The Satanic Verses

‘but is it possible that I ride, as you once offered, in your motor-car?’
    Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism. ‘My first convert,’ Mirza Saeed rejoiced.

    By the fourth week the defection of Sarpanch Muhammad Din had begun to have its effect. He sat on the back seat of the Mercedes as if he were the zamindar and Mirza Saeed the chauffeur, and little by little the leather upholstery and the air-conditioning unit and the whisky-soda cabinet and the electrically operated mirror-glass windows began to teach him hauteur; his nose tilted into the air and he acquired the supercilious expression of a man who can see without being seen. Mirza Saeed in the driver’s seat felt his eyes and nose filling up with the dust that came in through the hole where the windscreen used to be, but in spite of such discomforts he was feeling better than before. Now, at the end of each day, a cluster of pilgrims would congregate around the Mercedes-Benz with its gleaming star, and Mirza Saeed would try and talk sense into them while they watchedSarpanch Muhammad Din raise and lower the mirror-glass rear windows, so that they saw, alternately, his features and their own. The Sarpanch’s presence in the Mercedes lent new authority to Mirza Saeed’s words.
    Ayesha didn’t try to call the villagers away, and so far her confidence had been justified; there had been no further defections to the camp of the faithless. But Saeed saw her casting numerous glances in his direction and whether she was a visionary or not Mirza Saeed would have bet good money that those were the bad-tempered glances of a young girl who was no longer sure of getting her own way.
    Then she disappeared.
    She went off during an afternoon siesta and did not reappear for a day and a half, by which time there was pandemonium among the pilgrims – she always knew how to whip up an audience’s feelings, Saeed conceded; then she sauntered back up to them across the dust-clouded landscape, and this time her silver hair was streaked with gold, and her eyebrows, too, were golden. She summoned the villagers to her and told them that the archangel was displeased that the people of Titlipur had been filled up with doubts just because of the ascent of a martyr to Paradise. She warned that he was seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, ‘so that all you’ll get at the Arabian Sea is a salt-water bath, and then it’s back to your deserted potato fields on which no rain will ever fall again.’ The villagers were appalled. ‘No, it can’t be,’ they pleaded. ‘Bibiji, forgive us.’ It was the first time they had used the name of the longago saint to describe the girl who was leading them with an absolutism that had begun to frighten them as much as it impressed. After her speech the Sarpanch and Mirza Saeed were left alone in the station wagon. ‘Second round to the archangel,’ Mirza Saeed thought.

    By the fifth week the health of most of the older pilgrims had deteriorated sharply, food supplies were running low, water washard to find, and the children’s tear ducts were dry. The vulture herds were never far away.
    As the pilgrims left behind the rural areas and came towards more densely populated zones, the level of harassment increased. The long-distance buses and trucks often refused to deviate and the pedestrians had to leap, screaming and tumbling over each other, out of their way. Cyclists, families of six on Rajdoot motor-scooters, petty shop-keepers hurled abuse. ‘Crazies! Hicks! Muslims!’ Often they were obliged to keep marching for an entire night because the authorities in this or that small town didn’t want such riff-raff sleeping on their pavements. More deaths became inevitable.
    Then the bullock of the convert, Osman, fell to its knees amid the bicycles and camel-dung of a nameless little town. ‘Get up, idiot,’ he yelled at it impotently. ‘What do you think you’re doing, dying on me in front of the fruit-stalls of strangers?’ The bullock nodded, twice for yes, and expired.
    Butterflies covered the corpse, adopting the colour of its grey hide, its horn-cones and bells. The inconsolable Osman ran to Ayesha (who had put on a dirty sari as a concession to urban prudery, even though butterfly clouds still trailed off her like glory). ‘Do bullocks go