The Satanic Verses Read Free

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 theBombay 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. Wheel-chairmen, 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 tide, 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 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 mamzell, 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