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:

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

V e r s e s

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 it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.

There was a knocking at the door. Open, please. Police. Kas-turba had called them, after all.

Gibreel took the lid off the wonderful lamp of Changez Chamchawala and let it fall clattering to the floor.

He's hidden a gun inside, Salahuddin realized. ‘Watch out,’ he shouted. ‘There's an armed man in here.’ The knocking stopped, and now Gibreel rubbed his hand along the side of the magic lamp: once, twice, thrice.

The revolver jumped up, into his other hand.

A fearsome jinnee of monstrous stature appeared, Salahuddin remembered. ‘What is your wish? I am the slave of him who holds the lamp.’ What a limiting thing is a weapon, Salahuddin thought, feeling oddly detached from events. – Like Gibreel when the sickness came. – Yes, indeed; a most confining manner of thing. – For how few the choices were, now that Gibreel was the armed man and he, the unarmed; how the universe had shrunk! The true djinns of old had the power to open the gates of the Infinite, to make all things possible, to render all wonders capable of being attained; how banal, in comparison, was this modern spook, this degraded descendant of mighty ancestors, this feeble slave of a twentieth-century lamp.

‘I told you a long time back,’ Gibreel Farishta quietly said, ‘that if I thought the sickness would never leave me, that it would always return, I would not be able to bear up to it.’ Then, very quickly, before Salahuddin could move a finger, Gibreel put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth; and pulled the trigger; and was free.

He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water's shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

‘Come along,’ Zeenat Vakil's voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt – in spite of his humanity – he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one's good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. ‘My place,’ Zeeny offered. ‘Let's get the hell out of here.’

‘I'm coming,’ he answered her, and turned away from the view.

Acknowledgements