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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 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 over 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 toprove 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