Shalimar the Clown (30 page)

Back then there were no “media sieges” in the modern sense. All-India Radio sent a radio reporter to stand uncertainly outside the sage-green apartment building at Type-1 Number-22 Southeast Hira Bagh, holding out his microphone as if it were a begging bowl. Doordarshan, in those days the only television channel, sent a cameraman and sound recordist. The text of what they were permitted to say in commentary would no doubt be handed down later from the prime minister’s office, so there was no need to send a journalist. There was a man from the PTI news agency and two or three other men from the print media. They saw Odissi dancing divas come and go, and Jayababu’s boy running errands. The anonymous occupants of other apartments in the same building had seen nothing, knew nothing, shied away from the cameras and microphones as if from danger, and fled. Just once the great Jayababu himself sallied forth to scold the press for making too much noise and disturbing his dance class, whereupon the abashed reporters at once commenced to speak in whispers. Of the principal actors in the drama there was no sign. At mealtimes the watchers dispersed to seek refreshment, and they soon lost interest in staying at their posts. Delhi in winter was cold as a ghost and in the mornings and evenings the fog came down and pushed its clammy hands through your skin and froze your bones. There was no need for anyone to stay. The news was being constructed elsewhere. The American ambassador was being withdrawn in disgrace. The U.S. embassy was the place to be. Hira Bagh was just a gossipy footnote. In the winter mist it looked like a phantom world.

One fog-white night, at about three o’clock in the morning, long after the gentlemen of the press had departed, a hooded figure arrived at Boonyi’s pink apartment. When the pregnant woman beached on her bed like a stranded sea-monster heard the key turning in her front door she assumed it was Edgar Wood making his nocturnal food run. These days he only visited her in the middle of the night, arriving out of breath, burdened by huge amounts of edibles. She had no sympathy for him. He was a necessary side effect of a sick life, like vomit. “I’m hungry,” she called out. “You’re late.” He came into the bedroom wincing as if he were a schoolboy in a bully’s armlock, a child whose ear was being twisted by a disciplinarian aunt. The hooded figure followed him into the room, unveiled herself, and looked Boonyi over with a brisk, nannyish sympathy. “Oh, dear me,” she said. “Dear me, what a dreadful . . . ha! Can you believe it, my dear, I almost envied—haha!—oh, leave it.—But there’s this. I almost forgave him. Can you believe
that
?
—
Extraordinary.—But I almost did, in spite of everything. In spite, my dear, of you.—But look at you. No discipline. We can’t have this.—Hmm.—Edgar, you vile sticky creature, have you made the arrangements?—Well, of course you have, it’s what you do.—It’s what he does, dear. Yes, you loathe him too, of course you do, everyone does.—Harrumph.—We’re going to get you away from here, my dear.—You’ll be needing care. We’ll see you through.—Oh, I see. You misunderstand me.—No, my husband did not send me here. He has left the country. He has left the diplomatic service. However, let me be plain, he has not left me. It is I who have left him.—You follow?—Hmm?—Left him after everything and in spite of everything and at the end of it all.—Oh, let it go.—The point is to get you somewhere else. No more prying eyes and a spot of good medical care.—Hmm?—How far gone are you? Seven months?—More? Eight? Aha. Eight. Good. Won’t be long, then. Oh, get on with it, Edgar, for Christ’s sake.—Edgar’s been sacked too, dear, I thought you’d like to know. I’ll make sure this little shit never works for his country again, I promise you that.—Tonight’s your last hurrah, isn’t it, Edgar? Outlived your blasted usefulness, I’d say.—Poor Edgar. What will you do?—Ha!—No, on reflection, I don’t think we’re going to worry about you, are we, dear?—No.—Well then, Edgar: where’s the bally van?”

“Around the corner.” Thus Edgar Wood through gritted teeth. “But I warned you she might be too big to fit through the door.” Margaret Rhodes Ophuls whirled to face him, shriveling him in the dragon-fire of her gaze. “Quite right, Edgar,” she said, sweetly. “So you did. Run along then, and fetch the bloody sledgehammer.”

