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

ten, I heard he was the brother of 'No, man, that's crazy, she is good, you
know, so simple and holy, how would she leave her brother?' 'Anyway he refus
es to talk about it.' 'I heard one terrible thing, she hated him, man, that'
s why she!' 'No memory, not interested in people, lives like a dog!' 'But th
e tracking business is true all right! You see that nose on him?' 'Yah, man,
he can follow any trail on earth!' 'Through water, baba, across rocks! Such
a tracker, you never saw!' 'And he can't feel a thing! That's right! Numb,
I swear; head to foot numb! You touch him, he wouldn't know only by smell he
knows you're there!' 'Must be the war wound!' 'But that spittoon, man, who
knows? Carries it everywhere like a love token!' 'I tell you, I'm glad it's
you three; he gives me the creeps, yaar, it's those blue eyes.' 'You know ho
w they found out about his nose? He just wandered into a minefield, man, I s
wear, just picked his way through, like he could smell the damn mines!' 'O,
no, man, what are you talking, that's an old story, that was that first dog
in the whole cutia operation, that Bonzo, man, don't mix us up!' Hey, you Ay
ooba, you better watch your step, they say V.I.P.s are keeping their eyes on
him!' 'Yah, like I told you, Jamila Singer…» 'O, keep your mouth shut, we a
ll heard enough of your fairy tales!'
Once Ayooba, Farooq and Shaheed had become reconciled to their strange, impa
ssive tracker (it was after the incident at the latrines), they gave him the
nickname of buddha, 'old man'; not just because he must have been seven yea
rs their senior, and had actually taken part in the six years ago war of '65
, when the three boy soldiers weren't even in long pants, but because there
hung around him an air of great antiquity. The buddha was old before his tim
e.
O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word 'buddha', meaning o
ld man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is also Buddh
a, with soft tongued Ds, meaning he who achieved enlightenment under the bo
dhi tree… Once upon a time, a prince, unable to bear the suffering of the w
orld, became capable of not living in the world as well as living in it; he
was present, but also absent; his body was in one place, but his spirit wa
s elsewhere. In ancient India, Gautama the Buddha sat enlightened under a t
ree at Gaya; in the deer park at Sarnath he taught others to abstract thems
elves from worldly sorrows and achieve inner peace; and centuries later, Sa
leem the buddha sat under a different tree, unable to remember grief, numb
as ice, wiped clean as a slate… With some embarrassment, I am forced to adm
it that amnesia is the kind of gimmick regularly used by our lurid film mak
ers. Bowing my head slightly, I accept that my life has taken on, yet again
, the tone of a Bombay talkie; but after all, leaving to one side the vexed
issue of reincarnation, there is only a finite number of methods of achiev
ing rebirth. So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must doggedly insist that
I, he, had begun again; that after years of yearning for importance, he (o