Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Salman Rushdie
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue: The First Blackbird
I: A Faustian Contract in Reverse
II: ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’
III: Year Zero
IV: The Trap of Wanting to Be Loved
V: ‘Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me’
VI: Why It’s Impossible to Photograph the Pampas
VII: A Truckload of Dung
VIII: Mr Morning and Mr Afternoon
IX: His Millenarian Illusion
X: At the Halcyon Hotel
Acknowledgements
Copyright
On 14 February 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been ‘sentenced to death’ by Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being ‘against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran’.
So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov – Joseph Anton.
How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for over nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom.
It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels, one collection of short stories, three works of non-fiction, and the co-editor of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. In 1993 Midnight’s Children was judged to be the Best of the Booker, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its forty-year history. The Moor’s Last Sigh won the Whitbread Prize in 1995 and the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
To my children
Zafar and Milan
and their mothers
Clarissa and Elizabeth
and to everyone
who helped
And by that destiny, to perform an act
Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
AFTERWARDS, WHEN THE world was exploding around him and the lethal blackbirds were massing on the climbing frame in the school playground, he felt annoyed with himself for forgetting the name of the BBC reporter, a woman, who had told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She had called him at home on his private line without explaining how she got the number. ‘How does it feel,’ she asked him, ‘to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?’ It was a sunny Tuesday in London but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: ‘It doesn’t feel good.’ This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left to live and thought the answer was probably a single-digit number. He put down the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom at the top of the narrow Islington terraced house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door.
It was Valentine’s Day but he hadn’t been getting on with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. Six days earlier she had told him she was unhappy in the marriage, that she ‘didn’t feel good around him any more’, even though they had been married for little more than a year, and he, too, already knew it had been a mistake. Now she was staring at him as he moved nervously around the house, drawing curtains, checking window bolts, his body galvanised by the news as if an electric current were passing through it, and he had to explain to her what was happening. She reacted well, beginning to discuss what they should do next. She used the word we. That was courageous.
A car arrived at the house, sent by CBS television. He had an appointment at the American network’s studios in Bowater House, Knightsbridge, to appear live, by satellite link, on its morning show. ‘I should go,’ he said. ‘It’s live television. I can’t just not show up.’ Later that morning the memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin was to be held at the Orthodox church on Moscow Road in Bayswater. Less than two years earlier he had celebrated his fortieth birthday at Homer End, Bruce’s house in Oxfordshire. Now Bruce was dead of Aids, and death had arrived at his own door as well. ‘What about the memorial?’ his wife asked. He didn’t have an answer for her. He unlocked the front door, went outside, got into the car and was driven away, and although he did not know it then, so that the moment of leaving his home did not feel unusually freighted with meaning, he would not go back to that house, his home for five years, until three years later, by which time it was no longer his.
The children in the classroom in Bodega Bay, California, sing a sad nonsense song. She combed her hair but once a year, ristle-te, rostle-te, mo, mo, mo. Outside the school a cold wind is blowing. A single blackbird flies down from the sky and settles on the climbing frame in the playground. The children’s song is a roundelay. It begins but it doesn’t end. It just goes round and round. With every stroke she shed a tear, ristle-te, rostle-te, hey-bombosity, knicketyknackety, retroquo-quality, willoby-wallaby, mo, mo, mo. There are four blackbirds on the climbing frame, and then a fifth arrives. Inside the school the children are singing. Now there are hundreds of blackbirds on the climbing frame and thousands more birds fill the sky, like a plague of Egypt. A song has begun, to which there is no end.
When the first blackbird comes down to roost on the climbing frame it seems individual, particular, specific. It is not necessary to deduce a general theory, a wider scheme of things, from its presence. Later, after the plague begins, it’s easy for people to see the first blackbird as a harbinger. But when it lands on the climbing frame it’s just one bird.
In the years to come he will dream about this scene, understanding that his story is a sort of prologue: the tale of the moment when the first blackbird lands. When it begins it’s just about him; it’s individual, particular, specific. Nobody feels inclined to draw any conclusions from it. It will be a dozen years and more before the story grows until it fills the sky, like the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon, like a pair of planes flying into tall buildings, like the plague of murderous birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s great film.
At the CBS offices he was the big news story of the day. People in the newsroom and on various monitors were already using the word that would soon be hung around his neck like a millstone. They used the word as if it were a synonym for ‘death sentence’ and he wanted to argue, pedantically, that that was not what the word meant. But from this day forward it would mean that for most people in the world. And for him.
