London: Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie has spoken for the first time about the trauma he has been going through after the knife attack on him in New York.
The 76-year-old author said that he still has “crazy dreams” about the attack that has left him blind in one eye and revealed that he has been working with a therapist to help him process the mental impact of the trauma.
The Mumbai-born British-American author was on stage almost a year ago when he was stabbed up to 10 times by the suspect Hadi Matar, who is being held in prison for attempted murder.
The injuries from the attack resulted in damage to his liver, loss of vision in one eye, and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm.
"The human body has an amazing capacity to heal. And so, I'm fortunate to be well on that way," said the author of ‘Midnight’s Children’ who says he feels physically “more or less OK”.
Rushdie said that he was in "two minds" about whether to face his alleged attacker, who has pleaded not guilty, in court.
"If he changes his plea to guilty then actually there's not a trial, there's just a sentencing, and it may well be that then my presence isn't required. I'm in two minds about it. There's one bit of me that actually wants to go and stand on the court and look at him and there's another bit of me that just can't be bothered.
"I don't have a very high opinion of him. And I think what is important to me now is that you're able to find life continuing. I'm more engaged with the business of, you know, getting on with it," he said when asked if he plans to attend Matar’s trial later this year.
Rushdie is now writing a book about the near-fatal stabbing incident as a means of processing what he has been through. In the virtual interview, he told the BBC that it won't be more than a "couple of hundred pages" long.
"There's this colossal elephant in the room and, until I deal with that, it is difficult to take seriously anything else," he noted.
The author, who lives in New York, has been the subject of a fatwa by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini for his controversial novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ issued over 30 years ago, and has had several death threats over that time.
With inputs from PTI