Sir Salman Rushdie has laid naked his horror at mendacity in “a spectacular amount of blood” after the frenzied onstage assault that very practically claimed his life two years in the past.
The British-Indian writer, 76, writes that he was stabbed “13 or 14 instances” in August 2022 whereas making ready to ship a lecture on free speech on the Chautauqua Establishment in New York.
In a frank memoir, Sir Salman recollects “this murderous form speeding in the direction of me”, a “murderous ghost from the previous”, who would in the end hospitalise him for six weeks, completely injury his hand, and blind him in a single eye.
“I felt him hit me very exhausting on the best aspect of my jaw. He’s damaged it, I bear in mind pondering. All my tooth will fall out. At first I believed I’d simply been hit by somebody who actually packed a punch.”
Within the new novel, Sir Salman describes how “blood started to pour out of my neck. I turned conscious, as I fell, of liquid splashing onto my shirt.
“There was the deep knife wound in my left hand, which severed all of the tendons and a lot of the nerves. There have been at the least two extra deep stab wounds in my neck – one slash proper throughout it and extra on the best aspect – and one other farther up my face, additionally on the best.”
He continues: “I bear in mind mendacity on the ground watching the pool of my blood spreading outward from my physique. That’s quite a lot of blood, I believed. After which I believed: I’m dying.”
The writer additionally describes“the cruelest blow” – a knife within the eye.
“It was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way in which to the optic nerve, which meant there can be no chance of saving the imaginative and prescient. It was gone. He was simply stabbing wildly, stabbing and slashing, the knife flailing at me as if it had a lifetime of its personal, and I used to be falling backward, away from him, as he attacked; my left shoulder hit the bottom exhausting as I fell.”
A 24-year-old New Jersey resident, Hadi Matar, was charged with the assault, which got here three a long time after the infamous fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following the discharge of The Satanic Verses.
Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide tries to make sense of these astonishingly violent 27 seconds.
The assault broken Sir Salman’s liver and his fingers, and severed the optic nerve in his proper eye, which was left “sort of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek, like a soft-boiled egg. And blind.”
Whereas he considers himself fortunate to have averted mind injury, the scenario “upsets me daily”, he writes.
The writer displays on having to take larger care when strolling down stairs, crossing the highway, or performing a easy activity like pouring water right into a glass.
In a startling revelation, Sir Salman additionally confesses to having dreamt of an assault simply days earlier than his tried homicide, wherein he was thrashing round in a Roman colosseum, frantically avoiding a person wielding a spear. He describes his dream as being so vivid that his spouse, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, woke him and reassured him he was nonetheless secure in his mattress.
“There was an viewers roaring for blood. I used to be rolling about on the bottom making an attempt to allude a gladiator’s downward thrusts.
“I used to be fairly shaken by it – and I mentioned to Eliza, I don’t wish to go. And you then get up a bit extra, and also you suppose, it’s only a dream, and also you’re not going to permit your life to be dominated by one thing that occurred in a dream.
“And so I believed, ‘I’ll go. It’s a gig. Fifteen hundred folks had purchased tickets. I can’t simply not present up as a result of I had a foul dream,” he writes.
Matar has been held with out bail for the reason that assault, and mentioned to officers beforehand, “I don’t just like the individual. I don’t suppose he’s an excellent individual. He’s somebody who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the idea techniques.”
Matar’s trial, which was supposed to start in January, has been placed on maintain after his attorneys argued they wanted to assessment the memoir because it could possibly be proof.
In Knife, Sir Salman addresses Matar, saying: “Our lives touched one another for an immediate after which separated. Mine has improved since that day, however yours has deteriorated. You made a foul gamble. I used to be the one with the luck.”
The writer calls his memoir “at the least as a lot a love story” as it’s the story of a horrifying assault.
“There have been two forces in collision right here. One was a power of violence, fanaticism, bigotry, and the opposite was the power of affection,” he mentioned.
“And naturally, the power of affection is embodied within the determine of my spouse Eliza.
“And in the long run, the way in which I perceive what occurred is that the power of affection proved to be stronger than the forces of hatred.”
