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Eugene Dumsday gained his freedom by losing his tongue; the persuader succeeded in persuading his captors by surrendering his instrument of persuasion. They didn’t want to look after a wounded man, risk of gangrene and so on, and so he joined the exodus from the plane. In those first wild hours Saladin Chamcha’s mind kept throwing up questions of detail, are those automatic rifles or sub-machine guns, how did they smuggle all that metal on board, in which parts of the body is it possible to be shot and still survive, how scared they must be, the four of them, how full of their own deaths. . . once Dumsday had gone, he had expected to sit alone, but a man came and sat in the creationist’s old seat, saying you don’t mind, yaar, in such circs a guy needs company. It was the movie star, Gibreel.

After the first nervous days on the ground, during which the three turbaned young hijackers went perilously close to the edges of insanity, screaming into the desert night you bastards, come and get us , or, alternatively, o god o god they’re going to send in the fucking commandos, the motherfucking Americans, yaar, the sisterfucking British , -- moments during which the remaining hostages closed their eyes and prayed, because they were always most afraid when the hijackers showed signs of weakness, -- everything settled down into what began to feel like normality. Twice a day a solitary vehicle carried food and drink to Bostan and left it on the tarmac. The hostages had to bring in the cartons while the hijackers watched them from the safety of the plane. Apart from this daily visit there was no contact with the outside world. The radio had gone dead. It was as if the incident had been forgotten, as if it were so embarrassing that it had simply been erased from the record. “The bastards are leaving us to rot,” screamed Man Singh, and the hostages joined in with a will. “Hijras! Chootias! Shits!”

They were wrapped in heat and silence and now the spectres began to shimmer out of the corners of their eyes. The most highly strung of the hostages, a young man with a goatee beard and close-cropped curly hair, awoke at dawn, shrieking with fear because he had seen a skeleton riding a camel across the dunes. Other hostages saw coloured globes hanging in the sky, or heard the beating of gigantic wings. The three male hijackers fell into a deep, fatalistic gloom. One day Tavleen summoned them to a conference at the far end of the plane; the hostages heard angry voices. “She’s telling them they have to issue an ultimatum,” Gibreel Farishta said to Chamcha. “One of us has to die, or such.” But when the men returned Tavleen wasn’t with them and the dejection in their eyes was tinged, now, with shame. “They lost their guts,” Gibreel whispered. “No can do. Now what is left for our Tavleen bibi? Zero. Story funtoosh.”

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