Shalimar the Clown

The puppet master is back. He was absent for a while, busy with re-invention, polemic and courtship. The intervening years have perhaps softened him to the extent that he almost allows us believe that we are independently able to grasp his art. But no, with a snap, he reminds us that he holds the strings. We just get to dance around beneath his elevated acrobatics, bragging to our friends that yes, indeed we understand how the tightrope tricks are done.

This time, from his favoured terpsichorean high-wire theme, he brings us a new performer. Shalimar is a clown, but only in as far as Jean-Louis Barrault was in Les Enfants du Paradis, or Chaplin in Gold Rush. This is the tale of a clown whose tragedy transforms into anger, and then appositely to terrorism.

Salman Rushdie has returned to South Asia, theatre of his phenomenal invention of a new form of Anglo-English, or to be less reminiscent of Raj, as he might wish, Indo-English expression. It was a kneading of language that led to the Booker, and the Booker of Bookers. Maybe this story has been growing in him for years, forming, fragmenting, re-grouping, waiting, a tale chasing a tail in circles back to the ferment of his identity: Kashmiri by ancestry, Muslim by inheritance, a child of that Midnight, and now eclectic, or, as  those who imposed the fatwa would claim, wholly corrupted by the depravity of the West. As he sat beneath the weighted early years of the Satanic Verses fatwa he wrote the only children’s book he has written so far—Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In that time of inflicted and personal darkness he played with the notion of Kashmir, calling it the valley of K, Kosh-mar, as in nightmare, or Kache-mer, the place that hides the sea. Now there is no disguise as openly he calls out the village names of the valley with the repeating pathos of a roll call of the dead.

Or maybe, after 9/11, he decided to return to the fall out of  8/15/47 because this was where he could apply all that he is to the rising bile of fear about his religion of birth.  Out of this he could craft an understanding of the struggle that took hold of the Valley of Kashmir, a place of such beauty that it reduced visitors and trespassers alike to tears of elation, and then of the need to possess.

India comes at the beginning of this story, not as in India the country, but India, a woman in LA, her name the stigmata of geographical adultery. Then we meet Max Ophuls, India’s father, at the very end of his life.
Max is murdered. So we begin at the end, and then start again.

Max has been an American ambassador in India, neatly slipped in during the 60’s between the real players, John Kenneth Galbraith and Chester Bowles. He was a European who fled the old world to embrace the addiction of the new, a place where he could celebrate the ‘reinvention of the self, that classic American theme…That the self can so readily be remade is a dangerous, narcotic discovery. Once you’ve started using that drug, it isn’t easy to stop.’ Here Rushdie gives us the meter of his piece—that re-invention is a drug that has the capacity to destroy all who submit to its narcosis.
Max courted Margaret Rhodes through an elegantly and invisibly stitched evocation of a real and imagined time with the French Resistance. He takes her with him into his new life in America.

Shalimar, real name Noman Sher Noman, is a clown of the high wire. He was born a Muslim in village Kashmir at a time when Pandits, the Kashmiri Hindus, and Muslims, shared the great feasts of lamb upon lamb, and performed in the same bhand pather, their traditional and local theatre of shared Hindu-Muslim myth and history. They inter-flirt and even, in the case of Shalimar, inter-marry. He falls for Bhoomi, who is also called Boonyi, the daughter of a Pandit. She is a dancer whose swaying hips later capture Max, the ambassador and serial adulterer. See, the high-priest of string pullers is at work: Lola to Bhoomi, Boonyi from Kashmir to Delhi, from Shalimar’s side to ambassador’s mistress, clown to cuckold.
Shalimar Bagh is ‘the great Mughal garden…descending in verdant liquid terraces to a shining lake’. Shalimar the clown and Bhoomi were born on the same night in Shalimar Garden beyond Srinagar.  As he teeters, and Bhoomi strides out of puberty, he tells her that he loves her so intensely that he will kill her, and any children she may have, if she leaves him.
The meter comes from Max, and now we have the rhyme from Shalimar who is No-man, destroyed by love for a woman, formed but already re-forming, love turned to tragedy, tragedy to latent destruction.

Shalimar is re-carved by the conflict in his Valley. He is trained by the mad mullahs, men born of the jihad and armed so utterly through to the core that, in the case of the one who partially destroys the world of Shalimar’s birth, when his skin rubs away there are is only metal beneath, an assembly of machine parts.

Bhoomi, Boonyi loses her body to greed and drugs in Delhi, then she loses the ambassador’s love, but she carries his child. Max’ embittered wife takes the child and sends bloated Boonyi back to face the now realised destructive force that was once a clown in love. So we come back to the end that was the beginning, the aftermath of Max, the time of Shalimar and India. Now back in LA, the puppet master is frantically tugging so many strings, closing down his story against the ferment of the Rodney King riots in LA, and then the 1993 attack on The World Trade Centre.

This book is a colossus almost bestriding the great and growing rift, though sometimes losing its balance. We have a double helix that spins together information and misinformation. Perhaps Rushdie expects us to be able to distinguish between what is truth and fiction, almost line by line. But this is a novel, and that must not be forgotten, particularly when it turns from tightrope to razor’s edge in the most powerful parts of the book, the ones that will undoubtedly be written about and argued over most. These sections may also inform many people’s view of the cancer in the Kashmir Valley that is, like Rushdie’s characters, called by many names: the separatist movement that became the insurgency, that morphed into the state of terror. From there it slipped into the generic of  ‘the conflict’, an era that has defined this generation of Kashmiris, turning them from the almost mythical laughing blue and green-eyed inhabitants of Elysium into victims or fighters.

Rushdie’s template of this new generation of jihadis seems at times more informed by the Leninist model of the 1930s, and even his own secular passion for socialism, than by the reality of how these extremists are now trained. His boy-guerrillas driven by unearthly forces and passions, the clanking mullahs, and his personification of military frustration, are more Koestler or Marguez than those that I have lived among in Kashmir since 1989. Partial-truth and part-anachronism recount that these fighters are baptized into a state wherein they become ‘the truth’, a concept more of Che than Usama. In practice these disenfranchised and easily influenced boy-men are trained to fight to the death as servants of a strangely distorted version of Allah. They are god-gun-fodder.

Rushdie collapses time, stirring the Soviet-Afghan war and the valley insurgency together, as though they were concurrent, and similar in military nature, rather than being sequential; the first a clearly defined war, followed by Kashmir’s deadlock conflict.  To blur ideologies, to overlay them with templates from a different time, to telescope time, all this is allowed in the novel form. The risk is that the puppeteer can seem to be educating us. There are those who will close this book thinking that this is how it is.

This is an important book, a wonderful reversing story with a cast of characters with names that are not their names, and ideals that have been thrust upon them, but this is not a real study of the anatomy of terrorist warfare or its perpetrators. Remember this as you read this vast story set in a splintering world reflected in lakes.

Originally published in The Times

www.timesonline.co.uk