Book review | Facing mortality: Inside Salman Rushdie’s dark, reflective 'The Eleventh Hour'

The shadow of death stalks all, leaves none untouched. It is primal, almost involuntary, like a scream, and gasping for breath when smothered. In the hands of an alchemist, it reaches a state of immortality, a purer form of gold. When the maestro Salman Rushdie ponders death in The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories, the result is difficult to describe: tear-inducing, inward-looking and profound. It isn’t easy to look death in the eye unflinching, with tenderness and trepidation, agony and ache. Perhaps Rushdie’s own flirtation with it in the guise of a madman’s attack with a knife, then the slow recuperation offered him ample time to rehearse, research and simmer.

“That is better than looking, as you do, like a man who is still waiting to live.” Fittingly set in Chennai, ‘South’ features two men in their sunset era, known only as Senior and Junior V. With a rare economy of words, the author creates resonances which present a hologram of their reality: squabbles, a dwindling outer set of friends, and inevitably awaiting death. “… the two old men struggled to their feet and lurched out onto their adjacent verandas, emerging at the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in faithful coincidences, unable to escape the consequences of chance.”

The juxtaposition of a private tragedy with the tsunami’s after effects in Chennai tells of the public devastation set against a death by accident, of an entire fishermen’s village being swept away, of a city in shock and grief, of a populace changed forever by the present’s devastation. “Death and life were just adjacent verandas. Senior stood on one of them as he always had, and on the other, continuing the tradition of many years, was junior, his shadow, his namesake, arguing.”

Chandni Contractor is ‘The Musician of Kahani’, prodigiously talented. Blessed with a Steinway, she travels the world for her concerts and makes the mistake of falling in love with Majnoo Ferdaus, whose family is super-rich and blind to culture in any form. “Love lands where it lands and doesn’t ask for explanations. Explanations come from the world of rationality, and love is unreasonable.” The vast differences between the families lie at the heart of the story; that art is magic in its own right, and people who do not believe must be or deserve to be destroyed, figuratively or not. In this story, a thinly-veiled Osho-like figure meets his downfall as he clashes with Chandni’s music. This is a bombastic Bombay phillum-style fantasy that frankly quite loses the plot.

As a full scholarship student from India, Rosa is quite cowed down by the dynamics of her university with its Japanese, African, Thai and Jamaican students, the learning on display and the rigour. She unexpectedly finds an unusual friend; mournful, maybe morose. “When the honorary fellow SM Arthur woke up in his darken college bedroom, he was dead, but at first that didn’t seem to change anything. All was familiar: his curved-back “boat bed”, the cough drops and the assortment of morning medications, all in their place on the bedside table beside a small black notebook, the “dream diary” in which he wrote down the sentences that sometimes came into his sleeping mind instead of images.”

This is the ghost of Simon Merlyn Arthur, Indophile and a man who tried but could not make it as an author. And she is entrusted with the task of sorting out the notes he left behind. As she sorts through his unfinished writing, she finds dozens of unfinished works, some of promise. “An apocalyptic vision (that is, a fragment of one) in which Eden appeared at the end of time, rather than the beginning: The Garden at the End of the World. Adam and Eve stood naked in the garden and watched the death of the universe.” Rosa eventually serves as a translator, a bridge between the living and the dead, for an important conversation Merlyn must have with Lord Emmemm, which leads to the lord’s confession on TV that homophobia drove him to chemically tweak the mind of a genius and cause him to be trapped in mediocrity.

The final story is of an old man who waits for language to show up at the piazza, an author’s truest friend and mortal enemy. Three of the stories seem to have been destined to be full novels, stop at novella length and then are reframed as long short stories; perhaps a glitch in the publishing process. Entertaining as these stories are, they seem incomplete, almost abrupt, like death itself. Death here is not a grisly event but a transformation of a soul’s well-lived journey. The stories, despite their wandering, are a slow-burn of a kind that makes the reader long for respite while yearning for one more chance at life.