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In such a city there could be no grey areas, or so it seemed. Things were what
they were and nothing else, unambiguous, lacking the subtleties of drizzle,
shade and chill. Under the scrutiny of such a sun there was no place to hide.
People were everywhere on display, their bodies shining in the sunlight,
scantily clothed, reminding her of advertisements. No mysteries here or depths;
only surfaces and revelations. Yet to learn the city was to discover that this
banal clarity was an illusion. The city was all treachery, all deception, a
quick-change, quicksand metropolis, hiding its nature, guarded and secret in
spite of all its apparent nakedness. In such a place even the forces of
destruction no longer needed the shelter of the dark. They burned out of the
morning's brightness, dazzling the eye, and stabbed at you with sharp and
fatal light.
Her name was India. She did not like this name. People were never called
Australia, were they, or Uganda or Ingushetia or Peru. In the mid-1960s her
father, Max Ophuls (Maximilian Ophuls, raised in Strasbourg, France, in an
earlier age of the world), had been America's best-loved, and then most
scandalous, ambassador to India, but so what, children were not saddled with
names like Herzegovina or Turkey or Burundi just because their parents had
visited those lands and possibly misbehaved in them. She had been conceived in
the East—conceived out of wedlock and born in the midst of the firestorm of
outrage that twisted and ruined her father's marriage and ended his diplomatic
career—but if that were sufficient excuse, if it was okay to hang people's
birthplaces round their necks like albatrosses, then the world would be full of
men and women called Euphrates or Pisgah or Iztaccíhuatl or Woolloomooloo. In
America, damn it, this form of naming was not unknown, which spoiled her
argument slightly and annoyed her more than somewhat. Nevada Smith, Indiana
Jones, Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Ernie Ford: she directed mental curses and
a raised middle finger at them all.
"India" still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the
appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own, and she insisted to herself
that it didn't fit her anyway, she didn't feel like an India, even if her
color was rich and high and her long hair lustrous and black. She didn't want
to be vast or subcontinental or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or
ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World. Quite the reverse. She
presented herself as disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious,
understated, calm. She spoke with an English accent. In her behavior she was not
heated, but cool. This was the persona she wanted, that she had constructed with
great determination. It was the only version of her that anyone in America,
apart from her father and the lovers who had been scared off by her nocturnal
proclivities, had ever seen. As to her interior life, her violent English
history, the buried record of disturbed behavior, the years of delinquency, the
hidden episodes of her short but eventful past, these things were not subjects
for discussion, were not (or were no longer) of concern to the general public.
These days she had herself firmly in hand. The problem child within her was
sublimated into her spare-time pursuits, the weekly boxing sessions at Jimmy
Fish's boxing club on Santa Monica and Vine where Tyson and Christy Martin
were known to work out and where the cold fury of her hitting made the male
boxers pause to watch, the biweekly training sessions with a Clouseau-attacking
Burt Kwouk look-alike who was a master of the close-combat martial art of Wing
Chun, the sun-bleached blackwalled solitude of Saltzman's Moving Target
shooting gallery out in the desert at 29 Palms, and, best of all, the archery
sessions in downtown Los Angeles near the city's birthplace in Elysian Park,
where her new gifts of rigid self-control, which she had learned in order to
survive, to defend herself, could be used to go on the attack. As she drew back
her golden Olympic-standard bow, feeling the pressure of the bowstring against
her lips, sometimes touching the bottom of the arrow shaft with the tip of her
tongue, she felt the arousal in herself, allowed herself to feel the heat rising
in her while the seconds allotted to her for the shot ticked down toward zero,
until at last she let fly, unleashing the silent venom of the arrow, reveling in
the distant thud of her weapon hitting its target. The arrow was her weapon of
choice.
Excerpted from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie Copyright © 2005 by Salman Rushdie. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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