So now I have a dream-wife, the dreamer becomes conscious enough to think. What the hell to do with her? – But it isn’t up to him. Ayesha and Mishal Akhtar are together in the big house.
Ever since his birthday Mirza Saeed had been full of passionate desires, ‘as if life really does begin at forty’, his wife marvelled. Their marriage became so energetic that the servants had to change the bedsheets three times per day. Mishal hoped secretly that this heightening of her husband’s libido would lead her to conceive, because she was of the firm opinion that enthusiasm mattered, whatever doctors might say to the contrary, and that the years of taking her temperature every morning before getting out of bed, and then plotting the results on graph paper in order to establish her pattern of ovulation, had actually dissuaded the babies from being born, partly because it was difficult to be properly ardent when science got into bed along with you, and partly, too, in her view, because no self-respecting foetus would wish to enter the womb of so mechanically programmed a mother. Mishal still prayed for a child, although she no longer mentioned the fact to Saeed so as to spare him the sense of having failed her in this respect. Eyes shut, feigning sleep, she would call on God for a sign, and when Saeed became so loving, so frequently, she wondered if maybe this might not be it. As a result, his strange request that from now on, whenever they came to stay at Peristan, she should adopt the ‘old ways’ and retreat into purdah, was not treated by her with the contempt it deserved. In the city, where they kept a large and hospitable house, the zamindar and his wife were known as one of the most ‘modern’ and ‘go-go’ couples on the scene; they collected contemporary art and threw wild parties and invited friends round for fumbles in the dark on sofas while watching soft-porno VCRs. So when Mirza Saeed said, ‘Would it not be sort of delicious, Mishu, if we tailored our behaviour to fit this old house,’ she should have laughed in his face. Instead she replied, ‘What you like, Saeed,’ because he gave her to understand that it was a sort of erotic game. He even hinted that his passion for her had become so overwhelming that he might need to express it at any moment, and if she were out in the open at the time it might embarrass the staff; certainly her presence would make it impossible for him to concentrate on any of his tasks, and besides, in the city, ‘we will still be completely up-to-date’. From this she understood that the city was full of distractions for the Mirza, so that the chances of conceiving were greatest right here in Titlipur. She resolved to stay put. This was when she invited her mother to come and stay, because if she were to confine herself to the zenana she would need company. Mrs Qureishi arrived wobbling with plump fury, determined to scold her son-in-law until he gave up this purdah foolishness, but Mishal amazed her mother by begging: ‘Please don’t.’ Mrs Qureishi, the wife of the state bank director, was quite a sophisticate herself. ‘In fact, all your teenage, Mishu, you were the grey goose and I was the hipster. I thought you dragged yourself out of that ditch but I see he pushed you back in there again.’ The financier’s wife had always been of the opinion that her son-in-law was a secret cheapskate, an opinion which had survived intact in spite of being starved of any scrap of supporting evidence. Ignoring her daughter’s veto, she sought out Mirza Saeed in the formal garden and launched into him, wobbling, as was her wont, for emphasis. ‘What type of life are you living?’ she demanded. ‘My daughter is not for locking up, but for taking out! What is all your fortune for, if you keep it also under lock and key? My son, unlock both wallet and wife! Take her away, renew your love, on some enjoyable outing!’ Mirza Saeed opened his mouth, found no reply, shut it again. Dazzled by her own oratory, which had given rise, quite on the spur of the moment, to the idea of a holiday, Mrs Qureishi warmed to her theme. ‘Just get set, and go!’ she urged. ‘Go, man, go! Go away with her, or will you lock her up until she goes away,’ – here she jabbed an ominous finger at the sky – ‘forever?’
Guiltily, Mirza Saeed promised to consider the idea.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she cried in triumph. ‘You big softo? You … you Hamlet?’
