But beyond this, quite contrary to expectation, there is an ineffable lightness about Salman Rushdie. He has the gift of making you feel happy. As a master storyteller, it is no surprise that his conversation is pricked with telling and entertaining anecdotes. He is also so relaxed, funny and beguiling that it is easy to understand why gorgeous women, among them Marie Helvin, Kylie Minogue, Nigella Lawson, not to mention his model-actress-filmmaker wife number four, Padma Lakshmi, flock to his side. Is it because I have just been reading his fantastical novels that I imagine the ghost of his old, hunted self banished by the force of this resolutely sanguine, free man?

We repair to the library to sit in front of a frieze of painted books. He is appropriately dressed in the sweltering heat in a loose blue shirt and sandals, and upbraids me in a friendly way for wearing black. He is pushing 60 but has the carefree, unburdened air of someone much younger.

The timing of our interview could not be more chillingly apposite, coming as it does in the aftermath of the first wave of the terrorists’ bombing campaign in London. Just before we met, I was reading the writer’s new novel, Shalimar the Clown, watching the American broadcasters’ version of the troubling events unfolding back home – Who are these people? What is their mind-set? How are they persuaded to do the things they do? Why do they hate us so much? – then finding the answers in Rushdie’s vividly rendered account of what it might feel like to be in a terrorist training camp.

There are two points to emphasise here. Rushdie, self-evidently, has never actually been in a terrorist training camp. But having lived for nine years under the threat of the fatwa – from Valentine’s Day (horribly) 1989 to 1998, when the Iranian Government withdrew its support for the edict – he has clearly had plenty of time to think about the mentality of those who have. As he puts it: “I’ve spent years inhabiting that series of questions.”

When, inevitably, we do move on to discuss what measures must be taken to curb the fundamentalist cultists (aren’t we all in the West, to some extent, living under Rushdie’s fatwa now?) he resists being treated as an expert in the field.
“It’s less interesting for me to offer you theoretical answers, which I could do, you know, but actually so could anyone else,” he says. “What I tried to do in this book was to explain it by entering into it. To say, if you were there, who would be there and how would they talk to you and what would you feel like and how would it make you think and what would it change in you? What would you want to accept and what would you reject? What would you be pushed towards? And not just to explain it but to understand it. And that’s very interesting to me because research will only get you so far. The thing you have to do is to make that imaginative leap in order to get inside the skin of these people.”

Secondly, Shalimar the Clown is not a novel about terrorism. Rather, it is a story of trampled love and innocence, a central personal murder and institutionalised murder on a wider scale, which takes us from modern-day California, to wartime France, dropping off in England and always circling back – in some of the most direct and moving passages Rushdie has ever written – to the wilful destruction of the Eden which was Kashmir.

At the time when the first devastating bombs went off in London, Rushdie was in Brazil at his old friend and first publisher Liz Calder’s literary festival in the old coastal village of Parati between Rio and São Paulo. He hung out there with his pals Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson, but his new best friend is Joanna “Aga-saga” Trollope. “Joanna’s very cool,” Rushdie says, “and so smart, and I thought, ‘I’m going to go away and read all her books.” [He’s just bought Other People’s Children.] She for me was the great discovery of the festival because we had so much fun together. We really got on like a house on fire.”

Fairly early on, I’m concerned that his posture is literally so laid-back, my tape-recorder won’t capture his voice. Could you project a little more, I ask him, which reminds me of his first calling. It is well known that, like Fay Weldon and Peter Carey, Rushdie had a successful career in advertising before he was able to devote himself to writing fiction. I can still remember the impact of those billboards of oozing cream cakes, way back in the Seventies, for which he wrote the frisky legend: “Naughty but nice”. Midnight’s Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the children’s book he wrote while in captivity for his older son, Zafar, both show his appreciation for the artful if absurd slogan.

It is, perhaps, less known that in his youth Rushdie planned on becoming an actor. At Cambridge, he did everything from Ben Jonson to Brecht and “in a very small way, I sneaked into Footlights”. If he had to assess his strengths, he would say that his talent was for comedy rather than tragedy.

“My problem as a university actor, which I can see with hindsight, was doing too much. One of the things that good actors will tell you is that you do less and less and less all the time,” he says. “And, you know, I have a slight arm-waving tendency anyway and there was a little too much gesticulating and too much acting going on.”

Richard Curtis cast Rushdie ostensibly as himself in the first Bridget Jones film but the novelist would like to stress that there’s a big difference between being yourself and acting a scripted version of yourself: “Truthfully, I wouldn’t behave like that. If a girl comes up to you at a book party and is sort of embarrassed and confused and, you know, falling over her feet, your instinct is to be nice to her. Not to be arrogant and cruel. So I tried that and the director kept saying, ‘It’s not funny.’ And it turned out that the more haughty I was, the more her [Bridget’s] confusion became comical.”

I have to confess that I can barely remember Rushdie’s role. Should I hire the video as part of my deep research? “No. It’s one scene and it’s in the first 25 minutes, so you really don’t have to watch the film!” He had great fun on set watching all the principal actors at work, and emerged with a number of observations. Renée Zellweger’s method of realising her role, for instance, was never to come out of it. “So when we met again at the London premiere, she’d lost all the weight and had a Texan accent. It was as if I were meeting her for the first time. Very odd.”

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