Kashmir, 19150% in

Saleem Sinai

Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir

Kashmir, 1915

The story begins a generation before Saleem, in the Kashmir valley, where his grandfather Aadam Aziz returns from Europe and courts his future wife through a hole in a sheet. Dal Lake and the mountains around Srinagar set the note of longing and division the whole book carries. It is the far origin of a family that will end up in Bombay.

Book 1, 'The Perforated Sheet'

explicitSrinagar and its lake open the novel and are named directly; the point lies far north of the Bombay anchor and is flagged as an excursion into the family's origins.

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Bombay25% in

Shiva

Methwold's Estate, Warden Road, Bombay

Bombay

Saleem grows up in one of the grand houses on Methwold's Estate, bought cheap from the leaving British on the eve of independence. It is also where the midnight swap happens, so that Saleem and the boy Shiva are exchanged at birth and their fates knotted together. The Warden Road hill is the real Bombay ground under this invented address.

Book 1, 'Methwold'

inferredMethwold's Estate is a fictional name for a real kind of place: the departing-Englishman's villas Rushdie sites on Warden Road, on Cumballa Hill in south Bombay. The point is placed on the Warden Road (now Bhulabhai Desai Road) rise where such houses stood.

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Schooldays50% in

Padma

Cathedral & John Connon School, Bombay

Schooldays

Saleem's Bombay boyhood runs through the classrooms and rivalries of a colonial-era school in the old Fort district. That world of masters, cricket and cruelty carries the middle of the novel, the ordinary city life against which his secret midnight powers grow. The Cathedral and John Connon School is the real institution behind those scenes.

Book 2, 'At the Pioneer Cafe'

inferredThe Bombay schooling of Saleem and his classmates matches the real Cathedral and John Connon School in the Fort district, the elite institution of the city Rushdie himself attended; it is not named outright, so this is marked inferred.

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Old Delhi75% in

Saleem Sinai

The magicians' ghetto, Old Delhi

Old Delhi

After the wars, Saleem ends up in a colony of conjurers and performers huddled in the shadow of Delhi's great mosque, a community swept up in the emergency of the mid-1970s. The ghetto stands for the poor, precarious India the newspapers overlook. Its real anchor is the ground below the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi.

Book 3, 'The Shadow of the Mosque'

inferredThe magicians' slum where Saleem later lives is sited by the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi; the shanty colony is invented but its setting under the great mosque is real, and the point lies far from the Bombay anchor, so it is flagged as an excursion.

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The 1971 war100% in

Saleem Sinai

The Sundarbans, Bay of Bengal

The 1971 war

During the 1971 war that births Bangladesh, Saleem is lost in the vast tidal mangrove forest of the Sundarbans, a hallucinatory stretch where the soldiers unravel and memory dissolves. The jungle is where the novel's history turns most nightmarish. It is a real delta, the largest mangrove forest on earth, straddling the Bengal coast.

Book 3, 'In the Sundarbans'

explicitThe Sundarbans are named in the novel and are a real mangrove delta on the Bay of Bengal, far east of the Bombay anchor; the point is flagged as an excursion into the 1971 war chapters.

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