Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

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!'

(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, Dot to say exalted company.)