Novels, Deep-Read · Salman Rushdie · No.26
Midnight's Children · Salman Rushdie · 1981
Kashmir, spring 1915. A young doctor just back from his German training is called to examine a landowner's daughter. The patient lies behind a curtain; two burly women hold up a white bedsheet with a seven-inch hole cut in the middle of it. Today her stomach hurts, so the hole frames a small square of stomach. He reaches through.
For the next three years she falls ill every few weeks: an ankle, a right ear, a knee, the nape of a neck, a heart. He never once sees the whole of her, and falls in love with her one fragment at a time.
That is how this book intends to show you a country: one hole at a time.
At the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, the exact second of Indian independence, two boys are born in the same Bombay nursing home — one to a wealthy Muslim businessman, one to a street singer's wife — and the midwife, wanting to prove her devotion to a revolutionary boyfriend who preaches that the rich should not be born rich, swaps their name-tags; so the poor child grows up in the mansion on the hill, is adopted by the nation as its own child, and acquires a nose that can hear the thoughts of all India, while the rich man's son grows up in the slum into a pair of knees built for killing. Thirty-one years later the narrator writes it all down in a pickle factory while his body cracks apart like an old jug — because in an interrogation cell during the Emergency, he handed over every one of the thousand and one children born in his hour.
Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) was born in Bombay to an Urdu-speaking Muslim family, sent to school in England at fourteen, took a degree at King's College, Cambridge, and spent several years writing advertising copy. Midnight's Children (1981) is his second novel — almost nobody read the first, Grimus — and it took the Booker Prize the year it appeared. In 1993 it was voted the "Booker of Bookers" at the prize's twenty-fifth anniversary, and in 2008 the "Best of the Booker" at its fortieth. Both times, this book.
Its place in literary history is unambiguous: it carried the magic realism of the García Márquez line into South Asia, and shifted the centre of gravity of the English novel a notch eastward. Before it, most books that wrote India in English were explaining India to the West; after it, a generation of South Asian writers in English could push Hindi and Urdu word order, idiom and shouting straight into their prose without footnotes and without apology. Rushdie has repeatedly acknowledged a nearer master: Günter Grass's The Tin Drum — the same undersized narrator claiming to have rewritten history, the same grandiosity, the same brat's voice. Grass handed his narrator a drum; Rushdie hands his a nose.
The narrator's grandfather, Aadam Aziz, is a Kashmiri who has finished medical school in Germany. On his first morning home he prays by the lake, and as he bows his nose strikes a frost-hardened tussock; three drops of blood fall on the prayer mat. He stands up and resolves never again to kneel for any god or any man — and Rushdie adds at once that the decision leaves a hole in the middle of him, a permanent vacancy. This is how bodies work throughout the book: history does not happen around the characters, it happens directly to their organs. The old boatman Tai once looked at that enormous nose and told him it was a patriarch's nose, with dynasties waiting inside it. Setup ①
Then comes the perforated sheet. Setup ② The landowner Ghani is blind, and his daughter Naseem is too precious to be seen by an outside man, so for three years the doctor treats her through that seven-inch hole, one piece at a time. By the time she has been ill in every region of her body, he has assembled the fragments into a whole woman in his head, and fallen in love with the thing he assembled. They marry. She hardens into the toughest stone in the family — Reverend Mother — with a habit of calling any word she cannot retrieve "whatsitsname."
Politics enters the house here. Aziz works for the anti-Partition campaigner Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird; Abdullah is knifed to death one night, and his assistant Nadir Khan hides for years in the Aziz cellar. Down there sits a silver spittoon inlaid with lapis, the sole entertainment of those underground years — you lie back and spit, and see who has the better aim. Setup ③ Nadir secretly marries the second daughter, Mumtaz, in that cellar, and in two years never lays a finger on her. When they are discovered he leaves overnight, with nothing but a written divorce.
Mumtaz marries the leathercloth merchant Ahmed Sinai and changes her name to Amina — becoming someone new by changing your name will happen again and again in this book. She does not love her husband, so she decides to love him in instalments: today she will learn to love his voice, tomorrow the way he eats. The grandfather fell in love with a woman through a hole; the mother loves a man by disassembling him into parts. This family's method with love is hereditary.
The couple end up in Bombay, buying a villa on the hill from the Englishman William Methwold. The price is absurdly low; there are only two conditions — nothing in the house may be changed, and the sale completes at midnight on 15 August. Methwold's centre-parted hair is immaculate. At the last moment he reaches up and lifts the whole head of hair off. A wig. Of everything the colonizer leaves behind, the most convincing item turns out to be the fake one.
Amina, pregnant, visits a fortune-teller called Ramram Seth, who is so frightened by his own prophecy that he floats off the floor, producing only a string of nonsense: there will be two heads, but you shall see only one; knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Setup ④
Late on 14 August, in Delhi, Nehru begins his address: long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes to redeem it. In a Bombay nursing home, two women are in labour at the same moment. One is Amina. The other is Vanita, wife of the street singer Wee Willie Winkie — except that the father of her child is in fact the Englishman who has just removed his hair. Vanita dies on the delivery table.
The midwife on duty is Mary Pereira. She has a revolutionary boyfriend, Joseph D'Costa, who tells her daily that the injustice of the world is fixed at the moment of birth: poor children are born poor and stay poor. Mary wants to give him proof that she is a comrade too. So at the stroke of midnight she unties the two tags from the babies' ankles, exchanges them, and reties them. Setup ⑤
That gesture decides the book. The singer's son is carried up to the mansion and named Saleem Sinai; the merchant's natural son is carried to the slum to be raised by the street singer, and is called Shiva. Both were born exactly on the stroke, dead centre of the second of independence, which makes them the two most gifted of all the midnight's children. Mary tells nobody; she simply takes a job as the Sinais' ayah and spends the rest of her life atoning at the elbow of the child she stole.
The newspapers photograph the Independence Baby for the front page, and the Prime Minister writes to the infant personally:
"Your life will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own."— Nehru's letter to Saleem (quoted, Book One)
That letter is the book's warrant and the book's curse. An infant is officially designated the mirror of a nation — and he is not even his parents' son.
Saleem grows an enormous, permanently dripping cucumber of a nose, blue eyes, and birthmarks whose shape earns him a public roasting from his geography teacher as the map of India, along with a fistful of hair torn from his head. Up on the hill he grows up alongside his sister, the Brass Monkey, a feral girl who sets fire to other people's shoes.
Just before he turns nine, hiding from the adults, he climbs into his mother's washing-chest. It is full of dirty laundry and his nose seals up completely; through a slit he watches his mother go into the bathroom; in his panic he sniffs hard — and the passage opens. Payoff ① ↑ When Tai said his grandfather's nose had dynasties inside it, this was the moment he meant: the nose was never a breathing apparatus, it is a receiver. Rushdie sites the book's crucial superpower inside a nine-year-old's most humiliating hiding place — no lightning, no annunciation, just a box of dirty clothes and a hard sniff.
After that his head is full of voices. He assumes they are archangels, tells his father, and is slapped across the room. Later he learns to tune, to separate one voice from another, and finally works out what he is hearing: between midnight and one o'clock on 15 August 1947, one thousand and one children were born across India, every one of them carrying a supernatural gift, the gifts stronger the nearer the birth to the stroke itself. By the time he finds them, 420 are still alive — and he points out, helpfully, that 420 is the section of the Indian Penal Code that deals with fraud. He convenes them inside his own skull as the Midnight Children's Conference, MCC, an acronym it shares with a famous cricket club; no joke in this book is idle. The membership includes a boy who can step through mirrors, a girl who conjures fish out of air, children who change sex at will, and Parvati-the-witch, who has real magic.
But the other child born on the stroke arrives too: Shiva, raised in the slum, with monstrous, deformed knees that can crush a man, whose gift is war. Payoff ④ ↑ Only now does the fortune-teller's babble come due: knees and a nose were never two features of one child, they are two children. Of the pair whose tags were swapped, one received the power to understand everything and the other the power to destroy everything. Understanding has never once beaten destruction.
