The Satanic Verses

1

Eighteen months after his heart attack, Saladin Chamcha took to the air again in response to the telegraphed news that his father was in the terminal stages of multiple myeloma, a systemic cancer of the bone marrow that was ‘one hundred per cent fatal’, as Chamcha's GP unsentimentally put it when he telephoned her to check. There had been no real contact between father and son since Changez Chamchawala sent Saladin the proceeds from his felled walnut-tree all those eternities ago. Saladin had sent a brief note reporting that he had survived the Bostan disaster, and had been sent an even terser missive in return: ‘Rec.'d yr. communication. This information already to hand.’ When the bad news telegram arrived, however – the signatory was the unknown second wife, Nasreen II, and the tone was pretty unvarnished: FATHER GOING FAST + IF DESIROUS OF SEEING BETTER MOVE IT + N CHAMCHAWALA (MRS)– he discovered to his surprise that after a lifetime of tangled relationships with his father, after long years of crossed wires and ‘irrevocable sunderings’, he was once again capable of an uncomplicated reaction. Simply, overwhelmingly, it was imperative that he reach Bombay before Changez left it for good.

He spent the best part of a day first standing in the visa queue at the consular section of India House, and then trying to persuade a jaded official of the urgency of his application. He had stupidly forgotten to bring the telegram, and was told, as a result, that ‘it is issue of proof. You see, anybody could come and tell that their father is dying, isn't it? In order to expedite.’ Chamcha fought to restrain his anger, but finally burst, ‘Do I look like a Khalistan zealot to you?’ The official shrugged. ‘I'll tell you who I am,’ Chamcha bellowed, incensed by that shrug, ‘I'm the poor bastard who got blown up by terrorists, fell thirty thousand feet out of the sky because of terrorists, and now because of those same terrorists I have to be insulted by pen-pushers like you.’ His visa application, placed firmly at the bottom of a large pile by his adversary, was not granted until three days later. The first available flight was thirty-six hours after that: and it was an Air India 747, and its name was Gulistan.

Gulistan and Bostan, the twin gardens of Paradise – one blew apart, and then there was one... Chamcha, moving down one of the drains through which Terminal Three dripped passengers into aircraft, saw the name painted next to the 747`s open door, and turned a couple of shades paler. Then he heard the sari-clad Indian stewardess greeting him in an unmistakably Canadian accent, and lost his nerve, spinning away from the plane in a reflex of straightforward terror. As he stood there, facing the irritable throng of passengers waiting to board, he was conscious of how absurd he must look, with his brown leather holdall in one hand, two zippered suit-hanger bags in the other, and his eyes out on stalks; but for a long moment he was entirely unable to move. The crowd grew restive; if this is an artery, he found himself thinking, then I'm the blasted clot. ‘I used to chichi chicken out also,’ said a cheerful voice. ‘But now I've got the titrick. I fafa flap my hands during tatake-off and the plane always mama makes it into the isk isk isky.’

‘Today the top gogo goddess is absolutely Lakshmi,’ Sisodia confided over whisky once they were safely aloft. (He had been as good as his word, flapping his arms wildly as Gulistan rushed down the runway, and afterwards settled back contentedly in his seat, beaming modestly. ‘Wowoworks every time.’ They were both travelling in the 747's upper deck, reserved for business class non-smokers, and Sisodia had moved into the empty seat next to Chamcha like air filling a vacuum. ‘Call me Whisky,’ he insisted. ‘What lie lie line are you in? How mum much do you earn? How long you bibi been away? You know any women in town, or you want heh heh help?’) Chamcha closed his eyes and fixed his thoughts on his father. The saddest thing, he realized, was that he could not remember a single happy day with Changez in his entire life as a man. And the most gladdening thing was the discovery that even the unforgivable crime of being one's father could be forgiven, after all, in the end. Hang on, he pleaded silently. I'm coming as fast as I can. ‘In these hihighly material times,’ Sisodia explained, ‘who else but goddess of wewealth? In Bombay the young businessmen are hoho holding all night poopoo pooja parties. Statue of Lakshmi presides, with hands tuturned out, and lightbulbs running down her fifi fingers, lighting in sequence, you get me, as if the wealth is paw paw pouring down her palms.’ On the cabin's movie screen a stewardess was demonstrating the various safety procedures. In a corner of the screen an inset male figure translated her into sign language. This was progress, Chamcha recognized. Film instead of human beings, a small increase in sophistication (the signing) and a large increase in cost. High technology at the service, ostensibly, of safety; while in reality air travel got daily more dangerous, the world's stock of aircraft was ageing and nobody could afford to renew it. Bits fell off planes every day, or so it seemed, and collisions and near-misses were also on the up. So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a movie about it. Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality... ‘I'm planning a big bubudget picture about her,’ Sisodia said. ‘This is in strictest coco confidence. Maybe a Sridevi weewee wehicle, I hohope so. Now that Gibreel's comeback is flaw flaw flopping, she is number one supreme.’

Chamcha had heard that Gibreel Farishta had hit the comeback trail. His first film, The Parting of the Arabian Sea, had bombed badly; the special effects looked home-made, the girl in the central Ayesha role, a certain Pimple Billimoria, had been woefully inadequate, and Gibreel's own portrayal of the archangel had struck many critics as narcissistic and megalomaniac. The days when he could do no wrong were gone; his second feature, Mahound, had hit every imaginable religious reef, and sunk without trace. ‘You see, he chochose to go with other producers,’ Sisodia lamented. ‘The greegreed of the ista ista istar. With me the if if effects always work and the good tataste also you can take for gug, grunt, granted,’ Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He had drunk his whisky too fast on account of his fear of flying, and his head had begun to spin. Sisodia appeared not to recall his past connection to Farishta, which was fine. That was where the connection belonged: in the past. ‘Shh shh Sridevi as Lakshmi,’ Sisodia sang out, not very confidentially. ‘Now that is sosolid gold. You are an ack actor. You should work back hohome. Call me. Maybe we can do bubusiness. This picture: solid pap pap platinum.’

Chamcha's head whirled. What strange meanings words were taking on. Only a few days ago that back home would have rung false. But now his father was dying and old emotions were sending tentacles out to grasp him. Maybe his tongue was twisting again, sending his accent East along with the rest of him. He hardly dared open his mouth.

Almost twenty years earlier, when the young and newly renamed Saladin was scratching a living on the margins of the London theatre, in order to maintain a safe distance from his father; and when Changez was retreating in other ways, becoming both reclusive and religious; back then, one day, out of the blue, the father had written to the son, offering him a house. The property was a rambling mansion in the hill-station of Solan. ‘The first property I ever owned,’ Changez wrote, ‘and so it is the first I am gifting to you.’ Saladin's instant reaction was to see the offer as a snare, a way of rejoining him to home, to the webs of his father's power; and when he learned that the Solan property had long ago been requisitioned by the Indian Government in return for a peppercorn rent, and that it had for many years been occupied by a boys’ school, the gift stood revealed as a delusion as well. What did Chamcha care if the school were willing to treat him, on any visits he cared to make, as a visiting Head of State, putting on march-pasts and gymnastic displays? That sort of thing appealed to Changez's enormous vanity, but Chamcha wanted none of it. The point was, the school wasn't budging; the gift was useless, and probably an administrative headache as well. He wrote to his father refusing the offer. It was the last time Changez Chamchawala tried to give him anything. Home receded from the prodigal son.

