Twenty-seven seconds isn’t a lot of time, but as Salman Rushdie reminds us it is long enough to recite a Shakespeare sonnet or, if you are religiously inclined, the Lord’s Prayer. What he may well have added was that those 27 seconds — the period in which an assassin hysterically stabbed and slashed at his eye, neck, chest, mouth and thigh — could have meant a lifetime.
Luckily for Rushdie, for the world of letters and for all those who believe in the (inextricably twinned) values of liberalism and free expression, he survived. Even better, he has lived to tell the tale in a bright and rousing book about how he dealt with the cruel cuts and, quite miraculously, stitched his body and his life together again. At a personal level, the “angel of life” prevailed over the “angel of death”. At a larger and allegorical level, the Gupees (warm, talkative, even argumentative) were victorious over the Chupwalas (cold, silent, and disapproving).
Participants hold signs in solidarity for author Salman Rushdie during a reading event outside the New York Public Library. | Photo Credit: AP
Life post-fatwa
Thirty-three and a half years is the other germane span of time — one that begins with the fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini (following the publication of The Satanic Verses) and ends when Rushdie noticed the murderous shape of his assassin coming in “hard and low” at him just before he was about to speak at a public event in New York State in August 2022. After so long? he asks himself, almost incredulously. After all, it had been more than 20 years since he moved from Britain to the U.S., discarded his cloistered life, “to be rehabilitated out of the maximum-security world and reintroduced into polite society”. Should he have been more cautious? More aware of “the danger lurking in the shadows”? Was it his fault? He rejects such thoughts because those who regret end up being shaped by the life they subsequently regret. He is glad for the full rich life he lived for 23 years in New York.
This is a positive life-affirming work and, as one may have expected, the story about the attack, the trauma and recovery is dotted by delightful digressions, strewn with literary references, and marked by meditations, among other things, about religious faith, death, truth and ways of seeing. (“I am unable to escape the mind’s fondness for free association”.) An imaginary conversation with the assassin (who is referred to as A., a decision Rushdie has subsequently explained was made to deny him the “oxygen of publicity”) offers the space for exploring some of these ideas.
Salman Rushdie and Eliza Griffiths at an event in London. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
A love story
Wrapped tightly and ardently in the middle of this gripping book, is a love story. Knife is dedicated to the many men and women who prevented Rushdie from dying and nursed him back on his feet, but the book is also a paean to his fifth wife Eliza (Rachel Eliza Griffiths), the gifted poet/novelist/visual artist. Rushdie describes their relationship as the final and definitive one in his life, something that the rest of his family concurred with after meeting Eliza: “Finally”. (“Eliza then had T-shirts made for me, with FINALLY emblazoned upon them.”) Love stories demand to be told in the first person and this could be one reason why Rushdie gives up the unusual but compelling third-person narrative in his earlier memoir Joseph Anton, about his post-fatwa years in seclusion and hiding. Also, as he says, “when somebody wounds you fifteen times it definitely feels very first-person. That’s an ‘I’ story.”
Salman Rushdie in East Hampton, New York, in 2019. | Photo Credit: NYT
Knife is both cathartic and inevitable, something that Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent prophetically recognised — telling the writer, in the face of disbelief, that he would write about it. When Rushdie returned to writing well after the attack, he found himself casting aside the notes for his next fiction, realising that he had to write it before moving on to anything else. “To write about it would be my way of owning what happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.”
Salman Rushdie at his office in central London, in 2005. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Musings on freedom
There are short meditations here and there on freedom, in a way the very essence of the book, but one couldn’t help wishing there was more. Rushdie suggests, and correctly, the word has become a minefield — an intellectual battleground where the classical liberal idea of freedom, embodied in the writings of men such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine have been undermined by both the right and the left. If free speech has become a licence for bigotry for the former, he suggests it has been shackled by beliefs about what can or cannot be said by the latter. The painful memory in Joseph Anton — of being denounced, sometimes aggressively, by people on both sides of the ideological spectrum — is carried over in Knife. In a world that seems to have all but forgotten that any credible defence of free speech must involve upholding the right of free expression to those you disagree, dislike and even abhor, Rushdie’s new memoir is a reminder of the importance of rediscovering, in these volatile, polarised times, a true liberal spirit.
Knife; Salman Rushdie, Hamish Hamilton, ₹699.
The reviewer teaches philosophy at Krea University and is the author of ‘The Great Flap of 1942’.
