Sisodia

Sisodia is a film producer who appears late in the novel as Saladin Chamcha travels back to India to visit his dying father. A gregarious, commercially minded passenger aboard the Air India 747 Gulistan, he offers Chamcha a possible route back into Indian film work. His later death in Gibreel Farishta’s apartment places him among the victims of the violence surrounding Farishta’s disappearance, though the evidence does not identify who killed him.

On the Gulistan

Sisodia meets Chamcha in the business-class upper deck, where he has moved into the empty seat beside him. As the aircraft begins its takeoff, he flaps his arms wildly, treating the gesture as a personal safeguard against the dangers of flying. His cheerfully repeated, stammering speech gives the performance a comic quality; after the plane is airborne, he settles into his seat with satisfaction. Chamcha, who has reacted to the plane’s name with fear, encounters in Sisodia a companion whose response to air travel is exuberant ritual rather than visible alarm.

The flight also brings Sisodia into contact with Chamcha at a moment of private reckoning. While Sisodia talks, Chamcha thinks about his father, Changez Chamchawala, and recognizes both the absence of happy memories and the possibility of forgiving a father after all. Sisodia does not appear to recall Chamcha’s earlier connection with Gibreel Farishta, a lapse Chamcha accepts. Their exchange remains oriented toward possible work and the future, while Chamcha’s attention turns toward the unresolved bond with his father.

Producer and professional ambitions

Sisodia describes a proposed film centered on Lakshmi and hopes to cast Sridevi. He presents the project as confidential, but his enthusiasm quickly expands into an offer to Chamcha: the actor should work back home, contact him, and consider doing business together. His pitch joins celebrity, religious imagery, and commercial calculation; he imagines Lakshmi as a strong subject and regards the picture as a potential major success.

His optimism is sharpened by the account of Gibreel Farishta’s faltering film comeback. Farishta’s first feature, The Parting of the Arabian Sea, has performed badly, and his second, Mahound, has also failed. Sisodia attributes the disappointing results to Farishta’s choice to work with other producers, contrasting their work with his own confidence in his effects and taste. He treats the setback less as a reason for caution than as an opening for his own plans, and speaks as if Chamcha could join that renewed commercial enterprise.

A passenger seen through Chamcha’s eyes

Sisodia’s presence also prompts a memory in Chamcha. When stewardesses attend to the sleeping producer—taking the whisky glass from his hand, covering his lower half with a blanket, and admiring him—Chamcha recalls society women at his mother’s Bombay gatherings patting him on the head. The recollection unexpectedly brings him close to tears. Sisodia is thus not only a travelling companion and prospective employer in this scene: his easy reception by the stewardesses opens onto Chamcha’s childhood memory of being treated as an object of affectionate attention.

Chamcha’s reflections on Sisodia are comic and unsentimental. He notices the producer asleep without his spectacles and finds his appearance strange; the passage makes Sisodia’s self-assured public manner briefly vulnerable to the perspective of a watchful fellow passenger. The episode remains filtered through Chamcha’s impressions rather than offering an independent account of Sisodia’s private life.

Death and narrative significance

Later, domestic staff discover Sisodia dead in the living room of Gibreel Farishta’s apartment. The newspaper account identifies him as a respected film producer and reports a fatal wound to the heart. The same report describes Alleluia Cone’s fall from the roof of the skyscraper as a related incident, recalling that Rekha Merchant and her children had previously fallen from the same building. The morning papers then report Farishta missing and under suspicion; they do not, in the supplied evidence, establish who killed Sisodia.

Sisodia’s arc therefore moves abruptly from a sales pitch aboard the Gulistan to a death reported alongside other events in the crisis around Farishta. The contrast gives his earlier confidence in film production an abrupt end, while his death helps establish the gravity of the events Chamcha returns to in Bombay. The narrative leaves his killing embedded in a wider sequence of disappearance and loss rather than resolving it through a confirmed account of the perpetrator.