The Satanic Verses
bearing witness to her long divorce from theimpoverished, 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 severaltimes. 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

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