Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

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.’