Here we come to the notion of memory as it pertains to Rushdie’s treatment of fame. What does Saleem’s false genealogy and belief in his erroneous fame signify? His faith and pride in that posed reality seem to be Rushdie’s premiere way of tilting a mirror toward humanity’s tendency to overlook little lies and daily inconsistencies in favor of more comfortable truths that have been solidified by time and herd acceptance.
Saleem’s mother hereby actively sets the wheel of her son’s perpetual need for recognition and centrality turning. The lust for front-page pictures drives Saleem’s mother to compete with another local woman to be the first to give birth during the simultaneous birthing time of India’s sovereign nationhood. Saleem spends page upon page outlining the exploits of a family that we then discover are not his true blood relations. From the raw beginning of Saleem’s narrative, the reader is met with the concept of false history and illegitimate fame. The chasing toward, running from, and inherent disappointments associated with fame’s mirage become the nexus point in the epicenter of Saleem’s multitudinous transformations and the largest oak in Rushdie’s grove of prismatic leitmotifs.
The very inception of Saleem’s life balanced, one-legged, on flimsy fame and faux publicity. What could be worse than second place when it arrives strapped not just with its attendance-award badgery, but also a demotion from specialty of any kind in this case. Saleem is (at least in the eyes of the public and his parents) the son of the nation of India as he has the good fortune to be born exactly at the stroke of midnight on the eve of his country’s independence- or so we believe until we find out later that he has been switched at birth and is actually the second child born to India that night and not the son of the people he calls parents at all. Saleem Sinai, Rushdie’s illustrious adoptee narrator, embodies the underpinning idea of the entire book, which is that every small detail in one person’s life has its famous counterpart, its national face. Rushdie masterfully manipulates concepts of self, naming, and fictionalized history, much in the way that most of the world’s contemporary glitterati are encouraged to do in order to make themselves seem more interesting or acceptable to the tabloid-devouring public. Of the countless symbolic capers and allegorical hints at spiritual undoing with which Salman Rushdie peppers his seminal Midnight’s Children, fame and the seeking of it become the centerpiece of the author’s modernist depiction and exploration of how the soul grows dim when the lights surrounding it grow too bright.
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