I wrote this for my senior year English AP class. Spoiler alert, it is really horrible .

@Wind Chaser

As requested by fellow class mates. I didn't bother indenting paragraphs since that would take me more time. Score: 89/43 = 66

Having to complete two novels, Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses written by the author of Salman Rushdie, one has come to a sure conclusion that his works are in purpose of a certain goal he is trying to achieve in his world, and of those who read or critique his novels. According to Salman Rushdie’s use of symbols, and allegoric style of writing in just two of Salman Rushdie’s masterpieces, it is very certain that Salman Rushdie wishes to acknowledge his reading audience of the realities of life that all people experience, whether or not they appear to be erratic or predictable, and how one may decide to adapt to such truths introduced by Salman Rushdie. Among some realities depicted in Salman Rushdie‘s literature include but are not limited to the truth of successful love, destruction that is followed quickly by creation, the representation of one entity as many more entities, and the inevitability of events or attributes of a person‘s life as they continue to exist on this tiny blue world. Symbols, as they are clearly defined, do more than just represent something beyond it’s own existence, but they are not present just to make the literature look more svelte and stagy. Instead, literary artists such as Salman Rushdie, wish to include these devices to bring up a certain point. Among the symbols included in his works includes the perforated sheet in Midnight’s Children, which Doctor Aadam Aziz must use to view one of his patients, which later on becomes his future love life, Naseem Ghani. Doctor Aadam Aziz first uses this perforated sheet because Naseem’s grandfather explains to him that “[her] daughter is a decent girl…She does not flaunt her body under the noses of strange men” (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Page 19). Of course this is a reminder that the Islamic religion in the novel and the world that women are veiled and their appearances are kept hidden, so this definitely explains why the grandfather wishes her to be viewed only by a perforation. Aside from that, Doctor Aadam Aziz begins to fall in love with her, but only in fragments, as he is unable to see her completely for as long as they are not married. Unfortunately this creates some dilemmas with their relationship as the relationship itself starts to grow, or supposedly grow. The hole or perforation which Doctor Aadam Aziz peeks through is another figure; the absence of substance or something necessary to complete the puzzle. Because of this fissure of the two persons by this thin filmed schism, they never truly enjoy a complete relationship and aren’t what they hoped to be in the long run. Fragmentation is very prominent among the novel, such as the metaphorical fragmentation of one of the characters in the Midnight’s Children and has other interesting appearances as the novel is told. The novel of Midnight’s Children, first explaining it’s title before proceeding, tells a story of Saleem Sinai, who is born at the stroke of India’s independence from Great Britain at the date of August 15, 1947, and is paralleled in the story with his native country of India itself, henceforth he is one of the midnight children born at or near that time. Whatever condition he appears to be in, determines if the nation will be prosperous or in turmoil. Further into the novel, Saleem Sinai himself explains how his body is slowly falling and “crumbling into six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust” (Rushdie, Midnight‘s Children, Page 36). When the novel had first been published in the year of 1981, the population of India at the time was about over six hundred and thirty million people behind it’s border lines. The coincidental situation suggests with his disintegration that his destruction will break into enough dust and debris for every person in the country of India to spiritually hold upon to, almost like the Eucharist in communion at church. Unfortunately for Saleem and the other thousand midnight children, they must live with the fact that their lives are fully connected with India, no matter what they do. That brings up another truth about one’s life; a person is always born with certain attributes, that may not be changeable ever in life, regardless of the choices that person makes everyday of his life. This is plain inevitability, just like a person born with the human immunodeficiency virus must live with that haunting fact, or a person walking down a street in a downtown area being hit by a car, or shot by a nearby criminal, and so forth, they have no control of anything surrounding them but themselves. Although really, even if there are so many factors in one’s everyday experiences, there are still many innumerable manners in which one could shepherd their choices, and make the best out of everything. In the Satanic Verses, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin’s chance of