VIII
The Parting of the Arabian Sea
It had been the habit of Srinivas the toy merchant to threaten his wife and children, from time to time, that one day, when the material world had lost its savour, he would drop everything, including his name, and turn sanyasi, wandering from village to village with a begging bowl and a stick. Mrs. Srinivas treated these threats tolerantly, knowing that her gelatinous and good-humoured husband liked to be thought of as a devout man, but also a bit of an adventurer (had he not insisted on that absurd and scarifying flight into the Grand Canyon in Amrika years ago?); the idea of becoming a mendicant holy man satisfied both needs. Yet, when she saw his ample posterior so comfortably ensconced in an armchair on their front porch, looking out at the world through stout wire netting, -- or when she watched him playing with their youngest daughter, fiveyear-old Minoo, -- or when she observed that his appetite, far from diminishing to begging-bowl proportions, was increasing contentedly with the passing years -- then Mrs. Srinivas puckered up her lips, adopted the insouciant expression of a film
beauty (though she was as plump and wobbling as her spouse) and went whistling indoors. As a result, when she found his chair empty, with his glass of lime-juice unfinished on one of its arms, it took her completely by surprise.To tell the truth, Srinivas himself could never properly explain what made him leave the comfort of his morning porch and stroll across to watch the arrival of the villagers of Titlipur. The urchin boys who knew everything an hour before it happened
had been shouting in the street about an improbable procession of people coming with bags and baggage down the potato track towards the grand trunk road, led by a girl with silver hair, with great exclamations of butterflies over their heads, and, bringing up the rear, Mirza Saeed Akhtar in his olive--green
Mercedes--Benz station wagon, looking like a mango- stone had got stuck in his throat.
For all its potato silos and famous toy factories, Chatnapatna was not such a big place that the arrival of one hundred and fifty persons could pass unnoticed. Just before the procession arrived Srinivas had received a deputation from his factory workers, asking for permission to close down operations for a couple of hours so that they could witness the great event. Knowing they would probably take the time off anyway, he agreed. But
he himself remained, for a time, stubbornly planted on his porch, trying to pretend. that the butterflies of excitement had not begun to stir in his capacious stomach. Later, he would confide to Mishal Akhtar:"It was a presentiment. What to say? I knew you-all were not here for refreshments only. She had come for me."
Titlipur arrived in Chatnapatna in a consternation of howling babies, shouting children, creaking oldsters, and sour jokes from the Osman of the boom-boom bullock for whom Srinivas did not care one jot. Then the urchins informed the toy king that among the travellers were the wife and mother--in--law of the zamindar Mirza Saeed, and they were on foot like
the peasants, wearing simple kurta--pajamas and no jewels at all. This was the point at which Srinivas lumbered over to the roadside canteen around which the Titlipur pilgrims were crowding while potato bhurta and parathas were handed round. He arrived at the same time as the Chatnapatna police jeep.
The Inspector was standing on the passenger seat, shouting through a megaphone that he intended to take strong action against this "communal" march if it was not disbanded at once. Hindu--Muslim business, Srinivas thought; bad, bad.
The police were treating the pilgrimage as some kind of sectarian demonstration, but when Mirza
Saeed Akhtar stepped forward and told the Inspector the truth the officer became confused. Sri Srinivas, a Brahmin, was obviously not a man who had ever considered making a pilgrimage to Mecca, but he was impressed nevertheless. He pushed up through the crowd to hear what the zamindar was saying: "And it is the purpose of these good people to walk to the Arabian Sea, believing as they do that the waters will part for them." Mirza Saeed's voice sounded weak, and the Inspector, Chatnapatna's Station Head Officer, was unconvinced. "Are you serious, ji?" Mirza Saeed said: "Not me. They, but, are serious as hell. I'm planning to change their minds before anything crazy happens." The SHO, all straps, moustachioes and self-importance, shook his head. "But, see here, sir, how can I permit so many individuals to congregate on the street? Temperscan be inflamed; incident is possible." Just then the crowd of pilgrims parted and Srinivas saw for the first time the fantastic figure of the girl dressed entirely in butterflies, with snowy hair flowing down as far as her ankles. "Arré deo," he shouted, "Ayesha, is it you?" And added, foolishly: "Then where are my Family Planning dolls?"
His outburst was ignored; everybody was watching Ayesha as she approached the puff-chested SHO. She said nothing, but smiled and nodded, and the fellow seemed to grow twenty years younger, until
in the manner of a boy of ten or eleven he said, "Okay okay, mausi. Sorry, ma. No offence. I beg your pardon, please." That was the end of the police trouble. Later that day, in the afternoon heat, a group of town youths known to have RSS and Vishwa Hindu Parishad connections began throwingstones from nearby rooftops; whereupon the Station Head Officer had them arrested and in jail in two minutes flat.
"Ayesha, daughter," Srinivas said aloud to the empty air, "what the hell happened to you?"
During the heat of the day the pilgrims rested in whatever shade they could find. Srinivas wandered among them in a kind of daze, filled up with emotion, realizing that a great turning-- point in his life had unaccountably arrived. His eyes kept searching out the transformed figure of Ayesha the seer, who was resting in the shade of a pipal-tree in the company of Mishal Akhtar, her mother Mrs. Qureishi, and the lovesick Osman with his bullock. Eventually Srinivas bumped into the zamindar Mirza Saeed, who was stretched out on the back seat of his Mercedes-- Benz, unsleeping, a man in torment. Srinivas spoke to him with a humbleness born of his wonderment. "Sethji, you don't believe in the girl?"
"Srinivas," Mirza Saeed sat up to reply, "we are
modern men. We know, for instance, that old people die on long journeys, that God does not cure cancer, and that oceans do not part. We have to stop this idiocy. Come with me. Plenty of room in the car. Maybe you can help to talk them out of it; that Ayesha, she's grateful to you, perhaps she'll listen.""To come in the car?" Srinivas felt helpless, as though mighty hands were gripping his limbs. "There is my business, but."
"This is a suicide mission for many of our people," Mirza Saeed urged him. "I need help. Naturally I could pay."
"Money is no object," Srinivas retreated, affronted. "Excuse, please, Sethji. I must consider."
"Don't you see?" Mirza Saeed shouted after him. "We are not communal people, you and I. Hindu-- Muslim bhai-bhai! We can open up a secular front against this mumbo-jumbo."
Srinivas turned back. "But I am not an unbeliever," he protested. "The picture of goddess Lakshmi is always on my wall."
"Wealth is an excellent goddess for a businessman," Mirza Saeed said.
"And in my heart," Srinivas added. Mirza Saeed lost his temper. "But goddesses, I swear. Even your own philosophers admit that these are abstract concepts only. Embodiments of shakti which is itself an abstract notion: the dynamic power of the gods."The toy merchant was looking down at Ayesha as she slept under her quilt of butterflies. "I am no philosopher, Sethji," he said. And did not say that his heart had leapt into his mouth because he had
realized that the sleeping girl and the goddess in the calendar on his factory wall had the identical, same- to-same, face.
o o o
When the pilgrimage left town, Srinivas accompanied it, turning a deaf ear to the entreaties of his wild-haired wife who picked up Minoo and shook her in her husband's face. He explained to Ayesha that while he did not wish to visit Mecca he had been seized by a longing to walk with her a while, perhaps even as far as the sea.
