Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

'Hullo, man,' it said, 'What the hell are you here for?'

Shaheed Dar saw the pyramid of enemy soldiers apparently conversing with the buddha; Shaheed, suddenly seized by an irrational energy, flung himself upon me and pushed me to the ground, with, 'Who are you?-Spy? Traitor? What?-Why do they know who you-?' While Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, flapped pitifully around us, 'Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God.'

Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to re-unite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads: and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati-the-witch.

When Shaheed calmed down and got off me, the pyramid was no longer capable of speech. Later that afternoon, we resumed our journey towards the capital. Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, called cheerfully after us: 'Ho sirs! Ho my poor sirs! Who knows when a man will die? Who, my sirs, knows why?'

Sometimes, mountains must move before old comrades can be reunited. On December 15th, 1971, in the capital of the newly liberated state of Bangladesh, Tiger Niazi surrendered to his old chum Sam Manekshaw; while I, in my turn, surrendered to the embraces of a girl with eyes like saucers, a pony-tail like a long shiny black rope, and lips which had not at that time acquired what was to become their characteristic pout. These reunions were not achieved easily; and as a gesture of respect for all who made them possible, I shall pause briefly in my narrative to set out the whys and the wherefores.

Let me, then, be perfectly explicit: if Yahya Khan and Z. A. Bhutto had not colluded in the matter of the coup of March 25th, I would not have been flown to Dacca in civilian dress; nor, in all likelihood, would General Tiger Niazi have been in the city that December. To continue: the Indian intervention in the Bangladesh dispute was also the result of the interaction of great forces. Perhaps, if ten million had not walked across the frontiers into India, obliging the Delhi Government to spend $200,000,000 a month on refugee camps-the entire war of 1965, whose secret purpose had been the annihilation of my family, had cost them only $70,000,000!-Indian soldiers, led by General Sam, would never have crossed the frontiers in the opposite direction. But India came for other reasons, too: as I was to learn from the Communist magicians who lived in the shadow of the Delhi Friday Mosque, the Delhi sarkar had been highly concerned by the declining influence of Mujib's Awami League, and the growing popularity of the revolutionary Mukti Bahini; Sam and the Tiger met in Dacca to prevent the Bahini from gaining power. So if it were not for the Mukti Bahini, Parvati-the-witch might never have accompanied the Indian troops on their campaign of 'liberation'… But even that is not a full explanation. A third reason for Indian intervention was the fear that the disturbances in Bangladesh would, if they were not quickly curtailed, spread across the frontiers into West Bengal; so Sam and the Tiger, and also Parvati and I, owe our meeting at least in part to the more turbulent elements in West Bengali politics: the Tiger's defeat was only the beginning of a campaign against the Left in Calcutta and its environs.

At any rate, India came; and for the speed of her coming-because in a mere three weeks Pakistan had lost half her navy, a third of her army, a quarter of her air force, and finally, after the Tiger surrendered, more than half her population-thanks must be given to the Mukti Bahini once more; because, perhaps naively, failing to understand that the Indian advance was as much a tactical manoeuvre against them as a battle against the occupying West Wing forces, the Bahini advised General Manekshaw on Pakistani troop movements, on the Tiger's strengths and weaknesses; thanks, too, to Mr Chou En-Lai, who refused (despite Bhutto's entreaties) to give Pakistan any material aid in the war. Denied Chinese arms, Pakistan fought with American guns, American tanks and aircraft; the President of the United States, alone in the entire world, was resolved to 'tilt' towards Pakistan. While Henry A. Kissinger argued the cause of Yahya Khan, the same Yahya was secretly arranging the President's famous state visit to China… there were, therefore, great forces working against my reunion with Parvati and Sam's with the Tiger; but despite the tilting President, it was all over in three short weeks.

On the night of December 14th, Shaheed Dar and the buddha circled the fringes of the invested city of Dacca; but the buddha's nose (you will not have forgotten) was capable of sniffing out more than most. Following his nose, which could smell safety and danger, they found a way through the Indian lines, and entered the city under cover of night. While they moved stealthily through streets in which nobody except a few starving beggars could be seen, the Tiger was swearing to fight to the last man; but the next day, he surrendered instead. What is not known: whether the last man was grateful to be spared or peeved at missing his chance of entering the camphor garden.

And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not true because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap, after all, and our jawans were worth ten babus, we moved through the impossible hallucination of the night, hiding in doorways while fires blossomed like flowers, reminding me of the way the Brass Monkey used to set fire to shoes to attract a little attention, there were slit throats being buried in unmarked graves, and Shaheed began his, 'No, buddha-what a thing, Allah, you can't believe your eyes-no, not true, how can it-buddha, tell, what's got into my eyes?' And at last the buddha spoke, knowing Shaheed could not hear: 'O, Shaheeda,' he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, 'a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.' But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before they were shot. Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly down upon the scene.

As though talking to himself, the buddha said, 'It is time to think about saving our skins; God knows why we came back.' The buddha entered the doorway of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had once housed a tea-shop, a bicycle-repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny landing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the low desk on which he had left behind a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, there were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more than an old nobody-stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what was true and what was not. The notary public was absent, so I could not ask him to verify what was happening, I could not give a deposition under oath; but lying on the mat behind his desk was a loose flowing garment like a djellabah, and without waiting any longer I removed my uniform, including the she-dog badge of the cutia units, and became anonymous, a deserter, in a city whose language I could not speak.

Shaheed Dar, however, remained in the street; in the first light of morning he watched soldiers scurrying away from what-had-not-been-done; and then the grenade came. I, the buddha, was still inside the empty house; but Shaheed was unprotected by walls.