Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  So much was new in those days, so much only half understood. “Pakistan” itself was a former rumor, a phantom-word that had only had a real place attached to it for two short months. Perhaps for this reason—its move across the frontier from the shadow-world of rumors into the “real”—the subject of the new country aroused the most furious passions among the rumors swarming into the Shalimar Bagh. “Pakistan has right on its side,” said one rumor, “because here in Kashmir a Muslim people is being prevented by a Hindu ruler from joining their coreligionists in a new Muslim state.” A second rumor roared back, “How can you speak of right, when Pakistan has unleashed this murderous horde upon us? Don’t you know that the leaders of Pakistan told these cutthroat tribals that Kashmir is full of gold, carpets and beautiful women, and sent them to pillage and rape and kill infidels while they’re at it? Is that a country you want to join?” A third rumor blamed the maharaja. “He’s been dithering for months. The Partition was two months ago!—And still he can’t decide who to join, Pakistan or India.” A fourth butted in. “The fool! He has jailed Sheikh Abdullah, who has sworn off all communal politics, and is listening to that mullah, Moulvi Yusuf Shah, who obviously tilts toward Pakistan.” Then many rumors clamored at once. “Five hundred thousand tribals are attacking us, with Pak army soldiers in disguise commanding them!”—“They are only ten miles away!”—“Five miles!”—“Two!”—“Five thousand women raped and murdered on the Jammu border!”—“Twenty thousand Hindus and Sikhs slaughtered!”—“In Muzaffarabad, Muslim soldiers mutinied and killed their Hindu counterparts and the officer in charge as well!”—“Brigadier Rajender Singh, a hero, defended the road to Srinagar for three days with just 150 men!”—“Yes, but he is dead now, they slaughtered him.”—“Raise his war cry everywhere! Hamla-awar khabardar, ham Kashmiri hain tayyar!”—“Look out, attackers, we Kashmiris are ready for you!”—“Sheikh Abdullah has been let out of jail!”—“The maharaja has taken his advice and opted for India!”—“The Indian army is coming to save us!”—“Will it be in time?”—“The maharaja held his last Dassehra Durbar at the palace and then hightailed it to Jammu!”—“To Bombay!”—“To Goa!”—“To London!”—“To New York!”—“If he’s so scared what chance have we?”—“Run! Save yourselves! Run for your lives!”

  As panic gripped the people in the Shalimar garden, Abdullah Noman ran to be with his wife and sons in the little makeshift screened-off maternity area Firdaus had had constructed in a corner of the Bagh. He found her sitting grim-faced on the ground, nursing the baby Noman, and beside her were Pandit Pyarelal Kaul and Khwaja Abdul Hakim, standing with bowed heads by the body of Pamposh. Pyarelal was singing a hymn softly. Abdullah could not speak for a moment. He was full of feelings of self-reproach at his own ignorance. He had known nothing, or next to nothing, of the trouble rushing down upon them. He was the sarpanch and should have known; how could he protect his people if he knew nothing of the dangers threatening them? He did not deserve his office. He was no better than Yambarzal. Petty rivalries and prideful self-absorption had blinded them both, and they had brought their people toward this terrifying conflict instead of keeping them safe and far away. Tears fell from his eyes. He knew they were tears of shame.

  “Why are you singing that song of praise?” Firdaus’s voice dragged him back into the world. She was glaring savagely at Pyarelal. “What do you have to thank Durga for? You worshipped her for nine days and on the tenth she took your wife.” The pandit received the admonition without rancor. “When you pray for what you most want in the world,” he said, “its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love, and that is surely a thing for which to thank whoever or whatever you like, the goddess, or fate, or just my lucky stars.” Firdaus turned away from him. “Maybe we are too different, after all,” she grumbled under her breath. Khwaja Abdul Hakim took his leave. “I do not think I will stay in Kashmir,” he said. “I do not want to watch the sadness destroying the beauty. I have it in mind to give my land to the university and go south. Into India; always India; never into Pakistan.” Firdaus’s back was toward the khwaja. “You’re lucky,” she muttered without turning to wish him good-bye. “You’re one of those who has a choice.”

