Midnights Children

“No, listen now, everybody: without Saleem we are nowhere, we can’t talk or anything, he is right. Let him be the chief!” And I, “No, never mind
chief
, just think of me as a … a big brother, maybe. Yes; we’re a family, of a kind. I’m just the oldest, me.” To which Shiva replied, scornful, but unable to argue: “Okay, big brother: so now tell us what we do?”
    At this point I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued me all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. “We must think,” I said, “what we are for.”
    I record, faithfully, the views of a typical selection of the Conference members (excepting the circus-freaks, and the ones who, like Sundari the beggar-girl with the knife-scars, had lost their powers, and tended to remain silent in our debates, like poor relations at a feast): among the philosophies and aims suggested were collectivism—“We should all get together and live somewhere, no? What would we need from anyone else?”—and individualism—“You say we; but we together are unimportant; what matters is that each of us has a gift to use for his or her own good”—filial duty—“However we can help our father-mother, that is what it is for us to do”—and infant revolution—“Now at last we must show all kids that it is possible to get rid of parents!”—capitalism—“Just think what businesses we could do! How rich, Allah, we could be!”—and altruism—“Our country needs gifted people; we must ask the government how it wishes to use our skills”—science—“We must allow ourselves to be studied”—and religion—“Let us declare ourselves to the world, so that all may glory in God”—courage—“We should invade Pakistan!”—and cowardice—“O heavens, we must stay secret, just think what they will do to us, stone us for witches or what-all!”; there were declarations of women’s rights and pleas for the improvement of the lot of untouchables; landless children dreamed of land and tribals from the hills, of Jeeps; and there were, also, fantasies of power. “They can’t stop us, man! We can bewitch, and fly, and read minds, and turn them into frogs, and make gold and fishes, and they will fall in love with us, and we can vanish through mirrors and change our sex … how will they be able to fight?”
    I won’t deny I was disappointed. I shouldn’t have been; there was nothing unusual about the children except for their gifts; their heads were full of all the usual things, fathers mothers money food land possessions fame power God. Nowhere, in the thoughts of the Conference, could I find anything as new as ourselves … but then I was on the wrong track, too; I could not see any more clearly than anyone else; and even when Soumitra the time-traveller said, “I’m telling you—all this is pointless—they’ll finish us before we start!” we all ignored him; with the optimism of youth—which is a more virulent form of the same disease that once infected my grandfather Aadam Aziz—we refused to look on the dark side, and not a single one of us suggested that the purpose of Midnight’s Children might be annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed.
    For the sake of their privacy, I am refusing to distinguish the voices from one another; and for other reasons. For one thing, my narrative could not cope with five hundred and eighty-one fully-rounded personalities; for another, the children, despite their wondrously discrete and varied gifts, remained, to my mind, a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity, and I see no point in dividing them now. (But there were exceptions. In particular, there was Shiva; and there was Parvati-the-witch.)
    … Destiny, historical role, numen: these were mouthfuls too large for ten-year-old gullets. Even, perhaps, for mine; despite the ever-present admonitions of the fisherman’s pointing finger and the Prime Minister’s letter, I was constantly distracted from my sniff-given marvels by the tiny occurrences of everyday life, by feeling hungry or sleepy, by monkeying around with the Monkey, or going to the cinema to see
Cobra Woman
or
Vera Cruz
, by my growing longing for long trousers and by the inexplicable below-the-belt heat engendered by the approaching School Social at which we, the boys of the Cathedral and John Connon Boys’ High School, would be permitted to dance the box-step and