Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  The sky screamed as invisible warplanes scarred it with savage white lines. There were battles beyond the border near Uri and Chhamb, where Colonel Kachhwaha, unaware of the siege of Shirmal, was earning his battle spurs. The war between India and Pakistan had begun. It lasted for twenty-five days. During every minute of that time, except for the small intervals required for him to perform his natural functions behind a nearby bush, Big Man Misri like a rock squatted outside the door of Bulbul Fakh’s mosque with his saddle by his side. Food was brought to him from the kitchens of Shirmal, and a kindly young village syce stabled, fed and exercised his horse. A steady stream of visitors from Pachigam brought him news of Zoon, who was living with the Nomans, acting quiet and docile, and even smiling once or twice. The men of Shirmal took turns sitting with Big Man, and the police, too, worked shifts. And gradually the voices emanating from inside the mosque fell silent. The Gegroos had threatened, complained, cajoled, wept, ranted, quarreled, apologized and begged, but they had not emerged.

  After twenty-five days the sky stopped shrieking overhead. “Peace,” said Bombur Yambarzal to Hasina Karim, and a bloodstained peace it was; the silent sky over Shirmal felt like death. “Are they still alive? What do you think?” Bombur asked Big Man Misri, and the carpenter came slowly to his feet, swaying with exhaustion, like a soldier coming home from a war. “They always were gutless cutlets,” he said, knowing he was speaking the Gegroos’ epitaph. “They died like rats in a trap.”

  Big Man made sure that all exits from the windowless structure were securely padlocked before he gave up his vigil, and he took away the keys. The military police—that is, the weary duty officer in his dusty Jeep—protested without much enthusiasm. “Go home now,” Big Man told him. “No crime has been committed by any living person.” “And if they are alive?” the officer asked. “Then,” answered Big Man, “all they need to do is knock.” But no such knock was ever heard. The little mosque at the end of the village remained padlocked and unused. The great events of a single powerful day, the defeat of Bulbul Fakh by Bombur Yambarzal and his saucepans, and the crime of the Gegroo brothers and their decision to immure themselves in this building until they died, had somehow pushed the mosque out of the villagers’ consciousness, as if it had literally moved farther away from their homes. Wilderness reclaimed it. Trees marched out of the wood and captured it; creepers and thornbushes bound and guarded it. Like a castle under a fairy-tale curse it vanished from sight and eventually the wooden roof rotted and caved in, and the bolts on the doors rusted, the cheap padlocks fell away, and the memory of the Gegroo brothers was also eaten up, leaving behind a village superstition so powerful that nobody ever set foot in the place of their death by cowardice and starvation; and that was how things remained until the day of the dead brothers’ return. That day, however, would not come for more than twenty years, and in the meanwhile Zoon Misri lived quietly on, and was slowly nursed back to something like her former self, though a certain lightness of spirit had been lost forever. No man ever came to ask for her hand in marriage. That was how things were. Nobody could defend it but nobody could change it either. And nobody understood that the only thing keeping Zoon alive was the disappearance of the Gegroo brothers into their vanished tomb, which permitted her to agree with herself that they had never existed and the thing that they had done had never been done. The day of their return from the dead would be the last of her life.

  When he returned to Elasticnagar from the war of 1965, Colonel Hammirdev Kachhwaha was once more a changed man. His father’s death had briefly liberated him from the jail of unfulfilled expectations, but the experience of war had imprisoned him again, and this was a dungeon from which he would never escape. Military action had been a disappointment to Tortoise Colonel. War, whose highest purpose was the creation of clarity where none existed, the noble clarity of victory and defeat, had solved nothing. There had been little glory and much wasteful dying. Neither side had made good its claim to this land, or gained more than the tiniest patches of territory. The coming of peace left things in worse shape than they had been before the twenty-five days of battle. This was peace with more hatred, peace with greater embitterment, peace with deeper mutual contempt. For Colonel Kachhwaha, however, there was no peace, because the war raged on interminably in his memory, every moment of it replaying itself at every moment of every day, the livid green dampness of the trenches, the choking golf ball of fear in the throat, the shell bursts like lethal palm fronds in the sky, the sour grimaces of passing bullets, the iridescence of wounds and mutilations, the incandescence of death. Back in Elasticnagar, he immured himself in his quarters and pulled down the blinds and still the war would not cease, the intense slow motion of hand-to-hand combat in which the glassy fragility of his own pathetic, odorous life might be shattered at any moment by this bayonet that knife this grenade that screaming black-greased face, where this twist of the ankle that swivel of the hip this duck of the head that jab of the arm could summon up the darkness welling out of the cracks in the jagged earth, the darkness licking at the bodies of the soldiers, licking away their strength their legs their hope their legs their dissolving colorless legs. He had to sit in this darkness, his own soft darkness, so that other darkness, the hard darkness, would not come. To sit in soft darkness and forever be at war.

