A few years ago in the summer of 2003, I smuggled a copy of the Satanic Verses on a trip to India. It added an air of adventure and the secret, sweet pleasure of doing something forbidden in defiance of orders. For the first time, I had some ‘contraband’ that I was trying to sneak through the ‘green channel’ at the Mumbai airport. What would happen if they found the copy? Would they be up in arms? confiscate the book and threaten consequences? perhaps jail time? That seemed far-fetched, but exciting to think about at least as I wheeled my cart towards Customs. On the other hand would they (to caricature officials) be too dumb to know that I was bringing in a banned book? a book that was considered by the Indian government too dangerous for public consumption? Lives had been lost in the fight over this book in India and elsewhere, and the author had been in hiding from would-be assassins for more than a decade. Would they realise this was considered as dangerous as a bomb? Would they realise all this if they happened to look at the red border of the slightly-used hard-bound copy of the book? Would they see the serpents and the evil that lurked in the pages? - the satanic work of a satanic author? None of the two scenarios occurred. That was disappointing and ironic. For all the fuss on four continents, I made it through with the most controversial book in recent times without anyone making any note of the fact. I was just another person among a million with just another book among a million other books that were brought in to India that summer. It was nothing special. It was no big deal.
No big deal - that certainly wasn’t the case with the book and its author. Instead of quiet discussions in book clubs and chats among the literati, there were world-wide protests, effigy burnings, deaths, bans, an infamous fatwa and the author had to go into hiding. All for writing a book that challenged a notion. These stories on ‘the outside’ are well-known and well-documented. What about the story on ‘the inside’? What about the life of the fugitive author? The boy who was playing with the matches - “what was he thinking?” This is that story - the Curious Case of Joseph Anton a.k.a. Salman Rushdie - his chronicle of life under the fatwa. To ‘give himself some distance’, he chose to write this story more than two decades after the events described in the book. Unusually, it is also written in the third person, ostensibly to give him distance from the main subject - himself.
The Early Years
There is no escaping The Satanic Verses, but, before that, I must start at the beginning: the portrait of the artist as a young man. Salman Rushdie arrived as a young boy at Rugby, the storied public school. Far from having an idyllic and cheery Wodehousian time, he was generally miserable. Salman Rushdie writes he was charged with three unforgivable sins in an English public school: being clever, being foreign, and being non-sportif. He kept his family in the dark about his miseries and troubles adjusting at Rugby because he didn’t want to whine about the minor humiliations while his parents were spending a fortune to have him up there. So, he in his letters back home he wrote his first fictions. The lonely boy, if had no real friends, did have the company of books. He won a place to Cambridge where against his father’s advice he chose to studying history instead of economics. Cambridge was where he finally found himself adjusting to the life abroad. He always wanted to be a writer, an intention which he made clear to his parents upon graduating. This career choice baffled his father whose best response was, “What am I going to tell my friends?” (Later in life Salman Rushdie is equally baffled when his academically disinclined son Zafar decides to quit college and make a living as a DJ and event promoter).
Making it as a writer was more fantasy than reality. After a few futile months in which he wrote nothing of consequence, the hungry and penniless Rushdie set aside his dreams and began as a copywriter on the suggestion of a friend. It was a less romantic, but a prudent decision as the road to literary stardom is long and hard. The 1970s was a difficult decade. He did a lot of writing, but, by his own admission, a large part of what he wrote in those years was forgettable and fit for the rubbish bin. His first novel Grimus was published, but sank without a trace ignored by the critics and public alike. Rushdie then despaired. Colleagues like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan had in the meantime ‘soared like birds just after being hatched’. It was then that he decided to return to his ‘Indian roots’ and write a more authentic story. After an extended visit to India to gather material, he spent the next five years writing Midnight’s Children. Shortly before the novel was completed he made the courageous decision to quit his job and live by the pen alone. He had enough of writing ads for cream cakes and hair colorants. He told his then-wife Clarissa after quitting - “Be prepared to be poor”. His timing could not have been better. A few months later, the book won the Booker Prize and the success of Midnight’s Children catapulted him from obscurity into the literary universe. It took him thirteen years from the time he left Cambridge till the summer of 1981 when the book was published ‘to simply get started’.
