Hybrid Creature, Invisible Man

By Paul Gray

Salman Rushdie is no stranger to exile, but past experience could hardly have prepared him for what he faces now. In fact, the situation is so preposterous that it might have sprung from Rushdie's own phantasmagoric imagination: someone suddenly emerges as the most talked-about writer in the world, but his life depends on becoming an invisible man.

"I am this hybrid creature," Rushdie said shortly before going into hiding. Most of his life has been spent as an outsider, an alien among local populations. He was born in Bombay in 1947, two months before the British pulled out of India; his parents were well-to-do Kashmiri Muslims and admirers of English customs and manners. Young Salman's religion and pale skin made him something of an anomaly in his native city.

When he was 13, he was shipped off to England to be educated at Rugby. His Anglo-Saxon schoolmates wasted no time in letting him know that he did not fit in; they snickered while, facing his first English breakfast, Rushdie tried to figure out how to eat a kipper.

After his public-school ordeals, he went to Cambridge, where he read history (with an emphasis on Islamic subjects) and developed an interest in acting. After graduating in 1968, he moved to Pakistan, where his parents had relocated. His brief stay in a Muslim state was not happy. His production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story was censored because the play contains the word pork. Within the year, Rushdie fled back to England.

For the next decade he supported himself in London by writing advertising copy. He wed a British woman and fathered a son. (That union ended in divorce in 1987; Rushdie is now married to the American author Marianne Wiggins.) His first novel, Grimus (1974), was a critical and commercial flop, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981), created an international sensation. The book hinged on an inspired conceit: that 1,001 babies born across the subcontinent on the stroke of Indian independence had acquired magical powers to communicate with one another. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction, and sold roughly half a million copies worldwide.

Rushdie's next novel, Shame (1983), was another roistering allegory, this time refracting recent events in Pakistan. It too was nominated for the Booker Prize, but at the presentation dinner the award went to another contender. Rushdie raised eyebrows by standing up and protesting the injustice of the decision. "The thing about Salman," says an editor who knows him, "is that if he won the Nobel Prize, he would not be happy until he had won it twice."

Rushdie possesses an egotistical, self-righteous streak that has not always endeared him to his fellow Britons. He has been an articulate critic of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. And somewhere in the process of becoming Westernized, Rushdie lost his faith. "When I was young, I was religious in quite an unthinking way," he said recently. "Now I'm not, but I am conscious of a space where God was."

Once again, Rushdie cannot go home. His north London house, guarded around the clock by uniformed police, is empty. His fourth-floor study, where he wrote The Satanic Verses at the rate of roughly 800 words a day, no longer betrays the traces of his working routine, mounting piles of typescript scattered about the floor. But on a mantelpiece in this room rests an intriguing souvenir of Rushdie's past: a beautifully bound octagonal miniature, roughly the size of a silver dollar, of the Koran.

With reporting by Roland Flamini/London