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By Root 11946 0

of the continent towards the loose-bladdered: Zafar, although a Lieutenant, was the laughing-stock of the Abbottabad military base. There was a story that he had been instructed to wear a rubber undergarment like a balloon around his genitals, so that the glorious uniform of the Pak Army should not be desecrated; mere jawans, when he passed, would make a blowing movement of their cheeks, as if they were puffing up the balloon. (All this became public later, in the statement he made, in floods of tears, after his arrest for murder.) It is possible that Zafar’s assignment to the Rann of Kutch was thought up by a tactful superior, who was only trying to get him out of the firing-line of Abbottabad humor … Incontinence doomed Zafar Zulfikar to a crime as heinous as my own. I loved my sister; while he … but let me tell the story the right way up.

Ever since Partition, the Rann had been “disputed territory”; although, in practice, neither side had much heart for the dispute. On the hillocks along the 23 rd parallel, the unofficial frontier, the Pakistan Government had built a string of border posts, each with its lonely garrison of six men and one beacon-light. Several of these posts were occupied on April 9th, 1965, by troops of the Indian Army; a Pakistani force, including my cousin Zafar, which had been in the area on maneuvers, engaged in an eighty-two-day struggle for the frontier. The war in the Rann lasted until July 1st. That much is fact; but everything else lies concealed beneath the doubly hazy air of unreality and make-believe which affected all goings-on in those days, and especially all events in the phantasmagoric Rann … so that the story I am going to tell, which is substantially that told by my cousin Zafar, is as likely to be true as anything; as anything, that is to say, except what we were officially told.

… As the young Pakistani soldiers entered the marshy terrain of the Rann, a cold clammy perspiration broke out on their foreheads, and they were unnerved by the greeny sea-bed quality of the light; they recounted stories which frightened them even more, legends of terrible things which happened in this amphibious zone, of demonic sea-beasts with glowing eyes, of fish-women who lay with their fishy heads underwater, breathing, while their perfectly-formed and naked human lower halves lay on the shore, tempting the unwary into fatal sexual acts, because it is well known that nobody may love a fish-woman and live … so that by the time they reached the border posts and went to war, they were a scared rabble of seventeen-year-old boys, and would certainly have been annihilated, except that the opposing Indians had been subjected to the green air of the Rann even longer than they; so in that sorcerers’ world a crazy war was fought in which each side thought it saw apparitions of devils fighting alongside its foes; but in the end the Indian forces yielded; many of them collapsed in floods of tears and wept, Thank God, it’s over; they told about the great blubbery things which slithered around the border posts at night, and the floating-in-air spirits of drowned men with seaweed wreaths and seashells in their navels.

What the surrendering Indian soldiers said, within my cousin’s hearing: “Anyway, these border posts were unmanned; we just saw them empty and came inside.”

The mystery of the deserted border posts did not, at first, seem like a puzzle to the young Pakistani soldiers who were required to occupy them until new border guards were sent; my cousin Lieutenant Zafar found his bladder and bowels voiding themselves with hysterical frequency for the seven nights he spent occupying one of the posts with only five jawans for company. During nights filled with the shrieks of witches and the nameless slithery shufflings of the dark, the six youngsters were reduced to so abject a state that nobody laughed at my cousin any more, they were all too busy wetting their own pants. One of the jawans whispered in terror during the ghostly evil of their last-but-one night: “Listen, boys, if I had to sit here for a living,