Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Magic realism

Time of plot: 1915–77

Locale: India, including Kashmir, Amritsar, Agra, Delhi, Bombay, and the Sunderbans; Rawalpindi and Karachi, Pakistan; Dacca, Bangladesh

Principal Characters

• Saleem Sinai, the narrator, who is born at midnight on August 15, 1947—the moment India achieved independence
• Padma, Saleem’s audience and coworker in a pickle factory
• Jamila Singer (the Brass Monkey), Saleem’s sister
• Shiva, another Midnight's Child and the biological father of Aadam Sinai
• Parvati (Laylah Sinai), another Midnight's Child who later becomes Shiva’s lover and Saleem’s wife
• Dr. Aadam Aziz, Saleem’s grandfather
• Naseem (Reverend Mother), Saleem’s grandmother
• Mumtaz (Amina Sinai), Saleem’s mother
• Ahmed Sinai, Saleem’s father
• Aadam Sinai, Saleem’s son

The Story

In the early spring of 1915 in Kashmir, Dr. Aadam Aziz meets his future wife, Naseem, through a perforated sheet. After their marriage in 1919, they travel to Amritsar just in time to witness Mahatma Gandhi’s hartal (protest) on April 7 and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on April 13. They then move to Agra, where they have five children: Alia, Mumtaz, Hanif, Mustapha, and Emerald. In 1942, the second annual assembly of the Free Islam Convocation led by Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, is held in Agra; Mian Abdullah is assassinated. His secretary, Nadir Khan, flees and hides in the Aziz household. In 1943, Nadir Khan becomes Mumtaz’s first husband. In 1945, Major Zulfikar (who subsequently marries Mumtaz’s youngest sister, Emerald) attempts to arrest Nadir Khan. Before fleeing, Nadir Khan divorces Mumtaz, allowing her to marry Ahmed Sinai the following year. She changes her name to Amina Sinai. The Sinais move to Delhi, where Amina receives a prophecy about Saleem, and then to Bombay in 1947, where they purchase a piece of William Methwold’s estate. The estate is handed over to them exactly at midnight on August 15—the date of India’s independence from the British. They live there with the Catracks, Ibrahims, Dubashes, Dr. Narlikar (a gynecologist who delivers Saleem), and the Sabarmatis.

Also at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, two children are born, one to a poor couple, Wee Willie Winkie and Vanita, and the other to Ahmed and Amina Sinai. The father of Vanita’s son is actually William Methwold, who had an affair with Vanita. A nurse at the hospital, Mary Pereira, intentionally switches the two babies in an act of socialist resistance; the biological son of Methwold and Vanita grows up as Saleem Sinai, while the biological son of Ahmed and Amina grows up as Shiva. Pereira later becomes Saleem’s nanny.

A little over a year later, on September 1, 1948, Saleem’s sister, the Brass Monkey, is born. In the summer of 1956, Saleem learns about his mother’s first love, Nadir Khan (who is now called Qasim Khan and is a member of the Communist Party of India), while he hides in a washing chest. He thus discovers that he has the ability to hear voices in his head. These voices include the thoughts both of the people immediately around him and of those from other parts of India. In 1957, as a result of a bicycle accident, Saleem manages to use his miraculous ability to convene the voices of all the children born during the first hour of India’s independence from the British. These children all have miraculous powers. Saleem names these children, including himself, the Midnight Children’s Conference (MCC). Through the MCC, Saleem reconnects with Shiva, who has become a gangster, and meets Parvati, another child of midnight.

Saleem, who already possesses a big nose, is mutilated twice in 1958. A schoolteacher, Emil Zagallo, mutilates his hair, leaving him with a monk’s tonsure, and a group of school bullies chases him and slams his finger in a door. While in the hospital after the second mutilation, Saleem discovers via a blood test that he is not the biological son of his parents. Consequently, his horrified parents condemn him to his first exile at his uncle Hanif and aunt Pia’s apartment. A few months after Saleem’s return from exile, Mary Pereira finally confesses to switching the babies.

