The Satanic Verses (78 page)

Mirza Saeed spent the first weeks of the pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea in a state of permanent, hysterical agitation. Most of the
walking was done in the mornings and late afternoons, and at these times Saeed would often leap out of his station wagon to plead with his dying wife. ‘Come to your senses, Mishu. You’re a sick woman. Come and lie down at least, let me press your feet a while.’ But she refused, and her mother shooed him away. ‘See, Saeed, you’re in such a negative mood, it gets depressing. Go and drink your Coke-shoke in your AC vehicle and leave us yatris in peace.’ After the first week the Air Conditioned vehicle lost its driver. Mirza Saeed’s chauffeur resigned and joined the foot-pilgrims; the zamindar was obliged to get behind the wheel himself. After that, when his anxiety overcame him, it was necessary to stop the car, park, and then rush madly back and forth among the pilgrims, threatening, entreating, offering bribes. At least once a day he cursed Ayesha to her face for ruining his life, but he could never keep up the abuse because every time he looked at her he desired her so much that he felt ashamed. The cancer had begun to turn Mishal’s skin grey, and Mrs Qureishi, too, was beginning to fray at the edges; her society chappals had disintegrated and she was suffering from frightful foot-blisters that looked like little water-balloons. When Saeed offered her the comfort of the car, however, she continued to refuse point-blank. The spell that Ayesha had placed upon the pilgrims was still holding firm. – And at the end of these sorties into the heart of the pilgrimage Mirza Saeed, sweating and giddy from the heat and his growing despair, would realize that the marchers had left his car some way behind, and he would have to totter back to it by himself, sunk in gloom. One day he got back to the station wagon to find that an empty coconut-shell thrown from the window of a passing bus had smashed his laminated windscreen, which looked, now, like a spider’s web full of diamond flies. He had to knock all the pieces out, and the glass diamonds seemed to be mocking him as they fell on to the road and into the car, they seemed to speak of the transience and worthlessness of earthly possessions, but a secular man lives in the world of things and Mirza Saeed did not intend to be broken as easily as a windscreen. At night he would go to lie beside his wife on a bedroll under the stars by the side of the grand
trunk road. When he told her about the accident she offered him cold comfort. ‘It’s a sign,’ she said. ‘Abandon the station wagon and join the rest of us at last.’

‘Abandon a Mercedes-Benz?’ Saeed yelped in genuine horror.

‘So what?’ Mishal replied in her grey, exhausted voice. ‘You keep talking about ruination. Then what difference is a Mercedes going to make?’

‘You don’t understand,’ Saeed wept. ‘Nobody understands me.’

Gibreel dreamed a drought:

The land browned under the rainless skies. The corpses of buses and ancient monuments rotting in the fields beside the crops. Mirza Saeed saw, through his shattered windscreen, the onset of calamity: the wild donkeys fucking wearily and dropping dead, while still conjoined, in the middle of the road, the trees standing on roots exposed by soil erosion and looking like huge wooden claws scrabbling for water in the earth, the destitute farmers being obliged to work for the state as manual labourers, digging a reservoir by the trunk road, an empty container for the rain that wouldn’t fall. Wretched roadside lives: a woman with a bundle heading for a tent of stick and rag, a girl condemned to scour, each day, this pot, this pan, in her patch of filthy dust. ‘Are such lives really worth as much as ours?’ Mirza Saeed Akhtar asked himself. ‘As much as mine? As Mishal’s? How little they have experienced, how little they have on which to feed the soul.’ A man in a dhoti and loose yellow pugri stood like a bird on top of a milestone, perched there with one foot on the opposite knee, one hand under the opposite elbow, smoking a biri. As Mirza Saeed Akhtar passed him he spat, and caught the zamindar full in the face.

