Midnights Children

a vegetable.”
    Their uneasiness lingered. Did they sense, in the buddha’s numbed blankness, a trace of “undesirability”?—For was not his rejection of past-and-family just the type of subversive behavior they were dedicated to “rooting out”? The camp’s officers, however, were deaf to Ayooba’s requests of “Sir sir can’t we just have a real dog sir?” … so that Farooq, a born follower who had already adopted Ayooba as his leader and hero, cried, “What to do? With that guy’s family contacts, some high-ups must’ve told the Brigadier to put up with him, that’s all.”
    And (although none of the trio would have been able to express the idea) I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, the country’s East and West Wings were separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now. Enough philosophizing: what I am saying is that by abandoning consciousness, seceding from history, the buddha was setting the worst of examples—and the example was followed by no less a personage than Sheikh Mujib, when he led the East Wing into secession and declared it independent as “Bangladesh”! Yes, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were right to feel ill-at-ease—because even in those depths of my withdrawal from responsibility, I remained responsible, through the workings of the metaphorical modes of connection, for the belligerent events of 1971.
    But I must go back to my new companions, so that I can relate the incident at the latrines: there was Ayooba, tank-like, who led the unit, and Farooq, who followed contentedly. The third youth, however, was a gloomier, more private type, and as such closest to my heart. On his fifteenth birthday Shaheed Dar had lied about his age and enlisted. That day, his Punjabi sharecropper father had taken Shaheed into a field and wept all over his new uniform. Old Dar told his son the meaning of his name, which was “martyr,” and expressed the hope that he would prove worthy of it, and perhaps become the first of their family members to enter the perfumed garden, leaving behind this pitiful world in which a father could not hope to pay his debts and also feed his nineteen children. The overwhelming power of names, and the resulting approach of martyrdom, had begun to prey heavily on Shaheed’s mind; in his dreams, he began to see his death, which took the form of a bright pomegranate, and floated in mid-air behind him, following him everywhere, biding its time. The disturbing and somewhat unheroic vision of pomegranate death made Shaheed an inward, unsmiling fellow.
    Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various CUTIA units being sent away from the camp, into action; and became convinced that his time, and the time of the pomegranate, was very near. From departures of three-men-and-a-dog units in camouflaged jeeps, he deduced a growing political crisis; it was February, and the irritations of the exalted were becoming daily more marked. Ayooba-the-tank, however, retained a local point of view. His irritation was also mounting, but its object was the buddha.
    Ayooba had become infatuated with the only female in the camp, a skinny latrine-cleaner who couldn’t have been over fourteen and whose nipples were only just beginning to push against her tattered shirt: a low type, certainly, but she was all that there was, and for a latrine-cleaner she had very nice teeth and a pleasant line in saucy over-the-shoulder glances … Ayooba began to follow her around, and that was how he spied her going into the buddha’s straw-lined stall, and that was why he leaned a bicycle against the building and stood on the seat, and that was why he fell off, because he didn’t like what he saw. Afterwards he spoke to the latrine girl, grabbing her roughly by the arm: “Why do it with that crazy—why, when I, Ayooba, am, could be—?” and she replied that she liked the man-dog, he’s funny, says he can’t feel anything, he rubs his hosepipe inside me but can’t even feel, but it’s nice, and he tells that he likes my smell. The frankness of the urchin girl,