Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [31]
The Convocation offices were on the ground floor of the historical faculty building at the University campus. Abdullah and Nadir were coming to the end of their night’s work; the Hummingbird’s hum was low-pitched and Nadir’s teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the office wall, expressing Abdullah’s favorite anti-Partition sentiment, a quote from the poet Iqbal: “Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?” And now the assassins reached the campus.
Facts: Abdullah had plenty of enemies. The British attitude to him was always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn’t wanted him in town. There was a knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.
“At this point,” the betel-chewers say, “the Hummingbird’s hum became higher. Higher and higher, yara, and the assassin’s eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then—Allah, then!—the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he’d never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now—listen!—Abdullah’s humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair … and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers’ eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!”
They say, “When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt … they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah’s hum had shattered it … they thudded against the door until the wood broke … and then they were everywhere, baba! … some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at least, and some of these were sharp … And now see this: the assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs got them by surprise … the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty-eight dogs on their necks … afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody could say who they were.”
“At some point,” they say, “Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.”
Dogs? Assassins? … If you don’t believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we’ve swept his story under the carpet … then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three years under my family’s rugs.
As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. “Look at me,” he said before he killed himself, “I wanted to be a miniaturist and I