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mouth.
               
During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God,
every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not
abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some
small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my
ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need,
my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and
for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got
angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not
killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him
through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible
emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to thin air , that
there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his
life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn
it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found
that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of
metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to
himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's
most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.
               
He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair
that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of
mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away.
               
"Don't you get it?" he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments
from the corners of his mouth. "No thunderbolt. That's the point."
               
She came back to stand in front of him. "You're alive," she told him.
"You got your life back. That's the point."
               
He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in
love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest,
blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge, change your life, or did you get
it back for nothing , I couldn't resist.
               
"You and your reincarnation junk," Rekha cajoled him. "Such a
nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes
to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there
she is, hey presto, the blonde mame. Don't think I don't know what you're like,
Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?"
               
No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept, face-down, on
the floor); and never entered it again.
               
Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into
an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not-disturb sign, but
in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible
and what was impossible was im-, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a
transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her
challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his
belief it didn't mean he couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of
the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his
name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work.
               
And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded
passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was
named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but Bostan .
"To be born again," Gibreel Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much
later, "first you have to die. Me, I only half-expired, but I did it on
two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my
friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new
man with a