[Michael T. Kaufman]: How would you characterize the political position, or rather, the political lament, of your novels about India and Pakistan?

[Salman Rushdie]: Well, I think it's very difficult for a writer in the 20th century to look at the world and avoid a tragic view.

Yet your villians, if that's what they are, don't really come across as monstrous.

No, they are too small for that. I think the great characteristic of our age is that we don't have great despots, we have very low-grade people. This is not exclusive to the East. I would include many governments in the West. One of my central ideas during the writing of "Shame," though it is stated no-where in the book, is that what you have in Pakistan is a tragedy on a very large scale. But the protagonists are not tragic actors. It's as if you had...