cannot understand, or demonstrate,
what any of this achieves. These people are burning their own streets.
- Cut. - Here is a brightly lit video store. Several sets have been
left on in the windows; the camera, most delirious of narcissists, watches
TV, creating, for an instant, an infinite recession of television sets,
diminishing to a point. - Cut. - Here is a serious head bathed in light: a
studio discussion. The head is talking about
outlaws.
Billy the Kid, Ned
Kelly: these were men who stood
for
as well as
against.
Modern
mass-murderers, lacking this heroic dimension, are no more than sick,
damaged beings, utterly blank as personalities, their crimes distinguished
by an attention to procedure, to methodology - let's say
ritual -
driven,
perhaps, by the nonentity's longing to be noticed, to rise out of the ruck
and become, for a moment, a star. - Or by a kind of transposed deathwish: to
kill the beloved and so destroy the self. -
Which is the Granny Ripper?
a
questioner asks.
And what about Jack? -
The true outlaw, the head insists,
is a dark mirror-image of the hero. -
These rioters, perhaps?
comes the
challenge.
Aren't you in danger of glamorizing, of legitimizing'? -
The head
shakes, laments the materialism of modern youth. Looting video stores is not
what the head has been talking about. -
But what about the old-timers, then?
Butch Cassidy, the James brothers, Captain Moonlight, the Kelly gang. They
all robbed - did they not? - banks. -
Cut. - Later that night, the camera
will return to this shop-window. The television sets will be missing.
- From the air, the camera watches the entrance to Club Hot Wax. Now
the police have finished with wax effigies and are bringing out real human
beings. The camera homes in on the arrested persons: a tall albino man; a
man in an Armani suit, looking like a dark mirror-image of de Niro; a young
girl of -what? - fourteen, fifteen? - a sullen young man of twenty or
thereabouts. No names are titled; the camera does not know these faces.
Gradually, however,
the facts
emerge. The club DJ, Sewsunker Ram, known as
'Pinkwalla', and its proprietor, Mr. John Maslama, are to be charged with
running a large-scale narcotics operation - crack, brown sugar, hashish,
cocaine. The man arrested with them, an employee at Maslama's nearby 'Fair
Winds' music store, is the registered owner of a van in which an unspecified
quantity of 'hard drugs' has been discovered; also numbers of 'hot' video
recorders. The young girl's name is Anahita Sufyan; she is under-age, is
said to have been drinking heavily, and, it is hinted, having sex with at
least one of the three arrested men. She is further reported to have a
history of truancy and association with known criminal types: a delinquent,
clearly. - An illuminated journalist will offer the nation these titbits
many hours after the event, but the news is already running wild in the
streets: Pinkwalla! - And the
Wax:
they smashed the place up -
totalled
it!
- Now it's
war.
This happens, however - as does a great deal else - in places which the
camera cannot see.
Gibreel:
moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city
without eating or sleeping, with the trumpet named Azraeel tucked safely in
a pocket of his greatcoat, he no longer recognizes the distinction between
the waking and dreaming states; - he understands now something of what
omnipresence must be like, because he is moving through several stories at
once, there is a Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cone, and a
Gibreel hovering over the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching in
secret over the progress of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the moment
at which he will reveal himself, and a Gibreel who feels, more powerfully
every day, the will of the adversary, drawing him ever closer, leading him
towards their final embrace: the subtle, deceiving adversary, who has taken
the face of his friend, of Saladin his truest friend, in order to lull him
into lowering his guard. And there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets
of London, trying to understand the will of God.
Is he to be the agent of God's wrath?
Or of his love?
Is he vengeance or forgiveness? Should the fatal trumpet remain in his
pocket, or should he take it out and blow?
(I'm giving him no instructions. I, too, am interested in his choices -
in the result of his wrestling match. Character
vs.
destiny: a free-style
bout. Two falls, two submissions or a knockout will decide.)
Wrestling, through his many stories, he proceeds. There are times when
he aches for her, Alleluia, her very name an exaltation; but then he
remembers the diabolic verses, and turns his thoughts away. The horn in his
pocket demands to be blown; but he restrains himself. Now is not the time.
Searching for clues -
what is to be done?
- he stalks the city streets.
Somewhere he sees a television set through an evening window. There is
a woman's head on the screen, a famous 'presenter', being interviewed by an
equally famous, twinkling Irish 'host'.
-
What would be the worst thing you
could imagine? Oh, I think, I'm sure, it would be, oh,
yes:
to be alone on
Christmas Eve. You'd really have to face yourself, wouldn't you, you'd look
into a harsh mirror and ask yourself,
is this all there is? -
Gibreel,
alone, not knowing the date, walks on. In the mirror, the adversary
approaches at the same pace as his own, beckoning, stretching out his arms.
The city sends him messages. Here, it says, is where the Dutch king
decided to live when he came over three centuries ago. In those days this
was out of town, a village, set in green English fields. But when the King
arrived to set up house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick
buildings with Dutch crenellations rising against the sky, so that his
courtiers might have places in which to reside. Not all migrants are
powerless, the still-standing edifices whisper. They impose their needs on
their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land,
imagining it afresh. But look out, the city warns. Incoherence, too, must
have its day. Riding in the parkland in which he'd chosen to live
-
which
he'd
civilized
- William III was thrown by his horse, fell hard against the
recalcitrant ground, and broke his royal neck.
Some days he finds himself among walking corpses, great crowds of the
dead, all of them refusing to admit they're done for, corpses mutinously
continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting,
going home to make love, smoking cigarettes.
But you're dead,
he shouts at
them.
Zombies, get into your graves.
They ignore him, or laugh, or look
embarrassed, or menace him with their fists. He falls silent, and hurries
on.
The city becomes vague, amorphous. It is becoming impossible to
describe the world. Pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge, fade into mists,
emerge. As does she: Allie, Al-Lat.
She is the exalted bird. Greatly to be
desired.
He remembers now: she told him, long ago, about Jumpy's poetry.
He's trying to make a collection. A book.
The thumb-sucking artist with his
infernal views. A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts
the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in
return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of
his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but
posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who
wins.
What does a poet write? Verses. What jingle-jangles in Gibreel's brain?
Verses. What broke his heart? Verses and again verses.
The trumpet, Azraeel, calls out from a greatcoat pocket:
Pick me up!
Yesyesyes: the Trump. To hell with it all, the whole sorry mess: just puff
up your cheeks and rooty-toot-toot. Come on, it's party time.
How hot it is: steamy, close, intolerable. This is no Proper London:
not this improper city. Airstrip One, Mahagonny, Alphaville. He wanders
through a confusion of languages. Babel: a contraction of the Assyrian
'babilu'. 'The gate of God.' Babylondon.
Where's this?
- Yes. - He meanders, one night, behind the cathedrals of the
Industrial Revolution, the railway termini of north London. Anonymous King's
Cross, the bat-like menace of the St Pancras tower, the red-and-black
gas-holders inflating and deflating like giant iron lungs. Where once in
battle Queen Boudicca fell, Gibreel Farishta wrestles with himself.
The Goodsway: - but O what succulent goods lounge in doorways and under
tungsten lamps, what delicacies are on offer in that way! - Swinging
handbags, calling out, silver-skirted, wearing fish-net tights: these are
not only young goods (average age thirteen to fifteen) but also cheap. They
have short, identical histories: all have babies stashed away somewhere, all
have been thrown out of their homes by irate, puritanical parents, none of
them are white. Pimps with knives take ninety per cent of their earnings.
Goods are only goods, after all, especially when they're trash.
- Gibreel Farishta in the Goodsway is hailed from shadows and lamps;
and quickens, at first, his pace.
What's this to do with me? Bloody
pussies-galore.
But then he slows and stops, hearing something else calling
to him from lamps and shadows, some need, some wordless plea, hidden just
under the tinny voices of ten-pound tarts. His footsteps slow down, then
halt. He is held by their desires.
For what?
They are moving towards him
now, drawn to him like fishes on unseen hooks. As they near him their walks
change, their hips lose their swagger, their faces start looking their age,
in spite of all the make-up. When they reach him, they kneel.
Who do you say
that I am?
he asks, and wants to add:
I know your names. I met you once
before, elsewhere, behind a curtain. Twelve of you then as now. Ayesha,
Hafsah, Ramlah, Sawdah, Zainab, Zainab, Maimunah, Sofia, Juwairiyah, Umm
Salamah the Makhzumite, Rehana the Jew, and the beautiful Mary the Copt.
Silently, they remain on their knees. Their wishes are made known to him
without words.
What is an archangel but a puppet? Kathputli, marionette. The
faithful bend us to their will. We are forces of nature and they, our
masters. Mistresses, too.
The heaviness in his limbs, the heat, and in his
ears a buzzing like bees on summer afternoons. It would be easy to faint.
He does not faint.
He stands among the kneeling children, waiting for the pimps.
And when they come, he at last takes out, and presses to his lips, his
unquiet horn: the exterminator, Azraeel.
After the stream of fire has emerged from the mouth of his golden
trumpet and consumed the approaching men, wrapping them in a cocoon of
flame, unmaking them so completely that not even their shoes remain sizzling
on the sidewalk, Gibreel understands.
He is walking again, leaving behind him the gratitude of the whores,
heading in the direction of the borough of Brickhall, Azraeel once more in
his capacious pocket. Things are becoming clear.
He is the Archangel Gibreel, the angel of the Recitation, with the
power of revelation in his hands. He can reach into the breasts of men and
women, pick out the desires of their inmost hearts, and make them real. He
is the quencher of desires, the slaker of lusts, the fulfiller of dreams. He
is the genie of the lamp, and his master is the Roc.
What desires, what imperatives are in the midnight air? He breathes
them in. - And nods, so be it, yes. - Let it be fire. This is a city that
has cleansed itself in flame, purged itself by burning down to the ground.
Fire, falling fire. This is the judgment of God in his wrath,' Gibreel
Farishta proclaims to the riotous night, 'that men be granted their heart's
desires, and that they be by them consumed.'
Low-cost high-rise housing enfolds him.
Nigger eat white man's shit,
suggest the unoriginal walls. The buildings have names: 'Isandhlwana',
'Rorke's Drift'. But a revisionist enterprise is underway, for two of the
four towers have been renamed, and bear, now, the names 'Mandela' and
'Toussaint l'Ouverture'.-The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete
formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling of a perpetual
wind, and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle
tyres, shards of broken doors, dolls' legs, vegetable refuse extracted from
plastic disposal bags by hungry cats and dogs, fast-food packets, rolling
cans, shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended
angers, accumulated bitterness, vomited fear, and a rusting bath. He stands
motionless while small groups of residents rush past in different
directions. Some (not all) are carrying weapons. Clubs, bottles, knives. All
of the groups contain white youngsters as well as black. He raises his
trumpet to his lips and begins to play.
Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the
discarded heaps of possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile
of envy: it burns greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the
rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out
of his horn and they dance upon the concrete, needing neither combustible
materials nor roots. Here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a
silver rose. -And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing
like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their
neighbours, forming hedges of multicoloured flame. It is like watching a
luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden
blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable,
a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivalling in its own incandescent
fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping
beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.
But here, there is no beauty, sleeping within. There is Gibreel
Farishta, walking in a world of fire. In the High Street he sees houses
built of flame, with walls of fire, and flames like gathered curtains
hanging at the windows. - And there are men and women with fiery skins
strolling, running, milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The street
has become red hot, molten, a river the colour of blood. - All, all is
ablaze as he toots his merry horn,
giving the people what they want,
the
hair and teeth of the citizenry are smoking and red, glass burns, and birds
fly overhead on blazing wings.
The adversary is very close. The adversary is a magnet, is a
whirlpool's eye, is the irresistible centre of a black hole, his
gravitational force creating an event horizon from which neither Gibreel,
nor light, can escape.
This way,
the adversary calls.
I'm over here.
Not a palace, but only a cafe. And in the rooms above, a bed and
breakfast joint. No sleeping princess, but a disappointed woman, overpowered
by smoke, lies unconscious here; and beside her, on the floor beside their
bed, and likewise unconscious, her husband, the Mecca-returned
ex-schoolteacher, Sufyan. -While, elsewhere in the burning Shaandaar,
faceless persons stand at windows waving piteously for help, being unable
(no mouths) to scream.
The adversary: there he blows!
Silhouetted against the backdrop of the ignited Shaandaar
Cafe, see, that's the very fellow!
Azraeel leaps unbidden into Farishta's hand.
Even an archangel may experience a revelation, and when Gibreel
catches, for the most fleeting of instants, Saladin Chamcha's eye, - then in
that fractional and infinite moment the veils are ripped away from his
sight, - he sees himself walking with Chamcha in Brickhall Fields, lost in a
rhapsody, revealing the most intimate secrets of his lovemaking with
Alleluia Cone, - those same secrets which afterwards were whispered into
telephones by a host of evil voices, - beneath all of which Gibreel now
discerns the unifying talent of the adversary, who could be guttural and
high, who insulted and ingratiated, who was both insistent and shy, who was
prosaic, - yes! - and versifying, too. - And now, at last, Gibreel Farishta
recognizes for the first time that the adversary has not simply adopted
Chamcha's features as a disguise; - nor is this any case of paranormal
possession, of body-snatching by an invader up from Hell; that, in short,
the evil is not external to Saladin, but springs from some recess of his own
true nature, that it has been spreading through his selfhood like a cancer,
erasing what was good in him, wiping out his spirit, - and doing so with
many deceptive feints and dodges, seeming at times to recede; while, in
fact, during the illusion of remission, under cover of it, so to speak, it
continued perniciously to spread; - and now, no doubt, it has filled him up;
now there is nothing left of Saladin but this, the dark fire of evil in his
soul, consuming him as wholly as the other fire, multicoloured and
engulfing, is devouring the screaming city. Truly these are 'most horrid,
malicious, bloody flames, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire'.
The fire is an arch across the sky. Saladin Chamcha, the adversary, who
is also
Spoono, my old Chumch,
has disappeared into the doorway of the
Shaandaar Cafe. This is the maw of the black hole; the horizon closes around
it, all other possibilities fade, the universe shrinks to this solitary and
irresistible point. Blowing a great blast on his trumpet, Gibreel plunges
through the open door.
The building occupied by the Brickhall community relations council was
a single-storey monster in purple brick with bulletproof windows, a
bunker-like creation of the 1960s, when such lines were considered sleek. It
was not an easy building to enter; the door had been fitted with an
entryphone and opened on to a narrow alley down one side of the building
which ended at a second, also security-locked, door. There was also a
burglar alarm.
This alarm, it afterwards transpired, had been switched off, probably
by the two persons, one male, one female, who had effected an entry with the
assistance of a key. It was officially suggested that these persons had been
bent on an act of sabotage, an 'inside job', since one of them, the dead
woman, had in fact been an employee of the organization whose offices these
were. The reasons for the crime remained obscure, and as the miscreants had
perished in the blaze, it was unlikely that they would ever come to light.
An 'own goal' remained, however, the most probable explanation.
A tragic affair; the dead woman had been heavily pregnant.
Inspector Stephen Kinch, issuing the statement in which these facts
were stated, made a linkage' between the fire at the Brickhall CRC and that
at the Shaandaar Cafe, where the second dead person, the male, had been a
semi-permanent resident. It was possible that the man had been the real
firebug and the woman, who was his mistress although married to and still
cohabiting with another man, had been no more than his dupe.
Political motives - both parties were well known for their radical
views - could not be discounted, though such was the muddiness of the water
in the far-left groupuscules they frequented that it would be hard ever to
get a clear picture of what such motives might have been. It was also
possible that the two crimes, even if committed by the same man, could have
had different motivations. Possibly the man was simply the hired criminal,
burning down the Shaandaar for the insurance money at the behest of the
now-deceased owners, and torching the CRC at the behest of his lover,
perhaps on account of some intra-office vendetta?
That the burning of the CRC was an act of arson was beyond doubt.
Quantities of petrol had been poured over desks, papers, curtains. 'Many
people do not understand how quickly a petrol fire spreads,' Inspector Kinch
stated to scribbling journalists. The corpses, which had been so badly
burned that dental records had been required for identification purposes,
had been found in the photocopying room. 'That's all we have.' The end.
I have more.
I have certain questions, anyhow. - About, for instance, an unmarked
blue Mercedes panel van, which followed Walcott Roberts's pick-up truck, and
then Pamela Chamcha's MG. -About the men who emerged from this van, their
faces behind Hallowe'en masks, and forced their way into the CRC offices
just as Pamela unlocked the outer door. - About what really happened inside
those offices, because purple brick and bulletproof glass cannot easily be
penetrated by the human eye. - And about, finally, the whereabouts of a red
plastic briefcase, and the documents it contains.
Inspector Kinch? Are you there?
No. He's gone. He has no answers for me.
Here is Mr. Saladin Chamcha, in the camel coat with the silk collar,
running down the High Street like some cheap crook. - The same, terrible Mr.
Chamcha who has just spent his evening in the company of a distraught
Alleluia Cone, without feeling a flicker of remorse. - 'I look down towards
his feet,' Othello said of lago, 'but that's a fable.' Nor is Chamcha
fabulous any more; his humanity is sufficient form and explanation for his
deed. He has destroyed what he is not and cannot be; has taken revenge,
returning treason for treason; and has done so by exploiting his enemy's
weakness, bruising his unprotected heel. - There is satisfaction in this. -
Still, here is Mr. Chamcha, running. The world is full of anger and event.
Things hang in the balance. A building burns.
Boomba,
pounds his heart.
Doomba, boomba, dadoom.
Now he sees the Shaandaar, on fire; and comes to a skidding halt. He
has a constricted chest; -
badoomba! -
and there's a pain in his left arm.
He doesn't notice; is staring at the burning building.
And sees Gibreel Farishta.
And turns; and runs inside.
'Mishal! Sufyan! Hind!' cries evil Mr Chamcha. The ground floor is not
as yet ablaze. He flings open the door to the stairs, and a scalding,
pestilential wind drives him back.
Dragon's breath,
he thinks. The landing
is on fire; the flames reach in sheets from floor to ceiling. No possibility
of advance.
'Anybody?' screams Saladin Chamcha. 'Is anybody there?' But the dragon
roars louder than he can shout.
Something invisible kicks him in the chest, sends him toppling
backwards, on to the cafe floor, amid the empty tables. Doom, sings his
heart.
Take this. And this.
There is a noise above his head like the scurrying of a billion rats,
spectral rodents following a ghostly piper. He looks up: the ceiling is on
fire. He finds he cannot stand. As he watches, a section of the ceiling
detaches itself, and he sees the segment of beam falling towards him. He
crosses his arms in feeble self-defence.
