Midnight's Children

I read Salman Rushdie’s magic realist novel Midnight’s Children when it was first published, before it achieved the fame conferred on it by winning the Booker Prize.  Now I’ve seen the movie, directed by the Indian-Canadian Deepa Mehta, with screen play by Salman Rushdie.  These two Indian expatriates have joined forces to deliver a masterpiece as impressive in its own way as the novel.  The premise of the novel was that children born at midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment when India became independent from Britain and the British Empire, possessed special magical powers, were destined for important roles as India evolved into a great power.  The movie, brilliantly directed, masterfully acted by a cast of Indian actors, is as impressive as the novel. I wanted to reread the novel, which survived the winnowing of books as we moved from one house to another.  I remember which shelf it was on in the apartment where I’ve lived for the past dozen years, remember that it had a blue cover and spine detached from the book. Perhaps I discarded it because it was so battered: I was unable to find it when I went hunting for it after seeing the movie. Frustrated by that fruitless search I bought the 25^th anniversary edition, and dipping into this I’m as impressed as I was on first reading.  It’s a brilliant novel, conveys vividly the turbulent and bloody history of India’s first quarter century of freedom from British rule. The book and the movie end before the rise to economic prominence of India in the last quarter century; and the accompanying expansion of a prosperous well-educated urban middle class. It’s a sad commentary on modern India’s lack of mature political tolerance that the movie had to be made in Sri Lanka.