‘Ours was a love story, not an attempted murder story’: Rachel Eliza Griffiths on the day her husband, Salman Rushdie, was stabbed

I woke early and alone on the sunny morning of Friday 12 August 2022. I was having coffee at the moment my husband, the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, was nearly killed in a stabbing on stage in Chautauqua, New York.

This was the last morning, innocent and ordinary, before my life was shattered by the 27 seconds Salman’s attacker took to stab him more than a dozen times, driving a knife into his right eye until it nearly touched his optic nerve.

I knew none of these things yet, so early in the story I’d been living, for mere months, as his new wife. Our story was a love story, not an attempted murder story. We’d married on 24 September 2021, on a Friday that looked exactly like this day, which would maim our future.

I was at home, reading. The summer light filled our living room. My dog Hero curled nearby on the floor. I might have been on my second cup of coffee when the phone rang. I saw the call was a close friend, so I was smiling when I answered and wished her a good morning.

“Where are you?” she said, in a voice I’d never heard before.

“I’m at home, having coffee.”

For a moment I thought she was in my neighbourhood, perhaps just outside. But her voice was broken, strange. Then she was sobbing. I heard her say my husband’s name. “Eliza, I’ll be right over,” she said, her voice choking as she repeated to me. “Salman, it’s about Salman. He’s been – he is – hurt.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, but she’d already hung up. There wasn’t another Salman she could have meant. I looked at my dog, my book and my cup of coffee. They seemed different.

Realising my friend would arrive soon, I rushed upstairs to dress. My body moved but my mind had lost all coherence. Where is my husband? What kind of hurt? Something medical? A car accident? A shooting?

By the time I reached the top of the stairs, my mobile phone was ablaze with message alerts. I turned round in a circle, bewildered. I pulled on a pair of black jeans and a T-shirt. I looked at the unmade bed where I’d slept on Salman’s side because I’d missed him. Hurrying downstairs to answer the front door, I slipped, falling headlong down one entire flight.

This is when I began to scream. I screamed for Salman and kept screaming. I didn’t scream because I was hurt from the fall. I didn’t scream because I was afraid. I screamed because I had no control.

As I tried to stand up, I glimpsed a ­notification from the New York Times bearing Salman’s name flashing across the screen of my phone. The television was on in our living room, and his name appeared there too, locked inside ticker tape. The words “stabbing” and “attack” blurred in front of me. There was no other information ­available.

My friend arrived and helped me pack a suitcase as I attempted to answer the onslaught of calls. Friends, tearful and frantic, asked me if Salman was alive. Did I need help?

All I could say was “I don’t know”, because I didn’t know. I didn’t know what help I might need. I didn’t know if Salman was alive. I didn’t know where he was. Please don’t take him away from me. Please don’t let Salman die. In a moment of denial, I actually phoned him myself, aware he couldn’t answer because he was hurt, or worse.

I couldn’t let my mind go down that tunnel, because it was useless and dangerous to think about it. I had to get to Salman, wherever he was. I needed to be with him. Thinking about anything else was a distraction.

Through the help of our agents I was able to charter a private plane that would take myself, my sister and her husband, to UPMC Hamot, a medical facility in Erie, Pennsylvania. By car, this destination was more than seven hours away. By plane, it was just over an hour.

Breathlessly, I shared my credit card information over the phone, and completed the necessary forms. As I confirmed the astronomical hire cost, I tried not to think about how or when Salman and I would return home.

For five years, he and I had privately built a home for each other. It was a real place alive in each of us, filled by our imaginations, our laughter, our stories, and our freedom. I am his home and he is my home, I thought. I am not ready to live without him.

When the car arrived to drive us to a small airfield in Westchester County, there were a handful of men with cameras standing on the sidewalk across the street. A woman approached me with a microphone.

What is your relationship to the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie? Can you confirm that Sir Salman Rushdie is officially dead?

