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

le in his heart and on to Ayooba's gun arm. The next morning Ayooba's right
arm refused to move; it hung rigidly by his side as if it had been set in pl
aster. Although Farooq Rashid offered help and sympathy, it was no use; the
arm was held immovably in the invisible fluid of the ghost.
After this first apparition, they fell into a state of mind in which they wo
uld have believed the forest capable of anything; each night it sent them ne
w punishments, the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked down a
nd seized, the screaming and monkey gibbering of children left fatherless by
their work… and in this first time, the time of punishment, even the impass
ive buddha with his citified voice was obliged to confess that he, too, had
taken to waking up at night to find the forest closing in upon him like a vi
ce, so that he felt unable to breathe.
When it had punished them enough when they were all trembling shadows of th
e people they had once been the jungle permitted them the double edged luxu
ry of nostalgia. One night Ayooba, who was regressing towards infancy faste
r than any of them, and had begun to suck his one moveable thumb, saw his m
other looking down at him, offering him the delicate rice based sweets of h
er love; but at the same moment as he reached out for the laddoos, she scur
ried away, and he saw her climb a giant sundri tree to sit swinging from a
high branch by her tail: a white wraithlike monkey with the face of his mot
her visited Ayooba night after night, so that after a time he was obliged t
o remember more about her than her sweets: how she had liked to sit among t
he boxes of her dowry, as though she, too, were simply some sort of thing,
simply one of the gifts her father gave to her husband; in the heart of the
Sundarbans, Ayooba Baloch understood his mother for the first time, and st
opped sucking his thumb. Farooq Rashid, too, was given a vision. At dusk on
e day he thought he saw his brother running wildly through the forest, and
became convinced that his father had died. He remembered a forgotten day wh
en his peasant father had told him and his fleet footed brother that the lo
cal landlord, who lent money at 300 per cent, had agreed to buy his soul in
return for the latest loan. 'When I die,' old Rashid told Farooq's brother
, 'you must open your mouth and my spirit will fly inside it; then run run
run, because the zamindar will be after you!' Farooq, who had also started
regressing alarmingly, found in the knowledge of his father's death and the
flight of his brother the strength to give up the childish habits which th
e jungle had at first re created in him; he stopped crying when he was hung
ry and asking Why. Shaheed Dar, too, was visited by a monkey with the face
of an ancestor; but all he saw was a father who had instructed him to earn
his name. This, however, also helped to restore in him the sense of respons
ibility which the just following orders requirements of war had sapped; so it seemed th
ical jungle, having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them by