I followed the news about Salman Rushdie’s banishment from the Jaipur Literature Festival last week with considerable interest.  The local government claimed that Mumbai-based goons, engaged by pro-Muslim fanatics, were on their way to assassinate him.  It was a sub-plot as fantastic as the ones in The Satanic Verses, the book that started all the fuss twenty-three years ago, and that remains banned in India.  The last time that I thought about The Sanatic Verses in political terms, as anything other than literature, was when it was published in 1989 and the Ayatollah Khomeni’s fatwa sent the author in hiding.  I was in college and some students staged a public reading from the book, in protest.  Last week in Jaipur writers Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, and Ruchir Joshi read from the book, in protest, and were themselves, in turn, banished from the festival.

The Satanic Verses is, I think, Rushdie’s finest book, the most complex in its language and ideas.  It’s the only book I know that captures both India and the west (in this case England) with true emotional richness.  There are passages that I can recall from reading the book over fifteen years ago (a plane crash, a boy eating pork, a man spitting into another man’s food) with devastating clarity.  Yet my most powerful memories of the book aren’t related to the narrative, or to the edition I read from (a fat, secondhand hardcover that the author signed for me years later).  What I remember is the physical circumstances in which I read it: over a string of late summer evenings, in my first apartment, with the windows flung open, sunk low and dreamily in the only chair I owned – a secondhand one with nubby green cushions and Danish modern stylings.  I still have the chair, refinished and reupholstered, in a corner of my living room, although it only really gets used as a step stool.  My memories of the chair, and of the book too, remain more vivid than the things themselves.