Jason Yeo
Eng 167p, Spring 2006
Final Paper
Happy Accidents and Snakes-and-Ladders:
Fate, Agency and Repeating History in Midnight’s Children
The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snake and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties! O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of my happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes. (Rushdie 161)
In Midnight’s Children[1], Salman Rushdie uses the metaphor of the simple child’s game of Snakes and Ladders to explore multiple questions concerning the history (and thus the future) of India through the experience of Saleem Sinai, whose life is “tied” to the fate of India. Throughout the novel, Rushdie poses riddles to the reader, having us decide (or merely wonder) whether Saleem’s life (and in turn the allegorical referent of India herself) is the product of chance or of predestination, of human agency or of powerlessness, of logical inevitability or of historical reinvention. In other words, could Saleem affect his own life, or the life of others (or even the whole nation), through his rational will? Or was his influence merely incidental to his choices? And regardless of whether Saleem is in fact powerless to consciously control the tides of history, does his undeniable influence bear the mark of chance, or is there sufficient evidence to make us suspect the existence of inescapable fate? Finally, does the resulting history of these choices or non-choices, random or pre-destined acts and events reveal a pattern of cyclic repetition on a cosmic scale, or is this neat “form” merely an illusion in Saleem’s imagination? As Saleem admits towards the end of his narrative, “There have been illusions in my life; don’t think I’m unaware of the fact.” (Rushie 490) While Saleem ultimately comes to the conclusion that he is largely unable to affect the world in an “active-literal” sense (Rushdie 273), and that his effect upon the world is largely one of fate and as a part of the inevitable cycling of history, yet he leaves enough ambiguity for himself (and for us readers) to imagine other possibilities.
Although Saleem will eventually see his faith in human agency weakened by his experiences, early on Rushdie introduces us to Saleem’s contradictory sense of agency and fate. The young Saleem is a firm believer in fate (he-who-was-prophesied), yet he also refuses to give up his sense of autonomy and agency. This is apparent even in the passage quoted before, where Rushdie carefully describes Snakes and Ladders as a game of “seemingly random choices”, where each move is a product of a choice, made firstly (and importantly) by “tumbling dice” rather than the player, and secondly in a manner that is only “seemingly random”. This introduces Saleem’s underlying childhood belief in fate and predestination as something both real and non-random, and also as an element outside of human control. The former idea of fate being both non-random and only bearing the appearance of chance is echoed elsewhere in the novel, for example when the young Saleem ponders on the metaphor of “greatness as a falling mantle”, which “at the appointed hour, would float down around my shoulders like an immaculate, delicately worked pashmina shawl” (Rushdie 178). As Saleem reflects, the hour will be “appointed”, but unpredictable, and the effect will be as “immaculate” as any conception of deity. Yet at this point, Saleem still believes that he has some level of autonomy – after all, he can invite others to play the game, just as Saleem’s father is invited to “chance his fortune”; Saleem can choose not to play, just as later he will choose to shut Shiva out of the Conference and choose to keep his (and Mary Pereira’s) secret of switched-at-birth from the other Children. But perhaps Rushdie has been sufficiently explicit on the matter of Saleem’s sense of autonomy from fate: “From ayah to widow, I’ve been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as protagonist.” (Rushdie 272, italics in original)
Of course, the strongest piece of evidence for Saleem’s autonomous ability to influence events as a legitimate protagonist on a personal and national level is his revenge on his mother Amina, on Homi Catrack and Lila Sabarmati. Saleem’s anonymous letter tipping off Commander Sabarmati to Lila Sabarmati’s affair with Homi Catrack is itself a study in choices, with the passage detailing the construction of Saleem’s letter littered with active verbs which embody Saleem’s impending active role in India’s history. Saleem “extracted”, “found”, “excised”, “seized” and “took” at will, “cutting up history to suit [his] nefarious purposes” (Rushdie 297). In the careful composition of his poison note, we have evidence that Saleem Sinai is indeed able to influence his life, the lives of others, and even the nation, through premeditated acts. After all, did Saleem not succeed in punishing his mother for her secret meetings with Qasim (once her former husband Nadir) with a fear of exposure so profound that she would never visit the Pioneer Café again? But even in this incident the logic of destiny and greater purpose repeated throughout Midnight’s Children is discernible. Saleem may be “the puppet-master” watching as the nation “performed [his] play” (Rushdie 300), but as Saleem confesses later, “in my life, fate has never been unwilling to lend a hand.” (Rushdie 412) The result of this confluence of agency and snowballing, cosmic destiny eventually becomes clear to Saleem, who nonetheless traces the cycle of culpability back to himself:
If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted me; Misha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led me to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a rood into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of the nation was Nehru. Nehru’s death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault? (Rushdie 319)Saleem’s then-belief in personal agency extended far beyond himself, and the novel is filled with his suppositions for why other people act the way they do. But even in these instances, Saleem sees and insists upon the workings of fate and what he increasingly sees as the repetitive cycling of history at all levels – personal, social, economic, political and so on. While Saleem explicates this belief many times in the novel, a small taste of this can be seen in the “alternative explanation” that Saleem offers for his father becoming “entirely white” after the death of Doctor Narlikar (Rushdie 204). According to Saleem, “large numbers of the nation’s business community” turned white during the first nine year’s of Independence “in taking over from the British,” suggesting the replication of the social hierarchies of class and wealth present under the British (Rushdie 204). This cyclic view of history beneath the apparent influence of individual agency is also demonstrated in the chapter where Saleem describes the events that led to his marriage to Parvati, as well as the impending birth of his “son”, all of which he describes as actively planned and executed by Parvati but also inescapable and foretold according to the recurrence of history:
Parvati—just as she had planned, I’m sure—accepted me at once, said yes as easily and as often as she had said no in the past; and after that the Republic Day celebrations acquired the air of having been staged especially for our benefit, but what was in my mind was that once again destiny, inevitability, the antithesis of choice had come to rule my life, once again a child was to be a born to a father who was not his father, although by a terrible irony the child would be the true grandchild of his father’s parents… (Rushdie 477, emphasis added)
By this point in the novel, Saleem has already gone through the purifying rebirth of amnesia and the painful process of “reclaiming” (or of being reconciled with) his memories in the Sundarbans (Rushdie 419). That particular event is of especial interest to us as readers because it both signals the beginning as well as the eventual end of Saleem’s “rebellion against inevitability” (Rushdie 440). While Saleem will finally accept the logic of “No Escape” many months later while in captivity during the Emergency, his rejection of fate came in his discovery of anger and of “not fair”, and an unwillingness to espouse “a prophesied historical role” upon his re-connection with his past (Rushdie 440). In fact, by the very end of the novel Saleem will be completely won over by the inevitability of history and the very limited scope for personal agency in shaping the “many-headed multitudes” (Rushdie 532). In Saleem’s almost-31-year-old mind, he has rejected the promise of free will and potential-for-greatness that his father and Mary Pereira (later Mrs Catherine Braganza) had given to him in his childhood: “I hear lies being spoken in the night, anything you want to be you kin be, the greatest lie of all…” (Rushdie 533) The promise of childhood lullabies has been roundly refused as a lie in the face of 31 years of cruelly mutilating experiences at the hands of fate and history. Thus, as readers we have been transported by Rushdie through a sweeping and detailed retelling of Saleem’s life as an argument for the inevitable cycle of ups and downs of not-quite-chance, also known as fate, that mark Saleem’s life, which is also “a mirror” of India’s history, owing to the “happy accident of [Saleem’s] moment of birth” (Rushdie 139). Tragically, not all the “accidents” would be happy ones. Saleem offers an explanation: “Because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times” (Rushdie 533). We can think of the repeated mutilations that Saleem suffered of deafened left ear, truncated finger and uprooted hair. If Saleem had once described playing Snakes and Ladders as a metaphor for life, as “chancing [one’s] fortune” (Rushdie 161), much later he would allude to the “seemingly random choices” of fate as a potentially deadly gamble:
But the Midnite-Confidential had one trick left up its sleeve. Once a night—just to add a little spice—a roving spotlight searched out one of the illicit couples, and revealed them to the hidden eyes of their fellows: a touch of luminary Russian roulette which, no doubt, made life more thrilling for the city’s young cosmopolitans… (Rushdie 524)
But of course Russian roulette is a game of life and death, played by spinning the cylinder of a revolver loaded with a single bullet before squeezing the trigger with the muzzle pointed at one’s own temple (which remind’s the reader of Saleem’s temples-like-horns). At the same time, it is a gamble with one’s own life, the enactment of a certain recklessness that approximates an act of suicide or a death wish. This is the sort of death wish that Ilse Lubin and others carried when they went to drown in the Kashmiri lake of Aadam and Naseem Aziz, which Saleem reminds us he has not forgotten (Rushdie 464). And here we find an apparent internal contradiction between Rushdie’s choice of words and Saleem’s experience. While Russian roulette is a gamble that is willingly accepted and performed by the wielder of the gun, Saleem was by no means a willing participant in this game. Rather, Saleem found it to be a “trick”, or deception of the Midnite Confidential Club, which promised anonymity in the darkness but then exposed him to the humiliation of being “tittered” at by the faceless “young cosmopolitans”. In this humiliation we are reminded of the mirrored “daily humiliation” that filled Shiva with murderous hate and an “old violence” after Roshanara Shetty’s poisonous insults sank deep into Shiva’s heart (Rushdie 471). In remembering Shiva’s violent response to this humiliation during the Emergency, or even of the murderous result of Commander Sabarmati’s humiliation by his adulterous wife, we can see the life-and-death nature of the spotlight which fell upon Saleem at the Midnite-Confidential, inevitably-by-accident. This brings us as readers full circle to Saleem’s self-conscious position as just one person among some six hundred million Indians, but the one (along with Shiva, his midnight twin) upon whom the inevitable spotlight of history’s Russian roulette would fall, time and time again.
Ultimately though, embedded inextricably in the form of the novel as a tale for oration over many nights (echoing the one thousand and one tales of Arabian Nights), and also in the metaphors of games of chance—Snakes and Ladders, Russian roulette—is the unmistakable hope for alternate possibilities and outcomes. As Saleem hints when he evaluates his narrative, “perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin” (Rushdie 491). By offering a multitude of different conclusions to well-worn but half-forgotten bedtime stories, Saleem’s father Aadam provides us with the hope that prophesy and fate do not necessarily mark the end of human agency: “…the Brass Monkey and I heard, down the years, all kinds of different versions of the journey of Sinbad, and of the adventures of Hatim Tai… if I began again, would I, too, end in a different place?” (Rushdie 491). And recall also that Saleem, for all his rejection of boundless possibilities shaped only by human agency, and for all his wish to “write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet” (Rushdie 532), admits that this is impossible, that “the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty…” (Rushdie 432) Looking even closer at the previous lines, we realize also that far from having narrated the past “with the absolute certainty of a prophet”, Saleem has been a notoriously unreliable narrator, and self-consciously so at that. After all, this is the same Saleem that baldly told us: “in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe…” (Rushdie 310). This additional crack in the narrative lets us as readers discern the possibility of ambiguity in fate, human agency and the recurrence of history which Saleem recognizes as a profound source of hope (which he also calls the “disease of optimism” Rushdie 343), even as he ends his narrative with the (unlikely) possibility that he will live happily ever after with Padma. Finally, returning to Saleem’s fascination with Snakes and Ladders, we find the same unmistakable faith in ambiguity, which we may take to be the elusive “Third Principle” (Rushdie 292) that Saleem never seems to find.
All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up and down, good and evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosity of the serpent; in the opposition of staircases and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all possible opposition […] …but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity—because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake… (Rushdie 161)
[1]
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children. 1991. Penguin Books.