Sir Salman Rushdie

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:47

My castaway this week is the author Sir Salman Rushdie. His literary talent and his tenacity have earned him global success. He has published more than 20 books and his many awards include A Knighthood for Services to Literature and the Booker Prize, which he won for his 1981 novel Midnight's Children. It also topped the polls for the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the prize, making it the most lauded novel in Booker history.

Presenter1:13

Like the book's hero, he was born in Bombay in nineteen forty seven. His stories are in the fabulous tradition of the Arabian Nights' tales his father told him while he was growing up.

Presenter1:23

It was in 1989, following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, that his life took on the epic proportions of one of his stories. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a fatwa, an order to kill its author and anyone involved in its publication. Riots and a series of horrifying attacks followed. The book's Japanese translator was murdered and Sir Salman was forced into hiding for many years. Still, he kept writing and defending his and other authors' freedom to publish. He moved to America and got on with his life. Then in 2022 he was attacked on stage in New York. He was stabbed multiple times but defied the odds to survive. Again he returned to his desk, writing about the attack and his recovery in the best selling memoir Knife. He says Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence, and in the end it outlasts those who oppress it.

Presenter2:29

Sir Salman Rushdie, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Sir Salman Rushdie2:32

Thank you. Thank you. Very nice to be here.

Presenter2:34

Selma, despite everything that you've been through, you say that you've kept hold of your optimism. How?

Sir Salman Rushdie2:41

I'm not sure exactly. I I think it's somehow

Sir Salman Rushdie2:44

Ingrained.

Sir Salman Rushdie2:46

There'll be quite a lot of efforts to beat it out of me.

Presenter2:48

And it just hasn't

Sir Salman Rushdie2:49

And what

Presenter2:49

Yeah.

Sir Salman Rushdie2:49

Yeah.

Presenter2:50

Uh

Sir Salman Rushdie2:50

It just hasn't worked.

Presenter2:50

It's still sticking. Where do you find that optimism today? What helps you stay positive?

Sir Salman Rushdie2:56

Writing books is an optimistic act. You know, you s you sit alone in a room for long periods of time doing something which you hope is going to please people. You know, and so it that requires optimism. You know, you can't do it without that.

Presenter3:11

You've written about notions of home and also having multiple identities, and you're an example of that yourself. I mean, born in India, spent many years living in the UK and you're now based in New York. But the land of the imagination is another place where you've spent much of your time, isn't it?

Sir Salman Rushdie3:27

Yeah, it is, and sometimes feels most of all like home, because nobody bothers you.

Sir Salman Rushdie3:34

But you're making things up.

Sir Salman Rushdie3:36

But I just think it's my advantage as a writer to have belonged to many places. I sometimes have envied the opposite kind of writer, the kind of writer who's deeply rooted in one place, and can make a lifetime of work out of that place. I'm not like that, and I sometimes wish I was, but you make the best of what you have, and what I have is this multiple self.

Presenter4:01

Mm

Presenter4:04

We first cast you away, Salman, in 1988 and I'm looking forward to hearing today's list. What's disc number one?

Sir Salman Rushdie4:12

Well, it's Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side.

Sir Salman Rushdie4:15

It's kind of extraordinary to be able to say that I was friends with Lou Reed because when I was at college I kind of worshipped the Velvet Underground.

Sir Salman Rushdie4:24

And the idea that I would end up with Lou Reed's phone number occurred to me.

Presenter4:29

And so he told you about this this story behind the song?

Sir Salman Rushdie4:32

Yeah, I mean originally he it was written to go as the title track of this Nelson Olgren musical.

Sir Salman Rushdie4:39

Based on Nelson Olgren's novel Walk on the Wild Side, and then the musical fell apart, never happened.

Sir Salman Rushdie4:46

And so he rewrote, I mean the the music is the same, but he rewrote the lyrics, dropping the characters from the novel and replacing them with characters from the Warhol Factory. It's very strange because Nelson Olgren I almost met. He reviewed Midnight Children when it came out. He reviewed it in the Chicago Tribune. And I had gone out to spend a weekend with friends on Long Island and they had been invited to Nelson Olgren's housewarming party.

Sir Salman Rushdie5:14

And they said, Well, you'd better come, because he'd I'm sure he'd like to meet you.

Sir Salman Rushdie5:18

But then the tragedy happened that it was discovered that he had died.

Presenter5:22

As you were on the way to the party.

Sir Salman Rushdie5:24

He'd sort of prepare he the party was all laid out and prepared, and yet a colossal heart attack had died on the rug in the middle of the room.

Sir Salman Rushdie5:32

and the first guests to arrive found the host dead on the floor.

Sir Salman Rushdie5:36

So I never met Nelson Olgren, but almost.

Presenter5:39

And at least he liked your book.

Sir Salman Rushdie5:40

He liked my book.

Speaker 35:45

Holly came from Miami, FLA.

Speaker 35:50

Hitchhiked away across USA.

Speaker 35:54

Plucked her eyebrows on the way Shaved her legs and then he was a she She says hey babe take a walk on the wild side

Speaker 36:03

Said hey honey, take a walk on the wild side

Presenter6:14

Lou Reed and Walk on the Wild Side. Salman Rushdie, tell me about your father Anis. He was, I think, a volatile character in a lot of ways, wasn't he?

Sir Salman Rushdie6:24

Yeah, he had a bad temper. He was also he was a very good father of young children. He was like magical. He was enormous fun. I think he had trouble with grown up children, you know, when children develop their own mind and points of view which were not always his.

Presenter6:41

What about those happier memories of him then? Your memories of him when you were little. You were, you know, the eldest son, the only son, so it must have been a special status in the family.

Sir Salman Rushdie6:50

Yeah, I mean I think that I think that's true, yes. I have memories of going to the beach. Juhu Beach, which is the beach of Bombay.

Sir Salman Rushdie6:57

We used to go there at the weekends and eat coconuts and have camel races. My s my sister and I had camel races on the beach. I mean not alone on the camel. There would be a camel guy on the camel as well.

Presenter7:09

Well as well.

Presenter7:11

So, you know, you had fun and happy times with your dad, but, you know, when it was difficult, what was behind that? What was going on with him?

