Right eye was sitting on my cheek like a soft-boiled egg: Rushdie recalls brutal knife attack
Ahead of the release of his book, 'Knife', celebrated author Salman Rushdie relives the horrific attack he experienced in 2022 in New York and how upset he is about losing one eye
Talking about the knife attack on him in 2022, India-born Salman Rushdie confessed that losing an eye upsets him every day. Graphically explaining in detail what happened to him on that day, the Booker Prize-winning author said his eye was left hanging down his face "like a soft-boiled egg".
"I remember thinking I was dying," he told BBC in an interview, ahead of the release of his detailed account of the attack in ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ this week. And added that fortunately, that never happened.
The attack also damaged Rushdie’s liver and hands, and severed nerves in his right eye. His eye looked "very distended, swollen," he elaborated, adding that it was kind of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek, I've said like a soft-boiled egg. And blind."
Salman said losing one eye "upsets me every day". He finds he has to take greater care when walking down stairs, or crossing a road, or even when pouring water into a glass. But he considers himself lucky to have avoided brain damage. "It meant I was actually still able to be myself," he said, according to the report.
Recalling the attack
His new book, 'Knife', is his way of coming to terms with the horrifying attack that had stunned the world. The attack had taken place at an education institute in New York state in August 2022, as he was preparing to give a lecture.
Recalling how the assailant "sprinted up the stairs" and stabbed him 12 times, including in his neck and abdomen, in an attack that lasted 27 seconds, Rushdie said he couldn't have fought him. And that he couldn't have run away from him at all.
The 76-year-old Rushdie, it seems, fell to the floor, said the report quoting him as saying that he lay with "a spectacular quantity of blood" all around him. After which, he was rushed to hospital, where he spent six weeks. While he was lying in a pool of blood, he remembered that he inconsequentially thought about his personal belongings.
He was worried that his Ralph Lauren suit was getting spoiled, and that his house keys and credit cards might fall out of his pocket. But thinking on those lines though ludicrous, showed that he did not intend to die. And that some part of him was telling him that he was still going to need those house keys and the credit cards.
It was a "survival instinct" that was saying to him: "You're going to live, he recounted in the interview.
Premonition of an attack
In the interview, the New York-based novelist, knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature, admitted that he had a nightmare about the attack, a premonition two days before the event. He had even told his wife, American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths that he was not keen to go. However, he convinced himself that it was a just a “dream” and also felt that they were paying him quite well and everyone had bought tickets and he should go.
Rushdie admitted that he had always feared that someone might "jump out of an audience" one day. It would have been absurd if that had not crossed his mind, remarked the author, who had a fatwa against him because of his book, 'The Satanic Verses'.
Dislike of the disingenuous
The book 'Knife' also carries what Rushdie wanted to say to his alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, a 26-year-old New Jersey resident, who is in jail.
Matar told the New York Post from jail that he disliked people who are disingenuous like Rushdie, who he saw on videos. Rushdie has an imaginary conversation with his attacker, in which he responds to that accusation.
"In America, many people pretend to be honest, but they wear masks and lie. And would that be a reason to kill them all?” he asked.
Freedom of speech
Rushdie, who was born to non-practising Muslims and is an atheist, has long supported freedom of expression.
Warning that it has become much more difficult, he said, "a lot of people, including a lot of young people, I'm sorry to say, have formed the opinion that restrictions on freedom of speech are often a good idea". But the "whole point of freedom of speech is that you have to permit speech you don't agree with."
