IV
Ayesha
This, for instance, has started coming: a mansion block built in the Dutch style in a part of London which he will subsequently identify as Kensington, to which the dream flies him at high speed past
Barkers department store and the small grey house with double bay windows where Thackeray wrote
_Vanity Fair_ and the square with the convent where the little girls in uniform are always going in, but never come out, and the house where
Talleyrand lived in his old age when after a thousand and one chameleon changes of allegiance and principle he took on the outward form of the French ambassador to London, and arrives at a seven-- storey corner block with green wrought--iron balconies up to the fourth, and now the dream
rushes him up the outer wall of the house and on
the fourth floor it pushes aside the heavy curtains at the living-room window and finally there he sits, unsleeping as usual, eyes wide in the dim yellow light, staring into the future, the bearded and turbaned Imam.
Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball
hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own. These are the things the Imam thinks. His home is a rented flat. It is a waiting-- room, a photograph, air.The thick wallpaper, olive stripes on a cream ground, has faded a little, enough to emphasize the brighter rectangles and ovals that indicate where pictures used to hang. The Imam is the enemy of images. When he moved in the pictures slid noiselessly from the walls and slunk from the room, removing themselves from the rage of his unspoken disapproval. Some representations, however, are permitted to remain. On the mantelpiece he keeps a small group of postcards bearing conventional images of his homeland, which he calls simply Desh: a mountain looming over a city; a picturesque
village scene beneath a mighty tree; a mosque. But in his bedroom, on the wall facing the hard cot where he lies, there hangs a more potent icon, the portrait of a woman of exceptional force, famous for her profile of a Grecian statue and the black hair
that is as long as she is high. A powerful woman, his enemy, his other: he keeps her close. Just as, far away in the palaces of her omnipotence she will be
clutching his portrait beneath her royal cloak or hiding it in a locket at her throat. She is the Empress, and her name is -- what else? -- Ayesha. On this island, the exiled Imam, and at home in Desh, She. They plot each other's deaths.The curtains, thick golden velvet, are kept shut all day, because otherwise the evil thing might creep into the apartment: foreignness, Abroad, the alien nation. The harsh fact that he is here and not There, upon which all his thoughts are fixed. On those rare occasions when the Imam goes out to take the Kensington air, at the centre of a square formed by eight young men in sunglasses and bulging suits, he folds his hands before him and fixes his gaze upon them, so that no element or particle of this hated city, -- this sink of iniquities which humiliates him by giving him sanctuary, so that he must be beholden
to it in spite of the lustfulness, greed and vanity of
its ways, -- can lodge itself, like a dust--speck, in his eyes. When he leaves this loathed exile to return in triumph to that other city beneath the postcard- mountain, it will be a point of pride to be able to say that he remained in complete ignorance of the Sodom in which he had been obliged to wait; ignorant, and therefore unsullied, unaltered, pure.
And another reason for the drawn curtains is that of course there are eyes and ears around him, not all
of them friendly. The orange buildings are not neutral. Somewhere across the street there will be zoom lenses, video equipment, jumbo mikes; and always the risk of snipers. Above and below and beside the Imam are the safe apartments occupied by his guards, who stroll the Kensington streets disguised as women in shrouds and silvery beaks; but it is as well to be too careful. Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite of survival.A fable, which he heard from one of his favourites, the American convert, formerly a successful singer, now known as Bilal X. In a certain nightclub to which the Imam is in the habit of sending his lieutenants
to listen in to certain other persons belonging to certain opposed factions, Bilal met a young man from Desh, also a singer of sorts, so they fell to
talking. It turned out that this Mahmood was a badly scared individual. He had recently _shacked up_
with a gori, a long red woman with a big figure, and then it turned out that the previous lover of his beloved Renata was the exiled boss of the S A V A K torture organization of the Shah of Iran. The number one Grand Panjandrum himself, not some minor sadist with a talent for extracting toenails or setting fire to eyelids, but the great haramzada in person. The day after Mahmood and Renata moved in to
their new apartment a letter arrived for Mahmood.
_Okay, shit-eater, you're fucking my woman, I just
wanted to say hello_. The next day a second letter arrived. _By the way, prick, I forgot to mention, here is your new telephone number_. At that point Mahmood and Renata had asked for an exdirectory listing but had not as yet been given their new number by the telephone company. When it came through two days later and was exactly the same as the one on the letter, Mahmood's hair fell out all at once. Then, seeing it lying on the pillow, he joined his hands together in front of Renata and begged, "Baby, I love you, but you're too hot for me, please go somewhere, far far." When the Imam was told this story he shook his head and said, that whore, who will touch her now, in spite of her lustcreatingbody? She put a stain on herself worse than leprosy; thus do human beings mutilate themselves. But the true moral of the fable was the need for eternal vigilance. London was a city in which the ex-boss of
S A V A K had great connections in the telephone company and the Shah's ex-chef ran a thriving restaurant in Hounslow. Such a welcoming city, such a refuge, they take all types. Keep the curtains drawn.
Floors three to five of this block of mansion flats are, for the moment, all the homeland the Imam possesses. Here there are rifles and short-wave radios and rooms in which the sharp young men in suits sit and speak urgently into several telephones.
There is no alcohol here, nor are playing cards or dice anywhere in evidence, and the only woman is the one hanging on the old man's bedroom wall. In this surrogate homeland, which the insomniac saint thinks of as his waiting-room or transit lounge, the central heating is at full blast night and day, and the windows are tightly shut. The exile cannot forget, and must therefore simulate, the dry heat of Desh, the once and future land where even the moon ishot and dripping like a fresh, buttered chapati. O that longed--for part of the world where the sun and moon are male but their hot sweet light is named with female names. At night the exile parts his curtains and the alien moonlight sidles into the
room, its coldness striking his eyeballs like a nail. He winces, narrows his eyes. Loose-robed, frowning, ominous, awake: this is the Imam.
