Rushdie has named the debt repeatedly and written an essay about it, and the two novels answer each other point for point:
- A family saga standing in for a nation's century, told by a narrator inside it
- The impossible reported in the same flat voice as the everyday, so nobody in the book is surprised
- Births timed to a political event, which then shape everything the children become
- A closing act that folds the telling back into the told
Rushdie's own qualification is worth keeping: he has said the real common source is the condition of writing from a place where the official history is not believed.