a lovely but mundane (after all, it is for spitting in!) reminder of reality in a world that threatens to overwhelm with the sheer volume and variety of its voices and experiences. Saleem is subjected to the voices of the thousand and one Midnight's Children, that threaten to drown out his sense of himself as an individual human, as well as to the manifold physical and psychological beatings rained upon him through the course of his life; the reader is similarly assaulted by the overwhelming density and pace of Rushdie's novel. Without points of return we would be falling with the landslide rush of the story without hope of gaining an interpretive foothold.Spittoons, and betel-chewing, are endowed with other significance through the course of the novel, though never so explicitly as in the quotations above. Memory, truth, and storytelling are entwined into the motif of the spittoon. The group of old betel-chewers that make their appearance in several places in the novel serve as a kind of repository of common memory, and their stories are wrapped up in the game of "hit-the-spittoon," in which the spittoon is placed a distance away from the chewers and they attempt to direct their streams of red spittle into its waiting mouth. Rushdie warms up to the topics of memory and spit at the beginning of the chapter entitled, appropriately enough, "Hit-the-Spittoon:"Please believe that I am falling apart . . . . This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea-beast comes up for air, boils of the surface, but eventually returns tro the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan's game, which he learned from the old men in Agra.Another reference to the same game comes later in the same chapter:And...
