Author Salman Rushdie drew a huge audience for the reading of his new novel, Shalimar The Clown, in London last month. It was his first appearance on the South Bank stage in years, and four police officers on standby were the only reminder of the fatwa issued on the author sixteen years ago - following the publication of his book, The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie is the author of nine novels; a short story collection; one children's book; and three works of non-fiction. His latest, Shalimar The Clown, is short-listed for the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Set largely in Kashmir, the book parades a quartet of characters whose lives intersect.

"I'm just going to read you two little bits," said Rushdie, setting the scene for the first passage. In the book, Shalimar from a village of travelling actors falls in love with a girl, Boonyi, who runs off with the American Ambassador, Max. Things end in tears and she returns to beg for forgiveness. "Those people think that when something happens to a woman like what happened to me, that woman should go quietly to the trees and hang herself," goes a line in the novel. As Rushdie indicated, one of the things the book investigates is "the lack of connection between forgiveness and repentance," since Shalimar is unable to forgive.

In a discussion later, journalist Maya Jaggi asked Rushdie about his Kashmiri grandparents - to whom the book is dedicated - and about Kashmir, a place the author visited in childhood. He revealed that his grandparents were like Doctor Aziz and his wife in Midnight’s Children - Rushdie's greatest novel. In fact, the fictional characters were based on the real grandparents, only, they did not meet through the holes in perforated sheets as in the book. "I made that bit up!" he confessed.

The grandmother "was ferocious" and is the reason for the "ferocious women in my books." The grandfather was a gentle, devout Moslem who shared many qualities with Kashmir, "the enchanted place of my childhood" - said Rushdie. He insisted that his portrayal of Kashmir in Shalimar The Clown is not an idealised one, but one based on fact. "When you love a place like that, you don't want to see it blown up," observed Rushdie who reasoned that Kashmir had been waiting for him to fictionalise, for a long time.

Two traditions of the region are vividly brought to life in the book - folk theatre and food banquets. "I was in Kashmir in 1987 and saw a real village of actors," recalled Rushdie, who added that the average food banquet in Kashmir has "36 courses minimum." Kashmiris are also very fond of meat: "Too bad if you are vegetarian; not even the Hindus in Kashmir are vegetarians." In the novel, there is a war between the village of actors and the village of cooks - for comic reasons. All these are in the book "for you to be fond of," Rushdie explained, "to draw the reader into the place. If you don't care about a place, then you don't care if it's blown up."

However, Rushdie conceded that, "An earthly paradise is still an earthly paradise; it still has lots of things wrong with it." The Kashmir of today is a far cry from the paradise depicted in Shalimar The Clown. The author gave the audience a brief history, mentioning how Kashmir, then a princely state, was invited to choose between India and Pakistan during the Partition that came with India's independence. The ruling Maharajah dithered, then fled when a Pakistani incursion sought to "decide" for him; India later beat back the incursion. The result is a de-facto partitioned state, with the northern one-third held by Pakistan, and India controlling the rest.

In the hostilities between Pakistan and India since, the wish of the Kashmiris often goes unheard, said Rushdie, who indicated that the region would like to be free of both contesting countries. "I have a great respect for the Indian army, as one of the few in the third world that has not staged a coup or sought political power, but it has behaved horribly in Kashmir," said Rushdie, who cited this as one reason for the rise in Islamic fundamentalism.

The perception is that his novels are an exaggeration of India, justifying the Magical Realism tag "thrown" at him. But Rushdie maintained that, "My books are understatements of India." The country, he suggested, "Is so much weirder than anything I could ever write in my books." He understates things, because "the bald, brutal description is just too much to take. When atrocity happens in India, it happens on a scale that the mind cannot even begin to comprehend." The author added that, from the Partition Massacres to the present time, "We have a real talent for appalling atrocity."

Shalimar goes from being a clown to a terrorist. Rushdie is "interested in characters that change a lot, who become new persons inside themselves." He met Bernardo Bertolucci just before the director made the film, The Last Emperor. Bertolucci described it as a film about a boy-emperor who becomes a gardener later in life - in the same palace where he was once a god. Yet, the gardener says he is happy; the trajectory from one extreme state of life to another fascinates Rushdie and is something he strives for in his own characters.

Another character in Shalimar The Clown, Olga, may resurface later. "I've discovered that my characters come back; I never thought it would happen… but they pop up," said the author. This is perhaps inevitable, "when you write a number of books in the same milieu." Rushdie joked, "If you need an art critic and you already have one (from a previous work), why create another one?" The case for Olga's return, has to do with the fact that, "When I finished (the book) I felt there was more story to her than I told."

Max the ambassador has an illegitimate daughter in the book, named India Ophuls. According to the writer, "She along with the reader - learn the story of her life. You could say the book is about her." This led Rushdie into musings about the world today, arguing for dirtiness, impurity and miscegenation. Citing phrases like 'ethnic cleansing' and 'The Final Solution', the author declared, "Cultures need to be dirty. The moment you have cleanliness, people die."

Rushdie had been optimistic "for a while" when the Iron Curtain came down, thinking it would mean a less polarised world. But he now realises that "we have erected new and stranger barriers." He said of himself, "I'm an immigrant. My life has been a journey from one place to another. I do not want to give up that culture in order to have this (Western) one." And then, in a voice tinged with sadness, "These are the principles by which I have lived my life - but now, everybody distrusts them."

In Rushdie's view, the quest for realism in the novel is also affected by the "fracture", and the "enormous discrepancy" between ideas in collision about the reality of the world. It was not so during the heyday of the novel in the 19 th century, when writers and their readers shared the same assumptions about the world. Now, "one man's reality is another person's lie," Rushdie noted. "How do you create books that allow those incompatibilities and disagreements to come in? It is difficult but also necessary."

The author shares the vision of international writers "who are aware of these fault-lines and don't pretend they are not there." But then, he also envies writers like R.K. Narayan and William Faulkner who have a rooted "sense of deep place and make a life's work out of it, and it's beautiful." Fortunately, "there are many ways to write a book."

With few exceptions like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Rushdie believes a novel should not tell the reader its meaning. "The phenomenon of falling in love with a book is to be changed by it," said the author, who insisted that one can truly love only five or six books in a lifetime. Essentially, "the novel should create a world for the reader to inhabit," opined Rushdie, who can tell how much he likes a book by the speed at which he reads it; the more he enjoys it, the slower he reads.

The author distinguished between cinema and theatre - played out in front of the viewer - and a book, to which a person brings what he or she has. The result is "an imaginative union that happens inside the reader's mind." In Rushdie view, there lies the greatness of the book. "No other medium does that but the book," he said, "it happens inside your head."

Shalimar The Clown is published by Random House.

December 18, 2005

Molara Wood is a Nigerian writer and essayist based in London.  She is the reviews editor for Sentinel Poetry, a quarterly literary magazine.  She also writes a weekly column on the arts for the Nigerian Guardian.

This article first appeared in The Guardian, Lagos, Nigeria, on December 4, 2005.