It began with a name. The name was disembodied from its owner, a shadow devoid of a source. “Rushdie”. Long before I knew it belonged to a writer, the shadowy name had crept into my home, where it was whispered in secretive tones. But it was also familiar, intimately so, a variant of our own name. Who was this Salman Rushdie? He didn’t sound “rightly guided” (the common meaning of “Rashid” and “Rushdie”). Was he a neighbour’s child who had misbehaved? A long-lost, outcast relative?
Refracted through the mind of a naive child, this was a pretty good reading of the political backdrop of my upbringing. I was born shortly after Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) had caused a furore, threatening the author’s life. Allegations of blasphemy galvanised the disparate practitioners of Islam in Britain for the first time into a British-Muslim community. The British-Muslim identity, which would become, proudly, my own, was then just being born, in committees and sermons and pamphlets – thanks largely to Rushdie.
Amid all that, the name swirled around, alongside more religious terms, in the lexicon of a typical Muslim household in the Nineties. The peculiar effect of this was to lend it a totemic air; it had joined our private, Islamic realm. It would have surprised me to learn that Rushdie was the name of the world’s most famous writer, a newspaper name. It felt like he was one of us. Which, as a British Asian of Muslim heritage, he of course was – regardless of any fatwa.
One day, in the school library, I recognised the name on the spine of a book. Its sky-blue cover was illustrated with a boy flying a hoopoe, a handsome bird with heavenly connotations in Islam. This daunting tome had no other illustrations (at that age, pictures were the good bits). But it was exciting to know an author’s name. And an even more familiar name was on the cover.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), written by Salman Rushdie while in hiding and now a classic children’s book, became the first novel I ever read. Inspired by the Arabian Nights, it’s a fantasy about the power of storytelling, but also about the bond between father and son. The son is Haroun; the father, Rashid. Both halves of the relationship are named after Harun al-Rashid – everyone’s favourite hero from the Nights, the caliph who walks Baghdad in the guise of a beggar dispensing wisdom and gold. I recognised this allusion; these were favourite tales of mine. But there was another resonance: my dad’s name is Harun al-Rashid. He was given this name in honour of the storied figure; he’d heard the tales recited as a child and later retold them, half-remembered, to me.
Reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories – and having it read to me – I saw in my father his namesake, the novel’s protagonist: Rashid, the famous storyteller of the country of Alifbay threatened (allegory alert!) by sinister political forces. When I came across the book’s descriptions of “Rashid’s magic tongue”, I pictured, first, my father, a fond raconteur of humorous yarns, and then myself, aspiring to inherit his verbal gifts. Adoration for fathers and their stories glimmers all through the book. Rushdie had written it for his infant son, in homage to his own father and the retellings of the Arabian Nights that had hooked the boy Rushdie.
To these early narrative encounters, on his father’s knee, Rushdie attributes his beginnings as a writer, and to this first meeting with a novel, with my father at my bedside, I owe my love of reading. “Falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world,” Rushdie has said, recalling his juvenile immersion in the Nights and his later penchant, as a writer, for the bizarre and fantastical. What changed me – what made me a lifelong reader and, in adulthood, a literary critic – was reading and interpreting Rushdie. Not easy for a boy of ten. It was a step up from those primers with kids named things like Biff and Chip, whose dull adventures transported them to the frontiers of their front garden. Haroun and Rashid flew to the moon on a clockwork bird. That was more like it. But what did it mean?
Overcoming disapproval for the author, my father helped decode the book’s otherworldly visions, its multilingual mirages, conjured out of Islamic history and poetic Urdu. It was set in Alifbay – “alphabet” – and in a location called Kahani – “story”. Could literature, then, be a place – to be inhabited? (Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” would years later confirm the answer: yes). The commander of the goodies was one General Kitab; the name meant “book”. His space-faring army was a “library” and the rank-and-file “pages”. Conclusion: books were things of unearthly power. At school I’d been taught, tediously, examples of metaphor. Now, it clicked. These metaphors stuck with me, becoming part of my picture of the world. To this day I remain a devoted page in General Kitab’s library. I live within, for and by the written word – all because of Rushdie.
I was little then and Rushdie was young; now I am young and he is old. The 78-year-old greybeard of today is not the invigorating writer I grew up reading. It would be weird if he were, given all that has been endured: the ageing, the nearly dying, the 15 stabs to the neck, chest, cheek, thigh, the loss of an eye. With his scarred face, his eyepatch, his rasping voice, Rushdie resembles less Sinbad the Sailor from the Nights than Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab, grizzled, yet still questing, still firing his harpoon of words.