His mother-in-law’s attack brought on one of the periodic bouts of self-reproach which had been plaguing Mirza Saeed ever since he persuaded Mishal to take the veil. To console himself he settled down to read Tagore’s story Ghare-Baire in which a zamindar persuades his wife to come out of purdah, whereupon he takes up with a firebrand politico involved in the ‘swadeshi’ campaign, and the zamindar winds up dead. The novel cheered him up momentarily, but then his suspicions returned. Had he been sincere in the reasons he gave his wife, or was he simply finding a way of leaving the coast clear for his pursuit of the madonna of the butterflies, the epileptic, Ayesha? ‘Some coast,’ he thought, remembering Mrs Qureishi with her eyes of an accusative hawk, ‘some clear.’ His mother-in-law’s presence, he argued to himself, was further proof of his bona fides. Had he not positively encouraged Mishal to send for her, even though he knew perfectly well that the old fatty couldn’t stand him and would suspect him of every damn slyness under the sun? ‘Would I have been so keen for her to come if I was planning on hanky panky?’ he asked himself. But the nagging inner voices continued: All this recent sexology, this renewed interest in your lady wife, is simple transference. Really, you are longing for your peasant floozy to come and flooze with you.’
Guilt had the effect of making the zamindar feel entirely worthless. His mother-in-law’s insults came to seem, in his unhappiness, like the literal truth. ‘Softo,’ she called him, and sitting in his study, surrounded by bookcases in which worms were munching contentedly upon priceless Sanskrit texts such as were not to be found even in the national archives, and also, less upliftingly, on the complete works of Percy Westerman, G. A. Henty and Dornford Yates, Mirza Saeed admitted, yes, spot on, I am soft. The house was seven generations old and for seven generations the softening had been going on. He walked down the corridor in which his ancestors hung in baleful, gilded frames, and contemplated the mirror which he kept hanging in the last space as a reminder that one day he, too, must step up on to this wall. He was a man without sharp corners or rough edges; even his elbows were covered by little pads of flesh. In the mirror he saw the thin moustache, the weak chin, the lips stained by paan. Cheeks, nose, forehead: all soft, soft, soft. ‘Who would see anything in a type like me?’ he cried, and when he realized that he had been so agitated that he had spoken aloud he knew he must be in love, that he was sick as a dog with love, and that the object of his affections was no longer his loving wife.
‘Then what a damn, shallow, tricksy and self-deceiving fellow I am,’ he sighed to himself, ‘to change so much, so fast. I deserve to be finished off without ceremony.’ But he was not the type to fall on his sword. Instead, he strolled a while around the corridors of Peristan, and pretty soon the house worked its magic and restored him to something like a good mood once again.
The house: in spite of its faery name, it was a solid, rather prosy building, rendered exotic only by being in the wrong country. It had been built seven generations ago by a certain Perowne, an English architect much favoured by the colonial authorities, whose only style was that of the neo-classical English country house. In those days the great zamindars were crazy for European architecture. Saeed’s great-great-great-great-grandfather had hired the fellow five minutes after meeting him at the Viceroy’s reception, to indicate publicly that not all Indian Muslims had supported the action of the Meerut soldiers or been in sympathy with the subsequent uprisings, no, not by any means; – and then given him carte blanche; – so here Peristan now stood, in the middle of near-tropical potato fields and beside the great banyan-tree, covered in bougainvillaea creeper, with snakes in the kitchens and butterfly skeletons in the cupboards. Some said its name owed more to the Englishman’s than to anything more fanciful: it was a mere contraction of Perownistan.
