The Satanic Verses

1

‘Once I'm an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into myself?’ Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, prop. Shaan-daar Cafe and landlord of the rooming-house above, mentor to the variegated, transient and particoloured inhabitants of both, seen-it-all type, least doctrinaire of hajis and most unashamed of VCR addicts, ex-schoolteacher, self-taught in classical texts of many cultures, dismissed from post in Dhaka owing to cultural differences with certain generals in the old days when Bangladesh was merely an East Wing, and therefore, in his own words, ‘not so much an immig as an emig runt’ – this last a good-natured allusion to his lack of inches, for though he was a wide man, thick of arm and waist, he stood no more than sixty-one inches off the ground, blinked in his bedroom doorway, awakened by Jumpy Joshi's urgent midnight knock, polished his half-rimmed spectacles on the edge of Bengali-style kurta (drawstrings tied at the neck in a neat bow), squeezed lids tightly shut open shut over myopic eyes, replaced glasses, opened eyes, stroked moustacheless hennaed beard, sucked teeth, and responded to the now-indisputable horns on the brow of the shivering fellow whom Jumpy, like the cat, appeared to have dragged in, with the above impromptu quip, stolen, with commendable mental alacrity for one aroused from his slumbers, from Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, Moroccan priest, ad 120—180 approx., colonial of an earlier Empire, a person who denied the accusation of having bewitched a rich widow yet confessed, somewhat perversely, that at an early stage in his career he had been transformed, by witchcraft, into (not an owl, but) an ass. ‘Yes, yes,’ Sufyan continued, stepping out into the passage and blowing a white mist of winter breath into his cupped hands, ‘Poor misfortunate, but no point wallowing. Constructive attitude must be adopted. I will wake my wife.’

Chamcha was beard-fuzz and grime. He wore a blanket like a toga below which there protruded the comic deformity of goats’ hoofs, while above it could be seen the sad comedy of a sheepskin jacket borrowed from Jumpy, its collar turned up, so that sheepish curls nestled only inches from pointy billy-goat horns. He seemed incapable of speech, sluggish of body, dull of eye; even though Jumpy attempted to encourage him – ‘There, you see, we'll have this well sorted in a flash’ – he, Saladin, remained the most limp and passive of – what? – let us say: satyrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, offered further Apuleian sympathy. ‘In the case of the ass, reverse metamorphosis required personal intervention of goddess Isis,’ he beamed. ‘But old times are for old fogies. In your instance, young mister, first step would possibly be a bowl of good hot soup.’

At this point his kindly tones were quite drowned by the intervention of a second voice, raised high in operatic terror; moments after which, his small form was being jostled and shoved by the mountainous, fleshy figure of a woman, who seemed unable to decide whether to push him out of her way or keep him before her as a protective shield. Crouching behind Sufyan, this new being extended a trembling arm at whose end was a quivering, pudgy, scarlet-nailed index finger. ‘That over there,’ she howled. ‘What thing is come upon us?’

‘It is a friend of Joshi's,’ Sufyan said mildly, and continued, turning to Chamcha, ‘Please forgive, – the unexpectedness et cet, isn't it? – Anyhow, may I present my Mrs.; – my Begum Sahiba, – Hind.’

‘What friend? How friend?’ the croucher cried. ‘Ya Allah, eyes aren't next to your nose?’

The passageway, – bare-board floor, torn floral paper on the walls, – was starting to fill up with sleepy residents. Prominent among whom were two teenage girls, one spike-haired, the other pony-tailed, and both relishing the opportunity to demonstrate their skills (learned from Jumpy) in the martial arts of karate and Wing Chun: Sufyan's daughters, Mishal (seventeen) and fifteen-year-old Anahita, leapt from their bedroom in fighting gear, Bruce Lee pajamas worn loosely over T-shirts bearing the image of the new Madonna; – caught sight of unhappy Saladin; – and shook their heads in wide-eyed delight.

‘Radical,’ said Mishal, approvingly. And her sister nodded assent: ‘Crucial. Fucking A.’ Her mother did not, however, reproach her for her language; Hind's mind was elsewhere, and she wailed louder than ever: ‘Look at this husband of mine. What sort of haji is this? Here is Shaitan himself walking in through our door, and I am made to offer him hot chicken yakhni, cooked by my own right hand.’

Useless, now, for Jumpy Joshi to plead with Hind for tolerance, to attempt explanations and demand solidarity. ‘If he's not the devil on earth,’ the heaving-chested lady pointed out unanswerably, ‘from where that plague-breath comes that he's breathing? From, maybe, the Perfumed Garden?’

‘Not Gulistan, but Bostan,’ said Chamcha, suddenly. ‘A I Flight 420.’ On hearing his voice, however, Hind squealed frightfully, and plunged past him, heading for the kitchen.

‘Mister,’ Mishal said to Saladin as her mother fled downstairs, ‘anyone who scares her that way has got to be seriously bad.’

‘Wicked,’ Anahita agreed. ‘Welcome aboard.’

This Hind, now so firmly entrenched in exclamatory mode, had once been – strangebuttrue! – the most blushing of brides, the soul of gentleness, the very incarnation of tolerant good humour. As the wife of the erudite schoolteacher of Dhaka, she had entered into her duties with a will, the perfect helpmeet, bringing her husband cardamom-scented tea when he stayed up late marking examination papers, ingratiating herself with the school principal at the termly Staff Families Outing, struggling with the novels of Bibhutibhushan Banerji and the metaphysics of Tagore in an attempt to be more worthy of a spouse who could quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda as well as Quran-Sharif, from the military accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the Revelations of St John the Divine. In those days she had admired his pluralistic openness of mind, and struggled, in her kitchen, towards a parallel eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India as well as the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her espousal of the cause of gastronomic pluralism grew into a grand passion, and while secularist Sufyan swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent – ‘and let us not pretend that Western culture is not present; after these centuries, how could it not also be part of our heritage?’ – his wife cooked, and ate in increasing quantities, its food. As she devoured the highly spiced dishes of Hyderabad and the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of Lucknow her body began to alter, because all that food had to find a home somewhere, and she began to resemble the wide rolling land mass itself, the subcontinent without frontiers, because food passes across any boundary you care to mention.

Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, however, gained no weight: not a tola, not an ounce.

His refusal to fatten was the beginning of the trouble. When she reproached him – ‘You don't like my cooking? For whom I'm doing it all and blowing up like a balloon?’ – he answered, mildly, looking up at her (she was the taller of the two) over the top of half-rimmed specs: ‘Restraint is also part of our traditions, Begum. Eating two mouthfuls less than one's hunger: self-denial, the ascetic path.’ What a man: all the answers, but you couldn't get him to give you a decent fight.

Restraint was not for Hind. Maybe, if Sufyan had ever complained; if just once he'd said, I thought I was marrying one woman but these days you're big enough for two; if he'd ever given her the incentive! – then maybe she'd have desisted, why not, of course she would; so it was his fault, for having no aggression, what kind of a male was it who didn't know how to insult his fat lady wife? – In truth, it was entirely possible that Hind would have failed to control her eating binges even if Sufyan had come up with the required imprecations and entreaties; but, since he did not, she munched on, content to dump the whole blame for her figure on him.

As a matter of fact, once she had started blaming him for things, she found that there were a number of other matters she could hold against him; and found, too, her tongue, so that the schoolteacher's humble apartment resounded regularly to the kinds of tickings-off he was too much of a mouse to hand out to his pupils. Above all, he was berated for his excessively high principles, thanks to which, Hind told him, she knew he would never permit her to become a rich man's wife; – for what could one say about a man who, finding that his bank had inadvertently credited his salary to his account twice in the same month, promptly drew the institution's notice to the error and handed back the cash?; – what hope was there for a teacher who, when approached by the wealthiest of the schoolchildren's parents, flatly refused to contemplate accepting the usual remunerations in return for services rendered when marking the little fellows’ examination papers?

‘But all of that I could forgive,’ she would mutter darkly at him, leaving unspoken the rest of the sentence, which was if it hadn't been for your two real offences: your sexual, and political, crimes.

Ever since their marriage, the two of them had performed the sexual act infrequently, in total darkness, pin-drop silence and almost complete immobility. It would not have occurred to Hind to wiggle or wobble, and since Sufyan appeared to get through it all with an absolute minimum of motion, she took it – had always taken it – that the two of them were of the same mind on this matter, viz., that it was a dirty business, not to be discussed before or after, and not to be drawn attention to during, either. That the children took their time in coming she took as God's punishment for He only knew what misdeeds of her earlier life; that they both turned out to be girls she refused to blame on Allah, preferring, instead, to blame the weakling seed implanted in her by her unmanly spouse, an attitude she did not refrain from expressing, with great emphasis, and to the horror of the midwife, at the very moment of little Anahita's birth. ‘Another girl,’ she gasped in disgust. ‘Well, considering who made the baby, I should think myself lucky it's not a cockroach, or a mouse.’ After this second daughter she told Sufyan that enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into the hall. He accepted without any argument her refusal to have more children; but then she discovered that the lecher thought he could still, from time to time, enter her darkened room and enact that strange rite of silence and near-motionlessness to which she had only submitted in the name of reproduction. ‘What do you think,’ she shouted at him the first time he tried it, ‘I do this thing for fun?’

Once he had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no more hanky-panky, no sir, she was a decent woman, not a lust-crazed libertine, he began to stay out late at night. It was during this period – she had thought, mistakenly, that he was visiting prostitutes – that he became involved with politics, and not just any old politics, either, oh no, Mister Brainbox had to go and join the devils themselves, the Communist Party, no less, so much for those principles of his; demons, that's what they were, worse by far than whores. It was because of this dabbling in the occult that she had to pack up her bags at such short notice and leave for England with two small babies in tow; because of this ideological witchcraft that she had had to endure all the privations and humiliations of the process of immigration; and on account of this diabolism of his that she was stuck forever in this England and would never see her village again. ‘England,’ she once said to him, ‘is your revenge upon me for preventing you from performing your obscene acts upon my body.’ He had not given an answer; and silence denotes assent.

And what was it that made them a living in this Vilayet of her exile, this Yuke of her sex-obsessed husband's vindic-tiveness? What? His book learning? His Gitanjali, Eclogues, or that play Othello that he explained was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn't spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway?

It was: her cooking. ‘Shaandaar,’ it was praised. ‘Outstanding, brilliant, delicious.’ People came from all over London to eat her samosas, her Bombay chaat, her gulab jamans straight from Paradise. What was there for Sufyan to do? Take the money, serve the tea, run from here to there, behave like a servant for all his education. O, yes, of course the customers liked his personality, he always had an appealing character, but when you're running an eatery it isn't the conversation they pay for on the bill. Jalebis, barfi, Special of the Day. How life had turned out! She was the mistress now. Victory!

And yet it was also a fact that she, cook and breadwinner, chiefest architect of the success of the Shaandaar Café, which had finally enabled them to buy the whole four-storey building and start renting out its rooms, – she was the one around whom there hung, like bad breath, the miasma of defeat. While Sufyan twinkled on, she looked extinguished, like a lightbulb with a broken filament, like a fizzled star, like a flame. – Why? – Why, when Sufyan, who had been deprived of vocation, pupils and respect, bounded about like a young lamb, and even began to put on weight, fattening up in Proper London as he had never done back home; why, when power had been removed from his hands and delivered into hers, did she act – as her husband put it – the ‘sad sack’, the ‘glum chum’ and the ‘moochy pooch’? Simple: not in spite of, but on account of. Everything she valued had been upset by the change; had in this process of translation, been lost.

Her language: obliged, now, to emit these alien sounds that made her tongue feel tired, was she not entitled to moan? Her familiar place: what matter that they had lived, in Dhaka, in a teacher's humble flat, and now, owing to entrepreneurial good sense, savings and skill with spices, occupied this four-storey terraced house? Where now was the city she knew? Where the village of her youth and the green waterways of home? The customs around which she had built her life were lost, too, or at least were hard to find. Nobody in this Vilayet had time for the slow courtesies of life back home, or for the many observances of faith. Furthermore: was she not forced to put up with a husband of no account, whereas before she could bask in his dignified position? Where was the pride in being made to work for her living, for his living, whereas before she could sit at home in much-befitting pomp? – And she knew, how could she not, the sadness beneath his bonhomie, and that, too, was a defeat; never before had she felt so inadequate as a wife, for what kind of a Mrs. is it that cannot cheer up her man, but must observe the counterfeit of happiness and make do, as if it were the genuine McCoy? – Plus also: they had come into a demon city in which anything could happen, your windows shattered in the middle of the night without any cause, you were knocked over in the street by invisible hands, in the shops you heard such abuse you felt like your ears would drop off but when you turned in the direction of the words you saw only empty air and smiling faces, and every day you heard about this boy, that girl, beaten up by ghosts. – Yes, a land of phantom imps, how to explain; best thing was to stay home, not go out for so much as to post a letter, stay in, lock the door, say your prayers, and the goblins would (maybe) stay away. – Reasons for defeat? Baba, who could count them? Not only was she a shopkeeper's wife and a kitchen slave, but even her own people could not be relied on; – there were men she thought of as respectable types, sharif, giving telephone divorces to wives back home and running off with some haramzadi female, and girls killed for dowry (some things could be brought through the foreign customs without duty); – and worst of all, the poison of this devil-island had infected her baby girls, who were growing up refusing to speak their mother-tongue, even though they understood every word, they did it just to hurt; and why else had Mishal cut off all her hair and put rainbows into it; and every day it was fight, quarrel, disobey, – and worst of all, there was not one new thing about her complaints, this is how it was for women like her, so now she was no longer just one, just herself, just Hind wife of teacher Sufyan; she had sunk into the anonymity, the characterless plurality, of being merely one-of-the-women-like-her. This was history's lesson: nothing for women-like-her to do but suffer, remember, and die.

What she did: to deny her husband's weakness, she treated him, for the most part, like a lord, like a monarch, for in her lost world her glory had lain in his; to deny the ghosts outside the cafe, she stayed indoors, sending others out for kitchen provisions and household necessities, and also for the endless supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on VCR through which (along with her ever-increasing hoard of Indian movie magazines) she could stay in touch with events in the ‘real world’, such as the bizarre disappearance of the incomparable Gibreel Farishta and the subsequent tragic announcement of his death in an airline accident; and to give her feelings of defeated, exhausted despair some outlet, she shouted at her daughters. The elder of whom, to get her own back, hacked off her hair and permitted her nipples to poke through shirts worn provocatively tight.

The arrival of a fully developed devil, a horned goat-man, was, in the light of the foregoing, something very like the last, or at any rate the penultimate, straw.

Shaandaar residents gathered in the night-kitchen for an impromptu crisis summit. While Hind hurled imprecations into chicken soup, Sufyan placed Chamcha at a table, drawing up, for the poor fellow's use, an aluminium chair with a blue plastic seat, and initiated the night's proceedings. The theories of Lamarck, I am pleased to report, were quoted by the exiled schoolteacher, who spoke in his best didactic voice. When Jumpy had recounted the unlikely story of Chamcha's fall from the sky – the protagonist himself being too immersed in chicken soup and misery to speak for himself – Sufyan, sucking teeth, made reference to the last edition of The Origin of Species. ‘In which even great Charles accepted the notion of mutation in extremis, to ensure survival of species; so what if his followers – always more Darwinian than man himself! – repudiated, posthumously, such Lamarckian heresy, insisting on natural selection and nothing but, – however, I am bound to admit, such theory is not extended to survival of individual specimen but only to species as a whole; – in addition, regarding nature of mutation, problem is to comprehend actual utility of the change.’

‘Da-ad,’ Anahita Sufyan, eyes lifting to heaven, cheek lying ho-hum against palm, interrupted these cogitations. ‘Give over. Point is, how'd he turn into such a, such a,’ – admiringly – ‘freak?’

Upon which, the devil himself, looking up from chicken soup, cried out, ‘No, I'm not. I'm not a freak, O no, certainly I am not.’ His voice, seeming to rise from an unfathomable abyss of grief, touched and alarmed the younger girl, who rushed over to where he sat, and, impetuously caressing a shoulder of the unhappy beast, said, in an attempt to make amends: ‘Of course you aren't, I'm sorry, of course I don't think you're a freak; it's just that you look like one.’

Saladin Chamcha burst into tears.

Mrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, had been horrified by the sight of her younger daughter actually laying hands on the creature, and turning to the gallery of nightgowned residents she waved a soup-ladle at them and pleaded for support. ‘How to tolerate? – Honour, safety of young girls cannot be assured. – That in my own house, such a thing... !’

Mishal Sufyan lost patience. ‘Jesus, Mum.’

‘Jesus?’

‘Dju think it's temporary?’ Mishal, turning her back on scandalized Hind, inquired of Sufyan and Jumpy. ‘Some sort of possession thing – could we maybe get it you know exorcized? Omens, shinings, ghoulies, nightmares on Elm Street, stood excitedly in her eyes, and her father, as much the VCR aficionado as any teenager, appeared to consider the possibility seriously. ‘In Der Steppenwolf,’ he began, but Jumpy wasn't having any more of that. ‘The central requirement,’ he announced, ‘is to take an ideological view of the situation.’

That silenced everyone.

‘Objectively,’ he said, with a small self-deprecating smile, ‘what has happened here? A: Wrongful arrest, intimidation, violence. Two: Illegal detention, unknown medical experimentation in hospital,’ – murmurs of assent here, – as memories of intra-vaginal inspections, Depo-Provera scandals, unauthorized post-partum sterilizations, and, further back, the knowledge of Third World drug-dumping arose in every person present to give substance to the speaker's insinuations, – because what you believe depends on what you've seen, – not only what is visible, but what you are prepared to look in the face, – and anyhow, something had to explain horns and hoofs; in those policed medical wards, anything could happen – ‘And thirdly,’ Jumpy continued, ‘psychological breakdown, loss of sense of self, inability to cope. We've seen it all before.’

Nobody argued, not even Hind; there were some truths from which it was impossible to dissent. ‘Ideologically,’ Jumpy said, ‘I refuse to accept the position of victim. Certainly, he has been victimized, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused; our passiveness colludes with, permits such crimes.’ Whereupon, having scolded the gathering into shamefaced submission, he requested Sufyan to make available the small attic room that was presently unoccupied, and Sufyan, in his turn, was rendered entirely unable, by feelings of solidarity and guilt, to ask for a single p in rent. Hind did, it is true, mumble: ‘Now I know the world is mad, when a devil becomes my house guest,’ but she did so under her breath, and nobody except her elder daughter Mishal heard what she said.

Sufyan, taking his cue from his younger daughter, went up to where Chamcha, huddled in his blanket, was drinking enormous quantities of Hind's unrivalled chicken yakhni, squatted down, and placed an arm around the still-shivering unfortunate. ‘Best place for you is here,’ he said, speaking as if to a simpleton or small child. ‘Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own people, your own kind?’

Only when Saladin Chamcha was alone in the attic room at the very end of his strength did he answer Sufyan's rhetorical question. ‘I'm not your kind,’ he said distinctly into the night. ‘You're not my people. I've spent half my life trying to get away from you.’

His heart began to misbehave, to kick and stumble as if it, too, wanted to metamorphose into some new, diabolic form, to substitute the complex unpredictability of tabla improvisations for its old metronomic beat. Lying sleepless in a narrow bed, snagging his horns in bedsheets and pillowcases as he tossed and turned, he suffered the renewal of coronary eccentricity with a kind of fatalistic acceptance: if everything else, then why not this, too? Badoomboom, went the heart, and his torso jerked. Watch it or I'll really let you have it. Doomboombadoom. Yes: this was Hell, all right. The city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim.

Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren't they the ones with the pitchforks?

Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds.

The sun rose, unwrapping the misty city like a gift. Saladin Chamcha slept.

Which afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other night-street down which, in the company of the physiotherapist Hyacinth Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth's face and body had seemed to change. He saw the gap opening and widening between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited itself into medusas, and the strange triangularity of her profile, which sloped outwards from her hairline to the tip of her nose, swung about and headed in an unbroken line inwards to her neck. He saw in the yellow light that her skin was growing darker by the minute, and her teeth more prominent, and her body as long as a child's stick-figure drawing. At the same time she was casting him glances of an ever more explicit lechery, and grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a skeleton had seized him and was trying to drag him down into a grave; he could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it, on her breath, on her lips... revulsion seized him. How could he ever have thought her attractive, even desired her, even gone so far as to fantasize, while she straddled him and pummelled fluid from his lungs, that they were lovers in the violent throes of sexual congress?... The city thickened around them like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair. ‘No light can get in here,’ she whispered to him. ‘It's black; all black.’ She made as if to lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but he shouted, ‘Quick, the church,’ and plunged into an unprepossessing box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however, the pews were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless blue two-piece suits, false pearls, and little pill-box hats decked out with bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly, Fix me, Jesus; until they saw Chamcha, quit their spiritualling, and commenced to bawl in a most unspiritual manner, Satan, the Goat, the Goat, and suchlike stuff. Now it became clear that the Hyacinth with whom he'd entered was looking at him with new eyes, just the way he'd looked at her in the street; that she, too, had started seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust on that hideously pointy and clouded face he just let rip. ‘Hubshees,’ he cursed them in, for some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers and savages, he called them. ‘I feel sorry for you,’ he pronounced. ‘Every morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see, staring back, the darkness: the stain, the proof that you're the lowest of the low.’ They rounded upon him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now lost among them, indistinguishable, no longer an individual but a woman-like-them, and he was being beaten frightfully, emitting a piteous bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized that his assailants’ fear was greater than their wrath, and he rose up to his full height, spread his arms, and screamed devil-sounds at them, sending them scurrying for cover, cowering behind pews, as he strode bloody but unbowed from the battlefield.

Dreams put things in their own way; but Chamcha, coming briefly awake as his heartbeat skipped into a new burst of syncopations, was bitterly aware that the nightmare had not been so very far from the truth; the spirit, at least, was right. – That was the last of Hyacinth, he thought, and faded away again. – To find himself shivering in the hall of his own home while, on a higher plane, Jumpy Joshi argued fiercely with Pamela. With my wife.

And when dream-Pamela, echoing the real one word for word, had rejected her husband a hundred and one times, he doesn't exist, it, such things are not so, it was Jamshed the virtuous who, setting aside love and desire, helped. Leaving behind a weeping Pamela – Don't you dare bring that back here, she shouted from the top floor – from Saladin's den – Jumpy, wrapping Chamcha in sheepskin and blanket, led enfeebled through the shadows to the Shaandaar Café, promising with empty kindness: ‘It'll be all right. You'll see. It'll all be fine.’

When Saladin Chamcha awoke, the memory of these words filled him with a bitter anger. Where's Farishta, he found himself thinking. That bastard: I bet he's doing okay. – It was a thought to which he would return, with extraordinary results; for the moment, however, he had other fish to fry.

I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it had happened, it could not be denied. I am no longer myself, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.

Why? Why me?

What evil had he done – what vile thing could he, would he do?

For what was he – he couldn't avoid the notion – being punished? And, come to that, by whom? (I held my tongue.)

Had he not pursued his own idea of the good, sought to become that which he most admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, avoided trouble, striven to become new? Assiduity, fastidiousness, moderation, restraint, self-reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral code? Was it his fault that Pamela and he were childless? Were genetics his responsibility? Could it be, in this inverted age, that he was being victimized by – the fates, he agreed with himself to call the persecuting agency – precisely because of his pursuit of ‘the good’? – That nowadays such a pursuit was considered wrong-headed, even evil? – Then how cruel these fates were, to instigate his rejection by the very world he had so determinedly courted; how desolating, to be cast from the gates of the city one believed oneself to have taken long ago! – What mean small-mindedness was this, to cast him back into the bosom of his people, from whom he'd felt so distant for so long! – Here thoughts of Zeeny Vakil welled up, and guiltily, nervously, he forced them down again.

His heart kicked him violently, and he sat up, doubled over, gasped for breath. Calm down, or it's curtains. No place for such stressful cogitations: not any more. He took deep breaths; lay back; emptied his mind. The traitor in his chest resumed normal service.

No more of that, Saladin Chamcha told himself firmly. No more of thinking myself evil. Appearances deceive; the cover is not the best guide to the book. Devil, Goat, Shaitan? Not I.

Not I: another.

Who?

