Shalimar the Clown

  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.

  On the day she returned to Pachigam, obese, crippled by addictions, covered in snow, her old friends Himal and Gonwati circled her in the blizzard and the emotions they felt did not include any trace of their childhood love. If Gonwati Sharga felt any guilt about the cold-blooded machinations that had led to Boonyi’s killing, she suppressed it beneath her anger. “How dare she come back here,” she hissed at her sister, “after all the harm she’s caused?” But Himal was filled with happiness at the changes in Boonyi’s appearance, the advantages of which greatly outweighed the outrage of a dead woman’s return to life. “Just look at her,” she whispered to Gonwati. “How can he love her now?”

  The terrible truth, however, was that Himal Sharga’s failure to seduce Shalimar the clown had nothing whatsoever to do with his continuing feelings of love for his treacherous wife. The truth was t
hat Shalimar the clown had stopped loving Boonyi the instant he learned of her infidelity, stopped dead like an unplugged automaton, and the immense crater left behind by the destruction of that love had at once been filled by a sea of bile-yellow hatred. The truth was that even though he had been brought home from Lower Munda by his brothers he had sworn an oath on the bus that he would kill her if she ever returned to Pachigam, he would cut off her lying head, and if she had any bastard offspring with that sex-crazed American he would show them no mercy, he would cut off their heads as well. The main reason Pyarelal Kaul had supported the idea of his daughter’s death by official decree, and Abdullah Noman had gone along with the plan, was that the bureaucratic killing of Boonyi was the only way of holding back Shalimar the clown from committing a horrible crime. The two fathers worked hard to persuade the abandoned husband that there was no need to think about decapitation when a person was already deceased. Shalimar had been doubtful about the mritak plan at first. “If we all agree to lie,” he had argued, “then how are we better than her?” Abdullah and Pyarelal argued with him without sleeping for three days and two nights and when all three of them were dying with exhaustion the two fathers managed to persuade Shalimar the clown to accept the compromise, made him swear that he accepted it as a full settlement of his legitimate grievance, but in his secret heart he knew that the day would come when his two oaths would come into conflict, his two shadow planets, the dragon’s-head Rahu-oath that obliged him to murder her and the dragon’s-tail Ketu-oath that obliged him to let her live on, to the degree that dead people can and sometimes do, and he was unable to foretell which of the two promises he would break.

  To lay a trap for himself as well as Boonyi he went on writing letters to her, those same letters which had angered her and led her to despise him for his weakness, letters whose purpose was to fool her into believing that he was ready to forgive and forget, and whose deeper purpose was to bring matters to a head, to bring her back and to force him to choose between his oaths, so that he could find out what sort of a man he really was. And then there she was at the bus stop in a blizzard, coated in adipose tissue and covered in snow, and without stopping to think he ran toward her with his knife in his hand, but the two fathers blocked his way, grabbing him by the dragon’s tail and reminding him of his vow. They circled her in the thickly falling snow, and Pyarelal Kaul told Shalimar the clown, “If you try to break your word you will have to kill me on the way to her,” and Abdullah Noman confirmed, “You will have to kill me as well.” This was when Shalimar the clown solved the riddle of the two oaths. “In the first place,” he said, “the oath I made to the two of you was my personal promise to you, and so I will respect it as long as even one of you is alive. But the oath I made to myself was a personal promise as well, and when you are both dead you will no longer be able to hold me back. And in the second place,” he concluded, turning to go without so much as a nod in the direction of his dead wife, “keep the whore out of my sight.” The snow kept falling, thickly falling, upon all the living and the dead.

  The spring was an illusion of renewal. Flowers blossomed, baby calves and goats were born and eggs burst open in their nests, but the innocence of the past did not return. Boonyi Kaul Noman never went back to live in Pachigam. For the rest of her life she inhabited that hut on the pine-forested hill where a prophetess had once decided that the future was too horrible to contemplate and had waited cross-legged for death. She slowly became competent in practical matters, but her hold on reality grew correspondingly more erratic, as though something inside her refused to grasp that the world in which she was getting to be so self-sufficient would never turn back into the one she wanted, the one in which she could fold her husband’s love around herself while also wrapping him up in hers. Her phantom mother was now her perpetual companion, and as Pamposh’s ghost did not age the two dead women became more and more like sisters. When Pyarelal Kaul visited his daughter to warn her against visiting the village because it was all he and Abdullah could do to hold back Shalimar the clown when she was out of sight, and it was impossible to guarantee her safety if she came down to Pachigam, she replied with the gaiety of madness, “I’m fine here with Pamposh. Nobody can lay a finger on me while she is by my side. You should stay with us. Neither of us ladies is allowed in the village, it seems, but the three of us could have a high old time up here by ourselves.”