Then began the high life as a writer. His next book Shame, a sequel to Midnight’s Children did not take too long to write (1 ½ years) and a translation of the book even won a literary award in Iran. But by 1985, the writing wasn’t going as well and he felt stuck. On a trip to Australia with Bruce Chatwin (the one of the Moleskine fame) at Ayer’s Rock or Uluru, Rushdie got the idea for The Satanic Verses. Once again he dug deep into his past and history to find the seed of his next novel.
The Satanic Verses
His father, Anees Rushdie was a non-believing Muslim but was nevertheless a great reader and scholar of the Qu’ran. Interestingly, Anees had changed his last name to ‘Rushdie’, taken from Ibn-Rushd (or Averroës), the famous Islamic thinker and skeptic. According to Rushdie Sr. there were two main issues: a)Islam was the only major religion founded after recorded history, and hence could and should be studied historically, b) the order of the verses in the Qu’ran was messed up and needed some rearranging. So, Rushdie Jr., riffed on the speculation that the Prophet Muhammad may have changed a verse to include local deities/idols into his early version to perhaps make his message reach a wider audience. There are inscriptions on the Ka'aba according to Rushdie, Jr. that lead credence to the idea. The controversial verse that Rushdie was accused of tampering with was - Sura 53 - also known as ‘an-Najm’. In any case, this speculation was a point of departure for Rushdie. The Satanic Verses was a personal book, the third in his series of books ‘about naming the parts of himself’. “Then”, he writes, “there would be nothing more to write about - except the whole of human life.” The novel about ‘migration and transformation’ itself would be so radically transformed that it would be impossible to read it in the spirit of how he intended it.
Initially, his thought when the controversy broke out was to argue the literary merit of the novel - a serious writer had written a serious book. He would find that the arguments of art fail miserably in the face of the rhetoric of politics and irrational fervor of religionists. Ultimately, the book and its persecuted author would be subsumed in the larger fight for literary freedom.
Rushdie begins the book by invoking the image of blackbirds on a fence. The reaction to The Satanic Verses was like when one blackbird sits on the fence. No one takes any notice of the first blackbird. It’s nothing unusual. One by one blackbirds begin to arrive and soon there is a whole swarm. Then it’s hard not to take notice. In hindsight, it is easy to trace that line that connects his ‘unfunny Valentine’ from the Ayatollah to the planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11. Rushdie’s self-anointment as the ‘first’ martyr in the era of Islamic fundamentalism and international terrorism is contestable, but his words ring true:
Decoding Joseph Anton
As a reader the project is not to read Joseph Anton but to read Salman Rushdie; to draw out the first-person that is talking and hiding behind the voice of the third-person narrator. In his interview on the BBC, Rushdie said that he kept a detailed diary of his time and one can make the assumption that the facts in this book are narrated with accuracy. What good is a memoir that is an objective, journalistic account? In memoirs, one writes not as things unfolded, but as one remembers them. The reader is interested in a) in the facts presented, and more so in how they can be interpreted, and b) what details seem to be not completely filled in, or the silences. In that scheme of things, this book is a treasure trove. Clues are strewn all over its pages and you have the exciting possibility of an unreliable narrator/witness.
All the stress of running and hiding, he writes, may have cost him at least one, perhaps two books. Yet in those troubled times he managed to write the magnificent The Moor’s Last Sigh suffused with the scent of spices and the ghosts of Granada, and, one of my favorites, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a reworking of Orpheus and Eurydice myth into the history of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s remarkable that these books were written whilst he was still banned from visiting India. A feat no less astonishing than Joyce writing about a Dublin that he would never see again. Quoting an exiled African poet, he writes that he perhaps ‘carries India in his heart’. It is interesting that his recent works written in a state of freedom have failed to match the power of his books written under the fatwa. Has the creative fire ebbed? or the stimulus lost? the stimulus that comes from the realization that life may abruptly end.
Bulk of the book deals with details of the daily annoyances and humiliations of a man in hiding, dealing with controversies around The Satanic Verses, the fight to get the paperback published, the organizing for the freedom of speech, search for houses and various security arrangements, and how he spent time with Zafar. As much as one is sympathetic to his situation, after more than a few hundred pages one tires of the diaristic entries.