As he took his place among the Titlipur villagers and fell into step with the man next to him, he observed with a mixture of incomprehension and awe that infinite butterfly swarm over their heads, like a gigantic umbrella shading the pilgrims from the sun. It was as if the butterflies of Titlipur had taken over
the functions of the great tree. Next he gave a little cry of fear, astonishment and pleasure, because a few dozen of those chameleon-winged creatures had settled on his shoulders and turned, upon the instant, the exact shade of scarlet of his shirt. Now he recognized the man at his side as the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, who had chosen not to walk at the front. He and his wife Khadija strode contentedly forward in spite of their advanced years, and when he saw the lepidopteral blessing that had descended on the toy merchant, Muhammad Din reached out and grasped him by the hand.o o o
It was becoming clear that the rains would fail. Lines of bony cattle migrated across the landscape, searching for a drink. _Love is Water_, someone had written in whitewash on the brick wall of a scooter factory. On the road they met other families heading south with their lives bundled up on the backs of dying donkeys, and these, too, were heading hopefully towards water. "But not bloody salt
water," Mirza Saeed shouted at the Titlipur pilgrims. "And not to see it divide itself in two! They want to stay alive, but you crazies want to die." Vultures herded together by the roadside and watched the pilgrims pass.
Mirza Saeed spent the first weeks of the pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea in a state of permanent, hysterical agitation. Most of the walking was done in the mornings and late afternoons, and at thesetimes Saeed would often leap out of his station wagon to plead with his dying wife. "Come to your senses, Mishu. You're a sick woman. Come and lie down at least, let me press your feet a while." But she refused, and her mother shooed him away.
"See, Saeed, you're in such a negative mood, it gets depressing. Go and drink your Coke-shoke in your AC vehicle and leave us yatris in peace." After the first week the Air Conditioned vehicle lost its driver.
Mirza Saeed's chauffeur resigned and joined the foot- pilgrims; the zamindar was obliged to get behind the wheel himself. After that, when his anxiety
overcame him, it was necessary to stop the car, park, and then rush madly back and forth among
the pilgrims, threatening, entreating, offering bribes. At least once a day he cursed Ayesha to her face for ruining his life, but he could never keep up the
abuse because every time he looked at her he desired her so much that he felt ashamed. The cancer had begun to turn Mishal's skin grey, and Mrs. Qureishi, too, was beginning to fray at the edges; her society chappals had disintegrated and she was suffering from frightful foot-blisters that looked like little water--balloons. When Saeed offered her the comfort of the car, however, she
continued to refuse point-blank. The spell that Ayesha had placed upon the pilgrims was still holding firm. -- And at the end of these sorties into the heart of the pilgrimage Mirza Saeed, sweating and giddy from the heat and his growing despair, would realize that the marchers had left his car some way behind, and he would have to totter backto it by himself, sunk in gloom. One day he got back to the station wagon to find that an empty coconut- shell thrown from the window of a passing bus had smashed his laminated windscreen, which looked, now, like a spider's web full of diamond flies. He had to knock all the pieces out, and the glass diamonds seemed to be mocking him as they fell on to the
road and into the car, they seemed to speak of the transience and worthlessness of earthly possessions, but a secular man lives in the world of things and Mirza Saeed did not intend to be broken as easily as a windscreen. At night he would go to lie beside his wife on a bedroll under the stars by the side of the grand trunk road. When he told her about the accident she offered him cold comfort. "It's a sign," she said. "Abandon the station wagon and join the rest of us at last."
"Abandon a Mercedes-Benz?" Saeed yelped in genuine horror.
"So what?" Mishal replied in her grey, exhausted
voice. "You keep talking about ruination. Then what difference is a Mercedes going to make?""You don't understand," Saeed wept. "Nobody understands me."
Gibreel dreamed a drought:
The land browned under the rainless skies. The corpses of buses and ancient monuments rotting in the fields beside the crops. Mirza Saced saw, through his shattered windscreen, the onset of calamity: the wild donkeys fucking wearily and
dropping dead, while still conjoined, in the middle of the road, the trees standing on roots exposed by soil erosion and looking like huge wooden claws scrabbling for water in the earth, the destitute farmers being obliged to work for the state as
manual labourers, digging a reservoir by the trunk road, an empty container for the rain that wouldn't fall. Wretched roadside lives: a woman with a bundle heading for a tent of stick and rag, a girl
condemned to scour, each day, this pot, this pan, in her patch of filthy dust. "Are such lives really worth as much as ours?" Mirza Saeed Akhtar asked himself. "As much as mine? As Mishal"s? How little they have experienced, how little they have on which to feed the soul." A man in a dhoti and loose yellow pugri stood like a bird on top of a milestone,
perched there with one foot on the opposite knee, one hand under the opposite elbow, smoking a bin. As Mirza Saeed Akhtar passed him he spat, and caught the zamindar full in the face.The pilgrimage advanced slowly, three hours' walking in the mornings, three more after the heat, walking at the pace of the slowest pilgrim, subject to infinite delays, the sickness of children, the harassment of the authorities, a wheel coming off one of the bullock carts; two miles a day at best,
one hundred and fifty miles to the sea, a journey of approximately eleven weeks. The first death happened on the eighteenth day. Khadija, the tactless old lady who had been for half a century the contented and contenting spouse of Sarpanch Muhammad Din, saw an archangel in a dream. "Gibreel," she whispered, "is it you?"
"No," the apparition replied. "It's I, Azraeel, the one with the lousy job. Excuse the disappointment."
The next morning she continued with the pilgrimage, saying nothing to her husband about her vision.
After two hours they neared the ruin of one of the Mughal milepost inns that had, in times long gone, been built at five--mile intervals along the highway. When Khadija saw the ruin she knew nothing of its past, of the wayfarers robbed in their sleep and so
on, but she understood its present well enough. "I have to go in there and lie down," she said to the Sarpanch, who protested: "But, the march!" "Never mind that," she said gently. "You can catch them up later."She lay down in the rubble of the old ruin with her head on a smooth stone which the Sarpanch found for her. The old man wept, but that didn't do any good, and she was dead within a minute. He ran back to the march and confronted Ayesha angrily. "I should never have listened to you," he told her.
"And now you have killed my wife."
The march stopped. Mirza Saeed Akhtar, spotting an opportunity, insisted loudly that Khadija be taken to a proper Muslim burial ground. But Ayesha objected. "We are ordered by the archangel to go directly to the sea, without returns or detours." Mirza Saeed appealed to the pilgrims. "She is your Sarpanch's beloved wife," he shouted. "Will you dump her in a hole by the side of the road?"
When the Titlipur villagers agreed that Khadija should be buried at once, Saeed could not believe his ears. He realized that their determination was even greater than he had suspected: even the bereaved Sarpanch acquiesced. Khadija was buried
in the corner of a barren field behind the ruined way-
station of the past.The next day, however, Mirza Saeed noticed that the
Sarpanch had come unstuck from the pilgrimage, and was mooching along disconsolately, a little distance apart from the rest, sniffing the bougainvillaea bushes. Saeed jumped out of the Mercedes and rushed off to Ayesha, to make
another scene. "You monster!" he shouted. "Monster without a heart! Why did you bring the old woman here to die?" She ignored him, but on his way back to the station wagon the Sarpanch came over and said: "We were poor people. We knew we could never hope to go to Mecca Sharif, until she persuaded. She persuaded, and now see the outcome of her deeds."