Sir Salman Rushdie7:18

To put it simply, he drank too much. And uh when he drank too much, he became

Sir Salman Rushdie7:23

somebody else really and

Sir Salman Rushdie7:25

it it drove us apart from each other, you know, and and um there was a a lot of his life, a lot of my life, when we didn't see much of each other. But towards the end of his life that changed and we kind of made it up. And I'm very I'm actually very glad that that happened.

Presenter7:42

Your dad had come from quite a wealthy family, quite well to do. What what was his line of work?

Sir Salman Rushdie7:48

My grandfather really made all the money in a had a had a big textile factory in in Delhi and before the independence of India, before the partition of India and Pakistan.

Sir Salman Rushdie7:58

My father kind of rightly thinking that there might be violence in Delhi, and there was.

Sir Salman Rushdie8:05

So he he sold the factory and invested it in property in Bombay and and did very well. And then he spent the rest of his life not doing so well and gradually lost all his money. So by the time he died he had hardly anything left.

Presenter8:16

So

Presenter8:20

And did that feed into his his drinking then?

Sir Salman Rushdie8:22

Yeah, because I think he felt like he had failed in some way. I think he was a disappointed man.

Presenter8:28

Salmon, one of the things that your dad was very good at was telling stories happily. He and that is one of the great gifts that he gave you. When did he read to you? What kind of stories did he tell?

Sir Salman Rushdie8:38

Well, there's usually bedtime stories, and it it was usually his version of some of the great storehouse of fantastic tales that are available in India. You know, the animal stories of the Panchtantra and the great epic stories of the the Mahabharata and the Ramayan.

Sir Salman Rushdie8:54

and the tales of the fantastic, like from The Thousand and One Nights, but also from the Indian collection. Th there's a collection which is actually even longer than The Thousand and One Nights, whose name translates as The Ocean of the Streams of Story.

Sir Salman Rushdie9:09

And I actually, many, many years later, used the idea of an ocean of stories to write a book.

Sir Salman Rushdie9:16

So stuck in my head.

Presenter9:18

And what about your mother? She was a storyteller, but of a different kind. You've described her as a world-class gossip.

Sir Salman Rushdie9:24

Yeah, my mother knew where all the bodies were buried.

Sir Salman Rushdie9:30

Tell me more about that.

Presenter9:30

Tell me more about that.

Sir Salman Rushdie9:33

That she was going to stop telling me things. She said, because I tell you things and you put them in your books and I get in trouble.

Presenter9:39

Did you stop?

Sir Salman Rushdie9:41

Nope.

Presenter9:42

Couldn't help us out.

Sir Salman Rushdie9:43

Good morning for some.

Presenter9:44

And your dad's character was more volatile. How would you describe your mum? What kind of personality did you have?

Sir Salman Rushdie9:49

Oh, she was very she was a very sweet natured person.

Sir Salman Rushdie9:53

And I think it was hard for her because she had to bear most of the brunt of my father's anger, and she tried to keep us children sheltered from it. So, yeah, I think it was I think her life was hard in that way. But when he died

Sir Salman Rushdie10:10

She was absolutely distraught. So in spite of everything, you know, there there actually was some real love there.

Presenter10:18

Salman Rushdie, it's time to go to the music. Your second choice today. What are we going to hear and why are you taking it with you?

Sir Salman Rushdie10:25

This song is one of the songs I deeply associate with childhood.

Sir Salman Rushdie10:30

It's called Yehe Bombe Mirijan, which translates as This Is Bombe, my darling or Bombe my dear.

Sir Salman Rushdie10:37

I mean, like many Indian popular songs, it's it was born in a movie.

Sir Salman Rushdie10:41

called CID.

Sir Salman Rushdie10:43

And became a kind of anthem of the city. This is Bombay. Actually, the song is quite critical of the city. It says it's in the first line of the song says it's a hard town to live in. And then there's that's the male voice, and then the male voice is interrupted by a female voice which rejects

Sir Salman Rushdie11:00

The male voice's description of the city, it says actually it's very nice.

Sir Salman Rushdie11:04

And it was very, very catchy and everybody sang it, and I still have it in my head.

Speaker 311:32

Guradunya, dohe kehita, desabola tuna bana, johe karata, yo ha barata. Ah, hang on.

Presenter11:40

Yehe Bombay, Mary Jan By Mohammed Rafi and Geeta Dutt. Salman Rushdie, you were brought up in a secular Muslim household. Was faith or its absence discussed much at home?

Sir Salman Rushdie11:53

Not very much, really. Every so often, like maybe once a year.

Sir Salman Rushdie11:58

My father would take me to the big Eid prayers, and I had no idea, because they were all in Arabic, and my Arabic is zero, and it was all rote learning, and I didn't know what to do, so I was a little boy, so he just said, just do what I do, go up when I go up, go down when I go down. The extent of my mother's religion was that she didn't want people to eat pig. Right. So there was never any bacon or ham or any of that in the house. And the city of that generation was very secular. I mean, I remember as I grew up in most of my teenage years that my parents' circle of friends was of every possible background, you know, Hindus and Sikhs and Parsis and other Muslim families and so on. So it was very, very diverse. And all of that seemed available to all of us. So there are all these different festivals.

Sir Salman Rushdie12:52

And when we were kids we thought all the f we could have all the festivals, it just gave us more festivals.

Sir Salman Rushdie12:58

But I mean I think the thing I've always wondered is that you know I had I remember my childhood in Bombay as being quite happy. I had lots of friends. I went I liked my school. I was quite good at school. I won prizes.

Sir Salman Rushdie13:10

And then when I was coming up for, I think I must have been just over 12, when my father said, would I be interested in going to boarding school in England? He said there's this one school, which was rugby school, which says that if you can pass the exam at the right level, that they're willing to offer you a place. And neither of my parents forced me to do it. My mother actually was completely against it.

Sir Salman Rushdie13:36

And my father said, Look, it's only if you want to go, then we'll follow it up, and if you don't want to go, then you don't have to go.

Sir Salman Rushdie13:42

I've always wondered what was it in that young fellow.

Sir Salman Rushdie13:46

that made him want to cross the world.

Presenter13:47

And what was it?

Sir Salman Rushdie13:48

I don't know. Some spirit of adventure, I guess.

Presenter13:51

You mentioned your dad's the other side that that your father's character had, you know, when he drank too much. Wa was was that part of the decision to go?

Sir Salman Rushdie13:58

It was part of wanting to get away from that, yes, I think that had something to do with it. But I do think it was just that I was.

