The Satanic Verses (13 page)

           
After they landed the hijackers released all but fifty of the passengers,
having decided that fifty was the largest number they could comfortably supervise.
Women, children, Sikhs were all released. It turned out that Saladin Chamcha
was the only member of Prospero Players who was not given his freedom; he found
himself succumbing to the perverse logic of the situation, and instead of
feeling upset at having been retained he was glad to have seen the back of his
badly behaved colleagues; good riddance to bad rubbish, he thought.

           
The creationist scientist Eugene Dumsday was unable to bear the realization
that the hijackers did not intend to release him. He rose to his feet, swaying
at his great height like a skyscraper in a hurricane, and began shouting
hysterical incoherences. A stream of dribble ran out of the corner of his
mouth; he licked at it feverishly with his tongue.
Now just hold hard here,
busters, now goddamn it enough is ENOUGH, whaddya wheredya get the idea you can
and so forth, in the grip of his waking nightmare he drivelled on and on until
one of the four, obviously it was the woman, came up, swung her rifle butt and
broke his flapping jaw. And worse: because slobbering Dumsday had been licking
his lips as his jaw slammed shut, the tip of his tongue sheared off and landed
in Saladin Chamcha's lap; followed in quick time by its former owner. Eugene
Dumsday fell tongueless and insensate into the actor's arms.

           
Eugene Dumsday gained his freedom by losing his tongue; the persuader succeeded
in persuading his captors by surrendering his instrument of persuasion. They
didn't want to look after a wounded man, risk of gangrene and so on, and so he
joined the exodus from the plane. In those first wild hours Saladin Chamcha's
mind kept throwing up questions of detail, are those automatic rifles or
sub-machine guns, how did they smuggle all that metal on board, in which parts
of the body is it possible to be shot and still survive, how scared they must
be, the four of them, how full of their own deaths. . . once Dumsday had gone,
he had expected to sit alone, but a man came and sat in the creationist's old
seat, saying you don't mind, yaar, in such circs a guy needs company. It was
the movie star, Gibreel.

           
* * * * *

           
After the first nervous days on the ground, during which the three turbaned
young hijackers went perilously close to the edges of insanity, screaming into
the desert night
you bastards, come and get us
, or, alternatively,
o
god o god they're going to send in the fucking commandos, the motherfucking
Americans, yaar, the sisterfucking British
,―moments during which the
remaining hostages closed their eyes and prayed, because they were always most
afraid when the hijackers showed signs of weakness,―everything settled
down into what began to feel like normality. Twice a day a solitary vehicle
carried food and drink to
Bostan
and left it on the tarmac. The hostages
had to bring in the cartons while the hijackers watched them from the safety of
the plane. Apart from this daily visit there was no contact with the outside
world. The radio had gone dead. It was as if the incident had been forgotten,
as if it were so embarrassing that it had simply been erased from the record.
"The bastards are leaving us to rot," screamed Man Singh, and the
hostages joined in with a will. "Hijras! Chootias! Shits!"

           
They were wrapped in heat and silence and now the spectres began to shimmer out
of the corners of their eyes. The most highly strung of the hostages, a young
man with a goatee beard and close-cropped curly hair, awoke at dawn, shrieking
with fear because he had seen a skeleton riding a camel across the dunes. Other
hostages saw coloured globes hanging in the sky, or heard the beating of
gigantic wings. The three male hijackers fell into a deep, fatalistic gloom.
One day Tavleen summoned them to a conference at the far end of the plane; the
hostages heard angry voices. "She's telling them they have to issue an
ultimatum," Gibreel Farishta said to Chamcha. "One of us has to die,
or such." But when the men returned Tavleen wasn't with them and the
dejection in their eyes was tinged, now, with shame. "They lost their
guts," Gibreel whispered. "No can do. Now what is left for our
Tavleen bibi? Zero. Story funtoosh."

           
What she did:

           
In order to prove to her captives, and also to her fellow-captors, that the
idea of failure, or surrender, would never weaken her resolve, she emerged from
her momentary retreat in the first-class cocktail lounge to stand before them
like a stewardess demonstrating safety procedures. But instead of putting on a
lifejacket and holding up blow-tube whistle etcetera, she quickly lifted the
loose black djellabah that was her only garment and stood before them stark
naked, so that they could all see the arsenal of her body, the grenades like
extra breasts nestling in her cleavage, the gelignite taped around her thighs, just
the way it had been in Chamcha's dream. Then she slipped her robe back on and
spoke in her faint oceanic voice. "When a great idea comes into the world,
a great cause, certain crucial questions are asked of it," she murmured.
"History asks us: what manner of cause are we? Are we uncompromising,
absolute, strong, or will we show ourselves to be timeservers, who compromise,
trim and yield?" Her body had provided her answer.

           
The days continued to pass. The enclosed, boiling circumstances of his
captivity, at once intimate and distant, made Saladin Chamcha want to argue
with the woman, unbendingness can also be monomania, he wanted to say, it can
be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be
humane, and strong enough to last. But he didn't say anything, of course, he
fell into the torpor of the days. Gibreel Farishta discovered in the seat
pocket in front of him a pamphlet written by the departed Dumsday. By this time
Chamcha had noticed the determination with which the movie star resisted the
onset of sleep, so it wasn't surprising to see him reciting and memorizing the
lines of the creationist's leaflet, while his already heavy eyelids drooped
lower and lower until he forced them to open wide again. The leaflet argued
that even the scientists were busily re-inventing God, that once they had
proved the existence of a single unified force of which electromagnetism,
gravity and the strong and weak forces of the new physics were all merely
aspects, avatars, one might say, or angels, then what would we have but the
oldest thing of all, a supreme entity controlling all creation . . . "You
see, what our friend says is, if you have to choose between some type of
disembodied force-field and the actual living God, which one would you go for?
Good point, na? You can't pray to an electric current. No point asking a
wave-form for the key to Paradise." He closed his eyes, then snapped them
open again. "All bloody bunk," he said fiercely. "Makes me
sick."

