It really was incredible. Here appeared a celestial being, all radiance, effulgence and goodness, larger than Big Ben, capable of straddling the Thames colossus-style, and these little ants remained immersed in drive-time radio and quarrels with fellow-motorists. ‘I am Gibreel,’ he shouted in a voice that shook every building on the riverbank: nobody noticed. Not one person came running out of those quaking edifices to escape the earthquake. Blind, deaf and asleep.

He decided to force the issue.

The stream of traffic flowed past him. He took a mighty breath, lifted one gigantic foot, and stepped out to face the cars.

Gibreel Farishta was returned to Allie's doorstep, badly bruised, with many grazes on his arms and face, and jolted into sanity, by a tiny shining gentleman with an advanced stammer who introduced himself with some difficulty as the film producer S.S. Sisodia, ‘known as Whiwhisky because I'm papa partial to a titi tipple; mamadam, my caca card.’ (When they knew each other better, Sisodia would send Allie into convulsions of laughter by rolling up his right trouser-leg, exposing the knee, and pronouncing, while he held his enormous wraparound movie-man glasses to his shin: ‘Self pawpaw portrait.’ He was longsighted to a degree: ‘Don't need help to see moomovies but real life gets too damn cloclose up.’) It was Sisodia's rented limo that hit Gibreel, a slow-motion accident luckily, owing to traffic congestion; the actor ended up on the bonnet, mouthing the oldest line in the movies: Where am I, and Sisodia, seeing the legendary features of the vanished demigod squashed up against the limousine's windshield, was tempted to answer: Baback where you bibi belong: on the iska iska iscreen. – ‘No bobobones broken,’ Sisodia told Allie. ‘A mimi miracle. He ista ista istepped right in fafa front of the wee wee wehicle.’

So you're back, Allie greeted Gibreel silently. Seems this is where you always land up after you fall.

‘Also Scotch-and-Sisodia,’ the film producer reverted to the question of his sobriquets. Tor hoohoo humorous reasons. My fafavourite pup pup poison.’

‘It is very kind of you to bring Gibreel home,’ Allie belatedly got the point. ‘You must allow us to offer you a drink.’

‘Sure! Sure!’ Sisodia actually clapped his hands. ‘For me, for whowhole of heehee Hindi cinema, today is a baba banner day.’

‘You have not heard perhaps the story of the paranoid schizophrenic who, believing himself to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, agreed to undergo a lie-detector test?’ Alicja Cohen, eating gefilte fish hungrily, waved one of Bloom's forks under her daughter's nose. ‘The question they asked him: are you Napoleon? And the answer he gave, smiling wickedly, no doubt: No. So they watch the machine, which indicates with all the insight of modern science that the lunatic is lying.’ Blake again, Allie thought. Then I asked: does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He – i.e. Isaiah – replied. All poets believe that it does. & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. ‘Are you listening to me, young woman? I'm serious here. That gentleman you have in your bed: he requires not your nightly attentions – excuse me but I'll speak plainly, seeing I must – but, to be frank, a padded cell.’

‘You'd do that, wouldn't you,’ Allie hit back. ‘You'd throw away the key. Maybe you'd even plug him in. Burn the devils out of his brain: strange how our prejudices never change.’

‘Hmm,’ Alicja ruminated, adopting her vaguest and most innocent expression in order to infuriate her daughter. ‘What can it harm? Yes, maybe a little voltage, a little dose of the juice...’

‘What he needs is what he's getting, mother. Proper medical supervision, plenty of rest, and something you maybe forgot about.’ She dried suddenly, her tongue knotted, and it was in quite a different, low voice, staring at her untouched salad, that she got out the last word. ‘Love.’

‘Ah, the power of love,’ Alicja patted her daughter's (at once withdrawn) hand. ‘No, it's not what I forgot, Alleluia. It's what you just begun for the first time in your beautiful life to learn. And who do you pick?’ She returned to the attack. ‘An out-to-lunch! A ninety-pennies-in-the-pound! A butterflies-in-the-brainbox! I mean, angels, darling, I never heard the like. Men are always claiming special privileges, but this one is a first.’

‘Mother...’ Allie began, but Alicja's mood had changed again, and this time, when she spoke, Allie was not listening to the words, but hearing the pain they both revealed and concealed, the pain of a woman to whom history had most brutally happened, who had already lost a husband and seen one daughter precede her to what she once, with unforgettable black humour, referred to (she must have read the sports pages, by some chance, to come across the phrase) as an early bath. ‘Allie, my baby,’ Alicja Cohen said, ‘we're going to have to take good care of you.’

One reason why Allie was able to spot that panic-anguish in her mother's face was her recent sighting of the same combination on the features of Gibreel Farishta. After Sisodia returned him to her care, it became plain that Gibreel had been shaken to the very marrow, and there was a haunted look to him, a scarified popeyed quality, that quite pierced her heart. He faced the fact of his mental illness with courage, refusing to play it down or call it by a false name, but his recognition of it had, understandably, cowed him. No longer (for the present, anyway) the ebullient vulgarian for whom she had conceived her ‘grand passion’, he became for her, in this newly vulnerable incarnation, more lovable than ever. She grew determined to lead him back to sanity, to stick it out; to wait out the storm, and conquer the peak. And he was, for the moment, the easiest and most malleable of patients, somewhat dopey as a result of the heavy-duty medication he was being given by the specialists at the Maudsley Hospital, sleeping long hours, and acquiescing, when awake, in all her requests, without a murmur of protest. In alert moments he filled in for her the full background to his illness: the strange serial dreams, and before that the near-fatal breakdown in India. ‘I am no longer afraid of sleep,’ he told her. ‘Because what's happened in my waking time is now so much worse.’ His greatest fear reminded her of Charles II's terror, after his Restoration, of being sent ‘on his travels’ again: ‘I'd give anything only to know it won't happen any more,’ he told her, meek as a lamb.

Lives there who loves his pain? ‘It won't happen,’ she reassured him. ‘You've got the best help there is.’ He quizzed her about money, and, when she tried to deflect the questions, insisted that she withdraw the psychiatric fees from the small fortune stashed in his money-belt. His spirits remained low. ‘Doesn't matter what you say,’ he mumbled in response to her cheery optimisms. ‘The craziness is in here and it drives me wild to think it could get out any minute, right now, and he would be in charge again.’ He had begun to characterize his ‘possessed’, ‘angel’ self as another person: in the Beckettian formula, Not I. He. His very own Mr. Hyde. Allie attempted to argue against such descriptions. ‘It isn't he, it's you, and when you're well, it won't be you any more.’

It didn't work. For a time, however, it looked as though the treatment was going to. Gibreel seemed calmer, more in control; the serial dreams were still there – he would still speak, at night, verses in Arabic, a language he did not know: tilk al-gharaniq al-'ula wa inna shafa'ata-hunna la-turtaja, for example, which turned out to mean (Allie, woken by his sleeptalk, wrote it down phonetically and went with her scrap of paper to the Brickhall mosque, where her recitation made a mullah's hair stand on end under his turban): ‘These are exalted females whose intercession is to be desired’ – but he seemed able to think of these nightshows as separate from himself, which gave both Allie and the Maudsley psychiatrists the feeling that Gibreel was slowly reconstructing the boundary wall between dreams and reality, and was on the road to recovery; whereas in fact, as it turned out, this separation was related to, was the same phenomenon as, his splitting of his sense of himself into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to suppress, but which he also, by characterizing it as other than himself, preserved, nourished, and secretly made strong.