‘Today the top gogo goddess is absolutely Lakshmi,’ Sisodia confided over whisky once they were safely aloft. (He had been as good as his word, flapping his arms wildly as Gulistan rushed down the runway, and afterwards settled back contentedly in his seat, beaming modestly. ‘Wowoworks every time.’ They were both travelling in the 747's upper deck, reserved for business class non-smokers, and Sisodia had moved into the empty seat next to Chamcha like air filling a vacuum. ‘Call me Whisky,’ he insisted. ‘What lie lie line are you in? How mum much do you earn? How long you bibi been away? You know any women in town, or you want heh heh help?’) Chamcha closed his eyes and fixed his thoughts on his father. The saddest thing, he realized, was that he could not remember a single happy day with Changez in his entire life as a man. And the most gladdening thing was the discovery that even the unforgivable crime of being one's father could be forgiven, after all, in the end. Hang on, he pleaded silently. I'm coming as fast as I can. ‘In these hihighly material times,’ Sisodia explained, ‘who else but goddess of wewealth? In Bombay the young businessmen are hoho holding all night poopoo pooja parties. Statue of Lakshmi presides, with hands tuturned out, and lightbulbs running down her fifi fingers, lighting in sequence, you get me, as if the wealth is paw paw pouring down her palms.’ On the cabin's movie screen a stewardess was demonstrating the various safety procedures. In a corner of the screen an inset male figure translated her into sign language. This was progress, Chamcha recognized. Film instead of human beings, a small increase in sophistication (the signing) and a large increase in cost. High technology at the service, ostensibly, of safety; while in reality air travel got daily more dangerous, the world's stock of aircraft was ageing and nobody could afford to renew it. Bits fell off planes every day, or so it seemed, and collisions and near-misses were also on the up. So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a movie about it. Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality... ‘I'm planning a big bubudget picture about her,’ Sisodia said. ‘This is in strictest coco confidence. Maybe a Sridevi weewee wehicle, I hohope so. Now that Gibreel's comeback is flaw flaw flopping, she is number one supreme.’

Chamcha had heard that Gibreel Farishta had hit the comeback trail. His first film, The Parting of the Arabian Sea, had bombed badly; the special effects looked home-made, the girl in the central Ayesha role, a certain Pimple Billimoria, had been woefully inadequate, and Gibreel's own portrayal of the archangel had struck many critics as narcissistic and megalomaniac. The days when he could do no wrong were gone; his second feature, Mahound, had hit every imaginable religious reef, and sunk without trace. ‘You see, he chochose to go with other producers,’ Sisodia lamented. ‘The greegreed of the ista ista istar. With me the if if effects always work and the good tataste also you can take for gug, grunt, granted,’ Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He had drunk his whisky too fast on account of his fear of flying, and his head had begun to spin. Sisodia appeared not to recall his past connection to Farishta, which was fine. That was where the connection belonged: in the past. ‘Shh shh Sridevi as Lakshmi,’ Sisodia sang out, not very confidentially. ‘Now that is sosolid gold. You are an ack actor. You should work back hohome. Call me. Maybe we can do bubusiness. This picture: solid pap pap platinum.’

Chamcha's head whirled. What strange meanings words were taking on. Only a few days ago that back home would have rung false. But now his father was dying and old emotions were sending tentacles out to grasp him. Maybe his tongue was twisting again, sending his accent East along with the rest of him. He hardly dared open his mouth.

Almost twenty years earlier, when the young and newly renamed Saladin was scratching a living on the margins of the London theatre, in order to maintain a safe distance from his father; and when Changez was retreating in other ways, becoming both reclusive and religious; back then, one day, out of the blue, the father had written to the son, offering him a house. The property was a rambling mansion in the hill-station of Solan. ‘The first property I ever owned,’ Changez wrote, ‘and so it is the first I am gifting to you.’ Saladin's instant reaction was to see the offer as a snare, a way of rejoining him to home, to the webs of his father's power; and when he learned that the Solan property had long ago been requisitioned by the Indian Government in return for a peppercorn rent, and that it had for many years been occupied by a boys’ school, the gift stood revealed as a delusion as well. What did Chamcha care if the school were willing to treat him, on any visits he cared to make, as a visiting Head of State, putting on march-pasts and gymnastic displays? That sort of thing appealed to Changez's enormous vanity, but Chamcha wanted none of it. The point was, the school wasn't budging; the gift was useless, and probably an administrative headache as well. He wrote to his father refusing the offer. It was the last time Changez Chamchawala tried to give him anything. Home receded from the prodigal son.

