Shalimar the Clown (33 page)

After he learned of her infidelity with the American Shalimar the clown sharpened his favorite knife and headed south with murder on his mind. Fortunately the bus in which he had left Pachigam broke down under a small bridge at Lower Munda near the source of the Jhelum at Verinag. His brothers Hameed and Mahmood, dispatched by their father, caught up with him at the depot, where he was waiting impatiently for the next available carrier. “Thought you could run away from us, eh, little
boyi,
” cried Hameed, the louder and more boisterous of the twins. “No chance. We’re double trouble, us.” Troop transport vehicles were refueling all around them and a group of cheroot-smoking soldiers stared idly, and then not so idly—the words
double trouble
had not been well chosen—at the three quarreling brothers. The army was jumpy. Two nationalist leaders, Amanullah Khan and Maqbool Butt, had formed an armed group called the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front and had crossed the cease-fire line from what they called Azad Kashmir into the Indian sector to launch a number of surprise raids on army positions and personnel. These three argumentative young men could easily be NLF recruits spoiling for a fight. Mahmood Noman, always the more cautious of the twins, said quickly to Shalimar the clown: “If those bastards find that dagger you’re carrying,
boyi,
we’re all going to jail for good.” This was the sentence that saved Boonyi Noman’s life. Shalimar the clown burst into loud, fake laughter and his brothers joined in, slapping each other on the back. The soldiers relaxed. Later that afternoon all three Nomans were on a bus back home.

Firdaus Noman looked into the eyes of her betrayed and cuckolded son Shalimar the clown when his brothers brought him back, and was so horrified that she resolved to give up quarreling forever. Her famous battles with her illustrious husband over the nature of the universe, the traditions of Kashmir and each other’s bad habits had entertained the village for years, but now Firdaus saw the consequence of her fractious disposition. “Look at him,” she whispered to Abdullah. “He has an anger in him that would end the world if it could.”

The sarpanch was in a distracted state of mind. His health had begun to deteriorate. He had started feeling the first twinges of the pain in his hands that would eventually cripple them, leaving them frozen into useless claw-shapes that made it hard for him to eat or hold tools or wash his own behind. As the pain grew so did his feelings of discontentedness. He felt caught in between things, between the past and the future, the home and the world. His own needs were in conflict. Some days he longed for the applause of an audience and regretted the slow decline in the fortunes of the bhand pather thanks to which such gratification was harder and harder to come by, while at other times he yearned for a quiet life, sitting smoking a pipe by a golden fire. Even greater was the conflict between his personal requirements and the needs of others. Maybe he should give up his position as village headman. Maybe one could only be selfless for so long, and after that it was time for a little selfishness. He could not go on forever holding everyone in his hands. His hands were hurting. The future was dark and his light had begun to dim. He needed a little gentleness.

“Treat him gently,” Abdullah told Firdaus absently, thinking mostly about himself. “Maybe your love can put out the flame.”

But Shalimar the clown withdrew into himself, barely speaking for days at a time except during rehearsals in the practice glade. Everyone in the acting troupe noticed that his style of performance had changed. He was as dynamically physical a comedian as ever, but there was a new ferocity in him that could easily frighten people instead of making them laugh. One day he proposed that the scene in the Anarkali play in which the dancing girl was grabbed by the soldiers who had come to take her to be bricked up in her wall might be sharpened if the soldiers came on in American army uniform and Anarkali donned the flattened straw cone of a Vietnamese peasant woman. The American seizure of Anarkali-as-Vietnam would, he argued, immediately be understood by their audience as a metaphor for the Indian army’s stifling presence in Kashmir, which they were forbidden to depict. One army would stand in for another and the moment would give their piece an added contemporary edge. Himal Sharga had stepped into Boonyi’s old role and didn’t like the idea. “I know I’m not a great dancer,” she said petulantly, “but you don’t have to turn my big drama scene into some kind of silly stunt just because you have a reason for hating Americans.” Shalimar the clown rounded on her so savagely that for a moment the gathered players thought he was going to strike her down. Then he suddenly deflated, turned away and went to squat dejectedly in a corner. “Yes, bad idea,” he muttered. “Forget it. I’m not thinking straight just now.” Himal was the prettier of Shivshankar Sharga the village baritone’s two daughters. She went over to Shalimar the clown and put her hand on his shoulder. “Just try seeing straight instead,” she said. “Don’t look for what’s not here, but look at what there is.”

