Shalimar the Clown (18 page)

“That’s nonsense,” Bombur told the wanderer in his customarily haughty manner. “Be off with you. We don’t want any trouble, and you, standing here in the middle of our little town and yelling your head off about the punishments of hell—you look like trouble to me.” “There are big infidels,” replied the stranger, calmly, “who deny God and his Prophet; and then there are little infidels like you, in whose belly the heat of faith has long since cooled, who mistake tolerance for virtue and harmony for peace. You must let me stay or kill me, and I leave the choice to you. But understand this: I am the bellows who will rekindle your fire.”

“Of course we won’t kill you,” said Yambarzal, discomfited. “What sort of people do you think we are?” “Weaklings,” the stranger answered in his alarming, rasping voice. Bombur flushed, and called out loudly to the growing crowd, “Give this beggar some food to eat and he’ll pretty soon be on his way.” This was a misjudgment. The supposed reincarnation of Bulbul Shah had come to stay, and many ears wanted to hear what he had to tell them, especially because his response to Yambarzal’s dismissive remark was to remove the turban from his head, clench his right hand and rap his knuckles smartly on the bald dome of his head. Everybody present heard the hard metallic clang and many women and several men dropped instantly to their knees.

After that there was a new power in Shirmal. The iron mullah was given shelter in one Shirmali home after another, and within a year the character of the village had changed, and the cooks in whose hearts new passions were blazing had grouped together to build the inspirational Bulbul a mosque. The iron mullah never spoke of his origins, never said in what seminary or at the feet of which master he had received religious instruction; indeed he never said a word about his life before the day he arrived in Shirmal to change everything forever. He even allowed the village children to rename him. The Kashmiri love of nicknames and penchant for good-natured honesty meant that the children had soon dubbed him Bulbul Fakh, “Bulbul bad-odor,” because of his sulfurous smell. So Maulana Bulbul Fakh he became, accepting the name without demur, as if he had just come into the world, simultaneously innocent and ferocious, created particularly for this village, and it was the villagers’ right to call him whatsoever they chose, like parents naming a newborn child.

Relations between Shirmal and Pachigam had been good ever since Bombur Yambarzal and Abdullah Noman had embraced each other on the night of the Shalimar Bagh débâcle. Their periodical fishing expeditions had started up again, and on those occasions when a client with sufficient resources called for the outsized version of the wazwaan, the “super-wazwaan” or Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, the two villages would pool their resources and cooperate. Abdullah even offered to send some of his people over to give the Shirmalis acting lessons if they wanted to continue to seek employment as purveyors of portable theater, but Yambarzal declined the offer, going so far as to make a self-deprecating remark. “We can’t pretend to be people we’re not,” he said, “so we’ll just stick with who we are.” There was something a little backhanded in this compliment but Abdullah decided not to notice, partly because it was a pleasant day and the fish were jumping, and partly because he had come to understand that Yambarzal was not much more highly strung or egotistical than many artists—including some of his own troupe of performers—but was unquestionably better at putting his foot in his mouth. Bombur was definitely mellowing, however. Lately he had even managed to praise “that new pandit waza of yours” for “having the taste in his hands,” which was a compliment so high that when Abdullah repeated it to Pyarelal the pandit could not prevent himself from blushing with pride.

The two villages were still rivals in the feasting game, so some tension remained, and sharp words would sometimes be said. Bombur Yambarzal in his worst moments still blamed Abdullah Noman for taking away some of the wazwaan income on which Shirmal’s economic well-being and his, Bombur’s, personal standing depended. “If it wasn’t for Pachigam and that Hindu cook,” the voice of evil whispered in his ear, “you’d be the undisputed vasta waza again and that would make you, not Bulbul Fakh, unchallenged top dog in Shirmal.” The overall decline in festive occasions had hit both Pachigam and Shirmal hard. Kashmiris felt a lot less like celebrating these days. There were weeks, even months when Abdullah Noman believed that the days of the bhand pather were numbered, that nobody wanted the traditional clown stories anymore, and that it would be impossible to compete with the vans traveling to even the most remote towns and villages with projectors, screens and reels of the latest motion pictures in the back. Bombur Yambarzal was similarly worried that the Kashmiri love of gourmandizing might not be transmitted to the next generation. But even though the gaps between performances were lengthening, bookings for Pachigam’s bhand plays did still arrive; and, as for mass-catering cookery, that was also still required. Even the Indian army could not prevent families from arranging marriages, and there was also the occasional love match, this being the 1960s, after all, and so, thanks to the optimistic insistence of the human race in general on getting hitched, even in bad times, and also to Kashmiris’ continuing expectation that weddings would be celebrated with week-long displays of gluttony on the grandest possible scale, nobody in the business of producing the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum was likely to starve just yet. However, eighteen months after the appearance of Bulbul Fakh the iron mullah, over seventeen years of more or less pleasant cooperation between Shirmal and Pachigam came to an abrupt and ugly end.

