SATANIC VERSES

Copyright Salman Rushdie, 1988 All rights reserved 

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 1B4 
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190, Wairau Road, Auckland ro, New Zealand 
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England 
Published in 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc. 
For Marianne 



Contents 

I The Angel Gibreel 

II Mahound 

III Ellowen Deeowen 

IV Ayesha 

V A City Visible but Unseen 

VI Return to Jahilia 

VII The Angel Azraeel 

VIII The Parting of the Arabian Seas 

IX A Wonderful Lamp 



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_ 



I The Angel Gibreel 



"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first 
you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs 
to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? 
How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to 
get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day 
or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, 
twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without 
benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. 

"I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a 
moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your 
tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies 
you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises 
now." 

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his 
impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching 
himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the 
almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity 
against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "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 AI- 
420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, 
snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel 
has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, 
winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and 
premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from 
radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the 
Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea. 
Who am I? 
Who else is there? 

The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding 
its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin 
Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, 
below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, 
drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty- 



free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also -- 
for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity 
of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about 
the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a 
sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had 
cast its everreasonable doubts -- mingling with the remnants of the plane, 
equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, 
broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mothertongues, violated 
privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the 
forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, _land_, _belonging_, _home_. 
Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like 
bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because 
Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies 
entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's 
refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, 
hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without 
techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the 
slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their 
watery reincarnation. 

"O, my shoes are Japanese," Gibreel sang, translating the old song into 
English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, "These 
trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's 
Indian for all that." The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps 
it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, 
the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or 
perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the 
performance), or their blast—delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of 
the imminent . . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin 
Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish 
fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their 
transmutation began. 
Mutation? 

Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible 
field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, 
made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place 
of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most 
insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, -- 
because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible 
— wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would 
have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck: under extreme environmental 
pressure, characteristics were acquired. 

What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a 
rush? So then, neither does revelation . . . take a look at the pair of them. 
Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new 



about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too 
close to the sun, is that it? 
That's not it. Listen: 

Mr. Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel 
Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard 
wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr. 
James Thomson, seventeenhundred to seventeen-forty-eight. ". . . at 
Heaven's command," Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically 
redwhiteblue by the cold, "arooooose from out the aaaazure main." Farishta, 
horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately 
subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild recital: "And guardian 
aaaaangels sung the strain." 

Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much 
less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the 
planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this, 
too: they did. 

Downdown they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and 
threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from 
their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of 
the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the 
terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were 
drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds. 
They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, 
rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt 
come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would 
have shouted, "Keep away, get away from me," except that something 
prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his 
intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and 
Farishta 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 _AI-Lat_. 
He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds. 
Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof 
of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A 
scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam 
across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his 
open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations 
of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an 
indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it 
released more than noise: 

"Fly," Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. "Start flying, now." And added, without 
knowing its source, the second command: "And sing." 
How does newness come into the world? How is it born? 



Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? 

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, 

what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the 

wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? 

Is birth always a fall? 

Do angels have wings? Can men fly? 

When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel 
he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it 
was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more 
firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the 
implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, 
and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's, to blind, dumb luck. But at 
the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, 
unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him 
that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half- 
reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and 
he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in 
his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his 
body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to 
steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, 
holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; 
until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his 
fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread 
outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls. 
"Fly," it commanded Gibreel. "Sing." 

Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then 
with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he 
flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the 
spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a 
tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike 
Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying 
that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would 
have been for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that they 
would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on 
making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began 
to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and 
flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them 
were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze. 
They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from 
_Bostan_ and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more 
voluble of the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings 
that they had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently 
in to shore; but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by 
magic, denied this. "God, we were lucky," he said. "How lucky can you get?" 



I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence 
and -potence, I'm making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, 
I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed. 
Which was the miracle worker? 

Of what type -- angelic, satanic -- was Farishta's song? 
Who am I? 

Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes? 

These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the 
snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: 
"Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday 
to you." 

Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as 
befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears. 

2 

Reincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the 
biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he 
"miraculously" defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to 
believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been 
able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about again he 
would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old 
life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a 
trick, _into thin air_. 

The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film- 
studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of 
being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group 
of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven movies 
"sy-multaneous" needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex 
coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from 
his childhood among the fabled lunch-runners of Bombay (of which more 
later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as 
punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after 
each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high 
speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his 
lines. "A career in the Bombay talkies," he told his loyal crew, "is more like a 
wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route." 
After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had 
returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . . and 
then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among the 
silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the 
sets. Wheelchairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when 
movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has 
always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great 
artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for 



their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's unexplained 
hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio 
gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the 
painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach. 

Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked 
expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links -- only nine holes 
nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant 
weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn corpse 
of the old city lay -- there, right there, upper-echelon executives, missing 
the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn from senior 
heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of the producers 
was easy to understand, because in those days of declining audiences 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 mamzel!, but a 
whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite_ -- clad in temple—dancer veiled 
undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of 
copulating Tantric figures from the Chandela period, -- and perceiving that 
her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces -- offered up a 
spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians 
smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all 
elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's 
sake," she cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, 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 recreating at this exalted altitude the effect of a 
Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES 
CAMP, the headlines yelled, but had he gone up or down or sideways? No 
one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the 
sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all 
the papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the 
Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, 
heard a note that eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one 
son for a walk on the roof of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas. 
His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his 
own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course 
the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with 
hint innuendo and nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level. Why 
tarnish her reputation now? 

Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a 
tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in 
ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at 
their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets _klims_ and _kleens_ and 
the ancient artefacts were _anti-queues_. Yes, and she was beautiful, 
beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's 
sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce 
from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a 
strong personality, drank Jike 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 LOVELV'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 oment. 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 of 
faces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined 
by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, 
this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God 
stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for 
such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for 
him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much-metamorphosed 
Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too. 
Or, but, then again . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. 
Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, British Poona at 
the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, 
Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child 
involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, _star of the faith_; he'd 
given up quite a name when he took the angel's. 

Afterwards, when the aircraft _Bostan_ was in the grip of the hijackers, and 
the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, 



Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been 
his way of making 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 AI-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing 
Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners' 
coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his 
mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable 
system by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one 
hundred thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got 
mislaid, we were illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret tongue. 
_Bostan_ circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights in 
the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy illuminated 
the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the journey, the 
inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled lugubriously into the 
aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows moving, projected by the 
nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply defined of them was this 
spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel in a Gandhi cap, 
running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla skipped nimbly 
through the shadow-crowd, because he was used to such conditions, think, 
Spoono, picture, thirty-forty tiffins in a long wooden tray on your head, and 
when the local train stops you have maybe one minute to push on or off, 
and then running in the streets, flat out, yaar, with the trucks buses scooters 
cycles and what-all, one-two, one-two, lunch, lunch, the dabbas must get 
through, and in the monsoon running down the railway line when the train 
broke down, or waist-deep in water in some flooded street, and there were 
gangs, Salad baba, truly, organized gangs of dabba-stealers, it's a hungry 
city, baby, what to tell you, but we could handle them, we were everywhere, 
knew everything, what thieves could escape our eyes and ears, we never 
went to any policia, we looked after our own. 

