Everyone knows Salman Rushdie is a great writer. His sentences are love songs set in crystal prose. Like this one from Shalimar the Clown:

Anees Noman was captured alive, though suffering from gunshot wounds in the right leg and shoulder, after an encounter with security forces in the southwestern village of Siot, where he had holed up with twenty militant fighters aged between fifteen and nineteen above a food store called Ahdoo’s whose owner called in the troops because the youngsters drank all his cans of condensed milk, a decision he regretted after the army wrecked his shop with grenades that blew out the whole front wall of the small two-story wooden building, and several hundred rounds of automatic fire from an armored vehicle parked at point-blank range which destroyed all the produce that had managed to survive the grenade blast.

As opposed to the far less impressive version which might have been written:

Although wounded, Anees Noman was captured alive.

If you read back over Rushdie’s actual sentence you might notice that the author doesn’t include the pre-machine gunned price of the eggplant … what editing!