Bao De

Baud is a town on the Mahanadi River in Orissa associated with an unsettling exception to the Midnight’s Children’s general ignorance of one another: twin girls whose power over those who saw them made them local legends. Their story turns a place in the novel’s dispersed national map into a setting where wonder produces both devotion and harm.

Setting and Reputation

By 1957, the surviving 581 children born at midnight were nearing their tenth birthdays, and most had no knowledge of their fellow children across India. Baud was one of the rare exceptions to that isolation. Its twin sisters had already become famous in the region, placing the town within the novel’s account of unusual powers scattered across the country.

The Twin Sisters

Despite their plain appearance, the sisters could make men who saw them fall hopelessly in love, sometimes with suicidal intensity. Their parents were repeatedly approached by men offering marriage to either or both girls. The suitors included old men and young men who might otherwise have been expected to be captivated by the travelling picture-show’s actresses. Their attention turned the twins into objects of public fascination and made ordinary family life a continuing series of unwanted proposals.

Consequences and Significance

The legend had a darker counterpart: bereaved families blamed the sisters for leading their sons to acts of violence against themselves, including fatal self-injury and, in one reported case, self-immolation. The account presents these accusations as part of the disturbing procession surrounding the twins, rather than establishing the girls’ responsibility for the deaths. Baud thus marks the precarious boundary between extraordinary ability and the explanations people impose on its effects.

The twins’ fame also qualifies the wider pattern of separation among the Midnight’s Children. While most of the surviving children grew up unaware of their extraordinary counterparts, the sisters’ reputation made them known locally without making them part of a conscious shared community. Their story precedes Saleem Sinai’s awareness of the children as a group, illustrating that the powers could already have consequences across India before their bearers recognized their common identity.