Midnights Children

her legs, hair loose, voice pleading screaming, while the scythed avenger stumbles through drowned rice, covered from head to foot in water and mud. Ayooba roars with nervous relief: “The old billy-goat! Couldn’t keep his hands off the local women! Come on, buddha, don’t let him catch you, he’ll slice off both your cucumbers!” And Farooq, “But then what? If the buddha is sliced, what then?” And now Ayooba-the-tank is pulling a pistol out of its holster. Ayooba aiming: both hands held out in front, trying not to shake, Ayooba squeezing: a scythe curves up into the air. And slowly slowly the arms of a peasant rise up as though in prayer; knees kneel in paddy-water; a face plunges below the water-level to touch its forehead to the earth. On the dyke a woman wailing. And Ayooba tells the buddha: “Next time I’ll shoot you instead.” Ayooba-the-tank shaking like a leaf. And Time lies dead in a rice-paddy.
    But there is still the meaningless chase, the enemy who will never be seen, and the buddha, “Go that way,” and four of them row on, south south south, they have murdered the hours and forgotten the date, they no longer know if they are chasing after or running from, but whichever it is that pushes them is bringing them closer closer to the impossible green wall, “That way,” the buddha insists, and then they are inside it, the jungle which is so thick that history has hardly ever found the way in. The Sundarbans: it swallows them up.

In the Sundarbans
    I ’LL OWN UP: there was no last, elusive quarry, driving us south south south. To all my readers, I should like to make this naked-breasted admission: while Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were unable to distinguish between chasing-after and running-from, the buddha knew what he was doing. Although I’m well aware that I am providing any future commentators or venom-quilled critics (to whom I say: twice before, I’ve been subjected to snake-poison; on both occasions, I proved stronger than venenes) with yet more ammunition—through admission-of-guilt, revelation-of-moral-turpitude, proof-of-cowardice—I’m bound to say that he, the buddha, finally incapable of continuing in the submissive performance of his duty, took to his heels and fled. Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of pessimism futility shame, he deserted, into the historyless anonymity of rain-forests, dragging three children in his wake. What I hope to immortalize in pickles as well as words: that condition of the spirit in which the consequences of acceptance could not be denied, in which an overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of dreams … But the jungle, like all refuges, was entirely other—was both less and more—than he had expected.
    “I am glad,” my Padma says, “I am happy you ran away.” But I insist: not I. He. He, the buddha. Who, until the snake, would remain not-Saleem; who, in spite of running-from, was still separated from his past; although he clutched, in his limpet fist, a certain silver spittoon.
    The jungle closed behind them like a tomb, and after hours of increasingly weary but also frenzied rowing through incomprehensibly labyrinthine salt-water channels overtowered by the cathedral-arching trees, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were hopelessly lost; they turned time and again to the buddha, who pointed, “That way,” and then, “Down there,” but although they rowed feverishly, ignoring fatigue, it seemed as if the possibility of ever leaving this place receded before them like the lantern of a ghost; until at length they rounded on their supposedly infallible tracker, and perhaps saw some small light of shame or relief glowing in his habitually milky-blue eyes; and now Farooq whispered in the sepulchral greenness of the forest: “You don’t know. You’re just saying anything.” The buddha remained silent, but in his silence they read their fate, and now that he was convinced that the jungle had swallowed them the way a toad gulps down a mosquito, now that he was sure he would never see the sun again, Ayooba Baloch, Ayooba-the-tank himself, broke down utterly and wept like a monsoon. The incongruous spectacle of this huge figure with a crew-cut blubbering like a baby served to detach Farooq and Shaheed from their senses; so that Farooq almost upset the boat by attacking the buddha, who mildly bore all the fist-blows which rained down on his chest shoulders arms, until Shaheed pulled Farooq down for the sake of