‘I never forget a faface,’ Sisodia was saying. ‘You're mimi Mimi's friend. The Bostan susurvivor. Knew it the moment I saw you papa panic at the gaga gate. Hope you're not feefeeling too baba bad.’ Saladin, his heart sinking, shook his head, no, I'm fine, honestly. Sisodia, gleaming, knee-like, winked hideously at a passing stewardess and summoned more whisky. ‘Such a shashame about Gibreel and his lady,’ Sisodia went on. ‘Such a nice name that she had, alia alia Alleluia. What a temper on that boy, what a jeajealous tata type. Hard for a momodern gaga girl. They bus bust up.’ Saladin retreated, once again, into a pretence of sleep. I have only just recovered from the past. Go, go away.

He had formally declared his recovery complete only five weeks earlier, at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan and HanifJohnson. After the death of her parents in the Shaandaar fire Mishal had been assailed by a terrible, illogical guilt that caused her mother to appear to her in dreams and admonish her: ‘If only you'd passed the fire extinguisher when I asked. If only you'd blown a little harder. But you never listen to what I say and your lungs are so cigarette-rotten that you could not blow out one candle let alone a burning house.’ Under the severe eye of her mother's ghost Mishal moved out of Hanif's apartment, took a room in a place with three other women, applied for and got Jumpy Joshi's old job at the sports centre, and fought the insurance companies until they paid up. Only when the Shaandaar was ready to reopen under her management did Hind Sufyan's ghost agree that it was time to be off to the after-life; whereupon Mishal telephoned Hanif and asked him to marry her. He was too surprised to reply, and had to pass the telephone to a colleague who explained that the cat had got Mr Johnson's tongue, and accepted Mishal's offer on the dumbstruck lawyer's behalf. So everybody was recovering from the tragedy; even Anahita, who had been obliged to live with a stiflingly old-fashioned aunt, managed to look pleased at the wedding, perhaps because Mishal had promised her her own rooms in the renovated Shaandaar Hotel. Mishal had asked Saladin to be her chief witness in recognition of his attempt to save her parents’ life, and on their way to the registry office in Pinkwalla's van (all charges against the DJ and his boss, John Maslama, had been dropped for lack of evidence) Chamcha told the bride: ‘Today feels like a new start for me, too; perhaps for all of us.’ In his own case there had been by-pass surgery, and the difficulty of coming to terms with so many deaths, and nightmare visions of being metamorphosed once more into some sort of sulphurous, cloven-hoof demon. He was also, for a time, professionally crippled by a shame so profound that, when clients finally did begin to book him once more and ask for one of his voices, for example the voice of a frozen pea or a glove-puppet packet of sausages, he felt the memory of his telephonic crimes welling up in his throat and strangling the impersonations at birth. At Mishal's wedding, however, he suddenly felt free. It was quite a ceremony, largely because the young couple could not refrain from kissing one another throughout the procedure, and had to be urged by the registrar (a pleasant young woman who also exhorted the guests not to drink too much that day if they planned to drive) to hurry up and get through the words before it was time for the next wedding party to arrive. Afterwards at the Shaandaar the kissing continued, the kisses becoming gradually longer and more explicit, until finally the guests had the feeling that they were intruding on a private moment, and slipped quietly away leaving Hanif and Mishal to enjoy a passion so engulfing that they did not even notice their friends’ departure; they remained oblivious, too, of the small crowd of children that gathered outside the windows of the Shaandaar Café to watch them. Chamcha, the last guest to leave, did the newly weds the favour of pulling down the blinds, much to the children's annoyance; and strolled off down the rebuilt High Street feeling so light on his feet that he actually gave a kind of embarrassed skip.

Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy... These broodings were interrupted by a lusty snore from the seat beside him. Mr Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand, was asleep.

The producer was evidently a hit with the stewardesses. They fussed around his sleeping person, detaching the glass from his fingers and removing it to a place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half, and trilling admiringly over his snoring head: ‘Doesn't he look poochie? Just a little cuteso, I swear!’ Chamcha was reminded unexpectedly of the society ladies of Bombay patting him on the head during his mother's little soirees, and fought back tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly obscene; he had removed his spectacles before falling asleep, and their absence gave him an oddly naked appearance. To Chamcha's eyes he resembled nothing so much as an outsize Shiva lingam. Maybe that accounted for his popularity with the ladies.

Flicking through the magazines and newspapers he was offered by the stewardesses, Saladin chanced upon an old acquaintance in trouble. Hal Valance's sanitized Aliens Show had flopped badly in the United States and was being taken off the air. Worse still, his advertising agency and its subsidiaries had been swallowed by an American leviathan, and it was probable that Hal was on the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon he had set out to tame. It was hard to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed and down to his last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs. Torture and her pals, relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with busted entrepreneur-boffins and insider-dealing financiers and renegade ex-ministers; but Chamcha, flying to his father's deathbed, was in so heightened an emotional condition that he managed a valedictory lump in the throat even for wicked Hal. At whose pool table, he wondered vaguely, is Baby playing now?

In India, the war between men and women showed no sign of abating. In the Indian Express he read an account of the latest ‘bride suicide’. The husband, Prajapati, is absconding. On the next page, in the weekly small-ad marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of young women proudly offered, brides of ‘wheatish’ complexions. Chamcha remembered Zeeny's friend, the poet Bhupen Gandhi, speaking of such things with passionate bitterness. ‘How to accuse others of being prejudiced when our own hands are so dirty?’ he had declaimed. ‘Many of you in Britain speak of victimization. Well. I have not been there, I don't know your situation, but in my personal experience I have never been able to feel comfortable about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously, I am not. Even speaking culturally, you find here all the bigotries, all the procedures associated with oppressor groups. So while many Indians are undoubtedly oppressed, I don't think any of us are entitled to lay claim to such a glamorous position.’

‘Trouble with Bhupen's radical critiques,’ Zeeny had remarked, ‘is that reactionaries like Salad baba here just love to lap them up.’

An armaments scandal was raging; had the Indian government paid kickbacks to middlemen, and then gone in for a cover-up? Vast sums of money were involved, the Prime Minister's credibility had been weakened, but Chamcha couldn't be bothered with any of it. He was staring at the fuzzy photograph, on an inside page, of indistinct, bloated shapes floating down-river in large numbers. In a north Indian town there had been a massacre of Muslims, and their corpses had been dumped in the water, where they awaited the ministrations of some twentieth-century Gaffer Hexam. There were hundreds of bodies, swollen and rancid; the stench seemed to rise off the page. And in Kashmir a once-popular Chief Minister who had ‘made an accommodation’ with the Congress-I had shoes hurled at him during the Eid prayers by irate groups of Islamic fundamentalists. Communalism, sectarian tension, was omnipresent: as if the gods were going to war. In the eternal struggle between the world's beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day. Sisodia's voice intruded on these morose thoughts. The producer had woken up to see the photograph from Meerut staring up from Chamcha's fold-out table. ‘Fact is,’ he said without any of his usual bonhomie, ‘religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.’