           
After the first days Chamcha no longer noticed Gibreel's bad breath, because
nobody in that world of sweat and apprehension was smelling any better. But his
face was impossible to ignore, as the great purple welts of his wakefulness
spread outwards like oil-slicks from his eyes. Then at last his resistance
ended and he collapsed on to Saladin's shoulder and slept for four days without
waking once.

           
When he returned to his senses he found that Chamcha, with the help of the
mouse-like, goateed hostage, a certain Jalandri, had moved him to an empty row
of seats in the centre block. He went to the toilet to urinate for eleven
minutes and returned with a look of real terror in his eyes. He sat down by
Chamcha again, but wouldn't say a word. Two nights later, Chamcha heard him
fighting, once again, against the onset of sleep. Or, as it turned out: of
dreams.

           
"Tenth highest peak in the world," Chamcha heard him mutter, "is
Xixabangma Feng, eight oh one three metres. Annapurna ninth, eighty
seventy-eight." Or he would begin at the other end: "One,
Chomolungma, eight eight four eight. Two, K2, eighty-six eleven. Kanchenjunga,
eighty-five ninety-eight, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu. Nanga Parbat, metres
eight thousand one hundred and twenty-six."

           
"You count eight thousand metre peaks to fall asleep?" Chamcha asked
him. Bigger than sheep, but not so numerous.

           
Gibreel Farishta glared at him; then bowed his head; came to a decision.
"Not to sleep, my friend. To stay awake."

           
That was when Saladin Chamcha found out why Gibreel Farishta had begun to fear
sleep. Everybody needs somebody to talk to and Gibreel had spoken to nobody
about what had happened after he ate the unclean pigs. The dreams had begun
that very night. In these visions he was always present, not as himself but as
his namesake, and I don't mean interpreting a role, Spoono, I am him, he is me,
I am the bloody archangel, Gibreel himself, large as bloody life.

           
Spoono
. Like Zeenat Vakil, Gibreel had reacted with mirth to Saladin's
abbreviated name. "Bhai, wow. I'm tickled, truly. Tickled pink. So if you
are an English chamcha these days, let it be. Mr. Sally Spoon. It will be our
little joke." Gibreel Farishta had a way of failing to notice when he made
people angry.
Spoon, Spoono, my old Chumch
: Saladin hated them all. But
could do nothing. Except hate.

           
Maybe it was because of the nicknames, maybe not, but Saladin .found Gibreel's
revelations pathetic, anticlimactic, what was so strange if his dreams
characterized him as the angel, dreams do every damn thing, did it really
display more than a banal kind of egomania? But Gibreel was sweating from fear:
"Point is, Spoono," he pleaded, "every time I go to sleep the
dream starts up from where it stopped. Same dream in the same place. As if
somebody just paused the video while I went out of the room. Or, or. As if he's
the guy who's awake and this is the bloody nightmare. His bloody dream: us.
Here. All of it." Chamcha stared at him. "Crazy, right," he said.
"Who knows if angels even sleep, never mind dream. I sound crazy. Am I
right or what?"

           
"Yes. You sound crazy."

           
"Then what the hell," he wailed, "is going on in my head?"

           
* * * * *

           
The longer he spent without going to sleep the more talkative he became, he
began to regale the hostages, the hijackers, as well as the dilapidated crew of
Flight 420, those formerly scornful stewardesses and shining flight-deck
personnel who were now looking mournfully moth-eaten in a corner of the plane
and even losing their earlier enthusiasm for endless games of rummy,―with
his increasingly eccentric reincarnation theories, comparing their sojourn on
that airstrip by the oasis of Al-Zamzam to a second period of gestation, telling
everybody that they were all dead to the world and in the process of being
regenerated, made anew. This idea seemed to cheer him up somewhat, even though
it made many of the hostages want to string him up, and he leapt up on to a
seat to explain that the day of their release would be the day of their
rebirth, a piece of optimism that calmed his audience down. "Strange but
true!" he cried. "That will be day zero, and because we will all
share the birthday we will all be exactly the same age from that day on, for
the rest of our lives. How do you call it when fifty kids come out of the same
mother? God knows. Fiftuplets. Damn!"

           
Reincarnation, for frenzied Gibreel, was a term beneath whose shield many
notions gathered a-babeling: phoenix-from-ashes, the resurrection of Christ,
the transmigration, at the instant of death, of the soul of the Dalai Lama into
the body of a new-born child . . . such matters got mixed up with the avatars
of Vishnu, the metamorphoses of Jupiter, who had imitated Vishnu by adopting
the form of a bull; and so on, including of course the progress of human beings
through successive cycles of life, now as cockroaches, now as kings, towards
the bliss of no-more-returns.
To be born again, first you have to die
.
Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples Gibreel provided
in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; the new flesh had
been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving
like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. "The old must die, you get
my message, or the new cannot be whatnot."

           
Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his
exhaustion-beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on
Chamcha's shoulder, while Saladin―prolonged captivity erodes certain
reluctances among the captives
would stroke his face and kiss the top of his
head, There, there, there
. On other occasions Chamcha's irritation would
get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old Gramsci
chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that's what's happening to
you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is trying
to be born into your flesh.

           
* * * * *

           
"You want to hear something really crazy?" Gibreel after a hundred
and one days offered Chamcha more confidences. "You want to know why I'm
here?" And told him anyway: "For a woman. Yes, boss. For the bloody
love of my bloody life. With whom I have spent a sum total of days three point
five. Doesn't that prove I really am cracked? QED, Spoono, old Chumch."