The rain returned to London like an old, bitter friend. It came sideways, pushed by a malicious wind that slapped faces and rattled the shutters of tenement flats. In such weather, even the city's foxes stayed hidden in their burrows.
Saladin Chamcha, wrapped in a borrowed trench coat two sizes too large, hunched into himself as he slipped through the streets toward a meeting he had not wanted to attend.
But destiny has a peculiar way of dragging unwilling feet into pivotal rooms.
He had received the invitation — if it could be called that — tucked into the crack of his door:
"For those who would reshape themselves, there is a place."
No signature. No instructions beyond a time and a location scrawled in ink that bled into the page.
Curiosity gnawed at him stronger than caution.
He found the address behind a shuttered butcher shop in Whitechapel, a cracked doorway flanked by rotting posters promising revolutions that had already failed. Inside: a staircase spiraling downward into darkness.
He hesitated, hand on the grimy railing.
"No going back," he thought grimly.
The basement smelled of wet stone and old secrets. A single bare bulb swung overhead, throwing monstrous shadows across a small gathering of figures — men and women, their faces partly hidden, their clothes stitched from every corner of the city: saris under leather jackets, tweed over kurtas, punk boots kicking against the bones of old traditions.
At the center stood a man unlike the others.
Tall. Immaculately dressed. His smile was a scalpel, clean and precise.
"Welcome," he said, his voice silk over gravel.
"You are among friends here."
Chamcha said nothing.
He knew better than to trust a man who smiled like that.
"We know what you are," the man continued, as if reading his mind.
"Not quite one thing, not quite the other. Made foreign even in your own bones."
Chamcha flinched.
The words sliced too close to truths he kept buried even from himself.
"Here," the man said, spreading his arms, "we teach survival. Reinvention. We teach you how to wear the mask so well even you forget it's a mask."
The crowd murmured assent.
Chamcha's heart pounded. Was this what he had been seeking? A cure for the unrelenting ache of unbelonging?
Or was it just another lie wearing a prettier costume?
The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, intricate mirror — the kind a magician might produce in a cheap trick.
He held it toward Chamcha.
"Look," he commanded.
Chamcha did.
For a moment, he saw himself as he wished to be seen: flawless skin, accent polished into perfect Received Pronunciation, posture straight as a ruler.
A man without the lingering stain of elsewhere clinging to him.
But then, deeper —
In the mirror's second face, he glimpsed the truth: curling horns, eyes that glowed with unspoken rebellions, skin cracked like ancient riverbeds.
He jerked back as if burned.
The man laughed softly.
"The mask is yours to wear — or to shed."
Chamcha turned on his heel and fled up the stairs, the rain swallowing him the moment he stumbled into the night.
---
Across town, Gibreel Farishta wrestled with a different kind of temptation.
He had been approached earlier that day by a slim, severe woman who spoke with the authority of a thunderclap. She introduced herself only as Mariam.
"You have a gift," she said without preamble.
"You walk between worlds. You carry truths your tongue has not yet tasted."
He had tried to dismiss her, to laugh it off as a city's madness.
But her eyes — cold, ancient — undid him.
Now, as he sat alone in a crumbling café off Edgware Road, her words gnawed at his mind like moths on silk.
"Prophecy demands sacrifice," she had whispered before disappearing into the mist.
"Dreams are not given freely."
Gibreel stared into his untouched tea, watching it ripple with the heavy bass of buses thundering past outside. The city moved around him, oblivious.
He wondered — not for the first time — whether survival was the true miracle he had been granted, or the true curse.
He had fallen from an impossible height and lived.
But what had survived?
Was it the man, or only a shell wearing the memory of a man?
The fog pressed harder against the windows. A group of teenagers outside shouted in a mash of languages, their laughter carving holes in the gloom.
Gibreel envied them their certainty, their belonging.
He left the café without finishing his tea.
He walked into the night, unsure whether he was running toward destiny or fleeing from it — or whether, in London, the two were not the same thing after all.