After seven generations it was at last beginning to look as if it belonged in this landscape of bullock carts and palm-trees and high, clear, star-heavy skies. Even the stained-gl
ass window looking down on the staircase of King Charles the Headless had been, in an indefinable manner, naturalized. Very few of these old zamindar houses had survived the egalitarian depredations of the present, and accordingly there hung over Peristan something of the musty air of a museum, even though – or perhaps because – Mirza Saeed took great pride in the old place and had spent lavishly to keep it in trim. He slept under a high canopy of worked and beaten brass in a ship-like bed that had been occupied by three Viceroys. In the grand salon he liked to sit with Mishal and Mrs Qureishi in the unusual three-way love seat. At one end of this room a colossal Shiraz carpet stood rolled up, on wooden blocks, awaiting the glamorous reception which would merit its unfurling, and which never came. In the dining-room there were stout classical columns with ornate Corinthian tops, and there were peacocks, both real and stone, strolling on the main steps to the house, and Venetian chandeliers tinkling in the hall. The original punkahs were still in full working order, all their operating cords travelling by way of pulleys and holes in walls and floors to a little, airless boot-room where the punkah-wallah sat and tugged the lot together, trapped in the irony of the foetid air of that tiny windowless room while he despatched cool breezes to all other parts of the house. The servants, too, went back seven generations and had therefore lost the art of complaining. The old ways ruled: even the Titlipur sweet-vendor was required to seek the zamindar’s approval before commencing to sell any innovative sweetmeat he might have invented. Life in Peristan was as soft as it was hard under the tree; but, even into such cushioned existences, heavy blows can fall.
The discovery that his wife was spending most of her time closeted with Ayesha filled the Mirza with an insupportable irritation, an eczema of the spirit that maddened him because there was no way of scratching it. Mishal was hoping that the archangel, Ayesha’s husband, would grant her a baby, but because she couldn’t tell that to her husband she grew sullen and shrugged petulantly when he asked her why she wasted so much time with the village’s craziest girl. Mishal’s new reticence worsened the itch in Mirza Saeed’s heart, and made him jealous, too, although he wasn’t sure if he was jealous of Ayesha, or Mishal. He noticed for the first time that the mistress of the butterflies had eyes of the same lustrous grey shade as his wife, and for some reason this made him cross, too, as if it proved that the women were ganging up on him, whispering God knew what secrets; maybe they were chittering and chattering about him! This zenana business seemed to have backfired; even that old jelly Mrs Qureishi had been taken in by Ayesha. Quite a threesome, thought Mirza Saeed; when mumbo-jumbo gets in through your door, good sense leaves by the window.
As for Ayesha: when she encountered the Mirza on the balcony, or in the garden as he wandered reading Urdu love-poetry, she was invariably deferential and shy; but her good behaviour, coupled with the total absence of any spark of erotic interest, drove Saeed further and further into the helplessness of his despair. So it was that when, one day, he spied Ayesha entering his wife’s quarters and heard, a few minutes later, his mother-in-law’s voice rise in a melodramatic shriek, he was seized by a mood of mulish vengefulness and deliberately waited a full three minutes before going to investigate. He found Mrs Qureishi tearing her hair and sobbing like a movie queen, while Mishal and Ayesha sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, grey eyes staring into grey, and Mishal’s face was cradled between Ayesha’s outstretched palms.
It turned out that the archangel had informed Ayesha that the zamindar’s wife was dying of cancer, that her breasts were full of the malign nodules of death, and that she had no more than a few months to live. The location of the cancer had proved to Mishal the cruelty of God, because only a vicious deity would place death in the breast of a woman whose only dream was to suckle new life. When Saeed entered, Ayesha had been whispering urgently to Mishal: ‘You mustn’t think that way. God will save you. This is a test of faith.’
Mrs Qureishi told Mirza Saeed the bad news with many shrieks and howls, and for the confused zamindar it was the last straw. He flew into a temper and started yelling loudly and trembling as if he might at any moment start smashing up the furniture in the room and its occupants as well.
‘To hell with your spook cancer,’ he screamed at Ayesha in his exasperation. ‘You have come into my house with your craziness and angels and dripped poison into my family’s ears. Get out of here with your visions and your invisible spouse. This is the modern world, and it is medical doctors and not ghosts in potato fields who tell us when we are ill. You have created this bloody hullabaloo for nothing. Get out and never come on to my land again.’
