Allie was grateful for Sisodia’s attentiveness. The famous producer appeared to have limitless time at his disposal, whereas Allie’s schedule had just then grown very full. She had signed a promotional contract with a giant chain of freezer-food centres whose advertising agent, Mr Hal Valance, told Allie during a power breakfast – grapefruit, dry toast, decaf, all at Dorchester prices – that her profile, ‘uniting as it does the positive parameters (for our client) of “coldness” and “cool”, is right on line. Some stars end up being vampires, sucking attention away from the brand name, you understand, but this feels like real synergy.’ So now there were freezer-mart openings to cut ribbons at, and sales conferences, and advertising shots with tubs of softscoop icecream; plus the regular meetings with the designers and manufacturers of her autograph lines of equipment and leisurewear; and, of course, her fitness programme. She had signed on for Mr Joshi’s highly recommended martial arts course at the local sports centre, and continued, too, to force her legs to run five miles a day around the Fields, in spite of the soles-on-broken-glass pain. ‘No pop problem,’ Sisodia would send her off with a cheery wave. ‘I will iss iss issit here-only until you return. To be with Gigibreel is for me a pip pip privilege.’ She left him regaling Farishta with his inexhaustible anecdotes, opinions and general chitchat, and when she returned he would still be going strong. She came to identify several major themes; notably, his corpus of statements about The Trouble With The English. ‘The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.’ – ‘The see secret of a dinner party in London is to ow ow outnumber the English. If they’re outnumbered they bebehave; otherwise, you’re in trouble.’ – ‘Go to the Ché Ché Chamber of Horrors and you’ll see what’s rah rah wrong with the English. That’s what they rereally like, caw corpses in bubloodbaths, mad barbers, etc. etc. etera. Their pay papers full of kinky sex and death. But they tell the whir world they’re reserved, ist ist istiff upper lip and so on, and we’re ist ist istupid enough to believe.’ Gibreel listened to this collection of prejudices with what seemed like complete assent, irritating Allie profoundly. Were these generalizations really all they saw of England? ‘No,’ Sisodia conceded with a shameless smile. ‘But it feels googood to let this ist ist istuff out.’
By the time the Maudsley people felt able to recommend a major reduction in Gibreel’s dosages, Sisodia had become so much a fixture at his bedside, a sort of unofficial, eccentric and amusing layabout cousin, that when he sprung his trap Gibreel and Allie were taken completely by surprise.
He had been in touch with colleagues in Bombay: the seven producers whom Gibreel had left in the lurch when he boarded Air India’s Flight 420, Bostan, ‘All are eel, elated by the news of your survival,’ he informed Gibreel. ‘Unf unf unfortunately, question of breach of contract ararises.’ Various other parties were also interested in suing the renascent Farishta for plenty, in particular a starlet named Pimple Billimoria, who alleged loss of earnings and professional damage. ‘Could um amount to curcrores,’ Sisodia said, looking lugubrious. Allie was angry. ‘You stirred up this hornets’ nest,’ she said. ‘I should have known: you were too good to be true.’
Sisodia became agitated. ‘Damn damn damn.’
‘Ladies present,’ Gibreel, still a little drug-woozy, warned; but Sisodia windmilled his arms, indicating that he was trying to force words past his overexcited teeth. Finally: ‘Damage limitation. My intention. Not betrayal, you mumust not thithithink.’
To hear Sisodia tell it, nobody back in Bombay really wanted to sue Gibreel, to kill in court the goose that laid the golden eggs. All parties recognized that the old projects were no longer capable of being restarted: actors, directors, key crew members, even sound stages were otherwise committed. All parties further recognized that Gibreel’s return from the dead was an item of a commercial value greater than any of the defunct films; the question was how to utilize it best, to the advantage of all concerned. His landing up in London also suggested the possibility of an international connection, maybe overseas funding, use of non-Indian locations, participation of stars ‘from foreign’, etc.: in short, it was time for Gibreel to emerge from retirement and face the cameras again. ‘There is no chochoice,’ Sisodia explained to Gibreel, who sat up in bed trying to clear his head. ‘If you refuse, they will move against you en bloc, and not even your four four fortune could suffice. Bankruptcy, jajajail, funtoosh.’
