Midnight's Children

by Salman Rushdie

  Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various CUTIA units being sent away from the camp, into action; and became convinced that his time, and the time of the pomegranate, was very near. From departures of three-men-and-a-dog units in camouflaged jeeps, he deduced a growing political crisis; it was February, and the irritations of the exalted were becoming daily more marked. Ayooba-the-tank, however, retained a local point of view. His irritation was also mounting, but its object was the buddha.

  Ayooba had become infatuated with the only female in the camp, a skinny latrine-cleaner who couldn’t have been over fourteen and whose nipples were only just beginning to push against her tattered shirt: a low type, certainly, but she was all that there was, and for a latrine-cleaner she had very nice teeth and a pleasant line in saucy over-the-shoulder glances … Ayooba began to follow her around, and that was how he spied her going into the buddha’s straw-lined stall, and that was why he leaned a bicycle against the building and stood on the seat, and that was why he fell off, because he didn’t like what he saw. Afterwards he spoke to the latrine girl, grabbing her roughly by the arm: “Why do it with that crazy—why, when I, Ayooba, am, could be—?” and she replied that she liked the man-dog, he’s funny, says he can’t feel anything, he rubs his hosepipe inside me but can’t even feel, but it’s nice, and he tells that he likes my smell. The frankness of the urchin girl, the honesty of latrine-cleaners, made Ayooba sick; he told her she had a soul composed of pig-droppings, and a tongue caked with excrement also; and in the throes of his jealousy he devised the prank of the jump-leads, the trick of the electrified urinal. The location appealed to him; it had a certain poetic justice.

  “Can’t feel, huh?” Ayooba sneered to Farooq and Shaheed, “Just wait on: I’ll make him jump for sure.”

  On February 10th (when Yahya, Bhutto and Mujib were refusing to engage in high-level talks), the buddha felt the call of nature. A somewhat concerned Shaheed and a gleeful Farooq loitered by the latrines; while Ayooba, who had used jump-leads to attach the metal footplates of the urinals to the battery of a jeep, stood out of sight behind the latrine hut, beside the jeep, whose motor was running. The buddha appeared, with his eyes as dilated as a charas-chewer’s and his gait of walking-through-a-cloud, and as he floated into the latrine Farooq called out, “Ohé! Ayooba, yara!” and began to giggle. The child-soldiers awaited the howl of mortified anguish which would be the sign that their vacuous tracker had begun to piss, allowing electricity to mount the golden stream and sting him in his numb and urchin-rubbing hosepipe.

  But no shriek came; Farooq, feeling confused and cheated, began to frown; and as time went by Shaheed grew nervous and yelled over to Ayooba Baloch, “You Ayooba! What you doing, man?” To which Ayooba-the-tank, “What d’you think, yaar, I turned on the juice five minutes ago!” … And now Shaheed ran—FULL TILT!—into the latrine, to find the buddha urinating away with an expression of foggy pleasure, emptying a bladder which must have been filling up for a fortnight, while the current passed up into him through his nether cucumber, apparently unnoticed, so that he was filling up with electricity and there was a blue crackle playing around the end of his gargantuan nose; and Shaheed who didn’t have the courage to touch this impossible being who could absorb electricity through his hosepipe screamed, “Disconnect, man, or he’ll fry like an onion here!” The buddha emerged from the latrine, unconcerned, buttoning himself with his right hand while the left hand held his silver spittoon; and the three child-soldiers understood that it was really true, Allah, numb as ice, anesthetized against feelings as well as memories … For a week after the incident, the buddha could not be touched without giving an electric shock, and not even the latrine girl could visit him in his stall.

  Curiously, after the jump-lead business, Ayooba Baloch stopped resenting the buddha, and even began to treat him with respect; the canine unit was forged by that bizarre moment into a real team, and was ready to venture forth against the evildoers of the earth.

  Ayooba-the-tank failed to give the buddha a shock; but where the small man fails, the mighty triumph. (When Yahya and Bhutto decided to make Sheikh Mujib jump, there were no mistakes.)

