Shalimar the Clown (15 page)

It was possible that many Kashmiris were naturally subversive, that they all were, not just the Muslims but the meat-eating pandits as well, that it was a valley of subversives. In which case they were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down hard. He resisted this conclusion even though it was his own, even though there was something ineluctable about the process of thought that led to it, something almost beautiful. He was a man of deep feeling, a man who appreciated beauty and gentleness, who loved beauty, and who accordingly felt great love for beautiful Kashmir, or who wished to feel love, or who would feel love if he were not prevented from doing so at every turn, who would be a true and sincere lover if he were only loved in return.

He was lonely. In the midst of beauty he was mired in ugliness. If it were not subversive to say that Elasticnagar was a dump then he would have said that it was a dump. But it could not be a dump because it was Elasticnagar and so by definition and by law and so on and so forth. He went into a corner of his mind, a small subversive corner that didn’t exist because it shouldn’t, and he whispered into his cupped hands. Elasticnagar was a dump. It was fences and barbed wire and sandbags and latrines. It was Brasso and spit and canvas and metal and the smell of semen in the bunkhouses. It was a smudge on an illuminated manuscript. It was debris floating on a glassy lake. There were no women. There were no women. The men were going crazy. The men were masturbating like crazy and there were stories of crazy assaults on crazy local girls and when they were able to visit the crazy brothels of Srinagar the crazy wooden houses shook with their crazy exploding lust. There were many Elasticnagars now and they were getting bigger and bigger and some of them were up in the high mountains where there weren’t even goats to fuck so he shouldn’t be complaining, even in the little subversive corner in his head that didn’t exist because by definition and et cetera, he should be proud. He was proud. He was a man of integrity, honor and pride and where were the goddamn girls, why wouldn’t they come near him, he was a single male of wheatish complexion and good family who personally had no communalist-type Hindu-Muslim issues, he was a secularist through and through, and anyway it wasn’t as if he was talking about getting married, the question didn’t arise, but how about a cuddle for your commanding officer, how about a kiss or a goddamn caress?

It was like that bit in
The Magnificent Seven
where Horst Buchholz discovers that the villagers have been hiding their women from the gunmen they’ve hired to defend them. Except hereabouts the women weren’t hidden away. They just looked through you with their ice-blue eyes their golden eyes their emerald eyes their eyes of creatures from another world. They floated by you on the lakes wearing their scarlet head scarves their burgundy their cobalt head scarves concealing the dark or yellow flame of their hair. They were squatting down on the prows of their little boats like birds of prey and they ignored you as if you were plankton. They didn’t see you. You didn’t exist. How could they even think about kissing you cuddling you kissing you when you didn’t exist? You were living or so it seemed on a shadow planet. You were the creature from another world. You existed without actually existing. Your existence could only be perceived through your effects. The women could see Elasticnagar which was an effect and because they thought it was ugly even though it was illegal to think so they assumed that the invisible men who lived there must be ugly too.

He was not ugly. His voice barked like a British bulldog but his heart was Hindustani. He was unmarried at thirty-one but nothing should be deduced from that. Many men were not prepared to wait but he was resolved to do so. The men under his command cracked and went to brothels. They were of lower caliber than he. He contained his seed, which was sacred. This required self-discipline, this remaining within the bounds of the self and never spilling across one’s frontiers. This building of inner embankments, of dikes, like the Bund in Srinagar. When he walked on the Bund at the edge of the Jhelum he felt he was walking on the defenses of his heart.

He felt full to bursting of his need, of his unholy unfulfilled need, but he did not burst. He held himself in and told nobody his secret. This was his secret, which he attributed to all that was pent up in him, all that was dammed:
his senses were changing.
There was a bug in the system. His senses were shifting sands. If you devoted too many of your resources to fortifying one front line you left yourself open to an attack on another front. His desires had been reined in and so his senses were playing tricks. He barely had the words to describe these deceptions, these blurrings. He saw sounds nowadays. He heard colors. He tasted feelings. He had to control himself in conversation lest he ask, “What is that red noise?” or criticize the singing of a camouflaged truck. He was in turmoil. Everybody hated him. It was illegal but that didn’t stop them. People said terrible things about what the army did, its violence, its rapaciousness. Nobody remembered the kabailis. They saw what was before their eyes, and what it looked like was an army of occupation, eating their food, seizing their horses, requisitioning their land, beating their children, and there were sometimes deaths. Hatred tasted bitter, like the cyanide in almonds. If you ate eleven bitter almonds you died, that’s what they said. He had to eat hatred every day and yet he was still alive. But his head was whirling. His senses were changing into one another. Their names didn’t make sense anymore. What was hearing? What was taste? He hardly knew. He was in command of twenty thousand men and he thought the color gold sounded like a bass trombone. He needed poetry. A poet could explain him to himself but he was a soldier and had no place to go for
ghazals
or odes. If he spoke of his need for poetry his men would think him weak. He was not weak. He was contained.

