Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [243]
“Plenty shooting! Thaii! Thaii!” He made a pistol with his right hand. He was speaking bad, stilted Hindi. “Ho sirs! India has come, my sirs! Ho yes! Ho yes.”—And all over the field, the crops were leaking nourishing bone-marrow into the soil while he, “No shoot I, my sirs. Ho no. I have news—ho, such news! India comes! Jessore is fall, my sirs; in one-four days, Dacca, also, yes-no?” The buddha listened; the buddha’s eyes looked beyond the peasant to the field. “Such a things, my sir! India! They have one mighty soldier fellow, he can kill six persons at one time, break necks khrikk-khrikk between his knees, my sirs? Knees—is right words?” He tapped his own. “I see, my sirs.With these eyes, ho yes! He fights with not guns, not swords. With knees, and six necks go khrikk-khrikk. Ho God.” Shaheed was vomiting in the field. Farooq Rashid had wandered to the far edge and stood staring into a copse of mango trees. “In one-two weeks is over the war, my sirs! Everybody come back. Just now all gone, but I not, my sirs. Soldiers came looking for Bahini and killed many many, also my son. Ho yes, sirs, ho yes indeed.” The buddha’s eyes had become clouded and dull. In the distance he could hear the crump of heavy artillery. Columns of smoke trailed up into the colorless December sky. The strange crops lay still, unruffled by the breeze … “I say, my sirs. Here I know names of birds and plants. Ho yes. I am Deshmukh by name; vendor of notions by trade. I sell many so-fine thing. You want? Medicine for constipation, damn good, ho yes. I have. Watch you want, glowing in the dark? I also have. And book ho yes, and joke trick, truly. I was famous in Dacca before. Ho yes, most truly. No shoot.”
The vendor of notions chattered on, offering for sale item after item, such as a magical belt which would enable the wearer to speak Hindi—“I am wearing now, my sir, speak damn good, yes no? Many India soldier are buy, they talk so-many different tongues, the belt is godsend from God!”—and then he noticed what the buddha held in his hand. “Ho sir! Absolute master thing! Is silver? Is precious stone? You give; I give radio, camera, almost working order, my sir! Is a damn good deals, my friend. For one spittoon only, is damn fine. Ho yes. Ho yes, my sir, life must go on; trade must go on, my sir, not true?”
“Tell me more,” the buddha said, “about the soldier with the knees.”
But now, once again, a bee buzzes; in the distance, at the far end of the field, somebody drops to his knees; somebody’s forehead touches the ground as if in prayer; and in the field, one of the crops, which had been alive enough to shoot, also becomes very still. Shaheed Dar is shouting a name:
“Farooq! Farooq, man!”
But Farooq refuses to reply.
Afterwards, when the buddha reminisced about the war to his uncle Mustapha, he recounted how he had stumbled across the field of leaking bone-marrow towards his fallen companion; and how, long before he reached Farooq’s praying corpse, he was brought up short by the field’s greatest secret.
There was a small pyramid in the middle of the field. Ants were crawling over it, but it was not an anthill. The pyramid had six feet and three heads and, in between, a jumbled area composed of bits of torso, scraps of uniforms, lengths of intestine and glimpses of shattered bones. The pyramid was still alive. One of its three heads had a blind left eye, the legacy of a childhood argument. Another had hair that was thickly plastered down with hair oil. The third head was the oddest: it had deep hollows where