The Satanic Verses

performing umra then for God’s sake let’s go to town and catch a plane. We can be in Mecca within a couple of days.’
    Mishal answered, ‘We are commanded to walk.’
    Saeed lost control of himself. ‘Mishal? Mishal?’ he shrieked. ‘Commanded? Archangels, Mishu?
Gibreel
? God with a long beard and angels with wings? Heaven and hell, Mishal? The Devil with apointy tail and cloven hoofs? How far are you going with this? Do women have souls, what do you say? Or the other way: do souls have gender? Is God black or white? When the waters of the ocean part, where will the extra water go? Will it stand up sideways like walls? Mishal? Answer me. Are there miracles? Do you believe in Paradise? Will I be forgiven my sins?’ He began to cry, and fell on to his knees, with his forehead still pressed against the wall. His dying wife came up and embraced him from behind. ‘Go with the pilgrimage, then,’ he said, dully. ‘But at least take the Mercedes station wagon. It’s got air-conditioning and you can take the icebox full of Cokes.’
    ‘No,’ she said, gently. ‘We’ll go like everybody else. We’re pilgrims, Saeed. This isn’t a picnic at the beach.’
    ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Mirza Saeed Akhtar wept. ‘Mishu, I can’t handle this by myself.’
    Ayesha spoke from the bed. ‘Mirza sahib, come with us,’ she said. ‘Your ideas are finished with. Come and save your soul.’
    Saeed stood up, red-eyed. ‘A bloody outing you wanted,’ he said viciously to Mrs Qureishi. ‘That chicken certainly came home to roost. Your outing will finish off the lot of us, seven generations, the whole bang shoot.’
    Mishal leaned her cheek against his back. ‘Come with us, Saeed. Just come.’
    He turned to face Ayesha. ‘There is no God,’ he said firmly.
    ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet,’ she replied.
    ‘The mystical experience is a subjective, not an objective truth,’ he went on. ‘The waters will not open.’
    ‘The sea will part at the angel’s command,’ Ayesha answered.
    ‘You are leading these people into certain disaster.’
    ‘I am taking them into the bosom of God.’
    ‘I don’t believe in you,’ Mirza Saeed insisted. ‘But I’m going to come, and will try to end this insanity with every step I take.’
    ‘God chooses many means,’ Ayesha rejoiced, ‘many roads by which the doubtful may be brought into his certainty.’
    ‘Go to hell,’ shouted Mirza Saeed Akhtar, and ran, scattering butterflies, from the room.

    ‘Who is the madder,’ Osman the clown whispered into his bullock’s ear as he groomed it in its small byre, ‘the madwoman, or the fool who loves the madwoman?’ The bullock didn’t reply. ‘Maybe we should have stayed untouchable,’ Osman continued. ‘A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well.’ And the bullock nodded, twice for yes, boom, boom.



1

    ‘O nce I’m an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into myself
?’ Mr Muhammad Sufyan, prop. Shaandaar Café and landlord of the rooming-house above, mentor to the variegated, transient and particoloured inhabitants of both, seen-it-all type, least doctrinaire of hajis and most unashamed of VCR addicts, ex-schoolteacher, self-taught in classical texts of many cultures, dismissed from post in Dhaka owing to cultural differences with certain generals in the old days when Bangladesh was merely an East Wing, and therefore, in his own words, ‘not so much an immig as an emig runt’ – this last a good-natured allusion to his lack of inches, for though he was a wide man, thick of arm and waist, he stood no more than sixty-one inches off the ground, blinked in his bedroom doorway, awakened by Jumpy Joshi’s urgent midnight knock, polished his half-rimmed spectacles on the edge of Bengali-style kurta (drawstrings tied at the neck in a neat bow), squeezed lids tightly shut open shut over myopic eyes, replaced glasses, opened eyes, stroked moustacheless hennaed beard, sucked teeth, and responded to the now-indisputable horns on the brow of the shivering fellow whom Jumpy, like the cat, appeared to have dragged in, with the above impromptu quip, stolen, with commendable mental alacrity for one aroused from his slumbers, from Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, Moroccan priest, A D 120–180 approx., colonial of an earlier Empire, a person who denied the accusation of having bewitched a rich widow yet confessed, somewhat perversely, that at an early stage in his