Midnight's Children

  At last the voices stopped, though by now only the buddha (with his one good ear) could hear them; at last, when the four wanderers were near the point of panic, the jungle brought them through a curtain of tree-beards and showed them a sight so lovely that it brought lumps to their throats. Even the buddha seemed to tighten his grip on his spittoon. With one good ear between the four of them, they advanced into a glade filled with the gentle melodies of songbirds, in whose center stood a monumental Hindu temple, carved in forgotten centuries out of a single immense crag of rock; its walls danced with friezes of men and women, who were depicted coupling in postures of unsurpassable athleticism and, sometimes, of highly comic absurdity. The quartet moved towards this miracle with disbelieving steps. Inside, they found, at long last, some respite from the endless monsoon, and also the towering statue of a black dancing goddess, whom the boy-soldiers from Pakistan could not name; but the buddha knew she was Kali, fecund and awful, with the remnants of gold paint on her teeth. The four travellers lay down at her feet and fell into a rain-free sleep which ended at what could have been midnight, when they awoke simultaneously to find themselves being smiled upon by four young girls of a beauty which was beyond speech. Shaheed, who recalled the four houris awaiting him in the camphor garden, thought at first that he had died in the night; but the houris looked real enough, and their saris, under which they wore nothing at all, were torn and stained by the jungle. Now as eight eyes stared into eight, saris were unwound and placed, neatly folded, on the ground; after which the naked and identical daughters of the forest came to them, eight arms were twined with eight, eight legs were linked with eight legs more; below the statue of multi-limbed Kali, the travellers abandoned themselves to caresses which felt real enough, to kisses and love-bites which were soft and painful, to scratches which left marks, and they realized that this this this was what they had needed, what they had longed for without knowing it, that having passed through the childish regressions and child-like sorrows of their earliest jungle-days, having survived the onset of memory and responsibility and the greater pains of renewed accusations, they were leaving infancy behind for ever, and then forgetting reasons and implications and deafness, forgetting everything, they gave themselves to the four identical beauties without a single thought in their heads.

  After that night, they were unable to tear themselves away from the temple, except to forage for food, and every night the soft women of their most contented dreams returned in silence, never speaking, always neat and tidy with their saris, and invariably bringing the lost quartet to an incredible united peak of delight. None of them knew how long this period lasted, because in the Sundarban time followed unknown laws, but at last the day came when they looked at each other and realized they were becoming transparent, that it was possible to see through their bodies, not clearly as yet, but cloudily, like staring through mango-juice. In their alarm they understood that this was the last and worst of the jungle’s tricks, that by giving them their heart’s desire it was fooling them into using up their dreams, so that as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow and translucent as glass. The buddha saw now that the colorlessness of insects and leeches and snakes might have more to do with the depredations worked on their insectly, leechy, snakish imaginations than with the absence of sunlight … awakened as if for the first time by the shock of translucency, they looked at the temple with new eyes, seeing the great gaping cracks in the solid rock, realizing that vast segments could come detached and crash down upon them at any moment; and then, in a murky corner of the abandoned shrine, they saw the remnants of what might have been four small fires—ancient ashes, scorch-marks on stone—or perhaps four funeral pyres; and in the center of each of the four, a small, blackened, fire-eaten heap of uncrushed bones.

  How the buddha left the Sundarbans: the forest of illusions unleashed upon them, as they fled from temple towards boat, its last and most terrifying trick; they had barely reached the boat when it came towards them, at first a rumble in the far distance, then a roar which could penetrate even mud-deafened ears, they had untied the boat and leaped wildly into it when the wave came, and now they were at the mercy of the waters, which could have crushed them effortlessly against sundri or mangrove or nipa, but instead the tidal wave bore them down turbulent brown channels as the forest of their torment blurred past them like a great green wall, it seemed as if the jungle, having tired of its playthings, were ejecting them unceremoniously from its territory; waterborne, impelled forwards and still forwards by the unimaginable power of the wave, they bobbed pitifully amongst fallen branches and the sloughed-off skins of water-snakes, until finally they were hurled from the boat as the ebbing wave broke it against a tree-stump, they were left sitting in a drowned rice-paddy as the wave receded, in water up to their waists, but alive, borne out of the heart of the jungle of dreams, into which I had fled in the hope of peace and found both less and more, and back once more in the world armies and dates.

