Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  In the small hours of night she suddenly heard a familiar voice. Her father was leaning against the outside wall of the woodshed, wrapped up in as many warm garments as he could find, for he was a man who suffered the cold badly. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul addressed the woodshed familiarly, as if it were a living person, or at least a member of the living dead. “Let us speak of the Ocean of Love,” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul said to the woodshed through chattering teeth. “That is to say the Anurag Sagar, the great work of the poet K-K-K-Kabir.” Even in the wretchedness of her death Boonyi entombed within the woodshed could not repress a smile.

  “One of the big figures in the Anurag Sagar is Kal,” her father told the woodshed. “Kal, whose name means yesterday and tomorrow, which is to say, T-T-T-Time. Kal was one of the sixteen sons of Sat Purush whose name means Positive Power, and after his fall he became the father of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. This does not mean that our world is born of evil. Kal is a lapsarian figure but he is neither evil nor g-good. Yet it is true that he insists on an eye for an eye and that the demands he makes of us limit us and prevent us from reaching what we have it in ourselves to be.”

  Her heart leapt for joy and the flame of her lantern burned more brightly because both flame and heart knew that this was Boonyi’s father’s way of returning to her, of returning her to him. His next sentence, however, allowed the darkness to close in once more. “According to Kabir,” the pandit told the woodshed, “only the m-m-m-mritak, the Living Dead One, can rid himself of Kal’s pain. What does this mean? Some say it should be read thus: only the brave can achieve the Beloved. But another reading is, only the living dead are f-f-f-free of Time.”

  Hear, O saints, the nature of mritak. I have been away longer than I thought, she told herself. My father the man of reason, my matter-of-fact father, has given in to his mystical streak, his shadow planet, and become some sort of sadhu. The scholarly learning to which the pandit had always added an edge of irony, dispensing his versions of the ancient ideas with a mischievous little smile, was now, it seemed, being offered up without any distancing devices at all. The highest of human aspirations, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul sang to the woodshed, was to live in the world and yet not live in it. To extinguish the fire burning in the mind and live the holy life of total detachment. “The Living Dead One serves the S-S-S-Satguru. The Living Dead One manifests love within her; and by receiving love her life spirit is set free.” Boonyi heard the example of the earth. “The earth hurts no one. Be like that. The earth hates no one. Be like that as well.” She heard the example of the sugarcane and the candy. “The sugarcane is cut up and crushed and boiled to make the j-j-j-jaggery. The jaggery is boiled to make the raw sugar. The sugar burns to make rock candy. And from rock candy, sugar candy comes, and everyone likes that. In the same way the Living Dead One bears her sufferings and crosses the Ocean of Life t-t-t-toward joy.” She understood that her father was teaching her how she must now live; she hated the teaching and anger flared up in her. But she fought it back. He was right, just as Zoon had been right. She had to let go of anger and achieve humility. She had to let go of everything and be as nothing. It was not the love of God she sought, but the love of a particular man; however, by adopting the abnegatory posture of the disciple before the Divine, by erasing herself, she might also erase her crime and make herself what her husband could once again love.

  Only a brave soul can do it. The Living Dead Person must control the senses, said the pandit to the shed. She controls the organ of seeing and understands “beautiful” and “ugly” as the same. She controls the organ of hearing and can bear bad words as well as good. She controls the organ of taste and ceases to know the difference between tasty and tasteless things. She does not get excited even if she is brought the Five Nectars. She does not refuse food without salt, and lovingly accepts whatever is served her. The nose, too, she controls. Smells pleasant and unpleasant are as one to her.

