Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

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.

‘Saeed, son, do you hate me completely?’ she wheedled, her plump features arranging themselves in a parody of coquettishness.

Saeed was appalled by her grimace. ‘Of course not,’ he managed to say.

‘But you do, you loathe me, and my cause is hopeless,’ she flirted.

‘Ammaji,’ Saeed gulped, ‘what are you saying?’

‘Because I have from time to time spoken roughly to you,’

‘Please forget it,’ Saeed said, bemused by her performance, but she would not. ‘You must know it was all for love, isn't it? Love,’ said Mrs Qureishi, ‘it is a many-splendoured thing.’

‘Makes the world go round,’ Mirza Saeed agreed, trying to enter into the spirit of the conversation.

‘Love conquers all,’ Mrs. Qureishi confirmed. ‘It has conquered my anger. This I must demonstrate to you by riding with you in your motor.’

Mirza Saeed bowed. ‘It is yours, Ammaji.’

‘Then you will ask those two village men to sit in front with you. Ladies must be protected, isn't it?’

‘It is,’ he replied.

The story of the village that was walking to the sea had spread all over the country, and in the ninth week the pilgrims were being pestered by journalists, local politicos in search of votes, businessmen who offered to sponsor the march if the yatris would only consent to wear sandwich boards advertising various goods and services, foreign tourists looking for the mysteries of the East, nostalgic Gandhians, and the kind of human vultures who go to motor-car races to watch the crashes. When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded expectations, that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not paper over. Photographs of Ayesha were appearing in all the papers, and the pilgrims even passed advertising hoardings on which the lepidopteral beauty had been painted three times as large as life, beside slogans reading Our cloths also are as delicate as a butterfly's wing , or suchlike. Then more alarming news reached them. Certain religious extremist groupings had issued statements denouncing the ‘Ayesha Haj’ as an attempt to ‘hijack’ public attention and to ‘incite communal sentiment’. Leaflets were being distributed – Mishal picked them up off the road – in which it was claimed that ‘Padyatra, or foot-pilgrimage, is an ancient, pre-Islamic tradition of national culture, not imported property of Mughal immigrants.’ Also: ‘Purloining of this tradition by so-called Ayesha Bibiji is flagrant and deliberate inflammation of already sensitive situation.’

‘There will be no trouble,’ the kahin broke her silence to announce.

Gibreel dreamed a suburb:

As the Ayesha Haj neared Sarang, the outermost suburb of the great metropolis on the Arabian Sea towards which the visionary girl was leading them, journalists, politicos and police officers redoubled their visits. At first the policemen threatened to disband the march forcibly; the politicians, however, advised that this would look very like a sectarian act and could lead to outbreaks of communal violence from top to bottom of the country. Eventually the police chiefs agreed to permit the march, but groused menacingly about being ‘unable to guarantee safe passages’ for the pilgrims. Mishal Akhtar said: ‘We are going on.’

The suburb of Sarang owed its relative affluence to the presence of substantial coal deposits nearby. It turned out that the coal-miners of Sarang, men whose lives were spent boring pathways through the earth – ‘parting’ it, one might say – could not stomach the notion that a girl could do the same, with a wave of her hand, for the sea. Cadres of certain communalist groupings had been at work, inciting the miners to violence, and as a result of the activities of these agents provocateurs a mob was forming, carrying banners demanding: NO ISLAMIC PADYATRA! BUTTERFLY WITCH, GO HOME.

On the night before they were due to enter Sarang, Mirza Saeed made another futile appeal to the pilgrims. ‘Give up,’ he implored uselessly. ‘Tomorrow we will all be killed.’ Ayesha whispered in Mishal's ear, and she spoke up: ‘Better a martyr than a coward. Are there any cowards here?’

There was one. Sri Srinivas, explorer of the Grand Canyon, proprietor of a Toy Univas, whose motto was creativity and sinceriety, sided with Mirza Saeed. As a devout follower of the goddess Lakshmi, whose face was so perplexingly also Ayesha's, he felt unable to participate in the coming hostilities on either side. ‘I am a weak fellow,’ he confessed to Saeed. ‘I have loved Miss Ayesha, and a man should fight for what he loves; but, what to do, I require neutral status.’ Srinivas was the fifth member of the renegade society in the Mercedes-Benz, and now Mrs. Qureishi had no option but to share the back seat with a common man. Srinivas greeted her unhappily, and, seeing her bounce grumpily along the seat away from him, attempted to placate. ‘Please to accept a token of my esteem.’ – And produced, from an inside pocket, a Family Planning doll.

That night the deserters remained in the station wagon while the faithful prayed in the open air. They had been allowed to camp in a disused goods train marshalling yard, guarded by military police. Mirza Saeed couldn't sleep. He was thinking about something Srinivas had said to him, about being a Gandhian in his head, ‘but I'm too weak to put such notions into practice. Excuse me, but it's true. I was not cut out for suffering, Sethji. I should have stayed with wife and kiddies and cut out this adventure disease that has made me land up in such a place.’

In my family, too, Mirza Saeed in his insomnia answered the sleeping toy merchant, we have suffered from a kind of disease: one of detachment, of being unable to connect ourselves to things, events, feelings. Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we have lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.

Which was to say that he found it hard to believe that all this was really happening; but it was.

When the Ayesha Pilgrims were ready to set off the next morning, the huge clouds of butterflies that had travelled with them all the way from Titlipur suddenly broke up and vanished from view, revealing that the sky was filling up with other, more prosaic clouds. Even the creatures that had been clothing Ayesha – the elite corps, so to speak – decamped, and she had to lead the procession dressed in the mundanity of an old cotton sari with a block-printed hem of leaves. The disappearance of the miracle that had seemed to validate their pilgrimage depressed all the marchers; so that in spite of all Mishal Akhtar's exhortations they were unable to sing as they moved forwards, deprived of the benediction of the butterflies, to meet their fate.