At that time, Ayooba and Farooq were sixteen and a half years old. Shaheed (who had lied about his age) was perhaps a year younger. Because they were so young, and had not had time to acquire the type of memories which give men a firm hold on reality, such as memories of love or famine, the boy soldiers were highly susceptible to the influence of legends and gossip. Within twenty-four hours, in the course of mess-hall conversations with other cutia units, the man-dog had been fully mythologized… 'From a really important family, man!'-'The idiot child, they put him in the Army to make a man of him!'-'Had a war accident in '65, yaar, can't won't remember a thing about it!'-'Listen, I heard he was the brother of-'No, man, that's crazy, she is good, you know, so simple and holy, how would she leave her brother?'-'Anyway he refuses to talk about it.'-'I heard one terrible thing, she hated him, man, that's why she!'-'No memory, not interested in people, lives like a dog!'-'But the tracking business is true all right! You see that nose on him?'-'Yah, man, he can follow any trail on earth!'-'Through water, baba, across rocks! Such a tracker, you never saw!'-'And he can't feel a thing! That's right! Numb, I swear; head-to-foot numb! You touch him, he wouldn't know-only by smell he knows you're there!'-'Must be the war wound!'-'But that spittoon, man, who knows? Carries it everywhere like a love-token!'-'I tell you, I'm glad it's you three; he gives me the creeps, yaar, it's those blue eyes.'-'You know how they found out about his nose? He just wandered into a minefield, man, I swear, just picked his way through, like he could smell the damn mines!'-'O, no, man, what are you talking, that's an old story, that was that first dog in the whole cutia operation, that Bonzo, man, don't mix us up!'-Hey, you Ayooba, you better watch your step, they say V.I.P.s are keeping their eyes on him!'-'Yah, like I told you, Jamila Singer…»-'O, keep your mouth shut, we all heard enough of your fairy-tales!'
   Once Ayooba, Farooq and Shaheed had become reconciled to their strange, impassive tracker (it was after the incident at the latrines), they gave him the nickname of buddha, 'old man'; not just because he must have been seven years their senior, and had actually taken part in the six-years-ago war of '65, when the three boy soldiers weren't even in long pants, but because there hung around him an air of great antiquity. The buddha was old before his time.
   O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The Urdu word 'buddha', meaning old man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is also Buddha, with soft-tongued Ds, meaning he-who-achieved-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree… Once upon a time, a prince, unable to bear the suffering of the world, became capable of not-living-in-the-world as well as living in it; he was present, but also absent; his body was in one place, but his spirit was elsewhere. In ancient India, Gautama the Buddha sat enlightened under a tree at Gaya; in the deer park at Sarnath he taught others to abstract themselves from worldly sorrows and achieve inner peace; and centuries later, Saleem the buddha sat under a different tree, unable to remember grief, numb as ice, wiped clean as a slate… With some embarrassment, I am forced to admit that amnesia is the kind of gimmick regularly used by our lurid film-makers. Bowing my head slightly, I accept that my life has taken on, yet again, the tone of a Bombay talkie; but after all, leaving to one side the vexed issue of reincarnation, there is only a finite number of methods of achieving rebirth. So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must doggedly insist that I, he, had begun again; that after years of yearning for importance, he (or I) had been cleansed of the whole business; that after my vengeful abandonment by Jamila Singer, who wormed me into the Army to get me out her sight, I (or he) accepted the fate which was my repayment for love, and sat uncomplaining under a chinar tree; that, emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I became a citizen of Pakistan.

   It was arguably inevitable that, during the months of training, the buddha should begin to irritate Ayooba Baloch. Perhaps it was because he chose to live apart from the soldiers, in a straw-lined ascetic's stall at the far end of the kennel-barracks; or because he was so often to be found sitting cross-legged under his tree, silver spittoon clutched in hand, with unfocused eyes and a foolish smile on his lips-as if he were actually happy that he'd lost his brains! What's more, Ayooba, the apostle of meat, may have found his tracker insufficiently virile. 'Like a brinjal, man,' I permit Ayooba to complain, 'I swear-a vegetable!'
   (We may also, taking the wider view, assert that irritation was in the air at the year's turn. Were not even General Yahya and Mr Bhutto getting hot and bothered about the petulant insistence of Sheikh Mujib on his right to form the new government? The wretched Bengali's Awami League had won 160 out of a possible 162 East Wing seats; Mr Bhutto's P.P.P. had merely taken 81 Western constituencies. Yes, an irritating election. It is easy to imagine how irked Yahya and Bhutto, West Wingers both, must have been! And when even the mighty wax peevish, how is one to blame the small man? The irritation of Ayooba Baloch, let us conclude, placed him in excellent, Dot to say exalted company.)
   On training manoeuvres, when Ayooba Shaheed Farooq scrambled after the buddha as he followed the faintest of trails across bush rocks streams, the three boys were obliged to admit his skill; but still Ayooba, tank-like, demanded: 'Don't you remember really? Nothing? Allah, you don't feel bad? Somewhere you've maybe got mother father sister,' but the buddha interrupted him gently: 'Don't try and fill my head with that history. I am who I am, that's all there is.' His accent was so pure, 'Really classy Lucknow-type Urdu, wah-wah!' Farooq said admiringly, that Ayooba Baloch, who spoke coarsely, like a tribesman, fell silent; and the three boys began to believe the rumours even more fervently. They were unwillingly fascinated by this man with his nose like a cucumber and his head which rejected memories families histories, which contained absolutely nothing except smells… 'like a bad egg that somebody sucked dry,' Ayooba muttered to his companions, and then, returning to his central theme, added, 'Allah, even his nose looks like a vegetable.'
   Their uneasiness lingered. Did they sense, in the buddha's numbed blankness, a trace of 'undesirability'?-For was not his rejection of past-and-family just the type of subversive behaviour they were dedicated to 'rooting out'? The camp's officers, however, were deaf to Ayooba's requests of 'Sir sir can't we just have a real dog sir?'… so that Farooq, a born follower who had already adopted Ayooba as his leader and hero, cried, 'What to do? With that guy's family contacts, some high-ups must've told the Brigadier to put up with him, that's all.'
   And (although none of the trio would have been able to express the idea) I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, the country's East and West Wings were separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now. Enough philosophizing: what I am saying is that by abandoning consciousness, seceding from history, the buddha was setting the worst of examples-and the example was followed by no less a personage than Sheikh Mujib, when he led the East Wing into secession and declared it independent as 'Bangladesh'! Yes, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were right to feel ill-at-ease-because even in those depths of my withdrawal from responsibility, I remained responsible, through the workings of the metaphorical modes of connection, for the belligerent events of 1971.
   But I must go back to my new companions, so that I can relate the incident at the latrines: there was Ayooba, tank-like, who led the unit, and Farooq, who followed contentedly. The third youth, however, was a gloomier, more private type, and as such closest to my heart. On his fifteenth birthday Shaheed Dar had lied about his age and enlisted. That day, his Punjabi sharecropper father had taken Shaheed into a field and wept all over his new uniform. Old Dar told his son the meaning of his name, which was 'martyr', and expressed the hope that he would prove worthy of it, and perhaps become the first of their family members to enter the perfumed garden, leaving behind this pitiful world in which a father could not hope to pay his debts and also feed his nineteen children. The overwhelming power of names, and the resulting approach of martyrdom, had begun to prey heavily on Shaheed's mind; in his dreams, he began to see his death, which took the form of a bright pomegranate, and floated in mid-air behind him, following him everywhere, biding its time. The disturbing and somewhat unheroic vision of pomegranate death made Shaheed an inward, unsmiling fellow.
   Inwardly, unsmilingly, Shaheed observed various cutia units being sent away from the camp, into action; and became convinced that his time, and the time of the pomegranate, was very near. From departures of three-men-and-a-dog units in camouflaged jeeps, he deduced a growing political crisis; it was February, and the irritations of the exalted were becoming daily more marked. Ayooba-the-tank, however, retained a local point of view. His irritation was also mounting, but its object was the buddha.
   Ayooba had become infatuated with the only female in the camp, a skinny latrine cleaner who couldn't have been over fourteen and whose nipples were only just beginning to push against her tattered shirt: a low type, certainly, but she was all that there was, and for a latrine cleaner she had very nice teeth and a pleasant line in saucy over-the-shoulder glances… Ayooba began to follow her around, and that was how he spied her going into the buddha's straw-lined stall, and that was why he leaned a bicycle against the building and stood on the seat, and that was why he fell off, because he didn't like what he saw. Afterwards he spoke to the latrine girl, grabbing her roughly by the arm: 'Why do it with that crazy-why, when I, Ayooba, am, could be-?' and she replied that she liked the man-dog, he's funny, says he can't feel anything, he rubs his hosepipe inside me but can't even feel, but it's nice, and he tells that he likes my smell. The frankness of the urchin girl, the honesty of latrine cleaners, made Ayooba sick; he told her she had a soul composed of pig-droppings, and a tongue caked with excrement also; and in the throes of his jealousy he devised the prank of the jump-leads, the trick of the electrified urinal. The location appealed to him; it had a certain poetic justice.

