The Boy Who Spoke Elvish
Seventeen Is A Difficult Age To Be For Anyone.
Nov 05, 2012
Even the numeral is awkward, without the relatively rounded comfort of an 18 or 16. Because of what life has dealt them, 17 is more difficult for some people than for others. And so it must have seemed for Salman Rushdie in 1964. He’d been taken out of Bombay’s Cathedral School, where he was something of a star, and sent off to boarding school at Rugby, where he faced racism, bad food, worse weather, bullying and loneliness. As he would later recall, the problem was he was “foreign, clever and bad at games”; you could be two out of the three and get away with it, but he, unfortunately, was all three.
To make matters worse, his father, a well-to-do Bombay businessman, with interests in cloth and leather, finally made the difficult decision to migrate to Pakistan. If the dislocation was hard for the family, it was perhaps more so for the sensitive Salman, who, as a result, discovered for himself the truth of Tom Wolfe’s crushing line: “You can never go home again”. Now there was no going back to the old house with the pepper-pots, off Warden Road; to his old childhood friends, the only ones he ever had; to Bombelli’s cafe, Rhythm House and the Metro cinema. He had lost them all forever. But it is often the most difficult of times that define our personal growth. And it was these experiences that, doubtless, helped form the powerful themes of disruption, connection and migration between East and West that would mark Rushdie’s great writings of the future.
At Rugby, Rushdie came under the influence of inspirational teachers, cast in the Dead Poets’ Society mould, who encouraged his intellectual growth. He was also exposed to new cultural influences, like the music of Bob Dylan, with its extraordinarily surreal lyrics, and The Lord of The Rings (a cult even in those days). Rushdie became so obsessed with Tolkien that he says he neglected his studies and ultimately learned to even speak Elvish reasonably fluently. Tolkien’s fantasies obviously stoked the creative imagination Rushdie had been known for from his childhood, when he thought up fantasy stories and invented bizarre schoolboy games. At age 17, Rushdie was also incubating one of his earliest pieces of serious fiction, titled Terminal Report, that he would write shortly after. It dealt with racism and, rediscovering it many years later, he says he found it “incredibly sophisticated”: that teenaged boy somehow seemed to know everything the older Rushdie knew, except he knew it more painfully, because it had just happened to him.
Soon, Rushdie would turn 18, pass out of Rugby and go on to Cambridge, where, defying his father, who wanted him to study something “useful” like Economics, he insisted on studying history. Which is how, one day, he stumbled upon the infamous Satanic verses.