  His soldiers were on edge. They were counting their dead and nursing their wounded and the high voltage of war continued to flow in their veins. They had fought a war for people who were ungrateful, who didn’t deserve to be fought for. A fantasy of the enemy was spreading through the majority community in the valley, a dream of an idyllic life on the other side, in the religious state. You could not explain things to these people. You could not explain the measures taken for their protection in peace as well as war. For example it was not permitted for non-Kashmiris to own land here. This enlightened law did not exist on the other side where many people were settling whose culture was not Kashmiri culture. Wild mountain men, fanatics, aliens were coming in there. The laws here protected the citizenry against such elements but the citizenry remained ungrateful, continued to call for self-determination. Sheikh Abdullah was saying it again. Kashmir for the Kashmiris. The idiotic slogan was repeated everywhere, painted on walls, pasted on telegraph poles, hanging in the air like smoke. Maybe the enemy had the right idea. The population was unsuitable. A new population should be found. The valley should be emptied of all these people and refilled with others, who would be grateful to be here, grateful to be defended. Colonel Kachhwaha closed his eyes. The war exploded on the screen of his eyelids, its shapes coalescing and blurring, its colors darkening, until the world was black on black.

  Acting on his instructions the army began to make routine sweeps through the villages. Even in routine sweeps, it had to be emphasized, accidents could happen. And, in fact, the level of violence accidentally rose. There was talk of accidental shootings, accidental beatings, the accidental use of cattle prods, one or two accidental deaths. In Shirmal where Bulbul Fakh had been based everyone was suspect. There were long interrogations and these sessions were not marked by the gentleness of the questioners. There were problems in Pachigam as well, even though the presence of three pandits in the panchayat counted for something. Abdullah Noman, who for years had held the village in the palm of his hand, found himself in the unfamiliar position of having to depend on Pyarelal Kaul, Big Man Misri and Shivshankar Sharga to put in a good word for his family and himself. The Nomans were on a list. The shameless intermarriage of Abdullah’s youngest son and Boonyi Kaul was frowned on in the highest circles. Moreover, Anees Noman had disappeared. Firdaus told the soldiers he was visiting relatives in the north but this explanation was not believed. Anees Noman’s name was on another list.

  Boonyi Kaul Noman and Shalimar the clown were living with Abdullah and Firdaus. On the night that Anees left home the brothers quarreled badly. At the end of the argument Anees said, “The trouble with you is this marriage of yours that stops you from se
eing straight.” Boonyi and Shalimar the clown had no children because Boonyi claimed to be too young to start a family. Anees in a parting shot did not fail to point out that this was suspicious behavior on her part. Then, knowing he had said too much, he opened the back door and disappeared into the darkness. “He should stay out there,” said Shalimar the clown to nobody in particular. “It isn’t safe for him in here anymore.” Later that night when everyone was in bed Abdullah and Firdaus Noman spoke to each other of disillusion. Up to now they had tried to believe that their beloved Kashmiriness was best served by some kind of association with India, because India was where the churning happened, the commingling of this and that, Hindu and Muslim, many gods and one. But now the mood had changed. The union of Boonyi their friend’s daughter and Shalimar the clown their own sweet boy, which they had held up to the world as a sign, felt like a falsely optimistic symbol, and their fierce defense of that union was beginning to look like some kind of futile last stand. “Things are growing apart,” Firdaus said. “Now I know why Nazarébaddoor feared the future and didn’t want to live to see it come.” Unsleeping, they stared at the ceiling and feared for their sons.

