Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  He did not institute this radical change in the village’s lifestyle unopposed. Firdaus Begum told him it was a damn-fool scheme that would ruin the village financially. “Look at all the stuff we have to buy—all the copper haandis, the grills, the portable tandoor ovens, just for a start!—and then there is the cost of learning the food and practicing,” she protested. “Is there any reason, theoretically speaking,” Abdullah had roared ruminatively at Firdaus Begum one cold spring day—he had forgotten long ago that it was possible to lower one’s voice when speaking—“why actors should not be able to fry spices and boil rice into something other than a soggy mush?” Firdaus Begum bridled at his tone. “Is there any good explanation, by the same token,” she bawled back at him, “of why the sarus cranes aren’t flying upside down?”

  Her dissident voice was in the minority, however, and after the policy started showing signs of being a success the leading cookery village of Shirmal took a leaf out of Pachigam’s book and tried to put on comedy dramas to accompany their food. However, their amateurish stage show was a bust. Then one night war was declared between the rivals. The men of Shirmal staged a raid on Pachigam, aiming to steal the great cauldrons and to break the ovens in which the traveling players had learned to cook the noblest delicacies of the region, the roghan josh, the tabak maaz, the gushtaba, but the Pachigam men sent the Shirmalis home crying with broken heads. After the pot war it was tacitly accepted that Pachigam was at the top of the entertainment tree, and the others got hired only when Pachigam’s tellers of clown stories and cookers of banquets were too busy to offer their services.

  The pot war horrified everyone in Pachigam even though they had come out on the winning side. They had always thought of their neighbors the Shirmal villagers as being more than a little weird, but nobody had imagined that so outrageous a breach of the peace was possible, that Kashmiris would attack other Kashmiris driven by such crummy motivations as envy, malice and greed. Firdaus Begum’s friend, the ageless Gujar tribal woman and prophetess Nazarébaddoor, sank into an uncharacteristic gloom. Nazarébaddoor was the most optimistic of seers, whom people liked to visit in her mossy-roofed forest hut in spite of its damp smell of fornicating livestock because she invariably foretold happiness, wealth, long life and success. After the pot war her vision darkened. “This is the first pebble that starts the avalanche,” she said, shaking her toothless head. Then she went into her odorous little hut, drew a wooden screen across the entrance, and retired forever from the art of divination. Nazarébaddoor had taken her name—“evil eye, begone!”—from a character out of the old stories, a beautiful princess who was in love with the hero Prince Hatim Tai and whose touch could avert curses, and she allowed the more gullible villagers to believe that she was in fact none other than that fabled immortal beauty, whom death had been unable to seize because her lucky touch kept getting her out of its clutches. “If it makes people happy,” she confided in Firdaus, “I don’t care if they believe I was once the Queen of Sheba.”

  To tell the truth, Nazarébaddoor didn’t look much like the queen of anywhere. With her loose turban and her single golden front tooth she more closely resembled a marooned corsair. When she was young, she said, she had been blessed with flowing waves of auburn hair, gleaming white teeth and a blue left eye, but nobody could verify these claims because nobody in the neighborhood could remember when Nazarébaddoor had been young. Her husband had offended her by dying without managing to leave her with so much as a single son to look after her in her declining years, which she considered the height of bad manners, and which had left her with a poor opinion of men in general. “If there’s a way to propagate the human race without depending on men,” Nazarébaddoor said to Firdaus, “lead me to it, because then women can have everything they want and dispense with everything they don’t need.” By the time news of artificial insemination arrived in the valley, however, she was long past child-bearing age, and could not have afforded the procedure even if she had been in the first red, white and blue flush of youth.

  She had made the best of her life, tending her livestock, smoking her pipe, and surviving. The fortune-telling was a sideline that brought in a little extra, but prophecy was not Nazarébaddoor’s main concern. Like the true Gujar woman that she was, her first love was the pine forest. Her most frequently repeated saying was, in Kashmiri, Un poshi teli, yeli vun poshi, which meant, “Forests come first, food comes second.” She saw herself as the guardian of the trees of the Forest of Khel and had to be propitiated every autumn when the villagers of Pachigam and Shirmal, who both foraged there, needed to stock up on firewood before the coming of the winter snows. “You wouldn’t want our children to freeze to death,” the villagers pleaded, and eventually she would concede that human children mattered more than living wood. She would guide the village men to those trees that were closest to death and these were the only ones she would allow them to fell. They did what she said, fearing that if they did not she would bewitch them, blighting their crops and sending them a shaking sickness or a plague of boils.

