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’s ancient, decaying family and then ripened, over time 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 the gaze 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 her cut mouth, and he feared for her tongue, but the sickness left her just then, she became calm, and slept. Mishal had her carried to her own bedroom, and now Mirza Saeed was obliged to gaze on a second sleeping beauty in that bed, and was stricken for a second time by what seemed too rich and deep a sensation to be called by the crude name, lust. He found that he was at once sickened by his own impure designs and also elated by the feelings that were coursing within him, fresh feelings whose newness excited him greatly. Mishal came to stand beside her husband. ‘Do you know her?’ Saeed asked, and she nodded. ‘An orphan girl. She makes small enamel animals and sells them at the trunk road. She has had the falling sickness since she was very little.’ Mirza Saeed was awed, not for the first time, by his wife’s gift of involvement with other human beings. He himself could hardly recognize more than a handful of the villagers, but she knew each person’s pet names, family histories and incomes. They even told her their dreams, although few of them dreamed more than once a month on account of being too poor to afford such luxuries. The overflowing fondness he had felt at dawn returned, and he placed his arm around her shoulders. She leaned her head against him and said softly: ‘Happy birthday.’ He kissed the top of her hair. They stood embracing, watching the sleeping girl. Ayesha: his wife told him the name.
After the orphan girl Ayesha arrived at puberty and became, on account of her distracted beauty and her air of staring into another world, the object of many young men’s desires, it began to be said that she was looking for a lover from heaven, because she thought herself too good for mortal men. Her rejected suitors complained that in practical terms she had no business acting so choosy, in the first place because she was an orphan, and in the second, because she was possessed by the demon of epilepsy, who would certainly put off any heavenly spirits who might otherwise have been interested. Some embittered youths went so far as to suggest that as Ayesha’s defects would prevent her from ever finding a husband she might as well start taking lovers, so as not to waste that beauty, which ought in all fairness to have been given to a less problematic individual. In spite of these attempts by the young men of Titlipur to turn her into their whore, Ayesha remained chaste, her defence being a look of such fierce concentration on patches of air immediately above people’s left shoulders that it was regularly mistaken for contempt. Then people heard about her new habit of swallowing butterflies and they revised their opinion of her, convinced that she was touched in the head and therefore dangerous to lie with in case the demons crossed over into her lovers. After this the lustful males of her village left her alone in her hovel, alone with her toy animals and her peculiar fluttering diet. One young man, however, took to sitting a little distance from her doorway, facing discreetly in the opposite direction, as if he were on guard, even though she no longer had any need of protectors. He was a former untouchable from the neighbouring village of Chatnapatna who had been converted to Islam and taken the n
ame of Osman. Ayesha never acknowledged Osman’s presence, nor did he ask for such acknowledgement. The leafy branches of the village waved over their heads in the breeze.
The village of Titlipur had grown up in the shade of an immense banyan-tree, a single monarch that ruled, with its multiple roots, over an area more than half a mile in diameter. By now the growth of tree into village and village into tree had become so intricate that it was impossible to differentiate between the two. Certain districts of the tree had become well-known lovers’ nooks; others were chicken runs. Some of the poorer labourers had constructed rough-and-ready shelters in the angles of stout branches, and actually lived inside the dense foliage. There were branches that were used as pathways across the village, and children’s swings made out of the tree’s beards, and in places where the tree stooped low down towards the earth its leaves formed roofs for many a hutment that seemed to hang from the greenery like the nest of a weaver bird. When the village panchayat assembled, it sat on the mightiest branch of all. The villagers had grown accustomed to referring to the tree by the name of the village, and to the village simply as ‘the tree’. The banyan’s non-human inhabitants – honey ants, squirrels, owls – were accorded the respect due to fellow-citizens. Only the butterflies were ignored, like hopes long since shown to be false.
