Bhupen got up, angrily, to go. Zeeny pacified him: ‘We can’t afford schisms. There’s planning to be done.’ He sat down again, and Swatilekha kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Too much college education, George always says. In fact, I loved the poems. I was only arguing a case.’ Bhupen, mollified, pretended to punch her on the nose; the crisis passed.
They had met, Salahuddin now gathered, to discuss their part in a remarkable political demonstration: the formation of a human chain, stretching from the Gateway of India to the outermost northern suburbs of the city, in support of ‘national integration’. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had recently organized just such a human chain in Kerala, with great success. ‘But,’ George Miranda argued, ‘here in Bombay it will be totally another matter. In Kerala the CP(M) is in power. Here, with these Shiv Sena bastards in control, we can expect every type of harassment, from police obstructionism to out-and-out assaults by mobs on segments of the chain – especially when it passes, as it will have to, through the Sena’s fortresses, in Mazagaon, etc.’ In spite of these dangers, Zeeny explained to Salahuddin, such public demonstrations were essential. As communal violence escalated – and Meerut was only the latest in a long line of murderous incidents – it was imperative that the forces of disintegration weren’t permitted to have things all their own way. ‘We must show that there are also counterforces at work.’ Salahuddin was somewhat bemused at the rapidity with which, once again, his life had begun to change. Me, taking part in a CP(M) event. Wonders will never cease; I really must be in love.
Once they had settled matters – how many friends each of them might manage to bring along, where to assemble, what to carry in the way of food, drink and first-aid equipment – they relaxed, drank down the cheap, dark rum, and chattered inconsequentially, and that was when Salahuddin heard, for the first time, the rumours about the odd behaviour of the film star Gibreel Farishta that had started circulating in the city, and felt his old life prick him like a hidden thorn; – heard the past, like a distant trumpet, ringing in his ears.
The Gibreel Farishta who returned to Bombay from London to pick up the threads of his film career was not, by general consensus, the old, irresistible Gibreel. ‘Guy seems hell-bent on a suicide course,’ George Miranda, who knew all the filmi gossip, declared. ‘Who knows why? They say because he was unlucky in love he’s gone a little wild.’ Salahuddin kept his mouth shut, but felt his face heating up. Allie Cone had refused to have Gibreel back after the fires of Brickhall. In the matter of forgiveness, Salahuddin reflected, nobody had thought to consult the entirely innocent and greatly injured Alleluia; once again, we made her life peripheral to our own. No wonder she’s still hopping mad. Gibreel had told Salahuddin, in a final and somewhat strained telephone call, that he was returning to Bombay ‘in the hope that I never have to see her, or you, or this damn cold city, again in what remains of my life’. And now here he was, by all accounts, shipwrecking himself again, and on home ground, too. ‘He’s making some weird movies,’ George went on. ‘And this time he’s had to put in his own cash. After the two flops, producers have been pulling out fast. So if this one goes down, he’s broke, done for, funtoosh.’ Gibreel had embarked on a modern-dress remake of the Ramayana story in which the heroes and heroines had become corrupt and evil instead of pure and free from sin. Here was a lecherous, drunken Rama and a flighty Sita; while Ravana, the demon-king, was depicted as an upright and honest man. ‘Gibreel is playing Ravana,’ George explained in fascinated horror. ‘Looks like he’s trying deliberately to set up a final confrontation with religious sectarians, knowing he can’t win, that he’ll be broken into bits.’ Several members of the cast had already walked off the production, and given lurid interviews accusing Gibreel of ‘blasphemy’, ‘satanism’ and other misdemeanours. His most recent mistress, Pimple Billimoria, was seen on the cover of Ciné-Blitz, saying: ‘It was like kissing the Devil.’ Gibreel’s old problem of sulphurous halitosis had evidently returned with a vengeance.
His erratic behaviour had been causing tongues to wag even more than his choice of subjects to film. ‘Some days he’s sweetness and light,’ George said. ‘On others, he comes to work like lord god almighty and actually insists that people get down and kneel. Personally I don’t believe the film will be finished unless and until he sorts out his mental health which, I genuinely feel, is affected. First the illness, then the plane crash, then the unhappy love affair: you can understand the guy’s problems.’ And there were worse rumours: his tax affairs were under investigation; police officers had visited him to ask questions about the death of Rekha Merchant, and Rekha’s husband, the ball-bearings king, had threatened to ‘break every bone in the bastard’s body’, so that for a few days Gibreel had to be accompanied by bodyguards when he used the Everest Vilas lifts; and worst of all were the suggestions of his nocturnal visits to the city’s red-light district where, it was hinted, he had frequented certain Foras Road establishments until the dadas threw him out because the women were getting hurt. ‘They say some of them were very badly damaged,’ George said. ‘That big hush-money had to be paid. I don’t know. People say any damn thing. That Pimple of course jumped right on the bandwagon. The Man that Hates Women. She’s making herself a femme fatale star out of all this. But there is something badly wrong with Farishta. You know the fellow, I hear,’ George finished, looking at Salahuddin; who blushed.
