The Satanic Verses (37 page)

Ayesha the orphan was nineteen years old when she began her walk back to Titlipur along the rutted potato track, but by the time she turned up in her village some forty-eight hours later she had attained a kind of agelessness, because her hair had turned as white as snow while her skin had regained the luminous perfection of a new-born child’s, and although she was completely naked the butterflies had settled upon her body in such thick swarms that she seemed to be wearing a dress of the most delicate material in the universe. The clown Osman was practising routines with the boom-boom bullock near the track, because even
though he had been worried sick by her extended absence, and had spent the whole of the previous night searching for her, it was still necessary to earn a living. When he laid eyes on her, that young man who had never respected God because of having been born untouchable was filled with holy terror, and did not dare to approach the girl with whom he was so helplessly in love.

She went into her hut and slept for a day and a night without waking up. Then she went to see the village headman, Sarpanch Muhammad Din, and informed him matter-of-factly that the Archangel Gibreel had appeared to her in a vision and had lain down beside her to rest. ‘Greatness has come among us,’ she informed the alarmed Sarpanch, who had until then been more concerned with potato quotas than transcendence. ‘Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given to us also.’

In another part of the tree, the Sarpanch’s wife Khadija was consoling a weeping clown, who was finding it hard to accept that he had lost his beloved Ayesha to a higher being, for when an archangel lies with a woman she is lost to men forever. Khadija was old and forgetful and frequently clumsy when she tried to be loving, and she gave Osman cold comfort: ‘The sun always sets when there is fear of tigers,’ she quoted the old saying: bad news always comes all at once.

Soon after the story of the miracle got out, the girl Ayesha was summoned to the big house, and in the following days she spent long hours closeted with the zamindar’s wife, Begum Mishal Akhtar, whose mother had also arrived on a visit, and fallen for the archangel’s white-haired wife.

The dreamer, dreaming, wants (but is unable) to protest: I never laid a finger on her, what do you think this is, some kind of wet dream or what? Damn me if I know from where that girl was getting her information/inspiration. Not from this quarter, that’s for sure.

This happened: she was walking back to her village, but then
she seemed to grow weary all of a sudden, and went off the path to lie in the shade of a tamarind-tree and rest. The moment her eyes closed he was there beside her, dreaming Gibreel in coat and hat, sweltering in the heat. She looked at him but he couldn’t say what she saw, wings maybe, haloes, the works. Then he was lying there and finding he could not get up, his limbs had become heavier than iron bars, it seemed as if his body might be crushed by its own weight into the earth. When she finished looking at him she nodded, gravely, as if he had spoken, and then she took off her scrap of a sari and stretched out beside him, nude. Then in the dream he fell asleep, out cold as if somebody pulled out the plug, and when dreamed himself awake again she was standing in front of him with that loose white hair and the butterflies clothing her: transformed. She was still nodding, with a rapt expression on her face, receiving a message from somewhere that she called Gibreel. Then she left him lying there and returned to the village to make her entrance.

So now I have a dream-wife, the dreamer becomes conscious enough to think. What the hell to do with her? – But it isn’t up to him. Ayesha and Mishal Akhtar are together in the big house.

