Back to the Land I Love
By Salman Rushdie © 2000

In the first of a three-part series on his return to India, Salman Rushdie describes the pain of exile and his first days back after the 'dark decade'

PHOTOS: Rushdie celebrating in 1998 after Iran had set aside the fatwa against him. Right: Rushdie in his London study in 1988 Photographs: KEVIN HARVEY/AP; ADAM BUTLER/AP

Thursday, April 6
I have left India many times. The first time was when I was thirteen and a half and went to boarding school in Rugby, England. My mother didn't want me to go but I said I did. I flew west excitedly in January 1961, not really knowing that I was taking a step that would change my life forever. A few years later, my father, without telling me, suddenly sold Windsor Villa, our family home in Bombay. The day I heard this, I felt an abyss open beneath my feet.
I think that I never forgave my father for selling that house, and I'm sure that if he hadn't I would still be living in it. Since then my characters have frequently flown west from India, but in novel after novel their author's imagination has returned to it. This, perhaps, is what it means to love a country: that its shape is also yours, the shape of the way you think and feel and dream. That you can never really leave.

Before the Partition massacres of 1947, my parents left Delhi and moved south, correctly calculating that there would be less trouble in secular, cosmopolitan Bombay. As a result I grew up in that tolerant, broad-minded city whose particular quality - call it freedom - I've been trying to capture and celebrate ever since. Midnight's Children (1981) was my first attempt at such literary land reclamation. Living in London, I wanted to get India back; and the delight with which Indian readers clasped the book to themselves, the passion with which they, in turn, claimed me, remains the most precious memory of my writing life.

In 1988, I was planning to buy myself an Indian base with the advances I'd received for my new novel. But that novel was The Satanic Verses, and after it was published the world changed for me, and I was no longer able to set foot in the country which has been my primary source of artistic inspiration. Whenever I made inquiries about getting a visa, the word invariably came back that I would not be granted one.

Nothing about my plague years, the dark decade that followed the Khomeini fatwa, has hurt more than this rift. I felt like a jilted lover left alone with his unrequited, unbearable love. You can measure love by the size of the hole it leaves behind.

It has been a deep rift, let's admit that. India was the first country to ban The Satanic Verses - which was proscribed without following India's own stipulated due process in such matters, banned before it entered the country by a weak Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi, in a desperate, unsuccessful bid for Muslim votes. After that, it sometimes seemed as if the Indian authorities were determined to rub salt in the wound.

When The Moor's Last Sigh was published in the fall of 1995, the Indian Government, in an attempt to appease Bal Thackeray's thuggish Shiv Sena in Bombay (which has done much to damage the city's old free-spirited openness, and which I therefore satirised in the novel), blocked the book's import through Customs, but backed down quickly when challenged in
the courts.

BBC Television's efforts to make a prestigious five-hour dramatisation of Midnight's Children, with a screenplay I myself adapted from the novel, were thwarted when India refused permission to film. That Midnight's Children was deemed unfit to be filmed in its own country, the country which had so recently celebrated its publication with so much recognition and joy, was a bad and miserable shock.

There were smaller, but still wounding slights. For years I was declared persona non grata by the Indian High Commission in London's cultural arm, the Nehru Centre. And at the time of the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, I was similarly barred from the Indian consulate's celebrations in New York.

Meanwhile, in some Indian literary quarters, it has become fashionable to denigrate my work. And the ban on The Satanic Verses is, of course, still in place. After the September 24, 1998 agreement between the British and Iranian governments that effectively set aside the Khomeini fatwa, things began to change for me in India too. India granted me a five-year visa just over a year ago. But at once there were threats from Muslim hardliners like Imam Bukhari of the Delhi Juma Masjid. More worryingly, some commentators told me not to visit India because if I did so I might look like a pawn of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party Government. I have never been a BJP man, but that wouldn't stop them using me for their own sectarian ends.

"Exile," it says somewhere in The Satanic Verses, "is a dream of glorious return." But the dream fades, the imagined return stops feeling glorious. The dreamer awakes. I almost gave up on India, almost believed the love affair was over for good.

But, as it turns out, not so. As it turns out, I'm about to leave for Delhi after a gap of twelve and a half years. My son Zafar, 20, is coming with me. He hasn't been to India since he was three, and is very excited. Compared with me, however, he's the very picture of coolness and calm.

Friday, April 7
The telephone rings. The Delhi police are extremely nervous about my impending arrival. Can I please avoid being spotted on the plane? My bald head is very recognisable; will I please wear a hat? My eyes are also easily identified; will I please wear sunglasses? Oh, and my beard, too, is a real giveaway; will I wear a scarf around that? The temperature in India is close to 100F, I point out: a scarf might prove a little warm. Oh, but there are cotton scarves . . .

These requests are relayed to me in a don't-shoot-the-messenger voice by my usually unflappable Indian attorney, Vijay Shankardass. How about, I suggest hotly, if I just spend the entire journey with my head in a paper bag?

"Salman," says Vijay, carefully, "there's a lot of tension out here. I'm feeling fairly anxious myself." The organisers of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, at whose invitation I am travelling to Delhi, are sending mixed messages. Mr Pavan Varma, a civil servant who is also in charge of media relations for the event, ignores all requests for discretion and holds a press conference to say that I'll probably be at the prize banquet. Contrariwise, Colin Ball, head of the Commonwealth Foundation whose prize it is, tells Vijay that if police protection is not extended to all the 20 or so foreign visitors arriving at Claridge's Hotel for the ceremony he may have to withdraw my invitation, even though I won't be staying at Claridge's, and nobody has ever threatened the delegates, who are not deemed by the Indian authorities to be in any danger. The only threats around right now are Ball's.

I'm going to India because things are better now and I judge that it's time to go. I'm going because if I don't go I'll never know if it's OK to go or not. I'm going because in spite of everything that has happened between India and myself, in spite of the bruises on my heart, the hook of love is in too deeply to pull out. Most of all, I'm going because Zafar asked to come with me. High time he was re-introduced to his other country.

