‘Thought I was dying... losing eye upsets me every day’: Salman Rushdie relives 2022 knife attack

PTI

London, April 15

Mumbai-born Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie has spoken in gruesome detail about the moment he was attacked by a knifeman on stage in New York in 2022, and said he thought he was dying as his left eye hung down his face “like a soft-boiled egg”.

Memoir set for release today

Mumbai-born author Salman Rushdie’s new book, ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’, set for release on Tuesday, is dedicated to “the men and women who saved my life” after the attack on stage in New York

The 76-year-old British-American author was on stage in August 2022 when he was stabbed up to 12 times by accused Hadi Matar, in prison for attempted murder.

In an interview ahead of the release of his detailed account of the attack in ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ this week, the author admitted losing an eye is something that “upsets me every day” and that the memoir was his way of fighting back against what happened.

“I actually thought he punched me very hard. I didn’t realise it was a knife in his hand, and then I saw the blood, and I realised there was a weapon,” said Rushdie, recalling the moment of the attack at the Chautauqua Institution.

“I think he was just slashing wildly at everything. So, there was a very big slash across my neck and stab wounds down by the middle of my torso and two to the side, and then there was the wound in my eye, which was quite deep. It looked terrible. I mean, it was very distended, swollen, and it was kind of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek like a soft-boiled egg, and I am blind,” he recalls.

“I remember thinking I was dying. Fortunately, I was wrong,” he said.

Rushdie recounted how his attacker came “sprinting up the stairs” and stabbed him 12 times in an attack lasting 27 seconds. “I couldn’t have fought him. I couldn’t have run away from him,” he said.

He fell to the floor, where he lay with “a spectacular quantity of blood” all around him before he was rushed to a hospital by helicopter and spent six weeks recovering there.

Rushdie had spent several years in hiding after the 1988 publication of the controversial ‘The Satanic Verses’ triggered threats against his life, with the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa against him. The New York-based novelist, knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature, admitted he had thought someone might “jump out of an audience” one day. “Clearly, it would’ve been absurd for it not to cross my mind,” he admitted.

The attack damaged Rushdie’s liver and hands and severed nerves in his right eye. He finds he has to take greater care when walking down the stairs, crossing a road, or even 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 shared, adding his new book recounting the horror, which formally releases on Tuesday, is dedicated to “the men and women who saved my life”. In ‘Knife’, the author has an imaginary conversation with his attacker: “In America, many people pretend to be honest, but they wear masks and lie.”

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