Salman Rushdie’s name has been identified with magic realism for so long, but it appears that as one gets older, the traditional patterns of life or literature pull one back. In his latest novel The Golden House, Rushdie has dropped his signature magic realism and dished out traditional realism. This is not to condemn conventional notion of realism, rather to uphold it as something that was envisioned as integral to the art of novel, way back in 18th century England. The novel still has elements of postmodern style in so far as language and some of the narrative techniques like metanarrative reflexivity, ambivalence, obfuscation, multiple registers, high allusiveness, etc. are concerned. But so far as the thematics is concerned, Rushdie takes a firm stand rather than leave it open-ended. The villain of the piece, a Mumbai mafia don with links to terrorists gets poetic justice in the end. The notion of justice has always been upheld as a humanist ideal in Greek culture – the inspiration behind Western philosophy. That, incidentally, is also the gist of Indian poetics and philosophy. The Golden House, thus, marks a watershed in the creative career of Salman Rushdie and upholds the universal and eternal values, which are under attack from the postmodernists.