I did not reply to her, except to warn her not to touch me. Climbing into the car, my body began to shake uncontrollably. I covered my face. I could not bring myself to look back at our front door. My dog barked there in frantic distress. Our housekeeper stood next to my dear friend. Their faces shone with tears in the awful sunlight.

During the flight, I stared out at the gorgeous blue sky. I could only feel horror. I was very aware that the happy life I’d been living only yesterday had ended. I escorted self-pity out of my head. I am someone who believes that the questions why me? and why not me? frame unhelpful thoughts.

Besides, I needed to make some ground rules for myself before we landed so I could focus on Salman’s survival. I didn’t know how to prepare myself for whatever was ahead. I wasn’t afraid of hospitals. As a child, I’d witnessed my mother’s frequent hospitalisations due to chronic illness. I knew how hospitals worked. I could withstand the sight of blood and needles, and the sounds of invisible suffering. Back then, as a girl, I’d forced myself to find sunshine in those sterile hallways and sour smells. I’d learned to never forget the dignity of human life. As an adult woman, I would need all my strength to navigate this medical landscape again, because my husband was there now and he needed me.

Eleven months earlier, surrounded by family and friends, I’d laughed, greeting Salman, in a golden wedding dress. In spite of our age difference – he is 76 and I am 45 – we’d seen each other as equals from the start and had chosen to love each other with clarity, passion and courage. On our wedding day, Salman had vowed to love me that day and always. For better or for worse – we’d spoken those words. Not even a year had passed and here we were, engulfed by for worse.

I began to assemble a triage in my mind. What did I need to help Salman and myself? What would guide my decisions regarding his medical care? How would I care for myself in the light of this sudden global news story?

The public was not yet aware that Salman had recently married me, his fifth wife. From the beginning, I’d wanted to keep my privacy. I am an artist, not a spectacle. I’d foolishly believed that Salman’s former lives, and the years in hiding he called “the bad old days”, were part of a past that had little to do with the man I now called my husband. Still, I was aware that my Salman and Sir Salman Rushdie were the same man. Both of them lived in our house.

Closing my eyes, I visualised Salman’s face and the special light that fills his eyes whenever he looks at me. I pictured my mother’s smile, remembering how she’d taught me how to love and how to fight. Love is a powerful weapon, as real as the knife that has blinded my husband’s eye. It comes from vulnerability not cowardice.

As the plane began its descent, I wiped tears from my eyes. The woman I was yesterday waved farewell to me, wishing me luck. Below me on the airfield I could already make out a heavy display of police vehicles with their spinning lights. Armed men, wearing uniforms and aviator glasses, stood unmoving, their heads craned upward to watch our descent.

Was Salman alive or dead? Were they taking me to view his body? When could I hope to have hope? I didn’t have hope. Not yet. I just tried to breathe. My sister took my hand in hers and told me she loved me.

When the wheels touched the ground, it felt as if I was still in the air, still in freefall, without any sense of landing.

* * *

I walk down a fluorescent hall lined with armed men. Since landing, no one has looked me in the eye, even when directly addressing me. I am being taken to Salman, who is recovering from eight hours of surgery. My legs and eyes tingle. I’m not saying goodbye to my husband, I tell myself. He is not going to die. We are going to get through this, I just don’t know how yet.

Salman’s body lies unmoving on a raised medical bed. The dull transmission of beeps and humming punctures the room’s darkened hush. The loudest of these is the ventilator.

At the open door, I freeze. “Salman,” I whisper. He can’t hear me. “Oh my love, what has he done to you?” My sister and brother-in-law help me as I stumble forward. When I can stand again, I go alone to Salman, who isn’t moving. Near his side, my hands reach for whatever skin I can touch. Can he feel that I am here? Salman is unconscious, but I want to believe he knows I am with him.

His fingernails are caked with blood. The side of his face that suffered the most damage is a dizzying railroad track of stitching. His right ear is nearly pulp. His right eye is covered. The ventilator curves up out of his blue lips. His complexion is a palette of blue, grey, red, purple, yellow and black. Across his bald head is a long, angry slash.

