Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie [2]
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 didn’t 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 tomorrow—you’ll like what you see”) to solve the problem. In the end I had two titles and couldn’t choose between them: Midnight’s 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 Midnight’s 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 Dickens—Austen 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, Bombaylike 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 novel’s 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 mother’s reaction to the book, but she immediately understood that it was “just a story—Saleem isn’t you, Amina isn’t me, they’re all just characters,” thus demonstrating that her level head was a lot more use to her than my father’s 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 I’d 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 can’t 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 Midnight’s Children from Alenka’s father in Serbia, in which he mentioned a little crushingly that his daughter had no memory of ever having met me during her childhood years in Bombay. So it goes. Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
And as for Mary Menezes, my second mother, who never really loved a revolutionary nursing-home