Step Across This Line (26 page)
FRIDAY, APRIL 14
We leave Solan at dawn and drive Zafar and Vijay to Chandigarh station. (I, of course, am going all the way by road.) Zafar is recovering from the shrimp attack, but Vijay looks worn out, frazzled. He repeats several times that he has never been spoken to so rudely, and doesn’t propose to let the matter rest. I can see that he’s had it with the police, with all the traveling, and probably with me. Tomorrow night, I tell him, all this will be over and you can go back to being a lawyer and not think about Salman Rushdie and his problems even once. He laughs weakly and gets on the train.
It’s the day of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize banquet, but I’m not thinking about that. All the way back to Delhi, I’m wondering whose instincts will prove the sharper: mine or my protectors’. How will my return-of-the-native trip end: happily or badly? I’ll soon know.
At half past twelve I’m closeted in a meeting with R. S. Gupta, the special assistant commissioner in charge of security for the whole city of Delhi. He is a calm, forceful man, used to getting his way. He paints a dark picture. A Muslim politician, Shoaib Iqbal, plans to go to Friday midday prayers at the city’s most important mosque, the Juma Masjid in Old Delhi, and there get support for a demonstration against me, and against the Indian government for allowing me to enter the country. The congregation will be in six figures, and if the mosque’s imam—it’s Bukhari—supports the call to demonstrate, the numbers could be huge and bring the city to a standstill. “We are negotiating with them,” Gupta says, “to keep the numbers small, and the event peaceful. Maybe we will succeed.”
After a couple of hours of high-tension waiting, during which I am effectively confined to quarters—“Sir, no movements, please”—the news is good. Fewer than two hundred people have marched—and two hundred marchers, in India, is a number smaller than zero—and it has all gone off without a hitch. The nightmare scenario has not come to pass. “Fortunately,” Mr. Gupta tells me, “we have been able to manage it.”
What really happened in Delhi today? The security worldview is always impressive and often persuasive, but it remains just one version of the truth. It is one of the characteristics of security forces everywhere in the world to try and have it both ways. Had there been mass demonstrations, they would have said, “You see, all our nervousness has been amply justified.” But there were no such marches; and so I’m told, “We were able to prevent the trouble because of our foresight and skill.”
Maybe so. But it might also be the case that for the vast majority of Indian Muslims, the controversy over
The Satanic Verses
is old hat now, and in spite of the efforts of the politician and the imam (both of whom made blood-and-thunder speeches) nobody could really be bothered to march. Oh, there’s a novelist in town to go to a dinner? What’s his name? Rushdie? So what?
This, certainly, is the view taken, almost without exception, by the Indian press in its analysis of the day’s events. The small demonstration that has occurred is noted, but the private political agendas of its organizers are also pointed out.
It’s a hot day in Delhi, and there’s a hot wind blowing. A dust storm rages across the city. As we all take in the news that the only storm in Delhi today is meteorologically induced, we can finally begin to relax, and to concede that perhaps everyone has been more nervous than was necessary and that the long dispute that has kept me away from India is really over at last.
The script in people’s heads is being rewritten. The foretold ending has not come to pass. What happens instead is extraordinary and, for Zafar and myself, an event of immense emotional impact, exceeding in its force even the tumultuous reception of
Midnight’s Children
almost twenty years ago. What bursts out is not violence but joy.
At a quarter to eight in the evening, Zafar and I walk into the Commonwealth Prize reception at the Oberoi hotel, and from that moment until we leave India, the celebrations never stop. Journalists and photographers surround us, their faces wreathed in most unjournalistic smiles. Friends burst through the media wall to embrace us. The actor Roshan Seth, recently recovered from serious heart problems, hugs me and says, “Look at us, yaar, we’re both supposed to be dead but still going strong.” The eminent columnist Amita Malik, a friend of my family’s from the old days in Bombay, quickly gets over her embarrassment at mistaking Zafar for my bodyguard and reminisces wonderfully about the past, praising my father’s wit, his quick gift for repartee, and telling tales of my favorite uncle, Hameed, who died too young, too long ago.
Gifted young writers—Raj Kamal Jha, Namita Gokhale, Shauna Singh Baldwin—come up to say generous things about the significance of my writing for their own work. One of the great ladies of English-language Indian literature, the novelist Nayantara Sahgal, clasps my hands and whispers, “Welcome home.” I look around and there’s Zafar being interviewed for television and speaking fluently and touchingly about his own happiness at being here. My heart overflows. I had not really dared to expect this, had been infected by the fears of the police, and had defended my heart against many kinds of disappointment. Now I can feel the defenses falling away one by one, the happiness rising like a tropical dawn, fast and brilliant and hot. There are few such moments in a lifetime. Forgive me for saying perhaps too much about this one. It is a rare thing to be granted your heart’s desire.
