The Satanic Verses

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-ré! Then, will everybody go to hell?’
    Boom, boom.
    ‘But, bhaijan. Is there any hope for them?’
    Boom, boom, the bullock offered salvation. Excitedly, Osman bent down, placing his ear by the bullock’s mouth. ‘Tell, quickly. What should they do to be saved?’ At this point the bullock plucked Osman’s cap off his head and carried it around the crowd, asking for money, and Osman would nod, happily: Boom, boom.
    Osman the convert and his boom-boom bullock were well liked in Titlipur, but the young man only wanted the approval ofone 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 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 tinselledhead. 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