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.’

‘You chose me,’ he dourly replied.

On the seventh day after her disappearance Ayesha was sighted walking towards the village, naked again and dressed in golden butterflies, her silver hair streaming behind her in the breeze. She went directly to the home of Sarpanch Muhammad Din and asked that the Titlipur panchayat be convened for an immediate emergency meeting. ‘The greatest event in the history of the tree has come upon us,’ she confided. Muhammad Din, unable to refuse her, fixed the time of the meeting for that evening, after dark.

That night the panchayat members took their places on the usual branch of the tree, while Ayesha the kahin stood before them on the ground. ‘I have flown with the angel into the highest heights,’ she said. ‘Yes, even to the lote-tree of the uttermost end. The archangel, Gibreel: he has brought us a message which is also a command. Everything is required of us, and everything will be given.’

Nothing in the life of the Sarpanch Muhammad Din had prepared him for the choice he was about to face. ‘What does the angel ask, Ayesha, daughter?’ he asked, fighting to steady his voice.

‘It is the angel's will that all of us, every man, and woman and child in the village, begin at once to prepare for a pilgrimage. We are commanded to walk from this place to Mecca Sharif, to kiss the Black Stone in the Ka'aba at the centre of the Haram Sharif, the sacred mosque. There we must surely go.’

Now the panchayat's quintet began to debate heatedly. There were the crops to consider, and the impossibility of abandoning their homes en masse. ‘It is not to be conceived of, child,’ the Sarpanch told her. ‘It is well known that Allah excuses haj and umra to those who are genuinely unable to go for reasons of poverty or health.’ But Ayesha remained silent and the elders continued to argue. Then it was as if her silence infected everyone else and for a long moment, in which the question was settled – although by what means nobody ever managed to comprehend – there were no words spoken at all.

It was Osman the clown who spoke up at last, Osman the convert, for whom his new faith had been no more than a drink of water. ‘It's almost two hundred miles from here to the sea,’ he cried. ‘There are old ladies here, and babies. However can we go?’

‘God will give us the strength,’ Ayesha serenely replied.

‘Hasn't it occurred to you,’ Osman shouted, refusing to give up, ‘that there's a mighty ocean between us and Mecca Sharif? How will we ever cross? We have no money for the pilgrim boats. Maybe the angel will grow us wings, so we can fly?’

Many villagers rounded angrily upon the blasphemer Osman. ‘Be quiet now,’ Sarpanch Muhammad Din rebuked him. ‘You haven't been long in our faith or our village. Keep your trap shut and learn our ways.’

Osman, however, answered cheekily, ‘So this is how you welcome new settlers. Not as equals, but as people who must do as they are told.’ A knot of red-faced men began to tighten around Osman, but before anything else could happen the kahin Ayesha changed the mood entirely by answering the clown's questions.

‘This, too, the angel has explained,’ she said quietly. ‘We will walk two hundred miles, and when we reach the shores of the sea, we will put our feet into the foam, and the waters will open for us. The waves shall be parted, and we shall walk across the ocean-floor to Mecca.’

The next morning Mirza Saeed Akhtar awoke in a house that had fallen unusually silent, and when he called for the servants there was no reply. The stillness had spread into the potato fields, too; but under the broad, spreading roof of the Titlipur tree all was hustle and bustle. The panchayat had voted unanimously to obey the command of the Archangel Gibreel, and the villagers had begun to prepare for departure. At first the Sarpanch had wanted the carpenter Isa to construct litters that could be pulled by oxen and on which the old and infirm could ride, but that idea had been knocked on the head by his own wife, who told him, ‘You don't listen, Sarpanch sahibji! Didn't the angel say we must walk? Well then, that is what we must do.’ Only the youngest of infants were to be excused the foot-pilgrimage, and they would be carried (it had been decided) on the backs of all the adults, in rotation. The villagers had pooled all their resources, and heaps of potatoes, lentils, rice, bitter gourds, chillies, aubergines and other vegetables were piling up next to the panchayat bough. The weight of the provisions was to be evenly divided between the walkers. Cooking utensils, too, were being gathered together, and whatever bedding could be found. Beasts of burden were to be taken, and a couple of carts carrying live chickens and such, but in general the pilgrims were under the Sarpanch's instructions to keep personal belongings to a minimum. Preparations had been under way since before dawn, so that by the time an incensed Mirza Saeed strode into the village, things were well advanced. For forty-five minutes the zamindar slowed things up by making angry speeches and shaking individual villagers by the shoulders, but then, fortunately, he gave up and left, so that the work could be continued at its former, rapid pace. As the Mirza departed he smacked his head repeatedly and called people names, such as loonies, simpletons, very bad words, but he had always been a godless man, the weak end of a strong line, and he had to be left to find his own fate; there was no arguing with men like him.

By sunset the villagers were ready to depart, and the Sarpanch told everyone to rise for prayers in the small hours so that they could leave immediately afterwards and thus avoid the worst heat of the day. That night, lying down on his mat beside old Khadija, he murmured, ‘At last. I've always wanted to see the Ka'aba, to circle it before I die.’ She reached out from her mat to take his hand. ‘I, too, have hoped for it, against hope,’ she said. ‘We'll walk through the waters together.’