Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

At the entrance to the Shalimar garden, beside the sumptuous lake bobbing with boats that resembled an eager audience waiting impatiently for the show to begin, beneath the whispering chinars and the gossiping poplar trees and in the silent eternal presence of the uncaring mountains, who were preoccupied by the gigantic effort of very slowly pushing themselves higher and higher into the virginal sky, the villagers of Pachigam herded together the animals they had brought for slaughtering, the chickens, goats and lambs whose blood would soon be flowing as freely as the garden’s celebrated cascades, and unloaded their bullock carts and shouldered their loads of cooking utensils and theatrical props, their effigies and fireworks, while, as if for their entertainment, a tiny demagogue standing on an empty oil barrel made a startling claim, which he emphasized by beating a brightly painted stick vigorously against an enormous drum. “There is a tree in paradise,” this little fellow cried, “that gives shelter and sustenance to all those in need. It has long been my belief that here-right here, in our unparalleled paradise on earth!-which, so as not to sound too boastful to the ears of outsiders, we choose to call Kashmir!-there exists a cousin of that celestial tooba tree. According to legend the location of the earthly tooba was revealed by holy pirs to the Emperor Jehangir and he built the Shalimar Bagh around it. To this day nobody knows which tree it is. Tonight, however, through the use of my personal magic, the truth will be revealed.” He was a dark-skinned, glitter-eyed individual with a dancing moustache that seemed to lead a gymnastic life of its own above his mouthful of smiling white teeth, but even with the help of the oil barrel and the absurd cockaded turban on his head he didn’t rise off the ground much higher than a full-grown man, and it occurred to Abdullah Noman that this was a man whose life’s work was a form of revenge for the personal tragedy of his size: he had never fully appeared in the world and therefore wished to make parts of it dematerialize instead.

Firdaus saw more deeply. “He’s ridiculous when he’s banging his drum and yelling like that,” she murmured to her husband. “But look at him in his brief moments of repose. Don’t you think he suddenly looks like a man confident of his authority, calm, unafraid? If he’d just shut up he might convince us he isn’t a cheap fraud.”

“I am the Seventh Sarkar,” shouted the little man, banging his drum. “Ladies and gents!-You see before you the Seventh-Generation Perpetrator Extraordinaire of Illusion, Delusion and Confusion!-In sum, of Sorcery and Jadoo of every type!-And the Unique Exponent and Grand Master of the Most Ancient Form of Magic, known as Indrajal.” Whereupon he banged his drum so hard that he tottered on his oil barrel and people began, unfortunately, to laugh. “Laugh as hard as you like,” stormed the Seventh Sarkar, “but tonight, at the height of the evening’s celebrations, after the banquet, the play, the dancing and the fireworks, I will make the Shalimar Bagh disappear completely for a period of three minutes minimum, and at that time, when the tree of paradise will be revealed, for only a heaven-tree is proof against my wiles, then!-ha!-we will see who is laughing then.” With that he hopped off his oil barrel and, banging his drum with all his might, pushed his way through the mirthful Pachigami crowd.

Firdaus stopped him. “We mean no harm,” she said. “We’re entertainers too and if you pull off this trick, believe me, we’ll be the ones applauding first, loudest and for the longest time.” The Seventh Sarkar was greatly mollified upon hearing these words, but pretended not to be. “You think I haven’t done things already?” he snorted. “Please! Peruse. Regard.” From inside his shirt he pulled out a bundle of yellowing newspaper reports. The villagers crowded around. “SEVENTH SARKAR MAKES RUNNING TRAIN VANISH,” he read, proudly, and, “POOF! BOMBAY’S FLORA FOUNTAIN MAGICKED AWAY.” Then came his greatest credential. “TAJ MAHAL DISAPPEARS UNDER MAGIC SPELL.”

