Salman Rushdie and his magic space | Review of The Eleventh Hour

Salman Rushdie’s new short story collection is the first work of fiction he wrote following the attack on his life in 2022 that left him blind in one eye. Volume titled Eleventh Hour. The phrase ‘eleventh hour’ originally Bible.

In the ‘Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard’ in Matthew 20:1-16, a landowner hires laborers to work in his vineyard at various times of the day. At the end of the 12-hour workday, workers hired at the eleventh hour receive the same wages as workers hired earlier in the day; This shows that God’s grace applies to everyone the same and that it does not depend on the duration of an individual’s service or effort. The parable ends: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last; for many will be called, but few will be chosen.”

In contemporary usage, ‘eleventh hour’ means the latest possible moment, or the moment when it is almost too late. In the first short story of this collection, ‘In the South’, it is almost too late for two elderly, argumentative Indian friends named Senior and Junior. Over the years, the two gentleman neighbors argued endlessly, as long-time friends do. In the front yard of their Chennai apartment, they witnessed an Indian oriole plant grow from a small sprout into a large, beautiful tree – but for them, in the twilight of their lives, it was a daily reminder of their mortality.

One morning, Junior has an unnecessary fall on the side of the road and dies; The very next day, the tsunami claimed thousands of lives; and Senior, deprived, in despair. “The world was meaningless… The texts were empty and blind.” Suddenly he saw the slight movement of a shadow on the empty adjoining veranda. That’s when he realizes that there is nothing to fear, neither in this life nor in the afterlife: “Death and life were adjoining verandas.”

When words fail us

These stories are meditations on art itself in different ways. ‘Kahani’s Musician’ explains how art can create and destroy. Kahani’s musician, Chandni, is “one of the very rare artists whose work directly affects and shapes the world in which he lives.” In ‘Late’, we meet Rosa, another girl from Mumbai who is homesick now at Oxbridge; here he befriends the ghost of an elderly Fellow and discovers remnants of the imperial past. ‘In Oklahoma, two writers, young and old, collaborate on a Kafka tale set in an imaginary America that the German author has never visited. The elderly writer had flown the Pathfinder plane during the raid on Bremen during World War II. He currently suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. His wife, meanwhile, is described as “a good writer herself” — but is also in charge of the big Sunday brunch and the garden of their Long Island home. No wonder, then, that he was brimming with resentment and literary jealousy.

In the final story of this collection, ‘The Old Man in the Piazza’, language is personified as a woman: “Our language… is a very old language, one of the oldest and richest, which does not require a throne to sit on, although it prefers not to flaunt its wealth.” The old man becomes the arbiter of justice and righteousness in the square; so much so that at last, with a strong stimulus, the tongue stands up and begins to scream. The intensity of their screams creates deep cracks in buildings. “The square is destroyed, maybe we are too.” But when the language finally falls silent and disappears, it is too late. Sounds have no meaning. “Our words are misleading us.”

Praise for Mumbai

Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947, in Bombay, British India. | Photo Credit: Reuters

In this collection of elegies, Rushdie also reflects on the city of his birth. Mumbai, “the magical place of my childhood – and not just the place of my childhood, but also the place of my richest dreams and happiest dreams” is warmly, achingly present in these pages. (“Most of the stories I tell were born here. I think this will be the last story of this kind,” he adds.)

Mumbai, especially the city of a certain era, is here in the details, in the place names — Bandra, Breach Candy — The Wayside Inn, the horse-riding statue at Kala Ghoda, movie stars, gang murders, golf at the Willingdon Club. It’s in the visually accurate description of a beloved street: “If you go past Scandal Point towards Warden Road and round the little bend there, you’ll see… a narrow, leafy lane running (slowly) up a little hill.”

And, most impressively, it is here as a tribute to the figure of “the great poet of the city, who had succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease (and) still walked every day to his little office full of magazines, not knowing why he had gone there. His feet knew the way, and so he went until it was time to return home again, and he sat staring into space, and his feet took him back to the shabby home of the evening crowds gathered outside Churchgate station, the jasmine sellers, the scurrying sea urchins.” “The roar of BEST buses, girls on their Vespas, hungry dogs sniffing”.

Inside Eleventh HourWe encounter an older, gentler Rushdie, aware of his own mortality but also deeply interested in the world and existing within it.

The examiner is in IAS.

Eleventh Hour

Salman Rushdie

Penguin Hamish Hamilton

₹899

It was published – 05 December 2025 06:15 IST