Presenter14:01

So I think that

Sir Salman Rushdie14:06

attracted to the idea of the adventure.

Sir Salman Rushdie14:09

I mean I remember reading the Swallows in Amazon's books.

Sir Salman Rushdie14:12

And I thought, here are these kids, they've got their own boat and they're allowed to sail around the Lake District by themselves. There's no grown-up in sight. The amount of personal freedom that these children had, I thought, was kind of sensational.

Presenter14:27

So the level of expectation pretty high when you set off.

Sir Salman Rushdie14:30

Yeah.

Presenter14:31

How did you get on when you arrived?

Sir Salman Rushdie14:33

Well, it was first of all, it was winter. It was January 1961, and I'm a boy from the tropics, so it was shockingly cold. And then.

Sir Salman Rushdie14:43

I mean there was there was a certain amount of racial prejudice that I was a victim of.

Sir Salman Rushdie14:48

I mean, this is my first experience of feeling like I was somebody's other and not very you know, not very welcome. And I I mean, I had some bad things happen to me, like

Sir Salman Rushdie14:59

people coming into my little cubicle of a study and tearing up work that I'd done.

Sir Salman Rushdie15:05

and writing racist slogans on the wall.

Presenter15:08

Did you tell anyone what you were experiencing?

Sir Salman Rushdie15:09

No, I didn't actually, because I thought, you know, my parents have made all these sacrifices, they've sent me halfway around the world at expensive school and etcetera, and I I thought I can't disappoint them. Like my first fictions were my letters home.

Sir Salman Rushdie15:23

Well, I would say, you know, had a great game of cricket today, scored 23 not out, took two slip catches.

Presenter15:28

And you would just make it arc

Sir Salman Rushdie15:29

All complete nonsense.

Sir Salman Rushdie15:32

Um and actually wasn't very good at cricket.

Sir Salman Rushdie15:35

But I was quite good at school, I was quite good at the studies.

Sir Salman Rushdie15:39

And I thought that would be my revenge, is just to kind of beat everybody in class. And so I did, more or less.

Presenter15:47

Let's have some more music, Salman Rishti. Your third choice today. What's next?

Sir Salman Rushdie15:51

Well

Sir Salman Rushdie15:53

One of the things that happened more or less at the same time as I started being at at rugby was the arrival of Bob Dylan. And I remember one of the boys in in my boarding house who was actually one of the nicer ones had a little record player and he got a copy of the Freewheeling Dylan album.

Sir Salman Rushdie16:11

And he said, Come in here and listen to this. And I listened to a track or two and I wanted to speak. And he said, No, you can't say anything until you've listened to the whole thing.

Presenter16:17

Yeah.

Sir Salman Rushdie16:19

So he made me listen to the whole album, Both Sides. What did you think of it? I was blown away. And then I started saying, and he said, no, you have to listen to it all again.

Sir Salman Rushdie16:30

So we we listened to the whole album twice, and then I was allowed to say that I liked it.

Sir Salman Rushdie16:37

The reason I chose Blowing in the Wind is because many, many years later, living in New York, I went to a Dylan concert at at Madison Square Garden.

Sir Salman Rushdie16:46

And he sang Blowing in the Wind as his final encore, but instead of singing it in the tinkle-tinkle way that we all know it to be, he sang it as if he was Johnny Rodden, screamed it, as if it was a punk song, and it actually made you understand that it's actually a very angry song. If you listen to his words, how many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? So he just revisited the song in a way that revealed its anger.

Speaker 317:16

How many roads must a man walk down?

Speaker 317:21

Before you call him a man

Speaker 317:27

How many seas must the white dove sail?

Speaker 317:32

The fold she sleeps in the sand

Speaker 317:37

Guessing how many times must the cannon balls fly?

Presenter17:44

Bob Dylan and Blowin' in the Wind. Salman Rushdie, in nineteen sixty five you took up your place to read history at Cambridge University and you had a much happier time there. So you were sort of in your element by the sounds of it. So who were you hanging out with? What kind of thing were you doing?

Sir Salman Rushdie17:56

So

Sir Salman Rushdie17:59

Welcome.

Sir Salman Rushdie18:00

I did do a little bit of writing for the university newspaper called Varsity, that's what it used to be called.

Sir Salman Rushdie18:06

But mostly what I did was get involved with student theatre. Footlights. Footlights, I was a very small bulb in the footlights.

Presenter18:06

Most

Sir Salman Rushdie18:15

The big bulbs were like Jermaine Greer and Clive James. But I was in plays. I mean, I was in.

Sir Salman Rushdie18:22

Brecht and Ben Jonson and UNESCO and

Sir Salman Rushdie18:26

All sorts of things.

Presenter18:27

And you said you were writing. What kind of things were you writing?

Sir Salman Rushdie18:30

There had been a s a spate of thefts from student rooms in the in the university, and and I was asked by the editor, could I go and write something about this? I'd kind of just heard about new journalism.

Sir Salman Rushdie18:43

And so I thought, okay, well new journalism dictates, be the thief.

Sir Salman Rushdie18:49

So I thought what I would do is choose half a dozen staircases in different colleges and go up them and knock on the doors and if nobody answered see if the door was unlocked and if the door was unlocked go in and see what I could steal, make a list of it.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:02

And so I did that with the

Presenter19:03

So not actually stealing it, just what I here's what I could have stolen.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:04

Here's what I could have stolen, because people leave their doors unlocked, and here's their expensive stereo equipment. So and unfortunately, one of the rooms that I looked in was the editor's room.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:20

And it was unlocked and it had to have a lot of very expensive stuff in it.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:24

And to his credit, he ran the article.

Presenter19:26

He found the Peace out, buddy.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:27

Yeah, but he he never hired me again.

Presenter19:29

And what about your course? I mean, how did you get on? How easy did you find it? It sounds like you were.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:33

Well, I mean a history degree, I mean it you know, I love s the study of history.

Presenter19:36

Mm.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:37

And in your final year at Cambridge with a history degree.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:41

What you have to do is choose three special subjects. They offer you a range of about sixty or something.

Sir Salman Rushdie19:46

And so the three that I chose that ended up being very useful to me. One was

Sir Salman Rushdie19:51

the last 90 years of the British in India, let's say from 1857 to independence in 1947. The second subject, which was the United States from the Declaration of Independence 1776 until the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War in 1877. And the third was the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam.

