Midnight's Children (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Book One

Midnight's Children is the first-person narrative of Saleem Sinai, an obscure thirty-year-old pickle factory worker who writes the fantastic story of his life each night, reading it aloud each night and having it commented on by a doting woman named Padma. He starts his story by describing how his grandfather came to the Kashmir region of India in 1915 after receiving his medical degree from Oxford and how he was approached by a wealthy landowner to examine his daughter. He was not allowed to look at her, though, and during each examination for months could only view her through a hole in a sheet that was held up by attendants. Aadam Aziz, Saleem's grandfather, fell in love with his grandmother, Naseem Ghani, by viewing her in parts.

After their marriage, the couple is in Amritsar on April 13, 1919, when British troops massacre hundreds of Indian nationalists. Doctor Aziz avoids being killed in a confrontation when, sneezing, he bends over as the troops fire.

The narrative jumps to 1942, when Aadam and Naseem have grown children, three girls and two boys, and live in Agra. Aadam becomes optimistic about India's coming freedom in advance of the arrival of Mian Abdullah, a social activist known as the Hummingbird. The poet Nadir Khan, dating Aziz's daughter Emerald, is one of the Humming-bird's confidantes: when Abdullah is assassinated, Khan comes to the Aziz house and is hidden in the basement for three years. During his confinement, he and Mumtaz Aziz fall in love and are married. Emerald, feeling jilted, tells the army officer, Major Zulfikar, that Khan is hidden in the house. Zulfikar falls in love with Emerald and marries her; Khan runs away; Mumtaz becomes attracted to a leather merchant, Ahmed Sinai, and marries him, changing her first name to Amina.

Ahmed and Amina move to Delhi: though she does not love him, she does want to have children. Ahmed's business is threatened when he finds out that local criminals demand protection money from businessmen, including him. As tensions between Muslims and Hindus intensify, an angry mob chases a street vendor, Lifafa Das, and, standing between him and the mob, Amina makes a very public announcement that she is pregnant. Ahmed and some other businessmen arrange to make payments to the gangsters, but when they leave a suitcase containing the payment money at a deserted fort, a monkey steals it: that night, Ahmed's warehouse burns down. After Ahmed collects the insurance money, the family moves to Bombay.

In June 1947 they move into the Methwold estate, an historic site being sold by its owner, a descendent of one of the first British in India, who is leaving as independence approaches. When the baby is born, at the stroke of midnight on August 15, the midwife, Mary Pereira, exchanges the Sinai child with the child of Vanita. Vanita is married to the street musician Wee Willie Winkie and dies soon after childbirth. The child whom the Sinais take home is celebrated as a symbol of Indian independence: his picture is on the front page of the paper, and prime minister sends a letter addressed to him. The other baby falls into obscurity.

Book Two

Saleem's father, Ahmed Sinai, invests his money in a factory designed to create the parts needed for sea walls, but the government freezes all his assets, leaving him weak, an invalid. His wife Amina proves lucky at betting on horses and secretly amasses a fortune, which she uses to hire lawyers to have the accounts unfrozen. When the accounts are freed, the father loses his money by investing with a man who dies, leaving no record of the investments. Saleem's childhood is tough, given the financial strife and the fact that other children pick on him because of his odd looks.

When Saleem is nine, his father hits him on the ear, and he develops the ability to communicate telepathically, to put himself in the minds of other people. When he enters the head of a neighbor child, Evie Burns, she becomes upset, and he learns that other people know when he is reading their thoughts. This discovery leads him to create a network connecting all of the Children of Midnight, the ones who, like him, were born on August 15, 1947 (1001 were born then; only 581 have survived to the age of nine). They all have special powers, ranging from a boy who can walk through mirrors to a girl whose dazzling beauty blinds anyone who looks at her. Saleem uses his ability to find out that his mother is meeting privately with her first husband, Nadir Khan. Through the group he calls the Midnight's Children's Conference, he telepathically contacts Shiva, the child with whom he was switched at birth, who believes that he, not Saleem, should be the conference leader, advocating violence and control.

Saleem is injured at school; a blood type test reveals that neither of the people he thinks are his parents actually are. He is sent to live with his uncle Hanif and aunt Pia, who are in the film business. Saleem finds out that the financier of their films, Homi Catrack, is having an affair with the wife of a navy officer, and he sends an anonymous letter to the officer, who then shoots Catrack and his wife; Uncle Hanif, without financing, kills himself. Saleem's whole family gathers for forty days of mourning. Saleem is then taken to Pakistan, where his telekinetic powers are too weak to contact the Children. Living with his uncle General Zulfikar, he is involved in the military plans for a coup.

When he returns to Bombay, Saleem's father arranges an operation to fix the boy's draining sinuses, and as a result Saleem develops an extraordinarily keen sense of smell but loses his telekinetic power. His 15-year-old sister becomes a popular singer in Pakistani radio. Saleem confesses love for her, and she is repulsed, refusing to ever see him again. War breaks out between India and Pakistan: Indian bombs kill Saleem's grandmother, his aunts Pia and Emerald, and his parents.

Book Three

Saleem wanders around Pakistan with amnesia. He joins the army and leads his patrol up the Padma river, away from the war, and the other men are slaughtered deep in the jungle. He comes across Parvati-the-witch, one of the Midnight's Children, who recognizes him from the image that he projected, and he is taken under the care of her and Picture Singh, a snake charmer. They hide him from the Indian army then help sneak him back into India to the family of his uncle Mustapha, where he stays for 420 days, mourning the dead. He then returns to the Magician's Slums, to Picture Singh and Parvati, and becomes a Communist. He marries Parvati and finds out that Shiva, the child with whom he was switched at birth, is a war hero who has fathered hundreds of children. Saleem cannot have children with Parvati because he keeps thinking of his sister, but she gives birth to Shiva's son. Government forces, led by Shiva, attack the ghetto, and Parvati is killed. The remaining children of midnight are sterilized by the government.

Saleem accompanies Picture Singh to Bombay. There, Picture challenges another man at a nightclub for the title of greatest snake charmer in the world, and he wins in a long competition. Saleem smells chutney, which reminds him of his childhood: he goes to the factory where it is made and finds the factory is run by Mary Pereira, his old nanny. She hires him, and he works in the factory by days and tells his story to Padma by nights.

Media Adaptations

• Midnight's Children was adapted for the London stage in 2003. Based on a five-hour script that Rushdie wrote for the BBC which was never filmed, the West End production was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with financial assistance from the University of Michigan and Columbia University. After its London run, it played in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then at Harlem's Apollo Theater in New York for twelve performances in 2003.