While he could have spared us some of his quotidian tedium, a special treat of the book is the insider’s view of the writer’s world. He lays bare the the underbelly of publishing, and the cast of characters that making a living in it - writers, agents, critics, editors and publishers. The literary anecdotes make for interesting reading. He describes Roald Dahl’s nasty long hands that he tried to lay on his former lodger and editor Liz Calder; how he once corrected Harold Pinter’s social manners; his friendly I-shall-never-speak-to-you-again argument with one of his good friends Martin Amis; meeting Kurt Vonnegut, and the subsequent falling out; the solidarity of South African writers Lessing, Coetzee and Gordimer. Then there are the petty literary squabbles among writers. Whatever they may say, writers care a lot about reviews and a good way to make literary enemies is to write a bad review. Rushdie traces John Le Carre’s hostility after the crisis to an unfavorable review of his book for which Le Carre had not forgiven or forgotten him. There are other delights. His telephone conversation arranged impromptu by Carlos Fuentes with “God” or Gabriel García Marquez in broken English and Spanish just after dinner one day in Mexico City. His envy of Günter Grass’s talents for sculpting and dancing. What was greatly touching was the generosity of the literary world in offering him solidarity,shelter, and safety while he was on the run.
Man and Superman
Like all his other books, this book is simultaneously a lot of other things. It’s an apology and attack, a love letter to writers and the art of writing, a stage to settle personal and literary scores, a pulpit to denounce and mock his critics, as much as it is a memoir - an objective description and subjective interpretation of his life. Rushdie emerges as a more complex and complicated character than in any of his books. Joseph Anton, the main protagonist of the book is not its hero, or even its tragic hero, but a human participant in the roil of life. A man who is heroic in many ways, and miserably less so in others. The limitations of the mortal man get in the way of the superman’s script. Even a writer as gifted as Rushdie struggles to explain the course of his tangled human life.
His life is a work in progress on the difficulty and challenge of being a husband and father. The complicated domestic life of Mr. Rushdie is an ever present drama playing in the background despite whatever else is happening on the main stage. Over the course of the book, he tries to untangle some knots, clear the air, get back at his ex’s, apologize for his infidelities with the aim to steer the reader towards a sympathetic view. I found the dedication to be an atonement. He dedicates the book to Clarissa and Elizabeth, Wives #1 and #3, and the mothers of his two sons - Zafar and Milan. He cheated on them both, and then left them with toddling sons to move on to other women. In contrast, Wives #2 and #4, who were the ones who did the leaving, have been left out of the dedication. Wife #2, the writer Marianne Wiggins is not given the most flattering portrait (he alleges she disappeared with a bunch of his stuff, including the first copy of the Satanic Verses). His chief ire is reserved for Wife #4 - Padma Lakshmi - who he calls the ‘Illusion’. Like the original and improbable ‘egghead and bombshell’ combo of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, the media found the Padma and Salman mix just as fascinating. There is no fool like an old fool. Like Wife #2, Padma felt there was room for only one person’s ego and outsized ambitions in the relationship. There seem little sign that he has recovered from the breakup bomb that Padma dropped on him in 2007. For all his missteps with the women in his life, he does try in his way to be a good father to his sons. Like other places in the book, Rushdie then proceeds congratulate himself how sweet and balanced they both turned out, unscathed from all the separation and marital turmoil.
Another aspect that is uncovered in the pages is how many times Rushdie mentions his quibbles and worries about money. He complains about alimony, monetary arrangements, and the divorce settlements with his ex-wives. While he was given state-paid police protection, he had to pay for other items like the houses, their rents, and armored cars from his own wallet. Anees Rushdie had frittered away his wealth in drink and bad business schemes, to die with only a few notes in a drawer. Rushdie Jr., perhaps unconsciously decided to be more prudent with his own. It’s no surprise that he sought not just literary but also monetary success. Nothing wrong with putting thy money in thy purse. Shakespeare wrote for money and even that writer’s writer James Joyce was cadging money whenever he could. What seemed suspect was his motivation to get the paperback edition of The Satanic Verses published. Was driven by the lure of more royalties as alleged by his critics? If true, then its a double standard to put the lives of the publisher and his staff in jeopardy in the service of freedom of speech, while he was safely hiding. We may never know.
