Shalimar the Clown

  Boonyi was naturally well aware of her father’s growing importance in the preparation of the Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, but it had never occurred to her that this would lead to his making such a dramatic career move. Badly off balance, she lost her head completely. “If teaching isn’t that important to you,” she burst out at miserable Pyarelal, “then learning isn’t that important to me. If my father the great philosopher wants to turn into a tandoori cook, then maybe I’ll find something to turn into as well. Who wants to be your daughter? I’d rather be somebody’s wife.”

  It was her wildness talking, the impulsive uncontrolled thing that Shalimar the clown had begun to fear. When she saw Pyarelal’s face fall and Gopinath’s ears prick up she at once regretted that she had hurt the man who had loved her most ever since the day of her birth, and in addition that she had said far too much in the presence of a stranger. What she didn’t know was that Pandit Gopinath Razdan, Pyarelal’s distant cousin, was also a secret agent, and had been sent to Pachigam to sniff out certain subversive elements in this village of artists—for artists were natural subversives, after all. His orders were to report his findings covertly and in the first instance to Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha at Elasticnagar, who would evaluate the quality and value of the intelligence and recommend any course of action that might be required. Nobody in Pachigam suspected Gopinath of having a secret identity because the identity that he made apparent was so hard to take that it was impossible to believe he had an even more problematic self concealed beneath it. The children he taught with an asperity and severity that was the exact opposite of Pyarelal’s jolly prattling gave him the nickname of “Batta Rasashud.” Batta was another word for pandit and rasashud was an extremely bitter herb given to children who were infested with aam, that is to say, roundworms. When he discovered this, because teachers always discover the rude names by which they are known, his temper got even worse. He was living in a bedroom upstairs from the schoolroom and at nights the villagers would hear crashes and oaths emanating from it, so that many of them suspected that the angry pandit was possessed by a demon who came out of his body at night and flew around like a trapped bird.

  Pyarelal felt responsible for his distant cousin and believed in his good-natured way that a little human companionship and family feeling would improve the man’s temperament. Boonyi dissented strongly. “Once the milk has curdled,” she argued, “it never tastes sweet again.” In spite of her objections, Pyarelal Kaul assured Gopinath that he was always welcome at their table. Thus Boonyi had to breakfast and often dine with the spy, which suited Gopinath fine, because Colonel Kachhwaha’s interest in her made her an important topic for his regular reports. And inevitably, given the unusual degree of access to her that he enjoyed, it was only a matter of time before the angry pandit became besotted with Boonyi Kaul as well. His paan habit increased dramatically, but the betel-nut addiction failed to mask his new, deeper dependency on the presence in his life of a fourteen-year-old girl. In the small schoolhouse where he taught children of all ages in a single room, he quickly saw that Boonyi Kaul was a lazy student, smart but idle, whose detachment from her education was in part a deliberately anti-intellectual reaction against being her learned father’s child, in part a protest against Pyarelal’s withdrawal from school, and mostly the consequence of an immature belief, rooted in her highly eroticized self-image, that she already knew everything she would need to get men to do whatever she desired. It was easy to see why so sexually confident a child had inflamed the passions of poor confused Colonel Tortoise, but Gopinath had thought himself to be made of sterner stuff. The speed of his surrender to her charms engendered in his breast the same feelings of disgust he normally reserved for the sick and the maimed. And her obvious feelings for Noman Sher Noman who called himself Shalimar the clown nauseated the schoolteacher even more than his own infatuation, and distracted him from his original purpose in Pachigam, the secret pursuit of Shalimar the clown’s brother, the third son of Abdullah and Firdaus. Gopinath temporarily downgraded that project and focused instead on the sarpanch’s fourth and youngest boy, whom he privately resolved to destroy.

