Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

It was the morning after the great event in the high mountain meadow of Khelmarg. Boonyi, intoxicated by love for her lover, lounged with open sensuality on her rock, her arching body a provocation to anyone who cared to notice it. Her father, lost in melancholy, noticed that she was looking even more like her mother than usual, but failed, with the stupidity of fathers, to understand that this was because desire and the fulfillment of desire were running their hands over her body, welcoming it into womanhood. Shalimar the clown, however, was doubly agitated by her display; at once aroused and alarmed. He began to make small jerking downward movements of his fingers, as if to say calm down, don’t make it so obvious. But the invisible strings connecting his fingertips to her body weren’t working properly. The more insistently he pushed his fingers downward the higher she arched her back. The more urgently his hands pleaded for passivity the more languorously she rolled about. Later that day, when they were alone in the practice glade, both of them balancing high above the ground on the precarious illusion of a single tightrope, he said, “Why didn’t you stop when I asked you?” At which she grinned and said, “You weren’t asking me to stop. I could feel you fondling me here, pressing and squeezing and all, and pushing down on me here, hard hard, and it was driving me crazy, as you knew perfectly well it would.”

Shalimar the clown began to see that the loss of her virginity had unleashed something reckless in Boonyi, a wild defiant uncaringness, a sudden exhibitionism which was tumbling toward folly-for her flaunting of their consummated love could bring both their lives crashing down and smash them to bits. There was irony in this, because Boonyi’s daring was the single quality he most admired. He had fallen in love with her in large part because she was so seldom afraid, because she reached out for what she wanted and grabbed at it and didn’t see why it should elude her grasp. Now this same quality, intensified by their encounter, was endangering them both. Shalimar the clown’s signature trick on the high wire was to lean out sideways, increasing the angle until it seemed he must fall, and then, with much clownish playacting of terror and clumsiness, to right himself with gravity-defying strength and skill. Boonyi had tried to learn the trick but gave up, giggling, after many windmilling failures. “It’s impossible,” she confessed. “The impossible is what people pay to see,” Shalimar the clown on the high wire quoted his father, and bowed as if receiving applause. “Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show,” Abdullah Noman liked to tell his troupe. “Swallow a sword, tie yourself in a knot, defy gravity. Do what the audience knows it could never do no matter how hard it tries. After that you’ll have them eating out of your hand.”

There were times, Shalimar the clown understood with growing concern, when the laws of theater might not precisely apply to real life. Right now in real life Boonyi was the one leaning out from the high wire, brazenly flaunting her new status as lover and beloved, defying all convention and orthodoxy, and in real life these were forces that exerted at least as powerful a downward pull as gravity. “Fly,” she told him, laughing into his worried face. “Wasn’t that your dream, Mister Impossible? To do without the rope and walk on air.” She took him deeper into the wood and made love to him again and then for a while he didn’t care what followed. “Face it,” she whispered. “Married or not married, you’ve passed through the stone door.” The poets wrote that a good wife was like a shady boonyi tree, a beautiful chinar -kenchen renye chai shihiji boonyi- but in the common parlance the imagery was different. The word for the entrance to a house was braand; stone was kany. For comical reasons the two words were sometimes used, joined together, to refer to one’s beloved bride: braand-kany, “the gate of stone.” Let’s just hope, Shalimar the clown thought but did not say, that the stones don’t come smashing down on our heads.

Shalimar the clown was not the only local male to have Boonyi Kaul on the brain. Colonel Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha of the Indian army had had his eye on her for some time. Colonel Kachhwaha was just thirty-one years old but liked to call himself a Rajput of the old school, a spiritual descendant-and, he was certain, a distant blood relation-of the warrior princes, the old-time Suryavans and Kachhwaha rajas and ranas who had given both the Mughals and the British plenty to think about in the glory days of the kingdoms of Mewar and Marwar, when Rajputana was dominated by the two mighty fortresses of Chittorgarh and Mehrangarh, and fearsome one-armed legends rode into battle bisecting their enemies with cutlasses, crushing skulls with maces, or hacking through armor with the chaunch, a long-nosed axe with a cruel storklike beak. At any rate, England-returned Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha had a splendid Rajput moustache, a swaggering Rajput bearing, a barking British-style military voice, and now he was also commanding officer of the army camp a few miles to the northeast of Pachigam, the camp everyone locally called Elasticnagar because of its well-established tendency to stretch. The colonel wholeheartedly disapproved of this irreverent title, which in his ramrod opinion was far from commensurate with the dignity of the armed forces, and after arriving in post one year back had tried to insist that the camp’s official name be used by all persons at all times, but had given up when he realized that most of the soldiers under his command had forgotten it long ago.

The colonel had a preferred nickname for himself, too. “Hammer,” an English play on Hammir. A good, soldierly name. He practiced it sometimes when he was alone. “Hammer Kachhwaha.” “Hammer by name, hammer by nature.” “Colonel Hammer Kachhwaha at your service, sir.” “Oh, please, dear fellow, just call me Hammer.” But this attempted self-naming failed just as the battle against Elasticnagar had, because once people heard his surname they inevitably wanted to shorten it to Kachhwa Karnail, which is to say “Colonel Turtle” or “Tortoise.” So Tortoise Colonel he became, and was forced to look for his metaphors of self-description closer to the ground. “Slow and steady wins the race, eh, what?” he practiced; and “Tortoise by name, damned hard-shelled by nature.” But somehow he could never bring himself to say, “My dear chap, just call me Turtle,” or, “I mostly go by Tortoise, don’t you know-but it’s just plain Torto to you.” His testudinarious fate further soured a mood which had already been ruined by his father on his thirtieth birthday, when the newly promoted colonel was on home leave in Jodhpur before taking up his posting in Kashmir. His father was in fact the Rajput of the old school that his son aspired to be, and his birthday gift to Hammirdev was a set of two dozen golden bangles. Ladies’ bangles? Hammir Kachhwaha was confused. “Why, sir?” he asked, and the older man snorted, jingling the bangles on a finger. “If a Rajput warrior is still alive on his thirtieth birthday,” grunted Nagabhat Suryavans Kachhwaha in tones of disgust, “we give him women’s bangles to express our disappointment and surprise. Wear them until you prove they aren’t deserved.” “By dying, you mean,” his son sought clarification. “To win favor in your eyes I have to get myself killed.” His father shrugged. “Obviously,” he said, neglecting to discuss why there were no bangles on his own arms, and spat copious betel juice into a handy spittoon.

So Colonel Kachhwaha of Elasticnagar was well known not to be a happy man. The men of his command feared his martinet tongue, and the locals, too, had learned that he was not lightly to be crossed. As Elasticnagar grew-as soldiers flooded north into the valley and brought with them all the cumbersome matériel of war, guns and ammunition, artillery both heavy and light, and trucks so numberless that they acquired the local name of “locusts”-so its need for land increased, and Colonel Kachhwaha requisitioned what he needed without explanation or apology. When the owners of the seized fields protested at the low level of compensation they received, he answered furiously, his face turning shockingly red, “We’ve come to protect you, you ingrates. We’re here to save your land-so for God’s sake don’t give me some sob story when we have to bally well take it over.” The logic of his argument was powerful, but it didn’t always go down well. This was not finally important. Outraged by his continued failure to die in battle, the colonel was unquiet of spirit, and as livid as a rash. Then he saw Boonyi Kaul and things changed-or might have changed, had she not turned him down, flatly, and with scorn.