The beam pins him to the floor, breaking both his arms. His chest is
full of pain. The world recedes. Breathing is hard. He can't speak. He is
the Man of a Thousand Voices, and there isn't one left.
Gibreel Farishta, holding Azraeel, enters the Shaandaar Cafe.
What happens when you win?
When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise
is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.
- 'Spoono,' Gibreel nods at the fallen man. 'You really fooled me,
mister; seriously, you're quite a guy.' - And Chamcha, seeing what's in
Gibreel's eyes, cannot deny the knowledge he sees there. 'Wha,' he begins,
and gives up.
What are you going to do?
Fire is falling all around them now:
a sizzle of golden rain. 'Why'd you do it?' Gibreel asks, then dismisses the
question with a wave of the hand. 'Damnfool thing to be asking. Might as
well inquire, what possessed you to rush in here? Damnfool thing to do.
People, eh, Spoono? Crazy bastards, that's all.'
Now there are pools of fire all around them. Soon they will be
encircled, marooned in a temporary island amid this lethal sea. Chamcha is
kicked a second time in the chest, and jerks violently. Facing three deaths
- by fire, by 'natural causes', and by Gibreel - he strains desperately,
trying to speak, but only croaks emerge. 'Fa. Gur. Mmm.'
Forgive me.
'Ha.
Pa.'
Have pity.
The cafe tables are burning. More beams fall from above.
Gibreel seems to have fallen into a trance. He repeats, vaguely: 'Bloody
damnfool things.'
Is it possible that evil is never total, that its victory, no matter
how overwhelming, is never absolute?
Consider this fallen man. He sought without remorse to shatter the mind
of a fellow human being; and exploited, to do so, an entirely blameless
woman, at least partly owing to his own impossible and voyeuristic desire
for her. Yet this same man has risked death, with scarcely any hesitation,
in a foolhardy rescue attempt.
What does this mean?
The fire has closed around the two men, and smoke is everywhere. It can
only be a matter of seconds before they are overcome. There are more urgent
questions to answer than the
damnfool
ones above.
What choice will Farishta make?
Does he have a choice?
Gibreel lets fall his trumpet; stoops; frees Saladin from the prison of
the fallen beam; and lifts him in his arms. Chamcha, with broken ribs as
well as arms, groans feebly, sounding like the creationist Dumsday before he
got a new tongue of choicest rump. 'Ta. La.'
It's too late.
A little lick of
fire catches at the hem of his coat. Acrid black smoke fills all available
space, creeping behind his eyes, deafening his ears, clogging his nose and
lungs. -Now, however, Gibreel Farishta begins softly to exhale, a long,
continuous exhalation of extraordinary duration, and as his breath blows
towards the door it slices through the smoke and fire like a knife; - and
Saladin Chamcha, gasping and fainting, with a mule inside his chest, seems
to see - but will ever afterwards be unsure if it was truly so - the fire
parting before them like the red sea it has become, and the smoke dividing
also, like a curtain or a veil; until there lies before them a clear pathway
to the door; -whereupon Gibreel Farishta steps quickly forward, bearing
Saladin along the path of forgiveness into the hot night air; so that on a
night when the city is at war, a night heavy with enmity and rage, there is
this small redeeming victory for love.
Conclusions.
Mishal Sufyan is outside the Shaandaar when they emerge, weeping for
her parents, being comforted by Hanif - It is GibreePs turn to collapse;
still carrying Saladin, he passes out at Mishal's feet.
Now Mishal and Hanif are in an ambulance with the two unconscious men,
and while Chamcha has an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth Gibreel,
suffering nothing worse than exhaustion, is talking in his sleep: a
delirious babble about a magic trumpet and the fire that he blew, like
music, from its mouth. - And Mishal, who remembers Chamcha as a devil, and
has come to accept the possibility of many things, wonders: 'Do you think -
?' - But Hanif is definite, firm. 'Not a chance. This is Gibreel Farishta,
the actor, don't you recognize? Poor guy's just playing out some movie
scene.' Mishal won't let it go. 'But, Hanif,' - and he becomes emphatic.
Speaking gently, because she has just been orphaned, after all, he
absolutely insists. 'What has happened here in Brickhall tonight is a
socio-political phenomenon. Let's not fall into the trap of some damn
mysticism. We're talking about history: an event in the history of Britain.
About the process of change.'
At once Gibreel's voice changes, and his subject-matter also. He
mentions
pilgrims,
and a
dead baby,
and
like in 'The Ten Commandments',
and
a
decaying mansion,
and a
tree;
because in the aftermath of the purifying
fire he is dreaming, for the very last time, one of his serial dreams; - and
Hanif says: 'Listen, Mishu, darling. Just make-believe, that's all.' He puts
his arm around her, kisses her cheek, holding her fast. Stay
with me. The
world is real. We have to live in it; we have to live here, to live on.
Just then Gibreel Farishta, still asleep, shouts at the top of his
voice.
'Mishal! Come back! Nothing's happening! Mishal, for pity's sake; turn
around, come back, come back.'
Vlll
The
Parting of the
Arabian Sea
It had been the habit of Srinivas the toy merchant to threaten his wife
and children, from time to time, that one day, when the material world had
lost its savour, he would drop everything, including his name, and turn
sanyasi, wandering from village to village with a begging bowl and a stick.
Mrs. Srinivas treated these threats tolerantly, knowing that her gelatinous
and good-humoured husband liked to be thought of as a devout man, but also a
bit of an adventurer (had he not insisted on that absurd and scarifying
flight into the Grand Canyon in Amrika years ago?); the idea of becoming a
mendicant holy man satisfied both needs. Yet, when she saw his ample
posterior so comfortably ensconced in an armchair on their front porch,
looking out at the world through stout wire netting, - or when she watched
him playing with their youngest daughter, five-year-old Minoo, - or when she
observed that his appetite, far from diminishing to begging-bowl
proportions, was increasing contentedly with the passing years - then Mrs.
Srinivas puckered up her lips, adopted the insouciant expression of a film
beauty (though she was as plump and wobbling as her spouse) and went
whistling indoors. As a result, when she found his chair empty, with his
glass of lime-juice unfinished on one of its arms, it took her completely by
surprise.
To tell the truth, Srinivas himself could never properly explain what
made him leave the comfort of his morning porch and stroll across to watch
the arrival of the villagers of Titlipur. The urchin boys who knew
everything an hour before it happened had been shouting in the street about
an improbable procession of people coming with bags and baggage down the
potato track towards the grand trunk road, led by a girl with silver hair,
with great exclamations of butterflies over their heads, and, bringing up
the rear, Mirza Saeed Akhtar in his olive-green Mercedes-Benz station wagon,
looking like a mango-stone had got stuck in his throat.
For all its potato silos and famous toy factories, Chatnapatna was not
such a big place that the arrival of one hundred and fifty persons could
pass unnoticed. Just before the procession arrived Srinivas had received a
deputation from his factory workers, asking for permission to close down
operations for a couple of hours so that they could witness the great event.
Knowing they would probably take the time off anyway, he agreed. But he
himself remained, for a time, stubbornly planted on his porch, trying to
pretend that the butterflies of excitement had not begun to stir in his
capacious stomach. Later, he would confide to Mishal Akhtar: 'It was a
presentiment. What to say? I knew you-all were not here for refreshments
only. She had come for me.'
Titlipur arrived in Chatnapatna in a consternation of howling babies,
shouting children, creaking oldsters, and sour jokes from the Osman of the
boom-boom bullock for whom Srinivas did not care one jot. Then the urchins
informed the toy king that among the travellers were the wife and
mother-in-law of the zamindar Mirza Saeed, and they were on foot like the
peasants, wearing simple kurta-pajamas and no jewels at all. This was the
point at which Srinivas lumbered over to the roadside canteen around which
the Titlipur pilgrims were crowding while potato bhurta and parathas were
handed round. He arrived at the same time as the Chatnapatna police jeep.
The Inspector was standing on the passenger seat, shouting through a
megaphone that he intended to take strong action against this 'communal'
march if it was not disbanded at once. Hindu-Muslim business, Srinivas
thought; bad, bad.
The police were treating the pilgrimage as some kind of sectarian
demonstration, but when Mirza Saeed Akhtar stepped forward and told the
Inspector the truth the officer became confused. Sri Srinivas, a Brahmin,
was obviously not a man who had ever considered making a pilgrimage to
Mecca, but he was impressed nevertheless. He pushed up through the crowd to
hear what the zamindar was saying: 'And it is the purpose of these good
people to walk to the Arabian Sea, believing as they do that the waters will
part for them.' Mirza Saeed's voice sounded weak, and the Inspector,
Chatnapatna's Station Head Officer, was unconvinced. 'Are you serious, ji?'
Mirza Saeed said: 'Not me.
They,
but, are serious as hell. I'm planning to
change their minds before anything crazy happens.' The SHO, all straps,
moustachioes and self-importance, shook his head. 'But, see here, sir, how
can I permit so many individuals to congregate on the street? Tempers can be
inflamed; incident is possible.' Just then the crowd of pilgrims parted and
Srinivas saw for the first time the fantastic figure of the girl dressed
entirely in butterflies, with snowy hair flowing down as far as her ankles.
'Arre deo,' he shouted, 'Ayesha, is it you?' And added, foolishly: Then
where are my Family Planning dolls?'
His outburst was ignored; everybody was watching Ayesha as she
approached the puff-chested SHO. She said nothing, but smiled and nodded,
and the fellow seemed to grow twenty years younger, until in the manner of a
boy of ten or eleven he said, 'Okay okay, mausi. Sorry, ma. No offence. I
beg your pardon, please.' That was the end of the police trouble. Later that
day, in the afternoon heat, a group of town youths known to have RSS and
Vishwa Hindu Parishad connections began throwing stones from nearby
rooftops; whereupon the Station Head Officer had them arrested and in jail
in two minutes flat.
'Ayesha, daughter,' Srinivas said aloud to the empty air, 'what the
hell happened to you?'
During the heat of the day the pilgrims rested in whatever shade they
could find. Srinivas wandered among them in a kind of daze, filled up with
emotion, realizing that a great turning-point in his life had unaccountably
arrived. His eyes kept searching out the transformed figure of Ayesha the
seer, who was resting in the shade of a pipal-tree in the company of Mishal
Akhtar, her mother Mrs Qureishi, and the lovesick Osman with his bullock.
Eventually Srinivas bumped into the zamindar Mirza Saeed, who was stretched
out on the back seat of his Mercedes-Benz, unsleeping, a man in torment.
Srinivas spoke to him with a humbleness born of his wonderment. 'Sethji, you
don't believe in the girl?'
'Srinivas,' Mirza Saeed sat up to reply, 'we are modern men. We know,
for instance, that old people die on long journeys, that God does not cure
cancer, and that oceans do not part. We have to stop this idiocy. Come with
me. Plenty of room in the car. Maybe you can help to talk them out of it;
that Ayesha, she's grateful to you, perhaps she'll listen.'
'To come in the car?' Srinivas felt helpless, as though mighty hands
were gripping his limbs. 'There is my business, but.'
'This is a suicide mission for many of our people,' Mirza Saeed urged
him. 'I need help. Naturally I could pay.'
'Money is no object,' Srinivas retreated, affronted. 'Excuse, please,
Sethji. I must consider.'
'Don't you see?' Mirza Saeed shouted after him. 'We are not communal
people, you and I. Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai! We can open up a secular front
against this mumbo-jumbo.'
Srinivas turned back. 'But I am not an unbeliever,' he protested. 'The
picture of goddess Lakshmi is always on my wall.'
'Wealth is an excellent goddess for a businessman,' Mirza Saeed said.
'And in my heart,' Srinivas added. Mirza Saeed lost his temper. 'But
goddesses, I swear. Even your own philosophers admit that these are abstract
concepts only. Embodiments of shakti which is itself an abstract notion: the
dynamic power of the gods.'
The toy merchant was looking down at Ayesha as she slept under her
quilt of butterflies. 'I am no philosopher, Sethji,' he said. And did not
say that his heart had leapt into his mouth because he had realized that the
sleeping girl and the goddess in the calendar on his factory wall had the
identical, same-to-same, face.
When the pilgrimage left town, Srinivas accompanied it, turning a deaf
ear to the entreaties of his wild-haired wife who picked up Minoo and shook
her in her husband's face. He explained to Ayesha that while he did not wish
to visit Mecca he had been seized by a longing to walk with her a while,
perhaps even as far as the sea.
As he took his place among the Titlipur villagers and fell into step
with the man next to him, he observed with a mixture of incomprehension and
awe that infinite butterfly swarm over their heads, like a gigantic umbrella
shading the pilgrims from the sun. It was as if the butterflies of Titlipur
had taken over the functions of the great tree. Next he gave a little cry of
fear, astonishment and pleasure, because a few dozen of those
chameleon-winged creatures had settled on his shoulders and turned, upon the
instant, the exact shade of scarlet of his shirt. Now he recognized the man
at his side as the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, who had chosen not to walk at the
front. He and his wife Khadija strode contentedly forward in spite of their
advanced years, and when he saw the lepidopteral blessing that had descended
on the toy merchant, Muhammad Din reached out and grasped him by the hand.
It was becoming clear that the rains would fail. Lines of bony cattle
migrated across the landscape, searching for a drink.
Love is Water,
someone
had written in whitewash on the brick wall of a scooter factory. On the road
they met other families heading south with their lives bundled up on the
backs of dying donkeys, and these, too, were heading hopefully towards
water. 'But not bloody salt water,' Mirza Saeed shouted at the Titlipur
pilgrims. 'And not to see it divide itself in two! They want to stay alive,
but you crazies want to die.' Vultures herded together by the roadside and
watched the pilgrims pass.
Mirza Saeed spent the first weeks of the pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea
in a state of permanent, hysterical agitation. Most of the walking was done
in the mornings and late afternoons, and at these times Saeed would often
leap out of his station wagon to plead with his dying wife. 'Come to your
senses, Mishu. You're a sick woman. Come and lie down at least, let me press
your feet a while.' But she refused, and her mother shooed him away. 'See,
Saeed, you're in such a negative mood, it gets depressing. Go and drink your
Coke-shoke in your AC vehicle and leave us yatris in peace.' After the first
week the Air Conditioned vehicle lost its driver. Mirza Saeed's chauffeur
resigned and joined the foot-pilgrims; the zamindar was obliged to get
behind the wheel himself. After that, when his anxiety overcame him, it was
necessary to stop the car, park, and then rush madly back and forth among
the pilgrims, threatening, entreating, offering bribes. At least once a day
he cursed Ayesha to her face for ruining his life, but he could never keep
up the abuse because every time he looked at her he desired her so much that
he felt ashamed. The cancer had begun to turn Mishal's skin grey, and Mrs
Qureishi, too, was beginning to fray at the edges; her society chappals had
disintegrated and she was suffering from frightful foot-blisters that looked
like little water-balloons. When Saeed offered her the comfort of the car,
however, she continued to refuse point-blank. The spell that Ayesha had
placed upon the pilgrims was still holding firm. - And at the end of these
sorties into the heart of the pilgrimage Mirza Saeed, sweating and giddy
from the heat and his growing despair, would realize that the marchers had
left his car some way behind, and he would have to totter back to it by
himself, sunk in gloom. One day he got back to the station wagon to find
that an empty coconut-shell thrown from the window of a passing bus had
smashed his laminated windscreen, which looked, now, like a spider's web
full of diamond flies. He had to knock all the pieces out, and the glass
diamonds seemed to be mocking him as they fell on to the road and into the
car, they seemed to speak of the transience and worthlessness of earthly
possessions, but a secular man lives in the world of things and Mirza Saeed
did not intend to be broken as easily as a windscreen. At night he would go
to lie beside his wife on a bedroll under the stars by the side of the grand
trunk road. When he told her about the accident she offered him cold
comfort. 'It's a sign,' she said. 'Abandon the station wagon and join the
rest of us at last.'
'Abandon a Mercedes-Benz?' Saeed yelped in genuine horror.
'So what?' Mishal replied in her grey, exhausted voice. 'You keep
talking about ruination. Then what difference is a Mercedes going to make?'
'You don't understand,' Saeed wept. 'Nobody understands me.'
Gibreel dreamed a drought:
The land browned under the rainless skies. The corpses of buses and
ancient monuments rotting in the fields beside the crops. Mirza Saeed saw,
through his shattered windscreen, the onset of calamity: the wild donkeys
fucking wearily and dropping dead, while still conjoined, in the middle of
the road, the trees standing on roots exposed by soil erosion and looking
like huge wooden claws scrabbling for water in the earth, the destitute
farmers being obliged to work for the state as manual labourers, digging a
reservoir by the trunk road, an empty container for the rain that wouldn't
fall. Wretched roadside lives: a woman with a bundle heading for a tent of
stick and rag, a girl condemned to scour, each day, this pot, this pan, in
her patch of filthy dust. 'Are such lives really worth as much as ours?'
Mirza Saeed Akhtar asked himself. 'As much as mine? As Mishal's? How little
they have experienced, how little they have on which to feed the soul.' A
man in a dhoti and loose yellow pugri stood like a bird on top of a
milestone, perched there with one foot on the opposite knee, one hand under
the opposite elbow, smoking a biri. As Mirza Saeed Akhtar passed him he
spat, and caught the zamindar full in the face.
The pilgrimage advanced slowly, three hours' walking in the mornings,
three more after the heat, walking at the pace of the slowest pilgrim,
subject to infinite delays, the sickness of children, the harassment of the
authorities, a wheel coming off one of the bullock carts; two miles a day at
best, one hundred and fifty miles to the sea, a journey of approximately
eleven weeks. The first death happened on the eighteenth day. Khadija, the
tactless old lady who had been for half a century the contented and
contenting spouse of Sarpanch Muhammad Din, saw an archangel in a dream.
'Gibreel,' she whispered, 'is it you?'
'No,' the apparition replied. 'It's I, Azraeel, the one with the lousy
job. Excuse the disappointment.'
The next morning she continued with the pilgrimage, saying nothing to
her husband about her vision. After two hours they neared the ruin of one of
the Mughal milepost inns that had, in times long gone, been built at
five-mile intervals along the highway. When Khadija saw the ruin she knew
nothing of its past, of the wayfarers robbed in their sleep and so on, but
she understood its present well enough. 'I have to go in there and lie
down,' she said to the Sarpanch, who protested: 'But, the march!' 'Never
mind that,' she said gently. 'You can catch them up later.'
She lay down in the rubble of the old ruin with her head on a smooth
stone which the Sarpanch found for her. The old man wept, but that didn't do
any good, and she was dead within a minute. He ran back to the march and
confronted Ayesha angrily. 'I should never have listened to you,' he told
her. 'And now you have killed my wife.'
