50 Fun Facts About Midnight's Children

Which later novel by the author of Midnight's Children brought a fatwa calling for his death?

The Satanic Verses appeared in 1988, and its fallout reached this book too: a BBC series of Midnight's Children collapsed in 1997 when the country chosen for the shoot withdrew permission after protests.

Which leader writes to the newborn Saleem that his life will be 'the mirror of our own'?

Jawaharlal Nehru's letter, addressed 'Dear Baby Saleem', promises that the nation will watch over his life 'with the closest attention', a promise the boy grows up taking all too literally.

At what exact moment is Saleem Sinai born?

Midnight, 15 August 1947 is the instant of India's independence, so his photograph makes the front page of the Times of India and he grows up, in his own phrase, handcuffed to history.

What part-time job paid Rushdie's bills while he wrote Midnight's Children?

Advertising copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather, where his slogans included 'Naughty but nice' for cream cakes; he was broke, and the long, strange novel in his head was going to take years.

Saleem's race to finish his tale before his body fails echoes which story collection?

The Arabian Nights gives the novel more than its frame: Saleem says he must work 'faster than Scheherazade', and its 1,001 gifted children take their number from her thousand and one nights.

What special prize did Midnight's Children win in 1993, for the Booker Prize's 25th anniversary?

Booker of Bookers was a judges' choice; when the prize turned 40 in 2008 the public was asked to vote for the Best of the Booker, and picked the same novel again.

During which hour are all the gifted children of Midnight's Children born?

Midnight to 1 a.m. on the first day of independence is the window, and timing decides everything: the nearer to the stroke of twelve a child arrived, the stronger the gift.

What special power does Saleem use to gather the other children?

Telepathy turns his head into the meeting hall of a Midnight Children's Conference, which soon splits along the same lines of language, religion and class as the country outside.

Which body-part nickname does Saleem's great rival Shiva carry?

Of the Knees, because his are abnormally large and he fights with them; before the boys were born a seer had foretold them both in a chant of 'knees and a nose, a nose and knees'.

What is the nickname of the girl from the conjurers' ghetto who befriends Saleem?

The witch is no stage name: among the ghetto's illusionists Parvati alone can work real magic, and she uses it to smuggle Saleem home from Bangladesh in a basket of invisibility.

In which city, Rushdie's own birthplace, is Saleem Sinai born and raised?

Bombay was the city Rushdie was trying to get back: he called the novel an attempt to reclaim his Indian origins from a flat in north London, and it is full of images of land reclaimed from the sea.

During the 1971 Bangladesh war, in which jungle does the amnesiac Saleem recover his memory?

The Sundarbans swallow him and three boy soldiers for months, until a blind, translucent snake bites his heel and its venom jolts him back into his past, which pours out of him in stories.

Which real crisis in India's history ends the powers of the midnight's children?

The Emergency of 1975 to 1977 is when the novel has the children rounded up and sterilised, a grim echo of the mass vasectomy campaign of those years.

Which German novel is Midnight's Children often compared to for fusing a personal with a national story?

The Tin Drum has a narrator, Oskar Matzerath, whose stunted body carries Germany's history much as Saleem's carries India's; Rushdie names its author, Günter Grass, among his early influences.

Which word does Saleem coin in Midnight's Children for what his chapters do to history?

Chutnification is his name for what the novel itself does, preserving the past in thirty chapters, a jar apiece; critics have since borrowed the word for English spiced with Indian languages.

To whom does Saleem recount his life story aloud?

Padma is no passive audience: she scolds, sulks and keeps bullying him back to the plot, complaining that at his rate he will be two hundred before he gets to his own birth.

Midnight's Children is a landmark of which literary style?

Magic realism is the usual label for it; in India, Rushdie says, the novel was pirated so widely that the pirates sent him greeting cards, which he called the ultimate compliment.

Where did Midnight's Children finish in the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll of the nation's best-loved novels?

100th, the last place in the published top hundred and one spot behind The Princess Diaries; the public's favourite was The Lord of the Rings.

What does Saleem's rival Shiva, raised in the slums, grow up to become?

A decorated war hero: the boy with a gift for violence rises to major in the Indian army, and it is he, not Saleem, who fathers the child Saleem brings up as his son.

To whom is Midnight's Children dedicated, with the joke that he was 'born in the afternoon'?

Rushdie's son, Zafar, was born while the book about a midnight birth was being written, hence the dedication's joke that he arrived 'contrary to all expectations'; a general's son in the novel shares his name.

Which company staged a theatrical adaptation of Midnight's Children in 2003?

The Royal Shakespeare Company succeeded where television had failed: a BBC series had collapsed a few years earlier, and Rushdie co-wrote the stage script, which went on from London to New York.

Who directed the 2012 film of Midnight's Children?

Deepa Mehta had been daydreaming of filming a different Rushdie novel when the two friends agreed to work together, then heard herself say the only book she wanted was Midnight's Children.

Which actor played the adult Saleem in the 2012 film of Midnight's Children?

Satya Bhabha, until then seen in a small part in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, won the role after a worldwide search; Bollywood star Imran Khan had been the first name considered.

Which part did Rushdie himself perform in the 2012 film of Midnight's Children?

The narrator: Rushdie voices the grown Saleem looking back on his life, in a film he also wrote, cutting his own 600-page novel down to a feature script.

In which city was the 2012 film of Midnight's Children secretly shot?

Colombo kept the shoot away from protesters in both countries where the story is set, and its century-old streets had survived better than those of the Indian city they stood in for.

Which country's complaint briefly halted the secret shoot of the Midnight's Children film?

