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Nadir who became Qasim, and Pia and Zafar who wet his bed and also General Zulfikar, they throng around me pushing shoving crushing, and the cracks are widening, pieces of my body are falling off, there is Jamila who has left her nunnery to be present on this last day, night is falling has fallen, there is a countdown ticktocking to midnight, fireworks and stars, the cardboard cut-outs of wrestlers, and I see that I shall never reach Kashmir, like Jehangir the Mughal Emperor I shall die with Kashmir on my lips, unable to see the valley of delights to which men go to enjoy life, or to end it, or both; because now I see other figures in the crowd, the terrifying figure of a war-hero with lethal knees, who has found out how I cheated him of his birthright, he is pushing towards me through the crowd which is now wholly composed of familiar faces, there is Rashid the rickshaw boy arm-in-arm with the Rani of Cooch Naheen, and Ayooba Shaheed Farooq with Mutasim the Handsome, and from another direction, the direction of Haji Ali’s island tomb, I see a mythological apparition approaching, the Black Angel, except that as it nears me its face is green its eyes are black, a center-parting in its hair, on the left green and on the right black, its eyes the eyes of Widows; Shiva and the Angel are closing closing, I hear lies being spoken in the night, anything you want to be you kin be, the greatest lie of all, cracking now, fission of Saleem, I am the bomb in Bombay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd, bag of bones falling down down down, just as once at Jallianwala, but Dyer seems not to be present today, no Mercurochrome, only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three, and at last somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes, release.

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

About the Author

SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of eight other novels—Shalimar the Clown, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Grimus—and one collection of short stories, East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Step Across This Line. Originally published in 1981, Midnight’s Children received the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers.”

Table of Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition

Contents

Book One

The Perforated Sheet

Mercurochrome

Hit-the-Spittoon

Under the Carpet

A Public Announcement

Many-headed Monsters

Methwold

Tick, Tock

Book Two

The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger

Snakes and Ladders

Accident in a Washing-chest

All-India Radio

Love in Bombay

My Tenth Birthday

At the Pioneer Café

Alpha and Omega

The Kolynos Kid

Commander Sabarmati’s Baton

Revelations

Movements Performed by Pepperpots

Drainage and the Desert

Jamila Singer

How Saleem Achieved Purity

Book Three

The Buddha

In the Sundarbans

Sam and the Tiger

The Shadow of the Mosque

A Wedding

Midnight

Abracadabra

About the Author