  On the same night, at the other end of the village, in his empty house by the Muskadoon, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul also lay awake, also grieving, also afraid. But when the thunderbolt hit Pachigam, it wasn’t Hindu-Muslim trouble that brewed up the storm. The problem wasn’t caused by the creeping madness of Tortoise Colonel or the latent danger of the iron mullah or the blindness of India or the accidental sweeps or the crescent shadow of Pakistan. Winter was approaching when it happened. The trees were almost bare and the nights were drawing in and a cold wind blew. Many of the village women were beginning their winter work, the painstaking embroidery of shawls. Then, just as the bhands of Pachigam were packing away their props and costumes until the spring, an envoy from the government in Srinagar came to inform them that there would be an extra command performance that year.

  The American ambassador, Mr. Maximilian Ophuls, was coming to Kashmir. He was a scholarly gentleman who evidently took a strong interest in all aspects of Kashmiri culture. He and his entourage would be staying at the government guesthouse at Dachigam, a spacious lodge set below a steep hill where the barasingha deer walked like kings. (But at this time of year the stags would have lost their mighty horn racks and would be girding themselves for the winter like everyone else.) Ambassador Ophuls’s personal aide, Mr. Edgar Wood, had specially asked for an evening of festivities during which the Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum would be eaten, a santoor player from Srinagar would play traditional Kashmiri music, leading local authors would recite passages from the mystical poetry of Lal Ded as well as their own contemporary verses, an oral storyteller would tell tales selected from the gigantic Kashmiri story-compendium Katha-sarit-sagar, which made the Arabian Nights look like a novella; and, by particular request, the famous bhands of Pachigam would perform. The war had hit Pachigam’s earnings badly and this late commission was a bonanza. Abdullah decided to offer a selection of scenes from the company’s full repertoire, including, fatefully, the dance number from Anarkali, a new play devised by the group after the immense success of the film Mughal-e-Azam, which told the story of the love of Crown Prince Salim and the lowly but irresistible nautch girl Anarkali. Prince Salim was a popular figure in Kashmir, not because he was the son of the Grand Mughal, Akbar the Great, but because once he ascended to the throne as the emperor Jehangir he made it plain that Kashmir was his second Anarkali, his other great love. The role of the beautiful Anarkali would be played as usual by the best dancer in Pachigam, Boonyi Kaul Noman. Once Abdullah Noman had announced this decision, the die was cast. The invisible planets trained their full attention on Pachigam. The approaching scandal began to hiss and whisper in the chinar trees like a monsoon wind. But the leaves of the trees were still.

  When Boonyi met Maximilian Ophuls’s eyes for the first time he was applauding wildly and looking piercingly at her while she took her bow, as if he wanted to see right into her soul. At that moment she knew she had found what she had been waiting for. I swore I’d grab my chance when it showed up, she told herself, and here it is, staring me in the face and banging its hands together like a fool.

  In the city of Strasbourg, a place of charming old quarters and pleasant public gardens, near the charming parc des Contades, around the corner from the old synagogue on what is now the rue du Grand Rabbin René Hirschler, at the heart of a lovely and fashionable neighborhood peopled by delightful and charming folks, there stood the ample and, yes, undeniably charming mansion house, a petit palais of the Belle Époque in which Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, a man famed for possessing what a newspaper editorialist once described as “dangerous, possibly even lethal quantities” of charm, grew up in a family of highly cultured Ashkenazi Jews. Max Ophuls himself agreed with the leader writer’s jaundiced assessment. “To be a Strasbourgeois,” he was fond of saying, “was to learn the hard way about the deceptive nature of charm.”

