The Satanic Verses (73 page)

           
Ayesha the kahin asked to speak to the Sarpanch, but gave him not a single word
of consolation. "Harden your faith," she scolded him. "She who
dies on the great pilgrimage is assured of a home in Paradise. Your wife is
sitting now among the angels and the flowers; what is there for you to
regret?"

           
That evening the Sarpanch Muhammad Din approached Mirza Saeed as he sat by a
small campfire. "Excuse, Sethji," he said, "but is it possible
that I ride, as you once offered, in your motor-car?"

           
Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to
maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad
Din entered the station wagon of scepticism. "My first convert,"
Mirza Saeed rejoiced.

           
* * * * *

           
By the fourth week the defection of Sarpanch Muhammad Din had begun to have its
effect. He sat on the back seat of the Mercedes as if he were the zamindar and
Mirza Saeed the chauffeur, and little by little the leather upholstery and the
airconditioning unit and the whisky-soda cabinet and the electrically operated
mirror-glass windows began to teach him hauteur; his nose tilted into the air
and he acquired the supercilious expression of a man who can see without being
seen. Mirza Saeed in the driver's seat felt his eyes and nose filling up with
the dust that came in through the hole where the windscreen used to be, but in
spite of such discomforts he was feeling better than before. Now, at the end of
each day, a cluster of pilgrims would congregate around the Mercedes-Benz with
its gleaming star, and Mirza Saeed would try and talk sense into them while
they watched Sarpanch Muhammad Din raise and lower the mirrorglass rear
windows, so that they saw, alternately, his features and their own. The
Sarpanch's presence in the Mercedes lent new authority to Mirza Saeed's words.

           
Ayesha didn't try to call the villagers away, and so far her confidence had
been justified; there had been no further defections to the camp of the
faithless. But Saeed saw her casting numerous glances in his direction and
whether she was a visionary or not Mirza Saeed would have bet good money that
those were the bad-tempered glances of a young girl who was no longer sure of
getting her own way.

           
Then she disappeared.

           
She went off during an afternoon siesta and did not reappear for a day and a
half, by which time there was pandemonium among the pilgrims―she always
knew how to whip up an audience's feelings, Saeed conceded; then she sauntered
back up to them across the dust-clouded landscape, and this time her silver
hair was streaked with gold, and her eyebrows, too, were golden. She summoned
the villagers to her and told them that the archangel was displeased that the
people of Titlipur had been filled up with doubts just because of the ascent of
a martyr to Paradise. She warned that he was seriously thinking of withdrawing
his offer to part the waters, "so that all you'll get at the Arabian Sea
is a salt-water bath, and then it's back to your deserted potato fields on
which no rain will ever fall again." The villagers were appalled.
"No, it can't be," they pleaded. "Bibiji, forgive us." It
was the first time they had used the name of the longago saint to describe the
girl who was leading them with an absolutism that had begun to frighten them as
much as it impressed. After her speech the Sarpanch and Mirza Saeed were left
alone in the station wagon. "Second round to the archangel," Mirza
Saeed thought.

           
* * * * *

           
By the fifth week the health of most of the older pilgrims had deteriorated
sharply, food supplies were running low, water was hard to find, and the
children's tear ducts were dry. The vulture herds were never far away.

           
As the pilgrims left behind the rural areas and came towards more densely
populated zones, the level of harassment increased. The long-distance buses and
trucks often refused to deviate and the pedestrians had to leap, screaming and
tumbling over each other, out of their way. Cyclists, families of six on
Rajdoot motor-scooters, petty shop-keepers hurled abuse. "Crazies! Hicks!
Muslims!" Often they were obliged to keep marching for an entire night
because the authorities in this or that small town didn't want such riff-raff
sleeping on their pavements. More deaths became inevitable.

           
Then the bullock of the convert, Osman, fell to its knees amid the bicycles and
camel-dung of a nameless little town. "Get up, idiot," he yelled at
it impotently. "What do you think you're doing, dying on me in front of
the fruit-stalls of strangers?" The bullock nodded, twice for yes, and
expired.

           
Butterflies covered the corpse, adopting the colour of its grey hide, its
horn-cones and bells. The inconsolable Osman ran to Ayesha (who had put on a
dirty sari as a concession to urban prudery, even though butterfly clouds still
trailed off her like glory). "Do bullocks go to Heaven?" he asked in
a piteous voice; she shrugged. "Bullocks have no souls," she said
coolly, "and it is souls we march to save." Osman looked at her and
realized he no longer loved her. "You've become a demon," he told her
in disgust.

           
"I am nothing," Ayesha said. "I am a messenger."

           
"Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent,"
Osman raged. "What's he afraid of? Is he so unconfident that he needs us
to die to prove our love?"

           
As though in response to such blasphemy, Ayesha imposed even stricter
disciplinary measures, insisting that all pilgrims say all five prayers, and
decreeing that Fridays would be days of fasting. By the end of the sixth week
she had forced the marchers to leave four more bodies where they fell: two old
men, one old woman, and one six-year-old girl. The pilgrims marched on, turning
their backs on the dead; behind them, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar gathered up
the bodies and made sure they received a decent burial. In this he was assisted
by the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and the former untouchable, Osman. On such days
they would fall quite a way behind the march, but a Mercedes-Benz station wagon
doesn't take long to catch up with over a hundred and forty men, women and
children walking wearily towards the sea.

           
* * * * *

           
The dead grew in number, and the groups of unsettled pilgrims around the
Mercedes got larger night by night. Mirza Saeed began to tell them stories. He
told them about lemmings, and how the enchantress Circe turned men into pigs;
he told, too, the story of a pipe-player who lured a town's children into a
mountain-crack. When he had told this tale in their own language he recited
verses in English, so that they could listen to the music of the poetry even
though they didn't understand the words. "Hamelin town's in
Brunswick," he began. "Near famous Hanover City. The River Weser,
deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side . . ."

