December 7, 2025 • 42 mins
Salman Rushdie was nearly killed when he was stabbed 15 times on stage in upstate New York in 2022. His injuries were so severe that he lost an eye. It was an attack that came decades after he was first subjected to death threats over his novel, The Satanic Verses.
Once he had recovered, he found he was unable to write fiction. However, after publishing an account of what happened to him, the stories returned, with five brought together in his latest book, The Eleventh Hour.
In this conversation with Mishal Husain, Rushdie talks about free speech, the family connection they both share and the places he’s called home, from India to Britain and the US.
02:30 - “Don’t waste your time”
04:40 - Writing as a form of optimism
05:00 - Starting out as a writer
08:00 - Meeting E.M. Forster as a teenager
10:00 - “You write the story to find out what story you’re writing”
11:15 - Writing Midnight’s Children
12:46 - The family connection between Salman Rushdie and Mishal Husain
14:35 - The women in the family
16:00 - Getting together as a family
17:55 - Returning to India to write about childhood
20:30 - Reclaiming India
22:55 - India today and Prime Minister Modi
24:24 - “If you’re paying attention you see things coming”
24:50 - The family reacts to Midnight’s Children
26:44 - A farewell to India?
28:45 - Before and after the fatwa
31:30 - Defending free speech
32:25 - Banning books in the US
34:30 - Zohran Mamdani’s campaign
38:50 - The next novel
40:25 - “I’m a bit clumsier”
Watch this podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe4PRejZgr0Ns_wjGlmjlPz0cded0nTYS
You can find the written version of this interview with Mishal’s notes on Bloomberg Weekend: https://www.bloomberg.com/latest/weekend-interview
Contact The Mishal Husain Show mishalshow@bloomberg.net
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There's unexpected amounce of pressure on pre expression, and my
kind of old school viewers that the defense of free
speech begins when somebody says something you don't like.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Salman Rushty, writer survivor, observer of places he's called home
from India to the United States. I was looking at
this book, and you do warn about a lot of
things that have become more extreme ever since.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
As a writer, if you're paying attention, then sometimes you
see things coming. And I think that's what I was doing.
I was paying attention.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
From Bloomberg Weekend. This is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm
Michelle Hussein. It's now more than three years since a
celebrated author nearly lost his life on a stage at
an event in upstate New York. He was stabbed multiple
(01:05):
times in an attack that came more than thirty years
after death threats over his novel The Satanic Verses. For
the first time since that attack, Salman Brushti has returned
to fiction with a collection of short stories in a
new book called The Eleventh Hour. And yet so often
his stories have drawn on real events, real people and places.
(01:30):
It's something you'll hear us talk about, not least because,
as it happens, I know some of those real people
as well as the places. There's a family link between us,
a personal connection that makes this particular conversation an unusual
one for me, But I hope it helps paint a
portrait of a writer who has known great success and
(01:54):
the greatest of tests life in the spotlight as well
as in the shadows through the years when he was
in hiding. And so we discuss politics and protest, free speech,
and book bands and the countries he knows best India,
Britain and the United States. Pelmnus thee welcome, thank you.
(02:17):
Your new book is your second published since the awful
day on that stage in New York where you came
close to losing your life. So I feel I really
want to start by asking how you're doing.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I'm okay, thank you. I'm surprisingly okay. I found that
doctors inspecting me were constantly telling me that I shouldn't
be so well, as if I was doing something wrong.
But no, I've made a pretty good recovery.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But it was a hard road. I think that's clear
because in your last book, Knife, you write about the
life changing injuries that you've seen.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, I mean, you know, there were a lot of
injuries and they were very close to killing me, so
the recovery was Yeah, it took a long time.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Do you think it changed you that day?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I mean only in certain ways. I mean I think
if you are given an extra lease of life, it
makes you see every day is a blessing. You know,
every day is a luxury. And it also gives me
the sense of even more than before, don't waste your time.
If you've been given some extra time, use it.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
It's interesting to hear you say the word blessing because
you're famously not a man of faith.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
No, no, this is entirely secular blessing.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
But psychologically, do you feel it comes back to you
or have you turned well?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Not anymore? I mean, I think that's a classic symptom
of PTSDs to replay the event, And I mean I
guess there was a bit of that at the beginning.
I mean, it's been getting on for three and a
half years now. I think it's long enough to have
dealt with it.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It seems that you had the instinct to write about
it very early on, as you came round and were
conscious of your circumstances again, were you thinking in words
on the past.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
First I was thinking I don't want to write about.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It because it was too traumatic.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, I just thought that's the last thing I want
to do. And then I understood that it was impossible
for me to write anything else until i'd dealt with it,
and I just understood that the only way passed it
was to go through it. And so then I thought, yeah,
I better write about it.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
So it was a form of therapy.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Then that book, well, it was a form of dealing
with it. Yes, I don't like the idea of writing
as therapy. I think writing is writing and therapy is therapy.
But it certainly made me feel ownership, like taking charge
of it rather than simply being a victim lying on
the ground bleeding. It became my story that I was
telling in my way.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
You have talked though, about writing as a form of optimism.
It's an act of hope.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yes. I think all writing is that you sit alone
in a room for anything, sometimes for years, and you
hope that what you produce is going to be valuable
to people you know, or enjoyable to people, but at
least people will respond well to it. But you have
no idea, you know, and so that requires optimism. I
(05:00):
think all writing in that sense is born out of
a sort of optimism.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And you have been writing for more than fifty years.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, it hits up.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
There was it a lonely road at first when you're
trying to get your first novel published. And then that
first novel didn't do as well as.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
You hoped, to say the least.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I mean, you made up for it later, so I
think we can talk about it.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
I mean there was, you know, a lot of my
contemporaries like Ian McEwen and Martin Amiss and Julian Barnes.
You know, they were all taking off like rockets, you
know that in the early twenties, producing work which immediately
established their voice. And I was stumbling around and it
took me a while to find my direction. And in
(05:42):
a way I found it by going back to childhood.
And when I started writing what became Midnight's Children, I
was already thinking, I just want to write a novel
about childhood.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
But your childhood was in India and it ended up
being a story of India there.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, and then at some point the history came pouring
in and it became a much larger scale of and
it took me like over five years to write because
in a way, I was learning how to write it
while I was writing it.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
And the idea that you've lived in these multiple places,
You've lived across three continents. You've called Britain, India, and
now the United States your home. I think all of
these themes are present in your work throughout, whether it's
fiction or nonfiction.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Sometimes I envy those writers who are deeply rooted in
one place and can spend a lifetime drawing on that
one place. I mean William Faulkner, for example, Oxford, Mississippi,
is this tiny place, and yet it was enough for
him to have a lifetime of masterpieces. And that's not
been my experience because I've moved around. But then, you know,
(06:43):
you lose something, you gain something, And I think it's
helped me to have a wider vision of the world.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And I think it's there certainly in your latest book,
The Eleventh Hour, which is a collection of short stories,
not all of them the same length. I'm a bit
longer again, that sense of people, places that have influenced you.
One of the ones that interested me is Late, which
it's pretty clear is set in the place where you
went to university back in the nineteen six Yes.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
The university is not named and the college is not named,
but it's pretty obviously.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
King's College, cambridg Yes. And why go back to that period.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I'd always wanted to, you know, but I'd never really
found the story because it was a good time for me.
I mean, it was a happy time for me university,
and I'd never written about it. And then two things
happened sort of squashed together. One was my memory of
having briefly encountered the great em Foster, who was in
residence at the college. He was an honorary fellow of
Kings and he was very nice to me, especially when
(07:40):
he found out that I had an Indian background, because
India was so important to him.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
You meet him in the nineteen sixties, which is what
forty years after he's published a Passage to India and
he's an academic in Cambridge.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
This endless silence. You never wrote another novel after Passage
to India.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
What did he say to you about writing?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Well, he was encouraging, I mean, very shyly admitted that
I was kind of hoping that I would write something,
and He was very sweet and generous about it and
said that, you know, he thought that that was good.
He thought that the good book about India would probably
be written by somebody from India, but with knowledge of
Western literature. So for a nineteen year old kid, it
(08:21):
was enormously gratifying to have that kind of benediction.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You fitted the bill, I fitted his.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Bill, Yes, whatever that is. So that was one thing,
and the other thing was my I mean, I never
met Alan Turing, but of course he was another enormously
important graduate of Kings and both of them suffered quite
seriously because of their homosexuality. They were both very badly
treated and damaged by the fact that it was illegal
(08:50):
in England and so on. And so I thought, if
I just kind of squashed them both into the same character,
which will become my character, will be a third character
who isn't really either of them, But it's a way
of talking about all of that.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, and there's a sort of avenging of the injustices
that they went through, which is part of your story.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yes. First of all, I wasn't expecting it to be
a ghost story. And secondly, I wasn't expecting it to
be a revenge ghost story, and it just grew that way.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Is that the way that you write? Then you sit
down and you're not sure how the story's going to end.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Well, you have some sense of it, but not a
detailed sense. You know. What I thought it was going
to be was a story about an improbable friendship between
this elderly gentleman and this young Indian woman student who
had the love of India in common. And I thought,
it's going to be about this improbable friendship between the
two of them. And then when I started writing it,
(09:41):
I just found myself typing this sentence in which I
killed him in the first sentence. Now, when he woke
up that morning, he was dead, and I thought, where'd
that come from? And then I have to think about it,
and then I thought, okay, so it's still going to
be about an improbable friendship, but one of the people
is dead.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
But again, does that mean that you don't do a
plan of the story, or if it's a novel, you
don't chart out chapters in a way.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
I used to. I used to be architectural about it.
