Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  The ugliness of the bureaucratic terminology, its aggressive uninterest in euphony, marked it out as power-speech. Power had no need for prettification, no need to make things easy. By showing its contempt for verbal felicity it revealed itself as itself, naked and unadorned. The iron fist took off the velvet glove.

  Euphoria over the Islamabad accords proved short-lived. The estranged nations’ common fondness for alphabet soup did not mean they had developed a taste for peace. MADAM summoned Max to tell him of her anger at the cancellation of all joint projects. The military back-channel proposals had been for territorial adjustments along the cease-fire line; India might compensate Pakistan for lost strategic areas. Or, if this were not acceptable to Pakistan, India had suggested it might agree to accept guarantees of more adequate controls by the U.N. Mrs. Gandhi told Max the actual numbers of the war dead on both sides. They were much higher than the published figures. “We can’t go on letting our young men perish like this,” she said. “And the Pakistanis agree, you know. The generals are furious with Zulfy”—GOPMFA Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—“for leading them into a battle over a stretch of icy wasteland. Quelques arpents de neige, isn’t it.” In spite of the two nations’ common concerns, there would be no effective moves toward greater cross-border understanding. Two powerful men combined to sabotage the Ophuls Plan. The old Congress grandee Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon—the great left-wing orator and wit who had once, at the Security Council, filibustered for eight hours without a prepared text on the subject of India’s inalienable right to have and hold Kashmir; who called himself a “tea-totaller” because although he consumed no alcohol he drank a total of thirty-six cups of tea a day, and consequently spoke more rapidly than any man in India; whose rudeness was legendary; and who was considered an enemy by Indira Gandhi even though he had been her father’s friend—had worked assiduously to sabotage the détente. He had found a willing ally in home minister Gulzarilal Nanda, who had been caretaker prime minister twice, for a few days each, first after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death and again after Shastri’s, whose resentment of those who got the job for real was bitter and absolute, and whose nose was still out of joint because Shastri had overruled him about the wisdom of letting Max Ophuls visit the war zone in Kashmir. Together Nanda and Krishna Menon worked hard to build opposition to Ophuls inside the Indian cabinet and parliament, while simultaneously bolstering the Indian army’s military control over the Kashmir valley. At that early stage in her career Mrs. Gandhi was obliged to confess that she had allowed herself to be outmaneuvered. “You also, Mr. Ophuls,” she said. “GOIMHA Nanda and VKKM have foxed you too. Honestly! What a schmuck.” SCHMUCK? wondered Max. Ah . . . Sabotage of Cooperative . . . what? . . . Harmony-Motivated Undertakings Concerning Kashmir? The prime minister of India stroked his arm gently. “It’s not an acronym,” she said.

  Boonyi left Pachigam without her husband, because the Americans had only asked Abdullah Noman for a dance act. She had been commanded to give her Anarkali again, to dazzle the capital’s grandees on a specially constructed stage in the residence’s central atrium, below a pyramidal lantern. Himal and Gonwati were with her, to dance behind and beside her, content with their supporting roles, happy to shine a little in her reflected light. Habib Joo the old dance teacher was going, too, and a trio of musicians. “Pachigam sending a troupe to New Delhi, to the American embassy,” Abdullah Noman said happily at the bus stop, embracing each of them. “What honor you bring on us all.”

  Shalimar the clown had come to see her off. When the bus arrived, making its usual devil-squawk of a racket and daubed with warnings to motorists and pedestrians alike, Noman climbed onto the roof with her bedroll and made sure everything was safely tied down. When Boonyi said good-bye to him she knew it was an ending. He understood nothing, did not foresee the breaking of his heart. He loved her too much to suspect her of having a traitorous soul. But he was just a clown, and his love led nowhere, would change nothing, would not take her where it was her destiny to go. As she went up through the door of the bus she looked back and saw Shalimar the clown standing with her damaged friend Zoon Misri, a vague drifting presence, half-human, half-phantom, whose place at his side was like a portent of the damage that she, Boonyi, would shortly be inflicting on him. She gave him her best, brightest smile and he lit up in return, as always. This was how she would remember him, his beauty illumined by love. Then the bus set off with a jerk and a rush, and turned a corner, and he was gone, and she began to prepare for what was about to happen. What do you want, the ambassador had asked her. She knew what he wanted. He wanted what men want. But to have an answer to his question was important. To know exactly what she wanted and what she was prepared to offer in return.

