Salman Rushdie’s new collection of short stories is his first work of fiction since the attack on his life in 2022 that left him blind in one eye. The volume is entitled Eleventh Hour. The phrase “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 different times of the day to work in his vineyard. At the end of a 12-hour workday, workers hired at the eleventh hour receive the same wages as those hired earlier, indicating that God’s grace applies to all in the same way and is not based on length of service or individual effort. “Therefore the last will be first and the first last, for many will 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. Indeed, it is almost too late for the two elderly bickering Indian friends named Senior and Junior in the first story of this collection, “In the South”. Over the years, the two neighboring gentlemen bickered endlessly, as longtime friends do. In the front yard of their apartment building in Chennai, they have witnessed the Indian laburnum plant grow from a small shoot into a large and beautiful tree – but for them, in the twilight of their lives, it is a daily reminder of their mortality.
One morning, Junior unnecessarily falls to the side of the road and dies; the very next day a tsunami claims thousands of lives; and the senior, abandoned, is desperate. “The world was meaningless… The lyrics were empty and his eyes were blind.” Suddenly he sees a slight movement of a shadow on the empty adjoining porch. Then he realizes that there is nothing to fear either in this life or in the afterlife: “Death and life were but adjoining porches.”
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 Kahani musician, is “one of the very rare artists whose work directly influenced and shaped the world in which she lived”. In ‘Late’ we meet Rosa, another Bombay girl, now homesick in Oxbridge, where she befriends the ghost of an elderly Fellow – and discovers remnants of an imperial past. In ‘Oklahoma’, two writers, young and old, collaborate on a Kafka story set in an imaginary America that the German writer has never visited. The senior writer piloted a Pathfinder aircraft in the raid on Bremen during World War II. She still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Meanwhile, his wife is described as “a great writer herself” — but also responsible for the big Sunday brunch and garden of their Long Island home. So it is not surprising that she seethes with resentment and literary envy.
In the last story of this collection, “The Old Man in the Square”, language is personified as a woman: “our language… a very old language, one of the oldest and richest, although it does not want to boast of its wealth, it does not need a throne to sit on.” In the public square, the old man becomes the arbiter of propriety and justice—so much so that finally, in a strong warning, the tongue rises and begins to scream. The intensity of her screams creates deep cracks in the buildings. “The piazza is broken and maybe we are too. But when the language finally falls silent and disappears, it is indeed too late. The sounds have no meaning. “Our words fail us.
Ode to Bombay
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, British India, on June 19, 1947. | Photo credit: Reuters
Rushdie also thinks of his hometown in this elegiac collection. Bombay, “the magical space of my childhood—and not just my childhood, but of my richest imaginations and happiest dreams,” is warmly and achingly present in these pages. (“Many of the stories I’ve told were born here. I think this will be the last story like that,” he adds.)
Mumbai, particularly a city of a certain period, is here in detail, in place names – Bandra, Breach Candy – the Wayside Inn, the absent equestrian statue at Kala Ghoda, the movie stars, the gang killings, the golf at the Willingdon Club. It’s in an eidetically accurate description of the revered street: “If you drive down Warden Road past Scandal Point and round the little bend there, you’ll see… a narrow, leafy lane running (slowly) up a little slope.”
And most impressively, it is here as a tribute, in the form of “the great poet of the city, who succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease (and) still went to his little magazine-infested office every day without knowing why he went there. His feet knew the way, and so he walked and sat looking into space until it was time to go home again and his feet led him to the crowd in front of his crowd in front of his crowd in front of his crowd in front of Jasne Church station. shopkeepers, rushing hags, roaring NEJ buses, girls on their Vespas, sniffing hungry dogs”.
In The Eleventh Hour we meet an older, calm Rushdie, aware of his own mortality – but also deeply interested in and present in the world.
The reviewer is in the IAS.
Eleven o’clock
Salman Rushdie
Hamish Hamilton the penguin
₹899
Published – 05 Dec 2025 06:15 IST