  Abdullah asked for and received his swaddled baby boy. “We need to go,” he told Firdaus and Pyarelal gently. “The rumors flying around here are making people crazy.” All day, he thought, there have been kings and princes in my head. Alexander, Zain-ul-abidin, Jehangir, Ram. But it’s our own prince’s indecision that has unleashed this holocaust, and nobody can say whether or not India, that newly kingless land, can save us, or even if being saved by India is going to be good for us in the end.

  A drum boomed immensely in the night, louder and louder, commanding attention. So potent was the drumming that it froze people in their tracks, it silenced the rumors and got everyone’s attention. The little man, Sarkar the magician, was marching down the central avenue of the garden, hammering away at his mighty dhol. Finally, when all eyes were on him, he raised a megaphone to his lips and bellowed, “Fuck this. I came here to do something and I’m going to do it. The genius of my magic will triumph over the ugliness of the times. On the seventh beat of my drum, the Shalimar garden will disappear.” He banged the drum, one, two, three, four, five, six times. On the seventh boom, just as he had foretold, the whole Shalimar Bagh vanished from sight. Pitch blackness descended. People began to scream.

  For the rest of his life the Seventh Sarkar would curse history for cheating him of the credit for the unprecedented feat of “hiding from view” an entire Mughal garden, but most people in the garden that night thought he’d pulled it off, because on the seventh beat of his drum the power station at Mohra was blown to bits by the Pakistani irregular forces and the whole city and region of Srinagar was plunged into complete darkness. In the night-cloaked Shalimar Bagh the earthly version of the tooba tree of heaven remained secret, unrevealed. Abdullah Noman experienced the bizarre sensation of living through a metaphor made real. The world he knew was disappearing; this blind, inky night was the incontestable sign of the times.

  The remaining hours of that night passed in a frenzy of shouts and rushing feet. Somehow Abdullah managed to send his family away on a bullock cart, which Firdaus had to share with the dead body of her friend and, next to deceased Pamposh, Pyarelal Kaul cradling his baby daughter and unstoppably singing praisesongs to Durga. Then by a lucky chance Abdullah collided with Bombur Yambarzal again. Bombur in the darkness was a quivering wreck of a man, but Abdullah managed to get him on his feet. “We can’t leave our stuff here,” he persuaded Yambarzal, “or both our villages will be crippled for good.” Somehow the two of them rounded up a rump or quorum of villagers, half Shirmali, half from Pachigam, and this raggle-taggle remnant dismantled their special wuri ovens and hauled many dozens of pots full of feast-day food to the roadside. The portable theater had to be dismantled as well, and the materials for the plays packed in great wicker panniers and taken down the terraces to the lakeside. All night the villagers of Shirmal and Pachigam worked side by side, and when dawn crept over the hills at the end of that dark night and the garden reappeared, the waza and the sarpanch hugged each other and made promises of unbreakable fellowship and undying love. Above them, however, the shadow planets Rahu and Ketu existed without actually existing, pulling and pushing, intensifying and suppressing, inflaming and stifling, dancing out the moral struggle within human beings while remaining invisible in the brightening heavens. And when the actors and cooks departed from the Shalimar Bagh they left behind the giant effigies of the demon king, his brother and his son, all filled with unexploded fireworks. Ravan, Kumbhakaran and Meghnath glowered across the trembling valley, not caring whether they were Hindus or Muslims. The time of demons had begun.

  Man is ruined by the misfortune of possessing a mora
l sense,” reflected Pandit Pyarelal Kaul by the banks of the loquacious Muskadoon. “Consider the superior luck of the animals. The wild beasts of Kashmir, to enumerate a few, include Ponz the Monkey, Potsolov the Fox, Shal the Jackal, Sur the Boar, Drin the Marmot, Nyan and Sharpu the Sheep, Kail the Ibex, Hiran the Antelope, Kostura the Musk Deer, Suh the Leopard, Haput the Black Bear, Bota-khar the Ass, Hangul the Twelve-Pointed Barasingha Stag, and Zomba the Yak. Some of these are dangerous, it’s true, and many are fearsome. Ponz is a danger to walnuts. Potsolov is cunning and a danger to chickens. Shal’s is a fearsome howl. Sur is a danger to crops. Suh is ferocious and a danger to stags. Haput is a danger to shepherds. The Ass, by contrast, is a coward and runs from danger; however you must remember in mitigation that he is an Ass, just as a jackal is a jackal and a leopard is a leopard and a boar has no option but to be boarish one hundred percent of the time. They neither know nor shape their own nature; rather, their nature knows and shapes them. There are no surprises in the animal kingdom. Only Man’s character is suspect and shifting. Only Man, knowing good, can do evil. Only Man wears masks. Only Man is a disappointment to himself. Only by ceasing to need the things of the world and relieving oneself of the needs of the body . . .”

