The Satanic Verses (14 page)

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?’

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, arid because we will all share the birthday we will all be exactly the same age from that day on, for the rest of our lives. How do you call it when fifty kids come out of the same mother? God knows. Fiftuplets. Damn!’

Reincarnation, for frenzied Gibreel, was a term beneath whose shield many notions gathered a-babeling: phoenix-from-ashes, the
resurrection of Christ, the transmigration, at the instant of death, of the soul of the Dalai Lama into the body of a new-born child … such matters got mixed up with the avatars of Vishnu, the metamorphoses of Jupiter, who had imitated Vishnu by adopting the form of a bull; and so on, including of course the progress of human beings through successive cycles of life, now as cockroaches, now as kings, towards the bliss of no-more-returns.
To be born again, first you have to die
. Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; the new flesh had been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. ‘The old must die, you get my message, or the new cannot be whatnot.’

Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his exhaustion-beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on Chamcha’s shoulder, while Saladin – prolonged captivity erodes certain reluctances among the captives – would stroke his face and kiss the top of his head,
There, there, there
. On other occasions Chamcha’s irritation would get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old Gramsci chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that’s what’s happening to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is trying to be born into your flesh.

‘You want to hear something really crazy?’ Gibreel after a hundred and one days offered Chamcha more confidences. ‘You want to know why I’m here?’ And told him anyway: ‘For a woman. Yes, boss. For the bloody love of my bloody life. With whom I have spent a sum total of days three point five. Doesn’t that prove I really am cracked? QED, Spoono, old Chumch.’

And: ‘How to explain it to you? Three and a half days of it, how long do you need to know that the best thing has happened, the deepest thing, the has-to-be-it? I swear: when I kissed her there were mother-fucking sparks, yaar, believe don’t believe, she said it was static electricity in the carpet but I’ve kissed chicks in
hotel rooms before and this was a definite first, a definite one-and-only. Bloody electric shocks, man, I had to jump back with pain.’

He had no words to express her, his woman of mountain ice, to express how it had been in that moment when his life had been in pieces at his feet and she had become its meaning. ‘You don’t see,’ he gave up. ‘Maybe you never met a person for whom you’d cross the world, for whom you’d leave everything, walk out and take a plane. She climbed Everest, man. Twenty-nine thousand and two feet, or maybe twenty-nine one four one. Straight to the top. You think I can’t get on a jumbo-jet for a woman like that?’

The harder Gibreel Farishta tried to explain his obsession with the mountain-climber Alleluia Cone, the more Saladin tried to conjure up the memory of Pamela, but she wouldn’t come. At first it would be Zeeny who visited him, her shade, and then after a time there was nobody at all. Gibreel’s passion began to drive Chamcha wild with anger and frustration, but Farishta didn’t notice it, slapped him on the back,
cheer up, Spoono, won’t be long now
.

On the hundred and tenth day Tavleen walked up to the little goateed hostage, Jalandri, and motioned with her finger. Our patience has been exhausted, she announced, we have sent repeated ultimatums with no response, it is time for the first sacrifice. She used that word: sacrifice. She looked straight into Jalandri’s eyes and pronounced his death sentence. ‘You first. Apostate traitor bastard.’ She ordered the crew to prepare for take-off, she wasn’t going to risk a storming of the plane after the execution, and with the point of her gun she pushed Jalandri towards the open door at the front, while he screamed and begged for mercy. ‘She’s got sharp eyes,’ Gibreel said to Chamcha. ‘He’s a cut-sird.’ Jalandri had become the first target because of his decision to give up the turban and cut his hair, which made him a traitor to his faith, a shorn Sirdarji.
Cut-Sird
. A seven-letter condemnation; no appeal.

Jalandri had fallen to his knees, stains were spreading on the seat
of his trousers, she was dragging him to the door by his hair. Nobody moved. Dara Buta Man Singh turned away from the tableau. He was kneeling with his back to the open door; she made him turn round, shot him in the back of the head, and he toppled out on to the tarmac. Tavleen shut the door.