Fatwa.
‘I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the “Satanic Verses” book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.’ Somebody gave him a printout of the text as he was escorted towards the studio for his interview. Again, his old self wanted to argue, this time with the word ‘sentence’. This was not a sentence handed down by any court he recognised, or which had any jurisdiction over him. It was the edict of a cruel and dying old man. But he also knew that his old self’s habits were of no use any more. He was a new self now. He was the person in the eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses, a title subtly distorted by the omission of the initial The. The Satanic Verses was a novel. Satanic Verses were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author, ‘Satan Rushdy’, the horned creature on the placards carried by demonstrators down the streets of a faraway city, the hanged man with protruding red tongue in the crude cartoons they bore. Hang Satan Rushdy. How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight.
King Charles I had denied the legitimacy of the sentence handed down against him. That hadn’t stopped Oliver Cromwell from having him beheaded.
He was no king. He was the author of a book.
He looked at the journalists looking at him and he wondered if this was how people looked at men being taken to the gallows or the electric chair or the guillotine. One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous?
‘Oh, don’t worry too much,’ the journalist said. ‘Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.’
On air, when he was asked how he responded to the threat, he said, ‘I wish I’d written a more critical book.’ He was proud, then and always, that he had said this. It was the truth. He did not feel his book was especially critical of Islam, but, as he said on American television that morning, a religion whose leaders behaved in this way could probably do with a little criticism.
When the interview was over they told him his wife had called. He phoned the house. ‘Don’t come back here,’ she said. ‘There are two hundred journalists on the sidewalk waiting for you.’
‘I’ll go to the agency,’ he said. ‘Pack a bag and meet me there.’
His literary agency, Wylie, Aitken & Stone, had its offices in a white-stuccoed house on Fernshaw Road in Chelsea. There were no journalists camped outside – evidently the world’s press hadn’t thought he was likely to visit his agent on such a day – and when he walked in every phone in the building was ringing and every call was about him. Gillon Aitken, his British agent, gave him an astonished look. He was on the phone with the British-Indian Member of Parliament for Leicester East, Keith Vaz. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘Do you want to talk to this fellow?’
Vaz said, in that phone conversation, that what had happened was ‘appalling, absolutely appalling’, and promised his ‘full support’. A few weeks later he was one of the main speakers at a demonstration against The Satanic Verses attended by over three thousand Muslims, and described that event as ‘one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain’.
He found that he couldn’t think ahead, that he had no idea what the shape of his life ought now to be, or how to make plans. He could focus only on the immediate, and the immediate was the memorial service for Bruce Chatwin. ‘My dear,’ Gillon said, ‘do you think you ought to go?’ He made his decision. Bruce had been his close friend. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’
Marianne arrived, a faintly deranged look glinting in her eye, upset about having been mobbed by photographers when she left the house at 41 St Peter’s Street. The next day that look would be on the front pages of every newspaper in the land. One of the papers gave the look a name, in letters two inches high: THE FACE OF FEAR. She didn’t say much. Neither of them did. They got into their car, a black Saab, and he drove it across the park to Bays-water. Gillon Aitken, his worried expression and long, languid body folded into the back seat, came along for the ride.
His mother and his youngest sister lived in Karachi. What would happen to them? His middle sister, long estranged from the family, lived in Berkeley, California. Would she be safe there? His oldest sister, Sameen, his ‘Irish twin’, was in a north London suburb with her family, in Wembley, not far from the great stadium. What should be done to protect them? His son, Zafar, just nine years and eight months old, was with his mother Clarissa in their house at 60 Burma Road, off Green Lanes, near Clissold Park. At that moment Zafar’s tenth birthday felt far, far away. ‘Dad,’ Zafar had asked, ‘why don’t you write books I can read?’ It made him think of a line in ‘St Judy’s Comet’, a song by Paul Simon written as a lullaby for his young son. If I can’t sing my boy to sleep, well, it makes your famous daddy look so dumb. ‘Good question,’ he had replied. ‘Just let me finish this book I’m working on now, and then I’ll write a book for you. Deal?’ ‘Deal.’ So he had finished the book and it had been published and now, perhaps, he would not have time to write another. You should never break a promise made to a child, he thought, and then his whirling mind added the idiotic rider, but is the death of the author a reasonable excuse?
His mind was running on murder.
