Contents: IntroductionPlot Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Characters
Mian Abdullah
The founder of the Free Islam Convocation, Mian Abdullah is assassinated by government agents in Agra in 1942.
Aadam Aziz
Aadam Aziz is Saleem's grandfather. The story starts by telling how, as a young doctor, Aadam Aziz met Saleem's grandmother. He lives an unhappy life with her. He is briefly involved in politics in Amritstar in 1919, helping people who are being suppressed by British troops and nearly being shot for it, and again in Agra in 1942, when he is friends with the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who is involved in subversive politics. Aadam dies in 1964 after returning to Kashmir to find a religious icon, a strand of the Prophet Mohammed's hair.
Hanif Aziz
Hanif Aziz, one of Saleem's uncles, becomes a celebrated film director and marries Pia, a famous actress. While Saleem is living with them, he sends an anonymous letter that gets their financier, Homi Catrack, shot by a jealous husband; deprived of income, Hanif commits suicide.
Mumtaz Aziz
Mustapha Aziz
Mustapha Aziz is one of Saleem's uncles, a brother of his mother. After most of the family members have been killed when India bombs Pakistan, Saleem goes to Mustapha's house and lives there for forty days of mourning, even though his uncle and his aunt want him to leave.
Naseem Aziz
Naseem Aziz, the narrator's grandmother, is the daughter of a wealthy landowner who brings the single young doctor, Aadam Aziz, to examine her. Her father only allows Aadam to view her through a sheet with a hole in it, and so he falls in love with her a little at a time.
After they are married, Naseem turns into a hard, bitter woman. She is domineering, ruling the lives of her daughters when she sees them. It is at this time in her life that she gains the nickname Reverend Mother, indicating that she is as domineering as a nun. She also develops a verbal tic, adding the phrase "whatsisname" into the middle of sentences at random.
Late in life she convinces Saleem's Aunt Pia to go to Pakistan with her and open a gas station.
Brass Monkey
Evelyn Lilith Burns
A tough girl from the United States who lives in Saleem's neighborhood when he is a boy, Evelyn Lilith Burns, also called Evie, is a leader of the children until one day when, first learning about his telepathic power, he enters her thoughts and finds out that other people are aware of him when he is there. The experience is disorienting to Evie, who is more aloof after it.
Evie's personality is patterned after that of a cowgirl. She has an air rifle and goes around the neighborhood shooting cats with it. One day, Saleem's sister, the Brass Monkey, who is sympathetic to the cats, waits for her and fights her. Soon after that, Evie's father sends her home to the United States.
Homi Catrack
Homi Catrack is a financier of films in Bombay. He has an affair with the wife of navy officer Commander Subarmati. Saleem sends a note to the commander, tipping him off. The commander shoots his wife and her lover, triggering a scandal that fills the news in 1958.
Joseph D'costa
Joseph D'Costa betrays his girlfriend Mary Pereira and her sister Alice, which leads Mary to change the Sinai baby with Wee Willie Winkie's. For years after his death, Mary sees the ghost of Joseph periodically around Methwold's estate, a constant reminder of her guilt.
Lifafa Das
When Saleem's parents are newlyweds in Delhi, Lifafa Das walks the streets with a box for showing photos. One day an angry mob sets on him, accusing him of being a child molester because he is a Hindu in a Muslim part of town; to save him, Amina announces to the crowd that she is pregnant.
Ghani
The father of Saleem Sinai's grandmother, Ghani is a wealthy land owner who calls the doctor frequently to examine his daughter, clearly promoting a romance between Aadam Aziz and his daughter, Naseem. Ghani brags about the expensive European artwork that decorates his house, even though he is blind.
Naseem Ghani
The Hummingbird
Sonny Ibrihim
Sonny Ibrihim is Saleem's childhood friend.
