Getting a Rush from Rushdie

          I just read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Tristram Shandy meets Nabokov’s Ada meets Proust meets Gabriel García Márquez meets The Thousand Nights and a Night in Rushdie’s break-out novel, published in 1981, set in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, with the background of the first turbulent thirty years of freedom from the British raj, featuring hundreds of children born during the first hour of independence starting at midnight on August 15, 1947, all having superpowers. Telepathy is the power of the narrator, Saleem Sinai, who assembles the others in a telepathic conference that can never agree on anything because it represents, like modern India itself, too many languages, ethnic groups, religions, geographic regions, and points of view.

            Saleem is only thirty-one when he feels himself disintegrating and decides to tell his autobiography to his fiancée Padma Mangroli. She becomes, like the reader whom Tristram Shandy has dialogues with, the voice that urges him to get on with it.

But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next. “At this rate,” Padma complains, “you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.”

Actually it’s only a hundred and fifty pages until Saleem describes his birth, but first he tells of the courting of his grandmother by his grandfather and the story of their children and their children’s marriages. And Saleem likes to give hints of what will happen further along in the story, and to tell his tale as stories linked to other stories or nested within other stories, in the manner of the Arabian Nights. Saleem’s life is not, like Tristram’s bedeviled by his father’s odd philosophical notions, but is tied up with the history of modern India, with which he is coeval. He even has a letter addressed to Baby Saleem from Jawaharlal Nehru, telling him the he mirrors his country’s beginnings.

            Like the narrator of Nabokov’s Ada, Salem has a lifelong passion for his sister, who is at first given the nickname of the Brass Monkey and later becomes Jumila Singer, the voice of Pakistan and of Islam. But this love is never consummated, and in any case, as Saleem and his family learn when he is ten years old, she is not his sister; he was switched at birth with another newborn, another of Midnight’s Children who becomes his bête noir and is portentously named Shiva, recalling the god Shiva the Destroyer.

            The book is about memory, and Saleem admits at times that he may be misremembering and be an unreliable narrator. For him the stimulus of memory is not a finger cake dipped in tea but green chutney, “green as grasshoppers,” and it is the literal chutney made by the woman who switched the babies at birth as well as the figurative chutney of memory that brings Saleem’s narrative together at the end of the book, but not before we have been from Bombay to Pakistan to the jungle Sundarbans of Bangladesh, through the war of 1965 that Saleem insists was begun expressly to destroy his family (and does), and the infamous slum clearance, displacement of tens of thousands, and forced sterilizations of the rule of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay.