Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

That night there was a full moon. Pachigam had divided into two camps, and long years of communal harmony were at risk. Then, on an impulse, the baritone Shivshankar Sharga came out into the main street and began to sing love songs, songs of the love of the gods for men, and of men for God, songs of the love between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, songs of love requited and unrequited, courtly and passionate, sacred and profane. His daughters Himal and Gonwati, the tone-deaf duo, sat at his feet under strict instructions not to open their mouths no matter how much the music moved them. When he started singing the village was still in the grip of its plague of bad temper, and there were cries of “Shut up, we’re trying to sleep,” and “Nobody’s in the mood for these damned sentimental songs.” But slowly his voice worked its magic. Doors opened, lights came on, sleepers came in from the fields. Abdullah and Pyarelal met by the singer and embraced. “We’ll have two wedding days,” Abdullah said. “First we’ll do everything your way and then we’ll do it all again in the way we know.” A single shrewish aunt called out, “Why their way first?” but her carping cry was swiftly followed by a stifled gurgle, as her husband put his hand over her bad mouth and dragged her away to bed.

It was all settled. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul dug the aluminum box containing his wife’s wedding jewels out of the place in the backyard where he had buried them soon after her death and brought them to Boonyi lying wide awake in bed. “Here is everything that remains of her,” he told his daughter. “These jewels in this box and the greater jewel shining in this bed.” He left the box on the mattress, kissed her cheek and left. Boonyi remained wide awake, staring furiously at the nocturnal ceiling, willing the walls of the house to dissolve so that she could rise up into the night sky and escape. For at the very moment in which the village had decided to protect her and Shalimar the clown, to stand by them by forcing them to marry, thus condemning them to a lifetime jail sentence, Boonyi had been overwhelmed by claustrophobia and had seen clearly what she had been too deeply in love with Shalimar the clown to understand before, namely that this life, married life, village life, life with her father chattering away by the Muskadoon and with her friends dancing their gopi dance, life with all the people amongst whom she had spent every one of her days, was not remotely enough for her, didn’t begin to satisfy her hunger, her ravenous longing for something she could not yet name, and that as she grew older her life’s insufficiency would only grow harder and more painful to bear.

She knew then that she would do anything to get out of Pachigam, that she would spend every moment of every day waiting for her chance, and when it came she would not fail to pounce upon it, she would move faster than fortune, that elusive will-o’-the-wisp, because if you spotted a magic force-a fairy, a djinni, a piece of once-in-a-lifetime luck-and if you pinned it to the ground, it would grant you your heart’s desire; and she would make her wish, get me away from here, away from my father, away from this slow death and slower life, away from Shalimar the clown.

Two years later a gaunt man with a long straggling beard, beautiful pale eyes that seemed to look right through this world into the next one, and skin the color of rusting metal, suddenly showed up in Shirmal village wearing a long, threadbare woolen coat and a loosely tied black turban, with all his worldly goods tied up in a bundle like a common vagabond, and began preaching hellfire and damnation. He spoke the language harshly, like a foreigner, like someone unused to speaking at all. The words seemed to be torn from his throat like pieces of rough skin, causing him much physical pain. Shirmalis, like all the people of the valley, were unused to blood-and-thunder preachers of this type, but they gave him a hearing, because of the legends of the iron mullahs that were circulating in those days.

Kashmiris were fond of saints of all types. Some of these even had military associations, such as the Bibi Lalla or Lalla Maj, the daughter of the commander of the armies of Kashmir in the fourteenth century. Many were miracle workers. The story currently doing the rounds was both military and miraculous. The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley’s pristine beauty, like small mountain ranges made up of malfunctioning truck exhausts, jammed weaponry and broken tank treads. Then one day by the grace of God the junk began to stir. It came to life and took on human form. The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out into the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an entirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would hear a hollow metallic ring. Because they were made of armor they could not be shot but they were too heavy to swim and so if they fell into water they would drown. Their breath was hot and smoky, like burning rubber tires, or the exhalations of dragons. They were to be honored, feared and obeyed.

That day in Shirmal, Bombur Yambarzal, the vasta waza, was the only man who dared interrupt the mendicant preacher’s tirade. He confronted the strange faqir in the street and demanded to know his name and business. “My business is God’s business,” the fellow replied. In that first exchange the newcomer was reluctant to answer to any name at all. Eventually, under pressure from Bombur, he said, “Call me Bulbul Shah.” Bulbul Shah, as even Bombur knew, was a fabled saint who had come to Kashmir in the fourteenth century (the time of Bibi Lalla). He was a Sufi of the Suhrawardy order named Syed Sharafuddin Abdul Rehman, known as Bilal after the Prophet’s muezzin-an honorific title that got corrupted to Bulbul, or “nightingale.” His origins were disputed. He may have come from Tamkastan, in ancient Iran, or from Baghdad, or, most probably, from Turkistan; he may have been a refugee from the Mongols or he may not. He did, however, succeed in converting to Islam the Ladakhi usurper Rinchin or Renchan or Rencana, who had seized the throne of Kashmir in 1320, and began the process of conversions by which Kashmir became a Muslim state. At any rate, he had been dead for six hundred years, and certainly was not standing in front of Yambarzal now smelling like dragon’s breath.

“That’s nonsense,” Bombur told the wanderer in his customarily haughty manner. “Be off with you. We don’t want any trouble, and you, standing here in the middle of our little town and yelling your head off about the punishments of hell-you look like trouble to me.” “There are big infidels,” replied the stranger, calmly, “who deny God and his Prophet; and then there are little infidels like you, in whose belly the heat of faith has long since cooled, who mistake tolerance for virtue and harmony for peace. You must let me stay or kill me, and I leave the choice to you. But understand this: I am the bellows who will rekindle your fire.”

“Of course we won’t kill you,” said Yambarzal, discomfited. “What sort of people do you think we are?” “Weaklings,” the stranger answered in his alarming, rasping voice. Bombur flushed, and called out loudly to the growing crowd, “Give this beggar some food to eat and he’ll pretty soon be on his way.” This was a misjudgment. The supposed reincarnation of Bulbul Shah had come to stay, and many ears wanted to hear what he had to tell them, especially because his response to Yambarzal’s dismissive remark was to remove the turban from his head, clench his right hand and rap his knuckles smartly on the bald dome of his head. Everybody present heard the hard metallic clang and many women and several men dropped instantly to their knees.