Exile is a soulless country. In exile, the furniture is ugly, expensive, all bought at the same time in the same store and in too much of a hurry: shiny silver sofas with fins like old Buicks DeSotos Oldsmobiles, glass-fronted bookcases containing not books but clippings files. In exile the shower goes scalding hot whenever anybody turns on a kitchen tap, so that when the Imam goes to bathe his entire retinue must remember not to fill a kettle or rinse a dirty plate, and when the Imam goes to the toilet his disciples leap scalded from the shower. In exile no
food is ever cooked; the dark-spectacled bodyguards go out for takeaway. In exile all attempts to put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of defeat.The Imam is the centre of a wheel.
Movement radiates from him, around the clock. His son, Khalid, enters his sanctum bearing a glass of water, holding it in his right hand with his left palm under the glass. The Imam drinks water constantly, one glass every five minutes, to keep himself clean; the water itself is cleansed of impurities, before he sips, in an American filtration machine. All the young men surrounding him are well aware of his famous Monograph on Water, whose purity, the Imam believes, communicates itself to the drinker, its thinness and simplicity, the ascetic pleasures of its taste. "The Empress," he points out, "drinks wine." Burgundies, clarets, hocks mingle their intoxicating corruptions within that body both fair and foul. The sin is enough to condemn her for all time without hope of redemption. The picture on his bedroom wall shows the Empress Ayesha holding, in both hands, a human skull filled with a dark red fluid. The Empress drinks blood, but the Imam is a water man. "Not for nothing do the peoples of our hot lands offer it reverence," the Monograph proclaims. "Water, preserver of life. No civilized individual can refuse it
to another. A grandmother, be her limbs ever so arthritically stiff, will rise at once and go to the tap if a small child should come to her and ask, pani, nani. Beware all those who blaspheme against it. Who pollutes it, dilutes his soul."The Imam has often vented his rage upon the memory of the late Aga Khan, as a result of being shown the text of an interview in which the head of the Ismailis was observed drinking vintage champagne. _O, sir, this champagne is only for outward show. The instant it touches my lips, it turns to water_. Fiend, the Imam is wont to thunder. Apostate, blasphemer, fraud. When the
future comes such individuals will be judged, he tells his men. Water will have its day and blood will flow like wine. Such is the miraculous nature of the
future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. Who has not dreamed this dream, of being a king for a day? -- But the Imam dreams of more than a day; feels, emanating from his fingertips, the arachnid strings with which he will control the movement of history.
No: not history.
His is a stranger dream. o o o
His son, water-carrying Khalid, bows before hisfather like a pilgrim at a shrine, informs him that the guard on duty outside the sanctum is Salman Farsi. Bilal is at the radio transmitter, broadcasting the day's message, on the agreed frequency, to Desh.
The Imam is a massive stillness, an immobility. He is living stone. His great gnarled hands, granite-- grey, rest heavily on the wings of his high-backed chair. His head, looking too large for the body beneath, lolls ponderously on the surprisingly
scrawny neck that can be glimpsed through the grey- black wisps of beard. The Imam's eyes are clouded; his lips do not move. He is pure force, an elemental being; he moves without motion, acts without doing, speaks without uttering a sound. He is the conjurer and history is his trick.
No, not history: something stranger.
The explanation of this conundrum is to be heard, at this very moment, on certain surreptitious radio waves, on which the voice of the American convert Bilal is singing the Imam's holy song. Bilal the muezzin: his voice enters a ham radio in Kensington and emerges in dreamed-of Desh, transmuted into the thunderous speech of the Imam himself. Beginning with ritual abuse of the Empress, with
lists of her crimes, murders, bribes, sexual relations
with lizards, and so on, he proceeds eventually to issue in ringing tones the Imam's nightly call to his people to rise up against the evil of her State. "We will make a revolution," the Imam proclaims through him, "that is a revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history." For there is an enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood--wine that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies -- progress, science, rights -- against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day AlLah finished
his revelation to Mahound. "We will unmake the veil of history," Bilal declaims into the listening night, "and when it is unravelled, we will see Paradise standing there, in all its glory and light." The Imam chose Bilal for this task on account of the beauty of his voice, which in its previous incarnation succeeded in climbing the Everest of the hit parade, not once but a dozen times, to the very top. The
voice is rich and authoritative, a voice in the habit of being listened to; well--nourished, highly trained,
the voice of American confidence, a weapon of the West turned against its makers, whose might upholds the Empress and her tyranny. In the early days Bilal X protested at such a description of his voice. He, too, belonged to an oppressed people, he
insisted, so that it was unjust to equate him with the Yankee imperialists. The Imam answered, not without gentleness: Bilal, your suffering is ours as well. But to be raised in the house of power is to learn its ways, to soak them up, through that very skin that is the cause of your oppression. The habitof power, its timbre, its posture, its way of being with others. It is a disease, Bilal, infecting all who come too near it. If the powerful trample over you, you are infected by the soles of their feet.
Bilal continues to address the darkness. "Death to the tyranny of the Empress Ayesha, of calendars, of America, of time! We seek the eternity, the timelessness, of God. His still waters, not her flowing wines." Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word, as it was revealed by the Angel Gibreel to the Messenger Mahound and explicated by your interpreter and Imam. "Ameen," Bilal said, concluding the night's
proceedings. While, in his sanctum, the Imam sends a message of his own: and summons, conjures up, the archangel, Gibreel.
o o o
He sees himself in the dream: no angel to look at, just a man in his ordinary street clothes, Henry Diamond's posthumous handme-downs: gabardine
and trilby over outsize trousers held up by braces, a fisherman's woollen pullover, billowy white shirt. This dream-Gibreel, so like the waking one, stands quaking in the sanctum of the Imam, whose eyes are white as clouds.Gibreel speaks querulously, to hide his fear.
"Why insist on archangels? Those days, you should know, are gone."