The Conference falls apart fast. Saleem wants it to become a third principle — a loose federation belonging to no party, no religion, no caste. Shiva demolishes this on the spot: there are only things and the people who take them, the question is always who gets and who doesn't, and you lot can afford to sit around debating because there is food in your houses. The children then split along their parents' fault lines: Hindu against Muslim, rich against poor, north against south. The youngest, most gifted, most telepathically intimate people in the country get together and reproduce the previous generation's fractures exactly, in under ten years.
In the same period Saleem begins claiming that he moves history. In 1957 he rides his bicycle into a Marathi language march demanding that states be redrawn on linguistic lines, and blurts out a rhyme he has just learned that insults Gujarati speakers; the marchers take it up as a chant, and the riot that day kills more than a dozen people. He later files the partition of Bombay State under his own account. Later still, to punish his mother for a secret rendezvous, he cuts letters from newspapers into an anonymous note to a naval commander exposing his wife's affair; the commander shoots the lover dead. (Rushdie is reworking a genuine Bombay scandal of the period.) None of the harm Saleem does is harm he intended: he wanted peace at home and produced a corpse.
A door takes off the top of his middle finger. The hospital types his blood, and the family goes silent: this child's blood cannot have come from Ahmed and Amina. Payoff ⑤ ↑ Mary Pereira's two seconds of work eleven years earlier are repaid by a test tube, and she finally confesses. Notice where the elegance lies. Her swap was an act of class revolution — let the poor child be rich for once — and the thing that exposes it is blood typing, which recognizes no persons, no classes and no motives. The revolution is caught by biology. And the family immediately demonstrates something colder: everyone now knows he is not theirs, and not one of them can say what, exactly, that changes.
Saleem is packed off to Pakistan, to his aunt Emerald and her husband, General Zulfikar. On a night in 1958 the general lays out pepperpots and salt cellars on the dining table to plan troop movements, and eleven-year-old Saleem crouches beside him helping to shift them. The next day Pakistan has a military coup. He files that one under his account too, as a matter of course.
Back in Bombay his father has a stroke and the business collapses; in 1963 the family moves to Karachi and lodges with his aunt Alia — the elder sister Ahmed jilted all those years ago. Alia says nothing at all. She simply cooks, every day, spooning twenty years of stored bitterness into the curries she sets on the table. The cruellest revenge in this book is carried out through catering.
His sister the Brass Monkey becomes famous here, packaged as Jamila Singer, the Voice of Pakistan, singing patriotic songs until the whole country weeps. And every time she performs she sits behind a gold-bordered white sheet with a hole cut in the centre of it, through which the audience is permitted a small piece of her. Payoff ② ↑ The sheet that hid a girl in Kashmir fifty years earlier has become a national stage apparatus: the same hole, once used to protect a woman's body, now used to manufacture a country's voice. Rushdie does not need a line of commentary; he simply moves the prop. Saleem falls in love with this sister to whom he is not related, declares himself, and is pushed away in disgust.
In Pakistan a surgeon drains his lifelong sinus blockage and clears the passages for good. The side effect: all one thousand and one voices vanish from his head. In exchange he acquires a superhuman sense of smell — he can smell emotions, smell lies, smell whether a person's grief is real. He is no longer India's receiver, merely a dog with a good nose.
In 1965 war breaks out. An air raid flattens his family in minutes: father, mother, aunt, uncle, all dead. Saleem is standing in the courtyard when something falls out of the sky onto his head — the inlaid silver spittoon, Nadir Khan's cellar toy, carried all these years as part of his mother's dowry. Payoff ③ ↑ It knocks his memory out of him. This is the book's best metaphor and its best joke at once: the thing that erases a man's memory is not a bomb but his own family's old spittoon. When history falls on you out of the sky, it usually falls in the shape of something from your own house.
The amnesiac Saleem is absorbed into the Pakistani army as a tracker, nicknamed the buddha, in a unit whose acronym CUTIA stands for a canine intelligence outfit and also means "bitch" in Urdu. He has no name and no past, only the nose: he is used as a dog, to sniff out the people who are to be killed. Three boy soldiers follow him — Ayooba, Farooq, Shaheed.
