Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

The No Islamic Padyatra street mob had prepared a welcome for Ayesha in a street lined on both sides with the shacks of bicycle repairers. They had blocked the pilgrims' routes with dead bicycles, and waited behind this barricade of broken wheels, bent handlebars and silenced bells as the Ayesha Haj entered the northern sector of the street. Ayesha walked towards the mob as if it did not exist, and when she reached the last crossroads, beyond which the clubs and knives of the enemy awaited her, there was a thunderclap like the trumpet of doom and an ocean fell down out of the sky. The drought had broken too late to save the crops; afterwards many of the pilgrims believed that God had been saving up the water for just this purpose, letting it build up in the sky until it was as endless as the sea, sacrificing the year's harvest in order to save his prophetess and her people.

The stunning force of the downpour unnerved both pilgrims and assailants. In the confusion of the flood a second doom-trumpet was heard. This was, in point of fact, the horn of Mirza Saeed's Mercedes-Benz station wagon, which he had driven at high speed through the suffocating side gullies of the suburb, bringing down racks of shirts hanging on rails, and pumpkin barrows, and trays of cheap plastic notions, until he reached the street of basket-workers that intersected the street of bicycle repairers just to the north of the barricade. Here he accelerated as hard as he could and charged towards the crossroads, scattering pedestrians and wickerwork stools in all directions. He reached the crossroads immediately after the sea fell out of the sky, and braked violently. Sri Srinivas and Osman leaped out, seized Mishal Akhtar and the prophetess Ayesha, and hauled them into the Mercedes in a flurry of legs, sputum and abuse. Saeed accelerated away from the scene before anybody had managed to get the blinding water out of their eyes.

Inside the car: bodies heaped in an angry jumble. Mishal Akhtar shouted abuse at her husband from the bottom of the pile: ‘Saboteur! Traitor! Scum from somewhere! Mule!’ – To which Saeed sarcastically replied, ‘Martyrdom is too easy, Mishal. Don't you want to watch the ocean open, like a flower?’

And Mrs. Qureishi, sticking her head out through Osman's inverted legs, added in a pink-faced gasp: ‘Okay, come on, Mishu, quit. We meant well.’

Gibreel dreamed a flood:

When the rains came, the miners of Sarang had been waiting for the pilgrims with their pickaxes in their hands, but when the bicycle barricade was swept away they could not avoid the idea that God had taken Ayesha's side. The town's drainage system surrendered instantly to the overwhelming assault of the water, and the miners were soon standing in a muddy flood that reached as high as their waists. Some of them tried to move towards the pilgrims, who also continued to make efforts to advance. But now the rainstorm redoubled its force, and then doubled it again, falling from the sky in thick slabs through which it was getting difficult to breathe, as though the earth were being engulfed, and the firmament above were reuniting with the firmament below. Gibreel, dreaming, found his vision obscured by water.

The rain stopped, and a watery sun shone down on a Venetian scene of devastation. The roads of Sarang were now canals, along which there journeyed all manner of flotsam. Where only recently scooter-rickshaws, camel-carts and repaired bicycles had gone, there now floated newspapers, flowers, bangles, watermelons, umbrellas, chappals, sunglasses, baskets, excrement, medicine bottles, playing cards, dupattas, pancakes, lamps. The water had an odd, reddish tint that made the sodden populace imagine that the street was flowing with blood. There was no trace of bully-boy miners or of Ayesha Pilgrims. A dog swam across the intersection by the collapsed bicycle barricade, and all around there lay the damp silence of the flood, whose waters lapped at marooned buses, while children stared from the roofs of deliquescent gullies, too shocked to come out and play.

Then the butterflies returned.

From nowhere, as if they had been hiding behind the sun; and to celebrate the end of the rain they had all taken the colour of sunlight. The arrival of this immense carpet of light in the sky utterly bewildered the people of Sarang, who were already reeling in the aftermath of the storm; fearing the apocalypse, they hid indoors and closed their shutters. On a nearby hillside, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar and his party observed the miracle's return and were filled, all of them, even the zamindar, with a kind of awe.

Mirza Saeed had driven hell-for-leather, in spite of being half-blinded by the rain which poured through the smashed windscreen, until on a road that led up and around the bend of a hill he came to a halt at the gates of the No.1 Sarang Coalfield. The pitheads were dimly visible through the rain. ‘Brainbox,’ Mishal Akhtar cursed him weakly. ‘Those bums are waiting for us back there, and you drive us up here to see their pals. Tip-top notion, Saeed. Extra fine.’

But they had no more trouble from miners. That was the day of the mining disaster that left fifteen thousand pitmen buried alive beneath the Sarangi hill. Saeed, Mishal, the Sarpanch, Osman, Mrs Qureishi, Srinivas and Ayesha stood exhausted and soaked to the skin by the roadside as ambulances, fire-engines, salvage operators and pit bosses arrived in large quantities and left, much later, shaking their heads. The Sarpanch caught his earlobes between thumbs and forefingers. ‘Life is pain,’ he said. ‘Life is pain and loss; it is a coin of no value, worth even less than a kauri or a dam.’

Osman of the dead bullock, who, like the Sarpanch, had lost a dearly loved companion during the pilgrimage, also wept. Mrs. Qureishi attempted to look on the bright side: ‘Main thing is that we're okay,’ but this got no response. Then Ayesha closed her eyes and recited in the sing-song voice of prophecy, ‘It is a judgment upon them for the bad attempt they made.’

Mirza Saeed was angry. ‘They weren't at the bloody barricade,’ he shouted. ‘They were working under the goddamned ground.’

‘They dug their own graves,’ Ayesha replied.

This was when they sighted the returning butterflies. Saeed watched the golden cloud in disbelief, as it first gathered and then sent out streams of winged light in every direction. Ayesha wanted to return to the crossroads. Saeed objected: ‘It's flooded down there. Our only chance is to drive down the opposite side of this hill and come out the other side of town.’ But Ayesha and Mishal had already started back; the prophetess was supporting the other, ashen woman, holding her around the waist,

‘Mishal, for God's sake,’ Mirza Saeed called after his wife. ‘For the love of God. What will I do with the motor-car?’

But she went on down the hill, towards the flood, leaning heavily on Ayesha the seer, without looking round.

This was how Mirza Saeed Akhtar came to abandon his beloved Mercedes-Benz station wagon near the entrance to the drowned mines of Sarang, and join in the foot-pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea.

The seven bedraggled travellers stood thigh-deep in water at the intersection of the street of bicycle repairers and the alley of the basket-weavers. Slowly, slowly, the water had begun to go down. ‘Face it,’ Mirza Saeed argued. ‘The pilgrimage is finished. The villagers are who knows where, maybe drowned, possibly murdered, certainly lost. There's nobody left to follow you but us.’ He stuck his face into Ayesha's. ‘So forget it, sister; you're sunk.’

‘Look,’ Mishal said.

From all sides, out of the little tinkers’ gullies, the villagers of Titlipur were returning to the place of their dispersal. They were all coated from neck to ankles in golden butterflies, and long lines of the little creatures went before them, like ropes drawing them to safety out of a well. The people of Sarang watched in terror from their windows, and as the waters of retribution receded, the Ayesha Haj re-formed in the middle of the road.