Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The hut in the woods was in ruins; the roof had fallen in, and before allowing her to enter Yuvraj beat at the overgrown floor with a stick, in case of snakes. In a rusted pot on a long-dead fire the smell of uneaten food somehow lingered. Where did he do it, she asked the woman in the burqa, who was unable to speak, unable to describe, for example, the half-eaten condition of the mutilated corpse. Dumbly, Hasina Yambarzal pointed. Outside, she said. I found her there. The grass grew thick and dark where Boonyi fell. Her daughter imagined it was nourished by her blood. She saw the downward slash of the knife and felt the weight of the body hitting the ground and all of a sudden the pull of gravity increased, her own weight dragged her down, her head grew dizzy and she briefly fainted, collapsing onto the spot where her mother had died. When she regained consciousness she was lying in Hasina’s lap and Yuvraj was walking around her helplessly, flapping his hands, being a man. Light was failing on the hill and the people she was with took her by the arms and led her down. She was not capable of speech. She did not thank the woman in the burqa or look back in farewell as the car drove her away.

On the way back to the city the dangerous night closed in. Men with rifles and flashlights waved at them to stop at a checkpoint, men in uniform and not in uniform with woollen scarves wrapped around their heads, knotted under their chins. It was impossible to know if these men were members of the security forces or the militants, impossible to know which group would be more dangerous. It was necessary to stop. There were obstacles in the road: fences of metal and wood. There were lights shining in their faces and her companion was speaking firmly and fast. Then in spite of her shocked condition the thing inside her came out and stared at the men outside and what they saw in her eyes made them back away and remove the roadblocks and allow the Qualis to proceed. She was unstoppable now. She did not need to be here anymore, the uses of the place had been exhausted. The man driving the car was trying to say something. He was trying to express sympathy or love, sympathy and love. She was not able to pay attention. She had awoken from the fantasy of love and happiness, had departed from the lotus-land dream of joy, and she needed to return home. Yes, this was a man who loved her, a man she might be able to love if love were a possibility for her which at present it was not. Something got into her at her mother’s grave and it would not be denied.

The Qualis drove through Yuvraj’s gate and this time the magic didn’t work, the real world refused to be banished. She wasn’t well. She was running a fever and a doctor was summoned. She was confined to bed in a cool shuttered room and stayed there for a week. In a four-poster bed made of walnut wood and shrouded in mosquito netting she sweated and shook and when she slept saw only horrors. Yuvraj sat by her bedside and placed cold compresses on her brow until she asked him to stop. When her health returned she got out of bed and packed her bags. “No, no,” he begged, but she hardened her heart. “Attend to your business,” she told him coldly, “because I have to attend to mine.” He flinched slightly, nodded once and left her to her packing. When she was ready she stayed indoors until it was time to leave, refusing to set foot in the garden lest its soporific enchantments weakened her resolve. He was all injured nobility, stiff and monosyllabic. How second-rate men were, she told herself. Why would any woman yoke herself to a species of such pouting mediocrity? He couldn’t even say plainly what was written all over his face. Instead, he flounced and sulked. It was men who went in for the behavior they had the effrontery to call feminine, while women carried the world upon their backs. It was men who were the cowards and women who were the warriors. Let him hide behind his pots and rugs if he wanted! She had a battle to fight, and her war zone was on the far side of the world.

At the airport, however, he finally achieved courage and told her he loved her. She gritted her teeth. What was she supposed to do with his declaration, she asked him, it was too heavy, took up too much room, it was baggage she couldn’t carry with her on the flight. He refused to be slapped down. “You can’t escape me,” he said. “I’ll soon come for you. You can’t hide from me.” This was a false note. The image of an earlier, similarly blustering suitor, the American underwear model, popped into her head. You’ll never get me out of your mind, he’d said. You’ll think of my name in bed, in the bathtub. You might as well marry me. It’s inevitable. Face the facts. But standing at the barrier at Srinagar airport she had no idea what the American’s name had been, could barely remember his face, though his underwear had been memorable. Her self-possession strengthened its grip on her. She shook her head. This man, too, she would manage to forget. Love was a deception and a snare. The facts were that her life was elsewhere and that she wanted to return to it. “Look after that beautiful garden,” she told the handicrafts entrepreneur, touched his cheek briefly with a vague, distracted hand and flew ten thousand miles away from the unstable dangers of his useless love.

Three days after she returned to Los Angeles the prime suspect in the murder of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls was taken alive in the vicinity of Runyon Canyon. He had been living in the high wilderness areas up there, living like a beast, and was suffering from the effects of prolonged exposure, hunger and thirst. Acting on information received we ran him to ground he was one sorry sonofabitch came pretty quiet seemed happy to give himself up, Lieutenant Tony Geneva said on TV, into the thicket of thrusting microphones. The suspect had come down from the heights and broken cover to scavenge for food in a trash can in the dog park at the canyon’s foot, and had been somewhat ignominiously captured while holding a red McDonald’s carton and fishing for the few cold discarded fries it still contained. When Olga Simeonovna heard the news she took credit for the arrest. “Great is the power of the potato,” she crowed to anyone who would listen. “Whoo! Looks like I don’t lose my touch.” The man in custody had been positively identified as Noman Sher Noman, a known associate of more than one terrorist group, also known as “Shalimar the clown.”

When she heard the news Kashmira Ophuls found herself wrestling with a strange sense of disappointment. There was a thing inside her that had wanted to hunt him down itself. His voice, his chaotic voice, was absent from her head. Perhaps he was too weakened to be heard. Kashmir lingered in her, however, and his arrest in America, his disappearance beneath the alien cadences of American speech, created a turbulence in her that she did not at first identify as culture shock. She no longer saw this as an American story. It was a Kashmiri story. It was hers.

The news of the arrest of Shalimar the clown made the front page and gave the riot-battered Los Angeles Police Department some much-needed positive ink at a time of exceptional unpopularity. Police Chief Daryl Gates had left office, after initially refusing to do so. Lieutenant Michael Moulin, whose terrified and outnumbered officers had been withdrawn from the corner of Florence and Normandie when the troubles began, leaving the area in the hands of the rioters, also left the force. The damage to the city was estimated at over one billion dollars. The damage to the careers of Mayor Bradley and District Attorney Reiner was irreparable. At such a time the solid police work of Lieutenant Geneva and Sergeant Hilliker turned them into media heroes, good cops to set against the notorious Rodney King quartet, Sergeant Koon and Officers Powell, Briseno and Wind. Rodney King himself appeared on TV, calling for reconciliation. “Can we all get along?” he pleaded. Lieutenant Geneva and Sergeant Hilliker were interviewed on one of the last late-night shows hosted that May by Johnny Carson, and were asked by the host if the LAPD could ever regain the public’s trust. “We sure can,” Tony Geneva said, and Elvis Hilliker, smacking his right fist into his left palm, added, “And there’s a bad guy in jail tonight who proves just exactly why.”