For a man of grand gestures given to vividly articulating his rollicking imagination, it was a quiet evening in the spotlight. But the moment was surely momentous. When Salman Rushdie surfaced at a five-star hotel in New Delhi on Friday night, when he voiced the hope that a 12-year-long rift between him and his country had healed, one of the most unfortunate, and unnecessary, falling-outs was reversed. This polite resumption of a longstanding, reciprocal relationship also overturned what for Rushdie's readers was the most heartbreaking passage in his last book, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. ``And so farewell, my country,'' he wrote with an unbecoming petulance, which was perhaps his last defence against the bewildering animus in the land of his literary inspiration.``Don't worry; I won't come knocking at your door. I won't phone you in the middle of the night and hang up when you reply. India, my terra infirma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia, my crowd. India, my too-muchness, my everything at once, my Hug-me, my fable, my mother, my father and my first great truth. India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart. Goodbye.''Welcome back, Salman Rushdie, thank you for not hanging up when India decided to stop playing visa politics and facilitated an enigmatic return. It has been a complex process of give and take between Rushdie and his India, a process that soured at different levels. In 1981 when he published Midnight's Children, he did not just dazzle the reading world with his innovativeness in language and in literary licence, he unshackled the Indian imagination. He may have written in English, but the sensibility was entirely subcontinental, absolutely novel. And writing on and from India was never the same again. But, over the years, as he performed and cleared the way for his burgeoning herd of legatees, aiming slingshots at this prematurely patriarchal figure in itself became a stepping stone to temporary fame. If the pettiness of this was masked behind a sensational zeal for tabloidish copy, Rushdie too reacted peevishly by holding out a potentially self-destructive threat to snap all links with India for refusing toacknowledge him appropriately. Now, as the bespectacled master, with eyelids that droop no longer, celebrates the diversity of Indian writing in English, his signal contribution too needs to be applauded.And then, there were the protests, and the politics of the protests. And they obviously reinforced Rushdie's sense of betrayal. After a decade and more in personal exile, Rushdie has, over the last few months, attempted to make peace with his detractors. Accordingly, on Friday, he spoke of his appreciation of ``the serious and civilised way the protests in (Delhi) against my arrival have taken place''. However, if maybe he has not gauged the simultaneous celebrations in response to his arrival, to the prospect of him reneging on his promise to never write about India again, it is only because camera flashlights can be somewhat blinding.
