Midnights Children

can’t believe your eyes—no, not true, how can it—buddha, tell, what’s got into my eyes?” And at last the buddha spoke, knowing Shaheed could not hear: “O, Shaheeda,” he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, “a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.” But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before they were shot. Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly down upon the scene.
    As though talking to himself, the buddha said, “It is time to think about saving our skins; God knows why we came back.” The buddha entered the doorway of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had once housed a tea-shop, a bicycle-repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny landing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the low desk on which he had left behind a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, there were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more than an old nobody—stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what was true and what was not. The notary public was absent, so I could not ask him to verify what was happening, I could not give a deposition under oath; but lying on the mat behind his desk was a loose flowing garment like a djellabah, and without waiting any longer I removed my uniform, including the she-dog badge of the CUTIA units, and became anonymous, a deserter, in a city whose language I could not speak.
    Shaheed Dar, however, remained in the street; in the first light of morning he watched soldiers scurrying away from what-had-not-been-done; and then the grenade came. I, the buddha, was still inside the empty house; but Shaheed was unprotected by walls.
    Who can say why how who; but the grenade was certainly thrown. In that last instant of his un-bisected life, Shaheed was suddenly seized by an irresistible urge to look up … afterwards, in the muezzin’s roost, he told the buddha, “So strange, Allah—the pomegranate—in my head, just like that, bigger an’ brighter than ever before—you know, buddha, like a light-bulb—Allah, what could I do, I looked!”—And yes, it was there, hanging above his head, the grenade of his dreams, hanging just above his head, falling falling, exploding at waist-level, blowing his legs away to some other part of the city.
    When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and pointed up, “Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want,” so I carried what was now only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral stairs to the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of light-bulbs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach, battling away along the trowel-furrows in the crudely-laid concrete floor. Down below, amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke-haze, ant-like people were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the ant-like, and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and the eyrie’s one piece of furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to a loudspeaker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the disillusioning sight of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would always be scratched in the same places, extracted from the folds of his shapeless robe a glinting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver spittoon. Lost in contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams began; and looked up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping along trowel-furrows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived at the source of the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the victim of not one, but two wars.)
    Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony of war.
    After a few moments, silence. Shaheed’s head slumped forward. And the buddha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city as the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assist at the peace-making banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning streets to welcome General Sam.
    In the