Rushdiec Years

I browsed through the library touching the line of books with fingertips. A blue cover read: Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

I would have kept it back as I had done many times before; the history weighed on the book, so much I had read about the book and the lofty moments it had shared that it counted too heavy and distant, like those out of reach things from the other world. Had it been for that day, but.

An hour back, I had finished a long talk about drugs, rock music and how it fuelled student rebellion. I had spent long hours in the preparation and the research was mesmerizingly accepted. Standing in the huge hall, exposed to tiers of student benches, I looked around and voiding my mind out for an hour, constructing arguments and pulling out Naipaul, Kesey, and Che, Pink Floyd lyrics and random writings from the sixties, and few pictures: one of a man standing before a tank on the Tiananmen Square. I had stated the case and was now as empty as a discarded can on the street.

With nothing better to do, nothing else to read and no more music to listen to, I was back to scouting the library to grab a book to fill the void. Long hours were left in the day, and in the forgiving mood of the day, I picked up the book.

Midnight’s Children opened like a reluctant talker from a different world, though soon metamorphosed into a bold and bullying genre, a chapter on hallucinatory imagination to be fed on from time to time.

I remember I had discovered Camus, Sartre and Conard when I stumbled on Rushdie. Garcia would still remain unfathomed for a year more. Rushdie was an accident.

Shame followed, and I was handed a Xeroxed copy The Satanic Verses. Moor was the closest recreation of Midnight.

Grimus. Rushdie himself had rejected. Haroon was an effort. East West had no magic, a failed attempt, and Imaginary Homelands was nowhere to be found. 

The Ground Beneath Her Feet reminded me of my talk on the day I first picked Rushdie.

Those days, a neat portion of my allowance went into collecting books, the collection would vanish in the last month of the college, some borrowed never to be returned, some lost. Only things which that I carried from my hostel room were two big cartons of dusty old books, with a few Rushdies thrown in.

I read all the Rushdies I could find, and waited for Fury to come out. Rushdie was not in the news anywhere, he was forgotten and disliked, and no one cared. Fury came and the cover spoke of New York, the now adapted city of Rushdie. Inside, New York came to life, and was allowed to mercilessly be torched. That was the only impressionable part of the novel that I could remember.

In September that year, on that day after finishing the book, and feeling slightly disappointed, somebody shook we awake from sleep. I had come to watch play rehearsals; the practice was long over and the dramatists had returned. I had fallen to sleep on one of the cushioned chairs in the large hall. I stood up to a headache, the blue tint of disappointment still left. Collecting my stuff – a notepad, a pencil, Fury, a book on thermodynamics – I left the hall to the corner coffee shop.
I was feeling empty again, I had read the entire Rushdie; there was nothing left, no magic to discover. What next? I walked back to the hostel, craving for something to fill the vacuum.

There was a crowd in front of the single TV, everybody preoccupied and intense. A cricket match was on. I can pass some time too, and forget the novel, dislike for which was rising with the growing headache. I singled out the book for the headache.
It wasn’t the cricket match, and it took me long minutes to realise what it was. I first thought it to be my delirium taking shape, my leftover sleep penetrating the reality.

On the TV, a single tower, next to another holed one, burst into debris and flame when a 737 collided. It was New York. 

New York was being mercilessly torched.

Author: Nitin Chaudhary