‘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 ivory-sided 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: WHAT 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 whe
re 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.’
‘Mother …’ Allie began, but Alicja’s mood had changed again, and this time, when she spoke, Allie was not listening to the words, but hearing the pain they both revealed and concealed, the pain of a woman to whom history had most brutally happened, who had already lost a husband and seen one daughter precede her to what she once, with unforgettable black humour, referred to (she must have read the sports pages, by some chance, to come across the phrase) as an early bath. ‘Allie, my baby,’ Alicja Cohen said, ‘we’re going to have to take good care of you.’
One reason why Allie was able to spot that panic-anguish in her mother’s face was her recent sighting of the same combination on the features of Gibreel Farishta. After Sisodia returned him to her care, it became plain that Gibreel had been shaken to the very marrow, and there was a haunted look to him, a scarified popeyed quality, that quite pierced her heart. He faced the fact of his mental illness with courage, refusing to play it down or call it by a false name, but his recognition of it had, understandably, cowed him. No longer (for the present, anyway) the ebullient vulgarian for whom she had conceived her ‘grand passion’, he became for her, in this newly vulnerable incarnation, more lovable than ever. She grew determined to lead him back to sanity, to stick it out; to wait out the storm, and conquer the peak. And he was, for the moment, the easiest and most malleable of patients, somewhat dopey as a result of the heavy-duty medication he was being given by the specialists at the Maudsley Hospital, sleeping long hours, and acquiescing, when awake, in all her requests, without a murmur of protest. In alert moments he filled in for her the full background to his illness: the strange serial dreams, and before that the near-fatal breakdown in India. ‘I am no longer afraid of sleep,’ he told her. ‘Because what’s happened in my waking time is now so much worse.’ His greatest fear reminded her of Charles II’s terror, after his Restoration, of being sent ‘on his travels’ again: ‘I’d give anything only to know it won’t happen any more,’ he told her, meek as a lamb.
Lives there who loves his pain? ‘It won’t happen,’ she reassured him. ‘You’ve got the best help there is.’ He quizzed her about money, and, when she tried to deflect the questions, insisted that she withdraw the psychiatric fees from the small fortune stashed in his money-belt. His spirits remained low. ‘Doesn’t matter what you say,’ he mumbled in response to her cheery optimisms. ‘The craziness is in here and it drives me wild to think it could get out any minute, right now, and he would be in charge again.’ He had begun to characterize his ‘possessed’, ‘angel’ self as another person: in the Beckettian formula, Not I. He. His very own Mr Hyde. Allie attempted to argue against such descriptions. ‘It isn’t he, it’s you, and when you’re well, it won’t be you any more.’
It didn’t work. For a time, however, it looked as though the treatment was going to. Gibreel seemed calmer, more in control; the serial dreams were still there – he would still speak, at night, verses in Arabic, a language he did not know: tilk al-gharaniq al-’ula wa inna shafa’ata-hunna la-turtaja, for example, which turned out to mean (Allie, woken by his sleeptalk, wrote it down phonetically and went with her scrap of paper to the Brickhall mosque, where her recitation made a mullah’s hair stand on end under his turban): ‘These are exalted females whose intercession is to be desired’ – but he seemed able to think of these nightshows as separate from himself, which gave both Allie and the Maudsley psychiatrists the feeling that Gibreel was slowly reconstructing the boundary wall between dreams and reality, and was on the road to recovery; whereas in fact, as it turned out, this separation was related to, was the same phenomenon as, his splitting of his sense of himself into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to suppress, but which he also, by characterizing it as other than himself, preserved, nourished, and secretly made strong.
As for Allie, she lost, for a while, the prickly, wrong feeling of being stranded in a false milieu, an alien narrative; caring for Gibreel, investing in his brain, as she put it to herself, fighting to salvage him so that they could resume the great, exciting struggle of their love – because they would probably quarrel all the way to the grave, she mused tolerantly, they’d be two old codgers flapping feebly at one another with rolled-up newspapers as they sat upon the evening verandas of their lives – she felt more closely joined to him each day; rooted, so to speak, in his earth. It was some time since Maurice Wilson had been seen sitting among the chimneypots, calling her to her death.
Mr ‘Whisky’ Sisodia, that gleaming and charm-packed knee in spectacles, became a regular caller – three or four visits a week – during Gibreel’s convalescence, invariably arriving with boxes full of goodies to eat. Gibreel had been literally fasting to death during his ‘angel period’, and the medical opinion was that starvation had contributed in no small degree to his hallucinations. ‘So now we fafatten him up,’ Sisodia smacked his palms together, and once the invalid’s stomach was up to it, ‘Whisky’ plied him with delicacies: Chinese sweet-corn and chicken soup, Bombay-style bhel-puri from the new, chic but unfortunately named ‘Pagal Khana’ restaurant whose ‘Crazy Food’ (but the name could also be translated as Madhouse) had grown popular enough, especially among the younger set of British Asians, to rival even the long-standing preeminence of the Shaandaar Café, from which Sisodia, not wishing to show unseemly partisanship, also fetched eats – sweetmeats, samosas, chicken patties – for the increasingly voracious Gibreel. He brought, too, dishes made by his own hand, fish curries, raitas, sivayyan, khir, and doled out, along with the edibles, name-droppi
ng accounts of celebrity dinner parties: how Pavarotti had loved Whisky’s lassi, and O but that poor James Mason had just adored his spicy prawns. Vanessa, Amitabh, Dustin, Sridevi, Christopher Reeve were all invoked. ‘One soosoo superstar should be aware of the tatastes of his pipi peers.’ Sisodia was something of a legend himself, Allie learned from Gibreel. The most slippery and silver-tongued man in the business, he had made a string of ‘quality’ pictures on microscopic budgets, keeping going for over twenty years on pure charm and nonstop hustle. People on Sisodia projects got paid with the greatest difficulty, but somehow failed to mind. He had once quelled a cast revolt – over pay, inevitably – by whisking the entire unit off for a grand picnic in one of the most fabulous maharajah palaces in India, a place that was normally off limits to all but the high-born elite, the Gwaliors and Jaipurs and Kashmirs. Nobody ever knew how he fixed it, but most members of that unit had since signed up to work on further Sisodia ventures, the pay issue buried beneath the grandeur of such gestures. ‘And if he’s needed he is always there,’ Gibreel added. ‘When Charulata, a wonderful dancer-actress he’d often used, needed the cancer treatment, suddenly years of unpaid fees materialized overnight.’
These days, thanks to a string of surprise box-office hits based on old fables drawn from the Katha-Sarit-Sagar compendium – the ‘Ocean of the Streams of Story’, longer than the Arabian Nights and equally as fantasticated – Sisodia was no longer based exclusively in his tiny office on Bombay’s Readymoney Terrace, but had apartments in London and New York, and Oscars in his toilets. The story was that he carried, in his wallet, a photograph of the Hong Kong-based kung-phooey producer Run Run Shaw, his supposed hero, whose name he was quite unable to say. ‘Sometimes four Runs, sometimes a sixer,’ Gibreel told Allie, who was happy to see him laugh. ‘But I can’t swear. It’s only a media rumour.’
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