Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

by Salman Rushdie

  From the outset I made it clear to Alan Yentob and the original producer, Kevin Loader, that I would prefer not to write the adaptation myself. I had already spent years of my life writing Midnight’s Children, and the idea of doing it all over again was both daunting and unappealing. It would feel, to borrow Arundhati Roy’s memorable condemnation of the act of rewriting, “like breathing the same breath twice.” Besides, I had no experience of writing large-scale television drama. What we needed, or so I argued, was a television professional who would be sympathetic to my book but able to reshape it to fit the very different medium it was now preparing to enter. We needed, in short, an expert translator.

  We first approached the highly regarded Andrew Davies, who re-read Midnight’s Children, thought about it for a while, but eventually turned us down, saying that while he was an admirer of the novel he didn’t have enough of a feel for India to be confident of success. Then Kevin Loader proposed Ken Taylor, the adapter of Granada TV’s The Jewel in the Crown. I readily agreed to the suggestion. I was not an admirer of Paul Scott’s so-called Raj Quartet but had thought the TV adaptation, with its high production values, brilliant acting, and finely crafted scripts, to be a marked improvement on the original. And, of course, as a result of his work on Jewel, Ken knew a good deal about India.

  At our first meeting, Ken, while evidently attracted to the project, expressed worries about the nature of the text to be adapted. Television drama has long been dominated by naturalism, and Ken’s own inclinations and dramatic instincts were strongly naturalistic. How, then, was he to approach a novel with such a high content of surreal and fabulistic material? What was he to make of hypersensitive noses and lethal knees, optimism diseases and decaying ghosts, humming men and levitating soothsayers, telepaths and witches and one thousand and one magic children, indeed of the novel’s central conceit, that Saleem Sinai, a boy born at the instant of Indian independence, had been somehow “handcuffed to history” by the coincidence and that as a result the entire history of modern India might somehow be his fault?

  I told him that, however highly fabulated parts of the novel were, the whole was deeply rooted in the real life of the characters and the nation. Many of the apparently “magical” moments had naturalistic explanations. The soothsayer who seems to be levitating is in fact sitting cross-legged on a low shelf. Even Saleem’s “telepathic” discovery of the other “magic children” can be understood as an extreme instance of the imaginary friends invented by lonely children. Saleem’s idea that he is responsible for history is true for him, I said, but it may or may not be true for us. And all around Saleem is the stuff of real Indian history. On the novel’s first publication, Western critics tended to focus on its more fantastic elements, while Indian reviewers treated it like a history book. “I could have written your book,” a reader flatteringly told me in Bombay. “I know all that stuff.”

  Somewhat reassured, Ken agreed to undertake the task. It’s easy to be wise after the event, but I now think it was quite wrong of me to “sell” Ken this naturalistic version of my book. I suppose I thought it would allow him to pull the dramatic structure of the serial into shape, and if the scripts needed an injection of “unnaturalism,” that could be added later. Things turned out to be more complicated.

  Who would direct the scripts? Much too early to think about that, I was told; script first, director later. And would there be difficulties in gaining approval to film from the Indian government? I hoped not; after all, the novel itself had always been freely available throughout India, so what logical reason could there be for objecting to a film of it? In those early days, it was easy to shelve such matters until later.

  Ken went punctiliously to work on a seven-episode screenplay, and I went back to my own writing. In these years I was finishing The Moor’s Last Sigh, beginning The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and co-editing Mirrorwork, an anthology of Indian writing, so most of my attention was elsewhere. There followed a long phase in which Ken beavered away, Kevin Loader left the BBC, producers came and went, an Indian production company was signed up, one of its major tasks being to secure government approval; and concerns grew about how much the project was going to cost. Meanwhile, over at Channel Four, A Suitable Boy bit the dust. It’s an ill wind and so on, and there was a small ignoble feeling of relief at our end—we would no longer be competing for the same actors, the same sources of co-financing, the same audience—but we were also saddened, and chastened. The Vikram Seth cancellation was a bad omen for us, too.