The march stopped. Mirza Saeed Akhtar, spotting an opportunity,
insisted loudly that Khadija be taken to a proper Muslim burial ground. But
Ayesha objected. 'We are ordered by the archangel to go directly to the sea,
without returns or detours.' Mirza Saeed appealed to the pilgrims. 'She is
your Sarpanch's beloved wife,' he shouted. 'Will you dump her in a hole by
the side of the road?'
When the Titlipur villagers agreed that Khadija should be buried at
once, Saeed could not believe his ears. He realized that their determination
was even greater than he had suspected: even the bereaved Sarpanch
acquiesced. Khadija was buried in the corner of a barren field behind the
ruined way-station of the past.
The next day, however, Mirza Saeed noticed that the Sarpanch had come
unstuck from the pilgrimage, and was mooching along disconsolately, a little
distance apart from the rest, sniffing the bougainvillaea bushes. Saeed
jumped out of the Mercedes and rushed off to Ayesha, to make another scene.
'You monster!' he shouted. 'Monster without a heart! Why did you bring the
old woman here to die?' She ignored him, but on his way back to the station
wagon the Sarpanch came over and said: 'We were poor people. We knew we
could never hope to go to Mecca Sharif, until she persuaded. She persuaded,
and now see the outcome of her deeds.'
Ayesha the kahin asked to speak to the Sarpanch, but gave him not a
single word of consolation. 'Harden your faith,' she scolded him. 'She who
dies on the great pilgrimage is assured of a home in Paradise. Your wife is
sitting now among the angels and the flowers; what is there for you to
regret?'
That evening the Sarpanch Muhammad Din approached Mirza Saeed as he sat
by a small campfire. 'Excuse, Sethji,' he said, 'but is it possible that I
ride, as you once offered, in your motor-car?'
Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died,
unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise
required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism. 'My first
convert,' Mirza Saeed rejoiced.
By the fourth week the defection of Sarpanch Muhammad Din had begun to
have its effect. He sat on the back seat of the Mercedes as if he were the
zamindar and Mirza Saeed the chauffeur, and little by little the leather
upholstery and the air-conditioning unit and the whisky-soda cabinet and the
electrically operated mirror-glass windows began to teach him hauteur; his
nose tilted into the air and he acquired the supercilious expression of a
man who can see without being seen. Mirza Saeed in the driver's seat felt
his eyes and nose filling up with the dust that came in through the hole
where the windscreen used to be, but in spite of such discomforts he was
feeling better than before. Now, at the end of each day, a cluster of
pilgrims would congregate around the Mercedes-Benz with its gleaming star,
and Mirza Saeed would try and talk sense into them while they watched
Sarpanch Muhammad Din raise and lower the mirror-glass rear windows, so that
they saw, alternately, his features and their own. The Sarpanch's presence
in the Mercedes lent new authority to Mirza Saeed's words.
Ayesha didn't try to call the villagers away, and so far her confidence
had been justified; there had been no further defections to the camp of the
faithless. But Saeed saw her casting numerous glances in his direction and
whether she was a visionary or not Mirza Saeed would have bet good money
that those were the bad-tempered glances of a young girl who was no longer
sure of getting her own way.
Then she disappeared.
She went off during an afternoon siesta and did not reappear for a day
and a half, by which time there was pandemonium among the pilgrims - she
always knew how to whip up an audience's feelings, Saeed conceded; then she
sauntered back up to them across the dust-clouded landscape, and this time
her silver hair was streaked with gold, and her eyebrows, too, were golden.
She summoned the villagers to her and told them that the archangel was
displeased that the people of Titlipur had been filled up with doubts just
because of the ascent of a martyr to Paradise. She warned that he was
seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, 'so that all
you'll get at the Arabian Sea is a salt-water bath, and then it's back to
your deserted potato fields on which no rain will ever fall again.' The
villagers were appalled. 'No, it can't be,' they pleaded. 'Bibiji, forgive
us.' It was the first time they had used the name of the longago saint to
describe the girl who was leading them with an absolutism that had begun to
frighten them as much as it impressed. After her speech the Sarpanch and
Mirza Saeed were left alone in the station wagon. 'Second round to the
archangel,' Mirza Saeed thought.
By the fifth week the health of most of the older pilgrims had
deteriorated sharply, food supplies were running low, water was hard to
find, and the children's tear ducts were dry. The vulture herds were never
far away.
As the pilgrims left behind the rural areas and came towards more
densely populated zones, the level of harassment increased. The
long-distance buses and trucks often refused to deviate and the pedestrians
had to leap, screaming and tumbling over each other, out of their way.
Cyclists, families of six on Rajdoot motor-scooters, petty shop-keepers
hurled abuse. 'Crazies! Hicks! Muslims!' Often they were obliged to keep
marching for an entire night because the authorities in this or that small
town didn't want such riff-raff sleeping on their pavements. More deaths
became inevitable.
Then the bullock of the convert, Osman, fell to its knees amid the
bicycles and camel-dung of a nameless little town. 'Get up, idiot,' he
yelled at it impotently. 'What do you think you're doing, dying on me in
front of the fruit-stalls of strangers?' The bullock nodded, twice for yes,
and expired.
Butterflies covered the corpse, adopting the colour of its grey hide,
its horn-cones and bells. The inconsolable Osman ran to Ayesha (who had put
on a dirty sari as a concession to urban prudery, even though butterfly
clouds still trailed off her like glory). 'Do bullocks go to Heaven?' he
asked in a piteous voice; she shrugged. 'Bullocks have no souls,' she said
coolly, 'and it is souls we march to save.' Osman looked at her and realized
he no longer loved her. 'You've become a demon,' he told her in disgust.
'I am nothing,' Ayesha said. 'I am a messenger.'
'Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent,'
Osman raged. 'What's he afraid of? Is he so un-confident that he needs us to
die to prove our love?'
As though in response to such blasphemy, Ayesha imposed even stricter
disciplinary measures, insisting that all pilgrims say all five prayers, and
decreeing that Fridays would be days of fasting. By the end of the sixth
week she had forced the marchers to leave four more bodies where they fell:
two old men, one old woman, and one six-year-old girl. The pilgrims marched
on, turning their backs on the dead; behind them, however, Mirza Saeed
Akhtar gathered up the bodies and made sure they received a decent burial.
In this he was assisted by the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and the former
untouchable, Osman. On such days they would fall quite a way behind the
march, but a Mercedes-Benz station wagon doesn't take long to catch up with
over a hundred and forty men, women and children walking wearily towards the
sea.
The dead grew in number, and the groups of unsettled pilgrims around
the Mercedes got larger night by night. Mirza Saeed began to tell them
stories. He told them about lemmings, and how the enchantress Circe turned
men into pigs; he told, too, the story of a pipe-player who lured a town's
children into a mountain-crack. When he had told this tale in their own
language he recited verses in English, so that they could listen to the
music of the poetry even though they didn't understand the words. 'Hamelin
town's in Brunswick,' he began. 'Near famous Hanover City. The River Weser,
deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side . . .'
Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the girl Ayesha advance, looking
furious, while the butterflies glowed like the campfire behind her, making
it appear as though flames were streaming from her body.
'Those who listen to the Devil's verses, spoken in the Devil's tongue,'
she cried, 'will go to the Devil in the end.'
'It's a choice, then,' Mirza Saeed answered her, 'between the devil and
the deep blue sea.'
Eight weeks had passed, and relations between Mirza Saeed and his wife
Mishal had so deteriorated that they were no longer on speaking terms. By
now, and in spite of the cancer that had turned her as grey as funeral ash,
Mishal had become Ayesha's chief lieutenant and most devoted disciple. The
doubts of other marchers had only strengthened her own faith, and for these
doubts she unequivocally blamed her husband.
'Also,' she had rebuked him in their last conversation, 'there is no
warmth in you any more. I feel afraid to approach.'
'No warmth?' he yelled. 'How can you say it? No warmth? For whom did I
come running on this damnfool pilgrimage? To look after whom? Because I love
whom? Because I am so worried about, so sad about, so filled with misery
about whom? No warmth? Are you a stranger? How can you say such a thing?'
'Listen to yourself,' she said in a voice which had begun to fade into
a kind of smokiness, an opacity. 'Always anger. Cold anger, icy, like a
fort.'
'This isn't anger,' he bellowed. 'This is anxiety, unhappiness,
wretchedness, injury, pain. Where can you hear anger?'
'I hear it,' she said. 'Everyone can hear, for miles around.'
'Come with me,' he begged her. 'I'll take you to the top clinics in
Europe, Canada, the USA. Trust in Western technology. They can do marvels.
You always liked gadgets, too.'
'I am going on a pilgrimage to Mecca,' she said, and turned away.
'You damn stupid bitch,' he roared at her back. 'Just because you're
going to die doesn't mean you have to take all these people with you.' But
she walked away across the roadside camp-site, never looking back; and now
that he'd proved her point by losing control and speaking the unspeakable he
fell to his knees and wept. After that quarrel Mishal refused to sleep
beside him any more. She and her. mother rolled out their bedding next to
the butterfly-shrouded prophetess of their Meccan quest.
By day, Mishal worked ceaselessly among the pilgrims, reassuring them,
bolstering their faith, gathering them together beneath the wing of her
gentleness. Ayesha had started retreating deeper and deeper into silence,
and Mishal Akhtar became, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the
pilgrims. But there was one pilgrim over whom she lost her grip: Mrs.
Qureishi, her mother, the wife of the director of the state bank.
The arrival of Mr. Qureishi, Mishal's father, was quite an event. The
pilgrims had stopped in the shade of a line of plane-trees and were busy
gathering brushwood and scouring cookpots when the motorcade was sighted. At
once Mrs. Qureishi, who was twenty-five pounds lighter than she had been at
the beginning of the walk, leaped squeakily to her feet and tried
frantically to brush the dirt off her clothes and to put her hair in order.
Mishal saw her mother fumbling feebly with a molten lipstick and asked,
'What's bugging you, ma? Relax, na.'
Her mother pointed feebly at the approaching cars. Moments later the
tall, severe figure of the great banker was standing over them. 'If I had
not seen it I would not have believed,' he said. 'They told me, but I
pooh-poohed. Therefore it took me this long to find out. To vanish from
Peristan without a word: now what in tarnation?'
Mrs. Qureishi shook helplessly under her husband's eyes, beginning to
cry, feeling the calluses on her feet and the fatigue that had sunk into
every pore of her body. 'O God, I don't know, I am sorry,' she said. 'God
knows what came over.'
'Don't you know I occupy a delicate post?' Mr. Qureishi cried. 'Public
confidence is of essence. How does it look then that my wife gallivants with
bhangis?'
Mishal, embracing her mother, told her father to stop bullying. Mr
Akhtar saw for the first time that his daughter had the mark of death on her
forehead and deflated instantly like an inner tube. Mishal told him about
the cancer, and the promise of the seer Ayesha that a miracle would occur in
Mecca, and she would be completely cured.
'Then let me fly you to Mecca, pronto,' her father pleaded.
'Why walk if you can go by Airbus?'
But Mishal was adamant. 'You should go away,' she told her father.
'Only the faithful can make this thing come about. Mummy will look after
me.'
Mr. Qureishi in his limousine helplessly joined Mirza Saeed at the rear
of the procession, constantly sending one of the two servants who had
accompanied him on motor-scooters to ask Mishal if she would like food,
medicine, Thums Up, anything at all. Mishal turned down all his offers, and
after three days -because banking is banking - Mr. Qureishi departed for the
city, leaving behind one of the motor-scooter chaprassis to serve the women.
'He is yours to command,' he told them. 'Don't be stupid now. Make this as
easy as you can,'
The day after Mr. Qureishi's departure, the chaprassi Gul Muhammad
ditched his scooter and joined the foot-pilgrims, knotting a handkerchief
around his head to indicate his devotion. Ayesha said nothing, but when she
saw the scooter-wallah join the pilgrimage she grinned an impish grin that
reminded Mirza Saeed that she was, after all, not only a figure out of a
dream, but also a flesh-and-blood young girl.
Mrs. Qureishi began to complain. The brief contact with her old life
had broken her resolve, and now that it was too late she had started
thinking constantly about parties and soft cushions and glasses of iced
fresh lime soda. It suddenly seemed wholly unreasonable to her that a person
of her breeding should be asked to go barefoot like a common sweeper. She
presented herself to Mirza Saeed with a sheepish expression on her face.
'Saeed, son, do you hate me completely?' she wheedled, her plump
features arranging themselves in a parody of coquettishness.
Saeed was appalled by her grimace. 'Of course not,' he managed to say.
'But you do, you loathe me, and my cause is hopeless,' she flirted.
'Ammaji,' Saeed gulped, 'what are you saying?'
'Because I have from time to time spoken roughly to you,'
'Please forget it,' Saeed said, bemused by her performance, but she
would not. 'You must know it was all for love, isn't it? Love,' said Mrs
Qureishi, 'it is a many-splendoured thing.'
'Makes the world go round,' Mirza Saeed agreed, trying to enter into
the spirit of the conversation.
'Love conquers all,' Mrs. Qureishi confirmed. 'It has conquered my
anger. This I must demonstrate to you by riding with you in your motor.'
Mirza Saeed bowed. 'It is yours, Ammaji.'
'Then you will ask those two village men to sit in front with you.
Ladies must be protected, isn't it?'
'It is,' he replied.
The story of the village that was walking to the sea had spread all
over the country, and in the ninth week the pilgrims were being pestered by
journalists, local politicos in search of votes, businessmen who offered to
sponsor the march if the yatris would only consent to wear sandwich boards
advertising various goods and services, foreign tourists looking for the
mysteries of the East, nostalgic Gandhians, and the kind of human vultures
who go to motor-car races to watch the crashes. When they saw the host of
chameleon butterflies and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and
provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and
retreated with confounded expectations, that is to say with a hole in their
pictures of the world that they could not paper over. Photographs of Ayesha
were appearing in all the papers, and the pilgrims even passed advertising
hoardings on which the lepidopteral beauty had been painted three times as
large as life, beside slogans reading
Our cloths also are as delicate as a
butterfly's wing,
or suchlike. Then more alarming news reached them. Certain
religious extremist groupings had issued statements denouncing the 'Ayesha
Haj' as an attempt to 'hijack' public attention and to 'incite communal
sentiment'. Leaflets were being distributed - Mishal picked them up off the
road - in which it was claimed that 'Padyatra, or foot-pilgrimage, is an
ancient, pre-Islamic tradition of national culture, not imported property of
Mughal immigrants.' Also: 'Purloining of this tradition by so-called Ayesha
Bibiji is flagrant and deliberate inflammation of already sensitive
situation.'
'There will be no trouble,' the kahin broke her silence to announce.
Gibreel dreamed a suburb:
As the Ayesha Haj neared Sarang, the outermost suburb of the great
metropolis on the Arabian Sea towards which the visionary girl was leading
them, journalists, politicos and police officers redoubled their visits. At
first the policemen threatened to disband the march forcibly; the
politicians, however, advised that this would look very like a sectarian act
and could lead to outbreaks of communal violence from top to bottom of the
country. Eventually the police chiefs agreed to permit the march, but
groused menacingly about being 'unable to guarantee safe passages' for the
pilgrims. Mishal Akhtar said: 'We are going on.'
The suburb of Sarang owed its relative affluence to the presence of
substantial coal deposits nearby. It turned out that the coal-miners of
Sarang, men whose lives were spent boring pathways through the earth -
'parting' it, one might say - could not stomach the notion that a girl could
do the same, with a wave of her hand, for the sea. Cadres of certain
communalist groupings had been at work, inciting the miners to violence, and
as a result of the activities of these agents provocateurs a mob was
forming, carrying banners demanding: NO ISLAMIC PADYATRA! BUTTERFLY WITCH,
GO HOME.
On the night before they were due to enter Sarang, Mirza Saeed made
another futile appeal to the pilgrims. 'Give up,' he implored uselessly.
'Tomorrow we will all be killed.' Ayesha whispered in Mishal's ear, and she
spoke up: 'Better a martyr than a coward. Are there any cowards here?'
There was one. Sri Srinivas, explorer of the Grand Canyon, proprietor
of a Toy Univas, whose motto was creativity and sinceriety, sided with Mirza
Saeed. As a devout follower of the goddess Lakshmi, whose face was so
perplexingly also Ayesha's, he felt unable to participate in the coming
hostilities on either side. 'I am a weak fellow,' he confessed to Saeed. 'I
have loved Miss Ayesha, and a man should fight for what he loves; but, what
to do, I require neutral status.' Srinivas was the fifth member of the
renegade society in the Mercedes-Benz, and now Mrs. Qureishi had no option
but to share the back seat with a common man. Srinivas greeted her
unhappily, and, seeing her bounce grumpily along the seat away from him,
attempted to placate. 'Please to accept a token of my esteem.' - And
produced, from an inside pocket, a Family Planning doll.
That night the deserters remained in the station wagon while the
faithful prayed in the open air. They had been allowed to camp in a disused
goods train marshalling yard, guarded by military police. Mirza Saeed
couldn't sleep. He was thinking about something Srinivas had said to him,
about being a Gandhian in his head, 'but I'm too weak to put such notions
into practice. Excuse me, but it's true. I was not cut out for suffering,
Sethji. I should have stayed with wife and kiddies and cut out this
adventure disease that has made me land up in such a place.'
In my family, too, Mirza Saeed in his insomnia answered the sleeping
toy merchant, we have suffered from a kind of disease: one of detachment, of
being unable to connect ourselves to things, events, feelings. Most people
define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we
have lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.
Which was to say that he found it hard to believe that all this was
really happening; but it was.
When the Ayesha Pilgrims were ready to set off the next morning, the
huge clouds of butterflies that had travelled with them all the way from
Titlipur suddenly broke up and vanished from view, revealing that the sky
was filling up with other, more prosaic clouds. Even the creatures that had
been clothing Ayesha - the elite corps, so to speak - decamped, and she had
to lead the procession dressed in the mundanity of an old cotton sari with a
block-printed hem of leaves. The disappearance of the miracle that had
seemed to validate their pilgrimage depressed all the marchers; so that in
spite of all Mishal Akhtar's exhortations they were unable to sing as they
moved forwards, deprived of the benediction of the butterflies, to meet
their fate.
The No Islamic Padyatra street mob had prepared a welcome for Ayesha in
a street lined on both sides with the shacks of bicycle repairers. They had
blocked the pilgrims' routes with dead bicycles, and waited behind this
barricade of broken wheels, bent handlebars and silenced bells as the Ayesha
Haj entered the northern sector of the street. Ayesha walked towards the mob
as if it did not exist, and when she reached the last crossroads, beyond
which the clubs and knives of the enemy awaited her, there was a thunderclap
like the trumpet of doom and an ocean fell down out of the sky. The drought
had broken too late to save the crops; afterwards many of the pilgrims
believed that God had been saving up the water for just this purpose,
letting it build up in the sky until it was as endless as the sea,
sacrificing the year's harvest in order to save his prophetess and her
people.
