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

le urge to look up… afterwards, in the muezzin's roost, he told the buddha,
'So strange, Allah the pomegranate in my head, just like that, bigger an' b
righter than ever before you know, buddha, like a light bulb Allah, what cou
ld I do, I looked!' And yes, it was there, hanging above his head, the grena
de of his dreams, hanging just above his head, falling falling, exploding at
waist level, blowing his legs away to some other part of the city.
When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and pointed u
p, 'Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want,' so I carried what was now
only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral stairs to
the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of light bul
bs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach, battling awa
y along the trowel furrows in the crudely laid concrete floor. Down below,
amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke haze, antlike people were emerg
ing, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the antlike, and fough
t on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, . hav
ing placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and eyrie's one piece of
furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to a loudspea
ker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the disillusioning si
ght of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would always be scratc
hed in the same places, extracted from the folds of his shapeless robe a gl
inting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver spittoon. Lost in
contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams began; and looked
up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping along trowel furr
ows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived at the source of
the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the victim of not o
ne, but two wars.)
Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow a
gainst a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards peo
ple would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony o
f war.
After a few moments, silence. Shaheed's head slumped forward. And the budd
ha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city a
s the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assis
t at the peacemaking banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning st
reets to welcome General Sam.
In the minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha's mind ha
d not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed's top half had als
o kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking of onio
ns, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch until the bee, buzzing
… 'It's not fair,' the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over
, 'It's not fair,' and again, and again.
Shaheed, fulfilling his father's dearest wish, had finally earned his name; b