Shalimar the Clown

  “Today I forgive my daughters,” Olga Volga announced, caressing India’s hair while they both cried. “It don’t matter no more what they done.”

  At San Quentin State Prison, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Robert Alton Harris was put to death in the gas chamber. Pellets of sodium cyanide wrapped in cheesecloth were lowered into a small vat of sulphuric acid and Harris began to gasp and twitch. After about four minutes he became still and his face turned blue. Three minutes later he coughed and his body convulsed. Eleven minutes after the execution began Warden Daniel Vazquez declared Harris dead and read out his last words: “You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.” This was a line paraphrased from the Keanu Reeves movie Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

  Everywhere was a mirror of everywhere else. Executions, police brutality, explosions, riots: Los Angeles was beginning to look like wartime Strasbourg; like Kashmir. Eight days after Harris’s execution, when India Ophuls a.k.a. Kashmira Noman flew out of LAX, heading east, the jury returned its verdict in the trial of the four officers accused of the beating of Rodney King in the San Fernando Valley Foothill Police Division, a beating so savage that the amateur videotape of it looked, to many people, like something from Tiananmen Square or Soweto. When the King jury found the policemen not guilty, the city exploded, giving its verdict on the verdict by setting itself on fire, like a suicide bomber, like Jan Palach. Below India’s rising aircraft drivers were being pulled from their cars and chased and beaten by men holding rocks. The motionless body of a man called Reginald Denny was being savagely beaten. A huge piece of cinder block was thrown at his head by a man who did a war dance of celebration and made a gang sign at the sky, taunting the news helicopters and airline passengers up there, maybe even taunting God. Stores were looted, cars were torched, there were fires everywhere, on, for example, Normandie, Florence, Crenshaw, Arlington, Figueroa, Olympic, Jefferson, Pico and Rodeo. What was burning? Everything. Auto repair shops, Launderlands, Korean eateries, limo services, Rite Aids, mini-marts and Denny’s all over the city. L.A. was a flame-grilled Whopper that night. The lizard people were rising up from their subterranean redoubts; the sleeping dragon had woken. And India, flying east, was on fire also. There is no India, she thought. There is only Kashmira. There is only Kashmir.

  She would not be India in India. She would be her mother’s child. As Kashmira, then, Kashmira in a baseball cap and jeans, she walked into the Press Club in Delhi and with American daring asked the old India hands for guidance and help, and was warned that she might have trouble getting press accreditation to go up into the valley with a documentary film crew, or even without one. When these old hands patted her on the back and also on the derrière and counseled her not to even think of going up there, where things were worse than ever, the killings were at an all-time high and foreign backpackers were showing up headless on the hillsides and there was fury in the air, she exploded with rage herself. “Where do you imagine I’ve just come from,” she bellowed, “fucking Disneyland?” The vehemence of her outburst made sure she had their attention, and a few hours later that hot night, sitting in a deck chair on the lawn of another exclusive club near the Lodi Gardens, she drank beer with the most senior member of the foreign press corps and, after establishing that she was speaking one hundred percent off the record, told him her story. “This isn’t journalism,” the Englishman told her. “It’s personal. Forget about the camera and sound equipment. You want to get in? We’ll get you in. As to safety, however, it’s at your own risk.” Three days after this conversation took place she was in a Fokker Friendship bound for Srinagar with papers and introductions and phone numbers and a new name whose meaning she needed to learn. The need didn’t feel like excitement. It felt like pain. As the plane crossed the Pir Panjal she felt as if she had passed through a magic portal, and all at once the pain intensified, it clutched at her heart and squeezed hard, and she wondered in sudden terror whether she had come to Kashmir to be reborn, or to die.

  Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinagar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favorite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone. On that last evening Sardar Harbans Singh had been speaking with nostalgia about the glories of the so-called Khalsa Raj, the twenty-seven-year-long period of the nine Sikh governors of Kashmir that followed the conquest of the valley by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1819, during which, as he told his son, “all agriculture blossomed, all crafts flowered, all gurdwaras, temples and mosques were cared for, and everything in the garden was lovely, and even if people criticized Maharaja Ranjit Singh for falling prey to the charms of women, wine and Brahminical practices, what of it? These are not grave failings in a man. You, my son,” he continued, changing tack, “may or may not know much about Brahminical practices or wine, but you had better find yourself a woman before too long. I don’t care how full your warehouses are or how fat your bank balance is. A full godown and a bulging wallet do not excuse an empty bed.”

  These were his last words, and so, when a woman calling herself Kashmira presented herself at the house of mourning carrying a letter of introduction from his father’s friend the famous English journalist, when she arrived on the ninth day after the cremation, when the complete reading of the Guru Granth Sahib was one day away from being finished, Yuvraj considered it as a sign from the Almighty and welcomed her like a member of the family, offering her the hospitality of his house, insisting upon her staying, even though it was a time of sadness, and allowing her to take part in the Bhog ceremony with which the rituals ended on the tenth day, to listen to the hymns of passing, to partake of the karah parsad and langar, and to watch him being presented with the turban that made him the new head of the family. Only when his relatives had dispersed, without wailing or lamentation, as was the preferred way among Sikhs, did he have the time to talk to her about the reason for her visit, and by this time he already knew the real answer, namely that she had come to his house so that he could fall in love. In short, she was his father’s dying gift.

  “You have come into our story at the end,” he told her. “If my dear father were still with us he could answer all your questions. But maybe the truth is that, as he used to say, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can’t hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets. Maybe too much time has passed for you and you will have to accept, I’m sorry to say it, that there are things about your experience you will never understand. My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains’ nobility, the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. Such was his credo. I myself have spent my life in business pursuits, dirtying my hands with money, and only now that he is gone can I sit in his garden and listen to him talk. Only now that he has sadly departed but you have gladly come.”

  He described himself as a businessman but he had a poetic side to him. She asked him about his work and undammed a torrent of speech. When he told her about the handicrafts he bought and sold his voice was full of feeling. He spoke about the origins of the craft of numdah rug making in Central Asia, in Yarkand and Sinkiang, in the days of the old Silk Route, and the words Samarkand and Tashkent made his eyes shine with ancient glory, even though Tashkent and Samarkand, these days, were faded, down-at-heel dumps. Papier-mâché, too, had come to Kashmir from Samarkand
. “A prince of Kashmir in the fifteenth century was put in prison there for many years and learned this craftwork in jail.” Ah, the jails of Samarkand, said the sparkle in his eyes, where a man could learn such things! He told her about the two parts of the creative process, the sakhtsazi or manufacture, the soaking of waste paper, the drying of the pulp, the cutting of the shape, the layering with glue and gypsum, the pasting of layers of tissue paper, and then the naqashi or decorative phase, the painting and lacquering. “So many artists together make every piece, the final work is not one man’s alone, it is the product of our whole culture, it is not only made in but in fact made by Kashmir.”

  When he described the weaving and embroidery of the shawls of Kashmir his voice dropped with awe. He compared them lyrically to Gobelin tapestries though he had never seen such things. He fell into technical language, the decoration is formed by weft threads interlocked where the colors change, and such was his boyish excitement at the weavers’ skill that she, listening, was excited too. He told her about sozni embroidery techniques, which could be so skillful that the same motif would appear on both sides of the shawl in different colors, about satin-stitch and ari work and the hair of the ibex goat and the legendary jamawar shawls. By the time he was done, apologizing for boring her, she was already half in love.

  But she had not come to Kashmir to fall in love. What then was this man doing, loving her? What, when his father was not two weeks dead, was that foolish expression doing on his face, his admittedly handsome face, that expression which needed no translation? And what was wrong with her, by the way, why was she lingering here in this strange garden that seemed immune to history, setting aside her quest and listening instead to the buzzing of these innocent bees, wandering between these hedges which no evil could penetrate, breathing this jasmine air unpolluted by the smell of cordite, and passing her days bathed in this stranger’s worshipful regard, listening to his interminable accounts of handicraft manufacture and his recitals of poetry in his admittedly beautiful voice, and somehow insulated from the city’s daily noises of marching feet, clenched-fist demands and the age’s insoluble complaints? Feeling was rising in her also, it was necessary to concede this, and though it had been her habit not to surrender to feeling, to control herself, she understood that this feeling was strong. Perhaps it would prove stronger than her ability to resist it. Perhaps not. She was a woman from far away who had defended her heart for a long time. She did not know if she could satisfy his needs, did not see how she could, was amazed that she was even thinking about satisfying them. This was not her purpose. She felt shocked, even betrayed, by her emotions. Olga Simeonovna had warned her about the essentially sneaky nature of love. “It don’t approach from where you’re looking,” she had said. “It will creep up from behind your left ear and hit you on the head like a rock.”

  At night he sang for her and his voice kept her trapped in his spell. He was enough his father’s son to know something of the music of Kashmir and could play, albeit falteringly, the santoor. He sang the muquam ragas of the classical form known as Sufiana Kalam. He sang her the songs of Habba Khatoon, the legendary sixteenth-century poet-princess, who introduced lol or lyric love poetry to Kashmir, songs of the pain of her separation from her beloved Prince Yusuf Shah Chak, imprisoned by the Mughal emperor Akbar in faraway Bihar—“my garden has blossomed into colorful flowers, why are you away from me?”—and he apologized for not having a woman’s voice. He sang the irregular-meter bakhan songs of the Pahari musical style. The music had its effect. For five days she stayed in the enchanted garden, soporific with unlooked-for pleasure. Then on the sixth day she awoke and shook herself and asked him for help. “Pachigam.” She spoke the name as if it were a charm, an open-sesame that would roll back a boulder from the door of a treasure cave inside which her mother glistened and gleamed like hoarded gold. Pachigam, a place from a fable that needed to be made real. “Please,” she said. And he, declining to mention the dangers of the country roads, agreed to take her, to drive her into fable, or at least into the past. “I do not know the situation in that village and to my shame cannot tell you what you want to know,” he told her. “The village came under crackdown some time back. This was reported. It was my father who had contacts there. I regret I have not been sufficiently active in the culture area. I am a businessman.” What did that mean, crackdown, she wanted to know. Was anyone, is anyone, what happened. He did not tell her how brutal an event a crackdown could be. “I don’t know,” he repeated wretchedly. “As to specifics I am regrettably unaware.” But we will go and find out, won’t we, she said. “Yes,” he miserably assented. “We can go today.”

