Her feelings were unable to rise to the surface, they were buried beneath her fear. She did not know about the shadow planets but she felt in the presence of dark forces. This was her mother’s stream, she thought. By this water her mother danced. In those woodland glades her father’s killer learned the art of the clown. She felt lost and far from home. On a rock a few yards away a stranger sat, dying absurdly of love.
Yuvraj suddenly thought about his father, Sardar Harbans Singh, who had in a way prophesied the coming of this woman, who had perhaps arranged it after passing through the fire of death, Harbans who had loved and husbanded the old traditions amidst whose ruins his son now sat, who had been a gardener of their beauty. Feelings of loss and frustration pulled Yuvraj upright and pushed harsh words out of him. “What’s the point of sitting on here?” he burst out. “This place is finished. Places get smashed and then they are no longer the places they were. This is how things are.” She got to her feet too, full of impotent frenzy, her hands clenching, the fear choking her. She glared at him angrily and he wilted, as if scorched. “I apologize,” he said. “I am a clumsy fool and I have distressed you by my thoughtless words.” He didn’t need to explain. She saw the pain in his eyes and shook her head, forgiving him. Her own eyes were desperate for answers. It was necessary to find someone who would talk.
There were narcissi growing by the stream, visited by bees. Yuvraj Singh remembered a name his father had mentioned, the name of the celebrated vasta waza of Shirmal, master of the Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, who was named after the bumblebee, bombur, and the narcissus flower. “There was a man near here called Yambarzal,” he said.
“So Boonyi had a daughter,” Hasina Yambarzal said, and through the slit in her black burqa her eyes squinted hard at the young woman, this Kashmira from America with an Englishwoman’s voice. “Yes, it’s true,” she decided. “You have the same look of wanting what you want and never mind if the whole world goes to hell as a result.” Bombur Yambarzal, a decrepit, antique figure these days, added loudly from his smoker’s stool in the corner, “Tell her her bastard grandfather wasn’t content with his fields and orchards, he had to try to take away my livelihood as a cook. He was not fifteen percent of my quality, but still he gave himself airs. One may call oneself a vasta waza but it doesn’t change the facts. It doesn’t matter now, of course, even he managed to die but here I am still sitting waiting for my turn.”
The village of Shirmal, like most places in the valley, had been stricken by the twin diseases of poverty and fear, that double epidemic which was wiping out the old way of life. The decaying houses seemed actually to be built of poverty, the unrepaired rooftops of poverty, the unhinged windows of poverty, the broken steps of poverty, the empty kitchens of poverty and the joyless beds. The fear was revealed by the striking fact that the women—even Hasina Yambarzal—were all veiled now: Kashmiri women, who had scorned the veil all their lives. The large, gleaming vehicle parked outside the sarpanch’s residence seemed like an invader from another world. Inside the house a veiled old lady who no longer had it in her to be angry at her fate offered such hospitality as she could to the son of Sardar Harbans Singh and the daughter of Boonyi Kaul Noman. Even though nothing was visible of her except her hands and eyes it was evident that she had been a formidable woman in her time and that some remnant of that power lingered on. In a corner behind her sat her withered, milky-eyed octogenarian husband smoking a hookah and filled with the gummy malice of old age. “I am sorry that you see us in this condition,” Hasina Yambarzal said, offering her guests hot glasses of salty tea. “Once we were proud but now even that has been taken from us.” The old fellow in the corner shouted out, “Are they still here? Why are you talking to them? Tell them to go so I can die in peace.” The veiled woman did not apologize for her husband. “He is tired of life,” she calmly explained, “and it is a part of the cruelty of death that it is taking our little children, also our men and women in their prime, and ignoring the pleas of the one person who begs every day for it to come.”
