Midnight's Children (61 page)

Great sacrifices: for instance, at the battle for Lahore?—On September 6th, Indian troops crossed the Wagah border, thus hugely broadening the front of the war, which was no longer limited to Kashmir; and did great sacrifices take place, or not? Was it true that the city was virtually defenseless, because the Pak Army and Air Force were all in the Kashmir sector? Voice of Pakistan said: O memorable day! O unarguable lesson in the fatality of delay! The Indians, confident of capturing the city,
stopped for breakfast
. All-India Radio announced the fall of Lahore; meanwhile, a private aircraft spotted the breakfasting invaders. While the B.B.C. picked up the A.I.R. story, the Lahore militia was mobilized. Hear the Voice of Pakistan!—old men, young boys, irate grandmothers fought the Indian Army; bridge by bridge they battled, with any available weapons! Lame men loaded their pockets with grenades, pulled out the pins, flung themselves beneath advancing Indian tanks; toothless old ladies disembowelled Indian babus with pitch-forks! Down to the last man and child, they died; but they saved the city, holding off the Indians until air support arrived! Martyrs, Padma! Heroes, bound for the perfumed garden! Where the men would be given four beauteous houris, untouched by man or djinn; and the women, four equally virile males!
Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?
What a thing this holy war is, in which with one supreme sacrifice men may atone for all their evils! No wonder Lahore was defended; what did the Indians have to look forward to? Only reincarnation—as cockroaches, maybe, or scorpions, or green-medicine-wallahs—there’s really no comparison.

But did it or didn’t it? Was that how it happened? Or was All-India Radio—
great tank battle, huge Pak losses, 450 tanks destroyed
—telling the truth?

Nothing was real; nothing certain. Uncle Puffs came to visit the Clayton Road house, and there were no teeth in his mouth. (During India’s China war, when our loyalties were different, my mother had given gold bangles and jeweled ear-rings to the “Ornaments for Armaments” campaign; but what was that when set against the sacrifice of an entire mouthful of gold?) “The nation,” he said indistinctly through his untoothed gums, “must not, darn it, be short of funds on account of one man’s vanity!”—But did he or didn’t he? Were teeth truly sacrificed in the name of holy war, or were they sitting in a cupboard at home? “I’m afraid,” Uncle Puffs said gummily, “you’ll have to wait for that special dowry I promised.”—Nationalism or meanness? Was his baring of gums a supreme proof of his patriotism, or a slimy ruse to avoid filling a Puffia-mouth with gold?

And were there parachutists or were there not? “… have been dropped on every major city,” Voice of Pakistan announced. “All able-bodied persons are to stay up with weapons; shoot on sight after dusk curfew.” But in India, “Despite Pakistani air-raid provocation,” the radio claimed, “we have not responded!” Who to believe? Did Pakistani fighter-bombers truly make that “daring raid” which caught one-third of the Indian Air Force helplessly grounded on tarmac? Did they didn’t they? And those night-dances in the sky, Pakistani Mirages and Mystères against India’s less romantically-titled MiGs: did Islamic mirages and mysteries do battle with Hindu invaders, or was it all some kind of astonishing illusion? Did bombs fall? Were explosions true? Could even a death be said to be the case?

And Saleem? What did he do in the war?

This: waiting to be drafted, I went in search of friendly, obliterating, sleep-giving, Paradise-bringing bombs.

The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of—I’m making it sound too noble; no orotund phrases must be used. Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death.

Who died in the holy war? Who, while I in bright white kurta and pajamas went Lambretta-borne into the curfewed streets, found what I was looking for? Who, martyred by war, went straight to a perfumed garden? Study the bombing pattern; learn the secrets of rifle-shots.