Nadir Khan
Nadir Kahn is an anti-British poet who dates Saleem's aunt Emerald and then, while hidden from British troops under the Aziz house, falls in love with her sister Mumtaz and marries her. Their marriage is a secret, since he cannot come out from hiding in the basement of the Aziz house. Emerald, whom he dated first, betrays his hiding place to the police, forcing him to run away, and Mumtaz is left still a virgin after two years of marriage. Kahn shows up later in the story, meeting Amina Sinai (the name that Mumtaz has been going by) at the Pioneer Café, but Saleem lets his mother know that she is being watched, and she breaks off their relationship.
Ilse Lubin
A college friend of Aadam Aziz who comes to visit him while he is courting Naseem Ghani, Ilse Lubin goes for a ride on the lake with the boatman Tai and mysteriously ends up drowned. A brief suicide note ("I didn't mean it") is later found.
William Methwold
A descendant of the William Methwold who was one of the original British occupiers of India, this William Methwold sells his estate to several people, including Saleem Sinai's parents, in order to leave before Indian independence in 1947.
Padma
Padma is the narrator's confidante, the person to whom he tells the story of his life. Her name means "The One Who Possesses Dung." Throughout the novel, Saleem tells the story that he is writing to Padma, who is uneducated and illiterate. She listens and comments critically, telling him what parts she likes and what parts she finds impossible.
In the end, Padma convinces Saleem that he should be married, if only for the sake of his son, Aadam. The novel ends with Saleem marrying Padma.
Parvati-The-Witch
Parvati-the-witch is one of Midnight's Children. Saleem runs into her in Pakistan, while he is suffering amnesia, and she helps him remember who he is. She helps smuggle him back into India and then marries him. Saleem cannot have children with her because every time he touches her he thinks of his love for his sister, Jamila. Parvati becomes pregnant by Shiva instead and has a son whom Saleem raises as his own after she dies in a government raid against the Magician's Ghetto.
Mary Pereira
A midwife at Dr. Narlikar's nursing home in 1947, Mary Pereira loses her boyfriend to her sister: bitter about love, she exchanges the Sinai baby with Wee Willie Winkie's baby when they are born. Filled with regret soon after, she arranges to become the Sinais' nurse and thus is the person primarily responsible for Saleem's upbringing.
Rani of Cooch Naheen
In Agra, the Rani of Cooch Naheen is a supporter of the Free Islam Convocation and sponsor of Mian Abdullah.
Reverend Mother
Shiva
The true son of Ahmed and Amina Sinai, Shiva was switched with a poor family's baby at birth. He is known for his powerful, bulbous knees. When he is a boy, Shiva is a tough-talking street urchin, a bully. When he finds out about the Midnight's Children's Conference, he claims to be co-leader. Saleem fears him and tries to keep him out of the telekinetic conference.
As an adult, Shiva becomes a celebrated army hero in the India-Pakistan war. He enters into hundreds of affairs with women and leaves them when they become pregnant, leaving hundreds of children when he dies. The one woman about whom he is concerned, though, is Parvati-the-witch: he leads the attack on the Ghetto of the Magicians, where Saleem is living with Parvati. She dies in the attack. Soon after, there is a regime change, and Shiva is court-martialed as a traitor. Saleem tells a story of his being shot while in military prison by a woman who had his child, but later he says that the story was a lie.
Aadam Sinai
Aadam Sinai is the son to whom Parvati gives birth. Her natural father is Shiva, but Saleem raises the boy as his own, and the story ends with his trying to be a father to the boy.
Ahmed Sinai
The father of Saleem Sinai, Ahmed Sinai married Mumtaz Aziz after her first husband left her, and he encouraged her to change her name to Amina. Over the years, his fortune goes up and down: he is a wealthy merchant, then is ruined by a fire, then has insurance money to invest, then his holdings are frozen by the government, then they are unfrozen. In the end, he operates a successful towel manufacturing plant in Pakistan. He dies when India invades Pakistan in 1965.