Ayesha the kahin asked to speak to the Sarpanch, but gave him not a single word of consolation. "Harden your faith," she scolded him. "She who dies on the great pilgrimage is assured of a home in Paradise. Your wife is sitting now among the angels and the flowers; what is there for you to regret?"
That evening the Sarpanch Muhammad Din approached Mirza Saeed as he sat by a small campfire. "Excuse, Sethji," he said, "but is it possible that I ride, as you once offered, in your motor--car?"
Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism. "My first convert," Mirza Saeed rejoiced.o o o
By the fourth week the defection of Sarpanch Muhammad Din had begun to have its effect. He sat on the back seat of the Mercedes as if he were the zamindar and Mirza Saeed the chauffeur, and little by little the leather upholstery and the
airconditioning unit and the whisky-soda cabinet and the electrically operated mirror-glass windows began to teach him hauteur; his nose tilted into the air and he acquired the supercilious expression of a man
who can see without being seen. Mirza Saeed in the driver's seat felt his eyes and nose filling up with the dust that came in through the hole where the windscreen used to be, but in spite of such discomforts he was feeling better than before. Now, at the end of each day, a cluster of pilgrims would congregate around the Mercedes-Benz with its gleaming star, and Mirza Saeed would try and talk sense into them while they watched Sarpanch Muhammad Din raise and lower the mirrorglass rear windows, so that they saw, alternately, his features and their own. The Sarpanch's presence in the
Mercedes lent new authority to Mirza Saeed's words.Ayesha didn't try to call the villagers away, and so far her confidence had been justified; there had been no further defections to the camp of the faithless. But Saeed saw her casting numerous glances in his direction and whether she was a visionary or not Mirza Saeed would have bet good
money that those were the bad-tempered glances of a young girl who was no longer sure of getting her own way.
Then she disappeared.
She went off during an afternoon siesta and did not reappear for a day and a half, by which time there was pandemonium among the pilgrims -- she always knew how to whip up an audience's feelings, Saeed conceded; then she sauntered back up to them across the dust--clouded landscape, and this time
her silver hair was streaked with gold, and her eyebrows, too, were golden. She summoned the villagers to her and told them that the archangel was displeased that the people of Titlipur had been filled up with doubts just because of the ascent of a martyr to Paradise. She warned that he was seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, "so that all you'll get at the Arabian Sea is a salt--water bath, and then it's back to your
deserted potato fields on which no rain will ever fall again." The villagers were appalled. "No, it can't be," they pleaded. "Bibiji, forgive us." It was the firsttime they had used the name of the longago saint to describe the girl who was leading them with an absolutism that had begun to frighten them as much as it impressed. After her speech the Sarpanch and Mirza Saeed were left alone in the station wagon. "Second round to the archangel," Mirza Saeed thought.
o o o
By the fifth week the health of most of the older pilgrims had deteriorated sharply, food supplies were running low, water was hard to find, and the children's tear ducts were dry. The vulture herds were never far away.
As the pilgrims left behind the rural areas and came towards more densely populated zones, the level of harassment increased. The long--distance buses and trucks often refused to deviate and the pedestrians had to leap, screaming and tumbling over each other, out of their way. Cyclists, families of six on Rajdoot motor--scooters, petty shop--keepers
hurled abuse. "Crazies! Hicks! Muslims!" Often they were obliged to keep marching for an entire night because the authorities in this or that small town
didn't want such riff-raff sleeping on their pavements. More deaths became inevitable.Then the bullock of the convert, Osman, fell to its knees amid the bicycles and camel-dung of a nameless little town. "Get up, idiot," he yelled at it impotently. "What do you think you're doing, dying on me in front of the fruit--stalls of strangers?" The bullock nodded, twice for yes, and expired.
Butterflies covered the corpse, adopting the colour of its grey hide, its horn-cones and bells. The inconsolable Osman ran to Ayesha (who had put on a dirty sari as a concession to urban prudery, even though butterfly clouds still trailed off her like glory). "Do bullocks go to Heaven?" he asked in a piteous voice; she shrugged. "Bullocks have no souls," she said coolly, "and it is souls we march to save." Osman looked at her and realized he no
longer loved her. "You've become a demon," he told her in disgust.
"I am nothing," Ayesha said. "I am a messenger." "Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy
the innocent," Osman raged. "What's he afraid of? Is
he so unconfident that he needs us to die to prove our love?"
As though in response to such blasphemy, Ayesha
imposed even stricter disciplinary measures, insisting that all pilgrims say all five prayers, and decreeing that Fridays would be days of fasting. By the end of the sixth week she had forced the marchers to leave four more bodies where they fell: two old men, one old woman, and one six-year-old girl. The pilgrims marched on, turning their backs on the dead; behind them, however, Mirza SaeedAkhtar gathered up the bodies and made sure they received a decent burial. In this he was assisted by the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and the former untouchable, Osman. On such days they would fall quite a way behind the march, but a Mercedes-Benz station wagon doesn't take long to catch up with over a hundred and forty men, women and children walking wearily towards the sea.
o o o
The dead grew in number, and the groups of unsettled pilgrims around the Mercedes got larger night by night. Mirza Saeed began to tell them stories. He told them about lemmings, and how the enchantress Circe turned men into pigs; he told, too, the story of a pipe-player who lured a town's children into a mountain-crack. When he had told this tale in their own language he recited verses in
English, so that they could listen to the music of the poetry even though they didn't understand the
words. "Hamelin town's in Brunswick," he began. "Near famous Hanover City. The River Weser, deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side . . ."Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the girl Ayesha advance, looking furious, while the butterflies glowed like the campfire behind her, making it appear as though flames were streaming from her body.
"Those who listen to the Devil's verses, spoken in
the Devil's tongue," she cried, "will go to the Devil in the end."
"It's a choice, then," Mirza Saeed answered her, "between the devil and the deep blue sea."
o o o
Eight weeks had passed, and relations between Mirza Saeed and his wife Mishal had so deteriorated that they were no longer on speaking terms. By now, and in spite of the cancer that had turned her as grey as funeral ash, Mishal had become Ayesha's chief lieutenant and most devoted disciple. The
doubts of other marchers had only strengthened her own faith, and for these doubts she unequivocally blamed her husband.
"Also," she had rebuked him in their last
conversation, "there is no warmth in you any more. I feel afraid to approach.""No warmth?" he yelled. "How can you say it? No warmth? For whom did I come running on this damnfool pilgrimage? To look after whom? Because
I love whom? Because I am so worried about, so sad about, so filled with misery about whom? No
warmth? Are you a stranger? How can you say such a thing?"
"Listen to yourself," she said in a voice which had begun to fade into a kind of smokiness, an opacity. "Always anger. Cold anger, icy, like a fort."
"This isn't anger," he bellowed. "This is anxiety, unhappiness, wretchedness, injury, pain. Where can you hear anger?"
"I hear it," she said. "Everyone can hear, for miles around."
"Come with me," he begged her. "I'll take you to the top clinics in Europe, Canada, the USA. Trust in Western technology. They can do marvels. You always liked gadgets, too."
"I am going on a pilgrimage to Mecca," she said, and turned away.
"You damn .stupid bitch," he roared at her back. "Just because you're going to die doesn't mean you have to take all these people with you." But she walked away across the roadside camp--site, never looking back; and now that he'd proved her point by losing control and speaking the unspeakable he fell to his knees and wept. After that quarrel Mishal refused to sleep beside him any more. She and hermother rolled out their bedding next to the butterfly- shrouded prophetess of their Meccan quest.