But the truth is I don't know what to expect. Will I feel welcomed or spurned? I don't know if I'm going back to say hello or goodbye. Oh, stop being so melodramatic, Salman. Don't meet trouble halfway. Just get on the plane and go.

So: I fly to Delhi, and nobody sees me do it. Here's the invisible man in his business class seat. Here he is, watching the new Pedro Almodóvar movie on a little pop-up screen, while the plane flies over, er, Iran. Here's the invisible man sleep-masked and snoring.

And here I am at journey's end, stepping out into the heat of Delhi's international airport with Zafar at my side, and only Vijay Shankardass can see us. Abracadabra! Magic realism rules. Don't ask me how it's done. The shrewd conjurer never explains the trick.

I feel an urge to kiss the ground, or, rather, the blue rug in the airport "finger", but am embarrassed to do so beneath the watchful eyes of a small army of security guards. Leaving the rug unkissed, I move out of the terminal into the blazing, bone-dry Delhi heat, so different from the wet-towel humidity of my native Bombay. The hot day enfolds us like an embrace. A road unrolls before us like a carpet. We climb into a cramped, white Hindustan Ambassador, a car that is itself a blast from the past, the British Morris Oxford, long defunct in Britain, but alive and well here in this Indian translation. The Ambassador's air-conditioning system
isn't working.

I'm back.

Saturday, April 8
India doesn't stand on ceremony, and rushes in from every direction, thrusting me into the middle of its unending argument, clamouring for my total attention as it always did. Buy Chilly cockroach traps! Drink Hello mineral water! Speed Thrills But Kills! shout the hoardings. There are new kinds of message, too. Enrol for Oracle 81. Graduate with Java as well. And, as proof that the long protectionist years are over, Coca-Cola is back with a vengeance. When I was last here it was banned, leaving the field clear for the disgusting local imitation, Campa-Cola and Thums Up. Now there's a red Coke ad every 100 yards or so. Coke's slogan of the moment is written in Hindi transliterated into Roman script: Jo Chaho Ho Jaaye. Which could be translated, literally, as "whatever you desire, let it come to pass". I choose to think of this as a blessing.

Horn Please, demand the signs on the backs of the one million trucks blocking the road. All the other trucks, cars, bikes, motor-scooters, taxis and phut-phut autorickshaws enthusiastically respond, welcoming Zafar and me to town with an energetic rendition of the traditional symphony of the Indian street.

Wait for Side! Sorry-Bye-Bye! Fatta Boy!

The news is just as cacophonous. Between India and Pakistan, as usual, acrimony reigns. Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has just been sentenced to life imprisonment after what looked very like a show trial stage-managed by the latest military strongman to seize power, General Pervez Musharraf. India's army of vociferous commentators, linking this
story to the unveiling by Pakistan of a new missile, the Shaheen-II, warn darkly of the worsening relations between the two countries. A politician from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accuses Imam Bukhari of "seditious utterances" for some allegedly pro-Pakistani, anti-Indian statements. Plus ça change. Tempers, as ever, run high.

Inevitably, Bill Clinton, on his recent visit to the subcontinent, was drawn into these old antagonisms. From an Indian point of view, he said most of the right things. In particular, his toughness towards Pakistan, its dictatorship, its nuclear bomb, its illiberalism, won him many
friends, and this after many years during which Indians were convinced that the basis of American foreign policy in the region was, in Dr Kissinger's phrase, to "tilt towards Pakistan".

India is, on the whole, basking in the afterglow of the Clinton visit when I arrive. The roseate old charmer has done it again. Bombay's movie world is agog. "Hindustani hearts," reports a showbiz magazine in the city's inimitable prose style, "went bonkers over the Grand daddy of Uncle Sam." A starlet, Suman Ranganathan, variously described as a "sexy babe" and "apni sizzling mirchi", that is, "our very own sizzling hot chilli", is much taken by Big Bill, who is, she declares, "amazing, approachable, and someone who knows the pulse of the people".

In India, as my friend the distinguished art critic Geeta Kapur reminds me, people have very rarely been bothered by politicians' private lives. One very senior BJP leader is known to have kept a mistress for years without it affecting his career in the slightest. Indians, therefore, view
the Lewinsky scandal with bemused puzzlement. If various hot chillis choose to sizzle at the world's most powerful man, who could be surprised?

I've only been back an instant and already everyone I talk to – Vijay Shankardass, friends I'm eagerly ringing up to announce my arrival, even policemen - is regaling me with opinions on the new shape of Indian politics. If Bombay is India's New York - glamorous, glitzy, vulgar-chic,
a merchant city, a movie city, a slum city, incredibly rich, hideously poor - then Delhi is like Washington. Politics is the only game in town. Nobody talks about anything else for long.

Once India's minorities looked for protection to the left-leaning Congress, then the country's only organised political machine. Now the disarray of the Congress Party, and its drift to the right, is everywhere apparent. Under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi, the once mighty machine languishes and rusts.

People who have known Sonia for years urge me not to swallow the line that she was never interested in politics and allowed herself to be drafted into the leadership only because of her concern for the Party. A portrait is painted of a woman completely seduced by power but unable to wield it, lacking the skill, charm, vision, indeed everything except the hunger for power itself. Around her fawn the sycophantic courtiers of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, working to prevent the emergence of new leaders - P. Chidambaram, Madhavrao Scindia, Rajesh Pilot - who just might have the freshness and will to revive the party's fortunes, but who cannot be permitted to usurp the leadership role that, in the Sonia clique's view, belongs to her and her children alone.

I was last in India in August 1987, making a television documentary about the 40th anniversary of independence. I have never forgotten being at the Red Fort listening to Rajiv Gandhi delivering a stunningly tedious oration in broken schoolboy Hindi, while the audience simply and crushingly walked away. Now, here on television is his widow, her Hindi even more broken than his, a woman convinced of her right to rule, but convincing almost nobody except herself.