  I was abroad when a director was finally signed up: Richard Spence, a young filmmaker with a reputation for visual flair. At much the same time, it was decided that seven episodes were too many; could we compress the story into five? In the end we agreed to a feature-length opener followed by four fifty-minute episodes. Two hundred ninety minutes instead of 350: a whole hour less.

  When I got back to England I met Richard and was impressed by his ideas. We talked for hours, and I began to feel that we had the makings of something exciting. Richard’s imagination would build on the solid foundations of Ken’s work.

  It soon became apparent, however, that the working relationship between Ken and Richard was deteriorating. When I heard that Richard was asking Ken to make further drastic cuts in the story line—in particular to the hero’s childhood years—I began to worry. Midnight’s Children without children? The original impulse for the novel had been to write a story out of my memories of growing up in Bombay; were we really going to make a TV version which cut all that out?

  There was a crunch meeting in Alan Yentob’s office at the BBC. For a moment it seemed as if the whole project might founder there and then. I tried to mediate between Ken and Richard. Ken was right that the childhood sequence was essential, and was in his serious way acting as the faithful guardian of my book. But Richard was right that Ken’s draft scripts needed revision, to inject exactly that quality of imagination and magic which I’d hoped the involvement of a director would add. By the end of the meeting it seemed we might have hammered out a way forward.

  But within days it became plain that Ken and Richard couldn’t work together. One of them would have to go. In Hollywood the decision would have been simple and ruthless; whoever heard of a director being fired because the writer couldn’t work with him? But this was England, and Ken had been working on the project for a long time. The BBC backed him. Richard was disappointed but graceful, and took his leave.

  By now, I had begun to worry about the scripts, too. We had lost our director, the money people at the BBC were not “green-lighting” the production, and I heard that the scripts we had were not attracting other directors or inspiring confidence in the BBC’s corridors of power. I myself was now sure that the scripts did need a lot of work, I had all sorts of ideas about how they might be revised, and Ken and I had long telephone conversations about what might be done. But the changes made were minimal. We were going nowhere fast.

  It was around this time that Alan Yentob asked me if I’d consider taking over as scriptwriter. I had begun to think this might be the only way forward, but my fondness for Ken and respect for his efforts stopped me from agreeing. Also, I would have to set aside work on my new book, and I wasn’t at all keen to do that.

  Meanwhile, Gavin Millar had expressed an interest in directing, but had radical ideas about script revisions. In a document entitled “A Modest Proposal” he offered up a series of provocative thoughts, the most extreme being his idea that we should change the narrative sequence of the story. Instead of beginning, as the novel does, with the story of the narrator’s grandparents and then parents, Gavin suggested that we should plunge into Saleem’s own story, and then tell the other tales in a series of flashbacks that went further and further back in time.

  Gavin’s note provoked in me a sort of “lightbulb moment.” I suddenly saw with great clarity how to write the scripts. I saw how to make his “Modest Proposal” work and, beyond that, how to change the architecture of the screenpl
ay into something much freer, more surrealist. (Later, I would decide to abandon Gavin’s time-scrambling ideas and go back to the novel’s original, simpler time line. I’m sure it was right to do so, but I’m also sure that Gavin’s iconoclastic intervention had freed my imagination, and without it I might never have worked out how to proceed.)

  I think that Gavin’s note caused an equal and opposite reaction in Ken. It made him feel enough was enough; it made him dig in his heels, and stand by his drafts as if they were shooting scripts. At this point I understood that if anything was ever going to happen, I would have to take over, and after the passage of so much time and effort I wasn’t prepared to let the project founder. So I agreed to do it. The moment I started work I saw that little or nothing of the existing screenplays could survive. The entire manner of the scripts would be different now, the episodes would start and finish in different places, the selection of material from the novel and the internal arc of each episode would be different. All the two versions had in common was the dialogue taken directly from the book.

