This is the opening paragraph of Rushdie's novel.

"I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that's won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country." (1)

In these first few lines of the novel, Rushdie's already making it clear to us that he's going to write about the nation (in this case, India). The hero of the novel, Saleem Sinai, is born at exactly the moment of India's independence. So Rushdie (via Saleem) is signaling to us right away that he's going to have a lot to say about nationhood and nationalism here, so we had better pay attention.

What's really striking about this first paragraph is Saleem's narrative voice: it's spunky and interesting and surprising. Our attention is drawn to the fact that we are listening to an individual here, a person with a very specific experience and point of view.

This is important because Rushdie's tying the national story—the story of India—to a specific person. He's basically saying: we can't understand India as a country without understanding the story of this one guy, Saleem Sinai.

But Saleem's experience is different from another person's. So someone else can tell a very different story of the country. There are loads and loads of different versions of India. From that point of view, India's not just one nation; it's many, and that's because there are as many Indias as there Indians. And that's over a billion.