Saladin Chamcha—Alleluia Cone relationship

Saladin Chamcha’s relationship with Alleluia Cone is shaped less by what he knows about her than by what he imagines she possesses. At their first meeting, his renewed hostility toward Gibreel Farishta spreads immediately to Alleluia: her self-contained manner and apparent certainty make her seem part of an enemy camp. The attraction beneath that judgment is also a source of envy. Chamcha wants Alleluia, but he especially wants the assurance he attributes to her; unable to attain it, he turns the desire into an impulse to damage what he admires. Their connection therefore begins as a story he composes about her, not as a mutual understanding.

A First Encounter Built on Projection

At a gathering attended by film-industry acquaintances, Chamcha conceals his reaction. He greets Alleluia politely, shakes her hand, and embraces Gibreel, while privately imagining Alleluia as an antagonist in a drama of his own making. She, unaware of his resentment, leaves the two men to talk and goes off to explore. Chamcha notices that she briefly hobbles before continuing with a strong stride, but does not know that she is in pain. The moment establishes the unequal basis of their relationship: he watches her closely, yet interprets what he sees through assumptions rather than knowledge.

His mistaken picture of Alleluia is bound up with his mistaken picture of Gibreel. Chamcha sees his former companion as the embodiment of good fortune, without understanding that Gibreel is under medical supervision, taking medication to reduce the risk of his paranoid schizophrenia recurring, and being cared for by Alleluia. She has kept him away from film people she distrusts since his previous rampage, and reluctantly agreed to attend the gathering only after Gibreel insisted that he could no longer be kept from his former life. Looking after a disturbed partner has exhausted her and required her to act as nurse, scapegoat, and support. Chamcha’s grievance thus grows in the gap between the idealized figures he resents and the difficult circumstances he cannot see.

Trust Offered on the Road North

A week later, Alleluia herself calls Chamcha, having tracked him down through mutual acquaintances. She apologizes for how she had spoken to him, explains that Gibreel has been asking for him, and asks him to come north because his help might be useful to them both. Chamcha joins her at Carlisle station, and they drive in a three-year-old silver Citroën station wagon toward a borrowed place in Scotland. The journey is uneasy: the daylight is fading, one headlamp is broken, the fuel gauge appears to be in the red, and Alleluia drives fast along the A74. Chamcha, who regards remote countryside as perilous and empty, is wary of the route as well as of the reason for it.

Alleluia tells him that Gibreel recently took the car keys and was found heading the wrong way along a motorway exit, shouting about damnation and threatening to summon his lieutenant, Azraeel. The doctors, she says, believe possessive jealousy may be part of his illness and can help set it off. She speaks freely because Gibreel trusts Chamcha; Chamcha, in turn, decides not to betray that trust yet. He listens and studies the connections between them as if learning how to operate a puppet. What looks like sympathy is already becoming a method of access.

Alleluia also confides that she feels responsible for the failure of their life together and longs for a life in which her own work and needs can take priority. Her mother, Alicja Cohen, has challenged that self-blame, arguing that large historical forces can shape an individual’s life irrespective of personal character. The disagreement illuminates the strain Alleluia carries: she is trying to understand her own responsibility for a troubled relationship while also caring for a partner whose illness has overtaken their shared life. Chamcha encourages her not to let Gibreel cut her off from Jumpy Joshi or from her other worlds. The advice is useful, but its usefulness to him is double-edged: it earns her confidence and gives him information he can store for later.

Intimacy Turned into Leverage

On the return drive to Carlisle station, Alleluia speaks of hoping that one day her own life might take the central place, while hesitating over whether to call it their life. Chamcha’s encouragement strengthens their apparent alliance. When she tells him that Sisodia has made a pass at her, he registers the disclosure as potentially useful. At the station she says that she and Gibreel will soon be in London and that the visit has done Gibreel good. Chamcha wishes her luck and offers to be called; she leaves believing that his presence has helped.

Later, Gibreel meets Chamcha in London and describes his intimate life with Alleluia at length. Chamcha hears these disclosures with disgust and jealousy, and interprets Gibreel’s manic, unusually detailed speech as a sign that he may be reducing his medication and approaching another elevated, deranged state. The conversation confirms how readily Chamcha turns observation into a weapon: he reads Gibreel’s instability, Alleluia’s confidences, and the couple’s private life as openings for his own purpose. The narration also frames all three as caught in overlapping inventions. Gibreel and Alleluia have each partly imagined an ideal partner to love; Chamcha now imposes the demands of his own disappointed heart on both of them. Alleluia becomes, without knowing it, an agent in a revenge plot directed at Gibreel.

Anonymous Calls and the Unforgivable Thing

Chamcha’s access to Alleluia’s trust eventually enables a campaign of anonymous telephone harassment against both her and Gibreel. The calls reach them first at their London home and later at a remote address in Dumfries and Galloway. They are frequent enough to unsettle the couple but brief enough to frustrate police efforts to trace them. The episode lasts three and a half weeks, stopping only after it has driven Gibreel to do to Alleluia what he had previously done to Chamcha: the Unforgivable Thing.

Neither Alleluia nor Gibreel, nor even the professional phone-tappers they employ, suspects that one person is behind the calls. Chamcha, once known for his capacity to perform a thousand voices, selects no more than thirty-nine to make the deception convincing. Alleluia receives voices that appear to know intimate details about her; Gibreel hears a range of taunting, falsely friendly, and poetic callers. The changing voices disguise a single author and turn the couple’s private vulnerabilities into instruments of pressure. What Chamcha began as envy at their apparent happiness becomes an organized assault on the trust and intimacy he has observed from within.

A Relationship That Serves Revenge

Alleluia and Chamcha do not develop a genuine partnership in these episodes. She offers an apology, confides in him, and asks for his help; he responds with apparent concern while withholding his purpose. Her trust is not evidence that he has understood her. Rather, it gives him a position from which to manipulate the relationship between her and Gibreel. The contrast between her candid uncertainty and his concealed design is central: she wonders how to make room for her own life, while he treats her disclosures as material for a plot.

The relationship also repeats the book’s concern with imagined identities. Chamcha’s hostile version of Alleluia is as much a fiction as his idealized version of Gibreel, and the couple themselves have partly fashioned one another out of their needs. Yet invention here is not harmless. Chamcha’s private fantasies acquire practical consequences when he uses his skill with voices to make anonymous callers appear to be many people. The eventual rupture between Alleluia and Gibreel is the consequence of a deception that neither recognizes as his work. Through their relationship, the narrative shows how envy can imitate intimacy, how trust can be converted into access, and how a story imposed on other people can become a means of injuring them.