The Satanic Verses

‘There will be no trouble,’ the kahin broke her silence to a

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 coal-miners 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 ba

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 Pla

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 have stayed 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 co

Which was to say that he found it hard to believe that all this was really happening; but it was.

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.

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 stu

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.’

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.