  “Also controlled is the organ of lust.” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was particularly firm on this point, as if making sure that the woodshed understood that its sinful yearnings must cease. “The g-g-g-god of lust is a robber. Lust is a mighty, dangerous, pain-giving, negative power. The lustful woman is the mine of Kal. The Living Dead One has enlightened herself with the lamp of knowledge. She has drunk the nectar of the Name and merged into the Elementless. When she has done this, lust will be f-f-f-finished.” At first she tried to find his true message in the words themselves. At a certain point, however, she began to hear the words beneath the words. The age of reason was over, he was telling her, as was the age of love. The irrational was coming into its own. Strategies of survival might be required. She remembered what he had said when he saw her standing at the bus stop covered in snow. Nazarébaddoor. She had mistakenly thought he was averting the evil eye when in fact he had been giving her advice, telling her where to go. The old Gujar prophetess had retreated from the world before she, Boonyi, had been born, and had cursed the future with her last speech. What’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words. Years later the Gegroo brothers would immure themselves in a mosque for fear of the wrath of Big Man Misri; but Nazarébaddoor had shut herself away because she feared Kal, the passage of Time itself. She had seated herself cross-legged in the samadhi position and simply ceased to be. When the villagers finally plucked up the courage to look inside the hut her body had acquired the fragility of a withered leaf and the breeze from the doorway blew it away like dust. Now it was Boonyi’s turn. A dead person who wished to overcome Kal would do well to follow the prophetess’s path. And there was another precedent, which Boonyi the former dancing girl did not fail to recall. Anarkali, too, had been immured for indulging a forbidden lust. And the trapdoor and the escape passage that set her free? That was just in the movies. In real life there were no such easy escapes.

  Go up the mountain and die properly. If that was her father’s message to her then she had no choice but to obey. He was no longer outside the woodshed. The snowstorm had stopped and she was alone. She was a fat cow but she would haul herself up that hill to the prophetess’s hut and wait for death to come. There was no end to the list of the things she craved and could no longer have. Food, pills, tobacco, love, peace. She would do without them all. The impossible weight of her absent daughter knocked her flat. As if all the logs in the woodshed had rolled down onto her body. She lay smashed and gasping on the floor. She felt the moorings of her sanity loosen and welcomed the comforting madness. A beautiful day began.

  When she emerged from the woodshed she stood knee-deep in whiteness. The wooded hill hung over her like a threat. The meadow of Khelmarg was up there, with its memories of love. And in another direction, in the heart of the evergreen forest, was Nazarébaddoor, the dead awaiting the dead. Each step was an achievement. She was carrying her bedroll and her bag. Her feet her knees her hips all screamed their protests. The snow pushed back against her forward thrusts. Still she went on her slow, thudding way. More than once she fell against the drifts, and getting back to her feet was not easy. Her clothes were wet. She could not feel her toes. Stones hidden beneath the snow cut her feet and buried pine needles stabbed at her. Still she leaned into the slope and forced her legs to move. Speed was unimportant. Motion was all.

  She saw Zoon watching her from a distance. The carpenter’s daughter stayed about fifty feet away, and never said a word; but she came all the way up the hill with Boonyi. Sometimes she leapt ahead and then stood waiting like a sentinel, an arm upraised to indicate the easiest path. Their eyes never met, but Boonyi, glad of the help, followed her old friend’s lead. Her thoughts had lost coherence, which was a mercy. It would have been impossible to climb the mountain with Kashmira’s great weight on her back, but her daughter had been mislaid for the moment, somewhere in the jumble of her mother’s mind. Boonyi scooped up handfuls of snow and thrust them greedily in her mouth to slake her thirst.

  Halfway up the mountain she found a brown paper parcel in her path. Inside it was the miracle o
f food: a thick circle of unleavened lavas bread, a quantity of dum aloo in a little tin container, and two pieces of chicken in another such tin. She wolfed it all down, asking no questions. Then up the hill she went again, the heat of the sun punishing her from above, the cold of the snow from below. Her breath came in long wheezing gulps. The forest circled her, whirling about her and about. She was stumbling now, staggering, not even sure if she was going up or down the wooded slope. Faster and faster the trees spun around her, and then unconsciousness came, like a gift. When she awoke she was propped up against the doorway of a Gujar hut.

  In the days that followed her hold on her sanity weakened further, so that it seemed to her that she was the one who was alive and everyone else was dead. The interior of Nazarébaddoor’s hut had been cleaned and swept, as if a ghostly presence had known she was coming, and a new mat had been laid on the floor. A fire had been laid and lit and there was dry wood stacked by the side of the fireplace. A pot of bubbling stew, lotus stems in gravy, simmered over the fire, covered by a cheap aluminum plate. There was water in an earthen surahi in a corner. The roof of moss and turf was in bad shape, and water from the melting snow kept dripping through, but she would wake at night to hear the scurrying footfalls of ghosts running over the roof like mice, and in the morning there was new turf in place of the old, and there were no more drips. She cried out for her mother. “Maej.” Her mother Pamposh, nicknamed for the walnut kernel, had come back from the dead to take care of her newly dead child.

