Shalimar the Clown (8 page)

The pandit’s deceased wife had been named Pamposh after the lotus flower, but, as she confided to her dozing daughter, she preferred the nickname Giri, meaning a walnut kernel, which Firdaus Begum, Abdullah Noman’s yellow-haired wife, Firdaus Butt or Bhat, once gave her as a mark of friendship. One summer day in the saffron fields of Pachigam Firdaus and Giri were gathering crocuses when a rainstorm came at them like a witch’s spell out of a clear blue sky and soaked them both to the bone. The sarpanch’s wife was a foul-mouthed woman and let the cackling rain know what she thought of it but Pamposh danced in the downpour and cried out gaily, “Don’t scold the sky for giving us the gift of water.”

That was too much for Firdaus. “Everyone thinks you have such a sweet nature, so open, so accepting, but you don’t fool me,” she told Pamposh or Giri while they sheltered dripping under a spreading chinar. “Sure, I can see how quickly and easily you smile, how you never have a harsh word for anyone, how you face every hardship with equanimity. Me, I wake up in the morning and I have to start fixing everything I see, I need to shake people up, I want everything to be better, I want to clean up all the shit we have to deal with every day of this grueling life. You, by contrast, act like you take the world as it is and are happy to be in it and whatever happens is just fine by you. But guess what? I’m onto you. I’ve worked out your little act of an angel in paradise. It’s brilliant, no question about that, but it’s just your shell, your hard walnut shell, and inside you’re a completely different girl and it’s my guess that you’re far from contented. You’re the most generous woman I know, if I mention once that I like this or that shawl you’ll make me take it, even if it came down to you from your great-grandmother in your trousseau and it’s an heirloom one hundred and fifty years old, but secretly, in spite of all that, you’re a miser of yourself.”

It was the kind of speech that either destroys a friendship forever or pushes it to a new level of intimacy, and it was typical of Firdaus to gamble everything on one throw of the dice. “I guess I saw through her too that day,” Pamposh Kaul told her daughter Boonyi as she dreamed, “and I caught sight of the incredibly loyal and loving woman under her act of a hardass bitch. Also, she was the only woman in the village who might just be able to understand what I wanted to say.” So Pamposh confided her deepest secrets to Firdaus, amazing her. Until that moment the headman’s wife, like everyone else, had thought of Pamposh as the perfect wife for the pandit, because she had her feet planted firmly on the ground while his head was always getting a soaking in the middle of some metaphysical cloud. Now Firdaus discovered that Pamposh possessed a secret nature far more fantastic than her husband’s, that her dreams were far more radical and dangerous than anything Firdaus had ever been able to come up with in spite of all her world-shaking ambitions.

In the matter of lovemaking Kashmiri women had never been shrinking violets, but what Pamposh confided to Firdaus made her ears burn. The sarpanch’s wife understood that hidden away inside her friend was a personality so intensely sexual that it was a wonder the pandit was still able to get up out of bed and walk around. Pamposh’s passion for the wilder reaches of sexual behavior introduced Firdaus to a number of new concepts that simultaneously horrified and aroused her, although she feared that if she attempted to introduce them into her own bedroom Abdullah, for whom sex was a simple relief of physical urges and not to be unduly prolonged, would throw her out into the street like a common whore. Although Firdaus was the older of the two women by a few years she found herself in the unaccustomed position of awestruck student, inquiring with stammering fascination into how and why such and such a practice achieved the desired results. “It’s simple,” Pamposh replied. “If you trust each other you can do anything and so can he and believe me it feels pretty good.” What was even more remarkable about Pamposh’s revelations was the sense that she was not following her husband’s desires but leading them. When she moved on from sex itself to sexual politics and began to explain her broader ideas, her utopian vision of the emancipation of women, and to speak of her torment at having to live in a society that was at least a hundred years behind the times she had in mind, Firdaus held up her hand. “It’s bad enough that you have filled my head with stuff that will give me nightmares for weeks,” she said. “Don’t upset me with any more of your notions today. The present is already too much for me. I can’t cope with the future as well.”

