The Satanic Verses

themselves, they dropped beneath the water’s surface. In moments, every one of the Ayesha Pilgrims had sunk out of sight.
    None of them reappeared. Not a single gasping head or thrashing arm.
    Saeed, Osman, Srinivas, the Sarpanch, and even fat Mrs Qureishi ran into the water, shrieking: ‘God have mercy; come on, everybody, help.’
    Human beings in danger of drowning struggle against the water. It is against human nature simply to walk forwards meekly until the sea swallows you up. But Ayesha, Mishal Akhtar and the villagers of Titlipur subsided below sea-level; and were never seen again.
    Mrs Qureishi was pulled to shore by policemen, her face blue, her lungs full of water, and needed the kiss of life. Osman, Srinivas and the Sarpanch were dragged out soon afterwards. Only Mirza Saeed Akhtar continued to dive, further and further out to sea,staying under for longer and longer periods; until he, too, was rescued from the Arabian Sea, spent, sick and fainting. The pilgrimage was over.
    Mirza Saeed awoke in a hospital ward to find a CID man by his bedside. The authorities were considering the feasibility of charging the survivors of the Ayesha expedition with attempted illegal emigration, and detectives had been instructed to get down their stories before they had had a chance to confer.
    This was the testimony of the Sarpanch of Titlipur, Muhammad Din: ‘Just when my strength had failed and I thought I would surely die there in the water, I saw it with my own eyes; I saw the sea divide, like hair being combed; and they were all there, far away, walking away from me. She was there also, my wife, Khadija, whom I loved.’
    This is what Osman the bullock-boy told the detectives, who had been badly shaken by the Sarpanch’s deposition: ‘At first I was in great fear of drowning myself. Still, I was searching searching, mainly for her, Ayesha, whom I knew from before her alteration. And just at the last, I saw it happen, the marvellous thing. The water opened, and I saw them go along the ocean-floor, among the dying fish.’
    Sri Srinivas, too, swore by the goddess Lakshmi that he had seen the parting of the Arabian Sea; and by the time the detectives got to Mrs Qureishi, they were utterly unnerved, because they knew that it was impossible for the men to have cooked up the story together. Mishal’s mother, the wife of the great banker, told the same story in her own words. ‘Believe don’t believe,’ she finished emphatically, ‘but what my eyes have seen my tongue repeats.’
    Goosepimply CID men attempted the third degree: ‘Listen, Sarpanch, don’t shit from your mouth. So many were there, nobody saw these things. Already the drowned bodies are floating to shore, swollen like balloons and stinking like hell. If you go on lying we will take you and stick your nose in the truth.’
    ‘You can show me whatever you want,’ Sarpanch Muhammad Din told interrogators. ‘But I still saw what I saw.’

    ‘And you?’ the CID men assembled, once he awoke, to ask Mirza Saeed Akhtar. ‘What did you see at the beach?’
    ‘How can you ask?’ he protested. ‘My wife has drowned. Don’t come hammering with your questions.’
    When he found out that he was the only survivor of the Ayesha Haj not to have witnessed the parting of the waves – Sri Srinivas was the one who told him what the others saw, adding mournfully: ‘It is our shame that we were not thought worthy to accompany. On us, Sethji, the waters closed, they slammed in our faces like the gates of Paradise’ – Mirza Saeed broke down and wept for a week and a day, the dry sobs continuing to shake his body long after his tear ducts had run out of salt.
    Then he went home.

    Moths had eaten the punkahs of Peristan and the library had been consumed by a billion hungry worms. When he turned on the taps, snakes oozed out instead of water, and creepers had twined themselves around the four-poster bed in which Viceroys had once slept. It was as if time had accelerated in his absence, and centuries had somehow elapsed instead of months, so that when he touched the giant Persian carpet rolled up in the ballroom it crumbled under his hand, and the baths were full of frogs with scarlet eyes. At night there were jackals howling on the wind. The great tree was dead, or close to death, and the fields were barren as the desert; the gardens of Peristan, in which, long ago, he first saw a beautiful young girl, had long ago yellowed into ugliness. Vultures were the