Salman Rushdie’s quintet of stories — drawing on memories of Mumbai, ghostly writers, fraught friendships and gifted musicians — are preoccupied with physical decline, death and the question of legacy
There’s a segue casually snuck into the middle section of Salman Rushdie’s short story ‘In the South’, part of his new collection The Eleventh Hour (Penguin Random House India), wherein a minor character called D’Mello, a Mumbai romantic, recalls the tragic tale of the city’s most famous poet. Rushdie is far too magnanimous to name him, but the details make it quite clear that he’s talking about Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), arguably the greatest English-language poet India has ever seen. Sadly, during the last phase of his life, Ezekiel suffered through the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, including dementia.
“D’Mello’s most heartbreaking Mumbai story was his tale of the great poet of the city, who had surrendered to Alzheimer’s disease. The poet still walked to his small magazine-infested office every day, without knowing why he went there. His feet knew the way and so he went and sat looking into space until it was time to go home again and his feet walked him back to his shabby residence through the evening crowds massing outside Churchgate station, the jasmine-sellers, the hustling urchins, the roar of the B.E.S.T. buses, the girls on their Vespas, the sniffing, hungry dogs,” writes Rushdie.
Rushdie at his inimitable best
As the book’s title suggests, physical decline and death are never far from the action in The Eleventh Hour. ‘In the South’ is the first among five stories in this collection. It follows a pair of cantankerous old men nicknamed Junior and Senior, near the end of their respective lives. They spend their time squabbling with each other and remembering their halcyon days, until one day Junior suffers a sudden fall (caused by girls on a Vespa, foreshadowed in the passage cited above) and passes away, forcing Senior to reassess the legacy of his ‘frenemy’, and the highly unusual, bittersweet dynamic they shared.
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‘Late’ is an extended afterlife fantasy where the ghost of a deceased British writer (whose career has some overlap with E.M. Forster, the author of A Passage to India) haunts a young student named Rosa. ‘Oklahoma’ is equal parts literary whodunit and metaphysical thriller, where the main characters are a pair of writers, the younger one being unhealthily obsessed with the older one. Together the two writers discuss the deathbed of painter Francisco Goya, the final will and testament of Franz Kafka — and several other real-world examples of ‘late style’.
‘The Old Man in the Piazza’ is a short, slight allegory about free speech and modern-day democracy. ‘The Musician of Kahani’, significantly, is a kind of compendium of Rushdie’s greatest hits, the story of a preternaturally gifted musician named Chandni Contractor whose music has the ability to both bless and curse people. Together, this quintet of stories represents Rushdie at his inimitable best — this is one of our greatest writers recapturing his peak form, and creating what often feels like a well-planned farewell.
The question of legacy
In very different ways, both ‘In the South’ and ‘Late’ are preoccupied with the question of a man’s legacy at or near the end of his life. ‘Late’, of course, satirizes the premise itself by having the ghost of a dead writer negotiate their own legacy — and their complicity in colonial crimes. However out of the two it is ‘In the South’ that will stay with the reader long after they’ve turned the final page.
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For understandable reasons, Rushdie’s linguistic wizardry and rapid-fire cultural commentary are often the first things that readers notice about his books. But what is often overlooked is the sheer dexterity of his psychological profiles. The characterisation of Junior and Senior in ‘In the South’ is the perfect example of this skill. Every morning, we are told, Junior would tell Senior that he looks like a man waiting to die, prompting the rejoinder that that was preferable to looking like a man still waiting to live. This isn’t even ‘gallows humour’, it is two people who after years of camaraderie no longer feel the need for ‘filters’ of any kind whatsoever.
From the last days of Nissim Ezekiel to the wonder-tale of Mumbai, the collection — Salman Rushdie’s best outing in a decade or so — comes together as a rich reflection on decline, companionship and what remains after we go.
Another bravura moment happens when Senior realises why nobody at the post office ever gets into a fight with him, no matter how rude he is or how much of a tantrum he throws at bureaucratic procedures. It’s because everybody looks at Senior and thinks, ‘why quarrel with a dead man walking?’ When Senior hits upon the truth of the matter, Rushdie delivers a brutal one-two punch to drive home the point: “He understood the nature of the contempt in the eyes of the post office employee. It was the scorn of life for death.”
In The Eleventh Hour, whether you are an ordinary government clerk, a world-famous musician, a pioneering novelist, or a madman clinging onto sanity, the question of legacy is always at the forefront of your mind. Junior’s death makes Senior reconsider how he wants to be remembered by not just his own extended family, but also the world at large.
One last wonder tale
The two longest stories in this collection, almost novella-length, really, are also its finest: ‘The Musician of Kahani’ and ‘Oklahoma’. The former’s titular character, Chandni Contractor, is another midnight’s baby, like Saleem Sinai from Midnight’s Children. And, like Ormus Cama from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the prodigious Chandni too makes music with her hands as a child, a habit that persists well into adulthood, convincing her parents that their child possesses a supernatural power. Chandni’s rise to fame as a world-class musician, and her subsequent disastrous marriage to a rich spoilt brat named Majnoo Firdaus, make up one half of the narrative. The other half is the story of how Chandni’s father, the numerically sound but socially awkward Raheem Contractor, falls into the clutches of a predatory godman named Gurushankar or ‘GS’.
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‘Kahani’ is the name Rushdie uses for the city of Mumbai (‘The city itself is a kind of wonder tale’, Rushdie muses at one point) in this story, and it’s quite clear that this story is at least partially an excuse for the author to revisit some of the parts of town he grew up in (Rushdie even admits as much in the story’s first metafictional segment, where we hear directly from the author). This becomes clearer yet in the story’s third act, when in an audacious gambit, Rushdie acknowledges the fictional status of the Contractors — and their place amidst his own pantheon of oddball, precocious characters, including good ol’ Saleem Sinai.
“There are children playing around me and I know they aren’t really here, they are the ghost-children of my childhood, Beverly the Australian girl on her bicycle, Michael and David the blond English boys, (…) And Saleem, don’t forget him, Saleem Big-Nose, he isn’t real but he’s here too. They chase one another around and kick balls and laugh and shout. Here I am visiting my yesterdays one last time and they are visiting me. I will not come this way again. And at the end of the lane, while the children play, I look up at the end of my story.”
The bit about “visiting my yesterdays” and “the end of my story” hints at the larger picture Rushdie is painting here, and this sentiment manifests in a very different way in ‘Oklahoma’, which is a kind of guided tour through Rushdie’s long list of literary and aesthetic influences. It is also a cautionary tale about art and madness, those conjoined twins separated at birth. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator fixated on his “Uncle K” (the first of the story’s many Kafka nods), an older, well-regarded writer whose footsteps our young hero wishes to follow.
Can literary ‘influence’ warp our sense of reality? Can writers ever truly capture ‘real life’ or do they corrupt the very ‘realness’ they try to depict by making it an art-object? These are complex questions that Rushdie handles with his customary adroitness and wordsmith’s swagger in ‘Oklahoma’. Longtime Rushdie fans will cherish The Eleventh Hour as the veteran writer’s best outing in a decade or so — for Rushdie newbies, this book can also function as a great entry point for the man’s preoccupations.