Sir Salman Rushdie20:13

That's where I first heard about this incident known as the Incident of the Satanic Verses, where it's recorded in a couple of the so-called traditions, the Hadith, the traditions of the Prophet, where

Sir Salman Rushdie20:25

It seems that he was

Sir Salman Rushdie20:28

asked to accept three

Sir Salman Rushdie20:31

Winged bird goddesses

Sir Salman Rushdie20:34

As being part of the Islamic tradition.

Sir Salman Rushdie20:37

not at the same level as as Allah as God, but at the level of the angels.

Sir Salman Rushdie20:42

And

Sir Salman Rushdie20:43

According to the tradition, he came down from the mountain with verses that seemed to accept these three goddesses. And then we don't know what happened. We don't know how long an interval there was. But he went back up the mountain and came back down and rejected those verses and said that the devil had appeared to him in the guise of the archangel.

Sir Salman Rushdie21:03

and that these were satanic verses.

Sir Salman Rushdie21:05

Anyway, I thought that this story first of all is a really good story.

Sir Salman Rushdie21:09

Secondly, it it corresponded to the idea of the temptation of the prophet, of which there are many examples in many religious traditions. So I thought, oh well, that's interesting that there's one of those in the Islamic tradition, and put it in the back of my head. That was 1968.

Speaker 321:16

Sh

Presenter21:16

Uh

Sir Salman Rushdie21:26

Twenty years later I found out how good a story it was.

Presenter21:29

You graduated in 1968, but your parents didn't come to your graduation, Salmont. Why not?

Sir Salman Rushdie21:36

I don't know.

Presenter21:37

Didn't they tell you at the time why they weren't coming?

Sir Salman Rushdie21:38

No, they just said there was there was I don't remember being communicated about with except that they weren't coming.

Sir Salman Rushdie21:45

Uh

Presenter21:45

Uh

Sir Salman Rushdie21:45

Yeah, I mean I I still mind.

Presenter21:47

Yeah. Well, I'm I'm not surprised. I mean, your your father died in nineteen eighty seven. You said that, you know, your relationship improved with him later in his life. How did you find your way back to each other?

Sir Salman Rushdie21:58

Well, he got he had cancer and I went back to be with him and we started talking honestly to each other. It w it meant that the relationship was left in a very good place.

Presenter22:10

I know that you've said that one of the things that sustained you in the difficult years that followed the fatwa was that you felt that your father would have supported you.

Sir Salman Rushdie22:20

Yeah, and there's no question. I mean, that about that, there's no question. I mean, I think he a lot of what I know about that subject of Islam, for example, I got from him. I mean, this is actually a thing I should stress because we've been talking about

Sir Salman Rushdie22:34

difficulties with him, but the cast of his mind was not at all dissimilar to mine.

Presenter22:40

So after you graduated you stayed in Britain, you moved to London and worked in advertising, but you did keep writing in your spare time.

Sir Salman Rushdie22:49

Yeah, I then by then I was I was thinking that I would like to be a writer.

Presenter22:53

I mean, you know, you really had to sustain this dream because it took 13 years. It took a month.

Sir Salman Rushdie22:58

It took a long time. And after the poor reception, let's say to put it mildly of my first novel.

Presenter23:03

Hmm. Uh

Sir Salman Rushdie23:04

I had to really rethink what I thought I was doing.

Sir Salman Rushdie23:07

And out of that process of rethinking came what became Midnight Children.

Presenter23:12

Salman Rushdie, it's time for your next piece of music, your fourth choice today. What are we going to hear next? Right.

Sir Salman Rushdie23:17

Well, we're going back to the 60s really. Yeah, I mean I think there was this false dichotomy that people had in those days about you had to choose between the Beatles and the Stones. You wouldn't choose? No, I liked them both, you know. But satisfaction felt like defining that moment more than anything else.

Speaker 323:39

No one satisfies that short

Speaker 323:45

Can you get to know me sent this?

Speaker 323:50

Shall we cause I tried

Speaker 323:52

And try

Speaker 323:54

I'm drawing.

Presenter24:08

The Rolling Stones I can't get no satisfaction.

Presenter24:13

Salman Rushdie, after the success of Midnight's Children, you gave up copywriting, working in advertising, to become a full time novelist, and your third book, Shame, came out in nineteen eighty three. Your fourth, The Satanic Verses, followed five years later.

Presenter24:28

Take me back to publication day. Did you have any idea of the storm that the book would unleash?

Sir Salman Rushdie24:34

No, I mean truthfully I didn't. I mean I I thought

Sir Salman Rushdie24:37

The dream sequences which people took exception to.

Sir Salman Rushdie24:41

I thought, well, first of all, it's a dream, and the dream is taking place in the mind of somebody who is described as losing their mind.

Sir Salman Rushdie24:49

And in the dream, the Prophet is not called Muhammad, the city is not called Makkah, and the religion is not called Islam.

Sir Salman Rushdie24:55

I thought that's called fiction. And it got treated

Sir Salman Rushdie24:58

as if it was nonfiction. I mean, I thought probably some people of

Sir Salman Rushdie25:02

Conventional religious belief might not care for it.

Presenter25:05

So so you thought it would ruffle feathers but not profoundly insult people.

Sir Salman Rushdie25:08

You don't have to read it. That's the reason why there are lots of books in bookstores. You can read ones you like.

Presenter25:16

It was

Sir Salman Rushdie25:16

But it was a no, it was a real shock.

Sir Salman Rushdie25:20

But even then, it was a two-stage shock because the when the book first came out and the kind of

Sir Salman Rushdie25:25

Opposition that it aroused didn't feel dangerous. It felt like an argument.

Sir Salman Rushdie25:31

And I didn't mind that. I thought I I went on television and radio to argue against people who had points of view. I didn't feel there was any physical danger.

Sir Salman Rushdie25:41

For many months the book came out in September.

Sir Salman Rushdie25:44

Mm-hmm.

Presenter25:46

And it wasn't till Valentine's Day.

Sir Salman Rushdie25:47

And it was February of 1989. But once the Iranian threats arrived, I thought, oh, that's actually very dangerous. And well, within 24 hours I was offered police protection, having to stay in all sorts of places which were not my home because they thought it was too difficult to protect me in my own house. You know, I had to find ways of

Speaker 325:56

Mm-hmm.

Sir Salman Rushdie26:09

Seeing my son, I had to find ways of

Presenter26:12

'Cause he was, what, ten at the time?

