The Diary of Midnight's Children : in Fragments

(No date can be given because this draft was written in Fragments)



So our protagonist Saleem Sinai is not yet born. And we are around January 1947 , the most terrific year in the history of India. What a perfect time to be born.

"It seems like a day for big questions." ... Of course or why would I meet with a midnight tragedy , pause my writing work, resume again , fail again and now when I wake up I confront a big question. But leave that, here I must be in the circumference of the text. So the big the questions are -

Where the optimism is? If even time can be changed like this ("...clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts...") what's real anymore? And "what's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same."  Now no more about these questions.

The announcement of Saleem's birth saves one life. And then destiny takes Saleem's mother to a prophesy - a prophesy about Saleem's birth. Quite crudely , we come to know about Saleem Sinai. Something as the apparitions in Macbeth  had prophesied...

"He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die... before he is dead."

Well lets move on. There is this quote I had underlined : "My God... it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man." When Amina says this , I know what does she really mean. As her father , Ahmed Aziz , had once attempted to pray , she is attempting to love her husband. Its a nice way to love someone - love in bits. This way you would never fed up with the person and find  him anew every day. Only a woman can choose this way because a man always has more easy ways. But even when she tries to love his every part and action, what is surety that she would be able to love him in integrity? After all, "who... ever truly knows another human being completely?" In Adam Aziz's relationship with Naseem he had loved her (literally) in fragments and so could never be at peace with her when she came in his life in integrity. We think of fragments and are overjoyed that we are in love and yet we don't know who the person really is.

Anyway , one more typically Indian reference can be traced in the motif of 'nose'. These olfactory references are so powerful and obvious in the text that one can not ignore them. I guess would discuss them later.  

(to be continued...)