The Third of May 1808 in Madrid by Francisco Goya
Reflections on Salman Rushdie’s Knife
During one of my random visits to a local bookshop, I bought Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. I knew Salman Rushdie was a celebrated author and that he was considered controversial because I had seen him in the news and read one or two articles about him, but that was the extent of my knowledge. I hadn’t read any of his books before this. I picked up Knife because I’d made it a point to read widely, and I was loading up on regrets, I mean, books written by some of the best writers to grace this planet.
I was bored and restless one day, so like any sane person, I went to my bookshelf. For some inexplicable reason, Knife called out to me. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago. It’s a poignant and devastating yet beautiful work.
The book is about the violent and brutal attack that Salman Rushdie suffered in 2022 at the age of 75. It is about how the attack affected his loved ones, how he processed the attack, and what it took to recover. It’s also about the price and value of words. As you read the book, it keeps forcing you to think about the power and value of words.
The attacker was a 24-year-old weirdo who was radicalized by watching videos of some imam whom Rushdie sardonically refers to as Imam Yutubi—a play on YouTube. Knife is a unique book because writing about one’s tryst with death is not an easy thing.
After all, Rushdie paid a heavy price to survive. He not only sacrificed his right eye but also has to carry the scars from the knife wounds for as long as he’s alive. The writer of the book is a husband, a brother, a father, and perhaps, less importantly, a writer. As much as the book is about death, it’s also about life and perhaps more importantly about love.
Good books leave indelible marks on you, and Knife, the book, as its namesake object does, leaves marks on you. It’ll haunt you all the more if you have a special relationship with words, like I do.
A few pages into the book, I had the following thoughts.
To be able to speak and write is such a precious thing. My life, in many ways, depends on my ability to use words. What would happen to me if these words were taken away? Words—what precious things they are.
I also kept thinking about the sheer absurdity of attempting murder after listening to some random mouth-breathing idiot online. Of course, the power of words to inspire atrocities doesn’t surprise anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of history.
A prime example is religious texts. More blood has been spilled because of squiggly lines in these texts than has been caused by all the natural disasters put together. Nonetheless, the fact that human beings—supposedly the smartest creatures in the known universe—could commit such acts over a particular sequence of symbols boggles my mind.
How does that even work?
You read or listen to someone, get riled up, and then go on a murderous rampage? How feeble does one’s mind have to be to be driven to violence by the words of a random stranger?
I know this is a naïve question, but it’s one I kept grappling with throughout the book.
Knife isn’t just about the chronology of the attack and Rushdie’s eventual recovery; it’s also about how it affected his loved ones, how they coped, and how they dealt with the possibility of losing someone they all loved. It’s heavy stuff—about living under the ever-present shadow of death, about the triumph of love and life over hate.
Another aspect I’ve been thinking about, both as I read the book and after, is about the nature of words themselves. Funny little things, aren’t they, words? They can rouse someone’s spirits and inspire them to do great things and, at the same time, drive someone to commit unspeakable horrors.
I don’t want to “review” the book. The last thing the world needs is another pretentious person writing book reviews. Instead, I want to share some passages that left knife marks on me.
To survive an attempted murder and recover is one thing; to write about it in such a devastatingly beautiful way takes a special kind of courage:
I was sitting on a stage in front of an audience of maybe a thousand people, and I saw a man in dark clothes running toward me down the right-hand side of the auditorium. I was the only person on the stage. I was the only person he could be running toward.
This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years? Surely the world had moved on, and that subject was closed. Yet here, approaching fast, was a sort of time traveler, a murderous ghost from the past.
My first thought, however, was a sort of detached disbelief. I thought, That’s strange. That man is running toward me. He’s running fast. He’s wearing dark clothes. He’s wearing a dark mask. He’s running very fast. He’s running straight at me. That’s strange. Why would he be doing that?
And then I thought, Oh. It’s him. It’s him. After all this time, it’s him.
And then there was the knife.
And then there was blood everywhere.
The past
This line landed on my brain like a punch from a drunk heavyweight boxer:
There are things that are lost in the past, where we all end up, most of us forgotten.
The past is a strange place. It’s a place where we all end up, most of us forgotten. I’ve been thinking about this line for weeks now. It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? Most of us will be forgotten. The vast majority of us will be forgotten. Our stories, our struggles, our triumphs, our failures, our loves, our hates, our joys, our sorrows—all of it will be forgotten.
The line is so simple, yet it contains multitudes. It’s a reminder of our mortality, of the impermanence of our existence, of the fleeting nature of our lives. It’s a reminder that we’re all just passing through, that we’re all just temporary residents of this planet, that we’re all just renting space on this rock hurtling through space.
Erica Wagner, in a discussion with Rushdie about the book, took a 27-second pause during an event. Hearing the silence for that length of time was when this passage truly hit me. If you watch the clip, you’ll understand exactly what I mean.
Rushdie writes about the moments after the attack, when he was in the hospital, fighting for his life:
I was in a coma for two days, and when I came out of it, I was in a hospital bed, and I had no idea where I was. I had been intubated, and I couldn’t speak. I was on a ventilator, and I couldn’t breathe on my own. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of confusion. I was in a lot of fear.
And then I was told that I had been attacked, and that I had been stabbed multiple times, and that I had been airlifted to a hospital, and that I had been in surgery for eight hours, and that I had been lucky to survive.
