“The Satanic versus what? The Incredible Hulk? The title is incomplete!” has been one of my husband’s favourite gags. One doesn’t have to be a dad to spout dad jokes. But if I could stretch it, “… versus the incredible bulk of absurdity” could be the title of the saga that needn’t have been.
Sometime in November 2024, the ban in India on importing Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses was lifted quietly. After all the cacophony in geopolitics and the personal horrors endured by the author over the banning of the book, it went away as soundlessly as a soft-footed prankster. It’s just as well. Noise is the last thing one wants when sitting down with a good book. I was five when the book was published. I read it much later. Someone I knew had a copy with a newspaper cover on it. It was that simple.
I read Midnight’s Children when I was 13, and unequipped to appreciate all its nuances. There were no bookshops in my town, and the collection in the local library was meagre. I read what I found on my grandfather’s shelf. I have been meaning to reread it as an adult but haven’t gotten around to it.
I speedread Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie in 2010 when I was studying for an MA in Hyderabad. I was bored of all the photocopied and spiral-bound PoCo-PoMo and wanted to read a proper book. I went to the university library, picked the novel up, and sat down in a dusty, deserted corner where they kept the PhD theses of former students, and read. I started at daybreak after a light breakfast in the hostel mess, forewent my sambar-rice lunch, took only a short break for a cup of tea late in the day, and finished the book before bedtime. It was about (only speed-readers are allowed to say what a novel is “about”) vengeance.
Believing in love despite
Fifteen years later, I have a sizeable reading list to tackle for my PhD in a Welsh University. I put that aside, and borrowed from the council library a copy of Knife by Salman Rushdie. It’s not a novel and I read it slowly over two days. So, I won’t say what it is about, although vengeance might be the theme that started the events that led to the writing of the book. I am relieved and happy that flimsy plot was foiled.
This isn’t a review. Not just because it’s late to be reviewing a book that has been around and a bestseller for a while now, but mostly because I don’t know how to review memoirs. Readers of autobiographical works are essentially voyeurs – by invitation, yes, but voyeurs nonetheless. We bare our googly eyes if we comment on the author’s life, and sound frivolous if we comment on the textuality of something so deeply personal. Instead, I am writing an essay centred around my reading of Knife, which speaks of love – being and believing in love despite everything. I think I am something of a treader of such woods myself.
I had returned to India in August 2022 after spending four months in the UK on a writing fellowship. That was the farthest I’d ever travelled from India. I hadn’t wanted to go back home. But my visa was coming to an end and the fellowship money was spent. My British partner had travelled back with me. “Come,” I’d said to him, “We have a sentimental quote about hospitality in my country.” They gave him a year’s multiple-entry visa with permission to spend no more than 180 days of that in the country. Bureaucracy is an expensive obstacle for impoverished writers in love.
We had taken a BnB in a poor neighbourhood in Bangalore where they warned us to keep our windows shut as they wouldn’t be responsible for stolen things. They also counted their spoons when we checked out. If we’d had room for the weight of a spoon in our bags, we’d have stuffed in one more book. But our host wouldn’t understand that. He was certainly no reader. Our books had been scattered in the homes of friends in the hope we’d take them back and give them a shelf of their own someday. Love makes you optimistic.
I’d read somewhere that Salman Rushdie’s new book set in erstwhile Vijayanagar was due soon. I wasn’t interested. I had just finished translating Tejo Tungabhadra, a Kannada novel set in Vijayanagar during the Portuguese conquest of Goa. Even though Victory City was of a much different time and a Rushdie novel is a Rushdie novel, I was in no mood to hover over Hampi anytime soon. I’ll wait for his next book, I thought. That’s when we heard the news of the knife attack on the author.
My first reaction was one of indignance – like when your opponent plays foul in a game. “They can’t do it now!” I remember saying to my partner. “It is over. It was long over. He had put that behind him. Leave him alone, nutters!” We feared the worst. We were angry and sad. We might have held each other a little tighter that night on the pokey coconut coir mattress. A few days later, we heard that he had made it and was on the road to a slow but certain recovery. The sense of relief, and some sort of triumph, felt almost personal.