If not money, a writer at least wants fame. Public adulation is good, it pays the bills. Critical adulation is what elevates a writer, wins him awards and separates him from other writers of pulp. You would be hard-pressed to find a writer who eschews awards. Rushdie is no different. He uses the book to respond to critics and authors who have been less than favorable in their reviews, notably Hermione Lee, James Wood (who he calls a malevolent Procrustes). In the reception of his work, Salman Rushdie has a rather Manichean outlook. What seemed greatly absent from the book was a critical self-assessment of his own writing. The recent books that bombed have been blamed on the reluctance of the public and the critics to not have the courage to follow the artistic directions that he wished to explore. He has won almost every major literary award and even a knighthood. But, one can never tire of reading and wanting good reviews. I found it interesting that for all his hankering for awards he stops short of saying anything about the winning the Nobel prize. Maybe he considers it ill omen. If any author from the subcontinent gets it next, it will be him.
There are no doubts about the quality and originality of his writing. As for his personality, I found it hard to be swayed into a sympathetic assessment. It makes one wonders if there is a shred a truth to Marianne Wiggins’s description - ‘megalomaniacal’, ‘self-seeking’, and a ‘coward who threw away the great chance history gave him’. It’s been by any measure an extraordinary life. The inescapable fact is that we may not have had this book, on any books after the fatwa. The threat to his life was indeed real. His publisher in Norway survived an assassination attempt and his translator in Japan was killed. It would be an entirely different story if he had not lived to tell his tale. He lived. If he lived to blunder in his personal life, he also lived to write more. Despite recent disappointments, there is the hope that more wonderful words and works are yet to come forth from his pen.
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Our life is far less in our control than we like to believe. We, characters in our own Book of Life, are often pulled by strings that are not in our hands. A reason to write fiction is that we can exact more control over the destiny of our characters and choose the path the story takes. The art of fiction can transcend the limitations, weaknesses, and faults of personality; outlive the upheavals of history and tyrannical bans on the written word. Mikhail Bulgakov was right when he wrote that ‘manuscripts don’t burn’. Ten years after my smuggling attempt and twenty-five years after it was published, the book is still banned in India. My smuggled copy of The Satanic Verses will survive Hell. Ultimately, it’s not whether books can outlast fire, but if books can enmesh in human memory such that they withstand the slow erosion of Time.
No big deal - that certainly wasn’t the case with the book and its author. Instead of quiet discussions in book clubs and chats among the literati, there were world-wide protests, effigy burnings, deaths, bans, an infamous fatwa and the author had to go into hiding. All for writing a book that challenged a notion. These stories on ‘the outside’ are well-known and well-documented. What about the story on ‘the inside’? What about the life of the fugitive author? The boy who was playing with the matches - “what was he thinking?” This is that story - the Curious Case of Joseph Anton a.k.a. Salman Rushdie - his chronicle of life under the fatwa. To ‘give himself some distance’, he chose to write this story more than two decades after the events described in the book. Unusually, it is also written in the third person, ostensibly to give him distance from the main subject - himself.
The Early Years
There is no escaping The Satanic Verses, but, before that, I must start at the beginning: the portrait of the artist as a young man. Salman Rushdie arrived as a young boy at Rugby, the storied public school. Far from having an idyllic and cheery Wodehousian time, he was generally miserable. Salman Rushdie writes he was charged with three unforgivable sins in an English public school: being clever, being foreign, and being non-sportif. He kept his family in the dark about his miseries and troubles adjusting at Rugby because he didn’t want to whine about the minor humiliations while his parents were spending a fortune to have him up there. So, he in his letters back home he wrote his first fictions. The lonely boy, if had no real friends, did have the company of books. He won a place to Cambridge where against his father’s advice he chose to studying history instead of economics. Cambridge was where he finally found himself adjusting to the life abroad. He always wanted to be a writer, an intention which he made clear to his parents upon graduating. This career choice baffled his father whose best response was, “What am I going to tell my friends?” (Later in life Salman Rushdie is equally baffled when his academically disinclined son Zafar decides to quit college and make a living as a DJ and event promoter).
