Exile

Exile is a recurring condition of separation in Saleem Sinai’s life: it removes him from home and family, unsettles his sense of belonging, and can cut him off from the extraordinary connections he considers his birthright. The first exile is temporary and unexplained; the second takes him across the border into Pakistan and separates him from the Midnight Children. Together, these departures make exile both a physical displacement and a disruption of identity.

First Exile: A Child Sent Away

Saleem names his stay with Hanif and Pia Aziz the beginning of his first exile. He is sent to their flat on Marine Drive after his finger is injured and his family becomes concerned about him. He understands that there is one question he must not ask: how long he has been “loaned out,” or whether his parents will send for him at all. The absence of an explanation leaves him to supply his own cause. He wonders whether his injury has become one more deformity, and whether he has ceased to be worth the investment of his parents’ love and protection. Rather than ask, he resolves to be a model nephew and await events.

The household makes the separation bearable without making it less real. Hanif and Pia welcome Saleem, though their flat has no spare bedroom; he sleeps on a white sofa with green stripes, while Mary Pereira sleeps on the floor beside him. Mary gives him cakes and sweetmeats, and the adults offer him the attention a child might expect from childless relatives. He finds pleasures in the balcony and in the soft sofa, but still wishes that his sister, Brass Monkey, would visit or telephone. Her absence is one of the small, persistent measures of the distance from home.

At the end of five weeks, Saleem’s conduct while trying to cheer Pia makes it difficult for him to remain in the apartment. Hanif spends several days on long telephone calls trying to arrange what comes next; then Saleem’s mother collects him in the family’s old Rover. The return does not bring an account of why he was sent away. Saleem decides not to ask, now associating his long trousers with the obligation to bear his troubles like a man. He tells his mother that the injury is not so bad, that Hanif has taught him to hold a pen differently, and that the stay was a pleasant holiday. Her response points to distress at home: she urges him to be good to his father, who is unhappy, and remarks that terrible things happen without children knowing how.

A World That Can Be Broken

Exile belongs to a wider pattern of childhood worlds coming apart. In August 1958, as changes on Methwold’s Estate and the Narlikar women’s ambitions unsettle the old order, Saleem’s tin globe becomes an image of the precarious whole he tries to preserve. Its stand has broken, so he joins the two hemispheres at the Equator with Scotch Tape and rolls the globe around the Estate, taking comfort in the thought that the world remains in one piece, even if only provisionally. Then Brass Monkey jumps on its North Pole and crushes it. The scene links a child’s particular sense of loss to a larger collapse: the world of Saleem’s childhood has ended, and the apparent wholeness he had tried to maintain proves vulnerable to other people’s grief and anger.

The Second Exile and the Family Break

Saleem’s second exile begins after Hanif’s mourning period. Before that departure, he has already shut Shiva out of the Midnight Children’s Conference. He fears that Shiva, his rival and changeling brother, will discover the secret of their births and claim the position Saleem regards as his own. Saleem values his eleven-year-old sonship to Ahmed and Amina Sinai above biological kinship, and resolves to guard the secret Mary Pereira once kept. His decision to exclude Shiva from the Conference is therefore an attempt to protect both his family identity and his place within the group.

Avoiding the Conference does not keep Saleem safe. He is afraid that Shiva, the most ferocious and powerful of the children, can penetrate the mental barrier he hopes to build. He stops convening the Conference at times, first to keep his new knowledge from the other children and then because he fears Shiva’s access to it. The withdrawal ends in a larger separation: after exiling Shiva from his mind, Saleem is himself hurled into an exile that leaves him unable to contact his more than five hundred colleagues. The shift is consequential and ironic. A choice intended to keep one dangerous knowledge contained helps frame the personal and political rupture that follows.

At the close of Hanif’s mourning, Ahmed Sinai returns in a furious and distressed state, drinking and directing his anger at Amina Sinai. Reverend Mother intervenes, declares that Amina should leave, and insists that she take both children. Emerald and General Zulfikar agree to receive them. With the family fearing for its safety and the Zulfikars already due to sail that night, Saleem leaves his lifelong home that same day. The other servants leave when Amina departs; Ahmed remains alone with Alice Pereira. Thus the second exile begins not as a visit to accommodating relatives but as a forced break in the household, with Saleem’s family divided and his father left behind.

Crossing the Frontier

The journey to Pakistan gives exile a border and a political geography. A frontier “jammed” Saleem’s thought transmissions to the Midnight Children, so he loses not only access to home but also the gift he calls his truest birthright. In this way the border separates two kinds of belonging at once: the domestic world he has left and the extraordinary mental community through which he had reached other children.

Saleem travels by ship from Bombay toward Karachi. Anchored off the Rann of Kutch, he watches boats ferrying canvas-covered supplies between the shore and the ship. Heat and recent upheaval oppress him; he is conscious of his accelerated passage out of childhood, his deepening voice, and his first attempts at shaving. He calls Pakistan a place he has not yet reached a “complete dump,” voicing his resistance before arrival. The ship is the SS Sabarmati, named for Commander Sabarmati; its sister ship, the Sarasvati, passes before the vessel reaches Karachi. Saleem reads the recurrence in the names as another sign that escape from repetition is impossible.

From Karachi, the family travels by train to Rawalpindi. Emerald and General Zulfikar ride in air-conditioned accommodation, while the rest of the family travels ordinary first class. Saleem arrives in a northern city he remembers for its military presence and its capacity to be very cold, then enters the General’s large house behind a high wall topped with barbed wire and watched by sentries. These concrete circumstances establish the new setting of his exile: a guarded household under the authority and hospitality of his aunt and uncle, not a return to the home he has lost.

Four Years Apart

Saleem measures the separation as four years away from the Midnight Children and from the places and customs that made up his earlier life. He lists Warden Road, Breach Candy, Scandal Point, his school, and familiar Bombay celebrations among what he has left behind. The catalogue gives exile its texture without reducing it to distance: it is deprivation of an entire local world, composed of public places, routine pleasures, festivals, and shared history.

The separation also includes his father. During those four years, Ahmed remains alone in the house he had refused to sell, with Professor Schaapsteker as its other resident. The contrast is stark: Saleem is removed to Pakistan with his mother and relatives, while Ahmed stays behind in the home he had chosen to keep. Exile therefore divides not only Saleem from his childhood surroundings but also the family across separate households and countries.

As a motif, exile gathers these separations into one developing pattern. The first departure teaches Saleem to endure uncertainty in silence; the second makes that silence part of a much larger rupture, in which family, country, and mental community no longer coincide. The frontier’s interruption of telepathy gives the political border an intimate consequence, while the recurring departures make Saleem’s identity something repeatedly unsettled by where he is sent, whom he can reach, and which home he can still claim.