I am an extremely methodical person. Every time a certain area of study is capable of catching my wandering eye my first and foremost instinct is to grab the nearest pen and paper and begin my quest to find, categorize and catalog the best books in regards to my surging obsession.

I think that, maybe, it is a side effect of so many years of volunteering for my school's library, or my previous intentions of pursuing archival studies, or perhaps it is something much more primal, something buried deep enough within myself so that I find my own being unable to differentiate its beginning from its end, to recognize its core and say ‘I understand you and therefore I have become one with you, my fear for your existence is no longer justifiable, for you are me and I am you’.

All of this simply to delineate the brutality with which this book threw me off track, it stood there, affirming and yet easily lost within the bookshelves of titanic proportions that surrounded its being, as if fulfilling the role of a concrete barrier standing menacingly between the 14 euro paperback edition and the stranger taking it home.

I read some essays while still on the bookstore, I choose one whose title compelled me to go slightly further and actually sit down in the nearest flat surface in order to gather my thoughts concisely, ‘The half-woman god’ it wrote, it began with a brief introduction to the concept of gender in divinity and myth, how different cultures, especially the Greek and the Hindu, addressed engendred aspects within some of their mythical narratives. The essay strays from this initial development and connects it with the Hijra community in India, one which I only knew of at a surface level, ‘they are a group of eunuchs that dress in an extremely feminine manner aren’t they?’, ‘I heard they had an interestingly well defined hierarchy and kinship system which I thought of studying further some years ago…’, such thoughts invaded my mind but they were quickly shooed away for I was utterly engrossed by Salman’s writing, it possessed a certain power of transporting you beyond the real and suddenly planting you within the narrative at hand, a power only parallel to that possessed by childhood books you devotedly keep within your now much more mature bookshelf as if they are quintessential elements of a sacred shrine that is your built identity.

Rushdie doesn’t tell you what it’s like for the Hijra community in 5 clean paragraphs addressing each problem with a quick and direct solution, nor does he leave it all up to nuance and the blatant ‘perhaps it is too complex for us to wrap our individual minds about, it has layers, ah yes, many many layers’, as if these layers were not built and layered one on top of another with the intent of being known as a whole and individually in the first place.

Salman grabs your hand firmly and makes you sit alongside him at an alley cafe or a pub in the red light district, he transforms what you once thought of as a concept into flesh, he metamorphoses these abstractions within your mind into humans and gives you time to digest this new found reality.

There is much more addressed in the book, ‘What is freedom?’, ‘Is liberty as a whole, liberty from or liberty for?’, ‘How is anti-war literature eventually robbed of its initial meaning and intent with the ever growing gap between generations that lived through war and those that didn’t?’, ‘What is truth and how have we allowed politicians and religious institutions to define it for us?’.

This collection of essays is captivating and compelling, it holds you down by your shoulders and instead of telling you that you are about to undergo an info-dump of happenings that occurred when you weren't even born to witness anything of true value, it pushes gently towards you and begins a conversation, as if reuniting with an old friend whose acquaintance you always valued but just haven't been lucky enough to collide with in the middle of a busy street.