Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

And so who was this boy, the son of the village headman, the new pratfalling clown prince of the performing troupe, the lover she was preparing to meet in the upper sheep meadow above the village at midnight? Was he her epic hero or her demon king, or both? Would they exalt each other or be destroyed by what they had resolved to do? Had she chosen foolishly or well? For certainly she had invited him to cross a powerful line. How handsome he was, she mused tenderly, how funny in his clowning, how pure in his singing, how graceful in the dance and gravity-free on the high rope, and best of all how wonderfully gentle of nature. This was no warrior demon! He was sweet Noman, who called himself Shalimar the clown partly in her honor, because they had both come into the world on the same night in the Shalimar garden almost fourteen years ago, and partly in her mother’s, because she had died there on that night of many disappearances when the world began to change. She loved him because his choice of name was his way of honoring her deceased mother as well as celebrating the unbreakable connection of their birth. She loved him because he would not-he could not!-hurt any living soul. How could he cause her harm when he would not harm a fly?

Her hair was ready and her body was oiled. Rahu the intensifier had worked upon Kaam the passion and her body pulsated with its need. She had become a woman two years ago-early as usual, she thought; ever since her premature birth she had done things ahead of time-and was strong enough for whatever was to come. Through the moonless dark the scent of peach and apple blossom made her eyelids heavy. She sat on her bed and rested her head on the windowsill and closed her eyes. Soon enough her mother came to her as she had known she would. Her mother had died giving her birth but came to her most nights in dreams, letting her in on womanly secrets and family history and giving her good advice and unconditional love. Boonyi did not tell her father this because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. The pandit had tried to be both father and mother to her all her life. In spite of his unworldly nature he treated her as an inestimable treasure, as the pearl of great price his beloved wife had left behind for him as a going-away present. He had learned the secrets of child rearing from the women of the village, and from the beginning insisted on doing everything himself, preparing her compound and wiping her ass and waking up to tend to her whenever she screamed until the neighbors begged him to get some sleep, warning him that he had better let them help out unless he wanted the poor girl to grow up without even one parent to lean on for support. The pandit relented, but only very occasionally. As she got older he taught her to read and write and sing. He jumped rope with her and let her experiment with kohl and lipstick and told her what to do when she began to bleed. So he had done his best, but a girl’s mother is her mother even if she existed without actually existing, in the noncorporeal form of a dream, even if her existence could only be proved by her effect on the one human being whose fate she still cared to influence.

The pandit’s deceased wife had been named Pamposh after the lotus flower, but, as she confided to her dozing daughter, she preferred the nickname Giri, meaning a walnut kernel, which Firdaus Begum, Abdullah Noman’s yellow-haired wife, Firdaus Butt or Bhat, once gave her as a mark of friendship. One summer day in the saffron fields of Pachigam Firdaus and Giri were gathering crocuses when a rainstorm came at them like a witch’s spell out of a clear blue sky and soaked them both to the bone. The sarpanch’s wife was a foul-mouthed woman and let the cackling rain know what she thought of it but Pamposh danced in the downpour and cried out gaily, “Don’t scold the sky for giving us the gift of water.”

That was too much for Firdaus. “Everyone thinks you have such a sweet nature, so open, so accepting, but you don’t fool me,” she told Pamposh or Giri while they sheltered dripping under a spreading chinar. “Sure, I can see how quickly and easily you smile, how you never have a harsh word for anyone, how you face every hardship with equanimity. Me, I wake up in the morning and I have to start fixing everything I see, I need to shake people up, I want everything to be better, I want to clean up all the shit we have to deal with every day of this grueling life. You, by contrast, act like you take the world as it is and are happy to be in it and whatever happens is just fine by you. But guess what? I’m onto you. I’ve worked out your little act of an angel in paradise. It’s brilliant, no question about that, but it’s just your shell, your hard walnut shell, and inside you’re a completely different girl and it’s my guess that you’re far from contented. You’re the most generous woman I know, if I mention once that I like this or that shawl you’ll make me take it, even if it came down to you from your great-grandmother in your trousseau and it’s an heirloom one hundred and fifty years old, but secretly, in spite of all that, you’re a miser of yourself.”

It was the kind of speech that either destroys a friendship forever or pushes it to a new level of intimacy, and it was typical of Firdaus to gamble everything on one throw of the dice. “I guess I saw through her too that day,” Pamposh Kaul told her daughter Boonyi as she dreamed, “and I caught sight of the incredibly loyal and loving woman under her act of a hardass bitch. Also, she was the only woman in the village who might just be able to understand what I wanted to say.” So Pamposh confided her deepest secrets to Firdaus, amazing her. Until that moment the headman’s wife, like everyone else, had thought of Pamposh as the perfect wife for the pandit, because she had her feet planted firmly on the ground while his head was always getting a soaking in the middle of some metaphysical cloud. Now Firdaus discovered that Pamposh possessed a secret nature far more fantastic than her husband’s, that her dreams were far more radical and dangerous than anything Firdaus had ever been able to come up with in spite of all her world-shaking ambitions.

In the matter of lovemaking Kashmiri women had never been shrinking violets, but what Pamposh confided to Firdaus made her ears burn. The sarpanch’s wife understood that hidden away inside her friend was a personality so intensely sexual that it was a wonder the pandit was still able to get up out of bed and walk around. Pamposh’s passion for the wilder reaches of sexual behavior introduced Firdaus to a number of new concepts that simultaneously horrified and aroused her, although she feared that if she attempted to introduce them into her own bedroom Abdullah, for whom sex was a simple relief of physical urges and not to be unduly prolonged, would throw her out into the street like a common whore. Although Firdaus was the older of the two women by a few years she found herself in the unaccustomed position of awestruck student, inquiring with stammering fascination into how and why such and such a practice achieved the desired results. “It’s simple,” Pamposh replied. “If you trust each other you can do anything and so can he and believe me it feels pretty good.” What was even more remarkable about Pamposh’s revelations was the sense that she was not following her husband’s desires but leading them. When she moved on from sex itself to sexual politics and began to explain her broader ideas, her utopian vision of the emancipation of women, and to speak of her torment at having to live in a society that was at least a hundred years behind the times she had in mind, Firdaus held up her hand. “It’s bad enough that you have filled my head with stuff that will give me nightmares for weeks,” she said. “Don’t upset me with any more of your notions today. The present is already too much for me. I can’t cope with the future as well.”