  When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I am bound to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder at the time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal wave recorded that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeed devastated the region.

  In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is forever who you are.

  For seven months during the course of the year 1971, three soldiers and their tracker vanished off the face of the war. In October, however, when the rains ended and the guerilla units of the Mukti Bahini began terrorizing Pakistani military outposts; when Mukti Bahini snipers picked off soldiers and petty officials alike, our quartet emerged from invisibility and, having little option, attempted to rejoin the main body of the occupying West Wing forces. Later, when questioned, the buddha would always explain his disappearance with the help of a garbled story about being lost in a jungle amid trees whose roots grabbed at you like snakes. It was perhaps fortunate for him that he was never formally interrogated by officers in the army of which he was a member. Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar were not subjected to such interrogations, either; but in their case this was because they failed to stay alive long enough for any questions to be asked.

  … In an entirely deserted village of thatched huts with dung-plastered mud walls—in an abandoned community from which even the chickens had fled—Ayooba Shaheed Farooq bemoaned their fate. Rendered deaf by the poisonous mud of the rain-forest, a disability which had begun to upset them a good deal now that the taunting voices of the jungle were no longer hanging in the air, they wailed their several wails, all talking at once, none hearing the other; the buddha, however, was obliged to listen to them all: to Ayooba, who stood facing a corner inside a naked room, his hair enmeshed in a spider’s web, crying “My ears my ears, like bees buzzing inside,” to Farooq who, petulantly, shouted, “Whose fault, anyway?—Who, with his nose that could sniff out any bloody thing?—Who said That way, and that way?—And who, who will believe?—About jungles and temples and transparent serpents?—What a story, Allah, buddha, we should shoot you here-and-now!” While Shaheed, softly, “I’m hungry.” Out once more in the real world, they were forgetting the lessons of the jungle, and Ayooba, “My arm! Allah, man, my withered arm! The ghost, leaking fluid … !” And Shaheed, “Deserters, they’ll say—empty-handed, no prisoner, after so-many months!—Allah, a court-martial, maybe, what do you think, buddha?” And Farooq, “You bastard, see what you made us do! O God, too much, our uniforms! See, our uniforms, buddha—rags-and-tatters like a beggar-boy’s! Think of what the Brigadier—and that Najmuddin—on my mother’s head I swear I didn’t—I’m not a coward! Not!” And Shaheed, who is killing ants and licking them off his palm, “How to rejoin, anyway? Who knows where they are or if? And haven’t we seen and heard how Mukti Bahini—thai! thai! they shoot from their hiding-holes, and you’re dead! Dead, like an ant!” But Faro
oq is also talking, “And not just the uniforms, man, the hair! Is this military haircut? This, so-long, falling over ears like worms? This woman’s hair? Allah, they’ll kill us dead—up against the wall and thai! thai!—you see if they don’t!” But now Ayooba-the-tank is calming down; Ayooba holding his face in his hand; Ayooba saying softly to himself, “O man, O man. I came to fight those damn vegetarian Hindus, man. And here is something too different, man. Something too bad.”

  It is somewhere in November; they have been making their way slowly, north north north, past fluttering newspapers in curious curlicued script, through empty fields and abandoned settlements, occasionally passing a crone with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder, or a group of eight-year-olds with shifty starvation in their eyes and the threat of knives in their pockets, hearing how the Mukti Bahini are moving invisibly through the smoking land, how bullets come buzzing like bees-from-nowhere … and now a breaking-point has been reached, and Farooq, “If it wasn’t for you, buddha—Allah, you freak with your blue eyes of a foreigner, O God, yaar, how you stink!”

