Shalimar the Clown (32 page)

Zoon turned her face away. “And your father,” she replied.

It was snowing harder than ever and the cold was tightening its grip on her body, even through her protective layers of fat, and in spite of the kangri of hot coals nestled against her belly. The storm enclosed her and Zoon; the rest of Pachigam was a white cloud. Boonyi got to her feet to think about this new situation, about the business of being dead. “Can a dead person get shelter from a blizzard,” she wondered aloud. “Or is it required that she freeze to death. Can a dead person get something to eat and drink, or must a dead person die all over again, of hunger and thirst. I’m not even asking right now if a dead person can be brought back to life. I’m just thinking, if the dead speak, does anyone hear them, or do their words fall on deaf ears. Does anyone comfort the dead if they weep, or forgive them if they repent. Are the dead to be condemned for all time or can they be redeemed. But maybe these questions are too big to be answered in a snowstorm. I must be smaller in my demands. So it comes down to this for now. Can a dead person lie down in the warmth or must she find a spade and dig her own grave.”

“Try not to be bitter,” Zoon said. “Try to understand the grief that killed you. As for your question, my father says you can haunt his woodshed for the night.”

The woodshed was weatherproof, at least, and in spite of her demise the Misris made her as comfortable as possible, softening the discomforts of the outbuilding with rugs and blankets. They hung an oil lantern from a nail. The storm abated as darkness fell and Boonyi retreated into her temporary world of wood to face her first night as a dead woman, or, to be precise, as a woman who knew she was no more, because as it turned out her life had actually been terminated for well over a year. The dead have no rights, she knew, and so everything that had formerly belonged to her, from her mother’s jewelry to her husband’s hand, was no longer in her charge. And there was possibly some danger also. She had heard stories of people being declared dead before, and when these deceased entities tried to return to life and reclaim their assets they were sometimes murdered all over again, in ways that ended all arguments over their status. But those other members of the fellowship of the living dead, the
mritak,
were killed by the greed of their relatives. Her own death was nobody’s fault but her own.

In the small hours of night she suddenly heard a familiar voice. Her father was leaning against the outside wall of the woodshed, wrapped up in as many warm garments as he could find, for he was a man who suffered the cold badly. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul addressed the woodshed familiarly, as if it were a living person, or at least a member of the living dead. “Let us speak of the Ocean of Love,” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul said to the woodshed through chattering teeth. “That is to say the
Anurag Sagar,
the great work of the poet K-K-K-Kabir.” Even in the wretchedness of her death Boonyi entombed within the woodshed could not repress a smile.

“One of the big figures in the
Anurag Sagar
is Kal,” her father told the woodshed. “Kal, whose name means yesterday and tomorrow, which is to say, T-T-T-Time. Kal was one of the sixteen sons of Sat Purush whose name means Positive Power, and after his fall he became the father of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. This does not mean that our world is born of evil. Kal is a lapsarian figure but he is neither evil nor g-good. Yet it is true that he insists on an eye for an eye and that the demands he makes of us limit us and prevent us from reaching what we have it in ourselves to be.”

Her heart leapt for joy and the flame of her lantern burned more brightly because both flame and heart knew that this was Boonyi’s father’s way of returning to her, of returning her to him. His next sentence, however, allowed the darkness to close in once more. “According to Kabir,” the pandit told the woodshed, “only the
m-m-m-mritak,
the Living Dead One, can rid himself of Kal’s pain. What does this mean? Some say it should be read thus: only the brave can achieve the Beloved. But another reading is, only the living dead are f-f-f-free of Time.”

