*

   Two years and a day after Baal began his life at The Curtain, one of Ayesha's clients recognized him in spite of the dyed skin, pantaloons and body-building exercises. Baal was stationed outside Ayesha's room when the client emerged, pointed right at him and shouted: ‘So this is where you got to!’ Ayesha came running, her eyes blazing with fear. But Baal said, ‘It's all right. He won't make any trouble.’ He invited Salman the Persian to his own quarters and uncorked a bottle of the sweet wine made with uncrushed grapes which the Jahilians had begun to make when they found out that it wasn't forbidden by what they had started disrespectfully calling the Rule Book.
   ‘I came because I'm finally leaving this infernal cityI Salman said, ‘and I wanted one moment of pleasure out of it after all the years of shit.’ After Bilal had interceded for him in the name of their old friendship the immigrant had found work as a letter-writer and all-purpose scribe, sitting cross-legged by the roadside in the main street of the financial district. His cynicism and despair had been burnished by the sun. ‘People write to tell lies,’ he said, drinking quickly. ‘So a professional liar makes an excellent living. My love letters and business correspondence became famous as the best in town because of my gift for inventing beautiful falsehoods that involved only the tiniest departure from the facts. As a result I have managed to save enough for my trip home in just two years. Home! The old country! I'm off tomorrow, and not a minute too soon.’
   As the bottle emptied Salman began once again to talk, as Baal had known he would, about the source of all his ills, the Messenger and his message. He told Baal about a quarrel between Mahound and Ayesha, recounting the rumour as if it were incontrovertible fact. ‘That girl couldn't stomach it that her husband wanted so many other women,’ he said. ‘He talked about necessity, political alliances and so on, but she wasn't fooled. Who can blame her? Finally he went into – what else? – one of his trances, and out he came with a message from the archangel. Gibreel had recited verses giving him full divine support. God's own permission to fuck as many women as he liked. So there: what could poor Ayesha say against the verses of God? You know what she did say? This: “Your God certainly jumps to it when you need him to fix things up for you.” Well! If it hadn't been Ayesha, who knows what he'd have done, but none of the others would have dared in the first place.’ Baal let him run on without interruption. The sexual aspects of Submission exercised the Persian a good deal: ‘Unhealthy,’ he pronounced. ‘All this segregation. No good will come of it.’
   At length Baal did start arguing, and Salman was astonished to hear the poet taking Mahound's side: ‘You can see his point of view,’ Baal reasoned. ‘If families offer him brides and he refuses he creates enemies, – and besides, he's a special man and one can see the argument for special dispensations, – and as for locking them up, well, what a dishonour it would be if anything bad happened to one of them! Listen, if you lived in here, you wouldn't think a little less sexual freedom was such a bad thing, – for the common people, I mean.’
   ‘Your brain's gone,’ Salman said flatly. ‘You've been out of the sun too long. Or maybe that costume makes you talk like a clown.’
   Baal was pretty tipsy by this time, and began some hot retort, but Salman raised an unsteady hand. ‘Don't want to fight,’ he said. ‘Lemme tell you instead. Hottest story in town. Whoo-whoo! And it's relevant to whatch, whatchyou say.’
   Salman's story: Ayesha and the Prophet had gone on an expedition to a far-flung village, and on the way back to Yathrib their party had camped in the dunes for the night. Camp was struck in the dark before the dawn. At the last moment Ayesha was obliged by a call of nature to rush out of sight into a hollow. While she was away her litter-bearers picked up her palanquin and marched off. She was a light woman, and, failing to notice much difference in the weight of that heavy palanquin, they assumed she was inside. Ayesha returned after relieving herself to find herself alone, and who knows what might have befallen her if a young man, a certain Safwan, had not chanced to pass by on his camel... Safwan brought Ayesha back to Yathrib safe and sound; at which point tongues began to wag, not least in the harem, where opportunities to weaken Ayesha's power were eagerly seized by her opponents. The two young people had been alone in the desert for many hours, and it was hinted, more and more loudly, that Safwan was a dashingly handsome fellow, and the Prophet was much older than the young woman, after all, and might she not therefore have been attracted to someone closer to her own age? ‘Quite a scandal,’ Salman commented, happily.
   ‘What will Mahound do?’ Baal wanted to know.
   ‘O, he's done it,’ Salman replied. ‘Same as ever. He saw his pet, the archangel, and then informed one and all that Gibreel had exonerated Ayesha.’ Salman spread his arms in worldly resignation. ‘And this time, mister, the lady didn't complain about the convenience of the verses.’


*

   Salman the Persian left the next morning with a northbound camel-train. When he left Baal at The Curtain, he embraced the poet, kissed him on both cheeks and said: ‘Maybe you're right. Maybe it's better to keep out of the daylight. I hope it lasts.’ Baal replied: ‘And I hope you find home, and that there is something there to love.’ Salman's face went blank. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and left.
   ‘Ayesha’ came to Baal's room for reassurance. ‘He won't spill out the secret when he's drunk?’ she asked, caressing Baal's hair. ‘He gets through a lot of wine.’
   Baal said: ‘Nothing is ever going to be the same again.’ Salman's visit had wakened him from the dream into which he had slowly subsided during his years at The Curtain, and he couldn't go back to sleep.
   ‘Of course it will,’ Ayesha urged. ‘It will. You'll see.’ Baal shook his head and made the only prophetic remark of his life. ‘Something big is going to happen,’ he foretold. *A man can't hide behind skirts forever.’
   The next day Mahound returned to Jahilia and soldiers came to inform the Madam of The Curtain that the period of transition was at an end. The brothels were to be closed, with immediate effect. Enough was enough. From behind her drapes, the Madam requested that the soldiers withdraw for an hour in the name of propriety to enable the guests to leave, and such was the inexperience of the officer in charge of the vice-squad that he agreed. The Madam sent her eunuchs to inform the girls and escort the clients out by a back door. ‘Please apologize to them for the interruption,’ she ordered the eunuchs, ‘and say that in the circumstances, no charge will be made.’
   They were her last words. When the alarmed girls, all talking at once, crowded into the throne room to see if the worst were really true, she made no answer to their terrified questions, are we out of work, how do we eat, will we go to jail, what's to become of us, – until ‘Ayesha’ screwed up her courage and did what none of them had ever dared attempt. When she threw back the black hangings they saw a dead woman who might have been fifty or a hundred and twenty-five years old, no more than three feet tall, looking like a big doll, curled up in a cushion-laden wickerwork chair, clutching the empty poison-bottle in her fist.
   ‘Now that you've started,’ Baal said, coming into the room, ‘you may as well take all the curtains down. No point trying to keep the sun out any more.’

