The official name of their village, Pachigam, lacked any apparent meaning; but some of its older inhabitants claimed that it was a latter-day corruption of Panchigam, which is to say “birdville.” In the vexed debate on whether or not birds were transfigured human souls this etymological rumor proved nothing or everything depending on your inclination. When Shalimar the clown found Boonyi Kaul waiting for him in the Khelmarg meadow, however, that debate was no longer uppermost in his mind. Another debate was raging there instead. Standing before him, oiled of skin and with wildflowers scenting the carefully braided hair that hung kerchief-free around her shoulders, was the girl he loved, waiting for him to make her a woman and in doing so make himself a man. Desire rose in him, but so did a counterforce he had not expected: restraint. The shadow dragons were fighting over him, Rahu the exaggerator and Ketu the blocker battling for mastery of his heart.
He looked into Boonyi’s eyes and saw the telltale dreaminess there, warning him that she had smoked charas to give her the courage to be deflowered. In the subtly suggestive movements of her lips, too, he could discern the cryptic seductiveness of her condition. “Boonyi, Boonyi,” he mourned, “you’ve burdened me with a responsibility I don’t know how to discharge. Let’s, you know, caress each other in five places and kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but let’s not get carried away.” In reply, Boonyi pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot. “Don’t treat me like a child,” she said in a throaty voice that proved she had been unsparing in her drug abuse. “You think I went to all this trouble just for a kiddie-style session of lick and suck?” When he heard the unexpected coarseness of her speech Shalimar the clown surmised that she must have been very afraid indeed of what she had agreed to do, which was why she had needed to derange herself so completely. “Okay, it’s not going to happen,” he said, and the conflict within him grew so great, the two halves of the dragon churned up his insides so completely, that he was physically sick. Boonyi laughed hysterically at the sight. “You think that’s going to put me off?” she gasped between the sobs of laughter, and pulled him down on top of her. “Mister, you’ll have to try a lot harder than that to get yourself out of this.”
Never afterwards did Boonyi Kaul utter a word of regret or recrimination for what she did in the meadow of Khelmarg, even though the events of that night set her on the road that led to an early death. She never reproached herself or Shalimar the clown for their choice, which was really hers. Shalimar the clown had been wrong about that too. She had not smoked the charas to abdicate responsibility but to be sure of seizing her opportunity; nor was she afraid of what she had chosen to do. The dragon’s head had won her over long ago. The spirit-killing tail had no power over her.
“God,” she said when it was over, “and that’s what you didn’t want to do?”
“Don’t leave me,” he said, rolling over onto his back and panting for joy. “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also.”
“What a romantic you are,” she replied carelessly. “You say the sweetest things.”
Before Shalimar the clown and Boonyi were born there had been the villages of the actors and the villages of the cooks. Then times changed. The Pachigami performers of the traditional entertainments known as bhand pather or clown stories were still the undisputed player kings of the valley, but Abdullah the genius-young Abdullah, in his prime-was the one who made them learn how to be cooks as well. In the valley at times of celebration people liked a bit of a drama to watch but there was also a demand for those who could prepare the legendary wazwaan, the Banquet of Thirty-Six Courses Minimum. Thanks to Abdullah the villagers of Pachigam were the first to provide a rounded service which offered both sustenance for the body and pleasure for the soul. As a result they didn’t have to share the feast-day cash emoluments with anyone. There were other villages that specialized in the Thirty-Six-Courses-Minimum banquet, the most famous of which was Shirmal, just a mile and a half down the road; but as Abdullah pointed out it was easier to study recipes than to hold an audience in the palm of your hand.
He did not institute this radical change in the village’s lifestyle unopposed. Firdaus Begum told him it was a damn-fool scheme that would ruin the village financially. “Look at all the stuff we have to buy-all the copper haandis, the grills, the portable tandoor ovens, just for a start!-and then there is the cost of learning the food and practicing,” she protested. “Is there any reason, theoretically speaking,” Abdullah had roared ruminatively at Firdaus Begum one cold spring day-he had forgotten long ago that it was possible to lower one’s voice when speaking-“why actors should not be able to fry spices and boil rice into something other than a soggy mush?” Firdaus Begum bridled at his tone. “Is there any good explanation, by the same token,” she bawled back at him, “of why the sarus cranes aren’t flying upside down?”
Her dissident voice was in the minority, however, and after the policy started showing signs of being a success the leading cookery village of Shirmal took a leaf out of Pachigam’s book and tried to put on comedy dramas to accompany their food. However, their amateurish stage show was a bust. Then one night war was declared between the rivals. The men of Shirmal staged a raid on Pachigam, aiming to steal the great cauldrons and to break the ovens in which the traveling players had learned to cook the noblest delicacies of the region, the roghan josh, the tabak maaz, the gushtaba, but the Pachigam men sent the Shirmalis home crying with broken heads. After the pot war it was tacitly accepted that Pachigam was at the top of the entertainment tree, and the others got hired only when Pachigam’s tellers of clown stories and cookers of banquets were too busy to offer their services.
The pot war horrified everyone in Pachigam even though they had come out on the winning side. They had always thought of their neighbors the Shirmal villagers as being more than a little weird, but nobody had imagined that so outrageous a breach of the peace was possible, that Kashmiris would attack other Kashmiris driven by such crummy motivations as envy, malice and greed. Firdaus Begum’s friend, the ageless Gujar tribal woman and prophetess Nazarébaddoor, sank into an uncharacteristic gloom. Nazarébaddoor was the most optimistic of seers, whom people liked to visit in her mossy-roofed forest hut in spite of its damp smell of fornicating livestock because she invariably foretold happiness, wealth, long life and success. After the pot war her vision darkened. “This is the first pebble that starts the avalanche,” she said, shaking her toothless head. Then she went into her odorous little hut, drew a wooden screen across the entrance, and retired forever from the art of divination. Nazarébaddoor had taken her name-“evil eye, begone!”-from a character out of the old stories, a beautiful princess who was in love with the hero Prince Hatim Tai and whose touch could avert curses, and she allowed the more gullible villagers to believe that she was in fact none other than that fabled immortal beauty, whom death had been unable to seize because her lucky touch kept getting her out of its clutches. “If it makes people happy,” she confided in Firdaus, “I don’t care if they believe I was once the Queen of Sheba.”