Shalimar the Clown (28 page)

Pachigam was a trap, she told herself every night, but the Muskadoon still scurried through her dreams, its cold swift mountain music singing in her ears. She was a girl from the mountains and the climate of the plains affected her badly. When it was summer in Delhi the air conditioners were invariably incapacitated by “load-shedding” power cuts at the hottest times of day. The heat was like a hammer, like a stone. Crushed beneath it, she collapsed onto her illicit bed of shame and thought of Chandanwari, of Manasbal and Shishnag, of flower-carpeted Gulmarg and the eternal snows above, of cool glaciers and bubbling springs and the high ice-temples of the gods. She heard the soft splash of a heart-shaped oar in the water of a mirror lake, the rustle of chinar leaves, the boatmen’s songs and the soft beating of wings, thrushes’ wings, mynah wings, the wings of bluetits and hoopoes, and the top-knotted bulbuls that looked like young girls who had put up their hair. When she closed her eyes she invariably saw her father, her husband, her companions, her appointed place on earth. Not her new lover but her old, lost life.
My old life like a prison,
she told herself savagely, but her heart called her a fool. She had it all upside down and backward, her heart scolded her. What she thought of as her former imprisonment had been freedom, while this so-called liberation was no more than a gilded cage.

She thought of Shalimar the clown and was horrified again by the ease with which she had abandoned him. When she left Pachigam none of her closest people guessed what she was doing, the dolts. None of them tried to save her from herself, and how could she forgive them for that? What idiots they all were! Her husband was super-idiot number one and her father was super-idiot number two and everyone else was pretty close behind. Even after Himal and Gonwati returned to Pachigam without her and the bad talk began, even then Shalimar the clown sent her trusting letters, letters haunted by the phantom of their murdered love.
I reach out to you and touch you without touching you as on the riverbank in the old days. I know you are following your dream but that dream will always bring you back to me. If the Amrikan is of assistance well and good. People always talk lies but I know your heart is true. I sit with folded hands and await your loving return.
She lay perspiring on her bed, held captive by the chains of her enslaving solitude, and tore the letters into smaller and smaller pieces. They were letters that humiliated both their author and their recipient, letters that had no business existing, that should never have been sent. Such thoughts should never have come into being, and would not have, were it not for the enfeebled mind of that man without honor whom it was her shame to have espoused.

The paper scraps fell from her enervated summer hand and floated like snowflakes to the bedroom floor, and indeed the messages they bore were as irrelevant to her new life as snow. What kind of husband was he anyway, this clown? Was he storming the capital in his wrath like a Muslim conqueror of old, a Tughlaq or Khilji at least if not a Mughal, or, like Lord Ram, was he at least sending the monkey-god Hanuman to find her before he launched his lethal attack on her abductor, the American Ravan? No, he was mooning over her picture and weeping into the waters of the stupid Muskadoon like an impotent goof, accepting his fate like a true Kashmiri coward, content to be trampled over by anyone who felt like doing a bit of trampling, a wrong-headed duffer who quarreled with his brother Anees who at least had the guts to take matters into his own hands and blow up a few useless things. He was behaving like the performing dog he was, a creature who imitated life to make people laugh but who had not the slightest understanding of how a man should live.

On the night she first lay with him, she remembered, he had menaced her lovingly, swearing to pursue her and take her life, hers and her children’s, if she ever did what she had just so callously done. What empty words men spoke when they had had their way with a woman. He was a weakling, a strutting turkey-cock, a fool. In his place she would have hunted herself down and murdered herself in a gutter, like a dog, so that the shame of it would outlive her.

The letters stopped. But still every night in her dreams he came to her, walking the high wire, jumping rope in the sky, bouncing on air as if it were a trampoline, playing leapfrog with his brothers along the high thin line, pretending to slip on an invisible banana skin, windmilling his arms, saving himself, regaining his balance, then slipping on a second imaginary banana skin and falling in a skillfully chaotic tumble all the way to the ground, a finale that always brought the house down. In her dreams she smiled at his genius but when she woke the smile withered and died.

