Midnight Children - Salman Rushdie

Many protagonists or antagonists in several novels have had strange births. I always though Harry Potter’s birth was dramatic but the story of Saleem Sinai’s birth was queerer than I could have imagined. It is filled with strange instances and superstitions.

His impending birth is publicly announced by his mother in front of hundreds of strangers to save a strange man while his own father had no knowledge of the existence of the child. This begins the drama around Saleem Sinai’s birth. Also, as soon as his birth is announced, the readers are told of the fire in Ahmed Sinai’s factory which would eventually lead them to seek refuge in Bombay (present day Mumbai)

There are so many predictions that Ramram’s cousin makes as he reads Aamina Sinai’s palm, several of which come true in a strange fashion. Three of those, I could understand by the end of the eighth chapter:

A son... neither older, nor younger than his motherland – Although India has a history traceable to almost five thousand years back, Saleem Sinai is born at midnight of august 15, 1947, the day Indian subconstinent was partitioned and the present day India came into existence.

There will be two heads, but you shall see only one – I deduced that it was related to Mary’s crime. There is one baby who was born to Aamina and the other baby who she raises as her son. So she becomes mother to two sons but sees only one.

Newspapers praise him, two mothers raise him – The story of his birth was published in one of the leading English Dailies – The Times of India and he is raised by Aamina and Mary both.

A few months before his birth Ahmen and Aamina shift to Bombay and buy a house whose owner has very specific requests – not to throw away a single thing from the house until the midnight of August 15, 1947; drink scotch in the garden right at six o’clock in the evening. Even though Aamina hates the arrangement, she is forced to live with it as the house is sold at very cheap price.

And finally we find that the baby’s are exchanged. The nurse Mary is so full of anger and contempt over the death of her lover Joseph that she exchanges the tag on the babies. The child that Amina gave birth to is given to a poor man, the child who was supposed to be raised in luxury lives in poverty while the son of Wee Willie Winkie and Anglo Indian with a French heritage is given to the Sinais. They take him as their own and see their face in his – the Kashmiri long nose and the blue eyes.

The question that I am left asking is : if the baby is not Aamina’s then will the prophesies come true? How did Ramram’s cousin (who made so many remarks about the birth of the child that turned out to be true) missed the most crucial information about the child? How will Saleem come to know of his true parentage?

Midnight Children hosts numerous characters. Whether minor or major, each of them had an impact on Saleem Sanai’s life. One such character was Evelyn Lilith Burns. She came to live with her widower father and catapulted the ten year old Saleem into a new reality.

As Saleem confesses, ‘If Evie had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond tourism in a clock tower and cheating in class...’

She rode in a bicycle and challenged Saleem to look beyond the game of cricket. She showed him and the other boys how to fire a gun (a toy gun of course) and thus became the chief of their gangs. Her capriciousness left Saleem in awe of the new girl who had a soft corner for his best friend Sonny Ibrahi., At the tender age of ten, SAleem Sinai was in an emotional love triangle with no idea how to move forward. He had suddenly become someone with relationship issues.

Evie taught him how to ride a bicycle and raided the clock tower that was supposed to be Saleem and his friend’s hideout. She outsmarted the kids in their own territory.

Saleem tries hard to impress Evie. He learns tricks on bicycle and when she refuses to see them, he gets into her brain and read her thoughts. The horror of what was in there, led him to lose balance and he goes down crashing and in a way becomes responsible for the violence that ended up with the partition of the state of Bombay. That same accident and the incidents that followed led Saleem to discover the other Midnight Children. He was introduced to others like him – ones who possessed supernatural abilities and thus introduced him to a different world.

Saleem was a rich kid who lived in an affluent neighbourhood and was friends with kids with similar background. However, upon discovering the other midnight children, he became a part of a different world – the world of the poor and the needy and that of goons and criminals. He meets Willie Wenkie’s son Shiva (the child that Aamina gave birth to) and learns how as an eight year old he used to beat children who disobeyed him. He learns that the world outside the Methwold estate was a dangerous one in which no one could be trusted, and also that it’s pretty easy for some people to hurt, rob, kill others without any guilt or conscience.

Saleem turned from a child into an adult (who learned the cruel ways the world worked) before he started wearing long pants, all thanks to Evelyn Lilith Burns.

The WAR

Saleem says that in the war they were fighting an invisible enemy. It made me wonder who was this invisible enemy and was he different for each person who was fighting the war.

The four of them who ran from the battle ground fought their conscience in the first instance. A soldier who runs away from the war - a deserter, that’s the worst tag any soldier could wear and yet they ran away – out of fear, out of tiredness, out of the futility of the situation, or maybe because they did not find it in themselves to stand on the borderline for politics. Each must have had a reson of his own.

However, their war doesn’t ends so easily.

Sunderbans is one of the largest tidal mangroves in the world. There are parts that are restricted for entry because of the dense forest, wild animals, and salt water crocodiles. And these soldiers ran right into the middle of such a jungle. Now, the enemy changed but the struggle did not.

