MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN 精彩片段：
In the Sundarbans
Ill 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 Im well aware that I am providing any future commentators or venom quilled critics (to whom I say: twice before, Ive 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 Im 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 dont know. Youre 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 heros 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, Were 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 Ayoobas gun arm. The next morning Ayoobas 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 Farooqs 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 fathers 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 serpents 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 buddhas 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 didnt 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 thats why, when he confessed, after that she couldnt 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.