Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

“The hours are better,” she said, “and you don’t have to worry about the animals.” When she appeared to Bombur Yambarzal, however, all her old gloominess was back. The bulbous waza awoke in the dark to see her one-toothed face leaning down close to his, and he felt the cold breath of the dead upon his cheek. “If you don’t do something double-quick,” she said, “Bulbul Fakh’s civil war will burn both your villages down.” Then she drew back and became one with the darkness and he awoke all over again, alone in his bed and sweating. A few seconds later he heard the Maulana’s voice raised in the azaan. The dawn call to prayer was also, on this occasion, a call to arms.

Wherever information is tightly controlled, rumor becomes a valued alternative source of news, and according to rumor the whole tribe of iron mullahs was summoning Kashmiris to arms that day, calling upon them to arise and rid the land of the alien Indian troops and of the pandits too. But Bombur Yambarzal had not heard any such rumor. For him this was not a national but a personal matter. He rolled out of bed and ran, wobbling, heaving, panting and sweating, all the way to the main village kitchens where the wazwaan was prepared. There he girded himself for battle. Once he was ready, and had caught his breath, he walked much more deliberately down the main street of Shirmal toward the mosque at the far end of the village, in a manner that might almost have been called kingly except that this was a king with kitchen knives and cleavers stuck in his belt, with kitchen kettles and cookpots strung around his body in place of armor, and with a big kitchen saucepan on his head. The fresh blood of slaughtered chickens dripped from him, he had smeared it over his hands and face and over all the kitchen equipment too, and had brought along a small leather wineskin full of even more blood, to make sure the effect wasn’t lost ahead of time. He looked simultaneously horrifying and ridiculous, and the village’s women and children, who had been waiting anxiously for the men to emerge from the mosque and announce their decision regarding the attack on Pachigam, began to laugh and cry at the same time, not knowing which was the more appropriate response. Bombur Yambarzal stiffened his back and raised his head up proudly and led a parade of astonished women and children to the door of the mosque.

When he reached it he drew from his belt, as if they were swords, a pair of great metal spoons, and began to bang on his armor, making a noise that would have raised the dead had the dead not preferred to remain peacefully underground and ignore the appalling racket. The men of Shirmal poured out of the mosque with zealotry in their eyes, and behind them came a considerably irritated Maulana Bulbul Fakh. “Look at me,” shouted the waza Bombur Yambarzal. “This thickheaded, comical, bloodthirsty moron is what you have all decided to become.”

For years afterwards the men of Shirmal spoke of Bombur Yambarzal’s great, and unusually selfless, feat. By turning their familiar world of pots and pans into an effigy of horror, by sacrificing his own much-treasured dignity and pride, by insulting them with the weapon of himself, he awoke them from their strange waking sleep, the powerful hypnotic spell woven by the harsh seductive tongue of Bulbul Fakh. No, they would not arise against their neighbors, they told him, they would remain themselves, and the only creatures they would slaughter would be animals meant for tables at which people were celebrating moments of private joy. When Bulbul Fakh saw that he had lost the day, that his knifelike clarity had been blunted by Yambarzal’s obfuscating creation of a comic grotesque, he went without a word into his residential quarters and came out with nothing more than the ragged bundle he had carried on the day of his arrival in Shirmal. “You blockheads aren’t ready for me yet,” he said. “But the war that is beginning will be long, and necessary, too, because its enemy is godlessness, immorality and evil, and thanks to the corrupt heart of man in general and unbelieving kafirs in particular that is a war that cannot easily be brought to an end. When your hearts are open to me, at that time I may return.”

Bombur Yambarzal had never married and now that he was past fifty he no longer expected to find a bride. But in the eyes and faces of some of the matrons who watched him as he marched clanging and dripping back to the kitchens to take off the silly armor of righteousness and peace, he saw something he had not seen in women’s eyes and faces before: that is to say, affection. The widow of a recently deceased sub-waza, Hasina Karim, known as Harud, “Autumn,” on account of her red-tinged hair, a handsome woman with two grown sons to take care of her material needs but nobody to fill her bed, accompanied him without being asked and helped him take off his pots and pans and wash the chicken blood from his skin. When they were done Bombur Yambarzal attempted for the first time in his life to flatter a member of the opposite sex. “Harud is the wrong name for you,” he told her, meaning to continue, “They should call you Sonth, because you look as young as the Spring.” But anxiety made his mouth foolish, and sonth, to his great discomfiture, came out as sonf. “Because you look as young as aniseed” was an idiotic remark, obviously. Embarrassed, he flushed deeply. “I like it that you’re clumsy with compliments,” she consoled him, seriously, touching his hand. “I never trusted men who were too smooth with words.”

In spite of the waza’s boldness, there was a tragedy that day. Unknown to everyone except Bulbul Fakh, three young men, the sparsely bearded Gegroo brothers, Aurangzeb, Alauddin and Abulkalam, a trio of disaffected, layabout young rodents whom Bombur did not trust to do much at banquets except wash the dishes, had slipped out of the mosque the back way and headed for Pachigam, looking for trouble, and giving themselves courage from a bottle of dark rum of which Bulbul Fakh would most certainly have disapproved. Much later that night, under cover of darkness, they slipped back into Shirmal and locked themselves into the empty mosque. They were just in time. Before dawn broke, the immense figure of Big Man Misri the carpenter arrived in Shirmal on horseback, with axes in his belt and rifles slung across his shoulders. “Gegroos!” he yelled as he galloped into town, rousing all those villagers who were still asleep. “You have met my daughter, and now you must meet your God.”

Zoon Misri had been raped. She had been on her way to Khelmarg to gather flowers when it happened. She had been dragged off the hill path into the forest and held down on the rough ground and brutalized, and even though a sack had been thrown over her head she had easily identified her three assailants by their whiny, nasal Gegroo voices, which were unmistakable even though the brothers were horribly drunk. “If we can’t get the blasphemous whore herself,” she heard Aurangzeb say, “then her prettiest friend will do fine.” “Too fine,” Alauddin had assented, “she was always too stuck up to look back at the likes of us,” and the youngest, Abulkalam, concluded, “Well, Zoon, we see you now.” After the rape her assailants ran off giggling. She found the strength to walk, bruised and torn, down the hill to Pachigam, where in a frighteningly level voice she confided all the details of the assault to Boonyi, Gonwati and Himal, not daring to tell her father (her mother being some years deceased), and even though they comforted her and bathed her and told her she had no reason to be ashamed she said she could not imagine remaining alive with them inside her, with the memory of their intrusion, with their seed. Boonyi, dreadfully weighed down by the feeling that Zoon had suffered in her stead, that the wounds inflicted on her friend had been meant for herself, was the one who told the carpenter the news. Big Man Misri did little to relieve her of this burden. As he saddled his horse he told her, “The three of you keep her alive. It’s up to you. Get it? If she dies I’ll be asking you why.” Then he vanished into the night as fast as his horse could take him.