The Satanic Verses

world, in which the catastrophe was invariably his fault. He had been reading Nietzsche the night before – ‘the pitiless end of that small, overextended species called Man’ – and had fallen asleep with the book resting face downwards on his chest. Waking to the rustle of butterfly wings in the cool, shadowy bedroom, he was angry with himself for being so foolish in his choice of bedside reading matter. He was, however, wide awake now. Getting up quietly, he slipped his feet into chappals and strolled idly along the verandas of the great mansion, still in darkness on account of their lowered blinds, and the butterflies bobbed like courtiers at his back. In the far distance, someone was playing a flute. Mirza Saeed drew up the chick blinds and fastened their cords. The gardens were deep in mist, through which the butterfly clouds were swirling, one mist intersecting another. This remote region had always been renowned for its lepidoptera, for these miraculous squadrons that filled the air by day and night, butterflies with the gift of chameleons, whose wings changed colour as they settled on vermilion flowers, ochre curtains, obsidian goblets or amber finger-rings. In the zamindar’s mansion, and also in the nearby village, the miracle of the butterflies had become so familiar as to seem mundane, but in fact they had only returned nineteen years ago, as the servant women would recall. They had been the familiar spirits, or so the legend ran, of a local saint, the holy woman known only as Bibiji, who had lived to the age of two hundred and forty-two and whose grave, until its location was forgotten, had the property of curing impotence and warts. Since the death of Bibiji one hundred and twenty years ago the butterflies had vanished into the same realm of the legendary as Bibiji herself, so that when they came back exactly one hundred and one years after their departure it looked, at first, like an omen of some imminent, wonderful thing. After Bibiji’s death – it should quickly be said – the village had continued to prosper, the potato crops remained plentiful, but there had been a gap in many hearts, even though the villagers of the present had no memory of thetime of the old saint. So the return of the butterflies lifted many spirits, but when the expected wonders failed to materialize the locals sank back, little by little, into the insufficiency of the day-to-day. The name of the zamindar’s mansion,
Peristan
, may have had its origins in the magical creatures’ fairy wings, and the village’s name,
Titlipur
, certainly did. But names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit. The human inhabitants of Titlipur, and its butterfly hordes, moved amongst one another with a kind of mutual disdain. The villagers and the zamindar’s family had long ago abandoned the attempt to exclude the butterflies from their homes, so that now whenever a trunk was opened, a batch of wings would fly out of it like Pandora’s imps, changing colour as they rose; there were butterflies under the closed lids of the thunderboxes in the toilets of Peristan, and inside every wardrobe, and between the pages of books. When you awoke you found the butterflies sleeping on your cheeks.
    The commonplace eventually becomes invisible, and Mirza Saeed had not really noticed the butterflies for a number of years. On the morning of his fortieth birthday, however, as the first light of dawn touched the house and the butterflies began instantly to glow, the beauty of the moment took his breath away. He ran at once to the bedroom in the zenana wing in which his wife Mishal lay sleeping, veiled in a mosquito-net. The magic butterflies were resting on her exposed toes, and a mosquito had evidently found its way inside as well, because there was a line of little bites along the raised edge of her collar-bone. He wanted to lift the net, crawl inside and kiss the bites until they faded away. How inflamed they looked! How, when she awoke, they would itch! But he held himself back, preferring to enjoy the innocence of her sleeping form. She had soft, red-brown hair, white white skin, and her eyes, behind the closed lids, were silky grey. Her father was a director of the state bank, so it had been an irresistible match, an arranged marriage which restored the fortunes of the Mirza’sancient, decaying family and then ripened, over time