Padma interrupts the story to call Saleem a liar. He responds
by saying that even after his parents discovered what Mary Pereira
had done, they could not go back and erase the past, so he remained
their son. Saleem mentions a letter the prime minister sent when
he was born, which he buried in a cactus garden along with a newspaper article
titled “Midnight’s Child.” He tells us that the newspapermen who
came to take pictures of him gave his mother a pathetic sum of one
hundred rupees.
Analysis
The small-scale property transfer at Methwold’s Estate
clearly corresponds to the larger political situation, as Great
Britain prepares itself to transfer sovereign power over India to
the independent governments of India and Pakistan. Neither transfer
is complete or uncomplicated. Just as independent India must now
deal with the cultural legacy of British colonialism, which remains
active long after the British vacate the country, so too will the
inhabitants of Methwold’s Estate have to live with physical reminders
of the estate’s former owner. The British continue to exert a powerful influence
over independent India, as symbolized by the unconscious ways the
Methwold residents begin conforming to Methwold’s customs. Methwold’s
nostalgia for his estate, in turn, echoes the wide-scale nostalgia
felt by the British upon leaving the former crown of their colonial
empire.
As the moment of Saleem’s birth approaches—ostensibly
the most significant event of the novel thus far—the narrative seems
to swell to the point of breaking. Saleem wants to take into account everything
he can, because everything, he believes, has been working in tandem
to arrive at this exact moment. In order to understand the significance
of his birth, Saleem reminds the reader of everything that came
before it and all the family history that went into making Saleem
who he is. However, after accumulating all this momentum, it becomes
clear that the history is actually someone else’s history—it
belongs to Shiva, the boy with whom Saleem gets switched at birth.
Thus the narrator isn’t actually related at all to the people whose
stories he has been detailing so meticulously. Significantly, in this
same chapter, Aadam discovers that the sacred perforated sheet has
been gnawed full of moth holes. As one of the central symbols of Saleem’s
story, the partial damage of the perforated sheet seems to bode
poorly for the truthfulness of the narrative as a whole.
However, Saleem remains the narrator of this tale, and
the story still fundamentally belongs to him. That Saleem has told
this family’s history as if it were his own highlights one of the
narrative’s central themes: that truth is created and shaped, not
fixed and static. Regardless of whether he is Ahmed and Amina’s
biological son, they raise him up in their family, and he enjoys
all the privileges and problems that birthright entails. Saleem
can rightfully claim the history he has told as his own, because
he believes it to be so. The truth of the situation, therefore,
seems relative.
At the same time, the fact that William Methwold, an Englishman,
is revealed to be Saleem’s biological father proves appropriate, given
that Saleem sees himself as the perfect embodiment of modern India.
The legacy of British colonialism has undoubtedly shaped the newly
independent India, just as William Methwold has undeniably shaped
Saleem. It is also important to note that by switching the nametags,
Mary Pereira makes a distinct political decision. Alhough her primary
motivation remains a romantic one, Mary nonetheless attempts to
redress the vast social divide that separates rich from poor. The
child of a poor woman who dies in labor and an English father who
has returned to England, Saleem turns out to be an extraordinarily
apt representative of the new Indian nation.
