Salman Rushdie’s new collection of short stories is his first work of fiction after the 2022 attack on his life which left him blind in one eye. The volume is titled The Eleventh Hour. The phrase ‘the eleventh hour’ originally comes from the Bible.
In Matthew 20:1-16, in the ‘Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard’, a landowner hires workers at various times of the day to work in his vineyard. At the end of the 12-hour workday, workers hired at the eleventh hour receive the same wages as those hired earlier in the day — suggesting that God’s grace applies in the same way to all, and that it is not based on the length of an individual’s service or effort. “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen,” concludes the parable.
In contemporary usage, ‘the eleventh hour’ means the latest possible moment, or the moment when it is almost too late. For the two elderly argumentative Indian friends named Senior and Junior in the first short story in this collection, ‘In the South’, it is indeed almost too late. Over the years, the two gentlemen neighbours have bickered endlessly, as long-time friends do. In the front yard of their Chennai apartment building, they have witnessed an Indian laburnum plant grow from a tiny shoot to a grand and beautiful tree — but for them, in the twilight of their lives, it is a daily reminder of their mortality.
One morning, Junior has a needless fall on the roadside, and dies; the very next day, the tsunami claims thousands of lives; and Senior, bereft, is in despair. “The world was meaningless… The texts were empty and his eyes were blind.” Suddenly, on the empty adjacent veranda, he sees the slight movement of a shadow. That is when he realises that there is nothing to fear, about this life or the afterlife: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”
When words fail us
In different ways, these stories are meditations on art itself. ‘The Musician of Kahani’ is about how art can create and destroy. Chandni, the musician of Kahani, is “one of the very rare artists whose work directly impacted and shaped the world in which she lived”. In ‘Late’, we meet Rosa, another girl from Mumbai, now homesick in Oxbridge, where she develops a friendship with the ghost of an elderly Fellow — and discovers the 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 writer has never visited. The older writer had flown the Pathfinder aircraft in the raid on Bremen during World War II. He still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Meanwhile, his wife is described “a fine writer herself” — but also responsible for the large Sunday brunch and the garden of their Long Island house. No wonder then that she is seething with resentment and literary envy.
In the final story in this collection, ‘The Old Man in the Piazza’, language is personified as a woman: “our language… a very old language, one of the oldest and richest, even though she prefers not to flaunt her wealth, requires no throne to sit upon.” In the public square, the old man becomes arbiter of rightness and righteousness — so much so that eventually, in a powerful warning, language stands up and begins to shriek. The intensity of her shrieks puts deep cracks in the buildings. “The piazza is broken, and so, perhaps, are we.” But when language finally falls silent and disappears, it is indeed too late. Sounds have no meaning. “Our words fail us.”
Ode to Mumbai
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in British India, June 19, 1947.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters
In this elegiac collection, Rushdie is also thinking of the city of his birth. Mumbai, “the magic space of my childhood — and not only of my childhood but of my richest imaginings and happiest dreams”, is warmly, achingly present in these pages. (“Many of the stories I have told were born here. I think this will be the last such story,” he adds.)
Mumbai, especially the city of a certain period, is here in the details, the place names — Bandra, Breach Candy — the Wayside Inn, the absent horseriding statue at Kala Ghoda, the movie stars, the gang killings, the golf at Willingdon Club. It is in the eidetically precise description of a cherished street: “If you drive up Warden Road past Scandal Point, and you go around the little bend there, you’ll see… a narrow, leafy lane running (slowly) up a small slope.”
And most affectingly, it is here as a tribute, in the figure of “the great poet of the city, who had surrendered to Alzheimer’s disease (and) still walked to his small magazine-infested office every day, without knowing why he went there. His feet knew the way and so he went and sat looking into space until it was time to go home again and his feet walked him back to his shabby residence through the evening crowds massing outside Churchgate station, the jasmine sellers, the hustling urchins, the roar of the BEST buses, the girls on their Vespas, the sniffing, hungry dogs”.
In The Eleventh Hour, we encounter an older, mellow Rushdie, aware of his own mortality — but also profoundly interested in the world, and present in it.
The reviewer is in the IAS.
The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie
Penguin Hamish Hamilton
₹899
Published – December 05, 2025 06:15 am IST
