A Tale Of Two Great Men Of Letters

Two great men of letters—both Indians based in New York, with new books out this month. One rewrites Don Quixote into a contemporary quest-for-love tale and the other writes an updated immigrant manifesto, but both are purveyors and voices of the zeitgeist. Meet Salman Rushdie and Suketu Mehta, and sneak a peek into the celebrated authors’ most anticipated releases

SALMAN RUSHDIE

The novelist enters his seventies in a surge of productivity and nostalgia for a world he sees as long gone, finds Mallika Rao

In Salman Rushdie’s 19th book, Quichotte, a woman sits on a balcony in erstwhile Bombay sipping a cocktail. She’s an actress, one who will shift to America and a life of TV stardom, over the course of a story that crosses oceans into apocalyptic terrain. From the screen she attracts the attention of a TV addict, a man who coins himself Quichotte. The book is titled after him, named in homage to Miguel de Cervantes’s most famous creation. Like that comic novel’s foolish yet noble hero—the knight Don Quixote—our Quichotte moves through a series of challenges on his way to win his prize. On that note: the actress has decided to jettison her ageing grandfather from her field of concern, as she will many elements of her past. “I won’t let any ghosts haunt me now,” she tells a listener on the balcony.

Rushdie might say the same of his desire to quit old ghosts. To nonchalantly sip cocktails on a Bombay balcony is to recall what the 72-yearold novelist recently characterised to me as “that” Bombay. We met this May in a gloomy conference room in the Manhattan office of Rushdie’s long-time agent, the legendary Andrew Wylie. Manhattan might seem far from Bombay, but Rushdie made his name linking certain great metropoles of the world into an imaginary tripartite realm of his own: London, Manhattan, Bombay. The book, he tells me, is “a kind of final visit to Bombay.” Meaning “that” one, “the one that inspired me in the beginning and has continued to sit in my head.”

THEN AND NOW