I devoured Rushdie. There was a time when I could have asserted that I had read every word he had ever published, and that would have been a fact. I read all his fiction, all his non-fiction, and even the occasional titbit vintage internet would throw up on those text interfaces. The doctor who falls in love in parts while examining a woman through a veil. The Braganza pickle factory. The nuns who baked bread in Shame. The scribe of Satanic Verses. The kites in Ground Beneath Her Feet. The music in Ground Beneath Her Feet. Vina and Ormus in Ground Beneath Her Feet.
After a while, I felt I knew where the inspiration for this character came from (his long professed love for sci-fi) or that description of childhood (his relationship with his parents). When I learned to use a camera, I always thought, where is my kite shot? When I read about celebrity scandals, I thought of Vina, and why we need them in our lives. When I traveled abroad for a little while, I thought of his kaleidoscope and telescope. I thought of how he described the way someone afar has a perspective that someone close does not have — go very near the movie screen, and all you can see are garbled dots. It is as if, the author is a sieve; you start to see the world through them. Do it long enough, and the world rushdifies every time you wonder what if.
They are saying now that he may not be able to see through one eye.
I was very angry with him reading Fury. Now, this happens too. In this intimate cocoon you have woven for you and the author to inhabit, there will be some frayed threads. For, in any relationship that has survived a reasonable timespan, you get grumpy. The question is, do you stay grumpy, or do you patch up those tiny holes in your gharonda and move on? I could see what had happened — he had had an image of a person standing over the sleeping forms of his loved ones, with a knife in his hand. A potent seed, and he could harvest all sorts of herbs from it, guaranteed to alter your reality and send you on a trip. And yet, what he rolled up didn’t sit well with me — I felt queasy. It was as if he didn’t try hard enough. The resolution seemed, shudder, almost a cynical ploy. I was grumpy.
They are saying his liver could be damaged.
I think that’s about the time we parted ways. I did read Shalimar the Clown, and felt deflated. The experience seemed a simulacra of that pyaar I had — there was that wit, but where was the wisdom? Somewhere, I had changed, and he had too; it was as if the distance had grown too much, and so had time. The telescope could peer into stars, but could not comprehend the barbed wire. His perspective seemed dated, almost anachronistic.
Someone stabbed him.
I never paid much attention to Rushdie the person, the man, the celebrity. It was as if the abrasive relationships he had with the women he loved, or the person on Twitter were someone else, some other Rushdie, whom I did not care to know much, or perhaps even care for much. I did listen to him once giving a talk and what he said stayed with me. At that time, I was wondering then about why I wrote, what should I seek, should there even be a should, and all those circular statements that make logic roll its eyes. He said — push the envelope. Whatever you do as a writer, try to push the envelope — what are you doing to do that? Whether it is with the language, with the story, or with any other aspect of the art — how are you changing it? That quest and all that it meant, felt right, like awakening to birdsong.
When I read the news last night, I sat in shock, and I didn’t know when the tears came. A loved one is unwell, and in all the commotion of figuring out travel to see her, here I was, shocked and unable to process anything — should I help with the packing, should I also travel, should I do this or that.
I would not have been able to tell you what was it that made me livid. Was it because this person stabbed him, stabbed him in the neck, a direct attack on his voice, his rational voice, a funny voice, a voice that sought to playfully mock, a voice that epitomised the right to offend. Was it because it was Rushdie and his levity that I never imagined the threat to his life as real; it seemed like a farce — who would stab the clown? Was it pyaar — my fellow Bombaywallah who left her shores like me, showed me that I could say jetti when I wrote in my mongrel tongue, the curse and the craft of an urban Indian writing in English. And writing is all I can do — even now, when I don’t want to accept that the world changed last evening, and yet hasn’t changed at all.
i share the pained anger n love for his work, that you’ve written for yourself and us from.