It was the summer of 2022. I’d discovered that Salman Rushdie and one of my oldest friends were members of the same private members’ club. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought to myself, if these two cool guys could meet? So, on August 9, the three of us gathered for a drink in lower Manhattan. Salman drank an old-fashioned, my friend and I had sake over ice, and we talked about being New Yorkers – as Salman is now, having moved there nearly 25 years ago, and as I’ll always consider myself, though I’ve lived for many years in London. It was such an ordinary evening, ordinary in the best possible way – just happy, just fun. Salman spoke with warmth about his life; I remember how inspired he was by his students at New York University. Lucky students, I thought, to have him for a professor.
I have known Salman for many years. Through all that time, particularly when we’ve done literary events together, I’ve sensed the presence of security: sometimes more, sometimes less. The man himself never seemed fazed, and never failed to be as brilliant a performer as he is a writer. On one occasion, an audience member asked how he coped with fame: surely he was recognised all the time? Salman laughed, and said that only once in his New York life had he been accosted: “He was an older Indian gentleman. He came beetling up to me. ‘Salman Rushdie?’ Yes, I said. He wagged his finger in my face. ‘Not as good as VS Naipaul!’” The audience roared with laughter.
That August evening in that cosy club, when the three of us finally said our goodbyes, I thought to myself – really, I did – the fatwa, the death threats… thank goodness all that’s over. Three days later, on the morning of August 12, the friend whom Salman and I had met telephoned me, and told me to turn on the news.
Eighteen days on, having survived his near-murder, Rushdie was moved from the trauma centre in Pennsylvania to a rehabilitation unit in Manhattan. His younger son, 25-year-old Milan, had flown from London to his bedside. As Rushdie relates in this extraordinary book, Milan told him that he’d been researching knife attacks. “Dad, there are so many cases where somebody gets stabbed just once and dies,” he says. “And you got stabbed like 15 times and you’re still alive.” Dad nods in acknowledgment. “You know,” he says, “the fictional character with whom I now most strongly identify is Wolverine.” The astute reader will recall that the X-Man’s skeleton is reinforced with “adamantium”, and that he’s endowed with a superheroic “healing factor” that preserves his life over and over again.
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is full of Rushdie’s wit, his wisdom, his stoicism, his optimism, his love of all culture from the so-called “high” to the so-called “low”. Across the course of his career – he has won the Booker Prize, been elected to the Royal Society of Literature, received a knighthood; Knife is his 22nd book – he has proved himself adept at describing miracles. Yet he had never lived one until the dreadful August day and all that came after.
