Living in hiding felt like comedy routine

Nine years living in hiding after a fatwa was issued against him may not sound like a particularly merry experience, but Sir Salman Rushdie has said his period in police protection felt at times like "a comedy routine".
On leaving a dinner at the London home of fellow novelist Hanif Kureishi, he recalled that "one of the police officers left his gun behind. And for Hanif of course this was like a transcendent moment of joy. He ran out into the street, holding the gun by the barrel, shouting, 'Here, you forgot your shooter!'"
"We were in this rural cottage in remote Ayrshire and there was this arsenal of armoured Jaguars parked outside. The hard thing was not concealing me, it was concealing them … there was this police convention going on."
The author was speaking about his third-person-narrated memoir, Joseph Anton (his pseudonym under the fatwa, after the first names of Conrad and Chekhov), at the Edinburgh international book festival.
He had no premonition of the storm that would greet the publication of The Satanic Verses, he said, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa of death against him in 1989 – an event that led to the killing of one of Rushdie's translators, the serious injury of another, and bombings of bookshops.