Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  Sometimes in the middle of the night she awoke to the sound of a man’s voice singing a woman’s song and it took her a few moments to realize that she was listening to a memory. In an enchanted garden a man who loved her sang a melodious lol. Habba Khatoon’s original name was Zoon, which meant the moon. She lived four hundred years ago in a village called Chandrahar amid saffron fields and chinar trees. One day Yusuf Shah Chak the future ruler of Kashmir heard Zoon singing as he passed by and fell in love and when they married she changed her name. In 1579 the emperor Akbar ordered Yusuf Shah to come to Delhi and when Yusuf got there he was arrested and jailed. Come and enter my door, my jewel, Habba Khatoon sang, alone in Kashmir, why have you forsaken the path to my house? My youth is in bloom, she sang, this is your garden, come and enjoy it. The shock of your desertion has come as a blow to me, O cruel one, I continue to nurse the pain. Yuvraj, she thought. Forgive me. I’m in a kind of prison too.

  She swam in the pool, exercised in the private gym, worked out at home with a new personal trainer even though she knew it would hurt her friend the egg donor who had trained her for years, and played tennis on her own court, three times a week, with a visiting pro. When she did leave the premises it was to fight or shoot. Her body grew leaner and harder by the month, its spare tautness a testament to her relentless regimen, her rich woman’s monasticism, and to the growing strength of her self-denying will. After a day’s archery or boxing or martial arts, or a trip out of town to Saltzman’s shooting range, she came home and retired wordlessly to her private wing, where she wrote her letters and thought her thoughts and kept herself to herself while the attack dogs on their leashes sniffed the air for trouble and the searchlights searched and the men in night-vision goggles roamed the property. She no longer lived in America. She lived in a combat zone.

  The server carrying the subpoena summoning her to appear in the trial of her father’s murderer as a hostile witness for the defense was intercepted at the gate to the property and then escorted to her quarters by Frank, the same Jerome operative who had given her the night-vision goggles. “This came, ma’am.” It had to be some sort of practical joke, she thought, but it wasn’t, her letters were coming home to roost, they were important exhibits in William Tillerman’s case, and he wanted to question her about them. Tillerman had come up with a therapist named E. Prentiss Shaw who had developed a diagnostic tool for use with suspected brainwashing victims. The tool was a checklist that amounted to a form of psychological profiling. It was well known that Hamas chiefs in the Mideast used psychological profiling when selecting candidates for martyrdom. This was the age we lived in, Tillerman argued in court, an age in which our invisible foes understood that not everyone could be a suicide bomber, not everyone could be an assassin. Psychology was all-important. Character was destiny. Certain personality types were more suggestible than others, could be shaped by external forces and aimed like weapons by their masters against whatever targets were deemed worthy of attack. The Shaw profiling tool identified Shalimar the clown as a malleable personality of this type. Shalimar the clown screamed at night in his cell because he believed himself bewitched, Tillerman said. The defense presented as evidence over five hundred letters written by Ms. India a.k.a. Kashmira Ophuls to the accused, letters which clearly stated her intent to invade his thoughts and torment him while asleep. One of the known associates of Ms. Ophuls, a woman of Soviet origins, actually was a self-described witch and member of the Wicca organization, as the testimony of a former fellow-resident of the apartment building on Kings Road, Mr. Khadaffy Andang, would confirm. “Is it the contention of the defense, Mr. Tillerman,” Judge Weissberg interrupted, lowering his spectacles, “that sorcery exists?”

  William Tillerman lowered his spectacles right back at the judge. “Sir, it is not,” he replied. “But it is of no importance what you or I may believe here in this courtroom. What is important is that my client believes it. I beg the court’s indulgence for what may seem like grandstanding, but this speaks to my client’s extreme vulnerability to external manipulation. The defense will call witnesses from the intelligence community who will report on my client’s presence over many years at various locations known to us as schools of terrorism, brainwashing centers, and it is our contention that in the matter of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls my client ceased to be in command of his actions. His free will was subverted by mind-control techniques, verbal, mechanical and chemical, which gravely undermined his personality and turned him into a missile, aimed at a single human heart, which just happened to be the heart of this country’s most distinguished counterterrorism ambassador. A Manchurian Candidate, if you will, a death zombie, programmed to kill. The defense will argue that the assassination may have been triggered by an unknown “sorcerer” or “puppet master” who has not been apprehended. After thorough conditioning the trigger moment would not even require the puppet and the puppet master to meet. The command could be given on the telephone, the conditioned response could be activated by the use of a commonplace word such as, oh, I don’t know, banana, or solitaire. I am not sure, sir, if Your Honor and the members of the jury are familiar with the thirty-year-old movie to which I allude. If not, a video screening could easily be arranged.”

  “Far be it from this court, Mr. Tillerman,” Judge Weissberg said sternly, “to accuse you of trying to make a grandstand play. And yes: I saw the movie, and I have no doubt that the jury gets your point. However, this is murder one, Mr. Tillerman. We will not be going to the pictures in my courtroom.”

  In the days that followed Tillerman’s opening remarks the entire country was captured by his “sorcerer’s” or “Manchurian” defense of Shalimar the clown. The classic movie was screened on network television, and plans for a remake were announced. The Twin Towers bombers, the suicidists of Palestine, and now the terrifying possibility that mind-controlled human automata were walking amongst us, ready to commit murder whenever a voice on the phone said banana or solitaire . . . it all made the new, senseless kind of sense, Tillerman could see it in the jury’s eyes, and all the way through the prosecution’s case he found assistance for his own. Yes, the accused was a terrorist, the prosecution said. Yes, he had been in some remote, scary places where bad people gathered to plot dark deeds. Under a number of work-names he had been involved for many years in the perpetration of such acts. On this occasion, however, the prosecution argued, the probability was that he had been flying solo, because of the seduction by the victim of the accused’s beloved wife. When Janet Mientkiewicz proposed this, the vengeful husband theory, she actually saw the jury’s eyes glazing over, and understood that the plainness of the truth was suffering by comparison with Tillerman’s paranoid scenario, which was so perfectly attuned to the mood of the moment that the jury wanted it to be true, wanted it while not wanting it, believing that the world was now as Tillerman said it was while wishing it were not. “We may be screwed here,” she confided to Tanizaki one night. He shook his head. “Trust in the law and do your job,” he told her. “This isn’t Perry Mason. We’re not on TV.” “Oh yes we are,” she said, “but thanks for stiffening my spine.”

  It’s dog eat dog up there in the Himalayas, ladies and gentlemen, the Indian army against the Pakistan-sponsored fanatics, we sent men out to discover the truth and the truth is what they brought home. You want to know this man, my client? The defense will show that his village was destroyed by the Indian army. Razed to the ground, every structure destroyed. The dead body of his brother was thrown at his mother’s feet with the hands severed. Then his mother was raped and killed and his father was also slain. And then they killed his wife, his beloved wife, the greatest dancer in the village, the greatest beauty in all Kashmir. You don’t need psych profiling to get the point of this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this kind of thing would derange the best of us, and the best of them is what he was, a star performer in a troupe of traveling players, a comedian of the high wire, an artist, famous in his way, Shalimar the clown. Then one day hi
s whole world was shattered and his mind with it. This is exactly the kind of person the terrorist puppet masters seek out, this is the kind of mind that responds to their sorcery. The subject’s picture of the world has been broken and a new one is painted for him, brushstroke by brushstroke. Like the man says in the movie you aren’t going to see in Judge Weissberg’s courtroom, they don’t just get brainwashed, they get dry-cleaned. This is a man against whose whole community a blood crime was committed that he could not avenge, a blood crime that drove him out of his mind. When a man is out of his mind other forces can enter that mind and shape it. They took that avenging spirit and pointed it in the direction they required, not at India, but here. At America. At their real enemy. At us.

  The Manchurian bubble burst, as Larry Tanizaki had promised Janet Mientkiewicz it would, the day Kashmira Ophuls took the stand for the defense. A hostile witness was always a gamble, and Tillerman’s decision to field the Ophuls girl was, in Tanizaki’s opinion, a weak choice, a choice that showed what a house of cards his case was. Under cross-examination by Janet Mientkiewicz, Kashmira revealed what Shalimar the clown had not told his attorney, what Tillerman’s researchers had been unable to discover, what the usurpers of Pachigam did not know and the Yambarzals in Shirmal would not tell. In a single, brief statement, made with an executioner’s calm, she unmade the defense’s case. “That wasn’t how my mother died,” she said. “My mother died because that man, who also killed my father, cut off her beautiful head.”

  She turned to face Shalimar the clown and he understood perfectly what she did not need words to say. Now I have killed you, she told him. Now my arrow is in your heart and I am satisfied. When the time comes to execute you I will come and watch you die.

  On the day after sentence was passed on him Shalimar the clown was moved by road to the California state prison at San Quentin where the men’s death-row facility was located. Once again extreme security precautions were taken; he did not travel in the regular jail bus, and the eleven-vehicle motorcade with motorbikes buzzing beside it and helicopters tracking it from the sky looked, as it moved north past the silent concrete bells of the Camino Real, like a monarch’s journey into exile, like Napoleon in rags on his way to St. Helena. He remained impassive throughout the twelve-hour journey. His features had acquired something of the grey, pasty color and texture of prison life and his hair was whiter and had thinned a little. He did not speak to the guards sitting beside and across from him in the white armored van except once, to ask for a drink of water. He had the air of a man who had accepted his fate, and retained his calm demeanor while he was processed through the death-row reception center, photographed, fingerprinted, given blankets and prison blues, and then led wearing waist chains to the adjustment center or A/C to await classification. Here his possessions were taken from him except for a pencil and a sheet of writing paper and a comb and a bar of soap. He was handed a toothbrush with all but an inch of the handle cut off and some tooth powder. Then he was locked in a cage and stripped naked and the guards looked, as it was their habit to look, under his testicles and inside his bodily orifices, crack a smile, one of them told him, and he didn’t understand until the guard grabbed him by the back of the neck and bent him over so they could inspect his rear. He was handcuffed and checked with a metal detector and taken to his cell. The guard yelled the cell number and the door opened with a great hiss because compressed air was used to open and close it. Then a tray slot was opened and he put his hands through it and his handcuffs were removed. All this he suffered without protest. From the beginning the guards were struck by his quality of stillness, He was on some kind of meditation trip, they said, and later, after he made his impossible escape, his captors were almost respectful, It’s like spaceships, one of them argued, if you don’t see them you don’t believe in them, but me and my colleagues here, we saw what we saw.

