Words that kill
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.
Words can also travel through time, as was the case with Rushdie. Hateful words can lie dormant in the past, brooding and plotting, waiting for the opportune moment. If one isn’t careful, words can become parasites, feeding on the hatred and vileness in human hearts. At the right time, they can travel into the present and slice someone open.
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:
The amphitheater seats over four thousand people. It wasn’t full, but there was a big crowd. We were briefly introduced by Sony, speaking from a podium at stage left. I was seated at stage right. The audience applauded generously. I remember raising a hand to acknowledge the applause. Then, in the corner of my right eye—the last thing my right eye would ever see—I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low: a squat missile. I got to my feet and watched him come. I didn’t try to run. I was transfixed.
It had been thirty-three and a half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order against me and all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses, and during those years, I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are. It is said that Henry James’s last words were “So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.” Death was coming at me, too, but it didn’t strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic.
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.
There was no visible security in the amphitheater that morning—why not? I don’t know—so he had a clear run at me. I was just standing there, staring toward him, rooted to the spot like a rabbit-in-the-headlights fool. Then he reached me.
I never saw the knife, or at least I have no memory of it. I don’t know if it was long or short, a broad bowie blade or narrow like a stiletto, breadknife-serrated or crescent-curved or a street kid’s flick knife, or even a common carving knife stolen from his mother’s kitchen. I don’t care. It was serviceable enough, that invisible weapon, and it did its work.
In the first days after the attack, as I lay in my hospital bed with various parts of my body held together by metal staples, I would proudly say to anyone who would listen, “I never lost consciousness, so I remember everything.” It’s now clear to me that this wasn’t true. It’s true that I remained blurrily aware of my surroundings, and didn’t completely pass out, but not true that my powers of observation were functioning normally, or anything like it. The confidence of my assertion was probably bolstered by the powerful painkillers I was being given at that time—fentanyl, morphine, you name it. What follows, therefore, is a collage, with bits of my memory pieced together with other eyewitness and news reports.
I felt him hit me very hard on the right side of my jaw. He’s broken it, I remember thinking. All my teeth will fall out.
At first I thought I’d just been hit by someone who really packed a punch. (I learned later that he had been taking boxing lessons.) Now I know there was a knife in that fist. Blood began to pour out of my neck. I became aware, as I fell, of liquid splashing onto my shirt.
A number of things then happened very fast, and I can’t be certain of the sequence. There was the deep knife wound in my left hand, which severed all the tendons and most of the nerves. There were at least two more deep stab wounds in my neck—one slash right across it and more on the right side—and another farther up my face, also on the right. If I look at my chest now, I see a line of wounds down the center, two more slashes on the lower right side, and a cut on my upper right thigh. And there’s a wound on the left side of my mouth, and there was one along my hairline too.
And there was the knife in the eye. That was the cruelest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there would be no possibility of saving the vision. It was gone.
He was just stabbing wildly, stabbing and slashing, the knife flailing at me as if it had a life of its own, and I was falling backward, away from him, as he attacked; my left shoulder hit the ground hard as I fell.
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.
Even though the attacker hadn’t read Rushdie’s books, it took only a few malicious words from some random idiot online for this 24-year-old to decide Rushdie had to die. Rushdie’s past was forcibly dragged forward, colliding with his present and shattering it to pieces.
Another chilling line:
In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense.
Rushdie doesn’t name the assassin but instead calls him “the A.” or “the ass.” The passage below is one of the most haunting, brilliant segments in the book. The attack lasted 27 seconds. That isn’t long by most measures, but for Rushdie, that sliver of time meant the difference between life and death. The way he describes the intimacy of a knife attack is hauntingly beautiful:
According to news reports, the A. had twenty-seven seconds with me. In twenty-seven seconds—if you happen to be in a religious frame of mind—you can recite the Lord’s Prayer. Or, eschewing religion, you could read aloud one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the one about the summer’s day, perhaps, or my own favorite, number 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, octave and sestet: that’s how long we had together in the only moment of intimacy we will ever share. An intimacy of strangers. That’s a phrase I’ve sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.