  At the age of nineteen the twin eldest sons of Abdullah and Firdaus Noman, Hameed and Mahmood, were gentle, gregarious fools whose only interest in life was to make each other laugh. Accordingly they had contentedly lost themselves in the comic fictions of the bhand pather, and were so immersed in their imaginary world, in creating burlesque versions of pratfalling princes and clumsy gods, cowardly giants and devils in love, that the real world lost its charm for them, and perhaps alone of all Kashmiris they became immune to its natural beauty. The third boy, Anees, was introspective and morose, as if he expected little good to come of his life. He performed the clown antics required of him with an unblinkingly melancholy face that divided audiences. Most reacted with hilarity to his mournful air, but a minority, unexpectedly touched by his sadness in a place they did not expect a mere clown-story to reach, a sequestered place in which they guarded their own sadnesses about their beleaguered lives, were disturbed by him, and felt happy when he left the stage. As his seventeenth birthday neared Anees began to display a growing skill with his hands, casually creating miniature marvels of paper-chain cutout figures and fantastical creatures made out of twisted silver paper taken from the insides of cigarette packs. He whittled wood into tiny wonders, such as owls with latticed bodies inside which other, tinier owls could be seen. It was this gift that brought him to the attention of the local liberation front commander, and one star-filled night Anees was brought by two fighters with scarves around their faces to the wooded hill where Nazarébaddoor’s old cottage stood rotting and empty. Here he was asked by a man he could not see if he would like to learn to make bombs. Okay, Anees shrugged. At least this meant that his melancholy life was likely to be short. When he said this he was wearing his longest and most lugubrious face and the liberation front commander standing in the shadows was mysteriously seized by an inappropriate urge to laugh, which he only partially managed to resist.

  On the day of her denunciation, Boonyi was with her friends at their afternoon dance practice by the banks of the Muskadoon. “Look,” said Zoon the carpenter’s daughter, pointing to a rocky outcrop where Gopinath stood watching them. “If it isn’t Mr. Bitterherb himself.” The spy made his way down the rocks, chewing his paan, his umbrella tapping on the stone, and Boonyi suddenly saw through his fogyish pose. “This is not a crabby little duffer at all, but a very dangerous man,” she warned herself, but it was too late. Gopinath had already seen everything he needed to see. To wooded groves and moonlit mountain meadows he had followed Shalimar the clown and Boonyi. Eight-millimeter movie film had been exposed, and still photographs taken also. They had never suspected his presence, never heard his footfall. He, by contrast, had seen more than enough. Now he stood before Boonyi, spat out betel juice and dropped his mask. His body straightened, his voice strengthened, and his face changed—his furrowed brow smoothed itself out, his expression was no longer narrow and pinched but calm and authoritative, and he plainly didn’t need (and so removed) his spectacles; he looked younger and steelier, a man to be reckoned with, a man it might be advisable not to cross. “That boy is trash—not worthy of you,” he said, loudly and clearly. “And the trashy things you were doing with him are unworthy of any decent girl.” Wor’y. U’wor’y. The accent at least had been genuine. Zoon, Gonwati and Himal became stiff with curiosity and horror. “You will be angry with me now,” the spy went on, “but later, when we are married, you may be pleased to have at your side a man of real mettle, not a lecherous boy.” The girl shook her head in disbelief. “What have you done?” she asked. “I have put an end to sin,” the spy replied. Boonyi’s thoughts raced. Her friends had closed in around her, pressing their bodies loyally against hers, forming a wall against the alien attack. Catastrophe was close.

  “The panchayat is meeting at this moment in emergency session, to consider the evidence I have laid before it,” said Go
pinath. “The sarpanch, your father and the others will soon decide your fate. You are disgraced, of course, your face is blackened and your good name is dirt, and that is your own doing; but I have informed them that I am prepared to restore your honor by taking you as my wife. What choice does your father have? What other man would be so generous toward a fallen woman? Repent now and thank me later, when your senses are your own again. Your lover is finished, of course, he is branded forever as a varlet and a dastard, but I snap my fingers at him as should you—as you will, when you enter into your only possible destiny, namely your inevitable life with me.”