Somewhere in there the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize goes to J. M. Coetzee, thanks to the deciding vote of the specter at the feast, the stone-faced Indian judge Shashi Deshpande. But this is a party even her curdled judgments cannot poop. India is the prize.
SATURDAY, APRIL 15
Rushdie in India: like Solzhenitsyn regaining home, but without the anger or medieval prophecies. There is only joy, lots of joy.” As the
Indian Express
’s hyperbolically affectionate front-page lead demonstrates, the party spirit is spilling into the media, drowning the few, muted negative voices. In all my conversations with the press I’ve tried to avoid reopening old wounds, to tell Indian Muslims that I’m not and have never been their enemy, and to stress that I’m in India to mend broken links and to begin, so to speak, a new chapter. Today the
Asian Age
concurs: “Let’s turn a page.” Elsewhere, in
Outlook,
there is pleasure that India has “made some amends for being the first to ban
The Satanic Verses
and subjecting him to the persecution and agony that followed.” The
Pioneer
expresses its satisfaction that India is, once again, standing up for “democratic values and the individual’s right to express himself.” It also, in less elevated mood, improbably but delightfully accuses me of “turning the city’s sophisticated party women into a bunch of giggling schoolgirls” who tell their men, “Dahling, [he] could send Bollywood hunks back to school.”
Dilip Padgaonkar of
The Times of India
puts it most movingly: “He is reconciled with India and India with him . . . something sublime has happened to him which should enable him to continue to mesmerise us with his yarns. He has returned to where his heart has always been. He has returned home.” In
The Hindustan Times,
there is an editorial headed “Reconsider the Ban.” This sentiment is echoed right across the media. In
The Times of India
an Islamic scholar, among other intellectuals, backs an end to the ban. On the electronic media, opinion polls run 75 to 25 percent in favor of allowing
The Satanic Verses
to be freely published in India at long last.
Vijay throws a farewell party for me. His wife, Rani, an expert on prison systems and penal reform, has returned from a conference in Vienna just in time. And there’s a surprise: my two actress aunts, Uzra Butt and her sister Zohra Segal, are there, with my cousin Kiran Segal, Zohra’s daughter and one of the country’s foremost exponents and teachers of the Odissi school of Indian classical dancing. This is the zany wing of the family, sharp of tongue and mischievous of eye. Uzra and Zohra are the grand old ladies of the Indian theater, and we were all in love with Kiran at one time or another. Zohra and Kiran lived in an apartment in Hampstead for a time in the 1960s, and when I was at boarding-school at Rugby, I sometimes spent vacations in their spare bedroom, next to Kiran’s bedroom door, on which there was a large, admonitory skull and crossbones sign. I now discover that Vijay Shankardass and Roshan Seth both stayed in the same spare room in the same period. All three of us would look wistfully at the skull and crossbones, and none of us ever got past it.
“I haven’t seen you dance for years,” I say to Kiran.
“Come back soon,” she says. “Then I’ll dance.”
June 2000
PART II
Messages
from
the Plague
Years
This is a selection made from the large number of pieces I published during the long campaign against the
Satanic Verses
fatwa.
[
First, from a speech to the International Conference on Freedom of Expression, Washington, D.C., April 1992
]
I’d like to thank all those who helped make this trip possible. It wasn’t a simple matter, and how odd that is! For a writer interested in freedom of expression to attend a conference on the subject should be a simple matter. It should not be necessary for his travel plans to be shrouded in secrecy. The security forces should not need to pay me any special attention. It feels a little like being inside one of those science-fiction yarns in which the present has been altered, so that the Inquisition appears in Piccadilly Circus, and there are witch-burnings on the Potomac.
The fatwa of Imam Khomeini bent the world out of shape. Ancient blood-lusts were unleashed, armed with state-of-the-art modern technology. Battles that we thought no longer needed to be fought—battles against such concepts as “blasphemy” and “heresy,” which throughout human history have been the storm troopers of bigotry—were re-enacted in our streets. Many people who should have known better defended the real and threatened violence and blamed its victims. Even now, in Britain, there is a powerful lobby that regularly denigrates my character. It is hard for me to be my own advocate in this matter, hard for me to insist on my own value. When I do, I am accused of arrogance and ingratitude. But when I don’t fight my corner, my case is swiftly forgotten. Quite a double-bind.
As we used to say in the sixties, there is a fault in reality. Do not adjust your minds. What has been done to
The Satanic Verses,
its author, publishers, translators, and booksellers, is a crime against freedom. The novel is not the crime; the author is not the criminal.
Of course I know I’m not the only writer under attack. I have tried hard during the past three years to point out that those words, “blasphemy” and “heresy,” have been launched against writer after writer, especially in the Muslim world. I have tried repeatedly to remind people that we are witnessing a war against independence of mind, a war for power.
