5. Futility of statistics: during
1971, ten million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh
into India—but ten million (like all numbers larger than one thousand and
one) refuses to be understood.
This quotation appears in Book Three,
in the chapter “The Buddha.” Saleem, now in the service of the Pakistani
Army, finds himself aiding the violent repression of the Bangladeshi
independence movement. In a novel already riddled with violence
and massive causalities, this is a blunt acknowledgement of the
fact that there is no way to express the scale of violence and suffering
that is occurring. Even Saleem’s first hand account of the atrocities
he witnesses becomes suffused with a sense that what he sees is
incomprehensible. The human mind cannot grasp tragedies of this
scale, and we require a microcosmic representation of the victims—midnight’s children—to
attach individual identities to historical realities. One thousand
and one is the largest number that can be understood, according
to Saleem, and so rather than try and represent the loss of hope
for an entire generation, Rushdie has him offer us the representative
destruction of these children.
