For friends who meet daily, and are jobless, it becomes quite difficult to come up with topics to talk about. Silences in between only increases the awkwardness, boredom, and the desire to run back home. External events, whether global or domestic, then become of highest important, since they become the breathing life to one’s atrophying daily conversations.
‘Rushdie stabbed in NY while giving a talk; flown to nearest trauma center’, read the news a few days ago. My first reaction was that it was a small attack. I may’ve dismissed it because it’s been more than three decades since The Satanic Verses, and that he would at least have some security so that the attacker couldn’t have got him good. But it turned out that Rushdie had received two stabs, one on neck and the other on abdomen. The next day, official said that he might even lose an eye, but might just survive. Today, he is saved and taken off the ventilator; however, I don’t know about his eyes.
But what if he died from the attack? My personal reactions would reflect that of global: a mixture of sadness and joy. The Satanic Verses, which I revisited that same night after hearing about Rushdie’s attack, I still found it to be needlessly offensive. And with Islam being a religion so protective off itself, and necessarily absolute about its certain principles, it becomes difficult to receive such out right offenses. But what captivated me about Rushdie was his prose style – the magical realism. Ever since The Stream of Consciousness, this was a distinctly new form of writing for me, and despite not flowing with it, I was still in total admiration about it. So, while I wouldn’t have felt joy at the author’s death, it still would’ve been a remote grief at having lost such an acclaimed writer, I could’ve, however, understood the relief and sweetness of a victory, albeit a victory too late, that hard-and-fast Muslims might’ve felt around the world.
Rushdie lives, though, and he is a recent news already. I saw a lot of articles popping up after the attack, all looking at his of defiance and greatness. Yet under the tyranny of ‘recentness’ almost nothing gets it due amount of time. I hope for once the occurring of events cease and the news channels are forced to cover only the last event that occurred: Afghanistan takeover by Taliban; the blast on Kabul school; the images from James Web telescope, and so on, and should to a prolonged period. Or if that’s too much to ask, then at least I want the news to shut down, all, at a specific incident. And we’re left to take about that only for the foreseeable time to come. No more new news.
What isn’t news however, is my experience with reading Rushdie. My third book from him, and I still couldn’t finish it. Mind you though, I had a great time with it till about sixty pages in. Then, I woke up the next day, picked the book too late in the afternoon, and feeling rushed to get some reading done, felt miserably disappointed and frustrated.
Shame starts in Q. (maybe Quetta, where I’m from) and the father of the three daughters is dying. He lives in a palace near the military Cantt, and his daughters are happy to inherit all that wealth. Instead of a funeral, they throw a party; one of them gets pregnant afterwards. Not having seen the outside, they now completely shut themselves off. Omar Khayyam is born - to three mothers. He gets out at twelve, has a crush on a ‘gora’ girl, moves to Karachi later, become a doctor. In Karachi, we have Raza Hyder, the fictional Zia-ul-Haq, who prays six times a day. Iskandar Harappa, is his nemesis, the fictional Zulfiqar Bhutto, and their rivalry gets him hanged, as the real case was. And also, there’s a complicated story about these two families: wives, mothers, head-eating daughters, etcetera. Khayyam befriends Raza after marrying her daughter ‘shame’, I believe, and they flee for Q. at the novel’s end.
In between, there are passages where Rushdie directly talks to the reader and basically defends how this book isn’t about Pakistan – for the reason, it would’ve been too nasty. Instead, he talks about fairy-tales, and fat poets, and politicians, and three mothers, and shame and shamelessness – and it doesn’t work. I wish he had written a book about Pakistan, and not a fairy-tale retelling of it.
I call quits of Rushdie. Not that I won’t read him again, but that he’s out of area of interest. I hope something changes down the road, but I doubt it.
Ratings: 3/5 *** August 18, 2022_