  On March 15th, 1971, twenty units of the CUTIA agency assembled in a hut with a blackboard. The garlanded features of the President gazed down upon sixty-one men and nineteen dogs; Yahya Khan had just offered Mujib the olive branch of immediate talks with himself and Bhutto, to resolve all irritations; but his portrait maintained an impeccable poker-face, giving no clue to his true, shocking intentions … while Brigadier Iskandar rubbed knuckles on lapels, Sgt.-Mjr. Najmuddin issued orders: sixty-one men and nineteen dogs were instructed to shed their uniforms. A tumultuous rustling in the hut: obeying without query, nineteen individuals remove identifying collars from canine necks. The dogs, excellently trained, cock eyebrows but refrain from giving voice; and the buddha, dutifully, begins to undress. Five dozen fellow humans follow his lead; five dozen stand to attention in a trice, shivering in the cold, beside neat piles of military berets pants shoes shirts and green pullovers with leather patches at the elbows. Sixty-one men, naked except for imperfect underwear, are issued (by Lala Moin the batman) with Army-approved mufti. Najmuddin barks a command; and then there they all are, some in lungis and kurtas, some in Pathan turbans. There are men in cheap rayon pants and men in striped clerks’ shirts. The buddha is in dhoti and kameez; he is comfortable, but around him are soldiers squirming in ill-fitting plain-clothes. This is, however, a military operation; no voice, human or canine, is raised in complaint.

  On March 15th, after obeying sartorial instructions, twenty CUTIA units were flown to Dacca, via Ceylon; among them were Shaheed Dar, Farooq Rashid, Ayooba Baloch and their buddha. Also flying to the East Wing by this circuitous route were sixty thousand of the West Wing’s toughest troops: sixty thousand, like sixty-one, were all in mufti. The General Officer Commanding (in a nattily blue double-breasted suit) was Tikka Khan; the officer responsible for Dacca, for its taming and eventual surrender, was called Tiger Niazi. He wore bush-shirt, slacks and a jaunty little trilby on his head.

  Via Ceylon we flew, sixty thousand and sixty-one innocent airline passengers, avoiding overflying India, and thus losing our chance of watching, from twenty thousand feet, the celebrations of Indira Gandhi’s New Congress Party, which had won a landslide victory—350 out of a possible 515 seats in the Lok Sabha—in another recent election. Indira-ignorant, unable to see her campaign slogan, GARIBI HATAO, Get Rid of Poverty, blazoned on walls and banners across the great diamond of India, we landed in Dacca in the early spring, and were driven in specially-requisitioned civilian buses to a military camp. On this last stage of our journey, however, we were unable to avoid hearing a snatch of song, issuing from some unseen gramophone. The song was called “Amar Sonar Bangla” (“Our Golden Bengal,” author: R. Tagore) and ran, in part: “During spring the fragrance of your mango-groves maddens my heart with delight.” However, none of us could understand Bengali, so we were protected against the insidious subversion of the lyric, although our feet did inadvertently tap (it must be admitted) to the tune.

  At first, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha were not told the name of the city to which they had come. Ayooba, envisaging the destruction of vegetarians, whispered: “Didn’t I tell you? Now we’ll show them! Spy stuff, man! Plain clothes and all! Up and at ‘em, Number 22 Unit! Ka-bang! Ka-bang! Ka-pow!”

  But we were not in India; vegetarians were not our targets; and after days of cooling our heels, uniforms were issued to us once again. This second transfiguration took place on March 25th.

  On March 25th, Yahya and Bhutto abruptly broke off their talks with Mujib and returned to the West Wing. Night fell; Brigadier Iskandar, followed by Najmuddin and Lala Moin, who was staggering under the weight of sixty-one uniforms and nineteen dog-collars, burst into the CUTIA barracks. Now Najmuddin: “Snap to it! Actions not words! One-two double-quick time!” Airline passengers donned uniforms and took up arms; while Brigadier Isk
andar at last announced the purpose of our trip. “That Mujib,” he revealed, “We’ll give him whatfor all right. We’ll make him jump for sure!”

  (It was on March 25th, after the breakdown of the talks with Bhutto and Yahya, that Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman proclaimed the state of Bangladesh.)

  CUTIA units emerged from barracks, piled into waiting jeeps; while, over the loudspeakers of the military base, the recorded voice of Jamila Singer was raised in patriotic hymns. (And Ayooba, nudging the buddha: “Listen, come on, don’t you recognize—think, man, isn’t that your own dear—Allah, this type is good for nothing but sniffing!”)

  At midnight—could it, after all, have been at any other time?—sixty thousand crack troops also left their barracks; passengers-who-had-flown-as-civilians now pressed the starter buttons of tanks. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha, however, were personally selected to accompany Brigadier Iskandar on the greatest adventure of the night. Yes, Padma: when Mujib was arrested, it was I who sniffed him out. (They had provided me with one of his old shirts; it’s easy when you’ve got the smell.)

