Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  And all of a sudden he was forty years old, battle hardened, and no longer needed to ask himself what murder might be like. On a street corner outside a car park in North Africa an agent of the FIS had paid a cigarette vendor a few dinars to leave his tray behind and disappear for an hour. Then he had been brought forward, Shalimar the clown clean shaven and wearing Western clothes, and a bearded man wearing a khamis robe and smelling heavily of musk put the strap of the vending tray around his neck and left a pistol on it wrapped in a white cloth and then disappeared. Shalimar the clown felt strangely potent, he felt like Superman, because they had stuck a needle in his arm and injected an off-white liquid into it. He had no language in common with the people for whom he was carrying out the hit, but one-eyed Talib had sent Zahir the Boy with him to be his translator and aide. Talib said that Zahir the Boy spoke excellent Arabic and it was time he became a man. They had shown Shalimar the clown a picture of a man and brought him here in a windowless van and injected him and left him on the street with the gun. In the van Zahir the Boy had translated what the bearded man said. The man he was going to kill was a godless man, a writer against God, who spoke French and had sold his soul to the West. That was all he needed to know. He should not need to ask questions. It was a simple job.

  Shalimar the clown stood on the street corner surrounded by Arabic and when men came up for cigarettes Zahir the Boy did the work and Shalimar the clown grinned stupidly and pointed at his ears and open mouth, meaning I’m deaf and dumb, I can’t talk to you, I have no idea what you’re saying. Then the man in the photograph appeared, wearing blue-tinted sunglasses and an open white shirt and cream slacks and carrying a folded newspaper in his left hand. The man walked quickly toward the car park and Shalimar the clown took off the vending tray, picked up the cloth with the pistol inside and followed him. He was holding the cloth in his left hand and didn’t take the gun out because he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood. What it would feel like when he slashed the bastard’s throat in half so that his head lolled back and sideways off his neck and the blood gushed upwards like a tree. What it would feel like when the blood poured over him and he stepped away from the corpse, the useless twitching thing, the piece of fly-blown meat. Zahir came running and the windowless van came round a corner fast and the man who smelled of musk pulled him inside and slammed the door and the van drove away quickly while the man who smelled of musk shouted at him for a long, long time. Zahir the Boy said, “He says you are insane. The gun had a silencer fitted and would have been quick and clean. You disobeyed orders and he should kill you for this.” But Shalimar the clown was not killed. Zahir the Boy translated what the man who smelled of musk said after he had calmed down. “For a man like you, a complete fucking crazy asshole, there will always be plenty of work.”

  So he knew the answer to his question and had learned something about himself that he had not known before. The years passed and indeed there was plenty of work. He became a person of value and consequence, as assassins are. Also, his secret purpose was achieved. He had passports in five names and had learned good Arabic, ordinary French and bad English, and had opened routes for himself, routes in the real world, the invisible world, that would take him where he needed to go when the time for the ambassador came. He remembered his father teaching him to walk the tightrope, and realized that traveling the secret routes of the invisible world was exactly the same. The routes were gathered air. Once you had learned to use them you felt as if you were flying, as if the illusory world in which most people lived was vanishing and you were flying across the skies without even needing to get on board a plane.

  FC-22 was different when he returned: larger, more solidly constructed. It no longer looked like a bandits’ hideout. Many wooden houses had been built, and Nissen huts erected. Talib the Afghan had returned to active military service and Zahir the Boy was also long gone. Maulana Bulbul Fakh was there, however, and welcomed Shalimar the clown with the words, “You’re just in time. The uprising is near.” He had been away too long. Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, had been dead for five years. There had been India-Pakistan clashes on the Siachen Glacier, twenty thousand feet above sea level. But it was the just-concluded polls that changed everything. This was the year 1987, and the Indian government had held state elections in Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah, the Sheikh’s son, was the government’s preferred choice. The opposition party, the Muslim United Front, named as its candidate one Mohammad Yousuf Shah, described by General Hammirdev Kachhwaha as the state’s “most wanted militant.” Unofficially, as the results came in, it became plain that the wrong man was winning. So the election was rigged. MUF supporters and electoral agents were seized and tortured. Mohammad Yousuf Shah went underground, and as Syed Salahuddin became the chief of the militant group Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin. His closest aides, the so-called HAJY group (Abdul Hamid Shaikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, Javed Ahmed Mir and Mohammad Yasin Malik), crossed the mountains and joined the JKLF. Thousands of previously law-abiding young men took up arms and joined the militants, disillusioned by the electoral process. Pakistan was generous. There were AK-47s for everyone.

  Abdurajak Janjalani had gone home and started up a new group of his own, the “Sword Bearers,” or Abu Sayyaf faction. He had often talked about doing this, and more than once tried to recruit Shalimar the clown to help him. “Brothers from everywhere gathering,” he had said. “You see. It will be triumph for our international.” Seeing that Shalimar the clown had other things on his mind, Janjalani had not pressed him, but had assured him that there would always be a place for him in the struggle. “If you want to come to Basilan,” he said, “this person, call him. All fixed very quick and well. Brother Ramzi coming. There are so-much funds.” The name on the piece of paper meant nothing to Shalimar the clown but when the Sword Bearers hit the news fast with a campaign of bombings and kidnappings for ransom, the world’s visible and invisible networks began to buzz and various names did begin to crop up, such as Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a cousin of Sheikh Usama’s who ran a large number of Islamic charities in the southern Philippines and was spoken of as a major financier of the new group. President Qadhafi of Libya condemned Abu Sayyaf but Libyan charities in the southern Philippines also came under suspicion as possible channels for Libyan state cash. Likewise, the names of certain prominent Malaysian figures began to occur in the same sentence as the words Abu Sayyaf. The name and telephone number on Shalimar the clown’s piece of paper were both Malaysian, but neither ever appeared in the press. Of course the piece of paper had existed for less than an hour. Shalimar the clown had fixed the name and the number in his head and burned the paper as soon as the work of memorization was done.

  The Gegroo brothers had gone, too. The secular nationalist ideas of the JKLF militants had never been to their liking, and Talib the instructor had steered them (before he also left) in the direction of the most “Afghan” of the newer groups, the Lashkar-e-Pak or Army of the Pure. The LeP had moral as well as political aims. A month before Shalimar the clown’s return to FC-22, the Gegroos had taken part in an LeP raid on the village of Hast in Jammu & Kashmir Rajouri district. LeP posters had appeared in the village ordering all Muslim women to don the burqa and adhere to the dress and behavioral principles laid down by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Kashmiri women were mostly unaccustomed to the veil and ignored the posters. On the night in question the LeP group, including the Gegroos, took reprisals. They entered the home of Mohammed Sadiq and killed his twenty-year-old daughter, Nosen Kausar. In the home of Khalid Ahmed they beheaded twenty-two-year-old Tahira Parveen. In the home of Mohammed Rafiq they killed young Shehnaaz Akhtar. And they beheaded forty-three-year-old Jan Begam in her own home.

  In the months that followed the LeP grew bolder and moved its activities into
Srinagar itself. Women teachers were doused with acid for failing to adhere to the Islamic dress code. Threats were made and deadlines issued and many Kashmiri women put on, for the first time, the shroud their mothers and grandmothers had always proudly refused. Then, in the summer of 1987, the LeP posters appeared in Shirmal. Men and women were not to sit together and watch television anymore. That was a licentious and obscene practice. Hindus were not to sit among Muslims. And of course all women must instantly put on the veil. Hasina Yambarzal was outraged. “Tear all those posters down and announce business as usual,” she ordered her sons. “I don’t intend to watch my TV programs through a hole in a one-woman tent, nor do I plan to be liberated into a different kind of jail.”

  The last performance ever given by the bhands of Pachigam took place early the next year, at the start of the tourist season, on the day the national insurrection began. Abdullah Noman at the great age of seventy-six brought his troupe of players to an auditorium in Srinagar to perform for the valley’s Indian and foreign visitors, on whom the economy depended. His great stars were gone. There was no Boonyi to dance her Anarkali and devastate audiences with her beauty, no Shalimar to clown with dizzying skill on a high wire without a net, and he himself found it extremely painful to draw and brandish a kingly sword with his aging, crippled hands. The youngsters of today had other interests and had to be coerced into performing. The sullen woodenness of these younger actors was an insult to the ancient art. Abdullah mourned inwardly as he watched them at rehearsal. They were broken bits of matchstick pretending to be mighty trees. Who will watch such clumsy rubbish? he wondered sadly. They will pelt us with fruit and two veg and boo us off the stage.

