Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Just as Anarkali dancing her sorceress’s dance in the Sheesh Mahal, the hall of mirrors at the Mughal court, had captured Prince Salim’s heart, just as Madhubala dancing in the hit movie had bewitched millions of gaping men, so Boonyi in the hunting lodge at Dachigam understood that her dance was changing her life, that what was being born in the eyes of the moonstruck American ambassador was nothing less than her own future. By the time he got to his feet and applauded loudly and long, she knew that he would find a way to bring her to him, and all that was left for her to do was to make a single choice, a single act of will, yes or no. Then her eyes met his and blazed their answer and the point of no return was passed. Yes, the future would come for her, a messenger descending from the heavens to inform a mere mortal of the decision of the gods. She needed only to wait and see what form the messenger would take. She put the palms of her hands together, touched her fingertips to her chin, gazed at and then bowed her head before the man of power, and had the feeling as she left his presence that she wasn’t leaving the stage but making an entrance on the greatest stage she had ever been allowed to walk upon, that her performance was not ending but beginning, and that it would not end until her life ran out of days. It would be up to her to ensure that her story had a better ending than the court dancer’s. Anarkali’s punishment for the temerity of loving a royal personage was to be bricked up in a wall. Boonyi had seen the movie, in which the filmmakers had found a way of allowing the heroine to live: Emperor Akbar, relenting, has a tunnel constructed under her tomb to allow Anarkali to escape into exile with her mother. A lifetime’s exile wasn’t much better than death, Boonyi thought. It was the same as being bricked up, only in a larger grave. But times had changed. Maybe in the second half of the twentieth century it was permissible for a dancing girl to bag herself a prince.

The embassy aide Edgar Wood, floppy-haired, tall, pale and skinny, with a large, permanent zit on his right cheek to hint at his ridiculous youth, and the feeble shadow of a Zapata moustache to confirm it, was a former graduate student of international relations at Columbia who had followed Max to India at the ambassador’s special insistence. The reason for this was not Wood’s brilliance or industry (though he was indeed smart and a quick learner, known at Columbia as Eager Wood, a nickname he brought with him into the embassy). No, the reason Wood was indispensable was that he would do anything the ambassador needed done and keep his mouth shut about it. It wasn’t easy to find the perfect set-up man, the loyal go-between, the faultless fixer, but without such a person it was impossible for a man in the public eye to lead the kind of life that Max Ophuls’s nature compelled him to lead. He had his own nickname for Wood; in his eyes the kid was not so much an “Eager,” more of a “Beaver”; but of course he never told him so. The first time he had broached the subject of his assignations with women and his need for a discreet assistant, Beaver Wood volunteered immediately. “Just one question, sir,” he asked Max. “Do you have a bad back?” Max was puzzled. No, he answered, his back was fine. Wood bobbed his head in approval and apparent relief. “Excellent,” he said. “Because too much sex and a bad back is what got the president assassinated.”

This was strange, Max thought, and also evidence that Wood was a more interesting fellow than his raw young looks had yet found a way of revealing. “The truss, sir,” Wood explained. “Kennedy’s back was bad to begin with, but it got so much worse because of all the screwing around that he had to wear the truss all the time. He was wearing it in Dallas and that’s why he didn’t fall over after the first shot hit him. He was wounded and lurched over and the truss just sat him up again, boing, and then the second bullet blew off the back of his head. You see what I’m saying, Professor, maybe if he’d had less sex, he maybe wouldn’t have been wearing the truss, and then no boing, he’d just have fallen flat after being wounded; the first bullet wasn’t fatal, remember, and he wouldn’t have been as they say available for the second shot, and Johnson wouldn’t be president. There’s a moral in there somewhere, I guess, but as you don’t have a bad back, Professor, it doesn’t apply to you.”

In the hunting lodge at Dachigam, Max Ophuls reclining on carpets and cushions leaned backward, away from the Indian foreign minister, to whisper to Edgar Wood. “Get her details,” he said. Wood replied: “Sir, she’s allegedly buried in Lahore, Pakistan, and her real name was either Nadira Begum or Sharf-un-Nissa. Prince Salim gave her the love-name of Anarkali, meaning ‘pomegranate bud.’ Sir.” Max frowned. “Not the damn character, Wood. Not the damn apocryphal historical figure.” Wood grinned. “I’m on it, sir. I was just messing with you.” Max tolerated such cheekiness. It was a small price to pay for the services Wood so uncomplainingly, even enthusiastically rendered. He turned back to Swaran Singh, a soft-spoken man of simple habits whose charm and erudition were as great as Max’s own, and whom Max had begun to like very much. Swaran wanted to offer his own reaction to the dance piece. “You see, Akbar was remarkably tolerant of Hinduism,” he said. “Indeed his own wife Jodhabai, Salim’s mother, remained a practicing Hindu throughout their marriage. Interesting that class difference was where he drew the line. Suggests that as a people social order matters more to us than religious belief. Just like the English, eh? No wonder we hit it off so well.” Max laughed obligingly. “By the way,” added Swaran Singh, who was known for his strict moral rectitude but was also a shrewd man who knew the effectiveness of a shock tactic, “did you by any chance notice that young woman’s breasts?” He let out a loud guffaw, which Max, for the sake of Indo-American relations, felt the need to emulate. “National treasures,” he replied seriously, using much self-control to conceal his deeper feelings, but fearing that Swaran had noted the powerful involuntary reaction he had gone fishing for. “Integral parts of India,” he added, for good measure. This set Swaran Singh off again. “Ambassador,” the foreign minister chuckled, “I can see that with you as our guide, the new India will become more pro-West than ever before.”

When Peggy Ophuls, alone in the New York apartment, had answered her telephone and heard from one of her informants that Edgar Wood was slated for transfer to India her heart pounded and she threw the tall glass of Pellegrino she was holding as hard as she could in the general direction of ZOOMMM!!!!, the widescreen Lichtenstein portrait of her husband flying the Bugatti Racer which she had commissioned as a gift of love and which hung, when it was not being lent to this or that major gallery, on one long living-room wall in their capacious Riverside Drive home. Such was her agitation that the glass missed the large painting entirely and shattered on the white wall to the right of the unprotected canvas. She left the pieces where they fell, clenched both fists and controlled herself. Better the pimp you know, she told herself angrily. If Wood had been left behind in America her husband would certainly have found another little helper, and for a time Margaret wouldn’t have known who was setting up the action without which Max Ophuls apparently couldn’t live, and which she herself was, by this time, emphatically unwilling to provide. Neither Max nor Edgar had any idea that she knew all about them-that she knew everything- that she knew where all the bodies were-not buried-ha! aha!-what was the right word-yes! laid, that she knew in detail where all his damned damned damned bodies were well and truly laid, that she had made it her business to, that she was in a position to, that one of these days by God she would, that any woman in her situation-and she had killed a man once!-had a right to, to. To take her dashed revenge.