  She made her living selling buffalo milk and cheese, and her body and clothing smelled constantly of dairy products and ghee. This gave her the aroma of an ancient queen who took milk baths and made her flunkeys massage her in butter, even though she was as poor as mountain mud. The world outside the forest struck her as unreal and she did not like to go there more often than was necessary. “It was a long journey we made from Gujria,” she liked to say, “and when you have made such a trek it is no longer necessary to go gadding about the place.” The fact that the supposed migration of the Gujars from Gujria or Georgia had taken place fifteen hundred years earlier changed nothing. Nazarébaddoor spoke of the great trek as if it had happened just the other day and she herself had walked every step of the way, starting from the Caspian Sea and marching across central Asia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass and down into the Indian subcontinent. She knew the names of the settlements they had left behind in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India—Gurjara, Gujrabad, Gujru, Gujrabas, Gujdar-Kotta, Gujargarh, Gujranwala, Gujarat. She spoke with sorrow of the dreadful droughts that assailed Gujarat in the sixth century of the so-called Common Era, driving her ancestors out of the Forest of Gir and up into the verdant woods and meadows of the mountains of Kashmir. “Never mind,” she told Firdaus. “Out of tragedy, something good showed up. We lost Gujarat, but lo and behold! We got, instead, Kashmir.”

  Firdaus Butt or Bhat as a young girl formed what became the lifelong habit of making her way up the forested slopes behind Pachigam to sit at the Gujar woman’s feet, listening to Nazarébaddoor’s inexhaustible stories and drinking salty pink tea and learning the knack of disconnecting her sense of smell, until she could switch it off like a radio and in the bland silence of its absence could drown in the sound of Nazarébaddoor’s hypnotic voice without having her reverie interrupted by the scent of sheep shit or Nazarébaddoor’s own frequent and extraordinary buffalo farts. The prophetess revealed that it was around the time of her arrival at puberty that she first discovered that she could avert small-scale disasters by prophesying good news. However, she resisted making the seemingly obvious menstrual connection. “If it had anything to do with that nonsense sent to make women’s life hell, as if the world wasn’t tough enough without it,” she scoffed, “then it would have ended when I stopped bleeding, and that happened so long ago that it isn’t polite to ask.”

  Nazarébaddoor remembered that long ago when she had been a young child she once found herself in the city in the company of her father for reasons which she could no longer bring to mind. In spite of the beauty of the streets of Srinagar with their overhanging wooden houses out of whose upper stories women could lean toward one another and exchange gossip, linen, fruit and perhaps even surreptitious kisses, in spite of the shining mirrors of the lakes and the magic of the little boats cutting across them like knives, the young Nazarébaddoor had felt horribly ill at ease. “So many people so clo
se by,” she explained. “It was offensive to me.” Suddenly, and uncharacteristically, for she was a happy, sweet-natured child, not a rebel, the claustrophobic pressure of urban life became too much for her. She picked up a stone from the street and hurled it with all her might at the glass window of a shop selling numdah rugs. “I don’t know why I did it,” she told Firdaus years later. “The city seemed to be a kind of illusion, and the stone was a way of making it vanish so that the forest could reappear. Maybe that was it, but I really can’t be sure. We are mysteries to ourselves. We don’t know why we do things, why we fall in love or commit murder or throw a stone at a sheet of glass.”

  The thing young Firdaus loved best about Nazarébaddoor was that she talked to a girl exactly as she would to an adult, pulling no punches. “You mean,” she asked wonderingly, “that one day I could cut off somebody’s head and I wouldn’t even know why I was doing it?” Nazarébaddoor farted noisily under her phiran. “Don’t be so bloodthirsty, missy,” she admonished. “And, by the by, the subject under discussion right now is not you. There is a stone in the air, flying toward its mark.”