Making it as a writer was more fantasy than reality. After a few futile months in which he wrote nothing of consequence, the hungry and penniless Rushdie set aside his dreams and began as a copywriter on the suggestion of a friend. It was a less romantic, but a prudent decision as the road to literary stardom is long and hard. The 1970s was a difficult decade. He did a lot of writing, but, by his own admission, a large part of what he wrote in those years was forgettable and fit for the rubbish bin. His first novel Grimus was published, but sank without a trace ignored by the critics and public alike. Rushdie then despaired. Colleagues like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan had in the meantime ‘soared like birds just after being hatched’. It was then that he decided to return to his ‘Indian roots’ and write a more authentic story. After an extended visit to India to gather material, he spent the next five years writing Midnight’s Children. Shortly before the novel was completed he made the courageous decision to quit his job and live by the pen alone. He had enough of writing ads for cream cakes and hair colorants. He told his then-wife Clarissa after quitting - “Be prepared to be poor”. His timing could not have been better. A few months later, the book won the Booker Prize and the success of Midnight’s Children catapulted him from obscurity into the literary universe. It took him thirteen years from the time he left Cambridge till the summer of 1981 when the book was published ‘to simply get started’.
Then began the high life as a writer. His next book Shame, a sequel to Midnight’s Children did not take too long to write (1 ½ years) and a translation of the book even won a literary award in Iran. But by 1985, the writing wasn’t going as well and he felt stuck. On a trip to Australia with Bruce Chatwin (the one of the Moleskine fame) at Ayer’s Rock or Uluru, Rushdie got the idea for The Satanic Verses. Once again he dug deep into his past and history to find the seed of his next novel.
The Satanic Verses
His father, Anees Rushdie was a non-believing Muslim but was nevertheless a great reader and scholar of the Qu’ran. Interestingly, Anees had changed his last name to ‘Rushdie’, taken from Ibn-Rushd (or Averroës), the famous Islamic thinker and skeptic. According to Rushdie Sr. there were two main issues: a)Islam was the only major religion founded after recorded history, and hence could and should be studied historically, b) the order of the verses in the Qu’ran was messed up and needed some rearranging. So, Rushdie Jr., riffed on the speculation that the Prophet Muhammad may have changed a verse to include local deities/idols into his early version to perhaps make his message reach a wider audience. There are inscriptions on the Ka'aba according to Rushdie, Jr. that lead credence to the idea. The controversial verse that Rushdie was accused of tampering with was - Sura 53 - also known as ‘an-Najm’. In any case, this speculation was a point of departure for Rushdie. The Satanic Verses was a personal book, the third in his series of books ‘about naming the parts of himself’. “Then”, he writes, “there would be nothing more to write about - except the whole of human life.” The novel about ‘migration and transformation’ itself would be so radically transformed that it would be impossible to read it in the spirit of how he intended it.
When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator’s have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it …Life after the fatwa
… The Satanic Verses left home - its metamorphosis, its transformation would be extreme.
Initially, his thought when the controversy broke out was to argue the literary merit of the novel - a serious writer had written a serious book. He would find that the arguments of art fail miserably in the face of the rhetoric of politics and irrational fervor of religionists. Ultimately, the book and its persecuted author would be subsumed in the larger fight for literary freedom.
Rushdie begins the book by invoking the image of blackbirds on a fence. The reaction to The Satanic Verses was like when one blackbird sits on the fence. No one takes any notice of the first blackbird. It’s nothing unusual. One by one blackbirds begin to arrive and soon there is a whole swarm. Then it’s hard not to take notice. In hindsight, it is easy to trace that line that connects his ‘unfunny Valentine’ from the Ayatollah to the planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11. Rushdie’s self-anointment as the ‘first’ martyr in the era of Islamic fundamentalism and international terrorism is contestable, but his words ring true:
The violence and menace of the response was a terrorist act that had to be confronted. Having made trouble, he opposed the trouble that came at him in return, and wanted the world’s leaders to defend his right to be a troublemaker....It isn’t easy to play the role of a troublemaker even if you had 24-hr police protection. For the better part of the next decade, Rushdie would lead a fugitive existence, adopt a fake name - Joseph Anton (an amalgamation of ‘Joseph’ Conrad and ‘Anton’ Chekov), hide or be hidden by friends, and forgo any sort of normal life. Ostensibly, the book is about that struggle to lead a semblance of a normal life, the will to live the rich internal life of a creative artist in face of a challenge most people don’t face when they get up in the morning - a price on their head.