I remember another widow. In that 1987 documentary we included an interview with a Sikh woman, Ravel Kaur, who had seen her husband and sons murdered before her eyes by gangs known to be led and organised by Congress people. Indira Gandhi had recently been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards and the whole Sikh community of Delhi was paying the price. The Rajiv Gandhi government prosecuted nobody for these murders, in spite of much hard evidence identifying many of the killers.

For Vijay Shankardass, who had known Rajiv for years, those were disillusioning days. He and his wife hid their Sikh neighbours in their own home to keep them safe. He went to see Rajiv to demand that something be done to stop the killings, and was deeply shocked by Rajiv's seeming indifference. "Salman, he was so calm." One of Rajiv's close aides, Arjun Das, was less placid. "Saalón ko phoonk do," he snarled. "Blow the bastards away." Later, he too was killed.

Through the Indian High Commission in London (my friend and namesake, Salman Haidar, then the Deputy High Commissioner, was pressed into censorious service), the Rajiv Government did its level best to prevent our film from being shown, because of the interview with the Sikh widow. Even though she was no Sikh terrorist but a victim of anti-Sikh terrorism; even though she remained opposed to radical Sikh demands for a state of their own, and asked no more than justice for the dead, India sought to stifle her voice. And, I'm pleased to say, failed.

So many widows. In Midnight's Children, I satirised the first widow to take power in India, Indira Gandhi, for her abuse of that power during the quasi-dictatorial Emergency years in the mid-Seventies. I could not have
foreseen how resonant - by turns tragic and bathetic - the trope of the widow would continue to be.

The Congress has strange bedfellows these days. Its decay can perhaps best be measured these days by the poor quality of its allies. In the state of Bihar, the bizarre political double-act of Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi - on whom the wholly fictitious, and wildly corrupt, Bombay politicians Piloo and Golmatol Doodhwala in The Ground Beneath Her Feet were very loosely modelled - is once again taking centre stage.

Some years ago, Laloo, then Bihar's Chief Minister, was implicated in the Fodder Scam, a swindle in which large amounts of public livestock subsidies were claimed for the maintenance of cows which didn't actually exist. (In my novel, Piloo, India's "Scambaba Deluxe", runs a similar scheme involving non-existent goats.) Laloo was jailed, but managed to secure the Chief Ministership for Rabri, and blithely went on running the state, by proxy, from prison.

Since then he has been in and out of clink. At present he's inside, and Rabri is at least technically in the driving seat, and another juicy corruption scandal is emerging. The tax authorities want to know how Laloo and Rabri manage to live in such high style (they have a particularly grand house) on the relatively humble salaries even senior ministers in India pull down. Rabri has been "chargesheeted" but refuses to resign – or rather, Laloo, from jail, announces that there is no question of his wife the Chief Minister vacating her post.

As a writer with satirical inclinations, I'm delighted by the Yadav saga, the barefaced skulduggery of it, the shameless wholeheartedness, the glee with which Laloo and Rabri just go on being their appalling selves.

But their survival is also a sign of the growing corruption of Indian political culture. This is a country in which known gangsters have been elected to the national parliament, and where a man who runs a state from his prison cell can receive the vocal support of no less a figure than the Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi herself.


Sunday, April 9
Zafar at 20 is a big, gentle young man who, unlike his father, keeps his emotions concealed. But he is a deeply feeling fellow, and is engaging with India seriously, attentively, beginning the process of making his own
portrait of it, which may unlock in him an as yet unknown other self.

At first he notices what first-time visitors notice: the terrible poverty of the families living by the railway tracks in what look like trashcans and binliners, the men holding hands in the street, the "terrible" quality of Indian MTV and the "awful" Bollywood movies. We pass through the sprawling Army cantonment and he asks if the Armed Forces are as much of a political factor here as they are in neighbouring Pakistan, and looks impressed when I tell him that soldiers in India have never sought political power.

I can't tempt him into Indian national dress. I myself put on a cool, loose kurta-pajama outfit the moment I arrive, but Zafar is mutinous. "It's just not my style," he insists, preferring to stay in his young Londoner's uniform of T-shirt, cargo pants and sneakers. (By the end of the trip he is wearing the white pajamas, but not the kurtas; still,
progress of a kind has been made.)

Zafar has never read more than the first three chapters of Midnight's Children in spite of its dedication ("For Zafar Rushdie who, contrary to all expectations, was born in the afternoon"). In fact, apart from Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West, he hasn't finished any of my books. The children of writers are often this way. They need their parents to be parents, not novelists. Zafar has always had a complete set of my books proudly on display in his room, but he reads Alex Garland and Bill Bryson and I pretend not to care.

Now, poor fellow, he's getting a crash course in my work as well as my life. In the Red Fort after Partition, my aunt and uncle, like many Muslims, had to be protected by the Army from the violence raging outside; a version of this appears in my novel Shame. And here, off Chandni Chowk, the bustling main street of Old Delhi, are the lanes winding into the old Muslim mohallas or neighbourhoods in one of which, Ballimaran, my parents lived before they moved to Bombay; and it's also where Ahmed and Amina Sinai, the parents of the narrator of Midnight's Children, faced the gathering pre-Independence storm.

Zafar takes all this literary tourism in good part. Look, here at Purana Qila, the Old Fort supposedly built on the site of the legendary city of Indraprastha, is where Ahmed Sinai left a sack of money to appease a gang of arsonist blackmailers. Look, there are the monkeys who ripped up the sack and threw the money away. Look, here at the National Gallery of Modern Artare the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil, the half-Indian, >half-Hungarian artist who inspired the character of Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor's Last Sigh . . .

OK, enough, Dad, he plainly thinks but is too nice to say. OK, I'll read them, this time I really will. (He probably won't.)

There are signs at the Red Fort advertising an evening son et lumière show. "If Mum was here," he says suddenly, "she'd insist on coming to that."

