Saleem Sinai is the narrator of the book. In many ways, Saleem is the history he records - he seems to think everything is caused by him or because of him. His face has a birth mark on it in the shape of a map of India - his life is a microcosm of India's history.

He is, like modern India, through his birth a compound of Muslim, Hindu and British. He is 30 years old at the end of the book which is the same as the number of chapters the book contains. He is - metaphorically speaking - the book.

But saleem is unreliable in his narration. He gets many important dates and facts wrong. In his description of the Amritsar massacre he describes the troops that fire on the crowd as being white. Salman Rushdie himself admits that the troops were not white - although they were under British command. He also gets the date of Mahatma Gandhi's assasination wrong. Even within the context of the story the narrator realises some of these errors. Saleem is concerned that these 'errata' might invalidate his whole narrative.

This is not how unreliable narration usually works in novels - normally the narrator is a bit stupid or decieved and the reader can see 'through' his mistakes to get to the metanarrative. But Saleem is neither stupid - nor unaware of his mistakes so what are we to make of them?

Rushdie writes in an essay in Imaginary Homelands - entitled "'Errata': or, unreliable narration in Midnight's Children" that when writing he became interested in the process of filtration. "So my subject had changed, was no longer a search for a lost time, had become the way in which we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool. Saleem's greatest desire is for what he calls meaning, and near the end of his broken life he sets out to write himself, in the hope that by doing so he may achieve the significance that the events of adulthood have drained from him. He is no dispassionate, disinterested chronicler. He wants so to shape his material that the reader will be forced to concede his central role. He is cutting up history to suit himself

[...] He is also remembering, of course, and one of the simplest truths about memories is that many of them will be false." 3