Pamposh Kaul in her daughter’s dreams went into all the things Firdaus Noman had not wanted to hear, told her about the unshackled future that shone on the horizon like a promised land she could never enter, the vision of freedom that had eaten away at her all her life and destroyed her inner peace, although nobody knew it because she never stopped smiling, she never dropped her lying façade of contented calm. “A woman can make every choice she pleases just because it pleases her, and pleasing a man comes a poor second, a long way behind,” she said. “Also, if a woman’s heart is true then what the world thinks doesn’t matter a good goddamn.” This made a big impression on Boonyi. “That’s easy for you to say,” she told her mother. “Ghosts don’t have to live in the real world.”

“I’m not a ghost,” Pamposh replied. “I’m a dream of the mother you want me to be. I’m telling you what’s already in your heart, what you want me to confirm.”

“That’s true,” said Boonyi Kaul, and began to stretch and stir. “Go to him,” her mother said, and faded into nothing.

Boonyi slipped out of the house and made her way up the wooded hillside to Khelmarg, the meadow where sometimes by moonlight she practiced archery, spearing arrows into innocent trees. She had a gift for the bow but tonight was for different sport. There was no moon. There were a few lights shining from the Indian army camp across the fields, a few glowing lanterns and cigarette tips, but even the soldiers were mostly asleep. Her father was certainly asleep and snoring his buffalo snores. She was wearing a dark kerchief around her head and a full-length dark
phiran
over a long dark shirt. There was a chill in the air but the loose robe was warm enough. Under the phiran her little
kangri
of hot coals sent long fingers of heat across her stomach. She wore no other garments or undergarments. Her bare feet knew the path. She was a shadow in search of a shadow. She would find the shadow she was looking for and he would love and protect her. “I will hold you in the palm of my hand,” he had said, “the way my father held me.” Noman, also known as Shalimar the clown, the most beautiful boy in the world.

At that moment the most beautiful boy in the world was doing what he did whenever he needed to calm down and concentrate on what really mattered: he was climbing a tree. Trees had featured prominently both in his professional education and in his inner life. One night at the age of eleven Noman had been unable to sleep because of his uncertainties about the nature of the universe, on which subject his parents had arguments so spectacular that the whole village gathered outside their house to listen and take sides, arguments about the precise location of the heavenly paradise and whether or not in the future men would get there by spaceship, and about the probability or improbability of there being prophets and holy books on other planets, and consequently about whether or not it was blasphemous to hypothesize the theoretical existence of little green-skinned bug-eyed prophets receiving holy writ in the incomprehensible languages of Mars or of the creatures who lived on the unseen far side of the moon. Noman didn’t know how to choose between his father’s modern-day open-mindedness and his mother’s occultist threats which usually had something to do with snake charms, so that even though there was a rainstorm brewing he escaped through the back door and climbed the tallest chinar in the Pachigam district to think. He wasn’t stupid enough to step out onto the rope that night. He hung there madly in the wind and rain while all around him branches shook and broke. The universe flexed its muscles and demonstrated its complete lack of interest in quarrels about its nature. The universe was everything at once, science and sorcery, what was occult and what was known, and it didn’t give a damn. The storm’s fury grew. He saw dead men’s hands flying past his face, catching at him from their airy graves. The wind screamed and meant to kill him but he screamed back into its face and cursed it and it couldn’t take his life. Years later when he became an assassin he would say that it might have been better if he hadn’t lived, better if his life had been carried off that day in the rotting teeth of the gale.

Just outside the village there was a stand of ancient chinar trees clawing gracefully at the sky. A tightrope stretched between two of the oldest trees, and now, in preparation for his assignation with Boonyi, Shalimar the clown was strolling across it, tumbling, pirouetting, prancing so lightly that it seemed he was walking on air. He had been nine years old when he learned the secret of airwalking. In this green glade beneath a sun-pierced dome of leaves he stepped barefoot out of his father’s grasp and flew. On that first flight the tightrope was barely eighteen inches off the ground but the exhilaration was as great as anything he felt later in his professional life when he stepped out from a high branch and looked down twenty feet to where his open-mouthed admirers clapped and gasped. His feet knew what to do without being told. His toes curled round the rope, gripping hard. “Don’t think of the rope as a safety line through space,” his father had said. “Think of it as a line of gathered air. Or think of the air as something preparing to become rope. The rope and the air are the same. When you know this you will be ready to fly. The rope will melt away and you will step out onto the air knowing that it will bear your weight and take you wherever you may want to go.” Abdullah Sher Noman was initiating his son into a mystery. A rope could become air. A boy could become a bird. Metamorphosis was the secret heart of life.