Zafar's bright, beautiful mother, my first wife Clarissa Luard, the British Arts Council's highly esteemed literature officer, guardian angel of young writers and little magazines, died of a recurrence of breast cancer last November, aged just 50. Zafar and I had spent most of her final hours by her bedside. He is her only child.

"Well," I say, "she was here, you know." In 1974, Clarissa and I spent more than four months travelling around India, roughing it in cheap hotels and long-distance buses, using the advance I'd received for my first novel Grimus to finance the trip, and trying to stretch the money as far as it would go. Now, I begin to make a point of telling Zafar what his mother thought of this or that - how much she liked the serenity of this spot, or the hubbub over there. What began as a little father-and-son expedition acquires an extra dimension.

>I've always known that, after everything that has happened, this first visit would be the trickiest. Don't overreach yourself, I thought. If it goes well, things should ease. The second visit? "Rushdie returns again" isn't much of a news story. And the third - "Oh, here he is once more" - barely sounds like news at all. In the long slog back to "normality", habituation, even boredom, has been a useful weapon. "I intend," I start telling people in India, "to bore India into submission."

I should have worked out that if I myself was a little uncertain of how hings would go, everyone around me would be in a blue funk. Things have improved in England and America, and normal service has very largely been resumed. I have grown unaccustomed to the problems of a maximum-security protection operation. What's happening in India feels, in this regard, like entering a time-warp and being taken back to the bad old early days
of the Iranian attack.

My protection team couldn't be nicer or more efficient, but gosh, there are a lot of them, and they are jumpy. In Old Delhi, where many Muslims live, they are especially on edge, particularly whenever, in spite of my cloak of invisibility, a member of the public commits the faux pas of recognising me.

"Sir, there has been exposure! Exposure has occurred!" my protectors mourn.

"Sir, they have said the name, sir! The name has been spoken!" "Sir, please, the hat!"

It's useless to point out that I do tend to get recognised a fair bit because, well, I look like this and other people don't; or that, on every single "exposure", the reaction of the persons concerned has been friendly, even delighted. My protectors have a nightmare scenario in their heads - rioting mobs, etc - and mere real life isn't enough to wipe it away.

>This has been one of the most frustrating aspects of the past few years. People - journalists, policemen, friends, strangers - all write scripts for me, and I get trapped inside those fantasies. What none of the scenarists ever seems to come up with is the possibility of a happy ending - one in which the problems I've faced are gradually overcome, and I resume the ordinary literary life which is all I've ever wanted. Yet this, the wholly unanticipated story-line, is what has actually transpired.
>
My biggest problem these days is waiting for everyone to let go of their nightmares and catch up with the facts.
>
>Monday, April 10
>A somewhat paranoid start to my day. I learn that the head of the British Council in India, Colin Perchard, will not let me use the Council's auditorium for a press conference at the end of the week. In addition, the British High Commissioner, Sir Rob Young, has been instructed by the Foreign Office to stay away from me - he is "not to come out of the stables," he tells Vijay.
>
>Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, is arriving in India the day I am due to leave and, it would appear, is anxious not to be too closely associated with me. He is scheduled to travel to Iran soon, and naturally that trip must not be compromised. (Later: Cook's trip is cancelled anyway, because of the closed-court "spy trials" of Jews in Iran. So it goes.)
>
>Better news comes from the Commonwealth Foundation's Colin Ball, who has moderated his stance, and is no longer threatening to withdraw my invitation to his awards dinner. Like Cinderella, it would appear, I shall go to the ball. But in my paranoid mood I think that if the foundation is so nervous about my mere presence, they are unlikely to want the closer association with me that giving me the prize would inevitably create.
>
>I remind myself why I'm really here. The Commonwealth Writers' Prize is only a pretext. To have made this trip with Zafar is the real victory. For both of us, India is the prize.
>
>We're off on a road trip to show the boy the sights: Jaipur, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra. For me, the road itself has always been the main attraction.
>
>There are more trucks than I remembered, many more, blaring and lethal, often driving straight at us down the wrong side of the carriageway. There are wrecks from head-on smashes every few miles. Look, Zafar, that is the shrine of a prominent Muslim saint; all the truckers stop there and pray for luck, even the Hindus. Then they get back into their cabs and take hideous risks with their lives and ours as well.
>
>Look, Zafar, that is a tractor-trolley loaded with men. At election time the sarpanch or headman of every village is ordered to provide such trolleyloads for politicians' rallies. For Sonia Gandhi, ten tractor-trolleys per village is the requirement. People are so disillusioned with politicians these days that nobody would actually go to the rallies of their own free will.
>
>Look, those are the polluting chimneys of brick kilns smoking in the fields. Outside the city the air is less filthy, but it still isn't clean. But in Bombay between December and February, think of this, aircraft can't
>land or take off before 11am because of the smog.
>
>The new age is here all right. Zafar, if you could read Hindi you'd see the new age's new words being phonetically transliterated into that language's Devanagiri script: Millennium tyres. Oasis Cellular. Modern's Chinese "Fastfood".
>
>He wants to learn Hindi. He is good at languages and wants to learn Hindi and Urdu and come back without all the paraphernalia that presently surrounds us: without, to be blunt, me. Good. He's got the bug. Once India bites you, Zafar, you'll never be cured.
>
>Behold, Zafar, the incomprehensible acronyms of India. What is a WAKF Board? What is an HSIDC? But one acronym reveals a genuine shift in reality. You see it everywhere now, every 100 yards or so: STD-ISD-PCO. PCO is Personal Call Office, and now anyone can pop into one of these little booths, make calls to anywhere in India or, indeed, the world, and pay on the way out. This is the genuine communications revolution of India. Nobody need be isolated any more.
>
>Bill Clinton visited the hilltop fortress-palace of Amber, outside Jaipur, but his security people wouldn't allow him to indulge in the famous local tourist treat. At the bottom of Amber's hill is a taxi-rank of elephants. You buy a ticket at the Office of Elephant Booking and then lurch uphill on the back of your rented pachyderm. Where the President failed, Zafar and I succeed. I feel glad to know - in a moment of schadenfreude – that somebody else's security was tighter and more restrictive than mine.
>
>Clinton did, however, watch dancing girls twirling and cavorting for him in Amber's Saffron Garden. He'd have liked that. Rajasthan is colourful. People wear colourful clothes and perform colourful dances and ride on
>colourful elephants to colourful ancient palaces, and these are things a President should know.
>
>He should also know that at a test site near Pokhran in Rajasthan's Thar desert Indian know-how brought India into the nuclear age. Rajasthan is, therefore, the cradle of the new India that must be thought of as America's partner and equal. (Clinton did raise the subject of the Test Ban Treaty, but failed to persuade India to sign. After all, the US hasn't ratified it, either.)
>
>What should not be drawn to Clinton's attention - because it has no place in either the colourful, touristic, elephant-taxi India, or the new, thrusting, Internet-billionaire, entrepreneurial India that is presently
>being sold to the world - is that Rajasthan, along with its neighbouring state of Gujarat, is currently dying of thirst, in the grip of the worst drought for over a century.
>
>What the President must not be permitted even to think is that the money spent on India's ridiculous bomb could have helped to care for and feed the sick and hungry. Or that it's absurd for Prime Minister Vajpayee to appeal to the people of India to help to fight the massive destruction wrought by the drought by making charitable contributions, "no matter how small", while the Indian Government is still spending a fortune on Rajasthan's other weapon of mass destruction.
>
>It's hot: almost 110F, above 40C. The rains have failed for the past two years, and it's still two months to the next monsoon. Wells are running dry, and villagers are being forced to drink dirty water, which gives them diarrhoea, which causes dehydration, and so the vicious circle tightens its grip.
>
>When I was last here, a dozen years ago, the region was in the grip of the previous worst-ever drought. I travelled in Gujarat then and saw much the same sort of devastation as is apparent everywhere in rural Rajasthan today. This is something I wrote then; now things are even worse: "The rains have failed so often that now they say instead, the drought succeeded. They are plainsmen, livestock farmers, but their cattle are deserting them. The cattle, staggering, migrate south and east in search of water, and rattle as they walk. Their skulls, horned mile-posts, line the route of their vain exodus. There is water to the west, but it is salt. Soon even these marshes will have given up the ghost. Tumbleweed blows across the leached grey flats. There are cracks big enough to swallow a man. An apt enough way for a farmer to die: to be eaten by his land."
>
>As the gulf between the feast of the haves and the famine of the have-nots widens, the stability of the country must be more and more at risk. I have been smelling a difference in the air, and reluctant as I am to put into words what isn't much more than an instinct, I do feel a greater volatility in people, a crackle of anger just below the surface, a shorter fuse.
>
>At dinner, Zafar eats a bad shrimp. I blame myself. I should have known to remind him of the basic rules for travellers in India: always drink bottled water, make sure you see the seal on the bottle being broken in front of you, never eat salad (it won't have been washed in bottled water), never put ice in your drinks (it won't have been made with bottled water) . . . and never, never eat seafood unless you're by the sea.
>
>Zafar's desert shrimp knocks him flat. He has a sleepless night: vomiting, diarrhoetic. In the morning he looks terrible, and we have a long, hard journey ahead of us, on bumpy, difficult roads. Now he, too, needs to guard against dehydration. Unlike the villagers we're leaving behind, however, we have plenty of bottled water to drink, and proper medication. And, of course, we're leaving.
>
>Tuesday, April 11
>A day to grind through. Long, gruelling journey to Agra, then back to Delhi. Zafar suffers, but remains stoical. He's too weak to walk around the magnificent Fatehpur Sikri site, and only just manages to drag himself around the Taj, which he declares to be smaller than expected. I am very relieved when I can finally get him into a comfortable hotel bed.