Five years ago he had been travelling with Bruce Chatwin in Australia’s ‘red centre’, making a note of the graffiti in Alice Springs that read SURRENDER, WHITE MAN, YOUR TOWN IS SURROUNDED, and hauling himself painfully up Ayers Rock while Bruce, who was proud of having recently made it all the way up to Everest base camp, skipped ahead as if he were running up the gentlest of slopes, and listening to the locals’ tales about the so-called ‘dingo baby’ case, and staying in a fleapit called the Inland Motel where, the previous year, a thirty-six-year-old long-distance truck driver called Douglas Crabbe had been refused a drink because he was already too drunk, had become abusive to the bar staff, and, after he was thrown out, had driven his truck at full speed into the bar, killing five people.
Crabbe was giving evidence in a courtroom in Alice Springs and they went along to listen. The driver was conservatively dressed, with downcast eyes, and spoke in a low, even voice. He insisted he was not the sort of person who could have done such a thing, and, when asked why he was so sure of that, replied that he had been driving trucks for many years, and ‘looking after them as if they were my own’ (here there was a beat of silence, and the unspoken word in that silence might have been ‘children’), and for him to half destroy a truck was completely against his character. The members of the jury stiffened visibly when they heard that, and it was obvious that his cause was lost. ‘But of course,’ Bruce murmured, ‘he’s absolutely telling the truth.’
The mind of one murderer valued trucks more highly than human beings. Five years later there might be people on their way to execute a writer for his blasphemous words, and faith, or a particular interpretation of faith, was the truck they loved more than human life. This was not his first blasphemy, he reminded himself. His climb up Ayers Rock with Bruce would now also be forbidden. The Rock, returned to Aboriginal ownership and given back its ancient name of Uluru, was sacred territory, and climbers were no longer permitted.
It was on the flight home from that Australian journey in 1984 that he had begun to understand how to write The Satanic Verses.
The service at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St Sophia of the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, built and lavishly decorated 110 years earlier to resemble a grand cathedral of old Byzantium, was all sonorous, mysterious Greek. Its rituals were ornately Byzantine. Blah blah blah Bruce Chatwin, intoned the priests, blah blah Chatwin blah blah. They stood up, they sat down, they knelt, they stood and then sat again. The air was full of the stink of holy smoke. He remembered his father taking him, as a child in Bombay, to pray on the day of Eid ul-Fitr. There at the Idgah, the praying field, it was all Arabic, and a good deal of up–down forehead bumping, and standing up with your palms held in front of you like a book, and much mumbling of unknown words in a language he didn’t speak. ‘Just do what I do,’ his father said. They were not a religious family and hardly ever went to such ceremonies. He never learned the prayers or their meanings. This occasional prayer by imitation and mumbled rote was all he knew. Consequently, the meaningless ceremony in the church on Moscow Road felt familiar. Marianne and he were seated next to Martin Amis and his wife, Antonia Phillips. ‘We’re worried about you,’ Martin said, embracing him. ‘I’m worried about me,’ he replied. Blah Chatwin blah Bruce blah. The novelist Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew behind him. ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,’ he said.
There had been a couple of photographers on the pavement outside when he arrived. Writers didn’t usually draw a crowd of paparazzi. As the service progressed, however, journalists began to enter the church. One incomprehensible religion was playing host to a news story generated by another religion’s incomprehensibly violent assault. One of the worst aspects of what happened, he wrote later, was that the incomprehensible became comprehensible, the unimaginable became imaginable.
The service ended and the journalists pushed their way towards him. Gillon, Marianne and Martin tried to run interference. One persistent grey fellow (grey suit, grey hair, grey face, grey voice) got through the crowd, shoved a tape recorder towards him and asked the obvious questions. ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied. ‘I’m here for my friend’s memorial service. It’s not appropriate to do interviews.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ the grey fellow said, sounding puzzled. ‘I’m from the Daily Telegraph. They’ve sent me down specially.’
‘Gillon, I need your help,’ he said.
Gillon leaned down towards the reporter from his immense height and said, firmly, and in his grandest accent, ‘Fuck off.’
‘You can’t talk to me like that,’ said the man from the Telegraph. ‘I’ve been to public school.’
After that there was no more comedy. When he got out onto Moscow Road there were journalists swarming like drones in pursuit of their queen, photographers climbing on one another’s backs to form tottering hillocks bursting with flashlight. He stood there blinking and directionless, momentarily at a loss to know what to do.