At night father and son would return exhausted to their shack by the airport 
runway at Santacruz and when Ismail's mother saw him approaching, 
illuminated by the green red yellow of the departing jet-planes, she would 
say that simply to lay eyes on him made all her dreams come true, which 
was the first indication that there was something peculiar about Gibreel, 
because from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfil people's most secret 
desires without having any idea of how he did it. His father Najmuddin 
Senior never seemed to mind that his wife had eyes only for her son, that 



the boy's feet received nightly pressings while the father's went unstroked. A 
son is a blessing and a blessing requires the gratitude of the blest. 
Naima Najmuddin died. A bus hit her and that was that, Gibreel wasn't 
around to answer her prayers for life. Neither father nor son ever spoke of 
grief. Silently, as though it were customary and expected, they buried their 
sadness beneath extra work, engaging in an inarticulate contest, who could 
carry the most dabbas on his head, who could acquire the most new 
contracts per month, who could run faster, as though the greater labour 
would indicate the greater love. When he saw his father at night, the knotted 
veins bulging in his neck and at his temples, Ismail Najmuddin would 
understand how much the older man had resented him, and how important 
it was for the father to defeat the son and regain, thereby, his usurped 
primacy in 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 B T C A 
protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon- 



fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she 
brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin 
understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, 
however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. "You see, he is 
a grown fellow," she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, "Give the 
boy the blasted spoon of malt." Yes, a grown fellow, "we must make a man 
of him, husband, no babying for him." "Then damn it to hell," the Babasaheb 
exploded, "why do you do it to me?" Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. "But you 
are everything to me," she wept, "you are my father, my lover, my baby too. 
You are my lord and 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 greentinged spectacles which would correct his 
regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the 
dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath. 

From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the 
Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested 
in knowing what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would 
not wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he caught himself in the act 
of forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as 
he drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent fancy 
began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the time 
when, having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success of 
his job as the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended 
up marrying her as well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on a 
rose-strewn dais, simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had 
placed demurely over his face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre, 
reached lovingly towards him to remove the fabric, and gaze at his features 
in a mirror placed in his lap. This dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought 
him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that he began to worry about 
the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions. 
Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that 
required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb Mhatre 
took him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not alone 
in the world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not entirely 
surprised when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the morning 
of his twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being prepared to 
listen to an appeal. 

"You're fired," Mhatre emphasized, beaming. "Cashiered, had your chips. 
Dis-_miss_." 
"But, uncle," 
"Shut your face." 

Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, 
informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of 
the legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for 
appearance only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we 
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 
uhammad'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 elephantheaded god he was permitted to remove the 
thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order 
to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that 



owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from 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 Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or 
cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French 
champagne she leaned against marbled walls 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 NTR never pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, 
invariably ended up black and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old 
guy whom he could've eaten for breakfast, on _toast_, and had he ever, 
even once, lost his temper? Well, then? How could anyone think he would 
hurt the immortal Gibreel? -- They fired him anyway and the police put him 
in the lock-up, just in case. 

But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had been 
flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made 
available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come 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 Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item 
on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the 
national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road 
was so large that the police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and tear- 
gas, which they used even though every one of the half-million mourners 
was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her 



appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's 
bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the 
nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his 
most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the 
country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the mosques and 
temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for the life of 
the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves. 

Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone 
call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? 
While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, 
who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball- 
-bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and 
went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit- 
chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, 
not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul. 
He recovered. 

The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was 
called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A national 
holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But 
when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, 
and to 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 oven 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 kitchyCon-stanti- 
nople. And his favourite game was the version ofgrandmother's footsteps in 
which, when he was it, he would turn his back on upcreeping playmates to 
gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six letters of his dream--city, 
_ellowen deeowen_. In his secret heart, he crept silently up on London, 
letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to him. _Ellowen deeowen 
London_. 

The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it 
will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the 
lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the 
Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's 
creators to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be 
maintained. (But the games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed 
somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator 
versus imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain 
unresolved.) 

In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal 
Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And one day 
(it was so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that ample, crumbling, 
salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and shutters and little 
balconies, and through the garden that was his father's pride and joy and 
which in a certain evening light could give the impression of being infinite 
(and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because nobody, not his 
father, not the gardener, could tell him the names of most of the plants and 
trees), and out through the main gateway, a grandiose folly, a reproduction 
of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and across the wild 
insanity of the street, and over the sea wall, and so at last on to the broad 
expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls 
giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the 
blue horizon. In a hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti 
bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a 
single finger which he then laid across his lips. _Shh_, and the mystery of 
rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. 
Spectacles framed in what might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, 
like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down the other grasped 



him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand between old 
and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The 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, 
Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb, 
ooo 

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, 
ooo 

By then five and a half years had passed since young Salahuddin, garlanded 
and warned, boarded a Douglas D C-8 and journeyed into the west. Ahead of 
him, England; beside him, his father, Changez Chamchawala; below him, 
home and beauty. Like Nasreen, the future Saladin had never found it easy 
to cry. 

On that first aeroplane he read science fiction tales of interplanetary 
migration: Asimov's _Foundation_, Ray Bradbury's _Martian Chronicles_. He 
imagined the DC--8 was the mother ship, bearing the Chosen, the Elect of 
God and man, across unthinkable distances, travelling for generations, 
breeding eugenically, that their seed might one day take root somewhere in 
a brave new world beneath a yellow sun. He corrected himself: not the 
mother but the father ship, because there he was, after all, the great man, 
Abbu, Dad. Thirteen-year-old Salahuddin, setting aside recent doubts and 
grievances, entered once again his childish adoration of his father, because 
he had, had, had worshipped him, he was a great father until you started 
growing a mind of your own, and then to argue with him was called a 
betrayal of his love, but never mind that now, _I accuse him of becoming my 
supreme being, so that what happened was like a loss of faith_ . . . yes, the 
father ship, an aircraft was not a flying womb but a metal phallus, and the 
passengers were spermatozoa waiting to be spilt. 

Five and a half hours of time zones; turn your watch upside down in Bombay 
and you see the time in London. _My father_, Chamcha would think, years 
later, in the midst of his bitterness. _I accuse him of inverting Time_. 



How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from 
Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not very far at all, 
because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between 
cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, 
traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space. 

What Changez Chamchawala did when the aeroplane took off: trying not to 
let his son see him doing it, he crossed two pairs of fingers on each hand, 
and rotated both his thumbs. 

And when they were installed in a hotel within a few feet of the ancient 
location of the Tyburn tree, Changez said to his son: "Take. This belongs to 
you." And held out, at arm's length, a black billfold about whose identity 
there could be no mistake. "You are a man now. Take." 
The return of the confiscated wallet, complete with all its currency, proved to 
be one of Changez Chamchawala's little traps. Salahuddin had been 
deceived by these all his life. Whenever his father wanted to punish him, he 
would offer him a present, a bar of imported chocolate or a tin of Kraft 
cheese, and would then grab him when he came to get it. "Donkey," 
Changez scorned his infant son. "Always, always, the carrot leads you to my 
stick." 

Salahuddin in London took the proffered wallet, accepting the gift of 
manhood; whereupon his father said: "Now that you are a man, it is for you 
to look after your old father while we are in London town. You pay all the 
bills." 

January, 1961. A year you could turn upside down and it would still, unlike 
your watch, tell the same time. It was winter; but when Salahuddin 
Chamchawala began to shiver in his hotel room, it was because he was 
scared halfway out of his wits; his crock of gold had turned, suddenly, into a 
sorcerer's curse. 

Those two weeks in London before he went to his boarding school turned 
into a nightmare of cash — tills and calculations, because Changez had meant 
exactly what he said and never put his hand into his own pocket once. 
Salahuddin had to buy his own clothes, such as a double-breasted blue 
serge mackintosh and seven blue-and-white striped Van Heusen shirts with 
detachable semi--stiff collars which Changez made him wear every day, to 
get used to the studs, and Salahuddin felt as if a blunt knife were being 
pushed in just beneath his newly broken Adam"s-apple; and he had to make 
sure there would be enough for the hotel room, and everything, so that he 
was too nervous to ask his father if they could go to a movie, not even one, 
not even _The Pure Hell of St Trinians_, or to eat out, not a single Chinese 
meal, and in later years he would remember nothing of his first fortnight in 
his beloved Ellowen Deeowen except pounds shillings pence, like the disciple 
of the philosopher—king Chanakya who asked the great man what he meant 
by saying one could live in the world and also not live in it, and who was told 
to carry a brim-full pitcher of water through a holiday crowd without spilling 



a drop, on pain of death, so that when he returned he was unable to 
describe the day's festivities, having been like a blind man, seeing only the 
jug on his head. 

Changez Chamchawala became very still in those days, seeming not to care 
if he ate or drank or did any damn thing, he was happy sitting in the hotel 
room watching television, especially when the Flintstones were on, because, 
he told his son, that Wilma bibi reminded him of Nasreen. Salahuddin tried 
to prove he was a man by fasting right along with his father, trying to 
outlast him, but he never managed it, and when the pangs got too strong he 
went out of the hotel to the cheap joint nearby where you could buy take- 
away roast chickens that hung greasily in the window, turning slowly on 
their spits. When he brought the chicken into the hotel lobby he became 
embarrassed, not wanting the staff to see, so he stuffed it inside 
doublebreasted serge and went up in the lift reeking of spit—roast, his 
mackintosh bulging, his face turning red. Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze 
of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth of that implacable rage which 
would burn within him, undiminished, for over a quarter of a century; which 
would boil away his childhood father-worship and make him a secular man, 
who would do his best, thereafter, to live without a god of any type; which 
would fuel, perhaps, his determination to become the thing his father was- 
not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman. Yes, an English, 
even if his mother had been right all along, even if 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, 
ooo 

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 of fish as if nothing were the 
matter. So it was that when she started choking on the fishbone of her 
death there was nobody to help her, they were all crouching in corners with 
their eyes shut; even Saladin, conqueror of kippers, Saladin of the England- 
returned upper lip, had lost his nerve. Nasreen Chamchawala fell, twitched, 
gasped, died, and when the all-clear sounded the guests emerged 
sheepishly to find their hostess extinct in the middle of the dining-room, 
stolen away by 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 dandies the bonny babe upon one's knee; 
whereupon, without warning or provocation, the blessed creature -- may I 
be frank? — it _wets_ one. Perhaps for a moment one feels the gorge rising, 
a tide of anger swells within the blood — but then it dies away, as quickly as 
it came. For do we not, as adults, understand that the little one is not to 
blame? He knows not what he does." 

Deeply offended at being compared to a urinating baby, Saladin maintained 
what he hoped was a dignified silence. By the time of his graduation he had 
acquired a British passport, because he had arrived in the country just 
before the laws tightened up, so he was able to inform Changez in a brief 
note that he intended to settle down in London and look for work as an actor. 
Changez Chamchawala's reply came by express mail. "Might as well be a 
confounded gigolo. It's my belief some devil has got into you and turned 
your wits. You who have been given so much: do you not feel you owe 
anything to anyone? To your country? To the memory of your dear mother? 
To your own mind? Will you spend your life jiggling and preening under 
bright lights, kissing blonde women under the gaze of 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." 
ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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." 

ooo 

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, NeverNever, Oz." 
"And you?" Saladin reminded her. "Where were you back then?" 
"Same place," she said fiercely. "With all the other bloody Munchkins." 
Back streets. A Jain temple was being re--painted and all the saints were in 
plastic bags to protect them from the drips. A pavement magazine vendor 
displayed newspapers full of horror: a railway disaster. Bhupcn Gandhi 
began to speak in his mild whisper. After the accident, he said, the surviving 
passengers swam to the shore (the train had plunged off a bridge) and were 
met by local villagers, who pushed them under the water until they drowned 
and then looted their bodies. 

"Shut your face," Zeeny shouted at him. "Why are you telling him such 
things? Already he thinks we're savages, a lower form." 
A shop was selling sandalwood to burn in a nearby Krishna temple and sets 
of enamelled pink-and-white Krishna--eyes that saw everything. "Too damn 
much to see," Bhupen said. "That is fact of matter." 

ooo 

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 AN 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 see me 
without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven—tiles and kabaddi, I 
can't recite my prayers, I don't know what should happen at a nikah 
ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I'm on my own. This 
isn't home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It 
makes my heart tremble and my head spin." 

"You're a stupid," she shouted at him. "A stupid. Change back! Damn fool! 
Of course you can." She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back to his old 
self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost, and he would not become a 
phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he was 
going to use it. 

ooo 

"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 Jegendary beauty_. She became _plain, a common 
creature, unappetizing_ where she had been _toothsome_. Dark skin in 
north India. "I don't buy it," Saladin said. "You don't expect me to believe 

that." 

She laughed. "Good, you're not a complete idiot yet. Who needs to marry? I 
had work to do." 

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



_My wife, Pamela Lovelace, frail as porcelain, graceful as gazelles_, he 
remembered. _I put down roots in the women I love_. The banalities of 
infidelity. He put them away and talked about his work. 
When Zeeny Vakil found out how Saladin Chamcha made his money, she let 
fly a series of shrieks that made one of the medallioned Arabs knock at the 
door to make sure everything was all right. He saw a beautiful woman sitting 
up in bed with what looked like buffalo milk running down her face and 
dripping off the point of her chin, and, apologizing to Chamcha for the 
intrusion, he withdrew hastily, _sorry, sport, hey, you're some lucky guy_. 
"You poor potato," Zeeny gasped between peals of laughter. "Those Angrez 
bastards. They really screwed you up." 

So now his work was funny. "I have a gift for accents," he said haughtily. 
"Why I shouldn't employ?" 

'"Why I should not employ ?_"' she mimicked him, kicking her legs in the air. 
"Mister actor, your moustache just slipped again." 
Oh my God. 

What's happening to me? 

What the devil? 

Help. 

Because he did have that gift, truly he did, he was the Man of a Thousand 
Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should 
talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for 
your packet of garlicflavoured crisps, he was your very man. He made 
carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, 
baked beans, frozen peas. On the radio he could convince an audience that 
he was Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United States. Once, 
in a radio play for thirty—seven voices, he interpreted every single part 
under a variety of pseudonyms and nobody ever worked it out. With his 
female equivalent, Mimi Mamoulian, he ruled the airwaves of Britain. They 
had such a large slice of the voiceover racket that, as Mimi said, "People 
better not mention the Monopolies Commission around us, not even in fun." 
Her range was astonishing; she could do any age, anywhere in the world, 
any point on the vocal register, angelic Juliet to fiendish Mae West. "We 
should get married sometime, when you're free," Mimi once suggested to 
him. "You and me, we could be the United Nations." 

"You're Jewish," he pointed out. "I was brought up to have views on Jews." 
"So I'm Jewish," she shrugged. "You're the one who's circumcised. Nobody's 
perfect." 

