Shalimar the Clown
By Salman Rushdie,
Jonathan Cape, Rs 595

Salman Rushdie?s blatant love for the obvious is infectious. No one but he could have spun a fast-paced, populous, showy, blood-soaked, half-lyrical, half-comical 398-page novel out of the hackneyed image of Kashmir as the lost paradise, the destroyed garden. He takes particular care to rub it in: Shalimar the Clown takes his professional name from the Mughal garden where he is unexpectedly born on a night of festivity. But the planned theatrical performance and magnificent feast never take place, because of a rumour that an army of kabailis from Pakistan were advancing and the king had fled. His father, Abdullah Sher Noman, the sarpanch of Pachigam village and one of the best actors in the traditional bhand pather form, lets the ?magic of the garden? take hold of him: ?Paradise too was a garden ? Gulistan, Jannat, Eden ? and here before him was its mirror on earth.?

But the mirror is already cracking. Shalimar?s mother?s friend, the wife of Pyarelal Kaul, the village pandit, dies there while giving premature birth to a baby girl in the same hastily set-up shelter. In that night of ?dark absentings?, the guests fail to arrive, and Death, ?the most present of absences?, enters instead ? ?and from that moment on the absences multiplied?. The language weaves together persons and places, one could stand for the other. The story of obsessive love, ambition, betrayal, hatred and revenge is part of the destruction and fragmentation of places ? as much of Paris and Strasbourg during the Second World War as, more immediately, of Kashmir, of the villages of Pachigam and Shirimal with their rivalries over cookery and traditional theatre. Also of the Kauls and the Nomans, who had supported the marriage of Shalimar with the motherless Boonyi, the pandit?s daughter, because of Kashmiriyat: ??We are all brothers and sisters here?There is no Hindu-Muslim issue.??

Boonyi is a chosen name. Her name was Bhoomi, the earth. She is both the flawed Sita as well as the sinning Anarkali. The syncretic folk traditions of Kashmir make such shifts normal, and Rushdie?s universe is heavily laden with myths, magic, legends and fables. Myths would dissolve without obviousness, as would the charm of Hindi films and Hollywood dramas. Pachigam is a micro-world of showbiz, famous for its bhands or clown actors. When it is razed to the ground, there is still Boonyi?s illegitimate daughter, called India by her false mother and Kashmira by her real one, waiting to kill her father?s assassin, her mother?s husband and murderer, in Los Angeles, the showbiz city at the other end of the world. This is Shalimar, whose ?real? name was Noman Sher Noman. The obvious pun suggests the dangerous Everyman of a fractured world. He is the romantic lover-husband turned terrorist, not out of faith but out of a need to kill. He murmurs to himself as he lies among his fellow fighters in the dark mountains, ?but in the murmurous night it was just one of many stories, one small particular untold tale in a crowd of such untold tales, one minuscule portion of the unwritten tale of Kashmir?.

Rushdie?s technique of the pageant and the intertwined tales is here bent to the service of an unrelenting reality ? the destruction of Kashmir. The larger-than-life presence of the heroic, glamourous and recklessly lustful Maximilian Ophuls, American ambassador to India and Boonyi?s seducer, teeters on the brink of the fabular. But he is as real, or as unreal, as Shalimar. It is not just a woman they have in common, but also their pasts. Ophuls is a hero of the Resistance and a master forger, and is as intoxicated with the possibilities of changing and refilling identities as is Shalimar, the clown and expert tightrope walker. The ?run? routes of an admired resistance turn into the global routes of hated terrorists, and they bring Shalimar to Ophuls at last. But there is nothing magical about Colonel Kachhawaha, the Hammer of Kashmir, under whom the Indian army goes on rampage. When the body of Anees Noman, Shalimar?s brother and fighter against tyranny, is brought back to the house, Kachhawaha?s men respond to his mother?s queries about his lost hands by straightening out his father?s arthritic ones. ?What was that cry?? asks Rushdie, introducing a passage of harsh, spare repetitive questions, ending, ?Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again??

This deliberately orchestrated breakdown of the dominant story-telling tone, its flights and the depths, enacts the eruption of an unbearable reality that is beyond language. It is paralleled by a passage describing the fate of the Pandits forced to leave their homes by Muslim extremists, which culminates with ?Why is that why is that why is that why is that?? The litany of terrorist attacks counterbalances this toneless keening with the neutrality of reported news. The Indian army?s merciless ravaging of the lost garden is reflected not only in the burnt-out villages and ?missing? boys and girls, but comically presented in its ever-growing settlement, Elasticnagar, and the piles of metallic rubbish, like dragons? teeth, that they strew around. Out of these grow the Iron Mullahs, the ferocious believers who inspire men to kill and force women to wear the burqa, the mujs and followers of Talib, the scholar from over the mountains. Bulbul Fakh, Shalimar?s first teacher, breathes sulphur and is found to be a heap of metal when killed. Yet the map surrounding Eden is a very real one, made of heights and passes, across which in Pakistan gather men from Kashmir, from Afghanistan, Malaysia and the Philippines. There the training is rigid, the declarations of faith and the will to fight for ?Truth? closely scrutinized, and the fidayeen begin to be born.

Unforgettables like Olga Volga, the potato witch from Astrakhan in LA, or Nazarebaddoor, the Gujjar prophetess in Pachigam, the Uriah Heep-like Edgar Wood in Delhi, the lazy-eyed Firdaus Begum with her snake curse that kills the Hammer, leaven but do not relieve the heartless reality at the centre of the novel. ?My memory keeps getting in the way of your history,? says a line in Aga Shahid Ali?s poem that forms one of the epigraphs. They cannot be separated, like people and places. The other epigraph is terrifying: ?A plague on both your houses.? Whose houses are these? Everyone is included: Shalimar and Boonyi, India and Pakistan, the West and the East. Even the most comic flights, the most outrageous games with words are defeated by the plague of hatred. Even the force of Kashmira?s partial victory is ambivalent: is it a promise of distant peace or is it a threat of unending violence? Can anything compensate for what has been?