Midnight's Children

Title: Midnight's Children
Author: Salman Rushdie
My comment: The Indian spirit in the words of a true story teller..


Ofcourse I had heard of the book. Who hasn’t? It won the Booker in 1981 and then Booker of Bookers in 1991. In 2008 this book won the people’s choice award for the best book to ever win a booker. I had heard of the writer too. Salman Rushdie, against whom many fatwas had been issued. So there was nothing much to think before purchasing it since it had all the elements of a perfect-home-take-away-novel – Booker prize and a controversial author.

I read the first six pages and didn’t understand a thing. Though as a consolation to Mr. Rushdie, I must admit that I was a little sleepy too. I didn’t touch it for a week and then started it all over again, reading each and every word carefully this time, grasping the meaning of every word, forming it into a sentence, each metaphor carefully woven and satire placed at the right corners. And this time I slept with the book and woke up with it besides me.

Once you grab hold of Mr. Rushdie’s style of writing, the words will look like a flowing river, almost naturally at place. The magic that Mr. Rushdie casts upon the reader through his mystical style of writing and inter-woven, often out-of-chronology events is just fabulous. It didn’t take me long to recognize why the book has been deemed as the best of the best among modern writing.

The book begins with the protagonist Saleem Sinai, who narrates the story of his grandfather Aadam Aziz in Kashmir to his dung-goddess and then takes us through the history of India till second generation following the roads to independence, the five-year plans and the emergency under Mrs. Indira Gandhi. In this journey he explains how the cosmos planned his own birth at the opportune moment at the stroke of midnight hour when India itself became independent on 15 August 1947 and then how this birth was inter-woven with the bearing of his nation.

With Saleem, were born, thousand and one more children known as the children of midnight or the midnight’s children, each born with a special and unique power. This is the story of how these children realize their destiny of being and the true purpose of these powers. In this book what starts as a love story through a perforated sheet becomes a saga of human nature, mystique and will.      

As Aadam Aziz fell in love with Saleem’s grandmother through the hole in the bed-sheet, I fell in love with the book. As baby Saleem was being born in the hospital ward at Bombay (Mumbai), I was with Jawaharlal Nehru witnessing the midnight speech and as baby Saleem spied on his mother…I think I have said too much. And this is just half the book.

Mr. Rushdie, as the world now recognizes is a master story teller who, in this novel has told the story which people will associate to because it reaches such depths of human emotions and with such ease that you will find yourself living in the time as Saleem Sinai, the radio child. A must read for the English speaking community.

As an advice, just remember to keep a Webster’s dictionary with you while reading because Mr. Rushdie has probably used every available adjective in English language.