Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

s on fire! Better you lie down now; too soon for all this writing! The sickne
ss is talking; not you.'
But I've already lost a week; so, fever or no fever, I must press on; becaus
e, having (for the moment) exhausted this strain of old time fabulism, I am
coming to the fantastic heart of my own story, and must write in plain unvei
led fashion, about the midnight children.
Understand what I'm saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947 betw
een midnight and one a.m. no less than one thousand and one children were b
orn within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In itself,
that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number are str
angely literary) at the time, births in our part of the world exceeded deat
hs by approximately six hundred and eighty seven an hour. What made the eve
nt noteworthy (noteworthy! There's a dispassionate word, if you like!) was
the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of
biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or jus
t conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale
would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents or faculties
which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though if you will pe
rmit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I promise, the most,
sober account I can manage as though history, arriving at a point of the h
ighest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the se
eds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had se
en up to that time.
If a similar miracle was worked across the border, in the newly partitioned
off Pakistan, I have no knowledge of it; my perceptions were, while they l
asted, bounded by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Himalaya mountain
s, but also by the artificial frontiers which pierced Punjab and Bengal.
Inevitably, a number of these children failed to survive. Malnutrition, dise
ase and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than four
hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their existenc
e; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths, too, had their
purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated wi
th fraud, deception and trickery. Can it be, then, that the missing infants
were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow inadequate, and we
re not the true children of that midnight hour? Well, in the first place, th
at's another excursion into fantasy; in the second, it depends on a view of
life which is both excessively theological and barbarically cruel. It is als
o an unanswerable question; any further examination of it is therefore profitless.
By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty one children were all nearin
g their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant, for the most part, of one another
's existence although there were certainly exceptions. In the town of Baud,