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By Root 11937 0

”—“Through water, baba, across rocks! Such a tracker, you never saw!”—“And he can’t feel a thing! That’s right? Numb, I swear; head-to-foot numb! You touch him, he wouldn’t know—only by smell he knows you’re there!”—“Must be the war wound!”—“But that spittoon, man, who knows? Carries it everywhere like a love-token!”—“I tell you, I’m glad it’s you three; he gives me the creeps, yaar, it’s those blue eyes.”—“You know how they found out about his nose? He just wandered into a minefield, man, I swear, just picked his way through, like he could smell the damn mines!”—“O, no, man, what are you talking, that’s an old story, that was that first dog in the whole CUTIA operation, that Bonzo, man, don’t mix us up!”—“Hey, you Ayooba, you better watch your step, they say V.I.P.s are keeping their eyes on him!”—“Yah, like I told you, Jamila Singer …”—“O, keep your mouth shut, we all heard enough of your fairytales!”

Once Ayooba, Farooq and Shaheed had become reconciled to their strange, impassive tracker (it was after the incident at the latrines), they gave him the nickname of buddha, “old man”; not just because he must have been seven years their senior, and had actually taken part in the six-years-ago war of ’65, when the three boy soldiers weren’t even in long pants, but because there hung around him an air of great antiquity. The buddha was old before his time.

O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word “buddha,” meaning old man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is also Buddha, with soft-tongued Ds, meaning he-who-achieved-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree … Once upon a time, a prince, unable to bear the suffering of the world, became capable of not-living-in-the-world as well as living in it; he was present, but also absent; his body was in one place, but his spirit was elsewhere. In ancient India, Gautama the Buddha sat enlightened under a tree at Gaya; in the deer park at Sarnath he taught others to abstract themselves from worldly sorrows and achieve inner peace; and centuries later, Saleem the buddha sat under a different tree, unable to remember grief, numb as ice, wiped clean as a slate … With some embarrassment, I am forced to admit that amnesia is the kind of gimmick regularly used by our lurid film-makers. Bowing my head slightly, I accept that my life has taken on, yet again, the tone of a Bombay talkie; but after all, leaving to one side the vexed issue of reincarnation, there is only a finite number of methods of achieving rebirth. So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must doggedly insist that I, he, had begun again; that after years of yearning for importance, he (or I) had been cleansed of the whole business; that after my vengeful abandonment by Jamila Singer, who wormed me into the Army to get me out of her sight, I (or he) accepted the fate which was my repayment for love, and sat uncomplaining under a chinar tree; that, emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I became a citizen of Pakistan.

It was arguably inevitable that, during the months of training, the buddha should begin to irritate Ayooba Baloch. Perhaps it was because he chose to live apart from the soldiers, in a straw-lined ascetic’s stall at the far end of the kennel-barracks; or because he was so often to be found sitting cross-legged under his tree, silver spittoon clutched in hand, with unfocused eyes and a foolish smile on his lips—as if he were actually happy that he’d lost his brains! What’s more, Ayooba, the apostle of meat, may have found his tracker insufficiently virile. “Like a brinjal, man,” I permit Ayooba to complain, “I swear—a vegetable!”

(We may also, taking the wider view, assert that irritation was in the air at the year’s turn. Were not even General Yahya and Mr. Bhutto getting hot and bothered about the petulant insistence of Sheikh Mujib on his right to form the new government? The wretched Bengali’s Awami League had won 160 out of a possible 162 East Wing seats; Mr. Bhutto’s P.P.P. had merely taken 81 Western constituencies.