  When she poked her head out of the hut she thought she saw shadows moving among the trees and she remembered her father’s lesson about Haput the black bear, Suh the leopard, Shal the jackal and Potsolov the fox. These creatures were dangerous and maybe they were closing in on her to kill her but they could not be blamed because they were true to their natures. 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. Her body ached with hunger and other needs and her head was not entirely her own but for some reason she was not afraid. For some reason she described the shapes in the trees to herself as guardians. For some reason there was always fresh water in the surahi when she awoke and food left at the door or, once she felt well enough to take short walks, on the fire. For some reason she had not been abandoned. One could not expect to jump back into paradise from hell, she told herself. A purgative period in a middle place was required. Slowly the addictions would leave her body and her mind would begin to clear. In the meantime she had her mother by her side. The snow melted and she went out as far as Khelmarg and the wildflowers were coming out. She picked bunches of krats, which could be eaten as a vegetable and was good for the eyes, and shahtar, which produced a sweetly cooling effect when mixed with the whey that was left in a pot at her door. On the slopes of the mountain she found the shrub kava dach, which helped to purify her blood, and she ate, too, the fruit and leaves of the wan palak or goosefoot. The white flowers of the shepherd’s purse or kralamond were everywhere. She picked it and ate it raw. She gathered phakazur, fennel, and daphne, which was gandalun. As she ate the blue-flowered won-hand chicory and lay down in fields of maidan-hand dandelion she felt her life and her mind returning. The flowers of Kashmir had saved her. In her father’s orchards the almond trees would be blooming. Spring had come.

  After he learned of her infidelity with the American Shalimar the clown sharpened his favorite knife and headed south with murder on his mind. Fortunately the bus in which he had left Pachigam broke down under a small bridge at Lower Munda near the source of the Jhelum at Verinag. His brothers Hameed and Mahmood, dispatched by their father, caught up with him at the depot, where he was waiting impatiently for the next available carrier. “Thought you could run away from us, eh, little boyi,” cried Hameed, the louder and more boisterous of the twins. “No chance. We’re double trouble, us.” Troop transport vehicles were refueling all around them and a group of cheroot-smoking soldiers stared idly, and then not so idly—the words double trouble had not been well chosen—at the three quarreling brothers. The army was jumpy. Two nationalist leaders, Amanullah Khan and Maqbool Butt, had formed an armed group called the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front and had crossed the cease-fire line from what they called Azad Kashmir into the Indian sector to launch a number of surprise raids on army positions and personnel. These three argumentative young men could easily be NLF recruits spoiling for a fight. Mahmood Noman, always the more cautious of the twins, said quickly to Shalimar the clown: “If those bastards find that dagger you’re carrying, boyi, we’re all going to jail for good.” This was the sentence that saved Boonyi Noman’s life. Shalimar the clown burst into loud, fake laughter and his brothers joined in, slapping each other on the back. The soldiers relaxed. Later that afternoon all three Nomans were on a bus back home.

  Firdaus Noman looked into the eyes of her betrayed and cuckolded son Shalimar the clown when his brothers brought him back, and was so horrified that she resolved to give up quarreling forever. Her famous battles with her illustrious husband over the nature of the universe, the traditions of Kashmir and each other’s bad habits had entertained the village for years, but now Firdaus saw the consequence of her fractious disposition. “Look at him,” she whispered to Abdullah. “He has an anger in him that would end the world if it could.”

  The sarpanch was in a distracted state of mind. His health had begun to deteriorate. He had started feeling the first twinges of the pain in his hands that would eventually cripple them, leaving them frozen into useless claw-shapes that made it hard for him to eat or hold tools or wash his own behind. As the pain grew so did his feelings of discontentedness. He felt caught in between things, between the past and the future, the home and the world. His own needs were in conflict. Some days he longed for the applause of an audience and regretted the slow decline in the fortunes of the bhand pather thanks to which such gratification was harder and harder to come by, while at other times he yearned for a quiet life, sitting smoking a pipe by a golden fire. Even greater was the conflict between his personal requirements and the needs of others. Maybe he should give up his position as village headman. Maybe one could only be selfless for so long, and after that it was time for a little selfishness. He could not go on forever holding everyone in his hands. His hands were hurting. The future was dark and his light had begun to dim. He needed a little gentleness.

