Chapter One
At twenty-four the ambassador's daughter slept badly through the
warm, unsurprising nights. She woke up frequently and even when
sleep did come her body was rarely at rest, thrashing and flailing
as if trying to break free of dreadful invisible manacles. At times
she cried out in a language she did not speak. Men had told her
this, nervously. Not many men had ever been permitted to be present
while she slept. The evidence was therefore limited, lacking
consensus; however, a pattern emerged. According to one report she
sounded guttural, glottal-stoppy, as if she were speaking Arabic.
Night-Arabian, she thought, the dreamtongue of Scheherazade. Another
version described her words as science-fictional, like Klingon, like
a throat being cleared in a galaxy far, far away. Like Sigourney
Weaver channeling a demon in Ghostbusters. One night in a spirit of
research the ambassador's daughter left a tape recorder running by
her bedside but when she heard the voice on the tape its
death's-head ugliness, which was somehow both familiar and alien,
scared her badly and she pushed the erase button, which erased
nothing important. The truth was still the truth.
These agitated periods of sleep-speech were mercifully brief, and
when they ended she would subside for a time, sweating and panting,
into a state of dreamless exhaustion. Then abruptly she would awake
again, convinced, in her disoriented state, that there was an
intruder in her bedroom. There was no intruder. The intruder was an
absence, a negative space in the darkness. She had no mother. Her
mother had died giving her birth: the ambassador's wife had told her
this much, and the ambassador, her father, had confirmed it. Her
mother had been Kashmiri, and was lost to her, like paradise, like
Kashmir, in a time before memory. (That the terms Kashmir and
paradise were synonymous was one of her axioms, which everyone who
knew her had to accept.) She trembled before her mother's absence, a
void sentinel shape in the dark, and waited for the second calamity,
waited without knowing she was waiting. After her father died-her
brilliant, cosmopolitan father, Franco-American, "like Liberty," he
said, her beloved, resented, wayward, promiscuous, often absent,
irresistible father-she began to sleep soundly, as if she had been
shriven. Forgiven her sins, or, perhaps, his. The burden of sin had
been passed on. She did not believe in sin.
So until her father's death she was not an easy woman to sleep with,
though she was a woman with whom men wanted to sleep. The pressure
of men's desires was tiresome to her. The pressure of her own
desires was for the most part unrelieved. The few lovers she took
were variously unsatisfactory and so (as if to declare the subject
closed) she soon enough settled on one pretty average fellow, and
even gave serious consideration to his proposal of marriage. Then
the ambassador was slaughtered on her doorstep like a halal chicken
dinner, bleeding to death from a deep neck wound caused by a single
slash of the assassin's blade. In broad daylight! How the weapon
must have glistened in the golden morning sun; which was the city's
quotidian blessing, or its curse. The daughter of the murdered man
was a woman who hated good weather, but most of the year the city
offered little else. Accordingly, she had to put up with long
monotonous months of shadowless sunshine and dry, skin-cracking
heat. On those rare mornings when she awoke to cloud cover and a
hint of moisture in the air she stretched sleepily in bed, arching
her back, and was briefly, even hopefully, glad; but the clouds
invariably burned off by noon and then there it was again, the
dishonest nursery blue of the sky that made the world look childlike
and pure, the loud impolite orb blaring at her like a man laughing
too loudly in a restaurant.
In such a city there could be no grey areas, or so it seemed. Things
were what they were and nothing else, unambiguous, lacking the
subtleties of drizzle, shade and chill. Under the scrutiny of such a
sun there was no place to hide. People were everywhere on display,
their bodies shining in the sunlight, scantily clothed, reminding
her of advertisements. No mysteries here or depths; only surfaces
and revelations. Yet to learn the city was to discover that this
banal clarity was an illusion. The city was all treachery, all
deception, a quick-change, quicksand metropolis, hiding its nature,
guarded and secret in spite of all its apparent nakedness. In such a
place even the forces of destruction no longer needed the shelter of
the dark. They burned out of the morning's brightness, dazzling the
eye, and stabbed at you with sharp and fatal light.
