Salman Rushdie: The Fabulist at Play

Salman Rushdie in his new novel regains the magic as he unleashes the jinn in the War of the Worlds.

- S Prasannarajan

If the imagination of the storytellers we admire is a permanent astonishment, Salman Rushdie is out there in the front row, his fervour matching one of his favourite women, Scheherazade. So it is apt that his new novel is called Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which is to say The Thousand Nights and One Night.For a writer born ‘handcuffed to history’; the original ‘Bombay chokra’ shaped by the shame and sorceries of the Subcontinent; the one who dared to enter the Jahilia forbidden by faith; a wayfarer whose destinations ranged from Moorish Andalusia to the tequila country of Mexico, from ancestral Kashmir to Akbar’s court to Machiavelli’s Florence; every future, as the novelist Julio Cortázar would have said, is fabulous. Or: The story is the only way of life in a world where the nights are longer than Scheherazade’s.

Here, Rushdie makes a dazzling comeback as an oriental fabulist, looking back at a world in a whirl, where the forces of light and darkness, of reason and religious righteousness, are at war, from the vantage point of a distant future. You may be tempted to say that this kinetic epic populated by supernatural beings and magically transmuted humans is created by a combination of JRR Tolkien and Philip Pullman tutored by an array of philosophers and historians. It is not. Rushdie has been here before, on a lesser scale. In his book for his son, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the face-off between Rashid Khalifa and Khattam Shud, between the leaders of Gup and Chup, is a call for freedom from the enemies of imagination, and its appearance after the ordeal of The Satanic Verses only makes it all the more relevant an allegory worthy of a father who was once trapped in his own metaphor.