There didn’t seem to be any escape. There was no possibility of walking to the car, which was parked a hundred yards down the road, without being followed by cameras and microphones and men who had been to various kinds of school, and who had been sent down specially. He was rescued by his friend Alan Yentob of the BBC, the film-maker and senior executive whom he had first met eight years earlier, when Alan was making an Arena documentary about a young writer who had just published a well-received novel called Midnight’s Children. Alan had a twin brother but people often said, ‘Salman’s the one who looks like your twin.’ They both disagreed with this view but it persisted. And today might not be the best day for Alan to be mistaken for his not-twin.
Alan’s BBC car pulled up in front of the church. ‘Get in,’ he said, and then they were driving away from the shouting journalists. They circled around Notting Hill for a while until the crowd outside the church dispersed and then went back to where the Saab was parked.
He got into his car with Marianne and suddenly they were alone and the silence weighed heavily on them both. They didn’t turn on the car radio, knowing the news would be full of hatred. ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked, even though they both knew the answer. Marianne had recently rented a small basement flat in the south-west corner of Lonsdale Square in Islington, not far from the house on St Peter’s Street, ostensibly to use as a workspace but actually because of the growing strain between them. Very few people knew of this flat’s existence. It would give them space and time to take stock and make decisions. They drove to Islington in silence. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
Marianne was a fine writer and a beautiful woman, but he had been discovering things he didn’t like.
When she had moved into his house she left a message on the answering machine of his friend Bill Buford, the editor of Granta magazine, to tell him that her number had changed. ‘You may recognise the new number,’ the message went on, and then, after what Bill thought of as an alarming pause, ‘I’ve got him.’ He had asked her to marry him in the highly emotional state that followed his father’s death in November 1987 and things between them had not remained good for very long. His closest friends, Bill Buford, Gillon Aitken and his American colleague Andrew Wylie, the Guyanese actress and writer Pauline Melville, and his sister Sameen, who had always been closer to him than anyone else, had all begun to confess that they didn’t like her, which was what friends did when people were breaking up, of course, and so, he thought, some of that had to be discounted. But he himself had caught her in a few lies and that had shaken him. What did she think of him? She often seemed angry and had a way of looking at the air over his shoulder when she spoke to him, as if she were addressing a ghost. He had always been drawn to her intelligence and wit and that was still there, and the physical attraction as well, the falling waves of her auburn hair, her wide, full-lipped American smile. But she had become mysterious to him and sometimes he thought he had married a stranger. A woman in a mask.
It was mid-afternoon and on this day their private difficulties felt irrelevant. On this day there were crowds marching down the streets of Tehran carrying posters of his face with the eyes poked out, making him look like one of the corpses in The Birds, with their blackened, bloodied, bird-pecked eye sockets. That was the subject today: his unfunny Valentine from those bearded men, those shrouded women, and the lethal old man dying in his room, making his last bid for some sort of dark, murderous glory. After he came to power the imam murdered many of those who brought him there and everyone else he disliked. Unionists, feminists, socialists, communists, homosexuals, whores and his own former lieutenants as well. There was a portrait of an imam like him in The Satanic Verses, an imam grown monstrous, his gigantic mouth eating his own revolution. The real imam had taken his country into a useless war with its neighbour, and a generation of young people had died, hundreds of thousands of his country’s young, before the old man called a halt. He said that accepting peace with Iraq was like eating poison, but he had eaten it. After that the dead cried out against the imam and his revolution became unpopular. He needed a way to rally the faithful and he found it in the form of a book and its author. The book was the devil’s work and the author was the devil and that gave him the enemy he needed. This author in this basement flat in Islington huddling with the wife from whom he was half estranged. This was the necessary devil of the dying imam.
Now that the school day was over he had to see Zafar. He called Pauline Melville and asked her to keep Marianne company while he made his visit. She had been his neighbour in Highbury Hill in the early 1980s, a bright-eyed, flamboyantly gesticulating, warm-hearted, mixed-race actress full of stories, about Guyana, where one of her Melville ancestors had met Evelyn Waugh and shown him round and was probably, she thought, the model for Mr Todd, the crazy old coot who captured Tony Last in the rainforest and forced him to read Dickens aloud forever in A Handful of Dust; and about rescuing her husband Angus from the Foreign Legion by standing at the gates of the fort and yelling until they let him out; and about playing Adrian Edmondson’s mum in the hit TV comedy series The Young Ones. She did stand-up comedy and had invented a male character who ‘became so dangerous and frightening that I had to stop playing him’, she said. She wrote down several of her Guyana stories and showed them to him. They were very, very good, and when they were published in her first book, Shape-Shifter, were widely praised. She was tough, shrewd and loyal, and he trusted her completely. She came over at once without any discussion even though it was her birthday, and in spite of her reservations about Marianne. He felt relieved to be leaving Marianne behind in the Lonsdale Square basement and driving by himself to Burma Road. The beautiful sunny day, whose astonishing wintry radiance had been like a rebuke to the unbeautiful news, was over. London in February was dark as the children made their way home. When he got to Clarissa and Zafar’s house the police were already there. ‘There you are,’ said a police officer. ‘We’ve been wondering where you’d gone.’
