Tag Archives: Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children: The Final Jar of Time

30 Saturday Jun 2012

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Funny, isn’t it?  That twenty days after first tasting the final words of Midnight’s Children, I’m still pondering those pickle jars.

So why pickle jars?  And not the exotic people, places and things introduced into my mind, by the magical writing of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t author, Salman Rushdie? (Can anyone use that “writery” trick of foreshadowing as effective as he?)

How can it be that it’s the image of thirty-one pickle jars trumping all else, in the end?  Especially that one.  You know.  On the end.  Empty and waiting.

“Twenty-six pickle-jars stand gravely on a shelf; twenty-six special blends, each with its identifying label, neatly inscribed with familiar phrases:  “Movements Performed by Pepperpots,” for instance, or “Alpha and Omega,” or “Commander Sabarmati’s Baton.”  Twenty-six rattle eloquently when local trains go yellow and browning past; on my desk, five empty jars tinkle urgently, reminding me of my uncompleted task. But now I cannot linger over empty pickle-jars; the night is for words, and green chutney must wait its turn.”  —  p. 443

Pickle jars represent chapters; thirty full jars equate to thirty full chapters of the novel.  Thirty full chapters of the narrator’s Saleem Sinai’s life.  So full —  not of preserved cucumbers — but of a cucumber-nosed narrator’s stories, dreams and memories truth.  Artfully told.  Artfully preserved.  Artfully titled, with chapter headings that hide as much as they reveal; “Movements Performed by Pepperpots,” for example.  Hmmm.  What might that concoction smell and taste like?

I wouldn’t have written these words twenty days ago. Because the words and ending felt flat first-time around.  The final bite of words left a bad taste in my mouth.  Like onions that linger to overstay their welcome.

I expected something spicy.  Something like all that had come before.  After all, I had followed the narrator through India, Pakistan and Bangladesh —  through the ups and downs of his dramatic “India-talkie” life.  And like a child-soldier, I longed for a little more “Ka-pow’ for the finale.  Know what I mean?

I should have known better.  By now, I should have known Rushdie better.  Because, as with Books One and Two, it’s the second reading where appreciation for Rushdie’s novel grows, where chapter contents begin to meld into flavors both fabulous and subtle on the tongue and mind.  Cucumbers, after all, are not pickles overnight.  And neither are Rushdie’s pickle jars of stories.  They require time and space to appreciate fully.

“One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history.  They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes;  I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth… that they are, despite everything, acts of love.” p. 531

Truth.  Again it’s truth.  Truth floating up and swirling all around.  No longer truth in general, but truth in particular.  Truth as it’s embodied in a particular person.  Truth as it’s embodied in the narrator, Saleem.   And truth as it’s lived out (or not) by a country’s leaders. Military might as well as political power.  India.  Pakistan.  Eeny.  Meeny.  Miny.  Moe.    But rather than summarize, I prefer to get out-of-the-way, and let the Master Magician pull those ‘true-self’ “Rusdie-isms” out of his own top hat.

“Don’t you remember really?  Nothing? Allah, you don’t feel bad.  Somewhere you’ve maybe got mother father sister,” but the buddha interrupted him gently:  “Don’t try and fill my head with all that history.  I am who I am, that’s all there is.” [emphasis added] p. 403

“In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old self was waiting to reclaim me.  I should have known:  no escape from past acquaintance.  What you were is forever who you are.”  [emphasis added]  p. 423

“I no longer want to be anything except what who I am.  Who what am I?  My answer:  I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.  I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine.  I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come.  Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude.  I repeat for the last time”  to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” [emphasis added] p. 440-41

Simply beautiful.  Don’t you think? But as I said at the beginning, it’s the ending jar that gets me.  The jar that remains empty, since it represents the narrator’s future. And not just Saleem’s future, but my future, too.  And your future. And all of our futures.  Eeny.  Meeny.  Miny.  Moe.

Last days.  Last words.  Last breaths.  And then, eternity.  Yes, in the end, knowing ourselves — our true selves — requires accepting our own mortality.  Our own emptiness.  Our now-you-see-us-and-now-you-don’t selves. Which reminds me of Rushdie’s fabulous take on the after-life where we get a taste of invisibility through Parvarti’s magic tricks…. p. 438-39

And so much else, that I’ve no time to go there….

