Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

She sat in his olive-green Toyota Qualis and when they drove out of the gates of his house, that tiny Shangri-La, that miraculous island of calm in the middle of a war zone, she gave him a sidelong look, half expecting him to wither and die, to age horribly before her eyes as immortals do when they leave their magical paradise. But he remained himself, his beauty and grace undimmed. He saw her looking at him and was vain enough to blush. “Your home, your garden, is so beautiful,” she said quickly, seeking to disguise the light in her eyes: too late. His blush deepened. A man who blushed was irresistible, it could not be denied. “In my childhood, it was a heaven inside a heaven,” he said. “But now Kashmir is no longer heavenly and I am not a gardener like my father. I fear the house and garden will not last, without.” He stopped in midsentence. “Without what?” she teased him, guessing the unspoken words, but he blushed again and concentrated on the road ahead. Without a woman’s touch.

Kashmir in spring, the leaves budding on the chinars, the swaying poplars, the blossom on the fruit trees, the cradling mountains circled all around. Even in its time of darkness it was still a place of light. How easy it was, at first, to avert the gaze from the burned-out houses, the tanks, the fear in every woman’s eye, the different terror in the eyes of the men. But slowly the spell of Sardar Harbans Singh’s garden wore off. Yuvraj’s mood darkened also. “Tell me,” she said. “I want to know.” “It is hard to speak of such things,” he said. This is real life. “I need to know,” she said. Awkwardly, full of euphemisms at first and then more plainly, he told her about the two devils tormenting the valley. “The fanatics kill our gents and the army shames our ladies.” He named certain towns, Badgam, Batmaloo, Chawalgam, where militants had murdered locals. Shootings, hangings, stabbings, decapitations, bombs. “This is their Islam. They want us to forget but we remember.” Meanwhile the army used sexual assault to demoralize the population. In Kunan Poshpora, twenty-three women had been raped by soldiers at gunpoint. Systematic violation of young girls by entire Indian army units was becoming commonplace, the girls taken to army camps, naked, and strung up from trees, their breasts cut with knives. “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for the ugliness of the world. His left hand shook on the steering wheel. She placed her right hand over it. It was the first time they had touched.

A stream ran beside the road. “It is called the Muskadoon,” he said. “We are close to Pachigam.” The world disappeared. There was only the stream, its babble like thunder in her ears. She felt as if she were drowning. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Not carsick, is it? Shall I stop for some time so you can rest?” Dumbly, she shook her head. They rounded a bend in the road.

It was as if giant burrowing creatures, ants or worms, had wriggled up from underground and built a colony of earthworks in a graveyard. The ruins of the old village were still visible, the charred foundations of the wooden houses, the blighted orchards, the broken street, and around and in between these ghosts new dwellings had sprung up, ramshackle hovels of sticks and earth and moss thrown together without any evidence of care or thought, mud igloos with blue smoke issuing through holes in the roofs, “the slovenly products of an inferior species,” Yuvraj called them, sounding angry, “or of our own kind, regressing toward savagery.” Torn rags hung over the doorways and there were sullen faces peering out, silent, unwelcoming. “Something has happened here that is not so good, I fear,” Yuvraj cautiously said. “The original villagers are not these. I have seen the bhand pather players of Abdullah Noman and these are not they. New people are here. They do not want to talk because they have seized land that is not theirs and they fear to lose it.”

They walked down to the Muskadoon watched by suspicious eyes. Nobody came forward to greet them or ask them questions or tell them to go away. They were being treated like phantoms, like entities that did not exist, who could be made to vanish by being ignored. There were smooth boulders by the riverside and they sat down several yards apart and looked at the rushing water without speaking. She could feel the fingers of his longing stretching toward her, and she understood again that she desired him also, she wondered what his hands would feel like on her body, she closed her eyes and felt his lips at the nape of her neck, felt his tongue moving there, but when she opened her eyes he was still sitting on his rock some yards away, looking at her, helpless with love.

At that moment he was hating his life, the entrepreneurial work to which he had dedicated himself and what that work had made him, his banal businessman self. He was not worthy of her, was nothing more than a seller of carved wooden houseboats and papier-mâché vases, a purveyor of shawls and rugs. The shades of the departed bhands tugged at him and he wanted to give up his merchant existence and spend the rest of his life playing the santoor and singing the songs of the valley to her in his garden where no harmful thing could enter. He wanted to declare himself but did not because he could see the shadow over her, the deepening fear to which she could not yet give a name. He yearned to comfort her but had no words. He longed to get down on his knees and beg for her heart but did not and cursed inwardly at the fate that filled him with inappropriate longings, but blessed it as he cursed. He was a good man who knew how to love, he wanted to say but could not. He would worship her always and shape his life to her whims but this was no time to say so. This was no time for love. She was in agony and he could not be sure she would accept him even if she were not. She was a woman from far away.

Her feelings were unable to rise to the surface, they were buried beneath her fear. She did not know about the shadow planets but she felt in the presence of dark forces. This was her mother’s stream, she thought. By this water her mother danced. In those woodland glades her father’s killer learned the art of the clown. She felt lost and far from home. On a rock a few yards away a stranger sat, dying absurdly of love.

Yuvraj suddenly thought about his father, Sardar Harbans Singh, who had in a way prophesied the coming of this woman, who had perhaps arranged it after passing through the fire of death, Harbans who had loved and husbanded the old traditions amidst whose ruins his son now sat, who had been a gardener of their beauty. Feelings of loss and frustration pulled Yuvraj upright and pushed harsh words out of him. “What’s the point of sitting on here?” he burst out. “This place is finished. Places get smashed and then they are no longer the places they were. This is how things are.” She got to her feet too, full of impotent frenzy, her hands clenching, the fear choking her. She glared at him angrily and he wilted, as if scorched. “I apologize,” he said. “I am a clumsy fool and I have distressed you by my thoughtless words.” He didn’t need to explain. She saw the pain in his eyes and shook her head, forgiving him. Her own eyes were desperate for answers. It was necessary to find someone who would talk.

There were narcissi growing by the stream, visited by bees. Yuvraj Singh remembered a name his father had mentioned, the name of the celebrated vasta waza of Shirmal, master of the Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, who was named after the bumblebee, bombur, and the narcissus flower. “There was a man near here called Yambarzal,” he said.

“So Boonyi had a daughter,” Hasina Yambarzal said, and through the slit in her black burqa her eyes squinted hard at the young woman, this Kashmira from America with an Englishwoman’s voice. “Yes, it’s true,” she decided. “You have the same look of wanting what you want and never mind if the whole world goes to hell as a result.” Bombur Yambarzal, a decrepit, antique figure these days, added loudly from his smoker’s stool in the corner, “Tell her her bastard grandfather wasn’t content with his fields and orchards, he had to try to take away my livelihood as a cook. He was not fifteen percent of my quality, but still he gave himself airs. One may call oneself a vasta waza but it doesn’t change the facts. It doesn’t matter now, of course, even he managed to die but here I am still sitting waiting for my turn.”