After his first walk it proved impossible to keep Noman off the rope and gradually it rose higher and higher until he was flying at the level of the treetops. He practiced in all weathers and at all times of the day and night and his father, Abdullah, never stopped him, never reined him in, even when Firdaus Begum, the great man’s wife and Noman’s ferocious mother, threatened to bewitch them both and turn them into water snakes and trap them in a glass bowl in the kitchen if that was what it took to protect her son from his damn fool of a father who didn’t care if Noman fell headfirst to the ground and got himself smashed into a thousand pieces like a mirror. Snakes loomed large in Firdaus Begum’s worldview and therefore in her family’s too. “Snake wriggle, world jiggle,” she liked to say, meaning that the great serpents burrowing away down by the roots of the mountains caused earth tremors when they moved. She knew many snake secrets. Under the shivering Himalayas, she said, there was a lost city where the snakes hoarded gold and precious stones. Malachite was a snake favorite and its possession bestowed good fortune on the possessor; but only if the stone had been found, not bought. “You can’t buy snake luck,” she warned. In general if a snake got in the house it was to be considered a blessing, something to be grateful for, and not only because it might gobble up the household mice. You should take a stick and flick it out of the door or window, by all means, because luck was not something to be pushed; but you should do it with respect and not attempt to crush its head. Snake protection was a thing all houses needed, and if you didn’t have a snake to protect you then you’d better have some malachite stones instead.

(The first time Noman heard the pandit rhapsodizing about the sky-dragons Rahu and Ketu he marveled at the secret affinity between his beloved’s father and his own, standoffish mother. Dragons, lizards, snakes, the sinuous scaly worms of earth and air; it seemed like the whole world had magical monsters on the brain.)

Firdaus had a lazy right eye and people said behind her back that once you had been fixed by that lidded sidelong look you knew that she must be part snake herself. Noman sometimes suspected that it was because of his mother’s serpentine concerns that he slithered so well up, down and along things like trees and ropes. Now all his thoughts were coiling around this girl, Boonyi, to whom he planned to bring good luck for all the days of their lives. The words
Hindu
and
Muslim
had no place in their story, he told himself. In the valley these words were merely descriptions, not divisions. The frontiers between the words, their hard edges, had grown smudged and blurred. This was how things had to be. This was Kashmir. When he told himself these things he believed them with all his heart. In spite of this he had not told his father or mother about his feelings for the pandit’s child. He had rarely kept secrets from his father—with his mother he had always been more guarded, because she scared him in a way that his father did not—and he felt guilty about the great secret he was hugging to himself up here in the trees. But nobody, not even the three other clowns, who were also his older brothers and his closest friends, knew what he was planning to do tonight.

Boonyi, whose first love and greatest gift was dancing, could walk the high rope too, but for her it was just a rope. For young Noman it was a magic space. “One day I’ll really take off,” he told her after their first kiss. “One day I won’t need the rope at all. I’ll just walk into empty air and hang there like a cosmonaut without a suit. I’ll stand on my hands, on my feet, on my head, and there won’t even be anything to stand on.” She was impressed by his air of total certainty and even though she knew his words were the craziest kind of foolishness she was greatly moved by them. “What makes you so sure?” she asked. “My father made me believe it,” he replied. “He raised me nestling in the palm of his hand and my feet never touched the ground.”

In the palm of his father’s hand it wasn’t soft or cushiony as a rich man’s hand might have been, but hard and used and knowing. It was a hand that knew what the world was and it did not shield you from the knowledge of the hardships in store. But it was a strong hand nevertheless and could protect you from those hardships. As long as Noman stayed in the valley of its skin nothing could touch him and there was nothing to fear. His father raised him in the palm of his hand for he was the most precious jewel Abdullah ever possessed, or so the sarpanch said when his older boys Hameed, Mahmood and Anees weren’t listening, because a man in his position, a leader, should never lay himself open to the charge of favoritism. Still Noman in the palm of Abdullah’s hand knew his father’s secret, and kept it. “You are my lucky charm,” Abdullah told him. “With you beside me I am invincible.” Noman felt invincible too, for if he was his father’s magic talisman then his father was also his. “My father’s love was the first phase,” he told her. “It carried me as far as the treetops. But now it’s your love I need. That’s what will let me fly.”