           
Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the girl Ayesha advance, looking furious,
while the butterflies glowed like the campfire behind her, making it appear as
though flames were streaming from her body.

           
"Those who listen to the Devil's verses, spoken in the Devil's
tongue," she cried, "will go to the Devil in the end."

           
"It's a choice, then," Mirza Saeed answered her, "between the
devil and the deep blue sea."

           
* * * * *

           
Eight weeks had passed, and relations between Mirza Saeed and his wife Mishal
had so deteriorated that they were no longer on speaking terms. By now, and in
spite of the cancer that had turned her as grey as funeral ash, Mishal had
become Ayesha's chief lieutenant and most devoted disciple. The doubts of other
marchers had only strengthened her own faith, and for these doubts she
unequivocally blamed her husband.

           
"Also," she had rebuked him in their last conversation, "there
is no warmth in you any more. I feel afraid to approach."

           
"No warmth?" he yelled. "How can you say it? No warmth? For whom
did I come running on this damnfool pilgrimage? To look after whom? Because I
love whom? Because I am so worried about, so sad about, so filled with misery
about whom? No warmth? Are you a stranger? How can you say such a thing?"

           
"Listen to yourself," she said in a voice which had begun to fade
into a kind of smokiness, an opacity. "Always anger. Cold anger, icy, like
a fort."

           
"This isn't anger," he bellowed. "This is anxiety, unhappiness,
wretchedness, injury, pain. Where can you hear anger?"

           
"I hear it," she said. "Everyone can hear, for miles
around."

           
"Come with me," he begged her. "I'll take you to the top clinics
in Europe, Canada, the USA. Trust in Western technology. They can do marvels.
You always liked gadgets, too."

           
"I am going on a pilgrimage to Mecca," she said, and turned away.

           
"You damn stupid bitch," he roared at her back. "Just because
you're going to die doesn't mean you have to take all these people with
you." But she walked away across the roadside camp-site, never looking
back; and now that he'd proved her point by losing control and speaking the
unspeakable he fell to his knees and wept. After that quarrel Mishal refused to
sleep beside him any more. She and her mother rolled out their bedding next to the
butterfly-shrouded prophetess of their Meccan quest.

           
By day, Mishal worked ceaselessly among the pilgrims, reassuring them,
bolstering their faith, gathering them together beneath the wing of her
gentleness. Ayesha had started retreating deeper and deeper into silence, and
Mishal Akhtar became, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the pilgrims.
But there was one pilgrim over whom she lost her grip: Mrs. Qureishi, her
mother, the wife of the director of the state bank.

           
The arrival of Mr. Qureishi, Mishal's father, was quite an event. The pilgrims
had stopped in the shade of a line of plane-trees and were busy gathering
brushwood and scouring cookpots when the motorcade was sighted. At once Mrs.
Qureishi, who was twenty-five pounds lighter than she had been at the beginning
of the walk, leaped squeakily to her feet and tried frantically to brush the
dirt off her clothes and to put her hair in order. Mishal saw her mother
fumbling feebly with a molten lipstick and asked, "What's bugging you, ma?
Relax, na."

           
Her mother pointed feebly at the approaching cars. Moments later the tall,
severe figure of the great banker was standing over them. "If I had not
seen it I would not have believed," he said. "They told me, but I pooh-poohed.
Therefore it took me this long to find out. To vanish from Peristan without a
word: now what in tarnation?"

           
Mrs. Qureishi shook helplessly under her husband's eyes, beginning to cry,
feeling the calluses on her feet and the fatigue that had sunk into every pore
of her body. "O God, I don't know, I am sorry," she said. "God
knows what came over."

           
"Don't you know I occupy a delicate post?" Mr. Qureishi cried.
"Public confidence is of essence. How does it look then that my wife
gallivants with bhangis?"

           
Mishal, embracing her mother, told her father to stop bullying. Mr. Akhtar saw
for the first time that his daughter had the mark of death on her forehead and
deflated instantly like an inner tube. Mishal told him about the cancer, and
the promise of the seer Ayesha that a miracle would occur in Mecca, and she
would be completely cured.

           
"Then let me fly you to Mecca, pronto," her father pleaded. "Why
walk if you can go by Airbus?"

           
But Mishal was adamant. "You should go away," she told her father.
"Only the faithful can make this thing come about. Mummy will look after
me."

           
Mr. Qureishi in his limousine helplessly joined Mirza Saeed at the rear of the
procession, constantly sending one of the two servants who had accompanied him
on motor-scooters to ask Mishal if she would like food, medicine, Thums Up,
anything at all. Mishal turned down all his offers, and after three
days―because banking is banking―Mr. Qureishi departed for the city,
leaving behind one of the motor-scooter chaprassis to serve the women. "He
is yours to command," he told them. "Don't be stupid now. Make this
as easy as you can."

           
The day after Mr. Qureishi's departure, the chaprassi Gul Muhammad ditched his
scooter and joined the foot-pilgrims, knotting a handkerchief around his head
to indicate his devotion. Ayesha said nothing, but when she saw the
scooter-wallah join the pilgrimage she grinned an impish grin that reminded
Mirza Saeed that she was, after all, not only a figure out of a dream, but also
a flesh-and-blood young girl.

           
Mrs. Qureishi began to complain. The brief contact with her old life had broken
her resolve, and now that it was too late she had started thinking constantly about
parties and soft cushions and glasses of iced fresh lime soda. It suddenly
seemed wholly unreasonable to her that a person of her breeding should be asked
to go barefoot like a common sweeper. She presented herself to Mirza Saeed with
a sheepish expression on her face.