I wanted to discuss the repetition of certain images in both books. Multiple images are repeated throughout the texts, but they acquire a different meaning according to their temporal setting.
In God of Small Things'we can observe, for example, the repetition of things like 'blue church-sky" and "dum dum". Roy writes (at the beginning of Chapter 11): "She could have touched his body lightly with her fingers, and felt his smooth skin turn to gooseflesh. She could have let her fingers stray to the base of his flat stomach. Carelessly, over those burnished chocolate ridges. And left patterned trails of bumpy goose flesh on his body, like flat chalk on a blackboard, like a swath of breeze in a paddy field, like jet streaks in a blue church sky. She could so easily have done that, but she didn't."
Compare that to this passage later on in the novel: "That first night, on the day that Sophie Mol come, Velutha watched his lover dress. When she was ready she squatted facing him. She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin. Like flat chalk on a blackboard. Like breeze in a paddy field. Like jet streaks in a blue church-sky." Observe the change in style here, even though many of the phrases are identical. In this passage, the repetition of "like" is separated by periods. It is not a climbing on top of one another, all at once event like in the previous example. The action here unfolds in a staccato, more careful manner. It is interesting that frames it this way, because the second example is the active one. The first example is all imagining: She “could” have done this, she “could” have done that. Yet, it is written in a much lighter use of punctuation and prose mechanics. The second example is active, but it is stunted and suggests the weight of taking action.
The weight of taking action and reconciling ones self with time is a central concern of 'Midnight's Children', and Rushdie uses many instances of repetition and alternating meanings to manipulate time. I will use 'perforated sheet' as the example:
Saleem first remarks (at the beginning of the chapter 'Mercurochrome'): "But what is so precious,” Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air up-downup in exasperation, "to need all this writing-shiting?" I reply: now that I've let out the details of my birth, now that the perforated sheet stands between the doctor and patient, there's not going back." There is clearly a concession to forward motion here, to linear timekeeping. Yet, this belief in time being linear is subverted when we examine further mentions of the perforated sheet.
Let's observe the mention of the perforated sheet that concerns Jamila and Mutasim. Rushdie writes:
"But when Jamila Singer, concealed within a gold-brocaded burqa, arrived at the palace, Mutasim the Handsome-who owing to his foreign travels had never heard the rumors of her disfigurement-became obsessed with the idea of seeing her face; he feel head-over-heels with the glimpses of her demure eyes he saw through the perforated sheet. (p. 402(in my electronic version) In essence, the perforated sheet has found new life. It has found another worldly traveling man who falls in love piece by piece with a woman. The perforated sheet does not become clearer as the story evolves (as one would expect in a strictly linear narrative). This is another example of an active voice, but it appears that it is unaware of the tale that has come before it.
In the final chapters of the novel (the fourth paragraph in the chapter entitled "A Wedding") Saleem writes:
"In a blind landowner's house on the shores of a Kashmiri lake, Naseem Aziz doomed me to the inevitability of perforated sheets; and in the waters of that same lake, Isle Lubin leaked into history, and I have not forgotten her death wish." Here we get a passive, reflective mention of the perforated sheet. It is no longer the thing that drives the narrative (the first example), or the thing that has inspired a new one (the second example). It is now, in fact, the thing that prevents a narrative from ever fully forming. '
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