I needed to have quite a detailed structure. But as
it's gone on, that's kind of changed. I mean, of course,
you have some structure. You know, you have to know
what you're writing about and why you're writing it. And
it goes from here to here, and there are these
various points along the way that it needs to touch on.
But I more and more see it as a process
(10:27):
of discovery. You write the story to find out what
story you're writing.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
And then is there a moment when you know that
your instinct has been right?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Because it's also sometimes wrong? You know, sometimes you go
down blind alleys and you have to have the mental
toughness to say, no, that's not right. You have to
cancel that go another way.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Does that mean dropping a story entirely? Does that? Does
that mean they're unfinished fragments? Or do you just redo?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Do you make it right to redo it? Okay?
Speaker 1 (10:53):
With an editor or with your own instinct?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Me, I can't show people unfinished work. So what I
mean by initiatives? When I think I can't make it
any better, then I get very interested in editorial input.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And how do you respond to an editor saying you
could make this better?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
This I'm getting much better at it, but.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
You weren't to the beginning.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I wasn't.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
So well. Will take us back to Midnight's Children.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Then, well, there was the most important editorial contributions, both
of which I accepted. There was an extra character, you know,
in Midnight Children, Salem is theoretically telling the story to
this person who works in the same pickle factory, called Padna,
and so it's both an oral narrative and a written narrative.
(11:36):
And initially there was a second audience figure, and people
at Jonathan Cape as it was who read it all
said you don't need that second figure, you only need one.
And so then eventually I agreed to have a go
at removing the second figure, and it proved so easy
to remove that it was clear that they were right.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
But you seem to have struggled with it.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I thought, you know, what are you talking about? And
the second thing was there was a moment in the
sort of about two thirds of the way through the
novel where the timeline got a bit scrambled, where I
jumped forward and then back and then forward again. And
basically Liz Calder, who was my editor, said just keep
(12:19):
the chronology, tell it in sequence, and again she was right,
so did so I did even then accept very important
pieces of editorial contribution.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
And that was the book that was life changing for you,
that made you famous overnight when you won the book
a prize for it in nineteen eighty one. I still
want to go back in time, though, because saying while
you were still at university to Ian Foster that you
wanted to be a writer, I know a bit about
the kind of family environment you would have grown up in.
(12:51):
Even though we're a generation apart. There's a connection there,
certainly is between us. I might as well spell it
out now. Your mother and my grandmother were sisters.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yes, and your mother is my first cousin.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
With whom you spent time in your growing up years,
when you both spent time in the same family house,
your grandparents house. But the reason I'm interested in the
writing side of it is that, from what I know
of that environment, wasn't there an emphasis on being a
professional of a different kind, a doctor or a lawyer
or an engineer.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yes, my father was not pleased when I said I
wanted to write books, but I remember what he said.
He said, what will I tell my friends? And fortunately
he lived long enough for his friends to call him
up and congratulate him.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
But that's not because he you know, these are literate
people who enjoy consuming writing. But it's a question of
how you're going to support yourself.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I've been writing is not a real job, you know,
it's a hobby.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So what gave you the courage to think, no, I'm
really going to have a go a?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I yes, I really wanted to do it, you know.
I think if I look back at that young fellow,
he had real determination because it took me a long time.
I mean, I graduated from Cambridge in nineteen sixty eight
and Midnight Children came out in nineteen eighty one, so
that was almost thirteen years of not getting there before
I did get there. And I think that determination retrospectively,
(14:16):
I'm quite proud of it.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
It's either a short time or a long time, depending
on the way you look at it. It's a relatively
short time for the success you've had subsequently.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Well, but everybody else was doing much better than me, and.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
You were conscious of that competitive well.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I mean, you know you're aware of what your generation
is doing.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
I think, and then again to the environment that shaped
you in India's You're growing up in Bombay in the
nineteen fifties. I know your father read you stories, but
your mother, my great aunt, who I remember very well.
I feel that she and her sisters were also part
of an unusual generation where for women of their time,
they were thinking about careers. They were not going to
(14:56):
be in Parada, they were not going to live the
same way their mother did.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
They were very open I did, and brought us up
in that way. You know, we were not. We brought
up in a very what I suppose you would call
liberal atmosphere and very largely secular atmosphere. You know, it
wasn't wasn't an enormous amount of religion in our.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
House, and that was a tone that was then set
for the rest of your life. Did it give you
a certain freedom?
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, because we didn't. I mean, you know, maybe my
father would take me to eat the prayers once a year.
That was about it. And I didn't understand them because
I don't speak any Arabic. I'd just go up and
down when he'd went up and down, and that was
what he instructed me to do.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
But Urdu was your mother, yes, actually, as it was
mine as well, because I was also spoken to only
do in the first few years of my life. Is
it still present in your life?
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yes, somewhere I still speak, yes. I mean, what would
happen in childhood was that I went to a school
which was an English medium school in Bombay Cathedral School.
So at school we would speak English. When we got home,
my mother would tend to speak to us. So we
were brought up in that way.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
And what was the influence of your grandparents' home which
I tried to track down in northern India some years ago,
but it had already been pulled down they demolished.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, but you know in aligar which is this university
town south of Delhi, they had this rather beautiful old
style Indian courtyard house and like a couple of times
a year there would be like family gatherings where my mother,
her two sisters, her two brothers and their children would
all gather at the grandparents' house. I could remember. We
(16:34):
would perform little plays. Children would perform little plays for
the entertainment of the adults, and we would all sleep
on the roof on chart by beds under mosquito nets.
And it was kind of rather magical that house. And
it was where we because you know, some of the
family was in Pakistan and some was in India, so
(16:54):
that house became the place where we came together.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
And I think also because one of you on was
in films and his wife was an actor and a dancer,
this sort of sense of culture and performance and art
of different kinds is part of your life.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yes. Well, my uncle, my uncle Hamid, who also lived
in Bombay as we did, had this apartment on Marine Drive,
which I remember with great affection because he was like
my favorite uncle, and he was very booming and funny
and affectionate, and his wife was rather wonderful too, and
so I remember my visits to this apartment with great pleasure.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's so interesting hearing you talk about this because I've
only ever you know, I know that this environment is
part of what shaped my mother as well, but I've
always heard about it secondhand. When you set out to
write Midnight's Children, I know you by that stage you
hadn't been to Bombay or to India for a long time,
so I think you but I went back after it
was before, but you were trying. You spent a lot
(17:52):
of time trying to remember as well the fragments of it.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yes, I mean, I think memory is a great resource
when you seriously try and remember. It's amazing seeing how
much comes back, But now I did. After I've published
my unsuccessful first novel, I took what little money I'd
earned from it and went to India for many months,
living and traveling as cheaply as I could in order
to kind of get it back in my system.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
And making notes.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Making notes, and that included, of course Bombay, but also
some parts that I'd never been to, like Benaras for example,
which I mean I had in my mind some crude
structure of what would become Midnight Children, and I wanted
to go to places that I thought might get into
the book.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
And you stood outside your old childhood home.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
And went inside because we actually, I actually knew the
people to whom my parents had sold the house, so
they welcomed that in. And the interior had been completely transformed.
It looked like a Bollywood movie set, but the house
was still the house.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Were you setting out to tell a big story, it
got larger.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
That started out, I thought I'd just got to write
a novel about childhood. And because you know, I'm eight
weeks older than the independent nations of India and Pakistan.
And at some point it occurred to me supposing it
wasn't an eight week difference. Supposing it was the same time,
where did that take you? And of course where it
(19:16):
took you into was to have the subject of the
history of the Independent Nations being a part of the story.
