Three Writers, Three Wounds, and the Memoirs That Came After

It's the age of the memoir. And three recent memoirs by three iconic South Asian writers disturbingly demonstrate what violence can do to the body and spirit.

Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder recounts the diabolic assault made on his life on August 12, 2022 in upstate New York. He was at the Chautauqua Institution to speak, ironically, on safe spaces for writers who were at risk in their countries. That’s when 24-year-old Hadi Matar, born to Lebanese immigrant parents, leapt out of the audience seated in the amphitheater and assaulted Rushdie. He stabbed his left hand, which Rushdie had involuntarily raised in self-defense, and then rained blows on his neck, chest and eye, till, finally, Rushdie’s legs gave way, and he fell to the ground.

Reflecting on the attack, Rushdie writes: “Am I so feeble that I couldn’t make the slightest attempt to defend myself? Was I so fatalistic that I was prepared simply to surrender to my murderer?”

Watching the pool of blood spreading outward from his body, Rushdie thinks he is about to die. But existentialist that he is, he’s quick to add, “There was nothing supernatural about it. No ‘tunnel of light.’ No feeling of rising out of my body. In fact, I have rarely felt so strongly connected to my body.”

Rushdie was rushed to hospital in a helicopter and the doctors saved his life.

Why did Hadi Matar attack Rushdie? The answer obviously is, revenge for writing The Satanic Verses, against which Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran had issued a fatwa that said that Rushdie must be killed for blaspheming Islam.

But revenge wasn’t just Matar’s prerogative. Rushdie was happy that his attacker was put in jail. Together with his wife Eliza he visited the Chautauqua County Jail where Hadi Matar was lodged, and even had an imaginary conversation with him.

Commenting on violence, Rushdie writes: “Violence smashes that picture…Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible. Fear, panic, paralysis take over rational thought. They—we—become destabilised, even deranged. Our minds no longer know how to work.”

Shattered by Hanif Kureishi is a series of hospital dispatches dictated by the author to his partner Isabella and sons Kier and Sachin between January and December 2023. Kureishi and Isabella were in the latter’s home in Rome, when on Boxing Day, 2022, he had a paralytic fall. He tells us how it all started: “I was sipping a beer when I began to feel dizzy. I leant forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position…there was no coordination between my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying, that I had three breaths left…”

Soon Kureishi is hospitalised, but he doesn’t realise that he would be spending all of 2023 in hospitals in Italy and London.

Writers often fear losing their voice on account of censorship or self-censorship. In Kureishi’s case it was paralysis of the body that made it impossible for him to type or hold a pen. Desperate to record what was happening to him, he began dictating the words that formed in his head to family members. And that’s how Shattered came about. The book is a skillful juxtaposition of the author’s life before and after his fall.

Kureishi describes himself as a “vegetable.” He is constantly in need of help to perform even the most basic everyday functions like eating, bathing and going to the toilet. But his writing has always been no-holds-barred, and Shattered is no exception. Even as he is dictating his book to family, he uses words like cunnilingus, penis, urine, shit, arse, etc., without hesitation. Take this passage, for example: “The doctor ordered an abdominal X-ray, which demonstrated that I’m full of shit and heavily constipated. A clinical nurse stuck his finger up my arse to try to dislodge some of it, which gave me a tremendous pain, lasting all night and preventing me from sleeping. People pay good money to be fingered.”

Looking back at his year in hospitals on the day of his final discharge, Kureishi writes: “My world has taken a zig where previously it zagged; it has been smashed, remade and altered, and there is nothing I can do about it. But I will not go under; I will make something of this.”

If Rushdie’s and Kureishi’s memoirs deal with physical violence perpetrated on the body, Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me speaks of mental violence inflicted on the spirit. It is her mother’s death in 2022 that triggers the book. In spite of portraying her mother as a termagant with an unpredictable temper, Arundhati says she “was in ruins” as her mother’s body lay in her glass-topped coffin. At the same time, she is puzzled and ashamed by the intensity of her response.

Arundhati’s mother, referred to as Mrs Roy throughout the book, was a teacher who famously won a Supreme Court case that granted inheritance rights to Christian women in Kerala.

While Mrs Roy’s wrath was against motherhood itself, there are two incidents in the book that damage the little Arundhati’s psyche beyond repair.

In the first, on a plane back from Madras, Mrs Roy snubs her daughter for asking an innocent question: “I asked my mother how, if Mrs Joseph was her real sister, was Mrs Joseph so thin? My mother turned on me in a rage and mimicked me. I felt myself shrinking from my own skin and draining away, swirling like water down a sink until I was gone…I knew I had said something terrible, but I wasn’t sure what.”

The second incident tells of the time when a telephone was installed in their home. In Arundhati’s words, “Mrs Roy dialled a number … [and] was talking to someone [on the phone]. Fascinated by our new acquisition, I pressed down on the twin chrome plunger buttons, and the call was disconnected. Her eyes turned cold. ‘You bitch,’ she said. In front of everybody. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad, the way she said it. Once again, I swirled like water down a sink and disappeared. I have tried hard to forget this moment—but clearly, I haven’t succeeded.”

Arundhati left her mother’s home the day she turned sixteen. She writes, “I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible.”

Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy are better known as novelists. Yet, there is an immediacy and brutal frankness to their memoirs that talk of real-life experiences which have the power to grip readers in a way that fiction, relying as it does on the imagination, cannot. In writing about the violence inflicted on them, whether of body or spirit, Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy win a special place in the hearts and minds of admirers who have every one of their books on their bookshelves.

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