They had to run for their lives, find food, water, shelter, and fight for their safety. I wondered if it would have been better if they stayed in the battleground. Farooq and Shaheed were so inexperienced that they did not even notice the level of water rising in the river and keep bailing the boat. There was no repite from the invisible enemy even in the forest. Ther might be no war waged or no soldiers from the opposite side but the nature was still against them – working its ways in their lives like a monstrous enemy.

From what I gathered, they must have been lost in the jungle during monsoon, which is a four month long season of heavy downpour. It rains incessantly in that part of the country. And they slept underneath trees during such downpours.

The description – ‘While Ayooba sat in a red-eyed funk and Farooq seemed destroyed by his hero’s disintegration; while the Buddha remained silent and bowed with his head... shows that the soldiers were unable to escape fromt he war even in the jungle. Even Farooq says at a point, ‘we are gong to die.’ Neither of them had entered the jungle with the thought of further struggle but there they were.

I like Rushdie’s metaphor of invisible enemy in the chapter as he doesn’t use a single thing or instance but a series of instances and the entire jungle to explain that running is never the solution. Each of the men suffers in his own way even after getting out from the jungle.

Ayooba and Farooq both die after becoming target to a sniper’s bullet. Shaheed dies in the masque being consumed by greedy ants. Saleem finds no solace at his uncle’s place; and is thrown out of the house after being caught in bed with Parwati.

There is no escape from the invisible enemy whether ne is in the battleground or in the jungle or at the mosque or at home. Life catches up with us everywhere.

Narrative

Rushdie seems to be a master of writing with his complex narrative techniques and excellent vocabulary. There are times when I need to consult a dictionary while reading the novel. And despite that strong hold on language he keeps sprinkling the narrative with words from the native land not only in the dialogues but also in the description. I find this an interesting addition. The Hindi words come so effortlessly within the prose that at times (especially for me as Hindi is my mother tongue) that at time, the change in language goes unnoticed.

The text is replete with such instance. For example, Rushdie calls the army – India Fauj (Fauj is Hindi for army) although he used English equivalent for the name of the country (Bharat is the commonly used name for India in the native tongue). At another place he calls a swamp deep – ‘barasingha deer’. Here too he mixes the two languages and that too in a very interesting format. The hindi equivalent of deer is ‘hiran’ which Rushdie refrains from using. Also, ‘barasinha’ is not the Hindi equivalent of swamp, it actually means twelve horned. The name is a derivative of the physical attribute of the deer.

Elsewhere in the novel we see the characters speak a mix of Hindi and English. Although most of the dialogues are in English, the sudden expressions of surprise or hurt are often in the mother tongue. When Pia falls down, instead of expressing the physical hurt using the common English expression, ‘ouch’, she shouts ‘Hai! Hai! Ai Hai!’ The same words are repeated by Aamina’s mother to express her disgust.

The characters keep on using Hindi equivalents of English words and expression such as ‘Baap re Baap’ for ‘Oh God’, ‘rakshasa’ for ‘demon’, ‘ayah’ for ‘nanny’, and so on.

This gives certain Indian-ness to the novel. It makes it a story about the country which is being narrated by a native. He is retelling the story of his land in a foreign language, however, it seems that he retains the ‘desi’ – the local flavour, in the story by weaving words and expressions form his mother tongue.

Rushdie’s knowledge of both languages is extensive and he uses it to his advantage in the narrative. It is refreshing to see him mix the two languages and hence reclaiming the language of the novel as his own. He has built a sort of bridge between the two languages and the novel stands somewhere in between.

The book made me realise how easily magic realism come to Salman Rushdie. He weaves them within the story as if such things happen naturally in real life and the narrator is so convincing that the reader never questions these occurrences.

There were omens before Ahmed Sinai’s assets were frozen. In the month of January the beach of Chaowpaty and Juhu were littered with corpses of pomfrets. There was no explanation of the deaths of those fishes and finding pomfret in January in Mumbai is almost impossible under normal circumstances. Other unexplained omens included the comet exploding over the Bay of Bengal and flowers bleeding red blood. Mad snake charmer leading snakes out of their farms. All these are so seamlessly written into the narrative that we believe that the incidents must have happened - warning the Sinais of the impending doom.

Baby Saleem’s mother and nanny remain worried for the first few months of his life as he did not blink his eye even once. Though medically it is near to impossible for a baby to not blink his eyes and still remain healthy and grow with breakneck speed. Yet Rushdie shows us how Saleem is trained by Mary and Aamina to close his eyes at intervals and then open them back again and Aamina recalls the prophesises of RamRam thinking which one of them fits Saleem’s current state.

Then there is the tenant Doctor Schaapsteker who later on turned out to be a criminal on run. His stories are wild. His orderlies swore that he had the capability of dreaming about snakes and getting bitten by them and thus the man remained immune to snake bite. The doctor was so obsessed with snakes that he bought old horses and injected them with venoms. Now the story could have been concocted by angry employees but the secrecy around Schaapsteker’s life fed the magic realism in the story. The way he moved at nights and pursued his passion loomed on the borderline of unnatural behaviour.