So it became a much much bigger book.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And of course the family is deeply for your own
family is deeply affected by this. Our family because I
realized as I put the chronology together in my head
that your mother, with you as a newborn, is in
Bombay and her two sisters are sort of trying to
get from similar to Delhi and eventually to Pakistan. So
you're born at a time of tremendous rupture of different kinds.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yes, And like many Indian Muslim families, family was more
or less cut in half. So my mother and my
uncle Hamid and my uncle Mahmoud all stayed in India
and my mother's two sisters were in Pakistan. So I mean,
when we were little children, there were moments when it
was easier to travel between India and Pakistan than it
(20:08):
is now. There used to be these little boats that
went from Bombay to Karachi, not very grand boats called
Suburbati and Saraswati, and you used to be able to
take the boat because actually Bombaya Karachi is not very
far as the crow flies, you know, it's like a
day in the night on a tin pot boat. And
so we would go every so often, more to Karachi
than than to where your family was in Raalapindi. But
(20:32):
so there was more interchange between India and Pakistan at
that time.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Was India than the home of your childhood, The country
of your childhood effectively then taken away from you when
your parents moved to Pakistan in the sixties.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, I mean I was very cross with them for
selling the house in Bombay.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Why did they I'd never understood it.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
I mean they said, amongst other things, that they wanted
their daughters to have Muslim husbands, which was very odd
given how lacking in religious faith, particularly my father had
always been. So I never really got to the bottom
of it. And I don't think they were that content
after moving to Karachi, because they had a very nice
(21:13):
life in Bombay, which is it puzzles me that they left,
and I felt I had to get it back. You know.
There was a point after leaving Cambridge and deciding to
base myself in London to try and be a writer
that I felt that I was in danger of losing touch,
and that's why I went on that long journey of
several months and that led to Midnight Children, and I felt,
(21:35):
you know, I always told myself that Bombay is a city.
A lot of it is built on land reclaimed from
the sea. The British had a big land reclamation project
where they joined up the seven islands into one peninsula.
And I thought, I'm also engaged in an active land
reclamation and that's what that book was.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Did it give you what you were looking for?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
It did really Yeah, yeah, because it's the reception of
Midnight Children in India was wonderful. It gave me a
feeling of belonging again.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
You did make political points through it. It was at
the end of the period of the emergency Indi Ragandhi
had brought about and were you you were intending it
as that as a critique of India at that time.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
As I say, if you're writing a book about in
which the character and the country are kind of twins,
you have to write about both the twins. And the
emergency was a real shock to many of us. The
fact that you know, the so called world's largest democracy
would flirt with dictatorship. I mean more than flirt. Actually
for a couple of years it was quite serious. So
it had to get into the book. And I mean,
(22:36):
actually I was very worried because I didn't want the
book to end on that note. But I also thought,
I can't end the emergency in my book if it
hasn't ended in real life. And then in the Ragandhi
called an election and lost, and I felt really grateful
to her because she gave me the end of the book.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Do you think that, as you look at India today,
is in the Ragandhi a more benign figure than you
thought she was at the time.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Well, not during the years of the emergency. I think
that was a very dark time, which is not unlike
what's happening now in its way, But I mean she
is a more impressive figure, and of course when she
regained power after some years, so no, I mean she's
an extraordinary woman. And I remember, as I say, when
Midnight Children came out, it was very well received. If
(23:20):
there was any criticism of it, some people felt that
the ending was too pessimistic, and now looking back at it,
I think the ending was absurdly.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Optimistic compared to what's happened, what actually happens. So how
do you feel about India today under Prime Minister Modi.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I feel very worried about it, you know, because I mean,
I have a lot of friends in India who are
journalists and from whom I get interesting information about what's
going on. And I think everybody is extremely concerned with
the attack on freedoms of journalists, of writers, of intellectuals,
of professors, et cetera. Even beyond that, there seems to
(23:56):
be a desire to rewrite the history of the country,
essentially to say Hindus good, Muslims bad. The thing that vs.
Nippel once called a wounded civilization, the idea that India
is a Hindu civilization wounded by the arrival of Muslims, invaders, invaders.
That project has a lot of energy behind it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
There's a lot of Personally, I was looking at this
book Imaginary Homelands, which is your criticism and essays written
through the nineteen eighties and first published in nineteen ninety one,
and you do warn about a lot of things that
have become more extreme ever since.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah, I think you know, if as a writer, if
you're paying attention, then sometimes you see things coming, and
I think that's what I was doing. I was paying attention, what.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
About the people in your life? Because I know that
obviously The Knight's Children is a work of fiction, but
you draw on the structure of your real your true family.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
My father was very annoyed.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
You're not the only one. I think all those closer
to me were pretty upset. Or father, you'd good unfair.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
My mother was very very calm about it. He said, oh, yes,
I could see this, what's happening here, but this is
not me and this is not my husband, and it's
all made up. So actually my mother had a very
good literary response to it, and other people in the
family not so much.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Did you mind that or were you because you're also
basking in the massive adulation that.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
You had, Yes, because I minded it. There's a famous
sentence by the Nobel laureate Cheslad Milosh who said, when
a writer enters the family, the family is screwed.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
And that was you, and that was me. Bombay is
(25:52):
there in the Eleventh Hour as well, particularly in the
story The Musician of Kahani, the Musician of Stories, and
there's a part in it where you do the writer's
version of Breaking the Fourth Wall where you talk about
your own childhood home and there's an illusion as well
to the main character in Midnight's Children.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yes, it makes a little guest appearance.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
So tell me what's going on? What leads to that?
Is it a flight of fancy at the time you're writing?
Speaker 2 (26:21):
No, what I thought. One of the things about that
story is that it felt to me like a kind
of farewell from me to a neighborhood, which has been
very important in my writing. It's not only Midnight's Children. Actually,
there's a in my novel key Shot. One of the
major characters has a backstory in the same neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Is it bigger than a farewell to the neighborhood that
you grew up in? Is it more like a farewell
to India?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
I don't know the answer to that. I'm very reluctant
to predict what I'm going to write in the future,
because every time I've ever done it, I've been wrong.
If I say, oh, I'm never going to write about
India again, that you might try the six hundred page
novel about India following. So I don't know, but it
felt like a conclusion of a certain concern, and I
liked it that I found a story which wasn't about
(27:04):
me to tell, but to tell it as a way
of saying, that's enough.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
From that place, I met more in real life. Can
you visit? Do you want to visit?
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Oh? Yeah, I mean I hope to go. There was
the pandemic and then there was the attack, and that's
slowed things down. But yeah, I'm hoping to go.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
And do you feel you can visit safely?
Speaker 2 (27:23):
We'll find out.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Of course, the first time everything about your daily life
changed significantly with your writing was after the Satanic verses
in nineteen eighty nine. When you wrote your memoir of
that time, you wrote it in the third person, as
if what's happening is happening to someone else.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Was that a conscious effort to distance yourself from the events?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Well, what I felt was that by the time I
got round to writing it, it was quite a few
years after the events that are described in the book,
And what I felt was that the person writing the
book and the person about whom the book was written
were in slightly different places in their lives. Person about
whom the book was being written was, you know, under
great stress and was in all kinds of personal and
(28:07):
political difficulty, and the person writing the book was in
a better place. So I just thought that although they're
both me, they're not quite the same me. So that
was one of the reasons for the third person and
the other was I wanted the book to read like
a novel.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Which which was your your forte.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, And I think if you're writing a memoir or
an autobiography, the character called I has a kind of
significance that the other characters don't. And I thought, if
I take away the eye and if I refer to
the ME character in the same language as all the
other characters, that it brings that character down to the
same level as the other characters, that it reads like
(28:44):
a novel. So that those were the reasons. But then
by the time I got round to writing Knife, that
felt very personal. I felt that had to be a
first person book.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, it's interesting to me that so after the time
of the of the fatwa and the fact that your
life changes overnight when you have to go into hiding
and you're under British police protection, that you're still writing,
but you're throwing You're continuing to write fiction. You're not
writing about your real life.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Then I journal, which I don't. I have not in
my life been a journalist a journal keeper, unlike sun
writers I know, who are very detailed journal keepers. But
just in those years, I thought that these events were
so powerful and they were things moved so rapidly or
so much going on that I thought, there's no way
I'm going to remember this. I'm not going to remember
(29:31):
like the dailiness of it, and so I need to
keep a record. So I did, have, you know, hundreds
of hundreds of pages of journal that I kept for
that almost a decade.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Tell me if I'm wrong, But I feel like the
decade before the Fatwah, your nonfiction is a lot about
India and Pakistan and about race relations and so much
of what you're seeing around you, which you're doing alongside
your fiction. And then of course after the Fatwah, you've
(30:01):
become much more associated with the cause of free speech
because of the price that you've paid for yours.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
When you look around with free speech, Yeah, is it
even more challenged or is the right to it even
more challenge than it was in nineteen eighty nine when
the fat was I think there's.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah, I think there's unexpected amounts of pressure on free expression,
on people to restrain themselves from certain kinds of speech,
and the pressure comes I think. I mean, historically the
pressure on free speech comes from conservative forces in society
who disapprove of less conservative voices. But now it comes
(30:41):
from the other end as well. There are people who
are willing to, as they say, deplatform voices that they
don't like. Whereas my kind of old school viewers that
the defense of free speech begins when somebody says something
you don't like, because it's actually perfectly easy to defend
people who you agree with or to whom you're indifferent exactly.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That is in such short supply now, most people who
are defenders a free speech just really want their own
space defended.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Exactly, And that's the opposite of free speech. Over the years, yes,
I've been involved in quite a lot of free speech issues,
and very often you find yourself defending things you don't
like at all.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
But do you have to be careful then, not to
be co opted too much when you realize that some
of the people who want you to rally behind them
are actually only interested in one kind of free speech.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yes, the battle is it's not easy, you know, it's
a complicated battle and you have to be on your guard.
