Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

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 biri. 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.’

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 air-conditioning 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 mirror-glass 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.