The Satanic Verses

them together beneath the wing of her gentleness. Ayesha had started retreating deeper and deeper into silence, and Mishal Akhtar became, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the pilgrims. But there was one pilgrim over whom she lost her grip: Mrs Qureishi, her mother, the wife of the director of the state bank.
    The arrival of Mr Qureishi, Mishal’s father, was quite an event. The pilgrims had stopped in the shade of a line of plane-trees and were busy gathering brushwood and scouring cookpots when the motorcade was sighted. At once Mrs Qureishi, who was twenty-five pounds lighter than she had been at the beginning of the walk, leaped squeakily to her feet and tried frantically to brush the dirt off her clothes and to put her hair in order. Mishal saw her mother fumbling feebly with a molten lipstick and asked, ‘What’s bugging you, ma? Relax, na.’
    Her mother pointed feebly at the approaching cars. Moments later the tall, severe figure of the great banker was standing over them. ‘If I had not seen it I would not have believed,’ he said. ‘They told me, but I pooh-poohed. Therefore it took me this long to find out. To vanish from Peristan without a word: now what in tarnation?’
    Mrs Qureishi shook helplessly under her husband’s eyes, beginning to cry, feeling the calluses on her feet and the fatigue that had sunk into every pore of her body. ‘O God, I don’t know, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘God knows what came over.’
    ‘Don’t you know I occupy a delicate post?’ Mr Qureishi cried. ‘Public confidence is of essence. How does it look then that my wife gallivants with bhangis?’
    Mishal, embracing her mother, told her father to stop bullying. Mr Qureishi saw for the first time that his daughter had the mark of death on her forehead and deflated instantly like an inner tube. Mishal told him about the cancer, and the promise of the seer Ayesha that a miracle would occur in Mecca, and she would be completely cured.
    ‘Then let me fly you to Mecca, pronto,’ her father pleaded. ‘Why walk if you can go by Airbus?’
    But Mishal was adamant. ‘You should go away,’ she told her father. ‘Only the faithful can make this thing come about. Mummy will look after me.’
    Mr Qureishi in his limousine helplessly joined Mirza Saeed at the rear of the procession, constantly sending one of the two servantswho had accompanied him on motor-scooters to ask Mishal if she would like food, medicine, Thums Up, anything at all. Mishal turned down all his offers, and after three days – because banking is banking – Mr Qureishi departed for the city, leaving behind one of the motor-scooter chaprassis to serve the women. ‘He is yours to command,’ he told them. ‘Don’t be stupid now. Make this as easy as you can.’
    The day after Mr Qureishi’s departure, the chaprassi Gul Muhammad ditched his scooter and joined the foot-pilgrims, knotting a handkerchief around his head to indicate his devotion. Ayesha said nothing, but when she saw the scooter-wallah join the pilgrimage she grinned an impish grin that reminded Mirza Saeed that she was, after all, not only a figure out of a dream, but also a flesh-and-blood young girl.
    Mrs Qureishi began to complain. The brief contact with her old life had broken her resolve, and now that it was too late she had started thinking constantly about parties and soft cushions and glasses of iced fresh lime soda. It suddenly seemed wholly unreasonable to her that a person of her breeding should be asked to go barefoot like a common sweeper. She presented herself to Mirza Saeed with a sheepish expression on her face.
    ‘Saeed, son, do you hate me completely?’ she wheedled, her plump features arranging themselves in a parody of coquettishness.
    Saeed was appalled by her grimace. ‘Of course not,’ he managed to say.
    ‘But you do, you loathe me, and my cause is hopeless,’ she flirted.
    ‘Ammaji,’ Saeed gulped, ‘what are you saying?’
    ‘Because I have from time to time spoken roughly to you.’
    ‘Please forget it,’ Saeed said, bemused by her performance, but she would not. ‘You must know it was all for love, isn’t it? Love,’ said Mrs. Qureishi, ‘it is a many-splendoured thing.’
    ‘Makes the world go round,’ Mirza Saeed agreed, trying to enter into the spirit of the conversation.
    ‘Love conquers all,’ Mrs Qureishi confirmed. ‘It has conqueredmy anger. This I must demonstrate to you by riding with you in your motor.’
    Mirza Saeed