‘Not very well. Just because of the plane crash and so on.’ He was in turmoil. It seemed Gibreel had not managed to escape from his inner demons. He, Salahuddin, had believed – naively, it now turned out – that the events of the Brickhall fire, when Gibreel saved his life, had in some way cleansed them both, had driven those devils out into the consuming flames; that, in fact, love had shown that it could exert a humanizing power as great as that of hatred; that virtue could transform men as well as vice. But nothing was forever; no cure, it appeared, was complete.
‘The film industry is full of wackos,’ Swatilekha was telling George, affectionately. ‘Just look at you, mister.’ But Bhupen grew serious. ‘I always saw Gibreel as a positive force,’ he said. ‘An actor from a minority playing roles from many religions, and being accepted. If he has fallen out of favour, it’s a bad sign.’
Two days later, Salahuddin Chamchawala read in his Sunday papers that an international team of mountaineers, on their way to attempt an ascent of the Hidden Peak, had arrived in Bombay; and when he saw that among the team was the famed ‘Queen of Everest’, Miss Alleluia Cone, he had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. ‘Now I know what a ghost is,’ he thought. ‘Unfinished business, that’s what.’
Allie’s presence in Bombay came, in the next two days, to preoccupy him more and more. His mind insisted on making strange connections, between, for example, the evident recovery of her feet and the end of her affair with Gibreel: as if he had been crippling her with his jealous love. His rational mind knew that, in fact, her problem with the fallen arches had preceded her relationship with Gibreel, but he had entered an oddly dreamy mood, and seemed impervious to logic. What was she really doing here? Why had she really come? Some terrible doom, he became convinced, was in store.
Zeeny, her medical surgeries, college lectures and work for the human-chain demonstration leaving her no time, at present, for Salahuddin and his moods, mistakenly saw his introverted silence as expressive of doubts – about his return to Bombay, about being dragged into political activity of a type that had always been abhorrent to him, about her. To disguise her fears, she spoke to him in the form of a lecture. ‘If you’re serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don’t fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We’re all here. We’re right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory tha
t makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. Make its faults your own. Become its creature; belong.’ He nodded, absently; and she, thinking he was preparing to leave her once again, stormed out in a rage that left him utterly perplexed.
Should he telephone Allie? Had Gibreel told her about the voices?
Should he try to see Gibreel?
Something is about to happen, his inner voice warned. It’s going to happen, and you don’t know what it is, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. Oh yes: it’s something bad.
It happened on the day of the demonstration, which, against all the odds, was a pretty fair success. A few minor skirmishes were reported from the Mazagaon district, but the event was, in general, an orderly one. CP(M) observers reported an unbroken chain of men and women linking hands from top to bottom of the city, and Salahuddin, standing between Zeeny and Bhupen on Muhammad Ali Road, could not deny the power of the image. Many people in the chain were in tears. The order to join hands had been given by the organizers – Swatilekha prominent among them, riding on the back of a jeep, megaphone in hand – at eight am precisely; one hour later, as the city’s rush-hour traffic reached its blaring peak, the crowd began to disperse. However, in spite of the thousands involved in the event, in spite of its peaceful nature and positive message, the formation of the human chain was not reported on the Doordarshan television news. Nor did All-India Radio carry the story. The majority of the (government-supporting) ‘language press’ also omitted any mentions … one English-language daily, and one Sunday paper, carried the story; that was all. Zeeny, recalling the treatment of the Kerala chain, had forecast this deafening silence as she and Salahuddin walked home. ‘It’s a Communist show,’ she explained. ‘So, officially, it’s a non-event.’
What grabbed the evening paper headlines?
What screamed at readers in inch-high letters, while the human chain was not permitted so much as a small-print whisper?
EVEREST QUEEN, FILM MOGUL PERISH
DOUBLE TRAGEDY ON MALABAR HILL –
GIBREEL FARISHTA VANISHES
CURSE OF EVEREST VILAS STRIKES AGAIN
The body of the respected movie producer, S. S. Sisodia, had been discovered by domestic staff, lying in the centre of the living-room rug in the apartment of the celebrated actor Mr Gibreel Farishta, with a hole through the heart. Miss Alleluia Cone, in what was believed to be a ‘related incident’, had fallen to her death from the roof of the skyscraper, from which, a couple of years previously, Mrs Rekha Merchant had hurled her children and herself towards the concrete below.
