After finishing Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati (which I loved), I was looking for something else to read and decided to bring Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown with me on my journey. I began to read it on the flight home on Thursday and, while trying to rest myself well from a persistent cold, I finished it today. As always when it comes to Rushdie, there is a myriad of characters, innumerable events that trigger chains woven together as by fate, various places from all over the world and very strong emotions.

The starcrossed Kashmiri lovers, the hindu dancer Boonyi and the muslim tightrope artist Shalimar the clown, are in the forefront against the backdrop of the raw Kashmir conflict where neighbours are turned against neighbours. The situation is complicated further when Boonyi decides find means to escape the remote village and her marriage to Shalimar the clown. She seizes the opportunity when the American ambassador is spellbound by her beauty and her dance. Ambassador Max Ophuls, a man with his own stories of courage, resistance, betrayal and loss, wants the best for his newfound love and helps her to dance lessons and schooling, but he also involves himself politically in her native Kashmir. Nevertheless, he is ultimately forced to realise that the two of them simply have been using each other. In the very public wake of their secret liason Boonyi is forced to go back in shame to her village, whereas the fruit of their union, their daughter India/Kashmira, grows up not knowing anything about her past and she does not learn the true story until both her parents are dead and she, herself, is in mortal danger.

What will stay with me is Rushdie's portrait of the Kashmiri conflict, the depiction of the fertile soil for terrorism and the training camps for terrorist, as well as characters affected by it all. I really liked it.

Background image from Jesscail.com.