by ANVAR ALIKHAN
What made Midnight’s Children? Re-examining the innards of a classic 30 years on, and the once capacious city that inspired it
Rushdie has a quirky thing about the names of his characters. In Shalimar the Clown, for example, he whimsically named his character Max Ophuls—like the well-known film director, but no connection; when asked why he didn’t simply invent a new name for the character instead, he shrugged and replied, “I don’t know. Names stick.” Midnight’s Children is filled with names that evidently ‘stuck’, and when the book was first released, the biggest game in Mumbai was trying to figure out who-was-supposed-to-be-who. ‘Cyrus-the-Great’, for example, was apparently based loosely on Cyrus Guzder, the conservationist and chairman of AFL, whom Rushdie obviously admired in school. ‘Eyeslice’ and ‘Hairoil’ were his buddies, Fudli and Darab Talyarkhan, the former getting his nickname from the way his eyes stretched wide when he smiled and the latter from the quantities of Glostora hair-oil he applied—but their surname becomes ‘Sabarmati’, and their dashing naval officer father takes you sideways into the famous Nanavati murder case of the ’50s. ‘Evie Burns’ draws upon Beverly Burns, an Australian girl, apparently the first girl Rushdie ever kissed. And ‘Masha Miovic’ owes something to a Yugoslavian girl whom he had an adolescent crush on and who, ironically, doesn’t remember today who Salman Rushdie was (prompting the author to comment wryly, “Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow”). But the big question, of course, is, who was the book’s protagonist, ‘Saleem Sinai’?
Rushdie insists that while everyone assumes the book to be autobiographical, Saleem, in fact, feels very unlike himself, having obstinately acquired a life of his own during the writing process, quite different from the author’s intentions. “I had a kind of wrestling match with him, which I lost,” he explains. According to him, Saleem was named in tribute to his academic rival in school, a boy named Salim Merchant, who later went on to become a successful radiologist in Australia.
It is, however, the city of Bombay itself that is arguably the real hero of the book: it shaped Rushdie, gave him his uniquely rambunctious, kinetic voice and the themes he has delved into, time and again. “The Bombay of that period, of the ’50s and the first half of the ’60s, was a city going through a kind of golden age,” he once recalled. “It certainly felt like that, like a kind of enchanted zone, at the time. It was a wonderful, exciting, vibrant city to grow up in. And I fell in love with it then, and forever.” That tropical Camelot of a city also, of course, planted the seeds of Rushdie’s fluidly multi-cultural worldview, long before its time: “It was a very exciting town to grow up in, a very cosmopolitan town. When I grew up, the kids I played with were by no means all Indian kids. They were American kids, Australian, Japanese, Europeans and so on. The idea of a separation of cultures between the East and the West was certainly never the idea I grew up with. They were all mixed in together from the beginning.” It was, indeed, a very Baumgartnerian city.
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Rushdie laments this new Mumbai, where “the political gangs are all Hindu and the criminal gangs are all Muslim”, but he is perhaps most disturbed by its fascist politics, from which there seems to be no escape (ask Rohinton Mistry, its latest victim): “That Bombay, the tolerant, open-hearted, secularised Bombay has gone,” Rushdie once rued. “It’s still a great capital, it’s still a huge buzzing metropolis. It hasn’t lost that. But it’s lost some essential thing about its flavour.” Yes, something about that erstwhile Bombay has gone forever, and nothing can bring it back, not the McKinseys of the world with their visions of a corporatised, Shanghai-like world city, nor even that breed of midnight’s children with their strange, magical powers, whom Saleem Sinai once attempted to convene. One thing that does remain, however—if you know where to look—is Rushdie’s childhood home, Windsor Villa, in a quiet cul-de-sac off Bhulabhai Desai Road.
But re-reading Midnight’s Children today is a strange experience. The book has a breathtakingly transcendental playfulness, but one also discovers in it weird echoes of an unborn future, with references, for example, to “Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add: I don’t want to offend anyone)” and to a wife eerily named Padma (“a consolation for my last days”). Reading it today one wonders about the enormous risk that Rushdie took, investing five years of his life on writing this seemingly self-indulgent novel, crammed with India-specific cultural references that the Western reader would never entirely catch.
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