Mimi was tiny with tight dark curls and looked like a Michelin poster. In 
Bombay, Zeenat Vakil stretched and yawned and drove other women from 
his thoughts. "Too much," she laughed at him. "They pay you to imitate 
them, as long as they don't have to look at you. Your voice becomes famous 
but they hide your face. Got any ideas why? Warts on your nose, cross-- 



eyes, what? Anything come to mind, baby? You goddamn lettuce brain, I 
swear." 

It was true, he thought. Saladin and Mimi were legends of a sort, but 
crippled legends, dark stars. The gravitational field of their abilities drew 
work towards them, but they remained invisible, shedding bodies to put on 
voices. On the radio, Mimi could become the Botticelli Venus, she could be 
Olympia, Monroe, any damn woman she pleased. She didn't give a damn 
about the way she looked; she had become her voice, she was worth a mint, 
and three young women were hopelessly in love with her. Also, she bought 
property. "Neurotic behaviour," she would confess unashamedly. "Excessive 
need for rooting owing to upheavals of Armenian—Jewish history. Some 
desperation owing to advancing years and small polyps detected in the 
throat. Property is so soothing, I do recommend it." She owned a Norfolk 
vicarage, a farmhouse in Normandy, a Tuscan belltower, a sea--coast in 
Bohemia. "All haunted," she explained. "Clanks, howls, blood on the rugs, 
women in nighties, the works. Nobody gives up land without a fight." 
Nobody except me, Chamcha thought, a melancholy clutching at him as he 
lay beside Zeenat Vakil. Maybe I'm a ghost already. But at least a ghost with 
an airline ticket, success, money, wife. A shade, but living in the tangible, 
material world. With _assets_. Yes, sir. 

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

His big break, the one that could soon make money lose its meaning, had 
started small: children's television, a thing called _The Aliens Show_, by 
_The Munsters_ out of _Star Wars_ by way of _Sesame Street_. It was a 
situation comedy about a group of extraterrestrials ranging from cute to 
psycho, from animal to vegetable, and also mineral, because it featured an 
artistic space-- rock that could quarry itself for its raw material, and then 
regenerate itself in time for the next week's episode; this rock was named 
Pygmalien, and owing to the stunted sense of humour of the show's 
producers there was also a coarse, belching creature like a puking cactus 
that came from a desert planet at the end of time: this was Matilda, the 
Australien, and there were the three grotesquely pneumatic, singing space 
sirens known as the Alien Korns, maybe because you could lie down among 



them, and there was a team of Venusian hip-hoppers and subway 
spraypainters and soul-brothers who called themselves the Alien Nation, and 
under a bed in the spaceship that was the programme's main location there 
lived Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula who had run away 
from his father, and in a fish-tank you could find Brains the super-intelligent 
giant abalone who liked eating Chinese, and then there was Ridley, the most 
terrifying of the regular cast, who looked like a Francis Bacon painting" of a 
mouthful of teeth waving at the end of a sightless pod, and who had an 
obsession with the actress Sigourney Weaver. The stars of the show, its 
Kermit and Miss Piggy, were the very fashionable, slinkily attired, stunningly 
hairstyled duo, Maxim and Mamma Alien, who yearned to be -- what else? -- 
television personalities. They were played by Saladin Chamcha and Mimi 
Mamoulian, and they changed their voices along with their clothes, to say 
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 
videocomputers had gone to work -- made them look just like simulations, 
too. Maxim Alien, space playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic wrestling 
champion and universal all—corners pasta queen, were overnight sensations. 
Prime-time beckoned; America, Eurovision, the world. 
As _The Aliens Show_ got bigger it began to attract political criticism. 
Conservatives attacked it for being too frightening, too sexually explicit 
(Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard about Miss 
Weaver), too _weird_. Radical commentators began to attack its 
stereotyping, its reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of 
positive images. Charncha came under pressure to quit the show; refused; 
became a target. "Trouble waiting when I go home," he told Zeeny. "The 
damn show isn't an allegory. It's an entertainment. It aims to please." 
"To please whom?" she wanted to know. "Besides, even now they only let 
you on the air after they cover your face with rubber and give you a red wig. 
Big deal deluxe, say I." 

"The point is," she said when they awoke the next morning, "Salad darling, 
you really are good looking, no quesch. Skin like milk, England returned. 
Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you could be next in line. I'm serious, 
yaar. They need a new face. Come home and you could be the next, bigger 
than Bachchan was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn't as funny as theirs." 



When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, 
had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, 
because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by 
another. Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the 
possible had begun to harden. "It isn't easy to tell you this, but I'm married 
now, and not just to wife but life." _The accent slippage again_. "I really 
came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn't the play. He's in his late 
seventies now, and I won't have many more chances. He hasn't been to the 
show; Muhammad must go to the mountain." 

My father, Changez Chamchawala, owner of a magic lamp_. "Changez 
Chamchawala, are you kidding, don't think you can leave me behind," she 
clapped her hands. "I want to check out the hair and toenails." His father, 
the famous recluse. Bombay was a culture of re--makes. Its architecture 
mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented _The Magnificent 
Seven_ and _Love Story_, obliging all its heroes to save at least one village 
from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at least once 
in their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too, had taken to 
importing their lives. Changez's invisibility was an Indian dream of the 
crorepati penthoused wretch of Las Vegas; but a dream was not a 
photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her own eyes. "He 
makes faces at people if he's in a bad mood," Saladin warned her. "Nobody 
believes it till it happens, but it's true. Such faces! Gargoyles. Also, he's a 
prude and he'll call you a tart and anyway I'll probably have a fight with him, 
it's on the cards." 

What Saladin Chamcha had come to India for: forgiveness. That was his 
business in his old home town. But whether to give or to receive, he was not 
able to say. 
ooo 

Bizarre aspects of the present circumstances of Mr. Changez Chamchawala: 
with his new wife, Nasreen the Second, he lived for five days every week in 
a high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort in the Pali Hill district 
beloved of movie stars; but every weekend he returned without his wife to 
the old house at Scandal Point, to spend his days of rest in the lost world of 
the past, in the company of the first, and dead, Nasreen. Furthermore: it 
was said that his second wife refused to set foot in the old place. "Or isn't 
allowed to," Zeeny hypothesized in the back of the black-glass-windowed 
Mercedes limousine which Changez had sent to collect his son. As Saladin 
finished filling in the background, Zeenat Vakil whistled appreciatively. 
"Crazee." 

The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez's empire ofdung, was to be 
investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government 
commission, but Zeeny wasn't interested in that. "Now," she said, "I'll get to 
find out what you're really like." 



Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide, 
drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness. J'rn not myself 
today_, he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us 
are ourselves. None of us are Jike this_. 

These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within, 
sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring 
sound to admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut- 
tree in which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began 
to shake. He hid behind the neutrality of facts. "In Kashmir," he told Zeeny, 
"your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes of 
age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it's a 
valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult 
chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is 
appealing, don't you think?" 

The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two 
of them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by 
a composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery, whose shock 
of white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, 
as the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its 
major-domo in the Olden Days. "My God, Vallabhbhai," he managed, and 
embraced the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. "I grow so old, 
baba, I was thinking you would not recognize." He led them down the 
crystal-heavy corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of 
change was excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained 
to him, that when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house 
would be her memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she 
died, paintings, furniture, soap--dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls 
and china ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same 
magazines on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of paper in the 
wastebaskets, as though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. 
"Mummified," Zeeny said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. "God, but it's 
spooky, no?" It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the 
double doors leading into the blue drawingroom, that Saladin Chamcha saw 
his mother's ghost. 

