Salman Rushdie - Midnight's children

Who can say why how who; but the grenade was certainly thrown. In that last instant of his un-bisected life, Shaheed was suddenly seized by an irresistible urge to look up… afterwards, in the muezzin's roost, he told the buddha, 'So strange, Allah-the pomegranate-in my head, just like that, bigger an' brighter than ever before-you know, buddha, like a light-bulb-Allah, what could I do, I looked!'-And yes, it was there, hanging above his head, the grenade of his dreams, hanging just above his head, falling falling, exploding at waist-level, blowing his legs away to some other part of the city.

When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and pointed up, 'Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want,' so I carried what was now only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral stairs to the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of light-bulbs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach, battling away along the trowel-furrows in the crudely-laid concrete floor. Down below, amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke-haze, antlike people were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the antlike, and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, . having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and eyrie's one piece of furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to a loudspeaker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the disillusioning sight of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would always be scratched in the same places, extracted from the folds of his shapeless robe a glinting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver spittoon. Lost in contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams began; and looked up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping along trowel-furrows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived at the source of the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the victim of not one, but two wars.)

Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony of war.

After a few moments, silence. Shaheed's head slumped forward. And the buddha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city as the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assist at the peacemaking banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning streets to welcome General Sam.

In the minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha's mind had not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed's top half had also kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking of onions, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch-until the bee, buzzing… 'It's not fair,' the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, 'It's not fair,' and again, and again.

Shaheed, fulfilling his father's dearest wish, had finally earned his name; but the buddha could still not remember his own.

How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another independence day, the world had been saffron and green. This morning, the colours were green, red and gold. And in the cities, cries of 'Jai Bangla!' And voices of women singing 'Our Golden Bengal', maddening their hearts with delight… in the centre of the city, on the podium of his defeat, General Tiger Niazi awaited General Manekshaw. (Biographical details: Sam was a Parsee. He came from Bombay. Bombayites were in for happy times that day.) And amid green and red and gold, the buddha in his shapeless anonymous garment was jostled by crowds; and then India came. India, with Sam at her head.

Was it General Sam's idea? Or even Indira's?-Eschewing these fruitless questions, I record only that the Indian advance into Dacca was much more than a mere military parade; as befits a triumph, it was garlanded with side-shows. A special I.A.F. troop transport had flown to Dacca, carrying a hundred and one of the finest entertainers and conjurers India could provide. From the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi they came, many of them dressed for the occasion in the evocative uniforms of the Indian fauj, so that many Daccans got the idea that the Indians' victory had been inevitable from the start because even their uniformed jawans were sorcerers of the highest order. The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the troops, entertaining the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids on moving carts drawn by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female contortionists who could swallow their legs up to their knees; there were jugglers who operated outside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw oohs and aahs from the delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades, keeping four hundred and twenty in the air at a time; there were card-tricksters who could pull the queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds, the empress of clubs) out of women's ears; there was the great dancer Anarkali, whose name meant 'pomegranate-bud', doing leaps twists pirouettes on a donkey-cart while a giant piece of silver nose-jewellery jingled on her right nostril; there was Master Vikram the sitarist, whose sitar was capable of responding to, and exaggerating, the faintest emotions in the hearts of his audience, so that once (it was said) he had played before an audience so bad-tempered, and had so greatly enhanced their foul humour, that if his tabla-player hadn't made him stop his raga in mid-stream the power of his music would have had them all knifing each other and smashing up the auditorium… today, Master Vikram's music raised the celebratory goodwill of the people to fever-pitch; it maddened, let us say, their hearts with delight.

And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven-foot giant who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The World because of his unsurpassable skills as a snake-charmer. Not even the legendary Tubriwallahs of Bengal could exceed his talents; he strode through the happily shrieking crowds, twined from head to foot with deadly cobras, mambas and kraits, all with their poison-sacs intact… Picture Singh, who would be the last in the line of men who have been willing to become my fathers… and immediately behind him came Parvati-the-witch.

Parvati-the-witch entertained the crowds with the help of a large wicker basket with a lid; happy volunteers entered the basket, and Parvati made them disappear so completely that they could not return until she wished them to; Parvati, to whom midnight had given the true gifts of sorcery, had placed them at the service of her humble illusionist's trade; so that she was asked, 'But how do you pull it off?'

And, 'Come on, pretty missy, tell the trick, why not?'-Parvati, smiling beaming rolling her magic basket, came towards me with the liberating troops.

The Indian Army marched into town, its heroes following the magicians; among them, I learned afterwards, was that colossus of the war, the rat-faced Major with the lethal knees… but now there were still more illusionists, because the surviving prestidigitators of the city came out of hiding and began a wonderful contest, seeking to outdo anything and everything the visiting magicians had to offer, and the pain of the city was washed and soothed in the great glad outpouring of their magic. Then Parvati-the-witch saw me, and gave me back my name.

'Saleem! O my god Saleem, you Saleem Sinai, is it you Saleem?'

The buddha jerks, puppet-fashion. Crowd-eyes staring. Parvati pushing towards him. 'Listen, it must be you!' She is gripping his elbow. Saucer eyes searching milky blue. 'My God, that nose, I'm not being rude, but of course! Look, it's me, Parvati! O Saleem, don't be stupid now, come on come on…!'