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

a string of border posts, each with its lonely garrison of six men and one be
acon light. Several of these posts were occupied on April 9th, 1965, by troop
s of the Indian Army; a Pakistani force, including my cousin Zafar, which had
been in the area on manoeuvres, engaged in an eighty two day struggle for th
e frontier. The war in the Rann lasted until July 1st. That much is fact; but
everything else lies concealed beneath the doubly hazy air of unreality and
make believe which affected all goings on in those days, and especially all e
vents in the phantasmagoric Rann… so that the story I am going to tell, which
is substantially that told by my cousin Zafar, is as likely to be true as an
ything; as anything, that is to say, except what we were officially told.
… As the young Pakistani soldiers entered the marshy terrain of the Rann, a
cold clammy perspiration broke out on their foreheads, and they were unner
ved by the greeny sea bed quality of the light; they recounted stories whic
h frightened them even more, legends of terrible things which happened in t
his amphibious zone, of demonic sea beasts with glowing eyes, of fish women
who lay with their fishy heads underwater, breathing, while their perfectl
y formed and naked human lower halves lay on the shore, tempting the unwary
into fatal sexual acts, because it is well known that nobody may love a fi
sh woman and live… so that by the time they reached the border posts and we
nt to war, they were a scared rabble of seventeen year old boys, and would
certainly have been annihilated, except that the opposing Indians had been
subjected to the green air of the Rann even longer than they; so in that so
rcerers' world a crazy war was fought in which each side thought it saw app
aritions of devils fighting alongside its foes; but in the end the Indian f
orces yielded; many of them collapsed in floods of tears and wept, Thank Go
d, it's over; they told about the great blubbery things which slithered aro
und the border posts at night, and the floating in air spirits of drowned m
en with seaweed wreaths and seashells in their navels. What the surrenderin
g Indian soldiers said, within my cousin's hearing: 'Anyway, these border p
osts were unmanned; we just saw them empty and came inside.'
The mystery of the deserted border posts did not, at first, seem like a puzz
le to the young Pakistani soldiers who were required to occupy them until ne
w border guards were sent; my cousin Lieutenant Zafar found his bladder and
bowels voiding themselves with hysterical frequency for the seven nights he
spent occupying one of the posts with only five jawans for company. During n
ights filled with the shrieks of witches and the nameless slithery shuffling
s of the dark, the six youngsters were reduced to so abject a state that nob
ody laughed at my cousin any more, they were all too busy wetting their own
pants. One of the jawans whispered in terror during the ghostly evil of thei
r last but one night: 'Listen, boys, if I had to sit here for a living, I'd
bloody well run away, too!'
In a state of utter jelly like breakdown the soldiers sweated in the Rann; a