Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Pyarelal slapped Gopinath heartily on the back; whereupon he, the city slicker, winced, might even be said to have recoiled. “Ha! Ha! dear chap,” Boonyi’s father explained. “We’re all of a jumble here in Pachigam. Ever since I got bitten by the cooking bug I’ve been slowly introducing pandit cooking into the wazwaan-a radical change, but one of great symbolic importance, I’m sure you will agree!-so that now we for example offer our clients the garlicless kabargah rack of ribs, and even there are dishes made with asafoetida and curds!-and in return for everyone’s willingness to go along with my innovations, I thought it was only fair to start using lashings of onions and garlic in some of my own food, just the way our Muslim brothers like it.” A faint shudder coursed through Gopinath’s etiolated frame. “I see,” he stated faintly, “that many barriers -ma’y ba’iers- have fallen down around here. Much, sir, for a man like myself -my’elf- to ponder.”

Boonyi had listened to this exchange with growing impatience and bewilderment. Now she burst out, “Pon’er, is it? Daddy, who is this to come here from the city and immediately start pon’ering over us?”

It transpired that Gopinath was the new schoolteacher. Pyarelal, fearing Boonyi’s reaction, had hidden from her his decision to give up the pandit’s traditional role of educator and concentrate on his cooking instead. As the years passed the kitchen had moved ever closer to the center of his life. In the kitchen where once Pamposh had reigned he felt in communion with her departed beauty, felt their souls blending in his bubbling sauces, their vanished joy expressing itself in vegetables and meat. This much Boonyi knew: cooking was his way of keeping Pamposh alive. When they ate his food they swallowed her spirit too. What Boonyi had not noticed, however, because children need their parents only to be their parents and accordingly pay less attention than they should to their elders’ dreams, was that cooking gradually became more than therapy for Pyarelal. The kitchen released an unsuspected artistry in him and in that village of actors who had taken up cooking as a sideline his growing mastery gave him a new, central part to play. More and more, when Pachigam people went off to a wedding to prepare the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, the pandit took a leadership role. His saffron-flavored pulao was a miracle, his gushtaba meatball mixture was pounded until it acquired the softness of a baby’s cheek. Wedding guests clamored for his dum aloo, his chicken with almonds, his fenugreek-scented cottage cheese and tomatoes, his lotus stems in gravy, his red chili korma, and the closing, delicious sweetness of the firni, and cardamom tea. Women came up to him and asked slyly for his wazwaan recipes, at which the innocent fellow, ever ready to help, began to spell them out until his fellow cooks shouted him down and shut him up. After that he devised a standard response to all requests for the secrets of his culinary sorcery. “Ghee, madams,” he would say with a grin. “Nothing else to it. Use much and much of real, asli, ghee.”

Boonyi was naturally well aware of her father’s growing importance in the preparation of the Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, but it had never occurred to her that this would lead to his making such a dramatic career move. Badly off balance, she lost her head completely. “If teaching isn’t that important to you,” she burst out at miserable Pyarelal, “then learning isn’t that important to me. If my father the great philosopher wants to turn into a tandoori cook, then maybe I’ll find something to turn into as well. Who wants to be your daughter? I’d rather be somebody’s wife.”

It was her wildness talking, the impulsive uncontrolled thing that Shalimar the clown had begun to fear. When she saw Pyarelal’s face fall and Gopinath’s ears prick up she at once regretted that she had hurt the man who had loved her most ever since the day of her birth, and in addition that she had said far too much in the presence of a stranger. What she didn’t know was that Pandit Gopinath Razdan, Pyarelal’s distant cousin, was also a secret agent, and had been sent to Pachigam to sniff out certain subversive elements in this village of artists-for artists were natural subversives, after all. His orders were to report his findings covertly and in the first instance to Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha at Elasticnagar, who would evaluate the quality and value of the intelligence and recommend any course of action that might be required. Nobody in Pachigam suspected Gopinath of having a secret identity because the identity that he made apparent was so hard to take that it was impossible to believe he had an even more problematic self concealed beneath it. The children he taught with an asperity and severity that was the exact opposite of Pyarelal’s jolly prattling gave him the nickname of “Batta Rasashud.” Batta was another word for pandit and rasashud was an extremely bitter herb given to children who were infested with aam, that is to say, roundworms. When he discovered this, because teachers always discover the rude names by which they are known, his temper got even worse. He was living in a bedroom upstairs from the schoolroom and at nights the villagers would hear crashes and oaths emanating from it, so that many of them suspected that the angry pandit was possessed by a demon who came out of his body at night and flew around like a trapped bird.