It was a Muslim village, which was why the convert Osman had come here with his clown’s outfit and his ‘boom-boom’ bullock after he had embraced the faith in an act of desperation, hoping that changing to a Muslim name would do him more good than earlier re-namings, for example when untouchables were renamed ‘children of God.’ As a child of God in Chatnapatna he had not been permitted to draw water from the town well, because the touch of an outcaste would have polluted the drinking water … Landless and, like Ayesha, an orphan, Osman earned his living as a clown. His bullock wore bright red paper cones over its horns and much tinselly drapery over its nose and back. He went from village to village performing an act, at marriages and other celebrations, in which the bullock was his essential partner and foil, nodding in answer to his questions, one nod for no, twice for yes.
‘Isn’t this a nice village we’ve come to?’ Osman would ask.
Boom, the bullock disagreed.
‘It isn’t? Oh yes it is. Look: aren’t the people good?’
Boom.
‘What? Then it’s a village full of sinners?’
Boom, boom.
‘Baapu-ré! Then, will everybody go to hell?’
Boom, boom.
‘But, bhaijan. Is there any hope for them?’
Boom, boom, the bullock offered salvation. Excitedly, Osman bent down, placing his ear by the bullock’s mouth. ‘Tell, quickly. What should they do to be saved?’ At this point the bullock plucked Osman’s cap off his head and carried it around the crowd, asking for money, and Osman would nod, happily: Boom, boom.
Osman the convert and his boom-boom bullock were well liked in Titlipur, but the young man only wanted the approval of one person, and she would not give it. He had admitted to her that his conversion to Islam had been largely tactical, ‘Just so I could get a drink, bibi, what’s a man to do?’ She had been outraged by his confession, informed him that he was no Muslim at all, his soul was in peril and he could go back to Chatnapatna and die of thirst for all she cared. Her face coloured, as she spoke, with an unaccountably strong disappointment in him, and it was the vehemence of this disappointment that gave him the optimism to remain squatting a dozen paces from her home, day after day, but she continued to stalk past him, nose in air, without so much as a good morning or hope-you’re-well.
Once a week, the potato carts of Titlipur trundled down the rutted, narrow, four-hour track to Chatnapatna, which stood at the point at which the track met the grand trunk road. In Chatnapatna stood the high, gleaming aluminium silos of the potato wholesalers, but this had nothing to do with Ayesha’s regular visits to the town. She would hitch a ride on a potato cart, clutching a little sackcloth bundle, to take her toys to market. Chatnapatna was known throughout the region for its kiddies’ knick-knacks, carved wooden toys and enamelled figurines. Osman and his bullock stood at the edge of the banyan-tree, watching her bounce about on top of the potato sacks until she had diminished to a dot.
In Chatnapatna she made her way to the premises of Sri Srinivas, owner of the biggest toy factory in town. On its walls were the political graffiti of the day: Vote for Hand. Or, more politely: Please vote for CP(M). Above these exhortations was the proud announcement: Srinivas’s Toy Univas. Our Moto: Sincerity & Creativity. Srinivas was inside: a large jelly of a man, his head a hairless sun, a fiftyish fellow whom a lifetime of selling toys had failed to sour. Ayesha owed him her livelihood. He had been so taken with the artistry of her whittling that he had agreed to buy as many as she could produce. But in spite of his habitual bonhomie his expression darkened when Ayesha undid her bundle to show him two dozen figures of a young man in a clown hat, accompanied by a decorated bullock that could dip its tinselled head. Understanding that Ayesha had forgiven Osman his conversion, Sri Srinivas cried, ‘That man is a traitor to his birth, as you well know. What kind of a person will change gods as easily as his dhotis? God knows what got into you, daughter, but I don’t want these dolls.’ On the wall behind his desk hung a framed certificate which read, in elaborately curlicued print: This is to certify that MR SRI S. SRINIVAS is an Expert on the Geological History of the Planet Earth, having flown through Grand Canyon with SCENIC AIRLINES. Srinivas closed his eyes and folded his arms, an unlaughing Buddha with the indisputable authority of one who had flown. ‘That boy is a devil,’ he said with finality, and Ayesha folded the dolls into her piece of sackcloth and turned to leave, without arguing. Srinivas’s eyes flew open. ‘Damn you,’ he shouted, ‘aren’t you going to give me a hard time? You think I don’t know you need the money? Why you did such a damn stupid thing? What are you going to do now? Just go and make some FP dolls, double quick, and I will buy at best rate plus, because I am generous to a fault.’ Mr Srinivas’s personal invention was the Family Planning doll, a socially responsible variant of the old Russian-doll notion. Inside a suited-and-booted Abba-doll was a demure, sari-clad Amma, and inside her a daughter containing a son. Two children are plenty: that was the message of the dolls. ‘Make quickly quickly,’ Srinivas called after the departing Ayesha. ‘FP dolls have high turnover.’ Ayesha turned, and smiled. ‘Don’t worry about me, Srinivasji,’ she said, and left.