The London Times
>June 14, 2000
>
>'Abba, I Have Reclaimed Our House'
>By Salman Rushdie
>
>In the second part of our series, Salman Rushdie returns to his family's summer home
>
>PHOTOS: Anis Villa, the Rushdie family retreat (credit: SALMAN RUSHDIE) ; Salman Rushdie with Vijay Shankardass, the lawyer who fought to get the house back from the local state government
>
>Some time in the 1930s my paternal grandfather Mohammed Din Khaliqi, a successful Delhi businessman, built a hot-season retreat for his family, a modest stone cottage in the pretty town of Solan in the Simla Hills. He named it Anis Villa after his only son Anis Ahmed. That son, my father, who later took the surname Rushdie, gifted the house to me on my 21st birthday. And 11 years ago, the state government of Himachal Pradesh took it over without so much as a by your leave.
>
>It isn't easy to seize a man's property in India, even for a state government. In order to get hold of Anis Villa, the local authorities falsely declared it to be "evacuee property". The law pertaining to evacuee property was devised after Partition to enable the State to take possession of homes left behind by individuals and families who had gone
>to Pakistan. This law did not apply to me. I was an Indian citizen until I became a British one by naturalisation, and I have never held a Pakistani passport or been a resident of that country. Anis Villa had been wrongfully seized, and provably so.
>
>Vijay Shankardass and I became close friends because of Solan. One of the most distinguished attorneys in India, with, incidentally, a proud history of anti-censorship victories to his name, he took on the Himachal authorities on my behalf. The case took seven years, and we won. Both parts of this sentence are impressive. Seven years, by Indian standards, is incredibly fast. And to defeat a government, even when right is quite clearly on your side, takes some doing. Vijay's victory has been much admired in India, and he deserves all the kudos he has received.
>
>For Vijay, the Solan case was just one part of the larger task of putting right my relationship with India, which has become, for him, something of a personal crusade. He has dedicated much time to it, testing the waters, lobbying politicians, working tirelessly on my behalf. The present trip would have been impossible without him. He is softly spoken, has quite exceptional gifts of negotiation and persuasion, and I owe him a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.
>
>We regained possession of the Solan villa in November 1997. Since then, the roof has been fixed, the house cleaned and painted, and one bathroom modernised. Impressively, the electricity, plumbing and telephone all work. In preparation for our visit, furniture and furnishings have been rented for a week from a local store, at the surreal cost, for a six-bedroomed house, of $25. A caretaker and his family live on the premises. Solan has grown out of all recognition, but the villa's view of the hills remains clear and unspoilt.
>
>Zafar is just a few weeks shy of his own 21st birthday. Going to Solan with him today closes a circle. It also discharges a responsibility I have long felt to the memory of my father, who died in 1987. You see, Abba, I have reclaimed our house. Four generations of our family, living and dead, can now foregather there. One day it will belong to Zafar and his little brother Milan. In a family as uprooted and far-flung as ours, this little acre of continuity stands for a very great deal.
>
>To get to Solan you take a three-hour ride in an air-conditioned "chair car" on the Shatabdi Express from New Delhi to Le Corbusier's city of Chandigarh, the shared capital city of both Punjab and Haryana. Then you drive for an hour-and-a-half, up into the hills. At least, this is what you do if you're not me. The police do not want me to take the train: "Sir, exposure is too great." They are upset because the manager of the hotel in Jaipur has blabbed to Reuters that I was there. Vijay has managed to squash the Reuters story for the moment, but the shield of invisibility is wearing thin. At Solan, as even the police accept, or say they accept, the cat will surely spring from the bag. It's where everyone expects me to go. The day before yesterday, the Indian state television service,
>Doordarshan, sent a team up to Anis Villa to nose around and quiz the caretaker, Govind Ram, who stonewalled nobly. Once I'm actually there, however, the story will surely break.
>
>One rather unattractive development: the police high-ups who telephone Akshey Kumar every five minutes to ask how things are going have developed the notion that the Jaipur leak was engineered by Vijay and myself. This germ of suspicion will shortly blossom into a full-blown disease.

