Shalimar the Clown (50 page)

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 has 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.

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.