Hear, O saints, the nature of mritak.
I have been away longer than I thought, she told herself. My father the man of reason, my matter-of-fact father, has given in to his mystical streak, his shadow planet, and become some sort of sadhu. The scholarly learning to which the pandit had always added an edge of irony, dispensing his versions of the ancient ideas with a mischievous little smile, was now, it seemed, being offered up without any distancing devices at all. The highest of human aspirations, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul sang to the woodshed, was to live in the world and yet not live in it. To extinguish the fire burning in the mind and live the holy life of total detachment. “The Living Dead One serves the S-S-S-Satguru. The Living Dead One manifests love within her; and by receiving love her life spirit is set free.” Boonyi heard the example of the earth. “The earth hurts no one. Be like that. The earth hates no one. Be like that as well.” She heard the example of the sugarcane and the candy. “The sugarcane is cut up and crushed and boiled to make the j-j-j-jaggery. The jaggery is boiled to make the raw sugar. The sugar burns to make rock candy. And from rock candy, sugar candy comes, and everyone likes that. In the same way the Living Dead One bears her sufferings and crosses the Ocean of Life t-t-t-toward joy.” She understood that her father was teaching her how she must now live; she hated the teaching and anger flared up in her. But she fought it back. He was right, just as Zoon had been right. She had to let go of anger and achieve humility. She had to let go of everything and be as nothing. It was not the love of God she sought, but the love of a particular man; however, by adopting the abnegatory posture of the disciple before the Divine, by erasing herself, she might also erase her crime and make herself what her husband could once again love.

Only a brave soul can do it.
The Living Dead Person must control the senses, said the pandit to the shed. She controls the organ of seeing and understands “beautiful” and “ugly” as the same. She controls the organ of hearing and can bear bad words as well as good. She controls the organ of taste and ceases to know the difference between tasty and tasteless things. She does not get excited even if she is brought the Five Nectars. She does not refuse food without salt, and lovingly accepts whatever is served her. The nose, too, she controls. Smells pleasant and unpleasant are as one to her.

“Also controlled is the organ of lust.” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was particularly firm on this point, as if making sure that the woodshed understood that its sinful yearnings must cease. “The g-g-g-god of lust is a robber. Lust is a mighty, dangerous, pain-giving, negative power. The lustful woman is the mine of Kal. The Living Dead One has enlightened herself with the lamp of knowledge. She has drunk the nectar of the Name and merged into the Elementless. When she has done this, lust will be f-f-f-finished.” At first she tried to find his true message in the words themselves. At a certain point, however, she began to hear the words beneath the words. The age of reason was over, he was telling her, as was the age of love. The irrational was coming into its own. Strategies of survival might be required. She remembered what he had said when he saw her standing at the bus stop covered in snow.
Nazarébaddoor.
She had mistakenly thought he was averting the evil eye when in fact he had been giving her advice, telling her where to go. The old Gujar prophetess had retreated from the world before she, Boonyi, had been born, and had cursed the future with her last speech.
What’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words.
Years later the Gegroo brothers would immure themselves in a mosque for fear of the wrath of Big Man Misri; but Nazarébaddoor had shut herself away because she feared Kal, the passage of Time itself. She had seated herself cross-legged in the
samadhi
position and simply ceased to be. When the villagers finally plucked up the courage to look inside the hut her body had acquired the fragility of a withered leaf and the breeze from the doorway blew it away like dust. Now it was Boonyi’s turn. A dead person who wished to overcome Kal would do well to follow the prophetess’s path. And there was another precedent, which Boonyi the former dancing girl did not fail to recall. Anarkali, too, had been immured for indulging a forbidden lust. And the trapdoor and the escape passage that set her free? That was just in the movies. In real life there were no such easy escapes.

Go up the mountain and die properly.
If that was her father’s message to her then she had no choice but to obey. He was no longer outside the woodshed. The snowstorm had stopped and she was alone. She was a fat cow but she would haul herself up that hill to the prophetess’s hut and wait for death to come. There was no end to the list of the things she craved and could no longer have. Food, pills, tobacco, love, peace. She would do without them all. The impossible weight of her absent daughter knocked her flat. As if all the logs in the woodshed had rolled down onto her body. She lay smashed and gasping on the floor. She felt the moorings of her sanity loosen and welcomed the comforting madness. A beautiful day began.

When she emerged from the woodshed she stood knee-deep in whiteness. The wooded hill hung over her like a threat. The meadow of Khelmarg was up there, with its memories of love. And in another direction, in the heart of the evergreen forest, was Nazarébaddoor, the dead awaiting the dead. Each step was an achievement. She was carrying her bedroll and her bag. Her feet her knees her hips all screamed their protests. The snow pushed back against her forward thrusts. Still she went on her slow, thudding way. More than once she fell against the drifts, and getting back to her feet was not easy. Her clothes were wet. She could not feel her toes. Stones hidden beneath the snow cut her feet and buried pine needles stabbed at her. Still she leaned into the slope and forced her legs to move. Speed was unimportant. Motion was all.