Mishal and Anahita arrived with breakfast on a tray and excitement all over their faces. Chamcha devoured cornflakes and Nescafe while the girls, after a few moments of shyness, gabbled at him, simultaneously, non-stop. ‘Well, you've set the place buzzing and no mistake.’ – ‘You haven't gone and changed back in the night or anything?’ – ‘Listen, it's not a trick, is it? I mean, it's not make-up or something theatrical? – I mean, Jumpy says you're an actor, and I only thought, – I mean,’ and here young Anahita dried up, because Chamcha, spewing cornflakes, howled angrily: ‘Make-up? Theatrical? Trick?’

‘No offence,’ Mishal said anxiously on her sister's behalf. ‘It's just we've been thinking, know what I mean, and well it'd just be awful if you weren't, but you are, ‘course you are, so that's all right,’ she finished hastily as Chamcha glared at her again. – ‘Thing is,’ Anahita resumed, and then, faltering, ‘Mean to say, well, we just think it's great.’ – ‘You, she means,’ Mishal corrected. ‘We think you're, you know.’ – ‘Brilliant,’ Anahita said and dazzled the bewildered Chamcha with a smile. ‘Magic. You know. Extreme.’

‘We didn't sleep all night,’ Mishal said. ‘We've got ideas.’

‘What we reckoned,’ Anahita trembled with the thrill of it, ‘as you've turned into, – what you are, – then maybe, well, probably, actually, even if you haven't tried it out, it could be, you could...’ And the older girl finished the thought: ‘You could've developed – you know – powers.’

‘We thought, anyway,’ Anahita added, weakly, seeing the clouds gathering on Chamcha's brow. And, backing towards the door, added: ‘But we're probably wrong. – Yeh. We're wrong all right. Enjoy your meal.’ – Mishal, before she fled, took a small bottle full of green fluid out of a pocket of her red-and-black-check donkey jacket, put it on the floor by the door, and delivered the following parting shot. ‘O, excuse me, but Mum says, can you use this, it's mouthwash, for your breath.’

That Mishal and Anahita should adore the disfiguration which he loathed with all his heart convinced him that ‘his people’ were as crazily wrong-headed as he'd long suspected. That the two of them should respond to his bitterness – when, on his second attic morning, they brought him a masala dosa instead of packet cereal complete with toy silver spacemen, and he cried out, ungratefully: ‘Now I'm supposed to eat this filthy foreign food?’ – with expressions of sympathy, made matters even worse. ‘Sawful muck,’ Mishal agreed with him. ‘No bangers in here, worse luck.’ Conscious of having insulted their hospitality, he tried to explain that he thought of himself, nowadays, as, well, British... ‘What about us?’ Anahita wanted to know. ‘What do you think we are?’ – And Mishal confided: ‘Bangladesh in't nothing to me. Just some place Dad and Mum keep banging on about.’ – And Anahita, conclusively: ‘Bungleditch.’ – With a satisfied nod. – ‘What I call it, anyhow.’

But they weren't British, he wanted to tell them: not really, not in any way he could recognize. And yet his old certainties were slipping away by the moment, along with his old life... ‘Where's the telephone?’ he demanded. ‘I've got to make some calls.’

It was in the hall; Anahita, raiding her savings, lent him the coins. His head wrapped in a borrowed turban, his body concealed in borrowed trousers (Jumpy's) and Mishal's shoes, Chamcha dialled the past.

‘Chamcha,’ said the voice of Mimi Mamoulian. ‘You're dead.’

This happened while he was away: Mimi blacked out and lost her teeth. ‘A whiteout is what it was,’ she told him, speaking more harshly than usual because of difficulty with her jaw. ‘A reason why? Don't ask. Who can ask for reason in these times? What's your number?’ she added as the pips went. ‘I'll call you right back.’ But it was a full five minutes before she did. ‘I took a leak. You have a reason why you're alive? Why the waters parted for you and the other guy but closed over the rest? Don't tell me you were worthier. People don't buy that nowadays, not even you, Chamcha. I was walking down Oxford Street looking for crocodile shoes when it happened: out cold in mid-stride and I fell forward like a tree, landed on the point of my chin and all the teeth fell out on the sidewalk in front of the man doing find-the-lady. People can be thoughtful, Chamcha. When I came to I found my teeth in a little pile next to my face. I opened my eyes and saw the little bastards staring at me, wasn't that nice? First thing I thought, thank God, I've got the money. I had them stitched back in, privately of course, great job, better than before. So I've been taking a break for a while. The voiceover business is in bad shape, let me tell you, what with you dying and my teeth, we just have no sense of responsibility. Standards have been lowered, Chamcha. Turn on the TV, listen to radio, you should hear how corny the pizza commercials, the beer ads with the Cherman accents from Central Casting, the Martians eating potato powder and sounding like they came from the Moon. They fired us from The Aliens Show. Get well soon. Incidentally, you might say the same for me.’

So he had lost work as well as wife, home, a grip on life. ‘It's not just the dentals that go wrong,’ Mimi powered on. ‘The fucking plosives scare me stupid. I keep thinking I'll spray the old bones on the street again. Age, Chamcha: it's all humiliations. You get born, you get beaten up and bruised all over and finally you break and they shovel you into an urn. Anyway, if I never work again I'll die comfortable. Did you know I'm with Billy Battuta now? That's right, how could you, you've been swimming. Yeah, I gave up waiting for you so I cradlesnatched one of your ethnic co-persons. You can take it as a compliment. Now I gots to run. Nice talking to the dead, Chamcha. Next time dive from the low board. Toodle oo.’

I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected phone. I have struggled, in my fashion, to find my way towards an appreciation of the high things, towards a small measure of fineness. On good days I felt it was within my grasp, somewhere within me, somewhere within. But it eluded me. I have become embroiled, in things, in the world and its messes, and I cannot resist. The grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall. The sea gave me up; the land drags me down.

He was sliding down a grey slope, the black water lapping at his heart. Why did rebirth, the second chance granted to Gibreel Farishta and himself, feel so much, in his case, like a perpetual ending? He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of noway-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.

Billy Battuta: that worthless piece of shit. Playboy Pakistani, turned an unremarkable holiday business – Battuta's Travels – into a fleet of supertankers. A con-man, basically, famous for his romances with leading ladies of the Hindi screen and, according to gossip, for his predilection for white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom he ‘treated badly’, as the euphemism had it, and ‘rewarded handsomely’. What did Mimi want with bad Billy, his sexual instruments and his Maserati Biturbo? For boys like Battuta, white women – never mind fat, Jewish, non-deferential white women – were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in whites – love of brown sugar – one must also hate when it turns up, inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.

Mimi telephoned the next evening from New York. Anahita called him to the phone in her best damnyankee tones, and he struggled into his disguise. When he got there she had rung off, but she rang back. ‘Nobody pays transatlantic prices for hanging on.’ ‘Mimi,’ he said, with desperation patent in his voice, ‘you didn't say you were leaving.’ ‘You didn't even tell me your damn address,’ she responded. ‘So we both have secrets.’ He wanted to say, Mimi, come home, you're going to get kicked. ‘I introduced him to the family,’ she said, too jokily. ‘You can imagine. Yassir Arafat meets the Begins. Never mind. We'll all live.’ He wanted to say, Mimi, you're all I've got. He managed, however, only to piss her off. ‘I wanted to warn you about Billy,’ was what he said.

She went icy. ‘Chamcha, listen up. I'll discuss this with you one time because behind all your bullshit you do maybe care for me a little. So comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read Finnegans Wake and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a “flattened” world. When I become the voice of a bottle of bubble bath, I am entering Flatland knowingly, understanding what I'm doing and why. Viz., I am earning cash. And as an intelligent woman, able to do fifteen minutes on Stoicism and more on Japanese cinema, I say to you, Chamcha, that I am fully aware of Billy boy's rep. Don't teach me about exploitation. We had exploitation when you-plural were running round in skins. Try being Jewish, female and ugly sometime. You'll beg to be black. Excuse my French: brown.’

‘You concede, then, that he's exploiting you,’ Chamcha interposed, but the torrent swept him away. ‘What's the fuckin’ diff?’ she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. ‘Billy's a funny boy, a natural scam artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is? I'll tell you some notions I do not require: patriotism, God and love. Definitely not wanted on the voyage. I like Billy because he knows the score.’

‘Mimi,’ he said, ‘something's happened to me,’ but she was still protesting too much and missed it. He put the receiver down without giving her his address.

She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken precedents had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts, and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart, it was time to wave goodbye. It was still all Billy with Mimi: his plans to make Hindi movies in England and America, importing the top stars, Vinod Khanna, Sridevi, to cavort in front of Bradford Town Hall and the Golden Gate Bridge – ‘it's some sort of tax dodge, obviously,’ Mimi carolled gaily. In fact, things were heating up for Billy; Chamcha had seen his name in the papers, coupled with the terms fraud squad and tax evasion, but once a scam man, always a ditto, Mimi said. ‘So he says to me, do you want a mink? I say, Billy, don't buy me things, but he says, who's talking about buying? Have a mink. It's business.’ They had been in New York again, and Billy had hired a stretched Mercedes limousine ‘and a stretched chauffeur also’. Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy's lead. At length he said, You like that one? It's nice. Billy, she whispered, it's forty thousand, but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. ‘Well, by now they know he's an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat, and he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the coat, and says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here's the receipt, will you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend ahead.’ – Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang the first, where all the alarm bells went off in the manager's brain, and five minutes later the police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud cheque, and he and Mimi spent the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the banks opened and it turned out that Billy's account was in credit to the tune of forty-two thousand, one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intention to sue them for two million dollars damages, defamation of character, open and shut case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on the nail. ‘Don't you love him?’ Mimi asked Chamcha. ‘The boy's a genius. I mean, this was class.’

I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an amoral, survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita Sufyan, who still unaccountably treated him like a kind of soul-mate, in spite of all his attempts to dissuade them, were beings who plainly admired such creatures as moonlighters, shoplifters, filchers: scam artists in general. He corrected himself: not admired, that wasn't it. Neither girl would ever steal a pin. But they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of how-it-was. As an experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the mink coat. Their eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with delight: wickedness unpunished made them laugh. Thus, Chamcha realized, people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws, Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly, Phoolan Devi, and of course that other Billy: William Bonney, also a Kid.

‘Scrapheap Youths’ Criminal Idols,’ Mishal read his mind and then, laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while arranging her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body into similarly exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having stirred him, she prettily added: ‘Kissy kissy?’

Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal's pose, with less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some annoyance, she spoke sulkily. ‘Trouble is, we've got good prospects, us. Family business, no brothers, bob's your uncle. This place makes a packet, dunnit? Well then.’ The Shaandaar rooming-house was categorized as a Bed and Breakfast establishment, of the type that borough councils were using more and more owing to the crisis in public housing, lodging five-person families in single rooms, turning blind eyes to health and safety regulations, and claiming ‘temporary accommodation’ allowances from the central government. ‘Ten quid per night per person,’ Anahita informed Chamcha in his attic. ‘Three hundred and fifty nicker per room per week, it comes to, as often as not. Six occupied rooms: you work it out. Right now, we're losing three hundred pounds a month on this attic, so I hope you feel really bad.’ For that kind of money, it struck Chamcha, you could rent pretty reasonable family-sized apartments in the private sector. But that wouldn't be classified as temporary accommodation; no central funding for such solutions. Which would also be opposed by local politicians committed to fighting the ‘cuts’. La lutte continue; meanwhile, Hind and her daughters raked in the cash, unworldly Sufyan went to Mecca and came home to dispense homely wisdom, kindliness and smiles. And behind six doors that opened a crack every time Chamcha went to make a phone call or use the toilet, maybe thirty temporary human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent.

The real world.

‘You needn't look so fish-faced and holy, anyway,’ Mishal Sufyan pointed out. ‘Look where all your law abiding got you.’

‘Your universe is shrinking.’ A busy man, Hal Valance, creator of The Aliens Show and sole owner of the property, took exactly seventeen seconds to congratulate Chamcha on being alive before beginning to explain why this fact did not affect the show's decision to dispense with his services. Valance had started out in advertising and his vocabulary had never recovered from the blow. Chamcha could keep up, however. All those years in the voiceover business taught you a little bad language. In marketing parlance, a universe was the total potential market for a given product or service: the chocolate universe, the slimming universe. The dental universe was everybody with teeth; the others were the denture cosmos. ‘I'm talking,’ Valance breathed down the phone in his best Deep Throat voice, ‘about the ethnic universe.’

My people again: Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his ill-fitting drag, hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of impermanent women and children gleamed through barely opened doors; and wondered what his people had done to him now. ‘No capeesh,’ he said, remembering Valance's fondness for Italian—American argot – this was, after all, the author of the fast food slogan Getta pizza da action. On this occasion, however, Valance wasn't playing. ‘Audience surveys show,’ he breathed, ‘that ethnics don't watch ethnic shows. They don't want ‘em, Chamcha. They want fucking Dynasty, like everyone else. Your profile's wrong, if you follow: with you in the show it's just too damn racial. The Aliens Show is too big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension. The merchandising possibilities alone, but I don't have to tell you this.’

Chamcha saw himself reflected in the small cracked mirror above the phone box. He looked like a marooned genie in search of a magic lamp. ‘It's a point of view,’ he answered Valance, knowing argument to be useless. With Hal, all explanations were post facto rationalizations. He was strictly a seat-of-the-pants man, who took for his motto the advice given by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward: Follow the money. He had the phrase set in large sans-serif type and pinned up in his office over a still from All the President's Men: Hal Holbrook (another Hal!) in the car park, standing in the shadows. Follow the money: it explained, as he was fond of saying, his five wives, all independently wealthy, from each of whom he had received a handsome divorce settlement. He was presently married to a wasted child maybe one-third his age, with waist-length auburn hair and a spectral look that would have made her a great beauty a quarter of a century earlier. ‘This one doesn't have a bean; she's taking me for all I've got and when she's taken it she'll bugger off,’ Valance had told Chamcha once, in happier days. ‘What the hell. I'm human, too. This time it's love.’ More cradlesnatching. No escape from it in these times. Chamcha on the telephone found he couldn't remember the infant's name. ‘You know my motto,’ Valance was saying. ‘Yes,’ Chamcha said neutrally. ‘It's the right line for the product.’ The product, you bastard, being you.

By the time he met Hal Valance (how many years ago? Five, maybe six), over lunch at the White Tower, the man was already a monster: pure, self-created image, a set of attributes plastered thickly over a body that was, in Hal's own words, ‘in training to be Orson Welles’. He smoked absurd, caricature cigars, refusing all Cuban brands, however, on account of his uncompromisingly capitalistic stance. He owned a Union Jack waistcoat and insisted on flying the flag over his agency and also above the door of his Highgate home; was prone to dress up as Maurice Chevalier and sing, at major presentations, to his amazed clients, with the help of straw boater and silver-headed cane; claimed to own the first Loire chateau to be fitted with telex and fax machines; and made much of his ‘intimate’ association with the Prime Minister he referred to affectionately as ‘Mrs. Torture’. The personification of philistine triumphalism, midatlantic-accented Hal was one of the glories of the age, the creative half of the city's hottest agency, the Valance & Lang Partnership. Like Billy Battuta he liked big cars driven by big chauffeurs. It was said that once, while being driven at high speed down a Cornish lane in order to ‘heat up’ a particularly glacial seven-foot Finnish model, there had been an accident: no injuries, but when the other driver emerged furiously from his wrecked vehicle he turned out to be even larger than Hal's minder. As this colossus bore down on him, Hal lowered his push-button window and breathed, with a sweet smile: ‘I strongly advise you to turn around and walk swiftly away; because, sir, if you do not do so within the next fifteen seconds, I am going to have you killed.’ Other advertising geniuses were famous for their work: Mary Wells for her pink Braniff planes, David Ogilvy for his eyepatch, Jerry della Femina for ‘From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor’. Valance, whose agency went in for cheap and cheerful vulgarity, all bums and honky-tonk, was renowned in the business for this (probably apocryphal) ‘I'm going to have you killed’, a turn of phrase which proved, to those in the know, that the guy really was a genius. Chamcha had long suspected he'd made up the story, with its perfect ad-land components – Scandinavian icequeen, two thugs, expensive cars, Valance in the Blofeld role and 007 nowhere on the scene – and put it about himself, knowing it to be good for business.

The lunch was by way of thanking Chamcha for his part in a recent, smash-hit campaign for Slimbix diet foods. Saladin had been the voice of a cutesy cartoon blob: Hi. I'm Cal, and I'm one sad calorie. Four courses and plenty of champagne as a reward for persuading people to starve. How's a poor calorie to earn a salary? Thanks to Slimbix, I'm out of work. Chamcha hadn't known what to expect from Valance. What he got was, at least, unvarnished. ‘You've done well,’ Hal congratulated him, ‘for a person of the tinted persuasion.’ And proceeded, without taking his eyes off Chamcha's face: ‘Let me tell you some facts. Within the last three months, we re-shot a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because T'Chairman thought the singer sounded black, even though he was white as a sodding sheet, and even though, the year before, we'd used a black boy who, luckily for him, didn't suffer from an excess of soul. We were told by a major airline that we couldn't use any blacks in their ads, even though they were actually employees of the airline. A black actor came to audition for me and he was wearing a Racial Equality button badge, a black hand shaking a white one. I said this: don't think you're getting special treatment from me, chum. You follow me? You follow what I'm telling you?’ It's a goddamn audition, Saladin realized. ‘I've never felt I belonged to a race,’ he replied. Which was perhaps why, when Hal Valance set up his production company, Chamcha was on his ‘A list’; and why, eventually, Maxim Alien came his way.

When The Aliens Show started coming in for stick from black radicals, they gave Chamcha a nickname. On account of his private-school education and closeness to the hated Valance, he was known as ‘Brown Uncle Tom’.

Apparently the political pressure on the show had increased in Chamcha's absence, orchestrated by a certain Dr Uhuru Simba. ‘Doctor of what, beats me,’ Valance deepthroated down the phone. ‘Our ah researchers haven't come up with anything yet.’ Mass pickets, an embarrassing appearance on Right to Reply. ‘The guy's built like a fucking tank.’ Chamcha envisaged the pair of them, Valance and Simba, as one another's antitheses. It seemed that the protests had succeeded: Valance was ‘de-politicizing’ the show, by firing Chamcha and putting a huge blond Teuton with pectorals and a quiff inside the prosthetic make-up and computer-generated imagery. A latex-and-Quantel Schwarzenegger, a synthetic, hip-talking version of Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. The Jews were out, too: instead of Mimi, the new show would have a voluptuous shiksa doll. ‘I sent word to Dr Simba: stick that up your fucking pee aitch dee. No reply has been received. He'll have to work harder than that if he's going to take over this little country. I,’ Hal Valance announced, ‘love this fucking country. That's why I'm going to sell it to the whole goddamn world, Japan, America, fucking Argentina. I'm going to sell the arse off it. That's what I've been selling all my fucking life: the fucking nation. The flag.’ He didn't hear what he was saying. When he got going on this stuff, he went puce and often wept. He had done just that at the White Tower, that first time, while stuffing himself full of Greek food. The date came back to Chamcha now: just after the Falklands war. People had a tendency to swear loyalty oaths in those days, to hum ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ on the buses. So when Valance, over a large balloon of Armagnac, started up – ‘I'll tell you why I love this country’ – Chamcha, pro-Falklands himself, thought he knew what was coming next. But Valance began to describe the research programme of a British aerospace company, a client of his, which had just revolutionized the construction of missile guidance systems by studying the flight pattern of the common housefly. ‘Inflight course corrections,’ he whispered theatrically. ‘Traditionally done in the line of flight: adjust the angle up a bit, down a touch, left or right a nadge. Scientists studying high-speed film of the humble fly, however, have discovered that the little buggers always, but always, make corrections in right angles.’ He demonstrated with his hand stretched out, palm flat, fingers together. ‘Bzzt! Bzzt! The bastards actually fly vertically up, down or sideways. Much more accurate. Much more fuel efficient. Try to do it with an engine that depends on nose-to-tail airflow, and what happens? The sodding thing can't breathe, stalls, falls out of the sky, lands on your fucking allies. Bad karma. You follow. You follow what I'm saying. So these guys, they invent an engine with three-way airflow: nose to tail, plus top to bottom, plus side to side. And bingo: a missile that flies like a goddamn fly, and can hit a fifty p coin travelling at a ground speed of one hundred miles an hour at a distance of three miles. What I love about this country is that: its genius. Greatest inventors in the world. It's beautiful: am I right or am I right?’ He had been deadly serious. Chamcha answered: ‘You're right.’ ‘You're damn right I'm right,’ he confirmed.

They met for the last time just before Chamcha took off for Bombay: Sunday lunch at the flag-waving Highgate mansion. Rosewood panelling, a terrace with stone urns, a view down a wooded hill. Valance complaining about a new development that would louse up the scenery. Lunch was predictably jingoistic: rosbif, boudin Yorkshire, choux de bruxelles. Baby, the nymphet wife, didn't join them, but ate hot pastrami on rye while shooting pool in a nearby room. Servants, a thunderous Burgundy, more Armagnac, cigars. The self-made man's paradise, Chamcha reflected, and recognized the envy in the thought.

After lunch, a surprise. Valance led him into a room in which there stood two clavichords of great delicacy and lightness. ‘I make ‘em,’ his host confessed. To relax. Baby wants me to make her a fucking guitar.’ Hal Valance's talent as a cabinet-maker was undeniable, and somehow at odds with the rest of the man. ‘My father was in the trade,’ he admitted under Chamcha's probing, and Saladin understood that he had been granted a privileged glimpse into the only piece that remained of Valance's original self, the Harold that derived from history and blood and not from his own frenetic brain.

When they left the secret chamber of the clavichords, the familiar Hal Valance instantly reappeared. Leaning on the balustrade of his terrace, he confided: ‘The thing that's so amazing about her is the size of what she's trying to do.’ Her? Baby? Chamcha was confused. ‘I'm talking about you-know-who,’ Valance explained helpfully. ‘Torture. Maggie the Bitch.’ Oh. ‘She's radical all right. What she wants – what she actually thinks she can fucking achieve – is literally to invent a whole goddamn new middle class in this country. Get rid of the old woolly incompetent buggers from fucking Surrey and Hampshire, and bring in the new. People without background, without history. Hungry people. People who really want, and who know that with her, they can bloody well get. Nobody's ever tried to replace a whole fucking class before, and the amazing thing is she might just do it if they don't get her first. The old class. The dead men. You follow what I'm saying.’ ‘I think so,’ Chamcha lied. ‘And it's not just the businessmen,’ Valance said slurrily. ‘The intellectuals, too. Out with the whole faggoty crew. In with the hungry guys with the wrong education. New professors, new painters, the lot. It's a bloody revolution. Newness coming into this country that's stuffed full of fucking old corpses. It's going to be something to see. It already is.’

Baby wandered out to meet them, looking bored. ‘Time you were off, Chamcha,’ her husband commanded. ‘On Sunday afternoons we go to bed and watch pornography on video. It's a whole new world, Saladin. Everybody has to join sometime.’

No compromises. You're in or you're dead. It hadn't been Chamcha's way; not his, nor that of the England he had idolized and come to conquer. He should have understood then and there: he was being given, had been given, fair warning.

And now the coup de grace. ‘No hard feelings,’ Valance was murmuring into his ear. ‘See you around, eh? Okay, right.’

‘Hal,’ he made himself object, ‘I've got a contract.’

Like a goat to the slaughter. The voice in his ear was now openly amused. ‘Don't be silly,’ it told him. ‘Of course you haven't. Read the small print. Get a lawyer to read the small print. Take me to court. Do what you have to do. It's nothing to me. Don't you get it? You're history.’

Dialling tone.

Abandoned by one alien England, marooned within another, Mr. Saladin Chamcha in his great dejection received news of an old companion who was evidently enjoying better fortunes. The shriek of his landlady – ‘Tini bénché achén!’ – warned him that something was up. Hind was billowing along the corridors of the Shaandaar B and B, waving, it turned out, a current copy of the imported Indian fanzine Ciné-Blitz. Doors opened; temporary beings popped out, looking puzzled and alarmed. Mishal Sufyan emerged from her room with yards of midriff showing between shortie tank-top and 501s. From the office he maintained across the hall, Hanif Johnson emerged in the incongruity of a sharp three-piece suit, was hit by the midriff and covered his face. ‘Lord have mercy,’ he prayed. Mishal ignored him and yelled after her mother: ‘What's up? Who's alive?’

‘Shameless from somewhere,’ Hind shouted back along the passage, ‘cover your nakedness.’

‘Fuck off,’ Mishal muttered under her breath, fixing mutinous eyes on Hanif Johnson. ‘What about the michelins sticking out between her sari and her choli, I want to know.’ Down at the other end of the passage, Hind could be seen in the half-light, thrusting Ciné-Blitz at the tenants, repeating, he's alive. With all the fervour of those Greeks who, after the disappearance of the politician Lambrakis, covered the country with the whitewashed letter Z. Zi: he lives.

