Midnight's Children (48 page)

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.

Obviously 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 Kashmir! 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 Cub 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.'

Somewhat consoled by my offers of novelty, my Padma sniffs; wipes away mollusc-slime, dries eyes; breathes in deeply… and, for the spittoon-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 conies 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 (he 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 cutia 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-then 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 unquestioningly; to seek unflaggingly; to arrest remorselessly. Mode of procedure?-Covert; efficient; quick. Legal basis of such detentions?-Defence 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 cutia Unit 22. She-dog badges will be sewn to lapels. The acronym cutia, 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… 'Ekkkhh-thoo!' (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 cutia 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 cutia 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 fairy-tales!'

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 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!'