TELEVISTA
Proud Indian at heart
Amita Malik

Salman Rushdie was for some time one of the most controversial writers around. For years the British Government gave him protection at an enormous expense following the fatwa against him. A high price was offered for his head. India also fell into line and banned his book The Satanic Verses. But he still remains a proud Indian. In a long and interesting TV interview last week, and in spite of the fact that he was educated and mostly lived abroad and sounds more British than Indian, he said with deep sincerity that he feels most at home in the city of his childhood, Mumbai, than New York, where he now lives.

The fatwa against Rushdie still exists, but he ignores it bravely

In fact I knew Salman's parents very well when he was a child in Mumbai. His father was a Mumbai business man. His mother, a gracious and quiet-spoken lady, was the daughter of Dr Butt, Principal of the Aligarh Tibbia College of Medicine. Salman's doting mother used to dress him up in velvet pants and lace shirts and we called him Lord Fauntleroy. Yet when he came to Delhi for the Commonwealth Writers' Conference, I found him modest and polite, and he was delighted when I rounded up his aunt Uzra Butt and her sister Zohra Sehgal, and hugged them affectionately as soon as he spotted them.

In the interview, he was relaxed and natural and, luckily, allowed to speak by the woman who interviewed him, which was because the regular literary reviewer was absent. He is usually so busy showing off his knowledge of the author and his books that in the end the poor author has nothing much left to say. Rushdie was relaxed enough even to laugh at himself. He recounted the years spent under the fatwa in hiding in London with dignity. He also spoke of his childhood in Bombay, as it then was, in minute detail.

He admitted that whenever he comes to India, he makes it a point to visit Mumbai. Several of his school friends are still around. I know that he still has his family's ancestral house up on a hillside in Solan. I seemed to have climbed endless steps when I found it some years ago, and even suggested to him that he should convert it into a home for visiting writers, as is the case with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, housed in the old Vice Regal Lodge.

He had a spirited lawyer looking after his interests as the Himachal Government had its eye on it. His latest book, The Enchantress of Florence, seems a far cry from Midnight's Children, which is still in contention for the Booker. I still consider it the best book he has written, especially as the Bombay he describes is also the Bombay I knew. For all I know, the fatwa against him still exists. It is good to know that he ignores it so bravely. His personal life and the ladies concerned are a different matter. We are only concerned about his books.

In fact, it has been quite an artistic week. The last TV programme I saw before writing this column was an interchange between film-makers and writers of India and Pakistan called ‘Bridging the Boundaries’ with Mumbai and Karachi panels discussing their respective cinemas. Farooque Sheikh spoke lucidly and intelligently, as he always does. Unfortunately, I missed the name of the highly vocal woman anchor from Karachi.

The only person who put me off was Mahesh Bhatt's daughter, Poonam. She spoke too much and too fast and her eyes kept on popping out all the time in a most distracting way. If this is due to contact lenses, she had better do something about them. All this discussion, of course, was stimulated by the first Pakistani film to come to India in decades, Khuda ke Liye. It has broken fresh ground between India and Pakistan, brought up to believe the Pakistani cinema is negligible and that only Bollywood reigns supreme. This film also stars our own Naseeruddin Shah. The film has also won international awards.