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It was a weeknight in Manhattan in 2011, and a few of us were out to dinner at a restaurant on Lexington Avenue called the National. Across the room, sitting in a banquette talking with a woman as they had their meal, was Salman Rushdie.
The extraordinary thing about the moment was its seeming ordinariness. In 1989, Mr. Rushdie’s prospects for a long life had been widely assumed not to be auspicious. A fatwa—an edict—had been issued against the author by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and a multimillion-dollar bounty had been placed on his head. He was forced into hiding, although he was said to object to that word—he felt there was really no hiding place in a situation like his.
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