On the night of September 22nd, air-raids took place over every Pakistani city. (Although All-India Radio …) Aircraft, real or fictional, dropped actual or mythical bombs. It is, accordingly, either a matter of fact or a figment of a diseased imagination that of the only three bombs to hit Rawalpindi and explode, the first landed on the bungalow in which my grandmother Naseem Aziz and my aunty Pia were hiding under a table; the second tore a wing off the city jail, and spared my cousin Zafar a life of captivity; the third destroyed a large darkling mansion surrounded by a sentried wall; sentries were at their posts, but could not prevent Emerald Zulfikar from being carried off to a more distant place than Suffolk. She was being visited, that night, by the Nawab of Kif and his mulishly unmaturing daughter; who was also spared the necessity of becoming an adult woman. In Karachi, three bombs were also enough. The Indian planes, reluctant to come down low, bombed from a great height; the vast majority of their missiles fell harmlessly into the sea. One bomb, however, annihilated Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif and all his seven Puffias, thus releasing me from my promise for ever; and there were two last bombs. Meanwhile, at the front, Mutasim the Handsome emerged from his tent to go to the toilet; a noise like a mosquito whizzed (or did not whiz) towards him, and he died with a full bladder under the impact of a sniper’s bullet.

And still I must tell you about two-last-bombs.

Who survived? Jamila Singer, whom bombs were unable to find; in India, the family of my uncle Mustapha, with whom bombs could not be bothered; but my father’s forgotten distant relative Zohra and her husband had moved to Amritsar, and a bomb sought them out as well.

And two-more-bombs demand to be told.

… While I, unaware of the intimate connection between the war and myself, went foolishly in search of bombs; after the curfew-hour I rode, but vigilante bullets failed to find their target … and sheets of flame rose from a Rawalpindi bungalow, perforated sheets at whose center hung a mysterious dark hole, which grew into the smoke-image of an old wide woman with moles on her cheeks … and one by one the war eliminated my drained, hopeless family from the earth.

But now the countdown was at an end.

And at last I turned my Lambretta homewards, so that I was at the Guru Mandir roundabout with the roar of aircraft overhead, mirages and mysteries, while my father in the idiocy of his stroke was switching on lights and opening windows even though a Civil Defense official had just visited them to make sure the blackout was complete; and when Amina Sinai was saying to the wraith of an old white washing-chest, “Go away now—I’ve seen enough of you,” I was scooting past Civil Defense jeeps from which angry fists saluted me; and before bricks and stones could extinguish the lights in my aunt Alia’s house, the whining came, and I should have known there was no need to go looking elsewhere for death, but I was still in the street in the midnight shadow of the mosque when it came, plummeting towards the illuminated windows of my father’s idiocy, death whining like pie-dogs, transforming itself into falling masonry and sheets of flame and a wave of force so great that it sent me spinning off my Lambretta, while within the house of my aunt’s great bitterness my father mother aunt and unborn brother or sister who was only a week away from starting life, all of them all of them all squashed flatter than rice-pancakes, the house crashing in on their heads like a waffle-iron, while over on Korangi Road a last bomb, meant for the oil-refinery, landed instead on a split-level American-style residence which an umbilical cord had not quite managed to complete; but at Guru Mandir many stories were coming to an end, the story of Amina and her long-ago underworld husband and her assiduity and public announcement and her son-who-was-not-her-son and her luck with horses and verrucas and dancing hands in the Pioneer Café and last defeat by her sister, and of Ahmed who always lost his way and had a lower lip which stuck out and a squashy belly and went white in a freeze and succumbed to abstraction and burst dogs open in the street and fell in love too late and died because of his vulnerability to what-falls-out-of-the-sky; flatter than pancakes now, and around them the house exploding collapsing, an instant of destruction of such vehemence that things which had been buried deep in forgotten tin trunks flew upward into the air while other things people memories were buried under rubble beyond hope of salvation; the fingers of the explosion reaching down down to the bottom of an almirah and unlocking a green tin trunk, the clutching hand of the explosion flinging trunk-contents into air, and now something which has hidden unseen for many years is circling in the night like a whirligig piece of the moon, something catching the light of the moon and falling now falling as I pick myself up dizzily after the blast, something twisting turning somersaulting down, silver as moonlight, a wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli, the past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents’ funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo-sized front-page baby-snaps to the eighteen-year-old with his filthy dirty love, pouring out goes shame and guilt and wanting-to-please and needing-to-be-loved and determined-to-find-a-historical-role and growing-too-fast, I am free of Snotnose and Stainface and Baldy and Sniffer and Mapface and washing-chests and Evie Burns and language marches, liberated from Kolynos Kid and the breasts of Pia mumani and Alpha-and-Omega, absolved from the multiple murders of Homi Catrack and Hanif and Aadam Aziz and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, I have shaken off five-hundred-year-old whores and confessions of love at dead of night, free now, beyond caring, crashing on to tarmac, restored to innocence and purity by a tumbling piece of the moon, wiped clean as a wooden writing-chest, brained (just as prophesied) by my mother’s silver spittoon.