  The moment the stone left her hand the young Nazarébaddoor regretted it. She saw her father’s stunned eyes staring at her and for the first time in her life entered the trance of power. A form of blissful lethargy enveloped her and she felt as if the world had slowed down almost to the stopping point. “It won’t break! The window won’t break!” she heard her voice shouting out in the middle of that delicious stasis, and in that timeless period while the world stood still she saw the stone deviate slightly from its path so that when motion returned to the universe an instant later the missile struck the wooden window-frame of the numdah store and fell harmlessly to the ground.

  After that she discovered the extents and limits of her powers by a process of trial and error. In the same year as the incident of the stone the rains failed and there was great concern in Pachigam. The child Nazarébaddoor overheard two villagers discussing the subject as they walked in the forest. “But will the rains come?” one asked the other, and the lovely slowness descended on Nazarébaddoor once more. “Yes,” she answered loudly, astonishing the two men. “They will be here on Wednesday afternoon.” Sure enough, after lunch on Wednesday it began to pour.

  People started squinting at Nazarébaddoor with that mixture of suspicion and admiration which human beings reserve for those who can foretell the future. The path to her cottage began to be well trodden, by lovers asking if their sweethearts would return their love, by gamblers wondering if they would win at cards, by the curious and the cynical, the gullible and the hard-hearted. More than once there was a campaign against her in the village by people whose reaction to abnormality was to drive it away from their doorstep. She was saved by her discretion, by her refusal to speak if she didn’t know the answer, because the visionary indolence which allowed her to push the future in the required direction could not be conjured up; it came when it pleased, and her own will seemed to have little to do with it. Only when she was sure of her ability to ensure a happy outcome would she gently murmur the good news into a supplicant’s ear.

  As she grew into womanhood her power began to fill her with doubts. The gift of affecting the course of events positively, of being able to change the world, but only for the best, ought to have been a source of joy. Nazarébaddoor was cursed with a philosophical cast of mind, however, and as a result even her innate good nature could not avoid being infected by a strain of melancholy. Difficult questions began to nag at her. Was it always a good thing to make things better? Didn’t human beings need pain and suffering to learn and grow? Would a world in which only good things happened be a good world, a paradise, or would it in fact be an intolerable place whose denizens, excused from danger, failure, catastrophe and misery, turned into insufferably big-headed, overconfident bores? Was she damaging people by helping them? Should she just get her big nose out of everyone else’s business and let destiny take whatever course it chose? Yes, happiness was a thing of great, bright value, and she believed herself to be promoting it; but might not unhappiness be as important? Was she doing God’s work, or the devil’s? There were no answers to such questions, but the questions themselves felt, from time to time, like answers of a sort.

  In spite of her reservations, Nazarébaddoor continued to employ her gifts, unable to believe that she would have been given such powers if it wasn’t okay to use them. But her fears remained. Outwardly she continued to behave with happy, outspoken, flatulent ease, but the unhappiness inside her grew; slowly, it’s true, but it grew. Her greatest fear, which she shared with nobody, was that all the misfortune she was averting was piling up somewhere, that she was recklessly pouring out Pachigam’s supply of good luck while the bad luck accumulated like water behind a dam, and one day the floodgates would open and the flood of misery would be unleashed and everyone would drown. This was why the pot war affected her so badly. Her worst nightmare had begun to come true.

  Nazarébaddoor’s friendship with the much younger Firdaus was the reason that nobody in Pachigam worried about Firdaus’s lazy eye, and as a result Abdullah’s wife was able to set up a nice little sideline in the sale of protective charms, such as chilies and lemons hung on strings, painted eyes, malachite, black streamers and teeth taken from the fierce sur, the wild boar of Kashmir, which you were well advised to hang around your children’s necks. On wedding days people sent for Firdaus to line the happy couple’s eyes with special kohl and to burn the propitiatory seeds of the white isband flower, also known as rue. During the ceremony Firdaus often dueted with Nazarébaddoor, and with a backing group of eunuchs summoned from the village of the singing castrati the two of them would sing their magic songs:

  Lo, the wild young girl has her mild young guy,

  Save them, God, from the evil eye.

