The Satanic Verses (82 page)

           
What grabbed the evening paper headlines?

           
What screamed at readers in inch-high letters, while the human chain was not
permitted so much as a small-print whisper?

           
EVEREST QUEEN, FILM MOGUL PERISH

           
DOUBLE TRAGEDY ON MALABAR HILL―GIBREEL FARISHTA

           
VANISHES

           
CURSE OF EVEREST VILAS STRIKES AGAIN

           
The body of the respected movie producer, S. S. Sisodia, had been discovered by
domestic staff, lying in the centre of the living-room rug in the apartment of
the celebrated actor Mr. Gibreel Farishta, with a hole through the heart. Miss
Alleluia Cone, in what was believed to be a "related incident", had
fallen to her death from the roof of the skyscraper, from which, a couple of
years previously, Mrs. Rekha Merchant had hurled her children and herself
towards the concrete below.

           
The morning papers were less equivocal about Farishta's latest role. FARISHTA,
UNDER SUSPICION, ABSCONDS.

           
"I'm going back to Scandal Point," Salahuddin told Zeeny, who,
misunderstanding this withdrawal into an inner chamber of the spirit, flared
up, "Mister, you'd better make up your mind." Leaving, he did not
know how to reassure her; how to explain his overwhelming feeling of guilt, of
responsibility
:
how to tell her that these killings were the dark flowers of seeds he had
planted long ago? "I just need to think," he said, weakly, confirming
her suspicions. "Just a day or two."

           
"Salad baba," she said harshly, "I've got to hand it to you,
man. Your timing: really great."

           
* * * * *

           
On the night after his participation in the making of the human chain,
Salahuddin Chamchawala was looking out of the window of his childhood bedroom
at the nocturnal patterns of the Arabian Sea, when Kasturba knocked urgently on
his door. "A man is here to see you," she said, almost hissing the
words, plainly scared. Salahuddin had seen nobody coming through the gate.
"From the servants' entrance," Kasturba said in response to his
inquiry. "And, baba, listen, it is that Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, who the
papers say . . ." her voice trailed off and she chewed, fretfully, at the
nails on her left hand.

           
"Where is he?"

           
"What to do, I was afraid," Kasturba cried. "I told him, in your
father's study, he is waiting there only. But maybe it is better you don't go.
Should I call the police? Baapu re, that such a thing."

           
No. Don't call. I'll go see what he wants
.

           
Gibreel was sitting on Changez's bed with the old lamp in his hands. He was
wearing a dirty white kurta-pajama outfit and looked like a man who had been
sleeping rough. His eyes were unfocused, lightless, dead. "Spoono,"
he said wearily, waving the lamp in the direction of an armchair. "Make
yourself at home."

           
"You look awful," Salahuddin ventured, eliciting from the other man a
distant, cynical, unfamiliar smile. "Sit down and shut up, Spoono,"
Gibreel Farishta said. "I'm here to tell you a story."

           
It was you, then
, Salahuddin understood.
You really did it: you
murdered them both
. But Gibreel had closed his eyes, put his fingertips
together and embarked upon his story,―which was also the end of many
stories,―thus:

           
Kan ma kan

           
Fi qadim azzaman . . .

           
* * * * *

           
It was so it was not in a time long forgot

           
Well, anyway goes something like this

           
I can't be sure because when they came to call I wasn't myself no yaar not
myself at all some days are hard how to tell you what sickness is like
something like this but I can't be sure

           
Always one part of me is standing outside screaming no please don't no but it
does no good you see when the sickness comes

           
I am the angel the god damned angel of god and these days it's the avenging
angel Gibreel the avenger always vengeance why

           
I can't be sure something like this for the crime of being human

           
especially female but not exclusively people must pay

           
Something like that

           
So he brought her along he meant no harm I know that now he just wanted us to
be together caca can't you see he said she isn't ohoh over you not by a
longshot and you he said still crazy fofor her everyone knows all he wanted was
for us to be to be to be

           
But I heard verses

           
You get me Spoono

           
V e r s e s

           
Rosy apple lemon tart Sis boom bah

           
I like coffee I like tea

           
Violets are blue roses are red remember me when I am dead dead dead

           
That type of thing

           
Couldn't get them out of my nut and she changed in front of my eyes I called
her names whore like that and him I knew about him