The stunning force of the downpour unnerved both pilgrims and
assailants. In the confusion of the flood a second doom-trumpet was heard.
This was, in point of fact, the horn of Mirza Saeed's Mercedes-Benz station
wagon, which he had driven at high speed through the suffocating side
gullies of the suburb, bringing down racks of shirts hanging on rails, and
pumpkin barrows, and trays of cheap plastic notions, until he reached the
street of basket-workers that intersected the street of bicycle repairers
just to the north of the barricade. Here he accelerated as hard as he could
and charged towards the crossroads, scattering pedestrians and wickerwork
stools in all directions. He reached the crossroads immediately after the
sea fell out of the sky, and braked violently. Sri Srinivas and Osman leaped
out, seized Mishal Akhtar and the prophetess Ayesha, and hauled them into
the Mercedes in a flurry of legs, sputum and abuse. Saeed accelerated away
from the scene before anybody had managed to get the blinding water out of
their eyes.
Inside the car: bodies heaped in an angry jumble. Mishal Akhtar shouted
abuse at her husband from the bottom of the pile: 'Saboteur! Traitor! Scum
from somewhere! Mule!' - To which Saeed sarcastically replied, 'Martyrdom is
too easy, Mishal. Don't you want to watch the ocean open, like a flower?'
And Mrs. Qureishi, sticking her head out through Osman's inverted legs,
added in a pink-faced gasp: 'Okay, come on, Mishu, quit. We meant well.'
Gibreel dreamed a flood:
When the rains came, the miners of Sarang had been waiting for the
pilgrims with their pickaxes in their hands, but when the bicycle barricade
was swept away they could not avoid the idea that God had taken Ayesha's
side. The town's drainage system surrendered instantly to the overwhelming
assault of the water, and the miners were soon standing in a muddy flood
that reached as high as their waists. Some of them tried to move towards the
pilgrims, who also continued to make efforts to advance. But now the
rainstorm redoubled its force, and then doubled it again, falling from the
sky in thick slabs through which it was getting difficult to breathe, as
though the earth were being engulfed, and the firmament above were reuniting
with the firmament below. Gibreel, dreaming, found his vision obscured by
water.
The rain stopped, and a watery sun shone down on a Venetian scene of
devastation. The roads of Sarang were now canals, along which there
journeyed all manner of flotsam. Where only recently scooter-rickshaws,
camel-carts and repaired bicycles had gone, there now floated newspapers,
flowers, bangles, watermelons, umbrellas, chappals, sunglasses, baskets,
excrement, medicine bottles, playing cards, dupattas, pancakes, lamps. The
water had an odd, reddish tint that made the sodden populace imagine that
the street was flowing with blood. There was no trace of bully-boy miners or
of Ayesha Pilgrims. A dog swam across the intersection by the collapsed
bicycle barricade, and all around there lay the damp silence of the flood,
whose waters lapped at marooned buses, while children stared from the roofs
of deliquescent gullies, too shocked to come out and play.
Then the butterflies returned.
From nowhere, as if they had been hiding behind the sun; and to
celebrate the end of the rain they had all taken the colour of sunlight. The
arrival of this immense carpet of light in the sky utterly bewildered the
people of Sarang, who were already reeling in the aftermath of the storm;
fearing the apocalypse, they hid indoors and closed their shutters. On a
nearby hillside, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar and his party observed the
miracle's return and were filled, all of them, even the zamindar, with a
kind of awe.
Mirza Saeed had driven hell-for-leather, in spite of being half-blinded
by the rain which poured through the smashed windscreen, until on a road
that led up and around the bend of a hill he came to a halt at the gates of
the No.1 Sarang Coalfield. The pitheads were dimly visible through the rain.
'Brainbox,' Mishal Akhtar cursed him weakly. 'Those bums are waiting for us
back there, and you drive us up here to see their pals. Tip-top notion,
Saeed. Extra fine.'
But they had no more trouble from miners. That was the day of the
mining disaster that left fifteen thousand pitmen buried alive beneath the
Sarangi hill. Saeed, Mishal, the Sarpanch, Osman, Mrs Qureishi, Srinivas and
Ayesha stood exhausted and soaked to the skin by the roadside as ambulances,
fire-engines, salvage operators and pit bosses arrived in large quantities
and left, much later, shaking their heads. The Sarpanch caught his earlobes
between thumbs and forefingers. 'Life is pain,' he said. 'Life is pain and
loss; it is a coin of no value, worth even less than a kauri or a dam.'
Osman of the dead bullock, who, like the Sarpanch, had lost a dearly
loved companion during the pilgrimage, also wept. Mrs. Qureishi attempted to
look on the bright side: 'Main thing is that we're okay,' but this got no
response. Then Ayesha closed her eyes and recited in the sing-song voice of
prophecy, 'It is a judgment upon them for the bad attempt they made.'
Mirza Saeed was angry. 'They weren't at the bloody barricade,' he
shouted. 'They were working under the goddamned ground.'
'They dug their own graves,' Ayesha replied.
This was when they sighted the returning butterflies. Saeed watched the
golden cloud in disbelief, as it first gathered and then sent out streams of
winged light in every direction. Ayesha wanted to return to the crossroads.
Saeed objected: 'It's flooded down there. Our only chance is to drive down
the opposite side of this hill and come out the other side of town.' But
Ayesha and Mishal had already started back; the prophetess was supporting
the other, ashen woman, holding her around the waist,
'Mishal, for God's sake,' Mirza Saeed called after his wife. 'For the
love of God. What will I do with the motor-car?'
But she went on down the hill, towards the flood, leaning heavily on
Ayesha the seer, without looking round.
This was how Mirza Saeed Akhtar came to abandon his beloved
Mercedes-Benz station wagon near the entrance to the drowned mines of
Sarang, and join in the foot-pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea.
The seven bedraggled travellers stood thigh-deep in water at the
intersection of the street of bicycle repairers and the alley of the
basket-weavers. Slowly, slowly, the water had begun to go down. 'Face it,'
Mirza Saeed argued. 'The pilgrimage is finished. The villagers are who knows
where, maybe drowned, possibly murdered, certainly lost. There's nobody left
to follow you but us.' He stuck his face into Ayesha's. 'So forget it,
sister; you're sunk.'
'Look,' Mishal said.
From all sides, out of the little tinkers' gullies, the villagers of
Titlipur were returning to the place of their dispersal. They were all
coated from neck to ankles in golden butterflies, and long lines of the
little creatures went before them, like ropes drawing them to safety out of
a well. The people of Sarang watched in terror from their windows, and as
the waters of retribution receded, the Ayesha Haj re-formed in the middle of
the road.
'I don't believe it,' said Mirza Saeed.
But it was true. Every single member of the pilgrimage had been tracked
down by the butterflies and brought back to the main road. And stranger
claims were later made: that when the creatures had settled on a broken
ankle the injury had healed, or that an open wound had closed as if by
magic. Many marchers said they had awoken from unconsciousness to find the
butterflies fluttering about their lips. Some even believed that they had
been dead, drowned, and that the butterflies had brought them back to life.
'Don't be stupid,' Mirza Saeed cried. 'The storm saved you; it washed
away your enemies, so it's not surprising few of you are hurt. Let's be
scientific, please.'
'Use your eyes, Saeed,' Mishal told him, indicating the presence before
them of over a hundred men, women and children enveloped in glowing
butterflies. 'What does your science say about this?'
In the last days of the pilgrimage, the city was all around them.
Officers from the Municipal Corporation met with Mishal and Ayesha and
planned a route through the metropolis. On this route were mosques in which
the pilgrims could sleep without clogging up the streets. Excitement in the
city was intense: each day, when the pilgrims set off towards their next
resting-place, they were watched by enormous crowds, some sneering and
hostile, but many bringing presents of sweetmeats, medicines and food.
Mirza Saeed, worn-out and filthy, was in a state of deep frustration on
account of his failure to convince more than a handful of the pilgrims that
it was better to put one's trust in reason than in miracles. Miracles had
been doing pretty well for them, the Titlipur villagers pointed out,
reasonably enough. 'Those blasted butterflies,' Saeed muttered to the
Sarpanch. 'Without them, we'd have a chance.'
'But they have been with us from the start,' the Sarpanch replied with
a shrug.
Mishal Akhtar was clearly close to death; she had begun to smell of it,
and had turned a chalky white colour that frightened Saeed badly. But Mishal
wouldn't let him come near her. She had ostracized her mother, too, and when
her father took time off from banking to visit her on the pilgrimage's first
night in a city mosque, she told him to buzz off. 'Things have come to the
point,' she announced, 'where only the pure can be with the pure.' When
Mirza Saeed heard the diction of Ayesha the prophetess emerging from his
wife's mouth he lost all but the tiniest speck of hope.
Friday came, and Ayesha agreed that the pilgrimage could halt for a day
to participate in the Friday prayers. Mirza Saeed, who had forgotten almost
all the Arabic verses that had once been stuffed into him by rote, and could
scarcely remember when to stand with his hands held in front of him like a
book, when to genuflect, when to press his forehead to the ground, stumbled
through the ceremony with growing self-disgust. At the end of the prayers,
however, something happened that stopped the Ayesha Haj in its tracks.
As the pilgrims watched the congregation leaving the courtyard of the
mosque, a commotion began outside the main gate. Mirza Saeed went to
investigate. 'What's the hoo-hah?' he asked as he struggled through the
crowd on the mosque steps; then he saw the basket sitting on the bottom
step. - And heard, rising from the basket, the baby's cry.
The foundling was perhaps two weeks old, clearly illegitimate, and it
was equally plain that its options in life were limited. The crowd was in a
doubtful, confused mood. Then the mosque's Imam appeared at the head of the
flight of steps, and beside him was Ayesha the seer, whose fame had spread
throughout the city. The crowd parted like the sea, and Ayesha and the Imam
came down to the basket. The Imam examined the baby briefly; rose; and
turned to address the crowd.
'This child was born in devilment,' he said. 'It is the Devil's child.'
He was a young man.
The mood of the crowd shifted towards anger. Mirza Saeed Akhtar shouted
out: 'You, Ayesha, kahin. What do you say?'
'Everything will be asked of us,' she replied.
The crowd, needing no clearer invitation, stoned the baby to death.
After that the Ayesha Pilgrims refused to move on. The death of the
foundling had created an atmosphere of mutiny among the weary villagers,
none of whom had lifted or thrown a stone. Mishal, snow-white now, was too
enfeebled by her illness to rally the marchers; Ayesha, as ever, refused to
dispute. 'If you turn your backs on God,' she warned the villagers, 'don't
be surprised when he does the same to you.'
The pilgrims were squatting in a group in a corner of the large mosque,
which was painted lime-green on the outside and bright blue within, and lit,
when necessary, by multicoloured neon 'tube lights'. After Ayesha's warning
they turned their backs on her and huddled closer together, although the
weather was warm and humid enough. Mirza Saeed, spotting his opportunity,
decided to challenge Ayesha directly once again. 'Tell me,' he asked
sweetly, 'how exactly does the angel give you all this information? You
never tell us his precise words, only your interpretations of them. Why such
indirection? Why not simply quote?'
'He speaks to me,' Ayesha answered, 'in clear and memorable forms.'
Mirza Saeed, full of the bitter energy of his desire for her, and the
pain of his estrangement from his dying wife, and the memory of the
tribulations of the march, smelled in her reticence the weakness he had been
probing for. 'Kindly be more specific,' he insisted. 'Or why should anyone
believe? What are these forms?'
'The archangel sings to me,' she admitted, 'to the tunes of popular hit
songs.'
Mirza Saeed Akhtar clapped his hands delightedly and began to laugh the
loud, echoing laughter of revenge, and Osman the bullock-boy joined in,
beating on his dholki and prancing around the squatting villagers, singing
the latest filmi ganas and making nautch-girl eyes. 'Ho ji!' he carolled.
'This is how Gibreel recites, ho ji! Ho ji!'
And one after the other, pilgrim after pilgrim rose and joined in the
dance of the circling drummer, dancing their disillusion and disgust in the
courtyard of the mosque, until the Imam came running to shriek at the
ungodliness of their deeds.
Night fell. The villagers of Titlipur were grouped around their
Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and serious talks about returning to Titlipur were
under way. Perhaps a little of the harvest could be saved. Mishal Akhtar lay
dying with her head in her mother's lap, racked by pain, with a single tear
emerging from her left eye. And in a far comer of the courtyard of the
greenblue mosque with its technicolour tube-lighting, the visionary and the
zamindar sat alone and talked. A moon - new, horned, cold - shone down.
'You're a clever man,' Ayesha said. 'You knew how to take your chance.'
This was when Mirza Saeed made his offer of a compromise. 'My wife is
dying,' he said. 'And she wants very much to go to Mecca Sharif. So we have
interests in common, you and I.'
Ayesha listened. Saeed pressed on: 'Ayesha, I'm not a bad man. Let me
tell you, I've been damn impressed by many things on this walk;
damn
impressed. You have given these people a profound spiritual experience, no
question. Don't think we modern types lack a spiritual dimension.'
'The people have left me,' Ayesha said.
'The people are confused,' Saeed replied. 'Point is, if you actually
take them to the sea and then nothing happens, my God, they really could
turn against you. So here's the deal. I gave a tinkle to Mishal's papa and
he agreed to underwrite half the cost. We propose to fly you and Mishal, and
let's say ten - twelve! -of the villagers, to Mecca, within forty-eight
hours, personally. Reservations are available. We leave it to you to select
the individuals best suited to the trip. Then, truly, you will have
performed a miracle for some instead of for none. And in my view the
pilgrimage itself has been a miracle, in a way. So you will have done very
much.'
He held his breath.
'I must think,' Ayesha said.
'Think, think,' Saeed encouraged her happily. 'Ask your archangel. If
he agrees, it must be right.'
Mirza Saeed Akhtar knew that when Ayesha announced that the Archangel
Gibreel had accepted his offer her power would be destroyed forever, because
the villagers would perceive her fraudulence and her desperation, too. - But
how could she turn him down? - What choice did she really have? 'Revenge is
sweet,' he told himself. Once the woman was discredited, he would certainly
take Mishal to Mecca, if that were still her wish.
The butterflies of Titlipur had not entered the mosque. They lined its
exterior walls and onion dome, glowing greenly in the dark.
Ayesha in the night: stalking the shadows, lying down, rising to go on
the prowl again. There was an uncertainty about her; then the slowness came,
and she seemed to dissolve into the shadows of the mosque. She returned at
dawn.
After the morning prayer she asked the pilgrims if she might address
them; and they, doubtfully, agreed.
'Last night the angel did not sing,' she said. 'He told me, instead,
about doubt, and how the Devil makes use of it. I said, but they doubt me,
what can I do? He answered: only proof can silence doubt.'
She had their full attention. Next she told them what Mirza Saeed had
suggested in the night. 'He told me to go and ask my angel, but I know
better,' she cried. 'How could I choose between you? It is all of us, or
none.'
'Why should we follow you,' the Sarpanch asked, 'after all the dying,
the baby, and all?'
'Because when the waters part, you will be saved. You will enter into
the Glory of the Most High.'
'What waters?' Mirza Saeed yelled. 'How will they divide?'
'Follow me,' Ayesha concluded, 'and judge me by their parting.'
His offer had contained an old question:
What kind of idea are you?
And
she, in turn, had offered him an old answer.
I was tempted, but am renewed;
am uncompromising; absolute; pure.
The tide was in when the Ayesha Pilgrimage marched down an alley beside
the Holiday Inn, whose windows were full of the mistresses of film stars
using their new Polaroid cameras, - when the pilgrims felt the city's
asphalt turn gritty and soften into sand, - when they found themselves
walking through a thick mulch of rotting coconuts abandoned cigarette
packets pony turds non-degradable bottles fruit peelings jellyfish and
paper, -on to the mid-brown sand overhung by high leaning coco-palms and the
balconies of luxury sea-view apartment blocks, - past the teams of young men
whose muscles were so well-honed that they looked like deformities, and who
were performing gymnastic contortions of all sorts, in unison, like a
murderous army of ballet dancers, - and through the beachcombers, clubmen
and families who had come to take the air or make business contacts or
scavenge a living from the sand, - and gazed, for the first time in their
lives, upon the Arabian Sea.
Mirza Saeed saw Mishal, who was being supported by two of the village
men, because she was no longer strong enough to stand up by herself. Ayesha
was beside her, and Saeed had the idea that the prophetess had somehow
stepped out of the dying woman, that all the brightness of Mishal had hopped
out of her body and taken this mythological shape, leaving a husk behind to
die. Then he was angry with himself for allowing Ayesha's supernaturalism to
infect him, too.
The villagers of Titlipur had agreed to follow Ayesha after a long
discussion in which they had asked her not to take part. Their common sense
told them that it would be foolish to turn back when they had come so far
and were in sight of their first goal; but the new doubts in their minds
sapped their strength. It was as if they were emerging from some Shangri-La
of Ayesha's making, because now that they were simply walking behind her
rather than following her in the true sense, they seemed to age and sicken
with every step they took. By the time they saw the sea they were a lame,
tottering, rheumy, feverish, red-eyed bunch, and Mirza Saeed wondered how
many of them would manage the final few yards to the water's edge.
The butterflies were with them, high over their heads.
'What now, Ayesha?' Saeed called out to her, filled with the horrible
notion that his beloved wife might die here under the hoofs of ponies for
rent and beneath the eyes of sugarcane-juice vendors. 'You have brought us
all to the edges of extinction, but here is an unquestionable fact: the sea.
Where is your angel now?'
She climbed up, with the villagers' help, on to an unused thela lying
next to a soft-drink stall, and didn't answer Saeed until she could look
down at him from her new perch. 'Gibreel says the sea is like our souls.
When we open them, we can move through into wisdom. If we can open our
hearts, we can open the sea.'
'Partition was quite a disaster here on land,' he taunted her. 'Quite a
few guys died, you might remember. You think it will be different in the
water?'
'Shh,' said Ayesha suddenly. 'The angel's almost here.'
It was, on the face of it, surprising that after all the attention the
march had received the crowd at the beach was no better than moderate; but
the authorities had taken many precautions, closing roads, diverting
traffic; so there were perhaps two hundred gawpers on the beach. Nothing to
worry about.
What
was
strange was that the spectators did not see the butterflies,
or what they did next. But Mirza Saeed clearly observed the great glowing
cloud fly out over the sea; pause; hover; and form itself into the shape of
a colossal being, a radiant giant constructed wholly of tiny beating wings,
stretching from horizon to horizon, filling the sky.