   'Can't feel, huh?' Ayooba sneered to Farooq and Shaheed, 'Just wait on: I'll make him jump for sure.'
   On February loth (when Vahya, Bhutto and Mujib were refusing to engage in high-level talks), the buddha felt the call of nature. A somewhat concerned Shaheed and a gleeful Farooq loitered by the latrines; while Ayooba, who had used jump-leads to attach the metal footplates of the urinals to the battery of a jeep, stood out of sight behind the latrine hut, beside the jeep, whose motor was running. The buddha appeared, with his eyes as dilated as a charas-chewer's and his gait of walking-through-a-cloud, and as he floated into the latrine Farooq called out, 'Ohe! Ayooba, yara!' and began to giggle. The childsoldiers awaited the howl of mortified anguish which would be the sign that their vacuous tracker had begun to piss, allowing electricity to mount the golden stream and sting him in his numb and urchin-rubbing hosepipe.
   But no shriek came; Farooq, feeling confused and cheated, began to frown; and as time went by Shaheed grew nervous and yelled over to Ayooba Baloch, 'You Ayooba! What you doing, man?' To which Ayooba-the-tank, 'What d'you think, yaar, I turned on the juice five minutes ago!'… And now Shaheed ran-full tilt!-into the latrine, to find the buddha urinating away with an expression of foggy pleasure, emptying a bladder which must have been filling up for a fortnight, while the current passed up into him through his nether cucumber, apparently unnoticed, so that he was filling up with electrkity and there was a blue crackle playing around the end of his gargantuan nose; and Shaheed who didn't have the courage to touch this impossible being who could absorb electricity through his hosepipe screamed, 'Disconnect, man, or he'll fry like an onion here!' The buddha emerged from the latrine, unconcerned, buttoning himself with his right hand while the left hand held his silver spittoon; and the three child-soldiers understood that it was really true, Allah, numb as ice, anaesthetized against feelings as well as memories… For a week after the incident, the buddha could not be touched without giving an electric shock, and not even the latrine girl could visit him in his stall.
   Curiously, after the jump-lead business, Ayooba Baloch stopped resenting the buddha, and even began to treat him with respect; the canine unit was forged by that bizarre moment into a real team, and was ready to venture forth against the evildoers of the earth.

   Ayooba-the-tank failed to give the buddha a shock; but where the small man fails, the mighty triumph. (When Yahya and Bhutto decided to make Sheikh Mujib jump, there were no mistakes.)
   On March 15th, 1971, twenty units of the CUTIa agency assembled in a hut with a blackboard. The garlanded features of the President gazed down upon sixty-one men and nineteen dogs; Yahya Khan had just offered Mujib the olive branch of immediate talks with himself and Bhutto, to resolve all irritations; but his portrait maintained an impeccable poker-face, giving no clue to his true, shocking intentions… while Brigadier Iskandar rubbed knuckles on lapels, Sgt-Mjr Najmuddin issued orders: sixty-one men and nineteen dogs were instructed to shed their uniforms. A tumultuous rustling in the hut: obeying without query, nineteen individuals remove identifying collars from canine necks. The dogs, excellently trained, cock eyebrows but refrain from giving voice; and the buddha, dutifully, begins to undress. Five dozen fellow humans follow his lead; five dozen stand to attention in a trice, shivering in the cold, beside neat piles of military berets pants shoes shirts and green pullovers with leather patches at the elbows. Sixty-one men, naked except for imperfect underwear, are issued (by Lala Moin the batman) with Army-approved mufti. Najmuddin barks a command; and then there they all are, some in lungis and kurtas, some in Pathan turbans. There are men in cheap rayon pants and men in striped clerks' shirts. The buddha is in dhoti and kameez; he is comfortable, but around him are soldiers squirming in ill-fitting plain-clothes. This is, however, a military operation; no voice, human or canine, is raised in complaint.
   On March 15th, after obeying sartorial instructions, twenty cutia units were flown to Dacca, via Ceylon; among them were Shaheed Dar, Farooq Rashid, Ayooba Baloch and their buddha. Also flying to the East Wing by this circuitous route were sixty thousand of the West Wing's toughest troops: sixty thousand, like sixty-one, were all in mufti. The General Officer Commanding (in a nattily blue double-breasted suit) was Tikka Khan; the officer responsible for Dacca, for its taming and eventual surrender, was called Tiger Niazi. He wore bush-shirt, slacks and a jaunty little trilby on his head.
   Via Ceylon we flew, sixty thousand and sixty-one innocent airline passengers, avoiding overflying India, and thus losing our chance of watching, from twenty thousand feet, the celebrations of Indira Gandhi's New Congress Party, which had won a landslide victory-350 out of a possible 515 seats in the Lok Sabha-in another recent election. Indira-ignorant, unable to see her campaign slogan, garibi hatao, Get Rid of Poverty, blazoned on walls and banners across the great diamond of India, we landed in Dacca in the early spring, and were driven in specially-requisitioned civilian buses to a military camp. On this last stage of our journey, however, we were unable to avoid hearing a snatch of song, issuing from some unseen gramophone. The song was called 'Amar Sonar Bangla' ('Our Golden Bengal', author: R. Tagore) and ran, in part: 'During spring the fragrance of your mango-groves maddens my heart with delight.' However, none of us could understand Bengali, so we were protected against the insidious subversion of the lyric, although our feet did inadvertently tap (it must be admitted) to the tune.
   At first, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha were not told the name of the city to which they had come. Ayooba, envisaging the destruction of vegetarians, whispered: 'Didn't I tell you? Now we'll show them! Spy stuff, man! Plain clothes and all! Up and at 'em, Number 22 Unit! Ka-bang! Ka-dang! Ka-pow!'
   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 what-for 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 favour 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 women's hostels without knocking; women, dragged into the street, were also entered, and again nobody troubled' to knock. And newspaper offices, burning with the dirty yellowblack smoke of cheap gutter newsprint, and the offices of trade unions, smashed to the ground, and roadside ditches filling up with people who were not merely asleep-bare chests were seen, and the hollow pimples of bullet-holes. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq watched in silence through moving windows as our boys, our soldiers-for-Allah, our worth-ten-babus jawans held Pakistan together by turning flamethrowers machine-guns hand-grenades on the city slums. By the time we brought Sheikh Mujib to the airport, where Ayooba stuck a pistol into his rump and pushed him on to an aircraft which flew him into West Wing captivity, the buddha had closed his eyes. ('Don't fill my head with all this history,' he had once told Ayooba-the-tank, 'I am what I am and that's all there is.')
   And Brigadier Iskandar, rallying his troops: 'Even now there are subversive elements to be rooted out.'

