The Satanic Verses

and in spite of their failure to have children, into a union of real love. Full of emotion, Mirza Saeed watched Mishal sleep and chased the last shreds of his nightmare from his mind. ‘How can the world be done for,’ he reasoned contentedly to himself, ‘if it can offer up such instances of perfection as this lovely dawn?’
    Continuing down the line of these happy thoughts, he formulated a silent speech to his resting wife. ‘Mishal, I’m forty years old and as contented as a forty-day babe. I see now that I’ve been falling deeper and deeper into our love over the years, and now I swim, like some fish, in that warm sea.’ How much she gave him, he marvelled; how much he needed her! Their marriage transcended mere sensuality, was so intimate that a separation was unthinkable. ‘Growing old beside you,’ he told her while she slept, ‘will be, Mishal, a privilege.’ He permitted himself the sentimentality of blowing a kiss in her direction and then tiptoeing from the room. Out once more on the main veranda of his private quarters on the mansion’s upper storey, he glanced across to the gardens, which were coming into view as the dawn lifted the mist, and saw the sight that would destroy his peace of mind forever, smashing it beyond hope of repair at the very instant in which he had become certain of its invulnerability to the ravages of fate.
    A young woman was squatting on the lawn, holding out her left palm. Butterflies were settling on this surface while, with her right hand, she picked them up and put them in her mouth. Slowly, methodically, she breakfasted on the acquiescent wings.
    Her lips, cheeks, chin were heavily stained by the many different colours that had rubbed off the dying butterflies.
    When Mirza Saeed Akhtar saw the young woman eating her gossamer breakfast on his lawn, he felt a surge of lust so powerful that he instantly felt ashamed. ‘It’s impossible,’ he scolded himself, ‘I am not an animal, after all.’ The young woman wore a saffron yellow sari wrapped around her nakedness, after the fashion of the poor women of that region, and as she stooped over the butterflies the sari, hanging loosely forwards, bared her small breasts to thegaze of the transfixed zamindar. Mirza Saeed stretched out his hands to grip the balcony railing, and the slight movement of his white kurta must have caught her eye, because she lifted her head quickly and looked right into his face.
    And did not immediately look down again. Nor did she get up and run away, as he had half expected.
    What she did: waited for a few seconds, as though to see if he intended to speak. When he did not, she simply resumed her strange meal without taking her eyes from his face. The strangest aspect of it was that the butterflies seemed to be funnelling downwards from the brightening air, going willingly towards her outstretched palms and their own deaths. She held them by the wingtips, threw her head back and flicked them into her mouth with the tip of her narrow tongue. Once she kept her mouth open, the dark lips parted defiantly, and Mirza Saeed trembled to see the butterfly fluttering within the dark cavern of its death, yet making no attempt to escape. When she was satisfied that he had seen this, she brought her lips together and began to chew. They remained thus, peasant woman below, landowner above, until her eyes unexpectedly rolled upwards in their sockets and she fell heavily, twitching violently, on to her left side.
    After a few seconds of transfixed panic, the Mirza shouted, ‘Ohé, house! Ohé, wake up, emergency!’ At the same time he ran towards the stately mahogany staircase from England, brought here from some unimaginable Warwickshire, some fantastic location in which, in a damp and lightless priory, King Charles I had ascended these same steps, before losing his head, in the seventeenth century of another system of time. Down these stairs hurtled Mirza Saeed Akhtar, last of his line, trampling over the ghostly impressions of beheaded feet as he sped towards the lawn.
    The girl was having convulsions, crushing butterflies beneath her rolling, kicking body. Mirza Saeed got to her first, although the servants and Mishal, awakened by his cry, were not far behind. He grasped the girl by the jaw and forced it open, inserting a nearby twig, which she at once bit in half. Blood trickled from hercut mouth, and he feared for her tongue, but the sickness left her just then, she became calm, and slept. Mishal