After the rehearsal Himal’s sister Gonwati warned her, with the bitter almond of spite souring her words, that her cause was hopeless. “When you stand next to Boonyi you completely disappear,” she said, gravely malicious behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. “Just the way I vanish when I’m standing next to you. And in his mind you’ll always be standing next to her, a little shorter, a little uglier, with a nose that’s a little too long, a chin that’s a little too weak and a figure that’s too small where it should be big and too big where it should be small.” Himal grabbed her sister’s long dark plait high up, near her head, and pulled. “Stop being a jealous bitch, four-eyes,” she said sweetly, “and just help me catch him like a good
ben
should.”

Gonwati accepted the rebuke and put aside her own hopes in the family cause. The Sharga sisters set about plotting the capture of Shalimar the clown’s broken heart. Gonwati asked him the name of his favorite dish. He said he had always been partial to a good gushtaba. Himal at once set to work with a will, pounding the gushtaba meat to soften it, and when she offered him the results as a gift “to cheer you up” he immediately popped a meatball in his mouth. A few seconds later the expression on his face told her the bad news, and she confessed that she was famous in her family as the worst cook they had ever known. Next, Gonwati suggested to Shalimar the clown that Himal could replace Boonyi in the tightrope routine they had developed, and which he could not perform without a female aide. Shalimar the clown agreed to teach Himal to walk the wire, but after a few lessons, when the wire was still just a foot off the ground, she confessed that she had always suffered dreadfully from vertigo, and that if she ever stepped out across the air even her desire to please him would not prevent her from falling to her death. The third strategy was more direct. Gonwati told Shalimar the clown that her sister had recently been unlucky in love herself, that a bounder from the village of Shirmal whose name she would not deign to speak had toyed with her affections and then spurned her. “The two of you should comfort each other,” she proposed. “Only you can know how she suffers, and only she can come close to grasping the scale of your terrible grief.” Shalimar the clown allowed himself to be prevailed upon and accompanied Himal on a moonlit walk by the waters of the Muskadoon. But under the double influence of the moonlight and his beauty poor Himal lost her head and confessed that the Shirmali rascal didn’t exist, that he, Shalimar the clown, had always been the man she loved, there was nobody else but him for her in the whole of Kashmir. After this third catastrophe Shalimar the clown kept his distance from the Sharga sisters who continued, nevertheless, to hope.

The idea of declaring Boonyi dead was Gonwati Sharga’s brainwave. Gonwati’s bespectacled features gave her a look of studious virtue that concealed her sneaky chess-player’s nature. “He’ll never forget that woman while she’s alive,” her sister said mournfully after the disaster of the moonlit walk. “God, sometimes I wish she was dead.” Gonwati answered, without at first understanding what she was saying, “Hold tight,
ben.
Wishes can come true.” In the next few days her purpose revealed itself to her, and then she set about making other people believe they had had the idea all by themselves. Over a family dinner she quoted her sister’s sentiment back at her. “If that Boonyi was dead instead of just in Delhi with her American,” she said, “then perhaps poor Shalimar could start up his life again.” Her father Shivshankar Sharga snorted a deep baritone snort. “In Delhi with an American,” he said, thumping the table with his fist, “is what I call as good as dead.” Gonwati turned large myopic eyes upon Shivshankar. “You’re in the panchayat,” she said. “So couldn’t you make that official?”

Before the next panchayat meeting Shivshankar sounded out Habib Joo the dancing master on the subject of declaring Boonyi deceased. “She is dead to me,” he answered, and then confessed to a guilty sense of responsibility for her misdeed. “It is the skill I taught her that she used to betray us all.” That was two out of five. Together they approached Big Man Misri. “I don’t know,” the carpenter said doubtfully. “Zoon loved her, after all.” Shivshankar Sharga found himself arguing the case vehemently. “Don’t you want to make it difficult for men to run off with our girls?” he demanded. “After what happened in your household, I’d have thought you’d be the first to go along with our plan.” That was three out of five; which left the two fathers, Pyarelal and Abdullah, to persuade. “The sarpanch is so soft-hearted he will be a hard nut to crack,” said Gonwati when her father reported progress a few evenings later. “Trust me, it is Boonyi’s own daddy who will agree.”