  And so on. Boonyi Kaul knew that when her father, a man with many friends because of his love of people and one too many chins because of his ever more voracious and perfectionist love of food, started mourning the failings of the human race and making ascetic recommendations for its improvement he was secretly missing his wife, who had never disappointed him, whose surprises had filled his heart, and for whom after fourteen years his body still ached. At such times Boonyi usually became extra demonstrative, trying to bury her father’s grief beneath her love. Today, however, she was distracted, and could not play the dutifully loving daughter. Today, she and her Noman, her beloved clown Shalimar, sat listening to her father on their usual boulders, neither touching nor glancing at each other, both of them struggling to control the confessional smiles that kept creeping out onto their lips.

  It was the morning after the great event in the high mountain meadow of Khelmarg. Boonyi, intoxicated by love for her lover, lounged with open sensuality on her rock, her arching body a provocation to anyone who cared to notice it. Her father, lost in melancholy, noticed that she was looking even more like her mother than usual, but failed, with the stupidity of fathers, to understand that this was because desire and the fulfillment of desire were running their hands over her body, welcoming it into womanhood. Shalimar the clown, however, was doubly agitated by her display; at once aroused and alarmed. He began to make small jerking downward movements of his fingers, as if to say calm down, don’t make it so obvious. But the invisible strings connecting his fingertips to her body weren’t working properly. The more insistently he pushed his fingers downward the higher she arched her back. The more urgently his hands pleaded for passivity the more languorously she rolled about. Later that day, when they were alone in the practice glade, both of them balancing high above the ground on the precarious illusion of a single tightrope, he said, “Why didn’t you stop when I asked you?” At which she grinned and said, “You weren’t asking me to stop. I could feel you fondling me here, pressing and squeezing and all, and pushing down on me here, hard hard, and it was driving me crazy, as you knew perfectly well it would.”

  Shalimar the clown began to see that the loss of her virginity had unleashed something reckless in Boonyi, a wild defiant uncaringness, a sudden exhibitionism which was tumbling toward folly—for her flaunting of their consummated love could bring both their lives crashing down and smash them to bits. There was irony in this, because Boonyi’s daring was the single quality he most admired. He had fallen in love with her in large part because she was so seldom afraid, because she reached out for what she wanted and grabbed at it and didn’t see why it should elude her grasp. Now this same quality, intensified by their encounter, was endangering them both. Shalimar the clown’s signature trick on the high wire was to lean out sideways, increasing the angle until it seemed he must fall, and then, with much clownish playacting of terror and clumsiness, to right himself with gravity-defying strength and skill. Boonyi had tried to learn the trick but gave up, giggling, after many windmilling failures. “It’s impossible,” she confessed. “The impossible is what people pay to see,” Shalimar the clown on the high wire quoted his father, and bowed as if receiving applause. “Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show,” Abdullah Noman liked to tell his troupe. “Swallow a sword, tie yourself in a knot, defy gravity. Do what the audience knows it could never do no matter how hard it tries. After that you’ll have them eating out of your hand.”

  There were times, Shalimar the clown understood with growing concern, when the laws of theater might not precisely apply to real life. Right now in real life Boonyi was the one leaning out from the high wire, brazenly flaunting her new status as lover and beloved, defying all convention and orthodoxy, and in real life these were forces that exerted at least as powerful a downward pull as gravity. “Fly,” she told him, laughing into his worried face. “Wasn’t that your dream, Mister Impossible? To do without the rope and walk on air.” She took him deeper into the wood and made love to him again and then for a while he didn’t care what followed. “Face it,” she whispered. “Married or not married, you’ve passed through the stone door.” The poets wrote that a good wife was like a shady boonyi tree, a beautiful chinar—kenchen renye chai shihiji boonyi—but in the common parlance the imagery was different. The word for the entrance to a house was braand; stone was kany. For comical reasons the two words were sometimes used, joined together, to refer to one’s beloved bride: braand-kany, “the gate of stone.” Let’s just hope, Shalimar the clown thought but did not say, that the stones don’t come smashing down on our heads.

