In trying to restore his father’s subscription, Haroun is pulled into a larger battle to save the story sea from being poisoned by Khattam-Shud:

What follows is a bizarre adventure with telepathic hoopoes, tone-deaf regals, and shadow warriors from the dark side of Kahani. He confiscates the Water Genie’s Disconnecting Tool and holds it ransom until his father’s connection can be restored.

No one knows why until Haroun runs into a water genie disconnecting his father’s subscription to the Great Story Stream of Kahani (an invisible moon). If you’re still here (and not off reading Haroun, where you should be), I’ll provide a quickie synopsis: Haroun’s father, the Ocean of Notions, runs out of stories. To his wife, Soraya, Rashid was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during these years Haroun grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns, he had his father’s ready laughter and his mother’s sweet voice raised in song. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. Black smoke poured out of the chimneys of the sadness factories and hung over the city like bad news.Īnd in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. In the north of the sad city stood mighty factories in which (so I’m told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world, which never seemed to get enough of it. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue. There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. I’m so stoked over this first page (page 15 in my edition) that here it is, in full: Rushdie is brilliant!īy the time I turned to the second page of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, I was grinning ear-to-ear, feeling like a ten-year-old in anticipation of a bedtime story. Only now do I realize how much I’ve missed out. It wasn’t until a decade later when I perused a list of his books that I realized he didn’t write The Terrible Book. This sour experience struck Rushdie from my list of intriguing authors. It wasn’t and I tanked multiple papers in succession. In college, I skimmed a terrible book* by Salman Rushdie and crossed my fingers that it would be relevant for two days of discussion then forgotten.

Haroun and the sea of stories book