When Hind saw her elder daughter on the verge of walking out of her life forever, she understood the price one pays for harbouring the Prince of Darkness under one's roof. She begged her husband to see reason, to realize that his good-hearted generosity had brought them into this hell, and that if only that devil, Chamcha, could be removed from the premises, then maybe they could become once again the happy and industrious family of old. As she finished speaking, however, the house above her head began to rumble and shake, and there was the noise of something coming down the stairs, growling and – or so it seemed – singing, in a voice so vilely hoarse that it was impossible to understand the words.

It was Mishal who went up to meet him in the end, Mishal with Hanif Johnson holding her hand, while the treacherous Anahita watched from the foot of the stairs. Chamcha had grown to a height of over eight feet, and from his nostrils there emerged smoke of two different colours, yellow from the left, and from the right, black. He was no longer wearing clothes. His bodily hair had grown thick and long, his tail was swishing angrily, his eyes were a pale but luminous red, and he had succeeded in terrifying the entire temporary population of the bed and breakfast establishment to the point of incoherence. Mishal, however, was not too scared to talk. ‘Where do you think you're going?’ she asked him. ‘You think you'd last five minutes out there, looking like you do?’ Chamcha paused, looked himself over, observed the sizeable erection emerging from his loins, and shrugged. ‘I am considering action,’ he told her, using her own phrase, although in that voice of lava and thunder it didn't seem to belong to her any more. ‘There is a person I wish to find.’

‘Hold your horses,’ Mishal told him. ‘We'll work something out.’

What is to be found here, one mile from the Shaandaar, here where the beat meets the street, at Club Hot Wax, formerly the Blak-An-Tan? On this star-crossed and moonless night, let us follow the figures – some strutting, decked out, hot-to-trot, others surreptitious, shadow-hugging, shy – converging from all quarters of the neighbourhood to dive, abruptly, underground, and through this unmarked door. What's within? Lights, fluids, powders, bodies shaking themselves, singly, in pairs, in threes, moving towards possibilities. But what, then, are these other figures, obscure in the on-off rainbow brilliance of the space, these forms frozen in their attitudes amid the frenzied dancers? What are these that hip-hop and hindi-pop but never move an inch? – ‘You lookin good, Hot Wax posse!’ Our host speaks: ranter, toaster, deejay nonpareil – the prancing Pinkwalla, his suit of lights blushing to the beat. – Truly, he is exceptional, a seven-foot albino, his hair the palest rose, the whites of his eyes likewise, his features unmistakably Indian, the haughty nose, long thin lips, a face from a Hamza-nama cloth. An Indian who has never seen India, East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. A star.

Still the motionless figures dance between the shimmying of sisters, the jouncing and bouncing of youth. What are they? – Why, waxworks, nothing more. – Who are they? – History. See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping Lady, but, being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence's candle; – and, over there!, one Abdul Karim, aka The Munshi, whom Queen Victoria sought to promote, but who was done down by colour-barring ministers. They're all here, dancing motionlessly in hot wax: the black clown of Septimius Severus, to the right; to the left, George IV's barber dancing with the slave, Grace Jones. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, the African prince who was sold for six feet of cloth, dances according to his ancient fashion with the slave's son Ignatius Sancho, who became in 1782 the first African writer to be published in England. – The migrants of the past, as much the living dancers’ ancestors as their own flesh and blood, gyrate stilly while Pink walla rants toasts raps up on the stage, Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-dem-make-insinuation-we-no-part-a-de-nation-an-mi-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-Occupation, and from a different part of the crowded room, bathed in evil green light, wax villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward Long, all the local avatars of Legree. And now a murmur begins in the belly of the Club, mounting, becoming a single word, chanted over and over: ‘Meltdown,’ the customers demand. ‘Meltdown, meltdown, melt.’

Pinkwalla takes his cue from the crowd, So-it-meltdown-time-when-de-men-of-crime-gonna-get-in-line-for-some-hell-fire-fryin, after which he turns to the crowd, arms wide, feet with the beat, to ask, Who's-it-gonna-be? Who-you-wanna-see? Names are shouted, compete, coalesce, until the assembled company is united once more, chanting a single word. Pinkwalla claps his hands. Curtains part behind him, allowing female attendants in shiny pink shorts and singlets to wheel out a fearsome cabinet: man-sized, glass-fronted, internally-illuminated – the microwave oven, complete with Hot Seat, known to Club regulars as: Hell's Kitchen. ‘All right,’ cries Pinkwalla. ‘Now we really cookin.’

Attendants move towards the tableau of hate-figures, pounce upon the night's sacrificial offering, the one most often selected, if truth be told; at least three times a week. Her permawaved coiffure, her pearls, her suit of blue. Maggie-maggie-maggie, bays the crowd. Burn-burn-burn. The doll, – the guy, – is strapped into the Hot Seat. Pinkwalla throws the switch. And O how prettily she melts, from the inside out, crumpling into formlessness. Then she is a puddle, and the crowd sighs its ecstasy: done. ‘The fire this time,’ Pinkwalla tells them. Music regains the night.

When Pinkwalla the deejay saw what was climbing under cover of darkness into the back of his panel van, which his friends Hanif and Mishal had persuaded him to bring round the back of the Shaandaar, the fear of obeah filled his heart; but there was also the contrary exhilaration of realizing that the potent hero of his many dreams was a flesh-and-blood actuality. He stood across the street, shivering under a lamp-post though it wasn't particularly cold, and stayed there for half an hour while Mishal and Hanif spoke urgently to him, he needs somewhere to go, we have to think about his future. Then he shrugged, walked over to the van, and started up the engine. Hanif sat beside him in the cab; Mishal travelled with Saladin, hidden from view.

It was almost four in the morning when they bedded Chamcha down in the empty, locked-up nightclub. Pinkwalla – his real name, Sewsunker, was never used – had unearthed a couple of sleeping-bags from a back room, and they sufficed. Hanif Johnson, saying goodnight to the fearsome entity of whom his lover Mishal seemed entirely unafraid, tried to talk to him seriously, ‘You've got to realize how important you could be for us, there's more at stake here than your personal needs,’ but mutant Saladin only snorted, yellow and black, and Hanif backed quickly away. When he was alone with the waxworks Chamcha was able to fix his thoughts once again on the face that had finally coalesced in his mind's eye, radiant, the light streaming out around him from a point just behind his head, Mister Perfecto, portrayer of gods, who always landed on his feet, was always forgiven his sins, loved, praised, adored... the face he had been trying to identify in his dreams, Mr Gibreel Farishta, transformed into the simulacrum of an angel as surely as he was the Devil's mirror-self.