Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [232]
But we were not in India; vegetarians were not our targets; and after days of cooling our heels, uniforms were issued to us once again. This second transfiguration took place on March 25th.
On March 25th, Yahya and Bhutto abruptly broke off their talks with Mujib and returned to the West Wing. Night fell; Brigadier Iskandar, followed by Najmuddin and Lala Moin, who was staggering under the weight of sixty-one uniforms and nineteen dog-collars, burst into the CUTIA barracks. Now Najmuddin: “Snap to it! Actions not words! One-two double-quick time!” Airline passengers donned uniforms and took up arms; while Brigadier Iskandar at last announced the purpose of our trip. “That Mujib,” he revealed, “We’ll give him whatfor all right. We’ll make him jump for sure!”
(It was on March 25th, after the breakdown of the talks with Bhutto and Yahya, that Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman proclaimed the state of Bangladesh.)
CUTIA units emerged from barracks, piled into waiting jeeps; while, over the loudspeakers of the military base, the recorded voice of Jamila Singer was raised in patriotic hymns. (And Ayooba, nudging the buddha: “Listen, come on, don’t you recognize—think, man, isn’t that your own dear—Allah, this type is good for nothing but sniffing!”)
At midnight—could it, after all, have been at any other time?—sixty thousand crack troops also left their barracks; passengers-who-had-flown-as-civilians now pressed the starter buttons of tanks. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha, however, were personally selected to accompany Brigadier Iskandar on the greatest adventure of the night. Yes, Padma: when Mujib was arrested, it was I who sniffed him out. (They had provided me with one of his old shirts; it’s easy when you’ve got the smell.)
Padma is almost beside herself with anguish. “But mister, you didn’t, can’t have, how would you do such a thing …?” Padma: I did. I have sworn to tell everything; to conceal no shred of the truth. (But there are snail-tracks on her face, and she must have an explanation.)
So—believe me, don’t believe, but this is what it was like!—I must reiterate that everything ended, everything began again, when a spittoon hit me on the back of the head. Saleem, with his desperation for meaning, for worthy purpose, for genius-like-a-shawl, had gone; would not return until a jungle snake—for the moment, anyway, there is was only the buddha; who recognizes no singing voice as his relative; who remembers neither fathers nor mothers; for whom midnight holds no importance; who, some time after a cleansing accident, awoke in a military hospital bed, and accepted the Army as his lot; who submits to the life in which he finds himself, and does his duty; who follows orders; who lives both in-the-world and not-in-the-world; who bows his head; who can track man or beast through streets or down rivers; who neither knows nor cares how, under whose auspices, as a favor to whom, at whose vengeful instigation he was put into uniform; who is, in short, no more and no less than the accredited tracker of CUTIA Unit 22.
But how convenient this amnesia is, how much it excuses! So permit me to criticize myself: the philosophy of acceptance to which the buddha adhered had consequences no more and no less unfortunate than his previous lust-for-centrality; and here, in Dacca, those consequences were being revealed.
“No, not true,” my Padma wails; the same denials have been made about most of what befell that night.
Midnight, March 25th, 1971: past the University, which was being shelled, the buddha led troops to Sheikh Mujib’s lair. Students and lecturers came running out of hostels; they were greeted by bullets, and Mercurochrome stained the lawns. Sheikh Mujib, however, was not shot; manacled, manhandled, he was led by Ayooba Baloch to a waiting van. (As once before, after the revolution of the pepperpots … but Mujib was not naked; he had on a pair of green-and-yellow striped pajamas.) And while we drove through city streets, Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that weren’t-couldn’t-have-been true: soldiers entering