  I asked the production team to make it plain to Ken that what had started as a rewrite had become an entirely new piece of work. There was no nice way of saying this, but it needed to be said. Unfortunately, the executives concerned delayed telling Ken, which meant that the human mess was eventually much worse than it need have been. Ken was hurt and angry, I was upset, our friendship was damaged, there were accusations and counter-accusations. In the end, Ken withdrew, like the dignified man he is. I only wish it had all been handled better.

  For a while I worked with Gavin, but in the end, he backed out, too, on the grounds that he didn’t have the “feel” for India that the films required. I had been writing feverishly, convinced that the scripts could be made to work, and Gavin’s withdrawal, coming after everything else, felt like a sledgehammer blow.

  All this coming and going had delayed us by over a year, but the delay did give us one lucky break. Tristram Powell, who had earlier been unavailable to direct, was now available. In 1981, when Midnight’s Children was first published, it had been Tristram who made the Arena documentary about it. He professed himself keen to make the films, but only on the basis of my new approach. I began a mad writing burst. In five weeks in November and December 1996, I finished a draft of the entire five-episode screenplay. I gave myself Christmas Day off, but otherwise was hardly ever away from my desk. As I have already mentioned, I had a great time. I was much less respectful of the original text than Ken had been. His fidelity to the novel, his sense of himself as my representative, had constrained him. Perhaps nobody would have felt free to make the kinds of changes I made so guiltlessly. Out went long sequences—the sojourn in the valley of Kif, the war in the Rann of Kutch. Out went some of the novel’s more fanciful notions (a politician who literally hummed with energy) and peripheral characters (the snake-poison expert who lives upstairs from the Sinai family). In came new devices, such as the idea of allowing the peep-show man, Lifafa Das, to introduce each episode as if it were a part of his peep show, and occasional “unnaturalist” moments at which the narrator, Saleem, remembering his past life, is able to step into the bygone moments and watch the action unfold.

  Story lines were altered to suit the requirements of episode structure and dramatic form. For example, Saleem’s visits to Pakistan were reduced and condensed, and indeed now take place at somewhat different points in the story, to avoid the problem of yo-yoing back and forth at high speed between Bombay and Karachi. Also, in the novel, Saleem’s uncle General Zulfikar is murdered by his embittered son. In the screenplay, however, it seemed absurd to introduce a different Pakistani general later in the story, at the end of the war in Bangladesh. So I kept Zulfikar alive until then, and arranged for him to be bumped off in quite a different way.

  Perhaps the most significant changes in the plot have to do with the central duo of Saleem and Shiva, the two babies who are swapped at birth and thus lead each other’s lives. In the book, Shiva never learns the truth about his parentage, and it doesn’t matter, because the reader is aware of it throughout. On the screen, however, so large a plot motif simply insists on a climactic confrontation, and so I have provided one. There is a part of me that thinks that the version of events in this screenplay is more satisfactory than the one in the novel. (At the end of the book, Saleem is not certain if Shiva is dead or alive, and continues to fear his return. In the television version, the audience is offered a resolution of greater clarity.)

  The new scripts were well received. There followed a period of several months in 1997 during which Tristram Powell and I worked on the text, refining, clarifying, adding, subtracting. Tristram was so sharp, so helpful, so full of suggestions and improvements, and so completely in tune with the novel that I was sure we had found the ideal director for the job. The two of us worked together easily, and the scripts grew tighter by the day. Even when we had to change things purely because we couldn’t afford them, we found solutions that didn’t compromise the spirit of the work. For example, all the shipboard scenes in the screenplay now take place in dock; we didn’t have the cash to go to sea, but didn’t need to. More significant, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 now happens off-camera. To my mind, the horror of this famous atrocity is actually increased by suggesting rather than showing it.

