Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight's Children, realizes that he's made some serious mistakes in dates and times while telling his story. Oops.

"Reality is a question of perspective […] Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time.

"Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?" (198)

Here we see Rushdie doing that thing postcolonial writers like to do: he draws attention to the fact that history is really a matter of perspective. We all have our versions of history, and each one's different. In Saleem's version of Indian history, Mahatma Gandhi dies on the wrong day. Saleem doesn't try to correct this mistake; he lets it stand.

Midnight's Children is narrated in the first person. In this passage, there's a lot of emphasis on the "I." "I have discovered," "I cannot say," "Am I so far gone," and so on. By highlighting how we are getting history through Saleem's perspective, the passage makes us see how history is always told from someone's point of view; it's never totally objective or neutral.