SEVEN THINGS WE LEARNT FROM SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MEMOIR ‘KNIFE’

Rushdie has macular degeneration in his remaining eye and fears going blind

The author says his greatest fear is blindness, and having lost one eye in the attack, he fears losing sight in the other.

He has macular degeneration in his left eye, a condition of the retina that can lead to loss of vision, and has been receiving treatment for it for several years.

Rushdie has to have injections into the eye once a month and says that his condition is currently stable, but that if he loses his sight altogether he will be left in his personal version of Room 101, the torture chamber in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in which people are subjected to the thing they fear most.

He saw his attacker coming but did not try to run away

Rushie says he saw the masked knifeman coming towards him and stood up, “transfixed” as he watched him approach “hard and low”.

For reasons he cannot explain, he made no attempt to run away or fight him off, “I just stood there like a pinata and let him smash me.”

His reflection on what happened is that when an attack comes out of the blue, “fear, panic, paralysis take over from rational thought” and in the presence of violence “our minds no longer know how to work”.

His wife was told he was not going to make it

Rushdie’s wife Eliza was seven hours’ drive away in New York City at the time of the attack, and was told on the phone her husband was “not going to make it”. Doctors who assessed him in hospital admitted later that they did not think they could save him.

Eliza managed to charter a private aircraft at a cost of more than $20,000 to get to the hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where teams of surgeons spent eight hours working on different parts of his body simultaneously to save his life.

He was stabbed 15 times

For the first time, Rushdie reveals the full extent of his injuries, inflicted by 15 stab wounds during the attack. He was stabbed in the neck, right eye, left hand, liver, abdomen, face, forehead, cheeks, mouth and chest.

Part of his small intestine had to be removed, he was blinded in his right eye, and if the blade had penetrated any further it would have entered his brain.

After two years of physiotherapy, his left hand is functional again, though he still has no feeling in the middle two fingers. He also had to have stitches in his tongue, which he bit as he fell to the ground.

Rushdie had a premonition of the attack and almost cancelled his appearance at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state

Two days before the attack, Rushdie had a nightmare about being in a gladiatorial arena where a man was stabbing him with a spear. He was thrashing around in bed and was so shaken that he told his wife Eliza he wanted to cancel the lecture he was due to deliver.

In the end he decided he was being irrational, and he also needed the speaking fee to pay for the air conditioning to be replaced in his apartment.

He is aware of six other assassination plots against him

In the years following the fatwa placed on him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, which put a $3million bounty on his head, Rushdie was informed of six assassination plots.

In August 1989 a would-be assassin using the alias Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh blew himself up by accident in a London hotel.

Mazeh was priming a bomb inside a book in his room at the Beverley House Hotel in Paddington, which destroyed two floors of the building.

A Lebanese group later said he died preparing an attack “on the apostate Rushdie” and a memorial to him in Tehran describes him as “the first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie”.

He has around-the-clock protection in the UK

He makes his own security arrangements when at home in New York, but, when he visits his family in Britain, Rushdie is given 24-hour protection by the Metropolitan Police.