The Satanic Verses (72 page)

           
The police were treating the pilgrimage as some kind of sectarian demonstration,
but when Mirza Saeed Akhtar stepped forward and told the Inspector the truth
the officer became confused. Sri Srinivas, a Brahmin, was obviously not a man
who had ever considered making a pilgrimage to Mecca, but he was impressed
nevertheless. He pushed up through the crowd to hear what the zamindar was
saying: "And it is the purpose of these good people to walk to the Arabian
Sea, believing as they do that the waters will part for them." Mirza
Saeed's voice sounded weak, and the Inspector, Chatnapatna's Station Head
Officer, was unconvinced. "Are you serious, ji?" Mirza Saeed said:
"Not me. They, but, are serious as hell. I'm planning to change their
minds before anything crazy happens." The SHO, all straps, moustachioes
and self-importance, shook his head. "But, see here, sir, how can I permit
so many individuals to congregate on the street? Tempers can be inflamed;
incident is possible." Just then the crowd of pilgrims parted and Srinivas
saw for the first time the fantastic figure of the girl dressed entirely in
butterflies, with snowy hair flowing down as far as her ankles. "Arre
deo," he shouted, "Ayesha, is it you?" And added, foolishly:
"Then where are my Family Planning dolls?"

           
His outburst was ignored; everybody was watching Ayesha as she approached the
puff-chested SHO. She said nothing, but smiled and nodded, and the fellow
seemed to grow twenty years younger, until in the manner of a boy of ten or
eleven he said, "Okay okay, mausi. Sorry, ma. No offence. I beg your
pardon, please." That was the end of the police trouble. Later that day,
in the afternoon heat, a group of town youths known to have RSS and Vishwa
Hindu Parishad connections began throwing stones from nearby rooftops;
whereupon the Station Head Officer had them arrested and in jail in two minutes
flat.

           
"Ayesha, daughter," Srinivas said aloud to the empty air, "what
the hell happened to you?"

           
During the heat of the day the pilgrims rested in whatever shade they could
find. Srinivas wandered among them in a kind of daze, filled up with emotion,
realizing that a great turning- point in his life had unaccountably arrived.
His eyes kept searching out the transformed figure of Ayesha the seer, who was
resting in the shade of a pipal-tree in the company of Mishal Akhtar, her
mother Mrs. Qureishi, and the lovesick Osman with his bullock. Eventually
Srinivas bumped into the zamindar Mirza Saeed, who was stretched out on the
back seat of his Mercedes- Benz, unsleeping, a man in torment. Srinivas spoke
to him with a humbleness born of his wonderment. "Sethji, you don't
believe in the girl?"

           
"Srinivas," Mirza Saeed sat up to reply, "we are modern men. We
know, for instance, that old people die on long journeys, that God does not
cure cancer, and that oceans do not part. We have to stop this idiocy. Come
with me. Plenty of room in the car. Maybe you can help to talk them out of it;
that Ayesha, she's grateful to you, perhaps she'll listen."

           
"To come in the car?" Srinivas felt helpless, as though mighty hands
were gripping his limbs. "There is my business, but."

           
"This is a suicide mission for many of our people," Mirza Saeed urged
him. "I need help. Naturally I could pay."

           
"Money is no object," Srinivas retreated, affronted. "Excuse,
please, Sethji. I must consider."

           
"Don't you see?" Mirza Saeed shouted after him. "We are not
communal people, you and I. Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai! We can open up a secular
front against this mumbo-jumbo."

           
Srinivas turned back. "But I am not an unbeliever," he protested.
"The picture of goddess Lakshmi is always on my wall."

           
"Wealth is an excellent goddess for a businessman," Mirza Saeed said.

           
"And in my heart," Srinivas added. Mirza Saeed lost his temper.
"But goddesses, I swear. Even your own philosophers admit that these are
abstract concepts only. Embodiments of shakti which is itself an abstract
notion: the dynamic power of the gods."

           
The toy merchant was looking down at Ayesha as she slept under her quilt of
butterflies. "I am no philosopher, Sethji," he said. And did not say
that his heart had leapt into his mouth because he had realized that the
sleeping girl and the goddess in the calendar on his factory wall had the
identical, same-to-same, face.

