Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to reunite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads; and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati-the-witch.
When Shaheed calmed down and got off me, the pyramid was no longer capable of speech. Later that afternoon, we resumed our journey towards the capital. Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, called cheerfully after us: “Ho sirs! Ho my poor sirs! Who knows when a man will die? Who, my sirs, knows why?”
Sam and the Tiger
SOMETIMES, MOUNTAINS must move before old comrades can be reunited. On December 15th, 1971, in the capital of the newly liberated state of Bangladesh, Tiger Niazi surrendered to his old chum Sam Manekshaw; while I, in my turn, surrendered to the embraces of a girl with eyes like saucers, a pony-tail like a long shiny black rope, and lips which had not at that time acquired what was to become their characteristic pout. These reunions were not achieved easily; and as a gesture of respect for all who made them possible, I shall pause briefly in my narrative to set out the whys and the wherefores.
Let me, then, be perfectly explicit: if Yahya Khan and Z. A. Bhutto had not colluded in the matter of the coup of March 25th, I would not have been flown to Dacca in civilian dress; nor, in all likelihood, would General Tiger Niazi have been in the city that December. To continue: the Indian intervention in the Bangladesh dispute was also the result of the interaction of great forces. Perhaps, if ten million had not walked across the frontiers into India, obliging the Delhi Government to spend $200,000,000 a month on refugee camps—the entire war of 1965, whose secret purpose had been the annihilation of my family, had cost them only $70,000,000!—Indian soldiers, led by General Sam, would never have crossed the frontiers in the opposite direction. But India came for other reasons, too: as I was to learn from the Communist magicians who lived in the shadow of the Delhi Friday Mosque, the Delhi sarkar had been highly concerned by the declining influence of Mujib’s Awami League, and the growing popularity of the revolutionary Mukti Bahini; Sam and the Tiger met in Dacca to prevent the Bahini from gaining power. So if it were not for the Mukti Bahini, Parvati-the-witch might never have accompanied the Indian troops on their campaign of “liberation” … But even that is not a full explanation. A third reason for Indian intervention was the fear that the disturbances in Bangladesh would, if they were not quickly curtailed, spread across the frontiers into West Bengal; so Sam and the Tiger, and also Parvati and I, owe our meeting at least in part to the more turbulent elements in West Bengali politics: the Tiger’s defeat was only the beginning of a campaign against the Left in Calcutta and its environs.
At any rate, India came; and for the speed of her coming—because in a mere three weeks Pakistan had lost half her navy, a third of her army, a quarter of her air force, and finally, after the Tiger surrendered, more than half her population—thanks must be given to the Mukti Bahini once more; because, perhaps naïvely, failing to understand that the Indian advance was as much a tactical maneuver against them as a battle against the occupying West Wing forces, the Bahini advised General Manekshaw on Pakistani troop movements, on the Tiger’s strengths and weaknesses; thanks, too, to Mr. Chou En-Lai, who refused (despite Bhutto’s entreaties) to give Pakistan any material aid in the war. Denied Chinese arms, Pakistan fought with American guns, American tanks and aircraft; the President of the United States, alone in the entire world, was resolved to “tilt” towards Pakistan. While Henry A. Kissinger argued the cause of Yahya Khan, the same Yahya was secretly arranging the President’s famous state visits to China … there were, therefore, great forces working against my reunion with Parvati and Sam’s with the Tiger; but despite the tilting President, it was all over in three short weeks.
On the night of December 14th, Shaheed Dar and the buddha circled the fringes of the invested city of Dacca; but the buddha’s nose (you will not have forgotten) was capable of sniffing out more than most. Following his nose, which could smell safety and danger, they found a way through the Indian lines, and entered the city under cover of night. While they moved stealthily through streets in which nobody except a few starving beggars could be seen, the Tiger was swearing to fight to the last man; but the next day, he surrendered instead. What is not known: whether the last man was grateful to be spared or peeved at missing his chance of entering the camphor garden.
And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not true because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap, after all, and our jawans were worth ten babus, we moved through the impossible hallucination of the night, hiding in doorways while fires blossomed like flowers, reminding me of the way the Brass Monkey used to set fire to shoes to attract a little attention, there were slit throats being buried in unmarked graves, and Shaheed began his, “No, buddha—what a thing, Allah, you can’t believe your eyes—no, not true, how can it—buddha, tell, what’s got into my eyes?” And at last the buddha spoke, knowing Shaheed could not hear: “O, Shaheeda,” he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, “a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.” But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before they were shot. Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly down upon the scene.
