The world is real. We have to live in it; we have to live here, to live on.

“The world is real. We have to live in it; we have to live here, to live on.” Hanif speaks these words to Mishal in an ambulance after the Brickhall fire, as she wonders whether Gibreel’s delirious talk might point to something beyond an ordinary explanation. The phrase gives voice to Hanif’s refusal of mysticism: what happened in Brickhall, he insists, belongs to history and change. Yet his appeal is intimate as well as intellectual. Mishal has just been orphaned; he puts an arm around her, kisses her cheek, and holds her fast as he asks her to stay with him and keep living in the real world.

The Real World and the Dream

The sentence is immediately set against Gibreel’s sleeping voice. After speaking of the magic trumpet and the fire he blew from it, he shifts into the last of his serial dreams, mentioning pilgrims, a dead baby, The Ten Commandments, a decaying mansion, and a tree. Hanif calls it make-believe, but the dream’s images gather scenes and losses that trouble any clean division between fantasy and lived experience. Then Gibreel shouts for Mishal to come back, insisting that nothing is happening. His plea echoes Hanif’s call to remain, but in the dream’s language: the assertion that life must be lived here meets a voice summoning someone back from elsewhere.

A Grammar of Continuance

The sentence moves from a claim about reality to a demand for persistence: “The world is real. We have to live in it; we have to live here, to live on.” Its repeated “live” narrows the distance between an abstract world and the immediate “here,” then carries that presence forward in “to live on.” The collective “we” makes continuance a shared obligation rather than a solitary conclusion, giving Hanif Johnson’s words both the firmness of an argument and the urgency of a promise.

The Ambulance as a Threshold

The ambulance holds two unconscious men, but their conditions are sharply different: Saladin Chamcha has an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, while Gibreel Farishta, suffering no worse than exhaustion, talks in his sleep. Against this uneven aftermath, Hanif Johnson’s insistence on the real is not merely a rejection of supernatural explanation. As Mishal, newly orphaned, wonders aloud, he puts an arm around her, kisses her cheek, and holds her fast. His words thus meet the scene as an act of care: they turn the demand to live on into something immediate and shared, even as Gibreel’s sleeping voice continues to summon Mishal elsewhere.

A Character’s Claim, Not a Final Verdict

The sentence is Hanif Johnson’s spoken conviction, not an impersonal declaration by the narrator: he frames the Brickhall events as history and social change, while Gibreel Farishta’s sleep-talk continues to draw on dream imagery. That difference in speakers matters. Hanif’s words establish a practical stance toward the crisis, but the passage leaves his certainty beside the unresolved force of Gibreel’s visions, rather than making either voice erase the other.