The Kink’s English Episode III: Rushdie and I

Abstract

Salman Rushdie came into my life, as into those of many others, that fatidic February 14th, 1989. He may have actually done so a couple of days later, but hey, that is also my birthday, so I like to entertain the poetry of that possibility. I was eight years old and I used to devotedly watch the nightly news, as in those days journalism, albeit under a totalitarian regime, had not degraded to the lows of today’s standards. The news kept talking about Rushdie and the death threats against him; they said he had written a book called The Satanic Verses. To my eight year-old mind there was nothing more fascinating and attractive that a book title with the word Satanic on it, and so this news item imprinted itself in my memory. Who knew, perhaps some day, maybe one day I would be able to read these so-called verses and maybe I would knew what it was that Satan had to say.