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<strong>THE</strong><strong>SATANIC</strong><strong>VERSES</strong><br />
Mercedes--Benz, and now Mrs. Qureishi had no option but to share the back seat with a common man. Srinivas greeted her unhappily,<br />
and, seeing her bounce grumpily along the seat away from him, attempted to placate. "Please to accept a token of my esteem." -- And<br />
produced, from an inside pocket, a Family Planning doll.<br />
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<br />
disused goods train marshalling yard, guarded <strong>by</strong> military police. Mirza Saeed couldn't sleep. He was thinking about something Srinivas<br />
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<br />
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<br />
in such a place."<br />
In my family, too, Mirza Saeed in his insomnia answered the sleeping toy merchant, we have suffered from a kind of disease: one of<br />
detachment, of being unable to connect ourselves to things, events, feelings. Most people define themselves <strong>by</strong> their work, or where<br />
they come from, or suchlike; we have lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.<br />
Which was to say that he found it hard to believe that all this was really happening; but it was.<br />
o o o<br />
When the Ayesha Pilgrims were ready to set off the next morning, the huge clouds of butterflies that had travelled with them all the<br />
way from Titlipur suddenly broke up and vanished from view, revealing that the sky was filling up with other, more prosaic clouds.<br />
Even the creatures that had been clothing Ayesha -- the elite corps, so to speak -- decamped, and she had to lead the procession dressed<br />
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<br />
their pilgrimage depressed all the marchers; so that in spite of all Mishal Akhtar's exhortations they were unable to sing as they moved<br />
forwards, deprived of the benediction of the butterflies, to meet their fate.<br />
o o o<br />
The No Islamic Padyatra street mob had prepared a welcome for Ayesha in a street lined on both sides with the shacks of bicycle<br />
repairers. They had blocked the pilgrims' routes with dead bicycles, and waited behind this barricade of broken wheels, bent handlebars<br />
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<br />
when she reached the last crossroads, beyond which the clubs and knives of the enemy awaited her, there was a thunderclap like the<br />
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<br />
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<br />
sea, sacrificing the year's harvest in order to save his prophetess and her people.<br />
The stunning force of the downpour unnerved both pilgrims and assailants. In the confusion of the flood a second doomtrumpet was<br />
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<br />
the suffocating side gullies of the suburb, bringing down racks of shirts hanging on rails, and pumpkin barrows, and trays of cheap<br />
plastic notions, until he reached the street of basket--workers that intersected the street of bicycle repairers just to the north of the<br />
barricade. Here he accelerated as hard as he could and charged towards the crossroads, scattering pedestrians and wickerwork stools in<br />
all directions. He reached the crossroads immediately after the sea fell out of the sky, and braked violently. Sri Srinivas and Osman<br />
leaped out, seized Mishal Akhtar and the prophetess Ayesha, and hauled them into the Mercedes in a flurry of legs, sputum and abuse.<br />
Saeed accelerated away from the scene before anybody had managed to get the blinding water out of their eyes.<br />
Inside the car: bodies heaped in an angry jumble. Mishal Akhtar shouted abuse at her husband from the bottom of the pile:<br />
"Saboteur! Traitor! Scum from somewhere! Mule!" -- To which Saeed sarcastically replied, "Martyrdom is too easy, Mishal. Don't you<br />
want to watch the ocean open, like a flower?"<br />
And Mrs. Qureishi, sticking her head out through Osman's inverted legs, added in a pink-faced gasp: "Okay, come on, Mishu, quit.<br />
We meant well."<br />
o o o<br />
Gibreel dreamed a flood:<br />
When the rains came, the miners of Sarang had been waiting for the pilgrims with their pickaxes in their hands, but when the bicycle<br />
barricade was swept away they could not avoid the idea that God had taken Ayesha's side. The town's drainage system surrendered