By day, Mishal worked ceaselessly among the pilgrims, reassuring them, bolstering their faith, gathering them together beneath the wing of her gentleness. Ayesha had started retreating deeper and deeper into silence, and Mishal Akhtar became, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the pilgrims. But there was one pilgrim over whom she lost her grip: Mrs. Qureishi, her mother, the wife of the director of the state bank.
The arrival of Mr. Qureishi, Mishal's father, was quite an event. The pilgrims had stopped in the shade of a line of plane-trees and were busy gathering brushwood and scouring cookpots when the motorcade was sighted. At once Mrs. Qureishi, who was twenty-five pounds lighter than she had been at the beginning of the walk, leaped squeakily to her feet and tried frantically to brush the dirt off her
clothes and to put her hair in order. Mishal saw her mother fumbling feebly with a molten lipstick and asked, "What's bugging you, ma? Relax, na."Her mother pointed feebly at the approaching cars. Moments later the tall, severe figure of the great banker was standing over them. "If I had not seen it I would not have believed," he said. "They told me, but I pooh-poohed. Therefore it took me this long to find out. To vanish from Peristan without a word: now what in tarnation?"
Mrs. Qureishi shook helplessly under her husband's eyes, beginfling to cry, feeling the calluses on her feet and the fatigue that had sunk into every pore of her body. "O God, I don't know, I am sorry," she said. "God knows what came over."
"Don't you know I occupy a delicate post?" Mr. Qureishi cried. "Public confidence is of essence. How does it look then that my wife gallivants with bhangis?"
Mishal, embracing her mother, told her father to stop bullying. Mr. Akhtar saw for the first time that his daughter had the mark of death on her forehead and deflated instantly like an inner tube. Mishal told him about the cancer, and the promise of the seer Ayesha that a miracle would occur in Mecca, and she would be completely cured.
"Then let me fly you to Mecca, pronto," her father pleaded. "Why walk if you can go by Airbus?"But Mishal was adamant. "You should go away," she told her father. "Only the faithful can make this
thing come about. Mummy will look after me."
Mr. Qureishi in his limousine helplessly joined Mirza Saeed at the rear of the procession, constantly sending one of the two servants who had accompanied him on motor-scooters to ask Mishal if she would like food, medicine, Thums Up, anything at all. Mishal turned down all his offers, and after three days -- because banking is banking -- Mr. Qureishi departed for the city, leaving behind one of the motor--scooter chaprassis to serve the women. "He is yours to command," he told them. "Don't be stupid now. Make this as easy as you can."
The day after Mr. Qureishi's departure, the chaprassi Gul Muhammad ditched his scooter and joined the foot-pilgrims, knotting a handkerchief around his head to indicate his devotion. Ayesha said nothing, but when she saw the scooter-wallah join the pilgrimage she grinned an impish grin that reminded Mirza Saeed that she was, after all, not on"y a figure out of a dream, but also a flesh-and-blood young
girl.
Mrs. Qureishi began to complain. The brief contact with her old life had broken her resolve, and now that it was too late she had started thinking constantly about parties and soft cushions and glasses of iced fresh lime soda. It suddenly seemed wholly unreasonable to her that a person of her breeding should be asked to go barefoot like a common sweeper. She presented herself to Mirza Saeed with a sheepish expression on her face."Saeed, son, do you hate me completely?" she wheedled, her plump features arranging themselves in a parody of coquettishness.
Saeed was appalled by her grimace. "Of course not," he managed to say.
"But you do, you loathe me, and my cause is hopeless," she flirted.
"Ammaji," Saeed gulped, "what are you saying?" "Because I have from time to time spoken roughly
to you."
"Please forget it," Saeed said, bemused by her performance, but she would not. "You must know it was all for love, isn't it? Love," said Mrs. Qureishi, "it is a many--splendoured thing."
"Makes the world go round," Mirza Saeed agreed, trying to enter into the spirit of the conversation."Love conquers all," Mrs. Qureishi confirmed. "It has conquered my anger. This I must demonstrate to you by riding with you in your motor."
Mirza Saeed bowed. "It is yours, Ammaji."
"Then you will ask those two village men to sit in front with you. Ladies must be protected, isn't it?"
"It is," he replied. o o o
The story of the village that was walking to the sea had spread all over the country, and in the ninth week the pilgrims were being pestered by journalists, local politicos in search of votes, businessmen who offered to sponsor the march if the yatris would only consent to wear sandwich boards advertising various goods and services,
foreign tourists looking for the mysteries of the East, nostalgic Gandhians, and the kind of human vultures who go to motor--car races to watch the crashes. When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies
and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded
expectations, that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not paper over. Photographs of Ayesha were appearing in all the papers, and the pilgrims even passed advertising hoardings on which the lepidopteral beauty hadbeen painted three times as large as life, beside slogans reading _Our cloths also are as delicate as a butterfly's wing_, or suchlike. Then more alarming news reached them. Certain religious extremist groupings had issued statements denouncing the "Ayesha Haj" as an attempt to "hijack" public attention and to "incite communal sentiment". Leaflets were being distributed -- Mishal picked
them up off the road -- in which it was claimed that "Padyatra, or foot--pilgrimage, is an ancient, pre-- Islamic tradition of national culture, not imported property of Mughal immigrants." Also: "Purloining of this tradition by so--called Ayesha Bibiji is flagrant and deliberate inflammation of already sensitive situation."
"There will be no trouble," the kahin broke her silence to announce.
o o o
Gibreel dreamed a suburb:
As the Ayesha Haj neared Sarang, the outermost suburb of the great metropolis on the Arabian Sea
towards which the visionary girl was leading them, journalists, politicos and police officers redoubled their visits. At first the policemen threatened to disband the march forcibly; the politicians, however, advised that this would look very like a sectarian act and could lead to outbreaks of communal violence from top to bottom of the country. Eventually the police chiefs agreed to permit the march, but groused menacingly about being "unable to guarantee safe passages" for the pilgrims. Mishal Akhtar said: "We are going on."The suburb of Sarang owed its relative affluence to the presence of substantial coal deposits nearby. It turned out that the coalminers of Sarang, men
whose lives were spent boring pathways through the earth -- "parting" it, one might say -- could not stomach the notion that a girl could do the same, with a wave of her hand, for the sea. Cadres of certain communalist groupings had been at work, inciting the miners to violence, and as a result of the activities of these agents provocateurs a mob was forming, carrying banners demanding: NO ISLAMIC PADYATRA! BUTTERFLY WITCH, GO HOME.
On the night before they were due to enter Sarang, Mirza Saeed made another futile appeal to the pilgrims. "Give up," he implored uselessly. "Tomorrow we will all be killed." Ayesha whispered
in Mishal's ear, and she spoke up: "Better a martyr than a coward. Are there any cowards here?"There was one. Sri Srinivas, explorer of the Grand Canyon, proprietor of a Toy Univas, whose motto was creativity and sinceriety, sided with Mirza
Saeed. As a devout follower of the goddess Lakshmi, whose face was so perplexingly also Ayesha's, he
felt unable to participate in the coming hostilities on either side. "I am a weak fellow," he confessed to Saeed. "I have loved Miss Ayesha, and a man should fight for what he loves; but, what to do, I require neutral status." Srinivas was the fifth member of the renegade society in the Mercedes--Benz, and now Mrs. Qureishi had no option but to share the back seat with a common man. Srinivas greeted her unhappily, and, seeing her bounce grumpily along
the seat away from him, attempted to placate. "Please to accept a token of my esteem." -- And produced, from an inside pocket, a Family Planning doll.