Sisodia had talked himself into the hot seat: all the principals had agreed to grant him executive powers in the matter, and he had put together quite a package. The British-based entrepreneur Billy Battuta was eager to invest both in sterling and in ‘blocked rupees’, the non-repatriable profits made by various British film distributors in the Indian subcontinent, which Battuta had taken over in return for cash payments in negotiable currencies at a knockdown (37-point discount) rate: All the Indian producers would chip in, and Miss Pimple Billimoria, to guarantee her silence, was to be offered a showcase supporting role featuring at least two dance numbers. Filming would be spread between three continents – Europe, India, the North African coast. Gibreel got above-the-title billing, and three percentage points of producers’ net profits … ‘Ten,’ Gibreel interrupted, ‘against two of the gross.’ His mind was obviously clearing. Sisodia didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Ten against two,’ he agreed. ‘Pre-publicity campaign to be as fofollows …’
‘But what’s the project?’ Allie Cone demanded. Mr ‘Whisky’ Sisodia beamed from ear to ear. ‘Dear mamadam,’ he said. ‘He will play the archangel, Gibreel.’
The proposal was for a series of films, both historical and contemporary, each concentrating on one incident from the angel’s long and illustrious career: a trilogy, at least. ‘Don’t tell me,’ Allie said, mocking the small shining mogul. ‘Gibreel in Jahilia, Gibreel Meets the Imam, Gibreel with the Butterfly Girl.’ Sisodia wasn’t one bit embarrassed, but nodded proudly. ‘Stostorylines, draft scenarios, cacasting options are already well in haha hand.’ That was too much for Allie. ‘It stinks,’ she raged at him, and he retreated from her, a trembling and placatory knee, while she pursued him, until she was actually chasing him around the apartment, banging into the furniture, slamming doors. ‘It exploits his sickness, has nothing to do with his present needs, and shows an utter contempt for his own wishes. He’s retired; can’t you people respect that? He doesn’t want to be a star. And will you please stand still. I’m not going to eat you.’
He stopped running, but kept a cautious sofa between them. ‘Please see that this is imp imp imp,’ he cried, his stammer crippling his tongue on account of his anxiety. ‘Can the moomoon retire? Also, excuse, there are his seven sig sig sig. Signatures. Committing him absolutely. Unless and until you decide to commit him to a papapa.’ He gave up, sweating freely.
‘A what?’
‘Pagal Khana. Asylum. That would be another wwwway.’
Allie lifted a heavy brass inkwell in the shape of Mount Everest and prepared to hurl it. ‘You really are a skunk,’ she began, but then Gibreel was standing in the doorway, still rather pale, bony and hollow-eyed. ‘Alleluia,’ he said, ‘I am thinking that maybe I want this. Maybe I need to go back to work.’
‘Gibreel sahib! I can’t tell you how delighted. A star is reborn.’ Billy Battuta was a surprise: no longer the hair-gel-and-finger-rings society column shark, he was unshowily dressed in brass-buttoned blazer and blue jeans, and instead of the cocksure swagger Allie had expected there was an attractive, almost deferential reticence. He had grown a neat goatee beard which gave him a striking resemblance to the Christ-image on the Turin Shroud. Welcoming the three of them (Sisodia had picked them up in his limo, and the driver, Nigel, a sharp dresser from St Lucia, spent the journey telling Gibreel how many other pedestrians his lightning reflexes had saved from serious injury or death, punctuating these reminiscences with car-phone conversations in which mysterious deals involving amazing sums of money were discussed
), Billy had shaken Allie’s hand warmly, and then fallen upon Gibreel and hugged him in pure, infectious joy. His companion Mimi Mamoulian was rather less low-key. ‘It’s all fixed,’ she announced. ‘Fruit, starlets, paparazzi, talk-shows, rumours, little hints of scandal: everything a world figure requires. Flowers, personal security, zillion-pound contracts. Make yourselves at home.’
That was the general idea, Allie thought. Her initial opposition to the whole scheme had been overcome by Gibreel’s own interest, which, in turn, prompted his doctors to go along with it, estimating that his restoration to his familiar milieu – going home, in a way – might indeed be beneficial. And Sisodia’s purloining of the dream-narratives he’d heard at Gibreel’s bedside could be seen as serendipitous: for once those stories were clearly placed in the artificial, fabricated world of the cinema, it ought to become easier for Gibreel to see them as fantasies, too. That Berlin Wall between the dreaming and waking state might well be more rapidly rebuilt as a result. The bottom line was that it was worth the try.
