‘Abandon a Mercedes-Benz?’ Saeed yelped in genuine horror.
‘So what?’ Mishal replied in her grey, exhausted voice. ‘You keep talking about ruination. Then what difference is a Mercedes going to make?’
‘You don’t understand,’ Saeed wept. ‘Nobody understands me.’
Gibreel dreamed a drought:
The land browned under the rainless skies. The corpses of buses and ancient monuments rotting in the fields beside the crops. Mirza Saeed saw, through his shattered windscreen, the onset of calamity: the wild donkeys fucking wearily and dropping dead, while still conjoined, in the middle of the road, the trees standing on roots exposed by soil erosion and looking like huge wooden claws scrabbling for water in the earth, the destitute farmers being obliged to work for the state as manual labourers, digging a reservoir by the trunk road, an empty container for the rain that wouldn’t fall. Wretched roadside lives: a woman with a bundle heading for a tent of stick and rag, a girl condemned to scour, each day, this pot, this pan, in her patch of filthy dust. ‘Are such lives really worth as much as ours?’ Mirza Saeed Akhtar asked himself. ‘As much as mine? As Mishal’s? How little they have experienced, how little they have on which to feed the soul.’ A man in a dhoti and loose yellow pugri stood like a bird on top of a milestone, perched there with one foot on the opposite knee, one hand under the opposite elbow, smoking a biri. As Mirza Saeed Akhtar passed him he spat, and caught the zamindar full in the face.
The pilgrimage advanced slowly, three hours’ walking in the mornings, three more after the heat, walking at the pace of the slowest pilgrim, subject to infinite delays, the sickness of children, the harassment of the authorities, a wheel coming off one of the bullock carts; two miles a day at best, one hundred and fifty miles to the sea, a journey of approximately eleven weeks. The first death happened on the eighteenth day. Khadija, the tactless old lady who had been for half a century the contented and contenting spouse of Sarpanch Muhammad Din, saw an archangel in a dream. ‘Gibreel,’ she whispered, ‘is it you?’
‘No,’ the apparition replied. ‘It’s I, Azraeel, the one with the lousy job. Excuse the disappointment.’
The next morning she continued with the pilgrimage, saying nothing to her husband about her vision. After two hours they neared the ruin of one of the Mughal milepost inns that had, in times long gone, been built at five-mile intervals along the highway. When Khadija saw the ruin she knew nothing of its past, of the wayfarers robbed in their sleep and so on, but she understood its present well enough. ‘I have to go in there and lie down,’ she said to the Sarpanch, who protested: ‘But, the march!’ ‘Never mind that,’ she said gently. ‘You can catch them up later.’
She lay down in the rubble of the old ruin with her head on a smooth stone which the Sarpanch found for her. The old man wept, but that didn’t do any good, and she was dead within a minute. He ran back to the march and confronted Ayesha angrily. ‘I should never have listened to you,’ he told her. ‘And now you have killed my wife.’
The march stopped. Mirza Saeed Akhtar, spotting an opportunity, insisted loudly that Khadija be taken to a proper Muslim burial ground. But Ayesha objected. ‘We are ordered by the archangel to go directly to the sea, without returns or detours.’ Mirza Saeed appealed to the pilgrims. ‘She is your Sarpanch’s beloved wife,’ he shouted. ‘Will you dump her in a hole by the side of the road?’
When the Titlipur villagers agreed that Khadija should be buried at once, Saeed could not believe his ears. He realized that their determination was even greater than he had suspected: even the bereaved Sarpanch acquiesced. Khadija was buried in the corner of a barren field behind the ruined way-station of the past.