The morning papers were less equivocal about Farishta’s latest role. FARISHTA, UNDER SUSPICION, ABSCONDS.
‘I’m going back to Scandal Point,’ Salahuddin told Zeeny, who, misunderstanding this withdrawal into an inner chamber of the spirit, flared up, ‘Mister, you’d better make up your mind.’ Leaving, he did not know how to reassure her; how to explain his overwhelming feeling of guilt, of responsibility: how to tell her that these killings were the dark flowers of seeds he had planted long ago? ‘I just need to think,’ he said, weakly, confirming her suspicions. ‘Just a day or two.’
‘Salad baba,’ she said harshly, ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, man. Your timing: really great.’
On the night after his participation in the making of the human chain, Salahuddin Chamchawala was looking out of the window of his childhood bedroom at the nocturnal patterns of the Arabian Sea, when Kasturba knocked urgently on his door. ‘A man is here to see you,’ she said, almost hissing the words, plainly scared. Salahuddin had seen nobody coming through the gate. ‘From the servants’ entrance,’ Kasturba said in response to his inquiry. ‘And, baba, listen, it is that Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, who the papers say …’ her voice trailed off and she chewed, fretfully, at the nails on her left hand.
‘Where is he?’
‘What to do, I was afraid,’ Kasturba cried. ‘I told him, in your father’s study, he is waiting there only. But maybe it is better you don’t go. Should I call the police? Baapu ré, that such a thing.’
No. Don’t call. I’ll go see what he wants.
Gibreel was sitting on Changez’s bed with the old lamp in his hands. He was wearing a dirty white kurta-pajama outfit and looked like a man who had been sleeping rough. His eyes were unfocused, lightless, dead. ‘Spoono,’ he said wearily, waving the lamp in the direction of an armchair. ‘Make yourself at home.’
‘You look awful,’ Salahuddin ventured, eliciting from the other man a distant, cynical, unfamiliar smile. ‘Sit down and shut up, Spoono,’ Gibreel Farishta said. ‘I’m here to tell you a story.’
It was you, then, Salahuddin understood. You really did it: you murdered them both. But Gibreel had closed his eyes, put his fingertips together and embarked upon his story, – which was also the end of many stories, – thus:
Kan ma kan
Fi qadim azzaman …
It was so it was not in a time long forgot
Well, anyway goes something like this
I can’t be sure because when they came to call I wasn’t myself no yaar not myself at all some days are hard how to tell you what sickness is like something like this but I can’t be sure
Always one part of me is standing outside screaming no please don’t no but it does no good you see when the sickness comes
I am the angel the god damned angel of god and these days it’s the avenging angel Gibreel the avenger always vengeance why
I can’t be sure something like this for the crime of being human
especially female but not exclusively people must pay
Something like that
So he brought her along he meant no harm I know that now he just wanted us to be together caca can’t you see he said she isn’t ohoh over you not by a longshot and you he said still crazy fofor her everyone knows all he wanted was for us to be to be to be
But I heard verses
You get me Spoono
Verses
Rosy apple lemon tart Sis boom bah
I like coffee I like tea
Violets are blue roses are red remember me when I am dead dead dead
That type of thing
Couldn’t get them out of my nut and she changed in front of my eyes I called her names whore like that and him I knew about him
Sisodia lecher from somewhere I knew what they were up to
laughing at me in my own home something like that
I like butter I like toast
Verses Spoono who do you think makes such damn things up
So I called down the wrath of God I pointed my finger I shot him in the heart but she bitch I thought bitch cool as ice
stood and waited just waited and then I don’t know I can’t be sure we weren’t alone
Something like this
Rekha was there floating on her carpet you remember her Spoono
you remember Rekha on her carpet when we fell and someone else mad looking guy Scottish get-up gora type
didn’t catch the name
She saw them or she didn’t see them I can’t be sure she just stood there
It was Rekha’s idea take her upstairs summit of Everest once you’ve been there the only way is down
I pointed my finger at her we went up
I didn’t push her
Rekha pushed her
I wouldn’t have pushed her
Spoono
Understand me Spoono
Bloody hell
I loved that girl.
Salahuddin was thinking how Sisodia, with his remarkable gift for the chance encounter (Gibreel stepping out in front of London traffic, Salahuddin himself panicking before an open aircraft door, and now, it seemed, Alleluia Cone in her hotel lobby) had finally bumped accidentally into death; – and thinking, too, about Allie, less lucky a faller than himself, making (instead of her longed-for solo ascent of Everest) this ignominiously fatal descent, – and about how he was going to die for his verses, but could not find i
t in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.