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again, first you have to die . Chamcha did not bother to protest that in most of the examples Gibreel provided in his soliloquies, metamorphosis had not required a death; the new flesh had been entered into through other gates. Gibreel in full flight, his arms waving like imperious wings, brooked no interruptions. “The old must die, you get my message, or the new cannot be whatnot.”

Sometimes these tirades would end in tears. Farishta in his exhaustion-beyond-exhaustion would lose control and place his sobbing head on Chamcha’s shoulder, while Saladin—prolonged captivity erodes certain reluctances among the captives—would stroke his face and kiss the top of his head, There, there, there . On other occasions Chamcha’s irritation would get the better of him. The seventh time that Farishta quoted the old Gramsci chestnut, Saladin shouted out in frustration, maybe that’s what’s happening to you, loudmouth, your old self is dying and that dream-angel of yours is trying to be born into your flesh.

 “You want to hear something really crazy?” Gibreel after a hundred and one days offered Chamcha more confidences. “You want to know why I’m here?” And told him anyway: “For a woman. Yes, boss. For the bloody love of my bloody life. With whom I have spent a sum total of days three point five. Doesn’t that prove I really am cracked? QED, Spoono, old Chumch.”

And: “How to explain it to you? Three and a half days of it, how long do you need to know that the best thing has happened, the deepest thing, the has-to—be-it? I swear: when I kissed her there were mother—fucking sparks, yaar, believe don’t believe, she said it was static electricity in the carpet but I’ve kissed chicks in hotel rooms before and this was a definite first, a definite one-and-only. Bloody electric shocks, man, I had to jump back with pain.”

He had no words to express her, his woman of mountain ice, to express how it had been in that moment when his life had been in pieces at his feet and she had become its meaning. “You don’t see,” he gave up. “Maybe you never met a person for whom you’d cross the world, for whom you’d leave everything, walk out and take a plane. She climbed Everest, man. Twenty-nine thousand and two feet, or maybe twenty-nine one four one. Straight to the top. You think I can’t get on a jumbo-jet for a woman like that?”

The harder Gibreel Farishta tried to explain his obsession with the mountain—climber Alleluia Cone, the more Saladin tried to conjure up the memory of Pamela, but she wouldn’t come. At first it would be Zeeny who

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