Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Observe him, this unctuous rodent, this Eager Beaver Wood, this invisible, scurrying oiler of wheels, this subterranean enabler of the visible, this lizard person, this snake at the mountain’s root! A pimp of this ilk, a pander of this water would seem to be ill equipped for the burdensome work of moral disapproval. It is not easy to look down on others when one’s own position lacks elevation. Yet the feat was achieved by the ever-resourceful and duplicitous Wood, who proceeded entirely by inversions. The child of a Bostonian prelate (and therefore a Brahmin of sorts himself), he had turned away from religion at an early age. Having rejected religious observance, he nevertheless continued to harbor a secret love of sanctimony and pomp. Being covertly pompous and sanctimonious, he affected humility and open-minded tolerance. Being humble, he concealed within himself an overweening pride. Being prideful, he offered himself to Max Ophuls as a selfless devotee, an effacer of his own needs, a do-everything, see-nothing man without qualities, a servitor, a low footstool for his high master’s shoe. Thus, though low-natured, he was still able to consider himself high-minded. See him now, coursing through the streets of the Indian capital in a little phut-phut scooter-rickshaw, his white kurta flapping in the wind. Behold the simple chappals on his feet. See him arrive at his residential quarters, and note, if you please, the Indian artworks and memorabilia therein, the Madhubani painting, the Warli tribal art, the miniatures of the Kashmiri and Company schools. Is this not the very picture of a Westerner gone native? Yet this same Wood was privately convinced of the innate superiority of the West, and filled with a shadowy contempt for the nation whose style he sought so assiduously to ape. He was tormented, we may grant him that. Such tergiversations of the soul, such twists in the psyche, such tortuous contradictions between the apparent and the actual, would certainly be painful, we may concede, to endure.

Such a coiled and doubled man-serpent would have been too formidable an adversary for a heavily compromised and largely defenseless young woman in any case, but the truth was that she made his task much easier than he expected; and so, finally, did Max. Things in Delhi had not gone as Boonyi Kaul Noman would have wished. Pink, in her two small lonely rooms, rapidly became the color of her isolation and self-loathing. The blue-white of the neon strip-lighting became the color of judgment, a harsh contemptuous glare that erased shadows and left her no place to hide. And as for the sage-green color of her dance guru’s apartment walls, well, that became the color of her failure. The Odissi master Pandit Mudgal had been scornful of her from the first. He was the guru of Sonal Karnaa and Kumkum Segal! He had taught Alarmel Mansingh! He was the master of Kiran Qunango! No man had done more than he to popularize the Odissi dance form! Where would they all be without him-Aloka Panigrahi, Sanjukta Sarukkai, Protima Mahapatra, Madhavi Mohanty? And now in his mottled old age came this raw, lazy village girl, this kept woman, this nothing. She was a rich American’s toy, and he despised her for that; somewhat he despised himself for taking the Yankee dollars and becoming party to the arrangement, and this, too, he held against her. The lessons had gone badly from the start; nor had there been much subsequent improvement. At length Pandit Mudgal, a thickset man with the physiognomy-and all the sensuality-of an outsized eggplant, told her, “Yes, madam, sex appeal you have, that we can all see. You move and men watch you. That is only one thing. Great mastery requires a great soul and your soul, madam, is damned.” She fled weeping from his sight and the next day the ambassador sent Edgar Wood to tell Mudgal that his salary would be increased-doubled!-if he persevered. Like Charles Foster Kane trying to make a singer out of his discordant wife, Max Ophuls tried to buy what could not be bought, and failed. Jayababu, once long, lean and beautiful and now a dark brinjal of a man, an ill-tempered eggplant, refused the cash.

“I am a man for a challenge,” he told Edgar Wood. “But this girl is not for me. Hers is not the high calling, but the low.”

Max’s attention began to wander after that, though for a long time he refused to acknowledge the change in himself. He stayed away from Boonyi for longer periods. Once or twice he dined privately with his wife. Peggy Ophuls was annoyed with herself for feeling so pleased. She was legendary for her toughness but with him she was always weak. How easily she came back to him, how pathetically she opened her arms and let him slink shamefacedly home! He murmured something about the old days, about the Pat Line or the Lyons Corner House, and at once floods of repressed emotion surged through her body. He did his imitation of the vocal style of Mrs. Shanti Dickens of Porchester Terrace as she relished the day’s crime reports- “Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it? Maybe ’e is heatin’ ’er for ’is tea!” -and tears of laughter stood in the Grey Rat’s eyes. This time had been the hardest of all for her. She had lost him for so long that she had feared she would never get him back. But here he was, coming round to face her again. This was what they had, she told herself, this inevitability. They were built to last. She raised a glass to him and a smile trembled at the corners of her mouth. I am the most deluded woman in the world, she thought. But look at him, here he is. My man.

None of Max Ophuls’s amours ever lasted very long before he came to India. Boonyi had been different. This was “love,” and the nature of love was-was it not?-to endure. Or was that just one of the mistakes people made about love, Max got to wondering. Was he clothing an essentially savage, irrational thing in the garb of civilization, dolling it up in the dress shirt of endurance, the silk trousers of constancy, the frock coat of solicitude and the top hat of selflessness? Like Tarzan the ape man when he came to London or New York: the natural rendered unnatural. But under all the fancy apparel the untamable, unkind reality still remained, a feral thing more gorilla-like than human. Something having less to do with sweetness and tenderness and caring and more to do with spoor and territory and grooming and domination and sex. Something provisional, no matter what sort of treaties you acceded to, signed marriage contracts or private statements of accord.

When he began to speak in this way the matador Edgar Wood understood that the bull was tiring, and sent in the picadors, or, to be precise, the picadoras. The beauties he aimed at Max were carefully selected from the upper echelons of Delhi and Bombay society to make Boonyi look bad. They were wealthy, cultured, accomplished, extraordinary women. They circled him from a distance, then moved closer in. The lances of their flirtatious regard, their graceful motion, their touch, speared him time and time again. He fell to his knees. He was almost ready for the sword.

So perhaps it was her failure to be exceptional as well as beautiful that damned Boonyi, or perhaps it was just the passage of time. Shut away in her pink shame, sometimes for days on end (for the ambassador was an increasingly busy man), with only the opprobrium of her dance master for company, she slid downwards toward ruin, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. The excess of Delhi deranged her, its surfeit of muchness, its fecal odors, its hellish noise, its anonymity, its uncaring crowd of the desperate fighting to survive. She became addicted to chewing tobacco, keeping a little cud of it nestled between her lower molars and her cheek. To pass the empty time she frequently fell ill in a languid, faux-consumptive way, and (more truthfully) suffered often from stress, depression, hypertension, stomach trouble and all the other hysteric ailments, and so as the slow months passed she began to learn about medication, about the capacity of tablets and capsules and potions to make the world seem other than it was, faster, slower, more exciting, calmer, happier, more peaceful, kinder, wilder, better. Pandit Mudgal’s thirteen-year-old hamal, the household boy whom the dance teacher periodically bedded in an offhand, seigneurial manner, led Boonyi deeper into the psychotropical jungle, teaching her about afim: opium. After that she curled herself into the metamorphic smoke whenever she could, and dreamed thickly of lost joy while time, cruelly, continued to pass.