Late in part one on page 121, Saleem writes, "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world." In order to understand Saleem's life, the reader has to know all the forces, from decisions made by his grandparents to national politics, that went into the event of his birth. To understand Saleem's life is to understand something of the story of the Indian nation. The whole of India, of course, is made up of many parts, many different ethnic and religious groups, and many millions of stories like that of Saleem.
The image of the perforated sheet is a perfect metaphor for the reader's view of the story, and by extension the view of his own life. Aadam Aziz doctors Naseem through a seven-inch hole in a sheet, and forms what he describes as "a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts" (22). It is this badly-fitting collage that he falls in love with. Aziz, like every living being, knows only parts of the whole, and through his ignorance makes a bad choice. Similarly, Saleem tells his story in pieces, flashing forward and back through time, dropping clues about what is to come that only make sense in retrospect, leaving the reader to form his own badly-fitting collage. The narrative style makes sense because memory is non-linear. The image of the perforated sheet echoes throughout the story, like in the story of Saleem's mother Amina Sinai, who decides to learn to love her husband piece by piece, but finds she cannot love a certain crucial part of him.
Saleem himself knows less about the meaning of the whole than his confidence would indicate. He writes as if he is the successor to Tai the boatman, who seemed to know all of history, but his storytelling is also a search for meaning. He doesn't want to let the jumble of his life be reduced to absurdity.
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