  The production’s other problems began to surface. The BBC’s bizarre bureaucracy—there were no fewer than five layers of “suits” between the producer and the controller of BBC2—made it virtually impossible to get any definite decisions. Also, it became clear, we were competing for our budget with other drama projects, notably Tom Jones. And the money the BBC was putting up was simply not going to be enough. We needed outside investors.

  We found them, in the form of an American-based ex-banker and a businessman, both of Indian origin, both fired by patriotic pride. And so, finally, the sums added up, and the long sessions in which Tristram and I worried away at the scripts had produced a screenplay which everyone involved was excited by. We did three casting read-throughs in London, and the quality of the British Asian actors we saw impressed me greatly. At the time of the original publication of Midnight’s Children, there would have been very few such actors to choose from. One generation later, we were able to audition a diverse and multi-talented throng. I was touched and moved by the actors’ feelings for my novel, and their professional excitement at reading for roles other than the usual corner-shop Patels or hospital orderlies that came their way. The only snag we encountered was that some of the younger actors, born and raised in Britain, had difficulty pronouncing Indian names and phrases!

  Not all the parts were cast in this way. Some of the senior Indian actors—Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth—were approached and offered their choice of roles. There were also casting sessions in Bombay, and it was there that we found our Saleem, a brilliant young actor called Rahul Bose. Other “discoveries” included Nicole Arumugam as Padma, and Ayesha Dharker as Jamila (her sensational voice stunned us all when, in the middle of one read-through, she burst into unaccompanied song), and it is intensely frustrating that we were not able in the end to give them the opportunity they so richly deserved.

  For when the “green light” moment was finally upon us, the Indian government simply refused us permission to film, giving no explanation at all, and no hope of appeal. Worse still was the discovery that the BBC’s Indian partners had been told months earlier that the application would be refused. They had not informed us, perhaps believing they could get the decision changed. But they couldn’t.

  I felt as if we’d nose-dived into the ground at the end of the runway. I also felt personally insulted. That Midnight’s Children should have been rejected so arbitrarily, with such utter indifference, by the land about which it had been written with all my love and skill was a terrible blow, from which, I must say, I have not really recovered. It was like being told that a lifetime of work had been for nothing. I plunged into a deep depression.

  But now the
new producer, Christopher Hall, and the rest of the team made a heroic effort to save the project by relocating it in Sri Lanka. And Sri Lanka did indeed give us approval to film. (In writing.) President Chandrika Kumaratunga herself said she was strongly behind the project. Because of the Indian refusal, and the continuing controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses, she met with Sri Lankan Muslim MPs to reassure them about the content of our screenplay and to tell them that the project was economically important for Sri Lanka.

  So it was all on again. The hurt at my treatment by India remained unassuaged, but at least the film would be made. We found locations (in some ways Sri Lanka was actually an improvement on India in this regard), offered work on the crew to many local people, cast a number of Sri Lankan actors in featured roles. The spirit of cooperation we encountered was a delight. (The Sri Lankan army offered to help us stage the war scenes called for by the script.) We set up a Colombo production office and planned to start filming in January 1998.

  Then it all went wrong again. An article appeared in The Guardian, written by a journalist named Flora Botsford, who was also attached to the BBC in Colombo, and who, in the view of Chris Hall and the production team, used her inside knowledge of the problems we’d had to stir up a controversy. Local Muslim MPs, who had previously made no objection to the filming, now ascended their high horses. It seems too that this article alerted the Iranians, who then brought pressure on the Sri Lankan government to revoke permission. The entente cordiale that we had worked so hard to establish was breaking down.

  The Sri Lankan government was busily trying to get sensitive devolution legislation through its national assembly, and needed the support of opposition MPs. This meant that a tiny handful of parliamentarians were able to demand political concessions in return for their votes. And so, although the Sri Lankan media were strongly in favor of our project, and Muslim as well as non-Muslim commentators wrote daily in our support, permission was in fact revoked, abruptly and without warning, just one day after we had been assured by government ministers that there was no problem, and we should just go right ahead and make our film.