Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

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.