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From the SelectedWorks of Jonas Dupuich

December 1997

Pickling Time: The Creation of Narrative inMidnight's Children

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PICKLING TIME: THE CREATION OF NARRATIVEIN MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN

A thesis submitted to the faculty ofSan Francisco State University

in partial fulfillment of therequirements for the

degree

Master of Artsin

English: Literature

by

Jonas Hanson Dupuich

Alameda, California

December, 1997


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Copyright byJonas Hanson Dupuich

1997


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CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Pickling Time: The Creation Of Narrative

In Midnights Children by Jonas Hanson Dupuich, and that in my

opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree:

Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State

University.

Bruce AveryAssistant Professor of English

Loretta StecAssistant Professor of English


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PICKLING TIME: THE CREATION OF NARRATIVEIN MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN

Jonas Hanson DupuichSan Francisco State University

1997

By referring to Mark Johnsons argument that people understand their

lives and the lives of others through narratives, this thesis examines the way

Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdies novel, Midnights Children,

strives to make sense of his lifeand Indias modern historyby writing

meaning into his autobiography.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

(Chair, Thesis Committee) (Date)


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...........................................................................................1

I. Saleems Sense of the World.............................................................6Reality and Truth........................................................................6News and Reality .......................................................................9Unreal Traumatic Experiences.................................................13Saleems Sense of Time ..........................................................17

II. Saleems Connections with the World.............................................23

Feeding on the Past.................................................................23Saleem Takes the Blame.........................................................27Memory and the Sundarbans...................................................32Modes of Connection ...............................................................37

III. Saleems Sense of Narrative .........................................................48Reasons for Writing..................................................................48Saleems Memory ....................................................................51Emotional Influence..................................................................53Saleems Sense of Audience ...................................................56Narrative Fabric........................................................................63Chapters and Chutney .............................................................65

Notes .................................................................................................71

Works Cited ........................................................................................72

v


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1

Introduction

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an

adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is whatfools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by hisstories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to himthrough them, and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (39)

Because we live even when we tell (when we write, talk or think about life)

Sartres offer refers to whether we will live by the stories we find ourselves

enmeshed in or by more realistic accounts of our experience. Part of what fools

people is the difference between experienced life and recounted lifethe

difference between life as we perceive and understand it and the way life actually

occurs. But because it is so often difficult to locate this split, it becomes close to

impossible to choose between living and telling. A much more reasonable task,

though still a difficult one, would be to try to understand the stories with which we

live.

At the beginning of Salman Rushdies novel, Midnights Children, we find

Saleem Sinai embarking on the process of recounting the stories with which he

has lived when he writes: I was born in the city of Bombay. . . once upon a time

(3). As he continues to recount the banal as well as the fantastic in his attempt to

make his life become an adventure, Saleem


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reveals an unparalleled dedication to this work that continues to impress me. In

my search for the source of Saleems zeal for autobiography, I have found Mark

Johnsons argument about the role narratives play in our lives in Moral

Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics to be helpful. In this

book, Johnson argues that above all else people rely on narratives to understand

and construct their worlds. As if writing from Saleems experience, Johnson

writes: it is a fact of life that we are unable to escape sequences of events that

conspire, by their brutality, incoherence, and apparent senselessness, to

overwhelm us with a sense of the absurdity of it all, and recognizes: At the

same time, however, we humans are creatures who instinctively pursue meaning

in our lives. We live in search of significance and fulfillment, just by virtue of our

trying to survive and flourish (177). In these few lines Johnson sums up one of

the great dilemmas that plagues Saleemhow one can find significance in an

absurd world. To explain the role narratives play in our search for meaning,

Johnson writes:

To go on from day to day we must plot out our lives. That is to say, wemust construct narrative unities that make it possible for us to predictfuture events, criticize our current situation, solve (at least tentatively)certain practical problems, resolve certain indeterminacies in our presentstate, explore possibilities for fruitful action, and transform our identity.The fact that doing these sorts of things does often make it possible for usto more or less successfully order our lives and pursue our ends, or to finda limited measure of fulfillment, means that we are not merely living anillusion, but rather creating a reality! (177-8)


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Saleems narrative is this realitya reality constructed to accomplish the sorts of

things Johnson lists above. Believing that narrative characterizes the synthetic

character of our very experience, Johnson figures,

The stories we tell emerge from, and can then refigure, the narrativestructure of our experience. Consequently, the way we understand,express, and communicate our experience is derived from and dependenton that prior narrative structure of our lives. And yet, because we areimaginative narrative creatures, we can also configure our lives in novelways. (163)

To characterize the way we do this, Johnson writes that Every one of us is

actively plotting our lives, both consciously and unconsciously, by attempting to

construct ourselves as significant characters within what we regard as

meaningful life stories (165). Saleem combats his fear of absurdity by creating a

narrative that presents his life as meaningful, as if the narrative act itself will

provide Saleem with the spiritual comfort he desires. But as Saleem retells his

lifes story, he discovers the impossibility of accurately preserving time in

narrative.

By sharing with his readers the difficulties of trying to come to terms with

(and find terms for) reality, Saleem makes a good case for Clifford Geertzs

statement that There is no general story to be told, no synoptic picture to be

had of the past (Turner 15). Saleem demonstrates throughout his narrative that

What we can construct, according to Geertz, if we keep notes and survive, are

hindsight accounts of the connectedness of things that seem to have happened:


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4

pieced-together patternings, after the fact, but not much more (15). In light of

Saleems struggles with accuracy, Keith Wilson writes:

Midnights Children is, then, a novel centrally concerned with theimperfections of any narrative act, the compromises which govern therelationship of a writer with a reader who is hungry for linearity, and the

impossibility of rendering a realityhowever much concerned with public

historythat is not petrified into false and subjective form at the point atwhich an artist attempts to render it. (30)

Well aware of the inevitable distortions of the pickling process, Saleem, though

troubled by these distortions, is far more concerned with the satisfaction he gets

from his pickles than with the purity of their flavor (549).

Though much of this paper will support Wilsons claim by revealing the

problems Saleem has with his narrative, it will do so to better account for the role

this narrative plays in Saleems life. By analyzing how Saleem constructs his

narrative, this paper will also reveal his purpose for writing

as he puts it: to re-

write the whole history of my times to place myself in a more central role (198).

As a result, the first chapter of this paper reveals how much trouble Saleem has

understanding his experiences and accurately capturing them in narrative. The

second chapter supports Johnsons claims about the crucial role narrative plays

in our lives by revealing Saleems ability to alter his narrative for his own

purposes. The third chapter of this paper reveals Saleems understanding of a

narrative process that involves memory, audience and pickles.


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5

I. Saleems Sense of the World

For Saleem, reality and truth are shifty concepts. Not always

convinced that his surroundings are real, nor impressed by what is trueSaleem

presents us with a world in which reality has more to do with the person

experiencing it than with the world that surrounds that person. Sometimes

Saleem equates truth with realityother times he dismisses truth to talk about

the legends that contribute to reality. Further hindered by his damaged sense of

time, Saleem makes what he can of his experiences, less concerned with the

truth of his tales than with his sense of the way things might have happened.

Reality and Truth

Saleems world seldom offers clear alternatives between what is or isnt

true. Saleem writes, Time has been an unsteady affair in my experience, not a

thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan would

run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts (89). This situation leads S.