The knife, I think, as the word comes into sharp view. Someone is talking to me about multiple stab wounds, where they are, what violence they have done, what there is to be hopeful about. Fortunately, the knife did not puncture any organs, though it went across Salman’s throat, grazing his trachea, nearly decapitating him.

When a nurse lifts the gauze over Salman’s right eye, I see his entire eyeball, swollen and smashed, sitting in its cracked socket, bursting from a sliced eyelid. It’s as if his eye has been squeezed through a tube. I think of an egg, runny with hazel and green blobs that once formed something recognisable, an eye that belonged to a man named Salman Rushdie. No one needs to tell me that my husband has lost this eye.

For weeks during his convalescence, I refuse to allow Salman to look in a mirror. I know that if he were to look at himself as I am seeing him he would internalise the visible trauma in ways that could damage his capacity to heal.

* * *

On the first night after the removal of his intubation tube, Salman could not stop speaking. The words flew from his body as the fluids from IV bags surged through his veins, keeping him alive while managing his intense pain.

“Love,” he cried out to me. “The lesson I have been given now is of life, of its beauty. I swear I only wanted beauty, and look what has happened. I never wanted any of this.”

Salman apologised to me repeatedly. At one point he said he wanted to apologise to my father for not being able to protect me from his old life. He explained that he feared he’d ruined mine, dragging me inside the long, gilded corridors of his own, where things were both marvellous and dangerous.

Related: Knife by Salman Rushdie review – a story of hatred defeated by love

I reminded Salman that all life must be lived facing what is marvellous and terrifying. That, too, I told him, is a part of trying to love someone else. “How can you love me now?” he asked. “Are you afraid? Eliza, you are my miracle”.

On the second day after the attack, still in shock, Salman kept trying to make me understand what it had been like. “I was lying in a pool of my own blood,” he said. “It was so red I knew I was going to die.”

* * *

On the sixth dayOn the sixth day at the hospital, I spoon my husband’s first taste of chocolate ice-cream into his cracked lips. His smile will always be crooked because of the severed muscles. The right side of his face is a broken labyrinth of torn skin. Bruises form a hot scream of purples and reds.

During the attack, Salman raised his left hand to defend his face and neck. The knife went almost completely through his hand. The tendons, ligaments and cords of muscle all required reattachment. While flexible, his left hand is more like a glove now. He has no sensory nerves in three of his fingers.

* * *

To relieve the carousel of horror in my head during those days, I foolishly tried to speak and to listen to those working in the trauma ward. These people were our angels. Like us, they had dedicated their lives to our shared humanity and performed what storytellers also attempt to do, which is to confront wounds, to examine pain, and to probe the miraculous anatomy of our bodies and imaginations. In distinct ways, we all want to save and to heal lives.

One night, I asked the young guard who was sitting outside my husband’s room about pain and hope. I wanted to know why he’d chosen this career and how could he withstand witnessing such suffering. Over the past two hours, we’d listened to a man screaming for the help of Jesus Christ before a nurse intervened, cutting through that lost man’s prayers.

During a brief silence, the radio stuttered from the belt on the guard’s narrow hips. His grey, flickering eyes reminded me of funerals.

“Before I worked here, I used to have a soul,” he said in a weary voice that came from somewhere inside the silhouette of his navy uniform. “But I don’t any more.”

* * *

In late September,Salman and I wake up in a strange apartment, generously offered to us by our friends. For security concerns, we are here because we can’t return to our own home. I don’t know when we will be able to go home, or what home will mean to us now. But here we are, finally alone, on this first morning of our new life, after leaving the rehabilitation hospital. We’d had to leave with security in the middle of the night to avoid press or being followed.

I look over at Salman’s profile against the propped pillows. His breathing is soft. I can see his right eye, what it is now, a shiny gash sewn closed with no hope of healing. I let my eyes take in the sight of his left forearm in its cast that is arranged at an awkward angle. I remember holding that hand and watching as a doctor in Erie had taken a needle through Salman’s right eyelid to seal his right eye. I remember trying not to faint as black spots appeared in my own eyes and my own mouth filled with vomit.

