Shalimar the Clown

2

There was the earth and there were the planets. The earth was not a planet. The planets were the grabbers. They were called this because they could seize hold of the earth and bend its destiny to their will. The earth was never of their kind. The earth was the subject. The earth was the grabbee.

There were nine grabbers in the cosmos, Surya the Sun, Soma the Moon, Budha the Mercury, Mangal the Mars, Shukra the Venus, Brihaspati the Jupiter, Shani the Saturn, and Rahu and Ketu, the two shadow planets. The shadow planets actually existed without actually existing. They were heavenly bodies without bodies. They were out there but they lacked physical form. They were also the dragon planets: two halves of a single bisected dragon. Rahu was the dragon’s head and Ketu was the dragon’s tail. A dragon, too, was a creature that actually existed without 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 he prattled of the cosmos because he was a man who liked to talk and it was a way for them to be together, speaking to each other in the silent careful language of forbidden desire while they listened to Pyare her father babbling away as fluently as the garrulous river at his back. Noman’s fingers stretched toward Boonyi’s and hers yearned for his. They were several yards apart, sitting on smooth boulders by the riverside, bathed in the relentless clarity of mountain sunlight beneath the unbroken sky that shone above them blue as joy. In spite of the distance their yearning fingers were invisibly entwined. Noman could feel her hand curling around his, digging its long nails into his palm, and when he stole a look at her he could tell by the light in her eyes that she could feel his hand too, warming hers, rubbing at her fingertips, because the extremities of her body were always cold, her toes and fingers and earlobes and the points of her new breasts and the tip of her Greek nose. These places required the attention of his warming hand. She was the earth and the earth was the subject and he had grabbed it and sought to bend its destiny to his will.

Like many men who prided themselves upon their ability to resist spiritual fakery and mumbo-jumbo charlatanism of all kinds, Boonyi’s father the pandit had a sneaky love of the fabulous and fantastic, and the notion of the shadow planets appealed to him powerfully. In short he was wholly under the spell of Rahu and Ketu, whose existence could only be demonstrated by the influence they exercised over people’s daily lives. Einstein had proved the existence of unseen heavenly bodies by the power of their gravitational fields to bend light, and Sweetie Uncle could prove the existence of the cloven heavenly dragon-halves by their effects on human fortunes and misfortunes. “They churn our insides!” he cried, and there was a little thrill in his voice. “They hold sway over our emotions and give us pleasure or pain. There are six instincts,” he added parenthetically, “which keep us attached to the material purposes of life. These are called Kaam the Passion, Krodh the Anger, Madh the Intoxicant, e.g. alcohol, drug et cetera, Moh the Attachment, Lobh the Greed and Matsaya the Jealousy. To live a good life we must control them or else they will control us. The shadow planets act upon us from a distance and focus our minds upon our instincts. Rahu is the exaggerator the intensifier! Ketu is the blocker the suppressor! The dance of the shadow planets is the dance of the struggle within us, the inner struggle of moral and social choice.” He wiped his brow. “Now,” he said to his daughter, “let’s go eat.” The pandit was a jolly-bodied man who liked his food. Pachigam was a village of gastronomes.

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.

That evening, while she braided her long hair for her lover, Boonyi Kaul thought about the blessed Sita in the forest hermitage at Panchavati near the Godavari River during the wandering years of Lord Ram’s exile from Ayodhya. Ram and Lakshman were away hunting for demons that fateful day. Sita was left alone, but Lakshman had drawn a magic line in the dirt all the way across the mouth of the little hermitage and warned her not to cross it or to invite anyone else to do so. The line was powerfully enchanted and would protect her from harm. But the moment Lakshman had left, the demon king Ravan showed up disguised as a wandering mendicant dressed in a tattered ochre cloth and wooden sandals, and carrying a cheap umbrella. He did not talk like a holy beggar, however, but effusively praised, in sequence, Sita’s skin, her scent, her eyes, her face, her hair, her breasts and her waist. He said nothing about her legs. Her legs would have been concealed from view, of course, and although a great rakshasa like Ravan would surely have been able to see through cloth he could not admit it, because if he had praised her lower body his salacious hidden nature would have been revealed instantly. Boonyi Kaul’s almost-fourteen-year-old legs were already long and slender. She wanted to know about Sita Devi’s legs and was frustrated that they were never described.

She wanted to know, too, whether it was in spite of or because of his lecherous, flattering speech that Sita invited Ravan in disguise to come indoors and rest. It was a question of some importance because once Sita had invited the stranger to cross the magic line its power was broken. Moments later Ravan resumed his true multiheaded form and carried Sita off to his kingdom of Lanka, abducted her against her noble will in the flying chariot drawn by the green mules. The great eagle Jatayu, old and blind, tried to save her, killing the mules in the air and making the chariot fall to earth, but Ravan picked up Sita and leapt unharmed to the ground and when tired Jatayu attacked him he cut off the eagle’s wings.

Surely the whole epic conflict could not simply be Sita’s fault, Boonyi Kaul thought. “Jatayu, you have died for me,” Sita cried out. That was true. But how could the responsibility for everything that followed the abduction, the eagle’s fall, the countrywide search for the missing princess, the mighty war against Ravan, the rivers of blood and mountains of death, be laid at the door of Ram’s revered wife? What a strange meaning that would give to the old story-that women’s folly undid men’s magic, that heroes had to fight and die because of the vanity that had made a pretty woman act like a dunce. That didn’t feel right. The dignity, the moral strength, the intelligence of Sita was beyond doubt and could not so trivially be set aside. Boonyi gave the story a different interpretation. However much Sita’s family members sought to protect her, Boonyi thought, the demon king still existed, was hopelessly besotted by her, and would have to be faced sooner or later. A woman’s demons were out there, like her lovers, and she could only be coddled for so long. It was better to be done with magic lines and to confront your destiny. Lines in the dirt were all very well but they only delayed matters. What had to happen should be allowed to happen or it could never be overcome.

And so who was this boy, the son of the village headman, the new pratfalling clown prince of the performing troupe, the lover she was preparing to meet in the upper sheep meadow above the village at midnight? Was he her epic hero or her demon king, or both? Would they exalt each other or be destroyed by what they had resolved to do? Had she chosen foolishly or well? For certainly she had invited him to cross a powerful line. How handsome he was, she mused tenderly, how funny in his clowning, how pure in his singing, how graceful in the dance and gravity-free on the high rope, and best of all how wonderfully gentle of nature. This was no warrior demon! He was sweet Noman, who called himself Shalimar the clown partly in her honor, because they had both come into the world on the same night in the Shalimar garden almost fourteen years ago, and partly in her mother’s, because she had died there on that night of many disappearances when the world began to change. She loved him because his choice of name was his way of honoring her deceased mother as well as celebrating the unbreakable connection of their birth. She loved him because he would not-he could not!-hurt any living soul. How could he cause her harm when he would not harm a fly?

Her hair was ready and her body was oiled. Rahu the intensifier had worked upon Kaam the passion and her body pulsated with its need. She had become a woman two years ago-early as usual, she thought; ever since her premature birth she had done things ahead of time-and was strong enough for whatever was to come. Through the moonless dark the scent of peach and apple blossom made her eyelids heavy. She sat on her bed and rested her head on the windowsill and closed her eyes. Soon enough her mother came to her as she had known she would. Her mother had died giving her birth but came to her most nights in dreams, letting her in on womanly secrets and family history and giving her good advice and unconditional love. Boonyi did not tell her father this because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. The pandit had tried to be both father and mother to her all her life. In spite of his unworldly nature he treated her as an inestimable treasure, as the pearl of great price his beloved wife had left behind for him as a going-away present. He had learned the secrets of child rearing from the women of the village, and from the beginning insisted on doing everything himself, preparing her compound and wiping her ass and waking up to tend to her whenever she screamed until the neighbors begged him to get some sleep, warning him that he had better let them help out unless he wanted the poor girl to grow up without even one parent to lean on for support. The pandit relented, but only very occasionally. As she got older he taught her to read and write and sing. He jumped rope with her and let her experiment with kohl and lipstick and told her what to do when she began to bleed. So he had done his best, but a girl’s mother is her mother even if she existed without actually existing, in the noncorporeal form of a dream, even if her existence could only be proved by her effect on the one human being whose fate she still cared to influence.

The pandit’s deceased wife had been named Pamposh after the lotus flower, but, as she confided to her dozing daughter, she preferred the nickname Giri, meaning a walnut kernel, which Firdaus Begum, Abdullah Noman’s yellow-haired wife, Firdaus Butt or Bhat, once gave her as a mark of friendship. One summer day in the saffron fields of Pachigam Firdaus and Giri were gathering crocuses when a rainstorm came at them like a witch’s spell out of a clear blue sky and soaked them both to the bone. The sarpanch’s wife was a foul-mouthed woman and let the cackling rain know what she thought of it but Pamposh danced in the downpour and cried out gaily, “Don’t scold the sky for giving us the gift of water.”

That was too much for Firdaus. “Everyone thinks you have such a sweet nature, so open, so accepting, but you don’t fool me,” she told Pamposh or Giri while they sheltered dripping under a spreading chinar. “Sure, I can see how quickly and easily you smile, how you never have a harsh word for anyone, how you face every hardship with equanimity. Me, I wake up in the morning and I have to start fixing everything I see, I need to shake people up, I want everything to be better, I want to clean up all the shit we have to deal with every day of this grueling life. You, by contrast, act like you take the world as it is and are happy to be in it and whatever happens is just fine by you. But guess what? I’m onto you. I’ve worked out your little act of an angel in paradise. It’s brilliant, no question about that, but it’s just your shell, your hard walnut shell, and inside you’re a completely different girl and it’s my guess that you’re far from contented. You’re the most generous woman I know, if I mention once that I like this or that shawl you’ll make me take it, even if it came down to you from your great-grandmother in your trousseau and it’s an heirloom one hundred and fifty years old, but secretly, in spite of all that, you’re a miser of yourself.”

It was the kind of speech that either destroys a friendship forever or pushes it to a new level of intimacy, and it was typical of Firdaus to gamble everything on one throw of the dice. “I guess I saw through her too that day,” Pamposh Kaul told her daughter Boonyi as she dreamed, “and I caught sight of the incredibly loyal and loving woman under her act of a hardass bitch. Also, she was the only woman in the village who might just be able to understand what I wanted to say.” So Pamposh confided her deepest secrets to Firdaus, amazing her. Until that moment the headman’s wife, like everyone else, had thought of Pamposh as the perfect wife for the pandit, because she had her feet planted firmly on the ground while his head was always getting a soaking in the middle of some metaphysical cloud. Now Firdaus discovered that Pamposh possessed a secret nature far more fantastic than her husband’s, that her dreams were far more radical and dangerous than anything Firdaus had ever been able to come up with in spite of all her world-shaking ambitions.

In the matter of lovemaking Kashmiri women had never been shrinking violets, but what Pamposh confided to Firdaus made her ears burn. The sarpanch’s wife understood that hidden away inside her friend was a personality so intensely sexual that it was a wonder the pandit was still able to get up out of bed and walk around. Pamposh’s passion for the wilder reaches of sexual behavior introduced Firdaus to a number of new concepts that simultaneously horrified and aroused her, although she feared that if she attempted to introduce them into her own bedroom Abdullah, for whom sex was a simple relief of physical urges and not to be unduly prolonged, would throw her out into the street like a common whore. Although Firdaus was the older of the two women by a few years she found herself in the unaccustomed position of awestruck student, inquiring with stammering fascination into how and why such and such a practice achieved the desired results. “It’s simple,” Pamposh replied. “If you trust each other you can do anything and so can he and believe me it feels pretty good.” What was even more remarkable about Pamposh’s revelations was the sense that she was not following her husband’s desires but leading them. When she moved on from sex itself to sexual politics and began to explain her broader ideas, her utopian vision of the emancipation of women, and to speak of her torment at having to live in a society that was at least a hundred years behind the times she had in mind, Firdaus held up her hand. “It’s bad enough that you have filled my head with stuff that will give me nightmares for weeks,” she said. “Don’t upset me with any more of your notions today. The present is already too much for me. I can’t cope with the future as well.”

Pamposh Kaul in her daughter’s dreams went into all the things Firdaus Noman had not wanted to hear, told her about the unshackled future that shone on the horizon like a promised land she could never enter, the vision of freedom that had eaten away at her all her life and destroyed her inner peace, although nobody knew it because she never stopped smiling, she never dropped her lying façade of contented calm. “A woman can make every choice she pleases just because it pleases her, and pleasing a man comes a poor second, a long way behind,” she said. “Also, if a woman’s heart is true then what the world thinks doesn’t matter a good goddamn.” This made a big impression on Boonyi. “That’s easy for you to say,” she told her mother. “Ghosts don’t have to live in the real world.”

“I’m not a ghost,” Pamposh replied. “I’m a dream of the mother you want me to be. I’m telling you what’s already in your heart, what you want me to confirm.”

“That’s true,” said Boonyi Kaul, and began to stretch and stir. “Go to him,” her mother said, and faded into nothing.

Boonyi slipped out of the house and made her way up the wooded hillside to Khelmarg, the meadow where sometimes by moonlight she practiced archery, spearing arrows into innocent trees. She had a gift for the bow but tonight was for different sport. There was no moon. There were a few lights shining from the Indian army camp across the fields, a few glowing lanterns and cigarette tips, but even the soldiers were mostly asleep. Her father was certainly asleep and snoring his buffalo snores. She was wearing a dark kerchief around her head and a full-length dark phiran over a long dark shirt. There was a chill in the air but the loose robe was warm enough. Under the phiran her little kangri of hot coals sent long fingers of heat across her stomach. She wore no other garments or undergarments. Her bare feet knew the path. She was a shadow in search of a shadow. She would find the shadow she was looking for and he would love and protect her. “I will hold you in the palm of my hand,” he had said, “the way my father held me.” Noman, also known as Shalimar the clown, the most beautiful boy in the world.

At that moment the most beautiful boy in the world was doing what he did whenever he needed to calm down and concentrate on what really mattered: he was climbing a tree. Trees had featured prominently both in his professional education and in his inner life. One night at the age of eleven Noman had been unable to sleep because of his uncertainties about the nature of the universe, on which subject his parents had arguments so spectacular that the whole village gathered outside their house to listen and take sides, arguments about the precise location of the heavenly paradise and whether or not in the future men would get there by spaceship, and about the probability or improbability of there being prophets and holy books on other planets, and consequently about whether or not it was blasphemous to hypothesize the theoretical existence of little green-skinned bug-eyed prophets receiving holy writ in the incomprehensible languages of Mars or of the creatures who lived on the unseen far side of the moon. Noman didn’t know how to choose between his father’s modern-day open-mindedness and his mother’s occultist threats which usually had something to do with snake charms, so that even though there was a rainstorm brewing he escaped through the back door and climbed the tallest chinar in the Pachigam district to think. He wasn’t stupid enough to step out onto the rope that night. He hung there madly in the wind and rain while all around him branches shook and broke. The universe flexed its muscles and demonstrated its complete lack of interest in quarrels about its nature. The universe was everything at once, science and sorcery, what was occult and what was known, and it didn’t give a damn. The storm’s fury grew. He saw dead men’s hands flying past his face, catching at him from their airy graves. The wind screamed and meant to kill him but he screamed back into its face and cursed it and it couldn’t take his life. Years later when he became an assassin he would say that it might have been better if he hadn’t lived, better if his life had been carried off that day in the rotting teeth of the gale.

Just outside the village there was a stand of ancient chinar trees clawing gracefully at the sky. A tightrope stretched between two of the oldest trees, and now, in preparation for his assignation with Boonyi, Shalimar the clown was strolling across it, tumbling, pirouetting, prancing so lightly that it seemed he was walking on air. He had been nine years old when he learned the secret of airwalking. In this green glade beneath a sun-pierced dome of leaves he stepped barefoot out of his father’s grasp and flew. On that first flight the tightrope was barely eighteen inches off the ground but the exhilaration was as great as anything he felt later in his professional life when he stepped out from a high branch and looked down twenty feet to where his open-mouthed admirers clapped and gasped. His feet knew what to do without being told. His toes curled round the rope, gripping hard. “Don’t think of the rope as a safety line through space,” his father had said. “Think of it as a line of gathered air. Or think of the air as something preparing to become rope. The rope and the air are the same. When you know this you will be ready to fly. The rope will melt away and you will step out onto the air knowing that it will bear your weight and take you wherever you may want to go.” Abdullah Sher Noman was initiating his son into a mystery. A rope could become air. A boy could become a bird. Metamorphosis was the secret heart of life.

After his first walk it proved impossible to keep Noman off the rope and gradually it rose higher and higher until he was flying at the level of the treetops. He practiced in all weathers and at all times of the day and night and his father, Abdullah, never stopped him, never reined him in, even when Firdaus Begum, the great man’s wife and Noman’s ferocious mother, threatened to bewitch them both and turn them into water snakes and trap them in a glass bowl in the kitchen if that was what it took to protect her son from his damn fool of a father who didn’t care if Noman fell headfirst to the ground and got himself smashed into a thousand pieces like a mirror. Snakes loomed large in Firdaus Begum’s worldview and therefore in her family’s too. “Snake wriggle, world jiggle,” she liked to say, meaning that the great serpents burrowing away down by the roots of the mountains caused earth tremors when they moved. She knew many snake secrets. Under the shivering Himalayas, she said, there was a lost city where the snakes hoarded gold and precious stones. Malachite was a snake favorite and its possession bestowed good fortune on the possessor; but only if the stone had been found, not bought. “You can’t buy snake luck,” she warned. In general if a snake got in the house it was to be considered a blessing, something to be grateful for, and not only because it might gobble up the household mice. You should take a stick and flick it out of the door or window, by all means, because luck was not something to be pushed; but you should do it with respect and not attempt to crush its head. Snake protection was a thing all houses needed, and if you didn’t have a snake to protect you then you’d better have some malachite stones instead.

(The first time Noman heard the pandit rhapsodizing about the sky-dragons Rahu and Ketu he marveled at the secret affinity between his beloved’s father and his own, standoffish mother. Dragons, lizards, snakes, the sinuous scaly worms of earth and air; it seemed like the whole world had magical monsters on the brain.)

Firdaus had a lazy right eye and people said behind her back that once you had been fixed by that lidded sidelong look you knew that she must be part snake herself. Noman sometimes suspected that it was because of his mother’s serpentine concerns that he slithered so well up, down and along things like trees and ropes. Now all his thoughts were coiling around this girl, Boonyi, to whom he planned to bring good luck for all the days of their lives. The words Hindu and Muslim had no place in their story, he told himself. In the valley these words were merely descriptions, not divisions. The frontiers between the words, their hard edges, had grown smudged and blurred. This was how things had to be. This was Kashmir. When he told himself these things he believed them with all his heart. In spite of this he had not told his father or mother about his feelings for the pandit’s child. He had rarely kept secrets from his father-with his mother he had always been more guarded, because she scared him in a way that his father did not-and he felt guilty about the great secret he was hugging to himself up here in the trees. But nobody, not even the three other clowns, who were also his older brothers and his closest friends, knew what he was planning to do tonight.