He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. "There," he pointed 
towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, "no question, that blasted 
newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she, she," but 
now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless bird, you see, 
baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife, only my wife. 
_My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I grew up and 
went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses_. "Please, baba, 
nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib donated to 
my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a so- 
generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand." Chamcha, 



recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. "For God's sake, Vallabh," he 
muttered. "For God's sake. Obviously I don't object." An old stiffness re- 
entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted him to 
reprove, "Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme." 
"See how he's sweating," Zeeny stage-whispered. "He looks scared stiff." 
Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was 
warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring 
beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once 
said: "Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she 
holds herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I 
bet." Chamcha tried to be reasonable. "They stay 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-forearms and Bluto-belly, he seemed to be roaming about 
inside his clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite 
managed to identify. He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose 
and lips curled, by the withering sorcery of the years, into a feeble 
simulacrum of his former ogre--face. Chamcha had barely begun to 
understand that his father was no longer capable of frightening anybody, 
that his spell had been broken and he was just an old geezer heading for the 
grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment that Changez 
Chamchawala's hair was conservatively short, and since he was wearing 
highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn't seem likely that the eleveninch 
toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned, smoking a 
cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress, towards a 
blue velour-covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she 
arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a 
woman well advanced in years. 

No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez 
skipped past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny 
Vakil, her eyes sparkling with scandalpoints of light, hissed at Chamcha: 
"Close your mouth, dear. It looks bad." And in the doorway, the bearer 
Vallabh, pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer 
of many long years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife. 
When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as satanic, the child will 
frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: "And my stepmother, 
father dear? She is keeping well?" 



The old man addressed Zeeny. "He is not such a goody with you, I hope so. 
Or what a sad time you must have." Then to his son in harsher tones. "You 
have an interest in my wife these days? But she has none in you. She won't 
meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or, maybe, 
by now, to me." 

_I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn't fight. But this, 
this is intolerable_. "In my mother's house," Chamcha cried 
melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. "The state thinks your 
business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what 
you've done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much 
did it take? To poison their lives. You're a sick man." He stood before his 
father, blazing with righteous rage. 

Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. "Baba, with respect, excuse 
me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to 
judge us." Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was staring 
into the inferno. "It is true he pays us," Vallabh went on. "For our work, and 
also for what you see. For this." Changez Chamchawala tightened his grip on 
the ayah's unresisting shoulders. "How much?" Chamcha shouted. "Vallabh, 
how much did you two men decide upon? How much to prostitute your 
wife?" 

"What a fool," Kasturba said contemptuously. "Englandeducated and what-all, 
but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big--big, _in your 
mother's house_ etcetera, but maybe you didn't love her so much. But we 
loved her, we all. We three. And in this manner we may keep her spirit 
alive." 

"It is pooja, you could say," came Vallabh's quiet voice. "An act of worship." 
"And you," Changez Chamchawala spoke as softly as his servant, "you come 
here to this temple. With your unbelief. Mister, you've got a nerve." 
And finally, the treason of Zeenat Vakil. "Come off it, Salad," she said, 
moving to sit on the arm of the Chesterfield next to the old man. "Why be 
such a sourpuss? You're no angel, baby, and these people seem to have 
worked things out okay." 

Saladin's mouth opened and shut. Changez patted Zeeny on the knee. "He 
came to accuse, dear. He came to avenge his youth, but we have turned the 
tables and he is confused. Now we must let him have his chance, and you 
must referee. I will not be sentenced by him, but I will accept the worst from 
you." 

_The bastard. Old bastard. He wanted me off-balance, and here 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." 
ooo 

Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child- 
self, rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have 



become. Of making-a-man of. Of whatwill-I-tell-my-friends. Of irreparable 
sunderings and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to Allah-worship with 
new wife and also to blasphemous worship of late spouse. Above all, of 
magic-lampism, of being an open-sesamist. Everything had come easily to 
him, charm, women, wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie, wish, at once 
master, hey presto. He was a father who had promised, and then withheld, a 
magic lamp, 
ooo 

Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained motionless and silent until 
Saladin Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. "Such violence of the 
spirit after so long," Changez said after a silence. "So sad. A quarter of a 
century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son. 
You must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I? 
Finished. I'm not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don't explain 
you any more." 

Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of a fortyyear-old walnut- 
tree. "Cut it down," he said to his father. "Cut it, sell it, send me the cash." 
Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also 
rising, took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and 
Kasturba diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed 
pumpkin-time. "Your book," he said to Zeeny. "I have something you'd like 
to see." 

The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment's 
floundering, stamped petulantly in their wake. "Sourpuss," Zeeny called 
gaily over her shoulder. "Come on, snap out of it, grow up." 
The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included a 
large group of the legendary _Hamza-nama_ cloths, members of that 
sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may 
or may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad's 
uncle whose liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hind as he lay dead on 
the battlefield of Uhud. "I like these pictures," Changez Chamchawala told 
Zeeny, "because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be 
rescued from his troubles." The pictures also provided eloquent proof of 
Zeeny Vakil's thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian 
artistic tradition. The Mughals had brought artists from every part of India to 
work on the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a many- 
headed, many-brushed Overartist who, literally, _was_ Indian painting. One 
hand would draw the mosaic floors, a second the figures, a third would paint 
the Chinese-looking cloudy skies. On the backs of the cloths were the stories 
that accompanied the scenes. The pictures would be shown like a movie: 
held up while someone read out the hero's tale. In the _Hamza-nama_ you 
could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting 
styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their 
characteristically late--Mughal synthesis. 



A giant was trapped in a pit and his human tormentors were spearing him in 
the forehead. A man sliced vertically from the top of his head to his groin 
still held his sword as he fell. Everywhere, bubbling spillages of blood. 
Saladin Chamcha took a grip on himself. "The savagery," he said loudly in 
his English voice. "The sheer barbaric love of pain." 

Changez Chamchawala ignored his son, had eyes only for Zeeny; who gazed 
straight back into his own. "Ours is a government of philistines, young lady, 
don't you agree? I have offered this whole collection free gratis, did you 
know? Let them only house it properly, let them build a place. Condition of 
cloths is not A-l, you see . . . they won't do it. No interest. Meanwhile I get 
offers every month from Amrika. Offers of what-what size! You wouldn't 
believe. I don't sell. Our heritage, my dear, every day the U S A is taking it 
away. Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell 
ourselves, isn't it? They drop their wallets on the ground and we kneel at 
their feet. Our Nandi bulls end up in some gazebo in Texas. But you know all 
this. You know India is a free country today." He stopped, but Zeeny waited; 
there was more to come. It came: "One day I will also take the dollars. Not 
for the money. For the pleasure of being a whore. Of becoming nothing. Less 
than nothing." And now, at last, the real storm, the words behind the words, 
Jess 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. 

ooo 

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. 



0 0 0 

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 shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his 
voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self. 
The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr. Chamcha on that flight was 
that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams. 