Zafar is feeling better but I refuse to inflict what will be a seven-hour car journey on him. I put him on the train, lucky dog. I am to meet him at Chandigarh station with my inconspicuous "car-cade" of four black sedans.
>
THERE'S another train leaving Delhi, a train whose existence wasn't dreamt of the last time I was in India. This is the Samjhauta Express, the non-stop direct rail link between the Indian capital and the city of Lahore in Pakistan. Just as I'm preparing to celebrate this sign of improving relations between the old adversaries, however, I discover that the continuance of the service is now at risk. Pakistan complains that India isn't providing its share of the rolling stock. India complains, rather more seriously, that Pakistan is using the train to smuggle drugs
and counterfeit money into India.
>
>Drugs are a huge issue, of course, but the counterfeit money issue is also a big one. In Nepal, these days, people are reluctant to accept Indian 500 rupee notes because of the quantity of forgeries in circulation. Not long ago a diplomat from the Pakistan mission in Delhi went to pay his young son's school fees, and used a mixture of genuine and funny money to do so. The boy was expelled, and although he was later reinstated, the link between the Pakistani Government and the bad money had been clearly established.
>
>(On Friday 14, India and Pakistan agree to let the train continue running for the moment. But it can no longer be said to symbolise the spirit of friendly co-operation. Rather, it's just another problem, another location of the struggle between the two neighbours.)
>
>I COLLECT Zafar at Chandigarh and as we go up into the hills my heart lifts. For me this is the emotional highpoint of the trip to date, and I can see that Zafar, too, is moved. We stop at a dhaba near Solan for dinner and the owner tells me how happy he is that I'm there, and someone else runs up for an autograph. I ignore the worried expression on Akshey Kumar's face. Even though I've hardly ever been here in my life, and not at all since I was 12 years old, I feel like I'm home.
>
>It's dark when we reach the villa. From the road we have to climb down 122 steps to reach it. At the bottom there's a little gate and Vijay, also in a state of high feeling, formally welcomes me to the home he has won back for my family. Govind Ram runs up and astonishes Zafar by stooping down to touch our feet. I am not a superstitious man but I feel the presence at my shoulder of my grandfather who died before I was born, and of my parents' younger selves. The sky is on fire with stars. I go into the back garden by myself. I need to be alone.
>
>Thursday, April 13
I am woken at 5am by amplified music and chanting from a mandir, a Hindu temple, across the valley. I get dressed and walk around the house in the dawn light. With its high-pitched pink roofs and little corner turrets
it's more beautiful than I remembered, more beautiful than it looked in Vijay's photographs of it, and the view is as stunning as promised. It's a very strange feeling to walk around a house you don't know that somehow belongs to you. It takes a while for us to grow into one another, the house and I, but by the time the others wake up, it's mine.
>
>We spend most of the day mooching around the premises, sitting in the garden under the shade of big old conifers, eating Vijay's special eggs. I know now that the trip has been worthwhile: I know it from the expression
>on Zafar's face.
>
>In the afternoon we make an excursion to the next town, the former British summer capital. They called it Simla but it's gone back to being Shimla now that they have left. Vijay shows me the law courts where he fought for
>Anis Villa, and we go, too, to the former Viceregal Lodge, a big old pile that once staged the crucial pre-Independence Simla Conference of 1945 and now houses a research establishment called the Indian Institute of
>Advanced Studies. The fabric of the building, of course, is badly neglected, and may soon become unsafe.
>
>Zafar walks gravely around the conference table where the shades of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah are seated, but when we get outside again he asks, "Why is that stone lion still holding up an English flag?" The probable answer, I hypothesise, is that nobody noticed until he did. India has been independent for more than half a century, but the flag of St George is still up there on the roof.
>
>A little ducking and swerving in the grounds to dodge the BJP-wallah who now runs the Institute. Alas, I am not only here as observer but also as observed, and I mustn't fall into the trap of looking like the BJP's man. A handshake which would certainly be photographed is worth a little fancy footwork to avoid.
>
>Unlike V. S. Naipaul (who is also in India, I gather), I do not see the rise of Hindu nationalism as a great outpouring of India's creative spirit. I see it as the negation of the India I grew up in, as the triumph of sectarianism over secularism, of hatred over fellowship, of ugliness over love.
>
It is true that Prime Minister Vajpayee has tried to lead his party in a more moderate direction, and that Vajpayee personally is surprisingly popular among Muslims, but his attempt to reshape his party in his own image has failed.
>
>The BJP is the political manifestation of the extremist Hindu movement, the RSS (Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh), rather as Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland is the political offspring of the Provisional IRA. In order to change the BJP, Vajpayee would have to carry the leadership of the RSS with him. Regrettably, the opposite is happening. The relatively moderate RSS chief Professor Rajendra Singh - "Rajju Bhaiyya" - has been ousted by the hardline K. S. Sudarshan, who has started warning Vajpayee to toe the RSS line.
>
>The Prime Minister's options are limited. He could give in and unleash the dogs of religious strife. He could try doing what Indira Gandhi brilliantly carried off in 1969, when the kingmakers of the Congress tried to turn her into their puppet. (She resigned from her own party, formed the Congress-I or Indira Congress, took most of her MPs with her, called a general election and destroyed the old guard at the polls.) Or, as seems most likely, he could soldier on until the next election and then stand down. At that point the BJP's moderate mask will slip, it will no longer be able to hold together the kind of broad-based coalition of the sort that presently underpins its hold on power, and, given the shambles the Congress Party's in, India will enter another phase of splintered, unstable governments. It's not a happy prediction, but it's what the probabilities suggest. And it's a good enough reason for keeping away from BJP apparatchiks, however low-level they may be.
>
>There is a conference under way at the Institute. Prof. B. B. Lal, using grayware pottery shards found at sites associated with the great Kuru-Pandava war as evidence, concludes that the age of the revered Mahabharata may be only 3,000 years, not the supposed 5,000. What will the BJP/RSS make of so radical a rewriting of the story of this sacred Hindu text?
>
>The London Times
>June 15, 2000
>'There is Only Joy, Lots of Joy'
>By Salman Rushdie
>
>Concluding the memoir of his return to India, Salman Rushdie recalls how Delhi forgot the fatwa
>
>PHOTO: Joy is about to replace dread as Rushdie and his son meet India's press
>
>My metamorphosis from observer to observed, from the Salman I know to the "Rushdie" I often barely recognise, continues apace. Rumours of my presence in India are everywhere. I am profoundly depressed to hear that a couple of Islamic organisations have vowed to make trouble, and trouble is news, and so maybe, I think, this will be seen as the meaning of my trip to India, which will be very, very sad, and bad, indeed.
>
>At dinner in Solan's Himani restaurant, I'm tucking into the spicy Indian version of Chinese food when I'm approached by a Doordarshan reporter called Agnihotri who just by chance happens to be vacationing up here with his family. And there it is: he has his scoop and the story's out. Within moments a local press reporter arrives and asks me a few friendly questions.
>
>None of this is very unexpected, but as a result of these chance encounters the jitteriness of the police reaches new heights, and boils over into a full-scale row. Back at Anis Villa, Vijay receives a call on his cellphone from a police officer named Kulbir Krishan in Delhi. Krishan is somewhere in the middle of the invisible chain of command of Delhi desk-pilots, but what he says makes Vijay lose his composure for the first time in all the years of our friendship. He is almost trembling as he tells me: "We are accused of having called those journalists to the restaurant. This man says we have not been gentlemen, we have not kept our word, and we have, if you can believe the phrase, 'talked out of turn'. Finally the fellow says: 'There will be riots in Delhi tomorrow, and if we
>fire on the crowds and there are deaths, the blood will be on your heads.'"
>
>I am horrified. It quickly becomes clear to me that there are two issues here. The first and lesser issue is that, after a week of accepting all manner of limitations and security conditions, we are being accused of dishonesty and bad faith. That is insulting and unjust, but it isn't, finally, dangerous. The second issue is a matter of life and death. If the Delhi police have become so trigger-happy that they are preparing to kill people, then they must be stopped before it's too late.
>
>No time now for niceties. Zafar looks on, dazed, while I blow my stack at poor, decent Akshey Kumar (who is not at all to blame) and tell him that unless Kulbir Krishan gets back on the phone right now, apologises to Vijay and me personally, and assures me that there are no plans to murder anybody tomorrow, I will insist on our driving through the night back to New Delhi so that I can be waiting at Prime Minister Vajpayee's office door at dawn, to ask him to deal with the problem personally.
>
>After a certain amount of this kind of raging - "I'll go to the British High Commissioner! I'll call a press conference! I'll write a newspaper article!" - the hapless Kulbir does call back to speak of "misunderstandings", and promises that there will be no shootings or deaths.
>
>"If I spoke out of context," he memorably concludes, "then I am very sorry indeed." I burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of this formulation and put down the phone. But I do not sleep well. The meaning of this entire journey will be defined by what happens in the next two days, and even though I hope and believe that the police are overreacting, I can't be sure. Delhi is their town, and me, I'm Rip Van Winkle.