They did save me, but it was that close.
Another doctor said to me, “You know what you’re lucky about? You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”
A fast-flash memory of his black-clad silhouette, slashing wildly, narrowly failing. But also almost succeeding. My foolish, angry A.
Home
Rushdie writes about his love for the Odyssey, and how it’s a story about a man trying to get home. He writes:
The Odyssey is a story about a man who is trying to get home. It’s a story about a man who is trying to get back to his wife and his son and his dog and his house. It’s a story about a man who is trying to get back to his life.
And it’s a story about a man who is prevented from getting home by all sorts of obstacles, both natural and supernatural. He’s prevented from getting home by storms and by monsters and by gods and by his own weaknesses and by his own mistakes.
And when he has followed the scent and found his old home, and after a pleasant supper is settling down for the night in his own bed, he muses:
“As when a man buries a burning log in a black ash heap in a remote place in the country, where none live near as neighbors, and saves the seed of fire, having no other place to get a light from, so Odysseus buried his head in the leaves.”
I love that image of the burning log buried in the ash heap, the seed of fire saved for the future. That’s what I was trying to do. I was trying to save the seed of fire.
The knife
Rushdie’s description of the commonplace knife is brilliant:
The knife is a common object. It’s a tool. It’s a weapon. It’s a metaphor. It’s a symbol. It’s a thing that cuts. It’s a thing that separates. It’s a thing that divides. It’s a thing that kills.
It’s a thing that I now have a complicated relationship with.
The knife is a common object. It’s a tool. It’s a weapon. It’s a metaphor. It’s a symbol. It’s a thing that cuts. It’s a thing that separates. It’s a thing that divides. It’s a thing that kills.
As Rushdie recovers, he knows that his story has to be documented, and his wife Eliza agrees. He writes:
Eliza asked me to talk to her camera about The Satanic Verses.
When I started writing that book, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t allowed to do it. I had these stories I wanted to tell and I was trying to work out how to tell them. That was all I was doing.
And then, when the book was published, and the trouble started, I was completely bewildered. I couldn’t understand why people were so upset about a book that they hadn’t read. I couldn’t understand why people were so upset about a book that they couldn’t read, because they didn’t read English.
The question I had to ask myself after the attack was: Did I bring this on myself? Did I do something to deserve this? Was I asking for it? Was I being provocative? Was I being offensive? Was I being disrespectful?
In other words—as so many people had said all along—was it my own fault?
And I had to answer that question for myself. And the answer I came to was: No. It was not my fault. I did not bring this on myself. I did not do anything to deserve this. I was not asking for it. I was not being provocative. I was not being offensive. I was not being disrespectful.
I was just trying to tell a story. I was just trying to do my job. I was just trying to be a writer.
Rushdie writes about the value of words:
Words are valuable. Words are precious. Words are worth fighting for. Words are worth dying for.
Words are the only things that can tell us who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what it all means.
Words are the only things that can save us.
I have spent my life in the service of words, and now words have saved my life. They have given me a reason to live, a way to understand what happened to me, a way to make sense of the senseless.
Words have given me a way to fight back against the darkness. Words have given me a way to reclaim my life from the man who tried to take it from me.
I have spent my life in the service of words, and now words have saved my life. They have given me a reason to live, a way to understand what happened to me, a way to make sense of the senseless.
Words have given me a way to fight back against the darkness. Words have given me a way to reclaim my life from the man who tried to take it from me.
Rushdie ends the book with a powerful call to action:
In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play—narratives privileging the majority and oppressing minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed.
This is now the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, because it is through our work—at least the best of it, the work that endures into that future—that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention? And if we do turn our attention to this dreadful moment, what can we do, practically or effectively? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes.
But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars; we can stand in solidarity with those on the front lines and amplify their voices by adding our own to them.
Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do—stories within which people want to live.
The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are also contested territories. Perhaps we can emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.
After reading Knife, I’ve been asking myself: What is the responsibility of those who can write? We live in dangerous times when your life can be ruined for saying or writing the wrong thing. People with fragile egos are in power, and there’s a non-trivial chance of getting into trouble for saying the wrong thing even in seemingly democratic countries. Given this world we live in, what’s the responsibility of those who can speak and write?
I’m a hopeless romantic when it comes to the power of words. Like I wrote in the beginning, I think words have the power to rouse people, enlarge their spirits, and move them to do things and change things. I sincerely believe words have the power to change the world and alter destinies.
In certain cynical corners of the internet, people say the world doesn’t need more “shitty” writers. I hate that framing. I hate that framing. The world needs more people to say things, not less. Every good writer was a shitty writer once upon a time. The good writers are good not because they are chosen by divine providence, but because they work for it. They become so good that their words can move and inspire people like me. Aren’t words magical?
What this world needs is more people to speak and write. Half of them will be idiots, but that’s life—it’s always 50% shitty. Who knows, you might very well be destined to be a wordsmith, and you’ll never find out if you don’t write. Even if your words and stories have a remote chance of leaving a mark on someone somewhere, it’s a sin against humanity not to tell it. It’s like flicking God in his nuts.
That one can change the course of people with a few squiggly lines still blows my mind. I say this not as the shitty writer that I am but as a hopelessly quixotic believer in the magical power of words.
We don’t realize the value of something until we lose it. That applies to words as well.
So, what did you think?