'The angel!' Ayesha called to the pilgrims. 'Now you see! He's been
with us all the way. Do you believe me now?' Mirza Saeed saw absolute faith
return to the pilgrims. 'Yes,' they wept, begging her forgiveness. 'Gibreel!
Gibreel! Ya Allah.'
Mirza Saeed made his last effort. 'Clouds take many shapes,' he
shouted. 'Elephants, film stars, anything. Look, it's changing even now.'
But nobody paid any attention to him; they were watching, full of amazement,
as the butterflies dived into the sea.
The villagers were shouting and dancing for joy. 'The parting! The
parting!' they cried. Bystanders called out to Mirza Saeed: 'Hey, mister,
what are they getting so fired up about? We can't see anything going on.'
Ayesha had begun to walk towards the water, and Mishal was being
dragged along by her two helpers. Saeed ran to her and began to struggle
with the village men. 'Let go of my wife. At once! Damn you! I am your
zamindar. Release her; remove your filthy hands!' But Mishal whispered:
'They won't. Go away, Saeed. You are closed. The sea only opens for those
who are open.'
'Mishal!' he screamed, but her feet were already wet.
Once Ayesha had entered the water the villagers began to run. Those who
could not leapt upon the backs of those who could. Holding their babies, the
mothers of Titlipur rushed into the sea; grandsons bore their grandmothers
on their shoulders and rushed into the waves. Within minutes the entire
village was in the water, splashing about, falling over, getting up, moving
steadily forwards, towards the horizon, never looking back to shore. Mirza
Saeed was in the water, too. 'Come back,' he beseeched his wife. 'Nothing is
happening; come back.'
At the water's edge stood Mrs Qureishi, Osman, the Sarpanch, Sri
Srinivas. Mishal's mother was sobbing operatically: 'O my baby, my baby.
What will become?' Osman said: 'When it becomes clear that miracles don't
happen, they will turn back.' 'And the butterflies?' Srinivas asked him,
querulously. 'What were they? An accident?'
It dawned on them that the villagers were not coming back. 'They must
be nearly out of their depth,' the Sarpanch said. 'How many of them can
swim?' asked blubbering Mrs. Qureishi. 'Swim?' shouted Srinivas. 'Since when
can village folk swim?' They were all screaming at one another as if they
were miles apart, jumping from foot to foot, their bodies willing them to
enter the water, to do something. They looked as if they were dancing on a
fire. The incharge of the police squad that had been sent down for crowd
control purposes came up as Saeed came running out of the water.
'What is befalling?' the officer asked. 'What is the agitation?'
'Stop them,' Mirza Saeed panted, pointing out to sea.
'Are they miscreants?' the policeman asked.
'They are going to die,' Saeed replied.
It was too late. The villagers, whose heads could be seen bobbing about
in the distance, had reached the edge of the underwater shelf. Almost all
together, making no visible attempt to save themselves, they dropped beneath
the water's surface. In moments, every one of the Ayesha Pilgrims had sunk
out of sight.
None of them reappeared. Not a single gasping head or thrashing arm.
Saeed, Osman, Srinivas, the Sarpanch, and even fat Mrs. Qureishi ran
into the water, shrieking: 'God have mercy; come on, everybody, help.'
Human beings in danger of drowning struggle against the water. It is
against human nature simply to walk forwards meekly until the sea swallows
you up. But Ayesha, Mishal Akhtar and the villagers of Titlipur subsided
below sea-level; and were never seen again.
Mrs. Qureishi was pulled to shore by policemen, her face blue, her
lungs full of water, and needed the kiss of life. Osman, Srinivas and the
Sarpanch were dragged out soon afterwards. Only Mirza Saeed Akhtar continued
to dive, further and further out to sea, staying under for longer and longer
periods; until he, too, was rescued from the Arabian Sea, spent, sick and
fainting. The pilgrimage was over.
Mirza Saeed awoke in a hospital ward to find a CID man by his bedside.
The authorities were considering the feasibility of charging the survivors
of the Ayesha expedition with attempted illegal emigration, and detectives
had been instructed to get down their stories before they had had a chance
to confer.
This was the testimony of the Sarpanch of Titlipur, Muhammad Din: 'Just
when my strength had failed and I thought I would surely die there in the
water, I saw it with my own eyes; I saw the sea divide, like hair being
combed; and they were all there, far away, walking away from me. She was
there also, my wife, Khadija, whom I loved.'
This is what Osman the bullock-boy told the detectives, who had been
badly shaken by the Sarpanch's deposition: 'At first I was in great fear of
drowning myself Still, I was searching searching, mainly for her, Ayesha,
whom I knew from before her alteration. And just at the last, I saw it
happen, the marvellous thing. The water opened, and I saw them go along the
ocean-floor, among the dying fish.'
Sri Srinivas, too, swore by the goddess Lakshmi that he had seen the
parting of the Arabian Sea; and by the time the detectives got to Mrs.
Qureishi, they were utterly unnerved, because they knew that it was
impossible for the men to have cooked up the story together. Mishal's
mother, the wife of the great banker, told the same story in her own words.
'Believe don't believe,' she finished emphatically, 'but what my eyes have
seen my tongue repeats.'
Goosepimply CID men attempted the third degree: 'Listen, Sarpanch,
don't shit from your mouth. So many were there, nobody saw these things.
Already the drowned bodies are floating to shore, swollen like balloons and
stinking like hell. If you go on lying we will take you and stick your nose
in the truth.'
'You can show me whatever you want,' Sarpanch Muhammad Din told his
interrogators. 'But I still saw what I saw.'
'And you?' the CID men assembled, once he awoke, to ask Mirza Saeed
Akhtar. 'What did you see at the beach?'
'How can you ask?' he protested. 'My wife has drowned. Don't come
hammering with your questions.'
When he found out that he was the only survivor of the Ayesha Haj not
to have witnessed the parting of the waves - Sri Srinivas was the one who
told him what the others saw, adding mournfully: 'It is our shame that we
were not thought worthy to accompany. On us, Sethji, the waters closed, they
slammed in our faces like the gates of Paradise' - Mirza Saeed broke down
and wept for a week and a day, the dry sobs continuing to shake his body
long after his tear ducts had run out of salt.
Then he went home.
Moths had eaten the punkahs of Peristan and the library had been
consumed by a billion hungry worms. When he turned on the taps, snakes oozed
out instead of water, and creepers had twined themselves around the
four-poster bed in which Viceroys had once slept. It was as if time had
accelerated in his absence, and centuries had somehow elapsed instead of
months, so that when he touched the giant Persian carpet rolled up in the
ballroom it crumbled under his hand, and the baths were full of frogs with
scarlet eyes. At night there were jackals howling on the wind. The great
tree was dead, or close to death, and the fields were barren as the desert;
the gardens of Peristan, in which, long ago, he first saw a beautiful young
girl, had long ago yellowed into ugliness. Vultures were the only birds in
the sky.
He pulled a rocking-chair out on to his veranda, sat down, and rocked
himself gently to sleep.
Once, only once, he visited the tree. The village had crumbled into
dust; landless peasants and looters had tried to seize the abandoned land,
but the drought had driven them away. There had been no rain here. Mirza
Saeed returned to Peristan and padlocked the rusty gates. He was not
interested in the fate of his fellow-survivors; he went to the telephone and
ripped it out of the wall.
After an uncounted passage of days it occurred to him that he was
starving to death, because he could smell his body reeking of nail-varnish
remover; but as he felt neither hungry nor thirsty, he decided there was no
point bothering to find food. For what? Much better to rock in this chair,
and not think, not think, not think.
On the last night of his life he heard a noise like a giant crushing a
forest beneath his feet, and smelled a stench like the giant's fart, and he
realized that the tree was burning. He got out of his chair and staggered
dizzily down to the garden to watch the fire, whose flames were consuming
histories, memories, genealogies, purifying the earth, and coming towards
him to set him free; -because the wind was blowing the fire towards the
grounds of the mansion, so soon enough, soon enough, it would be his turn.
He saw the tree explode into a thousand fragments, and the trunk crack, like
a heart; then he turned away and reeled towards the place in the garden
where Ayesha had first caught his eye; - and now he felt a slowness come
upon him, a great heaviness, and he lay down on the withered dust. Before
his eyes closed he felt something brushing at his lips, and saw the little
cluster of butterflies struggling to enter his mouth. Then the sea poured
over him, and he was in the water beside Ayesha, who had stepped
miraculously out of his wife's body . . . 'Open,' she was crying. 'Open
wide!' Tentacles of light were flowing from her navel and he chopped at
them, chopped, using the side of his hand. 'Open,' she screamed. 'You've
come this far, now do the rest.' - How could he hear her voice? - They were
under water, lost in the roaring of the sea, but he could hear her clearly,
they could all hear her, that voice like a bell. 'Open,' she said. He
closed.
He was a fortress with clanging gates. - He was drowning. -She was
drowning, too. He saw the water fill her mouth, heard it begin to gurgle
into her lungs. Then something within him refused that, made a different
choice, and at the instant that his heart broke, he opened.
His body split apart from his adam's-apple to his groin, so that she
could reach deep within him, and now she was open, they all were, and at the
moment of their opening the waters parted, and they walked to Mecca across
the bed of the Arabian Sea.
A
Wonderful Lamp
1
ighteen months after his heart attack, Saladin Chamcha took to the air
again in response to the telegraphed news that his father was in the
terminal stages of multiple myeloma, a systemic cancer of the bone marrow
that was 'one hundred per cent fatal', as Chamcha's GP unsentimentally put
it when he telephoned her to check. There had been no real contact between
father and son since Changez Chamchawala sent Saladin the proceeds from his
felled walnut-tree all those eternities ago. Saladin had sent a brief note
reporting that he had survived the
Bostan
disaster, and had been sent an
even terser missive in return: 'Rec.'d yr. communication. This information
already to hand.' When the bad news telegram arrived, however - the
signatory was the unknown second wife, Nasreen II, and the tone was pretty
unvarnished: FATHER GOING FAST + IF DESIROUS OF SEEING BETTER MOVE IT + N
CHAMCHAWALA (MRS) - he discovered to his surprise that after a lifetime of
tangled relationships with his father, after long years of crossed wires and
'irrevocable sunderings', he was once again capable of an uncomplicated
reaction. Simply, overwhelmingly, it was imperative that he reach Bombay
before Changez left it for good.
He spent the best part of a day first standing in the visa queue at the
consular section of India House, and then trying to persuade a jaded
official of the urgency of his application. He had stupidly forgotten to
bring the telegram, and was told, as a result, that 'it is issue of proof.
You see, anybody could come and tell that their father is dying, isn't it?
In order to expedite.' Chamcha fought to restrain his anger, but finally
burst, 'Do I look like a Khalistan zealot to you?' The official shrugged.
'I'll tell you who I am,' Chamcha bellowed, incensed by that shrug, 'I'm the
poor bastard who got blown up by terrorists, fell thirty thousand feet out
of the sky because of terrorists, and now because of those same terrorists I
have to be insulted by pen-pushers like you.' His visa application, placed
firmly at the bottom of a large pile by his adversary, was not granted until
three days later. The first available flight was thirty-six hours after
that: and it was an Air India 747, and its name was
Gulistan.
Gulistan and Bostan, the twin gardens of Paradise - one blew apart, and
then there was one . . . Chamcha, moving down one of the drains through
which Terminal Three dripped passengers into aircraft, saw the name painted
next to the 747`s open door, and turned a couple of shades paler. Then he
heard the sari-clad Indian stewardess greeting him in an unmistakably
Canadian accent, and lost his nerve, spinning away from the plane in a
reflex of straightforward terror. As he stood there, facing the irritable
throng of passengers waiting to board, he was conscious of how absurd he
must look, with his brown leather holdall in one hand, two zippered
suit-hanger bags in the other, and his eyes out on stalks; but for a long
moment he was entirely unable to move. The crowd grew restive;
if this is an
artery,
he found himself thinking,
then I'm the blasted dot.
'I used to
chichi chicken out also,' said a cheerful voice. 'But now I've got the
titrick. I fafa flap my hands during tatake-off and the plane always mama
makes it into the isk isk isky.'
'Today the top gogo goddess is absolutely Lakshmi,' Sisodia confided
over whisky once they were safely aloft. (He had been as good as his word,
flapping his arms wildly as
Gulistan
rushed down the runway, and afterwards
settled back contentedly in his seat, beaming modestly. 'Wowoworks every
time.' They were both travelling in the 747's upper deck, reserved for
business class non-smokers, and Sisodia had moved into the empty seat next
to Chamcha like air filling a vacuum. 'Call me Whisky,' he insisted. 'What
lie lie line are you in? How mum much do you earn? How long you bibi been
away? You know any women in town, or you want heh heh help?') Chamcha closed
his eyes and fixed his thoughts on his father. The saddest thing, he
realized, was that he could not remember a single happy day with Changez in
his entire life as a man. And the most gladdening thing was the discovery
that even the unforgivable crime of being one's father could be forgiven,
after all, in the end.
Hang on,
he pleaded silently.
I'm coming as fast as I
can.
'In these hihighly material times,' Sisodia explained, 'who else but
goddess of wewealth? In Bombay the young businessmen are hoho holding all
night poopoo pooja parties. Statue of Lakshmi presides, with hands tuturned
out, and lightbulbs running down her fifi fingers, lighting in sequence, you
get me, as if the wealth is paw paw pouring down her palms.' On the cabin's
movie screen a stewardess was demonstrating the various safety procedures.
In a corner of the screen an inset male figure translated her into sign
language. This was progress, Chamcha recognized. Film instead of human
beings, a small increase in sophistication (the signing) and a large
increase in cost. High technology at the service, ostensibly, of safety;
while in reality air travel got daily more dangerous, the world's stock of
aircraft was ageing and nobody could afford to renew it. Bits fell off
planes every day, or so it seemed, and collisions and near-misses were also
on the up. So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said:
Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a
movie about it.
Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality
. . . 'I'm planning a big bubudget picture about her,' Sisodia said. 'This
is in strictest coco confidence. Maybe a Sridevi weewee wehicle, I hohope
so. Now that Gibreel's comeback is flaw flaw flopping, she is number one
supreme.'
Chamcha had heard that Gibreel Farishta had hit the comeback trail. His
first film,
The Parting of the Arabian Sea,
had bombed badly; the special
effects looked home-made, the girl in the central Ayesha role, a certain
Pimple Billimoria, had been woefully inadequate, and Gibreel's own portrayal
of the archangel had struck many critics as narcissistic and megalomaniac.
The days when he could do no wrong were gone; his second feature,
Mahound,
had hit every imaginable religious reef, and sunk without trace. 'You see,
he chochose to go with other producers,' Sisodia lamented. 'The greegreed of
the ista ista istar. With me the if if effects always work and the good
tataste also you can take for gug, grunt, granted,' Saladin Chamcha closed
his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He had drunk his whisky too fast on
account of his fear of flying, and his head had begun to spin. Sisodia
appeared not to recall his past connection to Farishta, which was fine. That
was where the connection belonged: in the past. 'Shh shh Sridevi as
Lakshmi,' Sisodia sang out, not very confidentially. 'Now that is sosolid
gold. You are an ack actor. You should work back hohome. Call me. Maybe we
can do bubusiness. This picture: solid pap pap
platinum.'
Chamcha's head whirled. What strange meanings words were taking on.
Only a few days ago that
back home
would have rung false. But now his father
was dying and old emotions were sending tentacles out to grasp him. Maybe
his tongue was twisting again, sending his accent East along with the rest
of him. He hardly dared open his mouth.
Almost twenty years earlier, when the young and newly renamed Saladin
was scratching a living on the margins of the London theatre, in order to
maintain a safe distance from his father; and when Changez was retreating in
other ways, becoming both reclusive and religious; back then, one day, out
of the blue, the father had written to the son, offering him a house. The
property was a rambling mansion in the hill-station of Solan. 'The first
property I ever owned,' Changez wrote, 'and so it is the first I am gifting
to you.' Saladin's instant reaction was to see the offer as a snare, a way
of rejoining him to
home,
to the webs of his father's power; and when he
learned that the Solan property had long ago been requisitioned by the
Indian Government in return for a peppercorn rent, and that it had for many
years been occupied by a boys' school, the gift stood revealed as a delusion
as well. What did Chamcha care if the school were willing to treat him, on
any visits he cared to make, as a visiting Head of State, putting on
march-pasts and gymnastic displays? That sort of thing appealed to Changez's
enormous vanity, but Chamcha wanted none of it. The point was, the school
wasn't budging; the gift was useless, and probably an administrative
headache as well. He wrote to his father refusing the offer. It was the last
time Changez Chamchawala tried to give him anything.
Home
receded from the
prodigal son.
'I never forget a faface,' Sisodia was saying. 'You're mimi Mimi's
friend. The
Bostan
susurvivor. Knew it the moment I saw you papa panic at
the gaga gate. Hope you're not feefeeling too baba bad.' Saladin, his heart
sinking, shook his head, no, I'm fine, honestly. Sisodia, gleaming,
knee-like, winked hideously at a passing stewardess and summoned more
whisky. 'Such a shashame about Gibreel and his lady,' Sisodia went on. 'Such
a nice name that she had, alia alia Alleluia. What a temper on that boy,
what a jeajealous tata type. Hard for a momodern gaga girl. They bus bust
up.' Saladin retreated, once again, into a pretence of sleep.
I have only
just recovered from the past. Go, go away.