*

   The young vice-squad officer, Umar, allowed himself to display a rather petulant bad temper when he found out about the suicide of the brothel-keeper. ‘Well, if we can't hang the boss, we'll just have to make do with the workers,’ he shouted, and ordered his men to place the ‘tarts’ under close arrest, a task the men performed with zeal. The women made a noise and kicked out at their captors, but the eunuchs stood and watched without twitching a muscle, because Umar had said to them: ‘They want the cunts to be put on trial, but I've no instructions about you. So if you don't want to lose your heads as well as your bails, keep out of this.’ Eunuchs failed to defend the women of The Curtain while soldiers wrestled them to the ground; and among the eunuchs was Baal, of the dyed skin and poetry. Just before the youngest ‘cunt’ or ‘slit’ was gagged, she yelled: ‘Husband, for God's sake, help us, if you are a man.’ The vice-squad captain was amused. ‘Which of you is her husband?’ he asked, staring carefully into each turban-topped face. ‘Come on, own up. What's it like to watch the world with your wife?’
   Baal fixed his gaze on infinity to avoid ‘Ayesha's’ glares as well as Umar's narrowed eyes. The officer stopped in front of him. ‘Is it you?’
   ‘Sir, you understand, it's just a term,’ Baal lied. ‘They like to joke, the girls. They call us their husbands because we, we…’
   Without warning, Umar grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed. ‘Because you can't be,’ he said. ‘Husbands, eh. Not bad.’
   When the pain subsided, Baal saw that the women had gone. Umar gave the eunuchs a word of advice on his way out. ‘Get lost,’ he suggested. ‘Tomorrow I may have orders about you. Not many people get lucky two days running.’
   When the girls of The Curtain had been taken away, the eunuchs sat down and wept uncontrollably by the Fountain of Love. But Baal, full of shame, did not cry.


*

   Gibreel dreamed the death of Baal:
   The twelve whores realized, soon after their arrest, that they had grown so accustomed to their new names that they couldn't remember the old ones. They were too frightened to give their jailers their assumed titles, and as a result were unable to give any names at all. After a good deal of shouting and a good many threats the jailers gave in and registered them by numbers, as Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2 and so on. Their former clients, terrified of the consequences of letting slip the secret of what the whores had been up to, also remained silent, so that it is possible that nobody would have found out if the poet Baal had not started pasting his verses to the walls of the city jail.
   Two days after the arrests, the jail was bursting with prostitutes and pimps, whose numbers had increased considerably during the two years in which Submission had introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. It transpired that many Jahilian men were prepared to countenance the jeers of the town riff-raff, to say nothing of possible prosecution under the new immorality laws, in order to stand below the windows of the jail and serenade those painted ladies whom they had grown to love. The women inside were entirely unimpressed by these devotions, and gave no encouragement whatsoever to the suitors at their barred gates. On the third day, however, there appeared among these lovelorn fools a peculiarly woebegone fellow in turban and pantaloons, with dark skin that was beginning to look decidedly blotchy. Many passers-by sniggered at the look of him, but when he began to sing his verses the sniggering stopped at once. Jahilians had always been connoisseurs of the art of poetry, and the beauty of the odes being sung by the peculiar gent stopped them in their tracks. Baal sang his love poems, and the ache in them silenced the other versifiers, who allowed Baal to speak for them all. At the windows of the jail, it was possible to see for the first time the faces of the sequestered whores, who had been drawn there by the magic of the lines. When he finished his recital he went forward to nail his poetry to the wall. The guards at the gates, their eyes running with tears, made no move to stop him.
   Every evening after that, the strange fellow would reappear and recite a new poem, and each set of verses sounded lovelier than the last. It was perhaps this surfeit of loveliness which prevented anybody from noticing, until the twelfth evening, when he completed his twelfth and final set of verses, each of which were dedicated to a different woman, that the names of his twelve ‘wives’ were the same as those of another group of twelve.
   But on the twelfth day it was noticed, and at once the large crowd that had taken to gathering to hear Baal read changed its mood. Feelings of outrage replaced those of exaltation, and Baal was surrounded by angry men demanding to know the reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of insults. At this point Baal took off his absurd turban. ‘I am Baal,’ he announced. ‘I recognize no jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be exact, my dozen Muses.’
   Guards seized him.

   The General, Khalid, had wanted to have Baal executed at once, but Mahound asked that the poet be brought to trial immediately following the whores. So when Baal's twelve wives, who had divorced stone to marry him, had been sentenced to death by stoning to punish them for the immorality of their lives, Baal stood face to face with the Prophet, mirror facing image, dark facing light. Khalid, sitting at Mahound's right hand, offered Baal a last chance to explain his vile deeds. The poet told the story of his stay at The Curtain, using the simplest language, concealing nothing, not even his final cowardice, for which everything he had done since had been an attempt at reparation. But now an unusual thing happened. The crowd packed into that tent of judgment, knowing that this was after all the famous satirist Baal, in his day the owner of the sharpest tongue and keenest wit in Jahilia, began (no matter how hard it tried not to) to laugh. The more honestly and simply Baal described his marriages to the twelve ‘wives of the Prophet’, the more uncontrollable became the horrified mirth of the audience. By the end of his speech the good folk of Jahilia were literally weeping with laughter, unable to restrain themselves even when soldiers with bullwhips and scimitars threatened them with instant death.
   ‘I'm not kidding!’ Baal screeched at the crowd, which hooted yelled slapped its thighs in response. ‘It's no joke!’ Ha ha ha. Until, at last, silence returned; the Prophet had risen to his feet. ‘In the old days you mocked the Recitation,’ Mahound said in the hush. ‘Then, too, these people enjoyed your mockery. Now you return to dishonour my house, and it seems that once again you succeed in bringing the worst out of the people.’ Baal said, ‘I've finished. Do what you want.’ So he was sentenced to be beheaded, within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled him out of the tent towards the killing ground, he shouted over his shoulder: ‘Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.’
   Mahound replied, ‘Writers and whores. I see no difference here.’