  When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy… dog-soldiers strain at the leash, and then, released, leap joyously to their work. O wolfhound chases of undesirables! O prolific seizings of professors and poets! O unfortunate shot-while-resisting arrests of Awami Leaguers and fashion correspondents! Dogs of war cry havoc in the city; but although tracker-dogs are tireless, soldiers are weaker: Farooq Shaheed Ayooba take turns at vomiting as their nostrils are assailed by the stench of burning slums. The buddha, in whose nose the stench spawns images of searing vividness, continues merely to do his job. Nose them out: leave the rest to the soldier-boys. cutia units stalk the smouldering wreck of the city. No undesirable is safe tonight; no hiding-place impregnable. Bloodhounds track the fleeing enemies of national unity; wolfhounds, not to be outdone, sink fierce teeth into their prey.
   How many arrests-ten, four-hundred-and-twenty, one-thousand-and-one?-did our own Number 22 Unit make that night? How many intellectual lily-livered Daccans hid behind women's saris and had to be yanked into the streets? How often did Brigadier Iskandar-'Smell this! That's the stink of subversion!'-unleash the war-hounds of unity? There are things which took place on the night of March 25th which must remain permanently in a state of confusion.

   Futility of statistics: during 1971, ten million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh into India-but ten million (like all numbers larger than one thousand and one) refuses to be understood. Comparisons do not help: 'the biggest migration in the history of the human race'-meaningless. Bigger than Exodus, larger than the Partition crowds, the many-headed monster poured into India. On the border, Indian soldiers trained the guerrillas known as Mukti Bahini; in Dacca, Tiger Niazi ruled the roost.
   And Ayooba Shaheed Farooq? Our boys in green? How did they take to battling against fellow meat-eaters? Did they mutiny? Were officers-Iskandar, Najmuddin, even Lala Moin-riddled with nauseated bullets? They were not. Innocence had been lost; but despite a new grimness about the eyes, despite the irrevocable loss of certainty, despite the eroding of moral absolutes, the unit went on with its work. The buddha was not the only one who did as he was told… while somewhere high above the struggle, the voice of Jamila Singer fought anonymous voices singing the lyrics of R. Tagore: 'My life passes in the shady village homes filled with rice from your fields; they madden my heart with delight.'
   Their hearts maddened, but not with delight, Ayooba and company followed orders; the buddha followed scent-trails. Into the heart of the city, which has turned violent maddened bloodsoaked as the West Wing soldiers react badly to their knowledge-of-wrongdoing, goes Number 22 Unit; through the blackened streets, the buddha concentrates on the ground, sniffing out trails, ignoring the ground-level chaos of cigarette-packs cow-dung fallen-bicycles abandoned-shoes; and then on other assignments, out into the countryside, where entire villages are being burned owing to their collective responsibility for harbouring Mukti Bahini, the buddha and three boys track down minor Awami League officials and well-known Communist types. Past migrating villagers with bundled possessions on their heads; past torn-up railway tracks and burnt-out trees; and always, as though some invisible force were directing their footsteps, drawing them into a darker heart of madness, their missions send them south south south, always nearer to the sea, to the mouths of the Ganges and the sea.
   And at last-who were they following then? Did names matter any more?-they were given a quarry whose skills must have been the equal-and-opposite of the buddha's own, otherwise why did it take so long to catch him? At last-unable to escape their training, pursue-relentlessly-arrest-remorselessly, they are in the midst of a mission without an end, pursuing a foe who endlessly eludes them, but they cannot report back to base empty-handed, and on they go, south south south, drawn by the eternally-receding scent-trail; and perhaps by something more: because, in my life, fate has never been unwilling to lend a hand.

   They have commandeered a boat, because the buddha said the trail led down the river; hungry unslept exhausted in a universe of abandoned rice-paddies, they row after their unseen prey; down the great brown river they go, until the war is too far away to remember, but still the scent leads them on. The river here has a familiar name: Padma. But the name is a local deception; in reality the river is still Her, the mother-water, goddess Ganga streaming down to earth through Shiva's hair. The buddha has not spoken for days; he just points, there, that way, and on they go, south south south to the sea.
   A nameless morning. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq awaking in the boat of their absurd pursuit, moored by the bank of Padma-Ganga-to find him gone. 'Allah-Allah,' Farooq yelps, 'Grab your ears and pray for pity, he's brought us to this drowned place and run off, it's all your fault, you Ayooba, that trick with the jump-leads and this is his revenge!'… The sun, climbing. Strange alien birds in the sky. Hunger and fear like mice in their bellies: and whatif, whatif the Mukti Bahini… parents are invoked. Shaheed has dreamed his pomegranate dream. Despair, lapping at the edges of the boat. And in the distance, near the horizon, an impossible endless huge green wall, stretching right and left to the ends of the earth! Unspoken fear: how can it be, how can what we are seeing be true, who builds walls across the world?… And then Ayooba, 'Look-look, Allah!' Because coming towards them across the rice-paddies is a bizarre slow-motion chase: first the buddha with that cucumber-nose, you could spot it a mile off, and following him, splashing through paddies, a gesticulating peasant with a scythe, Father Time enraged, while running along a dyke a woman with her sari caught up between her legs, hair loose, voice pleading screaming, while the scythed avenger stumbles through drowned rice, covered from head to foot in water and mud. Ayooba roars with nervous relief: 'The old billy-goat! Couldn't keep his hands off the local women! Come on, buddha, don't let him catch you, he'll slice off both your cucumbers!' And Farooq, 'But then what? If the buddha is sliced, what then?' And now Ayooba-the-tank is pulling a pistol out of its holster. Ayooba aiming: both hands held out in front, trying not to shake, Ayooba squeezing: a scythe curves up into the air. And slowly slowly the arms of a peasant rise up as though in prayer; knees kneel in paddy-water; a face plunges below the water-level to touch its forehead to the earth. On the dyke a woman wailing. And Ayooba tells the buddha: 'Next time I'll shoot you instead.' Ayooba-the-tank shaking like a leaf. And Time lies dead in a rice-paddy.
   But there is still the meaningless chase, the enemy who will never be seen, and the buddha, 'Go that way,' and the four of them row on, south south south, they have murdered the hours and forgotten the date, they no longer know if they are chasing after or running from, but whichever it is that pushes them is bringing them closer closer to the impossible green wall, 'That way,' the buddha insists, and then they are inside it, the jungle which is so thick that history has hardly ever found the way in. The Sundarbans: it swallows them up

In the Sundarbans

   I'll own up: there was no last, elusive quarry, driving us south south south. To all my readers, I should like to make this naked-breasted admission: while Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were unable to distinguish between chasing-after and running-from, the buddha knew what he was doing. Although I'm well aware that I am providing any future commentators or venom-quilled critics (to whom I say: twice before, I've been subjected to snake-poison; on both occasions, I proved stronger than venenes) with yet more ammunition-through admission-of-guilt, revelation-of-moral-turpitude, proof-of-coward-ice-I'm-bound to say that he, the buddha, finally incapable of continuing in the submissive performance of his duty, took to his heels and fled. Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of pessimism futility shame, he deserted, into the historyless anonymity of rain-forests, dragging three children in his wake. What I hope to immortalize in pickles as well as words: that condition of the spirit in which the consequences of acceptance could not be denied, in which an overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of dreams… But the jungle, like all refuges, was entirely other-was both less and more-than he had expected.
   'I am glad,' my Padma says, 'I am happy you ran away.' But I insist: not I. He. He, the buddha. Who, until the snake, would remain not-Saleem; who, in spite of running-from, was still separated from his past; although he clutched, in his limpet fist, a certain silver spittoon.

