Midnight's Children (62 page)

Somewhat consoled by my offers of novelty, my Padma sniffs; wipes away mollusc-slime, dries eyes; breathes in deeply … and, for the spitton-brained fellow we last met in his hospital bed, approximately five years pass before my dung-lotus exhales.

(While Padma, to calm herself, holds her breath, I permit myself to insert a Bombay-talkie-style close-up—a calendar ruffled by a breeze, its pages flying off in rapid succession to denote the passing of the years; I superimpose turbulent long-shots of street riots, medium shots of burning buses and blazing English-language libraries owned by the British Council and the United States Information Service; through the accelerated flickering of the calendar we glimpse the fall of Ayub Khan, the assumption of the presidency by General Yahya, the promise of elections … but now Padma’s lips are parting, and there is no time to linger on the angrily-opposed images of Mr. Z. A. Bhutto and Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman; exhaled air begins to issue invisibly from her mouth, and the dream-faces of the leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party and the Awami League shimmer and fade out; the gusting of her emptying lungs paradoxically stills the breeze blowing the pages of my calendar, which comes to rest upon a date late in 1970, before the election which split the country in two, before the war of West Wing against East Wing, P.P.P. against Awami League, Bhutto against Mujib … before the election of 1970, and far away from the public stage, three young soldiers are arriving at a mysterious camp in the Murree Hills.)

Padma has regained her self-control. “Okay, okay,” she expostulates, waving an arm in dismissal of her tears, “Why you’re waiting? Begin,” the lotus instructs me loftily, “Begin all over again.”

The camp in the hills will be found on no maps; it is too far from the Murree road for the barking of its dogs to be heard, even by the sharpest-eared of motorists. Its wire perimeter fence is heavily camouflaged; the gate bears neither symbol nor name. Yet it does, did, exist; though its existence has been hotly denied—at the fall of Dacca, for instance, when Pakistan’s vanquished Tiger Niazi was quizzed on this subject by his old chum, India’s victorious General Sam Manekshaw, the Tiger scoffed: “Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? Never heard of it; you’ve been misled, old boy. Damn ridiculous idea, if you don’t mind my saying.” Despite what the Tiger said to Sam, I insist: the camp was there all right …

… “Shape up!” Brigadier Iskandar is yelling at his newest recruits, Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar. “You’re a
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unit now!” Slapping swagger-stick against thigh, he turns on his heels and leaves them standing on the parade-ground, simultaneously fried by mountain sun and frozen by mountain air. Chests out, shoulders back, rigid with obedience, the three youths hear the giggling voice of the Brigadier’s batman, Lala Moin:
“So you’re the poor suckers who get the man-dog!”

In their bunks that night: “Tracking and intelligence!” whispers Ayooba Baloch, proudly. “Spies, man! O.S.S.117 types! Just let us at those Hindus—see what we don’t do! Ka-dang! Ka-pow! What weaklings, yara, those Hindus! Vegetarians all! Vegetables,” Ayooba hisses, “always lose to meat.” He is built like a tank. His crew-cut begins just above his eyebrows.

And Farooq, “You think there’ll be war?” Ayooba snorts. “What else? How not a war? Hasn’t Bhutto Sahib promised every peasant one acre of land? So where it’ll come from? For so much soil, we must conquer Punjab and Bengal! Just wait only; after the election, when People’s Party has won—than Ka-pow! Ka-blooey!”

Farooq is troubled: “Those Indians have Sikh troops, man. With so-long beards and hair, in the heat it pricks like crazy and they all go mad and fight like hell …!”

Ayooba gurgles with amusement. “Vegetarians, I swear, yaar … how are they going to beat beefy types like us?” But Farooq is long and stringy.

Shaheed Dar whispers, “But what did he mean: man-dog?”

