Midnights Children

who will believe?—About jungles and temples and transparent serpents?—What a story, Allah, buddha, we should shoot you here-and-now!” While Shaheed, softly, “I’m hungry.” Out once more in the real world, they were forgetting the lessons of the jungle, and Ayooba, “My arm! Allah, man, my withered arm! The ghost, leaking fluid … !” And Shaheed, “Deserters, they’ll say—empty-handed, no prisoner, after so-many months!—Allah, a court-martial, maybe, what do you think, buddha?” And Farooq, “You bastard, see what you made us do! O God, too much, our uniforms! See, our uniforms, buddha—rags-and-tatters like a beggar-boy’s! Think of what the Brigadier—and that Najmuddin—on my mother’s head I swear I didn’t—I’m not a coward! Not!” And Shaheed, who is killing ants and licking them off his palm, “How to rejoin, anyway? Who knows where they are or if? And haven’t we seen and heard how Mukti Bahini—
thai! thai!
they shoot from their hiding-holes, and you’re dead! Dead, like an ant!” But Farooq is also talking, “And not just the uniforms, man, the hair! Is this military haircut? This, so-long, falling over ears like worms? This woman’s hair? Allah, they’ll kill us dead—up against the wall and
thai! thai!
—you see if they don’t!” But now Ayooba-the-tank is calming down; Ayooba holding his face in his hand; Ayooba saying softly to himself, “O man, O man. I came to fight those damn vegetarian Hindus, man. And here is something too different, man. Something too bad.”
    It is somewhere in November; they have been making their way slowly, north north north, past fluttering newspapers in curious curlicued script, through empty fields and abandoned settlements, occasionally passing a crone with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder, or a group of eight-year-olds with shifty starvation in their eyes and the threat of knives in their pockets, hearing how the Mukti Bahini are moving invisibly through the smoking land, how bullets come buzzing like bees-from-nowhere … and now a breaking-point has been reached, and Farooq, “If it wasn’t for you, buddha—Allah, you freak with your blue eyes of a foreigner, O God, yaar, how you
stink!
”
    We all stink: Shaheed, who is crushing (with tatter-booted heel) a scorpion on the dirty floor of the abandoned hut; Farooq, searching absurdly for a knife with which to cut his hair; Ayooba, leaning his head against a corner of the hut while a spider walks along the crown; and the buddha, too: the buddha, who stinks to heaven, clutches in his right hand a tarnished silver spittoon, and is trying to recall his name. And can summon up only nicknames: Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Piece-of-the-Moon.
    … He sat cross-legged amid the wailing storm of his companions’ fear, forcing himself to remember; but no, it would not come. And at last the buddha, hurling spittoon against earthen floor, exclaimed to stone-deaf ears: “It’s not— NOT—FAIR!”
    In the midst of the rubble of war, I discovered fair-and-unfair. Unfairness smelled like onions; the sharpness of its perfume brought tears to my eyes. Seized by the bitter aroma of injustice, I remembered how Jamila Singer had leaned over a hospital bed—whose?
What name?
—how military gongs-and-pips were also present—how my sister—no, not my sister! how
she
—how she had said, “Brother, I have to go away, to sing in service of the country; the Army will look after you now—for me, they will look after you so, so well.” She was veiled; behind white-and-gold brocade I smelled her traitress’s smile; through soft veiling fabric she planted on my brow the kiss of her revenge; and then she, who always wrought a dreadful revenge upon those who loved her best, left me to the tender mercies of pips-and-gongs … and after Jamila’s treachery I remembered the long-ago ostracism I suffered at the hands of Evie Burns; and exiles, and picnic-tricks; and all the vast mountain of unreasonable occurrences plaguing my life; and now, I lamented cucumber-nose, stain-face, bandy legs, horn-temples, monk’s tonsure, finger-loss, one-bad-ear, and the numbing, braining spittoon; I wept copiously now, but still my name eluded me, and I repeated—“Not fair;
not fair;
NOT FAIR!” And, surprisingly, Ayooba-the-tank moved away from his corner; Ayooba, perhaps recalling his own breakdown in the Sundarbans, squatted down in front of me and wrapped his one good arm around my neck. I