If you decide to become a paid subscriber you’ll be able to read that, and more of my made-up stories, as well as personal stories, the stories behind the stories I’ll be telling, and sometimes I’ll ask you questions, too, and we can have a conversation about it all. Some of it won’t be, including a new, unpublished, full-length fiction I’ll be putting up in installments every week. I’d like it to talk about all sorts of stories, stories that have touched or moved or impressed or bored or even revolted me, in books and movies and on TV and in theaters, as well as stories I just plain made up.Ī lot of that will be on here for free. I’d like it if my Substack could work like that. “And because the stories were held here in liquid form, they retained the ability to change, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories.” It’s made up of “a thousand thousand thousand and one different story streams,” weaving in and out of one another. In another book of mine, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the boy hero is taken by a Water Genie to an actual Ocean of Stories. So out of those two stories came a story of my own. It would refuse the colonial past, and talk about freedom.

It wouldn’t be a story that the British gave us permission to tell. My father’s joke, a long time after even he had stopped telling it, made me think: “What if there wasn’t an eight-week gap? What if somebody was born at the exact same moment as his country? What sort of story might that be?”Īnd my Breach Candy moment answered that question. And one of the things I’ve learned is that stories give birth to other stories. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of my life swimming in stories (and telling a few, too). What burst out of me then was perhaps my first ever political statement.

As it happened, I had a white school friend, and he invited me to go to the club for a swim. Finally it gave an inch: it said that if a white member wished to bring in a brown guest, that brown person would be admitted. This didn’t go down well in newly independent India but the club was resistant to change. I could look down into it from my bedroom window. And here’s a true story: at the bottom of the hill where we lived, in the Breach Candy neighborhood of Bombay (now Mumbai), there was a private swimming club.

Sea of stories salman rushdie