Random House
We may earn an affiliate commission on anything you buy from this article.
“The Eleventh Hour: Quintet of Stories” (to be published Tuesday by Random House) is an elegiac new collection of short stories from acclaimed novelist Salman Rushi—his first fiction since the 2022 attack that nearly killed him—in which he writes about intimate encounters with death, ghosts, magic, and the unchanging passage of time.
Read the passage below and Don't miss Martha Teichner's conversation with Salman Rushdie on “CBS Sunday Morning” November 2nd!
“The Eleventh Hour” by Salman Rushdie
Prefer to listen? Sound There's a 30-day free trial available right now.
From “In the South”
The day Junior fell began like any other day: a blast of heat shaking the air, trumpeting sunlight, tidal waves on the roads, prayer chants in the distance, cheap movie music coming from downstairs, the pelvic thrusts of the “item number” dancing on the neighbor's TV; a child's cry, a mother's reproach, inexplicable laughter, scarlet discharge, bicycles, freshly braided hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong coffee, a green wing flickering on a tree. Senior and Junior, two very old men, opened their eyes in their bedrooms on the fourth floor of a sea-green building on a leafy lane, not far from Elliott Beach, where that evening, as always, young people gathered to perform the rites of youth, not far from a fishing village that had no time for such frivolity. The poor were Puritans day and night. As for the old ones, they had their own rituals and did not have to wait for the evening. As the sun beat down on them through the window blinds, the two old men struggled to their feet and jumped out onto the adjacent verandas, emerging at the same moment, like characters from an ancient fairy tale, trapped by fatal coincidences and unable to escape the consequences of chance.
Almost immediately they started talking. Their words were not new. These were ritual speeches, bows to the new day, offered in a call-and-response format, similar to the rhythmic dialogues or “duels” of Carnatic music virtuosos during the annual December festival.
“Be grateful that we are Southern people,” Junior said, stretching and yawning. “We are southerners, in the south of our city, in the south of our country, in the south of our continent. God bless. We are warm, slow and sensual guys, not like the cold fish of the north.”
The elder, scratching first his stomach and then the back of his head, immediately objected to him. “First,” he said, “the South is a fiction that exists only because people agreed to call it that. Suppose people imagined the earth in reverse!
That's how they behaved: they fought, stepping on each other, like ancient wrestlers whose left legs were tied at the ankles. The rope that bound them so tightly was their name. By some strange accident – which they came to call “fate” or, as they more often called it, “the curse” – they shared a name, a long name, similar to many names in the south, a name that neither of them wanted to say. Having expelled the name, reducing it to the initial letter, IN., they made the rope invisible, but that didn't mean it didn't exist. They echoed each other in other ways – their voices were high-pitched, they were equally wiry and of average height, they were both shortsighted, and after many lifetimes of pride in the quality of their teeth, they had both surrendered to the humiliating inevitability of dentures – but it was an unused name, this symmetrical IN., A name that could not be pronounced, that had united them together for decades.
However, the two old men did not share a birthday. One was seventeen days older than the other. This is probably how “Elder” and “Younger” came about, although these nicknames were used for so long that no one could remember who originally coined them. They became V. Senior and Younger, Junior V. and Senior V. forever, quarreling to the death. They were eighty-one years old. If old age was perceived as an evening ending in midnight oblivion, then it was already the eleventh hour.
“You look terrible,” Junior said to Senior, as he did every morning. “You look like a man just waiting to die.”
The elder, nodding seriously and also speaking in accordance with his personal tradition, replied: “It is better than looking like you, a person who is still waiting for life.”
Excerpt from Salman Rushdie's book The Eleventh Hour. Copyright © 2025 Salman Rushdie. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without written permission from the publisher.
Get the book here:
“The Eleventh Hour” by Salman Rushdie
Buy locally from Bookstore.org
For more information:
