Midnights Children

after she brought her action for defamation. Yet she sued nobody else.
    Before the book’s publication, Cape’s lawyers had been worried about my criticisms of Mrs. Gandhi and had asked me to write them a letter in support of the claims I was making. In this letter I justified the text to their satisfaction, except in regard to one sentence, which, as I said, was hard to substantiate, as it was about three people, two of whom were dead, while the third would be the one suing us. However, I argued, as I was clearly characterizing the information as gossip, and as it had been printed before, we should be all right. The lawyers agreed; and then, three years later, this one sentence, the novel’s Achilles heel, was the very sentence Mrs. Gandhi tried to spear. This was not, in my view, a coincidence.
    The case never came to court. The law of defamation is highly technical, and to repeat a defamatory rumor is to commit the defamation oneself, so technically we were in the wrong. Mrs. Gandhi was not asking for damages, only for the sentence to be removed from future editions of the book. The only defense we had was a high-risk route: We would have had to argue that her actions during the Emergency were so heinous that she could no longer be considered a person of good character, and could therefore not be defamed. In other words, we would have had, in effect, to put her on trial for her misdeeds. But if, in the end, a British court refused to accept that the prime minister of India was not a woman of good character, then we would be, not to put too fine a point upon it, royally screwed. Unsurprisingly, this was not the strategy that Cape wished to follow—and when it became clear that she was also willing to accept that this was her sole complaint against the book, I agreed to settle the matter. It was after all an amazing admission she was making, considering what the Emergency chapters of
Midnight’s Children
were about. Her willingness to make such an admission felt to me like an extraordinary validation of the novel’s portrait of those Emergency years. The reaction to the settlement in India was not favorable to the prime minister. A few short weeks later, stunningly, she was dead, assassinated on October 31, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards. “All of us who love India,” I wrote in a newspaper article, “are in mourning today.” In spite of our disagreements, I meant every word.
    This is by now an old story. I rehearse it here in part because I worried from the beginning that incorporating such momentarily “hot” contemporary material in the novel was a risk—and by that I meant a literary risk, not a legal one. One day, I knew, the subject of Mrs. Gandhi and the Emergency would cease to be current, would no longer exercise anyone overmuch, and at that point, I told myself, my novel would either get worse—because it would lose the power of topicality—or else it would get better—because once the topical had faded, the novel’s literary architecture would stand alone, and even, perhaps, be better appreciated. Clearly, I hoped for the latter, but there was no way to be sure. The fact that
Midnight’s Children
is still of interest twenty-five years after it first appeared is, therefore, reassuring.
    In 1981, Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister, the American hostages in Iran were released, President Reagan was shot and wounded, there were race riots across Britain, the Pope was shot and wounded, Picasso’s
Guernica
went back to Spain, and President Sadat of Egypt was assassinated. It was the year of V. S. Naipaul’s
Among the Believers
and Robert Stone’s
A Flag for Sunrise
and John Updike’s
Rabbit Is Rich
. Like all novels,
Midnight’s Children
is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by its time in ways that its author cannot wholly know. I am very glad that it still seems like a book worth reading in this very different time. If it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure. I will not be around to see that. But I am happy that I saw it leap the first hurdle.
    December 25, 2005
    London

BOOK ONE

The Perforated Sheet
    I WAS BORN in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands