Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Seven nights after the crackdown on Pachigam, to Hasina Yambarzal’s horror, Maulana Bulbul Fakh entered Shirmal in the first of three Jeeps, accompanied by Shalimar the clown and twenty more riders from the terrifying iron commando. Soon the Yambarzal home was besieged by armed men. The iron mullah came inside with a few of his aides, one of whom was the only surviving son of the deceased sarpanch of Pachigam. Even Bombur Yambarzal, a man whose sense of self-importance made him a bad observer of others, noticed the change in Shalimar the clown and later that night, in bed with his wife, he asked her about it. “Tragedy has struck that man so hard it’s not surprising he looks like he would cut your throat if you snapped your fingers at the wrong time, eh, Harud,” he said softly, afraid to raise his voice in case anyone was listening outside. Hasina Yambarzal shook her head slowly. “The tragedy is a new wound, and you can see its pain, that’s for sure,” she answered in a voice as low as her husband’s. “But I also saw in his eyes the thing you’re talking about, and I’m telling you that assassin’s look has been there for a long time. That’s not the look of a man shocked by his family’s death, but the expression of a man accustomed to killing. God alone knows where he’s been or what he’s become, to come back wearing a face like that.”

“Our bereaved brother needs to visit his parents’ graves,” Bulbul Fakh had said without preamble. “For tonight therefore I require your assistance in the matter of accommodation and food for the animals and men.” Bombur Yambarzal shook in his shoes and temporarily lost the power of speech because he was sure that the iron mullah had not forgotten the day he had defied him so many years ago, and so it was Hasina who said, “We’ll do what we can but it won’t be easy because we already have the homeless from Pachigam to feed and find roofs for.” She proposed, however, that the abandoned Gegroo house be opened for the fighters’ use, and the iron mullah agreed. Bulbul Fakh stationed himself in that dusty old ruin with half of his fighters on guard and Bombur personally served them a simple meal of vegetables, lentils and bread. The other fighters ate quickly and then dispersed into the shadows around Shirmal to keep watch.

Shalimar the clown borrowed a pony and rode off alone in the direction of Pachigam without a word to anyone.

“Poor fellow,” Bombur Yambarzal said as he watched him go. Nobody replied. Hasina Yambarzal had noted some time earlier that her two sons were nowhere to be seen, which meant that the instructions she had issued the moment she saw the fighters of the iron commando ride into town were being followed. The thing to do now was for everyone to get indoors. “Come to bed,” she said to Bombur, and he knew better than to argue with her when she used that particular voice.

In the small hours of the night General Hammirdev Kachhwaha’s forces, informed of the situation by Hasina Yambarzal’s emissaries, Hashim and Hatim Karim (who were highly commended for their patriotism and immediately inducted into places of honor in the anti-insurgency militia), launched a major assault on Shirmal. “First the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin started betraying the JKLF,” General Kachhwaha reflected, “and now the people have started betraying the Hizb. The situation has many satisfactory aspects.” The sanitary cordon around the Shirmal area was established so stealthily and swiftly that none of the iron-commando fighters managed to escape. As the noose tightened the sentries in the woods fell back toward the Gegroo house and there made their last stand. When the army tanks rumbled into Shirmal there was no indiscriminate destruction of the type so recently suffered by Pachigam. Cooperation had its rewards, and in any case, thanks to Hasina Yambarzal, the rats were already neatly in their trap. After a brief but overwhelming period of grenade explosions and artillery fire the Gegroo house had ceased to exist and nobody inside it remained alive. The bodies of the iron-commando fighters were brought out. Inside the garments of Maulana Bulbul Fakh no human body was discovered. However, a substantial quantity of disassembled machine parts was found, pulverized beyond hope of repair.

General Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha lying in bed in his darkened quarters at Army HQ, Badami Bagh, slipped contentedly toward sleep. He had been awakened by a phone call informing him of the successful eradication of at least twenty iron-commando fighters and the presumed death of their leader, the jihadi fanatic known as Maulana Bulbul Fakh. General Kachhwaha replaced the receiver, sighed gently and closed his eyes. The women of Jodhpur appeared before him, spreading their arms to welcome him. Soon his long northern marriage would be over. Soon he would return in triumph to that land of hot colors and fiery women and at the age of sixty would be restored to vigorous youth by a beauty whose attentions he had earned, whose sweet attentions he so fully deserved. The beauty approached him, beckoning. Her arm slipped around his shoulder, supple as a snake, and like a snake her leg coiled around his. Then like a third snake her other arm and like a fourth snake her other leg until she was slithering all over him, hanging around his body, licking at his ear with her forked tongues, her many forked tongues, the tongues at the ends of her arms and legs. She had as many arms and legs as a goddess, and multilimbed and irresistible she coiled and tightened around him and, finally, with all the power she possessed, she bit.

The accidental death by king cobra snakebite of General H. S. Kachhwaha was announced at Badami Bagh the next morning and he was buried with full honors in the military cemetery on the base. The details of the accident were not made public but in spite of the authorities’ best efforts it wasn’t long before everyone knew about the writhing swarm of snakes that had somehow penetrated the innermost sanctum of military power in Kashmir, the snakes whose numbers multiplied in the retelling until there were dozens of them, fifty, a hundred and one. It was said, and soon came to be commonly believed, that the snakes had burrowed their way beneath all the army’s defenses-and these were giant snakes, remember, the most poisonous snakes imaginable, snakes arriving after a long subterranean journey from their secret lairs at the roots of the Himalayas!-to avenge the wrongs against Kashmir, and, people told one another, when General Kachhwaha’s body was discovered it looked like he had been attacked by a swarm of hornets, so many and so vicious were the bites. It was not widely known, however, that as she died Firdaus Noman of Pachigam had called down a snake curse upon the army’s head; accordingly, this macabre detail was not a part of the story that did the rounds.

She knew he was coming, could feel his proximity, and prepared for his arrival. She killed the last kid goat, skinned it, dressed it with her choicest herbs and prepared a meal. She bathed in the mountain stream that ran through the meadow of Khelmarg and braided her hair with flowers. She was almost forty-four years old, her hands were rough with toil, she had two broken teeth, but her body was smooth. Her body told the story of her life. The obesity of her insane time was gone but had left its wounds, the broken veins, a looseness in the skin. She wanted him to see her story, to read the book of her nakedness, before he did what he had come to do.

She wanted him to know she loved him. She wanted to remind him of the hours by the Muskadoon, of what had happened in Khelmarg, of the village’s bold defense of their love. If she showed him her body he would see it all there, just as he would see the marks of another man’s hands, the marks that would force him to commit murder. She wanted him to see it all, her fall, and her survival of the fall. Her years of exile were written on her body and he should know their tale. She wanted him to know that at the end of the story of her body she loved him still, or again, or still. She wore no clothes, stirred the pot of food on the low fire and waited.