  He apologized in advance to his septuagenarian friend and longtime ally, the retired Sikh cultural administrator and celebrated horticulturalist Sardar Harbans Singh, who had supported the bhand pather throughout his career and, in retirement, had persuaded his young successors—who were as impatient with the old crafts as the youth of Pachigam—to give the old stagers the occasional break. “After tonight, Sardarji,” Abdullah Noman told the elegant old gent, “the organizers will probably want to give us not breaks but broken heads.” “Don’t worry about it, old man,” Harbans replied dryly. “The tourists have been fleeing the valley in droves this past week, and most of them never showed up in the first place anyway. It’s a catastrophe, a shipwreck, and I’m afraid it’s your job to provide the entertainment while we go down with all hands.”

  Firdaus had not come to Srinagar with the company. Abdullah knew she was unhappy, because she had started muttering about snake omens. When his wife started seeing snake-shapes in the clouds, in the branches of trees, in water, it invariably meant she was brooding about the miseries of life. Recently she claimed that actual snakes had been coming into the village, that she saw them wherever she went, in animal feeding barns and fruit orchards and produce stalls and homes. They had not started biting yet, no snake-deaths of livestock or human beings had been reported, but they were gathering, Firdaus said, like an army of invasion they were massing ranks and unless something was done about it they would attack at a moment of their choosing and that would be that. Once upon a time Abdullah Noman would have roared his disbelief and the village would have gathered delightedly outside his house to listen to the quarrel, but Abdullah didn’t roar anymore, even though he knew she would prefer it if he did. He had retreated into himself, old age and disappointment had pushed him into a cold place and he didn’t know how to get out of it. He saw his wife looking at him sometimes, fixing him with an unhappy questioning stare that asked where did you go, what happened to the man I loved, and he wanted to shout out to her, I’m still in here, save me, I’m trapped inside myself, but there was a coating of ice around him and the words couldn’t get through.

  “If the show goes as badly as I fear,” he told her stiffly, “then I’m going to stop. To hell with it! I don’t plan to spend my last years being humiliated in public in shows I wouldn’t pay to see myself.” Pachigam was much poorer than either of them could remember. Theatrical bookings were few and far between and since Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s withdrawal from the position of vasta waza, chief cook, the reputation of Pachigam’s wazwaan had declined. Firdaus replied to her husband’s announcement with a few stiff words of her own. “So, if we’re going to be even harder up than we are now,” she said, “then it’s just as well I never developed any fancy ideas about living in style.” Abdullah knew she was complaining about his behavior, his failure to make her feel loved, but the words that would soften her heart stuck in his throat and he left for Srinagar saying, with a curt nod, “Quite so. The poor should never succumb to the dream of a comfortable life.”

  The bus bringing the actors and musicians to Srinagar could not get to the depot on account of the crowds gathering in the city streets under the nervous eyes of the army and police. The bhands had to get out, carry their props and walk. There were already more than four hundred thousand people clogging up the roads. Abdullah Noman asked the bus driver what was going on. “It’s a funeral,” he replied. “They have come to mourn the death of our Kashmir.”

  The curtain rose on the story of the good king Zain-ul-abidin, and Abdullah walked out onto the stage with a raised sword in one hand and a spear in the other, clenching the weapons tightly, ignoring the spears of pain shooting down his hands. He was leading by example for the last time in his life, sending a message to his bored, mutinous troupe. If I can rise above my pain then you can rise above your indifference. But the auditorium was three-quarters empty, and the few tourists who were sitting out there weren’t really listening to him, because through the walls of the theater came the muffled sound of the start of the uprising, the crowd of one million persons marching through the streets carrying flaming torches above their heads and bellowing Azadi! Sardar Harbans Singh was sitting with his son Yuvraj, a strikingly handsome young man whose modernizing inclinations were trumpeted by his shaven face and lack of a Sikh turban, in the middle of the otherwise empty seventh row. With the sense of a man plunging from a high pinnacle to his death Abdullah Noman fixed his old comrade with his fiercest, most glittering stare and launched into the play with all the power he had left. For the next hour, in the silent tomb of the auditorium, the bhands of Pachigam told a story which nobody wanted to hear. Several members of the audience got up and left during the show. In the intermission Sardar Harbans Singh’s son Yuvraj, a businessman who in spite of the worsening political situation was successfully exporting Kashmiri papier-mâché boxes, carved wooden tables, numdah rugs and embroidered shawls to the rest of India and to Western buyers as well, who supported him “as an act of ridiculous optimism, considering that the region is on the verge of going insane,” warned Abdullah Noman that things might get out of hand in the street and demonstrators might even burst into the theater. “You’re holding a sword and a spear,” Yuvraj Singh reminded Abdullah. “If they do get inside here, a word of advice? Never mind about the play. Throw the props down and run.” He himself would have to miss the second act, he apologized. “The situation, you understand,” he explained, vaguely. “One has one’s proper duties to discharge.”