There was nothing happy about this union. Or perhaps there was for the A. He had reached his target, after all; his blade was entering his target’s body, over and over again, and he had every reason to think he had succeeded in his endeavor and was standing on the stage of history, having become the one who had fulfilled an antique threat. Yes. I believe he might have been happy during our time of intimacy. But then he was dragged off me and pinned down. His twenty-seven seconds of fame were over. He was nobody again.
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.
Salman Rushdie: “It’s a long time when somebody has a knife.”
The coin-toss moments of fate
Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rushdie’s wife, plays a key part in the book. Writing about the party where he met her (a party he didn’t even want to attend but did so reluctantly), he writes:
On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.”
The disasters that make us
We’re all agents carrying out the orders given to us by our past selves. Rushdie touches on this when he talks about the difficult relationship he had with his father. I’ve personally experienced a volatile life, and I often tell my friends that if I could go back in time and choose how my life turned out, I’d pick the exact same one because I wouldn’t be who I am today otherwise.
I did not return home for long after graduating but chose to make my life in England. For a long time after that, family life—or, rather, finding stability in it—was difficult for me. There were marriages, divorces. My father died, and in the last week of his life there was an important, though all too brief, loving reconciliation. However, this is not the place to intrude too much on such narrow privacies or to spill any tawdry secrets. I’ll just say: we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.
Dealing with death
One thing that stood out was the detached way Rushdie refers to his attacker as “A.” It’s an absurd description, but it robs the assassin of any power:
And Eliza, walking the corridors past rooms of dying men, couldn’t stop herself from wondering if that would also be my fate. Are they going to put my husband in a body bag as well? It almost happened. Later, when it was clear that I would live, the doctors’ relief was palpable too. “When they brought you in from the helicopter,” said a member of the surgery team, “we didn’t think we could save you.”
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
Home has always been an emotionally charged concept for me, largely because I spent half my life unsure of what it meant or where I truly belonged. That’s why Rushdie’s descriptions resonated so powerfully: he’s lived in many “homes.”
He moved from Bombay to London, where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him in 1988 in response to The Satanic Verses. Rushdie then spent years in hiding in London under police protection before moving to New York in 2000, hoping for a normal life. For nearly 25 years, he had it—until his past came calling in 2022.
In Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows, Mole, who has wandered away from his mole hole to start “messing about in boats” on the river with his friend the Water Rat, and worrying about the mischievous and irrepressible Mr. Toad of Toad Hall, is plodding along one night with Ratty through what he believes to be “strange country” when all of a sudden he is captivated by a scent:
It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through… Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.
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:
He saw clearly how plain and simple…it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence…this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.
Home. Dulce Domum, Kenneth Grahame calls it—Sweet Home. It was twelve weeks to the day since the attack that had made it impossible to return here. Now, as my front door closed behind me, I was that humble Mole, recognizing the smells of the place, my heart leaping as I saw the photograph of myself and my sisters reading Peter Pan that hung above the fireplace, feeling the welcome of my bookshelves, the familiarity of my workspace, and finally the mothering kindness of my own bed enveloping me, folding its arms around me, hugging me into a deep and carefree sleep. I felt 100 percent better and healthier immediately. I was home.
Again, the sheer absurdity that a few words could snatch away a man’s home—forcing him to hide in constant fear, estranged from himself and his anchor in the world—continues to amaze me. Losing one’s home isn’t a fate I’d wish on my worst enemy.
The knife
Rushdie’s description of the commonplace knife is brilliant:
During those empty sleepless nights, I thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. When a knife makes the first cut in a wedding cake, it is part of the ritual by which two people are joined together. A kitchen knife is an essential part of the creative act of cooking. A Swiss Army knife is a helper, able to perform many small but necessary tasks, such as opening a bottle of beer. Occam’s razor is a conceptual knife, a knife of theory, that cuts through a lot of bullshit by reminding us to prefer the simplest available explanations of things to more complex ones. In other words, a knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral. It is the misuse of knives that is immoral.