Decoding Joseph Anton
As a reader the project is not to read Joseph Anton but to read Salman Rushdie; to draw out the first-person that is talking and hiding behind the voice of the third-person narrator. In his interview on the BBC, Rushdie said that he kept a detailed diary of his time and one can make the assumption that the facts in this book are narrated with accuracy. What good is a memoir that is an objective, journalistic account? In memoirs, one writes not as things unfolded, but as one remembers them. The reader is interested in a) in the facts presented, and more so in how they can be interpreted, and b) what details seem to be not completely filled in, or the silences. In that scheme of things, this book is a treasure trove. Clues are strewn all over its pages and you have the exciting possibility of an unreliable narrator/witness.
All the stress of running and hiding, he writes, may have cost him at least one, perhaps two books. Yet in those troubled times he managed to write the magnificent The Moor’s Last Sigh suffused with the scent of spices and the ghosts of Granada, and, one of my favorites, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a reworking of Orpheus and Eurydice myth into the history of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s remarkable that these books were written whilst he was still banned from visiting India. A feat no less astonishing than Joyce writing about a Dublin that he would never see again. Quoting an exiled African poet, he writes that he perhaps ‘carries India in his heart’. It is interesting that his recent works written in a state of freedom have failed to match the power of his books written under the fatwa. Has the creative fire ebbed? or the stimulus lost? the stimulus that comes from the realization that life may abruptly end.
Bulk of the book deals with details of the daily annoyances and humiliations of a man in hiding, dealing with controversies around The Satanic Verses, the fight to get the paperback published, the organizing for the freedom of speech, search for houses and various security arrangements, and how he spent time with Zafar. As much as one is sympathetic to his situation, after more than a few hundred pages one tires of the diaristic entries.
While he could have spared us some of his quotidian tedium, a special treat of the book is the insider’s view of the writer’s world. He lays bare the the underbelly of publishing, and the cast of characters that making a living in it - writers, agents, critics, editors and publishers. The literary anecdotes make for interesting reading. He describes Roald Dahl’s nasty long hands that he tried to lay on his former lodger and editor Liz Calder; how he once corrected Harold Pinter’s social manners; his friendly I-shall-never-speak-to-you-again argument with one of his good friends Martin Amis; meeting Kurt Vonnegut, and the subsequent falling out; the solidarity of South African writers Lessing, Coetzee and Gordimer. Then there are the petty literary squabbles among writers. Whatever they may say, writers care a lot about reviews and a good way to make literary enemies is to write a bad review. Rushdie traces John Le Carre’s hostility after the crisis to an unfavorable review of his book for which Le Carre had not forgiven or forgotten him. There are other delights. His telephone conversation arranged impromptu by Carlos Fuentes with “God” or Gabriel García Marquez in broken English and Spanish just after dinner one day in Mexico City. His envy of Günter Grass’s talents for sculpting and dancing. What was greatly touching was the generosity of the literary world in offering him solidarity,shelter, and safety while he was on the run.
Man and Superman
Like all his other books, this book is simultaneously a lot of other things. It’s an apology and attack, a love letter to writers and the art of writing, a stage to settle personal and literary scores, a pulpit to denounce and mock his critics, as much as it is a memoir - an objective description and subjective interpretation of his life. Rushdie emerges as a more complex and complicated character than in any of his books. Joseph Anton, the main protagonist of the book is not its hero, or even its tragic hero, but a human participant in the roil of life. A man who is heroic in many ways, and miserably less so in others. The limitations of the mortal man get in the way of the superman’s script. Even a writer as gifted as Rushdie struggles to explain the course of his tangled human life.
