S. S. Sisodia

S. S. Sisodia is a film producer whose comic manner, tireless sociability, and instinct for managing people make him both a valued companion and a formidable show-business operator. After Gibreel Farishta’s collapse, Sisodia helps sustain his recovery, then turns the actor’s survival and famous screen image into the basis for a new film venture. His career shows how personal loyalty and commercial calculation can occupy the same gesture: he feeds and entertains Gibreel, but also helps draw him back toward the public identity from which he had withdrawn.

Identity and Career

Sisodia introduces himself to Alleluia Cone after his rented limousine strikes Gibreel, who has stepped into the traffic. The collision is slow enough that Gibreel is badly bruised but not seriously injured. Sisodia’s first response is characteristic: he treats the unlikely encounter as a comic film moment, recognizing Gibreel’s face and speaking in a pronounced stammer. The producer’s verbal difficulty becomes part of his manner, but it does not prevent him from directing conversations, cultivating contacts, or driving a deal.

By the time he is visiting Gibreel, Sisodia has a long record in the film business. He has made a string of so-called quality pictures on very small budgets and kept his career moving for more than twenty years through charm and persistent hustle. Payments on his productions can be difficult to collect, yet people continue to work with him. One episode captures the leverage of his personal style: when a cast revolts over pay, he takes the whole unit to a lavish palace picnic, and the workers later sign on for further projects. The story presents this as an ability to replace an unresolved material grievance with a memorable display of access and generosity. Another account credits him with ensuring that unpaid fees for a dancer-actress could be found when she needed cancer treatment.

Sisodia’s success later brings him beyond his small office on Readymoney Terrace in Mumbai. After several unexpected box-office hits adapted from old fables, he keeps apartments in London and New York and has Oscars in his toilets. He is also associated with extravagant celebrity anecdotes and a professed admiration for the Hong Kong producer Run Run Shaw, whose name he cannot reliably pronounce. The details make him a figure of the industry’s comic excess, but also of its durable, practical networks.

Care for Gibreel and the Film Proposal

During Gibreel’s convalescence, Sisodia becomes a regular visitor, arriving three or four times a week with boxes of food. Gibreel has been fasting during his period of believing himself an angel, and medical opinion holds that starvation contributed substantially to his hallucinations. Sisodia responds with an energetic program of feeding: he brings Chinese sweet-corn and chicken soup, bhel-puri from Pagal Khana, food from the Shaandaar Café, and dishes he has cooked himself, including fish curries, raitas, sivayyan, and khir. His celebrity stories and constant conversation give the visits a social liveliness as Gibreel regains his appetite.

The attention is not merely performative. Sisodia remains with Gibreel while Alleluia’s work schedule fills with promotional commitments, fitness training, and meetings. He tells her that staying with Gibreel is a privilege, and she repeatedly finds him still talking when she returns. His place at the bedside resembles that of an eccentric cousin, a dependable presence whose practical care helps make convalescence less solitary. The apparent ease of that role also makes his later business proposal more disarming.

Once doctors at Maudsley Hospital recommend a substantial reduction in Gibreel’s medication, Sisodia reveals that he has contacted the seven Mumbai producers Gibreel left behind when he boarded the Bostan. They are glad he survived, but contractual claims and other possible lawsuits threaten him with substantial costs. Sisodia has gathered the principals’ authority and assembled a production package: investment from Billy Battuta, contributions from the Indian producers, a supporting role for Pimple Billimoria, and filming across Europe, India, and the North African coast. Gibreel negotiates for a share of the profits, and Sisodia accepts his counteroffer without hesitation. The project is to be a series of films about incidents from the angel’s career, with Gibreel playing the archangel Gibreel. Alleluia objects that the proposal exploits his illness and disregards his wish to retire. Sisodia’s kindness has thus brought Gibreel back into the orbit of the industry, but it has not protected him from the industry’s appetite for his most marketable image.

The Dark Star and the Earls Court Appearance

Sisodia next makes uncertainty itself part of the publicity. Determined to keep the identity of the Dark Star concealed, he has Gibreel enter the Earls Court stage door in a burqa, then locks him in the largest dressing room. A black five-pointed star marks the door. Inside, Gibreel finds an angel costume and a forehead device designed to make lightbulbs glow behind him, giving the appearance of a halo. A closed-circuit television lets him watch the entertainment before his own entrance, while a cordless telephone connects him to Sisodia, who reports that the house is full.

A gift-wrapped box in the room contains Pimple Billimoria, arranged as part of the producer’s surprise. The staging turns Gibreel’s religious and cinematic associations into a managed spectacle: costume, concealment, artificial halo, and carefully controlled anticipation. When the ensuing riot surrounds the stage, an official account claims that Gibreel escaped in the winch-operated chariot that had carried him above the audience. The account is later contradicted by a revelation that the assistant stage manager never set the winch in motion and that backstage staff had been paid to support the false story. Sisodia’s determination to keep the Dark Star mysterious belongs to the event’s preparation, but the evidence does not identify him as the person who arranged that deception.

The rumor that Gibreel actually levitated away spreads quickly through London’s Asian communities, helped by reports of a halo behind his head. Within days, vendors in Brickhall, Wembley, and Brixton are selling toy haloes alongside rubber horns. The public response turns Sisodia’s manufactured secrecy into a story that exceeds the stage: the performer’s disappearance is interpreted through the same uncertain mixture of spectacle, belief, and popular image that has long surrounded his career.

Networks, Opportunism, and Narrative Role

Sisodia also connects people beyond the film set. When Alleluia needs to reach Saladin Chamcha, she tracks him down through a chain that includes Sisodia, Billy Battuta, and Mimi Mamoulian. Later, Sisodia helps deliver an invitation to the party at Shepperton film studios, where a vast reconstruction of Dickensian London provides the setting. He is present among the film and social-world figures gathered there, beside Alleluia and Gibreel. The party’s artificial city and assembled celebrity guests place his world of production and promotion at the center of the meeting between Saladin and Gibreel.

Sisodia’s connections also become material for Saladin’s campaign against Gibreel. On a drive with Alleluia, Saladin advises her not to let Gibreel cut her off from her own life. She then mentions that Sisodia once made a pass at her, describing him as shameless but able to accept rejection. Saladin immediately files the information away for possible use. The episode does not establish that Sisodia knows his conduct has become part of Saladin’s strategy; it shows instead how easily the producer’s social entanglements can be converted into leverage by someone else.

As a character, Sisodia is neither simply a benefactor nor simply a manipulator. His food, visits, and practical attention are real; so are his readiness to package Gibreel’s identity into a profitable project and his skill at turning uncertainty into publicity. The contrast gives his charm its narrative force. He helps Gibreel survive the withdrawal from public life, then offers a route back that makes the actor’s private crisis legible as a saleable screen role. Through Sisodia, the novel links the intimate work of care to the machinery of celebrity, where an image can be nurtured, negotiated, and marketed even as the person behind it remains uncertain.