After the events in Shirmal leading up to the death of the iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh, other militants had come by night. They had entered the sarpanch’s house and dragged him out of bed and conducted a trial on the spot, finding him, on behalf of his whole village, guilty of assisting the armed forces, betraying the faith and participating in the ungodly practice of cooking lavish banquets that encouraged gluttony, lasciviousness and vice. Bombur Yambarzal on his knees was sentenced to death in his own house and his wife was told that if the villagers did not cease their irreligious behavior and adopt godly ways within one week the militants would return to carry out the sentence. At that moment Bombur Yambarzal, with a gun at his temple and a knife at his throat, lost the power of sight forever, literally blinded by terror. After that the women had no choice but to wear burqas. For nine months the veiled women of Shirmal pleaded with the militant commanders to spare Bombur’s life. Finally his sentence was commuted to house arrest but he was told that if he ever again cooked the evil Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, or even the more modest but still disgusting Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, they would cut off his head and cook it in a stew and the whole village would be forced to eat it for dinner.
“Tell her what she wants to know,” blind Bombur muttered spitefully, surrounded by smoke. “Then see if she’s happy she came.”
On the morning after Maulana Bulbul Fakh and his men had been slaughtered in the old Gegroo house in Shirmal, Hasina Yambarzal had realized that Shalimar the clown had not returned, and the pony he had borrowed was also missing. If that boy escaped, she thought, then we’d better be prepared for him to come back someday and get even. She thought of his youthful clowning on the high rope, his extraordinary gravity-free quality, the way the rope seemed to dissolve and one experienced the illusion that the young monkey was actually walking on air. It was hard to put that young man into the same skin as the murderous warrior he had grown into. Twenty-four hours later the pony found its way back to Shirmal, hungry but unharmed. Shalimar the clown had disappeared; but that night Hasina Yambarzal had a dream that horrified her so profoundly that she woke up, dressed, wrapped herself in warm blankets and refused to tell her husband where she was going. “Don’t ask,” she warned him, “because I don’t have words to describe what I’m going to find.” When she arrived at the Gujar hut on the wooded hill, the home of Nazarébaddoor the prophetess which afterwards became the last redoubt of Boonyi Noman, she discovered that the putrescent, fly-blown reality of the world possessed a horrific force far in excess of any dream. None of us is perfect, she thought, but the ruler of the world is more cruel than any of us, and makes us pay too highly for our faults.
“My sons brought her down the hill,” she told Boonyi’s daughter. “We laid her in a decent grave.”
She stood by her mother’s grave and something got into her. Her mother’s grave was carpeted in spring flowers: a simple grave in a simple graveyard at the end of the village near the place where the forest had reclaimed the iron mullah’s vanished mosque. She knelt at her mother’s graveside and felt the thing enter her, rapidly, decisively, as if it had been waiting below ground for her, knowing she would come. The thing had no name but it had a force and it made her capable of anything. She thought about the number of times her mother had died or been killed. She had heard the whole story now, a tale told by an old woman shrouded in black cloth about a younger woman sewn into a white shroud who lay below the ground. Her mother had left everything she knew and had gone in search of a future and though she had thought of it as an opening it had been a closing, the first little death after which came greater fatalities. The failure of her future and her surrender of her child and her return in disgrace had been deaths also. She saw her mother standing in a blizzard while the people among whom she had grown up treated her like a ghost. They had all killed her too, they had actually gone to the proper authorities and murdered her with signatures and seals. And meanwhile in
another country the woman she would not name had killed her mother with a lie, killed her when she was still alive, and her father had joined in the lie so he was her killer too. Then in the hut on the hillside followed a long period of living death while death circled her waiting for its time and then death came in the guise of a clown. The man who killed her father had killed her mother too. The man who killed her father had been her mother’s husband. He killed her mother too. The cold weight of the information lay like ice upon her heart and the thing got into her and made her capable of anything. She did not weep for her mother not then nor at any other time even though she had believed her mother to be dead when in fact she had been alive and then believed her mother to be alive when she was already dead and now, finally, she had had to accept that her dead mother was dead, dead for the last time, dead in such a way that nobody could kill her anymore, Sleep, Mother, she thought by her mother’s graveside, sleep and don’t dream, because if the dead were to dream they could only dream of death and no matter how much they wanted to they would be unable to awake from the dream.
