Midnight’s Coincidence

By ASH Smyth
August 2022

I do the Breakfast Show on Falklands Radio, and on Mondays I usually drop in a segment – cos there’s no news – called Book at Breakfasttime. There’s not much of a book ‘scene’ in the Falkland Islands; but there is a well-provisioned library, and you can get books here by post, albeit slowly, and anyway it’s an excuse to read from things I like (and show off slightly if they’ve not been published yet).

My wife and I have a friend in town this week, and last weekend – when I would typically do book prep – we were away from Stanley, on a settlement which has no phone reception, let alone the internet. The last thing I saw as we left home, Friday, was the fact that Salman Rushdie had been stabbed, in New York, before a presentation.

Back in town by Sunday lunchtime, clearly I could have found something to read, but either I was simply being lazy, or I knew the only thing it would be right to read was The Satanic Verses. That infamously-fatwa’d volume even name-checks the Falklands War – tick! – but honestly I wasn’t sure that I could pull it off (middle-class English accent), or if it even was appropriate. Also, everyone knows that TSV is not, in fact, Rushdie’s best work. If I had had a copy (I have neither with me, quite surprisingly), I would have read from Midnight’s Children.

So anyway, on Monday morning I walked down to work, long before dawn, deciding we’d just take the week off Book at Breakfasttime. I went on air, played a few songs, and said we’d have no literature today, but if listeners were in need of reading matter, they could do worse than order something by Sir Salman Rushdie.

Embarking on the second hour of the show, I glanced, as I am wont to do, at the home page of Wikipedia, for ‘Did you know?s’ and ‘On this days…’ to talk about. The date was August 15th: the day of Indian (and Pakistani) Independence, and of the horrendous, botched partition which resulted in millions of deaths, but also spawned the pivotal conceit of Midnight’s Children.

I was then both irritated and embarrassed I’d not read from at least one damn Rushdie novel.

Back at home with my wife and our guest that evening, I more or less insisted that we watch a movie. While I was in the loo, Fiona took it upon herself to choose the film, somewhat abnormally: and of all the hundreds of DVDs I own, and scores more movies over several hard-drives, she chose the Blake Morrison memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?   

I considered saying that I’d watched it only recently, but didn’t. And so was gently tickled by the cosmos when, in what’s still more or less the opening montage, Morrison goes to an awards dinner, where he’ll be picking up a prize, and his incorrigible (and frankly infuriating) old man gets chatting to… Sir Salman Rushdie.

P.S. I saw this morning that a former pupil from Sri Lanka, who was in the film of Midnight’s Children 10 years back, was getting married, Saturday (while I was wondering about the fate of the book’s author), in Woolwich Town Hall – where my wife and I filed our own wedding paperwork.