Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. ‘Okay, you don’t have to say any more.’ She held up her hands. ‘I surrender. I’m going. Mr Saladin Chamcha. I thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but I was wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time.’
And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. ‘Don’t let people get too close to you, Mr Saladin. Let people through your defences and the bastards go and knife you in the heart.’
After that there had been nothing to stay for. The aeroplane lifted and banked over the city. Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a servant as his dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the city centre solid. Politicians were trying to build careers by going on padyatras, pilgrimages on foot across the country. There were graffiti that read: Advice to políticos. Only step to take: padyatra to hell. Or, sometimes: to Assam.
Actors were getting mixed up in politics: MGR, N. T. Rama Rao, Bachchan. Durga Khote complained that an actors’ association was a ‘red front’. Saladin Chamcha, on Flight 420, closed his eyes; and felt, with deep relief, the tell-tale shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self.
The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr Chamcha on that flight was that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams.
4
The dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of Bostan he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil’s departure he had fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long way away. The dream-woman had been so loaded down with explosives that she was not so much the bomber as the bomb; the woman walking the aisles held a baby that seemed to be sleeping noiselessly, a baby so skilfully swaddled and held so close to the breast that Chamcha could not see so much as a lock of new-born hair. Under the influence of the remembered dream he conceived the notion that the baby was in fact a bundle of dynamite sticks, or some sort of ticking device, and he was on the verge of crying out when he came to his senses and admonished himself severely. This was precisely the type of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. He was a neat man in a buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, contented life. He was a member of the real world.
He travelled alone, shunning the company of the other members of the Prospero Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin wearing Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the manner of natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking too much cheap airline champagne and importuning the scorn-laden stewardesses who, being Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type persons; and behaving, in short, with normal thespian impropriety. The woman holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players, of turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay ‘rail roko’ demonstration was being broken up by police lathi-charges. The newspaper’s reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed. The police had issued a ‘note’. Neither the reporter nor any other person was assaulted intentionally. Chamcha drifted into airline sleep. The city of lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second surprise of that macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He was bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him anyway: here, travelling incognito in the economy class of Flight AI-420, was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself.
‘Sleep okay?’ He realized the question was addressed to him, and turned away from the apparition of the great movie actor to stare at the equally extraordinary sight sitting next to him, an improbable American in baseball cap, metal-rim spectacles and a neon-green bush-shirt across which there writhed the intertwined and luminous golden forms of a pair of Chinese dragons. Chamcha had edited this entity out of his field of vision in an attempt to wrap himself in a cocoon of privacy, but privacy was no longer possible.
‘Eugene Dumsday at your service,’ the dragon man stuck out a huge red hand. ‘At yours, and at that of the Christian guard.’
Sleep-fuddled Chamcha shook his head. ‘You are a military man?’
‘Ha! Ha! Yes, sir, you could say. A humble foot soldier, sir, in the army of Guard Almighty.’ Oh, almighty guard, why didn’t you say. ‘I am a man of science, sir, and it has been my mission, my mission and let me add my privilege, to visit your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious devilment ever got folks’ brains by the balls.’
‘I don’t follow.’
Dumsday lowered his voice. ‘I’m talking monkey-crap here, sir. Darwinism. The evolutionary heresy of Mr Charles Darwin.’ His tones made it plain that the name of anguished, God-ridden Darwin was as distasteful as that of any other forktail fiend, Beelzebub, Asmodeus or Lucifer himself. ‘I have been warning your fellow-men,’ Dumsday confided, ‘against Mr Darwin and his works. With the assistance of my personal fifty-seven-slide presentation. I spoke most recently, sir, at the World Understanding Day banquet of the Rotary Club, Cochin, Kerala. I spoke of my own country, of its young people. I see them lost, sir. The young people of America: I see them in their despair, turning to narcotics, even, for I’m a plain-speaking man, to pre-marital sexual relations. And I said this then and I say it now to you. If I believed my great-granddaddy was a chimpanzee, why, I’d be pretty depressed myself.’
Gibreel Farishta was seated across the way, staring out of the window. The inflight movie was starting up, and the aircraft lights were being dimmed. The woman with the baby was still on her feet, walking up and down, perhaps to keep the baby quiet. ‘How did it go down?’ Chamcha asked, sensing that some contribution from him was being required.
A hesitancy came over his neighbour. ‘I believe there was a glitch in the sound system,’ he said finally. ‘That would be my best guess. I can’t see how those good people would’ve set to talking amongst themselves if they hadn’t’ve thought I was through.’
