The Satanic Verses

bicycle repairers and the alley of the basket-weavers. Slowly, slowly, the water had begun to go down. ‘Face it,’ Mirza Saeed argued. ‘The pilgrimage is finished. The villagers are who knows where, maybe drowned, possibly murdered, certainly lost. There’s nobody left to follow you but us.’ He stuck his face into Ayesha’s. ‘So forget it, sister; you’re sunk.’
    ‘Look,’ Mishal said.
    From all sides, out of little tinkers’ gullies, the villagers of Titlipur were returning to the place of their dispersal. They were all coated from neck to ankles in golden butterflies, and long linesof the little creatures went before them, like ropes drawing them to safety out of a well. The people of Sarang watched in terror from their windows, and as the waters of retribution receded, the Ayesha Haj re-formed in the middle of the road.
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mirza Saeed.
    But it was true. Every single member of the pilgrimage had been tracked down by the butterflies and brought back to the main road. And stranger claims were later made: that when the creatures had settled on a broken ankle the injury had healed, or that an open wound had closed as if by magic. Many marchers said they had awoken from unconsciousness to find the butterflies fluttering about their lips. Some even believed that they had been dead, drowned, and that the butterflies had brought them back to life.
    ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Mirza Saeed cried. ‘The storm saved you; it washed away your enemies, so it’s not surprising few of you are hurt. Let’s be scientific, please.’
    ‘Use your eyes, Saeed,’ Mishal told him, indicating the presence before them of over a hundred men, women and children enveloped in glowing butterflies. ‘What does your science say about this?’

    In the last days of the pilgrimage, the city was all around them. Officers from the Municipal Corporation met with Mishal and Ayesha and planned a route through the metropolis. On this route were mosques in which the pilgrims could sleep without clogging up the streets. Excitement in the city was intense: each day, when the pilgrims set off towards their next resting-place, they were watched by enormous crowds, some sneering and hostile, but many bringing presents of sweetmeats, medicines and food.
    Mirza Saeed, worn-out and filthy, was in a state of deep frustration on account of his failure to convince more than a handful of the pilgrims that it was better to put one’s trust in reason than in miracles. Miracles had been doing pretty well for them, the Titlipur villagers pointed out, reasonably enough. ‘Those blastedbutterflies,’ Saeed muttered to the Sarpanch. ‘Without them, we’d have a chance.’
    ‘But they have been with us from the start,’ the Sarpanch replied with a shrug.
    Mishal Akhtar was clearly close to death; she had begun to smell of it, and had turned a chalky white colour that frightened Saeed badly. But Mishal wouldn’t let him come near her. She had ostracized her mother, too, and when her father took time off from banking to visit her on the pilgrimage’s first night in a city mosque, she told him to buzz off. ‘Things have come to the point,’ she announced, ‘where only the pure can be with the pure.’ When Mirza Saeed heard the diction of Ayesha the prophetess emerging from his wife’s mouth he lost all but the tiniest speck of hope.
    Friday came, and Ayesha agreed that the pilgrimage could halt for a day to participate in the Friday prayers. Mirza Saeed, who had forgotten almost all the Arabic verses that had once been stuffed into him by rote, and could scarcely remember when to stand with his hands held in front of him like a book, when to genuflect, when to press his forehead to the ground, stumbled through the ceremony with growing self-disgust. At the end of the prayers, however, something happened that stopped the Ayesha Haj in its tracks.
    As the pilgrims watched the congregation leaving the courtyard of the mosque, a commotion began outside the main gate. Mirza Saeed went to investigate. ‘What’s the hoo-hah?’ he asked as he struggled through the crowd on the mosque steps; then he saw the basket sitting on the bottom step. – And heard, rising from the basket, the baby’s cry.
    The foundling was perhaps two weeks old, clearly illegitimate, and it was equally plain that its options in life were limited. The crowd was in a doubtful, confused mood. Then the mosque’s Imam appeared at the head of the