Sir Salman Rushdie26:13

He was ten yeah, just about ten.

Presenter26:16

So and and where was he how were you able to get him?

Sir Salman Rushdie26:19

Well he was living with his mother and we had to go through a whole performance of bringing us together because we had to make sure that we didn't want any danger to move in his direction. So we had to not tell people that I was actually managing to see him.

Presenter26:24

Bring it.

Sir Salman Rushdie26:36

And then

Sir Salman Rushdie26:37

Friends lent me their houses and I mean all ki all kinds of people kind of rallied round.

Presenter26:39

All kinds of

Presenter26:42

There were critics, you know, some people said it's too expensive to pay for this protection. Other people said you should have anticipated a backlash. How did you respond to those kinds of comments?

Sir Salman Rushdie26:52

Well I mean I f one of the things you have to learn is that you can't fight every battle. I mean leaving aside the radical Islamic criticisms

Sir Salman Rushdie27:02

There was quite a lot of non-radical, non-Islamic criticisms.

Presenter27:05

Mm-hmm.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:05

And some of that came from other writers, John Berger.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:09

For example.

Presenter27:10

I think Jermine Greer was was quite true.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:11

Janame, yeah.

Presenter27:13

How did you feel about about that?

Sir Salman Rushdie27:15

Well, not great.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:16

I mean, I remember when...

Sir Salman Rushdie27:18

I got an issue with The Guardian which had John Burgess op-ed, and I thought, oh good, John Burgers writing about it.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:24

and opened the paper to the op-ed page and there was him denouncing me.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:30

I mean, I'd met him a couple of times. I thought we got on perfectly well, but apparently not.

Presenter27:34

And of course, Salmon, it wasn't just you. I mean, over the years, several people associated with the book have been attacked, and the Japanese translator of the text was killed, tragically.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:43

Yeah.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:44

Tragically.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:46

And, you know, it would be weird not to feel responsible for that.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:53

I did.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:54

I mean, I still do it away, you know.

Sir Salman Rushdie27:57

But many of the people who but for example my Norwegian publisher who got shot in the back several times and miraculously made a full recovery

Sir Salman Rushdie28:06

He

Sir Salman Rushdie28:07

told me that

Sir Salman Rushdie28:09

I shouldn't feel badly about it because he was a grown-up and he was a publisher and it was a book he wanted to publish and.

Sir Salman Rushdie28:14

And he just ordered a big reprint.

Sir Salman Rushdie28:17

Just I thought that's a brave map.

Presenter28:19

Yeah, absolutely.

Presenter28:21

So you said that at a certain point you you felt like hiding was dishonourable, which is interesting. Tell me about that response and and what that taught you about yourself, I suppose, that that that feeling was in you.

Sir Salman Rushdie28:34

Yeah, you don't want you know, you feel like what I'm hiding behind the sofa? That's not a very heroic thing to do, is it?

Sir Salman Rushdie28:41

I mean, I think the thing that rescued me, actually, was work. I thought the only thing I can do is to go on being the writer that I'd always set out to be, you know.

Presenter28:50

And you actually wrote an incredibly optimistic book. That was your next salvo.

Sir Salman Rushdie28:54

Well I you know I had promised my son's offer that I would write a book.

Sir Salman Rushdie28:59

That he would enjoy reading. And I think, in general, even if there's no crisis in your life, if you make a promise to a child, he should probably keep it.

Sir Salman Rushdie29:08

And so I wrote Haroon in the Sea of Stories. And yes, it's a very optimistic book. I think maybe I needed to feel optimistic myself. And I have to say, the book written in maybe the darkest moment of my life

Sir Salman Rushdie29:22

has been one of the most joyful

Sir Salman Rushdie29:25

experiences in terms of its life in the world. You know, people kind of love it.

Presenter29:30

Salma Rushdie, it's time for some more music. Your fifth choice, please. What are we going to hear next and why are you taking this to the island?

Sir Salman Rushdie29:36

It's a celebratory song.

Sir Salman Rushdie29:40

Which I remember, I mean, I think it came out, or I heard it, sort of around the time that I was turning forty.

Sir Salman Rushdie29:47

The writer Bruce Chatwin, who we've lost.

Sir Salman Rushdie29:50

I had this beautiful house outside Oxford.

Sir Salman Rushdie29:53

And he offered me the house to have the fortieth birthday party in. And we played things like Whitney Houston's Want to Dance with Somebody and I think there was a certain amount of dancing.

Sir Salman Rushdie30:03

Yeah, nineteen eighty seven.

Sir Salman Rushdie30:05

Actually, I had a pretty good 1980s, beginning with Midnight Children and going through I mean, Shane was the number one bestseller as well. So I'd had a very good decade, and that birthday felt like a kind of climax to it.

Speaker 330:11

Mm-hmm.

Sir Salman Rushdie30:18

I didn't realize that 1989 was going to descend like a hammer.

Speaker 330:33

Hallelujah.

Speaker 330:35

With somebody who loves

Speaker 330:37

Before they

Speaker 330:41

By the hand.

Speaker 330:42

I wanna be on the heat with somebody.

Presenter30:52

Whitney Houston and I Wanna Dance with Somebody. Salman Rushdie, thinking back to you celebrating Toastin, your 40th, if you'd known what was coming, would you have thought you could handle it, you could stand in it? No.

Sir Salman Rushdie31:04

No, I mean I actually I've often thought that, that if

Sir Salman Rushdie31:07

If you had told me on that day, listening to Whitney, here's what's going to happen to you, how do you think you'll handle it?

Sir Salman Rushdie31:14

I would not have bet on myself to handle it well. I would never have described myself as tough.

Sir Salman Rushdie31:19

But some bit of me obviously is.

Presenter31:21

So Salman, the Iranian Government distanced itself from the Fatwa in nineteen ninety eight, but it has never been rescinded. Tell me about you and your family beginning to pick up your lives once you came out of hiding.

Sir Salman Rushdie31:34

Well, I just thought, you know

Sir Salman Rushdie31:36

Enough. Also I thought, if you wait for somebody to say to you, everything's fine now.

Sir Salman Rushdie31:42

That day will never come.

Sir Salman Rushdie31:44

So in the end you have to make the choice yourself.