‘What’s going on, Dad?’ His son had a look on his face that should never visit the face of a nine-year-old boy. ‘I’ve been telling him,’ Clarissa brightly said, ‘that you’ll be properly looked after until this blows over, and it’s going to be just fine.’ Then she hugged him as she had not hugged him in five years, since their marriage ended. She was the first woman he had ever loved. He met her on 26 December 1969, five days before the end of the sixties, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-one. Clarissa Mary Luard. She had long legs and green eyes and that day she wore a hippie sheepskin coat and a headband around her tightly curled russet hair, and there flowed from her a radiance that lightened every heart. She had friends in the world of pop music who called her Happily (though, also happily, that name perished with the fey decade that spawned it) and had a mother who drank too much, and a father who came home shell-shocked from the war, in which he had been a Pathfinder pilot, and who leaped off the top of a building when she was fifteen years old. She had a beagle called Bauble who pissed on her bed.
There was much about her that was locked away beneath the brightness; she didn’t like people to see the shadows in her and when melancholy struck she would go into her room and shut the door. Maybe she felt her father’s sadness in her then and feared it might propel her off a building as it had him, so she sealed herself off until it passed. She bore the name of Samuel Richardson’s tragic heroine and had been educated, in part, at Harlow Tech. Clarissa from Harlow, strange echo of Clarissa Harlowe, another suicide in her ambit, this one fictional; another echo to be feared and blotted out by the dazzle of her smile. Her mother, Lavinia Luard, also bore an embarrassing nickname, Lavvy-Loo, and stirred family tragedy into a glass of gin and dissolved it there so that she could play the merry widow with men who took advantage of her. At first there had been a married ex-Guards officer called Colonel Ken Sweeting who came down from the Isle of Man to romance her, but he never left his wife, never intended to. Later, when she emigrated to the village of Mijas in Andalusia, there was a string of European wastrels ready to live off her and spend too much of her money. Lavinia had been strongly opposed to her daughter’s determination first to live with and then marry a strange long-haired Indian writer of whose family background she was uncertain, and who didn’t seem to have much money. She was friendly with the Leworthy family of Westerham in Kent and the plan was for the Leworthys’ accountant son Richard, a pale, bony fellow with Warholesque white-blond hair, to marry her beautiful daughter. Clarissa and Richard dated but she also began to see the long-haired Indian writer in secret, and it took her two years to decide between them, but one night in January 1972 when he threw a house-warming party at his newly rented flat in Cambridge Gardens, Ladbroke Grove, she arrived with her mind made up, and after that they were inseparable. It was always women who did the choosing, and men’s place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones.
All their years of desire, love, marriage, parenthood, infidelity (mostly his), divorce and friendship were in the hug she gave him that night. The event had flooded over the pain between them and washed it away, and beneath the pain was something old and deep that had not been destroyed. And also of course they were the parents of this beautiful boy and as parents they had always been united and in agreement. Zafar had been born in June 1979 just as Midnight’s Children was getting close to being finished. ‘Keep your legs crossed,’ he told her, ‘I’m writing as fast as I can.’ One afternoon there was a false alarm and he had thought, The child is going to be born at midnight, but that didn’t happen, he was born on Sunday 17 June at 2.15 p.m. He put that in the dedication of his novel. For Zafar Rushdie who, contrary to all expectations, was born in the afternoon. And who was now nine and a half years old and asking, anxiously, What’s going on?
‘We need to know,’ the police officer was saying, ‘what your immediate plans might be.’ He thought before replying. ‘I’ll probably go home,’ he finally said, and the stiffening postures of the men in uniform confirmed his suspicions. ‘No, sir, I wouldn’t recommend that.’ Then he told them, as he had known all along he would, about the Lonsdale Square basement where Marianne was waiting. ‘It’s not generally known as a place you frequent, sir?’ No, officer, it is not. ‘That’s good. When you do get back, sir, don’t go out again tonight, if that’s all right. There are meetings taking place, and you will be advised of their outcome tomorrow, as early as possible. Until then you should stay indoors.’
