Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

As panic gripped the people in the Shalimar garden, Abdullah Noman ran to be with his wife and sons in the little makeshift screened-off maternity area Firdaus had had constructed in a corner of the Bagh. He found her sitting grim-faced on the ground, nursing the baby Noman, and beside her were Pandit Pyarelal Kaul and Khwaja Abdul Hakim, standing with bowed heads by the body of Pamposh. Pyarelal was singing a hymn softly. Abdullah could not speak for a moment. He was full of feelings of self-reproach at his own ignorance. He had known nothing, or next to nothing, of the trouble rushing down upon them. He was the sarpanch and should have known; how could he protect his people if he knew nothing of the dangers threatening them? He did not deserve his office. He was no better than Yambarzal. Petty rivalries and prideful self-absorption had blinded them both, and they had brought their people toward this terrifying conflict instead of keeping them safe and far away. Tears fell from his eyes. He knew they were tears of shame.

“Why are you singing that song of praise?” Firdaus’s voice dragged him back into the world. She was glaring savagely at Pyarelal. “What do you have to thank Durga for? You worshipped her for nine days and on the tenth she took your wife.” The pandit received the admonition without rancor. “When you pray for what you most want in the world,” he said, “its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love, and that is surely a thing for which to thank whoever or whatever you like, the goddess, or fate, or just my lucky stars.” Firdaus turned away from him. “Maybe we are too different, after all,” she grumbled under her breath. Khwaja Abdul Hakim took his leave. “I do not think I will stay in Kashmir,” he said. “I do not want to watch the sadness destroying the beauty. I have it in mind to give my land to the university and go south. Into India; always India; never into Pakistan.” Firdaus’s back was toward the khwaja. “You’re lucky,” she muttered without turning to wish him good-bye. “You’re one of those who has a choice.”

Abdullah asked for and received his swaddled baby boy. “We need to go,” he told Firdaus and Pyarelal gently. “The rumors flying around here are making people crazy.” All day, he thought, there have been kings and princes in my head. Alexander, Zain-ul-abidin, Jehangir, Ram. But it’s our own prince’s indecision that has unleashed this holocaust, and nobody can say whether or not India, that newly kingless land, can save us, or even if being saved by India is going to be good for us in the end.

A drum boomed immensely in the night, louder and louder, commanding attention. So potent was the drumming that it froze people in their tracks, it silenced the rumors and got everyone’s attention. The little man, Sarkar the magician, was marching down the central avenue of the garden, hammering away at his mighty dhol. Finally, when all eyes were on him, he raised a megaphone to his lips and bellowed, “Fuck this. I came here to do something and I’m going to do it. The genius of my magic will triumph over the ugliness of the times. On the seventh beat of my drum, the Shalimar garden will disappear.” He banged the drum, one, two, three, four, five, six times. On the seventh boom, just as he had foretold, the whole Shalimar Bagh vanished from sight. Pitch blackness descended. People began to scream.

For the rest of his life the Seventh Sarkar would curse history for cheating him of the credit for the unprecedented feat of “hiding from view” an entire Mughal garden, but most people in the garden that night thought he’d pulled it off, because on the seventh beat of his drum the power station at Mohra was blown to bits by the Pakistani irregular forces and the whole city and region of Srinagar was plunged into complete darkness. In the night-cloaked Shalimar Bagh the earthly version of the tooba tree of heaven remained secret, unrevealed. Abdullah Noman experienced the bizarre sensation of living through a metaphor made real. The world he knew was disappearing; this blind, inky night was the incontestable sign of the times.

The remaining hours of that night passed in a frenzy of shouts and rushing feet. Somehow Abdullah managed to send his family away on a bullock cart, which Firdaus had to share with the dead body of her friend and, next to deceased Pamposh, Pyarelal Kaul cradling his baby daughter and unstoppably singing praisesongs to Durga. Then by a lucky chance Abdullah collided with Bombur Yambarzal again. Bombur in the darkness was a quivering wreck of a man, but Abdullah managed to get him on his feet. “We can’t leave our stuff here,” he persuaded Yambarzal, “or both our villages will be crippled for good.” Somehow the two of them rounded up a rump or quorum of villagers, half Shirmali, half from Pachigam, and this raggle-taggle remnant dismantled their special wuri ovens and hauled many dozens of pots full of feast-day food to the roadside. The portable theater had to be dismantled as well, and the materials for the plays packed in great wicker panniers and taken down the terraces to the lakeside. All night the villagers of Shirmal and Pachigam worked side by side, and when dawn crept over the hills at the end of that dark night and the garden reappeared, the waza and the sarpanch hugged each other and made promises of unbreakable fellowship and undying love. Above them, however, the shadow planets Rahu and Ketu existed without actually existing, pulling and pushing, intensifying and suppressing, inflaming and stifling, dancing out the moral struggle within human beings while remaining invisible in the brightening heavens. And when the actors and cooks departed from the Shalimar Bagh they left behind the giant effigies of the demon king, his brother and his son, all filled with unexploded fireworks. Ravan, Kumbhakaran and Meghnath glowered across the trembling valley, not caring whether they were Hindus or Muslims. The time of demons had begun.

Man is ruined by the misfortune of possessing a moral sense,” reflected Pandit Pyarelal Kaul by the banks of the loquacious Muskadoon. “Consider the superior luck of the animals. The wild beasts of Kashmir, to enumerate a few, include Ponz the Monkey, Potsolov the Fox, Shal the Jackal, Sur the Boar, Drin the Marmot, Nyan and Sharpu the Sheep, Kail the Ibex, Hiran the Antelope, Kostura the Musk Deer, Suh the Leopard, Haput the Black Bear, Bota-khar the Ass, Hangul the Twelve-Pointed Barasingha Stag, and Zomba the Yak. Some of these are dangerous, it’s true, and many are fearsome. Ponz is a danger to walnuts. Potsolov is cunning and a danger to chickens. Shal’s is a fearsome howl. Sur is a danger to crops. Suh is ferocious and a danger to stags. Haput is a danger to shepherds. The Ass, by contrast, is a coward and runs from danger; however you must remember in mitigation that he is an Ass, just as a jackal is a jackal and a leopard is a leopard and a boar has no option but to be boarish one hundred percent of the time. They neither know nor shape their own nature; rather, their nature knows and shapes them. There are no surprises in the animal kingdom. Only Man’s character is suspect and shifting. Only Man, knowing good, can do evil. Only Man wears masks. Only Man is a disappointment to himself. Only by ceasing to need the things of the world and relieving oneself of the needs of the body…”

And so on. Boonyi Kaul knew that when her father, a man with many friends because of his love of people and one too many chins because of his ever more voracious and perfectionist love of food, started mourning the failings of the human race and making ascetic recommendations for its improvement he was secretly missing his wife, who had never disappointed him, whose surprises had filled his heart, and for whom after fourteen years his body still ached. At such times Boonyi usually became extra demonstrative, trying to bury her father’s grief beneath her love. Today, however, she was distracted, and could not play the dutifully loving daughter. Today, she and her Noman, her beloved clown Shalimar, sat listening to her father on their usual boulders, neither touching nor glancing at each other, both of them struggling to control the confessional smiles that kept creeping out onto their lips.