The reason for Gonwati’s confidence was her newly forged intimacy with Pandit Pyarelal Kaul. For many months after his daughter’s flight south the pandit had been lost in contemplation. His inattention to his duties as head waza of Pachigam had become so noticeable that the junior wazas finally asked him, gently, to stay home on wazwaan days until he felt better. Pyarelal inclined his head and left the world of cookpots and banquets behind. He had loved food all his life but it now seemed like an irrelevance. Alone at home, he prepared as little as possible, ate perfunctorily what was necessary for life, and took no pleasure in it. He meditated for eleven hours every day. The external world had become too painful to be bearable. His daughter’s disappearance felt like his wife’s second death. Not even the beauty of Kashmir could assuage the agony of a loss that was not only physical but moral. Her absence was bad enough but her immorality was worse. It made her a stranger to him. He felt himself crumbling, as if he were an old building whose foundations had rotted away. He felt a tide tugging at him and knew he was in danger of drowning. Meditating, he could make the sphere of feeling recede and reach out for succor toward the light of philosophy. At some point in his meditations he thought of Kabir.

People said that Kabir had been the child of a virgin birth, circa 1440, but Pyarelal was not interested in such flummery. What was known was that Kabir was raised by Muslim weavers and the only word he knew how to write was
Rama.
This also was relatively uninteresting. The interesting thing was Kabir’s concept of two souls, the personal soul or life-soul,
jivatma,
and the divine over-soul,
paramatma.
Salvation was to be gained by bringing these two souls into a state of union. The interesting thing was to let go of the personal and be absorbed into the divine. And if this was a form of death in life, that was merely an external perception. The internal perception of such an achievement would be ecstatic joy.

One day Pyarelal emerged from his meditations to see a young woman sitting on a rock by the Muskadoon and for a confused instant he thought Boonyi had returned. When he realized that it was Gonwati Sharga the singer’s daughter he fought down his disappointment and went out to keep her company. “Panditji,” she said after a time, “I used to see Boonyi and Shalimar the clown sitting here and forgive me, panditji, but I was a little jealous. I also wanted to hear your brilliant words. I also wished to benefit from your wisdom. Yet I was not your daughter and had to accept my lot.” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was deeply moved. He hadn’t known! He had sometimes felt his own daughter was merely humoring him when she sat with her beau and listened to his ramblings. But this girl actually wanted to learn! Gonwati’s confession put a smile on Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s face for the first time in months. In the following weeks the girl came to sit at his feet as often as she could and such was the seriousness and sympathy of her attention that he unburdened himself of many of his most private thoughts. Finally she rose from her rock by the river, went over to take Pyarelal’s hand in her own, and offered her own version of her sister’s advice to Shalimar the clown.

“Don’t blame yourself for what’s dead,” she said, “but thank God for what’s alive.”

Abdullah Noman could not stand against the
mritak
plan if Boonyi’s own father was in favor of it. “Are you sure?” he asked Pyarelal at the next panchayat meeting. They were drinking pink salty tea in the upstairs meeting room at the Noman house. Pyarelal’s cup began to rattle against its saucer as he pronounced the sentence of death. “For eleven hours a day,” the pandit told his old friend, “I have contemplated the topic of living in the world while also not living in it. Much has become clear to me regarding the meaning of this riddle. Bhoomi my child has chosen the path of death in life. Once she has so chosen I must not cling to her. I choose to let her go. And then,” he added, “there is also the question of bringing your enraged son under control.”

“They killed you,” Zoon Misri told Boonyi in the snowstorm. “They killed you because they loved you and you were gone.”

There was a deserted stretch of the Muskadoon just past Pachigam where the river was shielded by foliage from prying eyes. In childhood summers the four inseparable girls, the Sharga sisters, Zoon Misri and Boonyi Kaul, would rush there after school, throw off their garments and dive in. The bite of the water was exciting, even arousing. They screamed and laughed as the river god’s cold hands caressed their skin. Then they dried themselves by rolling on the grassy banks and rubbed their hair between the palms of their hands and didn’t go home until the evidence of their transgression had dried off. And on winter evenings the four fast friends, along with the rest of the village children, would crowd for warmth into the panchayat chamber upstairs from the Nomans’ kitchen and the adults would tell them stories. Abdullah Noman’s memory was a library of tales, fabulous and inexhaustible, and whenever he finished one the children would scream for more. The women of the village would take turns to tell them family anecdotes. Every family in Pachigam had its store of such narratives, and because all the stories of all the families were told to all the children it was as though everyone belonged to everyone else. That was the magic circle which had been broken forever when Boonyi ran away to Delhi to become the American ambassador’s whore.