Salman Rushdie refers in his memoirs to one of my page one stories in The Sunday Telegraph in London: “A decade on, the Rushdie crisis is over” appeared on September 22, 2001.

It had been based on an intense dialogue with the Iranian charge d’affaires in London who spoke for that part of his regime which wanted to solve “the Rushdie crisis”. I was known to them as a journalist who reported from Iran from time to time — I still have a large trunk deposited in the basement of the Intercontinental Hotel in Teheran.

Basically, the Iranians, who were being cold-shouldered by the UK, Germany and other key west European states, were trying to reconcile two conflicting requirements. The formulation, finally accepted by Western governments, was that while Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie could not technically be cancelled, the Iranian regime would make it clear it had “only theological validity”. The regime gave an undertaking there would be no bounty money offered or death squads sent by Teheran to hunt down the author.

It had been a long time since I had jumped into a taxi on January 14, 1989, and gone to Rushdie’s home at 41, Peter Street, in Islington, north London. Earlier that day, a copy of The Satanic Verses had been burnt in a public square in Bradford. I had already written up the news story for The Sunday Times, for which I then worked, but was seeking the author’s reaction to the book burning. I was getting worried that his phone was constantly engaged.

From the summer of 1988 onwards, I knew The Satanic Verses would prove to be a literary hot potato even before it was published in the UK by Viking Penguin on September 26, 1988. The book was going to be published in India by Penguin India ahead of the UK — and word came from my sources that India was “not going to touch the book”.

I provided tips about the gathering storm to Tony Bambridge, managing editor of The Sunday Times.

“Just a little immigrant story,” he said dismissively.

Back in Bombay, Rushdie’s home city, Rahul Singh, a close friend then editing The Sunday Observer, had been planning to carry some extracts from The Satanic Verses but changed his mind. “One of my Muslim compositors told me that if I carry the extracts, he would burn down the building.”

I never really got to the bottom of whether Rahul’s father, Khushwant Singh, editorial advisor to Penguin India, really had sent a fax to Peter Meyer, chief executive of Viking Penguin in London, advising him not to publish the book. In his book (Joseph Anton: A Memoir; Jonathan Cape; £25), Rushdie insists no such advice was given or, at least, received. I believe Khushwant did pass on his misgivings.

In The Sunday Times, where I would become almost a full time Rushdie correspondent, I did odd little stories on hostile Muslim reaction to the book. About 20 photocopied pages were being faxed around the world. Some of my stories were bylined jointly with Mazher Mahmood, who later found fame on the News of the World as the “Fake Sheikh”. One or two reports were bylined jointly with Marie Colvin, who was killed in February this year while covering the civil war in Syria.

The Middle East was her patch, while South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were mine. Iran was also my responsibility since I had lived there as a young reporter for The Daily Telegraph, going in just after the revolution.

Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on February 14, 1989, changing the literary world for ever — The Satanic Verses could not be unpublished once it had been published but today publishers are pretty scared to take on any work that might be deemed critical of Islam. Khomeini died on June 3, 1989, aged 86. His death meant that the one man who could have cancelled the fatwa was now gone. But I don’t think he would ever have relented.

Before the fatwa on February 14 was the Bradford book burning in January. Worried at not being able to contact Rushdie, I went down to see him. His house was all boarded up from the inside but the explanation was an innocent one.

“Sorry, my phone had come off the hook,” he apologised. Marianne Wiggins, his American second wife, was with him. She seemed warm and very pleasant — I had no idea they would split up before too long.

When the fatwa came, the department heads at The Sunday Times were holding their start of the weekly Tuesday morning conference. Afterwards, Bambridge, not entirely pleased that the “little immigrant story” had become bigger, said: “Do a page then, a ‘focus’.”

That evening BBC television led with the Rushdie story and moved it up several notches. The next morning, Bambridge, now even unhappier, came with fresh instructions from Andrew Neil. “The editor wants to do a 4-page special report. Knock out everything you have got in your notes — and give your copy to John Witherow.”

John, who was to become editor of The Sunday Times in 1994, did a good job, pulling all the strands together.

Between the summer of 1988 and February 14, 1989, I had built up a bulging file. One of the self-styled Muslim “community leaders” in Britain, Dr Kalim Siddiqui, told me he was in Teheran on February 13, 1989, and just about to catch a Lufthansa flight back to London. At Mehrabad airport, he was consulted by the National Guidance minister since Khomeini had seen TV reports of five protestors being shot dead in Islamabad.

“Oh, Rushdie, very bad man,” Siddiqui said he told the minister.

The latter rushed back, told Khomeini who called a secretary and dictated a statement, which was then rushed to Teheran Radio for the main 2pm bulletin. In such a fashion then, on the say so of Brother Kalim (as he would have it), was the fatwa born. In London, poor Rushdie had to disappear for 10 years. By and by, he moved to New York, where I went to see him in late 2002 just before Midnight’s Children was staged as a play by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2003 at the Barbican in London.

He told me he hoped Midnight’s Children, the play, would be seen in India. He pointed out that the book has a Muslim family at its centre. “It’s not a particularly religious Muslim family, but it’s a Muslim family and it puts the story of the Muslim family as the centre of the Indian story. That is something that has value right now.”

Maybe Rushdie, who has moved a long way from the old moorings by repeated migration, should settle in his “beloved Bombay” for a while to get back his own self and become part of Indian society. And Indians should be free to make up their own minds about his memoirs — all 636 pages of it — and Deepa Mehta’s cinematic version of Midnight’s Children.