The pilgrimage advanced slowly, three hours’ walking in the mornings, three more after the heat, walking at the pace of the slowest pilgrim, subject to infinite delays, the sickness of children, the harassment of the authorities, a wheel coming off one of the bullock carts; two miles a day at best, one hundred and fifty miles to the sea, a journey of approximately eleven weeks. The first death happened on the eighteenth day. Khadija, the tactless old
lady who had been for half a century the contented and contenting spouse of Sarpanch Muhammad Din, saw an archangel in a dream. ‘Gibreel,’ she whispered, ‘is it you?’

‘No,’ the apparition replied. ‘It’s I, Azraeel, the one with the lousy job. Excuse the disappointment.’

The next morning she continued with the pilgrimage, saying nothing to her husband about her vision. After two hours they neared the ruin of one of the Mughal milepost inns that had, in times long gone, been built at five-mile intervals along the highway. When Khadija saw the ruin she knew nothing of its past, of the wayfarers robbed in their sleep and so on, but she understood its present well enough. ‘I have to go in there and lie down,’ she said to the Sarpanch, who protested: ‘But, the march!’ ‘Never mind that,’ she said gently. ‘You can catch them up later.’

She lay down in the rubble of the old ruin with her head on a smooth stone which the Sarpanch found for her. The old man wept, but that didn’t do any good, and she was dead within a minute. He ran back to the march and confronted Ayesha angrily. ‘I should never have listened to you,’ he told her. ‘And now you have killed my wife.’

The march stopped. Mirza Saeed Akhtar, spotting an opportunity, insisted loudly that Khadija be taken to a proper Muslim burial ground. But Ayesha objected. ‘We are ordered by the archangel to go directly to the sea, without returns or detours.’ Mirza Saeed appealed to the pilgrims. ‘She is your Sarpanch’s beloved wife,’ he shouted. ‘Will you dump her in a hole by the side of the road?’

When the Titlipur villagers agreed that Khadija should be buried at once, Saeed could not believe his ears. He realized that their determination was even greater than he had suspected: even the bereaved Sarpanch acquiesced. Khadija was buried in the corner of a barren field behind the ruined way-station of the past.

The next day, however, Mirza Saeed noticed that the Sarpanch had come unstuck from the pilgrimage, and was mooching along disconsolately, a little distance apart from the rest, sniffing the bougainvillaea bushes. Saeed jumped out of the Mercedes and
rushed off to Ayesha, to make another scene. ‘You monster!’ he shouted. ‘Monster without a heart! Why did you bring the old woman here to die?’ She ignored him, but on his way back to the station wagon the Sarpanch came over and said: ‘We were poor people. We knew we could never hope to go to Mecca Sharif, until she persuaded. She persuaded, and now see the outcome of her deeds.’

Ayesha the kahin asked to speak to the Sarpanch, but gave him not a single word of consolation. ‘Harden your faith,’ she scolded him. ‘She who dies on the great pilgrimage is assured of a home in Paradise. Your wife is sitting now among the angels and the flowers; what is there for you to regret?’

That evening the Sarpanch Muhammad Din approached Mirza Saeed as he sat by a small campfire. ‘Excuse, Sethji,’ he said, ‘but is it possible that I ride, as you once offered, in your motor-car?’

Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism. ‘My first convert,’ Mirza Saeed rejoiced.

By the fourth week the defection of Sarpanch Muhammad Din had begun to have its effect. He sat on the back seat of the Mercedes as if he were the zamindar and Mirza Saeed the chauffeur, and little by little the leather upholstery and the air-conditioning unit and the whisky-soda cabinet and the electrically operated mirror-glass windows began to teach him hauteur; his nose tilted into the air and he acquired the supercilious expression of a man who can see without being seen. Mirza Saeed in the driver’s seat felt his eyes and nose filling up with the dust that came in through the hole where the windscreen used to be, but in spite of such discomforts he was feeling better than before. Now, at the end of each day, a cluster of pilgrims would congregate around the Mercedes-Benz with its gleaming star, and Mirza Saeed would try and talk sense into them while they watched
Sarpanch Muhammad Din raise and lower the mirror-glass rear windows, so that they saw, alternately, his features and their own. The Sarpanch’s presence in the Mercedes lent new authority to Mirza Saeed’s words.