On the morning of September 23rd, the United Nations announced the end of hostilities between India and Pakistan. India had occupied less than 500 square miles of Pakistani soil; Pakistan had conquered just 340 square miles of its Kashmiri dream. It was said that the ceasefire came because both sides had run out of ammunition, more or less simultaneously; thus the exigencies of international diplomacy, and the politically-motivated manipulations of arms suppliers, prevented the wholesale annihilation of my family. Some of us survived, because nobody sold our would-be assassins the bombs bullets aircraft necessary for the completion of our destruction.

Six years later, however, there was another war.

O
BVIOUSLY ENOUGH
(because otherwise I should have to introduce at this point some fantastic explanation of my continued presence in this “mortal coil”), you may number me amongst those whom the war of ’65 failed to obliterate. Spittoon-brained, Saleem suffered a merely partial erasure, and was only wiped clean whilst others, less fortunate, were wiped out; unconscious in the night-shadow of a mosque, I was saved by the exhaustion of ammunition dumps.

Tears—which, in the absence of the Kashmiri cold, have absolutely no chance of hardening into diamonds—slide down the bosomy contours of Padma’s cheeks. “O, mister, this war tamasha, kills the best and leaves the rest!” Looking as though hordes of snails have recently crawled down from her reddened eyes, leaving their glutinous shiny trails upon her face, Padma mourns my bomb-flattened clan. I remain dry-eyed as usual, graciously refusing to rise to the unintentional insult implied by Padma’s lachrymose exclamation.

“Mourn for the living,” I rebuke her gently, “The dead have their camphor gardens.” Grieve for Saleem! Who, barred from celestial lawns by the continued beating of his heart, awoke once again amid the clammy metallic fragrances of a hospital ward; for whom there were no houris, untouched by man or djinn, to provide the promised consolations of eternity—I was lucky to receive the grudging, bedpan-clattering ministrations of a bulky male nurse who, while bandaging my head, muttered sourly that, war or no war, the doctor sahibs liked going to their beach shacks on Sundays. “Better you’d stayed knocked out one more day,” he mouthed, before moving further down the ward to spread more good cheer.

Grieve for Saleem—who, orphaned and purified, deprived of the hundred daily pin-pricks of family life, which alone could deflate the great ballooning fantasy of history and bring it down to a more manageably human scale, had been pulled up by his roots to be flung unceremoniously across the years, fated to plunge memoryless into an adulthood whose every aspect grew daily more grotesque.

Fresh snail-tracks on Padma’s cheeks. Obliged to attempt some sort of “There, there,” I resort to movie-trailers. (How I loved them at the old Metro Club Club! O smacking of lips at the sight of the title
NEXT ATTRACTION
, superimposed on undulating blue velvet! O anticipatory salivation before screens trumpeting
COMING SOON
!—Because the promise of exotic futures has always seemed, to my mind, the perfect antidote to the disappointments of the present.) “Stop, stop,” I exhort my mournfully squatting audience, “I’m not finished yet! There is to be electrocution and a rain-forest; a pyramid of heads on a field impregnated by leaky marrowbones; narrow escapes are coming, and a minaret that screamed! Padma, there is still plenty worth telling: my further trials, in the basket of invisibility and in the shadow of another mosque; wait for the premonitions of Resham Bibi and the pout of Parvati-the-witch! Fatherhood and treason also, and of course that unavoidable Widow, who added to my history of drainage-above the final ignominy of voiding-below … in short, there are still next-attractions and coming-soons galore; a chapter ends when one’s parents die, but a new kind of chapter also begins.”