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exhaustive tests had come up with almost nothing; and
while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood-count that had fallen from his
normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the
national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. "It is a freak
mystery," he gave out. "Call it, if you so please, an act of
God."
               
Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no apparent
reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At the worst
moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis, and it seemed
that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his nose and ears and
out of the corners of his eyes. For seven days he bled, and received
transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical science, including a
concentrated form of rat poison, and although the treatment resulted in a
marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for lost.
               
The whole of India was at Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on
every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national
television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large
that the police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and tear-gas, which they
used even though every one of the half-million mourners was already tearful and
wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him.
Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand.
A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed
such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he
have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far
behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed,
not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves.
               
Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call,
despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many
lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him
most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball-bearing of a
husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the
motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her
husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the
bleak devastation of her soul.
               
He recovered.
               
The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was
called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A national
holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But when
Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a
startling degree, because he had lost his faith.
               
On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through
the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as
his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing
vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end
of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the
limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into
the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of
forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from
Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere;
with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism;
and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped
up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs
into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his