The Imam closes his eyes, sighs. The carpet extrudes long hairy tendrils, which wrap themselves around Gibreel, holding him fast.
"You don't need me," Gibreel emphasizes. "The revelation is complete. Let me go."
The other shakes his head, and speaks, except that his lips do not move, and it is Bilal's voice that fills Gibreel's ears, even though the broadcaster is nowhere to be seen, _tonight's the night_, the voice says, _and you must fly me to Jerusalem_.
Then the apartment dissolves and they are standing on the roof beside the water--tank, because the Imam, when he wishes to move, can remain still and move the world around him. His beard is blowing in the wind. It is longer now; if it were not for the wind that catches at it as if it were a flowing chiffon scarf,
it would touch the ground by his feet; he has red eyes, and his voice hangs around him in the sky. Take me. Gibreel argues, Seems you can do it easily by yourself: but the Imam, in a single movement of astonishing rapidity, slings his beard over his shoulder, hoists up his skirts to reveal two spindly legs with an almost monstrous covering of hair, and leaps high into the night air, twirls himself about, and settles on Gibreel's shoulders, clutching on to him with fingernails that have grown into long, curved claws. Gibreel feels himself rising into the sky, bearing the old man of the sea, the Imam with hair that grows longer by the minute, streaming in every direction, his eyebrows like pennants in the wind.Jerusalem, he wonders, which way is that? -- And then, it's a slippery word, Jerusalem, it can be an idea as well as a place: a goal, an exaltation. Where is the Imam's Jerusalem? "The fall of the harlot," the disembodied voice resounds in his ears. "Her crash, the Babylonian whore."
They zoom through the night. The moon is heating up, beginning to bubble like cheese under a grill; he, Gibreel, sees pieces of it falling off from time to
time, moon-drips that hiss and bubble on the sizzling griddle of the sky. Land appears below them. The heat grows intense.
It is an immense landscape, reddish, with flat- topped trees. They fly over mountains that are also flat-topped; even the stones, here, are flattened by the heat. Then they come to a high mountain of almost perfectly conical dimensions, a mountain that also sits postcarded on a mantelpiece far away; and in the shadow of the mountain, a city, sprawling at its feet like a supplicant, and on the mountain'slower slopes, a palace, the palace, her place: the Empress, whom radio messages have unmade. This is a revolution of radio hams.
Gibreel, with the Imam riding him like a carpet, swoops lower, and in the steaming night it looks as if the streets are alive, they seem to be writhing, like snakes; while in front of the palace of the Empress's defeat a new hill seems to be growing,
_while we watch, baba, what's going on here?_ The Imam's voice hangs in the sky: "Come down. I will show you Love."
They are at rooftop--level when Gibreel realizes that the streets are swarming with people. Human beings, packed so densely into those snaking paths that they have blended into a larger, composite entity, relentless, serpentine. The people move slowly, at an even pace, down alleys into lanes, down lanes into side streets, down side streets into highways, all of them converging upon the grand
avenue, twelve lanes wide and lined with giant eucalyptus trees, that leads to the palace gates. The avenue is packed with humanity; it is the central organ of the new, manyheaded being. Seventy abreast, the people walk gravely towards the Empress's gates. In front of which her household guards are waiting in three ranks, lying, kneelingand standing, with machine-guns at the ready. The people are walking up the slope towards the guns; seventy at a time, they come into range; the guns babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of the dead grows higher. Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons into the parade, _go, be a martyr, do the needful, die_. "You see how they love me," says the disembodied voice. "No tyranny on earth can withstand the power of
this slow, walking love."
"This isn't love," Gibreel, weeping, replies. "It's hate. She has driven them into your arms." The explanation sounds thin, superficial.
"They love me," the Imam's voice says, "because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty,
and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or tock. She looks in her mirror every day and is terrorized by the idea of age, of time passing. Thus she is the prisoner of her own nature; she, too, is in the chains of Time. After the revolution there will be no clocks; we'll smash the lot. The word _clock_ will be expunged from our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no birthdays. We shall all be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in the eye of Almighty God."He falls silent, now, because below us the great moment has come: the people have reached the guns. Which are silenced in their turn, as the
endless serpent of the people, the gigantic python of the risen masses, embraces the guards, suffocating them, and silences the lethal chuckling of their weapons. The Imam sighs heavily. "Done."
The lights of the palace are extinguished as the people walk towards it, at the same measured pace as before. Then, from within the darkened palace, there rises a hideous sound, beginning as a high, thin, piercing wail, then deepening into a howl, an ululation loud enough to fill every cranny of the city with its rage. Then the golden dome of the palace
bursts open like an egg, and rising from it, glowing with blackness, is a mythological apparition with vast black wings, her hair streaming loose, as long and black as the Imam's is long and white: Al--Lat, Gibreel understands, bursting out of Ayesha's shell."Kill her," the Imam commands.
Gibreel sets him down on the palace's ceremonial balcony, his arms outstretched to encompass the joy of the people, a sound that drowns even the howls
of the goddess and rises up like a song. And then he is being propelled into the air, having no option, he
is a marionette going to war; and she, seeing him coming, turns, crouches in air, and, moaning dreadfully, comes at him with all her might. Gibreel understands that the Imam, fighting by proxy as usual, will sacrifice him as readily as he did the hill of corpses at the palace gate, that he is a suicide soldier in the service of the cleric's cause. I am weak, he thinks, I am no match for her, but she, too, has been weakened by her defeat. The Imam's strength moves Gibreel, places thunderbolts in his hands, and the battle is joined; he hurls lightning
spears into her feet and she plunges comets into his groin, _we are killing each other_, he thinks, _we will die and there will be two new constellations in space: Al-Lat, and Gibreel_. Like exhausted warriors on a corpse-- littered field, they totter and slash.
