The many duplicates of Salman Rushdie in ‘The Eleventh Hour’

A writer wakes up and finds a body in his bed. On closer inspection, he discovers that the dead man, that stranger, is himself. Duplicates everywhere, he thinks, and remains clueless, even comedic about his own passing. Even though he is invisible, the ghost does not want to wander in his blue pajamas, or else he would gain the reputation of a laughing stock, the phantom in nightclothes. He prefers to be properly dressed for appearances. A man famous for his punctuality, he laughs hysterically at the new appendage to his name: ‘late’.

In Rushdie’s short story of the same name, this ghost worries about his legacy, his place in literary history, and other long-buried secrets. It would be preposterous to say this ghost is a fictional duplicate of Rushdie, but that is not entirely untrue. Inspecting the entanglements of fame, death, literature, and history, his latest quintet, ‘The Eleventh Hour’, is replete with doubles. Travelling between the three places he calls home, it arrives at the eleventh hour of his long and renowned literary career, an elegy to fiction itself.

In an interview, Rushdie admits that this book is born of his intimate encounter with death, and the many questions it let loose. He has been running from death for a large part of his life, but the latest tragedy struck the closest — in 2022, he was stabbed by a man who found his books offensive. While his last work of non-fiction was dedicated entirely to this event, these stories offer something more than celebrity.

There are multiple duplicates and different deaths. ‘In the South’ is about two old men, Junior and Senior, who are doubles of each other. Against the backdrop of the tsunami in India, Junior passes away. Senior wanted to die but ended up living. The story ends with him longing for his shadow and his copy, the hopeful other to his cynical self. Rushdie’s telling is charismatic as usual; the story sparkles in its detail. It begins like an ancient tale of twin brothers. And ends in dramatic reckoning: “The world was meaningless. The texts were empty, and his eyes were blind.”

‘The Musician of Kahani’ is a surrogate of Salman’s magnum opus, ‘Midnight’s Children’, in both length and character. Here, the fame of a musical prodigy turns ominous. The narrator is an old man who calls the city ‘kahaani’, story in English. There is a grand wedding, a gossip column, and a tough pregnancy. Perhaps because of such attempts at cliche, and the looming shadow of his own work, the story offers only a pale reflection of the novel. ‘Oklahoma’ begins with a similar experiment. The story has a foreword which claims it was written by Mamouli Ajeeb, a writer who signs as MA. This name, despite an interesting meaning and motive, fails to be a crafty alias. It doesn’t have the ring, comedy, or novelty of the alias, a practice that is commonplace in the language of ‘Mamouli Ajeeb’, Hindi-Urdu. The real surprise and substance of the story arrives later.

The literary relationship between the writer and his part-mentor, part-inspiration, Uncle K, starts off as endearing. Obsessed with disappearance, he vanishes. Later, Auntie K, also a writer, is about to shoot the narrator in the head. This dramatic and fearful turn offers the reader a meaty question. MA has been found guilty of stealing real people for his story instead of imagining characters as a writer must. He writes well but lacks imagination, and that is his crime, and failing. This story ends in Kafka-esque horror.

‘Late’ shines because it is the familiar retold in fascinating moves. Simone Merlyn Arthur, the writer at the heart of the story, is recognisable — something like EM Forster, gay and heartbroken by Indian men, and something like Alan Turing, who cracked secret codes for England during World War II. A great book happened to him once. After the glory and shock of literary stardom, he never published another word. He declared that he stopped writing, but that was only a flimsy veil over the truth. The manuscripts he wrote later remained incomplete or snaked away into the shadows. Is this writer Rushdie or Arthur? An Indian student at Cambridge discovers his ghost, and his later manuscripts, but doesn’t quite know how to assess them. Inhabiting her confusion, and her reverence for the writer, I find myself in the position of this young girl, trying to read the later work of a mighty writer. Of course, the girl is a double of the younger Rushdie, who was an Indian student at Cambridge himself, around the same time. Another one of the duplicates is the old man in the piazza, from the last story of the collection. This story mourns the pain of language itself.

In this melee of duplicates, the young are foils for the old. Grand characters are passing away. They are towering in different ways, as grandfathers, uncles, friends, writers, keepers of language. Duplicates in parables are often two halves of the same self, divided for neatness and quarrel. They remind us that no image is clean or reducible. While parts of this quintet shine with Rushdie’s still-intact brilliance, the less sharp stories take us back to their originals: his early genius. “I have planned quite the exit myself,” says Arthur Chacha, the ghost of a writer. He is about to vanish under a bridge. The narrator prophesies: “there are no neat resolutions”. I am glad that we have another hour until midnight.

— The reviewer teaches at Ashoka University