Her name was India. She did not like this name. People were never
called Australia, were they, or Uganda or Ingushetia or Peru. In the
mid-1960s her father, Max Ophuls (Maximilian Ophuls, raised in
Strasbourg, France, in an earlier age of the world), had been
America's best-loved, and then most scandalous, ambassador to India,
but so what, children were not saddled with names like Herzegovina
or Turkey or Burundi just because their parents had visited those
lands and possibly misbehaved in them. She had been conceived in the
East-conceived out of wedlock and born in the midst of the firestorm
of outrage that twisted and ruined her father's marriage and ended
his diplomatic career-but if that were sufficient excuse, if it was
okay to hang people's birthplaces round their necks like
albatrosses, then the world would be full of men and women called
Euphrates or Pisgah or Iztaccíhuatl or Woolloomooloo. In America,
damn it, this form of naming was not unknown, which spoiled her
argument slightly and annoyed her more than somewhat. Nevada Smith,
Indiana Jones, Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Ernie Ford: she
directed mental curses and a raised middle finger at them all.
"India" still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial,
suggesting the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own,
and she insisted to herself that it didn't fit her anyway, she
didn't feel like an India, even if her color was rich and high and
her long hair lustrous and black. She didn't want to be vast or
subcontinental or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or
ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World. Quite the
reverse. She presented herself as disciplined, groomed, nuanced,
inward, irreligious, understated, calm. She spoke with an English
accent. In her behavior she was not heated, but cool. This was the
persona she wanted, that she had constructed with great
determination. It was the only version of her that anyone in
America, apart from her father and the lovers who had been scared
off by her nocturnal proclivities, had ever seen. As to her interior
life, her violent English history, the buried record of disturbed
behavior, the years of delinquency, the hidden episodes of her short
but eventful past, these things were not subjects for discussion,
were not (or were no longer) of concern to the general public. These
days she had herself firmly in hand. The problem child within her
was sublimated into her spare-time pursuits, the weekly boxing
sessions at Jimmy Fish's boxing club on Santa Monica and Vine where
Tyson and Christy Martin were known to work out and where the cold
fury of her hitting made the male boxers pause to watch, the
biweekly training sessions with a Clouseau-attacking Burt Kwouk
look-alike who was a master of the close-combat martial art of Wing
Chun, the sun-bleached blackwalled solitude of Saltzman's Moving
Target shooting gallery out in the desert at 29 Palms, and, best of
all, the archery sessions in downtown Los Angeles near the city's
birthplace in Elysian Park, where her new gifts of rigid
self-control, which she had learned in order to survive, to defend
herself, could be used to go on the attack. As she drew back her
golden Olympic-standard bow, feeling the pressure of the bowstring
against her lips, sometimes touching the bottom of the arrow shaft
with the tip of her tongue, she felt the arousal in herself, allowed
herself to feel the heat rising in her while the seconds allotted to
her for the shot ticked down toward zero, until at last she let fly,
unleashing the silent venom of the arrow, reveling in the distant
thud of her weapon hitting its target. The arrow was her weapon of
choice.
She also kept the strangeness of her seeing under control, the
sudden otherness of vision that came and went. When her pale eyes
changed the things she saw, her tough mind changed them back. She
did not care to dwell on her turbulence, never spoke about her
childhood, and told people she did not remember her dreams.
On her twenty-fourth birthday the ambassador came to her door. She
looked down from her fourth-floor balcony when he buzzed and saw him
waiting in the heat of the day wearing his absurd silk suit like a
French sugar daddy. Holding flowers, yet. "People will think you're
my lover," India shouted down to Max, "my cradle-snatching
Valentine." She loved the ambassador when he was embarrassed, the
pained furrow of his brow, the right shoulder hunching up against
his ear, the hand raised as if to ward off a blow. She saw him
fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love. She
watched him recede into the past as he stood below her on the
sidewalk, each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and
being lost forever, surviving only in outer space in the form of
escaping light-rays. This is what loss was, what death was: an
escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the
light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the
cosmos. At the rim of the known universe an unimaginable creature
would someday put its eye to a telescope and see Max Ophuls
approaching, wearing a silk suit and carrying birthday roses,
forever borne forward on tidal waves of light. Moment by moment he
was leaving her, becoming an ambassador to such unthinkably distant
elsewheres. She closed her eyes and opened them again. No, he was
not billions of miles away amid the wheeling galaxies. He was here,
correct and present, on the street where she lived.