Friday, April 14
>We leave Solan at dawn and drive Zafar and Vijay to Chandigarh station. (I, of course, am going all the way by road.) Zafar is recovering from the shrimp attack, but Vijay looks worn out, frazzled. He repeats several times that he has never been spoken to so rudely, and doesn't propose to let the matter rest. I can see that he's had it with the police, with all the travelling, and probably with me. Tomorrow night, I tell him, all this will be over and you can go back to being a lawyer and not think about Salman Rushdie and his problems even once. He laughs weakly and gets on the train.
>
>It's the day of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize banquet, but I'm not thinking about that. All the way back to Delhi, I'm wondering whose instincts will prove the sharper: mine or my protectors'. How will my return-of-the-native trip end: happily or badly? I'll soon know.
>
At half-past twelve I'm closeted in a meeting with R. S. Gupta, the special Assistant Commissioner in charge of security for the whole city of Delhi. He is a calm, forceful man, used to getting his way. He paints a dark picture. A Muslim politician, Shoaib Iqbal, plans to go to Friday midday prayers at the city's most important mosque, the Juma Masjid in Old Delhi, and there get support for a demonstration against me, and against the Indian Government for allowing me to enter the country. The congregation will be in six figures and if the mosque's Imam - it's Bukhari - supports the call to demonstrate the numbers could be huge and bring the city to a standstill.
>
>"We are negotiating with them," says Gupta, "to keep the numbers small, and the event peaceful. Maybe we will succeed."
>
>After a couple of hours of high-tension waiting, during which I am effectively confined to quarters - "Sir, no movements, please" - the news is good. Only about 200 people have marched - and 200 marchers, in India,
>is a number smaller than zero - and it has all gone off without a hitch. The nightmare scenario has not come to pass. "Fortunately," Mr Gupta tells me, "we have been able to manage it."
>
>What really happened in Delhi today? The security worldview is always impressive and often persuasive, but it remains just one version of the truth. It is one of the characteristics of security forces everywhere in the world to try and have it both ways. Had there been mass demonstrations, they would have said: "You see, all our nervousness has been amply justified." But there were no such marches, and so I'm told: "We were able to prevent the trouble because of our foresight and skill."
>
>Maybe so. But it might also be the case that for the vast majority of Indian Muslims the controversy over The Satanic Verses is old hat now, and in spite of the efforts of the politician and the Imam nobody could really
>be bothered to march. Oh, there's a novelist? What's his name? Rushdie? So what?
>
>It's a hot day in Delhi, and there's a hot wind blowing. A dust storm
>rages across the city. As we all take in the news that the only storm in
>Delhi today is meteorologically induced, we can finally begin to relax,
>and to concede that perhaps everyone has been more nervous than was
>necessary and that the long dispute that has kept me away from India is
>really over at last.
>
>The script in people's heads is being rewritten. The foretold ending has not come to pass. What happens instead is extraordinary, and, for Zafar and myself, an event of immense emotional impact, far exceeding in its
>force even the tumultuous reception of Midnight's Children almost 20 years ago.
>
>What bursts out is not violence, but joy.
>AT A quarter to eight in the evening, Zafar and I walk into the Commonwealth Prize reception at the Oberoi Hotel and from that moment until we leave India the celebrations never stop. Journalists and photographers surround us, their faces wreathed in most unjournalistic smiles. Friends burst through the media wall to embrace us. The actor Roshan Seth, recently recovered from serious heart problems, hugs me and says: "Look at us, yaar, we're both supposed to be dead but still going strong." The eminent columnist Amita Malik, a friend of my family's from the old days in Bombay, quickly gets over her embarrassment at mistaking Zafar for my bodyguard and reminisces wonderfully about the past, praising my father's wit, his quick gift for repartee, and telling tales of my
>favourite uncle Hameed, who died too young, too long ago.
>
>Gifted young writers - Raj Kamal Jha, Namita Gokhale, Shauna Singh Baldwin - come up to say generous things about the significance of my writing for their own work. One of the great ladies of English-language Indian literature, the novelist Nayantara Sahgal, clasps my hands and whispers: "Welcome home." I look around and there's Zafar being interviewed for television and speaking fluently and touchingly about his own happiness at
>being here. My heart overflows.
>
>I had not really dared to expect this, had been infected by the fears of the police, and had defended my heart against many kinds of disappointment. Now I can feel the defences falling away one by one, the happiness rising like a tropical dawn, fast and brilliant and hot. There are few such moments in a lifetime. Forgive me for saying perhaps too much about this one. It is a rare thing to be granted your heart's desire.
>
>Somewhere in there the Commonwealth Writers' Prize goes to J.M. Coetzee, thanks to the casting vote of the spectre at the feast, the stone-faced Indian judge Shashi Deshpande. But this is a party even her curdled
>judgments cannot poop.

