Saleem Sinai, the hero of *Midnight's Children*, is one of the thousand and one children born in India at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the dawn of its independence from British rule—the moment, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when India had her "'tryst with destiny.'"

The twists and turns of this destiny form the springboard from which Salman Rushdie launches into his celebrated fantasia of our modernity.