The Satanic Verses Read Free Page A

certainly and unarguably vamoosed . . .
               
All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and trawlers
dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no avail,
epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of Rama
Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest
chilli-and-spices bombshell― she's no flibberti-gibberti mamzel!, but a
whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite― clad in temple-dancer veiled
undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of copulating
Tantric figures from the Chandela period,―and perceiving that her major
scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces―offered up a spiteful
farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians smoking their
cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all elbows, Pimple
attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's sake," she
cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, chhi chhi, I was just dying
inside, thinking how to go near to that fatmouth with his breath of rotting
cockroach dung." Bell-heavy anklets jingled as she stamped. "Damn
good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get one job as a leper
even." Here Pimple's soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of obscenities
that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to
compare Pimple's vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan Devi
whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists' pencils to rubber in
a trice.
               
Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor. Rhinestones
fell from her navel as she went, mirroring her tears. . . in the matter of
Farishta's halitosis she was not, however, altogether wrong; if anything, she
had a little understated the case. Gibreel's exhalations, those ochre clouds of
sulphur and brimstone, had always given him―when taken together with his pronounced
widow's peak and crowblack hair―an air more saturnine than haloed, in
spite of his archangelic name. It was said after he disappeared that he ought
to have been easy to find, all it took was a halfway decent nose . . . and one
week after he took off, an exit more tragic than Pimple Billimoria's did much
to intensify the devilish odour that was beginning to attach itself to that
forsolong sweet-smelling name. You could say that he had stepped out of the
screen into the world, and in life, unlike the cinema, people know it if you
stink.
                We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight.
Goodbye. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta's
penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar
Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the
city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way
across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point
and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies.
FARISHTA DIVES UNDERGROUND, opined Blitz in somewhat macabre fashion,
while Busybee in The Daily preferred GIBREEL FLIES coop. Many
photographs were published of that fabled residence in which French interior
decorators bearing letters of commendation from Reza Pahlevi for the work they
had done at Persepolis had spent a million dollars recreating at this exalted
altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence;
GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines yelled, but had he gone up or down or
sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the
sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the
papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan
TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, heard a note that
eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the
roof