Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Boonyi, whose first love and greatest gift was dancing, could walk the high rope too, but for her it was just a rope. For young Noman it was a magic space. “One day I’ll really take off,” he told her after their first kiss. “One day I won’t need the rope at all. I’ll just walk into empty air and hang there like a cosmonaut without a suit. I’ll stand on my hands, on my feet, on my head, and there won’t even be anything to stand on.” She was impressed by his air of total certainty and even though she knew his words were the craziest kind of foolishness she was greatly moved by them. “What makes you so sure?” she asked. “My father made me believe it,” he replied. “He raised me nestling in the palm of his hand and my feet never touched the ground.”

In the palm of his father’s hand it wasn’t soft or cushiony as a rich man’s hand might have been, but hard and used and knowing. It was a hand that knew what the world was and it did not shield you from the knowledge of the hardships in store. But it was a strong hand nevertheless and could protect you from those hardships. As long as Noman stayed in the valley of its skin nothing could touch him and there was nothing to fear. His father raised him in the palm of his hand for he was the most precious jewel Abdullah ever possessed, or so the sarpanch said when his older boys Hameed, Mahmood and Anees weren’t listening, because a man in his position, a leader, should never lay himself open to the charge of favoritism. Still Noman in the palm of Abdullah’s hand knew his father’s secret, and kept it. “You are my lucky charm,” Abdullah told him. “With you beside me I am invincible.” Noman felt invincible too, for if he was his father’s magic talisman then his father was also his. “My father’s love was the first phase,” he told her. “It carried me as far as the treetops. But now it’s your love I need. That’s what will let me fly.”

There was no moon. The white furnace of the galaxy burned across the sky. The birds were sleeping. Shalimar the clown climbed the wooded hill to Khelmarg and listened to the river flow. He wanted the world to remain frozen just as it was in this moment, when he was filled with hope and longing, when he was young and in love and nobody had disappointed him and nobody he loved had died. Regarding death, his mother believed in a snaky afterlife but his father’s eternity had wings. When Noman was a little boy of six his bad-tempered grandfather Farooq had ended his long, grumbling life in an uncharacteristically cheerful mood. “At least I won’t have all of you screwing things up all around me to worry about anymore,” he said. Farooq’s idea of love was to grab Noman’s young cheek and pinch and twist it as hard as he could.

“Babajan thinks I’m ugly,” Noman complained.

“Of course he doesn’t,” his father unconvincingly replied.

“If he didn’t think I was as ugly as a bhoot, ” said Noman conclusively, “he wouldn’t keep trying to rip my face off with his claws.”

In spite of Grandfather Farooq’s bad attitude to Noman’s physiognomy the boy was unnerved by the funeral rites. Grandfather Farooq was buried with bewildering speed, consigned to the earth six hours after his expiry, but he was mourned at devastating and tedious length. To comfort and invigorate Noman, Abdullah explained that after death the souls of their family members entered the local birds and flew around Pachigam singing the same songs they used to sing back when they were people. As birds they sang with the same level of musical talent they had possessed in their earlier human life, no more, no less. Noman didn’t believe him and said as much. His father replied seriously. “Just let me die and then look out for a hoopoe with a voice like a broken exhaust pipe. When you hear that hoopoe croaking and cracking that will be me singing my favorite I-told-you-so song.” Abdullah laughed and it was true that he sounded exactly like the split exhaust pipe of his old truck, and his singing voice was even worse than his laugh. It was also true that “I told you so” was Abdullah Noman’s favorite song, because he was cursed with the curse of knowing too much and the double curse of being unable to avoid pointing this out even though it made Firdaus Begum threaten to hit him on the head with a stone.

“You won’t die,” Noman told him. “You won’t die, ever, ever.”

