Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

adly. (No: I do not exempt myself.)
Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists
PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS– while peasants (unreported)
rsed the so called 'green revolution', claiming that most of the newly
drilled water wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong plac
es anyway; while editorials praised the probity of the nation's leader
ship, rumours, thick as flies, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the n
ew American motor cars of the President's son. The Karachi Dawn spoke
of another dawn– good INDO PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER?
in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a dif
ferent story.
In the cities, mirages and lies; to the north, in the high mountains, the Chi
nese were building roads and planning nuclear blasts; but it is time to rever
t from the general to the particular; or, to be more exact, to the General's
son, my cousin, the enuretic Zafar Zulfikar. Who became, between April and Ju
ly, the archetype of all the many disappointing sons in the land; history, wo
rking through him, was also pointing its finger at Gauhar, at future Sanjay a
nd Kanti Lal to come; and, naturally, at me.
So cousin Zafar. With whom I had much in common at that time… my heart was
full of forbidden love; his trousers, despite all his efforts, filled con
tinually with something rather more tangible, but equally forbidden. I dre
amed of mythical lovers, both happy and star crossed Shah Jehan and Mumtaz
Mahal, but also Montague and Capulet; he dreamed of his Kifi fiancee, who
se failure to arrive at puberty even after her sixteenth birthday must hav
e made her seem, in his thoughts, a fantasy of an unattainable future… in
April 1965, Zafar was sent on manoeuvres to the Pakistan controlled zone o
f the Rann of Kutch.
Cruelty of the continent towards the loose bladdered: Zafar, although a Lie
utenant, was the laughing stock of the Abbottabad military base. There was
a story that he had been instructed to wear a rubber undergarment like a ba
lloon around his genitals, so that the glorious uniform of the Pak Army sho
uld not be desecrated; mere jawans, when he passed, would make a blowing mo
vement of their cheeks, as if they were puffing up the balloon. (All this b
ecame public later, in the statement he made, in floods of tears, after his
arrest for murder.) It is possible that Zafar's assignment to the Rann of
Kutch was thought up by a tactful superior, who was only trying to get him
out of the firing line of Abbottabad humour… Incontinence doomed Zafar Zulf
ikar to a crime as heinous as my own. I loved my sister; while he… but let
me tell the story the right way up.
Ever since Partition, the Rann had been 'disputed territory.'; although, in p
ractice, neither side had much heart for the dispute. On the hillocks along t
he 23rd parallel, the unofficial frontier, the Pakistan Government had built