Rushdie hits the clubs as Padma finds love

Salman Rushdie has not let his separation and impending divorce from his fourth wife Padma Lakshmi slow him down. Indeed, his whirlwind social life - once the subject of mirth in the British media - is now the butt of jokes in New York where he mainly lives. The New York Observer - which describes him as "the 60-year-old fatwa-surviving, Booker Prize-winning author, knight and soon-to-be-ex-husband of a sultry Indian model almost half his age who hosts a cooking show on a cable television network" - has chronicled his jet-setting lifestyle over recent weeks in its latest issue.

"The vim with which he has approached newfound singledom is breathtaking," says the Observer - especially given that he doesn't have a book to plug ( his most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, was published in 2005). He has been living it up in New York and Boston, the West Coast, Toronto and London. No party is too far off Rushdie's map - and there's inevitably a "comely lady on his arm" whether he's handing out awards at a film festival in New York, dining at the Ivy in London (reportedly with a blonde who resembled Kay Saatchi, the ex-wife of ad man and art collector Charles Saatchi) and appearing back in Manhattan at a Hallowe'en party dressed as Darth Vader (where the New York Post's 'Page Six' claimed he had to "fend off a bevy of scantily costumed babes pawing at him").

Could all this activity have something to do with his ex-wife's own social whirl? Lakshmi, 37, has been hosting the reality competition show Top Chef in the US, publicising her cookbook Tangy, Tart and Sweet and appearing in the latest issue of Vanity Fair to deny rumours that the marriage fell apart because she had an affair with US tycoon Ted Forstmann, once a suitor of Princess Diana's.

"What can I say?" she tells the magazine. "Salman is the greatest love of my life. We really tried to work it out... There was no third party. I wasn't mean to his kids. There was no, like, infidelity." This has not stopped the gossip among New York socialities. "Lakshmi and Forstmann are an item. They're dating," is the word.