Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The next morning Firdaus demanded that Abdullah accompany her into the saffron field where, many years earlier, she had disported herself with the young Pamposh Kaul. Here, far from imprudent ears, she told her husband that an evil demon had gotten into their son Shalimar the clown up there in the frozen north, near the Line of Control. “He just wants to kill everyone now,” she told Abdullah Noman. “His wife, okay, that was a problem before, but now it’s also the philandering ambassador, and the whole army, and I don’t know who else. So either a djinni has taken him over or else it has been hiding inside him all this time, as if he was a bottle waiting for someone to uncork him, and either that’s what Boonyi did when she came back from the American or something happened to him when he was far from home. Hai-hai, ” she wailed. “What did my son ever do wrong, to be captured by the devil?”

“That’s not a devil talking, it’s his manhood,” Abdullah Noman told her, without tenderness. “He’s still young enough to have the idea that he can change history, whereas I am getting accustomed to the idea of being useless, and a man who feels useless stops feeling like a man. So if he is fired up by the possibility of being useful, don’t put out that flame. Maybe killing bastards is what the times require. Maybe if my hands still worked I would strangle a few myself.”

Discord had entered Pachigam, never to depart. Abdullah Noman did not tell his wife that relations between himself and Shalimar the clown were at a low ebb, partly because the sarpanch hadn’t liked the look of eagerness in his son’s eyes when the opportunity to replace his father as leader of the bhands had presented itself, but mostly because of the creepy feeling that Shalimar the clown was waiting for Abdullah and Pyarelal Kaul to die, so that he could be released from his oath. These days the two sexagenarians didn’t speak much. Abdullah had started mentioning the word azadi, but to Pyarelal the word didn’t mean freedom but something more like danger, and it made a difficulty between the two old friends. They did their work and thought their thoughts and came together for panchayat meetings, after which Pyarelal went back to his home at the far end of the village and stayed there staring at the burning pinecones in the fire. But Abdullah Noman knew that the pandit had the same problem as himself with the watchful stare of Shalimar the clown; it was like being watched by a vulture or a carrion crow. It was like being watched by Death himself. So if Shalimar the clown wanted to go off into the mountains with Anees and the liberation front fighters, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing on the whole, let the fellow go and do what he had to do, even if the liberation front was still a bunch of comedians trying to find out how to live up to their name.

Two weeks later, Shalimar the clown went to Shirmal to watch television and during the news-bulletin cigarette break he stood by a coal brazier with his back to the secretive electricians and got the instructions he had been waiting for. Hatim and Hashim pretended to be talking to each other about the beauties of the high pine meadow of Tragbal, located at twelve and a half thousand feet above sea level and looking down on the Wular Lake, and agreeing that it would be at its loveliest soon after midnight tomorrow. Shalimar the clown walked away from them without commenting, and went into Bombur Yambarzal’s tent to join in the furious argument that had broken out in there on account of Hasina Yambarzal’s announcement that from now on an admission fee would be charged, a small fee, the merest token, because life was not a charity, after all. People should respect what the Yambarzals were doing for them, and the tickets would be a sign of that respect. After she said this people began shouting in a way that didn’t sound respectful at all, whereupon that incisive and pragmatic lady bent down, picked up the electric cord and broke the connection. That shut everyone up at once, as if she had pulled out their plugs as well, and her very sensible sons came in with brass bowls and went around the audience gathering low-denomination coins. Shalimar the clown paid up, but when the soap opera returned to the screen he left without watching what happened to the weeping heroine in the clutches of her wicked uncle. He was all done with weeping heroines. He was going to the Wular Lake to enter the world of men.

Shalimar the clown left Pachigam the next morning carrying nothing but the clothes he stood up in and the knife in his waistband and was not seen again in the village for fifteen years. Above the shining shield of the Wular Lake and just below the Tragbal field he met his future on a hillside strewn with boulders. His future took the shape of a pair of men with woollen hats pulled low over their eyes and scarves wrapped around the lower parts of their faces. One of these men was whittling a wooden bird. Another was Bombur Yambarzal’s stepson, Hashim Karim. There was a third man standing behind a rock, and that was the man who mattered. “You wished to see your brother,” the man behind the rock said. “Your brother is here.” Anees’s knife went on whittling wood without pausing. “This would be touching,” said the man behind the rock, “if we were in the business of being touched. Or maybe it would be funny, if we were in the laughing business. Why don’t you tell me what I’m doing here listening to a crummy play-actor who wants to play an action hero for real, and maybe a martyr as well.” Shalimar the clown remained calm. “I need to learn a new trade,” he said. “And you’re going to need people with those skills as time goes by.” The man behind the rock thought about this. “What I hear,” he said, “is that you’ve been talking big to anyone who’ll listen about all the people you intend to wipe out, including the former American ambassador. That sounds like clown behavior to me.” Shalimar’s face tightened. “For now and until freedom comes I’ll kill anyone you want me to,” he said, “but yes, one of these days I want the American ambassador at my mercy.”

There was a grunt from behind the rock. “And I want to be the king of England,” the invisible man said. Then there was a long silence. “Okay,” said the man behind the rock. A longer silence followed. Shalimar the clown turned to his brother, who shook his head. “In some minutes,” said Anees Noman, “it will be our turn to leave.” “Am I coming with you?” asked Shalimar the clown. His brother’s whittling knife paused for one brief beat.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re coming.”

Before they left that hillside Shalimar the clown went behind a boulder to relieve himself. Only after the hot stream died away did he look down and see the enormous snake, the king cobra, lying coiled under the rock, an inch away from the puddle. During his exploits with the liberation front he often thought about that sleeping serpent, which reminded him of his mother Firdaus’s superstitions. “Snake luck,” he said one day to his brother as they crouched behind a rock near Tangmarg waiting for an army troop convoy to pass over the mines they had laid in the steeply ascending road. “I must have snake luck on my side. It’s a good sign.” Anees Noman’s habitual melancholy was deepened by this excavated memory of a mother he feared he might never see again, but he disguised his sadness and twisted his face into a rueful smile. “Anyway,” Shalimar the clown whispered further, “it’s what we do. I mean, pissing on a snake. If that snake had woken up that night, I’d be a dead man now. But this snake, the one we keep pissing on, it’s awake all right, awake and wet and mad.”

Anees chewed the end of a beedi gloomily. “Just aim for its motherfucking eyes,” he said. His vocabulary had been coarsened by the years. “If you piss hard enough maybe you’ll drill a hole in its sisterfucking head.”