But later.  Maybe, then.  Maybe, then, we’ll have more time.  For as the great Rushdie, himself, once wrote,

“To pickle is to give immortality, after all…”  p. 531

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Note 1:  For other book reviews, pop over to Arti’s place and follow the links.

Note 2: All page references are based on the 2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition.

Midnight’s Children: Three-Quarter’s Past Truth

31 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Good Reads, Writing

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Three-quarters to the end of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, I’m thinking I’ve missed the boat A LITTLE.  You know, the one sailing strong on the “smoke and mirrors” theme of truth, the very one dropping anchors of reality in earlier readings.

Why, not so far away in Book One, I recall underlining this passage — only to ignore it in my March write-up:

“True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me.  Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us.  True was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman’s finger pointed in the picture on my wall while the young Raleigh listened to his tales…I measure truth against those early things:  Is this how Mary would have told it?”  (p. 87*)

Then somewhere in Book Two, I underlined this passage — which again, by the end of April, failed to make press in April’s write-up:

“”What is truth?”  I waxed rhetorical, “What is sanity”  Did Jesus rise up from the grave?  Do Hindus not accept…that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma dreamed, is dreaming the universe that we only see dimly through that dream web, which is Maya. Maya.”” (p. 242)

Now comes May’s write-up.  And no longer can I ignore the undercurrent of truth versus illusion — the ability of one — any one of us and any of Rushdie’s characters — to discern in total, the falseness and reality of things. I can’t ignore it because it’s EVERYWHERE.  As big and bright as a billboard advertising Kolynos Toothpaste, in fact.  And to put the cart before the horse — and why not, since Rushdie is fond of doing the same? — is this wonderful observation on truth and false toward the end of this month’s reading:

…in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence — that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.” (p. 373)

So much happens in the second half of Book Two.  Dominoes fall.  One event  crashing into another until little is left standing.  All because characters — and Saleem, in particular, who sees himself on center stage — can’t help but reach false conclusions to perceived smidgens of truth —  and act accordingly to destructive results.

First, Saleem’s three exiles:  the first from his changeling family, the second from India and another from his rich inner world of the children of midnight — the latter, because of a nose job that results in shutting down his inner airwaves but offers in return the power of “sniffing-out-the-truths” (p. 352) in his exterior world.

Second, there is death — death of characters and, as a result, death of familiar ways of living.  Too many bodies to count except to say that there is plenty of room on board for the re-appearance of Shiva and Parvarti-the-Witch and whatever other children of midnight might wish to visit in Book Three.

Then, there is rebirth and transformation: Of love between Saleem’s changeling parents and of a shameful true-false love Saleem feels for his sister, the Brass Monkey — who, surprisingly, becomes not only tame and malleable while living in Pakistan, but an overnight singing sensation known as Jamila Singer.  Perhaps, most intriguing, is a rebirth of a protective sheet, with one small hole cut in the center — the one used to shield Jamila the Brass Monkey from her adoring public reminds us of another in Book One which shielded Saleem’s “grandmother” from the eyes of her future husband.  And really, how can anyone get a sense of the whole truth — of a person place or thing — when peering through a small hole of a sheet?

As usual, I’ve left much unsaid — because, as usual, there’s just too much in Rushdie’s fictional world to point a finger at.  But not so ‘as usual’ is this:  that unlike the previous two, this third section of reading was tough going.  Not because it’s not beautifully told.  Or that the pace wasn’t good.  Or that the characters had lost their power to charm me.  No, if anything, I found myself caring more about what happens to Saleem and his family, as I followed their movements to deal with loose “truths” that have slithered across chapters like a serpent to poison relationships and destroy worlds.

No, the reasons are more difficult to explain.  Maybe because some great truth is slithering off the page to become personal.  Maybe I feel snake-bit.  For like Saleem and company, I realize my bit knowledge of Truth  — the one I can see through a small hole in a symbolic perforated sheet — can only help me get at truth but not quite nail it.  Suffice it to say that the truth I’ve witnessed unfurl in Rushdie’s story is greater than any one character has yet realized.  And that it’s this fuller truth I’ve found exploding off the page into my own life.

If these characters can do and think such horrible deeds in the name of ‘truth’ — small case ‘t’ — and be so terribly mistaken in their one-sided judgments and self-righteousness — then what about me and my own small world?  What about any of us?  Can we be so different?

Unless of course, I’ve got it all wrong.  Yes.  Perhaps I’ve stayed with Rushdie in India too long.  For I, too, could be “obsessed with correspondence;” of finding “similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things… looking for meaning” revealed “only in flashes.”  (p. 344)

Perhaps better minds than mine know where Rushide’s boat is heading.  But wherever it docks, I’ve come to accept it will take me a little longer to get there.  I’m lagging behind.  Passing time and words on the slow boat to China.

Note:  All page references relate to 2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition.  For other viewpoints, please follow the link to other reactions of those participating in the read-along.

Midnight’s Children: Half-Time Report

30 Monday Apr 2012

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Half the words without half the story.  That’s my quick, half-time recap of Salman Rushdie’s hard-to-put-down novel, Midnight’s Children.

How tempting to leave it at just that.  I can’t say why, but I’m not ready to talk of what I’ve read quite yet.   But ready or not, it’s time to share notes with read-along partners — and any other who desires to listen in — though to react at all, feels plain premature at this point of the tale.

In this month’s reading, the spotlight shifts from the narrator’s holey grandfather to the young narrator himself.  It’s a story about growing up, endearing as it is universal.  I like this narrator.  No, I love this narrator.  Snot-nosed and ugly and misunderstood he may be, but how can one not admire his youthful idealism and brutally honest self-assessments?

Rushdie’s story just grows and grows, making it hard to point a finger at any thing in particular.   It grows like the young babe Saleem — and it grows like the population of India, too — though, thank God, it does not grow uncontrollably.   But at this point of the story, I wish I possessed greater understanding of how the young narrator, Saleem Sinai, is a mirror of India’s own young life.  While I sense that child and country are inextricably linked, for better and worse, I don’t yet understand HOW this is.  Yes, both experience growing pains from internal turmoil and blood-letting.  But surely there is more to their common ground than the story has currently revealed?

I’ve glimpsed three great religions and God-knows-how-many-languages and voices influencing both India and Saleem.  I see both growing up under the watchful eyes of an expectant world, waiting for a sort of payback on investments and loans.  And unlike the country of his birth, I’ve watched a young narrator become absolutely consumed with need to understand his larger purpose in the world. So much so, that Saleem is in constant need of a hidey hole to escape the pressures of his world.

Hiding that begins in the physical world — from a washing-chest in his mother’s bathroom to a clock-tower next to his parent’s home — becomes mental, growing out of Saleem’s interior world and a couple of physical blows to the head.  The last, a childhood mishap, finished the work of his father’s hand and “wild anger,” which left Saleem’s left ear permanently damaged.

So what words could beget such parental violence?  I’ll only share that Saleem was premature in his conclusions.  That Saleem was wrong.  That his parents more wrong.  And that maybe there’s plenty of wrong to go around whenever any of us fail to listen to others as fully as we can. Or ought.

But lack of listening isn’t Saleem’s problem.  Not at all.  Because, much like a radio, Saleem is gifted with a fantastic ability to tune his mind into other minds, to eavesdrop on real-time thinking of friends, parents and politicians.  What begins as simple mind-reading soon mushrooms into a type of telepathic communication center — where Saleem’s mind becomes much like an internet server, allowing Midnight’s Children — those uniquely gifted Indian children born in the first hour of Indian Independence — to communicate with one another.  There he meets scary Shiva — the true son of Saleem’s parents born at the same time as Saleem and India — who is dark to Saleem’s light and pessimist to Saleem’s idealism, hinting of conflicts to come.  What grows from this conflict is for the second half of the book to reveal.

But what, I wonder, will grow from all I failed to mention? Evie Burns, for example?  The Brass Monkey of a sister?  And all those with bald heads that keep popping up from time to time, on the pages of this book?   Who can say, at this point, whether any and what and who are the red herrings of this story? Who knows but what may ultimately become important in this fabulous tale?

Especially, with a narrator who laments, in the final paragraphs of this month’s section of reading, this bit of wisdom to fly off the page…

“Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.”

With words like these, I can only conclude I don’t know the half of it.