Both are failing fast. She falls.Down she tumbles, Al-Lat queen of the night; crashes upsidedown to earth, crushing her head to bits; and lies, a headless black angel, with her wings ripped off, by a little wicket gate in the palace gardens, all in a crumpled heap. -- And Gibreel, looking away from her in horror, sees the Imam grown monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole.
The body of Al-Lat has shrivelled on the grass, leaving behind only a dark stain; and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime, and
goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty- four, beyond one thousand and one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond measuring, the hour of the exile's return, of the victory of water
over wine, of the commencement of the Untimc of the Imam.
o o o
When the nocturnal story changes, when, without warning, the progress of events injahilia and Yathrib gives way to the struggle of Imam and Empress, Gibreel briefly hopes that the curse has ended, that
his dreams have been restored to the random eccentricity of ordinary life; but then, as the new story, too, falls into the old pattern, continuing each time he drops off from the precise point at which it was interrupted, and as his own image, translated into an avatar of the archangel, re-enters the frame, so his hope dies, and he succumbs once more to the inexorable. Things have reached the point at which some of his night-sagas seem more bearable than others, and after the apocalypse of the Imam hefeels almost pleased when the next narrative begins, extending his internal repertory, because at least it suggests that the deity whom he, Gibreel, has tried unsuccessfully to kill can be a God of love, as well as one of vengeance, power, duty, rules and hate; and it is, too, a nostalgic sort of tale, of a lost homeland; it feels like a return to the past . . . what story is, this? Coming right up. To begin at the beginning: On the morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies, Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched his sleeping wife.
o o o
On the fateful morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies, the zamindar Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched over his sleeping wife, and felt his heart fill up to the bursting-point with love. He had awoken early for once, rising before dawn with a
bad dream souring his mouth, his recurring dream of the end of the world, in which the catastrophe was invariably his fault. He had been readingNietzsche the night before -- "the pitiless end of that small, overextended species called Man" -- and had fallen asleep with the book resting face downwards on his chest. Waking to the rustle of butterfly wings in the cool, shadowy bedroom, he was angry with himself for being so foolish in his choice of bedside reading matter. He was, however, wide awake now. Getting up quietly, he slipped his feet into chappals and strolled idly along the verandas of the great mansion, still in darkness on account of their
lowered blinds, and the butterflies bobbed like courtiers at his back. In the far distance, someone was playing a flute. Mirza Saecd drew up the chick blinds and fastened their cords. The gardens were deep in mist, through which the butterfly clouds were swirling, one mist intersecting another. This remote region had always been renowned for its lepidoptera, for these miraculous squadrons that filled the air by day and night, butterflies with the gift of chameleons, whose wings changed colour as they settled on vermilion flowers, ochre curtains, obsidian goblets or amber finger-rings. In the zamindar's mansion, and also in the nearby village, the miracle of the butterflies had become so familiar as to seem mundane, but in fact they had only returned nineteen years ago, as the servant women
would recall. They had been the familiar spirits, or so the legend ran, of a local saint, the holy woman known only as Bibiji, who had lived to the age of two hundred and forty-two and whose grave, until its location was forgotten, had the property of curing impotence and warts. Since the death of Bibiji one hundred and twenty years ago the butterflies had vanished into the same realm of the legendary as Bibiji herself, so that when they came back exactly one hundred and one years after their departure it looked, at first, like an omen of some imminent, wonderful thing. After Bibiji's death -- it should quickly be said -- the village had continued to prosper, the potato crops remained plentiful, but there had been a gap in many hearts, even though the villagers of the present had no memory of the time of the old saint. So the return of the butterflies lifted many spirits, but when the expected wonders failed to materialize the locals sank back, little by little, into the insufficiency of the day-to-day. The name of the zamindar's mansion, _Peristan_, may have had its origins in the magical creatures' fairy wings, and the village's name, _Titlipur_, certainly did. But names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. The human inhabitants of Titlipur, and its butterfly hordes, moved amongst oneanother with a kind of mutual disdain. The villagers
and the zamindar's family had long ago abandoned the attempt to exclude the butterflies from their homes, so that now whenever a trunk was opened, a batch of wings would fly out of it like Pandora's imps, changing colour as they rose; there werebutterflies under the closed lids of the thunderboxes in the toilets of Peristan, and inside every wardrobe, and between the pages of books. When you awoke you found the butterflies sleeping on your cheeks.
The commonplace eventually becomes invisible, and Mirza Saeed had not really noticed the butterflies for a number of years. On the morning of his fortieth birthday, however, as the first light of dawn touched the house and the butterflies began instantly to
glow, the beauty of the moment took his breath away. He ran at once to the bedroom in the zenana wing in which his wife Mishal lay sleeping, veiled in a mosquito--net. The magic butterflies were resting on her exposed toes, and a mosquito had evidently found its way inside as well, because there was a
line of little bites along the raised edge of her collar-- bone. He wanted to lift the net, crawl inside and kiss the bites until they faded away. How inflamed they looked! How, when she awoke, they would itch! But he held himself back, preferring to enjoy the innocence of her sleeping form. She had soft, red- brown hair, white white skin, and her eyes, behind the closed lids, were silky grey. Her father was a
director of the state bank, so it had been an irresistible match, an arranged marriage which restored the fortunes of the Mirza's ancient, decaying family and then ripened, over time and in spite of their failure to have children, into a union of real love. Full of emotion, Mirza Saeed watched Mishal sleep and chased the last shreds of his nightmare from his mind. "How can the world be done for," he reasoned contentedly to himself, "if it can offer up such instances of perfection as this lovely dawn?"Continuing down the line of these happy thoughts, he formulated a silent speech to his resting wife. "Mishal, I'm forty years old and as contented as a forty-day babe. I see now that I've been falling deeper and deeper into our love over the years, and now I swim, like some fish, in that warm sea." How much she gave him, he marvelled; how much he needed her! Their marriage transcended mere sensuality, was so intimate that a separation was unthinkable. "Growing old beside you," he told her while she slept, "will be, Mishal, a privilege." He permitted himself the sentimentality of blowing a kiss in her direction and then tiptoeing from the room. Out once more on the main veranda of his private quarters on the mansion's upper storey, he glanced across to the gardens, which were coming into view as the dawn lifted the mist, and saw the
sight that would destroy his peace of mind forever, smashing it beyond hope of repair at the very instant in which he had become certain of its invulnerability to the ravages of fate.A young woman was squatting on the lawn, holding out her left palm. Butterflies were settling on this surface while, with her right hand, she picked them up and put them in her mouth. Slowly, methodically, she breakfasted on the acquiescent wings.
