‘You want your head examining is what,’ Alicja comforted her. How long since they had been like this in one another's arms? Too long. And maybe it would be the last time... Alicja hugged her daughter, said: ‘So dry your eyes. Comes now the good news. Your affairs might be shot to ribbons, but your old mother is in better shape.’

There was an American college professor, a certain Boniek, big in genetic engineering. ‘Now don't start, dear, you don't know anything, it's not all Frankenstein and geeps, it has many beneficial applications,’ Alicja said with evident nervousness, and Allie, overcoming her surprise and her own red-rimmed un-happiness, burst into convulsive, liberating sobs of laughter; in which her mother joined. ‘At your age,’ Allie wept, ‘you ought to be ashamed.’ – ‘Well, I'm not,’ the future Mrs. Boniek rejoined. ‘A professor, and in Stanford, California, so he brings the sunshine also. I intend to spend many hours working on my tan.’

When she discovered (a report found by chance in a desk drawer at the Sisodia palazzo) that Gibreel had started having her followed, Allie did, at last, make the break. She scribbled a note – This is killing me – slipped it inside the report, which she placed on the desktop; and left without saying goodbye. Gibreel never rang her up. He was rehearsing, in those days, for his grand public reappearance at the latest in a successful series of stage song-and-dance shows featuring Indian movie stars and staged by one of Billy Battuta's companies at Earls Court. He was to be the unannounced, surprise top-of-the-bill show-stopper, and had been rehearsing dance routines with the show's chorus line for weeks: also reacquainting himself with the art of mouthing to playback music. Rumours of the identity of the Mystery Man or Dark Star were being carefully circulated and monitored by Battuta's promo men, and the Valance advertising agency had been hired to devise a series of ‘teaser’ radio commercials and a local 48-sheet poster campaign. Gibreel's arrival on the Earls Court stage – he was to be lowered from the flies surrounded by clouds of cardboard and smoke – was the intended climax to the English segment of his re-entry into his superstardom; next stop, Bombay. Deserted, as he called it, by Alleluia Cone, he once more ‘refused to crawl’; and immersed himself in work.

The next thing that went wrong was that Billy Battuta got himself arrested in New York for his Satanic sting. Allie, reading about it in the Sunday papers, swallowed her pride and called Gibreel at the rehearsal rooms to warn him against consorting with such patently criminal elements. ‘Battuta's a hood,’ she insisted. ‘His whole manner was a performance, a fake. He wanted to be sure he'd be a hit with the Manhattan dowagers, so he made us his tryout audience. That goatee! And a college blazer, for God's sake: how did we fall for it?’ But Gibreel was cold and withdrawn; she had ditched him, in his book, and he wasn't about to take advice from deserters. Besides, Sisodia and the Battuta promo team had assured him – and he had grilled them about it all right – that Billy's problems had no relevance to the gala night (Filmmela, that was the name) because the financial arrangements remained solid, the monies for fees and guarantees had already been allocated, all the Bombay-based stars had confirmed, and would participate as planned. ‘Plans fifilling up fast,’ Sisodia promised. ‘Shoshow must go on.’

The next thing that went wrong was inside Gibreel.

Sisodia's determination to keep people guessing about this Dark Star meant that Gibreel had to enter the Earls Court stage-door dressed in a burqa. So that even his sex remained a mystery. He was given the largest dressing-room – a black five-pointed star had been stuck on the door – and was unceremoniously locked in by the bespectacled genuform producer. In the dressing-room he found his angel-costume, including a contraption that, when tied around his forehead, would cause lightbulbs to glow behind him, creating the illusion of a halo; and a closed-circuit television, on which he would be able to watch the show – Mithun and Kimi cavorting for the ‘disco diwané’ set; Jayapradha and Rekha (no relation: the megastar, not a figment on a rug) submitting regally to on-stage interviews, in which Jaya divulged her views on polygamy while Rekha fantasized about alternative lives – ‘If I'd been born out of India, I'd have been a painter in Paris'; he-man stunts from Vinod and Dharmendra; Sridevi getting her sari wet – until it was time for him to take up his position on a winch-operated ‘chariot’ high above the stage. There was a cordless telephone, on which Sisodia called to tell him that the house was full – ‘All sorts are here,’ he triumphed, and proceeded to offer Gibreel his technique of crowd analysis: you could tell the Pakistanis because they dressed up to the gills, the Indians because they dressed down, and the Bangladeshis because they dressed badly, ‘all that pupurple and pink and gogo gold gota that they like’ – and which otherwise remained silent; and, finally, a large gift-wrapped box, a little present from his thoughtful producer, which turned out to contain Miss Pimple Billimoria wearing a winsome expression and a quantity of gold ribbon. The movies were in town.

The strange feeling began – that is, returned – when he was in the ‘chariot’, waiting to descend. He thought of himself as moving along a route on which, any moment now, a choice would be offered him, a choice – the thought formulated itself in his head without any help from him – between two realities, this world and another that was also right there, visible but unseen. He felt slow, heavy, distanced from his own consciousness, and realized that he had not the faintest idea which path he would choose, which world he would enter. The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to treat him for schizophrenia; the splitting was not in him, but in the universe. As the chariot began its descent towards the immense, tidal roar that had begun to swell below him, he rehearsed his opening line – My name is Gibreel Farishta, and I'm back – and heard it, so to speak, in stereo, because it, too, belonged in both worlds, with a different meaning in each; – and now the lights hit him, he raised his arms high, he was returning wreathed in clouds, – and the crowd had recognized him, and his fellow-performers, too; people were rising from their seats, every man, woman and child in the auditorium, surging towards the stage, unstoppable, like a sea. – The first man to reach him had time to scream out Remember me, Gibreel? With the six toes? Maslama, sir: John Maslama. I kept secret your presence among us; but yes, I have been speaking out about the coming of the Lord, I have gone before you, a voice crying in the wilderness, the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain– but then he had been dragged away, and the security guards were around Gibreel, they're out of control, it's a fucking riot, you'll have to– but he wouldn't go, because he'd seen that at least half the crowd were wearing bizarre headgear, rubber horns to make them look like demons, as if they were badges of belonging and defiance; – and in that instant when he saw the adversary's sign he felt the universe fork and he stepped down the left-hand path.

The official version of what followed, and the one accepted by all the news media, was that Gibreel Farishta had been lifted out of the danger area in the same winch-operated chariot in which he'd descended, and from which he hadn't had time to emerge; – and that it would therefore have been easy for him to make his escape, from his isolated and unwatched place high above the mêlée. This version proved resilient enough to survive the ‘revelation’ in the Voice that the assistant stage manager in charge of the winch had not, repeat not, set it in motion after it landed; – that, in fact, the chariot remained grounded throughout the riot of the ecstatic film fans; – and that substantial sums of money had been paid to the backstage staff to persuade them to collude in the fabrication of a story which, because totally fictional, was realistic enough for the newspaper-buying public to believe. However, the rumour that Gibreel Farishta had actually levitated away from the Earls Court stage and vanished into the blue under his own steam spread rapidly through the city's Asian population, and was fed by many accounts of the halo that had been seen streaming out from a point just behind his head. Within days of the second disappearance of Gibreel Farishta, vendors of novelties in Brickhall, Wembley and Brixton were selling as many toy haloes (green fluorescent hoops were the most popular) as headbands to which had been affixed a pair of rubber horns.