The Satanic Verses (38 page)

The discovery that his wife was spending most of her time closeted with Ayesha filled the Mirza with an insupportable irritation, an eczema of the spirit that maddened him because there was no way of scratching it. Mishal was hoping that the archangel, Ayesha’s husband, would grant her a baby, but because she couldn’t tell that to her husband she grew sullen and shrugged petulantly when he asked her why she wasted so much time with the village’s craziest girl. Mishal’s new reticence worsened the itch in Mirza Saeed’s heart, and made him jealous, too, although he wasn’t sure if he was jealous of Ayesha, or Mishal. He noticed for the first time that the mistress of the butterflies had eyes of the same lustrous grey shade as his wife, and for some reason this made him cross, too, as if it proved that the women were ganging up on him, whispering God knew what secrets; maybe they were chittering and chattering about
him
! This zenana business seemed to have backfired; even that old jelly Mrs Qureishi had been taken in by Ayesha. Quite a threesome, thought Mirza Saeed; when mumbo-jumbo gets in through your door, good sense leaves by the window.

As for Ayesha: when she encountered the Mirza on the balcony, or in the garden as he wandered reading Urdu love-poetry, she was invariably deferential and shy; but her good behaviour, coupled with the total absence of any spark of erotic interest, drove Saeed further and further into the helplessness of his despair. So it was that when, one day, he spied Ayesha entering his wife’s quarters and heard, a few minutes later, his
mother-in-law’s voice rise in a melodramatic shriek, he was seized by a mood of mulish vengefulness and deliberately waited a full three minutes before going to investigate. He found Mrs Qureishi tearing her hair and sobbing like a movie queen, while Mishal and Ayesha sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, grey eyes staring into grey, and Mishal’s face was cradled between Ayesha’s outstretched palms.

It turned out that the archangel had informed Ayesha that the zamindar’s wife was dying of cancer, that her breasts were full of the malign nodules of death, and that she had no more than a few months to live. The location of the cancer had proved to Mishal the cruelty of God, because only a vicious deity would place death in the breast of a woman whose only dream was to suckle new life. When Saeed entered, Ayesha had been whispering urgently to Mishal: ‘You mustn’t think that way. God will save you. This is a test of faith.’

Mrs Qureishi told Mirza Saeed the bad news with many shrieks and howls, and for the confused zamindar it was the last straw. He flew into a temper and started yelling loudly and trembling as if he might at any moment start smashing up the furniture in the room and its occupants as well.

‘To hell with your spook cancer,’ he screamed at Ayesha in his exasperation. ‘You have come into my house with your craziness and angels and dripped poison into my family’s ears. Get out of here with your visions and your invisible spouse. This is the modern world, and it is medical doctors and not ghosts in potato fields who tell us when we are ill. You have created this bloody hullabaloo for nothing. Get out and never come on to my land again.’

Ayesha heard him out without removing her eyes or hands from Mishal. When Saeed stopped for breath, clenching and unclenching his fists, she said softly to his wife: ‘Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given.’ When he heard this formula, which people all over the village were beginning to parrot as if they knew what it meant, Mirza Saeed Akhtar went briefly out of his mind, raised his hand and knocked Ayesha senseless. She fell to
the floor, bleeding from the mouth, a tooth loosened by his fist, and as she lay there Mrs Qureishi hurled abuse at her son-in-law. ‘O God, I have put my daughter in the care of a killer. O God, a woman hitter. Go on, hit me also, get some practice. Defiler of saints, blasphemer, devil, unclean.’ Saeed left the room without saying a word.

The next day Mishal Akhtar insisted on returning to the city for a complete medical check-up. Saeed took a stand. ‘If you want to indulge in superstition, go, but don’t expect me to come along. It’s eight hours’ drive each way; so, to hell with it.’ Mishal left that afternoon with her mother and the driver, and as a result Mirza Saeed was not where he should have been, that is, at his wife’s side, when the results of the tests were communicated to her: positive, inoperable, too far advanced, the claws of the cancer dug in deeply throughout her chest. A few months, six if she was lucky, and before that, coming soon, the pain. Mishal returned to Peristan and went straight to her rooms in the zenana, where she wrote her husband a formal note on lavender stationery, telling him of the doctor’s diagnosis. When he read her death sentence, written in her own hand, he wanted very badly to burst into tears, but his eyes remained obstinately dry. He had had no time for the Supreme Being for many years, but now a couple of Ayesha’s phrases popped back into his mind.
God will save you. Everything will be given
. A bitter, superstitious notion occurred to him: ‘It is a curse,’ he thought. ‘Because I lusted after Ayesha, she has murdered my wife.’

When he went to the zenana, Mishal refused to see him, but her mother, barring the doorway, handed Saeed a second note on scented blue notepaper, ‘I want to see Ayesha,’ it read. ‘Kindly permit this.’ Bowing his head, Mirza Saeed gave his assent, and crept away in shame.

