Shalimar the Clown (26 page)

The embassy aide Edgar Wood, floppy-haired, tall, pale and skinny, with a large, permanent zit on his right cheek to hint at his ridiculous youth, and the feeble shadow of a Zapata moustache to confirm it, was a former graduate student of international relations at Columbia who had followed Max to India at the ambassador’s special insistence. The reason for this was not Wood’s brilliance or industry (though he was indeed smart and a quick learner, known at Columbia as Eager Wood, a nickname he brought with him into the embassy). No, the reason Wood was indispensable was that he would do anything the ambassador needed done and keep his mouth shut about it. It wasn’t easy to find the perfect set-up man, the loyal go-between, the faultless fixer, but without such a person it was impossible for a man in the public eye to lead the kind of life that Max Ophuls’s nature compelled him to lead. He had his own nickname for Wood; in his eyes the kid was not so much an “Eager,” more of a “Beaver”; but of course he never told him so. The first time he had broached the subject of his assignations with women and his need for a discreet assistant, Beaver Wood volunteered immediately. “Just one question, sir,” he asked Max. “Do you have a bad back?” Max was puzzled. No, he answered, his back was fine. Wood bobbed his head in approval and apparent relief. “Excellent,” he said. “Because too much sex and a bad back is what got the president assassinated.”

This was strange, Max thought, and also evidence that Wood was a more interesting fellow than his raw young looks had yet found a way of revealing. “The truss, sir,” Wood explained. “Kennedy’s back was bad to begin with, but it got so much worse because of all the screwing around that he had to wear the truss all the time. He was wearing it in Dallas and that’s why he didn’t fall over after the first shot hit him. He was wounded and lurched over and the truss just sat him up again, boing, and then the second bullet blew off the back of his head. You see what I’m saying, Professor, maybe if he’d had less sex, he maybe wouldn’t have been wearing the truss, and then no boing, he’d just have fallen flat after being wounded; the first bullet wasn’t fatal, remember, and he wouldn’t have been as they say
available
for the second shot, and Johnson wouldn’t be president. There’s a moral in there somewhere, I guess, but as you don’t have a bad back, Professor, it doesn’t apply to you.”

In the hunting lodge at Dachigam, Max Ophuls reclining on carpets and cushions leaned backward, away from the Indian foreign minister, to whisper to Edgar Wood. “Get her details,” he said. Wood replied: “Sir, she’s allegedly buried in Lahore, Pakistan, and her real name was either Nadira Begum or Sharf-un-Nissa. Prince Salim gave her the love-name of Anarkali, meaning ‘pomegranate bud.’ Sir.” Max frowned. “Not the damn character, Wood. Not the damn apocryphal historical figure.” Wood grinned. “I’m on it, sir. I was just messing with you.” Max tolerated such cheekiness. It was a small price to pay for the services Wood so uncomplainingly, even enthusiastically rendered. He turned back to Swaran Singh, a soft-spoken man of simple habits whose charm and erudition were as great as Max’s own, and whom Max had begun to like very much. Swaran wanted to offer his own reaction to the dance piece. “You see, Akbar was remarkably tolerant of Hinduism,” he said. “Indeed his own wife Jodhabai, Salim’s mother, remained a practicing Hindu throughout their marriage. Interesting that class difference was where he drew the line. Suggests that as a people social order matters more to us than religious belief. Just like the English, eh? No wonder we hit it off so well.” Max laughed obligingly. “By the way,” added Swaran Singh, who was known for his strict moral rectitude but was also a shrewd man who knew the effectiveness of a shock tactic, “did you by any chance notice that young woman’s breasts?” He let out a loud guffaw, which Max, for the sake of Indo-American relations, felt the need to emulate. “National treasures,” he replied seriously, using much self-control to conceal his deeper feelings, but fearing that Swaran had noted the powerful involuntary reaction he had gone fishing for. “Integral parts of India,” he added, for good measure. This set Swaran Singh off again. “Ambassador,” the foreign minister chuckled, “I can see that with you as our guide, the new India will become more pro-West than ever before.”

When Peggy Ophuls, alone in the New York apartment, had answered her telephone and heard from one of her informants that Edgar Wood was slated for transfer to India her heart pounded and she threw the tall glass of Pellegrino she was holding as hard as she could in the general direction of
ZOOMMM!!!!,
the widescreen Lichtenstein portrait of her husband flying the Bugatti Racer which she had commissioned as a gift of love and which hung, when it was not being lent to this or that major gallery, on one long living-room wall in their capacious Riverside Drive home. Such was her agitation that the glass missed the large painting entirely and shattered on the white wall to the right of the unprotected canvas. She left the pieces where they fell, clenched both fists and controlled herself. Better the pimp you know, she told herself angrily. If Wood had been left behind in America her husband would certainly have found another little helper, and for a time Margaret wouldn’t have known who was setting up the action without which Max Ophuls apparently couldn’t live, and which she herself was, by this time, emphatically unwilling to provide. Neither Max nor Edgar had any idea that she knew all about them—that she knew
everything—
that she knew where all the bodies were—not buried—ha! aha!—what was the right word—yes!
laid,
that she knew
in detail
where all his damned damned damned bodies were well and truly laid, that she had made it her business to, that she was in a position to, that one of these days by God she would, that any woman in her situation—and she had killed a man once!—had a right to, to. To
take her dashed revenge.

The seduction of Boonyi Kaul Noman—or, more accurately, the seduction of Max Ophuls by Boonyi—took time. Even for a man of Edgar Wood’s unusual aptitudes it was not easy to arrange a private meeting between the American ambassador and a married Kashmiri dancing girl. At the end of the Dachigam hunting lodge festivities Wood voiced the ambassador’s desire to thank personally all those who had given him such a delightful evening, and out they came in a crowd, the poets and santoor players, the actors and cooks. Max moved among them with an interpreter and the genuineness of his interest and concern touched everyone he spoke to. At one point, casually, as if it were not the point of the entire exercise, he turned to Boonyi and congratulated her on her artistry. “A talent like yours,” he said, “must surely seek to advance and develop itself.” The interpreter translated, and Boonyi, her eyes modestly downcast, felt a breeze on her cheek, as if a door were opening and the air of the outside world were being allowed to enter. She told herself, Patience is everything now. You must just fold your hands in your lap and wait for what will be.

“Ask her name,” Max Ophuls ordered the interpreter. “Boonyi,” the fellow answered. “She tells that it is her preferred, how to say it, her optioned name. Actually her given name is Bhoomi, the earth, but her friends are calling her by this Boonyi cognomen which, sir, is the beloved tree of Kashmir.” “I see,” said Max, “a name for outsiders and a pet name for her friends. Ask her then, Bhoomi the earth or Boonyi the beloved tree—as a dancer, in her career as a dancer, what is it she wants?” There was nothing personal in his voice or manner, no hint of impropriety. Her reply was similarly courteous, freighted with nothing, a neutral politeness. “Boonyi says first that she is Boonyi,” the interpreter translated, “and second that to please you is joy enough.” Max Ophuls saw Swaran Singh looking across the crowded room with a faint smile on his face, the most innocent of smiles, a gentle smile, quite devoid of guile.

Max moved away from Boonyi and didn’t look in her direction again all evening. However, he spoke at length to Abdullah Noman, asking carefully about economic conditions in the valley, learning about the decline of the fortunes of the bhand pather, expressing a fascination with their ancient hand-me-down skills which he did not have to fake. Soon enough, Abdullah took the bait, as Max had known he would. “He, Pachigam headman, sir, is saying it would be lifetime honor for him if one day you will grace his village,” the interpreter said. “It will be lifetime privilege for him to afford you full performances of traditional and modern plays and if interest is in you, also you may see how techniques et cetera are refined. Cooking too is there, wazwaan cooks are coming tonight from that place only.” Here Edgar Wood intervened, all haste and business. “The ambassador’s schedule does not presently permit . . .” Max patted his eager young aide on the arm. “Edgar, Edgar, we’re just chatting,” he said. “Who knows? Could be that some day even the American ambassador may have a moment to spare.”

After so successfully choreographed an encounter, Max Ophuls returned to Delhi, to the cool, sprawling New Formalist palazzo of decorated modernism encased in a mosaic grillwork of white stone where he now lived. He walked by its fountain-lined reflecting pool, and, like Boonyi Noman, waited. Edgar Wood quietly arranged for him to receive daily private lessons in Hindi and Kashmiri. The ambassador’s wife, meanwhile, was mostly absent from the ambassadorial residence. Transformed into her new persona of Peggy-Mata, mother of the motherless, she had embarked on a nonstop nationwide tour of Indian orphanages, and would occasionally send Max a note saying things like
These children are so beautiful I just absolutely want to scoop a few of them up and bring them home.
Her success in raising funds in America and Europe to improve conditions at orphanages all over India increased the couple’s popularity. “Perhaps we should regard Peggy-Mata as the real U.S. ambassador,” one newspaper editorial suggested, “and Mr. Ophuls as her charming and personable consort.” Next to the editorial was a large photograph of Peggy Ophuls standing beside a handsome young Catholic priest, Father Ambrose, and surrounded by smiling young girls from his orphanage, the Holy Love of India Evangalactic Girls’ Orphanage for Disabled & Destitute Street Girls in Mehrauli. “The dying in Calcutta have Mother Teresa,” Father Ambrose was reported to have said, “but for the living we have Peggy-Mata right here.”

Meanwhile the Ophuls marriage continued to decay. Six months after the ambassador’s first visit to Kashmir, the thing that Peggy Rhodes Ophuls had most dreaded had happened. Instead of playing the field and bedding every woman who succumbed to his famous charm, her bastard husband had become fixated on one particular girl, a nobody, a nothing, damn him. When the spring came he had visited the village of the traveling players who had by all accounts put on quite a show, drama, comedy, high-wire stunts and of course the dancing, and soon afterwards Max had decreed that a banquet be given “for Indian friends” at Roosevelt House, which by the by was the residence not only of the lecherous U.S. ambassador but of the ambassador’s wretched wife as well, he probably came up with the idea just so that he could bring the hussy down to New Delhi on the pretext of providing after-dinner entertainment—after-dinner entertainment indeed!—the scheme had that young so-and-so Wood’s fingerprints all over it, and the worst of it, the worst of the worst, was that he, her husband, the ambassador—the man she still loved, in her way, in the only way she knew, it didn’t give him what he needed but that didn’t mean it wasn’t love—her Max had made her, Peggy, come home from her orphanage inspections to act as hostess, to sit in her own home and watch that girl dance for him, did he think she was blind, she didn’t need any spies to see what that girl was doing, the effrontery of her hips, the recklessness of her eyes, it was as if they were naked and making love right there in front of Peggy, in front of everyone, the humiliation of it, she had seen a good deal of human cruelty in her life, they both had, so she wasn’t going to lose perspective, this wasn’t as bad as that, but still it was pretty goddamned cruel, pretty goddamned impossible to take.

They had come all this way together, the Rat and her Mole, they had survived so much, only to be shipwrecked at last on the rock of a gold-digging Kashmiri beauty. If the liaison lasted, Peggy Ophuls would of course have to leave him, after all this time and the expenditure of so much love and tolerance she would have to turn back into Margaret Rhodes and somehow live without him for the rest of her life. “Pumpkin time, Cinders,” she told herself. The magic spell was about to break, her gown would once again be an ashy rag, her footmen would turn back into mice, the beautiful fiction of her marriage would finally have to yield to the unpalatable facts. The glass slipper didn’t fit her anymore. It was on another woman’s foot.

The government of India was GOI. The government of Pakistan was GOP. In the aftermath of the Tashkent Peace Conference (TPC) between the two countries, during the period of partial political vacuum created by the fatal heart attack of the Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) on the day following the signature of the Tashkent Declaration (TD), Max Ophuls launched a major new American initiative. In this interregnum, a bitter stalemate between the potentates of the Congress Party ended when the kingmakers Kumaraswami Kamaraj (KK) and Morarji Desai (MD) elevated Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (IPG) to the premiership in the mistaken belief that she would be their helpless puppet. During this period of savage intraparty warfare only President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan rose above the political storm. His national stature and his air of a philosopher-saint gave him unusual influence over all government matters, even though the authors of the Indian constitution had clearly intended the president’s role to be largely ceremonial. Max’s close friendship with this revered figure (PSK) provided the opening for the so-called Ophuls Plan.

The ambassador’s idea was that if he could persuade both governments to work together on multilateral projects (GOI/GOP-MP) they could start getting used to interdependence instead of conflict. Mastering the language of unpronounceable acronyms which was the true lingua franca of the subcontinent’s political class, he proposed a fuel exchange program, or FEP: Pakistan would export its gas (PG) to India and India would send coal (IC) to Pakistan. He further proposed that the two nations cooperate over hydroelectric and irrigation projects (HAIP) in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Tista river system (GBTRS or, colloquially, GABTRIS). He spoke to the Indian government minister for planning and social work (GOIMPSW or MINPLASOC), Asoka Mehta, and assured him of World Bank support. He encouraged his old pal the minister for foreign affairs, GOIMFA Swaran Singh, to send out a feeler to his GOP counterpart concerning the possibility of back-channel arms limitation talks (BALT). Indira Gandhi was settling in as GOIPM, a.k.a. MADAM, and Max urged her to move down the path of reconciliation. The result of all his cajoling and bullying was the briefly celebrated Islamabad Joint Statement, the so-called IJOSTAT or GOIGOPJS(ISL)66. Max received personal messages of congratulations from both POTUS and UNSGUT. Of late, America had been infected by a Western strain of the South Asian disease of acronymial initialitis. JFK, RFK, MLK, and POTUS of course was LBJ and UNSGUT was the secretary-general of the United Nations, U Thant.