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 had 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. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history.
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
—Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Rushdie has been a unique figure in my relationship to literature. I came to him late and at a time when I didn’t have much truck with fiction. I never developed an unhealthy parasocial relationship with him like I have with, say, certain Polish or Chilean poets. I haven’t obsessed about his childhood or his writing habits. Nor indeed have I read any of his work from the past three decades. And yet he played a pivotal walk-on role for me, particularly his blockbuster second novel, the 1981 Midnight’s Children. (The Satanic Verses, also excellent, is the one for which his life has been considered forfeit among many non-literary types and which presumably spurred the attack that nearly just killed him.)
I probably wouldn’t say that Midnight’s Children is the greatest novel I have ever read. There is always The Brothers Karamazov lurking out there. But it is great, in both the modern and antiquated senses.
Every once in a while I think about why this one hit me so hard and I never quite resolve it. I first read it when I was twenty years old and, among other things, it certainly put any hopes I had of being a real writer in grim perspective. So this was writing, this was what grappling with the modern world, entangled as it is in ghosts and history and slaughter and God, really meant. I wasn’t even in the same solar system. The story of India’s independence told through the eyes of a child named Saleem born at midnight on August 15, 1947 and imbued with various magical powers, the book is voluminous, hilarious, insanely complex, almost unbelievably rich with cultural and historical parallels, from the Arabian Nights to the crumbling of the British Raj to the odiferous vagaries of chutney-making. Even if one day I would learn to love also coolness and concision, in their proper place, the sheer ecstatic freewheeling energy density of this prose embodied for me the highest ideal of fiction: to contain all the world. Stories within stories within stories.
Another part of it, undeniably, were the circumstances of my reading: I came across a worn copy while on study abroad at a small ecumenical religious retreat on the outskirts of Bangalore. (Now Bengaluru—one more layer on the palimpsest of history.) Before this I had no particular interest in Rushdie, but it seemed appropriate, and we faced many long days of bus rides ahead. Criss-crossing between Bangalore and Mysore (now Mysuru), Bombay (now Mumbai), and New Delhi, it felt like a strangely embodied participation in the book’s own geographical schizophrenia, as its characters were thrown back and forth not just across space but through time and its constantly shifting political, emotional, and linguistic borders.
A third factor might be that I was in many ways a fiction neophyte. (“I used to be…I still am, but I used to be too.”) This conclusion sort of surprises me since I was always the stereotypical book nerd. Yet as a kid, armed only with solitude and a library card, it was mostly what would be considered genre-lit, tending to thrillers and sci-fi. Crichton, Benchley, King, Asimov, Card. Of course like any respectable middle-class Christian boy, I read Tolkein, Lewis, and L’Engle. Some YA—I remember loving and often rereading an Afrofuturism sci-fi called The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm, and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. But it wasn’t, like, Dickens, or anything of the English canon. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
In high school, despite some vaguely-recalled Chekhov, the arrival of Rilke, and a fair bit of Shakespeare, the myriad distractions of adolescence overtook the endless empty book-filled hours of childhood. College coursework in philosophy and theology plunged me into more serious reading, but when it came to literature I always felt out of place. Too far behind to ever catch up. I gather this is a sensation shared among autodidacts, who both objectively do often miss big things in their dilettantism but who also, no matter how completist they get, maintain a nagging sense of inferiority deriving from a lack of institutional approval. And I did: despite writerly pretensions I took zero classes in the English department. Most of my literary exposure came from the Spanish language, which inadvertently became my major.
My obsessions were with the Latin Americans—Borges, Neruda, Mistral, Bolaño, Allende, Paz—who were an inexhaustible resource but also a river that carried me yet further from the English language mainstream. (Replete, bloated, stuffed-to-suffocating with the irony that Neruda worshipped Whitman and Borges was a devotee of Anglo letters from Beowulf to Boswell to Blake.) It would be years before I would read the likes of Faulkner or Baldwin or Melville or Fitzgerald or Woolfe. Much less contemporary writers like Saunders or Morrison. (Still haven’t read Dickens...forgive me, Jorge.)
All that to say that Rushdie’s novel arrived to me at a time when I was not well-versed in modern “literary fiction.” I’m not sure that category existed to me as a living thing. If I had been capable of articulating this then, I might have thought that the ghettoization of “serious” fiction into the self-conscious “literary” designation, as opposed to lowbrow genre trash, represented a disturbing sign of the fossilization of the form itself.
