Shalimar the Clown (49 page)

Then for a time she was sane and happy in the house on Mulholland Drive and surprised herself by becoming a proficient athlete and a brilliant student with a strong interest in history and biography and, more particularly, in fact-based films. After leaving high school she traveled alone to London to study the work of the British documentary film movement of the thirties and forties and—though she mentioned this to nobody—to do a little documentary research of her own. During these months she lived in a poorly lit but spacious and high-ceilinged room in furnished student digs near Coram’s Fields and made no attempt to contact the Grey Rat. She never traveled south to Lower Belgrave Street but she did make her way up the Northern Line to Colindale, where she unearthed the frustratingly patchy newspaper records of the events surrounding her birth. She returned to Los Angeles and kept the trip to the newspaper library to herself but volubly informed her father of her newfound reverence for the British documentarists John Grierson and Jill Craigie, and her determination to turn away from the dangers of the imagination and make a career in the world of the nonfictional, to make films that insisted, as he had insisted, on the absolute paramountcy of the truth.
This is real life.
In the late eighties she studied documentary filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory and graduated with flying colors and moved into her own apartment on Kings Road and was ready to make her father proud of her when his killer cheated her of the chance.

The woman had come to confess. She had carried a burden for a quarter of a century and it had weighed her down; after a lifetime of upright bearing she had entered a stooped old age. The burden, the years, the loneliness had made her body a question mark. She didn’t matter anymore, India thought, she had no power. She had come out of the house of power empty-handed, the flying bird-men had ripped her treasure out of her hands, and people were jeering at her in the street. Why had she come, it was not necessary to receive her condolences in person. She had come to assist the police with their inquiries, she said, sounding like a character from the days of black-and-white television. There aren’t any policemen here, India said, so there’s no one for you to assist.

The woman opened her purse and took out a photograph and tossed it down onto the bed. “The work it took to keep this out of the papers, hah! you have no idea.” Then, talking rapidly, just to get it said, the confession of the lie. “She didn’t die she gave you to me and went back to Kashmir I arranged a plane and a car I sent her where she wanted to go and I never heard of her again so she might as well have been dead but actually she didn’t die.” The name of the village, her mother’s village. The village of the traveling players. The village of Shalimar the clown. “Are you listening to me?” No, India wasn’t listening, she was hearing the words but the picture had all her attention. Her father was dead but her mother was coming back to life, except this wasn’t her mother, this was another lie, her mother was a great dancer, she had seduced Max by dancing for him, so this swollen woman could not be her. She saw the tears fall onto the photograph and realized they were her own. “I’m sorry,” the woman was saying. “Dreadful thing to have done, I suppose. Hah! I’m sure you think so. But she chose to give you up and I chose to take you in. I’m your mother. Forgive me. I made your father lie as well. I’m your mother. Forgive me. She didn’t die.”

Repentance is for the sinner. Forgiveness is for the victim: who looked at the damp photograph, and did not, could not, forgive. Who was all intransigence, not knowing that a harder blow was yet to fall.

“Kashmira,” the woman said, spinning on her heel, removing her hateful unwanted world-altering presence. “Kashmira Noman. That was your given name.” She felt as if the weight of her body had suddenly doubled, as if she had suddenly become the woman in the photograph. Gravity dragged at her and she fell backward on the bed, gasping for air. She heard the bed frame groan, saw in the mirror the mattress yield and sag. Kashmira. The weight of the word was too much for her to bear. Kashmira. Her mother was calling to her from the far side of the globe. Her mother who didn’t die. Kashmira, her mother called, come home. I’m coming, she called back. I’ll be there as fast as I can.

“Today I forgive my daughters,” Olga Volga announced, caressing India’s hair while they both cried. “It don’t matter no more what they done.”

A
t San Quentin State Prison, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Robert Alton Harris was put to death in the gas chamber. Pellets of sodium cyanide wrapped in cheesecloth were lowered into a small vat of sulphuric acid and Harris began to gasp and twitch. After about four minutes he became still and his face turned blue. Three minutes later he coughed and his body convulsed. Eleven minutes after the execution began Warden Daniel Vazquez declared Harris dead and read out his last words: “You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.” This was a line paraphrased from the Keanu Reeves movie
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Everywhere was a mirror of everywhere else. Executions, police brutality, explosions, riots: Los Angeles was beginning to look like wartime Strasbourg; like Kashmir. Eight days after Harris’s execution, when India Ophuls a.k.a. Kashmira Noman flew out of LAX, heading east, the jury returned its verdict in the trial of the four officers accused of the beating of Rodney King in the San Fernando Valley Foothill Police Division, a beating so savage that the amateur videotape of it looked, to many people, like something from Tiananmen Square or Soweto. When the King jury found the policemen not guilty, the city exploded, giving its verdict on the verdict by setting itself on fire, like a suicide bomber, like Jan Palach. Below India’s rising aircraft drivers were being pulled from their cars and chased and beaten by men holding rocks. The motionless body of a man called Reginald Denny was being savagely beaten. A huge piece of cinder block was thrown at his head by a man who did a war dance of celebration and made a gang sign at the sky, taunting the news helicopters and airline passengers up there, maybe even taunting God. Stores were looted, cars were torched, there were fires everywhere, on, for example, Normandie, Florence, Crenshaw, Arlington, Figueroa, Olympic, Jefferson, Pico and Rodeo. What was burning? Everything. Auto repair shops, Launderlands, Korean eateries, limo services, Rite Aids, mini-marts and Denny’s all over the city. L.A. was a flame-grilled Whopper that night. The lizard people were rising up from their subterranean redoubts; the sleeping dragon had woken. And India, flying east, was on fire also. There is no India, she thought. There is only Kashmira. There is only Kashmir.

She would not be India in India. She would be her mother’s child. As Kashmira, then, Kashmira in a baseball cap and jeans, she walked into the Press Club in Delhi and with American daring asked the old India hands for guidance and help, and was warned that she might have trouble getting press accreditation to go up into the valley with a documentary film crew, or even without one. When these old hands patted her on the back and also on the derrière and counseled her not to even think of going up there, where things were worse than ever, the killings were at an all-time high and foreign backpackers were showing up headless on the hillsides and there was fury in the air, she exploded with rage herself. “Where do you imagine I’ve just come from,” she bellowed, “fucking Disneyland?” The vehemence of her outburst made sure she had their attention, and a few hours later that hot night, sitting in a deck chair on the lawn of another exclusive club near the Lodi Gardens, she drank beer with the most senior member of the foreign press corps and, after establishing that she was speaking one hundred percent off the record, told him her story. “This isn’t journalism,” the Englishman told her. “It’s personal. Forget about the camera and sound equipment. You want to get in? We’ll get you in. As to safety, however, it’s at your own risk.” Three days after this conversation took place she was in a Fokker Friendship bound for Srinagar with papers and introductions and phone numbers and a new name whose meaning she needed to learn. The need didn’t feel like excitement. It felt like pain. As the plane crossed the Pir Panjal she felt as if she had passed through a magic portal, and all at once the pain intensified, it clutched at her heart and squeezed hard, and she wondered in sudden terror whether she had come to Kashmir to be reborn, or to die.

Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinagar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favorite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone. On that last evening Sardar Harbans Singh had been speaking with nostalgia about the glories of the so-called Khalsa Raj, the twenty-seven-year-long period of the nine Sikh governors of Kashmir that followed the conquest of the valley by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1819, during which, as he told his son, “all agriculture blossomed, all crafts flowered, all gurdwaras, temples and mosques were cared for, and everything in the garden was lovely, and even if people criticized Maharaja Ranjit Singh for falling prey to the charms of women, wine and Brahminical practices, what of it? These are not grave failings in a man. You, my son,” he continued, changing tack, “may or may not know much about Brahminical practices or wine, but you had better find yourself a woman before too long. I don’t care how full your warehouses are or how fat your bank balance is. A full
godown
and a bulging wallet do not excuse an empty bed.”

These were his last words, and so, when a woman calling herself Kashmira presented herself at the house of mourning carrying a letter of introduction from his father’s friend the famous English journalist, when she arrived on the ninth day after the cremation, when the complete reading of the Guru Granth Sahib was one day away from being finished, Yuvraj considered it as a sign from the Almighty and welcomed her like a member of the family, offering her the hospitality of his house, insisting upon her staying, even though it was a time of sadness, and allowing her to take part in the Bhog ceremony with which the rituals ended on the tenth day, to listen to the hymns of passing, to partake of the
karah parsad
and
langar,
and to watch him being presented with the turban that made him the new head of the family. Only when his relatives had dispersed, without wailing or lamentation, as was the preferred way among Sikhs, did he have the time to talk to her about the reason for her visit, and by this time he already knew the real answer, namely that she had come to his house so that he could fall in love. In short, she was his father’s dying gift.

“You have come into our story at the end,” he told her. “If my dear father were still with us he could answer all your questions. But maybe the truth is that, as he used to say, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can’t hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets. Maybe too much time has passed for you and you will have to accept, I’m sorry to say it, that there are things about your experience you will never understand. My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains’ nobility, the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. Such was his credo. I myself have spent my life in business pursuits, dirtying my hands with money, and only now that he is gone can I sit in his garden and listen to him talk. Only now that he has sadly departed but you have gladly come.”

He described himself as a businessman but he had a poetic side to him. She asked him about his work and undammed a torrent of speech. When he told her about the handicrafts he bought and sold his voice was full of feeling. He spoke about the origins of the craft of numdah rug making in Central Asia, in Yarkand and Sinkiang, in the days of the old Silk Route, and the words
Samarkand
and
Tashkent
made his eyes shine with ancient glory, even though Tashkent and Samarkand, these days, were faded, down-at-heel dumps. Papier-mâché, too, had come to Kashmir from Samarkand. “A prince of Kashmir in the fifteenth century was put in prison there for many years and learned this craftwork in jail.” Ah, the jails of Samarkand, said the sparkle in his eyes, where a man could learn such things! He told her about the two parts of the creative process, the
sakhtsazi
or manufacture, the soaking of waste paper, the drying of the pulp, the cutting of the shape, the layering with glue and gypsum, the pasting of layers of tissue paper, and then the
naqashi
or decorative phase, the painting and lacquering. “So many artists together make every piece, the final work is not one man’s alone, it is the product of our whole culture, it is not only made in but in fact made by Kashmir.”

When he described the weaving and embroidery of the shawls of Kashmir his voice dropped with awe. He compared them lyrically to Gobelin tapestries though he had never seen such things. He fell into technical language,
the decoration is formed by weft threads interlocked where the colors change,
and such was his boyish excitement at the weavers’ skill that she, listening, was excited too. He told her about
sozni
embroidery techniques, which could be so skillful that the same motif would appear on both sides of the shawl in different colors, about satin-stitch and
ari
work and the hair of the ibex goat and the legendary
jamawar
shawls. By the time he was done, apologizing for boring her, she was already half in love.

But she had not come to Kashmir to fall in love. What then was this man doing, loving her? What, when his father was not two weeks dead, was that foolish expression doing on his face, his admittedly handsome face, that expression which needed no translation? And what was wrong with her, by the way, why was she lingering here in this strange garden that seemed immune to history, setting aside her quest and listening instead to the buzzing of these innocent bees, wandering between these hedges which no evil could penetrate, breathing this jasmine air unpolluted by the smell of cordite, and passing her days bathed in this stranger’s worshipful regard, listening to his interminable accounts of handicraft manufacture and his recitals of poetry in his admittedly beautiful voice, and somehow insulated from the city’s daily noises of marching feet, clenched-fist demands and the age’s insoluble complaints? Feeling was rising in her also, it was necessary to concede this, and though it had been her habit not to surrender to feeling, to control herself, she understood that this feeling was strong. Perhaps it would prove stronger than her ability to resist it. Perhaps not. She was a woman from far away who had defended her heart for a long time. She did not know if she could satisfy his needs, did not see how she could, was amazed that she was even thinking about satisfying them. This was not her purpose. She felt shocked, even betrayed, by her emotions. Olga Simeonovna had warned her about the essentially sneaky nature of love. “It don’t approach from where you’re looking,” she had said. “It will creep up from behind your left ear and hit you on the head like a rock.”

At night he sang for her and his voice kept her trapped in his spell. He was enough his father’s son to know something of the music of Kashmir and could play, albeit falteringly, the santoor. He sang the
muquam
ragas of the classical form known as Sufiana Kalam. He sang her the songs of Habba Khatoon, the legendary sixteenth-century poet-princess, who introduced
lol
or lyric love poetry to Kashmir, songs of the pain of her separation from her beloved Prince Yusuf Shah Chak, imprisoned by the Mughal emperor Akbar in faraway Bihar—“my garden has blossomed into colorful flowers, why are you away from me?”—and he apologized for not having a woman’s voice. He sang the irregular-meter
bakhan
songs of the Pahari musical style. The music had its effect. For five days she stayed in the enchanted garden, soporific with unlooked-for pleasure. Then on the sixth day she awoke and shook herself and asked him for help. “Pachigam.” She spoke the name as if it were a charm, an open-sesame that would roll back a boulder from the door of a treasure cave inside which her mother glistened and gleamed like hoarded gold. Pachigam, a place from a fable that needed to be made real. “Please,” she said. And he, declining to mention the dangers of the country roads, agreed to take her, to drive her into fable, or at least into the past. “I do not know the situation in that village and to my shame cannot tell you what you want to know,” he told her. “The village came under crackdown some time back. This was reported. It was my father who had contacts there. I regret I have not been sufficiently active in the culture area. I am a businessman.” What did that mean, crackdown, she wanted to know. Was anyone, is anyone, what happened. He did not tell her how brutal an event a crackdown could be. “I don’t know,” he repeated wretchedly. “As to specifics I am regrettably unaware.” But we will go and find out, won’t we, she said. “Yes,” he miserably assented. “We can go today.”

She sat in his olive-green Toyota Qualis and when they drove out of the gates of his house, that tiny Shangri-La, that miraculous island of calm in the middle of a war zone, she gave him a sidelong look, half expecting him to wither and die, to age horribly before her eyes as immortals do when they leave their magical paradise. But he remained himself, his beauty and grace undimmed. He saw her looking at him and was vain enough to blush. “Your home, your garden, is so beautiful,” she said quickly, seeking to disguise the light in her eyes: too late. His blush deepened. A man who blushed was irresistible, it could not be denied. “In my childhood, it was a heaven inside a heaven,” he said. “But now Kashmir is no longer heavenly and I am not a gardener like my father. I fear the house and garden will not last, without.” He stopped in midsentence. “Without what?” she teased him, guessing the unspoken words, but he blushed again and concentrated on the road ahead.
Without a woman’s touch.