life

As one century gives way to another, a child is born in Mumbai. “The millennium’s gift,” Chandni Contractor, is a source of joy to her parents. When Chandni turns 4 and reveals herself to be a musical prodigy, she becomes a source of wonder. At the age of 13, she dazzles audiences across India with her piano and sitar performances. Five years later, she enthralls Majnoo, the playboy son of billionaire parents, and the pair go on to have a spectacular wedding. But their marriage sours and her in-laws turn overbearing. Eventually Chandni snaps and wreaks havoc by playing a different kind of music, one that has the power to destroy livelihoods and lives.

“The Musician of Kahani” is one of five stories in a new collection by Salman Rushdie. “The Eleventh Hour” sees the acclaimed Indian-born British American author exploring the weighty matters of life and death. That he should choose to craft tales around these twin themes is hardly surprising. In 2022, he was nearly killed in a frenzied attack at an event in upstate New York. Two years later, in his up-close-and-personal memoir, “Knife,” he recounted his ordeal and told how he had come to embrace what he called “my second-chance life.” Rushdie’s brush with death and new lease on life renders his latest stories — his first fiction since the attack — all the more potent and poignant.

The collection’s opener, “In the South,” gets underway both innocently and ominously: “The day Junior fell down began like any other day.” What follows is a chronicle of a death foretold. Senior and Junior are two octogenarian neighbors in Chennai, India, who spend their time together arguing. The former has had a rich and fulfilling life, but as so many of his friends and family have died — or “gone to their fiery rest” — he now longs for death. The latter, afflicted by “the incurable disease of mediocrity,” has led a disappointing life yet still possesses a lust for it.

When a tsunami hits the city, it kills Junior. At first Senior is angry (“Why not me?” he rages), but his dominant emotion turns to sadness after he realizes he has lost a man who was his “shadow.” Or so he believes. For Junior’s passing is not the end. Senior continues to see, and quarrel with, his fallen friend. As Rushdie puts it: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”

One of the finest stories here, “Late,” involves another apparition. English academic S. M. Arthur wakes up in his university college (an unnamed King’s College, Cambridge) and discovers he is dead. Feeling like “a broken entity trapped in a kind of prison,” he finds peace by communing with the one person who can see him, Indian student and fellow lonely soul, Rosa.

The pair form a bond in the empty college over the Christmas holidays. Despite their affinity, Arthur harbors secrets. When Rosa is tasked with sorting his papers, she comes across a mysteriously locked box file, the contents of which he refuses to disclose. Then Arthur takes stock of his situation and decides he can’t rest until Rosa helps him get even with a past persecutor. What is in the box and why the need for revenge?

Weighing in at over 70 pages, “Late” constitutes more a novella than a story, as does “The Musician of Kahani” and the equally substantial “Oklahoma.” This last offering about writers, writing and elaborate vanishing acts is artfully structured and formally daring, made up of multiple layers, diverse references, literary ventriloquy and slick twists and turns. In a lesser writer’s hands, this novella might have been too clever for its own good; however, Rushdie, a seasoned pro, achieves the perfect balance.

He hasn’t done so in recent years in his long-form fiction. “The Golden House” (2017), “Quichotte” (2019) and his last novel, “Victory City” (2023), were blighted in places by digressive riffs and monologues, bottomless subplots, “humorous” character names (Evel Cent, Thimma the Almost as Huge) and excessive magic-realist high jinks comprising talking revolvers, ferocious mastodons, an Italian-speaking cricket and a demigoddess who grows a city from seeds and lives for 247 years. Sometimes this hocus-pocus worked wonders; at other times it felt like cheap tricks.

Rushdie has far more success in “The Eleventh Hour.” His narratives are more streamlined. His flights of fancy— malevolent music, undead scholars, imaginary brothers, a cult led by a guru with 93 Ferraris in an “experimental township” called the Moon — are more controlled and add subtle strokes of color. Some groan-inducing puns aside, Rushdie’s comic touches are deftly managed, appearing as sharp satirical swipes or witty repartee. “You look like a man who is only waiting to die,” says Junior to Senior, who in turn retorts: “That is better than looking, as you do, like a man who is still waiting to live.”

