Midnight's Children Novel by Salman Rushdie a short summary

 

Characters in Midnight Children:

Saleem Sinai - The narrator and protagonist of the novel. Born at the moment of India’s independence and blessed with the powers of telepathy and a mysterious sense of smell, Saleem tells his extraordinary life story as his body begins to fall apart, an account that significantly parallels the history of postcolonial India.

 

Adam Aziz - Saleem’s grandfather. Adam is the patriarch of the family, a doctor by profession. Aadam falls in love with his wife, Naseem.

 

Ahmed Sinai - Saleem’s father. Amina’s husand.  A businessman who is nonetheless destined for failure, Ahmed spends much of his marriage fighting his wife and his alcohol addiction.

 

Mumtaz (Amina Sinai) - Saleem’s mother, and the daughter of Aadam Aziz. Her first name was  Mumtaz, later she changes her name to Amina after her marriage to Ahmed sina. Despite being married to Ahmed, she is never able to forget her first husband, Nadir Khan.

 

Mary Pereira - Saleem’s ayah and surrogate mother. Mary is responsible for switching Saleem and Shiva at birth out of a misguided sense of social justice. In order to compensate for her crime, she dedicates her life to raising Saleem.

 

Shiva - Saleem’s archrival. Shiva is born at exactly the same moment as Saleem. While Saleem is raised in a loving, wealthy household, Shiva is raised in abject poverty by a single father. He is blessed with a pair of strong knees and an amazing skill in war. Shiva is named after the Hindu god of
destruction.

 Padma - Saleem’s devoted caretaker and future wife. Padma is a strong personality and down-to-earth as Saleem is weak and dreamy. She provides Saleem with a constant support.

 

Naseem Ghani - Saleem’s grandmother and Aadam Aziz’s wife. After marriage, Naseem becomes known as Reverend Mother, in part because of her religious devotion. As her husband withers away with age, Reverend Mother grows increasingly large and powerful.

 

William Methwold - Saleem’s biological father. An Englishman, William Methwold seduces Vanita. He owns a big Estate, a portion of which he sells to Ahmed Sinai. He sees his departure from India as marking the tragic end of an era.

Alia - Saleem’s aunt and a sister of Amina. After Ahmed Sinai rejects her for her sister, Alia harbors a lifelong bitterness and determination to destroy her sister and her sister’s family.

Hanif - Saleem’s uncle and a brother of Amina. Hanif was once one of the most promising film directors in India. But  his career falls apart, he commits suicide.

 
Nadir Khan - Amina’s first husband. As a young man, Nadir Khan is the personal assistant to Mian Abdullah, as well as a poet. He falls in love with Amina but is forced to divorce her on account of his impotence. He later changes his name to Qasim Khan and becomes a communist.

Mustapha - Saleem’s uncle, and a brother of Amina. Mustapha is the ideal, obedient civil servant.

Emerald - Saleem’s aunt, and a sister of Amina. Emerald marries Major Zulfikar and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle.

General Zulfikar - Emerald’s husband and an important figure in the Pakistani army. General Zulfikar makes money by smuggling items into the country. His constant abuse of his son, Zafar, eventually provokes Zafar into killing him.

Zafar - The son of General Zulfikar and Emerald. Zafar wets himself throughout his life and is ridiculed and abused by his father as a result he murders him.

 
Adam Sinai - The biological son of Shiva and Parvati-the-witch. Saleem raises Aadam as if he were his own child. Aadam is just three years old at the novel’s conclusion.

Picture Singh - A snake charmer, and the leader of the magician’s ghetto. Charming and diplomatic, Picture Singh is Saleem’s closest friend.

 

Wee Willie Winkie - Shiva’s father. Wee Willie Winkie is a poor man who earns a living by singing for the wealthy families of Methwold’s Estate.

Vanita - Saleem’s biological mother. Vanita dies during labor.

Farooq, Shaheed, and Ayoob - Three soldiers assigned to work with Saleem in the Pakistani army. Each one is eventually killed during the war.

Ghani - Naseem’s father. Ghani is a blind, wealthy landowner.

 

Brief Summary :

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a magical realist novel published in 1981 revolving around India’s independence and resulting partition. Midnight’s Children was critically acclaimed and won many literary awards, including the Booker Prize and the special Booker of Bookers Prize, which commemorated the award’s 25^th anniversary.

