The Satanic Verses

train marshalling yard, guarded by military police. Mirza Saeed couldn’t sleep. He was thinking about something Srinivas had said to him, about being a Gandhian in his head, ‘but I’m too weak to put such notions into practice. Excuse me, but it’s true. I was not cut out for suffering, Sethji. I should have stayed with wife and kiddies and cut out this adventure disease that has made me land up in such a place.’
    In my family, too, Mirza Saeed in his insomnia answered the sleeping toy merchant, we have suffered from a kind of disease: one of detachment, of being unable to connect ourselves to things, events, feelings. Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we have lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.
    Which was to say that he found it hard to believe that all this was really happening; but it was.

    When the Ayesha Pilgrims were ready to set off the next morning, the huge clouds of butterflies that had travelled with them all the way from Titlipur suddenly broke up and vanished from view, revealing that the sky was filling up with other, more prosaic clouds. Even the creatures that had been clothing Ayesha – the elite corps, so to speak – decamped, and she had to lead the procession dressed in the mundanity of an old cotton sari with a block-printed hem of leaves. The disappearance of the miracle that had seemed to validate their pilgrimage depressed all the marchers; so that in spite of all Mishal Akhtar’s exhortations theywere unable to sing as they moved forwards, deprived of the benediction of the butterflies, to meet their fate.

    The No Islamic Padyatra street mob had prepared a welcome for Ayesha in a street lined on both sides with the shacks of bicycle repairers. They had blocked the pilgrims’ routes with dead bicycles, and waited behind this barricade of broken wheels, bent handlebars and silenced bells as the Ayesha Haj entered the northern sector of the street. Ayesha walked towards the mob as if it did not exist, and when she reached the last crossroads, beyond which the clubs and knives of the enemy awaited her, there was a thunderclap like the trumpet of doom and an ocean fell down out of the sky. The drought had broken too late to save the crops; afterwards many of the pilgrims believed that God had been saving up the water for just this purpose, letting it build up in the sky until it was as endless as the sea, sacrificing the year’s harvest in order to save his prophetess and her people.
    The stunning force of the downpour unnerved both pilgrims and assailants. In the confusion of the flood a second doom-trumpet was heard. This was, in point of fact, the horn of Mirza Saeed’s Mercedes-Benz station wagon, which he had driven at high speed through the suffocating side gullies of the suburb, bringing down racks of shirts hanging on rails, and pumpkin barrows, and trays of cheap plastic notions, until he reached the street of basket-workers that intersected the street of bicycle repairers just to the north of the barricade. Here he accelerated as hard as he could and charged towards the crossroads, scattering pedestrians and wickerwork stools in all directions. He reached the crossroads immediately after the sea fell out of the sky, and braked violently. Sri Srinivas and Osman leaped out, seized Mishal Akhtar and the prophetess Ayesha, and hauled them into the Mercedes in a flurry of legs, sputum and abuse. Saeed accelerated away from the scene before anybody had managed to get the blinding water out of their eyes.
    Inside the car: bodies heaped in an angry jumble. Mishal Akhtar shouted abuse at her husband from the bottom of the pile: ‘Saboteur! Traitor! Scum from somewhere! Mule!’ – To which Saeed sarcastically replied, ‘Martyrdom is too easy, Mishal. Don’t you want to watch the ocean open, like a flower?’
    And Mrs Qureishi, sticking her head out through Osman’s inverted legs, added in a pink-faced gasp: ‘Okay, come on, Mishu, quit. We meant well.’

    Gibreel dreamed a flood:
    When the rains came, the miners of Sarang had been waiting for the pilgrims with their pickaxes in their hands, but when the bicycle barricade was swept away they could not avoid the idea that God had taken Ayesha’s side. The town’s drainage system surrendered instantly to the overwhelming assault of the water, and the miners were soon standing in a muddy flood that reached as high as their waists. Some of