Although the fatwa, an injunction by the Ayatollah Kohmeini which demanded Salman Rushdie's execution, was partially reversed by the Iranian government in the fall of 1998, Rushdie still cannot travel with complete freedom and is always attended by armed guards. As a result, Rushdie has not been able to visit India for more than a decade. This, combined with his lengthy residence in the British Isles since he left the Indian subcontinent to enroll in the prestigious Rugby public school at the age of 13, has made him see himself as a kind of exile for the length of his writing life. In retrospect, he has observed, "I think actually there are certain things about me that just inescapably, 100 percent, will always be Indian." Because of this feeling, he has "spent a great deal of my life trying to understand and write about the world from which I...