HOME ALONE: Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie moves with ease through the studied cool and white leather chic of his fashionable west London club. In his jerkin and grey trousers, Rushdie looks like he may have come to fix the fridge or go over the accounts with the restaurant manager, but he has been a member here for years, even if his battered shoes are probably older than most of the clientele.

Fresh from a lunch of grilled courgettes and roast lamb at the River Café, Rushdie still has the taint of Rosso di Montalcino on his breath and a spark of fire in his well-fed belly.

In recent weeks, he has fallen out with Germaine Greer over her support for the Bengali traders who wish to ban the filming of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane. The traders who work there are aggrieved by Ali’s depiction of the area, saying they want to protect the reputation of Britain’s best-known Asian street.

“What people don’t often say about Germaine Greer is that she is barking mad. She is an idiot. The idea that she would take the opinion of half a dozen 70-year-old men is moronic,” says Rushdie, who has feuded with Greer before. “She’s mad, and her determination to be out of step leads her into batty positions. We just watch her, and wonder why.”

Rushdie has never forgiven Greer for her lack of support during the fatwa that was imposed on him by Iranian religious leaders after the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. “She attacked me in public at the time of the fatwa in the same kind of batty language as she has attacked Monica Ali. She may not wish to remember it, but that is what she did. I noticed it and I minded. Germaine thinks her actions have no consequences, but unfortunately they do.”

Attracting the censure of famous feminist authors seems to be an occupational hazard for Rushdie these days. Recently, Fay Weldon wrote that Rushdie had “made his home among the poseurs”, which seems a harsh judgment to make on someone forced to live his life in the shadows for so long, even if we all know exactly what she means.

Across the rooftops, you can just about see the home Rushdie shares with his wife, the actress Padma Lakshmi, in a spot that is so much a part of the Notting Hill scene that enterprising locals set up a jerk chicken stall in his front doorway during the annual carnival. Can it get any more teeth-achingly trendy? Yes, the clothes designer Alice Temperley lives next door, and has become a close friend.

Salman Rushdie with his wife Padma Lakshmi

So Rushdie’s in the groovy club (in more ways than one), and he likes to come for coffee with his chum Helen Fielding when she visits from California, or perhaps spend time gossiping with twinkling, one-name-only girlfriends such as Kylie and Dannii, Nigella and Mariella. He thinks he gets on so well with women because he grew up with three sisters, but his eager coterie of glittering gal pals suggests that it’s got to be something more than that.

One thing that really gets him going is the odd but pervasive notion of Rushdie as a party dude to reckon with. While the reality may be very different, the enduring public perception of the post-fatwa Salman is of a gyrating daddio grooving away on dance floors across the capital and turning up to the opening of an envelope. What does he say to that?

“Oh go and look in your nearest envelope! You will not find me in it. I do not have a wardrobe full of lamé clothes at home, you know. I spend most of my life doing serious things. There are no shocks left to learn about me. In fact,” he says, warming to his theme, “the problem with my life is that you know the whole f—ing thing! You know all the bits that are true. Even the bits that are not true, you think you know those, too.”

Like what?

“Like disco boy. You know. I am not a disco boy. I am not some Travolta-like party animal who’s always on the dance floor. I like to dance with my wife. Gee, so what? How shallow can you get?”

After a five-year courtship, Rushdie and the gorgeous Lakshmi married in 2004 and he today professes himself to be both a lucky man and a changed one.

“I think I have always been mellow, but it is certainly true that she has made me mellower, even if she tells me I am still too intense. Her big criticism of me is that I am too intense and that I need to chill. Good advice,” he nods. “But she has made me happy and that’s nice. That has all kinds of ripple effect in life.”

Lakshmi is Rushdie’s fourth and last wife — “There’s no way I am going through it again” — and, at 32, is 27 years younger than him.

According to Rushdie, the age difference is becoming more, not less, apparent as time goes by and he finds himself mourning the fact that his young wife believes many of the films and books he likes are “ancient history” and also that his hero Bob Dylan cannot sing. “It is terrible. She is wrong, of course. I mean, she likes hip hop. We just listen to our music in different rooms.”

At the moment, they seem to be spending much of their time in different countries, as Lakshmi’s career as an actress, model and television cook expands across continents with dizzying speed and Rushdie’s more sedentary life as a writer keeps him chained to his desk.

The couple have homes in both London and New York and, here, Rushdie is currently working on a new novel which he has planned for a long time — “a fantasia or shaggy dog story which connects Renaissance Florence with 16th century India” — while Lakshmi is in Los Angeles making a television series. The couple have been together for only three weeks in the last four months.

“I do miss her, it is the hardest thing because the person you want to talk to is the person who is not there. But at the same time I am very proud of her, she is a fantastic, unusual, brilliant woman, just coming into her own. In the last couple of years, everything has opened out for her.”

Does he worry about other men, or get jealous?

“Yes! But she is more jealous than me. With much less reason! Truthfully, we both trust each other very deeply. If we didn’t, it wouldn’t work.”

Still, his resolutely domestic placement seems an odd reversal of roles, particularly for an ego-driven writer such as he, so long used to being the feted, centre of attention. Even more poignantly, Rushdie — who has two sons from previous marriages — is now the partner who would like to start a family while his wife is the one who wants to wait.

“Oh, yes. Padma wants children, but she does not want them now because she is absurdly busy. She is a woman for whom work is very important and has great aspirations in all kinds of things. So she is the one who says she is not ready. I don’t mind. Any time for me. I love my children and the idea of having another one is not a problem.”

Rushdie’s journey through life to get to this happy point has been an incredible one — “interesting, but bumpier than I would have liked”. The worst time of all, says Rushdie, was the first 18 months following the fatwa when he lost focus and became incredibly depressed.

“I didn’t know how to behave, I didn’t know what was good or bad. I really felt very bewildered. I had spent five years of my life writing the book (Satanic Verses) and that was what I got in return for it? At the time I thought, what kind of deal is this? I thought I would go and be a bus conductor, it would be more rewarding work. I felt very black.”

Rushdie’s way back to literature and to life was writing a book for his son — Haroun and the Sea of Stories — and refusing to be diminished by his ordeal. “I discovered in myself a kind of obstinacy. I thought, f—you. And became determined to continue,” he says.

It has not escaped his attention that living under a fundamentalist threat was once a solo occupation for him. Now we all are.

“That’s true,” he says cheerfully. “And I think we all are in the end making the same choice that I made all those years ago which was, you just have to get on with your life. You know, in the end, that is all you can do.”

©The Daily Telegraph