London: Mumbai-born author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie on Monday said he felt lucky to have survived the brutal stabbing at a literary event in the US last year when he first spoke about it. It was “Giant Attack”. The 75-year-old British-American novelist was giving a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York on August 12 last year when a man stormed the stage and stabbed and punched him multiple times.
In his first interview since the attack, the author told The New Yorker magazine that his main emotion was to express his gratitude to those who showed their support and to his family, including sons Zafar and Milan.
I am able to get up and walk: Salman Rushdie after being stabbed
Rushdie told the magazine, “I’m lucky. What I really want to say is that my greatest emotion is gratitude.”
He said, “I am able to get up and walk. When I say I am fine, I mean parts of my body need constant checks. It was a massive attack.”
Three quarters of my life has passed since fatwa on ‘The Satanic Verses’: Salman Rushdie
Asked if it was a mistake to lower its guard in New York years after Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill the author over the allegedly ‘blasphemous’ novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ , he replied: “Well, I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer. I’ve had more than 20 years of life. So, is this a mistake?”
“Besides that, I wrote a lot of books. ‘The Satanic Verses’ was my fifth published book, my fourth published novel and it [‘Victory City’] I am twenty one. So, three-quarters of my life as a writer has happened since the fatwa. In a way, you can’t regret your life.”
in the photo @new yorker Dramatic and powerful but this, more professionally, is what I really look like. pic.twitter.com/ydrV7WvWgE— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) February 6, 2023
The famed author told the magazine that he has been touched by the tributes that his near-death inspired and is determined to look forward to more.
“It’s great that everyone was so touched by it, you know. I never thought how people would react if I was murdered, or almost murdered,” he said.
“I’ve tried very hard over the years to avoid recrimination and bitterness. I think that’s not a good look. One of the ways to deal with this whole thing is to look forward and not back.” And. What happens tomorrow is more. Important than what happened yesterday,” he said.
He said of his wife, poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “She kind of took over when I was helpless.”
His latest novel, ‘Victory City’, completed before the attack, traces a visit decades earlier to Hampi, the site in Karnataka of the ruins of the medieval Vijayanagara Empire.
“The first kings of Vijayanagara declared, quite solemnly, that they had descended from the moon… It is like saying, “I come from the same family as Achilles.’ Or your first play. And so, I thought, well, if you can say that, I can say anything,” the author said.
Rushdie’s attacker, Hadi Matar, is being held at the Chautauqua County Jail in the village of Mayville, charged with attempted murder in the second degree and facing a lengthy prison sentence.