Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The sarpanch was in a distracted state of mind. His health had begun to deteriorate. He had started feeling the first twinges of the pain in his hands that would eventually cripple them, leaving them frozen into useless claw-shapes that made it hard for him to eat or hold tools or wash his own behind. As the pain grew so did his feelings of discontentedness. He felt caught in between things, between the past and the future, the home and the world. His own needs were in conflict. Some days he longed for the applause of an audience and regretted the slow decline in the fortunes of the bhand pather thanks to which such gratification was harder and harder to come by, while at other times he yearned for a quiet life, sitting smoking a pipe by a golden fire. Even greater was the conflict between his personal requirements and the needs of others. Maybe he should give up his position as village headman. Maybe one could only be selfless for so long, and after that it was time for a little selfishness. He could not go on forever holding everyone in his hands. His hands were hurting. The future was dark and his light had begun to dim. He needed a little gentleness.

“Treat him gently,” Abdullah told Firdaus absently, thinking mostly about himself. “Maybe your love can put out the flame.”

But Shalimar the clown withdrew into himself, barely speaking for days at a time except during rehearsals in the practice glade. Everyone in the acting troupe noticed that his style of performance had changed. He was as dynamically physical a comedian as ever, but there was a new ferocity in him that could easily frighten people instead of making them laugh. One day he proposed that the scene in the Anarkali play in which the dancing girl was grabbed by the soldiers who had come to take her to be bricked up in her wall might be sharpened if the soldiers came on in American army uniform and Anarkali donned the flattened straw cone of a Vietnamese peasant woman. The American seizure of Anarkali-as-Vietnam would, he argued, immediately be understood by their audience as a metaphor for the Indian army’s stifling presence in Kashmir, which they were forbidden to depict. One army would stand in for another and the moment would give their piece an added contemporary edge. Himal Sharga had stepped into Boonyi’s old role and didn’t like the idea. “I know I’m not a great dancer,” she said petulantly, “but you don’t have to turn my big drama scene into some kind of silly stunt just because you have a reason for hating Americans.” Shalimar the clown rounded on her so savagely that for a moment the gathered players thought he was going to strike her down. Then he suddenly deflated, turned away and went to squat dejectedly in a corner. “Yes, bad idea,” he muttered. “Forget it. I’m not thinking straight just now.” Himal was the prettier of Shivshankar Sharga the village baritone’s two daughters. She went over to Shalimar the clown and put her hand on his shoulder. “Just try seeing straight instead,” she said. “Don’t look for what’s not here, but look at what there is.”

After the rehearsal Himal’s sister Gonwati warned her, with the bitter almond of spite souring her words, that her cause was hopeless. “When you stand next to Boonyi you completely disappear,” she said, gravely malicious behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. “Just the way I vanish when I’m standing next to you. And in his mind you’ll always be standing next to her, a little shorter, a little uglier, with a nose that’s a little too long, a chin that’s a little too weak and a figure that’s too small where it should be big and too big where it should be small.” Himal grabbed her sister’s long dark plait high up, near her head, and pulled. “Stop being a jealous bitch, four-eyes,” she said sweetly, “and just help me catch him like a good ben should.”

Gonwati accepted the rebuke and put aside her own hopes in the family cause. The Sharga sisters set about plotting the capture of Shalimar the clown’s broken heart. Gonwati asked him the name of his favorite dish. He said he had always been partial to a good gushtaba. Himal at once set to work with a will, pounding the gushtaba meat to soften it, and when she offered him the results as a gift “to cheer you up” he immediately popped a meatball in his mouth. A few seconds later the expression on his face told her the bad news, and she confessed that she was famous in her family as the worst cook they had ever known. Next, Gonwati suggested to Shalimar the clown that Himal could replace Boonyi in the tightrope routine they had developed, and which he could not perform without a female aide. Shalimar the clown agreed to teach Himal to walk the wire, but after a few lessons, when the wire was still just a foot off the ground, she confessed that she had always suffered dreadfully from vertigo, and that if she ever stepped out across the air even her desire to please him would not prevent her from falling to her death. The third strategy was more direct. Gonwati told Shalimar the clown that her sister had recently been unlucky in love herself, that a bounder from the village of Shirmal whose name she would not deign to speak had toyed with her affections and then spurned her. “The two of you should comfort each other,” she proposed. “Only you can know how she suffers, and only she can come close to grasping the scale of your terrible grief.” Shalimar the clown allowed himself to be prevailed upon and accompanied Himal on a moonlit walk by the waters of the Muskadoon. But under the double influence of the moonlight and his beauty poor Himal lost her head and confessed that the Shirmali rascal didn’t exist, that he, Shalimar the clown, had always been the man she loved, there was nobody else but him for her in the whole of Kashmir. After this third catastrophe Shalimar the clown kept his distance from the Sharga sisters who continued, nevertheless, to hope.

The idea of declaring Boonyi dead was Gonwati Sharga’s brainwave. Gonwati’s bespectacled features gave her a look of studious virtue that concealed her sneaky chess-player’s nature. “He’ll never forget that woman while she’s alive,” her sister said mournfully after the disaster of the moonlit walk. “God, sometimes I wish she was dead.” Gonwati answered, without at first understanding what she was saying, “Hold tight, ben. Wishes can come true.” In the next few days her purpose revealed itself to her, and then she set about making other people believe they had had the idea all by themselves. Over a family dinner she quoted her sister’s sentiment back at her. “If that Boonyi was dead instead of just in Delhi with her American,” she said, “then perhaps poor Shalimar could start up his life again.” Her father Shivshankar Sharga snorted a deep baritone snort. “In Delhi with an American,” he said, thumping the table with his fist, “is what I call as good as dead.” Gonwati turned large myopic eyes upon Shivshankar. “You’re in the panchayat,” she said. “So couldn’t you make that official?”

Before the next panchayat meeting Shivshankar sounded out Habib Joo the dancing master on the subject of declaring Boonyi deceased. “She is dead to me,” he answered, and then confessed to a guilty sense of responsibility for her misdeed. “It is the skill I taught her that she used to betray us all.” That was two out of five. Together they approached Big Man Misri. “I don’t know,” the carpenter said doubtfully. “Zoon loved her, after all.” Shivshankar Sharga found himself arguing the case vehemently. “Don’t you want to make it difficult for men to run off with our girls?” he demanded. “After what happened in your household, I’d have thought you’d be the first to go along with our plan.” That was three out of five; which left the two fathers, Pyarelal and Abdullah, to persuade. “The sarpanch is so soft-hearted he will be a hard nut to crack,” said Gonwati when her father reported progress a few evenings later. “Trust me, it is Boonyi’s own daddy who will agree.”