In 1971 they are dropped into East Pakistan, soon to be Bangladesh. Rushdie does not editorialize about what Dacca looks like; he simply lets the nose go through it — burnt houses, liquidated intellectuals, women. At some point all four of them break at once and turn into the Sundarbans, the mangrove forest.
The jungle section is the most nightmarish writing in the book. The forest punishes them by stages: first it feeds them, then it gives them fever, finally it makes them weep — and past a certain volume of weeping, memory begins to return in pieces. The three boys die there one after another. Saleem recovers nearly everything except his own name.
He is recognized in the chaos of the fall of Dacca by Parvati-the-witch, the one midnight's child with genuine magic, who spots him in a crowd and says his name aloud. She hides him in a wicker basket, speaks over it, and the man inside ceases to exist. He is smuggled back into India inside that invisible basket, through an interval in which it is unclear whether he is alive or dead: the way a man without a name returns to his country is by first becoming transparent.
Back in Delhi he moves into the magicians' ghetto beside the mosque — a whole settlement of people who live by conjuring, almost all of them communists, on the grounds that men who know exactly how illusions are manufactured cannot be fooled by anyone. Its leading citizen is the snake charmer Picture Singh, billed as the Most Charming Man in the World, who becomes Saleem's last father.
Parvati loves him; he has nothing to give back. She turns and seduces Shiva — by now a major and a decorated war hero out of the slums — is made pregnant and abandoned. Saleem marries her and raises another man's child. Shiva, who should have grown up in the Sinai mansion, ends by sleeping with Saleem's wife and having Saleem raise his son: the two swapped lives settle up, thirty years late, in that particular currency.
At midnight on 25 June 1975, Indira Gandhi declares a state of Emergency. In the same second Parvati gives birth to Aadam Sinai, a boy with ears like two fans who from birth does not cry, does not laugh, makes no sound at all, and only listens. Another child born at midnight alongside a nation — except that what the nation gives birth to this time is its own crackdown.
Saleem calls the ruler the Widow, a figure who appears only as hair and a hand. What follows is drawn from things that actually happened in modern India: bulldozers enter the magicians' ghetto and flatten the settlement in the name of civic beautification, killing Parvati; and Shiva, now working for the regime, picks up the midnight's children one by one.
And then the floor of the book gives way: Saleem talks. In the interrogation cell he hands over the name and whereabouts of every midnight's child still living. They are taken to a Widows' Hostel in Benares and forcibly sterilized — the mass sterilization drive of the Emergency was real, and the novel adds one layer to it: what the surgery removes is not only fertility. Rushdie coins a word for it, sperectomy, the draining of hope. You do not need to kill midnight's children to kill them; you need only ensure they can have no successors and can never believe in anything again. Shiva himself ends up on that table. The one who slips the net is the big-eared baby, Aadam, carried off by Picture Singh.
The ruling party loses the 1977 election, the Emergency ends, and Saleem walks out with nothing. He makes his way to Bombay and finds the owner of a pickle factory — Mary Pereira, the tag-swapping midwife, now a respectable proprietor. She takes him in. He minds the vats by day and writes by night, reading it aloud to Padma, an illiterate, short-tempered factory worker who interrupts every two pages to tell him he talks too much.
On 15 August 1978 he turns thirty-one, and so does India. His body is opening along a network of cracks, like a jug that has been used too long. He foresees being trampled in a Bombay crowd and breaking into six hundred million pieces, one per Indian, and being sucked dry by the multitude — unable either to live or to die in peace. He seals his thirty chapters into thirty jars of pickle, and leaves one jar empty.
Set the six acts side by side and the book has exactly one fuse, and a very short one: Indian history did not sweep up a child; a midwife moved her hands twice at the stroke of midnight. Swap those two tags and the poor boy gets the front page, the Prime Minister's letter, the conviction that he is the mirror of his country, the Midnight Children's Conference — and then the interrogation cell where he gives them all up; while the rich man's son falls into the slum, grows a pair of killing knees, and finally reels that same group in for the Widow. Everything after — the language riots, the coup, the spittoon out of the sky, the jungle, the basket, the bulldozers — is the echo of that one second. This book is not about how history shapes a person. It is about how a person can write out someone else's entire life in a second, after which nobody can tell who is who.
