Thirty-three years after the then Iran leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa with a nearly $3 million bounty to kill Salman Rushdie for his apparently blasphemous book, Satanic Verses, and years after the world had relegated and buried that death warrant to distant memory, the author was stabbed grievously by a fanatic just as he had settled down to address a literary event at a college in New York, bringing the fatwa back into public discourse.
As Rushdie lay on his hospital bed, moved by the devastating impact the attack had on his body and spirit, he decided to write about it as a cathartic exercise and to seek some closure. The result is the book called, what else, Knife.
Rushdie’s books are not easy to read, as his incredible plots tend to combine history with fantasy, surreal incidents, magic, cultural interpretations, absurdist philosophies and reimaginations of older classics, written using inventive grammar. Even though his excitingly titled books have Indianness ingrained in them, for me, more often than not, they have belonged to the fifty-club, where I’ve barely managed to cross the fiftieth page. So, with much trepidation I picked up his new book.
Suffice it to say, it was bereft of his naturally crafty storytelling and his vivid imaginations, and I surprised myself by finishing it in one binge read, enjoying it thoroughly.
Divided into two sections, one on his near-death experience triggered by hate and the other on his survival and astonishing recovery ignited by love, we closely witness the attempted murder and his struggle back to normalcy, albeit after losing an eye and the use of an arm, permanently.
A life of irony
Knife brings to fore the few ironies in his life. Rushdie was to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm when the man had rushed up the stage and violently stabbed him multiple times. To dramatic effect, Rushdie describes the man in black clothes and a black mask charging up to him as the last thing his right eye would ever see.
Rushdie confesses that he had imagined this event happening at some time or other in his life because of the fatwa. He claims he had a premonition of this a few nights before when he had a dream about being attacked by a gladiator in a Roman amphitheatre. As if it was a scene that had already played out, in his book Shalimar the Crown, Rushdie describes a man stabbed brutally by another man who towers above him holding a bloodied knife.
Rushdie had hoped that bigger events like 9/11 and the knighthood conferred on him in 2007, would get people to forget the fatwa, but the attack brought it right back into public consciousness. While in his autobiography, Joseph Anton, which I have since read, he is very bitter about life and his relationships, in Knife, he seems to have reconciled to his fate. Through the book, Rushdie projects a very Candide type okay-bring-in-on like state of mind.
In his tepid humor, Rushdie says he never managed to see the knife and wonders what it would be like – long or short, broad bowie blade or narrow like a stiletto, bread knife serrated or crescent curved or a street kids flick knife, or a common kitchen knife stolen from his mother’s kitchen.
The irony is not lost on the fact that Khomeini had died the year he issued the fatwa and as per religious dictum, only the one who has issued the fatwa can rescind it, and so it lingered, not quite disappearing from public memory.
The fatwa years
His book Shame, set in Pakistan, resulted in vehement protests there, setting the stage for the fatwa after the outrage against Satanic Verses, released a few years later.
Prolific writer that he is, Rushdie has written sixteen books after the fatwa, compared to the five he had written before. The knife attack stifled his desire to be remembered as an accomplished author, a conjuror of varied stories, rather than just the man on who the fatwa was issued for a book, which was no longer available and, as per Royal Court Theatre, impossible to read.
Rushdie reflects on the price he has had to pay for his freedom to write. Immediately after the fatwa was issued in 1989, while Margaret Thatcher gave him protection in the UK, the Japanese translator was stabbed to death, the Italian translator was stabbed horrifically; his Norwegian publisher was shot three times and the hotel in which the Turkish translator was staying, was burnt down, killing 36 people. This led to a continually furious debate in British Parliament on why the state had to spend money to protect Rushdie from people of his own religion.
Rushdie refers to his decision to move to the US to be free of constant protection and to live like a free man. He says that the first principle of free expression is that you must take it for granted and that the person, who considers the consequences of what he says before he says it, cannot be free. He became a social butterfly in New York in order to shrug off the notion that he was dangerous company.
The attack
Rushdie vividly details the attack that lasted all of 27 seconds, beginning with the hard punch to his left jaw, bloodying his mouth followed by the vigorous stabbing and slashing, in the left hand, two deep stab wounds in his neck, one on his left shoulder, a few on his right side, slashes across the center of his chest and a deep gash on his thigh, one on the left side of his mouth and finally how the knife was thrust in his right eye and went all the way to the optic nerve, damaging it permanently.
Rushdie feels embarrassed, ashamed of his failure to fight back at that instant as fear, panic and paralysis overcame him. He questions why he was overcome by the fatalistic sense of surrender and didn’t make the slightest attempt to defend himself or to run?
Rushdie then wonders why the assailant didn’t opt to shoot him from afar and be done with the task, choosing instead to use the knife. Did the assassin, he asks, want an intimate encounter, deriving pleasure from the act that would thrust him to glory as the executor of Khomeini’s fatwa?
Rushdie recounts the feeling of pain, deliriousness, and the fear that he would die without meeting his family one last time. He also writes about feeling humiliated with his legs in the air, his clothes torn apart and his inability to understand the conversations of hundreds of people around, picturing himself as a dish under preparation with many cooks hovering around him.
At times, he laments his financial condition while choosing which hospital to be attached to for recovery, whether he could afford an emergency airlift costing $20,000 or the $15,000 he paid for his oral surgery. Comically, he talks about his scarred Ralph Lauren suit and remembers in the initial minutes after the attack if he would ever be reunited with his credit cards and the car keys in it.
The book, though on a darkest chapter on Rushdie’s life, is metaphorically rich and a delight to read. This is perhaps his first book that reads partly like a thriller, partly like a discourse on freedom and partly expound his views on religious fanaticism.
The attacker
Not wanting to give the attacker any glory, Rushdie refers to him as ‘A’, wondering how without having read any of his books, and having just watched a couple of YouTube videos, he was incited enough to attack him.
In an imaginary conversation with his attacker who he decided against meeting and refrained from attending the court hearings, Rushdie questions him about God, religion, and his beliefs. It’s an interesting even if a one-sided view, since we don’t have the assailant’s perspective, who after spending time in Lebanon had got radicalised. But we get nothing from this, much like when Samuel Beckett asked his drunk assailant why he stabbed him, the man had said ‘I don’t know sir, I’m sorry!’
Love
Rushdie cherishes his love story and the happiness he has found with his current wife Eliza. He met her at a literary event, and charmed by her smile, spent the entire evening with her. He discovered that just like him, she uses her middle name. He lists others like Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Sean Connery and Rachel Meghan Markle who are middle name people and tries to position himself and Eliza in such company.
I thoroughly enjoyed his use of free association, illuminating a thought with multiple literary and cultural references, bringing an occasional chuckle at his effort.
As a declared atheist, he ponders over the dilemma of accepting that a greater force had a role to play in giving him a new life, after such a ghastly attack with zero chances of survival.
Perhaps the final irony is the opening line in The Satanic Verses, in which the character Gibreel Farishta sings, “To be born again, first you have to die!”
Book details
- Published: Penguin Random House Ltd
- Pages: 320
- Price: ₹428
Find the book here
(The reviewer runs 91 film studios that produces regional language feature films)