Shalimar the Clown (37 page)

Pyarelal asked her: “How do you know these things?” It was winter, so they were huddled round the fire in her hut. The goats were in the barn he had helped her build. He heard the clanking of the small brass bells around their necks. His daughter was in a condition not unlike a trance. She was at once there in the hut and somewhere else as well. She could hear what he was saying but she was also listening elsewhere. She said: “My husband tells me. He has crossed the mountains to meet the iron mullah. The iron mullah says that the question of religion can only be answered by looking at the condition of the world. When the world is in disarray then God does not send a religion of love. At such times he sends a martial religion, he asks that we sing battle hymns and crush the infidel. The iron mullah says that at the root of religion is this desire, the desire to crush the infidel. This is the fundamental urge. When the infidel has been crushed there may be time for love, although in the iron mullah’s opinion this is of secondary importance. Religion demands austerity and self-denial, says Bulbul Fakh. It has little time for the softnesses of pleasure or the weaknesses of love. God should be loved but that is a manly love, a love of action, not a girlish affliction of the heart. The iron mullah preaches to many hundreds of men from many parts of the world. They are preparing for war.”

Pyarelal asked: “How does your husband tell you this?”

She answered: “He speaks to me as you speak. He is full of fire and death. When you and the sarpanch are no more he will come here for his honor.”

“This then is a part of what he says,” her father needed to know.

“This is the reason we are able to speak,” she replied. “This is our bond that cannot be broken.” She fell sideways and was unconscious. Pyarelal caught her and laid her gently down to sleep. “Then I will never die,” he whispered to her sleeping body. “I will live forever and he will never be released from his oath.”

This was not how things were supposed to go, according to the old story. In the old story Sita the pure was kidnapped and Ram fought a war to win her back. In the modern world everything had been turned upside down and inside out. Sita, or rather Boonyi in the Sita role, had freely chosen to run off with her American Ravan and willingly became his mistress and bore him a child; and Ram—the Muslim clown, Shalimar, misplaying the part of Ram—fought no war to rescue her. In the old story, Ravan had died rather than surrender Sita. In the contemporary bowdlerization of the tale, the American had turned away from Sita and allowed his queen to steal her daughter and send her home in shame. In the ancient tale, when Sita returned to Ayodhya after defending her chastity throughout her captive years, Ram had sent her back into forest exile because her long residence under Ravan’s roof made that chastity suspect in the eyes of the common people. In Boonyi’s story, she too had been exiled to the forest, but it was the people—her friend Zoon, her father, even her father-in-law—who had helped her and saved her life, deflecting her husband’s vengeful knife, making him swear an oath; after which, and at the wrong time, her husband went off to war, and she knew that for him the battle was a form of waiting, that he would fight other enemies, slay other foes, until he was free to return and take her unfaithful life.

But it was something more than that. It was also a way of being with her. While he was away his thoughts returned to her and they could commune as they once had. And even if his thoughts were murderous this prolonged communion often felt, strongly felt to her, like love. All that remained between them was death, but the deferment of death was life. All that remained between them, perhaps, was hatred, but this yearning hatred-at-a-distance was surely also one of love’s many faces, yes, its ugliest face. She began to entertain fantasies of earning his forgiveness and winning back his heart. In the great old book Sita had called upon the gods to defend her virtue, stepping into a fire and emerging from it unscathed; and she had asked the underworld to open so that she could depart from this world in which her innocence was not enough, and the gates of the underworld did open, and she went down into darkness. If she, Boonyi, set fire to herself no god would protect her. She would burn and the forest would burn with her. Accordingly, she lit no fire. Once in despair she did ask the gates of hell to open in the earth below her feet, but no cavity yawned. She was already in hell.

The iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh was their appointed superior. His breath was still the sulfurous dragon-breath that had earned him his stinky name,
fakh,
and he still spoke in the old harsh way, as if human speech were painful to him, but he was taller than Shalimar the clown remembered, a giant over six feet tall, and also leaner and much more beautiful than in the old days in Shirmal. Was it possible that he had grown bigger and more attractive with the passing years? As for his being made of iron, there could no longer be any argument about that. There were places on his shins and shoulders where the knocks of a hard life had rubbed away the covering of skin and the dull metal beneath had become visible, battle hardened, indestructible. These proofs of his miraculous nature gave Bulbul Fakh great authority in the camps over the mountains. He carried a lump of rock salt at all times. “This is Pakistani salt,” he told the liberation front commander and his men. “This we will bring to Kashmir when we set it free.” He wrapped the salt in a green handkerchief and put it away in a bag. “The green is for our religion which makes all things possible. God willing,” he said. “With the blessing of God,” they replied.

The iron mullah led them to a “forward camp,” known as FC-22, a front-line facility of the Markaz Dawar center for worldwide Islamist-jihadist activities set up by Pak Inter-Services Intelligence. FC-22 in those early days was a shithole. There were few pukka buildings—the only sleeping accommodation was in filthy, patched-up tents—and not enough food or warmth. However, there were staggering quantities of weapons available, and there were ISI personnel on hand to offer training in the use of these weapons, including high-precision sniper-killer training. There were firing ranges with moving targets and instructors who would push the new recruits in the back or jog their elbows at the same time as ordering them to fire, and they had to learn not to miss, because hitting a moving target when they were off balance was what they were being taught. There were weekly seminars about, and real-time training exercises in, high-speed, guerrilla-style strike-and-withdraw operations across the Line of Control. There was a bomb factory and a course in fifth-column infiltration technique, and above all there was prayer.

The five daily prayers at the camp
maidan
were compulsory for all the fighters and the only book permitted at the site—training manuals excepted—was the Holy Qur’an. In between formal prayers there was much discussion of God by foreigners speaking in languages which Shalimar the clown did not understand, in which only the word for God stood out. Maulana Bulbul Fakh was his guide to weaponry and foreigners alike. But before he was ready to embark on the great work at hand his consciousness had to be altered. Shalimar the clown was asked to make certain revisions in his worldview. “It is not possible to shoot straight,” Bulbul Fakh said bluntly, “if the way you see things is all screwed up.”

Ideology was primary. The infidel, obsessed with possessions and wealth, did not grasp this, and believed that men were primarily motivated by social and material self-interest. This was the mistake of all infidels, and also their weakness, which made it possible for them to be defeated. The true warrior was not primarily motivated by worldly desires, but by what he believed to be true. Economics was not primary. Ideology was primary.

The iron mullah took upon himself the task of reeducating all newcomers. It was a part of his gift to the revolution, a part of God’s work. Shalimar the clown sat on a boulder by a frozen mountain stream and listened to the iron mullah as once he had listened to Pandit Pyarelal Kaul while longing for the simple happiness of Boonyi’s touch. But that happiness had proved to be an illusion, a deception, and Shalimar the clown’s memory of being deceived made the iron mullah’s lessons easier for him to accept.

Everything they thought they knew about the nature of reality, about how things worked and what things were, was wrong, the iron mullah said. That was the first thing for the true warrior to understand
.—Yes, Shalimar the clown thought, that’s right, everything I thought I knew about her was a mistake.—
The visible world, the world of space and time and sensation and perception in which they had believed themselves to be living, was a lie
.—Yes, that’s so.—
Everything that seemed to be, was not
.—Yes.—
By crossing the mountains they had passed through a curtain and stood now on the threshold of the world of truth, which was invisible to most men
.—Thank God, thought Shalimar the clown. Truth. At last. Truth that endures. Truth that will never become a lie.—
In the world of truth, the iron mullah preached, there was no room for weakness, argument, or half measures. Before the power of truth, every knee must bow, and then truth will protect you. Truth will keep your soul safe in the palm of its mighty hand.
—In the palm of its hand.—
Only the truth can be your father now, but through the truth you will be fathers of history
.—Only the truth can be my father.—
Only the truth can be your mother now, but when the truth has won its victory all mothers will bless your names
.—Only the truth can be my mother.—
Only the truth can be your brother, but in the truth you will be a brother to all men
.—Only the
truth can be my brother.—
Only the truth can be your wife
.—Only the truth can be my wife.

Time itself was the servant of truth, the iron mullah told them. Years could pass in an instant, or a moment could be infinitely prolonged, if the truth were best served by doing so. Distance, too, was as nothing in the eye of truth. A journey of a thousand miles could be accomplished in a single day. And if time and distance could be moved and changed, if these great things were the malleable disciples of truth, then how much more easily molded was the human self! If the so-called laws of the universe were illusions, if these fictions were no more than the fabric of the veil behind which truth was concealed, then human nature was an illusion also, and human desires and human intelligence, human character and human will, would all bow to truth’s imperatives once the veil was removed. No man could face the naked truth, defy it and survive.

The new recruits listening to the iron mullah felt their old lives shrivel in the flame of his certainty. The invisible commander who called himself Dar from Shirmal even though there were no Dars in Shirmal leapt up suddenly and flung off his woollen balaclava-style hat, his polythene outer garments, his woollen waistcoast, his gumboots, the woollen blanket-strips wrapping his feet, his grey sleeveless V-neck woollen jumper, his long khaki-colored woollen kurta and pajamas, his socks and his underpants, and stood before Bulbul Fakh stripped and ready for action. “I have no name,” he cried loudly, “except the name of truth. I have no face but the face you choose for me. I have no body but the one that will die for the truth. I have no soul but the soul that is God’s.” The iron mullah came to him and gently, as a father might, helped him to dress again. “This warrior,” Bulbul Fakh tenderly announced when the man whom Shalimar the clown thought of as Naked Mountain was fully clothed once more, “has put off the garments of the lie and put on those of truth. He is ready for the war.”

While the invisible commander was naked, Shalimar the clown had understood how young he was: probably only eighteen or nineteen years old, young enough to be prepared to erase himself in a cause, young enough to make himself a blank sheet upon which another man could write. For Shalimar the clown the total abnegation of the self was a more problematic requirement, a sticking place. He was, he wanted to be, a part of the holy war, but he also had private matters to attend to, personal oaths to fulfill. At night his wife’s face filled his thoughts, her face and behind hers the face of the American. To let go of himself would be to let go of them as well; and he found that he could not order his heart to set his body free.

“The infidel believes in the immutability of the soul,” said Bulbul Fakh. “But we believe that all living things can be transformed in the service of the truth. The infidel says that a man’s character will decide his fate; we say that a man’s fate will forge his character anew. The infidel holds that the picture of the world he draws is a picture we must all recognize. We say that his picture means nothing to us, for we live in a different world. The infidel speaks of universal truth. We know that the universe is an illusion and that truth lies beyond the illusion, where the infidel cannot see. The infidel believes the world is his. But we shall drive him from his redoubts and cast him into darkness and live in Paradise and rejoice as he plunges into the fire.”

Shalimar the clown rose to his feet and tore off his garments. “Take me!” he cried. “Truth, I am ready for you!” He was a trained performer, a leading actor in the leading bhand pather troupe in the valley, and so of course he could make his gestures more convincing, and imbue his journey toward nakedness with more meaning, than any eighteen-year-old youth. He stripped off his shirt and shouted out his acquiescence—“I cleanse myself of everything except the struggle! Without the struggle I am nothing!”—he screamed his assent—“Take me or kill me now!”—and stripped off his undergarments. The passion of his avowals made an impression on the iron mullah. “We knew that those who chose to make the arduous winter journey over the Tragbal Pass must have been driven from within to do so,” he said. “But in you the desire burns more fiercely than I had thought.” He helped Shalimar the clown put his clothes back on, to dress himself in garments transformed by his shedding of them into the raiment of belonging. When he was fully clothed again Shalimar the clown prostrated himself at the feet of Bulbul Fakh, and almost believed his own performance, almost believed that he was no longer what he was and could indeed leave the past behind.