Dispatches from the present
Like Hadi Matar, Salman Rushdie’s would-be killer, I had not yet been born when Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous fatwa in 1989. I first encountered Rushdie in my teens, as a tabloid celebrity: a squat, balding man posing next to the very beautiful and very tall Padma Lakshmi. Rushdie was in the papers all the time those days—he was perhaps the most famous Indian-born figure out there in the white, English-speaking world. Before I read anything by him, I heard his work read out on stage, as part of a skit performed by a Calcutta theatre group. It sounded magical, nothing like the stilted English we all spoke. After the show, someone told me that what we had been listening to was a little bit of Midnight’s Children: “August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s birthday and Coconut Day; and this year—fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve—there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom…”
I finally read Midnight’s Children in college, for a course on Indian writing in English. The linguistic comedy was delightful, but it was the impotence of the poet in the basement that stayed with me. That, and a scene describing the assassination of a Muslim politician opposed to Partition by six men all in black, holding crescent knives. In college, my favorite Rushdie book was a relatively minor one: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a children’s book written as a gift for his son, after the fatwa forced him underground. Haroun had a grace and contentment I envied: it promised that you did not have to forget your mother tongue to read English books. The two languages in your head would speak to each other, the city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name would remember it once again; it would rain, and policemen would float by on upturned umbrellas.
Before Rushdie, English-language writing about the Indian subcontinent had appeared to be something of a dead end, a “blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere” (to quote a particularly dismissive appraisal by an Indian poet). Rushdie’s success changed everything. But it was not fashionable to admire Rushdie when I was in college. The shock of the fatwa had receded; Rushdie was seen as a spent talent, and most Indian academics had not forgiven him for what they saw as his betrayal of subcontinental writers once he became a gatekeeper with the power to bring new languages and voices to the world literary stage. The unspoken assumption in the classroom was that real Indian literature was elsewhere, in a vernacular language, struggling to be published or translated—Rushdie’s expansive magical realism was the lite stuff that foreigners liked. There was some truth to this, of course. But all of us had a couple of Rushdie novels on our shelves, and all of us went through a phase of unsuccessfully trying to write like him, trying to wave a wand and make slums and sewage and traffic jams turn into something wondrous, something out of a book. It is a cliche to say Salman Rushdie unlocked a new world for English-speaking Indians, but it really was true for us.
Unsurprisingly, The Satanic Verses was one of the first books I bought in America (India had informally “banned” the book by prohibiting its import). I remember my ears burning as I got to the brothel scene, shocked by how far the book went, by its willingness to upturn the injunctions at the heart of Islam. The global backlash to The Satanic Verses was an ominous indicator that decolonization and multiculturalism would change the world in ways that went beyond the proliferation of tikka houses, yoga studios and British-style Parliaments. Western-derived ideas of secularism and freedom of speech were no more universal than a preference for mayonnaise. The new middle-class groups—Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs; Indians, Chinese and Arabs—would set their own rules for what they found acceptable in the public sphere.
The only time I ever came close to meeting Rushdie in person was at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2012. Rushdie did not make it to Jaipur in the end; he withdrew from the festival after receiving threats. Despite this, there were still massive protests on the day he was scheduled to address the event virtually. A mob of angry locals burst into the grounds, with very clear demands. They wouldn’t even allow Rushdie to be video-conferenced in. If you put up his image on the screen, we cannot guarantee this venue will not be burnt to the ground. I heard them say it, and I believed it. It is not Rushdie but his opponents who are the men of the future.
Although Rushdie has never shied away from expressing a political opinion, his genius is not political. Even Naipaul’s travelogues on India and Pakistan, for all their bitterness, are a far more bruising and revealing guide to the region than Rushdie’s allegories, to say nothing of the fiction of, say, Intizar Hussain or Mahasweta Devi. Rushdie possesses, rather, a unique power to heal, to make whole, to turn a paper-thin story about a chance encounter in London between an ayah from Bombay and a porter from Eastern Europe into the most charming bit of fluff you will ever read, with real heart and real hurt. I have not enjoyed Rushdie’s recent writing much—Joseph Anton, Quichotte, the Substack where he has been releasing a serialized book for paying subscribers. But I loved seeing him on television, holding forth on the parallels between his life and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds or joking about fatwa sex with Larry David (who invariably called him salmon, like the fish). It felt like a rare victory for literature.
I hope Rushdie pulls through with his smugness intact, despite the life-altering injuries. I want to see him troll idiots on Twitter again, and make another cameo in another season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the writer who could not be assassinated, as pink as the inside of a salmon, with the healthy glow of a life well-lived.