Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses

Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets klims and kleens and the ancient artefacts were anti-queues. Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong personality, drank like a fish from Lalique crystal and hung her hat shameless on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it, fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate.

‘Many years ago,’ her letter read, ‘I married out of cowardice.

Now, finally, I'm doing something brave.’ She left a newspaper on her bed with Gibreel's message circled in red and heavily underscored – three harsh lines, one of them ripping the page in fury. So naturally the bitch-journals went to town and it was all LOVELY'S LOVELORN LEAP, and BROKEN-HEARTED BEAUTY TAKES LAST DIVE. But:

Perhaps she, too, had the rebirth bug, and Gibreel, not understanding the terrible power of metaphor, had recommended flight. To be born again, first you have to and she was a creature of the sky, she drank Lalique champagne, she lived on Everest, and one of her fellow-Olympians had flown; and if he could, then she, too, could be winged, and rooted in dreams.

She didn't make it. The lala who was employed as gatekeeper of the Everest Vilas compound offered the world his blunt testimony. ‘I was walking, here here, in the compound only, when there came a thud, tharaap . I turned. It was the body of the oldest daughter. Her skull was completely crushed. I looked up and saw the boy falling, and after him the younger girl. What to say, they almost hit me where I stood. I put my hand on my mouth and came to them. The young girl was whining softly. Then I looked up a further time and the Begum was coming. Her sari was floating out like a big balloon and all her hair was loose. I took my eyes away from her because she was falling and it was not respectful to look up inside her clothes.’

Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. The whispers blamed Gibreel. Let's leave it at that for the moment.

Oh: don't forget: he saw her after she died. He saw her several times. It was a long time before people understood how sick the great man was. Gibreel, the star. Gibreel, who vanquished the Nameless Ailment. Gibreel, who feared sleep.

After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list. Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered, snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of Celebrity and Society and Illustrated Weekly went blank at the bookstalls and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink. Even on the silver screen itself, high above his worshippers in the dark, that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to putrefy, blister and bleach; projectors jammed unaccountably every time he passed through the gate, his films ground to a halt, and the lamp-heat of the malfunctioning projectors burned his celluloid memory away: a star gone supernova, with the consuming fire spreading outwards, as was fitting, from his lips.

It was the death of God. Or something very like it; for had not that outsize face, suspended over its devotees in the artificial cinematic night, shone like that of some supernal Entity that had its being at least halfway between the mortal and the divine? More than halfway, many would have argued, for Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre movies known as ‘theologicals’. It was part of the magic of his persona that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute in hand, amongst the beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with upturned palms, serene, he meditated (as Gautama) upon humanity's suffering beneath a studio-rickety bodhi-tree. On those infrequent occasions when he descended from the heavens he never went too far, playing, for example, both the Grand Mughal and his famously wily minister in the classic Akbar and Birbal . For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist.

The fans, yes, and? How about Gibreel?

That face. In real life, reduced to life-size, set amongst ordinary mortals, it stood revealed as oddly un-starry. Those low-slung eyelids could give him an exhausted look. There was, too, something coarse about the nose, the mouth was too well fleshed to be strong, the ears were long-lobed like young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual effaces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars , like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too.

Or, but, thenagain... not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Naj-muddin in Poona, British Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, star of the faith ; he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's.

Afterwards, when the aircraft Bostan was in the grip of the hijackers, and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been his way of making a homage to the memory of his dead mother, ‘my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me, farishta , because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as goddamn gold.’

Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city, his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay. And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps.