Story of His Life

So he did.

He gave them a far bigger canvas, including on it -- among many other things -- the Nazi occupation of Alsace in World War II, the postwar projection of American power around the globe, the end of the Cold War, the rise of Islamic radicalism and, most centrally, the destruction of a peerlessly beautiful mountain land caught in a politico-religious crossfire.

"The world is now so interpenetrated," Rushdie says, that "to explain a murder in California you have to understand the history of Kashmir."

An Ominous Clang

Love, hate, shame, repentance, revenge: The tragedy of four linked lives is Rushdie's reader-grabbing engine.

The murdered man is Max Ophuls, a former American ambassador to India: irresistibly charming, cheerfully amoral. His killer is Shalimar the clown, a Kashmiri acrobat turned terrorist, his name taken from his assigned role in a traditional theatrical production. The other principals are Max's beautiful Kashmiri lover -- who longs to escape the narrow bounds of village life -- and the daughter they scandalously produce.

The personal narrative has its climax in Los Angeles. The broader, public tragedy of Kashmir, which lies behind it, is remote from the experience of Rushdie's Western readers. But it is central to his own.

Kashmir was the enchanted place of childhood for Rushdie. Not only was it a physical paradise, mountain-ringed and cool, but it was a repository of the kind of human beauty exemplified by his Kashmiri grandfather.

A devout Muslim, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca and said his prayers five times a day every day of his life. "Not praying again, Granddad!" his grandchildren would tease. But he was also, Rushdie says, "the most tolerant, open-minded, intellectually generous, nonjudgmental adult that I ever met as a child.

"You would say to him, 'Grandfather, I don't believe in God,' and he would say, 'Well, sit down here and tell me how you came to that nonsensical conclusion.' " A serious conversation would ensue, at the end of which "nobody was cross with anybody."

Small wonder that as Rushdie wrote about Kashmir, "the spirit of my grandfather came to infuse the spirit of the place."

He has, perhaps, exaggerated that spirit's universality. The real Kashmir of his childhood was already feeling the tensions produced by the India-Pakistan split. Yet to Rushdie it remained a place where, for the most part, tolerance reigned between the Hindu minority and Muslim majority; where Muslim women never wore the veil; where the people were so pacific that Indians told racist jokes about their cowardice. He offers an example: "If you put a gun in a Kashmiri's hand, it has to go off by itself, because he'll be too scared to pull the trigger."

So how did this tiny, tolerant corner of northwest India, with its 5 million inhabitants, become what Rushdie describes as a paradise not simply lost but destroyed? How did Kashmir end up with two jittery nuclear powers facing off across a "Line of Control," with 900,000 Indian troops on one side and 700,000 Pakistani troops on the other? How did its homegrown liberation movement get hijacked by radical jihadists who terrorize the population, murder moderate Muslim leaders and force burqas on village women? How did hundreds of thousands of Hindus come to be driven from their homes?