These news reports changed the mood around him. Though he could barely be seen at the heart of the gathering crowd, he had grown greatly in stature. “What is it you do, then?” Abdullah Noman asked, somewhat gracelessly, for his disbelieving laugh had been the loudest of all. “I mean to say, what’s the basis of your act? Some sort of mass hypnotism?” The Seventh Sarkar shook his head gaily. “No, no. Hypnotism totally not involved. I am simply able to keep things away from your eyes. Nothing supernatural or occultist, friends! It is all Science, the Science of the Perfect Illusion and of Mind Control.” Many voices now clamored for further details, but the Seventh Sarkar banged on his drum to silence them. “ Bas! Enough! Shall I reveal my secrets in the public street even before I amaze you all? I say only this: that I have the willpower to create a Psychic Balance with the world around me, and this makes possible my Deeds. What is Indrajal? It is a theatrical representation of the wishful dream of living happily-for when you live happily, nothing seems impossible. But be still now my voice and babble no more! Already I have said too much. Perform your play, bhand-folk. Then watch a true master of the art of theater go to work.” Bang! Bang! And off he went, up into the terraced lawns. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul said to his wife, “You wait; by the end of the evening I will unlock the secret of this fancy vanishing trick.” It was a night of dark absentings. Giri Kaul herself would be among those spirited away.

From the moment he entered the garden and found himself wading through high golden drifts of leaves Abdullah Noman began to suffer from misgivings about the event. It was an exceptionally cold October night. Snow had already begun to fall. “By the time the guests arrive in their finery we’ll be in the middle of a blizzard and the air will ice people’s lungs. Will there be enough braziers to keep the guests warm while they eat? And after that? Because a cold audience isn’t easy to warm up. This is not the weather for a garden party. Not even Ram Leela and Budshah can overcome an obstacle like this snow.”

Then the magic of the garden began to take hold. Paradise too was a garden-Gulistan, Jannat, Eden-and here before him was its mirror on earth. He had always loved the Mughal gardens of Kashmir, Nishat, Chashma Shahi, and above all Shalimar, and to perform there had been his lifelong dream. The present maharaja was no Mughal emperor, but Abdullah’s imagination could easily change that, and as he stood at the center of the central terrace and directed his people to their posts, as the theater troupe went off to the highest terrace to build the stage for the performance of Budshah, while the chefs’ brigade headed for the kitchen tents and began the interminable work of chopping, slicing, frying and boiling, the sarpanch closed his eyes and conjured up the long-dead creator of this wonderland of swaying trees, liquid terraces and water music, the horticulturalist monarch for whom the earth was the beloved and such gardens were his verdant love-songs to it. Abdullah drifted toward a trancelike state in which he felt himself being transformed into that dead king, Jehangir the Encompasser of the Earth, and something almost feminine came into his body, an imperial lassitude, the languorous sensuality of power. Where was his palanquin, he dreamily wondered. He should be carried up into the garden in a jeweled palanquin borne on the shoulders of wiry rope-sandaled men; why then was he on foot? “Wine,” he murmured under his breath. “Bring sweet wine and let the music start.”

There were times when Abdullah’s powers of autosuggestion frightened his fellow actors. When he unleashed them he could, or so it seemed, resurrect the dead to inhabit his living flesh, an occultist feat far more impressive, but also more alarming, than mere performance. Now, as on all such occasions, the players of Pachigam brought his wife Firdaus to his side, to talk him back from the past. “The times are growing so dark,” he told her distantly, “that we must try as best we can to cling to the memory of brightness.” It was the emperor speaking, the emperor on his last journey hundreds of years ago, dying on the road to Kashmir without reaching the longed-for haven of his earthly paradise, his hymnlike garden of terraces and birds. Firdaus saw that the time for gentle measures was past and, what was more, she had news of her own to impart. She grabbed her husband roughly and shook him. Soft explosions of snow flew off his chugha coat and his beard. “Have you been smoking something?” she shouted, deliberately making her words as harsh as possible. “This garden has a big effect on small men. They start believing they are giants.” The insult penetrated Abdullah’s reverie and he began to return mournfully to the waking banality of himself. He was not the emperor. He was the help. Firdaus, who knew everything about him before he knew it himself, read his mind and laughed in his face. This increased his groggy dolor and heightened the color in his cheeks. “If you want to prepare to play a king,” she said more gently, “think about Zain-ul-abidin in the first play. Think about being Lord Ram in the second half of the program. But right now there are more important lives to think about. Giri’s baby is coming early, probably just because you said it would.”