TRUTH AND DARE

Salman Rushdie’s latest volume of non-fiction bristles with candour and courage

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

Salman Rushdie was 72 when he contracted Covid in March 2020. His age and asthma gave his family cause to worry. The virus, thankfully, never reached his lungs. Having recovered 17 days later, he, like so many others, missed his children. After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against The Satanic Verses in 1989, calling for Rushdie’s death, the author was forced to move from one safe house to another. When New York went into lockdown, he was told, “This must be familiar to you.” Rushdie’s comeback, one he thought but never articulated, is as funny as it is unnerving: “A stone thrown at a man’s head in a village square is not the same as a lethal avalanche of boulders descending upon that village and destroying it.” There are, however, other reasons to enjoy his essay, ‘Pandemic’.

Rushdie, of course, didn’t buy Hulk Hogan’s theory—the coronavirus is divine retribution—but neither did he endorse Arundhati Roy’s view that it is “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”. Rushdie’s takeaway is more ruthless in its objectivity: “Crisis shines a very bright light on human behaviour, leaves no shadows in which we can hide, and reveals, simultaneously, the worst of which we are capable and our better natures as well.” For those who have read Rushdie’s fiction and, more specifically, his two earlier collected volumes of non-fiction—Imaginary Homelands (1981-1991) and Step Across this Line (1992-2002)—this faith in “our better natures” may be recognisable.