… Morning. In a hut with a blackboard, Brigadier Iskandar polishes knuckles on lapels while one Sgt.-Mjr. Najmuddin briefs new recruits. Question-and-answer format; Najmuddin provides both queries and replies. No interruptions are to be tolerated. While above the blackboard the garlanded portraits of President Yahya and Mutasim the Martyr stare sternly down. And through the (closed) windows, the persistent barking of dogs … Najmuddin’s inquiries and responses are also barked. What are you here for?—Training. In what field?—Pursuit-and-capture. How will you work?—In canine units of three persons and one dog. What unusual features?—Absence of officer personnel, necessity of taking own decisions, concomitant requirement for high Islamic sense of self-discipline and responsibility. Purpose of units?—To root out undesirable elements. Nature of such elements?—Sneaky, well-disguised, could-be-anyone. Known intentions of same?—To be abhorred: destruction of family life, murder of God, expropriation of landowners, abolition of film-censorship. To what ends?—Annihilation of the State, anarchy, foreign domination. Accentuating causes of concern?—Forthcoming elections; and subsequently, civilian rule. (Political prisoners have been are being freed. All types of hooligans are abroad.) Precise duties of units?—To obey un-questioningly; to seek unflaggingly; to arrest remorselessly. Mode of procedure?—Covert; efficient; quick. Legal basis of such detentions?—Defense of Pakistan Rules, permitting the pick-up of undesirables, who may be held incommunicado for a period of six months. Footnote: a renewable period of six months. Any questions?—No. Good. You are
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Unit 22. She-dog badges will be sewn to lapels. The acronym
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, of course, means
bitch.

And the man-dog?

Cross-legged, blue-eyed, staring into space, he sits beneath a tree. Bodhi trees do not grow at this altitude; he makes do with a chinar. His nose: bulbous, cucumbery, tip blue with cold. And on his head a monk’s tonsure where once Mr. Zagallo’s hand. And a mutilated finger whose missing segment fell at Masha Miovic’s feet after Glandy Keith had slammed. And stains on his face like a map …
“Ekkkhhthoo!”
(He spits.)

His teeth are stained; betel-juice reddens his gums. A red stream of expectorated paan-fluid leaves his lips, to hit, with commendable accuracy, a beautifully-wrought silver spittoon, which sits before him on the ground. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq are staring in amazement. “Don’t try to get it away from him,” Sgt.-Mjr. Najmuddin indicates the spittoon, “It sends him wild.” Ayooba begins, “Sir sir I thought you said three persons and a—,” but Najmuddin barks, “No questions! Obedience without queries! This is your tracker; that’s that. Dismiss.”

At that time, Ayooba and Farooq were sixteen and a half years old. Shaheed (who had lied about his age) was perhaps a year younger. Because they were so young, and had not had time to acquire the type of memories which give men a firm hold on reality, such as memories of love or famine, the boy soldiers were highly susceptible to the influence of legends and gossip. Within twenty-four hours, in the course of mess-hall conversations with other
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units, the man-dog had been fully mythologized … “From a really important family, man!”—“The idiot child, they put him in the Army to make a man of him!”—“Had a war accident in ’65, yaar, can’t won’t remember a thing about it!”—“Listen, I heard he was the brother of—“No, man, that’s crazy, she is good, you know, so simple and holy, how would she leave her brother?”—“Anyway he refuses to talk about it.”—“I heard one terrible thing, she hated him, man, that’s why she!”—“No memory,” not interested in people, lives like a dog!”—“But the tracking business is true all right! You see that nose on him?”—“Yah, man, he can follow any trail on earth!”—“Through water, baba, across rocks! Such a tracker, you never saw!”—“And he can’t feel a thing! That’s right? Numb, I swear; head-to-foot numb! You touch him, he wouldn’t know—only by smell he knows you’re there!”—“Must be the war wound!”—“But that spittoon, man, who knows? Carries it everywhere like a love-token!”—“I tell you, I’m glad it’s you three; he gives me the creeps, yaar, it’s those blue eyes.”—“You know how they found out about his nose? He just wandered into a minefield, man, I swear, just picked his way through, like he could smell the damn mines!”—“O, no, man, what are you talking, that’s an old story, that was that first dog in the whole
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operation, that Bonzo, man, don’t mix us up!”—“Hey, you Ayooba, you better watch your step, they say V.I.P.s are keeping their eyes on him!”—“Yah, like I told you, Jamila Singer …”—“O, keep your mouth shut, we all heard enough of your fairytales!”

Once Ayooba, Farooq and Shaheed had become reconciled to their strange, impassive tracker (it was after the incident at the latrines), they gave him the nickname of buddha, “old man”; not just because he must have been seven years their senior, and had actually taken part in the six-years-ago war of ’65, when the three boy soldiers weren’t even in long pants, but because there hung around him an air of great antiquity. The buddha was old before his time.

