It had been a couple of hours ago that I had finished reading Salman Rushdie’s latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and I was still in a bit of a trance when I sat down to write this piece. A variety of thoughts were swirling in my mind. Of course, Rushdie’s prowess with the pen is a given. What did come as a pleasant — and goosebump-inducing — surprise, however, is how he continues to not give a damn about what other people think about what he writes. And, mind you, he will be reminded of some of these others for the rest of his life each time he looks in the mirror and sees a piece of dark glass in front of his right eye where just a couple of years ago had resided a clear lens.
It’s important to clarify what is meant by “Rushdie doesn’t give a damn...”. I simply mean that he continues to write what he believes in, with zero regret. When you read his books, there is a very profound sense of reality that seeps into you from the pages — as though his mind and his thoughts are imbibed into yours through the very words that are chosen so deliberately to be placed on them. And that, of course, is the mark of an extremely powerful writer — perhaps more powerful when you remember that the act of literary creation is itself a political act. It is these very words and thoughts of the author that have had him living underground for a significant period of the past 35-odd years.
When The Satanic Verses was published in 1988, general readers would never have imagined the catastrophic consequences that followed, both then as well as more than three decades later in 2022. Yet, here we are, a few weeks after the publication of Knife, a remarkable account of the atrocities that were inflicted upon Rushdie on August 12, 2022, ironically enough as he was about to address the Chautauqua Institute on the importance and ethics of ensuring safety for writers, and as an extension of that, of the fundamental right to free speech. Of course, in true Rushdie style, he has managed to score several goals with this book as well, but we are not here to list the several authorly qualities that Rushdie has. We’d be stuck here for days if we embarked on that venture.
I was born more than a decade after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was declared by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. However, I do remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when the news of the knife attack on Rushdie hit Twitter. The world was slowly coming out of the Covid pandemic, and for a brief, fleeting period, everything had seemed normal again. But the pure shock and disbelief that followed that day at my university is something I will never forget.
There is an enormous difference between walking into a literature class knowing that a thorough discussion is to follow, and walking into class to see stormy faces and distressed concern being voiced in low whispers. For my classmates and I, especially, as literature students, the knife attack meant a great deal more — things like what our degree meant now, what literature and fiction signified in the current scenario, and what, in the future, the consequences would be for anyone who dared to pick their pen up against the status quo. One classmate was in tears, I remember, at the atrocity of it all, and our professor was so overcome he let us ramble along about Rushdie for an hour. Even for myself, things seemed especially complicated because I had just moved to the UK at the time to pursue a Master’s degree. Terribly paradoxical, I know, but the fact remains that that day, the post-colonial serpent in me had reared its head and hissed in defiance, simultaneously trying as best as it could to disacknowledge the fact that it was scared as hell for its life.
A few days later, a few friends were discussing the attack and what its ramifications would be on writers when an acquaintance from Theology (interestingly so) said that I should consider a different career path. “It’s too dangerous, Subho. If this is what’s happening, you’ll never make it [as a writer],” he’d said. With differences in religion, opinion, language and thinking, we’ve got ourselves a melting pot of identities just waiting to be targeted, apparently.
So, we circle back to the point I was trying to make — that words, sheer words, have the ability to hold mirrors up to people’s faces. And most of these are magic mirrors like the one Snow White’s stepmother had. As long as its answers satisfy you are you happy, and the moment the mirror decides to tell you the truth, or anything divergent from what you believe is the truth, is when you decide that the other party must take a bite into a poisoned apple and hopefully never be kissed awake again.
The apple wasn’t offered to Rushdie so much as chucked at him squarely in the face. Fifteen stab wounds, no less, and about two years to recover! And yet, his writing is as sharp as ever, his jokes on point, his puns funny and his politics astute. Beautiful are his writings on love, on life, his family — Knife is, at the end of it all, a book that is as inspiring as it is soul-shaking, even though it is profoundly sad. But perhaps that is what non-fiction, and life, and reality are. Sad, miserable, indeed, as is the state of the world.
The kiss, of course, comes in the form of the support he had received from his wife Eliza and his family — his sons, his sister, his friends and colleagues — and, of course, the literary world. Poets and philosophers, activists and advocates had all made their voices known in the aftermath of the attack and the detention of the attacker. And while the book ends on a sweet, if not entirely optimistic, note, there are plenty of unsettling feelings that linger long after the last page is turned.