Midnight's Children

The boyhood of Walter Raleigh – Millais

“What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with?” Deborah Levy asks, in her memoir Things I don’t want to Know. Picture yourself: you are a thirty one year old (gelded) male, who is cracking in the skin with piles and piles of pent up stories; you have an angle-poised light (of a dim yellow colour, I presume) shining over your head like a halo and you write and write in the nights and then read out your literary output to your sole companion: Padma, a pickle maker; you are writing primarily for your son, who is not in fact your son (albeit being the son of your dead wife) but is in fact, ironically, through a strange twist of events, the great-grandson of your grandfather–a doctor, who trained at Heidelberg and returned to Kashmir–with whose story you intend to start, at Kashmir; there’s the story of his piecemeal courtship with his bride-to-be: the Reverend Mother; there’s the story of his surviving the Jalianwalla Bagh massacre by the mere skin of his teeth; there’s the story of your mother’s first failed marriage with a failed-poet who kept coming back into her life, from time to time; your mother’s public announcement to street-folk of your being in her belly when they threatened to harm her for trying to save a Hindu man from a violent fate – which Hindu man will later take her to Ramram Seth who will, in a moment of paroxysm, foretell of you and your arch-rival – the real father of your... never mind … so many stories: that begin with an idyllic childhood in convent school Bombay where you realise that being born at the very moment of India’s coming into Freedom has given you occult powers: your mind is connected to that of other children who all share your gift or curse; a gift or curse that a series of incidents, beginning in a washtub where you witness your mother… never mind… and ending with your nanny Mary Pereira’s revelation about your true… never mind… and the Sino-Indian war and the collapse of your father’s trade and the removing of snot from your nose (which is your special power) and your eventual emigration to Pakistan will shatter. At Pakistan, your sister, whom you had thus far thought of only as a Brass Monkey, finally develops an identity of her own, an identity that will haunt you incestuously every time you prospect romance with a woman. Then there is the Indo-Pak war of 1965 that leaves you memory-less like the Buddha, and when West Pakistan decides to suppress East Pakistan with what has to be perhaps the cruellest genocide in our collective history, you find yourself playing dog in the Pakistani army; then the Bangladesh genocide; it brings you to the erstwhile East Pakistan and thence, to the succubus-suffused Sundarbans, with its tall Sundar trees that cut out all light; you sniff your way back to Dacca where, thanks to the Indian Army under Sam Manekshaw, Bangladesh has been liberated, and there are celebrations in which you meet a sorcerer with whom you had connected telepathically in your childhood – she kind of teleports you in a wicker basket to a slum in Delhi where you live in a little hovel in a slum; and then, The Emergency: sterilisation of people, slums, animals, and magic: everything, all traces of these stories are wiped out. Except that they are seeping through your cracked skin, keeping you from rest or sleep. So what do you with all this knowledge?

You pickle it.  

The Main Metaphor: With its coming into Independence a new sort of magic is born in India. It grows, like this novel, light-heartedly, cheerfully, until events turn bitter and, with Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (when, fifty years ago, the political climate was not unlike the present one, where opposition leaders are ruthlessly incarcerated, and bank accounts of opposition parties are abruptly frozen in light of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections), it abruptly ends. 

But not without the possibility of return. 

What I liked about this book: If fiction could be thought of as the process of turning Information to Music, this book is a most exotic–at times even quixotic!–symphony. The narrative is very, very rambling in nature – too much circumlocution: which is kind of justifiable in view of the fact that the narrator exists in a highly confabulated state of mind. But what kept me going was the many promises of drama the narrator keeps making to keep his plump, lotus-dung Padma hooked to his narrative. For example, consider this snippet: 

      Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch… and the Widow, who I am keeping for the end…

Who is the Widow?? Our curiosities are raised, especially in view of the fact that we know that she gives the narrator green and black nightmares. When we find out at the end the spinal column tingles. So yes, promises are made, and with every kept promise, our trust of the writer increases. 

It is only when you read it the second time that the structure of the novel leaves you in awestruck admiration. For instance, that letter from Nehru congratulating Saleem on being a midnight's child, informing him that, "We"–to whom is this pronoun referring?–"shall be watching over your life with the closest attention." Towards the end, when, during The Emergency, all the Midnight's Children are forcibly collected at a Widow's Hostel in Benares and sterilised, this innocent letter begins to wear a much more macabre expression, especially in view of the fact that Nehru had had strong Dynastic tendencies, and, the fact that he and his daughter employed a great many soothsayers, some of whom were the most powerful people of their time. Also that painting of Walter Raleigh as a boy, by Millais (framed in teak) and placed just above the baby narrator's blue crib – where a fisherman "whose right arm fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh..." – what does it represent? it is invoked frequently in the novel. Does it hint at the temptation of stories, to collect which you must plunge yourself into the interminable Conradian doom that is the deep blue sea?

We are presented with fragments, reminiscent of the piecemeal courtship of the Kashmiri doctor and his bride-to-be, and in the end, when the entire screen is finally lifted, we are presented with a whole that is quite tragic. “Most of what happens in our lives takes place in our absence,” Saleem, our narrator, says, so that “to understand just one life you have to swallow the world,”. But what if that world is India, where, the moment you forsake that safe and urbane platform beneath your feet, you are caught in a tumultuous whirlpool of multitudes?