KNOWN HISTORY SHEETERS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS, a government spokesman alleged, but ‘progressive elements’ rejected this analysis. CITY CONSTABULARY CONTAMINATED BY COMMUNAL AGITATORS, the counter-argument suggested. HINDU NATIONALISTS RUN AMUCK. A political fortnightly contained a photograph of signboards that had been mounted outside the Juma Masjid in Old Delhi. The Imam, a loose-bellied man with cynical eyes, who could be found most mornings in his ‘garden’ – a red-earth-and-rubble waste land in the shadow of the mosque – counting rupees donated by the faithful and rolling up each note individually, so that he seemed to be holding a handful of thin beedi-like cigarettes – and who was no stranger to communalist politics himself, was apparently determined that the Meerut horror should be turned to good account. Quench the Fire under our Breast, the signboards cried. Salute with Reverence those who met Martyrdom from the Bullets of the P o l i s. Also: Alas! Alas! Alas! Awak the Prime Minister! And finally, the call to action: Bandh will be observed, and the date of the strike.

‘Bad days,’ Sisodia went on. ‘For the moomoo movies also TV and economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects.’ Then he cheered up as stewardesses approached. ‘I will confess to being a mem member of the mile high cluck cluck club,’ he said gaily within the attendants’ hearing. ‘And you? Should I see what I can ficfic fix?’

O, the dissociations of which the human mind is capable, marvelled Saladin gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of ... He himself had found his thoughts straying, no matter how hard he tried to fix them on his father, towards the question of Miss Zeenat Vakil. He had wired ahead, informing her of his arrival; would she meet the flight? What might or might not happen between them? Had he, by leaving her, by not returning, by losing touch for a time, done the Unforgivable Thing? Was she – he thought, and was shocked by the realization that it had simply not occurred to him earlier – married? In love? Involved? And as for himself: what did he really want? I'll know when I see her, he thought. The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.

The flight passed without incident.

Zeenat Vakil was not waiting at the airport, ‘Come along,’ Sisodia waved. ‘My car has come to pipi pick, so please to lelet me drop.’

Thirty-five minutes later Saladin Chamcha was at Scandal Point, standing at the gates of childhood with holdall and suit-bags, looking at the imported video-controlled entry system. Anti-narcotics slogans had been painted on the perimeter wall: DREAMS ALL DROWN / WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. And: FUTURE IS BLACK / WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. Courage, my old, he braced himself; and rang as directed, once, firmly, for attention.

In the luxuriant garden the stump of the felled walnut-tree caught his unquiet eye. They probably used it as a picnic table now, he mused bitterly. His father had always had a gift for the melodramatic, self-pitying gesture, and to eat his lunch off a surface which packed such an emotional wallop – with, no doubt, many profound sighs between the large mouthfuls – would be right in character. Was he going to camp up his death, too, Saladin wondered. What a grandstand play for sympathy the old bastard could make now! Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.

His stepmother emerged from the dying man's marbled mansion to greet Chamcha without a hint of rancour. ‘Salahuddin. Good you came. It will lift his spirit, and now it is his spirit that he must fight with, because his body is more or less kaput.’ She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Saladin's mother would have been, but out of the same birdlike mould. His large, expansive father had been remarkably consistent in these matters at least. ‘How long does he have?’ Saladin asked. Nasreen was as undeceived as her telegram had suggested. ‘It could be any day.’ The myeloma was present throughout Changez's ‘long bones’ – the cancer had brought its own vocabulary to the house; one no longer spoke of arms and legs – and in his skull. Cancerous cells had even been detected in the blood around the bones. ‘We should have spotted it,’ Nasreen said, and Saladin began to feel the old lady's power, the force of will with which she was reining in her feelings. ‘His pronounced weight-loss these past two years. Also he has complained of aches and pains, for instance in the knees. You know how it is. With an old man, you blame his age, you don't imagine that a vile, hideous disease.’ She stopped, needing to control her voice. Kasturba, the ex-ayah, had come out to join them in the garden. It turned out that her husband Vallabh had died almost a year earlier, of old age, in his sleep: a kinder death than the one now eating its way out of the body of his employer, the seducer of his wife. Kasturba was still dressing in Nasreen I's old, loud saris: today she had chosen one of the dizziest of the Op-Art black-and-white prints. She, too, greeted Saladin warmly: hugs kisses tears. ‘As for me,’ she sobbed, ‘I will never stop praying for a miracle while there is one breath left in his poor lungs.’

Nasreen II embraced Kasturba; each woman rested her head on the other's shoulder. The intimacy between the two women was spontaneous and untarnished by resentments; as if the proximity of death had washed away the quarrels and jealousies of life. The two old ladies comforted one another in the garden, each consoling the other for the imminent loss of the most precious of things: love. Or, rather: the beloved. ‘Come on,’ Nasreen finally said to Saladin. ‘He should see you, pronto.’

‘Does he know?’ Saladin asked. Nasreen answered evasively. ‘He is an intelligent man. He keeps asking, where has all the blood gone? He says, there are only two illnesses in which the blood vanishes like this. One is tuberculosis.’ But, Saladin pressed, he never actually speaks the word? Nasreen lowered her head. The word had not been spoken, either by Changez or in his presence. ‘Shouldn't he know?’ Chamcha asked. ‘Doesn't a man have the right to prepare for his death?’ He saw Nasreen's eyes blaze for an instant. Who do you think you are to tell us our duty. You have sacrificed all rights. Then they faded, and when she spoke her voice was level, unemotional, low. ‘Maybe you're correct.’ But Kasturba wailed: ‘No! How to tell him, poor man? It will break his heart.’

The cancer had thickened Changez's blood to the point at which his heart was having the greatest difficulty pumping it round his body. It had also polluted the bloodstream with alien bodies, platelets, that would attack any blood with which he was transfused, even blood of his own type. So, even in this small way, I can't help him, Saladin understood. Changez could easily die of these side-effects before the cancer did for him. If he did die from the cancer, the end would take the form either of pneumonia or of kidney failure; the doctors, knowing they could do nothing for him, had sent him home to wait for it. ‘Because myeloma is systemic, chemotherapy and radiation treatment are not used,’ Nasreen explained. ‘Only medicament is the drug Melphalan, which can in some cases prolong life, even for years. However, we are informed he is in the category which will not respond to Melphalan tablets.’ But he has not been told, Saladin's inner voices insisted. And that's wrong, wrong, wrong. ‘Still, a miracle has happened,’ Kasturba cried. ‘The doctors told that normally this is one of the most painful cancers; but your father is in no pain. If one prays, then sometimes a kindness is granted.’ It was on account of the freak absence of pain that the cancer had taken so long to diagnose; it had been spreading in Changez's body for at least two years. ‘I must see him now,’ Saladin gently asked. A bearer had taken his holdall and suit-bags indoors while they spoke; now, at last, he followed his garments indoors.

