Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [231]
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 colorless 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 picked 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 center 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 child-like 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.