MUMBAI, Oct. 11 -- Twenty-seven seconds: On the clock, it is less than half of a minute, and a little more than a quarter of one. Nothing exceptional can possibly occur in such a short passage of time. Unless, of course, you enjoy poetry - "you could read aloud one of Shakespeare's sonnets, the one about the summer's day," novelist Salman Rushdie wrote in his memoir, 'Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder'. His romantic recall of the use of time as fleeting as this is abruptly marred by a more terrifying 27-second memory-his encounter with his assassin on the morning of August 12, 2022 at the amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institution in New York State, ironically to talk about "the importance of keeping writers safe from harm". The knife attack would change Rushdie's life, almost forever. He escaped death by a whisker and permanently lost vision in his right eye, which in his words made him a "one-eyed man in a two-eyed world". The account of that incident and its aftermath, which became the heart of Rushdie's memoir, is now being brought to life on stage by Motley Productions. Titled '27 Seconds', the play starring Naseeruddin Shah as Rushdie and Malaika Choudhury as his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, alongside an ensemble cast, will open at the Prithvi Theatre Festival next month. "I have been an admirer of Naseer's for a very long time. I'm delighted he has taken on this project," Rushdie told HT in an email interview. At a hall in Juhu, where Shah and the rest of the cast recently began rehearsing, grinding through the nuts and bolts of the play's script, the experience is equally surreal for this writer, having just read the book. It feels like pages from Rushdie's text have unexpectedly come alive. Shah, who, along with theatre director Kaushik Sen, is the dramaturge behind the stage rendition of this memoir, opens by clarifying that this is not a "reenactment". "It is a representation," he insists-what he'd also prefer to define as "theatrical realism". Work on the play began sometime after the book released in 2024. Sen and Shah first reached out to the author's team to secure rights for the adaptation. "Salman Rushdie responded warmly," says Arghya Lahiri, who is co-directing the play with Shah. "The only caveat was that the script had to have words from his book. So, everything that anybody says in this play is directly from the text." Once the script was ready, Lahiri says that Shah did another major polish, followed by a reading that was vetted by Motley founder member Ratna Pathak Shah. Lahiri who came on board much later, first as lighting designer along with Yael Crishna, before Shah roped him in to bring his vision to life, says "a lot of conversations went behind the structuring of the play". In the book, for instance, Rushdie's conversation with his assassin Hadi Matar-whom he addresses as "The A", alternately played by actors Sahir Mehta and Vijay Tilani-which was an imagined inner dialogue, runs into an entire chapter. "I think unlocking the treatment of that chapter opened up the structure of the play," he says. What fascinated Lahiri about this project was its layered subtext. "The book itself is surprising because you go into it thinking you're going to read a work that recounts, in graphic detail, the attack and its aftermath from the pen of one of the most powerful writers this and the previous century has known," he says, adding, "But it is also a book about the creative process. About censorship; ideas about religion; about how narratives are created, about how what we have always presumed is the truth, and certain tenets that we live our lives by-respect for human life being the main one." Yet, his biggest takeaway was love. In 'Knife', Rushdie writes in telling detail the first time he met poet-novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths at a PEN event in May 2017- "that smile was hard to ignore". After living together for years, the couple married in September 2021. Post the attack, it is Griffiths who sees him through his physical and mental scars, keeping him alive. "It's an astounding love story in that sense. But I also think that love allows him to come to terms with the trauma from 33 years ago, when the fatwa was issued following the release of his book, 'The Satanic Verses' (1988)." It's a sentiment shared by Rushdie: "It's a story about overcoming violence through love and art and in the end, I hope it's actually uplifting for audiences." Choudhury, who plays Griffiths in the play, recreates this relationship with sensitivity and remarkable authenticity. So much so that during the rehearsal, an emotional scene appears to entirely consume her. Shah, on the other hand, sinks his teeth into Rushdie's character very convincingly, blurring the lines between what's real and not. Formalistically too, while it draws from Shah's passion for storytelling, there is experimentation, with fewer blackouts and seamless transitions, with one scene flowing into the other. The supporting cast, comprising Kenny Desai, Heeba Shah, Sahil Vaid, Vikram Kochhar, Sowmiyaa Baali, Mansi Srivastava, Ahimsa, Vansh Raj Kaul and Rukmani Sharma, take on multiple roles throughout the play. "It's quite a wide range of exposure and experiences," says Lahiri. With sectarian violence rampant globally, and the art and artist most vulnerable, there couldn't have been a better time to stage the play. When the rehearsal ends, I cannot help but wonder what it would be like for Rushdie, who still considers Bombay- "not Mumbai" -his beloved homeland, and whose literature is often informed by it, to sit in the audience. "I have always felt close to Bombay and I hope to visit sooner rather than later. If the play is running, I'll definitely see it!" says Rushdie....