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

the hand towards a new adulthood. And flitting through the night forest we
nt the wraiths of their hopes; these, however, they were unable to see clea
rly, or to grasp.
The buddha, however, was not granted nostalgia at first. He had taken to sit
ting cross legged under a sundri tree; his eyes and mind seemed empty, and a
t night, he no longer awoke. But finally the forest found a way through to h
im; one afternoon, when rain pounded down on the trees and boiled off them a
s steam, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq saw the buddha sitting under his tree while a
blind, translucent serpent bit, and poured venom into, his heel. Shaheed Da
r crushed the serpent's head with a stick; the buddha, who was head to foot
numb, seemed not to have noticed. His eyes were closed. After this, the boy
soldiers waited for the man dog to die; but I was stronger than the snake po
ison. For two days he became as rigid as a tree, and his eyes crossed, so th
at he saw the world in mirror image, with the right side on the left; at las
t he relaxed, and the look of milky abstraction was no longer in his eyes. I
was rejoined to the past, jolted into unity by snake poison, and it began t
o pour out through the buddha's lips. As his eyes returned to normal, his wo
rds flowed so freely that they seemed to be an aspect of the monsoon. The ch
ild soldiers listened, spellbound, to the stories issuing from his mouth, be
ginning with a birth at midnight, and continuing unstoppably, because he was
reclaiming everything, all of it, all lost histories, all the myriad comple
x processes that go to make a man. Open mouthed, unable to tear themselves a
way, the child soldiers drank his life like leaf tainted water, as he spoke
of bed wetting cousins, revolutionary pepperpots, the perfect voice of a sis
ter… Ayooba Shaheed Farooq would have (once upon a time) given anything to k
now that those rumours had been true; but in the Sundarbans, they didn't eve
n cry out.
And rushing on: to late flowering love, and Jamila in a bedroom in a shaft o
f light. Now Shaheed did murmur, 'So that's why, when he confessed, after th
at she couldn't stand to be near…' But the buddha continues, and it becomes
apparent that he is struggling to recall something particular, something whi
ch refuses to return, which obstinately eludes him, so that he gets to the e
nd without finding it, and remains frowning and unsatisfied even after he ha
s recounted a holy war, and revealed what fell from the sky.
There was a silence; and then Farooq Rashid said, 'So much, yaar, inside o
ne person; so many bad things, no wonder he kept his mouth shut!'
You see, Padma: I have told this story before. But what refused to return? W
hat, despite the liberating venene of a colourless serpent, failed to emerge
from my lips? Padma: the buddha had forgotten his name. (To be precise: his
first name.)
And still it went on raining. The water level was rising daily, until it bec