Her lips, cheeks, chin were heavily stained by the many different colours that had rubbed off the dying butterflies.
When Mirza Saeed Akhtar saw the young woman eating her gossamer breakfast on his lawn, he felt a surge of lust so powerful that he instantly felt ashamed. "It's impossible," he scolded himself, "I
am not an animal, after all." The young woman wore a saffron yellow sari wrapped around her nakedness, after the fashion of the poor women of that region, and as she stooped over the butterflies the sari, hanging loosely forwards, bared her small breasts to the gaze of the transfixed zamindar. Mirza Saeed stretched out his hands to grip the balcony railing, and the slight movement of his white kurta must have caught her eye, because she lifted her head quickly and looked right into his face.
And did not immediately look down again. Nor did she get up and run away, as he had half expected.What she did: waited for a few seconds, as though
to see if he intended to speak. When he did not, she simply resumed her strange meal without taking her eyes from his face. The strangest aspect of it was that the butterflies seemed to be funnelling downwards from the brightening air, going willingly towards her outstretched palms and their own deaths. She held them by the wingtips, threw her head back and flicked them into her mouth with the tip of her narrow tongue. Once she kept her mouth open, the dark lips parted defiantly, and Mirza Saced trembled to see the butterfly fluttering within the dark cavern of its death, yet making no attempt to escape. When she was satisfied that he had seen this, she brought her lips together and began to chew. They remained thus, peasant woman below, landowner above, until her eyes unexpectedly rolled upwards in their sockets and she fell heavily, twitching violently, on to her left side.
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 heplaced 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.
o o o
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 forcontempt. 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 ban yan--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 inplaces 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 panchayat 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, Osmanearned 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.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 adevil," 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 ofhaving 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.o o o
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. Aycsha and Mishal Akhtar are together in the big house.
o o o
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 thisrespect. 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 Periscan, 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?_"Guiltily, Mirza Saeed promised to consider the idea. "What are you waiting for?" she cried in triumph.
"You big softo? You .. . you _Hamlet?_"
His mother-in-law's attack brought on one of the periodic bouts of self-reproach which had been plaguing Mirza Saced ever since he persuaded
Mishal to take the veil. To console himself he settled down to read Tagore's story _Ghare-Baire_ in which a zamindar persuades his wife to come out of purdah, whereupon she takes up with a firebrand politico involved in the "swadeshi" campaign, and
the zamindar winds up dead. The novel cheered him up momentarily, but then his suspicions returned. Had he been sincere in the reasons he gave his wife, or was he simply finding a way of leaving the coast clear for his pursuit of the madonna of the
butterflies, the epileptic, Ayesha? "Some coast," he thought, remembering Mrs. Qureishi with her eyesof an accusative hawk, "some clear." His mother-in- law's presence, he argued to himself, was further proof of his bona fides. Had he not positively encouraged Mishal to send for her, even though he knew perfectly well that the old fatty couldn't stand him and would suspect him of every damn slyness under the sun? "Would I have been so keen for her to come if I was planning on hanky panky?" he asked himself. But the nagging inner voices continued: "All this recent sexology, this renewed interest in your lady wife, is simple transference. Really, you are longing for your peasant floozy to come and flooze with you."
Guilt had the effect of making the zamindar feel entirely worthless. His mother--in--law's insults came to seem, in his unhappiness, like the literal truth. "Softo," she called him, and sitting in his study, surrounded by bookcases in which worms were munching contentedly upon priceless Sanskrit texts such as were not to be found even in the national archives, and also, less upliftingly, on the complete works of Percy Westerman, G. A. Henty
and Dornford Yates, Mirza Saeed admitted, yes, spot on, I am soft. The house was seven generations old and for seven generations the softening had been going on. He walked down the corridor in which his
ancestors hung in baleful, gilded frames, and contemplated the mirror which he kept hanging in the last space as a reminder that one day he, too, must step up on to this wall. He was a man without sharp corners or rough edges; even his elbows were covered by little pads of flesh. In the mirror he saw the thin moustache, the weak chin, the lips stained by paan. Cheeks, nose, forehead: all soft, soft, soft. "Who would see anything in a type like me?" he cried, and when he realized that he had been so agitated that he had spoken aloud he knew he must be in love, that he was sick as a dog with love, and that the object of his affections was no longer his loving wife."Then what a damn, shallow, tricksy and self- deceiving fellow I am," he sighed to himself, "to change so much, so fast. I deserve to be finished off without ceremony." But he was not the type to fall
on his sword. Instead, he strolled a while around the corridors of Peristan, and pretty soon the house worked its magic and restored him to something like a good mood once again.
The house: in spite of its faery name, it was a solid, rather prosy building, rendered exotic only by being in the wrong country. It had been built seven generations ago by a certain Perowne, an English architect much favoured by the colonial authorities,
whose only style was that of the neo--classical English country house. In those days the great zamindars were crazy for European architecture. Saeed's great--great--great--great--grand-father had hired the fellow five minutes after meeting him at the Viceroy's reception, to indicate publicly that not all Indian Muslims had supported the action of the Meerut soldiers or been in sympathy with the subsequent uprisings, no, not by any means; -- and then given him carte blanche; -- so here Peristan now stood, in the middle of near-tropical potato fields and beside the great banyan-tree, covered in bougainvillaea creeper, with snakes in the kitchens and butterfly skeletons in the cupboards. Some said its name owed more to the Englishman's than to anything more fanciful: it was a mere contraction of_Perownistan_.
