Midnight's Children

This novel connects the author with the history of his vast country and its people - Incia. He is inseparable from his culture, and the lives of others born on the date India was liberated in 1947. Page 529 - "My special blends: I've been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized picklejar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon."

To know Saleem Sinai.

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."