   The jungle closed behind them like a tomb, and after hours of increasingly weary but also frenzied rowing through incomprehensibly labyrinthine salt-water channels overtowered by the cathedral-arching trees, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were hopelessly lost; they turned time and again to the buddha, who pointed, 'That way', and then, 'Down there', but although they rowed feverishly, ignoring fatigue, it seems as if the possibility of ever leaving this place receded before them like the lantern of a ghost; until at length they rounded on their supposedly infallible tracker, and perhaps saw some small light of shame or relief glowing in his habitually milky-blue eyes; and now Farooq whispered in the sepulchral greenness of the forest: 'You don't know. You're just saying anything.' The buddha remained silent, but in his silence they read their fate, and now that he was convinced that the jungle had swallowed them the way a toad gulps down a mosquito, now that he was sure he would never see the sun again, Ayooba Baloch, Ayooba-the-tank himself, broke down utterly and wept like a monsoon. The incongruous spectacle of this huge figure with a crew-cut blubbering like a baby served to detach Farooq and Shaheed from their senses; so that Farooq almost upset the boat by attacking the buddha, who mildly bore all the fist-blows which rained down on his chest shoulders arms, until Shaheed pulled Farooq down for the sake of safety. Ayooba Baloch cried without stopping for three entire hours or days or weeks, until the rain began and made his tears unnecessary; and Shaheed Dar heard himself saying, 'Now look what you started, man, with your crying,' proving that they were already beginning to succumb to the logic of the jungle, and that was only the start of it, because as the mystery of evening compounded the unreality of the trees, the Sundarbans began to grow in the rain.
   At first they were so busy baling out their boat that they did not notice; also, the water-level was rising, which may have confused them; but in the last light there could be no doubt that the jungle was gaining in size, power and ferocity; the huge stilt-roots of vast ancient mangrove trees could be seen snaking about thirstily in the dusk, sucking in the rain and becoming thicker than elephants' trunks, while the mangroves themselves were getting so tall that, as Shaheed Dar said afterwards, the birds at the top must have been able to sing to God. The leaves in the heights of the great nipa palms began to spread like immense green cupped hands, swelling in the nocturnal downpour until the entire forest seemed to be thatched; and then the nipa-fruits began to fall, they were larger than any coconuts on earth and gathered speed alarmingly as they fell from dizzying heights to explode like bombs in the water. Rainwater was filling their boat; they had only their soft green caps and an old ghee tin to bale with; and as night fell and the nipa-fruits bombed them from the air, Shaheed Dar said, 'Nothing else to do-we must land,' although his thoughts were full of his pomegranate-dream and it crossed his mind that this might be where it came true, even if the fruits were different here.
   While Ayooba sat in a red-eyed funk and Farooq seemed destroyed by his hero's disintegration; while the buddha remained silent and bowed his head, Shaheed alone remained capable of thought, because although he was drenched and worn out and the night-jungle screeched around him, his head became partly clear whenever he thought about the pomegranate of his death; so it was Shaheed who ordered us, them, to row our, their, sinking boat to shore.
   A nipa-fruit missed the boat by an inch and a half, creating such turbulence in the water that they capsized; they struggled ashore in the dark holding guns oilskins ghee-tin above their heads, pulled the boat up after themselves, and past caring about bombarding nipa palms and snaking mangroves, fell into their sodden craft and slept. When they awoke, soaking-shivering in spite of the heat, the rain had become a heavy drizzle. They found their bodies covered in three-inch-long leeches which were almost entirely colourless owing to the absence of direct sunlight, but which had now turned bright red because they were full of blood, and which, one by one, exploded on the bodies of the four human beings, being too greedy to stop sucking when they were full. Blood trickled down legs and on to the forest floor; the jungle sucked it in, and knew what they were like.
   When the falling nipa-fruits smashed on the jungle floor, they, too, exuded a liquid the colour of blood, a red milk which was immediately covered in a million insects, including giant flies as transparent as the leeches. The flies, too, reddened as they filled up with the milk of the fruit… all through the night, it seemed, the Sundarbans had continued to grow. Tallest of all were the sundri trees which had given their name to the jungle; trees high enough to block out even the faintest hope of sun. The four of us, them, climbed out of the boat; and only when they set foot on a hard bare soil crawling with pale pink scorpions and a seething mass of dun-coloured earthworms did they remember their hunger and thirst. Rainwater poured off leaves all around them, and they turned their mouths up to the roof of the jungle and drank; but perhaps because the water came to them by way of sundri leaves and mangrove branches and nipa fronds, it acquired on its journey something of the insanity of the jungle, so that as they drank they fell deeper and deeper into the thraldom of that livid green world where the birds had voices like creaking wood and all the snakes were blind. In the turbid, miasmic state of mind which the jungle induced, they prepared their first meal, a combination of nipa-fruits and mashed earthworms, which inflicted on them all a diarrhoea so violent that they forced themselves to examine the excrement in case their intestines had fallen out in the mess.
   Farooq said, 'We're going to die.' But Shaheed was possessed by a powerful lust for survival; because, having recovered from the doubts of the night, he had become convinced that this was not how he was supposed to go.
   Lost in the rain-forest, and aware that the lessening of the monsoon was only a temporary respite, Shaheed decided that there was little point in attempting to find a way out when, at any moment, the returning monsoon might sink their inadequate craft; under his instructions, a shelter was constructed from oilskins and palm fronds; Shaheed said, 'As long as we stick to fruit, we can survive.' They bad all long ago forgotten the purpose of their journey; the chase, which had begun far away in the real world, acquired in the altered light of the Sundarbans a quality of absurd fantasy which enabled them to dismiss it once and for all.
   So it was that Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha surrendered themselves to the terrible phantasms of the dream-forest. The days passed, dissolving into each other under the force of the returning rain, and despite chills fevers diarrhoea they stayed alive, improving their shelter by pulling down the lower branches of sundris and mangroves, drinking the red milk of nipa-fruits, acquiring the skills of survival, such as the power of strangling snakes and throwing sharpened sticks so accurately that they speared multicoloured birds through their gizzards. But one night Ayooba awoke in the dark to find the translucent figure of a peasant with a bullet-hole in his heart and a scythe in his hand staring mournfully down at him, and as he struggled to get out of the boat (which they had pulled in, under the cover of their primitive shelter) the peasant leaked a colourless fluid which flowed out of the hole in his heart and on to Ayooba's gun arm. The next morning Ayooba's right arm refused to move; it hung rigidly by his side as if it had been set in plaster. Although Farooq Rashid offered help and sympathy, it was no use; the arm was held immovably in the invisible fluid of the ghost.
   After this first apparition, they fell into a state of mind in which they would have believed the forest capable of anything; each night it sent them new punishments, the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked down and seized, the screaming and monkey-gibbering of children left fatherless by their work… and in this first time, the time of punishment, even the impassive buddha with his citified voice was obliged to confess that he, too, had taken to waking up at night to find the forest closing in upon him like a vice, so that he felt unable to breathe.
   When it had punished them enough-when they were all trembling shadows of the people they had once been-the jungle permitted them the double-edged luxury of nostalgia. One night Ayooba, who was regressing towards infancy faster than any of them, and had begun to suck his one moveable thumb, saw his mother looking down at him, offering him the delicate rice-based sweets of her love; but at the same moment as he reached out for the laddoos, she scurried away, and he saw her climb a giant sundri-tree to sit swinging from a high branch by her tail: a white wraithlike monkey with the face of his mother visited Ayooba night after night, so that after a time he was obliged to remember more about her than her sweets: how she had liked to sit among the boxes of her dowry, as though she, too, were simply some sort of thing, simply one of the gifts her father gave to her husband; in the heart of the Sundarbans, Ayooba Baloch understood his mother for the first time, and stopped sucking his thumb. Farooq Rashid, too, was given a vision. At dusk one day he thought he saw his brother running wildly through the forest, and became convinced that his father had died. He remembered a forgotten day when his peasant father had told him and his fleet-footed brother that the local landlord, who lent money at 300 per cent, had agreed to buy his soul in return for the latest loan. 'When I die,' old Rashid told Farooq's brother, 'you must open your mouth and my spirit will fly inside it; then run run run, because the zamindar will be after you!' Farooq, who had also started regressing alarmingly, found in the knowledge of his father's death and the flight of his brother the strength to give up the childish habits which the jungle had at first re-created in him; he stopped crying when he was hungry and asking Why. Shaheed Dar, too, was visited by a monkey with the face of an ancestor; but all he saw was a father who had instructed him to earn his name. This, however, also helped to restore in him the sense of responsibility which the just-following-orders requirements of war had sapped; so it seemed that the magical jungle, having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them by the hand towards a new adulthood. And flitting through the night-forest went the wraiths of their hopes; these, however, they were unable to see clearly, or to grasp.

