Billy Battuta

Billy Battuta is a British-based entrepreneur and practiced confidence man who makes performance serve business, whether he is selling a mink coat, a story of infernal danger, or a film-star comeback. His dealings with Mimi Mamoulian and Gibreel Farishta connect the novel’s entertainment world to its wider concerns with public image, belief, and the uneasy boundary between a convincing story and a material fact.

Identity and Methods

Billy Battuta has turned an otherwise unremarkable holiday business, Battuta’s Travels, into a fleet of supertankers. The contrast between the modest starting point and the scale of his later enterprise accompanies a reputation built on romantic associations with leading Hindi-screen actresses and a talent for extracting money from people. The narrative presents him as a con man whose instinct is to find a profitable opening and make the people around him accept his version of events.

His dealings are not confined to one kind of deception. In one account, he and Mimi Mamoulian visit a New York furrier in a stretched Mercedes limousine, where Billy persuades the shop to accept his cheque for a mink coat priced at $40,000. He then takes the coat to another store and tries to sell it for $30,000, presenting the purchase receipt as proof of value. The second shop checks with the first, and Billy and Mimi are arrested. The following Monday, the bank confirms that Billy’s account had held $42,117, so the cheque was valid; he threatens the furriers with a lawsuit and secures an out-of-court settlement of $250,000 within forty-eight hours. The episode leaves the reader with a characteristic reversal: even an apparent failure becomes another opportunity for Billy to negotiate a gain.

Mimi Mamoulian and the Business of Deception

Billy’s relationship with Mimi is both intimate and professional. When she leaves for New York, Saladin Chamcha worries that Billy will exploit her, but Mimi rejects the assumption that she is an unwitting victim. She understands the reputational risks, regards herself as an intelligent participant in her choices, and refuses to accept Chamcha’s account of exploitation as the only possible interpretation. Her own defence complicates the distinction between Billy’s schemes and her agency, without establishing that their relationship is free of manipulation.

Their shared furrier episode becomes a story Mimi tells with admiration. She treats the arrest, the bank’s confirmation, and the settlement not as a warning but as evidence of Billy’s skill. Chamcha, by contrast, recognizes that he does not understand the rules of the amoral, survivalist world she describes. When he recounts the episode to Mishal Sufyan and Anahita Sufyan, they applaud its outcome; what delights them is that the apparent wrongdoing goes unpunished. Billy’s success therefore circulates beyond his own circle as a form of entertainment, and his exploits expose how easily cunning can be recast as ingenuity when it ends in money and escape.

The furrier affair is followed by a more elaborate confidence scheme in New York. Billy approaches wealthy society women and asks for substantial sums to buy his freedom from devil worshippers, claiming that he has encountered infernal beings and needs rescue. The pitch trades on the donors’ desire for direct contact with the supernatural: Billy offers his supposed experience as proof that a Devil exists, and therefore that a heavenly counterpart must exist too. Investigators allege that he collects six-figure sums, while Mimi allegedly assists by performing distress and pleading for help. Their deception is exposed after Mrs. Struwelpeter recognizes them at a restaurant, having given them a $5,000 cheque the previous day. The pair go quietly with the police. The episode makes Billy’s method especially clear: he sells not just a claim but a chain of reassuring conclusions, turning uncertainty about the unseen into a payment.

The Gibreel Farishta Comeback

Billy’s talents also make him useful to the film industry. After Gibreel Farishta survives the disaster that had led the public to believe he was dead, a London-based production outfit headed by Billy joins forces with the Indian producer S. S. Sisodia to plan Gibreel’s screen comeback. A report in Ciné-Blitz presents Gibreel as having missed the ill-fated plane under an assumed name and then having allowed the fiction of his death to stand. The planned film is another theological, set in an imaginary city of sand and concerned with a prophet, an archangel, temptation, and the choice between purity and compromise. Billy insists on presenting it as fiction and a moral tale rather than as a direct religious representation.

The production package shows the practical machinery behind the spectacle. Billy is ready to invest in sterling and in blocked rupees: profits made by British distributors in the Indian subcontinent that could not be repatriated, which he had acquired at a 37-point discount. Indian producers would also contribute, the filming would take place across Europe, India, and the North African coast, and Gibreel would receive top billing and a share of profits. The proposed package includes a supporting role for Miss Pimple Billimoria, intended to secure her silence. Billy’s involvement thus extends beyond promotion: he helps assemble the financing, personnel, and arrangements that make Gibreel’s return commercially possible.

When Gibreel meets the producers, Billy’s appearance differs from the flamboyant society figure Alleluia Cone had expected. He is dressed plainly, wears a neat goatee, and behaves with an almost deferential reserve. His welcome to Gibreel is warm, while Mimi announces the promotional apparatus awaiting a star: publicity, security, contracts, and managed rumours. This apparent change in manner does not displace his familiar business instincts. The comeback is conceived as a carefully packaged public event, and Gibreel’s reappearance is treated as a marketable asset in its own right.

Arrest, Return, and Narrative Role

Billy’s criminal methods eventually disrupt the film campaign. After his arrest in New York over the supernatural-rescue scheme, Alleluia Cone warns Gibreel that Billy’s manner is a performance and that his criminal problems could threaten the production. Gibreel, hurt by Alleluia’s departure and unwilling to take advice from someone he sees as having deserted him, accepts the assurances of Billy and Sisodia’s team. They tell him that the financing, fees, guarantees, and promised appearances remain in place, and that the show will go on. The episode shows how Billy’s assurances can retain their force even when the facts around him have become damaging.

The legal outcome returns Billy and Mimi to London quickly. Wealthy women who had given him money sign a clemency petition, presenting him as repentant and emphasizing the employment and wealth his business ventures might create. Mimi receives a suspended sentence. Billy is fined and faces deportation, but the judge allows him to leave voluntarily so that a deportation order will not damage his business interests. Within twenty-four hours of the judgment, Billy and Mimi are back in London and preparing a lavish party at Shepperton film studios, where an enormous recreation of Dickensian London provides the setting. Invitations reach Gibreel and Alleluia Cone, as well as Saladin Chamcha through Jumpy Joshi.

Billy’s importance lies in the way he makes incompatible kinds of credibility serve the same commercial purpose. He can invoke spiritual peril to solicit money, use legal and financial procedures to transform an arrest into a settlement, and present a disputed comeback as a dependable film project. The narrative does not reduce every transaction to a single verdict: Mimi asserts her own judgment, donors later advocate for him, and producers continue to rely on his arrangements. But Billy’s recurring success exposes a world in which spectacle, money, and belief overlap. His schemes work by persuading others that the performance is worth treating as fact.