Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Her self-sufficiency was hard won. The food addiction was as painful to break as the chemical dependencies, but in the end her attitude to all things edible became less rapacious. For a long time her father and the other friendly villagers continued to provide her with essential supplies, and she learned how to supplement them. She began to grow her own vegetables. One day she found a pair of young goats tethered to a post outside the hut. She learned how to raise them and as time passed her flock grew. It became possible for her to sell goats’ milk, and other things. Her father carried a metal milk-churn down the hill to the store every day, and tomatoes in season. This was a small rehabilitation. People accepted the idea of paying real money to buy things from the dead. Her days were filled with physical labor and as long as she was using her body the madness was held at bay. Her body strengthened. Muscles made their appearance in her buttocks, arms and legs. Her shoulders hardened and her belly flattened out. This third-phase Boonyi was beautiful in a new way, the bruised, life-hardened, imperfect way of an adult woman. It was her reason that had been bruised most deeply and at night those bruises still hurt. At night, when the day’s work was done, when it was time for the mind to take over from the body, her thoughts ran wild. Some summer nights, she was sure, Shalimar the clown prowled in the trees around the hut. On those nights she deliberately went outdoors and took off all her clothes, challenging him to love her or kill her. She could do this because everybody knew she was mad. Her mother Pamposh came out with her and they danced naked in the moon like wolves. Let a man try to approach them! Let him only dare! They would rip him to shreds with their fangs.

She was right; Shalimar the clown did sometimes climb the hill, knife in hand, and watch her from behind a tree. It comforted him to know she was there, that when he was released from his oath she would be right there to kill, defenseless, just as his life had been defenseless when she ruined it, defenseless and vulnerable just as his heart had once been, defenseless and vulnerable and fragile just like his shattered capacity for trust. Dance, my wife, he told her silently. I will dance with you again one day, for one last time.

Shalimar the clown decided he had to murder the American ambassador at some point not long after the end of the Bangladesh war, around the time that the Pachigam bhands went north to perform near the cease-fire line which had just turned into the Line of Control; that India and Pakistan signed the agreement at Simla which promised that the status of Kashmir would be decided bilaterally at a future date; that the Indian military tightened its choke hold on the valley-because tomorrow was for politicians and dreamers but the army controlled today-and stepped up the toughness of its approach to the majority population; and that Bombur Yambarzal’s wife bought the first television in the locality and set it up in a tent in the middle of Shirmal. Ever since the commencement of television transmissions at the beginning of the 1960s the panchayat of Pachigam had taken the view that as the new medium was destroying their traditional way of life by eroding the audience for live drama, the one-eyed monster should be banned from their village. The waza of Shirmal, however, was swept along by the entrepreneurial spirit of his bride, the red-haired widow Hasina “Harud” Karim, a woman with a strong desire for self-improvement and two secretive sons, Hashim and Hatim, who had learned the electrician’s trade in Srinagar and were keen to bring the village into the modern age. “Give everyone a free show for a couple of months,” Hasina Karim urged her new husband, “and after that you can start charging for tickets and nobody will argue about the cost.”

To finance the purchase of the black-and-white set she sold some pieces of wedding jewelry from her first marriage. Her sons, who, like her, were of a practical cast of mind, made no objection. “You can’t watch soap operas on a necklace,” Hashim the elder pointed out reasonably. The two brothers were not close to Bombur Yambarzal but not opposed to their mother’s new husband either. “If we know you are not lonely then it liberates us to follow our own paths, about which it’s better that you don’t know too much,” Hatim the younger explained. He was a tall young fellow but his mother reached up and ruffled his hair affectionately as if he were a toddler. “I taught my boys good sense,” she said proudly to Bombur Yambarzal. “See how well they calculate life’s odds?”

Once the Yambarzals’ TV soirées got going in Shirmal, evening life changed, even in Pachigam, whose residents proved perfectly willing to set aside the long history of difficulties with their neighbors in order to be able to watch comedy shows, music and song recitals, and exotically choreographed “item numbers” from the Bombay movies. In Pachigam as well as Shirmal it became possible to talk about any forbidden subject you cared to raise, at top volume, in the open street, without fear of reprisals; you could advocate blasphemy, sedition or revolution, you could confess to murder, arson or rape, and no attention would be paid to what you said, because the streets were deserted-almost the entire population of both villages was packed into Bombur the waza’s bulging tent to watch the damn-fool programs on “Harud” Yambarzal’s shining, loquacious screen. Abdullah Noman and Pyarelal Kaul were among the few who refused to go, Abdullah for reasons of principle and Pyarelal on account of the bitter, deepening depression that had spread outwards from his physical person to affect his immediate surroundings, hanging in the enclosed air of his empty home like a bad smell. Some days it would shrivel the riverbank flowers as he walked by. Some mornings it would curdle his milk supply.

Firdaus was itching to see the new marvel but ever since Boonyi’s return she had been working mightily to change her behavior and avoid quarreling with Abdullah, no matter how great the provocation. So after the labors of the day were over she remained grumpily but uncomplainingly at home. After a few days, however, Abdullah couldn’t bear the nightly pressure of her silent frustration anymore. “Damn it, woman,” he expostulated, burbling the water violently in his hubble-bubble pipe, “if you want to walk a mile and a half to sell your soul to the devil, I don’t want to stand in your way.” Firdaus leapt to her feet and put on her outdoor clothes. “What you mean to say,” she told Abdullah with majestic self-control, “is, ‘Dear wife, after all your hard work, you deserve to go off and have a little fun, even if I am such an old curmudgeon that I’ve forgotten what fun is.’” Abdullah gave her a hard look. “Exactly,” he agreed in a new, cold voice, and turned his face away.

All the way over to Shirmal, Firdaus was thinking about that new voice and its shocking coldness. She had given this man her life because of his gentle manner and his air of caring for everyone’s well-being. She hadn’t minded, or had taught herself not to mind, that he had never pampered her, never remembered her birthday, never brought her a bunch of wildflowers plucked by his own hand. She had learned to accept the solitude of her marital bed, had resigned herself to a lifetime of sleeping beside a man whose most prolonged and enthusiastic sexual performance had been less than two minutes in duration. She had admired his concern for their children and for the community whose shepherd he was, and had ignored or at least tried to understand his corresponding lack of interest in the needs and desires of his wife. But something had changed in him since the claw disease began to cripple his hands; his compassion for others had diminished as his self-pity increased. True, he had restrained Shalimar the clown from committing a vile crime; but perhaps that was a last twitch of the dying personality of the old Abdullah, the Abdullah whose gifts were tolerance, moral rectitude and great personal warmth, in whose place this new, crippled Abdullah seemed to be showing up more and more often. In a cold country no woman should live with a cold man, she told herself as she arrived in Shirmal, and her amazement at having considered the possibility of leaving her husband was so great that she failed to pay attention to the miracle of the television broadcast which she had walked all this way to witness, until the news bulletin began.