Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Pachigam was a trap, she told herself every night, but the Muskadoon still scurried through her dreams, its cold swift mountain music singing in her ears. She was a girl from the mountains and the climate of the plains affected her badly. When it was summer in Delhi the air conditioners were invariably incapacitated by “load-shedding” power cuts at the hottest times of day. The heat was like a hammer, like a stone. Crushed beneath it, she collapsed onto her illicit bed of shame and thought of Chandanwari, of Manasbal and Shishnag, of flower-carpeted Gulmarg and the eternal snows above, of cool glaciers and bubbling springs and the high ice-temples of the gods. She heard the soft splash of a heart-shaped oar in the water of a mirror lake, the rustle of chinar leaves, the boatmen’s songs and the soft beating of wings, thrushes’ wings, mynah wings, the wings of bluetits and hoopoes, and the top-knotted bulbuls that looked like young girls who had put up their hair. When she closed her eyes she invariably saw her father, her husband, her companions, her appointed place on earth. Not her new lover but her old, lost life. My old life like a prison, she told herself savagely, but her heart called her a fool. She had it all upside down and backward, her heart scolded her. What she thought of as her former imprisonment had been freedom, while this so-called liberation was no more than a gilded cage.

She thought of Shalimar the clown and was horrified again by the ease with which she had abandoned him. When she left Pachigam none of her closest people guessed what she was doing, the dolts. None of them tried to save her from herself, and how could she forgive them for that? What idiots they all were! Her husband was super-idiot number one and her father was super-idiot number two and everyone else was pretty close behind. Even after Himal and Gonwati returned to Pachigam without her and the bad talk began, even then Shalimar the clown sent her trusting letters, letters haunted by the phantom of their murdered love. I reach out to you and touch you without touching you as on the riverbank in the old days. I know you are following your dream but that dream will always bring you back to me. If the Amrikan is of assistance well and good. People always talk lies but I know your heart is true. I sit with folded hands and await your loving return. She lay perspiring on her bed, held captive by the chains of her enslaving solitude, and tore the letters into smaller and smaller pieces. They were letters that humiliated both their author and their recipient, letters that had no business existing, that should never have been sent. Such thoughts should never have come into being, and would not have, were it not for the enfeebled mind of that man without honor whom it was her shame to have espoused.

The paper scraps fell from her enervated summer hand and floated like snowflakes to the bedroom floor, and indeed the messages they bore were as irrelevant to her new life as snow. What kind of husband was he anyway, this clown? Was he storming the capital in his wrath like a Muslim conqueror of old, a Tughlaq or Khilji at least if not a Mughal, or, like Lord Ram, was he at least sending the monkey-god Hanuman to find her before he launched his lethal attack on her abductor, the American Ravan? No, he was mooning over her picture and weeping into the waters of the stupid Muskadoon like an impotent goof, accepting his fate like a true Kashmiri coward, content to be trampled over by anyone who felt like doing a bit of trampling, a wrong-headed duffer who quarreled with his brother Anees who at least had the guts to take matters into his own hands and blow up a few useless things. He was behaving like the performing dog he was, a creature who imitated life to make people laugh but who had not the slightest understanding of how a man should live.

On the night she first lay with him, she remembered, he had menaced her lovingly, swearing to pursue her and take her life, hers and her children’s, if she ever did what she had just so callously done. What empty words men spoke when they had had their way with a woman. He was a weakling, a strutting turkey-cock, a fool. In his place she would have hunted herself down and murdered herself in a gutter, like a dog, so that the shame of it would outlive her.

The letters stopped. But still every night in her dreams he came to her, walking the high wire, jumping rope in the sky, bouncing on air as if it were a trampoline, playing leapfrog with his brothers along the high thin line, pretending to slip on an invisible banana skin, windmilling his arms, saving himself, regaining his balance, then slipping on a second imaginary banana skin and falling in a skillfully chaotic tumble all the way to the ground, a finale that always brought the house down. In her dreams she smiled at his genius but when she woke the smile withered and died.

In short, she could not get her cuckolded husband out of her mind, and because it was impossible to talk to her American lover about anything important she spoke heatedly of “Kashmir” instead. Whenever she said “Kashmir” she secretly meant her husband, and this ruse allowed her to declare her love for the man she had betrayed to the man with whom she had committed the act of treason. More and more often she spoke of her love for this encoded “Kashmir,” arousing no suspicion, even when her pronouns occasionally slipped, so that she referred to his mountains, his valleys, his gardens, his flowing streams, his flowers, his stags, his fish. Her American lover was obviously too stupid to crack the code, and attributed the pronoun slippage to her incomplete command of the language. However he, the ambassador, took careful note of her passion, and was plainly moved when she was at her angriest, when she castigated “Kashmir” for his cowardice, for his passivity in the face of the horrible crimes committed against him. “These crimes,” he asked, reclining on her pillows, caressing her naked back, kissing her exposed hip, pinching her nipple, “these would be actions of the Indian armed forces you’re talking about?” At that moment she decided that the term “Indian armed forces” would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body, so, “Yes, that’s it,” she cried, “the ‘Indian armed forces,’ raping and pillaging. How can you not know it? How can you not comprehend the humiliation of it, the shame of having your boots march all over my private fields?” Again, those telltale slips of the tongue. Your boots, my fields. Again, distracted by her inflamed beauty, he paid no attention to the errors. “Yes, dearest,” he said in a muffled voice from between her thighs, “I believe I do begin to understand, but would it be possible to table the subject for the moment?”

Time passed. Max Ophuls knew that Boonyi Noman did not love him but at first he shut the knowledge away, blinding himself to its consequences, because she had taken up temporary residence in a tender corner of his heart. He knew she hid a great deal of herself from him, exposing only her body, like a true courtesan, like any common whore, but he agreed with himself to forget this, deceiving himself into believing that she reciprocated what he was pleased to call his love. And he allowed her diatribes on the “occupation” of “Kashmir” to affect his thinking, never suspecting that she was secretly railing against himself and against the ineffectual husband who had failed to come to her rescue. He began to object, in private session and in public speeches, to the militarization of the Kashmir valley, and when the word oppressors passed his lips for the first time the bubble of his popularity finally burst.

Newspaper editorials lambasted him. Here, they said, here beneath all the phony Indiaphile posturing, was just another cheap “cigarette” (this was a slang term meaning a Pak-American, an American with Pakistani sympathies, a play on the name of the Pak-American Tobacco Company), just another uncomprehending gringo. America was trampling over southeast Asia, Vietnamese children’s bodies were burning with unquenchable napalm fire, and yet the American ambassador had the gall to speak of oppression. “America should put its own house in order,” thundered India’s editorial writers, “and stop telling us how to take care of our own land.” It was at this point that Edgar Wood, correctly identifying the source of the ambassador’s problems, decided that Boonyi Noman had to go.