Shalimar the Clown

  It was the pandit Pyarelal Kaul who taught him about grabbing and it was the pandit’s green-eyed daughter Bhoomi whom he loved. Her name meant “the earth,” so that made him a grabber, Noman supposed, but cosmological allegory didn’t account for everything, it didn’t explain, for example, her interest in grabbing him back. Except on performance days when there were audiences within earshot she never called him Shalimar, preferring the name he had been born with, even though she disliked her own name—“my name is mud,” she said, “it’s mud and dirt and stone and I don’t want it,” and asked him to call her “Boonyi” instead. This was the local word for the celestial Kashmiri chinar tree. Noman would go out into the pine forests above and behind the village and whisper her name to the monkeys. “Boonyi,” he murmured also to the hoopoes in the high flower-strewn meadow of Khelmarg, where he first kissed her. “Boonyi,” the birds and monkeys solemnly replied, honoring his love.

  The pandit was a widower. He and Bhoomi-who-was-Boonyi lived at one end of Pachigam in the village’s second-best dwelling, a wooden house like all the other houses but with two floors instead of one (the best house, which belonged to the Nomans, had a third level, a single large room in which the panchayat met and all the village’s key decisions were taken). There was also a separate kitchen house and a toilet hut at the end of a little covered walkway. It was a dark, slightly tilting house with a pitched roof of corrugated iron, just like everyone else’s only a little larger. It stood by a talkative little river, the Muskadoon, whose name meant “refreshing” and whose water was sweet to drink but freezing cold to swim in because it tumbled down from the high eternal snows where the bare-chested, naked-breasted Hindu deities played their daily thunder-and-lightning games. The gods didn’t feel the cold, Pandit Kaul explained, on account of the divine heat of their immortal blood. But in that case—Noman wondered but did not dare to ask—why were their nipples always erect?

  Pandit Kaul didn’t like his name either. There were far too many Kauls in the valley already. For an uncommon man it was demeaning to bear so everyday a surname, and it surprised nobody when he announced that he wanted to be called Pandit Kaul-Toorpoyni, Pandit Kaul of the Cold Water. That was too long to be practical, so he dropped the hated Kaul altogether. But Pandit Pyarelal Toorpoyn, which is to say, Pandit Sweetheart Coldstream, didn’t stick either. In the end he gave up and accepted his nomenclatural fate. Noman called the pandit Sweetie Uncle, though they were not connected by blood or faith. Kashmiris were connected by deeper ties than those. Boonyi was the pandit’s only child, and as she and Noman approached their fourteenth birthday they both discovered that they had been in love for their whole lives and it was time to do something about it, even though that was the most dangerous decision in the world.

  They sat by the Muskadoon with the pandit while he prattled of the cosmos because he was a man who liked to talk and it was a way for them to be together, speaking to each other in the silent careful language of forbidden desire while they listened to Pyare her father babbling away as fluently as the garrulous river at his back. Noman’s fingers stretched toward Boonyi’s and hers yearned for his. They were several yards apart, sitting on smooth boulders by the riverside, bathed in the relentless clarity of mountain sunlight beneath the unbroken sky that shone above them blue as joy. In spite of the distance their yearning fingers were invisibly entwined. Noman could feel her hand curling around his, digging its long nails into his palm, and when he stole a look at her he could tell by the light in her eyes that she could feel his hand too, warming hers, rubbing at her fingertips, because the extremities of her body were always cold, her toes and fingers and earlobes and the points of her new breasts and the tip of her Greek nose. These places required the attention of his warming hand. She was the earth and the earth was the subject and he had grabbed it and sought to bend its destiny to his will.

  Like many men who prided themselves upon their ability to resist spiritual fakery and mumbo-jumbo charlatanism of all kinds, Boonyi’s father the pandit had a sneaky love of the fabulous and fantastic, and the notion of the shadow planets appealed to him powerfully. In short he was wholly under the spell of Rahu and Ketu, whose existence could only be demonstrated by the influence they exercised over people’s daily lives. Einstein had proved the existence of unseen heavenly bodies by the power of their gravitational fields to bend light, and Sweetie Uncle could prove the existence of the cloven heavenly dragon-halves by their effects on human fortunes and misfortunes. “They churn our insides!” he cried, and there was a little thrill in his voice. “They hold sway over our emotions and give us pleasure or pain. There are six instincts,” he added parenthetically, “which keep us attached to the material purposes of life. These are called Kaam the Passion, Krodh the Anger, Madh the Intoxicant, e.g. alcohol, drug et cetera, Moh the Attachment, Lobh the Greed and Matsaya the Jealousy. To live a good life we must control them or else they will control us. The shadow planets act upon us from a distance and focus our minds upon our instincts. Rahu is the exaggerator the intensifier! Ketu is the blocker the suppressor! The dance of the shadow planets is the dance of the struggle within us, the inner struggle of moral and social choice.” He wiped his brow. “Now,” he said to his daughter, “let’s go eat.” The pandit was a jolly-bodied man who liked his food. Pachigam was a village of gastronomes.

  Shalimar the clown watched them go and had to fight to stop his feet from following. It wasn’t just the shadow planets that tugged at his feelings. Boonyi acted on him too, she worked her magic on him every minute of the day and night, dragging at him, pulling, caressing and nibbling him, even when she was at the opposite end of the village. Boonyi Kaul, dark as a secret, bright as happiness, his first and only love. Bhoomi by the Cold Water, great kisser, expert caresser, fearless acrobat, fabulous cook. Shalimar the clown’s heart was pounding joyfully because it was about to be granted its greatest desire. In the lusty silence during the pandit’s monologue they had decided that the moment had come to consummate their love, and in an exchange of wordless signals had briskly settled the hour and the place. Now it was time to prepare.

