Midnight's Children

The Perforated Sheet
 
I WAS BORN in the city of Bombay once upon a time. No, that won t do, there s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it s important to be more On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn t even wipe my own nose at the time.
 
Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, overused body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning yes, meaning something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
 
And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives;

Salman Rushdie

In Salman Rushdie, India has produced a glittering novelist one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. The New Yorker

A marvelous epic . . . Rushdie s prose snaps into playback and flash-forward . . . stopping on images, vistas, and characters of unforgettable presence. Their range is as rich as India herself. Newsweek

Burgeons with life, with exuberance and fantasy . . . Rushdie is a writer of courage, impressive strength, and sheer stylistic brilliance. The Washington Post Book World

Pure story an ebullient, wildly clowning, satirical, descriptively witty charge of energy. Chicago Sun-Times

This brash, knowing, massive, aggressive novel is to modern India what Günter Grass s The Tin Drum is to modern Germany. The New York Times Book Review

Dazzling . . . In combining past with present, nostalgic realism with mythic overtones, specific detail with complex and binding narrative devices, Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction. The Philadelphia Inquirer