Saleem is the narrator and the protagonist of Midnight’s Children. His birth is auspicious: He is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. This is the exact moment India gained independence from the British Empire, and, as Saleem explains, this quirk of history means his fate is forever handcuffed to the fate of his country. In his role as the narrator, he cannot tell his own story without telling the story of India in the years leading up to and the year after independence.

Saleem’s birth has two important consequences. Firstly, a midwife switches the nametag on his crib with the nametag of a boy born at exactly the same time. Saleem, the nonmarital son of a beggar and a colonialist, is switched with Shiva, the baby of a wealthy family. He is raised by Amina and Ahmed as their own son while Shiva is raised by his impoverished father. Saleem makes sure to point out that this switch was not a random moment in time. Rather, it was the consequence of Mary’s relationship with Joseph and the swirling political chaos of revolutionary politics in India at the time. Rather than a random moment, the switching of the babies was the logical product of a chain of events that was decades in the making.