  We all stink: Shaheed, who is crushing (with tatter-booted heel) a scorpion on the dirty floor of the abandoned hut; Farooq, searching absurdly for a knife with which to cut his hair; Ayooba, leaning his head against a corner of the hut while a spider walks along the crown; and the buddha, too: the buddha, who stinks to heaven, clutches in his right hand a tarnished silver spittoon, and is trying to recall his name. And can summon up only nicknames: Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Piece-of-the-Moon.

  … He sat cross-legged amid the wailing storm of his companions’ fear, forcing himself to remember; but no, it would not come. And at last the buddha, hurling spittoon against earthen floor, exclaimed to stone-deaf ears: “It’s not—NOT—FAIR!”

  In the midst of the rubble of war, I discovered fair-and-unfair. Unfairness smelled like onions; the sharpness of its perfume brought tears to my eyes. Seized by the bitter aroma of injustice, I remembered how Jamila Singer had leaned over a hospital bed—whose? What name?—how military gongs-and-pips were also present—how my sister—no, not my sister! how she—how she had said, “Brother, I have to go away, to sing in service of the country; the Army will look after you now—for me, they will look after you so, so well.” She was veiled; behind white-and-gold brocade I smelled her traitress’s smile; through soft veiling fabric she planted on my brow the kiss of her revenge; and then she, who always wrought a dreadful revenge upon those who loved her best, left me to the tender mercies of pips-and-gongs … and after Jamila’s treachery I remembered the long-ago ostracism I suffered at the hands of Evie Burns; and exiles, and picnic-tricks; and all the vast mountain of unreasonable occurrences plaguing my life; and now, I lamented cucumber-nose, stain-face, bandy legs, horn-temples, monk’s tonsure, finger-loss, one-bad-ear, and the numbing, braining spittoon; I wept copiously now, but still my name eluded me, and I repeated—“Not fair; not fair; NOT FAIR!” And, surprisingly, Ayooba-the-tank moved away from his corner; Ayooba, perhaps recalling his own breakdown in the Sundarbans, squatted down in front of me and wrapped his one good arm around my neck. I accepted his comfortings; I cried into his shirt; but then there was a bee, buzzing towards us; while he squatted, with his back to the glassless window of the hut, something came whining through the overheated air; while he said, “Hey, buddha—come on, buddha—hey, hey!” and while other bees, the bees of deafness, buzzed in his ears, something stung him in the neck. He made a popping noise deep in his throat and fell forwards on top of me. The sniper’s bullet which killed Ayooba Baloch would, but for his presence, have speared me through the head. In dying, he saved my life.

  Forgetting past humiliations; putting aside fair-and-unfair, and what-can’t-be-cured-must-be-endured, I crawled out from under the corpse of Ayooba-the-tank, while Farooq, “O God O God!” and Shaheed, “Allah, I don’t even know if my gun will—” And Farooq, again, “O God O! O God, who knows where the bastard is—!” But Shaheed, like soldiers in films, is flat against the wall beside the window. In these positions: I on the floor, Farooq crouched in a corner, Shaheed pressed against dung-plaster: we waited, helplessly, to see what would transpire.

  There was no second shot; perhaps the sniper, not knowing the size of the force hidden inside the mud-walled hut, had simply shot and run. The three of us remained inside the hut for a night and a day, until the body of Ayooba Baloch began to demand attention. Before we left, we found pickaxes, and buried him … And afterwards, when the Indian Army did come, there was no Ayooba Baloch to greet them with his theories of the superiority of meat over vegetables; no Ayooba went into action, yelling, “Ka-dang! Ka-blam! Ka-pow!!”

  Perhaps it was just as well.

  … And sometime in December the three of us, riding on stolen bicycles, arrived at a field from which the city of Dacca could be seen against the horizon; a field in which grew crops so strange, with so nauseous an aroma, that we found ourselves incapable of remaining on our bicycles. Dismounting before we fell off, we entered the terrible field.

  There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha’s eyes. The crops were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight … and most of them, but not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into the peasant’s treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots. The peasant saw them and came running towards them, smiling ingratiatingly, talking rapidly in a wheedling voice that only the buddha was obliged to hear. Farooq and Shaheed stared glassily at the field while the peasant began his explanations.