surviving an airplane crash by falling from the sky are one to a million impossible, since flapping one’s hands and singing while rapidly descending towards the hardened Earth’s crust wouldn’t slow the fall at all, and wouldn’t fall “like scraps of paper in a breeze” (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, Page 10). Much like being born with an inherited cardiovascular virus which runs in the family. In spite of the indubitableness that this genetic disorder could terminate one’s time alive on the planet at any given second of any hour, fashioning the best congenial decisions could augment greatly to the net health of a person’s well-being. This may not always be the case however, since with great numbers comes the chance for many great exceptions to come. Which leads to the next main idea. If the idea that the sole person of Saleem Sinai, and the many other “midnight children” are symbols and representatives of the condition of the mother country, should that not mean that there’s a theory that whenever a minor individual incident or event occurs, should it not also occur wide scale? Or maybe differently interpreted, could a single agglomeration of individuals be represented of many other hundreds and thousands of ideas and people? Thinking about India, being the home to many religions like Islam and Buddhism, many languages and cultures as well. As of now it has a population of at least one billion, being the second most populous country in the world, and very diverse in its peoples. Not just India, but other larger countries too, much like the United States, which had been first created by immigrants all across the world. One country, but many meanings and ideas, and belief systems. The importance of that is that it creates a sense of, importance to a single individual. Despite the fact that they are just one person on the Earth out of the seven billion inhabitants, it may not seem encouraging or significant, but even one person can make a monumental influence on others, much like civil rights speakers like Martin Luther King Junior, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, or the creation of new technologies and innovations that have helped ameliorate and enhance the standards of livings in the recent centuries of our world’s civilizations. That also therefore means, it can take one man or woman to cause great destruction or despair on other people. Adolf Hitler during the later early twentieth century, around the start of the 1940s lets just say, had managed to acquire power, and put thousands of his men to believe his own ideology, and commit terrible genocide on the Jewish peoples, and those others he believed were too inferior or “evil” to deserve to live. So overall, one person can spread or represent his ideologies to others, the speed at which it occurs depends on his or her popularity among the peoples, hopefully nothing with a bad cause. One voice can represent a Destruction however, doesn’t always mean it has to be a bad thing. In the novel of The Satanic Verses, one of the main characters, “Shiva”, directly alludes to the Hindu God of Destruction (sanatanasociety). Saleem Sinai, who is Shiva’s nemesis, is symbolized as the Hindu God of Creation, Brahma (eng.fju.edu

). The two Gods in Hinduism, along with Vishnu the God of Maintenance, work together to bring a cycle of creation and destruction, with maintenance being that transition between the two (rudraksha-ratna), much like morning dies into noon, and noon dies into night. To the main point, destruction is not always a deed of malevolence, but rather, it could be an act of making way for newer things; an act of renewal. In the book of Genesis, our God had brought a great flood onto the Earth, washing away all the old terrible planet but Noah, relatives, and many pairs of animals on an arc for forty days and forty nights. Most people will agree that our God is not evil, he simply wished to renew the world from all the troubles and crime that was occurring at the time, and it ended with clear skies and a rainbow, a symbol of promise of good. The past eventually just seems to grow on and burden the newer generations, and for that reason it is the best choice to have the old ruins torn down and demolished for the purpose of preventing it to exasperate the new prosperous, youthful present, much like an old refrigerator is removed from the kitchen to make space for a newer and cooler refrigerator that will cool food for years to come. If the old is not removed from the picture, then there is a problem with space. If one were to have the real world rid of all death, though that is impossible, then this planet would be jam packed with people who have set foot on Earth long before today‘s inhabitants, like Christopher Columbus and John Lennon; one would have had to found a way to the moon or one would be uncomfortably stuck face to face with one another, living one’s lives insufficiently with no possible way of pursuing happiness because of an overpopulation issue. This of course, would never be the case since death is inevitable, but well, it can be delayed. There