The interior of the house was unchanged – the generosity of the second Nasreen towards the memory of the first seemed boundless, at least during these days, the last on earth of their mutual spouse – except that Nasreen II had moved in her collection of stuffed birds (hoopoes and rare parrots under glass bell-jars, a full-grown King Penguin in the marble-and-mosaic hall, its beak swarming with tiny red ants) and her cases of impaled butterflies. Saladin moved past this colourful gallery of dead wings towards his father's study – Changez had insisted on vacating his bedroom and having a bed moved downstairs into that wood-panelled retreat full of rotting books, so that people didn't have to run up and down all day to look after him – and came, at last, to death's door.

Early in life Changez Chamchawala had acquired the disconcerting knack of sleeping with his eyes wide open, ‘staying on guard', as he liked to say. Now, as Saladin quietly entered the room, the effect of those open grey eyes staring blindly at the ceiling was positively unnerving. For a moment Saladin thought he was too late; that Changez had died while he'd been chatting in the garden. Then the man on the bed emitted a series of small coughs, turned his head, and extended an uncertain arm. Saladin Chamcha went towards his father and bowed his head beneath the old man's caressing palm.

To fall in love with one's father after the long angry decades was a serene and beautiful feeling; a renewing, life-giving thing, Saladin wanted to say, but did not, because it sounded vampirish; as if by sucking this new life out of his father he was making room, in Changez's body, for death. Although he kept it quiet, however, Saladin felt hourly closer to many old, rejected selves, many alternative Saladins – or rather Salahuddins – which had split off from himself as he made his various life choices, but which had apparently continued to exist, perhaps in the parallel universes of quantum theory. Cancer had stripped Changez Chamchawala literally to the bone; his cheeks had collapsed into the hollows of the skull, and he had to place a foam-rubber pillow under his buttocks because of the atrophying of his flesh. But it had also stripped him of his faults, of all that had been domineering, tyrannical and cruel in him, so that the mischievous, loving and brilliant man beneath lay exposed, once again, for all to see. If only he could have been this person all his life, Saladin (who had begun to find the sound of his full, un-Englished name pleasing for the first time in twenty years) found himself wishing. How hard it was to find one's father just when one had no choice but to say goodbye.

On the morning of his return Salahuddin Chamchawala was asked by his father to give him a shave. ‘These old women of mine don't know which side of a Philishave is the business end.’ Changez's skin hung off his face in soft, leathery jowls, and his hair (when Salahuddin emptied the machine) looked like ashes. Salahuddin could not remember when he had last touched his father's face this way, gently drawing the skin tight as the cordless shaver moved across it, and then stroking it to make sure it felt smooth. When he had finished he continued for a moment to run his fingers along Changez's cheeks. ‘Look at the old man,’ Nasreen said to Kasturba as they entered the room, ‘he can't take his eyes off his boy.’ Changez Chamchawala grinned an exhausted grin, revealing a mouth full of shattered teeth, flecked with spittle and crumbs.

When his father fell asleep again, after being forced by Kasturba and Nasreen to drink a small quantity of water, and gazed up at – what? – with his open, dreaming eyes, which could see into three worlds at once, the actual world of his study, the visionary world of dreams, and the approaching after-life as well (or so Salahuddin, in a fanciful moment, found himself imagining); – then the son went to Changez's old bedroom for a rest. Grotesque heads in painted terracotta glowered down at him from the walls: a horned demon; a leering Arab with a falcon on his shoulder; a bald man rolling his eyes upwards and putting his tongue out in panic as a huge black fly settled on his eyebrow. Unable to sleep beneath these figures, which he had known all his life and also hated, because he had come to see them as portraits of Changez, he moved finally to a different, neutral room.

Waking up in the early evening, he went downstairs to find the two old women outside Changez's room, trying to work out the details of his medication. Apart from the daily Melphalan tablet, he had been prescribed a whole battery of drugs in an attempt to combat the cancer's pernicious side-effects: anaemia, the strain on the heart, and so on. Isosorbide dimtrate, two tablets, four times a day; Furosemide, one tablet, three times; Pred-nisolone, six tablets, twice daily... ‘I'll do this,’ he told the relieved old women. ‘At least it is one thing I can do.’ Agarol for his constipation, Spironolactone for goodness knew what, and a zyloric, Allopurinol: he suddenly remembered, crazily, an antique theatre review in which the English critic, Kenneth Tynan, had imagined the polysyllabic characters in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great as ‘a horde of pills and wonder drugs bent on decimating one another’:

The things one's memory threw up! But perhaps this pharmaceutical Tamburlaine was not such a bad eulogy for the fallen monarch lying here in his bookwormed study, staring into three worlds, waiting for the end. ‘Come on, Abba,’ he marched cheerily into the presence. ‘Time to save your life.’

Still in its place, on a shelf in Changez's study: a certain copper-and-brass lamp, reputed to have the power of wish fulfilment, but as yet (because never rubbed) untested. Somewhat tarnished now, it looked down upon its dying owner; and was observed, in its turn, by his only son. Who was sorely tempted, for an instant, to get it down, rub three times, and ask the turbanned djinni for a magic spell... however, Salahuddin left the lamp where it was. There was no place for djinns or ghouls or afreets here; no spooks or fancies could be permitted. No magic formulae; just the impotence of the pills. ‘Here's the medicine man,’ Salahuddin sang out, rattling the little bottles, rousing his father from sleep. ‘Medicine,’ Changez grimaced childishly. ‘Eek, bhaak, thoo.’

That night, Salahuddin forced Nasreen and Kasturba to sleep comfortably in their own beds while he kept watch over Changez from a mattress on the floor. After his midnight dose of Isosorbide, the dying man slept for three hours, and then needed to go to the toilet. Salahuddin virtually lifted him to his feet, and was astonished at Changez's lightness. This had always been a weighty man, but now he was a living lunch for the advancing cancer cells ... in the toilet, Changez refused all help, ‘He won't let you do one thing,’ Kasturba had complained lovingly. ‘Such a shy fellow that he is.’ On his way back to bed he leaned lightly on Salahuddin's arm, and shuffled along flat-footed in old, worn bedroom slippers, his remaining hairs sticking out at comical angles, his head stuck beakily forward on its scrawny, fragile neck. Salahuddin suddenly longed to pick the old man up, to cradle him in his arms and sing soft, comforting songs. Instead, he blurted out, at this least appropriate of moments, an appeal for reconciliation. ‘Abba, I came because I didn't want there to be trouble between us any more...’ Fucking idiot. The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon. In the middle of the bloody night! And if he hasn't guessed he's dying, that little deathbed speech will certainly have let him know. Changez continued to shuffle along; his grip on his son's arm tightened very slightly. ‘That doesn't matter any more,’ he said. ‘It's forgotten, whatever it was.’

