Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

After this first apparition, they fell into a state of mind in which they would have believed the forest capable of anything; each night it sent them new punishments, the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked down and seized, the screaming and monkey-gibbering of children left fatherless by their work… and in this first time, the time of punishment, even the impassive buddha with his citified voice was obliged to confess that he, too, had taken to waking up at night to find the forest closing in upon him like a vice, so that he felt unable to breathe.

When it had punished them enough-when they were all trembling shadows of the people they had once been-the jungle permitted them the double-edged luxury of nostalgia. One night Ayooba, who was regressing towards infancy faster than any of them, and had begun to suck his one moveable thumb, saw his mother looking down at him, offering him the delicate rice-based sweets of her love; but at the same moment as he reached out for the laddoos, she scurried away, and he saw her climb a giant sundri-tree to sit swinging from a high branch by her tail: a white wraithlike monkey with the face of his mother visited Ayooba night after night, so that after a time he was obliged to remember more about her than her sweets: how she had liked to sit among the boxes of her dowry, as though she, too, were simply some sort of thing, simply one of the gifts her father gave to her husband; in the heart of the Sundarbans, Ayooba Baloch understood his mother for the first time, and stopped sucking his thumb. Farooq Rashid, too, was given a vision. At dusk one day he thought he saw his brother running wildly through the forest, and became convinced that his father had died. He remembered a forgotten day when his peasant father had told him and his fleet-footed brother that the local landlord, who lent money at 300 per cent, had agreed to buy his soul in return for the latest loan. 'When I die,' old Rashid told Farooq's brother, 'you must open your mouth and my spirit will fly inside it; then run run run, because the zamindar will be after you!' Farooq, who had also started regressing alarmingly, found in the knowledge of his father's death and the flight of his brother the strength to give up the childish habits which the jungle had at first re-created in him; he stopped crying when he was hungry and asking Why. Shaheed Dar, too, was visited by a monkey with the face of an ancestor; but all he saw was a father who had instructed him to earn his name. This, however, also helped to restore in him the sense of responsibility which the just-following-orders requirements of war had sapped; so it seemed that the magical jungle, having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them by the hand towards a new adulthood. And flitting through the night-forest went the wraiths of their hopes; these, however, they were unable to see clearly, or to grasp.

The buddha, however, was not granted nostalgia at first. He had taken to sitting cross-legged under a sundri-tree; his eyes and mind seemed empty, and at night, he no longer awoke. But finally the forest found a way through to him; one afternoon, when rain pounded down on the trees and boiled off them as steam, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq saw the buddha sitting under his tree while a blind, translucent serpent bit, and poured venom into, his heel. Shaheed Dar crushed the serpent's head with a stick; the buddha, who was head-to-foot numb, seemed not to have noticed. His eyes were closed. After this, the boy soldiers waited for the man-dog to die; but I was stronger than the snake-poison. For two days he became as rigid as a tree, and his eyes crossed, so that he saw the world in mirror-image, with the right side on the left; at last he relaxed, and the look of milky abstraction was no longer in his eyes. I was rejoined to the past, jolted into unity by snake-poison, and it began to pour out through the buddha's lips. As his eyes returned to normal, his words flowed so freely that they seemed to be an aspect of the monsoon. The child-soldiers listened, spellbound, to the stories issuing from his mouth, beginning with a birth at midnight, and continuing unstoppably, because he was reclaiming everything, all of it, all lost histories, all the myriad complex processes that go to make a man. Open-mouthed, unable to tear themselves away, the child-soldiers drank his life like leaf-tainted water, as he spoke of bed-wetting cousins, revolutionary pepperpots, the perfect voice of a sister… Ayooba Shaheed Farooq would have (once upon a time) given anything to know that those rumours had been true; but in the Sundarbans, they didn't even cry out.

And rushing on: to late-flowering love, and Jamila in a bedroom in a shaft of light. Now Shaheed did murmur, 'So that's why, when he confessed, after that she couldn't stand to be near…' But the buddha continues, and it becomes apparent that he is struggling to recall something particular, something which refuses to return, which obstinately eludes him, so that he gets to the end without finding it, and remains frowning and unsatisfied even after he has recounted a holy war, and revealed what fell from the sky.