           
Sisodia lecher from somewhere I knew what they were up to

           
laughing at me in my own home something like that

           
I like butter I like toast

           
Verses Spoono who do you think makes such damn things up

           
So I called down the wrath of God I pointed my finger I shot him in the heart
but she bitch I thought bitch cool as ice

           
stood and waited just waited and then I don't know I can't be sure we weren't
alone

           
Something like this

           
Rekha was there floating on her carpet you remember her Spoono

           
you remember Rekha on her carpet when we fell and someone else mad looking guy
Scottish get-up
gora
type

           
didn't catch the name

           
She saw them or she didn't see them I can't be sure she just stood there

           
It was Rekha's idea take her upstairs summit of Everest once you've been there
the only way is down

           
I pointed my finger at her we went up

           
I didn't push her

           
Rekha pushed her

           
I wouldn't have pushed her

           
Spoono

           
Understand me Spoono

           
Bloody hell

           
I loved that girl.

           
* * * * *

           
Salahuddin was thinking how Sisodia, with his remarkable gift for the chance
encounter (Gibreel stepping out in front of London traffic, Salahuddin himself
panicking before an open aircraft door, and now, it seemed, Alleluia Cone in
her hotel lobby) had finally bumped accidentally into death;―and
thinking, too, about Allie, less lucky a faller than himself, making (instead
of her longed-for solo ascent of Everest) this ignominiously fatal
descent,―and about how he was going to die for his verses, but could not
find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.

           
There was a knocking at the door.
Open, please. Police
. Kasturba had
called them, after all.

           
Gibreel took the lid off the wonderful lamp of Changez Chamchawala and let it
fall clattering to the floor.

           
He's hidden a gun inside
, Salahuddin realized. "Watch out," he
shouted. "There's an armed man in here." The knocking stopped, and
now Gibreel rubbed his hand along the side of the magic lamp: once, twice,
thrice.

           
The revolver jumped up, into his other hand.

           
A fearsome jinnee of monstrous stature appeared
, Salahuddin remembered.
"What
is your wish? I am the slave of him who holds the lamp."
What a
limiting thing is a weapon, Salahuddin thought, feeling oddly detached from
events.―Like Gibreel when the sickness came.―Yes, indeed; a most
confining manner of thing.―For how few the choices were, now that Gibreel
was the
armed man
and he, the
unarmed;
how the universe had
shrunk! The true djinns of old had the power to open the gates of the Infinite,
to make all things possible, to render all wonders capable of being attained;
how banal, in comparison, was this modern spook, this degraded descendant of
mighty ancestors, this feeble slave of a twentieth-century lamp.

           
"I told you a long time back," Gibreel Farishta quietly said,
"that if I thought the sickness would never leave me, that it would always
return, I would not be able to bear up to it." Then, very quickly, before
Salahuddin could move a finger, Gibreel put the barrel of the gun into his own
mouth; and pulled the trigger; and was free.

           
He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The
moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out
to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in
the water's shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head;
could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from
this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it!
Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

           
"Come along," Zeenat Vakil's voice said at his shoulder. It seemed
that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt―in spite of his
humanity―he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one's
good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its
hand. "My place," Zeeny offered. "Let's get the hell out of
here."

           
"I'm coming," he answered her, and turned away from the view.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

           
The quotations from the Quran in this book are composites of the English
Versions of N. J. Dawood in the Penguin edition and of Maulana Muhammad Ali
(Lahore, 1973), with a few touches of my own; that from Faiz Ahmad Faiz is a
variant of the translation by Mahmood Jamal in the
Penguin Book of Modern
Urdu Poetry
. For the description of the Manticore, I'm indebted to Jorge
Luis Borges's
Book of Imaginary Beings
, while the material on Argentina
derives, in part, from the writings of W. H. Hudson, especially
Far Away and
Long Ago
. I should like to thank Pauline Melville for untangling my plaits
from my dreadlocks; and to confess that the "Gagari" poems of
"Bhupen Gandhi" are, in fact, echoes of Arun Kolatkar's collection
Jejuri
.
The verses from "Living Doll" are by Lionel Bart (1959 Peter Maurice
Music Co. Ltd., all rights for the U.S. and Canada administered by Colgems-EMI
Music Inc.) and those by Kenneth Tynan in the novel's final section have been
taken from
Tynan Right and Left
(copyright Kenneth Tynan, 1967).

           
The identities of many of the authors from whom I've learned will, I hope, be
clear from the text; others must remain anonymous, but I thank them, too.