‘Who?’ Mishal demanded again.

‘Gibreel,’ came the cry of impermanent children. ‘Farishta bénché achén.’ Hind, disappearing downstairs, did not observe her elder daughter returning to her room, – leaving the door ajar; – and being followed, when he was sure the coast was clear, by the well-known lawyer Hanif Johnson, suited and booted, who maintained this office to keep in touch with the grass roots, who was also doing well in a smart uptown practice, who was well connected with the local Labour Party and was accused by the sitting M P of scheming to take his place when reselection came around.

When was Mishal Sufyan's eighteenth birthday? – Not for a few weeks yet. And where was her sister, her roommate, sidekick, shadow, echo and foil? Where was the potential chaperone? She was: out.

But to continue:

The news from Cinée-Blitz was that a new, London-based film production outfit headed by the whiz-kid tycoon Billy Battuta, whose interest in cinema was well known, had entered into an association with the reputable, independent Indian producer Mr. S. S. Sisodia for the purpose of producing a comeback vehicle for the legendary Gibreel, now exclusively revealed to have escaped the jaws of death for a second time. ‘It is true I was booked on the plane under the name of Naj-muddin,’ the star was quoted as saying. ‘I know that when the investigating sleuths identified this as my incognito – in fact, my real name – it caused great grief back home, and for this I do sincerely apologize to my fans. You see, the truth is, that grace of God I somehow missed the flight, and as I had wished in any case to go to ground, excuse, please, no pun intended, I permitted the fiction of my demise to stand uncorrected and took a later flight. Such luck: truly, an angel must have been watching over me.’ After a time of reflection, however, he had concluded that it was wrong to deprive his public, in this unsportsmanlike and hurtful way, of the true data and also his presence on the screen. ‘Therefore I have accepted this project with full commitment and joy.’ The film was to be – what else – a theological, but of a new type. It would be set in an imaginary and fabulous city made of sand, and would recount the story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel; also the temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that of base compromise. ‘It is a film,’ the producer, Sisodia, informed Ciné-Blitz, ‘about how newness enters the world.’ – But would it not be seen as blasphemous, a crime against ... – ‘Certainly not,’ Billy Battuta insisted. ‘Fiction is fiction; facts are facts. Our purpose is not to make some farrago like that movie The Message in which, whenever Prophet Muhammad (on whose name be peace!) was heard to speak, you saw only the head of his camel, moving its mouth. That– excuse me for pointing out – had no class. We are making a high-taste, quality picture. A moral tale: like – what do you call them? – fables.’

‘Like a dream,’ Mr. Sisodia said.

When the news was brought to Chamcha's attic later that day by Anahita and Mishal Sufyan, he flew into the vilest rage either of them had ever witnessed, a fury under whose fearful influence his voice rose so high that it seemed to tear, as if his throat had grown knives and ripped his cries to shreds; his pestilential breath all but blasted them from the room, and with arms raised high and goat-legs dancing he looked, at last, like the very devil whose image he had become. ‘Liar,’ he shrieked at the absent Gibreel. ‘Traitor, deserter, scum. Missed the plane, did you? – Then whose head, in my own lap, with my own hands... ? – who received caresses, spoke of nightmares, and fell at last singing from the sky?’

‘There, there,’ pleaded terrified Mishal. ‘Calm down. You'll have Mum up here in a minute.’

Saladin subsided, a pathetic goaty heap once again, no threat to anyone. ‘It's not true,’ he wailed. ‘What happened, happened to us both.’

‘Course it did,’ Anahita encouraged him. ‘Nobody believes those movie magazines, anyway. They'll say anything, them.’

Sisters backed out of the room, holding their breath, leaving Chamcha to his misery, failing to observe something quite remarkable. For which they must not be blamed; Chamcha's antics were sufficient to have distracted the keenest eyes. It should also, in fairness, be stated that Saladin failed to notice the change himself.

What happened? This: during Chamcha's brief but violent outburst against Gibreel, the horns on his head (which, one may as well point out, had grown several inches while he languished in the attic of the Shaandaar B and B) definitely, unmistakably, – by about three-quarters of an inch, – diminished.

In the interest of the strictest accuracy, one should add that, lower down his transformed body, – inside borrowed pantaloons (delicacy forbids the publication of explicit details), – something else, let us leave it at that, got a little smaller, too.

Be that as it may: it transpired that the optimism of the report in the imported movie magazine had been ill founded, because within days of its publication the local papers carried news of Billy Battuta's arrest, in a midtown New York sushi bar, along with a female companion, Mildred Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years of age. The story was that he had approached numbers of society matrons, ‘movers and shakers', asking for ‘very substantial’ sums of money which he had claimed to need in order to buy his freedom from a sect of devil worshippers. Once a confidence man, always a confidence man: it was what Mimi Mamoulian would no doubt have described as a beautiful sting. Penetrating the heart of American religiosity, pleading to be saved – ‘when you sell your soul you can't expect to buy back cheap’ – Billy had banked, the investigators alleged, ‘six figure sums’. The world community of the faithful longed, in the late 1980s, for direct contact with the supernal, and Billy, claiming to have raised (and therefore to need rescuing from) infernal fiends, was on to a winner, especially as the Devil he offered was so democratically responsive to the dictates of the Almighty Dollar. What Billy offered the West Side matrons in return for their fat cheques was verification: yes, there is a Devil; I've seen him with my own eyes – God, it was frightful! – and if Lucifer existed, so must Gabriel; if Hellfire had been seen to burn, then somewhere, over the rainbow, Paradise must surely shine. Mimi Mamoulian had, it was alleged, played a full part in the deceptions, weeping and pleading for all she was worth. They were undone by over-confidence, spotted at Takesushi (whooping it up and cracking jokes with the chef) by a Mrs. Aileen Struwelpeter who had, only the previous afternoon, handed the then-distraught and terrified couple a five-thousand-dollar cheque. Mrs. Struwelpeter was not without influence in the New York Police Department, and the boys in blue arrived before Mimi had finished her tempura. They both went quietly. Mimi was wearing, in the newspaper photographs, what Chamcha guessed was a forty-thousand-dollar mink coat, and an expression on her face that could only be read one way.

The hell with you all.

Nothing further was heard, for some while, about Farishta's film.

It was so, it was not, that as Saladin Chamcha's incarceration in the body of a devil and the attic of the Shaandaar B and B lengthened into weeks and months, it became impossible not to notice that his condition was worsening steadily. His horns (notwithstanding their single, momentary and unobserved diminution) had grown both thicker and longer, twirling themselves into fanciful arabesques, wreathing his head in a turban of darkening bone. He had grown a thick, long beard, a disorienting development in one whose round, moony face had never boasted much hair before; indeed, he was growing hairier all over his body, and had even sprouted, from the base of his spine, a fine tail that lengthened by the day and had already obliged him to abandon the wearing of trousers; he tucked the new limb, instead, inside baggy salwar pantaloons filched by Anahita Sufyan from her mother's generously tailored collection. The distress engendered in him by his continuing metamorphosis into some species of bottled djinn will readily be imagined. Even his appetites were altering. Always fussy about his food, he was appalled to find his palate coarsening, so that all foodstuffs began to taste much the same, and on occasion he would find himself nibbling absently at his bedsheets or old newspapers, and come to his senses with a start, guilty and shamefaced at this further evidence of his progress away from manhood and towards – yes – goatishness. Increasing quantities of green mouthwash were required to keep his breath within acceptable limits. It really was too grievous to be borne.

His presence in the house was a continual thorn in the side of Hind, in whom regret for the lost income mingled with the remnants of her initial terror, although it's true to say that the soothing processes of habituation had worked their sorceries on her, helping her to see Saladin's condition as some kind of Elephant Man illness, a thing to feel disgusted by but not necessarily to fear. ‘Let him keep out of my way and I'll keep out of his,’ she told her daughters. ‘And you, the children of my despair, why you spend your time sitting up there with a sick person while your youth is flying by, who can say, but in this Vilayet it seems everything I used to know is a lie, such as the idea that young girls should help their mothers, think of marriage, attend to studies, and not go sitting with goats, whose throats, on Big Eid, it is our old custom to slit.’

Her husband remained solicitous, however, even after the strange incident that took place when he ascended to the attic and suggested to Saladin that the girls might not have been so wrong, that perhaps the, how could one put it, possession of his body could be terminated by the intercession of a mullah? At the mention of a priest Chamcha reared up on his feet, raising both arms above his head, and somehow or other the room filled up with dense and sulphurous smoke while a high-pitched vibrato screech with a kind of tearing quality pierced Sufyan's hearing like a spike. The smoke cleared quickly enough, because Chamcha flung open a window and fanned feverishly at the fumes, while apologizing to Sufyan in tones of acute embarrassment: ‘I really can't say what came over me, – but at times I fear I am changing into something, – something one must call bad.’

Sufyan, kindly fellow that he was, went over to where Chamcha sat clutching at his horns, patted him on the shoulder, and tried to bring what good cheer he could. ‘Question of mutability of the essence of the self,’ he began, awkwardly, ‘has long been subject of profound debate. For example, great Lucretius tells us, in De Rerum Natura, this following thing: quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante. Which being translated, forgive my clumsiness, is “Whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers,” – that is, bursts its banks, – or, maybe, breaks out of its limitations, – so to speak, disregards its own rules, but that is too free, I am thinking... “that thing”, at any rate, Lucretius holds, “by doing so brings immediate death to its old self”. However,’ up went the ex-schoolmaster's finger, ‘poet Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: “As yielding wax” – heated, you see, possibly for the sealing of documents or such, – “is stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet is indeed the same, even so our souls,” – you hear, good sir? Our spirits! Our immortal essences! – “Are still the same forever, but adopt In their migrations ever-varying forms.”’

He was hopping, now, from foot to foot, full of the thrill of the old words. ‘For me it is always Ovid over Lucretius,’ he stated. ‘Your soul, my good poor dear sir, is the same. Only in its migration it has adopted this presently varying form.’

‘This is pretty cold comfort,’ Chamcha managed a trace of his old dryness. ‘Either I accept Lucretius and conclude that some demonic and irreversible mutation is taking place in my inmost depths, or I go with Ovid and concede that everything now emerging is no more than a manifestation of what was already there.’

‘I have put my argument badly,’ Sufyan miserably apologized. ‘I meant only to reassure.’

‘What consolation can there be,’ Chamcha answered with bitter rhetoric, his irony crumbling beneath the weight of his unhappiness, ‘for a man whose old friend and rescuer is also the nightly lover of his wife, thus encouraging – as your old books would doubtless affirm – the growth of cuckold's horns?’

The old friend, Jumpy Joshi, was unable for a single moment of his waking hours to rid himself of the knowledge that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he had lost the will to lead his life according to his own standards of morality. At the sports centre where he taught martial arts techniques to ever-greater numbers of students, emphasizing the spiritual aspects of the disciplines, much to their amusement (‘Ah so, Grasshopper,’ his star pupil Mishal Sufyan would tease him, ‘when honolable fascist swine jump at you flom dark alleyway, offer him teaching of Buddha before you kick him in honolable balls’), – he began to display such passionate intensity that his pupils, realizing that some inner anguish was being expressed, grew alarmed. When Mishal asked him about it at the end of a session that had left them both bruised and panting for breath, in which the two of them, teacher and star, had hurled themselves at one another like the hungriest of lovers, he threw her question back at her with an uncharacteristic lack of openness. ‘Talk about pot and kettle,’ he said. ‘Question of mote and beam.’ They were standing by the vending machines. She shrugged. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I confess, but keep the secret.’ He reached for his Coke: ‘What secret?’ Innocent Jumpy. Mishal whispered in his ear: ‘I'm getting laid. By your friend: Mister Hanif Johnson, Bar At Law.’

He was shocked, which irritated her. ‘O, come on. It's not like I'm fifteen.’ He replied, weakly, ‘If your mother ever,’ and once again she was impatient. ‘If you want to know,’ petulantly, ‘the one I'm worried about is Anahita. She wants whatever I've got. And she, by the way, really is fifteen.’ Jumpy noticed that he'd knocked over his paper-cup and there was Coke on his shoes. ‘Out with it,’ Mishal was insisting. ‘I owned up. Your turn.’ But Jumpy couldn't say; was still shaking his head about Hanif. ‘It'd be the finish of him,’ he said. That did it. Mishal put her nose in the air. ‘O, I get it,’ she said. ‘Not good enough for him, you reckon.’ And over her departing shoulder: ‘Here, Grasshopper. Don't holy men ever fuck?’

Not so holy. He wasn't cut out for sainthood, any more than the David Carradine character in the old Kung Fu programmes: like Grasshopper, like Jumpy. Every day he wore himself out trying to stay away from the big house in Netting Hill, and every evening he ended up at Pamela's door, thumb in mouth, biting the skin around the edges of the nail, fending off the dog and his own guilt, heading without wasting any time for the bedroom. Where they would fall upon one another, mouths searching out the places in which they had chosen, or learned, to begin: first his lips around her nipples, then hers moving along his lower thumb.

She had come to love in him this quality of impatience, because it was followed by a patience such as she had never experienced, the patience of a man who had never been ‘attractive’ and was therefore prepared to value what was offered, or so she had thought at first; but then she learned to appreciate his consciousness of and solicitude for her own internal tensions, his sense of the difficulty with which her slender, bony, small-breasted body found, learned and finally surrendered to a rhythm, his knowledge of time. She loved in him, too, his overcoming of himself; loved, knowing it to be a wrong reason, his willingness to overcome his scruples so that they might be together: loved the desire in him that rode over all that had been imperative in him. Loved it, without being willing to see, in this love, the beginning of an end.

Near the end of their lovemaking, she became noisy. ‘Yow!’ she shouted, all the aristocracy in her voice crowding into the meaningless syllables of her abandonment. ‘Whoop! Hi! Hah.’

She was still drinking heavily, scotch bourbon rye, a stripe of redness spreading across the centre of her face. Under the influence of alcohol her right eye narrowed to half the size of the left, and she began, to his horror, to disgust him. No discussion of her boozing was permitted, however: the one time he tried he found himself on the street with his shoes clutched in his right hand and his overcoat over his left arm. Even after that he came back: and she opened the door and went straight upstairs as though nothing had happened. Pamela's taboos: jokes about her background, mentions of whisky-bottle ‘dead soldiers’, and any suggestion that her late husband, the actor Saladin Chamcha, was still alive, living across town in a bed and breakfast joint, in the shape of a supernatural beast.

These days, Jumpy – who had, at first, badgered her incessantly about Saladin, telling her she should go ahead and divorce him, but this pretence of widowhood was intolerable: what about the man's assets, his rights to a share of the property, and so forth? Surely she would not leave him destitute? – no longer protested about her unreasonable behaviour. ‘I've got a confirmed report of his death,’ she told him on the only occasion on which she was prepared to say anything at all. ‘And what have you got? A billy-goat, a circus freak, nothing to do with me.’ And this, too, like her drinking, had begun to come between them. Jumpy's martial arts sessions increased in vehemence as these problems loomed larger in his mind.

Ironically, while Pamela refused point-blank to face the facts about her estranged husband, she had become embroiled, through her job at the community relations committee, in an investigation into allegations of the spread of witchcraft among the officers at the local police station. Various stations did from time to time gain the reputation of being ‘out of control’ – Notting Hill, Kentish Town, Islington – but witchcraft? Jumpy was sceptical. ‘The trouble with you,’ Pamela told him in her loftiest shooting-stick voice, ‘is that you still think of normality as being normal. My God: look at what's happening in this country. A few bent coppers taking their clothes off and drinking urine out of helmets isn't so weird. Call it working-class Freemasonry, if you want. I've got black people coming in every day, scared out of their heads, talking about obeah, chicken entrails, the lot. The goddamn bastards are enjoying this: scare the coons with their own ooga booga and have a few naughty nights into the bargain. Unlikely? Bloody wake up.’ Witchfinding, it seemed, ran in the family: from Matthew Hopkins to Pamela Lovelace. In Pamela's voice, speaking at public meetings, on local radio, even on regional news programmes on television, could be heard all the zeal and authority of the old Witchfinder-General, and it was only on account of that voice of a twentieth-century Gloriana that her campaign was not laughed instantly into extinction. New Broomstick Needed to Sweep Out Witches. There was talk of an official inquiry. What drove Jumpy wild, however, was Pamela's refusal to connect her arguments in the question of the occult policemen to the matter of her own husband: because, after all, the transformation of Saladin Chamcha had precisely to do with the idea that normality was no longer composed (if it had ever been) of banal, ‘normal’ elements. ‘Nothing to do with it,’ she said flatly when he tried to make the point: imperious, he thought, as any hanging judge.

After Mishal Sufyan told him about her illegal sexual relations with Hanif Johnson, Jumpy on his way over to Pamela Chamcha's had to stifle a number of bigoted thoughts, such as if his father hadn't been white he'd never have done it; Hanif, he raged, that immature bastard who probably cut notches in his cock to keep count of his conquests, this Johnson with aspirations to represent his people who couldn't wait until they were of age before he started shafting them!... couldn't he see that Mishal with her omniscient body was just a, just a, child? – No she wasn't. – Damn him, then, damn him for (and here Jumpy shocked himself) being the first.

Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his resentments of Hanif, his friend Hanif, were primarily – how to put it? – linguistic. Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power. But you bastard you rummage in my drawers and laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven't got a clue. How hard that struggle, how inevitable the defeat. Nobody's going to elect me to anything. No power-baset no constituency: just the battle with the words. But he, Jumpy, also had to admit that his envy of Hanif was as much as anything rooted in the other's greater control of the languages of desire. Mishal Sufyan was quite something, an elongated, tubular beauty, but he wouldn't have known how, even if he'd thought of, he'd never have dared. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

When Pamela Chamcha answered the door he found that her hair had gone snow-white overnight, and that her response to this inexplicable calamity had been to shave her head right down to the scalp and then conceal it inside an absurd burgundy turban which she refused to remove.

‘It just happened,’ she said. ‘One must not rule out the possibility that I have been bewitched.’

He wasn't standing for that. ‘Or the notion of a reaction, however delayed, to the news of your husband's altered, but extant, state.’

She swung to face him, halfway up the stairs to the bedroom, and pointed dramatically towards the open sitting-room door. ‘In that case,’ she triumphed, ‘why did it also happen to the dog?’

He might have told her, that night, that he wanted to end it, that his conscience no longer permitted, – he might have been willing to face her rage, and to live with the paradox that a decision could be simultaneously conscientious and immoral (because cruel, unilateral, selfish); but when he entered the bedroom she grabbed his face with both hands, and watching closely to see how he took the news she confessed to having lied about contraceptive precautions. She was pregnant. It turned out she was better at making unilateral decisions than he, and had simply taken from him the child Saladin Chamcha had been unable to provide. ‘I wanted it,’ she cried defiantly, and at close range. ‘And now I'm going to have it.’

Her selfishness had pre-empted his. He discovered that he felt relieved; absolved of the responsibility for making and acting upon moral choices, – because how could he leave her now? – he put such notions out of his head and allowed her, gently but with unmistakable intent, to push him backwards on to the bed.

Whether the slowly transmogrifying Saladin Chamcha was turning into some sort of science-fiction or horror-video mutey, some random mutation shortly to be naturally selected out of existence, – or whether he was evolving into an avatar of the Master of Hell, – or whatever was the case, the fact is (and it will be as well in the present matter to proceed cautiously, stepping from established fact to established fact, leaping to no conclusion until our yellowbrick lane of things-incontrovertibly-so has led us to within an inch or two of our destination) that the two daughters of Haji Sufyan had taken him under their wing, caring for the Beast as only Beauties can; and that, as time passed, he came to be extremely fond of the pair of them himself. For a long while Mishal and Anahita struck him as inseparable, fist and shadow, shot and echo, the younger girl seeking always to emulate her tall, feisty sibling, practising karate kicks and Wing Chun forearm smashes in flattering imitation of Mishal's uncompromising ways. More recently, however, he had noted the growth of a saddening hostility between the sisters. One evening at his attic window Mishal was pointing out some of the Street's characters, – there, a Sikh ancient shocked by a racial attack into complete silence; he had not spoken, it was said, for nigh on seven years, before which he had been one of the city's few ‘black’ justices of the peace... now, however, he pronounced no sentences, and was accompanied everywhere by a crotchety wife who treated him with dismissive exasperation, O, ignore him, he never says a dicky bird; – and over there, a perfectly ordinary-looking ‘accountant type’ (Mishal's term) on his way home with briefcase and box of sweetmeats; this one was known in the Street to have developed the strange need to rearrange his sitting-room furniture for half an hour each evening, placing chairs in rows interrupted by an aisle and pretending to be the conductor of a single-decker bus on its way to Bangladesh, an obsessive fantasy in which all his family were obliged to participate, and after half an hour precisely he snaps out of it, and the rest of the time he's the dullest guy you could meet; – and after some moments of this, fifteen-year-old Anahita broke in spitefully: ‘What she means is, you're not the only casualty, round here the freaks are two a penny, you only have to look.’

Mishal had developed the habit of talking about the Street as if it were a mythological battleground and she, on high at Chamcha's attic window, the recording angel and the exterminator, too. From her Chamcha learned the fables of the new Kurus and Pandavas, the white racists and black ‘self-help’ or vigilante posses starring in this modern Mahabharata, or, more accurately, Mahavilayet. Up there, under the railway bridge, the National Front used to do battle with the fearless radicals of the Socialist Workers Party, ‘every Sunday from closing time to opening time,’ she sneered, ‘leaving us lot to clear up the wreckage the rest of the sodding week.’ – Down that alley was where the Brickhall Three were done over by the police and then fitted up, verballed, framed; up that side-street he'd find the scene of the murder of the Jamaican, Ulysses E. Lee, and in that public house the stain on the carpet marking where Jatinder Singh Mehta breathed his last. ‘Thatcherism has its effect,’ she declaimed, while Chamcha, who no longer had the will or the words to argue with her, to speak of justice and the rule of law, watched Anahita's mounting rage. – ‘No pitched battles these days,’ Mishal elucidated. ‘The emphasis is on small-scale enterprises and the cult of the individual, right? In other words, five or six white bastards murdering us, one individual at a time.’ These days the posses roamed the nocturnal Street, ready for aggravation. ‘It's our turf,’ said Mishal Sufyan of that Street without a blade of grass in sight. ‘Let ‘em come and get it if they can.’

‘Look at her,’ Anahita burst out. ‘So ladylike, in'she? So refined. Imagine what Mum'd say if she knew.’ – ‘If she knew what, you little grass —?’ But Anahita wasn't to be cowed: ‘O, yes,’ she wailed. ‘O, yes, we know, don't think we don't. How she goes to the bhangra beat shows on Sunday mornings and changes in the ladies into those tarty-farty clothes – who she wiggles with and jiggles with at the Hot Wax daytime disco that she thinks I never heard of before – what went on at that bluesdance she crept off to with Mister You-know-who Cocky-bugger – some big sister,’ she produced her grandstand finish, ‘she'll probably wind up dead of wossname ignorance.’ Meaning, as Chamcha and Mishal well knew, – those cinema commercials, expressionist tombstones rising from earth and sea, had left the residue of their slogan well implanted, no doubt of that – Aids.

Mishal fell upon her sister, pulling her hair, – Anahita, in pain, was nevertheless able to get in another dig, ‘Least I didn't cut my hair into any weirdo pincushion, must be a nutter who fancies that,’ and the two departed, leaving Chamcha to wonder at Anahita's sudden and absolute espousal of her mother's ethic of femininity. Trouble brewing, he concluded.

Trouble came: soon enough.

More and more, when he was alone, he felt the slow heaviness pushing him down, until he fell out of consciousness, running down like a wind-up toy, and in those passages of stasis that always ended just before the arrival of visitors his body would emit alarming noises, the howlings of infernal wahwah pedals, the snare-drum cracking of satanic bones. These were the periods in which, little by little, he grew. And as he grew, so too did the rumours of his presence; you can't keep a devil locked up in the attic and expect to keep it to yourself forever.