Boonyi, whose first love and greatest gift was dancing, could walk the high rope too, but for her it was just a rope. For young Noman it was a magic space. “One day I’ll really take off,” he told her after their first kiss. “One day I won’t need the rope at all. I’ll just walk into empty air and hang there like a cosmonaut without a suit. I’ll stand on my hands, on my feet, on my head, and there won’t even be anything to stand on.” She was impressed by his air of total certainty and even though she knew his words were the craziest kind of foolishness she was greatly moved by them. “What makes you so sure?” she asked. “My father made me believe it,” he replied. “He raised me nestling in the palm of his hand and my feet never touched the ground.”

In the palm of his father’s hand it wasn’t soft or cushiony as a rich man’s hand might have been, but hard and used and knowing. It was a hand that knew what the world was and it did not shield you from the knowledge of the hardships in store. But it was a strong hand nevertheless and could protect you from those hardships. As long as Noman stayed in the valley of its skin nothing could touch him and there was nothing to fear. His father raised him in the palm of his hand for he was the most precious jewel Abdullah ever possessed, or so the sarpanch said when his older boys Hameed, Mahmood and Anees weren’t listening, because a man in his position, a leader, should never lay himself open to the charge of favoritism. Still Noman in the palm of Abdullah’s hand knew his father’s secret, and kept it. “You are my lucky charm,” Abdullah told him. “With you beside me I am invincible.” Noman felt invincible too, for if he was his father’s magic talisman then his father was also his. “My father’s love was the first phase,” he told her. “It carried me as far as the treetops. But now it’s your love I need. That’s what will let me fly.”

There was no moon. The white furnace of the galaxy burned across the sky. The birds were sleeping. Shalimar the clown climbed the wooded hill to Khelmarg and listened to the river flow. He wanted the world to remain frozen just as it was in this moment, when he was filled with hope and longing, when he was young and in love and nobody had disappointed him and nobody he loved had died. Regarding death, his mother believed in a snaky afterlife but his father’s eternity had wings. When Noman was a little boy of six his bad-tempered grandfather Farooq had ended his long, grumbling life in an uncharacteristically cheerful mood. “At least I won’t have all of you screwing things up all around me to worry about anymore,” he said. Farooq’s idea of love was to grab Noman’s young cheek and pinch and twist it as hard as he could.

“Babajan thinks I’m ugly,” Noman complained.

“Of course he doesn’t,” his father unconvincingly replied.

“If he didn’t think I was as ugly as a bhoot,” said Noman conclusively, “he wouldn’t keep trying to rip my face off with his claws.”

In spite of Grandfather Farooq’s bad attitude to Noman’s physiognomy the boy was unnerved by the funeral rites. Grandfather Farooq was buried with bewildering speed, consigned to the earth six hours after his expiry, but he was mourned at devastating and tedious length. To comfort and invigorate Noman, Abdullah explained that after death the souls of their family members entered the local birds and flew around Pachigam singing the same songs they used to sing back when they were people. As birds they sang with the same level of musical talent they had possessed in their earlier human life, no more, no less. Noman didn’t believe him and said as much. His father replied seriously. “Just let me die and then look out for a hoopoe with a voice like a broken exhaust pipe. When you hear that hoopoe croaking and cracking that will be me singing my favorite I-told-you-so song.” Abdullah laughed and it was true that he sounded exactly like the split exhaust pipe of his old truck, and his singing voice was even worse than his laugh. It was also true that “I told you so” was Abdullah Noman’s favorite song, because he was cursed with the curse of knowing too much and the double curse of being unable to avoid pointing this out even though it made Firdaus Begum threaten to hit him on the head with a stone.

“You won’t die,” Noman told him. “You won’t die, ever, ever.”

When he was a boy his father could find birds all over him. Abdullah kissed Noman’s cheek, his stomach or his knee and at once the child could hear birdsong right there where his father’s puckered lips touched his skin. “I think there’s a bird in your armpit,” Abdullah would say and Noman would wriggle with delight, trying to stop him, not wanting him to stop, and Abdullah would wrestle his way in there and suddenly, hey presto, there were the piercing tweets coming out of Noman’s armpit too. “Maybe,” his father said as he moved menacingly toward his face, “that birdy wants to escape through your nose.”

Abdullah Sher Noman was indeed a lion, as the honorific sher which he had eventually taken as his middle name suggested. Ever since his young days people in Pachigam had said that there were two lions in Kashmir. One was Sheikh Abdullah, of course, Sher-e-Kashmir himself, the unquestioned leader of his people. Everyone agreed that Sheikh Abdullah was the valley’s real prince, not that Dogra maharaja living in the palace on the slopes above Srinagar that afterwards became the Oberoi Hotel. The other lion was Pachigam’s very own headman, Abdullah Noman, whom everybody admired and, in a loving and respectful way, also somewhat feared, not only because he was the boss but also because he possessed a stage presence so commanding in its heroism, so fiercely valiant for truth, that some of the more unsavory members of their audiences around the valley had been known to leap to their feet and confess to unsuspected crimes without even waiting for the climax and finale of the play.

Abdullah wasn’t tall but he was strong, with arms as thick as any blacksmith’s. He was wide of shoulder, profuse of hair, and the Indian soldiers in the camp treated him with as much respect as they could summon up. He was also a formidable actor-manager who led the traveling players wherever they went, and greatly beloved of women too, though Firdaus Begum was all the lioness he required. “He gave me his same, leonine middle name,” Shalimar the assassin wrote many years later, “but I do not deserve to bear it. My life was going to be one thing but death turned it into another. The bright sky vanished for me and a dark passage opened. Now I am made of darkness, but a lion is made of light.” He wrote this on a flimsy sheet of lined prison notepaper. Then he tore the paper to bits.

The official name of their village, Pachigam, lacked any apparent meaning; but some of its older inhabitants claimed that it was a latter-day corruption of Panchigam, which is to say “birdville.” In the vexed debate on whether or not birds were transfigured human souls this etymological rumor proved nothing or everything depending on your inclination. When Shalimar the clown found Boonyi Kaul waiting for him in the Khelmarg meadow, however, that debate was no longer uppermost in his mind. Another debate was raging there instead. Standing before him, oiled of skin and with wildflowers scenting the carefully braided hair that hung kerchief-free around her shoulders, was the girl he loved, waiting for him to make her a woman and in doing so make himself a man. Desire rose in him, but so did a counterforce he had not expected: restraint. The shadow dragons were fighting over him, Rahu the exaggerator and Ketu the blocker battling for mastery of his heart.

He looked into Boonyi’s eyes and saw the telltale dreaminess there, warning him that she had smoked charas to give her the courage to be deflowered. In the subtly suggestive movements of her lips, too, he could discern the cryptic seductiveness of her condition. “Boonyi, Boonyi,” he mourned, “you’ve burdened me with a responsibility I don’t know how to discharge. Let’s, you know, caress each other in five places and kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but let’s not get carried away.” In reply, Boonyi pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot. “Don’t treat me like a child,” she said in a throaty voice that proved she had been unsparing in her drug abuse. “You think I went to all this trouble just for a kiddie-style session of lick and suck?” When he heard the unexpected coarseness of her speech Shalimar the clown surmised that she must have been very afraid indeed of what she had agreed to do, which was why she had needed to derange herself so completely. “Okay, it’s not going to happen,” he said, and the conflict within him grew so great, the two halves of the dragon churned up his insides so completely, that he was physically sick. Boonyi laughed hysterically at the sight. “You think that’s going to put me off?” she gasped between the sobs of laughter, and pulled him down on top of her. “Mister, you’ll have to try a lot harder than that to get yourself out of this.”

Never afterwards did Boonyi Kaul utter a word of regret or recrimination for what she did in the meadow of Khelmarg, even though the events of that night set her on the road that led to an early death. She never reproached herself or Shalimar the clown for their choice, which was really hers. Shalimar the clown had been wrong about that too. She had not smoked the charas to abdicate responsibility but to be sure of seizing her opportunity; nor was she afraid of what she had chosen to do. The dragon’s head had won her over long ago. The spirit-killing tail had no power over her.

“God,” she said when it was over, “and that’s what you didn’t want to do?”

“Don’t leave me,” he said, rolling over onto his back and panting for joy. “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also.”

“What a romantic you are,” she replied carelessly. “You say the sweetest things.”

Before Shalimar the clown and Boonyi were born there had been the villages of the actors and the villages of the cooks. Then times changed. The Pachigami performers of the traditional entertainments known as bhand pather or clown stories were still the undisputed player kings of the valley, but Abdullah the genius-young Abdullah, in his prime-was the one who made them learn how to be cooks as well. In the valley at times of celebration people liked a bit of a drama to watch but there was also a demand for those who could prepare the legendary wazwaan, the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum. Thanks to Abdullah the villagers of Pachigam were the first to provide a rounded service which offered both sustenance for the body and pleasure for the soul. As a result they didn’t have to share the feast-day cash emoluments with anyone. There were other villages that specialized in the Thirty-Six-Courses-Minimum banquet, the most famous of which was Shirmal, just a mile and a half down the road; but as Abdullah pointed out it was easier to study recipes than to hold an audience in the palm of your hand.

He did not institute this radical change in the village’s lifestyle unopposed. Firdaus Begum told him it was a damn-fool scheme that would ruin the village financially. “Look at all the stuff we have to buy-all the copper haandis, the grills, the portable tandoor ovens, just for a start!-and then there is the cost of learning the food and practicing,” she protested. “Is there any reason, theoretically speaking,” Abdullah had roared ruminatively at Firdaus Begum one cold spring day-he had forgotten long ago that it was possible to lower one’s voice when speaking-“why actors should not be able to fry spices and boil rice into something other than a soggy mush?” Firdaus Begum bridled at his tone. “Is there any good explanation, by the same token,” she bawled back at him, “of why the sarus cranes aren’t flying upside down?”

Her dissident voice was in the minority, however, and after the policy started showing signs of being a success the leading cookery village of Shirmal took a leaf out of Pachigam’s book and tried to put on comedy dramas to accompany their food. However, their amateurish stage show was a bust. Then one night war was declared between the rivals. The men of Shirmal staged a raid on Pachigam, aiming to steal the great cauldrons and to break the ovens in which the traveling players had learned to cook the noblest delicacies of the region, the roghan josh, the tabak maaz, the gushtaba, but the Pachigam men sent the Shirmalis home crying with broken heads. After the pot war it was tacitly accepted that Pachigam was at the top of the entertainment tree, and the others got hired only when Pachigam’s tellers of clown stories and cookers of banquets were too busy to offer their services.

The pot war horrified everyone in Pachigam even though they had come out on the winning side. They had always thought of their neighbors the Shirmal villagers as being more than a little weird, but nobody had imagined that so outrageous a breach of the peace was possible, that Kashmiris would attack other Kashmiris driven by such crummy motivations as envy, malice and greed. Firdaus Begum’s friend, the ageless Gujar tribal woman and prophetess Nazarébaddoor, sank into an uncharacteristic gloom. Nazarébaddoor was the most optimistic of seers, whom people liked to visit in her mossy-roofed forest hut in spite of its damp smell of fornicating livestock because she invariably foretold happiness, wealth, long life and success. After the pot war her vision darkened. “This is the first pebble that starts the avalanche,” she said, shaking her toothless head. Then she went into her odorous little hut, drew a wooden screen across the entrance, and retired forever from the art of divination. Nazarébaddoor had taken her name-“evil eye, begone!”-from a character out of the old stories, a beautiful princess who was in love with the hero Prince Hatim Tai and whose touch could avert curses, and she allowed the more gullible villagers to believe that she was in fact none other than that fabled immortal beauty, whom death had been unable to seize because her lucky touch kept getting her out of its clutches. “If it makes people happy,” she confided in Firdaus, “I don’t care if they believe I was once the Queen of Sheba.”

To tell the truth, Nazarébaddoor didn’t look much like the queen of anywhere. With her loose turban and her single golden front tooth she more closely resembled a marooned corsair. When she was young, she said, she had been blessed with flowing waves of auburn hair, gleaming white teeth and a blue left eye, but nobody could verify these claims because nobody in the neighborhood could remember when Nazarébaddoor had been young. Her husband had offended her by dying without managing to leave her with so much as a single son to look after her in her declining years, which she considered the height of bad manners, and which had left her with a poor opinion of men in general. “If there’s a way to propagate the human race without depending on men,” Nazarébaddoor said to Firdaus, “lead me to it, because then women can have everything they want and dispense with everything they don’t need.” By the time news of artificial insemination arrived in the valley, however, she was long past child-bearing age, and could not have afforded the procedure even if she had been in the first red, white and blue flush of youth.

She had made the best of her life, tending her livestock, smoking her pipe, and surviving. The fortune-telling was a sideline that brought in a little extra, but prophecy was not Nazarébaddoor’s main concern. Like the true Gujar woman that she was, her first love was the pine forest. Her most frequently repeated saying was, in Kashmiri, Un poshi teli, yeli vun poshi, which meant, “Forests come first, food comes second.” She saw herself as the guardian of the trees of the Forest of Khel and had to be propitiated every autumn when the villagers of Pachigam and Shirmal, who both foraged there, needed to stock up on firewood before the coming of the winter snows. “You wouldn’t want our children to freeze to death,” the villagers pleaded, and eventually she would concede that human children mattered more than living wood. She would guide the village men to those trees that were closest to death and these were the only ones she would allow them to fell. They did what she said, fearing that if they did not she would bewitch them, blighting their crops and sending them a shaking sickness or a plague of boils.

She made her living selling buffalo milk and cheese, and her body and clothing smelled constantly of dairy products and ghee. This gave her the aroma of an ancient queen who took milk baths and made her flunkeys massage her in butter, even though she was as poor as mountain mud. The world outside the forest struck her as unreal and she did not like to go there more often than was necessary. “It was a long journey we made from Gujria,” she liked to say, “and when you have made such a trek it is no longer necessary to go gadding about the place.” The fact that the supposed migration of the Gujars from Gujria or Georgia had taken place fifteen hundred years earlier changed nothing. Nazarébaddoor spoke of the great trek as if it had happened just the other day and she herself had walked every step of the way, starting from the Caspian Sea and marching across central Asia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass and down into the Indian subcontinent. She knew the names of the settlements they had left behind in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India-Gurjara, Gujrabad, Gujru, Gujrabas, Gujdar-Kotta, Gujargarh, Gujranwala, Gujarat. She spoke with sorrow of the dreadful droughts that assailed Gujarat in the sixth century of the so-called Common Era, driving her ancestors out of the Forest of Gir and up into the verdant woods and meadows of the mountains of Kashmir. “Never mind,” she told Firdaus. “Out of tragedy, something good showed up. We lost Gujarat, but lo and behold! We got, instead, Kashmir.”

Firdaus Butt or Bhat as a young girl formed what became the lifelong habit of making her way up the forested slopes behind Pachigam to sit at the Gujar woman’s feet, listening to Nazarébaddoor’s inexhaustible stories and drinking salty pink tea and learning the knack of disconnecting her sense of smell, until she could switch it off like a radio and in the bland silence of its absence could drown in the sound of Nazarébaddoor’s hypnotic voice without having her reverie interrupted by the scent of sheep shit or Nazarébaddoor’s own frequent and extraordinary buffalo farts. The prophetess revealed that it was around the time of her arrival at puberty that she first discovered that she could avert small-scale disasters by prophesying good news. However, she resisted making the seemingly obvious menstrual connection. “If it had anything to do with that nonsense sent to make women’s life hell, as if the world wasn’t tough enough without it,” she scoffed, “then it would have ended when I stopped bleeding, and that happened so long ago that it isn’t polite to ask.”

Nazarébaddoor remembered that long ago when she had been a young child she once found herself in the city in the company of her father for reasons which she could no longer bring to mind. In spite of the beauty of the streets of Srinagar with their overhanging wooden houses out of whose upper stories women could lean toward one another and exchange gossip, linen, fruit and perhaps even surreptitious kisses, in spite of the shining mirrors of the lakes and the magic of the little boats cutting across them like knives, the young Nazarébaddoor had felt horribly ill at ease. “So many people so close by,” she explained. “It was offensive to me.” Suddenly, and uncharacteristically, for she was a happy, sweet-natured child, not a rebel, the claustrophobic pressure of urban life became too much for her. She picked up a stone from the street and hurled it with all her might at the glass window of a shop selling numdah rugs. “I don’t know why I did it,” she told Firdaus years later. “The city seemed to be a kind of illusion, and the stone was a way of making it vanish so that the forest could reappear. Maybe that was it, but I really can’t be sure. We are mysteries to ourselves. We don’t know why we do things, why we fall in love or commit murder or throw a stone at a sheet of glass.”

The thing young Firdaus loved best about Nazarébaddoor was that she talked to a girl exactly as she would to an adult, pulling no punches. “You mean,” she asked wonderingly, “that one day I could cut off somebody’s head and I wouldn’t even know why I was doing it?” Nazarébaddoor farted noisily under her phiran. “Don’t be so bloodthirsty, missy,” she admonished. “And, by the by, the subject under discussion right now is not you. There is a stone in the air, flying toward its mark.”

The moment the stone left her hand the young Nazarébaddoor regretted it. She saw her father’s stunned eyes staring at her and for the first time in her life entered the trance of power. A form of blissful lethargy enveloped her and she felt as if the world had slowed down almost to the stopping point. “It won’t break! The window won’t break!” she heard her voice shouting out in the middle of that delicious stasis, and in that timeless period while the world stood still she saw the stone deviate slightly from its path so that when motion returned to the universe an instant later the missile struck the wooden window-frame of the numdah store and fell harmlessly to the ground.

After that she discovered the extents and limits of her powers by a process of trial and error. In the same year as the incident of the stone the rains failed and there was great concern in Pachigam. The child Nazarébaddoor overheard two villagers discussing the subject as they walked in the forest. “But will the rains come?” one asked the other, and the lovely slowness descended on Nazarébaddoor once more. “Yes,” she answered loudly, astonishing the two men. “They will be here on Wednesday afternoon.” Sure enough, after lunch on Wednesday it began to pour.

People started squinting at Nazarébaddoor with that mixture of suspicion and admiration which human beings reserve for those who can foretell the future. The path to her cottage began to be well trodden, by lovers asking if their sweethearts would return their love, by gamblers wondering if they would win at cards, by the curious and the cynical, the gullible and the hard-hearted. More than once there was a campaign against her in the village by people whose reaction to abnormality was to drive it away from their doorstep. She was saved by her discretion, by her refusal to speak if she didn’t know the answer, because the visionary indolence which allowed her to push the future in the required direction could not be conjured up; it came when it pleased, and her own will seemed to have little to do with it. Only when she was sure of her ability to ensure a happy outcome would she gently murmur the good news into a supplicant’s ear.

