Midnights Children

heart’s desire it was fooling them into using up their dreams, so that as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow and translucent as glass. The buddha saw now that the colorlessness of insects and leeches and snakes might have more to do with the depredations worked on their insectly, leechy, snakish imaginations than with the absence of sunlight … awakened as if for the first time by the shock of translucency, they looked at the temple with new eyes, seeing the great gaping cracks in the solid rock, realizing that vast segments could come detached and crash down upon them at any moment; and then, in a murky corner of the abandoned shrine, they saw the remnants of what might have been four small fires—ancient ashes, scorch-marks on stone—or perhaps four funeral pyres; and in the center of each of the four, a small, blackened, fire-eaten heap of uncrushed bones.
    How the buddha left the Sundarbans: the forest of illusions unleashed upon them, as they fled from temple towards boat, its last and most terrifying trick; they had barely reached the boat when it came towards them, at first a rumble in the far distance, then a roar which could penetrate even mud-deafened ears, they had untied the boat and leaped wildly into it when the wave came, and now they were at the mercy of the waters, which could have crushed them effortlessly against sundri or mangrove or nipa, but instead the tidal wave bore them down turbulent brown channels as the forest of their torment blurred past them like a great green wall, it seemed as if the jungle, having tired of its playthings, were ejecting them unceremoniously from its territory; waterborne, impelled forwards and still forwards by the unimaginable power of the wave, they bobbed pitifully amongst fallen branches and the sloughed-off skins of water-snakes, until finally they were hurled from the boat as the ebbing wave broke it against a tree-stump, they were left sitting in a drowned rice-paddy as the wave receded, in water up to their waists, but alive, borne out of the heart of the jungle of dreams, into which I had fled in the hope of peace and found both less and more, and back once more in the world armies and dates.
    When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I am bound to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder at the time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal wave recorded that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeed devastated the region.
    In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is forever who you are.
    For seven months during the course of the year 1971, three soldiers and their tracker vanished off the face of the war. In October, however, when the rains ended and the guerilla units of the Mukti Bahini began terrorizing Pakistani military outposts; when Mukti Bahini snipers picked off soldiers and petty officials alike, our quartet emerged from invisibility and, having little option, attempted to rejoin the main body of the occupying West Wing forces. Later, when questioned, the buddha would always explain his disappearance with the help of a garbled story about being lost in a jungle amid trees whose roots grabbed at you like snakes. It was perhaps fortunate for him that he was never formally interrogated by officers in the army of which he was a member. Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar were not subjected to such interrogations, either; but in their case this was because they failed to stay alive long enough for any questions to be asked.
    … In an entirely deserted village of thatched huts with dung-plastered mud walls—in an abandoned community from which even the chickens had fled—Ayooba Shaheed Farooq bemoaned their fate. Rendered deaf by the poisonous mud of the rain-forest, a disability which had begun to upset them a good deal now that the taunting voices of the jungle were no longer hanging in the air, they wailed their several wails, all talking at once, none hearing the other; the buddha, however, was obliged to listen to them all: to Ayooba, who stood facing a corner inside a naked room, his hair enmeshed in a spider’s web, crying “My ears my ears, like bees buzzing inside,” to Farooq who, petulantly, shouted, “Whose fault, anyway?—Who, with his nose that could sniff out any bloody thing?—Who said That way, and that way?—And who,