A WORDSMITH'S DEFIANCE

Salman Rushdie survived an attack to tell another tale

- MANDIRA NAYAR

The beginning of Midnight’s Children is difficult to forget. “I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947.” And 42 years later, the last words of Victory City, as Bisnaga turned to “rubble, blood, ash” are written to be remembered: “Words are the only victors”.

These words—symbolic, prophetic, powerful, and certainly poignant—are the mantra by which Salman Rushdie has chosen to live. Victory City is the manifesto that all writers need. That it comes at a time when Rushdie, too, has lived to tell the tale about the attack that left him blind in one eye only reinforces its power. And makes Victory City both a symbol of his defiance and a reaffirmation of the sheer force of his talent. No one tells a story quite as seductively, compellingly, vividly and addictively as him. Rushdie—the gladiator with a pen mightier than a sword—has the ability to keep you engrossed. We giggle, sigh, dream and willingly sink into a world that he has conjured up.

The story of Victory City is told by Pampa Kampana—a poet “miracle worker and prophetess’’ who grew a city out of seeds. “It was necessary she said to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality,’’ writes Rushdie. “Her solution was fiction.” The poet, who lived to be 247 years old, is the perfect Rushdie-esque heroine. She does not age and she whispers cities into being. Her poem—the immortal masterpiece Jayaparajaya (Victory and Defeat)—is written in Sanskrit and is as long as the Ramayana.