Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 70
70 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi In England he had lost his Anglo-Indian snobbery and conservatism and became radical. After Cambridge he went to Pakistan, whither his parents had removed. He got a job in the country’s new television service but ran up against political and religious prejudice due to his outspoken and unorthodox views. This added further to his conflict with, and ha- tred for Islam which he accredits to his parents, as Rushdie himself says: ‘My father was mercifully free of religion. The fact that I was brought up in a religion- free household was my parents’ greatest gift to me. ’ (WM p. 7). Horrified and disillusioned with Pakistan, he returned to England and scratched a living as an advertising copywriter and in between he started to get on with his ‘real writing’. His first marriage was to an English girl called Clarissa Luard, who bore him his only son, Zafar, now in his mid-teens; he later divorced her and married an American novelist Marianne Wiggins from whom he is now separated. His father died in 1987 escaping knowledge of his son’s fate. His mother, Negin, is in her seventies and living in Pakistan. He has three younger sisters, Sameen, Nervid and Nabeelah.