  In the hollow vacuum of the empty theater Abdullah Noman saw his troupe of disaffected youngsters give the performances of their young lives, as if they had suddenly understood a secret which nobody had explained to them before. The pounding drumbeats of the demonstration echoed around them, the chanting of the demonstrators was like a chorus crying doom, the menace of the ever-growing crowd crackled around the empty seats like an electric charge. Still the bhands of Pachigam went on with their show, dancing, singing, clowning, telling their tale of old-time tolerance and hope. At one point Abdullah Noman succumbed to the illusion that their voices, their instruments had become inaudible, that, even though they were declaiming their lines and singing their songs and playing their music with a passion they had not been able to muster for a long time, there was complete silence in the theater, the few
scattered spectators sat mutely watching a dumb show, while outside in the streets the noise was already immense and grew louder by the instant, and now a second group of noises was superimposed on the first, the noises of troop transports, Jeeps and tanks, of booted feet marching in step, of loaded weapons being readied and finally of gunshots, rifle shots as well as automatic fire. The chanting turned into screaming, the drumbeats turned into thunder, the march turned into a stampede, and as the auditorium began to shake the tale of King Zain-ul-abidin silently reached its happy ending and the actors joined hands and took their bow, but even though Sardar Harbans Singh, the only person left in the audience, applauded as heartily as he could in the circumstances, his clapping hands didn’t make any sound at all.

  For a time it was impossible to return home. Forty demonstrators had been killed. The situation in the streets was highly unstable, there were roadblocks and troops and armored vehicles everywhere, and public transport was not a priority. The bhands of Pachigam blockaded themselves inside the theater and waited. Sardar Harbans Singh refused to stay with them. “I’m going to sleep in my own bed, chaps,” he declared. “The wife would be most suspicious if I don’t. Besides which, I have my garden to attend to.” Harbans’s walled garden villa was one of the secret wonders of the city, and was believed by some to have been placed under an enchantment by a pari from Pari Mahal, a magic spell which protected it and all who dwelt there from coming to harm. But Harbans didn’t seem to need the assistance of fairies. He managed to find his way back to the old-town residence on foot in spite of the wildness of the city. Harbans was an intrepid old fox, knew all the city’s byways and back alleys, and came back every day without fail, immaculately turned out in achkan jacket and trousers, his silver beard and moustache trimmed and pomaded, to bring the company food and essential supplies. He was sometimes escorted by his son, but more often came alone, on account of Yuvraj’s unspecified “duties,” which turned out to involve the hiring and management of a private security force to protect his business premises and warehouses against looters and firebombers. Sardar Harbans Singh shook his head sadly. “My son is a person of high ideals and noble beliefs,” he told Abdullah, “who is obliged by the times to deal with guttersnipes and bounders, mercenary hooligans whom he hires to save our goods from other hooligans, and whom he then has to watch like a hawk in case they do the bad hats’ dirty work themselves. Poor fellow never sleeps, but never complains. He does the needful. As we all must.” Sardar Harbans Singh carried a silver-headed walnut swordstick and walked briskly through the unsafe streets, pooh-poohing the risk to himself. “I’m an old man,” he said. “Who would trouble to do anything to me when Father Time is doing such a dashed good job already?” Abdullah shook his head wonderingly. “You can know a man for fifty years,” he said, “and still not know what he’s capable of.” Harbans shrugged in self-deprecation. “You never know the answer to the questions of life until you’re asked,” he said.