Chamcha felt a little abashed. He had been thinking that in a country of fervent believers the notion that science was the enemy of God would have an easy appeal; but the boredom of the Rotarians of Cochin had shown him up. In the flickering light of the inflight movie, Dumsday continued, in his voice of an innocent ox, to tell stories against himself without the faintest indication of knowing what he was doing. He had been accosted, at the end of a cruise around the magnificent natural harbour of Cochin, to which Vasco da Gama had come in search of spices and so set in motion the whole ambiguous history of east-and-west, by an urchin full of pssts and hey-mister-okays. ‘Hi there, yes! You want hashish, sahib? Hey, misteramerica. Yes, unclesam, you want opium, best quality, top price? Okay, you want cocaine?’
Saladin began, helplessly, to giggle. The incident struck him as Darwin’s revenge: if Dumsday held poor, Victorian, starchy Charles responsible for American drug culture, how delicious that he should himself be seen, across the globe, as representing the very ethic he battled so fervently against. Dumsday fixed him with a look of pained reproof. It was a hard fate to be an American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked.
After the involuntary giggle had escaped Saladin’s lips, Dumsday sank into a sullen, injured drowse, leaving Chamcha to his own thoughts. Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell … Chamcha was drifting back into sleep when t
he cabin lights came on; the movie stopped; and the illusion of the cinema was replaced by one of watching the television news, as four armed, shouting figures came running down the aisles.
The passengers were held on the hijacked aircraft for one hundred and eleven days, marooned on a shimmering runway around which there crashed the great sand-waves of the desert, because once the four hijackers, three men one woman, had forced the pilot to land nobody could make up their minds what to do with them. They had come down not at an international airport but at the absurd folly of a jumbo-sized landing strip which had been built for the pleasure of the local sheikh at his favourite desert oasis, to which there now also led a six-lane highway very popular among single young men and women, who would cruise along its vast emptiness in slow cars ogling one another through the windows … once 420 had landed here, however, the highway was full of armoured cars, troop transports, limousines waving flags. And while diplomats haggled over the airliner’s fate, to storm or not to storm, while they tried to decide whether to concede or to stand firm at the expense of other people’s lives, a great stillness settled around the airliner and it wasn’t long before the mirages began.
In the beginning there had been a constant flow of events, the hijacking quartet full of electricity, jumpy, trigger-happy. These are the worst moments, Chamcha thought while children screamed and fear spread like a stain, here’s where we could all go west. Then they were in control, three men one woman, all tall, none of them masked, all handsome, they were actors, too, they were stars now, shootingstars or falling, and they had their own stage-names. Dara Singh Buta Singh Man Singh. The woman was Tavleen. The woman in the dream had been anonymous, as if Chamcha’s sleeping fancy had no time for pseudonyms; but, like her, Tavleen spoke with a Canadian accent, smooth-edged, with those give-away rounded O’s. After the plane landed at the oasis of Al-Zamzam it became plain to the passengers, who were observing their captors with the obsessive attention paid to a cobra by a transfixed mongoose, that there was something posturing in the beauty of the three men, some amateurish love of risk and death in them that made them appear frequently at the open doors of the airplane and flaunt their bodies at the professional snipers who must have been hiding amid the palm-trees of the oasis. The woman held herself aloof from such silliness and seemed to be restraining herself from scolding her three colleagues. She seemed insensible to her own beauty, which made her the most dangerous of the four. It struck Saladin Chamcha that the young men were too squeamish, too narcissistic, to want blood on their hands. They would find it difficult to kill; they were here to be on television. But Tavleen was here on business. He kept his eyes on her. The men do not know, he thought. They want to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies and on TV; they are reality aping a crude image of itself, they are worms swallowing their tails. But she, the woman, knows … while Dara, Buta, Man Singh strutted and pranced, she became quiet, her eyes turned inwards, and she scared the passengers stiff.
What did they want? Nothing new. An independent homeland, religious freedom, release of political detainees, justice, ransom money, a safe-conduct to a country of their choice. Many of the passengers came to sympathize with them, even though they were under constant threat of execution. If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.
After they landed the hijackers released all but fifty of the passengers, having decided that fifty was the largest number they could comfortably supervise. Women, children, Sikhs were all released. It turned out that Saladin Chamcha was the only member of the Prospero Players who was not given his freedom; he found himself succumbing to the perverse logic of the situation, and instead of feeling upset at having been retained he was glad to have seen the back of his badly behaved colleagues; good riddance to bad rubbish, he thought.
The creationist scientist Eugene Dumsday was unable to bear the realization that the hijackers did not intend to release him. He rose to his feet, swaying at his great height like a skyscraper in a hurricane, and began shouting hysterical incoherences. A stream of dribble ran out of the corner of his mouth; he licked at it feverishly with his tongue. Now just hold hard here, busters, now goddamn it enough is ENOUGH, whaddya wheredya get the idea you can and so forth, in the grip of his waking nightmare he drivelled on and on until one of the four, obviously it was the woman, came up, swung her rifle butt and broke his flapping jaw. And worse: because slobbering Dumsday had been licking his lips as his jaw slammed shut, the tip of his tongue sheared off and landed in Saladin Chamcha’s lap; followed in quick time by its former owner. Eugene Dumsday fell tongueless and insensate into the actor’s arms.
