Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children, The Film, And Why Everything Is Not Tickety-boo

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had been waiting behind glass panes of bookshelves, on library racks, and on bedside tables, to tumble out, get wings and fly onto the cinema screens for more than 30 years. Who will puff life into the book, who can untangle the tantalising web of words and make them dialogues, who can capture the magic in the reality of camera and lenses? In 2012, Candian-Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta put her hand up and bravely took on what has so far been considered unfilmable. Midnight’s Children is her most ambitious film, traversing a span of 60 years of India’s complex history, travelling from Srinagar to Agra to Bombay to Rawalpindi to Karachi, chronicling three generations of cryptic characters, going into palatial houses with intrigue in every crevice, getting inside gleaming, curvaceous automobiles with tense cabins, careening from Dal Lake to the Gateway, all spellbindingly shot by Giles Nuttgens, not in India or Pakistan, to avoid any disruptions, but in Sri Lanka. As with anything so sweeping and so layered, the film has its moments and great flaws.

The soul of Midnight’s Children, the book, was Rushdie’s genius with wordplay, his mind-bending sojourns of back and forth in time and his devastating wit. All of them are extremely difficult to transpose into a film. The viewer gets a flavour of it in the voice-over that runs through the film, narrated by Rushdie himself. For instance, when Mumtaz meets Nadir Khan for the first time with some food, who is hiding in the basement of their house (we will get to the story soon), Rushdie says in the voice-over: “Sometimes emotions are stirred into food and become what you feel, and sometimes people leak into each other, like flavours when you cook.” In the book, you can re-read these lines and savour them, in the film it’s gone in a few seconds. 

As for the story, here is an attempt at a recap. Dr Aadam Aziz (Rajat Kapoor looks every bit the Kashmiri gent despite a badly fixed prosthetic nose over his already prominent protuberance), soft-spoken and sophisticated (even in a toilet scene) falls for rich businessman Ghani’s (a hamming Anupam Kher) daughter Naseem (a wasted Shabana Azmi as the middle-aged Naseem, who was so electric in Mehta’s breakout film Fire). Dr Aziz has three daughters ‘wise Alia, sweet Mumtaz and the flighty Emerald’. In the tumultuous 40’s of pre-partition India, Nadir Khan, a politician’s secretary witnesses his boss’s assassination and flees to Dr Aziz’s house. They make him hide in their basement where Mumtaz (a quicksilver Shahana Goswami, the lead female part of the film, why don’t we see more of her in films and OTT serials?) takes care of him and love blossoms. Enter General Zulfikar (Rahul Bose, who barely manages to keep a straight face with his put-on accent and exaggerated mannerisms, who I am sure broke into peals of laughter on hearing Mehta’s ‘cut’ after every scene) who has been chasing Nadir Khan. He gets the fugitive and a wife—the ‘flighty Emerald’ who flies off the handle whenever she is on screen. The heartbroken Mumtaz takes the name Amina and marries the staid businessman Ahmed Sinai (Ronit Roy, always full of whiskey, and vehemence). 

Well, after all these halting parentheses, let’s get to the core of the film. So far everything is tickety-boo, as Charles Dance as a lecherous English trader says in the film before the twists and turns reach head-spinning heights. Amina and Ahmed have a son, the hero of the film Saleem, who is switched at birth, in true Manmohan Desai style, by a left-leaning nurse Mary with the baby of a ‘nautch girl’, as she wants the poor couple’s son to have a decent life and the rich boy a taste of poverty. Saleem Sinai has this magic trick—with a wiggle of his nose he can conjure up all the children born on the midnight of August 15, 1947, who have special powers, someone can fly, another can become invisible, and someone can read minds. In this parallel universe, Saleem’s friend is Parvati, and his foe Shiva, who is none other than the baby switched at the hospital. 

This is the toughest and the most complex part of the book to film and Mehta tries hard to infuse some magic but falters. The other midnight’s children are shown in a diffused camera effect, for a ghostly appearance. Satya Bhabha as Saleem, south Indian stars Shriya Saran and Sidharth as Parvati and Shiva try their best to rise above the absurdity of the situation but come out as stilted and theatrical. In this dream world, Shiva is always snarling at the peaceable Saleem, who wants to unite all those born at the midnight hour, to do magic together.

Ahmad Sinai learns Saleem is not his son, he starts pouring stronger and stronger drinks, and Amina packs him off to Emerald and Zulfikar’s house in Pakistan where he has a harrowing childhood. When Saleem returns all grown-up, a worse fate awaits him. Mary (a superb Seema Biswas, another actor we should be seeing more of) tells Ahmad and Amina she switched the babies at birth, and that their real son is Shiva, who has miraculously become a decorated officer in the Pakistan army. The tables have turned now, Saleem is out on the streets like a madman, he has lost his memory, torn his clothes, and grown his beard. 
Meanwhile, in the real world, the two newborn countries are growing up, losing their innocence at every step. Pakistan is plunging into military rule, and India is struggling with its messy democracy and political corruption. Two deadly wars have taken place, thousands have died, India tests its nuclear capability, and the film ends on a note of despair with the dark days of Emergency. The film misses the sharp political satire of the book, Mehta choosing to deal with the real events from history in quick strokes. It’s impossible to include everything from a 600-page book in a film, too like the one in the discussion. Deepa Mehta’s biggest triumph with Midnight’s Children is that it got made at all.