Story of His Life

Later, at the reading, another question arises: Can we not find contemporary resonance in the nightmare of Kashmir?

Of course, Rushdie says. He hears the echoes himself. But his job is to write the story he's writing, not to put up neon signs telling his readers what connections to make.

Still . . .

"We know about armies of occupation. We know about insurgencies," he says.

Everything You Wanted

Lunch threatens to be over far too soon. Rushdie is too good a talker, and too many questions remain unasked. Still, he covers a lot of ground.

Was he being ironic, you inquire, when he had an Indian character praise Max Ophuls as "the Rudyard Kipling of ambassadors"?

Not at all. The author of "Kim" may have been racist at times, and he certainly suffered from the "ill-judged internalization of imperialist ideas." But when Kipling spins his tales of rural India, says Rushdie -- who particularly loved "The Jungle Book" as a child -- "he gets it right in a way that I think no other English writer really did."

What about the omnipresent J.K. Rowling? Has Rushdie dipped into her version of magical storytelling?

Well, he's listened to "Harry Potter" audiotapes with his 8-year-old and worries what Rowling can possibly do for an encore. It wouldn't do to have a flop, after all.

He gets an idea.

"You know how, in Donald Duck cartoons, the character Scrooge McDuck used to have this room full of gold coins and a diving board and he'd go dive off of it and swim in his money?" A big laugh. "That's what she might have to do."

More seriously:

What about the scene in "Shalimar" in which the title character, as a newly minted international terrorist, is turned loose on "a writer against God, who spoke French and had sold his soul to the West"? Was that some kind of personal nightmare leftover from the fatwa days?

No, he says. He was thinking of the Algerian writer Tahar Djaout -- he spells the name out carefully -- who really was killed by Islamic militants, in 1993. "It was a nod of respect in his direction."

One more thing:

How did he dream up the wonderful bedtime fable that Ophuls tells his daughter, the one about the ambitious man in the palace of power? Abbreviated some, it goes like this:

To reach the room where the man of power sits, you must first get past the jackal-headed man, the man with the head of the rabid dog and a whole labyrinth of other monstrous threats. If you penetrate these defenses, the man of power must give you your heart's desire -- "that's the rule" -- but other monsters will rip and claw at your treasure as you try to leave. Finally outside again, "clutching your poor, torn remnant, you must persuade the skeptical crowd -- the envious, impotent crowd! -- that you have returned with everything you wanted. If you don't, you'll be marked as a failure forever."

Are we talking Washington, or what? Does Rushdie know that he might as well be describing the career of Bill Clinton?

He does. "Lobbying about the fatwa," he says -- straight-faced, not laughing now -- "I got into a lot of similar corridors."

Call it reportage, call it experience -- call it whatever you want. Salman Rushdie's instinct was to turn it into a story.