Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Once a week, the potato carts of Titlipur trundled down the rutted, narrow, four-hour track to Chatnapatna, which stood at the point at which the track met the grand trunk road. In Chatnapatna stood the high, gleaming aluminium silos of the potato wholesalers, but this had nothing to do with Ayesha's regular visits to the town. She would hitch a ride on a potato cart, clutching a little sackcloth bundle, to take her toys to market. Chatnapatna was known throughout the region for its kiddies’ knick-knacks, carved wooden toys and enamelled figurines. Osman and his bullock stood at the edge of the banyan-tree, watching her bounce about on top of the potato sacks until she had diminished to a dot.

In Chatnapatna she made her way to the premises of Sri Srinivas, owner of the biggest toy factory in town. On its walls were the political graffiti of the day: Vote for Hand . Or, more politely: Please to vote for CP (M) . Above these exhortations was the proud announcement: Srinivas's Toy Univas. Our Moto: Sinceriety & Creativity . Srinivas was inside: a large jelly of a man, his head a hairless sun, a fiftyish fellow whom a lifetime of selling toys had failed to sour. Ayesha owed him her livelihood. He had been so taken with the artistry of her whittling that he had agreed to buy as many as she could produce. But in spite of his habitual bonhomie his expression darkened when Ayesha undid her bundle to show him two dozen figures of a young man in a clown hat, accompanied by a decorated bullock that could dip its tinselled head. Understanding that Ayesha had forgiven Osman his conversion, Sri Srinivas cried, ‘That man is a traitor to his birth, as you well know. What kind of a person will change gods as easily as his dhotis? God knows what got into you, daughter, but I don't want these dolls.’ On the wall behind his desk hung a framed certificate which read, in elaborately cur-licued print: This is to certify that MR SRI S. SRINIVAS is an Expert on the Geological History of the Planet Earth, having flown through Grand Canyon with SCENIC AIRLINES . Srinivas closed his eyes and folded his arms, an unlaughing Buddha with the indisputable authority of one who had flown. ‘That boy is a devilI he said with finality, and Ayesha folded the dolls into her piece of sackcloth and turned to leave, without arguing. Srinivas's eyes flew open. ‘Damn you,’ he shouted, ‘aren't you going to give me a hard time? You think I don't know you need the money? Why you did such a damn stupid thing? What are you going to do now? Just go and make some FP dolls, double quick, and I will buy at best rate plus, because I am generous to a fault.’ Mr Srinivas's personal invention was the Family Planning doll, a socially responsible variant of the old Russian-doll notion. Inside a suited-and-booted Abba-doll was a demure, sari-clad Amma, and inside her a daughter containing a son. Two children are plenty: that was the message of the dolls. ‘Make quickly quickly,’ Srinivas called after the departing Ayesha. ‘FP dolls have high turnover.’ Ayesha turned, and smiled. ‘Don't worry about me, Srinivasji,’ she said, and left.

Ayesha the orphan was nineteen years old when she began her walk back to Titlipur along the rutted potato track, but by the time she turned up in her village some forty-eight hours later she had attained a kind of agelessness, because her hair had turned as white as snow while her skin had regained the luminous perfection of a new-born child's, and although she was completely naked the butterflies had settled upon her body in such thick swarms that she seemed to be wearing a dress of the most delicate material in the universe. The clown Osman was practising routines with the boom-boom bullock near the track, because even though he had been worried sick by her extended absence, and had spent the whole of the previous night searching for her, it was still necessary to earn a living. When he laid eyes on her, that young man who had never respected God because of having been born untouchable was filled with holy terror, and did not dare to approach the girl with whom he was so helplessly in love.

She went into her hut and slept for a day and a night without waking up. Then she went to see the village headman, Sarpanch Muhammad Din, and informed him matter-of-factly that the Archangel Gibreel had appeared to her in a vision and had lain down beside her to rest. ‘Greatness has come among us,’ she informed the alarmed Sarpanch, who had until then been more concerned with potato quotas than transcendence. ‘Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given to us also.’

In another part of the tree, the Sarpanch's wife Khadija was consoling a weeping clown, who was finding it hard to accept that he had lost his beloved Ayesha to a higher being, for when an archangel lies with a woman she is lost to men forever. Khadija was old and forgetful and frequently clumsy when she tried to be loving, and she gave Osman cold comfort: ‘The sun always sets when there is fear of tigers,’ she quoted the old saying: bad news always comes all at once.

Soon after the story of the miracle got out, the girl Ayesha was summoned to the big house, and in the following days she spent long hours closeted with the zamindar's wife, Begum Mishal Akhtar, whose mother had also arrived on a visit, and fallen for the archangel's white-haired wife.