P. Butt to ask: If they can change the time just like that, whats real any more? I

ask you? Whats true? (90). Saleem replies to Butt across the unreliable

years by writing: Whats real and whats true arent necessarily the same.

True, for me,


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was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told

me. . . . True was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the

fishermans finger pointed (90). Saleem readily admits that this belief has

affected him deeply: Now I measure truth against those early things: Is this how

Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what that fisherman would have said?

(90). Saleem begins his next story by writing, And by those standards it is

undeniably true. . . revealing that he sometimes believes the truth of the telling is

more important than the truth of the tale (90).

For a number of the people and places Saleem describes, reality is

difficult to maintain. Not long before Saleem is born, Ahmed Sinai invents a

family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of his

memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all traces of

reality (128). Just as damaging as a false pedigree, whiskey and djinn-bottles,

Heat, gnawing at the minds divisions between fantasy and reality, made

anything seem possible, according to Saleem; the half-waking chaos of

afternoon siestas fogged mens brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness

of aroused desires (199). Filled with more than the stickiness of aroused

desires, Saleems India contains more fantasy than reality as he indicates while

writing about Indias need for a new myth,

because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win itsfreedom, catapulting us into a world which [. . .] was nevertheless quiteimaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except

by the efforts of a phenomenal collective willexcept in a dream we all


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7

agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by

Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need thesanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood.

India, the new mytha collective fiction in which anything was possible.(129-30)

At the time India was quite imaginary because it wasnt yet a unified,

independent nation. It was something that would exist only by a phenomenal

collective will: a will strong enough to pressure the British back to their islands

and strong enough to defend its new borders which were under pressure from

their very inception. As a new myth, India represents an accretion of many

competing beliefs which vary in degrees and compose the collective fiction of

what its inhabitants believe it to be.

Saleem almost ceases to involve experience with reality when he writes,

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more

concrete and plausible it seemsbut as you approach the present, it inevitably

seems more and more incredible; an idea which he compares to the workings of

a cinema (197). When sitting far from the screen we can see the movie images

clearly; but as we move closer to the screen the images gradually dissolve into

dancing grain (197). When we focus on recent events the illusion dissolvesor

rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality

that we lack the

perspective which helps us to understand the past when we look at the present

(197). At the same time, the coherence of the big picture is often an illusion, a

forced arrangement of events by which we make sense of our actions and lessen


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the absurdity of life. Saleem uses this metaphor while imprisoned in the Widows

hostel to claim that a lack of perspective prevents the Midnights Children from

understanding their situation:

we are too close to what-is-happening, perspective is impossible, laterperhaps analysts will say why and wherefore, will adduce underlyingeconomic trends and political developments, but right now were too closeto the cinema-screen, the picture is breaking up into dots, only subjective

judgments are possible. (518)

Unfortunately for Saleem, no screen can contain a picture large enough to help

him make sense of the Emergency.1

News and Reality

Like the rest of us, Saleem depends on various media accounts of the

world to inform his view of reality. Taking advantage of the fallibility of these

accounts, Saleem justifies skewing one of his stories by remarking how subtle his

errors appear when compared with the greater factual transgressions that

newspapers commit. After revealing the inside story of how the Nawab of Kif

prevented two Combined Opposition Party officials from voting, Saleem writes

that a number of newspapers:

announced a crushing victory for the Presidents Muslim League over theMader-i-Millats Combined Opposition party; thus proving to me that I havebeen only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country wherethe truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist,so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case,

which we will see clearly from Saleems account of war-time headlines (389).

Saleem finds an analogue for the occasion in his childhood: and maybe this was


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the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescencethat in

the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was

adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities

and lies (389). But before Saleem continues his story he adds, A little bird

whispers in my ear: Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth

(389). Saleem accepts this with a consideration of his sister: for whom what-

had-been-sanctified-as-truth (by Time, by habit, by a grandmothers

pronouncement, by lack of imagination, by a fathers acquiescence) proved more

believable than what she knew to be so (389). Rejecting his bid for her love,

Jamila regarded Saleem as a sibling, not as a strangers kid who happened to

grow up with her. By finding her this excuse, Saleem can ignore (or repress) the

possibility that Jamila cared little for him anyway.

As India battles Pakistan Saleem shares with us his sense of the Divorce

between news and reality by writing:

The war in the Rann lasted until July 1st. That much is fact; buteverything else lies concealed beneath the doubly hazy air of unreality andmake-believe which affected all goings-on in those days, and especially allevents in the phantasmagoric Rann. . . so that the story I am going to tell,which is substantially that told by my cousin Zafar, is as likely to be true asanything; as anything, that is to say, except what we were officially told.(399-400)

Just as Saleem has reasons for occasionally ignoring the truth, newspapers and

governments have theirs. The former group needs to keep up circulation; the

latter needs to maintain morale and deceive its enemy. According to Saleem,


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the paying-off of border guards became, in the papers, INNOCENT SOLDIERS

MASSACRED BY INDIAN FUAJ (402). Because people not on the front rely on

government and press accounts of battles, it becomes very hard for an outsider

to piece together what actually occurred. Saleem both acknowledges and tries to

overcome this problem:

I am trying to stop being mystifying. Important to concentrate on goodhard facts. But which facts? One week before my eighteenth birthday, onAugust 8th, did Pakistani troops in civilian clothing cross the cease-fire linein Kashmir and infiltrate the Indian sector, or did they not? (404)

Even if he can get the facts right he is left to wonder, If it happened, what were

the motives? and who attacked? Who defended? On my eighteenth birthday,

reality took another terrible beating (405). In one sense reality suffers because

few people can get a good sense of what really happened on Saleems

birthdayfew people can successfully match their sense of what happened with

what really happened. In another sense, by having reality and not people take

blows, Saleem removes both the responsibility for and guilt associated with

traumatic events from people and places it on reality. But if war accounts for

the realitys suffering, then the people or governments behind the war become

responsible for the reality troubles. This connection highlights the fact that

governments, by engaging in war, attack not just other governments, but reality,

or life as people are used to living it.

Saleem finds Some certainties during the warthat the voice of Jamila

Singer sang Pakistani troops to their deathsbut at the same time, In the first


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five days of the war Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more aircraft

than India had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the

Pakistan Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man (405). Among

other improbabilities, Saleem learns that Lame men loaded their pockets with

grenades, pulled out the pins, flung themselves beneath advancing Indian tanks;

toothless old ladies disemboweled Indian babus with pitchforks! (406). These

absurd accounts of battle lead Saleem to wonder whether any of these events

really happened as they were described: But did it or didnt it? Was that how it

happened? Or was All-India Radiogreat tank battle, huge Pak losses, 450

tanks destroyedtelling the truth? (406). He questions:

And those night-dances in the sky, Pakistani Mirages and Mysteresagainst Indias less romantically-titled MiGs: did Islamic mirages andmysteries do battle with Hindu invaders, or was it all some kind of

astonishing illusion? Did bombs fall? Were explosions true? Could evena death be said to be the case? (407)

At the time believing Nothing was real; nothing certain, upon recounting the

experience Saleem can state,

unequivocally. . . that the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my benightedfamily from the face of the earth. In order to understand the recenthistory of our times, it is only necessary to examine the bombing-pattern

of that war with an analytical, unprejudiced eye. (406; 403)

By creatively interpreting the bombing pattern of that war with one of the most

biased eyes imaginable, Saleem interprets the purpose of the war to be a plot to

destroy his familypossibly the least likely of all explanations, but more


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importantly for the narcissistic Saleem, one that can account for the tragedies his

family suffers.

