Midnights Children

minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha’s mind had not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed’s top half had also kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking of onions, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch—until the bee, buzzing … “It’s not fair,” the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, “It’s not fair,” and again, and again.
    Shaheed, fulfilling his father’s dearest wish, had finally earned his name; but the buddha could still not remember his own.
    How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another independence day, the world had been saffron and green. This morning, the colors were green, red and gold. And in the cities, cries of “Jai Bangla!” And voices of women singing “Our Golden Bengal,” maddening their hearts with delight … in the center of the city, on the podium of his defeat, General Tiger Niazi awaited General Manekshaw. (Biographical details: Sam was a Parsee. He came from Bombay. Bombayites were in for happy times that day.) And amid green and red and gold, the buddha in his shapeless anonymous garment was jostled by crowds; and then India came. India, with Sam at her head.
    Was it General Sam’s idea? Or even Indira’s?—Eschewing these fruitless questions, I record only that the Indian advance into Dacca was much more than a mere military parade; as befits a triumph, it was garlanded with side-shows. A special I.A.F. troop transport had flown to Dacca, carrying a hundred and one of the finest entertainers and conjurers India could provide. From the famous magicians’ ghetto in Delhi they came, many of them dressed for the occasion in the evocative uniforms of the Indian fauj, so that many Daccans got the idea that the Indians’ victory had been inevitable from the start because even their uniformed jawans were sorcerers of the highest order. The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the troops, entertaining the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids on moving carts drawn by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female contortionists who could swallow their legs up to their knees; there were jugglers who operated outside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw oohs and aahs from the delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades, keeping four hundred and twenty in the air at a time; there were card-tricksters who could pull the queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds, the empress of clubs) out of women’s ears; there was the great dancer Anarkali, whose name meant “pomegranate-bud,” doing leaps twists pirouettes on a donkey-cart while a giant piece of silver nose-jewelery jingled on her right nostril; there was Master Vikram the sitarist, whose sitar was capable of responding to, and exaggerating, the faintest emotions in the hearts of his audience, so that once (it was said) he had played before an audience so bad-tempered, and had so greatly enhanced their foul humor, that if his tabla-player hadn’t made him stop his raga in mid-stream the power of his music would have had them all knifing each other and smashing up the auditorium … today, Master Vikram’s music raised the celebratory goodwill of the people to fever-pitch; it maddened, let us say, their hearts with delight.
    And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven-foot giant who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The World because of his unsurpassable skills as a snake-charmer. Not even the legendary Tubriwallahs of Bengal could exceed his talents; he strode through the happily shrieking crowds, twined from head to foot with deadly cobras, mambas and kraits, all with their poison-sacs intact … Picture Singh, who would be the last in the line of men who have been willing to become my fathers … and immediately behind him came Parvati-the-witch.
    Parvati-the-witch entertained the crowds with the help of a large wicker basket with a lid; happy volunteers entered the basket, and Parvati made them disappear so completely that they could not return until she wished them to; Parvati, to whom midnight had given the true gifts of sorcery, had placed them at the service of her humble illusionist’s trade; so that she was asked, “But how do you pull it off?” And, “Come on, pretty missy, tell the trick, why not?”—Parvati, smiling beaming rolling her magic basket, came towards me with the liberating troops.
    The Indian Army marched