Saladin Chamcha’s revenge against Gibreel

Saladin Chamcha’s revenge against Gibreel Farishta is carried out not through a direct confrontation but through impersonated voices on the telephone. It begins with a conversation in which Saladin appears to offer Alleluia Cone friendly advice, then becomes a carefully sustained campaign against both her and Gibreel. Its effects reach beyond its intended target: Gibreel breaks with Alleluia, and she is left with an apartment ransacked of the mountain keepsakes that recorded her past.

The conversation that begins the campaign

On the drive back to the Carlisle railway station, Saladin and Alleluia talk about the depopulated countryside and the contrast between its open spaces and the crowdedness Gibreel associates with India. When Saladin asks about her work, Alleluia speaks of wanting a life that gives her own ambitions a central place, while hesitating over the idea of describing that future as shared with Gibreel. The exchange brings an uncertainty in their relationship into the open, but at this point it is framed as a private conversation rather than a confrontation.

Saladin advises Alleluia not to let Gibreel cut her off from Jumpy Joshi or from her own worlds. The advice sounds supportive; the narration, however, marks this as the beginning of Saladin’s campaign and describes the course he has entered as one with only a single direction. His concern is therefore double-edged: he encourages Alleluia to protect her independence while beginning to treat what she tells him as material for retaliation.

That material includes her account of Sisodia making a pass at her under Gibreel’s nose. Alleluia describes Sisodia as unembarrassed by rejection, and Saladin guesses what happened before quietly filing the information away for possible later use. The scene establishes the method of his revenge in miniature: he listens closely, elicits information in a familiar conversation, and stores it rather than responding openly. At the railway station he wishes Alleluia luck. She says she and Gibreel will be in London for a couple of weeks for her meetings and suggests the two men might get together because the trip has done Gibreel good. Saladin offers to be contacted at any time and watches her car leave.

A campaign made of voices

The calls begin at the couple’s London residence and continue after they move to a remote address in Dumfries and Galloway. They are frequent enough to persist as a threat, but not so frequent as to make the pattern immediately obvious. Their callers vary, and the calls last long enough to unsettle their recipients but not long enough for police monitoring to trace their source. The episode runs for three and a half weeks, ending only after it has achieved its intended effect on Gibreel’s relationship with Alleluia.

Neither Alleluia nor Gibreel, nor even the professional phone-tappers they employ, recognizes that the many callers are one person. Saladin, formerly known in specialist circles as the Man of a Thousand Voices, needs only thirty-nine of those voices to sustain the deception. His talent gives the campaign its practical means: the voices differ in pitch, pace, mood, and manner, creating the impression of numerous unrelated men rather than one persistent attacker.

The calls to Alleluia are invasive and humiliating. Unknown men speak as if they possess intimate knowledge of her, presenting themselves as familiar with private preferences. Once attempts to trace the calls are under way, she cannot simply hang up without interfering with those efforts; instead, she is made to remain on the line and try to prolong the calls, though those attempts do not succeed. The harassment thus makes the effort to stop it part of the ordeal: the more actively she tries to help identify the callers, the longer she must listen.

Gibreel receives a different assortment of voices. Some boast of conquering Everest; others adopt mocking, crude, or falsely sympathetic manners, mixing warnings with insinuations about Alleluia. One caller distinguishes himself by speaking only in rhyme. His deliberately innocent, childlike verses contrast with the coarser calls and make him, for Gibreel, the most disturbing voice of all. After one call, Gibreel hangs up in disgust and fear. Although the versifier stops for a time, Gibreel begins to dread and await his return, giving the calls power even during their absence.

The final taunt and its consequences

Saladin delays using the rhyming voice that he understands to be especially potent. In the meantime, the other callers weaken Gibreel’s confidence in what is real and draw him further into the deception. The calls invent women and scenarios that begin to intrude on his understanding of his actual relationship; the campaign’s effect is cumulative, as repeated falsehoods blur the distinction between Alleluia and the degrading fiction built around her. The final return of the versifier precipitates Gibreel’s break with her, the same kind of act the narrative identifies as the Unforgivable Thing he had previously done to Saladin.

The last rhyme comes after the couple have returned to London, while Alleluia is away at the ceremonial opening of a freezer-food mart in Hounslow. The caller taunts Gibreel with the claim that he is with Alleluia, then ends the call. Alleluia returns to find Gibreel gone. His departure is accompanied by a second, unmistakable act of destruction: he has vandalized the apartment and destroyed the surrogate Himalayas she collected over the years.

The objects make the damage specific. Gibreel has thawed the ice Everest kept in her freezer, pulled down and shredded the parachute-silk peaks above her bed, and hacked apart a wooden memento of her ascent of Chomolungma. Pemba had given her that carving as both warning and commemoration. Gibreel uses the small axe kept in the broom cupboard beside the fire extinguisher. In destroying the keepsakes, he attacks not just the furnishings of the apartment but the material record of Alleluia’s mountaineering life.

Alleluia decides she will not take Gibreel back, whatever condition he returns in or however he pleads. She opens the windows and shouts at the fields below, then, weeping, telephones Saladin to tell him what has happened. The call closes the chain begun at the railway station: Saladin’s apparently helpful listening has become covert interference, and its consequences have reached the woman whose trust he used as well as the man he sought to injure.

Voice as an instrument of revenge

The episode turns Saladin’s defining vocal ability into a tool of concealment. The voices are not merely disguises; their range allows him to manufacture the appearance of a crowd, while the listeners’ inability to connect them to a single speaker protects him from suspicion. His anonymity is confirmed by the failure of both the couple and their hired specialists to identify the pattern.

The revenge proceeds through language rather than open force: insinuation, false familiarity, invented scenarios, and finally the rhyme that Gibreel has learned to fear. The result is not a clean victory for Saladin. The phone campaign fractures Gibreel and Alleluia’s relationship, while Gibreel’s response leaves Alleluia with a wrecked home and a decision to refuse reconciliation. The narrative thus makes the revenge’s reach visible in two forms: the unseen voices that invade the couple’s private life, and the broken mountain mementos left behind when the calls have stopped.