In the morning, Nasreen and Kasturba arrived in clean saris, looking rested and complaining, ‘It was so terrible sleeping away from him that we didn't sleep one wink.’ They fell upon Changez, and so tender were their caresses that Salahuddin had the same sense of spying on a private moment that he'd had at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan. He left the room quietly while the three lovers embraced, kissed and wept.

Death, the great fact, wove its spell around the house on Scandal Point. Salahuddin surrendered to it like everyone else, even Changez, who, on that second day, often smiled his old crooked smile, the one that said I know what's up, I'll go along with it, just don't think I'm fooled. Kasturba and Nasreen fussed over him constantly, brushing his hair, coaxing him to eat and drink. His tongue had grown fat in his mouth, slurring his speech slightly, making it hard to swallow; he refused anything at all fibrous or stringy, even the chicken breasts he had loved all his life. A mouthful of soup, pureed potatoes, a taste of custard. Baby food. When he sat up in bed Salahuddin sat behind him; Changez leaned against his son's body while he ate.

‘Open the house,’ Changez commanded that morning. ‘I want to see some smiling faces here, instead of your three glum mugs.’ So, after a long time, people came: young and old, half-forgotten cousins, uncles, aunts; a few comrades from the old days of the nationalist movement, poker-backed gentlemen with silver hair, achkan jackets and monocles; employees of the various foundations and philanthropical enterprises set up by Changez years ago; rival manufacturers of agricultural sprays and artificial dung. A real bag of allsorts, Salahuddin thought; but marvelled, also, at how beautifully everyone behaved in the presence of the dying man: the young spoke to him intimately about their lives, as if reassuring him that life itself was invincible, offering him the rich consolation of being a member of the great procession of the human race, – while the old evoked the past, so that he knew nothing was forgotten, nothing lost; that in spite of the years of self-imposed sequestration he remained joined to the world. Death brought out the best in people; it was good to be shown Salahuddin realized – that this, too, was what human beings were like: considerate, loving, even noble. We are still capable of exaltation, he thought in celebratory mood; in spite of everything, we can still transcend. A pretty young woman – it occurred to Salahuddin that she was probably his niece, and he felt ashamed that he didn't know her name – was taking Polaroid snapshots of Changez with his visitors, and the sick man was enjoying himself hugely, pulling faces, then kissing the many proffered cheeks with a light in his eyes that Salahuddin identified as nostalgia. ‘It's like a birthday party,’ he thought. Or: like Finnegan's wake. The dead man refusing to lie down and let the living have all the fun.

‘We have to tell him,’ Salahuddin insisted when the visitors had left. Nasreen bowed her head; and nodded. Kasturba burst into tears.

They told him the next morning, having asked the specialist to attend to answer any questions Changez might have. The specialist, Panikkar (a name the English would mispronounce and giggle over, Salahuddin thought, like the Muslim ‘Fakhar’), arrived at ten, shining with self-esteem. ‘I should tell him,’ he said, taking control. ‘Most patients feel ashamed to let their loved ones see their fear.’

‘The hell you will,’ Salahuddin said with a vehemence that took him by surprise. ‘Well, in that case,’ Panikkar shrugged, making as if to leave; which won the argument, because now Nasreen and Kasturba pleaded with Salahuddin: ‘Please, let's not fight.’ Salahuddin, defeated, ushered the doctor into his father's presence; and shut the study door.

‘I have a cancer,’ Changez Chamchawala said to Nasreen, Kasturba and Salahuddin after Panikkar's departure. He spoke clearly, enunciating the word with defiant, exaggerated care. ‘It is very far advanced. I am not surprised. I said to Panikkar: “This is what I told you the very first day. Where else could all the blood have gone?”’ – Outside the study, Kasturba said to Salahuddin: ‘Since you came, there was a light in his eye. Yesterday, with all the people, how happy he was! But now his eye is dim. Now he won't fight.’

That afternoon Salahuddin found himself alone with his father while the two women napped. He discovered that he, who had been so determined to have everything out in the open, to say the word, was now awkward and inarticulate, not knowing how to speak. But Changez had something to say.

‘I want you to know,’ he said to his son, ‘that I have no problem about this thing at all. A man must die of something, and it is not as though I were dying young. I have no illusions; I know I am not going anywhere after this. It's the end. That's okay. The only thing I'm afraid of is pain, because when there is pain a man loses his dignity. I don't want that to happen.’ Salahuddin was awestruck. First one falls in love with one's father all over again, and then one learns to look up to him, too. ‘The doctors say you're a case in a million,’ he replied truthfully. ‘It looks like you have been spared the pain.’ Something in Changez relaxed at that, and Salahuddin realized how afraid the old man had been, how much he'd needed to be told... ‘Bas,’ Changez Chamchawala said gruffly. ‘Then I'm ready. And by the way: you get the lamp, after all.’

An hour later the diarrhoea began: a thin black trickle. Nasreen's anguished phone calls to the emergency room of the Breach Candy Hospital established that Panikkar was unavailable. ‘Take him off the Agarol at once,’ the duty doctor ordered, and prescribed Imodium instead. It didn't help. At seven pm the risk of dehydration was growing, and Changez was too weak to sit up for his food. He had virtually no appetite, but Kasturba managed to spoon-feed him a few drops of semolina with skinned apricots. ‘Yum, yum,’ he said ironically, smiling his crooked smile.

He fell asleep, but by one o'clock had been up and down three times. ‘For God's sake,’ Salahuddin shouted down the telephone, ‘give me Panikkar's home number.’ But that was against hospital procedure. ‘You must judge,’ said the duty doctor, ‘if the time has come to bring him down.’ Bitch, Salahuddin Chamchawala mouthed. ‘Thanks a lot.’

At three o'clock Changez was so weak that Salahuddin more or less carried him to the toilet. ‘Get the car out,’ he shouted at Nasreen and Kasturba. ‘We're going to the hospital. Now.’ The proof of Changez's decline was that, this last time, he permitted his son to help him out. ‘Black shit is bad,’ he said, panting for breath. His lungs had filled up alarmingly; the breath was like bubbles pushing through glue. ‘Some cancers are slow, but I think this is very fast. Deterioration is very rapid.’ And Sala-huddin, the apostle of truth, told comforting lies: Abba, don't worry. You'll be fine. Changez Chamchawala shook his head. ‘I'm going, son,’ he said. His chest heaved; Salahuddin grabbed a large plastic mug and held it under Changez's mouth. The dying man vomited up more than a pint of phlegm mixed up with blood: and after that was too weak to talk. This time Salahuddin did have to carry him, to the back seat of the Mercedes, where he sat between Nasreen and Kasturba while Salahuddin drove at top speed to Breach Candy Hospital, half a mile down the road. ‘Shall I open the window, Abba?’ he asked at one point, and Changez shook his head and bubbled: ‘No.’ Much later, Salahuddin realized this had been his father's last word.

