Midnight SAGA: Satya Bhabha as Saleem Sinai and Shriya Saran as Parvati

At the stroke of the midnight hour, Saleem Sinai, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist, famously burst forth into the world, to take his place in a newly born nation torn apart by Partition and riots. Fireworks lit the sky, while two babies were swopped at Narlikar’s nursing home in Bombay, fated to fight each other. Most of the wars thereafter, as Rushdie wrote in Midnight’s Children were “wars between friends”.

Thirty-two years after the publication of the book, Sinai’s journey of magic realism, against the backdrop of the histories of India and Pakistan, finally had its celluloid adaptation shown in London — the city in which the novel was written, and where it won the 1981 Booker and the coveted Booker of Bookers in 2001. Screened at the London Film Festival to packed houses, the level of anticipation was high. This was after all the epic story of India, and Rushdie was there to tell it himself.

It is his voice that is used in the narration and his screenplay that brings the vast and complicated story of the birth of a nation to screen.

Initially reluctant to do the screenplay, Rushdie agreed when persuaded by director Deepa Mehta. Looking happy and relaxed, he told an audience at the Screenwriters talk at the festival: “I thought, it is the first of my books to be filmed. I could walk away from writing it, and hate it when it opened, or I could write it myself. Then if it didn’t succeed I had no one else to blame.”

The whole process, Mehta said, had happened very naturally. “We were chatting in Toronto one day about adapting his books into films,” she told The Telegraph. “And I just asked him, who has the rights to Midnight’s Children? He said ‘I do’. So I said, ‘Would you like me to adapt it for a film?’ and he said ‘Yes.’ It was as spontaneous as that, and we agreed.”

Rushdie optioned the book to Mehta for the grand price of $1 for two years, with the option that she could renew it again for another year for another dollar. The next stage was convincing Rushdie to write the screenplay.

“This is an iconic book. I cannot simply say do away with chapters 4, 5, 6, 7 or something like that. The only one who could be disrespectful about what could be kept in or out was Rushdie himself,” said Mehta. Though initially reluctant, Rushdie was soon on board.

Mehta decided that she’d do her own adaptation in Toronto, while he’d do his in New York. “We wrote it, and about two weeks later we came back and gave each other the notes. And we read them and then we started laughing. Because they were so similar — they were almost identical. So our vision of the film was very similar. If the writer and director are in agreement, then a lot of the work becomes much easier,” she said.

Unlike what most people expected, Mehta said it was easy to work with Rushdie. “He is a very generous person. He’s also someone who has a great sense of humour.”

The film, shot in Sri Lanka and India in 70 days on a budget of $10.6 million, uses an ensemble cast of established actors such as Shabana Azmi, Seema Biswas, Anupam Kher, Rahul Bose and Soha Ali Khan, alongside fresh faces Shahana Goswami, Shriya Saran and Siddharth Narayan. Playing Saleem Sinai is Satya Bhabha (son of Harvard academic Homi K. Bhabha), in his first major role.

Rushdie stayed away from the shoot, not wanting to cause any problems or controversies by his presence. It was on the cutting floor that Mehta felt there was something missing and reached out to him again. While they had decided that there would be no narration, Mehta felt the need for one.

“I was missing Rushdie’s language — his expression, his choice of words to describe a situation,” Mehta said. “The narrative was so important. And I wanted Rushdie himself to be the narrator. Again, he did not want to do it, but I persuaded him. I think it brought out the flavour of the book.”

So in his unmistakable voice Rushdie narrates the story of Saleem Sinai in the film. “I just did everything she [Deepa Mehta] said,” Rushdie stressed.

It was not the first time that Rushdie’s magnum opus had been sought out for adaptation. One attempt fell through in the early Eighties when the Indian producer of Gandhi asked him to cut the portion of the book that deals with the Emergency. “That negotiation did not go far,” said Rushdie.

In 2003, Rushdie adapted the book with Simon Reade for a theatre version for the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Tim Supple. Another screenplay of Midnight’s Children was done by Rushdie for a TV series for BBC which never saw the light of day.

“Writing for stage is different. People speak more in plays,” said Rushdie. “In a film there is room for silence. Also, the TV series was five hours. You don’t have that luxury in a film. You should not be galloping through it without room to breathe.”

The next challenge was magic realism — the genre that marries realism with magical elements. For Rushdie it had to be kept simple and close to realism. “When people use this term, it is magic rooted in realism. The surreal elements would be done as close to realism as we could get.”

Mehta felt the same way. “It is a metaphor for the potential in everybody to achieve the extraordinary. But reality is different. Nobody can be perfect, no country can be perfect — everybody has their growths and pitfalls and that’s how we survive.”

With the magical synergies in place, both Mehta and Rushdie are hoping that Indian audiences take to the film when it is released in India in December. Rushdie has always been proud of the fact that the highest number of copies of Midnight’s Children were sold in India. Even though he was a young writer at the time, financially dependent on the royalties, he did not mind that pirated copies of the book were selling on pavements in Delhi and Bombay.

Given the scale of the book, he is probably the one screenplay writer who won’t mind if he hears the comment that most filmmakers dread: “The book was better.” As he said, “If they don’t like the film, I’ll still have the book.”