  “Treat him gently,” Abdullah told Firdaus absently, thinking mostly about himself. “Maybe your love can put out the flame.”

  But Shalimar the clown withdrew into himself, barely speaking for days at a time except during rehearsals in the practice glade. Everyone in the acting troupe noticed that his style of performance had changed. He was as dynamically physical a comedian as ever, but there was a new ferocity in him that could easily frighten people instead of making them laugh. One day he proposed that the scene in the Anarkali play in which the dancing girl was grabbed by the soldiers who had come to take her to be bricked up in her wall might be sharpened if the soldiers came on in American army uniform and Anarkali donned the flattened straw cone of a Vietnamese peasant woman. The American seizure of Anarkali-as-Vietnam would, he argued, immediately be understood by their audience as a metaphor for the Indian army’s stifling presence in Kashmir, which they were forbidden to depict. One army would stand in for another and the moment would give their piece an added contemporary edge. Himal Sharga had stepped into Boonyi’s old role and didn’t like the idea. “I know I’m not a great dancer,” she said petulantly, “but you don’t have to turn my big drama scene into some kind of silly stunt just because you have a reason for hating Americans.” Shalimar the clown rounded on her so savagely that for a moment the gathered players thought he was going to strike her down. Then he suddenly deflated, turned away and went to squat dejectedly in a corner. “Yes, bad idea,” he muttered. “Forget it. I’m not thinking straight just now.” Himal was the prettier of Shivshankar Sharg
a the village baritone’s two daughters. She went over to Shalimar the clown and put her hand on his shoulder. “Just try seeing straight instead,” she said. “Don’t look for what’s not here, but look at what there is.”

  After the rehearsal Himal’s sister Gonwati warned her, with the bitter almond of spite souring her words, that her cause was hopeless. “When you stand next to Boonyi you completely disappear,” she said, gravely malicious behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. “Just the way I vanish when I’m standing next to you. And in his mind you’ll always be standing next to her, a little shorter, a little uglier, with a nose that’s a little too long, a chin that’s a little too weak and a figure that’s too small where it should be big and too big where it should be small.” Himal grabbed her sister’s long dark plait high up, near her head, and pulled. “Stop being a jealous bitch, four-eyes,” she said sweetly, “and just help me catch him like a good ben should.”

  Gonwati accepted the rebuke and put aside her own hopes in the family cause. The Sharga sisters set about plotting the capture of Shalimar the clown’s broken heart. Gonwati asked him the name of his favorite dish. He said he had always been partial to a good gushtaba. Himal at once set to work with a will, pounding the gushtaba meat to soften it, and when she offered him the results as a gift “to cheer you up” he immediately popped a meatball in his mouth. A few seconds later the expression on his face told her the bad news, and she confessed that she was famous in her family as the worst cook they had ever known. Next, Gonwati suggested to Shalimar the clown that Himal could replace Boonyi in the tightrope routine they had developed, and which he could not perform without a female aide. Shalimar the clown agreed to teach Himal to walk the wire, but after a few lessons, when the wire was still just a foot off the ground, she confessed that she had always suffered dreadfully from vertigo, and that if she ever stepped out across the air even her desire to please him would not prevent her from falling to her death. The third strategy was more direct. Gonwati told Shalimar the clown that her sister had recently been unlucky in love herself, that a bounder from the village of Shirmal whose name she would not deign to speak had toyed with her affections and then spurned her. “The two of you should comfort each other,” she proposed. “Only you can know how she suffers, and only she can come close to grasping the scale of your terrible grief.” Shalimar the clown allowed himself to be prevailed upon and accompanied Himal on a moonlit walk by the waters of the Muskadoon. But under the double influence of the moonlight and his beauty poor Himal lost her head and confessed that the Shirmali rascal didn’t exist, that he, Shalimar the clown, had always been the man she loved, there was nobody else but him for her in the whole of Kashmir. After this third catastrophe Shalimar the clown kept his distance from the Sharga sisters who continued, nevertheless, to hope.