It’s aimed now at death itself. His new book, The Eleventh Hour – two short stories, three long ones – reckons with ageing and dying, themes by now perilously close to the bone. These are stories of old men approaching the end, or already past its threshold, gracefully told by a writer who has edged near enough to it himself. It is Rushdie in his “late style” – the term popularised by Edward Said for the way an artist matures in the face of death. Rushdie admitted in an interview that he’d been studying the literary theorist while writing this book: “[Said] discusses how artists have approached and should approach the kind of final act. And some people respond with serenity, and others respond with rage.” Which, then, is Rushdie’s response? Surprisingly for the author of a novel named Fury (2001) – one who has enough grudges to bear against the world – this late work is marked by a calmness.
The book begins in India, with “In the South” – about affectionate next-door neighbours of the same age and name (they’re called Senior and Junior, since one is older by days). In the days before a tsunami strikes, they sit on their balconies and bicker over their mortality. By Rushdie’s standards, the story hews closely to realist conventions, capturing the humdrum of the city of Madras. Still, critics will snipe at it for not hewing closer.
Here’s how we meet Junior and Senior: “The two old men struggled to their feet and lurched out onto their adjacent verandas, emerging at the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in fateful coincidences.” Fate; coincidences: already the allergens that get critics sniffy about the later Rushdie. Western narrative eschews predestination and chance; it prefers the illusion of free individuals. South Asian storytelling, by contrast, presents characters as archetypes with a destiny. That nod there to an “ancient tale” hints at how we can better read this story. The descriptions of Junior and Senior – of their daily conversation (“ritual speeches”), their ailments (“penances of bowel and urethra”), their general behaviour (“as for the old, they had rites of their own”) – all create the impression, as in a fable, of two everymen obeying their cosmic kismet.
Such men, idly enthroned on their verandas in tropical climes, unafraid of what awaits them, have always struck me as a heroic species of man – who form the population of most of the southern hemisphere. More reflexive and voluble than old men in the West, they don’t need psychoanalysts to talk about their feelings or understand them. “At the end of life,” Senior complains of children, “nothing stinks worse than the smells of life’s sweet beginning.” These are people barely seen in the English novel; Junior and Senior’s close relations in fiction are the elderly men portrayed in RK Narayan’s Malgudi, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, or VS Naipaul’s Trinidad. Whatever else they may be, these are people blithely composed about death. The story ends with a lovely image reflecting that equanimity: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.” No big deal, then, to move from one to another.
[Further reading: Salman Rushdie: “The world has abandoned realism”]
Salman Rushdie was born in British India in June 1947. That very summer, the empire fled in fright. This was a joke Rushdie’s father told. It didn’t amuse the son. But it would inspire him. A fantasy about birth, and growth, not ageing and dying, stirred Rushdie into writing: what if his own start in life, and independent India’s, were not coincidences? What if, at the time of his birth, the personal and the political mingled in his body?
Out of this seed bloomed Rushdie’s finest novel, which won the 1981 Booker Prize. Midnight’s Children is the story of Saleem Sinai, born, like his creator, as his country comes into being – on the very stroke of midnight on independence day itself. “Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting,” Rushdie writes of Saleem’s birth in the novel’s memorable opening. What follows is an enchanted autobiography that also narrates the history of South Asia, “plac[ing] myself”, Rushdie writes (as Saleem), “in the central role”.
Without Midnight’s Children nearby, the subtleties of The Eleventh Hour cannot be grasped; it features many of the same scenes, themes and motifs, envisioned now not by a young man at the height of his powers but an old master for whom they are irretrievably waning. Both books’ titles invoke images of the clock face, mirroring each other. But time has been upended. Imbued now with a sense of an ending, Rushdie writes, of Junior and Senior: “If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.” To a young Rushdie writing Midnight’s Children, midnight signified, and felt like, the start of things; now it connotes “oblivion”.
“The Musician of Kahani”, one of three novelettes in the book, reprises the trope of the enchanted midnight baby, and the location too – Rushdie’s birth city, Bombay. The story – a musical prodigy ensconced via marriage into a corrupt world on which she wreaks revenge – is not so interesting; but the ways in which it is told, its valedictory notes, are. The narrator zealously maps the streets of Bombay. “If you drive up Warden Road, past Scandal Point, and you go round the little bend there, you’ll see on the right a small run of shops,” relates the narrator. “When I was young, seven decades ago, there was a Band Box laundry there…” Evocative names we have heard before. But when lyrically recollected in the earlier novels, the neighbourhoods buzzed with life. Now they seem long lost, named as in a memorial service. This is the style of dying men; I’ve heard it in my father’s village reminiscences, and in Patrimony (1991), Philip Roth’s memoir of his dying dad, where the tumoured father bids farewell by manically cataloguing the names of New Jersey streets. “Many of the stories I have told were born here,” Rushdie writes of his mythic home city with final-episode pathos, “I think this will be the last such story.” Bye-bye, Bombay.
