Condemned By a Perforated Sheet: Midnight's Children

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Recommended: Salman Rushdie's midnight children

In Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” Saleem Sinai clings to his silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli (the spittoon given to his mother, Amina Sinai, by Rani of Cooch Naheen for her dowry) as a sort of personal talisman. The spittoon, responsible for his temporary memory loss (after hitting him in the head during an air raid), remains a symbol of his former life, a symbol he cherishes even when he is incapable of remembering what it means. The spittoon represents the former wholeness of his life, his family, his country. Despite his attachment to the physical and symbolic spittoon, Saleem seems more haunted by the perforated sheet. The symbolic opposite of the silver spittoon, the perforated sheet represents fragmentation—the fragmentation of Saleem (both body and life), of his family, his country, and even his narrative.

“Midnight’s Children” begins with a chapter entitled “The Perforated Sheet.” This chapter lays the groundwork for the perforated sheet metaphor that comes up repeatedly throughout the remainder of the text. The sheet is “a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre” (Rushdie 4). The hole in the sheet is not there by accident. The design is devised by Ghani, a wealthy landowner, and is created to preserve the modesty of his daughter, Naseem, when being seen by a doctor. To be treated, Naseem presents the offending body part to doctor through the hole in the sheet and this is how Aadam Aziz (Naseem’s doctor and Saleem’s grandfather) comes to see Naseem in fragments—her ankle, toe, calf, various other appendages, eventually even one of her breasts and her buttocks, and finally her face. Saleem sums it up, “In short: my grandfather had fallen in lov...

... middle of paper ...

...e like Aziz and love each fragment as he sees it, or he might be more like Amina, who has to force herself to love each piece. But “condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments” (Rushdie 141), Saleem is faced with yet another fragmentation. In writing this paper, I have continued the pattern of perforated sheet in his life by selecting only pieces of “Midnight’s Children” to show others.

Works Cited

Kane, Jean M. “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children.’” Contemporary Literature 37.1 (1996): 94-118. JSTOR. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

Mukherjee, A. “Fissured Skin, Inner-Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.” Paragraph 29.3 (2006): 55-76. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

Rushdie, Salman. “Midnight's Children.” New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin, 1991. Print.

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