Rushdie on the Birth of Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie has written a new preface to Midnight's Children on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of it's publication, describing the origins and initial reaction to the novel,

My father was so angry about the character of “Ahmed Sinai” that he refused to speak to me for many months; then he decided to “forgive” me, which annoyed me so much that for several more months I refused to speak to him. I had been more worried about my mother’s reaction to the book, but she immediately understood that it was “just a story — Saleem isn’t you, Amina isn’t me, they’re all just characters”, thus demonstrating that her level head was a lot more use to her than my father’s Cambridge University education in English literature was to him.