The day was drawing on and it would have been better to set off for the city while the light remained but she had things to see that needed to be seen, the meadow of Khelmarg where her mother made love to Shalimar the clown and the Gujar hut in the woods where he murdered her by cutting off her head. The woman in the burqa came with her to show her the way and the man who had fallen in love with her came too but they didn’t exist, only the past existed, the past and the thing that got inside her chest, the thing that made her capable of whatever was necessary, of doing what had to be done. She did not know her mother but she learned her mother’s places, her sites of love and death. The meadow glowed yellow in the long-shadowed late afternoon light. She saw her mother there, running and laughing with the man she loved, the man who loved her, she saw them tumble and kiss. To love was to risk your life, she thought. She glanced at the man who had driven her here, who evidently loved her although he had not yet had the courage to declare his love, and without meaning to she took a step back, away from him. Her mother had stepped toward love, defying convention, and it had cost her dearly. If she was wise she would learn the lesson of her mother’s fate.
The hut in the woods was in ruins; the roof had fallen in, and before allowing her to enter Yuvraj beat at the overgrown floor with a stick, in case of snakes. In a rusted pot on a long-dead fire the smell of uneaten food somehow lingered. Where did he do it, she asked the woman in the burqa, who was unable to speak, unable to describe, for example, the half-eaten condition of the mutilated corpse. Dumbly, Hasina Yambarzal pointed. Outside, she said. I found her there. The grass grew thick and dark where Boonyi fell. Her daughter imagined it was nourished by her blood. She saw the downward slash of the knife and felt the weight of the body hitting the ground and all of a sudden the pull of gravity increased, her own weight dragged her down, her head grew dizzy and she briefly fainted, collapsing onto the spot where her mother had died. When she regained consciousness she was lying in Hasina’s lap and Yuvraj was walking around her helplessly, flapping his hands, being a man. Light was failing on the hill and the people she was with took her by the arms and led her down. She was not capable of speech. She did not thank the woman in the burqa or look back in farewell as the car drove her away.
On the way back to the city the dangerous night closed in. Men with rifles and flashlights waved at them to stop at a checkpoint, men in uniform and not in uniform with woollen scarves wrapped around their heads, knotted under their chins. It was impossible to know if these men were members of the security forces or the militants, impossible to know which group would be more dangerous. It was necessary to stop. There were obstacles in the road: fences of metal and wood. There were lights shining in their faces and her companion was speaking firmly and fast. Then in spite of her shocked condition the thing inside her came out and stared at the men outside and what they saw in her eyes made them back away and remove the roadblocks and allow the Qualis to proceed. She was unstoppable now. She did not need to be here anymore, the uses of the place had been exhausted. The man driving the car was trying to say something. He was trying to express sympathy or love, sympathy and love. She was not able to pay attention. She had awoken from the fantasy of love and happiness, had departed from the lotus-land dream of joy, and she needed to return home. Yes, this was a man who loved her, a man she might be able to love if love were a possibility for her which at present it was not. Something got into her at her mother’s grave and it would not be denied.
The Qualis drove through Yuvraj’s gate and this time the magic didn’t work, the real world refused to be banished. She wasn’t well. She was running a fever and a doctor was summoned. She was confined to bed in a cool shuttered room and stayed there for a week. In a four-poster bed made of walnut wood and shrouded in mosquito netting she sweated and shook and when she slept saw only horrors. Yuvraj sat by her bedside and placed cold compresses on her brow until she asked him to stop. When her health returned she got out of bed and packed her bags. “No, no,” he begged, but she hardened her heart. “Attend to your business,” she told him coldly, “because I have to attend to mine.” He flinched slightly, nodded once and left her to her packing. When she was ready she stayed indoors until it was time to leave, refusing to set foot in the garden lest its soporific enchantments weakened her resolve. He was all injured nobility, stiff and monosyllabic. How second-rate men were, she told herself. Why would any woman yoke herself to a species of such pouting mediocrity? He couldn’t even say plainly what was written all over his face. Instead, he flounced and sulked. It was men who went in for the behavior they had the effrontery to call feminine, while women carried the world upon their backs. It was men who were the cowards and women who were the warriors. Let him hide behind his pots and rugs if he wanted! She had a battle to fight, and her war zone was on the far side of the world.