But the general principle I think has to be if
there's a pressure to censor something, the sensor has to
make the case. The default setting has to be the
freedom freedom. And you know, different countries set the limit
in different places. So for example, here in the UK,
(31:51):
because of the Race Relations Act, there are certain kinds
of speech which are forbidden racist speech, whereas in America,
because of the First Amends, much of the speech that
would be forbidden under the Race Relations actors permitted. They
are European countries which outlaw Holocaust denial, and there are
other countries which think that's a mistake.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
But the US, which is your home. Now, do you
see a different climate on free speech even there?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, I mean. The Writer's Organization PEN America a few
weeks ago issued a report in which it said that
at this moment in the United States there are twenty
three thousand active book bands, and in many cases in schools,
one parent objecting to the presence of a book on
the syllabus or in the library can result in having
that book removed. Twenty three thousand and these are not
(32:39):
just any old books. These are Tony Morrison's Beloved or
Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, some of the
best books ever written. And there is a fight back
against it because there is the defense of the First Amendment,
and there's a lot of court cases, and in many
cases those court cases are succeeding, but there's just a
lot to fight about. What's interesting thing is that recently
(33:01):
there have been a series of elections to school boards
across America and in every single case, the book banners
have been swept off the board and more liberal people
have come on it. So there is a backlash against
the book bans, and hopefully that will prevail.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
But the fact that they have come in at all.
Could you ever have imagined that in the US, because
you've made the country your home for twenty five years.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
At twenty six now, yeah, but no, I would never
imagined it. Because one of the reasons why people like
me wanted to live in America is because the fact
that free speech is enshrined in the Constitution, I mean,
the First Development is very powerful and in a country
of that kind that this should happen, And especially what
you begin to notice is that many of the books
that are being banned have something in common, which is
(33:44):
that they deal with America seen from the perspective of
people who are not white. You know, if you think
about Beloved or to Kill a Bockingbird, books like that,
that's what they have in common. That they tell the
story of America from a different viewpoint. And there is,
in my view, clearly an attempt again to erase that viewpoint.
And so it's more important than just the fact that
(34:06):
this or that title that you happen to be fond
of is banned. It's a question of what would happen
to a generation of children if they grow up ignorant
of the history of the country. That's dangerous, dangerous, dangerous
because it is a very plural society, a very diverse society,
and if all you hear is one version, which is
(34:27):
the version of the dominant race, then that's potentially very destabilizing.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
It is New York, which you've made your home, and
New York now has a new mayor elect who I
think you must know because you've worked with his mother, Mira,
and I well, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Worked with Mirah, but I've known her a long time.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yes, Yes, it's a film of Midnight's Children.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Was it.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
I think Mira has she not collaborated with you?
Speaker 2 (34:51):
And mir have this joke that they're always being congratulated
on each other's films.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Okay, don't tell them I said this, But you know
Mira and I know Mirah.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yes, I don't know his father so well, but I've
met Mahmoud as well. And I mean, look, he ran
a terrific campaign. He energized young people. Especially Normally, in
a New York mayoral election, the vote is, the percentage
of people voting is not that High's a very Democrat city.
The Democrat always wins, except Giuliani, so normally it's kind
(35:24):
of boring. But this was a very energized race. I
think it's the highest percentage of turnout since about the
nineteen sixties, so he certainly earned it.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Do you think, zoraon Mumdaney's success is replicable outside New
York City.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
I don't know. I mean, I think maybe in certain
parts of the country, but New York is a very
particular place. I thought. What was interesting on the day
that he won the election to be mayor was that
in two other places in New Jersey and Virginia women
Democrat women much more centrist than Mumdani also won by
very large margins, much larger margins than were expected digit margins.
(36:01):
So I thought, it's unclear which is the better direction
to follow, and maybe you don't have to follow one
direction everywhere.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Sarah Mundani did not resile from his support for Palestinian rights,
which became an issue for some in that campaign. Tell
me how you feel about that particular cause today, because
in imaginary homelands there's a long conversation that you had
with Edward Sayid, who you obviously knew in his life
a good friend.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Well, look, I mean, I'm still have the view that
two state solution is the solution. But question is whether
anybody there believes in that anymore. I think neither Netanyahu
nor Hamas were that interested in a two state solution.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
And Hamas is not all the Palestinian people.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
No, it's not. And the question is how do we
get out of this dreadful situation and move towards something
that has some kind of justice. And I don't know
the answer to that because the Palestinian authority isn't supported
a lot of Palestinians. Hamas I think has perhaps lost
support amongst a lot of Palestinians. So I mean, who
(37:06):
do you negotiate with and who does the negotiating.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
And back to the free speech side in this country.
In the UK today you can't hold up a sign
saying I support Palestine action without being arrested. What do
you think of essentially making it a terrorist group.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
I think that's probably a mistake. My view has always
been let voices be heard, especially if I disagree with them,
because I was saying, it's no trick to allow somebody
to hold up a blackuard that you agree with. I mean,
I was surprised the last time I was in England,
which was some months ago now, there was this huge
demonstration in London of one hundred and fifty thousand people
(37:45):
marching against immigration.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
The Unite the Kingdom rally.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, and I thought I couldn't believe that that was
happening in England. So I think there is a destabilization
here as well as in America. So yeah, it's a
very worrying time.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Well how does that leave you feeling? Because we've talked
about India, the United Kingdom and the United States, things
happening is disquieted by what's happening in all three countries.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I mean, you know this book which deals with all
three countries. Writing it, I was aware of the fact
that there were echoes. They're not exactly the same situation,
you know, they all have their local differences, but there
are echoes between all three societies of what's going on.
I mean, not to my liking. This is sometimes the
world moves in a direction that's not to your liking,
(38:32):
and all you can do is hope that it will change.
In America, there are some small indications that it will change,
and I'm saying that in the various votes that there
have been recently, there's been an enormous swing away from
what one might call trump Ism.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
And then you yourself with a book tour for your
most recent book. What comes next? Are you writing again?
Or will you take a breath before your next?
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Now? You know, I'm always happier when I'm writing than
when i'm not. Ask anybody who knows me. I'm much
better company when I have a book to write. I
would hope that the next thing will be a novel,
and I have a germ of something that I've started
work on. But I really don't know where it's going yet.
I think I know what it's about, but I don't
know how to do it yet.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Does that mean you haven't yet sat down with the
empty laptop screen.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
I've got some I've got some stuff, you know, I've
got some pages, but I'm not sure about them.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And what is your routine like? Do you are you?
Are you disciplined? Is it like this is my writing
time and this is my personal line.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Actually, what's happened to me over these as you say,
this half century, is that I've become very disciplined. And
now I do it like a job. And I'm not
one of those writers who can get up at dawn
and work. You know, I'm not very good early in
the morning. So I get up the morning as a
sort of ordinary time, and I have my coffee, and
I go to work and I do a day's work.
(39:50):
And I am very disciplined. Now. I think there's a
funny line of Hemingway was once asked about literary commitment,
you know, by which the interviewer meant political commitment, and
having aways said the only commitment to writer needs is
the commitment of the seat of his pants to the
seat of his chair, and I think that's very very important.
(40:11):
Sitting down you can't. I mean there are writers who
work standing up, but mostly mostly you sit down.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
But is any of that more difficult because you have
had life changing injuries, You've lost the sight in one eye.
I know you have problems with the other one in
your hand.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, it's difficult. I mean I'm clumsier, I make more
typing mistakes, etc. Everything is a bit harder. But you know,
writing is hard anyway, so it's just a different problem.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
And how do you cope with the solitude required, the
locking yourself away to work?
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Is it? Well, I've got you know, I've got a
very nice room to work in, and I shut the door.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
And come out when you've got to a certain number
of words.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yes, I always give myself an artificially low number of words.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
That's the cheat, so that you can exceed it.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
So what is the daily total? Then?
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Well, if I could get a couple of hundred words
downe I would think that's not bad. I mean a
page is usually three hundred in a bit, you know,
three hundred and twenty something like that. If I can
do that, I'd extremely pleased. But you know, Flaubert used
to come down from his study and say he'd had
a great day today he wrote a sentence. So writing
(41:22):
is sometimes slow, sometimes quick. I mean with these books
Knife and the Eleventhous, I mean they came out at
one year intervals. For me, that's some kind of a record.
Quite often, I've taken five years to write a book,
so it seems I'm getting faster in my old age.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Samondrishtie good luck with the next one. Thank you, And
that's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week. If you subscribe,
you'll know as soon as a new episode hits the feed.