Unreal Traumatic Experiences

Before he knows it (since hes lost his memory) Saleem explores the

effect war has on reality as a soldier in Rushdies fictionalized account of the

battle that led to Bangladeshs independence. Again linking reality with the

person experiencing it, Saleem writes how his companions, Ayooba, Farooq and

Shaheed are predisposed to lose touch with the world: Because they were so

young, and had not had time to acquire the type of memories which give men a

firm hold on reality, such as memories of love or famine, the boy soldiers were

highly susceptible to the influence of legends and gossip (417). Having

experienced (and forgotten) the kinds of experiences that give one a good sense

of reality, Saleem leads his cohort past Daccas unrealities: And while we drove

through the city streets, Shaheed looked out of windows and saw things that

werent-couldnt-have-been true: soldiers entering womens hostels without

knocking; women, dragged into the street, were also entered, and again nobody

troubled to knock (426). Not completely removed from his surroundings,

Saleem recalls, By the time we brought Sheikh Mujib to the airport. . . the

buddha had closed his eyes. (Dont fill my head with all this history, he had

once told Ayooba-the-tank, I am what I am and thats all there is) (426).

Continuing to leave history behind until he regains his memory, Saleem writes of


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the Dacca invasion: There are things which took place on the night of March

25th which must remain permanently in a state of confusionbecause they

never seemed real, because the buddha blocked out much of what he

experienced, and because other records of the event are likely to be as biased

as Saleems (427).

Though in Dacca the soldiers witnessed what couldnt-have-been true,

their experiences in the city become an overdose of reality [that] gave birth to a

miasmic longing for flight into the safety of dreams when they reach the

Sundarbans (431). There, They had all long ago forgotten the purpose of their

journey; the chase, which had begun far away in the real world, acquired in the

altered light of the Sundarbans a quality of absurd fantasy which enabled them to

dismiss it once and for allor at least until they leave the jungle (434). Of the

buddhas return to war-torn Dacca Saleem writes:

Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were notpossible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly;we saw men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets,we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but itwas not true because it could not have been true,

because he did not want it to be true (449). Shaheed also has trouble believing

his senses: No, buddha

what a thing, Allah, you cant believe your eyes

no,

not true, how can itbuddha, tell, whats got into my eyes? he asks as if the

horrors could simply be wiped away (449). The buddhas response provides little

comfort: a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not;


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look away, look away from there now (449). Upon finding abandoned seals and

stamps, the buddha laments that The notary public was absent, so I could not

ask him to verify what was happening (449). Instead, Saleem buries his

perceptions until he begins to record his lifes story.

Finding himself in a situation more devastating than the previous two wars

had been for him, Saleem writes that his child, whose birth coincided with the

beginning of the Emergency, was the child of a time which damaged reality so

badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again (500). Though he

writes that time damages reality in this line, elsewhere Saleem lays ample

blame on the Widow for the tragedies which occurred as a result of the

Emergency, including the discombobulation of the children of

midnightchildren whose realities were altered surgically (510). Yet in spite of

his claim that nobody managed to put the reality of the Emergency together

again, Saleem later builds reality by recording his memories of the Emergency in

narrative form (509). However limited he perceives his account to be, he

nevertheless provides as coherent a version of events as he can manage for any

period of his life.


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Saleems Sense of Time

Just as Saleem writes that reality took another terrible beating to

heighten the effect that traumatic events have on his nation, he writes that time

gets excited to call attention to significant events in his life (405). When Aadam

Aziz receives the message which will catapult him into his future from Tai,

Saleem writes that it sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of

excitement, though it is not time but Aadam, and later Saleem, who actually get

excited (9; 13). As a result of this excitement, Saleem splices the next several

scenes in the novel together: those in which Aadam approaches his future wife;

rides in Tais boat; and speaks with his mother. Not until Ghani leads Aadam to

the room where his daughter waits does the narrative again present one event at

a time. At this moment Saleem writes that Time settles down and concentrates

on the importance of the moment (17). By presenting time as the agent

controlling his narrative, Saleem heightens the apparent importance of events by

presenting them as exciting to a broader audience, personified by time.

Again linking important events to the movement of time, Saleem writes

about an East India Company Officer named Methwold [who] saw a vision. This

visiona dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending Indias West against all

comerswas a notion of such force that it set time in motion, as if time is a

physical object whose movement controls events (106). According to Saleems

notion of motions, only important events move time. According to Saleems


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mother, important events do the opposite. Not wanting to admit that her

pregnancy had slowed her down, Amina would say, just before Saleem was

born, To me, it was like time had come to a complete stop. The baby in my

stomach stopped the clocks. Im sure of that. Dont laugh: you remember the

clocktower at the end of the hill? Im telling you, after that monsoon it never

worked again (115). Though baby Saleem may not be as responsible for

stopping the clocktower as the monsoon, he did stop Amina from going to the

racetrack and from moving around the house as she was used to until he finally

immobilized [her] in a room in a tower, thus slowing her once active life to a

near complete stop (116).

Before long, Dr. Schaapsteker gets time moving again. Ten years after

saving his life, Dr. Schaapsteker greets Saleem by saying, So, childyou have

recovered from the typhoid (309). Saleem writes that The sentence stirred time

like a sluggish dust-cloud and rejoined me to my one-year-old self as if time, and

not memory had been disturbed by Schaapstekers line (309). Padma, anxious

to hear about Saleems birth, dreaded the intervening time separating her from

the continuation of Saleems story, so at work she stirred vats like a whirlwind,

as if that would make the time go faster (123). Saleem gives some credit to this

idea:

And perhaps it did; time, in my experience, has been as variable andinconstant as Bombays electric power supply. Just telephone the

speaking clock if you dont believe metied to electricity, its usually a fewhours wrong. Unless were the ones who are wrong. . . no people whose


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word for yesterday is the same as their word for tomorrow can be said

to have a firm grip on the time. (123)

Though hours continue to pass twenty-four to a day, the representations of these

hours pass less predictably when dependent upon Indias electricity supply,

Saleems narrative, or the Sundarbans jungle.

After leading Ayooba, Farooq and Shaheed along the Ganges away from

Dacca, Saleem (as the buddha) meets Father Time in a bizarre slow-motion

chase: first the buddha with that cucumber-nose, you could spot it a mile off, and

following him, splashing through paddies, a gesticulating peasant with a scythe,

Father Time enraged, for it appears Saleem Couldnt keep his hands off the

local women! (429). Worried that the peasant might slice up Saleem, Farooq

convinces Ayooba to kill the peasant so Saleem can continue leading the gang

around, but as a result, Time lies dead in a rice-paddy (429). From this

moment through their escape from the Sundarbans months later, the four

Pakistani soldiers have not only forgotten the date, but have entered a jungle

which is so thick that history has hardly ever found the way in (429).

