Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [218]
My father was heading steadily towards his stroke; but before the bomb went off in his brain, another fuse was lit: in April 1965, we heard about the peculiar incidents in the Rann of Kutch.
While we thrashed like flies in the webs of my aunt’s revenge, the mill of history continued to grind. President Ayub’s reputation was in decline: rumors of malpractice in the 1964 election buzzed about, refusing to be swatted. There was, too, the matter of the President’s son: Gauhar Ayub, whose enigmatic Gandhara Industries made him a “multi-multi” overnight. O endless sequence of nefarious sons-of-the-great! Gauhar, with his bullyings and rantings; and later, in India, Sanjay Gandhi and his Maruti Car Company and his Congress Youth; and most recently of all, Kanti Lal Desai … the sons of the great unmake their parents. But I, too, have a son; Aadam Sinai, flying in the face of precedent, will reverse the trend. Sons can be better than their fathers, as well as worse … in April 1965, however, the air buzzed with the fallibility of sons. And whose son was it who scaled the walls of President House on April 1st—what unknown father spawned the foul-smelling fellow who ran up to the President and fired a pistol at his stomach? Some fathers remain mercifully unknown to history; at any rate, the assassin failed, because his gun miraculously jammed. Somebody’s son was taken away by police to have his teeth pulled out one by one, to have his nails set on fire; burning cigarette-ends were no doubt pressed against the tip of his penis, so it would probably not be much consolation for that nameless, would-be assassin to know that he had simply been carried away by a tide of history in which sons (high and low) were frequently observed to behave exceptionally badly. (No: I do not exempt myself.)
Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists—PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS—while peasants (unreported) cursed the so-called “green revolution,” claiming that most of the newly-drilled water-wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong places anyway; while editorials praised the probity of the nation’s leadership, rumors, thick as files, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American motor-cars of the President’s son. The Karachi Dawn spoke of another dawn—GOOD INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER?—but, in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story.
In the cities, mirages and lies; to the north, in the high mountains, the Chinese were building roads and planning nuclear blasts; but it is time to revert from the general to the particular; or, to be more exact, to the General’s son, my cousin, the enuretic Zafar Zulfikar. Who became, between April and July, the archetype of all the many disappointing sons in the land; history, working through him, was also pointing its finger at Gauhar, at future-Sanjay and Kanti-Lal-to-come; and, naturally, at me.
So—cousin Zafar. With whom I had much in common at that time … my heart was full of forbidden love; his trousers, despite all his efforts, filled continually with something rather more tangible, but equally forbidden. I dreamed of mythical lovers, both happy and star-crossed—Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal, but also Montague-and-Capulet; he dreamed of his Kifi fiancée, whose failure to arrive at puberty even after her sixteenth birthday must have made her seem, in his thoughts, a fantasy of an unattainable future … in April 1965, Zafar was sent on maneuvers to the Pakistan-controlled zone of the Rann of Kutch.
Cruelty