Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children

by

Salman Rushdie

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Midnight’s Children makes teaching easy.

Midnight’s Children Quotes

Need another quote?
Need analysis on another quote?
Need analysis for a quote we don't cover?
Need analysis for a quote we don't cover?
Need analysis for a quote we don't cover?
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
Request it
Request it
Request analysis
Request analysis
Request analysis
Book 1: The Perforated Sheet Quotes

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes has solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Aadam Aziz
Related Symbols: Noses
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1: Hit-the-Spittoon Quotes

“I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I’m still not much of a Muslim, but I’m all for Abdullah. He’s fighting my fight.”

Related Characters: Aadam Aziz (speaker), Rani of Cooch Naheen, Mian Abdullah / The Hummingbird
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1: Under the Carpet Quotes

“Change your name,” Ahmed Sinai said. “Time for a fresh start. Throw Mumtaz and her Nadir Khan out of the window, I’ll choose you a new name. Amina. Amina Sinai: you’d like that?”

Related Characters: Ahmed Sinai (speaker), Mumtaz Aziz / Amina Sinai, Nadir Khan / Qasim Khan
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1: A Public Announcement Quotes

“See the whole world, come see everything!” The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box. (I am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan’s friend the painter: is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Nadir Khan / Qasim Khan, Lafifa Das
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1: Many-headed Monsters Quotes

“It was only a matter of time,” my father said, with every appearance of pleasure; but time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan would run a half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts…Mr. Kemal, who wanted nothing to do with Partition, was fond of saying, “Here’s proof of the folly of the scheme! Those Leaguers plan to abscond with a whole thirty minutes! Time without Partitions,” Mr. Kemal cried, “That’s the ticket!” And S. P. Butt said, “If they can change the time just like that, what’s real any more?” I ask you? What’s true?”

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Ahmed Sinai, Mustapha Kemal, Mr. S. P. Butt
Page Number: 86-7
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1: Methwold Quotes

The Estate, Methwold’s Estate, is changing them. Every evening at six they are out in their gardens, celebrating the cocktail hour, and when William Methwold comes to call they slip effortlessly in their imitation Oxford drawls; and they are learning, about ceiling fans and gas cookers and the correct diet for budgerigars, and Methwold, supervising their transformation, is mumbling under his breath. Listen carefully: what’s he saying? Yes, that’s it. “Sabkuch ticktock hai,” mumbles Methwold. All is well.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), William Methwold
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1: Tick, Tock Quotes

And when she was alone—two babies in her hands—two lives in her power—she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name-tags on the two huge infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty…“Love me, Joseph!” was in Mary Pereira’s mind, and then it was done. On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky—which were also as blue as Methwold’s—and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather’s—which was also the nose of grandmother from France—she placed this name: Sinai.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Shiva, Mary Pereira, Alice Pereira, Joseph D’Costa
Related Symbols: Noses
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger Quotes

“Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India, which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closet attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.”

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker)
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Snakes and Ladders Quotes

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures […] the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, […] but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity—because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker)
Page Number: 160-1
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: All-India Radio Quotes

Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience—before I began to act—there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the wall of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmission—the front-of-mind stuff which is what I’d originally been picking up—language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker)
Page Number: 192
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Love in Bombay Quotes

Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I’m keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central—perhaps the place which they should have filled, the hole in the center of me which was my inheritance from grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps—one must consider all possibilities—they always made me a little afraid.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Aadam Aziz, The Brass Monkey / Jamila Singer, Mary Pereira, Parvati-the-witch / Laylah, Evie Burns, The Widow / Indira Gandhi
Page Number: 119-20
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: At the Pioneer Café Quotes

And while chutney—the same chutney which, back in 1957, my ayah Mary Pereira has made so perfectly; the grasshopper-green chutney which is forever associated with those days—carried them back into the world of my past, while chutney mellowed them and made them receptive, I spoke to them, gently, persuasively, and by a mixture of condiment and oratory kept myself out of the hands of the pernicious green-medicine men. I said: “My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I’m telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I’ve lost my struggle against the cracks, he will know. Morality, judgement, character…it all starts with memory…and I am keeping carbons.”

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Mary Pereira, Padma, Aadam Sinai
Related Symbols: Pickles
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: The Kolynos Kid Quotes

“…Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,” the Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term “modes of connection” composed of “dualistically-combined configurations” of the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. This is why hyphens are necessary: actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker)
Page Number: 272-3
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Commander Sabarmati’s Baton Quotes

“Loose woman,” the demon within me whispered silently, “Perpetrator of the worst of maternal perfidies! We shall turn you into an awful example; through you we shall demonstrate the fate which awaits the lascivious. O unobservant adulteress! Did you see what sleeping around did to the illustrious Baroness Simki von der Heiden?—who was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bitch, just like yourself.”

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Homi Catrack, Lila Sabarmati
Page Number: 296
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Revelations Quotes

What leaked into me from Aadam Aziz: a certain vulnerability to women, but also its cause, the hole at the center of himself caused by his (which is also my) failure to believe or disbelieve in God. And something else as well—something which, at the age of eleven, I saw before anyone else noticed. My grandfather has begun to crack.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Aadam Aziz
Page Number: 315
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Movements Performed by Pepperpots Quotes

Midnight has many children: the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots…I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker)
Page Number: 333
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: Jamila Singer Quotes

Saleem’s parents said, “We must all become new people”; in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s (like India’s first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivalled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith) […].

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker)
Page Number: 355
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2: How Saleem Achieved Purity Quotes

What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza pickle works…nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by little, even the harmonies of my parents’ autumnal love went out of tune.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Mumtaz Aziz / Amina Sinai, Mary Pereira, Alia Aziz
Related Symbols: Pickles
Page Number: 378
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: The Buddha Quotes

So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must doggedly insist that I, he, had begun again; that after years of yearning for importance, he (or I) had been cleansed of the whole business; that after my vengeful abandonment by Jamila Singer, who wormed me into the Army to get me out of her sight, I (or he) accepted the fate which was my repayment for love, and sat uncomplaining under a chinar tree; that, emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I became a citizen of Pakistan.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), The Brass Monkey / Jamila Singer
Page Number: 403
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: In the Sundarbans Quotes

In the aftermath of the Sundarbans, my old life was waiting to reclaim me. I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is forever who you are.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker)
Page Number: 423
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Sam and the Tiger Quotes

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Padma
Page Number: 440-1
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: A Wedding Quotes

“Women have made me; and also unmade. Form Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there’s no escape from her.”

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Naseem Ghani / Reverend Mother, Padma, The Widow / Indira Gandhi
Page Number: 465
Explanation and Analysis:

Parvati’s formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on which I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was performed by a red-bearded Haji who looked ill-at-ease in the presence of so many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting gaze of this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her belief there was no God but God and that Muhammed was his prophet; she took a name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, becoming Laylah, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cycles of my history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been obliged to change their names…like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch became a new person to have a child.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Mumtaz Aziz / Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch / Laylah, Picture Singh
Page Number: 477
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Midnight Quotes

[T]he Emergency had a black part as well as a white, and here is the secret which has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight. (Whose Conference had, of course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of our reunification was enough to trigger off the red alert.)

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Aadam Sinai, The Widow / Indira Gandhi
Page Number: 492
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3: Abracadabra Quotes

I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills.

Related Characters: Saleem Sinai (speaker), Aadam Sinai
Page Number: 515
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.