How the news got out (for the people in the know remained tight-lipped, the Sufyans because they feared loss of business, the temporary beings because their feeling of evanescence had rendered them unable, for the moment, to act, – and all parties because of the fear of the arrival of the police, never exactly reluctant to enter such establishments, bump accidentally into a little furniture and step by chance on a few arms legs necks): he began to appear to the locals in their dreams. The mullahs at the Jamme Masjid which used to be the Machzikel HaDath synagogue which had in its turn replaced the Huguenots’ Calvinist church; – and Dr Uhuru Simba the man-mountain in African pill-box hat and red-yellow-black poncho who had led the successful protest against The Aliens Show and whom Mishal Sufyan hated more than any other black man on account of his tendency to punch uppity women in the mouth, herself for example, in public, at a meeting, plenty of witnesses, but it didn't stop the Doctor, he's a crazy bastard, that one, she told Chamcha when she pointed him out from the attic one day, capable of anything; he could've killed me, and all because I told everybody he wasn't no African, I knew him when he was plain Sylvester Roberts from down New Cross way; fucking witch doctor, if you ask me; – and Mishal herself, and Jumpy, and Hanif; – and the Bus Conductor, too, they all dreamed him, rising up in the Street like Apocalypse and burning the town like toast. And in every one of the thousand and one dreams he, Saladin Chamcha, gigantic of limb and horn-turbaned of head, was singing, in a voice so diabolically ghastly and guttural that it proved impossible to identify the verses, even though the dreams turned out to have the terrifying quality of being serial, each one following on from the one the night before, and so on, night after night, until even the Silent Man, that former justice of the peace who had not spoken since the night in an Indian restaurant when a young drunk stuck a knife under his nose, threatened to cut him, and then committed the far more shocking offence of spitting all over his food, – until this mild gentleman astounded his wife by sitting upright in his sleep, ducking his neck forwards like a pigeon's, clapping the insides of his wrists together beside his right ear, and roaring out a song at the top of his voice, which sounded so alien and full of static that she couldn't make out a word.

Very quickly, because nothing takes a long time any more, the image of the dream-devil started catching on, becoming popular, it should be said, only amongst what Hal Valance had described as the tinted persuasion. While non-tint neo-Georgians dreamed of a sulphurous enemy crushing their perfectly restored residences beneath his smoking heel, nocturnal browns-and-blacks found themselves cheering, in their sleep, this what-else-after-all-but-black-man, maybe a little twisted up by fate class race history, all that, but getting off his behind, bad and mad, to kick a little ass.

At first these dreams were private matters, but pretty soon they started leaking into the waking hours, as Asian retailers and manufacturers of button-badges sweatshirts posters understood the power of the dream, and then all of a sudden he was everywhere, on the chests of young girls and in the windows protected against bricks by metal grilles, he was a defiance and a warning. Sympathy for the Devil: a new lease of life for an old tune. The kids in the Street started wearing rubber devil-horns on their heads, the way they used to wear pink-and-green balls jiggling on the ends of stiff wires a few years previously, when they preferred to imitate spacemen. The symbol of the Goatman, his fist raised in might, began to crop up on banners at political demonstrations, Save the Six, Free the Four, Eat the Heinz Fifty-Seven. Pleasechu meechu, the radios sang, hopeyu guessma nayym. Police community relations officers pointed to the ‘growing devil-cult among young blacks and Asians’ as a ‘deplorable tendency’, using this ‘Satanist revival’ to fight back against the allegations of Ms Pamela Chamcha and the local CRC: ‘Who are the witches now?’ ‘Chamcha,’ Mishal said excitedly, ‘you're a hero. I mean, people can really identify with you. It's an image white society has rejected for so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own. It's time you considered action.’

‘Go away,’ cried Saladin, in his bewilderment. ‘This isn't what I wanted. This is not what I meant, at all.’

‘You're growing out of the attic, anyhow,’ rejoined Mishal, miffed. ‘It won't be big enough for you in not too long a while.’

Things were certainly coming to a head.

‘Another old lady get slice las’ night,’ announced Hanif Johnson, affecting a Trinidadian accent in the way he had. ‘No mo soshaal security for she.’ Anahita Sufyan, on duty behind the counter of the Shaandaar Café, banged cups and plates. ‘I don't know why you do that,’ she complained. ‘Sends me spare.’ Hanif ignored her, sat down beside Jumpy, who muttered absently: ‘What're they saying?’ – Approaching fatherhood was weighing on Jumpy Joshi, but Hanif slapped him on the back. ‘The ol’ poetry not goin great, bra,’ he commiserated. ‘Look like that river of blood get coagulate.’ A look from Jumpy changed his tune. ‘They sayin what they say,’ he answered. ‘Look out for coloureds cruisin in cars. Now if she was black, man, it'd be “No grounds to suspec racial motive.” I tell you,’ he went on, dropping the accent, ‘sometimes the level of aggression bubbling just under the skin of this town gets me really scared. It's not just the damn Granny Ripper. It's everywhere. You bump into a guy's newspaper in a rush-hour train and you can get your face broken. Everybody's so goddamn angry, seems like to me. Including, old friend, you,’ he finished, noticing. Jumpy stood, excused himself, and walked out without an explanation. Hanif spread his arms, gave Anahita his most winsome smile: ‘What'd I do?’

Anahita smiled back sweetly. ‘Dju ever think, Hanif, that maybe people don't like you very much?’

When it became known that the Granny Ripper had struck again, suggestions that the solution to the hideous killings of old women by a ‘human fiend’, – who invariably arranged his victims’ internal organs neatly around their corpses, one lung by each ear, and the heart, for obvious reasons, in the mouth, – would most likely be found by investigating the new occultism among the city's blacks which was giving the authorities so much cause for concern, – began to be heard with growing frequency. The detention and interrogation of ‘tints’ intensified accordingly, as did the incidence of snap raids on establishments ‘suspected of harbouring underground occultist cells’. What was happening, although nobody admitted it or even, at first, understood, was that everyone, black brown white, had started thinking of the dream-figure as real, as a being who had crossed the frontier, evading the normal controls, and was now roaming loose about the city. Illegal migrant, outlaw king, foul criminal or race-hero, Saladin Chamcha was getting to be true. Stories rushed across the city in every direction: a physiotherapist sold a shaggy-dog tale to the Sundays, was not believed, but no smoke without fire, people said; it was a precarious state of affairs, and it couldn't be long before the raid on the Shaandaar Café that would send the whole thing higher than the sky. Priests became involved, adding another unstable element – the linkage between the term black and the sin blasphemy – to the mix. In his attic, slowly, Saladin Chamcha grew.

He chose Lucretius over Ovid. The inconstant soul, the mutability of everything, das Ich, every last speck. A being going through life can become so other to himself as to be another, discrete, severed from history. He thought, at times, of Zeeny Vakil on that other planet, Bombay, at the far rim of the galaxy: Zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity. The optimism of those ideas! The certainty on which they rested: of will, of choice! But, Zeeny mine, life just happens to you: like an accident. No: it happens to you as a result of your condition. Not choice, but – at best – process, and, at worst, shocking, total change. Newness: he had sought a different kind, but this was what he got.

Bitterness, too, and hatred, all these coarse things. He would enter into his new self; he would be what he had become: loud, stenchy, hideous, outsize, grotesque, inhuman, powerful. He had the sense of being able to stretch out a little finger and topple church spires with the force growing in him, the anger, the anger, the anger. Powers.

He was looking for someone to blame. He, too, dreamed; and in his dreams, a shape, a face, was floating closer, ghostly still, unclear, but one day soon he would be able to call it by its name.

I am, he accepted, that I am.

Submission.

His cocooned life at the Shaandaar B and B blew apart the evening Hanif Johnson came in shouting that they had arrested Uhuru Simba for the Granny Ripper murders, and the word was they were going to lay the Black Magic thing on him too, he was going to be the voodoo-priest baron-samedi fall guy, and the reprisals – beatings-up, attacks on property, the usual – were already beginning. ‘Lock your doors,’ Hanif told Sufyan and Hind. ‘There's a bad night ahead.’

Hanif was standing slap in the centre of the cafe, confident of the effect of the news he was bringing, so when Hind came across to him and hit him in the face with all her strength he was so unprepared for the blow that he actually fainted, more from surprise than pain. He was revived by Jumpy, who threw a glass of water at him the way he had been taught to do by the movies, but by then Hind was hurling his office equipment down into the street from upstairs; typewriter ribbons and red ribbons, too, the sort used for securing legal documents, made festive streamers in the air. Anahita Sufyan, unable any more to resist the demonic proddings of her jealousy, had told Hind about Mishal's relations with the up-and-coming lawyer-politico, and after that there had been no holding Hind, all the years of her humiliation had come pouring out of her, it wasn't enough that she was stuck in this country full of jews and strangers who lumped her in with the negroes, it wasn't enough that her husband was a weakling who performed the Haj but couldn't be bothered with godliness in his own home, but this had to happen to her also; she went at Mishal with a kitchen knife and her daughter responded by unleashing a painful series of kicks and jabs, self-defence only, otherwise it would have been matricide for sure. – Hanif regained consciousness and Haji Sufyan looked down on him, moving his hands in small helpless circles by his sides, weeping openly, unable to find consolation in learning, because whereas for most Muslims a journey to Mecca was the great blessing, in his case it had turned out to be the beginning of a curse; – ‘Go,’ he said, ‘Hanif, my friend, get out,’ – but Hanif wasn't going without having his say, I've kept my mouth shut for too long, he cried, you people who call yourself so moral while you make fortunes off the misery of your own race, whereupon it became clear that Haji Sufyan had never known of the prices being charged by his wife, who had not told him, swearing her daughters to secrecy with terrible and binding oaths, knowing that if he discovered he'd find a way of giving the money back so that they could go on rotting in poverty; – and he, the twinkling familiar spirit of the Shaandaar Café, after that lost all love of life. – And now Mishal arrived in the cafe, O the shame of a family's inner life being enacted thus, like a cheap drama, before the eyes of paying customers, – although in point of fact the last tea-drinker was hurrying from the scene as fast as her old legs would carry her. Mishal was carrying bags. ‘I'm leaving, too,’ she announced. ‘Try and stop me. It's only eleven days.’

When Hind saw her elder daughter on the verge of walking out of her life forever, she understood the price one pays for harbouring the Prince of Darkness under one's roof. She begged her husband to see reason, to realize that his good-hearted generosity had brought them into this hell, and that if only that devil, Chamcha, could be removed from the premises, then maybe they could become once again the happy and industrious family of old. As she finished speaking, however, the house above her head began to rumble and shake, and there was the noise of something coming down the stairs, growling and – or so it seemed – singing, in a voice so vilely hoarse that it was impossible to understand the words.

It was Mishal who went up to meet him in the end, Mishal with Hanif Johnson holding her hand, while the treacherous Anahita watched from the foot of the stairs. Chamcha had grown to a height of over eight feet, and from his nostrils there emerged smoke of two different colours, yellow from the left, and from the right, black. He was no longer wearing clothes. His bodily hair had grown thick and long, his tail was swishing angrily, his eyes were a pale but luminous red, and he had succeeded in terrifying the entire temporary population of the bed and breakfast establishment to the point of incoherence. Mishal, however, was not too scared to talk. ‘Where do you think you're going?’ she asked him. ‘You think you'd last five minutes out there, looking like you do?’ Chamcha paused, looked himself over, observed the sizeable erection emerging from his loins, and shrugged. ‘I am considering action,’ he told her, using her own phrase, although in that voice of lava and thunder it didn't seem to belong to her any more. ‘There is a person I wish to find.’

‘Hold your horses,’ Mishal told him. ‘We'll work something out.’

What is to be found here, one mile from the Shaandaar, here where the beat meets the street, at Club Hot Wax, formerly the Blak-An-Tan? On this star-crossed and moonless night, let us follow the figures – some strutting, decked out, hot-to-trot, others surreptitious, shadow-hugging, shy – converging from all quarters of the neighbourhood to dive, abruptly, underground, and through this unmarked door. What's within? Lights, fluids, powders, bodies shaking themselves, singly, in pairs, in threes, moving towards possibilities. But what, then, are these other figures, obscure in the on-off rainbow brilliance of the space, these forms frozen in their attitudes amid the frenzied dancers? What are these that hip-hop and hindi-pop but never move an inch? – ‘You lookin good, Hot Wax posse!’ Our host speaks: ranter, toaster, deejay nonpareil – the prancing Pinkwalla, his suit of lights blushing to the beat. – Truly, he is exceptional, a seven-foot albino, his hair the palest rose, the whites of his eyes likewise, his features unmistakably Indian, the haughty nose, long thin lips, a face from a Hamza-nama cloth. An Indian who has never seen India, East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. A star.

Still the motionless figures dance between the shimmying of sisters, the jouncing and bouncing of youth. What are they? – Why, waxworks, nothing more. – Who are they? – History. See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady, but, being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence's candle; – and, over there!, one Abdul Karim, aka The Munshi, whom Queen Victoria sought to promote, but who was done down by colour-barring ministers. They're all here, dancing motionlessly in hot wax: the black clown of Septimius Severus, to the right; to the left, George IV's barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, the African prince who was sold for six feet of cloth, dances according to his ancient fashion with the slave's son Ignatius Sancho, who became in 1782 the first African writer to be published in England. – The migrants of the past, as much the living dancers’ ancestors as their own flesh and blood, gyrate stilly while Pink walla rants toasts raps up on the stage, Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-dem-make-insinuation-we-no-part-a-de-nation-an-mi-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-Occupation, and from a different part of the crowded room, bathed in evil green light, wax villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward Long, all the local avatars of Legree. And now a murmur begins in the belly of the Club, mounting, becoming a single word, chanted over and over: ‘Meltdown,’ the customers demand. ‘Meltdown, meltdown, melt.’

Pinkwalla takes his cue from the crowd, So-it-meltdown-time-when-de-men-of-crime-gonna-get-in-line-for-some-hell-fire-fryin, after which he turns to the crowd, arms wide, feet with the beat, to ask, Who's-it-gonna-be? Who-you-wanna-see? Names are shouted, compete, coalesce, until the assembled company is united once more, chanting a single word. Pinkwalla claps his hands. Curtains part behind him, allowing female attendants in shiny pink shorts and singlets to wheel out a fearsome cabinet: man-sized, glass-fronted, internally-illuminated – the microwave oven, complete with Hot Seat, known to Club regulars as: Hell's Kitchen. ‘All right,’ cries Pinkwalla. ‘Now we really cookin.’

Attendants move towards the tableau of hate-figures, pounce upon the night's sacrificial offering, the one most often selected, if truth be told; at least three times a week. Her permawaved coiffure, her pearls, her suit of blue. Maggie-maggie-maggie, bays the crowd. Burn-burn-burn. The doll, – the guy, – is strapped into the Hot Seat. Pinkwalla throws the switch. And O how prettily she melts, from the inside out, crumpling into formlessness. Then she is a puddle, and the crowd sighs its ecstasy: done. ‘The fire this time,’ Pinkwalla tells them. Music regains the night.

When Pinkwalla the deejay saw what was climbing under cover of darkness into the back of his panel van, which his friends Hanif and Mishal had persuaded him to bring round the back of the Shaandaar, the fear of obeah filled his heart; but there was also the contrary exhilaration of realizing that the potent hero of his many dreams was a flesh-and-blood actuality. He stood across the street, shivering under a lamp-post though it wasn't particularly cold, and stayed there for half an hour while Mishal and Hanif spoke urgently to him, he needs somewhere to go, we have to think about his future. Then he shrugged, walked over to the van, and started up the engine. Hanif sat beside him in the cab; Mishal travelled with Saladin, hidden from view.

It was almost four in the morning when they bedded Chamcha down in the empty, locked-up nightclub. Pinkwalla – his real name, Sewsunker, was never used – had unearthed a couple of sleeping-bags from a back room, and they sufficed. Hanif Johnson, saying goodnight to the fearsome entity of whom his lover Mishal seemed entirely unafraid, tried to talk to him seriously, ‘You've got to realize how important you could be for us, there's more at stake here than your personal needs,’ but mutant Saladin only snorted, yellow and black, and Hanif backed quickly away. When he was alone with the waxworks Chamcha was able to fix his thoughts once again on the face that had finally coalesced in his mind's eye, radiant, the light streaming out around him from a point just behind his head, Mister Perfecto, portrayer of gods, who always landed on his feet, was always forgiven his sins, loved, praised, adored... the face he had been trying to identify in his dreams, Mr Gibreel Farishta, transformed into the simulacrum of an angel as surely as he was the Devil's mirror-self.

Who should the Devil blame but the Archangel, Gibreel?

The creature on the sleeping-bags opened its eyes; smoke began to issue from its pores. The face on every one of the waxwork dummies was the same now, Gibreel's face with its widow's peak and its long thin saturnine good looks. The creature bared its teeth and let out a long, foul breath, and the waxworks dissolved into puddles and empty clothes, all of them, every one. The creature lay back, satisfied. And fixed its mind upon its foe.

Whereupon it felt within itself the most inexplicable sensations of compression, suction, withdrawal; it was racked by terrible, squeezing pains, and emitted piercing squeals that nobody, not even Mishal who was staying with Hanif in Pinkwalla's apartment above the Club, dared to investigate. The pains mounted in intensity, and the creature thrashed and tossed around the dance-floor, wailing most piteously; until, at length, granted respite, it fell asleep.

When Mishal, Hanif and Pinkwalla ventured into the club-room several hours later, they observed a scene of frightful devastation, tables sent flying, chairs broken in half, and, of course, every waxwork – good and evil – Topsy and Legree – melted like tigers into butter; and at the centre of the carnage, sleeping like a baby, no mythological creature at all, no iconic Thing of horns and hellsbreath, but Mr Saladin Chamcha himself, apparently restored to his old shape, mother-naked but of entirely human aspect and proportions, humanized – is there any option but to conclude? – by the fearsome concentration of his hate.

He opened his eyes; which still glowed pale and red.

2

Alleluia Cone, coming down from Everest, saw a city of ice to the west of Camp Six, across the Rock Band, glittering in the sunlight below the massif of Cho Oyu. Shangri-La, she momentarily thought; however, this was no green vale of immortality but a metropolis of gigantic ice-needles, thin, sharp and cold. Her attention was distracted by Sherpa Pemba warning her to maintain her concentration, and the city had gone when she looked back. She was still at twenty-seven thousand feet, but the apparition of the impossible city threw her back across space and time to the Bayswater study of old dark wooden furniture and heavy velvet curtains in which her father Otto Cone, the art historian and biographer of Picabia, had spoken to her in her fourteenth and his final year of ‘the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives', which was, in his opinion, the idea of the continuum. ‘Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor,’ he advised her, managing to give the impression of having visited more planets than one before coming to his conclusions. ‘The world is incompatible, just never forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can't ask for a wilder place.’ Ice cities on the roof of the world wouldn't have fazed Otto. Like his wife Alicja, Allie's mother, he was a Polish émigré, a survivor of a wartime prison camp whose name was never mentioned throughout Allie's childhood. ‘He wanted to make it as if it had not been,’ Alicja told her daughter later. ‘He was unrealistic in many ways. But a good man; the best I knew.’ She smiled an inward smile as she spoke, tolerating him in memory as she had not always managed to during his life, when he was frequently appalling. For example: he developed a hatred of communism which drove him to embarrassing extremes of behaviour, notably at Christmas, when this Jewish man insisted on celebrating with his Jewish family and others what he described as ‘an English rite’, as a mark of respect to their new ‘host nation’ – and then spoiled it all (in his wife's eyes) by bursting into the salon where the assembled company was relaxing in the glow of log fire, Christmas tree lights and brandy, got up in pantomime Chinee, with droopy moustaches and all, crying: ‘Father Christmas is dead! I have killed him! I am The Mao: no presents for anyone! Hee! Hee! Hee!’ Allie on Everest, remembering, winced – her mother's wince, she realized, transferred to her frosted face.

The incompatibility of life's elements: in a tent at Camp Four, 27,600 feet, the idea which seemed at times to be her father's daemon sounded banal, emptied of meaning, of atmosphere, by the altitude. ‘Everest silences you,’ she confessed to Gibreel Farishta in a bed above which parachute silk formed a canopy of hollow Himalayas. ‘When you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. The world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.’ They spent most of their time in bed during their first weeks together: the appetite of each for the other seemingly inexhaustible, they made love six or seven times a day. ‘You opened me up,’ she told him. ‘You with the ham in your mouth. It was exactly as if you were speaking to me, as if I could read your thoughts. Not as if,’ she amended. ‘I did read them, right?’ He nodded: it was true. ‘I read your thoughts and the right words just came out of my mouth,’ she marvelled. ‘Just flowed out. Bingo: love. In the beginning was the word.’

Her mother took a fatalistic view of this dramatic turn of events in Allie's life, the return of a lover from beyond the grave. ‘I'll tell you what I honestly thought when you gave me the news,’ she said over lunchtime soup and kreplach at the White-chapel Bloom's. ‘I thought, oh dear, it's grand passion; poor Allie has to go through this now, the unfortunate child.’ Alicja's strategy was to keep her emotions strictly under control. She was a tall, ample woman with a sensual mouth but, as she put it, ‘I've never been a noise-maker.’ She was frank with Allie about her sexual passivity, and revealed that Otto had been, ‘Let's say, otherwise inclined. He had a weakness for grand passion, but it always made him so miserable I could not get worked up about it.’ She had been reassured by her knowledge that the women with whom her little, bald, jumpy husband consorted were ‘her type', big and buxom, ‘except they were brassy, too: they did what he wanted, shouting things out to spur him on, pretending for all they were worth; it was his enthusiasm they responded to, I think, and maybe his chequebook, too. He was of the old school and gave generous gifts.’

Otto had called Alleluia his ‘pearl without price', and dreamed for her a great future, as maybe a concert pianist or, failing that, a Muse. ‘Your sister, frankly, is a disappointment to me,’ he said three weeks before his death in that study of Great Books and Picabian bric-à-brac – a stuffed monkey which he claimed was a ‘first draft’ of the notorious Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir, numerous mechanical contraptions including sexual stimulators that delivered small electric shocks, and a first edition of Jarry's Ubu Roi. ‘Elena has wants where she should have thoughts.’ He Anglicized the name – Yelyena into Ellaynah – just as it had been his idea to reduce ‘Alleluia’ to Allie and bowdlerize himself, Cohen from Warsaw, into Cone. Echoes of the past distressed him; he read no Polish literature, turning his back on Herbert, on Milosz, on ‘younger fellows’ like Baranczak, because for him the language was irredeemably polluted by history. ‘I am English now,’ he would say proudly in his thick East European accent. ‘Silly mid-off! Pish-Tush! Widow of Windsor! Bugger all.’ In spite of his reticences he seemed content enough being a pantomime member of the English gentry. In retrospect, though, it looked likely that he'd been only too aware of the fragility of the performance, keeping the heavy drapes almost permanently drawn in case the inconsistency of things caused him to see monsters out there, or moonscapes instead of the familiar Moscow Road.

‘He was strictly a melting-pot man,’ Alicja said while attacking a large helping of tsimmis. ‘When he changed our name I told him, Otto, it isn't required, this isn't America, it's London W-two; but he wanted to wipe the slate clean, even his Jewishness, excuse me but I know. The fights with the Board of Deputies! All very civilized, parliamentary language throughout, but bareknuckle stuff none the less.’ After his death she went straight back to Cohen, the synagogue, Chanukah and Bloom's. ‘No more imitation of life,’ she munched, and waved a sudden, distracted fork. ‘That picture. I was crazy for it. Lana Turner, am I right? And Mahalia Jackson singing in a church.’

Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into an empty lift-shaft and died. Now there was a subject which Alicja, who would readily discuss most taboo matters, refused to touch upon: why does a survivor of the camps live forty years and then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph, no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it hits the heart? Or, worse: can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Allie, whose first response on learning of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother. Who, stonefaced beneath a wide black hat, said only: ‘You have inherited his lack of restraint, my dear.’

After Otto's death Alicja ditched the elegant high style of dress and gesture which had been her offering on the altar of his lust for integration, her attempt to be his Cecil Beaton grande dame. ‘Phoo,’ she confided in Allie, ‘what a relief, my dear, to be shapeless for a change.’ She now wore her grey hair in a straggly bun, put on a succession of identical floral-print supermarket dresses, abandoned make-up, got herself a painful set of false teeth, planted vegetables in what Otto had insisted should be an English floral garden (neat flowerbeds around the central, symbolic tree, a ‘chimeran graft’ of laburnum and broom) and gave, instead of dinners full of cerebral chat, a series of lunches – heavy stews and a minimum of three outrageous puddings – at which dissident Hungarian poets told convoluted jokes to Gurdjieffian mystics, or (if things didn't quite work out) the guests sat on cushions on the floor, staring gloomily at their loaded plates, and something very like total silence reigned for what felt like weeks. Allie eventually turned away from these Sunday afternoon rituals, sulking in her room until she was old enough to move out, with Alicja's ready assent, and from the path chosen for her by the father whose betrayal of his own act of survival had angered her so much. She turned towards action; and found she had mountains to climb.