As she grew into womanhood her power began to fill her with doubts. The gift of affecting the course of events positively, of being able to change the world, but only for the best, ought to have been a source of joy. Nazarébaddoor was cursed with a philosophical cast of mind, however, and as a result even her innate good nature could not avoid being infected by a strain of melancholy. Difficult questions began to nag at her. Was it always a good thing to make things better? Didn’t human beings need pain and suffering to learn and grow? Would a world in which only good things happened be a good world, a paradise, or would it in fact be an intolerable place whose denizens, excused from danger, failure, catastrophe and misery, turned into insufferably big-headed, overconfident bores? Was she damaging people by helping them? Should she just get her big nose out of everyone else’s business and let destiny take whatever course it chose? Yes, happiness was a thing of great, bright value, and she believed herself to be promoting it; but might not unhappiness be as important? Was she doing God’s work, or the devil’s? There were no answers to such questions, but the questions themselves felt, from time to time, like answers of a sort.

In spite of her reservations, Nazarébaddoor continued to employ her gifts, unable to believe that she would have been given such powers if it wasn’t okay to use them. But her fears remained. Outwardly she continued to behave with happy, outspoken, flatulent ease, but the unhappiness inside her grew; slowly, it’s true, but it grew. Her greatest fear, which she shared with nobody, was that all the misfortune she was averting was piling up somewhere, that she was recklessly pouring out Pachigam’s supply of good luck while the bad luck accumulated like water behind a dam, and one day the floodgates would open and the flood of misery would be unleashed and everyone would drown. This was why the pot war affected her so badly. Her worst nightmare had begun to come true.

Nazarébaddoor’s friendship with the much younger Firdaus was the reason that nobody in Pachigam worried about Firdaus’s lazy eye, and as a result Abdullah’s wife was able to set up a nice little sideline in the sale of protective charms, such as chilies and lemons hung on strings, painted eyes, malachite, black streamers and teeth taken from the fierce sur, the wild boar of Kashmir, which you were well advised to hang around your children’s necks. On wedding days people sent for Firdaus to line the happy couple’s eyes with special kohl and to burn the propitiatory seeds of the white isband flower, also known as rue. During the ceremony Firdaus often dueted with Nazarébaddoor, and with a backing group of eunuchs summoned from the village of the singing castrati the two of them would sing their magic songs:

After Nazarébaddoor immured herself in her cottage she stopped eating and drinking. Firdaus, heavily pregnant with the unborn Noman, went to her door with food and water and pleaded to be let in. She didn’t dare to push the screen aside and force an entrance because that would be to draw bad luck down upon her own head. The two friends sat down on either side of the flimsy wooden screen, placed their lips against it and began the last conversation of their lives. “Live,” Firdaus implored, “or you’ll be leaving me to handle this shitty new world full of cookpots and anger all by myself.” She heard Nazarébaddoor kissing the other side of the screen as if she were taking leave of a lover. “The age of prophecy is at an end,” Nazarébaddoor whispered, “because what’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words to foretell it.”

Firdaus lost her temper. “Okay, die if you want to,” she said fiercely, placing defensive hands upon her swollen womb, “but to curse us all just because you’ve decided to go is just plain bad form.”

For a while it didn’t seem as if Nazarébaddoor’s curse was going to come true. Pachigam was a blessed village, and its two great families, the Nomans and Kauls, had inherited much of the natural bounty of the region. Pandit Pyarelal had the apple orchard and Abdullah Noman had the peach trees. Abdullah had the honeybees and the mountain ponies and the pandit owned the saffron field, as well as the larger flocks of sheep and goats. That summer the weather was kind and the fruit hung heavy on the trees, the honey dripped sweetly from the combs, the saffron crop was rich, the meat animals fattened nicely and the breeding mares gave birth to their valuable young. There were many requests for the actors to perform the traditional plays. The dramatization of the reign of Zain-ul-abidin, the fifteenth-century monarch known simply as Budshah, “the great king,” was especially in demand. The only dark cloud on the horizon was that relations with the village of Shirmal continued to be poor. Abdullah Noman was confident that his people would continue to defend themselves successfully against any further attacks but he was saddened by the estrangement, even though it had been his own idea to try and break the Shirmalis’ local monopoly of the banquet market. He felt no guilt about his initiative. The world moved on and all enterprises had to adapt to survive. However, he felt bad about the damage to his friendship with the Shirmalis’ waza or head chef, Bombur Yambarzal, and Firdaus of the unsparing tongue made him feel worse. “To put business before friendship is to displease God,” she warned him. “We had enough to be going on with but in Shirmal they have it tougher; if they don’t get hired to feed other people they will starve themselves.”

Firdaus’s pregnancy was weighing her down in those days and she spent most of her time in the company of the pandit’s wife Pamposh a.k.a. Giri the walnut kernel, whose own pregnancy was a couple of months less advanced, and because all dreams are permitted to pregnant women they fantasized about the future lifelong friendship of their unborn children. The sweetness of these fantasies served only to intensify the force with which Firdaus attacked her husband for his behavior toward the master cook of Shirmal. Pamposh, however, gently defended Abdullah. While the two women sat on the back verandah of Firdaus’s home and looked out across the saffron fields toward Shirmal, Pamposh Kaul pointed out gently that the chef was a hard man to like. “Abdullah was the only one of us who even kept up a friendship with him,” she said. “To try and love somebody who loves nobody but himself-well, it just goes to show what a generous man your husband is. Now that things have been broken off between them, that big fat waza doesn’t have a single pal in the world.”

As his name suggested, Bombur Yambarzal was part black bumblebee, part narcissus; he could sting when he chose to do so, and he was extremely vain. He ruled the roost in Shirmal because of his culinary mastery, but was widely disliked by his own kitchen brigade on account of his strutting manner of a parade-ground martinet and his repeated demands that all their pots be polished until he could see his reflection in them. As long as Shirmal village was the undisputed champion maker of the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, and Shirmalis provided gluttonous quantities of food at all important weddings and celebrations, Bombur Yambarzal ruled the roost, and everyone put up with his bee stings and narcissism. However, his influence waned as the village’s income declined, and, as will be seen, the new mullah Bulbul Fakh’s power began to grow. For this and much else Yambarzal blamed Abdullah Noman.

Out of admiration for his great skills as a chef and respect for his village headman status, Abdullah had long made an effort to remain on cordial terms with Bombur Yambarzal. At Abdullah’s suggestion the two men had gone fishing for brook trout together from time to time, and spent occasional evenings drinking dark rum, and taken several mountain walks. Abdullah had begun to see glimpses of another, better Bombur beneath the bloated, preening surface that Yambarzal unfortunately presented to the world: a lonely man for whom cookery was his single passion in life, who approached it with an almost religious fervor and who demanded of others the same level of dedication he himself brought to his work, and who was therefore constantly and vociferously disappointed by the ease with which his fellow human beings were drawn away from the ecstatic devotions of the gastronomic arts by such petty distractions as family life, weariness and love. “If you weren’t so hard on yourself,” Abdullah had once told Bombur, “maybe you’d ease off on everyone else and run a happier outfit.” Bombur bristled. “I’m not in the happiness game,” he said sharply. “I’m in the banquet business.” It was a statement that revealed the monomaniacal strain in the waza’s personality, a characteristic he shared with the fanatical Mullah Bulbul Fakh, whose dreams became the two villages’ nightmares.

After the pot war, contact between the two village headmen came to an acrimonious end, until messengers from the maharaja himself arrived in both Pachigam and Shirmal, demanding that to augment the staff of the palace kitchens they set aside their quarrels and pool their resources to provide food (and theatrical entertainment) at a grand Dassehra festival banquet in the Shalimar garden, a feast conceived on a scale not seen in the valley since the time of the Mughal emperor Jehangir. Firdaus Noman, who had picked up a little of Nazarébaddoor’s prophetic ability the way one picks up an itch from a flea-ridden dog, at once concluded that bad trouble was on the way and the maharaja knew it. “He’s partying like there’s no tomorrow,” she told Abdullah. “Let’s hope that just goes for him, not us.”

On the morning of Dassehra, at the end of the nine Navratri nights of singing paeans to Durga, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul awoke with a big smile on his face. “What’s made you so happy?” Pamposh asked him, sulking. Her pregnancy was making her feel very ill that morning, so that her disposition was less than cheerful, especially as her husband’s incessant hymn-singing, with which he persevered doughtily, not only when officiating at the village’s small temple but also at home, had interfered severely with her sleep. “Doesn’t matter how many love songs you sing to the goddess,” Pamposh added sourly, “the only woman in your life is this big balloon.” But the pandit’s blithe spirits could not be deflated, even by his wife’s bad mood. “Just consider for a moment!” cried Pyarelal. “Today our Muslim village, in the service of our Hindu maharaja, will cook and act in a Mughal-that is to say Muslim-garden, to celebrate the anniversary of the day on which Ram marched against Ravan to rescue Sita. What is more, two plays are to be performed: our traditional Ram Leela, and also Budshah, the tale of a Muslim sultan. Who tonight are the Hindus? Who are the Muslims? Here in Kashmir, our stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes. We will joyfully celebrate the reign of the good king Zain-ul-abidin, and as for our Muslim brothers and sisters, no problem! They all like to see Sita rescued from the demon-king, and besides, there will be fireworks.” Giant effigies of Ravan, his son Meghnath and his brother Kumbhakaran would be erected within the walls of the Shalimar Bagh, and Abdullah Noman as Lord Ram-a Muslim actor playing the part of a Hindu god-would shoot an arrow at Ravan, after which the effigies would be burned at the heart of a huge fireworks display. “Okay, okay,” said Pamposh, doubtfully, “but I’ll be the bloated girl in the corner, throwing up.”

At the other end of Pachigam, Firdaus Noman awoke at dawn and noticed that her yellow hair had begun to darken. The baby was almost due and strange juices were running in her veins and because she was full of intimate forebodings the shadow lying on her hair seemed like one more bad omen. Abdullah had learned to trust his wife’s instincts and went so far as to ask her if the Pachigam actors’ troupe and kitchen brigade should stay home and let the royal command performance go to hell, but she shook her head. “Something shitty is beginning, like Nazarébaddoor said,” she answered him, patting her distended womb. “That’s for sure, but the person that’s giving me the shivers right now is still inside here.” It was the only time that Firdaus ever uttered what became the greatest secret of her life, a secret for which she had no rational explanation and to which, accordingly, she had no desire to give voice: that even before his birth her son, whom everyone loved the minute he was born, and whose nature was the sweetest, gentlest and most open of any human being in Pachigam, had started scaring her half to death.

“There’s no need to worry,” Abdullah reassured her, misunderstanding her. “We’ll only be gone one night. Stay here with the boys”-that is to say, the five-year-old twins Hameed and Mahmood, and the two-and-a-half-year-old Anees-“and Pamposh will also wait by your side until we return…” “If you imagine that Giri Kaul and I are going to stay home and miss out on such a gala evening,” Firdaus interrupted, returning her attention to everyday matters, “then men are even more ignorant than I thought. Besides which, if the baby decides to come, don’t you think I’d rather be with the women of the village, instead of staying back in an empty ghost-town?” Like all the women of Pachigam, Firdaus had a matter-of-fact view of childbirth. There was pain involved, but it had to be borne without a fuss. There were risks involved, but they were best faced with a shrug. As to timing, the baby would come when it came and its imminence was no reason for changing one’s plans. “Besides,” she added, conclusively, “who should run the show in a Mughal pleasure-garden if not a direct-line descendant of mighty Iskander the Great?” Abdullah Noman knew better than to go on arguing once Alexander the Great had entered the discussion. “Okay.” He shrugged, turning away. “If you two waddling hens are prepared to go behind a bush and lay your children like eggs while the grandees feast on chicken, there’s no more to be said.”

The Alexandrian fantasy of Firdaus Noman, which caused her to insist that her fair hair and blue eyes were a royal Macedonian legacy, had provoked her most vehement quarrels with her husband, who opined that conquering foreign monarchs were pestilences as undesirable as malaria, while simultaneously, and without conceding that his behavior was in any way contradictory, reveling in his own theatrical portrayals of the arriviste pre-Mughal and Mughal rulers of Kashmir. “A king on stage is a metaphor, an idea of grandeur made flesh,” he said, straightening the flat woolen hat which he wore every day like a crown, “whereas a king in a palace is usually a sot or a bore, and a king on a warhorse”-Firdaus bridled at this gibe, as he knew she would-“is invariably a menace to decent society.” On the subject of the current Hindu maharaja of Kashmir, Abdullah had managed to preserve a position of diplomatic neutrality. “At present I don’t care if he’s a maharaja, a maharishi, a maha-lout or a mahaseer trout,” he told the assembling villagers before the banquet at the Shalimar Bagh. “He’s our employer, and the traveling players and wazwaan cooks of Pachigam treat all their employers like kings.”

Firdaus’s family had moved to Pachigam in her grandfather’s time, carrying, on their sturdy little mountain ponies, the gunny sacks filled with gold dust with which her grandparents had purchased the fruit orchards and grazing meadows which she, as an only child, afterwards brought with her as her dowry when she married the charismatic sarpanch. Before the move her family had lived in the beautiful (but also bandit-infested) Peer Rattan hills to the east of Poonch, in a village named Buffliaz after Alexander the Great’s legendary horse Bucephalus, who according to legend had died in that very spot centuries ago. In that hill town, as Abdullah Noman was well aware, Bucephalus was still revered as a semidivinity, and it was Firdaus’s Buffliazi blood that had risen in her cheeks when her husband jeered dismissively at warhorses.

It was also possible to rile Firdaus by speaking dismissively of giant ants. The historian Herodotus had written about the gold-digging ants of northern India, and Alexander’s scientists believed him. They were not foolishly gullible, these scientists, primitive as science was in those swordlike days: for example, they had swiftly disproved the racist Greek legend that Indians had black semen. (Best not to ask how.) Nevertheless, they believed in the prospector ants, and so did the villagers of the Peer Rattan. Alexander himself, according to the ancients of Buffliaz, had come to these mysterious hills because he had heard that giant, furry, antlike creatures were to be found in that locality, smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes, the size of a marmot, more or less, and in the construction of their outsized formicaries they dug up great heaps of gold-heavy earth. Once the Greek army, or at least its generals, found out that the gold-digging ants actually existed, many of them refused to go back home, settling in the region instead and leading the lives of the idle rich, raising miscegenated families amongst whom children with Grecian noses, blue or green eyes and yellow hair frequently coexisted with darker-haired, differently-nosed Himalayan siblings. Alexander himself stuck around long enough to restock his war chest and leave a few random by-blows behind; from whom there grew a series of accidental family trees, Firdaus’s two-thousand-year-old ancestor being the first shoot of one such plant.

“My people, Iskander’s progeny, knew the secret locations of the treasure-laden anthills,” Firdaus would tell her infant son Noman as he grew, “but over the centuries the gold deposits dwindled. When they finally ran out we filled our gunny sacks with the last dusty remnants of that strange fortune and migrated to Pachigam, obliged by necessity to become actor-counterfeits of the magnificoes we once were.” Firdaus Noman was a third-generation Pachigami and the wife of the headman, and in spite of her lazy eye and her tales of subterranean ant and snake cities she had the protection of Nazarébaddoor, so the village arranged to forget what everyone knew in her grandfather’s time, namely that when a Mr. Butt or Bhat comes to town at dead of night from a well-known bandit region and buys his way into the community by throwing money around and sleeps sitting up with a shotgun across his lap and uses a name that everyone suspects is not his own because he doesn’t know how to spell it, you don’t have to believe in furry, marmotlike, treasure-hunting ants to understand the situation.

Mr. Butt or Bhat didn’t say much to anyone in Pachigam at first. He just sat up every night guarding his sleeping wife and son and in the daytime his eyes looked like they would crack with silent pain. Nobody dared ask him any of the obvious questions, and after five or six years he calmed down and began to act as if he believed that whoever he was running from wasn’t coming after him. After ten years he smiled for the first time. Maybe the bandit chief who had deposed him out there in Buffliaz had settled for his newfound power and didn’t need to finish off his ousted rival. Maybe there really were giant treasure-hunting ants, but they had let him go. It was said in the ancient tales that the ants chased you if you stole their wealth, and woe betide the man or woman who didn’t run fast or far enough. Death by ant horde was a terrible fate. It would be better to hang yourself or cut your own worthless throat. Mr. Butt or Bhat had probably been afraid that the ant army would come after him, but his luck had held, they had lost his trail or found a new motherlode to mine and lost interest in his few pathetic bags of subterranean loot. Anyway, after fifteen years had passed the people who remembered Mr. Butt or Bhat’s arrival started dying off and when the old man himself breathed his last twenty-one years after he arrived in Pachigam, dying in bed like anyone else, without a shotgun in sight, people called it quits and stopped bitching about the family’s shady past. Then Firdaus made her good marriage and after that the subject of the bandit gold became taboo and the ant story was the only one anyone ever told. To doubt this version was to be given the rough end of Firdaus’s tongue and that was a lash only the sarpanch himself could withstand; even he sometimes reeled beneath the ferocity of her verbal attacks. But when Firdaus awoke on the day of the Shalimar banquet and saw that her hair had begun to darken she spoke clouded words about fearing her unborn son, who would be born later that night upon those numinous lawns. “He gives me the shivers,” she repeated to herself both before and after the birth, because she saw something in his newly opened eyes, some golden glint of piracy, warning her that he, too, would have much to do in his burgeoning life with lost treasures, fear and death.

At the entrance to the Shalimar garden, beside the sumptuous lake bobbing with boats that resembled an eager audience waiting impatiently for the show to begin, beneath the whispering chinars and the gossiping poplar trees and in the silent eternal presence of the uncaring mountains, who were preoccupied by the gigantic effort of very slowly pushing themselves higher and higher into the virginal sky, the villagers of Pachigam herded together the animals they had brought for slaughtering, the chickens, goats and lambs whose blood would soon be flowing as freely as the garden’s celebrated cascades, and unloaded their bullock carts and shouldered their loads of cooking utensils and theatrical props, their effigies and fireworks, while, as if for their entertainment, a tiny demagogue standing on an empty oil barrel made a startling claim, which he emphasized by beating a brightly painted stick vigorously against an enormous drum. “There is a tree in paradise,” this little fellow cried, “that gives shelter and sustenance to all those in need. It has long been my belief that here-right here, in our unparalleled paradise on earth!-which, so as not to sound too boastful to the ears of outsiders, we choose to call Kashmir!-there exists a cousin of that celestial tooba tree. According to legend the location of the earthly tooba was revealed by holy pirs to the Emperor Jehangir and he built the Shalimar Bagh around it. To this day nobody knows which tree it is. Tonight, however, through the use of my personal magic, the truth will be revealed.” He was a dark-skinned, glitter-eyed individual with a dancing moustache that seemed to lead a gymnastic life of its own above his mouthful of smiling white teeth, but even with the help of the oil barrel and the absurd cockaded turban on his head he didn’t rise off the ground much higher than a full-grown man, and it occurred to Abdullah Noman that this was a man whose life’s work was a form of revenge for the personal tragedy of his size: he had never fully appeared in the world and therefore wished to make parts of it dematerialize instead.

Firdaus saw more deeply. “He’s ridiculous when he’s banging his drum and yelling like that,” she murmured to her husband. “But look at him in his brief moments of repose. Don’t you think he suddenly looks like a man confident of his authority, calm, unafraid? If he’d just shut up he might convince us he isn’t a cheap fraud.”

