Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [190]
How we made the revolution: General Zulfikar described troop movements; I moved pepperpots symbolically while he spoke. In the clutches of the active-metaphorical mode of connection, I shifted saltcellars and bowls of chutney: This mustard-jar is Company A occupying Head Post Office; there are two pepperpots surrounding a serving-spoon, which means Company B has seized the airport. With the fate of the nation in my hands, I shifted condiments and cutlery, capturing empty biriani-dishes with water-glasses, stationing saltcellars, on guard, around water-jugs. And when General Zulfikar stopped talking, the march of the table-service also came to an end. Ayub Khan seemed to settle down in his chair; was the wink he gave me just my imagination?—at any rate, the Commander-in-Chief said, “Very good, Zulfikar; good show.”
In the movements performed by pepperpots etcetera, one table-ornament remained uncaptured: a cream-jug in solid silver, which, in our tabletop coup, represented the Head of State, President Iskander Mirza; for three weeks, Mirza remained President.
An eleven-year-old boy cannot judge whether a President is truly corrupt, even if gongs-and-pips say he is; it is not for eleven-year-olds to say whether Mirza’s association with the feeble Republican Party should have disqualified him from high office under the new régime. Saleem Sinai made no political judgments; but when, inevitably at midnight, on November 1st, my uncle shook me awake and whispered, “Come on, sonny, it’s time you got a taste of the real thing!,” I leaped out of bed smartly; I dressed and went out into the night, proudly aware that my uncle had preferred my company to that of his own son.
Midnight. Rawalpindi speeding past us at seventy m.p.h. Motorcycles in front of us beside us behind us. “Where are we going Zulfy-uncle?” Wait and see. Black smoked-windowed limousine pausing at darkened house. Sentries guard the door with crossed rifles; which part, to let us through. I am marching at my uncle’s side, in step, through half-lit corridors; until we burst into a dark room with a shaft of moonlight spotlighting a four-poster bed. A mosquito net hangs over the bed like a shroud.
There is a man waking up, startled, what the hell is going … But General Zulfikar has a long-barrelled revolver; the tip of the gun is forced mmff between the man’s parted teeth. “Shut up,” my uncle says, superfluously. “Come with us.” Naked overweight man stumbling from his bed. His eyes, asking: Are you going to shoot me? Sweat rolls down ample belly, catching moonlight, dribbling on to his soo-soo; but it is bitterly cold; he is not perspiring from the heat. He looks like a white Laughing Buddha; but not laughing. Shivering. My uncle’s pistol is extracted from his mouth. “Turn. Quick march!” … And gun-barrel pushed between the cheeks of an overfed rump. The man cries, “For God’s sake be careful; that thing has the safety off!” Jawans giggle as naked flesh emerges into moonlight, is pushed into black limousine … That night, I sat with a naked man as my uncle drove him to a military airfield; I stood and watched as the waiting aircraft taxied, accelerated, flew. What began, active-metaphorically, with pepperpots, ended then; not only did I overthrow a government—I also consigned a president to exile.
Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots … I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed.
“Really truly?” Padma asks. “You were truly there?” Really truly. “They say that Ayub was a good man before he became bad,” Padma says; it is a question. But Saleem, at eleven, made no such judgments. The movement of pepperpots does not necessitate moral choices. What Saleem was concerned with: not public upheaval, but personal rehabilitation. You see the paradox—my most crucial foray into history up to that moment was inspired by the most parochial