The dreamer, dreaming, wants (but is unable) to protest: I never laid a finger on her, what do you think this is, some kind of wet dream or what? Damn me if I know from where that girl was getting her information/inspiration. Not from this quarter, that's for sure.

This happened: she was walking back to her village, but then she seemed to grow weary all of a sudden, and went off the path to lie in the shade of a tamarind-tree and rest. The moment her eyes closed he was there beside her, dreaming Gibreel in coat and hat, sweltering in the heat. She looked at him but he couldn't say what she saw, wings maybe, haloes, the works. Then he was lying there and finding he could not get up, his limbs had become heavier than iron bars, it seemed as if his body might be crushed by its own weight into the earth. When she finished looking at him she nodded, gravely, as if he had spoken, and then she took off her scrap of a sari and stretched out beside him, nude. Then in the dream he fell asleep, out cold as if somebody pulled out the plug, and when dreamed himself awake again she was standing in front of him with that loose white hair and the butterflies clothing her: transformed. She was still nodding, with a rapt expression on her face, receiving a message from somewhere that she called Gibreel. Then she left him lying there and returned to the village to make her entrance.

So now I have a dream-wife, the dreamer becomes conscious enough to think. What the hell to do with her? – But it isn't up to him. Ayesha and Mishal Akhtar are together in the big house.

Ever since his birthday Mirza Saeed had been full of passionate desires, ‘as if life really does begin at forty’, his wife marvelled. Their marriage became so energetic that the servants had to change the bedsheets three times per day. Mishal hoped secretly that this heightening of her husband's libido would lead her to conceive, because she was of the firm opinion that enthusiasm mattered, whatever doctors might say to the contrary, and that the years of taking her temperature every morning before getting out of bed, and then plotting the results on graph paper in order to establish her pattern of ovulation, had actually dissuaded the babies from being born, partly because it was difficult to be properly ardent when science got into bed along with you, and partly, too, in her view, because no self-respecting foetus would wish to enter the womb of so mechanically programmed a mother; Mishal still prayed for a child, although she no longer mentioned the fact to Saeed so as to spare him the sense of having failed her in this respect. Eyes shut, feigning sleep, she would call on God for a sign, and when Saeed became so loving, so frequently, she wondered if maybe this might not be it. As a result, his strange request that from now on, whenever they came to stay at Peristan, she should adopt the ‘old ways’ and retreat into purdah, was not treated by her with the contempt it deserved. In the city, where they kept a large and hospitable house, the zamindar and his wife were known as one of the most ‘modern’ and ‘go-go’ couples on the scene; they collected contemporary art and threw wild parties and invited friends round for fumbles in the dark on sofas while watching soft-porno VCRs. So when Mirza Saeed said, ‘Would it not be sort of delicious, Mishu, if we tailored our behaviour to fit this old house,’ she should have laughed in his face. Instead she replied, ‘What you like, Saeed,’ because he gave her to understand that it was a sort of erotic game. He even hinted that his passion for her had become so overwhelming that he might need to express it at any moment, and if she were out in the open at the time it might embarrass the staff; certainly her presence would make it impossible for him to concentrate on any of his tasks, and besides, in the city, ‘we will still be completely up-to-date’. From this she understood that the city was full of distractions for the Mirza, so that her chances of conceiving were greatest right here in Titlipur. She resolved to stay put. This was when she invited her mother to come and stay, because if she were to confine herself to the zenana she would need company. Mrs. Qureishi arrived wobbling with plump fury, determined to scold her son-in-law until he gave up this purdah foolishness, but Mishal amazed her mother by begging: ‘Please don't.’ Mrs. Qureishi, the wife of the state bank director, was quite a sophisticate herself. ‘In fact, all your teenage, Mishu, you were the grey goose and I was the hipster. I thought you dragged yourself out of that ditch but I see he pushed you back in there again.’ The financier's wife had always been of the opinion that her son-in-law was a secret cheapskate, an opinion which had survived intact in spite of being starved of any scrap of supporting evidence. Ignoring her daughter's veto, she sought out Mirza Saeed in the formal garden and launched into him, wobbling, as was her wont, for emphasis. ‘What type of life are you living?’ she demanded. ‘My daughter is not for locking up, but for taking out! What is all your fortune for, if you keep it also under lock and key? My son, unlock both wallet and wife! Take her away, renew your love, on some enjoyable outing !’ Mirza Saeed opened his mouth, found no reply, shut it again. Dazzled by her own oratory, which had given rise, quite on the spur of the moment, to the idea of a holiday, Mrs. Qureishi warmed to her theme. ‘Just get set, and go!’ she urged. ‘Go, man, go! Go away with her, or will you lock her up until she goes away,’ – here she jabbed an ominous finger at the sky – ‘ forever ?’