  Repen’ and than’ me whe’ your se’ses are your ow’. It was a remarkable proposal of marriage and after making it the transformed Gopinath did not wait for his beloved’s reply, but walked off some distance along the bank of the Muskadoon and sat down perhaps a hundred yards away, pretending that he didn’t have a care in the world. In reality he knew that he would be in boiling hot water with his superiors, having revealed his spying abilities to everyone in Pachigam and simultaneously turned himself into the most hated man in the village. His serious purposes were undone, he would have to withdraw immediately from his post at the school and from the village itself, and it would be far harder for the authorities to plant a second agent inside a community that would henceforth be on its guard against traitors and spies. In short, Gopinath had gambled everything on Boonyi, had been willing to sacrifice his secret career in return for capturing a wife who would never reciprocate his love, who would in fact detest him for painting her scarlet and puncturing her dreams of love. He stared into the fast-flowing waters and contemplated the tragedy of desire.

  An air of calamity was rapidly enveloping the village. The fruit orchards, saffron fields and rice paddies lay empty and untended as those who habitually labored there put down tools and gathered outside the Noman residence where the panchayat was meeting. No food was cooked in the villagers’ kitchens that afternoon. Children ran barefoot hither and yon, gleefully shouting out ill-founded rumors of banishment and suicide. Boonyi and her three friends huddled together, arms around one another, in an inward-facing circle of misery from which loud wails and sobs of anguish escaped constantly. Even the livestock had divined that something was wrong; goats and cattle, dogs and geese displayed the kind of instinctive or premonitory agitation that is sometimes seen in the hours before an earthquake. Bees stung their keepers with unwonted ferocity. The very air seemed to shimmer with concern and there was a rumble in the empty sky. Firdaus Noman came for Boonyi, running with an ungainly lolloping gait, panting heavily, and screamed abuse at the judas Gopinath sitting calmly by the riverside. “Carbuncle!” she cursed him. “Clovenhoof! Bad-smell buttock! Little penis! Dried-up brinjal!” The object of her wrath, the zaharbad, the pedar, the possessor of the smelly mandal, the wee kuchur, the wangan hachi, neither turned nor flinched. “Wattal-nath Gopinath!” Firdaus screamed—that is to say, mean-spirited, low-life, degraded Gopinath—and Boonyi’s friends broke away from their circle to take up the chant. “Wattal-nath Gopinath! Gopinath Wattal-nath!” Through the village went that cry, taken up by the eager children, until the whole village, almost all of whose residents were by now gathered outside the sarpanch’s home, was shouting. “Wattal-nath Gopinath! Little penis, bad-smell buttock, dried-up brinjal, clovenhoof! Gopinath Wattal-nath, go!”

  “Damn you too,” Firdaus said more conversationally to Boonyi. “Come on, you stupid oversexed child. I’m taking you back to your father’s house and there you’ll stay until what’s done is done and your fate is known.” “We’re coming too,” cried Zoon, Himal and Gonwati. Firdaus shrugged. “That’s your concern. But I will be locking you four wretches in.” Boonyi did not argue and made her way home, chaperoned by her beloved’s irate mother. “Where is Noman?” she asked Firdaus in a small voice. “Shut up,” Firdaus answered loudly. “That is nothing to do with you.” Then in a low fast murmur she went on, “His brothers have taken him away, up to Khelmarg, to stop him from cutting off Pandit Gopinath Razdan’s fat head.” Boonyi replied more heatedly, and certainly more lewdly, than her situation warranted. “Anyway, they shouldn’t make me marry that snake. The first time he’s asleep I’ll cut off his kuchur and stuff it into his evil little mouth.” Firdaus slapped her hard across the face. “You’ll do as you are told,” she said. “And that was for the dirty talk, which I will not tolerate.” Faced with the incandescent fury of Firdaus Noman, neither Boonyi nor her friends dared to remind her where that day’s bad language had come from in the first place.

