Midnight's Child

Driving east from Austin the air turned stickier and the sky steel-grey, and after certain turns the road stretched momentarily, empty and inviting, to the horizon. I arrived in 'Houston' to visit relatives both young and old, but the 'city' was not recognizable as anything but giant houses hidden among wooded lanes, and giant highways flanked by chain stores, the names of which should be recognized coast-to-coast. Dead racoons decorated the streets. Other roadkill were decomposed to clumps of moist-looking dirt, identifiable only by scaly bits, or denuded feathers. As formless as Houston.

I had lunch at the world's dirtiest Pizza Hut, which was infested with flies as assiduous as the wait-staff was indifferent.

After midnight, I walked to the Dennys next to the hotel and sat down with Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a weighty worrying work describing the 31 year history (and 31 year prehistory!) of one Saleem Sinai. Saleem, the unreliable fatalistic narrator, believes his own phantasmagorical fate is tied to that of the nation of India (a community wild, fissiparious, and imagined). At 31 he believes his end (and India's?) is near, and openly declares that he is 'cracking' and falling apart. He and the other children of midnight (born at the midnight moment where India was born from colonial British rule), gifted with strange and wondrous powers, represented the diverse potentials, the mystical chaos, the superstitions and traditions of that populace which would be disciplined into a modern nation. His hopelessness, and the ultimate destruction of the children (during the 1975-1977 state of Emergency called by Indira Gandhi where hundreds of thousands were put in jail, or worse.) seems to speak of the tragedies and contradictions of modernization, development, and political power. (My immediate interpretation: why is it necessary for post-colonial regimes to repeat the brutal legacies of their former colonial masters? Why repeat the massacres perpetrated by the British, in the name of the nation?)
The work is surprisingly consistent for all its flabby interior monologue, its interjections by Padma (his erstwhile lover and audience throughout), its indulgent forays into dream and suppposition. Oblique references uttered early prove to be omens, that if remembered correctly by befuddled readers reveal their significance in later chapters. The puzzling complexity of the work must have been a gargantuan task to keep straight; I can imagine stacks and stacks of notecards.
One lesson from Saleem Sinai (Rushdie) straight to me:
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 ths game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent. . .