  When he came to her she was ready. Edgar Wood, that peculiar young man, had arranged everything perfectly. The dancing girls were allocated comfortable rooms in the Roosevelt House guest wing, and Wood was careful to seek Mrs. Ophuls’s approval of the arrangements. Mrs. Ophuls’s private suite was at the far end of the building—she and the ambassador preferred not to share a bedroom—and Beaver Wood had handpicked the Marines guarding the route between the distinguished couple’s quarters, and also the Marines stationed in the corridor outside the dancing girls’ rooms. (After his arrival in New Delhi the Beaver had made it his first business to establish which members of the embassy security detail he could rely on, the ones who understood that their absolute loyalty lay to the ambassador and not to their Midwestern parents’ conservative moral values or even to God.) It was embassy policy, Wood informed the young women, that in order to ensure their safety the residence’s corridors would be off-limits until breakfast time, even for themselves. Himal and Gonwati made no objection, particularly as their rooms were filled with bolts of fabric, bottles of perfume and necklaces and wrist-cuffs made of antique silver, and with wicker baskets overflowing with good things to eat and drink. With cries of delight they rushed toward their gifts. Meanwhile Habib Joo and his trio of male musicians were taken to a suite of rooms at the Ashoka, where they made the acquaintance of minibars for the first time in their lives and decided contentedly that their religion made a special blind-eye exception for expenses-paid nights away from home in deluxe five-star hotels.

  In her room at Roosevelt House, Boonyi examined no sari, smelled no perfume, ate no bonbon. Still wearing the clothes of Anarkali, the tight high scarlet bodice that revealed the slenderness of her midriff and the muscled flatness of her belly, the wide, much-pleated dancer’s skirt in emerald green silk edged in gold braid, the white tights below to preserve her modesty when the skirt fanned and flared outwards as she whirled, and the costume jewelry, the “ruby” pendant around her neck, the “golden” nose-ring, the braids of fake pearls in her hair, she sat perfectly still on the edge of her bed, staying “in character,” acting the part of the great courtesan waiting for the heir to the Mughal throne. With her hands folded in her lap she waited, without complaint. It was three o’clock in the morning before she heard a single, quiet knock on her door.

  He had prepared a declaration in newly learned Kashmiri but she put a finger across his lips. How handsome he was, how much his eyes had seen, how much his body knew. “I can speak some little English,” she said—not for nothing was she the daughter of Pyarelal Kaul!—and laughed as his whole body relaxed in surprised relief. She had prepared a speech, too, laboring over it in her racing mind as she lay sleepless during the small hours beside her unknowing husband. This was her stage and it was time for her soliloquy. “Please, I want to be a great dancer,” she told him. “So I want a great teacher. Also, I want please to be educated to high standard. And I want a good place to live—please—so that I am not ashamed to receive you there. Finally,” and now her voice trembled, “because I will give up much for this, please, sir, I want to hear from your own lips that you will keep me safe.”

