Andy Bethune, Assistant Professor of English, Albion College:

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen—

My name is Andy Bethune, I teach in the Department of English at Albion College and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this question and answer session with Salman Rushdie.  I began reading Mr. Rushdie’s work more than a decade ago as an undergraduate at the University of Ottawa and I was immediately overwhelmed by the richness of his narratives, the vitality of his characters, the humour and wit evident in his writing, and his unparalleled facility with language.  I’ve also had the good fortune to hear Mr. Rushdie read from his work on two occasions, most recently at the University of Toronto—where he read from his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet—and, most interestingly, in the fall of 1997 at the University of London, at the launch of the anthology Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, which Mr. Rushdie co-edited. 

At that reading in London, which was marked by an incredibly high degree of security—an intimidatingly high degree of security—I sat in the audience listening to Mr. Rushdie read from the chapter “The Perforated Sheet,” from the novel Midnight’s Children, and I was immediately disappointed.  He seemed to be insufficiently engaged in the task at hand; indeed he seemed as if he would rather be anywhere else in the world than in that room reading to us.  As I looked around the room and noticed the bank of police officers lining the back of the hall I thought to myself, Well maybe I should cut him some slack.  This can’t, after all, be the most comfortable environment for him to be in.  And then an extraordinary thing happened: as he read aloud the passage in which Saleem’s grandfather is afforded glimpses of his bride-to-be through the whole in the perforated sheet, Mr. Rushdie started to chuckle.  And then he began to laugh.  And finally he put his finger on the page to hold his place, looked up at the audience for the first time that evening and said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever realized how funny this is!”  And then of course everyone laughed, the rest of the reading was a delight and I’m certain that Mr. Rushdie read for much longer than he had originally planned he was enjoying himself so much.  It was an extraordinary opportunity to see one of the great voices of contemporary literature overwhelmed by his own text! 

I think Albion College is extremely fortunate to have him here with us and at this point I would like to call upon Dr. Bindu Madhok, Associate Professor of Philosophy, to introduce Salman Rushdie to us.