The Satanic Verses (34 page)

           
* * * * *

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

           
The village of Titlipur had grown up in the shade of an immense 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 in
places where the tree stooped low down towards the earth its leaves formed
roofs for many a hutment that seemed to hang from the greenery like the nest of
a weaver bird. When the village 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, Osman earned his living as a clown. His bullock wore bright red
paper cones over its horns and much tinselly drapery over its nose and back. He
went from village to village performing an act, at marriages and other
celebrations, in which the bullock was his essential partner and foil, nodding
in answer to his questions, one nod for no, twice for yes.

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

           
Boom, the bullock disagreed.

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

           
Boom.

           
"What? Then it's a village full of sinners?"

           
Boom, boom.

           
"Baapu-re! 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: Sincerity 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 curlicued print:
This is to
certify that MR SRI S. SRINIVAS is an Expert on the Geological History of the
Planet Earth, having flown through Grand Canyon with SCENIC AIRLINES
.
Srinivas closed his eyes and folded his arms, an unlaughing Buddha with the
indisputable authority of one who had flown. "That boy is a devil,"
he said with finality, and Ayesha folded the dolls into her piece of sackcloth
and turned to leave, without arguing. Srinivas's eyes flew open. "Damn
you," he shouted, "aren't you going to give me a hard time? You think
I don't know you need the money? Why you did such a damn stupid thing? What are
you going to do now? just go and make some FP dolls, double quick, and I will
buy at best rate plus, because I am generous to a fault." Mr. Srinivas's
personal invention was the Family Planning doll, a socially responsible variant
of the old Russian-doll notion. Inside a suited-and-booted Abba-doll was a
demure, sari-clad Amma, and inside her a daughter containing a son. Two
children are plenty: that was the message of the dolls. "Make quickly
quickly," Srinivas called after the departing Ayesha. "FP dolls have
high turnover." Ayesha turned, and smiled. "Don't worry about me,
Srinivasji," she said, and left.

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

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

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

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

           
* * * * *

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

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

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

           
* * * * *

           
Ever since his birthday Mirza Saeed had been full of passionate desires,
"as if life really does begin at forty", his wife marvelled. Their
marriage became so energetic that the servants had to change the bedsheets
three times per day. Mishal hoped secretly that this heightening of her
husband's libido would lead her to conceive, because she was of the firm
opinion that enthusiasm mattered, whatever doctors might say to the contrary,
and that the years of taking her temperature every morning before getting out
of bed, and then plotting the results on graph paper in order to establish her
pattern of ovulation, had actually dissuaded the babies from being born, partly
because it was difficult to be properly ardent when science got into bed along
with you, and partly, too, in her view, because no self-respecting foetus would
wish to enter the womb of so mechanically programmed a mother; Mishal still
prayed for a child, although she no longer mentioned the fact to Saeed so as to
spare him the sense of having failed her in this respect. Eyes shut, feigning
sleep, she would call on God for a sign, and when Saeed became so loving, so
frequently, she wondered if maybe this might not be it. As a result, his strange
request that from now on, whenever they came to stay at 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?
"