Things (being things) didn’t work out quite as planned. Allie found herself resenting the extent to which Sisodia, Battuta and Mimi moved in on Gibreel’s life, taking over his wardrobe and daily schedules, and moving him out of Allie’s apartment, declaring that the time for a ‘permanent liaison’ was not yet ripe, ‘imagewise’. After the stint at the Ritz, the movie star was given three rooms in Sisodia’s cavernous, designer-chic flat in an old mansion block near Grosvenor Square, all Art Deco marbled floors and scumbling on the walls. Gibreel’s own passive acceptance of these changes was, for Allie, the most infuriating aspect of all, and she began to comprehend the size of the step he’d taken when he left behind what was clearly second nature to him, and came hunting for her. Now that he was sinking back into that universe of armed bodyguards and maids with breakfast trays and giggles, would he dump her as dramatically as he had entered her life? Had she helped to engineer a reverse migration that would leave her high and dry? Gibreel stared out of newspapers, magazines, television sets, with many different women on his arm, grinning foolishly. She hated it, but he refused to notice. ‘What are you worrying?’ he dismissed her, while sinking into a leather sofa the size of a small pick-up truck. ‘It’s only photo opportunities: business, that’s all.’
Worst of all: he got jealous. As he came off the heavy drugs, and as his work (as well as hers) began to force separations upon them, he began to be possessed, once again, by that irrational, out-of-control suspiciousness which had precipitated the ridiculous quarrel over the Brunel cartoons. Whenever they met he would put her through the mill, interrogating her minutely: where had she been, who had she seen, what did he do, did she lead him on? She felt as if she were suffocating. His mental illness, the new influences in his life, and now this nightly third-degree treatment: it was as though her real life, the one she wanted, the one she was hanging in there and fighting for, was being buried deeper and deeper under this avalanche of wrongnesses. What about what I need, she felt like screaming, when do I get to set the terms? Driven to the very edge of her self-control, she asked, as a last resort, her mother’s advice. In her father’s old study in the Moscow Road house – which Alicja had kept just the way Otto liked it, except that now the curtains were drawn back to let in what light England could come up with, and there were flower-vases at strategic points – Alicja at first offered little more than world-weariness. ‘So a woman’s life-plans are being smothered by a man’s,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘So welcome to your gender. I see it’s strange for you to be out of control.’ And Allie confessed: she wanted to leave him, but found she couldn’t. Not just because of guilt about abandoning a seriously unwell person; also because of ‘grand passion’, because of the word that still dried her tongue when she tried to say it. ‘You want his child,’ Alicja put her finger on it. At first Allie blazed: ‘I want my child,’ but then, subsiding abruptly, blowing her nose, she nodded dumbly, and was on the verge of tears.
‘You want your head examining is what,’ Alicja comforted her. How long since they had been like this in one another’s arms? Too long. And maybe it would be the last time … Alicja hugged her daughter, said: ‘So dry your eyes. Comes now the good news. Your affairs might be shot to ribbons, but your old mother is in better shape.’
There was an American college professor, a certain Boniek, big in genetic engineering. ‘Now don’t start, dear, you don’t know anything, it’s not all Frankenstein and geeps, it has many beneficial applications,’ Alicja said with evident nervousness, and Allie, overcoming her surprise and her own red-rimmed unhappiness, burst into convulsive, liberating sobs of laughter; in which her mother joined. ‘At your age,’ Allie wept, ‘you ought to be ashamed.’ – ‘Well, I’m not,’ the future Mrs Boniek rejoined. ‘A professor, and in Stanford, California, so he brings the sunshine also. I intend to spend many hours working on my tan.’
When she discovered (a report found by chance in a desk drawer at the Sisodia palazzo) that Gibreel had started having her followed, Allie did, at last, make the break. She scribbled a note – This is killing me – slipped it inside the report, which she placed on the desktop; and left without saying goodbye. Gibreel never rang her up. He was rehearsing, in those days, for his grand public reappearance at the latest in a successful series of stage song-and-dance shows featuring Indian movie stars and staged by one of Billy Battuta’s companies at Earls Court. He was to be the unannounced, surprise top-of-the-bill show-stopper, and had been rehearsing dance routines with the show’s chorus line for weeks: also reacquainting himself with the art of mouthing to playback music. Rumours of the identity of the Mystery Man or Dark Star were being carefully circulated and monitored by Battuta’s promo men, and the Valance advertising agency had been hired to devise a series of ‘teaser’ radio commercials and a local 48-sheet poster campaign. Gibreel’s arrival on the Earls Court stage – he was to be lowered from the flies surrounded by clouds of cardboard and smoke – was the intended climax to the English segment of his reentry into his superstardom; next stop, Bombay. Deserted, as he called it, by Alleluia Cone, he once more ‘refused to crawl’; and immersed himself in work.
