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Midnight’s Children is a history novel, looking for an answer to the great question history asks us: What is the relationship between society and the individual, between the macrocosm and the microcosm? To put it another way: Do we make history or does it make (or unmake)
“people get the government they deserve,”
I had in mind an arc of history moving from the hope—the bloodied hope, but still the hope—of independence to the betrayal of that hope in the so-called Emergency, followed by the birth of a new hope. India today, to someone of my mind, has entered an even darker phase than the Emergency years. The horrifying escalation of assaults on women, the increasingly authoritarian character of the state, the unjustifiable arrests of people who dare to stand against that authoritarianism, the religious fanaticism, the rewriting of history to fit the narrative of those who want to transform India into a
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I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
you rub your nose with embarrassment to make the itch go away. A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you’ll be finished. Follow your nose and you’ll go far.”
antagonists. Doctor Aziz begins to fight, against sadness, and against Tai’s anger, which is beginning to infect him, to become his own, which erupts only rarely, but comes, when it does come, unheralded in a roar from his deepest places, laying waste everything in sight; and then vanishes, leaving him wondering why everyone is so upset
Time settles down and concentrates on the importance of the moment.
And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings—by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.
Will you have hateful children, woman?” “Will you have godless ones?”
“In the end, everyone can do without fathers,”
she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes … in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.
my father was a man over whom, even in his moments of triumph, there hung the stink of future failure, the odor of a wrong turning that was just around the corner, an aroma which could not be washed away by his frequent baths.
Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?
time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon.
“What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.”
one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears,
maybe that’s where my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier—and yes, almost certainly innocent—adventure.
To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.
perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
At six o’clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits.
What tiny grain of grit, in the sea of old age now washing over the old bearer, lodged between his lips to fatten into the dark pearl of hatred—into
“I make no bones about it: this is kill or cure.
Children get food shelter pocketmoney longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it’s a sort of compensation for having been born. “There are no strings on me!” they sing; but I, Pinocchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive—nothing more, nothing less.
I struggled, alone, to understand what had happened to me; until at last I saw the shawl of genius fluttering down, like an embroidered butterfly, the mantle of greatness settling upon my shoulders.
REALITY IS A QUESTION of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.
“It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects.”
It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.
I hover at the apex, above present and past, and feel fluency returning to my pen.
the worst of everything; the age when property gives a man rank, when wealth is equated with virtue, when passion becomes the sole bond between men and women, when falsehood brings success (is it any wonder, in such a time, that I too have been confused about good and evil?)
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.
system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we switch her off to save power.
“My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I’m telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I’ve lost my struggle against cracks, he will know. Morality, judgment, character … it all starts with memory … and I am keeping carbons.”
“Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”
It’s a dangerous business to try and impose one’s view of things on others.
if you’re a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too.
was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own pell-mell tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Uncork the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out. Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate. And these, mark you, are only the effects on private life.
Hanif Aziz, the only realistic writer working in the Bombay film industry, was writing the story of a pickle-factory created, run and worked in entirely by women. There were long scenes describing the formation of a trade union; there were detailed descriptions of the pickling process.
game!” He played cards like a fool; but I, who had never seen such singleness of purpose, felt like clapping.
a woman’s back is broad, but, beloved husband, you have made my days into deserts! Go, ignore me now, just leave me in peace to jump from the window! I will go into the bedroom now,” she concluded, “and if you hear no more from me it is because my heart is broken and I am dead.” More doors slammed: it was a terrific exit.
When novelty wears off, boredom, and then dissension, must inevitably ensue.
If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered.
(Indians grow larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a European, and his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and often completely disappear.)
It was started by Reverend Mother, perhaps because the years had filled her out until she resembled the Sankara Acharya mountain in her native Srinagar, so that she presented the dust with the largest surface area to attack. Rumbling up from her mountainous body came a noise like an avalanche, which, when it turned into words, became a fierce attack on Aunt Pia, the bereaved widow. We had all noticed that my mumani was behaving unusually. There was an unspoken feeling that an actress of her standing should have risen to the challenge of widowhood in high style; we had unconsciously been eager
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Men of worth have always roamed the desert.
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.
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;
