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

Forgetting past humiliations; putting aside fair and unfair, and what can't
be cured must be endured, I crawled out from under the corpse of Ayooba th
e tank, while Farooq, 'O God O God O!' and Shaheed, 'Allah, I don't even kn
ow if my gun will ' And Farooq, again, 'O God O! O God, who knows where the
bastard is !' But Shaheed, like soldiers in films, is flat against the wal
l beside the window. In these positions: I on the floor, Farooq crouched in
a corner, Shaheed pressed against dung plaster: we waited, helplessly, to
see what would transpire.
There was no second shot; perhaps the sniper, not knowing the size of the
force hidden inside the mud walled hut, had simply shot and run. The three
of us remained inside the hut for a night and a day, until the body of Ay
ooba Baloch began to demand attention. Before we left, we found pickaxes,
and buried him… And afterwards, when the Indian Army did come, there was n
o Ayooba Baloch to greet them with his theories of the superiority of meat
over vegetables; no Ayooba went into action, yelling, 'Ka dang! Ka blam!
Ka pow!!'
Perhaps it was just as well.
… And sometime in December the three of us, riding on stolen bicycles, arri
ved at a field from which the city of Dacca could be seen against the horiz
on; a field in which grew crops so strange, with so nauseous an aroma, that
we found ourselves incapable of remaining on our bicycles. Dismounting bef
ore we fell off, we entered the terrible field.
There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with a
n outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which g
ripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which
was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. The w
histle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hol
lowly from the barrels of mud blocked rifles, sinking without trace into th
e fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell o
f unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha's eyes. The crops
were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight… and most of them, but n
ot all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistl
ing, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into t
he peasant's treasure sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth fillings, sp
ectacle frames, tiffin carriers, water flasks, boots. The peasant saw them
and came running towards them, smiling ingratiatingly, talking rapidly in a
wheedling voice that only the buddha was obliged to hear. Farooq and Shahe
ed stared glassily at the field while the peasant began his explanations.
'Plenty shooting! Thaii! Ttiaiii!' He made a pistol with his right hand. He
was speaking bad, stilted Hindi. 'Ho sirs! India has come, my sirs! Ho yes
! Ho yes.' And all over the field, the crops were leaking nourishing bone m