The emergency ward. Running feet, orderlies, wheelchair, Changez being heaved on to a bed, curtains. A young doctor, doing what had to be done, very quickly but without the appearance of speed. I like him, Salahuddin thought. Then the doctor looked him in the eye and said: ‘I don't think he's going to make it,’ It felt like being punched in the stomach. Salahuddin realized he'd been clinging on to a futile hope, they'll fix him and we'll take him home; this isn't ‘it’, and his instant reaction to the doctor's words was rage. You're the mechanic. Don't tell me the car won't start; mend the damn thing. Changez was flat out, drowning in his lungs. ‘We can't get at his chest in this kurta; may we...’ Cut it off. Do what you have to do. Drips, the blip of a weakening heartbeat on a screen, helplessness. The young doctor murmuring: ‘It won't be long now, so...’ At which, Salahuddin Chamchawala did a crass thing. He turned to Nasreen and Kasturba and said: ‘Come quickly now. Come and say goodbye.’

‘For God's sake!’ the doctor exploded... the women did not weep, but came up to Changez and took a hand each. Salahuddin blushed for shame. He would never know if his father heard the death-sentence dripping from the lips of his son.

Now Salahuddin found better words, his Urdu returning to him after a long absence. We're all beside you, Abba. We all love you very much. Changez could not speak, but that was, – was it not? – yes, it must have been – a little nod of recognition. He heard me. Then all of a sudden Changez Chamchawala left his face; he was still alive, but he had gone somewhere else, had turned inwards to look at whatever there was to sec. He is teaching me how to die, Salahuddin thought. He does not avert his eyes, but looks death right in the face. At no point in his dying did Changez Chamchawala speak the name of God.

‘Please,’ the doctor said, ‘go outside the curtain now and let us make our effort.’ Salahuddin took the two women a few steps away; and now, when a curtain hid Changez from their sight, they wept. ‘He swore he would never leave me,’ Nasreen sobbed, her iron control broken at last, ‘and he has gone away.’ Salahuddin went to watch through a crack in the curtain; – and saw the voltage being pumped into his father's body, the sudden green jaggedness of the pulse on the monitor screen; saw doctor and nurses pounding his father's chest; saw defeat.

The last thing he had seen in his father's face, just before the medical staff's final, useless effort, was the dawning of a terror so profound that it chilled Salahuddin to the bone. What had he seen? What was it that waited for him, for all of us, that brought such fear to a brave man's eyes? – Now, when it was over, he returned to Changez's bedside; and saw his father's mouth curved upwards, in a smile.

He caressed those sweet cheeks. I didn't shave him today. He died with stubble on his chin. How cold his face was already; but the brain, the brain retained a little warmth. They had stuffed cottonwool into his nostrils. But suppose there's been a mistake? What if he wants to breathe? Nasreen Chamchawala was beside him. ‘Let's take your father home,’ she said.

Changez Chamchawala returned home in an ambulance, lying in an aluminium tray on the floor between the two women who had loved him, while Salahuddin followed in the car. Ambulance men laid him to rest in his study; Nasreen turned the air-conditioner up high. This was, after all, a tropical death, and the sun would be up soon.

What did he see? Salahuddin kept thinking. Why the horror? And, whence that final smile?

People came again. Uncles, cousins, friends took charge, arranging everything. Nasreen and Kasturba sat on white sheets on the floor of the room in which, once upon a time, Saladin and Zeeny had visited the ogre, Changez; women sat with them to mourn, many of them reciting the qalmah over and over, with the help of counting beads. Salahuddin was irritated by this; but lacked the will to tell them to stop. – Then the mullah came, and sewed Changez's winding-sheet, and it was time to wash the body; and even though there were many men present, and there was no need for him to help, Salahuddin insisted. If he could look his death in the eye, then I can do it, too. – And when his father was being washed, his body rolled this way and that at the mullah's command, the flesh bruised and slabby, the appendix scar long and brown, Salahuddin recalled the only other time in his life when he'd seen his physically demure father naked: he'd been nine years old, blundering into a bathroom where Changez was taking a shower, and the sight of his father's penis was a shock he'd never forgotten. That thick squat organ, like a club. O the power of it; and the insignificance of his own... ‘His eyes won't close,’ the mullah complained. ‘You should have done it before.’ He was a stocky, pragmatic fellow, this mullah with his mous-tacheless beard. He treated the dead body as a commonplace thing, needing washing the way a car does, or a window, or a dish. ‘You are from London? Proper London? – I was there many years. I was doorman at Claridge's Hotel.’ Oh? Really? How interesting. The man wanted to make small-talk! Salahuddin was appalled. That's my father, don't you understand? ‘These garments,’ the mullah asked, indicating Changez's last kurta-pajama outfit, the one which the hospital staff had cut open to get at his chest. ‘You have need of them?’ No, no. Take them. Please. ‘You are very kind.’ Small pieces of black cloth were being stuffed into Changez's mouth and under his eyelids. ‘This cloth has been to Mecca,’ the mullah said. Get it out! ‘I don't understand. It is holy fabric.’ You heard me: out, out. ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’

And:

The bier, strewn with flowers, like an outsize baby's cot.

The body, wrapped in white, with sandalwood shavings, for fragrance, scattered all about it.

More flowers, and a green silken covering with Quranic verses embroidered upon it in gold.

The ambulance, with the bier resting in it, awaiting the widows' permission to depart.

The last farewells of women.

The graveyard. Male mourners rushing to lift the bier on their shoulders trample Salahuddin's foot, ripping off a segment of the nail on his big toe.

Among the mourners, an estranged old friend of Changez's, here in spite of double pneumonia; – and another old gentleman, weeping copiously, who will die himself the very next day; – and all sorts, the walking records of a dead man's life.

The grave. Salahuddin climbs down into it, stands at the head end, the gravedigger at the foot. Changez Chamchawala is lowered down. The weight of my father's head, lying in my hand. I laid it down; to rest.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Waiting for him when he returned from the graveyard: a copper-and-brass lamp, his renewed inheritance. He went into Changez's study and closed the door. There were his old slippers by the bed: he had become, as he'd foretold, ‘a pair of emptied shoes'. The bedclothes still bore the imprint of his father's body; the room was full of sickly perfume: sandalwood, camphor, cloves. He took the lamp from its shelf and sat at Changez's desk. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he rubbed briskly: once, twice, thrice.

The lights all went on at once.

Zeenat Vakil entered the room.

‘O God, I'm sorry, maybe you wanted them off, but with the blinds closed it was just so sad.’ Waving her arms, speaking loudly in her beautiful croak of a voice, her hair woven, for once, into a waist-length ponytail, here she was, his very own djinn. ‘I feel so bad I didn't come before, I was just trying to hurt you, what a time to choose, so bloody self-indulgent, yaar, it's good to see you, you poor orphaned goose.’

