TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022789/02278900.031

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 4KB | 75 lines

                )▄                                                            WORLD, Page 33

Hybrid Creature, Invisible Man


    Salman Rushdie is no stranger to exile, but past experience
could hardly have prepared him for what he faces now. In fact,
the situation is so preposterous that it might have sprung from
Rushdie's own phantasmagoric imagination: someone suddenly
emerges as the most talked-about writer in the world, but his
life depends on becoming an invisible man.

    "I am this hybrid creature," Rushdie said shortly before
going into hiding. Most of his life has been spent as an
outsider, an alien among local populations. He was born in
Bombay in 1947, two months before the British pulled out of
India; his parents were well-to-do Kashmiri Muslims and
admirers of English customs and manners. Young Salman's religion
and pale skin made him something of an anomaly in his native
city.

    When he was 13, he was shipped off to England to be educated
at Rugby. His Anglo-Saxon schoolmates wasted no time in letting
him know that he did not fit in; they snickered while, facing
his first English breakfast, Rushdie tried to figure out how to
eat a kipper.

    After his public-school ordeals, he went to Cambridge, where
he read history (with an emphasis on Islamic subjects) and
developed an interest in acting. After graduating in 1968, he
moved to Pakistan, where his parents had relocated. His brief
stay in a Muslim state was not happy. His production of Edward
Albee's The Zoo Story was censored because the play contains
the word pork. Within the year, Rushdie fled back to England.

    For the next decade he supported himself in London by
writing advertising copy. He wed a British woman and fathered a
son. (That union ended in divorce in 1987; Rushdie is now
married to the American author Marianne Wiggins.) His first
novel, Grimus (1974), was a critical and commercial flop, but
his second, Midnight's Children (1981), created an
international sensation. The book hinged on an inspired conceit:
that 1,001 babies born across the subcontinent on the stroke of
Indian independence had acquired magical powers to communicate
with one another. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize,
Britain's most coveted award for fiction, and sold roughly half
a million copies worldwide.

    Rushdie's next novel, Shame (1983), was another roistering
allegory, this time refracting recent events in Pakistan. It too
was nominated for the Booker Prize, but at the presentation
dinner the award went to another contender. Rushdie raised
eyebrows by standing up and protesting the injustice of the
decision. "The thing about Salman," says an editor who knows
him, "is that if he won the Nobel Prize, he would not be happy
until he had won it twice."

    Rushdie possesses an egotistical, self-righteous streak that
has not always endeared him to his fellow Britons. He has been
an articulate critic of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's
economic policies. And somewhere in the process of becoming
Westernized, Rushdie lost his faith. "When I was young, I was
religious in quite an unthinking way," he said recently. "Now
I'm not, but I am conscious of a space where God was."

    Once again, Rushdie cannot go home. His north London house,
guarded around the clock by uniformed police, is empty. His
fourth-floor study, where he wrote The Satanic Verses at the
rate of roughly 800 words a day, no longer betrays the traces of
his working routine, mounting piles of typescript scattered
about the floor. But on a mantelpiece in this room rests an
intriguing souvenir of Rushdie's past: a beautifully bound
octagonal miniature, roughly the size of a silver dollar, of
the Koran.