Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [181]
We reached Rawalpindi by hot, dusty train. (The General and Emerald travelled in Air-Conditioned; they bought the rest of us ordinary first-class tickets.) But it was cool when we reached ’Pindi and I set foot, for the first time, in a northern city … I remember it as a low, anonymous town; army barracks, fruitshops, a sports goods industry; tall military men in the streets; Jeeps; furniture carvers; polo. A town in which it was possible to be very, very cold. And in a new and expensive housing development, a vast house surrounded by a high wall which was topped by barbed wire and patrolled by sentries: General Zulfikar’s home. There was a bath next to the double bed in which the General slept; there was a house catch-phrase: “Let’s get organized!”; the servants wore green military jerseys and berets; in the evenings the odors of bhang and charas floated up from their quarters. The furniture was expensive and surprisingly beautiful; Emerald could not be faulted on her taste. It was a dull, lifeless house, for all its military airs; even the goldfish in the tank set in the dining-room wall seemed to bubble listlessly; perhaps its most interesting inhabitant was not even human. You will permit me, for a moment, to describe the General’s dog Bonzo. Excuse me: the General’s old beagle bitch.
This goitred creature of papery antiquity had been supremely indolent and useless all her life; but while I was still recovering from sunstroke she created the first furore of our stay—a sort of trailer for the “revolution of the pepperpots.” General Zulfikar had taken her one day to a military training-camp, where he was to watch a team of mine-detectors at work in a specially-prepared minefield. (The General was anxious to mine the entire Indo-Pak border. “Let’s get organized!” he would exclaim. “Let’s give those Hindus something to worry! We’ll blow their invaders into so many pieces, there’ll be no damn thing left to reincarnate.” He was not, however, overly concerned about the frontiers of East Pakistan, being of the view that “those damn blackies can look after themselves.”) … And now Bonzo slipped her leash, and somehow evading the frantically clutching hands of young jawans, waddled out into the minefield.
Blind panic. Mine-detecting soldiers picking their way in frenzied slow-motion through the blasting zone. General Zulfikar and other Army brass diving for shelter behind their grandstand, awaiting the explosion … But there was none; and when the flower of the Pakistan Army peeped out from inside dustbins or behind benches, it saw Bonzo picking her way daintily through the field of the lethal seeds, nose to ground, Bonzo-the-insouciant, quite at her ease. General Zulfikar flung his peaked cap in the air. “Damn marvellous!” he cried in the thin voice which squeezed between his nose and chin, “The old lady can smell the mines!” Bonzo was drafted forthwith into the armed forces as a four-legged mine-detector with the courtesy rank of sergeant-major.
I mention Bonzo’s achievement because it gave the General a stick with which to beat us. We Sinais—and Pia Aziz—were helpless, nonproductive members of the Zulfikar household, and the General did not wish us to forget it: “Even a damn hundred-year-old beagle bitch can earn her damn living,” he was heard to mutter, “but my house is full of people who can’t get organized into one damn thing.” But before the end of October he would be grateful for (at least) my presence … and the transformation of the Monkey was not far away.
We went to school with cousin Zafar, who seemed less anxious to marry my sister now that we were children of a broken home; but his worst deed came one weekend when we were taken to the General’s mountain cottage in Nathia Gali, beyond Murree. I was in a state of high excitement (my illness had just been declared cured): mountains! The possibility of panthers! Cold, biting air!—so that I thought nothing of it when the General asked me if I’d mind sharing a bed with Zafar, and didn’t even guess when they spread the rubber sheet over the mattress … I awoke in the small hours in a large rancid pool of lukewarm liquid and began to yell blue murder. The General appeared at our bedside and began to thrash the living daylights out of his son.