Cutting-edge chronicle

In his new book, Salman Rushdie's pen is mightier than the knife

- MANDIRA NAYAR

Five is a life-changing number for Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses was his fifth book. The Satanic Verses-which, he said, was his least political-changed his life forever. His second book, Midnight's Children, had only changed the world of English literary writing. And after four divorces, Rushdie is married again. Rachel Eliza Griffiths is his fifth go at the fuzzy feeling. But with Griffiths, the feeling is very much the 'print it on a T-shirt and wear as a slogan' kind. (He was not looking for love, he says).

A poet, Griffiths often goes by her second name. Like him. Rushdie's first name is Ahmed. (Nobody has ever called me Ahmed except my mother when she was cross with me, he writes in Knife, his much-awaited memoir after the attack on his life in 2022.) He is in love. And this time it is happiness.

Knife-Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a brave, unflinching chronicle of the attack on a writer. It is his most accessible book and certainly his most important work. Rushdie is out of hiding. He lays himself bare. He has survived, and has lived to tell the tale. There is the detailed, vivid chronicling of his own recovery. (Griffiths has a documentary, too.) Details include finding a bump during his prostate examination. (Not cancer, though they thought it was.) Then there were the urinary problems, fears of going blind, and pain. And this book about almost dying is his most life-affirming work.

His attack lasts 27 seconds. The same time it would take to recite the Lord's Prayer, if you were religious, he writes. Or read out his favourite Shakespeare's sonnet 130. "Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, octave and sestet," he writes. He describes sitting in an amphitheatre in Chautauqua on that fateful day to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe. "My first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: "So it's you. Here you are," he writes.