John Maslama

John Maslama is a Guyanese-born Indian businessman whose appetite for religious synthesis, self-fashioning, and commercial enterprise makes him both an unexpected believer in Gibreel Farishta and an uneasy herald of Gibreel’s apparent divinity. His encounters with Gibreel turn on a sharp reversal: the man who first denounces him as a fraud soon kneels before him, then quietly organizes publicity around his return. The novel leaves that devotion entangled with Maslama’s public identity as a successful entrepreneur and, finally, with his arrest during a police raid.

Identity and Background

Maslama introduces himself to Gibreel in a train compartment, where he mistakes Gibreel’s movement and use of the name Alleluia for an opening to social and theological conversation. He describes his beliefs as non-denominational and says that he follows a personal version of the universal faith associated with Emperor Akbar. In his account, God is akin to the Music of the Spheres, and the names used for the divine are codes concealing a truer name. He also presents himself as a regular churchgoer, fond of the English Hymnal, whose singing can raise the roof. These commitments do not settle into a single orthodox position: his religious vocabulary ranges across traditions, while his confidence in a hidden divine name gives his eclecticism a private center.

Maslama has made a conspicuous success of himself. He says he began earning his first fortune by writing advertising jingles, which he describes as the devil’s music, and by promoting products that draw consumers toward temptation. He now owns record stores around town, the successful Hot Wax nightclub, and Fair Winds, a store devoted to musical instruments. A Guyanese Indian from Bartica on the Essequibo, he describes the place he left as one from which people are departing rapidly. His account of social ascent is inseparable from a carefully displayed English style: an Oxford drawl, bespoke pinstripe suit, gold watch, Italian shoes, crested silk tie, and jeweled cuff links. He calls himself unusually successful for a brown man, making his clothes and manner part of the case he presents for having prospered in England.

Faith, Performance, and the Train Encounter

Maslama’s first extended conversation with Gibreel shifts between theological enthusiasm and comic self-display. He praises Gibreel as a figure capable of representing deities from many traditions, then presses him about the concealed name of God. Gibreel, alarmed by Maslama’s insistence and by what seems to him an increasingly unstable conversation, suspects that the man’s professed faith and personal history may be inventions. That suspicion belongs to Gibreel’s point of view; the scene makes Maslama’s conviction vivid without providing an independent test of every claim he makes about himself.

The encounter turns when Maslama abruptly stands and denounces Gibreel as a pretender who does not know the truth he claims to embody. Gibreel rises too, and Maslama’s movement knocks Gibreel’s hat from his head. Seeing Gibreel’s halo reflected in the compartment door, Maslama’s anger gives way to reverence. He kneels, asks forgiveness, and removes a shoe and sock to show Gibreel the six toes on his foot. Maslama interprets the extra toe as a sign of his own election: he is, in his formulation, the sixth toe on the foot of a universal divine being, appointed as the Lord’s helper. The episode leaves the supernatural status of the sign bound to Gibreel’s perception and to Maslama’s interpretation of it.

Maslama then asks whether Gibreel has returned to bring annihilation or salvation. Gibreel answers that humanity is under judgment, that the evidence must be weighed, and that the verdict is reserved. He adds that his presence must remain secret. Pleased with his performance of authority, Gibreel leaves Maslama with the understanding that discretion is required. Maslama accepts the instruction; Gibreel soon escapes the compartment while Maslama’s hymns follow him down the train. The scene establishes a pattern that recurs later: Maslama’s certainty makes him an eager interpreter of Gibreel, while Gibreel exploits that certainty without offering a clear account of what he is.

Businessman and Secret Herald

Later, Maslama’s business life supplies the setting for a second encounter. He owns Hot Wax and the record chain of the same name, as well as Fair Winds, a celebrated London town shop where customers can buy clarinets, saxophones, and trombones. He is described as a busy, practical businessman who treats the chance of being present when Gibreel enters Fair Winds as an instance of divine providence. This time, Maslama does not merely recognize Gibreel privately. He has already taken on the secret work of promoting the returned celestial figure.

Maslama keeps that activity apart from his ordinary business dealings. He puts posters in shop windows only when he believes no one is watching, pays for newspaper and magazine advertisements without signing them, and issues press releases through a public-relations subsidiary of the Valance agency. Those releases ask that his anonymity be protected while reporting that Gibreel is somewhere in London town and may reveal himself soon. The announcements are cryptic enough to amuse Fleet Street diarists, but Maslama’s efforts are substantial: he spends his own money and uses advertising methods developed through his commercial career to circulate the news of Gibreel’s supposed return.

At Fair Winds, Maslama’s staff witness the conviction that these private preparations conceal. Gibreel arrives unshaven and dressed in an Armani suit, with a money belt under his shirt. He points to a trumpet on a high shelf and pays for it with high-denomination notes, although Maslama tries to refuse payment. Maslama bows, attends to him personally, and moves around him with a deference that surprises the employees who know him as a hard-nosed employer. Gibreel declares himself the right hand of God and names the trumpet Azraeel, the Last Trump, the Exterminator of Men. The shop attendants report seeing a bright halo around his head, echoing the train encounter. Their account, like the earlier scene, presents the apparent miracle through witnesses who interpret what they see rather than through a detached confirmation of Gibreel’s status.

Arrest and Narrative Significance

Maslama’s later appearance comes through television coverage of a police operation at Club Hot Wax. The camera first shows police removing wax figures, then arrested people, including Maslama, the club’s DJ Sewsunker Ram, known as Pinkwalla, and an employee of Fair Winds. Reports say Maslama and Ram are to be charged with running a large-scale narcotics operation involving crack, brown sugar, hashish, and cocaine. A van registered to the Fair Winds employee is reported to contain an unspecified quantity of hard drugs and stolen video recorders. The account establishes arrest and reported charges, not a subsequent verdict or the outcome of the case.

The camera-mediated presentation matters to Maslama’s characterization. Earlier, he uses the tools of advertising and publicity to make Gibreel’s presence known while attempting to keep his own role anonymous. In the later broadcast, the camera identifies him among those arrested and turns his private commercial world into public spectacle. The novel does not resolve the tension between his piety and his business dealings by explaining one away through the other. Instead, Maslama’s many roles remain in view: the polished entrepreneur, the religious eclectic, the man who interprets an extra toe as a divine sign, and the covert promoter who kneels before Gibreel in his own shop. His episodes make belief, performance, and publicity difficult to separate, while the arrest supplies no final answer about which parts of his self-presentation are conviction, calculation, or both.