Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 76
76 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi But was it indeed, a miracle, or was it more than likely part of the long term plan and ploy of certain powers to heighten the repu- tation of their secret tool, and then later to let him loose on to the unsuspecting Muslim world ? Midnight’s Children is described in the inside jacket cover as a novel about a Saleem Sinai : one of 1,001 children born at that mid- night hour, each of them endowed with an extra-ordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both masters and victims of their times. Is it not ironic that the same could be said of Salman Rushdie - his ‘extra-ordinary talent’ of the fictitious earned him various accolades of being the ‘master’ of his profession, among them the Booker Prize for Fiction; but his subsequent work, namely The Satanic Verses, became a ‘curse’ for him, and he did indeed become a ‘victim’ of the time. It nevertheless has to be stressed that this became a curse for him through his own doing. He was in fact the author of his own destiny. One particular verse of the Holy Qur’an clearly befits the fate of Salman Rushdie : ‘So the evil result of what they did befell them, and that which they used to mock at encompassed them. ’ ( Al-Nahl, Chapter 16, verse 35 ). This verse points to the great truth that the punishment of an evil deed is no extraneous thing, but is the natural consequence of the deed itself and is also proportionate to it. And it is the Majesty of the Supreme Being in fashioning out the fate of an individual by that individual’s own contribution to his downfall and in unwittingly predicting his own exact punishment himself. So was the case with Salman Rushdie, who in his earlier books had predicted, unconsciously, his own downfall almost word for word. This will become evident in due course. Midnight’s Children is supposedly a book of fiction ( thus the award for Literary Fiction ), but Rushdie has used the story of the