The destruction of paradise

ON a frozen November Saturday in 1963, shortly before the Kennedy assassination, I walked into the cinema of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, an 8-year-old armed with the birthday present of membership, and discovered paradise. Floating houseboats on an endless lake, flocks of sheep at the foot of impossible mountains, brilliant purples of saffron fields outside Srinagar. I don’t remember any of the other movies in that winter series, but the documentary on Kashmir filled me with a talismanic longing that continues to warm me.

More than 40 years later, I despair of ever visiting the Hindu temple of Shankaracharya, the Muslim mosque of Hazaratbal with its icon of a single hair from the beard of the Prophet Muhammad or the Mughal garden of Shalimar above Dal Lake.

The last four decades have seen Kashmir caught between “the rock of India and the hard place of Pakistan,” as Salman Rushdie wrote in 1999 in the New York Times. Caught in an ill-defined limbo after partition in 1947, with a largely Muslim population and a maharajah who had thrown in his lot with India, Kashmir became a militarized Verona of warring factions. “A plague on both their houses,” Rushdie wrote in 1999. Six years later, Mercutio’s curse serves as an epigraph to “Shalimar the Clown,” Rushdie’s greatest novel since “The Satanic Verses.”

Rushdie’s Edenic Verona is the village of Pachigam, a shtetl of Hindu and Muslim actors and cooks, who stage a kind of Kashmiri dinner party featuring “the legendary wazwaan, the Banquet of the Thirty-Six Courses Minimum.... “ “Here in Kashmir,” says the Hindu pandit, or wise man, Pyarelal Kaul, “our stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes.”

The Juliet of Rushdie’s novel is the pandit’s daughter, the preternaturally sensuous Boonyi. Her Romeo is a boy named Noman, the son of the Muslim headman. In his childhood, Noman was the double-threat star of Pachigam’s troupe, a genius of both comedy and the high wire, who traded the anonymity of his birth name for the nom de guerre Shalimar the Clown. In prelapsarian Pachigam, no one told Shalimar or Boonyi that they could not fall in love and no one told their fathers that, after making a few changes to the wedding customs for Hindus and Muslims, their children could not marry. In Pachigam, if the stars do not cross it is because they have better things to do.

But the snake of art is more lethal to romance than any constellation. Boonyi joins the troupe and makes her mark with a seductive dance that draws the attention of the local Indian Gauleiter. More dangerous still, it draws the patronage of the truly star-crossed star of Pachigam, a man who is not a Kashmiri at all, but an American and a Jew. He is Maximilian Ophuls, born into the haute Strasbourgeoisie of pre-World War II France, scion of a proud family of art book printers, hero of the Resistance, historian and strategist in the mold of George Kennan, spy and lover in the mold of Graham Greene.

More important, during the early 1960s Max is “America’s best-loved, and then most scandalous, ambassador to India.” Like the great knights of Kennedy’s Camelot, an era in which politics was still attractive to men with brains, Max has a shield whose quadrants are emblazoned with equal parts charm and wit. “India is chaos making sense,” is his most famous epigram. “Freedom is not a tea party. Freedom is a war,” is another. He was “the Rudyard Kipling of ambassadors,” one beautiful Indian actress tells Max. Yet for all his brains and sophistication, this circumcised Ubermensch cannot keep his head. Boonyi dances, Max beckons, Shalimar sulks, a daughter is born, paradise fractures.

Rushdie warns us from the beginning that this is no mere love triangle. On Page 4, Shalimar decapitates Max on the doorstep of his daughter’s apartment in Los Angeles, “like a halal chicken dinner.” Evoking a novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or a movie by Quentin Tarantino or a tragedy, say, by Shakespeare, “Shalimar the Clown” is a chronicle of an assassination foretold. The story of the crime follows its solution. How can this possibly hold a reader for 400 pages? “The impossible is what people pay to see,” Shalimar’s father tells his performers in one pre-show pep talk. “Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show.... Swallow a sword, tie yourself in a knot, defy gravity. Do what the audience knows it could never do no matter how hard it tries. After that you’ll have them eating out of your hand.”

