The Imam is the centre of a wheel.
Movement radiates from him, around the clock. His son, Khalid, enters his sanctum bearing a glass of water, holding it in his right hand with his left palm under the glass. The Imam drinks water constantly, one glass every five minutes, to keep himself clean; the water itself is cleansed of impurities, before he sips, in an American filtration machine. All the young men surrounding him are well aware of his famous Monograph on Water, whose purity, the Imam believes, communicates itself to the drinker, its thinness and simplicity, the ascetic pleasures of its taste. ‘The Empress,’ he points out, ‘drinks wine.’ Burgundies, clarets, hocks mingle their intoxicating corruptions within that body both fair and foul. The sin is enough to condemn her for all time without hope of redemption. The picture on his bedroom wall shows the Empress Ayesha holding, in both hands, a human skull filled with a dark red fluid. The Empress drinks blood, but the Imam is a water man. ‘Not for nothing do the peoples of our hot lands offer it reverence,’ the Monograph proclaims. ‘Water, preserver of life. No civilized individual can refuse it to another. A grandmother, be her limbs ever so arthritically stiff, will rise at once and go to the tap if a small child should come to her and ask, pani, nani. Beware all those who blaspheme against it. Who pollutes it, dilutes his soul.’
The Imam has often vented his rage upon the memory of the late Aga Khan, as a result of being shown the text of an interview in which the head of the Ismailis was observed drinking vintage champagne. O, sir, this champagne is only for outward show. The instant it touches my lips, it turns to water. Fiend, the Imam is wont to thunder. Apostate, blasphemer, fraud. When the future comes such individuals will be judged, he tells his men. Water will have its day and blood will flow like wine. Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. Who has not dreamed this dream, of being a king for a day? – But the Imam dreams of more than a day; feels, emanating from his fingertips, the arachnid strings with which he will control the movement of history.
No: not history.
His is a stranger dream.
His son, water-carrying Khalid, bows before his father like a pilgrim at a shrine, informs him that the guard on duty outside the sanctum is Salman Farsi. Bilal is at the radio transmitter, broadcasting the day’s message, on the agreed frequency, to Desh.
The Imam is a massive stillness, an immobility. He is living stone. His great gnarled hands, granite-grey, rest heavily on the wings of his high-backed chair. His head, looking too large for the body beneath, lolls ponderously on the surprisingly scrawny neck that can be glimpsed through the grey-black wisps of beard. The Imam’s eyes are clouded; his lips do not move. He is pure force, an elemental being; he moves without motion, acts without doing, speaks without uttering a sound. He is the conjurer and history is his trick.
No, not history: something stranger.
The explanation of this conundrum is to be heard, at this very moment, on certain surreptitious radio waves, on which the voice of the American convert Bilal is singing the Imam’s holy song. Bilal the muezzin: his voice enters a ham radio in Kensington and emerges in dreamed-of Desh, transmuted into the thunderous speech of the Imam himself. Beginning with ritual abuse of the Empress, with lists of her crimes, murders, bribes, sexual relations with lizards, and so on, he proceeds eventually to issue in ringing tones the Imam’s nightly call to his people to rise up against the evil of her State. ‘We will make a revolution,’ the Imam proclaims through him, ‘that is a revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history.’ For there is an enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood-wine that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies – progress, science, rights – against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound. ‘We will unmake the veil of history,’ Bilal declaims into the listening night, ‘and when it is unravelled, we will see Paradise standing there, in all its glory and light.’ The Imam chose Bilal for this task on account of the beauty of his voice, which in its previous incarnation succeeded in climbing the Everest of the hit parade, not once but a dozen times, to the very top. The voice is rich and authoritative, a voice in the habit of being listened to; well-nourished, highly trained, the voice of American confidence, a weapon of the West turned against its makers, whose might upholds the Empress and her tyranny. In the early days Bilal X protested at such a description of his voice. He, too, belonged to an oppressed people, he insisted, so that it was unjust to equate him with the Yankee imperialists. The Imam answered, not without gentleness: Bilal, your suffering is ours as well. But to be raised in the house of power is to learn its ways, to soak them up, through that very skin that is the cause of your oppression. The habit of power, its timbre, its posture, its way of being with others. It is a disease, Bilal, infecting all who come too near it. If the powerful trample over you, you are infected by the soles of their feet.
