Writer : Salman Rushdie Direction : Naseeruddin Shah and Arghya Lahiri Cast : Naseeruddin Shah, Malaika Choudhury, Sahir Mehta/Vijay Telani, Kenny Desai, Heeba Shah, Vikram Kochhar and others
27 SECONDS Review
"Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist," wrote Salman Rushdie in his book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)
That lies at the core of 27 SECONDS, the play based on the book, directed by Naseeruddin Shah with Arghya Lahiri; the actor playing the role of Rushdie with complete empathy.
On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was about to deliver a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Suddenly, a figure dressed in black charged down the aisle. In 27 seconds, an assailant armed with a knife plunged the blade into Rushdie fifteen times, wounding him severely and blinding his right eye.
The incident was as shocking as it was unexpected. Thirty-three years earlier, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa condemning the celebrated writer to death for his book, The Satanic Verses, which was perceived to have insulted Islam. There were worldwide protests against the book, lives were lost and the concept of freedom of expression, that is the bedrock of any democratic society, came under threat. The risk of assassination trailed Rushie for years, forcing him to live under police protection.
After so much time had elapsed, and it seemed as if the danger to his life had receded, the writer lived a normal life in New York, without that lingering fear. The attack seemed to state that a fatwa can be carried out anywhere, at any time.
The book, and the play, detail the 74-year-old Rushdie’s painful recovery and will to live. His wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths (played by Malaika Choudhury) stood by him during the traumatic period, also recording his arduous struggle, which were part of a Alex Gibney’s documentary, on this incident.
Rushdie wrote Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder in (2024), with honesty, clarity and, considering the painful time, humour. It is a difficult book to adapt for the stage, but with an actor like Shah, willing to accept the challenge, the production does bring out the essence of what Rushdie conveys through the book.
A backlit screen uses shadow play to portray the attack and other scenes – including the apt and amusing visual from Georges Melies’s animation film, A Trip To The Moon, in which a bullet-shaped space capsule pierces the eye of the moon.
The hospital ward, the surgeries, and the grueling physiotherapy, Rushdie documents it all without flinching, and Shah plays this part altering his voice and gait to portray the excruciating process of healing and the nightmare of having his right eyelid sewn shut. Yet, he says, with dry wit, "Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader: if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut… avoid it. It really, really hurts."
He refuses to name the assailant, referring to him as just ‘A’ (for Assailant, Would-Be Assassin, or Asinine) but imagines conversations with the man in prison.The life of the 24-year-old man has the banality of ignorance and zealotry—he has not even read the book for which he was willing to kill a man.
While A stews alone in a prison cell, Rushdie’s imagination can roam over a wondrous universe made of words. In the confrontation he conjures up in his mind, Rushie tells the young man that he has lived a life devoid of art, music, romance, or skepticism. "You could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh." He does not return hate with rage, but with pity.
The book and its message of liberal humanism obviously resonated with Shah, who is known for not mincing words, when it comes to the dangerous foolishness of fundamentalism. He gives life to Rushdie’s ideas on stage, so that the other actors, competent as they are, remain in the shade of his brilliance.
In the end, as Rushdie writes and Shah says with conviction, love and art endure. Nobody remembers the name of A, but Salman Rushdie’s words will live forever. To quote him, "A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death."
Deepa Gahlot is a journalist, columnist, author and curator. Some of her writings are on deepagahlot.com
