The Satanic Verses (3 page)

           
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
like 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 LOVELY"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 moment.

           
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 long ago 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 fulfill 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."