Midnight's Children

by Salman Rushdie

In the end I took my cue from Jewish American writers like Philip Roth, who sprinkled their English with untranslated Yiddish words. If they could do it, so could I.

The question of crowdedness needed a formal answer as well as a linguistic one. Multitude is the most obvious fact about the subcontinent. Everywhere you go, there’s a throng of humanity. Even in remote rural areas, the landscape is never empty. The human figure is always present. How could a novel embrace the idea of such multitude? My answer was to tell a crowd of stories, deliberately to overcrowd the narrative, so that “my” story, the main thrust of the novel, would need to push its way, so to speak, through a crowd of other stories. There are small, secondary characters and peripheral incidents in the book that could be expanded into longer narratives of their own. This kind of deliberate “wasting” of material was intentional. This was my hubbub, my maelstrom, my crowd.

But I find hope in the determination of India’s women and college students to resist that sectarianism, to reclaim the old, secular India and dismiss the darkness. I wish them well. But right now, in India, it’s midnight again.

I don’t know how my grandmother came to adopt the term whatsitsname as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help … as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn’t know, you see, what it was called.

the cellars … because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India,

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book—perhaps an encyclopedia—even a whole language

“The first birth,” he had said, “will make you real.”

and here is Nussie’s husband, Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from his son’s forcep-birth: “Nothing comes out right in life,” he tells his duck of a wife, “unless it’s forced out.” Applying this philosophy to his legal career, he embarks on a career of bribing judges and fixing juries; all children have the power to change their parents, and Sonny turned his father into a highly successful crook.

The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down.

the sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap.

Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add; I don’t want to offend anyone) heard a voice saying, “Recite!” and thought he was going mad;

The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?

To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother’s favorite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse.

In absolute soundlessness, fear gave Doctor Narlikar the strength of limpets; his arms stuck to the tetrapod and would not be detached.

had been warned by them just in time; but his one fleeting glimpse of his daughter so badly impaired his vision that he was unable, afterwards, to distinguish between Indians and foreign tourists, a handicap which greatly affected his earning power as a beggar.

But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from family life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we didn’t enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing. Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the creaks and groans of a rusting, decayed imagination.

when I would often stand in the garden of Buckingham Villa in the evenings, watching the Sputniks cross the sky, and feeling as simultaneously exalted and isolated as little Laika, the first and still the only dog to be shot into space (the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, shortly to contract syphilis, sat beside me following the bright pinprick of Sputnik II with her Alsatian eyes—it was a time of great canine interest in the space race);

… But now Padma says, mildly, “What date was it?” And, without thinking, I answer: “Some time in the spring.” And then it occurs to me that I have made another error—that the election of 1957 took place before, and not after, my tenth birthday; but although I have racked my brains, my memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events. This is worrying. I don’t know what’s gone wrong.

could not see any more clearly than anyone else; and even when Soumitra the time-traveller said, “I’m telling you—all this is pointless—they’ll finish us before we start!” we all ignored him; with the optimism of youth—which is a more virulent form of the same disease that once infected my grandfather Aadam Aziz—we refused to look on the dark side, and not a single one of us suggested that the purpose of Midnight’s Children might be annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed.

There is a noise outside: like a clap. Or a slap. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

You ask: these are ten-year-olds? I reply: Yes, but. You say: did ten-year-olds, or even almost-elevens, discuss the role of the individual in society? And the rivalry of capital and labor? Were the internal stresses of agrarian and industrialized zones made explicit? And conflicts in socio-cultural heritages? Did children of less than four thousand days discuss identity, and the inherent conflicts of capitalism? Having got through fewer than one hundred thousand hours, did they contrast Gandhi and Marxlenin, power and impotence? Was collectivity opposed to singularity? Was God killed by children? Even allowing for the truth of the supposed miracles, can we now believe that urchins spoke like old men with beards?