Ayesha heard him out without removing her eyes or hands from Mishal. When Saeed stopped for breath, clenching and unclenching his fists, she said softly to his wife: ‘Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given.’ When he heard this formula, which people all over the village were beginning to parrot as if they knew what it meant, Mirza Saeed Akhtar went briefly out of his mind, raised his hand and knocked Ayesha senseless. She fell to the floor, bleeding from the mouth, a tooth loosened by his fist, and as she lay there Mrs Qureishi hurled abuse at her son-in-law. ‘O God, I have put my daughter in the care of a killer. O God, a woman hitter. Go on, hit me also, get some practice. Defiler of saints, blasphemer, devil, unclean.’ Saeed left the room without saying a word.
The next day Mishal Akhtar insisted on returning to the city for a complete medical check-up. Saeed took a stand. ‘If you want to indulge in superstition, go, but don’t expect me to come along. It’s eight hours’ drive each way; so, to hell with it.’ Mishal left that afternoon with her mother and the driver, and as a result Mirza Saeed was not where he should have been, that is, at his wife’s side, when the results of the tests were communicated to her: positive, inoperable, too far advanced, the claws of the cancer dug in deeply throughout her chest. A few months, six if she was lucky, and before that, coming soon, the pain. Mishal returned to Peristan and went straight to her rooms in the zenana, where she wrote her husband a formal note on lavender stationery, telling him of the doctor’s diagnosis. When he read her death sentence, written in her own hand, he wanted very badly to burst into tears, but his eyes remained obstinately dry. He had had no time for the Supreme Being for many years, but now a couple of Ayesha’s phrases popped back into his mind. God will save you. Everything will be given. A bitter, superstitious notion occurred to him: ‘It is a curse,’ he thought. ‘Because I lusted after Ayesha, she has murdered my wife.’
When he went to the zenana, Mishal refused to see him, but her mother, barring the doorway, handed Saeed a second note on scented blue notepaper, ‘I want to see Ayesha,’ it read. ‘Kindly permit this.’ Bowing his head, Mirza Saeed gave his assent, and crept away in shame.
With Mahound, there is always a struggle; with the Imam, slavery; but with this girl, there is nothing. Gibreel is inert, usually asleep in the dream as he is in life. She comes upon him under a tree, or in a ditch, hears what he isn’t saying, takes what she needs, and leaves. What does he know about cancer, for example? Not a solitary thing.
All around him, he thinks as he half-dreams, half-wakes, are people hearing voices, being seduced by words. But not his; never his original material. – Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling them to move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease?
He can’t work it out.
The day after Mishal Akhtar’s return to Titlipur, the girl Ayesha, whom people were beginning to call a kahin, a pir, disappeared completely for a week. Her hapless admirer, Osman the clown, who had been following her at a distance along the dusty potato track to Chatnapatna, told the villagers that a breeze got up and blew dust into his eyes; when he got it out again she had ‘just gone’. Usually, when Osman and his bullock started telling their tall tales about djinnis and magic lamps and open-sesames, the villagers looked tolerant and teased him, okay, Osman, save it for those idiots in Chatnapatna; they may fall for that stuff but here in Titlipur we know which way
is up and that palaces do not appear unless a thousand and one labourers build them, nor do they disappear unless the same workers knock them down. On this occasion, however, nobody laughed at the clown, because where Ayesha was concerned the villagers were willing to believe anything. They had grown convinced that the snow-haired girl was the true successor to old Bibiji, because had the butterflies not reappeared in the year of her birth, and did they not follow her around like a cloak? Ayesha was the vindication of the long-soured hope engendered by the butterflies’ return, and the evidence that great things were still possible in this life, even for the weakest and poorest in the land.
‘The angel has taken her away,’ marvelled the Sarpanch’s wife Khadija, and Osman burst into tears. ‘But no, it is a wonderful thing,’ old Khadija uncomprehendingly explained. The villagers teased the Sarpanch: ‘How you got to be village headman with such a tactless spouse, beats us.’
The Satanic Verses Page 25