4 

The dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but 
the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of 
_Bostan_ he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil's departure he 
had fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the 
vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented 
voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a 
long way away. The dream-woman had been so loaded down with explosives 
that she was not so much the bomber as the bomb; the woman walking the 
aisles held a baby that seemed to be sleeping noiselessly, a baby so skilfully 
swaddled and held so close to the breast that Chamcha could not see so 
much as a lock of new-born hair. Under the influence of the remembered 
dream he conceived the notion that the baby was in fact a bundle of 
dynamite sticks, or some sort of ticking device, and he was on the verge of 
crying out when he came to his senses and admonished himself severely. 
This was precisely the type of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. 
He was a neat man in a buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, 
contented life. He was a member of the real world. 
He travelled alone, shunning the company of the other members of the 
Prospero Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin 
wearing Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the 
manner of natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking 
too much cheap airline champagne and importuning the scorn—laden 
stewardesses who, being Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type 
persons; and behaving, in short, with normal thespian impropriety. The 
woman holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players, 
of turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like 
Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too 
painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay "rail 
roko" demonstration was being broken up by police lathicharges. The 
newspaper's reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed. 
The police had issued a "note". _Neither the reporter nor any other person 
was assaulted intentionally_. Chamcha drifted into airline sleep. The city of 
lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. 
When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second, surprise of that 
macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He was 
bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him 
anyway: here, travelling incognito in the economy class of Flight A 1--420, 
was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself. 



"Sleep okay?" He realized the question was addressed to him, and turned 
away from the apparition of the great movie actor to stare at the equally 
extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in baseball 
cap, metal--rim spectacles and a neon--green bush--shirt across which there 
writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese 
dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an 
attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer 
possible. 

"Eugene Dumsday at your service," the dragon man stuck out a huge red 
hand. "At yours, and at that of the Christian guard." 
Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. "You are a military man?" 
"Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the army of 
Guard Almighty." Oh, _almighty_ guard, why didn't you say. "I am a man of 
science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add my 
privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious 
devilment ever got folks' brains by the balls." 
"I don't follow." 

Dumsday lowered his voice. "I'm talking monkey-crap here, sir. Darwinism. 
The evolutionary heresy of Mr. Charles Darwin." His tones made it plain that 
the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as that of any 
other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. "I have been 
warning your fellow-men," Dumsday confided, "against Mr. Darwin and his 
works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide presentation. I 
spoke most recently, sir, at the World Understanding Day banquet of the 
Rotary Club, Cochin, Kerala. I spoke of my own country, of its young people. 
I see them lost, sir. The young people of America: I see them in their 
despair, turning to narcotics, even, for I'm a plain—speaking man, to pre- 
marital sexual relations. And I said this then and I say it now to you. If I 
believed my great-granddaddy was a chimpanzee, why, I'd be pretty 
depressed myself." 

Gibreel Farishta was seated across the way, staring out of the window. The 
inflight movie was starting up, and the aircraft lights were being dimmed. 
The woman with the baby was still on her feet, walking up and down, 
perhaps to keep the baby quiet. "How did it go down?" Chamcha asked, 
sensing that some contribution from him was being required. 
A hesitancy came over his neighbour. "I believe there was a glitch in the 
sound system," he said finally. "That would be my best guess. I can't see 
how those good people would've set to talking amongst themselves if they 
hadn't've thought I was through." 

Chamcha felt a little abashed. He had been thinking that in a country of 
fervent believers the notion that science was the enemy of God would have 
an easy appeal; but the boredom of the Rotarians of Cochin had shown him 
up. In the flickering light of the inflight movie, Dumsday continued, in his 
voice of an innocent ox, to tell stories against himself without the faintest 



indication of knowing what he was doing. He had been accosted, at the end 
of a cruise around the magnificent natural harbour of Cochin, to which Vasco 
da Gama had come in search of spices and so set in motion the whole 
ambiguous history of east-and-west, by an urchin full of pssts and hey- 
mister— okays. "Hi there, yes! You want hashish, sahib? Hey, misteramerica. 
Yes, unclesam, you want opium, best quality, top price? Okay, you want 
_cocaine?_" 

Saladin began, helplessly, to giggle. The incident struck him as Darwin's 
revenge: if Dumsday held poor, Victorian, starchy Charles responsible for 
American drug culture, how delicious that he should himself be seen, across 
the globe, as representing the very ethic he battled so fervently against. 
Dumsday fixed him with a look of pained reproof. It was a hard fate to be an 
American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked. 
After the involuntary giggle had escaped Saladin's lips, Dumsday sank into a 
sullen, injured drowse, leaving Chamcha to his own thoughts. Should the 
inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the 
form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or 
were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies 
eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to 
contemplate; it was a vision of Hell . . . Chamcha was drifting back into 
sleep when the cabin lights came on; the movie stopped; and the illusion of 
the cinema was replaced by one of watching the television news, as four 
armed, shouting figures came running down the aisles. 

ooo 

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 arc reality aping a crude image of 
itself, they are worms swallowing their tails. But she, the woman, 
_knows_ . . . while Dara, Buta, Man Singh strutted and pranced, she became 
quiet, her eyes turned inwards, and she scared the passengers stiff. 
What did they want? Nothing new. An independent homeland, religious 
freedom, release of political detainees, justice, ransom money, a safe- 
conduct to a country of their choice. Many of the passengers came to 
sympathize with them, even though they were under constant threat of 
execution. If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see 
yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to 
their will. 

After they landed the hijackers released all but fifty of the passengers, 
having decided that fifty was the largest number they could comfortably 
supervise. Women, children, Sikhs were all released. It turned out that 
Saladin Chamcha was the only member of Prospero Players who was not 
given his freedom; he found himself succumbing to the perverse logic of the 
situation, and instead of feeling upset at having been retained he was glad 
to have seen the back of his badly behaved colleagues; good riddance to bad 
rubbish, he thought. 

The creationist scientist Eugene Dumsday was unable to bear the realization 
that the hijackers did not intend to release him. He rose to his feet, swaying 
at his great height like a skyscraper in a hurricane, and began shouting 
hysterical incoherences. A stream of dribble ran out of the corner of his 
mouth; he licked at it feverishly with his tongue. _Now just hold hard here, 



busters, now goddamn it enough is ENO UGH, whaddya wheredya get the 
idea you can_ and so forth, in the grip of his waking nightmare he drivelled 
on and on until one of the four, obviously it was the woman, came up, 
swung her rifle butt and broke his flapping jaw. And worse: because 
slobbering Dumsday had been licking his lips as his jaw slammed shut, the 
tip of his tongue sheared off and landed in Saladin Chamcha's lap; followed 
in quick time by its former owner. Eugene Dumsday fell tongueless and 
insensate into the actor's arms. 

Eugene Dumsday gained his freedom by losing his tongue; the persuader 
succeeded in persuading his captors by surrendering his instrument of 
persuasion. They didn't want to look after a wounded man, risk of gangrene 
and so on, and so he joined the exodus from the 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. 
ooo 

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. Annapurna ninth, eighty 
seventy-eight." Or he would begin at the other end: "One, Chomolungma, 
eight eight four eight. Two, K2, eighty-six eleven. Kanchenjunga, eighty-five 
ninety-eight, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu. Nanga Parbat, metres eight 
thousand one hundred and twenty-six." 

"You count eight thousand metre peaks to fall asleep?" Chamcha asked him. 
Bigger than sheep, but not so numerous. Gibreel Farishta glared at him; 
then bowed his head; came to a decision. "Not to sleep, my friend. To stay 
awake." 

That was when Saladin Chamcha found out why Gibreel Farishta had begun 
to fear sleep. Everybody needs somebody to talk to and Gibreel had spoken 
to nobody about what had happened after he ate the unclean pigs. The 
dreams had begun that very night. In these visions he was always present, 
not as himself but as his namesake, and I don't mean interpreting a role, 
Spoono, I am him, he is me, I am the bloody archangel, Gibreel himself, 
large as bloody life. 

