Midnights Children

they fell. He is bandaging wounds, daubing them liberally with Mercurochrome, which makes them look bloodier than ever, but at least disinfects them. Finally he returns to his hotel room, his clothes soaked in red stains, and Naseem commences a panic. “Let me help, let me help, Allah what a man I’ve married, who goes into gullies to fight with goondas!” She is all over him with water on wads of cotton wool. “I don’t know why can’t you be a respectable doctor like ordinary people are just cure important illnesses and all? O God you’ve got blood everywhere! Sit, sit now, let me wash you at least!”
    “It isn’t blood, wife.”
    “You think I can’t see for myself with my own eyes? Why must you make a fool of me even when you’re hurt? Must your wife not look after you, even?”
    “It’s Mercurochrome, Naseem. Red medicine.”
    Naseem—who had become a whirlwind of activity, seizing clothes, running taps—freezes. “You do it on purpose,” she says, “to make me look stupid. I am not stupid. I have read several books.”
    It is April 13th, and they are still in Amritsar. “This affair isn’t finished,” Aadam Aziz told Naseem. “We can’t go, you see: they may need doctors again.”
    “So we must sit here and wait until the end of the world?”
    He rubbed his nose. “No, not so long, I am afraid.”
    That afternoon, the streets are suddenly full of people, all moving in the same direction, defying Dyer’s new Martial Law regulations. Aadam tells Naseem, “There must be a meeting planned—there will be trouble from the military. They have banned meetings.”
    “Why do you have to go? Why not wait to be called?”
    … A compound can be anything from a wasteland to a park. The largest compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. It is not grassy. Stones cans glass and other things are everywhere. To get into it, you must walk down a very narrow alleyway between two buildings. On April 13th, many thousands of Indians are crowding through this alleyway. “It is peaceful protest,” someone tells Doctor Aziz. Swept along by the crowds, he arrives at the mouth of the alley. A bag from Heidelberg is in his right hand. (No close-up is necessary.) He is, I know, feeling very scared, because his nose is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained doctor, he puts it out of his mind, he enters the compound. Somebody is making a passionate speech. Hawkers move through the crowd selling channa and sweetmeats. The air is filled with dust. There do not seem to be any goondas, any troublemakers, as far as my grandfather can see. A group of Sikhs has spread a cloth on the ground and is eating, seated around it. There is still a smell of ordure in the air. Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. E. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops. He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar—an important man, after all; the waxed tips of his moustache are rigid with importance. As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer’s right and twenty-five to his left; and Aadam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. “Yaaaakh-
thoooo
!” he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. His “doctori-attaché” flies open; bottles, liniment and syringes scatter in the dust. He is scrabbling furiously at people’s feet, trying to save his equipment before it is crushed. There is a noise like teeth chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuff stains his shirt. There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues. More and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather. He becomes afraid for his back. The clasp of his bag is digging into his chest, inflicting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or Takht-e-Sulaiman. His nose is jammed against a bottle of red pills. The chattering stops and is replaced by the noises of people and birds. There seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. Brigadier Dyer’s fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one