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

g units in camouflaged jeeps, he deduced a growing political crisis; it was
February, and the irritations of the exalted were becoming daily more mark
ed. Ayooba the tank, however, retained a local point of view. His irritatio
n was also mounting, but its object was the buddha.
Ayooba had become infatuated with the only female in the camp, a skinny latr
ine cleaner who couldn't have been over fourteen and whose nipples were only
just beginning to push against her tattered shirt: a low type, certainly, b
ut she was all that there was, and for a latrine cleaner she had very nice t
eeth and a pleasant line in saucy over the shoulder glances… Ayooba began to
follow her around, and that was how he spied her going into the buddha's st
raw lined stall, and that was why he leaned a bicycle against the building a
nd stood on the seat, and that was why he fell off, because he didn't like w
hat he saw. Afterwards he spoke to the latrine girl, grabbing her roughly by
the arm: 'Why do it with that crazy why, when I, Ayooba, am, could be ?' an
d she replied that she liked the man dog, he's funny, says he can't feel any
thing, he rubs his hosepipe inside me but can't even feel, but it's nice, an
d he tells that he likes my smell. The frankness of the urchin girl, the hon
esty of latrine cleaners, made Ayooba sick; he told her she had a soul compo
sed of pig droppings, and a tongue caked with excrement also; and in the thr
oes of his jealousy he devised the prank of the jump leads, the trick of the
electrified urinal. The location appealed to him; it had a certain poetic justice.
'Can't feel, huh?' Ayooba sneered to Farooq and Shaheed, 'Just wait on: I'll
make him jump for sure.'
On February loth (when Vahya, Bhutto and Mujib were refusing to engage in h
igh level talks), the buddha felt the call of nature. A somewhat concerned
Shaheed and a gleeful Farooq loitered by the latrines; while Ayooba, who ha
d used jump leads to attach the metal footplates of the urinals to the batt
ery of a jeep, stood out of sight behind the latrine hut, beside the jeep,
whose motor was running. The buddha appeared, with his eyes as dilated as a
charas chewer's and his gait of walking through a cloud, and as he floated
into the latrine Farooq called out, 'Ohe! Ayooba, yara!' and began to gigg
le. The childsoldiers awaited the howl of mortified anguish which would be
the sign that their vacuous tracker had begun to piss, allowing electricity
to mount the golden stream and sting him in his numb and urchin rubbing hosepipe.
But no shriek came; Farooq, feeling confused and cheated, began to frown; a
nd as time went by Shaheed grew nervous and yelled over to Ayooba Baloch, '
You Ayooba! What you doing, man?' To which Ayooba the tank, 'What d'you thi
nk, yaar, I turned on the juice five minutes ago!'… And now Shaheed ran ful
l tilt! into the latrine, to find the buddha urinating away with an express
ion of foggy pleasure, emptying a bladder which must have been filling up f
or a fortnight, while the current passed up into him through his nether cuc
umber, apparently unnoticed, so that he was filling up with electrkity and