Rushdie exhibits further playfulness by scattering clues and inviting his reader to trace connections. Arthur is in part a crafty composite of the writer E.M. Forster and the computer scientist Alan Turing — all three being, like their creator, King’s College alumni. “And at midnight, the approved hour for miraculous births in our part of the world, a baby was born to a Breach Candy family,” Rushdie writes of Chandni, with a knowing nod to the key time, place and circumstances in his 1981 masterpiece “Midnight’s Children.”

The book’s last and shortest entry, the fabular “The Old Man in the Piazza,” makes for a somewhat slight coda. Otherwise, this is an inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden. With luck this master writer has more tales to tell.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer and critic from Edinburgh, Scotland, who writes for the Economist, the Washington Post and other publications.

The wait for the first Dodgers parade of the century: 36 years.

The wait for the second: One year and two days.

On Monday, in celebration of the Dodgers becoming baseball’s first back-to-back champion in 25 years, Los Angeles will throw another party for the Dodgers.

The Dodgers’ 2025 championship parade starts Monday at 11 a.m. and runs through downtown, followed by a rally at Dodger Stadium. The rally requires a ticket, which can be obtained starting at noon Sunday at dodgers.com/postseason.

For fans with rally tickets, parking lot gates will open at 8:30 a.m. and stadium gates at 9 a.m. The event is expected to start at about 12:15 p.m.

The parade and rally will be aired live on Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 11 as well as SportsNet LA and AM 570, the team said.

In last year’s rally, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts and Ice Cube performed next to one another, with Roberts dancing and Ice Cube singing.

At one point, future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw took his turn at the microphone and hollered, “Dodger for life!”

In September, Kershaw announced he would retire at the end of the season. In his only World Series appearance, he got a critical out in the Dodgers’ 18-inning victory in Game 3.

He’ll make his final Dodger Stadium appearance as a player as part of a second consecutive championship rally. He’ll be back: The Dodgers will retire his No. 22 — they retire the number of all their Hall of Famers — and he’d certainly be in line to throw ceremonial first pitches in the Dodgers’ future postseason runs.

For now, though: Three-time champion Dodger for life.

Suzanne Rogers, who has spent more than five decades as a cast member on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” has enviable endurance. This past summer, she learned she was even stronger than she’d thought.

For six weeks between June and July, Rogers, 82, underwent treatment for Stage II colorectal cancer, she told TV Insider in an interview published Thursday. The actor said she was diagnosed with the disease earlier this year after consulting a doctor about a nagging feeling that something “wasn’t quite right” with her body.

Colorectal cancer is a term for cancer originating in the colon or rectum. Chances of occurrence increase with age, and experts recommend regular screenings for those age 45 and above, continuing until at least age 75.

Rogers suspected her health issues might be serious when her doctor told her he would like to do a slew of tests, including a colonoscopy, MRI and PET scan. Still, when he confirmed the bad news, the Daytime Emmy winner — who already did routine colonoscopies — couldn’t believe it.

“I think I was in shock for several days because I take pretty good care of myself,” she told TV Insider. Fortunately, her doctor said, “It’s a good thing you caught it in time.”

After wrapping on “Days” in June, Rogers began daily radiation and chemotherapy treatments. She said the intense regimen made her treasure her weekends “because I didn’t have to go to and see a doctor. I was so tired of seeing doctors.”

Luckily, the Peacock soap happened to be on hiatus at the time, so Rogers had no trouble making her appointments. On top of that, her onscreen daughter Linsey Godfrey, who herself battled Hodgkin‘s lymphoma as a teenager, was able to accompany her on treatment visits, which made the ordeal less daunting.

“We really feel like a family,” Rogers said, adding that other cast and crew members regularly called to check in on her, and the “Days” producers never rushed her recovery.

“They all said, ‘Don’t worry about a thing, take care of yourself, get yourself well. That’s the most important thing. We are here,’ ” Rogers said. As the actor heads back to the “Days” set next week, she said she is “feeling really good,” albeit nervous that lingering fatigue might hold her back.

“That’s the only anxiousness I feel. It’s not because of my illness, let’s put it that way,” she said. When she does return to the screen, Rogers will still be sporting her famous ginger mane, as she didn’t lose her hair during chemo.

“Days of Our Lives” premiered on NBC in 1965 and is currently airing Season 61 on Peacock. In July, the classic daytime drama announced it had been renewed for a 62nd and 63rd season on the streaming service.