By representing a peasant as Father Time, Saleem can begin to make

sense of his perceptions of time in the Sundarbans by leaving (Father) time for

dead once he enters the jungle. (Whether or not this is the real Father Time

matters little because Saleem could as easily account for what happens to time

in the Sundarbans with the death of a real or a symbolic Father Time.) Once

stuck in the historyless anonymity of rain-forests (historyless because so little of


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significance happens there) Ayooba Baloch cried without stopping for three

entire hours or days or weeks, until the rain began and made his tears

unnecessary (431). By blending hours, days and weeks together, Saleem calls

attention to the lack of elements in the jungle that normally indicate the passing

of time. Because the jungle floor lacks direct sunlight, the passing of hours, or

even of days, becomes hard to monitor. Here The days passed, dissolving into

each other not by effect of the sun, but under the force of the returning rain

(434).

After recounting the soldiers escape from their timeless visit to the

Sundarbans, Saleem writes,

When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I ambound to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder atthe time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal waverecorded that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeeddevastated the region. (440)

By revealing his inability to ground his experience in any recorded reality Saleem

again highlights the conflict between recorded and remembered truth. And as in

many places in his narrative, it is impossible for us to tell which story is more

accurate (though stories in which people ride tidal waves have trouble mustering

credibility).

Time shifts more drastically during the Emergency which Saleem

describes as a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years,

though he later admits this description is perhaps excessively romantic, and

certainly contradicted by the available meteorological data (499-500; 529). For


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Saleem, the Emergency is an Endless night, days weeks months without the

sun, or rather (because its important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as a

stream-rinsed plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light (504). Again

under the influence of severely traumatic events, Saleem fails to perceive (or at

least to represent) the natural passing of time. By doing so he implies that life

during the Emergency was not passing naturally, that events in India have been

perverted to such an extent that both time and reality have been seriously

damagedor have at least damaged himself.

In the relatively untraumatic Midnite Confidential Club, Saleem and his son

wait forwhat? minutes, hours, weeks? for Picture Singhs epic snake battle to

begin (541). Once it starts Saleem wonders, How long, in that sunless cavern,

did they struggle? Months, years, centuries? I cannot say (542). Unable to

accurately discern or represent time in the club, Saleem reveals his serious

problem with time. If Saleem loses his sense of time before he gets to the

Midnite-Confidential then we can assume that he creates his whole

narrativequite a featwith a damaged sense of time. But if Saleems sense of

time has decayed more recently (during the time he wrote about the Sundarbans,

about the Emergency or about his night in the club) we might consider his failing

faculties to indicate his impending death. Regardless of when his faculties for

time break down, it appears that Saleem writes about the damage done to time

and reality to minimize the damage he has suffered.


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II. Saleems Connections with the World

Telling us at the outset of his story that he had been mysteriously

handcuffed to history, [his] destinies indissolubly chained to those of [his]

country, Saleem often writes these links into his narrative not only to justify the

fanfare he received at birth, but to represent his role in the world as more

significant than it actually was (3). Even though he suffers greatly from the

experiences the world sends his way, Saleem tries hard to convince his audience

(and himself) that he is often responsible for the tragedies he experiences. By

revealing how he drinks history as a child, confuses cause and effect

relationships and relates his life to his nation through modes of connection,

Saleem instead convinces us that he is more responsible for controlling events in

his narrative than in his life.

Feeding on the Past

Saleem describes his earliest links to the world by using metaphors that

express his relationship with the history of his family and nation. By writing about

these things, people and events as if they were liquids, and about people as

vessels that can contain these liquids, Saleem highlights the way events affect

his life and metaphorically become part of him. Early in his narrative Saleem

explains to Padma the relevance of the events that


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precede his birth. Things he tells her, even peoplehave a way of leaking

into each other. . . like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubins suicide, for example,

leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise. . .

the past has dripped into me. . . so we cant ignore it (38). By explaining his

relationship with the past with a theory of leaking Saleem begins to account for

his life by connecting it to events that are out of his control. By drinking up

historys leaks as if they were water or wine, Saleem subtly argues that his past

influences his life the way swallowed substances can influence the one drinking.

He writes: I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me,

youll have to swallow the lot as well, because the lot has leaked into him just

as he leaks into them (4).

Before writing about his birth Saleem recalls many of the events that have

filled his narrative to reinforce the impact these events will have on his life.

Taking in the past like a soft meal, Saleem writes about ingesting thumb-and-

forefinger, swallowing the moment at which Aadam Aziz did not know whether he

was Kashmiri or Indian (124). We catch Saleem gulping down Dyer,

moustache and all, not because Dyer directly influences Saleems life, but

because he influenced the incident in which Saleems grandfather is saved by

his nose and a bruise appears on his chest, never to fade, so that he and

[Saleem] find in its ceaseless throbbing the answer to the question, Indian or

Kashmiri (124). Saleem writes that he grows larger now, floating in the


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amniotic fluid of the past, feeding on a hum that rose higherhigher until dogs

came to the rescue (125). He writes that he gets,

heavier by the second, fattening up on washing-chests and the under-the-carpet love of Mumtaz and the rhymeless bard, plumping out as I swallowZulfikars dream of a bath by his bedside and an underground Taj Mahaland a silver spittoon encrusted with lapis lazuli; a marriage disintegrates,and feeds me; an aunt runs traitorously through Agra streets, without herhonour, and that feeds me too. (125)

Through [his] umbilical cord, Saleem takes in fare dodgers and the dangers of

purchasing peacock-feather fans (125). Aminas assiduity seeps into Saleem

and Public announcements nurture him (125). Saleem continues to ingest

events even after he is born, as we learn when he writes he imbibed Nehru-

letter and Winkies prophecy, but as Saleem ages he begins to take in history

like the rest of usby experiencing it (152).

In addition to drinking the past, Saleem writes about events that have

impacted his life as an inheritance: my inheritance grows, because now I have

the mythical golden teeth of the boatman Tai, and his brandy bottle which

foretold my fathers alcoholic djins; I have Ilse Lubin for suicide and pickled

snakes for virility (123-4). Commenting on the diverse nature of this inheritance,

Saleem reflects: How many things people notions we bring with us into the

world, how many possibilities and also restrictions of possibility!Because all of

these were the parents of the child born that midnight, and for every one of the

midnight children there were as many more (125-6). Saleem lists some of the

parents of midnight: the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme; the determination


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of M. A. Jinnah. . . and Mountbatten with his extraordinary haste and his chicken-

breast-eater of a wife; and more and more (126). By counting so much among

his historical inheritance, Saleem makes a good case for his warning: To

understand just one life, you have to swallow the world (126).

Saleem explains the source of his inheritance by writing: All over the new

India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially

the offspring of their parents

the children of midnight were also the children of

the time: fathered, you understand, by history (137). Just as Saleem receives

genes (things that determine the shape of a child) from his parents, he and his

metaphorical siblings receive the events listed above (things that will affect these

childrens lives) from history. Saleem begins to reveal his purpose for explaining

his inheritance when he writes: If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild

profusion of my inheritance. . . perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in

the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque (126).

By mentioning the need one may have for making oneself grotesque, Saleem

reveals the need that so often prevents his narrative from accurately portraying

his life.