I certainly recognized, say, the Dostoyevsky I read in philosophy courses as “literary” in some sense, a sense like the Bible is literary. That is, in an anachronistic and only partial sense. Such works persist because they are simply—life itself, and our multitudinous experience of life as partially mediated through language. I think this must have been another attitude influenced by the Latin Americans, or at least my uninformed but eager interpretation of them. They seemed to do less gatekeeping between texts and authors of texts and instead seek to integrate the many aspects of linguistic expression with each other and with the “rest of life.” Not to dissolve their differences, but to connect them in a livable and communicative whole, like the many alluring rooms of a very large and very old and still expanding house.
A shorter version of the problem might be: I was reading too much politics and non-fiction and felt, if subconsciously, that only such “hard-headed” things mattered, could justify the effort. Many such cases.
But whatever I thought the modern novel was, and I admit my thoughts were (and are) tentative and naive, I did not think it was like Midnight’s Children. This was, indeed, a book of life. Not a life, in its particulars of Bombay street urchins and mystical Kashmiri lakes, with which I was familiar. But nonetheless life that, even for a Midwestern boy, could be entered, experienced, awed by, confused by, wounded by. Here I first fully understood that the magic of the magical realist style could serve not as fantasy or escapism but as a faithful doorway into human experience. Into the simultaneous slipperiness and inexplicable coherence of the world as we find it. It could deepen the verisimilitude of the relationships between people, between nations, between past and future, between our conflicting internal selves.
The world as discovered from a broken-down clocktower: at first, I was no more than a tourist, a child peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private ‘Dilli-dekho’ machine. Dugdugee-drums rattled in my left (damaged) ear as I gained my first glimpse of the Taj Mahal through the eyes of a fat Englishwoman suffering from the tummy-runs; after which, to balance south against north, I hopped down to Madurai’s Meenakshi temple and nestled amongst the woolly, mystical perceptions of a chanting priest. I toured Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guise of an auto-rickshaw driver, complaining bitterly to my fares about the rising price of gasoline; in Calcutta I slept rough in a section of drainpipe. By now thoroughly bitten by the travel bug, I zipped down to Cape Comorin and became a fisher-woman whose sari was as tight as her morals were loose… standing on red sands washed by three seas, I flirted with Dravidian beachcombers in a language I couldn’t understand; then up into the Himalayas, into the neanderthal moss-covered hut of a Goojar tribal, beneath the glory of a completely circular rainbow and the tumbling moraine of the Kolahoi glacier. At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirrorwork dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Tantric carvings on the Chandela temples standing in the fields, but unable to tear away my eyes… in the exotic simplicities of travel I was able to find a modicum of peace. But, in the end, tourism ceased to satisfy; curiosity began to niggle; ‘Let’s find out,’ I told myself, ‘what really goes on around here.’
The fact that I read this on the jolting back seats of buses and under the hot dim lights of cheap hotels and in the shaded porticoes of ancient temples on a trip across India was an accident of my personal history that, depending on your perspective, might have either providentially amplified the virtues of the book or artificially stoked my enthusiasm beyond what the text itself delivered. Maybe that autobiographical fact distorted my first reading and imbued it with a glow that has more to do with my own innate romanticism than with Rushdie’s kaleidoscopic portrait of India through the eyes of Saleem Sinai. Maybe.
Our names contain our fates; living as we do in a place where names have not acquired the meaninglessness of the West, and are still more than mere sounds, we are also the victims of our titles. Sinai contains Ibn Sina, master magician, Sufi adept; and also Sin the moon, the ancient god of Hadhramaut, with his own mode of connection, his powers of action-at-a-distance upon the tides of the world. But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration—Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert—of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end.
What I do think with some confidence is that all true encounters with works of art are the product of various infinitesimally unlikely accidents of personal history, beginning with the initial conditions of our conception and extending to the circumstances of our receptiveness in particular seasons of life. That I would have originated as a tadpole on the muddy banks of the Mississippi and through a circuitous and unrepeatable sequence of events arrived at a neglected bookshelf in an unassuming back parlor in a suburb of Bangalore the year, the month, the day that this particular well-loved paperback was left by its previous owner to catch my particular eye in the particular window of spiritual time when that eye was uniquely open to and yearning for answers to unarticulated questions about the meaning and worth of language—well, it could be a coincidence almost worthy of Saleem’s birth right on the stroke of midnight.
But then, fiction always was truer than life.
Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, ‘A cook?’ you gasp in horror, ‘A khansama merely? How is it possible?’ And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings—by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.