Rushdie’s ‘Knife’

Writing about happiness is probably one of the hardest things to do. Writing about trauma is far easier and also cathartic. For Rushdie:

Happiness writes in white ink on white pages. In other words, you can’t make it appear on the page. It’s invisible. It doesn’t show up.

Twenty-three years after the Fatwa, Rushdie was stabbed by a fanatic in an attack that lasted twenty-seven seconds and in which he was stabbed around fifteen times. In Knife – his memoir documenting his painful recovery – we have him share all the pain, suffering, and anxiety he experienced in the aftermath of that dreadful deed.

Rushdie grappling with the death of his friends and contemporaries while being relieved about his survival was poignant. Martin Amis’ death from oesophageal cancer, Paul Auster’s lung cancer diagnosis (Auster passed away a few weeks back), and Hanif Kureishi’s paralysis remind Rushdie what it means to come out of a knife attack at the age of 75. ‘Living your life’ at this age is accompanied by the regular flow of such mind-numbing news.

Rushdie also reminds us that he wasn’t the first writer to have been stabbed. In 1994, Naguib Mehfouz was similarly stabbed in his neck by an Islamic zealot. In 1938, Samuel Becket too survived a horrific knife attack when he was stabbed by a pimp in Paris.

Blindness is something that I feel is the worst fate that can befall a person. Rushdie, already suffering from macular degeneration, vents out his anxieties of living with a single eye. His struggles with pouring water onto a glass and the fear of ending up blind someday were written with such candor. He also tips his hat to the famous son of India who was one-eyed and nevertheless went on to do heroic acts – Tiger Pataudi.

I decided that the Tiger would be my role model. If he could face up to the ferocious speed of Hall and Griffith, I should be able to manage to pour water into a glass without spilling it, cross sidewalks without colliding with other pedestrians, and in general succeed at being functional as a one-eyed man in a two-eyed world.

The memoir brought back memories of Philippe Lancon’s ‘Disturbance’ which I read in 2021 during the pandemic. Lancon was the sole survivor of the Charlie Hebdo attack and his work, just as this one, documents his painful recovery and rehab and the slow assimilation into the normal world. There was an interesting snippet from the book on his interaction with Francois Hollande, which I will write on soon.