Midnight's septuagenarians

As independent India turns 74, so do the children of midnight, and in particular, one loveable snot-nosed baldy. Saleem Sinai, the cucumber-nosed narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, who, by being born on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, finds himself “mysteriously handcuffed to history” — a newly-liberated country and a new-born baby share a birthday that causes interferences and entanglements in each other’s fates. 

What are the stories that septuagenarian Saleem might tell, were he to recount events now? Would he be able to view the septuagenarian democracy’s politics, its traumas, its unrequited dreams through his grandfather Aadam Aziz’s eyes, those eyes into which the blue of a Kashmiri sky has trickled? Would his narrative contain a Hummingbird (the doomed founder of the Free Islam Convocation), a Lifafa Das with his dugdugee drum and his box on wheels through which one might get a glimpse of the world, a poet who cannot rhyme and who abandons poetry for communism? 

Would the Agra of his imagination be speckled with betel-chewing old men who play games of hit-the-spittoon at a paan-shop? Would Kashmir appear, thawing in early spring, its landscape uninterrupted by army jeeps or camouflaged trucks or men in uniform? And Bombay — forever Bombay, the city of Saleem’s birth, of cocktail hour at Methwold’s Estate, of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys’ High School, of the Kolynos Kid in a green hat on a hoarding for Kolynos Toothpaste, of graduating from shorts to long pants — would Bombay, now irrevocably Mumbai, still kindle a deep and abiding love? 

One might speculate and arrive at the conclusion that a septuagenarian narrator will offer a rheumy-eyed view of a country that, like him, is no longer young or prone to optimism or animated with slivers of magic. Both are now unlike the Saleem Sinai and the shifting geographies of Midnight’s Children, which was first published in 1981, and won several prizes, including The Best of Booker Prize 2008. 

Prizes aside, and regardless of its position as an emissary of magic realism in Indian English literature, there are immediate reasons why Midnight’s Children has endured. The novel examines history without pomposity, it contains facts that read like fairy tales, it is an accurate sketch of the subcontinent in spite of its allegories, its allusions, its myth-making, its tendency to digress (or maybe because of it). But it isn’t attempting accuracy; its narrative isn’t burdened by all that Saleem knows and must tell. In fact, Midnight’s Children sets out to seek, and achieve, an intimacy.

Saleem, nearly thirty-one-years old, puts on display the many personal artefacts and feelings and notions and nicknames and omens that are his inheritance. These, he uses to scrutinise history, inviting the reader into his explorations. One peeps through a perforated bedsheet to learn what, or who lies behind it; one observes the red stains of Mercurochrome, and those of blood. One drives in a borrowed Studebaker along with Saleem’s parents, Amina and Ahmed Sinai, towards Dr Narlikar’s Nursing Home in Bombay, where Saleem will be born even as India is declared a free country:

“The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying, ‘…At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom…’ And beneath the roar of the monster there are two more yells, cries, bellows, the howls of children arriving in the world, their unavailing protests mingling with the din of independence which hangs saffron-and-green in the night sky...”
 

In Midnight’s Children, a novel of intermingling fates and intertwined lives, and the fluid nature of people and places that drip into one another, personal events seep into history. And vice versa. The pact of intimacy between reader and narrator, between reader and the politics of the land, is maintained when familial upheavals become microcosms of historically significant ones — the birthing of nations, language marches, revolutions, war.

Saleem’s nose, too, an olfactory organ of exceptional powers, plays its role in establishing a variety of intimacies. Perennially blocked in childhood, it connects him with a babble of voices in his head, allowing him to tune in, telepathically, to all the children of midnight — those born during the first hour of August 15, 1947. These children (one thousand and one are born, only five hundred and eighty-one survive), assemble in 1958, within the cacophonous parliament of Saleem’s brain. Those born closer to midnight are astonishingly gifted; those farthest from the hour are “…(to be frank) little more than circus freaks…” although this notion is challenged in the children’s parliament.

Where are they now, the children of midnight, with their fabulous gifts of transmogrification or wizardry or flight? Has the free nation that was born alongside them robbed them of their abilities? Did they die before their time or do they lie, diseased and forgotten, in some corner of a filthy ghetto? One might ask Saleem Sinai, that is, if he is still alive, in a country hostile to those like him.