The pressure was building. Where was the enemy? Give him an enemy and let him fight. He needed a war.

Then he saw Boonyi. It felt like the meeting of Radha and Krishna except that he was riding in an army Jeep and he wasn’t blue-skinned and didn’t feel godlike and she barely recognized his existence. Apart from those details it was exactly the same: life-changing, world-altering, mythic, religious. She looked like a poem. His Jeep was enveloped in a cloud of khaki noise. She was with her girlfriends, Himal, Gonwati and Zoon, just like Radha with the milky gopis. Kachhwaha had done his homework. Zoon Misri was the olive-skinned girl who liked to claim descent from the queens of Egypt even though she was only the daughter of the outsized village carpenter Big Man Misri and Himal and Gonwati were the tone-deaf children of Shivshankar Sharga who had the best singing voice in town. The four of them were practicing a dance from one of the bhand plays. Looked like they were playing at being milkmaids, which would be perfect. Kachhwaha didn’t know much about dancing but the dance was all perfume and the look of her was emerald. He was on his way to meet the panchayat of Pachigam to discuss important and difficult issues of resources and subversion but his need spoke to him and he told the driver to stop and got out by himself.

The dancers stopped and faced him. He felt at a loss. He saluted. That was a misstep. That didn’t go down well. He asked to speak to her alone. It came out as a barked command and her girlfriends scattered like breaking glass. She faced him. She was thunder and music. His voice stank of dog turds. He had hardly begun to speak when she guessed his meaning, saw him naked. His hands moved involuntarily to cover his genitals. You are the
afsar,
she said, Kachhwa Karnail. He flushed. He did not know how to speak his heart. The officer, yes
bibi.
The officer who—after a lifetime of waiting—of building dams—of saving himself—who profoundly wishes. Who hopes—who most fervently yearns . . . He said nothing, and she bridled. Have you come to arrest me, she demanded. Am I a subversive, then. Do I need to be beaten on the soles of my feet or electrocuted or raped. Do people need to be protected against me. Is that what you have come to offer. Protection. Her contempt smelled like spring rain. Her voice showered over him like silver. No,
bibi,
not that way, he said. But she knew the truth already, his burgeoning hangdog desire. Fuck off, she told him, and fled, into the woods, along the stream, anywhere but where he stood on the outskirts of Pachigam with the embankments crumbling around his soul.

Back in Elasticnagar he allowed his anger to claim him, and began to lay plans to descend on Pachigam in force. Pachigam would suffer for Boonyi Kaul’s insulting behavior, for metaphorically slapping her better’s face. The liberation movement was starting up in those days and the idea was to nip it in the bud by strong preemptive measures. Kashmir for the Kashmiris, a moronic idea. This tiny landlocked valley with barely five million people to its name wanted to control its own fate. Where did that kind of thinking get you? If Kashmir, why not also Assam for the Assamese, Nagaland for the Nagas? And why stop there? Why shouldn’t towns or villages declare independence, or city streets, or even individual houses? Why not demand freedom for one’s bedroom, or call one’s toilet a republic? Why not stand still and draw a circle round your feet and name that Selfistan? Pachigam was like everywhere else in this sneaky, dissembling valley. There were tendencies there on which he had been too soft for too long. He had leads: suspects, targets. Oh, yes. He would come down hard. And he had a reliable informer in the village, a subtle, ruthless and skillful spy, eating breakfast on most days right in Boonyi Kaul’s house.