*

   Once upon a time there was a woman who did not change.
   After the treachery of Abu Simbel handed Jahilia to Mahound on a plate and replaced the idea of the city's greatness with the reality of Mahound's, Hind sucked toes, recited the La-ilaha, and then retreated to a high tower of her palace, where news reached her of the destruction of the Al-Lat temple at Taif, and of all the statues of the goddess that were known to exist. She locked herself into her tower room with a collection of ancient books written in scripts which no other human being in Jahilia could decipher; and for two years and two months she remained there, studying her occult texts in secret, asking that a plate of simple food be left outside her door once a day and that her chamberpot be emptied at the same time. For two years and two months she saw no other living being. Then she entered her husband's bedroom at dawn, dressed in all her finery, with jewels glittering at her wrists, ankles, toes, ears and throat. ‘Wake up,’ she commanded, flinging back his curtains. ‘It's a day for celebrations.’ He saw that she hadn't aged by so much as a day since he last saw her; if anything, she looked younger than ever, which gave credence to the rumours which suggested that her witchcraft had persuaded time to run backwards for her within the confines of her tower room. ‘What have we got to celebrate?’ the former Grandee of Jahilia asked, coughing up his usual morning blood. Hind replied: ‘I may not be able to reverse the flow of history, but revenge, at least, is sweet.’
   Within an hour the news arrived that the Prophet, Mahound, had fallen into a fatal sickness, that he lay in Ayesha's bed with his head thumping as if it had been filled up with demons. Hind continued to make calm preparations for a banquet, sending servants to every corner of the city to invite guests. But of course nobody would come to a party on that day. In the evening Hind sat alone in the great hall of her home, amid the golden plates and crystal glasses of her revenge, eating a simple plate of couscous while surrounded by glistening, steaming, aromatic dishes of every imaginable type. Abu Simbel had refused to join her, calling her eating an obscenity. ‘You ate his uncle's heart,’ Simbel cried, ‘and now you would eat his.’ She laughed in his face. When the servants began to weep she dismissed them, too, and sat in solitary rejoicing while candles sent strange shadows across her absolute, uncompromising face.

   Gibreel dreamed the death of Mahound:
   For when the head of the Messenger began to ache as never before, he knew the time had come when he would be offered the Choice:
   Since no Prophet may die before he has been shown Paradise, and afterward asked to choose between this world and the next:
   So that as he lay with his head in his beloved Ayesha's lap, he closed his eyes, and life seemed to depart from him; but after a time he returned:
   And he said unto Ayesha, ‘I have been offered and made my Choice, and I have chosen the kingdom of God.’
   Then she wept, knowing that he was speaking of his death; whereupon his eyes moved past her, and seemed to fix upon another figure in the room, even though when she, Ayesha, turned to look she saw only a lamp there, burning upon its stand:
   ‘Who's there?’ he called out. ‘Is it Thou, Azraeel?’
   But Ayesha heard a terrible, sweet voice, that was a woman's, make reply: ‘No, Messenger of Al-Lah, it is not Azraeel.’
   And the lamp blew out; and in the darkness Mahound asked: ‘Is this sickness then thy doing, O Al-Lat?’
   And she said: ‘It is my revenge upon you, and I am satisfied. Let them cut a camel's hamstrings and set it on your grave.’
   Then she went, and the lamp that had been snuffed out burst once more into a great and gentle light, and the Messenger murmured, ‘Still, I thank Thee, Al-Lat, for this gift.’
   Not long afterwards he died. Ayesha went out into the next room, where the other wives and disciples were waiting with heavy hearts, and they began mightily to lament:
   But Ayesha wiped her eyes, and said: ‘If there be any here who worshipped the Messenger, let them grieve, for Mahound is dead; but if there be any here who worship God, then let them rejoice, for He is surely alive.’

   It was the end of the dream.

