Shalimar the Clown (9 page)

There was no moon. The white furnace of the galaxy burned across the sky. The birds were sleeping. Shalimar the clown climbed the wooded hill to Khelmarg and listened to the river flow. He wanted the world to remain frozen just as it was in this moment, when he was filled with hope and longing, when he was young and in love and nobody had disappointed him and nobody he loved had died. Regarding death, his mother believed in a snaky afterlife but his father’s eternity had wings. When Noman was a little boy of six his bad-tempered grandfather Farooq had ended his long, grumbling life in an uncharacteristically cheerful mood. “At least I won’t have all of you screwing things up all around me to worry about anymore,” he said. Farooq’s idea of love was to grab Noman’s young cheek and pinch and twist it as hard as he could.

“Babajan thinks I’m ugly,” Noman complained.

“Of course he doesn’t,” his father unconvincingly replied.

“If he didn’t think I was as ugly as a
bhoot,
” said Noman conclusively, “he wouldn’t keep trying to rip my face off with his claws.”

In spite of Grandfather Farooq’s bad attitude to Noman’s physiognomy the boy was unnerved by the funeral rites. Grandfather Farooq was buried with bewildering speed, consigned to the earth six hours after his expiry, but he was mourned at devastating and tedious length. To comfort and invigorate Noman, Abdullah explained that after death the souls of their family members entered the local birds and flew around Pachigam singing the same songs they used to sing back when they were people. As birds they sang with the same level of musical talent they had possessed in their earlier human life, no more, no less. Noman didn’t believe him and said as much. His father replied seriously. “Just let me die and then look out for a hoopoe with a voice like a broken exhaust pipe. When you hear that hoopoe croaking and cracking that will be me singing my favorite I-told-you-so song.” Abdullah laughed and it was true that he sounded exactly like the split exhaust pipe of his old truck, and his singing voice was even worse than his laugh. It was also true that “I told you so” was Abdullah Noman’s favorite song, because he was cursed with the curse of knowing too much and the double curse of being unable to avoid pointing this out even though it made Firdaus Begum threaten to hit him on the head with a stone.

“You won’t die,” Noman told him. “You won’t die, ever, ever.”

When he was a boy his father could find birds all over him. Abdullah kissed Noman’s cheek, his stomach or his knee and at once the child could hear birdsong right there where his father’s puckered lips touched his skin. “I think there’s a bird in your armpit,” Abdullah would say and Noman would wriggle with delight, trying to stop him, not wanting him to stop, and Abdullah would wrestle his way in there and suddenly, hey presto, there were the piercing tweets coming out of Noman’s armpit too. “Maybe,” his father said as he moved menacingly toward his face, “that birdy wants to escape through your nose.”

Abdullah Sher Noman was indeed a lion, as the honorific
sher
which he had eventually taken as his middle name suggested. Ever since his young days people in Pachigam had said that there were two lions in Kashmir. One was Sheikh Abdullah, of course, Sher-e-Kashmir himself, the unquestioned leader of his people. Everyone agreed that Sheikh Abdullah was the valley’s real prince, not that Dogra maharaja living in the palace on the slopes above Srinagar that afterwards became the Oberoi Hotel. The other lion was Pachigam’s very own headman, Abdullah Noman, whom everybody admired and, in a loving and respectful way, also somewhat feared, not only because he was the boss but also because he possessed a stage presence so commanding in its heroism, so fiercely valiant for truth, that some of the more unsavory members of their audiences around the valley had been known to leap to their feet and confess to unsuspected crimes without even waiting for the climax and finale of the play.

Abdullah wasn’t tall but he was strong, with arms as thick as any blacksmith’s. He was wide of shoulder, profuse of hair, and the Indian soldiers in the camp treated him with as much respect as they could summon up. He was also a formidable actor-manager who led the traveling players wherever they went, and greatly beloved of women too, though Firdaus Begum was all the lioness he required. “He gave me his same, leonine middle name,” Shalimar the assassin wrote many years later, “but I do not deserve to bear it. My life was going to be one thing but death turned it into another. The bright sky vanished for me and a dark passage opened. Now I am made of darkness, but a lion is made of light.” He wrote this on a flimsy sheet of lined prison notepaper. Then he tore the paper to bits.

The official name of their village, Pachigam, lacked any apparent meaning; but some of its older inhabitants claimed that it was a latter-day corruption of Panchigam, which is to say “birdville.” In the vexed debate on whether or not birds were transfigured human souls this etymological rumor proved nothing or everything depending on your inclination. When Shalimar the clown found Boonyi Kaul waiting for him in the Khelmarg meadow, however, that debate was no longer uppermost in his mind. Another debate was raging there instead. Standing before him, oiled of skin and with wildflowers scenting the carefully braided hair that hung kerchief-free around her shoulders, was the girl he loved, waiting for him to make her a woman and in doing so make himself a man. Desire rose in him, but so did a counterforce he had not expected: restraint. The shadow dragons were fighting over him, Rahu the exaggerator and Ketu the blocker battling for mastery of his heart.

He looked into Boonyi’s eyes and saw the telltale dreaminess there, warning him that she had smoked
charas
to give her the courage to be deflowered. In the subtly suggestive movements of her lips, too, he could discern the cryptic seductiveness of her condition. “Boonyi, Boonyi,” he mourned, “you’ve burdened me with a responsibility I don’t know how to discharge. Let’s, you know, caress each other in five places and kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but let’s not get carried away.” In reply, Boonyi pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot. “Don’t treat me like a child,” she said in a throaty voice that proved she had been unsparing in her drug abuse. “You think I went to all this trouble just for a kiddie-style session of lick and suck?” When he heard the unexpected coarseness of her speech Shalimar the clown surmised that she must have been very afraid indeed of what she had agreed to do, which was why she had needed to derange herself so completely. “Okay, it’s not going to happen,” he said, and the conflict within him grew so great, the two halves of the dragon churned up his insides so completely, that he was physically sick. Boonyi laughed hysterically at the sight. “You think that’s going to put me off?” she gasped between the sobs of laughter, and pulled him down on top of her. “Mister, you’ll have to try a lot harder than that to get yourself out of this.”

Never afterwards did Boonyi Kaul utter a word of regret or recrimination for what she did in the meadow of Khelmarg, even though the events of that night set her on the road that led to an early death. She never reproached herself or Shalimar the clown for their choice, which was really hers. Shalimar the clown had been wrong about that too. She had not smoked the charas to abdicate responsibility but to be sure of seizing her opportunity; nor was she afraid of what she had chosen to do. The dragon’s head had won her over long ago. The spirit-killing tail had no power over her.

“God,” she said when it was over, “and
that’s
what you
didn’t
want to do?”

“Don’t leave me,” he said, rolling over onto his back and panting for joy. “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also.”

“What a romantic you are,” she replied carelessly. “You say the sweetest things.”

Before Shalimar the clown and Boonyi were born there had been the villages of the actors and the villages of the cooks. Then times changed. The Pachigami performers of the traditional entertainments known as
bhand pather
or clown stories were still the undisputed player kings of the valley, but Abdullah the genius—young Abdullah, in his prime—was the one who made them learn how to be cooks as well. In the valley at times of celebration people liked a bit of a drama to watch but there was also a demand for those who could prepare the legendary
wazwaan,
the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum. Thanks to Abdullah the villagers of Pachigam were the first to provide a rounded service which offered both sustenance for the body and pleasure for the soul. As a result they didn’t have to share the feast-day cash emoluments with anyone. There were other villages that specialized in the Thirty-Six-Courses-Minimum banquet, the most famous of which was Shirmal, just a mile and a half down the road; but as Abdullah pointed out it was easier to study recipes than to hold an audience in the palm of your hand.

He did not institute this radical change in the village’s lifestyle unopposed. Firdaus Begum told him it was a damn-fool scheme that would ruin the village financially. “Look at all the stuff we have to buy—all the copper haandis, the grills, the portable tandoor ovens, just for a start!—and then there is the cost of learning the food and practicing,” she protested. “Is there any reason, theoretically speaking,” Abdullah had roared ruminatively at Firdaus Begum one cold spring day—he had forgotten long ago that it was possible to lower one’s voice when speaking—“why actors should not be able to fry spices and boil rice into something other than a soggy mush?” Firdaus Begum bridled at his tone. “Is there any good explanation, by the same token,” she bawled back at him, “of why the sarus cranes aren’t flying upside down?”

Her dissident voice was in the minority, however, and after the policy started showing signs of being a success the leading cookery village of Shirmal took a leaf out of Pachigam’s book and tried to put on comedy dramas to accompany their food. However, their amateurish stage show was a bust. Then one night war was declared between the rivals. The men of Shirmal staged a raid on Pachigam, aiming to steal the great cauldrons and to break the ovens in which the traveling players had learned to cook the noblest delicacies of the region, the
roghan josh,
the
tabak maaz,
the
gushtaba,
but the Pachigam men sent the Shirmalis home crying with broken heads. After the pot war it was tacitly accepted that Pachigam was at the top of the entertainment tree, and the others got hired only when Pachigam’s tellers of clown stories and cookers of banquets were too busy to offer their services.

The pot war horrified everyone in Pachigam even though they had come out on the winning side. They had always thought of their neighbors the Shirmal villagers as being more than a little weird, but nobody had imagined that so outrageous a breach of the peace was possible, that Kashmiris would attack other Kashmiris driven by such crummy motivations as envy, malice and greed. Firdaus Begum’s friend, the ageless Gujar tribal woman and prophetess Nazarébaddoor, sank into an uncharacteristic gloom. Nazarébaddoor was the most optimistic of seers, whom people liked to visit in her mossy-roofed forest hut in spite of its damp smell of fornicating livestock because she invariably foretold happiness, wealth, long life and success. After the pot war her vision darkened. “This is the first pebble that starts the avalanche,” she said, shaking her toothless head. Then she went into her odorous little hut, drew a wooden screen across the entrance, and retired forever from the art of divination. Nazarébaddoor had taken her name—“evil eye, begone!”—from a character out of the old stories, a beautiful princess who was in love with the hero Prince Hatim Tai and whose touch could avert curses, and she allowed the more gullible villagers to believe that she was in fact none other than that fabled immortal beauty, whom death had been unable to seize because her lucky touch kept getting her out of its clutches. “If it makes people happy,” she confided in Firdaus, “I don’t care if they believe I was once the Queen of Sheba.”

To tell the truth, Nazarébaddoor didn’t look much like the queen of anywhere. With her loose turban and her single golden front tooth she more closely resembled a marooned corsair. When she was young, she said, she had been blessed with flowing waves of auburn hair, gleaming white teeth and a blue left eye, but nobody could verify these claims because nobody in the neighborhood could remember when Nazarébaddoor had been young. Her husband had offended her by dying without managing to leave her with so much as a single son to look after her in her declining years, which she considered the height of bad manners, and which had left her with a poor opinion of men in general. “If there’s a way to propagate the human race without depending on men,” Nazarébaddoor said to Firdaus, “lead me to it, because then women can have everything they want and dispense with everything they don’t need.” By the time news of artificial insemination arrived in the valley, however, she was long past child-bearing age, and could not have afforded the procedure even if she had been in the first red, white and blue flush of youth.

She had made the best of her life, tending her livestock, smoking her pipe, and surviving. The fortune-telling was a sideline that brought in a little extra, but prophecy was not Nazarébaddoor’s main concern. Like the true Gujar woman that she was, her first love was the pine forest. Her most frequently repeated saying was, in Kashmiri,
Un poshi teli, yeli vun poshi,
which meant, “Forests come first, food comes second.” She saw herself as the guardian of the trees of the Forest of Khel and had to be propitiated every autumn when the villagers of Pachigam and Shirmal, who both foraged there, needed to stock up on firewood before the coming of the winter snows. “You wouldn’t want our children to freeze to death,” the villagers pleaded, and eventually she would concede that human children mattered more than living wood. She would guide the village men to those trees that were closest to death and these were the only ones she would allow them to fell. They did what she said, fearing that if they did not she would bewitch them, blighting their crops and sending them a shaking sickness or a plague of boils.