Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

After Nazarébaddoor immured herself in her cottage she stopped eating and drinking. Firdaus, heavily pregnant with the unborn Noman, went to her door with food and water and pleaded to be let in. She didn’t dare to push the screen aside and force an entrance because that would be to draw bad luck down upon her own head. The two friends sat down on either side of the flimsy wooden screen, placed their lips against it and began the last conversation of their lives. “Live,” Firdaus implored, “or you’ll be leaving me to handle this shitty new world full of cookpots and anger all by myself.” She heard Nazarébaddoor kissing the other side of the screen as if she were taking leave of a lover. “The age of prophecy is at an end,” Nazarébaddoor whispered, “because what’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words to foretell it.”

Firdaus lost her temper. “Okay, die if you want to,” she said fiercely, placing defensive hands upon her swollen womb, “but to curse us all just because you’ve decided to go is just plain bad form.”

For a while it didn’t seem as if Nazarébaddoor’s curse was going to come true. Pachigam was a blessed village, and its two great families, the Nomans and Kauls, had inherited much of the natural bounty of the region. Pandit Pyarelal had the apple orchard and Abdullah Noman had the peach trees. Abdullah had the honeybees and the mountain ponies and the pandit owned the saffron field, as well as the larger flocks of sheep and goats. That summer the weather was kind and the fruit hung heavy on the trees, the honey dripped sweetly from the combs, the saffron crop was rich, the meat animals fattened nicely and the breeding mares gave birth to their valuable young. There were many requests for the actors to perform the traditional plays. The dramatization of the reign of Zain-ul-abidin, the fifteenth-century monarch known simply as Budshah, “the great king,” was especially in demand. The only dark cloud on the horizon was that relations with the village of Shirmal continued to be poor. Abdullah Noman was confident that his people would continue to defend themselves successfully against any further attacks but he was saddened by the estrangement, even though it had been his own idea to try and break the Shirmalis’ local monopoly of the banquet market. He felt no guilt about his initiative. The world moved on and all enterprises had to adapt to survive. However, he felt bad about the damage to his friendship with the Shirmalis’ waza or head chef, Bombur Yambarzal, and Firdaus of the unsparing tongue made him feel worse. “To put business before friendship is to displease God,” she warned him. “We had enough to be going on with but in Shirmal they have it tougher; if they don’t get hired to feed other people they will starve themselves.”

Firdaus’s pregnancy was weighing her down in those days and she spent most of her time in the company of the pandit’s wife Pamposh a.k.a. Giri the walnut kernel, whose own pregnancy was a couple of months less advanced, and because all dreams are permitted to pregnant women they fantasized about the future lifelong friendship of their unborn children. The sweetness of these fantasies served only to intensify the force with which Firdaus attacked her husband for his behavior toward the master cook of Shirmal. Pamposh, however, gently defended Abdullah. While the two women sat on the back verandah of Firdaus’s home and looked out across the saffron fields toward Shirmal, Pamposh Kaul pointed out gently that the chef was a hard man to like. “Abdullah was the only one of us who even kept up a friendship with him,” she said. “To try and love somebody who loves nobody but himself-well, it just goes to show what a generous man your husband is. Now that things have been broken off between them, that big fat waza doesn’t have a single pal in the world.”

As his name suggested, Bombur Yambarzal was part black bumblebee, part narcissus; he could sting when he chose to do so, and he was extremely vain. He ruled the roost in Shirmal because of his culinary mastery, but was widely disliked by his own kitchen brigade on account of his strutting manner of a parade-ground martinet and his repeated demands that all their pots be polished until he could see his reflection in them. As long as Shirmal village was the undisputed champion maker of the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, and Shirmalis provided gluttonous quantities of food at all important weddings and celebrations, Bombur Yambarzal ruled the roost, and everyone put up with his bee stings and narcissism. However, his influence waned as the village’s income declined, and, as will be seen, the new mullah Bulbul Fakh’s power began to grow. For this and much else Yambarzal blamed Abdullah Noman.

Out of admiration for his great skills as a chef and respect for his village headman status, Abdullah had long made an effort to remain on cordial terms with Bombur Yambarzal. At Abdullah’s suggestion the two men had gone fishing for brook trout together from time to time, and spent occasional evenings drinking dark rum, and taken several mountain walks. Abdullah had begun to see glimpses of another, better Bombur beneath the bloated, preening surface that Yambarzal unfortunately presented to the world: a lonely man for whom cookery was his single passion in life, who approached it with an almost religious fervor and who demanded of others the same level of dedication he himself brought to his work, and who was therefore constantly and vociferously disappointed by the ease with which his fellow human beings were drawn away from the ecstatic devotions of the gastronomic arts by such petty distractions as family life, weariness and love. “If you weren’t so hard on yourself,” Abdullah had once told Bombur, “maybe you’d ease off on everyone else and run a happier outfit.” Bombur bristled. “I’m not in the happiness game,” he said sharply. “I’m in the banquet business.” It was a statement that revealed the monomaniacal strain in the waza’s personality, a characteristic he shared with the fanatical Mullah Bulbul Fakh, whose dreams became the two villages’ nightmares.

After the pot war, contact between the two village headmen came to an acrimonious end, until messengers from the maharaja himself arrived in both Pachigam and Shirmal, demanding that to augment the staff of the palace kitchens they set aside their quarrels and pool their resources to provide food (and theatrical entertainment) at a grand Dassehra festival banquet in the Shalimar garden, a feast conceived on a scale not seen in the valley since the time of the Mughal emperor Jehangir. Firdaus Noman, who had picked up a little of Nazarébaddoor’s prophetic ability the way one picks up an itch from a flea-ridden dog, at once concluded that bad trouble was on the way and the maharaja knew it. “He’s partying like there’s no tomorrow,” she told Abdullah. “Let’s hope that just goes for him, not us.”

On the morning of Dassehra, at the end of the nine Navratri nights of singing paeans to Durga, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul awoke with a big smile on his face. “What’s made you so happy?” Pamposh asked him, sulking. Her pregnancy was making her feel very ill that morning, so that her disposition was less than cheerful, especially as her husband’s incessant hymn-singing, with which he persevered doughtily, not only when officiating at the village’s small temple but also at home, had interfered severely with her sleep. “Doesn’t matter how many love songs you sing to the goddess,” Pamposh added sourly, “the only woman in your life is this big balloon.” But the pandit’s blithe spirits could not be deflated, even by his wife’s bad mood. “Just consider for a moment!” cried Pyarelal. “Today our Muslim village, in the service of our Hindu maharaja, will cook and act in a Mughal-that is to say Muslim-garden, to celebrate the anniversary of the day on which Ram marched against Ravan to rescue Sita. What is more, two plays are to be performed: our traditional Ram Leela, and also Budshah, the tale of a Muslim sultan. Who tonight are the Hindus? Who are the Muslims? Here in Kashmir, our stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes. We will joyfully celebrate the reign of the good king Zain-ul-abidin, and as for our Muslim brothers and sisters, no problem! They all like to see Sita rescued from the demon-king, and besides, there will be fireworks.” Giant effigies of Ravan, his son Meghnath and his brother Kumbhakaran would be erected within the walls of the Shalimar Bagh, and Abdullah Noman as Lord Ram-a Muslim actor playing the part of a Hindu god-would shoot an arrow at Ravan, after which the effigies would be burned at the heart of a huge fireworks display. “Okay, okay,” said Pamposh, doubtfully, “but I’ll be the bloated girl in the corner, throwing up.”