He had formally declared his recovery complete only five weeks earlier,
at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan and HanifJohnson. After the death of her
parents in the Shaandaar fire Mishal had been assailed by a terrible,
illogical guilt that caused her mother to appear to her in dreams and
admonish her: 'If only you'd passed the fire extinguisher when I asked. If
only you'd blown a little harder. But you never listen to what I say and
your lungs are so cigarette-rotten that you could not blow out one candle
let alone a burning house.' Under the severe eye of her mother's ghost
Mishal moved out of Hanif's apartment, took a room in a place with three
other women, applied for and got Jumpy Joshi's old job at the sports centre,
and fought the insurance companies until they paid up. Only when the
Shaandaar was ready to reopen under her management did Hind Sufyan's ghost
agree that it was time to be off to the after-life; whereupon Mishal
telephoned Hanif and asked him to marry her. He was too surprised to reply,
and had to pass the telephone to a colleague who explained that the cat had
got Mr Johnson's tongue, and accepted Mishal's offer on the dumbstruck
lawyer's behalf. So everybody was recovering from the tragedy; even Anahita,
who had been obliged to live with a stiflingly old-fashioned aunt, managed
to look pleased at the wedding, perhaps because Mishal had promised her her
own rooms in the renovated Shaandaar Hotel. Mishal had asked Saladin to be
her chief witness in recognition of his attempt to save her parents' life,
and on their way to the registry office in Pinkwalla's van (all charges
against the DJ and his boss, John Maslama, had been dropped for lack of
evidence) Chamcha told the bride: 'Today feels like a new start for me, too;
perhaps for all of us.' In his own case there had been by-pass surgery, and
the difficulty of coming to terms with so many deaths, and nightmare visions
of being metamorphosed once more into some sort of sulphurous, cloven-hoof
demon. He was also, for a time, professionally crippled by a shame so
profound that, when clients finally did begin to book him once more and ask
for one of his voices, for example the voice of a frozen pea or a
glove-puppet packet of sausages, he felt the memory of his telephonic crimes
welling up in his throat and strangling the impersonations at birth. At
Mishal's wedding, however, he suddenly felt free. It was quite a ceremony,
largely because the young couple could not refrain from kissing one another
throughout the procedure, and had to be urged by the registrar (a pleasant
young woman who also exhorted the guests not to drink too much that day if
they planned to drive) to hurry up and get through the words before it was
time for the next wedding party to arrive. Afterwards at the Shaandaar the
kissing continued, the kisses becoming gradually longer and more explicit,
until finally the guests had the feeling that they were intruding on a
private moment, and slipped quietly away leaving Hanif and Mishal to enjoy a
passion so engulfing that they did not even notice their friends' departure;
they remained oblivious, too, of the small crowd of children that gathered
outside the windows of the Shaandaar Cafe to watch them. Chamcha, the last
guest to leave, did the newly weds the favour of pulling down the blinds,
much to the children's annoyance; and strolled off down the rebuilt High
Street feeling so light on his feet that he actually gave a kind of
embarrassed skip.
Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over
Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life
moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not
unhappiness, then at least melancholy . . . These broodings were interrupted
by a lusty snore from the seat beside him. Mr Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand,
was asleep.
The producer was evidently a hit with the stewardesses. They fussed
around his sleeping person, detaching the glass from his fingers and
removing it to a place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half,
and trilling admiringly over his snoring head: 'Doesn't he look poochie?
Just a little cuteso, I swear!' Chamcha was reminded unexpectedly of the
society ladies of Bombay patting him on the head during his mother's little
soirees, and fought back tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly
obscene; he had removed his spectacles before falling asleep, and their
absence gave him an oddly naked appearance. To Chamcha's eyes he resembled
nothing so much as an outsize Shiva lingam. Maybe that accounted for his
popularity with the ladies.
Flicking through the magazines and newspapers he was offered by the
stewardesses, Saladin chanced upon an old acquaintance in trouble. Hal
Valance's sanitized
Aliens Show
had flopped badly in the United States and
was being taken off the air. Worse still, his advertising agency and its
subsidiaries had been swallowed by an American leviathan, and it was
probable that Hal was on the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon
he had set out to tame. It was hard to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed
and down to his last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs. Torture and
her pals, relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with
busted entrepreneur-boffins and insider-dealing financiers and renegade
ex-ministers; but Chamcha, flying to his father's deathbed, was in so
heightened an emotional condition that he managed a valedictory lump in the
throat even for wicked Hal.
At whose pool table,
he wondered vaguely,
is
Baby playing now?
In India, the war between men and women showed no sign of abating. In
the
Indian Express
he read an account of the latest 'bride suicide'.
The
husband, Prajapati, is absconding.
On the next page, in the weekly small-ad
marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of
young women proudly offered, brides of 'wheatish' complexions. Chamcha
remembered Zeeny's friend, the poet Bhupen Gandhi, speaking of such things
with passionate bitterness. 'How to accuse others of being prejudiced when
our own hands are so dirty?' he had declaimed. 'Many of you in Britain speak
of victimization. Well. I have not been there, I don't know your situation,
but in my personal experience I have never been able to feel comfortable
about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously, I am not. Even
speaking culturally, you find here all the bigotries, all the procedures
associated with oppressor groups. So while many Indians are undoubtedly
oppressed, I don't think any of
us
are entitled to lay claim to such a
glamorous position.'
'Trouble with Bhupen's radical critiques,' Zeeny had remarked, 'is that
reactionaries like Salad baba here just love to lap them up.'
An armaments scandal was raging; had the Indian government paid
kickbacks to middlemen, and then gone in for a cover-up? Vast sums of money
were involved, the Prime Minister's credibility had been weakened, but
Chamcha couldn't be bothered with any of it. He was staring at the fuzzy
photograph, on an inside page, of indistinct, bloated shapes floating
down-river in large numbers. In a north Indian town there had been a
massacre of Muslims, and their corpses had been dumped in the water, where
they awaited the ministrations of some twentieth-century Gaffer Hexam. There
were hundreds of bodies, swollen and rancid; the stench seemed to rise off
the page. And in Kashmir a once-popular Chief Minister who had 'made an
accommodation' with the Congress-I had shoes hurled at him during the Eid
prayers by irate groups of Islamic fundamentalists. Communalism, sectarian
tension, was omnipresent: as if the gods were going to war. In the eternal
struggle between the world's beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining
ground by the day. Sisodia's voice intruded on these morose thoughts. The
producer had woken up to see the photograph from Meerut staring up from
Chamcha's fold-out table. 'Fact is,' he said without any of his usual
bonhomie, 'religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations
of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts,
and gogo God is the creature of evil.'
KNOWN HISTORY SHEETERS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS, a government spokesman
alleged, but 'progressive elements' rejected this analysis. CITY
CONSTABULARY CONTAMINATED BY COMMUNAL AGITATORS, the counter-argument
suggested. HINDU NATIONALISTS RUN AMUCK. A political fortnightly contained a
photograph of signboards that had been mounted outside the Juma Masjid in
Old Delhi. The Imam, a loose-bellied man with cynical eyes, who could be
found most mornings in his 'garden' - a red-earth-and-rubble waste land in
the shadow of the mosque - counting rupees donated by the faithful and
rolling up each note individually, so that he seemed to be holding a handful
of thin beedi-like cigarettes - and who was no stranger to communalist
politics himself, was apparently determined that the Meerut horror should be
turned to good account.
Quench the Fire under our Breast,
the signboards
cried.
Salute with Reverence those who met Martyrdom from the Bullets of the
Polis.
Also:
Alas! Alas! Alas! Awak the Prime Minister!
And finally, the
call to action:
Bandh will be observed,
and the date of the strike.
'Bad days,' Sisodia went on. 'For the moomoo movies also TV and
economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects.' Then he cheered up as
stewardesses approached. 'I will confess to being a mem member of the mile
high cluck cluck club,' he said gaily within the attendants' hearing. 'And
you? Should I see what I can ficfic fix?'
O, the dissociations of which the human mind is capable, marvelled
Saladin gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within
these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything
for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices.
If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels
than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of ... He himself had found his
thoughts straying, no matter how hard he tried to fix them on his father,
towards the question of Miss Zeenat Vakil. He had wired ahead, informing her
of his arrival; would she meet the flight? What might or might not happen
between them? Had he, by leaving her, by not returning, by losing touch for
a time, done the Unforgivable Thing? Was she - he thought, and was shocked
by the realization that it had simply not occurred to him earlier - married?
In love? Involved? And as for himself: what did he really want?
I'll know
when I see her,
he thought. The future, even when it was only a
question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when
death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal
rights.
The flight passed without incident.
Zeenat Vakil was not waiting at the airport, 'Come along,' Sisodia
waved. 'My car has come to pipi pick, so please to lelet me drop.'
Thirty-five minutes later Saladin Chamcha was at Scandal Point,
standing at the gates of childhood with holdall and suit-bags, looking at
the imported video-controlled entry system. Anti-narcotics slogans had been
painted on the perimeter wall: DREAMS ALL DROWN/WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. And:
FUTURE IS BLACK/WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. Courage, my old, he braced himself; and
rang as directed, once, firmly, for attention.
In the luxuriant garden the stump of the felled walnut-tree caught his
unquiet eye. They probably used it as a picnic table now, he mused bitterly.
His father had always had a gift for the melodramatic, self-pitying gesture,
and to eat his lunch off a surface which packed such an emotional wallop -
with, no doubt, many profound sighs between the large mouthfuls - would be
right in character. Was he going to camp up his death, too, Saladin
wondered. What a grandstand play for sympathy the old bastard could make
now! Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches
delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.
His stepmother emerged from the dying man's marbled mansion to greet
Chamcha without a hint of rancour. 'Salahuddin. Good you came. It will lift
his spirit, and now it is his spirit that he must fight with, because his
body is more or less kaput.' She was perhaps six or seven years younger than
Saladin's mother would have been, but out of the same birdlike mould. His
large, expansive father had been remarkably consistent in these matters at
least. 'How long does he have?' Saladin asked. Nasreen was as undeceived as
her telegram had suggested. 'It could be any day.' The myeloma was present
throughout Changez's 'long bones' -the cancer had brought its own vocabulary
to the house; one no longer spoke of
arms and legs -
and in his skull.
Cancerous cells had even been detected in the blood around the bones. 'We
should have spotted it,' Nasreen said, and Saladin began to feel the old
lady's power, the force of will with which she was reining in her feelings.
'His pronounced weight-loss these past two years. Also he has complained of
aches and pains, for instance in the knees. You know how it is. With an old
man, you blame his age, you don't imagine that a vile, hideous disease.' She
stopped, needing to control her voice. Kasturba, the ex-ayah, had come out
to join them in the garden. It turned out that her husband Vallabh had died
almost a year earlier, of old age, in his sleep: a kinder death than the one
now eating its way out of the body of his employer, the seducer of his wife.
Kasturba was still dressing in Nasreen I's old, loud saris: today she had
chosen one of the dizziest of the Op-Art black-and-white prints. She, too,
greeted Saladin warmly: hugs kisses tears. 'As for me,' she sobbed, 'I will
never stop praying for a miracle while there is one breath left in his poor
lungs.'
Nasreen II embraced Kasturba; each woman rested her head on the other's
shoulder. The intimacy between the two women was spontaneous and untarnished
by resentments; as if the proximity of death had washed away the quarrels
and jealousies of life. The two old ladies comforted one another in the
garden, each consoling the other for the imminent loss of the most precious
of things: love. Or, rather: the beloved. 'Come on,' Nasreen finally said to
Saladin. 'He should see you, pronto.'
'Does he know?' Saladin asked. Nasreen answered evasively. 'He is an
intelligent man. He keeps asking, where has all the blood gone? He says,
there are only two illnesses in which the blood vanishes like this. One is
tuberculosis.' But, Saladin pressed, he never actually speaks the word?
Nasreen lowered her head. The word had not been spoken, either by Changez or
in his presence. 'Shouldn't he know?' Chamcha asked. 'Doesn't a man have the
right to prepare for his death?' He saw Nasreen's eyes blaze for an instant.
Who do you think you are to tell us our duty. You have sacrificed all
rights.
Then they faded, and when she spoke her voice was level,
unemotional, low. 'Maybe you're correct.' But Kasturba wailed: 'No! How to
tell him, poor man? It will break his heart.'
The cancer had thickened Changez's blood to the point at which his
heart was having the greatest difficulty pumping it round his body. It had
also polluted the bloodstream with alien bodies, platelets, that would
attack any blood with which he was transfused, even blood of his own type.
So,
even in this small way, I can't help him,
Saladin understood. Changez
could easily die of these side-effects before the cancer did for him. If he
did die from the cancer, the end would take the form either of pneumonia or
of kidney failure; the doctors, knowing they could do nothing for him, had
sent him home to wait for it. 'Because myeloma is systemic, chemotherapy and
radiation treatment are not used,' Nasreen explained. 'Only medicament is
the drug Melphalan, which can in some cases prolong life, even for years.
However, we are informed he is in the category which will not respond to
Melphalan tablets.'
But he has not been told,
Saladin's inner voices
insisted.
And that's wrong, wrong, wrong.
'Still, a miracle has happened,'
Kasturba cried. 'The doctors told that normally this is one of the most
painful cancers; but your father is in no pain. If one prays, then sometimes
a kindness is granted.' It was on account of the freak absence of pain that
the cancer had taken so long to diagnose; it had been spreading in Changez's
body for at least two years. 'I must see him now,' Saladin gently asked. A
bearer had taken his holdall and suit-bags indoors while they spoke; now, at
last, he followed his garments indoors.
The interior of the house was unchanged - the generosity of the second
Nasreen towards the memory of the first seemed boundless, at least during
these days, the last on earth of their mutual spouse - except that Nasreen
II had moved in her collection of stuffed birds (hoopoes and rare parrots
under glass bell-jars, a full-grown King Penguin in the marble-and-mosaic
hall, its beak swarming with tiny red ants) and her cases of impaled
butterflies. Saladin moved past this colourful gallery of dead wings towards
his father's study - Changez had insisted on vacating his bedroom and having
a bed moved downstairs into that wood-panelled retreat full of rotting
books, so that people didn't have to run up and down all day to look after
him - and came, at last, to death's door.
Early in life Changez Chamchawala had acquired the disconcerting knack
of sleeping with his eyes wide open, 'staying on guard', as he liked to say.
Now, as Saladin quietly entered the room, the effect of those open grey eyes
staring blindly at the ceiling was positively unnerving. For a moment
Saladin thought he was too late; that Changez had died while he'd been
chatting in the garden. Then the man on the bed emitted a series of small
coughs, turned his head, and extended an uncertain arm. Saladin Chamcha went
towards his father and bowed his head beneath the old man's caressing palm.
To fall in love with one's father after the long angry decades was a
serene and beautiful feeling; a renewing, life-giving thing, Saladin wanted
to say, but did not, because it sounded vampirish; as if by sucking this new
life out of his father he was making room, in Changez's body, for death.
Although he kept it quiet, however, Saladin felt hourly closer to many old,
rejected selves, many alternative Saladins - or rather Salahuddins - which
had split off from himself as he made his various life choices, but which
had apparently continued to exist, perhaps in the parallel universes of
quantum theory. Cancer had stripped Changez Chamchawala literally to the
bone; his cheeks had collapsed into the hollows of the skull, and he had to
place a foam-rubber pillow under his buttocks because of the atrophying of
his flesh. But it had also stripped him of his faults, of all that had been
domineering, tyrannical and cruel in him, so that the mischievous, loving
and brilliant man beneath lay exposed, once again, for all to see.
If only
he could have been this person all his life,
Saladin (who had begun to find
the sound of his full, un-Englished name pleasing for the first time in
twenty years) found himself wishing. How hard it was to find one's father
just when one had no choice but to say goodbye.
On the morning of his return Salahuddin Chamchawala was asked by his
father to give him a shave. 'These old women of mine don't know which side
of a Philishave is the business end.' Changez's skin hung off his face in
soft, leathery jowls, and his hair (when Salahuddin emptied the machine)
looked like ashes. Salahuddin could not remember when he had last touched
his father's face this way, gently drawing the skin tight as the cordless
shaver moved across it, and then stroking it to make sure it felt smooth.
When he had finished he continued for a moment to run his fingers along
Changez's cheeks. 'Look at the old man,' Nasreen said to Kasturba as they
entered the room, 'he can't take his eyes off his boy.' Changez Chamchawala
grinned an exhausted grin, revealing a mouth full of shattered teeth,
flecked with spittle and crumbs.
When his father fell asleep again, after being forced by Kasturba and
Nasreen to drink a small quantity of water, and gazed up at -what? - with
his open, dreaming eyes, which could see into three worlds at once, the
actual world of his study, the visionary world of dreams, and the
approaching after-life as well (or so Salahuddin, in a fanciful moment,
found himself imagining); - then the son went to Changez's old bedroom for a
rest. Grotesque heads in painted terracotta glowered down at him from the
walls: a horned demon; a leering Arab with a falcon on his shoulder; a bald
man rolling his eyes upwards and putting his tongue out in panic as a huge
black fly settled on his eyebrow. Unable to sleep beneath these figures,
which he had known all his life and also hated, because he had come to see
them as portraits of Changez, he moved finally to a different, neutral room.
Waking up in the early evening, he went downstairs to find the two old
women outside Changez's room, trying to work out the details of his
medication. Apart from the daily Melphalan tablet, he had been prescribed a
whole battery of drugs in an attempt to combat the cancer's pernicious
side-effects: anaemia, the strain on the heart, and so on. Isosorbide
dimtrate, two tablets, four times a day; Furosemide, one tablet, three
times; Pred-nisolone, six tablets, twice daily . . . 'I'll do this,' he told
the relieved old women. 'At least it is one thing I can do.' Agarol for his
constipation, Spironolactone for goodness knew what, and a zyloric,
Allopurinol: he suddenly remembered, crazily, an antique theatre review in
which the English critic, Kenneth Tynan, had imagined the polysyllabic
characters in Marlowe's
Tamburlaine the Great
as 'a horde of pills and
wonder drugs bent on decimating one another':
Beard'st thou me here, thou bold Barbiturate?
Sirrah, thy grandam's dead - old Nembutal.
The spangled stars shall weep for Nembutal . . .
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
Aureomycin and Formaldehyde,
Is it not passing brave to be a king
And ride in triumph through Amphetamine?
The things one's memory threw up! But perhaps this pharmaceutical
Tamburlaine
was not such a bad eulogy for the fallen monarch lying here in
his bookwormed study, staring into three worlds, waiting for the end. 'Come
on, Abba,' he marched cheerily into the presence. 'Time to save your life.'
Still in its place, on a shelf in Changez's study: a certain
copper-and-brass lamp, reputed to have the power of wish fulfilment, but as
yet (because never rubbed) untested. Somewhat tarnished now, it looked down
upon its dying owner; and was observed, in its turn, by his only son. Who
was sorely tempted, for an instant, to get it down, rub three times, and ask
the turbanned djinni for a magic spell . . . however, Salahuddin left the
lamp where it was. There was no place for djinns or ghouls or afreets here;
no spooks or fancies could be permitted. No magic formulae; just the
impotence of the pills. 'Here's the medicine man,' Salahuddin sang out,
rattling the little bottles, rousing his father from sleep. 'Medicine,'
Changez grimaced childishly. 'Eek, bhaak, thoo.'
That night, Salahuddin forced Nasreen and Kasturba to sleep comfortably
in their own beds while he kept watch over Changez from a mattress on the
floor. After his midnight dose of Isosorbide, the dying man slept for three
hours, and then needed to go to the toilet. Salahuddin virtually lifted him
to his feet, and was astonished at Changez's lightness. This had always been
a weighty man, but now he was a living lunch for the advancing cancer cells
... in the toilet, Changez refused all help, 'He won't let you do one
thing,' Kasturba had complained lovingly. 'Such a shy fellow that he is.' On
his way back to bed he leaned lightly on Salahuddin's arm, and shuffled
along flat-footed in old, worn bedroom slippers, his remaining hairs
sticking out at comical angles, his head stuck beakily forward on its
scrawny, fragile neck. Salahuddin suddenly longed to pick the old man up, to
cradle him in his arms and sing soft, comforting songs. Instead, he blurted
out, at this least appropriate of moments, an appeal for reconciliation.
