Free Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie Page B

disappearances when the world began to change. She loved him because his choice of name was his way of honoring her deceased mother as well as celebrating the unbreakable connection of their birth. She loved him because he would not—he could not!—hurt any living soul. How could he cause her harm when he would not harm a fly?
    Her hair was ready and her body was oiled. Rahu the intensifier had worked upon Kaam the passion and her body pulsated with its need. She had become a woman two years ago—early as usual, she thought; ever since her premature birth she had done things ahead of time—and was strong enough for whatever was to come. Through the moonless dark the scent of peach and apple blossom made her eyelids heavy. She sat on her bed and rested her head on the windowsill and closed her eyes. Soon enough her mother came to her as she had known she would. Her mother had died giving her birth but came to her most nights in dreams, letting her in on womanly secrets and family history and giving her good advice and unconditional love. Boonyi did not tell her father this because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. The pandit had tried to be both father and mother to her all her life. In spite of his unworldly nature he treated her as an inestimable treasure, as the pearl of great price his beloved wife had left behind for him as a going-away present. He had learned the secrets of child rearing from the women of the village, and from the beginning insisted on doing everything himself, preparing her compound and wiping her ass and waking up to tend to her whenever she screamed until the neighbors begged him to get some sleep, warning him that he had better let them help out unless he wanted the poor girl to grow up without even one parent to lean on for support. The pandit relented, but only very occasionally. As she got older he taught her to read and write and sing. He jumped rope with her and let her experiment with kohl and lipstick and told her what to do when she began to bleed. So he had done his best, but a girl’s mother is her mother even if she existed without actually existing, in the noncorporeal form of a dream, even if her existence could only be proved by her effect on the one human being whose fate she still cared to influence.
    The pandit’s deceased wife had been named Pamposh after the lotus flower, but, as she confided to her dozing daughter, she preferred the nickname Giri, meaning a walnut kernel, which Firdaus Begum, Abdullah Noman’s yellow-haired wife, Firdaus Butt or Bhat, once gave her as a mark of friendship. One summer day in the saffron fields of Pachigam Firdaus and Giri were gathering crocuses when a rainstorm came at them like a witch’s spell out of a clear blue sky and soaked them both to the bone. The sarpanch’s wife was a foul-mouthed woman and let the cackling rain know what she thought of it but Pamposh danced in the downpour and cried out gaily, “Don’t scold the sky for giving us the gift of water.”
    That was too much for Firdaus. “Everyone thinks you have such a sweet nature, so open, so accepting, but you don’t fool me,” she told Pamposh or Giri while they sheltered dripping under a spreading chinar. “Sure, I can see how quickly and easily you smile, how you never have a harsh word for anyone, how you face every hardship with equanimity. Me, I wake up in the morning and I have to start fixing everything I see, I need to shake people up, I want everything to be better, I want to clean up all the shit we have to deal with every day of this grueling life. You, by contrast, act like you take the world as it is and are happy to be in it and whatever happens is just fine by you. But guess what? I’m onto you. I’ve worked out your little act of an angel in paradise. It’s brilliant, no question about that, but it’s just your shell, your hard walnut shell, and inside you’re a completely different girl and it’s my guess that you’re far from contented.