  He was both moved and amused. “I will be guided by you in this,” he replied, gravely. “Meh haav tae sae wath. Please show
me the way.” Whereupon for an hour they hammered out the treaty of their affiliation as if it were a back-channel negotiation or an international arms deal, each recognizing a need in the other that complemented their own. Max Ophuls was actually aroused by the young woman’s naked pragmatism. Perhaps her notable openness concerning her ambition foreshadowed an equal openness in lovemaking. He looked forward to discovering if this were so. The negotiation was also pleasing in itself. The details of the “Understanding,” as they both elected to call it—though Max privately preferred the term BKN/MO/JSA(C), which more fully summarized the joint statement of accord (classified) between Boonyi Kaul Noman and himself—were quickly agreed. Just as mutual self-interest was the only real guarantee of a durable accord between nations, so Boonyi’s perception that this liaison was her best chance of furthering her own purposes constituted a reliable guarantee of her future seriousness and discretion. That the most delicate clause in the unwritten contract proved not to be an obstacle provided Max with a further necessary guarantee. “And for your part, if I do as you require?” he asked her: the question she had known he would ask, and to which, in her thoughts, her answer had been given, refined and given again a thousand and one times. She looked him in the eyes. “In that case I will do anything you want, whenever you want it,” she replied in immaculate English. “My body will be yours to command and it will be my joy to obey.”

  Thus all Max’s significant requirements were in place: not only discretion and seriousness but also complete docility, absolute compliance, maximum attentiveness, exceptional eagerness to please and unlimited access, all fueled by the girl’s determination to better herself, to make the leap from the village to the world, to give herself the future she believed she deserved. The clown of a husband was a problem, but she insisted that Max need not concern himself with this aspect of things as it was something she could easily take care of. Everything was acceptable. Edgar Wood, whose forte was anticipation, had already found the apartment, at Type-1 Number-22 Southeast Hira Bagh, two pink rooms with harsh blue-white neon strip-lights and no balcony located in a sage-green concrete bunker of an apartment block in a low-rent residential “colony” to the south of the city center. The rooms were on the floor above the purple-faced Odissi dance guru Jayababu—Pandit Jayanta Mudgal—who would be paid well to teach the girl everything he knew and to be deaf and blind to everything he should not know. Max and Boonyi actually shook hands on the deal. At the age of fifty-five Ambassador Ophuls was being offered a garden of earthly delights. There was, however, a strangeness. In spite of the cynicism of the Understanding, he felt something that had been asleep for a long time and should not have been awakened begin to stir within himself. Desire was to be expected, for he had rarely been in the presence of so beautiful a woman. But the worm stirring in him lay deeper than desire.

  “Don’t do this,” he warned himself. “To fall in love would break the treaty—nothing can come of it but trouble.” But the secret creature within him stretched and yawned, climbed out of its almost-forgotten cellar and rose toward the light. He began to smile a foolish smile whenever he thought of her, to visit her more often than was wise, and to lavish gifts on her. She wanted treasures from the U.S. diplomats’ store: American cheese in a tin, the new ridged American potato chips that looked like miniature plowed fields, 45 rpm recordings celebrating the joys of surfing and driving fast motorcars, and above all candy bars. Chocolates and sweets, which would be her downfall, entered her life in quantity for the first time. She also craved the women’s fashions of 1966, not the boring Jackie Kennedy pillbox-hat-and-pearls styles but the looks in the magazines she devoured, the Pocahontas headbands, the swirling orange-print shift dresses, the fringed leather jackets, the Mondrian squares of Saint Laurent, the hoop dresses, the space-age catsuits, the miniskirts, the vinyl, the gloves. She only wore these things in the privacy of the love nest, dressing up eagerly for her lover, giggling at her own daring, and allowing him to undress her as he pleased, to take his time, or to rip the clothes roughly off her body and leave them in shreds on the floor. Edgar Wood, given the task of acquiring and later dispensing these gifts in such a way as to avoid suspicion falling on the ambassador, fulfilled his duties with a growing hostility which Boonyi regally ignored. He got his revenge by insisting on being present to watch her take the daily contraceptive pills that had been Understood to be essential to the deal.

  As a result of Max’s unexpected romantic infatuation—and also because Boonyi was every bit as attentive as promised—he failed to sense what she had silently been telling him from the beginning, what she assumed he knew to be a part of their hard-nosed agreement: Don’t ask for my heart, because I am tearing it out and breaking it into little bits and throwing it away so I will be heartless but you will not know it because I will be the perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you will receive from me a perfect forgery of love.

