Stories From The Frontier

People — journalists, policemen, friends, strangers — all write scripts for me, and I get trapped inside those fantasies. What non...

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People — journalists, policemen, friends, strangers — all write scripts for me, and I get trapped inside those fantasies. What none of the scenarists ever seems to come up with is the possibility of a happy ending — one in which the problems I’ve faced are gradually overcome, and I resume an ordinary literary life which is all I’ve ever wanted.

— From ‘A Dream of Glorious Return’, a diary of Rushdie’s India visit, April 2002

In the years since Khomeini’s 1989 Valentine’s Day fatwa, the novelist’s saga has itself become one of the leading narratives of our times. While it has provided a focus and context to many a fiery debate — on freedom of expression, the perils of political correctness, etc — it has also situated the man in hiding in a baffling hall of mirrors. Everyone, it would appear, has a carefully constructed profile of the writer.

Step Across This Line
By Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape
Price: Rs 895

In this collection of Salman Rushdie’s non-fictional writings between 1992 and 2002, it is inevitable that the fatwa never really recedes from the fringes of the essays and columns. It is of course highlighted amply in the section Messages from the Plague Years, a sampling of his long and tireless campaign against the fatwa on The Satanic Verses. But it is also ever present in meditations on literature, culture and politics.

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Speedread the book, and you could actually twist a Rushdie-ism and accuse him of victim-itis. There he goes — as some complained at the time — highlighting his circumstances in a piece on the best British writers in 1993, labelling a literary editor’s criticism as being “as supportive as a fatwa”. And here he is, in the passage quoted above, obsessing about the drama of his first post-fatwa visit to the land of his birth. Yes, self-obsession is a charge you could certainly hurl at Rushdie as he calls Shashi Deshpande stone-faced and her judgements curdled for denying him the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

But ignore for a moment this petulance — which resonated in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) when he reacted to successive denials of an Indian visa by bidding goodbye to India. He returned in April 2002, undertaking an almost incognito visit to his ancestral home in Himachal, appearing dramatically at a literary meet in Delhi. Now in a travelogue, it was time to clear misunderstandings: “My characters have frequently flown west from India, but in novel after novel their author’s imagination has returned to it. This, perhaps, is what it means to love a country.” And about the betrayal at the visa office: “Nothing about my plague years… has hurt more than this rift.”

India’s borders are thankfully no longer shut to its most imaginative storyteller, but he is definitely not lacking for frontiers to be crossed. His fiction, as he writes here once again, has always pushed at the edges, challenged frontiers. Perhaps the best piece in this collection is Step Across This Line, a long reflection of the various frontiers we must consistently confront — historical, imaginative, physical, social, religious, literary. “The frontier is a wake-up call,” he writes. It’s a terrain Rushdie has ventured into repeatedly. And at the frontier there is no ordinariness.