Fragmented.

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images”

-TS Eliot, The Waste Land

While reading Midnight’s Children, I have been unable to ignore how fragmentation pervades the text; not only through the lives of the characters but in the structure of the narrative as well. I offer an excerpt of Eliot to begin with because, although fragmentation is not a novel concept in the 20^th century, it is certainly where this displaced sentiment (and form) has found its stride. I intend to explore this theme on an interpersonal, individual and national level as conveyed through the lives of Aadem/Naseem, Amina/Ahmed, and Saleem Sinai, as both an individual and a representation of India.

The first relationship to develop in the narrative exists between Aadem and

Naseem. As her physician, he is charged with the examination of the landowner’s

daughter through a perforated sheet, as she is a “decent girl….she does not flaunt her body under the noses of strange men.” (19) Over the proceeding years, Aadem falls under the spell of the perforated sheet, falling in love with Naseem one body part at a time, as “a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts.” (22) Nevertheless, this collage is regarded by Aadem as something “sacred and magical” (23) and it is through these partial, magical glimpses that Aadem chooses to marry Naseem. The ensuing marriage and family is beset with consternation as Aadem discovers the woman he has constructed in his mind via the perforated sheet is not, in reality, the same woman he has pledged his life to. Here is the first example in which fragmentation leads to a loss of identity; as Aadem has built a picture of Naseem piece by piece, he is unable to accept her whole identity and particularly as she changes with time into the woman known as “Reverend Mother” Aadem “more or less {gives} up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain.” (40)

The second relationship which follows very closely to Aadem and Naseem is their daughter, Amina. In love with a basement dweller who is unable to consummate their marriage, Amina is obliged to marry Ahmed Sinai in order to produce children. She does not love Ahmed, however, possibly taking a cue from her father whom she is most like and connected with in the family, she forces herself to learn to love him, “to do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes…in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet.” (73) Here again is an example of a character being unable to accept the identity of their partner as a whole and, in this case, a premeditated attempt to break them into palatable pieces, pieces that she will form into her own collage resembling the man she loves, Nadir.

Both of the aforementioned relationships convey the sense of something missing, something, which I would argue, is identity. For Aadem, this began with the rejection of his faith, as he was “knocked forever in that middle place, unable to worship  a God whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve” a result of which “a permanent alteration: a hole” formed within him. Aadem’s inability to reconcile his former spiritual life with the new life he discovered while studying in Germany has left him at an impasse and left him vulnerable to the allure of the perforated sheet. For Naseem, it is only after she has married Aadem that we begin to see her as “adrift in the universe” (41) and is unable to specify the environment around her, relying on the phrase “whatsitsname” as an ever debilitating crutch. As for Amina and Ahmed, they each develop their own coping mechanisms at the racetrack and the bottle, respectively.

            Although not biologically related, Saleem relays the history of Aadem, Naseem, Amina and Ahmed as if they are inextricably linked to his own existence. And they are.  He comes to discover that “"the ghostly essence of the perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life -- its meaning, its structures -- in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late" (119) As he physically fragments and disintegrates, so too does his narrative; the oscillations from his present state of affairs and the story which he is attempting to convey become more frequent and cumbersome, erstwhile he beseeches the reader, “please believe me that I am falling apart.” (36)

He claims that he is falling into 630 million pieces, which, at the time of publication, was the estimated population of India. Saleem could then be viewed as the representation of India as a nation (his birth coinciding with the birth of the nation is another clear connection)  It is with this piece that we can then take the theme of fragmentation to a national level; from partition to independence to discussion of dividing India along religious or linguistic lines, Rushdie utilizes his characters to demonstrate how, by breaking down into individual pieces, one loses the essence of the whole and thus India would cease to exist if it were to fragment along these lines.