Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

He said: There are six of us climbing the paths. The invisible commander, Anees’s boss, says he has no regrets. We have left Anees behind, left him to his outmoded ways, and are heading toward the future. The insurgency is divided; very well then, it is divided. We are throwing in our lot with the radicals over the mountains. The name of the invisible commander is Dar, but there are ten thousand Dars in Kashmir. He says his people were from Shirmal originally. I don’t know any Dars in Shirmal. We all make ourselves up now, we don’t have to be ourselves anymore. He trained as a junior cook, he says, but he has been with the resistance almost from the beginning, almost from childhood. He learned invisibility early and now nobody sees him unless he chooses to let himself be seen. I see his bundled clothes pulled tightly around him, his goggles, the ice crusting his beard. His face is a mystery. He is younger than I am, he says. In the mountains people confide in one another. We whisper our secret lies. We may die at any minute, from the cold, from a bullet. From a frozen bullet. I call him Doorway, Dar-waza, put his name and his old job side by side and that’s what they mean. I call him Naked Mountain because like Nanga Parbat he never shows his face. They say that on those rare days when the mountain unveils herself she is so beautiful that she blinds all who see her. Perhaps my Doorway-Darwaza, my Naked Mountain of a leader, is also an exceptionally handsome man, whose beauty blinds. At any rate he will be my door into the next place. Over the mountains I will be trained and my power will increase. I will meet men of power and draw power from them. I will learn the subtle arts of deception and deceit of which you are already a mistress and I will perfect the art of death. The time for love is past. We may die at any minute. The Indian troops know the routes we use and maybe they are lying in wait. We are going in dead of winter when only crazy people would go because maybe they will not be watching. It is too cold. It is impossible to cross the mountains. We are crossing the mountains. We are impossible. We are invisible and impossible and we are going over the mountains to be free.

Boonyi talked to herself too, about mountain passes and danger and despair. Zoon Misri came up to visit her and heard her friend muttering about the return of the iron mullah and the survival of the rapist brothers, and began to tremble. The basket she had brought Boonyi as a gift, with home-baked breads and kababs wrapped in a cloth, fell from her hand. She ran all the way down the hill to Pyarelal’s house by the stream. “The longer she stays up there in Nazarébaddoor’s hut, the more she begins to sound like some kind of crazy Gujar prophetess herself,” she wept. “Only she’s turning into some sort of curse-giving Nazarébad, just the evil eye without the begone.”

Pyarelal tried to console her. “People who spend a lot of time alone do begin to talk to themselves,” he said. “It means nothing. She probably doesn’t know she’s doing it.” Zoon went on sobbing. “No, she is crazy, she really is,” she insisted, her tongue loosened by emotion. “She talks to Shalimar the clown as if he was sitting right beside her, talks to him about how he’s going to kill her-as if it was some small unimportant thing, you know?-as if it was lovers’ talk, can you imagine?-sweet nothings about death. Hai-hai! She asks where he’s going to stab her first and how many times and what-all-how can a person ask such questions and react as if the answers excited her, as if excuse me ji they aroused her?-and now she’s started saying worse things, things that will be the death not only of her but of me as well.” What things are those, Pyarelal tried to ascertain, but Zoon just shook her head and wept. There were words she could not say, names she could not bring herself to speak. The Gegroo brothers are alive and so is Bulbul Fakh. That was the sentence which would end her life if spoken in Pachigam. As long as it only hung in the air in a madwoman’s hillside hut it might be possible for Zoon Misri to survive. “I can’t visit her anymore,” she told Pyarelal. “Don’t ask me to say why. It’s too dangerous for me up there, that’s all.”

Boonyi said: “They have crossed the Tragbal Pass. No Indian soldiers were lying in wait for them and they have safely crossed. Men have come to meet them and one of these men is Maulana Bulbul Fakh. The iron mullah has placed them under his protection. He lives in Gilgit and plots his triumphant return. The three Gegroos are with him. They were sealed up in the Shirmal mosque like Anarkali but there was a secret passage just like in Mughal-e-Azam. They escaped into the woods and went over the mountains and waited for their time.”

Pyarelal asked her: “How do you know these things?” It was winter, so they were huddled round the fire in her hut. The goats were in the barn he had helped her build. He heard the clanking of the small brass bells around their necks. His daughter was in a condition not unlike a trance. She was at once there in the hut and somewhere else as well. She could hear what he was saying but she was also listening elsewhere. She said: “My husband tells me. He has crossed the mountains to meet the iron mullah. The iron mullah says that the question of religion can only be answered by looking at the condition of the world. When the world is in disarray then God does not send a religion of love. At such times he sends a martial religion, he asks that we sing battle hymns and crush the infidel. The iron mullah says that at the root of religion is this desire, the desire to crush the infidel. This is the fundamental urge. When the infidel has been crushed there may be time for love, although in the iron mullah’s opinion this is of secondary importance. Religion demands austerity and self-denial, says Bulbul Fakh. It has little time for the softnesses of pleasure or the weaknesses of love. God should be loved but that is a manly love, a love of action, not a girlish affliction of the heart. The iron mullah preaches to many hundreds of men from many parts of the world. They are preparing for war.”

Pyarelal asked: “How does your husband tell you this?”

She answered: “He speaks to me as you speak. He is full of fire and death. When you and the sarpanch are no more he will come here for his honor.”

“This then is a part of what he says,” her father needed to know.

“This is the reason we are able to speak,” she replied. “This is our bond that cannot be broken.” She fell sideways and was unconscious. Pyarelal caught her and laid her gently down to sleep. “Then I will never die,” he whispered to her sleeping body. “I will live forever and he will never be released from his oath.”

This was not how things were supposed to go, according to the old story. In the old story Sita the pure was kidnapped and Ram fought a war to win her back. In the modern world everything had been turned upside down and inside out. Sita, or rather Boonyi in the Sita role, had freely chosen to run off with her American Ravan and willingly became his mistress and bore him a child; and Ram-the Muslim clown, Shalimar, misplaying the part of Ram-fought no war to rescue her. In the old story, Ravan had died rather than surrender Sita. In the contemporary bowdlerization of the tale, the American had turned away from Sita and allowed his queen to steal her daughter and send her home in shame. In the ancient tale, when Sita returned to Ayodhya after defending her chastity throughout her captive years, Ram had sent her back into forest exile because her long residence under Ravan’s roof made that chastity suspect in the eyes of the common people. In Boonyi’s story, she too had been exiled to the forest, but it was the people-her friend Zoon, her father, even her father-in-law-who had helped her and saved her life, deflecting her husband’s vengeful knife, making him swear an oath; after which, and at the wrong time, her husband went off to war, and she knew that for him the battle was a form of waiting, that he would fight other enemies, slay other foes, until he was free to return and take her unfaithful life.