The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is born on August 15th, 1947, at the exact moment India gains its independence from Britain. Thirty years later, Saleem feels as if he is dying, so he decides to tell the story of his life to his lover, Padma. Saleem begins the story of his grandfather, Adam Aziz who lived in Kashmir, India. In Saleem’s story, Adam is a doctor taking care for a woman named Naseem, who later becomes Saleem’s grandmother. When Adam was treating her, he was not allowed to see her. He usually treats her having hidden behind a sheet. Finally he gets a chance to see her face when she has a headache. Naseem and Adam marry. They move to Amritsar, where Adam witnesses for Indian independence from British rule.

These protests are violently suppressed and end with the protesters being massacred. After having three daughters and two sons, Adam becomes a follower of an activist named Mian Abdullah. Abdullah is assassinated for his beliefs, and Adam agrees to take in his assistant, Nadir Khan. Naseem labels Nadir as cowardly and protests his staying in their house.

Ultimately, Nadir Khan and Adam’s daughter Mumtaz fall in love. They marry, but even after two years, fail to consummate their marriage. Nadir Khan later flees from their house, leaving his wife behind. Mumtaz remarries Ahmed Sinai. He was a merchant. Mumtaz decides to change her name to Amina and she and her husband move to the large city of Delhi. Amina is soon pregnant, and visits a fortune teller to learn about her future child. The prophecy about her child states that he will never be older or younger than his country. Due to some complications with Ahmed’s factory being burned down by terrorists, he decides to move them to Bombay.

In Bombay, Mumtaz and Ahmed buy a house from an Englishman named William Methwold. One of their neighbors is an entertainer named Wee Willie Winkie who lives with his pregnant wife, Vanita. Without the knowledge of Willie, Vanita had a clandestine affair with Methwold and he is the father of her child. Both Vanita and Mumtaz go into labor and have their children at midnight, though Vanita does not survive after the childbirth.

The midwife who has recently had an affair with a socialist, decides to switch the babies so that the poor baby can live a life of privilege and vice versa. Saleem is not truly the biological child of Mumtaz and Ahmed, but of Vanita and Methwold. The midwife becomes Saleem’s nanny out of guilt.
Saleem’s birth is given large press coverage, since it coincided with Indian independence. Saleem is strange looking, with a cucumber-shaped nose and blue eyes. One day, Saleem is punished for hiding out in the bathroom, where he accidentally witnesses his mother using the toilet. She forces him to be silent for a day, wherein he notices he can hear the thoughts of others. Ultimately, he realizes he can also hear the thoughts of those children born in the same hour as him. He also finds out that they all have powers; the strongest ones being born closest to midnight.

Shiva, the child with whom he was switched at birth, is physically strong and gifted in fighting. Saleem loses a part of his finger and is rushed to the hospital. When the doctors obtain his blood type, it is revealed that Saleem cannot be Ahmed and Mumtaz’s biological son. Saleem’s nanny admits she switched the two boys at birth. Ahmed, now an alcoholic, becomes violent at hearing the news, which prompts Amina to take Saleem and his sister to the recently created nation of Pakistan to live with her sister.

After Ahmed dies, the family moves back to Bombay. At this time, India is embroiled in a war with China. Saleem’s large nose has been giving him trouble all his life, so he gets an operation to fix it. After the operation, he is no longer telepathic, but has an enhanced sense of smell and he can sense people’s emotions.

After India loses to China, the family moves back to Pakistan. There, his entire family is killed, save his sister Jamila, during a war between India and Pakistan. Saleem loses his memory after being hit in the head. He ends up in the army, although he is not quite sure how he ended up there. Saleem witnesses many war crimes and barbarisms, and he escapes into the Bangladesh jungle. There, Saleem recovers some of his memory, but does not recover his name until he meets Parvati- the-witch, who is another one of midnight’s children. She helps him recall his name.

They retreat to a magicians’ ghetto. Parvati wants Saleem to marry her, which he refuses to do. She then has an affair with Shiva, who is now a famous war hero. Shiva and Parvati have relationship troubles, and Parvati returns to the magicians’ ghetto, pregnant and unmarried. Saleem agrees to marry her. Indira Gandhi, who is the prime minister of India, has begun sterilization (castration) camps to decrease India’s population. She also destroys the magicians’ ghetto. Parvati dies after childbirth, and Shiva captures Saleem to take him to a sterilization camp. There, all of midnight’s children are sterilized.

All of midnight’s children are set free, and Saleem heads out to find  Parvati’s son. He finds him with a snake charmer they knew in the ghetto and the three travels to Bombay. There, Saleem eats some chutney which reminds him of his nanny. He tracks down the chutney factory his former nanny owns, and there he meets Padma. He decides to marry her, but is certain that on his thirty-first birthday, the anniversary of India’s independence, he will die and explode into dust.