Lewis Beale in the Los Angeles Times:
Rushdie says the idea first came to him in 1999. “The germ of the book came in two bits,” he notes. “One was this image of the murder scene with which the book begins. It then connected for me with having been in Kashmir and having met a group of traveling players not unlike the one in the book. Somehow, I realized this murderer was Kashmiri, he might come from that village and, somehow, that might give me a way of uniting the two worlds.”
Yet Rushdie had to set “Shalimar” aside for a while because it wasn’t coming together. He picked it up again partly, he says, because of Sept. 11. “What that made me see was this idea that the world was interconnected and is one of the things that everyone saw in this city on that day,” Rushdie says. “And it made me think that what was wrong with my original conception was that I hadn’t made the canvas big enough. You have to go back into Strasbourg, back into India. By enlarging the story, you get to see how different bits of the world connect.”
More here.