Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [246]
Who can say why how who; but the grenade was certainly thrown. In that last instant of his un-bisected life, Shaheed was suddenly seized by an irresistible urge to look up … afterwards, in the muezzin’s roost, he told the buddha, “So strange, Allah—the pomegranate—in my head, just like that, bigger an’ brighter than ever before—you know, buddha, like a light-bulb—Allah, what could I do, I looked!”—And yes, it was there, hanging above his head, the grenade of his dreams, hanging just above his head, falling falling, exploding at waist-level, blowing his legs away to some other part of the city.
When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and pointed up, “Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want,” so I carried what was now only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral stairs to the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of light-bulbs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach, battling away along the trowel-furrows in the crudely-laid concrete floor. Down below, amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke-haze, ant-like people were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the ant-like, and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and the eyrie’s one piece of furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to a loudspeaker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the disillusioning sight of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would always be scratched in the same places, extracted from the folds of his shapeless robe a glinting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver spittoon. Lost in contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams began; and looked up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping along trowel-furrows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived at the source of the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the victim of not one, but two wars.)
Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony of war.
After a few moments, silence. Shaheed’s head slumped forward. And the buddha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city as the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assist at the peace-making banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning streets to welcome General Sam.
In the minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha’s mind had not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed’s top half had also kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking of onions, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch—until the bee, buzzing … “It’s not fair,” the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, “It’s not fair,” and again, and again.
Shaheed, fulfilling his father’s dearest wish, had finally earned his name; but the buddha could still not remember his own.
How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another independence day, the world had been saffron and green. This morning, the colors were green, red and gold. And in the cities, cries of “Jai Bangla!” And voices of women singing “Our Golden Bengal,” maddening their hearts with delight … in the center of the city, on the podium of his defeat, General Tiger Niazi awaited General Manekshaw. (Biographical details: Sam was a Parsee. He came from Bombay. Bombayites were in for happy times that day.) And amid green and red and gold, the buddha in his shapeless anonymous garment was jostled by crowds; and then India came. India, with Sam at her head.
Was it General Sam’s idea? Or even Indira’s?—Eschewing these fruitless questions, I record only that the Indian advance into Dacca