The phone rang just as I finished my breakfast. It was my sister calling from Kerala. “Do you remember that professor who got into a controversy with a question he had set for an exam on Muslims?” asked my sister. “Yes, has something happened to him?” I asked with a sense of foreboding. “He was attacked by a group of people this morning and his palms have been chopped off,” said my sister who lives quite near to the college where the professor teaches. I switched on the TV. A Malayalam news channel reported that about eight persons intercepted the professor’s car as he was returning home from church. They were carrying weapons like knives and axes. They also attacked the women in the car though not fatally. My thoughts raced back to J. S. Bandukwala’s article in the latest edition of Outlook which I read last evening and the interview with Salman Rushdie in this morning’s Literary Review of the Hindu. Both Bandukwala and Rushdie are Muslims who think that there is something ser