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

nd then on the last night their worst fears came true, they saw an army of g
hosts coming out of the darkness towards them; they were in the border post
nearest the sea shore, and in the greeny moonlight they could see the sails
of ghost ships, of phantom dhows; and the ghost army approached, relentlessl
y, despite the screams of the soldiers, spectres bearing moss covered chests
and strange shrouded litters piled high with unseen things; and when the gh
ost army came in through the door, my cousin Zafar fell at their feet and be
gan to gibber horribly.
The first phantom to enter the outpost had several missing teeth and a curved
knife stuck in his belt; when he saw the soldiers in the hut his eyes blazed
with a vermilion fury. 'God's pity!' the ghost chieftain said, 'What are you
mother sleepers here for? Didn't you all get properly paid off?'
Not ghosts; smugglers. The six young soldiers found themselves in absurd p
ostures of abject terror, and although they tried to redeem themselves, th
eir shame was engulfingly complete… and now we come to it. In whose name w
ere the smugglers operating? Whose name fell from the lips of the smuggler
chief, and made my cousin's eyes open in horror? Whose fortune, built ori
ginally on the miseries of fleeing Hindu families in 1947, was now augment
ed by these spring and summer smugglers' convoys through the unguarded Ran
n and thence into the cities of Pakistan? Which Punch faced General, with
a voice as thin as a razor blade, commanded the phantom troops?… But I sha
ll concentrate on facts. In July 1965, my cousin Zafar returned on leave t
o his father's house in Rawalpindi; and one morning he began to walk slowl
y towards his father's bedroom, bearing on his shoulders not only the memo
ry of a thousand childhood humiliations and blows; not only the shame of h
is lifelong enuresis; but also the knowledge that his own father had been
responsible for what happened at the Rann, when Zafar Zulfikar was reduced
to gibbering on a floor. My cousin found his father in his bedside bath,
and slit his' throat with a long, curved smuggler's knife.
Hidden behind newspaper reports dastardly indian invasion repelled by our ga
llant boys the truth about General Zulfikar became a ghostly, uncertain thin
g; the paying off of border guards became, in the papers, innocent soldiers
massacred by indian fauj; and who would spread the story of my uncle's vast
smuggling activities? What General, what politician did not possess the tran
sistor radios of my uncle's illegality, the air conditioning units and the i
mported watches of his sins? General Zulfikar died; cousin Zafar went to pri
son and was spared marriage to a Kifi princess who obstinately refused to me
nstruate precisely in order to be spared marriage to him; and the incidents
in the Rann of Kutch became the tinder, so to speak, of the larger fire that
broke out in August, the fire of the end, in which Saleem finally, and in s
pite of himself, achieved his elusive purity.
As for my aunt Emerald: she was given permission to emigrate; she had made