Midnight's Children (63 page)

But I must go back to my new companions, so that I can relate the incident at the latrines: there was Ayooba, tank-like, who led the unit, and Farooq, who followed contentedly. The third youth, however, was a gloomier, more private type, and as such closest to my heart. On his fifteenth birthday Shaheed Dar had lied about his age and enlisted. That day, his Punjabi sharecropper father had taken Shaheed into a field and wept all over his new uniform. Old Dar told his son the meaning of his name, which was “martyr,” and expressed the hope that he would prove worthy of it, and perhaps become the first of their family members to enter the perfumed garden, leaving behind this pitiful world in which a father could not hope to pay his debts and also feed his nineteen children. The overwhelming power of names, and the resulting approach of martyrdom, had begun to prey heavily on Shaheed’s mind; in his dreams, he began to see his death, which took the form of a bright pomegranate, and floated in mid-air behind him, following him everywhere, biding its time. The disturbing and somewhat unheroic vision of pomegranate death made Shaheed an inward, unsmiling fellow.

Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various
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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
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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
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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
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barracks. Now Najmuddin: “Snap to it! Actions not words! One-two double-quick time!” Airline passengers donned uniforms and took up arms; while Brigadier Iskandar 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.)

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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
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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.
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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.