The Satanic Verses

world-weariness. ‘So a woman’s life-plans are being smothered by a man’s,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘So welcome to your gender. I see it’s strange for you to be out of control.’And Allie confessed: she wanted to leave him, but found she couldn’t. Not just because of guilt about abandoning a seriously unwell person; also because of ‘grand passion’, because of the word that still dried her tongue when she tried to say it. ‘You want his child,’ Alicja put her finger on it. At first Allie blazed: ‘I want my child,’ but then, subsiding abruptly, blowing her nose, she nodded dumbly, and was on the verge of tears.
    ‘You want your head examining is what,’ Alicja comforted her. How long since they had been like this in one another’s arms? Too long. And maybe it would be the last time … Alicja hugged her daughter, said: ‘So dry your eyes. Comes now the good news. Your affairs might be shot to ribbons, but your old mother is in better shape.’
    There was an American college professor, a certain Boniek, big in genetic engineering. ‘Now don’t start, dear, you don’t know anything, it’s not all Frankenstein and geeps, it has many beneficial applications,’ Alicja said with evident nervousness, and Allie, overcoming her surprise and her own red-rimmed unhappiness, burst into convulsive, liberating sobs of laughter; in which her mother joined. ‘At your age,’ Allie wept, ‘you ought to be ashamed.’ – ‘Well, I’m not,’ the future Mrs Boniek rejoined. ‘A professor, and in Stanford, California, so he brings the sunshine also. I intend to spend many hours working on my tan.’

    When she discovered (a report found by chance in a desk drawer at the Sisodia palazzo) that Gibreel had started having her followed, Allie did, at last, make the break. She scribbled a note –
This is killing me –
slipped it inside the report, which she placed on the desktop; and left without saying goodbye. Gibreel never rang her up. He was rehearsing, in those days, for his grand public reappearance at the latest in a successful series of stage song-and-dance shows featuring Indian movie stars and staged by one of Billy Battuta’s companies at Earls Court. He was to be the unannounced, surprise top-of-the-bill show-stopper, and had beenrehearsing dance routines with the show’s chorus line for weeks: also reacquainting himself with the art of mouthing to playback music. Rumours of the identity of the Mystery Man or Dark Star were being carefully circulated and monitored by Battuta’s promo men, and the Valance advertising agency had been hired to devise a series of ‘teaser’ radio commercials and a local 48-sheet poster campaign. Gibreel’s arrival on the Earls Court stage – he was to be lowered from the flies surrounded by clouds of cardboard and smoke – was the intended climax to the English segment of his reentry into his superstardom; next stop, Bombay. Deserted, as he called it, by Alleluia Cone, he once more ‘refused to crawl’; and immersed himself in work.
    The next thing that went wrong was that Billy Battuta got himself arrested in New York for his Satanic sting. Allie, reading about it in the Sunday papers, swallowed her pride and called Gibreel at the rehearsal rooms to warn him against consorting with such patently criminal elements. ‘Battuta’s a hood,’ she insisted. ‘His whole manner was a performance, a fake. He wanted to be sure he’d be a hit with the Manhattan dowagers, so he made us his tryout audience. That goatee! And a college blazer, for God’s sake: how did we fall for it?’ But Gibreel was cold and withdrawn; she had ditched him, in his book, and he wasn’t about to take advice from deserters. Besides, Sisodia and the Battuta promo team had assured him – and he had grilled them about it all right – that Billy’s problems had no relevance to the gala night (Filmmela, that was the name) because the financial arrangements remained solid, the monies for fees and guarantees had already been allocated, all the Bombay-based stars had confirmed, and would participate as planned. ‘Plans fifilling up fast,’ Sisodia promised. ‘Shoshow must go on.’
    The next thing that went wrong was inside Gibreel.

    Sisodia’s determination to keep people guessing about this Dark Star meant that Gibreel had to enter the Earls Court stage-doordressed in a burqa. So that even his sex remained a mystery. He was given the largest dressing-room – a black