Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Alas! Not one of the Pachigam contingent of five dancers survived, succumbing to an undetected internal hemorrhage (Himal), an untreated and subsequently gangrenous broken leg (Gonwati), horrific and eventually fatal convulsions brought on by being injected with bad medicines (Ahmed and Razia Joo) and, in the case of Sulaiman Joo, acute viral meningitis caught from a seven-year-old girl who happened to be dying in the bed next to him. There were no relatives on hand to collect the bodies and no facility existed for returning the five dancers to their home village and they were burned on the municipal pyre, even the three Jews.

Their characters were not their destinies.

In early 1991, before the spring thaw, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul felt his life detaching itself from his body in a series of small, painless, inaudible pops. Well, that was all right, he thought, he had nobody to teach anymore except himself, and even to himself he no longer had any knowledge to impart. He spent much time in his small library in those final days, alone with his old books. These books, his true treasure, would also be lost when his time came. He ran his fingers along the worn spines of the treasure vaults on the shelves and pulled out the English romantics. Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain. Ah! Poor Keats. Only the very young could imagine that death was a proper response to beauty. We in Kashmir have heard the Bulbul too, he apostrophized the great poet across space and time, and he may prove to be the death of us all.

He closed his eyes and pictured his Kashmir. He conjured up its crystal lakes, Shishnag, Wular, Nagin, Dal; its trees, the walnut, the poplar, the chinar, the apple, the peach; its mighty peaks, Nanga Parbat, Rakaposhi, Harmukh. The pandits Sanskritized the Himalayas. He saw the boats like little fingers tracing lines in the surface of the waters and the flowers too numberless to name, ablaze with bright perfume. He saw the beauty of the golden children, the beauty of the green- and blue-eyed women, the beauty of the blue- and green-eyed men. He stood atop Mount Shankaracharya which the Muslims called Takht-e-Sulaiman and spoke aloud the famous old verse concerning the earthly paradise. It is this, it is this, it is this. Spread out below him like a feast he saw gentleness and time and love. He considered getting out his bicycle and setting forth into the valley, bicycling until he fell, on and on into the beauty. O! Those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went. No, he would not ride out into Kashmir, did not want to see her scarred face, the lines of burning oil drums across the roads, the wrecked vehicles, the smoke of explosions, the broken houses, the broken people, the tanks, the anger and fear in every eye. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home.

“Ya Kashmir!” he cried out. “Hai-hai! Ya Kashmir!”

He would not see his daughter again, his only child, whose life he had saved by making an exile of her, transforming her into a tribal wild woman. What a strange tale hers had been. He did not know her fully anymore, could not grasp her thoughts. She had turned within herself and was communing with death. As, now, was he. Bhoomi Kaul, Boonyi Noman. He could protect her no longer. He sent her a word of loving farewell and felt a breeze lift it up and carry it away to her enchanted wood.

He wondered if he would live to see the blossom on his apple trees, and felt an answering pop inside himself. Ah, so it would not be long now. It began to snow lightly, the last flakes to fall before the spring. He put on his wedding finery, the clothes he had worn long ago when he married his beloved Pamposh, and which he had kept all this time wrapped in tissue paper in a trunk. As a bridegroom he went outdoors and the snowflakes caressed his grizzled cheeks. His mind was alert, he was ambulatory and nobody was waiting for him with a club. He had his body and his mind and it seemed he was to be spared a brutal end. That at least was kind. He went into his blighted apple orchard, seated himself cross-legged beneath a tree, closed his eyes, heard the verses of the Rig-Veda fill the world with beauty and ceased upon the midnight with no pain.

Anees Noman was captured alive, though suffering from gunshot wounds in the right leg and shoulder, after an encounter with security forces in the southwestern village of Siot, where he had holed up with twenty militant fighters aged between fifteen and nineteen above a food store called Ahdoo’s whose owner called in the troops because the youngsters drank all his cans of condensed milk, a decision he regretted after the army wrecked his shop with grenades that blew out the whole front wall of the small two-story wooden building, and several hundred rounds of automatic fire from an armored vehicle parked at point-blank range which destroyed all the produce that had managed to survive the grenade blast. “Look what your greed has done,” old man Ahdoo complained to the corpses of the militants as they were dragged out of his upstairs room, adding, in an explanation to the world in general, “They drank my imported goods. Goods from foreign! Then what was I to do?”

Several of the dead boys had been involved in the defense of Pachigam against the LeP, and they saved Anees’s life too by coming between him and the grenade blast and bullets. It would have been better if they had let him die in Siot, however, because then he would not have met his end in the secret torture chambers of Badami Bagh, those rooms which had never existed, did not exist and would never exist, and from which nobody ever heard a scream, no matter how loud it was.

On the wall of the room somebody had written two words in black crayon. They were the last words Anees would ever read.

Everybody talks.

After the capture of Anees Noman, the son of the sarpanch of Pachigam, the decision makers of Badami Bagh knew that it was no longer possible for Sardar Harbans Singh or any other high-ranking bleeding-heart string-puller to protect the traitorous sisterfuckers of that village of so-called traditional actors and cooks. General Kachhwaha himself signed the document of authorization and the cordon-and-search crackdown teams moved out on the double. The sheltered status of the bhand village had been a long-standing annoyance to jawans and ranking officers alike. The crackdown on Pachigam would therefore be particularly satisfying, and the gloves, of course, would be off.

The army officer who brought Anees Noman’s body back to his mother’s house, the detachment in charge, did not offer his name or his condolences. The corpse was tossed onto the doorstep, wrapped in a bloodied grey blanket, and the front door was smashed down. Firdaus was dragged out by her grey hair and pushed so that she stumbled over her dead son. A single cry escaped her lips, but after that, in spite of everything she saw on his body, she remained silent, until she stood up and looked the incharge in the eye. “Where are his hands?” she asked. His hands that were so deft, that had whittled and shaped so much. “Give me back his hands.”

Anees’s father knelt proudly by his son, placed his twisted hands together and began to recite verses. The incharge was unimpressed. “Why is your woman making noise about hands,” he said to Abdullah, “when your hands don’t even know how to pray?” He made a gesture and two soldiers grabbed the sarpanch’s hands and pushed them against the floor. “Hands, is it,” the incharge said. “Before going any further let’s straighten these two out right here.”

What was that cry? Was it a man, a woman, an angel or a god who keened thus, who howled just so? Could any human voice make such a desolate noise?