She saw Zoon watching her from a distance. The carpenter’s daughter stayed about fifty feet away, and never said a word; but she came all the way up the hill with Boonyi. Sometimes she leapt ahead and then stood waiting like a sentinel, an arm upraised to indicate the easiest path. Their eyes never met, but Boonyi, glad of the help, followed her old friend’s lead. Her thoughts had lost coherence, which was a mercy. It would have been impossible to climb the mountain with Kashmira’s great weight on her back, but her daughter had been mislaid for the moment, somewhere in the jumble of her mother’s mind. Boonyi scooped up handfuls of snow and thrust them greedily in her mouth to slake her thirst.

Halfway up the mountain she found a brown paper parcel in her path. Inside it was the miracle of food: a thick circle of unleavened
lavas
bread, a quantity of dum aloo in a little tin container, and two pieces of chicken in another such tin. She wolfed it all down, asking no questions. Then up the hill she went again, the heat of the sun punishing her from above, the cold of the snow from below. Her breath came in long wheezing gulps. The forest circled her, whirling about her and about. She was stumbling now, staggering, not even sure if she was going up or down the wooded slope. Faster and faster the trees spun around her, and then unconsciousness came, like a gift. When she awoke she was propped up against the doorway of a Gujar hut.

In the days that followed her hold on her sanity weakened further, so that it seemed to her that she was the one who was alive and everyone else was dead. The interior of Nazarébaddoor’s hut had been cleaned and swept, as if a ghostly presence had known she was coming, and a new mat had been laid on the floor. A fire had been laid and lit and there was dry wood stacked by the side of the fireplace. A pot of bubbling stew, lotus stems in gravy, simmered over the fire, covered by a cheap aluminum plate. There was water in an earthen
surahi
in a corner. The roof of moss and turf was in bad shape, and water from the melting snow kept dripping through, but she would wake at night to hear the scurrying footfalls of ghosts running over the roof like mice, and in the morning there was new turf in place of the old, and there were no more drips. She cried out for her mother.
“Maej.”
Her mother Pamposh, nicknamed for the walnut kernel, had come back from the dead to take care of her newly dead child.

When she poked her head out of the hut she thought she saw shadows moving among the trees and she remembered her father’s lesson about Haput the black bear, Suh the leopard, Shal the jackal and Potsolov the fox. These creatures were dangerous and maybe they were closing in on her to kill her but they could not be blamed because they were true to their natures.
Only Man wears masks. Only Man is a disappointment to himself. Only by ceasing to need the things of the world and relieving oneself of the needs of the body
and so on. Her body ached with hunger and other needs and her head was not entirely her own but for some reason she was not afraid. For some reason she described the shapes in the trees to herself as guardians. For some reason there was always fresh water in the surahi when she awoke and food left at the door or, once she felt well enough to take short walks, on the fire. For some reason she had not been abandoned. One could not expect to jump back into paradise from hell, she told herself. A purgative period in a middle place was required. Slowly the addictions would leave her body and her mind would begin to clear. In the meantime she had her mother by her side. The snow melted and she went out as far as Khelmarg and the wildflowers were coming out. She picked bunches of
krats,
which could be eaten as a vegetable and was good for the eyes, and
shahtar,
which produced a sweetly cooling effect when mixed with the whey that was left in a pot at her door. On the slopes of the mountain she found the shrub
kava dach,
which helped to purify her blood, and she ate, too, the fruit and leaves of the
wan palak
or goosefoot. The white flowers of the shepherd’s purse or
kralamond
were everywhere. She picked it and ate it raw. She gathered
phakazur,
fennel, and daphne, which was
gandalun.
As she ate the blue-flowered
won-hand
chicory and lay down in fields of
maidan-hand
dandelion she felt her life and her mind returning. The flowers of Kashmir had saved her. In her father’s orchards the almond trees would be blooming. Spring had come.