  “Plenty shooting! Thaii! Thaii!” He made a pistol with his right hand. He was speaking bad, stilted Hindi. “Ho sirs! India has come, my sirs! Ho yes! Ho yes.”—And all over the field, the crops were leaking nourishing bone-marrow into the soil while he, “No shoot I, my sirs. Ho no. I have news—ho, such news! India comes! Jessore is fall, my sirs; in one-four days, Dacca, also, yes-no?” The buddha listened; the buddha’s eyes looked beyond the peasant to the field. “Such a things, my sir! India! They have one mighty soldier fellow, he can kill six persons at one time, break necks khrikk-khrikk between his knees, my sirs? Knees—is right words?” He tapped his own. “I see, my sirs. With these eyes, ho yes! He fights with not guns, not swords. With knees, and six necks go khrikk-khrikk. Ho God.” Shaheed was vomiting in the field. Farooq Rashid had wandered to the far edge and stood staring into a copse of mango trees. “In one-two weeks is over the war, my sirs! Everybody come back. Just now all gone, but I not, my sirs. Soldiers came looking for Bahini and killed many many, also my son. Ho yes, sirs, ho yes indeed.” The buddha’s eyes had become clouded and dull. In the distance he could hear the crump of heavy artillery. Columns of smoke trailed up into the colorless December sky. The strange crops lay still, unruffled by the breeze … “I say, my sirs. Here I know names of birds and plants. Ho yes. I am Deshmukh by name; vendor of notions by trade. I sell many so-fine thing. You want? Medicine for constipation, damn good, ho yes. I have. Watch you want, glowing in the dark? I also have. And book ho yes, and joke trick, truly. I was famous in Dacca before. Ho yes, most truly. No shoot.”

  The vendor of notions chattered on, offering for sale item after item, such as a magical belt which would enable the wearer to speak Hindi—“I am wearing now, my sir, speak damn good, yes no? Many India soldier are buy, they talk so-many different tongues, the belt is godsend from God!”—and then he noticed what the b
uddha held in his hand. “Ho sir! Absolute master thing! Is silver? Is precious stone? You give; I give radio, camera, almost working order, my sir! Is a damn good deals, my friend. For one spittoon only, is damn fine. Ho yes. Ho yes, my sir, life must go on; trade must go on, my sir, not true?”

  “Tell me more,” the buddha said, “about the soldier with the knees.”

  But now, once again, a bee buzzes; in the distance, at the far end of the field, somebody drops to his knees; somebody’s forehead touches the ground as if in prayer; and in the field, one of the crops, which had been alive enough to shoot, also becomes very still. Shaheed Dar is shouting a name:

  “Farooq! Farooq, man!”

  But Farooq refuses to reply.

  Afterwards, when the buddha reminisced about the war to his uncle Mustapha, he recounted how he had stumbled across the field of leaking bone-marrow towards his fallen companion; and how, long before he reached Farooq’s praying corpse, he was brought up short by the field’s greatest secret.

  There was a small pyramid in the middle of the field. Ants were crawling over it, but it was not an anthill. The pyramid had six feet and three heads and, in between, a jumbled area composed of bits of torso, scraps of uniforms, lengths of intestine and glimpses of shattered bones. The pyramid was still alive. One of its three heads had a blind left eye, the legacy of a childhood argument. Another had hair that was thickly plastered down with hair oil. The third head was the oddest: it had deep hollows where the temples should have been, hollows that could have been made by a gynecologist’s forceps which had held it too tightly at birth … it was this third head which spoke to the buddha:

  “Hullo, man,” it said, “What the hell are you here for?”

  Shaheed Dar saw the pyramid of enemy soldiers apparently conversing with the buddha; Shaheed, suddenly seized by an irrational energy, flung himself upon me and pushed me to the ground, with, “Who are you?—Spy? Traitor? What?—Why do they know who you—?” While Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, flapped pitifully around us, “Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God.”