Boonyi gave birth to a baby daughter in a clean, simple bedroom in Father Joseph Ambrose’s Holy Love of India Evangalactic Girls’ Orphanage for Disabled & Destitute Street Girls, located at 77-A, Ward-5, Mehrauli, an institution that had benefited greatly from the ex-ambassador’s wife’s fund-raising skills and personal largesse. In spite of everyone at the Evangalactic Orphanage’s affection and admiration for Peggy-Mata, the new resident she had foisted on them was not initially popular. Every detail of Boonyi’s story somehow became common knowledge at the orphanage almost at once. There were girls at the Evangalactic who had been rescued from the whorehouses of Old Delhi at the age of nine, and these children gathered outside Boonyi’s door and conversed in loud, impolite voices about the fallen rich man’s tart who had actually chosen the demeaning life from which they had managed to escape. There were girls who looked like giant spiders because of spinal problems that obliged them to walk on all fours, and they joined the former child prostitutes to jeer at this new type of cripple, who had rendered herself almost immobile through sheer gluttony. There were country girls who had fled to the big city from the dirty old men to whom they had been betrothed—or, rather, sold into betrothal—and these girls, too, added to the crowd at Boonyi’s door to express their disbelief that a woman should leave a good man who had truly loved her.

Things were on the brink of getting out of hand, until Father Ambrose, nudged by Peggy Ophuls, addressed the girls and shamed them into something like compassion. “The holy love of India brought all of you to the harbor of this safe place,” Father Ambrose, a young but charismatic Catholic priest who had grown up in a Keralan fishing village and was accordingly fond of maritime metaphors, rebuked his charges. “God’s love cast out its nets for you upon the filthy seas in which you swam. God caught up your souls from the black water and revealed your shining light. Show me, then, that you, too, can be fishers of the spirit. Cast out the nets of your compassion and bring back to a safe place this new soul crying out for your love.”

After Father Ambrose’s little speech Peggy Ophuls was able to find a few willing helpers, not only a doctor and a midwife but also girls to cook for Boonyi, and to wash her and oil her and comb her tangled hair. Mrs. Ophuls made no attempt to limit the damaged woman’s food intake. “Let’s have the child out safely,” she told Father Ambrose and the orphans (who muttered sullenly, but made no objection). “Then we can think about the mother.”

In due course the baby was born. Boonyi, cradling her daughter, named her Kashmira. “Do you hear me?” she whispered into the little girl’s ear. “Your name is Kashmira Noman, and I’m going to take you home.”

This was when Peggy Ophuls’s face hardened and she revealed her darker purpose, unveiling the secret she had kept hidden until this moment beneath the cloak of her apparently boundless altruism. “Young lady,” she said, “it’s time to face facts. You want to go home, you say?” Yes, replied Boonyi, it is the only thing I now want in the world. “Hmm,” said Peggy Ophuls. “Home to that husband of yours in Pachigam. The one who never came for you. The one who stopped writing. The clown.” Boonyi’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, my dear, I make it my business to know—Ha! I see!—That’s the chap you’re going back to with another man’s baby in your arms?—Mmm?—And you imagine that’s the chap who will give this little girl his name
—Kashmira Noman—
and take her for his own, and then it’s off into the sunset for a spot of happily ever after?” The tears were streaming down Boonyi’s face. “That’s a nonstarter, my dear,” said Peggy Ophuls unsentimentally, moving in for the kill. “
Noman,
indeed!—That’s not her name. And what did you say?
Kashmira?
No, no, darling. That can’t be her future.” Something new in the tone of her voice made Boonyi dry her tears.

“Tell you what, though,” added Peggy Ophuls, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “Here’s a bit of a plan.—Are you listening? You’d do well to listen.” Boonyi was paying attention now. “It’s winter,” said Peggy Ophuls. “The road over the Pir Panjal is closed. No way into the valley by land.—No matter.—I can give you what you want. I can get an aircraft to fly you in. You’re probably more than one seat wide. That can be taken into account.—You don’t have to worry about nursing the child. I have a wet nurse standing by.—You can probably travel in, what, a week? Let’s say a week. I can have a comfortable vehicle waiting for you at the other end to drive you back to Pachigam in style. How does that sound?—Hmm?—Sounds good, I expect. Ha! Of course it does.”

Boonyi’s tears had dried. “Please, I do not understand,” she said at last. “What is the need for a wet nurse?” As the words left her lips she saw the answer to the question in her benefactress’s eyes.

“Do you know the tale of Rumplestiltskin?” asked Peggy Ophuls, dreamily. “No, of course you don’t.—Well, in brief.—Once upon a time there was a miller’s daughter who was told by one of those whimsical fairy-tale kings,
If you have not spun this straw into gold by tomorrow morning, you must die.—
You know the type of fellow I mean, dear.—They’ll screw you or chop off your head, those killer princes, love and death being the same sort of thing to them. They’ll screw you
and
chop off your head. They’ll screw you
while your head is being chopped off. . . . —
Sorry. As I was saying.—In the middle of the night, while she sat helpless and weeping, locked away in a castle tower, there was a knock at the door, and in came a little manikin, who asked,
What will you give me if I do it for you?
And he did it, you know, three nights running he spun the straw into gold, and the miller’s daughter lived, and of course she married the whimsical king, and had a child. Silly woman! To marry the man who would have killed her as easily as blinking.—Well!—Scheherazade married her murderous Shahryar, too.—Can’t beat women for stupidity, what?—Take me, for example. I married my whimsical prince as well, the murderer of my love.—But you know all about him, of course, I’m so sorry.—So, where was I.—Yes. In conclusion.—One night the little manikin came back.
You know what I came for,
he said. Rumplestiltskin was his name.”

They were alone in the room; alone with their desperate needs. The silence was terrible: a dark, hopeless hush of inevitability. But the look on Margaret Rhodes Ophuls’s face was worse, at once savage and happy. “
Ophuls,
” said Peggy-Mata. “That’s her father’s name. And
India
’s a nice name, a name containing, as it does, the truth. The question of origins is one of the two great questions.
India Ophuls
is an answer. To the second great question, the question of ethics, she’ll have to find answers of her own.”

“No,” said Boonyi, shouting. “I won’t do it.” Peggy Ophuls put a hand on the young mother’s head. “You get what you want,” she said. “You live, and go home. But there are two of us here, my dear.—Don’t you see?—Two of us to satisfy. Yes. You know, the night before I came to India I dreamed I would not leave without a child to call my own. I dreamed I was holding a little baby girl and singing her a song I’d made up specially.—And then all this time with all these children I’ve wondered when my child would come.—You understand, I’m sure.—One wants the world to be what it is not.—One clings to hope. Then finally one faces up.—Let’s look at the world as it is, shall we?—I can’t have a baby. That’s clear. More than one reason now. Biology and divorce.—And you?—You can’t keep this little girl. She will drag you down and she will be the death of you and that will be the death of her.—You follow?—Whereas with me she can live like a queen.”

“No,” said Boonyi, dully, hugging her daughter. “No, no, no.”

“I’m so glad,” said Peggy Ophuls. “Hmm?—Yes. Really!—Couldn’t be more delighted. I knew you’d be sensible once it was all properly explained.” As she left the room she was humming the dream-song to herself.
Ratetta, sweet Ratetta,
she sang,
who could be better than you?

Here is ex-ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, falling, for the time being, out of history. Here he is in disgrace, plunging down through the turbulent waters of 1968, past the Prague Spring and the Magical Mystery Tour and the Tet Offensive and the Paris
événements
and the My Lai massacre and the dead bodies of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, past Grosvenor Square and Baader-Meinhof and Mrs. Robinson and O. J. Simpson and Nixon. The swollen ocean of events, mighty and heartless, closes over Max as it always does over losers. Here is drowned Max, the invisible man. Underground Max, trapped in a subterranean Edgar Wood world, a world of the disregarded, of lizard people and snake people, of busted hustlers and discarded lovers and lost leaders and dashed hopes. Here is Max wandering among the high heaps of the bodies of the rejected, the mountain ranges of defeat. But even in this, his newfound invisibility, he is ahead of his time, because in this occult soil the seeds of the future are being planted, and the time of the invisible world will come, the time of the altered dialectic, the time of the dialectic gone underground, when anonymous spectral armies will fight in secret over the fate of the earth. A good man is never discarded for long. A use is always found for such a man. Invisible Max will find a new use. He will be one of the makers of this new age, too, until old age at last rings down the curtain, and Death comes to his door in the form of a handsome man, a Mercader, an Udham Singh, Death asking him, in the name of the woman they once both loved, for work.