Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Rushdie returned to New York City for a stay in the Rusk rehabilitation center. Being back in the city was bittersweet: Although he was thrilled to be surrounded by the sights and sounds of the city he loved, he felt imprisoned in the rehab center, unable to interact with the city in any way. He was happy, however, when his son Milan arrived. It was an emotional reunion and significantly bolstered Rushdie’s spirits. He needed this new optimism to deal with some of the early complications of his stay in rehab—for instance, the medication that made it difficult for him to urinate, necessitating intermittent catheterization. In addition, Milan’s arrival meant that Eliza, exhausted from dealing with her own worries as well as constant paparazzi harassment, could take more frequent breaks; she and Milan arranged their time so that one of them was always with Rushdie from the time his rigorous daily therapy ended until it was time for him to go to sleep.

Rushdie had difficulty sleeping, however. He was plagued by nightmares. His hospital bed had an alarm that alerted staff if he tried to get out of bed without assistance, making him feel even more like a prisoner. The bed was uncomfortable, and hospital staff members were constantly coming and going, subjecting him to various painful wound-care procedures. The police security detail outside his room sometimes talked and laughed loudly, even at night. He felt as if the attacker’s knife had cut him away from the beloved city just outside his window and trapped him in the narrow, unpleasant confines of his hospital bed. He thought about knives as a technology, neutral in and of themselves but capable of good or bad depending on the person wielding them. It occurred to him that language can be like a knife too: “It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could […] open people’s eyes, create beauty” (85). Language, he concluded, was his knife. He could use it to take control of his own narrative and what was happening to him. During a visit from his agent, Andrew Wylie, Wylie advised him to get some distance from the attack before writing about it publicly. Rushdie told Wylie that he was not sure he would want to write for the public about the attack; Wylie assured him that eventually he would.

When Rushdie looked in the mirror during this time, he felt alienated from himself. He looked far different physically, of course, but beyond this, he wondered about the person he might have become as a result of the attack and whether he would ever feel like himself again. He thought about all the changes he had already undergone through the different phases of his life. He recalled his difficult childhood: His volatile father, who abused alcohol and abused his mother, was enraged by the thinly veiled portrait of himself in one of Rushdie’s early novels. Rushdie notes that after this book’s release, he left home and became estranged from his father, bringing this chapter of his life to a close. He recalled his subsequent life in London as a kind of psychological rehabilitation. His slow transformation during these years brought about Midnight’s Children, a novel that helped him “reclaim” himself (90). Khomeini’s death edict for Rushdie brought this chapter to a close; he felt attacked from all sides by public criticism of his book The Satanic Verses and his decision to go into hiding, and he once again felt uncertain of his own identity. Becoming a public advocate of free speech helped him find himself again. His later move to New York began a new kind of rehabilitation. In an attempt to show that there was nothing to fear, he deliberately became a highly visible public figure. Rushdie claims that it had already become habitual for the media to negatively portray everything he did, so his attempt to be publicly visible led to his being branded shallow and frivolous.

In the wake of the 2022 attack, Rushdie asked himself critical questions about whether he had been behaving carelessly and not taking the threats against him seriously enough. Ultimately, he rejected the idea. The person he had become was shaped by all the choices he had made, and he felt that he did his best to live a good life. When Eliza asked to record footage of him talking about The Satanic Verses, he remembered a childhood in which people spoke freely; he explained that because of this, when he was writing the novel, it never occurred to him to be fearful of anything. He notes that he no longer wishes to talk about The Satanic Verses and would rather focus on Victory City, his newest novel. He mentions that in this novel, the heroine is blinded; this was not rewritten or added after the 2022 attack on him but rather reflected his lifelong terror at the idea of being blind.

On September 26, Rushdie was released from Rusk. Eliza arranged for security and for the two of them to temporarily move into a friend’s vacant Soho loft. Although Rushdie desperately wanted to be in his own home again, he agreed that it still might not be safe to return there.