He always dreamed of moving to London, and got his wish when his father sent him to boarding school there.

Saladin, born Salahuddin Chamchawala, grew up in Bombay, where he was molested by an older man and had a troubled relationship with his father, Changez Chamchawala. Although Gibreel’s affair with Alleluia was brief, it inspired him to follow her to London to start a new life.

Her ghost haunts Gibreel for the rest of the novel. Out of jealousy, his former lover, Rekha Merchant, committed suicide. Soon after his recovery, he met and fell in love with Alleluia Cone, an English mountain climber. This caused him to lose his faith in God. Shortly before the fateful flight, Gibreel had a bout with mental illness, but recovered. When his parents died, he moved in with a foster family, the patriarch of which eventually arranged for him to become an actor.

Gibreel had a hardscrabble youth – he started working as a delivery boy as a teenager. The narrator gives some background on the two men. Two passengers plummet down to the water and survive: Gibreel Farishta, a famous Bollywood actor, and Saladin Chamcha, an obscure voice actor who lives in London. There were attacks on bookstores and threats to many more.The jumbo jet Bostan explodes over the English Channel. Reaction intensified after the publication of the book in the United States that same month, even as more countries banned it. Many died in protests against its publication, including 12 people in a riot in Bombay in February 1989 and six more in another riot in Islamabad.

He lived there for most of the next 10 years.Įven before the fatwa, the book was banned in a number of countries, including India, Bangladesh, Sudan and Sri Lanka. Rushdie, who lived in London at the time, immediately went into hiding with 24-hour protection from the British police, moving every three days from place to place until a fortified safehouse was prepared for him. Rushdie and putting a price on his head of several million dollars. Salman Rushdie has been living under a death sentence since 1989, about six months after the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which fictionalized parts of the life of the Prophet Muhammad with depictions that many Muslims found offensive and some considered blasphemous.Īyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, issued a fatwa on Feb.

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