Whoa, I told myself. A hard pause. Wasn’t that the same thing as saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”? Was I falling into a familiar trap?
No. Because a gun had only one use, one purpose. You couldn’t cut a cake with a Glock, or cook with an AR-15, or open a bottle of beer with James Bond’s favorite Walther PPK. A gun’s only way of being in the world was violence; its sole purpose was to cause damage, even to take lives, animal or human. A knife was not like a gun.
Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine.
On free expression
Salman Rushdie is a writer who suffered this attack because of his words. Knife is about his ordeal, but free expression, in all its dimensions, is always lurking in the background throughout the book.
The term "free speech" has always made me nervous because I often have no clue what people mean by it. I understand its worth; I understand why it must be protected and cherished, but its meaning in popular usage has always eluded me. Of course, I know the literal meaning, but the literal meaning and the real-world meaning are total strangers.
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.
(Sometimes I think I belong to another age. I can remember being in the garden of our house as a child in the 1950s, listening to my parents and their friends laughing and joking as they discussed everything under the sun, from contemporary politics to the existence of God, without feeling any pressure to censor or dilute their opinions. I also remember being at the apartment of my favorite uncle, Hameed Butt, who sometimes wrote for the movies, and his dancer-actress wife, Uzra, who sometimes acted in them. I watched them playing cards with their artsy-filmi crowd, speaking in even more outrageous language about everything and nothing, and laughing even more uproariously than my parents’ friends. These settings were where I learned the first lesson of free expression—that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free. When I was making The Satanic Verses, it never occurred to me to be afraid.)
In fact, for a while I thought it might not be one book, but three. One book about the village that walked into the sea, a second about the birth-of-a-religion stuff, and a third, longer book about South Asian immigrants in contemporary London. Then I was on a plane to go, I think, to a literary festival in Australia, and I understood that all the stories were episodes from the life of the Archangel Gabriel, and I saw that it was one book. And the main character would be named Gibreel Farishta. Gibreel, Gabriel, and Farishta, angel. That was it. I wasn’t trying to offend or insult anyone. I was trying to write a novel.
A life well lived or one worth regretting?
Rushdie spent nearly a decade in hiding under police protection in London after the fatwa. In 2002, he decided to stop hiding, moved to New York, and started living a normal life. It was only natural to question whether that was the right decision after the 2022 attack. His answer is moving:
The question arises (I’ve been asked this quite a few times since the attack): Was I wrong to make this new, carefree life for myself? With hindsight, shouldn’t I have been more cautious, less open, more aware of the danger lurking in the shadows? Did I construct a fool’s paradise for myself and find out, two decades later, just how big a fool I had been? Had I, so to speak, made myself available for the knife?
In other words—as so many people had said all along—was it my own fault?
To be absolutely truthful, in those first, physically weak, low-spirited days in the trauma ward in Erie, it was a question I asked myself. But as I grew stronger in body and mind, it was an analysis I rejected emphatically. To regret what your life has been is the true folly, I told myself, because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets. There were probably exceptions to this principle, but very few of the people who ought to regret their lives—Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Adolf Eichmann, Harvey Weinstein—ever do so. At any rate: whether the general principle held up or not, in the situation in which I found myself it held up for me. I had had close to twenty-three years in New York living a full, rich life. There were mistakes along the way, plenty of those, and things I could have done better, and I do regret those, but my life in general? I’m glad I have lived it, and I’ve tried to live it as well as possible.
A world war of stories
I could continue quoting passages from the book, but in the interest of making sure you buy the book and also not getting sued, I want to leave with this speech Rushdie gave in 2022, three months before the attack. Even though it's three years old, it still stands the test of time—if anything, it’s more relevant today.
On May 13, 2022, PEN America convened a unique international gathering of writers at the United Nations to discuss how writers might best respond to a world in crisis—meaning the war in Ukraine, but not only that. I was asked to speak briefly. This is what I said:
We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it.
A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant invents false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with these lies.
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?