‘I never forget a faface,’ Sisodia was saying. ‘You're mimi Mimi's friend. The Bostan susurvivor. Knew it the moment I saw you papa panic at the gaga gate. Hope you're not feefeeling too baba bad.’ Saladin, his heart sinking, shook his head, no, I'm fine, honestly. Sisodia, gleaming, knee-like, winked hideously at a passing stewardess and summoned more whisky. ‘Such a shashame about Gibreel and his lady,’ Sisodia went on. ‘Such a nice name that she had, alia alia Alleluia. What a temper on that boy, what a jeajealous tata type. Hard for a momodern gaga girl. They bus bust up.’ Saladin retreated, once again, into a pretence of sleep. I have only just recovered from the past. Go, go away.

He had formally declared his recovery complete only five weeks earlier, at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan and HanifJohnson. After the death of her parents in the Shaandaar fire Mishal had been assailed by a terrible, illogical guilt that caused her mother to appear to her in dreams and admonish her: ‘If only you'd passed the fire extinguisher when I asked. If only you'd blown a little harder. But you never listen to what I say and your lungs are so cigarette-rotten that you could not blow out one candle let alone a burning house.’ Under the severe eye of her mother's ghost Mishal moved out of Hanif's apartment, took a room in a place with three other women, applied for and got Jumpy Joshi's old job at the sports centre, and fought the insurance companies until they paid up. Only when the Shaandaar was ready to reopen under her management did Hind Sufyan's ghost agree that it was time to be off to the after-life; whereupon Mishal telephoned Hanif and asked him to marry her. He was too surprised to reply, and had to pass the telephone to a colleague who explained that the cat had got Mr Johnson's tongue, and accepted Mishal's offer on the dumbstruck lawyer's behalf. So everybody was recovering from the tragedy; even Anahita, who had been obliged to live with a stiflingly old-fashioned aunt, managed to look pleased at the wedding, perhaps because Mishal had promised her her own rooms in the renovated Shaandaar Hotel. Mishal had asked Saladin to be her chief witness in recognition of his attempt to save her parents’ life, and on their way to the registry office in Pinkwalla's van (all charges against the DJ and his boss, John Maslama, had been dropped for lack of evidence) Chamcha told the bride: ‘Today feels like a new start for me, too; perhaps for all of us.’ In his own case there had been by-pass surgery, and the difficulty of coming to terms with so many deaths, and nightmare visions of being metamorphosed once more into some sort of sulphurous, cloven-hoof demon. He was also, for a time, professionally crippled by a shame so profound that, when clients finally did begin to book him once more and ask for one of his voices, for example the voice of a frozen pea or a glove-puppet packet of sausages, he felt the memory of his telephonic crimes welling up in his throat and strangling the impersonations at birth. At Mishal's wedding, however, he suddenly felt free. It was quite a ceremony, largely because the young couple could not refrain from kissing one another throughout the procedure, and had to be urged by the registrar (a pleasant young woman who also exhorted the guests not to drink too much that day if they planned to drive) to hurry up and get through the words before it was time for the next wedding party to arrive. Afterwards at the Shaandaar the kissing continued, the kisses becoming gradually longer and more explicit, until finally the guests had the feeling that they were intruding on a private moment, and slipped quietly away leaving Hanif and Mishal to enjoy a passion so engulfing that they did not even notice their friends’ departure; they remained oblivious, too, of the small crowd of children that gathered outside the windows of the Shaandaar Café to watch them. Chamcha, the last guest to leave, did the newly weds the favour of pulling down the blinds, much to the children's annoyance; and strolled off down the rebuilt High Street feeling so light on his feet that he actually gave a kind of embarrassed skip.