'Arrogant, me? I'm nice'

Salman Rushdie has emerged from his ordeal a 'humble' man. He talks to JAN MOIR about his marriages, the missing years and his next work.

MEETING Salman Rushdie today, 16 months after the Iranian Government publicly dissociated itself from the fatwa, you can still glimpse traces of the singular weirdness that has marked his life for the past 11 years.

At the reception desk in the offices of his London publisher, his name is not spoken aloud, even though there is no one around to overhear. "The party you are meeting has already arrived," whispers the clerk, although Rushdie's signature is missing from the security book that all visitors must sign.

After a few telephone calls, instructions are issued to proceed to the boardroom to "await the gentleman". I feel as if I am about to have lunch with a ghost.

Up on the sixth floor, I admire the view - appropriately, straight across to the M16 building on the south bank of the Thames - and hardly notice that Salman Rushdie has appeared, soundlessly, by my side, muffled up in a winter coat and scarf, with a knapsack slung boyishly over his shoulder. He peels off a few layers to reveal an Armani suit and a navy Gap T-shirt; an outfit that makes him look prosperous and groovy, like a chief executive on dress-down Friday.

He still has that wiry explosion of patchily dispersed hair but, following an operation last year to correct his ptosis - a medical condition that causes the eyelids to droop - the hooded stare, which often made him appear so darkly sinister, has vanished, supplanted by a new, twinkly gleam.

Rushdie has come out from the shadows in more ways than one and seems thoroughly amiable and gracious, not at all the spooky, arrogant fugitive of popular legend.

"Oh, I am sick of being called arrogant," he cries. "What am I supposed to be, Mother Teresa? Where is it written that novelists have to walk around in sackcloth, hmmm? I am like this and if you do not like it," he adds, "so what?"

Making a beeline for a platter of sandwiches, he loads up a paper plate and encourages me to do the same. Water is poured, napkins are found, then Rushdie settles himself in a chair which, I note with surprise, positions him with his back to the door.

In the corridor outside, however, a Special Branch officer hovers. Despite the fact that the death sentence and the œ1.5 million bounty on his head were lifted in 1998, Rushdie must still have a sentinel to accompany him on public outings, a restriction he finds chafing, although there are now far fewer constraints on his movements and there is "more or less nothing" that he cannot do.

"I hope it will not last for much longer. I will feel really pleased when there is no need for protection any more," he says, then sinks his teeth into a chicken sandwich.

Rushdie slipped off the edge of the world on Valentine's Day in 1989, after Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Muslims across the world were enraged - or, more accurately, encouraged to be enraged - by passages in the book that appeared to defame Islam, the Prophet and the Koran.

Never mind that the offending images were the nightmares of a character who was going mad anyway: the dogs were unleashed and would not be kennelled again until Foreign Secretary Robin Cook began to put pressure on Teheran in the summer of 1998. The Blair Government, Rushdie feels, made a more energetic effort to secure his freedom than its predecessor ever did.

"I do not think this would have happened to Beryl Bainbridge," he says. "In certain sectors of England, there was a prejudice because I am an immigrant. People thought: he comes over here, gets in trouble with his own kind, he is not grateful, he does not say sorry ..."

He trails off, his combative energy draining away. These days, he is more disposed to let the troubled water flow under the bridge.

"I do not want to spend the rest of my life feeling embittered, wanting to get even. I do not want to let it wreck me."

But you do feel bitter?

"I often feel very angry, but I kind of cannot be bothered. I have other things to do," he shrugs.

When Rushdie was whisked off in an armourplated Range Rover with darkened windows, he all but disappeared from public view for many years. In the beginning, he was constantly on the move with his round-the-clock protection team. His marriage to his second wife - the American novelist Marianne Wiggins - was an early casualty.

The couple had been having problems before the fatwa began and they split within five months. Famously, she talked with contempt of the fact that her husband would do "anything to save his life". So? Wouldn't we all? "Oh, she was always giving interviews saying what a bastard I was. That marriage was the biggest mistake I ever made," he says.

Throughout his bizarre exile, Rushdie lived in many areas of England, Wales and Scotland - renting homes in both rural and urban locations. Each brought its own problems: in cities, it was difficult to get in and out of houses without being noticed; in the countryside, everyone is just so nosey.

"Villagers know everything that is going on in their area," he says. Friends and family who visited were subjected to elaborate security checks; followed to make sure they were not being tailed, searched and then accompanied into Rushdie's presence.

"Some things were taken away that can never be returned," he says. "It was difficult to see my son. And when I did, he would ask me why I could not go out and kick a football around a park with him like the other dads. It kind of broke my heart."

He asserts that he never truly lived in fear of being assassinated - "I just felt constrained, like walking around in lead boots" - but was routinely informed when Iranian agents were arrested and deported.

"I kept being told that there were people arriving in the country with bombs, which there evidently were. I was certainly told there were attempts under way to kill me on several occasions."

Although there was no genuine threat from British based Muslims or freelance crackpots - "they existed only in the public mind" - it did become clear that the real enemy was, in fact, deadly serious. The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was murdered, the Italian translator was stabbed and the Norwegian publisher was lucky to survive being shot in the back several times.

When Rushdie talks about those terrible, early days now, a fragmented picture emerges of frantic responses and deep uncertainty on all sides. At one stage, he was encouraged to convert to the Muslim faith, a political and placatory move that backfired badly.