Alicja Cohen, who had found Allie's change of course perfectly comprehensible, even laudable, and rooted for her all the way, could not (she admitted over coffee) quite see her daughter's point in the matter of Gibreel Farishta, the revenant Indian movie star. ‘To hear you talk, dear, the man's not in your league,’ she said, using a phrase she believed to be synonymous with not your type, and which she would have been horrified to hear described as a racial, or religious, slur: which was inevitably the sense in which her daughter understood it. ‘That's just fine by me,’ Allie riposted with spirit, and rose. ‘The fact is, I don't even like my league.’

Her feet ached, obliging her to limp, rather than storm, from the restaurant. ‘Grand passion,’ she could hear her mother behind her back announcing loudly to the room at large. ‘The gift of tongues; means a girl can babble out any blasted thing.’

Certain aspects of her education had been unaccountably neglected. One Sunday not long after her father's death she was buying the Sunday papers from the corner kiosk when the vendor announced: ‘It's the last week this week. Twenty-three years I've been on this corner and the Pakis have finally driven me out of business.’ She heard the word p-a-c-h-y, and had a bizarre vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news vendors. ‘What's a pachy?’ she foolishly asked and the reply was stinging: ‘A brown Jew.’ She went on thinking of the proprietors of the local ‘CTN’ (confectioner-tobacconist-newsagent) as pachyderms for quite a while: as people set apart – rendered objectionable – by the nature of their skin. She told Gibreel this story, too. ‘Oh,’ he responded, crushingly, ‘an elephant joke.’ He wasn't an easy man.

But there he was in her bed, this big vulgar fellow for whom she could open as she had never opened before; he could reach right into her chest and caress her heart. Not for many years had she entered the sexual arena with such celerity, and never before had so swift a liaison remained wholly untainted by regret or self-disgust. His extended silence (she took it for that until she learned that his name was on the Boston's passenger list) had been sharply painful, suggesting a difference in his estimation of their encounter; but to have been mistaken about his desire, about such an abandoned, hurtling thing, was surely impossible? The news of his death accordingly provoked a double response: on the one hand, there was a kind of grateful, relieved joy to be had from the knowledge that he had been racing across the world to surprise her, that he had given up his entire life in order to construct a new one with her; while, on the other, there was the hollow grief of being deprived of him in the very moment of knowing that she truly had been loved. Later, she became aware of a further, less generous, reaction. What had he thought he was doing, planning to arrive without a word of warning on her doorstep, assuming that she'd be waiting with open arms, an unencumbered life, and no doubt a large enough apartment for them both? It was the kind of behaviour one would expect of a spoiled movie actor who expects his desires simply to fall like ripe fruits into his lap ... in short, she had felt invaded, or potentially invaded. But then she had rebuked herself, pushing such notions back down into the pit where they belonged, because after all Gibreel had paid heavily for his presumption, if presumption it was. A dead lover deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Then there he lay at her feet, unconscious in the snow, taking her breath away with the impossibility of his being there at all, leading her momentarily to wonder if he might not be another in the series of visual aberrations – she preferred the neutral phrase to the more loaded visions– by which she'd been plagued ever since her decision to scorn oxygen cylinders and conquer Chomolungma on lung power alone. The effort of raising him, slinging his arm around her shoulders and half-carrying him to her flat – more than half, if the truth be told – fully persuaded her that he was no chimera, but heavy flesh and blood. Her feet stung her all the way home, and the pain reawakened all the resentments she'd stifled when she thought him dead. What was she supposed to do with him now, the lummox, sprawled out across her bed? God, but she'd forgotten what a sprawler the man was, how during the night he colonized your side of the bed and denuded you entirely of bedclothes. But other sentiments, too, had re-emerged, and these won the day; for here he was, sleeping beneath her protection, the abandoned hope: at long last, love.

He slept almost round the clock for a week, waking up only to satisfy the minimum requirements of hunger and hygiene, saying almost nothing. His sleep was tormented: he thrashed about the bed, and words occasionally escaped his lips: Jahilia, Al-Lat, Hind. In his waking moments he appeared to wish to resist sleep, but it claimed him, waves of it rolling over him and drowning him while he, almost piteously, waved a feeble arm. She was unable to guess what traumatic events might have given rise to such behaviour, and, feeling a little alarmed, telephoned her mother. Alicja arrived to inspect the sleeping Gibreel, pursed her lips, and pronounced: ‘He's a man possessed.’ She had receded more and more into a kind of Singer Brothers dybbukery, and her mysticism never failed to exasperate her pragmatic, mountain-climbing daughter. ‘Use maybe a suction pump on his ear,’ Alicja recommended. ‘That's the exit these creatures prefer.’ Allie shepherded her mother out of the door. ‘Thanks a lot,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know.’

On the seventh day he came wide awake, eyes popping open like a doll's, and instantly reached for her. The crudity of the approach made her laugh almost as much as its unexpectedness, but once again there was that feeling of naturalness, of Tightness; she grinned, ‘Okay, you asked for it,’ and slipped out of the baggy, elasticated maroon pantaloons and loose jacket – she disliked clothes that revealed the contours of her body – and that was the beginning of the sexual marathon that left them both sore, happy and exhausted when it finally ground to a halt.

He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. ‘Okay,’ she said, exhaling. ‘I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right?’ The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the – stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche... She focused her thoughts. ‘Sometimes,’ she decided to say, ‘wonderful things happen to me, too.’

She told him then what she had never told any living being: about the visions on Everest, the angels and the ice-city. ‘It wasn't only on Everest, either,’ she said, and continued after a hesitation. When she got back to London, she went for a walk along the Embankment to try and get him, as well as the mountain, out of her blood. It was early in the morning and there was the ghost of a mist and the thick snow made everything vague. Then the icebergs came.

There were ten of them, moving in stately single file upriver. The mist was thicker around them, so it wasn't until they sailed right up to her that she understood their shapes, the precisely miniaturized configurations of the ten highest mountains in the world, in ascending order, with her mountain, the mountain bringing up the rear. She was trying to work out how the icebergs had managed to pass under the bridges across the river when the mist thickened, and then, a few instants later, dissolved entirely, taking the icebergs with it. ‘But they were there,’ she insisted to Gibreel. ‘Nanga Parbat, Dhaulagiri, Xixabangma Feng.’ He didn't argue. ‘If you say it, then I know it truly was so.’

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated – nearly – into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. Her apartment was full of Himalayas. Representations of Everest in cork, in plastic, in tile, stone, acrylics, brick jostled for space; there was even one sculpted entirely out of ice, a tiny berg which she kept in the freezer and brought out from time to time to show off to friends. Why so many? Because– no other possible answer – they were there. ‘Look,’ she said, stretching out a hand without leaving the bed and picking up, from her bedside table, her newest acquisition, a simple Everest in weathered pine. ‘A gift from the sherpas of Namche Bazar.’ Gibreel took it, turned it in his hands. Pemba had offered it to her shyly when they said goodbye, insisting it was from all the sherpas as a group, although it was evident that he'd whittled it himself. It was a detailed model, complete with the ice fall and the Hillary Step that is the last great obstacle on the way to the top, and the route they had taken to the summit was scored deeply into the wood. When Gibreel turned it upside down he found a message, scratched into the base in painstaking English. To Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again.

What Allie did not tell Gibreel was that the sherpa's prohibition had scared her, convincing her that if she ever set her foot again upon the goddess-mountain, she would surely die, because it is not permitted to mortals to look more than once upon the face of the divine; but the mountain was diabolic as well as transcendent, or, rather, its diabolism and its transcendence were one, so that even the contemplation of Pemba's ban made her feel a pang of need so deep that it made her groan aloud, as if in sexual ecstasy or despair. ‘The Himalayas,’ she told Gibreel so as not to say what was really on her mind, ‘are emotional peaks as well as physical ones: like opera. That's what makes them so awesome. Nothing but the giddiest heights. A hard trick to pull off, though.’ Allie had a way of switching from the concrete to the abstract, a trope so casually achieved as to leave the listener half-wondering if she knew the difference between the two; or, very often, unsure as to whether, finally, such a difference could be said to exist.

Allie kept to herself the knowledge that she must placate the mountain or die, that in spite of the flat feet which made any serious mountaineering out of the question she was still infected by Everest, and that in her heart of hearts she kept hidden an impossible scheme, the fatal vision of Maurice Wilson, never achieved to this day. That is: the solo ascent.

What she did not confess: that she had seen Maurice Wilson since her return to London, sitting among the chimneypots, a beckoning goblin in plus-fours and tam-o'-shanter hat. – Nor did Gibreel Farishta tell her about his pursuit by the spectre of Rekha Merchant. There were still closed doors between them for all their physical intimacy: each kept secret a dangerous ghost. – And Gibreel, on hearing of Allie's other visions, concealed a great agitation behind his neutral words – if you say it, then I know– an agitation born of this further evidence that the world of dreams was leaking into that of the waking hours, that the seals dividing the two were breaking, and that at any moment the two firmaments could be joined, – that is to say, the end of all things was near. One morning Allie, awaking from spent and dreamless sleep, found him immersed in her long-unopened copy of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which her younger self, disrespectful of books, had made a number of marks: underlinings, ticks in the margins, exclamations, multiple queries. Seeing that she had awoken, he read out a selection of these passages with a wicked grin. ‘From the Proverbs of Hell,’ he began. ‘The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.’ She blushed furiously. ‘And what is more,’ he continued, ‘The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. Then, lower down the page: This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. Tell me, who is this? I found her pressed in the pages.’ He handed her a dead woman's photograph: her sister, Elena, buried here and forgotten. Another addict of visions; and a casualty of the habit. ‘We don't talk about her much.’ She was kneeling unclothed on the bed, her pale hair hiding her face. ‘Put her back where you found her.’

I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing. He riffled on through the book, and replaced Elena Cone next to the image of the Regenerated Man, sitting naked and splay-legged on a hill with the sun shining out of his rear end. I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. Allie put her hands up and covered her face. Gibreel tried to cheer her up. ‘You have written in the flyleaf: “Creation of world ace. Archbish. Usher, 4004 bc. Estim'd date of apocalypse, .·., 1996.” So time for improvement of sensual enjoyment still remains.’ She shook her head: stop. He stopped. ‘Tell me,’ he said, putting away the book.

Elena at twenty had taken London by storm. Her feral six-foot body winking through a golden chain-mail Rabanne. She had always carried herself with uncanny assurance, proclaiming her ownership of the earth. The city was her medium, she could swim in it like a fish. She was dead at twenty-one, drowned in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can one drown in one's element, Allie had wondered long ago. If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air? In those days Allie, eighteen-nineteen, had envied Elena her certainties. What was her element? In what periodic table of the spirit could it be found? – Now, flat-footed, Himalayan veteran, she mourned its loss. When you have earned the high horizon it isn't easy to go back into your box, into a narrow island, an eternity of anticlimax. But her feet were traitors and the mountain would kill.

Mythological Elena, the cover girl, wrapped in couture plastics, had been sure of her immortality. Allie, visiting her in her World's End crashpad, refused a proffered sugar-lump, mumbled something about brain damage, feeling inadequate, as usual in Elena's company. Her sister's face, the eyes too wide apart, the chin too sharp, the effect overwhelming, stared mockingly back. ‘No shortage of brain cells,’ Elena said. ‘You can spare a few.’ The spare capacity of the brain was Elena's capital. She spent her cells like money, searching for her own heights; trying, in the idiom of the day, to fly. Death, like life, came to her coated in sugar.

She had tried to ‘improve’ the younger Alleluia. ‘Hey, you're a great looking kid, why hide it in those dungarees? I mean, God, darling, you've got all the equipment in there.’ One night she dressed Allie up, in an olive-green item composed of frills and absences that barely covered her body-stockinged groin: sugaring me like candy, was Allie's puritanical thought, my own sister putting me on display in the shop-window, thanks a lot. They went to a gaming club full of ecstatic lordlings, and Allie had left fast when Elena's attention was elsewhere. A week later, ashamed of herself for being such a coward, for rejecting her sister's attempt at intimacy, she sat on a beanbag at World's End and confessed to Elena that she was no longer a virgin. Whereupon her elder sister slapped her in the mouth and called her ancient names: tramp, slut, tart. ‘Elena Cone never allows a man to lay a finger,’ she yelled, revealing her ability to think of herself as a third person, ‘not a goddamn fingernail. I know what I'm worth, darling, I know how the mystery dies the moment they put their willies in, I should have known you'd turn out to be a whore. Some fucking communist, I suppose,’ she wound down. She had inherited her father's prejudices in such matters. Allie, as Elena knew, had not.

They hadn't met much after that, Elena remaining until her death the virgin queen of the city – the post-mortem confirmed her as virgo intacta – while Allie gave up wearing underwear, took odd jobs on small, angry magazines, and because her sister was untouchable she became the other thing, every sexual act a slap in her sibling's glowering, whitelipped face. Three abortions in two years and the belated knowledge that her days on the contraceptive pill had put her, as far as cancer was concerned, in one of the highest-risk categories of all.

She heard about her sister's end from a newsstand billboard, MODEL'S ‘ACID BATH’ DEATH. You're not even safe from puns when you die, was her first reaction. Then she found she was unable to weep.

‘I kept seeing her in magazines for months,’ she told Gibreel. ‘On account of the glossies’ long lead times.’ Elena's corpse danced across Moroccan deserts, clad only in diaphanous veils; or it was sighted in the Sea of Shadows on the moon, naked except for spaceman's helmet and half a dozen silk ties knotted around breasts and groin. Allie took to drawing moustaches on the pictures, to the outrage of newsagents; she ripped her late sister out of the journals of her zombie-like undeath and crumpled her up. Haunted by Elena's periodical ghost, Allie reflected on the dangers of attempting to fly; what flaming falls, what macabre hells were reserved for such Icarus types! She came to think of Elena as a soul in torment, to believe that this captivity in an immobile world of girlie calendars in which she wore black breasts of moulded plastic, three sizes larger than her own; of pseudo-erotic snarls; of advertising messages printed across her navel, was no less than Elena's personal hell. Allie began to see the scream in her sister's eyes, the anguish of being trapped forever in those fashion spreads. Elena was being tortured by demons, consumed in fires, and she couldn't even move... after a time Allie had to avoid the shops in which her sister could be found staring from the racks. She lost the ability to open magazines, and hid all the pictures of Elena she owned. ‘Goodbye, Yel,’ she told her sister's memory, using her old nursery name. ‘I've got to look away from you.’

‘But I turned out to be like her, after all.’ Mountains had begun to sing to her; whereupon she, too, had risked brain cells in search of exaltation. Eminent physicians expert in the problems facing mountaineers had frequently proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that human beings could not survive without breathing apparatus much above eight thousand metres. The eyes would haemorrhage beyond hope of repair, and the brain, too, would start to explode, losing cells by the billion, too many and too fast, resulting in the permanent damage known as High Altitude Deterioration, followed in quick time by death. Blind corpses would remain preserved in the permafrost of those highest slopes. But Allie and Sherpa Pemba went up and came down to tell the tale. Cells from the brain's deposit boxes replaced the current-account casualties. Nor did her eyes blow out. Why had the scientists been wrong? ‘Prejudice, mostly,’ Allie said, lying curled around Gibreel beneath parachute silk. ‘They can't quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations. But it's will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don't push your luck, anyway.’

There had been some damage. She had been suffering unaccountable lapses of memory: small, unpredictable things. Once at the fishmonger's she had forgotten the word fish. Another morning she found herself in her bathroom picking up a toothbrush blankly, quite unable to work out its purpose. And one morning, waking up beside the sleeping Gibreel, she had been on the verge of shaking him awake to demand, ‘Who the hell are you? How did you get in my bed?’ – when, just in time, the memory returned. ‘I'm hoping it's temporary,’ she told him. But kept to herself, even now, the appearances of Maurice Wilson's ghost on the rooftops surrounding the Fields, waving his inviting arm.

She was a competent woman, formidable in many ways: very much the professional sportswoman of the 1980s, a client of the giant MacMurray public relations agency, sponsored to the gills. Nowadays she, too, appeared in advertisements, promoting her own range of outdoor products and leisurewear, aimed at holidaymakers and amateurs more than pro climbers, to maximize what Hal Valance would have called the universe. She was the golden girl from the roof of the world, the survivor of ‘my Teutonic twosome’, as Otto Cone had been fond of calling his daughters. Once again, Yel, I follow in your footsteps. To be an attractive woman in a sport dominated by, well, hairy men was to be saleable, and the ‘icequeen’ image didn't hurt either. There was money in it, and now that she was old enough to compromise her old, fiery ideals with no more than a shrug and a laugh, she was ready to make it, ready, even, to appear on T V talk-shows to fend off, with risque hints, the inevitable and unchanging questions about life with the boys at twenty-odd thousand feet. Such high-profile capers sat uneasily alongside the view of herself to which she still fiercely clung: the idea that she was a natural solitary, the most private of women, and that the demands of her business life were ripping her in half. She had her first fight with Gibreel over this, because he said, in his unvarnished way: ‘I guess it's okay to run from the cameras as long as you know they're chasing after you. But suppose they stop? My guess is you'd turn and run the other way.’ Later, when they'd made up, she teased him with her growing stardom (since she became the first sexually attractive blonde to conquer Everest, the noise had increased considerably, she received photographs of gorgeous hunks in the mail, also invitations to high life soirees and a quantity of insane abuse): ‘I could be in movies myself now that you've retired. Who knows? Maybe I will.’ To which he responded, shocking her by the force of his words, ‘Over my goddamn dead body.’

In spite of her pragmatic willingness to enter the polluted waters of the real and swim in the general direction of the current, she never lost the sense that some awful disaster was lurking just around the corner – a legacy, this, of her father's and sister's sudden deaths. This hairs-on-neck prickliness had made her a cautious climber, a ‘real percentage man’, as the lads would have it, and as admired friends died on various mountains her caution increased. Away from mountaineering, it gave her, at times, an unrelaxed look, a jumpiness; she acquired the heavily defended air of a fortress preparing for an inevitable assault. This added to her reputation as a frosty berg of a woman; people kept their distance, and, to hear her tell it, she accepted loneliness as the price of solitude. – But there were more contradictions here, for she had, after all, only recently thrown caution overboard when she chose to make the final assault on Everest without oxygen. ‘Aside from all the other implications,’ the agency assured her in its formal letter of congratulations, ‘this humanizes you, it shows you've got that what-the-hell streak, and that's a positive new dimension.’ They were working on it. In the meantime, Allie thought, smiling at Gibreel in tired encouragement as he slipped down towards her lower depths, There's now you. Almost a total stranger and here you've gone and moved right in. God, I even carried you across the threshold, near as makes no difference. Can't blame you for accepting the lift.

He wasn't housetrained. Used to servants, he left clothes, crumbs, used tea-bags where they fell. Worse: he dropped them, actually let them fall where they would need picking up; perfectly, richly unconscious of what he was doing, he went on proving to himself that he, the poor boy from the streets, no longer needed to tidy up after himself. It wasn't the only thing about him that drove her crazy. She'd pour glasses of wine; he'd drink his fast and then, when she wasn't looking, grab hers, placating her with an angelic-faced, ultra-innocent ‘Plenty more, isn't it?’ His bad behaviour around the house. He liked to fart. He complained – actually complained, after she'd literally scooped him out of the snow! – about the smallness of the accommodations. ‘Every time I take two steps my face hits a wall.’ He was rude to telephone callers, really rude, without bothering to find out who they were: automatically, the way film stars were in Bombay when, by some chance, there wasn't a flunkey available to protect them from such intrusions. After Alicja had weathered one such volley of obscene abuse, she said (when her daughter finally got on the end of the phone): ‘Excuse me for mentioning, darling, but your boyfriend is in my opinion a case.’

‘A case, mother?’ This drew out Alicja's grandest voice. She was still capable of grandeur, had a gift for it, in spite of her post-Otto decision to disguise herself as a bag-lady. ‘A case,’ she announced, taking into consideration the fact that Gibreel was an Indian import, ‘of cashew and monkey nuts.’

Allie didn't argue with her mother, being by no means certain that she could continue to live with Gibreel, even if he had crossed the earth, even if he had fallen from the sky. The long term was hard to predict; even the medium term looked cloudy. For the moment, she concentrated on trying to get to know this man who had just assumed, right off, that he was the great love of her life, with a lack of doubt that meant he was either right or off his head. There were plenty of difficult moments. She didn't know what he knew, what she could take for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's doomed chess-player Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there were certain combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him, as a way of explaining by analogy her own (in fact somewhat different) sense of impending catastrophe (which had to do not with recurring patterns but with the inescapability of the unforeseeable), but he fixed her with a hurt stare that told her he'd never heard of the writer, let alone The Defence. Conversely, he surprised her by asking, out of the blue, ‘Why Picabia?’ Adding that it was peculiar, was it not, for Otto Cohen, a veteran of the terror camps, to go in for all that neo-Fascistic love of machinery, brute power, dehu-manization glorified. ‘Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,’ he added, ‘and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.’ Where did you find out about, she began, and faltered because she didn't like the patronizing note she was striking, but he answered without vanity. The first time he'd heard about Marinetti, he said, he'd got the wrong end of the stick and thought Futurism was something to do with puppets. ‘Marionettes, kathputli, at that time I was keen to use advanced puppetry techniques in a picture, maybe to depict demons or other supernormal beings. So I got a book.’ I got a book: Gibreel the autodidact made it sound like an injection. To a girl from a house that revered books – her father had made them all kiss any volume that fell by chance to the floor – and who had reacted by treating them badly, ripping out pages she wanted or didn't like, scribbling and scratching at them to show them who was boss, Gibreel's form of irreverence, non-abusive, taking books for what they offered without feeling the need to genuflect or destroy, was something new; and, she accepted, pleasing. She learned from him. He, however, seemed impervious to any wisdom she might wish to impart, about, for example, the correct place in which to dispose of dirty socks. When she attempted to suggest he ‘did his share’, he went into a profound, injured sulk, expecting to be cajoled back into a good humour. Which, to her disgust, she found herself willing, for the moment at any rate, to do.

The worst thing about him, she tentatively concluded, was his genius for thinking himself slighted, belittled, under attack. It became almost impossible to mention anything to him, no matter how reasonable, no matter how gently put. ‘Go, go, eat air,’ he'd shout, and retire into the tent of his wounded pride. – And the most seductive thing about him was the way he knew instinctively what she wanted, how when he chose he could become the agent of her secret heart. As a result, their sex was literally electric. That first tiny spark, on the occasion of their inaugural kiss, wasn't any one-off. It went on happening, and sometimes while they made love she was convinced she could hear the crackle of electricity all around them; she felt, at times, her hair standing on end. ‘It reminds me of the electric dildo in my father's study,’ she told Gibreel, and they laughed. ‘Am I the love of your life?’ she asked quickly, and he answered, just as quickly: ‘Of course.’

She admitted to him early on that the rumours about her unattainability, even frigidity, had some basis in fact. ‘After Yel died, I took on that side of her as well.’ She hadn't needed, any more, to hurl lovers into her sister's face. ‘Plus I really wasn't enjoying it any more. It was mostly revolutionary socialists at the time, making do with me while they dreamed about the heroic women they'd seen on their three-week trips to Cuba. Never touched them, of course; the combat fatigues and ideological purity scared them silly. They came home humming “Guantanamera” and rang me up.’ She opted out. ‘I thought, let the best minds of my generation soliloquize about power over some other poor woman's body, I'm off.’ She began climbing mountains, she used to say when she began, ‘because I knew they'd never follow me up there. But then I thought, bullshit, I didn't do it for them; I did it for me.’

For an hour every evening she would run barefoot up and down the stairs to the street, on her toes, for the sake of her fallen arches. Then she'd collapse into a heap of cushions, looking enraged, and he'd flap helplessly around, usually ending up pouring her a stiff drink: Irish whiskey, mostly. She had begun drinking a fair bit as the reality of her foot problem sank in. (‘For Christ's sake keep the feet quiet,’ a voice from the PR agency told her surreally on the phone. ‘If they get out it's finite, curtains, sayonara, go home, goodnight.’) On their twenty-first night together, when she had worked her way through five doubles of Jameson's, she said: ‘Why I really went up there. Don't laugh: to escape from good and evil.’ He didn't laugh. ‘Are mountains above morality, in your estimation?’ he asked seriously. ‘This's what I learned in the revolution,’ she went on. ‘This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that got abolsh, abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story. Got me? Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's going on. So how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what it is. So what I thought was, you can either break your heart trying to work it all out, or you can go sit on a mountain, because that's where all the truth went, believe it or not, it just upped and ran away from these cities where even the stuff under our feet is all made up, a lie, and it hid up there in the thin thin air where the liars don't dare come after it in case their brains explode. It's up there all right. I've been there. Ask me.’ She fell asleep; he carried her to the bed.

