On February 14th, 1989, the British writer Salman Rushdie was condemned to death in a fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini over the publication of his "blasphemous" The Satanic Verses. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fatwa, Elisa Mantin crafts an incisive and revealing examination of the author and the sources of his novelistic imagination—the bustling megacities of Mumbai and London, and mother India herself.