And to everyone who's rated us here or left comments,
thank you. We also have an email. It's Michelle's show
(41:58):
at Bloomberg. You can watch these conversations on YouTube and
Bloomberg TV, and the text version with my notes for
added context are at Bloomberg dot com slash Weekend. The
show's producers are Jessica Beck and Chris marklu The executive
producer is Louisa Lewis. Our sound engineer is Richard Ward.
(42:22):
Video editing Toby Babalola and Evando Thompson. Social media Alex Morgan,
Music by Bart Walshaw at Bloomberg Weekend. Brendan Francis Newnham
is Editorial director of Audio and Special Projects, and our
executive editor is Catherine Bell. We'd also like to thank Summer,
Sadi and the Bloomberg podcast team, and thank you for
(42:46):
listening until next weekend. Goodbye,
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There's unexpected amounce of pressure on pre expression, and my
kind of old school viewers that the defense of free
speech begins when somebody says something you don't like.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Salman Rushty, writer survivor, observer of places he's called home
from India to the United States. I was looking at
this book, and you do warn about a lot of
things that have become more extreme ever since.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
As a writer, if you're paying attention, then sometimes you
see things coming. And I think that's what I was doing.
I was paying attention.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
From Bloomberg Weekend. This is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm
Michelle Hussein. It's now more than three years since a
celebrated author nearly lost his life on a stage at
an event in upstate New York. He was stabbed multiple
(01:05):
times in an attack that came more than thirty years
after death threats over his novel The Satanic Verses. For
the first time since that attack, Salman Brushti has returned
to fiction with a collection of short stories in a
new book called The Eleventh Hour. And yet so often
his stories have drawn on real events, real people and places.
(01:30):
It's something you'll hear us talk about, not least because,
as it happens, I know some of those real people
as well as the places. There's a family link between us,
a personal connection that makes this particular conversation an unusual
one for me, But I hope it helps paint a
portrait of a writer who has known great success and
(01:54):
the greatest of tests life in the spotlight as well
as in the shadows through the years when he was
in hiding. And so we discuss politics and protest, free speech,
and book bands and the countries he knows best India,
Britain and the United States. Pelmnus thee welcome, thank you.
(02:17):
Your new book is your second published since the awful
day on that stage in New York where you came
close to losing your life. So I feel I really
want to start by asking how you're doing.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I'm okay, thank you. I'm surprisingly okay. I found that
doctors inspecting me were constantly telling me that I shouldn't
be so well, as if I was doing something wrong.
But no, I've made a pretty good recovery.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But it was a hard road. I think that's clear
because in your last book, Knife, you write about the
life changing injuries that you've seen.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, I mean, you know, there were a lot of
injuries and they were very close to killing me, so
the recovery was Yeah, it took a long time.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Do you think it changed you that day?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I mean only in certain ways. I mean I think
if you are given an extra lease of life, it
makes you see every day is a blessing. You know,
every day is a luxury. And it also gives me
the sense of even more than before, don't waste your time.
If you've been given some extra time, use it.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
It's interesting to hear you say the word blessing because
you're famously not a man of faith.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
No, no, this is entirely secular blessing.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
But psychologically, do you feel it comes back to you
or have you turned well?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Not anymore? I mean, I think that's a classic symptom
of PTSDs to replay the event, And I mean I
guess there was a bit of that at the beginning.
I mean, it's been getting on for three and a
half years now. I think it's long enough to have
dealt with it.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
It seems that you had the instinct to write about
it very early on, as you came round and were
conscious of your circumstances again, were you thinking in words
on the past.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
First I was thinking I don't want to write about.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It because it was too traumatic.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, I just thought that's the last thing I want
to do. And then I understood that it was impossible
for me to write anything else until i'd dealt with it,
and I just understood that the only way passed it
was to go through it. And so then I thought, yeah,
I better write about it.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
So it was a form of therapy.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Then that book, well, it was a form of dealing
with it. Yes, I don't like the idea of writing
as therapy. I think writing is writing and therapy is therapy.
But it certainly made me feel ownership, like taking charge
of it rather than simply being a victim lying on
the ground bleeding. It became my story that I was
telling in my way.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
You have talked though, about writing as a form of optimism.
It's an act of hope.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yes. I think all writing is that you sit alone
in a room for anything, sometimes for years, and you
hope that what you produce is going to be valuable
to people you know, or enjoyable to people, but at
least people will respond well to it. But you have
no idea, you know, and so that requires optimism. I
(05:00):
think all writing in that sense is born out of
a sort of optimism.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And you have been writing for more than fifty years.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, it hits up.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
There was it a lonely road at first when you're
trying to get your first novel published. And then that
first novel didn't do as well as.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
You hoped, to say the least.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I mean, you made up for it later, so I
think we can talk about it.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
I mean there was, you know, a lot of my
contemporaries like Ian McEwen and Martin Amiss and Julian Barnes.
You know, they were all taking off like rockets, you
know that in the early twenties, producing work which immediately
established their voice. And I was stumbling around and it
took me a while to find my direction. And in
(05:42):
a way I found it by going back to childhood.
And when I started writing what became Midnight's Children, I
was already thinking, I just want to write a novel
about childhood.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
But your childhood was in India and it ended up
being a story of India there.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, and then at some point the history came pouring
in and it became a much larger scale of and
it took me like over five years to write because
in a way, I was learning how to write it
while I was writing it.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
And the idea that you've lived in these multiple places,
You've lived across three continents. You've called Britain, India, and
now the United States your home. I think all of
these themes are present in your work throughout, whether it's
fiction or nonfiction.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Sometimes I envy those writers who are deeply rooted in
one place and can spend a lifetime drawing on that
one place. I mean William Faulkner, for example, Oxford, Mississippi,
is this tiny place, and yet it was enough for
him to have a lifetime of masterpieces. And that's not
been my experience because I've moved around. But then, you know,
(06:43):
you lose something, you gain something, And I think it's
helped me to have a wider vision of the world.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And I think it's there certainly in your latest book,
The Eleventh Hour, which is a collection of short stories,
not all of them the same length. I'm a bit
longer again, that sense of people, places that have influenced you.
One of the ones that interested me is Late, which
it's pretty clear is set in the place where you
went to university back in the nineteen six Yes.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
The university is not named and the college is not named,
but it's pretty obviously.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
King's College, cambridg Yes. And why go back to that period.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I'd always wanted to, you know, but I'd never really
found the story because it was a good time for me.
I mean, it was a happy time for me university,
and I'd never written about it. And then two things
happened sort of squashed together. One was my memory of
having briefly encountered the great em Foster, who was in
residence at the college. He was an honorary fellow of
Kings and he was very nice to me, especially when
(07:40):
he found out that I had an Indian background, because
India was so important to him.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
You meet him in the nineteen sixties, which is what
forty years after he's published a Passage to India and
he's an academic in Cambridge.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
This endless silence. You never wrote another novel after Passage
to India.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
What did he say to you about writing?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Well, he was encouraging, I mean, very shyly admitted that
I was kind of hoping that I would write something,
and He was very sweet and generous about it and
said that, you know, he thought that that was good.
He thought that the good book about India would probably
be written by somebody from India, but with knowledge of
Western literature. So for a nineteen year old kid, it
(08:21):
was enormously gratifying to have that kind of benediction.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You fitted the bill, I fitted his.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Bill, Yes, whatever that is. So that was one thing,
and the other thing was my I mean, I never
met Alan Turing, but of course he was another enormously
important graduate of Kings and both of them suffered quite
seriously because of their homosexuality. They were both very badly
treated and damaged by the fact that it was illegal
(08:50):
in England and so on. And so I thought, if
I just kind of squashed them both into the same character,
which will become my character, will be a third character
who isn't really either of them, But it's a way
of talking about all of that.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, and there's a sort of avenging of the injustices
that they went through, which is part of your story.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yes. First of all, I wasn't expecting it to be
a ghost story. And secondly, I wasn't expecting it to
be a revenge ghost story, and it just grew that way.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Is that the way that you write? Then you sit
down and you're not sure how the story's going to end.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Well, you have some sense of it, but not a
detailed sense. You know. What I thought it was going
to be was a story about an improbable friendship between
this elderly gentleman and this young Indian woman student who
had the love of India in common. And I thought,
it's going to be about this improbable friendship between the
two of them. And then when I started writing it,
(09:41):
I just found myself typing this sentence in which I
killed him in the first sentence. Now, when he woke
up that morning, he was dead, and I thought, where'd
that come from? And then I have to think about it,
and then I thought, okay, so it's still going to
be about an improbable friendship, but one of the people
is dead.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
But again, does that mean that you don't do a
plan of the story, or if it's a novel, you
don't chart out chapters in a way.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
I used to. I used to be architectural about it.
