As the pilgrims watched the congregation leaving the courtyard of the mosque, a commotion began outside the main gate. Mirza Saeed went to investigate. ‘What's the hoo-hah?’ he asked as he struggled through the crowd on the mosque steps; then he saw the basket sitting on the bottom step. – And heard, rising from the basket, the baby's cry.
The foundling was perhaps two weeks old, clearly illegitimate, and it was equally plain that its options in life were limited. The crowd was in a doubtful, confused mood. Then the mosque's Imam appeared at the head of the flight of steps, and beside him was Ayesha the seer, whose fame had spread throughout the city. The crowd parted like the sea, and Ayesha and the Imam came down to the basket. The Imam examined the baby briefly; rose; and turned to address the crowd.
‘This child was born in devilment,’ he said. ‘It is the Devil's child.’ He was a young man.
The mood of the crowd shifted towards anger. Mirza Saeed Akhtar shouted out: ‘You, Ayesha, kahin. What do you say?’
‘Everything will be asked of us,’ she replied.
The crowd, needing no clearer invitation, stoned the baby to death.
After that the Ayesha Pilgrims refused to move on. The death of the foundling had created an atmosphere of mutiny among the weary villagers, none of whom had lifted or thrown a stone. Mishal, snow-white now, was too enfeebled by her illness to rally the marchers; Ayesha, as ever, refused to dispute. ‘If you turn your backs on God,’ she warned the villagers, ‘don't be surprised when he does the same to you.’
The pilgrims were squatting in a group in a corner of the large mosque, which was painted lime-green on the outside and bright blue within, and lit, when necessary, by multicoloured neon ‘tube lights'. After Ayesha's warning they turned their backs on her and huddled closer together, although the weather was warm and humid enough. Mirza Saeed, spotting his opportunity, decided to challenge Ayesha directly once again. ‘Tell me,’ he asked sweetly, ‘how exactly does the angel give you all this information? You never tell us his precise words, only your interpretations of them. Why such indirection? Why not simply quote?’
‘He speaks to me,’ Ayesha answered, ‘in clear and memorable forms.’
Mirza Saeed, full of the bitter energy of his desire for her, and the pain of his estrangement from his dying wife, and the memory of the tribulations of the march, smelled in her reticence the weakness he had been probing for. ‘Kindly be more specific,’ he insisted. ‘Or why should anyone believe? What are these forms?’
‘The archangel sings to me,’ she admitted, ‘to the tunes of popular hit songs.’
Mirza Saeed Akhtar clapped his hands delightedly and began to laugh the loud, echoing laughter of revenge, and Osman the bullock-boy joined in, beating on his dholki and prancing around the squatting villagers, singing the latest filmi ganas and making nautch-girl eyes. ‘Ho ji!’ he carolled. ‘This is how Gibreel recites, ho ji! Ho ji!’
And one after the other, pilgrim after pilgrim rose and joined in the dance of the circling drummer, dancing their disillusion and disgust in the courtyard of the mosque, until the Imam came running to shriek at the ungodliness of their deeds.
Night fell. The villagers of Titlipur were grouped around their Sarpanch, Muhammad Din, and serious talks about returning to Titlipur were under way. Perhaps a little of the harvest could be saved. Mishal Akhtar lay dying with her head in her mother's lap, racked by pain, with a single tear emerging from her left eye. And in a far comer of the courtyard of the greenblue mosque with its technicolour tube-lighting, the visionary and the zamindar sat alone and talked. A moon – new, horned, cold – shone down. ‘You're a clever man,’ Ayesha said. ‘You knew how to take your chance.’
This was when Mirza Saeed made his offer of a compromise. ‘My wife is dying,’ he said. ‘And she wants very much to go to Mecca Sharif. So we have interests in common, you and I.’
Ayesha listened. Saeed pressed on: ‘Ayesha, I'm not a bad man. Let me tell you, I've been damn impressed by many things on this walk; damn impressed. You have given these people a profound spiritual experience, no question. Don't think we modern types lack a spiritual dimension.’
‘The people have left me,’ Ayesha said.
‘The people are confused,’ Saeed replied. ‘Point is, if you actually take them to the sea and then nothing happens, my God, they really could turn against you. So here's the deal. I gave a tinkle to Mishal's papa and he agreed to underwrite half the cost. We propose to fly you and Mishal, and let's say ten – twelve! – of the villagers, to Mecca, within forty-eight hours, personally. Reservations are available. We leave it to you to select the individuals best suited to the trip. Then, truly, you will have performed a miracle for some instead of for none. And in my view the pilgrimage itself has been a miracle, in a way. So you will have done very much.’
He held his breath.
‘I must think,’ Ayesha said.
‘Think, think,’ Saeed encouraged her happily. ‘Ask your archangel. If he agrees, it must be right.’
Mirza Saeed Akhtar knew that when Ayesha announced that the Archangel Gibreel had accepted his offer her power would be destroyed forever, because the villagers would perceive her fraudulence and her desperation, too. – But how could she turn him down? – What choice did she really have? ‘Revenge is sweet,’ he told himself. Once the woman was discredited, he would certainly take Mishal to Mecca, if that were still her wish.
The butterflies of Titlipur had not entered the mosque. They lined its exterior walls and onion dome, glowing greenly in the dark.
Ayesha in the night: stalking the shadows, lying down, rising to go on the prowl again. There was an uncertainty about her; then the slowness came, and she seemed to dissolve into the shadows of the mosque. She returned at dawn.
After the morning prayer she asked the pilgrims if she might address them; and they, doubtfully, agreed.
‘Last night the angel did not sing,’ she said. ‘He told me, instead, about doubt, and how the Devil makes use of it. I said, but they doubt me, what can I do? He answered: only proof can silence doubt.’
She had their full attention. Next she told them what Mirza Saeed had suggested in the night. ‘He told me to go and ask my angel, but I know better,’ she cried. ‘How could I choose between you? It is all of us, or none.’
‘Why should we follow you,’ the Sarpanch asked, ‘after all the dying, the baby, and all?’
‘Because when the waters part, you will be saved. You will enter into the Glory of the Most High.’
‘What waters?’ Mirza Saeed yelled. ‘How will they divide?’
‘Follow me,’ Ayesha concluded, ‘and judge me by their parting.’
His offer had contained an old question: What kind of idea are you? And she, in turn, had offered him an old answer. I was tempted, but am renewed; am uncompromising; absolute; pure.
The tide was in when the Ayesha Pilgrimage marched down an alley beside the Holiday Inn, whose windows were full of the mistresses of film stars using their new Polaroid cameras, – when the pilgrims felt the city's asphalt turn gritty and soften into sand, – when they found themselves walking through a thick mulch of rotting coconuts abandoned cigarette packets pony turds non-degradable bottles fruit peelings jellyfish and paper, – on to the mid-brown sand overhung by high leaning coco-palms and the balconies of luxury sea-view apartment blocks, – past the teams of young men whose muscles were so well-honed that they looked like deformities, and who were performing gymnastic contortions of all sorts, in unison, like a murderous army of ballet dancers, – and through the beachcombers, clubmen and families who had come to take the air or make business contacts or scavenge a living from the sand, – and gazed, for the first time in their lives, upon the Arabian Sea.