This is plenty annoying – I finally find my copy of Rushdie’s ‘Shame’ (the book, that is, not emotion) and read through a couple of pages before I doze off; and the next morning I can’t find it. Why? Because my father suddenly decides to get curious about the book and takes it with him to office. And there it lies amidst thrilling oeuvres, such as Naval Architecture and Thermodynamics or Synthesis of Electrical Engineering and Quay Management.
Over dinner, father says things like, “What’s so great about Rushdie?”
Well…that’s like asking what’s wet about water. Rushdie and greatness go together. He has an expansiveness about life and literature that dwarf other writers who merely write. He creates a language that is not but also English. He can describe ‘khichri’ like it was the last gem of a relic palace. He can describe sapphire like a mouldy lump of stale khichri.
He makes composition feel fluid, he makes writing feel anchored. He singes and he coalesces. He is, in a fragmented, partisan, splintered clustered nebullae of wordsmiths, a sad, solid, superb Universe.
He has given me so much life and living, and now he’s somewhere in a pile of some silly shippy books.
No comments:
Post a Comment