Relish This Rushdie Story

In August 2022, Salman Rushdie, the brilliant author of 24 major books and winner of the ‘Booker of all Booker’ prize, was attacked onstage in New York at a public event by an American-Lebanese man who’s now serving a 25-year sentence. Rushdie was stabbed 15 times in the neck, abdomen, and eye, lost his left eye, his nerves in the arm were severed, and his liver was punctured. The then 75-year-old writer’s life was saved after he was air-lifted to a nearby trauma unit and received immediate medical and surgical care.

Rushdie didn’t write for six months; no stories came to him, but within two years, he wrote and published a memoir about it in 2024: ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.’ Rushdie, of course, knows a thing or two about attempted murder.

In 1998, after the publication of Satanic Verses, which I have read and I still marvel why it sent squirrels racing inside Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s black turban, Rushdie, the man with the upturned eyebrows, a sardonic and razor intellect, and a never-ending reserve of sparkling sentences that take you places, faced the following:

1. A global fatwa by Khomeini to all fervent Muslims to kill Rushdie and everyone related to the publication of the book.

2. A bounty on his head that reached $3.3 million dollars.

3. Protective seclusion under British armed guard for 10 years.

4. Changing safe houses on a regular basis for years to avoid a targeted attack.

5. The fatwa on Rushdie’s ‘supporters’ was carried through. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of his book, was killed by stabbing in 1991; the novel’s Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, survived a vicious stabbing in his apartment in 1993; and the Satanic Verses’ Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot three times outside his home and survived.

6. And, one would expect, psychological turmoil, continuous stress, a physical toll on health, a change in personality, giving up one’s voice, and reduced joy and freedom in telling stories.

What Rushdie experienced was staggering: a death sentence for dead thoughts in a non-alive book that caused no harm except made-up hysterics. And yet, he didn’t overly resist the mental scars and bruises that can play snakes and ladders with one’s conscious and unconscious being. He processed them and carried on to tell many more riveting tales, probably aided by a sense of self as thick and supple as one of his sentences.

But let’s read what Rushdie had to say about dealing with harm that wasn’t his making. When he was mulling over his brutal, public stabbing, he finally made some decisions and never looked back. In one of the interviews, following the publication of ‘Knife,’ he gave a clue to how he side-stepped a downward spiral after getting a second life and surviving the dark years of being hunted day and night by a death squad salivating at the bounty. He was asked, “Didn’t the stabbing affect you?” A question that also meant: why was it not the straw that broke the camel’s back, especially after experiencing life on the run?

Rushdie replied, “Well, I do have a therapist. After the knifing incident, I asked the therapist to list all the classic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and I went down the list and said, I don’t seem to have any of the symptoms, why? The therapist told me, ‘Because you’re a bad ass. That’s the technical term for it.’ And I asked, is it a professional psychotherapist’s assessment term for it?! He said, yes. And I said I would take that!”

The interviewer immediately asked Rushdie, what about the attacker who stabbed you multiple times? What’s your attitude towards him? Does he rush back memories? (One can also retrospectively project what about Ayatollah Khomeini, the terror of betrayal and a sword hanging over one’s head, and being in the middle of a deadly cat and mouse game of being cornered for a decade? The fatwa on Rushdie has not been officially withdrawn, though Iran’s government, it’s said, has stopped actively enforcing it.)

Rushdie responded, “He’s had his 27 seconds in the limelight. Let him go back to being anonymous and a nobody again.” He also made a resolution, never to take the name of the person, verbal or written, who attacked him, calling him ‘A’ in his book: attacker, assailant, adversary, or the filled-in asshole.

When asked why, he said he remembered a time in the UK when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in power, and faced a rampaging Irish Republican Army (IRA) that tried to assassinate her in a hotel bombing and fought her tooth and nail at every step of the peace process. Thatcher said, as a strategy, she would deny the IRA the oxygen of publicity. And that’s what Rushdie did: he used adversity as a paddle and knifed ahead in fifth gear. He published a collection of five short stories, The Eleventh Hour, in 2025, and is now apparently working on a trilogy of novellas based on his life spent in the US, UK, and India.

Rushdie: our man Salman, born in India and raised in Mumbai, whose prose outlived his verses and the Satanic.