Extract

I was born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time.

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, as India gains its independence, a child is born whose enormous nose will smell the future and whose life will be handcuffed to the history of the nation itself. Published in 1981, its sentences overflow with the exuberance of a subcontinent trying to narrate itself: pickle factories, Bollywood, war, Emergency, and a thousand and one children born in that first hour, each gifted with some impossible power. Saleem Sinai mixes memory with desire and fact with fable in the grandest unreliable tradition. The novel insists that history is not what happened but what is remembered, and that a country, like a body, can crack from the pressure of containing too many stories.