As though talking to himself, the buddha said, “It is time to think about saving our skins; God knows why we came back.” The buddha entered the doorway of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had once housed a tea-shop, a bicycle-repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny landing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the low desk on which he had left behind a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, there were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more than an old nobody—stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what was true and what was not. The notary public was absent, so I could not ask him to verify what was happening, I could not give a deposition under oath; but lying on the mat behind his desk was a loose flowing garment like a djellabah, and without waiting any longer I removed my uniform, including the she-dog badge of the CUTIA units, and became anonymous, a deserter, in a city whose language I could not speak.
Shaheed Dar, however, remained in the street; in the first light of morning he watched soldiers scurrying away from what-had-not-been-done; and then the grenade came. I, the buddha, was still inside the empty house; but Shaheed was unprotected by walls.
Who can say why how who; but the grenade was certainly thrown. In that last instant of his un-bisected life, Shaheed was suddenly seized by an irresistible urge to look up … afterwards, in the muezzin’s roost, he told the buddha, “So strange, Allah—the pomegranate—in my head, just like that, bigger an’ brighter than ever before—you know, buddha, like a light-bulb—Allah, what could I do, I looked!”—And yes, it was there, hanging above his head, the grenade of his dreams, hanging just above his head, falling falling, exploding at waist-level, blowing his legs away to some other part of the city.
When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and pointed up, “Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want,” so I carried what was now only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral stairs to the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of light-bulbs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach, battling away along the trow
el-furrows in the crudely-laid concrete floor. Down below, amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke-haze, ant-like people were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the ant-like, and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and the eyrie’s one piece of furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to a loudspeaker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the disillusioning sight of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would always be scratched in the same places, extracted from the folds of his shapeless robe a glinting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver spittoon. Lost in contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams began; and looked up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping along trowel-furrows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived at the source of the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the victim of not one, but two wars.)
Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony of war.
After a few moments, silence. Shaheed’s head slumped forward. And the buddha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city as the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assist at the peace-making banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning streets to welcome General Sam.
In the minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha’s mind had not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed’s top half had also kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking of onions, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch—until the bee, buzzing … “It’s not fair,” the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, “It’s not fair,” and again, and again.
Shaheed, fulfilling his father’s dearest wish, had finally earned his name; but the buddha could still not remember his own.
How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another independence day, the world had been saffron and green. This morning, the colors were green, red and gold. And in the cities, cries of “Jai Bangla!” And voices of women singing “Our Golden Bengal,” maddening their hearts with delight … in the center of the city, on the podium of his defeat, General Tiger Niazi awaited General Manekshaw. (Biographical details: Sam was a Parsee. He came from Bombay. Bombayites were in for happy times that day.) And amid green and red and gold, the buddha in his shapeless anonymous garment was jostled by crowds; and then India came. India, with Sam at her head.
Was it General Sam’s idea? Or even Indira’s?—Eschewing these fruitless questions, I record only that the Indian advance into Dacca was much more than a mere military parade; as befits a triumph, it was garlanded with side-shows. A special I.A.F. troop transport had flown to Dacca, carrying a hundred and one of the finest entertainers and conjurers India could provide. From the famous magicians’ ghetto in Delhi they came, many of them dressed for the occasion in the evocative uniforms of the Indian fauj, so that many Daccans got the idea that the Indians’ victory had been inevitable from the start because even their uniformed jawans were sorcerers of the highest order. The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the troops, entertaining the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids on moving carts drawn by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female contortionists who could swallow their legs up to their knees; there were jugglers who operated outside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw oohs and aahs from the delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades, keeping four hundred and twenty in the air at a time; there were card-tricksters who could pull the queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds, the empress of clubs) out of women’s ears; there was the great dancer Anarkali, whose name meant “pomegranate-bud,” doing leaps twists pirouettes on a donkey-cart while a giant piece of silver nose-jewelery jingled on her right nostril; there was Master Vikram the sitarist, whose sitar was capable of responding to, and exaggerating, the faintest emotions in the hearts of his audience, so that once (it was said) he had played before an audience so bad-tempered, and had so greatly enhanced their foul humor, that if his tabla-player hadn’t made him stop his raga in mid-stream the power of his music would have had them all knifing each other and smashing up the auditorium … today, Master Vikram’s music raised the celebratory goodwill of the people to fever-pitch; it maddened, let us say, their hearts with delight.
And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven-foot giant who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The World because of his unsurpassable skills as a snake-charmer. Not even the legendary Tubriwallahs of Bengal could exceed his talents; he strode through the happily shrieking crowds, twined from head to foot with deadly cobras, mambas and kraits, all with their poison-sacs intact … Picture Singh, who would be the last in the line of men who have been willing to become my fathers … and immediately behind him came Parvati-the-witch.