   The buddha, however, was not granted nostalgia at first. He had taken to sitting cross-legged under a sundri-tree; his eyes and mind seemed empty, and at night, he no longer awoke. But finally the forest found a way through to him; one afternoon, when rain pounded down on the trees and boiled off them as steam, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq saw the buddha sitting under his tree while a blind, translucent serpent bit, and poured venom into, his heel. Shaheed Dar crushed the serpent's head with a stick; the buddha, who was head-to-foot numb, seemed not to have noticed. His eyes were closed. After this, the boy soldiers waited for the man-dog to die; but I was stronger than the snake-poison. For two days he became as rigid as a tree, and his eyes crossed, so that he saw the world in mirror-image, with the right side on the left; at last he relaxed, and the look of milky abstraction was no longer in his eyes. I was rejoined to the past, jolted into unity by snake-poison, and it began to pour out through the buddha's lips. As his eyes returned to normal, his words flowed so freely that they seemed to be an aspect of the monsoon. The child-soldiers listened, spellbound, to the stories issuing from his mouth, beginning with a birth at midnight, and continuing unstoppably, because he was reclaiming everything, all of it, all lost histories, all the myriad complex processes that go to make a man. Open-mouthed, unable to tear themselves away, the child-soldiers drank his life like leaf-tainted water, as he spoke of bed-wetting cousins, revolutionary pepperpots, the perfect voice of a sister… Ayooba Shaheed Farooq would have (once upon a time) given anything to know that those rumours had been true; but in the Sundarbans, they didn't even cry out.
   And rushing on: to late-flowering love, and Jamila in a bedroom in a shaft of light. Now Shaheed did murmur, 'So that's why, when he confessed, after that she couldn't stand to be near…' But the buddha continues, and it becomes apparent that he is struggling to recall something particular, something which refuses to return, which obstinately eludes him, so that he gets to the end without finding it, and remains frowning and unsatisfied even after he has recounted a holy war, and revealed what fell from the sky.
   There was a silence; and then Farooq Rashid said, 'So much, yaar, inside one person; so many bad things, no wonder he kept his mouth shut!'
   You see, Padma: I have told this story before. But what refused to return? What, despite the liberating venene of a colourless serpent, failed to emerge from my lips? Padma: the buddha had forgotten his name. (To be precise: his first name.)

   And still it went on raining. The water-level was rising daily, until it became clear that they would have to move deeper into the jungle, in search of higher ground. The rain was too heavy for the boat to be of use; so, still following Shaheed's instructions, Ayooba Farooq and the buddha pulled it far away from the encroaching bank, tied mooring-rope around sundri-trunk, and covered their craft with leaves; after which, having no option, they moved ever further into the dense uncertainty of the jungle.
   Now, once again, the Sundarbans changed its nature; once again Ayooba Shaheed Farooq found their ears filled with the lamentations of families from whose bosom they had torn what once, centuries ago, they had termed 'undesirable elements'; they rushed wildly forward into the jungle to escape from the accusing, pain-filled voices of their victims; and at night the ghostly monkeys gathered in the trees and sang the words of 'Our Golden Bengal': '… O Mother, I am poor, but what little I have, I lay at thy feet. And it maddens my heart with delight.' Unable to escape from the unbearable torture of the unceasing voices, incapable of bearing for a moment longer the burden of shame, which was now greatly increased by their jungle-learned sense of responsibility, the three boy-soldiers were moved, at last, to take desperate measures. Shaheed Dar stooped down and pkked up two handfuls of rain-heavy jungle mud; in the throes of that awful hallucination, he thrust the treacherous mud of the rain-forest into his ears. And after him, Ayooba Baloch and Farooq Rashid stopped their ears also with mud. Only the buddha left his ears (one good, one already bad) unstopped; as though he alone were willing to bear the retribution of the jungle, as though he were bowing his head before the inevitability of his guilt… The mud of the dream-forest, which no doubt also contained the concealed translucency of jungle-insects and the devilry of bright orange bird-droppings, infected the ears of the three boy-soldiers and made them all as deaf as posts; so that although they were spared the singsong accusations of the jungle, they were now obliged to converse in a rudimentary form of sign-language. They seemed, however, to prefer their diseased deafness to the unpalatable secrets which the sundri-leaves had whispered in their ears.
   At last, the voices stopped, though by now only the buddha (with his one good ear) could hear them; at last, when the four wanderers were near the point of panic, the jungle brought them through a curtain of tree-beards and showed them a sight so lovely that it brought lumps to their throats. Even the buddha seemed to tighten his grip on his spittoon. With one good ear between the four of them, they advanced into a glade filled with the gentle melodies of songbirds, in whose centre stood a monumental Hindu temple, carved in forgotten centuries out of a single immense crag of rock; its walls danced with friezes of men and women, who were depicted coupling in postures of unsurpassable athleticism and sometimes, of highly comic absurdity. The quartet moved towards this miracle with disbelieving steps. Inside, they found, at long last, some respite from the endless monsoon, and also the towering statue of a black dancing goddess, whom the boy-soldiers from Pakistan could not name; but the buddha knew she was Kali, fecund and awful, with the remnants of gold paint on her teeth. The four travellers lay down at her feet and fell into a rain-free sleep which ended at what could have been midnight, when they awoke simultaneously to find themselves being smiled upon by four young girls of a beauty which was beyond speech. Shaheed, who recalled the four houris awaiting him in the camphor garden, thought at first that he had died in the night; but the houris looked real enough, and their saris, under which they wore nothing at all, were torn and stained by the jungle. Now as eight eyes stared into eight, saris were unwound and placed, neatly folded, on the ground; after which the naked and identical daughters of the forest came to them, eight arms were twined with eight, eight legs were linked with eight legs more; below the statue of multi-limbed Kali, the travellers abandoned themselves to caresses which felt real enough, to kisses and love-bites which were soft and painful, to scratches which left marks, and they realized that this this this was what they had needed, what they had longed for without knowing it, that having passed through the childish regressions and childlike sorrows of their earliest jungle-days, having survived the onset of memory and responsibility and the greater pains of renewed accusations, they were leaving infancy behind for ever, and then forgetting reasons and implications and deafness, forgetting everything, they gave themselves to the four identical beauties without a single thought in their heads.
   After that night, they were unable to tear themselves away from the temple, except to forage for food, and every night the soft women of their most contented dreams returned in silence, never speaking, always neat and tidy with their saris, and invariably bringing the lost quartet to an incredible united peak of delight. None of them knew how long this period lasted, because in the Sundarbans time followed unknown laws, but at last the day came when they looked at each other and realized they were becoming transparent, that it was possible to see through their bodies, not clearly as yet, but cloudily, like staring through mango-juice. In their alarm they understood that this was the last and worst of the jungle's tricks, that by giving them their heart's desire it was fooling them into using up their dreams, so that as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow and translucent as glass. The buddha saw now that the colourlessness of insects and leeches and snakes might have more to do with the depredations worked on their insectly, leechy, snakish imaginations than with the absence of sunlight… awakened as if for the first time by the shock of translucency, they looked at the temple with new eyes, seeing the great gaping cracks in the solid rock, realizing that vast segments could come detached and crash down upon them at any moment; and then, in a murky corner of the abandoned shrine, they saw the remnants of what might have been four small fires-ancient ashes, scorch-marks on stone-or perhaps four funeral pyres; and in the centre of each of the four, a small, blackened, fire-eaten heap of uncrushed bones.
   How the buddha left the Sundarbans: the forest of illusions unleashed upon them, as they fled from temple towards boat, its last and most terrifying trick; they had barely reached the boat when it came towards them, at first a rumble in the far distance, then a roar which could penetrate even mud-deafened ears, they had untied the boat and leapt wildly into it when the wave came, and now they were at the mercy of the waters, which could have crushed them effortlessly against sundri or mangrove or nipa, but instead the tidal wave bore them down turbulent brown channels as the forest of their torment blurred past them like a great green wall, it seemed as if the jungle, having tired of its playthings, were ejecting them unceremoniously from its territory; waterborne, impelled forwards and still forwards by the unimaginable power of the wave, they bobbed pitifully amongst fallen branches and the sloughed-off skins of water-snakes, until finally they were hurled from the boat as the ebbing wave broke it against a tree-stump, they were left sitting in a drowned rice-paddy as the wave receded, in water up to their waists, but alive, borne out of the heart of the jungle of dreams, into which I had fled in the hope of peace and found both less and more, and back once more in the world of armies and dates.
   When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I am bound to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder at the time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal wave recorded that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeed devastated the region.

