The Satanic Verses (2 page)

           
This person had, however, no time for such "high falutions"; was,
indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the swirl
of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a brocade
sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer defending her
high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she
sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. "Rekha Merchant," Gibreel greeted
her. "You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?" Insensitive
words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be
offered in mitigation

           
. . . Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: "What
the hell?"

           
"You don't see her?" Gibreel shouted. "You don't see her goddamn
Bokhara rug?"

           
No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to confirm. I
am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think,
you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my
beloved, so I can call you by your true names.

           
Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha:
"Spoono? You see her or you don't?"

           
Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her
alone. "You shouldn't have done it," he admonished her. "No,
sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing."

           
O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral
tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear,
seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind
a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love.

           
He became afraid. "What do you want? No, don't tell, just go."

           
When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I could
not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished, you used it
as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and also her, the
icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to forgive. I curse
you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because that's where you sent me,
damn you, where you came from, devil, where you're going, sucker, enjoy the
bloody dip. Rekha's curse; and after that, verses in a language he did not
understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which he thought he made out, but
maybe not, the repeated name
Al-Lat
.

           
He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds.

           
Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof
of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A
scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam
across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his open
mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations of the
clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an indistinctness, at
the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it released more than noise:

           
"Fly," Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. "Start flying, now."
And added, without knowing its source, the second command: "And
sing."

           
How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

           
Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

           
How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what
deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the
wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

           
Is birth always a fall?

           
Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

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

           
"Fly," it commanded Gibreel. "Sing."

           
Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then with
increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he flapped,
and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the spectre of
Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a tune he had never
heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike Chamcha, who tried to
reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying that the gazal had been
celestial, that without the song the flapping would have been for nothing, and
without the flapping it was a sure thing that they would have hit the waves
like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on making contact with the taut
drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began to slow down. The more emphatically
Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and flapped, the more pronounced the
deceleration, until finally the two of them were floating down to the Channel
like scraps of paper in a breeze.

           
They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from
Bostan
and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more voluble of the two,
the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they had walked
upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore; but the
other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied this.
"God, we were lucky," he said. "How lucky can you get?"

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

           
Which was the miracle worker?

           
Of what type―angelic, satanic―was Farishta's song?

           
Who am I?

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

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

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

           
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.