THE ELEVENTH HOUR

The famed writer delivers a brilliant series of intimations of mortality.

Several of the stories here are set in Rushdie’s native India. The opener, “In the South,” recounts two octogenarians, Junior and Senior, who pass their days arguing about this and that: The younger, by 17 days, exults in being a native of southern India, “warm, slow, and sensual,” while the older retorts, “Suppose men had imagined the earth the other way up! We would be the northerners then. The universe does not understand up and down; neither does a dog.” Senior awaits death, eager to be free of his teeming family. Alas, his wish doesn’t come true, death claiming the other, which doesn’t stop their arguments from continuing. “Death and life were just adjacent verandas,” Rushdie writes, having had plenty of cause to ponder the matter. The following story, “The Musician of Kahani,” winds its way through some 80 eventful pages, tracing the fortunes of an academic family grown suddenly superrich and investing heavily in the musical education of their brilliant daughter, a master of both sitar and classical piano and many other instruments, who, oddly, turns her tremendous skills to eldritch purposes. The closing line is delightfully chilling: “And Chandni, who doesn’t laugh a lot, whose default expression is sort of grave, is smiling her strange little smile.” Eldritch indeed is the next long tale, “Late,” a bona fide ghost story, its protagonist a newly deceased one-book writer whose secrets are ferreted out by an enterprising exchange student from India (“Her hometown was far away. Books were her homeland now”) who just happens to be able to see and speak with the shade—and, in the bargain, help him take just revenge. The last entry, “The Old Man in the Piazza,” enigmatic and arch, closes with something of an epitaph: “Our words fail us.”

A provocative set of tales that, though with grim moments, celebrate life, language, and love in the face of death.