Shalimar the Clown (29 page)

When he began to speak in this way the matador Edgar Wood understood that the bull was tiring, and sent in the picadors, or, to be precise, the picadoras. The beauties he aimed at Max were carefully selected from the upper echelons of Delhi and Bombay society to make Boonyi look bad. They were wealthy, cultured, accomplished, extraordinary women. They circled him from a distance, then moved closer in. The lances of their flirtatious regard, their graceful motion, their touch, speared him time and time again. He fell to his knees. He was almost ready for the sword.

So perhaps it was her failure to be exceptional as well as beautiful that damned Boonyi, or perhaps it was just the passage of time. Shut away in her pink shame, sometimes for days on end (for the ambassador was an increasingly busy man), with only the opprobrium of her dance master for company, she slid downwards toward ruin, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. The excess of Delhi deranged her, its surfeit of muchness, its fecal odors, its hellish noise, its anonymity, its uncaring crowd of the desperate fighting to survive. She became addicted to chewing tobacco, keeping a little cud of it nestled between her lower molars and her cheek. To pass the empty time she frequently fell ill in a languid, faux-consumptive way, and (more truthfully) suffered often from stress, depression, hypertension, stomach trouble and all the other hysteric ailments, and so as the slow months passed she began to learn about medication, about the capacity of tablets and capsules and potions to make the world seem other than it was, faster, slower, more exciting, calmer, happier, more peaceful, kinder, wilder, better. Pandit Mudgal’s thirteen-year-old
hamal,
the household boy whom the dance teacher periodically bedded in an offhand, seigneurial manner, led Boonyi deeper into the psychotropical jungle, teaching her about
afim:
opium. After that she curled herself into the metamorphic smoke whenever she could, and dreamed thickly of lost joy while time, cruelly, continued to pass.

But her narcotic of choice turned out to be food. At a certain point early in the second year of her liberated captivity, she began, with great seriousness and a capacity for excess learned from the devil-city itself, to eat. If her world would not expand, her body could. She took to gluttony with the same bottomless enthusiasm she had once had for sex, diverting the immense force of her erotic requirements from her bed to her table. She ate seven times a day, guzzling down a proper breakfast, then a midmorning plate, then a full luncheon, then a midafternoon array of sweet delicacies, then a hearty dinner, then a second dinner at bedtime, and finally a fridge-raiding gobble in the small hours before dawn. Yes, she was a whore, she admitted to herself with a twist of the heart, but she would at least be an extremely well-fed one.

Of all this her keeper Edgar Wood was fully aware, and in all of it he was wholly complicit. If she was setting out down the road to self-destruction (he reasoned), who was he to prevent her? It saved him the difficulty of steering her down exactly such a path. Without a word to his master he brought her the chewing tobacco that was ruining her smile, filled her little bathroom cabinet with pills to pop, clouded her mind with opium, and above all arranged for food to be cooked and delivered, food by the basketful, the trolleyful, delivered by unmarked car or by a dependable tiffin-runner pushing a laden two-wheeled wooden cart. All this he did with a sober grace that entirely deceived her. She had never trusted him until now, but his immaculate courtesy and her growing list of addictions forged a kind of trust, or at least pushed her to set the issue of his trustworthiness to one side. Pragmatism ruled; he was the only one who could satisfy her now. In a sense, he had become her lover, supplanting the ambassador. He was the one who gave her what she needed.

Edgar Wood himself was far too proper to make any such suggestion. He was simply there to be of assistance, he assured Boonyi. Nothing was too good for the woman the ambassador had chosen to love. She had only to ask. And ask she did. It was as if the nostalgic memory of the Kashmiri “super-wazwaan,” the Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, had possessed her and driven her insane. Once she understood that Edgar was prepared to satisfy her every whim she grew increasingly promiscuous and peremptory in her gourmandizing. She sent for Kashmiri food, of course, but also for the tandoori and Mughlai cuisines of north India, the
boti kabab
s, the
murgh makhani,
and for the fish dishes of the Malabar coast, for the
masala dosa
s of Madras and the fabled early pumpkins of the coast of Coromandel, for the hot pickle curries of Hyderabad, for
kulfi
and
barfi
and
pista-ki-lauz,
and for sweet Bengali
sandesh.
Her appetite had grown to subcontinental size. It crossed all frontiers of language and custom. She was vegetarian and nonvegetarian, fish- and meat-eating, Hindu, Christian and Muslim, a democratic, secularist omnivore.

