In the middle of researching a forthcoming book on Khorshed and Kekoo Gandhy and the gallery that birthed the Progressive Artists Group in my city, I discovered that Salman Rushdie had given Kekoo a cameo role in The Moor’s Last Sigh. He comes on briefly as Kekoo Mody. I wrote to Rushdie, asking whether this was indeed the case.
I didn’t really expect a reply from the Great Man but almost immediately, this:
Hi Jerry
Yes I did meet Kekoo G and knew him just a little and stole his first name for my book… new book due in September hope you like it!
Best
S
Mumbai is not an easy city to claim because our claim is always made on knowledge, on how much we know of it. Mumbai then resists definition because it is constantly redefining itself. You see this in the way it snakes out into new suburbs, you see this in its conservative electoral choices and its bids for modern cosmopolitanism, you see it in the way it has simply abandoned the premises of Bollywood for the demands of OTT platforms.
And yet Salman Rushdie remains the quintessential novelist of this city. At some level, he can claim the city as much as it has a claim on him. It was his childhood home, it was where he grew up and where he went to school. The poet Adil Jussawalla gleefully-ruefully describes a patterning. Jussawalla was born in 1940, seven years before Rushdie. They were delivered by the same doctor, went to the same school and finally Rushdie wrote what Jussawalla describes as ‘my novel, Midnight’s Children.’ I laughed when I read that as Jussawalla expected his reader would but I knew what he meant. Midnight’s Children was everyone’s novel, not just in its magnificent execution, not just in the way it ambushed the novel in English and left it bleeding, not just in the way it won the Booker and then the Booker of Bookers but because it was big, it was capacious, it turned tangentiality into the magic of a Bhuleshwar by-lane where the eyes of the Goddess are available in different sizes.
In that Midnight’s Children was like the city of Mumbai. Nissim Ezekiel once described this as ‘unsuitable for song’ and so it might be but what a city for a novel, what an amazing city for any number of novels. To provide fodder for novels, one does not need history, one does not need sandstone buildings, one does not need FSI or even a 1BHK, though all these help. One needs attentiveness.
If every citizen sometimes feels that the city is rushing past, it might be of some reassurance to know that if one shifts perspective a little, one is rushing past someone else who is watching bemused. The author finds a way to run and to stay at the same time; it is the trick Lewis Carroll describes beautifully in the phrase the Red Queen throws at Alice: “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
Thus the cinematic strategies of the novels, the intercuts, the self-confident breaks with the narrative, the heightened awareness of time and space, the ways in which good and evil coexist and struggle with each other. And at another level, the childish interest in the names of people, (Virgil Beauvoir, Chanakya Jones, Moraes Zogoiby, Chunni, Munni and Bunny Shakil). If you do not remember, how you ate names as you heard them, watched them form pictures in your head, made you giggle if they had other meanings in your home language, it may be why you’re no longer a genius (passing reference to Picasso). We did not know as each of those names fed some internal ear how much the strangeness of them was building the nation-state of India, precisely with the differences we heard. We did not know this but we should now at a time when that dream of a wide-open world, the world of a Rushdie novel, the world of a city remembered not for the bullies who filled his inkpot with sulphuric acid so as to dissolve his Mont Blanc pen but for its celebration of diversity, needs urgent resuscitation. As Rushdie struggles for his life in a city which has so much similarity to the city of his birth, as the novel struggles for existence its death having been hymned time and again by myopic white academics who believe that once their supply of stories ran out the world was done, as we confront the brave new world of our own making that has such people in’t, we might all want to go back to the irresistible buoyant, rhythms of Rushdie’s prose. And to remember that his was a claim of love and one that defies all logic, all constraints of space and time and togetherness.