   In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is forever who you are.
   For seven months during the course of the year 1971, three soldiers and their tracker vanished off the face of the war. In October, however, when the rains ended and the guerrilla units of the Mukti Bahini began terrorizing Pakistani military outposts; when Mukti Bahini snipers picked off soldiers and petty officials alike, our quartet emerged from invisibility and, having little option, attempted to rejoin the main body of the occupying West Wing forces. Later, when questioned, the buddha would always explain his disappearance with the help of a garbled story about being lost in a jungle amid trees whose roots grabbed at you like snakes. It was perhaps fortunate for him that he was never formally interrogated by officers in the army of which he was a member. Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar were not subjected to such interrogations, either; but in their case this was because they failed to stay alive long enough for any questions to be asked.
   … 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 hair-cut? 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, Baidy, 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. Unfairness smelled like onions; the sharpness of its perfume brought tears to my eyes. Seized by the bitter aroma of injustice, I remembered how Jamila Singer had leaned over a hospital bed-whose? What name?-how military gongs-and-pips were also present-how my sister-no, not my sister! how she-how she had said, 'Brother, I have to go away, to sing in service of the country; the Army will look after you now-for me, they will look after you so, so well.' She was veiled; behind white-and-gold brocade I smelled her traitress's smile; through soft veiling fabric she planted on my brow the kiss of her revenge; and then she, who always wrought a dreadful revenge upon those who loved her best, left me to the tender mercies of pips-and-gongs… and after Jamila's treachery I remembered the long-ago ostracism I suffered at the hands of Evie Burns; and exiles, and picnic-tricks; and all the vast mountain of unreasonable occurrences plaguing my life; and now, I lamented cucumber-nose, stain-face, bandy legs, horn-temples, monk's tonsure, finger-loss, one-bad-ear, and the numbing, braining spittoon; I wept copiously now, but still my name eluded me, and I repeated-'Not fair; not fair, not fair!' And, surprisingly, Ayooba-the-tank moved away from his corner; Ayooba, perhaps recalling his own breakdown in the Sundarbans, squatted down in front of me and wrapped his one good arm around my neck. I accepted his comfortings; I cried into his shirt; but then there was a bee, buzzing towards us; while he squatted, with his back to the glassless window of the hut, something came whining through the overheated air; while he said, 'Hey, buddha-come on, buddha-hey, hey!' and while other bees, the bees of deafness, buzzed in his ears, something stung him in the neck. He made a popping noise deep in his throat and fell forwards on top of me. The sniper's bullet which killed Ayooba Baloch would, but for his presence, have speared me through the head. In dying, he saved my life.
   Forgetting past humiliations; putting aside fair-and-unfair, and what-can't-be-cured-must-be-endured, I crawled out from under the corpse of Ayooba-the-tank, while Farooq, 'O God O God O!' and Shaheed, 'Allah, I don't even know if my gun will-' And Farooq, again, 'O God O! O God, who knows where the bastard is-!' But Shaheed, like soldiers in films, is flat against the wall beside the window. In these positions: I on the floor, Farooq crouched in a corner, Shaheed pressed against dung-plaster: we waited, helplessly, to see what would transpire.
   There was no second shot; perhaps the sniper, not knowing the size of the force hidden inside the mud-walled hut, had simply shot and run. The three of us remained inside the hut for a night and a day, until the body of Ayooba Baloch began to demand attention. Before we left, we found pickaxes, and buried him… And afterwards, when the Indian Army did come, there was no Ayooba Baloch to greet them with his theories of the superiority of meat over vegetables; no Ayooba went into action, yelling, 'Ka-dang! Ka-blam! Ka-pow!!'
   Perhaps it was just as well.

   … And sometime in December the three of us, riding on stolen bicycles, arrived at a field from which the city of Dacca could be seen against the horizon; a field in which grew crops so strange, with so-nauseous an aroma, that we found ourselves incapable of remaining on our bicycles. Dismounting before we fell off, we entered the terrible field.
   There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. The whistle echoed around the field, bouncing off fallen helmets, resounding hollowly from the barrels of mud-blocked rifles, sinking without trace into the fallen boots of the strange, strange crops, whose smell, like the smell of unfairness, was capable of bringing tears to the buddha's eyes. The crops were dead, having been hit by some unknown blight… and most of them, but not all, wore the uniforms of the West Pakistani Army. Apart from the whistling, the only noises to be heard were the sounds of objects dropping into the peasant's treasure-sack: leather belts, watches, gold tooth-fillings, spectacle frames, tiffin-carriers, water flasks, boots. The peasant saw them and came running towards them, smiling ingratiatingly, talking rapidly in a wheedling voice that only the buddha was obliged to hear. Farooq and Shaheed stared glassily at the field while the peasant began his explanations.
   'Plenty shooting! Thaii! Ttiaiii!' 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 colourless December sky. The strange crops lay still, unruffled by the breeze… 'I stay, 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 bonemarrow 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 the temples should have been, hollows that could have been made by a gynaecologist's forceps which had held it too tightly at birth… it was this third head which spoke to the buddha:
   'Hullo, man,' it said, 'What the hell are you here for?'
   Shaheed Dar saw the pyramid of enemy soldiers apparently conversing with the buddha; Shaheed, suddenly seized by an irrational energy, flung himself upon me and pushed me to the ground, with, 'Who are you?-Spy? Traitor? What?-Why do they know who you-?' While Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, flapped pitifully around us, 'Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God.'
   Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to re-unite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads: and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati-the-witch.
   When Shaheed calmed down and got off me, the pyramid was no longer capable of speech. Later that afternoon, we resumed our journey towards the capital. Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, called cheerfully after us: 'Ho sirs! Ho my poor sirs! Who knows when a man will die? Who, my sirs, knows why?'