  Once they were inside Boonyi’s home, Firdaus stopped pretending to be angry and made the girls a pot of salty pink tea. “The boy loves you,” she said to Boonyi, “and even though you have behaved like a disgusting slut, that love counts with me.” One hour later a boy knocked at the door to tell them that the panchayat had reached its decision and their presence was required. “We’re coming too,” said Himal, Gonwati and Zoon again, and again Firdaus did not demur. They made their way to the steps of the sarpanch’s residence where the panchayat members stood solemn-faced. Shalimar the clown was there with his brothers surrounding him and Boonyi’s heart thumped when she saw his face. There was a murderous darkness on his brow that she had not seen before. It frightened her and, worse than that, it made him look unattractive to her for the first time in her life. All the villagers were gathered around this little tableau and when they saw Firdaus approaching with Boonyi and her girlfriends a silence fell. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was standing beside Abdullah Noman and the two fathers’ faces were the grimmest on display. “I’m done for,” Boonyi thought. “They’re going to pack me off to that bastard sitting like a cold fish by the river, waiting to have me handed over on a plate—me, Boonyi Kaul, whom he could never otherwise have won.”

  She was wrong. Abdullah Noman the sarpanch spoke first, followed by Pyarelal, and the other three members of the panchayat, Big Man Misri the carpenter, Sharga the singer, and the frail old dancing master Habib Joo, also made brief remarks, and their verdict was unanimous. The lovers were their children and must be supported. Their behavior was worthy of the strongest censure—it had been licentious and rash and filled with improprieties that were a disappointment to their parents—but they were good children, as everybody knew. Abdullah then mentioned Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences. Most bhand villages were Muslim but Pachigam was a mixture, with families of pandit background, the Kauls, the Misris, and the baritone singer’s long-nosed kin—sharga being a local nickname for the nasally elongated—and even one family of dancing Jews. “So we have not only Kashmiriness to protect but Pachigaminess as well. We are all brothers and sisters here,” said Abdullah. “There is no Hindu-Muslim issue. Two Kashmiri—two Pachigami—youngsters wish to marry, that’s all. A love match is acceptable to both families and so a marriage there will be; both Hindu and Muslim customs will be observed.” Pyarelal added, when his turn came, “To defend their love is to defend what is finest in ourselves.” The crowd cheered and Shalimar the clown broke out into a broad smile of disbelieving joy. Firdaus went up to Abdullah and whispered, “If you had made any other decision I would have kicked you out of my bed.” (Later that night, when they lay in that bed in the dark, she was in a more reflective mood. “The times are changing,” she said softly. “Our children aren’t like us. In our generation we were straightforward folk, both hands on the table in plain view at all times. But these youngsters are trickier types, there are shadows on the surface and secrets underneath, and they are not always as they seem, maybe not always even what they think they are. I guess that’s how it has to be, because they will live through times more deceptive than any we have known.”)

  Two panchayat members, Misri the carpenter and Sharga the baritone, the two largest and, along with the sarpanch, strongest men in Pachigam, were dispatched to the riverside to throw Gopinath Razdan out of town—Abdull
ah the sarpanch, fearing excessive violence, forbade his enraged sons to have anything to do with the ejection—but by the time the posse of two reached the Muskadoon the spy had already slipped away, and he was never seen in Pachigam again. Six months later, after a period of professional disgrace, he was assigned new duties in the village of Pahalgam, and was found dead one morning in the nearby mountain meadow of Baisaran. His legs had been blown off by some sort of homemade bomb and his head had been severed from his body by a single slash of a blade. The murder was never solved, nor did any clues lead back to anyone in the actors’ village. Eventually the investigation ran out of steam and the official case file was closed. Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha had his strong suspicions, however, and his frustration grew. Not only had he been insulted by Boonyi Kaul, but the failure of his spy’s mission had given him no shred of a pretext for the “descent in force” that he had planned for Pachigam. The colors of his world continued to darken, and he made a note that the village of actors was still earmarked for special attention, a decision whose medium- and long-term consequences would be grave.