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

a trace of 'undesirability'? For was not his rejection of past and family j
ust the type of subversive behaviour they were dedicated to 'rooting out'? T
he camp's officers, however, were deaf to Ayooba's requests of 'Sir sir can'
t we just have a real dog sir?'… so that Farooq, a born follower who had alr
eady adopted Ayooba as his leader and hero, cried, 'What to do? With that gu
y's family contacts, some high ups must've told the Brigadier to put up with
him, that's all.'
And (although none of the trio would have been able to express the idea) I
suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizo
phrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Paki
stani heart. In those days, the country's East and West Wings were separate
d by the unbridgeable land mass of India; but past and present, too, are di
vided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding t
he halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a ho
mogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of perso
nality, holding together our then and our now. Enough philosophizing: what
I am saying is that by abandoning consciousness, seceding from history, the
buddha was setting the worst of examples and the example was followed by n
o less a personage than Sheikh Mujib, when he led the East Wing into secess
ion and declared it independent as 'Bangladesh'! Yes, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq
were right to feel ill at ease because even in those depths of my withdraw
al from responsibility, I remained responsible, through the workings of the
metaphorical modes of connection, for the belligerent events of 1971.
But I must go back to my new companions, so that I can relate the incident
at the latrines: there was Ayooba, tank like, who led the unit, and Faroo
q, who followed contentedly. The third youth, however, was a gloomier, mor
e private type, and as such closest to my heart. On his fifteenth birthday
Shaheed Dar had lied about his age and enlisted. That day, his Punjabi sh
arecropper father had taken Shaheed into a field and wept all over his new
uniform. Old Dar told his son the meaning of his name, which was 'martyr'
, and expressed the hope that he would prove worthy of it, and perhaps bec
ome the first of their family members to enter the perfumed garden, leavin
g behind this pitiful world in which a father could not hope to pay his de
bts and also feed his nineteen children. The overwhelming power of names,
and the resulting approach of martyrdom, had begun to prey heavily on Shah
eed's mind; in his dreams, he began to see his death, which took the form
of a bright pomegranate, and floated in mid air behind him, following him
everywhere, biding its time. The disturbing and somewhat unheroic vision o
f pomegranate death made Shaheed an inward, unsmiling fellow.
Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various cutia units being sent away
from the camp, into action; and became convinced that his time, and the ti
me of the pomegranate, was very near. From departures of three men and a do