Shalimar the Clown (31 page)

T
he air was full of frozen particles of itself. Each breath she took scraped at her windpipe before melting, but to Boonyi standing on the Elasticnagar military airstrip the inhaled sharpness was the sweet sting of home. “O icy beauty,” she lamented silently, “how could I ever have left you?” She shivered, and the shiver was the feeling of her self returning to herself. Since the day she left, her mother had not visited her in her dreams. “Even a ghost is more sensible than I,” she thought, almost wanting to lie down on the tarmac and go to sleep then and there to renew her acquaintance with Pamposh. “My mother, too, is waiting for me at home.” The chartered Fokker Friendship, named
Yamuna
after the great river, had been granted special permission to land here, away from prying eyes. Peggy-Mata had many friends. Boonyi had boarded the plane in a discreet corner of the general aviation sector at Palam, partially sedated to calm her hysteria, but as the small plane flew north the emptiness in her arms began to feel like an intolerable burden. The weight of her missing child, the cradled void, was too much to bear. Yet it had to be borne.

The plane reached the Pir Panjal and went into an upward spiral to gain height; then, without warning, it dropped two thousand feet down a hole in the air, and she cried out in terror. Twice it spiraled upwards, twice it fell, twice she shrieked. The Pir Panjal was the gateway to the valley and Boonyi felt as if the gate had been locked against her. The weight of the absent girl had grown so great that the plane could not carry it over the peaks. The mountains were pushing her back, telling her to take her mighty burden and begone. But they would not succeed. She had abandoned her baby so that she could go home and she would not permit the mountains to stand in her way. On the plane’s third attempt she summoned all her remaining will and let the phantom baby go. There was no baby, she told herself. She had no baby daughter. She was returning home to her husband and there was no leaden void being carried in her cradling arms. She felt the weight in her lap lessen, felt the aircraft rise. She threw away her lost baby and forced the plane up and over. This time the spiral did not end in a fall and the mountains passed beneath the belly of the little plane, wrapped in a storm. Then the valley rolled out below her wearing its winter ermine. As the plane descended toward Elasticnagar she thought she saw Pachigam, and all the villagers were standing in the main street, looking up at the plane and cheering.

The
Yamuna
had no meal service and the small packed lunch that had been among Peggy Ophuls’s farewell gifts was long gone. There was no cabinet of pharmaceuticals aboard and her supplier was gone as well. She felt hungry and crazy. There was no tobacco to chew. She had a craving for offal. There was a scream in her blood. Mighty invisible forces were pulling at her. The shadow planets were at war. Of course the villagers had not been cheering her homecoming. That was a delusion. She was vulnerable to delusions of all kinds, she knew that. Her dependencies were chastising her. She did not know if she could live without the things she needed, the bottled and the cooked. She did not know if she could live without her little girl. When she thought this, the weight crashed back into her lap and the plane’s trajectory sagged downwards sharply. She closed her eyes and willed her child away. There was no Kashmira. There was only Kashmir.

“Madam, please to sit.” A young soldier with a tumble-tongued Southern name and a smile full of big innocent teeth was waiting for her outside the small wooden arrivals building, seated behind the steering wheel of an army Jeep. Boonyi was wearing the dark phiran and blue head scarf that Peggy Ophuls had given her the day before. The
shahtush
shawl was folded away in her bag. She did not wish to seem ostentatious. She had asked that a kangri of hot coals be ready for her and the driver had it waiting. As she felt the familiar heat against her skin her spirits rose. The world was regaining its ordained shape. Her southern adventure was fading away. Perhaps it had never happened. Perhaps her innocence was still unstained. No, it had happened, but perhaps, at least, the stains would wash out easily, leaving no permanent mark. Boonyi Kaul was back. She had exchanged her baby for a phiran, a head scarf, a shawl, a packed lunch, a Fokker Friendship flight and a Jeep ride. When she thought this, the earth’s gravitational force suddenly increased and she was unable to move. She gritted her teeth.
There is no Kashmira.
“Help me,” she said, and with her hand in the driver’s she hauled herself painfully into the Jeep’s passenger seat. The driver was courteous and spoke to her as if she were a visiting dignitary but she was not delusional enough to think of herself in that way.