Saleem Takes the Blame

While considering how we should live if theres no such thing as chance,

Saleem wonders whether,


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we should eitheroptimisticallyget up and cheer, because if everything

is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared theterror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of

course, we mightas pessimistsgive up right here and now,understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we thinkmakes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. Where then isoptimism? In fate or in chaos? (89)

Saleem never optimistically celebrates lifes meaning or resigns himself to

the futility of thought decision action. Though he admits that hes not always in

control of his life (hes frequently left entirely without a say in the matter) he far

more often takes control not only of his own life but of others lives as wellto

hear him tell it (354). Rather than accepting that he might have had no say in a

matter, Saleem often goes out of his way to claim responsibility for actions and

events that he has little to do with. He wonders: Am I so far gone, in my

desperate need for meaning, that Im prepared to distort everythingto re-write

the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?

and answers: Today, in my confusion, I cant judge. Ill have to leave it to

others (198). However confused about this Saleem may be, he makes it easy

for his readers to see how often he writes himself into a more central role than a

less biased observer might offer. By insisting on seeing life the way he does (on

seeing it as under his control) Saleem creates an often tragic role for himself

because apparently the only way Saleem can understand a number of events is

to take blame for them.


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Saleem introduces us to his power when he recounts his birth: Yes, it

was my fault (despite everything) . . . it was the power of my face, mine and

nobody elses, which caused Ahmed Sinais hands to release the chair [. . .] it

was on my account that my father cried out too, because the falling chair

shattered his toe (135). Though its tough to lay blame for this event on any one

person, we can see that by claiming responsibility for breaking Ahmeds toe,

Saleem takes control of his fate by enabling Mary Pereira to switch baby tags

and provide himself with what she hoped would be a life of comfort. [A]lready,

Saleem claims, my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby

Saleem is working changes on the people around himthough specifically,

Saleems father suffers from these changes more than anyone else (152).

Saleem writes, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed

him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the

freeze (152). Without clearly explaining how he perhaps ruins his father,

Saleem adds: Cocktail-cabinets had whetted his appetite; but it was my arrival

that drove him to it (153).

To balance the bad effect he has on his father, Saleem takes credit for his

mothers good luck at the race track. After debunking what others might guess to

be the source of her luck, Saleem offers another explanation that includes a

description of Baby Saleem, who has acquired an expression of the most

intense concentration and whose nose is twitching strangely while he appears


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had killed my uncle, too. It was my fault; and the dying wasnt over yet (326).

Just as Saleem ignores any emotions accompanying these deaths, he ignores

any sense of logic in the following faulty syllogism: my grandfather was the

founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation,

and the father of the nation was Nehru. Nehrus death: can I avoid the

conclusion that that, too, was all my fault? (334). After a while it becomes

natural for Saleem to assume responsibility for other peoples lives and deaths:

Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of

itJamilas fall was, as usual, all my fault (470). Before relating how most of his

family dies he writes that the war happened because I dreamed Kashmir into the

fantasies of our rulers; furthermore, I remained impure, and the war was to

separate from my sins (404). After relating his escape from the Sundarbans

Saleem writes: Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then

have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of

that entire war had been to re-unite me with an old life, to bring me back together

with my old friends (446). In a similar manner Saleem reveals the secret which

has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those stifled days: the truest,

deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the

smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of

midnight (510).


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Though improbable is too weak a word to express the likelihood that these

events happened for the reasons Saleem provides, we can better understand

why he makes these claims by considering that for Saleem legends are

sometimes more useful than facts, illusions can become reality, time can ratify

the truth and memorys truth selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes,

glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality (253). Saleems

narrative does the same

it recreates his past by expressing his memories in a

way that lets him make sense of them. Battered by a troubled life, unidentified

physical ailments and survivors guilt, Saleem creates reasons for why things

happened when the rest of the world fails to provide satisfying, concrete

answers, for few can say with more certainty who is responsible for the

accidents, deaths, and wars that fill not only Saleems story, but Indias history as

well. By revealing how Saleems narrative bends truth to satisfy his desire for

meaning, Rushdie calls attention to how any explanation of these tragic events

gets filtered through a biased commentator before it makes its way into some

form of public discourse.

Memory and the Sundarbans

As a result of his desire to escape duty in Dacca, the buddha and his

companions find themselves isolated from the rest of the world and its history (an

effect heightened by the death of time) in the Sundarbans. Saleem recounts this


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adventure as a rite of passage for the soldiers, who exit the jungle with a greater

understanding of their lives following the trials they suffer in the darkly-canopied

jungle. Of the four soldiers the buddha makes the greatest discovery by

regaining his memory after living for almost six years without it. After entering

what Saleem calls a new adulthood, the soldiers learn one final lesson from the

jungle that only Saleem will live long enough to profit from: that one must see

ones past clearly before becoming an adult, and that one must maintain dreams

and plans for the future if one is to continue livingan idea Saleem learns more

about from Picture Singhs wife Durga.

Ayooba Baloch is the first of the four soldiers to make contact with his

past, for until the translucent figure of a peasant with a bullet-hole in his heart

and a scythe in his hand staring mournfully down at Ayooba, the soldiers

entertain no links to the world outside of the jungle (435). After Time visits

Ayooba the jungle sends the soldiers a series of nightly punishments. It first

sends the accusing eyes of the wives of men they had tracked down and seized,

the screaming and monkey-gibbering of children left fatherless by their work

(435). When it had punished them enough, Saleem writes, when they were all

trembling shadows of the people they had been

the jungle permitted them the

double-edged luxury of nostalgia, double-edged because it offered as much

comfort as it did pain (435). After regressing towards infancy faster than any of

them, Ayooba saw his mother looking down at him, offering him the delicate


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rice-based sweets of her love; but at the same moment as he reached out for the

laddoos, she scurried away, and he saw her climb a giant sundri-tree to sit

swinging from a high branch by her tail (435). Somehow this delusion gets

Ayooba thinking: After a time he was obliged to remember more about her than

her sweets: how she had liked to sit among the boxes of her dowry as though

she, too, were simply some sort of thing (435). Having reached this bit of

knowledge, Ayooba Baloch understood his mother for the first time, and stopped

sucking his thumb (435).

Saleem charts similar developments in both Farooq Rashid and Shaheed

Dal before he too encounters his past. Farooq finds in the knowledge of his

fathers death and the flight of his brother the strength to give up the childish

habits which the jungle had at first re-created in him; Shaheed regains the

sense of responsibility which the just-following-orders requirements of war had

sapped (436). Together, these lessons lead the trio by the hand towards a

new adulthood (436). The buddha, however, was not granted nostalgia at first

(436). The amnesiac Saleem only regains his memory after receiving a snake

bite: I was rejoined to the past, jolted into unity by snake-poison (436). This

poison inspires Saleems first narration of his life, a narration that began to pour

out through the buddhas lips and enable The child-soldiers [to drink] his life like

leaf-tainted water (436-7).

Newly armed with fresh perspectives of their pasts, the soldiers make their

way through the jungle until they find a monumental Hindu temple at which four


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young girls of a beauty which was beyond speech appear every night (438-9).

As Saleem explains, the soldiers,

realized that this this this this was what they had needed, what they hadlonged for without knowing it, that having passed through the childishregressions and childlike sorrows of their earliest jungle-days, havingsurvived the onset of memory and responsibility and the greater pains ofrenewed accusations, they were leaving infancy behind for ever, and thenforgetting reasons and implications and deafness, forgetting everything,they gave themselves to the four identical beauties without a singlethought in their heads. (439)

With memory comes responsibility for the soldiers, but with the four temple girls a

satisfaction enters their lives that makes everything but food unimportant. None

of them knew how long this period lasted, Saleem writes, because in the

Sundarban time followed unknown laws, but at last the day came when they

looked at each other and realized they were becoming transparent (439). Very

quickly they understood that this was the last and worst of the jungles tricks,

that by giving them their hearts desire it was fooling them into using up their

dreams, so that as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow

and translucent as glass (439). Alarmed by their invisibility, the soldiers re-

engage their lives by fleeing the temple and heading toward civilization where

Saleem explicitly learns the import of the jungles lesson.

