Friday, February 27, 2015

I'm always pleased upon those rare occasions when I find wrestling in my reading. Lately I've found it in a couple of things I've read by Salman Rushdie. Wrestling, particularly the Indian wrestler Dara Singh, shows up in Midnight's Children, and in The Satanic Verses a wrestling match takes place between a man and an angel, similar to Jacob's wrestling the angel/God in Genesis 32. Of course, in neither of Rushdie's works is the wrestling described in the detailed way we wrestling fans would like (not a head scissors in any of the passages), but that's probably better for the flow of the fictions. We have our imaginations and, having them, should use them.

I imagine that Rushdie himself would be a good wrestler. He seems built for it. I bet he'd be fun to wrestle, and I bet he knows his head scissors from his headlocks.