The Satanic Verses

fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls.
    ‘Fly,’ it commanded Gibreel. ‘Sing.’
    Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would havebeen for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that they would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze.
    They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from
Bostan
and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more voluble of the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore; but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied this. ‘God, we were lucky,’ he said. ‘How lucky can you get?’
    I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and -potence, I’m making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed.
    Which was the miracle worker?
    Of what type – angelic, satanic – was Farishta’s song?
    Who am I?
    Let’s put it this way: who has the best tunes?
    These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: ‘Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you.’
    Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears.

2

    R eincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he ‘miraculously’ defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about again he would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a trick,
into thin air
.
    The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven movies ‘sy-multaneous’ needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his childhood among the fabled lunch-runners of Bombay (of which more later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. ‘A career in theBombay talkies,’ he told his loyal crew, ‘is more like a wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route.’
    After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time … and then, justlikethat, he wasn’t there. The wheelchair stood empty among the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the sets. Wheel-chairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when movie executives descended upon them in wrath; Ji, he must be sick, he has always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta’s unexplained hey-presto, being