He talked to his son, holding him close, deciding at that moment that he would tell the boy as much as possible, giving what was happening the most positive colouring he could; that the way to help Zafar deal with the event was to make him feel on the inside of it, to give him a parental version he could trust and hold on to while he was being bombarded with other versions, in the school playground, or on television. The school was being terrific, Clarissa said, holding off photographers and a TV crew who wanted to film the threatened man’s son, and the boys too had been great. Without discussion they had closed ranks around Zafar and allowed him to have a normal, or an almost normal, day at school. Almost all the parents had been supportive, and the one or two who had demanded that Zafar be withdrawn from school, because his continued presence there might endanger their children, had been scolded by the headmaster and had beaten a shamefaced retreat. It was heartening to see courage, solidarity and principle at work on that day, the best of human values setting themselves against violence and bigotry – the human race’s dark side – in the very hour when the rising tide of darkness seemed so difficult to resist. What had been unthinkable until that day was becoming thinkable. But in Hampstead, at the Hall School, the resistance had already begun.
‘Will I see you tomorrow, Dad?’ He shook his head. ‘But I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you every evening at seven. If you’re not going to be here,’ he told Clarissa, ‘please leave me a message on the answering machine at home and say when I should call instead.’ This was early 1989. The terms PC, laptop, cellphone, mobile phone, Internet, Wi-Fi, SMS, email were either unknown or very new. He did not own a computer or a mobile phone. But he did own a house, even if he could not spend the night there, and in the house there was an answering machine, and he could call in and interrogate it, a new use of an old word, and get, no, retrieve, his messages. ‘Seven o’clock,’ he repeated. ‘Every night, OK?’ Zafar nodded gravely. ‘OK, Dad.’
He drove home alone and the news on the radio was all bad. Two days earlier there had been a ‘Rushdie riot’ outside the US Cultural Center in Islamabad, Pakistan. (It was not clear why the United States was being held responsible for The Satanic Verses.) The police had fired on the crowd and there were five dead and sixty injured. The demonstrators carried signs saying RUSHDIE, YOU ARE DEAD. Now the danger had been greatly multiplied by the Iranian edict. The Ayatollah Khomeini was not just a powerful cleric. He was a head of state ordering the murder of the citizen of another state, over whom he had no jurisdiction; and he had assassins at his service and they had been used before against ‘enemies’ of the Iranian Revolution, including enemies living outside Iran. There was another new word he had to learn. Here it was on the radio: extraterritoriality. Also known as state-sponsored terrorism. Voltaire had once said that it was a good idea for a writer to live near an international frontier so that, if he angered powerful men, he could skip across the border and be safe. Voltaire himself left France for England after he gave offence to an aristocrat, the Chevalier de Rohan, and remained in exile for seven years. But to live in a different country from one’s persecutors was no longer to be safe. Now there was extraterritorial action. In other words, they came after you.
Night in Lonsdale Square was cold, dark and clear. There were two policemen in the square. When he got out of his car they pretended not to notice. They were on short patrol, watching the street near the flat for one hundred yards in each direction, and he could hear their footsteps even when he was indoors. He realised, in that footstep-haunted silence, that he no longer understood his life, or what it might become, and he thought for the second time that day that there might not be very much more of life to understand. Pauline went home and Marianne went to bed early. It was a day to forget. It was a day to remember. He got into bed beside his wife and she turned towards him and they embraced, rigidly, like the unhappily married couple they were. Then, separately, each lying with their own thoughts, they failed to sleep.
Footsteps. Winter. A black wing fluttering on a climbing frame. I inform the proud Muslim people of the world, ristle-te, rostle-te, mo, mo, mo. To execute them wherever they may find them. Ristle-te, rostle-te, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retroquoquality, willoby-wallaby, mo, mo, mo.
WHEN HE WAS a small boy his father at bedtime told him the great wonder tales of the East, told them and retold them and remade them and reinvented them in his own way – the stories of Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights, stories told against death to prove the ability of stories to civilise and overcome even the most murderous of tyrants; and the animal fables of the Panchatantra; and the marvels that poured like a waterfall from the Kathasaritsagara, the ‘Ocean of the Streams of Story’, the immense story-lake created in Kashmir where his ancestors had been born; and the tales of mighty heroes collected in the Hamzanama and the Adventures of Hatim Tai (this was also a film, whose many embellishments of the original tales were added to and augmented in the bedtime retellings). To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no ‘real’ genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him; and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were his father’s, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life by them in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.
