Salman Rushdie - Midnights Children

Salman Rushdie

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

I N 1975 I PUBLISHED my first novel, Grimus, and decided to use the 700 advance to travel in India as cheaply as possible for as long as I could make the money last, and on that journey of fifteen-hour bus rides and humble hostelries Midnights Children was born. It was the year that Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party and Sheikh Mujib, the founder of Bangladesh, was murdered; when the Baader-Meinhof gang was on trial in Stuttgart and Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham and the last Americans were evacuated from Saigon and Generalissimo Franco died. In Cambodia it was the Khmer Rouges bloody Year Zero. E. L. Doctorow published Ragtime that year, and David Mamet wrote American Buffalo, and Eugenio Montale won the Nobel Prize. And just after my return from India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi was convicted of election fraud, and one week after my twenty-eighth birthday she declared a state of emergency and assumed tyrannical powers. It was the beginning of a long period of darkness that would not end until 1977. I understood almost at once that Mrs. G. had somehow become central to my still-tentative literary plans.

I had wanted for some time to write a novel of childhood, arising from my memories of my own childhood in Bombay. Now, having drunk deeply from the well of India, I conceived a more ambitious plan. I remembered a minor character named Saleem Sinai, born at the midnight moment of Indian independence, who had appeared in an abandoned draft of a stillborn novel called The Antagonist. As I placed Saleem at the center of my new scheme I understood that his time of birth would oblige me immensely to increase the size of my canvas. If he and India were to be paired, I would need to tell the story of both twins. Then Saleem, ever a striver for meaning, suggested to me that the whole of modern Indian history happened as it did because of him; that history, the life of his nation-twin, was somehow all his fault. With that immodest proposal, the novels characteristic tone of voicecomically assertive, unrelentingly garrulous, and with, I hope, a growing pathos in its narrators increasingly tragic overclaimingcame into being. I even made the boy and the country identical twins. When the sadistic geography teacher Emil Zagallo, giving the boys a lesson in human geography, compares Saleems nose to the Deccan peninsula, the cruelty of his joke is also, obviously, mine.

There were many problems along the way, most of them literary, some of them urgently practical. When we returned to England from India I was broke. The novel in my head was clearly going to be long and strange and take quite a while to write, and in the meanwhile I had no money. As a result I was forced back into the world of advertising. Before we left I had worked for a year or so as a copywriter at the London office of the Ogilvy & Mather agency, whose founder, David Ogilvy, immortally instructed us that the consumer is not a moron, she is your wife, and whose creative director (and my boss) was Dan Ellerington, a man of rumored Romanian origins with a command of English that was, let us say, eccentric, so that, according to mirthful company legend, he once had to be forcibly restrained from presenting to the Milk Marketing Board a successor to the famous Drinka pinta milka day campaign that would be based on the amazing, the positively Romanian slogan, Milk goes down like a dose of salts. In those less hard-nosed times Ogilvy was prepared to employ a few oddball creative people on a part-time basis, and I managed to persuade them to rehire me as one of that happy breed. I worked two or three days a week, essentially job-sharing with another part-timer, the writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny. On Friday nights I would come home to Kentish Town from the agencys offices near Waterloo Bridge, take a long hot bath, wash the weeks commerce away, and emergeor so I told myselfas a novelist. As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger selfs dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.

Still, advertising taught me discipline, forcing me to learn how to get on with whatever task needed getting on with, and ever since those days I have treated my writing simply as a job to be done, refusing myself all (well, most) luxuries of artistic temperament. And it was at my desk at Ogilvy that I remember becoming worried that I didnt know what my new novel was to be called. I took several hours off from the important work of coming up with campaigns for fresh cream cakes (Naughty but nice), Aero chocolate bars (Irresistibubble), and the Daily Mirror newspaper (Look into the Mirror tomorrowyoull like what you see) to solve the problem. In the end I had two titles and couldnt choose between them: Midnights Children and Children of Midnight. I typed them out one after the other, over and over, and then all at once I understood that there was no contest, that Children of Midnight was a banal title and Midnights Children a good one. To know the title was also to understand the book better, and after that it became easier, a little easier, to write.

I have written and spoken elsewhere about my debt to the oral narrative traditions of India, and also to those great Indian novelists Jane Austen and Charles DickensAusten for her portraits of brilliant women caged by the social convention of their time, women whose Indian counterparts I knew well; Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city, and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyperrealistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seem to grow organically, becoming intensifications of, and not escapes from, the real world. I have probably said enough, too, about my interest in creating a literary idiolect that allowed the rhythms and thought patterns of Indian languages to blend with the idiosyncrasies of Hinglish and Bambaiyya, the polyglot street slang of Bombay. The novels interest in the slippages and distortions of memory will also, I think, be evident enough to the reader. This may, however, be an appropriate moment to give thanks to the original people from whom my fictional characters sprang: my family, my ayah, Miss Mary Menezes, and my childhood friends.

My father was so angry about the character of Ahmed Sinai that he refused to speak to me for many months; then he decided to forgive me, which annoyed me so much that for several more months I refused to speak to him. I had been more worried about my mothers reaction to the book, but she immediately understood that it was just a storySaleem isnt you, Amina isnt me, theyre all just characters, thus demonstrating that her level head was a lot more use to her than my fathers Cambridge University education in English literature was to him. My sister, Sameen, who really was called the brass monkey as a girl, was also happy with the use Id made of my raw material, even though some of that raw material was her. Of the reactions of my boyhood friends and schoolmates Arif Tayabali, Darab and Fudli Talyarkhan, Keith Stevenson, and Percy Karanjia I cant be sure, but I must thank them for having contributed bits of themselves (not always the best bits) to the characters of Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Fat Perce, and Glandy Keith. Evie Burns was born out of an Australian girl, Beverly Burns, the first girl I ever kissed; the real Beverly was no bicycle queen, though, and I lost touch with her after she returned to Australia. Masha Miovic, the champion breaststroker, owed something to the real-life Alenka Miovic, but a couple of years ago I received a letter about