  After Nazarébaddoor immured herself in her cottage she stopped eating and drinking. Firdaus, heavily pregnant with the unborn Noman, went to her door with food and water and pleaded to be let in. She didn’t dare to push the screen aside and force an entrance because that would be to draw bad luck down upon her own head. The two friends sat down on either side of the flimsy wooden screen, placed their lips against it and began the last conversation of their lives. “Live,” Firdaus implored, “or you’ll be leaving me to handle this shitty new world full of cookpots and anger all by myself.” She heard Nazarébaddoor kissing the other side of the screen as if she were taking leave of a lover. “The age of prophecy is at an end,” Nazarébaddoor whispered, “because what’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words to foretell it.”

  Firdaus lost her temper. “Okay, die if you want to,” she said fiercely, placing defensive hands upon her swollen womb, “but to curse us all just because you’ve decided to go is just plain bad form.”

  For a while it didn’t seem as if Nazarébaddoor’s curse was going to come true. Pachigam was a blessed village, and its two great families, the Nomans and Kauls, had inherited much of the natural bounty of the region. Pandit Pyarelal had the apple orchard and Abdullah Noman had the peach trees. Abdullah had the honeybees and the mountain ponies and the pandit owned the saffron field, as well as the larger flocks of sheep and goats. That summer the weather was kind and the fruit hung heavy on the trees, the honey dripped sweetly from the combs, the saffron crop was rich, the meat animals fattened nicely and the breeding mares gave birth to their valuable young. There were many requests for the actors to perform the traditional plays. The dramatization of the reign of Zain-ul-abidin, the fifteenth-century monarch known simply as Budshah, “the great king,” was especially in demand. The only dark cloud on the horizon was that relations with the village of Shirmal continued to be poor. Abdullah Noman was confident that his people would continue to defend themselves successfully against any further attacks but he was saddened by the estrangement, even though it had been his own idea to try and break the Shirmalis’ local monopoly of the banquet market. He felt no guilt abou
t his initiative. The world moved on and all enterprises had to adapt to survive. However, he felt bad about the damage to his friendship with the Shirmalis’ waza or head chef, Bombur Yambarzal, and Firdaus of the unsparing tongue made him feel worse. “To put business before friendship is to displease God,” she warned him. “We had enough to be going on with but in Shirmal they have it tougher; if they don’t get hired to feed other people they will starve themselves.”

  Firdaus’s pregnancy was weighing her down in those days and she spent most of her time in the company of the pandit’s wife Pamposh a.k.a. Giri the walnut kernel, whose own pregnancy was a couple of months less advanced, and because all dreams are permitted to pregnant women they fantasized about the future lifelong friendship of their unborn children. The sweetness of these fantasies served only to intensify the force with which Firdaus attacked her husband for his behavior toward the master cook of Shirmal. Pamposh, however, gently defended Abdullah. While the two women sat on the back verandah of Firdaus’s home and looked out across the saffron fields toward Shirmal, Pamposh Kaul pointed out gently that the chef was a hard man to like. “Abdullah was the only one of us who even kept up a friendship with him,” she said. “To try and love somebody who loves nobody but himself—well, it just goes to show what a generous man your husband is. Now that things have been broken off between them, that big fat waza doesn’t have a single pal in the world.”

  As his name suggested, Bombur Yambarzal was part black bumblebee, part narcissus; he could sting when he chose to do so, and he was extremely vain. He ruled the roost in Shirmal because of his culinary mastery, but was widely disliked by his own kitchen brigade on account of his strutting manner of a parade-ground martinet and his repeated demands that all their pots be polished until he could see his reflection in them. As long as Shirmal village was the undisputed champion maker of the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, and Shirmalis provided gluttonous quantities of food at all important weddings and celebrations, Bombur Yambarzal ruled the roost, and everyone put up with his bee stings and narcissism. However, his influence waned as the village’s income declined, and, as will be seen, the new mullah Bulbul Fakh’s power began to grow. For this and much else Yambarzal blamed Abdullah Noman.