I needed to have quite a detailed structure. But as
it's gone on, that's kind of changed. I mean, of course,
you have some structure. You know, you have to know
what you're writing about and why you're writing it. And
it goes from here to here, and there are these
various points along the way that it needs to touch on.
But I more and more see it as a process
(10:27):
of discovery. You write the story to find out what
story you're writing.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
And then is there a moment when you know that
your instinct has been right?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Because it's also sometimes wrong? You know, sometimes you go
down blind alleys and you have to have the mental
toughness to say, no, that's not right. You have to
cancel that go another way.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Does that mean dropping a story entirely? Does that? Does
that mean they're unfinished fragments? Or do you just redo?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Do you make it right to redo it? Okay?
Speaker 1 (10:53):
With an editor or with your own instinct?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Me, I can't show people unfinished work. So what I
mean by initiatives? When I think I can't make it
any better, then I get very interested in editorial input.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And how do you respond to an editor saying you
could make this better?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
This I'm getting much better at it, but.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
You weren't to the beginning.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I wasn't.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
So well. Will take us back to Midnight's Children.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Then, well, there was the most important editorial contributions, both
of which I accepted. There was an extra character, you know,
in Midnight Children, Salem is theoretically telling the story to
this person who works in the same pickle factory, called Padna,
and so it's both an oral narrative and a written narrative.
(11:36):
And initially there was a second audience figure, and people
at Jonathan Cape as it was who read it all
said you don't need that second figure, you only need one.
And so then eventually I agreed to have a go
at removing the second figure, and it proved so easy
to remove that it was clear that they were right.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
But you seem to have struggled with it.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I thought, you know, what are you talking about? And
the second thing was there was a moment in the
sort of about two thirds of the way through the
novel where the timeline got a bit scrambled, where I
jumped forward and then back and then forward again. And
basically Liz Calder, who was my editor, said just keep
(12:19):
the chronology, tell it in sequence, and again she was right,
so did so I did even then accept very important
pieces of editorial contribution.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
And that was the book that was life changing for you,
that made you famous overnight when you won the book
a prize for it in nineteen eighty one. I still
want to go back in time, though, because saying while
you were still at university to Ian Foster that you
wanted to be a writer, I know a bit about
the kind of family environment you would have grown up in.
(12:51):
Even though we're a generation apart. There's a connection there,
certainly is between us. I might as well spell it
out now. Your mother and my grandmother were sisters.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yes, and your mother is my first cousin.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
With whom you spent time in your growing up years,
when you both spent time in the same family house,
your grandparents house. But the reason I'm interested in the
writing side of it is that, from what I know
of that environment, wasn't there an emphasis on being a
professional of a different kind, a doctor or a lawyer
or an engineer.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yes, my father was not pleased when I said I
wanted to write books, but I remember what he said.
He said, what will I tell my friends? And fortunately
he lived long enough for his friends to call him
up and congratulate him.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
But that's not because he you know, these are literate
people who enjoy consuming writing. But it's a question of
how you're going to support yourself.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I've been writing is not a real job, you know,
it's a hobby.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So what gave you the courage to think, no, I'm
really going to have a go a?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I yes, I really wanted to do it, you know.
I think if I look back at that young fellow,
he had real determination because it took me a long time.
I mean, I graduated from Cambridge in nineteen sixty eight
and Midnight Children came out in nineteen eighty one, so
that was almost thirteen years of not getting there before
I did get there. And I think that determination retrospectively,
(14:16):
I'm quite proud of it.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
It's either a short time or a long time, depending
on the way you look at it. It's a relatively
short time for the success you've had subsequently.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Well, but everybody else was doing much better than me, and.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
You were conscious of that competitive well.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I mean, you know you're aware of what your generation
is doing.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
I think, and then again to the environment that shaped
you in India's You're growing up in Bombay in the
nineteen fifties. I know your father read you stories, but
your mother, my great aunt, who I remember very well.
I feel that she and her sisters were also part
of an unusual generation where for women of their time,
they were thinking about careers. They were not going to
(14:56):
be in Parada, they were not going to live the
same way their mother did.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
They were very open I did, and brought us up
in that way. You know, we were not. We brought
up in a very what I suppose you would call
liberal atmosphere and very largely secular atmosphere. You know, it
wasn't wasn't an enormous amount of religion in our.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
House, and that was a tone that was then set
for the rest of your life. Did it give you
a certain freedom?
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, because we didn't. I mean, you know, maybe my
father would take me to eat the prayers once a year.
That was about it. And I didn't understand them because
I don't speak any Arabic. I'd just go up and
down when he'd went up and down, and that was
what he instructed me to do.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
But Urdu was your mother, yes, actually, as it was
mine as well, because I was also spoken to only
do in the first few years of my life. Is
it still present in your life?
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yes, somewhere I still speak, yes. I mean, what would
happen in childhood was that I went to a school
which was an English medium school in Bombay Cathedral School.
So at school we would speak English. When we got home,
my mother would tend to speak to us. So we
were brought up in that way.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
And what was the influence of your grandparents' home which
I tried to track down in northern India some years ago,
but it had already been pulled down they demolished.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, but you know in aligar which is this university
town south of Delhi, they had this rather beautiful old
style Indian courtyard house and like a couple of times
a year there would be like family gatherings where my mother,
her two sisters, her two brothers and their children would
all gather at the grandparents' house. I could remember. We
(16:34):
would perform little plays. Children would perform little plays for
the entertainment of the adults, and we would all sleep
on the roof on chart by beds under mosquito nets.
And it was kind of rather magical that house. And
it was where we because you know, some of the
family was in Pakistan and some was in India, so
(16:54):
that house became the place where we came together.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
And I think also because one of you on was
in films and his wife was an actor and a dancer,
this sort of sense of culture and performance and art
of different kinds is part of your life.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yes. Well, my uncle, my uncle Hamid, who also lived
in Bombay as we did, had this apartment on Marine Drive,
which I remember with great affection because he was like
my favorite uncle, and he was very booming and funny
and affectionate, and his wife was rather wonderful too, and
so I remember my visits to this apartment with great pleasure.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's so interesting hearing you talk about this because I've
only ever you know, I know that this environment is
part of what shaped my mother as well, but I've
always heard about it secondhand. When you set out to
write Midnight's Children, I know you by that stage you
hadn't been to Bombay or to India for a long time,
so I think you but I went back after it
was before, but you were trying. You spent a lot
(17:52):
of time trying to remember as well the fragments of it.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yes, I mean, I think memory is a great resource
when you seriously try and remember. It's amazing seeing how
much comes back, But now I did. After I've published
my unsuccessful first novel, I took what little money I'd
earned from it and went to India for many months,
living and traveling as cheaply as I could in order
to kind of get it back in my system.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
And making notes.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Making notes, and that included, of course Bombay, but also
some parts that I'd never been to, like Benaras for example,
which I mean I had in my mind some crude
structure of what would become Midnight Children, and I wanted
to go to places that I thought might get into
the book.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
And you stood outside your old childhood home.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
And went inside because we actually, I actually knew the
people to whom my parents had sold the house, so
they welcomed that in. And the interior had been completely transformed.
It looked like a Bollywood movie set, but the house
was still the house.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Were you setting out to tell a big story, it
got larger.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
That started out, I thought I'd just got to write
a novel about childhood. And because you know, I'm eight
weeks older than the independent nations of India and Pakistan.
And at some point it occurred to me supposing it
wasn't an eight week difference. Supposing it was the same time,
where did that take you? And of course where it
(19:16):
took you into was to have the subject of the
history of the Independent Nations being a part of the story.
So it became a much much bigger book.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And of course the family is deeply for your own
family is deeply affected by this. Our family because I
realized as I put the chronology together in my head
that your mother, with you as a newborn, is in
Bombay and her two sisters are sort of trying to
get from similar to Delhi and eventually to Pakistan. So
you're born at a time of tremendous rupture of different kinds.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yes, And like many Indian Muslim families, family was more
or less cut in half. So my mother and my
uncle Hamid and my uncle Mahmoud all stayed in India
and my mother's two sisters were in Pakistan. So I mean,
when we were little children, there were moments when it
was easier to travel between India and Pakistan than it
(20:08):
is now. There used to be these little boats that
went from Bombay to Karachi, not very grand boats called
Suburbati and Saraswati, and you used to be able to
take the boat because actually Bombaya Karachi is not very
far as the crow flies, you know, it's like a
day in the night on a tin pot boat. And
so we would go every so often, more to Karachi
than than to where your family was in Raalapindi. But
(20:32):
so there was more interchange between India and Pakistan at
that time.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Was India than the home of your childhood, The country
of your childhood effectively then taken away from you when
your parents moved to Pakistan in the sixties.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, I mean I was very cross with them for
selling the house in Bombay.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Why did they I'd never understood it.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
I mean they said, amongst other things, that they wanted
their daughters to have Muslim husbands, which was very odd
given how lacking in religious faith, particularly my father had
always been. So I never really got to the bottom
of it. And I don't think they were that content
after moving to Karachi, because they had a very nice
(21:13):
life in Bombay, which is it puzzles me that they left,
and I felt I had to get it back. You know.
