In 1989, the year that Salman Rushdie went into hiding, and in the years immediately before and following, I frequently wrote columns about cross-country travels with my daughter that proved quite popular with readers of the local paper.

She was just 11 that year, four years older than Rushdie’s son, Zafar, who was suddenly and necessarily estranged from his father. To maintain some connection, the author of probing novels with deep historical, religious, and philosophical content, wrote a children’s story and engaged his son as his first-read editor.

After hearing the first draft, Zafar told his dad that it was a good story, but it needed “some jump.” Rushdie took that to mean “quicken the pace” and told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Zafar liked the “jump” of the second version.

In September, 1990, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the adventures of an irrepressibly happy young boy who finds himself living in a city so sad that it has forgotten its name, appeared in bookstores and libraries all over the world where speech is–or at least was–still free.

These were years when I spent more time downtown playing music than anywhere writing anything, and in the holiday season I would bundle up with fingerless gloves that allowed me to pipe Christmas carols along with my standard jigs and reels, bourees and minuets.

On the very day before Rushdie’s interview aired, a woman approached after I finished a song and handed me a $20 bill rather than putting it the basket. She insisted on a condition: That I would turn it into “a present for Rachel.”

‘Twas a few nights before Christmas that I had her open it. I figured it would take five or six nights of bedtime installments, but Haroun has more jump than Zafar may have bargained for. Several times I had to stop my voice from racing. Rachel loved it, only conceding to sleep when we were halfway through.

I took it to bed and read to the end before turning out the light.

When we woke up to pouring rain, we finished breakfast and rejoined Haroun and his story-telling father through pages of magical realism that she found exciting page by page–and that I found as thoughtful and satisfying as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robertson Davies.

One recurring item in the dialogue we adopted into our own father-daughter vocabulary: The label that Haroun used whenever he could not answer the boy’s questions, 2C2E for “too complicated to explain” Sure sounded better than “I don’t know” and “Because.”

In the age before internet shorthand and texting abbreviations, both the sight and sound of it struck us as hilarious, and yet it had a weird echo of Hamlet’s 2B or not 2B that kept us guessing about subjects rather than shrugging them off.

Perhaps that’s my response this weekend to the news that Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator, likely to lose an eye if not his life: 2C2E. No matter what we might guess or learn about why it happened, we cannot shrug it off.

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