The Satanic Verses

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 thetreatment 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 wefafatten 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-dropping 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