The Satanic Verses

screamed at readers in inch-high letters, while the human chain was not permitted so much as a small-print whisper?
    EVEREST QUEEN, FILM MOGUL PERISH
DOUBLE TRAGEDY ON MALABAR HILL –
GIBREEL FARISHTA VANISHES
CURSE OF EVEREST VILAS STRIKES AGAIN

    The body of the respected movie producer, S. S. Sisodia, had been discovered by domestic staff, lying in the centre of the living-room rug in the apartment of the celebrated actor Mr Gibreel Farishta, with a hole through the heart. Miss Alleluia Cone, in what was believed to be a ‘related incident’, had fallen to her death from the roof of the skyscraper, from which, a couple of years previously, Mrs Rekha Merchant had hurled her children and herself towards the concrete below.
    The morning papers were less equivocal about Farishta’s latest role. FARISHTA, UNDER SUSPICION, ABSCONDS .
    ‘I’m going back to Scandal Point,’ Salahuddin told Zeeny, who, misunderstanding this withdrawal into an inner chamber of the spirit, flared up, ‘Mister, you’d better make up your mind.’ Leaving, he did not know how to reassure her; how to explain his overwhelming feeling of guilt,
of responsibility
: how to tell her that these killings were the dark flowers of seeds he had planted long ago? ‘I just need to think,’ he said, weakly, confirming her suspicions. ‘Just a day or two.’
    ‘Salad baba,’ she said harshly, ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, man. Your timing: really great.’

    On the night after his participation in the making of the human chain, Salahuddin Chamchawala was looking out of the window of his childhood bedroom at the nocturnal patterns of the Arabian Sea, when Kasturba knocked urgently on his door. ‘A man is here to see you,’ she said, almost hissing the words, plainly scared. Salahuddin had seen nobody coming through the gate. ‘From the servants’ entrance,’ Kasturba said in response to his inquiry. ‘And, baba, listen, it is that Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, who the papers say …’ her voice trailed off and she chewed, fretfully, at the nails on her left hand.
    ‘Where is he?’
    ‘What to do, I was afraid,’ Kasturba cried. ‘I told him, in your father’s study, he is waiting there only. But maybe it is better you don’t go. Should I call the police? Baapu ré, that such a thing.’
    No. Don’t call. I’ll go see what he wants
.
    Gibreel was sitting on Changez’s bed with the old lamp in his hands. He was wearing a dirty white kurta-pajama outfit and looked like a man who had been sleeping rough. His eyes were unfocused, lightless, dead. ‘Spoono,’ he said wearily, waving the lamp in the direction of an armchair. ‘Make yourself at home.’
    ‘You look awful,’ Salahuddin ventured, eliciting from the otherman a distant, cynical, unfamiliar smile. ‘Sit down and shut up, Spoono,’ Gibreel Farishta said. ‘I’m here to tell you a story.’
    It was you, then
, Salahuddin understood.
You really did it: you murdered them both
. But Gibreel had closed his eyes, put his fingertips together and embarked upon his story, – which was also the end of many stories, – thus:
    Kan ma kan
Fi qadim azzaman …

    It was so it was not in a time long forgot
    Well, anyway goes something like this
    I can’t be sure because when they came to call I wasn’t myself no yaar not myself at all some days are hard how to tell you what sickness is like something like this but I can’t be sure
    Always one part of me is standing outside screaming no please don’t no but it does no good you see when the sickness comes
    I am the angel the god damned angel of god and these days it’s the avenging angel Gibreel the avenger always vengeance why
    I can’t be sure something like this for the crime of being human
    especially female but not exclusively people must pay
    Something like that
    So he brought her along he meant no harm I know that now he just wanted us to be together caca can’t you see he said she isn’t ohoh over you not by a longshot and you he said still crazy fofor her everyone knows all he wanted was for us to be to be to be
    But I heard verses
    You get me Spoono
    Verses
    Rosy apple lemon tart Sis boom bah
    I like coffee I like tea
    Violets are blue roses are red remember me when I am dead dead dead
    That type of thing
    Couldn’t get them out of my nut and she changed in front of my eyes I called her names whore like that and him I knew about him
    Sisodia lecher from somewhere I knew what they were up to
    laughing at me in my