The technical achievement here is the fusion of a comic surface with a structural intention. On the face of it this is a farce about an obsolete custom: a blind father, two female wrestlers, a bedsheet, and a girl who is ill in a different place every few weeks. Everyone can see she is faking; nobody says so. But Rushdie is laying down the law of the whole novel: you will only ever see things through a hole, and you will develop whole feelings about the fragments.
Aziz does not fall in love with Naseem; he falls in love with the composite he assembled out of the pieces, and by the time he discovers the real woman is nothing like it, it is far too late. That is this book's consistent position on memory, country and history alike: all three are seen through a hole, all three are assembled — and the assembly is still capable of making people love to the point of ruin and hate to the point of blood.
Better still, the prop walks itself through the entire novel: the mother loving her husband one part at a time; the sister singing for a nation from behind a sheet with a hole in it; the narrator in the pickle factory sealing his life away one jar at a time. An opening joke ends up as the book's epistemology.
Rushdie cuts the crucial fifteen seconds of the book like this: Delhi, Nehru on the radio announcing that an ancient nation is waking; a Bombay delivery room, two women pushing; and in the corner of the same room, a pair of nurse's hands untying a string. The monumental, the physiological and the criminal, compressed into a single second.
The craft is in the order the information arrives. You see the birth of a nation first (solemn), then two infants (biological), and only then the hands (the crime). By the time you understand what has happened, the solemnity has already set and cannot be poured off: the Prime Minister's letter goes out anyway, the newspapers run the picture anyway, the whole country is delighted with this child anyway. Here is the book's blackest joke: a nation's founding myth is attached to the wrong person from its first second, and will never find out.
One more detail deserves a pause. The person who swaps the tags is the lowest-status human in the room — an illiterate Catholic midwife whose motive is that she wants to please her boyfriend. The hinge of history is worked by someone whose name nobody records, for a reason that does not matter. That judgement is closer to what Rushdie actually believes than any of the novel's grand arias about national destiny.
The calibration here is very hard to get right. The more sacred the source of a superpower, the more the reader disengages; the more undignified, the more the reader buys it. Rushdie pushes it to the limit of indignity: spying, mucus, dirty underwear, a slap. Not one word in the passage is exalted — and it accomplishes the largest thing in the book, because from this moment the wall between one child's private life and one country's public life is gone.
Note also that both of the nose's turning points are purely physiological: it works when it is blocked, and is cut off by surgery once it is clear. Rushdie declines to give the gift any metaphysics; he gives it a set of sinuses. Magic in this novel never happens in the sky — it happens in one specific body part: a nose, a pair of knees, a set of ears, a womb. Which is exactly why the Emergency section hurts so much: to destroy a whole generation's magic, all you need is an operating theatre.
If the engine of a hard-SF novel is a physical premise, the engine of Midnight's Children is narration itself — specifically, a first person who is demonstrably unreliable and who admits it to your face.
Saleem blends spices by day and writes himself by night, and he makes the equation explicit: to finish a chapter is to seal a jar, to preserve memory in brine. The nature of pickling determines the nature of the book — you pickle in order to preserve, and pickling necessarily alters the taste. What goes into the jar will keep for years and can never again be what it was fresh. He is not reconstructing history; he is producing history with too much spice in it. He even flags the recipe problem: some jars have taken too much salt, some too much sugar.
The dates in this book are wrong, and not by accident. The most famous instance misplaces the timing of Gandhi's assassination — and having noticed, Saleem publicly refuses to correct it: in his India, Gandhi will go on dying on the wrong day. Rushdie later wrote an essay acknowledging that errors of this kind were designed, to remind the reader that what you are holding is not the history of India but the India inside one Indian's memory, and that memory will edit a date to preserve its own shape.
This move rescues the whole novel, because Saleem is simultaneously doing something enormously arrogant: claiming to have caused language riots, a military coup, even a war. He goes so far as to classify his connections to history into four modes — active-literal, passive-literal, active-metaphorical, passive-metaphorical. A man earnestly building a taxonomy of his own delusion is comic; but because the reader has been told in advance that he misremembers, the delusion need not be taken at face value, and becomes instead a symptom one can pity. He is not saying "I caused history." He is saying "I cannot get myself and history apart."
