The Satanic Verses (4 page)

           
Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt.

           
He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the
orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy
of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for
re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had
attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the
whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an
amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses.
"But I gave that up," he told his protege, with many suitably
melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns, "after I got the fright of my
bloody life."

           
Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most co-operative of
spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to ask him some big
questions.
Is there a God
, and that glass which had been running round
like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a twitch, completely
phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won't answer that try this one
instead, and I came right out with it,
Is there a Devil
. After that the
glass―baprebap!―began to shake―catch your
ears!―slowslow at first, then faster-faster, like a jelly, until it
jumped!―ai-hai!―up from the table, into the air, fell down on its
side, and―o-ho!―into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don't
believe, Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but then-and-there I learned my
lesson: don't meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.

           
This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young listener,
because even before his mother's death he had become convinced of the existence
of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in
the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its
features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the
atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that
everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people,
motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality
concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would fade, but the
sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God, angels, demons,
afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or
lamp-posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight that he had never
seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he
would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his
regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense,
blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

           
From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the Prophet,
and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested in knowing
what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would not
wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he caught himself in the act of
forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as he
drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent fancy
began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the time when,
having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success of his job as
the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended up marrying her as
well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on a rose-strewn dais,
simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had placed demurely over his
face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre, reached lovingly towards him to
remove the fabric, and gaze at his features in a mirror placed in his lap. This
dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought him awake, flushing hotly for shame,
and after that he began to worry about the impurity in his make-up that could
create such terrible visions.

           
Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that
required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb Mhatre took
him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not alone in the
world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not entirely surprised
when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the morning of his
twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being prepared to listen to
an appeal.

           
"You're fired," Mhatre emphasized, beaming. "Cashiered, had your
chips. Dis-
miss
."

           
"But, uncle,"

           
"Shut your face."

           
Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, informing
him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary
film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for appearance
only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we have
discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight
and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit."

           
"But, uncle,"

           
"Boy like you is too damn good-looking to carry tiffins on his head all
his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five
minutes back."

           
"But, uncle,"

           
"I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars."

           
He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star,
serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He
remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent
lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of
industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the
four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth.

           
On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can't see
that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor
relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them
the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him,
teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to
him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he
lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women
looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and
desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the
metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who
became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of
Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic verses
in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after
his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which
butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and
children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail
of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious
stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the
small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had
never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In
his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he
preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general
knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a
larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer
it to.

           
His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the
formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of
songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got
his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on
the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were
willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel
jumped at the chance. That was his first hit,
Ganpati Baba
, and suddenly
he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies
playing the elephant-headed god he was permitted to remove the thick,
pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play
Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a
certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the
Ramayana. This series proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigueur for
the city's young bucks at the kind of parties frequented by convent girls known
as "firecrackers" because of their readiness to go off with a bang.

           
After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success
deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more regrettable
development.

           
(I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha's beans.)

           
Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become irresistibly
attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so great that several
of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganesh-mask on while they
made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of the god. Owing to
the innocence of his upbringing he could not at that time differentiate between
quantity and quality and accordingly felt the need to make up for lost time. He
had so many sexual partners that it was not uncommon for him to forget their
names even before they had left his room. Not only did he become a philanderer
of the worst type, but he also learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man
who plays gods must be above reproach. So skillfully did he conceal his life of
scandal and debauch that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his
deathbed a decade after he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of
illusion, black-money and lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a
man. "God-sake, mister," the Babasaheb pleaded, "when I told you
back then to go and be a homo I never thought you would take me seriously,
there is a limit to respecting one's elders, after all." Gibreel threw up
his hands and swore that he was no such disgraceful thing, and that when the
right girl came along he would of course undergo nuptials with a will.
"What you waiting? Some goddess from heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali,
who?" cried the old man, coughing blood, but Gibreel left him with the
enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without having his mind set entirely
at rest.

           
The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to bury his
greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost forever, his
talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without holding back, the
rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to employ. By the time of
his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he used to experience owing to
his longing for love, which had twisted and turned in him like a sorcerer's
knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if
he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his
heart.

           
"Your trouble," Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of
the clouds, "is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always
got let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for
what you did." He couldn't argue. "God's gift," she screamed at
him, "God knows where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the
gutter, God knows what diseases you brought."

           
But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the vessels
into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand
that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody blamed him for
leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness, how many
abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud-hole, how many broken hearts. In all
those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity of women, but he
was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made possible the deepest and
sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he was doing nothing wrong.

           
Rekha: she entered his life when he bought the penthouse at Everest Vilas and
she offered, as a neighbour and businesswoman, to show him her carpets and
antiques. Her husband was at a world-wide congress of ball-bearings
manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she invited Gibreel
into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and carved wooden handrails
from Keralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a
whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne she leaned against
marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone against her back. When he
sipped the champagne she teased him, surely gods should not partake of alcohol,
and he answered with a line he had once read in an interview with the Aga Khan,
O, you know, this champagne is only for outward show, the moment it touches my
lips it turns to water. After that it didn't take long for her to touch his
lips and deliquesce into his arms. By the time her children returned from
school with the ayah she was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and sat with him
in the drawing-room, revealing the secrets of the carpet business, confessing
that art silk stood for artificial not artistic, telling him not to be fooled
by her brochure in which a rug was seductively described as being made of wool
plucked from the throats of baby lambs, which means, you see, only
low-grade
wool
, advertising, what to do, this is how it is.