Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

“Around the corner.” Thus Edgar Wood through gritted teeth. “But I warned you she might be too big to fit through the door.” Margaret Rhodes Ophuls whirled to face him, shriveling him in the dragon-fire of her gaze. “Quite right, Edgar,” she said, sweetly. “So you did. Run along then, and fetch the bloody sledgehammer.”

Boonyi gave birth to a baby daughter in a clean, simple bedroom in Father Joseph Ambrose’s Holy Love of India Evangalactic Girls’ Orphanage for Disabled & Destitute Street Girls, located at 77-A, Ward-5, Mehrauli, an institution that had benefited greatly from the ex-ambassador’s wife’s fund-raising skills and personal largesse. In spite of everyone at the Evangalactic Orphanage’s affection and admiration for Peggy-Mata, the new resident she had foisted on them was not initially popular. Every detail of Boonyi’s story somehow became common knowledge at the orphanage almost at once. There were girls at the Evangalactic who had been rescued from the whorehouses of Old Delhi at the age of nine, and these children gathered outside Boonyi’s door and conversed in loud, impolite voices about the fallen rich man’s tart who had actually chosen the demeaning life from which they had managed to escape. There were girls who looked like giant spiders because of spinal problems that obliged them to walk on all fours, and they joined the former child prostitutes to jeer at this new type of cripple, who had rendered herself almost immobile through sheer gluttony. There were country girls who had fled to the big city from the dirty old men to whom they had been betrothed-or, rather, sold into betrothal-and these girls, too, added to the crowd at Boonyi’s door to express their disbelief that a woman should leave a good man who had truly loved her.

Things were on the brink of getting out of hand, until Father Ambrose, nudged by Peggy Ophuls, addressed the girls and shamed them into something like compassion. “The holy love of India brought all of you to the harbor of this safe place,” Father Ambrose, a young but charismatic Catholic priest who had grown up in a Keralan fishing village and was accordingly fond of maritime metaphors, rebuked his charges. “God’s love cast out its nets for you upon the filthy seas in which you swam. God caught up your souls from the black water and revealed your shining light. Show me, then, that you, too, can be fishers of the spirit. Cast out the nets of your compassion and bring back to a safe place this new soul crying out for your love.”

After Father Ambrose’s little speech Peggy Ophuls was able to find a few willing helpers, not only a doctor and a midwife but also girls to cook for Boonyi, and to wash her and oil her and comb her tangled hair. Mrs. Ophuls made no attempt to limit the damaged woman’s food intake. “Let’s have the child out safely,” she told Father Ambrose and the orphans (who muttered sullenly, but made no objection). “Then we can think about the mother.”

In due course the baby was born. Boonyi, cradling her daughter, named her Kashmira. “Do you hear me?” she whispered into the little girl’s ear. “Your name is Kashmira Noman, and I’m going to take you home.”

This was when Peggy Ophuls’s face hardened and she revealed her darker purpose, unveiling the secret she had kept hidden until this moment beneath the cloak of her apparently boundless altruism. “Young lady,” she said, “it’s time to face facts. You want to go home, you say?” Yes, replied Boonyi, it is the only thing I now want in the world. “Hmm,” said Peggy Ophuls. “Home to that husband of yours in Pachigam. The one who never came for you. The one who stopped writing. The clown.” Boonyi’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, my dear, I make it my business to know-Ha! I see!-That’s the chap you’re going back to with another man’s baby in your arms?-Mmm?-And you imagine that’s the chap who will give this little girl his name -Kashmira Noman- and take her for his own, and then it’s off into the sunset for a spot of happily ever after?” The tears were streaming down Boonyi’s face. “That’s a nonstarter, my dear,” said Peggy Ophuls unsentimentally, moving in for the kill. “ Noman, indeed!-That’s not her name. And what did you say? Kashmira? No, no, darling. That can’t be her future.” Something new in the tone of her voice made Boonyi dry her tears.

“Tell you what, though,” added Peggy Ophuls, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “Here’s a bit of a plan.-Are you listening? You’d do well to listen.” Boonyi was paying attention now. “It’s winter,” said Peggy Ophuls. “The road over the Pir Panjal is closed. No way into the valley by land.-No matter.-I can give you what you want. I can get an aircraft to fly you in. You’re probably more than one seat wide. That can be taken into account.-You don’t have to worry about nursing the child. I have a wet nurse standing by.-You can probably travel in, what, a week? Let’s say a week. I can have a comfortable vehicle waiting for you at the other end to drive you back to Pachigam in style. How does that sound?-Hmm?-Sounds good, I expect. Ha! Of course it does.”

Boonyi’s tears had dried. “Please, I do not understand,” she said at last. “What is the need for a wet nurse?” As the words left her lips she saw the answer to the question in her benefactress’s eyes.

“Do you know the tale of Rumplestiltskin?” asked Peggy Ophuls, dreamily. “No, of course you don’t.-Well, in brief.-Once upon a time there was a miller’s daughter who was told by one of those whimsical fairy-tale kings, If you have not spun this straw into gold by tomorrow morning, you must die.- You know the type of fellow I mean, dear.-They’ll screw you or chop off your head, those killer princes, love and death being the same sort of thing to them. They’ll screw you and chop off your head. They’ll screw you while your head is being chopped off… - Sorry. As I was saying.-In the middle of the night, while she sat helpless and weeping, locked away in a castle tower, there was a knock at the door, and in came a little manikin, who asked, What will you give me if I do it for you? And he did it, you know, three nights running he spun the straw into gold, and the miller’s daughter lived, and of course she married the whimsical king, and had a child. Silly woman! To marry the man who would have killed her as easily as blinking.-Well!-Scheherazade married her murderous Shahryar, too.-Can’t beat women for stupidity, what?-Take me, for example. I married my whimsical prince as well, the murderer of my love.-But you know all about him, of course, I’m so sorry.-So, where was I.-Yes. In conclusion.-One night the little manikin came back. You know what I came for, he said. Rumplestiltskin was his name.”

They were alone in the room; alone with their desperate needs. The silence was terrible: a dark, hopeless hush of inevitability. But the look on Margaret Rhodes Ophuls’s face was worse, at once savage and happy. “ Ophuls, ” said Peggy-Mata. “That’s her father’s name. And India ’s a nice name, a name containing, as it does, the truth. The question of origins is one of the two great questions. India Ophuls is an answer. To the second great question, the question of ethics, she’ll have to find answers of her own.”

“No,” said Boonyi, shouting. “I won’t do it.” Peggy Ophuls put a hand on the young mother’s head. “You get what you want,” she said. “You live, and go home. But there are two of us here, my dear.-Don’t you see?-Two of us to satisfy. Yes. You know, the night before I came to India I dreamed I would not leave without a child to call my own. I dreamed I was holding a little baby girl and singing her a song I’d made up specially.-And then all this time with all these children I’ve wondered when my child would come.-You understand, I’m sure.-One wants the world to be what it is not.-One clings to hope. Then finally one faces up.-Let’s look at the world as it is, shall we?-I can’t have a baby. That’s clear. More than one reason now. Biology and divorce.-And you?-You can’t keep this little girl. She will drag you down and she will be the death of you and that will be the death of her.-You follow?-Whereas with me she can live like a queen.”