After the shocking attack on Salman Rushdie, the pain kept cropping up throughout my scrollhazed days. There was the fear of loss. A brilliant storyteller, whose mercurial play with words, conjures vast, magical lands to share the worlds he has inhabited with us less gifted imaginers - Salman Rushdie is a personal deity to me. Midnight's Children was the first Rushdie book I came across on the sidewalks of Kothi and Abids - the secondhand stores that sold books from all over the world - from the communist publications of the USSR to sheet music, and the main draw for the many secretly wild teenage girls - the Mills and Boon doses of heartaches and fantasies. This colossal tome usually with its front cover ripped off would be there and I forget how I actually got my hands on it. Perhaps I borrowed it from the school library in my father's school. The beautiful long hall in the basement with windows high up near the ceiling, a couple of rows of narrow, slanted desks, benches alo