Parvati-the-witch entertained the crowds with the help of a large wicker basket with a lid; happy volunteers entered the basket, and Parvati made them disappear so completely that they could not return until she wished them to; Parvati, to whom midnight had given the true gifts of sorcery, had placed them at the service of her humble illusionist’s trade; so that she was asked, “But how do you pull it off?” And, “Come on, pretty missy, tell the trick, why not?”—Parvati, smiling beaming rolling her magic basket, came towards me with the liberating troops.
The Indian Army marched into town, its heroes following the magicians; among them, I learned afterwards, was that colossus of the war, the rat-faced Major with the lethal knees … but now there were still more illusionists, because the surviving prestidigitators of the city came out of hiding and began a wonderful contest, seeking to outdo anything and everything the visiting magicians had to offer, and the pain of the city was washed and soothed in the great glad outpouring of their magic. Then Parvati-the-witch saw me, and gave me back my name.
“Saleem! O my god Saleem, you Saleem Sinai, is it you Saleem?”
The buddha jerks, puppet-fashion. Crowd-eyes staring. Parvati pushing towards him. “Listen, it must be you!” She is gripping his elbow. Saucer eyes searching milky blue. “My God, that nose, I’m not being rude, but of course! Look, it’s me, Parvati! O Saleem, don’t be stupid now, come on come on … !”
“That’s it,” the buddha says. “Saleem: that was it.”
“O God, too much excitement!” she cries. “Arré baap, Saleem, you remember—the Children, yaar, O this is too good! So why are you looking so serious when I feel like to hug you to pieces? So many years I only saw you inside here,” she taps her forehead, “and now you’re here with a face like a fish. Hey, Saleem! Come on, say one hullo at least.”
On December 15th, 1971, Tiger Niazi surrendered to Sam Manekshaw; the Tiger and ninety-three thousand Pakistani troops became prisoners of war. I, meanwhile, became the willing captive of the Indian magicians, because Parvati dragged me into the procession with, “Now that I’ve found you I’m not letting you go.”
That night, Sam and the Tiger drank chota pegs and reminisced about the old days in the British Army. “I say, Tiger,” Sam Manekshaw said, “You behaved jolly decently by surrendering.” And the Tiger, “Sam, you fought one hell of a war.” A tiny cloud passes across the face of General Sam, “Listen, old sport: one hears such damn awful lies. Slaughters, old boy, mass graves, special units called CUTIA or some damn thing, developed for purposes of rooting out opposition … no truth in it, I suppose?” And the Tiger, “Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? Never heard of it. Must’ve been misled, old man. Some damn bad intelligence-wallahs on both sides. No, ridiculous, damn ridiculous, if you don’t mind me saying.” “Thought as much,” says General Sam, “I say, bloody fine to see you, Tiger, you old devil!” And the Tiger, “Been years, eh, Sam? Too damn long.”
…
While old friends sang “Auld Lang Syne” in officers’ messes, I made my escape from Bangladesh, from my Pakistani years. “I’ll get you out,” Parvati said, after I explained. “You want it secret secret?”
I nodded. “Secret secret.”
Elsewhere in the city, ninety-three thousand soldiers were preparing to be carted off to P.O.W. camps; but Parvati-the-witch made me climb into a wicker basket with a close-fitting lid. Sam Manekshaw was obliged to place his old friend the Tiger under protective custody; but Parvati-the-witch assured me, “This way they’ll never catch.”
Behind an army barracks where the magicians were awaiting their transport back to Delhi, Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, stood guard when, that evening, I climbed into the basket of invisibility. We loitered casually, smoking biris, waiting until there were no soldiers in sight, while Picture Singh told me about his name. Twenty years ago, an Eastman-Kodak photographer had taken his portrait—which, wreathed in smiles and snakes, afterwards appeared on half the Kodak advertisements and in-store displays in India; ever since when the snake-charmer had adopted his present cognomen. “What do you think, captain?” he bellowed amiably. “A fine name, isn’t it so? Captain, what to do, I can’t even remember what name I used to have, from before, the name my mother-father gave me! Pretty stupid, hey, captain?” But Picture Singh was not stupid; and there was much more to him than charm. Suddenly his voice lost its casual, sleepy good-nature; he whispered, “Now! Now, captain, ek dum, double-quick time!” Parvati whipped lid away from wicker; I dived head first into her cryptic basket. The lid, returning, blocked out the day’s last light.