The Satanic Verses Read Free

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
               
Reincarnation 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 the
Bombay 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.
Wheelchairmen, 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 fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio
gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the painted
coco-palms around a sawdust beach.
               
Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked
expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links―only nine
holes nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant
weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn corpse
of the old city lay―there, right there, upper-echelon executives, missing
the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn from senior
heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of the producers was
easy to understand, because in those days of declining audiences and the
creation of historical soap operas and contemporary crusading housewives by the
television network, there was but a single name which, when set above a
picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire, cent-per-cent guarantee of an
Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said name had departed, up, down or
sideways, but