Shalimar the Clown

6

The air was full of frozen particles of itself. Each breath she took scraped at her windpipe before melting, but to Boonyi standing on the Elasticnagar military airstrip the inhaled sharpness was the sweet sting of home. “O icy beauty,” she lamented silently, “how could I ever have left you?” She shivered, and the shiver was the feeling of her self returning to herself. Since the day she left, her mother had not visited her in her dreams. “Even a ghost is more sensible than I,” she thought, almost wanting to lie down on the tarmac and go to sleep then and there to renew her acquaintance with Pamposh. “My mother, too, is waiting for me at home.” The chartered Fokker Friendship, named Yamuna after the great river, had been granted special permission to land here, away from prying eyes. Peggy-Mata had many friends. Boonyi had boarded the plane in a discreet corner of the general aviation sector at Palam, partially sedated to calm her hysteria, but as the small plane flew north the emptiness in her arms began to feel like an intolerable burden. The weight of her missing child, the cradled void, was too much to bear. Yet it had to be borne.

The plane reached the Pir Panjal and went into an upward spiral to gain height; then, without warning, it dropped two thousand feet down a hole in the air, and she cried out in terror. Twice it spiraled upwards, twice it fell, twice she shrieked. The Pir Panjal was the gateway to the valley and Boonyi felt as if the gate had been locked against her. The weight of the absent girl had grown so great that the plane could not carry it over the peaks. The mountains were pushing her back, telling her to take her mighty burden and begone. But they would not succeed. She had abandoned her baby so that she could go home and she would not permit the mountains to stand in her way. On the plane’s third attempt she summoned all her remaining will and let the phantom baby go. There was no baby, she told herself. She had no baby daughter. She was returning home to her husband and there was no leaden void being carried in her cradling arms. She felt the weight in her lap lessen, felt the aircraft rise. She threw away her lost baby and forced the plane up and over. This time the spiral did not end in a fall and the mountains passed beneath the belly of the little plane, wrapped in a storm. Then the valley rolled out below her wearing its winter ermine. As the plane descended toward Elasticnagar she thought she saw Pachigam, and all the villagers were standing in the main street, looking up at the plane and cheering.

The Yamuna had no meal service and the small packed lunch that had been among Peggy Ophuls’s farewell gifts was long gone. There was no cabinet of pharmaceuticals aboard and her supplier was gone as well. She felt hungry and crazy. There was no tobacco to chew. She had a craving for offal. There was a scream in her blood. Mighty invisible forces were pulling at her. The shadow planets were at war. Of course the villagers had not been cheering her homecoming. That was a delusion. She was vulnerable to delusions of all kinds, she knew that. Her dependencies were chastising her. She did not know if she could live without the things she needed, the bottled and the cooked. She did not know if she could live without her little girl. When she thought this, the weight crashed back into her lap and the plane’s trajectory sagged downwards sharply. She closed her eyes and willed her child away. There was no Kashmira. There was only Kashmir.

“Madam, please to sit.” A young soldier with a tumble-tongued Southern name and a smile full of big innocent teeth was waiting for her outside the small wooden arrivals building, seated behind the steering wheel of an army Jeep. Boonyi was wearing the dark phiran and blue head scarf that Peggy Ophuls had given her the day before. The shahtush shawl was folded away in her bag. She did not wish to seem ostentatious. She had asked that a kangri of hot coals be ready for her and the driver had it waiting. As she felt the familiar heat against her skin her spirits rose. The world was regaining its ordained shape. Her southern adventure was fading away. Perhaps it had never happened. Perhaps her innocence was still unstained. No, it had happened, but perhaps, at least, the stains would wash out easily, leaving no permanent mark. Boonyi Kaul was back. She had exchanged her baby for a phiran, a head scarf, a shawl, a packed lunch, a Fokker Friendship flight and a Jeep ride. When she thought this, the earth’s gravitational force suddenly increased and she was unable to move. She gritted her teeth. There is no Kashmira. “Help me,” she said, and with her hand in the driver’s she hauled herself painfully into the Jeep’s passenger seat. The driver was courteous and spoke to her as if she were a visiting dignitary but she was not delusional enough to think of herself in that way.

She had no plan except to beg for mercy. She would go to her village, leaving behind the world of VIP treatment to which she had briefly had access, and she would throw her bloated self at her husband’s feet in the snow. At her husband’s feet and at his parents’ feet and at her own father’s feet as well and she would beg until they raised her up and kissed her, until the world went back to being what it had been and the only remaining mark of her transgression was the imprint of her prostrate body in the omnipresent whiteness, a shadow-self which would be obliterated soon enough, by the next snowfall or by a sudden thaw. How could they not take her back when she had sacrificed her own daughter just to have a chance of being accepted? When she thought this, the immense weight, the growing weight of the lost child, thudded into her at once, and the Jeep lurched to the left and stalled. The driver frowned in puzzlement, stared at her briefly, apologized and restarted the car. Boonyi repeated her magic mantra to herself, over and over, There is no Kashmira, there is only Kashmir. The Jeep started up and moved forward.

The army was everywhere. She had been allowed to use military facilities so that she could slip out of one sphere of the world into another, so that she could leave behind the public and return to the private. There was reason to doubt whether such slippage was possible anymore. As she drove out through the gates of Elasticnagar and was caressed by the shadows of the poplars and chinars lining the road that would take her through Gargamal and Grangussia to Pachigam, she remembered an argument between Anees Noman and his brothers that began when her bomb-making brother-in-law started insisting over dinner that the boundary, the cease-fire line, between private life and the public arena no longer existed. “Everything is politics now,” he said. “The old comfortable days are gone.” His brothers began to tease him. “How about soup?” asked Hameed the firstborn twin. “Is your mother’s chicken broth politicized too?” And his secondborn brother Mahmood added, thoughtfully, “There is also the question of hair. The two of us are big hairy bastards who ought to shave twice a day, but you, Anees, are as smooth as a girl and the razor hardly needs to touch your cheek. So is hairiness conservative or radical? What do the revolutionaries say?”

“You’ll see,” Anees yelled, pounding the dinner table, falling into his brothers’ trap and sounding ridiculous, “One day even beards will be the subject of ideological disputes.” Hameed Noman twisted his lips judiciously. “Okay, okay,” he conceded. “Fair enough. But they better leave my chicken soup alone.”

Boonyi on the highway home saw Abdullah Noman’s house in her mind’s eye, illuminated by memory’s golden glow. The patriarch sat at the head of the family table, lips pursed, staring into the distance with an amused twinkle in his eye, pretending to have higher things on his mind while his sons jostled and squabbled and lazy-eyed Firdaus banged a plate of food down in front of him as if challenging him to a duel. Yellow flame flickered in iron lanterns, and drums and santoors and pipes were stacked in a corner near a rack of regal costumery and a hook from which half a dozen painted masks hung down. The twins’ loud knockabout act went on as usual and Anees of the dolorous countenance was irritated by it. This irritation, too, was customary. The family was eternal and would not, must not change, and by returning to it she would put it all back the way it had been, she would even heal the quarrel between Anees and her husband Shalimar the clown, and at Firdaus’s table they would enjoy the happy ending of such meals together, blessed by the boundless gastronomic largesse of the sarpanch’s wife.

As they neared Pachigam it began to snow. “Set me down at the bus stop,” she told the driver. “Weather is inclement, madam,” he replied. “Better to drop you at your homestead.” But she was adamant. The bus stop was the place from which she had departed this life and it was at the bus stop that she would return to it. “Okay, madam,” the driver said doubtfully. “Will I wait until they come for you?” But she did not want to be seen with an army man. It was snowing heavily as they turned the last corner. This was the bus stop. There was no sign but that didn’t matter. Here was the produce store where her father and the sarpanch sold fruit from their orchards. It was boarded up against the blizzard. “Please, madam,” the driver said. “I am fearful for your good health.” She still knew how to look at a greenhorn with a hardy village woman’s contempt. “The cold is warmth to us,” she said. “The snow to me is like a hot shower would be to you. No cause for your concern.”

So she was standing by herself in the snowstorm when the villagers first saw her, standing still at the bus stop with snow on her shoulders and snowdrifts pushing up against her legs. The sight of a dead woman who had somehow materialized at the edge of town with her bedroll and bag beside her brought the whole village out of doors, snow or no snow. Everyone was mesmerized by the sight of this stationary corpse that looked as if it had done nothing in the afterlife but eat. It looked like a snow-woman such as a child might build, a snow-woman with the body of the deceased Boonyi inside it. Nobody spoke to the snow-woman. It could be bad luck to speak to a ghost. But the whole village also knew that somebody would have to do some talking sooner or later, because Boonyi didn’t know she was dead.

She saw them all through the snowstorm, circling her like crows, keeping their distance. She called out but nobody called back. One by one they approached her-Himal, Gonwati and Shivshankar Sharga, Big Man Misri, Habib Joo-and one by one they receded. Then the principal actors made their entrance, snow crusting their eyebrows and beards. Hameed and Mahmood Noman came arm in arm, giggling peculiarly, as if she had done something odd by returning, something that wasn’t really funny. And this was Firdaus Noman, her mother’s friend, Firdaus stretching out a hand toward her, then dropping it and running away. Boonyi thought she understood. She was being punished. She was being judged in dumb show and ritually ostracized. But surely they could not go on this way, not in this blizzard? Surely someone would take her in and scold her and give her a hug and something hot to drink?

When her sweet father came hopping awkwardly through the snow she was sure the spell would break. But he stopped six feet away and wept, the tears freezing on his cheeks. She was his only child. He had loved her more than his own life, until she died. If he did not speak now her dead gaze would curse him. A rejected child can place the evil eye upon the parent who spurns her, even after death. In a low voice, a voice she could barely hear over the whistling wind, he murmured superstitious words: nazaré-bad-door. Evil eye, begone. Then, slowly, as if struggling against chains, his feet took small steps away from her, and the snow clouded her sight, and he was gone. In his place, finally, was her husband, Noman Noman, who was Shalimar the clown. What was that look on his face? She had never seen such a look before. Humbly she told herself that it was the look she deserved, in which hatred and contempt mingled with grief and hurt and a terrible, broken love. And something else, something she didn’t understand. His father the sarpanch was with him, holding him by the arm. His father who held them all in the palm of his hand. Abdullah Noman seemed to be restraining his son, pulling him away from her. And there too was her own father again, putting himself between her husband and herself. Why would he do that. Shalimar the clown was holding something in his fist. Maybe it was a knife, held in the assassin’s grip, the reversed blade concealed up the sleeve of his chugha with the haft clenched in his hand. Maybe she would die here beneath her husband’s blade. She was ready to die. She fell to her knees in the snow, arms outspread, and waited.

Zoon Misri the carpenter’s daughter knelt down beside her. Zoon’s olive-skinned Egyptian beauty seemed to belong to another place and time, a hot dry world of deserts and snakes in fig baskets and huge lions with the heads of kings. In happier times she had accentuated her exotic looks with dramatically upturned kohl-lines at the corners of her eyes, but since the assault of the Gegroo brothers she wore no embellishments. She had grown thinner; her vivid eyes were two burning lamps set in a face of polished bone. “A lot of people around these parts think of me as a living ghost,” she said distantly, not looking at Boonyi. “Those people think that when a thing happens to a woman like the thing that happened to me, the woman should go quietly into the trees and hang herself.” She smiled faintly. “I didn’t do that.” Boonyi’s spirits lifted slightly. Her friend was with her. Loyalty still existed in the world, even for a traitor such as herself. By her deeds, by sorrowful repentance and right action, she would earn the loyalty of the others again. Zoon’s friendship was all the start she needed. She stretched out a hand. Zoon made a tiny negative movement of the head. “It’s because I have been treated like this that I can speak,” she said. “The living dead can speak to each other, can’t they? Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.” Now for the first time she looked Boonyi in the eye. “They killed you,” she said. “After what you did. They said you were dead to them and they announced your death and they made us all swear an oath. They went to the authorities and filled out a form and got it signed and stamped and so you are dead, and you cannot return. You have been mourned properly for forty days with all correct religious and social observances and so of course you cannot just pop up again. You are a dead person. Your life has been ended. It’s official.” Zoon was controlling the muscles of her face, and her voice, as well, was strictly disciplined. “Who killed me,” Boonyi asked. “Tell me their names.” Zoon’s silence went on so long that Boonyi thought she was refusing to answer. Then the carpenter’s daughter said, “Your husband. Your husband’s father. Your husband’s mother. And.” Boonyi’s voice shook as she implored her friend to go on. “Who else?” she pleaded. “You’re saying there was someone else.”

Zoon turned her face away. “And your father,” she replied.

It was snowing harder than ever and the cold was tightening its grip on her body, even through her protective layers of fat, and in spite of the kangri of hot coals nestled against her belly. The storm enclosed her and Zoon; the rest of Pachigam was a white cloud. Boonyi got to her feet to think about this new situation, about the business of being dead. “Can a dead person get shelter from a blizzard,” she wondered aloud. “Or is it required that she freeze to death. Can a dead person get something to eat and drink, or must a dead person die all over again, of hunger and thirst. I’m not even asking right now if a dead person can be brought back to life. I’m just thinking, if the dead speak, does anyone hear them, or do their words fall on deaf ears. Does anyone comfort the dead if they weep, or forgive them if they repent. Are the dead to be condemned for all time or can they be redeemed. But maybe these questions are too big to be answered in a snowstorm. I must be smaller in my demands. So it comes down to this for now. Can a dead person lie down in the warmth or must she find a spade and dig her own grave.”

“Try not to be bitter,” Zoon said. “Try to understand the grief that killed you. As for your question, my father says you can haunt his woodshed for the night.”

The woodshed was weatherproof, at least, and in spite of her demise the Misris made her as comfortable as possible, softening the discomforts of the outbuilding with rugs and blankets. They hung an oil lantern from a nail. The storm abated as darkness fell and Boonyi retreated into her temporary world of wood to face her first night as a dead woman, or, to be precise, as a woman who knew she was no more, because as it turned out her life had actually been terminated for well over a year. The dead have no rights, she knew, and so everything that had formerly belonged to her, from her mother’s jewelry to her husband’s hand, was no longer in her charge. And there was possibly some danger also. She had heard stories of people being declared dead before, and when these deceased entities tried to return to life and reclaim their assets they were sometimes murdered all over again, in ways that ended all arguments over their status. But those other members of the fellowship of the living dead, the mritak, were killed by the greed of their relatives. Her own death was nobody’s fault but her own.

In the small hours of night she suddenly heard a familiar voice. Her father was leaning against the outside wall of the woodshed, wrapped up in as many warm garments as he could find, for he was a man who suffered the cold badly. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul addressed the woodshed familiarly, as if it were a living person, or at least a member of the living dead. “Let us speak of the Ocean of Love,” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul said to the woodshed through chattering teeth. “That is to say the Anurag Sagar, the great work of the poet K-K-K-Kabir.” Even in the wretchedness of her death Boonyi entombed within the woodshed could not repress a smile.

“One of the big figures in the Anurag Sagar is Kal,” her father told the woodshed. “Kal, whose name means yesterday and tomorrow, which is to say, T-T-T-Time. Kal was one of the sixteen sons of Sat Purush whose name means Positive Power, and after his fall he became the father of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. This does not mean that our world is born of evil. Kal is a lapsarian figure but he is neither evil nor g-good. Yet it is true that he insists on an eye for an eye and that the demands he makes of us limit us and prevent us from reaching what we have it in ourselves to be.”

Her heart leapt for joy and the flame of her lantern burned more brightly because both flame and heart knew that this was Boonyi’s father’s way of returning to her, of returning her to him. His next sentence, however, allowed the darkness to close in once more. “According to Kabir,” the pandit told the woodshed, “only the m-m-m-mritak, the Living Dead One, can rid himself of Kal’s pain. What does this mean? Some say it should be read thus: only the brave can achieve the Beloved. But another reading is, only the living dead are f-f-f-free of Time.”

Hear, O saints, the nature of mritak. I have been away longer than I thought, she told herself. My father the man of reason, my matter-of-fact father, has given in to his mystical streak, his shadow planet, and become some sort of sadhu. The scholarly learning to which the pandit had always added an edge of irony, dispensing his versions of the ancient ideas with a mischievous little smile, was now, it seemed, being offered up without any distancing devices at all. The highest of human aspirations, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul sang to the woodshed, was to live in the world and yet not live in it. To extinguish the fire burning in the mind and live the holy life of total detachment. “The Living Dead One serves the S-S-S-Satguru. The Living Dead One manifests love within her; and by receiving love her life spirit is set free.” Boonyi heard the example of the earth. “The earth hurts no one. Be like that. The earth hates no one. Be like that as well.” She heard the example of the sugarcane and the candy. “The sugarcane is cut up and crushed and boiled to make the j-j-j-jaggery. The jaggery is boiled to make the raw sugar. The sugar burns to make rock candy. And from rock candy, sugar candy comes, and everyone likes that. In the same way the Living Dead One bears her sufferings and crosses the Ocean of Life t-t-t-toward joy.” She understood that her father was teaching her how she must now live; she hated the teaching and anger flared up in her. But she fought it back. He was right, just as Zoon had been right. She had to let go of anger and achieve humility. She had to let go of everything and be as nothing. It was not the love of God she sought, but the love of a particular man; however, by adopting the abnegatory posture of the disciple before the Divine, by erasing herself, she might also erase her crime and make herself what her husband could once again love.

Only a brave soul can do it. The Living Dead Person must control the senses, said the pandit to the shed. She controls the organ of seeing and understands “beautiful” and “ugly” as the same. She controls the organ of hearing and can bear bad words as well as good. She controls the organ of taste and ceases to know the difference between tasty and tasteless things. She does not get excited even if she is brought the Five Nectars. She does not refuse food without salt, and lovingly accepts whatever is served her. The nose, too, she controls. Smells pleasant and unpleasant are as one to her.

“Also controlled is the organ of lust.” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was particularly firm on this point, as if making sure that the woodshed understood that its sinful yearnings must cease. “The g-g-g-god of lust is a robber. Lust is a mighty, dangerous, pain-giving, negative power. The lustful woman is the mine of Kal. The Living Dead One has enlightened herself with the lamp of knowledge. She has drunk the nectar of the Name and merged into the Elementless. When she has done this, lust will be f-f-f-finished.” At first she tried to find his true message in the words themselves. At a certain point, however, she began to hear the words beneath the words. The age of reason was over, he was telling her, as was the age of love. The irrational was coming into its own. Strategies of survival might be required. She remembered what he had said when he saw her standing at the bus stop covered in snow. Nazarébaddoor. She had mistakenly thought he was averting the evil eye when in fact he had been giving her advice, telling her where to go. The old Gujar prophetess had retreated from the world before she, Boonyi, had been born, and had cursed the future with her last speech. What’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words. Years later the Gegroo brothers would immure themselves in a mosque for fear of the wrath of Big Man Misri; but Nazarébaddoor had shut herself away because she feared Kal, the passage of Time itself. She had seated herself cross-legged in the samadhi position and simply ceased to be. When the villagers finally plucked up the courage to look inside the hut her body had acquired the fragility of a withered leaf and the breeze from the doorway blew it away like dust. Now it was Boonyi’s turn. A dead person who wished to overcome Kal would do well to follow the prophetess’s path. And there was another precedent, which Boonyi the former dancing girl did not fail to recall. Anarkali, too, had been immured for indulging a forbidden lust. And the trapdoor and the escape passage that set her free? That was just in the movies. In real life there were no such easy escapes.

Go up the mountain and die properly. If that was her father’s message to her then she had no choice but to obey. He was no longer outside the woodshed. The snowstorm had stopped and she was alone. She was a fat cow but she would haul herself up that hill to the prophetess’s hut and wait for death to come. There was no end to the list of the things she craved and could no longer have. Food, pills, tobacco, love, peace. She would do without them all. The impossible weight of her absent daughter knocked her flat. As if all the logs in the woodshed had rolled down onto her body. She lay smashed and gasping on the floor. She felt the moorings of her sanity loosen and welcomed the comforting madness. A beautiful day began.

When she emerged from the woodshed she stood knee-deep in whiteness. The wooded hill hung over her like a threat. The meadow of Khelmarg was up there, with its memories of love. And in another direction, in the heart of the evergreen forest, was Nazarébaddoor, the dead awaiting the dead. Each step was an achievement. She was carrying her bedroll and her bag. Her feet her knees her hips all screamed their protests. The snow pushed back against her forward thrusts. Still she went on her slow, thudding way. More than once she fell against the drifts, and getting back to her feet was not easy. Her clothes were wet. She could not feel her toes. Stones hidden beneath the snow cut her feet and buried pine needles stabbed at her. Still she leaned into the slope and forced her legs to move. Speed was unimportant. Motion was all.

She saw Zoon watching her from a distance. The carpenter’s daughter stayed about fifty feet away, and never said a word; but she came all the way up the hill with Boonyi. Sometimes she leapt ahead and then stood waiting like a sentinel, an arm upraised to indicate the easiest path. Their eyes never met, but Boonyi, glad of the help, followed her old friend’s lead. Her thoughts had lost coherence, which was a mercy. It would have been impossible to climb the mountain with Kashmira’s great weight on her back, but her daughter had been mislaid for the moment, somewhere in the jumble of her mother’s mind. Boonyi scooped up handfuls of snow and thrust them greedily in her mouth to slake her thirst.

Halfway up the mountain she found a brown paper parcel in her path. Inside it was the miracle of food: a thick circle of unleavened lavas bread, a quantity of dum aloo in a little tin container, and two pieces of chicken in another such tin. She wolfed it all down, asking no questions. Then up the hill she went again, the heat of the sun punishing her from above, the cold of the snow from below. Her breath came in long wheezing gulps. The forest circled her, whirling about her and about. She was stumbling now, staggering, not even sure if she was going up or down the wooded slope. Faster and faster the trees spun around her, and then unconsciousness came, like a gift. When she awoke she was propped up against the doorway of a Gujar hut.

In the days that followed her hold on her sanity weakened further, so that it seemed to her that she was the one who was alive and everyone else was dead. The interior of Nazarébaddoor’s hut had been cleaned and swept, as if a ghostly presence had known she was coming, and a new mat had been laid on the floor. A fire had been laid and lit and there was dry wood stacked by the side of the fireplace. A pot of bubbling stew, lotus stems in gravy, simmered over the fire, covered by a cheap aluminum plate. There was water in an earthen surahi in a corner. The roof of moss and turf was in bad shape, and water from the melting snow kept dripping through, but she would wake at night to hear the scurrying footfalls of ghosts running over the roof like mice, and in the morning there was new turf in place of the old, and there were no more drips. She cried out for her mother. “Maej.” Her mother Pamposh, nicknamed for the walnut kernel, had come back from the dead to take care of her newly dead child.

When she poked her head out of the hut she thought she saw shadows moving among the trees and she remembered her father’s lesson about Haput the black bear, Suh the leopard, Shal the jackal and Potsolov the fox. These creatures were dangerous and maybe they were closing in on her to kill her but they could not be blamed because they were true to their natures. 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. Her body ached with hunger and other needs and her head was not entirely her own but for some reason she was not afraid. For some reason she described the shapes in the trees to herself as guardians. For some reason there was always fresh water in the surahi when she awoke and food left at the door or, once she felt well enough to take short walks, on the fire. For some reason she had not been abandoned. One could not expect to jump back into paradise from hell, she told herself. A purgative period in a middle place was required. Slowly the addictions would leave her body and her mind would begin to clear. In the meantime she had her mother by her side. The snow melted and she went out as far as Khelmarg and the wildflowers were coming out. She picked bunches of krats, which could be eaten as a vegetable and was good for the eyes, and shahtar, which produced a sweetly cooling effect when mixed with the whey that was left in a pot at her door. On the slopes of the mountain she found the shrub kava dach, which helped to purify her blood, and she ate, too, the fruit and leaves of the wan palak or goosefoot. The white flowers of the shepherd’s purse or kralamond were everywhere. She picked it and ate it raw. She gathered phakazur, fennel, and daphne, which was gandalun. As she ate the blue-flowered won-hand chicory and lay down in fields of maidan-hand dandelion she felt her life and her mind returning. The flowers of Kashmir had saved her. In her father’s orchards the almond trees would be blooming. Spring had come.

After he learned of her infidelity with the American Shalimar the clown sharpened his favorite knife and headed south with murder on his mind. Fortunately the bus in which he had left Pachigam broke down under a small bridge at Lower Munda near the source of the Jhelum at Verinag. His brothers Hameed and Mahmood, dispatched by their father, caught up with him at the depot, where he was waiting impatiently for the next available carrier. “Thought you could run away from us, eh, little boyi,” cried Hameed, the louder and more boisterous of the twins. “No chance. We’re double trouble, us.” Troop transport vehicles were refueling all around them and a group of cheroot-smoking soldiers stared idly, and then not so idly-the words double trouble had not been well chosen-at the three quarreling brothers. The army was jumpy. Two nationalist leaders, Amanullah Khan and Maqbool Butt, had formed an armed group called the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front and had crossed the cease-fire line from what they called Azad Kashmir into the Indian sector to launch a number of surprise raids on army positions and personnel. These three argumentative young men could easily be NLF recruits spoiling for a fight. Mahmood Noman, always the more cautious of the twins, said quickly to Shalimar the clown: “If those bastards find that dagger you’re carrying, boyi, we’re all going to jail for good.” This was the sentence that saved Boonyi Noman’s life. Shalimar the clown burst into loud, fake laughter and his brothers joined in, slapping each other on the back. The soldiers relaxed. Later that afternoon all three Nomans were on a bus back home.

Firdaus Noman looked into the eyes of her betrayed and cuckolded son Shalimar the clown when his brothers brought him back, and was so horrified that she resolved to give up quarreling forever. Her famous battles with her illustrious husband over the nature of the universe, the traditions of Kashmir and each other’s bad habits had entertained the village for years, but now Firdaus saw the consequence of her fractious disposition. “Look at him,” she whispered to Abdullah. “He has an anger in him that would end the world if it could.”

The sarpanch was in a distracted state of mind. His health had begun to deteriorate. He had started feeling the first twinges of the pain in his hands that would eventually cripple them, leaving them frozen into useless claw-shapes that made it hard for him to eat or hold tools or wash his own behind. As the pain grew so did his feelings of discontentedness. He felt caught in between things, between the past and the future, the home and the world. His own needs were in conflict. Some days he longed for the applause of an audience and regretted the slow decline in the fortunes of the bhand pather thanks to which such gratification was harder and harder to come by, while at other times he yearned for a quiet life, sitting smoking a pipe by a golden fire. Even greater was the conflict between his personal requirements and the needs of others. Maybe he should give up his position as village headman. Maybe one could only be selfless for so long, and after that it was time for a little selfishness. He could not go on forever holding everyone in his hands. His hands were hurting. The future was dark and his light had begun to dim. He needed a little gentleness.

“Treat him gently,” Abdullah told Firdaus absently, thinking mostly about himself. “Maybe your love can put out the flame.”

But Shalimar the clown withdrew into himself, barely speaking for days at a time except during rehearsals in the practice glade. Everyone in the acting troupe noticed that his style of performance had changed. He was as dynamically physical a comedian as ever, but there was a new ferocity in him that could easily frighten people instead of making them laugh. One day he proposed that the scene in the Anarkali play in which the dancing girl was grabbed by the soldiers who had come to take her to be bricked up in her wall might be sharpened if the soldiers came on in American army uniform and Anarkali donned the flattened straw cone of a Vietnamese peasant woman. The American seizure of Anarkali-as-Vietnam would, he argued, immediately be understood by their audience as a metaphor for the Indian army’s stifling presence in Kashmir, which they were forbidden to depict. One army would stand in for another and the moment would give their piece an added contemporary edge. Himal Sharga had stepped into Boonyi’s old role and didn’t like the idea. “I know I’m not a great dancer,” she said petulantly, “but you don’t have to turn my big drama scene into some kind of silly stunt just because you have a reason for hating Americans.” Shalimar the clown rounded on her so savagely that for a moment the gathered players thought he was going to strike her down. Then he suddenly deflated, turned away and went to squat dejectedly in a corner. “Yes, bad idea,” he muttered. “Forget it. I’m not thinking straight just now.” Himal was the prettier of Shivshankar Sharga the village baritone’s two daughters. She went over to Shalimar the clown and put her hand on his shoulder. “Just try seeing straight instead,” she said. “Don’t look for what’s not here, but look at what there is.”

After the rehearsal Himal’s sister Gonwati warned her, with the bitter almond of spite souring her words, that her cause was hopeless. “When you stand next to Boonyi you completely disappear,” she said, gravely malicious behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. “Just the way I vanish when I’m standing next to you. And in his mind you’ll always be standing next to her, a little shorter, a little uglier, with a nose that’s a little too long, a chin that’s a little too weak and a figure that’s too small where it should be big and too big where it should be small.” Himal grabbed her sister’s long dark plait high up, near her head, and pulled. “Stop being a jealous bitch, four-eyes,” she said sweetly, “and just help me catch him like a good ben should.”

Gonwati accepted the rebuke and put aside her own hopes in the family cause. The Sharga sisters set about plotting the capture of Shalimar the clown’s broken heart. Gonwati asked him the name of his favorite dish. He said he had always been partial to a good gushtaba. Himal at once set to work with a will, pounding the gushtaba meat to soften it, and when she offered him the results as a gift “to cheer you up” he immediately popped a meatball in his mouth. A few seconds later the expression on his face told her the bad news, and she confessed that she was famous in her family as the worst cook they had ever known. Next, Gonwati suggested to Shalimar the clown that Himal could replace Boonyi in the tightrope routine they had developed, and which he could not perform without a female aide. Shalimar the clown agreed to teach Himal to walk the wire, but after a few lessons, when the wire was still just a foot off the ground, she confessed that she had always suffered dreadfully from vertigo, and that if she ever stepped out across the air even her desire to please him would not prevent her from falling to her death. The third strategy was more direct. Gonwati told Shalimar the clown that her sister had recently been unlucky in love herself, that a bounder from the village of Shirmal whose name she would not deign to speak had toyed with her affections and then spurned her. “The two of you should comfort each other,” she proposed. “Only you can know how she suffers, and only she can come close to grasping the scale of your terrible grief.” Shalimar the clown allowed himself to be prevailed upon and accompanied Himal on a moonlit walk by the waters of the Muskadoon. But under the double influence of the moonlight and his beauty poor Himal lost her head and confessed that the Shirmali rascal didn’t exist, that he, Shalimar the clown, had always been the man she loved, there was nobody else but him for her in the whole of Kashmir. After this third catastrophe Shalimar the clown kept his distance from the Sharga sisters who continued, nevertheless, to hope.

The idea of declaring Boonyi dead was Gonwati Sharga’s brainwave. Gonwati’s bespectacled features gave her a look of studious virtue that concealed her sneaky chess-player’s nature. “He’ll never forget that woman while she’s alive,” her sister said mournfully after the disaster of the moonlit walk. “God, sometimes I wish she was dead.” Gonwati answered, without at first understanding what she was saying, “Hold tight, ben. Wishes can come true.” In the next few days her purpose revealed itself to her, and then she set about making other people believe they had had the idea all by themselves. Over a family dinner she quoted her sister’s sentiment back at her. “If that Boonyi was dead instead of just in Delhi with her American,” she said, “then perhaps poor Shalimar could start up his life again.” Her father Shivshankar Sharga snorted a deep baritone snort. “In Delhi with an American,” he said, thumping the table with his fist, “is what I call as good as dead.” Gonwati turned large myopic eyes upon Shivshankar. “You’re in the panchayat,” she said. “So couldn’t you make that official?”

Before the next panchayat meeting Shivshankar sounded out Habib Joo the dancing master on the subject of declaring Boonyi deceased. “She is dead to me,” he answered, and then confessed to a guilty sense of responsibility for her misdeed. “It is the skill I taught her that she used to betray us all.” That was two out of five. Together they approached Big Man Misri. “I don’t know,” the carpenter said doubtfully. “Zoon loved her, after all.” Shivshankar Sharga found himself arguing the case vehemently. “Don’t you want to make it difficult for men to run off with our girls?” he demanded. “After what happened in your household, I’d have thought you’d be the first to go along with our plan.” That was three out of five; which left the two fathers, Pyarelal and Abdullah, to persuade. “The sarpanch is so soft-hearted he will be a hard nut to crack,” said Gonwati when her father reported progress a few evenings later. “Trust me, it is Boonyi’s own daddy who will agree.”

The reason for Gonwati’s confidence was her newly forged intimacy with Pandit Pyarelal Kaul. For many months after his daughter’s flight south the pandit had been lost in contemplation. His inattention to his duties as head waza of Pachigam had become so noticeable that the junior wazas finally asked him, gently, to stay home on wazwaan days until he felt better. Pyarelal inclined his head and left the world of cookpots and banquets behind. He had loved food all his life but it now seemed like an irrelevance. Alone at home, he prepared as little as possible, ate perfunctorily what was necessary for life, and took no pleasure in it. He meditated for eleven hours every day. The external world had become too painful to be bearable. His daughter’s disappearance felt like his wife’s second death. Not even the beauty of Kashmir could assuage the agony of a loss that was not only physical but moral. Her absence was bad enough but her immorality was worse. It made her a stranger to him. He felt himself crumbling, as if he were an old building whose foundations had rotted away. He felt a tide tugging at him and knew he was in danger of drowning. Meditating, he could make the sphere of feeling recede and reach out for succor toward the light of philosophy. At some point in his meditations he thought of Kabir.

People said that Kabir had been the child of a virgin birth, circa 1440, but Pyarelal was not interested in such flummery. What was known was that Kabir was raised by Muslim weavers and the only word he knew how to write was Rama. This also was relatively uninteresting. The interesting thing was Kabir’s concept of two souls, the personal soul or life-soul, jivatma, and the divine over-soul, paramatma. Salvation was to be gained by bringing these two souls into a state of union. The interesting thing was to let go of the personal and be absorbed into the divine. And if this was a form of death in life, that was merely an external perception. The internal perception of such an achievement would be ecstatic joy.

One day Pyarelal emerged from his meditations to see a young woman sitting on a rock by the Muskadoon and for a confused instant he thought Boonyi had returned. When he realized that it was Gonwati Sharga the singer’s daughter he fought down his disappointment and went out to keep her company. “Panditji,” she said after a time, “I used to see Boonyi and Shalimar the clown sitting here and forgive me, panditji, but I was a little jealous. I also wanted to hear your brilliant words. I also wished to benefit from your wisdom. Yet I was not your daughter and had to accept my lot.” Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was deeply moved. He hadn’t known! He had sometimes felt his own daughter was merely humoring him when she sat with her beau and listened to his ramblings. But this girl actually wanted to learn! Gonwati’s confession put a smile on Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s face for the first time in months. In the following weeks the girl came to sit at his feet as often as she could and such was the seriousness and sympathy of her attention that he unburdened himself of many of his most private thoughts. Finally she rose from her rock by the river, went over to take Pyarelal’s hand in her own, and offered her own version of her sister’s advice to Shalimar the clown.

“Don’t blame yourself for what’s dead,” she said, “but thank God for what’s alive.”

Abdullah Noman could not stand against the mritak plan if Boonyi’s own father was in favor of it. “Are you sure?” he asked Pyarelal at the next panchayat meeting. They were drinking pink salty tea in the upstairs meeting room at the Noman house. Pyarelal’s cup began to rattle against its saucer as he pronounced the sentence of death. “For eleven hours a day,” the pandit told his old friend, “I have contemplated the topic of living in the world while also not living in it. Much has become clear to me regarding the meaning of this riddle. Bhoomi my child has chosen the path of death in life. Once she has so chosen I must not cling to her. I choose to let her go. And then,” he added, “there is also the question of bringing your enraged son under control.”

“They killed you,” Zoon Misri told Boonyi in the snowstorm. “They killed you because they loved you and you were gone.”

There was a deserted stretch of the Muskadoon just past Pachigam where the river was shielded by foliage from prying eyes. In childhood summers the four inseparable girls, the Sharga sisters, Zoon Misri and Boonyi Kaul, would rush there after school, throw off their garments and dive in. The bite of the water was exciting, even arousing. They screamed and laughed as the river god’s cold hands caressed their skin. Then they dried themselves by rolling on the grassy banks and rubbed their hair between the palms of their hands and didn’t go home until the evidence of their transgression had dried off. And on winter evenings the four fast friends, along with the rest of the village children, would crowd for warmth into the panchayat chamber upstairs from the Nomans’ kitchen and the adults would tell them stories. Abdullah Noman’s memory was a library of tales, fabulous and inexhaustible, and whenever he finished one the children would scream for more. The women of the village would take turns to tell them family anecdotes. Every family in Pachigam had its store of such narratives, and because all the stories of all the families were told to all the children it was as though everyone belonged to everyone else. That was the magic circle which had been broken forever when Boonyi ran away to Delhi to become the American ambassador’s whore.

On the day she returned to Pachigam, obese, crippled by addictions, covered in snow, her old friends Himal and Gonwati circled her in the blizzard and the emotions they felt did not include any trace of their childhood love. If Gonwati Sharga felt any guilt about the cold-blooded machinations that had led to Boonyi’s killing, she suppressed it beneath her anger. “How dare she come back here,” she hissed at her sister, “after all the harm she’s caused?” But Himal was filled with happiness at the changes in Boonyi’s appearance, the advantages of which greatly outweighed the outrage of a dead woman’s return to life. “Just look at her,” she whispered to Gonwati. “How can he love her now?”

The terrible truth, however, was that Himal Sharga’s failure to seduce Shalimar the clown had nothing whatsoever to do with his continuing feelings of love for his treacherous wife. The truth was that Shalimar the clown had stopped loving Boonyi the instant he learned of her infidelity, stopped dead like an unplugged automaton, and the immense crater left behind by the destruction of that love had at once been filled by a sea of bile-yellow hatred. The truth was that even though he had been brought home from Lower Munda by his brothers he had sworn an oath on the bus that he would kill her if she ever returned to Pachigam, he would cut off her lying head, and if she had any bastard offspring with that sex-crazed American he would show them no mercy, he would cut off their heads as well. The main reason Pyarelal Kaul had supported the idea of his daughter’s death by official decree, and Abdullah Noman had gone along with the plan, was that the bureaucratic killing of Boonyi was the only way of holding back Shalimar the clown from committing a horrible crime. The two fathers worked hard to persuade the abandoned husband that there was no need to think about decapitation when a person was already deceased. Shalimar had been doubtful about the mritak plan at first. “If we all agree to lie,” he had argued, “then how are we better than her?” Abdullah and Pyarelal argued with him without sleeping for three days and two nights and when all three of them were dying with exhaustion the two fathers managed to persuade Shalimar the clown to accept the compromise, made him swear that he accepted it as a full settlement of his legitimate grievance, but in his secret heart he knew that the day would come when his two oaths would come into conflict, his two shadow planets, the dragon’s-head Rahu-oath that obliged him to murder her and the dragon’s-tail Ketu-oath that obliged him to let her live on, to the degree that dead people can and sometimes do, and he was unable to foretell which of the two promises he would break.

To lay a trap for himself as well as Boonyi he went on writing letters to her, those same letters which had angered her and led her to despise him for his weakness, letters whose purpose was to fool her into believing that he was ready to forgive and forget, and whose deeper purpose was to bring matters to a head, to bring her back and to force him to choose between his oaths, so that he could find out what sort of a man he really was. And then there she was at the bus stop in a blizzard, coated in adipose tissue and covered in snow, and without stopping to think he ran toward her with his knife in his hand, but the two fathers blocked his way, grabbing him by the dragon’s tail and reminding him of his vow. They circled her in the thickly falling snow, and Pyarelal Kaul told Shalimar the clown, “If you try to break your word you will have to kill me on the way to her,” and Abdullah Noman confirmed, “You will have to kill me as well.” This was when Shalimar the clown solved the riddle of the two oaths. “In the first place,” he said, “the oath I made to the two of you was my personal promise to you, and so I will respect it as long as even one of you is alive. But the oath I made to myself was a personal promise as well, and when you are both dead you will no longer be able to hold me back. And in the second place,” he concluded, turning to go without so much as a nod in the direction of his dead wife, “keep the whore out of my sight.” The snow kept falling, thickly falling, upon all the living and the dead.

The spring was an illusion of renewal. Flowers blossomed, baby calves and goats were born and eggs burst open in their nests, but the innocence of the past did not return. Boonyi Kaul Noman never went back to live in Pachigam. For the rest of her life she inhabited that hut on the pine-forested hill where a prophetess had once decided that the future was too horrible to contemplate and had waited cross-legged for death. She slowly became competent in practical matters, but her hold on reality grew correspondingly more erratic, as though something inside her refused to grasp that the world in which she was getting to be so self-sufficient would never turn back into the one she wanted, the one in which she could fold her husband’s love around herself while also wrapping him up in hers. Her phantom mother was now her perpetual companion, and as Pamposh’s ghost did not age the two dead women became more and more like sisters. When Pyarelal Kaul visited his daughter to warn her against visiting the village because it was all he and Abdullah could do to hold back Shalimar the clown when she was out of sight, and it was impossible to guarantee her safety if she came down to Pachigam, she replied with the gaiety of madness, “I’m fine here with Pamposh. Nobody can lay a finger on me while she is by my side. You should stay with us. Neither of us ladies is allowed in the village, it seems, but the three of us could have a high old time up here by ourselves.”

Faced with the derangement of his beloved daughter, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul entered into a darkness of his own. He climbed the mountain every day to care for her needs and listen to her ramblings and was not able to tell her of the disillusion that had taken hold of his own optimism and squeezed it almost to death. The love of Boonyi and Shalimar the clown had been defended by the whole of Pachigam, had been worth defending, as a symbol of the victory of the human over the inhuman, and the dreadful ending of that love made Pyarelal question, for the first time in his life, the idea that human beings were essentially good, that if men could be helped to strip away imperfections their ideal selves would stand revealed, shining in the light, for all to see. He was even questioning the anticommunalist principles embodied in the notion of Kashmiriyat, and beginning to wonder if discord were not a more powerful principle than harmony. Communal violence everywhere was an intimate crime. When it burst out one was not murdered by strangers. It was your neighbors, the people with whom you had shared the high and low points of life, the people whose children your own children had been playing with just yesterday. These were the people in whom the fire of hatred would suddenly light up, who would hammer on your door in the middle of the night with burning torches in their hands.

Maybe Kashmiriyat was an illusion. Maybe all those children learning one another’s stories in the panchayat room in winter, all those children becoming a single family, were an illusion. Maybe the tolerant reign of good king Zain-ul-abidin should be seen-as some pandits were beginning to see it-as an aberration, not a symbol of unity. Maybe tyranny, forced conversions, temple-smashing, iconoclasm, persecution and genocide were the norms and peaceful coexistence was an illusion. He had begun to receive political circulars to this effect from various pandit organizations. They told a tale of abuse that went back many hundreds of years. Sikander the iconoclast crushed Hindus the most. The crimes of the fourteenth century needed to be avenged in the twentieth. Saifuddin crossed all limits of cruelty. Saifuddin was the prime minister under Sikander’s son, Alishah. Out of the fear of conversion Brahmins jumped into the fire. Many Brahmins hanged themselves to death, some consumed poison and others drowned themselves. Innumerable Brahmins jumped to death from the mountains. The state was filled with hatred. The supporters of the king did not stop even a single person from committing suicide. And so on, all the way up to the present day. Maybe peace was his opium pipe-dream, in which case he was as much of an addict in his own way as his poor daughter, and he, too, needed to go through a painful cure.

He forced such forebodings to the back of his mind and nursed his daughter. The delirium of her withdrawal symptoms worsened, and for long periods she shook convulsively and sweated ice and her mouth was full of needles and her hungers felt like wild beasts that would gobble her up if they weren’t given what they really wanted. Then slowly the crisis passed, until she was no longer at the mercy of the chemicals she could no longer have; and her tobacco habit, too, was broken. During the hallucinatory period of her helplessness she knew that the guardians in the trees were taking care of her. Gradually they emerged from the shadows, and in her groggy condition she imagined her mother Pamposh leading them to her, her daring, independent mother who did not judge people for giving in to their sexual urges. Pamposh’s ghost was at least as substantial to her daughter as the others who visited her, and although she recognized among her angels her own father above all, and Firdaus Noman and Zoon and Big Man Misri as well, it made her happy to believe that her beloved mother was actually running the show.

Pyarelal blamed himself for her obesity. “Poor girl inherited my physique and not her slim mother’s,” he chastised himself inwardly. “Even as a child she was buxom. No wonder Shalimar the clown fell for her when she was still a child. Food was my weakness and this, too, I passed on to her.” But his body had changed as a result of his new ascetic’s régime, and her body changed as well. Her beauty returned slowly, as her physical health improved. The months lengthened into years and the fat fell away-nobody around here was going to help her eat seven meals a day!-and she looked like herself again. Some damage remained. She suffered from backaches. Black veins stood out on her legs and in some places the skin hung off her more loosely than it should have. The tobacco’s discoloration of her teeth never entirely faded, even though she was assiduous in the use of the neem sticks with which her father kept her supplied. She intuited, from occasional spells of arrhythmia, that her heart had been damaged, too. Never mind, she told herself. It was not her destiny to grow old. It was her destiny to live among ghosts as a half-ghost until she learned how to cross the line. She said this aloud once and her father burst into tears.

Her self-sufficiency was hard won. The food addiction was as painful to break as the chemical dependencies, but in the end her attitude to all things edible became less rapacious. For a long time her father and the other friendly villagers continued to provide her with essential supplies, and she learned how to supplement them. She began to grow her own vegetables. One day she found a pair of young goats tethered to a post outside the hut. She learned how to raise them and as time passed her flock grew. It became possible for her to sell goats’ milk, and other things. Her father carried a metal milk-churn down the hill to the store every day, and tomatoes in season. This was a small rehabilitation. People accepted the idea of paying real money to buy things from the dead. Her days were filled with physical labor and as long as she was using her body the madness was held at bay. Her body strengthened. Muscles made their appearance in her buttocks, arms and legs. Her shoulders hardened and her belly flattened out. This third-phase Boonyi was beautiful in a new way, the bruised, life-hardened, imperfect way of an adult woman. It was her reason that had been bruised most deeply and at night those bruises still hurt. At night, when the day’s work was done, when it was time for the mind to take over from the body, her thoughts ran wild. Some summer nights, she was sure, Shalimar the clown prowled in the trees around the hut. On those nights she deliberately went outdoors and took off all her clothes, challenging him to love her or kill her. She could do this because everybody knew she was mad. Her mother Pamposh came out with her and they danced naked in the moon like wolves. Let a man try to approach them! Let him only dare! They would rip him to shreds with their fangs.

She was right; Shalimar the clown did sometimes climb the hill, knife in hand, and watch her from behind a tree. It comforted him to know she was there, that when he was released from his oath she would be right there to kill, defenseless, just as his life had been defenseless when she ruined it, defenseless and vulnerable just as his heart had once been, defenseless and vulnerable and fragile just like his shattered capacity for trust. Dance, my wife, he told her silently. I will dance with you again one day, for one last time.

7

Shalimar the clown decided he had to murder the American ambassador at some point not long after the end of the Bangladesh war, around the time that the Pachigam bhands went north to perform near the cease-fire line which had just turned into the Line of Control; that India and Pakistan signed the agreement at Simla which promised that the status of Kashmir would be decided bilaterally at a future date; that the Indian military tightened its choke hold on the valley-because tomorrow was for politicians and dreamers but the army controlled today-and stepped up the toughness of its approach to the majority population; and that Bombur Yambarzal’s wife bought the first television in the locality and set it up in a tent in the middle of Shirmal. Ever since the commencement of television transmissions at the beginning of the 1960s the panchayat of Pachigam had taken the view that as the new medium was destroying their traditional way of life by eroding the audience for live drama, the one-eyed monster should be banned from their village. The waza of Shirmal, however, was swept along by the entrepreneurial spirit of his bride, the red-haired widow Hasina “Harud” Karim, a woman with a strong desire for self-improvement and two secretive sons, Hashim and Hatim, who had learned the electrician’s trade in Srinagar and were keen to bring the village into the modern age. “Give everyone a free show for a couple of months,” Hasina Karim urged her new husband, “and after that you can start charging for tickets and nobody will argue about the cost.”

To finance the purchase of the black-and-white set she sold some pieces of wedding jewelry from her first marriage. Her sons, who, like her, were of a practical cast of mind, made no objection. “You can’t watch soap operas on a necklace,” Hashim the elder pointed out reasonably. The two brothers were not close to Bombur Yambarzal but not opposed to their mother’s new husband either. “If we know you are not lonely then it liberates us to follow our own paths, about which it’s better that you don’t know too much,” Hatim the younger explained. He was a tall young fellow but his mother reached up and ruffled his hair affectionately as if he were a toddler. “I taught my boys good sense,” she said proudly to Bombur Yambarzal. “See how well they calculate life’s odds?”

Once the Yambarzals’ TV soirées got going in Shirmal, evening life changed, even in Pachigam, whose residents proved perfectly willing to set aside the long history of difficulties with their neighbors in order to be able to watch comedy shows, music and song recitals, and exotically choreographed “item numbers” from the Bombay movies. In Pachigam as well as Shirmal it became possible to talk about any forbidden subject you cared to raise, at top volume, in the open street, without fear of reprisals; you could advocate blasphemy, sedition or revolution, you could confess to murder, arson or rape, and no attention would be paid to what you said, because the streets were deserted-almost the entire population of both villages was packed into Bombur the waza’s bulging tent to watch the damn-fool programs on “Harud” Yambarzal’s shining, loquacious screen. Abdullah Noman and Pyarelal Kaul were among the few who refused to go, Abdullah for reasons of principle and Pyarelal on account of the bitter, deepening depression that had spread outwards from his physical person to affect his immediate surroundings, hanging in the enclosed air of his empty home like a bad smell. Some days it would shrivel the riverbank flowers as he walked by. Some mornings it would curdle his milk supply.

Firdaus was itching to see the new marvel but ever since Boonyi’s return she had been working mightily to change her behavior and avoid quarreling with Abdullah, no matter how great the provocation. So after the labors of the day were over she remained grumpily but uncomplainingly at home. After a few days, however, Abdullah couldn’t bear the nightly pressure of her silent frustration anymore. “Damn it, woman,” he expostulated, burbling the water violently in his hubble-bubble pipe, “if you want to walk a mile and a half to sell your soul to the devil, I don’t want to stand in your way.” Firdaus leapt to her feet and put on her outdoor clothes. “What you mean to say,” she told Abdullah with majestic self-control, “is, ‘Dear wife, after all your hard work, you deserve to go off and have a little fun, even if I am such an old curmudgeon that I’ve forgotten what fun is.’” Abdullah gave her a hard look. “Exactly,” he agreed in a new, cold voice, and turned his face away.

All the way over to Shirmal, Firdaus was thinking about that new voice and its shocking coldness. She had given this man her life because of his gentle manner and his air of caring for everyone’s well-being. She hadn’t minded, or had taught herself not to mind, that he had never pampered her, never remembered her birthday, never brought her a bunch of wildflowers plucked by his own hand. She had learned to accept the solitude of her marital bed, had resigned herself to a lifetime of sleeping beside a man whose most prolonged and enthusiastic sexual performance had been less than two minutes in duration. She had admired his concern for their children and for the community whose shepherd he was, and had ignored or at least tried to understand his corresponding lack of interest in the needs and desires of his wife. But something had changed in him since the claw disease began to cripple his hands; his compassion for others had diminished as his self-pity increased. True, he had restrained Shalimar the clown from committing a vile crime; but perhaps that was a last twitch of the dying personality of the old Abdullah, the Abdullah whose gifts were tolerance, moral rectitude and great personal warmth, in whose place this new, crippled Abdullah seemed to be showing up more and more often. In a cold country no woman should live with a cold man, she told herself as she arrived in Shirmal, and her amazement at having considered the possibility of leaving her husband was so great that she failed to pay attention to the miracle of the television broadcast which she had walked all this way to witness, until the news bulletin began.

The evening news bulletin, the least interesting program of the night because of the deadening and often fictionalizing effect of heavy government censorship, usually emptied the tent. People went outside to smoke beedis, joke and gossip. Although men and women sat together inside the Yambarzal auditorium as equal members of the great national television audience, they separated when they emerged, and stood in separate groups. But Firdaus Noman joined neither group; she was a first-timer and remained in her place. An Indian Airlines Fokker Friendship called Ganga after the great river had been hijacked by Pak-backed terrorists, two cousins called Qureshi, who had absconded across the border to Pakistan. The cousins Qureshi had allowed the passengers to leave, then blown up the plane and surrendered to the Pak authorities who had gone through the pretense of jailing them but had refused to entertain Indian requests for extradition. It was manifestly plain that the archterrorist Maqbool Butt who now based himself in Pakistan with the full connivance and collusion of the Pak leadership was behind the exploit. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had visited the terrorists in Lahore, described them as freedom fighters, and declared that their “heroic action” was a sign that no power on earth could stop the Kashmiri struggle. He further promised that his party would contact the Kashmiri National Liberation Front to offer its cooperation and assistance, which would also be given to the hijackers themselves. Thus the Pak régime’s entanglement with terrorism was proved for all the world to see. After some sort of show trial, the report conjectured, the bounders would doubtless be released as heroes. However, the Indian government’s resolve would never weaken. The state of Jammu and Kashmir was an integral part, et cetera et cetera, the end. When the audience charged back into the tent at the end of the news Firdaus stood up and told them about the hijacking, whereupon an extraordinary thing happened. Members of the minority community unanimously condemned the treacherous Qureshi cousins and their leader Maqbool Butt’s desire to destabilize the situation in Kashmir, while members of the majority cheered the hijackers loudly and drowned out the angry Hindus’ protests. There was no trace of a Shirmal-Pachigam divide, no distinction between male and female opinion, only this deep communal rift. The Muslim majority eyed their Hindu pandit opponents with a sudden distrust that crept uncomfortably close to open hostility. Yet a few minutes earlier they had been smoking and gossiping together outside the tent. It was suddenly oppressive to be there in that ugly crowd. Wordlessly, as if some sort of vote had been taken, every member of the pandit community rose up and left the tent. Firdaus remembered Nazarébaddoor’s last prophecy-“what’s coming is so terrible that no prophet will have the words to foretell it”-and her appetite for further TV entertainment disappeared.

The Shirmal-Pachigam road was a humble country lane, rutted and dusty, running along a bund or embankment a few feet higher than the fields on either side; and it was lined with poplar trees. Shalimar the clown was waiting for Firdaus near the midway point of her journey home. He had not been in the television tent; in fact, he had been away for several weeks, because the bhands of Pachigam had been hired by the state government’s cultural authorities to provide entertainment in one of the world’s least entertained areas, the villages and army bases to the immediate south of the de facto border drawn through the broken heart of Kashmir. Abdullah, nursing his damaged hands, had told his talented son to take charge of the troupe. “You’ll have to do it eventually,” the sarpanch had said in a clipped voice stripped of all emotion, “so you may as well start up right now in that godforsaken part of the world in front of our brutalized countryfolk and those Indian soldiers for whom I can’t find the words without using language I do not care to employ in front of my children.” Abdullah’s politics were changing like the rest of him. These days he was disillusioned with the Indian government, which kept putting his namesake, the leader Sheikh Abdullah, in jail, then doing secret deals with him, then reinstalling him in power on the condition that he supported the union with India, then getting irritated all over again when he started talking about autonomy in spite of everything. “Kashmir for the Kashmiris, and everybody else, kindly get out,” Abdullah Noman said, echoing his hero. “Because if we get protected by this army for much longer we’re going to be ruined for good.”

It was a moonless night and Shalimar the clown was wearing dark clothes and had been lying low in the fields and he jumped up in front of Firdaus like a poplar coming to life and scared her. “I’ve been asleep,” he said. She understood at once that her son wasn’t speaking literally but was telling her that he’d arrived at a turning point in his life, which was why she didn’t interrupt him even though he was on fire, speaking to her in the foulmouthed language his father had refused to use, the speech of a man who has started dreaming of death. A cold wind was slicing through her heart. “I’ve been wasting my time,” Shalimar the clown continued. “All I ever learned how to do is walk across a rope and fall over like an idiot and make a few bored people laugh. All that is becoming useless and not just because of the stupid television. I’ve been looking at bad things for so long that I’d stopped seeing them, but I’m not sleeping now and I see how it is: the real bad dream starts when you wake up, the men in tanks who hide their faces so that we don’t know their names and the women torturers who are worse than the men and the people made of barbed wire and the people made of electricity whose hands would fry your balls if they grabbed them and the people made of bullets and the people made of lies and they are all here to do something important, namely to fuck us until we’re dead. And now that I’ve woken up there is something important I need to do also and I don’t know how to go about it. I need you to tell me how to get in touch with Anees.”

Their dark phirans flapped in the night wind like shrouds. “Be glad you’re not a mother in these times,” she answered him. “Because if you were you would be happy that your two quarreling sons were about to be reunited but at the same time you would be filled with the fear that both children would probably end up dead, and the conflict of that happiness and that terror would be too much to bear.”

“Be glad you’re not a man,” he retorted. “Because once we stop being asleep we can see that there are only enemies for us in this world, the enemies pretending to defend us who stand before us made of guns and khaki and greed and death, and behind them the enemies pretending to rescue us in the name of our own God except that they’re made of death and greed as well, and behind them the enemies who live among us bearing ungodly names, who seduce us and then betray us, enemies for whom death is too lenient a punishment, and behind them the enemies we never see, the ones who pull the strings of our lives. That last enemy, the invisible enemy in the invisible room in the foreign country far away: that’s the one I want to face, and if I have to work my way through all the others to get to him then that is what I’ll do.”

Firdaus wanted to beg and plead, to ask him to forget about the monsters in his waking dream, to set aside thoughts of the vanished American, and to forgive his wife and take her back and be happy with life’s blessings, such as they were. But that would make her an enemy too and she didn’t want that. So she agreed to do what Shalimar the clown required, and the next evening after working all day in the fruit orchards she walked to Shirmal again and this time when the news bulletin began she got up and followed Hasina Yambarzal outside, tugging at her shawl to indicate that she wanted a private word. At first, when Firdaus told the waza’s wife what she wanted, Hasina feigned bewilderment, but Firdaus raised the palm of her right hand to indicate that the time for subterfuge was past. “Harud, excuse me,” she said, “but stop, please, your bullshit. I don’t know you as well as I should, but I already know you better than your husband does, who is too besotted with love to see you straight. I recognize the pain in your eyes because I have the same pain in mine. So tell your sons the secretive electricians that when next they run into my son the wood-whittler, my boy who was always so clever with his hands, they should mention that his brother wants to be friends with him again.” The other women were gathered around a brazier of hot coals and began to throw curious glances in their direction, so they started laughing and giggling as if they were sharing risqué confidences about their husbands the waza and the sarpanch. Hasina Yambarzal’s eyes were not laughing, however. “The resistance isn’t a social club,” she giggled, putting her hands over her mouth and widening those calculating eyes as if she had just been told something really awful. “I’m not a fool, madam,” chuckled Firdaus severely. “And Anees will surely understand what I mean.” One of her eyes was lazy but the brightness in it was unmistakably energetic. Hasina shut up fast, nodded and went back into the tent to watch TV.

The next morning Firdaus demanded that Abdullah accompany her into the saffron field where, many years earlier, she had disported herself with the young Pamposh Kaul. Here, far from imprudent ears, she told her husband that an evil demon had gotten into their son Shalimar the clown up there in the frozen north, near the Line of Control. “He just wants to kill everyone now,” she told Abdullah Noman. “His wife, okay, that was a problem before, but now it’s also the philandering ambassador, and the whole army, and I don’t know who else. So either a djinni has taken him over or else it has been hiding inside him all this time, as if he was a bottle waiting for someone to uncork him, and either that’s what Boonyi did when she came back from the American or something happened to him when he was far from home. Hai-hai,” she wailed. “What did my son ever do wrong, to be captured by the devil?”

“That’s not a devil talking, it’s his manhood,” Abdullah Noman told her, without tenderness. “He’s still young enough to have the idea that he can change history, whereas I am getting accustomed to the idea of being useless, and a man who feels useless stops feeling like a man. So if he is fired up by the possibility of being useful, don’t put out that flame. Maybe killing bastards is what the times require. Maybe if my hands still worked I would strangle a few myself.”

Discord had entered Pachigam, never to depart. Abdullah Noman did not tell his wife that relations between himself and Shalimar the clown were at a low ebb, partly because the sarpanch hadn’t liked the look of eagerness in his son’s eyes when the opportunity to replace his father as leader of the bhands had presented itself, but mostly because of the creepy feeling that Shalimar the clown was waiting for Abdullah and Pyarelal Kaul to die, so that he could be released from his oath. These days the two sexagenarians didn’t speak much. Abdullah had started mentioning the word azadi, but to Pyarelal the word didn’t mean freedom but something more like danger, and it made a difficulty between the two old friends. They did their work and thought their thoughts and came together for panchayat meetings, after which Pyarelal went back to his home at the far end of the village and stayed there staring at the burning pinecones in the fire. But Abdullah Noman knew that the pandit had the same problem as himself with the watchful stare of Shalimar the clown; it was like being watched by a vulture or a carrion crow. It was like being watched by Death himself. So if Shalimar the clown wanted to go off into the mountains with Anees and the liberation front fighters, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing on the whole, let the fellow go and do what he had to do, even if the liberation front was still a bunch of comedians trying to find out how to live up to their name.

Two weeks later, Shalimar the clown went to Shirmal to watch television and during the news-bulletin cigarette break he stood by a coal brazier with his back to the secretive electricians and got the instructions he had been waiting for. Hatim and Hashim pretended to be talking to each other about the beauties of the high pine meadow of Tragbal, located at twelve and a half thousand feet above sea level and looking down on the Wular Lake, and agreeing that it would be at its loveliest soon after midnight tomorrow. Shalimar the clown walked away from them without commenting, and went into Bombur Yambarzal’s tent to join in the furious argument that had broken out in there on account of Hasina Yambarzal’s announcement that from now on an admission fee would be charged, a small fee, the merest token, because life was not a charity, after all. People should respect what the Yambarzals were doing for them, and the tickets would be a sign of that respect. After she said this people began shouting in a way that didn’t sound respectful at all, whereupon that incisive and pragmatic lady bent down, picked up the electric cord and broke the connection. That shut everyone up at once, as if she had pulled out their plugs as well, and her very sensible sons came in with brass bowls and went around the audience gathering low-denomination coins. Shalimar the clown paid up, but when the soap opera returned to the screen he left without watching what happened to the weeping heroine in the clutches of her wicked uncle. He was all done with weeping heroines. He was going to the Wular Lake to enter the world of men.

Shalimar the clown left Pachigam the next morning carrying nothing but the clothes he stood up in and the knife in his waistband and was not seen again in the village for fifteen years. Above the shining shield of the Wular Lake and just below the Tragbal field he met his future on a hillside strewn with boulders. His future took the shape of a pair of men with woollen hats pulled low over their eyes and scarves wrapped around the lower parts of their faces. One of these men was whittling a wooden bird. Another was Bombur Yambarzal’s stepson, Hashim Karim. There was a third man standing behind a rock, and that was the man who mattered. “You wished to see your brother,” the man behind the rock said. “Your brother is here.” Anees’s knife went on whittling wood without pausing. “This would be touching,” said the man behind the rock, “if we were in the business of being touched. Or maybe it would be funny, if we were in the laughing business. Why don’t you tell me what I’m doing here listening to a crummy play-actor who wants to play an action hero for real, and maybe a martyr as well.” Shalimar the clown remained calm. “I need to learn a new trade,” he said. “And you’re going to need people with those skills as time goes by.” The man behind the rock thought about this. “What I hear,” he said, “is that you’ve been talking big to anyone who’ll listen about all the people you intend to wipe out, including the former American ambassador. That sounds like clown behavior to me.” Shalimar’s face tightened. “For now and until freedom comes I’ll kill anyone you want me to,” he said, “but yes, one of these days I want the American ambassador at my mercy.”

There was a grunt from behind the rock. “And I want to be the king of England,” the invisible man said. Then there was a long silence. “Okay,” said the man behind the rock. A longer silence followed. Shalimar the clown turned to his brother, who shook his head. “In some minutes,” said Anees Noman, “it will be our turn to leave.” “Am I coming with you?” asked Shalimar the clown. His brother’s whittling knife paused for one brief beat.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re coming.”

Before they left that hillside Shalimar the clown went behind a boulder to relieve himself. Only after the hot stream died away did he look down and see the enormous snake, the king cobra, lying coiled under the rock, an inch away from the puddle. During his exploits with the liberation front he often thought about that sleeping serpent, which reminded him of his mother Firdaus’s superstitions. “Snake luck,” he said one day to his brother as they crouched behind a rock near Tangmarg waiting for an army troop convoy to pass over the mines they had laid in the steeply ascending road. “I must have snake luck on my side. It’s a good sign.” Anees Noman’s habitual melancholy was deepened by this excavated memory of a mother he feared he might never see again, but he disguised his sadness and twisted his face into a rueful smile. “Anyway,” Shalimar the clown whispered further, “it’s what we do. I mean, pissing on a snake. If that snake had woken up that night, I’d be a dead man now. But this snake, the one we keep pissing on, it’s awake all right, awake and wet and mad.”

Anees chewed the end of a beedi gloomily. “Just aim for its motherfucking eyes,” he said. His vocabulary had been coarsened by the years. “If you piss hard enough maybe you’ll drill a hole in its sisterfucking head.”

In those days before the crazies got into the act the liberation front was reasonably popular and azadi was the universal cry. Freedom! A tiny valley of no more than five million souls, landlocked, preindustrial, resource rich but cash poor, perched thousands of feet up in the mountains like a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant’s teeth, wanted to be free. Its inhabitants had come to the conclusion that they didn’t much like India and didn’t care for the sound of Pakistan. So: freedom! Freedom to be meat-eating Brahmins or saint-worshipping Muslims, to make pilgrimages to the ice-lingam high in the unmelting snows or to bow down before the prophet’s hair in a lakeside mosque, to listen to the santoor and drink salty tea, to dream of Alexander’s army and to choose never to see an army again, to make honey and carve walnut into animal and boat shapes and to watch the mountains push their way, inch by inch, century by century, further up into the sky. Freedom to choose folly over greatness but to be nobody’s fools. Azadi! Paradise wanted to be free.

“But free isn’t free of charge,” Anees Noman told his brother in his sad-sack way. “The only paradise that’s free that way is a fairy-tale place full of dead people. Here among the living, free costs money. Collections must be made.” Though he didn’t know it, he sounded exactly like Hasina Yambarzal announcing to the villagers of Shirmal and Pachigam that they needed to start paying to watch TV.

The first phase of Shalimar the clown’s initiation into the world of the liberation front involved him in the group’s fund-raising activities. The first principle of this work was that operatives working in the financial field could not be sent back to their own localities, because fund-raising was sometimes no joke and such humorlessness never went down well with one’s own folks. The second principle was that as it was a well-established fact that the poor were more generous than the rich it was proper to be more so to speak persuasive when dealing with the rich. It was not necessary to spell out the precise nature of such persuasion. Each operative could be trusted to devise the tactics best suited to the situation. Shalimar the clown, a member of his brother’s financial team, a man newly awakened to rage and ready for extreme measures, prepared himself to threaten, slash and burn.

However, Abdullah and Firdaus Noman had raised their sons to be courteous at all times, and even though Shalimar the clown had been possessed by a devil his brother Anees had not. When they arrived, at twilight, at a large lakeside mansion at the edge of Srinagar whose gloomy look perfectly matched Anees’s own, the lady of the house, a certain Mrs. Ghani, informed them that her husband the affluent landowner was not at home; whereupon Anees decided it would be improper for half-a-dozen armed men to enter a decent lady’s home when the man of the house was absent, and announced that he and his colleagues would wait for her husband Mr. Ataullah Ghani outside. They waited for four hours, hunkered down outside the servants’ entrance with their rifles rolled up inside scarves, and Mrs. Ghani sent out hot tea and snacks. At length Shalimar the clown insubordinately expressed his anxiety. “The level of risk is unacceptable,” he said. “The lady could have telephoned the security forces many times by now.” Anees Noman stopped whittling wood into owl shapes and raised an admonitory finger. “If it is our time to die, then we shall die,” he replied. “But we will die as men of culture, not barbarians.” Shalimar the clown subsided into sullen silence, fingering the edge of his blade inside the folds of his cloak. One of the hardest things about becoming a freedom fighter was having to accept his brother’s seniority in the organization.

After four and a half hours Mr. Ghani returned and came out to smoke a pensive cigarette with the financial committee on the back stoop. “This house,” he said, “belonged to my late paternal Ghani-uncle, the well-known Andha Sahib, the blind philanthropist who lived to the great age of one hundred and one, God be praised, and died only three years back. Perhaps you have heard about him? His personal life was a great tragedy, a poor reward for all his generosity, because he lost his beloved daughter, his only child, who moved to Pakistan and then died there in ’65 in consequence of Indian aerial bombing during that foolish war. Before Andha Sahib this was the residence of other eminent members of my family for a hundred and one years more. There is a collection of European paintings of quality. There is a picture of Diana the Huntress that is particularly fine. If you care to see it I will gladly conduct a tour. Also naturally there is my wife and there are my daughters. I thank you for respecting the sanctity of the house and the honor of my womenfolk. To express my gratitude, and in the blessed memory of Naseem Ghani, the child of this house and my personal cousin whom the Indian air force bombed to death in her own kitchen in Rawalpindi on September 22, 1965, I will assure you of the following sum, to be paid at quarterly intervals.”

The sum named was large enough to make it difficult for the liberation fighters to continue to look impassive. There were muffled gasps behind their woollen hoods. Afterwards, as they retreated into the shadows, Shalimar the clown looked shamefaced about his earlier fears, but Anees Noman had the grace not to rub it in. “Srinagar isn’t like back home,” he said. “It takes time to acquire local knowledge. Where the backing is, where it isn’t, where it needs a little encouragement of the type you’re itching to provide. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

It was not possible to go home. A system of billets was in operation. The brothers Noman were assigned a series of temporary lodgings with families who sometimes welcomed them, at other times had to be coerced into housing such potentially dangerous guests and treated them with a mixture of anger and fear, barely speaking to them except when absolutely necessary, locking up their marriageable daughters, and sending the younger children to live elsewhere until the peril had passed. Anees and Shalimar the clown stayed with a friendly family working in the trout hatcheries of Harwan, and with passionate supporters in the Srinagar silk industry; in a hostile household of pony-wallahs and farmhands near the famous spring of Bawan, sacred to Vishnu, with its holy tank bursting with hungry fish, and in an even more threatening encampment of limestone miners near the Manasbal quarry, a billet they abandoned after a single night because they both dreamed the same dream, a nightmare of being killed in their sleep, of having their skulls crushed by angry men with rocks in their fists. They slept for a season in an attic room in the home of a terrified truck driver’s family in Bijbehara near the tourist village of Pahalgam. This was the neighborhood in which the spy Gopinath Razdan had been murdered some years earlier, after leaking the news of Boonyi’s liaison with Shalimar the clown. It was therefore a region of which the Nomans had some prior knowledge. Shalimar the clown felt oddly homesick here. The fast-flowing Liddar reminded him of the smaller Muskadoon, and the lovely mountain meadow of Baisaran above Pahalgam, where Razdan had actually been killed, called to mind flower-carpeted Khelmarg, where his great and lethal love had been consummated. The devil inside him was aroused by the memory of his faithless wife, and murder again filled all his thoughts.

Another summer the brothers stayed among kindly people, the Hanji and Manji tribal boatmen who rowed and punted their craft down the myriad waterways of the valley, gathering singhare, water chestnuts, on the Wular Lake, or working market gardens on Lake Dal, or fishing, or dredging for driftwood in the rivers. When a boatman ferried passengers on his craft the brothers Noman sat huddled up at the back of the vessel with their faces wrapped up in shawls. At other times, on the big boats, they pitched in and worked as hard as their hosts. Poling a boat carrying seven thousand pounds of grain from lake to lake was a hard day’s work. By night, after so effortful a day, the brothers gathered with the boating families at the kitchen end of one of the giant covered boats with its barrel-thatched roof and ate meals of highly spiced fish and lotus root. The boatman with whom they stayed longest was the unofficial patriarch of the Hanji tribe, Ahmed Hanji, who not only resembled an Old Testament prophet but believed that his people were the descendants of Noah, and that their boats were the pygmy children of the ark. “Boat’s the best place to be right now,” he philosophized. “Another flood’s coming, and God knows how many of us will be drowned this time.” “That’s the trouble with this damn country of ours,” Anees Noman muttered to his brother when they lay down to sleep that night. “Everyone’s a prophet.”

All the men in the liberation front were afraid almost all the time. There were not enough of them, the security forces were hunting them down, and in every village there were stories of families shot to death on suspicion of having harbored insurrectionists, stories that made it harder to recruit new members or to gain the support and assistance of the frightened and downtrodden population. Azadi! The word sounded like a fantasy, a children’s fable. Even the freedom fighters sometimes failed to believe in the future. How could the future begin when the present had such a stranglehold on everyone and everything? They feared betrayal, capture, torture, their own cowardice, the fabled insanity of the new officer in charge of all internal security in the Kashmir sector, General Hammirdev Kachhwaha, failure and death. They feared the killing of their loved ones in reprisal for their few successes, a bridge bombed, an army convoy hit, a notorious security officer laid low. They feared, almost above all things, the winter, when their high-ground encampments became unusable, when the Aru route over the mountains became impassable, when their access to arms and combat supplies dwindled, when there was nothing to do but wait to be arrested, to sit shivering in loveless garrets and dream of the unattainable: women, power and wealth. When Maqbool Butt himself was arrested and jailed, morale hit an all-time low. Butt’s old associate Amanullah Khan ended up in exile in England.

The resistance changed its name and became the JKLF, four initials instead of five, “Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front” without the “National,” but it made no difference. The Kashmiris of England, in Birmingham and Manchester and London, could dream on about freedom. The Kashmiris of Kashmir were shivering, leaderless and very close to defeat.

In the old stories, love made possible a kind of spiritual contact between lovers long separated by necessity or chance. In the days before telecommunications, true love itself was enough. A woman left at home would close her eyes and the power of her need would enable her to see her man on his ocean ship battling pirates with cutlass and pistol, her man in the battle’s fray with his sword and shield, standing victorious among the corpses on some foreign field, her man crossing a distant desert whose sands were on fire, her man amid mountain peaks, drinking the driven snow. So long as he lived she would follow his journey, she would know the day-by-day of it, the hour-by-hour, would feel his elation and his grief, would fight temptation with him and with him rejoice in the beauty of the world; and if he died a spear of love would fly back across the world to pierce her waiting, omniscient heart. It would be the same for him. In the midst of the desert’s fire he would feel her cool hand on his cheek and in the heat of battle she would murmur words of love into his ear: live, live. And more: he would know her dailiness too, her moods, her illnesses, her labors, her loneliness, her thoughts. The bond of their communion would never break. That was what the stories said about love. That was what human beings knew love to be.

When Boonyi Kaul and Shalimar the clown first fell in love they didn’t need to read books to find out what it was. They could see each other with their eyes closed, touch each other without making physical contact, hear each other’s endearments even when no word was spoken aloud, and each would always know what the other was doing and feeling, even when they were at opposite ends of Pachigam, or dancing or cooking or acting away from each other in distant no-account towns. A channel of communication had been opened then, and though their love had died the channel was still functioning, held open now by a kind of anti-love, a force fueled by strong emotions that were love’s dark opposites: her fear, his wrath, their belief that their story was not over, that they were each other’s destiny, and that they both knew how it would end. At night in his appointed city garret, or on a straw bed in a stinking country barn, or aboard a lurching boat wedged in between sacks of grain, Shalimar the clown went looking for Boonyi in his mind, he prowled through the night and found her, and at once the fires of his rage flared up and kept him warm. He nursed this heat, the hot coals of his fury, as if in a kangri next to his skin, and even when the fight for freedom was at its lowest ebb this dark flame kept his will strong, because his own goals were personal as well as national, and would not be denied. Sooner or later two deaths would release him from his vow and make possible a third. Sooner or later he would find his way to the American ambassador as well and his honor would be avenged. What happened after that was unimportant. Honor ranked above everything else, above the sacred vows of matrimony, above the divine injunction against cold-blooded murder, above decency, above culture, above life itself.

There you are, he greeted her every night. You can’t get away from me.

But he couldn’t get away from her either. He spoke to her silently as if she were lying by his side, as if his knife were at her throat and he were confessing his secrets to her before she took them to her grave, he told her everything, about the finance committee, the billeting, the impotence, the fear. It turned out that hatred and love were not so very far apart. The levels of intimacy were the same. People heard him murmuring in the dark, his fellow fighters heard him and so did his hosts, but the words couldn’t be made out, and nobody cared anyway, because all the other fighters were murmuring too, talking to their mothers or daughters or wives and listening to their replies. The murderous rage of Shalimar the clown, his possession by the devil, burned fiercely in him and carried him forward, but in the murmurous night it was just one of many stories, one small particular untold tale in a crowd of such tales, one minuscule portion of the unwritten history of Kashmir.

He said: Don’t leave that hut, the place of your exile, or you will release me from my oath and I will return, I will certainly know and I will certainly return.

She said: I’ll stay here and wait and I know you will return.

He said: This terrible time, this in-between time in which we have all been dying of doing nothing, is coming to an end. I am going over the mountains. Here I am, in the mountains. I am taking the Tragbal Pass. Above me stands Nanga Parbat the mighty peak that veils its face in storm clouds and spits lightning at all who dare to pass it by. On the far side of the mountains is freedom, the part of Kashmir that is free. Gilgit, Hunza, Baltistan. Our lost places. I am going to see what Kashmir looks like when it’s free, when its face is not veiled in tears.

He said: I quarreled with Anees again. I spoke of our Pak allies and told him I would put my trust in them and in our common God and he called me a liar and a whore who wants to be fucked from both ends, from behind and in front at the same time. He has a filthy mouth these days. He is against Pakistan and doesn’t want to talk about religion. He laughed in my face when I spoke of my faith and told me I didn’t know what faith was if I could be faithless to my own brother. I said there was a higher allegiance and he laughed in my face again and said maybe I could fool everyone else but I couldn’t fool him that all of a sudden I had turned into some kind of fire-eater for God. He speaks like an old man. I don’t care about the old ways anymore. I want to drive the army bastards out and our enemy’s enemy is our friend. He said no, our enemy’s enemy is our enemy too. But he knows as well as I do that many of our comrades are going over the mountains. His own boss is leaving him and coming with me. He is with me now. I am in the mountains now. I left my brother behind but I am with my brothers. Anees and I parted on bad terms which I regret. He says he knows he will not live to be an old man but who wants to be old in hell. I am wearing dark green gumboots and inside them I have wrapped my legs in a woollen blanket torn in half. I am wearing everything warm I could find but there is no hot coal for my kangri. They gave me a polythene coat and pants to put over it all. Over the mountain there are training camps. Over the mountain there are comrades and weapons and money and political backing. Over the mountain I will find the rainbow’s end.

He said: There are six of us climbing the paths. The invisible commander, Anees’s boss, says he has no regrets. We have left Anees behind, left him to his outmoded ways, and are heading toward the future. The insurgency is divided; very well then, it is divided. We are throwing in our lot with the radicals over the mountains. The name of the invisible commander is Dar, but there are ten thousand Dars in Kashmir. He says his people were from Shirmal originally. I don’t know any Dars in Shirmal. We all make ourselves up now, we don’t have to be ourselves anymore. He trained as a junior cook, he says, but he has been with the resistance almost from the beginning, almost from childhood. He learned invisibility early and now nobody sees him unless he chooses to let himself be seen. I see his bundled clothes pulled tightly around him, his goggles, the ice crusting his beard. His face is a mystery. He is younger than I am, he says. In the mountains people confide in one another. We whisper our secret lies. We may die at any minute, from the cold, from a bullet. From a frozen bullet. I call him Doorway, Dar-waza, put his name and his old job side by side and that’s what they mean. I call him Naked Mountain because like Nanga Parbat he never shows his face. They say that on those rare days when the mountain unveils herself she is so beautiful that she blinds all who see her. Perhaps my Doorway-Darwaza, my Naked Mountain of a leader, is also an exceptionally handsome man, whose beauty blinds. At any rate he will be my door into the next place. Over the mountains I will be trained and my power will increase. I will meet men of power and draw power from them. I will learn the subtle arts of deception and deceit of which you are already a mistress and I will perfect the art of death. The time for love is past. We may die at any minute. The Indian troops know the routes we use and maybe they are lying in wait. We are going in dead of winter when only crazy people would go because maybe they will not be watching. It is too cold. It is impossible to cross the mountains. We are crossing the mountains. We are impossible. We are invisible and impossible and we are going over the mountains to be free.

Boonyi talked to herself too, about mountain passes and danger and despair. Zoon Misri came up to visit her and heard her friend muttering about the return of the iron mullah and the survival of the rapist brothers, and began to tremble. The basket she had brought Boonyi as a gift, with home-baked breads and kababs wrapped in a cloth, fell from her hand. She ran all the way down the hill to Pyarelal’s house by the stream. “The longer she stays up there in Nazarébaddoor’s hut, the more she begins to sound like some kind of crazy Gujar prophetess herself,” she wept. “Only she’s turning into some sort of curse-giving Nazarébad, just the evil eye without the begone.”

Pyarelal tried to console her. “People who spend a lot of time alone do begin to talk to themselves,” he said. “It means nothing. She probably doesn’t know she’s doing it.” Zoon went on sobbing. “No, she is crazy, she really is,” she insisted, her tongue loosened by emotion. “She talks to Shalimar the clown as if he was sitting right beside her, talks to him about how he’s going to kill her-as if it was some small unimportant thing, you know?-as if it was lovers’ talk, can you imagine?-sweet nothings about death. Hai-hai! She asks where he’s going to stab her first and how many times and what-all-how can a person ask such questions and react as if the answers excited her, as if excuse me ji they aroused her?-and now she’s started saying worse things, things that will be the death not only of her but of me as well.” What things are those, Pyarelal tried to ascertain, but Zoon just shook her head and wept. There were words she could not say, names she could not bring herself to speak. The Gegroo brothers are alive and so is Bulbul Fakh. That was the sentence which would end her life if spoken in Pachigam. As long as it only hung in the air in a madwoman’s hillside hut it might be possible for Zoon Misri to survive. “I can’t visit her anymore,” she told Pyarelal. “Don’t ask me to say why. It’s too dangerous for me up there, that’s all.”

Boonyi said: “They have crossed the Tragbal Pass. No Indian soldiers were lying in wait for them and they have safely crossed. Men have come to meet them and one of these men is Maulana Bulbul Fakh. The iron mullah has placed them under his protection. He lives in Gilgit and plots his triumphant return. The three Gegroos are with him. They were sealed up in the Shirmal mosque like Anarkali but there was a secret passage just like in Mughal-e-Azam. They escaped into the woods and went over the mountains and waited for their time.”

Pyarelal asked her: “How do you know these things?” It was winter, so they were huddled round the fire in her hut. The goats were in the barn he had helped her build. He heard the clanking of the small brass bells around their necks. His daughter was in a condition not unlike a trance. She was at once there in the hut and somewhere else as well. She could hear what he was saying but she was also listening elsewhere. She said: “My husband tells me. He has crossed the mountains to meet the iron mullah. The iron mullah says that the question of religion can only be answered by looking at the condition of the world. When the world is in disarray then God does not send a religion of love. At such times he sends a martial religion, he asks that we sing battle hymns and crush the infidel. The iron mullah says that at the root of religion is this desire, the desire to crush the infidel. This is the fundamental urge. When the infidel has been crushed there may be time for love, although in the iron mullah’s opinion this is of secondary importance. Religion demands austerity and self-denial, says Bulbul Fakh. It has little time for the softnesses of pleasure or the weaknesses of love. God should be loved but that is a manly love, a love of action, not a girlish affliction of the heart. The iron mullah preaches to many hundreds of men from many parts of the world. They are preparing for war.”

Pyarelal asked: “How does your husband tell you this?”

She answered: “He speaks to me as you speak. He is full of fire and death. When you and the sarpanch are no more he will come here for his honor.”

“This then is a part of what he says,” her father needed to know.

“This is the reason we are able to speak,” she replied. “This is our bond that cannot be broken.” She fell sideways and was unconscious. Pyarelal caught her and laid her gently down to sleep. “Then I will never die,” he whispered to her sleeping body. “I will live forever and he will never be released from his oath.”

This was not how things were supposed to go, according to the old story. In the old story Sita the pure was kidnapped and Ram fought a war to win her back. In the modern world everything had been turned upside down and inside out. Sita, or rather Boonyi in the Sita role, had freely chosen to run off with her American Ravan and willingly became his mistress and bore him a child; and Ram-the Muslim clown, Shalimar, misplaying the part of Ram-fought no war to rescue her. In the old story, Ravan had died rather than surrender Sita. In the contemporary bowdlerization of the tale, the American had turned away from Sita and allowed his queen to steal her daughter and send her home in shame. In the ancient tale, when Sita returned to Ayodhya after defending her chastity throughout her captive years, Ram had sent her back into forest exile because her long residence under Ravan’s roof made that chastity suspect in the eyes of the common people. In Boonyi’s story, she too had been exiled to the forest, but it was the people-her friend Zoon, her father, even her father-in-law-who had helped her and saved her life, deflecting her husband’s vengeful knife, making him swear an oath; after which, and at the wrong time, her husband went off to war, and she knew that for him the battle was a form of waiting, that he would fight other enemies, slay other foes, until he was free to return and take her unfaithful life.

But it was something more than that. It was also a way of being with her. While he was away his thoughts returned to her and they could commune as they once had. And even if his thoughts were murderous this prolonged communion often felt, strongly felt to her, like love. All that remained between them was death, but the deferment of death was life. All that remained between them, perhaps, was hatred, but this yearning hatred-at-a-distance was surely also one of love’s many faces, yes, its ugliest face. She began to entertain fantasies of earning his forgiveness and winning back his heart. In the great old book Sita had called upon the gods to defend her virtue, stepping into a fire and emerging from it unscathed; and she had asked the underworld to open so that she could depart from this world in which her innocence was not enough, and the gates of the underworld did open, and she went down into darkness. If she, Boonyi, set fire to herself no god would protect her. She would burn and the forest would burn with her. Accordingly, she lit no fire. Once in despair she did ask the gates of hell to open in the earth below her feet, but no cavity yawned. She was already in hell.

The iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh was their appointed superior. His breath was still the sulfurous dragon-breath that had earned him his stinky name, fakh, and he still spoke in the old harsh way, as if human speech were painful to him, but he was taller than Shalimar the clown remembered, a giant over six feet tall, and also leaner and much more beautiful than in the old days in Shirmal. Was it possible that he had grown bigger and more attractive with the passing years? As for his being made of iron, there could no longer be any argument about that. There were places on his shins and shoulders where the knocks of a hard life had rubbed away the covering of skin and the dull metal beneath had become visible, battle hardened, indestructible. These proofs of his miraculous nature gave Bulbul Fakh great authority in the camps over the mountains. He carried a lump of rock salt at all times. “This is Pakistani salt,” he told the liberation front commander and his men. “This we will bring to Kashmir when we set it free.” He wrapped the salt in a green handkerchief and put it away in a bag. “The green is for our religion which makes all things possible. God willing,” he said. “With the blessing of God,” they replied.

The iron mullah led them to a “forward camp,” known as FC-22, a front-line facility of the Markaz Dawar center for worldwide Islamist-jihadist activities set up by Pak Inter-Services Intelligence. FC-22 in those early days was a shithole. There were few pukka buildings-the only sleeping accommodation was in filthy, patched-up tents-and not enough food or warmth. However, there were staggering quantities of weapons available, and there were ISI personnel on hand to offer training in the use of these weapons, including high-precision sniper-killer training. There were firing ranges with moving targets and instructors who would push the new recruits in the back or jog their elbows at the same time as ordering them to fire, and they had to learn not to miss, because hitting a moving target when they were off balance was what they were being taught. There were weekly seminars about, and real-time training exercises in, high-speed, guerrilla-style strike-and-withdraw operations across the Line of Control. There was a bomb factory and a course in fifth-column infiltration technique, and above all there was prayer.

The five daily prayers at the camp maidan were compulsory for all the fighters and the only book permitted at the site-training manuals excepted-was the Holy Qur’an. In between formal prayers there was much discussion of God by foreigners speaking in languages which Shalimar the clown did not understand, in which only the word for God stood out. Maulana Bulbul Fakh was his guide to weaponry and foreigners alike. But before he was ready to embark on the great work at hand his consciousness had to be altered. Shalimar the clown was asked to make certain revisions in his worldview. “It is not possible to shoot straight,” Bulbul Fakh said bluntly, “if the way you see things is all screwed up.”

Ideology was primary. The infidel, obsessed with possessions and wealth, did not grasp this, and believed that men were primarily motivated by social and material self-interest. This was the mistake of all infidels, and also their weakness, which made it possible for them to be defeated. The true warrior was not primarily motivated by worldly desires, but by what he believed to be true. Economics was not primary. Ideology was primary.

The iron mullah took upon himself the task of reeducating all newcomers. It was a part of his gift to the revolution, a part of God’s work. Shalimar the clown sat on a boulder by a frozen mountain stream and listened to the iron mullah as once he had listened to Pandit Pyarelal Kaul while longing for the simple happiness of Boonyi’s touch. But that happiness had proved to be an illusion, a deception, and Shalimar the clown’s memory of being deceived made the iron mullah’s lessons easier for him to accept.

Everything they thought they knew about the nature of reality, about how things worked and what things were, was wrong, the iron mullah said. That was the first thing for the true warrior to understand.-Yes, Shalimar the clown thought, that’s right, everything I thought I knew about her was a mistake.-The visible world, the world of space and time and sensation and perception in which they had believed themselves to be living, was a lie.-Yes, that’s so.-Everything that seemed to be, was not.-Yes.-By crossing the mountains they had passed through a curtain and stood now on the threshold of the world of truth, which was invisible to most men.-Thank God, thought Shalimar the clown. Truth. At last. Truth that endures. Truth that will never become a lie.-In the world of truth, the iron mullah preached, there was no room for weakness, argument, or half measures. Before the power of truth, every knee must bow, and then truth will protect you. Truth will keep your soul safe in the palm of its mighty hand.-In the palm of its hand.-Only the truth can be your father now, but through the truth you will be fathers of history.-Only the truth can be my father.-Only the truth can be your mother now, but when the truth has won its victory all mothers will bless your names.-Only the truth can be my mother.-Only the truth can be your brother, but in the truth you will be a brother to all men.-Only the truth can be my brother.-Only the truth can be your wife.-Only the truth can be my wife.

Time itself was the servant of truth, the iron mullah told them. Years could pass in an instant, or a moment could be infinitely prolonged, if the truth were best served by doing so. Distance, too, was as nothing in the eye of truth. A journey of a thousand miles could be accomplished in a single day. And if time and distance could be moved and changed, if these great things were the malleable disciples of truth, then how much more easily molded was the human self! If the so-called laws of the universe were illusions, if these fictions were no more than the fabric of the veil behind which truth was concealed, then human nature was an illusion also, and human desires and human intelligence, human character and human will, would all bow to truth’s imperatives once the veil was removed. No man could face the naked truth, defy it and survive.

The new recruits listening to the iron mullah felt their old lives shrivel in the flame of his certainty. The invisible commander who called himself Dar from Shirmal even though there were no Dars in Shirmal leapt up suddenly and flung off his woollen balaclava-style hat, his polythene outer garments, his woollen waistcoast, his gumboots, the woollen blanket-strips wrapping his feet, his grey sleeveless V-neck woollen jumper, his long khaki-colored woollen kurta and pajamas, his socks and his underpants, and stood before Bulbul Fakh stripped and ready for action. “I have no name,” he cried loudly, “except the name of truth. I have no face but the face you choose for me. I have no body but the one that will die for the truth. I have no soul but the soul that is God’s.” The iron mullah came to him and gently, as a father might, helped him to dress again. “This warrior,” Bulbul Fakh tenderly announced when the man whom Shalimar the clown thought of as Naked Mountain was fully clothed once more, “has put off the garments of the lie and put on those of truth. He is ready for the war.”

While the invisible commander was naked, Shalimar the clown had understood how young he was: probably only eighteen or nineteen years old, young enough to be prepared to erase himself in a cause, young enough to make himself a blank sheet upon which another man could write. For Shalimar the clown the total abnegation of the self was a more problematic requirement, a sticking place. He was, he wanted to be, a part of the holy war, but he also had private matters to attend to, personal oaths to fulfill. At night his wife’s face filled his thoughts, her face and behind hers the face of the American. To let go of himself would be to let go of them as well; and he found that he could not order his heart to set his body free.

“The infidel believes in the immutability of the soul,” said Bulbul Fakh. “But we believe that all living things can be transformed in the service of the truth. The infidel says that a man’s character will decide his fate; we say that a man’s fate will forge his character anew. The infidel holds that the picture of the world he draws is a picture we must all recognize. We say that his picture means nothing to us, for we live in a different world. The infidel speaks of universal truth. We know that the universe is an illusion and that truth lies beyond the illusion, where the infidel cannot see. The infidel believes the world is his. But we shall drive him from his redoubts and cast him into darkness and live in Paradise and rejoice as he plunges into the fire.”

Shalimar the clown rose to his feet and tore off his garments. “Take me!” he cried. “Truth, I am ready for you!” He was a trained performer, a leading actor in the leading bhand pather troupe in the valley, and so of course he could make his gestures more convincing, and imbue his journey toward nakedness with more meaning, than any eighteen-year-old youth. He stripped off his shirt and shouted out his acquiescence-“I cleanse myself of everything except the struggle! Without the struggle I am nothing!”-he screamed his assent-“Take me or kill me now!”-and stripped off his undergarments. The passion of his avowals made an impression on the iron mullah. “We knew that those who chose to make the arduous winter journey over the Tragbal Pass must have been driven from within to do so,” he said. “But in you the desire burns more fiercely than I had thought.” He helped Shalimar the clown put his clothes back on, to dress himself in garments transformed by his shedding of them into the raiment of belonging. When he was fully clothed again Shalimar the clown prostrated himself at the feet of Bulbul Fakh, and almost believed his own performance, almost believed that he was no longer what he was and could indeed leave the past behind.

Later that day, however, he was accosted at the mess table by a little Far Eastern-looking guy with an almost absurdly innocent face, a man in his late thirties who looked ten years younger, who seemed to shine with some sort of crazy internal light, and who spoke enough broken Hindi to make himself understood. The little guy asked politely, “Okay? I sit? Okay?” Shalimar the clown shrugged and the little guy sat down. “Moro,” he said, tapping his own chest. “Filipino Muslim. From Basilan, Mindanao. You can say this?” Shalimar the clown went along with it. “Basilan, Mindanao,” he said. The little guy applauded. “Was fisherman there, son of fisherman,” he said. “Janjalani, Abdurajak Abubakar. This also you can say?” “Janjalani,” repeated Shalimar the clown. “Not fish long. Fish stink. Fish rot from head. Filipino state stink like rotten fish. Join Moro National Liberation Front,” Janjalani said in his faltering Hindi. “But broken away. Join al-Islamic Tabligh, good movement. Cash from Saudi, also Pakistan. Send me to school West Asia. Which is, you say, Mideast.” Shalimar the clown twisted his mouth to show he was impressed. “You’re far from home,” he suggested. “Study. Learn,” said the little man. “Saudi Arab. Libya. Afghanistan. Study at the Base. You know the Base? Brother Ayman, brother Ramzi, Sheikh Usama. Learn many good thing. Field-strip rifle, I learn. Ambush I learn. Kidnap I also learn. Extortion, bombing, assassination. Fight Russian, kill Russian. Good education.” He laughed heartily. “Education in person’s character I have already. So I see through you, sir. I see through you like window. You are not man of God.” Shalimar the clown’s body tightened and he calculated the speed at which he could draw his knife and attack if an attack became necessary. “No, no, sir,” the little man replied in mock alarm. “Peace, please. I here in observer capacity only. Noncombatant status. Ha! Ha! Full respect, please. Man of God in his place, fighter killer in his. Man of God inspire. Man of war do. Combination person of Bulbul Fakh style very rare. You not combination person I think. You act combination person to please iron Bulbul but really you a fighter killer. It is okay. I however am combination person like Bulbul, same same. Fighter, also ustadz. Preacher. It is my fate.”

Everyone’s story was a part of everyone else’s. Shalimar the clown at forward camp 22 befriended the luminous little man who had fought with Afghans and al-Qaeda against the Soviet Union, who had accepted U.S. arms and backing but loathed the United States because American soldiers had historically backed the settlement of Catholics in Mindanao against the wishes of the local Muslims. The majority Muslim population of seven million people had been pushed into increasingly cramped and crowded living conditions to make room. Basilan, the small island to the southwest of the main Mindanao island, was a place of grinding poverty where gun law had begun to rule. The Christians controlled the economy and the Muslims were kept poor. “In seventies big war. One hun’red thou, hun’red twenty thou die. Then peace deal, then MNLF split, MNLF-MILF, then fight again. Hate Filipino government. Hate also U.S.A. U.S. secret ambassador comes to the Base to give weapons and support. I hold my fire but in my heart I want to kill this man.” When Shalimar the clown heard the ambassador’s name he sat bolt upright at the refectory table. “Abdurajak, my friend,” he said, his voice trembling because of his discovery, “this man I also want to kill.”

“Let me know if I can help,” the Filipino revolutionary said.

Sometimes, now, she did not hear his voice for weeks, even months. In the night she reached out for him but found only a void. He had gone beyond her reach and she could only wait for him to return, not knowing if she wanted him to return so that she could preserve her dream of a happy ending, or if she wished him dead because his death would set her free. But he always returned in the end, and when he did it seemed that in his life only a single night had passed, or at the very most two or three. Years of her life were vanishing but in the place from which he called to her, time ran at a different speed, the space around him took a different shape. She did not know how to tell him everything that was happening in Pachigam. There was no time. Increasingly, however, he wanted only to send her the message of himself, of the fire that continued to burn in him, and the only question to which he needed an answer was the old, macabre one: Are they dead yet? But Abdullah Noman and Pyarelal Kaul were alive, though their years, too, were rushing by during his weeks. In his time, he wouldn’t have long to wait.

The Russians were in Afghanistan and consequently many Afghans had fled to Pakistan, and were even to be found at forward camp number 22 in the “free”-Azad-sector of Kashmir. In spite of the enormous numbers of refugees occupying huge, town-sized camps in the Pak northwest, the Afghans were not poor. There were extensive opium fields in the vicinity of the camps and the refugee chieftains bought their way into the poppy business, using the gold and jewelry they had brought across the border for capital and backing it up with menaces and guns. Once they had gained control of the poppy fields they instituted a system of double-cropping so that they could produce heroin as well as opium. The income from the heroin was large enough to pay off the Pak authorities and to pay for the costs of the refugee camps as well. The authorities turned a blind eye to what was going on in the poppy fields because it prevented the refugees from becoming a burden on the state and besides there were the payoffs, which were generous.

The Afghans had freedom fighters of their own, and the United States decided to support these fighters against its own great enemy, which had occupied their country. U.S. operatives in the field-CIA, Counter-Terrorism and Special Units personnel-took to referring to these fighters as the Muj, which sounded mysterious and exciting and concealed the fact that the word mujahid meant the same thing as the word jihadi, “holy warrior.” Weapons, blankets and cash poured into northern Pakistan, and some of this aid did reach the Muj. Much of it ended up in the arms bazaars of the wild frontier zone, and a percentage of it reached Azad Kashmir. After a while the fighters gathering in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir started calling themselves the Kashmiri Muj. The ISI provided them with powerful long-range missiles which had been intended for the Afghan front, but had unfortunately been diverted along the way. Other high-quality arms also began to appear at FC-22: automatic grenade launchers of Soviet and Chinese origin, rocket pods with solar-powered timing devices that made possible delayed-firing rocket barrages, 60-mm mortars. At a certain point Stinger missiles, SAMs, were also made available to the “Kashmiri Muj.” Weapons training took up much of every day. The chief instructor was an Afghan war buddy of Janjalani the Filipino’s, a black-turbaned warrior from Kandahar who called himself simply Talib, meaning “the student.” The word for knowledge was taleem. Those who acquired knowledge were scholars: taliban. Talib the student was a mullah of a sort, or, at least, had been trained at a religious school, a madrasa. Like the iron mullah Bulbul Fakh, however, he never mentioned the name of his seminary. Talib the Afghan had lost an eye in battle and wore a black patch. As a result he had been temporarily withdrawn from the front line, but he was determined to return to combat duties as soon as possible. “In the meanwhile,” he said, “God’s work can be done here also.”

Talib the Afghan’s one eye bored through Shalimar the clown and seemed to read his thoughts, to see the pretense there as Janjalani had, the untold, forbidden secret. Janjalani understood his reasons but Shalimar the clown feared Talib would not. He felt like a fraud and feared exposure constantly. He had not surrendered his self as he had been required to do, had hidden it deep beneath a performance of abnegation, the greatest performance he had ever given. He had his own goals in life and would not give them up. I am ready to kill but I am not ready to stop being myself, he repeated many times in his heart. I will kill readily but I will not give myself up. But his goals did not officially exist, not in this dangerous place. “You were an actor,” Talib the Afghan said scornfully in bad, heavily accented Urdu. “God spits on actors. God spits on dancing and singing. Maybe you are acting now. Maybe you are a traitor and a spy. You are fortunate I am not the one in charge of this camp. I would immediately order the execution of all entertainers. God spits on entertainment. I would also order the execution of dentists, professors, sportsmen and whores. God spits on intellectualism and licentiousness and games. If you hold the rocket launcher like that it will break your shoulder. This is the way to do it.”

Shalimar the clown thought at first that he understood one-eyed Talib’s rage, thought it was the anger of the wounded warrior deprived of war, of the doer forced to be a teacher. Later he revised his opinion. Talib’s rage was not a side effect. It was his reason for being. An age of fury was dawning and only the enraged could shape it. Talib the Afghan had become his wrath. He was a student, a scholar of rage. Of all other learning he was contemptuous but he was wise in the ways of anger. It had burned through him and now it was all that remained: the rage, and his attachment to Zahir, the boy he had brought with him from Kandahar, his protégé, disciple and lover. A warrior of Kandahar, like some ancient Greek, would take such a boy for a time, make a man of him and let him go. Zahir the Boy slept in Talib’s tent and looked after his weapons and attended to his normal, nocturnal needs. But this was not homosexuality. This was manliness. Talib the Afghan was in favor of executing homosexuals, those unnatural effeminates upon whom God expectorated most violently of all.

Shalimar the clown forged a friendship of sorts with Zahir, who often seemed lonely and scared, and whose need to confide was great. Zahir spoke of Kandahar, of parents and friends, of his closed, destroyed school, of his love of kite flying and horses, and of what he had seen of blood and terrifying death. It was from Zahir the Boy that Shalimar received, by the merest chance, news of the man he wanted to kill more than any other man on earth. “The Americans bring us weapons to kill the Russians,” Zahir said. “Thus even the infidel can be made to do the work of God. They send their important people to deal with us and think of us as allies. It is amusing.” Ambassador Max Ophuls, who these days was supporting terror activities while calling himself an ambassador for counterterrorism, had been in charge of liaison with Talib the Afghan’s branch of the Muj. A tiger leapt up inside Shalimar the clown whenever he heard that name, and caging it again was hard. Talib’s one eye would have seen that leap and suspected it at once, but Zahir the Boy was too wrapped up in the past to see what was going on under his nose.

Our lives touch again, Shalimar said silently to the ambassador. Maybe the gun I’m holding was brought to this region by you. Maybe one day it will point at you and fire. But he knew he did not want to shoot the ambassador. His weapon of choice had always been the knife.

He was ready for battle. Winter was dissolving into spring and the mountain pathways were becoming passable. The forward bases were filling up with men. FC-22 was bursting at the seams with men with the snarling, spittle-flecked manner of attack dogs straining to be unleashed. New groups were appearing every day, or so it seemed: Harakats, Lashkars, Hizbs of this or that, martyrdom or faith or glory. The word was that Amanullah Khan had come to Pakistan from England to assume command of the JKLF. Shalimar the clown went through his daily routine, the fitness regimen, the commando training, the weapons work, and wondered what it would be like to kill a man. Then the iron mullah asked him if he would like to go abroad.

The weight of her lost daughter still hit her almost every day, and as the daughter grew older in the other world to which Boonyi had surrendered her the weight increased. Now when Boonyi thought about Kashmira it was like being crushed beneath a house. It was as though the earth’s gravitational force increased and dragged her down and shackled her. The pressure on her chest was so great that her lungs could barely function. If you’re going to kill me, my husband, she thought, come home and do it soon, or else my daughter, whose name I don’t know, whose face I can’t see, will beat you to the punch. But her husband did not come to her for a long time. When at last he did come, there were strange words in his messages, the names of places of whose existence she was only dimly aware: Tajikistan, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine. When she heard these names she knew only that the old Shalimar was dead. In his place, bearing his name, was this new creature, bathed in strangeness, and all that was left of Shalimar the clown was a murderous desire. She gave up her dream of a happy ending and waited for his return.

And all of a sudden he was forty years old, battle hardened, and no longer needed to ask himself what murder might be like. On a street corner outside a car park in North Africa an agent of the FIS had paid a cigarette vendor a few dinars to leave his tray behind and disappear for an hour. Then he had been brought forward, Shalimar the clown clean shaven and wearing Western clothes, and a bearded man wearing a khamis robe and smelling heavily of musk put the strap of the vending tray around his neck and left a pistol on it wrapped in a white cloth and then disappeared. Shalimar the clown felt strangely potent, he felt like Superman, because they had stuck a needle in his arm and injected an off-white liquid into it. He had no language in common with the people for whom he was carrying out the hit, but one-eyed Talib had sent Zahir the Boy with him to be his translator and aide. Talib said that Zahir the Boy spoke excellent Arabic and it was time he became a man. They had shown Shalimar the clown a picture of a man and brought him here in a windowless van and injected him and left him on the street with the gun. In the van Zahir the Boy had translated what the bearded man said. The man he was going to kill was a godless man, a writer against God, who spoke French and had sold his soul to the West. That was all he needed to know. He should not need to ask questions. It was a simple job.

Shalimar the clown stood on the street corner surrounded by Arabic and when men came up for cigarettes Zahir the Boy did the work and Shalimar the clown grinned stupidly and pointed at his ears and open mouth, meaning I’m deaf and dumb, I can’t talk to you, I have no idea what you’re saying. Then the man in the photograph appeared, wearing blue-tinted sunglasses and an open white shirt and cream slacks and carrying a folded newspaper in his left hand. The man walked quickly toward the car park and Shalimar the clown took off the vending tray, picked up the cloth with the pistol inside and followed him. He was holding the cloth in his left hand and didn’t take the gun out because he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood. What it would feel like when he slashed the bastard’s throat in half so that his head lolled back and sideways off his neck and the blood gushed upwards like a tree. What it would feel like when the blood poured over him and he stepped away from the corpse, the useless twitching thing, the piece of fly-blown meat. Zahir came running and the windowless van came round a corner fast and the man who smelled of musk pulled him inside and slammed the door and the van drove away quickly while the man who smelled of musk shouted at him for a long, long time. Zahir the Boy said, “He says you are insane. The gun had a silencer fitted and would have been quick and clean. You disobeyed orders and he should kill you for this.” But Shalimar the clown was not killed. Zahir the Boy translated what the man who smelled of musk said after he had calmed down. “For a man like you, a complete fucking crazy asshole, there will always be plenty of work.”

So he knew the answer to his question and had learned something about himself that he had not known before. The years passed and indeed there was plenty of work. He became a person of value and consequence, as assassins are. Also, his secret purpose was achieved. He had passports in five names and had learned good Arabic, ordinary French and bad English, and had opened routes for himself, routes in the real world, the invisible world, that would take him where he needed to go when the time for the ambassador came. He remembered his father teaching him to walk the tightrope, and realized that traveling the secret routes of the invisible world was exactly the same. The routes were gathered air. Once you had learned to use them you felt as if you were flying, as if the illusory world in which most people lived was vanishing and you were flying across the skies without even needing to get on board a plane.

FC-22 was different when he returned: larger, more solidly constructed. It no longer looked like a bandits’ hideout. Many wooden houses had been built, and Nissen huts erected. Talib the Afghan had returned to active military service and Zahir the Boy was also long gone. Maulana Bulbul Fakh was there, however, and welcomed Shalimar the clown with the words, “You’re just in time. The uprising is near.” He had been away too long. Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, had been dead for five years. There had been India-Pakistan clashes on the Siachen Glacier, twenty thousand feet above sea level. But it was the just-concluded polls that changed everything. This was the year 1987, and the Indian government had held state elections in Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah, the Sheikh’s son, was the government’s preferred choice. The opposition party, the Muslim United Front, named as its candidate one Mohammad Yousuf Shah, described by General Hammirdev Kachhwaha as the state’s “most wanted militant.” Unofficially, as the results came in, it became plain that the wrong man was winning. So the election was rigged. MUF supporters and electoral agents were seized and tortured. Mohammad Yousuf Shah went underground, and as Syed Salahuddin became the chief of the militant group Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin. His closest aides, the so-called HAJY group (Abdul Hamid Shaikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, Javed Ahmed Mir and Mohammad Yasin Malik), crossed the mountains and joined the JKLF. Thousands of previously law-abiding young men took up arms and joined the militants, disillusioned by the electoral process. Pakistan was generous. There were AK-47s for everyone.

Abdurajak Janjalani had gone home and started up a new group of his own, the “Sword Bearers,” or Abu Sayyaf faction. He had often talked about doing this, and more than once tried to recruit Shalimar the clown to help him. “Brothers from everywhere gathering,” he had said. “You see. It will be triumph for our international.” Seeing that Shalimar the clown had other things on his mind, Janjalani had not pressed him, but had assured him that there would always be a place for him in the struggle. “If you want to come to Basilan,” he said, “this person, call him. All fixed very quick and well. Brother Ramzi coming. There are so-much funds.” The name on the piece of paper meant nothing to Shalimar the clown but when the Sword Bearers hit the news fast with a campaign of bombings and kidnappings for ransom, the world’s visible and invisible networks began to buzz and various names did begin to crop up, such as Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a cousin of Sheikh Usama’s who ran a large number of Islamic charities in the southern Philippines and was spoken of as a major financier of the new group. President Qadhafi of Libya condemned Abu Sayyaf but Libyan charities in the southern Philippines also came under suspicion as possible channels for Libyan state cash. Likewise, the names of certain prominent Malaysian figures began to occur in the same sentence as the words Abu Sayyaf. The name and telephone number on Shalimar the clown’s piece of paper were both Malaysian, but neither ever appeared in the press. Of course the piece of paper had existed for less than an hour. Shalimar the clown had fixed the name and the number in his head and burned the paper as soon as the work of memorization was done.

The Gegroo brothers had gone, too. The secular nationalist ideas of the JKLF militants had never been to their liking, and Talib the instructor had steered them (before he also left) in the direction of the most “Afghan” of the newer groups, the Lashkar-e-Pak or Army of the Pure. The LeP had moral as well as political aims. A month before Shalimar the clown’s return to FC-22, the Gegroos had taken part in an LeP raid on the village of Hast in Jammu & Kashmir Rajouri district. LeP posters had appeared in the village ordering all Muslim women to don the burqa and adhere to the dress and behavioral principles laid down by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Kashmiri women were mostly unaccustomed to the veil and ignored the posters. On the night in question the LeP group, including the Gegroos, took reprisals. They entered the home of Mohammed Sadiq and killed his twenty-year-old daughter, Nosen Kausar. In the home of Khalid Ahmed they beheaded twenty-two-year-old Tahira Parveen. In the home of Mohammed Rafiq they killed young Shehnaaz Akhtar. And they beheaded forty-three-year-old Jan Begam in her own home.

In the months that followed the LeP grew bolder and moved its activities into Srinagar itself. Women teachers were doused with acid for failing to adhere to the Islamic dress code. Threats were made and deadlines issued and many Kashmiri women put on, for the first time, the shroud their mothers and grandmothers had always proudly refused. Then, in the summer of 1987, the LeP posters appeared in Shirmal. Men and women were not to sit together and watch television anymore. That was a licentious and obscene practice. Hindus were not to sit among Muslims. And of course all women must instantly put on the veil. Hasina Yambarzal was outraged. “Tear all those posters down and announce business as usual,” she ordered her sons. “I don’t intend to watch my TV programs through a hole in a one-woman tent, nor do I plan to be liberated into a different kind of jail.”

8

The last performance ever given by the bhands of Pachigam took place early the next year, at the start of the tourist season, on the day the national insurrection began. Abdullah Noman at the great age of seventy-six brought his troupe of players to an auditorium in Srinagar to perform for the valley’s Indian and foreign visitors, on whom the economy depended. His great stars were gone. There was no Boonyi to dance her Anarkali and devastate audiences with her beauty, no Shalimar to clown with dizzying skill on a high wire without a net, and he himself found it extremely painful to draw and brandish a kingly sword with his aging, crippled hands. The youngsters of today had other interests and had to be coerced into performing. The sullen woodenness of these younger actors was an insult to the ancient art. Abdullah mourned inwardly as he watched them at rehearsal. They were broken bits of matchstick pretending to be mighty trees. Who will watch such clumsy rubbish? he wondered sadly. They will pelt us with fruit and two veg and boo us off the stage.

He apologized in advance to his septuagenarian friend and longtime ally, the retired Sikh cultural administrator and celebrated horticulturalist Sardar Harbans Singh, who had supported the bhand pather throughout his career and, in retirement, had persuaded his young successors-who were as impatient with the old crafts as the youth of Pachigam-to give the old stagers the occasional break. “After tonight, Sardarji,” Abdullah Noman told the elegant old gent, “the organizers will probably want to give us not breaks but broken heads.” “Don’t worry about it, old man,” Harbans replied dryly. “The tourists have been fleeing the valley in droves this past week, and most of them never showed up in the first place anyway. It’s a catastrophe, a shipwreck, and I’m afraid it’s your job to provide the entertainment while we go down with all hands.”

Firdaus had not come to Srinagar with the company. Abdullah knew she was unhappy, because she had started muttering about snake omens. When his wife started seeing snake-shapes in the clouds, in the branches of trees, in water, it invariably meant she was brooding about the miseries of life. Recently she claimed that actual snakes had been coming into the village, that she saw them wherever she went, in animal feeding barns and fruit orchards and produce stalls and homes. They had not started biting yet, no snake-deaths of livestock or human beings had been reported, but they were gathering, Firdaus said, like an army of invasion they were massing ranks and unless something was done about it they would attack at a moment of their choosing and that would be that. Once upon a time Abdullah Noman would have roared his disbelief and the village would have gathered delightedly outside his house to listen to the quarrel, but Abdullah didn’t roar anymore, even though he knew she would prefer it if he did. He had retreated into himself, old age and disappointment had pushed him into a cold place and he didn’t know how to get out of it. He saw his wife looking at him sometimes, fixing him with an unhappy questioning stare that asked where did you go, what happened to the man I loved, and he wanted to shout out to her, I’m still in here, save me, I’m trapped inside myself, but there was a coating of ice around him and the words couldn’t get through.

“If the show goes as badly as I fear,” he told her stiffly, “then I’m going to stop. To hell with it! I don’t plan to spend my last years being humiliated in public in shows I wouldn’t pay to see myself.” Pachigam was much poorer than either of them could remember. Theatrical bookings were few and far between and since Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s withdrawal from the position of vasta waza, chief cook, the reputation of Pachigam’s wazwaan had declined. Firdaus replied to her husband’s announcement with a few stiff words of her own. “So, if we’re going to be even harder up than we are now,” she said, “then it’s just as well I never developed any fancy ideas about living in style.” Abdullah knew she was complaining about his behavior, his failure to make her feel loved, but the words that would soften her heart stuck in his throat and he left for Srinagar saying, with a curt nod, “Quite so. The poor should never succumb to the dream of a comfortable life.”

The bus bringing the actors and musicians to Srinagar could not get to the depot on account of the crowds gathering in the city streets under the nervous eyes of the army and police. The bhands had to get out, carry their props and walk. There were already more than four hundred thousand people clogging up the roads. Abdullah Noman asked the bus driver what was going on. “It’s a funeral,” he replied. “They have come to mourn the death of our Kashmir.”

The curtain rose on the story of the good king Zain-ul-abidin, and Abdullah walked out onto the stage with a raised sword in one hand and a spear in the other, clenching the weapons tightly, ignoring the spears of pain shooting down his hands. He was leading by example for the last time in his life, sending a message to his bored, mutinous troupe. If I can rise above my pain then you can rise above your indifference. But the auditorium was three-quarters empty, and the few tourists who were sitting out there weren’t really listening to him, because through the walls of the theater came the muffled sound of the start of the uprising, the crowd of one million persons marching through the streets carrying flaming torches above their heads and bellowing Azadi! Sardar Harbans Singh was sitting with his son Yuvraj, a strikingly handsome young man whose modernizing inclinations were trumpeted by his shaven face and lack of a Sikh turban, in the middle of the otherwise empty seventh row. With the sense of a man plunging from a high pinnacle to his death Abdullah Noman fixed his old comrade with his fiercest, most glittering stare and launched into the play with all the power he had left. For the next hour, in the silent tomb of the auditorium, the bhands of Pachigam told a story which nobody wanted to hear. Several members of the audience got up and left during the show. In the intermission Sardar Harbans Singh’s son Yuvraj, a businessman who in spite of the worsening political situation was successfully exporting Kashmiri papier-mâché boxes, carved wooden tables, numdah rugs and embroidered shawls to the rest of India and to Western buyers as well, who supported him “as an act of ridiculous optimism, considering that the region is on the verge of going insane,” warned Abdullah Noman that things might get out of hand in the street and demonstrators might even burst into the theater. “You’re holding a sword and a spear,” Yuvraj Singh reminded Abdullah. “If they do get inside here, a word of advice? Never mind about the play. Throw the props down and run.” He himself would have to miss the second act, he apologized. “The situation, you understand,” he explained, vaguely. “One has one’s proper duties to discharge.”

In the hollow vacuum of the empty theater Abdullah Noman saw his troupe of disaffected youngsters give the performances of their young lives, as if they had suddenly understood a secret which nobody had explained to them before. The pounding drumbeats of the demonstration echoed around them, the chanting of the demonstrators was like a chorus crying doom, the menace of the ever-growing crowd crackled around the empty seats like an electric charge. Still the bhands of Pachigam went on with their show, dancing, singing, clowning, telling their tale of old-time tolerance and hope. At one point Abdullah Noman succumbed to the illusion that their voices, their instruments had become inaudible, that, even though they were declaiming their lines and singing their songs and playing their music with a passion they had not been able to muster for a long time, there was complete silence in the theater, the few scattered spectators sat mutely watching a dumb show, while outside in the streets the noise was already immense and grew louder by the instant, and now a second group of noises was superimposed on the first, the noises of troop transports, Jeeps and tanks, of booted feet marching in step, of loaded weapons being readied and finally of gunshots, rifle shots as well as automatic fire. The chanting turned into screaming, the drumbeats turned into thunder, the march turned into a stampede, and as the auditorium began to shake the tale of King Zain-ul-abidin silently reached its happy ending and the actors joined hands and took their bow, but even though Sardar Harbans Singh, the only person left in the audience, applauded as heartily as he could in the circumstances, his clapping hands didn’t make any sound at all.

For a time it was impossible to return home. Forty demonstrators had been killed. The situation in the streets was highly unstable, there were roadblocks and troops and armored vehicles everywhere, and public transport was not a priority. The bhands of Pachigam blockaded themselves inside the theater and waited. Sardar Harbans Singh refused to stay with them. “I’m going to sleep in my own bed, chaps,” he declared. “The wife would be most suspicious if I don’t. Besides which, I have my garden to attend to.” Harbans’s walled garden villa was one of the secret wonders of the city, and was believed by some to have been placed under an enchantment by a pari from Pari Mahal, a magic spell which protected it and all who dwelt there from coming to harm. But Harbans didn’t seem to need the assistance of fairies. He managed to find his way back to the old-town residence on foot in spite of the wildness of the city. Harbans was an intrepid old fox, knew all the city’s byways and back alleys, and came back every day without fail, immaculately turned out in achkan jacket and trousers, his silver beard and moustache trimmed and pomaded, to bring the company food and essential supplies. He was sometimes escorted by his son, but more often came alone, on account of Yuvraj’s unspecified “duties,” which turned out to involve the hiring and management of a private security force to protect his business premises and warehouses against looters and firebombers. Sardar Harbans Singh shook his head sadly. “My son is a person of high ideals and noble beliefs,” he told Abdullah, “who is obliged by the times to deal with guttersnipes and bounders, mercenary hooligans whom he hires to save our goods from other hooligans, and whom he then has to watch like a hawk in case they do the bad hats’ dirty work themselves. Poor fellow never sleeps, but never complains. He does the needful. As we all must.” Sardar Harbans Singh carried a silver-headed walnut swordstick and walked briskly through the unsafe streets, pooh-poohing the risk to himself. “I’m an old man,” he said. “Who would trouble to do anything to me when Father Time is doing such a dashed good job already?” Abdullah shook his head wonderingly. “You can know a man for fifty years,” he said, “and still not know what he’s capable of.” Harbans shrugged in self-deprecation. “You never know the answer to the questions of life until you’re asked,” he said.

The bus service to Pachigam started running again five days after these events. When Abdullah Noman arrived at his front door Firdaus could not prevent herself from weeping copiously for joy. Abdullah fell to his knees in the doorway and asked for her forgiveness. “If you can still love me,” he said, “then please help me find the courage to face the coming storm.” She raised him up and kissed him. “You are the only great man I have ever known,” she said, “and I will be proud to stand beside you and beat back death, the devil, the Indian army or whatever other trouble’s on its way.”

Bombur Yambarzal had done a brave thing once, when he faced down the rabble-rousing iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh at the door of the Shirmal mosque, but now that life was asking difficult questions again in his great old age, his fear for the safety of his beloved wife led him astray. He was no longer the big-bellied vasta waza of yore. The years had withered him, palsied his hands, dotted him with liver spots and put cataracts in his eyes, and he cut a skinny, unimpressive figure as he wondered with some trepidation whether he would live to see the dawn of his eightieth year. This enfeebled Bombur expressed the view that the Lashkar-e-Pak would look more favorably on Shirmal and be less likely to attempt any “funny business” if people responded to the radicals’ poster campaign in a spirit of compromise, not confrontation. “We should agree to at least one thing they propose, Harud,” he said, “or we’ll be the ones who look unreasonable and hard line.”

Hasina Yambarzal, that powerfully built lady whom age had not weakened in the slightest and who continued to henna her hair in order to justify the rubicund nickname “Harud,” was preparing the television tent for the evening’s viewing. “What do you suggest?” she said in an uncompromising voice. “I told you my views about the burqa and if you try to stop the women coming in here there will be hell to pay.” The waza of Shirmal accepted her argument. “In that case,” he said, “can’t we just just tell our Hindu brothers and sisters that in response to the LeP intervention, and having regard to the gravity of the regional situation, and having weighed the available options, and only for the time being, and in this dangerous climate, and until things blow over, and for their own good as well as ours, and purely as a precautionary measure, and without meaning anything bad by it, and taking everything into consideration, and in spite of our deep reluctance, and with a heavy heart, and while fully appreciating their very understandable feelings of disappointment, and hoping earnestly for better days to come soon, and with the intention of reversing the decision at the earliest feasible opportunity, it might be better for all concerned if.” He stopped talking because he could not say the final words aloud. Hasina Yambarzal nodded judiciously. “There are a few pandit families over in Pachigam who won’t like it, of course,” she said, “but here in Shirmal there’s no need for anyone to get upset.”

When news reached Pachigam that the television tent was now for viewing by Muslims only, Firdaus could not restrain herself. “That Hasina, excuse me if I mention,” she told Abdullah, “people say she’s a very pragmatical lady but I’d put it another way. In my opinion she’d sleep with the devil if it was in her business interest to do so, and she’s got that dope Bombur so twisted up that he’d think it was his good idea.”

Two nights later the Yambarzal tent was full of Muslim-only TV watchers enjoying an episode of a fantasy serial in which the legendary prince of Yemen Hatim Tai, during his quest to solve the mysterious riddles posed by the evil Dajjal, found himself in the land of Kopatopa on the occasion of their new year celebrations. The Kopatopan phrase meaning “happy new year”-tingi mingi took took-so delighted the enthralled viewers that most of them leapt to their feet and started bowing to one another and repeating it over and over again: “Tingi mingi took took! Tingi mingi took took!” They were so busy wishing one another a happy Kopatopan new year that they didn’t instantly notice that some person or persons had set fire to the tent.

It was fortunate indeed that nobody was burned to death in the blaze. After a period of screaming, panic, jostling, terror, trampling, anger, running, bewilderment, crawling, cowardice, tears and heroism, in short all the usual phenomena that may be observed whenever and wherever people find themselves trapped in a burning tent, the congregation of the faithful all escaped, in better or worse condition, suffering from burns or not suffering from them, wheezing and gasping on account of the effects of smoke inhalation, or else by good luck neither gasping nor wheezing, bruised or not bruised, lying around on the ground some distance from the now-incandescent tent, or else (and more usefully) fetching water to ensure that the fire, which had by that time taken hold of the tent too powerfully to be extinguished before it had consumed its prey, at least did not spread to the rest of the village, but burned itself out on the spot.

As a result everybody missed the scene in which Hatim Tai met the immortal princess Nazarébaddoor whose touch could turn away not only the evil eye but also death itself. At the precise instant when Nazarébaddoor attempted to kiss Prince Hatim-he valiantly refused her advances, reminding her that he loved another “more than his very life”-the television set of the Yambarzal family exploded loudly and died, taking with it a major source of the family’s income, but, as against that, a significant cause of communal discord as well.

The next morning the three Gegroo brothers, Aurangzeb, Alauddin and Abulkalam, rode back into Shirmal on small mountain ponies, bristling with guns and festooned in cartridge belts. It was a beautiful spring day. Early moisture glistened on the corrugated metal roofs of the little wooden houses and flowers sprouted by every doorstep. The loveliness of the day only served to heighten the ugliness of the black circle of charred grass and earth that marked the spot where the fire had consumed the Yambarzals’ place and means of entertainment, and the Gegroos halted by the still-smoking spot and fired pistols into the air. Such villagers as were able to do so came out of their homes and saw three phantoms from their past, older, but still giggling and unshaven. Their old home was still standing, locked up and empty like a ghost house, but the brothers didn’t appear to care. They had just stopped by to say hello on behalf of their present employers, the LeP. “Did you do this to us?” Hasina Yambarzal demanded. They giggled at that. “If the LeP had laid the fire,” screamed Aurangzeb Gegroo at the top of his thin voice, “then every soul in that tent would have met his or her maker by now.” This was either true or not true. It was getting to be a characteristic of the times that people never knew who had hit them or why.

Alauddin Gegroo rode right up to Hasina Yambarzal, dismounted and shrieked into her face. “Don’t you know, you stupid disobedient woman flaunting before me the shamelessness of your uncovered features, that it’s only on account of us that the Lashkar hasn’t punished you people yet? Don’t you know that we’ve been protecting our own home village from the Lashkar’s holy wrath? Why don’t you wretched ignorant people understand who your real friends are?” But an alternative explanation was that it was only on account of the Gegroo brothers’ desire for vengeance that the LeP had taken the risk of sending a team as far afield as Shirmal. However, this was plainly not the time for a debate.

Abulkalam Gegroo completed his brother’s harangue at some length, baring a set of decayed teeth in an exaggerated snarl that marked him out as the very worst kind of weak man, the type who might very well kill you to prove his strength. “You are the same damn-fool villagers who sent away the great Maulana Bulbul Fakh. The same damn-fool villagers that won’t observe the simplest Islamic decencies as politely requested and who nevertheless expect to be protected from the consequences of your refusal. The same damn-fool villagers who thought we were dust, us, the worthless Gegroo brothers whom you were ready to starve to death in a mosque, whose lives weren’t worth two paisas to you, the pathetic Gegroos who couldn’t count on their own people to save them from the murderous Hindus-the same people who are only alive today because those same Gegroo brothers keep interceding for them. Arré, how stupid can even stupid people be? Because even these useless dead Gegroos whom you were prepared to throw away like the corpses of dead dogs can work out that the people who burned your tent must be the same people you threw out of it, your Hindu brothers and sisters, whom you love so much you feel bad about what you did to them even though you didn’t give a damn about what you thought you did to us, and you still don’t get it, you don’t see that the Hindus who set the fire, your pandit pals, would have been happy to see the whole lot of you laid out in the street here, burned to a crisp like so many overcooked sikh kababs.”

“He’s right,” said Hashim Karim suddenly, taking his mother by surprise.

“He probably is correct,” his brother Hatim agreed. “That Big Man Misri loved watching TV, and he was always a big man for revenge.”

A carpenter could always find work in Kashmir in the spring, when wooden houses and fences all over the valley needed attention, so Big Man Misri was one of the few citizens of Pachigam to be immune from the general economic depression. He traveled the country roads on a little motor scooter with his sack of tools on his back and often, when he passed a secluded little grove of trees that stood just out of sight of his home village around a bend in the Muskadoon, he parked the scooter, concealed himself in the trees, set down his tool sack and danced.

Big Man had always been of the view that his terpsichorean skills had been too harshly judged by the Pachigam bhands, and that he could leap as high and twirl as effectively as the next man. Abdullah Noman had told him kindly but firmly that the world was not yet ready for a jumping giant, and so Big Man Misri was obliged to practice his art in secret, without hope of an audience, for love alone, and often with his eyes closed, so that he could imagine the rapt faces of the audience he would never be allowed to have. On the last day of his life he was leaping and pirouetting in his army surplus boots when he heard the sound of insincere applause. Opening his eyes, he saw that he was surrounded by the three heavily armed Gegroo brothers on their mountain ponies, and understood that his time had come. There was a knife tucked into each of his boots and so he went down on one knee and begged to be spared in the most pitiful and cowardly voice he could produce, which amused the brothers mightily, as he knew it would. I could have been an actor as well as a dancer, he mused fleetingly, and in the same instant, when the Gegroos were shaking with laughter instead of concentrating on their victim, he reached for both his knives and threw them. Abulkalam Gegroo was hit in the throat and Alauddin Gegroo in the left eye and they fell from their mounts without making any further contribution to events. Aurangzeb Gegroo, distracted by the calamity that had befallen his brothers, delayed his reaction almost long enough to allow the charging carpenter to seize him. Big Man Misri the private dancer made the biggest leap of his life, his hands outstretched toward Aurangzeb Gegroo, but the eldest and only surviving sibling came to his senses just in time and fired both his AK-47s into the soaring Big Man at point-blank range. Big Man Misri was already dead by the time his body hit Aurangzeb, knocking him backward off his pony and breaking his puny neck.

That same night, after the dead body of Big Man Misri was discovered lying on top of Aurangzeb Gegroo as if they were lovers who had made a death pact, with the other two dead Gegroos by their side, Zoon Misri climbed up the hill to the edge of the Khelmarg meadow and hanged herself from a majestic spreading chinar, the only tree of its kind to have taken root and survived at this height, among the evergreens. She was discovered by Boonyi Noman, who understood at once the meaning of this eloquent, final message from her beloved friend. The horror was upon them now and would not be denied.

General Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha realized, as he thought about his approaching fifty-ninth birthday, that the reason he had never married was that for almost thirty years Kashmir had been his wife. For more than half his life he had been wedded to this ungrateful, shrewish mountain state where disloyalty was a badge of honor and insubordination a way of life. It had been a cold marriage. Now things were coming to a head. He wanted to be done with her once and for all. He wanted to tame the shrew. Then he wanted a divorce.

The coming battle against the insurgency, reflected General Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha, would be a conflict that lacked all nobility. The true soldier wanted a noble war, sought out such nobility as might be available. This struggle was a dirty bare-knuckle fight against dirty gutter rats and there was nothing in it to exalt the martial soul. It was not General Kachhwaha’s way to fight dirty but when one faced terrorists any attempt to stay clean was doomed to ignoble defeat. It was not his way to take off his gloves but there was a time and a place for gloves and Kashmir was not a boxing ring and the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules did not apply. This was what he had been saying to the political echelon. He had informed the political echelon that if he were allowed to take his gloves off, if his boys were allowed to stop pussyfooting and namby-pambying and mollycoddling and pitter-pattering around, if they were allowed to crack down on the miscreants by whatever means necessary, then he could clean up this mess, no problem, he could crush the insurgency’s testicles in his fist until it wept blood through the corners of its eyes.

For many years the political echelon had been reluctant. For too long it had said yes and no at the same time. But now at last there was movement. The character of the political echelon had changed. Its new belief system was supported by prominent members of the intellectual tier and the economic stratum and held that the introduction of Islam in the classical period had been uniformly deleterious, a cultural calamity, and that centuries-overdue corrections needed to be made. Heavyweight figures in the intellectual tier spoke of a new awakening of the suppressed cultural energy of the Hindu masses. Prominent inhabitants of the economic stratum invested massively in this glistening new zero-tolerance world. The political echelon responded positively to such encouragement. The introduction of President’s Rule provided security personnel with unrestricted powers. The amended code of criminal procedure immunized all public servants, soldiers included, against prosecution for deeds performed in the line of duty. The definition of such deeds was broad and included destruction of private property, torture, rape and murder.

The political echelon’s decision to declare Kashmir a “disturbed area” was also greatly appreciated. In a disturbed area, search warrants were not required, arrest warrants ditto, and shoot-to-kill treatment of suspects was acceptable. Suspects who remained alive could be arrested and detained for two years, during which period it would not be necessary to charge them or to set a date for their trial. For more dangerous suspects the political echelon permitted more severe responses. Persons who committed the ultimate crime of challenging the territorial integrity of India or in the opinion of the armed forces attempted to disrupt same could be jailed for five years. Interrogation of such suspects would take place behind closed doors and confessions extracted by force during these secret interrogations would be admissible as evidence provided the interrogating officer had reason to believe the statement was being made voluntarily. Confessions made after the suspect was beaten or hung by the feet, or after he had experienced electricity or the crushing of his hands or feet, would be considered as being voluntary. The burden of proof would be shifted and it would be for these persons to prove the falsehood of the automatic presumption of guilt. If they failed so to do the death penalty could be applied.

In the dark General Kachhwaha experienced a smooth, ovoid feeling of satisfaction, even vindication. His own old theory, which proposed the essentially sneaky and subversive nature of the Kashmiri Muslim population in toto, and which in bygone times he had reluctantly set aside, was one whose time had come. The political echelon had sent word. Every Muslim in Kashmir should be considered a militant. The bullet was the only solution. Until the militants were wiped out normality could not return to the valley. General Kachhwaha smiled. Those were instructions he could follow.

He had moved on from Elasticnagar to Army Corps Headquarters at Badami Bagh, Srinagar. In spite of its name this was no fragrant almond garden but a center of naked power. General Kachhwaha on his arrival at the giant base had immediately given orders for the replication of his old suite of rooms in Elasticnagar and soon sat once more in darkness, at the center of the web. There was nothing he needed to witness in person anymore. He knew everything and forgot nothing. He went nowhere and was everywhere. He sat in darkness and saw the valley, every cranny of it, bathed in garish light. He felt the bloat of memory expanding his body, he was all swollen up, stuffed full of the babel of the unforgotten, and the confusion of his senses grew ever more extreme. The idea of violence had a velvet softness now. One took off one’s gloves and smelled the sweet fragrance of necessity. Bullets entered flesh like music, the pounding of clubs was the rhythm of life, and then there was the sexual dimension to consider, the demoralization of the population through the violation of its women. In that dimension every color was bright and tasted good. He closed his eyes and averted his head. What must be, must be.

The insurgency was pathetic. It fought against itself. Half of it was fighting for that old fairy tale, Kashmir for the Kashmiris, while the other half wanted Pakistan, and to be a part of the Islamist terror international. The insurrectionists would kill each other while he watched. But he would kill them too, to hurry things along. He didn’t care what they wanted. He wanted them dead. In the darkness, while he waited, he had refined and perfected the philosophy and methodology of the coming crackdown. The philosophy of crackdown was, fuck the enemy in the crack. The methodology of crackdown could be expressed technically as cordon-and-search. Curfews would be imposed and soldiers would go house to house. It could also be expressed colloquially as, and then fuck them in the crack again. Town by town, hamlet by hamlet, every part of the valley would be visited by his wrath, by men who had taken their gloves off, his warriors, his storm troopers, his fists. He would see how much these people loved their insurgency then, when they had the Indian army fucking them in the crack.

He knew everything and forgot nothing. He read the reports and closed his eyes and ate with relish the scenes he conjured up, drawing nourishment from the details. Village Z came under crackdown and the headmaster of the school was picked up, a bastard by the name of A. He stood accused of being a militant. He dared to lie and deny it, saying he was not a militant but a headmaster. He was asked to identify which of his pupils were militants and this man, this self-avowed headmaster, had the nerve to claim not only that he did not know about his own students but also that he didn’t know any militants at all. But every Kashmiri was a militant as had been laid down by the political echelon and so this liar was lying and needed to be assisted toward the truth. He was beaten, obviously. Then his beard was set on fire. Then electricity was offered to his eyes, his genitals and his tongue. Afterwards he claimed to have been blinded in one eye, which was an obvious lie, an attempt to blame the investigators for a previously existing condition. He had no pride and begged the men to stop. He repeated his lie, that he was just a schoolteacher, which offended them. To assist him they took him to a small stream containing dirty water and broken glass. The liar was pushed into the stream and kept there for five hours. The men walked over him with their boots, applying his head to the rocks in the water. He lost consciousness to avoid questioning, so when he woke up they chastised him again. In the end it was deemed correct to let him go. He was warned that the next time he would be killed. He ran away screaming, I swear I’m not a militant. I’m a schoolteacher. These people were beyond saving. There was no hope for them.

The town of Y came under crackdown and a middle-aged man by the name of B was picked up along with his sixteen-year-old son, C. The door to his home, a suspected terrorist rat’s nest, was kicked down. To show him that the matter was serious his father’s Qur’an was thrown to the floor and muddy boots were applied to it. There would be no more special treatment for Muslims. That had to be understood. His daughter was ordered into the back room from which she crawled out of a window and escaped, which was unfortunate but proved that this was a high-value family of rat terrorists. The sixteen-year-old was formally accused of terrorism. He had the cheek to deny. Again he was accused and again denied. And a third time, ditto. He said he was a student and such subterfuge inflamed the sentiments of the men. He was taken outside and rifle butts were applied to his person. The father, B, tried to intervene and he also required vigorous physical attention. When the terrorist youth, C, lost consciousness he was put in the back of a truck and taken away for his own benefit, for medical assistance. At a later time the middle-aged man, B, claimed that his son had been located in a ditch unclothed and with a bullet in his back. This was not the doing of the men. Probably after he had received medical attention and was allowed to go home he encountered terrorists of a rival faction and they attended to him.

The village of X, high up near the snow line and the Line of Control, came under crackdown because militants often crossed the border in its vicinity and so it was plain that the villagers harbored them, gave them beds to rest in and food to eat. Reports had been received of the presence in the locality of the so-called iron mullah, Maulana Bulbul Fakh, whom General Kachhwaha had once made the mistake of tolerating, back in the old days of tolerant weakness. Those days were gone, as the notorious priest and his gang of desperadoes would discover soon enough, as their henchpersons in X had already learned-the malevolent youth D, who would trouble the security forces no further, the dotards E (gender m.) and F (gender f.) whose house had been demolished to punish them, and the women G, H and I, upon whom the virile wrath of the Indian forces had been potently unleashed. The bayoneting of the womb of the pregnant woman J was a scurrilous allegation, however: pure fiction. None of the personnel on duty that day had carried bayonets; only automatic weapons, grenades, knives. The enemies of the state would stop at nothing to slander its military protectors. This would no longer inhibit the security forces from doing the needful. The manifestation of the protectors’ virile wrath against the female population was an important psychological tool. It discouraged the menfolk from carrying out the subversive acts which it was in their nature to perform. Consequently, the danger to the security forces diminished. These were strategic and tactical matters and should not be discussed emotionally.

It was just the beginning. Things would move faster now. He was no longer Tortoise Colonel. He was the Hammer of Kashmir.

That dark summer after the Misris perished the fruit in Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s apple orchards was bitter and inedible, but the peaches of Firdaus Noman were as succulent as usual. The saffron in Pyarelal’s saffron field was paler and less potent, but the honey in Abdullah’s beehives was sweeter than ever before. These matters were difficult to understand; but when Pyarelal heard on the radio that the well-known pandit leader Tika Lal Taploo had been gunned down the nature of the portents became plain. “In the time of Sikandar But-Shikan, Sikander the Iconoclast,” he told his daughter at her Gujar hut in the woods, “Muslim attacks on Kashmiri Hindus were described as the falling of locust swarms upon the helpless paddy crops. I am afraid that what is beginning now will make Sikandar’s time look peaceful by comparison.” In the weeks that followed his prophecy came true and he told Boonyi, “Now that everything I have stood for is in ruins I am ready to die, but I will live on to protect your life from the insanity of your husband, even though neither one of us has anything left to live for.” The radical cadres of the Jamaat-i-Islami party had new words for “pandit”: mukhbir, kafir. Meaning spy, infidel. “So we are slandered as fifth-columnists now,” Pyarelal mourned. “That means the assault cannot be far away.”

In the aftermath of the Muslim insurgency against Indian rule another pandit was murdered in Tangmarg. Posters appeared on the road leading from Srinagar to Pachigam demanding that all pandits vacate their property and leave Kashmir. The first Hindus to respond to the poster campaign were the gods, who began to disappear. The famous black stone statue of Maha-Kali was one of twenty deities who vacated their home in Hari Parbat Fort and vanished forever. A priceless deity from the ninth century fled the Lok Bhavan in Anantnag and was never seen again. The Shiva-lingam of the Dewan temple also mysteriously departed. These exits were timely, because soon after they occurred the fire-bombings began. The Shaivite temple complex at Handwara, near the famous shrine of Kheer Bhawani, was gutted by a blaze. Pyarelal sat beside Boonyi and buried his face in his hands. “Our story is finished,” he told her. “It is no longer the story of our lives, but the story of a plague year during which we have the misfortune to be around to grow buboes in our armpits and die unclean and stenchy deaths. We are no longer protagonists, only agonists.” A few days later in Anantnag district there began a week-long orgy of unprovoked violence against pandit residential and commercial property, temples, and the physical persons of pandit families. Many of them fled. The exodus of the pandits of Kashmir had begun.

Firdaus Noman came to see Pyarelal at his house to assure him that Pachigam’s Muslims would protect their Hindu brethren. “My wise and gentle friend,” she said, “never fear; we will take care of our own. The killing of Big Man Misri and Zoon’s suicide was bad enough, and we won’t let it happen again. You are too precious to lose.” Pyarelal shook his head. “It is out of our hands,” he said. “Our natures are no longer the critical factors in our fates. When the killers come, will it matter if we lived well or badly? Will the choices we made affect our destiny? Will they spare the kind and gentle among us and take only the selfish and dishonest? It would be absurd to think so. Massacres aren’t finicky. I may be precious or I may be valueless, but it doesn’t signify either way.” He kept the radio close to his ear at all times. As the bitter apples fell from their trees and rotted on the ground Pyarelal remained indoors, cross-legged, with the transistor held up against his head, listening to the BBC. Loot, plunder, arson, mayhem, murder, exodus: these words recurred, day after day, and a phrase from another part of the world that had flown many thousands of miles to find a new home in Kashmir.

“Ethnic cleansing.”

“Kill one, scare ten. Kill one, scare ten.” Hindu community houses, temples, private homes and whole neighborhoods were being destroyed. Pyarelal repeated, like a prayer, the names of the places struck by calamity. “Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg. Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg. Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg.” These names had to be remembered. Forgetting would be a crime against those who suffered “whole-hog” burning of their neighborhoods, or seizure of their property, or death, preceded by such violences as could not be imagined or described. Kill one, scare ten, the Muslim mobs chanted, and ten were, indeed, scared. More than ten. Three hundred and fifty thousand pandits, almost the entire pandit population of Kashmir, fled from their homes and headed south to the refugee camps where they would rot, like bitter fallen apples, like the unloved, undead dead they had become. In the so-called Bangladeshi Markets in the Iqbal Park-Hazuri Bagh area of Srinagar the things looted from temples and homes were being openly bought and sold. The shoppers hummed the most popular song of the times as they bought their pretty pieces of Hindu Kashmir, a song by the well-beloved Mehjoor: “I will give my life and soul for India, but my heart is with Pakistan.”

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

She knew where he was. He was in the north with the iron mullah at the Line of Control. He was part of the elite “iron commando.” She knew what he was doing. He was killing people. He was killing time. He was killing everyone he could find to kill so that he could tolerate the time that had to pass until he could kill her. She blamed herself for their deaths. Come and get it over with, she told him. Come: I release you from your restraints. Never mind what you promised my father and the sarpanch. My father is right, there is no longer any reason for any of us to live. Come and do what you have to do, what you need to do in a place so deep it causes you pain. I have nothing but you and my father, his love and your hatred, and his love is ruined now, his capacity for it is damaged, his picture of the world has been broken and when a man does not have a picture of the world he goes a little mad, which is how my father is. He says the end of the world is coming because his apples are too bitter to eat. He says there is an earthquake trembling in the earth and he has started believing in the snake stories of the sarpanch’s wife, he has started believing the snakes will awake, out of their disgust for humankind they will come forth and kill us all and the valley will have peace, snake peace, the peace it is beyond human beings to make. He says the earth is sodden with blood and will give way and no house can stand upon it. He says the mountains will thrust up all around us, they will push higher into the sky and the valley will be gone and that is what should happen to it, we don’t deserve such beauty, we were the guardians of beauty and we could not do our work. I say we are what we are and we do what we do and I am beyond pride in myself I am just a thing that lives and breathes and if I stopped breathing or living it would make no difference except to him, except, in spite of everything, and for a few more moments, to him. Come if you want. I’m waiting. I no longer care.

He said: Everything I do prepares me for you and for him. Every blow I strike, strikes you or him. The people leading us up here are fighting for God or for Pakistan but I am killing because it is what I have become. I have become death.

He said: I’ll be there soon enough.

The situation as it stood had developed new characteristics that lent themselves to advantageous exploitation by the armed forces. General Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha closed his eyes and let the pictures flow. Already the army had made contact with renegade militants around the country and when extrajudicial activity was required these renegades could be used to kill other militants. After the executions the renegade militants would be given the use of uniforms and would bring the corpses to this or that house belonging to this or that individual and place the corpses in the said location with guns in their hands. The renegades would then depart and be relieved of their uniforms while the armed forces attacked the house, blew it to bits and murdered the dead militants all over again for public consumption. If the householder and his family objected they could be charged with harboring dangerous militants and the consequences of such charges would be dire. The householder, knowing this, was unlikely to squawk.

There was beauty in such schemes, elegance and beauty. General Kachhwaha was discussing with himself whether or not the renegade militants might be used against other categories of person, such as journalists and human rights activists. The deniability of such operations was a big plus. The possibilities should be explored.

The battle against the weaklings of the JKLF would be won soon enough. General Kachhwaha despised the fundamentalists, the jihadis, the Hizb, but he despised the secular nationalists more. What sort of God was secular nationalism? People would not die for that for very long. Already the crackdown was having an effect. Soon the two leading JKLF factions would sue for peace. The HAJY group’s Yasin Malik would crack, and so would Amanullah Khan himself. The back channels would open and the deals would be done. This month, next month, this year, next year. It didn’t matter. He could wait. He could tighten his grip on the testicles of the insurgency and let it come to him. Word was reaching him from over the mountains, floating over the ice caps and fluttering down into his ear, that Pak Inter-Services Intelligence felt the same way about the JKLF as he did. ISI funding to the JKLF was being reduced and the Hizb was getting the cash instead. The Hizb was strong, maybe ten thousand strong, and he could respect that. He could despise them and respect them simultaneously. No difficulty there.

Intergroup rivalries played into his hands. Already there had been a case of a JKLF area commander murdered by the Hizb. Once the JKLF was done with, the jihadis would turn against one another. He would see to that. The Lashkar of this and the Harkat of that. He would see to them all right. Also the feared “iron commando” of Maulana Bulbul Fakh. Soon he would have the bastards in his sights.

Anees Noman had taken over leadership of his roving JKLF militant group after the departure across the mountains of the invisible commander Dar. His heroes were Guevara the Cuban and the FSLN of Nicaragua and he liked to cultivate the Latino guerrilla look. When the group was on an operation he affected a beret, Western combat fatigues and black boots, and wanted to be known as Comandante Zero after a famous Sandinista fighter, but his soldiers, who were less solemnly respectful of him than he would have wished, called him Baby Che. In the period after the start of the insurgency his mine-laying skills had led to some notable successes against military convoys and the reputation of the Baby Che group grew. Word of its existence reached the ear of General Kachhwaha in Badami Bagh, and though the identity of Baby Che was uncertain the military authorities had had their suspicions for some time. More than once, however, the proposal to put Pachigam under crackdown so that its subversive associations could be properly explored had been vetoed by the civilian authority. An army attack on the folk arts of Kashmir, on its theatrical and gastronomic traditions, was exactly the kind of story that made headlines. Even in retirement Sardar Harbans Singh was standing up for his old friend the sarpanch of Pachigam. Even in his claw-fingered old age Abdullah Noman could still claim to be protecting his village, just as he always had.

There was no work, however. There was no money. The Noman family’s peaches and honey were distributed free of charge among the villagers. Pachigam was a lucky village, with its fertile fields and animal herds, but everyone knew that great hardship was just around the corner. If the crisis continued, a statewide famine was a real possibility. “We’ll face the famine if it comes,” Firdaus Noman told her husband. “Right now I’m so sick of honey and peaches I might even prefer to starve.” Her sons Hameed and Mahmood agreed. “Anyway,” Hameed said cheerfully, “maybe we won’t live long enough to reach the point of starvation.” Mahmood nodded. “What a stroke of luck! We can choose from so many different ways to die.”

Firdaus Noman awoke one night with her husband snoring by her side and another man’s hand over her mouth. When she recognized the shaggy, beret-wearing figure of the son she had not seen for many years she allowed herself to weep, and when he made as if to remove the precautionary hand from her lips she seized it and covered it in kisses. “Don’t wake him up right now,” she told Anees, looking across at Abdullah. “I want you to myself for a while. And what do you think you look like with that hair? Before you meet your father you’d better start looking like his son, not a wild man from the woods.” She led him to the kitchen, sat him down on a stool and cut his hair. Anees didn’t object, didn’t tell her it was dangerous for him to stay too long, didn’t hurry her up or insist she wake his brothers or his father. He sat on the wooden stool, closed his eyes and leaned back against her, feeling her body move slowly against his back as the dark curls fell from his head. “Do you remember, maej,” he said, “when I was the saddest clown in Pachigam, and people actually cheered up when I left the stage?” She made a small dismissive noise with her lips. “You were the most profound of my children,” she said proudly. “I used to worry that you would go so deep inside yourself that you might just vanish completely. But look at you: here you are.”

When the men of the house were awake the family held a kitchen-table council of war. “Because Big Man Misri did us all a favor and rid the world of those worthless Gegroos before he died, the Lashkar-e-Pak now has Pachigam in its sights much more than Shirmal,” Anees said quietly. “This is bad. Even without the Gegroos those crazy LeP bastards have maybe forty or fifty soldiers in the area and there is no question that they will pick their moment and attack.” Firdaus Noman shook her head. “How can a woman’s face be the enemy of Islam?” she asked angrily. Anees took her hands in his. “For these idiots it’s all about sex, maej, excuse me. They think it is a scientific fact that a woman’s hair emits rays that arouse men to deeds of sexual depravity. They think that if a woman’s bare legs rub together, even under a floor-length robe, the friction of her thighs will generate sexual heat which will be transmitted through her eyes into the eyes of men and will inflame them in an unholy way.” Firdaus spread her hands in a gesture of resignation. “So, because men are animals, according to them, women must pay. This is an old story. Tell me something else.” Anees nodded in his grave, unsmiling way. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “My unit has decided that we will defend Pachigam and Shirmal too, if need be. Don’t worry. We have a hundred good guys and can get some friends to assist. But you must be prepared. Hide weapons in every house but don’t try to fight them when they first come. Be patient and take whatever insults they hand out. When we start the battle, then and then only you can help us beat the living shit out of them, excuse me, maej. Soldier’s talk.” Firdaus thumped the table, softly. “Little boy,” she said, “you won’t know what the living shit looks like until you’ve seen me at work.”

The Lashkar-e-Pak came to Pachigam on horseback three weeks later, in broad daylight, not expecting any resistance. The leader, a black-turbaned Afghan homicidal maniac aged fifteen, ordered everyone into the street and announced that since the women of Pachigam were too shameless to conceal themselves as Islam required they should take off their clothes completely so that the world could see what whores they really were. A great murmur arose from the villagers but Firdaus Noman stepped forward, took off her phiran and began to undress. Taking their cue from her, the other women and girls of the village also started to strip. A silence fell. The LeP fighters were unable to take their eyes off the women, who were stripping slowly, seductively, moving their bodies rhythmically, with their eyes closed. “Help me, God,” one of the LeP’s foreign fighters moaned in Arabic, writhing on his horse, “These blue-eyed she-devils are stealing away my soul.” The fifteen-year-old homicidal maniac pointed his Kalashnikov at Firdaus Noman. “If I kill you now,” he said nastily, “no man in the whole Muslim world will say I was unjustified.” At that moment a small red hole appeared in his forehead and the back of his head blew off. The Baby Che group was getting to be known for the marksmanship of its snipers as well as for its land mines and it had a reputation to protect.

The battle for Pachigam didn’t last long. Anees’s men had been well positioned and were eager for the fight. The LeP militants were encircled and outnumbered and, in a few minutes, also dead. Firdaus Noman and the other women put their clothes back on. Firdaus spoke sadly to the dead body of the fifteen-year-old Lashkar commander. “You discovered that women are dangerous, my boy,” she said. “Too bad you didn’t get a chance to become a man and discover we’re also good to love.”

The extermination of the LeP group of radicals failed to reassure some of the villagers. The old dancing master Habib Joo had passed away peacefully in his bed some years earlier, but his grown-up sons and daughter, all in their twenties now, sober, quiet young people who had inherited their father’s love of the dance, still lived in the village. The eldest son, Ahmed Joo, came to inform Abdullah Noman that his younger brother Sulaiman, his sister Razia and he had all decided to go south with the pandit refugees. “How long can Anees protect us?” he said, and went on, “We don’t think it’s a good idea to be Jewish when the Islamists come to town again.” Abdullah knew that the Joo children were gifted dancers like their father, they were the future of the Pachigam bhands except that the Pachigam bhands didn’t seem to have a future. He didn’t try to stop them. The next day the village’s dance troupe was further impoverished when the Sharga girls came to say that they, too, were leaving. Himal and Gonwati had been terrified by the stories of the attacks on pandit families and had forced their father the great old baritone to go with them. “This is no time for songs,” Shivshankar Sharga said, “and, anyway, my singing days are done.”

Sad to say, the Joos and Shargas were not saved by their decision to flee. The crowded bus in which they were heading south met with an accident at the foot of the mountains not far from the Banihal Pass. The driver, terrified of being stopped by anyone, security forces or militants, had been charging onwards as fast as possible. He screeched around a certain bend only to discover that one of the huge piles of garbage that were accumulating everywhere in the valley on account of the breakdown of the sanitation system had toppled forward across the road. Frantically, he took evasive action, but the bus ended up on its side in a roadside ditch. The driver and most of the passengers were seriously injured and one of the older passengers, the noted singer Shivshankar Sharga, was dead.

There followed a long topsy-turvy wait in the crashed bus. The air was full of petrol fumes. Everyone who could scream or cry was doing so. (Himal was screaming, while Gonwati wept.) Others, less vocally capable, contented themselves with moans (the Joo siblings fell into this category), while still others (e.g. the deceased baritone) were unable to make any sound at all. Eventually the emergency services showed up and the injured passengers were hospitalized in a nearby medical facility. The emergency room was dirty. The sheets in it were badly stained. Rusty red marks ran down the walls. There were few beds and the mattresses on the floor were filthy and torn. The passengers were placed on the beds, on the mattresses, on the floor and along the corridor outside. One single doctor, an exhausted young man with a thin moustache and a numbed expression on his face, addressed the crash victims, who continued to scream (Himal), weep (Gonwati) and moan (Ahmed, Sulaiman, Razia Joo) while he spoke. “It is my onerous obligation before proceeding,” the young doctor said, “to offer you our obsequious apologies and to seek from you an obligatory clarification. This is odious but indispensable current routine. Heartfelt apology is primarily offered for understaffing. Many pandit personnel have decamped and policy does not permit replacement. Many ambulance drivers also are being accosted by security forces and are being extremely chastised and therefore no longer are reporting for duty. Apology is secondarily offered for shortages of supplies. Asthma medication is unavailable. Treatment for diabetics is unavailable. Oxygen tanks are unavailable. Owing to load shedding certain medicaments are not refrigerated and condition of said medicaments is dubious. Replacements, however, are unavailable. Apology is additionally offered for failure of all X-ray machines, sterilization devices and such equipment as is designed to analyze blood. Apology is further extended owing to supply of blood not tested for HIV. Ultimate apology is regarding presence of meningitis epidemic in this facility, and for impossibility of quarantining same. Guidance at this time is sought from your good selves. Under circumstances as sorrowfully outlined above you will kindly and severally confirm or de-confirm your wish to be admitted to or de-admitted from this facility so that treatment is able to proceed or de-proceed. Have no doubt, ladies and gentlemen, that if you trust in us we will make our best effort.”

Alas! Not one of the Pachigam contingent of five dancers survived, succumbing to an undetected internal hemorrhage (Himal), an untreated and subsequently gangrenous broken leg (Gonwati), horrific and eventually fatal convulsions brought on by being injected with bad medicines (Ahmed and Razia Joo) and, in the case of Sulaiman Joo, acute viral meningitis caught from a seven-year-old girl who happened to be dying in the bed next to him. There were no relatives on hand to collect the bodies and no facility existed for returning the five dancers to their home village and they were burned on the municipal pyre, even the three Jews.

Their characters were not their destinies.

In early 1991, before the spring thaw, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul felt his life detaching itself from his body in a series of small, painless, inaudible pops. Well, that was all right, he thought, he had nobody to teach anymore except himself, and even to himself he no longer had any knowledge to impart. He spent much time in his small library in those final days, alone with his old books. These books, his true treasure, would also be lost when his time came. He ran his fingers along the worn spines of the treasure vaults on the shelves and pulled out the English romantics. Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain. Ah! Poor Keats. Only the very young could imagine that death was a proper response to beauty. We in Kashmir have heard the Bulbul too, he apostrophized the great poet across space and time, and he may prove to be the death of us all.

He closed his eyes and pictured his Kashmir. He conjured up its crystal lakes, Shishnag, Wular, Nagin, Dal; its trees, the walnut, the poplar, the chinar, the apple, the peach; its mighty peaks, Nanga Parbat, Rakaposhi, Harmukh. The pandits Sanskritized the Himalayas. He saw the boats like little fingers tracing lines in the surface of the waters and the flowers too numberless to name, ablaze with bright perfume. He saw the beauty of the golden children, the beauty of the green- and blue-eyed women, the beauty of the blue- and green-eyed men. He stood atop Mount Shankaracharya which the Muslims called Takht-e-Sulaiman and spoke aloud the famous old verse concerning the earthly paradise. It is this, it is this, it is this. Spread out below him like a feast he saw gentleness and time and love. He considered getting out his bicycle and setting forth into the valley, bicycling until he fell, on and on into the beauty. O! Those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went. No, he would not ride out into Kashmir, did not want to see her scarred face, the lines of burning oil drums across the roads, the wrecked vehicles, the smoke of explosions, the broken houses, the broken people, the tanks, the anger and fear in every eye. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home.

“Ya Kashmir!” he cried out. “Hai-hai! Ya Kashmir!”

He would not see his daughter again, his only child, whose life he had saved by making an exile of her, transforming her into a tribal wild woman. What a strange tale hers had been. He did not know her fully anymore, could not grasp her thoughts. She had turned within herself and was communing with death. As, now, was he. Bhoomi Kaul, Boonyi Noman. He could protect her no longer. He sent her a word of loving farewell and felt a breeze lift it up and carry it away to her enchanted wood.

He wondered if he would live to see the blossom on his apple trees, and felt an answering pop inside himself. Ah, so it would not be long now. It began to snow lightly, the last flakes to fall before the spring. He put on his wedding finery, the clothes he had worn long ago when he married his beloved Pamposh, and which he had kept all this time wrapped in tissue paper in a trunk. As a bridegroom he went outdoors and the snowflakes caressed his grizzled cheeks. His mind was alert, he was ambulatory and nobody was waiting for him with a club. He had his body and his mind and it seemed he was to be spared a brutal end. That at least was kind. He went into his blighted apple orchard, seated himself cross-legged beneath a tree, closed his eyes, heard the verses of the Rig-Veda fill the world with beauty and ceased upon the midnight with no pain.

Anees Noman was captured alive, though suffering from gunshot wounds in the right leg and shoulder, after an encounter with security forces in the southwestern village of Siot, where he had holed up with twenty militant fighters aged between fifteen and nineteen above a food store called Ahdoo’s whose owner called in the troops because the youngsters drank all his cans of condensed milk, a decision he regretted after the army wrecked his shop with grenades that blew out the whole front wall of the small two-story wooden building, and several hundred rounds of automatic fire from an armored vehicle parked at point-blank range which destroyed all the produce that had managed to survive the grenade blast. “Look what your greed has done,” old man Ahdoo complained to the corpses of the militants as they were dragged out of his upstairs room, adding, in an explanation to the world in general, “They drank my imported goods. Goods from foreign! Then what was I to do?”

Several of the dead boys had been involved in the defense of Pachigam against the LeP, and they saved Anees’s life too by coming between him and the grenade blast and bullets. It would have been better if they had let him die in Siot, however, because then he would not have met his end in the secret torture chambers of Badami Bagh, those rooms which had never existed, did not exist and would never exist, and from which nobody ever heard a scream, no matter how loud it was.

On the wall of the room somebody had written two words in black crayon. They were the last words Anees would ever read.

Everybody talks.

After the capture of Anees Noman, the son of the sarpanch of Pachigam, the decision makers of Badami Bagh knew that it was no longer possible for Sardar Harbans Singh or any other high-ranking bleeding-heart string-puller to protect the traitorous sisterfuckers of that village of so-called traditional actors and cooks. General Kachhwaha himself signed the document of authorization and the cordon-and-search crackdown teams moved out on the double. The sheltered status of the bhand village had been a long-standing annoyance to jawans and ranking officers alike. The crackdown on Pachigam would therefore be particularly satisfying, and the gloves, of course, would be off.

The army officer who brought Anees Noman’s body back to his mother’s house, the detachment in charge, did not offer his name or his condolences. The corpse was tossed onto the doorstep, wrapped in a bloodied grey blanket, and the front door was smashed down. Firdaus was dragged out by her grey hair and pushed so that she stumbled over her dead son. A single cry escaped her lips, but after that, in spite of everything she saw on his body, she remained silent, until she stood up and looked the incharge in the eye. “Where are his hands?” she asked. His hands that were so deft, that had whittled and shaped so much. “Give me back his hands.”

Anees’s father knelt proudly by his son, placed his twisted hands together and began to recite verses. The incharge was unimpressed. “Why is your woman making noise about hands,” he said to Abdullah, “when your hands don’t even know how to pray?” He made a gesture and two soldiers grabbed the sarpanch’s hands and pushed them against the floor. “Hands, is it,” the incharge said. “Before going any further let’s straighten these two out right here.”

What was that cry? Was it a man, a woman, an angel or a god who keened thus, who howled just so? Could any human voice make such a desolate noise?

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.

Pachigam was the earth, the grabbee, helpless, and powerful uncaring planets stooped low, extended their celestial and merciless tentacles and grabbed.

Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old man’s nose? Who broke that young girl’s heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his fiancée? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughtered the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?

The village of Pachigam still exists on the official maps of Kashmir, due south of Srinagar and west of Shirmal near the Anantnag road. In such public records as are still available for inspection its population is given as three hundred and fifty, and in a few guides for the benefit of visitors there are passing references to the bhand pather, a dying folk art, and to the dwindling number of dedicated troupes that seek to preserve it. This official existence, this paper self is its only memorial, for where Pachigam once stood by the blithe Muskadoon, where its little street ran along from the pandit’s house to the sarpanch’s, where Abdullah roared and Boonyi danced and Shivshankar sang and Shalimar the clown walked the tightrope as if treading upon air, nothing resembling a human habitation remains. What happened that day in Pachigam need not be set down here in full detail, because brutality is brutality and excess is excess and that’s all there is to it. There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. So, to repeat: there was no Pachigam anymore. Pachigam was destroyed. Imagine it for yourself.

Second attempt: The village of Pachigam still existed on maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory.

Third and final attempt: The beautiful village of Pachigam still exists.

9

The increased use of fidayeen, suicide bombers, by the group led by Maulana Bulbul Fakh and also by other insurgents, Hizb-ul-this, Lashkar-e-the-other, Jaish-e-whatever-you-want, was a new annoyance, thought General Hammirdev Kachhwaha hunkered down in the dark, but it was also an indication that purely military activities, even of the so-called iron commando, had been judged to lack sufficient teeth, and that a second, decisive phase had begun. The milquetoasts of secular nationalism had had their day, and as the months passed looked more and more like sidelined irrelevances. “Kashmir for the Kashmiris” was no longer an option. Only the big boys were left standing, and so it was to be Kashmir for the Indians or Kashmir for the Pakistanis whose proxies the terror organizations were. Things had clarified and the creation of clarity was after all the universal goal of military activity. General Kachhwaha liked this simpler, clearer world. Now, he told himself, it’s either us or them, and we are the stronger, and will inevitably prevail.

He had to concede that the suicide missions had had

successes. Here they all were in his memory. July 13 last year, attack on Border Security Force camp at Bandipora, deputy inspector general and four personnel killed. August 6, one major and two junior commissioned officers slain at Natnoos army camp. August 7, colonel and three personnel done to death at Trehgam army camp. September 3, in a daring raid on the perimeter area of Army Corps HQ Badami Bagh itself, ten personnel murdered including a public relations officer (no loss, in General Kachhwaha’s unexpressed private view). And so it went on, pinprick after pinprick. December 2, Army HQ, Baramulla, one JCO lost. December 13, Civil Lines, Srinagar, five personnel. December 15, army camp, Rafiabad, many injuries, no fatalities. January 7, meteorological center, Srinagar, attacked. Four personnel lost. January 10, car bomb in Srinagar. February 14, unmanned pony used to carry an IED (improvised explosive device) into security force camp at Lapri, district Udhampur. General Kachhwaha could admire initiative when he saw it. However, the enemy’s losses during these encounters were also heavy. They had been hit hard. The iron commando had been shot full of holes. Hence the new tactic. They accepted some small loss of life in order to inflict large wounds. February 19 saw the first fidayeen attack on Badami Bagh. Two personnel killed. Three weeks later, a second suicide bomb attack on HQ, four army personnel dead.

There were those who claimed that the terrorists, inspired by fidayeen activities, were gaining momentum, that the war was being lost. There were calls for General Kachhwaha to be replaced. Fidayeen bombed the police control room in Srinagar (eight personnel killed). Fidayeen attacked Wazir Bagh base in Srinagar (four killed). Fidayeen attacked Lassipora army base, district Kupwara (six). And alongside this, there was a non-fidayeen ambush at Morha Chatru, Rajouri district (which claimed fifteen lives), a patrol party ambushed at Gorikund, Udhampur (five lives), an attack on Shahlal base, Kupwara (five), on Poonch police station (seven). IEDs were placed under military buses at Hangalpua (eight) and Khooni Nallah (five). Very well, General Kachhwaha grudgingly conceded, the list was long. Fidayeen attacks at Handwara, twice. The annual Amarnath pilgrimage attacked, nine pilgrims killed. More Hindus dead at Raghunath temple in Jammu courtesy of two fidayeen bombers. Fidayeen attacked a bus stand in Poonch, and the deputy superintendent of police was killed. A three-man fidayeen squad stormed the army camp at village Bangti on Tanda Road, Akhnoor, Jammu: eight dead, including a brigadier, and four top generals injured. Then, at last, there were some successes to report. Baby Che, the notorious militant Anees Noman, was dead. A fidayeen attack on a security force camp in Poonch was foiled; two foreign mercenaries were slain. A daring and highly dangerous fidayeen attack on the chief minister’s residence on Maulana Azad Road, Srinagar, was thwarted; both terrorists were killed. The tide was turning. The political echelon must appreciate this. The situation was being stabilized. Approximately one hundred alleged insurgents and their alleged associates were being shot dead every day. The point was to have the will to succeed. If fifty thousand deaths were required there would be fifty thousand deaths. The battle would not be lost while the will was there and he, General Kachhwaha, was the embodiment of that will. Therefore the battle was not being lost. It was being won.

News of the razing of Pachigam spread quickly. The Hammer of Kashmir had made an example of this village and his strong-arm tactics had been effective in their way. People were even more scared of harboring militants than before. The few survivors of the crackdown action, some oldsters, some children, a few farmhands and shepherds who had managed to hide in the wooded hills behind the village, made their way to the neighboring village of Shirmal where they were shown such kindnesses as the Shirmalis could afford in that time of empty pockets and open mouths. The old resentments between Pachigam and Shirmal were forgotten as if they had never been. Bombur Yambarzal and his wife Hasina a.k.a. Harud personally ensured that the refugees were fed and housed for the time being. The ruins of Pachigam were still smoldering. “First let things cool down,” Harud Yambarzal told the terrified, heartbroken Pachigamis, “and then we’ll see about rebuilding your homes.” She was trying to sound as reassuring as she could but was inwardly panic-stricken. In the privacy of the Yambarzal home she hit both her sons across their faces with an open hand and said that unless they broke all their connections with militant groups immediately she personally would cut off their noses while they slept. “If you think I will allow what happened to Pachigam to befall this village,” she hissed at them, “then, boys, you don’t know your mother. I raised you to be sensible and practical fellows. This is when you repay the debt of childhood and do as you are told.” She was a formidable lady and her sons the secretive electricians mumbled okay, okay, and skulked out the back way to smoke beedis and wait for the ringing in their ears to stop. By that time there was a shortage of young men in the villages of Kashmir. They had gone underground in Srinagar, which was still safer than the villages, or underground to join the militants, or underground into the army’s counterinsurgency fifth columns, or underground across the Line of Control to join the Pakistani ISI’s jihadi groups or just underground into their graves. Hasina Yambarzal had held on to her boys by sheer force of personality. She wanted them where she could see them: overground, at home.

Seven nights after the crackdown on Pachigam, to Hasina Yambarzal’s horror, Maulana Bulbul Fakh entered Shirmal in the first of three Jeeps, accompanied by Shalimar the clown and twenty more riders from the terrifying iron commando. Soon the Yambarzal home was besieged by armed men. The iron mullah came inside with a few of his aides, one of whom was the only surviving son of the deceased sarpanch of Pachigam. Even Bombur Yambarzal, a man whose sense of self-importance made him a bad observer of others, noticed the change in Shalimar the clown and later that night, in bed with his wife, he asked her about it. “Tragedy has struck that man so hard it’s not surprising he looks like he would cut your throat if you snapped your fingers at the wrong time, eh, Harud,” he said softly, afraid to raise his voice in case anyone was listening outside. Hasina Yambarzal shook her head slowly. “The tragedy is a new wound, and you can see its pain, that’s for sure,” she answered in a voice as low as her husband’s. “But I also saw in his eyes the thing you’re talking about, and I’m telling you that assassin’s look has been there for a long time. That’s not the look of a man shocked by his family’s death, but the expression of a man accustomed to killing. God alone knows where he’s been or what he’s become, to come back wearing a face like that.”

“Our bereaved brother needs to visit his parents’ graves,” Bulbul Fakh had said without preamble. “For tonight therefore I require your assistance in the matter of accommodation and food for the animals and men.” Bombur Yambarzal shook in his shoes and temporarily lost the power of speech because he was sure that the iron mullah had not forgotten the day he had defied him so many years ago, and so it was Hasina who said, “We’ll do what we can but it won’t be easy because we already have the homeless from Pachigam to feed and find roofs for.” She proposed, however, that the abandoned Gegroo house be opened for the fighters’ use, and the iron mullah agreed. Bulbul Fakh stationed himself in that dusty old ruin with half of his fighters on guard and Bombur personally served them a simple meal of vegetables, lentils and bread. The other fighters ate quickly and then dispersed into the shadows around Shirmal to keep watch.

Shalimar the clown borrowed a pony and rode off alone in the direction of Pachigam without a word to anyone.

“Poor fellow,” Bombur Yambarzal said as he watched him go. Nobody replied. Hasina Yambarzal had noted some time earlier that her two sons were nowhere to be seen, which meant that the instructions she had issued the moment she saw the fighters of the iron commando ride into town were being followed. The thing to do now was for everyone to get indoors. “Come to bed,” she said to Bombur, and he knew better than to argue with her when she used that particular voice.

In the small hours of the night General Hammirdev Kachhwaha’s forces, informed of the situation by Hasina Yambarzal’s emissaries, Hashim and Hatim Karim (who were highly commended for their patriotism and immediately inducted into places of honor in the anti-insurgency militia), launched a major assault on Shirmal. “First the Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin started betraying the JKLF,” General Kachhwaha reflected, “and now the people have started betraying the Hizb. The situation has many satisfactory aspects.” The sanitary cordon around the Shirmal area was established so stealthily and swiftly that none of the iron-commando fighters managed to escape. As the noose tightened the sentries in the woods fell back toward the Gegroo house and there made their last stand. When the army tanks rumbled into Shirmal there was no indiscriminate destruction of the type so recently suffered by Pachigam. Cooperation had its rewards, and in any case, thanks to Hasina Yambarzal, the rats were already neatly in their trap. After a brief but overwhelming period of grenade explosions and artillery fire the Gegroo house had ceased to exist and nobody inside it remained alive. The bodies of the iron-commando fighters were brought out. Inside the garments of Maulana Bulbul Fakh no human body was discovered. However, a substantial quantity of disassembled machine parts was found, pulverized beyond hope of repair.

General Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha lying in bed in his darkened quarters at Army HQ, Badami Bagh, slipped contentedly toward sleep. He had been awakened by a phone call informing him of the successful eradication of at least twenty iron-commando fighters and the presumed death of their leader, the jihadi fanatic known as Maulana Bulbul Fakh. General Kachhwaha replaced the receiver, sighed gently and closed his eyes. The women of Jodhpur appeared before him, spreading their arms to welcome him. Soon his long northern marriage would be over. Soon he would return in triumph to that land of hot colors and fiery women and at the age of sixty would be restored to vigorous youth by a beauty whose attentions he had earned, whose sweet attentions he so fully deserved. The beauty approached him, beckoning. Her arm slipped around his shoulder, supple as a snake, and like a snake her leg coiled around his. Then like a third snake her other arm and like a fourth snake her other leg until she was slithering all over him, hanging around his body, licking at his ear with her forked tongues, her many forked tongues, the tongues at the ends of her arms and legs. She had as many arms and legs as a goddess, and multilimbed and irresistible she coiled and tightened around him and, finally, with all the power she possessed, she bit.

The accidental death by king cobra snakebite of General H. S. Kachhwaha was announced at Badami Bagh the next morning and he was buried with full honors in the military cemetery on the base. The details of the accident were not made public but in spite of the authorities’ best efforts it wasn’t long before everyone knew about the writhing swarm of snakes that had somehow penetrated the innermost sanctum of military power in Kashmir, the snakes whose numbers multiplied in the retelling until there were dozens of them, fifty, a hundred and one. It was said, and soon came to be commonly believed, that the snakes had burrowed their way beneath all the army’s defenses-and these were giant snakes, remember, the most poisonous snakes imaginable, snakes arriving after a long subterranean journey from their secret lairs at the roots of the Himalayas!-to avenge the wrongs against Kashmir, and, people told one another, when General Kachhwaha’s body was discovered it looked like he had been attacked by a swarm of hornets, so many and so vicious were the bites. It was not widely known, however, that as she died Firdaus Noman of Pachigam had called down a snake curse upon the army’s head; accordingly, this macabre detail was not a part of the story that did the rounds.

She knew he was coming, could feel his proximity, and prepared for his arrival. She killed the last kid goat, skinned it, dressed it with her choicest herbs and prepared a meal. She bathed in the mountain stream that ran through the meadow of Khelmarg and braided her hair with flowers. She was almost forty-four years old, her hands were rough with toil, she had two broken teeth, but her body was smooth. Her body told the story of her life. The obesity of her insane time was gone but had left its wounds, the broken veins, a looseness in the skin. She wanted him to see her story, to read the book of her nakedness, before he did what he had come to do.

She wanted him to know she loved him. She wanted to remind him of the hours by the Muskadoon, of what had happened in Khelmarg, of the village’s bold defense of their love. If she showed him her body he would see it all there, just as he would see the marks of another man’s hands, the marks that would force him to commit murder. She wanted him to see it all, her fall, and her survival of the fall. Her years of exile were written on her body and he should know their tale. She wanted him to know that at the end of the story of her body she loved him still, or again, or still. She wore no clothes, stirred the pot of food on the low fire and waited.

He came on foot, holding a knife. There was a horse’s whinny somewhere but he did not ride. There was no moon. She stepped out of her hut to greet him.

Do you want to eat first? she asked, pushing a strand of hair away from her face. If you want to eat, there’s food.

He said nothing. He was reading the story of her skin.

Everyone is dead, she said, my father’s dead, and yours, and I think maybe you’re dead too, so why should I want to live?

He said nothing.

Get on with it, she said. Oh God, be done with it, please.

He moved toward her. He was reading her body. He held it in his hands.

Now, she commanded him. Now.

He was on his way down the pine-forested hill with tears in his eyes when he heard the explosions in Shirmal and guessed the rest. That simplified things, in a way. He had been the iron mullah’s right-hand man and communications chief but the two men no longer saw eye to eye. Shalimar the clown had never liked the use of fidayeen suicides, which struck him as an unmanly way of making war, but Bulbul Fakh was increasingly convinced of the tactic’s value and was rapidly moving from military raids of the iron-commando type toward fidayeen recruiting and training activities. The business of finding young boys and even young girls who were ready to blow themselves up felt demeaning to Shalimar the clown, who had therefore decided to make his break with the iron mullah as soon as he could think of a way of doing so that wouldn’t lead to his execution for desertion. The explosions in Shirmal solved that problem. There was nothing left for him in Kashmir and now that the last obstacle had been removed it was time for him to make his run.

He got off the little mountain pony he had borrowed from Bombur Yambarzal, wiped his face and fished in his backpack for the satphone. It was always risky to use satellite telephone communications because satchat was often monitored by the enemy, but he had no choice. He was too far from the northern passes over the mountains and the southern end of the Line of Control was heavily militarized and hard to cross. There were crossing places if you knew where to look, but even though he had a good idea of where to head for it would be a difficult trick to pull off on his own. He needed what would once, in another war, in another time, have been called a passeur.

The first phone call set that up. The second was a gamble. But the Malaysian intermediary’s phone number was a real number, and was answered by a voice that spoke and understood Arabic, and the codes he had been given seemed to mean something, the message he needed to send was accepted for transmission, and an instruction was given in return. But nothing could be done until he crossed the Line of Control. As things turned out, however, that wasn’t his biggest problem. The passeur showed up and did his work on the Indian side of the LoC and the fighter he thought of as the doorway, the militant known as Dar, whom he called Naked Mountain, was waiting for him across the line with a group of hoodlums who didn’t seem pleased to see him. “I’m sorry,” Naked Mountain said in Kashmiri, “but you know how it goes.” This was Shalimar the clown’s last human contact with his old life. He was blindfolded and taken for debriefing in a windowless room where he was tied to a chair and invited to explain how it was that he alone had survived the massacre at Shirmal, and to give his intelligence interlocutors one good reason why he should not be thought of as a dirty traitorous asshole and shot within the hour. Blindfolded, not knowing the name of his interrogator, he spoke the coded phrase he had been given on the satphone and there was a long silence in the room. Then the interrogator left and after several hours another man entered. “Okay, it checks out,” the second man said. “You’re a lucky bastard, you know that? Our plan was to cut off your balls and stuff them between your teeth but it seems you have friends in high places, and if the ustadz wants you alongside him then that, my friend, is exactly where you will go.”

After that the real world ceased to exist for Shalimar the clown. He entered the phantom world of the run. In the phantom world there were business suits and commercial aircraft, and he was passed from hand to hand like a package. At one point he was in Kuala Lumpur but that was just an airport and a hotel room and then an airport again. At the far end of the phantom run there were place-names that meant next to nothing: Zamboanga, Lamitan, Maluso, Isabela. There were several boats. Around the main Basilan island there were sixty-one smaller islands and on one of these, a part of the Pilas group, he emerged from the phantom world in a palm-thatched stilt-house in a village smelling of tuna and sardines, and was greeted by a familiar face. “So, godless man,” the ustadz said in his bad, cheerful Hindi, “as you see I am back to fisherman again, but also-right? right?-one pretty good fisher of men.”

Abdurajak Janjalani had wealthy backers but his Abu Sayyaf group was in its infancy. There were less than six hundred fighters in all. “So, my friend, we need good fighter killer like you.” The plan was simple. “Everywhere in Basilan and western Mindanao we ambush Christians, we bomb Christians, we burn Christian business, we kidnap Christian tourists for ransom, we execute Christian soldiers, and then we ambush them some more. In between we show you good time. Land of plenty! Plenty fish, plenty rubber, plenty corn, plenty palm oil, plenty pepper, plenty coconut, plenty women, plenty music, plenty Christians to take it all and leave nothing for plenty Muslim. Plenty language. Want to learn? Chavacano, sort of Spanish. Also Yakan, Tausug, Samal, Cebuano, Tagalog. Forget it, never mind. Now we bring our new language. In our language few words are needed. Ambush, bomb, kidnap, ransom, execute. No more mister nice guy! We are the Bearers of the Sword.” They were eating mackerel and rice in the fisherman’s hut. The ustadz leaned in close. “I know you, my friend. I remember your quest. But how will you find your quarry? He knows the secret world, and the world, also, is large.” Shalimar the clown shrugged. “Maybe he will find me,” he said. “Maybe God will bring him to me for justice.” Janjalani laughed merrily. “Godless fighter killer, you are funny man.” His voice dropped. “Fight with me one year. What else is there for you? We will try to find him. Who knows? The world is full of ears. Maybe we are fortunate.”

Exactly one year later-one year to the day!-they were in Latuan, to the east of Isabela, and had just finished burning a rubber plantation called Timothy da Cruz Filipinas. Against an apocalyptic backdrop of flame Abdurajak Janjalani turned to him wearing a red and white Palestinian keffiyeh and the sudden glory of his big smile. “Wonderful news! My friend! I keep my word.” Shalimar the clown took the envelope the ustadz was holding out. “The ambassador, no?” Janjalani grinned. “His picture, his name, his home address. Now we will send you on your mission. Look inside, look inside! Los Angeles, my friend! Hollywood and Vine! Malibu Colony! Beverly Hills 90210! We will send you to become big big movie star and soon to be kissing American girls on TV and driving fancy motorcars and making stupid thank-you speech at Oscars! I am man of my word, don’t you agree?”

Shalimar the clown looked at the envelope. “How did you do this?” he asked. Janjalani shrugged. “Like I say. Maybe we got lucky. Filipinos are everywhere, with eyes to see and ears to hear.” A thought struck Shalimar the clown. “How long have you known? You’ve known all along, haven’t you?” Ustadz Abdurajak Janjalani pretended to look remorseful. “My friend! Fighter killer! Please forgive. I needed you for one year. Thank you! This was the deal. And now I send you where you need to go. Thank you! Our stories touched. Okay. It’s enough. This is my good-bye gift.”

And after another plunge into the phantom world, after boats, cars and planes, after a Canadian border crossing by helicopter shuttle from Vancouver to Seattle and a bus ride south, after a strange assignation at the IHOP on Sunset and Highland with his local contact, a middle-aged Filipino gentleman sporting slicked-down hair and a silk smoking jacket, after a night’s sleep in a downtown flophouse across the street from the Million Dollar Hotel, he stood in his business suit outside high gates on Mulholland Drive and spoke open-sesame words into an entry-phone. I am for Ambassador Max and my name is Shalimar the clown. No, sir, not tradesman. Sir, I am not understanding. You please to inform Ambassador Max, sir, wait on sir, sir, please, sir. And on the second day, again, the speech to the unnamed voice, the hostile, aloof, dismissive voice, the voice of security, taking no risks, considering the worst-case scenario, taking steps. On the third day there were dogs on the other side of the gate. Sir, he said, no dogs, please. I am known to Ambassador Max. No trouble, sir, please. Only please to inform Excellency and I will wait on his pleasure.

He slept in the rough grasses below the road’s rim, keeping out of sight of the cruising patrol cars. He was trained in many things. He could have caught the dogs by their jaws and ripped their heads in half. He could have faced the security voice and shown it some tricks, could have forced it to roll over like a dog and play dead like a dog. It was a dog’s voice and its owner could be killed like a dog. But he controlled himself, was humble, supplicant, mild. When the ambassador’s Bentley came out through the gates on the fourth day Shalimar the clown rose into view. Security guards raised their weapons but he had a woollen Kashmiri hat in his hands, his head was bowed and his demeanor was worshipful and sad. The window of the car came down and there was the target, Ambassador Max, old now but still the man he wanted, his prey. One’s prey can be hunted in many ways. Some of these are stealthy. Who are you, the ambassador was saying, why do you keep coming here. Sir, he said, my name is Shalimar the clown and once in Kashmir you met my wife. She danced for you. Anarkali. Yes, sir, Shalimar. Yes, sir, Boonyi, my wife. No, sir, I don’t want trouble. What’s done is done. No, sir, unfortunately she is deceased. Yes, sir. Some while back. Sad, yes, sir, very sad. Life is short and full of sorrow. Yes, sir, thank you for asking. I am happy to be here in land of frees home of braves. Only I am in need of employment. This, for her sake, sir, I ask. Sir, if you are able, for love. God bless you, sir. I will not disappoint.

Come tomorrow, the ambassador said. We’ll talk then. He bowed his head and backed off. On the fifth day he buzzed again. I am for Ambassador Max and my name is Shalimar the clown.

The gates opened.

He was more than a driver. He was a valet, a body servant, the ambassador’s shadow-self. There were no limits to his willingness to serve. He wanted to draw the ambassador close, as close as a lover. He wanted to know his true face, his strengths and weaknesses, his secret dreams. To know as intimately as possible the life he planned to terminate with maximum brutality. There was no hurry. There was time.

He knew the ambassador had a wife, from whom he was estranged. He knew there was a daughter who had been raised by the wife but now lived in Los Angeles also. Mr. Khadaffy Andang, the odd-looking Filipino gentleman, was a connection of the ustadz’s connections, a long-term sleeper planted in California by the operatives of the Base, and had been activated by the Sheikh at the ustadz’s request, to assist Shalimar the clown. By chance, or divine intervention, the sleeper resided in the same apartment building as the Ophuls girl. He talked to her at the laundry machines and his gentle courteous old-world manner put her at her ease. This was how the information about the ambassador had come to light. This was the way of the world. Sometimes your heart’s desire hung from the highest branch of the highest tree and you could never climb high enough to reach it. Or else you just waited patiently and it fell into your lap.

The ambassador kept no framed photographs of his family on his desk. That was his preference, to be low key in family matters. Then it was his daughter’s birthday and the ambassador sent him up to her apartment with flowers. When he saw her, when those green eyes speared him, he began to tremble. The flowers shook in his hands and she took them quickly from him, looking amused. In the elevator he couldn’t take his eyes off her until she saw him staring and then he dragged his gaze away and forced himself to look down at the floor. She spoke to him. His heart pounded. The voice was incredible. It was the ambassador’s voice on the surface but beneath the English words he could hear a voice he knew. He was from Kashmir, he said, answering her question. He made his English sound worse than it was, to prevent a conversation from beginning. He couldn’t speak to her. He could barely speak. He wanted to reach out to her. He didn’t know what he wanted. She let her hair down and there were tears in his eyes. He watched her drive away with her father and all he could think was, She’s alive. He didn’t know what he wanted. She was living in America now and by some miracle she was twenty-four years old again, mocking him with her emerald eyes, she was the same and not the same, but she was still alive.

He had warned Boonyi against leaving him. In Khelmarg long ago he promised her, “I’ll never forgive you. I’ll have my revenge. I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children too.” And here now was that child, the child she had concealed from him until the end, the child in whom the mother was reborn. How beautiful she was. He would love her if he still knew how to love. But he had forgotten the way. All he knew now was slaughter. I’ll kill the children too.