The Satanic Verses (32 page)

‘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 crocodileskin 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, sire, are a rainbow coalition of the celestial; a walking United Nations of gods! You are, in short, the future. Permit me to salute you.’ He was beginning to give off the unmistakable odour of the genuine crazy, and even though he had not yet said or done anything beyond the merely idiosyncratic, Gibreel was getting alarmed and measuring the distance to the door with anxious little glances. ‘I incline, sir,’ Maslama was saying, ‘towards the opinion that whatever name one calls It by is no more than a code; a cypher, Mr Farishta, behind which the true name lies concealed.’

Gibreel remained silent, and Maslama, making no attempt to hide his disappointment, was obliged to speak for him. ‘What is that true name, I hear you inquire,’ he said, and then Gibreel knew he was right; the man was a full-fledged lunatic, and his autobiography was very likely as much of a concoction as his ‘faith’. Fictions were walking around wherever he went, Gibreel reflected, fictions masquerading as real human beings. ‘I have
brought him upon me,’ he accused himself. ‘By fearing for my own sanity I have brought forth, from God knows what dark recess, this voluble and maybe dangerous nut.’

‘You don’t know it!’ Maslama yelled suddenly, jumping to his feet. ‘Charlatan! Poser! Fake! You claim to be the screen immortal, avatar of a hundred and one gods, and you haven’t a
foggy
! How is it possible that I, a poor boy made good from Bartica on the Essequibo, can know such things while Gibreel Farishta does not? Phoney! Phooey to you!’

Gibreel got to his feet, but the other was filling almost all the available standing room, and he, Gibreel, had to lean over awkwardly to one side to escape Maslama’s windmilling arms, one of which knocked off his grey trilby. At once Maslama’s mouth fell open. He seemed to shrink several inches, and after a few frozen moments, he fell to his knees with a thud.

What’s he doing down there, Gibreel wondered, picking up my hat? But the madman was begging for forgiveness. ‘I never doubted you would come,’ he was saying. ‘Pardon my clumsy rage.’ The train entered a tunnel, and Gibreel saw that they were surrounded by a warm golden light that was coming from a point just behind his head. In the glass of the sliding door, he saw the reflection of the halo around his hair.

Maslama was struggling with his shoelaces. ‘All my life, sir, I knew I had been chosen,’ he was saying in a voice as humble as it had earlier been menacing. ‘Even as a child in Bartica, I knew.’ He pulled off his right shoe and began to roll down his sock. ‘I was given,’ he said, ‘a sign.’ The sock was removed, revealing what looked to be a perfectly ordinary, if outsize, foot. Then Gibreel counted and counted again, from one to six. ‘The same on the other foot,’ Maslama said proudly. ‘I never doubted the meaning for a minute.’ He was the self-appointed helpmate of the Lord, the sixth toe on the foot of the Universal Thing. Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, thought Gibreel Farishta. Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

The train emerged from the tunnel. Gibreel took a decision.
‘Stand, six-toed John,’ he intoned in his best Hindi movie manner. ‘Maslama, arise.’

The other scrambled to his feet and stood pulling at his fingers, his head bowed. ‘What I want to know, sir,’ he mumbled, ‘is, which is it to be? Annihilation or salvation? Why have you returned?’

Gibreel thought rapidly. ‘It is for judging,’ he finally answered. ‘Facts in the case must be sifted, due weight given pro and contra. Here it is the human race that is the undertrial, and it is a defendant with a rotten record: a history-sheeter, a bad egg. Careful evaluations must be made. For the present, verdict is reserved; will be promulgated in due course. In the meantime, my presence must remain a secret, for vital security reasons.’ He put his hat back on his head, feeling pleased with himself.

Maslama was nodding furiously. ‘You can depend on me,’ he promised. ‘I’m a man who respects a person’s privacy. Mum’ – for the second time! – ‘is the word.’

Gibreel fled the compartment with the lunatic’s hymns in hot pursuit. As he rushed to the far end of the train Maslama’s paeans remained faintly audible behind him. ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’ Apparently his new disciple had launched into selections from Handel’s
Messiah
.

However: Gibreel wasn’t followed, and there was, fortunately, a first-class carriage at the rear of the train, too. This one was of open-plan design, with comfortable orange seats arranged in fours around tables, and Gibreel settled down by a window, staring towards London, with his chest thumping and his hat jammed down on his head. He was trying to come to terms with the undeniable fact of the halo, and failing to do so, because what with the derangement of John Maslama behind him and the excitement of Alleluia Cone ahead it was hard to get his thoughts straight. Then to his despair Mrs Rekha Merchant floated up alongside his window, sitting on her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to the snowstorm that was building up out there and making England look like a television set after the day’s programmes end. She gave him a little wave and he felt hope ebbing
from him. Retribution on a levitating rug: he closed his eyes and concentrated on trying not to shake.

‘I know what a ghost is,’ Allie Cone said to a classroom of teenage girls whose faces were illuminated by the soft inner light of worship. ‘In the high Himalayas it is often the case that climbers find themselves being accompanied by the ghosts of those who failed in the attempt, or the sadder, but also prouder, ghosts of those who succeeded in reaching the summit, only to perish on the way down.’

Outside, in the Fields, the snow was settling on the high, bare trees, and on the flat expanse of the park. Between the low, dark snow-clouds and the white-carpeted city the light was a dirty yellow colour, a narrow, foggy light that dulled the heart and made it impossible to dream. Up
there
, Allie remembered, up there at eight thousand metres, the light was of such clarity that it seemed to resonate, to sing, like music. Here on the flat earth the light, too, was flat and earthbound. Here nothing flew, the sedge was withered, and no birds sang. Soon it would be dark.

‘Ms Cone?’ The girls’ hands, waving in the air, drew her back into the classroom. ‘Ghosts, miss? Straight up?’ ‘You’re pulling our legs, right?’ Scepticism wrestled with adoration in their faces. She knew the question they really wanted to ask, and probably would not: the question of the miracle of her skin. She had heard them whispering excitedly as she entered the classroom, ’s true, look how
pale
, ’s incredible. Alleluia Cone, whose iciness could resist the heat of the eight-thousand-metre sun. Allie the snow maiden, the icequeen.
Miss, how come you never get a tan
? When she went up Everest with the triumphant Collingwood expedition, the papers called them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though she was no Disneyish cutie, her full lips pale rather than rose-red, her hair ice-blonde instead of black, her eyes not innocently wide but narrowed, out of habit, against the high snow-glare. A memory of Gibreel Farishta welled up, catching her unawares: Gibreel at some point during their three and a half days,
booming with his usual foot-in-mouth lack of restraint, ‘Baby, you’re no iceberg, whatever they say. You’re a passionate lady, bibi. Hot, like a kachori.’ He had pretended to blow on scalded fingertips, and shook his hand for emphasis:
O, too hot. O, throw water
. Gibreel Farishta. She controlled herself: Hi, ho, it’s off to work.

‘Ghosts,’ she repeated firmly. ‘On the Everest climb, after I came through the ice-fall, I saw a man sitting on an outcrop in the lotus position, with his eyes shut and a tartan tam-o’-shanter on his head, chanting the old mantra: om mani padmé 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.