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

d, in between, a jumbled area composed of bits of torso, scraps of uniforms,
lengths of intestine and glimpses of shattered bones. The pyramid was still
alive. One of its three heads had a blind left eye, the legacy of a childho
od argument. Another had hair that was thickly plastered down with hair oil.
The third head was the oddest: it had deep hollows where the temples should
have been, hollows that could have been made by a gynaecologist's forceps w
hich had held it too tightly at birth… it was this third head which spoke to
the buddha:
'Hullo, man,' it said, 'What the hell are you here for?'
Shaheed Dar saw the pyramid of enemy soldiers apparently conversing with
the buddha; Shaheed, suddenly seized by an irrational energy, flung himse
lf upon me and pushed me to the ground, with, 'Who are you? Spy? Traitor?
What? Why do they know who you ?' While Deshmukh, the vendor of notions,
flapped pitifully around us, 'Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already.
Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God.'
Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him w
hat I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entir
e war had been to re unite me with an old life, to bring me back together
with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old
friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the
field of leaking bone marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was
greeted by a dying pyramid of heads: and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati th
e witch.
When Shaheed calmed down and got off me, the pyramid was no longer capabl
e of speech. Later that afternoon, we resumed our journey towards the cap
ital. Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, called cheerfully after us: 'Ho si
rs! Ho my poor sirs! Who knows when a man will die? Who, my sirs, knows w
hy?'
Sam and the Tiger
Sometimes, mountains must move before old comrades can be reunited. On Dece
mber 15th, 1971, in the capital of the newly liberated state of Bangladesh,
Tiger Niazi surrendered to his old chum Sam Manekshaw; while I, in my turn
, surrendered to the embraces of a girl with eyes like saucers, a pony tail
like a long shiny black rope, and lips which had not at that time acquired
what was to become their characteristic pout. These reunions were not achi
eved easily; and as a gesture of respect for all who made them possible, I
shall pause briefly in my narrative to set out the whys and the wherefores.
Let me, then, be perfectly explicit: if Yahya Khan and Z. A. Bhutto had not
colluded in the matter of the coup of March 25th, I would not have been fl
own to Dacca in civilian dress; nor, in all likelihood, would General Tiger