There was a point after leaving Cambridge and deciding to
base myself in London to try and be a writer
that I felt that I was in danger of losing touch,
and that's why I went on that long journey of
several months and that led to Midnight Children, and I felt,
(21:35):
you know, I always told myself that Bombay is a city.
A lot of it is built on land reclaimed from
the sea. The British had a big land reclamation project
where they joined up the seven islands into one peninsula.
And I thought, I'm also engaged in an active land
reclamation and that's what that book was.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Did it give you what you were looking for?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
It did really Yeah, yeah, because it's the reception of
Midnight Children in India was wonderful. It gave me a
feeling of belonging again.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
You did make political points through it. It was at
the end of the period of the emergency Indi Ragandhi
had brought about and were you you were intending it
as that as a critique of India at that time.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
As I say, if you're writing a book about in
which the character and the country are kind of twins,
you have to write about both the twins. And the
emergency was a real shock to many of us. The
fact that you know, the so called world's largest democracy
would flirt with dictatorship. I mean more than flirt. Actually
for a couple of years it was quite serious. So
it had to get into the book. And I mean,
(22:36):
actually I was very worried because I didn't want the
book to end on that note. But I also thought,
I can't end the emergency in my book if it
hasn't ended in real life. And then in the Ragandhi
called an election and lost, and I felt really grateful
to her because she gave me the end of the book.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Do you think that, as you look at India today,
is in the Ragandhi a more benign figure than you
thought she was at the time.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Well, not during the years of the emergency. I think
that was a very dark time, which is not unlike
what's happening now in its way, But I mean she
is a more impressive figure, and of course when she
regained power after some years, so no, I mean she's
an extraordinary woman. And I remember, as I say, when
Midnight Children came out, it was very well received. If
(23:20):
there was any criticism of it, some people felt that
the ending was too pessimistic, and now looking back at it,
I think the ending was absurdly.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Optimistic compared to what's happened, what actually happens. So how
do you feel about India today under Prime Minister Modi.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I feel very worried about it, you know, because I mean,
I have a lot of friends in India who are
journalists and from whom I get interesting information about what's
going on. And I think everybody is extremely concerned with
the attack on freedoms of journalists, of writers, of intellectuals,
of professors, et cetera. Even beyond that, there seems to
(23:56):
be a desire to rewrite the history of the country,
essentially to say Hindus good, Muslims bad. The thing that vs.
Nippel once called a wounded civilization, the idea that India
is a Hindu civilization wounded by the arrival of Muslims, invaders, invaders.
That project has a lot of energy behind it.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
There's a lot of Personally, I was looking at this
book Imaginary Homelands, which is your criticism and essays written
through the nineteen eighties and first published in nineteen ninety one,
and you do warn about a lot of things that
have become more extreme ever since.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah, I think you know, if as a writer, if
you're paying attention, then sometimes you see things coming, and
I think that's what I was doing. I was paying attention, what.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
About the people in your life? Because I know that
obviously The Knight's Children is a work of fiction, but
you draw on the structure of your real your true family.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
My father was very annoyed.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
You're not the only one. I think all those closer
to me were pretty upset. Or father, you'd good unfair.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
My mother was very very calm about it. He said, oh, yes,
I could see this, what's happening here, but this is
not me and this is not my husband, and it's
all made up. So actually my mother had a very
good literary response to it, and other people in the
family not so much.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Did you mind that or were you because you're also
basking in the massive adulation that.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
You had, Yes, because I minded it. There's a famous
sentence by the Nobel laureate Cheslad Milosh who said, when
a writer enters the family, the family is screwed.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
And that was you, and that was me. Bombay is
(25:52):
there in the Eleventh Hour as well, particularly in the
story The Musician of Kahani, the Musician of Stories, and
there's a part in it where you do the writer's
version of Breaking the Fourth Wall where you talk about
your own childhood home and there's an illusion as well
to the main character in Midnight's Children.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yes, it makes a little guest appearance.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
So tell me what's going on? What leads to that?
Is it a flight of fancy at the time you're writing?
Speaker 2 (26:21):
No, what I thought. One of the things about that
story is that it felt to me like a kind
of farewell from me to a neighborhood, which has been
very important in my writing. It's not only Midnight's Children. Actually,
there's a in my novel key Shot. One of the
major characters has a backstory in the same neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Is it bigger than a farewell to the neighborhood that
you grew up in? Is it more like a farewell
to India?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
I don't know the answer to that. I'm very reluctant
to predict what I'm going to write in the future,
because every time I've ever done it, I've been wrong.
If I say, oh, I'm never going to write about
India again, that you might try the six hundred page
novel about India following. So I don't know, but it
felt like a conclusion of a certain concern, and I
liked it that I found a story which wasn't about
(27:04):
me to tell, but to tell it as a way
of saying, that's enough.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
From that place, I met more in real life. Can
you visit? Do you want to visit?
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Oh? Yeah, I mean I hope to go. There was
the pandemic and then there was the attack, and that's
slowed things down. But yeah, I'm hoping to go.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
And do you feel you can visit safely?
Speaker 2 (27:23):
We'll find out.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Of course, the first time everything about your daily life
changed significantly with your writing was after the Satanic verses
in nineteen eighty nine. When you wrote your memoir of
that time, you wrote it in the third person, as
if what's happening is happening to someone else.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Was that a conscious effort to distance yourself from the events?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Well, what I felt was that by the time I
got round to writing it, it was quite a few
years after the events that are described in the book,
And what I felt was that the person writing the
book and the person about whom the book was written
were in slightly different places in their lives. Person about
whom the book was being written was, you know, under
great stress and was in all kinds of personal and
(28:07):
political difficulty, and the person writing the book was in
a better place. So I just thought that although they're
both me, they're not quite the same me. So that
was one of the reasons for the third person and
the other was I wanted the book to read like
a novel.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Which which was your your forte.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, And I think if you're writing a memoir or
an autobiography, the character called I has a kind of
significance that the other characters don't. And I thought, if
I take away the eye and if I refer to
the ME character in the same language as all the
other characters, that it brings that character down to the
same level as the other characters, that it reads like
(28:44):
a novel. So that those were the reasons. But then
by the time I got round to writing Knife, that
felt very personal. I felt that had to be a
first person book.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, it's interesting to me that so after the time
of the of the fatwa and the fact that your
life changes overnight when you have to go into hiding
and you're under British police protection, that you're still writing,
but you're throwing You're continuing to write fiction. You're not
writing about your real life.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Then I journal, which I don't. I have not in
my life been a journalist a journal keeper, unlike sun
writers I know, who are very detailed journal keepers. But
just in those years, I thought that these events were
so powerful and they were things moved so rapidly or
so much going on that I thought, there's no way
I'm going to remember this. I'm not going to remember
(29:31):
like the dailiness of it, and so I need to
keep a record. So I did, have, you know, hundreds
of hundreds of pages of journal that I kept for
that almost a decade.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Tell me if I'm wrong, But I feel like the
decade before the Fatwah, your nonfiction is a lot about
India and Pakistan and about race relations and so much
of what you're seeing around you, which you're doing alongside
your fiction. And then of course after the Fatwah, you've
(30:01):
become much more associated with the cause of free speech
because of the price that you've paid for yours.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
When you look around with free speech, Yeah, is it
even more challenged or is the right to it even
more challenge than it was in nineteen eighty nine when
the fat was I think there's.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah, I think there's unexpected amounts of pressure on free expression,
on people to restrain themselves from certain kinds of speech,
and the pressure comes I think. I mean, historically the
pressure on free speech comes from conservative forces in society
who disapprove of less conservative voices. But now it comes
(30:41):
from the other end as well. There are people who
are willing to, as they say, deplatform voices that they
don't like. Whereas my kind of old school viewers that
the defense of free speech begins when somebody says something
you don't like, because it's actually perfectly easy to defend
people who you agree with or to whom you're indifferent exactly.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
That is in such short supply now, most people who
are defenders a free speech just really want their own
space defended.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Exactly, And that's the opposite of free speech. Over the years, yes,
I've been involved in quite a lot of free speech issues,
and very often you find yourself defending things you don't
like at all.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
But do you have to be careful then, not to
be co opted too much when you realize that some
of the people who want you to rally behind them
are actually only interested in one kind of free speech.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yes, the battle is it's not easy, you know, it's
a complicated battle and you have to be on your guard.