  That evening, while she braided her long hair for her lover, Boonyi Kaul thought about the blessed Sita in the forest hermitage at Panchavati near the Godavari River during the wandering years of Lord Ram’s exile from Ayodhya. Ram and Lakshman were away hunting for demons that fateful day. Sita was left alone, but Lakshman had drawn a magic line in the dirt all the way across the mouth of the little hermitage and warned her not to cross it or to invite anyone else to do so. The line was powerfully enchanted and would protect her from harm. But the moment Lakshman had left, the demon king Ravan showed up disguised as a wandering mendicant dressed in a tattered ochre cloth and wooden sandals, and carrying a cheap umbrella. He did not talk like a holy beggar, however, but effusively praised, in sequence, Sita’s skin, her scent, her eyes, her face, her hair, her breasts and her waist. He said nothing about her legs. Her legs would have been concealed from view, of course, and although a great rakshasa like Ravan would surely have been able to see through cloth he could not admit it, because if he had praised her lower body his salacious hidden nature would have been revealed instantly. Boonyi Kaul’s almost-fourteen-year-old legs were already long and slender. She wanted to know about Sita Devi’s legs and was frustrated that they were never described.

  She wanted to know, too, whether it was in spite of or because of his lecherous, flattering speech that Sita invited Ravan in disguise to come indoors and rest. It was a question of some importance because once Sita had invited the stranger to cross the magic line its power was broken. Moments later Ravan resumed his true multiheaded form and carried Sita off to his kingdom of Lanka, abducted her against her noble will in the flying chariot drawn by the green mules. The great eagle Jatayu, old and blind, tried to save her, killing the mules in the air and making the chariot fall to earth, but Ravan picked up Sita and leapt unharmed to the ground and when tired Jatayu attacked him he cut off the eagl
e’s wings.

  Surely the whole epic conflict could not simply be Sita’s fault, Boonyi Kaul thought. “Jatayu, you have died for me,” Sita cried out. That was true. But how could the responsibility for everything that followed the abduction, the eagle’s fall, the countrywide search for the missing princess, the mighty war against Ravan, the rivers of blood and mountains of death, be laid at the door of Ram’s revered wife? What a strange meaning that would give to the old story—that women’s folly undid men’s magic, that heroes had to fight and die because of the vanity that had made a pretty woman act like a dunce. That didn’t feel right. The dignity, the moral strength, the intelligence of Sita was beyond doubt and could not so trivially be set aside. Boonyi gave the story a different interpretation. However much Sita’s family members sought to protect her, Boonyi thought, the demon king still existed, was hopelessly besotted by her, and would have to be faced sooner or later. A woman’s demons were out there, like her lovers, and she could only be coddled for so long. It was better to be done with magic lines and to confront your destiny. Lines in the dirt were all very well but they only delayed matters. What had to happen should be allowed to happen or it could never be overcome.

  And so who was this boy, the son of the village headman, the new pratfalling clown prince of the performing troupe, the lover she was preparing to meet in the upper sheep meadow above the village at midnight? Was he her epic hero or her demon king, or both? Would they exalt each other or be destroyed by what they had resolved to do? Had she chosen foolishly or well? For certainly she had invited him to cross a powerful line. How handsome he was, she mused tenderly, how funny in his clowning, how pure in his singing, how graceful in the dance and gravity-free on the high rope, and best of all how wonderfully gentle of nature. This was no warrior demon! He was sweet Noman, who called himself Shalimar the clown partly in her honor, because they had both come into the world on the same night in the Shalimar garden almost fourteen years ago, and partly in her mother’s, because she had died there on that night of many disappearances when the world began to change. She loved him because his choice of name was his way of honoring her deceased mother as well as celebrating the unbreakable connection of their birth. She loved him because he would not—he could not!—hurt any living soul. How could he cause her harm when he would not harm a fly?

  Her hair was ready and her body was oiled. Rahu the intensifier had worked upon Kaam the passion and her body pulsated with its need. She had become a woman two years ago—early as usual, she thought; ever since her premature birth she had done things ahead of time—and was strong enough for whatever was to come. Through the moonless dark the scent of peach and apple blossom made her eyelids heavy. She sat on her bed and rested her head on the windowsill and closed her eyes. Soon enough her mother came to her as she had known she would. Her mother had died giving her birth but came to her most nights in dreams, letting her in on womanly secrets and family history and giving her good advice and unconditional love. Boonyi did not tell her father this because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. The pandit had tried to be both father and mother to her all her life. In spite of his unworldly nature he treated her as an inestimable treasure, as the pearl of great price his beloved wife had left behind for him as a going-away present. He had learned the secrets of child rearing from the women of the village, and from the beginning insisted on doing everything himself, preparing her compound and wiping her ass and waking up to tend to her whenever she screamed until the neighbors begged him to get some sleep, warning him that he had better let them help out unless he wanted the poor girl to grow up without even one parent to lean on for support. The pandit relented, but only very occasionally. As she got older he taught her to read and write and sing. He jumped rope with her and let her experiment with kohl and lipstick and told her what to do when she began to bleed. So he had done his best, but a girl’s mother is her mother even if she existed without actually existing, in the noncorporeal form of a dream, even if her existence could only be proved by her effect on the one human being whose fate she still cared to influence.

  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. Wh
en 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.