Amina Sinai
Originally named Mumtaz, Amina Sinai, the narrator's mother, first marries Nadir Kahn, a revolutionary poet. He is wanted by the government for involvement with revolutionaries, and their marriage takes place in secret while he is hiding in her family's basement. After Kahn goes into hiding, Amina marries Ahmed Sinai and changes her first name. She has a run of good luck betting on horses when her husband's bank account is frozen and is able to pay for lawyers with the money she earns from gambling, in order to have his money released. She dies in 1965, during the bombing of Pakistan by Indian forces.
Saleem Sinai
Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight's Children, tells a story that begins decades before his birth, with details about his grandparents' courtship and his parents' lives before he is born. Regarding the details of his own life what he narrates is so fantastic that Padma, the person who listens to his life story night after night, often refuses to believe him.
Saleem is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment at which Great Britain granted India, its former colony, its independence. Minutes after his birth to a poor street singer and his unfortunate wife, who dies during childbirth, he is switched with the son of a wealthy merchant family, and they raise him. He is an ugly child with a large, constantly congested nose. When Saleem is young, a blow from his father triggers telepathic ability in him, which eventually lets him bring all of the children born on that night in August into mental contact with each other. He finds out that his rival, Shiva, who was born at approximately the same time, wants to control the Midnight's Children, to use the special powers they all have to rule the country. After an operation to fix his sinuses, Saleem loses his telepathic ability.
When his parents learn after a blood test that Saleem is not their real child, they send him to Pakistan to live with relatives. He is there when India invades Pakistan. Most of his family is destroyed, and Saleem, having lost his memory, travels the countryside as a conscript in the army, going deep into territories that are sparsely inhabited. He regains his memory when Parvati-the-witch, one of the children who was connected to him telepathically, recognizes him. Parvati is part of a traveling magic show, and she helps him sneak back into India. She is killed, and Saleem is left to raise Aadam, the child fathered by his rival Shiva.
In the end, Saleem works at the pickle factory run by his old nurse. It is a job for which he is particularly well suited because he has an extraordinarily keen sense of smell. Padma, an uneducated worker who has listened to his stories throughout the book, tells Saleem that a man his age, 31, should be married, and so he marries her.
Jamila Singer
Saleem's younger sister, Jamila Singer starts life known as Brass Monkey, a plucky, tomboyish girl. After Saleem is found not to be her biological brother, she deals with his exile out of the country by turning to the Catholic religion.
In her teens, living in Pakistan, Jamila is found to have a beautiful singing voice; a friend of the family puts her on the radio, and she becomes a national sensation and a symbol of Pakistani pride. She is never seen in public, and nobody knows that she is actually Indian. Saleem falls in love with her, but she refuses to see him and sends him away.
After the India-Pakistan war, she is thought to be dead, but Saleem is certain that she has gone to live in a convent.
Tai
Tai, the boatman on Lake Dal, becomes a foil for Aadam Aziz when he moves to the Kashmiri region. He mocks the doctor for being too self-important. Tai becomes increasingly eccentric and stops bathing. When the doctor's college friend Ilse visits, she is last seen in Tai's boat before she drowns. Tai is rumored to have died in 1947 while protesting the struggle for Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
Vanita
Wife of Wee Willie Winkie and the real mother of Saleem Sinai, Vanita has a baby just as India is granted independence, but her baby is exchanged with the Sinai baby in the crib. Vanita dies soon after the baby is born.
Wee Willie Winkie
The actual father of Saleem Sinai, Wee Willie Winkie loses his own child when it is switched with the Sinai child soon after the babies are born. Wee Willie Winkie is a traveling singer who happens to be around the Methwold estate in August 1947. After he loses the child's mother in childbirth, he stays around Bombay for a while, a ruined alcoholic, singing on the streets with his ruined voice.
Major Zulfikar
Investigating the assassination of Mian Abdullah in Agra in 1942, Major Zulfikar falls in love with Saleem's aunt Emerald and marries her.
