The Satanic Verses

will save you. This is a test of faith.’
    Mrs Qureishi told Mirza Saeed the bad news with many shrieks and howls, and for the confused zamindar it was the last straw. He flew into a temper and started yelling loudly and trembling as if he might at any moment start smashing up the furniture in the room and its occupants as well.
    ‘To hell with your spook cancer,’ he screamed at Ayesha in his exasperation. ‘You have come into my house with your craziness and angels and dripped poison into my family’s ears. Get out of here with your visions and your invisible spouse. This is the modern world, and it is medical doctors and not ghosts in potato fields who tell us when we are ill. You have created this bloody hullabaloo for nothing. Get out and never come on to my land again.’
    Ayesha heard him out without removing her eyes or hands from Mishal. When Saeed stopped for breath, clenching and unclenching his fists, she said softly to his wife: ‘Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given.’ When he heard this formula, which people all over the village were beginning to parrot as if they knew what it meant, Mirza Saeed Akhtar went briefly out of his mind, raised his hand and knocked Ayesha senseless. She fell tothe floor, bleeding from the mouth, a tooth loosened by his fist, and as she lay there Mrs Qureishi hurled abuse at her son-in-law. ‘O God, I have put my daughter in the care of a killer. O God, a woman hitter. Go on, hit me also, get some practice. Defiler of saints, blasphemer, devil, unclean.’ Saeed left the room without saying a word.
    The next day Mishal Akhtar insisted on returning to the city for a complete medical check-up. Saeed took a stand. ‘If you want to indulge in superstition, go, but don’t expect me to come along. It’s eight hours’ drive each way; so, to hell with it.’ Mishal left that afternoon with her mother and the driver, and as a result Mirza Saeed was not where he should have been, that is, at his wife’s side, when the results of the tests were communicated to her: positive, inoperable, too far advanced, the claws of the cancer dug in deeply throughout her chest. A few months, six if she was lucky, and before that, coming soon, the pain. Mishal returned to Peristan and went straight to her rooms in the zenana, where she wrote her husband a formal note on lavender stationery, telling him of the doctor’s diagnosis. When he read her death sentence, written in her own hand, he wanted very badly to burst into tears, but his eyes remained obstinately dry. He had had no time for the Supreme Being for many years, but now a couple of Ayesha’s phrases popped back into his mind.
God will save you. Everything will be given
. A bitter, superstitious notion occurred to him: ‘It is a curse,’ he thought. ‘Because I lusted after Ayesha, she has murdered my wife.’
    When he went to the zenana, Mishal refused to see him, but her mother, barring the doorway, handed Saeed a second note on scented blue notepaper, ‘I want to see Ayesha,’ it read. ‘Kindly permit this.’ Bowing his head, Mirza Saeed gave his assent, and crept away in shame.

    With Mahound, there is always a struggle; with the Imam, slavery; but with this girl, there is nothing. Gibreel is inert, usually asleepin the dream as he is in life. She comes upon him under a tree, or in a ditch, hears what he isn’t saying, takes what she needs, and leaves. What does he know about cancer, for example? Not a solitary thing.
    All around him, he thinks as he half-dreams, half-wakes, are people hearing voices, being seduced by words. But not his; never his original material. – Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling them to move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease?
    He can’t work it out.

    The day after Mishal Akhtar’s return to Titlipur, the girl Ayesha, whom people were beginning to call a kahin, a pir, disappeared completely for a week. Her hapless admirer, Osman the clown, who had been following her at a distance along the dusty potato track to Chatnapatna, told the villagers that a breeze got up and blew dust into his eyes; when he got it out again she had ‘just gone’. Usually, when Osman and his bullock started telling their tall tales about djinnis and magic lamps and open-sesames, the villagers looked tolerant and teased him, okay, Osman, save it for those idiots in Chatnapatna; they may fall for that stuff but here in Titlipur we know which way is up and that