His mother, Negin, had stories for him too. Negin Rushdie had been born Zohra Butt. When she married Anis she changed not just her surname but her given name as well, reinventing herself for him, leaving behind the Zohra he didn’t want to think about, who had once been deeply in love with another man. Whether she was Zohra or Negin in her heart of hearts her son never knew, for she never spoke to him about the man she left behind, choosing, instead, to spill everyone’s secrets except her own. She was a gossip of world class, and sitting on her bed pressing her feet the way she liked him to, he, her eldest child and only son, drank in the delicious and sometimes salacious local news she carried in her head, the gigantic branching interwoven forests of whispering family trees she bore within her, hung with the juicy forbidden fruit of scandal. And these secrets too, he came to feel, belonged to him, for once a secret had been told it no longer belonged to her who told it but to him who received it. If you did not want a secret to get out there was only one rule: Tell it to nobody. This rule, too, would be useful to him in later life. In that later life, when he had become a writer, his mother said to him, ‘I’m going to stop telling you these things, because you put them in your books and then I get into trouble.’ Which was true, and perhaps she would have been well advised to stop, but gossip was her addiction, and she could not, any more than her husband, his father, could give up drink.
Windsor Villa, Warden Road, Bombay-26. It was a house on a hill and it overlooked the sea and the city flowing between the hill and the sea; and yes, his father was rich, though he spent his life losing all that money and died broke, unable to pay off his debts, with a stash of rupee notes in the top left-hand drawer of his desk that was all the cash he had left in the world. Anis Ahmed Rushdie (‘BA Cantab., Bar-at-Law’ it proudly said on the brass nameplate screwed into the wall by the front door of Windsor Villa) inherited a fortune from the textile magnate father whose only son he was, spent it, lost it and then died, which could be the story of a happy life, but was not. His children knew certain things about him: that in the mornings he was cheerful until he shaved, and then, after the Philishave had done its work, he grew irritable and they were careful to keep out of his way; that when he took them to the beach at the weekend he would be lively and funny on the way there but angry on the way home; that when he played golf with their mother at the Willingdon Club she had to be careful to lose, though she was a stronger player than him, because it was not worth her while to win; and that when he was drunk he grimaced hideously at them, pulling his features into bizarre and terrifying positions, which frightened them horribly, and which no outsider ever saw, so that nobody understood what they meant when they said that their father ‘made faces’. But when they were little there were the stories and then sleep, and if they heard raised voices in another room, if they heard their mother crying, there was nothing they could do about it. They pulled their sheets over their heads and dreamed.
Anis took his thirteen-year-old son to England in January 1961 and for a week or so, before he began his education at Rugby School, they shared a room in the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch in London. By day they went shopping for the school’s prescribed items, tweed jackets, grey flannel trousers, Van Heusen shirts with detached semi-stiff collars that necessitated the use of collar studs that pressed into the boy’s neck and made it hard to breathe. They drank chocolate milkshakes at the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street and they went to the Odeon Marble Arch to watch The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s and he wished there were going to be girls at his boarding school. In the evening his father bought grilled chicken from the Kardomah takeaway on Edgware Road and made him smuggle it into the hotel room inside his new double-breasted blue serge mackintosh. At night Anis got drunk and in the small hours would shake his horrified son awake to shout at him in language so filthy that it didn’t seem possible to the boy that his father could even know such words. Then they went to Rugby and bought a red armchair and said their goodbyes. Anis took a photograph of his son outside his boarding house in his blue-and-white-striped house cap and his chicken-scented mackintosh, and if you looked at the sadness in the boy’s eyes you would think he was sad to be going to school so far from home. But in fact the son couldn’t wait for the father to leave so that he could start trying to forget the nights of foul language and unprovoked, red-eyed rage. He wanted to put the sadness in the past and begin his future, and after that it was perhaps inevitable that he would make his life as far away from his father as he could, that he would put oceans between them and keep them there. When he graduated from Cambridge University and told his father he wanted to be a writer a pained yelp burst uncontrollably out of Anis’s mouth. ‘What,’ he cried, ‘am I going to tell my friends?’