Literary soul searching
I had read Joseph Anton when I was stuck in a bad marriage – the kind you wonder why you didn’t leave sooner, in retrospect. I was drawn into the book. I had little in common with the celebrity author except, say, the experience of being fathered (I won’t say raised – we raise ourselves, don’t we?) by hurt men who cannot help but perpetuate the hurt. But the master storyteller was doing what he did best – tell a story. He just happened to be his own material this time: a most rich and interesting life that deserved none of the fear and frustration of being on the run from bigoted goons. I do remember thinking the parts about leaving the mother of his child for another woman – though the narrative was far from self-justificatory – and then losing her for a richer man was rather whingey. I admired his eloquence as an infidel. Not so much his infidelity. But that is the whole point, isn’t it? One wants to be left alone to be human, to be flawed, vulnerable, lonely, to seek, find, lose love, to seek it again, to grumble about rejections, to bask in one’s successes, to be magnanimous, to be petty, to tell brilliant stories … anything… it’s no one’s business really. And it is most certainly not his burden to bear the hate and hounding of the propounders of singular theories of life for the simple crime of assuming an ideal world where literature is read and liked, or disliked, for no more than what it is – literature.
One normally doesn’t expect sequels to memoirs. Joseph Anton is a big book. It must have taken a lot of soul-searching and care to write. Many questions and predicaments were put to rest with great literary flourish in it. It was “done and dusted,” the angry mobs were a thing of the past, the ridiculous films with video-game music and laser beams coming out of books in the sky were laughed at and forgotten, the author had moved on, found love and was happy. And then, as if out of nowhere came “the A,” as he calls him, and showed us there’s simply no end to hateful nonsense.
Knife isn’t set in Hampi. It was the next Rushdie book I read. It is a painful, and gripping narrative. But it is also optimistic and beautiful, full of stories of love, friendship, solidarity, and resilience. And true his style, it’s funny. There’s no wisdom without wit, and to laugh off a near-death experience is the wisest thing one can do.
Accounts of a favourite author’s body fluids may not be very charming. But when a knife slashed him, the intended death of the author was not Barthesian. The fatwa and its relentless aftermath had not allowed the author the luxury of a private life behind his books. He was yanked into the naked biology of being and he had no choice but to tell a biological story of survival. I’m grateful it was that.
I have also found love after many bumps and scrapes. Although our situation is far from ideal, we are no longer on the prickly mattress. Similar to the Rushdies, ours is a late love with an age difference that makes me scowl at every bite of anything delightful my older husband takes. Because, I want to hold and hold him and not be reminded of time. It is the love that bears no children but will settle for nothing less than a complete entwining of spirits. Salman Rushdie’s survival is, for me, personally reassuring.
Just like Joseph Anton, Knife is scholarly and it gave me a reading list. Which reminds me, around the time I read Shalimar, I had also picked up John Berger’s novel G. I didn’t finish it.
Decades ago, I had survived engineering college studying for a degree I didn’t want by constantly reading fiction. Once, an impertinent bore of a classmate saw me with my head stuck in a paperback and asked “Reading a novel, huh, Maits?”
“Yes,” I said worried she might ask me what it was about.
It was worse. “My father says reading novels is sinful”, she said thickly smug. Smugly thick.
I don’t remember my reaction. I’d probably only gaped at her in disbelief and outrage.
After I put Knife down, I suddenly thought of the perfect rejoinder for her.
“Then tell your father he needn’t read them!”
It is twenty years too late, I’ve forgotten her face, but I am chuckling with long-overdue satisfaction. We won’t let them have the last laugh.
Maithreyi Karnoor writes fiction and poetry and translates Kannada literary works into English. Her novel Sylvia was published by Westland in 2021. Her second book, Gooday Nagar, is forthcoming.