Ayesha didn’t try to call the villagers away, and so far her confidence had been justified; there had been no further defections to the camp of the faithless. But Saeed saw her casting numerous glances in his direction and whether she was a visionary or not Mirza Saeed would have bet good money that those were the bad-tempered glances of a young girl who was no longer sure of getting her own way.

Then she disappeared.

She went off during an afternoon siesta and did not reappear for a day and a half, by which time there was pandemonium among the pilgrims – she always knew how to whip up an audience’s feelings, Saeed conceded; then she sauntered back up to them across the dust-clouded landscape, and this time her silver hair was streaked with gold, and her eyebrows, too, were golden. She summoned the villagers to her and told them that the archangel was displeased that the people of Titlipur had been filled up with doubts just because of the ascent of a martyr to Paradise. She warned that he was seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, ‘so that all you’ll get at the Arabian Sea is a salt-water bath, and then it’s back to your deserted potato fields on which no rain will ever fall again.’ The villagers were appalled. ‘No, it can’t be,’ they pleaded. ‘Bibiji, forgive us.’ It was the first time they had used the name of the longago saint to describe the girl who was leading them with an absolutism that had begun to frighten them as much as it impressed. After her speech the Sarpanch and Mirza Saeed were left alone in the station wagon. ‘Second round to the archangel,’ Mirza Saeed thought.

By the fifth week the health of most of the older pilgrims had deteriorated sharply, food supplies were running low, water was
hard to find, and the children’s tear ducts were dry. The vulture herds were never far away.

As the pilgrims left behind the rural areas and came towards more densely populated zones, the level of harassment increased. The long-distance buses and trucks often refused to deviate and the pedestrians had to leap, screaming and tumbling over each other, out of their way. Cyclists, families of six on Rajdoot motor-scooters, petty shop-keepers hurled abuse. ‘Crazies! Hicks! Muslims!’ Often they were obliged to keep marching for an entire night because the authorities in this or that small town didn’t want such riff-raff sleeping on their pavements. More deaths became inevitable.

Then the bullock of the convert, Osman, fell to its knees amid the bicycles and camel-dung of a nameless little town. ‘Get up, idiot,’ he yelled at it impotently. ‘What do you think you’re doing, dying on me in front of the fruit-stalls of strangers?’ The bullock nodded, twice for yes, and expired.

Butterflies covered the corpse, adopting the colour of its grey hide, its horn-cones and bells. The inconsolable Osman ran to Ayesha (who had put on a dirty sari as a concession to urban prudery, even though butterfly clouds still trailed off her like glory). ‘Do bullocks go to Heaven?’ he asked in a piteous voice; she shrugged. ‘Bullocks have no souls,’ she said coolly, ‘and it is souls we march to save.’ Osman looked at her and realized he no longer loved her. ‘You’ve become a demon,’ he told her in disgust.

‘I am nothing,’ Ayesha said. ‘I am a messenger.’

‘Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent,’ Osman raged. ‘What’s he afraid of? Is he so unconfident that he needs us to die to prove our love?’

As though in response to such blasphemy, Ayesha imposed even stricter disciplinary measures, insisting that all pilgrims say all five prayers, and decreeing that Fridays would be days of fasting. By the end of the sixth week she had forced the marchers to leave four more bodies where they fell: two old men, one old woman,
and one six-year-old girl. The pilgrims marched on, turning their backs on the dead; behind them, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar gathered up the bodies and made sure they received a decent burial. In this he was assisted by the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and the former untouchable, Osman. On such days they would fall quite a way behind the march, but a Mercedes-Benz station wagon doesn’t take long to catch up with over a hundred and forty men, women and children walking wearily towards the sea.