  Faced with the derangement of his beloved daughter, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul entered into a darkness of his own. He climbed the mountain every day to care for her needs and listen to her ramblings and was not able to tell her of the disillusion that had taken hold of his own optimism and squeezed it almost to death. The love of Boonyi and Shalimar the clown had been defended by the whole of Pachigam, had been worth defending, as a symbol of the victory of the human over the inhuman, and the dreadful ending of that love made Pyarelal question, for the first time in his life, the idea that human beings were essentially good, that if men could be helped to strip away imperfections their ideal selves would stand revealed, shining in the light, for all to see. He was even questioning the anticommunalist principles embodied in the notion of Kashmiriyat, and beginning to wonder if discord were not a more powerful principle than harmony. Communal violence everywhere was an intimate crime. When it burst out one was not murdered by strangers. It was your neighbors, the people with whom you had shared the high and low points of life, the people whose children your own children had been playing with just yesterday. These were the people in whom the fire of hatred would suddenly light up, who would hammer on your door in the middle of the night with burning torches in their hands.

  Maybe Kashmiriyat was an illusion. Maybe all those children learning one another’s stories in the panchayat room in winter, all those children becoming a single family, were an illusion. Maybe the tolerant reign of good king Zain-ul-abidin should be seen—as some pandits were beginning to see it—as an aberration, not a symbol of unity. Maybe tyranny, forced conversions, temple-smashing, iconoclasm, persecution and genocide were the norms and peaceful coexistence was an illusion. He had begun to receive political circulars to this effect from various pandit organizations. They told a tale of abuse that went back many hundreds of years. Sikander the iconoclast crushed Hindus the most. The crimes of the fourteenth century needed to be avenged in the twentieth. Saifuddin crossed all limits of cruelty. Saifuddin was the prime minister under Sikander’s son, Alishah. Out of the fear of conversion Brahmins jumped into the fire. Many Brahmins hanged themselves to death, some consumed poison and others drowned themselves. Innumerable Brahmins jumped to death from the mountains. The state was filled with hatred. The supporters of the king did not stop even a single person from committing suicide. And so on, all the way up to the present day. Maybe peace was his opium pipe-dream, in which case he was as much of an addict in his own way as his poor daughter, and he, too, needed to go through a painful cure.

  He forced such forebodings to the back of his mind and nursed his daughter. The delirium of her withdrawal symptoms worsened, and for long periods she shook convulsively and sweated ice and her mouth was full of needles and her hungers felt like wild beasts that would gobble her up if they weren’t given what they really wanted. Then slowly the crisis passed, until she was no longer at the mercy of the chemicals she could no longer have; and her tobacco habit, too, was broken. During the hallucinatory period of her helplessness she knew that the guardians in the trees were taking care of her. Gradually they emerged from the shadows, and in her groggy condition she imagined her mother Pamposh leading them to her, her daring, independent mother who did not judge people for giving in to their sexual urges. Pamposh’s ghost was at least as substantial to her daughter as the others who visited her, and although she recognized among her angels her own father above all, and Firdaus Noman and Zoon and Big Man Misri as well, it made her happy to believe that her beloved mother was actually running the show.

  Pyarelal blamed himself for her obesity. “Poor girl inherit
ed my physique and not her slim mother’s,” he chastised himself inwardly. “Even as a child she was buxom. No wonder Shalimar the clown fell for her when she was still a child. Food was my weakness and this, too, I passed on to her.” But his body had changed as a result of his new ascetic’s régime, and her body changed as well. Her beauty returned slowly, as her physical health improved. The months lengthened into years and the fat fell away—nobody around here was going to help her eat seven meals a day!—and she looked like herself again. Some damage remained. She suffered from backaches. Black veins stood out on her legs and in some places the skin hung off her more loosely than it should have. The tobacco’s discoloration of her teeth never entirely faded, even though she was assiduous in the use of the neem sticks with which her father kept her supplied. She intuited, from occasional spells of arrhythmia, that her heart had been damaged, too. Never mind, she told herself. It was not her destiny to grow old. It was her destiny to live among ghosts as a half-ghost until she learned how to cross the line. She said this aloud once and her father burst into tears.