Elsewhere in the world it was the summer of love.

Inevitably her beauty dimmed. Her hair lost its luster, her skin coarsened, her teeth rotted, her body odor soured, and her bulk—ah! her bulk—increased steadily, week by week, day by day, almost hour by hour. Her head rattled with pills, her lungs were full of poppies. Soon the pretense of lessons was dropped. The general education she had requested as part of her deal with the ambassador had ceased long ago; she had always been too lazy to be a good student, even in Pachigam. Now the dancing also fell away. Pandit Mudgal stayed downstairs with his young hamal, and Boonyi lived above him in a perpetual daze, with her head in a chemical spin and her belly full of food. Edgar Wood, her candyman, allowed himself to wonder idly if her astonishingly self-destructive behavior might be a deliberate suicide attempt, but quite frankly he wasn’t interested enough in her interior life to pursue the thought. What interested him more was the durability of the ambassador’s feeling for her. Max went on visiting her for a considerable time after she had passed what Edgar Wood privately called the point of revoltingness. It must be like sleeping not only on but with a stinking foam mattress, he thought with a fastidious shudder:
yeuchh.
According to Mudgal’s boy, a voyeuristic youth whom Wood was paying for information, the ambassador liked the Kashmiri woman’s use during lovemaking of her teeth and clawlike nails. Like many others, Edgar Wood had read Max Ophuls’s unusually frank account of his wartime exploits. How strange, he thought, that the famous anti-Nazi should still be aroused by his memory of the sexual preferences of the fascist Ursula Brandt, the Panther, whom he had fucked for the Cause. How very strange that a bloated Kashmiri woman should close that sexual circle, so that he went on needing her services long after she had ceased to be attractive. In the end, however, the break was made; the ambassador stopped visiting Boonyi. “It’s impossible,” he told Edgar Wood. “See that she is taken care of, the poor wretch. What a wreck she has made of herself.”

When the man of power withdraws his protection from a concubine, she becomes like a child abandoned in wolf-infested hills. Mowgli’s adoption by the Seeonee pack is untypical; this is not the way such stories usually develop. Boonyi Noman, prostrate on her groaning bed, gasping beneath the weight of her own body, saw Edgar Wood enter her quarters like a predator, without the civility of a knock or a word of greeting and with murder in his eyes, and understood that the crisis was upon her. It was time to tell him her secret.

Edgar Wood heard the news of her pregnancy and accepted that he had been outwitted by a master. He had come to terminate the Understanding, to give Boonyi a final cash payment, a ticket to oblivion and a warning of the dangers of future indiscretion, and he came to her in an ugly way because it was an ugly duty he had to perform, because the man whose ugly deed this was didn’t have the decency to come here himself. But before he could deliver his message of ugliness she played her trump. He had brought her a contraceptive pill every day without fail and had watched her place it in her mouth, take a gulp of water and swallow, but plainly she had fooled him, she had tongued the pills to one side, concealing them beneath those ever-present wads of chewing tobacco, and now she was carrying the ambassador’s child, and she was many months pregnant. She had grown so obese that the pregnancy had been invisible, it lay hidden somewhere inside her fat, and it was too late to think about an abortion, she was too far advanced and the risks were too great. “Congratulations,” said Edgar Wood. “We underestimated you.” “I want to see him,” Boonyi answered. “Tell him to come at once.”

In one version of the story of the dancing girl Anarkali, the Emperor Akbar himself spoke to the young beauty and persuaded her that Prince Salim’s love affair with her must end, that she must trick him into believing she no longer loved him so that he could go away from her and return to the path of destiny that would lead him eventually to the throne; and, just as in
La Traviata,
just like Violetta giving up Alfredo after the visit from his father Germont, she agreed. But Boonyi was no longer Anarkali, she had lost her beauty and could no longer dance, and the ambassador was nobody’s son but the man of power himself. And Anarkali didn’t get pregnant. Stories were stories and real life was real life, naked, ugly, and finally impossible to cosmeticize in the greasepaint of a tale. Max Ophuls came to Boonyi’s pink bedroom that night. He stood before her bed in the dark, leaning forward slightly and clutching at his straw hat’s brim with both his trembling hands. The sight of her ballooning, cetacean body still had the power to shock him. What lay within it, what was growing daily in her womb, was even more of a shock. His child was taking shape in there. It would be his firstborn child. “What do you want,” he asked in a low voice, while dark thoughts and wild emotions rioted in his inner squares and streets.

“I want to tell you what I think of you,” she said.

Her English had improved and he had learned her language too. At their closest they had sometimes forgotten which language they were speaking; the two tongues blurred into one. As they drifted apart so did their speech. Now she spoke her own language and he spoke his. Each understood the other well enough. He had known there would be abuse and there was abuse. There were empty threats and accusations of betrayal. All this he comprehended. Look at me, she was saying. I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born. Look at me. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love, your destructive, selfish, wanton love. Look at me. Your love looks just like hatred. I never spoke of love, she was saying. I was honest and you have turned me into your lie. This is not me. This is not me. This is you.

And then came another, older line of attack. I should have known, she was saying. I should have known better than to lie with a Jew. The Jews are our enemy and I should have known.

The past reared up. Briefly he saw again the army of the Jewish fallen. He set the memory aside. The wheel had turned. In this moment of his story he was not the victim. In this moment she, not he, had the right to claim kinship with the lost. At least I never spoke of love, she was saying. I kept my love for my husband though my body served you, Jew. Look what you have made of the body I gave you. But my heart is still my own.

“You never loved me, then,” he said, hanging his head, when she had finished. He sounded ridiculously false and hypocritical even to himself. She was laughing at him, viciously. Does a rat love the snake that gobbles it up, she was asking. He winced at the sharpness of her tongue, at the violence welling up in her. “You will be well looked after. Everything you need,” he said, and turned to go. In the doorway he paused. “I once loved a Rat,” he said. “Maybe you were the snake that ate her.”

The scandal broke a week later. A baby changed things. A pregnancy could not be winked at. Max Ophuls never found out who leaked the information to the papers—Boonyi herself, or the eggplant dancing master downstairs, or his young catamite, or one of the group of drivers and security guards handpicked for their alleged discretion by Edgar Wood, or even Wood himself, Wood washing his hands after many years of his master’s grubby work—but within days of Max’s last meeting with Boonyi, every journalist in the city had the story.

It was not the biggest story of the period, but it fed naturally into those stories. The working committee of the national conference of Jammu and Kashmir had unanimously passed a resolution calling for a permanent merger of the state with India. Indira Gandhi had asked for and been given powers to outlaw groups that questioned Indian sovereignty over the valley. A Kashmiri girl ruined and destroyed by a powerful American gave the Indian government an opportunity to look like it would stand up and defend Kashmiris against marauders of all types—to defend the honor of Kashmir as stoutly as it would defend that of any other integral part of India. Nothing less than Max’s head on a plate would do. His friend Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had retired from the presidency; the new president, Zakir Hussain, was making angry statements in private about the godless American’s exploitation of an innocent Hindu girl. Nobody had said the words
sexual assault
yet but Max knew they could not be far from people’s lips. He was no longer the well-beloved lover of India, but her heartless ravisher. And Indira Gandhi was out for blood.

The Vietnam War was at its height and so was American unpopularity in Asia. Draft cards were burned in Central Park and Martin Luther King led a protest march to the United Nations and in India the goddamn American ambassador was apparently fucking the local peasantry. So war-torn America turned on Max as well, his alleged oppression of Boonyi becoming a sort of allegory of Vietnam. Norman Mailer wrote about Boonyi and Max as if she were the countryside near Saigon and he was Operation Cedar Falls. Joan Baez made up a song about them. These interventions were not sympathetic to Max Ophuls. It was as if his previous selves were erased overnight—the Resistance hero, the bestselling author, the economic genius, the famous lover of his equally heroic wife, and the Flying Jew—and standing in their place was this Bluebeard-like ogre, this sexual predator who was fit for nothing but gelding. Tarring and feathering were too good for the likes of him. Che Guevara was killed around then, and that was just about the only thing that happened that wasn’t laid at Max’s door.