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation—[robbing] those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. [For] if the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
Those words are from John Stuart Mill’s great essay “On Liberty.” It is extraordinary how much of Mill’s essay applies directly to the case of
The Satanic Verses.
The demand for the banning of this novel and indeed the eradication of its author is precisely what Mill called the “assumption of infallibility.” Those who make such demands do so, just as Mill anticipated, because they find the book and its author “immoral and impious.”
“But,” he writes, “this is the case in which [the assumption of infallibility] is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity.” Mill gives two examples of such occasions: the cases of Socrates and of Jesus Christ. To these can be added a third case, that of Galileo. All three men were accused of blasphemy and heresy. All three were attacked by the storm troopers of bigotry. And yet they are, as is plain to anyone, the founders of the philosophical, moral, and scientific traditions of the West. We can say, therefore, that blasphemy and heresy, far from being the greatest evils, are the methods by which human thought has made its most vital advances. The writers of the European Enlightenment, who all came up against the storm troopers at one time or another, knew this. It was because of his nervousness of the power of the Church, not of the State, that Voltaire suggested it was advisable for writers to live in close proximity to a frontier, so that, if necessary, they could hop across it into safety. Frontiers will not defend a writer now, not if this new form of terrorism, terrorism by edict and bounty, is allowed to have its day.
Many people say that the Rushdie case is a one-off, that it will never be repeated. This complacency, too, is an enemy to be defeated. I return to John Stuart Mill. “The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. . . . Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectually persecuted.” There it is in a nutshell. Religious persecution is never a matter of morality, always a question of power. To defeat the modern-day witch-burners, it is necessary to show them that our power, too, is great—that our numbers are greater than theirs, and our resolve, too. This is a battle of wills.
Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence. Totalitarian societies seek to replace the many truths of freedom by the one truth of power, be it secular or religious; to halt the motion of society, to snuff out its spark. Unfreedom’s primary purpose is invariably to shackle the mind.
The creative process is rather like the processes of a free society. Many attitudes, many views of the world, jostle and conflict within the artist, and from these frictions the spark, the work of art, is born. This inner multiplicity is frequently very difficult for the artist to bear, let alone explain. Denis Diderot, the great novelist-philosopher of the French Enlightenment, spoke of the dispute within him between atheistic, materialistic rationalism and a profound need for spiritual and moral depth. “It infuriates me,” he said, “to be enmeshed in a devilish philosophy which my mind is forced to accept but my heart to disown.” An even greater writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, also agonized about the coexistence in his heart of absolute faith and absolute unbelief. And before him, William Blake said approvingly that Milton, that devout genius, was, as a poet, naturally, of the devil’s party. Within every artist—within, perhaps, every human imagination—there exists, to paraphrase Blake, a marriage between Heaven and Hell.
[
An open letter published in Japan in July 1992, on the anniversary of the murder of Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of
The Satanic Verses]
One year has passed since the vicious murder of Professor Igarashi, but I have still not become accustomed to the fact. It still feels as appalling, as enraging, as evil as it did when I first heard the news. The celebratory response of some Japanese-based Muslims also remains in the memory as a sour, unpleasant taste.
I have come to understand that what is important is precisely not to become accustomed to the intolerable. In our modern world, with its rapid shifts of focus and its short attention span, it is all too easy to lose interest in a particular case, no matter how vivid the story once was. But to do so in this case would be an insult to Professor Igarashi’s memory. It simply can never be acceptable to murder a man in the name of any god or ideology. In such a case, morality is never on the side of the murderers.
I did not know Professor Igarashi, but he knew me, because he translated my work. Translation is a kind of intimacy, a kind of friendship, and so I mourn his death as I would that of a friend. I do not believe that the people of Japan will find his murder acceptable.
I have read that there is now evidence linking the murder to Middle Eastern terrorists. I would say this: whoever the murderers were (and we know that many Middle Eastern terrorists have their paymasters in Tehran), it was Khomeini’s fatwa that was the real murderer.
For this reason, and to do honor to the name of the fallen man, a distinguished scholar and my translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, I call upon the people and government of Japan to demand an end to this terrorist threat. A Japanese citizen has been the first to lose his life to the fatwa. Japan can help ensure that he is also the last.
[
First published on February 7, 1993, under the title “The Last Hostage”
]
Four years. It’s been four years and I’m still here. Strange how that feels simultaneously like a victory and a defeat.
Why a victory? Because when, on February 14, 1989, I heard the news from Tehran, my instant reaction was: I’m a dead man. I remembered a poem by my friend Raymond Carver about being told by his doctor he had lung cancer.
He said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help . . .