The summer of 1965 was a bad season. India and Pakistan had already engaged in battle, briefly, in the Rann of Kutch far away to the south, but now the talk was all about war over Kashmir. The rumble of convoys was heard, and the overhead roar of jets. Threats were made
—force will be met with overwhelming force!—
and counterthreats offered in return
—aggression will not be countenanced or permitted to succeed!
There was a hammering, a howling, a dark cloud in the air. Children in playgrounds postured, menaced, attacked, defended, fled. Fear was the year’s biggest crop. It hung from the fruit trees instead of apples and peaches, and bees made fear instead of honey. In the paddies, fear grew thickly beneath the surface of the shallow water, and in the saffron fields, fear like bindweed strangled the delicate plants. Fear clogged the rivers like water hyacinth, and sheep and goats in the high pastures died for no apparent reason. Work was scarce for actors and chefs alike. Terror was killing livestock, like a plague.

The new mosque built for Bulbul Fakh in Shirmal was a simple enough structure. The roof was wooden and the walls were of whitewashed earth. There were two simple windowless rooms at the back where he now lived. No provision had been made for ladies to attend prayers. The one striking feature stood in the mosque’s main hall, where, in Bulbul Fakh’s honor, a frightening-looking scrap-metal pulpit had been erected, complete with a bank of truck headlights (nonfunctional), bent fenders spearing upwards like horns, and a snarling radiator grille. The floors, more traditionally, were covered in numdah rugs. One Friday in late August the iron mullah climbed into his ominous pulpit and made a declaration of war of his own. “There is the enemy from outside,” he declared in his cold, rust-covered voice, “and then there is the enemy hiding in our midst.” The enemy within was Pachigam, a degenerate village where, in spite of a substantial Muslim majority among the residents, only one member of the panchayat was of the true faith, whereas three appointed elders—three!—were idol worshippers, and the fifth was a Jew. Furthermore, a Hindu had been named as chief waza of the wazwaan, and had started using curds in the food. And above all—O final, irrefutable proof of Pachigam’s moral perfidy!—there was its wholehearted support for the wanton, lascivious, whorish, debauched, ungodly, idolatrous, four-year-long liaison between Bhoomi Kaul better known as Boonyi and Noman Sher Noman alias Shalimar the clown.

Colonel Kachhwaha in Elasticnagar heard about the sermon soon enough. Such a sermon was worse than improper. It was seditious. Such a sermon called for the sternest response: an arrest, a jail sentence of seven years minimum. Colonel Kachhwaha had heard the absurd stories about the so-called iron mullahs and these stories needed to be knocked on the head and to the devil with hollow metallic sounds. This Fakh fellow was not miracle but man and needed to be taught a lesson and taken down a peg. This Fakh fellow was a pro-Pak communalist bastard and dared to preach about enemies within the state when he himself was the incarnation of that foe. Yes, strong measures were called for. Iron fist against iron priest. Quite so. And yet, and yet.

The Hammirdev Kachhwaha of August 1965 was a very different fellow from the tongue-tied ass who had allowed Boonyi Kaul to cheek him so outrageously four years earlier: on the one hand he was a seasoned commander, planning eagerly for battle, and on the other hand there were the deepening sensory and mnemonic disorders. His father had passed away so it was no longer incumbent upon the son to die to gain the parent’s approval. On the day in the fall of 1963 when he heard the news of Nagabhat Kachhwaha’s demise, Tortoise Colonel took off the golden bangles of humiliation, had his driver take him all the way to the Bund in Srinagar, stood with his back to the city’s great stores, Cheap John, Suffering Moses and Subhana the Worst, and hurled the gleaming circlets far out into the sluggish brown waters of the Jhelum. He felt like Sir Bedivere returning Excalibur to the lake, except that the bangles had been a symbol of weakness, not of strength. At any rate, in this case there was no arm clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, emerging to receive what was thrown. The bangles scattered noiselessly on the sluggish surface of the river and quickly sank. Tall poplars faintly swayed, and reddened autumnal chinar leaves fluttered a farewell. Colonel Kachhwaha saluted briefly and crisply, performed a smart about-face and marched forward into a newer, more confident future.

The number of men under his command had grown. Elasticnagar had stretched so wide that people were beginning to call it Broken-Elasticnagar. The war drums were beating and the troop transport aircraft were flying a nonstop relay service and the eager glitter-eyed
jawans
were pouring in. Kachhwaha was one of the chief supervisors of the major statewide operation that was sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the front lines. Now he had received his own marching orders. Elasticnagar’s boss was going to war. He was going to smash the enemy with maximum force, and survival was permissible. Returning as a war hero was permissible. Returning as a decorated war hero and enjoying the attentions of excited young women back home was not only permissible but actively encouraged. Colonel Kachhwaha in jodhpurs smacked a riding crop against his thigh in anticipation. Since his father’s death he had begun to dream of going home in triumph and having the pick of the women, the beautiful Rajput women of the kohl-rimmed flashing eyes, the gorgeous Jodhpuri women waiting in their mirrored halls, opening wide their arms for their conquering local hero, dressed in clouds of organza and lace. These women were women of his own kind, desert roses, women who appreciated a warrior, women quite unlike the foolish girls of Kashmir. Unlike, for example, Boonyi. He did not permit himself these days to think about Boonyi Kaul even though reports reached his ears of her extraordinary, blossoming beauty. At eighteen she would be in full flower, she would have entered into the first flush of womanhood, but he would not allow himself to consider that. His restraint was laudable. He congratulated himself upon it. In spite of many provocations he had not persecuted her village of bohemians and suspicious types, in spite of her insult to his honor. He would not wish it said of him that H. S. Kachhwaha pursued vendettas while on duty, that his conduct had been in even the smallest way unbecoming. He had shown himself to be above such matters. Discipline was all. Dignity was all. Boonyi was nothing to him, nothing compared to the waiting Rajput girls, even though he did not know their names, had not seen their faces, met them only in his dreams. These dream women were the ones he wanted. Any one of them was worth ten Boonyis.

He was a soldier and so he tried to compartmentalize, to put his disorders in a box in the corner of the room and to go on functioning normally. When they spilled out it was regrettable but his troops had grown accustomed to the jumbling of his senses, the strangeness of his descriptions. Nowadays his fellow officers reacted normally when told that they had rigid vermilion voices and the soldiers on parade kept silent when he congratulated them on smelling like jasmine blossoms and the cooks at Elasticnagar knew just to nod wisely when he told them that the lamb korma wasn’t pointy enough. The condition could be said to be under control. The problem of memory, of excessive remembering, was not. The accumulation grew every day more oppressive and it became harder and harder to sleep. It was impossible to forget the cockroach that had crawled out of the shower drain six months earlier, or a bad dream, or any one of the thousands of hands of cards he had played in his military life. The weather of the past piled up in him, names and faces jostled for space, and the overload of unforgotten words and deeds left him wide-eyed with horror. Time was supposed to soothe all pain wasn’t it but the knife of his late father’s disapproval refused to grow dull with the passing months. He now believed that the two problems, the two bugs in the system, were somehow connected. He did not seek medical help for his troubles because any diagnosis of mental problems, however slight, would certainly be a reason for removing him from his command. He could not return home as a head case. There would be no dream girls then. And memory was not madness was it, not even when the remembered past piled up so high inside you that you feared the files of your yesterdays would become visible in the whites of your eyes. Memory was a gift. It was a positive. It was a professional resource.