Rushdie’s meditations on mortality

Salman Rushdie’s latest opus is a many-splendored offering.

- SHREEKANT SAMBRANI

It is a radiant display of the treasure trove of artefacts in the attic of his memory, some priceless gems, some not quite shiny, but none pallid, all placed in dazzling arrays of words. It is a now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t game where Rushdie has readers guessing the real-life person (or a mix of them) on which a fictionalised character is based. It is a serenade for the one true love of Rushdie’s, the siren city of Bombay before she was Mumbai. Above all, it is a meditation on intimations of mortality by one who has lived under a fatwa threat for ever so long and suffered a near-fatal knife attack three years ago but survived to tell his remarkable tale, at once emotional and rational. The last thing The Eleventh Hour is just a quintet of stories, as the dust jacket puts it rather prosaically.

Rushdie tells us, with barely concealed braggadaccio, that he knows something about mathematics of numbers, classical and popular music, both western and Indian, cinema old and new, cryptography, renaissance music, art and architecture and, of course, books and writers, with Franz Kafka as the subject of his supreme adoration. Bombay is everywhere in the book, even in “In the South,” a story located in Chennai. It becomes a central character in “The Musician of Kahani”. Since so many of the Rushdie tales originate in or are inspired by Bombay, it comes as no surprise that he chooses to call it Kahani. Renaissance and Kafka are the major influences in the spellbinding “Oklahoma”.