Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  “That’s not a devil talking, it’s his manhood,” Abdullah Noman told her, without tenderness. “He’s still young enough to have the idea that he can change history, whereas I am getting accustomed to the idea of being useless, and a man who feels useless stops feeling like a man. So if he is fired up by the possibility of being useful, don’t put out that flame. Maybe killing bastards is what the times require. Maybe if my hands still worked I would strangle a few myself.”

  Discord had entered Pachigam, never to depart. Abdullah Noman did not tell his wife that relations between himself and Shalimar the clown were at a low ebb, partly because the sarpanch hadn’t liked the look of eagerness in his son’s eyes when the opportunity to replace his father as leader of the bhands had presented itself, but mostly because of the creepy feeling that Shalimar the clown was waiting for Abdullah and Pyarelal Kaul to die, so that he could be released from his oath. These days the two sexagenarians didn’t speak much. Abdullah had started mentioning the word azadi, but to Pyarelal the word didn’t mean freedom but something more like danger, and it made a difficulty between the two old friends. They did their work and thought their thoughts and came together for panchayat meetings, after which Pyarelal went back to his home at the far end of the village and stayed there staring at the burning pinecones in the fire. But Abdullah Noman knew that the pandit had the same problem as himself with the watchful stare of Shalimar the clown; it was like being watched by a vulture or a carrion crow. It was like being watched by Death himself. So if Shalimar the clown wanted to go off into the mountains with Anees and the liberation front fighters, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing on the whole, let the fellow go and do what he had to do, even if the liberation front was still a bunch of comedians trying to find out how to live up to their name.

  Two weeks later, Shalimar the clown went to Shirmal to watch television and during the news-bulletin cigarette break he stood by a coal brazier with his back to the secretive electricians and got the instructions he had been waiting for. Hatim and Hashim pretended to be talking to each other about the beauties of the high pine meadow of Tragbal, located at twelve and a half thousand feet above sea level and looking down on the Wular Lake, and agreeing that it would be at its loveliest soon after midnight tomorrow. Shalimar the clown walked away from them without commenting, and went into Bombur Yambarzal’s tent to join in the furious argument that had broken out in there on account of Hasina Yambarzal’s announcement that from now on an admission fee would be charged, a small fee, the merest token, because life was not a charity, after all. People should respect what the Yambarzals were doing for them, and the tickets would be a sign of that respect. After she said this people began shouting in a way that didn’t sound respectful at all, whereupon that incisive and pragmatic lady bent down, picked up the electric cord and broke the connection. That shut everyone up at once, as if she had pulled out their plugs as well, and her very sensible sons came in with brass bowls and went around the audience gathering low-denomination coins. Shalimar the clown paid up, but when the soap opera returned to the screen he left without watching what happened to the weeping heroine in the clutches of her wicked uncle. He was all done with weeping heroines. He was going to the Wular Lake to enter the world of men.

  Shalimar the clown left Pachigam the next morning carrying nothing but the clothes he stood up in and the knife in his waistband and was not seen again in the village for fifteen years. Above the shining shield of the Wular Lake and just below the Tragbal field he met his future on a hillside strewn with boulders. His future took the shape of a pair of men with woollen hats pulled low over their eyes and scarves wrapped around the lower parts of their faces. One of these men was whittling a wooden bird. Another was Bombur Yambarzal’s stepson, Hashim Karim. There was a third man standing behind a rock, and that was the man who mattered. “You wished to see your brother,” the man behind the rock said. “Your brother is here.” Anees’s knife went on whittling wood without pausing. “This would be touching,” said the man behind the rock, “if we were in the business of being touched. Or maybe it would be funny, if we were in the laughing business. Why don’t you tell me what I’m doing here listening to a crummy play-actor who wants to play an action hero for real, and maybe a martyr as well.” Shalimar the clown remained calm. “I need to learn a new trade,” he said. “And you’re going to need people with those skills as time goes by.” The man behind the rock thought about this. “What I hear,” he said, “is that you’ve been talking big to anyone who’ll listen about all the people you intend to wipe out, including the former American ambassador. That sounds like clown behavior to me.” Shalimar’s face tightened. “For now and until freedom comes I’ll kill anyone you want me to,” he said, “but yes, one of these days I want the American ambassador at my mercy.”

