Salman Rushdie’s last visit to Calcutta did not take place. He was asked not to come.

Rushdie was denied entry into the city in 2013, with a play of words that was not the kind one finds in his fiction, where words take off like fireworks and blaze through your mind like a spectacle. What he heard from Calcutta was brutal. It is an episode that does not show the city, the so-called cultural capital of India, in a favourable light. One also wonders how the city would appear in Rushdie’s fiction if the writer, who has always defended free speech at the risk of his life, had at all written about it in a significant way. “I write to save my life,” Rushdie, who suffered severe stabbing injuries on a New York stage on August 12, had said in a famous interview.

The episode also makes us ask who is the city.

In 2013, several arms of the Bengal administration had come together to swiftly prevent the writer, one of the greatest contemporary names, from entering the city, after the police had come to know that he was scheduled to arrive here on January 30, 2013. He would be attending a literary meet that was being held on the Calcutta Book Fair grounds. Rushdie would also promote the film Midnight’s Children, based on his novel of the same name. Rushdie had made his stunning entry into the world literary scene in 1981 with this novel. And with his 1988 novel Satanic Verses, considered “anti-Islamic” by many across the world, he had sparked a controversy that is still refusing to die down. In 1989, he had earned a fatwa on his head from Iran that kept him underground for about a decade.

But in January 2013, Rushdie had already toured Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. On January 29, one day before the Calcutta visit, his trip was cancelled.

How was it cancelled?

A report published in this newspaper said Rushdie himself had reportedly cancelled his visit after his hosts in Bengal pulled back the invitation following warnings from the local police and political establishment, who were unanimous that the writer’s visit would irk sections of the Muslim community. Rushdie, the source said, was “dejected” when he was told about the invitation being withdrawn.

His hosts said that there had been no invitation to him at all. An organiser of Kolkata Literary Meet (KLM, partnered by this newspaper) had told this newspaper: “We have not had a single exchange with Rushdie about coming to Calcutta....” They had been in touch with the film team. “Now if he wanted to come to Calcutta, we are no one to stop him. But we never invited him.”

This act of not inviting was termed by another writer as a “disinvitation”.

This newspaper added that the Calcutta police top brass, after getting in touch with the political leadership for instructions on Rushdie’s visit, had apparently on their own informed Muslim organisation leaders of the impending visit. One wonders if that is the way to prevent law-and-order problems.

On trying to keep Rushdie away, a senior minister had told this newspaper that the police were following chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s instructions. “The chief minister expressed her displeasure and instructed the chief secretary and the home secretary to deal with it strongly,” he had said, remaining anonymous.

Rushdie, in a statement, had said he was informed that the police would refuse him entry and that the decision was at the behest of West Bengal state’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee.

What could have been a memorable event for the city turned into a shameful show of lack of courage. The previous Bengal government had behaved similarly in 2007 when it made Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen leave the city after her writings sparked protests for being “anti-Islam”.

On the day Rushdie was scheduled to arrive, about 100 members of different Muslim organisations gathered at the airport to protest his visit after it was cancelled. Among them were organisations the police had informed of the visit.

The writer had also been stopped from making an appearance, even on video, at the Jaipur Literary Festival, the year before.

His previous visits to Calcutta were less ugly, though his 2004 visit to the city had been abridged, too, to mainly an appearance at Birla Sabhaghar and at a few bookstores. He had visited College Street, the Coffee House there and the Rupa and Co. bookstore, who were his publishers in India. He had visited a Park Street bookstore too.

That trip was less ugly also because at his side was the beautiful Padma Lakshmi, who he was married to then. Padma Lakshmi had looked radiant.

And Rushdie had had a chance to say what he had wanted to.

At Birla Sabhaghar he had concluded his speech by referring to a Saul Bellow novel, The Dean’s December, set in Ceausescu’s bleak Romania, and about a dog in it.

“The dog barks and barks and barks and barks... it will not stop barking, nothing can stop it barking, and it barks for ages and ages… it becomes necessary to understand why the dog is barking, and the dean imagines that what the dog is doing is uttering a protest against the limitations of dog-experience. And what the dog is saying in its barking is, ‘For god’s sake open the universe a little more.’”

That is the job of the artist or the writer, Rushdie said. A work of great art or literature “opens the universe a little more, makes it possible for you, a little bit, to feel something, or think something or understand something just a little bit beyond the limits of what you previously felt and knew and understood.”

But when someone does that, it goes against those who do not want to open doors. They get angry, they hurt, they strike. Opening the door, though, remains far more difficult than keeping it closed, as creating words that endure are far more difficult than stabbing someone or cutting off a head.