With Mahound, there is always a struggle; with the Imam, slavery; but with this girl, there is nothing. Gibreel is inert, usually asleep
in the dream as he is in life. She comes upon him under a tree, or in a ditch, hears what he isn’t saying, takes what she needs, and leaves. What does he know about cancer, for example? Not a solitary thing.

All around him, he thinks as he half-dreams, half-wakes, are people hearing voices, being seduced by words. But not his; never his original material. – Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling them to move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease?

He can’t work it out.

The day after Mishal Akhtar’s return to Titlipur, the girl Ayesha, whom people were beginning to call a kahin, a pir, disappeared completely for a week. Her hapless admirer, Osman the clown, who had been following her at a distance along the dusty potato track to Chatnapatna, told the villagers that a breeze got up and blew dust into his eyes; when he got it out again she had ‘just gone’. Usually, when Osman and his bullock started telling their tall tales about djinnis and magic lamps and open-sesames, the villagers looked tolerant and teased him, okay, Osman, save it for those idiots in Chatnapatna; they may fall for that stuff but here in Titlipur we know which way is up and that palaces do not appear unless a thousand and one labourers build them, nor do they disappear unless the same workers knock them down. On this occasion, however, nobody laughed at the clown, because where Ayesha was concerned the villagers were willing to believe anything. They had grown convinced that the snow-haired girl was the true successor to old Bibiji, because had the butterflies not reappeared in the year of her birth, and did they not follow her around like a cloak? Ayesha was the vindication of the long-soured hope engendered by the butterflies’ return, and the evidence that great things were still possible in this life, even for the weakest and poorest in the land.

‘The angel has taken her away,’ marvelled the Sarpanch’s wife
Khadija, and Osman burst into tears. ‘But no, it is a wonderful thing,’ old Khadija uncomprehendingly explained. The villagers teased the Sarpanch: ‘How you got to be village headman with such a tactless spouse, beats us.’

‘You chose me,’ he dourly replied.

On the seventh day after her disappearance Ayesha was sighted walking towards the village, naked again and dressed in golden butterflies, her silver hair streaming behind her in the breeze. She went directly to the home of Sarpanch Muhammad Din and asked that the Titlipur panchayat be convened for an immediate emergency meeting. ‘The greatest event in the history of the tree has come upon us,’ she confided. Muhammad Din, unable to refuse her, fixed the time of the meeting for that evening, after dark.

That night the panchayat members took their places on the usual branch of the tree, while Ayesha the kahin stood before them on the ground. ‘I have flown with the angel into the highest heights,’ she said. ‘Yes, even to the lote-tree of the uttermost end. The archangel, Gibreel: he has brought us a message which is also a command. Everything is required of us, and everything will be given.’

Nothing in the life of the Sarpanch Muhammad Din had prepared him for the choice he was about to face. ‘What does the angel ask, Ayesha, daughter?’ he asked, fighting to steady his voice.

‘It is the angel’s will that all of us, every man, and woman and child in the village, begin at once to prepare for a pilgrimage. We are commanded to walk from this place to Mecca Sharif, to kiss the Black Stone in the Ka’aba at the centre of the Haram Sharif, the sacred mosque. There we must surely go.’

Now the panchayat’s quintet began to debate heatedly. There were the crops to consider, and the impossibility of abandoning their homes en masse. ‘It is not to be conceived of, child,’ the Sarpanch told her. ‘It is well known that Allah excuses haj and umra to those who are genuinely unable to go for reasons of poverty or health.’ But Ayesha remained silent and the elders continued to argue. Then it was as if her silence infected everyone
else and for a long moment, in which the question was settled – although by what means nobody ever managed to comprehend – there were no words spoken at all.

It was Osman the clown who spoke up at last, Osman the convert, for whom his new faith had been no more than a drink of water. ‘It’s almost two hundred miles from here to the sea,’ he cried. ‘There are old ladies here, and babies. However can we go?’

‘God will give us the strength,’ Ayesha serenely replied.

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you,’ Osman shouted, refusing to give up, ‘that there’s a mighty ocean between us and Mecca Sharif? How will we ever cross? We have no money for the pilgrim boats. Maybe the angel will grow us wings, so we can fly?’

Many villagers rounded angrily upon the blasphemer Osman. ‘Be quiet now,’ Sarpanch Muhammad Din rebuked him. ‘You haven’t been long in our faith or our village. Keep your trap shut and learn our ways.’

Osman, however, answered cheekily, ‘So this is how you welcome new settlers. Not as equals, but as people who must do as they are told.’ A knot of red-faced men began to tighten around Osman, but before anything else could happen the kahin Ayesha changed the mood entirely by answering the clown’s questions.

‘This, too, the angel has explained,’ she said quietly. ‘We will walk two hundred miles, and when we reach the shores of the sea, we will put our feet into the foam, and the waters will open for us. The waves shall be parted, and we shall walk across the ocean-floor to Mecca.’