Sam and the Tiger

   Sometimes, mountains must move before old comrades can be reunited. On December 15th, 1971, in the capital of the newly liberated state of Bangladesh, Tiger Niazi surrendered to his old chum Sam Manekshaw; while I, in my turn, surrendered to the embraces of a girl with eyes like saucers, a pony-tail like a long shiny black rope, and lips which had not at that time acquired what was to become their characteristic pout. These reunions were not achieved easily; and as a gesture of respect for all who made them possible, I shall pause briefly in my narrative to set out the whys and the wherefores.
   Let me, then, be perfectly explicit: if Yahya Khan and Z. A. Bhutto had not colluded in the matter of the coup of March 25th, I would not have been flown to Dacca in civilian dress; nor, in all likelihood, would General Tiger Niazi have been in the city that December. To continue: the Indian intervention in the Bangladesh dispute was also the result of the interaction of great forces. Perhaps, if ten million had not walked across the frontiers into India, obliging the Delhi Government to spend $200,000,000 a month on refugee camps-the entire war of 1965, whose secret purpose had been the annihilation of my family, had cost them only $70,000,000!-Indian soldiers, led by General Sam, would never have crossed the frontiers in the opposite direction. But India came for other reasons, too: as I was to learn from the Communist magicians who lived in the shadow of the Delhi Friday Mosque, the Delhi sarkar had been highly concerned by the declining influence of Mujib's Awami League, and the growing popularity of the revolutionary Mukti Bahini; Sam and the Tiger met in Dacca to prevent the Bahini from gaining power. So if it were not for the Mukti Bahini, Parvati-the-witch might never have accompanied the Indian troops on their campaign of 'liberation'… But even that is not a full explanation. A third reason for Indian intervention was the fear that the disturbances in Bangladesh would, if they were not quickly curtailed, spread across the frontiers into West Bengal; so Sam and the Tiger, and also Parvati and I, owe our meeting at least in part to the more turbulent elements in West Bengali politics: the Tiger's defeat was only the beginning of a campaign against the Left in Calcutta and its environs.
   At any rate, India came; and for the speed of her coming-because in a mere three weeks Pakistan had lost half her navy, a third of her army, a quarter of her air force, and finally, after the Tiger surrendered, more than half her population-thanks must be given to the Mukti Bahini once more; because, perhaps naively, failing to understand that the Indian advance was as much a tactical manoeuvre against them as a battle against the occupying West Wing forces, the Bahini advised General Manekshaw on Pakistani troop movements, on the Tiger's strengths and weaknesses; thanks, too, to Mr Chou En-Lai, who refused (despite Bhutto's entreaties) to give Pakistan any material aid in the war. Denied Chinese arms, Pakistan fought with American guns, American tanks and aircraft; the President of the United States, alone in the entire world, was resolved to 'tilt' towards Pakistan. While Henry A. Kissinger argued the cause of Yahya Khan, the same Yahya was secretly arranging the President's famous state visit to China… there were, therefore, great forces working against my reunion with Parvati and Sam's with the Tiger; but despite the tilting President, it was all over in three short weeks.
   On the night of December 14th, Shaheed Dar and the buddha circled the fringes of the invested city of Dacca; but the buddha's nose (you will not have forgotten) was capable of sniffing out more than most. Following his nose, which could smell safety and danger, they found a way through the Indian lines, and entered the city under cover of night. While they moved stealthily through streets in which nobody except a few starving beggars could be seen, the Tiger was swearing to fight to the last man; but the next day, he surrendered instead. What is not known: whether the last man was grateful to be spared or peeved at missing his chance of entering the camphor garden.
   And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not true because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap, after all, and our jawans were worth ten babus, we moved through the impossible hallucination of the night, hiding in doorways while fires blossomed like flowers, reminding me of the way the Brass Monkey used to set fire to shoes to attract a little attention, there were slit throats being buried in unmarked graves, and Shaheed began his, 'No, buddha-what a thing, Allah, you can't believe your eyes-no, not true, how can it-buddha, tell, what's got into my eyes?' And at last the buddha spoke, knowing Shaheed could not hear: 'O, Shaheeda,' he said, revealing the depths of his fastidiousness, 'a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.' But Shaheed was staring at a maidan in which lady doctors were being bayoneted before they were raped, and raped again before they were shot. Above them and behind them, the cool white minaret of a mosque stared blindly down upon the scene.
   As though talking to himself, the buddha said, 'It is time to think about saving our skins; God knows why we came back.' The buddha entered the doorway of a deserted house, a broken, peeling shell of an edifice which had once housed a tea-shop, a bicycle-repair shop, a whorehouse and a tiny landing on which a notary public must once have sat, because there was the low desk on which he had left behind a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, there were the abandoned seals and stamps which had once enabled him to be more than an old nobody-stamps and seals which had made him an arbiter of what was true and what was not. The notary public was absent, so I could not ask him to verify what was happening, I could not give a deposition under oath; but lying on the mat behind his desk was a loose flowing garment like a djellabah, and without waiting any longer I removed my uniform, including the she-dog badge of the cutia units, and became anonymous, a deserter, in a city whose language I could not speak.
   Shaheed Dar, however, remained in the street; in the first light of morning he watched soldiers scurrying away from what-had-not-been-done; and then the grenade came. I, the buddha, was still inside the empty house; but Shaheed was unprotected by walls.
   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, antlike people were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the antlike, and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, . having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and 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 peacemaking 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 colours 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 centre 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 was much more than a mere military parade; as befits a triumph, it was garlanded with side-shows. A special I.A.F. troop transport had flown to Dacca, carrying a hundred and one of the finest entertainers and conjurers India could provide. From the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi they came, many of them dressed for the occasion in the evocative uniforms of the Indian fauj, so that many Daccans got the idea that the Indians' victory had been inevitable from the start because even their uniformed jawans were sorcerers of the highest order. The conjurers and other artistes marched beside the troops, entertaining the crowds; there were acrobats forming human pyramids on moving carts drawn by white bullocks; there were extraordinary female contortionists who could swallow their legs up to their knees; there were jugglers who operated outside the laws of gravity, so that they could draw oohs and aahs from the delighted crowd as they juggled with toy grenades, keeping four hundred and twenty in the air at a time; there were card-tricksters who could pull the queen of chiriyas (the monarch of birds, the empress of clubs) out of women's ears; there was the great dancer Anarkali, whose name meant 'pomegranate-bud', doing leaps twists pirouettes on a donkey-cart while a giant piece of silver nose-jewellery jingled on her right nostril; there was Master Vikram the sitarist, whose sitar was capable of responding to, and exaggerating, the faintest emotions in the hearts of his audience, so that once (it was said) he had played before an audience so bad-tempered, and had so greatly enhanced their foul humour, that if his tabla-player hadn't made him stop his raga in mid-stream the power of his music would have had them all knifing each other and smashing up the auditorium… today, Master Vikram's music raised the celebratory goodwill of the people to fever-pitch; it maddened, let us say, their hearts with delight.
   And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven-foot giant who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The World because of his unsurpassable skills as a snake-charmer. Not even the legendary Tubriwallahs of Bengal could exceed his talents; he strode through the happily shrieking crowds, twined from head to foot with deadly cobras, mambas and kraits, all with their poison-sacs intact… Picture Singh, who would be the last in the line of men who have been willing to become my fathers… and immediately behind him came Parvati-the-witch.
   Parvati-the-witch entertained the crowds with the help of a large wicker basket with a lid; happy volunteers entered the basket, and Parvati made them disappear so completely that they could not return until she wished them to; Parvati, to whom midnight had given the true gifts of sorcery, had placed them at the service of her humble illusionist's trade; so that she was asked, 'But how do you pull it off?'
   And, 'Come on, pretty missy, tell the trick, why not?'-Parvati, smiling beaming rolling her magic basket, came towards me with the liberating troops.
   The Indian Army marched into town, its heroes following the magicians; among them, I learned afterwards, was that colossus of the war, the rat-faced Major with the lethal knees… but now there were still more illusionists, because the surviving prestidigitators of the city came out of hiding and began a wonderful contest, seeking to outdo anything and everything the visiting magicians had to offer, and the pain of the city was washed and soothed in the great glad outpouring of their magic. Then Parvati-the-witch saw me, and gave me back my name.
   'Saleem! O my god Saleem, you Saleem Sinai, is it you Saleem?'
   The buddha jerks, puppet-fashion. Crowd-eyes staring. Parvati pushing towards him. 'Listen, it must be you!' She is gripping his elbow. Saucer eyes searching milky blue. 'My God, that nose, I'm not being rude, but of course! Look, it's me, Parvati! O Saleem, don't be stupid now, come on come on…!'
   'That's it,' the buddha says. 'Saleem: that was it.'
   'O God, too much excitement!' she cries. 'Arre baap, Saleem, you remember-the Children, yaar, O this is too good! So why are you looking so serious when I feel like to hug you to pieces? So many years I only saw you inside here,' she taps her forehead, 'and now you're here with a face like a fish. Hey, Saleem! Come on, say one hullo at least.'