"I am not a religious person and never was. Shouldn't have said so. Everyone saw through it straight away. But it was very easy to get confused, especially at that time of maximum stress, doubt and grief. It was the worst step I made, and I regret it."

Hostile relations with his minders were another initial source of frustration and he recalls a nuclear row when his children's book - Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, written for his son as a way of maintaining contact - was given a Writers' Guild award in 1991. Against the wishes of his Special Branch officer, Rushdie wanted to attend the ceremony to collect the prize himself.

"And he was personally rude to me. He said that I was endangering the citizens of London for reasons of my own desire for self aggrandisement," Rushdie snorts, still bristling slightly at the memory. I am so taken aback by Rushdie's vehement reaction - for a moment he looks like an indignant owl who has flown into a tree - that it is only later that I think perhaps the policeman had a point.

But it has not been all bad. Throughout his fugitive days, he has been guarded by more than 60 officers and become fond of many of them. One, he tells me proudly, has even left the security services and is now finishing a graduate degree in post-colonial literature at London University.

"I turned him on to that. I have sold an enormous amount of books to Scotland Yard. Maybe I should open up a shop right in their building," he says, pleased.

In one of their loonier moments, the protection team suggested that perhaps Rushdie should try out some disguises. They introduced him to a wigmaker who promised to fashion a hairpiece that would transform his appearance so much that even his best friends would not recognise him. "Really?" said Rushdie, intrigued.

When the toupee was finished, painstakingly dyed to match his own hair colour, he decided to take it for an outing. So off he went to Harrods, where he stepped out of the car and was instantly confronted with gales of laughter from passers-by. "There's that Rushdie in a wig," shouted one. "Like the rug, Salman," bellowed another.

"It was so ludicrous that I just took it off and threw it away. And that was the end of the disguises," he says.

It is hardly a surprise that Hollywood directors have expressed interest in making a film of Rushdie's remarkable escapades, an experience the author himself once described as the hottest literary story of the century. One recent inquiry came from Milos Forman - the director who made One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - who wants to make a movie based on the author's life.

Although he has long harboured an ambition to be an actor himself, Rushdie was not keen. "I just thought: no thanks. I do not want that. I would be embarrassed by it. If someone wants to make a film in 100 years' time, that is fine, but not now. I am fed up of being a front-page freak show, it is not a particularly attractive thing to be. And I am not such an egomaniac that I want more of it."

For much the same reasons, he has shelved plans to write a non- fiction account of his experiences during the years when the death decree was in force, based on a diary he has been keeping.

"I got really bored with that idea. I have actually had 10 years stuck in this mess and I do not want to stick myself back into it for the couple of years it would take to write the book. Do I want to hang the fatwa around my neck again? I do not think I do."

* * *

SO instead of tormenting himself over the past, Rushdie's wide open eyes are fixed on the future. He is very excited about his current work, a four-volume, non-sequential project with no recurring characters but which is thematically linked. The first and fourth novels will be contemporary, the second is a medieval tale set in renaissance Florence and the third will be a futuristic fantasy.

After the sprawling length of his most recent novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie is determined to keep these new books under 300 pages apiece. "If I do not, I am going to kill myself," he says, with a total lack of irony.

He already knows that the first novel will be called Repentance - inspired by the (untrue) story that Sirhan Sirhan murdered Robert Kennedy because he misunderstood what Kennedy had said in a speech about Palestine. Rushdie is tantalised by the notion that one human being could kill another because of his imperfect control of that man's language. Perhaps this has echoes of what happened to him - the imperfect interpretation of The Satanic Verses - although he is not so sure.

"The trouble with what happened to me," he says, "is that it is so large in people's minds that you can almost always find a connection. The link is probably there, but that is not the point."

Remarkably, Salman Rushdie has emerged from the darkness with his powerful sense of self intact, though a distinct mellowness has replaced the scratchy edges of before. He is not above the odd acidic comment - he made a bitchy little remark about writer Arundhati Roy during our conversation - but seems essentially a humane and humorous man.

He has many female friends - always an encouraging sign in a man - and numbers Mariella Frostrup, Nigella Lawson and Marie Helvin among his inner circle. In fact, it was a photograph of Rushdie dancing with Lawson at a party to launch a new Martin Amis novel that ignited some of the fiercest criticism during the fatwa.

"Clearly, I was not supposed to be enjoying myself, I was supposed to stand in a corner and hide. My view was: 'Sorry, too bad'," he says. "And anyway, when Nigella asks you to dance, you say yes."

He has his vanities, however, and remains quite astoundingly thin-skinned. This, he says, stems from his wish always to "want and need everybody to like me".

Among the many who really do like him are his 21-year-old son from his first marriage to Clarissa Luard, and his wife, Elizabeth West, whom he married in New York in the summer of 1998 and with whom he has a two-year-old son, Milan. They met in 1990 and West, who works in publishing, co-operated with Rushdie on an anthology of Indian writing a few years later; he credits her with being his most important influence during the fatwa. "She saved my life," he says. "In a time of bad luck, she was my good luck. Somehow, we stumbled through it together."

All Salman's friends say that he has emerged from his experiences a much more agreeable person and he, somewhat immodestly, tends to agree. "I am certainly less excitable than I used to be. I used to wave my arms about a lot more. Yes, I am incredibly nice now, but I was very nice then, too, you know. But not arrogant. Never arrogant. Oh, I do hate that word."

So, what word would he choose? He strokes his beard and thinks for a long time. "Humble," he says, finally - then has a good laugh to himself.

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