  There was a grunt from behind the rock. “And I want to be the king of England,” the invisible man said. Then there was a long silence. “Okay,” said the man behind the rock. A longer silence followed. Shalimar the clown turned to his brother, who shook his head. “In some minutes,” said Anees Noman, “it will be our turn to leave.” “Am I coming with you?” asked Shalimar the clown. His brother’s whittling knife paused for one brief beat.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re coming.”

  Before they left that hillside Shalimar the clown went behind a boulder to relieve himself. Only after the hot stream died away did he look down and see the enormous snake, the king cobra, lying coiled under the rock, an inch away from the puddle. During his exploits with the liberation front he often thought about that sleeping serpent, which reminded him of his mother Firdaus’s superstitions. “Snake luck,” he said one day to his brother as they crouched behind a rock near Tangmarg waiting for an army troop convoy to pass over the mines they had laid in the steeply ascending road. “I must have snake luck on my side. It’s a good sign.” Anees Noman’s habitual melancholy was deepened by this excavated memory of a mother he feared he might never see again, but he disguised his sadness and twisted his face into a rueful smile. “Anyway,” Shalimar the clown whispered further, “it’s what we do. I mean, pissing on a snake. If that snake had woken up that night, I’d be a dead man now. But this snake, the one we keep pissing on, it’s awake all right, awake and wet and mad.”

  Anees chewed the end of a beedi gloomily. “Just aim for its motherfucking eyes,” he said. His vocabulary had been coarsened by the years. “If you piss hard enough maybe you’ll drill a hole in its sisterfucking head.”

  In those days before the crazies got into the act the liberation front was reasonably popular and azadi was the universal cry. Freedom! A tiny valley of no more than five million souls, landlocked, preindustrial, resource rich but cash poor, perched thousands of feet up in the mountains like a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant’s teeth, wanted to be free. Its inhabitants had come to the conclusion that they didn’t much like India and didn’t care for the sound of Pakistan. So: freedom! Freedom to be meat-eating Brahmins or saint-worshipping Muslims, to make pilgrimages to the ice-lingam high in the unmelting snows or to bow down before the prophet’s hair in a lakeside mosque, to listen to the santoor and drink salty tea, to dream of Alexander’s army and to choose never to see an army again, to make honey and carve walnut into animal and boat shapes and to watch the mountains push their way, inch by inch, century by century, further up into the sky. Freedom to choose folly over greatness but to be nobody’s fools. Azadi! Paradise wanted to be free.

  “But free isn’t free of charge,” Anees Noman told his brother in his sad-sack way. “The only paradise that’s free that way is a fairy-tale place full of dead people. Here among the living, free costs money. Collections must be made.” Though he didn’t know it, he sounded exactly like Hasina Yambarzal announcing to the villagers of Shirmal and Pachigam that they needed to start paying to watch TV.

  The first phase of Shalimar the clown’s initiation into the world of the liberation front involved him in the group’s fund-
raising activities. The first principle of this work was that operatives working in the financial field could not be sent back to their own localities, because fund-raising was sometimes no joke and such humorlessness never went down well with one’s own folks. The second principle was that as it was a well-established fact that the poor were more generous than the rich it was proper to be more so to speak persuasive when dealing with the rich. It was not necessary to spell out the precise nature of such persuasion. Each operative could be trusted to devise the tactics best suited to the situation. Shalimar the clown, a member of his brother’s financial team, a man newly awakened to rage and ready for extreme measures, prepared himself to threaten, slash and burn.

  However, Abdullah and Firdaus Noman had raised their sons to be courteous at all times, and even though Shalimar the clown had been possessed by a devil his brother Anees had not. When they arrived, at twilight, at a large lakeside mansion at the edge of Srinagar whose gloomy look perfectly matched Anees’s own, the lady of the house, a certain Mrs. Ghani, informed them that her husband the affluent landowner was not at home; whereupon Anees decided it would be improper for half-a-dozen armed men to enter a decent lady’s home when the man of the house was absent, and announced that he and his colleagues would wait for her husband Mr. Ataullah Ghani outside. They waited for four hours, hunkered down outside the servants’ entrance with their rifles rolled up inside scarves, and Mrs. Ghani sent out hot tea and snacks. At length Shalimar the clown insubordinately expressed his anxiety. “The level of risk is unacceptable,” he said. “The lady could have telephoned the security forces many times by now.” Anees Noman stopped whittling wood into owl shapes and raised an admonitory finger. “If it is our time to die, then we shall die,” he replied. “But we will die as men of culture, not barbarians.” Shalimar the clown subsided into sullen silence, fingering the edge of his blade inside the folds of his cloak. One of the hardest things about becoming a freedom fighter was having to accept his brother’s seniority in the organization.

  After four and a half hours Mr. Ghani returned and came out to smoke a pensive cigarette with the financial committee on the back stoop. “This house,” he said, “belonged to my late paternal Ghani-uncle, the well-known Andha Sahib, the blind philanthropist who lived to the great age of one hundred and one, God be praised, and died only three years back. Perhaps you have heard about him? His personal life was a great tragedy, a poor reward for all his generosity, because he lost his beloved daughter, his only child, who moved to Pakistan and then died there in ’65 in consequence of Indian aerial bombing during that foolish war. Before Andha Sahib this was the residence of other eminent members of my family for a hundred and one years more. There is a collection of European paintings of quality. There is a picture of Diana the Huntress that is particularly fine. If you care to see it I will gladly conduct a tour. Also naturally there is my wife and there are my daughters. I thank you for respecting the sanctity of the house and the honor of my womenfolk. To express my gratitude, and in the blessed memory of Naseem Ghani, the child of this house and my personal cousin whom the Indian air force bombed to death in her own kitchen in Rawalpindi on September 22, 1965, I will assure you of the following sum, to be paid at quarterly intervals.”

  The sum named was large enough to make it difficult for the liberation fighters to continue to look impassive. There were muffled gasps behind their woollen hoods. Afterwards, as they retreated into the shadows, Shalimar the clown looked shamefaced about his earlier fears, but Anees Noman had the grace not to rub it in. “Srinagar isn’t like back home,” he said. “It takes time to acquire local knowledge. Where the backing is, where it isn’t, where it needs a little encouragement of the type you’re itching to provide. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

  It was not possible to go home. A system of billets was in operation. The brothers Noman were assigned a series of temporary lodgings with families who sometimes welcomed them, at other times had to be coerced into housing such potentially dangerous guests and treated them with a mixture of anger and fear, barely speaking to them except when absolutely necessary, locking up their marriageable daughters, and sending the younger children to live elsewhere until the peril had passed. Anees and Shalimar the clown stayed with a friendly family working in the trout hatcheries of Harwan, and with passionate supporters in the Srinagar silk industry; in a hostile household of pony-wallahs and farmhands near the famous spring of Bawan, sacred to Vishnu, with its holy tank bursting with hungry fish, and in an even more threatening encampment of limestone miners near the Manasbal quarry, a billet they abandoned after a single night because they both dreamed the same dream, a nightmare of being killed in their sleep, of having their skulls crushed by angry men with rocks in their fists. They slept for a season in an attic room in the home of a terrified truck driver’s family in Bijbehara near the tourist village of Pahalgam. This was the neighborhood in which the spy Gopinath Razdan had been murdered some years earlier, after leaking the news of Boonyi’s liaison with Shalimar the clown. It was therefore a region of which the Nomans had some prior knowledge. Shalimar the clown felt oddly homesick here. The fast-flowing Liddar reminded him of the smaller Muskadoon, and the lovely mountain meadow of Baisaran above Pahalgam, where Razdan had actually been killed, called to mind flower-carpeted Khelmarg, where his great and lethal love had been consummated. The devil inside him was aroused by the memory of his faithless wife, and murder again filled all his thoughts.

