Peristan is the estate to which Mirza Saeed Akhtar retreats after the pilgrimage’s disasters, and its collapse gives physical form to the world he has withdrawn from. A mansion once marked by grandeur becomes a waterless, barren ruin; its grounds hold the memories of Ayesha’s first appearance and, at the end, the scene of Mirza Saeed’s last choice.

The Estate and Its Ruin

On returning, Mirza Saeed finds Peristan transformed as if centuries had passed during his absence of months. Moths have eaten the punkahs, worms have consumed the library, and snakes emerge from the taps instead of water. Creepers coil around the four-poster bed where Viceroys once slept; the Persian carpet crumbles at his touch, and frogs with scarlet eyes fill the baths. Outside, jackals howl at night, the fields are as barren as a desert, and vultures are the only birds in the sky.

The estate’s decline extends beyond the mansion. Its great tree is dead or nearly so, while the gardens that once held the memory of Mirza Saeed first seeing Ayesha have yellowed into ugliness. The surrounding village has crumbled into dust. Landless peasants and looters attempted to take the abandoned land, but drought drove them away; there has been no rain. Peristan is thus not merely neglected property: its ruin belongs to a landscape emptied of water, cultivation, and community.

Retreat and Isolation

Mirza Saeed visits the tree only once. He returns to Peristan and padlocks its rusty gates, showing no interest in what has become of the other survivors. He then rips the telephone from the wall. The closed gates and severed line make his retreat material: he cuts himself off both from the ruined land outside and from any appeal for contact or help.

In the mansion, time passes without a count. Mirza Saeed recognizes that he is starving because he can smell his body reeking of nail-varnish remover, yet he feels neither hunger nor thirst and sees no reason to seek food. He rocks in a chair and tries not to think. The estate’s decay around him and his chosen stillness converge: Peristan has become a place where survival itself seems to have lost its claim on him.

The Burning Tree and Final Vision

On the last night of his life, a noise and a stench alert Mirza Saeed that the great tree is burning. He staggers into the garden to watch the fire move toward the mansion. In his perception, its flames consume histories, memories, and genealogies, purifying the earth; the tree bursts into fragments and its trunk cracks like a heart. The fire makes the estate’s destruction at once physical and historical, reducing the place’s accumulated past to something that can be burned away.

Mirza Saeed turns toward the spot in the garden where he first noticed Ayesha, then collapses on the withered dust. Butterflies brush his lips and struggle to enter his mouth before the sea pours over him. In the water, he sees Ayesha beside him, apparently emerging from his wife’s body, and hears her urge him to open. At first he resists, imagining himself as a fortress with clanging gates while Ayesha, too, is drowning. At the moment his heart breaks, something within him chooses differently: he opens. Peristan’s final scene therefore returns to the garden’s earliest remembered encounter, but changes the meaning of its gates. The man who shut the estate and severed every line of connection makes a last, uncertain movement toward openness as the landscape around him is consumed.