Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses

Bhupen got up, angrily, to go. Zeeny pacified him: ‘We can't afford schisms. There's planning to be done.’ He sat down again, and Swatilekha kissed him on the cheek. Tm sorry,’ she said. ‘Too much college education, George always says. In fact, I loved the poems. I was only arguing a case.’ Bhupen, mollified, pretended to punch her on the nose; the crisis passed.

They had met, Salahuddin now gathered, to discuss their part in a remarkable political demonstration: the formation of a human chain, stretching from the Gateway of India to the outermost northern suburbs of the city, in support of ‘national integration’. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had recently organized just such a human chain in Kerala, with great success. ‘But,’ George Miranda argued, ‘here in Bombay it will be totally another matter. In Kerala the CP(M) is in power. Here, with these Shiv Sena bastards in control, we can expect every type of harassment, from police obstructionism to out-and-out assaults by mobs on segments of the chain – especially when it passes, as it will have to, through the Sena's fortresses, in Mazagaon, etc.’ In spite of these dangers, Zeeny explained to Salahuddin, such public demonstrations were essential. As communal violence escalated – and Meerut was only the latest in a long line of murderous incidents – it was imperative that the forces of disintegration weren't permitted to have things all their own way. ‘We must show that there are also counterforces at work.’ Salahuddin was somewhat bemused at the rapidity with which, once again, his life had begun to change. Me, taking part in a CP(M) event. Wonders will never cease; I really must be in love .

Once they had settled matters – how many friends each of them might manage to bring along, where to assemble, what to carry in the way of food, drink and first-aid equipment – they relaxed, drank down the cheap, dark rum, and chattered inconsequentially, and that was when Salahuddin heard, for the first time, the rumours about the odd behaviour of the film star Gibreel Farishta that had started circulating in the city, and felt his old life prick him like a hidden thorn; – heard the past, like a distant trumpet, ringing in his ears.

The Gibreel Farishta who returned to Bombay from London to pick up the threads of his film career was not, by general consensus, the old, irresistible Gibreel. ‘Guy seems hell-bent on a suicide course,’ George Miranda, who knew all the filmi gossip, declared. ‘Who knows why? They say because he was unlucky in love he's gone a little wild.’ Salahuddin kept his mouth shut, but felt his face heating up. Allie Cone had refused to have Gibreel back after the fires of Brickhall. In the matter of forgiveness, Salahuddin reflected, nobody had thought to consult the entirely innocent and greatly injured Alleluia; once again, we made her life peripheral to our own. No wonder she's still hopping mad . Gibreel had told Salahuddin, in a final and somewhat strained telephone call, that he was returning to Bombay ‘in the hope that I never have to see her, or you, or this damn cold city, again in what remains of my life’. And now here he was, by all accounts, shipwrecking himself again, and on home ground, too. ‘He's making some weird movies,’ George went on. ‘And this time he's had to put in his own cash. After the two flops, producers have been pulling out fast. So if this one goes down, he's broke, done for, funtoosh .’ Gibreel had embarked on a modern-dress remake of the Ramayana story in which the heroes and heroines had become corrupt and evil instead of pure and free from sin. Here was a lecherous, drunken Rama and a flighty Sita; while Ravana, the demon-king, was depicted as an upright and honest man. ‘Gibreel is playing Ravana,’ George explained in fascinated horror. ‘Looks like he's trying deliberately to set up a final confrontation with religious sectarians, knowing he can't win, that he'll be broken into bits,’ Several members of the cast had already walked off the production, and given lurid interviews accusing Gibreel of ‘blasphemy’, ‘satanism’ and other misdemeanours. His most recent mistress, Pimple Billimoria, was seen on the cover of Ciné-Blitz , saying: ‘It was like kissing the Devil.’ Gibreel's old problem of sulphurous halitosis had evidently returned with a vengeance.

His erratic behaviour had been causing tongues to wag even more than his choice of subjects to film. ‘Some days he's sweetness and light,’ George said. ‘On others, he conies to work like lord god almighty and actually insists that people get down and kneel. Personally I don't believe the film will be finished unless and until he sorts out his mental health which, I genuinely feel, is affected. First the illness, then the plane crash, then the unhappy love affair: you can understand the guy's problems.’ And there were worse rumours: his tax affairs were under investigation; police officers had visited him to ask questions about the death of Rekha Merchant, and Rekha's husband, the ball-bearings king, had threatened to ‘break every bone in the bastard's body’, so that for a few days Gibreel had to be accompanied by bodyguards when he used the Everest Vilas lifts; and worst of all were the suggestions of his nocturnal visits to the city's red-light district where, it was hinted, he had frequented certain Foras Road establishments until the dadas threw him out because the women were getting hurt. ‘They say some of them were very badly damaged,’ George said. ‘That big hush-money had to be paid. I don't know. People say any damn thing. That Pimple of course jumped right on the bandwagon. The Man that Hates Women . She's making herself a femme fatale star out of all this. But there is something badly wrong with Farishta. You know the fellow, I hear,’ George finished, looking at Salahuddin; who blushed.

‘Not very well. Just because of the plane crash and so on.’ He was in turmoil. It seemed Gibreel had not managed to escape from his inner demons. He, Salahuddin, had believed – naïvely, it now turned out – that the events of the Brickhall fire, when Gibreel saved his life, had in some way cleansed, them both, had driven those devils out into the consuming flames; that, in fact, love had shown that it could exert a humanizing power as great as that of hatred; that virtue could transform men as well as vice. But nothing was forever; no cure, it appeared, was complete.

‘The film industry is full of wackos,’ Swatilekha was telling George, affectionately. ‘Just look at you, mister.’ But Bhupen grew serious. ‘I always saw Gibreel as a positive force,’ he said. ‘An actor from a minority playing roles from many religions, and being accepted. If he has fallen out of favour, it's a bad sign.’

Two days later, Salahuddin Chamchawala read in his Sunday papers that an international team of mountaineers, on their way to attempt an ascent of the Hidden Peak, had arrived in Bombay; and when he saw that among the team was the famed ‘Queen of Everest’, Miss Alleluia Cone, he had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. ‘Now I know what a ghost is,’ he thought. ‘Unfinished business, that's what.’

Allie's presence in Bombay came, in the next two days, to preoccupy him more and more. His mind insisted on making strange connections, between, for example, the evident recovery of her feet and the end of her affair with Gibreel: as if he had been crippling her with his jealous love. His rational mind knew that, in fact, her problem with the fallen arches had preceded her relationship with Gibreel, but he had entered an oddly dreamy mood, and seemed impervious to logic. What was she really doing here? Why had she really come? Some terrible doom, he became convinced, was in store.