His life is a work in progress on the difficulty and challenge of being a husband and father. The complicated domestic life of Mr. Rushdie is an ever present drama playing in the background despite whatever else is happening on the main stage. Over the course of the book, he tries to untangle some knots, clear the air, get back at his ex’s, apologize for his infidelities with the aim to steer the reader towards a sympathetic view. I found the dedication to be an atonement. He dedicates the book to Clarissa and Elizabeth, Wives #1 and #3, and the mothers of his two sons - Zafar and Milan. He cheated on them both, and then left them with toddling sons to move on to other women. In contrast, Wives #2 and #4, who were the ones who did the leaving, have been left out of the dedication. Wife #2, the writer Marianne Wiggins is not given the most flattering portrait (he alleges she disappeared with a bunch of his stuff, including the first copy of the Satanic Verses). His chief ire is reserved for Wife #4 - Padma Lakshmi - who he calls the ‘Illusion’. Like the original and improbable ‘egghead and bombshell’ combo of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, the media found the Padma and Salman mix just as fascinating. There is no fool like an old fool. Like Wife #2, Padma felt there was room for only one person’s ego and outsized ambitions in the relationship. There seem little sign that he has recovered from the breakup bomb that Padma dropped on him in 2007. For all his missteps with the women in his life, he does try in his way to be a good father to his sons. Like other places in the book, Rushdie then proceeds congratulate himself how sweet and balanced they both turned out, unscathed from all the separation and marital turmoil.
Another aspect that is uncovered in the pages is how many times Rushdie mentions his quibbles and worries about money. He complains about alimony, monetary arrangements, and the divorce settlements with his ex-wives. While he was given state-paid police protection, he had to pay for other items like the houses, their rents, and armored cars from his own wallet. Anees Rushdie had frittered away his wealth in drink and bad business schemes, to die with only a few notes in a drawer. Rushdie Jr., perhaps unconsciously decided to be more prudent with his own. It’s no surprise that he sought not just literary but also monetary success. Nothing wrong with putting thy money in thy purse. Shakespeare wrote for money and even that writer’s writer James Joyce was cadging money whenever he could. What seemed suspect was his motivation to get the paperback edition of The Satanic Verses published. Was driven by the lure of more royalties as alleged by his critics? If true, then its a double standard to put the lives of the publisher and his staff in jeopardy in the service of freedom of speech, while he was safely hiding. We may never know.
If not money, a writer at least wants fame. Public adulation is good, it pays the bills. Critical adulation is what elevates a writer, wins him awards and separates him from other writers of pulp. You would be hard-pressed to find a writer who eschews awards. Rushdie is no different. He uses the book to respond to critics and authors who have been less than favorable in their reviews, notably Hermione Lee, James Wood (who he calls a malevolent Procrustes). In the reception of his work, Salman Rushdie has a rather Manichean outlook. What seemed greatly absent from the book was a critical self-assessment of his own writing. The recent books that bombed have been blamed on the reluctance of the public and the critics to not have the courage to follow the artistic directions that he wished to explore. He has won almost every major literary award and even a knighthood. But, one can never tire of reading and wanting good reviews. I found it interesting that for all his hankering for awards he stops short of saying anything about the winning the Nobel prize. Maybe he considers it ill omen. If any author from the subcontinent gets it next, it will be him.
There are no doubts about the quality and originality of his writing. As for his personality, I found it hard to be swayed into a sympathetic assessment. It makes one wonders if there is a shred a truth to Marianne Wiggins’s description - ‘megalomaniacal’, ‘self-seeking’, and a ‘coward who threw away the great chance history gave him’. It’s been by any measure an extraordinary life. The inescapable fact is that we may not have had this book, on any books after the fatwa. The threat to his life was indeed real. His publisher in Norway survived an assassination attempt and his translator in Japan was killed. It would be an entirely different story if he had not lived to tell his tale. He lived. If he lived to blunder in his personal life, he also lived to write more. Despite recent disappointments, there is the hope that more wonderful words and works are yet to come forth from his pen.
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Our life is far less in our control than we like to believe. We, characters in our own Book of Life, are often pulled by strings that are not in our hands. A reason to write fiction is that we can exact more control over the destiny of our characters and choose the path the story takes. The art of fiction can transcend the limitations, weaknesses, and faults of personality; outlive the upheavals of history and tyrannical bans on the written word. Mikhail Bulgakov was right when he wrote that ‘manuscripts don’t burn’. Ten years after my smuggling attempt and twenty-five years after it was published, the book is still banned in India. My smuggled copy of The Satanic Verses will survive Hell. Ultimately, it’s not whether books can outlast fire, but if books can enmesh in human memory such that they withstand the slow erosion of Time.
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