Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (post #2): The narrator says he hears voices and reads minds, which his family and girlfriend think is crazy

His Family

“I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio…at nearlynine [years old]…inside me, the voices rebounded against the walls of my skull…I had discovered that the voices could be controlled—I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly-discovered inner ear…

[With his family assembled] “I told them. ‘I heard voices yesterday. Voices are speaking to me inside my head. I think…that Archangels have started to talk to me’…”

But his mother called him crazy, his father hit him “a mighty blow on the side of my head,” and his father declared, “Wife, let nobody give him food today. You hear me? Let him enjoy his joke on an empty stomach!”

So Saleem decided to keep his voices to himself and pretend it had been “a stupid joke, like you said” (1, pp. 185-188).

“I was wrong about the Archangels, of course…the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels…Telepathy, then…In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening…All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father’s wrath…I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable…I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing…” (1, pp. 191-194).

His Girlfriend

“I am coming to the fantastic heart of my own story…during the first hour of August 15th, 1947—between midnight and one a.m.—no less than one thousand and one children were born within the [newly] sovereign state of India…endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous…By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all nearing their tenth birthdays, wholly ignorant…of one another’s existence…And then, as a result of a jolt received in a bicycle-accident, I, Saleem Sinai, became aware of them all…

“…So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry…but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem…to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war…and to me, the greatest gift of all—the ability to look into the hears and minds of men…

“Padma [his girlfriend, and the audience for most of his narration] is looking as if her mother had died… ‘O baba!’ she says at last. ‘O baba! You are sick…’

“No, that would be too easy. I refuse to take refuge in illness. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing what I’ve unveiled as mere delirium; or even as the insanely exaggerated fantasies of a lonely, ugly child. I have stated before that I am not speaking metaphorically; what I have just written (and read aloud to stunned Padma) is nothing less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother’s-head truth…”

“…On my tenth birthday, abandoned by one set of children, I learned that five hundred and eighty-one others were celebrating their birthdays, too…a gang which was spread over the length and breadth of the country, and whose headquarters were behind my eyebrows…That is how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it” (1, pp. 224-237).

Blog Comment

I am still reading the novel. So, at this point, I can only say two things: First, I am surprised to find that the narrator’s sanity is the novel’s central question. And that it is a seriously posed question, since the text says that the people who know him best—from his own family and culture, his parents and girlfriend—think his claim of hearing voices and reading minds is crazy. Second, if Saleem does not have a psychosis like schizophrenia, but, rather, has the nonpsychotic condition, multiple personality, then the above scenario is a very good illustration of why multiple personality is so hard to diagnose: When the symptoms first arise in childhood, the child soon finds that disclosing the symptoms causes problems, so the child becomes good at keeping the symptoms secret.

1. Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children. New York, Random House, 1981/2006.