Salman Rushdie’s second thought as the would-be assassin rushed towards him was: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years? That was my first thought when I read about the attack on X/Twitter hours after it happened on the morning of August 12, 2022, at a function in upstate New York. The author’s first thought was of course something inconceivable to anyone else: So it’s you. Here you are. He was staring back at potential death, something he had been cheating since 1989. An attempt on his life after so long, as he puts it, was indeed anachronistic.
My second thoughts were of shock, concern and fervent prayer hoping for a miracle. I don’t know about him, but every time he stepped into the limelight to promote his books or even the cinematic adaptation of Midnight’s Children, I used to think of his vulnerability – that an attack could occur at any time, any place. Eventually, concerns faded with the misplaced hope that it was all in the past: ‘I achieved freedom by living like a free man. I became acceptable.’ Until 33-and-a-half years of borrowed life after the fatwa nearly came to an end with the hate-filled fanatical stabbing-and-slashing of a sharp blade in the hands of Hadi Matar. Rushdie deigns to call him ‘the A’, as in Assailant, in his new book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Matar was only 24 years old. Hate can indeed survive and thrive over generations.
Ironically, Rushdie was going to converse about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm when he was attacked on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution’s amphitheatre on that August Friday in 2022. The peaceful setting of the venue sharply contrasted with the unexpected violence inflicted upon him. It led to severe injuries in his left hand, chest, neck, upper thigh, face and cruelly, his right eye. The wound was deep, severing his optic nerve, with no chance of vision being restored. Despite Rushdie reaffirming that his godlessness remains intact in Knife, I am sure an overwhelming number of us fans and admirers would have made an Almighty attempt to pull him back from the abyss.
“A book about an attempted murder might be a way for the almost-murderee to come to grips with the event.” Knife is the story of this shocking event and how the author decided to fight back with the weapon he is best suited to use: language. Unlike his powerful memoir Joseph Anton which was written in the third person, Knife is very much first-person. It is an I for an eye, so to speak. His imagined conversation with A is a highlight of the book, one of catharsis. One sentence stands out, when A tells him, “You are hated by two billion people. That is all that is necessary to know. How must that feel, to be so hated?” When he briefly comes back to X/Twitter to promote Victory City – yes, the same novel that had a public blinding towards the end – he is called ‘Dajjal’, the one-eyed false messiah of Muslim demonology on that platform. That puts into perspective Rushdie’s life post The Satanic Verses, something which he so much wanted to put back in the past by living like a free man. Of course, Rushdie has the last word in the imagined conversation: “You could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh.”
Irrespective of the startling and memorably designed cover, Knife is not about hate, it is about love. Despite billions of people despising him, many loved him deeply. When lying on the floor bleeding, he wasn’t registering pain. Instead, the strongest emotion he felt was that of loneliness, of the possibility that he would never see his loved ones again. But he survives, succeeds at ‘being functional as a one-eyed man in a two-eyed world’ and makes Knife a tribute to the powerful love, affection and concern he received from his fifth wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths – a multi-talented poet, author, photographer and visual artist – his family, and a host of other people in his life, including fellow authors, doctors and therapists. It is a gripping book, and a fascinating read, bringing startlingly to life the physical world of the human body and pain and at the same time, soaring into metaphysical wanderings while stumbling across literary references. Imagine a tightly-edited free association of a wounded genius, if that were possible. The book is also a triumph of the human spirit. As Rushdie puts it, “The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn’t ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on.” Knife is a book of life.
Amidst all this love and physical pain, where he is truly hurting is India not showing signs of sympathy and support at his darkest hour, at a time when the world is rallying around him: “India, the country of my birth and my deepest inspiration, on that day found no words.” This comes even as the wounds caused by the hostility he received from India, Pakistan and the South Asian community in the UK post the publication of The Satanic Verses remain unhealed. The city of his dreams stars in his nightmares after the event: “I dreamed of returning to my beloved Bombay – not Mumbai – and kneeling to kiss the tarmac as I came down from the plane, but when I looked up there was a crowd shouting at me, “Dafa ho.” Begone.” Not so, Mr Rushdie, not so. I am from your Bombay, and the city awaits you once again.
Knife is a weapon wielded by the most gifted writer alive in the English language. It is another chapter in the magical realism of his own life. If he had written Knife in the third person, it would have easily become yet another exquisite Salman Rushdie novel. Though this book was one he’d rather not have needed to write, it had to be written – not only for his readers but himself. It provides a springboard to all of us to move on from our weakest moments to greater glory, that it is possible to fight hate and take revenge with love, with the weapons we are best suited to wield and at the time of our choosing. A Nobel Prize for Literature for Salman Rushdie would be a fitting victory in this fight.
–Srinivas Krishnan
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin India
Format: Hardcover / Kindle
Number of pages: 320 / 211
Price: Rs 481 / Rs 379
Available on Amazon
Book Review: Knife – Meditations After an Attempted Murder
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