He had recovered his poise. A woman in running clothes rounded the
corner from Oakwood and cantered toward him, appraising him, making
the easy judgments of the times, judgments about sex and money. He
was one of the architects of the postwar world, of its international
structures, its agreed economic and diplomatic conventions. His
tennis game was strong even now, at his advanced age. The inside-out
forehand, his surprise weapon. That wiry frame in long white
trousers, carrying not much more than five percent body fat, could
still cover the court. He reminded people of the old champion Jean
Borotra: those few old-timers who remembered Borotra. He stared with
undisguised European pleasure at the jogger's American breasts in
their sports bra. As she passed him he offered her a single rose
from the enormous birthday bouquet. She took the flower; and then,
appalled by his charm, by the erotic proximity of his snappy crackle
of power, and by herself, accelerated anxiously away. Fifteen-love.
From the balconies of the apartment building the old Central and
East European ladies were also staring at Max, admiringly, with the
open lust of toothless age. His arrival was the high point of their
month. They were out en masse today. Usually they gathered together
in small street-corner clumps or sat in twos and threes by the
courtyard swimming pool chewing the fat, sporting inadvisable
beachwear without shame. Usually they slept a lot and when not
sleeping complained. They had buried the husbands with whom they had
spent forty or even fifty years of unregarded life. Stooped,
leaning, expressionless, the old women lamented the mysterious
destinies that had stranded them here, halfway across the world from
their points of origin. They spoke in strange tongues that might
have been Georgian, Croatian, Uzbek. Their husbands had failed them
by dying. They were pillars that had fallen, they had asked to be
relied upon and had brought their wives away from everything that
was familiar into this shadowless lotus-land full of the obscenely
young, this California whose body was its temple and whose ignorance
was its bliss, and then proved themselves unreliable by keeling over
on the golf course or face down in a bowl of noodle soup, thus
revealing to their widows at this late stage in their lives the
untrustworthiness of existence in general and of husbands in
particular. In the evenings the widows sang childhood songs from the
Baltic, from the Balkans, from the vast Mongolian plains.
The neighborhood's old men were single, too, some inhabiting sagging
sacks of bodies over which gravity had exerted far too much power,
others grizzle-chopped and letting themselves go in dirty T-shirts
and pants with unbuttoned flies, while a third, jauntier contingent
dressed sharply, affecting berets and bow ties. These natty gents
periodically tried to engage the widows in conversation. Their
efforts, with yellow glints of false teeth and melancholy sightings
of slicked-down vestiges of hair beneath the doffed berets, were
invariably and contemptuously ignored. To these elderly beaux, Max
Ophuls was an affront, the ladies' interest in him a humiliation.
They would have killed him if they could, if they had not been too
busy staving off their own deaths.
India saw it all, the exhibitionist, desirous old women pirouetting
and flirting on the verandahs, the lurking, spiteful old men. The
antique Russian super, Olga Simeonovna, a bulbous denim-clad samovar
of a woman, was greeting the ambassador as if he were a visiting
head of state. If there had been a red carpet on the premises she
would have rolled it out for him.
"She keeps you waiting, Mr. Ambassador, what you gonna do, the
young. I say nothing against. Just, a daughter these days is more
difficult, I was a daughter myself who for me my father was like a
god, to keep him waiting unthinkable. Alas, daughters today are hard
to raise and then they leave you flat. I sir am formerly mother, but
now they are dead to me, my girls. I spit on their forgotten names.
This is how it is."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shalimar the Clown
by Salman Rushdie
Copyright © 2005 by Salman Rushdie.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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