After the news of his death in the plane crash reached her, she had tormented herself by inventing him: by speculating, that is to say, about her lost lover. He had been the first man she'd slept with in more than five years: no small figure in her life. She had turned away from her sexuality, her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed by it; that it was for her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark continent to map, and she wasn't prepared to go that way, be that explorer, chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet. But she'd never shaken off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might be like to be wholly possessed by that archetypal, capitalized djinn, the yearning towards, the blurring of the boundaries of the self, the unbuttoning, until you were open from your adam's-apple to your crotch: just words, because she didn't know the thing. Suppose he had come to me, she dreamed. I could have learned him, step by step, climbed him to the very summit. Denied mountains by my weak-boned feet, I'd have looked for the mountain in him: establishing base camp, sussing out routes, negotiating ice-falls, crevasses, overhangs. I'd have assaulted the peak and seen the angels dance. O, but he's dead, and at the bottom of the sea.

Then she found him. – And maybe he'd invented her, too, a little bit, invented someone worth rushing out of one's old life to love. – Nothing so remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together: or not. It works out or it doesn't. But to suppose that Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia Cone could have gone along so familiar a path is to make the mistake of thinking their relationship ordinary. It wasn't; didn't have so much as a shot at ordinariness.

It was a relationship with serious flaws.

(‘The modern city,’ Otto Cone on his hobbyhorse had lectured his bored family at table, ‘is the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus. One universe, on a zebra crossing, is caught for an instant, blinking like a rabbit, in the headlamps of a motor-vehicle in which an entirely alien and contradictory continuum is to be found. And as long as that's all, they pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their hats in some hotel corridor, it's not so bad. But if they meet! It's uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom.’ – ‘As a matter of fact, dearest,’ Alicja said dryly, ‘I often feel a little incompatible myself.’)

The flaws in the grand passion of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta were as follows: her secret fear of her secret desire, that is, love; – owing to which she was wont to retreat from, even hit violently out at, the very person whose devotion she sought most; – and the deeper the intimacy, the harder she kicked; – so that the other, having been brought to a place of absolute trust, and having lowered all his defences, received the full force of the blow, and was devastated; – which, indeed, is what befell Gibreel Farishta, when after three weeks of the most ecstatic lovemaking either of them had ever known he was told without ceremony that he had better find himself somewhere to live, pretty sharpish, because she, Allie, required more elbow-room than was presently available; —

– and his overweening possessiveness and jealousy, of which he himself had been wholly unaware, owing to his never previously having thought of a woman as a treasure that had to be guarded at all costs against the piratical hordes who would naturally be trying to purloin her; —and of which more will be said almost instantly; —

– and the fatal flaw, namely, Gibreel Farishta's imminent realization – or, if you will, insane idea, – that he truly was nothing less than an archangel in human form, and not just any archangel, but the Angel of the Recitation, the most exalted (now that Shaitan had fallen) of them all.

They had spent their days in such isolation, wrapped up in the sheets of their desires, that his wild, uncontrollable jealousy, which, as Iago warned, ‘doth mock the meat it feeds on', did not instantly come to light. It first manifested itself in the absurd matter of the trio of cartoons which Allie had hung in a group by her front door, mounted in cream and framed in old gold, all bearing the same message, scrawled across the lower right-hand corner of the cream mounts: To A., in hopes, from Brunei. When Gibreel noticed these inscriptions he demanded an explanation, pointing furiously at the cartoons with fully extended arm, while with his free hand he clutched a bedsheet around him (he was attired in this informal manner because he'd decided the time was ripe for him to make a full inspection of the premises, can't spend one's whole life on one's back, or even yours, he'd said); Allie, forgivably, laughed. ‘You look like Brutus, all murder and dignity,’ she teased him. ‘The picture of an honourable man.’ He shocked her by shouting violently: ‘Tell me at once who the bastard is.’

‘You can't be serious,’ she said. Jack Brunei worked as an animator, was in his late fifties and had known her father. She had never had the faintest interest in him, but he had taken to courting her by the strangulated, wordless method of sending her, from time to time, these graphic gifts.

‘Why you didn't throw them in the wpb?’ Gibreel howled. Allie, still not fully understanding the size of his rage, continued lightly. She had kept the pictures because she liked them. The first was an old Punch cartoon in which Leonardo da Vinci stood in his atelier, surrounded by pupils, and hurled the Mona Lisa like a frisbee across the room. ‘Mark my words,’ he said in the caption, ‘one day men shall fly to Padua in such as these.’ In the second frame there was a page from Toff, a British boys’ comic dating from World War II. It had been thought necessary in a time when so many children became evacuees to create, by way of explanation, a comic-strip version of events in the adult world. Here, therefore, was one of the weekly encounters between the home team – the Toff (an appalling monocled child in Etonian bum-freezer and pin-striped trousers) and cloth-capped, scuff-kneed Bert – and the dastardly foe, Hawful Hadolf and the Nastiparts (a bunch of thuggish fiends, each of whom had one extremely nasty part, e.g. a steel hook instead of a hand, feet like claws, teeth that could bite through your arm). The British team invariably came out on top. Gibreel, glancing at the framed comic, was scornful. ‘You bloody Angrez. You really think like this; this is what the war was really like for you.’ Allie decided not to mention her father, or to tell Gibreel that one of the Toff artists, a virulently anti-Nazi Berlin man named Wolf, had been arrested one day and led away for internment along with all the other Germans in Britain, and, according to Brunei, his colleagues hadn't lifted a finger to save him. ‘Heartlessness,’ Jack had reflected. ‘Only thing a cartoonist really needs. What an artist Disney would have been if he hadn't had a heart. It was his fatal flaw.’ Brunel ran a small animation studio named Scarecrow Productions, after the character in The Wizard of Oz.

The third frame contained the last drawing from one of the films of the great Japanese animator Yoji Kuri, whose uniquely cynical output perfectly exemplified Brunei's unsentimental view of the cartoonist's art. In this film, a man fell off a skyscraper; a fire engine rushed to the scene and positioned itself beneath the falling man. The roof slid back, permitting a huge steel spike to emerge, and, in the still on Allie's wall, the man arrived head first and the spike rammed into his brain. ‘Sick,’ Gibreel Farishta pronounced.

These lavish gifts having failed to get results, Brunei was obliged to break cover and show up in person. He presented himself at Allie's apartment one night, unannounced and already considerably the worse for alcohol, and produced a bottle of dark rum from his battered briefcase. At three the next morning he had drunk the rum but showed no signs of leaving. Allie, going ostentatiously off to the bathroom to brush her teeth, returned to find the animator standing stark naked in the centre of her living-room rug, revealing a surprisingly shapely body covered by an inordinate amount of thick grey hair. When he saw her he spread his arms and cried: ‘Take me! Do what you will!’ She made him dress, as kindly as she could, and put him and his briefcase gently out of the door. He never returned.

Allie told Gibreel the story, in an open, giggling manner that suggested she was entirely unprepared for the storm it would unleash. It is possible, however (things had been rather strained between them in recent days) that her innocent air was a little disingenuous, that she was almost hoping for him to begin the bad behaviour, so that what followed would be his responsibility, not hers ... at any rate, Gibreel blew sky-high, accusing Allie of having falsified the story's ending, suggesting that poor Brunei was still waiting by his telephone and that she intended to ring him the moment his, Farishta's, back was turned. Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all. As this terrible emotion took charge of him, he found himself improvising a whole series of lovers for her, imagining them to be waiting around every corner. She had used the Brunei story to taunt him, he shouted, it was a deliberate and cruel threat. ‘You want men down on their knees,’ he screamed, every scrap of his self-control long gone, ‘Me, I do not kneel.’

That's it,’ she said. ‘Out.’

His anger redoubled. Clutching his toga around him, he stalked into the bedroom to dress, putting on the only clothes he possessed, including the scarlet-lined gabardine overcoat and grey felt trilby of Don Enrique Diamond; Allie stood in the doorway and watched. ‘Don't think I'm coming back,’ he yelled, knowing his rage was more than sufficient to get him out of the door, waiting for her to begin to calm him down, to speak softly, to give him a way of staying. But she shrugged and walked away, and it was then, at that precise moment of his greatest wrath, that the boundaries of the earth broke, he heard a noise like the bursting of a dam, and as the spirits of the world of dreams flooded through the breach into the universe of the quotidian, Gibreel Farishta saw God.

For Blake's Isaiah, God had simply been an immanence, an incorporeal indignation; but Gibreel's vision of the Supreme Being was not abstract in the least. He saw, sitting on the bed, a man of about the same age as himself, of medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard cropped close to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the apparition was balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and wore glasses. This was not the Almighty he had expected. ‘Who are you?’ he asked with interest. (Of no interest to him now was Alleluia Cone, who had stopped in her tracks on hearing him begin to talk to himself, and who was now observing him with an expression of genuine panic.)

‘Ooparvala,’ the apparition answered. ‘The Fellow Upstairs.’

‘How do I know you're not the other One,’ Gibreel asked craftily, ‘Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath?’

A daring question, eliciting a snappish reply. This Deity might look like a myopic scrivener, but It could certainly mobilize the traditional apparatus of divine rage. Clouds massed outside the window; wind and thunder shook the room. Trees fell in the Fields. ‘We're losing patience with you, Gibreel Farishta. You've doubted Us just about long enough.’ Gibreel hung his head, blasted by the wrath of God. ‘We are not obliged to explain Our nature to you,’ the dressing-down continued. ‘Whether We be multiform, plural, representing the union-by-hybridization of such opposites as Oopar and Neechay, or whether We be pure, stark, extreme, will not be resolved here.’ The disarranged bed on which his Visitor had rested Its posterior (which, Gibreel now observed, was glowing faintly, like the rest of the Person) was granted a highly disapproving glance. ‘The point is, there will be no more dilly-dallying. You wanted clear signs of Our existence? We sent Revelation to fill your dreams: in which not only Our nature, but yours also, was clarified. But you fought against it, struggling against the very sleep in which We were awakening you. Your fear of the truth has finally obliged Us to expose Ourself, at some personal inconvenience, in this woman's residence at an advanced hour of the night. It is time, now, to shape up. Did We pluck you from the skies so that you could boff and spat with some (no doubt remarkable) flatfoot blonde? There's work to be done.’

‘I am ready,’ Gibreel said humbly. ‘I was just going, anyway.’

‘Look,’ Allie Cone was saying, ‘Gibreel, goddamn it, never mind the fight. Listen: I love you.’

There were only the two of them in the apartment now. ‘I have to go,’ Gibreel said, quietly. She hung upon his arm. ‘Truly, I don't think you're really well.’ He stood upon his dignity. ‘Having commanded my exit, you no longer have jurisdiction re my health.’ He made his escape. Alleluia, trying to follow him, was afflicted by such piercing pains in both feet that, having no option, she fell weeping to the floor: like an actress in a masala movie; or Rekha Merchant on the day Gibreel walked out on her for the last time. Like, anyhow, a character in a story of a kind in which she could never have imagined she belonged.

The meteorological turbulence engendered by God's anger with his servant had given way to a clear, balmy night presided over by a fat and creamy moon. Only the fallen trees remained to bear witness to the might of the now-departed Being. Gibreel, trilby jammed down on his head, money-belt firmly around his waist, hands deep in gabardine – the right hand feeling, in there, the shape of a paperback book – was giving silent thanks for his escape. Certain now of his archangelic status, he banished from his thoughts all remorse for his time of doubting, replacing it with a new resolve: to bring this metropolis of the ungodly, this latter-day ‘Ad or Thamoud, back to the knowledge of God, to shower upon it the blessings of the Recitation, the sacred Word. He felt his old self drop from him, and dismissed it with a shrug, but chose to retain, for the time being, his human scale. This was not the time to grow until he filled the sky from horizon to horizon – though that, too, would surely come before long.

The city's streets coiled around him, writhing like serpents. London had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future. He wandered its streets through that night, and the next day, and the next night, and on until the light and dark ceased to matter. He no longer seemed to need food or rest, but only to move constantly through that tortured metropolis whose fabric was now utterly transformed, the houses in the rich quarters being built of solidified fear, the government buildings partly of vainglory and partly of scorn, and the residences of the poor of confusion and material dreams. When you looked through an angel's eyes you saw essences instead of surfaces, you saw the decay of the soul blistering and bubbling on the skins of people in the street, you saw the generosity of certain spirits resting on their shoulders in the form of birds. As he roamed the metamorphosed city he saw bat-winged imps sitting on the corners of buildings made of deceits and glimpsed goblins oozing wormily through the broken tilework of public urinals for men. As once the thirteenth-century German monk Richalmus would shut his eyes and instantly see clouds of minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on earth, dancing like dust-specks in the sunlight, so now Gibreel with open eyes and by the light of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his adversary, his – to give the old word back its original meaning – shaitan.

Long before the Flood, he remembered – now that he had reassumed the role of archangel, the full range of archangelic memory and wisdom was apparently being restored to him, little by little – a number of angels (the names Semjaza and Azazel came first to mind) had been flung out of Heaven because they had been lusting after the daughters of men, who in due course gave birth to an evil race of giants. He began to understand the degree of the danger from which he had been saved when he departed from the vicinity of Alleluia Cone. O most false of creatures! O princess of the powers of the air! – When the Prophet, on whose name be peace, had first received the wahi, the Revelation, had he not feared for his sanity? – And who had offered him the reassuring certainty he needed? – Why, Khadija, his wife. She it was who convinced him that he was not some raving crazy but the Messenger of God. – Whereas what had Alleluia done for him? You're not yourself, I don't think you're really well. – O bringer of tribulation, creatrix of strife, of soreness of the heart! Siren, temptress, fiend in human form! That snowlike body with its pale, pale hair: how she had used it to fog his soul, and how hard he had found it, in the weakness of his flesh, to resist... enmeshed by her in the web of a love so complex as to be beyond comprehension, he had come to the very edge of the ultimate Fall. How beneficent, then, the Over-Entity had been to him! – He saw now that the choice was simple: the infernal love of the daughters of men, or the celestial adoration of God. He had found it possible to choose the latter; in the nick of time.

He drew out of the right-hand pocket of his overcoat the book that had been there ever since his departure from Rosa's house a millennium ago: the book of the city he had come to save, Proper London, capital of Vilayet, laid out for his benefit in exhaustive detail, the whole bang shoot. He would redeem this city: Geographers’ London, all the way from A to Z.

On a street corner in a part of town once known for its population of artists, radicals and men in search of prostitutes, and now given over to advertising personnel and minor film producers, the Archangel Gibreel chanced to see a lost soul. It was young, male, tall, and of extreme beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair oiled down and parted in the centre; its teeth were made of gold. The lost soul stood at the very edge of the pavement, its back to the road, leaning forwards at a slight angle and clutching, in its right hand, something it evidently held very dear. Its behaviour was striking: first it would stare fiercely at the thing it held in its hand, and then look around, whipping its head from right to left, scrutinizing with blazing concentration the faces of the passers-by. Reluctant to approach too quickly, Gibreel on a first pass saw that the object the lost soul was clutching was a small passport-sized photograph. On his second pass he went right up to the stranger and offered his help. The other eyed him suspiciously, then thrust the photograph under his nose. ‘This man,’ he said, jabbing at the picture with a long index finger. ‘Do you know this man?’

When Gibreel saw, staring out of the photograph, a young man of extreme beauty, with a strikingly aquiline nose and longish black hair, oiled, with a central parting, he knew that his instincts had been correct, that here, standing on a busy street corner watching the crowd in case he saw himself going by, was a Soul in search of its mislaid body, a spectre in desperate need of its lost physical casing – for it is known to archangels that the soul or ka cannot exist (once the golden cord of light linking it to the body is severed) for more than a night and a day. ‘I can help you,’ he promised, and the young soul looked at him in wild disbelief. Gibreel leaned forward, grasped the ka's face between his hands, and kissed it firmly upon the mouth, for the spirit that is kissed by an archangel regains, at once, its lost sense of direction, and is set upon the true and righteous path. – The lost soul, however, had a most surprising reaction to being favoured by an archangelic kiss. ‘Sod you,’ it shouted, ‘I may be desperate, mate, but I'm not that desperate,’ – after which, manifesting a solidity most unusual in a disembodied spirit, it struck the Archangel of the Lord a resounding blow upon the nose with the very fist in which its image was clasped; – with disorienting, and bloody, results.

When his vision cleared, the lost soul had gone but there, floating on her carpet a couple of feet off the ground, was Rekha Merchant, mocking his discomfiture. ‘Not such a great start,’ she snorted. ‘Archangel my foot. Gibreel janab, you're off your head, take it from me. You played too many winged types for your own good. I wouldn't trust that Deity of yours either, if I were you,’ she added in a more conspiratorial tone, though Gibreel suspected that her intentions remained satirical. ‘He hinted as much himself, fudging the answer to your Oopar—Neechay question like he did. This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam – O, children of Adam, let not the Devil seduce you, as he expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from them their clothing that he might show them their shame– but go back a bit and you see that it's a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century BC, asks: “Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?” Also Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn't until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century BC, that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’ This speech was one of which the ‘real’ Rekha would plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition and never having evinced the faintest interest in comparative religion or, of all things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever since he fell from Bostan was, Gibreel knew, not real in any objective, psychologically or corporeally consistent manner. – What, then, was she? It would be easy to imagine her as a thing of his own making – his own accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would account for her ease with the arcana. – But how had he himself come by such knowledge? Had he truly, in days gone by, possessed it and then lost it, as his memory now informed him? (He had a nagging notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix his thoughts upon his ‘dark age’, that is to say the period during which he had unaccountably come to disbelieve in his angelhood, he was faced with a thick bank of clouds, through which, peer and blink as he might, he could make out little more than shadows.) – Or could it be that the material now filling his thoughts, the echo, to give but a single example, of how his lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon had found the adversary squat like a toad by Eve's ear in Eden, using his wiles ‘to reach/The organs of her fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams’, had in fact been planted in his head by that same ambiguous Creature, that Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia's boudoir, and awoken him from his long waking sleep? – Then Rekha, too, was perhaps an emissary of this God, an external, divine antagonist and not an inner, guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.

His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully. He had never been able to tolerate pain. ‘Always a cry-baby,’ Rekha laughed in his face, Shaitan had understood more:

He couldn't have put it better. A person who found himself in an inferno would do anything, rape, extortion, murder, felo de se, whatever it took to get out ... he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose as Rekha, still present on her flying rug, and intuiting his ascent (descent?) into the realm of metaphysical speculation, attempted to get things back on to more familiar ground. ‘You should have stuck with me,’ she opined. ‘You could have loved me, good and proper. I knew how to love. Not everybody has the capacity for it; I do, I mean did. Not like that self-centred blonde bombshell thinking secretly about having a child and not even mentioning same to you. Not like your God, either; it's not like the old days, when such Persons took proper interest.’

This needed contesting on several grounds. ‘You were married, start to finish,’ he replied. ‘Ball-bearings. I was your side dish. Nor will I, who waited so long for Him to manifest Himself, now speak poorly of Him post facto, after the personal appearance. Finally, what's all this baby-talk? You'll go to any extreme, seems like.’

‘You don't know what hell is,’ she snapped back, dropping the mask of her imperturbability. ‘But, buster, you sure will. If you'd ever said, I'd have thrown over that ball-bearings bore in two sees, but you kept mum. Now I'll see you down there: Neechayvala's Hotel.’

‘You'd never have left your children,’ he insisted. ‘Poor fellows, you even threw them down first when you jumped.’ That set her off. ‘Don't you talk! To dare to talk! Mister, I'll cook your goose! I'll fry your heart and eat it up on toast! – And as to your Snow White princess, she is of the opinion that a child is a mother's property only, because men may come and men may go but she goes on forever, isn't it? You're only the seed, excuse me, she is the garden. Who asks a seed permission to plant? What do you know, damn fool Bombay boy messing with the modern ideas of mames.’

‘And you,’ he came back strongly. ‘Did you, for example, ask their Daddyji's permission before you threw his kiddies off the roof?’

She vanished in fury and yellow smoke, with an explosion that made him stagger and knocked the hat off his head (it lay upturned on the pavement at his feet). She unleashed, too, an olfactory effect of such nauseous potency as to make him gag and retch. Emptily: for he was perfectly void of all foodstuffs and liquids, having partaken of no nourishment for many days. Ah, immortality, he thought: ah, noble release from the tyranny of the body. He noticed that there were two individuals watching him curiously, one a violent-looking youth in studs and leather, with a rainbow Mohican haircut and a streak of face-paint lightning zig-zagging down his nose, the other a kindly middle-aged woman in a headscarf. Very well then: seize the day. ‘Repent,’ he cried passionately. ‘For I am the Archangel of the Lord.’

‘Poor bastard,’ said the Mohican and threw a coin into Farishta's fallen hat. He walked on; the kindly, twinkling lady, however, leaned confidentially towards Gibreel and passed him a leaflet. ‘You'll be interested in this.’ He quickly identified it as a racist text demanding the ‘repatriation’ of the country's black citizenry. She took him, he deduced, for a white angel. So angels were not exempt from such categories, he wonderingly learned. ‘Look at it this way,’ the woman was saying, taking his silence for uncertainty – and revealing, by slipping into an over-articulated, over-loud mode of delivery, that she thought him not quite pukka, a Levantine angel, maybe, Cypriot or Greek, in need of her best talking-to-the-afflicted voice. ‘If they came over and filled up wherever you come from, well! You wouldn't like that.’

Punched in the nose, taunted by phantoms, given alms instead of reverence, and in divers ways shewn the depths to which the denizens of the city had sunk, the intransigence of the evil manifest there, Gibreel became more determined than ever to commence the doing of good, to initiate the great work of rolling back the frontiers of the adversary's dominion. The atlas in his pocket was his master-plan. He would redeem the city square by square, from Hockley Farm in the north-west corner of the charted area to Chance Wood in the south-east; after which, perhaps, he would celebrate the conclusion of his labours by playing a round of golf at the aptly named course situated at the very edge of the map: Wildernesse.

And somewhere along the way the adversary himself would be waiting. Shaitan, Iblis, or whatever name he had adopted – and in point of fact that name was on the tip of Gibreel's tongue – just as the face of the adversary, horned and malevolent, was still somewhat out of focus... well, it would take shape soon enough, and the name would come back, Gibreel was sure of it, for were not his powers growing every day, was he not the one who, restored to his glory, would hurl the adversary down, once more, into the Darkest Deeps? – That name: what was it? Tch-something? Tchu Tché Tchin Tchow. No matter. All in good time.

But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the cartographers, changing shape at will and without warning, making it impossible for Gibreel to approach his quest in the systematic manner he would have preferred. Some days he would turn a corner at the end of a grand colonnade built of human flesh and covered in skin that bled when scratched, and find himself in an uncharted wasteland, at whose distant rim he could see tall familiar buildings, Wren's dome, the high metallic spark-plug of the Telecom Tower, crumbling in the wind like sandcastles. He would stumble across bewildering and anonymous parks and emerge into the crowded streets of the West End, upon which, to the consternation of the motorists, acid had begun to drip from the sky, burning great holes in the surfaces of the roads. In this pandemonium of mirages he often heard laughter: the city was mocking his impotence, awaiting his surrender, his recognition that what existed here was beyond his powers to comprehend, let alone to change. He shouted curses at his still-faceless adversary, pleaded with the Deity for a further sign, feared that his energies might, in truth, never be equal to the task. In brief, he was becoming the most wretched and bedraggled of archangels, his garments filthy, his hair lank and greasy, his chin sprouting hair in uncontrollable tufts. It was in this sorry condition that he arrived at the Angel Underground.

It must have been early in the morning, because the station staff drifted up as he watched, to unlock and then roll back the metal grille of night. He followed them in, shuffling along, head low, hands deep in pockets (the street atlas had been discarded long ago); and raising his eyes at last, found himself looking into a face on the verge of dissolving into tears.

