With a mix of humour and chilling detail, Salman Rushdie, the Indian-British novelist, shocked a jury on Tuesday as he calmly recounted the terrifying moments when a masked man stormed the stage in western New York and repeatedly stabbed him.
“It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought,” the renowned author stated, adding that the bystanders who subdued the attacker likely saved his life.
Testifying at the trial of 27-year-old Hadi Matar—who has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder—Rushdie faced the man who nearly killed him for the first time since the 2022 attack. However, he refused to acknowledge him, just as he had in his memoir Knife, where he referred to Matar only as “the A”—short for assassin, assailant, or asinine.
In the court, Rushdie recounted how he initially thought he was being punched until he saw blood pouring onto his clothes. “He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing,” he said. His voice remained measured even as he described lying in a “lake” of blood, an image that left the courtroom silent.
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At one point, he revealed his now-blinded right eye to the jury, typically concealed behind a tinted lens. Rushdie also described the painful surgery to seal its lid and funnily turned to the audience in the court and quipped, “I don’t recommend it.”
Under cross-examination, when asked how many times he was stabbed, the novelist replied dryly, “I wasn’t counting at the time. I was otherwise occupied.”
The courtroom bore witness to both the gravity of his ordeal and the resilience of a man who, despite the attack, still found moments for wit—even in the face of his would-be killer.
Salman Rushdie is well-known for his novels such as Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Wizard of Oz, The Enchantress, amongst other great novels. One of his recent books is the memoir, Knife (2022), which he recounts the scene of his attack.
He details theme of magic realism. Historical fictions, connection and disruption of Western and Eastern civilization.
