916 Rushdie, salman
heady with the power of his gift, is a different
person from what he would become. Indeed, dur-
ing the war, Saleem even forgets his name, being
called “the Buddha” for a time. Many characters
in Midnight’s Children become someone else as
their lives progress. Naseem becomes the Reverend
Mother, the Brass Monkey becomes Jamila Singer,
Mumtaz becomes Amina. It is the circumstances of
our lives, these changes seem to say, that make us
who we are, and as those circumstances change, so
do our identities.
Jennifer McClinton-Temple
memor y in Midnight’s Children
When the narrator of a novel is a actual character, as
opposed to an omniscient unnamed being, the reli-
ability of the narrator’s recollections and perceptions
may be called into question. In Midnight’s Children,
the narrator, Saleem Sinai, is self-consciously unreli-
able. In fact, he is deliberately unreliable on occasion,
describing false memories and then defending his
right to remember the past that way. Saleem also
wants Padma, his audience within the story, and his
readers to remember things the way he does, and so
he gives us frequent recaps of the story thus far.
These recaps have the effect of making the
memories our memories as well. When, shortly
before narrating his own birth, he reminds us that
“[t]hirty-two years before the transfer of power,
my grandfather bumped his nose against Kashmiri
earth,” we remember Grandfather Aadam’s acci-
dent right along with him. Then, when he goes
on to recall the perforated sheet, Tai the boatman,
the Hummingbird, Nadir Khan’s escape into the
cornfield, and Ramram Seth and his prophecy,
sprinkled in with real-life references to M. A. Jin-
nah (the first governor-general of Pakistan), Lord
Mountbatten (the last viceroy of India), and the
goddess Mumbadevi, the reader undergoes the pro-
cess of accessing memory as well. As we do this, the
memories become our own, instead of remaining
Saleem’s alone.
The effect of this style of narration is that we
understand the nature of memory with more depth.
For instance, in a traditional narrative, the narrator
might foreshadow events that have yet to occur but
would rarely tell the reader outright what is going
to happen. Saleem, however, frequently tells us what
is going to happen before it does. For instance, long
before his family makes their fateful move to Paki-
stan, he says, “Years later, in Pakistan, on the very
night when the roof was to fall in on her head and
squash her flatter than a rice-pancake, Amina Sinai
saw the washing-chest in a vision.” The effect of this
is that in the end, we too feel that we hold Saleem’s
entire story in our heads, and therefore we under-
stand how it might be subject to question.
Reinforcing the idea that memories are not
carved in stone is Saleem’s tendency to get the facts
wrong. Because Midnight’s Children is at once a his-
tory of the fictional Saleem and the real India, fiction
mixes with fact throughout. On occasion, Saleem’s
facts do not correspond to reality. For instance, he
gets Mahatma Gandhi’s death wrong, but refuses to
change it. He says “The assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date.
But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of
events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will
continue to die at the wrong time.” He also gives
us the wrong dates for the 1957 elections—but
claims that even though he knows this, his memory
“refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events.”
Right or wrong, correct or false, is relative, Saleem’s
memory seems to indicate. What matters most is
how the story gets told. To those who doubt his
veracity, Saleem says, “believe, don’t believe” and asks
his readers (and his listener, Padma) how accurate
and believable their own memories are.
After Saleem’s family is killed in the Indo-Paki-
stani War of 1965, after his sister disappears and he
himself becomes a soldier for a cause in which he
does not believe, he loses his memory entirely. He
cannot remember his own name and is simply called
“the Buddha” by his fellow soldiers. His attempt to
drown out the past is unsuccessful, however, and
ultimately he spends 400 days mourning his fam-
ily—immersing himself in his memory of them. His
narrative, in the end, is the truth. He tells Padma
that memory has its own special kind of truth:It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, mini-
mizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the
end it creates its own reality, its heteroge-
neous but usually coherent version of events;