Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [241]
… In an entirely deserted village of thatched huts with dung-plastered mud walls—in an abandoned community from which even the chickens had fled—Ayooba Shaheed Farooq bemoaned their fate. Rendered deaf by the poisonous mud of the rain-forest, a disability which had begun to upset them a good deal now that the taunting voices of the jungle were no longer hanging in the air, they wailed their several wails, all talking at once, none hearing the other; the buddha, however, was obliged to listen to them all: to Ayooba, who stood facing a corner inside a naked room, his hair enmeshed in a spider’s web, crying “My ears my ears, like bees buzzing inside,” to Farooq who, petulantly, shouted, “Whose fault, anyway?—Who, with his nose that could sniff out any bloody thing?—Who said That way, and that way?—And who, who will believe?—About jungles and temples and transparent serpents?—What a story, Allah, buddha, we should shoot you here-and-now!” While Shaheed, softly, “I’m hungry.” Out once more in the real world, they were forgetting the lessons of the jungle, and Ayooba, “My arm! Allah, man, my withered arm! The ghost, leaking fluid … !” And Shaheed, “Deserters, they’ll say—empty-handed, no prisoner, after so-many months!—Allah, a court-martial, maybe, what do you think, buddha?” And Farooq, “You bastard, see what you made us do! O God, too much, our uniforms! See, our uniforms, buddha—rags-and-tatters like a beggar-boy’s! Think of what the Brigadier—and that Najmuddin—on my mother’s head I swear I didn’t—I’m not a coward! Not!” And Shaheed, who is killing ants and licking them off his palm, “How to rejoin, anyway? Who knows where they are or if? And haven’t we seen and heard how Mukti Bahini—thai! thai! they shoot from their hiding-holes, and you’re dead! Dead, like an ant!” But Farooq is also talking, “And not just the uniforms, man, the hair! Is this military haircut? This, so-long, falling over ears like worms? This woman’s hair? Allah, they’ll kill us dead—up against the wall and thai! thai!—you see if they don’t!” But now Ayooba-the-tank is calming down; Ayooba holding his face in his hand; Ayooba saying softly to himself, “O man, O man. I came to fight those damn vegetarian Hindus, man. And here is something too different, man. Something too bad.”
It is somewhere in November; they have been making their way slowly, north north north, past fluttering newspapers in curious curlicued script, through empty fields and abandoned settlements, occasionally passing a crone with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder, or a group of eight-year-olds with shifty starvation in their eyes and the threat of knives in their pockets, hearing how the Mukti Bahini are moving invisibly through the smoking land, how bullets come buzzing like bees-from-nowhere … and now a breaking-point has been reached, and Farooq, “If it wasn’t for you, buddha—Allah, you freak with your blue eyes of a foreigner, O God, yaar, how you stink!”
We all stink: Shaheed, who is crushing (with tatter-booted heel) a scorpion on the dirty floor of the abandoned hut; Farooq, searching absurdly for a knife with which to cut his hair; Ayooba, leaning his head against a corner of the hut while a spider walks along the crown; and the buddha, too: the buddha, who stinks to heaven, clutches in his right hand a tarnished silver spittoon, and is trying to recall his name. And can summon up only nicknames: Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Piece-of-the-Moon.
… He sat cross-legged amid the wailing storm of his companions’ fear, forcing himself to remember; but no, it would not come. And at last the buddha, hurling spittoon against earthen floor, exclaimed to stone-deaf ears: “It’s not—NOT—FAIR!”
In the midst of the rubble of war, I discovered fair-and-unfair.