Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

What then was justice? Was she, in mourning her butchered parent, crying out (she had not wept) for a guilty man? Was Shalimar the assassin in fact the hand of justice, the appointed executioner of some unseen high court, was his sword righteous, had justice been done to Max, had some sort of sentence been carried out in response to his unknown unlisted unseen crimes of power, because blood will have blood, an eye demands an eye, and how many eyes had her father covertly put out, by direct action or indirect, one, or a hundred, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, how many trophied corpses, like stags’ heads, adorned his secret walls?

The words right and wrong began to crumble, to lose meaning, and it was as if Max were being murdered all over again, assassinated by the voices who were praising him, as if the Max she knew were being unmade and replaced by this other Max, this stranger, this clone-Max moving through the world’s burning desert places, part arms dealer, part kingmaker, part terrorist himself, dealing in the future, which was the only currency that mattered more than the dollar. He had been a puissant speculator in that mightiest and least controllable of all currencies, had been both a manipulator and a benefactor, both a philanthropist and a dictator, both creator and destroyer, buying or stealing the future from those who no longer deserved to possess it, selling the future to those who would be most useful in it, smiling the false lethal smile of power at all the planet’s future-greedy hordes, its murderous doctors, its paranoid holy warriors, its embattled high priests, its billionaire financiers, its insane dictators, its generals, its venal politicians, its thugs. He had been a dealer in the dangerous, hallucinogenic narcotic of the future, offering it at a price to his chosen addicts, the reptilian cohorts of the future which his country had chosen for itself and for others; Max, her unknown father, the invisible robotic servant of his adopted country’s overweening amoral might.

Her telephones rang but she didn’t answer them. Her buzzer buzzed but she didn’t respond. Her friends were concerned, they left urgent expressions of concern on her voice mail, they shouted their concern from the street below her balcony, Come on, India, let us in, you’re scaring us here, but she kept her defenses up, her defenses being Olga Volga and the pairs of police officers guarding her floor in two-hour shifts, No visitors, she told them, banishing her increasingly angry friends from her presence. Her beloved friend the high-powered executive headhunter, a gesticulating Italian woman with acute foot-in-mouth disease, sent her an e-mail expressing the general exasperation, Okay, darling, so your dad is dead, okay, it’s sad, I agree, it’s horrible, no question about it, but what, are you going to kill us all as well, we’re dying here with worry, how many deaths do you want on your conscience? But even her closest intimates didn’t feel real to her anymore, not even her film producer friend who had only just survived a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight and who now, restored to health, had taken to recommending the quadruple-bypass operation enthusiastically to all his colleagues, not even her friend the personal trainer, presently unattached, whose eggs had made babies for four other women but who had no children of her own, not even her friend (and former lover) who managed a band whose name changed every day and who kept signing contracts with indie outfits that immediately went belly-up so that the band was getting an unfortunate reputation as a jinx, not even her friend who broke up with her husband because he got angry when she complained about his snoring, not even her friend who left his wife for a man of the same name, not even her geek friend who was losing his dot-com fortune, not even her broke friends who were always broke, not even her cameraman, her sound guy, her accountant, her lawyer, her therapist, these were stories she couldn’t relate to right now, she was the only person who felt real to herself, apart from her dead father and the assassin, they were real, and when she was in the ring with her instructor Jimmy Fish he briefly felt real as well.

Fish was a stocky middle-aged man with thick bottle-black Italian hair, heavy in the gut, his face still handsome in a flat-nosed Marciano way, and he was pulling his punches, which didn’t mean they didn’t hurt. The first time he hit her, in the stomach, avoiding her breasts, she was badly shocked and a little scared, but she stayed calm, the ice didn’t leave her veins, and moments later she connected with a pair of fast left jabs to the chin and had the satisfaction of seeing the anger flare up in his eyes, seeing him working to fight it down. He called a time-out. They were both breathing heavily. “Listen,” he said. “You’re a beautiful lady, you don’t want me to damage anything you can’t fix.” She shrugged. “Seems to me,” she said, “that you’re the one who just got himself cluster-punched in the mouth by a woman.” He shook his head mournfully, and spoke more slowly, like a parent. “You’re not paying attention,” he said. “I was a ranking light-heavy. You know this. I was ranking. I got in the ring with people you don’t want to even imagine getting in the ring with, not even to hold up the card saying what round. You think you can take me? Lady, I’m a professional fighter. You follow? You’re a Sunday driver. Don’t make me hit you. Let me put the pads back on my hands and you can get yourself a great workout, tone that body you got there, that’s like a national treasure. You work with what God gave you and stop dreaming. You think I’m fighting you here? Baby, you can’t fight me. You fight me, you’re dead. Pay attention now. This is serious. You’re not in the family business. You’re a civilian. You’re Kay Corleone. You can’t fight me.”

She touched gloves with him and backed off, going into her crouch, shuffling, dancing. “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” she said. “I don’t come here to talk.”

Her father’s killer was her mother’s husband. The investigation had uncovered this one immense, all-explaining, devastating thing. The crime, which had at first looked political, turned out to be a personal matter, insofar as anything was personal anymore. The assassin was a professional, but the consequences of U.S. policy choices in South Asia, and their echoes in the labyrinthine chambers of the paranoiac jihadi mind, these and other related geopolitical variables receded from the analysis, could with a high percentage of probability be eliminated from the equation. The picture had simplified, becoming a familiar image: the cuckolded and now avenged husband, the disgraced and now very nearly decapitated philanderer, locked in a final embrace. The motive, too, turned out to be conventional. Cherchez la femme. India had learned the murderer’s real name, which sounded more like an alias than his alias, and the reports confirmed his wife’s name as well, her mother’s name, which India knew already because she had found it in an old copy of the Indian Express preserved on microfiche at the British Museum’s newspaper library in Colindale. Neither India’s father nor the woman she lived with when she was a child had ever spoken that name: not once in a quarter-century. Her father had once accidentally referred to his lover by the name of her greatest role, Anarkali, and India, watching him as only children watch their parents, saw an expression cross his face that only crossed it when he thought about her mother, an expression in which his undimmed desire for the young dancing girl mingled with shame, nostalgia and something darker, a premonition of death, perhaps, an intuition of how this particular Anarkali’s story would end. As for the woman who was not her mother, the woman she had lived with when she was a child, on the rare occasions when that woman was forced by India’s questions to allude to the birth mother she used the term paramour, as in your father’s paramour, and when irked by India’s insistence she would say in a tone of finality, We will not speak of her. But now the wheel had turned and it was that woman’s name which was never spoken, not by India, anyhow, whereas Bhoomi a.k.a. Boonyi Kaul Noman’s name was traveling the world’s airwaves on, for example, CNN.