Stories have their own journey. They embody freedom. They embody the vision of us that perhaps we fail to visualise. Stories are a part of us, they are our history, culture, language, our beliefs, practices and rituals, our community, our individual and collective self. They are our past, our present. With all its incidents and history, with the many narratives of history, perspectives of ideas, and reasons for actions. Or, inactions, at times. Stories are also our future. They hold within themselves the possibilities of the impossible. They are our dreams and aspirations, ideas and visions. They help to spin that magical space where we would experience ‘our owns elves’, just the way we want it!
And writers are those magicians who make it all possible. They hold within themselves to spin that yarn which can have the capacity to enamour us, completely. As readers, what we can offer to create is a space to wield that magic. Spin that yarn. Build those castles in the air. To question or take away the freedom of the writers is akin to controlling our very thought, imagination and consciousness. The battle of ‘Baat mat Karo’ was waged against ‘Khattam Shud’ to stop the ‘Sea of Stories’ from drying up. It is perhaps a task to be taken up by all ‘Harouns’ to steal the giant ‘plug’ that was meant to seal the source of stories! Keeping the magic of stories alive, and thereby the magic of life itself!
Room 101, at the basement of the ‘Ministry of Love’ in George Orwell’s 1984. Was a place where one encountered one’s deepest fear, the worst thing imaginable in the world. The face of this fear was not alike. For Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, it was ‘rats’. For Rushdie, it was inability to see. A ‘knife’ did just that.
Knife: Meditations after an attempted murder, is a book on meditations. Meditative thoughts on many aspects and imaginations that have intrigued the author and have evoked emotions, fathomable and unfathomable. It is a book on the many everyday things of life which one moves through. Some of which are taken for granted like the capacity of the field of vision, literally. Most importantly, it is a book on love and courage, where one cannot survive without the other. It is also a book of indomitable conviction on the power of writing and storytelling!
In that one short affair called life where the past cannot be retrieved, no matter what, one gets a glimpse into the person who is Salman Rushdie. He stands out from the multiplicity of identities that he has. He stands out as the author.
This is not just a recollection of events, a memoir. It is but a putting forward of oneself. Authentic. Stark. Genuine. With promises and fears. With hopes and desperations. With the ups and downs. With optimism and vulnerability. With anger and bewilderment. It is an honest work of examining oneself through all these various emotional facets that form our being, that is our desire to be.
Freedom is the capacity to change. It entails the intentionality of desire to be. The desire of disclosure of being. As we as readers sought after that magical ‘Land of Stories’, what right do we have to curtail and question the very hand that writes them? Freedom of expression is perhaps a fundamental right in the world of creativity. To hold back the truth of creation is an complete contradiction to the very ethos of ‘creativity’-which embodies freedom.
Knife- meditations after an attempted Murder, is also perhaps a book about freedom. A book celebration freedom.
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