The Satanic Verses (35 page)

           
Guiltily, Mirza Saeed promised to consider the idea.

           
"What are you waiting for?" she cried in triumph. "You big
softo? You . . . you
Hamlet?
"

           
His mother-in-law's attack brought on one of the periodic bouts of
self-reproach which had been plaguing Mirza Saeed ever since he persuaded
Mishal to take the veil. To console himself he settled down to read Tagore's
story
Ghare-Baire
in which a zamindar persuades his wife to come out of
purdah, whereupon she takes up with a firebrand politico involved in the
"swadeshi" campaign, and the zamindar winds up dead. The novel
cheered him up momentarily, but then his suspicions returned. Had he been sincere
in the reasons he gave his wife, or was he simply finding a way of leaving the
coast clear for his pursuit of the madonna of the butterflies, the epileptic,
Ayesha? "Some coast," he thought, remembering Mrs. Qureishi with her
eyes of an accusative hawk, "some clear." His mother-in-law's
presence, he argued to himself, was further proof of his bona fides. Had he not
positively encouraged Mishal to send for her, even though he knew perfectly
well that the old fatty couldn't stand him and would suspect him of every damn
slyness under the sun? "Would I have been so keen for her to come if I was
planning on hanky panky?" he asked himself. But the nagging inner voices
continued: "All this recent sexology, this renewed interest in your lady
wife, is simple transference. Really, you are longing for your peasant floozy
to come and flooze with you."

           
Guilt had the effect of making the zamindar feel entirely worthless. His
mother-in-law's insults came to seem, in his unhappiness, like the literal
truth. "Softo," she called him, and sitting in his study, surrounded
by bookcases in which worms were munching contentedly upon priceless Sanskrit
texts such as were not to be found even in the national archives, and also,
less upliftingly, on the complete works of Percy Westerman, G. A. Henty and
Dornford Yates, Mirza Saeed admitted, yes, spot on, I am soft. The house was
seven generations old and for seven generations the softening had been going
on. He walked down the corridor in which his ancestors hung in baleful, gilded
frames, and contemplated the mirror which he kept hanging in the last space as
a reminder that one day he, too, must step up on to this wall. He was a man
without sharp corners or rough edges; even his elbows were covered by little
pads of flesh. In the mirror he saw the thin moustache, the weak chin, the lips
stained by paan. Cheeks, nose, forehead: all soft, soft, soft. "Who would
see anything in a type like me?" he cried, and when he realized that he
had been so agitated that he had spoken aloud he knew he must be in love, that
he was sick as a dog with love, and that the object of his affections was no
longer his loving wife.

           
"Then what a damn, shallow, tricksy and self-deceiving fellow I am,"
he sighed to himself, "to change so much, so fast. I deserve to be
finished off without ceremony." But he was not the type to fall on his
sword. Instead, he strolled a while around the corridors of Peristan, and
pretty soon the house worked its magic and restored him to something like a
good mood once again.

           
The house: in spite of its faery name, it was a solid, rather prosy building,
rendered exotic only by being in the wrong country. It had been built seven
generations ago by a certain Perowne, an English architect much favoured by the
colonial authorities, whose only style was that of the neo-classical English
country house. In those days the great zamindars were crazy for European
architecture. Saeed's great-great-great-great-grand-father had hired the fellow
five minutes after meeting him at the Viceroy's reception, to indicate publicly
that not all Indian Muslims had supported the action of the Meerut soldiers or
been in sympathy with the subsequent uprisings, no, not by any means;―and
then given him carte blanche;―so here Peristan now stood, in the middle
of near-tropical potato fields and beside the great banyan-tree, covered in
bougainvillaea creeper, with snakes in the kitchens and butterfly skeletons in
the cupboards. Some said its name owed more to the Englishman's than to
anything more fanciful: it was a mere contraction of
Perownistan
.

           
After seven generations it was at last beginning to look as if it belonged in
this landscape of bullock carts and palm-trees and high, clear, star-heavy
skies. Even the stained-glass window looking down on the staircase of King
Charles the Headless had been, in an indefinable manner, naturalized. Very few
of these old zamindar houses had survived the egalitarian depredations of the
present, and accordingly there hung over Peristan something of the musty air of
a museum, even though―or perhaps because―Mirza Saeed took great
pride in the old place and had spent lavishly to keep it in trim. He slept
under a high canopy of worked and beaten brass in a ship-like bed that had been
occupied by three Viceroys. In the grand salon he liked to sit with Mishal and
Mrs. Qureishi in the unusual three-way love seat. At one end of this room a
colossal Shiraz carpet stood rolled up, on wooden blocks, awaiting the
glamorous reception which would merit its unfurling, and which never came. In
the dining-room there were stout classical columns with ornate Corinthian tops,
and there were peacocks, both real and stone, strolling on the main steps to
the house, and Venetian chandeliers tinkling in the hail. The original punkahs
were still in full working order, all their operating cords travelling by way
of pulleys and holes in walls and floors to a little, airless boot-room where
the punkah-wallah sat and tugged the lot together, trapped in the irony of the
foetid air of that tiny windowless room while he dispatched cool breezes to all
other parts of the house. The servants, too, went back seven generations and
had therefore lost the art of complaining. The old ways ruled: even the
Titlipur sweet-vendor was required to seek the zamindar's approval before
commencing to sell any innovative sweetmeat he might have invented. Life in
Peristan was as soft as it was hard under the tree; but, even into such
cushioned existences, heavy blows can fall.

           
* * * * *

           
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.