Pandit Gopinath Razdan, an exceedingly thin man with a deep furrow between his eyebrows, the reddened gums of an addict of
paan
and the air of one who expected to find much to be dissatisfied with wherever he went, arrived at Boonyi’s door wearing narrow gold-rimmed spectacles and a pinched expression, carrying an attaché case full of Sanskrit texts and a letter from the education authorities. He wore citified Western dress, a cheap tweedy jacket with its collar turned up against the crisp breeze, and grey flannel trousers with a coffee stain above the right knee. He was a young man, about the same age as Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha, but he took pains to look older. His lips were pursed, his eyes were narrowed, and he leaned upon a furled umbrella with at least one visibly broken spoke. Boonyi disliked him on sight and before he had opened his bony face she told him, “You must be looking for someone somewhere else. There is nothing here for you.” But of course there was.

“Everything is in order, please be assured,” said Pandit Gopinath Razdan, jerking his head to the side and emitting a long red stream of betel juice and saliva; and there was hauteur in his voice, even though he spoke with the bizarre accent of Srinagar which not only omitted the ends of some words but also left out the occasional middles.
Ev’thing is in or’er, plea’ be assur’.
“I am presenting myself
—I am prese’ing mysel’—
at your goodfather’s own behest.” Bustling out from the kitchen came Pandit Pyarelal Kaul, smelling of onions and garlic. “Dear cousin, dear cousin,” fussed Pyarelal, casting shifty glances at Boonyi, “I wasn’t expecting you until next week at the earliest. I am afraid you have taken my daughter by surprise.” Gopinath was sniffing the air disapprovingly. “If I did not know better,” he said in his skeletal voice, “I would think that was a Muslim kitchen you have back there.”
Know be’er. Musli’ ki’en.
Boonyi felt a great snort of laughter blowing through her nostrils. Then a huge surge of irritation welled up in her and the impulse to laugh was lost.

Pyarelal slapped Gopinath heartily on the back; whereupon he, the city slicker, winced, might even be said to have recoiled. “Ha! Ha! dear chap,” Boonyi’s father explained. “We’re all of a jumble here in Pachigam. Ever since I got bitten by the cooking bug I’ve been slowly introducing pandit cooking into the wazwaan—a radical change, but one of great symbolic importance, I’m sure you will agree!—so that now we for example offer our clients the garlicless
kabargah
rack of ribs, and even there are dishes made with asafoetida and curds!—and in return for everyone’s willingness to go along with my innovations, I thought it was only fair to start using lashings of onions and garlic in some of my own food, just the way our Muslim brothers like it.” A faint shudder coursed through Gopinath’s etiolated frame. “I see,” he stated faintly, “that many barriers
—ma’y ba’iers—
have fallen down around here. Much, sir, for a man like myself
—my’elf—
to ponder.”

Boonyi had listened to this exchange with growing impatience and bewilderment. Now she burst out, “Pon’er, is it? Daddy, who is this to come here from the city and immediately start pon’ering over us?”

It transpired that Gopinath was the new schoolteacher. Pyarelal, fearing Boonyi’s reaction, had hidden from her his decision to give up the pandit’s traditional role of educator and concentrate on his cooking instead. As the years passed the kitchen had moved ever closer to the center of his life. In the kitchen where once Pamposh had reigned he felt in communion with her departed beauty, felt their souls blending in his bubbling sauces, their vanished joy expressing itself in vegetables and meat. This much Boonyi knew: cooking was his way of keeping Pamposh alive. When they ate his food they swallowed her spirit too. What Boonyi had not noticed, however, because children need their parents only to be their parents and accordingly pay less attention than they should to their elders’ dreams, was that cooking gradually became more than therapy for Pyarelal. The kitchen released an unsuspected artistry in him and in that village of actors who had taken up cooking as a sideline his growing mastery gave him a new, central part to play. More and more, when Pachigam people went off to a wedding to prepare the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, the pandit took a leadership role. His saffron-flavored pulao was a miracle, his gushtaba meatball mixture was pounded until it acquired the softness of a baby’s cheek. Wedding guests clamored for his
dum aloo,
his chicken with almonds, his fenugreek-scented cottage cheese and tomatoes, his lotus stems in gravy, his red chili
korma,
and the closing, delicious sweetness of the
firni,
and cardamom tea. Women came up to him and asked slyly for his wazwaan recipes, at which the innocent fellow, ever ready to help, began to spell them out until his fellow cooks shouted him down and shut him up. After that he devised a standard response to all requests for the secrets of his culinary sorcery. “Ghee, madams,” he would say with a grin. “Nothing else to it. Use much and much of real,
asli,
ghee.”