Sir Salman Rushdie31:46

Well, it wasn't only me. It was also that the the authorities' analysis of the level of threat, it dropped dramatically after the agreement with the Iranians at the United Nations. And there was a point

Presenter31:58

Mm.

Sir Salman Rushdie32:00

After that, where they said it's now reached the level at which we wouldn't normally offer full-time protection.

Sir Salman Rushdie32:07

I said, Okay, well, let's stop. And

Sir Salman Rushdie32:10

I said, what do we do now? and they got up and shook hands and walked out of the room.

Presenter32:13

That must have been so weird.

Sir Salman Rushdie32:14

Like that. I got in the car and drove off. I I knew I had to go somewhere and I thought, oh, I better get a taxi.

Presenter32:20

Uh

Presenter32:22

I mean

Sir Salman Rushdie32:22

And I hadn't got a taxi in eight and a half years.

Presenter32:25

And what was it like being out in the world again?

Sir Salman Rushdie32:28

But

Sir Salman Rushdie32:28

What was interesting was how quickly I adjusted back. It's as if human beings' desire for normality is so great.

Sir Salman Rushdie32:37

that when you get it, you just go for it in a big way.

Presenter32:40

Oh, it must have been wonderful. I mean, just

Sir Salman Rushdie32:42

It was just stand out on the street with your arm out, hailing a cab. Go for a walk. You want to go for a walk. You're hungry, go to a supermarket.

Presenter32:49

And what about managing your reentry into public life? How is that?

Sir Salman Rushdie32:53

Well, I wasn't very bothered about that really. I was I was more interested in regaining ordinary life, living somewhere, seeing friends and family, writing books.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:04

There was all this nonsense about me being some kind of party animal.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:08

And actually I'm really the opposite of that.

Presenter33:11

But what there was an element of, I think when you moved to New York in 2000, certainly an element of just demonstrating that you were living your life comfortably.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:18

Well that I had to do because I was worried that people would because of everything that had happened and all the reporting of it and the danger levels and etc.

Presenter33:26

etcetera.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:26

That people would be scared to be around me. And I thought the only way I could show them that they don't need to be scared is to behave in a way where I'm not scared. And if they see, well, oh, he's walking around taking the subway.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:38

Oh, it's all right then.

Presenter33:39

Then they relax. They take their cue from you.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:40

Yeah, yeah, and and that worked.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:43

And that allowed me to have

Sir Salman Rushdie33:45

An ordinary life.

Presenter33:46

And in terms of your own feelings, to what extent were you fearful? Were you scared?

Sir Salman Rushdie33:51

Well, I thought that I you know, we have to be careful, but I felt that the story had moved on.

Sir Salman Rushdie33:57

I mean, I had some degree of contact with American security forces. They're obviously listening to all kinds of noises of groups that they monitor, so on. And they said nobody seems interested. And for twenty years, more than twenty years, nobody was interested.

Presenter34:14

You said, Selman, that you remain proud of the Satanic Verses and grateful for it too. I mean, what are you grateful to the book for?

Sir Salman Rushdie34:22

Well, you know that book

Sir Salman Rushdie34:24

has a real strength in it. Because if you think about the

Sir Salman Rushdie34:27

Incredible attack against it and the incredible pressure that it was placed under. A lot of books would just disintegrate and disappear. Instead, it's still there, published in forty-five languages.

Sir Salman Rushdie34:40

And now what's happening is that people read it not because it's some kind of hot potato or scandal.

Sir Salman Rushdie34:48

But because it's a book they're interested to read.

Sir Salman Rushdie34:51

The two things that happen over and over and over again when people read it, I get the same comments. One comment is, where's the dirty bit? Because I can't find it.

Sir Salman Rushdie35:01

And the answer is because it's not really there.

Sir Salman Rushdie35:04

And the others who knew that it was funny.

Sir Salman Rushdie35:07

And I said, well, people who read it knew that it was funny.

Sir Salman Rushdie35:11

And so it's beginning to have the ordinary life of a book.

Sir Salman Rushdie35:15

That means some people like it, some people don't like it, and that's all fine. You know, that's what happens with books.

Presenter35:21

Time for some more music, I think, Salmon Rushdie. Your sixth choice today. What's next?

Sir Salman Rushdie35:25

Well, I just wanted to find something.

Sir Salman Rushdie35:27

that represented the pleasure of

Sir Salman Rushdie35:30

living in New York. And then one of the

Sir Salman Rushdie35:33

Musicians that I've always enormously enjoyed as Paul Simon. I I could have chosen a whole lot of songs. But I chose this one'cause it's the most fun. Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard. It's a bit of a naughty song.

Sir Salman Rushdie35:45

I think I was beginning to feel a bit naughty by this time.

Speaker 335:49

The mamma looked down and spit on the ground Every time my name gets mentioned

Speaker 335:55

Papa said, Oh, if I get that boy, I'm gonna stick him in the house of detention.

Speaker 335:59

Well I'm on my way.

Speaker 336:02

I don't know where I'm going, I'm on my way.

Speaker 336:07

I'm taking my time but I don't know where Goodbye rose if the Queen of Corona

Speaker 336:14

See William Julio down by the schoolyard.

Presenter36:19

Paul Simon, me and Julio down by the schoolyard.

Presenter36:23

Salman Rushdie, on August 12th, 2022, you stepped out on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. Ironically, you'd been invited there to talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Then a man jumped out of the audience and started running towards you. Do you remember what was going through your mind when you saw him?

Sir Salman Rushdie36:44

Well, I mean, I only just saw him before he got to me. And I th I I just thought

Sir Salman Rushdie36:49

Why now? So it was just shocking. I thought, really? I mean, this is.

Sir Salman Rushdie36:56

Three decades later.

Sir Salman Rushdie36:58

And this kid was very young, wasn't even born at the time that the Satanic Verses came out and so on.

Presenter37:04

They hadn't even read it.

Sir Salman Rushdie37:05

Hadn't read any, as we discovered afterwards. I mean, he said himself in an interview.

Sir Salman Rushdie37:10

that he'd read a couple of pages of something I'd written and he'd seen me on YouTube.

Presenter37:15

You've testified at the trial but but not met him, I don't think. Would you be

Sir Salman Rushdie37:19

No, I don't think he'd open his heart to me, you know, somehow. I tried in my memoir that I wrote, Knife.

Sir Salman Rushdie37:26

To get inside his head, you know, I tried, I had this sort of imaginary dialogue with him, where I tried to understand what he might have been motivated by.

Sir Salman Rushdie37:34

And I thought if I actually ever got into a conversation with my attacker, I'd get some nonsense, you know, which would not actually help very much.

Presenter37:42

Do you need an answer? Do you what you

Sir Salman Rushdie37:44

No, I don't. I mean, I think I've got what I need.

Sir Salman Rushdie37:47

By writing I think writing the memoir.

Sir Salman Rushdie37:51

By the time I'd finished it,

Sir Salman Rushdie37:53

I thought, okay, I'm kind of done with this subject.

Presenter37:55

So you lost your right eye and your left hand was badly damaged as obviously you tried to defend yourself.

Presenter38:02

But I know that the medical teams who've worked with you have been absolutely amazed at your resilience, your ability to recover.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:07

Yep, I'm again, apparently I'm tougher than I thought.

Presenter38:09

And yeah, I mean, what was your approach to rehab and how extensive?

Sir Salman Rushdie38:14

Well, my approach was that I was absolutely determined to get my life back. And I just thought, the hell with this, I'm not letting this.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:23

Stop me.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:25

And

Sir Salman Rushdie38:26

An important part of it

Sir Salman Rushdie38:28

It's when I went back to Chautauqua.

Presenter38:30

Yes.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:30

And I thought I ju I thought just something said to me

Sir Salman Rushdie38:33

You need to revisit the scene of the crime. You need to show yourself.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:38

that you're standing up in the place where you fell down.

Presenter38:41

And how was it?

Sir Salman Rushdie38:42

It was very important.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:43

My wife Eliza came with me.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:46

and I said to her that I felt as if a physical weight had been removed from my shoulders. It felt suddenly lighter.

Sir Salman Rushdie38:53

And yeah, and then I wrote about that, and then I thought, okay, I'm done with this. So by the time the trial happened, and I had to go and testify.

Sir Salman Rushdie39:00

That wasn't for me, I mean, people said, was that a big deal and was that emotionally difficult to stay? Actually, it wasn't. And he looked like a little squirt.

Sir Salman Rushdie39:08

I mean, I saw him sitting across the courtroom, and he I thought, Oh, you're in a little punk

Sir Salman Rushdie39:13

and quite unimpressive.

Sir Salman Rushdie39:16

But then I thought, well, unimpressive little punks could kill you.

Sir Salman Rushdie39:20

And he almost did.

Presenter39:21

You mentioned your wife Eliza, also a writer, and she's written about the traumatic moment when she heard what had happened and getting to you and reading her account I found very powerful because often I think the people who are supporting someone going through something traumatic, they get forgotten.

Sir Salman Rushdie39:38

Oh yeah, and you know, the trauma is not only experienced by the injured person, I mean it's you know, loved ones and family and etcetera, that it's traumatic for all concerned. You've had to all work with the trauma and the and the PTSD and so on. And

Presenter39:42

I mean it's

Sir Salman Rushdie39:55

I think we've got I think we've mostly got there.

Presenter39:58

Has it changed you? Has it changed your relationship?

Sir Salman Rushdie40:01

I think what happens is when you have a lucky escape like this and

Sir Salman Rushdie40:05

is that you begin to value everything more. You begin to value the days more. And you begin to value love and your work and everything. You j it suddenly it just puts into enormous relief the important things in life.

Presenter40:08

Mm-hmm.

Sir Salman Rushdie40:21

and makes you understand that there are many things in life which are not important and that you can do without.

Sir Salman Rushdie40:27

And you focus on the things that are most important. And yeah, that's what happened to me.

Presenter40:33

Selma, let's have some more music. It's your seventh choice.

Sir Salman Rushdie40:37

You know what, this is I chose this because

Presenter40:37

Hey, what's the

Sir Salman Rushdie40:39

I think the best concert I ever went to in my life, and excluding classical music.

Sir Salman Rushdie40:45

was I I went to Madison Square Garden

Sir Salman Rushdie40:48

And Stevie Wonder was there, and he played the whole double album, Songs in the Key of Life, in track order.

Sir Salman Rushdie40:57

with only like a 15 minute gap between the two discs.

Sir Salman Rushdie41:01

I could have chosen any song from that double album, but I chose Isn't She Lovely just because it's a great song. And I'm so happy that I was able to see him live. It was just breathtaking. Brought tears to the eyes.

Speaker 341:19

In the sea what

Speaker 341:23

Infant C bada

Speaker 341:26

Less than one minute old

Speaker 341:31

Find out a bath through love with me.

Speaker 341:35

Making one as lovely as she

Speaker 341:39

Forgiveness and lovely

Presenter41:45

Stevie Wonder, and isn't she lovely? Salman Rushdie, you recently said freedom of expression in the West is at a critical juncture and should be fought for. How are you using your voice to fight for it?

Sir Salman Rushdie41:59

Well, you use your voice by using it. You know, you just speak up.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:03

I think it's quite a timid time, but a lot of people are

Sir Salman Rushdie42:07

scared of speaking up or of saying something which they're not allowed to say.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:12

And I grew up as a writer and as a person in a much less timid time, you know, in which you could say anything you wanted, and you could write anything you wanted, and nobody would tell you you weren't allowed to.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:23

The only question was whether you did it well or badly.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:26

And I still think that's the only way to think because

Sir Salman Rushdie42:29

Art has always been something that took what it needed from wherever it could find it. You know, without African masks you would not have Picasso.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:38

And if we narrow ourselves into a condition where, you know, that straight people can't write about gay characters.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:45

White people can't write about black people.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:48

Art disappears.

Sir Salman Rushdie42:50

And that's what the thing is. That's what the art is. It's it's to create the world. So I I've the thing that I've felt for a long time is that writers are very vulnerable and sometimes need protecting.

Presenter42:55

Do you know?

Sir Salman Rushdie43:03

What they do

Sir Salman Rushdie43:05

will endure.

Presenter43:07

Salmon, you've been married five times, and you've got two grown up sons and grandchildren now. I wonder what Salmon Rushdie, the father and grandfather, is like?

Sir Salman Rushdie43:17

Oh, I'm I'm I'm a walk in the park.

Sir Salman Rushdie43:21

Are you? Well, I mean, I think the thing is that I've reached a very happy place in my life, you know, and.