Pyarelal felt responsible for his distant cousin and believed in his good-natured way that a little human companionship and family feeling would improve the man’s temperament. Boonyi dissented strongly. “Once the milk has curdled,” she argued, “it never tastes sweet again.” In spite of her objections, Pyarelal Kaul assured Gopinath that he was always welcome at their table. Thus Boonyi had to breakfast and often dine with the spy, which suited Gopinath fine, because Colonel Kachhwaha’s interest in her made her an important topic for his regular reports. And inevitably, given the unusual degree of access to her that he enjoyed, it was only a matter of time before the angry pandit became besotted with Boonyi Kaul as well. His paan habit increased dramatically, but the betel-nut addiction failed to mask his new, deeper dependency on the presence in his life of a fourteen-year-old girl. In the small schoolhouse where he taught children of all ages in a single room, he quickly saw that Boonyi Kaul was a lazy student, smart but idle, whose detachment from her education was in part a deliberately anti-intellectual reaction against being her learned father’s child, in part a protest against Pyarelal’s withdrawal from school, and mostly the consequence of an immature belief, rooted in her highly eroticized self-image, that she already knew everything she would need to get men to do whatever she desired. It was easy to see why so sexually confident a child had inflamed the passions of poor confused Colonel Tortoise, but Gopinath had thought himself to be made of sterner stuff. The speed of his surrender to her charms engendered in his breast the same feelings of disgust he normally reserved for the sick and the maimed. And her obvious feelings for Noman Sher Noman who called himself Shalimar the clown nauseated the schoolteacher even more than his own infatuation, and distracted him from his original purpose in Pachigam, the secret pursuit of Shalimar the clown’s brother, the third son of Abdullah and Firdaus. Gopinath temporarily downgraded that project and focused instead on the sarpanch’s fourth and youngest boy, whom he privately resolved to destroy.

At the age of nineteen the twin eldest sons of Abdullah and Firdaus Noman, Hameed and Mahmood, were gentle, gregarious fools whose only interest in life was to make each other laugh. Accordingly they had contentedly lost themselves in the comic fictions of the bhand pather, and were so immersed in their imaginary world, in creating burlesque versions of pratfalling princes and clumsy gods, cowardly giants and devils in love, that the real world lost its charm for them, and perhaps alone of all Kashmiris they became immune to its natural beauty. The third boy, Anees, was introspective and morose, as if he expected little good to come of his life. He performed the clown antics required of him with an unblinkingly melancholy face that divided audiences. Most reacted with hilarity to his mournful air, but a minority, unexpectedly touched by his sadness in a place they did not expect a mere clown-story to reach, a sequestered place in which they guarded their own sadnesses about their beleaguered lives, were disturbed by him, and felt happy when he left the stage. As his seventeenth birthday neared Anees began to display a growing skill with his hands, casually creating miniature marvels of paper-chain cutout figures and fantastical creatures made out of twisted silver paper taken from the insides of cigarette packs. He whittled wood into tiny wonders, such as owls with latticed bodies inside which other, tinier owls could be seen. It was this gift that brought him to the attention of the local liberation front commander, and one star-filled night Anees was brought by two fighters with scarves around their faces to the wooded hill where Nazarébaddoor’s old cottage stood rotting and empty. Here he was asked by a man he could not see if he would like to learn to make bombs. Okay, Anees shrugged. At least this meant that his melancholy life was likely to be short. When he said this he was wearing his longest and most lugubrious face and the liberation front commander standing in the shadows was mysteriously seized by an inappropriate urge to laugh, which he only partially managed to resist.