In short, she could not get her cuckolded husband out of her mind, and because it was impossible to talk to her American lover about anything important she spoke heatedly of “Kashmir” instead. Whenever she said “Kashmir” she secretly meant her husband, and this ruse allowed her to declare her love for the man she had betrayed to the man with whom she had committed the act of treason. More and more often she spoke of her love for this encoded “Kashmir,” arousing no suspicion, even when her pronouns occasionally slipped, so that she referred to his mountains, his valleys, his gardens, his flowing streams, his flowers, his stags, his fish. Her American lover was obviously too stupid to crack the code, and attributed the pronoun slippage to her incomplete command of the language. However he, the ambassador, took careful note of her passion, and was plainly moved when she was at her angriest, when she castigated “Kashmir” for his cowardice, for his passivity in the face of the horrible crimes committed against him. “These crimes,” he asked, reclining on her pillows, caressing her naked back, kissing her exposed hip, pinching her nipple, “these would be actions of the Indian armed forces you’re talking about?” At that moment she decided that the term “Indian armed forces” would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body, so, “Yes, that’s it,” she cried, “the ‘Indian armed forces,’ raping and pillaging. How can you not know it? How can you not comprehend the humiliation of it, the shame of having your boots march all over my private fields?” Again, those telltale slips of the tongue. Your boots, my fields. Again, distracted by her inflamed beauty, he paid no attention to the errors. “Yes, dearest,” he said in a muffled voice from between her thighs, “I believe I do begin to understand, but would it be possible to table the subject for the moment?”

Time passed. Max Ophuls knew that Boonyi Noman did not love him but at first he shut the knowledge away, blinding himself to its consequences, because she had taken up temporary residence in a tender corner of his heart. He knew she hid a great deal of herself from him, exposing only her body, like a true courtesan, like any common whore, but he agreed with himself to forget this, deceiving himself into believing that she reciprocated what he was pleased to call his love. And he allowed her diatribes on the “occupation” of “Kashmir” to affect his thinking, never suspecting that she was secretly railing against himself and against the ineffectual husband who had failed to come to her rescue. He began to object, in private session and in public speeches, to the militarization of the Kashmir valley, and when the word
oppressors
passed his lips for the first time the bubble of his popularity finally burst.

Newspaper editorials lambasted him. Here, they said, here beneath all the phony Indiaphile posturing, was just another cheap “cigarette” (this was a slang term meaning a Pak-American, an American with Pakistani sympathies, a play on the name of the Pak-American Tobacco Company), just another uncomprehending gringo. America was trampling over southeast Asia, Vietnamese children’s bodies were burning with unquenchable napalm fire, and yet the American ambassador had the gall to speak of oppression. “America should put its own house in order,” thundered India’s editorial writers, “and stop telling us how to take care of our own land.” It was at this point that Edgar Wood, correctly identifying the source of the ambassador’s problems, decided that Boonyi Noman had to go.

Observe him, this unctuous rodent, this Eager Beaver Wood, this invisible, scurrying oiler of wheels, this subterranean enabler of the visible, this lizard person, this snake at the mountain’s root! A pimp of this ilk, a pander of this water would seem to be ill equipped for the burdensome work of moral disapproval. It is not easy to look down on others when one’s own position lacks elevation. Yet the feat was achieved by the ever-resourceful and duplicitous Wood, who proceeded entirely by inversions. The child of a Bostonian prelate (and therefore a Brahmin of sorts himself), he had turned away from religion at an early age. Having rejected religious observance, he nevertheless continued to harbor a secret love of sanctimony and pomp. Being covertly pompous and sanctimonious, he affected humility and open-minded tolerance. Being humble, he concealed within himself an overweening pride. Being prideful, he offered himself to Max Ophuls as a selfless devotee, an effacer of his own needs, a do-everything, see-nothing man without qualities, a servitor, a low footstool for his high master’s shoe. Thus, though low-natured, he was still able to consider himself high-minded. See him now, coursing through the streets of the Indian capital in a little phut-phut scooter-rickshaw, his white kurta flapping in the wind. Behold the simple
chappals
on his feet. See him arrive at his residential quarters, and note, if you please, the Indian artworks and memorabilia therein, the Madhubani painting, the Warli tribal art, the miniatures of the Kashmiri and Company schools. Is this not the very picture of a Westerner gone native? Yet this same Wood was privately convinced of the innate superiority of the West, and filled with a shadowy contempt for the nation whose style he sought so assiduously to ape. He was tormented, we may grant him that. Such tergiversations of the soul, such twists in the psyche, such tortuous contradictions between the apparent and the actual, would certainly be painful, we may concede, to endure.

Such a coiled and doubled man-serpent would have been too formidable an adversary for a heavily compromised and largely defenseless young woman in any case, but the truth was that she made his task much easier than he expected; and so, finally, did Max. Things in Delhi had not gone as Boonyi Kaul Noman would have wished. Pink, in her two small lonely rooms, rapidly became the color of her isolation and self-loathing. The blue-white of the neon strip-lighting became the color of judgment, a harsh contemptuous glare that erased shadows and left her no place to hide. And as for the sage-green color of her dance guru’s apartment walls, well, that became the color of her failure. The Odissi master Pandit Mudgal had been scornful of her from the first. He was the guru of Sonal Karnaa and Kumkum Segal! He had taught Alarmel Mansingh! He was the master of Kiran Qunango! No man had done more than he to popularize the Odissi dance form! Where would they all be without him—Aloka Panigrahi, Sanjukta Sarukkai, Protima Mahapatra, Madhavi Mohanty? And now in his mottled old age came this raw, lazy village girl, this kept woman, this nothing. She was a rich American’s toy, and he despised her for that; somewhat he despised himself for taking the Yankee dollars and becoming party to the arrangement, and this, too, he held against her. The lessons had gone badly from the start; nor had there been much subsequent improvement. At length Pandit Mudgal, a thickset man with the physiognomy—and all the sensuality—of an outsized eggplant, told her, “Yes, madam, sex appeal you have, that we can all see. You move and men watch you. That is only one thing. Great mastery requires a great soul and your soul, madam, is damned.” She fled weeping from his sight and the next day the ambassador sent Edgar Wood to tell Mudgal that his salary would be increased—doubled!—if he persevered. Like Charles Foster Kane trying to make a singer out of his discordant wife, Max Ophuls tried to buy what could not be bought, and failed. Jayababu, once long, lean and beautiful and now a dark brinjal of a man, an ill-tempered eggplant, refused the cash.

“I am a man for a challenge,” he told Edgar Wood. “But this girl is not for me. Hers is not the high calling, but the low.”

Max’s attention began to wander after that, though for a long time he refused to acknowledge the change in himself. He stayed away from Boonyi for longer periods. Once or twice he dined privately with his wife. Peggy Ophuls was annoyed with herself for feeling so pleased. She was legendary for her toughness but with him she was always weak. How easily she came back to him, how pathetically she opened her arms and let him slink shamefacedly home! He murmured something about the old days, about the Pat Line or the Lyons Corner House, and at once floods of repressed emotion surged through her body. He did his imitation of the vocal style of Mrs. Shanti Dickens of Porchester Terrace as she relished the day’s crime reports—
“Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it? Maybe ’e is heatin’ ’er for ’is tea!”
—and tears of laughter stood in the Grey Rat’s eyes. This time had been the hardest of all for her. She had lost him for so long that she had feared she would never get him back. But here he was, coming round to face her again. This was what they had, she told herself, this inevitability. They were built to last. She raised a glass to him and a smile trembled at the corners of her mouth. I am the most deluded woman in the world, she thought. But look at him, here he is. My man.

None of Max Ophuls’s amours ever lasted very long before he came to India. Boonyi had been different. This was “love,” and the nature of love was—was it not?—to endure. Or was that just one of the mistakes people made about love, Max got to wondering. Was he clothing an essentially savage, irrational thing in the garb of civilization, dolling it up in the dress shirt of endurance, the silk trousers of constancy, the frock coat of solicitude and the top hat of selflessness? Like Tarzan the ape man when he came to London or New York: the natural rendered unnatural. But under all the fancy apparel the untamable, unkind reality still remained, a feral thing more gorilla-like than human. Something having less to do with sweetness and tenderness and caring and more to do with spoor and territory and grooming and domination and sex. Something provisional, no matter what sort of treaties you acceded to, signed marriage contracts or private statements of accord.