Commander Sabarmati told the policeman, “I have only now killed my wife and her lover with this gun; I surrender myself into your …” But he had been waving the gun under the policeman’s nose; the officer was so scared that he dropped his traffic-conducting baton and fled. Commander Sabarmati, left alone on the policeman’s pedestal amid the sudden confusion of the traffic, began to direct the cars, using the smoking gun as a baton. This is how he was found by the posse of twelve policemen who arrived ten minutes later, who sprang courageously upon him and seized him hand and foot, and who removed from him the unusual baton with which, for ten minutes, he had expertly conducted the traffic.

The jury said, “Not guilty.” My mother cried, “Oh wonderful! … But, but: is it justice?” And the judge, answering her: “Using the powers vested in me, I reverse this absurd verdict. Guilty as charged.”

from Delhi, my uncle Mustapha, the Civil Servant who had polished the art of agreeing with his superiors to the point at which they had stopped hearing him, which is why he never got promoted;

That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet.

Having realized the crucial nature of morality, having sniffed out that smells could be sacred or profane, I invented, in the isolation of my scooter-trips, the science of nasal ethics.

Think of me what you like; I spent one hot, humid afternoon in a tenement-room containing a flea-ridden mattress and a naked lightbulb and the oldest whore in the world.

Alia Aziz, sated with her terrible revenge; my aunt Emerald, widowed and awaiting exile; the hollow lasciviousness of my aunt Pia and the glass-boothed withdrawal of my grandmother Naseem Aziz; my cousin Zafar, with his eternally pre-pubertal princess and his future of wetting mattresses in jail-cells; the retreat into childishness of my father and the haunted, accelerated ageing of pregnant Amina Sinai … all these terrible conditions were to be cured as a result of the adoption, by the Government, of my dream of visiting Kashmir. In the meantime, the flinty refusals of my sister to countenance my love had driven me into a deeply fatalistic frame of mind; in the grip of my new carelessness about my future I told Uncle Puffs that I was willing to marry any one of the Puffias he chose for me.

If it happened, what were the motives? Again, a rash of possible explanations: the continuing anger which had been stirred up by the Rann of Kutch; the desire to settle, once-and-for-all, the old issue of who-should-possess-the-Perfect-Valley? … Or one which didn’t get into the papers: the pressures of internal political troubles in Pakistan—Ayub’s government was tottering, and a war works wonders at such times. This reason or that or the other? To simplify matters, I present two of my own: the war happened because I dreamed Kashmir into the fantasies of our rulers; furthermore, I remained impure, and the war was to separate me from my sins.

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,

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.

Saleem, today, is certain that he answered, “Yes”; that on the selfsame morning, still dressed in shapeless robe, still inseparable from a silver spittoon, he walked away, without looking back at a girl who followed him with eyes moistened with accusations; that, strolling hastily past practising jugglers and sweetmeat-stalls which filled his nostrils with the temptations of rasgullas, past barbers offering shaves for ten paisa, past the derelict maunderings of crones and the American-accented caterwauls of shoe-shine boys who importuned bus-loads of Japanese tourists in identical blue suits and incongruous saffron turbans which had been tied around their heads by obsequiously mischievous guides, past the towering flight of stairs to the Friday Mosque, past vendors of notions and itr-essences and plaster-of-Paris replicas of the Qutb Minar and painted toy horses and fluttering unslaughtered chickens, past invitations to cockfights and empty-eyed games of cards, he emerged from the ghetto of the illusionists and found himself on Faiz Bazar, facing the infinitely-extending walls of a Red Fort from whose ramparts a prime minister had once announced independence, and in whose shadow a woman had been met by a peepshow-merchant, a Dilli-dekho man who had taken her into narrowing lanes to hear her son’s future foretold amongst mongeese and vultures and broken men with leaves bandaged around their arms; that, to be brief, he turned to his right and walked away from the Old City to...

He can be concealed no longer, however; because one morning in May 1974—is it just my cracking memory, or am I right in thinking it was the 18th, perhaps at the very moment at which the deserts of Rajasthan were being shaken by India’s first nuclear explosion? Was Shiva’s explosion into my life truly synchronous with India’s arrival, without prior warning, at the nuclear age?—he

cases. She had turned bright blue, Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks into eyes;

Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offense at my voyeurism, calls: “Watch this!” and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. “Fifteen inches!” he calls, “How long can you make yours?” Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I’d have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times;