The next day, however, Mirza Saeed noticed that the Sarpanch had come unstuck from the pilgrimage, and was mooching along disconsolately, a little distance apart from the rest, sniffing the bougainvillaea bushes. Saeed jumped out of the Mercedes and rushed off to Ayesha, to make another scene. ‘You monster!’ he shouted. ‘Monster without a heart! Why did you bring the old woman here to die?’ She ignored him, but on his way back to the station wagon the Sarpanch came over and said: ‘We were poor people. We knew we could never hope to go to Mecca Sharif, until she persuaded. She persuaded, and now see the outcome of her deeds.’
Ayesha the kahin asked to speak to the Sarpanch, but gave him not a single word of consolation. ‘Harden your faith,’ she scolded him. ‘She who dies on the great pilgrimage is assured of a home in Paradise. Your wife is sitting now among the angels and the flowers; what is there for you to regret?’
That evening the Sarpanch Muhammad Din approached Mirza Saeed as he sat by a small campfire. ‘Excuse, Sethji,’ he said, ‘but is it possible that I ride, as you once offered, in your motor-car?’
Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism. ‘My first convert,’ Mirza Saeed rejoiced.
By the fourth week the defection of Sarpanch Muhammad Din had begun to have its effect. He sat on the back seat of the Mercedes as if he were the zamindar and Mirza Saeed the chauffeur, and little by little the leather upholstery and the air-conditioning unit and the whisky-soda cabinet and the electrically operated mirror-glass windows began to teach him hauteur; his nose tilted into the air and he acquired the supercilious expression of a man who can see without being seen. Mirza Saeed in the driver’s seat felt his eyes and nose filling up with the dust that came in through the hole where the windscreen used to be, but in spite of such discomforts he was feeling better than before. Now, at the end of each day, a cluster of pilgrims would congregate around the Mercedes-Benz with its gleaming star, and Mirza Saeed would try and talk sense into them while they watched Sarpanch Muhammad Din raise and lower the mirror-glass rear windows, so that they saw, alternately, his features and their own. The Sarpanch’s presence in the Mercedes lent new authority to Mirza Saeed’s words.
Ayesha didn’t try to call the villagers away, and so far her confidence had been justified; there had been no further defections to the camp of the faithless. But Saeed saw her casting numerous glances in his direction and whether she was a visionary or not Mirza Saeed would have bet good money that those were the bad-tempered glances of a young girl who was no longer sure of getting her own way.
Then she disappeared.
She went off during an afternoon siesta and did not reappear for a day and a half, by which time there was pandemonium among the pilgrims – she always knew how to whip up an audience’s feelings, Saeed conceded; then she sauntered back up to them across the dust-clouded landscape, and this time her silver hair was streaked with gold, and her eyebrows, too, were golden. She summoned the villagers to her and told them that the archangel was displeased that the people of Titlipur had been filled up with doubts just because of the ascent of a martyr to Paradise. She warned that he was seriously thinking of withdrawing his offer to part the waters, ‘so that all you’ll get at the Arabian Sea is a salt-water bath, and then it’s back to your deserted potato fields on which no rain will ever fall again.’ The villagers were appalled. ‘No, it can’t be,’ they pleaded. ‘Bibiji, forgive us.’ It was the first time they had used the name of the longago saint to describe the girl who was leading them with an absolutism that had begun to frighten them as much as it impressed. After her speech the Sarpanch and Mirza Saeed were left alone in the station wagon. ‘Second round to the archangel,’ Mirza Saeed thought.
By the fifth week the health of most of the older pilgrims had deteriorated sharply, food supplies were running low, water was hard to find, and the children’s tear ducts were dry. The vulture herds were never far away.
As the pilgrims left behind the rural areas and came towards more densely populated zones, the level of harassment increased. The long-distance buses and trucks often refused to deviate and the pedestrians had to leap, screaming and tumbling over each other, out of their
way. Cyclists, families of six on Rajdoot motor-scooters, petty shop-keepers hurled abuse. ‘Crazies! Hicks! Muslims!’ Often they were obliged to keep marching for an entire night because the authorities in this or that small town didn’t want such riff-raff sleeping on their pavements. More deaths became inevitable.