'Abba, I came because I didn't want there to be trouble between us any more
. . .'
Fucking idiot. The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon. In
the middle of the bloody night! And if he hasn't guessed he's dying, that
little deathbed speech will certainly have let him know.
Changez continued
to shuffle along; his grip on his son's arm tightened very slightly. 'That
doesn't matter any more,' he said. 'It's forgotten, whatever it was.'
In the morning, Nasreen and Kasturba arrived in clean saris, looking
rested and complaining, 'It was so terrible sleeping away from him that we
didn't sleep one wink.' They fell upon Changez, and so tender were their
caresses that Salahuddin had the same sense of spying on a private moment
that he'd had at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan. He left the room quietly
while the three lovers embraced, kissed and wept.
Death, the great fact, wove its spell around the house on Scandal
Point. Salahuddin surrendered to it like everyone else, even Changez, who,
on that second day, often smiled his old crooked smile, the one that said I
know what's up, I'll go along with it, just don't think I'm fooled. Kasturba
and Nasreen fussed over him constantly, brushing his hair, coaxing him to
eat and drink. His tongue had grown fat in his mouth, slurring his speech
slightly, making it hard to swallow; he refused anything at all fibrous or
stringy, even the chicken breasts he had loved all his life. A mouthful of
soup, pureed potatoes, a taste of custard. Baby food. When he sat up in bed
Salahuddin sat behind him; Changez leaned against his son's body while he
ate.
'Open the house,' Changez commanded that morning. 'I want to see some
smiling faces here, instead of your three glum mugs.' So, after a long time,
people came: young and old, half-forgotten cousins, uncles, aunts; a few
comrades from the old days of the nationalist movement, poker-backed
gentlemen with silver hair, achkan jackets and monocles; employees of the
various foundations and philanthropical enterprises set up by Changez years
ago; rival manufacturers of agricultural sprays and artificial dung. A real
bag of allsorts, Salahuddin thought; but marvelled, also, at how beautifully
everyone behaved in the presence of the dying man: the young spoke to him
intimately about their lives, as if reassuring him that life itself was
invincible, offering him the rich consolation of being a member of the great
procession of the human race, - while the old evoked the past, so that he
knew nothing was forgotten, nothing lost; that in spite of the years of
self-imposed sequestration he remained joined to the world. Death brought
out the best in people; it was good to be shown Salahuddin realized - that
this, too, was what human beings were like: considerate, loving, even noble.
We are still capable of exaltation, he thought in celebratory mood; in spite
of everything, we can still transcend. A pretty young woman - it occurred to
Salahuddin that she was probably his niece, and he felt ashamed that he
didn't know her name - was taking Polaroid snapshots of Changez with his
visitors, and the sick man was enjoying himself hugely, pulling faces, then
kissing the many proffered cheeks with a light in his eyes that Salahuddin
identified as nostalgia. 'It's like a birthday party,' he thought. Or: like
Finnegan's wake. The dead man refusing to lie down and let the living have
all the fun.
'We have to tell him,' Salahuddin insisted when the visitors had left.
Nasreen bowed her head; and nodded. Kasturba burst into tears.
They told him the next morning, having asked the specialist to attend
to answer any questions Changez might have. The specialist, Panikkar (a name
the English would mispronounce and giggle over, Salahuddin thought, like the
Muslim 'Fakhar'), arrived at ten, shining with self-esteem. 'I should tell
him,' he said, taking control. 'Most patients feel ashamed to let their
loved ones see their fear.' 'The hell you will,' Salahuddin said with a
vehemence that took him by surprise. 'Well, in that case,' Panikkar
shrugged, making as if to leave; which won the argument, because now Nasreen
and Kasturba pleaded with Salahuddin: 'Please, let's not fight.' Salahuddin,
defeated, ushered the doctor into his father's presence; and shut the study
door.
'I have a cancer,' Changez Chamchawala said to Nasreen, Kasturba and
Salahuddin after Panikkar's departure. He spoke clearly, enunciating the
word with defiant, exaggerated care. 'It is very far advanced. I am not
surprised. I said to Panikkar: "This is what I told you the very first day.
Where else could all the blood have gone?"' - Outside the study, Kasturba
said to Salahuddin: 'Since you came, there was a light in his eye.
Yesterday, with all the people, how happy he was! But now his eye is dim.
Now he won't fight.'
That afternoon Salahuddin found himself alone with his father while the
two women napped. He discovered that he, who had been so determined to have
everything out in the open, to say the word, was now awkward and
inarticulate, not knowing how to speak. But Changez had something to say.
'I want you to know,' he said to his son, 'that I have no problem about
this thing at all. A man must die of something, and it is not as though I
were dying young. I have no illusions; I know I am not going anywhere after
this. It's the end. That's okay. The only thing I'm afraid of is pain,
because when there is pain a man loses his dignity. I don't want that to
happen.' Salahuddin was awestruck.
First one falls in love with one's father
all over again, and then one learns to look up to him, too.
'The doctors say
you're a case in a million,' he replied truthfully. 'It looks like you have
been spared the pain.' Something in Changez relaxed at that, and Salahuddin
realized how afraid the old man had been, how much he'd needed to be told .
. . 'Bas,' Changez Chamchawala said gruffly. 'Then I'm ready. And by the
way: you get the lamp, after all.'
An hour later the diarrhoea began: a thin black trickle. Nasreen's
anguished phone calls to the emergency room of the Breach Candy Hospital
established that Panikkar was unavailable. 'Take him off the Agarol at
once,' the duty doctor ordered, and prescribed Imodium instead. It didn't
help. At seven pm the risk of dehydration was growing, and Changez was too
weak to sit up for his food. He had virtually no appetite, but Kasturba
managed to spoon-feed him a few drops of semolina with skinned apricots.
'Yum, yum,' he said ironically, smiling his crooked smile.
He fell asleep, but by one o'clock had been up and down three times.
'For God's sake,' Salahuddin shouted down the telephone, 'give me Panikkar's
home number.' But that was against hospital procedure. 'You must judge,'
said the duty doctor, 'if the time has come to bring him down.' Bitch,
Salahuddin Chamchawala mouthed. 'Thanks a lot.'
At three o'clock Changez was so weak that Salahuddin more or less
carried him to the toilet. 'Get the car out,' he shouted at Nasreen and
Kasturba. 'We're going to the hospital. Now.' The proof of Changez's decline
was that, this last time, he permitted his son to help him out. 'Black shit
is bad,' he said, panting for breath. His lungs had filled up alarmingly;
the breath was like bubbles pushing through glue. 'Some cancers are slow,
but I think this is very fast. Deterioration is very rapid.' And
Sala-huddin, the apostle of truth, told comforting lies:
Abba, don't worry.
You'll be fine.
Changez Chamchawala shook his head. 'I'm going, son,' he
said. His chest heaved; Salahuddin grabbed a large plastic mug and held it
under Changez's mouth. The dying man vomited up more than a pint of phlegm
mixed up with blood: and after that was too weak to talk. This time
Salahuddin did have to carry him, to the back seat of the Mercedes, where he
sat between Nasreen and Kasturba while Salahuddin drove at top speed to
Breach Candy Hospital, half a mile down the road. 'Shall I open the window,
Abba?' he asked at one point, and Changez shook his head and bubbled: 'No.'
Much later, Salahuddin realized this had been his father's last word.
The emergency ward. Running feet, orderlies, wheelchair, Changez being
heaved on to a bed, curtains. A young doctor, doing what had to be done,
very quickly but without the appearance of speed.
I like him,
Salahuddin
thought. Then the doctor looked him in the eye and said: 'I don't think he's
going to make it,' It felt like being punched in the stomach. Salahuddin
realized he'd been clinging on to a futile hope,
they'll fix him and we'll
take him home; this isn't 'it',
and his instant reaction to the doctor's
words was rage.
You're the mechanic. Don't tell me the car won't start; mend
the damn thing.
Changez was flat out, drowning in his lungs. 'We can't get
at his chest in this kurta; may we . . .'
Cut it off. Do what you have to
do.
Drips, the blip of a weakening heartbeat on a screen, helplessness. The
young doctor murmuring: 'It won't be long now, so . . .' At which,
Salahuddin Chamchawala did a crass thing. He turned to Nasreen and Kasturba
and said: 'Come quickly now. Come and say goodbye.' 'For God's sake!' the
doctor exploded . . . the women did not weep, but came up to Changez and
took a hand each. Salahuddin blushed for shame. He would never know if his
father heard the death-sentence dripping from the lips of his son.
Now Salahuddin found better words, his Urdu returning to him after a
long absence.
We're all beside you, Abba. We all love you very much.
Changez
could not speak, but that was, - was it not? - yes, it must have been - a
little nod of recognition.
He heard me.
Then all of a sudden Changez
Chamchawala left his face; he was still alive, but he had gone somewhere
else, had turned inwards to look at whatever there was to sec.
He is
teaching me how to die,
Salahuddin thought.
He does not avert his eyes, but
looks death right in the face.
At no point in his dying did Changez
Chamchawala speak the name of God.
'Please,' the doctor said, 'go outside the curtain now and let us make
our effort.' Salahuddin took the two women a few steps away; and now, when a
curtain hid Changez from their sight, they wept. 'He swore he would never
leave me,' Nasreen sobbed, her iron control broken at last, 'and he has gone
away.' Salahuddin went to watch through a crack in the curtain; - and saw
the voltage being pumped into his father's body, the sudden green jaggedness
of the pulse on the monitor screen; saw doctor and nurses pounding his
father's chest; saw defeat.
The last thing he had seen in his father's face, just before the
medical staff's final, useless effort, was the dawning of a terror so
profound that it chilled Salahuddin to the bone. What had he seen? What was
it that waited for him, for all of us, that brought such fear to a brave
man's eyes? - Now, when it was over, he returned to Changez's bedside; and
saw his father's mouth curved upwards, in a smile.
He caressed those sweet cheeks.
I didn't shave him today. He died with
stubble on his chin.
How cold his face was already; but the brain, the brain
retained a little warmth. They had stuffed cottonwool into his nostrils.
But
suppose there's been a mistake? What if he wants to breathe?
Nasreen
Chamchawala was beside him. 'Let's take your father home,' she said.
Changez Chamchawala returned home in an ambulance, lying in an
aluminium tray on the floor between the two women who had loved him, while
Salahuddin followed in the car. Ambulance men laid him to rest in his study;
Nasreen turned the air-conditioner up high. This was, after all, a tropical
death, and the sun would be up soon.
What did he see?
Salahuddin kept thinking.
Why the horror? And, whence
that final smile?
People came again. Uncles, cousins, friends took charge, arranging
everything. Nasreen and Kasturba sat on white sheets on the floor of the
room in which, once upon a time, Saladin and Zeeny had visited the ogre,
Changez; women sat with them to mourn, many of them reciting the qalmah over
and over, with the help of counting beads. Salahuddin was irritated by this;
but lacked the will to tell them to stop. - Then the mullah came, and sewed
Changez's winding-sheet, and it was time to wash the body; and even though
there were many men present, and there was no need for him to help,
Salahuddin insisted.
If he could look his death in the eye, then I can do
it, too. -
And when his father was being washed, his body rolled this way
and that at the mullah's command, the flesh bruised and slabby, the appendix
scar long and brown, Salahuddin recalled the only other time in his life
when he'd seen his physically demure father naked: he'd been nine years old,
blundering into a bathroom where Changez was taking a shower, and the sight
of his father's penis was a shock he'd never forgotten. That thick squat
organ, like a club. O the power of it; and the insignificance of his own . .
. 'His eyes won't close,' the mullah complained. 'You should have done it
before.' He was a stocky, pragmatic fellow, this mullah with his
mous-tacheless beard. He treated the dead body as a commonplace thing,
needing washing the way a car does, or a window, or a dish. 'You are from
London? Proper London? - I was there many years. I was doorman at Claridge's
Hotel.'
Oh? Really? How interesting.
The man wanted to make small-talk!
Salahuddin was appalled.
That's my father, don't you understand?
'These
garments,' the mullah asked, indicating Changez's last kurta-pajama outfit,
the one which the hospital staff had cut open to get at his chest. 'You have
need of them?' No,
no. Take them. Please.
'You are very kind.' Small pieces
of black cloth were being stuffed into Changez's mouth and under his
eyelids. 'This cloth has been to Mecca,' the mullah said.
Get it out!
'I
don't understand. It is holy fabric.'
You heard me: out, out.
'May God have
mercy on your soul.'
And:
The bier, strewn with flowers, like an outsize baby's cot.
The body, wrapped in white, with sandalwood shavings, for fragrance,
scattered all about it.
More flowers, and a green silken covering with Quranic verses
embroidered upon it in gold.
The ambulance, with the bier resting in it, awaiting the widows'
permission to depart.
The last farewells of women.
The graveyard. Male mourners rushing to lift the bier on their
shoulders trample Salahuddin's foot, ripping off a segment of the nail on
his big toe.
Among the mourners, an estranged old friend of Changez's, here in spite
of double pneumonia; - and another old gentleman, weeping copiously, who
will die himself the very next day; - and all sorts, the walking records of
a dead man's life.
The grave. Salahuddin climbs down into it, stands at the head end, the
gravedigger at the foot. Changez Chamchawala is lowered down.
The weight of
my father's head, lying in my hand. I laid it down; to rest.
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
Waiting for him when he returned from the graveyard: a copper-and-brass
lamp, his renewed inheritance. He went into Changez's study and closed the
door. There were his old slippers by the bed: he had become, as he'd
foretold, 'a pair of emptied shoes'. The bedclothes still bore the imprint
of his father's body; the room was full of sickly perfume: sandalwood,
camphor, cloves. He took the lamp from its shelf and sat at Changez's desk.
Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he rubbed briskly: once, twice,
thrice.
The lights all went on at once.
Zeenat Vakil entered the room.
'O God, I'm sorry, maybe you wanted them off, but with the blinds
closed it was just so sad.' Waving her arms, speaking loudly in her
beautiful croak of a voice, her hair woven, for once, into a waist-length
ponytail, here she was, his very own djinn. 'I feel so bad I didn't come
before, I was just trying to hurt you, what a time to choose, so bloody
self-indulgent, yaar, it's good to see you, you poor orphaned goose.'
She was the same as ever, immersed in life up to her neck, combining
occasional art lectures at the university with her medical practice and her
political activities. 'I was at the goddamn hospital when you came, you
know? I was right there, but I didn't know about your dad until it was over,
and even then I didn't come to give you a hug, what a bitch, if you want to
throw me out I will have no complaints.' This was a generous woman, the most
generous he'd known.
When you see her, you'll know,
he had promised himself,
and it turned out to be true. 'I love you,' he heard himself saying,
stopping her in her tracks. 'Okay, I won't hold you to that,' she finally
said, looking hugely pleased. 'Balance of your mind is obviously disturbed.
Lucky for you you aren't in one of our great public hospitals; they put the
loonies next to the heroin addicts, and there's so much drug traffic in the
wards that the poor schizos end up with bad habits. -
Anyway, if you say it again after forty days, watch out, because maybe
then I'll take it seriously. Just now it could be a disease.'
Undefeated (and, it appeared, unattached), Zeeny's re-entry into his
life completed the process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the
most surprising and paradoxical product of his father's terminal illness.
His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils, now seemed very remote,
even irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. 'About time,' Zeeny approved
when he told her of his return to
Salahuddin.
'Now you can stop acting at
last.' Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase, in which the world
would be solid and real, and in which there was no longer the broad figure
of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the grave. An
orphaned life, like Muhammad's; like everyone's. A life illuminated by a
strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind's eye, like a
sort of magic lamp.
I
must think of myself , from now on, as living perpetually in the
first instant of the future,
he resolved a few days later, in Zeeny's
apartment on Sophia College Lane, while recovering in her bed from the
toothy enthusiasms of her lovemaking. (She had invited him home shyly, as if
she were removing a veil after long concealment.) But a history is not so
easily shaken off; he was also living, after all, in the
present moment of
the past,
and his old life was about to surge around him once again, to
complete its final act.
He became aware that he was a rich man. Under the terms of Changez's
will, the dead tycoon's vast fortune and myriad business interests were to
be supervised by a group of distinguished trustees, the income being divided
equally between three parties: Changez's second wife Nasreen, Kasturba, whom
he referred to in the document as 'in every true sense, my third', and his
son, Salahuddin. After the deaths of the two women, however, the trust could
be dissolved whenever Salahuddin chose: he inherited, in short, the lot. 'On
the condition,' Changez Chamchawala had mischievously stipulated, 'that the
scoundrel accepts the gift he previously spurned, viz., the requisitioned
schoolhouse situated at Solan, Himachal Pradesh.' Changez might have chopped
down a walnut-tree, but he had never attempted to cut Salahuddin out of his
will. - The houses at Pali Hill and Scandal Point were excluded from these
provisions, however. The former passed to Nasreen Chamchawala outright; the
latter became, with immediate effect, the sole property of Kasturbabai, who
quickly announced her intention of selling the old house to property
developers. The site was worth crores, and Kasturba was wholly unsentimental
about real estate. Salahuddin protested vehemently, and was slapped down
hard. 'I have lived my whole life here,' she informed him. 'It is therefore
for me only to say.' Nasreen Chamchawala was entirely indifferent to the
fate of the old place. 'One more high-rise, one less piece of old Bombay,'
she shrugged. 'What's the difference? Cities change.' She was already
preparing to move back to Pali Hill, taking the cases of butterflies off the
walls, assembling her stuffed birds in the hall. 'Let it go,' Zeenat Vakil
said. 'You couldn't live in that museum, anyway.'
She was right, of course; no sooner had he resolved to set his face
towards the future than he started mooning around and regretting childhood's
end. 'I'm off to meet George and Bhupen, you remember,' she said. 'Why don't
you come along? You need to start plugging into the town.' George Miranda
had just completed a documentary film about communalism, interviewing Hindus
and Muslims of all shades of opinion. Fundamentalists of both religions had
instantly sought injunctions banning the film from being shown, and,
although the Bombay courts had rejected this request, the case had gone up
to the Supreme Court. George, even more stubbly of chin, lank of hair and
sprawling of stomach than Salahuddin remembered, drank rum in a Dhobi Talao
boozer and thumped the table with pessimistic fists. 'This is the Supreme
Court of Shah Bano fame,' he cried, referring to the notorious case in
which, under pressure from Islamic extremists, the Court had ruled that
alimony payments were contrary to the will of Allah, thus making India's
laws even more reactionary than, for example, Pakistan's. 'So I don't have
much hope.' He twisted, disconsolately, the waxy points of his moustache.