She had no plan except to beg for mercy. She would go to her village, leaving behind the world of VIP treatment to which she had briefly had access, and she would throw her bloated self at her husband’s feet in the snow. At her husband’s feet and at his parents’ feet and at her own father’s feet as well and she would beg until they raised her up and kissed her, until the world went back to being what it had been and the only remaining mark of her transgression was the imprint of her prostrate body in the omnipresent whiteness, a shadow-self which would be obliterated soon enough, by the next snowfall or by a sudden thaw. How could they not take her back when she had sacrificed her own daughter just to have a chance of being accepted? When she thought this, the immense weight, the growing weight of the lost child, thudded into her at once, and the Jeep lurched to the left and stalled. The driver frowned in puzzlement, stared at her briefly, apologized and restarted the car. Boonyi repeated her magic mantra to herself, over and over,
There is no Kashmira, there is only Kashmir.
The Jeep started up and moved forward.

The army was everywhere. She had been allowed to use military facilities so that she could slip out of one sphere of the world into another, so that she could leave behind the public and return to the private. There was reason to doubt whether such slippage was possible anymore. As she drove out through the gates of Elasticnagar and was caressed by the shadows of the poplars and chinars lining the road that would take her through Gargamal and Grangussia to Pachigam, she remembered an argument between Anees Noman and his brothers that began when her bomb-making brother-in-law started insisting over dinner that the boundary, the
cease-fire line,
between private life and the public arena no longer existed. “Everything is politics now,” he said. “The old comfortable days are gone.” His brothers began to tease him. “How about soup?” asked Hameed the firstborn twin. “Is your mother’s chicken broth politicized too?” And his secondborn brother Mahmood added, thoughtfully, “There is also the question of hair. The two of us are big hairy bastards who ought to shave twice a day, but you, Anees, are as smooth as a girl and the razor hardly needs to touch your cheek. So is hairiness conservative or radical? What do the revolutionaries say?”

“You’ll see,” Anees yelled, pounding the dinner table, falling into his brothers’ trap and sounding ridiculous, “One day even beards will be the subject of ideological disputes.” Hameed Noman twisted his lips judiciously. “Okay, okay,” he conceded. “Fair enough. But they better leave my chicken soup alone.”

Boonyi on the highway home saw Abdullah Noman’s house in her mind’s eye, illuminated by memory’s golden glow. The patriarch sat at the head of the family table, lips pursed, staring into the distance with an amused twinkle in his eye, pretending to have higher things on his mind while his sons jostled and squabbled and lazy-eyed Firdaus banged a plate of food down in front of him as if challenging him to a duel. Yellow flame flickered in iron lanterns, and drums and santoors and pipes were stacked in a corner near a rack of regal costumery and a hook from which half a dozen painted masks hung down. The twins’ loud knockabout act went on as usual and Anees of the dolorous countenance was irritated by it. This irritation, too, was customary. The family was eternal and would not, must not change, and by returning to it she would put it all back the way it had been, she would even heal the quarrel between Anees and her husband Shalimar the clown, and at Firdaus’s table they would enjoy the happy ending of such meals together, blessed by the boundless gastronomic largesse of the sarpanch’s wife.

As they neared Pachigam it began to snow. “Set me down at the bus stop,” she told the driver. “Weather is inclement, madam,” he replied. “Better to drop you at your homestead.” But she was adamant. The bus stop was the place from which she had departed this life and it was at the bus stop that she would return to it. “Okay, madam,” the driver said doubtfully. “Will I wait until they come for you?” But she did not want to be seen with an army man. It was snowing heavily as they turned the last corner. This was the bus stop. There was no sign but that didn’t matter. Here was the produce store where her father and the sarpanch sold fruit from their orchards. It was boarded up against the blizzard. “Please, madam,” the driver said. “I am fearful for your good health.” She still knew how to look at a greenhorn with a hardy village woman’s contempt. “The cold is warmth to us,” she said. “The snow to me is like a hot shower would be to you. No cause for your concern.”

So she was standing by herself in the snowstorm when the villagers first saw her, standing still at the bus stop with snow on her shoulders and snowdrifts pushing up against her legs. The sight of a dead woman who had somehow materialized at the edge of town with her bedroll and bag beside her brought the whole village out of doors, snow or no snow. Everyone was mesmerized by the sight of this stationary corpse that looked as if it had done nothing in the afterlife but eat. It looked like a snow-woman such as a child might build, a snow-woman with the body of the deceased Boonyi inside it. Nobody spoke to the snow-woman. It could be bad luck to speak to a ghost. But the whole village also knew that somebody would have to do some talking sooner or later, because Boonyi didn’t know she was dead.