After seven generations it was at last beginning to look as if it belonged in this landscape of bullock carts and palm-trees and high, clear, star--heavy skies. Even the stained--glass window looking down on the staircase of King Charles the Headless had been, in an indefinable manner, naturalized. Very few of these old zamindar houses had survived the egalitarian depredations of the present, and accordingly there hung over Peristan something of the musty air of a museum, even though -- or perhaps because -- Mirza Saeed took great pride in
the old place and had spent lavishly to keep it in trim. He slept under a high canopy of worked and beaten brass in a ship-like bed that had been occupied by three Viceroys. In the grand salon he liked to sit with Mishal and Mrs. Qureishi in the unusual three-way love seat. At one end of this room a colossal Shiraz carpet stood rolled up, on wooden blocks, awaiting the glamorous reception which would merit its unfurling, and which never came. In the dining-room there were stout classicalcolumns with ornate Corinthian tops, and there were peacocks, both real and stone, strolling on the main steps to the house, and Venetian chandeliers tinkling in the hail. The original punkahs were still in full working order, all their operating cords travelling by way of pulleys and holes in walls and floors to a
little, airless boot-room where the punkah-wallah
sat and tugged the lot together, trapped in the irony of the foetid air of that tiny windowless room while he despatched cool breezes to all other parts of the house. The servants, too, went back seven generations and had therefore lost the art of complaining. The old ways ruled: even the Titlipur sweet-vendor was required to seek the zamindar's approval before commencing to sell any innovative sweetmeat he might have invented. Life in Peristan was as soft as it was hard under the tree; but, even into such cushioned existences, heavy blows can
fall.
o o oThe discovery that his wife was spending most of her time closeted with Ayesha filled the Mirza with an insupportable irritation, an eczema of the spirit that maddened him because there was no way of scratching it. Mishal was hoping that the archangel, Ayesha's husband, would grant her a baby, but because she couldn't tell that to her husband she grew sullen and shrugged petulantly when he asked her why she wasted so much time with the village's craziest girl. Mishal's new reticence worsened the itch in Mirza Saeed's heart, and made him jealous, too, although he wasn't sure if he was jealous of Ayesha, or Mishal. He noticed for the first time that the mistress of the butterflies had eyes of the same
lustrous grey shade as his wife, and for some reason this made him cross, too, as if it proved that the women were ganging up on him, whispering God knew what secrets; maybe they were chittcring and chattering about him! This zenana business seemed to have backfired; even that old jelly Mrs. Qureishi had been taken in by Ayesha. Quite a threesome, thought Mirza Saeed; when mumbo-jumbo gets in through your door, good sense leaves by the
window.
As for Ayesha: when she encountered the Mirza on
the balcony, or in the garden as he wandered reading Urdu love-poetry, she was invariably deferential and shy; but her good behaviour,coupled with the total absence of any spark of erotic interest, drove Saeed further and further into the helplessness of his despair. So it was that when, one day, he spied Ayesha entering his wife's quarters
and heard, a few minutes later, his mother--in-- law's voice rise in a melodramatic shriek, he was seized by a mood of mulish vengefulness and deliberately waited a full three minutes before going to investigate. He found Mrs. Qureishi tearing her hair and sobbing like a movie queen, while Mishal and Ayesha sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, grey eyes staring into grey, and Mishal's face was cradled between Ayesha's outstretched palms.
It turned out that the archangel had informed Ayesha that the zamindar's wife was dying of cancer, that her breasts were full of the malign nodules of death, and that she had no more than a few months to live. The location of the cancer had proved to Mishal the cruelty of God, because only a vicious deity would place death in the breast of a woman whose only dream was to suckle new life. When Saeed entered, Ayesha had been whispering
urgently to Mishal: "You mustn't think that way. God will save you. This is a test of faith."
Mrs. Qureishi told Mirza Saeed the bad news with many shrieks and howls, and for the confused zamindar it was the last straw. He flew into atemper and started yelling loudly and trembling as if he might at any moment start smashing up the furniture in the room and its occupants as well.
"To hell with your spook cancer," he screamed at Ayesha in his exasperation. "You have come into my house with your craziness and angels and dripped poison into my family's ears. Get out of here with your visions and your invisible spouse. This is the modern world, and it is medical doctors and not ghosts in potato fields who tell us when we are ill. You have created this bloody hullabaloo for nothing. Get out and never come on to my land again."
Ayesha heard him out without removing her eyes or hands from Mishal. When Saeed stopped for breath, clenching and unclenching his fists, she said softly to his wife: "Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given." When he heard this formula, which people all over the village were beginning to parrot as if they knew what it meant, Mirza Saced Akhtar went briefly out of his mind, raised his hand and knocked Ayesha senseless. She fell to the floor, bleeding from the mouth, a tooth loosened by his fist, and as she lay there Mrs. Qureishi hurled abuse at her son-in-law. "O God, I
have put my daughter in the care of a killer. O God, a woman hitter. Go on, hit me also, get some practice. Defiler of saints, blasphemer, devil, unclean." Saeed left the room without saying a word.The next day Mishal Akhtar insisted on returning to the city for a complete medical check-up. Saeed
took a stand. "If you want to indulge in superstition, go, but don't expect me to come along. It's eight hours' drive each way; so, to hell with it." Mishal left that afternoon with her mother and the driver, and as a result Mirza Saeed was not where he should have been, that is, at his wife's side, when the results of the tests were communicated to her: positive, inoperable, too far advanced, the claws of the cancer dug in deeply throughout her chest. A
few months, six if she was lucky, and before that, coming soon, the pain. Mishal returned to Peristan and went straight to her rooms in the zenana, where she wrote her husband a formal note on lavender stationery, telling him of the doctor's diagnosis. When he read her death sentence, written in her
own hand, he wanted very badly to burst into tears, but his eyes remained obstinately dry. He had had no time for the Supreme Being for many years, but now a couple of Aycsha's phrases popped back into his mind. _God will save you. Everything will be given_. A bitter, superstitious notion occurred to
him: "It is a curse," he thought. "Because I lusted after Ayesha, she has murdered my wife."When he went to the zenana, Mishal refused to see him, but her mother, barring the doorway, handed Saeed a second note on scented blue notepaper. "I want to see Ayesha," it read. "Kindly permit this." Bowing his head, Mirza Saeed gave his assent, and crept away in shame.