VII. The Angel Azraeel

1

   It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love, the refractory bird of Meilhac and Halévy's libretto for Carmen– one of the prize specimens, this, in the Allegorical Aviary he'd assembled in lighter days, and which included among its winged metaphors the Sweet (of youth), the Yellow (more lucky than me), Khayyám-FitzGerald's adjectiveless Bird of Time (which has but a little way to fly, and lo! is on the Wing), and the Obscene; this last from a letter written by Henry James, Sr, to his sons... ‘Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.’ Take that, kids. – And in a separate but proximate glass display-case of the younger, happier Chamcha's fancy there fluttered a captive from a piece of hit-parade bubblegum music, the Bright Elusive Butterfly, which shared l'amour with the oiseau rebelle.
   Love, a zone in which nobody desirous of compiling a human (as opposed to robotic, Skinnerian-android) body of experience could afford to shut down operations, did you down, no question about it, and very probably did you in as well. It even warned you in advance. ‘Love is an infant of Bohemia,’ sings Carmen, herself the very Idea of the Beloved, its perfect pattern, eternal and divine, ‘and if you love me, look out for you.’ You couldn't ask for fairer. For his own part, Saladin in his time had loved widely, and was now (he had come to believe) suffering Love's revenges upon the foolish lover. Of the things of the mind, he had most loved the protean, inexhaustible culture of the English-speaking peoples; had said, when courting Pamela, that Othello, ‘just that one play', was worth the total output of any other dramatist in any other language, and though he was conscious of hyperbole, he didn't think the exaggeration very great. (Pamela, of course, made incessant efforts to betray her class and race, and so, predictably, professed herself horrified, bracketing Othello with Shylock and beating the racist Shakespeare over the head with the brace of them.) He had been striving, like the Bengali writer, Nirad Chaudhuri, before him – though without any of that impish, colonial intelligence's urge to be seen as an enfant terrible – to be worthy of the challenge represented by the phrase Civis Britannicus sum. Empire was no more, but still he knew ‘all that was good and living within him’ to have been ‘made, shaped and quickened’ by his encounter with this islet of sensibility, surrounded by the cool sense of the sea. – Of material things, he had given his love to this city, London, preferring it to the city of his birth or to any other; had been creeping up on it, stealthily, with mounting excitement, freezing into a statue when it looked in his direction, dreaming of being the one to possess it and so, in a sense, become it, as when in the game of grandmother's footsteps the child who touches the one who's it (‘on it’, today's young Londoners would say) takes over that cherished identity; as, also, in the myth of the Golden Bough. London, its conglomerate nature mirroring his own, its reticence also his; its gargoyles, the ghostly footfalls in its streets of Roman feet, the honks of its departing migrant geese. Its hospitality – yes! – in spite of immigration laws, and his own recent experience, he still insisted on the truth of that: an imperfect welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was attested by the existence in a South London borough of a pub in which no language but Ukrainian could be heard, and by the annual reunion, in Wembley, a stone's throw from the great stadium surrounded by imperial echoes – Empire Way, the Empire Pool – of more than a hundred delegates, all tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village. – ‘We Londoners can be proud of our hospitality,’ he'd told Pamela, and she, giggling helplessly, took him to see the Buster Keaton movie of that name, in which the comedian, arriving at the end of an absurd railway line, gets a murderous reception. In those days they had enjoyed such oppositions, and after hot disputes had ended up in bed... He returned his wandering thoughts to the subject of the metropolis. Its – he repeated stubbornly to himself – long history as a refuge, a role it maintained in spite of the recalcitrant ingratitude of the refugees’ children; and without any of the self-congratulatory huddled-masses rhetoric of the ‘nation of immigrants’ across the ocean, itself far from perfectly open-armed. Would the United States, with its are-you-now-have-you-ever-beens, have permitted Ho Chi Minh to cook in its hotel kitchens? What would its McCarran-Walter Act have to say about a latter-day Karl Marx, standing bushy-bearded at its gates, waiting to cross its yellow lines? O Proper London! Dull would he truly be of soul who did not prefer its faded splendours, its new hesitancies, to the hot certainties of that transatlantic New Rome with its Nazified architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make its human occupants feel like worms... London, in spite of an increase in excrescences such as the NatWest Tower – a corporate logo extruded into the third dimension – preserved the human scale. Viva! Zindabad!
   Pamela had always taken a caustic view of such rhapsodies. ‘These are museum-values,’ she used to tell him. ‘Sanctified, hanging in golden frames on honorific walls.’ She had never had any time for what endured. Change everything! Rip it up! He said: ‘If you succeed you will make it impossible for anybody like you, in one or two generations’ time, to come along.’ She celebrated this vision of her own obsolescence. If she ended up like the dodo – a stuffed relic, Class Traitor, 1980$ – that would, she said, certainly suggest an improvement in the world. He begged to differ, but by this time they had begun to embrace: which surely was an improvement, so he conceded the other point.
   (One year, the government had introduced admission charges at museums, and groups of angry art-lovers picketed the temples of culture. When he saw this, Chamcha had wanted to get up a placard of his own and stage a one-man counter-protest. Didn't these people know what the stuff inside was worth? There they were, cheerfully rotting their lungs with cigarettes worth more per packet than the charges they were protesting against; what they were demonstrating to the world was the low value they placed upon their cultural heritage... Pamela put her foot down, ‘Don't you dare,’ she said. She held the then-correct view: that the museums were too valuable to charge for. So: ‘Don't you dare,’ and to his surprise he found he did not. He had not meant what he would have seemed to mean. He had meant that he would have given, maybe, in the right circumstances, his life for what was in those museums. So he could not take seriously these objections to a charge of a few pence. He quite saw, however, that this was an obscure and ill-defended position.)
   – And of human beings, Pamela, I loved you. —
   Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw himself, accompanied by a small boy of about five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly at first, made heroic efforts to gain and maintain his balance, with the ferocity of one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha ran along behind his imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the parcel-rack over the rear wheel. Then he released it, and the boy (not knowing himself to be unsupported) kept going: balance came like a gift of flight, and the two of them were gliding down the avenue, Chamcha running, the boy pedalling harder and harder. ‘You did it!’ Saladin rejoiced, and the equally elated child shouted back: ‘Look at me! See how quickly I learned! Aren't you pleased with me? Aren't you pleased?’ It was a dream to weep at; for when he awoke, there was no bicycle and no child.
   ‘What will you do now?’ Mishal had asked him amid the wreckage of the Hot Wax nightclub, and he'd answered, too lightly: ‘Me? I think I'll come back to life.’ Easier said than done; it was life, after all, that had rewarded his love of a dream-child with childlessness; his love of a woman, with her estrangement from him and her insemination by his old college friend; his love of a city, by hurling him down towards it from Himalayan heights; and his love of a civilization, by having him bedevilled, humiliated, broken upon its wheel. Not quite broken, he reminded himself; he was whole again, and there was, too, the example of Niccolò Machiavelli to consider (a wronged man, his name, like that of Muhammad-Mahon-Mahound, a synonym for evil; whereas in fact his staunch republicanism had earned him the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel? – enough, at any rate, to make most men confess to raping their grandmothers, or anything else, just to make the pain go away; – yet he had confessed to nothing, having committed no crimes while serving the Florentine republic, that all-too-brief interruption in the power of the Medici family); if Niccolo could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror-of-princes literature then so much in vogue, Il Principe, following it with the magisterial Discorsi, then he, Chamcha, need certainly not permit himself the luxury of defeat. Resurrection it was, then; roll back that boulder from the cave's dark mouth, and to hell with the legal problems.
   Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla – in whose eyes Chamcha's metamorphoses had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of special-effects fantasy-movies (Labyrinth, Legend, Howard the Duck) entered the Real – drove Saladin over to Pamela's place in the DJ's van; this time, though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. ‘Good luck,’ said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. ‘No, thanks,’ Saladin replied. ‘When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?’ He waved goodbye. ‘Good for you,’ Mishal said, and they had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids, with whom his relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One of them, an evil-looking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed an imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: ‘Fast forward!’ His was a generation that believed in skipping life's boring, troublesome, unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax to the next. Welcome home, Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.
   Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. ‘I didn't think people did that any more,’ he said. ‘Not since Dr Strangelove.’ Her pregnancy wasn't visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but confirmed that it was going well. ‘So far so good.’ She was naturally off balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she ‘stuck with’ her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby); but in point of fact Chamcha felt one down (there had been a period in which he'd been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter's amusing little books) throughout this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had denied him at least thrice; but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason for Chamcha's discomfiture – and he had not, let's recall, arrived in this awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood – was that he had realized, on seeing Pamela, with her too-bright brightness, her face like a saintly mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious), her shaven head under its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard thing that had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite simply fallen out of love, and would not want her back even should she want (which was improbable but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he became aware of this he commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a result, at a conversational disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling at him, too. He recalled that he'd never really cared for pets.
   ‘I suppose,’ she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table in the spacious kitchen, ‘that what I did was unforgivable, huh?’
   That little Americanizing huh was new: another of her infinite series of blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip little acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling violence again: down with it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely inappropriate to the situation.) ‘I don't think I can say what I'm capable of forgiving,’ he replied. ‘That particular response seems to be out of my control; it either operates or it doesn't and I find out in due course. So let's say, for the moment, that the jury's out.’ She didn't like that, she wanted him to defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted coffee. Pamela had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn't his problem now. ‘I'm moving back in,’ he said. ‘It's a big house and there's plenty of room. I'll take the den, and the rooms on the floor below, including the spare bathroom, so I'll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen very sparingly. I'm assuming that, as my body was never found, I'm still officially missing-presumed-dead, that you haven't gone to court to have me wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn't take too long to resuscitate me, once I alert Bentine, Milligan and Sellers.’ (Respectively, their lawyer, their accountant and Chamcha's agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her posture informing him that she wouldn't be offering any counter-arguments, that whatever he wanted was okay: making amends with body language. ‘After that,’ he concluded, ‘we sell up and you get your divorce.’ He swept out, making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just before they hit him. Pamela, downstairs, would be weeping; he had never found crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too: boom badoom doodoodoom.
   To be born again, first you have to die.

   Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they'd both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, ‘that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven's sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a lifetime's friendship; could they not even say goodbye? ‘No,’ said the unforgiving man. – ‘Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – ‘It was the vase,’ he answered, ‘the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. ‘Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, ‘by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.’
   Sunt lacrimae rerum, as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said, and Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears in things. He remained at first virtually immobile in his den, allowing it to grow back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something of the solid comforting quality of its old self, as it had been before the altering of the universe. He watched a good deal of television with half an eye, channel-hopping compulsively, for he was a member of the remote-control culture of the present as much as the piggy boy on the street corner; he, too, could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the composite video monster his button-pushing brought into being... what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth century; it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight; – and whereas the original Procrustes, citizen of what could now be termed a ‘hands-on’ culture, had to exercise both brain and brawn, he, Chamcha, could lounge back in his Parker-Knoll recliner chair and let his fingers do the chopping. It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants – ‘Mutts’ – on Dr Who, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial machinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called Mutilasians; children's television appeared to be exclusively populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war. A hospital in Guyana had apparently preserved the body of a fully formed merman, complete with gills and scales. Lycanthropy was on the increase in the Scottish Highlands. The genetic possibility of centaurs was being seriously discussed. A sex-change operation was shown. – He was reminded of an execrable piece of poetry which Jumpy Joshi had hesitantly shown him at the Shaandaar B and B. Its name, ‘I Sing the Body Eclectic’, was fully representative of the whole. – But the fellow has a whole body, after all, Saladin thought bitterly. He made Pamela's baby with no trouble at all: no broken sticks on his damn chromosomes ... he caught sight of himself in a rerun of an old Aliens Show ‘classic’. (In the fast-forward culture, classic status could be achieved in as little as six months; sometimes even overnight.) The effect of all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in what remained of his idea of the normal, average quality of the real; but there were also countervailing forces at work.
   On Gardeners' World he was shown how to achieve something called a ‘chimeran graft’ (the very same, as chance would have it, that had been the pride of Otto Cone's garden); and although his inattention caused him to miss the names of the two trees that had been bred into one – Mulberry? Laburnum? Broom? – the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies – the uselessness of mermen, the failures of plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-Colonization of the planet – he was given this one gift. It was enough. He switched off the set.
   Gradually, his animosity towards Gibreel lessened. Nor did horns, goat-hoofs, etc. show any signs of manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a cure was in progress. In point of fact, with the passage of the days not only Gibreel, but everything which had befallen Saladin of late that was irreconcilable with the prosiness of everyday life came to seem somehow irrelevant, as even the most stubborn of nightmares will once you've splashed your face, brushed your teeth and had a strong, hot drink. He began to make journeys into the outside world – to those professional advisers, lawyer accountant agent, whom Pamela used to call ‘the Goons’, and when sitting in the panelled, book – and ledger-lined stability of those offices in which miracles could plainly never happen he took to speaking of his ‘breakdown’, – ‘the shock of the accident’, – and so on, explaining his disappearance as though he had never tumbled from the sky, singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ while Gibreel yowled an air from the movie Shree 420. He made a conscious effort to resume his old life of delicate sensibilities, taking himself off to concerts and art galleries and plays, and if his responses were rather dull; – if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in the state of exaltation which was the return he expected from all high art; – then he insisted to himself that the thrill would soon return; he had had ‘a bad experience’, and needed a little time.
   In his den, seated in the Parker-Knoll armchair, surrounded by his familiar objects – the china pierrots, the mirror in the shape of a cartoonist's heart, Eros holding up the globe of an antique lamp – he congratulated himself on being the sort of person who had found hatred impossible to sustain for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted. Towards Pamela, for example, he was now sure he felt nothing but the most altruistic affections. Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon the smooth glass of the sensitive soul; a mere grease-mark, which disappeared if left alone. Gibreel? Pooh! He was forgotten; he no longer existed. There; to surrender animosity was to become free.
   Saladin's optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to life proved more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their time about unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela. Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the phone: ‘Clients get funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort of unclean: as if they were robbing a grave.’ Charlie, who still sounded in her early fifties like a disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with the clients’ point of view. ‘Wait it out,’ she advised. ‘They'll come round. After all, it isn't as if you were Dracula, for heaven's sake.’ Thank you, Charlie.
   Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some cruel and appropriate revenge, – these were things of the past, aspects of a reality incompatible with his passionate desire to re-establish ordinary life. Not even the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could deflect him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as monstrous. Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the world – mass-murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate of the Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned neat.) You only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed homosexual Irishmen stuffing babies’ mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally, had been of the view that ‘monster’ was too – what? – judgmental a term for such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as casualties of the age. Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their victims as the casualties. ‘There's nothing to be done with you,’ she had said in her most patrician voice. ‘You actually do think in cheap debating points.’
   And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money, power, sex, death, love. Angels and devils – who needed them? ‘Why demons, when man himself is a demon?’ the Nobel Laureate Singer's ‘last demon’ asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: ‘And why angels, when man is angelic too?’ (If this wasn't true, how to explain, for instance, the Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a powdered wig?) – But, it had to be conceded, and this was his original point, that the circumstances of the age required no diabolic explanations.

*

   I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don't plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it's true, I did. I sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. Ooparvala or Neechayvala, he wanted to know, and I didn't enlighten him; I certainly don't intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.
   I'm leaving now. The man's going to sleep.


*

   His reborn, fledgling, still-fallible optimism was hardest to maintain at night; because at night that otherworld of horns and hoofs was not so easily denied. There was the matter, too, of the two women who had started haunting his dreams. The first – it was hard to admit this, even to himself – was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal ally in that nightmare time which he was now trying so mightily to conceal behind banalities and mists, the aficionada of the martial arts, Hanif Johnson's lover, Mishal Sufyan.
   The second – whom he'd left in Bombay with the knife of his departure sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead – was Zeeny Vakil.

   The jumpiness of Jumpy Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had returned, in human form, to reoccupy the upper storeys of the house in Notting Hill, was frightful to behold, and incensed Pamela more than she could say. On the first night – she had decided not to tell him until they were safely in bed – he leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear of the bed and stood on the pale blue carpet, stark naked and quaking with his thumb stuck in his mouth.
   ‘Come back here and stop being foolish,’ she commanded, but he shook his head wildly, and removed his thumb long enough to gibber: ‘But if he's here! In this house! Then how can I...?’ – With which he snatched up his clothes in an untidy bundle, and fled from her presence; she heard thumps and crashes which suggested that his shoes, possibly accompanied by himself, had fallen down the stairs. ‘Good,’ she screamed after him. ‘Chicken, break your neck.’
   Some moments later, however, Saladin was visited by the purple-faced figure of his estranged and naked-headed wife, who spoke thickly through clamped teeth. ‘J.J. is standing outside in the street. The damn fool says he can't come in unless you say it's okay with you.’ She had, as usual, been drinking. Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: ‘What about you, you want him to come in?’ Which Pamela interpreted as his way of rubbing salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded with humiliated ferocity. Yes.
   So it was that on his first night home, Saladin Chamcha went outside – ‘Hey, hombre! You're really well?’ Jumpy greeted him in terror, making as if to slap palms, to conceal his fear – and persuaded his wife's lover to share her bed. Then he retreated upstairs, because Jumpy's mortification now prevented him from entering the house until Chamcha was safely out of the way.
   ‘What a man!’ Jumpy wept at Pamela. ‘He's a prince, a saint!’
   ‘If you don't pack it in,’ Pamela Chamcha warned apoplectically, ‘I’ll set the fucking dog on you.’


