Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Go up the mountain and die properly. If that was her father’s message to her then she had no choice but to obey. He was no longer outside the woodshed. The snowstorm had stopped and she was alone. She was a fat cow but she would haul herself up that hill to the prophetess’s hut and wait for death to come. There was no end to the list of the things she craved and could no longer have. Food, pills, tobacco, love, peace. She would do without them all. The impossible weight of her absent daughter knocked her flat. As if all the logs in the woodshed had rolled down onto her body. She lay smashed and gasping on the floor. She felt the moorings of her sanity loosen and welcomed the comforting madness. A beautiful day began.

When she emerged from the woodshed she stood knee-deep in whiteness. The wooded hill hung over her like a threat. The meadow of Khelmarg was up there, with its memories of love. And in another direction, in the heart of the evergreen forest, was Nazarébaddoor, the dead awaiting the dead. Each step was an achievement. She was carrying her bedroll and her bag. Her feet her knees her hips all screamed their protests. The snow pushed back against her forward thrusts. Still she went on her slow, thudding way. More than once she fell against the drifts, and getting back to her feet was not easy. Her clothes were wet. She could not feel her toes. Stones hidden beneath the snow cut her feet and buried pine needles stabbed at her. Still she leaned into the slope and forced her legs to move. Speed was unimportant. Motion was all.

She saw Zoon watching her from a distance. The carpenter’s daughter stayed about fifty feet away, and never said a word; but she came all the way up the hill with Boonyi. Sometimes she leapt ahead and then stood waiting like a sentinel, an arm upraised to indicate the easiest path. Their eyes never met, but Boonyi, glad of the help, followed her old friend’s lead. Her thoughts had lost coherence, which was a mercy. It would have been impossible to climb the mountain with Kashmira’s great weight on her back, but her daughter had been mislaid for the moment, somewhere in the jumble of her mother’s mind. Boonyi scooped up handfuls of snow and thrust them greedily in her mouth to slake her thirst.

Halfway up the mountain she found a brown paper parcel in her path. Inside it was the miracle of food: a thick circle of unleavened lavas bread, a quantity of dum aloo in a little tin container, and two pieces of chicken in another such tin. She wolfed it all down, asking no questions. Then up the hill she went again, the heat of the sun punishing her from above, the cold of the snow from below. Her breath came in long wheezing gulps. The forest circled her, whirling about her and about. She was stumbling now, staggering, not even sure if she was going up or down the wooded slope. Faster and faster the trees spun around her, and then unconsciousness came, like a gift. When she awoke she was propped up against the doorway of a Gujar hut.

In the days that followed her hold on her sanity weakened further, so that it seemed to her that she was the one who was alive and everyone else was dead. The interior of Nazarébaddoor’s hut had been cleaned and swept, as if a ghostly presence had known she was coming, and a new mat had been laid on the floor. A fire had been laid and lit and there was dry wood stacked by the side of the fireplace. A pot of bubbling stew, lotus stems in gravy, simmered over the fire, covered by a cheap aluminum plate. There was water in an earthen surahi in a corner. The roof of moss and turf was in bad shape, and water from the melting snow kept dripping through, but she would wake at night to hear the scurrying footfalls of ghosts running over the roof like mice, and in the morning there was new turf in place of the old, and there were no more drips. She cried out for her mother. “Maej.” Her mother Pamposh, nicknamed for the walnut kernel, had come back from the dead to take care of her newly dead child.

When she poked her head out of the hut she thought she saw shadows moving among the trees and she remembered her father’s lesson about Haput the black bear, Suh the leopard, Shal the jackal and Potsolov the fox. These creatures were dangerous and maybe they were closing in on her to kill her but they could not be blamed because they were true to their natures. Only Man wears masks. Only Man is a disappointment to himself. Only by ceasing to need the things of the world and relieving oneself of the needs of the body and so on. Her body ached with hunger and other needs and her head was not entirely her own but for some reason she was not afraid. For some reason she described the shapes in the trees to herself as guardians. For some reason there was always fresh water in the surahi when she awoke and food left at the door or, once she felt well enough to take short walks, on the fire. For some reason she had not been abandoned. One could not expect to jump back into paradise from hell, she told herself. A purgative period in a middle place was required. Slowly the addictions would leave her body and her mind would begin to clear. In the meantime she had her mother by her side. The snow melted and she went out as far as Khelmarg and the wildflowers were coming out. She picked bunches of krats, which could be eaten as a vegetable and was good for the eyes, and shahtar, which produced a sweetly cooling effect when mixed with the whey that was left in a pot at her door. On the slopes of the mountain she found the shrub kava dach, which helped to purify her blood, and she ate, too, the fruit and leaves of the wan palak or goosefoot. The white flowers of the shepherd’s purse or kralamond were everywhere. She picked it and ate it raw. She gathered phakazur, fennel, and daphne, which was gandalun. As she ate the blue-flowered won-hand chicory and lay down in fields of maidan-hand dandelion she felt her life and her mind returning. The flowers of Kashmir had saved her. In her father’s orchards the almond trees would be blooming. Spring had come.

After he learned of her infidelity with the American Shalimar the clown sharpened his favorite knife and headed south with murder on his mind. Fortunately the bus in which he had left Pachigam broke down under a small bridge at Lower Munda near the source of the Jhelum at Verinag. His brothers Hameed and Mahmood, dispatched by their father, caught up with him at the depot, where he was waiting impatiently for the next available carrier. “Thought you could run away from us, eh, little boyi, ” cried Hameed, the louder and more boisterous of the twins. “No chance. We’re double trouble, us.” Troop transport vehicles were refueling all around them and a group of cheroot-smoking soldiers stared idly, and then not so idly-the words double trouble had not been well chosen-at the three quarreling brothers. The army was jumpy. Two nationalist leaders, Amanullah Khan and Maqbool Butt, had formed an armed group called the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front and had crossed the cease-fire line from what they called Azad Kashmir into the Indian sector to launch a number of surprise raids on army positions and personnel. These three argumentative young men could easily be NLF recruits spoiling for a fight. Mahmood Noman, always the more cautious of the twins, said quickly to Shalimar the clown: “If those bastards find that dagger you’re carrying, boyi, we’re all going to jail for good.” This was the sentence that saved Boonyi Noman’s life. Shalimar the clown burst into loud, fake laughter and his brothers joined in, slapping each other on the back. The soldiers relaxed. Later that afternoon all three Nomans were on a bus back home.

Firdaus Noman looked into the eyes of her betrayed and cuckolded son Shalimar the clown when his brothers brought him back, and was so horrified that she resolved to give up quarreling forever. Her famous battles with her illustrious husband over the nature of the universe, the traditions of Kashmir and each other’s bad habits had entertained the village for years, but now Firdaus saw the consequence of her fractious disposition. “Look at him,” she whispered to Abdullah. “He has an anger in him that would end the world if it could.”