The word became his punishment, and the world became a prison for him. The Satanic Verses, the banned, burnt, misread novel of his, swayed the minds of fanaticism from Bradford to Islamabad. From the remoteness of banishment, Rushdie could only imagine home. He wrote home, in so many words of memory and loss. And India was his most enchanting memory.

India of the midnight's child. On his pages danced India with all its passions and sorrows, the country that provided the grammar of his imagination, also, the country that banned his words. Perhaps, India refused to realise that the act of denying Rushdie his homeland was an act of self-denial.Now, India has redeemed itself by granting him a visa. A welcome political act. A belated correction, too.

After all, it was the politics of desperation that banished The Satanic Verses from the Indian bookshelves. India was the first country to ban it, much before Khomeini's reaction. The Imam woke up to the opportunity only when he saw the televised images of the Satanic flames from Islamabad. The Rajiv regime's reaction was a sop to certain Muslim politicians who were short of issues -- and votes.

That was a time when politicians doubled as literary critics, when men of literature and activists of culture defined freedom with so much expediency. To some extent, Khomeini's fatwa was understandable, since it was coming from the helmsman of the Great Islamic Revolution. He badly needed a soft enemy with a strong symbolic value. The reality of the revolution was not at all encouraging in those days. The novelist was fair game for the desperate revolutionary. But the Indian ban and the successivegovernments' indifference towards Rushdie's wish to visit his India were acts of convenience, not conviction.

For them Rushdie was an insignificant abstraction. They didn't want to rake up a forgotten issue. So they kept him out of the country. Today, only the politics of courage can give back Rushdie his freedom. And it was courage when President Khatami of Iran said Rushdie's head was no longer in the wanted list.

Now the Vajpayee government has shown some courage. There are bound to be noises of no from Jama Masjid and elsewhere. If the country can protect cricketers, it can certainly protect a novelist, a novelist who is a living rejoinder to the extra-territorial tyranny of religion. The Indian gesture comes on the eve of the tenth anniversary of Khomeini's fatwa. Rushdie went underground in a miraculous year: 1989. It marked the beginning of the end of another faith that banished questions.

Europe's annus mirabilis was Rushdie's annus horribilis. Even Solzhenitsyn could come home. But for Rushdie,the ``bastard child of history,'' the most famous Bombay boy, home continued to be elsewhere. ``Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way,'' wrote the novelist. Come home, Rushdie, listen to the voices and see the places you kept in the secrecy of your head in public.