Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The seduction of Boonyi Kaul Noman-or, more accurately, the seduction of Max Ophuls by Boonyi-took time. Even for a man of Edgar Wood’s unusual aptitudes it was not easy to arrange a private meeting between the American ambassador and a married Kashmiri dancing girl. At the end of the Dachigam hunting lodge festivities Wood voiced the ambassador’s desire to thank personally all those who had given him such a delightful evening, and out they came in a crowd, the poets and santoor players, the actors and cooks. Max moved among them with an interpreter and the genuineness of his interest and concern touched everyone he spoke to. At one point, casually, as if it were not the point of the entire exercise, he turned to Boonyi and congratulated her on her artistry. “A talent like yours,” he said, “must surely seek to advance and develop itself.” The interpreter translated, and Boonyi, her eyes modestly downcast, felt a breeze on her cheek, as if a door were opening and the air of the outside world were being allowed to enter. She told herself, Patience is everything now. You must just fold your hands in your lap and wait for what will be.

“Ask her name,” Max Ophuls ordered the interpreter. “Boonyi,” the fellow answered. “She tells that it is her preferred, how to say it, her optioned name. Actually her given name is Bhoomi, the earth, but her friends are calling her by this Boonyi cognomen which, sir, is the beloved tree of Kashmir.” “I see,” said Max, “a name for outsiders and a pet name for her friends. Ask her then, Bhoomi the earth or Boonyi the beloved tree-as a dancer, in her career as a dancer, what is it she wants?” There was nothing personal in his voice or manner, no hint of impropriety. Her reply was similarly courteous, freighted with nothing, a neutral politeness. “Boonyi says first that she is Boonyi,” the interpreter translated, “and second that to please you is joy enough.” Max Ophuls saw Swaran Singh looking across the crowded room with a faint smile on his face, the most innocent of smiles, a gentle smile, quite devoid of guile.

Max moved away from Boonyi and didn’t look in her direction again all evening. However, he spoke at length to Abdullah Noman, asking carefully about economic conditions in the valley, learning about the decline of the fortunes of the bhand pather, expressing a fascination with their ancient hand-me-down skills which he did not have to fake. Soon enough, Abdullah took the bait, as Max had known he would. “He, Pachigam headman, sir, is saying it would be lifetime honor for him if one day you will grace his village,” the interpreter said. “It will be lifetime privilege for him to afford you full performances of traditional and modern plays and if interest is in you, also you may see how techniques et cetera are refined. Cooking too is there, wazwaan cooks are coming tonight from that place only.” Here Edgar Wood intervened, all haste and business. “The ambassador’s schedule does not presently permit…” Max patted his eager young aide on the arm. “Edgar, Edgar, we’re just chatting,” he said. “Who knows? Could be that some day even the American ambassador may have a moment to spare.”

After so successfully choreographed an encounter, Max Ophuls returned to Delhi, to the cool, sprawling New Formalist palazzo of decorated modernism encased in a mosaic grillwork of white stone where he now lived. He walked by its fountain-lined reflecting pool, and, like Boonyi Noman, waited. Edgar Wood quietly arranged for him to receive daily private lessons in Hindi and Kashmiri. The ambassador’s wife, meanwhile, was mostly absent from the ambassadorial residence. Transformed into her new persona of Peggy-Mata, mother of the motherless, she had embarked on a nonstop nationwide tour of Indian orphanages, and would occasionally send Max a note saying things like These children are so beautiful I just absolutely want to scoop a few of them up and bring them home. Her success in raising funds in America and Europe to improve conditions at orphanages all over India increased the couple’s popularity. “Perhaps we should regard Peggy-Mata as the real U.S. ambassador,” one newspaper editorial suggested, “and Mr. Ophuls as her charming and personable consort.” Next to the editorial was a large photograph of Peggy Ophuls standing beside a handsome young Catholic priest, Father Ambrose, and surrounded by smiling young girls from his orphanage, the Holy Love of India Evangalactic Girls’ Orphanage for Disabled & Destitute Street Girls in Mehrauli. “The dying in Calcutta have Mother Teresa,” Father Ambrose was reported to have said, “but for the living we have Peggy-Mata right here.”

Meanwhile the Ophuls marriage continued to decay. Six months after the ambassador’s first visit to Kashmir, the thing that Peggy Rhodes Ophuls had most dreaded had happened. Instead of playing the field and bedding every woman who succumbed to his famous charm, her bastard husband had become fixated on one particular girl, a nobody, a nothing, damn him. When the spring came he had visited the village of the traveling players who had by all accounts put on quite a show, drama, comedy, high-wire stunts and of course the dancing, and soon afterwards Max had decreed that a banquet be given “for Indian friends” at Roosevelt House, which by the by was the residence not only of the lecherous U.S. ambassador but of the ambassador’s wretched wife as well, he probably came up with the idea just so that he could bring the hussy down to New Delhi on the pretext of providing after-dinner entertainment-after-dinner entertainment indeed!-the scheme had that young so-and-so Wood’s fingerprints all over it, and the worst of it, the worst of the worst, was that he, her husband, the ambassador-the man she still loved, in her way, in the only way she knew, it didn’t give him what he needed but that didn’t mean it wasn’t love-her Max had made her, Peggy, come home from her orphanage inspections to act as hostess, to sit in her own home and watch that girl dance for him, did he think she was blind, she didn’t need any spies to see what that girl was doing, the effrontery of her hips, the recklessness of her eyes, it was as if they were naked and making love right there in front of Peggy, in front of everyone, the humiliation of it, she had seen a good deal of human cruelty in her life, they both had, so she wasn’t going to lose perspective, this wasn’t as bad as that, but still it was pretty goddamned cruel, pretty goddamned impossible to take.

They had come all this way together, the Rat and her Mole, they had survived so much, only to be shipwrecked at last on the rock of a gold-digging Kashmiri beauty. If the liaison lasted, Peggy Ophuls would of course have to leave him, after all this time and the expenditure of so much love and tolerance she would have to turn back into Margaret Rhodes and somehow live without him for the rest of her life. “Pumpkin time, Cinders,” she told herself. The magic spell was about to break, her gown would once again be an ashy rag, her footmen would turn back into mice, the beautiful fiction of her marriage would finally have to yield to the unpalatable facts. The glass slipper didn’t fit her anymore. It was on another woman’s foot.

The government of India was GOI. The government of Pakistan was GOP. In the aftermath of the Tashkent Peace Conference (TPC) between the two countries, during the period of partial political vacuum created by the fatal heart attack of the Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) on the day following the signature of the Tashkent Declaration (TD), Max Ophuls launched a major new American initiative. In this interregnum, a bitter stalemate between the potentates of the Congress Party ended when the kingmakers Kumaraswami Kamaraj (KK) and Morarji Desai (MD) elevated Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (IPG) to the premiership in the mistaken belief that she would be their helpless puppet. During this period of savage intraparty warfare only President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan rose above the political storm. His national stature and his air of a philosopher-saint gave him unusual influence over all government matters, even though the authors of the Indian constitution had clearly intended the president’s role to be largely ceremonial. Max’s close friendship with this revered figure (PSK) provided the opening for the so-called Ophuls Plan.