Then the bullock of the convert, Osman, fell to its knees amid the bicycles and camel-dung of a nameless little town. ‘Get up, idiot,’ he yelled at it impotently. ‘What do you think you’re doing, dying on me in front of the fruit-stalls of strangers?’ The bullock nodded, twice for yes, and expired.
Butterflies covered the corpse, adopting the colour of its grey hide, its horn-cones and bells. The inconsolable Osman ran to Ayesha (who had put on a dirty sari as a concession to urban prudery, even though butterfly clouds still trailed off her like glory). ‘Do bullocks go to Heaven?’ he asked in a piteous voice; she shrugged. ‘Bullocks have no souls,’ she said coolly, ‘and it is souls we march to save.’ Osman looked at her and realized he no longer loved her. ‘You’ve become a demon,’ he told her in disgust.
‘I am nothing,’ Ayesha said. ‘I am a messenger.’
‘Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent,’ Osman raged. ‘What’s he afraid of? Is he so unconfident that he needs us to die to prove our love?’
As though in response to such blasphemy, Ayesha imposed even stricter disciplinary measures, insisting that all pilgrims say all five prayers, and decreeing that Fridays would be days of fasting. By the end of the sixth week she had forced the marchers to leave four more bodies where they fell: two old men, one old woman, and one six-year-old girl. The pilgrims marched on, turning their backs on the dead; behind them, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar gathered up the bodies and made sure they received a decent burial. In this he was assisted by the Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and the former untouchable, Osman. On such days they would fall quite a way behind the march, but a Mercedes-Benz station wagon doesn’t take long to catch up with over a hundred and forty men, women and children walking wearily towards the sea.
The dead grew in number, and the groups of unsettled pilgrims around the Mercedes got larger night by night. Mirza Saeed began to tell them stories. He told them about lemmings, and how the enchantress Circe turned men into pigs; he told, too, the story of a pipe-player who lured a town’s children into a mountain-crack. When he had told this tale in their own language he recited verses in English, so that they could listen to the music of the poetry even though they didn’t understand the words. ‘Hamelin town’s in Brunswick,’ he began. ‘Near famous Hanover City. The River Weser, deep and wide, washes its walls on the southern side …’
Now he had the satisfaction of seeing the girl Ayesha advance, looking furious, while the butterflies glowed like the campfire behind her, making it appear as though flames were streaming from her body.
‘Those who listen to the Devil’s verses, spoken in the Devil’s tongue,’ she cried, ‘will go to the Devil in the end.’
‘It’s a choice, then,’ Mirza Saeed answered her, ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea.’
Eight weeks had passed, and relations between Mirza Saeed and his wife Mishal had so deteriorated that they were no longer on speaking terms. By now, and in spite of the cancer that had turned her as grey as funeral ash, Mishal had become Ayesha’s chief lieutenant and most devoted disciple. The doubts of other marchers had only strengthened her own faith, and for these doubts she unequivocally blamed her husband.
‘Also,’ she had rebuked him in their last conversation, ‘there is no warmth in you any more. I feel afraid to approach.’
‘No warmth?’ he yelled. ‘How can you say it? No warmth? For whom did I come running on this damnfool pilgrimage? To look after whom? Because I love whom? Because I am so worried about, so sad about, so filled with misery about whom? No warmth? Are you a stranger? How can you say such a thing?’
‘Listen to yourself,’ she said in a voice which had begun to fade into a kind of smokiness, an opacity. ‘Always anger. Cold anger, icy, like a fort.’
‘This isn’t anger,’ he bellowed. ‘This is anxiety, unhappiness, wretchedness, injury, pain. Where can you hear anger?’
‘I hear it,’ she said. ‘Everyone can hear, for miles around.’
‘Come with me,’ he begged her. ‘I’ll take you to the top clinics in Europe, Canada, the USA. Trust in Western technology. They can do marvels. You always liked gadgets, too.’