o o o
With Mahound, there is always a struggle; with the Imam, slavery; but with this girl, there is nothing. Gibreel is inert, usually asleep in the dream as he is in life. She comes upon him under a tree, or in a ditch, hears what he isn't saying, takes what she needs, and leaves. What does he know about cancer, for example? Not a solitary thing.
All around him, he thinks as he half--dreams, half- wakes, are people hearing voices, being seduced by words. But not his; never his original material. -- Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling them to move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease?
He can't work it out. o o o
The day after Mishal Akhtar's return to Titlipur, the girl Ayesha, whom people were beginning to call a kahin, a pir, disappeared completely for a week. Her hapless admirer, Osman the clown, who had been following her at a distance along the dusty potato track to Chatnapatna, told the villagers that abreeze got up and blew dust into his eyes; when he got it out again she had "just gone". Usually, when Osman and his bullock started telling their tall tales about djinnis and magic lamps and open--sesames, the villagers looked tolerant and teased him, okay, Osman, save it for those idiots in Chatnapatna; they may fall for that stuff but here in Titlipur we know which way is up and that palaces do not appear unless a thousand and one labourers build them, nor do they disappear unless the same workers knock them down. On this occasion, however, nobody laughed at the clown, because where Ayesha was concerned the villagers were willing to believe anything. They had grown convinced that the snow- haired girl was the true successor to old Bibiji, because had the butterflies not reappeared in the year of her birth, and did they not follow her around like a cloak? Ayesha was the vindication of the longsoured hope engendered by the butterflies' return, and the evidence that great things were still possible in this life, even for the weakest and
poorest in the land.
"The angel has taken her away," marvelled the Sarpanch's wife Khadija, and Osman burst into tears. "But no, it is a wonderful thing," old Khadija uncomprehendingly explained. The villagers teased the Sarpanch: "How you got to be village headman with such a tactless spouse, beats us.""You chose me," he dourly replied.
On the seventh day after her disappearance Ayesha was sighted walking towards the village, naked again and dressed in golden butterflies, her silver hair streaming behind her in the breeze. She went directly to the home of Sarpanch Muhammad Din and asked that the Titlipur panchayat be convened
for an immediate emergency meeting. "The greatest event in the history of the tree has come upon us," she confided. Muhammad Din, unable to refuse her, fixed the time of the meeting for that evening, after dark.
That night the panchayat members took their places on the usual branch of the tree, while Ayesha the kahin stood before them on the ground. "I have flown with the angel into the highest heights," she said. "Yes, even to the lote--tree of the uttermost end. The archangel, Gibreel: he has brought us a message which is also a command. Everything is required of us, and everything will be given."
Nothing in the life of the Sarpanch Muhammad Din had prepared him for the choice he was about to face. "What does the angel ask, Ayesha, daughter?" he asked, fighting to steady his voice."It is the angel's will that all of us, every man, and woman and child in the village, begin at once to prepare for a pilgrimage. We are commanded to walk from this place to Mecca Sharif, to kiss the Black Stone in the Ka"aba at the centre of the Haram Sharif, the sacred mosque. There we must surely go."
Now the panchayat's quintet began to debate heatedly. There were the crops to consider, and the impossibility of abandoning their homes en masse. "It is not to be conceived of, child," the Sarpanch
told her. "It is well known that Allah excuses haj and umra to those who are genuinely unable to go for reasons of poverty or health." But Ayesha remained silent and the elders continued to argue. Then it was as if her silence infected everyone else and for a
long moment, in which the question was settled -- although by what means nobody ever managed to comprehend -- there were no words spoken at all.
It was Osman the clown who spoke up at last, Osman the convert, for whom his new faith had
been no more than a drink of water. "It's almost two
hundred miles from here to the sea," he cried. "There are old ladies here, and babies. However can we go?""God will give us the strength," Ayesha serenely replied.
"Hasn't it occurred to you," Osman shouted, refusing to give up, "that there's a mighty ocean between us and Mecca Sharif? How will we ever cross? We have no money for the pilgrim boats. Maybe the angel will grow us wings, so we can fly?"
Many villagers rounded angrily upon the blasphemer Osman. "Be quiet now," Sarpanch Muhammad Din rebuked him. "You haven't been long in our faith or our village. Keep your trap shut and learn our
ways."
Osman, however, answered cheekily, "So this is how you welcome new settlers. Not as equals, but as people who must do as they are told." A knot of red-- faced men began to tighten around Osman, but
before anything else could happen the kahin Ayesha changed the mood entirely by answering the clown's questions.