*

   Jumpy continued to find Chamcha's presence distracting, envisaging him (or so it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her surprise and relief, to be quite a Mughlai chef) he insisted on asking Chamcha down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred, took him up a tray, explaining to Pamela that to do otherwise would be rude, and also provocative. ‘Look what he permits under his own roof! He's a giant; least we can do is have good manners.’ Pamela, with mounting rage, was obliged to put up with a series of such acts and their accompanying homilies. ‘I'd never have believed you were so conventional,’ she fumed, and Jumpy replied: ‘It's just a question of respect.’
   In the name of respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers and mail; he never failed, on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for a visit of at least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon three floors below. He brought Saladin little presents: propitiatory offerings of books, old theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to put her foot down, he argued against her with an innocent, but also mulish passion: ‘We can't behave as if the man's invisible. He's here, isn't he? Then we must involve him in our lives.’ Pamela replied sourly: ‘Why don't you just ask him to come down and join us in bed?’ To which Jumpy, seriously, replied: ‘I didn't think you'd approve.’
   In spite of his inability to relax and take for granted Chamcha's residence upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this unusual way, his predecessor's blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives of love and friendship, he cheered up a good deal, and found the idea of fatherhood growing on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him weep, the next morning, in delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was running down an avenue of overarching trees, helping a small boy to ride a bicycle. ‘Aren't you pleased with me?’ the boy cried in his elation. ‘Look: aren't you pleased?’

*

   Pamela and Jumpy had both become involved in the campaign mounted to protest against the arrest of Dr Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper Murders. This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin. ‘The whole thing's completely trumped-up, based on circumstantial evidence and insinuations. Hanif reckons he can drive a truck through the holes in the prosecution case. It's just a straightforward malicious fit-up; the only question is how far they'll go. They'll verbal him for sure. Maybe there will even be witnesses saying they saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly they want to get him. Pretty badly, I'd say; he's been a loud voice around town for some while.’ Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan's loathing for Simba, he said: ‘The fellow has – has he not? – a record of violence towards women...’ Jumpy turned his palms outward. ‘In his personal life,’ he owned, ‘the guy's frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn't mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don't have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you're black.’ Chamcha let this pass. ‘The point is, this isn't personal, it's political,’ Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, ‘Urn, there's a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you'd like, if you'd be interested, that is, come along if you want.’
   ‘You asked him to go with us?’ Pamela was incredulous. She had started to feel nauseous most of the time, and it did nothing for her mood. ‘You actually did that without consulting me?’ Jumpy looked crestfallen. ‘Doesn't matter, anyhow,’ she let him off the hook. ‘Catch him going to anything like that.’
   In the morning, however, Saladin presented himself in the hall, wearing a smart brown suit, a camel coat with a silk collar, and a rather natty brown homburg hat. ‘Where are you off to?’ Pamela, in turban, army-surplus leather jacket and tracksuit bottoms that revealed the incipient thickening of her middle, wanted to know. ‘Bloody Ascot?’
   ‘I believe I was invited to a meeting,’ Saladin answered in his least combative manner, and Pamela freaked. ‘You want to be careful,’ she warned him. ‘The way you look, you'll probably get fucking mugged.’


*

   What drew him back into the otherworld, into that undercity whose existence he had so long denied? – What, or rather who, forced him by the simple fact of its (her) existence, to emerge from that cocoon-den in which he was being – or so he believed – restored to his former self, and plunge once more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and of himself? ‘I’il be able to fit in the meeting,’ Jumpy Joshi had told Saladin, ‘before my karate class.’ – Where his star pupil waited: long, rainbow-haired and, Jumpy added, just past her eighteenth birthday. – Not knowing that Jumpy, too, was suffering some of the same illicit longings, Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.

