Story of His Life

His own border-crossing story began in India, where he was born in 1947 and spent his first 13 years. If his non-religious Muslim parents had stayed put, he says, "there's no question that I would be today living in my family house in Bombay." But after sending their son off to an English boarding school, they sold that house -- in a move that still angers and mystifies him -- and relocated to Pakistan.

Finishing up at Cambridge University in 1968, he faced a choice: Karachi or London? After a short, unhappy stay in his parents' new home, he flew west.

As it happens, English writers had shaped his sensibility even before he'd left India. At an evening reading sponsored by Politics and Prose at Temple Sinai on Military Road NW, Rushdie will startle an audience of close to 500 people by citing as his earliest literary influences none other than Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse.

Really? The creators of Miss Marple and Jeeves?

"They're fantastic storytellers," he explains, "whatever else they may or may not be." And "when I began to think seriously about writing, I thought it was very important to try and return narrative to the center of the literary novel." Because if you "put a big narrative engine in the middle of the book, people will swallow almost anything else. I mean, you can do all kinds of weird stuff around it and people will go along with it, because if you've got them by the throat and you're dragging them through the story, they want to find out what happened next."

By 1980, when he published "Midnight's Children," he'd gotten the technique down.

An almost impossibly rich mingling of the personal and political, the fabulous and the historic, "Midnight's Children" hinges on the liberation of Rushdie's homeland from British rule and its bloody division, in 1947, into the perpetually feuding nations of India and Pakistan. Showered with literary honors -- it won England's prestigious Booker Prize, and in 1993 it was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" as the best book to win the prize in its 25-year history -- the novel succeeded so well in hanging complex historical and cultural information on its "big narrative engine" that it shows up on the reading lists of history and sociology classes today.

"Shame" followed, and "The Satanic Verses." Then Rushdie became a target of state-sponsored terrorism, and the books he continued to write were overshadowed by Iran's promise to make a millionaire of anyone who'd take his life. This remained true long after the death threat was repudiated in an agreement between the British and Iranian governments in 1998.

"Shalimar the Clown" began with a single, grim image that came to him in 1999: a dead man on his daughter's doorstep, the killer standing over him with a knife. He started writing but "couldn't get it right," so he set the book aside and wrote another. Set in New York City, where Rushdie now makes his home, "Fury" had the bad luck to come out on Sept. 11, 2001.

"It became a historical novel on the day it was published," he says.

He went back to "Shalimar." He'd conceived it as a narrowly focused story built around the dead man, the daughter and the killer. But after 9/11, he says, he heard his characters speaking to him:

Don't confine us that way, they said. Tell our full stories.