Midnight's children

Salman Rushdie


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Book One
The perforated sheet
Mercurochrome
Hit-the-spittoon
Under the carpet
A public announcement
Many-headed monsters
Methwold
Tick, tock
Book Two
The fisherman's pointing finger
Snakes and ladders
Accident in a washing-chest
All-India radio
Love in Bombay
My tenth birthday
At the Pioneer Cafe
Alpha and Omega
The Kolynos Kid
Commander Sabarmati's baton
Revelations
Movements performed by pepperpots
Drainage and the desert
Jamila Singer
How Saleem achieved purity
Book Three
The Buddha
In the Sundarbans
Sam and the Tiger
The shadow of the Mosque
A wedding
Midnight
Abracadabra
Salman Rushdie
Midnight's children

for Zafar Rushdie who,
contrary to all expectations,
was born in the afternoon



Book One

The perforated sheet

I was born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but Ms accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate-at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning-yes, meaning-something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
And there are so many stories to tell,-too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitud...

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