The Satanic Verses

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 eventhough 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 thenshe 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