Salman Rushdie is the author of 11 novels, which include Midnight’s Children—a totally disruptive book that eventually catalysed the postcolonial literarure with previously unknown flavours of global recognition. Rushdie became what he is with his first published work of fiction—and not surprisingly, he couldn’t surpass his own magnificent early success, even after producing ten more novels. Even with a conservative estimation, Midnight’s Children  should get the credit for levelling the playing field for Indian Writing in English (IWE)—and firming up a culture of English writing across the Indian subcontinent.

Rushdie, an old charmer but with much lesser capacity of a disrupter, comes out with an engaging work of fiction that rests on a timeless love story. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, nevertheless keeps a strong binding with history and mythology—and even compels the readers to enter the same space where things are not straight placed. With this novel too, Rushdie is kind enough to lend himself, the freedom of ‘tryst with free venturing’. Thus, the believers in his master storytelling, wouldn’t find it tough to hold their breath till the very last page of this not so thick a novel.

The story begins and ends without falling in the charm of old classical narrative, hence accordingly, Rushdie manages to retain the ‘soul of his writing’.

“In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.

Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.

Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.”

While reading these paragraphs, it would be apt to notice an explicit influence of tradition on Salman Rushdie. Effortlessly, Rushdie appears hands on in the use of subtle details, filled with satire and absurdity. Equally well, he captures the full-scale of cunningness and folly—  rivalries’ and betrayal—Kismet and Karma—ecstasy and absolution.  

Although, the old readers of Rushdie will not be surprised for his return to basics—for depicting ‘age-old conflicts’. Lately, this great author who once confessed to being an ‘urban soul’—and stayed in forced exile, actually never went far from  leaning towards his roots, Solan in Himachal Pradesh of India. Rushdie is a grounded person inside; his finest literary contributions confirm it.

Like Rushdie himself, the central character of his new novel is at term with odds—without proper stake in the mess.  He is Geronimo Manezes, a Mumbai-born gardener fated to live in New York with easy dreams, whose fulfilments were not the part of that ‘easiness’. This comes at the cost of his livelihood, which already stays on a tenuous hold. At first he appears a victim of ‘strangeness’—a grown up urban phenomenon in a largely unequal global world. Thus, his case is not unique—and he rather exemplifies the predicaments of scores of people, without urgency to know about their actual beingness.

The novel progresses with taking into account the tragedies, which are not bereft of human life. Added to that, Rushdie has much to look on rancorous spirits. Hence, he finds characters in four evil jinn— Zabardast, Zumurrud, Ra’im Blood-drinker and Shining Ruby— and they are placed distant from fairyland, are hell bent on wrecking the self-indulged momentums of the 21st century.

At the heart of the novel, the story starts with a living philosopher of the 12th century Arab, Ibn Rush or Averroes—the charmer of Dunia, a princess of the jinn separated from the fairytale world by her veil.

The come in union to outline a half-human and half-jinn progeny—the ‘Rushdi’, whose successors in due course of time helm to form an army under ‘Dunia’ to wage a war to herself and overpowering humanity to change its fundamentals.

This army comes into force as ‘strangeness’ stays the strongest overwhelming factor wherever the human and evil spirits have room to stay. At such peak of ‘strangeness’, Geronimo Manezes, makes his way out and insist to stay half-inch above the ground—and Jimmy Kapoor, primarily a comic-book artist, gets his creations come to life.

Among the wonderful plots Rushdie has on his name is ‘depiction of the war’—he always succeeds to make it a confrontation playing out at both physical and ideological level. Like him, few can correlate the ‘nature of reality’ with two sets of target crowd—humans and evils. Rushdie had written The Satanic Verses in late 1980’s, allowed himself to be troubled by the humans who were extremely divided about the nature of reality and the applications of ‘reason’. But yet he has attempted once again to mirror the parallel worlds of humans and jinns—self-consumed and at loss for unknown causes.

Precisely, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights maintains Rushdie’s class act with writing and overwhelming the thought processes. Well argued, well attempted—this one is among the most readable works of Salman Rushdie.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, keeps a strong binding with history and mythology—and even compels the readers to enter a space where things are not straight placed

The author is a New Delhi based journalist and literary critic, he tweets @atul_mdb