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

At midnight could it, after all, have been at any other time? sixty thousan
d crack troops also left their barracks; passengers who had flown as civili
ans now pressed the starter buttons of tanks. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the
buddha, however, were personally selected to accompany Brigadier Iskandar
on the greatest adventure of the night. Yes, Padma: when Mujib was arrested
, it was I who sniffed him out. (They had provided me with one of his old s
hirts; it's easy when you've got the smell.)
Padma is almost beside herself with anguish. 'But mister, you didn't, can't
have, how would you do such a thing… ?' Padma: I did. I have sworn to tell e
verything; to conceal no shred of the truth. (But there are snail tracks on
her face, and she must have an explanation.)
So believe me, don't believe, but this is what it was like! I must reiterat
e that everything ended, everything began again, when a spittoon hit me on
the back of the head. Saleem, with his desperation for meaning, for worthy
purpose, for genius like a shawl, had gone; would not return until a jungle
snake for the moment, anyway, there is was only the buddha; who recognizes
no singing voice as his relative; who remembers neither fathers nor mother
s; for whom midnight holds no importance; who, some time after a cleansing
accident, awoke in a military hospital bed, and accepted the Army as his lo
t; who submits to the life in which he finds himself, and does his duty; wh
o follows orders; who lives both in the world and not in the world; who bow
s his head; who can track man or beast through streets or down rivers; who
neither knows nor cares how, under whose auspices, as a favour to whom, at
whose vengeful instigation he was put into uniform; who is, in short, no mo
re and no less than the accredited tracker of cutia Unit 22.
But how convenient this amnesia is, how much it excuses! So permit me to c
riticize myself: the philosophy of acceptance to which the buddha adhered
had consequences no more and no less unfortunate than his previous lust fo
r centrality; and here, in Dacca, those consequences were being revealed.
'No, not true,' my Padma wails; the same denials have been made about most
of what befell that night.
Midnight, March 25th, 1971: past the University, which was being shelled,
the buddha led troops to Sheikh Mujib's lair. Students and lecturers came
running out of hostels; they were greeted by bullets, and Mercurochrome st
ained the lawns. Sheikh Mujib, however, was not shot; manacled, manhandled
, he was led by Ayooba Baloch to a waiting van. (As once before, after the
revolution of the pepperpots… but Mujib was not naked; he had on a pair o
f green and yellow striped pajamas.) And while we drove through city stree
ts, Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that weren't couldn't hav
e been true: soldiers entering women's hostels without knocking; women, dr
agged into the street, were also entered, and again nobody troubled' to kn
ock. And newspaper offices, burning with the dirty yellowblack smoke of ch