And then finally we see the nine year old Saleem hearing strange voices. When he tells his parents about it, he is punished for making up stories but Saleem keep professing in front of the readers that he heard voices in toungues he did not even understand – Malayalam, Naga, Tamil, Urdu and several more. Saleem uses this newly acquired talent of his to cheat on tests or listen to the voices of accomplished people. He peeps into other’s lives through the voice in their heads (which he could somehow hear despite the distance of kilometres).

Chapter after chapter Rushdie uses his imagination to give us a paranormal experience which plays with our senses and takes us on a ride into a strange, exciting world.

I started reading Midnight Children with the expectation of meeting a very difficult narrative arc, since the book received the Booker Prize twice but as I went ahead with the novel, the storytelling began to grow on me.

Saleem Sinai doesn’t writes like a farfetched narrator, rather the chapters seem to read like a folktale told orally by someone sitting close to me. Saleem (Rushdie) writes as if he is talking to someone. He keeps getting lost in his family history and then comes back to the present to talk to Padma or describe how she wants his attention or how he is not able to provide for her.

The novel begins with Saleem telling us about the childhood of his grandfather in Kashmir of undivided India. He gives us a detailed description of the scenery – the chinars and the walnuts and the shikaras that float in the lakes. He then goes on to tell how his grandfather grew up to be a doctor and met his grandmother. The chapter is written similar to that of folklore where the orator lays the ground of his story, mesmerising the readers with the rich details of the landscape and the how his characters move within in.

In the second chapter Mercurochrome, we see Saleem telling us of the time, he uses the perforated sheet at a prop in a family New Year show celebration and then goes back to the time when his grandparents were newlywed. Rushdie uses his narrator to talk to the reader like some old friend relaying his family history. He links the recent past, the ancient past, and the present seamlessly.

Rushdie writes with the flexibility of an oral storyteller where he infuses Saleem’s comments and personal biases about the characters in the narrative. A lot of what we read about Aadam and Naseem or their daughters is influenced by Saleem’s view about them. He tells us how the long nose of his grandfather sits on the face of each of his off springs and how his grandmother was more a Reverand mother than a wife. He explains his own view of the perforated sheet (it looked like a ghost’s wrapping to him) which was quite different from how his grandfather saw it or his grandmother used it.

Also, at the same time Saleem talks to or talks about the woman staying with him. He describes Padma’s concerns. The story is constantly interrupted by what is happening around Saleem in the present. It is both fragmented and interwoven at the same time.

This provided the narrative has certain mysticism. It moves ahead like a folklore that binds the listeners who believe in everything that Saleem says without questioning the authenticity of his words.

As the novel ended, the thing that fascinated me the most was how Rushdie creates and epic without following the structure of classical epics. I call the novel an epic because it is the story of three generations intertwined with the history of a nation which (despite being led by non-violent leader Mahatma Gandhi) saw bloodshed of hundreds of thousands of people during independence. There is so much that happens from Aadam Sinai’s youth to the time when Saleem marries Parvati that the novel feels like an action packed epic. Uncanny things keep happening in Saleem’s life and most of these incidents happen exactly at the same time when a watershed event happens in the history of India.

- In a classical epic, the plot structures around the life of a hero of unbelievable stature: MC revolves around the life of Saleem who keeps on developing and losing uncanny abilities (telepathic hearing, smell, loss of memory), however, his stature doesn’t seems unbelievable. If at all, he loses everything he had when Ahmad Sinai finds out about the switch at birth. Also, Saleem keeps failing to find love especially as a young child. Evie leaves him, Jameela refuses to acknowledge his love, and he is unable to satisfy Padma (even she leaves him in the middle of the novel – although she comes back later, it never seems like she is in awe of Saleem).

- The hero of classical epic has superhuman strength and valour: The only superhuman abilities that Saleem possessed were by the virtue of his birth at midnight of the eve of India’s independence. Other than that, he keeps being beaten – Evelyn beats him, Shiva hits him, the children of MCC refuse to accept his supremacy over him and chased him out. Even when Saleem goes to war, he runs away to the forest of Sunderbans. Yet, he is the hero of this almost sixty year long saga that Rushdie creates.

- In a classical epic, narrator remains objective and omniscient: The narrator of this epic is Saleem and often we, as readers doubt his opinion. He is unreliable and biased. Saleem keeps forgetting things, he keeps mixing reality with his imagination and more often than not, he comments on the beahvious of the characters which takes him far away from being objective.

Even though the hero who also happens to be the narrator is unreliable and defies all the qualitites that the protagonist of the epic possesses, I call Midnight Children an epic as it involves vast setting that spans three countries of the Indian subcontinent; there are supernatural forces at work which begins with Aadam Sinai’s falling in love with a woman standing behind a perforated sheet and keep on finding place in the novel till the end. Also, though the narrative style of Rushdie is not that of a typical epic – there is no invocation of muse or poetic diction, but the techniques that he used still makes me feel like I am reading a story that hovers on the boundary of normal and para normal.