I said not yet but I intend to start today
But I’m not a religious man. I didn’t kneel down. I went to do a TV interview and said I wished I’d written a more critical book. Why? Because when the leader of a terrorist state has just announced his intention to murder you in the name of god you can either bluster or gibber. I did not want to gibber. And because when murder is ordered in the name of god you begin to think less well of the name of god.
Afterward I thought: if there is a god I don’t think he’s very bothered by
The Satanic Verses,
because he wouldn’t be much of a god if he could be rocked on his throne by a book. Then again, if there isn’t a god, he certainly isn’t bothered. So this quarrel’s not between me and god but between me and those who think—as Bob Dylan once reminded us—they can do any damn thing because they have god on their side.
The police came to see me and said, stay put, don’t go anywhere, plans are being made. Police officers on short patrol watched over me that night. I lay unsleeping and listened out for the angel of death. One of my favorite films was and is Luis Buñuel’s
The Exterminating Angel.
It is a film about people who cannot get out of a room.
The next afternoon—when the television was roaring with hatred and blood-lust—I was offered Special Branch protection. The officers who came said I should go somewhere for a few days while the politicians sorted things out. Do you remember? Four years ago we all thought this crisis would be solved in a matter of days. That in the late twentieth century a man should be threatened with murder for writing a book, that the leader of a religious-fascist state should threaten the free citizen of a free country far away from his own, was too crazy. It would be stopped. The police thought so. I thought so too.
So off we went, not to any deep-secret safe house, but to a hotel in the countryside. In the room next door to mine was a reporter from the
Daily Mirror
who had checked in with a lady who was not his wife. I kept out of his way, not wishing to intrude. And that night, when every journalist in the country was trying to find out where I’d gone, this gentleman—how shall I put this?—missed his scoop.
It was going to be over in a few days, but four years later, it’s still going on. And I am told the level of threat against my life has not diminished at all. I am told there is nobody protected by the Special Branch whose life is in more danger than mine. So, a victory and a defeat: a victory because I’m alive, in spite of being described by a “friend” as a dead man on leave. A defeat because I’m still in this prison. It goes where I go. It has no walls, no roof, no manacles, but I haven’t found a way out in four years.
I was under political pressure. I do not think it is generally known how heavy this pressure was. The issue of the British hostages kept cropping up. I was asked to make an apologetic statement: otherwise something might happen to a British hostage and that, it was hinted, would be my fault. The statement that I agreed to make was not even written by me, but by the late John Lyttle, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s man on the hostage case, and by other worthies and eminences. I changed two words, and even that alteration required a bit of a fight. It did no good to anyone. It was done to help the hostages but was portrayed as my first failure to save my wretched neck. Khomeini restated his fatwa. Multi-million-dollar bounties were offered.
Now there was official pressure on me simply to disappear. The argument was that I’d made enough trouble already. I should not speak up on the issue, I should not defend myself. There was a big enough public-order problem, and since the authorities were doing so much to protect me I should not make life harder for them. Go nowhere, see nobody, say nothing. Be an un-person and be grateful to be alive. Listen to the vilifications, the misrepresentations, the murderous speeches, the appeasements, and shut up.
For almost a year and a half I had no contact with any member of the British government or any civil servant, in either the Home Office or the Foreign Office. I was in limbo. I have been told that the Home Office vetoed any meeting with me, because this would allegedly be bad for race relations. In the end I telephoned William Waldegrave, at that time a Foreign Office minister, and asked if it might not be a good idea for us to meet. He was not able—not permitted, I think—to meet me. But I did at last have a meeting with a Foreign Office diplomat, and on one occasion with the foreign secretary Douglas Hurd himself. These meetings were held on the basis that they must be kept entirely secret, “so that the hostages should not suffer.”
Incidentally, I do not recall Tehran or the hostage-holders in Lebanon ever making this linkage. But maybe I am mistaken about this. If I reveal these details now, it is because it is safe to do so. Until the day Terry Waite was released, I was a sort of hostage to the hostages. I accepted that their cases had to be resolved first; that, to an extent, my rights had to be set aside for the sake of theirs. I hoped only that, once they were free, it would be my turn; that the British government and the world community would seek the end of this crisis, too.
I had a long wait, with many bizarre moments during it. A Pakistani film portraying me as a torturer, murderer, and drunkard wearing an appalling variety of Technicolor safari suits was refused a certificate in Britain. I saw a video of the film; it was awful. It ended with my “execution” by the power of god. The ugliness of those images stayed with me for a while. However, I wrote to the British Board of Film Classification promising them that I would not take legal action against them or the film, and asking them to license it. I told them I did not want the dubious protection of censorship. The film was un-banned and promptly vanished from sight. An attempt to screen it in Bradford was greeted by rows of empty seats. It was a perfect illustration of the argument for free speech: people really can make up their own minds. Still, it was weird to be pleased at the release of a film whose subject was my death.