Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Elasticnagar was unpopular, the colonel knew that, but unpopularity was illegal. The legal position was that the Indian military presence in Kashmir had the full support of the population, and to say otherwise was to break the law. To break the law was to be a criminal and criminals were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on them heavily with the full panoply of the law and with hobnailed boots and lathi sticks as well. The key to understanding this position was the word integral and its associated concepts. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honored and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honor and was not to be tolerated. Therefore Elasticnagar was to be honored and all other attitudes were dishonorable and consequently illegal. Kashmir was an integral part of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral. Not to accept this was to lack integrity and implicitly or explicitly to question the unquestionable integrity of those who did accept it. Not to accept this was latently or patently to favor disintegration. This was subversive. Subversion leading to disintegration was not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on it heavily whether it was of the overt or covert kind. The legally compulsory and enforceable popularity of Elasticnagar was thus a matter of integrity, pure and simple, even if the truth was that Elasticnagar was unpopular. When the truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that had to be given precedence. Not even the truth could be permitted to dishonor the nation. Therefore Elasticnagar was popular even though it was not popular. It was a simple enough matter to understand.

Colonel Kachhwaha saw himself as a man of the thinking kind. He was famous for possessing an exceptional memory and liked to demonstrate it. He could remember two hundred and seventeen random words in succession and also tell you if asked what the eighty-fourth or one hundred and fifty-ninth word had been, and there were other such tests that impressed the officers’ mess and gave him the air of a superior being. His knowledge of military history and the details of famous battles was encyclopedic. He prided himself on his storehouse of information and was pleased with the consequent, irrefutable thrust of his analyses. The problem of the accumulating detritus of quotidian memories had not yet begun to distress him, although it was tiresome to remember every day of one’s life, every conversation, every bad dream, every cigarette. There were times when he hoped for forgetfulness as a condemned man hopes for mercy. There were times when he wondered what the long-term effect of so much remembering might be, when he wondered if there might be moral consequences. But he was a soldier. Shaking off such thoughts, he got on with his day.

He thought of himself, too, as a man of deep feeling, and consequently the ingratitude of the valley weighed heavily upon him. Fourteen years ago, at the behest of the fleeing maharaja and the Lion of Kashmir, the army had driven back the kabaili marauders but had stopped short of driving them out of Kashmiri territory, leaving them in control of some of the high mountainous areas to the north, Gilgit, Hunza, Baltistan. The de facto partition that resulted from this decision would be easy to call a mistake if it were not illegal to do so. Why had the army stopped? It had stopped because it had decided to stop, it was a decision taken in response to the actual situation on the ground, and it followed that that was the proper decision, the only decision, the decision with integrity. All very well for armchair experts to query it now, but they hadn’t been there, on the ground, at the time. The decision was the correct decision because it was the decision that had been taken. Other decisions that might have been taken had not been taken and were therefore wrong decisions, decisions that should not have been taken, that it had been right not to take. The de facto line of partition existed and so had to be adhered to and the question of whether it should exist or not was not a question. There were Kashmiris on both sides who treated the line with contempt and walked across the mountains whenever they so chose. This contempt was an aspect of Kashmiri ingratitude because it did not recognize the difficulties faced by the soldiers at the line of partition, the hardships they endured in order to defend and maintain the line. There were men up there freezing their balls off and occasionally dying, dying of the cold, dying because they intercepted a Pak sniper’s bullet, dying before they were given golden bangles by their fathers, dying to defend an idea of freedom. If people were suffering for you, if they were dying for you, then you should respect their suffering and to ignore the line they were defending was disrespectful. Such behavior was not commensurate with the army’s honor to say nothing of national security and was therefore illegal.

It was possible that many Kashmiris were naturally subversive, that they all were, not just the Muslims but the meat-eating pandits as well, that it was a valley of subversives. In which case they were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down hard. He resisted this conclusion even though it was his own, even though there was something ineluctable about the process of thought that led to it, something almost beautiful. He was a man of deep feeling, a man who appreciated beauty and gentleness, who loved beauty, and who accordingly felt great love for beautiful Kashmir, or who wished to feel love, or who would feel love if he were not prevented from doing so at every turn, who would be a true and sincere lover if he were only loved in return.

He was lonely. In the midst of beauty he was mired in ugliness. If it were not subversive to say that Elasticnagar was a dump then he would have said that it was a dump. But it could not be a dump because it was Elasticnagar and so by definition and by law and so on and so forth. He went into a corner of his mind, a small subversive corner that didn’t exist because it shouldn’t, and he whispered into his cupped hands. Elasticnagar was a dump. It was fences and barbed wire and sandbags and latrines. It was Brasso and spit and canvas and metal and the smell of semen in the bunkhouses. It was a smudge on an illuminated manuscript. It was debris floating on a glassy lake. There were no women. There were no women. The men were going crazy. The men were masturbating like crazy and there were stories of crazy assaults on crazy local girls and when they were able to visit the crazy brothels of Srinagar the crazy wooden houses shook with their crazy exploding lust. There were many Elasticnagars now and they were getting bigger and bigger and some of them were up in the high mountains where there weren’t even goats to fuck so he shouldn’t be complaining, even in the little subversive corner in his head that didn’t exist because by definition and et cetera, he should be proud. He was proud. He was a man of integrity, honor and pride and where were the goddamn girls, why wouldn’t they come near him, he was a single male of wheatish complexion and good family who personally had no communalist-type Hindu-Muslim issues, he was a secularist through and through, and anyway it wasn’t as if he was talking about getting married, the question didn’t arise, but how about a cuddle for your commanding officer, how about a kiss or a goddamn caress?

It was like that bit in The Magnificent Seven where Horst Buchholz discovers that the villagers have been hiding their women from the gunmen they’ve hired to defend them. Except hereabouts the women weren’t hidden away. They just looked through you with their ice-blue eyes their golden eyes their emerald eyes their eyes of creatures from another world. They floated by you on the lakes wearing their scarlet head scarves their burgundy their cobalt head scarves concealing the dark or yellow flame of their hair. They were squatting down on the prows of their little boats like birds of prey and they ignored you as if you were plankton. They didn’t see you. You didn’t exist. How could they even think about kissing you cuddling you kissing you when you didn’t exist? You were living or so it seemed on a shadow planet. You were the creature from another world. You existed without actually existing. Your existence could only be perceived through your effects. The women could see Elasticnagar which was an effect and because they thought it was ugly even though it was illegal to think so they assumed that the invisible men who lived there must be ugly too.