Midnight's Children; Bombay Rains

After nearly three months of tattered reading, a foreign trip and disinterestedness I finally managed to finish reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I thought it a 531-page tome of rambling prose, late charges of political leitmotif and a messy flotsam of just too many characters but nonetheless made singularly enchanting and delicious by Mr Rushdie's tropical flair to animate his fiction vividly with intoxicating and delirious montages of India in the seventies -- a young nation trying to find her ideological footing. He imbues each of his anecdotes with the smells, colours and sense of place that is rightfully their due. What turned me off however is the almost puerile and vacuous content -- some of his concoctions were even more insipid than the pointless and utterly stultifying fiction of a nine-year old whose mind is rife with wild creativity but severely lacks either the maturity or the savoir faire to direct it. Still, one comes away with a lasting sensation of nostalgia and pining to have been born in more interesting times and not exactly after the storm had passed. And I am sure that those who have been living in Bombay all their lives will find Mr Rushdie's devout depiction of the city extremely gratifying and also somewhat dispiriting as perhaps was intended by him.

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Bombay Rains

But the Bombay of this past week was an entirely different city than how it is found in Midnight's Children. In one single day of unfettered, relentless and shattering cloudbursts the city turned from a cocky, self-absorbed and cynical glut of the masses into a debilitated, tottering and self-emancipating community that found conviction and a well-ingrained survival instinct within themselves. In the days to come, we shall be inundated ourselves with trickles of small acts of courage and gallantry and we will be expected to doff our hats to these doughty souls and we should, but I wonder that even though a city as big and heartless as Bombay may lose its heart can it ever forsake a prickly and tormenting conscience? And what better leveller than a calamity to erase if temporarily barriers of class and social breeding?

Midnight's Children

Rushdie biography

When the water came: Photo retrospective

Risked lives to reach out

Bombay Monsoon 2005 links

December 2004 - March 2005

October 2004 - November 2004

July 2004 - September 2004

May 2004 - June 2004

April 2004

January 2004 - March 2004

October 2003 - January 2004