Ever since his birthday Mirza Saeed had been full of passionate desires, ‘as if life really does begin at forty’, his wife marvelled. Their marriage became so energetic that the servants had to change the bedsheets three times per day. Mishal hoped secretly that this heightening of her husband’s libido would lead her to conceive, because she was of the firm opinion that enthusiasm mattered, whatever doctors might say to the contrary, and that the years of taking her temperature every morning before getting out of bed, and then plotting the results on graph paper in order to establish her pattern of ovulation, had actually dissuaded the babies from being born, partly because it was difficult to be properly ardent when science got into bed along with you, and partly, too, in her view, because no self-respecting foetus would wish to enter
the womb of so mechanically programmed a mother. Mishal still prayed for a child, although she no longer mentioned the fact to Saeed so as to spare him the sense of having failed her in this respect. Eyes shut, feigning sleep, she would call on God for a sign, and when Saeed became so loving, so frequently, she wondered if maybe this might not be it. As a result, his strange request that from now on, whenever they came to stay at Peristan, she should adopt the ‘old ways’ and retreat into purdah, was not treated by her with the contempt it deserved. In the city, where they kept a large and hospitable house, the zamindar and his wife were known as one of the most ‘modern’ and ‘go-go’ couples on the scene; they collected contemporary art and threw wild parties and invited friends round for fumbles in the dark on sofas while watching soft-porno VCRs. So when Mirza Saeed said, ‘Would it not be sort of delicious, Mishu, if we tailored our behaviour to fit this old house,’ she should have laughed in his face. Instead she replied, ‘What you like, Saeed,’ because he gave her to understand that it was a sort of erotic game. He even hinted that his passion for her had become so overwhelming that he might need to express it at any moment, and if she were out in the open at the time it might embarrass the staff; certainly her presence would make it impossible for him to concentrate on any of his tasks, and besides, in the city, ‘we will still be completely up-to-date’. From this she understood that the city was full of distractions for the Mirza, so that the chances of conceiving were greatest right here in Titlipur. She resolved to stay put. This was when she invited her mother to come and stay, because if she were to confine herself to the zenana she would need company. Mrs Qureishi arrived wobbling with plump fury, determined to scold her son-in-law until he gave up this purdah foolishness, but Mishal amazed her mother by begging: ‘Please don’t.’ Mrs Qureishi, the wife of the state bank director, was quite a sophisticate herself. ‘In fact, all your teenage, Mishu, you were the grey goose and I was the hipster. I thought you dragged yourself out of that ditch but I see he pushed you back in there again.’ The financier’s wife had always
been of the opinion that her son-in-law was a secret cheapskate, an opinion which had survived intact in spite of being starved of any scrap of supporting evidence. Ignoring her daughter’s veto, she sought out Mirza Saeed in the formal garden and launched into him, wobbling, as was her wont, for emphasis. ‘What type of life are you living?’ she demanded. ‘My daughter is not for locking up, but for taking out! What is all your fortune for, if you keep it also under lock and key? My son, unlock both wallet and wife! Take her away, renew your love, on some enjoyable
outing!’
Mirza Saeed opened his mouth, found no reply, shut it again. Dazzled by her own oratory, which had given rise, quite on the spur of the moment, to the idea of a holiday, Mrs Qureishi warmed to her theme. ‘Just get set, and go!’ she urged. ‘Go, man, go! Go away with her, or will you lock her up until she goes away,’ – here she jabbed an ominous finger at the sky – ‘
forever
?’

Guiltily, Mirza Saeed promised to consider the idea.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she cried in triumph. ‘You big softo? You … you
Hamlet
?’

His mother-in-law’s attack brought on one of the periodic bouts of self-reproach which had been plaguing Mirza Saeed ever since he persuaded Mishal to take the veil. To console himself he settled down to read Tagore’s story
Ghare-Baire
in which a zamindar persuades his wife to come
out
of purdah, whereupon he takes up with a firebrand politico involved in the ‘swadeshi’ campaign, and the zamindar winds up dead. The novel cheered him up momentarily, but then his suspicions returned. Had he been sincere in the reasons he gave his wife, or was he simply finding a way of leaving the coast clear for his pursuit of the madonna of the butterflies, the epileptic, Ayesha? ‘Some coast,’ he thought, remembering Mrs Qureishi with her eyes of an accusative hawk, ‘some clear.’ His mother-in-law’s presence, he argued to himself, was further proof of his bona fides. Had he not positively encouraged Mishal to send for her, even though he knew perfectly well that the old fatty couldn’t stand him and would suspect him of every damn slyness under the sun? ‘Would I have been so keen
for her to come if I was planning on hanky panky?’ he asked himself. But the nagging inner voices continued: All this recent sexology, this renewed interest in your lady wife, is simple transference. Really, you are longing for your peasant floozy to come and flooze with you.’

