On 12th August 2022, my favorite writer Salman Rushdie was attacked. He was stabbed by a fanatic when he was delivering a lecture in upstate NewYork. He survived. He has a certain tenacity to survive. Nevertheless, it came as a shock. More than 30 years after a fatwa of death was put on his head by Ayatollah Khomeini, he was finally caught off guard
My first instinct was to pay homage by reading one of his books, ideally The Satanic Verses. But my sister cautioned against any unnecessary bravado in searching for it in the market. The pull of Shalimar the Clown, a personal favorite, was hard to resist—I had planned to revisit its pages soon enough. Yet, I wasn’t quite ready to engage with the heavy political themes it confronts. In the end, I reached for East, West, tucked away on the obscure shelf of my brother-in-law’s collection, and lost myself in its pages.
‘East, West’ is about the phenomenon that practically defines Rushdie’s life – and consequently, his writing.
It is an anthology of 9 short stories, divided into three main sections – East (the stories from Indian subcontinent), West (stories of Europe) and East, West (where the three worlds converge and influence each other. These stories define Rushdie’s life because they have pieces from both the lands that he occupies and cherishes, and obsesses. Then there are stories which are caught in between.
Consider ‘The Courter’, the last story from the last section East, West. A young man reminisces about his Ayah’s platonic relationship with the building porter (whom she ironically mispronounces as the Courter) in London, England, where his family had migrated from India.
The Ayah likes the porter but he cannot bring her peace of living in her own homeland. The western world that offers a life of freedom and luxury for many of us Indians – had nothing to offer to the Ayah. For her – poor migrant against her will – London feels cold and unfriendly. Similarly, in the very first story, ‘Good advice is rarer than rubies’ – Miss Rehana refuses to fall for the charms of London and leave the independent life she had carved for herself in India.
Both want to live in their own country, among their own people. What is remarkable is that both the protagonists who chose to abandon the London dream were women, an allusion to the fact that perhaps they experience reality very differently from men. Women would want to reject something which is desirable for men. Period.
In most of his stories, Rushdie touches upon the oppression that women so often and so disproportionately face. But they have a voice. Women are often at the receiving end in his stories, and are also in charge of their lives.
‘The Free Radio’, which offers a critique on the excesses that took place during the emergency, also has a woman – a widow with seven children who successfully lures a rickshaw walla into marrying her. In the story, Ramani the Rickshaw walla undergoes sterilization with the promise of getting a free radio (symbolic of free speech), which he never gets. And while others would write on the damage the dark period inflicted on poor Indians, my attention is taken by the widow – who, burdened by seven children from her first marriage, develops the agency to convince her boyfriend to undergo sterilization if he wants to marry her. And he does.
Salman Rushdie has a panache for satire. In Prophet’s hair, his most startling story (which makes us understand, afterall, why this man carries a death threat over his head. Sigh), he traces the episodes following the theft of the famous prophet’s hair. Hashim, a non pious and so called honorable money lender finds it by accident, and decides to keep it for himself as a souvenir. What follows is his increasingly erratic behavior towards his family, where he becomes a ‘fundamentalist’ – ordering his daughter Huma to wear the hijab and burning all the books in the library except the holy Quran.
The story is set in Rushdie’s favorite Kashmir, which grew increasingly radical as the conflict between the two nations grew. Just like Kashmir, the more Hashim turned to symbolism and iconoclasm in religion, the more he became irrational. Because women often bear the brunt of the hypocrisy and bigotry embedded in patriarchal interpretations across all religions, they also emerge as the flag-bearers of rebellion too.
Even in this story – it is Huma, like Alibaba’s Mariuana, who, tired of the dullness of her male conspirators, decides to take charge to change things.
Because you cannot complete a story about the West without bringing the reference of Shakespeare, we have the ‘Yorick’ – which retells the story of the Shakespearean Hamlet through the lens of Hamlet’s court jester (he is legit only present in the original play as a skull that launches Hamlet’s reflections on mortality. Who but Rushdie could have brought him to life!).
The story is apparently a Metacriticism, which is the criticism of criticism (yes, cynics – such a thing exists, now you have a word for it). Ask me more – and I will tell you to read the story and enlighten me. I think one of the quirks of being a genius writer is having one story which can only make sense in your own head.
Then there is the story of the imagined affair between the legendary Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, where his entire ambition of ‘opening the doors of the east and beyond.. “ is filtered down to his attempts to woo her. So much for the sake of love!
In Checkov and Zulu (another East, West wala story), which touches on the episode where Indira Gandhi was assassinated and Sikhs in Delhi were hunted down by Congress workers as a retaliation, an IB officer makes a drunken speech. “England has always been a breeding ground for our revolutionaries” he says, concluding it with how the quality of revolutionaries (the khalistanis which he was in charge of investigating) has fallen with the decline of the greatness of Britain.
The names the officers have adopted—drawn from the American Star Trek series—signal a shift in influence from the ‘Great’ Britain to the mighty America.
His ‘At the auction of the Ruby slippers’ is set in a dystopian world – where pretty much everything can be auctioned, including family heirloom and legacies. One of the most coveted items which is being auctioned is the ruby slippers of Dorothy (from Wizard of the Oz) – which have the power to take you back home.
The protagonist bids for the ruby slippers to impress his childhood sweetheart and regain her love, but he also knows, that in the world where everything needs to have a value, where material is the new radical and where the rich and the famous are the new Gods, home is a scattered, damaged concept – a mere abstraction – impossible to go back.
Balancing between two beliefs, two conflicting desires, two whole worlds is a repetitive theme in all his short stories.
‘Harmony of the Spheres’, my favorite story, takes it to a whole new abstract level, where the balance is sought between a chaotic mind of a schizophrenic writer and his outwardly sane and sensible friend. As the narrator muses into the life of his friend and writer’s slowly spiraling madness – he knows he also needs an anchor in the inwardly turbulent personal life.
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Salman Rusdie, in his ‘The Courter’ writes – “to this day, I have ropes around my neck.. Pulling me this way and that… East and West… the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. Ropes, I choose neither of you and both. Do you hear?I refuse to choose”.
Indeed his refusal to choose has given us rich literary works. His refusal to choose relieves us from the confusion of making difficult choices, making it okay to not choose and still make sense of life. Salman Rushdie must live and we must learn to tolerate the living of people even whom we do not understand, and sometimes hate.
Did you know – Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s spiritual leader at the time, proclaimed a fatwa for the execution of Salman Rusdhie in 1989 calling The Satanic Verses ‘blasphemy against Islam’. Rushdie continued to write while hiding, using the name ‘Joseph Anton’, on his two favourite writers – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov