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So he had lost work as well as wife, home, a grip on life. ‘It's not just the dentals that go wrong,’ Mimi powered on. ‘The fucking plosives scare me stupid. I keep thinking I'll spray the old bones on the street again. Age, Chamcha: it's all humiliations. You get born, you get beaten up and bruised all over and finally you break and they shovel you into an urn. Anyway, if I never work again I'll die comfortable. Did you know I'm with Billy Battuta now? That's right, how could you, you've been swimming. Yeah, I gave up waiting for you so I cradlesnatched one of your ethnic co-persons. You can take it as a compliment. Now I gots to run. Nice talking to the dead, Chamcha. Next time dive from the low board. Toodle oo.’
I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disco
He was sliding down a grey slope, the black water lapping at his heart. Why did rebirth, the second chance granted to Gibreel Farishta and himself, feel so much, in his case, like a perpetual ending? He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of noway-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.
Billy Battuta: that worthless piece of shit. Playboy Pakistani, turned an unremarkable holiday business – Battuta's Travels – into a fleet of supertankers. A con-man, basically, famous for his romances with leading ladies of the Hindi screen and, according to gossip, for his predilection for white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom he ‘treated badly’, as the euphemism had it, and ‘rewarded handsomely’. What did Mimi want with bad Billy, his sexual instruments and his Maserati Biturbo? For boys like Battuta, white women – never mind fat, Jewish, non-deferential white women – were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in whites – love of brown sugar – one must also hate when it turns up, inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.
Mimi telephoned the next evening from New York. Anahita called him to the phone in her best damnyankee tones, and he struggled into his disguise. When he got there she had rung off, but she rang back. ‘Nobody pays transatlantic prices for hanging on.’ ‘Mimi,’ he said, with desperation patent in his voice, ‘you didn't say you were leaving.’ ‘You didn't even tell me your damn address,’ she responded. ‘So we both have secrets.’ He wanted to say, Mimi, come home, you're going to get kicked. ‘I introduced him to the family,’ she said, too jokily. ‘You can imagine. Yassir Arafat meets the Begins. Never mind. We'll all live.’ He wanted to say, Mimi, you're all I've got. He managed, however, only to piss her off. ‘I wanted to warn you about Billy,’ was what he said.
She went icy. ‘Chamcha, listen up. I'll discuss this with you one time because behind all your bullshit you do maybe care for me a little. So comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read Fi
‘You concede, then, that he's exploiting you,’ Chamcha interposed, but the torrent swept him away. ‘What's the fuckin’ diff?’ she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. ‘Billy's a fu
‘Mimi,’ he said, ‘something's happened to me,’ but she was still protesting too much and missed it. He put the receiver down without giving her his address.
She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken precedents had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts, and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart, it was time to wave goodbye. It was still all Billy with Mimi: his plans to make Hindi movies in England and America, importing the top stars, Vinod Kha
I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an amoral, survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita Sufyan, who still unaccountably treated him like a kind of soul-mate, in spite of all his attempts to dissuade them, were beings who plainly admired such creatures as moonlighters, shoplifters, filchers: scam artists in general. He corrected himself: not admired, that wasn't it. Neither girl would ever steal a pin. But they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of how-it-was. As an experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the mink coat. Their eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with delight: wickedness unpunished made them laugh. Thus, Chamcha realized, people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws, Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly, Phoolan Devi, and of course that other Billy: William Bo