She was the same as ever, immersed in life up to her neck, combining occasional art lectures at the university with her medical practice and her political activities. ‘I was at the goddamn hospital when you came, you know? I was right there, but I didn't know about your dad until it was over, and even then I didn't come to give you a hug, what a bitch, if you want to throw me out I will have no complaints.’ This was a generous woman, the most generous he'd known. When you see her, you'll know, he had promised himself, and it turned out to be true. ‘I love you,’ he heard himself saying, stopping her in her tracks. ‘Okay, I won't hold you to that,’ she finally said, looking hugely pleased. ‘Balance of your mind is obviously disturbed. Lucky for you you aren't in one of our great public hospitals; they put the loonies next to the heroin addicts, and there's so much drug traffic in the wards that the poor schizos end up with bad habits. – Anyway, if you say it again after forty days, watch out, because maybe then I'll take it seriously. Just now it could be a disease.’

Undefeated (and, it appeared, unattached), Zeeny's re-entry into his life completed the process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most surprising and paradoxical product of his father's terminal illness. His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils, now seemed very remote, even irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. ‘About time,’ Zeeny approved when he told her of his return to Salahuddin. ‘Now you can stop acting at last.’ Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase, in which the world would be solid and real, and in which there was no longer the broad figure of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the grave. An orphaned life, like Muhammad's; like everyone's. A life illuminated by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind's eye, like a sort of magic lamp.

I must think of myself , from now on, as living perpetually in the first instant of the future, he resolved a few days later, in Zeeny's apartment on Sophia College Lane, while recovering in her bed from the toothy enthusiasms of her lovemaking. (She had invited him home shyly, as if she were removing a veil after long concealment.) But a history is not so easily shaken off; he was also living, after all, in the present moment of the past, and his old life was about to surge around him once again, to complete its final act.

He became aware that he was a rich man. Under the terms of Changez's will, the dead tycoon's vast fortune and myriad business interests were to be supervised by a group of distinguished trustees, the income being divided equally between three parties: Changez's second wife Nasreen, Kasturba, whom he referred to in the document as ‘in every true sense, my third’, and his son, Salahuddin. After the deaths of the two women, however, the trust could be dissolved whenever Salahuddin chose: he inherited, in short, the lot. ‘On the condition,’ Changez Chamchawala had mischievously stipulated, ‘that the scoundrel accepts the gift he previously spurned, viz., the requisitioned schoolhouse situated at Solan, Himachal Pradesh.’ Changez might have chopped down a walnut-tree, but he had never attempted to cut Salahuddin out of his will. – The houses at Pali Hill and Scandal Point were excluded from these provisions, however. The former passed to Nasreen Chamchawala outright; the latter became, with immediate effect, the sole property of Kasturbabai, who quickly announced her intention of selling the old house to property developers. The site was worth crores, and Kasturba was wholly unsentimental about real estate. Salahuddin protested vehemently, and was slapped down hard. ‘I have lived my whole life here,’ she informed him. ‘It is therefore for me only to say.’ Nasreen Chamchawala was entirely indifferent to the fate of the old place. ‘One more high-rise, one less piece of old Bombay,’ she shrugged. ‘What's the difference? Cities change.’ She was already preparing to move back to Pali Hill, taking the cases of butterflies off the walls, assembling her stuffed birds in the hall. ‘Let it go,’ Zeenat Vakil said. ‘You couldn't live in that museum, anyway.’

She was right, of course; no sooner had he resolved to set his face towards the future than he started mooning around and regretting childhood's end. ‘I'm off to meet George and Bhupen, you remember,’ she said. ‘Why don't you come along? You need to start plugging into the town.’ George Miranda had just completed a documentary film about communalism, interviewing Hindus and Muslims of all shades of opinion. Fundamentalists of both religions had instantly sought injunctions banning the film from being shown, and, although the Bombay courts had rejected this request, the case had gone up to the Supreme Court. George, even more stubbly of chin, lank of hair and sprawling of stomach than Salahuddin remembered, drank rum in a Dhobi Talao boozer and thumped the table with pessimistic fists. ‘This is the Supreme Court of Shah Bano fame,’ he cried, referring to the notorious case in which, under pressure from Islamic extremists, the Court had ruled that alimony payments were contrary to the will of Allah, thus making India's laws even more reactionary than, for example, Pakistan's. ‘So I don't have much hope.’ He twisted, disconsolately, the waxy points of his moustache. His new girlfriend, a tall, thin Bengali woman with cropped hair that reminded Salahuddin a little of Mishal Sufyan, chose this moment to attack Bhupen Gandhi for having published a volume of poems about his visit to the ‘little temple town’ of Gagari in the Western Ghats. The poems had been criticized by the Hindu right; one eminent South Indian professor had announced that Bhupen had ‘forfeited his right to be called an Indian poet’, but in the opinion of the young woman, Swatilekha, Bhupen had been seduced by religion into a dangerous ambiguity. Grey hair flopping earnestly, moon-face shining, Bhupen defended himself. ‘I have said that the only crop of Gagari is the stone gods being quarried from the hills. I have spoken of herds of legends, with sacred cowbells tinkling, grazing on the hillsides. These are not ambiguous images.’ Swatilekha wasn't convinced. ‘These days,’ she insisted, ‘our positions must be stated with crystal clarity. All metaphors are capable of misinterpretation.’ She offered her theory. Society was orchestrated by what she called grand narratives: history, economics, ethics. In India, the development of a corrupt and closed state apparatus had ‘excluded the masses of the people from the ethical project’. As a result, they sought ethical satisfactions in the oldest of the grand narratives, that is, religious faith. ‘But these narratives are being manipulated by the theocracy and various political elements in an entirely retrogressive way.’ Bhupen said: ‘We can't deny the ubiquity of faith. If we write in such a way as to pre-judge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the masses?’ Swatilekha was scornful. ‘Battle lines are being drawn up in India today,’ she cried. ‘Secular versus rational, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.’

Bhupen got up, angrily, to go. Zeeny pacified him: ‘We can't afford schisms. There's planning to be done.’ He sat down again, and Swatilekha kissed him on the cheek. Tm sorry,’ she said. ‘Too much college education, George always says. In fact, I loved the poems. I was only arguing a case.’ Bhupen, mollified, pretended to punch her on the nose; the crisis passed.

They had met, Salahuddin now gathered, to discuss their part in a remarkable political demonstration: the formation of a human chain, stretching from the Gateway of India to the outermost northern suburbs of the city, in support of ‘national integration’. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had recently organized just such a human chain in Kerala, with great success. ‘But,’ George Miranda argued, ‘here in Bombay it will be totally another matter. In Kerala the CP(M) is in power. Here, with these Shiv Sena bastards in control, we can expect every type of harassment, from police obstructionism to out-and-out assaults by mobs on segments of the chain – especially when it passes, as it will have to, through the Sena's fortresses, in Mazagaon, etc.’ In spite of these dangers, Zeeny explained to Salahuddin, such public demonstrations were essential. As communal violence escalated – and Meerut was only the latest in a long line of murderous incidents – it was imperative that the forces of disintegration weren't permitted to have things all their own way. ‘We must show that there are also counterforces at work.’ Salahuddin was somewhat bemused at the rapidity with which, once again, his life had begun to change. Me, taking part in a CP(M) event. Wonders will never cease; I really must be in love.