  Most of the men under sentence of death were sent to the East Block or the “North Seg”—the original death row, where the gas chamber was located—but those who were classified Grade B Condemned—the gang members, the men who had been involved in stabbings while in prison, the ones other inmates wanted to see dead in a hurry—had to stay in the A/C, where there were almost a hundred solitary confinement cells, on three floors. The classification committee decided that Shalimar the clown was a Grade-B prisoner because of the potentially large numbers of enemies he might find in the prison population. There were about thirty-five men in the North Seg and over three hundred in the East Block and violence and rape were commonplace and anything could be a weapon, a pencil stub could put out a man’s eye. The men were let out for yard in groups of sixty or seventy and this was a dangerous time. If a fight broke out a guard might start shooting down into the yard and the risk of being hit by a bullet bouncing off the concrete walls was not small. The accommodation in the A/C was unpleasant even by the standards of death row but for a long time Shalimar the clown opted not to participate in yard. He remained in his cell, doing push-ups or strange, slow-motion, dancelike exercises for hour after hour or, for further hours at a time, simply sitting cross-legged on the floor with his eyes closed and his hands lying open on his knees, with the palms upturned.

  His room was ten feet long and four feet wide and contained a bed made of a plate of steel and a stainless-steel sink and toilet. Twice a month the prison issued him writing paper, toilet paper, a pencil and some soap. He was not allowed to have a cup. He was given a container of milk for breakfast each day and if he wanted coffee he had to hold this container out through the tray slot and the guard would pour hot coffee into it. When the guard’s aim was poor Shalimar the clown’s hands were scalded, but he never cried out. The A/C was filled with the noises of a hundred condemned human beings and their smells as well. The men shouted and raged and made obscene remarks but they were also full of philosophy and religion and there were some who sang, The days are coming when things will get better, First we must overcome the stormy weather, and some who spoke fast and rhythmically in a kind of jailhouse rap, I pace back and forth in a straight line, Thinking of nothing, trying to burn Time, The darkness cloaks the brightest of days, The chill in the bones is here to stay, and many who called out to God, Although I still sit in my cell, my new home, for hours and days upon end, I know in my heart that I’m never alone, ’cause Jesus is now my best friend. The life of Shalimar the clown had dwindled to this, but he never ranted, nor did he sing, nor did he speak fast and rhythmically, nor did he call upon God. He took what was given to him and waited, when William T. Tillerman abandoned him and walked away he heard all around the voices of death row’s most hated inmates telling him, man, took me four years to find an attorney to get my appeal lodged, that ain’t nothin’, motherfucker, took me five and a half, there were men who had waited nine years or ten, waited for justice they said, because many of them still protested their innocence, many of them had studied up and knew the statistics, the percentage of exonerations on death row was high, far, far higher than in the rest of the prison community, so God would help, if you trusted in God he would send down his love and save you, but in the meanwhile you just had to wait, you just had to hope your number didn’t come up when some election-happy governor wanted a condemned man to fry.

  On the wall of his prison cell a previous inmate had chalked a chemical equation: 2NaCn + H2SO4 = 2HCN + Na2SO4. This, Shalimar the clown realized, was the true sentence of his death. “You don’t need to worry about no ten years, pretty boy,” one of the guards taunted him. “Brutha, in yo’ case we hear ev’thing gonna be expedite.”

  This turned out not to be true. The months lengthened into years. Five years passed, more than five years, two thousand slow, stinking days. The fabric of the prison was crumbling and so were its inmates. A rainstorm brought down chunks of the perimeter wall, injuring guards and prisoners. The men on death row grew older, fell sick, got stabbed, got kicked to death, got shot. There were many ways to die here that were not covered by the equation on Shalimar
the clown’s cell wall. After the third year he chose to come out of his cell and allow himself to be strip-searched and go outside wearing only his underwear and participate in yard and let what had to be come to pass. On the first day there were clumps of men staring at him, challenging him. He did not try to stare anybody down. He leaned against a wall and looked up at the giant green chimney stack sticking out of the gas-chamber roof. After the gas chamber was used the poison gas, the hydrogen cyanide, HCN, would be released into the atmosphere through this pipe. He turned his eyes away.