In the dim rise of morning light, the centre of Salman’s palm still offers caked, dried blood that will require weeks for his physical therapist to slowly remove. But he is here next to me, I think. And that is something. Tears of relief stream silently down my face.

There is also something dying in me for which I have no language. In my body there are blades of grief and anger that slice and cut me from within. I was not wounded by the knife, but I am also wounded. And I will live that way.

* * *

Later that same morning, Salman meets me in the bathroom for his first haircut since the attack. During Covid, I’d become his barber, which we’d both found funny. We used to play Bob Marley, Motown, Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones while I snipped and trimmed. We liked the intimacy of this ordinary thing.

Related: ‘So it’s you. Here you are’: Salman Rushdie describes moment he was stabbed

Today we are exhausted. Salman sits slowly on a chair that I have placed in the centre of an elegant bathroom that is not ours. I get out the scissors and the clippers. I help Salman pull his Yankees T-shirt over his head as he holds his cast away to avoid pain.

Dizziness goes through me as I circle him, letting my eyes rest on the wreckage of his torso. I have scissors in my hand. I feel nervous getting near him with anything sharp. He bends his head, closing his eye. With me, he is safe.

I try to work quickly. Wisps of hair fall. I ask him is he in any pain. Are you hurting, Salman? There is pain going through me. Flashbacks of his hair soaked in blood. The metal staples that kept his face together. The first words he whispered to me when the ventilator tube was pulled out of his throat.

It is hard for me to take a full breath. These memories swirl like molten lava through my entire body, twisting my lower back as I blink rapidly and try to focus.

I don’t look over at our images in the bathroom mirror. But I can see our faint ghosts in the reflection of the wide glass door of the shower. I orbit Salman with my lifted hands and broken eyes. I never drop the scissors. As I finish, everything tilts, including my husband. I don’t want Salman to witness the panic attacks that I fight with each day.

“We will survive this,” he says at one point while I brush fallen hair away from his wounds. He is about to have his first shower in this new life. I open the glass door and turn on the water jet.

“Do you want to be alone?”

“No,” he says. He stares at me with one eye. His gaze reminds me that he is my best friend. He is my joy.

“We will survive this,” Salman repeats, reaching for me.

* * *

One January morning,One January morning, we are finally at home again. It is 2023. We enjoy coffee together, laughing and trying not to think about our future and Salman’s mortality. For now, we exist in the present moment, aware that our lives can never be as they were. This acceptance shifts like weather across a temperamental channel. Sometimes the knife shows up like a thick shadow of grief or rage. Other days, it’s almost as if that August day and its aftermath was only a bad dream.

But the reality is that I am still struggling with intense post-traumatic stress disorder. Salman, half-blinded, has not learned to embrace this permanent injury except to remind himself that it could be worse. He could be dead.

Salman stares at me, taking my hand in his injured one. His face is glowing. He tells me he is trying to write about the atttack. I’d worried whether he could; but writing is how my husband breathes.

We know that Salman is at the beginning of a new tale. This true story, named Knife, will contain neither magic nor enchanted cities yet it will be conceived from that singular imagination. Salman Rushdie will not only be a symbol of freedom but a flesh-and-blood man whose near murder connects him to a greater human war, a fight to make sense of this dark, contemporary world where violence everywhere chokes all peace.

Knife is a profound reckoning that does not cut love but expands it, offering us Salman’s intelligence, his humour, his truth telling, and his passionate defence of our inherent freedoms and rights as human beings.

Living through something that has been so difficult and beautiful, I can never forget the sheer bounty of miracles that were given to me, and to Salman and myself, to keep us alive.

I hope that the woman and the writer I am becoming can look back at this personal history, and continue to arm myself with love. I do not thank or forgive the knife that nearly killed my husband. But I will always celebrate the forces of good that brought him back home to me.

• Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is published by John Murray; Knife by Salman Rushdie is published by Jonathan Cape. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.