But the general principle I think has to be if
there's a pressure to censor something, the sensor has to
make the case. The default setting has to be the
freedom freedom. And you know, different countries set the limit
in different places. So for example, here in the UK,
(31:51):
because of the Race Relations Act, there are certain kinds
of speech which are forbidden racist speech, whereas in America,
because of the First Amends, much of the speech that
would be forbidden under the Race Relations actors permitted. They
are European countries which outlaw Holocaust denial, and there are
other countries which think that's a mistake.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
But the US, which is your home. Now, do you
see a different climate on free speech even there?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, I mean. The Writer's Organization PEN America a few
weeks ago issued a report in which it said that
at this moment in the United States there are twenty
three thousand active book bands, and in many cases in schools,
one parent objecting to the presence of a book on
the syllabus or in the library can result in having
that book removed. Twenty three thousand and these are not
(32:39):
just any old books. These are Tony Morrison's Beloved or
Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, some of the
best books ever written. And there is a fight back
against it because there is the defense of the First Amendment,
and there's a lot of court cases, and in many
cases those court cases are succeeding, but there's just a
lot to fight about. What's interesting thing is that recently
(33:01):
there have been a series of elections to school boards
across America and in every single case, the book banners
have been swept off the board and more liberal people
have come on it. So there is a backlash against
the book bans, and hopefully that will prevail.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
But the fact that they have come in at all.
Could you ever have imagined that in the US, because
you've made the country your home for twenty five years.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
At twenty six now, yeah, but no, I would never
imagined it. Because one of the reasons why people like
me wanted to live in America is because the fact
that free speech is enshrined in the Constitution, I mean,
the First Development is very powerful and in a country
of that kind that this should happen, And especially what
you begin to notice is that many of the books
that are being banned have something in common, which is
(33:44):
that they deal with America seen from the perspective of
people who are not white. You know, if you think
about Beloved or to Kill a Bockingbird, books like that,
that's what they have in common. That they tell the
story of America from a different viewpoint. And there is,
in my view, clearly an attempt again to erase that viewpoint.
And so it's more important than just the fact that
(34:06):
this or that title that you happen to be fond
of is banned. It's a question of what would happen
to a generation of children if they grow up ignorant
of the history of the country. That's dangerous, dangerous, dangerous
because it is a very plural society, a very diverse society,
and if all you hear is one version, which is
(34:27):
the version of the dominant race, then that's potentially very destabilizing.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
It is New York, which you've made your home, and
New York now has a new mayor elect who I
think you must know because you've worked with his mother, Mira,
and I well, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Worked with Mirah, but I've known her a long time.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yes, Yes, it's a film of Midnight's Children.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Was it.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
I think Mira has she not collaborated with you?
Speaker 2 (34:51):
And mir have this joke that they're always being congratulated
on each other's films.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Okay, don't tell them I said this, But you know
Mira and I know Mirah.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yes, I don't know his father so well, but I've
met Mahmoud as well. And I mean, look, he ran
a terrific campaign. He energized young people. Especially Normally, in
a New York mayoral election, the vote is, the percentage
of people voting is not that High's a very Democrat city.
The Democrat always wins, except Giuliani, so normally it's kind
(35:24):
of boring. But this was a very energized race. I
think it's the highest percentage of turnout since about the
nineteen sixties, so he certainly earned it.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Do you think, zoraon Mumdaney's success is replicable outside New
York City.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
I don't know. I mean, I think maybe in certain
parts of the country, but New York is a very
particular place. I thought. What was interesting on the day
that he won the election to be mayor was that
in two other places in New Jersey and Virginia women
Democrat women much more centrist than Mumdani also won by
very large margins, much larger margins than were expected digit margins.
(36:01):
So I thought, it's unclear which is the better direction
to follow, and maybe you don't have to follow one
direction everywhere.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Sarah Mundani did not resile from his support for Palestinian rights,
which became an issue for some in that campaign. Tell
me how you feel about that particular cause today, because
in imaginary homelands there's a long conversation that you had
with Edward Sayid, who you obviously knew in his life
a good friend.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Well, look, I mean, I'm still have the view that
two state solution is the solution. But question is whether
anybody there believes in that anymore. I think neither Netanyahu
nor Hamas were that interested in a two state solution.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
And Hamas is not all the Palestinian people.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
No, it's not. And the question is how do we
get out of this dreadful situation and move towards something
that has some kind of justice. And I don't know
the answer to that because the Palestinian authority isn't supported
a lot of Palestinians. Hamas I think has perhaps lost
support amongst a lot of Palestinians. So I mean, who
(37:06):
do you negotiate with and who does the negotiating.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
And back to the free speech side in this country.
In the UK today you can't hold up a sign
saying I support Palestine action without being arrested. What do
you think of essentially making it a terrorist group.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
I think that's probably a mistake. My view has always
been let voices be heard, especially if I disagree with them,
because I was saying, it's no trick to allow somebody
to hold up a blackuard that you agree with. I mean,
I was surprised the last time I was in England,
which was some months ago now, there was this huge
demonstration in London of one hundred and fifty thousand people
(37:45):
marching against immigration.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
The Unite the Kingdom rally.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, and I thought I couldn't believe that that was
happening in England. So I think there is a destabilization
here as well as in America. So yeah, it's a
very worrying time.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Well how does that leave you feeling? Because we've talked
about India, the United Kingdom and the United States, things
happening is disquieted by what's happening in all three countries.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I mean, you know this book which deals with all
three countries. Writing it, I was aware of the fact
that there were echoes. They're not exactly the same situation,
you know, they all have their local differences, but there
are echoes between all three societies of what's going on.
I mean, not to my liking. This is sometimes the
world moves in a direction that's not to your liking,
(38:32):
and all you can do is hope that it will change.
In America, there are some small indications that it will change,
and I'm saying that in the various votes that there
have been recently, there's been an enormous swing away from
what one might call trump Ism.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
And then you yourself with a book tour for your
most recent book. What comes next? Are you writing again?
Or will you take a breath before your next?
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Now? You know, I'm always happier when I'm writing than
when i'm not. Ask anybody who knows me. I'm much
better company when I have a book to write. I
would hope that the next thing will be a novel,
and I have a germ of something that I've started
work on. But I really don't know where it's going yet.
I think I know what it's about, but I don't
know how to do it yet.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Does that mean you haven't yet sat down with the
empty laptop screen.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
I've got some I've got some stuff, you know, I've
got some pages, but I'm not sure about them.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And what is your routine like? Do you are you?
Are you disciplined? Is it like this is my writing
time and this is my personal line.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Actually, what's happened to me over these as you say,
this half century, is that I've become very disciplined. And
now I do it like a job. And I'm not
one of those writers who can get up at dawn
and work. You know, I'm not very good early in
the morning. So I get up the morning as a
sort of ordinary time, and I have my coffee, and
I go to work and I do a day's work.
(39:50):
And I am very disciplined. Now. I think there's a
funny line of Hemingway was once asked about literary commitment,
you know, by which the interviewer meant political commitment, and
having aways said the only commitment to writer needs is
the commitment of the seat of his pants to the
seat of his chair, and I think that's very very important.
(40:11):
Sitting down you can't. I mean there are writers who
work standing up, but mostly mostly you sit down.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
But is any of that more difficult because you have
had life changing injuries, You've lost the sight in one eye.
I know you have problems with the other one in
your hand.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, it's difficult. I mean I'm clumsier, I make more
typing mistakes, etc. Everything is a bit harder. But you know,
writing is hard anyway, so it's just a different problem.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
And how do you cope with the solitude required, the
locking yourself away to work?
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Is it? Well, I've got you know, I've got a
very nice room to work in, and I shut the door.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
And come out when you've got to a certain number
of words.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yes, I always give myself an artificially low number of words.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
That's the cheat, so that you can exceed it.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
So what is the daily total? Then?
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Well, if I could get a couple of hundred words
downe I would think that's not bad. I mean a
page is usually three hundred in a bit, you know,
three hundred and twenty something like that. If I can
do that, I'd extremely pleased. But you know, Flaubert used
to come down from his study and say he'd had
a great day today he wrote a sentence. So writing
(41:22):
is sometimes slow, sometimes quick. I mean with these books
Knife and the Eleventhous, I mean they came out at
one year intervals. For me, that's some kind of a record.
Quite often, I've taken five years to write a book,
so it seems I'm getting faster in my old age.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Samondrishtie good luck with the next one. Thank you, And
that's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week. If you subscribe,
you'll know as soon as a new episode hits the feed.
And to everyone who's rated us here or left comments,
thank you. We also have an email. It's Michelle's show
(41:58):
at Bloomberg. You can watch these conversations on YouTube and
Bloomberg TV, and the text version with my notes for
added context are at Bloomberg dot com slash Weekend. The
show's producers are Jessica Beck and Chris marklu The executive
producer is Louisa Lewis. Our sound engineer is Richard Ward.
(42:22):
Video editing Toby Babalola and Evando Thompson. Social media Alex Morgan,
Music by Bart Walshaw at Bloomberg Weekend. Brendan Francis Newnham
is Editorial director of Audio and Special Projects, and our
executive editor is Catherine Bell. We'd also like to thank Summer,
Sadi and the Bloomberg podcast team, and thank you for
(42:46):
listening until next weekend. Goodbye,
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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