Midnight's Children

Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence, tells his life and the nation's together, from a Kashmir lake in 1915 through his Bombay childhood on Warden Road to the ghettos of Old Delhi and the swamps of the 1971 war. The anchor is Bombay; the story reaches the length of the subcontinent.

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'

explicit Srinagar 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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