"Midnight's Children" Post 4b

This section really shocked me! Saleem is Saleem yet at the same time he is not, all due to the meddling of Mary. "And when she was alone- two babies in her hands- two lives in her power- she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name tags on the two huge infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty... On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky- which were also eyes as blue as Methwold's- and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather's- which was also the nose of grandmother from France- she placed this name: Sinai" (130). I felt rather cheated after this section: all the history leading up to this moment of Saleem's birth was not his own? He wasn't even born at midnight! Is he still endowed with these powers? I was overall confused; the story had thrown me for a loop on the constant leading up to this point, which was the birth of the narrator Saleem. However, a quote the next page, as his lover Padma protested the same way reassured me, in a way, that despite this switch, this complication the story is still Saleem's as we know him: "It's this: when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts..." (131). Even though he is biologically not their son, Saleem is his parents' child: he has been raised by them and by their history; even if the story described preceding his birth is not technically his, if those mentioned are not his ancestors, it is still his story: it shaped the events that brought him to the moment in which he became his family's child and affected their actions from there on out.