Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and essayist, winner of the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children, which was later voted the best Booker novel of all time, and survivor of a fatwa and
On the island
Eight records
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.
This song is one of the songs I deeply associate with childhood.
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. So he made me listen to the whole album, Both Sides. ... 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.
Satisfaction felt like defining that moment more than anything else.
I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)
It's a celebratory song. Which I remember, I mean, I think it came out, or I heard it, sort of around the time that I was turning forty.
Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
I just wanted to find something that represented the pleasure of living in New York. ... It's a bit of a naughty song.
I chose that 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.
For the Love of YouFavourite
It's the song that we chose for our song when when Eliza and I got married.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:34Despite everything that you've been through, you say that you've kept hold of your optimism. How?
I'm not sure exactly. I I think it's somehow ingrained. There'll be quite a lot of efforts to beat it out of me. ... It just hasn't worked.
Presenter asks
6:14Tell me about your father Anis. He was a volatile character in a lot of ways, wasn't he?
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.
Presenter asks
8:28When did he read to you? What kind of stories did he tell?
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. 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. And I actually, many, many years later, used the idea of an ocean of stories to write a book.
The keepsakes
The book
Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)
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.
The luxury
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, 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.
Presenter asks
11:53You were brought up in a secular Muslim household. Was faith or its absence discussed much at home?
Not very much, really. Every so often, like maybe once a year. 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. ... 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. 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?
Presenter asks
24:28Take me back to publication day [of The Satanic Verses]. Did you have any idea of the storm that the book would unleash?
No, I mean truthfully I didn't. I mean I I thought The dream sequences which people took exception to. 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. And in the dream, the Prophet is not called Muhammad, the city is not called Makkah, and the religion is not called Islam. I thought that's called fiction. And it got treated as if it was nonfiction. I mean, I thought probably some people of Conventional religious belief might not care for it. ... But it was a no, it was a real shock. But even then, it was a two-stage shock because the when the book first came out and the kind of Opposition that it aroused didn't feel dangerous. It felt like an argument. ... It wasn't till Valentine's Day. ... And it was February of 1989. But once the Iranian threats arrived, I thought, oh, that's actually very dangerous.
Presenter asks
28:21You said that at a certain point you felt like hiding was dishonourable. Tell me about that response and what it taught you about yourself.
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? 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. ... And 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 has been one of the most joyful experiences in terms of its life in the world.
“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.”
“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.”
“I've always wondered what was it in that young fellow that made him want to cross the world.”
“I would not have bet on myself to handle it well. I would never have described myself as tough. But some bit of me obviously is.”
“I thought if you wait for somebody to say to you, everything's fine now. That day will never come. So in the end you have to make the choice yourself.”
“I felt as if a physical weight had been removed from my shoulders. It felt suddenly lighter.”