Iran, whose leader had issued the fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, made its displeasure known and the crew was told to stop; the film-makers appealed to the host country's president, who let them carry on.

Which deliberately bland working title kept the shoot of the Midnight's Children film quiet?

Winds of Change worked as cover: an Indian newspaper reported one of the cast signing for a film of that name, with no word of Rushdie's novel; the director's own verdict on the title was 'very Hallmark'.

At which festival did the film of Midnight's Children have its gala premiere on 9 September 2012?

Toronto was a home crowd, since the film is a Canadian production; it went on to eight nominations, Best Picture among them, at the first Canadian Screen Awards and won two.

Which streaming service announced a series of Midnight's Children in 2018, then abandoned it?

Netflix announced the series in June 2018, but by the end of 2019 it was dead: showrunner Vishal Bhardwaj wanted a bigger special-effects budget than the company would agree to.

Who was to star in the BBC's aborted 1990s mini-series of Midnight's Children?

Rahul Bose did reach the screen in the story some fifteen years later, though not in the lead: in the 2012 film he plays General Zulfikar, Saleem's uncle by marriage.

Who is Saleem's grandfather, a Kashmiri doctor who survives the Amritsar Massacre?

Aadam Aziz owes his life to his nose: as the troops in Amritsar are ordered to fire, a violent sneeze throws him to the ground, and the bullets pass over him.

Which boatman on Dal Lake advises Saleem's grandfather to 'follow his nose'?

Tai, the ancient ferryman who claims to have watched the mountains being born, calls the nose the place where the outside world meets the world inside you, and tells the boy to trust its warnings.

What does Saleem call his grandmother Naseem Ghani?

Reverend Mother earns the grand title by sheer force of will: furious at a house guest her husband had taken in, she once refused to speak a single word for three years.

What was Saleem's mother Amina Sinai called before her marriage?

Mumtaz became Amina at her new husband's request: Ahmed Sinai wanted a fresh start and chose the name for her, and she set about making herself love him by sheer willpower.

Where is the poet Nadir Khan hidden after the Hummingbird's assassination?

The basement of the doctor's house shelters him for three years; one of the daughters marries him there in secret, and when the secret comes out he flees, leaving her a three-word note of divorce.

What kind of verse is Nadir Khan known for?

Rhymeless poetry gets him teased by his own employer, who booms 'not one rhyme in page after page!', and politely labelled a modernist by the cause's wealthy patron.

What does the Rani of Cooch Naheen's name mean in English?

The Queen of Nothing is Rushdie's joke at the expense of grand princely titles; she is the doctor's intellectual friend and bankrolls the Hummingbird's political campaign.

From which Englishman do the Sinais buy their house on the eve of independence?

William Methwold sells on two conditions: everything in the houses stays, and no sale takes effect until the moment of independence; the buyers soon fall into his cocktail hour, and he turns out to be Saleem's biological father.

Who switches Saleem and Shiva at birth?

Mary Pereira swaps the name-tags as a private revolutionary act, hoping to impress her radical sweetheart by giving a poor baby a rich life; guilt then keeps her at Saleem's side as his nursemaid for years.

What business does Saleem's old nursemaid later run under the name Mrs Braganza?

A pickle factory, whose produce reunites them: the grown Saleem tastes his childhood in a single mouthful, reads the address on the jar and tracks down its maker.

What nickname does Saleem's sister Jamila earn as a child?

The Brass Monkey gets the name from her thatch of red-gold hair; the girl who set fire to the family's shoes to win attention grows up to be Jamila Singer, the most celebrated voice in Pakistan.

Which schoolteacher is sacked after pulling out a clump of Saleem's hair?

Emil Zagallo, who claims to be Peruvian, is using the boy's face as a map in a lesson on human geography when he loses his temper; the bald patch he leaves earns Saleem the nickname Baldy.

Which freckled tomboy with braces on her teeth is the young Saleem's first love?

Evie Burns, newly arrived from America, rules the neighbourhood children from her bicycle for a few months; two years later, Saleem reports, she is back home knifing an old woman and bound for reform school.

How does nuclear physicist Adi Dubash die?

Choking on an orange pip leaves his widow, a religious fanatic, free to groom their clever son Cyrus, Saleem's playmate, into the child guru Lord Khusro.

Which seven-foot snake charmer befriends Saleem in the magicians' ghetto?

Picture Singh, known as the Most Charming Man in the World, took his name after a Kodak photographer's portrait of him, wreathed in smiles and snakes, turned up on half the company's displays in India.

What part does the amnesiac Saleem play in his Pakistani army unit during the 1971 war?

Its tracker dog, more or less: the Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities teams three boy soldiers with a 'man-dog', and Saleem's uncanny sense of smell makes him the hound.

Which real Indian general is given a voice at the fall of Dhaka in Midnight's Children?

Sam Manekshaw, India's army chief, quizzes his old colleague Tiger Niazi about Saleem's secret unit; in the real ceremony it was Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora who took the surrender.

What is unusual about Saleem's baby son in Midnight's Children?

Enormous ears, so huge that the women at the birth take the emerging head for a tiny elephant's; he is really the child of Shiva and Parvati, whose son in Hindu myth is the elephant-headed Ganesh.

Who is 'the Widow' in Midnight's Children?

Indira Gandhi, a widow since 1960, is unmasked only late in the book; in 1984 she sued over a single sentence about her son Sanjay, and Rushdie agreed to cut it.

How old does the ancient Karachi prostitute visited by Saleem claim to be?

512 is her own figure; what draws Saleem, whose gift by then is his sense of smell, is her power to take on the scent of any person he names.