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

mbers made tents under their robes. Then Allah, then! the knives began to s
ing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high high like he'd never hummed befo
re. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; o
ne broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now
listen! Abdullah's humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was
heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four
hundred and twenty pie dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were e
ating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not
hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four
hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the Un
iversity, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong sid
e of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, exc
ept those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards
their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair… and all the
time Abdullahji was humming, humming humming, and the knives were singing.
And know this: suddenly one of the killers' eyes cracked and fell out of it
s socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!'
They say, 'When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives wer
e blunt… they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which ha
d no glass because Abdullah's hum had shattered it… they thudded against
the door until the wood broke… and then they were everywhere, baba!… some
without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at le
ast, and some of these were sharp… And now see this: the assassins cannot
have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs
got them by surprise… the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one
, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty eight dogs on t
heir necks… afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody coul
d say who they were.'
'At some point,' they say, 'Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs
and assassins were too busy to follow him.'
Dogs? Assassins?… If you don't believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abd
ullah and his Convocations. Discover how we've swept his story under the
carpet… then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three year
s under my family's rugs.
As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown
larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. 'Look
at me,' he said before he killed himself, 'I wanted to be a miniaturist and
I've got elephantiasis instead!' The swollen events of the night of the cres
cent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room mate, because life had once agai
n, perversely, refused to remain life sized. It had turned melodramatic: and
that embarrassed him.
How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I put