The Satanic Verses (5 page)

           
He did not love her, was not faithful to her, forgot her birthdays, failed to
return her phone calls, turned up when it was most inconvenient owing to the
presence in her home of dinner guests from the world of the ball-bearing, and
like everyone else she forgave him. But her forgiveness was not the silent,
mousy let-off he got from the others. Rekha complained like crazy, she gave him
hell, she bawled him out and cursed him for a useless lafanga and haramzada and
salah and even, in extremis, for being guilty of the impossible feat of fucking
the sister he did not have. She spared him nothing, accusing him of being a
creature of surfaces, like a movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave
him anyway and allowed him to unhook her blouse. Gibreel could not resist the
operatic forgiveness of Rekha Merchant, which was all the more moving on
account of the flaw in her own position, her infidelity to the ball-bearing
king, which Gibreel forbore to mention, taking his verbal beatings like a man.
So that whereas the pardons he got from the rest of his women left him cold and
he forgot them the moment they were uttered, he kept coming back to Rekha, so
that she could abuse him and then console him as only she knew how.

           
Then he almost died.

           
He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia, taking part
in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems that three
oceans are truly smashing into one another. Three sets of waves rolled in from
the west east south and collided in a mighty clapping of watery hands just as
Gibreel took a punch on the jaw, perfect timing, and he passed out on the spot,
falling backwards into tri-oceanic spume. He did not get up.

           
To begin with everybody blamed the giant English stunt-man Eustace Brown, who
had delivered the punch. He protested vehemently. Was he not the same fellow
who had performed opposite Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao in his many
theological movie roles? Had he not perfected the art of making the old man
look good in combat without hurting him? Had he ever complained that NTR never
pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black and blue,
having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've eaten for
breakfast,
on toast
, and had he ever, even once, lost his temper? Well,
then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel?―They
fired him anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case.

           
But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had been
flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made available
for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come up with almost nothing; and
while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood-count that had fallen from his
normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the
national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. "It is a freak
mystery," he gave out. "Call it, if you so please, an act of
God."

           
Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no apparent
reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At the worst
moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis, and it seemed
that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his nose and ears and
out of the corners of his eyes. For seven days he bled, and received
transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical science, including a
concentrated form of rat poison, and although the treatment resulted in a
marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for lost.

           
The whole of India was at Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on
every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national
television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large
that the police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and tear-gas, which they
used even though every one of the half-million mourners was already tearful and
wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him.
Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand.
A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed
such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he
have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far
behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed,
not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves.

           
Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call,
despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many
lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him
most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball-bearing of a
husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the
motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her
husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the
bleak devastation of her soul.

           
He recovered.

           
The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was
called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A national
holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But when
Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a
startling degree, because he had lost his faith.

           
On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through
the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as
his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing
vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end
of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the
limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into
the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of
forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from
Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere;
with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism;
and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped
up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs
into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.

           
During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God,
every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not
abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some
small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my
ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need,
my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and
for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got
angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not
killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him
through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible
emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to
thin air
, that
there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his
life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn
it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found
that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of
metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to
himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's
most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

           
He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair
that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of
mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away.

           
"Don't you get it?" he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments
from the corners of his mouth. "No thunderbolt. That's the point."

           
She came back to stand in front of him. "You're alive," she told him.
"You got your life back.
That's
the point."

           
He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in
love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest,
blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge,
change your life, or did you get
it back for nothing
, I couldn't resist.

           
"You and your reincarnation junk," Rekha cajoled him. "Such a
nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes
to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there
she is, hey presto, the blonde mame. Don't think I don't know what you're like,
Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?"

           
No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept, face-down, on
the floor); and never entered it again.

           
Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into
an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not-disturb sign, but
in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible
and what was impossible was im-, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a
transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her
challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his
belief it didn't mean he couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of
the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his
name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work.

           
And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded
passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was
named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but
Bostan
.
"To be born again," Gibreel Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much
later, "first you have to die. Me, I only half-expired, but I did it on
two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my
friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new
man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?"

           
Why did he leave?

           
Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of
them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on
its right to become.

           
And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a
nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams.

           
Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing
two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish
fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall
away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly
across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion,
with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin
eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert
contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care―it had
taken him several years to get it just right―and for many more years now
he had thought of it simply as
his own
―indeed, he had forgotten
what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice
to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted
disconcertingly with the sawn-off abruptness of the consonants. The combination
of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home
town, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should
observe, of Gibreel Farishta's film stardom), there had been strange and
worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first
to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down.

           
It started―Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping, in
some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone unobserved by
his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a delicate shudder
of horror―on his flight east some weeks ago. He had fallen into a torpid
sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a
dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles
mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and
begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his skin. Chamcha
picked up a stone and began to batter at the glass. At once a latticework of
blood oozed up through the cracked surface of the stranger's body, and when
Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards the other began to scream, because
chunks of his flesh were coming away with the glass. At this point an air
stewardess bent over the sleeping Chamcha and demanded, with the pitiless
hospitality of her tribe:
Something to drink, sir? A drink?
, and
Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed
into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago!) unmade.
"Achha, means what?" he mumbled. "Alcoholic beverage or
what?" And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all
beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: "So, okay,
bibi, give one whiskysoda only."