  When he was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to succeed John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India nearly two years after the Kennedy assassination, Max Ophuls went so far as to say—he was speaking at a Rashtrapati Bhavan banquet in his honor, hosted by the philosopher-president Sarvepalli

  Radhakrishnan soon after Ophuls’s presentation of his diplomatic credentials—that it was because he came from Alsace that he hoped he might be able to understand India a little, since the part of the world where he was raised had also been defined and redefined for many centuries by shifting frontiers, upheavals and dislocations, flights and returns, conquests and reconquests, the Roman Empire followed by the Alemanni, the Alemanni by Attila’s Huns, the Huns by the Alemanni again, the Alemanni by the Franks. Even before the year acquired four digits Strasbourg had belonged first to Lotharingia and then to Germania, had been smashed up by nameless Hungarians and reconstructed by Saxons called Otto. Reformation and revolution were in its citizens’ blood, which counter-reformation and reaction spilled in its charming streets. After the Thirty Years’ War weakened the German Empire, the French made their move. The Frenchification of Alsace, which Louis XIV began, led in turn to de-Frenchification in 1871, after the Prussians starved and burned the city through the brutal winter of 1870. So there was Germanification, but less than forty years later there was de-Germanizing too. And then came Hitler, and Gauleiter Robert Wagner, and history stopped being theoretical and musty and became personal and malodorous instead. New place-names became a part of Strasbourg’s story and the story of his family as well: Schirmeck, Struthof. The concentration camp, the extermination camp. “We know all about being part of an ancient civilization,” Ambassador Ophuls said, “and we have suffered our share of slaughter and bloodletting as well. Our great leaders, and our mothers and children, too, have been taken from us.” He bowed his head, momentarily unable to speak, and President Radhakrishnan reached over and took his hand. Everyone was suddenly in a heightened emotional state. “The loss of one man’s dream, one family’s home, one people’s rights, one woman’s life,” said Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, when he could resume, “is the loss of all our freedoms: of every life, every home, every hope. Each tragedy belongs to itself and at the same time to everyone else. What diminishes any of us diminishes us all.” Few people paid much attention to these rather too generalized sentiments at the time; it was the handclasp that stuck in the mind. Those few seconds of undefended human contact caused Max Ophuls to be seen as a friend of India, to be gathered to the national bosom even more enthusiastically than his admired predecessor had been. From that moment Max’s popularity soared, and as it became evident to everyone with the passage of time that he was in fact a great enthusiast for most things Indian, the relationship deepened toward something not unlike love. It was for this reason that the storm of scandal, when it broke, was so horrifyingly ferocious. The country felt more than mere disappointment in Max Ophuls; it felt jilted. Like a scorned lover, India turned on t
he charming cad of an ambassador and tried to break him into charming little bits. And after his departure, his successor, Chester Bowles, who tried for many years to tilt American policy away from Pakistan and toward India, was nevertheless given an altogether rougher ride.

  Like most people from his part of the country, the young Max Ophuls had been raised to distrust Paris. His parents, Anya Ophuls and Max senior, owned an apartment at 8, avenue du Bois, but they rarely used the place, except when business necessitated the unwelcome journey west, and they invariably returned home as soon as possible with their eyebrows lifted high in fastidious disdain. Max junior himself had spent some years in Paris after graduating from the University of Strasbourg with brilliant degrees in economics and international relations, and had almost been seduced. In Paris he added the law to his accomplishments, established a reputation as a dandy and a ladykiller, affected spats and carried a cane, and demonstrated an astonishing technical skill as a spare-time painter, making Dalís and Magrittes of such subtle brilliance that they fooled the art dealer Julien Levy when he visited Max’s studio apartment after a long drunken night at the Coupole. “Why are you wasting your time with law and money when you should dedicate your life to being a forger?” Levy shrieked when the deception was revealed. He was the lover of Frida Kahlo and exhibitor of the magic realist Tchelitchew, and in those days he was also in a permanent rage because his plan to build a Surrealist pavilion in the shape of a giant eye in the middle of the New York World’s Fair had just been turned down. “These aren’t forgeries,” Max Ophuls said, “because there are no originals.” Levy was silenced and examined the pictures more closely. “There’s only one thing wrong with them,” he said. “I’ll bring the artists over to sign them one of these days, and then they will be complete.” Max Ophuls was flattered, but he knew that art was not the world for him. He was right about this; about his future membership in the world of forgers, however, he was incorrect. History, which was his true métier, the real profession to which he would devote his life, would for a time value his skills as a faker above his talents in other fields.