Year One of the new era

Year One of the new era names the threshold of a renewed historical and sacred order in The Satanic Verses. It is marked by the faithful’s flight from Jahilia toward Yathrib, as the old world recedes and a new beginning is imagined; later, the measured duration of the Titlipur pilgrimage offers a contrasting way of reckoning time, through delay, loss, and an ending that does not deliver the promised passage across the sea.

The New Beginning

From Mount Cone, Gibreel Farishta watches the faithful leave Jahilia in small, nearly empty-handed groups. Their movement away from aridity toward palms and water is placed on the first day of the first year of a new beginning of Time. The phrasing makes their departure more than a change of location: the old dies behind them, while the new remains ahead, not yet fully reached.

The migration’s temporal frame also unsettles the idea that a new era begins in a single, clean break. The faithful depart first; Mahound slips away later, and his escape prompts Baal to compose a valedictory ode questioning what Submission means in the changed moment. The sequence binds the claimed beginning to both movement and retrospective doubt: an epoch is announced, but its meaning remains open to dispute.

Time Measured in the Pilgrimage

The Titlipur villagers’ later pilgrimage is narrated through a different scale of time. After Ayesha returns and declares that the village must walk to Mecca, the panchayat votes unanimously to obey. Preparations begin before dawn: provisions are pooled, infants are assigned to be carried in rotation, and the villagers set out on foot. These details make the passage of time collective and practical, shaped by the requirements of walking together rather than by a single announced era.

The march proceeds slowly, at the pace of its slowest pilgrims. The group walks in the morning and again after the heat, but sickness, official harassment, and a cartwheel coming off repeatedly interrupt its progress. At best, it covers two miles a day, with about 150 miles still to go and an estimated eleven weeks before the sea. On the eighteenth day, Khadija dreams that an apparition is Azraeel rather than Gibreel Farishta. She says nothing to her husband about the vision, continues the next morning, and then asks to lie down at a ruined Mughal milepost inn; she dies there, the first death of the journey.

A Public, Prolonged Journey

By the ninth week, the pilgrimage has become a national spectacle. Journalists, politicians, prospective sponsors, tourists, Gandhians, and onlookers converge on the walkers. Photographs of Ayesha appear in newspapers, and her image is reproduced on advertising hoardings. The attention turns the pilgrims’ slow passage into a public contest over how their journey should be understood: some visitors seek to commercialize it, while religious extremist groups accuse it of appropriating a national tradition and inflaming communal feeling.

The arrival at the Arabian Sea is another temporal threshold, reached only after the long road has accumulated delay, scrutiny, and loss. The pilgrims walk down to the shore, where Mishal Akhtar has become too weak to stand without support. Ayesha’s command had promised that the waters would open and the group would walk across the ocean floor to Mecca. Instead, Ayesha, Mishal, and the villagers go below the surface and never reappear. Several people who enter the water to help are rescued; Mirza Saeed Akhtar continues diving until he, too, is pulled out, exhausted and ill. The pilgrimage ends, and the survivors awaken to official questioning about the expedition.

Meaning of the Temporal Contrast

The novel does not identify the villagers’ pilgrimage as occurring in Year One of the new era. Rather, the two temporal patterns illuminate one another: the migration from Jahilia is cast as a beginning that remakes historical time, while the pilgrimage is tracked by days, weeks, distance, and the bodies that cannot complete it. Its extraordinary promise unfolds within ordinary duration, where every delay has consequences and the anticipated destination does not arrive as promised.

This contrast keeps renewal from becoming a simple synonym for escape. The faithful’s departure gives the new era its founding image, but Baal’s question about Submission registers uncertainty within that beginning. The villagers’ march, meanwhile, makes time visible through preparation, fatigue, Khadija’s death, public attention, and the final disappearance at sea. Together, these episodes place the idea of a new age beside the harder question of what people undergo while waiting for a promised transformation.