Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

by Salman Rushdie

And it’s even stranger than that, because while the divine population is presumably reasonably stable—one assumes divine birth control to be better than the human variety—the human population has been growing at high speed; in fact it has more than doubled since I was at school in Bombay in the 1950s. So if we project that population curve backward, we see that it was probably only sometime in the 1930s that the human population of India grew larger than the divine population for the first time. What does it do to a writer’s sensibility and his artistic imagination to grow up in a world in which the supernatural and the quotidian rub up against each other in approximately equal numbers? What does it do to his understanding of the word “realism”? In my case, the answer is that it liberated me, showing me early on that kitchen-sink naturalism is only one way, and perhaps quite a limited way, of describing the world. This realization was a part of what I call “the given.” All writers start out with a “given,” some little or large nugget of good or bad feeling, funny-ha-ha or funny-peculiar stories, some little moral or sexual twistedness, some unexpected angle on the language, some unscratched itch that makes them want to write in the first place. Some writers are able to mine that seam for a lifetime. Others—most of us, I believe—eventually feel that we have exhausted what we started out with and have to find a second act.