‘I am going on a pilgrimage to Mecca,’ she said, and turned away.
‘You damn stupid bitch,’ he roared at her back. ‘Just because you’re going to die doesn’t mean you have to take all these people with you.’ But she walked away across the roadside camp-site, never looking back; and now that he’d proved her point by losing control and speaking the unspeakable he fell to his knees and wept. After that quarrel Mishal refused to sleep beside him any more. She and her mother rolled out their bedding next to the butterfly-shrouded prophetess of their Meccan quest.
By day, Mishal worked ceaselessly among the pilgrims, reassuring them, bolstering their faith, gathering them together beneath the wing of her gentleness. Ayesha had started retreating deeper and deeper into silence, and Mishal Akhtar became, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the pilgrims. But there was one pilgrim over whom she lost her grip: Mrs Qureishi, her mother, the wife of the director of the state bank.
The arrival of Mr Qureishi, Mishal’s father, was quite an event. The pilgrims had stopped in the shade of a line of plane-trees and were busy gathering brushwood and scouring cookpots when the motorcade was sighted. At once Mrs Qureishi, who was twenty-five pounds lighter than she had been at the beginning of the walk, leaped squeakily to her feet and tried frantically to brush the dirt off her clothes and to put her hair in order. Mishal saw her mother fumbling feebly with a molten lipstick and asked, ‘What’s bugging you, ma? Relax, na.’
Her mother pointed feebly at the approaching cars. Moments later the tall, severe figure of the great banker was standing over them. ‘If I had not seen it I would not have believed,’ he said. ‘They told me, but I pooh-poohed. Therefore it took me this long to find out. To vanish from Peristan without a word: now what in tarnation?’
Mrs Qureishi shook helplessly under her husband’s eyes, beginning to cry, feeling the calluses on her feet and the fatigue that had sunk into every pore of her body. ‘O God, I don’t know, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘God knows what came over.’
‘Don’t you know I occupy a delicate post?’ Mr Qureishi cried. ‘Public confidence is of essence. How does it look then that my wife gallivants with bhangis?’
Mishal, embracing her mother, told her father to stop bullying. Mr Qureishi saw for the first time that his daughter had the mark of death on her forehead and deflated instantly like an inner tube. Mishal told him about the cancer, and the promise of the seer Ayesha that a miracle would occur in Mecca, and she would be completely cured.
‘Then let me fly you to Mecca, pronto,’ her father pleaded. ‘Why walk if you can go by Airbus?’
But Mishal was adamant. ‘You should go away,’ she told her father. ‘Only the faithful can make this thing come about. Mummy will look after me.’
Mr Qureishi in his limousine helplessly joined Mirza Saeed at the rear of the procession, constantly sending one of the two servants who had accompanied him on motor-scooters to ask Mishal if she would like food, medicine, Thums Up, anything at all. Mishal turned down all his offers, and after three days – because banking is banking – Mr Qureishi departed for the city, leaving behind one of the motor-scooter chaprassis to serve the women. ‘He is yours to command,’ he told them. ‘Don’t be stupid now. Make this as easy as you can.’
The day after Mr Qureishi’s departure, the chaprassi Gul Muhammad ditched his scooter and joined the foot-pilgrims, knotting a handkerchief around his head to indicate his devotion. Ayesha said nothing, but when she saw the scooter-wallah join the pilgrimage she grinned an impish grin that rem
inded Mirza Saeed that she was, after all, not only a figure out of a dream, but also a flesh-and-blood young girl.
Mrs Qureishi began to complain. The brief contact with her old life had broken her resolve, and now that it was too late she had started thinking constantly about parties and soft cushions and glasses of iced fresh lime soda. It suddenly seemed wholly unreasonable to her that a person of her breeding should be asked to go barefoot like a common sweeper. She presented herself to Mirza Saeed with a sheepish expression on her face.