Symbolism In Midnight's Children

He is a defeatist kind of person who makes no endeavor to control his life aggressively; he just takes the disasters as they come. There are other characters in Rushdie’s novels that absolutely mislay the conception of heir selves. The narrator of Midnight’s Children Saleem suffers a shock and an absolute amnesia after the city he lives in is bombed and the majority of his family dies there. He forgets everything about his earlier life and he also loses his human skills and manners. By that time he has previously lost his magical gift of telepathy and has gained a superhuman sense of smell in its place so is he sent to a exceptional army unit which uses dogs for penetrating for radical units in the mountains and where Saleem gains a position

So not only does he mislay his self, he also loses his humanity and becomes an animal. But not just any animal; he becomes a dog which is in Muslim culture considered an unclean animal (Muslims for example cannot touch anything a dog has touched). The identity in the novel does not end here; another swap of a child is made when Saleem’s wife Parvati runs away from her husband and conceives a child (Aadam Sinai) with Shiva who then kicks her out. She returns to Saleem, who takes care of Aadam after Parvati’s death. So Aadam is a double- swapped child who by transaction returns to his original family and he is named after Saleem’s grandfather who really is Aadam’s biological grand grandfather. Many comparable situations of convoluted parenthood occurs in Shame where one of the three sisters Shakil gets pregnant illegitimately by unlawful relationship, they vow a sort of oath that they will not let the secret out and the oath makes the bond between them so strong, they become like one

There is a absolute mess in her old age, she feels hassled with their numbers who were in huge numerical. It is very intricate to handle such a large numerical, to feed, to handle, to call, to manage and to recognize. It is perceptible that they have lost their identity in their lives. It seems she has hired an army of ayahs:

“Begum Naveed Talvar, the former Good News Hyder, proved utterly incapable of coping with the endless stream of humanity flowing out between her thighs-[…] Her old personality was getting squashed by the pressure of the children who were so numerous that she forget their names, she hired an army of ayahs and abandoned her offspring to their fate, and then she gave up trying. No more attempts to sit on her hair: the absolute determination to be beautiful which had entranced first Haroun Harappa and then Captain Talvar faded from her features, and she stood revealed as the plain, unremarkable matron she had always really been.” (Shame, 207)

Shame is a satire on a pair of “conjoined opposites”-