  Padma is almost beside herself with anguish. “But mister, you didn’t, can’t have, how would you do such a thing … ?” Padma: I did. I have Sworn to tell everything; to conceal no shred of the truth. (But there are snail-tracks on her face, and she must have an explanation.)

  So—believe me, don’t believe, but this is what it was like!—I must reiterate that everything ended, everything began again, when a spittoon hit me on the back of the head. Saleem, with his desperation for meaning, for worthy purpose, for genius-like-a-shawl, had gone; would not return until a jungle snake—for the moment, anyway, there is was only the buddha; who recognizes no singing voice as his relative; who remembers neither fathers nor mothers; for whom midnight holds no importance; who, some time after a cleansing accident, awoke in a military hospital bed, and accepted the Army as his lot; who submits to the life in which he finds himself, and does his duty; who follows orders; who lives both in-the-world and not-in-the-world; who bows his head; who can track man or beast through streets or down rivers; who neither knows nor cares how, under whose auspices, as a favor to whom, at whose vengeful instigation he was put into uniform; who is, in short, no more and no less than the accredited tracker of CUTIA Unit 22.

  But how convenient this amnesia is, how much it excuses! So permit me to criticize myself: the philosophy of acceptance to which the buddha adhered had consequences no more and no less unfortunate than his previous lust-for-centrality; and here, in Dacca, those consequences were being revealed.

  “No, not true,” my Padma wails; the same denials have been made about most of what befell that night.

  Midnight, March 25th, 1971: past the University, which was being shelled, the buddha led troops to Sheikh Mujib’s lair. Students and lecturers came running out of hostels; they were greeted by bullets, and Mercurochrome stained the lawns. Sheikh Mujib, however, was not shot; manacled, manhandled, he was led by Ayooba Baloch to a waiting van. (As once before, after the revolution of the pepperpots … but Mujib was not naked; he had on a pair of green-and-yellow striped pajamas.) And while we drove through city streets, Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that weren’t-couldn’t-have-been true: soldiers entering women’s hostels without knocking; women, dragged into the street, were also entered, and again nobody troubled to knock. And newspaper offices, burning with the dirty yellowblack smoke of cheap gutter newsprint, and the offices of trade unions, smashed to the ground, and roadside ditches filling up with people who were not merely asleep—bare chests were seen, and the hollow pimples of bullet-holes. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq watched in silence through moving windows as our boys, our soldiers-for-Allah, our worth-ten-babus jawans held Pakistan together by turning flamethrowers machine-guns hand-grenades on the city slums. By the time we brought Sheikh Mujib to the airport, where Ayooba stuck a pistol into his rump and pushed him on to an aircraft which flew him into West Wing captivity, the buddha had closed his eyes. (“Don’t fill my head with all this history,” he had once told Ayooba-the-tank, “I am what I am and that’s all there is.”)

  And Brigadier Iskandar, rallying his troops: “Even now there are subversive elements to be rooted out.”

  When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy … dog-soldiers strain at the leash, and then, released, leap joyously to their work. O wolfhound chases of undesirables! O prolific seizings of professors and poets! O unfortunate shot-while-resisting arrests of Awami Leaguers and fashion correspondents! Dogs of war cry havoc in the city; but although tracker-dogs are tireless, soldiers are weaker: Farooq Shaheed Ayooba take turns at vomiting as their nostrils are assailed by the stench of burning slums. The buddha, in whose nose the stench spawns images of searing vividness, continues merely to do his job. Nose them out: leave the rest to the soldier-boys. CUTIA units stalk the smoldering wreck of the city. No undesirable is safe tonight; no hiding-place impregnable. Bloodhounds track the fleeing enemies of national unity; wolfhounds, not to be outdone, sink fierce teeth into their prey.

  How many arrests—ten, four-hundred-and-twenty, one-thousand-and-one?—did our own Number 22 Unit make that night? How many intellectual lily-livered Daccans hid behind women’s saris and had to be yanked into the streets? How often did Brigadier Iskandar—“Smell this! That’s the stink of subversion!”—unleash the war-hounds of unity? There are things which took place on the night of March 25th which must remain permanently in a state of confusion.

  Futility of statistics: during 1971, ten million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh into India—but ten million (like all numbers larger than one thousand and one) refuses to be understood. Comparisons do not help: “the biggest migration in the history of the human race”—meaningless. Bigger than Exodus, larger than the Partition crowds, the many-headed monster poured into India. On the border, Indian soldiers trained the guerrillas known as Mukti Bahini; in Dacca, Tiger Niazi ruled the roost.