There was a silence; and then Farooq Rashid said, 'So much, yaar, inside one person; so many bad things, no wonder he kept his mouth shut!'

You see, Padma: I have told this story before. But what refused to return? What, despite the liberating venene of a colourless serpent, failed to emerge from my lips? Padma: the buddha had forgotten his name. (To be precise: his first name.)

And still it went on raining. The water-level was rising daily, until it became clear that they would have to move deeper into the jungle, in search of higher ground. The rain was too heavy for the boat to be of use; so, still following Shaheed's instructions, Ayooba Farooq and the buddha pulled it far away from the encroaching bank, tied mooring-rope around sundri-trunk, and covered their craft with leaves; after which, having no option, they moved ever further into the dense uncertainty of the jungle.

Now, once again, the Sundarbans changed its nature; once again Ayooba Shaheed Farooq found their ears filled with the lamentations of families from whose bosom they had torn what once, centuries ago, they had termed 'undesirable elements'; they rushed wildly forward into the jungle to escape from the accusing, pain-filled voices of their victims; and at night the ghostly monkeys gathered in the trees and sang the words of 'Our Golden Bengal': '… O Mother, I am poor, but what little I have, I lay at thy feet. And it maddens my heart with delight.' Unable to escape from the unbearable torture of the unceasing voices, incapable of bearing for a moment longer the burden of shame, which was now greatly increased by their jungle-learned sense of responsibility, the three boy-soldiers were moved, at last, to take desperate measures. Shaheed Dar stooped down and pkked up two handfuls of rain-heavy jungle mud; in the throes of that awful hallucination, he thrust the treacherous mud of the rain-forest into his ears. And after him, Ayooba Baloch and Farooq Rashid stopped their ears also with mud. Only the buddha left his ears (one good, one already bad) unstopped; as though he alone were willing to bear the retribution of the jungle, as though he were bowing his head before the inevitability of his guilt… The mud of the dream-forest, which no doubt also contained the concealed translucency of jungle-insects and the devilry of bright orange bird-droppings, infected the ears of the three boy-soldiers and made them all as deaf as posts; so that although they were spared the singsong accusations of the jungle, they were now obliged to converse in a rudimentary form of sign-language. They seemed, however, to prefer their diseased deafness to the unpalatable secrets which the sundri-leaves had whispered in their ears.

At last, the voices stopped, though by now only the buddha (with his one good ear) could hear them; at last, when the four wanderers were near the point of panic, the jungle brought them through a curtain of tree-beards and showed them a sight so lovely that it brought lumps to their throats. Even the buddha seemed to tighten his grip on his spittoon. With one good ear between the four of them, they advanced into a glade filled with the gentle melodies of songbirds, in whose centre stood a monumental Hindu temple, carved in forgotten centuries out of a single immense crag of rock; its walls danced with friezes of men and women, who were depicted coupling in postures of unsurpassable athleticism and sometimes, of highly comic absurdity. The quartet moved towards this miracle with disbelieving steps. Inside, they found, at long last, some respite from the endless monsoon, and also the towering statue of a black dancing goddess, whom the boy-soldiers from Pakistan could not name; but the buddha knew she was Kali, fecund and awful, with the remnants of gold paint on her teeth. The four travellers lay down at her feet and fell into a rain-free sleep which ended at what could have been midnight, when they awoke simultaneously to find themselves being smiled upon by four young girls of a beauty which was beyond speech. Shaheed, who recalled the four houris awaiting him in the camphor garden, thought at first that he had died in the night; but the houris looked real enough, and their saris, under which they wore nothing at all, were torn and stained by the jungle. Now as eight eyes stared into eight, saris were unwound and placed, neatly folded, on the ground; after which the naked and identical daughters of the forest came to them, eight arms were twined with eight, eight legs were linked with eight legs more; below the statue of multi-limbed Kali, the travellers abandoned themselves to caresses which felt real enough, to kisses and love-bites which were soft and painful, to scratches which left marks, and they realized that this this this was what they had needed, what they had longed for without knowing it, that having passed through the childish regressions and childlike sorrows of their earliest jungle-days, having survived the onset of memory and responsibility and the greater pains of renewed accusations, they were leaving infancy behind for ever, and then forgetting reasons and implications and deafness, forgetting everything, they gave themselves to the four identical beauties without a single thought in their heads.