Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

The Salman Effect

A new book by Salman Rushie is always reason to celebrate, even though he has never managed to surpass the creative, critical and commercial success of Midnight’s Children.  After that, he has been more in the news over the fatwa following The Satanic Verses, and the Page 3 kind of gossip about his girlfriends.

If every he does is compared to Midnight’s Children, then of course, nothing will ever measure up, but his latest, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights has that blend of fable, fantasy, mythology, social comment and sheer mischief that makes his work so exciting to read, even it is somewhat laborious to go through as this one it and almost impossible to summarise.  The suggestion is, not to read it on one go, but savour it s few pages at a time, and enjoy the prose, the play on words, the slow, unfolding process of a writer enjoying his work.

There is the now familiar magic realism, the love story of a female jinn or jinia called Dunia and a philosopher called Ibn Rushd, that spans several generations and two worlds, one inhabited by humans and the other by jinns.  The jinn universe is peaceful and happy, where the favourite pastime is sex;  humans are blessed (or cursed) with the ability to feel emotion, so are as capable of love as hate and violence.

Ibn Rushd’s rival is Ghazali who foments trouble in the name of religion, and they fight even after death; while they try to win arguments as their bodies disintegrate in their graves, four evil jinn Zabardast, Zumurrud, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, are causing mayhem on Earth and only Dunia can stop them.

Dunia gives birth to numerous offspring and their descendants (the Rushdi—no modesty here!) populate Earth as normal human beings, except that they have no earlobes, and have some hidden powers that they may be unaware of—like the foundling who can spot corruption (pity there’s not more of her).  When jinns enter the human world through a slit in the universe, there is chaos—one such storm leaves a placid gardener Geronimo Manezes floating a few inches above the ground.  (Geronimo is from Bandra, Mumbai, which makes Rushdie come up with some sharp observations about the city where he spent some years). Or Jimmy Kapoor, the Indian-American graphic designer who has created a superhero called Natraj Hero, finding a terrifying apparition, emerging out of a wormhole into his bedroom.

It’s an Arabian Nights (two years eight months and twenty-eight nights adds up to 1,001 nights) meets Bollywood meets graphic novel kind of vivid story telling that embraces the bizarre and leaves the reader to understand what remains unsaid, or make sense of the bizarre goings-on.  The novel is funny, absurd, provocative, outrageous and totally unpredictable…which is the least one can expect from Rushdie

Two Years Eight Months And Twenty-Eight Nights
By: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 304