  Another summer the brothers stayed among kindly people, the Hanji and Manji tribal boatmen who rowed and punted their craft down the myriad waterways of the valley, gathering singhare, water chestnuts, on the Wular Lake, or working market gardens on Lake Dal, or fishing, or dredging for driftwood in the rivers. When a boatman ferried passengers on his craft the brothers Noman sat huddled up at the back of the vessel with their faces wrapped up in shawls. At other times, on the big boats, they pitched in and worked as hard as their hosts. Poling a boat carrying seven thousand pounds of grain from lake to lake was a hard day’s work. By night, after so effortful a day, the brothers gathered with the boating families at the kitchen end of one of the giant covered boats with its barrel-thatched roof and ate meals of highly spiced fish and lotus root. The boatman with whom they stayed longest was the unofficial patriarch of the Hanji tribe, Ahmed Hanji, who not only resembled an Old Testament prophet but believed that his people were the descendants of Noah, and that their boats were the pygmy children of the ark. “Boat’s the best place to be right now,” he philosophized. “Another flood’s coming, and God knows how many of us will be drowned this time.” “That’s the trouble with this damn country of ours,” Anees Noman muttered to his brother when they lay down to sleep that night. “Everyone’s a prophet.”

  All the men in the liberation front were afraid almost all the time. There were not enough of them, the security forces were hunting them down, and in every village there were stories of families shot to death on suspicion of having harbored insurrectionists, stories that made it harder to recruit new members or to gain the support and assistance of the frightened and downtrodden population. Azadi! The word sounded like a fantasy, a children’s fable. Even the freedom fighters sometimes failed to believe in the future. How could the future begin when the present had such a stranglehold on everyone and everything? They feared betrayal, capture, torture, their own cowardice, the fabled insanity of the new officer in charge of all internal security in the Kashmir sector, General Hammirdev Kachhwaha, failure and death. They feared the killing of their loved ones in reprisal for their few successes, a bridge bombed, an army convoy hit, a notorious security officer laid low. They feared, almost above all things, the winter, when their high-ground encampments became unusable, when the Aru route over the mountains became impassable, when their access to arms and combat supplies dwindled, when there was nothing to do but wait to be arrested, to sit shivering in loveless garrets and dream of the unattainable: women, power and wealth. When Maqbool Bu
tt himself was arrested and jailed, morale hit an all-time low. Butt’s old associate Amanullah Khan ended up in exile in England.

  The resistance changed its name and became the JKLF, four initials instead of five, “Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front” without the “National,” but it made no difference. The Kashmiris of England, in Birmingham and Manchester and London, could dream on about freedom. The Kashmiris of Kashmir were shivering, leaderless and very close to defeat.

  In the old stories, love made possible a kind of spiritual contact between lovers long separated by necessity or chance. In the days before telecommunications, true love itself was enough. A woman left at home would close her eyes and the power of her need would enable her to see her man on his ocean ship battling pirates with cutlass and pistol, her man in the battle’s fray with his sword and shield, standing victorious among the corpses on some foreign field, her man crossing a distant desert whose sands were on fire, her man amid mountain peaks, drinking the driven snow. So long as he lived she would follow his journey, she would know the day-by-day of it, the hour-by-hour, would feel his elation and his grief, would fight temptation with him and with him rejoice in the beauty of the world; and if he died a spear of love would fly back across the world to pierce her waiting, omniscient heart. It would be the same for him. In the midst of the desert’s fire he would feel her cool hand on his cheek and in the heat of battle she would murmur words of love into his ear: live, live. And more: he would know her dailiness too, her moods, her illnesses, her labors, her loneliness, her thoughts. The bond of their communion would never break. That was what the stories said about love. That was what human beings knew love to be.