Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The Hammirdev Kachhwaha of August 1965 was a very different fellow from the tongue-tied ass who had allowed Boonyi Kaul to cheek him so outrageously four years earlier: on the one hand he was a seasoned commander, planning eagerly for battle, and on the other hand there were the deepening sensory and mnemonic disorders. His father had passed away so it was no longer incumbent upon the son to die to gain the parent’s approval. On the day in the fall of 1963 when he heard the news of Nagabhat Kachhwaha’s demise, Tortoise Colonel took off the golden bangles of humiliation, had his driver take him all the way to the Bund in Srinagar, stood with his back to the city’s great stores, Cheap John, Suffering Moses and Subhana the Worst, and hurled the gleaming circlets far out into the sluggish brown waters of the Jhelum. He felt like Sir Bedivere returning Excalibur to the lake, except that the bangles had been a symbol of weakness, not of strength. At any rate, in this case there was no arm clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, emerging to receive what was thrown. The bangles scattered noiselessly on the sluggish surface of the river and quickly sank. Tall poplars faintly swayed, and reddened autumnal chinar leaves fluttered a farewell. Colonel Kachhwaha saluted briefly and crisply, performed a smart about-face and marched forward into a newer, more confident future.

The number of men under his command had grown. Elasticnagar had stretched so wide that people were beginning to call it Broken-Elasticnagar. The war drums were beating and the troop transport aircraft were flying a nonstop relay service and the eager glitter-eyed jawans were pouring in. Kachhwaha was one of the chief supervisors of the major statewide operation that was sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the front lines. Now he had received his own marching orders. Elasticnagar’s boss was going to war. He was going to smash the enemy with maximum force, and survival was permissible. Returning as a war hero was permissible. Returning as a decorated war hero and enjoying the attentions of excited young women back home was not only permissible but actively encouraged. Colonel Kachhwaha in jodhpurs smacked a riding crop against his thigh in anticipation. Since his father’s death he had begun to dream of going home in triumph and having the pick of the women, the beautiful Rajput women of the kohl-rimmed flashing eyes, the gorgeous Jodhpuri women waiting in their mirrored halls, opening wide their arms for their conquering local hero, dressed in clouds of organza and lace. These women were women of his own kind, desert roses, women who appreciated a warrior, women quite unlike the foolish girls of Kashmir. Unlike, for example, Boonyi. He did not permit himself these days to think about Boonyi Kaul even though reports reached his ears of her extraordinary, blossoming beauty. At eighteen she would be in full flower, she would have entered into the first flush of womanhood, but he would not allow himself to consider that. His restraint was laudable. He congratulated himself upon it. In spite of many provocations he had not persecuted her village of bohemians and suspicious types, in spite of her insult to his honor. He would not wish it said of him that H. S. Kachhwaha pursued vendettas while on duty, that his conduct had been in even the smallest way unbecoming. He had shown himself to be above such matters. Discipline was all. Dignity was all. Boonyi was nothing to him, nothing compared to the waiting Rajput girls, even though he did not know their names, had not seen their faces, met them only in his dreams. These dream women were the ones he wanted. Any one of them was worth ten Boonyis.

He was a soldier and so he tried to compartmentalize, to put his disorders in a box in the corner of the room and to go on functioning normally. When they spilled out it was regrettable but his troops had grown accustomed to the jumbling of his senses, the strangeness of his descriptions. Nowadays his fellow officers reacted normally when told that they had rigid vermilion voices and the soldiers on parade kept silent when he congratulated them on smelling like jasmine blossoms and the cooks at Elasticnagar knew just to nod wisely when he told them that the lamb korma wasn’t pointy enough. The condition could be said to be under control. The problem of memory, of excessive remembering, was not. The accumulation grew every day more oppressive and it became harder and harder to sleep. It was impossible to forget the cockroach that had crawled out of the shower drain six months earlier, or a bad dream, or any one of the thousands of hands of cards he had played in his military life. The weather of the past piled up in him, names and faces jostled for space, and the overload of unforgotten words and deeds left him wide-eyed with horror. Time was supposed to soothe all pain wasn’t it but the knife of his late father’s disapproval refused to grow dull with the passing months. He now believed that the two problems, the two bugs in the system, were somehow connected. He did not seek medical help for his troubles because any diagnosis of mental problems, however slight, would certainly be a reason for removing him from his command. He could not return home as a head case. There would be no dream girls then. And memory was not madness was it, not even when the remembered past piled up so high inside you that you feared the files of your yesterdays would become visible in the whites of your eyes. Memory was a gift. It was a positive. It was a professional resource.

And so, to return to the matter at hand, this mullah, this Bulbul Fakh, was quite unacceptably denouncing a neighboring village for its tolerance, was stirring things up, inciting violence and advocating a firebrand Islam that was positively un-Kashmiri and un-Indian as well. However, he made a good point when he condemned the hussy and her fancy boy, that couple who had chosen to fly in the face of every decent social and religious convention and who had been defended for it by people who should have known better, people among whom a number of suspected subversives probably lurked. These liberation-front-wallahs were nationalist subversives rather than religious fanatics and between them and the iron mullahs there was little love lost. So why not just stand back, eh? Resources were not infinite and time was pressing and one could not be everywhere and there was a war to fight. It was not so much a matter of turning a blind eye as of the proper prioritizing of goals. Why not let two kinds of subversive wipe each other out, and allow the young whore to reap the whirlwind for her misdeeds? If some sort of cleanup operation was required later, the forces left behind to police the district would be fully capable of handling that situation. Maulana Bulbul Fakh’s turn would come. Yes, yes. The thing to do was to do nothing. That was the statesmanlike choice.

Colonel Hammirdev Kachhwaha in his office put his legs up on his desk, closed his eyes and surrendered for a time to the internal whirl of the system, submerging his consciousness in the ocean of the senses, listening like a boy with a shell at his ear to the unceasing babble of the past.

It was almost eighteen years since the death of the Gujar prophetess Nazarébaddoor, but that didn’t stop her from intervening in local affairs when the need arose. Numerous residents of the region reported her visits, which usually took place in dreams, and whose purpose was usually to warn (“Don’t marry your daughter to that boy-his cousins in the north are dwarfs,” she advised a drowsy goat farmer on a hillside near Anantnag) or to commend (“Snap up that girl for your boy before someone else does, because her firstborn is destined to be a great saint,” she commanded a boatman sleeping in his shikara on Lake Gandarbal, causing him to jerk awake and fall out of the boat). In death Nazarébaddoor appeared more cheerful than she had been in the last days of her life, and she admitted to several of those who had seen her in visions that death suited her.