_Spoono_. Like Zeenat Vakil, Gibreel had reacted with mirth to Saladin's 
abbreviated name. "Bhai, wow. I'm tickled, truly. Tickled pink. So if you are 
an English chamcha these days, let it be. Mr. Sally Spoon. It will be our little 
joke." Gibreel Farishta had a way of failing to notice when he made people 
angry. _Spoon, Spoono, my old Chumch_: Saladin hated them all. But could 
do nothing. Except hate. 

Maybe it was because of the nicknames, maybe not, but Saladin .found 
Gibreel's revelations pathetic, anticlimactic, what was so strange if his 
dreams characterized him as the angel, dreams do every damn thing, did it 
really display more than a banal kind of egomania? But Gibreel was sweating 
from fear: "Point is, Spoono," he pleaded, "every time I go to sleep the 
dream starts up from where it stopped. Same dream in the 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?" 
ooo 

The longer he spent without going to sleep the more talkative he became, he 
began to regale the hostages, the hijackers, as well as the dilapidated crew 
of Flight 420, those formerly scornful stewardesses and shining flight-deck 
personnel who were now looking mournfully moth-eaten in a corner of the 
plane and even losing their earlier enthusiasm for endless games of rummy, 
-- with his increasingly eccentric reincarnation theories, comparing their 
sojourn on that airstrip by the oasis of Al-Zamzam to a second period of 
gestation, telling everybody that they were all dead to the world and in the 
process of being regenerated, made anew. This idea seemed to cheer him up 
somewhat, even though it made many of the hostages want to string him up, 
and he leapt up on to a seat to explain that the day of their release would be 
the day of their rebirth, a piece of optimism that calmed his audience down. 
"Strange but true!" he cried. "That will be day zero, and because we will all 
share the birthday we will all be exactly the same age from that day on, for 
the rest of our lives. How do you call it when fifty kids come out of the same 
mother? God knows. Fiftuplets. Damn!" 

Reincarnation, for frenzied Gibreel, was a term beneath whose shield many 
notions gathered a-babeling: phoenix-from-ashes, the resurrection of Christ, 
the transmigration, at the instant of death, of the soul of the Dalai Lama into 
the body of a new-born child . . . such matters got mixed up with the 
avatars of Vishnu, the metamorphoses of Jupiter, who had imitated Vishnu 
by adopting the form of a bull; and so on, including of course the progress of 
human beings through successive cycles of life, now as cockroaches, now as 
kings, towards the bliss of no-morereturns. _To be born again, first you have 
to die_. Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples 
Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; 
the new flesh had been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, 
his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. "The old 
must die, you get my message, or the new cannot be whatnot." 
Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his exhaustion- 
beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on 
Chamcha's shoulder, while Saladin -- prolonged captivity erodes certain 
reluctances among the captives -- would stroke his face and kiss the top of 
his head, _There, there, there_. On other occasions Chamcha's irritation 
would get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old 
Gramsci chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that's what's 
happening to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of 
yours is trying to be born into your flesh. 



0 0 0 

"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_. 

ooo 

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." 

ooo 

Sand gave way to snow. Europe in winter, beneath its white, transforming 
carpet, its ghost-white shining up through the night. The Alps, France, the 
coastline of England, white cliffs rising to whitened meadowlands. Mr. 
Saladin Chamcha jammed on an anticipatory bowler hat. The world had 
rediscovered Flight A 1-420, the Boeing 747 _Bostan_. Radar tracked it; 
radio messages crackled. _Do you want permission to land?_ But no 
permission was requested. _Bostan_ circled over England's shore like a 
gigantic sea-bird. Gull. Albatross. Fuel indicators dipped: towards zero. 
When the fight broke out, it took all the passengers by surprise, because this 
time the three male hijackers didn't argue with Tavleen, there were no fierce 
whispers about the _fuel_ about _what the fuck you're doing_ but just a 
mute stand-off, they wouldn't even talk to one another, as if they had given 
up hope, and then it was Man Singh who cracked and went for her. The 
hostages watched the fight to the death, unable to feel involved, because a 
curious detachment from reality had come over the aircraft, a kind of 
inconsequential casualness, a fatalism, one might say. They fell to the floor 
and her knife went up through his stomach. That was all, the brevity of it 
adding to its seeming unimportance. Then in the instant when she rose up it 
was as if everybody awoke, it became clear to them all that she really meant 
business, she was going through with it, all the way, she was holding in her 
hand the wire that connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath her 
gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara 
rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling 
down. 

No, not death: birth. 



II Mahound 



1 



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 heilbelow 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, eaglenose, 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-yourtongue 
caution. Up through the thorn-bushes and opobalsam trees he comes, 
scrabbling on boulders, this is a fit man, no softbellied 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 MocHammered; 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, prophetmotivated 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. 



0 0 0 

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 watercarriers 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. 

ooo 

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 SilverHaired 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 qasidah, 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." Baa! 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 J ahilia. 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 eagleform! 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. Hat, 
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 are 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, Baa! 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 scif-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 
ear. "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." 
Baa!, 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 Baa! 
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." Baa! 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." 

ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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 cara-- vanserais prospered. The produce of the world came 
up from Zafar to Sheba, and thence toJahilia 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_. 

ooo 

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. JJnthinkable. 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." 

ooo 

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 threehundred-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 comes. 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 business-man, 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, eck, 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_. 
ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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 Gibreel, 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, Gibreel 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. Does 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?_ 
ooo 

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. Gibreel 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 water-carriers. 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 notsicep, 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, 
ooo 

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. 

ooo 



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; J ahilians 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. 

ooo 

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 manticorc 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 poisone& 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 manlion masks: he 
rushes towards his fate. 

ooo 



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. 
. . . Gibreel 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 are finishing for us now." 
Slayers of manticores, water-terrorists, the followers of Mahound sit and 
weep in the shadow of the city wall, 
ooo 

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 stonelatticed 
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. 

ooo 

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, 
ooo 

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 K N OW 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. 

ooo 

At the end of his wrestling match with the Archangel Gibreel, the Prophet 
Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, postrevelatory 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 hejumps 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." 

ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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." 

ooo 

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. 



Ill Ellowen Deeowen 



1 

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. _l_es 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. 

ooo 

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 
hands flapping, 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 silverheaded 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?" 

ooo 

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 sideeffects? 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. 

ooo 

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-quitenonagenarian 
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 I i ke 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 fust 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_. 

ooo 

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 f ri My — 
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. 
ooo 

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-hundredyear--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 fishingboats, 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, u"hat'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 ugandokenyattas, 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. 

ooo 

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 skydiver?" 

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 
halfdrowned 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 

_Kan 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 sehora 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 possjble, 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, unlookedfor 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, _sehora, 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 buirushes 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 descriptiSns 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, 
sehora, 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 Clau-- dette, 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 sideeffect 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 oi 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 fullgrown, 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. 

ooo 

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 hoise, 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 ponytrap. 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 fi4cking 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." 

ooo 

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 boathouse 
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 Doha 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 stories, 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. 

ooo 

"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 Doha 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 Doha 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 boathouse 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 

When 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: "Maaaa-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." 
ooo 

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 gameshow 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, fldwer 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." 
ooo 

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 goatexcrement 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: Weybridge, 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. 

ooo 

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 fightly 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." 

ooo 



"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 holidaymakers 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. "OJesus I want to go. Jesus Mary I gotta go, lemme go, O God, 
O Jesus God." A very lecherouslooking 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. 

ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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 

Jumpy 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 HareKrishna 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 livingroom 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 li ke 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." 
ooo 

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 U S 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 hail; _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, comes 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, barn. It felt 
incredible. It felt necessary." 

"Oh, my God," she said, turning to him. "Oh, my God, I'm sorry, but yes, it 
did." 

0 0 0 

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 often 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. 

ooo 

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 M G 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, 
ooo 

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"eni, 
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, NET; 
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 M Ps 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, eb? 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. 

ooo 

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 pun 
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 himas 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 V C R, 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?" _l_ike the Roman_, the ferrety Enoch Powell had said, _I seem to see 
the river Tiber foaming with much blood_. Reclaim the metaphor, Jumpy 
Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use. "This is like 
rape," he pleaded with Hanif. "For God's sake, stop." 
"Voices that one hears are outside, but," the cafe proprietor was musing. 
"Joan of Arc, na. Or that what's his name with the cat: Turn-again 
Whittington. But with such voices one becomes great, or rich at least. This 
one however is not great, and poor." 



"Enough." Jumpy held both arms above his head, grinning without really 
wanting to. "I surrender." 

For three days after that, in spite of all the efforts of Mr. Sufyan, Mrs. 
Sufyan, their daughters Mishal and Anahita, and the lawyer Hanif Johnson, 
Jumpy Joshi was not really himself, "More a Dumpy than a Jumpy," as 
Sufyan said. He went about his business, at the youth clubs, at the offices of 
the film co-operative to which he belonged, and in the streets, distributing 
leaflets, selling certain newspapers, hanging out; but his step was heavy as 
he went his way. Then, on the fourth evening, the telephone rang behind the 
counter of the Shaandaar Cafe. 

"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." 

ooo 

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 hockeystick and ran 
upstairs as fast as they could go; while down in the front hail, standing 
brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed in 
order to turn the knob of the tongue-and-groove lock (Pamela in the throes 
of her passion had forgotten to use the security locks), was a figure out of a 
nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice and 
blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of a 
giant goat, a man's torso covered in goat's hair, human arms, and a horned 
but otherwise human head covered in muck and grime and the beginnings of 
a beard. Alone and unobserved, the impossible thing pitched forward on to 
the floor and lay still. Upstairs, at the very top of the house, that is to say in 
Saladin's "den", Mrs. Pamela Chamcha was writhing in her lover's arms, 
crying her heart out, and bawling at the top of her voice: "It isn't true. My 
husband exploded. No survivors. Do you hear me? I am the widow Chamcha 
whose spouse is beastly dead." 
5 

Mr. Gibreel Farishta on the railway train to London was once again seized as 
who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss 
of faith by driving him insane. He had seated himself by the window in a 
first-class non-smoking compartment, with his back to the engine because 
unfortunately another fellow was already in the other place, and jamming his 
trilby down on his head he sat with his 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." 

ooo 

"Although I must add, sir, that my beliefs are strictly non-denominational," 
the stranger continued. "Had you said 'La--ilaha', I would gladly have 
responded with a full-throated 'illallah'." 

Gibreel realized that his move across the compartment and his inadvertent 
taking of Allie's unusual name had been mistaken by his companion for 
overtures both social and theological. "John Maslama," the fellow cried, 
snapping a card out of a little crocodile-skin case and pressing it upon 
Gibreel. "Personally, I follow my own variant of the universal faith invented 
by the Emperor Akbar. God, I would say, is something akin to the Music of 
the Spheres." 

It was plain that Mr. Maslama was bursting with words, and that, now that 
he had popped, there was nothing for it but to sit it out, to permit the 
torrent to run its orotund course. As the fellow had the build of a prize- 
fighter, it seemed inadvisable to irritate him. In his eyes Farishta spotted the 
glint of the True Believer, a light which, until recently, he had seen in his 
own shaving-mirror every day. 

"I have done well for myself, sir," Maslama was boasting in his well- 
modulated Oxford drawl. "For a brown man, exceptionally well, considering 
the quiddity of the circumstances in which we live; as I hope you will allow." 
With a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand, he indicated the 
opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin-stripe, the 
gold watch with its fob and chain, the 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 forjudging," 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. 

ooo 

"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 snowglare. 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: _0, 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 snowfield, 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 Pern 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, Al lie?" 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. 

ooo 

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. 



IV Ayesha 



Even 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: foreignness, 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 exdirectory 
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 lustcreating 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 S A V A K 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. _0, 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. 

ooo 

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 AILah 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. 

ooo 

He sees himself in the dream: no angel to look at, just a man in his ordinary 
street clothes, Henry Diamond's posthumous handme-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, manyheaded 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 upsidedown 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 Untimc of the Imam. 

ooo 

When the nocturnal story changes, when, without warning, the progress of 
events injahilia 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. 

ooo 

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, overtime 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. 

ooo 

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 ban yan-- 
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 
panchayat 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 ofhaving 
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. 

ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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 Periscan, 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— grand-father 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 hail. 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. 

ooo 

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 chittcring 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 Aycsha'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. 



0 0 0 

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. 

ooo 

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 longsoured 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." 



0 0 0 

The next morning Mirza Saced 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 Joonies, 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."! 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. 

ooo 

"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. 



V A City Visible but Unseen 



1 

"_Once I'm an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into 
myself?_" Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, prop. Shaandaar 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 V C R 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 sixtyone 
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 
fifteenyear-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, forJumpyJoshi 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. "AI 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." 

ooo 

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 hail. 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," he 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 vindictiveness? 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 mothertongue, 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 V C R 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. 

ooo 

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 himselfl -- 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 V C 
R 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 victim _ized_, 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." 
ooo 

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 spir— 
itualling, 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-likethem, 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 devilsounds 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 hail 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 whatwe--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? 

ooo 

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-andblack-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." 

ooo 

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 findthe-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 TV, 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 bulishit 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 
youplural 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" d iff?" 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, Ijust 
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, flichers: 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, DickTurpin, 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 fiveperson 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." 

ooo 

"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 icequcen, 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 oi 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 deepthroatcd 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 computergenerated 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 -- "I'll 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. 

ooo 

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 -- "_Tini 
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 Najmuddin," 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 overconfidence, 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-thousanddollar 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. 

ooo 

_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 highpitched 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 mutatumfinibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quodfuit 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?" 

ooo 

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 Notting 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 shootingstick 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 Witchflnder-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. 

ooo 

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 _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- 
base, 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?" 

ooo 

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. 

ooo 

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, _0, 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 ha if 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, _Mahavila yet_. 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 ofjustice 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 Cockybugger -- 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 flutter 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. 

ooo 

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 suiphurous 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 FiftySeven. _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 CR C: "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. 



0 0 0 

"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 1 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 fi 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. 



0 0 0 

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. 
_I am_, he accepted, _that I am_. 
Submission. 

ooo 

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." 

ooo 

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 Pinkwalla 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-fi re-fr yin_, 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. 

ooo 

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 dancefloor, wailing most piteously; until, at length, granted 
respite, it fell asleep. 

When Mishal, Hanif and Pinkwalla ventured into the clubroom 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 



Alleluia 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 
massifofCho 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 Far-- ishta 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 Whitechapel 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-offl 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." 

ooo 



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 wek 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 "C TN" (confectioner—tobacconist-- newsagent) as _pach yderms_ 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 _Bostan"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 zillionthfloor windows and bounced. There was a scene 
about that in Francois Truffaut's movie _L"Argent du Poche_ . . . She 



focused her thoughts. "Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things 
happen to me, too."