           
* * * * *

           
When the pilgrimage left town, Srinivas accompanied it, turning a deaf ear to
the entreaties of his wild-haired wife who picked up Minoo and shook her in her
husband's face. He explained to Ayesha that while he did not wish to visit
Mecca he had been seized by a longing to walk with her a while, perhaps even as
far as the sea.

           
As he took his place among the Titlipur villagers and fell into step with the
man next to him, he observed with a mixture of incomprehension and awe that
infinite butterfly swarm over their heads, like a gigantic umbrella shading the
pilgrims from the sun. It was as if the butterflies of Titlipur had taken over
the functions of the great tree. Next he gave a little cry of fear,
astonishment and pleasure, because a few dozen of those chameleon-winged
creatures had settled on his shoulders and turned, upon the instant, the exact
shade of scarlet of his shirt. Now he recognized the man at his side as the
Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, who had chosen not to walk at the front. He and his
wife Khadija strode contentedly forward in spite of their advanced years, and
when he saw the lepidopteral blessing that had descended on the toy merchant,
Muhammad Din reached out and grasped him by the hand.

           
* * * * *

           
It was becoming clear that the rains would fail. Lines of bony cattle migrated
across the landscape, searching for a drink.
Love is Water
, someone had
written in whitewash on the brick wall of a scooter factory. On the road they
met other families heading south with their lives bundled up on the backs of
dying donkeys, and these, too, were heading hopefully towards water. "But
not bloody salt water," Mirza Saeed shouted at the Titlipur pilgrims.
"And not to see it divide itself in two! They want to stay alive, but you
crazies want to die." Vultures herded together by the roadside and watched
the pilgrims pass.

           
Mirza Saeed spent the first weeks of the pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea in a
state of permanent, hysterical agitation. Most of the walking was done in the
mornings and late afternoons, and at these times Saeed would often leap out of
his station wagon to plead with his dying wife. "Come to your senses,
Mishu. You're a sick woman. Come and lie down at least, let me press your feet
a while." But she refused, and her mother shooed him away. "See,
Saeed, you're in such a negative mood, it gets depressing. Go and drink your
Coke-shoke in your AC vehicle and leave us yatris in peace." After the first
week the Air Conditioned vehicle lost its driver. Mirza Saeed's chauffeur
resigned and joined the foot-pilgrims; the zamindar was obliged to get behind
the wheel himself. After that, when his anxiety overcame him, it was necessary
to stop the car, park, and then rush madly back and forth among the pilgrims,
threatening, entreating, offering bribes. At least once a day he cursed Ayesha
to her face for ruining his life, but he could never keep up the abuse because
every time he looked at her he desired her so much that he felt ashamed. The
cancer had begun to turn Mishal's skin grey, and Mrs. Qureishi, too, was
beginning to fray at the edges; her society chappals had disintegrated and she
was suffering from frightful foot-blisters that looked like little water-balloons.
When Saeed offered her the comfort of the car, however, she continued to refuse
point-blank. The spell that Ayesha had placed upon the pilgrims was still
holding firm.―And at the end of these sorties into the heart of the
pilgrimage Mirza Saeed, sweating and giddy from the heat and his growing
despair, would realize that the marchers had left his car some way behind, and
he would have to totter back to it by himself, sunk in gloom. One day he got
back to the station wagon to find that an empty coconut-shell thrown from the
window of a passing bus had smashed his laminated windscreen, which looked,
now, like a spider's web full of diamond flies. He had to knock all the pieces
out, and the glass diamonds seemed to be mocking him as they fell on to the
road and into the car, they seemed to speak of the transience and worthlessness
of earthly possessions, but a secular man lives in the world of things and
Mirza Saeed did not intend to be broken as easily as a windscreen. At night he
would go to lie beside his wife on a bedroll under the stars by the side of the
grand trunk road. When he told her about the accident she offered him cold
comfort. "It's a sign," she said. "Abandon the station wagon and
join the rest of us at last."

           
"Abandon a Mercedes-Benz?" Saeed yelped in genuine horror.