When he was a boy his father could find birds all over him. Abdullah kissed Noman’s cheek, his stomach or his knee and at once the child could hear birdsong right there where his father’s puckered lips touched his skin. “I think there’s a bird in your armpit,” Abdullah would say and Noman would wriggle with delight, trying to stop him, not wanting him to stop, and Abdullah would wrestle his way in there and suddenly, hey presto, there were the piercing tweets coming out of Noman’s armpit too. “Maybe,” his father said as he moved menacingly toward his face, “that birdy wants to escape through your nose.”

Abdullah Sher Noman was indeed a lion, as the honorific sher which he had eventually taken as his middle name suggested. Ever since his young days people in Pachigam had said that there were two lions in Kashmir. One was Sheikh Abdullah, of course, Sher-e-Kashmir himself, the unquestioned leader of his people. Everyone agreed that Sheikh Abdullah was the valley’s real prince, not that Dogra maharaja living in the palace on the slopes above Srinagar that afterwards became the Oberoi Hotel. The other lion was Pachigam’s very own headman, Abdullah Noman, whom everybody admired and, in a loving and respectful way, also somewhat feared, not only because he was the boss but also because he possessed a stage presence so commanding in its heroism, so fiercely valiant for truth, that some of the more unsavory members of their audiences around the valley had been known to leap to their feet and confess to unsuspected crimes without even waiting for the climax and finale of the play.

Abdullah wasn’t tall but he was strong, with arms as thick as any blacksmith’s. He was wide of shoulder, profuse of hair, and the Indian soldiers in the camp treated him with as much respect as they could summon up. He was also a formidable actor-manager who led the traveling players wherever they went, and greatly beloved of women too, though Firdaus Begum was all the lioness he required. “He gave me his same, leonine middle name,” Shalimar the assassin wrote many years later, “but I do not deserve to bear it. My life was going to be one thing but death turned it into another. The bright sky vanished for me and a dark passage opened. Now I am made of darkness, but a lion is made of light.” He wrote this on a flimsy sheet of lined prison notepaper. Then he tore the paper to bits.

The official name of their village, Pachigam, lacked any apparent meaning; but some of its older inhabitants claimed that it was a latter-day corruption of Panchigam, which is to say “birdville.” In the vexed debate on whether or not birds were transfigured human souls this etymological rumor proved nothing or everything depending on your inclination. When Shalimar the clown found Boonyi Kaul waiting for him in the Khelmarg meadow, however, that debate was no longer uppermost in his mind. Another debate was raging there instead. Standing before him, oiled of skin and with wildflowers scenting the carefully braided hair that hung kerchief-free around her shoulders, was the girl he loved, waiting for him to make her a woman and in doing so make himself a man. Desire rose in him, but so did a counterforce he had not expected: restraint. The shadow dragons were fighting over him, Rahu the exaggerator and Ketu the blocker battling for mastery of his heart.

He looked into Boonyi’s eyes and saw the telltale dreaminess there, warning him that she had smoked charas to give her the courage to be deflowered. In the subtly suggestive movements of her lips, too, he could discern the cryptic seductiveness of her condition. “Boonyi, Boonyi,” he mourned, “you’ve burdened me with a responsibility I don’t know how to discharge. Let’s, you know, caress each other in five places and kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but let’s not get carried away.” In reply, Boonyi pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot. “Don’t treat me like a child,” she said in a throaty voice that proved she had been unsparing in her drug abuse. “You think I went to all this trouble just for a kiddie-style session of lick and suck?” When he heard the unexpected coarseness of her speech Shalimar the clown surmised that she must have been very afraid indeed of what she had agreed to do, which was why she had needed to derange herself so completely. “Okay, it’s not going to happen,” he said, and the conflict within him grew so great, the two halves of the dragon churned up his insides so completely, that he was physically sick. Boonyi laughed hysterically at the sight. “You think that’s going to put me off?” she gasped between the sobs of laughter, and pulled him down on top of her. “Mister, you’ll have to try a lot harder than that to get yourself out of this.”