There were names no longer spoken aloud.
Not by immigrants who clutched new passports with sweaty hands, nor by old men who mumbled prayers into their beer.
Names that once commanded oceans, bent mountains, drew maps in blood and iron.
Now, they slipped between languages like oil on water — too heavy to lift, too dangerous to discard.
Gibreel Farishta, the archangel lost in mortal skin, wandered through one such forgotten quarter.
Past a shuttered library where pamphlets in Tamil, Urdu, Amharic, Yoruba lay gathering dust.
Past a mosque where pigeons outnumbered prayers.
He had come seeking voices — a rumor passed by a drunk, half-joking: "Go down to the Steps of the Nameless, brother. That's where the real miracles are."
He found the Steps behind a railway siding, where tracks split and rejoined like veins.
Fifty stone stairs, slick with moss and rain, plunging downward into darkness.
No signs. No lamps.
Just a cold certainty curling in his stomach: this is a place where things begin and end.
---
Chamcha walked another city.
One layered atop Gibreel's, perhaps, or burrowed underneath.
A place of new names — shiny, hard-edged, bought at a discount.
Here, shopfronts had mutated:
"Royal Punjab Fried Chicken."
"Uncle Chang's Authentic Italian."
"Madame Freedom's Hair & Nails Emporium."
Inside these neon-lit hothouses, families argued in three tongues at once.
Grandmothers cursed unseen devils while scrolling WhatsApp.
Children drew superheroes who looked suspiciously like their own fathers, except with wings or laser eyes.
Chamcha felt the brittle mask in his pocket vibrating, as if trying to warn him.
He ignored it.
He needed a name, too, didn't he?
A new one.
A name that would slip past customs officers and embassy guards.
A name that would get him a table at the Savoy without a second glance.
A name that would bleach the soil from his skin.
"Saladin Chamcha."
He whispered it under his breath, savoring its false music.
"Saladin Chamcha," he said again, louder this time.
A businessman's name.
A broadcaster's name.
A name with no mud on its shoes.
But the mask in his pocket pulsed once, sharply — a warning.
He kept walking.
---
At the bottom of the Steps of the Nameless, Gibreel found a room filled with water.
It wasn't deep — a few inches, at most — but it covered the floor like a silver mirror.
Above, the ceiling hung low, heavy with dripping stalactites of broken concrete.
At the center of the room, a single figure sat cross-legged on a slab of stone: a woman, or perhaps a man — the face was blurred, shifting moment to moment, refusing to settle.
Their voice, when it came, was neither male nor female, neither old nor young:
"You seek the place where old selves die."
Gibreel said nothing.
"You have carried too many names," the figure continued, "and now they are devouring you."
Ripples spread across the water.
In each ripple, Gibreel glimpsed versions of himself:
— A Bollywood god, worshipped and betrayed.
— A terrified boy clutching his mother's sari.
— A winged giant roaring across a burning sky.
"Choose," the figure whispered.
"Or be unmade."
---
In the polished malls of the city, Chamcha chose.
He bought suits stitched in Milan, silk ties in discreet colors.
He practiced smiling with his mouth only, never his eyes.
He taught himself to laugh lightly when someone mispronounced his real name — as if it were a harmless joke, not an amputation.
He dined with men who smelled of old money and older fear.
He learned to nod in the right places, to pretend he had never been hungry, never barefoot, never brown.
And when he lay awake at night, in a flat too white and too silent, he pressed the brittle mask against his face and prayed it would fuse with his skin at last.
But it never did.
It only whispered, over and over:
"Whose skin are you wearing today?"
---
At the Steps of the Nameless, Gibreel made no choice.
He turned away from the stone figure, from the rippling visions, from the voice that offered annihilation disguised as mercy.
He fled upward, stumbling, half-blind.
When he burst into the grey daylight, gasping, the city had changed.
The skyline was wrong — buildings hunched lower, streets twisted at wrong angles, even the smell of the air had altered.
It was not a new city.
It was the true city, revealed at last.
And Gibreel understood — dimly, fearfully — that from now on, he would walk its secret streets forever.
No return.
No forgetting.
No salvation.
Only forward — into a world where names cracked like old paint and nothing stayed buried for long.
---