"This, too, the angel has explained," she said quietly. "We will walk two hundred miles, and when we reach the shores of the sea, we will put our feet
into the foam, and the waters will open for us. The waves shall be parted, and we shall walk across the ocean-floor to Mecca."o o o
The next morning Mirza Saced Akhtar awoke in a house that had fallen unusually silent, and when he called for the servants there was no reply. The stillness had spread into the potato fields, too; but under the broad, spreading roof of the Titlipur tree all was hustle and bustle. The panchayat had voted unanimously to obey the command of the Archangel Gibreel, and the villagers had begun to prepare for departure. At first the Sarpanch had wanted the
carpenter Isa to construct litters that could be pulled by oxen and on which the old and infirm could ride, but that idea had been knocked on the head by his own wife, who told him, "You don't listen, Sarpanch sahibji! Didn't the angel say we must walk? Well then, that is what we must do." Only the youngest
of infants were to be excused the foot-pilgrimage, and they would be carried (it had been decided) on the backs of all the adults, in rotation. The villagers had pooled all their resources, and heaps of potatoes, lentils, rice, bitter gourds, chillies, aubergines and other vegetables were piling up next to the panchayat bough. The weight of the
provisions was to be evenly divided between the
walkers. Cooking utensils, too, were being gathered together, and whatever bedding could be found. Beasts of burden were to be taken, and a couple of carts carrying live chickens and such, but in general the pilgrims were under the Sarpanch's instructions to keep personal belongings to a minimum. Preparations had been under way since before dawn, so that by the time an incensed Mirza Saeed strode into the village, things were well advanced. For forty-five minutes the zamindar slowed thingsup by making angry speeches and shaking individual villagers by the shoulders, but then, fortunately, he gave up and left, so that the work could be
continued at its former, rapid pace. As the Mirza departed he smacked his head repeatedly and called people names, such as _loonies, simpletons_, very bad words, but he had always been a godless man, the weak end of a strong line, and he had to be left to find his own fate; there was no arguing with men like him.
By sunset the villagers were ready to depart, and
the Sarpanch told everyone to rise for prayers in the small hours so that they could leave immediately afterwards and thus avoid the worst heat of the day. That night, lying down on his mat beside old
Khadija, he murmured, "At last. I've always wanted to see the Ka"aba, to circle it before I die." She reached out from her mat to take his hand. "I, too,
have hoped for it, against hope," she said. "We'll walk through the waters together."Mirza Saeed, driven into an impotent frenzy by the spectacle of the packing village, burst in on his wife without ceremony. "You should see what's going on, Mishu," he exclaimed, gesticulating absurdly. "The whole of Titlipur has taken leave of its brains, and is off to the seaside. What is to happen to their homes, their fields? There is ruination in store. Must be political agitators involved. Someone has been bribing someone. -- Do you think if I offered cash they would stay here like sane persons?" His voice dried. Ayesha was in the room.
"You bitch," he cursed her. She was sitting cross-- legged on the bed while Mishal and her mother squatted on the floor, sorting through their belongings and working out how little they could manage with on the pilgrimage.
"You're not going," Mirza Saeed ranted."! forbid it, the devil alone knows what germ this whore has infected the villagers with, but you are my wife and I refuse to let you embark upon this suicidal venture."
"Good words," Mishal laughed bitterly. "Saeed, good choice of words. You know I can't live but you talk about suicide. Saeed, a thing is happening here, and
you with your imported European atheism don't know what it is. Or maybe you would if you looked beneath your English suitings and tried to locate your heart.""It's incredible," Saeed cried. "Mishal, Mishu, is this you? All of a sudden you've turned into this God- bothered type from ancient history?"
Mrs. Qureishi said, "Go away, son. No room for unbelievers here. The angel has told Ayesha that when Mishal completes the pilgrimage to Mecca her cancer will have disappeared. Everything is required and everything will be given."
Mirza Saeed Akhtar put his palms against a wall of his wife's bedroom and pressed his forehead against the plaster. After a long pause he said: "If it is a question of performing umra then for God's sake let's go to town and catch a plane. We can be in Mecca within a couple of days."
Mishal answered, "We are commanded to walk." Saeed lost control of himself. "Mishal? Mishal?" he
shrieked. "Commanded? Archangels, Mishu?
_Gibreel?_ God with a long beard and angels with wings? Heaven and hell, Mishal? The Devil with a pointy tail and cloven hoofs? How far are you going with this? Do women have souls, what do you say?
Or the other way: do souls have gender? Is God black or white? When the waters of the ocean part, where will the extra water go? Will it stand up sideways like walls? Mishal? Answer me. Are there miracles? Do you believe in Paradise? Will I be forgiven my sins?" He began to cry, and fell on tohis knees, with his forehead still pressed against the wall. His dying wife came up and embraced him
from behind. "Go with the pilgrimage, then," he said, dully. "But at least take the Mercedes station wagon. It's got air-conditioning and you can take the icebox full of Cokes."
"No," she said, gently. "We'll go like everybody else. We're pilgrims, Saeed. This isn't a picnic at the beach."
"I don't know what to do," Mirza Saeed Akhtar wept. "Mishu, I can't handle this by myself."
Aycsha spoke from the bed. "Mirza sahib, come with us," she said. "Your ideas are finished with. Come and save your soul."
Saeed stood up, red-eyed. "A bloody outing you wanted," he said viciously to Mrs. Qureishi. "That chicken certainly came home to roost. Your outing will finish off the lot of us, seven generations, the whole bang shoot."
Mishal leaned her cheek against his back. "Come with us, Saeed. Just come."He turned to face Ayesha. "There is no God," he said firmly.
"There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His
Prophet," she replied.
"The mystical experience is a subjective, not an objective truth," he went on. "The waters will not open."
"The sea will part at the angel's command," Ayesha answered.
"You are leading these people into certain disaster." "I am taking them into the bosom of God."
"I don't believe in you," Mirza Saeed insisted. "But I'm going to come, and will try to end this insanity with every step I take."
"God chooses many means," Ayesha rejoiced, "many roads by which the doubtful may be brought into his certainty."
"Go to hell," shouted Mirza Saeed Akhtar, and ran, scattering butterflies, from the room.
o o o"Who is the madder," Osman the clown whispered into his bullock's ear as he groomed it in its small byre, "the madwoman, or the fool who loves the madwoman?" The bullock didn't reply. "Maybe we should have stayed untouchable," Osman continued. "A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well." And the bullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.
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