           
"So what?" Mishal replied in her grey, exhausted voice. "You
keep talking about ruination. Then what difference is a Mercedes going to
make?"

           
"You don't understand," Saeed wept. "Nobody understands
me."

           
Gibreel dreamed a drought:

           
The land browned under the rainless skies. The corpses of buses and ancient
monuments rotting in the fields beside the crops. Mirza Saeed saw, through his
shattered windscreen, the onset of calamity: the wild donkeys fucking wearily
and dropping dead, while still conjoined, in the middle of the road, the trees
standing on roots exposed by soil erosion and looking like huge wooden claws
scrabbling for water in the earth, the destitute farmers being obliged to work
for the state as manual labourers, digging a reservoir by the trunk road, an
empty container for the rain that wouldn't fall. Wretched roadside lives: a
woman with a bundle heading for a tent of stick and rag, a girl condemned to
scour, each day, this pot, this pan, in her patch of filthy dust. "Are
such lives really worth as much as ours?" Mirza Saeed Akhtar asked
himself. "As much as mine? As Mishal's? How little they have experienced,
how little they have on which to feed the soul." A man in a dhoti and
loose yellow pugri stood like a bird on top of a milestone, perched there with
one foot on the opposite knee, one hand under the opposite elbow, smoking a
bin. As Mirza Saeed Akhtar passed him he spat, and caught the zamindar full in
the face.

           
The pilgrimage advanced slowly, three hours' walking in the mornings, three
more after the heat, walking at the pace of the slowest pilgrim, subject to
infinite delays, the sickness of children, the harassment of the authorities, a
wheel coming off one of the bullock carts; two miles a day at best, one hundred
and fifty miles to the sea, a journey of approximately eleven weeks. The first
death happened on the eighteenth day. Khadija, the tactless old lady who had
been for half a century the contented and contenting spouse of Sarpanch
Muhammad Din, saw an archangel in a dream. "Gibreel," she whispered,
"is it you?"

           
"No," the apparition replied. "It's I, Azraeel, the one with the
lousy job. Excuse the disappointment."

           
The next morning she continued with the pilgrimage, saying nothing to her
husband about her vision. After two hours they neared the ruin of one of the
Mughal milepost inns that had, in times long gone, been built at five-mile
intervals along the highway. When Khadija saw the ruin she knew nothing of its
past, of the wayfarers robbed in their sleep and so on, but she understood its
present well enough. "I have to go in there and lie down," she said
to the Sarpanch, who protested: "But, the march!" "Never mind
that," she said gently. "You can catch them up later."

           
She lay down in the rubble of the old ruin with her head on a smooth stone
which the Sarpanch found for her. The old man wept, but that didn't do any
good, and she was dead within a minute. He ran back to the march and confronted
Ayesha angrily. "I should never have listened to you," he told her.
"And now you have killed my wife."

           
The march stopped. Mirza Saeed Akhtar, spotting an opportunity, insisted loudly
that Khadija be taken to a proper Muslim burial ground. But Ayesha objected.
"We are ordered by the archangel to go directly to the sea, without
returns or detours." Mirza Saeed appealed to the pilgrims. "She is
your Sarpanch's beloved wife," he shouted. "Will you dump her in a
hole by the side of the road?"

           
When the Titlipur villagers agreed that Khadija should be buried at once, Saeed
could not believe his ears. He realized that their determination was even
greater than he had suspected: even the bereaved Sarpanch acquiesced. Khadija
was buried in the corner of a barren field behind the ruined way-station of the
past.

           
The next day, however, Mirza Saeed noticed that the Sarpanch had come unstuck
from the pilgrimage, and was mooching along disconsolately, a little distance
apart from the rest, sniffing the bougainvillaea bushes. Saeed jumped out of
the Mercedes and rushed off to Ayesha, to make another scene. "You
monster!" he shouted. "Monster without a heart! Why did you bring the
old woman here to die?" She ignored him, but on his way back to the
station wagon the Sarpanch came over and said: "We were poor people. We
knew we could never hope to go to Mecca Sharif, until she persuaded. She
persuaded, and now see the outcome of her deeds."