The illiterate factory worker Padma is the most practical device in the novel. She sits and listens, and whenever it gets mystical she snaps: you are wandering again; that is impossible; get on with what happened next. Rushdie hires the impatience of every normal reader in advance and puts it on the payroll. She also supplies the book's only reality check — she is the one person in it who never talks about the nation, and only wants to know whether he has eaten and how the cracks are doing.
An honest word about the "magic": it is not Indian mysticism, and it has a very specific job. When the official version of a period is being rewritten by force, realism loses the fight — you say this many died, they say that many died. But a thousand and one magical children forcibly sterilized cannot be denied by any statistical method, because it was never inside the statistics to begin with. Magic realism here is not decoration; it is a way of copying memory onto a second medium, in a place where the records can be deleted at any time.
Take the pathology side first, at full strength. Saleem claims the language riots were shouted into being by him, the coup was arranged by his pepperpots, the war was fought to eliminate his family. This is textbook delusion, and delusion has a cost: when one man books every event to his own account, the people actually responsible disappear. The men who gave the orders, fired the weapons, signed off on the sterilizations all retreat behind a narcissistic metaphor. "History is my doing" sounds like accountability and functions exactly like "history is fate" — neither one requires you to name anybody.
Now the other side, argued better than Saleem argues it himself. This is in fact how human beings experience history. You do not know a decade through statistics; you know it through the year your father stopped talking, the reason your mother sewed jewellery into a padded coat, the morning your school was closed. National events are never background to an individual — they are the substance of the life. Saleem's only error is converting that sensation into causation, and the thing he is reaching for is true: nobody stands outside history as a spectator. The opposing posture — big events have nothing to do with me, I just want to live my life well — sounds modest and is the most widely used self-exemption on earth.
Bring it home: how much of what your era does are you willing to book to your own account? Too much and you go mad; too little and none of it has an owner. The book supplies no dial setting. It only shows you a man who turned the dial to maximum, cracking open in front of you.
The defence can be made beautifully. Birth decides everything — the one fact nobody in this novel disputes. Whether a child becomes a lawyer or a pickpocket is settled before he opens his eyes, and Mary overturned that verdict in one second. If birth is itself a distribution nobody ever consented to, on what grounds is redistributing it once more illegitimate? And she paid: she gave up her post, never married, and spent her life as ayah to the child she stole, watching her own crime at close range.
The opposite case holds too, and hurts more. Her revolution produced precisely one victim and one beneficiary, both of them newborns, neither of them consulted. The thirty years Shiva should have had — schooling, standing, the right to be believed — were taken from him, and what he got instead was a pair of knees for crushing men and a lifetime of rage. He duly becomes a brutal man, and then everybody, the narrator of this book included, cites the brutality as proof that he never deserved better. It is the perfect circular argument: first you dispossess a man, then you use the results of the dispossession to characterize him. Worse, the microphone belongs to the beneficiary — the Shiva we read is the Shiva written by the man who has his life.
The structure is everywhere today: every redistribution carried out in the name of fairness lands on specific people, and the ones who bear it are usually not the generation that ran up the debt. "History owes a debt" is true; whether it is just to collect it from the person in front of you is a separate question. The novel does not rule. It simply leaves both men crippled, and lets one of them narrate.
Stand on the defence and stand there firmly. Nobody outside the room has standing to require that the man inside it hold out. By then Saleem had lost his wife, his community and, once already, his memory, and he was being held in a place built specifically to break people. To demand that he not talk is to require something he plainly could not do and then cite the failure as evidence of a defective character. And he does a harder thing than holding out: he writes the episode into his own book, without mitigation. Most informers' memoirs are missing that chapter.
Now the prosecution, at full strength. He narrates this in the identical voice he has used for thirty chapters — the digressions, the winks, the constant trailers for the next instalment. That voice is the most seductive thing in the book, and precisely because it is seductive, it thins a very concrete event (four hundred–odd people taken to an operating table, many because he said their names) into one more turn of the story. He has spent the novel calling himself history's victim; in this scene he is its instrument. Using charm to narrate your own cowardice is a continuation of the cowardice. And note the asymmetry: he takes full responsibility for a dozen deaths in a riot he barely affected, and moves briskly past four hundred people he did affect. People apologize most readily for the things they did not do.
