Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [230]
Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various CUTIA units being sent away from the camp, into action; and became convinced that his time, and the time of the pomegranate, was very near. From departures of three-men-and-a-dog units in camoflaged jeeps, he deduced a growing political crisis; it was February, and the irritations of the exalted were becoming daily more marked. Ayooba-the-tank, however, retained a local point of view. His irritation was also mounting, but its object was the buddha.
Ayooba had become infatuated with the only female in the camp, a skinny latrine-cleaner who couldn’t have been over fourteen and whose nipples were only just beginning to push against her tattered shirt: a low type, certainly, but she was all that there was, and for a latrine-cleaner she had very nice teeth and a pleasant line in saucy over-the-shoulder glances … Ayooba began to follow her around, and that was how he spied her going into the buddha’s straw-lined stall, and that was why he leaned a bicycle against the building and stood on the seat, and that was why he fell off, because he didn’t like what he saw. Afterwards he spoke to the latrine girl, grabbing her roughly by the arm: “Why do it with that crazy—why, when I, Ayooba, am, could be—?” and she replied that she liked the man-dog, he’s funny, says he can’t feel anything, he rubs his hosepipe inside me but can’t even feel, but it’s nice, and he tells that he likes my smell. The frankness of the urchin girl, the honesty of latrine-cleaners, made Ayooba sick; he told her she had a soul composed of pig-droppings, and a tongue caked with excrement also; and in the throes of his jealousy he devised the prank of the jump-leads, the trick of the electrified urinal. The location appealed to him; it had a certain poetic justice.
“Can’t feel, huh?” Ayooba sneered to Farooq and Shaheed, “Just wait on: I’ll make him jump for sure.”
On February 10th (when Yahya, Bhutto and Mujib were refusing to engage in high-level talks), the buddha felt the call of nature. A somewhat concerned Shaheed and a gleeful Farooq loitered by the latrines; while Ayooba, who had used jump-leads to attach the metal footplates of the urinals to the battery of a jeep, stood out of sight behind the latrine hut, beside the jeep, whose motor was running. The buddha appeared, with his eyes as dilated as a charas-chewer’s and his gait of walking-through-a-cloud, and as he floated into the latrine Farooq called out, “Ohé! Ayooba, yara!” and began to giggle. The child-soldiers awaited the howl of mortified anguish which would be the sign that their vacuous tracker had begun to piss, allowing electricity to mount the golden stream and sting him in his numb and urchin-rubbing hosepipe.
But no shriek came; Farooq, feeling confused and cheated, began to frown; and as time went by Shaheed grew nervous and yelled over to Ayooba Baloch, “You Ayooba! What you doing, man?” To which Ayooba-the-tank, “What d’you think, yaar, I turned on the juice five minutes ago!” … And now Shaheed ran—FULL TILT!—into the latrine, to find the buddha urinating away with an expression of foggy pleasure, emptying a bladder which must have been filling up for a fortnight, while the current passed up into him through his nether cucumber, apparently unnoticed, so that he was filling up with electricity and there was a blue crackle playing around the end of his gargantuan nose; and Shaheed who didn’t have the courage to touch this impossible being who could absorb electricity through his hosepipe screamed, “Disconnect, man, or he’ll fry like an onion here!” The buddha emerged from the latrine, unconcerned, buttoning himself with his right hand while the left hand held his silver spittoon; and the three child-soldiers understood that it was really true, Allah, numb as ice, anesthetized against feelings as well as memories … For a week after the incident, the buddha could not