RUSHDIES AND A SEA OF SUITS

A property in Delhi, originally owned by author Salman Rushdie's father, is at the heart of a five-decade-long case in the Delhi High Court. A slew of alleged lies, fake deals and fraud led to the case being dragged since

- SONI MISHRA

A longing for the past and the lost homeland has inspired much of Salman Rushdie’s writing. Returning to where it all began and picking up the pieces of fragmented memories is a theme that permeates the acclaimed author’s works.

In ‘Imaginary Homelands’—the title piece in a collection of essays originally published in the London Review of Books on October 7, 1982—Rushdie begins by describing an old photograph that hangs on the wall of the room in London where he worked. It is a picture of his house in the city that was then Bombay, he writes. The sepia-toned photo was taken a year before he was born—1946. A few years before he wrote the essay, he had visited the house. Overwhelmed by the sight of it, he wanted to restore the past to himself and reclaim a history he felt was his despite the many years spent abroad.

Around the time the picture of the Mumbai home was taken, his father Anis Ahmed Rushdie had bought another house in the Civil Lines area of Delhi. Unlike the Mumbai home, Rushdie probably has little memory of the Delhi house. He never lived there. However, it is a house with its own story to tell—a property suit that has dragged on for close to five decades, which could very well be the oldest civil suit in the Delhi High Court.