Bilal continues to address the darkness. ‘Death to the tyranny of the Empress Ayesha, of calendars, of America, of time! We seek the eternity, the timelessness, of God. His still waters, not her flowing wines.’ Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word, as it was revealed by the Angel Gibreel to the Messenger Mahound and explicated by your interpreter and Imam. ‘Ameen,’ Bilal said, concluding the night’s proceedings. While, in his sanctum, the Imam sends a message of his own: and summons, conjures up, the archangel, Gibreel.
He sees himself in the dream: no angel to look at, just a man in his ordinary street clothes, Henry Diamond’s posthumous hand-me-downs: gabardine and trilby over outsize trousers held up by braces, a fisherman’s woollen pullover, billowy white shirt. This dream-Gibreel, so like the waking one, stands quaking in the sanctum of the Imam, whose eyes are white as clouds.
Gibreel speaks querulously, to hide his fear.
‘Why insist on archangels? Those days, you should know, are gone.’
The Imam closes his eyes, sighs. The carpet extrudes long hairy tendrils, which wrap themselves around Gibreel, holding him fast.
‘You don’t need me,’ Gibreel emphasizes. ‘The revelation is complete. Let me go.’
The other shakes his head, and speaks, except that his lips do not move, and it is Bilal’s voice that fills Gibreel’s ears, even though the broadcaster is nowhere to be seen, tonight’s the night, the voice says, and you must fly me to Jerusalem.
Then the apartment dissolves and they are standing on the roof beside the water-tank, because the Imam, when he wishes to move, can remain still and move the world around him. His beard is blowing in the wind. It is longer now; if it were not for the wind that catches at it as if it were a flowing chiffon scarf, it would touch the ground by his feet; he has red eyes, and his voice hangs around him in the sky. Take me. Gibreel argues, Seems you can do it easily by yourself: but the Imam, in a single movement of astonishing rapidity, slings his beard over his shoulder, hoists up his skirts to reveal two spindly legs with an almost monstrous covering of hair, and leaps high into the night air, twirls himself about, and settles on Gibreel’s shoulders, clutching on to him with fingernails that have grown into long, curved claws. Gibreel feels himself rising into the sky, bearing the old man of the sea, the Imam with hair that grows longer by the minute, streaming in every direction, his eyebrows like pennants in the wind.
Jerusalem, he wonders, which way is that? – And then, it’s a slippery word, Jerusalem, it can be an idea as well as a place: a goal, an exaltation. Where is the Imam’s Jerusalem? ‘The fall of the harlot,’ the disembodied voice resounds in his ears. ‘Her crash, the Babylonian whore.’
They zoom through the night. The moon is heating up, beginning to bubble like cheese under a grill; he, Gibreel, sees pieces of it falling off from tim
e to time, moon-drips that hiss and bubble on the sizzling griddle of the sky. Land appears below them. The heat grows intense.
It is an immense landscape, reddish, with flat-topped trees. They fly over mountains that are also flat-topped; even the stones, here, are flattened by the heat. Then they come to a high mountain of almost perfectly conical dimensions, a mountain that also sits postcarded on a mantelpiece far away; and in the shadow of the mountain, a city, sprawling at its feet like a supplicant, and on the mountain’s lower slopes, a palace, the palace, her place: the Empress, whom radio messages have unmade. This is a revolution of radio hams.
Gibreel, with the Imam riding him like a carpet, swoops lower, and in the steaming night it looks as if the streets are alive, they seem to be writhing, like snakes; while in front of the palace of the Empress’s defeat a new hill seems to be growing, while we watch, baba, what’s going on here? The Imam’s voice hangs in the sky: ‘Come down. I will show you Love.’
They are at rooftop-level when Gibreel realizes that the streets are swarming with people. Human beings, packed so densely into those snaking paths that they have blended into a larger, composite entity, relentless, serpentine. The people move slowly, at an even pace, down alleys into lanes, down lanes into side streets, down side streets into highways, all of them converging upon the grand avenue, twelve lanes wide and lined with giant eucalyptus trees, that leads to the palace gates. The avenue is packed with humanity; it is the central organ of the new, many-headed being. Seventy abreast, the people walk gravely towards the Empress’s gates. In front of which her household guards are waiting in three ranks, lying, kneeling and standing, with machine-guns at the ready. The people are walking up the slope towards the guns; seventy at a time, they come into range; the guns babble, and they die, and then the next seventy climb over the bodies of the dead, the guns giggle once again, and the hill of the dead grows higher. Those behind it commence, in their turn, to climb. In the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons into the parade, go, be a martyr, do the needful, die. ‘You see how they love me,’ says the disembodied voice. ‘No tyranny on earth can withstand the power of this slow, walking love.’
