Saladin Chamcha’s retaliation against Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia Cone is a covert campaign of telephone harassment that turns Saladin’s gift for voices into an instrument of revenge. Over three and a half weeks, anonymous callers invade the couple’s privacy and erode Gibreel’s hold on reality until he commits against Alleluia the same unnamed Unforgivable Thing he had previously done to Saladin. The retaliation ends not with a confrontation but with Gibreel’s departure and the destruction of Alleluia’s treasured reminders of her mountaineering.

Design and concealed agency

The calls begin at the couple’s London residence and continue after they move to a remote address in Dumfries and Galloway. Their frequency is carefully calibrated: they are neither so frequent as to seem implausible nor so rare as to disappear into ordinary nuisance. They last long enough to distress their recipients but not long enough for police monitoring to trace their source. This measured pattern makes the campaign feel both pervasive and elusive, as if it were designed to keep the couple alert without giving them a usable lead.

Neither Alleluia nor Gibreel suspects that one person is behind the callers. Even the professional phone-tappers they hire fail to identify a single operator. The explanation is Saladin, once known in specialist circles as the Man of a Thousand Voices. He selects no more than thirty-nine voices from his repertoire, turning vocal variety into concealment: a chorus of apparent strangers masks one deliberate author. The method also reverses the public meaning of his talent. Voice, which can make a performer recognizable and admired, becomes a means of hiding the speaker and entering someone else’s home by sound.

The callers and their targets

Alleluia receives men who murmur intimate secrets as if they know the most private recesses of her body and her preferences in love. Their claims make the calls violating even before any source is found. Once attempts to trace them begin, she cannot simply hang up: she has to stay on the line in an effort to prolong the calls for the listeners monitoring them. The procedure meant to catch the offender therefore extends her exposure. Her humiliation is registered physically as well as emotionally, in her flushed face and the cold along her spine.

Gibreel’s share of the calls uses a broader gallery of voices. Some boast of having conquered Mount Everest in a Byronic register; others sneer, feign intimacy, or offer warnings dressed up as friendly concern. Their insinuations suggest that Alleluia is sexually unfaithful, making the assault on Gibreel’s confidence depend not on a single accusation but on the repeated appearance of different, apparently independent witnesses. Saladin’s performance makes each voice sound like another source of knowledge, although the calls are all part of the same deception.

One caller is distinct: a soulful, high-pitched poet who speaks only in naïve doggerel. Its childish simplicity contrasts with the coarseness of the other men, and that contrast makes it more unsettling to Gibreel, not less. The voice sings, “I like coffee, I like tea, / I like things you do with me.” When it returns after a pause, Gibreel bangs down the receiver in disgust and fear. He nevertheless begins to dread—and wait for—its reappearance. The rhyme has become the campaign’s most distinctive signal: an apparently innocent form that Gibreel comes to experience as a threat.

How the campaign breaks the relationship

The calls work cumulatively. Saladin initially holds back the rhyming voice while sending deep and squeaky, slow and quick, cheerful and sad callers. Their fabricated stories gradually weaken Gibreel’s grasp on the real world. The invented women described by the callers begin, in the narration’s image, to coat the actual Alleluia like a film. Gibreel protests, but the distinction between the woman before him and the obscene picture assembled by the calls continues to deteriorate. Saladin’s revenge is thus not merely a succession of insults: its force lies in repetition, impersonation, and the gradual contamination of an existing intimacy by fabricated accounts.

The calls stop forever after three and a half weeks, but their duration is tied to their intended result. They continue exactly long enough to drive Gibreel to do to Alleluia what he had previously done to Saladin. The account does not specify the act itself; it names it as the Unforgivable Thing. That withheld detail keeps the emphasis on the repeated injury and its transmission: Gibreel’s earlier act against Saladin becomes the pattern of a new injury against Alleluia, produced under pressure from Saladin’s hidden campaign.

Departure and aftermath

The final rhyme comes when Alleluia is away in Hounslow for the ceremonial opening of a freezer-food mart. The caller tells Gibreel that he has her in bed. After the dialling tone, Alleluia returns to find Gibreel gone. His departure is accompanied by a deliberate assault on the objects through which she had kept the Himalayas close: he thaws the ice Everest in her freezer, tears down the parachute-silk peaks above her bed, and hacks apart the wooden memento Pemba gave her to commemorate her conquest of Mount Everest. The small axe he uses is the one she keeps beside the fire extinguisher in the broom cupboard. The destruction turns the private apartment into evidence of the rupture, extending Gibreel’s departure into an attack on Alleluia’s personal history and cherished achievements.

Alleluia decides that she will not take him back, whatever condition he returns in or however he pleads. She flings open the sash windows and screams at the innocent fields below, then, weeping, calls Saladin to give him the bad news. Her call does not undo Saladin’s concealment or restore what has been destroyed, but it brings him the news of the separation his scheme has brought about. The episode makes his voice-driven revenge a chain of consequences: anonymous speech unsettles Gibreel’s trust, Gibreel’s response breaks with Alleluia, and the breakup is marked by the wreckage of the very objects that embodied her attachment to the mountains.