[H]e had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. 'Now I know what a ghost is,' he thought. 'Unfinished business, that's what.'

The passage frames “ghosts” not as supernatural entities but as the return of what has been left unresolved—projects, guilt, histories, or narratives that refuse closure. The character’s sense that imagination is “stepping out into the real world” suggests a porous boundary between inner life and external events: what one invents, fears, or suppresses can begin to structure reality with the “slow, fatal logic of a dream.” Rushdie often explores how stories and histories haunt the present; here, haunting becomes a metaphor for the compulsive pressure of unfinished obligations and unprocessed pasts, which can feel fated precisely because they are psychologically and morally inescapable.