Eugene Dumsday gained his freedom by losing his tongue; the persuader succeeded in persuading his captors by surrendering his instrument of persuasion. They didn’t want to look after a wounded man, risk of gangrene and so on, and so he joined the exodus from the plane. In those first wild hours Saladin Chamcha’s mind kept throwing up questions of detail, are those automatic rifles or sub-machine guns, how did they smuggle all that metal on board, in which parts of the body is it possible to be shot and still survive, how scared they must be, the four of them, how full of their own deaths … once Dumsday had gone, he had expected to sit alone, but a man came and sat in the creationist’s old seat, saying you don’t mind, yaar, in such circs a guy needs company. It was the movie star, Gibreel.
After the first nervous days on the ground, during which the three turbaned young hijackers went perilously close to the edges of insanity, screaming into the desert night you bastards, come and get us, or, alternatively, o god o god they’re going to send in the fucking commandos, the motherfucking Americans, yaar, the sister-fucking British, – moments during which the remaining hostages closed their eyes and prayed, because they were always most afraid when the hijackers showed signs of weakness, – everything settled down into what began to feel like normality. Twice a day a solitary vehicle carried food and drink to Bostan and left it on the tarmac. The hostages had to bring in the cartons while the hijackers watched them from the safety of the plane. Apart from this daily visit there was no contact with the outside world. The radio had gone dead. It was as if the incident had been forgotten, as if it were so embarrassing that it had simply been erased from the record. ‘The bastards are leaving us to rot,’ screamed Man Singh, and the hostages joined in with a will. ‘Hijras! Chootias! Shits!’
They were wrapped in heat and silence and now the spectres began to shimmer out of the corners of their eyes. The most highly strung of the hostages, a young man with a goatee beard and close-cropped curly hair, awoke at dawn, shrieking with fear because he had seen a skeleton riding a camel across the dunes. Other hostages saw coloured globes hanging in the sky, or heard the beating of gigantic wings. The three male hijackers fell into a deep, fatalistic gloom. One day Tavleen summoned them to a conference at the far end of the plane; the hostages heard angry voices. ‘She’s telling them they have to issue an ultimatum,’ Gibreel Farishta said to Chamcha. ‘One of us has to die, or such.’ But when the men returned Tavleen wasn’t with them and the dejection in their eyes was tinged, now, with shame. ‘They lost their guts,’ Gibreel whispered. ‘No can do. Now what is left for our Tavleen bibi? Zero. Story funtoosh.’
What she did:
In order to prove to her captives, and also to her fellow-captors, that the idea of failure, or surrender, would never weaken her resolve, she emerged from her momentary retreat in the first-class cocktail lounge to stand before them like a stewardess demonstrating safety procedures. But instead of putting on a lifejacket and holding up blow-tube whistle etcetera, she quickly lifted the loose black djellabah that was her only garment and stood before them stark naked, so that they could all see the arsenal of her body, the grenades like extra breasts nestling in her cleavage, the gelignite taped around her thighs, just the way it had been in Chamcha’s dream. Then she slipped her robe back on a
nd spoke in her faint oceanic voice. ‘When a great idea comes into the world, a great cause, certain crucial questions are asked of it,’ she murmured. ‘History asks us: what manner of cause are we? Are we uncompromising, absolute, strong, or will we show ourselves to be timeservers, who compromise, trim and yield?’ Her body had provided her answer.
The days continued to pass. The enclosed, boiling circumstances of his captivity, at once intimate and distant, made Saladin Chamcha want to argue with the woman, unbendingness can also be monomania, he wanted to say, it can be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last. But he didn’t say anything, of course, he fell into the torpor of the days. Gibreel Farishta discovered in the seat pocket in front of him a pamphlet written by the departed Dumsday. By this time Chamcha had noticed the determination with which the movie star resisted the onset of sleep, so it wasn’t surprising to see him reciting and memorizing the lines of the creationist’s leaflet, while his already heavy eyelids drooped lower and lower until he forced them to open wide again. The leaflet argued that even the scientists were busily re-inventing God, that once they had proved the existence of a single unified force of which electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces of the new physics were all merely aspects, avatars, one might say, or angels, then what would we have but the oldest thing of all, a supreme entity controlling all creation … ‘You see, what our friend says is, if you have to choose between some type of disembodied force-field and the actual living God, which one would you go for? Good point, na? You can’t pray to an electric current. No point asking a wave-form for the key to Paradise.’ He closed his eyes, then snapped them open again. ‘All bloody bunk,’ he said fiercely. ‘Makes me sick.’