That night the deserters remained in the station wagon while the faithful prayed in the open air. They had been allowed to camp in a disused goods train marshalling yard, guarded by military police. Mirza Saeed couldn't sleep. He was thinking about something Srinivas had said to him, about being a Gandhian in his head, "but I'm too weak to put such
notions into practice. Excuse me, but it's true. I was not cut out for suffering, Sethji. I should havestayed with wife and kiddies and cut out this adventure disease that has made me land up in such a place."
In my family, too, Mirza Saeed in his insomnia answered the sleeping toy merchant, we have suffered from a kind of disease: one of detachment, of being unable to connect ourselves to things, events, feelings. Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we have lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.
Which was to say that he found it hard to believe that all this was really happening; but it was.
o o o
When the Ayesha Pilgrims were ready to set off the next morning, the huge clouds of butterflies that had travelled with them all the way from Titlipur suddenly broke up and vanished from view, revealing that the sky was filling up with other, more prosaic clouds. Even the creatures that had
been clothing Ayesha -- the elite corps, so to speak -
- decamped, and she had to lead the procession dressed in the mundanity of an old cotton sari with a block-printed hem of leaves. The disappearance of
the miracle that had seemed to validate their pilgrimage depressed all the marchers; so that in spite of all Mishal Akhtar's exhortations they were unable to sing as they moved forwards, deprived of the benediction of the butterflies, to meet their fate.o o o
The No Islamic Padyatra street mob had prepared a welcome for Ayesha in a street lined on both sides with the shacks of bicycle repairers. They had blocked the pilgrims' routes with dead bicycles, and waited behind this barricade of broken wheels, bent handlebars and silenced bells as the Ayesha Haj entered the northern sector of the street. Ayesha walked towards the mob as if it did not exist, and when she reached the last crossroads, beyond which the clubs and knives of the enemy awaited her,
there was a thunderclap like the trumpet of doom and an ocean fell down out of the sky. The drought had broken too late to save the crops; afterwards many of the pilgrims believed that God had been saving up the water for just this purpose, letting it build up in the sky until it was as endless as the sea, sacrificing the year's harvest in order to save his prophetess and her people.
The stunning force of the downpour unnerved both pilgrims and assailants. In the confusion of the flood
a second doomtrumpet was heard. This was, in point of fact, the horn of Mirza Saeed's Mercedes-Benz station wagon, which he had driven at high speed through the suffocating side gullies of the suburb, bringing down racks of shirts hanging on rails, and pumpkin barrows, and trays of cheap plasticnotions, until he reached the street of basket-- workers that intersected the street of bicycle repairers just to the north of the barricade. Here he accelerated as hard as he could and charged towards the crossroads, scattering pedestrians and wickerwork stools in all directions. He reached the crossroads immediately after the sea fell out of the sky, and braked violently. Sri Srinivas and Osman
leaped out, seized Mishal Akhtar and the prophetess Ayesha, and hauled them into the Mercedes in a flurry of legs, sputum and abuse. Saeed accelerated away from the scene before anybody had managed to get the blinding water out of their eyes.
Inside the car: bodies heaped in an angry jumble. Mishal Akhtar shouted abuse at her husband from the bottom of the pile: "Saboteur! Traitor! Scum from somewhere! Mule!" -- To which Saeed sarcastically replied, "Martyrdom is too easy, Mishal. Don't you want to watch the ocean open, like a flower?"
And Mrs. Qureishi, sticking her head out through
Osman's inverted legs, added in a pink-faced gasp: "Okay, come on, Mishu, quit. We meant well."o o o
Gibreel dreamed a flood:
When the rains came, the miners of Sarang had been waiting for the pilgrims with their pickaxes in their hands, but when the bicycle barricade was swept away they could not avoid the idea that God had taken Ayesha's side. The town's drainage system surrendered instantly to the overwhelming assault of the water, and the miners were soon standing in a muddy flood that reached as high as their waists. Some of them tried to move towards the pilgrims, who also continued to make efforts to advance. But now the rainstorm redoubled its force, and then doubled it again, falling from the sky in thick slabs through which it was getting difficult to breathe, as though the earth were being engulfed, and the firmament above were reuniting with the firmament below.
Gibreel, dreaming, found his vision obscured by water.
o o o
The rain stopped, and a watery sun shone down on
a Venetian scene of devastation. The roads of Sarang were now canals, along which there journeyed all manner of flotsam. Where only recently scooter--rickshaws, camel--carts and repaired bicycles had gone, there now floated newspapers, flowers, bangles, watermelons, umbrellas, chappals, sunglasses, baskets, excrement, medicine bottles, playing cards, dupattas, pancakes, lamps. The water had an odd, reddish tint that made the sodden populace imaginethat the street was flowing with blood. There was no trace of bully-boy miners or of Ayesha Pilgrims. A dog swam across the intersection by the collapsed bicycle barricade, and all around there lay the damp silence of the flood, whose waters lapped at marooned buses, while children stared from the
roofs of deliquescent gullies, too shocked to come out and play.
Then the butterflies returned.
From nowhere, as if they had been hiding behind the sun; and to celebrate the end of the rain they had
all taken the colour of sunlight. The arrival of this immense carpet of light in the sky utterly bewildered the people of Sarang, who were already reeling in
the aftermath of the storm; fearing the apocalypse, they hid indoors and closed their shutters. On a nearby hillside, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar and
his party observed the miracle's return and were filled, all of them, even the zamindar, with a kind of awe.Mirza Saeed had driven hell-for--leather, in spite of being half-- blinded by the rain which poured through the smashed windscreen, until on a road that led up and around the bend of a hill he came to a halt at the gates of the No. i Sarang Coalfield. The pitheads were dimly visible through the rain. "Brainbox," Mishal Akhtar cursed him weakly.
"Those bums are waiting for us back there, and you drive us up here to see their pals. Tip-top notion, Saeed. Extra fine."
But they had no more trouble from miners. That was the day of the mining disaster that left fifteen thousand pitmen buried alive beneath the Sarangi hill. Saeed, Mishal, the Sarpanch, Osman, Mrs. Qureishi, Srinivas and Ayesha stood exhausted and soaked to the skin by the roadside as ambulances, fire--engines, salvage operators and pit bosses arrived in large quantities and left, much later, shaking their heads. The Sarpanch caught his earlobes between thumbs and forefingers. "Life is pain," he said. "Life is pain and loss; it is a coin of
no value, worth even less than a kauri or a dam."
Osman of the dead bullock, who, like the Sarpanch,
had lost a dearly loved companion during the pilgrimage, also wept. Mrs. Qureishi attempted to look on the bright side: "Main thing is that we're okay," but this got no response. Then Ayesha closed her eyes and recited in the sing--song voice of prophecy, "It is a judgment upon them for the bad attempt they made."Mirza Saeed was angry. "They weren't at the bloody barricade," he shouted. "They were working under the goddamned ground."
