Rushdie as Orpheus, on Guitar (Page 3)

Imagine, if you will, the elaborately ritualised (yes, and marriage-obsessed) formal society of Jane Austen, grafted on to the stenchy, pullulating London beloved of Dickens, as full of chaos and surprises as a rotting fish is full of writhing worms; swash & rollick the whole into a Shandy-and-arrack cocktail; colour it magenta, vermilion, scarlet, lime; sprinkle with crooks & bawds, and you have something like my fabulous home town. I gave it up, true enough; but don't ask me to say it wasn't one hell of a place.

"Wombay," Rushdie calls it. I went there once and looked for him, and I'm not so sure I didn't find him on Chowpatty Beach, with the contortionists; in the lobby of the Taj Hotel, among Russians and Sikhs; at low tide on the causeway to the Tomb of Haji Ali, with its barbershop quartet of the maimed, a boxed set of missing limbs singing for their supper; at the cricket club, where the editor of the English-language daily told us that he felt guilty every time he ate ice cream; by boat to Elephanta Island, where you hack your way through thickets of monkeys to get to the great cave-temple of the three-headed Shiva; at midnight on Carmichael Road, where the Indian intellectuals rose and converged and danced on the ceiling, like Sufis or Chagalls.

The point is, I knew my way around. His books were a map in my head.

But, of course, Rushdie had been banned. I even met one of the critics who'd conspired at that banning. While he claimed to admire The Satanic Verses, I suspect that he had read only the pages on Mahound (the Mohammed figure); he seemed unaware how much of the book, like so much of Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh, was about his own Bombay. He said that I had to understand the horrific communal tensions in his country. I said they seemed to know, as well as we did, how to kill each other without the help of a novelist. Our wrangling carried us all the way up to my room, with a balcony where we watched a kite fight and then an enormous crowd, surging toward the sea with representations of Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Shiva, the boy-god of auspicious beginnings. I gave him a book of mine. He gave me Kautilya's Arthasastra. Kautilya was a fourth-century Machiavelli. The Arthasastra is his pithy Prince: "Princes, like crabs, are father-eaters."

With Kautilya's help, I was able to leap conceptually from the Bronze Age slave societies of the Indus valley to the Mauryan empire, part Persian and part Seleucid--the Asiatic Mode of Production and Buddha's Wheel of Law. I was a round abacus on a bell-shaped lotus, nibbled on by elephants, horses, lions and bulls. I liked India so much that I went to a Bollywood movie, but you really have to be into snake theology.

Rushdie likes it too, and there's a lot more Bombay in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, from the Hanging Gardens to Scandal Point, from the caged whores on Falkland Road to the Governors of Mahalaxmi Racecourse, from snake-buckled schoolchildren and Gold Flake cigarettes to dried bummelo and chambeli flowers--bicycle bells, warships, bootleg stills, tamarind, jasmine, cocopalms and camels!--until suddenly, his passion unrequited, he calls it quits forever on page 249. "Optimism," says Ormus, "is the fuel of art, and ecstasy, and elation, and the supply of these commodities is not endless." No more than I can imagine living without New York, my very own Book of Kells, can I imagine a storyteller without a home, writing on the run, like the Shadow Warrior in Haroun stuttering to articulate "Gogogol" and "Kafkafka." But in a way that's awfully godlike, as Prometheus gave us fire and Quetzalcoatl gave us music, Salman Rushdie gives us laughter, and brings back love from the dead.

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