She saw them all through the snowstorm, circling her like crows, keeping their distance. She called out but nobody called back. One by one they approached her—Himal, Gonwati and Shivshankar Sharga, Big Man Misri, Habib Joo—and one by one they receded. Then the principal actors made their entrance, snow crusting their eyebrows and beards. Hameed and Mahmood Noman came arm in arm, giggling peculiarly, as if she had done something odd by returning, something that wasn’t really funny. And this was Firdaus Noman, her mother’s friend, Firdaus stretching out a hand toward her, then dropping it and running away. Boonyi thought she understood. She was being punished. She was being judged in dumb show and ritually ostracized. But surely they could not go on this way, not in this blizzard? Surely someone would take her in and scold her and give her a hug and something hot to drink?

When her sweet father came hopping awkwardly through the snow she was sure the spell would break. But he stopped six feet away and wept, the tears freezing on his cheeks. She was his only child. He had loved her more than his own life, until she died. If he did not speak now her dead gaze would curse him. A rejected child can place the evil eye upon the parent who spurns her, even after death. In a low voice, a voice she could barely hear over the whistling wind, he murmured superstitious words:
nazaré-bad-door.
Evil eye, begone. Then, slowly, as if struggling against chains, his feet took small steps away from her, and the snow clouded her sight, and he was gone. In his place, finally, was her husband, Noman Noman, who was Shalimar the clown. What was that look on his face? She had never seen such a look before. Humbly she told herself that it was the look she deserved, in which hatred and contempt mingled with grief and hurt and a terrible, broken love. And something else, something she didn’t understand. His father the sarpanch was with him, holding him by the arm. His father who held them all in the palm of his hand. Abdullah Noman seemed to be restraining his son, pulling him away from her. And there too was her own father again, putting himself between her husband and herself. Why would he do that. Shalimar the clown was holding something in his fist. Maybe it was a knife, held in the assassin’s grip, the reversed blade concealed up the sleeve of his chugha with the haft clenched in his hand. Maybe she would die here beneath her husband’s blade. She was ready to die. She fell to her knees in the snow, arms outspread, and waited.

Zoon Misri the carpenter’s daughter knelt down beside her. Zoon’s olive-skinned Egyptian beauty seemed to belong to another place and time, a hot dry world of deserts and snakes in fig baskets and huge lions with the heads of kings. In happier times she had accentuated her exotic looks with dramatically upturned kohl-lines at the corners of her eyes, but since the assault of the Gegroo brothers she wore no embellishments. She had grown thinner; her vivid eyes were two burning lamps set in a face of polished bone. “A lot of people around these parts think of me as a living ghost,” she said distantly, not looking at Boonyi. “Those people think that when a thing happens to a woman like the thing that happened to me, the woman should go quietly into the trees and hang herself.” She smiled faintly. “I didn’t do that.” Boonyi’s spirits lifted slightly. Her friend was with her. Loyalty still existed in the world, even for a traitor such as herself. By her deeds, by sorrowful repentance and right action, she would earn the loyalty of the others again. Zoon’s friendship was all the start she needed. She stretched out a hand. Zoon made a tiny negative movement of the head. “It’s because I have been treated like this that I can speak,” she said. “The living dead can speak to each other, can’t they? Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.” Now for the first time she looked Boonyi in the eye. “They killed you,” she said. “After what you did. They said you were dead to them and they announced your death and they made us all swear an oath. They went to the authorities and filled out a form and got it signed and stamped and so you are dead, and you cannot return. You have been mourned properly for forty days with all correct religious and social observances and so of course you cannot just pop up again. You are a dead person. Your life has been ended. It’s official.” Zoon was controlling the muscles of her face, and her voice, as well, was strictly disciplined. “Who killed me,” Boonyi asked. “Tell me their names.” Zoon’s silence went on so long that Boonyi thought she was refusing to answer. Then the carpenter’s daughter said, “Your husband. Your husband’s father. Your husband’s mother. And.” Boonyi’s voice shook as she implored her friend to go on. “Who else?” she pleaded. “You’re saying there was someone else.”