"They dug their own graves," Ayesha replied. o o o
This was when they sighted the returning butterflies. Saeed watched the golden cloud in disbelief, as it first gathered and then sent out streams of winged light in every direction. Ayesha wanted to return to the crossroads. Saeed objected: "It's flooded down there. Our only chance is to drive down the opposite side of this hill and come out the other side of
town." But Ayesha and Mishal had already started back; the prophetess was supporting the other, ashen woman, holding her around the waist.
"Mishal, for God's sake," Mirza Saeed called after his wife. "For the love of God. What will I do with the motor-car?"
But she went on down the hill, towards the flood, leaning heavily on Ayesha the seer, without looking round.This was how Mirza Saeed Akhtar came to abandon his beloved Mercedes-Benz station wagon near the entrance to the drowned mines of Sarang, and join in the foot-pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea.
The seven bedraggled travellers stood thigh--deep in water at the intersection of the street of bicycle repairers and the alley of the basket-weavers. Slowly, slowly, the water had begun to go down. "Face it," Mirza Saeed argued. "The pilgrimage is finished. The villagers are who knows where, maybe drowned, possibly murdered, certainly lost. There's nobody left to follow you but us." He stuck his face into Ayesha's. "So forget it, sister; you're sunk."
"Look," Mishal said.
From all sides, out of the little tinkers' gullies, the villagers of Titlipur were returning to the place of their dispersal. They were all coated from neck to ankles in golden butterflies, and long lines of the little creatures went before them, like ropes drawing them to safety out of a well. The people of Sarang watched in terror from their windows, and as the waters of retribution receded, the Ayesha Haj re-
formed in the middle of the road."I don't believe it," said Mirza Saeed.
But it was true. Every single member of the pilgrimage had been tracked down by the butterflies and brought back to thF main road. And stranger claims were later made: that when the creatures
had settled on a broken ankle the injury had healed, or that an open wound had closed as if by magic. Many marchers said they had awoken from unconsciousness to find the butterflies fluttering about their lips. Some even believed that they had been dead, drowned, and that the butterflies had brought them back to life.
"Don't be stupid," Mirza Saeed cried. "The storm saved you; it washed away your enemies, so it's not surprising few of you are hurt. Let's be scientific, please."
"Use your eyes, Saeed," Mishal told him, indicating the presence before them of over a hundred men, women and children enveloped in glowing
butterflies. "What does your science say about this?"
o o o
In the last days of the pilgrimage, the city was all around them. Officers from the Municipal
Corporation met with Mishal and Ayesha and planned a route through the metropolis. On this route were mosques in which the pilgrims could sleep without clogging up the streets. Excitement in the city was intense: each day, when the pilgrims set off towards their next resting--place, they were watched by enormous crowds, some sneering and hostile, but many bringing presents of sweetmeats, medicines and food.Mirza Saeed, worn-out and filthy, was in a state of deep frustration on account of his failure to convince more than a handful of the pilgrims that it was
better to put one's trust in reason than in miracles. Miracles had been doing pretty well for them, the Titlipur villagers pointed out, reasonably enough. "Those blasted butterflies," Saeed muttered to the Sarpanch. "Without them, we'd have a chance."
"But they have been with us from the start," the
Sarpanch replied with a shrug.
Mishal Akhtar was clearly close to death; she had begun to smell of it, and had turned a chalky white colour that frightened Saeed badly. But Mishal wouldn't let him come near her. She had ostracized her mother, too, and when her father took time off from banking to visit her on the pilgrimage's first night in a city mosque, she told him to buzz off.
"Things have come to the point," she announced, "where only the pure can be with the pure." When Mirza Saeed heard the diction of Ayesha the prophetess emerging from his wife's mouth he lost all but the tiniest speck of hope.Friday came, and Ayesha agreed that the pilgrimage could halt for a day to participate in the Friday prayers. Mirza Saeed, who had forgotten almost all the Arabic verses that had once been stuffed into him by rote, and could scarcely remember when to
stand with his hands held in front of him like a book, when to genuflect, when to press his forehead to the ground, stumbled through the ceremony with growing self-disgust. At the end of the prayers, however, something happened that stopped the Ayesha Haj in its tracks.
As the pilgrims watched the congregation leaving the courtyard of the mosque, a commotion began outside the main gate. Mirza Saeed went to investigate. "What's the hoo--hah?" he asked as he struggled through the crowd on the mosque steps; then he saw the basket sitting on the bottom step. -- And heard, rising from the basket, the baby's cry.
The foundling was perhaps two weeks old, clearly illegitimate, and it was equally plain that its options in life were limited. The crowd was in a doubtful,
confused mood. Then the mosque's Imam appeared at the head of the flight of steps, and beside him was Ayesha the seer, whose fame had spread throughout the city.The crowd parted like the sea, and Ayesha and the Imam came down to the basket. The Imam examined the baby briefly; rose; and turned to address the crowd.
"This child was born in devilment," he said. "It is the
Devil's child." He was a young man.
The mood of the crowd shifted towards anger. Mirza Saeed Akhtar shouted out: "You, Ayesha, kahin. What do you say?"
"Everything will be asked of us," she replied.
The crowd, needing no clearer invitation, stoned the baby to death.
o o o
After that the Ayesha Pilgrims refused to move on. The death of the foundling had created an atmosphere of mutiny among the weary villagers, none of whom had lifted or thrown a stone. Mishal, snow-white now, was too enfeebled by her illness to rally the marchers; Ayesha, as ever, refused to
dispute. "If you turn your backs on God," she warned the villagers, "don't be surprised when he does the same to you."The pilgrims were squatting in a group in a corner of the large mosque, which was painted lime-green on the outside and bright blue within, and lit, when necessary, by multicoloured neon "tube lights". After Ayesha's warning they turned their backs on her and huddled closer together, although the weather was warm and humid enough. Mirza Saeed, spotting his opportunity, decided to challenge Ayesha directly once again. "Tell me," he asked sweetly, "how exactly does the angel give you all this information? You never tell us his precise words, only your interpretations of them. Why such indirection? Why not simply quote?"
"He speaks to me," Ayesha answered, "in clear and memorable forms."
Mirza Saeed, full of the bitter energy of his desire for her, and the pain of his estrangement from his dying wife, and the memory of the tribulations of the march, smelled in her reticence the weakness he
had been probing for. "Kindly be more specific," he insisted. "Or why should anyone believe? What are these forms?"
"The archangel sings to me," she admitted, "to the
tunes of popular hit songs."Mirza Saeed Akhtar clapped his hands delightedly and began to laugh the loud, echoing laughter of revenge, and Osman the bullock-boy joined in, beating on his dholki and prancing around the squatting villagers, singing the latest filmi ganas and making nautch--girl eyes. "Hoji!" he carolled. "This
is how Gibreel recites, ho ji! Ho ji!"
And one after the other, pilgrim after pilgrim rose and joined in the dance of the circling drummer, dancing their disillusion and disgust in the courtyard of the mosque, until the Imam came running to shriek at the ungodliness of their deeds.
o o o
Night fell. The villagers of Titlipur were grouped around their Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and serious talks about returning to Titlipur were under way. Perhaps a little of the harvest could be saved. Mishal Akhtar lay dying with her head in her mother's lap, racked by pain, with a single tear emerging from her left eye. And in a far corner of the courtyard of the greenblue mosque with its technicolour tube- lighting, the visionary and the zamindar sat alone and talked. A moon -- new, horned, cold -- shone down.
