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

short of funds on account of one man's vanity!' But did he or didn't he? W
ere teeth truly sacrificed in the name of holy war, or were they sitting in
a cupboard at home? 'I'm afraid,' Uncle Puffs said gummily, 'you'll have t
o wait for that special dowry I promised.' Nationalism or meanness? Was his
baring of gums a supreme proof of his patriotism, or a slimy ruse to avoid
filling a Puffna mouth with gold?
And were there parachutists or were there not? '…have been dropped on every
major city,' Voice of Pakistan announced. 'All able bodied persons are to
stay up with weapons; shoot on sight after dusk curfew.' But in India, 'Des
pite Pakistani air raid provocation,' the radio claimed, 'we have not respo
nded!' Who to believe? Did Pakistani fighter bombers truly make that 'darin
g raid' which caught one third of the Indian Air Force helplessly grounded
on tarmac? Did they didn't they? And those night dances in the sky, Pakista
ni Mirages and Mysteres against India's less romantically titled MiGs: did
Islamic mirages and mysteries do battle with Hindu invaders, or was it all
some kind of astonishing illusion? Did bombs fall? Were explosions true? Co
uld even a death be said to be the case?
And Saleem? What did he do in the war?
This: waiting to be drafted, I went in search of friendly, obliterating, sleep
giving, Paradise bringing bombs.
The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even mor
e terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries
to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, los
t in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of I
'm making it sound too noble; no orotund phrases must be used. Baldly, then:
I rode the night streets of the city, looking for death.
Who died in the holy war? Who, while I in bright white kurta and pajamas w
ent Lambretta borne into the curfewed streets, found what I was looking fo
r? Who, martyred by war, went straight to a perfumed garden? Study the bom
bing pattern; learn the secrets of rifle shots.
On the night of September 22nd, air raids took place over every Pakistani c
ity. (Although All India Radio…) Aircraft, real or fictional, dropped actua
l or mythical bombs. It is, accordingly, either a matter of fact or a figme
nt of a diseased imagination that of the only three bombs to hit Rawalpindi
and explode, the first landed on the bungalow in which my grandmother Nase
em Aziz and my aunty Pia were hiding under a table; the second tore a wing
off the city jail, and spared my cousin Zafar a life of captivity; the thir
d destroyed a large darkling mansion surrounded by a sentried wall; sentrie
s were at their posts, but could not prevent Emerald Zolfikar from being ca
rried off to a more distant place than Suffolk. She was being visited, that
night, by the Nawab of Kif and his mulishly unmaturing daughter; who was a
lso spared the necessity of becoming an adult woman. In Karachi, three bomb