*

   He had expected the meeting to be small, envisaging a back room somewhere full of suspicious types looking and talking like clones of Malcolm X (Chamcha could remember finding funny a TV comic's joke – ‘Then there's the one about the black man who changed his name to Mr. X and sued the News of the World for libel’ – and provoking one of the worst quarrels of his marriage), with maybe a few angry-looking women as well; he had pictured much fist-clenching and righteousness. What he found was a large hall, the Brickhall Friends Meeting House, packed wall-to-wall with every conceivable sort of person – old, wide women and uniformed schoolchildren, Rastas and restaurant workers, the staff of the small Chinese supermarket in Plassey Street, soberly dressed gents as well as wild boys, whites as well as blacks; the mood of the crowd was far from the kind of evangelical hysteria he'd imagined; it was quiet, worried, wanting to know what could be done. There was a young black woman standing near him who gave his attire an amused once-over; he stared back at her, and she laughed: ‘Okay, sorry, no offence.’ She was wearing a lenticular badge, the sort that changed its message as you moved. At some angles it read, Uhuru for the Simba; at others, Freedom for the Lion. ‘It's on account of the meaning of his chosen name,’ she explained redundantly. ‘In African.’ Which language? Saladin wanted to know. She shrugged, and turned away to listen to the speakers. It was African: born, by the sound of her, in Lewisham or Deptford or New Cross, that was all she needed to know... Pamela hissed into his ear. ‘I see you finally found somebody to feel superior to.’ She could still read him like a book.
   A minute woman in her middle seventies was led up on to the stage at the far end of the hall by a wiry man who, Chamcha was almost reassured to observe, really did look like an American Black Power leader, the young Stokely Carmichael, in fact – the same intense spectacles – and who was acting as a sort of compere. He turned out to be Dr Simba's kid brother Walcott Roberts, and the tiny lady was their mother, Antoinette. ‘God knows how anything as big as Simba ever came out of her,’ Jumpy whispered, and Pamela frowned angrily, out of a new feeling of solidarity with all pregnant women, past as well as present. When Antoinette Roberts spoke, however, her voice was big enough to fill the room on lung-power alone. She wanted to talk about her son's day in court, at the committal proceedings, and she was quite a performer. Hers was what Chamcha thought of as an educated voice; she spoke in the BBC accents of one who learned her English diction from the World Service, but there was gospel in there, too, and hellfire sermonizing. ‘My son filled that dock,’ she told the silent room. ‘Lord, he filled it up. Sylvester – you will pardon me if I use the name I gave him, not meaning to belittle the warrior's name he took for himself, but only out of ingrained habit – Sylvester, he burst upwards from that dock like Leviathan from the waves. I want you to know how he spoke: he spoke loud, and he spoke clear. He spoke looking his adversary in the eye, and could that prosecutor stare him down? Never in a month of Sundays. And I want you to know what he said: “I stand here,” my son declared, “because I have chosen to occupy the old and honourable role of the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude.” He was a colossus among the dwarfs. “Make no mistake,” he said in that court, “we are here to change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners of the new. It is our turn now.” I wish you to think on what my son, Sylvester Roberts, Dr Uhuru Simba, said in the place of justice. Think on it while we decide what we must do.’
   Her son Walcott helped her leave the stage amid cheers and chants; she nodded judiciously in the direction of the noise. Less charismatic speeches followed. Hanif Johnson, Simba's lawyer, made a series of suggestions – the visitors’ gallery must be packed, the dispensers of justice must know that they were being watched; the court must be picketed, and a rota should be organized; there was the need for a financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: ‘Nobody mentions his history of sexual aggression.’ Jumpy shrugged. ‘Some of the women he's attacked are in this room. Mishal, for example, is over there, look, in the corner by the stage. But this isn't the time or place for that. Simba's bull craziness is, you could say, a trouble in the family. What we have here is trouble with the Man.’ In other circumstances, Saladin would have had a good deal to say in response to such a statement. – He would have objected, for one thing, that a man's record of violence could not be set aside so easily when he was accused of murder. – Also that he didn't like the use of such American terms as ‘the Man’ in the very different British situation, where there was no history of slavery; it sounded like an attempt to borrow the glamour of other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt about the organizers’ decision to punctuate the speeches with such meaning-loaded songs as We Shall Overcome, and even, for Pete's sake, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. As if all causes were the same, all histories interchangeable. – But he said none of these things, because his head had begun to spin and his senses to reel, owing to his having been given, for the first time in his life, a stupefying premonition of his death.
   – Hanif Johnson was finishing his speech. As Dr Simba has written, newness will enter this society by collective, not individual, actions. He was quoting what Chamcha recognized as one of Camus's most popular slogans. The passage from speech to moral action, Hanif was saying, has a name: to become human. – And now a pretty young British Asian woman with a slightly-too-bulbous nose and a dirty, bluesy voice was launching into Bob Dylan's song, I Pity the Poor Immigrant. Another false and imported note, this: the song actually seemed rather hostile towards immigrants, though there were lines that struck chords, about the immigrant's visions shattering like glass, about how he was obliged to ‘build his town with blood'. Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image of the rivers of blood, would appreciate that. – All these things Saladin experienced and thought as if from a considerable distance. – What had happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan's presence at the Friends Meeting House, Saladin Chamcha, looking in her direction, saw a blazing fire burning in the centre of her forehead; and felt, in the same moment, the beating, and the icy shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings. – He experienced the kind of blurring associated with double vision, seeming to look into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed meeting hall, but the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and a girl's forehead could burn with ominous flames. – She's death to me, that's what it means, Chamcha thought in one of the two worlds, while in the other he told himself not to be foolish; the room was full of people wearing those inane tribal badges that had latterly grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted with fluorescent paint; Mishal probably had on some piece of space-age junk jewellery. – But his other self took over again, she's off limits to you, it said, not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim. – Whereupon his heart got in on the act, bababoom, boomba, dabadoom.
   Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing concern. ‘I'm the one with the bun in the oven,’ she said with a gruff remnant of affection. ‘What business have you got to pass out?’ Jumpy insisted: ‘You'd best come with me to my class; just sit quietly, and afterwards I'll take you home.’ – But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was required. No, no, I'll go with Jumpy, I'll be fine. It was just hot in there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing.
   There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning against a movie poster. The film was Mephisto, the story of an actor seduced into a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor – played by the German star Klaus Maria Brandauer – was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from Faust stood above his head:
   – Who art thou, then?
   – Part of that Power, not understood,
   Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.

*

   At the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in Mishal's direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the class.) – Although she was all over him, you came back, I bet it was to see me, isn't that nice, he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask were you wearing a luminous something in the middle of your, because she wasn't now, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black leotard. – Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion and injured pride.
   ‘Our other star hasn't turned up today,’ Jumpy mentioned to Saladin during a break in the exercises. ‘Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she's apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow-survivor of the crash.’
   Things are closing in on me. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland proto-continent, it floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas. – What is a mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect.
   ‘Where are you going?’ Jumpy was calling. ‘I thought I was giving you a lift. Are you okay?’
   I'm fine. I need to walk, that's all.
   ‘Okay, but only if you're sure.’
   Sure. Walk away fast, without catching Mishal's aggrieved eye.
   ... In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this underworld. – God: no escape. Here's a shop-front, a store selling musical instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what's the name? – Fair Winds, and here in the window is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent return of, that's right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation of the earth. Walk. Walk away fast.
   ...Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.) Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that hijacking and lost the half of his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he says, with flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn't fancy a mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.
   Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record with his new, buttocky tongue. The Devil tried to silence me but the good Lord and American surgical techniques knew better. These gaps were the creationist's main selling-point: if natural selection was the truth, where were all the random mutations that got deselected? Where were the monster-children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent. No three-legged horses there. No point arguing with these geezers, the cabbie said. I don't hold with God myself. No point, one small part of Chamcha's consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that ‘the fossil record’ wasn't some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in the stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution. – I've heard enough, the cabbie said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music. Ave atque vale.
   What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was that he had been living in a state of phoney peace, that the change in him was irreversible. A new, dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky; no matter how assiduously he attempted to re-create his old existence, this was, he now saw a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left-hand path.