  She sat in his olive-green Toyota Qualis and when they drove out of the gates of his house, that tiny Shangri-La, that miraculous island of calm in the middle of a war zone, she gave him a sidelong look, half expecting him to wither and die, to age horribly before her eyes as immortals do when they leave their magical paradise. But he remained himself, his beauty and grace undimmed. He saw her looking at him and was vain enough to blush. “Your home, your garden, is so beautiful,” she said quickly, seeking to disguise the light in her eyes: too late. His blush deepened. A man who blushed was irresistible, it could not be denied. “In my childhood, it was a heaven inside a heaven,” he said. “But now Kashmir is no longer heavenly and I am not a gardener like my father. I fear the house and garden will not last, without.” He stopped in midsentence. “Without what?” she teased him, guessing the unspoken words, but he blushed again and concentrated on the road ahead. Without a woman’s touch.

  Kashmir in spring, the leaves budding on the chinars, the swaying poplars, the blossom on the fruit trees, the cradling mountains circled all around. Even in its time of darkness it was still a place of light. How easy it was, at first, to avert the gaze from the burned-out houses, the tanks, the fear in every woman’s eye, the different terror in the eyes of the men. But slowly the spell of Sardar Harbans Singh’s garden wore off. Yuvraj’s mood darkened also. “Tell me,” she said. “I want to know.” “It is hard to speak of such things,” he said. This is real life. “I need to know,” she said. Awkwardly, full of euphemisms at first and then more plainly, he told her about the two devils tormenting the valley. “The fanatics kill our gents and the army shames our ladies.” He named certain towns, Badgam, Batmaloo, Chawalgam, where militants had murdered locals. Shootings, hangings, stabbings, decapitations, bombs. “This is their Islam. They want us to forget but we remember.” Meanwhile the army used sexual assault to demoralize the population. In Kunan Poshpora, twenty-three women had been raped by soldiers at gunpoint. Systematic violation of young girls by entire Indian army units was becoming commonplace, the girls taken to army camps, naked, and strung up from trees, their breasts cut with knives. “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for the ugliness of the world. His left hand shook on the steering wheel. She placed her right hand over it. It was the first time they had touched.

  A stream ran beside the road. “It is called the Muskadoon,” he said. “We are close to Pachigam.” The world disappeared. There was only the stream, its babble like thunder in her ears. She felt as if she were drowning. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Not carsick, is it? Shall I stop for some time so you can rest?” Dumbly, she shook her head. They rounded a bend in the road.

  It was as if giant burrowing creatures, ants or worms, had wriggled up from underground and built a colony of earthworks in a graveyard. The ruins of the old village were still visible, the charred foundations of the wooden houses, the blighted orchards, the broken street, and around and in between these ghosts new dwellings had sprung up, ramshackle hovels of sticks and earth and moss thrown together without any evidence of care or thought, mud igloos with blue smoke issuing through holes in the roofs, “the slovenly products of an inferior species,” Yuvraj called them, sounding angry, “or of our own kind, regressing toward savagery.” Torn rags hung over the doorways and there were sullen faces peering out, silent, unwelcoming. “Something h
as happened here that is not so good, I fear,” Yuvraj cautiously said. “The original villagers are not these. I have seen the bhand pather players of Abdullah Noman and these are not they. New people are here. They do not want to talk because they have seized land that is not theirs and they fear to lose it.”

  They walked down to the Muskadoon watched by suspicious eyes. Nobody came forward to greet them or ask them questions or tell them to go away. They were being treated like phantoms, like entities that did not exist, who could be made to vanish by being ignored. There were smooth boulders by the riverside and they sat down several yards apart and looked at the rushing water without speaking. She could feel the fingers of his longing stretching toward her, and she understood again that she desired him also, she wondered what his hands would feel like on her body, she closed her eyes and felt his lips at the nape of her neck, felt his tongue moving there, but when she opened her eyes he was still sitting on his rock some yards away, looking at her, helpless with love.

  At that moment he was hating his life, the entrepreneurial work to which he had dedicated himself and what that work had made him, his banal businessman self. He was not worthy of her, was nothing more than a seller of carved wooden houseboats and papier-mâché vases, a purveyor of shawls and rugs. The shades of the departed bhands tugged at him and he wanted to give up his merchant existence and spend the rest of his life playing the santoor and singing the songs of the valley to her in his garden where no harmful thing could enter. He wanted to declare himself but did not because he could see the shadow over her, the deepening fear to which she could not yet give a name. He yearned to comfort her but had no words. He longed to get down on his knees and beg for her heart but did not and cursed inwardly at the fate that filled him with inappropriate longings, but blessed it as he cursed. He was a good man who knew how to love, he wanted to say but could not. He would worship her always and shape his life to her whims but this was no time to say so. This was no time for love. She was in agony and he could not be sure she would accept him even if she were not. She was a woman from far away.