Recalling his initial reaction to Durga, Saleem writes: Her name, even

before I met her, had the smell of new things; she represented novelty,

beginnings, the advent of new stories events complexities, and I was no longer

interested in anything new (532). Durga justifies Saleems bad feelings by


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predicting his death with the following words: when a man loses interest in new

matters, he is opening the door for the Black Angel (533). Just as the cave with

the houris left him transparent, Saleems aversion to new things prepares him for

death. At the Midnite-Confidential Club Saleem chooses to ignore all manner of

new stories and

beginnings. . . because this was a new world in which [he] had no place (542).

Even though Saleem soon renews his relationship with the Pereira sisters,

begins a relationship of sorts with Padma and begins the colossal task of

recounting his lifes adventures, these endeavors (excepting Padma) focus

Saleem on his past. When perilously close to the end of [his] reminiscences,

Saleem thinks about Padmas proposal for the future, about what he could

accomplish if only he could live longer: An infinity of new endings clusters

around my head, buzzing like heat-insects (530). But since only ends and not

beginnings buzz around Saleems head, he reveals how little hope (or desire) he

entertains for the future. He writes: Saleem had come through amnesia and

been shown the extent of its immorality; in his mind the past grew daily more

vivid while the present (from which knives had disconnected him for ever)

seemed colourless, confused, a thing of no consequence (531). By sacrificing

his desires for the future in the jungle Saleem turns transparentby abandoning

them a second time he resigns himself to die.


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Before Saleem lets his lease on life lapse, he reflects on his jungle-

adventure: In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim

me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is

forever who you are (440). But as Saleems story demonstrates, narrative

versions of ourselves can become whatever we want them to be. Although

Saleem learns from the Sundarbans that he cannot undo or escape his past, in

his narrative he can alter and interpret events to make sense of them, as we can

see from his discussion of the modes of connection.

Modes of Connection

According to Saleem the letter he receives from Nehru (Your life, which

will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own) obliges him scientifically to face the

question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single

individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? (285). Saleem answers in

adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically,

both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term

modes of connection composed of dualistically-combined configurations of the

two pairs of opposed adverbs given above (285). [W]ith the proper solemnity of

a man of science Saleem explains why hyphens are necessary: actively-

literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I

was inextricably entwined with my world (285-6). This complex-sounding

system allows Saleem to represent his connections with the world in language


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and to establish his place at the centre of things (285). What Saleem doesnt

point out is that the modes of connection work as well for him as they do for

everyone else in the world. Some things we do affect other people, places or

things (actively-literally); other things we do symbolically correspond with

unrelated events (actively-metaphorically). Sometimes the world affects us

(passively-literally); and sometimes we can find correspondences between

unrelated events in our lives and in the world (passively-metaphorically). Just as

Saleem uses these terms to center himself in the world, we too can use them to

provide a similar focus to our lives.

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write in Metaphors We Live By, In

order to understand the world and function in it, we have to categorize, in ways

that make sense to us, the things and experiences that we encounter (162).

One way we do this, they argue, is by seeking out personal metaphors to

highlight and make coherent our own pasts, our present activities, and our

dreams, hopes and goals as well (233). By categorizing four modes of

connection and sharing them with his audience, Saleem can make a scientific

appeal to his audience (minus Padma) who will recognize the pattern of his

observations. But because To highlight certain properties is necessarily to

downplay or hide others, which is what happens whenever we categorize

something, Saleem can prevent, to some extent, his audience from carefully

considering the cause and effect relationships he names when he invokes the

modes of connection (Lakoff and Johnson 163).


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Saleem downplays (though not effectively) a ridiculous connection when

he writes: whether or not the cracks in the Conference were the (active-

metaphorical) result of my finger-loss, they were certainly widening (305). By

noticing that members of the Midnight Childrens Conference began to acquire

the prejudices of their families, Saleem finds the passive-literal mode of

connection at work: Children, however magical, are not immune to their parents;

and as the prejudices and world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I

found children from Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners

reviling Dravidian blackies (306). Thus, according to Saleem, In this way the

Midnight Childrens Conference fulfilled the prophecy of the Prime Minister and

became, in truth, a mirror of the nation; the passive-literal mode was at work,

although I rallied against it (306). To successfully rally against the passive-

literal mode Saleem would have to deny the world the opportunity to affect the

members of his conferencea task at which he shortly fails.

In Pakistan Saleem writes that the telepathic airwaves were jammed but

he finds that the modes of connection still seemed to function; active-literally as

well as -metaphorically, [he] helped change the fate of the Land of the Pure

(344). In the Zulfikar residence, and In the clutches of the active-metaphorical

mode of connection, [Saleem] shifted salt-cellars and bowls of chutney (348).

But What began, active-metaphorically, with pepperpots, ended then; not only

did [Saleem] overthrow a government[he] also consigned a president to exile


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(349). Though Saleem may have metaphorically begun the overthrow of a

government, by excluding the roles others played in the scheme Saleem claims

sole responsibility for events which he watched, not directed.

Even when he represses his normal desire to claim responsibility for

events, Saleem highlights his concern for connections by emphatically denying

his participation in events in which he obviously played no significant part. While

summing up the events that followed over the next four years Saleem writes:

And (without any assistance from me) relations between India and Pakistan

grew worse; entirely without my help, India conquered Goa, as if we would

naturally expect Saleem to play a role in all major national events (351). By

continuing to list events in which he played no part, or did nothing Saleem

responds to an expectation that he might in some way be responsible for these

events. The only link Saleem finds between his life and his nation during these

years proves to be a thin one binding him to an election, but as he writes, Not

even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved; except, perhaps,

metaphorically: the status quo was preserved in India; in my life, nothing

changed either (351).

At one point Saleem acknowledges that Shiva might also entertain special

connections with the world, for he too, was born on the stroke of midnight; he

like me, Saleem writes, was connected to history. The modes of connectionif

Im right in thinking they applied to meenabled him, too, to affect the passage


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of the days (358). Saleem is right to state that the modes of connection apply to

both he and Shiva, but he continues to miss the observation that that they apply

to a similar extent to all people. Even when Saleem drops the formality of

naming which modes of connection bind him to the world he continues to find

parallels between his experience and his world. Saleem writes of the time before

his family moved back to India: The disease of optimism, in those days, once

again attained epidemic proportions; I, meanwhile, was afflicted by an

inflammation of the sinuses (358). Continuing to link his nose to his nation

Saleem writes:

While parliamentarians poured out speeches about Chinese aggressionand the blood of our martyred jawans, my eyes began to stream withtears; while the nation puffed itself up, convincing itself that theannihilation of the little yellow men was at hand, my sinuses, too, puffedup and distorted a face which was already so startling that Ayub Khanhimself had stared at it in open amazement. (359)

To account for his eagerness to make such seemingly meaningless connections

Saleem writes:

As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similaritiesbetween this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make usclap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national

longing for formor perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief thatforms lie hidden with in reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes.(359)

To whatever extent Saleem believes in Indians thirst for connections, we can far

more easily locate Saleems need for finding correspondences in his fear of

absurdity and his desire to star in his own story. Further distinguishing himself


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from other Indians, Saleem writes: Born amidst correspondence, I have found it

continuing to hound me. . . while Indians headed blindly towards a military

debacle, I, too, was nearing (and entirely without knowing it) a catastrophe of my

own (360). Saleem claims a role in a much bigger catastrophe when he

explains the buddhas involvement in the creation of Bangladesh:

what I am saying is that by abandoning consciousness, seceding from

history, the buddha was setting the worst of examplesand the example

was followed by no less a personage than Sheikh Mujib, when he led theEast Wing into secession and declared it independent as Bangladesh!