2

   The temperature continued to rise; and when the heatwave reached its highest point, and stayed up there so long that the whole city, its edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil, – then Mr. Billy Battuta and his companion Mimi Mamoulian, recently returned to the metropolis after a period as guests of the penal authority of New York, announced their ‘grand coming-out’ party. Billy's business connections downtown had arranged for his case to be heard by a well-disposed judge; his personal charm had persuaded every one of the wealthy female ‘marks’ from whom he'd extracted such generous amounts for the purpose of the re-purchase of his soul from the Devil (including Mrs. Struwelpeter) to sign a clemency petition, in which the matrons stated their conviction that Mr. Battuta had honestly repented him of his error, and asked, in the light of his vow to concentrate henceforth on his startlingly brilliant entrepreneurial career (whose social usefulness in terms of wealth creation and the provision of employment to many persons, they suggested, should also be considered by the court in mitigation of his offences), and his further vow to undergo a full course of psychiatric treatment to help him overcome his weakness for criminal capers, – that the worthy judge settle upon some lighter punishment than a prison sentence, ‘the deterrent purpose underlying such incarceration being better served here,’ in the ladies’ opinion, ‘by a judgment of a more Christian sort’. Mimi, adjudged to be no more than Billy's love-duped underling, was given a suspended sentence; for Billy it was deportation, and a stiff fine, but even this was rendered considerably less severe by the judge's consent to Billy's attorney's plea that his client be allowed to leave the country voluntarily, without having the stigma of a deportation order stamped into his passport, a thing that would do great damage to his many business interests. Twenty-four hours after the judgment Billy and Mimi were back in London, whooping it up at Crockford's, and sending out fancy invitation cards to what promised to be the party of that strangely sweltering season. One of these cards found its way, with the assistance of Mr. S. S. Sisodia, to the residence of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta; another arrived, a little belatedly, at Saladin Chamcha's den, slipped under the door by the solicitous Jumpy. (Mimi had called Pamela to invite her, adding, with her usual directness: ‘Any notion where that husband of yours has gotten to?’ – Which Pamela answered, with English awkwardness, yes er but. Mimi got the whole story out of her in less than half an hour, which wasn't bad, and concluded triumphantly: ‘Sounds like your life is looking up, Pam. Bring ‘em both; bring anyone. It's going to be quite a circus.’)
   The location for the party was another of Sisodia's inexplicable triumphs: the giant sound stage at the Shepperton film studios had been procured, apparently at no cost, and the guests would be able, therefore, to take their pleasures in the huge re-creation of Dickensian London that stood within. A musical adaptation of the great writer's last completed novel, renamed Friend!, with book and lyrics by the celebrated genius of the musical stage, Mr. Jeremy Bentham, had proved a mammoth hit in the West End and on Broadway, in spite of the macabre nature of some of its scenes; now, accordingly, The Chums, as it was known in the business, was receiving the accolade of a big-budget movie production. ‘The pipi PR people,’ Sisodia told Gibreel on the phone, ‘think that such a fufufuck, function, which is to be most ista ista istar ista ista istudded, will be good for their bibuild up cacampaign.’
   The appointed night arrived: a night of dreadful heat.


*

   Shepperton! – Pamela and Jumpy are already here, borne on the wings of Pamela's MG, when Chamcha, having disdained their company, arrives in one of the fleet of coaches the evening's hosts have made available to those guests wishing for whatever reason to be driven rather than to drive. – And someone else, too, – the one with whom our Saladin fell to earth, – has come; is wandering within. – Chamcha enters the arena; and is amazed. – Here London has been altered – no, condensed, – according to the imperatives of film. – Why, here's the Stucconia of the Veneerings, those bran-new, spick and span new people, lying shockingly adjacent to Portman Square, and the shady angle containing various Podsnaps. – And worse: behold the dustman's mounds of Boffin's Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in this abridged metropolis over Fascination Fledgeby's rooms in the Albany, the West End's very heart! – But the guests are not disposed to grumble; the reborn city, even rearranged, still takes the breath away; most particularly in that part of the immense studio through which the river winds, the river with its fogs and Gaffer Hexam's boat, the ebbing Thames flowing beneath two bridges, one of iron, one of stone. – Upon its cobbled banks the guests’ gay footsteps fall; and there sound mournful, misty, footfalls of ominous note. A dry ice pea-souper lifts across the set.
   Society grandees, fashion models, film stars, corporation bigwigs, a brace of minor royal Personages, useful politicians and suchlike riff-raff perspire and mingle in these counterfeit streets with numbers of men and women as sweat-glistened as the ‘real’ guests and as counterfeit as the city: hired extras in period costume, as well as a selection of the movie's leading players. Chamcha, who realizes in the moment of sighting him that this encounter has been the whole purpose of his journey, – which fact he has succeeded in keeping from himself until this instant, – spots Gibreel in the increasingly riotous crowd.
   Yes: there, on London Bridge Which Is Of Stone, without a doubt, Gibreel! – And that must be his Alleluia, his Icequeen Cone! – What a distant expression he seems to be wearing, how he lists a few degrees to the left; and how she seems to dote on him – how everyone adores him: for he is among the very greatest at the party, Battuta to his left, Sisodia at Allie's right, and all about a host of faces that would be recognized from Peru to Timbuctoo! – Chamcha struggles through the crowd, which grows ever more dense as he nears the bridge; – but he is resolved – Gibreel, he will reach Gibreel! – when with a clash of cymbals loud music strikes up, one of Mr. Bentham's immortal, show-stopping tunes, and the crowd parts like the Red Sea before the children of Israel. – Chamcha, off-balance, staggers back, is crushed by the parting crowd against a fake half-timbered edifice – what else? – a Curiosity Shop; and, to save himself, retreats within, while a great singing throng of bosomy ladies in mob-caps and frilly blouses, accompanied by an over-sufficiency of stovepipe-hatted gents, comes rollicking down the riverside street, singing for all they're worth.


What kind of fellow is Our Mutual Friend?
What does he intend?
Is he the kind of fellow on whom we may depend?
&c. &c. &c.


   ‘It's a funny thing,’ a woman's voice says behind him, ‘but when we were doing the show at the C—Theatre, there was an outbreak of lust among the cast; quite unparalleled, in my experience. People started missing their cues because of the shenanigans in the wings.’
   The speaker, he observes, is young, small, buxom, far from unattractive, damp from the heat, flushed with wine, and evidently in the grip of the libidinous fever of which she speaks. – The ‘room’ has little light, but he can make out the glint in her eye. ‘We've got time,’ she continues matter-of-factly. ‘After this lot finish there's Mr Podsnap's solo.’ Whereupon, arranging herself in an expert parody of the Marine Insurance agent's self-important posture, she launches into her own version of the scheduled musical Podsnappery:


Ours is a Copious Language,
A Language Trying to Strangers;
Ours is the Favoured Nation,
Blest, and Safe from Dangers...


   Now, in Rex-Harrisonian speech-song, she addresses an invisible Foreigner. ‘And How Do You Like London? – “Ay-normaymong rich?” – Enormously Rich, we say. Our English adverbs do Not terminate in Mong. – And Do You Find, Sir, Many Evidences of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World's Metropolis, London, Londres, London? – I would say,’ she adds, still Podsnapping, ‘that there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.’
   The creature has been approaching Chamcha while delivering herself of these lines; – unfastening, the while, her blouse; – and he, mongoose to her cobra, stands there transfixed; while she, exposing a shapely right breast, and offering it to him, points out that she has drawn upon it, – as an act of civic pride, – the map of London, no less, in red magic-marker, with the river all in blue. The metropolis summons him; – but he, giving an entirely Dickensian cry, pushes his way out of the Curiosity Shop into the madness of the street.
   Gibreel is looking directly at him from London Bridge; their eyes – or so it seems to Chamcha – meet. Yes: Gibreel lifts, and waves, an unexcited arm.