Step Across This Line Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

From Part I: Essays Out of Kansas I wrote my first short story in Bombay at the age of ten. Its title was "Over the Rainbow." It amounted to a dozen or so pages, was dutifully typed up by my father's secretary on flimsy paper, and was eventually lost somewhere along my family's mazy journeyings between India, England, and Pakistan. Shortly before my father's death in 1987, he claimed to have found a copy moldering in an old file, but despite my pleadings he never produced it. I've often wondered about this incident. Maybe he never really found the story, in which case he had succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairy tales he told me. Or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine -- his pot of nostalgic, parental gold. I don't remember much about the story. It was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon the beginning of a rainbow, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end zone, and as rich in promise. The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and constructed like a grand staircase. Naturally, the boy begins to climb. I have forgotten almost everything about his adventures, except for an encounter with a talking pianola whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, and the "playback singers" of the Hindi movies, many of which made The Wizard of Oz look like kitchen-sink realism. My bad memory -- what my mother would call a "forgettery" -- is probably a blessing. Anyway, I remember what matters. I remember that The Wizard of Oz (the film, not the book, which I didn't read as a child) was my very first literary influence. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of my going to school in England was mentioned, it felt as exciting as any voyage over rainbows. England felt as wonderful a prospect as Oz. The wizard, however, was right there in Bombay. My father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a magical parent of young children, but he was also prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon smoke, and other menaces of the type also practiced by Oz, the great and terrible, the first Wizard Deluxe. And when the curtain fell away and we, his growing offspring, discovered (like Dorothy) the truth about adult humbug, it was easy for us to think, as she did, that our wizard must be a very bad man indeed. It took me half a lifetime to discover that the Great Oz's apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well; that he too was a good man but a very bad wizard. I have begun with these personal reminiscences because The Wizard of Oz is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults. At its beginning, the weaknesses of grown-ups force a child to take control of her own destiny (and her dog's). Thus, ironically, she begins the process of becoming a grown-up herself. The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy's parent-substitutes, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, are powerless to help her save her dog, Toto, from the marauding Miss Gulch, into a world where the people are her own size, and in which she is never treated as a child but always treated as a heroine. She gains this status by accident, it's true, having played no part in her house's decision to squash the Wicked Witch of the East; but by the end of her adventure she has certainly grown to fill those shoes -- or, rather, those famous ruby slippers. "Who'd have thought a girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?" laments the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts -- an adult becoming smaller than, and giving way to, a child. As the Wicked Witch of the WestRushdie, Salman is the author of 'Step Across This Line Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002' with ISBN 9780679463344 and ISBN 0679463348.