Yes, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq were right to feel ill-at-easebecause evenin those depths of my withdrawal from responsibility, I remainedresponsible, through the workings of the metaphorical modes ofconnection, for the belligerent events of 1971. (420)

By holding himself responsible for certain belligerent events, Saleem pays for

his place at the centre of things by assuming tremendous amounts of guilt that

appear to lead him to his discovery of unfairness (285).

Sitting cross-legged in a village hut after escaping the jungle by riding a

tidal wave Saleem reflects on his past and cries out, Its notNOT

FAIR! (442). Saleem explains: In the midst of the rubble of war, I discovered

fair-and-unfair (442). Once Saleem gets the smell (like onions) he recalls a

number of the tragedies that have filled his life. These prompt him to repeat, Not

fair; not fair; NOT FAIRa cry that attracts attention from Ayooba, whose

attempt to comfort Saleem leads to his death and ironically reinforces Saleems

feeling of unfairness (443). Though the shot that killed Ayooba wipes the thought

from Saleems head, he finds it again when he watches Shaheed die in a


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minaret: Its not fair, the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over,

Its not fair, and again, and again (451). These two moments in which Saleem

reflects on lifes failure to be fair are his most powerful admissions that he is not

in control of his life. Only now does Saleem comprehend the nature of his

relationship with the world and judge it to be unfairan admission which

eventually leads him to make a discovery in a magic basket.

During his return to India in Parvatis basket, Saleem feels his hold on the

world slip away, but he checks this sliding before the world leaves his reach

(456). I was saved, he explains, not only by the glints of a spittoon, but also by

another transformation: in the grip of that awful disembodied loneliness, whose

smell was the smell of graveyards, I discovered anger (456). To explain exactly

what angered him Saleem writes:

The object of my wrath was, in fact, everything which I had, until then,blindly accepted: my parents desire that I should repay their investment inme by becoming great; genius-like-a-shawl; the modes of connectionthemselves inspired in me a blind, lunging fury. Why me? Why, owing toaccidents of birth prophecy etcetera, must I be responsible for languageriots and after-Nehru-who, for pepperpot-revolutions and bombs whichannihilated my family? Why should I, Saleem Snotnose, Sniffer, Mapface,Piece-of-the-Moon, accept the blame for what-was-not-done by Pakistanitroops in Dacca? . . . Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million,should I have to bear the burden of history? (457)

Under the influence of invisibility Saleem makes his greatest protest against life

in his story, but by asking why he alone must bear historys burdens he again

reveals his failure to realize that he bears close to what others bear and that he

goes out of his way to convince himself (and his readers) that he bears more


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than his share. Though he complains the modes of connections inspire a blind,

lunging fury, they are nothing more than his personal attempt to systematically

highlight often insignificant connections between himself and his world. Saleem

further explains his anger by writing:

What my discovery of unfairness (smelling of onions) had begun, myinvisible rage completed. Wrath enabled me to survive the soft sirentemptations of invisibility; anger made me determined, after I was releasedfrom vanishment in the shadow of a Friday mosque, to begin, from thatmoment forth, to choose my own, undestined future. (457)

As admirable as this determination is, it reveals Saleems impossible desire to

abandon his connections to the world. Although Saleem pursues this goal for a

while, life eventually teaches him enough that a more mature Saleem writes:

I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I?My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all Ihave been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyoneeverything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I amanything that happens after Ive gone which would not have happened if Ihad not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each I,every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similarmultitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, youll have toswallow a world. (457-8)

In these lines Saleem reveals a perspective which expresses his understanding

that he is less unique than he so often leads his readers to believe. When

Saleem writes that guilt is a complex matter, for are we not all, each of us in

some sense responsible fordo we not get the leaders we deserve? he

expresses his understanding of collective responsibility, his understanding that

he is not alone in his responsibility for the world that surrounds him (518).


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Sometime between his experience in the magic basket and his recollection

of the event, Saleem gains a perspective towards life that makes his attempts of

centering himself in his world appear to be the result of less mature thinking. But

since he maintains a number of unrealistic claims throughout his narrative,

Saleem reveals either an inability to distinguish when he does or does not

represent his life accurately, or a lack of desire to set straight (or even comment

upon) these misrepresented events. Though both of these alternatives make him

out to be a poor candidate for an autobiographer, we can see that Saleem tries

hard to convince his audience that what he says is trueas if our belief in his

story will ratify his representation of his life as true and further combat his fear of

absurdity.


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III. Saleems Sense of Narrative

In addition to sharing the story of his life with his readers, Saleem shares

the story of how he reproduces his life in narrative form. He expresses his goals

for his narrative and explains how his memory works. He reveals some forces

that guide his literary task and shows us how he works to make his story

convincing. By concluding his lifes story with an explanation of how his narrative

worksmost notably with the metaphors narrative is fabric and narrative is

chutney

Saleem highlights the imperfect way writing, like pickling, fails to

accurately preserve its subject. And by expressing this failure through the

fictional Saleem, Rushdie calls attention to the bias inherent in all representations

of the past, whether fictional or not.

Reasons for Writing

Though Saleem rarely mentions his purposes for engaging the task of

recalling his life on paper, what little he does mention reveals his profound lust

for meaning (501). Near the beginning of his narrative he writes: I must work

fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaningyes,

meaningsomething. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity (4). By fearing

absurdity above widows, knees and cracks, Saleem vaguely


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establishes meaning as the primary goal for his narrative. By comparing

himself to Scheherazade (who also has great investment in her stories) Saleem

dramatizes his need to work quickly because unlike the princess he cannot

depend on his narrative to prolong his life (even though he later writes about a

nostalgia which would keep [him] alive long enough to write these pages) (538).

When he writes that he left a narrative hanging in mid-airjust as

Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten

up by curiosity, used to do night after night! Saleem reinforces the connection

between his narrative and one upon which the authors survival depended (21-

22). Finding no chance to prolong his own life with words, Saleem writes that As

much as for any living being, Im telling my story for [my son], so that afterwards,

when Ive lost the struggle against cracks, he will know, but by creating, in his

narrative, such a central role for himself, Saleem reveals that he writes for

himself as much as he does for others (252-3). Mark Johnson finds that We

spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to construct significant

unities in our lives, thereby minimizing the fragmentary, isolated, and insignificant

episodes of our existence (164). By constructing significant unities in his

narrative, Saleem works what meaning he can into his own episodes of

existence.

