Midnights Children

war, they were a scared rabble of seventeen-year-old boys, and would certainly have been annihilated, except that the opposing Indians had been subjected to the green air of the Rann even longer than they; so in that sorcerers’ world a crazy war was fought in which each side thought it saw apparitions of devils fighting alongside its foes; but in the end the Indian forces yielded; many of them collapsed in floods of tears and wept, Thank God, it’s over; they told about the great blubbery things which slithered around the border posts at night, and the floating-in-air spirits of drowned men with seaweed wreaths and seashells in their navels.
    What the surrendering Indian soldiers said, within my cousin’s hearing: “Anyway, these border posts were unmanned; we just saw them empty and came inside.”
    The mystery of the deserted border posts did not, at first, seem like a puzzle to the young Pakistani soldiers who were required to occupy them until new border guards were sent; my cousin Lieutenant Zafar found his bladder and bowels voiding themselves with hysterical frequency for the seven nights he spent occupying one of the posts with only five jawans for company. During nights filled with the shrieks of witches and the nameless slithery shufflings of the dark, the six youngsters were reduced to so abject a state that nobody laughed at my cousin any more, they were all too busy wetting their own pants. One of the jawans whispered in terror during the ghostly evil of their last-but-one night: “Listen, boys, if I had to sit here for a living, I’d bloody well run away, too!”
    In a state of utter jelly-like breakdown the soldiers sweated in the Rann; and then on the last night their worst fears came true, they saw an army of ghosts coming out of the darkness towards them; they were in the border post nearest the sea-shore, and in the greeny moonlight they could see the sails of the ghost-ships, of phantom dhows; and the ghost-army approached, relentlessly, despite the screams of the soldiers, specters bearing moss-covered chests and strange shrouded litters piled high with unseen things; and when the ghost-army came in through the door, my cousin Zafar fell at their feet and began to gibber horribly.
    The first phantom to enter the outpost had several missing teeth and a curved knife stuck in his belt; when he saw the soldiers in the hut his eyes blazed with a vermilion fury. “God’s pity!” the ghost chieftain said, “What are you mother-sleepers here for? Didn’t you all get properly paid off?”
    Not ghosts; smugglers. The six young soldiers found themselves in absurd postures of abject terror, and although they tried to redeem themselves, their shame was engulfingly complete … and now we come to it. In whose name were the smugglers operating? Whose name fell from the lips of the smuggler-chief, and made my cousin’s eyes open in horror? Whose fortune, built originally on the miseries of fleeing Hindu families in 1947, was now augmented by these spring-and-summer smugglers’ convoys through the unguarded Rann and thence into the cities of Pakistan? Which Punch-faced General, with a voice as thin as a razor-blade, commanded the phantom troops? … But I shall concentrate on facts. In July 1965, my cousin Zafar returned on leave to his father’s house in Rawalpindi; and one morning he began to walk slowly towards his father’s bedroom, bearing on his shoulders not only the memory of a thousand childhood humiliations and blows; not only the shame of his life-long enuresis; but also the knowledge that his own father had been responsible for what-happened-at-the-Rann, when Zafar Zulfikar was reduced to gibbering on a floor. My cousin found his father in his bedside bath, and slit his throat with a long, curved smuggler’s knife.
    Hidden behind newspaper reports— DASTARDLY INDIAN INVASION REPELLED BY OUR GALLANT BOYS —the truth about General Zulfikar became a ghostly, uncertain thing; the paying-off of border guards became, in the papers, INNOCENT SOLDIERS MASSACRED BY INDIAN FAUJ; and who would spread the story of my uncle’s vast smuggling activities? What General, what politician did not possess the transistor radios of my uncle’s illegality, the air-conditioning units and the imported watches of his sins? General Zulfikar died; cousin Zafar went to prison and was spared marriage to a Kifi princess who obstinately refused to menstruate precisely in order to be spared marriage to him; and