Salman Rushdie’s Resolve to Stay Normal

It was a weekday in Manhattan in 2011, and some of us were having dinner at a restaurant on Lexington Avenue called National. Across the room, they sat on a bench and chatted with a woman while they ate their meal Salman Rushdie.

The extraordinary thing about this moment was its seeming ordinaryness. In 1989, Mr Rushdie’s prospects for long life had been widely regarded as unpromising. A fatwa – an edict – had been issued by Iran against the author Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and a multimillion-dollar bounty had been placed on his head. He was forced into hiding, although he reportedly objected to the word – he felt there really was no hiding in a situation like his.