Time Out at 40

Salman Rushdie | Amitabh Bachchan | MF Husain | Zubin Mehta

Salman Rushdie
Ever since the success of 'Midnight’s Children' in 1981, Salman Rushdie has been Mumbai’s town crier, sharing the city’s stories with the world in the pun-filled swirl of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English that he’s labelled HUG-ME. He’s won so many prizes (a knighthood in 2007, the Booker of Bookers earlier this year), his showcase is more packed than a Mumbai train at rush hour. Even though he moved away more than four decades ago, Rushdie is among Mumbai’s most revered sons.

When you moved away to go to school, what was it about Mumbai that you missed the most?
I was only thirteen and a half years old, after all, so I missed the obvious things: my family, my friends, my home. I’ve always thought that if my father hadn’t sold our house, Windsor Villa on Warden Road in Breach Candy, while I was being educated in England, I would quite simply have returned there after college and lived there for the rest of my life. In fact I’d be there right now. Feature continues

What makes Mumbai different from London and New York, those other great cities that you’ve also called home?
The place where you were a child always has a unique feeling. But I also like Mumbai because it is the place where all Indias collide, where Indians from every corner of the country come to make new lives. Great cities do have many similarities (and Mumbai and New York even share Catherine of Braganza, in whose dowry the islands came to Britain, and who is also the queen after whom Queens is named), but there are differences, too. The Mumbai of my childhood was celebrated for its tolerant spirit. It may have lost some of that spirit by now.

How did you cope with the Mumbai traffic on your last visit?
Very badly. But at least I wasn’t driving the car.

Do you have a favourite Mumbai snack?
Bhel-puri [puffed rice with spices and vegetables]. Obviously.

If you had to nominate a Mumbai hero, past or present, who would that be?
I would probably nominate the great writer Sadat Hasan Manto, even though he eventually left Mumbai for Pakistan. His stories of the city’s lowlife are very high on my list of classic Indian literature, and his famous Partition story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’ about the 1947 partition of a lunatic asylum on the Indo-Pakistani border, is, in my view, still the best literary response to that dreadful time.
Interview Naresh Fernandes

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Salman Rushdie | Amitabh Bachchan | MF Husain | Zubin Mehta