Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The evening news bulletin, the least interesting program of the night because of the deadening and often fictionalizing effect of heavy government censorship, usually emptied the tent. People went outside to smoke beedis, joke and gossip. Although men and women sat together inside the Yambarzal auditorium as equal members of the great national television audience, they separated when they emerged, and stood in separate groups. But Firdaus Noman joined neither group; she was a first-timer and remained in her place. An Indian Airlines Fokker Friendship called Ganga after the great river had been hijacked by Pak-backed terrorists, two cousins called Qureshi, who had absconded across the border to Pakistan. The cousins Qureshi had allowed the passengers to leave, then blown up the plane and surrendered to the Pak authorities who had gone through the pretense of jailing them but had refused to entertain Indian requests for extradition. It was manifestly plain that the archterrorist Maqbool Butt who now based himself in Pakistan with the full connivance and collusion of the Pak leadership was behind the exploit. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had visited the terrorists in Lahore, described them as freedom fighters, and declared that their “heroic action” was a sign that no power on earth could stop the Kashmiri struggle. He further promised that his party would contact the Kashmiri National Liberation Front to offer its cooperation and assistance, which would also be given to the hijackers themselves. Thus the Pak régime’s entanglement with terrorism was proved for all the world to see. After some sort of show trial, the report conjectured, the bounders would doubtless be released as heroes. However, the Indian government’s resolve would never weaken. The state of Jammu and Kashmir was an integral part, et cetera et cetera, the end. When the audience charged back into the tent at the end of the news Firdaus stood up and told them about the hijacking, whereupon an extraordinary thing happened. Members of the minority community unanimously condemned the treacherous Qureshi cousins and their leader Maqbool Butt’s desire to destabilize the situation in Kashmir, while members of the majority cheered the hijackers loudly and drowned out the angry Hindus’ protests. There was no trace of a Shirmal-Pachigam divide, no distinction between male and female opinion, only this deep communal rift. The Muslim majority eyed their Hindu pandit opponents with a sudden distrust that crept uncomfortably close to open hostility. Yet a few minutes earlier they had been smoking and gossiping together outside the tent. It was suddenly oppressive to be there in that ugly crowd. Wordlessly, as if some sort of vote had been taken, every member of the pandit community rose up and left the tent. Firdaus remembered Nazarébaddoor’s last prophecy-“what’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words to foretell it”-and her appetite for further TV entertainment disappeared.

The Shirmal-Pachigam road was a humble country lane, rutted and dusty, running along a bund or embankment a few feet higher than the fields on either side; and it was lined with poplar trees. Shalimar the clown was waiting for Firdaus near the midway point of her journey home. He had not been in the television tent; in fact, he had been away for several weeks, because the bhands of Pachigam had been hired by the state government’s cultural authorities to provide entertainment in one of the world’s least entertained areas, the villages and army bases to the immediate south of the de facto border drawn through the broken heart of Kashmir. Abdullah, nursing his damaged hands, had told his talented son to take charge of the troupe. “You’ll have to do it eventually,” the sarpanch had said in a clipped voice stripped of all emotion, “so you may as well start up right now in that godforsaken part of the world in front of our brutalized countryfolk and those Indian soldiers for whom I can’t find the words without using language I do not care to employ in front of my children.” Abdullah’s politics were changing like the rest of him. These days he was disillusioned with the Indian government, which kept putting his namesake, the leader Sheikh Abdullah, in jail, then doing secret deals with him, then reinstalling him in power on the condition that he supported the union with India, then getting irritated all over again when he started talking about autonomy in spite of everything. “Kashmir for the Kashmiris, and everybody else, kindly get out,” Abdullah Noman said, echoing his hero. “Because if we get protected by this army for much longer we’re going to be ruined for good.”

It was a moonless night and Shalimar the clown was wearing dark clothes and had been lying low in the fields and he jumped up in front of Firdaus like a poplar coming to life and scared her. “I’ve been asleep,” he said. She understood at once that her son wasn’t speaking literally but was telling her that he’d arrived at a turning point in his life, which was why she didn’t interrupt him even though he was on fire, speaking to her in the foulmouthed language his father had refused to use, the speech of a man who has started dreaming of death. A cold wind was slicing through her heart. “I’ve been wasting my time,” Shalimar the clown continued. “All I ever learned how to do is walk across a rope and fall over like an idiot and make a few bored people laugh. All that is becoming useless and not just because of the stupid television. I’ve been looking at bad things for so long that I’d stopped seeing them, but I’m not sleeping now and I see how it is: the real bad dream starts when you wake up, the men in tanks who hide their faces so that we don’t know their names and the women torturers who are worse than the men and the people made of barbed wire and the people made of electricity whose hands would fry your balls if they grabbed them and the people made of bullets and the people made of lies and they are all here to do something important, namely to fuck us until we’re dead. And now that I’ve woken up there is something important I need to do also and I don’t know how to go about it. I need you to tell me how to get in touch with Anees.”

Their dark phirans flapped in the night wind like shrouds. “Be glad you’re not a mother in these times,” she answered him. “Because if you were you would be happy that your two quarreling sons were about to be reunited but at the same time you would be filled with the fear that both children would probably end up dead, and the conflict of that happiness and that terror would be too much to bear.”

“Be glad you’re not a man,” he retorted. “Because once we stop being asleep we can see that there are only enemies for us in this world, the enemies pretending to defend us who stand before us made of guns and khaki and greed and death, and behind them the enemies pretending to rescue us in the name of our own God except that they’re made of death and greed as well, and behind them the enemies who live among us bearing ungodly names, who seduce us and then betray us, enemies for whom death is too lenient a punishment, and behind them the enemies we never see, the ones who pull the strings of our lives. That last enemy, the invisible enemy in the invisible room in the foreign country far away: that’s the one I want to face, and if I have to work my way through all the others to get to him then that is what I’ll do.”

Firdaus wanted to beg and plead, to ask him to forget about the monsters in his waking dream, to set aside thoughts of the vanished American, and to forgive his wife and take her back and be happy with life’s blessings, such as they were. But that would make her an enemy too and she didn’t want that. So she agreed to do what Shalimar the clown required, and the next evening after working all day in the fruit orchards she walked to Shirmal again and this time when the news bulletin began she got up and followed Hasina Yambarzal outside, tugging at her shawl to indicate that she wanted a private word. At first, when Firdaus told the waza’s wife what she wanted, Hasina feigned bewilderment, but Firdaus raised the palm of her right hand to indicate that the time for subterfuge was past. “Harud, excuse me,” she said, “but stop, please, your bullshit. I don’t know you as well as I should, but I already know you better than your husband does, who is too besotted with love to see you straight. I recognize the pain in your eyes because I have the same pain in mine. So tell your sons the secretive electricians that when next they run into my son the wood-whittler, my boy who was always so clever with his hands, they should mention that his brother wants to be friends with him again.” The other women were gathered around a brazier of hot coals and began to throw curious glances in their direction, so they started laughing and giggling as if they were sharing risqué confidences about their husbands the waza and the sarpanch. Hasina Yambarzal’s eyes were not laughing, however. “The resistance isn’t a social club,” she giggled, putting her hands over her mouth and widening those calculating eyes as if she had just been told something really awful. “I’m not a fool, madam,” chuckled Firdaus severely. “And Anees will surely understand what I mean.” One of her eyes was lazy but the brightness in it was unmistakably energetic. Hasina shut up fast, nodded and went back into the tent to watch TV.