Read Online Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Salman Rushdie
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actually existing. It was, because our thinking made it be.
Until he found out about the shadow planets Noman Sher Noman had never understood how to think about love, how to give names to its effects of moral illumination and tidal fluctuation and gravitational pull. The moment he heard about the cloven dragon many things became clear. Love and hate were shadow planets too, noncorporeal but out there, pulling at his heart and soul. He was fourteen years old and had fallen in love for the first time in the village of Pachigam where the traveling players lived. It was his time of glory. His apprenticeship was over and he had taken his professional name. He wanted to set Noman the child aside and be his new adult self. He wanted to make his father proud of Shalimar the clown, his son. His great father, Abdullah, the headman, the
sarpanch,
who held them all in the palm of his hand.
It was the pandit Pyarelal Kaul who taught him about grabbing and it was the pandit’s green-eyed daughter Bhoomi whom he loved. Her name meant “the earth,” so that made him a grabber, Noman supposed, but cosmological allegory didn’t account for everything, it didn’t explain, for example, her interest in grabbing him back. Except on performance days when there were audiences within earshot she never called him Shalimar, preferring the name he had been born with, even though she disliked her own name—“my name is mud,” she said, “it’s mud and dirt and stone and I don’t want it,” and asked him to call her “Boonyi” instead. This was the local word for the celestial Kashmiri chinar tree. Noman would go out into the pine forests above and behind the village and whisper her name to the monkeys. “Boonyi,” he murmured also to the hoopoes in the high flower-strewn meadow of Khelmarg, where he first kissed her. “Boonyi,” the birds and monkeys solemnly replied, honoring his love.
The pandit was a widower. He and Bhoomi-who-was-Boonyi lived at one end of Pachigam in the village’s second-best dwelling, a wooden house like all the other houses but with two floors instead of one (the best house, which belonged to the Nomans, had a third level, a single large room in which the
panchayat
met and all the village’s key decisions were taken). There was also a separate kitchen house and a toilet hut at the end of a little covered walkway. It was a dark, slightly tilting house with a pitched roof of corrugated iron, just like everyone else’s only a little larger. It stood by a talkative little river, the Muskadoon, whose name meant “refreshing” and whose water was sweet to drink but freezing cold to swim in because it tumbled down from the high eternal snows where the bare-chested, naked-breasted Hindu deities played their daily thunder-and-lightning games. The gods didn’t feel the cold, Pandit Kaul explained, on account of the divine heat of their immortal blood. But in that case—Noman wondered but did not dare to ask—why were their nipples always erect?
Pandit Kaul didn’t like his name either. There were far too many Kauls in the valley already. For an uncommon man it was demeaning to bear so everyday a surname, and it surprised nobody when he announced that he wanted to be called Pandit Kaul-Toorpoyni, Pandit Kaul of the Cold Water. That was too long to be practical, so he dropped the hated Kaul altogether. But Pandit Pyarelal Toorpoyn, which is to say, Pandit Sweetheart Coldstream, didn’t stick either. In the end he gave up and accepted his nomenclatural fate. Noman called the pandit Sweetie Uncle, though they were not connected by blood or faith. Kashmiris were connected by deeper ties than those. Boonyi was the pandit’s only child, and as she and Noman approached their fourteenth birthday they both discovered that they had been in love for their whole lives and it was time to do something about it, even though that was the most dangerous decision in the world.
They sat by the Muskadoon with the pandit while
Until he found out about the shadow planets Noman Sher Noman had never understood how to think about love, how to give names to its effects of moral illumination and tidal fluctuation and gravitational pull. The moment he heard about the cloven dragon many things became clear. Love and hate were shadow planets too, noncorporeal but out there, pulling at his heart and soul. He was fourteen years old and had fallen in love for the first time in the village of Pachigam where the traveling players lived. It was his time of glory. His apprenticeship was over and he had taken his professional name. He wanted to set Noman the child aside and be his new adult self. He wanted to make his father proud of Shalimar the clown, his son. His great father, Abdullah, the headman, the
sarpanch,
who held them all in the palm of his hand.
It was the pandit Pyarelal Kaul who taught him about grabbing and it was the pandit’s green-eyed daughter Bhoomi whom he loved. Her name meant “the earth,” so that made him a grabber, Noman supposed, but cosmological allegory didn’t account for everything, it didn’t explain, for example, her interest in grabbing him back. Except on performance days when there were audiences within earshot she never called him Shalimar, preferring the name he had been born with, even though she disliked her own name—“my name is mud,” she said, “it’s mud and dirt and stone and I don’t want it,” and asked him to call her “Boonyi” instead. This was the local word for the celestial Kashmiri chinar tree. Noman would go out into the pine forests above and behind the village and whisper her name to the monkeys. “Boonyi,” he murmured also to the hoopoes in the high flower-strewn meadow of Khelmarg, where he first kissed her. “Boonyi,” the birds and monkeys solemnly replied, honoring his love.
The pandit was a widower. He and Bhoomi-who-was-Boonyi lived at one end of Pachigam in the village’s second-best dwelling, a wooden house like all the other houses but with two floors instead of one (the best house, which belonged to the Nomans, had a third level, a single large room in which the
panchayat
met and all the village’s key decisions were taken). There was also a separate kitchen house and a toilet hut at the end of a little covered walkway. It was a dark, slightly tilting house with a pitched roof of corrugated iron, just like everyone else’s only a little larger. It stood by a talkative little river, the Muskadoon, whose name meant “refreshing” and whose water was sweet to drink but freezing cold to swim in because it tumbled down from the high eternal snows where the bare-chested, naked-breasted Hindu deities played their daily thunder-and-lightning games. The gods didn’t feel the cold, Pandit Kaul explained, on account of the divine heat of their immortal blood. But in that case—Noman wondered but did not dare to ask—why were their nipples always erect?
Pandit Kaul didn’t like his name either. There were far too many Kauls in the valley already. For an uncommon man it was demeaning to bear so everyday a surname, and it surprised nobody when he announced that he wanted to be called Pandit Kaul-Toorpoyni, Pandit Kaul of the Cold Water. That was too long to be practical, so he dropped the hated Kaul altogether. But Pandit Pyarelal Toorpoyn, which is to say, Pandit Sweetheart Coldstream, didn’t stick either. In the end he gave up and accepted his nomenclatural fate. Noman called the pandit Sweetie Uncle, though they were not connected by blood or faith. Kashmiris were connected by deeper ties than those. Boonyi was the pandit’s only child, and as she and Noman approached their fourteenth birthday they both discovered that they had been in love for their whole lives and it was time to do something about it, even though that was the most dangerous decision in the world.
They sat by the Muskadoon with the pandit while
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