World Crossing Voices

Our narrator discloses:

Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong date.

This introduces a split into the fictional world. There is the sequence that the narrator relates and the fictional world he inhabits while engaged in this relating. The author could have chosen any moment to make this turn; he chose a place in the novel when the narrator-hero is beginning to experience hearing voices (like those that are broadcast through All-India Radio) and coming to the realization that he has telepathic powers (a rather special tuning). The split in the narration emerges nicely just as our hero is relating his own experiences in hearing outer and inner voices and his discovery via eavesdropping of the disjunction between what a person says to the world and what they say to themselves.

Our hero is Saleem in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Gifted/cursed. Now inhabiting a split world where historical dates deviate from the actuality of the fictional world ["my India"] (and not just from the actual world's chronology [our India]).

And so for day 1082
29.11.2009