There are few writers who can pull off such an act. But Rushdie defies gravity and dispatches his characters on journeys leading up to the assassination, leading away from the assassination, entertaining and dazzling, but all the while guiding us on an examination of this precarious high wire we find ourselves walking in the 21st century.

The guide for one of these hegiras is Max and Boonyi’s love child, Kashmira. A Lost Angelena of a documentary filmmaker, Kashmira goes to pieces on witnessing her father’s murder. But like a Bollywood Uma Thurman, she rises up and reinvents herself -- there’s a montage of boxing sessions, Wing Chun tutorials and hours on the shooting range with multicaliber guns and bows and arrows -- preparing herself for a cycle of revenge that is equal parts Capulet and Kashmir.

Rushdie is a writer of many worlds, so, of course, “Shalimar the Clown” pulls as much from “Ramayana” and “Thousand and One Nights” as it does from Shakespeare, and metaphor is often his weapon of choice. When Boonyi, transplanted from Pachigam to Delhi, grows bloated and ugly from neglect and despair, she turns on Max with a speech that, in the hands of a British agitprop playwright, might read well in left-leaning sections of London as an attack on the Americanization of the world:

“Look at me, she was saying. I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born. Look at me. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love, your destructive, selfish, wanton love. Look at me. Your love looks just like hatred. I never spoke of love, she was saying. I was honest and you have turned me into your lie. This is not me. This is not me. This is you.”

Yet, as his writings on Kashmir and -- more recently in the Times of London -- Islamic fundamentalism demonstrate, Rushdie is intensely immersed in a world less finely created than literature. Metaphor is a dangerous weapon, he suggests, often imperfectly used, especially if the motives themselves are imperfect. The origins of war, the origins of terrorism are complex subjects, and in “Shalimar the Clown,” Rushdie avoids placing easy blame on the United States. Max Ophuls is neither Uncle Sam nor an Elder of Zion. Boonyi is not Kashmir. And Shalimar the Clown, Shalimar the Vengeful Lover, Shalimar the Assassin, is no simple subway bomber.

What are most simple in “Shalimar the Clown” are Rushdie’s wrenching descriptions of the destruction of paradise. There is nothing cutesy here, no pages of puns to hide the naked pain of the horrors that one house can inflict on another, but transparent, extraordinary writing. In the tradition of Shakespeare and the “Mahabharata,” stories about people are stories about countries and vice versa, and these stories have lived in our midst for years. If the world is only now waking up to old stories of terror and destruction, it is perhaps because white people are losing their heads in Western cities.

One senses, nevertheless, that the author of “Shalimar the Clown,” although full of sadness and fury, is a proud optimist. Like Max Ophuls, Rushdie seems to “believe that the ending of his age would be happy, and that the new world which would come after would be better than the one that would die with him. Europe, free of the Soviet threat, and America, free of the need to remain permanently at battle stations, would build that new world in friendship, a world without walls, a frontierless newfound land of infinite possibility. The doomsday clock would no longer be set at seven seconds to midnight.”

Rushdie continues to write, in Op-Ed pieces and novels, with a belief in the power of reformation both of Islam and the politics of the West. Kashmir is still a Paradise to be Lost. The gods and the Satans are among us, which means that the possibility of salvation is still at hand. “The beautiful village of Pachigam,” like Anatevka and Atlantis, “still exists.” *

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From Shalimar the Clown

SHALIMAR the clown watched them go and had to fight to stop his feet from following. It wasn’t just the shadow planets that tugged at his feelings. Boonyi acted on him too, she worked her magic on him every minute of the day and night, dragging at him, pulling, caressing and nibbling him, even when she was at the opposite end of the village. Boonyi Kaul, dark as a secret, bright as happiness, his first and only love. Bhoomi by the Cold Water, great kisser, expert caresser, fearless acrobat, fabulous cook. Shalimar the clown’s heart was pounding joyfully because it was about to be granted its greatest desire. In the lusty silence during the pandit’s monologue they had decided that the moment had come to consummate their love, and in an exchange of wordless signals had briskly settled the hour and the place. Now it was time to prepare.