Midnights Children

that the first reader’s report had been brief and forbiddingly negative: “The author should concentrate on short stories until he has mastered the novel form.” Liz asked for a second report, and this time I was luckier, because the second reader, Susannah Clapp, was enthusiastic; as, after her, was another eminent publishing figure, the editor Catherine Carver. Liz bought the book, and soon afterward so did Bob Gottlieb at Alfred A. Knopf. I quit my part-time copywriting job. (I had moved on from Ogilvy & Mather to another agency, Ayer Barker Hegemann.) “Oh,” the creative director said when I tendered my resignation, “you want a raise?” No, I explained, I was just giving notice as required so that I could leave and be a full-time writer. “I see,” he said. “You want a
big
raise.” But on the night
Midnight’s Children
won the Booker, he sent me a telegram of congratulations. “One of us made it,” it read.
    Liz Calder’s editing saved me from making at least two bad mistakes. The manuscript as originally submitted contained a second “audience” character, an offstage woman journalist to whom Saleem was sending the written pages of his life story, which he also read aloud to the “mighty pickle-woman,” Padma. All the book’s readers at Cape agreed that this character was redundant, and I’m extremely glad I took their advice. Liz also helped me untangle a knot in the timeline. In the submitted manuscript the story jumped from the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 to the end of the Bangladesh war, then circled back to tell the story of Saleem’s role in that conflict, caught up with itself at the surrender of the Pakistani army, and then went on. Liz felt that there were too many temporal shifts here and the reader’s concentration was broken by them. I agreed to restructure the story chronologically and, again, am very relieved that I did. The role of the great publishing editor is often effaced by the editor’s modesty. But without Liz Calder,
Midnight’s Children
would have been something rather less than she helped it to become.
    The novel’s publication was delayed by a series of industrial strikes, but in the end it was published in London in early April 1981, and on April 6 my first wife, Clarissa Luard, and I threw a party at our friend Tony Stokes’s little art gallery in Langley Court, Covent Garden, to celebrate it. I still have the invitation, tucked into my first-received copy of the novel, and can remember feeling, above all, relieved. When I finished the book, I suspected that I might at last have written something good, but I was not sure if anyone else would agree, and I told myself that if the book were generally disliked it would mean that I probably didn’t know what a good book was and should stop wasting my time trying to write one. So there was a lot riding on the novel’s reception, and, fortunately, the reviews were good; hence the high spirits in Covent Garden that spring night.
    In the West people tended to read
Midnight’s Children
as a fantasy, while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book. (“I could have written your book,” one reader told me when I was lecturing in India in 1982. “I know all that stuff.”) But it was wonderfully well liked almost everywhere, and it changed its author’s life. One reader who didn’t care for it, however, was Mrs. Indira Gandhi, and in 1984, three years after its publication—she was prime minister again by this time—she brought an action against it, claiming to have been defamed by one single sentence. It appeared in the penultimate paragraph of the twenty-eighth chapter, “A Wedding,” a paragraph in which Saleem provides a brief account of Mrs. Gandhi’s life. This was it: “It has often been said that Mrs. Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father’s death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything.” Tame stuff, you might think, not really the kind of thing a thick-skinned politician would usually sue a novelist for mentioning, and an odd choice of
casus belli
in a book that excoriated Indira for the many crimes of the Emergency. After all, it was a thing much said in India in those days, had often been in print, and was indeed reprinted prominently in the Indian press (“The sentence Mrs. Gandhi is afraid of” read one front-page headline)