Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

A man was executed at San Quentin that year. His name was Floyd Grammar and he was a diagnosed schizophrenic who talked to his food and believed that the beans on his plate talked back to him. He was on death row for the double murder of a business executive and his secretary in Corte Madera; after shooting them dead he had gone home and taken off all his clothes except for his socks and then stood out in the street until the police came. Nobody ever knew why he did it. He didn’t know himself. Martians might have been involved. On the night before his lethal injection he believed that he had been granted an amnesty and so refused to fill out the last-meal request form. The guards gave him cookies and sandwiches and took him away. One hour later Shalimar the clown stood naked at his cell door while the guard named Wallace searched him before letting him go out to the yard. Wallace was in a good mood, a comical mood. Interest in the execution had been high. A media center had been set up on the prison grounds and one hundred accredited persons had been given passes. “We on national TV, man,” Wallace said, holding Shalimar the clown’s testicles in his gloved hand. “But we just rehearsin’. The main attraction is when we do you. Today we just terminated some dummy. Call it a dummy run.” Something broke inside Shalimar the clown at that moment, and naked as he was with his balls in the other man’s hand he brought up his knee as fast as he could and hammered downward with both hands joined together and he pounded at Wallace for a spell until two other guards shot at him with wooden bullets and knocked him out. The guards gathered round him and kicked his unconscious body for several minutes, breaking his ribs all over again and damaging his back and injuring his groin so severely that he was unable to walk for a week and smashing his nose in two places and that was the end of his pretty-boy looks.

When he made it out to the yard again the Blood King beckoned him over. “You okay?” he asked. Shalimar the clown was limping slightly and his right shoulder hung lower than his left. “Yes,” he replied. The Blood King offered him a cigarette. “You got some devil in you, terroris’,” he said. “You need somethin’, you ask me.”

A sixth year went by.

Once the trial of Shalimar the clown had ended, Kashmira Ophuls became herself again. She telephoned her friends and apologized to them for her behavior, she threw a party on Mulholland Drive to prove she wasn’t crazy anymore, she called up her old film crew and said, “Let’s go to work.” In the course of the next six years she completed Camino Real, took it to the major festivals, found a good home for it on television, and followed it with Art and Adventure, a dramatized re-creation of her grandparents’ lost, prewar Strasbourg and its eventual destruction. At home, she revised the security agreement with the Jerome company, scaling down the level of protection to more conventional antiburglary levels. She also fell in love. Yuvraj Singh had followed her to America as he had promised he would, showing up on her doorstep looking a little ludicrous, carrying a bunch of flowers in a papier-mâché vase, a portrait of her face carved out of walnut, a selection of embroidered shawls and a yellow-and-gold chain-stitch rug, You look like a walking flea market, she said into her video entry-phone, then buzzed him in, and in her new, post-trial mood of euphoria lowered her defenses and allowed herself to be happy and eased off on her weapons work and ring time and martial arts.

The relationship had its difficulties. She returned to Kashmir, to his enchanted garden, to be with him when she could, but he mostly needed to be there in the winter because the work of the craftsmen and craftswomen was winter work, the slow embroidery, the carving, and in that Himalayan winter the cold gnawed at her face and made her miss the Californian warmth about which she had always complained. Also there was the political situation; which did not improve, which deteriorated. War was often close, and he advised her to stay away. He was finding a growing market for his goods in the United States but still needed to be away for extended periods of time, and the fact that his absences seemed fine by her, that she matter-of-factly got on with her work and was happy to see him whenever he showed up, this was upsetting to him, he wanted her to mind his absences more, he wanted her to be more afraid for him, and especially to pine, because when they were apart he couldn’t sleep, he said, the loneliness was overpowering, he thought about her every minute of every day, it was driving him crazy, no woman had ever made him feel this way. “That’s because in this relationship I’m the guy,” she told him sweetly, “and you, my dear, are the girl.” This remark did not improve matters. However, in spite of the problems of an intercontinental love affair, and in spite of the fact that she seemed to dodge the subject of marriage whenever he tried to raise it, in spite of her gently pushing aside the box with the ring inside that he put on the table when he took her out for dinner on her thirtieth birthday, they were for the most part content with each other, so that when the letter from Shalimar the clown arrived it seemed anachronistic, like a punch thrown long after the final bell.

Everything I am your mother makes me, the letter began. Every blow I suffer your father deals. There followed more along these lines, and then it ended with the sentence that Shalimar the clown had carried within him all his life. Your father deserves to die, and your mother is a whore. She showed the letter to Yuvraj. “Too bad he hasn’t improved his English in San Quentin,” he said, trying to dismiss the ugly words, to rob them of their power. “He puts the past into the present tense.”

Night in the A/C was a little quieter than the day. There was a certain amount of screaming but after the one a.m. inspection it quieted down. Three in the morning was almost peaceful. Shalimar the clown lay on his steel cot and tried to conjure up the sound of the running of the Muskadoon, tried to taste the gushtaba and roghan josh and firni of Pandit Pyarelal Kaul, tried to remember his father. I wish I was still held in the palm of your hand. Abdullah had promised he would return from the grave in the form of a winged creature, but Shalimar the clown never looked to see if a tone-deaf hoopoe was hopping about somewhere, because it was his human lion of a father that he had loved and not some lousy orange bird. He summoned up the memory of his father finding birds under his skin, but Abdullah’s face kept changing, becoming the contorted face of another bird-finder. Maximilian Ophuls. Shalimar the clown looked away. His brothers came into the cell to say hello. They were out of focus, like amateur photographs, and they soon disappeared again. Abdullah went too. The Muskadoon died away and the taste of the dishes of the wazwaan turned back into the usual bitter blood-flecked shit taste he’d grown used to over the years. Then there was a loud hissing noise and the cell door sprang open. He moved quickly onto his feet and crouched slightly, ready for whatever was coming. Nobody entered but there was a noise of running feet. Men in prison fatigues were running in the corridors. It’s a jailbreak, he realized. There was no gunfire yet but it would start soon. He stood staring at the open cell door, transfixed by the empty space. Then the bulk of the Blood King filled the doorway. “You fixin’ to reside on in this ’stablishment?” the Blood King asked. “Because in case you in’rested, we jus’ arranged a early checkout time.” Shalimar the clown did not ask how the doors had been sprung. The prison was crumbling and maybe some of the guards were for sale. It did not interest him. He ran.