His new girlfriend, a tall, thin Bengali woman with cropped hair that
reminded Salahuddin a little of Mishal Sufyan, chose this moment to attack
Bhupen Gandhi for having published a volume of poems about his visit to the
'little temple town' of Gagari in the Western Ghats. The poems had been
criticized by the Hindu right; one eminent South Indian professor had
announced that Bhupen had 'forfeited his right to be called an Indian poet',
but in the opinion of the young woman, Swatilekha, Bhupen had been seduced
by religion into a dangerous ambiguity. Grey hair flopping earnestly,
moon-face shining, Bhupen defended himself. 'I have said that the only crop
of Gagari is the stone gods being quarried from the hills. I have spoken of
herds of legends, with sacred cowbells tinkling, grazing on the hillsides.
These are not ambiguous images.' Swatilekha wasn't convinced. 'These days,'
she insisted, 'our positions must be stated with crystal clarity. All
metaphors are capable of misinterpretation.' She offered her theory. Society
was orchestrated by what she called
grand narratives:
history, economics,
ethics. In India, the development of a corrupt and closed state apparatus
had 'excluded the masses of the people from the ethical project'. As a
result, they sought ethical satisfactions in the oldest of the grand
narratives, that is, religious faith. 'But these narratives are being
manipulated by the theocracy and various political elements in an entirely
retrogressive way.' Bhupen said: 'We can't deny the ubiquity of faith. If we
write in such a way as to pre-judge such belief as in some way deluded or
false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the
masses?' Swatilekha was scornful. 'Battle lines are being drawn up in India
today,' she cried. 'Secular versus rational, the light versus the dark.
Better you choose which side you are on.'
Bhupen got up, angrily, to go. Zeeny pacified him: 'We can't afford
schisms. There's planning to be done.' He sat down again, and Swatilekha
kissed him on the cheek. Tm sorry,' she said. 'Too much college education,
George always says. In fact, I loved the poems. I was only arguing a case.'
Bhupen, mollified, pretended to punch her on the nose; the crisis passed.
They had met, Salahuddin now gathered, to discuss their part in a
remarkable political demonstration: the formation of a human chain,
stretching from the Gateway of India to the outermost northern suburbs of
the city, in support of 'national integration'. The Communist Party of India
(Marxist) had recently organized just such a human chain in Kerala, with
great success. 'But,' George Miranda argued, 'here in Bombay it will be
totally another matter. In Kerala the CP(M) is in power. Here, with these
Shiv Sena bastards in control, we can expect every type of harassment, from
police obstructionism to out-and-out assaults by mobs on segments of the
chain - especially when it passes, as it will have to, through the Sena's
fortresses, in Mazagaon, etc.' In spite of these dangers, Zeeny explained to
Salahuddin, such public demonstrations were essential. As communal violence
escalated - and Meerut was only the latest in a long line of murderous
incidents - it was imperative that the forces of disintegration weren't
permitted to have things all their own way. 'We must show that there are
also counterforces at work.' Salahuddin was somewhat bemused at the rapidity
with which, once again, his life had begun to change.
Me, taking part in a
CP(M) event. Wonders will never cease; I really must be in love.
Once they had settled matters - how many friends each of them might
manage to bring along, where to assemble, what to carry in the way of food,
drink and first-aid equipment - they relaxed, drank down the cheap, dark
rum, and chattered inconsequentially, and that was when Salahuddin heard,
for the first time, the rumours about the odd behaviour of the film star
Gibreel Farishta that had started circulating in the city, and felt his old
life prick him like a hidden thorn; - heard the past, like a distant
trumpet, ringing in his ears.
The Gibreel Farishta who returned to Bombay from London to pick up the
threads of his film career was not, by general consensus, the old,
irresistible Gibreel. 'Guy seems hell-bent on a suicide course,' George
Miranda, who knew all the filmi gossip, declared. 'Who knows why? They say
because he was unlucky in love he's gone a little wild.' Salahuddin kept his
mouth shut, but felt his face heating up. Allie Cone had refused to have
Gibreel back after the fires of Brickhall. In the matter of forgiveness,
Salahuddin reflected, nobody had thought to consult the entirely innocent
and greatly injured Alleluia;
once again, we made her life peripheral to our
own. No wonder she's still hopping mad.
Gibreel had told Salahuddin, in a
final and somewhat strained telephone call, that he was returning to Bombay
'in the hope that I never have to see her, or you, or this damn cold city,
again in what remains of my life'. And now here he was, by all accounts,
shipwrecking himself again, and on home ground, too. 'He's making some weird
movies,' George went on. 'And this time he's had to put in his own cash.
After the two flops, producers have been pulling out fast. So if this one
goes down, he's broke, done for,
funtoosh.'
Gibreel had embarked on a
modern-dress remake of the Ramayana story in which the heroes and heroines
had become corrupt and evil instead of pure and free from sin. Here was a
lecherous, drunken Rama and a flighty Sita; while Ravana, the demon-king,
was depicted as an upright and honest man. 'Gibreel is playing Ravana,'
George explained in fascinated horror. 'Looks like he's trying deliberately
to set up a final confrontation with religious sectarians, knowing he can't
win, that he'll be broken into bits,' Several members of the cast had
already walked off the production, and given lurid interviews accusing
Gibreel of 'blasphemy', 'satanism' and other misdemeanours. His most recent
mistress, Pimple Billimoria, was seen on the cover of
Cine-Blitz,
saying:
'It was like kissing the Devil.' Gibreel's old problem of sulphurous
halitosis had evidently returned with a vengeance.
His erratic behaviour had been causing tongues to wag even more than
his choice of subjects to film. 'Some days he's sweetness and light,' George
said. 'On others, he conies to work like lord god almighty and actually
insists that people get down and kneel. Personally I don't believe the film
will be finished unless and until he sorts out his mental health which, I
genuinely feel, is affected. First the illness, then the plane crash, then
the unhappy love affair: you can understand the guy's problems.' And there
were worse rumours: his tax affairs were under investigation; police
officers had visited him to ask questions about the death of Rekha Merchant,
and Rekha's husband, the ball-bearings king, had threatened to 'break every
bone in the bastard's body', so that for a few days Gibreel had to be
accompanied by bodyguards when he used the Everest Vilas lifts; and worst of
all were the suggestions of his nocturnal visits to the city's red-light
district where, it was hinted, he had frequented certain Foras Road
establishments until the dadas threw him out because the women were getting
hurt. 'They say some of them were very badly damaged,' George said. 'That
big hush-money had to be paid. I don't know. People say any damn thing. That
Pimple of course jumped right on the bandwagon.
The Man that Hates Women.
She's making herself a femme fatale star out of all this. But there is
something badly wrong with Farishta. You know the fellow, I hear,' George
finished, looking at Salahuddin; who blushed.
'Not very well. Just because of the plane crash and so on.' He was in
turmoil. It seemed Gibreel had not managed to escape from his inner demons.
He, Salahuddin, had believed - naively, it now turned out - that the events
of the Brickhall fire, when Gibreel saved his life, had in some way
cleansed, them both, had driven those devils out into the consuming flames;
that, in fact, love had shown that it could exert a humanizing power as
great as that of hatred; that virtue could transform men as well as vice.
But nothing was forever; no cure, it appeared, was complete.
'The film industry is full of wackos,' Swatilekha was telling George,
affectionately. 'Just look at you, mister.' But Bhupen grew serious. 'I
always saw Gibreel as a positive force,' he said. 'An actor from a minority
playing roles from many religions, and being accepted. If he has fallen out
of favour, it's a bad sign.'
Two days later, Salahuddin Chamchawala read in his Sunday papers that
an international team of mountaineers, on their way to attempt an ascent of
the Hidden Peak, had arrived in Bombay; and when he saw that among the team
was the famed 'Queen of Everest', Miss Alleluia Cone, he had a strange sense
of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping
out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of
a dream. 'Now I know what a ghost is,' he thought. 'Unfinished business,
that's what.'
Allie's presence in Bombay came, in the next two days, to preoccupy him
more and more. His mind insisted on making strange connections, between, for
example, the evident recovery of her feet and the end of her affair with
Gibreel: as if he had been crippling her with his jealous love. His rational
mind knew that, in fact, her problem with the fallen arches had preceded her
relationship with Gibreel, but he had entered an oddly dreamy mood, and
seemed impervious to logic. What was she really doing here? Why had she
really come? Some terrible doom, he became convinced, was in store.
Zeeny, her medical surgeries, college lectures and work for the
human-chain demonstration leaving her no time, at present, for Salahuddin
and his moods, mistakenly saw his introverted silence as expressive of
doubts - about his return to Bombay, about being dragged into political
activity of a type that had always been abhorrent to him, about her. To
disguise her fears, she spoke to him in the form of a lecture. 'If you're
serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into
some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in
front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this
place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood
memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually
existing place. Make its faults your own. Become its creature; belong.' He
nodded, absently; and she, thinking he was preparing to leave her once
again, stormed out in a rage that left him utterly perplexed.
Should he telephone Allie? Had Gibreel told her about the voices?
Should he try to see Gibreel?
Something is about to happen,
his inner voice warned.
It's going to
happen, and you don't know what it is, and you can't do a damn thing about
it. Oh yes: it's something bad.
It happened on the day of the demonstration, which, against all the
odds, was a pretty fair success. A few minor skirmishes were reported from
the Mazagaon district, but the event was, in general, an orderly one. CPI(M)
observers reported an unbroken chain of men and women linking hands from top
to bottom of the city, and Salahuddin, standing between Zeeny and Bhupen on
Muhammad Ali Road, could not deny the power of the image. Many people in the
chain were in tears. The order to join hands had been given by the
organizers - Swatilekha prominent among them, riding on the back of a jeep,
megaphone in hand - at eight am precisely; one hour later, as the city's
rush-hour traffic reached its blaring peak, the crowd began to disperse.
However, in spite of the thousands involved in the event, in spite of its
peaceful nature and positive message, the formation of the human chain was
not reported on the Doordarshan television news. Nor did All-India Radio
carry the story. The majority of the (government-supporting) 'language
press' also omitted any mentions. . . one English-language daily, and one
Sunday paper, carried the story; that was all. Zeeny, recalling the
treatment of the Kerala chain, had forecast this deafening silence as she
and Salahuddin walked home. 'It's a Communist show,' she explained. 'So,
officially, it's a non-event.'
What grabbed the evening paper headlines?
What screamed at readers in inch-high letters, while the human chain
was not permitted so much as a small-print whisper?
EVEREST QUEEN, FILM MOGUL PERISH
DOUBLE TRAGEDY ON MALABAR HILL - GIBREEL FARISHTA
VANISHES
CURSE OF EVEREST VILAS STRIKES AGAIN
The body of the respected movie producer, S. S. Sisodia, had been
discovered by domestic staff, lying in the centre of the living-room rug in
the apartment of the celebrated actor Mr. Gibreel Farishta, with a hole
through the heart. Miss Alleluia Cone, in what was believed to be a 'related
incident', had fallen to her death from the roof of the skyscraper, from
which, a couple of years previously, Mrs. Rekha Merchant had hurled her
children and herself towards the concrete below.
The morning papers were less equivocal about Farishta's latest role.
FARISHTA, UNDER SUSPICION, ABSCONDS.
'I'm going back to Scandal Point,' Salahuddin told Zeeny, who,
misunderstanding this withdrawal into an inner chamber of the spirit, flared
up, 'Mister, you'd better make up your mind.' Leaving, he did not know how
to reassure her; how to explain his overwhelming feeling of guilt, of
responsibility:
how to tell her that these killings were the dark flowers of
seeds he had planted long ago? 'I just need to think,' he said, weakly,
confirming her suspicions. 'Just a day or two.'
'Salad baba,' she said harshly, 'I've got to hand it to you, man. Your
timing: really great.'
On the night after his participation in the making of the human chain,
Salahuddin Chamchawala was looking out of the window of his childhood
bedroom at the nocturnal patterns of the Arabian Sea, when Kasturba knocked
urgently on his door. 'A man is here to see you,' she said, almost hissing
the words, plainly scared. Salahuddin had seen nobody coming through the
gate. 'From the servants' entrance,' Kasturba said in response to his
inquiry. 'And, baba, listen, it is that Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, who the
papers say . . .' her voice trailed off and she chewed, fretfully, at the
nails on her left hand.
'Where is he?'
'What to do, I was afraid,' Kasturba cried. 'I told him, in your
father's study, he is waiting there only. But maybe it is better you don't
go. Should I call the police? Baapu re, that such a thing.'
No.
Don't call. I'll go see what he wants.
Gibreel was sitting on Changez's bed with the old lamp in his hands. He
was wearing a dirty white kurta-pajama outfit and looked like a man who had
been sleeping rough. His eyes were unfocused, lightless, dead. 'Spoono,' he
said wearily, waving the lamp in the direction of an armchair. 'Make
yourself at home.'
'You look awful,' Salahuddin ventured, eliciting from the other man a
distant, cynical, unfamiliar smile. 'Sit down and shut up, Spoono,' Gibreel
Farishta said. 'I'm here to tell you a story.'
It was you, then,
Salahuddin understood.
You really did it: you
murdered them both.
But Gibreel had closed his eyes, put his fingertips
together and embarked upon his story, - which was also the end of many
stories, - thus:
Kan ma kan
Fi qadim azzaman . . .
It was so it was not in a time long forgot
Well, anyway goes something like this
I can't be sure because when they came to call I wasn't myself no yaar
not my self at all some days are hard how to tell you what sickness is like
something like this but I can't be sure
Always one part of me is standing outside screaming no please don't no
but it does no good you see when the sickness comes
I am the angel the god damned angel of god and these days it's the
avenging angel Gibreel the avenger always vengeance why
I can't be sure something like this for the crime of being human
especially female but not exclusively people must pay
Something like that
So he brought her along he meant no harm I know that now he just wanted
us to be together caca can't you see he said she isn't ohoh over you not by
a longshot and you he said still crazy fofor her everyone knows all he
wanted was for us to be to be to be
But I heard verses
You get me Spoono
V e r s e s
Rosy apple lemon tart Sis boom bah
I like coffee I like tea
Violets are blue roses are red remember me when I am
dead dead dead
That type of thing
Couldn't get them out of my nut and she changed in front of my eyes I
called her names whore like that and him I knew about him
Sisodia lecher from somewhere I knew what they were up to
laughing at me in my own home something like that
I like butter I like toast
Verses Spoono who do you think makes such damn things up
So I called down the wrath of God I pointed my finger I shot him in the
heart but she bitch I thought bitch cool as ice
stood and waited just waited and then I don't know I can't be sure we
weren't alone
Something like this
Rekha was there floating on her carpet you remember her Spoono
you remember Rekha on her carpet when we fell and someone else mad
looking guy Scottish get-up
gora
type
didn't catch the name
She saw them or she didn't see them I can't be sure she just stood
there
It was Rekha's idea take her upstairs summit of Everest once you've
been there the only way is down
I pointed my finger at her we went up
I didn't push her
Rekha pushed her
I wouldn't have pushed her
Spoono
Understand me Spoono
Bloody hell
I loved that girl.
Salahuddin was thinking how Sisodia, with his remarkable gift for the
chance encounter (Gibreel stepping out in front of London traffic,
Salahuddin himself panicking before an open aircraft door, and now, it
seemed, Alleluia Cone in her hotel lobby) had finally bumped accidentally
into death; - and thinking, too, about Allie, less lucky a faller than
himself, making (instead of her longed-for solo ascent of Everest) this
ignominiously fatal descent, - and about how he was going to die for his
verses, but could not find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.
There was a knocking at the door.
Open, please. Police.
Kas-turba had
called them, after all.
Gibreel took the lid off the wonderful lamp of Changez Chamchawala and
let it fall clattering to the floor.
He's hidden a gun inside,
Salahuddin realized. 'Watch out,' he shouted.
'There's an armed man in here.' The knocking stopped, and now Gibreel rubbed
his hand along the side of the magic lamp: once, twice, thrice.
The revolver jumped up, into his other hand.
A fearsome jinnee of
monstrous stature appeared,
Salahuddin remembered.
'What is your wish? I am
the slave of him who holds the lamp.'
What a limiting thing is a weapon,
Salahuddin thought, feeling oddly detached from events. - Like Gibreel when
the sickness came. - Yes, indeed; a most confining manner of thing. - For
how few the choices were, now that Gibreel was the
armed man
and he, the
unarmed;
how the universe had shrunk! The true djinns of old had the power
to open the gates of the Infinite, to make all things possible, to render
all wonders capable of being attained; how banal, in comparison, was this
modern spook, this degraded descendant of mighty ancestors, this feeble
slave of a twentieth-century lamp.
'I told you a long time back,' Gibreel Farishta quietly said, 'that if
I thought the sickness would never leave me, that it would always return, I
would not be able to bear up to it.' Then, very quickly, before Salahuddin
could move a finger, Gibreel put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth;
and pulled the trigger; and was free.
He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian
Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of
Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver
pathway, like a parting in the water's shining hair, like a road to
miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales.
Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old
and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the
old refused to die, the new could not be born.
'Come along,' Zeenat Vakil's voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that
in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt - in spite of his humanity
- he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one's good
fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand.
'My place,' Zeeny offered. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'
'I'm coming,' he answered her, and turned away from the view.
The quotations from the Quran in this book are composites of the
English versions of N. J. Dawood in the Penguin edition and of Maulana
Muhammad AH (Lahore, 1973), with a few touches of my own; that from Faiz
Ahmad Faiz is a variant of the translation by Mahmood Jamal in the
Penguin
Book of Modem Urdu Poetry.
For the description of the Manticore, I'm
indebted to Jorge Luis Borges's
Book of Imaginary Beings,
while the material
on Argentina derives, in part, from the writings of W. H. Hudson, especially
Far Away and Long Ago.
I should like to thank Pauline Melville for
untangling my plaits from my dreadlocks; and to confess that the 'Gagari'
poems of 'Bhupen Gandhi' are, in fact, echoes of Arun Kolatkar's collection
Jejuri.
The verses from 'Living Doll' are by Lionel Bart ((c) 1959 Peter
Maurice Music Co. Ltd., all rights for the U.S. and Canada administered by
Colgeins-EMI Music Inc.) and those by Kenneth Tynan in the novel's final
section have been taken from
Tynan Right and Left
(copyright (c) Kenneth
Tynan, 1967).
The identities of many of the authors from whom I've learned will, I
hope, be clear from the text; others must remain anonymous, but I thank
them, too.