Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

An intimacy of strangers. That’s a phrase I’ve sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.

On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.”

I’ll just say: we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.

What right did anyone have to claim true happiness in our almost terminally unhappy world? And yet the heart knew what it knew, and insisted.

Afterward, when it was removed and I could say things, I said it was like having an armadillo’s tail pushed down your throat. And when it was removed it was like having an armadillo’s tail pulled out of your throat. I had survived Covid without needing a ventilator. But here it was. And although my head was very fuzzy I remembered the early days of the pandemic, when very few people came off a ventilator and lived.

When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness.

But, as Saleem Sinai’s parents repeatedly told him during his childhood in Midnight’s Children (and as mine told me), “What can’t be cured must be endured.”

One has to find life, I said. One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.

There have been many times since the attack when I have thought that Death was hovering over the wrong people. Wasn’t I the one earmarked for collection by the Reaper, the one about whom everyone agreed that the odds were strongly against my surviving?

I remembered, but refrained from reciting, lines from “Invictus” by W. E. Henley. “Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.”