"You're a clever man," Ayesha said. "You knew how to take your chance."This was when Mirza Saeed made his offer of a compromise. "My wife is dying," he said. "And she wants very much to go to Mecca Sharif. So we have interests in common, you and I."
Ayesha listened. Saeed pressed on: "Ayesha, I'm not a bad man. Let me tell you, I've been damn impressed by many things on this walk; damn impressed. You have given these people a profound spiritual experience, no question. Don't think we modern types lack a spiritual dimension."
"The people have left me," Ayesha said.
"The people are confused," Saeed replied. "Point is, if you actually take them to the sea and then nothing happens, my God, they really could turn against you. So here's the deal. I gave a tinkle to Mishal's papa and he agreed to underwrite half the
cost. We propose to fly you and Mishal, and let's say ten -- twelve! -- of the villagers, to Mecca, within forty-eight hours, personally. Reservations are available. We leave it to you to select the individuals best suited to the trip. Then, truly, you will have performed a miracle for some instead of for none. And in my view the pilgrimage itself has been a miracle, in a way. So you will have done very
much."He held his breath.
"I must think," Ayesha said.
"Think, think," Saeed encouraged her happily. "Ask your archangel. If he agrees, it must be right."
o o o
Mirza Saeed Akhtar knew that when Ayesha announced that the Archangel Gibreel had accepted his offer her power would be destroyed forever, because the villagers would perceive her fraudulence and her desperation, too. -- But how could she turn him down? -- What choice did she really have? "Revenge is sweet," he told himself. Once the
woman was discredited, he would certainly take
Mishal to Mecca, if that were still her wish.
The butterflies of Titlipur had not entered the mosque. They lined its exterior walls and onion dome, glowing greenly in the dark.
Ayesha in the night: stalking the shadows, lying down, rising to go on the prowl again. There was an uncertainty about her; then the slowness came, and she seemed to dissolve into the shadows of the mosque. She returned at dawn.
After the morning prayer she asked the pilgrims if she might address them; and they, doubtfully, agreed."Last night the angel did not sing," she said. "He told me, instead, about doubt, and how the Devil makes use of it. I said, but they doubt me, what can I do? He answered: only proof can silence doubt."
She had their full attention. Next she told them what Mirza Saeed had suggested in the night. "He told me to go and ask my angel, but I know better," she cried. "How could I choose between you? It is all of us, or none."
"Why should we follow you," the Sarpanch asked, "after all the dying, the baby, and all?"
"Because when the waters part, you will be saved. You will enter into the Glory of the Most High."
"What waters?" Mirza Saeed yelled. "How will they divide?"
"Follow me," Ayesha concluded, "and judge me by their parting."
His offer had contained an old question: _What kind of idea are you?_ And she, in turn, had offered him an old answer. _I was tempted, but am renewed;
am uncompromising; absolute; pure_. o o oThe tide was in when the Ayesha Pilgrimage marched down an alley beside the Holiday Inn, whose windows were full of the mistresses of film stars using their new Polaroid cameras, -- when the pilgrims felt the city's asphalt turn gritty and soften into sand, -- when they found themselves walking
through a thick mulch of rotting coconuts abandoned cigarette packets pony turds non-degradable bottles fruit peelings jellyfish and paper, -- on to the mid- brown sand overhung by high leaning cocopalms
and the balconies of luxury sea-view apartment blocks, -- past the teams of young men whose muscles were so well-honed that they looked like deformities, and who were performing gymnastic contortions of all sorts, in unison, like a murderous army of ballet dancers, -- and through the beachcombers, clubmen and families who had come to take the air or make business contacts or scavenge a living from the sand, -- and gazed, for the first time in their lives, upon the Arabian Sea.
Mirza Saeed saw Mishal, who was being supported by two of the village men, because she was no longer strong enough to stand up by herself. Ayesha was beside her, and Saeed had the idea that the
prophetess had somehow stepped out of the dying woman, that all the brightness of Mishal had hopped out of her body and taken this mythological shape, leaving a husk behind to die. Then he was angrywith himself for allowing Ayesha's supernaturalism to infect him, too.
The villagers of Titlipur had agreed to follow Ayesha after a long discussion in which they had asked her not to take part. Their common sense told them that it would be foolish to turn back when they had come so far and were in sight of their first goal; but the new doubts in their minds sapped their strength. It was as if they were emerging from some Shangri-La of Ayesha's making, because now that they were simply walking behind her rather than following her in the true sense, they seemed to age and sicken with every step they took. By the time they saw the sea they were a lame, tottering, rheumy, feverish, red-eyed bunch, and Mirza Saeed wondered how many of them would manage the final few yards to the water's edge.
The butterflies were with them, high over their heads.
"What now, Ayesha?" Saeed called out to her, filled with the horrible notion that his beloved wife might die here under the hoofs of ponies for rent and
beneath the eyes of sugarcane-juice vendors. "You have brought us all to the edges of extinction, but here is an unquestionable fact: the sea. Where is your angel now?"She climbed up, with the villagers' help, on to an unused thela lying next to a soft--drink stall, and didn't answer Saeed until she could look down at
him from her new perch. "Gibreel says the sea is like our souls. When we open them, we can move through into wisdom. If we can open our hearts, we can open the sea."
"Partition was quite a disaster here on land," he taunted her. "Quite a few guys died, you might remember. You think it will be different in the water?"
"Shh," said Ayesha suddenly. "The angel's almost here."
It was, on the face of it, surprising that after all the attention the march had received the crowd at the beach was no better than moderate; but the authorities had taken many precautions, closing roads, diverting traffic; so there were perhaps two hundred gawpers on the beach. Nothing to worry about.
What _was_ strange was that the spectators did not
see the butterflies, or what they did next. But Mirza Saeed clearly observed the great glowing cloud fly out over the sea; pause; hover; and form itself into the shape of a colossal being, a radiant giant constructed wholly of tiny beating wings, stretching from horizon to horizon, filling the sky."The angel!" Ayesha called to the pilgrims. "Now you see! He's been with us all the way. Do you believe me now?" Mirza Saeed saw absolute faith return to the pilgrims. "Yes," they wept, begging her forgiveness. "Gibreel! Gibreel! Ya Allah."
Mirza Saeed made his last effort. "Clouds take many shapes," he shouted. "Elephants, film stars, anything. Look, it's changing even now." But nobody paid any attention to him; they were watching, full
of amazement, as the butterflies dived into the sea.
The villagers were shouting and dancing for joy. "The parting! The parting!" they cried. Bystanders called out to Mirza Saeed: "Hey, mister, what are they getting so fired up about? We can't see anything going on."
Ayesha had begun to walk towards the water, and Mishal was being dragged along by her two helpers. Saeed ran to her and began to struggle with the village men. "Let go of my wife. At once! Damn you! I am your zamindar. Release her; remove your filthy
hands!" But Mishal whispered: "They won't. Goaway, Saeed. You are closed. The sea only opens for those who are open."
"Mishal!" he screamed, but her feet were already wet.
Once Ayesha had entered the water the villagers began to run. Those who could not leapt upon the backs of those who could. Holding their babies, the mothers of Titlipur rushed into the sea; grandsons bore their grandmothers on their shoulders and rushed into the waves. Within minutes the entire village was in the water, splashing about, falling over, getting up, moving steadily forwards, towards the horizon, never looking back to shore. Mirza Saeed was in the water, too. "Come back," he beseeched his wife. "Nothing is happening; come back."
