The Satanic Verses (74 page)

           
"Saeed, son, do you hate me completely?" she wheedled, her plump
features arranging themselves in a parody of coquettishness.

           
Saeed was appalled by her grimace. "Of course not," he managed to
say.

           
"But you do, you loathe me, and my cause is hopeless," she flirted.

           
"Ammaji," Saeed gulped, "what are you saying?"

           
"Because I have from time to time spoken roughly to you."

           
"Please forget it," Saeed said, bemused by her performance, but she
would not. "You must know it was all for love, isn't it? Love," said
Mrs. Qureishi, "it is a many-splendoured thing."

           
"Makes the world go round," Mirza Saeed agreed, trying to enter into
the spirit of the conversation.

           
"Love conquers all," Mrs. Qureishi confirmed. "It has conquered
my anger. This I must demonstrate to you by riding with you in your
motor."

           
Mirza Saeed bowed. "It is yours, Ammaji."

           
"Then you will ask those two village men to sit in front with you. Ladies
must be protected, isn't it?"

           
"It is," he replied.

           
* * * * *

           
The story of the village that was walking to the sea had spread all over the
country, and in the ninth week the pilgrims were being pestered by journalists,
local politicos in search of votes, businessmen who offered to sponsor the
march if the yatris would only consent to wear sandwich boards advertising
various goods and services, foreign tourists looking for the mysteries of the
East, nostalgic Gandhians, and the kind of human vultures who go to motor-car
races to watch the crashes. When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies and
the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid
food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded expectations,
that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not
paper over. Photographs of Ayesha were appearing in all the papers, and the
pilgrims even passed advertising hoardings on which the lepidopteral beauty had
been painted three times as large as life, beside slogans reading
Our cloths
also are as delicate as a butterfly's wing
, or suchlike. Then more alarming
news reached them. Certain religious extremist groupings had issued statements
denouncing the "Ayesha Haj" as an attempt to "hijack"
public attention and to "incite communal sentiment". Leaflets were
being distributed―Mishal picked them up off the road―in which it
was claimed that "Padyatra, or foot-pilgrimage, is an ancient, pre-Islamic
tradition of national culture, not imported property of Mughal
immigrants." Also: "Purloining of this tradition by so-called Ayesha
Bibiji is flagrant and deliberate inflammation of already sensitive
situation."

           
"There will be no trouble," the kahin broke her silence to announce.

           
* * * * *

           
Gibreel dreamed a suburb:

           
As the Ayesha Haj neared Sarang, the outermost suburb of the great metropolis
on the Arabian Sea towards which the visionary girl was leading them,
journalists, politicos and police officers redoubled their visits. At first the
policemen threatened to disband the march forcibly; the politicians, however,
advised that this would look very like a sectarian act and could lead to
outbreaks of communal violence from top to bottom of the country. Eventually
the police chiefs agreed to permit the march, but groused menacingly about
being "unable to guarantee safe passages" for the pilgrims. Mishal
Akhtar said: "We are going on."

           
The suburb of Sarang owed its relative affluence to the presence of substantial
coal deposits nearby. It turned out that the coalminers of Sarang, men whose
lives were spent boring pathways through the earth―"parting"
it, one might say―could not stomach the notion that a girl could do the
same, with a wave of her hand, for the sea. Cadres of certain communalist
groupings had been at work, inciting the miners to violence, and as a result of
the activities of these agents provocateurs a mob was forming, carrying banners
demanding: NO ISLAMIC PADYATRA! BUTTERFLY WITCH, GO HOME.

           
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 sinceriety, 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 doomtrumpet 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."