  So there were two unspoken clauses in the Understanding, one regarding the giving of love and the other concerning the withholding of it, codicils that were sharply at odds with each other and impossible to reconcile. The result was, as Max had foreseen, trouble; the biggest Indo-American diplomatic rumpus in history. But for a time the master forger was deceived by the forgery he had bought, both deceived and satisfied, as content to possess it as an art collector who discovers a masterpiece concealed in a mound of garbage, as happy to keep it hidden from view as a collector who can’t resist buying what he knows to be stolen property. And that was how it came about that a faithless wife from the village of the bhand pather began to influence, to complicate and even to shape, American diplomatic activity regarding the vexed matter of Kashmir.

  Pachigam was a trap, she told herself every night, but the Muskadoon still scurried through her dreams, its cold swift mountain music singing in her ears. She was a girl from the mountains and the climate of the plains affected her badly. When it was summer in Delhi the air conditioners were invariably incapacitated by “load-shedding” power cuts at the hottest times of day. The heat was like a hammer, like a stone. Crushed beneath it, she collapsed onto her illicit bed of shame and thought of Chandanwari, of Manasbal and Shishnag, of flower-carpeted Gulmarg and the eternal snows above, of cool glaciers and bubbling springs and the high ice-temples of the gods. She heard the soft splash of a heart-shaped oar in the water of a mirror lake, the rustle of chinar leaves, the boatmen’s songs and the soft beating of wings, thrushes’ wings, mynah wings, the wings of bluetits and hoopoes, and the top-knotted bulbuls that looked like young girls who had put up their hair. When she closed her eyes she invariably saw her father, her husband, her companions, her appointed place on earth. Not her new lover but her old, lost life. My old life like a prison, she told herself savagely, but her heart called her a fool. She had it all upside down and backward, her heart scolded her. What she thought of as her former imprisonment had been freedom, while this so-called liberation was no more than a gilded cage.

  She thought of Shalimar the clown and was horrified again by the ease with which she had abandoned him. When she left Pachigam none of her closest people guessed what she was doing, the dolts. None of them tried to save her from herself, and how could she forgive them for that? What idiots they all were! Her husband was super-idiot number one and her father was super-idiot number two and everyone else was pretty close behind. Even after Himal and Gonwati returned to Pachigam without her and the bad talk began, even then Shalimar the clown sent her trusting letters, letters haunted by the phantom of their murdered love. I reach out to you and touch you without touching you as on the riverbank in the old days. I know you are following your dream but that dream will always bring you back to me. If the Amrikan is of assistance well and good. People always talk lies but I know your heart is true. I sit with folded hands and await your loving return. She lay perspiring on her bed, held captive by the chains of her enslaving solitude, and tore the letters into smaller and smaller pieces. They were letters that humiliated both their author
and their recipient, letters that had no business existing, that should never have been sent. Such thoughts should never have come into being, and would not have, were it not for the enfeebled mind of that man without honor whom it was her shame to have espoused.

  The paper scraps fell from her enervated summer hand and floated like snowflakes to the bedroom floor, and indeed the messages they bore were as irrelevant to her new life as snow. What kind of husband was he anyway, this clown? Was he storming the capital in his wrath like a Muslim conqueror of old, a Tughlaq or Khilji at least if not a Mughal, or, like Lord Ram, was he at least sending the monkey-god Hanuman to find her before he launched his lethal attack on her abductor, the American Ravan? No, he was mooning over her picture and weeping into the waters of the stupid Muskadoon like an impotent goof, accepting his fate like a true Kashmiri coward, content to be trampled over by anyone who felt like doing a bit of trampling, a wrong-headed duffer who quarreled with his brother Anees who at least had the guts to take matters into his own hands and blow up a few useless things. He was behaving like the performing dog he was, a creature who imitated life to make people laugh but who had not the slightest understanding of how a man should live.