‘This isn’t love,’ Gibreel, weeping, replies. ‘It’s hate. She has driven them into your arms.’ The explanation sounds thin, superficial.
‘They love me,’ the Imam’s voice says, ‘because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or tock. She looks in her mirror every day and is terrorized by the idea of age, of time passing. Thus she is the prisoner of her own nature; she, too, is in the chains of Time. After the revolution there will be no clocks; we’ll smash the lot. The word clock will be expunged from our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no birthdays. We shall all be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in the eye of Almighty God.’
He falls silent, now, because below us the great moment has come: the people have reached the guns. Which are silenced in their turn, as the endless serpent of the people, the gigantic python of the risen masses, embraces the guards, suffocating them, and silences the lethal chuckling of their weapons. The Imam sighs heavily. ‘Done.’
The lights of the palace are extinguished as the people walk towards it, at the same measured pace as before. Then, from within the darkened palace, there rises a hideous sound, beginning as a high, thin, piercing wail, then deepening into a howl, an ululation loud enough to fill every cranny of the city with its rage. Then the golden dome of the palace bursts open like an egg, and rising from it, glowing with blackness, is a mythological apparition with vast black wings, her hair streaming loose, as long and black as the Imam’s is long and white: Al-Lat, Gibreel understands, bursting out of Ayesha’s shell.
‘Kill her,’ the Imam commands.
Gibreel sets him down on the palace’s ceremonial balcony, his arms outstretched to encompass the joy of the people, a sound that drowns even the howls of the goddess and rises up like a song. And then he is being propelled into the air, having no option, he is a marionette going to war; and she, seeing him coming, turns, crouches in air, and, moaning dreadfully, comes at him with all her might. Gibreel understands that the Imam, fighting by proxy as usual, will sacrifice him as readily as he did the hill of corpses at the palace gate, that he is a suicide soldier in the service of the cleric’s cause. I am weak, he thinks, I am no match for her, but she, too, has been weakened by her defeat. The Imam’s strength moves Gibreel, places thunderbolts in his hands, and the battle is joined; he hurls lightning spears into her feet and she plunges comets into his groin, we are killing each other, he thinks, we will die and there will be two new constellations in space: Al-Lat, and Gibreel. Like exhausted warriors on a corpse-littered field, they totter and slash. Both are failing fast.
She falls.
Down she tumbles, Al-Lat queen of the night; crashes upside-down to earth, crushing her head to bits; and lies, a headless black angel, with her wings ripped off, by a little wicket gate in the palace gardens, all in a crumpled heap. – And Gibreel, looking away from her in horror, sees the Imam grown monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole.
The body of Al-Lat has shrivelled on the grass, leaving behind only a dark stain; and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime, and goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty-four, beyond one thousand and one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond measuring, the hour of the exile’s return, of the victory of water over wine, of the commencement of the Untime of the Imam.
When the nocturnal story changes, when, without warning, the progress of events in Jahilia and Yathrib gives way to the struggle of Imam and Empress, Gibreel briefly hopes that the curse has ended, that his dreams have been restored to the random eccentricity of ordinary life; but then, as the new story, too, falls into the old pattern, continuing each time he drops off from the precise point at which it was interrupted, and as his own image, translated into an avatar of the archangel, re-enters the frame, so his hope dies, and he succumbs once more to the inexorable. Things have reached the point at which some of his night-sagas seem more bearable than others, and after the apocalypse of the Imam he feels almost pleased when the next narrative begins, extending his internal repertory, because at least it suggests that the deity whom he, Gibreel, has tried unsuccessfully to kill can be a God of love, as well as one of vengeance, power, duty, rules and hate; and it is, too, a nostalgic sort of tale, of a lost homeland; it feels like a return to the past … what story is this? Coming right up. To begin at the beginning: On the morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies, Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched his sleeping wife …
On the fateful morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies, the zamindar Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched over his sleeping wife, and felt his heart fill up to the bursting-point with love. He had awoken early for once, rising before dawn with a bad dream souring his mouth, his recurring dream of the end of the 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 f
astened 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 the time 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.