  Shalimar the clown was not the only local male to have Boonyi Kaul on the brain. Colonel Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha of the Indian army had had his eye on her for some time. Colonel Kachhwaha was just thirty-one years old but liked to call himself a Rajput of the old school, a spiritual descendant—and, he was certain, a distant blood relation—of the warrior princes, the old-time Suryavans and Kachhwaha rajas and ranas who had given both the Mughals and the British plenty to think about in the glory days of the kingdoms of Mewar and Marwar, when Rajputana was dominated by the two mighty fortresses of Chittorgarh and Mehrangarh, and fearsome one-armed legends rode into battle bisecting their enemies with cutlasses, crushing skulls with maces, or hacking through armor with the chaunch, a long-nosed axe with a cruel storklike beak. At any rate, England-returned Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha had a splendid Rajput moustache, a swaggering Rajput bearing, a barking British-style military voice, and now he was also commanding officer of the army camp a few miles to the northeast of Pachigam, the camp everyone locally called Elasticnagar because of its well-established tendency to stretch. The colonel wholeheartedly disapproved of this irreverent title, which in his ramrod opinion was far from commensurate with the dignity of the armed forces, and after arriving in post one year back had tried to insist that the camp’s official name be used by all persons at all times, but had given up when he realized that most of the soldiers under his command had forgotten it long ago.

  The colonel had a preferred nickname for himself, too. “Hammer,” an English play on Hammir. A good, soldierly name. He practiced it sometimes when he was alone. “Hammer Kachhwaha.” “Hammer by name, hammer by nature.” “Colonel Hammer Kachhwaha at your service, sir.” “Oh, please, dear fellow, just call me Hammer.” But this attempted self-naming failed just as the battle against Elasticnagar had, because once people heard his surname they inevitably wanted to shorten it to Kachhwa Karnail, which is to say “Colonel Turtle” or “Tortoise.” So Tortoise Colonel he became, and was forced to look for his metaphors of self-description closer to the ground. “Slow and steady wins the race, eh, what?” he practiced; and “Tortoise by name, damned hard-shelled by nature.”
But somehow he could never bring himself to say, “My dear chap, just call me Turtle,” or, “I mostly go by Tortoise, don’t you know—but it’s just plain Torto to you.” His testudinarious fate further soured a mood which had already been ruined by his father on his thirtieth birthday, when the newly promoted colonel was on home leave in Jodhpur before taking up his posting in Kashmir. His father was in fact the Rajput of the old school that his son aspired to be, and his birthday gift to Hammirdev was a set of two dozen golden bangles. Ladies’ bangles? Hammir Kachhwaha was confused. “Why, sir?” he asked, and the older man snorted, jingling the bangles on a finger. “If a Rajput warrior is still alive on his thirtieth birthday,” grunted Nagabhat Suryavans Kachhwaha in tones of disgust, “we give him women’s bangles to express our disappointment and surprise. Wear them until you prove they aren’t deserved.” “By dying, you mean,” his son sought clarification. “To win favor in your eyes I have to get myself killed.” His father shrugged. “Obviously,” he said, neglecting to discuss why there were no bangles on his own arms, and spat copious betel juice into a handy spittoon.

  So Colonel Kachhwaha of Elasticnagar was well known not to be a happy man. The men of his command feared his martinet tongue, and the locals, too, had learned that he was not lightly to be crossed. As Elasticnagar grew—as soldiers flooded north into the valley and brought with them all the cumbersome matériel of war, guns and ammunition, artillery both heavy and light, and trucks so numberless that they acquired the local name of “locusts”—so its need for land increased, and Colonel Kachhwaha requisitioned what he needed without explanation or apology. When the owners of the seized fields protested at the low level of compensation they received, he answered furiously, his face turning shockingly red, “We’ve come to protect you, you ingrates. We’re here to save your land—so for God’s sake don’t give me some sob story when we have to bally well take it over.” The logic of his argument was powerful, but it didn’t always go down well. This was not finally important. Outraged by his continued failure to die in battle, the colonel was unquiet of spirit, and as livid as a rash. Then he saw Boonyi Kaul and things changed—or might have changed, had she not turned him down, flatly, and with scorn.