Salman Rushdie’s new story collection is the first fiction he has published since a savage assassination attempt three years ago. His recent novel Victory City, set in the ancient city of Vijayanagar, was written before the attack; in that book, the main character is blinded with a hot iron, prefiguring Rushdie’s own blinding – in his right eye – during the attempt on his life.
The psychic impact of the attack on Rushdie’s imagination ripples through the five stories here. Two of the longer works – The Musician of Kahani and Late – have protagonists hellbent on revenge. In the first, a rollicking satire of the pretensions and hypocrisy of both big money and religious cults, a father and daughter are caught in webs “woven out of cash”. Raheem falls prey to a self-styled guru who describes the “three fantasies … that would cease to exist if we stopped believing in them”.
These fantasies are all supernatural beings, money and India. (“Until August 15, 1947, there was no such country.”) The guru, who is fond of Ferraris, chooses to keep believing in money and India.
Daughter Chandni, a skilled performer of both piano and sitar, discovers the true passion and skill of her rich husband – another Ferrari fan – was “having a good time”. After the death of her “billion-dollar baby”, Chandni unleashes a “devil magic” revenge on his shocking family, including financial ruin and sickness. Her mother begs her to stop: “We love you … but we are also a little afraid of you.” Money is lost but that fantasy, the supernatural, triumphs.
Late, set at King’s College Cambridge in the early 1970s, begins with the supernatural: the college was founded, the story tells us, by a king – Henry VI – who, after death, “began performing miracles, blinding an enemy from beyond the grave”. In Late, the “Honorary Fellow SM Arthur” wakes up in his college bed and realises he is dead; his immediate afterlife makes him feel like “a lump of sugar dissolving slowly in water”. He also realises he can terrorise his code-breaker-era tormentor, the Provost, and force him into public humiliation. Only after this can there “be an end to magic and then a return to the everyday”.
The collection is bookended with shorter pieces, both about old men. The book takes its title from the elegiac first story, In the South, set in a southern Indian city about to be swamped by a tsunami.
The two elderly neighbours are 81 years old. “If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.” Early in the story, the men emerge on to adjacent verandas “at the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in fateful coincidences, unable to escape the consequences of chance”.
This is typical Rushdie, moving from the tawdry and contemporary – “the cheap film music rising up from the floor below, the pelvic thrusts of an ‘item number’ dancing across a neighbour’s TV” – to the mythic. This is also Rushdie now, intensely aware of his mortality. He is 78 and has lived in the shadow of a fatwa on his life for almost 40 years. In his post-attack memoir, Knife, he wrote: “In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense.” When his friend and peer Martin Amis dies, he laments the way “an entire generation was nearing the exits”.
Rushdie remains the great chronicler of cities, the great interrogator of empire and fundamentalism. His home town is described in In the South as “the storied city of Mumbai … that city which was neither of the north nor of the south but a frontier ville, the greatest, most wondrous and most dreadful of all such places, the megalopolis of the borderlands, the place of in-between”.
He continues to delight in the metafictional, and the stories crackle with historical events as well as literary and musical allusions. Kafka, Elias Canetti, Byron, Shelley and Bob Dylan are all evoked on the first page of the story Oklahoma. It is set in the US, a country “somehow lost in the middle of its own story, the future unknown”.
The collection ends with The Old Man in the Piazza and a return to the subject of frontiers: partition is “the drawing of borderlines through our territory by ignoramuses from elsewhere”. There is “also the invisible frontier between action and observation … The audience sits over here; the stage is over there. The fourth wall is a powerful force.”
Again we are reminded of the attack Rushdie endured, on the stage of an auditorium, in front of a large audience; he was stabbed many times before anyone rose. (The first to help was 73-year-old Henry Reese.) “It is unclear what we must do now,” we are told at the story’s end. “What will become of us?”