The Rushdie of my younger years, and his, wrote of childhood and beginnings; he was a rhapsodist of the cradle and the dawn. Now he’s an elegist for what’s old and past. He not only mythologised childhood, he could see history through its fresh eyes: politically, this committed him to visions of genesis and rebirth; new nations, new cultures. Saleem’s growth is twinned with India’s as a nation “step[ping] out from the old to the new”, as Prime Minister Nehru famously says at midnight when both are born. Shame (1983) inquired into another nascent political project, Pakistan. Then, intoxicated by the hybrid new cultures of immigrant London, Rushdie wrote a prophetic novel that partly ushered into the world the dynamics it gave form to. The Satanic Verses wasn’t about religion, but the emergence of a “mongrel” modernity, of which London had become an epicentre: “a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past” – Rushdie writes – and populated by a “Man-Friday underclass”, ie: immigrants like my father. The book is a celebration of what they created here out of the flotsam of history: a new society, a new story.
The Eleventh Hour casts its eye backwards. Bombay has been renamed Kahani, which – as I learned reading my first Rushdie years ago – means “story” in Urdu; it’s that metaphor again, of fiction as a place you inhabit, a home. Only now Rushdie writes as if he’s about to be evicted from it. “I will not come this way again. And at the end of the lane… I look up at the end of my story.” Before, Rushdie’s storyland presented a radical future for the globally displaced. Now, Rushdie writes as a man displaced by time, by the vicissitudes of ageing not migration; his storyland is a memory mausoleum.
This senescent twist on what Rushdie has called “imaginary homelands” was always latent in the idea. In the famous essay of that name, Rushdie wrote: “The past is a country from which we have all emigrated.” It differs from LP Hartley’s better-known remark in that the foreign country, for Rushdie, is the present not the past. Ageing and dying thus becomes akin to emigrating, an exile from the world of yesterday.
The worlds of yesterday and today met one day on the lawn of King’s College, Cambridge: when Salman Rushdie improbably played croquet with EM Forster. Rushdie had gone up to read history in 1965. By then in his eighties, Forster hadn’t published a novel since A Passage to India (1924), and the Edwardian gentleman, living in King’s as an honorary fellow, must have felt like a ghost. In “Late”, another novelette in The Eleventh Hour, Rushdie fictionalises Forster as the Indophile writer SM Arthur who dies, at midnight, and haunts Cambridge as a phantom. He befriends an Indian student – “R”, a woman – much as Forster did Rushdie, attracted by his Indian background.
Foggy, English Cambridge is a late-style setting for Rushdie: a place firmly in its eleventh hour. “Fading is the worldling’s pleasure,” Arthur catches the choir singing at King’s chapel. When Rushdie describes that building as “stone transformed into music”, he is, instead of forging new metaphors as he used to, knowingly invoking hoary old ones (the idea of architecture as “frozen music” is Goethe’s). By contrast, Rushdie’s earlier novels, while set in the past, unfolded in dynamic places, where history was still being made, and looked forwards: London, New York, Bombay, even seventh-century Mecca and 17th-century Cochin.
Depicting the lonely afterlife of a grand old man of letters, Rushdie gives us a peephole into his mellowing mind. “Late” could be read as a self-portrait. Does he feel like Forster? For so long an enfant terrible, Rushdie is surely now as venerable. Forster was a father figure to Indian writers, patronising RK Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, and gently encouraging the teenage Rushdie. A Passage to India – alluded to as SM Arthur’s “celebrated book”, which R has read – was then still the great Indian novel in English literature. It would only finally be surpassed by the work of an actual Indian when Rushdie authored Midnight’s Children. Now, Rushdie is himself a patriarch, who has sired a whole tribe of postcolonial literature; via his writing – and that of his progeny, from Hanif Kureishi to Zadie Smith – the stories of families like mine migrated into English literature.
As a child, I saw my father’s namesake in a book; since then, the realisation has grown that South Asians writing in English – especially British Muslims – have in Rushdie another father. Between us all there is, Rushdie once said, a “family quarrel”; Muslims of my father’s generation never forgave Rushdie and Rushdie never forgave them, for the pain of rejection by his “own characters”. But I found in Rushdie a faith-affirming writer. Steeped in Islamic mysticism, he has reckoned with the “emptied God-chamber” of modern culture by drawing on traditions of the supernatural, in order, he says, “honestly to describe reality as it is experienced by religious people”. Barely anyone else bothered.
The Eleventh Hour reminded me most of the beautiful ending of The Satanic Verses, when Saladin Chamcha returns home – “after the long angry decades” – to bid farewell to his cancer-stricken father. “He is teaching me how to die,” Saladin thinks. That was a book, Rushdie wrote in his apologia for it, about “how newness enters the world”. Now, for all of us children of Rushdie, is a moving book about how oldness leaves it.
The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £16.99
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[Further reading: The feminisation mystique: who ruined the West?]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand