It was a weeknight in Manhattan in 2011, and some of us had been out to dinner at a restaurant on Lexington Avenue referred to as the Nationwide. Throughout the room, sitting in a banquette speaking with a lady as that they had their meal, was Salman Rushdie.
The extraordinary factor concerning the second was its seeming ordinariness. In 1989, Mr. Rushdie’s prospects for an extended life had been extensively assumed to not be auspicious. A fatwa—an edict—had been issued in opposition to the writer by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and a multimillion-dollar bounty had been positioned on his head. He was compelled into hiding, though he was stated to object to that phrase—he felt there was actually no hiding place in a scenario like his.
