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A Private Affair

© Mrinal Bose

Let me confess: I’m a great fan of Salman Rushdie, and love to read all the tidbits of the great writer’s private life. So I haven’t missed out on his recent split with girlfriend Padma Lakshmi, and his subsequent advances to Sophie Dahl, a 24-year-old model who has a talent for posing provocatively in the nude, but has recently published a novel as well.

Perhaps, nothing wrong with it. The famous and the rich have, down the ages, chased the young and beautiful women, and possessed them. Why would it be different for a writer who is known the world over, and has enough of wealth to live life like a Nawab?

Rushdie, now 53, had married and divorced as many as three times, and it was a European lady each time. I don’t know about his first wife, but both her second and third wives were very much into writing, and apparently good matches for his sensibilities. His second wife, a journalist, walked out on him out of a fear of her life in the wake of the “fatwa” pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini. In case of his third wife, a publisher and a writer, he sought divorce from her for whatever reason.

I could not care less about these things, but when he started living with Padma Lakshmi, a model, twenty years junior to him, I had to give it a thought. What the hell did he find in her except her physical beauty and, perhaps Indianness, and could he live with her too long, given their obvious gap in intellectuality among other things?

Then I came across an interview in a web magazine, in which Rushdie waxed eloquent about the new relationship. “It is nice to have somebody who understands the echoes. It gives us shorthand and the essential thing, which is the second language.” Now, with such words, who would not be convinced? Besides, the very name Padma had a ring for me. In ‘Midnight’s Children’, it was to a woman of the same name to whom Saleem Sinai recounted his unique story. You can’t say for sure that the very name had no magical influence on its creator himself. And I thought – naively enough – it might be a good idea to live with one who he fantasized about in his writing. But nevertheless, I was skeptical too.

Then came the “Fury”, another of Rushdie’s novels. Hey, it was his and her story, and how mushy, fatuous, nutty, unfermented and hugely forgettable! I knew he was in bad company, and she had cast a spell on the middle-aged writer with whatever.

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