The Satanic Verses (80 page)

On the night before they were due to enter Sarang, Mirza Saeed made another futile appeal to the pilgrims. ‘Give up,’ he implored uselessly. ‘Tomorrow we will all be killed.’ Ayesha whispered in Mishal’s ear, and she spoke up: ‘Better a martyr than a coward. Are there any cowards here?’

There was one. Sri Srinivas, explorer of the Grand Canyon, proprietor of a Toy Univas, whose motto was creativity and sincerity, sided with Mirza Saeed. As a devout follower of the goddess Lakshmi, whose face was so perplexingly also Ayesha’s, he felt unable to participate in the coming hostilities on either side. ‘I am a weak fellow,’ he confessed to Saeed. ‘I have loved Miss Ayesha, and a man should fight for what he loves; but, what to do, I require neutral status.’ Srinivas was the fifth member of the
renegade society in the Mercedes-Benz, and now Mrs Qureishi had no option but to share the back seat with a common man. Srinivas greeted her unhappily, and, seeing her bounce grumpily along the seat away from him, attempted to placate. ‘Please to accept a token of my esteem.’ – And produced, from an inside pocket, a Family Planning doll.

That night the deserters remained in the station wagon while the faithful prayed in the open air. They had been allowed to camp in a disused goods train marshalling yard, guarded by military police. Mirza Saeed couldn’t sleep. He was thinking about something Srinivas had said to him, about being a Gandhian in his head, ‘but I’m too weak to put such notions into practice. Excuse me, but it’s true. I was not cut out for suffering, Sethji. I should have stayed with wife and kiddies and cut out this adventure disease that has made me land up in such a place.’

In my family, too, Mirza Saeed in his insomnia answered the sleeping toy merchant, we have suffered from a kind of disease: one of detachment, of being unable to connect ourselves to things, events, feelings. Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we have lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.

Which was to say that he found it hard to believe that all this was really happening; but it was.

When the Ayesha Pilgrims were ready to set off the next morning, the huge clouds of butterflies that had travelled with them all the way from Titlipur suddenly broke up and vanished from view, revealing that the sky was filling up with other, more prosaic clouds. Even the creatures that had been clothing Ayesha – the elite corps, so to speak – decamped, and she had to lead the procession dressed in the mundanity of an old cotton sari with a block-printed hem of leaves. The disappearance of the miracle that had seemed to validate their pilgrimage depressed all the marchers; so that in spite of all Mishal Akhtar’s exhortations they
were unable to sing as they moved forwards, deprived of the benediction of the butterflies, to meet their fate.

The No Islamic Padyatra street mob had prepared a welcome for Ayesha in a street lined on both sides with the shacks of bicycle repairers. They had blocked the pilgrims’ routes with dead bicycles, and waited behind this barricade of broken wheels, bent handlebars and silenced bells as the Ayesha Haj entered the northern sector of the street. Ayesha walked towards the mob as if it did not exist, and when she reached the last crossroads, beyond which the clubs and knives of the enemy awaited her, there was a thunderclap like the trumpet of doom and an ocean fell down out of the sky. The drought had broken too late to save the crops; afterwards many of the pilgrims believed that God had been saving up the water for just this purpose, letting it build up in the sky until it was as endless as the sea, sacrificing the year’s harvest in order to save his prophetess and her people.

The stunning force of the downpour unnerved both pilgrims and assailants. In the confusion of the flood a second doom-trumpet was heard. This was, in point of fact, the horn of Mirza Saeed’s Mercedes-Benz station wagon, which he had driven at high speed through the suffocating side gullies of the suburb, bringing down racks of shirts hanging on rails, and pumpkin barrows, and trays of cheap plastic notions, until he reached the street of basket-workers that intersected the street of bicycle repairers just to the north of the barricade. Here he accelerated as hard as he could and charged towards the crossroads, scattering pedestrians and wickerwork stools in all directions. He reached the crossroads immediately after the sea fell out of the sky, and braked violently. Sri Srinivas and Osman leaped out, seized Mishal Akhtar and the prophetess Ayesha, and hauled them into the Mercedes in a flurry of legs, sputum and abuse. Saeed accelerated away from the scene before anybody had managed to get the blinding water out of their eyes.