Guilt had the effect of making the zamindar feel entirely worthless. His mother-in-law’s insults came to seem, in his unhappiness, like the literal truth. ‘Softo,’ she called him, and sitting in his study, surrounded by bookcases in which worms were munching contentedly upon priceless Sanskrit texts such as were not to be found even in the national archives, and also, less upliftingly, on the complete works of Percy Westerman, G. A. Henty and Dornford Yates, Mirza Saeed admitted, yes, spot on, I am soft. The house was seven generations old and for seven generations the softening had been going on. He walked down the corridor in which his ancestors hung in baleful, gilded frames, and contemplated the mirror which he kept hanging in the last space as a reminder that one day he, too, must step up on to this wall. He was a man without sharp corners or rough edges; even his elbows were covered by little pads of flesh. In the mirror he saw the thin moustache, the weak chin, the lips stained by paan. Cheeks, nose, forehead: all soft, soft, soft. ‘Who would see anything in a type like me?’ he cried, and when he realized that he had been so agitated that he had spoken aloud he knew he must be in love, that he was sick as a dog with love, and that the object of his affections was no longer his loving wife.

‘Then what a damn, shallow, tricksy and self-deceiving fellow I am,’ he sighed to himself, ‘to change so much, so fast. I deserve to be finished off without ceremony.’ But he was not the type to fall on his sword. Instead, he strolled a while around the corridors of Peristan, and pretty soon the house worked its magic and restored him to something like a good mood once again.

The house: in spite of its faery name, it was a solid, rather prosy building, rendered exotic only by being in the wrong country. It had been built seven generations ago by a certain Perowne, an English architect much favoured by the colonial authorities,
whose only style was that of the neo-classical English country house. In those days the great zamindars were crazy for European architecture. Saeed’s great-great-great-great-grandfather had hired the fellow five minutes after meeting him at the Viceroy’s reception, to indicate publicly that not all Indian Muslims had supported the action of the Meerut soldiers or been in sympathy with the subsequent uprisings, no, not by any means; – and then given him carte blanche; – so here Peristan now stood, in the middle of near-tropical potato fields and beside the great banyan-tree, covered in bougainvillaea creeper, with snakes in the kitchens and butterfly skeletons in the cupboards. Some said its name owed more to the Englishman’s than to anything more fanciful: it was a mere contraction of
Perownistan
.

After seven generations it was at last beginning to look as if it belonged in this landscape of bullock carts and palm-trees and high, clear, star-heavy skies. Even the stained-glass window looking down on the staircase of King Charles the Headless had been, in an indefinable manner, naturalized. Very few of these old zamindar houses had survived the egalitarian depredations of the present, and accordingly there hung over Peristan something of the musty air of a museum, even though – or perhaps because – Mirza Saeed took great pride in the old place and had spent lavishly to keep it in trim. He slept under a high canopy of worked and beaten brass in a ship-like bed that had been occupied by three Viceroys. In the grand salon he liked to sit with Mishal and Mrs Qureishi in the unusual three-way love seat. At one end of this room a colossal Shiraz carpet stood rolled up, on wooden blocks, awaiting the glamorous reception which would merit its unfurling, and which never came. In the dining-room there were stout classical columns with ornate Corinthian tops, and there were peacocks, both real and stone, strolling on the main steps to the house, and Venetian chandeliers tinkling in the hall. The original punkahs were still in full working order, all their operating cords travelling by way of pulleys and holes in walls and floors to a little, airless boot-room where the punkah-wallah sat and tugged the lot together, trapped in the irony of the foetid air
of that tiny windowless room while he despatched cool breezes to all other parts of the house. The servants, too, went back seven generations and had therefore lost the art of complaining. The old ways ruled: even the Titlipur sweet-vendor was required to seek the zamindar’s approval before commencing to sell any innovative sweetmeat he might have invented. Life in Peristan was as soft as it was hard under the tree; but, even into such cushioned existences, heavy blows can fall.