The MCC disintegrates. At the same time, Saleem instigates the Sabarmati affair by delivering an anonymous note to Commander Sabarmati about his wife Lila’s affair with Homi Catrack. The end result is that Commander Sabarmati shoots and kills Homi, as well as shooting and injuring his wife, before turning himself in. Side consequences to the Sabarmati affair are that Amina stops meeting Qasim Khan in secret and that all the part owners of the Methwold estate other than the Sinais sell their portions.

Near the end of 1958, because of his father’s alcoholic raging and his inability to accept a child that is not his by birth, Saleem (with his mother and sister) begins his second exile to his uncle Zulfikar and aunt Emerald’s house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. While in Rawalpindi, Saleem assists in General Ayub’s military coup. Four years later, on the Brass Monkey’s fourteenth birthday in 1962, she becomes Jamila Singer, intending to become a singing star. Before she hits popular stardom, however, Amina, Saleem, and Jamila are called home because Ahmed is ill. Once home in Bombay, Saleem attempts to reconvene the MCC but leaves out Shiva; however, the other Midnight’s Children ultimately flee him. On November 21, 1962, Saleem is taken to a clinic to have his inflamed sinuses drained. That surgical draining also removes all his telepathic powers, but it provides Saleem with a superhuman sense of smell.

In 1963, the Sinais finally sell their piece of the Methwold estate and move to Karachi, Pakistan, where Jamila launches her singing career. At the age of sixteen, Saleem discovers his love for Jamila, but she rejects him. In 1964, Aadam Aziz and Prime MinisterJawaharlal Nehru die. Naseem moves to Rawalpindi with the widowed Pia (Hanif having committed suicide in 1958). In 1965, Amina becomes pregnant again. Saleem attributes her deteriorating health and his father’s failing towel factory business to the vengeful machinations of his jealous aunt Alia. Also in 1965, Saleem’s cousin Lieutenant Zafar Zulfikar encounters smugglers in the Rann who work for his father. Because of the smuggling operation and his childhood humiliations (one of which turns out to be enuresis even in adulthood), Zafar kills his father and is imprisoned for murder.

The Indo-Pakistani war breaks out, annihilating—and, in his opinion, purifying—Saleem’s family. Falling bombs kill Naseem, Pia, Emerald, Zafar, Alia, Amina, and Ahmed. Jamila Singer and Saleem survive. Although the war ends in a ceasefire, it lasts only six years: another war begins in 1971, when Pakistan invades Bangladesh. In that war, Saleem (now known as the buddha), abandoned by Jamila Singer and newly made a citizen of Pakistan, works as a tracker in the Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities (CUTIA). His sense of smell is more powerful than that of any dog. During the war, Saleem and his handlers flee into the jungle of the surreal Sundarbans for seven months. After leaving the Sundarbans, Saleem goes to Dacca, where he meets his dying childhood friends Sonny Ibrahim, Hairoil Sabarmati, and Eyeslice Sabarmati, who are now enemy soldiers on a battlefield. Saleem also reunites with Parvati, who is part of an entertainers’ troop, and returns with her to the magicians’ ghetto in Delhi.

Saleem moves from the magicians’ ghetto to his uncle Mustapha’s home, also in Delhi, and stays there for 420 days before returning to the magicians’ ghetto on February 23, 1973. Exactly two years later, he marries Parvati (who becomes Laylah Sinai after her conversion to Islam), although he first rejects her and causes her to turn to his nemesis Shiva (now known as Major Shiva). She gives birth to Aadam Sinai (biologically Shiva’s son) at midnight on June 25, 1975. At the same time, Indira Gandhi, the Widow, imposes a state of emergency on India. In 1976, during that emergency, Parvati dies in the razing of the magicians’ ghetto, and Saleem is arrested by Major Shiva. Saleem is forced to reveal the names of all the previous MCC members. The entire MCC undergoes forced vasectomies (except for Major Shiva, who cooperates voluntarily). At the end of the emergency in 1977, Saleem is released. He finds Aadam looked after by friends from the magicians’ ghetto. He and Aadam follow a friend and father figure, Picture Singh, to Bombay, where Saleem reunites with Mary Pereira and gets a job in her pickle factory.

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