The Power of Worlds
On October 5, 1988, I was sitting in the comfortable living room of Gopi Poddar, one of the brave New Delhians who had agreed to take American college kids into their homes. We were watching Doordarshan, the one television station available to Indians at the time. I suspect we were drinking Foster’s beer, because although I was only 20, Gopi liked to have an after-work tipple and he thought it was better for me to have beer than the scotch he preferred—though I have no specific memory of that. What I do recall was the special announcement dominating the news that day: the government of India had banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
The book had only been out a week in the UK, and to quell sectarian tension, India was taking preemptive action and banning importation. As a self-righteous college student, I was outraged. As a passionate reader, I was intrigued. I’d never heard of this writer, and I was thrilled at the prospect a novelist could still spark riots. It was one of the many lessons I learned about India. Within a few weeks, bootleg versions of the book were in every bookstore and newspaper kiosk in the city. Politicians knew what they were doing. They took an official stand against the book, knowing it would have absolutely no effect on its real-world availability. I did a bit of research and learned that Rushdie’s previous book, Midnight’s Children, had won the Booker prize, and I skipped Verses and immediately picked up a copy.
I was surprised to see how much attention the world was paying to the news that he was stabbed at a public event in Chautauqua yesterday. The actress Anne Heche died the same day, but that news was hardly mentioned. If you asked me a week ago which celebrity news would receive the most attention—the death of an elfin Hollywood actress or the stabbing of an author almost no American has ever read—it would have been a no-brainer. Yet Rushdie’s fame comes not from his glorious, looping sentences and vivid metaphors, but for the sentence rendered by an Iranian Ayatollah. I suppose I should have seen that coming.
My own relationship to Rushdie began forming in those days after the fatwa, as I read Midnight’s Children, truly one of the masterpieces of 20th century fiction. (At both the 25th and 40th anniversary of the Booker awards, it was cited as the best of all the winners, and the committee wasn’t wrong.) Rushdie was known as a central proponent of magical realism, and the book weaves a story of Indian history out of the babies born at the same moment India was (in 1947, also the year of Rushdie’s birth).
Calling Rushdie’s style magical realism limits it. No country has a richer imagination than India, with its ancient written and modern Bollywood epics and its uncountable deities and multitude of tongues. The porous membrane between the imagined and the real leaves the country wandering in a dreamlike state, one Rushdie rendered so brilliantly in his opus.
As good as Midnight’s Children is, though, I think Satanic Verses is better. The book that so many bought (the fatwa turned Rushdie into a millionaire) but never read is never celebrated as a text, only a marker in the culture wars. That is perhaps the greatest shame. By the time he published Satanic Verses, he’d written one masterpiece and one very good but flawed novel (Shame) and deserved to be read for the letters on the page, not the outrage they caused among people who never bothered to read them. To give you a sense of Rushdie’s prose, here are two sentences setting up the novel:
“The aircraft cracked and a half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like tidbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar.”
Part of the richness of the novel comes from the way Rushdie used Indian references—history, people, and especially pop culture. They include no explanatory: readers must keep up. A couple paragraphs after that quote, Gibreel begins singing a song British readers might have taken as semi-conscious rambling. Any Indian, however, would have instantly recognized it as one of the most famous Bollywood songs ever recorded, which people were still humming thirty years later. Even for an American just fascinated by India, I found this approach daring and delicious. Of course, Rushdie opened the door for two generations of Indian writers who could now reach an international audience.
Writers are, more than anything else, the deities of small worlds. Whether they write well or poorly, whether they reach an audience or find their work mouldering in a drawer, they feel compelled to create these universes of imagination. Their creations have the capacity to come to life. Who has more substance in American life, Huckleberry Finn or his contemporary Chester Arthur? Can you more easily call to mind Jon Snow or Jon Huntsman? Fiction isn’t fiction: isn’t it true that we all live somewhere between imagination and reality?
Literature has always been one of the two or three most potent forces in my life. Had I been able to make a career writing fiction—had I possessed Rushdie’s genius—I’d have abandoned beer in a heartbeat. Authors shaped me in profound and lasting ways. I inhabit their worlds as much as my own, and memories of them commingle with events of my own life. As all consciousness is created by these wisps of thought. Are their fictions any less “real?” Not for me.
Rushdie sits at the top of the list of most loved and important writers in my life (with a few others). It was shocking a disturbing to hear about his injuries (though I have to say that I’ve seen him three times in public dating back to the 90s and he never had security). I wish him well. Even more, I hope that people will use the opportunity to pick up one of his books. A writer cares far less that people remember them than they remember their words. Honor Rushdie by reading him—you’ll certainly thank yourself for doing so.