Midnights Children

accepted his comfortings; I cried into his shirt; but then there was a bee, buzzing towards us; while he squatted, with his back to the glassless window of the hut, something came whining through the overheated air; while he said, “Hey, buddha—come on, buddha—hey, hey!” and while other bees, the bees of deafness, buzzed in his ears, something stung him in the neck. He made a popping noise deep in his throat and fell forwards on top of me. The sniper’s bullet which killed Ayooba Baloch would, but for his presence, have speared me through the head. In dying, he saved my life.
    Forgetting past humiliations; putting aside fair-and-unfair, and what-can’t-be-cured-must-be-endured, I crawled out from under the corpse of Ayooba-the-tank, while Farooq, “O God O God!” and Shaheed, “Allah, I don’t even know if my gun will—” And Farooq, again, “O God O! O God, who knows where the bastard is—!” But Shaheed, like soldiers in films, is flat against the wall beside the window. In these positions: I on the floor, Farooq crouched in a corner, Shaheed pressed against dung-plaster: we waited, helplessly, to see what would transpire.
    There was no second shot; perhaps the sniper, not knowing the size of the force hidden inside the mud-walled hut, had simply shot and run. The three of us remained inside the hut for a night and a day, until the body of Ayooba Baloch began to demand attention. Before we left, we found pickaxes, and buried him … And afterwards, when the Indian Army did come, there was no Ayooba Baloch to greet them with his theories of the superiority of meat over vegetables; no Ayooba went into action, yelling, “Ka-dang! Ka-blam! Ka-pow!!”
    Perhaps it was just as well.
    … And sometime in December the three of us, riding on stolen bicycles, arrived at a field from which the city of Dacca could be seen against the horizon; a field in which grew crops so strange, with so nauseous an aroma, that we found ourselves incapable of remaining on our bicycles. Dismounting before we fell off, we entered the terrible field.
    There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha’s eyes. The crops were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight … and most of them, but not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into the peasant’s treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots. The peasant saw them and came running towards them, smiling ingratiatingly, talking rapidly in a wheedling voice that only the buddha was obliged to hear. Farooq and Shaheed stared glassily at the field while the peasant began his explanations.
    “Plenty shooting!
Thaii! Thaii!
” He made a pistol with his right hand. He was speaking bad, stilted Hindi. “Ho sirs! India has come, my sirs! Ho yes!
Ho
yes.”—And all over the field, the crops were leaking nourishing bone-marrow into the soil while he, “No shoot I, my sirs. Ho no. I have news—ho, such news! India comes! Jessore is fall, my sirs; in one-four days, Dacca, also, yes-no?” The buddha listened; the buddha’s eyes looked beyond the peasant to the field. “Such a things, my sir! India! They have one mighty soldier fellow, he can kill six persons at one time, break necks
khrikk-khrikk
between his knees, my sirs? Knees—is right words?” He tapped his own. “I see, my sirs. With these eyes, ho yes! He fights with not guns, not swords. With knees, and six necks go
khrikk-khrikk. Ho
God.” Shaheed was vomiting in the field. Farooq Rashid had wandered to the far edge and stood staring into a copse of mango trees. “In one-two weeks is over the war, my sirs! Everybody come back. Just now all gone, but I not, my sirs. Soldiers came looking for Bahini and killed many many, also my son. Ho yes, sirs, ho yes indeed.” The buddha’s eyes had become clouded and dull. In