In Salman Rushdie's “Midnight's Children,” Saleem Sinai clings to his silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli (the spittoon given to his mother, Amina Sinai, from Rani of Cooch Naheen for her dowry) as a sort of personal talisman. The spittoon, responsible for his temporary memory loss (after hitting him on the head during an air raid), remains a symbol of his previous life, a symbol he cherishes even when he is unable to remember what it means. The spittoon represents the ancient totality of his life, his family, his country. Despite his attachment to the physical and symbolic spittoon, Saleem seems more obsessed with the perforated sheet. The symbolic opposite of the silver spittoon, the perforated sheet represents fragmentation: the fragmentation of Saleem (of both body and life), his family, his country, and even his narrative. "Midnight's Children" begins with a chapter titled "The Perforated Sheet." .” This chapter lays the foundation for the perforated paper metaphor that recurs repeatedly throughout the rest of the text. The sheet is “a large white sheet with a roughly circular hole about seven inches in diameter cut through the center” (Rushdie 4). The hole in the sheet isn't there by chance. The design is conceived by Ghani, a wealthy landowner, and is created to preserve the modesty of his daughter, Naseem, when she is examined by a doctor. To be treated, Naseem presents the offending body part to the doctor through the hole in the sheet and this is how Aadam Aziz (Naseem's doctor and Saleem's grandfather) comes to see Naseem in fragments: the ankle, the toe, the calf , various other appendages, finally also one of her breasts and her buttocks, and finally her face. Saleem sums it up like this: “In short: my grandfather had fallen in love… with the medium of paper… like Aziz and loves every piece as he sees it, or he might be more like Amina, who has to force himself to love every piece. But “condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments” (Rushdie 141), Saleem finds himself facing yet another fragmentation. In writing this article, I continued the pattern of punched paper into his life by selecting only pieces of “Midnight's Children” to show others. Works Cited Kane, Jean M. “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children."" Contemporary Literature 37.1 (1996): 94-118. JSTOR. Network. November 29, 2011. Mukherjee, A. “Fissured Skin, Inner Ear Radium, and Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.” Paragraph 29.3 (2006): 55-76. EBSCO. Network. November 29, 2011.Rushdie, Salman. “Midnight's Children”. New York, NY, USA: Penguin, 1991. Print.