India is the prize.

Saturday, April 15
Rushdie in India: like Solzhenitsyn regaining home, but without the anger or medieval prophecies. There is only joy, lots of joy." As Indian Express's hyperbolically affectionate front-page lead demonstrates, the party spirit is spilling into the media, drowning the few muted negative voices. In all my conversations with the press I've tried to avoid reopening old wounds, to tell Indian Muslims that I'm not and have never been their enemy, and to stress that I'm in India to mend broken links and to begin, so to speak, a new chapter. Today The Asian Age concurs: "Let's turn a page."

The Pioneer expresses its satisfaction that India is, once again, standing up for "democratic values and the individual's right to express himself". It also, in less elevated mood, improbably but delightfully accuses me of
"turning the city's sophisticated party women into a bunch of giggling schoolgirls" who tell their men: "Dahling, [he] could send Bollywood hunks back to school."

Dilip Padgaonkar, of The Times of India, puts it most movingly: "He is >reconciled with India and India with him . . . something sublime has happened to him which should enable him to continue to mesmerise us with his yarns. He has returned to where his heart has always been. He has returned home."

Vijay throws a farewell party for me. His wife Rani, an expert on prison systems and penal reform, has returned from a conference in Vienna just in time. And there's a surprise: my two actress aunts, Uzra Butt and her >sister Zohra Segal, are there with my cousin Kiran Segal, Zohra's daughter and one of the country's foremost exponents and teachers of the Odissi school of Indian classical dancing. This is the zany wing of the family, sharp of tongue and mischievous of eye. Uzra and Zohra are the grand old ladies of the Indian theatre, and we were all in love with Kiran at one time or another. Zohra and Kiran lived in an apartment in Hampstead for a time in the 1960s, and when I was at boarding school at Rugby I sometimes spent vacations in their spare bedroom, next to Kiran's bedroom door, on which there was a large, admonitory skull and crossbones sign. I now discover that Vijay Shankardass and Roshan Seth both stayed in the same >spare room in the same period. All three of us would look wistfully at the >skull and crossbones and none of us ever got past it. "I haven't seen you dance for years," I say to Kiran. "Come back soon," she says. "Then I'll dance."