‘Good morning,’ he ventured, and the young woman in the ticket office responded bitterly, ‘What's good about it, that's what I want to know,’ and now her tears did come, plump, globular and plenteous. ‘There, there, child,’ he said, and she gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You're no priest,’ she opined. He answered, a little tentatively: ‘I am the Angel, Gibreel.’ She began to laugh, as abruptly as she had wept. ‘Only angels roun here hang from the lamp-posts at Christmas. Illuminations. Only the Council swing them by their necks.’ He was not to be put off. ‘I am Gibreel,’ he repeated, fixing her with his eye. ‘Recite.’ And, to her own emphatically expressed astonishment, I cyaan believe I doin this, emptyin my heart to some tramp, I not like this, you know, the ticket clerk began to speak.

Her name was Orphia Phillips, twenty years old, both parents alive and dependent on her, especially now that her fool sister Hyacinth had lost her job as a physiotherapist by ‘gettin up to she nonsense’. The young man's name, for of course there was a young man, was Uriah Moseley. The station had recently installed two gleaming new elevators and Orphia and Uriah were their operators. During rush-hours, when both lifts were working, they had little time for conversation; but for the rest of the day, only one lift was used. Orphia took up her position at the ticket-collection point just along from the elevator-shaft, and Uri managed to spend a good deal of time down there with her, leaning against the door-jamb of his gleaming lift and picking his teeth with the silver toothpick his great-grandfather had liberated from some old-time plantation boss. It was true love. ‘But I jus get carry away,’ Orphia wailed at Gibreel. ‘I always too hasty for sense.’ One afternoon, during a lull, she had deserted her post and stepped up right in front of him as he leaned and picked teeth, and seeing the look in her eye he put away the pick. After that he came to work with a spring in his step; she, too, was in heaven as she descended each day into the bowels of the earth. Their kisses grew longer and more passionate. Sometimes she would not detach himself when the buzzer rang for the lift; Uriah would have to push her back, with a cry of, ‘Cool off, girl, the public.’ Uriah had a vocational attitude to his work. He spoke to her of his pride in his uniform, of his satisfaction at being in the public service, giving his life to society. She thought he sounded a shade pompous, and wanted to say, ‘Uri, man, you jus a elevator boy here,’ but intuiting that such realism would not be well received, she held her troublesome tongue, or, rather, pushed it into his mouth.

Their embraces in the tunnel became wars. Now he was trying to get away, straightening his tunic, while she bit his ear and pushed her hand down inside his trousers. ‘You crazy,’ he said, but she, continuing, inquired: ‘So? You vex?’

They were, inevitably, caught: a complaint was lodged by a kindly lady in headscarf and tweeds. They had been lucky to keep their jobs. Orphia had been ‘grounded’, deprived of elevator-shafts and boxed into the ticket booth. Worse still, her place had been taken by the station beauty, Rochelle Watkins. ‘I know what goin on,’ she cried angrily. ‘I see Rochelle expression when she come up, fixin up her hair an all o’ dat.’ Uriah, nowadays, avoided Orphia's eyes.

‘Can't figure out how you get me to tell you me business,’ she concluded, uncertainly. ‘You not no angel. That is for sure.’ But she was unable, try as she might, to break away from his transfixing gaze. ‘I know,’ he told her, ‘what is in your heart.’

He reached in through the booth's window and took her unresisting hand. – Yes, this was it, the force of her desires filling him up, enabling him to translate them back to her, making action possible, allowing her to say and do what she most profoundly required; this was what he remembered, this quality of being joined to the one to whom he appeared, so that what followed was the product of their joining. At last, he thought, the archangelic functions return. – Inside the ticket booth, the clerk Orphia Phillips had her eyes closed, her body had slumped down in her chair, looking slow and heavy, and her lips were moving. – And his own, in unison with hers. – There. It was done.

At this moment the station manager, a little angry man with nine long hairs, fetched from ear-level, plastered across his baldness, burst like a cuckoo from his little door. ‘What's your game?’ he shouted at Gibreel. ‘Get out of it before I call the police.’ Gibrcel stayed where he was. The station manager saw Orphia emerging from her trance and began to shriek. ‘You, Phillips. Never saw the like. Anything in trousers, but this is ridiculous. All my born days. And nodding off on the job, the idea.’ Orphia stood up, put on her raincoat, picked up her folding umbrella, emerged from ticket booth. ‘Leaving public property unattended. You get back in there this minute, or it's your job, sure as eggsis.’ Orphia headed for the spiral stairs and moved towards the lower depths. Deprived of his employee, the manager swung round to face Gibreel. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Eff off. Go crawl back under your stone.’

‘I am waiting,’ replied Gibreel with dignity, ‘for the lift.’

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Orphia Phillips turning a corner saw Uriah Moseley leaning against the ticket-collection booth in that way he had, and Rochelle Watkins simpering with delight. But Orphia knew what to do. ‘You let ‘Chelle feel you toothpick yet, Uri?’ she sang out. ‘She'd surely love to hold it.’

They both straightened up, stung. Uriah began blustering: ‘Don't be so common now, Orphia,’ but her eyes stopped him in his tracks. Then he began to walk towards her, dreamily, leaving Rochelle flat. ‘Thas right, Uri,’ she said softly, never looking away from him for an instant. ‘Come along now. Come to momma.’ Now walk backwards to the lift and just suck him right in there, and after that it's up and away we go. – But something was wrong here. He wasn't walking any more. Rochelle Watkins was standing beside him, too damn close, and he'd come to a halt. ‘You tell her, Uriah,’ Rochelle said. ‘Her stupid obeah don't signify down here.’ Uriah was putting an arm around Rochelle Watkins. This wasn't the way she'd dreamed it, the way she'd suddenly been certain-sure it would be, after that Gibreel took her hand, just like that, as if they were intended; wee-yurd, she thought; what was happening to her? She advanced. – ‘Get her offa me, Uriah,’ Rochelle shouted. ‘She mashin up me uniform and all.’ – Now Uriah, holding the struggling ticket clerk by both wrists, gave out the news: ‘I aks her to get marry!’ – Whereupon the fight went out of Orphia. Beaded plaits no longer whirled and clicked. ‘So you out of order, Orphia Phillips,’ Uriah continued, puffing somewhat. ‘And like the lady say, no obeah na change nutten.’ Orphia, also breathing heavily, her clothes disarranged, flopped down on the floor with her back to the curved tunnel wall. The noise of a train pulling in came up towards them; the affianced couple hurried to their posts, tidying themselves up, leaving Orphia where she sat. ‘Girl,’ Uriah Moseley offered by way of farewell, ‘you too damn outrageous for me.’ Rochelle Watkins blew Uriah a kiss from her ticket-collection booth; he, lounging against his lift, picked his teeth. ‘Home cooking,’ Rochelle promised him. ‘And no surprises.’

‘You filthy bum,’ Orphia Phillips screamed at Gibreel after walking up the two hundred and forty-seven steps of the spiral staircase of defeat. ‘You no good devil bum. Who ask you to mash up me life so?’

Even the halo has gone out, like a broken bulb, and I don't know where's the store. Gibreel on a bench in the small park near the station meditated over the futility of his efforts to date. And found blasphemies surfacing once again: if the dabba had the wrong markings and so went to incorrect recipient, was the dabbawalla to blame? If special effect – travelling mat, or such – didn't work, and you saw the blue outline shimmering at the edge of the flying fellow, how to blame the actor? Bythe-sametoken, if his angeling was proving insufficient, whose fault, please, was this? His, personally, or some other Personage? – Children were playing in the garden of his doubting, among the midge-clouds and rosebushes and despair. Grandmother's footsteps, ghostbusters, tag. Ellowen deeowen, London. The fall of angels, Gibreel reflected, was not the same kettle as the Tumble of Woman and Man. In the case of human persons, the issue had been morality. Of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they shouldst not eat, and ate. Woman first, and at her suggestion man, acquired the verboten ethical standards, tastily apple-flavoured: the serpent brought them a value system. Enabling them, among other things, to judge the Deity Itself, making possible in good time all the awkward inquiries: why evil? Why suffering? Why death? – So, out they went. It didn't want Its pretty creatures getting above their station. – Children giggled in his face: something straaange in the neighbourhood. Armed with zapguns, they made as if to bust him like some common, lowdown spook. Come away from there, a woman commanded, a tightly groomed woman, white, a redhead, with a broad stripe of freckles across the middle of her face; her voice was full of distaste. Did you hear me? Now!– Whereas the angels' crash was a simple matter of power: a straightforward piece of celestial police work, punishment for rebellion, good and tough ‘pour encourager les autres’. – Then how unconfident of Itself this Deity was, Who didn't want Its finest creations to know right from wrong; and Who reigned by terror, insisting upon the unqualified submission of even Its closest associates, packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of Hell... he checked himself. These were satanic thoughts, put into his head by Iblis-Beelzebub-Shaitan. If the Entity were still punishing him for his earlier lapse of faith, this was no way to earn remission. He must simply continue until, purified, he felt his full potency restored. Emptying his mind, he sat in the gathering darkness and watched the children (now at some distance) play. Ip-dip-sky-blue who's-there-not-you not-because-you're-dirty not-because-you're-clean, and here, he was sure, one of the boys, a grave eleven-year-old with outsize eyes, stared straight at him: my-mother-says you're-the-fairy-queen.

Rekha Merchant materialized, all jewels and finery. ‘Bachchas are making rude rhymes about you now, Angel of the Lord,’ she gibed. ‘Even that little ticket-girl back there, she isn't so impressed. Still doing badly, baba, looks like to me.’

On this occasion, however, the spirit of the suicide Rekha Merchant had not come merely to mock. To his astonishment she claimed that his many tribulations had been of her making: ‘You imagine there is only your One Thing in charge?’ she cried. ‘Well, lover-boy, let me put you wise.’ Her smart-alec Bombay English speared him with a sudden nostalgia for his lost city, but she wasn't waiting for him to regain his composure. ‘Remember that I died for love of you, you creepo; this gives me rights. In particular, to be revenged upon you, by totally bungling up your life. A man must suffer for causing a lover's leap; don't you think so? That's the rule, anyway. For so long now I've turned you inside out; now I'm just fed up. Don't forget how I was so good at forgiving! You liked it also, na? Therefore I have come to say that compromise solution is always possible. You want to discuss it, or you prefer to go on being lost in this craziness, becoming not an angel but a down-and-out hobo, a stupid joke?’

Gibreel asked: ‘What compromise?’

‘What else?’ she replied, her manner transformed, all gentleness, with a shine in her eyes. ‘My farishta, a so small thing.’

If he would only say he loved her:

If he would only say it, and, once a week, when she came to lie with him, show his love:

If on a night of his choice it could be as it was during the ballbearings-man's absences on business:

‘Then I will terminate the insanities of the city, with which I am persecuting you; nor will you be possessed, any longer, by this crazy notion of changing, redeeming the city like something left in a pawnshop; it'll all be calm-calm; you can even live with your paleface mame and be the greatest film star in the world; how could I be jealous, Gibreel, when I'm already dead, I don't want you to say I'm as important as her, no, just a second-rank love will do for me, a side-dish amour; the foot in the other boot. How about it, Gibreel, just three-little-words, what do you say?’

Give me time.

‘It isn't even as if I'm asking for something new, something you haven't already agreed to, done, indulged in. Lying with a phantom is not such a bad-bad thing. What about down at that old Mrs. Diamond's – in the boathouse, that night? Quite a tamasha, you don't think so? So: who do you think put it on? Listen: I can take for you any form you prefer; one of the advantages of my condition. You wish her again, that boathouse mame from the stone age? Hey presto. You want the mirror image of your own mountain-climber sweaty tomboy iceberg? Also, allakazoo, allakazam. Who do you think it was, waiting for you after the old lady died?’

All that night he walked the city streets, which remained stable, banal, as if restored to the hegemony of natural laws; while Rekha – floating before him on her carpet like an artiste on a stage, just above head-height – serenaded him with the sweetest of love songs, accompanying herself on an old ivory-sided harmonium, singing everything from the gazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz to the best old film music, such as the defiant air sung by the dancer Anarkali in the presence of the Grand Mughal Akbar in the fifties classic Mughal-e-Azam, – in which she declares and exults in her impossible, forbidden love for the Prince, Salim, – ‘Pyaar kiya to darna kya?’ – That is to say, more or less, why be afraid of love? and Gibreel, whom she had accosted in the garden of his doubt, felt the music attaching strings to his heart and leading him towards her, because what she asked was, just as she said, such a little thing, after all.

He reached the river; and another bench, cast-iron camels supporting the wooden slats, beneath Cleopatra's Needle. Sitting, he closed his eyes. Rekha sang Faiz:

Gibreel saw a man behind his closed eyes: not Faiz, but another poet, well past his heyday, a decrepit sort of fellow. – Yes, that was his name: Baal. What was he doing here? What did he have to say for himself? – Because he was certainly trying to say something; his speech, thick and slurry, made understanding difficult... Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

‘What's the second question?’ Gibreel asked aloud.

Answer the first one first.

Gibreel, opening his eyes at dawn, found Rekha unable to sing, silenced by expectations and uncertainties. He let her have it straight off. ‘It's a trick. There is no God but God. You are neither the Entity nor Its adversary, but only some caterwauling mist. No compromises; I won't do deals with fogs.’ He saw, then, the emeralds and brocades fall from her body, followed by the flesh, until only the skeleton remained, after which that, too, crumbled away; finally, there was a piteous, piercing shriek, as whatever was left of Rekha flew with vanquished fury into the sun.

And did not return: except at – or near – the end.

Convinced that he had passed a test, Gibreel realized that a great weight had lifted from him; his spirits grew lighter by the second, until by the time the sun was in the sky he was literally delirious with joy. Now it could really begin: the tyranny of his enemies, of Rekha and Alleluia Cone and all the women who wished to bind him in the chains of desires and songs, was broken for good; now he could feel light streaming out, once more, from the unseen point just behind his head; and his weight, too, began to diminish. – Yes, he was losing the last traces of his humanity, the gift of flight was being restored to him, as he became ethereal, woven of illumined air. – He could simply step, this minute, off this blackened parapet and soar away above the old grey river; – or leap from any of its bridges and never touch land again. So: it was time to show the city a great sight, for when it perceived the Archangel Gibreel standing in all his majesty upon the western horizon, bathed in the rays of the rising sun, then surely its people would be sore afraid and repent them of their sins.

He began to enlarge his person.

How astonishing, then, that of all the drivers streaming along the Embankment – it was, after all, rush-hour – not one should so much as look in his direction, or acknowledge him! This was in truth a people who had forgotten how to see. And because the relationship between men and angels is an ambiguous one – in which the angels, or mala'ikah, are both the controllers of nature and the intermediaries between the Deity and the human race; but at the same time, as the Quran clearly states, we said unto the angels, be submissive unto Adam, the point being to symbolize man's ability to master, through knowledge, the forces of nature which the angels represented – there really wasn't much that the ignored and infuriated malak Gibreel could do about it. Archangels could only speak when men chose to listen. What a bunch! Hadn't he warned the Over-Entity at the very beginning about this crew of criminals and evildoers? ‘Wilt thou place in the earth such as make mischief in it and shed blood?’ he had asked, and the Being, as usual, replied only that he knew better. Well, there they were, the masters of the earth, canned like tuna on wheels and blind as bats, their heads full of mischief and their newspapers of blood.

It really was incredible. Here appeared a celestial being, all radiance, effulgence and goodness, larger than Big Ben, capable of straddling the Thames colossus-style, and these little ants remained immersed in drive-time radio and quarrels with fellow-motorists. ‘I am Gibreel,’ he shouted in a voice that shook every building on the riverbank: nobody noticed. Not one person came running out of those quaking edifices to escape the earthquake. Blind, deaf and asleep.

He decided to force the issue.

The stream of traffic flowed past him. He took a mighty breath, lifted one gigantic foot, and stepped out to face the cars.

Gibreel Farishta was returned to Allie's doorstep, badly bruised, with many grazes on his arms and face, and jolted into sanity, by a tiny shining gentleman with an advanced stammer who introduced himself with some difficulty as the film producer S.S. Sisodia, ‘known as Whiwhisky because I'm papa partial to a titi tipple; mamadam, my caca card.’ (When they knew each other better, Sisodia would send Allie into convulsions of laughter by rolling up his right trouser-leg, exposing the knee, and pronouncing, while he held his enormous wraparound movie-man glasses to his shin: ‘Self pawpaw portrait.’ He was longsighted to a degree: ‘Don't need help to see moomovies but real life gets too damn cloclose up.’) It was Sisodia's rented limo that hit Gibreel, a slow-motion accident luckily, owing to traffic congestion; the actor ended up on the bonnet, mouthing the oldest line in the movies: Where am I, and Sisodia, seeing the legendary features of the vanished demigod squashed up against the limousine's windshield, was tempted to answer: Baback where you bibi belong: on the iska iska iscreen. – ‘No bobobones broken,’ Sisodia told Allie. ‘A mimi miracle. He ista ista istepped right in fafa front of the wee wee wehicle.’

So you're back, Allie greeted Gibreel silently. Seems this is where you always land up after you fall.

‘Also Scotch-and-Sisodia,’ the film producer reverted to the question of his sobriquets. Tor hoohoo humorous reasons. My fafavourite pup pup poison.’

‘It is very kind of you to bring Gibreel home,’ Allie belatedly got the point. ‘You must allow us to offer you a drink.’

‘Sure! Sure!’ Sisodia actually clapped his hands. ‘For me, for whowhole of heehee Hindi cinema, today is a baba banner day.’

‘You have not heard perhaps the story of the paranoid schizophrenic who, believing himself to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, agreed to undergo a lie-detector test?’ Alicja Cohen, eating gefilte fish hungrily, waved one of Bloom's forks under her daughter's nose. ‘The question they asked him: are you Napoleon? And the answer he gave, smiling wickedly, no doubt: No. So they watch the machine, which indicates with all the insight of modern science that the lunatic is lying.’ Blake again, Allie thought. Then I asked: does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He – i.e. Isaiah – replied. All poets believe that it does. & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. ‘Are you listening to me, young woman? I'm serious here. That gentleman you have in your bed: he requires not your nightly attentions – excuse me but I'll speak plainly, seeing I must – but, to be frank, a padded cell.’

‘You'd do that, wouldn't you,’ Allie hit back. ‘You'd throw away the key. Maybe you'd even plug him in. Burn the devils out of his brain: strange how our prejudices never change.’

‘Hmm,’ Alicja ruminated, adopting her vaguest and most innocent expression in order to infuriate her daughter. ‘What can it harm? Yes, maybe a little voltage, a little dose of the juice...’

‘What he needs is what he's getting, mother. Proper medical supervision, plenty of rest, and something you maybe forgot about.’ She dried suddenly, her tongue knotted, and it was in quite a different, low voice, staring at her untouched salad, that she got out the last word. ‘Love.’

‘Ah, the power of love,’ Alicja patted her daughter's (at once withdrawn) hand. ‘No, it's not what I forgot, Alleluia. It's what you just begun for the first time in your beautiful life to learn. And who do you pick?’ She returned to the attack. ‘An out-to-lunch! A ninety-pennies-in-the-pound! A butterflies-in-the-brainbox! I mean, angels, darling, I never heard the like. Men are always claiming special privileges, but this one is a first.’

‘Mother...’ Allie began, but Alicja's mood had changed again, and this time, when she spoke, Allie was not listening to the words, but hearing the pain they both revealed and concealed, the pain of a woman to whom history had most brutally happened, who had already lost a husband and seen one daughter precede her to what she once, with unforgettable black humour, referred to (she must have read the sports pages, by some chance, to come across the phrase) as an early bath. ‘Allie, my baby,’ Alicja Cohen said, ‘we're going to have to take good care of you.’

One reason why Allie was able to spot that panic-anguish in her mother's face was her recent sighting of the same combination on the features of Gibreel Farishta. After Sisodia returned him to her care, it became plain that Gibreel had been shaken to the very marrow, and there was a haunted look to him, a scarified popeyed quality, that quite pierced her heart. He faced the fact of his mental illness with courage, refusing to play it down or call it by a false name, but his recognition of it had, understandably, cowed him. No longer (for the present, anyway) the ebullient vulgarian for whom she had conceived her ‘grand passion’, he became for her, in this newly vulnerable incarnation, more lovable than ever. She grew determined to lead him back to sanity, to stick it out; to wait out the storm, and conquer the peak. And he was, for the moment, the easiest and most malleable of patients, somewhat dopey as a result of the heavy-duty medication he was being given by the specialists at the Maudsley Hospital, sleeping long hours, and acquiescing, when awake, in all her requests, without a murmur of protest. In alert moments he filled in for her the full background to his illness: the strange serial dreams, and before that the near-fatal breakdown in India. ‘I am no longer afraid of sleep,’ he told her. ‘Because what's happened in my waking time is now so much worse.’ His greatest fear reminded her of Charles II's terror, after his Restoration, of being sent ‘on his travels’ again: ‘I'd give anything only to know it won't happen any more,’ he told her, meek as a lamb.

Lives there who loves his pain? ‘It won't happen,’ she reassured him. ‘You've got the best help there is.’ He quizzed her about money, and, when she tried to deflect the questions, insisted that she withdraw the psychiatric fees from the small fortune stashed in his money-belt. His spirits remained low. ‘Doesn't matter what you say,’ he mumbled in response to her cheery optimisms. ‘The craziness is in here and it drives me wild to think it could get out any minute, right now, and he would be in charge again.’ He had begun to characterize his ‘possessed’, ‘angel’ self as another person: in the Beckettian formula, Not I. He. His very own Mr. Hyde. Allie attempted to argue against such descriptions. ‘It isn't he, it's you, and when you're well, it won't be you any more.’

It didn't work. For a time, however, it looked as though the treatment was going to. Gibreel seemed calmer, more in control; the serial dreams were still there – he would still speak, at night, verses in Arabic, a language he did not know: tilk al-gharaniq al-'ula wa inna shafa'ata-hunna la-turtaja, for example, which turned out to mean (Allie, woken by his sleeptalk, wrote it down phonetically and went with her scrap of paper to the Brickhall mosque, where her recitation made a mullah's hair stand on end under his turban): ‘These are exalted females whose intercession is to be desired’ – but he seemed able to think of these nightshows as separate from himself, which gave both Allie and the Maudsley psychiatrists the feeling that Gibreel was slowly reconstructing the boundary wall between dreams and reality, and was on the road to recovery; whereas in fact, as it turned out, this separation was related to, was the same phenomenon as, his splitting of his sense of himself into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to suppress, but which he also, by characterizing it as other than himself, preserved, nourished, and secretly made strong.

As for Allie, she lost, for a while, the prickly, wrong feeling of being stranded in a false milieu, an alien narrative; caring for Gibreel, investing in his brain, as she put it to herself, fighting to salvage him so that they could resume the great, exciting struggle of their love – because they would probably quarrel all the way to the grave, she mused tolerantly, they'd be two old codgers flapping feebly at one another with rolled-up newspapers as they sat upon the evening verandas of their lives – she felt more closely joined to him each day; rooted, so to speak, in his earth. It was some time since Maurice Wilson had been seen sitting among the chimneypots, calling her to her death.

Mr. ‘Whisky’ Sisodia, that gleaming and charm-packed knee in spectacles, became a regular caller – three or four visits a week – during Gibreel's convalescence, invariably arriving with boxes full of goodies to eat. Gibreel had been literally fasting to death during his ‘angel period’, and the medical opinion was that starvation had contributed in no small degree to his hallucinations. ‘So now we fafatten him up,’ Sisodia smacked his palms together, and once the invalid's stomach was up to it, ‘Whisky’ plied him with delicacies: Chinese sweet-corn and chicken soup, Bombay-style bhel-puri from the new, chic but unfortunately named ‘Pagal Khana’ restaurant whose ‘Crazy Food’ (but the name could also be translated as Madhouse) had grown popular enough, especially among the younger set of British Asians, to rival even the long-standing pre-eminence of the Shaandaar Café, from which Sisodia, not wishing to show unseemly partisanship, also fetched eats – sweetmeats, samosas, chicken patties – for the increasingly voracious Gibreel. He brought, too, dishes made by his own hand, fish curries, raitas, sivayyan, khir, and doled out, along with the edibles, name-dropping accounts of celebrity dinner parties: how Pavarotti had loved Whisky's lassi, and O but that poor James Mason had just adored his spicy prawns. Vanessa, Amitabh, Dustin, Sridevi, Christopher Reeve were all invoked. ‘One soosoo superstar should be aware of the tatastes of his pipi peers.’ Sisodia was something of a legend himself, Allie learned from Gibreel. The most slippery and silver-tongued man in the business, he had made a string of ‘quality’ pictures on microscopic budgets, keeping going for over twenty years on pure charm and nonstop hustle. People on Sisodia projects got paid with the greatest difficulty, but somehow failed to mind. He had once quelled a cast revolt – over pay, inevitably – by whisking the entire unit off for a grand picnic in one of the most fabulous maharajah palaces in India, a place that was normally off limits to all but the high-born elite, the Gwaliors and Jaipurs and Kashmirs. Nobody ever knew how he fixed it, but most members of that unit had since signed up to work on further Sisodia ventures, the pay issue buried beneath the grandeur of such gestures. ‘And if he's needed he is always there,’ Gibreel added. ‘When Charulata, a wonderful dancer-actress he'd often used, needed the cancer treatment, suddenly years of unpaid fees materialized overnight.’

