In the South: A Story by Salman Rushdie

On 16^th May, 2026, Literati Lounge, Bhopal’s leading Book Club, hosted a discussion on The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie. Anshu Vaish chaired the well-attended session.

Nishi Agrawal initiated the discussion with introductory comments on each of the five stories after which several members shared their thoughts about the stories, and other recent works by Rushdie. 

Here is a brief review of “In the South”, the lead story in The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie.

The story opens ominously: Junior falls and dies, yet the day is otherwise ordinary—don’t people die every day? Rushdie begins with a sprawling 81‑word sentence, setting the tone for the story’s meditative pace.

The lead story is about two old men, “eighty-one years old. If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.” The quintet of stories gets its title from this sentence.

The old men live in Chennai – in the South, which is not merely geographical since Hindus also associate south with Yama or Death.

Senior is waiting to die – “[E]ach morning he regretted that he had not died in the night.” Junior isn’t bubbling with zest for life, but he’s happy to be alive. Senior has lived a fulfilled life, but is now lonely. His large extended family is a nuisance, a swarm of mosquitoes. Junior, a clerk, had an uneventful life, never married, but has no regrets or complaints, though he is enthralled by the much younger D’Mello’s enchanting descriptions of Mumbai – the legendary bitch-city - and looks forward to his periodic visits which Senior much resents.

Both men are frail, their health in decline. Junior shuffles slowly when he walks. Senior has “multiple health problems of the very old, the daily penances of bowel and urethra, of back and knee, the milkiness climbing in his eyes, the breathing troubles, the nightmares, the slow failing of the soft machine.”

Senior is erudite. He taught scriptures, maths, and much else besides post-retirement, and enjoyed the lively discussions on politics, chess, poetry, and music at a local coffeehouse with his ten friends in the park. But all were gone now. He is lonely.

Senior’s wife with a wooden leg, his second after the demise of his first wife, is Aarthi; “but he never used it [her name] …To him she was always ‘Woman’ or ‘Wife.’” She retaliates Senior’s lack of love and courtesy by totally ignoring him, refusing even to get him a glass of water when asked. She invites her cacophonous clan who invade the premises forcing Senior to flee to Junior’s home for quiet and peace.

Rushdie layers domestic disquiet atop existential loneliness. Senior is now friendless, but for Junior’s argumentative company. But their quarrel is feigned sparring, not unlike the playful teasing in Carnatic musical duets. Life won’t be worth living but for the daily quarrel, exchange of insults and repartees from their adjacent verandas.

Senior had scholarly, thoughtful views about life after death, soul, and similar stuff. Junior’s views were mundane and laughable. He wasn’t a well-read man, nor did he think deeply about such matters.  

“Junior’s life had been a disappointment to him … The discovery of his affliction by the incurable disease of mediocrity might have cowed a less ebullient spirit, but he remained bright-eyed, with a ready smile for the world.”

When they are on their way to the post office to collect their weekly pension, the sun is at their back, and their shadows fall in front — ‘like lovers’ — the thought occurs to both of them, but neither one voices it. At the crossing, Junior stumbles, falls, and dies instantly; Senior regrets not saying what he could have said.

What was the special bond between the old men?
Both were shadows.
“The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern. But the shadows see each other and know who they are. So it was with us.”

After Junior’s death, Senior reminisces mournfully about the dear departed.
“He who knew me knows nothing now and therefore I am not known. What else, woman, is death?”

Regardless of Senior’s scripture-supported views on life after death, Junior’s ghost appears on the adjacent veranda when Senior feels lonely.

Is the story about the meaninglessness of existence, the banality of life—the routine progression from adulthood, marriage, family, friends, work, and thereafter, decline, decrepitude, and death—the inevitable fate of all who live?
Or, is it about the loneliness of the old who pass like shadows in the world of the young?

Rushdie wrote this story in 2009, long before the near fatal knife attack on him in 2022; but under the shadow of the fatwa calling for his death issued in 1989. Not surprising that mortality is a brooding presence in this story.

Is this story a swan song—depressing, melancholic, and mournful? The looming spectre of shape-shifting death—sometimes visiting quietly in sleep, sometimes as a small fall and a little bump on a sidewalk, sometimes as a giant wave of tsunami which the author calls Death. The ultimate indignity of an ordinary, uneventful, inconsequential death; regardless of the life lived—ordinary or extraordinary, meaningful or not so meaningful.

When life-breath leaves Junior’s body, Senior unhesitatingly picks up the pension slip from Junior’s pocket and proceeds to the post office to collect the modest sum. There is enough time to mourn for the dead during the thirteen-days long ritual; why forego the weekly pension?

Each morning, Senior regrets that he had not died during the night; yet he dons his formal attire for the weekly sojourn to the post office to collect the meagre sum, pleased to note respect and deference in the postal clerk’s conduct.

Ultimately, the story is less about death itself than about the duet between life and death—two verandas, two shadows, inseparable.

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