The rain stopped, and a watery sun shone down on a Venetian scene of devastation. The roads of Sarang were now canals, along which there journeyed all manner of flotsam. Where only recently scooter-rickshaws, camel-carts and repaired bicycles had gone, there now floated newspapers, flowers, bangles, watermelons, umbrellas, chappals, sunglasses, baskets, excrement, medicine bottles, playing cards, dupattas, pancakes, lamps. The water had an odd, reddish tint that made the sodden populace imagine that the street was flowing with blood. There was no trace of bully-boy miners or of Ayesha Pilgrims. A dog swam across the intersection by the collapsed bicycle barricade, and all around there lay the damp silence of the flood, whose waters lapped at marooned buses, while children stared from the roofs of deliquescent gullies, too shocked to come out and play.
Then the butterflies returned.
From nowhere, as if they had been hiding behind the sun; and to celebrate the end of the rain they had all taken the colour of sunlight. The arrival of this immense carpet of light in the sky utterly bewildered the people of Sarang, who were already reeling in the aftermath of the storm; fearing the apocalypse, they hid indoors and closed their shutters. On a nearby hillside, however, Mirza Saeed Akhtar and his party observed the miracle's return and were filled, all of them, even the zamindar, with a kind of awe.
Mirza Saeed had driven hell-for-leather, in spite of being half-blinded by the rain which poured through the smashed windscreen, until on a road that led up and around the bend of a hill he came to a halt at the gates of the No.1 Sarang Coalfield. The pitheads were dimly visible through the rain. ‘Brainbox,’ Mishal Akhtar cursed him weakly. ‘Those bums are waiting for us back there, and you drive us up here to see their pals. Tip-top notion, Saeed. Extra fine.’
But they had no more trouble from miners. That was the day of the mining disaster that left fifteen thousand pitmen buried alive beneath the Sarangi hill. Saeed, Mishal, the Sarpanch, Osman, Mrs Qureishi, Srinivas and Ayesha stood exhausted and soaked to the skin by the roadside as ambulances, fire-engines, salvage operators and pit bosses arrived in large quantities and left, much later, shaking their heads. The Sarpanch caught his earlobes between thumbs and forefingers. ‘Life is pain,’ he said. ‘Life is pain and loss; it is a coin of no value, worth even less than a kauri or a dam.’
Osman of the dead bullock, who, like the Sarpanch, had lost a dearly loved companion during the pilgrimage, also wept. Mrs. Qureishi attempted to look on the bright side: ‘Main thing is that we're okay,’ but this got no response. Then Ayesha closed her eyes and recited in the sing-song voice of prophecy, ‘It is a judgment upon them for the bad attempt they made.’
Mirza Saeed was angry. ‘They weren't at the bloody barricade,’ he shouted. ‘They were working under the goddamned ground.’
‘They dug their own graves,’ Ayesha replied.
This was when they sighted the returning butterflies. Saeed watched the golden cloud in disbelief, as it first gathered and then sent out streams of winged light in every direction. Ayesha wanted to return to the crossroads. Saeed objected: ‘It's flooded down there. Our only chance is to drive down the opposite side of this hill and come out the other side of town.’ But Ayesha and Mishal had already started back; the prophetess was supporting the other, ashen woman, holding her around the waist,
‘Mishal, for God's sake,’ Mirza Saeed called after his wife. ‘For the love of God. What will I do with the motor-car?’
But she went on down the hill, towards the flood, leaning heavily on Ayesha the seer, without looking round.
This was how Mirza Saeed Akhtar came to abandon his beloved Mercedes-Benz station wagon near the entrance to the drowned mines of Sarang, and join in the foot-pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea.
The seven bedraggled travellers stood thigh-deep in water at the intersection of the street of bicycle repairers and the alley of the basket-weavers. Slowly, slowly, the water had begun to go down. ‘Face it,’ Mirza Saeed argued. ‘The pilgrimage is finished. The villagers are who knows where, maybe drowned, possibly murdered, certainly lost. There's nobody left to follow you but us.’ He stuck his face into Ayesha's. ‘So forget it, sister; you're sunk.’
‘Look,’ Mishal said.
From all sides, out of the little tinkers’ gullies, the villagers of Titlipur were returning to the place of their dispersal. They were all coated from neck to ankles in golden butterflies, and long lines of the little creatures went before them, like ropes drawing them to safety out of a well. The people of Sarang watched in terror from their windows, and as the waters of retribution receded, the Ayesha Haj re-formed in the middle of the road.
‘I don't believe it,’ said Mirza Saeed.
But it was true. Every single member of the pilgrimage had been tracked down by the butterflies and brought back to the main road. And stranger claims were later made: that when the creatures had settled on a broken ankle the injury had healed, or that an open wound had closed as if by magic. Many marchers said they had awoken from unconsciousness to find the butterflies fluttering about their lips. Some even believed that they had been dead, drowned, and that the butterflies had brought them back to life.
‘Don't be stupid,’ Mirza Saeed cried. ‘The storm saved you; it washed away your enemies, so it's not surprising few of you are hurt. Let's be scientific, please.’
‘Use your eyes, Saeed,’ Mishal told him, indicating the presence before them of over a hundred men, women and children enveloped in glowing butterflies. ‘What does your science say about this?’
In the last days of the pilgrimage, the city was all around them. Officers from the Municipal Corporation met with Mishal and Ayesha and planned a route through the metropolis. On this route were mosques in which the pilgrims could sleep without clogging up the streets. Excitement in the city was intense: each day, when the pilgrims set off towards their next resting-place, they were watched by enormous crowds, some sneering and hostile, but many bringing presents of sweetmeats, medicines and food.
Mirza Saeed, worn-out and filthy, was in a state of deep frustration on account of his failure to convince more than a handful of the pilgrims that it was better to put one's trust in reason than in miracles. Miracles had been doing pretty well for them, the Titlipur villagers pointed out, reasonably enough. ‘Those blasted butterflies,’ Saeed muttered to the Sarpanch. ‘Without them, we'd have a chance.’
‘But they have been with us from the start,’ the Sarpanch replied with a shrug.
Mishal Akhtar was clearly close to death; she had begun to smell of it, and had turned a chalky white colour that frightened Saeed badly. But Mishal wouldn't let him come near her. She had ostracized her mother, too, and when her father took time off from banking to visit her on the pilgrimage's first night in a city mosque, she told him to buzz off. ‘Things have come to the point,’ she announced, ‘where only the pure can be with the pure.’ When Mirza Saeed heard the diction of Ayesha the prophetess emerging from his wife's mouth he lost all but the tiniest speck of hope.
Friday came, and Ayesha agreed that the pilgrimage could halt for a day to participate in the Friday prayers. Mirza Saeed, who had forgotten almost all the Arabic verses that had once been stuffed into him by rote, and could scarcely remember when to stand with his hands held in front of him like a book, when to genuflect, when to press his forehead to the ground, stumbled through the ceremony with growing self-disgust. At the end of the prayers, however, something happened that stopped the Ayesha Haj in its tracks.