These days, thanks to a string of surprise box-office hits based on old fables drawn from the Katha-Sarit-Sagar compendium – the ‘Ocean of the Streams of Story’, longer than the Arabian Nights and equally as fantasticated – Sisodia was no longer based exclusively in his tiny office on Bombay's Readymoney Terrace, but had apartments in London and New York, and Oscars in his toilets. The story was that he carried, in his wallet, a photograph of the Hong Kong-based kung-phooey producer Run Run Shaw, his supposed hero, whose name he was quite unable to say. ‘Sometimes four Runs, sometimes a sixer,’ Gibreel told Allie, who was happy to see him laugh. ‘But I can't swear. It's only a media rumour.’

Allie was grateful for Sisodia's attentiveness. The famous producer appeared to have limitless time at his disposal, whereas Allie's schedule had just then grown very full. She had signed a promotional contract with a giant chain of freezer-food centres whose advertising agent, Mr. Hal Valance, told Allie during a power breakfast – grapefruit, dry toast, decaf, all at Dorchester prices – that her profile, ‘uniting as it does the positive parameters (for our client) of “coldness” and “cool”, is right on line. Some stars end up being vampires, sucking attention away from the brand name, you understand, but this feels like real synergy.’ So now there were freezer-mart openings to cut ribbons at, and sales conferences, and advertising shots with tubs of softscoop icecream; plus the regular meetings with the designers and manufacturers of her autograph lines of equipment and leisurewear; and, of course, her fitness programme. She had signed on for Mr Joshi's highly recommended martial arts course at the local sports centre, and continued, too, to force her legs to run five miles a day around the Fields, in spite of the soles-on-broken-glass pain. ‘No pop problem,’ Sisodia would send her off with a cheery wave. ‘I will iss iss issit here-only until you return. To be with Gigibreel is for me a pip pip privilege.’ She left him regaling Farishta with his inexhaustible anecdotes, opinions and general chitchat, and when she returned he would still be going strong. She came to identify several major themes; notably, his corpus of statements about The Trouble With The English. The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don't know what it means.’ – ‘The see secret of a dinner party in London is to ow ow outnumber the English. If they're outnumbered they bebehave; otherwise, you're in trouble.’ – ‘Go to the Ché Ché Chamber of Horrors and you'll see what's rah rah wrong with the English. That's what they rereally like, caw corpses in bubloodbaths, mad barbers, etc. etc. etera. Their pay papers full of kinky sex and death. But they tell the whir world they're reserved, ist ist istiff upper lip and so on, and we're ist ist istupid enough to believe.’ Gibreel listened to this collection of prejudices with what seemed like complete assent, irritating Allie profoundly. Were these generalizations really all they saw of England? ‘No,’ Sisodia conceded with a shameless smile. ‘But it feels googood to let this ist ist istuff out.’

By the time the Maudsley people felt able to recommend a major reduction in Gibreel's dosages, Sisodia had become so much a fixture at his bedside, a sort of unofficial, eccentric and amusing layabout cousin, that when he sprung his trap Gibreel and Allie were taken completely by surprise.

He had been in touch with colleagues in Bombay: the seven producers whom Gibreel had left in the lurch when he boarded Air India's Flight 420, Bostan. ‘All are eel, elated by the news of your survival,’ he informed Gibreel. ‘Unf unf unfortunately, question of breach of contract ararises.’ Various other parties were also interested in suing the renascent Farishta for plenty, in particular a starlet named Pimple Billimoria, who alleged loss of earnings and professional damage. ‘Could um amount to curcrores,’ Sisodia said, looking lugubrious. Allie was angry. ‘You stirred up this hornets’ nest.’ she said. ‘I should have known: you were too good to be true.’

Sisodia became agitated. ‘Damn damn damn.’

‘Ladies present,’ Gibreel, still a little drug-woozy, warned; but Sisodia windmilled his arms, indicating that he was trying to force words past his overexcited teeth. Finally: ‘Damage limitation. My intention. Not betrayal, you mumust not thithithink.’ To hear Sisodia tell it, nobody back in Bombay really wanted to sue Gibreel, to kill in court the goose that laid the golden eggs. All parties recognized that the old projects were no longer capable of being restarted: actors, directors, key crew members, even sound stages were otherwise committed. All parties further recognized that Gibreel's return from the dead was an item of a commercial value greater than any of the defunct films; the question was how to utilize it best, to the advantage of all concerned. His landing up in London also suggested the possibility of an international connection, maybe overseas funding, use of non-Indian locations, participation of stars ‘from foreign’, etc.: in short, it was time for Gibreel to emerge from retirement and face the cameras again, ‘There is no chochoice,’ Sisodia explained to Gibreel, who sat up in bed trying to clear his head. ‘If you refuse, they will move against you en bloc, and not even your four four fortune could suffice. Bankruptcy, jajajail, funtoosh.’

Sisodia had talked himself into the hot seat: all the principals had agreed to grant him executive powers in the matter, and he had put together quite a package. The British-based entrepreneur Billy Battuta was eager to invest both in sterling and in ‘blocked rupees’, the non-repatriable profits made by various British film distributors in the Indian subcontinent, which Battuta had taken over in return for cash payments in negotiable currencies at a knockdown (37-point discount) rate. All the Indian producers would chip in, and Miss Pimple Billimoria, to guarantee her silence, was to be offered a showcase supporting role featuring at least two dance numbers. Filming would be spread between three continents – Europe, India, the North African coast. Gibreel got above-the-title billing, and three percentage points of producers’ net profits... ‘Ten,’ Gibreel interrupted, ‘against two of the gross.’ His mind was obviously clearing. Sisodia didn't bat an eyelid. ‘Ten against two,’ he agreed. ‘Pre-publicity campaign to be as fofollows...’

‘But what's the project?’ Allie Cone demanded. Mr. ‘Whisky’ Sisodia beamed from ear to ear. ‘Dear mamadam,’ he said. ‘He will play the archangel, Gibreel.’

The proposal was for a series of films, both historical and contemporary, each concentrating on one incident from the angel's long and illustrious career: a trilogy, at least. ‘Don't tell me.’ Allie said, mocking the small shining mogul. ‘Gibreel in Jahilia, Gibreel Meets the Imam, Gibreel with the Butterfly Girl.’ Sisodia wasn't one bit embarrassed, but nodded proudly. ‘Stostorylines, draft scenarios, cacasting options are already well in haha hand.’ That was too much for Allie. ‘It stinks,’ she raged at him, and he retreated from her, a trembling and placatory knee, while she pursued him, until she was actually chasing him around the apartment, banging into the furniture, slamming doors. ‘It exploits his sickness, has nothing to do with his present needs, and shows an utter contempt for his own wishes. He's retired; can't you people respect that? He doesn't want to be a star. And will you please stand still. I'm not going to eat you.’

He stopped running, but kept a cautious sofa between them. ‘Please see that this is imp imp imp,’ he cried, his stammer crippling his tongue on account of his anxiety. ‘Can the moomoon retire? Also, excuse, there are his seven sig sig sig. Signatures. Committing him absolutely. Unless and until you decide to commit him to a papapa.’ He gave up, sweating freely.

‘A what?’

‘Pagal Khana. Asylum. That would be another wwwway.’ Allie lifted a heavy brass inkwell in the shape of Mount Everest and prepared to hurl it. ‘You really are a skunk,’ she began, but then Gibreel was standing in the doorway, still rather pale, bony and hollow-eyed. ‘Alleluia,’ he said, ‘I am thinking that maybe I want this. Maybe I need to go back to work.’

‘Gibreel sahib! I can't tell you how delighted. A star is reborn.’ Billy Battuta was a surprise: no longer the hair-gel-and-finger-rings society column shark, he was unshowily dressed in brass-buttoned blazer and blue jeans, and instead of the cocksure swagger Allie had expected there was an attractive, almost deferential reticence. He had grown a neat goatee beard which gave him a striking resemblance to the Christ-image on the Turin Shroud. Welcoming the three of them (Sisodia had picked them up in his limo, and the driver, Nigel, a sharp dresser from St Lucia, spent the journey telling Gibreel how many other pedestrians his lightning reflexes had saved from serious injury or death, punctuating these reminiscences with car-phone conversations in which mysterious deals involving amazing sums of money were discussed), Billy had shaken Allie's hand warmly, and then fallen upon Gibreel and hugged him in pure, infectious joy. His companion Mimi Mamoulian was rather less low-key. ‘It's all fixed,’ she announced. ‘Fruit, starlets, paparazzi, talk-shows, rumours, little hints of scandal: everything a world figure requires. Flowers, personal security, zillion-pound contracts. Make yourselves at home.’

That was the general idea, Allie thought. Her initial opposition to the whole scheme had been overcome by Gibreel's own interest, which, in turn, prompted his doctors to go along with it, estimating that his restoration to his familiar milieu – going home, in a way – might indeed be beneficial. And Sisodia's purloining of the dream-narratives he'd heard at Gibreel's bedside could be seen as serendipitous: for once those stories were clearly placed in the artificial, fabricated world of the cinema, it ought to become easier for Gibreel to see them as fantasies, too. That Berlin Wall between the dreaming and waking state might well be more rapidly rebuilt as a result. The bottom line was that it was worth the try.

Things (being things) didn't work out quite as planned. Allie found herself resenting the extent to which Sisodia, Battuta and Mimi moved in on Gibreel's life, taking over his wardrobe and daily schedules, and moving him out of Allie's apartment, declaring that the time for a ‘permanent liaison’ was not yet ripe, ‘imagewise’. After the stint at the Ritz, the movie star was given three rooms in Sisodia's cavernous, designer-chic flat in an old mansion block near Grosvenor Square, all Art Deco marbled floors and scumbling on the walls. Gibreel's own passive acceptance of these changes was, for Allie, the most infuriating aspect of all, and she began to comprehend the size of the step he'd taken when he left behind what was clearly second nature to him, and came hunting for her. Now that he was sinking back into that universe of armed bodyguards and maids with breakfast trays and giggles, would he dump her as dramatically as he had entered her life? Had she helped to engineer a reverse migration that would leave her high and dry? Gibreel stared out of newspapers, magazines, television sets, with many different women on his arm, grinning foolishly. She hated it, but he refused to notice. ‘What are you worrying?’ he dismissed her, while sinking into a leather sofa the size of a small pick-up truck. ‘It's only hoto opportunities: business, that's all.’

Worst of all: he got jealous. As he came off the heavy drugs, and as his work (as well as hers) began to force separations upon them, he began to be possessed, once again, by that irrational, out-of-control suspiciousness which had precipitated the ridiculous quarrel over the Brunei cartoons. Whenever they met he would put her through the mill, interrogating her minutely: where had she been, who had she seen, what did he do, did she lead him on? She felt as if she were suffocating. His mental illness, the new influences in his life, and now this nightly third-degree treatment: it was as though her real life, the one she wanted, the one she was hanging in there and fighting for, was being buried deeper and deeper under this avalanche of wrong-nesses. What about what I need, she felt like screaming, when do I get to set the terms? Driven to the very edge of her self-control, she asked, as a last resort, her mother's advice. In her father's old study in the Moscow Road house – which Alicja had kept just the way Otto liked it, except that now the curtains were drawn back to let in what light England could come up with, and there were flower-vases at strategic points – Alicja at first offered little more than world-weariness. ‘So a woman's life-plans are being smothered by a man's,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘So welcome to your gender. I see it's strange for you to be out of control.’ And Allie confessed: she wanted to leave him, but found she couldn't. Not just because of guilt about abandoning a seriously unwell person; also because of ‘grand passion’, because of the word that still dried her tongue when she tried to say it. ‘You want his child,’ Alicja put her finger on it. At first Allie blazed: ‘I want my child,’ but then, subsiding abruptly, blowing her nose, she nodded dumbly, and was on the verge of tears.

‘You want your head examining is what,’ Alicja comforted her. How long since they had been like this in one another's arms? Too long. And maybe it would be the last time... Alicja hugged her daughter, said: ‘So dry your eyes. Comes now the good news. Your affairs might be shot to ribbons, but your old mother is in better shape.’

There was an American college professor, a certain Boniek, big in genetic engineering. ‘Now don't start, dear, you don't know anything, it's not all Frankenstein and geeps, it has many beneficial applications,’ Alicja said with evident nervousness, and Allie, overcoming her surprise and her own red-rimmed un-happiness, burst into convulsive, liberating sobs of laughter; in which her mother joined. ‘At your age,’ Allie wept, ‘you ought to be ashamed.’ – ‘Well, I'm not,’ the future Mrs. Boniek rejoined. ‘A professor, and in Stanford, California, so he brings the sunshine also. I intend to spend many hours working on my tan.’

When she discovered (a report found by chance in a desk drawer at the Sisodia palazzo) that Gibreel had started having her followed, Allie did, at last, make the break. She scribbled a note – This is killing me – slipped it inside the report, which she placed on the desktop; and left without saying goodbye. Gibreel never rang her up. He was rehearsing, in those days, for his grand public reappearance at the latest in a successful series of stage song-and-dance shows featuring Indian movie stars and staged by one of Billy Battuta's companies at Earls Court. He was to be the unannounced, surprise top-of-the-bill show-stopper, and had been rehearsing dance routines with the show's chorus line for weeks: also reacquainting himself with the art of mouthing to playback music. Rumours of the identity of the Mystery Man or Dark Star were being carefully circulated and monitored by Battuta's promo men, and the Valance advertising agency had been hired to devise a series of ‘teaser’ radio commercials and a local 48-sheet poster campaign. Gibreel's arrival on the Earls Court stage – he was to be lowered from the flies surrounded by clouds of cardboard and smoke – was the intended climax to the English segment of his re-entry into his superstardom; next stop, Bombay. Deserted, as he called it, by Alleluia Cone, he once more ‘refused to crawl’; and immersed himself in work.

The next thing that went wrong was that Billy Battuta got himself arrested in New York for his Satanic sting. Allie, reading about it in the Sunday papers, swallowed her pride and called Gibreel at the rehearsal rooms to warn him against consorting with such patently criminal elements. ‘Battuta's a hood,’ she insisted. ‘His whole manner was a performance, a fake. He wanted to be sure he'd be a hit with the Manhattan dowagers, so he made us his tryout audience. That goatee! And a college blazer, for God's sake: how did we fall for it?’ But Gibreel was cold and withdrawn; she had ditched him, in his book, and he wasn't about to take advice from deserters. Besides, Sisodia and the Battuta promo team had assured him – and he had grilled them about it all right – that Billy's problems had no relevance to the gala night (Filmmela, that was the name) because the financial arrangements remained solid, the monies for fees and guarantees had already been allocated, all the Bombay-based stars had confirmed, and would participate as planned. ‘Plans fifilling up fast,’ Sisodia promised. ‘Shoshow must go on.’

The next thing that went wrong was inside Gibreel.

Sisodia's determination to keep people guessing about this Dark Star meant that Gibreel had to enter the Earls Court stage-door dressed in a burqa. So that even his sex remained a mystery. He was given the largest dressing-room – a black five-pointed star had been stuck on the door – and was unceremoniously locked in by the bespectacled genuform producer. In the dressing-room he found his angel-costume, including a contraption that, when tied around his forehead, would cause lightbulbs to glow behind him, creating the illusion of a halo; and a closed-circuit television, on which he would be able to watch the show – Mithun and Kimi cavorting for the ‘disco diwané’ set; Jayapradha and Rekha (no relation: the megastar, not a figment on a rug) submitting regally to on-stage interviews, in which Jaya divulged her views on polygamy while Rekha fantasized about alternative lives – ‘If I'd been born out of India, I'd have been a painter in Paris'; he-man stunts from Vinod and Dharmendra; Sridevi getting her sari wet – until it was time for him to take up his position on a winch-operated ‘chariot’ high above the stage. There was a cordless telephone, on which Sisodia called to tell him that the house was full – ‘All sorts are here,’ he triumphed, and proceeded to offer Gibreel his technique of crowd analysis: you could tell the Pakistanis because they dressed up to the gills, the Indians because they dressed down, and the Bangladeshis because they dressed badly, ‘all that pupurple and pink and gogo gold gota that they like’ – and which otherwise remained silent; and, finally, a large gift-wrapped box, a little present from his thoughtful producer, which turned out to contain Miss Pimple Billimoria wearing a winsome expression and a quantity of gold ribbon. The movies were in town.

The strange feeling began – that is, returned – when he was in the ‘chariot’, waiting to descend. He thought of himself as moving along a route on which, any moment now, a choice would be offered him, a choice – the thought formulated itself in his head without any help from him – between two realities, this world and another that was also right there, visible but unseen. He felt slow, heavy, distanced from his own consciousness, and realized that he had not the faintest idea which path he would choose, which world he would enter. The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to treat him for schizophrenia; the splitting was not in him, but in the universe. As the chariot began its descent towards the immense, tidal roar that had begun to swell below him, he rehearsed his opening line – My name is Gibreel Farishta, and I'm back – and heard it, so to speak, in stereo, because it, too, belonged in both worlds, with a different meaning in each; – and now the lights hit him, he raised his arms high, he was returning wreathed in clouds, – and the crowd had recognized him, and his fellow-performers, too; people were rising from their seats, every man, woman and child in the auditorium, surging towards the stage, unstoppable, like a sea. – The first man to reach him had time to scream out Remember me, Gibreel? With the six toes? Maslama, sir: John Maslama. I kept secret your presence among us; but yes, I have been speaking out about the coming of the Lord, I have gone before you, a voice crying in the wilderness, the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain– but then he had been dragged away, and the security guards were around Gibreel, they're out of control, it's a fucking riot, you'll have to– but he wouldn't go, because he'd seen that at least half the crowd were wearing bizarre headgear, rubber horns to make them look like demons, as if they were badges of belonging and defiance; – and in that instant when he saw the adversary's sign he felt the universe fork and he stepped down the left-hand path.

The official version of what followed, and the one accepted by all the news media, was that Gibreel Farishta had been lifted out of the danger area in the same winch-operated chariot in which he'd descended, and from which he hadn't had time to emerge; – and that it would therefore have been easy for him to make his escape, from his isolated and unwatched place high above the mêlée. This version proved resilient enough to survive the ‘revelation’ in the Voice that the assistant stage manager in charge of the winch had not, repeat not, set it in motion after it landed; – that, in fact, the chariot remained grounded throughout the riot of the ecstatic film fans; – and that substantial sums of money had been paid to the backstage staff to persuade them to collude in the fabrication of a story which, because totally fictional, was realistic enough for the newspaper-buying public to believe. However, the rumour that Gibreel Farishta had actually levitated away from the Earls Court stage and vanished into the blue under his own steam spread rapidly through the city's Asian population, and was fed by many accounts of the halo that had been seen streaming out from a point just behind his head. Within days of the second disappearance of Gibreel Farishta, vendors of novelties in Brickhall, Wembley and Brixton were selling as many toy haloes (green fluorescent hoops were the most popular) as headbands to which had been affixed a pair of rubber horns.

He was hovering high over London! – Haha, they couldn't touch him now, the devils rushing upon him in that Pandemonium! – He looked down upon the city and saw the English. The trouble with the English was that they were English: damn cold fish! – Living underwater most of the year, in days the colour of night! – Well: he was here now, the great Transformer, and this time there'd be some changes made – the laws of nature are the laws of its transformation, and he was the very person to utilize the same! – Yes, indeed: this time, clarity.

He would show them – yes! – his power. – These powerless English! – Did they not think their history would return to haunt them? – ‘he native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor’ (Fanon). English women no longer bound him; the conspiracy stood exposed! – Then away with all fogs. He would make this land anew. He was the Archangel, Gibreel. – And I'm back!

The face of the adversary hung before him once again, sharpening, clarifying. Moony with a sardonic curl to the lips: but the name still eluded... tcha, like tea? Shah, a king? Or like a (royal? tea?) dance: Shatchacha. – Nearly there. – And the nature of the adversary: self-hating, constructing a false ego, auto-destructive. Fanon again: ‘In this way the individual’ – the Fanonian native – ‘accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior re-stabilization acquires a stony calm.’ – I'll give him stony calm! – Native and settler, that old dispute, continuing now upon these soggy streets, with reversed categories. – It occurred to him now that he was forever joined to the adversary, their arms locked around one another's bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail, as when they fell to earth: when they settled. – As things begin so they continue. – Yes, he was coming closer. – Chichi? Sasa? – My other, my love...

...No! – He floated over parkland and cried out, frightening the birds.—No more of these England-induced ambiguities, these Biblical – Satanic confusions! – Clarity, clarity, at all costs clarity! – This Shaitan was no fallen angel. – Forget those son-of-the-morning fictions; this was no good boy gone bad, but pure evil. Truth was, he wasn't an angel at all! – ‘He was of the djinn, so he transgressed.’ – Quran 18:50, there it was as plain as the day. – How much more straightforward this version was! How much more practical, down-to-earth, comprehensible! – Iblis/Shaitan standing for the darkness, Gibreel for the light.—Out, out with these sentimentalities: joining, locking together, love. Seek and destroy: that was all.

...O most slippery, most devilish of cities! – In which such stark, imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of greys. – How right he'd been, for instance, to banish those Satanico-Biblical doubts of his, – those concerning God's unwillingness to permit dissent among his lieutenants, – for as Iblis/Shaitan was no angel, so there had been no angelic dissidents for the Divinity to repress; – and those concerning forbidden fruit, and God's supposed denial of moral choice to his creations; – for nowhere in the entire Recitation was that Tree called (as the Bible had it) the root of the knowledge of good and evil. It was simply a different Tree! Shaitan, tempting the Edenic couple, called it only ‘the Tree of Immortality’ – and as he was a liar, so the truth (discovered by inversion) was that the banned fruit (apples were not specified) hung upon the Death-Tree, no less, the slayer of men's souls. – What remained now of that morality-fearing God? Where was He to be found? – Only down below, in English hearts. – Which he, Gibreel, had come to transform.

Abracadabra!

Hocus Pocus!

But where should he begin? – Well, then, the trouble with the English was their:

Their:

In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather.

Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. ‘When the day is not warmer than the night,’ he reasoned, ‘when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything – from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs – as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is 50 and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,’ he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, ‘I am going to tropicalize you.’

Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.; better cricketers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to ‘high workrate’ having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks’ homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.

Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires’ disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess.

Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: ‘Let it be.’

Three things happened, fast.

The first was that, as the unimaginably colossal, elemental forces of the transformational process rushed out of his body (for was he not their embodiment?), he was temporarily overcome by a warm, spinning heaviness, a soporific churning (not at all unpleasant) that made him close, just for an instant, his eyes.

The second was that the moment his eyes were shut the horned and goaty features of Mr. Saladin Chamcha appeared, on the screen of his mind, as sharp and well-defined as could be; accompanied, as if it were sub-titled there, by the adversary's name.

And the third thing was that Gibreel Farishta opened his eyes to find himself collapsed, once again, on Alleluia Cone's doorstep, begging her forgiveness, weeping O God, it happened, it really happened again.

She put him to bed; he found himself escaping into sleep, diving headlong into it, away from Proper London and towards Jahma, because the real terror had crossed the broken boundary wall, and stalked his waking hours.

‘A homing instinct: one crazy heading for another, Alicja said when her daughter phoned with the news. ‘You must be putting out a signal, some sort of bleeping thing.’ As usual, she hid her concern beneath wisecracks. Finally she came out with it: This time be sensible, Alleluia, okay? This time the asylum.’

‘We'll see, mother. He's asleep right now.’

‘So he isn't going to wake up?’ Alicja expostulated, then controlled herself. ‘All right, I know, it's your life. Listen, isn t this weather something? They say it could last months: “blocked pattern”, I heard on television, rain over Moscow, while here it s a tropical heatwave. I called Boniek at Stanford and told him: now we have weather in London, too.’