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

n, the Tiger was swearing to fight to the last man; but the next day, he su
rrendered instead. What is not known: whether the last man was grateful to
be spared or peeved at missing his chance of entering the camphor garden.
And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunion
s, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possib
le, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men
in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side streets, we saw the i
ntelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not tr
ue because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap, after
all, and our jawans were worth ten babus, we moved through the impossible h
allucination of the night, hiding in doorways while fires blossomed like fl
owers, reminding me of the way the Brass Monkey used to set fire to shoes t
o attract a little attention, there were slit throats being buried in unmar
ked graves, and Shaheed began his, 'No, buddha what a thing, Allah, you can
't believe your eyes no, not true, how can it buddha, tell, what's got into
my eyes?' And at last the buddha spoke, knowing Shaheed could not hear: 'O
, Shaheeda,' he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, 'a person
must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, lo
ok away from there now.' But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady
doctors were being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before
they were shot. Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mo
sque stared blindly down upon the scene.
As though talking to himself, the buddha said, 'It is time to think about
saving our skins; God knows why we came back.' The buddha entered the door
way of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had o
nce housed a tea shop, a bicycle repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny land
ing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the low
desk on which he had left behind a pair of half rimmed spectacles, there
were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more
than an old nobody stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what
was true and what was not. The notary public was absent, so I could not as
k him to verify what was happening, I could not give a deposition under oa
th; but lying on the mat behind his desk was a loose flowing garment like
a djellabah, and without waiting any longer I removed my uniform, includin
g the she dog badge of the cutia units, and became anonymous, a deserter,
in a city whose language I could not speak.
Shaheed Dar, however, remained in the street; in the first light of morning
he watched soldiers scurrying away from what had not been done; and then t
he grenade came. I, the buddha, was still inside the empty house; but Shahe
ed was unprotected by walls.
Who can say why how who; but the grenade was certainly thrown. In that last
instant of his un bisected life, Shaheed was suddenly seized by an irresisti