   On December 15th, 1971, Tiger Niazi surrendered to Sam Manek-shaw; the Tiger and ninety-three thousand Pakistani troops became prisoners of war. I, meanwhile, became the willing captive of the Indian magicians, because Parvati dragged me into the procession with, 'Now that I've found you I'm not letting you go.'
   That night, Sam and the Tiger drank chota pegs and reminisced about the old days in the British Army. 'I say, Tiger,' Sam Manekshaw said, 'You behaved jolly decently by surrendering.' And the Tiger, 'Sam, you fought one hell of a war.' A tiny cloud passes across the face of General Sam, 'Listen, old sport: one hears such damn awful lies. Slaughters, old boy, mass graves, special units called cutia or some damn thing, developed for purposes of rooting out opposition… no truth in it, I suppose?' And the Tiger, 'Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? Never heard of it. Must've been misled, old man. Some damn bad intelligence-wallahs on both sides. No, ridiculous, damn ridiculous, if you don't mind me saying.' 'Thought as much,' says General Sam, 'I say, bloody fine to see you, Tiger, you old devil!' And the Tiger, 'Been years, eh, Sam? Too damn long.'
   … While old friends sang 'Auld Lang Syne' in officers' messes, I made my escape from Bangladesh, from my Pakistani years. 'I'll get you out,' Parvati said, after I explained. 'You want it secret secret?'
   I nodded. 'Secret secret.'
   Elsewhere in the city, ninety-three thousand soldiers were preparing to be carted off to P.O.W. camps; but Parvati-the-witch made me climb into a wicker basket with a close-fitting lid. Sam Manekshaw was obliged to place his old friend the Tiger under protective custody; but Parvati-the-witch assured me, 'This way they'll never catch.'
   Behind an army barracks where the magicians were awaiting their transport back to Delhi, Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, stood guard when, that evening, I climbed into the basket of invisibility. We loitered casually, smoking bins, waiting until there were no soldiers in sight, while Picture Singh told me about his name. Twenty years ago, an Eastman-Kodak photographer had taken his portrait-which, wreathed in smiles and snakes, afterwards appeared on half the Kodak advertisements and in-store displays in India; ever since when the snake-charmer had adopted his present cognomen. 'What do you think, captain?' he bellowed amiably. 'A fine name, isn't it so? Captain, what to do, I can't even remember what name I used to have, from before, the name my mother-father gave me! Pretty stupid, hey, captain?' But Picture Singh was not stupid; and there was much more to him than charm. Suddenly his voice lost its casual, sleepy good-nature; he whispered, 'Now! Now, captain, ek dum, double-quick time!' Parvati whipped lid away from wicker; I dived head first into her cryptic basket. The lid, returning, blocked out the day's last light.
   Picture Singh whispered, 'Okay, captain-damn good!' And Parvati bent down close to me; her lips must have been against the outside of the basket. What Parvati-the-witch whispered through wickerwork:
   'Hey, you Saleem: just to think! You and me, mister-midnight's children, yaar! That's something, no?'
   That's something… Saleem, shrouded in wickerwork darkness, was reminded of years-ago midnights, of childhood wrestling bouts with purpose and meaning; overwhelmed by nostalgia, I still did not understand what that something was. Then Parvati whispered some other words, and, inside the basket of invisibility, I, Saleem Sinai, complete with my loose anonymous garment, vanished instantly into thin air.
   'Vanished? How vanished, what vanished?' Padma's head jerks up; Padma's eyes stare at me in bewilderment. I, shrugging, merely reiterate; Vanished, just like that. Disappeared. Dematerialized. Like a djinn: poof, like so.
   'So,' Padma presses me, 'she really-truly was a witch?' Really-truly. I was in the basket, but also not in the basket; Picture Singh lifted it one-handed and tossed it into the back of the Army truck taking him and Parvati and ninety-nine others to the aircraft waiting at the military airfield; I was tossed with the basket, but also not tossed. Afterwards, Picture Singh said, 'No, captain, I couldn't feel your weight'; nor could I feel any bump thump bang. One hundred and one artistes had arrived, by I.A.F. troop transport, from the capital of India; one hundred and two persons returned, although one of them was both there and not there. Yes, magic spells can occasionally succeed. But also fail: my father, Ahmed Sinai, never succeeded in cursing Sherri, the mongrel bitch.
   Without passport or permit, I returned, cloaked in invisibility, to the land of my birth; believe, don't believe, but even a sceptic will have to provide another explanation for my presence here. Did not the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid (in an earlier set of fabulous tales) also wander, unseen invisible anonymous, cloaked through the streets of Baghdad? What Haroun achieved in Baghdad streets, Parvati-the-witch made possible for me, as we flew through the air-lanes of the subcontinent. She did it; I was invisible; bas. Enough.
   Memories of invisibility: in the basket, I learned what it was like, will be like, to be dead. I had acquired the characteristics of ghosts! Present, but insubstantial; actual, but without being or weight… I discovered, in the basket, how ghosts see the world. Dimly hazily faintly… it was around me, but only just; I hung in a sphere of absence at whose fringes, like faint reflections, could be seen the spectres of wickerwork. The dead die, and are gradually forgotten; time does its healing, and they fade-but in Parvati's basket I learned that the reverse is also true; that ghosts, too, begin to forget; that the dead lose their memories of the living, and at last, when they are detached from their lives, fade away-that dying, in short, continues for a long time after death. Afterwards, Parvati said, 'I didn't want to tell you-but nobody should be kept invisible that long-it was dangerous, but what else was there to do?'

   In the grip of Parvati's sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away-and how easy, how peaceful not to never to return!-to float in this cloudy nowhere, wafting further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze-in short, I was in mortal danger.
   What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside… clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir.
   No-there was more to it than spittoons: for, as we all know by now, our hero is greatly affected by being shut up in confined spaces. Transformations spring upon him in the enclosed dark. As a mere embryo in the secrecy of a womb (not his mother's), did he not grow into the incarnation of the new myth of August 15th, the child of ticktock-did he not emerge as the Mubarak, the Blessed Child? In a cramped wash-room, were name-tags not switched around? Alone in a washing-chest with a drawstring up one nostril, did he not glimpse a Black Mango and sniff too hard, turning himself and his upper cucumber into a kind of supernatural ham radio? Hemmed in by doctors, nurses and anaesthetic masks, did he not succumb to numbers and, having suffered drainage-above, move into a second phase, that of nasal philosopher and (later) tracker supreme? Squashed, in a small abandoned hut, beneath the body of Ayooba Baloch, did he not learn the meaning of fair-and-unfair? Well, then-trapped in the occult peril of the basket of invisibility, I was saved, not only by the glints of a spittoon, but also by another transformation: in the grip of that awful disembodied loneliness, whose smell was the smell of graveyards, I discovered anger.
   Something was fading in Saleem and something was being born. Fading: an old pride in baby-snaps and framed Nehru-letter; an old determination to espouse, willingly, a prophesied historical role; and also a willingness to make allowances, to understand how parents and strangers might legitimately despise or exile him for his ugliness; mutilated fingers and monks' tonsures no longer seemed like good enough excuses for the way in which he, I, had been treated. The object of my wrath was, in fact, everything which I had, until then, blindly accepted: my parents' desire that I should repay their investment in me by becoming great; genius-Iike-a-shawl; the modes of connection themselves inspired in me a blind, lunging fury. Why me? Why, owing to accidents of birth prophecy etcetera, must I be responsible for language riots and after-Nehru-who, for pepperpot-revolutions and bombs which annihilated my family? Why should I, Saleem Snotnose, Sniffer, Mapface, Piece-of-the-Moon, accept the blame for what-was-not-done by Pakistani troops in Dacca?… Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?
   What my discovery of unfairness (smelling of onions) had begun, my invisible rage completed. Wrath enabled me to survive the soft siren temptations of invisibility; anger made me determined, after I was released from vanishment in the shadow of a Friday Mosque, to 'begin, from that moment forth, to choose my own, undestined future. And there, in the silence of graveyard-reeking isolation, I heard the long-ago voice of the virginal Mary Pereira, singing:
 
   @@@Anything you want to be, you kin be,
   You kin be just what-all you want.
 
   Tonight, as I recall my rage, I remain perfectly calm; the Widow drained anger out of me along with everything else. Remembering my basket-born rebellion against inevitability, I even permit myself a wry, understanding smile. 'Boys,' I mutter tolerantly across the years to Saleem-at-twenty-four, 'will be boys.' In the Widows' Hostel, I was taught, harshly, once-and-for-all, the lesson of No Escape; now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particulary exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.
   Although now, as the pouring-out of what-was-inside-me nears an end; as cracks widen within-I can hear and feel the rip tear crunch-I begin to grow thinner, translucent almost; there isn't much of me left, and soon there will be nothing at all. Six hundred million specks of dust, and all transparent, invisible as glass…
   But then I was angry. Glandular hyper-activity in a wicker amphora: eccrine and apocrine glands poured forth sweat and stink, as if I were trying to shed my fate through my pores; and, in fairness to my wrath, I must record that it claimed one instant achievement-that when I tumbled out of the basket of invisibility into the shadow of the mosque, I had been rescued by rebellion from the abstraction of numbness; as I bumped out on to the dirt of the magicians' ghetto, silver spittoon in hand, I realized that I had begun, once again, to feel.
   Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.