The next thing that went wrong was that Billy Battuta got himself arrested in New York for his Satanic sting. Allie, reading about it in the Sunday papers, swallowed her pride and called Gibreel at the rehearsal rooms to warn him against consorting with such patently criminal elements. ‘Battuta’s a hood,’ she insisted. ‘His whole manner was a performance, a fake. He wanted to be sure he’d be a hit with the Manhattan dowagers, so he made us his tryout audience. That goatee! And a college blazer, for God’s sake: how did we fall for it?’ But Gibreel was cold and withdrawn; she had ditched him, in his book, and he wasn’t about to take advice from deserters. Besides, Sisodia and the Battuta promo team had assured him – and he had grilled them about it all right – that Billy’s problems had no relevance to the gala night (Filmmela, that was the name) because the financial arrangements remained solid, the monies for fees and guarantees had already been allocated, all the Bombay-based stars had confirmed, and would participate as planned. ‘Plans fifilling up fast,’ Sisodia promised. ‘Shoshow must go on.’
The next thing that went wrong was inside Gibreel.
Sisodia’s determination to keep people guessing about this Dark Star meant that Gibreel had to enter the Earls Court stage-door dressed in a burqa. So that even his sex remained a mystery. He was given the largest dressing-room – a black five-pointed star had been stuck on the door – and was unceremoniously locked in by the bespectacled genuform producer. In the dressing-room he found his angel-costume, including a contraption that, when tied around his forehead, would cause lightbulbs to glow behind him, creating the illusion of a halo; and a closed-circuit television, on which he would be able to watch the show – Mithun and Kimi cavorting for the ‘disco diwané’ set; Jayapradha and Rekha (no relation: the megastar, not a figment on a rug) submitting regally to on-stage interviews, in which Jay
a divulged her views on polygamy while Rekha fantasized about alternative lives – ‘If I’d been born out of India, I’d have been a painter in Paris’; heman stunts from Vinod and Dharmendra; Sridevi getting her sari wet – until it was time for him to take up his position on a winch-operated ‘chariot’ high above the stage. There was a cordless telephone, on which Sisodia called to tell him that the house was full – ‘All sorts are here,’ he triumphed, and proceeded to offer Gibreel his technique of crowd analysis: you could tell the Pakistanis because they dressed up to the gills, the Indians because they dressed down, and the Bangladeshis because they dressed badly, ‘all that pupurple and pink and gogo gold gota that they like’ – and which otherwise remained silent; and, finally, a large gift-wrapped box, a little present from his thoughtful producer, which turned out to contain Miss Pimple Billimoria wearing a winsome expression and a quantity of gold ribbon. The movies were in town.
The strange feeling began – that is, returned – when he was in the ‘chariot’, waiting to descend. He thought of himself as moving along a route on which, any moment now, a choice would be offered him, a choice – the thought formulated itself in his head without any help from him – between two realities, this world and another that was also right there, visible but unseen. He felt slow, heavy, distanced from his own consciousness, and realized that he had not the faintest idea which path he would choose, which world he would enter. The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to treat him for schizophrenia; the splitting was not in him, but in the universe. As the chariot began its descent towards the immense, tidal roar that had begun to swell below him, he rehearsed his opening line – My name is Gibreel Farishta, and I’m back – and heard it, so to speak, in stereo, because it, too, belonged in both worlds, with a different meaning in each; – and now the lights hit him, he raised his arms high, he was returning wreathed in clouds, – and the crowd had recognized him, and his fellow-performers, too; people were rising from their seats, every man, woman and child in the auditorium, surging towards the stage, unstoppable, like a sea. – The first man to reach him had time to scream out Remember me, Gibreel? With the six toes? Maslama, sir: John Maslama. I kept secret your presence among us; but yes, I have been speaking out about the coming of the Lord, I have gone before you, a voice crying in the wilderness, the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain – but then he had been dragged away, and the security guards were around Gibreel, they’re out of control, it’s a fucking riot, you’ll have to – but he wouldn’t go, because he’d seen that at least half the crowd were wearing bizarre headgear, rubber horns to make them look like demons, as if they were badges of belonging and defiance; – and in that instant when he saw the adversary’s sign he felt the universe fork and he stepped down the left-hand path.