O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word “buddha,” meaning old man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is also Buddha, with soft-tongued Ds, meaning he-who-achieved-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree … Once upon a time, a prince, unable to bear the suffering of the world, became capable of not-living-in-the-world as well as living in it; he was present, but also absent; his body was in one place, but his spirit was elsewhere. In ancient India, Gautama the Buddha sat enlightened under a tree at Gaya; in the deer park at Sarnath he taught others to abstract themselves from worldly sorrows and achieve inner peace; and centuries later, Saleem the buddha sat under a different tree, unable to remember grief, numb as ice, wiped clean as a slate … With some embarrassment, I am forced to admit that amnesia is the kind of gimmick regularly used by our lurid film-makers. Bowing my head slightly, I accept that my life has taken on, yet again, the tone of a Bombay talkie; but after all, leaving to one side the vexed issue of reincarnation, there is only a finite number of methods of achieving rebirth. So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must doggedly insist that I, he, had begun again; that after years of yearning for importance, he (or I) had been cleansed of the whole business; that after my vengeful abandonment by Jamila Singer, who wormed me into the Army to get me out of her sight, I (or he) accepted the fate which was my repayment for love, and sat uncomplaining under a chinar tree; that, emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I became a citizen of Pakistan.

It was arguably inevitable that, during the months of training, the buddha should begin to irritate Ayooba Baloch. Perhaps it was because he chose to live apart from the soldiers, in a straw-lined ascetic’s stall at the far end of the kennel-barracks; or because he was so often to be found sitting cross-legged under his tree, silver spittoon clutched in hand, with unfocused eyes and a foolish smile on his lips—as if he were actually happy that he’d lost his brains! What’s more, Ayooba, the apostle of meat, may have found his tracker insufficiently virile. “Like a brinjal, man,” I permit Ayooba to complain, “I swear—a vegetable!”

(We may also, taking the wider view, assert that irritation was in the air at the year’s turn. Were not even General Yahya and Mr. Bhutto getting hot and bothered about the petulant insistence of Sheikh Mujib on his right to form the new government? The wretched Bengali’s Awami League had won 160 out of a possible 162 East Wing seats; Mr. Bhutto’s P.P.P. had merely taken 81 Western constituencies. Yes, an irritating election. It is easy to imagine how irked Yahya and Bhutto, West Wingers both, must have been! And when even the mighty wax peevish, how is one to blame the small man? The irritation of Ayooba Baloch, let us conclude, placed him in excellent, not to say exalted company.)

On training maneuvers, when Ayooba Shaheed Farooq scrambled after the buddha as he followed the faintest of trails across bush rocks streams, the three boys were obliged to admit his skill; but still Ayooba, tank-like, demanded: “Don’t you remember really? Nothing? Allah, you don’t feel
bad?
Somewhere you’ve maybe got mother father sister,” but the buddha interrupted him gently: “Don’t try and fill my head with all that history. I am who I am, that’s all there is.” His accent was so pure, “Really classy Lucknow-type Urdu,
wah-wah!
” Farooq said admiringly, that Ayooba Baloch, who spoke coarsely, like a tribesman, fell silent; and the three boys began to believe the rumors even more fervently. They were unwillingly fascinated by this man with his nose like a cucumber and his head which rejected memories families histories, which contained absolutely nothing except smells … “like a bad egg that somebody sucked dry,” Ayooba muttered to his companions, and then, returning to his central theme, added, “Allah, even his nose looks like a vegetable.”

Their uneasiness lingered. Did they sense, in the buddha’s numbed blankness, a trace of “undesirability”?—For was not his rejection of past-and-family just the type of subversive behavior they were dedicated to “rooting out”? The camp’s officers, however, were deaf to Ayooba’s requests of “Sir sir can’t we just have a real dog sir?” … so that Farooq, a born follower who had already adopted Ayooba as his leader and hero, cried, “What to do? With that guy’s family contacts, some high-ups must’ve told the Brigadier to put up with him, that’s all.”

And (although none of the trio would have been able to express the idea) I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, the country’s East and West Wings were separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now. Enough philosophizing: what I am saying is that by abandoning consciousness, seceding from history, the buddha was setting the worst of examples—and the example was followed by no less a personage than Sheikh Mujib, when he led the East Wing into secession and declared it independent as “Bangladesh”! Yes, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were right to feel ill-at-ease—because even in those depths of my withdrawal from responsibility, I remained responsible, through the workings of the metaphorical modes of connection, for the belligerent events of 1971.