As a look at my essay A Dream of Glorious Return, published in Step Across This Line, will quickly show, I was talking somewhat satirically about the tourist-Rajasthan that was presented to Bill Clinton on his visit to India (“People wear colourful clothes and perform colourful dances and ride on colourful elephants and these are things a president should know”) while the non-colourful realities of the drought and so on were not drawn to his attention.
It is quite improper to quote my essay selectively so that he can praise my friend Mehta by making me look foolish.
Salman Rushdie,
New York