Midnight's Children summary

There’s almost too much to say, Saleem Sinai, the narrator of our story, tells us. The tale we’ll be hearing has a vast setting: the entire Indian subcontinent. The facts we’ll learn – and Saleem insists that they are facts – span an “excess” of lives, events, and places. It’s Saleem’s story, but it’s also the story of India, a nation of 600 million inhabitants at independence. 

Saleem, then, starts with a question: where to begin this sprawling story? 

He chooses the year 1915. Neither India nor its neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, had been born – they were still gestating in the British Empire’s stomach. The first character we meet is a doctor who has returned to his native Kashmir from medical studies in Germany: Aadam Aziz. 

We watch Aziz unfurling his prayer rug beneath Kashmir’s snow-capped mountains. He kneels, places his forehead on the ground, and then bangs his huge nose on the frost-hardened earth. Blood flows from his proboscis-like appendage, congealing into ruby-red droplets in the icy air. In that moment, he resolves to never again prostrate himself before a God. 

Aadam Aziz’s nose is significant, but we have to fast-forward to understand why. 

It’s August 14, 1947, and we find ourselves in an affluent suburb of the port city of Bombay, India’s window to the west. We see a young couple in a hospital room. The husband, Ahmed Sinai, paces back and forth; his wife, Amina, the daughter of Aziz, lies in a bed, clutching her swollen stomach. Both the city and the Sinais are expectant. 

Britain, the power on whose empire the sun was never supposed to set, is relinquishing its hold on the subcontinent. The Muslim-majority state of Pakistan is two days old – at midnight, its Hindu-majority neighbor, India, will celebrate its own independence. While crowds light fireworks in Bombay’s bustling streets, the Sinais await the birth of their first child. 

He tumbles into the world at the stroke of midnight. A second boy is born at exactly the same time in the adjoining room. These are the first of the 1,001 children born in the opening hour of India’s independence whom Saleem will later call “midnight’s children.” 

These two boys’ futures are mapped out: the first, the son of a Hindu beggar, will grow up in poverty in Bombay’s backstreets. The second, the son of a Muslim landowner, in the comfort of a well-appointed villa. However, a nursemaid, discontented with a system that fixes their fates from the start, secretly exchanges the infants. The beggar’s boy receives the Muslim name of Saleem and goes home with the Sinais – their actual child is given the Hindu name of Shiva and goes home with the beggar. 

The switch isn’t noticed for many years, though. Saleem, everyone says as they admire the baby’s huge cucumber-like nose, looks exactly like his grandfather!

ANALYSIS

There are lots of errors in Midnight’s Children. Saleem, for example, gets everything from the date of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination to the routes of Bombay buses wrong. 

Mostly, these mistakes are deliberate – not, as some early readers assumed, the product of sloppy fact-checking. As Rushdie put it in an essay in 1983, memory and history – the overlapping themes of his novel – are “always ambiguous.” Facts, after all, are hard to establish and open to interpretation. The realities we construct from them are just as likely to reflect prejudice, ignorance, and misconception as they are perceptiveness and knowledge. 

Saleem is engaged in the business of remembering, and one of the “simplest truths” about memories according to Rushdie is that many of them are false. That Saleem begins his story with a fact – his grandfather’s huge nose – that leads directly to a misconception about identity is Rushdie’s way of warning us to take what we’re about to hear with a grain of salt.