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

ut the buddha could still not remember his own.
How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another independence
day, the world had been saffron and green. This morning, the colours wer
e green, red and gold. And in the cities, cries of 'Jai Bangla!' And voic
es of women singing 'Our Golden Bengal', maddening their hearts with deli
ght… in the centre of the city, on the podium of his defeat, General Tige
r Niazi awaited General Manekshaw. (Biographical details: Sam was a Parse
e. He came from Bombay. Bombayites were in for happy times that day.) And
amid green and red and gold, the buddha in his shapeless anonymous garme
nt was jostled by crowds; and then India came. India, with Sam at her head.
Was it General Sam's idea? Or even Indira's? Eschewing these fruitless ques
tions, I record only that the Indian advance into Dacca was much more than
a mere military parade; as befits a triumph, it was garlanded with side sho
ws. A special I.A.F. troop transport had flown to Dacca, carrying a hundred
and one of the finest entertainers and conjurers India could provide. From
the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi they came, many of them dressed for
the occasion in the evocative uniforms of the Indian fauj, so that many Dac
cans got the idea that the Indians' victory had been inevitable from the st
art because even their uniformed jawans were sorcerers of the highest order
. The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the troops, entertaining
the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids on moving carts draw
n by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female contortionists who cou
ld swallow their legs up to their knees; there were jugglers who operated o
utside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw oohs and aahs from the
delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades, keeping four hundred and
twenty in the air at a time; there were card tricksters who could pull the
queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds, the empress of clubs) out of wome
n's ears; there was the great dancer Anarkali, whose name meant 'pomegranat
e bud', doing leaps twists pirouettes on a donkey cart while a giant piece
of silver nose jewellery jingled on her right nostril; there was Master Vik
ram the sitarist, whose sitar was capable of responding to, and exaggeratin
g, the faintest emotions in the hearts of his audience, so that once (it wa
s said) he had played before an audience so bad tempered, and had so greatl
y enhanced their foul humour, that if his tabla player hadn't made him stop
his raga in mid stream the power of his music would have had them all knif
ing each other and smashing up the auditorium… today, Master Vikram's music
raised the celebratory goodwill of the people to fever pitch; it maddened,
let us say, their hearts with delight.
And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven foot giant who weighed two h
undred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The Wor