At the water's edge stood Mrs. Qureishi, Osman, the Sarpanch, Sri Srinivas. Mishal's mother was sobbing operatically: "O my baby, my baby. What will become?" Osman said: "When it becomes clear that miracles don't happen, they will turn back." "And the butterflies?" Srinivas asked him, querulously. "What were they? An accident?"
It dawned on them that the villagers were not coming back. "They must be nearly out of their
depth," the Sarpanch said. "How many of them can swim?" asked blubbering Mrs. Qureishi. "Swim?" shouted Srinivas. "Since when can village folk swim?" They were all screaming at one another as if they were miles apart, jumping from foot to foot, their bodies willing them to enter the water, to dosomething. They looked as if they were dancing on a fire. The incharge of the police squad that had been sent down for crowd control purposes came up as Saeed came running out of the water.
"What is befalling?" the officer asked. "What is the agitation?"
"Stop them," Mirza Saeed panted, pointing out to sea.
"Are they miscreants?" the policeman asked. "They are going to die," Saeed replied.
It was too late. The villagers, whose heads could be seen bobbing about in the distance, had reached the edge of the underwater shelf. Almost all together, making no visible attempt to save themselves, they dropped beneath the water's surface. In moments, every one of the Ayesha Pilgrims had sunk out of sight.
None of them reappeared. Not a single gasping head
or thrashing arm.Saeed, Osman, Srinivas, the Sarpanch, and even fat Mrs. Qureishi ran into the water, shrieking: "God have mercy; come on, everybody, help."
Human beings in danger of drowning struggle
against the water. It is against human nature simply to walk forwards meekly until the sea swallows you up. But Ayesha, Mishal Akhtar and the villagers of Titlipur subsided below sea-level; and were never seen again.
Mrs. Qureishi was pulled to shore by policemen, her face blue, her lungs full of water, and needed the kiss of life. Osman, Srinivas and the Sarpanch were dragged out soon afterwards. Only Mirza Saeed Akhtar continued to dive, further and further out to sea, staying under for longer and longer periods; until he, too, was rescued from the Arabian Sea, spent, sick and fainting. The pilgrimage was over.
Mirza Saecd awoke in a hospital ward to find a CID man by his bedside. The authorities were considering the feasibility of charging the survivors of the Ayesha expedition with attempted illegal emigration, and detectives had been instructed to get down their stories before they had had a chance to confer.
This was the testimony of the Sarpanch of Titlipur, Muhammad Din: "Just when my strength had failed and I thought I would surely die there in the water,I saw it with my own eyes; I saw the sea divide, like hair being combed; and they were all there, far away, walking away from me. She was there also, my wife, Khadija, whom I loved."
This is what Osman the bullock-boy told the detectives, who had been badly shaken by the Sarpanch's deposition: "At first I was in great fear of drowning myself. Still, I was searching searching, mainly for her, Ayesha, whom I knew from before her alteration. And just at the last, I saw it happen, the marvellous thing. The water opened, and I saw them go along the oceanfloor, among the dying
fish."
Sri Srinivas, too, swore by the goddess Lakshmi that he had seen the parting of the Arabian Sea; and by the time the detectives got to Mrs. Qureishi, they were utterly unnerved, because they knew that it was impossible for the men to have cooked up the story together. Mishal's mother, the wife of the
great banker, told the same story in her own words. "Believe don't believe," she finished emphatically, "but what my eyes have seen my tongue repeats."
Goosepimply CID men attempted the third degree:
"Listen, Sarpanch, don't shit from your mouth. So many were there, nobody saw these things. Already the drowned bodies are floating to shore, swollenlike balloons and stinking like hell. If you go on lying we will take you and stick your nose in the truth."
"You can show me whatever you want," Sarpanch Muhammad Din told his interrogators. "But I still saw what I saw."
"And you?" the CID men assembled, once he awoke, to ask Mirza Saeed Akhtar. "What did you see at the beach?"
"How can you ask?" he protested. "My wife has drowned. Don't come hammering with your questions."
When he found out that he was the only survivor of the Ayesha Haj not to have witnessed the parting of the waves -- Sri Srinivas was the one who told him what the others saw, adding mournfully: "It is our shame that we were not thought worthy to accompany. On us, Sethji, the waters closed, they slammed in our faces like the gates of Paradise" -- Mirza Saeed broke down and wept for a week and a day, the dry sobs continuing to shake his body long after his tear ducts had run out of salt.
Then he went home.
o o oMoths had eaten the punkahs of Peristan and the library had been consumed by a billion hungry worms. When he turned on the taps, snakes oozed out instead of water, and creepers had twined themselves around the four-poster bed in which Viceroys had once slept. It was as if time had accelerated in his absence, and centuries had somehow elapsed instead of months, so that when he touched the giant Persian carpet rolled up in the ballroom it crumbled under his hand, and the baths were full of frogs with scarlet eyes. At night there were jackals howling on the wind. The great tree was dead, or close to death, and the fields were barren as the desert; the gardens of Peristan, in which, long ago, he first saw a beautiful young girl, had long ago yellowed into ugliness. Vultures were the only birds in the sky.
He pulled a rocking-chair out on to his veranda, sat down, and rocked himself gently to sleep.
Once, only once, he visited the tree. The village had crumbled into dust; landless peasants and looters had tried to seize the abandoned land, but the drought had driven them away. There had been no rain here. Mirza Saeed returned to Peristan and padlocked the rusty gates. He was not interested in
the fate of his fellow-survivors; he went to the telephone and ripped it out of the wall.After an uncounted passage of days it occurred to him that he was starving to death, because he could smell his body reeking of nail-varnish remover; but as he felt neither hungry nor thirsty, he decided there was no point bothering to find food. For what? Much better to rock in this chair, and not think, not think, not think.
On the last night of his life he heard a noise like a giant crushing a forest beneath his feet, and smelled a stench like the giant's fart, and he realized that
the tree was burning. He got out of his chair and staggered dizzily down to the garden to watch the fire, whose flames were consuming histories, memories, genealogies, purifying the earth, and coming towards him to set him free; -- because the wind was blowing the fire towards the grounds of
the mansion, so soon enough, soon enough, it would be his turn. He saw the tree explode into a thousand fragments, and the trunk crack, like a heart; then
he turned away and reeled towards the place in the garden where Ayesha had first caught his eye; -- and now he felt a slowness come upon him, a great heaviness, and he lay down on the withered dust. Before his eyes closed he felt something brushing at his lips, and saw the little cluster of butterflies
struggling to enter his mouth. Then the sea poured over him, and he was in the water beside Ayesha, who had stepped miraculously out of his wife's body. .. "Open," she was crying. "Open wide!" Tentacles of light were flowing from her navel and he chopped at them, chopped, using the side of his hand. "Open," she screamed. "You've come this far, now do the rest." -- How could he hear her voice? --
They were under water, lost in the roaring of the sea, but he could hear her clearly, they could all hear her, that voice like a bell. "Open," she said. He closed.
He was a fortress with clanging gates. -- He was drowning. -- She was drowning, too. He saw the water fill her mouth, heard it begin to gurgle into her lungs. Then something within him refused that, made a different choice, and at the instant that his heart broke, he opened.
His body split apart from his adam"s-apple to his groin, so that she could reach deep within him, and now she was open, they all were, and at the moment of their opening the waters parted, and they walked to Mecca across the bed of the Arabian Sea.
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