  And Ayooba Shaheed Farooq? Our boys in green? How did they take to battling against fellow meat-eaters? Did they mutiny? Were officers—Iskandar, Najmuddin, even Lala Moin—riddled with nauseated bullets? They were not. Innocence had been lost; but despite a new grimness about the eyes, despite the irrevocable loss of certainty, despite the eroding of moral absolutes, the unit went on with its work. The buddha was not the only one who did as he was told … while somewhere high above the struggle, the voice of Jamila Singer fought anonymous voices singing the lyrics of R. Tagore: “My life passes in the shady village homes filled with rice from your fields; they madden my heart with delight.”

  Their hearts maddened, but not with delight, Ayooba and company followed orders; the buddha followed scent-trails. Into the heart of the city, which has turned violent maddened bloodsoaked as the West Wing soldiers react badly to their knowledge-of-wrongdoing, goes Number 22 Unit; through the blackened streets, the buddha concentrates on the ground, sniffing out trails, ignoring the ground-level chaos of cigarette-packs cow-dung fallen-bicycles abandoned-shoes; and then on other assignments, out into the countryside, where entire villages are being burned owing to their collective responsibility for harboring Mukti Bahini, the buddha and three boys track down minor Awami League officials and well-known Communist types. Past migrating villagers with bundled possessions on their heads; past torn-up railway tracks and burnt-out trees; and always, as though some invisible force were directing their footsteps, drawing them into a darker heart of madness, their missions send them south south south, always nearer to the sea, to the mouths of the Ganges and the sea.

  And at last—who were they following then? Did names matter any more?—they were given a quarry whose skills must have been the equal-and-opposite of the buddha’s own, otherwise why did it take so long to catch him? At last—unable to escape their training, pursue-relentlessly-arrest-remorselessly, they are in the midst of a mission without an end, pursuing a foe who endlessly eludes them, but they cannot report back to ba
se empty-handed, and on they go, south south south, drawn by eternally-receding scent-trail; and perhaps by something more: because, in my life, fate has never been unwilling to lend a hand.

  They have commandeered a boat, because the buddha said the trail led down the river; hungry unslept exhausted in a universe of abandoned rice-paddies, they row after their unseen prey; down the great brown river they go, until the war is too far away to remember, but still the scent leads them on. The river here has a familiar name: Padma. But the name is a local deception; in reality the river is still Her, the mother-water, goddess Ganga streaming down to earth through Shiva’s hair. The buddha has not spoken for days; he just points, there, that way, and on they go, south south south to the sea.

  A nameless morning. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq awaking in the boat of their absurd pursuit, moored by the bank of Padma-Ganga—to find him gone. “Allah-Allah,” Farooq yelps, “Grab your ears and pray for pity, he’s brought us to this drowned place and run off, it’s all your fault, you Ayooba, that trick with the jump-leads and this is his revenge!” … The sun, climbing. Strange alien birds in the sky. Hunger and fear like mice in their bellies: and whatif, whatif the Mukti Bahini … parents are invoked. Shaheed has dreamed his pomegranate dream. Despair, lapping at the edges of the boat. And in the distance, near the horizon, an impossible endless huge green wall, stretching right and left to the ends of the earth! Unspoken fear: how can it be, how can what we are seeing be true, who builds walls across the world? … And then Ayooba, “Look-look, Allah!” Because coming towards them across the rice-paddies is a bizarre slow-motion chase: first the buddha with that cucumber-nose, you could spot it a mile off, and following him, splashing through paddies, a gesticulating peasant with a scythe, Father Time enraged, while running along a dyke a woman with her sari caught up between her legs, hair loose, voice pleading screaming, while the scythed avenger stumbles through drowned rice, covered from head to foot in water and mud. Ayooba roars with nervous relief: “The old billy-goat! Couldn’t keep his hands off the local women! Come on, buddha, don’t let him catch you, he’ll slice off both your cucumbers!” And Farooq, “But then what? If the buddha is sliced, what then?” And now Ayooba-the-tank is pulling a pistol out of its holster. Ayooba aiming: both hands held out in front, trying not to shake, Ayooba squeezing: a scythe curves up into the air. And slowly slowly the arms of a peasant rise up as though in prayer; knees kneel in paddy-water; a face plunges below the water-level to touch its forehead to the earth. On the dyke a woman wailing. And Ayooba tells the buddha: “Next time I’ll shoot you instead.” Ayooba-the-tank shaking like a leaf. And Time lies dead in a rice-paddy.