The Shaw Theatre in London is not far from King’s Cross Railway Station – good news for a pair of frantic and wide-eyed Americans scurrying through the bustling July streets of London. The clocks seemed to count against us as we ran past passengers both boarding and departing at King’s Cross. Mere minutes from show time, touristy shopping cart photos on Platform 9 _ would have to wait; we were on the hunt for a different kind of magic.

I first discovered Salman Rushdie my senior year in high school. “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” a short story chronicling the sale of Dorothy’s magical ruby slippers, changed the way I thought about reading and writing. Rushdie writes:

See: Behind bullet-proof glass, the ruby slippers sparkle. We do not know the limits of their powers. We suspect that these limits may not exist.

The fabled ruby slippers of “The Wizard of Oz” fame are on sale to the highest bidder in an alternate universe where reality and fiction hit a crossroads. Characters from movies and books enter into the real world to place their bids against real-life movie stars, disgraced politicians and religious zealots. The subjects of portraits compete against witches, lions, wizards and Totos, all in a desperate attempt to win the slippers. In Rushdie’s auction house, everyone’s dollar has an equal sway at the Auctioneers’ “courtroom of demand.”

Having never much understood or appreciated the classics of high school English reading lists, I found myself shocked by the awesomeness of Rushdie’s “At the Auction.” Here was a living man producing that obscure, overly-and-overtly-pretentious stuff called literature. But instead of turning away and reviling it as I had with just about all the other masters and their timeless masterpieces, I picked up his words and ran with them. And I loved them.

It’s in the ideas and concepts. His stories are told through people whose actions and lives ricochet and amplify themselves to affect the scale of all India. Lives are dictated by a sequence of paintings. Characters come to personify angels and devils. The sale of a pair of ruby slippers causes reality and fiction to crash into one another.

It’s about style, too. The Indian-British author wields the English language so well that at times it doesn’t even feel like English. Marathon-length sentences weave embellishments and digressions in and out richly with ease. Plotlines span generations inside massively dysfunctional and lascivious family trees. His narrators jump back and forth, revising their own stories as they progress. His stories are resolved before they begin; it’s the hows and whys that drive his books’ momentums. Reading a book by Salman Rushdie takes endurance but is monumentally rewarding.

The controversy around Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” his critically acclaimed but widely contested novel where blasphemous remarks against Islam are made, really opened my eyes to the power of words. Sentenced to death by outraged leaders of Islam, Rushdie lived for years in hiding after his fatwa was declared. Working through the book, I am reading carefully to understand the full nature of Rushdie’s meaning. In spite of the controversy and very real death threats, Rushdie has continued to write and garner praise from readers. I admire Salman Rushdie for his literary accomplishments as well as for his courage to continue writing in the face of abject extremist intolerance.

It was a logical and incremental set of coincidences that landed me in London on a school night hunting for Salman Rushdie. Spending my summer at King’s College where Rushdie had studied history years earlier, I pledged to make every effort to find traces of his stay at Cambridge. I was reading another one of his works for class, and after a long discussion with a professor about my dream to meet Rushdie, I haphazardly stumbled across a blurb in The Guardian. He was coming to London to discuss his award-winning “Midnight’s Children.”

The dash from late afternoon lecture to taxi to train station through English countryside to King’s Cross is a blur. As my friend and I took our seats inside the Shaw Theatre, the mood of the audience reminded me of the mood gathered before Rushdie’s limitlessly magical ruby slippers. In the story, the narrator comes to grips with his mindless fanaticism for the ruby slippers. He leaves the auction “refreshed, and free.”

In the audience I watched and listened to my hero speak. His words out loud, like his words on paper, had a magic of their own. They were rapturous. I returned to Cambridge that night feeling weightless and free.

Henry is a sophomore in business. He made sure to stop by Platform 9 _ after Salman Rushdie’s lecture to pose embarrassingly for Harry Potter pictures.