Crucially, Shalimar the Clown depicts the valley in happier times, not as a trouble-free bed of roses but a place where open-hearted Muslim and open-hearted Hindu could live with and even enjoy their differences, with their separate identities as “descriptions not divisions”.Rushdie uses Kashmir’s fall from grace into grief as a microcosm of a period in which “an age of fury was dawning and only the enraged could shape it”. But “turn the camera off, and they’d tell all kinds of horror stories”. The actors lingered in his memory, and “in the end I found away to tell a story about them”.In the pacific past, the meadows and slopes of Kashmir “did feel like paradise, at least to the rest India – if only because it had snow It was the first time in my life I ever saw snow. That has been, quite consistently, the position of ordinary people in Kashmir for the past 60 years. And that’s the only option nobody considers.”He visited the region’s peaks and lakes often in his youth, and last went back in 1987, when the travelling players he filmed with a Channel 4 documentary crew would put on a public face of support for the Indian armed forces. And the book depicts the globalisation of this conflict, in a rage-filled “time of demons” when family rows spill out over the oceans and “everywhere was a mirror of everywhere else”.As for the people of Kashmir, says Rushdie, their attitude towards the headscarved jihadi thugs and uniformed military thugs remains the same: “Would you both please fuck off. It invades the body politic, bloodily thrusting itself to the forefront of every act and thought, reducing many subjects into one It makes monomaniacs of us all.

In many ways, Rushdie’s new novel, Shalimar the Clown (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), enacts exactly this dismaying process.The book shows, through a quartet of tragically entangled lives, the descent into cyclical slaughter and repression of the once-idyllic valley of Kashmir. That “tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant’s teeth” has been torn for two decades between Islamist atrocities and Indian army reprisals. Terrorism (by groups or by states) not only wrecks bodies and lives. Before the London bombings, he went to see the Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart, along with Rowan Atkinson.

“I remember saying to her, ‘Look, if you’re talking about inciting hatred, are you going to send people to listen to the sermons in the mosques? Are you going to go in there and haul people out of the pulpits?’ And she looked embarrassed.” Now, of course, the Government hints that it might do just that. “It’s the opposite of what they were saying before 7 July,” snorts Rushdie. “Again, a piece of Blairite opportunism: ‘Let’s reverse the meaning of this legislation’.”The crimes of the jihadis and the follies of the politicians ought not to hijack this interview. I do think that the Government has strong authoritarian tendencies, and I do worry that, now that it feels justified in slinging people out, it’ll start slinging out anyone whose face it doesn’t like.”Rushdie has worked with British PEN against the draft bill to outlaw incitement to religious hatred.