are however, certain cases whence one must confront the reality of life that even the unlikeliest of events may just be a foot step away from happening, whether or not they appear to contain good or bad juju. Anything could happen if it is not already physically impossible. Re mentioning the incident occurring in the first chapter of The Satanic Verses; one New Year’s Day, a cruising airplane flying across the rocky and watery Earth, “twenty-nine thousand and two feet” (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, Page 3) up in the frigid deleterious air, all of a sudden discharges a violent explosion, instantly eliminating all of the unfortunate passengers onboard their flight. All except for two fortuitous riders of this voyage in the sky survived; Gibreel Farishta and Mr Saladin Chamcha. Despite the fact that surviving the fiery outburst of the airliner was already a hard task to accomplish by one’s luck, they still had to experience that immense fall from their lofty height of, thousands of feet. Without carrying anything special equipment or clothing other than the clothes they were already wearing, their odds of surviving such a drop of doom are, well virtually below anything desirable. However, the novel is fiction, no surprise there by the way, so anything that the author wishes to include in his works, Salman Rushdie being the writer in this case, can be as fiction as common fairy tales would be, or as real as a book based on a true story, also no surprise there. Instead of the two travelers landing hard on the solid earthy ground, or plopping sharply into the unforgiving water, Mr Saladin Chamcha began to blindly holler to Gibreel Farishta to “Start flying now…and Sing” (Rushdie, Satanic Verses, Page 8). Two problems exist with his command he yells at Gibreel Farishta; men, or women not in this case, are unable to fly, literally, and not with their own means of levitation. Second of all, singing provides no means of physical propulsion which may slow down a sky diving session. In the novel, it appears that this hopeless method of deceleration actually enables the two wanderers to “float down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze” (Rushdie, Satanic Verses, Page 10). Being fiction, this occurrence could may as well happen however the author wishes to scribe it, but it does have a different meaning symbolically. In general, “flight is freedom“ (Foster, How to Read Literature, Page 127); the idea of plowing through clouds and the free air, is a soothing comment and desire all people wish to perform though impossible. In the context of the novel, it purely means that as long as a person is halcyon and focused on the situation, they should be able to accomplish whatever is necessary for them to complete. There are many other instances which require great focus to achieve a task which may be as simple as an insignificant game of tic tack toe, or a life or death situation. Had one not paid attention in that herb studies class, the devil snare plant would have strangled any poor soul unfortunate enough to fall upon it’s treacherous roots and strings of vegetation, or had a lack of concentration become great enough, it would have caused one to loose a large gamble in Las Vegas, leading one to enter a stage of depression, which in the end, provokes one to commit suicide. Going back to flight, who said that flight only means freedom in Salman Rushdie’s context? While it does mean liberty, in addition means that Gibreel Farashti and Saleem Sinai are angelic. Angels, not truly being a physical human being, “are not subject to death or any form of extinction” (christiananswers) and do possess the ability to fly as they wish wherever. Gibreel Farashti and Saleem Sinai, are not exactly angels, but are similar to them in a way; they didn’t die, and they “flew” for a long period of time. Both Saleem Sinai and Gibreel Farashti’s acts of singing and flying are angelic acts, so their drop from the heavenly heights is just a manner of saying that they have been sent to Earth as messengers, as the word angel derives from the Greek word “aggelos” meaning messenger (christiananswers). So there’s a lot of things that people don’t realize about their lives; some experiences in one’s lives are just inevitable, some things in one’s life will be found highly improbable or unlikely by others, or maybe one just fails to notice that taking their time and being focused is a much more better choice than quickly trying to react fidgety and unsure. Many of these symbols shown in the novels are telling their own theme or story while the story itself is running along. One must not be easily fooled to think that only the most possible will happen, for even miracles and sudden catastrophes may occur without warning or notice. One might even find out in about eleven months from now that what they ignored and deemed as outrageously false is actually a true event that will occur and most likely provoke one to believe that their ignorance lead to downright demise, had they not attempted to take some form of action, as if they were just in wonderland.