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By Root 11869 0

prime minister, the American hostages in Iran were released, President Reagan was shot and wounded, there were race riots across Britain, the Pope was shot and wounded, Picasso’s Guernica went back to Spain, and President Sadat of Egypt was assassinated. It was the year of V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich. Like all novels, Midnight’s Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by its time in ways that its author cannot wholly know. I am very glad that it still seems like a book worth reading in this very different time. If it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure. I will not be around to see that. But I am happy that I saw it leap the first hurdle.

December 25, 2005

London

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition

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

BOOK ONE

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; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the center, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present,