Whether the narrative remains absurd or not, it continues to provoke

Saleems anxiety. After realizing that he discovered an error in his report of


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Gandhis assassination, Saleem begins to wonder if he really subordinates facts

to fabrications, writing: Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that

Im prepared to distort everythingto re-write the whole history of my times

purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I cant

judge. Ill have to leave it to others (198). As the previous chapters of this paper

reveal, Saleem frequently bends the truth to suit his needs throughout his

narrative. In his first attempt at rearranging history, a young Saleem snips

letters from newspapers (themselves contributing to his nations history) to

compose a letter to Commander Sabarmati; in a much more bold attempt at

rearranging history, an older Saleem skews the whole story of his life (312).

Striving vainly to better understand his life, Saleem values his narratives ability

to provide his life with meaning more than he values the truth or accuracy of his

narrative.

Saleem reinforces this view of his reliability when he writes, before relating

the Hummingbirds story: Sometimes legends make reality, and become more

useful than the facts (48). By finding utility in legend Saleem draws our attention

to the irrelevance of facts that few are familiar with. Saleem tells Mian Abdullahs

story According to legend, then

according to the polished gossip of the

ancients at the paan-shop (48). By preferring conversational utility to truth

Saleem reveals that he is not strictly concerned with factsa sign that he will not

always offer the most accurate of conflicting stories, but also a sign that he


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considers how he wants to represent his story to his audience. Saleem

reinforces this view when he tells Padma more directly, if youre a little uncertain

of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do

terrible deeds. Women, too (254).

Saleems Memory

Despite his pithy explanations, its often hard to account for Saleems

super-human memory. Few thirty-one year-olds, I suspect, could even hope to

accurately recreate page after page of mental dialogue experienced twenty-one

years earlier as Saleem does when he recounts his Midnights Childrens

Conferences, let alone when he recounts the thirty-two years of history that

precede his birth. Apparently wary of his audiences concerns, Saleem mentions

a trick that aids his memory: Most of what matters in our lives takes place in

our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the

gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail

(14-5). Describing a sensual component of this trick that strikes me as being

just as special as his midnight-given powers, Saleem writes,

Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it,so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory

gifts)turning it inwards, Ive been sniffing out the atmosphere in mygrandfathers house in those days after the death of Indias humminghope. (56)


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Although Saleems facility with details makes his narrative rich and realistic by

accounting so well for the world in which he appears doomed to suffer, its hard

for us to distinguish whether Saleem simply makes up missing bits of stories or if

he can actually channel truth directly into his narrative. Since we know how

much trouble he has setting his stories straight, we might want to believe that he

invents what he cannot rememberbut the extent to which Saleem fabricates his

past matters little when we consider how often his memory, whether guided by

magic or by scents, fails him, because regardless of the source of his memories,

Saleem acknowledges its flaws.

Confusing memories of his tenth birthday with elections that took place

one year earlier, Saleem writes, although I have racked my brains, my memory

refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events. This is worrying. I dont

know whats gone wrong (265). Though Padma tries to console Saleem by

saying that Everybody forgets some small things, all the time! Saleem still

wonders, if small things go, will large things be close behind? (266). Later,

Saleem wont be able to wonder, as we can see when he writes about the

Emergency: It wasor am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me

all the time

a day of horrors. It was then

unless it was another day

that we

found old Resham Bibi dead of cold (493-4). Though Saleem struggles to recall

the details of the day, he has no trouble wondering if perhaps, in Bombay, dead

pomfrets were floating belly-side-up to shore (494). By shoring up


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approximations of what happened with conjecture, Saleem again marks his

narrative as his own personal version of historynot what may or may not have

happened, not the way others might remember events, but the way Saleem

remembers them, however imperfectly this may be (490).

Emotional Influence

As is the case with most story-tellers, Saleems attitude toward his subject

frequently affects the accuracy of his tale. Saleem follows his retelling of

Ramram Seths prophecy by writing, because there are yet more questions and

ambiguities, I am obliged to voice certain suspicions (100). But as we soon

learn, the questions and ambiguities he raises have far less to do with real

suspicions than with his desire for revenge (100). Saleem refers to his all-

knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father

grandfather grandmother and everyone else to help him amass details which

supposedly allow him to conclude that his mother might have slept with Seth

(100). But before Saleem can voice his suspicions, Padma interrupts to say how

baseless his ideas area criticism Saleem readily accepts: If she knew, she

would say I was only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see Amina

doing, years later, through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Cafe (100-1). Even

though Saleem admits that Padma is right, as always, he offers even more

meaningless details which lead to weak suspicions before admitting that all are


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Unworthy suspicions. . . I must dismiss them; must save my strictures for later,

when, in the absence of ambiguity, without the clouding curtain, she gave me

hard, clear, irrefutable proofs that reveal nothing more serious than secret

conversations (100-1).

Saleem begins to analyze his reaction to his mothers adventure with Seth

by writing that events occurring between the night of Too much prophecy and

his recording of the event influenced his view of what happened (100). He

wonders if it was at the Pioneer cafe that his irrational notion was born, to grow

illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlierand yes,

almost certainly innocentadventure (100-1). Because Saleem writes his

narrative near the end of his life, he cant help but recall the events he records

through the faulty filter of his memory (or through his magical nose). He must

also filter these events through all of his more recent experiences, experiences

that clearly affect the way he understands his life.

In more traumatic situations Saleems story has trouble making it to the

page at all, let alone making it with any accuracy. More than any other event in

his narrative, the Emergency halts Saleems normally smooth flow of words.

Beginning his recollection by writing No!

But I must! Saleem cannot prevent

his prose from quickly deteriorating: But the horror of it, I cant wont mustnt

wont cant no!Stop this; begin.No!Yes (503). Hoping to present Facts,

as remembered. To the best of ones ability, Saleem regains some of his


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fluency and reports on the winter of 1975-6the winter he at first leads us to

believe is Shivas last (503; 506).

Whereas the pain Saleem experiences during the Emergency only slows

down his narrative for a while, his fear of Shiva leads him to make his first out-

and-out lie (529). To account for his lie Saleem writes, Padma, try and

understand: Im still terrified of him. There is unfinished business between us,

and I spend my days quivering at the thought that the war hero might somehow

have discovered the secret of his birth (529). While contemplating his reasons

for lying, Saleem writes:

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion thatsince the past exists only in ones memories and the words which strivevainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply bysaying they occurred. My present fear put a gun into Roshanara Shettyshand; with the ghost of Commander Sabarmati looking over my shoulder, I

enabled her to bribe coquette worm her way into his cell. . . in short, thememory of one of my earliest crimes created the (fictitious) circumstances

of my last

almost the same way he accounts for his suspicions of his mother with a notion

born during an episode at the Pioneer Cafe (529-30). The reason Saleem gave

in to the temptation of every autobiographer was to try to make the story of his

life read the way he would like it to read. In this manner Saleem demonstrates

the usefulness of his narrative as a medium through which he can enjoy an

idealized version of his life, however fleeting or unrealistic it may be.

Saleems Sense of Audience


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In Midnights Children and reader responsibility, Keith Wilson comments

on Saleems reliance on Padmas presence. When she leaves him for a while

Saleem writes: I feel confused [. . .] in her absence my certainties are falling

apart (197). In his Padma-deprived state Saleem loses track of datesas a

result, in Saleems India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time (198).

But as soon as Padma returns (and Saleem recovers from her poison)

pickling timethe creation of narrative in

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