The Satanic Verses Read Free Page A

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 inGibreel 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 re-creating 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 of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas.
    His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with hint innuendo and nudge, but that’s no reason for sinking to their level. Why tarnish her reputation now?
    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