Skip to content
Read the Places
BooksBrowseAdd a book
← Back to the book

Midnight's Children

Saleem Sinai's Bombay, from Independence in 1947 to the Emergency of the mid-1970s, seen mostly from the hillside villas of Methwold's Estate on the Warden Road rise. The map holds to the elite crescent of Malabar Hill, Breach Candy and Cumballa Hill, with the school in the Fort and the sea at Chowpatty; the family saga's far excursions to Kashmir, Delhi, Karachi and the Sundarbans sit outside this frame.

Saleem Sinai

Methwold's Estate, Warden Road

Book One

The hilltop cluster of villas where the narrator's family buys a home just as the British leave, and where he is raised among the departing empire's leftover cocktail hours and pianolas. It stands in for the Warden Road enclave of Rushdie's own childhood, high above the city on the Malabar Hill slope.

Book One, Methwold

inspired by Methwold's Estate is invented, four villas named for European palaces that a departing Englishman sells off at the stroke of Independence. Rushdie grew up at Windsor Villa on Warden Road, now Bhulabhai Desai Road, and that gated enclave on the Malabar Hill rise is the estate's model. Sited on Warden Road near Kemps Corner as a representative point.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Saleem Sinai

Dal Lake, Srinagar

Book One

The saga opens a generation before the narrator, in the Kashmir valley, where his grandfather the doctor first examines his future wife through a hole in a sheet. It is the family's point of origin, deliberately far from the Bombay where the rest of the story unfolds, which is why it sits outside this map's frame.

Book One, The Perforated Sheet

explicit Kashmir and Srinagar are named as the setting of the family's opening chapter; sited at Dal Lake. This lies far north of the Bombay frame, so it is flagged as outside the setting.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Stop 1 of 2

Read the Places

An open atlas of the real places in novels, in the order the story happens.

Explore

  • All books
  • Browse by country, author, era
  • By city
  • Open for adoption

Contribute

  • Add a book
  • Source on GitHub
  • Open issues

Credits

Book data CC BY-SA 4.0. Code MIT.

Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors. Historical maps © National Library of Scotland.