At the airport, however, he finally achieved courage and told her he loved her. She gritted her teeth. What was she supposed to do with his declaration, she asked him, it was too heavy, took up too much room, it was baggage she couldn’t carry with her on the flight. He refused to be slapped down. “You can’t escape me,” he said. “I’ll soon come for you. You can’t hide from me.” This was a false note. The image of an earlier, similarly blustering suitor, the American underwear model, popped into her head. You’ll never get me out of your mind, he’d said. You’ll think of my name in bed, in the bathtub. You might as well marry me. It’s inevitable. Face the facts. But standing at the barrier at Srinagar airport she had no idea what the American’s name had been, could barely remember his face, though his underwear had been memorable. Her self-possession strengthened its grip on her. She shook her head. This man, too, she would manage to forget. Love was a deception and a snare. The facts were that her life was elsewhere and that she wanted to return to it. “Look after that beautiful garden,” she told the handicrafts entrepreneur, touched his cheek briefly with a vague, distracted hand and flew ten thousand miles away from the unstable dangers of his useless love.
Three days after she returned to Los Angeles the prime suspect in the murder of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls was taken alive in the vicinity of Runyon Canyon. He had been living in the high wilderness areas up there, living like a beast, and was suffering from the effects of prolonged exposure, hunger and thirst. Acting on information received we ran him to ground he was one sorry sonofabitch came pretty quiet seemed happy to give himself up, Lieutenant Tony Geneva said on TV, into the thicket of thrusting microphones. The suspect had come down from the heights and broken cover to scavenge for food in a trash can in the dog park at the canyon’s foot, and had been somewhat ignominiously captured while holding a red McDonald’s carton and fishing for the few cold discarded fries it still contained. When Olga Simeonovna heard the news she took credit for the arrest. “Great is the power of the potato,” she crowed to anyone who would listen. “Whoo! Looks like I don’t lose my touch.”
The man in custody had been positively identified as Noman Sher Noman, a known associate of more than one terrorist group, also known as “Shalimar the clown.”
When she heard the news Kashmira Ophuls found herself wrestling with a strange sense of disappointment. There was a thing inside her that had wanted to hunt him down itself. His voice, his chaotic voice, was absent from her head. Perhaps he was too weakened to be heard. Kashmir lingered in her, however, and his arrest in America, his disappearance beneath the alien cadences of American speech, created a turbulence in her that she did not at first identify as culture shock. She no longer saw this as an American story. It was a Kashmiri story. It was hers.
The news of the arrest of Shalimar the clown made the front page and gave the riot-battered Los Angeles Police Department some much-needed positive ink at a time of exceptional unpopularity. Police Chief Daryl Gates had left office, after initially refusing to do so. Lieutenant Michael Moulin, whose terrified and outnumbered officers had been withdrawn from the corner of Florence and Normandie when the troubles began, leaving the area in the hands of the rioters, also left the force. The damage to the city was estimated at over one billion dollars. The damage to the careers of Mayor Bradley and District Attorney Reiner was irreparable. At such a time the solid police work of Lieutenant Geneva and Sergeant Hilliker turned them into media heroes, good cops to set against the notorious Rodney King quartet, Sergeant Koon and Officers Powell, Briseno and Wind. Rodney King himself appeared on TV, calling for reconciliation. “Can we all get along?” he pleaded. Lieutenant Geneva and Sergeant Hilliker were interviewed on one of the last late-night shows hosted that May by Johnny Carson, and were asked by the host if the LAPD could ever regain the public’s trust. “We sure can,” Tony Geneva said, and Elvis Hilliker, smacking his right fist into his left palm, added, “And there’s a bad guy in jail tonight who proves just exactly why.”