No verdict here, but one distinction worth taking away: the act under coercion can be forgiven; the tone you use to tell it afterwards was never coerced. You cannot choose how you behave under torture. You can choose entirely how you sound describing it.
Saleem's position is unambiguous: in his India, Gandhi died on that wrong day, and he will not amend it. The defence is easy to make and genuinely moving. People do not live inside chronologies. What shapes the rest of your life is the version you remember, not the version in the archive; a man who misremembers his father's death by a year does not grieve any less for the error. The same holds collectively — a people lives on the story it tells itself, not on the footnotes. Correct all the distortions out of a memory and you have deleted the person whose memory it is.
But this doctrine has become dangerous, and the danger has to be stated fully. The most enthusiastic users of "my truth" are not poets; they are the people rewriting history. The very sentence "the official version cannot be trusted" protects deleted victims and denies documented massacres with equal efficiency. Saleem holds an exemption nobody else has: he is fictional, and his wrong dates cost no one a monument. Outside the book, the people insisting that only what they remember counts are frequently the ones holding the bulldozers at the site.
The novel does supply a boundary, without ever saying so aloud: every one of its departures from fact runs in the direction of making erased people reappear, and never the other way. It invents a thousand and one children so that the nameless of the Emergency have a shape that can be remembered; it invents no victory that did not happen. Maybe the test of an inaccurate memory is not how accurate it is, but who it favours — who it puts back in the room.
Line his books up and the same fixation surfaces again and again: purity is the fiction and mongrelization is the fact — and the whole world is killing for purity.
Nobody in Midnight's Children is pure. Saleem is the son of an Englishman and a Hindu woman, raised by a Muslim family, swapped by a Christian midwife, married at last to a witch; his country was cut in two along religious lines in the second he was born, and twenty-four years later one of the halves splits again. Shame (1983) turns to the country next door and announces on its opening pages that this is not quite Pakistan, but a Pakistan at a slight angle. The Satanic Verses (1988) drops two migrants out of the sky, one sprouting a halo and the other horns — migration as metamorphosis. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) sends a boy to rescue the sea that supplies the world's stories, because someone has been poisoning it; he wrote it for his son while under threat.
The second thread is that the storyteller must keep talking or die. The thousand and one children point straight at the Arabian Nights: Scheherazade buys a day with each night's story, Saleem buys one more night uncracked with each jar he seals. The real protagonist of this novel is not Saleem but the voice — glib and grieving at once, cracking a joke one second and reading out a list of the dead the next. It carries six hundred pages, until it splits open itself.
Without flattery, the objections to this book are literary, legal and political at once:
1. This is not the story of a country shaping a child. A midwife moved her hands twice at midnight, and everyone has had the wrong man ever since.
2. The method is handed over on page one: you can only see through a seven-inch hole, and you will develop whole feelings about the fragments.
3. Nehru writes that the child will be the mirror of the nation — and the child is not even his parents' son. The founding myth is attached to the wrong person from second one.
4. Nose against knees: the power to understand everything and the power to destroy everything, born in the same instant, separated by one name-tag. Understanding has never won.
5. The Conference is the cruellest passage in the book — the youngest, most gifted, most telepathically intimate people in the country reproduce their parents' fractures within a decade.
6. What falls out of the sky and smashes his memory is not a bomb but his own family's old spittoon. History usually hits you with something from your house.
7. "Sperectomy" is this book's coinage and its most precise description of tyranny: you need not kill people, only ensure they have no successors and can believe in nothing.
8. He narrates his own betrayal in the same charming voice as everything else. The act under coercion can be forgiven; the tone was never coerced.
9. Memory misremembers, of course. The test of an inaccurate memory may not be its accuracy but who it favours — who it puts back in the room.
10. Thirty chapters sealed into thirty jars, with one left empty. You pickle to preserve, and pickling always changes the taste. That is all writing about the past.