But nineteen years later, on his son’s fortieth birthday, Anis Rushdie sent him a letter written in his own hand that became the most precious communication that writer had ever received or would receive. This was just five months before Anis’s death at seventy-seven of rapidly advancing multiple myeloma – cancer of the bone marrow. In that letter Anis showed how carefully and deeply he had read and understood his son’s books, how eagerly he looked forward to reading more of them, and how profoundly he felt the fatherly love he had spent half a lifetime failing to express. He lived long enough to be happy at the success of Midnight’s Children and Shame, but by the time the book that owed the greatest debt to him was published he was no longer there to read it. Perhaps that was a good thing, because he also missed the furore that followed; although one of the few things of which his son was utterly certain was that in the battle over The Satanic Verses he would have had his father’s unqualified, unyielding support. Without his father’s ideas and example to inspire him, in fact, that novel would never have been written. They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.
The first gift he received from his father, a gift like a message in a time capsule, which he didn’t understand until he was an adult, was the family name. ‘Rushdie’ was Anis’s invention; his father’s name had been quite a mouthful, Khwaja Muhammad Din Khaliqi Dehlavi, a fine Old Delhi name that sat well on that old-school gentleman glaring fiercely out of his only surviving photograph, that successful industrialist and part-time essayist who lived in a crumbling haveli in the famous old muhalla, or neighbourhood, of Ballimaran, a warren of small winding lanes off Chandni Chowk that had been the home of the great Farsi and Urdu poet Ghalib. Muhammad Din Khaliqi died young, leaving his son the fortune which he would squander and a name that was too heavy to carry around in the modern world. Anis renamed himself ‘Rushdie’ because of his admiration for Ibn Rushd, ‘Averroës’ to the West, the twelfth-century Spanish-Arab philosopher of Cordoba who rose to become the qadi, or judge, of Seville, the translator of and acclaimed commentator upon the works of Aristotle. His son bore the name for two decades before he understood that his father, a true scholar of Islam who was also entirely lacking in religious belief, had chosen it because he respected Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time; and twenty more years elapsed before the battle over The Satanic Verses provided a twentieth-century echo of that eight-hundred-year-old argument.
‘At least,’ he told himself when the storm broke over his head, ‘I’m going into this battle bearing the right name.’ From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he was ready to fight, the flag of Ibn Rushd, which stood for intellect, argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation. Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called ‘Rushdie’, and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.
They had the same voice, his father and he. When he answered the telephone at home Anis’s friends would begin to talk to him as if he were his father and he would have to stop them before they said anything embarrassing. They looked like each other, and when, during the smoother passages of their bumpy journey as father and son, they sat on a veranda on a warm evening with the scent of bougainvillea in their nostrils and argued passionately about the world, they both knew that although they disagreed on many topics they had the same cast of mind. And what they shared above all else was unbelief.
Anis was a godless man – still a shocking statement to make in the United States, though an unexceptional one in Europe, and an incomprehensible idea in much of the rest of the world, where the thought of not believing is hard even to formulate. But that was what he was, a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God. The birth of Islam fascinated him because it was the only one of the great world religions to be born within recorded history, whose prophet was not a legend described and glorified by ‘evangelists’ writing a hundred years or more after the real man lived and died, or a dish recooked for easy global consumption by the brilliant proselytiser Saint Paul, but rather a man whose life was largely on the record, whose social and economic circumstances were well known, a man living in a time of profound social change, an orphan who grew up to become a successful merchant with mystical tendencies, and who saw, one day on Mount Hira near Mecca, the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon and filling the sky and instructing him to ‘recite’ and thus, slowly, to create the book known as the Recitation: al-Qur’an.
This passed from the father to the son: the belief that the story of the birth of Islam was fascinating because it was an event inside history, and that, as such, it was obviously influenced by the events and pressures and ideas of the time of its creation; that to historicise the story, to try to understand how a great idea was shaped by those forces, was the only possible approach to the subject; and that one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic – just as one could accept Joan of Arc’s voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of St John the Divine as being that troubled soul’s ‘real’ experiences – without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the archangel. Revelation was to be understood as an interior, subjective event, not an objective reality, and a revealed text was to be scrutinised like any other text, using all the tools of the critic, literary, historical, psychological, linguistic and sociological. In short, the text was to be regarded as a human artefact and thus, like all such artefacts, prey to human fallibility and imperfection. The American critic Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as ‘a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it’. Anis Rushdie thought he knew what was wrong with the Quran; it had become, in places, jumbled up.