Sir Salman Rushdie43:27

It's very good to be able to say that. I mean, my sons are grown up and they're both, I think, rather kind of impressive young men. And yeah, I've got uh my older granddaughter has got her fifth birthday, actually, as we speak tomorrow.

Sir Salman Rushdie43:44

So that's nice, I mean, to be a granddad. I mean, her younger sister is still only two. So suddenly I have the next generation showing up.

Sir Salman Rushdie43:52

Do you tell them stories? No, I think I I have occasionally with Rose, the older girl, she's allowed me to read her a children's book.

Sir Salman Rushdie44:00

But none of my I don't have any stories to tell five-year-old girls.

Presenter44:05

Well, that's your next task, I think is so.

Sir Salman Rushdie44:06

Yeah, I think

Presenter44:08

Your current collection of stories, Salman, is called At the Eleventh Hour, and it tackles aging and mortality. How are you approaching later life yourself?

Sir Salman Rushdie44:16

Like that, by writing about it.

Sir Salman Rushdie44:19

And I mean not all the stories are just about old buggers on the edge.

Sir Salman Rushdie44:25

But it's also in some way it felt to me like for example, one of the stories is set in India and it's set in Bombay and it's set very much in the neighborhood that I've written about before. And it's up a little hill, which is actually the little hill up which I grew up. And I just thought I've got maybe got one more walk up that hill.

Sir Salman Rushdie44:41

And so this story felt like a farewell to a part of my creative life that's been very important.

Presenter44:49

You'll have to make a new home, of course, on your desert island. I'm about to send you away. How will you prepare for your new life?

Sir Salman Rushdie44:56

I remember watch listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs in which the old fell walker Wainwright was doing Desert Island Discs.

Speaker 345:03

Oh yes.

Sir Salman Rushdie45:04

And soon Loli asked him how he'd do on the desert island, and he said, I don't know, he said, only would there be a chip shop on the island?

Presenter45:13

Did she say yes?

Sir Salman Rushdie45:14

He said no, there'd be no chip shop. I don't think I'd do very well then.

Presenter45:15

Maybe don't chip traffic.

Sir Salman Rushdie45:19

I think I'm sort of of that same opinion. If there's no chip shop, we're done. We're done. We're in trouble. What will you

Presenter45:26

Miss the most

Sir Salman Rushdie45:26

Uh

Presenter45:26

Yeah.

Sir Salman Rushdie45:27

Oh, I'm an urban person, you know. I'm a s a writer of the big city. And so I would miss I'd miss that. I'd miss the big city.

Presenter45:36

Well, we'll let you have one more disk before we send you there, Sir Selman Rushdie. What have you got?

Sir Salman Rushdie45:41

Well, what I've chosen is a song that means a lot to me because it's the song that we chose for our song when when Eliza and I got married.

Sir Salman Rushdie45:50

So she entered looking devastating to the tune of the Isley brothers for the love of you. Yeah, as they used to say, the message is in the song.

Speaker 346:01

I wanna be

Speaker 346:04

For the love of you.

Speaker 346:08

Poor side.

Speaker 346:10

Oh, that I'm giving.

Speaker 346:14

It's for the love of you.

Speaker 346:18

All right, man.

Speaker 346:22

Lovely as a ray of sun

Speaker 346:26

That touches me when the morning comes Feels good to me.

Presenter46:32

For the love of you, the Isley Brothers. So, Sir Solmon Rushdie, I'm going to send you away to the island now. I'll give you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, to take with you, and you can have one other book. What will it be?

Sir Salman Rushdie46:44

Yeah, I mean actually if I had my way I'd have two books and not the Bible, but apparently I'm not allowed to do that because you have to play the game by the rules.

Presenter46:51

We've got to stick to the rules.

Sir Salman Rushdie46:53

So, I thought what I'd do is I'd take The Odyssey, because it's a book about somebody on a long journey where he gets marooned in all kinds of places, which he can't get away from, although he does in the end. So, it has the optimistic hope of getting away from it in the end. And I think there's Robert Fagel's translation, and there's Emily Wilson's translation, and I think maybe the Wilson, which is more recent, I'd take that.

Presenter47:16

Well, an epic tale will be perfect for the island. What about your luxury item?

Sir Salman Rushdie47:20

I think I'd like mosquito netting to sleep under. Comfortable bed with mosquito nets, which is also for me a memory of childhood because when we used to visit my grandparents' home,

Sir Salman Rushdie47:30

We all would sleep on the roof in the hot weather on beds which had mosquito nets. It was a magic sight, these white mosquito nets on on the roof, and you'd be inside them. So it was a kind of magic space. So I'd like a mosquito net, please.

Presenter47:42

Well, there's a touch of the practical there, but you did use the phrase magic space, so I'm definitely going to allow it. There's plenty of precedent for people taking beautiful beds. Any particular kinda you know, sheet wise, what are we talking of?

Sir Salman Rushdie47:53

Thread

Presenter47:53

High thread count. All over it. It is yours. And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you save from the waves first?

Sir Salman Rushdie48:03

I think I'd save that last one. I feel that

Sir Salman Rushdie48:07

I'm now in a very happy place with my life, and that song represents that. For the love of you, Island Brothers.

Presenter48:14

Sir Salman Rushdie, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Sir Salman Rushdie48:18

Thank you.

Presenter48:41

Hello, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Salman and that he sleeps well beneath those magical mosquito nets. We've cast away many other writers over the years, including William Boyd, John Boyne, Zadie Smith, and Maya Angelou. The studio manager for today's programme was Bob Nettles. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky. The executive production coordinator was Zusie Roylance. The content editor was Mugabe Turia, and the producer was Paula McGinley. Next time, my guest will be the wildlife presenter, Gordon Buchanan. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 249:34

After Anthony Easton's father passes away, he goes through his dad's old suitcase.

Speaker 249:39

It's filled with cryptic clues, neatly stacked German money, a family tree he doesn't recognise.

Speaker 249:47

and also finds his father's birth certificate, but bearing a different name.

Speaker 249:53

From BBC Radio 4 and the History Podcast, I'm Charlie Northcott.

Speaker 249:57

And I've been working with Anthony Easton to understand his family's dark history.

Speaker 250:02

and how they lost a fortune worth billions today.

Speaker 250:06

What happened to his family?

Speaker 250:08

their business empire.

Speaker 250:10

And all the money.

Speaker 250:12

Listen to the house at number 48 on BBC Sounds.