The Satanic Verses (81 page)

‘Mishal, for God’s sake,’ Mirza Saeed called after his wife. ‘For the love of God. What will I do with the motor-car?’

But she went on down the hill, towards the flood, leaning heavily on Ayesha the seer, without looking round.

This was how Mirza Saeed Akhtar came to abandon his beloved Mercedes-Benz station wagon near the entrance to the drowned mines of Sarang, and join in the foot-pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea.

The seven bedraggled travellers stood thigh-deep in water at the intersection of the street of bicycle repairers and the alley of the basket-weavers. Slowly, slowly, the water had begun to go down. ‘Face it,’ Mirza Saeed argued. ‘The pilgrimage is finished. The villagers are who knows where, maybe drowned, possibly murdered, certainly lost. There’s nobody left to follow you but us.’ He stuck his face into Ayesha’s. ‘So forget it, sister; you’re sunk.’

‘Look,’ Mishal said.

From all sides, out of little tinkers’ gullies, the villagers of Titlipur were returning to the place of their dispersal. They were all coated from neck to ankles in golden butterflies, and long lines
of the little creatures went before them, like ropes drawing them to safety out of a well. The people of Sarang watched in terror from their windows, and as the waters of retribution receded, the Ayesha Haj re-formed in the middle of the road.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mirza Saeed.

But it was true. Every single member of the pilgrimage had been tracked down by the butterflies and brought back to the main road. And stranger claims were later made: that when the creatures had settled on a broken ankle the injury had healed, or that an open wound had closed as if by magic. Many marchers said they had awoken from unconsciousness to find the butterflies fluttering about their lips. Some even believed that they had been dead, drowned, and that the butterflies had brought them back to life.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Mirza Saeed cried. ‘The storm saved you; it washed away your enemies, so it’s not surprising few of you are hurt. Let’s be scientific, please.’

‘Use your eyes, Saeed,’ Mishal told him, indicating the presence before them of over a hundred men, women and children enveloped in glowing butterflies. ‘What does your science say about this?’

In the last days of the pilgrimage, the city was all around them. Officers from the Municipal Corporation met with Mishal and Ayesha and planned a route through the metropolis. On this route were mosques in which the pilgrims could sleep without clogging up the streets. Excitement in the city was intense: each day, when the pilgrims set off towards their next resting-place, they were watched by enormous crowds, some sneering and hostile, but many bringing presents of sweetmeats, medicines and food.

Mirza Saeed, worn-out and filthy, was in a state of deep frustration on account of his failure to convince more than a handful of the pilgrims that it was better to put one’s trust in reason than in miracles. Miracles had been doing pretty well for them, the Titlipur villagers pointed out, reasonably enough. ‘Those blasted
butterflies,’ Saeed muttered to the Sarpanch. ‘Without them, we’d have a chance.’

‘But they have been with us from the start,’ the Sarpanch replied with a shrug.

Mishal Akhtar was clearly close to death; she had begun to smell of it, and had turned a chalky white colour that frightened Saeed badly. But Mishal wouldn’t let him come near her. She had ostracized her mother, too, and when her father took time off from banking to visit her on the pilgrimage’s first night in a city mosque, she told him to buzz off. ‘Things have come to the point,’ she announced, ‘where only the pure can be with the pure.’ When Mirza Saeed heard the diction of Ayesha the prophetess emerging from his wife’s mouth he lost all but the tiniest speck of hope.

Friday came, and Ayesha agreed that the pilgrimage could halt for a day to participate in the Friday prayers. Mirza Saeed, who had forgotten almost all the Arabic verses that had once been stuffed into him by rote, and could scarcely remember when to stand with his hands held in front of him like a book, when to genuflect, when to press his forehead to the ground, stumbled through the ceremony with growing self-disgust. At the end of the prayers, however, something happened that stopped the Ayesha Haj in its tracks.

As the pilgrims watched the congregation leaving the courtyard of the mosque, a commotion began outside the main gate. Mirza Saeed went to investigate. ‘What’s the hoo-hah?’ he asked as he struggled through the crowd on the mosque steps; then he saw the basket sitting on the bottom step. – And heard, rising from the basket, the baby’s cry.

The foundling was perhaps two weeks old, clearly illegitimate, and it was equally plain that its options in life were limited. The crowd was in a doubtful, confused mood. Then the mosque’s Imam appeared at the head of the flight of steps, and beside him was Ayesha the seer, whose fame had spread throughout the city.

The crowd parted like the sea, and Ayesha and the Imam came
down to the basket. The Imam examined the baby briefly; rose; and turned to address the crowd.

‘This child was born in devilment,’ he said. ‘It is the Devil’s child.’ He was a young man.