Ayesha the orphan was nineteen years old when she began her walk back to Titlipur along the rutted potato track, but by the time she turned up in her village some forty-eight hours later she had attained a kind of agelessness, because her hair had turned as white as snow while her skin had regained the luminous perfection of a new-born child’s, and although she was completely naked the butterflies had settled upon her body in such thick swarms that she seemed to be wearing a dress of the most delicate material in the universe. The clown Osman was practising routines with the boom-boom bullock near the track, because even though he had been worried sick by her extended absence, and had spent the whole of the previous night searching for her, it was still necessary to earn a living. When he laid eyes on her, that young man who had never respected God because of having been born untouchable was filled with holy terror, and did not dare to approach the girl with whom he was so helplessly in love.
She went into her hut and slept for a day and a night without waking up. Then she went to see the village headman, Sarpanch Muhammad Din, and informed him matter-of-factly that the Archangel Gibreel had appeared to her in a vision and had lain down beside her to rest. ‘Greatness has come among us,’ she informed the alarmed Sarpanch, who had until then been more concerned with potato quotas than transcendence. ‘Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given to us also.’
In another part of the tree, the Sarpanch’s wife Khadija was consoling a weeping clown, who was finding it hard to accept that he had lost his beloved Ayesha to a
higher being, for when an archangel lies with a woman she is lost to men forever. Khadija was old and forgetful and frequently clumsy when she tried to be loving, and she gave Osman cold comfort: ‘The sun always sets when there is fear of tigers,’ she quoted the old saying: bad news always comes all at once.
Soon after the story of the miracle got out, the girl Ayesha was summoned to the big house, and in the following days she spent long hours closeted with the zamindar’s wife, Begum Mishal Akhtar, whose mother had also arrived on a visit, and fallen for the archangel’s white-haired wife.
The dreamer, dreaming, wants (but is unable) to protest: I never laid a finger on her, what do you think this is, some kind of wet dream or what? Damn me if I know from where that girl was getting her information/inspiration. Not from this quarter, that’s for sure.
This happened: she was walking back to her village, but then she seemed to grow weary all of a sudden, and went off the path to lie in the shade of a tamarind-tree and rest. The moment her eyes closed he was there beside her, dreaming Gibreel in coat and hat, sweltering in the heat. She looked at him but he couldn’t say what she saw, wings maybe, haloes, the works. Then he was lying there and finding he could not get up, his limbs had become heavier than iron bars, it seemed as if his body might be crushed by its own weight into the earth. When she finished looking at him she nodded, gravely, as if he had spoken, and then she took off her scrap of a sari and stretched out beside him, nude. Then in the dream he fell asleep, out cold as if somebody pulled out the plug, and when dreamed himself awake again she was standing in front of him with that loose white hair and the butterflies clothing her: transformed. She was still nodding, with a rapt expression on her face, receiving a message from somewhere that she called Gibreel. Then she left him lying there and returned to the village to make her entrance.