“It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives, their castes, their faiths, how many brothers and sisters they had, and what childhood games they had played, and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them. She was writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life. Some of her stories came from her memories of lost Kampili, the slaughtered fathers and the burned mothers; she was trying to bring that place back to life in this place, to bring back the old dead in the newly living, but memory wasn’t enough, there were too many lives to enliven, and so imagination had to take over from the point at which memory failed.”
A sackful of seeds, Salman Rushdie, New Yorker, December 12, 2022 issue.
