Of course a novel, however fragmented, is neither a temple nor a collage that may be examined in parts or perceived as an instantaneous whole; it must be experienced sequentially. But the reader is nonetheless advised to keep in mind the image of the perforated sheet in the narrative summary that follows.
Midnight’s Children traces the grotesque destiny of a Muslim Indian family from 1915 to 1977, when Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule was about to end in a general election which she, in a hubristic burst of overconfidence, had called. Its narrator-protagonist is Saleem Sinai, who, in the novel’s present (1977), is an impotent wreck of a man whose body has begun to develop cracks. Living, or rather dying, in a Bombay pickle factory, Saleem tells his fantastic story to a woman who works in the factory. This woman, Padma, whom he calls his “dung-lotus,” is thick, illiterate, superstitious, and often grouchy; a stubbornly resistant audience, Padma nonetheless loves Saleem and is the consolation of his latter days.
The story itself reaches back in time to Dr. Aziz’s odd courtship and the family’s move from Kashmir to Agra. Then it proceeds to the marriage of Saleem’s (supposed) mother, Mumtaz (later Amina) Aziz to his (supposed) father, Ahmed Sinai. Since Ahmed, though well-off, is not an attractive man, his wife (who has inherited her father’s big nose) resolves, “under the spell of the perforated sheet,” to fall in love with him part by part; she succeeds finally in loving every part except the one that is essential to her achievement of motherhood. We follow this affluent but ill-assorted couple first to Delhi and then to Bombay, where they buy a villa on the estate of an Englishman who will allow no changes in his properties or their furnishings until the day of Indian independence, for which the countdown has now begun with the arrival of Lord Mountbatten. This opening section, occupying over a hundred tightly printed pages, is not only densely populated but contains sufficient action, both realistic and fantastic, to stock half a dozen contemporary novels of the short, well-made variety. The link between the family’s history and that of the nation (the campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, the prelude to Partition, Hindu-Muslim rioting, etc.) is established through dozens of small episodes, together with numerous digressions and disquisitions on the part of the narrator. Meanwhile, this loquacious fellow has not yet been born.
But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: “At this rate,” Padma complains, “you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.” She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my general direction, but doesn’t fool me. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked…. “You better get a move on, or you’ll die before you get yourself born.” Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. “Things—even people—have a way of leaking into each other,” I explain, “like flavours when you cook….”In this much-deferred birth, as in so much else, Midnight’s Children is reminiscent of that two-hundred-year-old masterpiece of digression, Tristram Shandy. The birth, for which there is also a countdown of days, hours, and minutes, occurs on the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, just as Prime Minister Nehru is beginning his radio speech and as the partitioned Punjab bursts into flames of communal savagery.
Saleem is not a beautiful baby: he has a moon face, fair skin stained by birthmarks, ice-blue eyes, bulbous temples like Byzantine domes, and a rampant cucumber of a nose from which constantly flows “a shining cascade of goo.” Furthermore, nasal appearances to the contrary, he is not his parents’ child but the son of a poor itinerant entertainer and a woman who dies in childbirth; a midwife had, in a moment of revolutionary fervor, changed the babies’ name-tags, “giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty….” The real offspring of the Sinais—a powerful, knock-kneed infant named Shiva—reappears from time to time in the novel as Saleem’s counterpart and nemesis. As the first-born child of midnight, Saleem is celebrated in the newspapers and receives a letter from the prime minister; but at the same time his father, as a rich Muslim suspected of leanings toward Pakistan, receives a letter from the new government stating that all his assets have been frozen. Again the ironic linking of the personal and the historical is reinforced.
The account of Saleem’s middle-class boyhood in Bombay is so crowded with vividly realized incidents that I can only call attention to their existence. Once more we are confronted with the writhing figures on the temple. The clustering that must be brought into focus centers around Saleem’s discovery, at nine, of extraordinary telepathic powers that enable him to read the minds of those around him—and, incidentally, to cheat at school. At ten, as the result of a concussion, he learns that he is in communication with the 581 children who have survived (given India’s high rate of child mortality) from the 1,001 children born between midnight and 1 AM on August 15, 1947.
These are midnight’s children, “every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale would stagger even C.G. Jung), endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous.” A boy from Kerala has the ability to step through mirrors and reemerge through any reflective surface, including the polished metal bodies of automobiles. A blue-eyed child from Kashmir can alter his or her sex by stepping into water. Still another, Parvati, is a true witch, with powers of conjuration and sorcery. To Shiva, Saleem’s changeling brother, “the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!)….” As the divine names of Shiva and Parvati and the references to the Mahabharata and Ramayana suggest, midnight’s children incorporate the stupendous Indian past, with its pantheon, its epics, and its wealth of folklore and fairy tales, while at the same time playing a role in the tumultuous Indian present. Saleem confesses that, though born and raised in the Muslim tradition, he finds himself overwhelmed by an “older learning” and speculates that he himself might, with his trunk-like nose, embody some of the attributes of the elephant-god Ganesh.
To Saleem himself is given “the greatest talent of all—the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.” Thanks to these gifts, it is Saleem who organizes the disparate group into the Midnight Children’s Conference, which night after night he telepathically convenes. But the existence of the MCC does not survive Saleem’s adolescence (it is indeed rather like an adolescents’ club). When he is fifteen his telepathic powers are destroyed by an operation that drains his inflamed sinuses—an operation that also confers upon him, for the first time in his life, the ability to smell. Great things lie ahead for Saleem’s extraordinary nasal talents, which can detect psychological and moral as well as physical odors.
When Saleem moves to Pakistan with his family, the novel swerves into a more immediate concern with the political and military history of the two rival nations in the sub-Himalayan triangle. Despite the unabated crackle of comedy on the novel’s surface, the tone darkens, becoming less Shandian or Rabelaisian than Swiftian. Passages of mordantly ironic satire alternate with scenes of phantasmagoric horror. The wife of an Indian government official (Saleem’s uncle Mustapha Aziz), who has been passed over forty-seven times for the headship of his department, is driven insane “by a life in which she has been required to begin ‘being a chamcha’ (literally a spoon, but idiomatically a flatterer) to forty-seven separate and successive wives of number-ones whom she had previously alienated by her manner of colossal condescension when they had been wives of number-threes….” As for her husband, “If Indira Gandhi had asked him to commit suicide, Mustapha Aziz would have ascribed it to anti-Muslim bigotry but also defended the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally, performed the task without daring (or even wishing) to demur.”
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