Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The woman had come to confess. She had carried a burden for a quarter of a century and it had weighed her down; after a lifetime of upright bearing she had entered a stooped old age. The burden, the years, the loneliness had made her body a question mark. She didn’t matter anymore, India thought, she had no power. She had come out of the house of power empty-handed, the flying bird-men had ripped her treasure out of her hands, and people were jeering at her in the street. Why had she come, it was not necessary to receive her condolences in person. She had come to assist the police with their inquiries, she said, sounding like a character from the days of black-and-white television. There aren’t any policemen here, India said, so there’s no one for you to assist.

The woman opened her purse and took out a photograph and tossed it down onto the bed. “The work it took to keep this out of the papers, hah! you have no idea.” Then, talking rapidly, just to get it said, the confession of the lie. “She didn’t die she gave you to me and went back to Kashmir I arranged a plane and a car I sent her where she wanted to go and I never heard of her again so she might as well have been dead but actually she didn’t die.” The name of the village, her mother’s village. The village of the traveling players. The village of Shalimar the clown. “Are you listening to me?” No, India wasn’t listening, she was hearing the words but the picture had all her attention. Her father was dead but her mother was coming back to life, except this wasn’t her mother, this was another lie, her mother was a great dancer, she had seduced Max by dancing for him, so this swollen woman could not be her. She saw the tears fall onto the photograph and realized they were her own. “I’m sorry,” the woman was saying. “Dreadful thing to have done, I suppose. Hah! I’m sure you think so. But she chose to give you up and I chose to take you in. I’m your mother. Forgive me. I made your father lie as well. I’m your mother. Forgive me. She didn’t die.”

Repentance is for the sinner. Forgiveness is for the victim: who looked at the damp photograph, and did not, could not, forgive. Who was all intransigence, not knowing that a harder blow was yet to fall.

“Kashmira,” the woman said, spinning on her heel, removing her hateful unwanted world-altering presence. “Kashmira Noman. That was your given name.” She felt as if the weight of her body had suddenly doubled, as if she had suddenly become the woman in the photograph. Gravity dragged at her and she fell backward on the bed, gasping for air. She heard the bed frame groan, saw in the mirror the mattress yield and sag. Kashmira. The weight of the word was too much for her to bear. Kashmira. Her mother was calling to her from the far side of the globe. Her mother who didn’t die. Kashmira, her mother called, come home. I’m coming, she called back. I’ll be there as fast as I can.

“Today I forgive my daughters,” Olga Volga announced, caressing India’s hair while they both cried. “It don’t matter no more what they done.”

At San Quentin State Prison, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Robert Alton Harris was put to death in the gas chamber. Pellets of sodium cyanide wrapped in cheesecloth were lowered into a small vat of sulphuric acid and Harris began to gasp and twitch. After about four minutes he became still and his face turned blue. Three minutes later he coughed and his body convulsed. Eleven minutes after the execution began Warden Daniel Vazquez declared Harris dead and read out his last words: “You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.” This was a line paraphrased from the Keanu Reeves movie Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Everywhere was a mirror of everywhere else. Executions, police brutality, explosions, riots: Los Angeles was beginning to look like wartime Strasbourg; like Kashmir. Eight days after Harris’s execution, when India Ophuls a.k.a. Kashmira Noman flew out of LAX, heading east, the jury returned its verdict in the trial of the four officers accused of the beating of Rodney King in the San Fernando Valley Foothill Police Division, a beating so savage that the amateur videotape of it looked, to many people, like something from Tiananmen Square or Soweto. When the King jury found the policemen not guilty, the city exploded, giving its verdict on the verdict by setting itself on fire, like a suicide bomber, like Jan Palach. Below India’s rising aircraft drivers were being pulled from their cars and chased and beaten by men holding rocks. The motionless body of a man called Reginald Denny was being savagely beaten. A huge piece of cinder block was thrown at his head by a man who did a war dance of celebration and made a gang sign at the sky, taunting the news helicopters and airline passengers up there, maybe even taunting God. Stores were looted, cars were torched, there were fires everywhere, on, for example, Normandie, Florence, Crenshaw, Arlington, Figueroa, Olympic, Jefferson, Pico and Rodeo. What was burning? Everything. Auto repair shops, Launderlands, Korean eateries, limo services, Rite Aids, mini-marts and Denny’s all over the city. L.A. was a flame-grilled Whopper that night. The lizard people were rising up from their subterranean redoubts; the sleeping dragon had woken. And India, flying east, was on fire also. There is no India, she thought. There is only Kashmira. There is only Kashmir.

She would not be India in India. She would be her mother’s child. As Kashmira, then, Kashmira in a baseball cap and jeans, she walked into the Press Club in Delhi and with American daring asked the old India hands for guidance and help, and was warned that she might have trouble getting press accreditation to go up into the valley with a documentary film crew, or even without one. When these old hands patted her on the back and also on the derrière and counseled her not to even think of going up there, where things were worse than ever, the killings were at an all-time high and foreign backpackers were showing up headless on the hillsides and there was fury in the air, she exploded with rage herself. “Where do you imagine I’ve just come from,” she bellowed, “fucking Disneyland?” The vehemence of her outburst made sure she had their attention, and a few hours later that hot night, sitting in a deck chair on the lawn of another exclusive club near the Lodi Gardens, she drank beer with the most senior member of the foreign press corps and, after establishing that she was speaking one hundred percent off the record, told him her story. “This isn’t journalism,” the Englishman told her. “It’s personal. Forget about the camera and sound equipment. You want to get in? We’ll get you in. As to safety, however, it’s at your own risk.” Three days after this conversation took place she was in a Fokker Friendship bound for Srinagar with papers and introductions and phone numbers and a new name whose meaning she needed to learn. The need didn’t feel like excitement. It felt like pain. As the plane crossed the Pir Panjal she felt as if she had passed through a magic portal, and all at once the pain intensified, it clutched at her heart and squeezed hard, and she wondered in sudden terror whether she had come to Kashmir to be reborn, or to die.

Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinagar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favorite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone. On that last evening Sardar Harbans Singh had been speaking with nostalgia about the glories of the so-called Khalsa Raj, the twenty-seven-year-long period of the nine Sikh governors of Kashmir that followed the conquest of the valley by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1819, during which, as he told his son, “all agriculture blossomed, all crafts flowered, all gurdwaras, temples and mosques were cared for, and everything in the garden was lovely, and even if people criticized Maharaja Ranjit Singh for falling prey to the charms of women, wine and Brahminical practices, what of it? These are not grave failings in a man. You, my son,” he continued, changing tack, “may or may not know much about Brahminical practices or wine, but you had better find yourself a woman before too long. I don’t care how full your warehouses are or how fat your bank balance is. A full godown and a bulging wallet do not excuse an empty bed.”