Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

“I want to tell you what I think of you,” she said.

Her English had improved and he had learned her language too. At their closest they had sometimes forgotten which language they were speaking; the two tongues blurred into one. As they drifted apart so did their speech. Now she spoke her own language and he spoke his. Each understood the other well enough. He had known there would be abuse and there was abuse. There were empty threats and accusations of betrayal. All this he comprehended. Look at me, she was saying. I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born. Look at me. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love, your destructive, selfish, wanton love. Look at me. Your love looks just like hatred. I never spoke of love, she was saying. I was honest and you have turned me into your lie. This is not me. This is not me. This is you.

And then came another, older line of attack. I should have known, she was saying. I should have known better than to lie with a Jew. The Jews are our enemy and I should have known.

The past reared up. Briefly he saw again the army of the Jewish fallen. He set the memory aside. The wheel had turned. In this moment of his story he was not the victim. In this moment she, not he, had the right to claim kinship with the lost. At least I never spoke of love, she was saying. I kept my love for my husband though my body served you, Jew. Look what you have made of the body I gave you. But my heart is still my own.

“You never loved me, then,” he said, hanging his head, when she had finished. He sounded ridiculously false and hypocritical even to himself. She was laughing at him, viciously. Does a rat love the snake that gobbles it up, she was asking. He winced at the sharpness of her tongue, at the violence welling up in her. “You will be well looked after. Everything you need,” he said, and turned to go. In the doorway he paused. “I once loved a Rat,” he said. “Maybe you were the snake that ate her.”

The scandal broke a week later. A baby changed things. A pregnancy could not be winked at. Max Ophuls never found out who leaked the information to the papers-Boonyi herself, or the eggplant dancing master downstairs, or his young catamite, or one of the group of drivers and security guards handpicked for their alleged discretion by Edgar Wood, or even Wood himself, Wood washing his hands after many years of his master’s grubby work-but within days of Max’s last meeting with Boonyi, every journalist in the city had the story.

It was not the biggest story of the period, but it fed naturally into those stories. The working committee of the national conference of Jammu and Kashmir had unanimously passed a resolution calling for a permanent merger of the state with India. Indira Gandhi had asked for and been given powers to outlaw groups that questioned Indian sovereignty over the valley. A Kashmiri girl ruined and destroyed by a powerful American gave the Indian government an opportunity to look like it would stand up and defend Kashmiris against marauders of all types-to defend the honor of Kashmir as stoutly as it would defend that of any other integral part of India. Nothing less than Max’s head on a plate would do. His friend Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had retired from the presidency; the new president, Zakir Hussain, was making angry statements in private about the godless American’s exploitation of an innocent Hindu girl. Nobody had said the words sexual assault yet but Max knew they could not be far from people’s lips. He was no longer the well-beloved lover of India, but her heartless ravisher. And Indira Gandhi was out for blood.

The Vietnam War was at its height and so was American unpopularity in Asia. Draft cards were burned in Central Park and Martin Luther King led a protest march to the United Nations and in India the goddamn American ambassador was apparently fucking the local peasantry. So war-torn America turned on Max as well, his alleged oppression of Boonyi becoming a sort of allegory of Vietnam. Norman Mailer wrote about Boonyi and Max as if she were the countryside near Saigon and he was Operation Cedar Falls. Joan Baez made up a song about them. These interventions were not sympathetic to Max Ophuls. It was as if his previous selves were erased overnight-the Resistance hero, the bestselling author, the economic genius, the famous lover of his equally heroic wife, and the Flying Jew-and standing in their place was this Bluebeard-like ogre, this sexual predator who was fit for nothing but gelding. Tarring and feathering were too good for the likes of him. Che Guevara was killed around then, and that was just about the only thing that happened that wasn’t laid at Max’s door.

Back then there were no “media sieges” in the modern sense. All-India Radio sent a radio reporter to stand uncertainly outside the sage-green apartment building at Type-1 Number-22 Southeast Hira Bagh, holding out his microphone as if it were a begging bowl. Doordarshan, in those days the only television channel, sent a cameraman and sound recordist. The text of what they were permitted to say in commentary would no doubt be handed down later from the prime minister’s office, so there was no need to send a journalist. There was a man from the PTI news agency and two or three other men from the print media. They saw Odissi dancing divas come and go, and Jayababu’s boy running errands. The anonymous occupants of other apartments in the same building had seen nothing, knew nothing, shied away from the cameras and microphones as if from danger, and fled. Just once the great Jayababu himself sallied forth to scold the press for making too much noise and disturbing his dance class, whereupon the abashed reporters at once commenced to speak in whispers. Of the principal actors in the drama there was no sign. At mealtimes the watchers dispersed to seek refreshment, and they soon lost interest in staying at their posts. Delhi in winter was cold as a ghost and in the mornings and evenings the fog came down and pushed its clammy hands through your skin and froze your bones. There was no need for anyone to stay. The news was being constructed elsewhere. The American ambassador was being withdrawn in disgrace. The U.S. embassy was the place to be. Hira Bagh was just a gossipy footnote. In the winter mist it looked like a phantom world.

One fog-white night, at about three o’clock in the morning, long after the gentlemen of the press had departed, a hooded figure arrived at Boonyi’s pink apartment. When the pregnant woman beached on her bed like a stranded sea-monster heard the key turning in her front door she assumed it was Edgar Wood making his nocturnal food run. These days he only visited her in the middle of the night, arriving out of breath, burdened by huge amounts of edibles. She had no sympathy for him. He was a necessary side effect of a sick life, like vomit. “I’m hungry,” she called out. “You’re late.” He came into the bedroom wincing as if he were a schoolboy in a bully’s armlock, a child whose ear was being twisted by a disciplinarian aunt. The hooded figure followed him into the room, unveiled herself, and looked Boonyi over with a brisk, nannyish sympathy. “Oh, dear me,” she said. “Dear me, what a dreadful… ha! Can you believe it, my dear, I almost envied-haha!-oh, leave it.-But there’s this. I almost forgave him. Can you believe that ? - Extraordinary.-But I almost did, in spite of everything. In spite, my dear, of you.-But look at you. No discipline. We can’t have this.-Hmm.-Edgar, you vile sticky creature, have you made the arrangements?-Well, of course you have, it’s what you do.-It’s what he does, dear. Yes, you loathe him too, of course you do, everyone does.-Harrumph.-We’re going to get you away from here, my dear.-You’ll be needing care. We’ll see you through.-Oh, I see. You misunderstand me.-No, my husband did not send me here. He has left the country. He has left the diplomatic service. However, let me be plain, he has not left me. It is I who have left him.-You follow?-Hmm?-Left him after everything and in spite of everything and at the end of it all.-Oh, let it go.-The point is to get you somewhere else. No more prying eyes and a spot of good medical care.-Hmm?-How far gone are you? Seven months?-More? Eight? Aha. Eight. Good. Won’t be long, then. Oh, get on with it, Edgar, for Christ’s sake.-Edgar’s been sacked too, dear, I thought you’d like to know. I’ll make sure this little shit never works for his country again, I promise you that.-Tonight’s your last hurrah, isn’t it, Edgar? Outlived your blasted usefulness, I’d say.-Poor Edgar. What will you do?-Ha!-No, on reflection, I don’t think we’re going to worry about you, are we, dear?-No.-Well then, Edgar: where’s the bally van?”