The Satanic Verses (51 page)

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

           
* * * * *

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

           
Gibreel asked: "What compromise?"

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

           
If he would only say he loved her:

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

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

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

           
Give me time
.

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

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

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

           
Do not ask of me, my love,

           
that love I once had for you . . .

           
How lovely you are still, my love,

           
but I am helpless too;

           
for the world has other sorrows than love,

           
and other pleasures too.

           
Do not ask of me, my love,

           
that love I once had for you.

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

           
"What's the second question?" Gibreel asked aloud.

           
Answer the first one first
.

           
* * * * *

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

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

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

           
He began to enlarge his person.

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

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

           
He decided to force the issue.

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

           
* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

           
* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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