Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

“They liked Galbraith,” Lyndon Johnson was rumored to have told Dean Rusk, “so go ahead and send them another liberal professor, but don’t let this one go native on us.” When Secretary Rusk called Maximilian Ophuls in the immediate aftermath of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war and offered him the Indian embassy, Max realized that he had been waiting for the call, waiting without knowing he was waiting, and that India, which he had never visited, might prove to be, if not his destiny, then at least the destination to which the mazy journey of his life had been leading all along. “We need you to go right away,” Rusk said. “Those Indian gentlemen need a good old American spanking and it’s our belief you’re just the man to hand it to ’em.” In his classic inquiry Why the Poor Are Poor Max Ophuls had used India, China and Brazil as economic case studies, and in the book’s much-discussed last chapter had proposed a means by which these “sleeping giants” might awake. This was perhaps the first time a major Western economist had seriously analyzed what came to be known as “South-South collaboration,” and Max, putting down the telephone that humid Manhattan evening-it was late September but the summer wouldn’t end-wondered aloud why an academic who had published a theoretical model of how Third World economies might flourish by learning to bypass the U.S. dollar should be chosen to represent the United States in one such southern land. His wife the Rat knew the answer to that. “Glamour, dear, glamour. Ha! Don’t you get it, you dope? Everyone loves a star.”

America didn’t know what to do about India. Johnson liked the dictator of Pakistan, Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, so much that he was even willing to turn a blind eye to Pakistan’s growing intimacy with China. “A wife can understand a Saturday night fling by her husband, so long as she’s the wife,” he told Ayub in Washington. Ayub laughed. Of course America was the wife, how could the president doubt it? Then he went home and forged even closer ties with China. Rusk, meanwhile, was openly hostile to Indian interests. This was the period in which the devaluation of the Indian rupee and the national food crisis had put India into the humiliating position of being dependent on American supplies. Yet these supplies were slow in coming, and B. K. Nehru, India’s ambassador to the United States, had to confront Rusk about it: “Why are you trying to starve us out?” The answer was equally blunt: because India was receiving arms from the Soviet Union. Before Max left for New Delhi, he visited Rusk at Foggy Bottom and found himself on the receiving end of an extended anti-Indian tirade, in which Rusk not only opposed the Indian line on Kashmir but also criticized the annexations of Hyderabad and Goa, and the vocal support of several Indian leaders for the government of North Vietnam. “Professor Ophuls, we are at war with that gentleman, Ho Chi Minh, and you will be so good as to make plain to the Indian authorities that our enemy’s friend can only be our foe.” This was why Max Ophuls told Margaret, after the Radhakrishnan hand-holding incident, that his sudden popularity would probably prove short-lived. “If I dance to Rusk’s tune,” he said, “they’ll start throwing things at us soon enough.”

When he expressed a desire to go immediately to Kashmir, the Indian home minister Gulzarilal Nanda objected strongly: the security concerns were too great, his safety could not be guaranteed. Then for the first time in his life Max Ophuls exercised the power of the United States of America. “The nature of overwhelming might,” he would later write in The Man of Power, “is such that the powerful man does not need to allude to his power. The fact of it is present in everyone’s consciousness. Thus power does its work by stealth, and the powerful can subsequently deny that their strength was ever used at all.” Within hours, Nanda was overruled by Prime Minister Shastri’s office, and the visit to Kashmir was green-lit.

Five days later Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, in fur earmuffs, greatcoat, bulletproof vest and hard hat, was standing on what was then called the cease-fire line, and would later come to be known as the Line of Control. His whole life suddenly seemed absurd. The Belle Époque Strasbourg mansion, the cottage in Gergovie, the Porchester Terrace basement, the economic summit in New Hampshire, the eleventh-floor apartment on Riverside Drive, and even Roosevelt House, the sprawling, recently completed ambassador’s residence built by the half-praised, half-derided Edward Durrell Stone in the Chanakyapuri diplomatic enclave of the Indian capital… all these faded away. For a long moment Max slipped loose of all his different selves, the brilliant young economist, lawyer and student of international relations, the master forger of the Resistance, the ace pilot, the Jewish survivor, the genius of Bretton Woods, the bestselling author, and the American ambassador cocooned in the house of power. He stood alone and as if unclothed, dwarfed by the high Himalayas and stripped bare of comprehension by the scale of the crisis made flesh, the two frozen armies facing each other across the explosive borderline. Then his history reasserted itself and he climbed back into its familiar garments-in particular the history of his hometown, and the whiplash movements of the Franco-German frontier across its people’s lives. He had come a long way but perhaps not so very far. Could any two places have been more different, he asked himself; could any two places have been more the same? Human nature, the great constant, surely persisted in spite of all surface differences. One snaking frontier had made him what he was, he found himself thinking. Had he come here, to another such unstable twilight zone, in order to be unmade?

The Indian foreign minister Swaran Singh touched his arm. “It’s long enough,” he said. “It really is not safe to stand still here for very long.”

For the rest of his life Max Ophuls would remember that instant during which the shape of the conflict in Kashmir had seemed too great and alien for his Western mind to understand, and the sense of urgent need with which he had drawn his own experience around him, like a shawl. Had he been trying to understand, or to blind himself to his failure to do so? Did the mind discover likeness in the unlike in order to clarify the world, or to obscure the impossibility of such clarification? He didn’t know the answer. But it was one hell of a question.

He had begun to look for allies in Washington and had found a few: the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, his eventual successor, Walt Whitman Rostow, and the man who would follow Max to New Delhi after the scandal, Chester Bowles. Bundy learned that the Ayub-China relationship was “significantly closer” than either would admit, and advised Johnson that India, the “largest and potentially most powerful non-Communist Asian nation,” was “the biggest prize in Asia,” and that on account of the United States’ handing seven hundred million dollars in military aid to Pakistan, that prize was in danger of being lost. The tail was wagging the dog. Rostow agreed. “India is more important than Pakistan.” And Bowles argued that America’s unwillingness to arm India had pushed the late Jawaharlal Nehru, and now Lal Bahadur Shastri, into the Russians’ arms. “Only when it became clear that we were not prepared to give India this assistance, did India turn to the Soviet Union as its major source of military equipment.” Johnson remained reluctant to favor India. “We ought to get out of military aid to both India and Pakistan,” he replied. However, Max Ophuls’s Washington contacts charged him to discuss urgently, “on the front burner,” what India wanted most: to purchase American supersonic fighter jets in significant numbers and on advantageous terms. Sitting on carpets and cushions in the Dachigam hunting lodge, laughing and drinking in the intermissions between the acts of the play being performed by the bhands of Pachigam, Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, “the Flying Jew,” the man who had flown the Bugatti Racer to safety, murmured to the Indian Foreign Ministry delegation about the various ways in which it might be possible to structure a deal for the high-speed jets. Then Boonyi Kaul Noman came out to dance and Max realized that his Indian destiny would have little to do with politics, diplomacy or arms sales, and everything to do with the far more ancient imperatives of desire.