Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

After a few seconds of transfixed panic, the Mirza shouted, ‘Ohé, house! Ohé, wake up, emergency!’ At the same time he ran towards the stately mahogany staircase from England, brought here from some unimaginable Warwickshire, some fantastic location in which, in a damp and lightless priory, King Charles I had ascended these same steps, before losing his head, in the seventeenth century of another system of time. Down these stairs hurtled Mirza Saeed Akhtar, last of his line, trampling over the ghostly impressions of beheaded feet as he sped towards the lawn.

The girl was having convulsions, crushing butterflies beneath her rolling, kicking body. Mirza Saeed got to her first, although the servants and Mishal, awakened by his cry, were not far behind. He grasped the girl by the jaw and forced it open, inserting a nearby twig, which she at once bit in half. Blood trickled from her cut mouth, and he feared for her tongue, but the sickness left her just then, she became calm, and slept. Mishal had her carried to her own bedroom, and now Mirza Saeed was obliged to gaze on a second sleeping beauty in that bed, and was stricken for a second time by what seemed too rich and deep a sensation to be called by the crude name, lust . He found that he was at once sickened by his own impure designs and also elated by the feelings that were coursing within him, fresh feelings whose newness excited him greatly. Mishal came to stand beside her husband. ‘Do you know her?’ Saeed asked, and she nodded. ‘An orphan girl. She makes small enamel animals and sells them at the trunk road. She has had the falling sickness since she was very little.’ Mirza Saeed was awed, not for the first time, by his wife's gift of involvement with other human beings. He himself could hardly recognize more than a handful of the villagers, but she knew each person's pet names, family histories and incomes. They even told her their dreams, although few of them dreamed more than once a month on account of being too poor to afford such luxuries. The overflowing fondness he had felt at dawn returned, and he placed his arm around her shoulders. She leaned her head against him and said softly: ‘Happy birthday.’ He kissed the top of her hair. They stood embracing, watching the sleeping girl. Ayesha: his wife told him the name.

After the orphan girl Ayesha arrived at puberty and became, on account of her distracted beauty and her air of staring into another world, the object of many young men's desires, it began to be said that she was looking for a lover from heaven, because she thought herself too good for mortal men. Her rejected suitors complained that in practical terms she had no business acting so choosy, in the first place because she was an orphan, and in the second, because she was possessed by the demon of epilepsy, who would certainly put off any heavenly spirits who might otherwise have been interested. Some embittered youths went so far as to suggest that as Ayesha's defects would prevent her from ever finding a husband she might as well start taking lovers, so as not to waste that beauty, which ought in all fairness to have been given to a less problematic individual. In spite of these attempts by the young men of Titlipur to turn her into their whore, Ayesha remained chaste, her defence being a look of such fierce concentration on patches of air immediately above people's left shoulders that it was regularly mistaken for contempt. Then people heard about her new habit of swallowing butterflies and they revised their opinion of her, convinced that she was touched in the head and therefore dangerous to lie with in case the demons crossed over into her lovers. After this the lustful males of her village left her alone in her hovel, alone with her toy animals and her peculiar fluttering diet. One young man, however, took to sitting a little distance from her doorway, facing discreetly in the opposite direction, as if he were on guard, even though she no longer had any need of protectors. He was a former untouchable from the neighbouring village of Chatnapatna who had been converted to Islam and taken the name of Osman. Ayesha never acknowledged Osman's presence, nor did he ask for such acknowledgement. The leafy branches of the village waved over their heads in the breeze.

The village of Titlipur had grown up in the shade of an immense banyan-tree, a single monarch that ruled, with its multiple roots, over an area more than half a mile in diameter. By now the growth of tree into village and village into tree had become so intricate that it was impossible to differentiate between the two. Certain districts of the tree had become well-known lovers’ nooks; others were chicken runs. Some of the poorer labourers had constructed rough-and-ready shelters in the angles of stout branches, and actually lived inside the dense foliage. There were branches that were used as pathways across the village, and children's swings made out of the old tree's beards, and in places where the tree stooped low down towards the earth its leaves formed roofs for many a hutment that seemed to hang from the greenery like the nest of a weaver bird. When the village pan-chayat assembled, it sat on the mightiest branch of all. The villagers had grown accustomed to referring to the tree by the name of the village, and to the village simply as ‘the tree’. The banyan's non-human inhabitants – honey ants, squirrels, owls – were accorded the respect due to fellow-citizens. Only the butterflies were ignored, like hopes long since shown to be false.

It was a Muslim village, which was why the convert Osman had come here with his clown's outfit and his ‘boom-boom’ bullock after he had embraced the faith in an act of desperation, hoping that changing to a Muslim name would do him more good than earlier re-namings, for example when untouchables were renamed ‘children of God’. As a child of God in Chatnapatna he had not been permitted to draw water from the town well, because the touch of an outcaste would have polluted the drinking water... Landless and, like Ayesha, an orphan, Osman earned his living as a clown. His bullock wore bright red paper cones over its horns and much tinselly drapery over its nose and back. He went from village to village performing an act, at marriages and other celebrations, in which the bullock was his essential partner and foil, nodding in answer to his questions, one nod for no, twice for yes.

‘Isn't this a nice village we've come to?’ Osman would ask.

Boom, the bullock disagreed.

‘It isn't? Oh yes it is. Look: aren't the people good?’

Boom.

‘What? Then it's a village full of sinners?’

Boom, boom.

‘Baapu-ré! Then, will everybody go to hell?’

Boom, boom.

‘But, bhaijan. Is there any hope for them?’

Boom, boom, the bullock offered salvation. Excitedly, Osman bent down, placing his ear by the bullock's mouth. ‘Tell, quickly. What should they do to be saved?’ At this point the bullock plucked Osman's cap off his head and carried it around the crowd, asking for money, and Osman would nod, happily: Boom, boom.

Osman the convert and his boom-boom bullock were well liked in Titlipur, but the young man only wanted the approval of one person, and she would not give it. He had admitted to her that his conversion to Islam had been largely tactical, ‘Just so I could get a drink, bibi, what's a man to do?’ She had been outraged by his confession, informed him that he was no Muslim at all, his soul was in peril and he could go back to Chatnapatna and die of thirst for all she cared. Her face coloured, as she spoke, with an unaccountably strong disappointment in him, and it was the vehemence of this disappointment that gave him the optimism to remain squatting a dozen paces from her home, day after day, but she continued to stalk past him, nose in air, without so much as a good morning or hope-you're-well.