Once they had settled matters – how many friends each of them might manage to bring along, where to assemble, what to carry in the way of food, drink and first-aid equipment – they relaxed, drank down the cheap, dark rum, and chattered inconsequentially, and that was when Salahuddin heard, for the first time, the rumours about the odd behaviour of the film star Gibreel Farishta that had started circulating in the city, and felt his old life prick him like a hidden thorn; – heard the past, like a distant trumpet, ringing in his ears.

The Gibreel Farishta who returned to Bombay from London to pick up the threads of his film career was not, by general consensus, the old, irresistible Gibreel. ‘Guy seems hell-bent on a suicide course,’ George Miranda, who knew all the filmi gossip, declared. ‘Who knows why? They say because he was unlucky in love he's gone a little wild.’ Salahuddin kept his mouth shut, but felt his face heating up. Allie Cone had refused to have Gibreel back after the fires of Brickhall. In the matter of forgiveness, Salahuddin reflected, nobody had thought to consult the entirely innocent and greatly injured Alleluia; once again, we made her life peripheral to our own. No wonder she's still hopping mad. Gibreel had told Salahuddin, in a final and somewhat strained telephone call, that he was returning to Bombay ‘in the hope that I never have to see her, or you, or this damn cold city, again in what remains of my life’. And now here he was, by all accounts, shipwrecking himself again, and on home ground, too. ‘He's making some weird movies,’ George went on. ‘And this time he's had to put in his own cash. After the two flops, producers have been pulling out fast. So if this one goes down, he's broke, done for, funtoosh.’ Gibreel had embarked on a modern-dress remake of the Ramayana story in which the heroes and heroines had become corrupt and evil instead of pure and free from sin. Here was a lecherous, drunken Rama and a flighty Sita; while Ravana, the demon-king, was depicted as an upright and honest man. ‘Gibreel is playing Ravana,’ George explained in fascinated horror. ‘Looks like he's trying deliberately to set up a final confrontation with religious sectarians, knowing he can't win, that he'll be broken into bits,’ Several members of the cast had already walked off the production, and given lurid interviews accusing Gibreel of ‘blasphemy’, ‘satanism’ and other misdemeanours. His most recent mistress, Pimple Billimoria, was seen on the cover of Ciné-Blitz, saying: ‘It was like kissing the Devil.’ Gibreel's old problem of sulphurous halitosis had evidently returned with a vengeance.

His erratic behaviour had been causing tongues to wag even more than his choice of subjects to film. ‘Some days he's sweetness and light,’ George said. ‘On others, he conies to work like lord god almighty and actually insists that people get down and kneel. Personally I don't believe the film will be finished unless and until he sorts out his mental health which, I genuinely feel, is affected. First the illness, then the plane crash, then the unhappy love affair: you can understand the guy's problems.’ And there were worse rumours: his tax affairs were under investigation; police officers had visited him to ask questions about the death of Rekha Merchant, and Rekha's husband, the ball-bearings king, had threatened to ‘break every bone in the bastard's body’, so that for a few days Gibreel had to be accompanied by bodyguards when he used the Everest Vilas lifts; and worst of all were the suggestions of his nocturnal visits to the city's red-light district where, it was hinted, he had frequented certain Foras Road establishments until the dadas threw him out because the women were getting hurt. ‘They say some of them were very badly damaged,’ George said. ‘That big hush-money had to be paid. I don't know. People say any damn thing. That Pimple of course jumped right on the bandwagon. The Man that Hates Women. She's making herself a femme fatale star out of all this. But there is something badly wrong with Farishta. You know the fellow, I hear,’ George finished, looking at Salahuddin; who blushed.

‘Not very well. Just because of the plane crash and so on.’ He was in turmoil. It seemed Gibreel had not managed to escape from his inner demons. He, Salahuddin, had believed – naïvely, it now turned out – that the events of the Brickhall fire, when Gibreel saved his life, had in some way cleansed, them both, had driven those devils out into the consuming flames; that, in fact, love had shown that it could exert a humanizing power as great as that of hatred; that virtue could transform men as well as vice. But nothing was forever; no cure, it appeared, was complete.

‘The film industry is full of wackos,’ Swatilekha was telling George, affectionately. ‘Just look at you, mister.’ But Bhupen grew serious. ‘I always saw Gibreel as a positive force,’ he said. ‘An actor from a minority playing roles from many religions, and being accepted. If he has fallen out of favour, it's a bad sign.’

Two days later, Salahuddin Chamchawala read in his Sunday papers that an international team of mountaineers, on their way to attempt an ascent of the Hidden Peak, had arrived in Bombay; and when he saw that among the team was the famed ‘Queen of Everest’, Miss Alleluia Cone, he had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. ‘Now I know what a ghost is,’ he thought. ‘Unfinished business, that's what.’

Allie's presence in Bombay came, in the next two days, to preoccupy him more and more. His mind insisted on making strange connections, between, for example, the evident recovery of her feet and the end of her affair with Gibreel: as if he had been crippling her with his jealous love. His rational mind knew that, in fact, her problem with the fallen arches had preceded her relationship with Gibreel, but he had entered an oddly dreamy mood, and seemed impervious to logic. What was she really doing here? Why had she really come? Some terrible doom, he became convinced, was in store.

Zeeny, her medical surgeries, college lectures and work for the human-chain demonstration leaving her no time, at present, for Salahuddin and his moods, mistakenly saw his introverted silence as expressive of doubts – about his return to Bombay, about being dragged into political activity of a type that had always been abhorrent to him, about her. To disguise her fears, she spoke to him in the form of a lecture. ‘If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. Make its faults your own. Become its creature; belong.’ He nodded, absently; and she, thinking he was preparing to leave her once again, stormed out in a rage that left him utterly perplexed.

Should he telephone Allie? Had Gibreel told her about the voices?

Should he try to see Gibreel?

Something is about to happen, his inner voice warned. It's going to happen, and you don't know what it is, and you can't do a damn thing about it. Oh yes: it's something bad.

It happened on the day of the demonstration, which, against all the odds, was a pretty fair success. A few minor skirmishes were reported from the Mazagaon district, but the event was, in general, an orderly one. CPI(M) observers reported an unbroken chain of men and women linking hands from top to bottom of the city, and Salahuddin, standing between Zeeny and Bhupen on Muhammad Ali Road, could not deny the power of the image. Many people in the chain were in tears. The order to join hands had been given by the organizers – Swatilekha prominent among them, riding on the back of a jeep, megaphone in hand – at eight am precisely; one hour later, as the city's rush-hour traffic reached its blaring peak, the crowd began to disperse. However, in spite of the thousands involved in the event, in spite of its peaceful nature and positive message, the formation of the human chain was not reported on the Doordarshan television news. Nor did All-India Radio carry the story. The majority of the (government-supporting) ‘language press’ also omitted any mentions...one English-language daily, and one Sunday paper, carried the story; that was all. Zeeny, recalling the treatment of the Kerala chain, had forecast this deafening silence as she and Salahuddin walked home. ‘It's a Communist show,’ she explained. ‘So, officially, it's a non-event.’

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 ré, 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:

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. Kas-turba 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.