“I am the Seventh Sarkar,” shouted the little man, banging his drum. “Ladies and gents!-You see before you the Seventh-Generation Perpetrator Extraordinaire of Illusion, Delusion and Confusion!-In sum, of Sorcery and Jadoo of every type!-And the Unique Exponent and Grand Master of the Most Ancient Form of Magic, known as Indrajal.” Whereupon he banged his drum so hard that he tottered on his oil barrel and people began, unfortunately, to laugh. “Laugh as hard as you like,” stormed the Seventh Sarkar, “but tonight, at the height of the evening’s celebrations, after the banquet, the play, the dancing and the fireworks, I will make the Shalimar Bagh disappear completely for a period of three minutes minimum, and at that time, when the tree of paradise will be revealed, for only a heaven-tree is proof against my wiles, then!-ha!-we will see who is laughing then.” With that he hopped off his oil barrel and, banging his drum with all his might, pushed his way through the mirthful Pachigami crowd.

Firdaus stopped him. “We mean no harm,” she said. “We’re entertainers too and if you pull off this trick, believe me, we’ll be the ones applauding first, loudest and for the longest time.” The Seventh Sarkar was greatly mollified upon hearing these words, but pretended not to be. “You think I haven’t done things already?” he snorted. “Please! Peruse. Regard.” From inside his shirt he pulled out a bundle of yellowing newspaper reports. The villagers crowded around. “SEVENTH SARKAR MAKES RUNNING TRAIN VANISH,” he read, proudly, and, “POOF! BOMBAY’S FLORA FOUNTAIN MAGICKED AWAY.” Then came his greatest credential. “TAJ MAHAL DISAPPEARS UNDER MAGIC SPELL.”

These news reports changed the mood around him. Though he could barely be seen at the heart of the gathering crowd, he had grown greatly in stature. “What is it you do, then?” Abdullah Noman asked, somewhat gracelessly, for his disbelieving laugh had been the loudest of all. “I mean to say, what’s the basis of your act? Some sort of mass hypnotism?” The Seventh Sarkar shook his head gaily. “No, no. Hypnotism totally not involved. I am simply able to keep things away from your eyes. Nothing supernatural or occultist, friends! It is all Science, the Science of the Perfect Illusion and of Mind Control.” Many voices now clamored for further details, but the Seventh Sarkar banged on his drum to silence them. “Bas! Enough! Shall I reveal my secrets in the public street even before I amaze you all? I say only this: that I have the willpower to create a Psychic Balance with the world around me, and this makes possible my Deeds. What is Indrajal? It is a theatrical representation of the wishful dream of living happily-for when you live happily, nothing seems impossible. But be still now my voice and babble no more! Already I have said too much. Perform your play, bhand-folk. Then watch a true master of the art of theater go to work.” Bang! Bang! And off he went, up into the terraced lawns. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul said to his wife, “You wait; by the end of the evening I will unlock the secret of this fancy vanishing trick.” It was a night of dark absentings. Giri Kaul herself would be among those spirited away.

From the moment he entered the garden and found himself wading through high golden drifts of leaves Abdullah Noman began to suffer from misgivings about the event. It was an exceptionally cold October night. Snow had already begun to fall. “By the time the guests arrive in their finery we’ll be in the middle of a blizzard and the air will ice people’s lungs. Will there be enough braziers to keep the guests warm while they eat? And after that? Because a cold audience isn’t easy to warm up. This is not the weather for a garden party. Not even Ram Leela and Budshah can overcome an obstacle like this snow.”

Then the magic of the garden began to take hold. Paradise too was a garden-Gulistan, Jannat, Eden-and here before him was its mirror on earth. He had always loved the Mughal gardens of Kashmir, Nishat, Chashma Shahi, and above all Shalimar, and to perform there had been his lifelong dream. The present maharaja was no Mughal emperor, but Abdullah’s imagination could easily change that, and as he stood at the center of the central terrace and directed his people to their posts, as the theater troupe went off to the highest terrace to build the stage for the performance of Budshah, while the chefs’ brigade headed for the kitchen tents and began the interminable work of chopping, slicing, frying and boiling, the sarpanch closed his eyes and conjured up the long-dead creator of this wonderland of swaying trees, liquid terraces and water music, the horticulturalist monarch for whom the earth was the beloved and such gardens were his verdant love-songs to it. Abdullah drifted toward a trancelike state in which he felt himself being transformed into that dead king, Jehangir the Encompasser of the Earth, and something almost feminine came into his body, an imperial lassitude, the languorous sensuality of power. Where was his palanquin, he dreamily wondered. He should be carried up into the garden in a jeweled palanquin borne on the shoulders of wiry rope-sandaled men; why then was he on foot? “Wine,” he murmured under his breath. “Bring sweet wine and let the music start.”

There were times when Abdullah’s powers of autosuggestion frightened his fellow actors. When he unleashed them he could, or so it seemed, resurrect the dead to inhabit his living flesh, an occultist feat far more impressive, but also more alarming, than mere performance. Now, as on all such occasions, the players of Pachigam brought his wife Firdaus to his side, to talk him back from the past. “The times are growing so dark,” he told her distantly, “that we must try as best we can to cling to the memory of brightness.” It was the emperor speaking, the emperor on his last journey hundreds of years ago, dying on the road to Kashmir without reaching the longed-for haven of his earthly paradise, his hymnlike garden of terraces and birds. Firdaus saw that the time for gentle measures was past and, what was more, she had news of her own to impart. She grabbed her husband roughly and shook him. Soft explosions of snow flew off his chugha coat and his beard. “Have you been smoking something?” she shouted, deliberately making her words as harsh as possible. “This garden has a big effect on small men. They start believing they are giants.” The insult penetrated Abdullah’s reverie and he began to return mournfully to the waking banality of himself. He was not the emperor. He was the help. Firdaus, who knew everything about him before he knew it himself, read his mind and laughed in his face. This increased his groggy dolor and heightened the color in his cheeks. “If you want to prepare to play a king,” she said more gently, “think about Zain-ul-abidin in the first play. Think about being Lord Ram in the second half of the program. But right now there are more important lives to think about. Giri’s baby is coming early, probably just because you said it would.”

His head was clearing. Life-and-death matters were all around him. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Sultan Zain-ul-abidin succumbed to a deadly Disease, viz. a poisonous Boil on the Chest, and would certainly have died, had it not been for the intervention of a scholarly Doctor, a Pandit whose Name was Shri Butt or Bhat. After Dr. Butt or Bhat had cured the King of his Illness, Zain-ul-abidin told him he should ask for a very precious Gift, for had he not given the King himself renewed Life, the most precious of all Gifts? “I need nothing for myself,” Dr. Butt or Bhat replied, “but sire, under the Kings who came before you my Brothers were persecuted without end, and they are in need of a Gift at least as valuable as Life.” The King agreed to cease the Persecution of the Kashmiri Pandits at once. In addition, he made it his Business to see to the Rehabilitation of their devastated and scattered Families, and allowed them to preach and practice their Religion without any Hindrance. He rebuilt their Temples, reopened their Schools, abolished the Taxes that burdened them, repaired their Libraries and ceased to murder their Cows. Whereupon a Golden Age began.

Words reawakened in him and rushed out like panicky sheep. “Pamposh, hai! hai! Pamposh-where is she-what’s happening-is she all right-the baby, will the baby live-where is Pyarelal, he must be wild-my God, didn’t I tell you to stay back-arré, how did she, when did it, what should we do?”

His wife put her hand on his lips and loudly, for public consumption, jeered dismissively. “Listen to my great husband who holds the whole village in his hand,” she said. “Listen to what one new baby turns him into-a panicky little boy.” Then, so that nobody else could hear, she whispered into his ear in quite a different manner. “We have taken sheets and constructed a private delivery area behind the kitchen tents. There are enough women to do the needful. I can help with the baby and the others will keep an eye on the twins and little Anees. But Giri is not so well, and the blizzard doesn’t help. There are doctors on the guest list and some of them live in nearby parts of Srinagar. Pyarelal has gone into the city to fetch one. Everything that can be done is being done. Leave it to me. There is enough on your plate just now.”

Abdullah opened his mouth to speak, and Firdaus saw the words I told you so trembling on his lips. “Don’t say it,” she forestalled him. “Just don’t even bother to try.”

Abdullah Noman was himself again. Yes, the doctor would be brought and Pamposh and the baby would be saved. The intervention of a scholarly doctor, a pandit, just the way it was in Budshah. In the meanwhile there was cooking to supervise and a double bill of plays to prepare for. Abdullah strode about, pointing and ordering, smoothing points of liaison with liveried members of the maharaja’s security guards, as well as service personnel and kitchen staff. The world resumed its familiar shape. On each of the terraces of the Shalimar garden, on either side of the central cascade of water, gaily colored shamiana tents had been erected, and the royal household staff were spreading the Dogra dastarkhans, the floor-cloths surrounded by bolster cushions at which the banquet was traditionally served to guests sitting in groups of four. Abdullah was everywhere, satisfying himself that all was as it should be. The snow fell straight down in large feathery flakes. It was hard to tell if it was a benediction or a curse.

In a tent on the lowest terrace Bombur Yambarzal the waza of Shirmal confronted him with a face whose colors were anything but gay. In spite of the maharaja’s requirement that their rivalries be set aside, this was not a man at peace with his neighbor. “It’s the final humiliation,” he snapped. “We-we, who are the unrivaled wazwaanis, longtime virtuosos of the pulao, maestros of methi chicken and artists of aab gosh!-we have been given the junior terrace, where the least important diners will come to eat. You interlopers-you pickpockets-you ignoramuses who think you can cook this food without even a waza to supervise you, let alone a vasta waza, a grand chef like myself!-have been ranked above us. The insult is apparent to all and will not be forgotten. I console myself that at least your rabble don’t have access to the highest terrace either, because the household chefs threatened to walk out if they didn’t get to feed the top tables. Clearly the maharaja was prepared to insult the whole village of Shirmal but felt obliged to butter up his cooks.”

Abdullah Noman held his tongue. It was true that Pachigam was to feed the middle tier of guests, but later in the evening Abdullah’s troupe of bhand pather actors would perform the history of Zain-ul-abidin, and then the Ram Leela, climaxing in the burning of the effigies and the fireworks, before the maharaja himself. “No point rubbing poor Bombur’s nose in his misfortune,” he thought, feeling one of his periodic twinges of guilty compassion for the waza of Shirmal; he inclined his head toward Yambarzal in a manner that was almost apologetic or at least deferential, and went on his way without returning hot words for hot, never suspecting that what lay ahead was not an evening of feasting and theater but one of the great hinge moments of his life and also of the life of everyone and everything he loved, a night after which nothing in the world would continue down its expected path, rivers would change their courses, the stars would turn up in unexpected places in the sky, the sun might as well start rising in the north or south or any damn place, because all certainty was lost, and the darkening began, ushering in the time of horrors, which Abdullah’s dreaming tongue had prophesied without consulting his brain. He went about his business, leaning into the snow, kicking drifts aside with his stout boots; and he was on his way to inspect the progress of the stage construction when Firdaus, staggering slightly, found him by the pond on the uppermost terrace. Exclamatory fountains burst upwards as she clutched his arm for support, as if the garden itself were shocked by the alteration in her demeanor. She looked much less in control of things than before, her face showed evidence of strain, and her lazy eye drifted uncertainly away to the side. “Okay,” she said, and then winced and gritted her teeth, perspiring silently as a powerful contraction hit her, “so, I admit, the situation has become a little more complicated than we thought.”

Two women gave snowbound birth behind the bushes, attended by a well-known local doctor and Sufistic philosopher, Khwaja Abdul Hakim, master of medicine both herbal and chemical, traditional and modern, Eastern and Western. But tonight his skills were useless; life arrived by itself, and death would not be denied. One boy child, one girl child, one trouble-free birth, one fatality. Firdaus Noman gave birth at speed, spitting out Noman Noman like a fruit pip. “Here you are, then, in a hurry,” she whispered into the ear of her newborn boy, neglecting to make sure that the first word he heard was the name of God. “Your father is a shape-shifter who calls his sorcery acting and your mother’s family of desperadoes is pretty suspicious, too, and nothing is at all normal about tonight; but just grow up normal anyway, okay, and don’t give me any reason to be scared.” Then Giri shrieked and Firdaus had to be restrained from jumping up to help her anguished friend. The women of Pachigam tended the living mother, swaddled and cared for the two healthy children and covered the dead woman’s face. They would take the body home during the night on a bullock cart covered with blossom from the garden and tomorrow she would burn in a sandalwood flame. What was there to say about such things? They happened. They did not happen frequently enough to threaten the survival of the species, the statistics were improving all the time, but when it was your turn, you were one hundred percent dead. There was grieving to be done and it would be done, as fully as was fitting. The pandit and his baby daughter needed the village’s support and they would receive it. The village would close around them like a hand. The pandit would live on. His daughter would live on. Life continued. The snow would melt and new flowers would grow. Death was not the end.

The news of a fourth son was brought to Abdullah, whose pride in fatherhood had to be shelved for the moment, there being so much to be done before the guests arrived; and, besides, he was already preparing for the role of Zain-ul-abidin, metamorphosing into the old-time Sultan who represented for him everything that was best about the valley he loved, its tolerance, its merging of faiths. The pandits of Kashmir, unlike Brahmins anywhere else in India, happily ate meat. Kashmiri Muslims, perhaps envying the pandits their choice of gods, blurred their faith’s austere monotheism by worshipping at the shrines of the valley’s many local saints, its pirs. To be a Kashmiri, to have received so incomparable a divine gift, was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided. Of all this the story of Budshah Zain was a symbol. Abdullah closed his eyes and sank ever deeper into his favorite role. As a result he was unable to be present to comfort his friend the pandit when Pamposh Kaul died in the bloody mess of her daughter’s premature birth.

A flight of winged shadows fled from the garden with her soul. Pyarelal wept beneath the illuminated trees while the Sufi philosopher embraced and kissed him, weeping as copiously as he. “The question of death,” said the khwaja through his tears, “proposes itself, does it not, panditji, every day. How long do we have left, will it be kind or unkind when it comes, how much more work can we do, how much of life’s richness will we experience, how much of our children’s lives will we see, et cetera.” Under normal circumstances, the opportunity to discuss ontology, to say nothing of the finer points of Sufi and Hindu mysticism, would have overjoyed Pyarelal Kaul. But nothing was normal that night. “She knows the answer now,” he wept back in reply, “and what a bitter answer it is.” The sobbing khwaja stroked the distraught widower’s face. “You have a beautiful daughter,” he said, choking. “The question of death is also the question of life, panditji, and the question of how to live is also the question of love. That is the question you have to go on answering, to which there is no answer except in the going on.” Then there were no more words. They both wailed long and loud at the baleful, gibbous moon. Before there was a Mughal garden here this had been a jackal-infested place. The weeping of the two grown men sounded like jackals’ howls.

Death, most present of absences, had entered the garden, and from that moment on the absences multiplied. It was dusk, and the appointed hour had arrived, the warm scents of the banquet were rising from the kitchens, and in spite of tragedy everything was ready on time; but where were the guests? It was cold, certainly, and perhaps that put some people off; the first few Dassehra revelers who did arrive were bundled up for warmth and looking dramatically unlike people who had come to have fun. But the expected flood of visitors never materialized, and, what was worse, many members of the royal household staff began to sneak quietly away, the bearers, the guards, even the chefs from the uppermost terrace, the maharaja’s own chefs who had been preparing the food for his personal entourage.

How could the occasion be saved? Abdullah Noman rushed around the garden shouting at people but got few of the answers he needed. Beneath a Mughal pavilion he found the magician Sarkar with his head buried in his hands. “It’s a catastrophe,” said the Seventh Sarkar. “People are too afraid to come out in this snowstorm-and from what I’ve been hearing it’s not only the snow that frightens them!-and so my greatest achievement will only be witnessed by a bunch of village buffoons.”

The shamiana tents, their bright colors glowing in the light of the great heat-braziers and gay strings and loops of illuminations bouncing across the trees, stood almost empty as the evening darkened toward night, looking ghostly as they loomed out through the snow. Bombur Yambarzal, unnerved by the phantom banquet, sought Abdullah’s advice. “What does that sorcerer mean, it’s not only the snow? If people are too scared to show up,” he said, almost timidly, the change in his demeanor an indication of the depth of his uncertainty, “do you think it’s safe for us to stay?” Abdullah’s heart was already in turmoil, the joy of Noman’s birth warring in his breast with his feeling of despair at the death of sweet Pamposh. He just shook his head perplexedly. “Let’s wait it out awhile,” he said. “We should both send people into Srinagar to ask around. Things must become clearer than they are.” Abdullah was not himself. There would be no performance of Budshah that night and he was trying to shake loose the shade of Zain-ul-abidin, pieces of whom were still stuck to his psyche. This was confusing. It was the second time that day that he had needed to exorcise the spirit of a king, and he was spent.

In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage-an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The fittest rumors survived, and began to make themselves heard above the general hubbub; and in the hissed or murmured noises emanating from these survivors, the loudest, most persistent, most puissant rumors, the single word kabailis was heard, over and over again. It was a new word, with which few people in the Shalimar Bagh were familiar, but it terrified them anyway. “An army of kabailis from Pakistan has crossed the border, looting, raping, burning, killing,” the rumors said, “and it is nearing the outskirts of the city.” Then the darkest rumor of all came in and sat down in the maharaja’s chair. “The maharaja has run away,” it said, contempt and terror mingling in its voice, “because he heard about the crucified man.” The authority of this rumor was so great that it seemed to the appalled villagers of Pachigam and Shirmal that the crucified man materialized then and there on the lawns of the Mughal garden, nailed to the white ground, the snow around him reddening with his blood. The crucified man’s name was Sopor and he was a simple shepherd. At a remote hillside crossroads in the far north the kabaili horde had come sweeping past him and his sheep and demanded to know the way to Srinagar. Sopor the shepherd lifted an arm and pointed, deliberately sending the invaders in the wrong direction. When, after a day-long wild goose chase, they realized what he had done, they retraced their steps, found him, crucified him in the dirt of the crossroads where he had misled them, let him scream for a while to beg God for the death that wouldn’t come quickly enough for his needs, and when they were bored of his noise, hammered a final nail through his throat.

So much was new in those days, so much only half understood. “Pakistan” itself was a former rumor, a phantom-word that had only had a real place attached to it for two short months. Perhaps for this reason-its move across the frontier from the shadow-world of rumors into the “real”-the subject of the new country aroused the most furious passions among the rumors swarming into the Shalimar Bagh. “Pakistan has right on its side,” said one rumor, “because here in Kashmir a Muslim people is being prevented by a Hindu ruler from joining their coreligionists in a new Muslim state.” A second rumor roared back, “How can you speak of right, when Pakistan has unleashed this murderous horde upon us? Don’t you know that the leaders of Pakistan told these cutthroat tribals that Kashmir is full of gold, carpets and beautiful women, and sent them to pillage and rape and kill infidels while they’re at it? Is that a country you want to join?” A third rumor blamed the maharaja. “He’s been dithering for months. The Partition was two months ago!-And still he can’t decide who to join, Pakistan or India.” A fourth butted in. “The fool! He has jailed Sheikh Abdullah, who has sworn off all communal politics, and is listening to that mullah, Moulvi Yusuf Shah, who obviously tilts toward Pakistan.” Then many rumors clamored at once. “Five hundred thousand tribals are attacking us, with Pak army soldiers in disguise commanding them!”-“They are only ten miles away!”-“Five miles!”-“Two!”-“Five thousand women raped and murdered on the Jammu border!”-“Twenty thousand Hindus and Sikhs slaughtered!”-“In Muzaffarabad, Muslim soldiers mutinied and killed their Hindu counterparts and the officer in charge as well!”-“Brigadier Rajender Singh, a hero, defended the road to Srinagar for three days with just 150 men!”-“Yes, but he is dead now, they slaughtered him.”-“Raise his war cry everywhere! Hamla-awar khabardar, ham Kashmiri hain tayyar!”-“Look out, attackers, we Kashmiris are ready for you!”-“Sheikh Abdullah has been let out of jail!”-“The maharaja has taken his advice and opted for India!”-“The Indian army is coming to save us!”-“Will it be in time?”-“The maharaja held his last Dassehra Durbar at the palace and then hightailed it to Jammu!”-“To Bombay!”-“To Goa!”-“To London!”-“To New York!”-“If he’s so scared what chance have we?”-“Run! Save yourselves! Run for your lives!”

As panic gripped the people in the Shalimar garden, Abdullah Noman ran to be with his wife and sons in the little makeshift screened-off maternity area Firdaus had had constructed in a corner of the Bagh. He found her sitting grim-faced on the ground, nursing the baby Noman, and beside her were Pandit Pyarelal Kaul and Khwaja Abdul Hakim, standing with bowed heads by the body of Pamposh. Pyarelal was singing a hymn softly. Abdullah could not speak for a moment. He was full of feelings of self-reproach at his own ignorance. He had known nothing, or next to nothing, of the trouble rushing down upon them. He was the sarpanch and should have known; how could he protect his people if he knew nothing of the dangers threatening them? He did not deserve his office. He was no better than Yambarzal. Petty rivalries and prideful self-absorption had blinded them both, and they had brought their people toward this terrifying conflict instead of keeping them safe and far away. Tears fell from his eyes. He knew they were tears of shame.

“Why are you singing that song of praise?” Firdaus’s voice dragged him back into the world. She was glaring savagely at Pyarelal. “What do you have to thank Durga for? You worshipped her for nine days and on the tenth she took your wife.” The pandit received the admonition without rancor. “When you pray for what you most want in the world,” he said, “its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love, and that is surely a thing for which to thank whoever or whatever you like, the goddess, or fate, or just my lucky stars.” Firdaus turned away from him. “Maybe we are too different, after all,” she grumbled under her breath. Khwaja Abdul Hakim took his leave. “I do not think I will stay in Kashmir,” he said. “I do not want to watch the sadness destroying the beauty. I have it in mind to give my land to the university and go south. Into India; always India; never into Pakistan.” Firdaus’s back was toward the khwaja. “You’re lucky,” she muttered without turning to wish him good-bye. “You’re one of those who has a choice.”

Abdullah asked for and received his swaddled baby boy. “We need to go,” he told Firdaus and Pyarelal gently. “The rumors flying around here are making people crazy.” All day, he thought, there have been kings and princes in my head. Alexander, Zain-ul-abidin, Jehangir, Ram. But it’s our own prince’s indecision that has unleashed this holocaust, and nobody can say whether or not India, that newly kingless land, can save us, or even if being saved by India is going to be good for us in the end.

A drum boomed immensely in the night, louder and louder, commanding attention. So potent was the drumming that it froze people in their tracks, it silenced the rumors and got everyone’s attention. The little man, Sarkar the magician, was marching down the central avenue of the garden, hammering away at his mighty dhol. Finally, when all eyes were on him, he raised a megaphone to his lips and bellowed, “Fuck this. I came here to do something and I’m going to do it. The genius of my magic will triumph over the ugliness of the times. On the seventh beat of my drum, the Shalimar garden will disappear.” He banged the drum, one, two, three, four, five, six times. On the seventh boom, just as he had foretold, the whole Shalimar Bagh vanished from sight. Pitch blackness descended. People began to scream.

For the rest of his life the Seventh Sarkar would curse history for cheating him of the credit for the unprecedented feat of “hiding from view” an entire Mughal garden, but most people in the garden that night thought he’d pulled it off, because on the seventh beat of his drum the power station at Mohra was blown to bits by the Pakistani irregular forces and the whole city and region of Srinagar was plunged into complete darkness. In the night-cloaked Shalimar Bagh the earthly version of the tooba tree of heaven remained secret, unrevealed. Abdullah Noman experienced the bizarre sensation of living through a metaphor made real. The world he knew was disappearing; this blind, inky night was the incontestable sign of the times.

The remaining hours of that night passed in a frenzy of shouts and rushing feet. Somehow Abdullah managed to send his family away on a bullock cart, which Firdaus had to share with the dead body of her friend and, next to deceased Pamposh, Pyarelal Kaul cradling his baby daughter and unstoppably singing praisesongs to Durga. Then by a lucky chance Abdullah collided with Bombur Yambarzal again. Bombur in the darkness was a quivering wreck of a man, but Abdullah managed to get him on his feet. “We can’t leave our stuff here,” he persuaded Yambarzal, “or both our villages will be crippled for good.” Somehow the two of them rounded up a rump or quorum of villagers, half Shirmali, half from Pachigam, and this raggle-taggle remnant dismantled their special wuri ovens and hauled many dozens of pots full of feast-day food to the roadside. The portable theater had to be dismantled as well, and the materials for the plays packed in great wicker panniers and taken down the terraces to the lakeside. All night the villagers of Shirmal and Pachigam worked side by side, and when dawn crept over the hills at the end of that dark night and the garden reappeared, the waza and the sarpanch hugged each other and made promises of unbreakable fellowship and undying love. Above them, however, the shadow planets Rahu and Ketu existed without actually existing, pulling and pushing, intensifying and suppressing, inflaming and stifling, dancing out the moral struggle within human beings while remaining invisible in the brightening heavens. And when the actors and cooks departed from the Shalimar Bagh they left behind the giant effigies of the demon king, his brother and his son, all filled with unexploded fireworks. Ravan, Kumbhakaran and Meghnath glowered across the trembling valley, not caring whether they were Hindus or Muslims. The time of demons had begun.

3

Man is ruined by the misfortune of possessing a moral sense,” reflected Pandit Pyarelal Kaul by the banks of the loquacious Muskadoon. “Consider the superior luck of the animals. The wild beasts of Kashmir, to enumerate a few, include Ponz the Monkey, Potsolov the Fox, Shal the Jackal, Sur the Boar, Drin the Marmot, Nyan and Sharpu the Sheep, Kail the Ibex, Hiran the Antelope, Kostura the Musk Deer, Suh the Leopard, Haput the Black Bear, Bota-khar the Ass, Hangul the Twelve-Pointed Barasingha Stag, and Zomba the Yak. Some of these are dangerous, it’s true, and many are fearsome. Ponz is a danger to walnuts. Potsolov is cunning and a danger to chickens. Shal’s is a fearsome howl. Sur is a danger to crops. Suh is ferocious and a danger to stags. Haput is a danger to shepherds. The Ass, by contrast, is a coward and runs from danger; however you must remember in mitigation that he is an Ass, just as a jackal is a jackal and a leopard is a leopard and a boar has no option but to be boarish one hundred percent of the time. They neither know nor shape their own nature; rather, their nature knows and shapes them. There are no surprises in the animal kingdom. Only Man’s character is suspect and shifting. Only Man, knowing good, can do evil. Only Man wears masks. Only Man is a disappointment to himself. Only by ceasing to need the things of the world and relieving oneself of the needs of the body…”

And so on. Boonyi Kaul knew that when her father, a man with many friends because of his love of people and one too many chins because of his ever more voracious and perfectionist love of food, started mourning the failings of the human race and making ascetic recommendations for its improvement he was secretly missing his wife, who had never disappointed him, whose surprises had filled his heart, and for whom after fourteen years his body still ached. At such times Boonyi usually became extra demonstrative, trying to bury her father’s grief beneath her love. Today, however, she was distracted, and could not play the dutifully loving daughter. Today, she and her Noman, her beloved clown Shalimar, sat listening to her father on their usual boulders, neither touching nor glancing at each other, both of them struggling to control the confessional smiles that kept creeping out onto their lips.

It was the morning after the great event in the high mountain meadow of Khelmarg. Boonyi, intoxicated by love for her lover, lounged with open sensuality on her rock, her arching body a provocation to anyone who cared to notice it. Her father, lost in melancholy, noticed that she was looking even more like her mother than usual, but failed, with the stupidity of fathers, to understand that this was because desire and the fulfillment of desire were running their hands over her body, welcoming it into womanhood. Shalimar the clown, however, was doubly agitated by her display; at once aroused and alarmed. He began to make small jerking downward movements of his fingers, as if to say calm down, don’t make it so obvious. But the invisible strings connecting his fingertips to her body weren’t working properly. The more insistently he pushed his fingers downward the higher she arched her back. The more urgently his hands pleaded for passivity the more languorously she rolled about. Later that day, when they were alone in the practice glade, both of them balancing high above the ground on the precarious illusion of a single tightrope, he said, “Why didn’t you stop when I asked you?” At which she grinned and said, “You weren’t asking me to stop. I could feel you fondling me here, pressing and squeezing and all, and pushing down on me here, hard hard, and it was driving me crazy, as you knew perfectly well it would.”

Shalimar the clown began to see that the loss of her virginity had unleashed something reckless in Boonyi, a wild defiant uncaringness, a sudden exhibitionism which was tumbling toward folly-for her flaunting of their consummated love could bring both their lives crashing down and smash them to bits. There was irony in this, because Boonyi’s daring was the single quality he most admired. He had fallen in love with her in large part because she was so seldom afraid, because she reached out for what she wanted and grabbed at it and didn’t see why it should elude her grasp. Now this same quality, intensified by their encounter, was endangering them both. Shalimar the clown’s signature trick on the high wire was to lean out sideways, increasing the angle until it seemed he must fall, and then, with much clownish playacting of terror and clumsiness, to right himself with gravity-defying strength and skill. Boonyi had tried to learn the trick but gave up, giggling, after many windmilling failures. “It’s impossible,” she confessed. “The impossible is what people pay to see,” Shalimar the clown on the high wire quoted his father, and bowed as if receiving applause. “Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show,” Abdullah Noman liked to tell his troupe. “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 were times, Shalimar the clown understood with growing concern, when the laws of theater might not precisely apply to real life. Right now in real life Boonyi was the one leaning out from the high wire, brazenly flaunting her new status as lover and beloved, defying all convention and orthodoxy, and in real life these were forces that exerted at least as powerful a downward pull as gravity. “Fly,” she told him, laughing into his worried face. “Wasn’t that your dream, Mister Impossible? To do without the rope and walk on air.” She took him deeper into the wood and made love to him again and then for a while he didn’t care what followed. “Face it,” she whispered. “Married or not married, you’ve passed through the stone door.” The poets wrote that a good wife was like a shady boonyi tree, a beautiful chinar-kenchen renye chai shihiji boonyi-but in the common parlance the imagery was different. The word for the entrance to a house was braand; stone was kany. For comical reasons the two words were sometimes used, joined together, to refer to one’s beloved bride: braand-kany, “the gate of stone.” Let’s just hope, Shalimar the clown thought but did not say, that the stones don’t come smashing down on our heads.

Shalimar the clown was not the only local male to have Boonyi Kaul on the brain. Colonel Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha of the Indian army had had his eye on her for some time. Colonel Kachhwaha was just thirty-one years old but liked to call himself a Rajput of the old school, a spiritual descendant-and, he was certain, a distant blood relation-of the warrior princes, the old-time Suryavans and Kachhwaha rajas and ranas who had given both the Mughals and the British plenty to think about in the glory days of the kingdoms of Mewar and Marwar, when Rajputana was dominated by the two mighty fortresses of Chittorgarh and Mehrangarh, and fearsome one-armed legends rode into battle bisecting their enemies with cutlasses, crushing skulls with maces, or hacking through armor with the chaunch, a long-nosed axe with a cruel storklike beak. At any rate, England-returned Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha had a splendid Rajput moustache, a swaggering Rajput bearing, a barking British-style military voice, and now he was also commanding officer of the army camp a few miles to the northeast of Pachigam, the camp everyone locally called Elasticnagar because of its well-established tendency to stretch. The colonel wholeheartedly disapproved of this irreverent title, which in his ramrod opinion was far from commensurate with the dignity of the armed forces, and after arriving in post one year back had tried to insist that the camp’s official name be used by all persons at all times, but had given up when he realized that most of the soldiers under his command had forgotten it long ago.

The colonel had a preferred nickname for himself, too. “Hammer,” an English play on Hammir. A good, soldierly name. He practiced it sometimes when he was alone. “Hammer Kachhwaha.” “Hammer by name, hammer by nature.” “Colonel Hammer Kachhwaha at your service, sir.” “Oh, please, dear fellow, just call me Hammer.” But this attempted self-naming failed just as the battle against Elasticnagar had, because once people heard his surname they inevitably wanted to shorten it to Kachhwa Karnail, which is to say “Colonel Turtle” or “Tortoise.” So Tortoise Colonel he became, and was forced to look for his metaphors of self-description closer to the ground. “Slow and steady wins the race, eh, what?” he practiced; and “Tortoise by name, damned hard-shelled by nature.” But somehow he could never bring himself to say, “My dear chap, just call me Turtle,” or, “I mostly go by Tortoise, don’t you know-but it’s just plain Torto to you.” His testudinarious fate further soured a mood which had already been ruined by his father on his thirtieth birthday, when the newly promoted colonel was on home leave in Jodhpur before taking up his posting in Kashmir. His father was in fact the Rajput of the old school that his son aspired to be, and his birthday gift to Hammirdev was a set of two dozen golden bangles. Ladies’ bangles? Hammir Kachhwaha was confused. “Why, sir?” he asked, and the older man snorted, jingling the bangles on a finger. “If a Rajput warrior is still alive on his thirtieth birthday,” grunted Nagabhat Suryavans Kachhwaha in tones of disgust, “we give him women’s bangles to express our disappointment and surprise. Wear them until you prove they aren’t deserved.” “By dying, you mean,” his son sought clarification. “To win favor in your eyes I have to get myself killed.” His father shrugged. “Obviously,” he said, neglecting to discuss why there were no bangles on his own arms, and spat copious betel juice into a handy spittoon.

So Colonel Kachhwaha of Elasticnagar was well known not to be a happy man. The men of his command feared his martinet tongue, and the locals, too, had learned that he was not lightly to be crossed. As Elasticnagar grew-as soldiers flooded north into the valley and brought with them all the cumbersome matériel of war, guns and ammunition, artillery both heavy and light, and trucks so numberless that they acquired the local name of “locusts”-so its need for land increased, and Colonel Kachhwaha requisitioned what he needed without explanation or apology. When the owners of the seized fields protested at the low level of compensation they received, he answered furiously, his face turning shockingly red, “We’ve come to protect you, you ingrates. We’re here to save your land-so for God’s sake don’t give me some sob story when we have to bally well take it over.” The logic of his argument was powerful, but it didn’t always go down well. This was not finally important. Outraged by his continued failure to die in battle, the colonel was unquiet of spirit, and as livid as a rash. Then he saw Boonyi Kaul and things changed-or might have changed, had she not turned him down, flatly, and with scorn.

Elasticnagar was unpopular, the colonel knew that, but unpopularity was illegal. The legal position was that the Indian military presence in Kashmir had the full support of the population, and to say otherwise was to break the law. To break the law was to be a criminal and criminals were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on them heavily with the full panoply of the law and with hobnailed boots and lathi sticks as well. The key to understanding this position was the word integral and its associated concepts. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honored and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honor and was not to be tolerated. Therefore Elasticnagar was to be honored and all other attitudes were dishonorable and consequently illegal. Kashmir was an integral part of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral. Not to accept this was to lack integrity and implicitly or explicitly to question the unquestionable integrity of those who did accept it. Not to accept this was latently or patently to favor disintegration. This was subversive. Subversion leading to disintegration was not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on it heavily whether it was of the overt or covert kind. The legally compulsory and enforceable popularity of Elasticnagar was thus a matter of integrity, pure and simple, even if the truth was that Elasticnagar was unpopular. When the truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that had to be given precedence. Not even the truth could be permitted to dishonor the nation. Therefore Elasticnagar was popular even though it was not popular. It was a simple enough matter to understand.

Colonel Kachhwaha saw himself as a man of the thinking kind. He was famous for possessing an exceptional memory and liked to demonstrate it. He could remember two hundred and seventeen random words in succession and also tell you if asked what the eighty-fourth or one hundred and fifty-ninth word had been, and there were other such tests that impressed the officers’ mess and gave him the air of a superior being. His knowledge of military history and the details of famous battles was encyclopedic. He prided himself on his storehouse of information and was pleased with the consequent, irrefutable thrust of his analyses. The problem of the accumulating detritus of quotidian memories had not yet begun to distress him, although it was tiresome to remember every day of one’s life, every conversation, every bad dream, every cigarette. There were times when he hoped for forgetfulness as a condemned man hopes for mercy. There were times when he wondered what the long-term effect of so much remembering might be, when he wondered if there might be moral consequences. But he was a soldier. Shaking off such thoughts, he got on with his day.

He thought of himself, too, as a man of deep feeling, and consequently the ingratitude of the valley weighed heavily upon him. Fourteen years ago, at the behest of the fleeing maharaja and the Lion of Kashmir, the army had driven back the kabaili marauders but had stopped short of driving them out of Kashmiri territory, leaving them in control of some of the high mountainous areas to the north, Gilgit, Hunza, Baltistan. The de facto partition that resulted from this decision would be easy to call a mistake if it were not illegal to do so. Why had the army stopped? It had stopped because it had decided to stop, it was a decision taken in response to the actual situation on the ground, and it followed that that was the proper decision, the only decision, the decision with integrity. All very well for armchair experts to query it now, but they hadn’t been there, on the ground, at the time. The decision was the correct decision because it was the decision that had been taken. Other decisions that might have been taken had not been taken and were therefore wrong decisions, decisions that should not have been taken, that it had been right not to take. The de facto line of partition existed and so had to be adhered to and the question of whether it should exist or not was not a question. There were Kashmiris on both sides who treated the line with contempt and walked across the mountains whenever they so chose. This contempt was an aspect of Kashmiri ingratitude because it did not recognize the difficulties faced by the soldiers at the line of partition, the hardships they endured in order to defend and maintain the line. There were men up there freezing their balls off and occasionally dying, dying of the cold, dying because they intercepted a Pak sniper’s bullet, dying before they were given golden bangles by their fathers, dying to defend an idea of freedom. If people were suffering for you, if they were dying for you, then you should respect their suffering and to ignore the line they were defending was disrespectful. Such behavior was not commensurate with the army’s honor to say nothing of national security and was therefore illegal.

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.”

Boonyi was naturally well aware of her father’s growing importance in the preparation of the Thirty-Six Courses Minimum, but it had never occurred to her that this would lead to his making such a dramatic career move. Badly off balance, she lost her head completely. “If teaching isn’t that important to you,” she burst out at miserable Pyarelal, “then learning isn’t that important to me. If my father the great philosopher wants to turn into a tandoori cook, then maybe I’ll find something to turn into as well. Who wants to be your daughter? I’d rather be somebody’s wife.”

It was her wildness talking, the impulsive uncontrolled thing that Shalimar the clown had begun to fear. When she saw Pyarelal’s face fall and Gopinath’s ears prick up she at once regretted that she had hurt the man who had loved her most ever since the day of her birth, and in addition that she had said far too much in the presence of a stranger. What she didn’t know was that Pandit Gopinath Razdan, Pyarelal’s distant cousin, was also a secret agent, and had been sent to Pachigam to sniff out certain subversive elements in this village of artists-for artists were natural subversives, after all. His orders were to report his findings covertly and in the first instance to Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha at Elasticnagar, who would evaluate the quality and value of the intelligence and recommend any course of action that might be required. Nobody in Pachigam suspected Gopinath of having a secret identity because the identity that he made apparent was so hard to take that it was impossible to believe he had an even more problematic self concealed beneath it. The children he taught with an asperity and severity that was the exact opposite of Pyarelal’s jolly prattling gave him the nickname of “Batta Rasashud.” Batta was another word for pandit and rasashud was an extremely bitter herb given to children who were infested with aam, that is to say, roundworms. When he discovered this, because teachers always discover the rude names by which they are known, his temper got even worse. He was living in a bedroom upstairs from the schoolroom and at nights the villagers would hear crashes and oaths emanating from it, so that many of them suspected that the angry pandit was possessed by a demon who came out of his body at night and flew around like a trapped bird.

Pyarelal felt responsible for his distant cousin and believed in his good-natured way that a little human companionship and family feeling would improve the man’s temperament. Boonyi dissented strongly. “Once the milk has curdled,” she argued, “it never tastes sweet again.” In spite of her objections, Pyarelal Kaul assured Gopinath that he was always welcome at their table. Thus Boonyi had to breakfast and often dine with the spy, which suited Gopinath fine, because Colonel Kachhwaha’s interest in her made her an important topic for his regular reports. And inevitably, given the unusual degree of access to her that he enjoyed, it was only a matter of time before the angry pandit became besotted with Boonyi Kaul as well. His paan habit increased dramatically, but the betel-nut addiction failed to mask his new, deeper dependency on the presence in his life of a fourteen-year-old girl. In the small schoolhouse where he taught children of all ages in a single room, he quickly saw that Boonyi Kaul was a lazy student, smart but idle, whose detachment from her education was in part a deliberately anti-intellectual reaction against being her learned father’s child, in part a protest against Pyarelal’s withdrawal from school, and mostly the consequence of an immature belief, rooted in her highly eroticized self-image, that she already knew everything she would need to get men to do whatever she desired. It was easy to see why so sexually confident a child had inflamed the passions of poor confused Colonel Tortoise, but Gopinath had thought himself to be made of sterner stuff. The speed of his surrender to her charms engendered in his breast the same feelings of disgust he normally reserved for the sick and the maimed. And her obvious feelings for Noman Sher Noman who called himself Shalimar the clown nauseated the schoolteacher even more than his own infatuation, and distracted him from his original purpose in Pachigam, the secret pursuit of Shalimar the clown’s brother, the third son of Abdullah and Firdaus. Gopinath temporarily downgraded that project and focused instead on the sarpanch’s fourth and youngest boy, whom he privately resolved to destroy.

At the age of nineteen the twin eldest sons of Abdullah and Firdaus Noman, Hameed and Mahmood, were gentle, gregarious fools whose only interest in life was to make each other laugh. Accordingly they had contentedly lost themselves in the comic fictions of the bhand pather, and were so immersed in their imaginary world, in creating burlesque versions of pratfalling princes and clumsy gods, cowardly giants and devils in love, that the real world lost its charm for them, and perhaps alone of all Kashmiris they became immune to its natural beauty. The third boy, Anees, was introspective and morose, as if he expected little good to come of his life. He performed the clown antics required of him with an unblinkingly melancholy face that divided audiences. Most reacted with hilarity to his mournful air, but a minority, unexpectedly touched by his sadness in a place they did not expect a mere clown-story to reach, a sequestered place in which they guarded their own sadnesses about their beleaguered lives, were disturbed by him, and felt happy when he left the stage. As his seventeenth birthday neared Anees began to display a growing skill with his hands, casually creating miniature marvels of paper-chain cutout figures and fantastical creatures made out of twisted silver paper taken from the insides of cigarette packs. He whittled wood into tiny wonders, such as owls with latticed bodies inside which other, tinier owls could be seen. It was this gift that brought him to the attention of the local liberation front commander, and one star-filled night Anees was brought by two fighters with scarves around their faces to the wooded hill where Nazarébaddoor’s old cottage stood rotting and empty. Here he was asked by a man he could not see if he would like to learn to make bombs. Okay, Anees shrugged. At least this meant that his melancholy life was likely to be short. When he said this he was wearing his longest and most lugubrious face and the liberation front commander standing in the shadows was mysteriously seized by an inappropriate urge to laugh, which he only partially managed to resist.

On the day of her denunciation, Boonyi was with her friends at their afternoon dance practice by the banks of the Muskadoon. “Look,” said Zoon the carpenter’s daughter, pointing to a rocky outcrop where Gopinath stood watching them. “If it isn’t Mr. Bitterherb himself.” The spy made his way down the rocks, chewing his paan, his umbrella tapping on the stone, and Boonyi suddenly saw through his fogyish pose. “This is not a crabby little duffer at all, but a very dangerous man,” she warned herself, but it was too late. Gopinath had already seen everything he needed to see. To wooded groves and moonlit mountain meadows he had followed Shalimar the clown and Boonyi. Eight-millimeter movie film had been exposed, and still photographs taken also. They had never suspected his presence, never heard his footfall. He, by contrast, had seen more than enough. Now he stood before Boonyi, spat out betel juice and dropped his mask. His body straightened, his voice strengthened, and his face changed-his furrowed brow smoothed itself out, his expression was no longer narrow and pinched but calm and authoritative, and he plainly didn’t need (and so removed) his spectacles; he looked younger and steelier, a man to be reckoned with, a man it might be advisable not to cross. “That boy is trash-not worthy of you,” he said, loudly and clearly. “And the trashy things you were doing with him are unworthy of any decent girl.” Wor’y. U’wor’y. The accent at least had been genuine. Zoon, Gonwati and Himal became stiff with curiosity and horror. “You will be angry with me now,” the spy went on, “but later, when we are married, you may be pleased to have at your side a man of real mettle, not a lecherous boy.” The girl shook her head in disbelief. “What have you done?” she asked. “I have put an end to sin,” the spy replied. Boonyi’s thoughts raced. Her friends had closed in around her, pressing their bodies loyally against hers, forming a wall against the alien attack. Catastrophe was close.

“The panchayat is meeting at this moment in emergency session, to consider the evidence I have laid before it,” said Gopinath. “The sarpanch, your father and the others will soon decide your fate. You are disgraced, of course, your face is blackened and your good name is dirt, and that is your own doing; but I have informed them that I am prepared to restore your honor by taking you as my wife. What choice does your father have? What other man would be so generous toward a fallen woman? Repent now and thank me later, when your senses are your own again. Your lover is finished, of course, he is branded forever as a varlet and a dastard, but I snap my fingers at him as should you-as you will, when you enter into your only possible destiny, namely your inevitable life with me.”

Repen’ and than’ me whe’ your se’ses are your ow’. It was a remarkable proposal of marriage and after making it the transformed Gopinath did not wait for his beloved’s reply, but walked off some distance along the bank of the Muskadoon and sat down perhaps a hundred yards away, pretending that he didn’t have a care in the world. In reality he knew that he would be in boiling hot water with his superiors, having revealed his spying abilities to everyone in Pachigam and simultaneously turned himself into the most hated man in the village. His serious purposes were undone, he would have to withdraw immediately from his post at the school and from the village itself, and it would be far harder for the authorities to plant a second agent inside a community that would henceforth be on its guard against traitors and spies. In short, Gopinath had gambled everything on Boonyi, had been willing to sacrifice his secret career in return for capturing a wife who would never reciprocate his love, who would in fact detest him for painting her scarlet and puncturing her dreams of love. He stared into the fast-flowing waters and contemplated the tragedy of desire.

An air of calamity was rapidly enveloping the village. The fruit orchards, saffron fields and rice paddies lay empty and untended as those who habitually labored there put down tools and gathered outside the Noman residence where the panchayat was meeting. No food was cooked in the villagers’ kitchens that afternoon. Children ran barefoot hither and yon, gleefully shouting out ill-founded rumors of banishment and suicide. Boonyi and her three friends huddled together, arms around one another, in an inward-facing circle of misery from which loud wails and sobs of anguish escaped constantly. Even the livestock had divined that something was wrong; goats and cattle, dogs and geese displayed the kind of instinctive or premonitory agitation that is sometimes seen in the hours before an earthquake. Bees stung their keepers with unwonted ferocity. The very air seemed to shimmer with concern and there was a rumble in the empty sky. Firdaus Noman came for Boonyi, running with an ungainly lolloping gait, panting heavily, and screamed abuse at the judas Gopinath sitting calmly by the riverside. “Carbuncle!” she cursed him. “Clovenhoof! Bad-smell buttock! Little penis! Dried-up brinjal!” The object of her wrath, the zaharbad, the pedar, the possessor of the smelly mandal, the wee kuchur, the wangan hachi, neither turned nor flinched. “Wattal-nath Gopinath!” Firdaus screamed-that is to say, mean-spirited, low-life, degraded Gopinath-and Boonyi’s friends broke away from their circle to take up the chant. “Wattal-nath Gopinath! Gopinath Wattal-nath!” Through the village went that cry, taken up by the eager children, until the whole village, almost all of whose residents were by now gathered outside the sarpanch’s home, was shouting. “Wattal-nath Gopinath! Little penis, bad-smell buttock, dried-up brinjal, clovenhoof! Gopinath Wattal-nath, go!”

“Damn you too,” Firdaus said more conversationally to Boonyi. “Come on, you stupid oversexed child. I’m taking you back to your father’s house and there you’ll stay until what’s done is done and your fate is known.” “We’re coming too,” cried Zoon, Himal and Gonwati. Firdaus shrugged. “That’s your concern. But I will be locking you four wretches in.” Boonyi did not argue and made her way home, chaperoned by her beloved’s irate mother. “Where is Noman?” she asked Firdaus in a small voice. “Shut up,” Firdaus answered loudly. “That is nothing to do with you.” Then in a low fast murmur she went on, “His brothers have taken him away, up to Khelmarg, to stop him from cutting off Pandit Gopinath Razdan’s fat head.” Boonyi replied more heatedly, and certainly more lewdly, than her situation warranted. “Anyway, they shouldn’t make me marry that snake. The first time he’s asleep I’ll cut off his kuchur and stuff it into his evil little mouth.” Firdaus slapped her hard across the face. “You’ll do as you are told,” she said. “And that was for the dirty talk, which I will not tolerate.” Faced with the incandescent fury of Firdaus Noman, neither Boonyi nor her friends dared to remind her where that day’s bad language had come from in the first place.

Once they were inside Boonyi’s home, Firdaus stopped pretending to be angry and made the girls a pot of salty pink tea. “The boy loves you,” she said to Boonyi, “and even though you have behaved like a disgusting slut, that love counts with me.” One hour later a boy knocked at the door to tell them that the panchayat had reached its decision and their presence was required. “We’re coming too,” said Himal, Gonwati and Zoon again, and again Firdaus did not demur. They made their way to the steps of the sarpanch’s residence where the panchayat members stood solemn-faced. Shalimar the clown was there with his brothers surrounding him and Boonyi’s heart thumped when she saw his face. There was a murderous darkness on his brow that she had not seen before. It frightened her and, worse than that, it made him look unattractive to her for the first time in her life. All the villagers were gathered around this little tableau and when they saw Firdaus approaching with Boonyi and her girlfriends a silence fell. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was standing beside Abdullah Noman and the two fathers’ faces were the grimmest on display. “I’m done for,” Boonyi thought. “They’re going to pack me off to that bastard sitting like a cold fish by the river, waiting to have me handed over on a plate-me, Boonyi Kaul, whom he could never otherwise have won.”

She was wrong. Abdullah Noman the sarpanch spoke first, followed by Pyarelal, and the other three members of the panchayat, Big Man Misri the carpenter, Sharga the singer, and the frail old dancing master Habib Joo, also made brief remarks, and their verdict was unanimous. The lovers were their children and must be supported. Their behavior was worthy of the strongest censure-it had been licentious and rash and filled with improprieties that were a disappointment to their parents-but they were good children, as everybody knew. Abdullah then mentioned Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences. Most bhand villages were Muslim but Pachigam was a mixture, with families of pandit background, the Kauls, the Misris, and the baritone singer’s long-nosed kin-sharga being a local nickname for the nasally elongated-and even one family of dancing Jews. “So we have not only Kashmiriness to protect but Pachigaminess as well. We are all brothers and sisters here,” said Abdullah. “There is no Hindu-Muslim issue. Two Kashmiri-two Pachigami-youngsters wish to marry, that’s all. A love match is acceptable to both families and so a marriage there will be; both Hindu and Muslim customs will be observed.” Pyarelal added, when his turn came, “To defend their love is to defend what is finest in ourselves.” The crowd cheered and Shalimar the clown broke out into a broad smile of disbelieving joy. Firdaus went up to Abdullah and whispered, “If you had made any other decision I would have kicked you out of my bed.” (Later that night, when they lay in that bed in the dark, she was in a more reflective mood. “The times are changing,” she said softly. “Our children aren’t like us. In our generation we were straightforward folk, both hands on the table in plain view at all times. But these youngsters are trickier types, there are shadows on the surface and secrets underneath, and they are not always as they seem, maybe not always even what they think they are. I guess that’s how it has to be, because they will live through times more deceptive than any we have known.”)

Two panchayat members, Misri the carpenter and Sharga the baritone, the two largest and, along with the sarpanch, strongest men in Pachigam, were dispatched to the riverside to throw Gopinath Razdan out of town-Abdullah the sarpanch, fearing excessive violence, forbade his enraged sons to have anything to do with the ejection-but by the time the posse of two reached the Muskadoon the spy had already slipped away, and he was never seen in Pachigam again. Six months later, after a period of professional disgrace, he was assigned new duties in the village of Pahalgam, and was found dead one morning in the nearby mountain meadow of Baisaran. His legs had been blown off by some sort of homemade bomb and his head had been severed from his body by a single slash of a blade. The murder was never solved, nor did any clues lead back to anyone in the actors’ village. Eventually the investigation ran out of steam and the official case file was closed. Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha had his strong suspicions, however, and his frustration grew. Not only had he been insulted by Boonyi Kaul, but the failure of his spy’s mission had given him no shred of a pretext for the “descent in force” that he had planned for Pachigam. The colors of his world continued to darken, and he made a note that the village of actors was still earmarked for special attention, a decision whose medium- and long-term consequences would be grave.

For a time after the departure of the spy, however, the mood in Pachigam was celebratory. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul agreed to resume his teaching duties, to shoulder the dual burdens of education and gastronomy as long as his strength lasted; and preparations for the nuptials of Boonyi and Shalimar the clown began. However, snags soon started cropping up. The detailed wedding arrangements proved more problematic than Abdullah, with his plan for an idealistic, multifaith ceremony, had foreseen. This was because of the arrival of the families. From Poonch, from Baramulla, from Sonamarg, from Tangmarg, from Chhamb, from Aru, from Uri, from Udhampur, from Kishtwar, from Riasi, from Jammu, the two clans gathered; aunts, cousins, uncles, more cousins, great-aunts, great-uncles, nephews, nieces, yet more cousins and in-laws descended on Pachigam until all the village’s houses were badly overcrowded and many minor relatives had to sleep under the fruit trees and trust to luck regarding rain and snakes. Almost all the new arrivals had strong ideas and expectations about the proceedings, and many of them were openly scornful of the sarpanch’s ecumenical scheme. “What, she won’t convert to Islam?” the doubters from the groom’s side demanded, and the bride’s people retorted, “What, there will be meat served at the feast?” All over the village and in the surrounding fields and pastures the arguments raged. The only thing generally agreed was that the traditional Muslim Thap ceremony, when the young couple meet in a public place to decide if they want to go ahead with the match, was unnecessary. “They have thapped each other long ago,” said a wicked aunt’s tongue, and there was laughter from wicked uncles, cousins, great-aunts, great-uncles, further cousins and so on.

Then came the argument over the Livun ceremonies of the Hindus, when, the Kauls insisted, the two families’ houses should be ritually cleansed. “Let the Kauls cleanse their idolatrous home if they need to,” said a hard-line old Muslim granny, “but our people’s place is already perfectly clean.” Nobody objected to frequent wazwaan banquets, naturally, and the veg/nonveg disputes were relatively easily resolved when Pandit Pyarelal Kaul, in spite of his abiding love for meat, agreed to banish all trace of it from his kitchen, while the Nomans, who had built a new brick-and-mud wuri oven in their backyard, offered daily menus that were carnivore’s delights. At the actual wedding, it was agreed after much haggling, separate groups of chefs would prepare both cuisines, chicken to the left, lotus to the right, goat meat on one side, goat cheese on the other. Music, too, was agreed on without too much dispute. The santoor, the sarangi, the rabab, the harmonium were nonsectarian instruments, after all. Professional bachkot singers and musicians were hired and ordered to alternate Hindu bhajans and Sufi hymns.

The question of the bride’s clothes was far thornier. “Obviously,” said the groom’s side, “when the yenvool, the wedding procession, comes to the bride’s house, we will expect to be welcomed by a girl in a red lehenga, and later, after she is bathed by her family women, she will don a shalwar-kameez.”-“Absurd,” retorted the Kauls. “She will wear a phiran just like all our brides, embroidered at the neck and cuffs. On her head will be the starched and papery tarang headgear, and the wide haligandun belt will be round her waist.” This standoff lasted three days until Abdullah and Pyarelal decreed that the bride would indeed wear her traditional garb, but so would Shalimar the clown. No tweed phiran for him! No peacock-feathered turban! He would wear an elegant sherwani and a karakuli topi on his head and that was that. Once the clothes issue had been resolved, the mehndi ceremony, a joint custom, was quickly settled. Then came the matter of the wedding itself and at that point the entire entente cordiale came close to collapse. To many Muslim ears, the other side’s suggestions were appalling. Blow a conch shell if you will, cried the Islamic aunts and great-aunts and cousins and so on, exchange all the gifts of nutmeg you desire, but a purohit, a priest, performing puja before idols? Sacred fire, sacred thread? The newlyweds to be treated as Shiva and Parvati and worshipped as such? Hai-hai. Such superstition would never do. The Kauls retreated in high dudgeon. All dialogue between the two households ceased. “Families,” sighed Firdaus Noman in despair, “are the narrow-minded, low-grade cause of all the discontent on earth.”

That night there was a full moon. Pachigam had divided into two camps, and long years of communal harmony were at risk. Then, on an impulse, the baritone Shivshankar Sharga came out into the main street and began to sing love songs, songs of the love of the gods for men, and of men for God, songs of the love between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, songs of love requited and unrequited, courtly and passionate, sacred and profane. His daughters Himal and Gonwati, the tone-deaf duo, sat at his feet under strict instructions not to open their mouths no matter how much the music moved them. When he started singing the village was still in the grip of its plague of bad temper, and there were cries of “Shut up, we’re trying to sleep,” and “Nobody’s in the mood for these damned sentimental songs.” But slowly his voice worked its magic. Doors opened, lights came on, sleepers came in from the fields. Abdullah and Pyarelal met by the singer and embraced. “We’ll have two wedding days,” Abdullah said. “First we’ll do everything your way and then we’ll do it all again in the way we know.” A single shrewish aunt called out, “Why their way first?” but her carping cry was swiftly followed by a stifled gurgle, as her husband put his hand over her bad mouth and dragged her away to bed.

It was all settled. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul dug the aluminum box containing his wife’s wedding jewels out of the place in the backyard where he had buried them soon after her death and brought them to Boonyi lying wide awake in bed. “Here is everything that remains of her,” he told his daughter. “These jewels in this box and the greater jewel shining in this bed.” He left the box on the mattress, kissed her cheek and left. Boonyi remained wide awake, staring furiously at the nocturnal ceiling, willing the walls of the house to dissolve so that she could rise up into the night sky and escape. For at the very moment in which the village had decided to protect her and Shalimar the clown, to stand by them by forcing them to marry, thus condemning them to a lifetime jail sentence, Boonyi had been overwhelmed by claustrophobia and had seen clearly what she had been too deeply in love with Shalimar the clown to understand before, namely that this life, married life, village life, life with her father chattering away by the Muskadoon and with her friends dancing their gopi dance, life with all the people amongst whom she had spent every one of her days, was not remotely enough for her, didn’t begin to satisfy her hunger, her ravenous longing for something she could not yet name, and that as she grew older her life’s insufficiency would only grow harder and more painful to bear.

She knew then that she would do anything to get out of Pachigam, that she would spend every moment of every day waiting for her chance, and when it came she would not fail to pounce upon it, she would move faster than fortune, that elusive will-o’-the-wisp, because if you spotted a magic force-a fairy, a djinni, a piece of once-in-a-lifetime luck-and if you pinned it to the ground, it would grant you your heart’s desire; and she would make her wish, get me away from here, away from my father, away from this slow death and slower life, away from Shalimar the clown.

Two years later a gaunt man with a long straggling beard, beautiful pale eyes that seemed to look right through this world into the next one, and skin the color of rusting metal, suddenly showed up in Shirmal village wearing a long, threadbare woolen coat and a loosely tied black turban, with all his worldly goods tied up in a bundle like a common vagabond, and began preaching hellfire and damnation. He spoke the language harshly, like a foreigner, like someone unused to speaking at all. The words seemed to be torn from his throat like pieces of rough skin, causing him much physical pain. Shirmalis, like all the people of the valley, were unused to blood-and-thunder preachers of this type, but they gave him a hearing, because of the legends of the iron mullahs that were circulating in those days.

Kashmiris were fond of saints of all types. Some of these even had military associations, such as the Bibi Lalla or Lalla Maj, the daughter of the commander of the armies of Kashmir in the fourteenth century. Many were miracle workers. The story currently doing the rounds was both military and miraculous. The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley’s pristine beauty, like small mountain ranges made up of malfunctioning truck exhausts, jammed weaponry and broken tank treads. Then one day by the grace of God the junk began to stir. It came to life and took on human form. The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out into the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an entirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would hear a hollow metallic ring. Because they were made of armor they could not be shot but they were too heavy to swim and so if they fell into water they would drown. Their breath was hot and smoky, like burning rubber tires, or the exhalations of dragons. They were to be honored, feared and obeyed.

That day in Shirmal, Bombur Yambarzal, the vasta waza, was the only man who dared interrupt the mendicant preacher’s tirade. He confronted the strange faqir in the street and demanded to know his name and business. “My business is God’s business,” the fellow replied. In that first exchange the newcomer was reluctant to answer to any name at all. Eventually, under pressure from Bombur, he said, “Call me Bulbul Shah.” Bulbul Shah, as even Bombur knew, was a fabled saint who had come to Kashmir in the fourteenth century (the time of Bibi Lalla). He was a Sufi of the Suhrawardy order named Syed Sharafuddin Abdul Rehman, known as Bilal after the Prophet’s muezzin-an honorific title that got corrupted to Bulbul, or “nightingale.” His origins were disputed. He may have come from Tamkastan, in ancient Iran, or from Baghdad, or, most probably, from Turkistan; he may have been a refugee from the Mongols or he may not. He did, however, succeed in converting to Islam the Ladakhi usurper Rinchin or Renchan or Rencana, who had seized the throne of Kashmir in 1320, and began the process of conversions by which Kashmir became a Muslim state. At any rate, he had been dead for six hundred years, and certainly was not standing in front of Yambarzal now smelling like dragon’s breath.

“That’s nonsense,” Bombur told the wanderer in his customarily haughty manner. “Be off with you. We don’t want any trouble, and you, standing here in the middle of our little town and yelling your head off about the punishments of hell-you look like trouble to me.” “There are big infidels,” replied the stranger, calmly, “who deny God and his Prophet; and then there are little infidels like you, in whose belly the heat of faith has long since cooled, who mistake tolerance for virtue and harmony for peace. You must let me stay or kill me, and I leave the choice to you. But understand this: I am the bellows who will rekindle your fire.”

“Of course we won’t kill you,” said Yambarzal, discomfited. “What sort of people do you think we are?” “Weaklings,” the stranger answered in his alarming, rasping voice. Bombur flushed, and called out loudly to the growing crowd, “Give this beggar some food to eat and he’ll pretty soon be on his way.” This was a misjudgment. The supposed reincarnation of Bulbul Shah had come to stay, and many ears wanted to hear what he had to tell them, especially because his response to Yambarzal’s dismissive remark was to remove the turban from his head, clench his right hand and rap his knuckles smartly on the bald dome of his head. Everybody present heard the hard metallic clang and many women and several men dropped instantly to their knees.

After that there was a new power in Shirmal. The iron mullah was given shelter in one Shirmali home after another, and within a year the character of the village had changed, and the cooks in whose hearts new passions were blazing had grouped together to build the inspirational Bulbul a mosque. The iron mullah never spoke of his origins, never said in what seminary or at the feet of which master he had received religious instruction; indeed he never said a word about his life before the day he arrived in Shirmal to change everything forever. He even allowed the village children to rename him. The Kashmiri love of nicknames and penchant for good-natured honesty meant that the children had soon dubbed him Bulbul Fakh, “Bulbul bad-odor,” because of his sulfurous smell. So Maulana Bulbul Fakh he became, accepting the name without demur, as if he had just come into the world, simultaneously innocent and ferocious, created particularly for this village, and it was the villagers’ right to call him whatsoever they chose, like parents naming a newborn child.

Relations between Shirmal and Pachigam had been good ever since Bombur Yambarzal and Abdullah Noman had embraced each other on the night of the Shalimar Bagh débâcle. Their periodical fishing expeditions had started up again, and on those occasions when a client with sufficient resources called for the outsized version of the wazwaan, the “super-wazwaan” or Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, the two villages would pool their resources and cooperate. Abdullah even offered to send some of his people over to give the Shirmalis acting lessons if they wanted to continue to seek employment as purveyors of portable theater, but Yambarzal declined the offer, going so far as to make a self-deprecating remark. “We can’t pretend to be people we’re not,” he said, “so we’ll just stick with who we are.” There was something a little backhanded in this compliment but Abdullah decided not to notice, partly because it was a pleasant day and the fish were jumping, and partly because he had come to understand that Yambarzal was not much more highly strung or egotistical than many artists-including some of his own troupe of performers-but was unquestionably better at putting his foot in his mouth. Bombur was definitely mellowing, however. Lately he had even managed to praise “that new pandit waza of yours” for “having the taste in his hands,” which was a compliment so high that when Abdullah repeated it to Pyarelal the pandit could not prevent himself from blushing with pride.

The two villages were still rivals in the feasting game, so some tension remained, and sharp words would sometimes be said. Bombur Yambarzal in his worst moments still blamed Abdullah Noman for taking away some of the wazwaan income on which Shirmal’s economic well-being and his, Bombur’s, personal standing depended. “If it wasn’t for Pachigam and that Hindu cook,” the voice of evil whispered in his ear, “you’d be the undisputed vasta waza again and that would make you, not Bulbul Fakh, unchallenged top dog in Shirmal.” The overall decline in festive occasions had hit both Pachigam and Shirmal hard. Kashmiris felt a lot less like celebrating these days. There were weeks, even months when Abdullah Noman believed that the days of the bhand pather were numbered, that nobody wanted the traditional clown stories anymore, and that it would be impossible to compete with the vans traveling to even the most remote towns and villages with projectors, screens and reels of the latest motion pictures in the back. Bombur Yambarzal was similarly worried that the Kashmiri love of gourmandizing might not be transmitted to the next generation. But even though the gaps between performances were lengthening, bookings for Pachigam’s bhand plays did still arrive; and, as for mass-catering cookery, that was also still required. Even the Indian army could not prevent families from arranging marriages, and there was also the occasional love match, this being the 1960s, after all, and so, thanks to the optimistic insistence of the human race in general on getting hitched, even in bad times, and also to Kashmiris’ continuing expectation that weddings would be celebrated with week-long displays of gluttony on the grandest possible scale, nobody in the business of producing the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum was likely to starve just yet. However, eighteen months after the appearance of Bulbul Fakh the iron mullah, over seventeen years of more or less pleasant cooperation between Shirmal and Pachigam came to an abrupt and ugly end.

The summer of 1965 was a bad season. India and Pakistan had already engaged in battle, briefly, in the Rann of Kutch far away to the south, but now the talk was all about war over Kashmir. The rumble of convoys was heard, and the overhead roar of jets. Threats were made-force will be met with overwhelming force!-and counterthreats offered in return-aggression will not be countenanced or permitted to succeed! There was a hammering, a howling, a dark cloud in the air. Children in playgrounds postured, menaced, attacked, defended, fled. Fear was the year’s biggest crop. It hung from the fruit trees instead of apples and peaches, and bees made fear instead of honey. In the paddies, fear grew thickly beneath the surface of the shallow water, and in the saffron fields, fear like bindweed strangled the delicate plants. Fear clogged the rivers like water hyacinth, and sheep and goats in the high pastures died for no apparent reason. Work was scarce for actors and chefs alike. Terror was killing livestock, like a plague.

The new mosque built for Bulbul Fakh in Shirmal was a simple enough structure. The roof was wooden and the walls were of whitewashed earth. There were two simple windowless rooms at the back where he now lived. No provision had been made for ladies to attend prayers. The one striking feature stood in the mosque’s main hall, where, in Bulbul Fakh’s honor, a frightening-looking scrap-metal pulpit had been erected, complete with a bank of truck headlights (nonfunctional), bent fenders spearing upwards like horns, and a snarling radiator grille. The floors, more traditionally, were covered in numdah rugs. One Friday in late August the iron mullah climbed into his ominous pulpit and made a declaration of war of his own. “There is the enemy from outside,” he declared in his cold, rust-covered voice, “and then there is the enemy hiding in our midst.” The enemy within was Pachigam, a degenerate village where, in spite of a substantial Muslim majority among the residents, only one member of the panchayat was of the true faith, whereas three appointed elders-three!-were idol worshippers, and the fifth was a Jew. Furthermore, a Hindu had been named as chief waza of the wazwaan, and had started using curds in the food. And above all-O final, irrefutable proof of Pachigam’s moral perfidy!-there was its wholehearted support for the wanton, lascivious, whorish, debauched, ungodly, idolatrous, four-year-long liaison between Bhoomi Kaul better known as Boonyi and Noman Sher Noman alias Shalimar the clown.

Colonel Kachhwaha in Elasticnagar heard about the sermon soon enough. Such a sermon was worse than improper. It was seditious. Such a sermon called for the sternest response: an arrest, a jail sentence of seven years minimum. Colonel Kachhwaha had heard the absurd stories about the so-called iron mullahs and these stories needed to be knocked on the head and to the devil with hollow metallic sounds. This Fakh fellow was not miracle but man and needed to be taught a lesson and taken down a peg. This Fakh fellow was a pro-Pak communalist bastard and dared to preach about enemies within the state when he himself was the incarnation of that foe. Yes, strong measures were called for. Iron fist against iron priest. Quite so. And yet, and yet.

The Hammirdev Kachhwaha of August 1965 was a very different fellow from the tongue-tied ass who had allowed Boonyi Kaul to cheek him so outrageously four years earlier: on the one hand he was a seasoned commander, planning eagerly for battle, and on the other hand there were the deepening sensory and mnemonic disorders. His father had passed away so it was no longer incumbent upon the son to die to gain the parent’s approval. On the day in the fall of 1963 when he heard the news of Nagabhat Kachhwaha’s demise, Tortoise Colonel took off the golden bangles of humiliation, had his driver take him all the way to the Bund in Srinagar, stood with his back to the city’s great stores, Cheap John, Suffering Moses and Subhana the Worst, and hurled the gleaming circlets far out into the sluggish brown waters of the Jhelum. He felt like Sir Bedivere returning Excalibur to the lake, except that the bangles had been a symbol of weakness, not of strength. At any rate, in this case there was no arm clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, emerging to receive what was thrown. The bangles scattered noiselessly on the sluggish surface of the river and quickly sank. Tall poplars faintly swayed, and reddened autumnal chinar leaves fluttered a farewell. Colonel Kachhwaha saluted briefly and crisply, performed a smart about-face and marched forward into a newer, more confident future.

The number of men under his command had grown. Elasticnagar had stretched so wide that people were beginning to call it Broken-Elasticnagar. The war drums were beating and the troop transport aircraft were flying a nonstop relay service and the eager glitter-eyed jawans were pouring in. Kachhwaha was one of the chief supervisors of the major statewide operation that was sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the front lines. Now he had received his own marching orders. Elasticnagar’s boss was going to war. He was going to smash the enemy with maximum force, and survival was permissible. Returning as a war hero was permissible. Returning as a decorated war hero and enjoying the attentions of excited young women back home was not only permissible but actively encouraged. Colonel Kachhwaha in jodhpurs smacked a riding crop against his thigh in anticipation. Since his father’s death he had begun to dream of going home in triumph and having the pick of the women, the beautiful Rajput women of the kohl-rimmed flashing eyes, the gorgeous Jodhpuri women waiting in their mirrored halls, opening wide their arms for their conquering local hero, dressed in clouds of organza and lace. These women were women of his own kind, desert roses, women who appreciated a warrior, women quite unlike the foolish girls of Kashmir. Unlike, for example, Boonyi. He did not permit himself these days to think about Boonyi Kaul even though reports reached his ears of her extraordinary, blossoming beauty. At eighteen she would be in full flower, she would have entered into the first flush of womanhood, but he would not allow himself to consider that. His restraint was laudable. He congratulated himself upon it. In spite of many provocations he had not persecuted her village of bohemians and suspicious types, in spite of her insult to his honor. He would not wish it said of him that H. S. Kachhwaha pursued vendettas while on duty, that his conduct had been in even the smallest way unbecoming. He had shown himself to be above such matters. Discipline was all. Dignity was all. Boonyi was nothing to him, nothing compared to the waiting Rajput girls, even though he did not know their names, had not seen their faces, met them only in his dreams. These dream women were the ones he wanted. Any one of them was worth ten Boonyis.

He was a soldier and so he tried to compartmentalize, to put his disorders in a box in the corner of the room and to go on functioning normally. When they spilled out it was regrettable but his troops had grown accustomed to the jumbling of his senses, the strangeness of his descriptions. Nowadays his fellow officers reacted normally when told that they had rigid vermilion voices and the soldiers on parade kept silent when he congratulated them on smelling like jasmine blossoms and the cooks at Elasticnagar knew just to nod wisely when he told them that the lamb korma wasn’t pointy enough. The condition could be said to be under control. The problem of memory, of excessive remembering, was not. The accumulation grew every day more oppressive and it became harder and harder to sleep. It was impossible to forget the cockroach that had crawled out of the shower drain six months earlier, or a bad dream, or any one of the thousands of hands of cards he had played in his military life. The weather of the past piled up in him, names and faces jostled for space, and the overload of unforgotten words and deeds left him wide-eyed with horror. Time was supposed to soothe all pain wasn’t it but the knife of his late father’s disapproval refused to grow dull with the passing months. He now believed that the two problems, the two bugs in the system, were somehow connected. He did not seek medical help for his troubles because any diagnosis of mental problems, however slight, would certainly be a reason for removing him from his command. He could not return home as a head case. There would be no dream girls then. And memory was not madness was it, not even when the remembered past piled up so high inside you that you feared the files of your yesterdays would become visible in the whites of your eyes. Memory was a gift. It was a positive. It was a professional resource.

And so, to return to the matter at hand, this mullah, this Bulbul Fakh, was quite unacceptably denouncing a neighboring village for its tolerance, was stirring things up, inciting violence and advocating a firebrand Islam that was positively un-Kashmiri and un-Indian as well. However, he made a good point when he condemned the hussy and her fancy boy, that couple who had chosen to fly in the face of every decent social and religious convention and who had been defended for it by people who should have known better, people among whom a number of suspected subversives probably lurked. These liberation-front-wallahs were nationalist subversives rather than religious fanatics and between them and the iron mullahs there was little love lost. So why not just stand back, eh? Resources were not infinite and time was pressing and one could not be everywhere and there was a war to fight. It was not so much a matter of turning a blind eye as of the proper prioritizing of goals. Why not let two kinds of subversive wipe each other out, and allow the young whore to reap the whirlwind for her misdeeds? If some sort of cleanup operation was required later, the forces left behind to police the district would be fully capable of handling that situation. Maulana Bulbul Fakh’s turn would come. Yes, yes. The thing to do was to do nothing. That was the statesmanlike choice.

Colonel Hammirdev Kachhwaha in his office put his legs up on his desk, closed his eyes and surrendered for a time to the internal whirl of the system, submerging his consciousness in the ocean of the senses, listening like a boy with a shell at his ear to the unceasing babble of the past.

It was almost eighteen years since the death of the Gujar prophetess Nazarébaddoor, but that didn’t stop her from intervening in local affairs when the need arose. Numerous residents of the region reported her visits, which usually took place in dreams, and whose purpose was usually to warn (“Don’t marry your daughter to that boy-his cousins in the north are dwarfs,” she advised a drowsy goat farmer on a hillside near Anantnag) or to commend (“Snap up that girl for your boy before someone else does, because her firstborn is destined to be a great saint,” she commanded a boatman sleeping in his shikara on Lake Gandarbal, causing him to jerk awake and fall out of the boat). In death Nazarébaddoor appeared more cheerful than she had been in the last days of her life, and she admitted to several of those who had seen her in visions that death suited her.

“The hours are better,” she said, “and you don’t have to worry about the animals.” When she appeared to Bombur Yambarzal, however, all her old gloominess was back. The bulbous waza awoke in the dark to see her one-toothed face leaning down close to his, and he felt the cold breath of the dead upon his cheek. “If you don’t do something double-quick,” she said, “Bulbul Fakh’s civil war will burn both your villages down.” Then she drew back and became one with the darkness and he awoke all over again, alone in his bed and sweating. A few seconds later he heard the Maulana’s voice raised in the azaan. The dawn call to prayer was also, on this occasion, a call to arms.

Wherever information is tightly controlled, rumor becomes a valued alternative source of news, and according to rumor the whole tribe of iron mullahs was summoning Kashmiris to arms that day, calling upon them to arise and rid the land of the alien Indian troops and of the pandits too. But Bombur Yambarzal had not heard any such rumor. For him this was not a national but a personal matter. He rolled out of bed and ran, wobbling, heaving, panting and sweating, all the way to the main village kitchens where the wazwaan was prepared. There he girded himself for battle. Once he was ready, and had caught his breath, he walked much more deliberately down the main street of Shirmal toward the mosque at the far end of the village, in a manner that might almost have been called kingly except that this was a king with kitchen knives and cleavers stuck in his belt, with kitchen kettles and cookpots strung around his body in place of armor, and with a big kitchen saucepan on his head. The fresh blood of slaughtered chickens dripped from him, he had smeared it over his hands and face and over all the kitchen equipment too, and had brought along a small leather wineskin full of even more blood, to make sure the effect wasn’t lost ahead of time. He looked simultaneously horrifying and ridiculous, and the village’s women and children, who had been waiting anxiously for the men to emerge from the mosque and announce their decision regarding the attack on Pachigam, began to laugh and cry at the same time, not knowing which was the more appropriate response. Bombur Yambarzal stiffened his back and raised his head up proudly and led a parade of astonished women and children to the door of the mosque.

When he reached it he drew from his belt, as if they were swords, a pair of great metal spoons, and began to bang on his armor, making a noise that would have raised the dead had the dead not preferred to remain peacefully underground and ignore the appalling racket. The men of Shirmal poured out of the mosque with zealotry in their eyes, and behind them came a considerably irritated Maulana Bulbul Fakh. “Look at me,” shouted the waza Bombur Yambarzal. “This thickheaded, comical, bloodthirsty moron is what you have all decided to become.”

For years afterwards the men of Shirmal spoke of Bombur Yambarzal’s great, and unusually selfless, feat. By turning their familiar world of pots and pans into an effigy of horror, by sacrificing his own much-treasured dignity and pride, by insulting them with the weapon of himself, he awoke them from their strange waking sleep, the powerful hypnotic spell woven by the harsh seductive tongue of Bulbul Fakh. No, they would not arise against their neighbors, they told him, they would remain themselves, and the only creatures they would slaughter would be animals meant for tables at which people were celebrating moments of private joy. When Bulbul Fakh saw that he had lost the day, that his knifelike clarity had been blunted by Yambarzal’s obfuscating creation of a comic grotesque, he went without a word into his residential quarters and came out with nothing more than the ragged bundle he had carried on the day of his arrival in Shirmal. “You blockheads aren’t ready for me yet,” he said. “But the war that is beginning will be long, and necessary, too, because its enemy is godlessness, immorality and evil, and thanks to the corrupt heart of man in general and unbelieving kafirs in particular that is a war that cannot easily be brought to an end. When your hearts are open to me, at that time I may return.”

Bombur Yambarzal had never married and now that he was past fifty he no longer expected to find a bride. But in the eyes and faces of some of the matrons who watched him as he marched clanging and dripping back to the kitchens to take off the silly armor of righteousness and peace, he saw something he had not seen in women’s eyes and faces before: that is to say, affection. The widow of a recently deceased sub-waza, Hasina Karim, known as Harud, “Autumn,” on account of her red-tinged hair, a handsome woman with two grown sons to take care of her material needs but nobody to fill her bed, accompanied him without being asked and helped him take off his pots and pans and wash the chicken blood from his skin. When they were done Bombur Yambarzal attempted for the first time in his life to flatter a member of the opposite sex. “Harud is the wrong name for you,” he told her, meaning to continue, “They should call you Sonth, because you look as young as the Spring.” But anxiety made his mouth foolish, and sonth, to his great discomfiture, came out as sonf. “Because you look as young as aniseed” was an idiotic remark, obviously. Embarrassed, he flushed deeply. “I like it that you’re clumsy with compliments,” she consoled him, seriously, touching his hand. “I never trusted men who were too smooth with words.”

In spite of the waza’s boldness, there was a tragedy that day. Unknown to everyone except Bulbul Fakh, three young men, the sparsely bearded Gegroo brothers, Aurangzeb, Alauddin and Abulkalam, a trio of disaffected, layabout young rodents whom Bombur did not trust to do much at banquets except wash the dishes, had slipped out of the mosque the back way and headed for Pachigam, looking for trouble, and giving themselves courage from a bottle of dark rum of which Bulbul Fakh would most certainly have disapproved. Much later that night, under cover of darkness, they slipped back into Shirmal and locked themselves into the empty mosque. They were just in time. Before dawn broke, the immense figure of Big Man Misri the carpenter arrived in Shirmal on horseback, with axes in his belt and rifles slung across his shoulders. “Gegroos!” he yelled as he galloped into town, rousing all those villagers who were still asleep. “You have met my daughter, and now you must meet your God.”

Zoon Misri had been raped. She had been on her way to Khelmarg to gather flowers when it happened. She had been dragged off the hill path into the forest and held down on the rough ground and brutalized, and even though a sack had been thrown over her head she had easily identified her three assailants by their whiny, nasal Gegroo voices, which were unmistakable even though the brothers were horribly drunk. “If we can’t get the blasphemous whore herself,” she heard Aurangzeb say, “then her prettiest friend will do fine.” “Too fine,” Alauddin had assented, “she was always too stuck up to look back at the likes of us,” and the youngest, Abulkalam, concluded, “Well, Zoon, we see you now.” After the rape her assailants ran off giggling. She found the strength to walk, bruised and torn, down the hill to Pachigam, where in a frighteningly level voice she confided all the details of the assault to Boonyi, Gonwati and Himal, not daring to tell her father (her mother being some years deceased), and even though they comforted her and bathed her and told her she had no reason to be ashamed she said she could not imagine remaining alive with them inside her, with the memory of their intrusion, with their seed. Boonyi, dreadfully weighed down by the feeling that Zoon had suffered in her stead, that the wounds inflicted on her friend had been meant for herself, was the one who told the carpenter the news. Big Man Misri did little to relieve her of this burden. As he saddled his horse he told her, “The three of you keep her alive. It’s up to you. Get it? If she dies I’ll be asking you why.” Then he vanished into the night as fast as his horse could take him.

When the Gegroo brothers sobered up they realized that as a consequence of their stupidity their lives had suddenly become worthless, and their only hope was to remain within the sanctuary of the mosque until the army or the police showed up and restrained Zoon’s father from crucifying them, chopping them to bits or whatever else he might be planning by way of revenge. Big Man Misri did indeed have a number of vile fates in mind for each of the three Gegroos, and when he informed the gathering Shirmalis of the nature of the ratty brothers’ crime nobody had the heart to dissuade him. However, the consensus of opinion was that the carpenter should not violate the sanctity of the mosque. Big Man Misri tethered his horse to a tree and shouted to the Gegroo brothers, “I’ll be waiting here whenever you decide to come out, even if it takes me twenty years.”

Aurangzeb, the eldest Gegroo, attempted bravado. “It’s three to one and we’re heavily armed,” he yelled back. “You’d better look out for yourself.” “If you come out one at a time,” mused Big Man Misri, “I’ll slice you like kababs. If you all come out I’ll certainly get two of you before you get me, and you don’t know which two that will be.” “Besides,” added Bombur Yambarzal, angrily, “it isn’t three against one. It’s you three little shits against every able-bodied man in these parts.” The men of Shirmal had ringed the building to make escape impossible. After a few hours a jeepload of military police did arrive and warned all present that violence would not be tolerated, a warning which everyone ignored. “By the way,” Bombur shouted to the terrified Gegroos, “no food or drink will be brought to you. So let’s see how long you last.”

The sky screamed as invisible warplanes scarred it with savage white lines. There were battles beyond the border near Uri and Chhamb, where Colonel Kachhwaha, unaware of the siege of Shirmal, was earning his battle spurs. The war between India and Pakistan had begun. It lasted for twenty-five days. During every minute of that time, except for the small intervals required for him to perform his natural functions behind a nearby bush, Big Man Misri like a rock squatted outside the door of Bulbul Fakh’s mosque with his saddle by his side. Food was brought to him from the kitchens of Shirmal, and a kindly young village syce stabled, fed and exercised his horse. A steady stream of visitors from Pachigam brought him news of Zoon, who was living with the Nomans, acting quiet and docile, and even smiling once or twice. The men of Shirmal took turns sitting with Big Man, and the police, too, worked shifts. And gradually the voices emanating from inside the mosque fell silent. The Gegroos had threatened, complained, cajoled, wept, ranted, quarreled, apologized and begged, but they had not emerged.

After twenty-five days the sky stopped shrieking overhead. “Peace,” said Bombur Yambarzal to Hasina Karim, and a bloodstained peace it was; the silent sky over Shirmal felt like death. “Are they still alive? What do you think?” Bombur asked Big Man Misri, and the carpenter came slowly to his feet, swaying with exhaustion, like a soldier coming home from a war. “They always were gutless cutlets,” he said, knowing he was speaking the Gegroos’ epitaph. “They died like rats in a trap.”

Big Man made sure that all exits from the windowless structure were securely padlocked before he gave up his vigil, and he took away the keys. The military police-that is, the weary duty officer in his dusty Jeep-protested without much enthusiasm. “Go home now,” Big Man told him. “No crime has been committed by any living person.” “And if they are alive?” the officer asked. “Then,” answered Big Man, “all they need to do is knock.” But no such knock was ever heard. The little mosque at the end of the village remained padlocked and unused. The great events of a single powerful day, the defeat of Bulbul Fakh by Bombur Yambarzal and his saucepans, and the crime of the Gegroo brothers and their decision to immure themselves in this building until they died, had somehow pushed the mosque out of the villagers’ consciousness, as if it had literally moved farther away from their homes. Wilderness reclaimed it. Trees marched out of the wood and captured it; creepers and thornbushes bound and guarded it. Like a castle under a fairy-tale curse it vanished from sight and eventually the wooden roof rotted and caved in, and the bolts on the doors rusted, the cheap padlocks fell away, and the memory of the Gegroo brothers was also eaten up, leaving behind a village superstition so powerful that nobody ever set foot in the place of their death by cowardice and starvation; and that was how things remained until the day of the dead brothers’ return. That day, however, would not come for more than twenty years, and in the meanwhile Zoon Misri lived quietly on, and was slowly nursed back to something like her former self, though a certain lightness of spirit had been lost forever. No man ever came to ask for her hand in marriage. That was how things were. Nobody could defend it but nobody could change it either. And nobody understood that the only thing keeping Zoon alive was the disappearance of the Gegroo brothers into their vanished tomb, which permitted her to agree with herself that they had never existed and the thing that they had done had never been done. The day of their return from the dead would be the last of her life.

When he returned to Elasticnagar from the war of 1965, Colonel Hammirdev Kachhwaha was once more a changed man. His father’s death had briefly liberated him from the jail of unfulfilled expectations, but the experience of war had imprisoned him again, and this was a dungeon from which he would never escape. Military action had been a disappointment to Tortoise Colonel. War, whose highest purpose was the creation of clarity where none existed, the noble clarity of victory and defeat, had solved nothing. There had been little glory and much wasteful dying. Neither side had made good its claim to this land, or gained more than the tiniest patches of territory. The coming of peace left things in worse shape than they had been before the twenty-five days of battle. This was peace with more hatred, peace with greater embitterment, peace with deeper mutual contempt. For Colonel Kachhwaha, however, there was no peace, because the war raged on interminably in his memory, every moment of it replaying itself at every moment of every day, the livid green dampness of the trenches, the choking golf ball of fear in the throat, the shell bursts like lethal palm fronds in the sky, the sour grimaces of passing bullets, the iridescence of wounds and mutilations, the incandescence of death. Back in Elasticnagar, he immured himself in his quarters and pulled down the blinds and still the war would not cease, the intense slow motion of hand-to-hand combat in which the glassy fragility of his own pathetic, odorous life might be shattered at any moment by this bayonet that knife this grenade that screaming black-greased face, where this twist of the ankle that swivel of the hip this duck of the head that jab of the arm could summon up the darkness welling out of the cracks in the jagged earth, the darkness licking at the bodies of the soldiers, licking away their strength their legs their hope their legs their dissolving colorless legs. He had to sit in this darkness, his own soft darkness, so that other darkness, the hard darkness, would not come. To sit in soft darkness and forever be at war.

His soldiers were on edge. They were counting their dead and nursing their wounded and the high voltage of war continued to flow in their veins. They had fought a war for people who were ungrateful, who didn’t deserve to be fought for. A fantasy of the enemy was spreading through the majority community in the valley, a dream of an idyllic life on the other side, in the religious state. You could not explain things to these people. You could not explain the measures taken for their protection in peace as well as war. For example it was not permitted for non-Kashmiris to own land here. This enlightened law did not exist on the other side where many people were settling whose culture was not Kashmiri culture. Wild mountain men, fanatics, aliens were coming in there. The laws here protected the citizenry against such elements but the citizenry remained ungrateful, continued to call for self-determination. Sheikh Abdullah was saying it again. Kashmir for the Kashmiris. The idiotic slogan was repeated everywhere, painted on walls, pasted on telegraph poles, hanging in the air like smoke. Maybe the enemy had the right idea. The population was unsuitable. A new population should be found. The valley should be emptied of all these people and refilled with others, who would be grateful to be here, grateful to be defended. Colonel Kachhwaha closed his eyes. The war exploded on the screen of his eyelids, its shapes coalescing and blurring, its colors darkening, until the world was black on black.

Acting on his instructions the army began to make routine sweeps through the villages. Even in routine sweeps, it had to be emphasized, accidents could happen. And, in fact, the level of violence accidentally rose. There was talk of accidental shootings, accidental beatings, the accidental use of cattle prods, one or two accidental deaths. In Shirmal where Bulbul Fakh had been based everyone was suspect. There were long interrogations and these sessions were not marked by the gentleness of the questioners. There were problems in Pachigam as well, even though the presence of three pandits in the panchayat counted for something. Abdullah Noman, who for years had held the village in the palm of his hand, found himself in the unfamiliar position of having to depend on Pyarelal Kaul, Big Man Misri and Shivshankar Sharga to put in a good word for his family and himself. The Nomans were on a list. The shameless intermarriage of Abdullah’s youngest son and Boonyi Kaul was frowned on in the highest circles. Moreover, Anees Noman had disappeared. Firdaus told the soldiers he was visiting relatives in the north but this explanation was not believed. Anees Noman’s name was on another list.

Boonyi Kaul Noman and Shalimar the clown were living with Abdullah and Firdaus. On the night that Anees left home the brothers quarreled badly. At the end of the argument Anees said, “The trouble with you is this marriage of yours that stops you from seeing straight.” Boonyi and Shalimar the clown had no children because Boonyi claimed to be too young to start a family. Anees in a parting shot did not fail to point out that this was suspicious behavior on her part. Then, knowing he had said too much, he opened the back door and disappeared into the darkness. “He should stay out there,” said Shalimar the clown to nobody in particular. “It isn’t safe for him in here anymore.” Later that night when everyone was in bed Abdullah and Firdaus Noman spoke to each other of disillusion. Up to now they had tried to believe that their beloved Kashmiriness was best served by some kind of association with India, because India was where the churning happened, the commingling of this and that, Hindu and Muslim, many gods and one. But now the mood had changed. The union of Boonyi their friend’s daughter and Shalimar the clown their own sweet boy, which they had held up to the world as a sign, felt like a falsely optimistic symbol, and their fierce defense of that union was beginning to look like some kind of futile last stand. “Things are growing apart,” Firdaus said. “Now I know why Nazarébaddoor feared the future and didn’t want to live to see it come.” Unsleeping, they stared at the ceiling and feared for their sons.

On the same night, at the other end of the village, in his empty house by the Muskadoon, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul also lay awake, also grieving, also afraid. But when the thunderbolt hit Pachigam, it wasn’t Hindu-Muslim trouble that brewed up the storm. The problem wasn’t caused by the creeping madness of Tortoise Colonel or the latent danger of the iron mullah or the blindness of India or the accidental sweeps or the crescent shadow of Pakistan. Winter was approaching when it happened. The trees were almost bare and the nights were drawing in and a cold wind blew. Many of the village women were beginning their winter work, the painstaking embroidery of shawls. Then, just as the bhands of Pachigam were packing away their props and costumes until the spring, an envoy from the government in Srinagar came to inform them that there would be an extra command performance that year.

The American ambassador, Mr. Maximilian Ophuls, was coming to Kashmir. He was a scholarly gentleman who evidently took a strong interest in all aspects of Kashmiri culture. He and his entourage would be staying at the government guesthouse at Dachigam, a spacious lodge set below a steep hill where the barasingha deer walked like kings. (But at this time of year the stags would have lost their mighty horn racks and would be girding themselves for the winter like everyone else.) Ambassador Ophuls’s personal aide, Mr. Edgar Wood, had specially asked for an evening of festivities during which the Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum would be eaten, a santoor player from Srinagar would play traditional Kashmiri music, leading local authors would recite passages from the mystical poetry of Lal Ded as well as their own contemporary verses, an oral storyteller would tell tales selected from the gigantic Kashmiri story-compendium Katha-sarit-sagar, which made the Arabian Nights look like a novella; and, by particular request, the famous bhands of Pachigam would perform. The war had hit Pachigam’s earnings badly and this late commission was a bonanza. Abdullah decided to offer a selection of scenes from the company’s full repertoire, including, fatefully, the dance number from Anarkali, a new play devised by the group after the immense success of the film Mughal-e-Azam, which told the story of the love of Crown Prince Salim and the lowly but irresistible nautch girl Anarkali. Prince Salim was a popular figure in Kashmir, not because he was the son of the Grand Mughal, Akbar the Great, but because once he ascended to the throne as the emperor Jehangir he made it plain that Kashmir was his second Anarkali, his other great love. The role of the beautiful Anarkali would be played as usual by the best dancer in Pachigam, Boonyi Kaul Noman. Once Abdullah Noman had announced this decision, the die was cast. The invisible planets trained their full attention on Pachigam. The approaching scandal began to hiss and whisper in the chinar trees like a monsoon wind. But the leaves of the trees were still.

When Boonyi met Maximilian Ophuls’s eyes for the first time he was applauding wildly and looking piercingly at her while she took her bow, as if he wanted to see right into her soul. At that moment she knew she had found what she had been waiting for. I swore I’d grab my chance when it showed up, she told herself, and here it is, staring me in the face and banging its hands together like a fool.