Where is the rupture in these roots and how far down must one go to touch the wound? Looking into "the well of the past" is not off the point; it aims directly at the heart of the matter: the existential rift in the two protagonists.

Just as Jacob is incomprehensible without Abraham (who, according to Mann, lived centuries before him), being merely his "imitation and continuation," Gibreel Farishta is incomprehensible without the Archangel Gibreel, without Mahound (Mohammed), incomprehensible even without the theocratic Islam of Khomeini or of that fanatical girl who leads the villagers to Mecca, or rather to death. They are all his own potentialities, which sleep within him and which he must battle for his own individuality. In this novel, there is no important question that can be examined without looking down the well of the past. What is good and what is evil? Who is the other's devil, Chamcha for Farishta or Farishta for Chamcha? Is it the devil or the angel that has inspired the pilgrimage of the villagers? Is their drowning a piteous disaster or the glorious

journey to Paradise? Who can say? Who can know? And what if this unknowability of good and evil was the torment suffered by the founders of religions? Those terrible words of despair, Christ's unprecedented blasphemy, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?": do they not resound in the soul of every Christian? Mahound's doubt as he wonders who put those verses into his head, God or the devil: does it not conceal the uncertainty that is the ground of man's very existence?