How Easily We Create New Enemies
When Saleem is born, he is one of 1,001 children born at the moment of India's partition. There are 581 left by the time he is 10 years old.
“Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.”
It’s the most haunting line of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a book about children who are born at midnight on the day of the partition that separated India and Pakistan.
The partition was a bloodbath. Tensions between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan erupted as ordinary people scrambled to get on the “correct” side of the new border. According to The New Yorker, about 15 million people were displaced and one to two million were killed in the months following partition.
Midnight’s Children follows a family through several generations from pre-partition through the state of emergency Indira Gandhi — the Widow in Rushdie’s book — imposed, suspending elections and constitutional rights.
It’s an exploration of the complicated relationships we have with our countries, with poignant moments we’ve all experienced personally even if we haven’t experienced them politically.
Can We Bear to See Everything?
When he was a baby, Saleem didn’t blink. His many caretakers brushed it off at first. They could’ve missed his blinks or he could’ve been a particularly attentive baby.
But after alternating blinks, there was no doubt: Saleem’s bright blue eyes never closed.
“Their eyelids opening-and-closing alternately, they observed my icy blueness; but there was no the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. ‘He’ll learn, Madam,’ Mary comforted Amina, ‘He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.’”
At a glance, it’s a funny and memorable way to build a character. How many people have been able to teach their children to shut their eyes? The scene’s humor sets up the paragraph’s punchline:
“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”
One of the best things about Rushdie’s writing is his pairing of humor and profundity. It’s all the more prescient when Saleem grows up and has to navigate the war zones caused by the partition. Saleem would encounter horrific scenes as he and the other Midnight’s Children navigated the split between India and Pakistan.
His first lesson has aged remarkably well in the social media era. Elon Musk’s X has made it possible to view every depraved human rights violation known to man. Even softcore social media brings suffering from war zones and corrupt governments to everyone’s smartphone.
Our social media feeds seem to prove that we can’t stare at the worst things people do to each other. Sometimes we have to set the phone down and return to our normal lives.
But even ordinary lives carry dangers. As an older child, Saleem would learn the ways that “ordinary” lives laid the groundwork for future tragedies.
Children Are Their Parents, But Smaller
Each of the Midnight’s Children has mystical powers, among them an ability to psychically communicate with all the others.
One of Saleem’s troubling findings was the bigoted thoughts that pervaded his fellow Midnight’s Children. Saleem noticed the same ethnic, religious, and class rivalries that divided Indian society in the 10-year-olds he was connected to. He was also clear-eyed about where those prejudices came from:
“…because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did [speak] for us.”
Children don’t grow up in a vacuum. They absorb the best and worst qualities from the adults around them.
In the novel, these children begin as the hope for a peaceful India. Many of them age into adults who are just as eager to annihilate their enemies inside and outside India as their parents. Midnight’s Children is as much a study of the world’s largest democracy as it is the story of Saleem and his family.
In 700 words, I can’t begin to fit all the wit and insight Rushdie packs into his book. All I can do is recommend it so you can see what you get out of it.