The Satanic Verses (75 page)

           
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.

           
"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 the 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. "Hoji!" 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.

           
"Last night the angel did not sing," she said. "He told me,
instead, about doubt, and how the Devil makes use of it. I said, but they doubt
me, what can I do? He answered: only proof can silence doubt."

           
She had their full attention. Next she told them what Mirza Saeed had suggested
in the night. "He told me to go and ask my angel, but I know better,"
she cried. "How could I choose between you? It is all of us, or
none."

           
"Why should we follow you," the Sarpanch asked, "after all the
dying, the baby, and all?"

           
"Because when the waters part, you will be saved. You will enter into the
Glory of the Most High."

           
"What waters?" Mirza Saeed yelled. "How will they divide?"

           
"Follow me," Ayesha concluded, "and judge me by their
parting."

           
His offer had contained an old question:
What kind of idea are you?
And
she, in turn, had offered him an old answer.
I was tempted, but am renewed;
am uncompromising; absolute; pure
.

           
* * * * *

           
The tide was in when the Ayesha Pilgrimage marched down an alley beside the
Holiday Inn, whose windows were full of the mistresses of film stars using
their new Polaroid cameras,―when the pilgrims felt the city's asphalt
turn gritty and soften into sand,―when they found themselves walking
through a thick mulch of rotting coconuts abandoned cigarette packets pony turds
non-degradable bottles fruit peelings jellyfish and paper,―on to the
mid-brown sand overhung by high leaning cocopalms and the balconies of luxury
sea-view apartment blocks,―past the teams of young men whose muscles were
so well-honed that they looked like deformities, and who were performing
gymnastic contortions of all sorts, in unison, like a murderous army of ballet
dancers,―and through the beachcombers, clubmen and families who had come
to take the air or make business contacts or scavenge a living from the
sand,―and gazed, for the first time in their lives, upon the Arabian Sea.