The mood of the crowd shifted towards anger. Mirza Saeed Akhtar shouted out: ‘You, Ayesha, kahin. What do you say?’

‘Everything will be asked of us,’ she replied.

The crowd, needing no clearer invitation, stoned the baby to death.

After that the Ayesha Pilgrims refused to move on. The death of the foundling had created an atmosphere of mutiny among the weary villagers, none of whom had lifted or thrown a stone. Mishal, snow-white now, was too enfeebled by her illness to rally the marchers; Ayesha, as ever, refused to dispute. ‘If you turn your backs on God,’ she warned the villagers, ‘don’t be surprised when he does the same to you.’

The pilgrims were squatting in a group in a corner of the large mosque, which was painted lime-green on the outside and bright blue within, and lit, when necessary, by multicoloured neon ‘tube lights’. After Ayesha’s warning they turned their backs on her and huddled closer together, although the weather was warm and humid enough. Mirza Saeed, spotting his opportunity, decided to challenge Ayesha directly once again. ‘Tell me,’ he asked sweetly, ‘how exactly does the angel give you all this information? You never tell us his precise words, only your interpretations of them. Why such indirection? Why not simply quote?’

‘He speaks to me,’ Ayesha answered, ‘in clear and memorable forms.’

Mirza Saeed, full of the bitter energy of his desire for her, and the pain of his estrangement from his dying wife, and the memory of the tribulations of the march, smelled in her reticence the weakness he had been probing for. ‘Kindly be more specific,’ he insisted. ‘Or why should anyone believe? What are these forms?’

‘The archangel sings to me,’ she admitted, ‘to the tunes of popular hit songs.’

Mirza Saeed Akhtar clapped his hands delightedly and began to laugh the loud, echoing laughter of revenge, and Osman the bullock-boy joined in, beating on his dholki and prancing around the squatting villagers, singing the latest filmi ganas and making nautch-girl eyes. ‘Ho ji!’ he carolled. ‘This is how Gibreel recites, ho ji! Ho ji!’

And one after the other, pilgrim after pilgrim rose and joined in the dance of the circling drummer, dancing their disillusion and disgust in the courtyard of the mosque, until the Imam came running to shriek at the ungodliness of their deeds.

Night fell. The villagers of Titlipur were grouped around their Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and serious talks about returning to Titlipur were under way. Perhaps a little of the harvest could be saved. Mishal Akhtar lay dying with her head in her mother’s lap, racked by pain, with a single tear emerging from her left eye. And in a far corner of the courtyard of the greenblue mosque with its technicolour tube-lighting, the visionary and the zamindar sat alone and talked. A moon – new, horned, cold – shone down.

‘You’re a clever man,’ Ayesha said. ‘You knew how to take your chance.’

This was when Mirza Saeed made his offer of a compromise. ‘My wife is dying,’ he said. ‘And she wants very much to go to Mecca Sharif. So we have interests in common, you and I.’

Ayesha listened. Saeed pressed on: ‘Ayesha, I’m not a bad man. Let me tell you, I’ve been damn impressed by many things on this walk;
damn
impressed. You have given these people a profound spiritual experience, no question. Don’t think we modern types lack a spiritual dimension.’

‘The people have left me,’ Ayesha said.

‘The people are confused,’ Saeed replied. ‘Point is, if you actually take them to the sea and then nothing happens, my God, they really could turn against you. So here’s the deal. I gave a tinkle to
Mishal’s papa and he agreed to underwrite half the cost. We propose to fly you and Mishal, and let’s say ten – twelve! – of the villagers, to Mecca, within forty-eight hours, personally. Reservations are available. We leave it to you to select the individuals best suited to the trip. Then, truly, you will have performed a miracle for some instead of for none. And in my view the pilgrimage itself has been a miracle, in a way. So you will have done very much.’

He held his breath.

‘I must think,’ Ayesha said.

‘Think, think,’ Saeed encouraged her happily. ‘Ask your archangel. If he agrees, it must be right.’

Mirza Saeed Akhtar knew that when Ayesha announced that the Archangel Gibreel had accepted his offer her power would be destroyed forever, because the villagers would perceive her fraudulence and her desperation, too. – But how could she turn him down? – What choice did she really have? ‘Revenge is sweet,’ he told himself. Once the woman was discredited, he would certainly take Mishal to Mecca, if that were still her wish.

The butterflies of Titlipur had not entered the mosque. They lined its exterior walls and onion dome, glowing greenly in the dark.

Ayesha in the night: stalking the shadows, lying down, rising to go on the prowl again. There was an uncertainty about her; then the slowness came, and she seemed to dissolve into the shadows of the mosque. She returned at dawn.

After the morning prayer she asked the pilgrims if she might address them; and they, doubtfully, agreed.