Inside the car: bodies heaped in an angry jumble. Mishal Akhtar shouted abuse at her husband from the bottom of the pile: ‘Saboteur! Traitor! Scum from somewhere! Mule!’ – To which Saeed sarcastically replied, ‘Martyrdom is too easy, Mishal. Don’t you want to watch the ocean open, like a flower?’

And Mrs Qureishi, sticking her head out through Osman’s inverted legs, added in a pink-faced gasp: ‘Okay, come on, Mishu, quit. We meant well.’

Gibreel dreamed a flood:

When the rains came, the miners of Sarang had been waiting for the pilgrims with their pickaxes in their hands, but when the bicycle barricade was swept away they could not avoid the idea that God had taken Ayesha’s side. The town’s drainage system surrendered instantly to the overwhelming assault of the water, and the miners were soon standing in a muddy flood that reached as high as their waists. Some of them tried to move towards the pilgrims, who also continued to make efforts to advance. But now the rainstorm redoubled its force, and then doubled it again, falling from the sky in thick slabs through which it was getting difficult to breathe, as though the earth were being engulfed, and the firmament above were reuniting with the firmament below.

Gibreel, dreaming, found his vision obscured by water.

The rain stopped, and a watery sun shone down on a Venetian scene of devastation. The roads of Sarang were now canals, along which there journeyed all manner of flotsam. Where only recently scooter-rickshaws, camel-carts and repaired bicycles had gone, there now floated newspapers, flowers, bangles, watermelons, umbrellas, chappals, sunglasses, baskets, excrement, medicine bottles, playing cards, dupattas, pancakes, lamps. The water had an odd, reddish tint that made the sodden populace imagine that the street was flowing with blood. There was no trace of bully-boy
miners or of Ayesha Pilgrims. A dog swam across the intersection by the collapsed bicycle barricade, and all around there lay the damp silence of the flood, whose waters lapped at marooned buses, while children stared from the roofs of deliquescent gullies, too shocked to come out and play.

Then the butterflies returned.

From nowhere, as if they had been hiding behind the sun; and to celebrate the end of the rain they had all taken the colour of sunlight. The arrival of this immense carpet of light in the sky utterly bewildered the people of Sarang, who were already reeling in the aftermath of the storm; fearing the apocalypse, they hid indoors and closed their shutters. On a nearby hillside, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar and his party observed the miracle’s return and were filled, all of them, even the zamindar, with a kind of awe.

Mirza Saeed had driven hell-for-leather, in spite of being half-blinded by the rain which poured through the smashed windscreen, until on a road that led up and around the bend of a hill he came to a halt at the gates of the No. 1 Sarang Coalfield. The pitheads were dimly visible through the rain. ‘Brainbox,’ Mishal Akhtar cursed him weakly. ‘Those bums are waiting for us back there, and you drive us up here to see their pals. Tip-top notion, Saeed. Extra fine.’

But they had no more trouble from miners. That was the day of the mining disaster that left fifteen thousand pitmen buried alive beneath the Sarangi hill. Saeed, Mishal, the Sarpanch, Osman, Mrs Qureishi, Srinivas and Ayesha stood exhausted and soaked to the skin by the roadside as ambulances, fire-engines, salvage operators and pit bosses arrived in large quantities and left, much later, shaking their heads. The Sarpanch caught his earlobes between thumbs and forefingers. ‘Life is pain,’ he said. ‘Life is pain and loss; it is a coin of no value, worth even less than a kauri or a dam.’

Osman of the dead bullock, who, like the Sarpanch, had lost a dearly loved companion during the pilgrimage, also wept. Mrs Qureishi attempted to look on the bright side: ‘Main thing is that
we’re okay,’ but this got no response. Then Ayesha closed her eyes and recited in the sing-song voice of prophecy, ‘It is a judgment upon them for the bad attempt they made.’

Mirza Saeed was angry. ‘They weren’t at the bloody barricade,’ he shouted. ‘They were working under the goddamned ground.’

‘They dug their own graves,’ Ayesha replied.

This was when they sighted the returning butterflies. Saeed watched the golden cloud in disbelief, as it first gathered and then sent out streams of winged light in every direction. Ayesha wanted to return to the crossroads. Saeed objected: ‘It’s flooded down there. Our only chance is to drive down the opposite side of this hill and come out the other side of town.’ But Ayesha and Mishal had already started back; the prophetess was supporting the other, ashen woman, holding her around the waist.