In Lefebvre’s conception of representational spaces, we see the importance of users’ experience of space, which is not only influenced by their perception and cognition of the place but also by their memories and dreams of lived space. The relation between time and space plays an important role in the production of space. In
Shalimar the Clown, which is seen as an archive of migratory narratives, readers can
not only see how users of space perceive, conceive, and experience space in different periods of time but also how memories and histories influence their perception, cognition and expression of space. We have stories of both the past and the present in different places in Shalimar the Clown, and each of them influences each other through migration.
In Jason Cowly’s review of Shalimar the Clown, he argues that “[t]he novel is nearly all backstory.” Most parts of the novel are made up of flashbacks, telling backgrounds of different characters who are involved in the assassination in Los Angeles. If we only focus on the assassination itself, the time scale of the novel will seem much smaller: a few days before the assassination and the confrontation between India/Kashmira and Shalimar after the assassination. However, flashbacks and recurrences of past memories, especially those of Pachigam, keep intervening in the main characters’ life in Los Angeles, shaping their viewpoints of the city. As Stephen Morton indicates, “Shalimar the Clown shifts the focus away from the transformative potential of migration in the west to a focus on the way in which political events in Kashmir during the latter half of the twentieth century have impacted on the lives and transnational mobility of people” (340). In other words,
Shalimar the Clown is mainly about two paradises, from whose inhabitants’
perspectives we know the transformation and disappearance of paradise on one hand.
On the other hand, the first example of lost paradise, Pachigam, representing other smashed paradises around the world, will affect the spatial production of Los Angeles.
It is the intervention of the past that influences users’ perception of their present lives, and it is also the influence from the past that urges people to uncover the buried past so as to understand their present and future.
With each character’s revelation about their relations with the remote village Pachigam and their different interpretations of the attack, the assassination, originally considered a terrorist attack with political attempts by most people, turns out to be an act of revenge due to the betrayal in Pachigam and a consequence of political turbulence in Kashmir. Instead of treating the attack as a binary opposition of two different political or religious groups as many discourses on terrorist attacks might do, such as India and Pakistan, Christians and Muslims, what the novel proposes is a relational perspective on the production of space, bringing more unknown facts from a remote village of Kashmir and other parts of the world to the point of convergence in California. This will make clear what has long been concealed or ignored in recent discussions about the U.S. and terrorism. As what will be exemplified in India/Kashmira’s attitude toward her past in Kashmir and the present Los Angeles, Rushdie’s emphasis of relating Kashmir to Los Angeles lies in making the unknown facts emerge while encountering violence. In this way, not only will the tension between terrorism and counter-terrorism be taken into consideration, but the past, the memories of a certain community and the history of a remote area will also show up to speak for their stories. By incorporating the story of Pachigam into a murder case in Los Angeles, perhaps Rushdie is asking the same questions that Harvey proposes in his discussion of “Ground Zero”: “What will we know about those who attacked?
How far will we connect?” (137), and those flashbacks in the novel become possible answers to the above questions.
The assassination is undoubtedly the most apparent and concrete example of how our hidden past grasps the opportunity to manifest its influence on the present. The story of Pachigam turns a Muslim man into an avenger, who migrates to the U.S. and disguises himself as Max’s driver. However, before the arrival of Shalimar, the past of Pachigam has already haunted the city. India/Kashmira, the illegitimate child of Boonyi and Max that Shalimar has waited to revenge, has been influenced by the past for a long time. Before the story of Pachigam is unveiled, the portrayal of India/Kashmira’s life in Los Angeles shows how she desperately wants to know her past and how the past will be categorized and memorized (or not memorized), which greatly influences her imagination of Los Angeles that will be discussed in chapter four. India/Kashmira can see and hear some extraordinary scenes or sounds, but she tries to “keep the strangeness of seeing under control, the sudden otherness of vision that came and went” (Rushdie, Shalimar 6) and pretends as if she were not affected by the otherness. The otherness comes from her unknown mother and the past, both of which allude to the rural village in Kashmir, Pachigam.
In Shalimar the Clown, Pachigam not only exists in remote Kashmir but also metaphorically appears in Los Angeles. It firstly appears in the novel as an unknown intruder to India/Kashmira’s sleep and is connected to her feeling of emptiness and incompatibility with her life in Los Angeles. She wakes up frequently while sleeping, thinking that there is an intruder. However, the intruder does not have a concrete form and might only be perceptible to India/Kashmira. “There was no intruder. The intruder was an absence, a negative space in darkness. She had no mother. Her mother had died giving her birth: the ambassador’s wife had told her this much, and the
ambassador, her father, had confirmed it” (4). According to the passage, the absence of something past occupies a place in India/Kashmira’s life. New experiences may cover parts of it, but they cannot erase all the traces the past has left. In fact, our life is not only constructed by presence of things. Sometimes, our cognition of space will be based on the absence of what we had, what we should have, or what we could have.
The loss of something and the desire for retrieving it will become the traces of that absence. Therefore, the uneasiness aroused by the absence reveals India/Kashmira’s desire for retrieving the loss of her mother, her Kashmiri past, and a more profound eagerness at the bottom of her heart: Kashmiriyat.
India/Kashmira’s expression about both Kashmir and Los Angeles lies greatly in the inconsistency between presence and absence of some facts in her living space. She knows her Kashmiri mother, but she has no further clues to her. She does some researches on the expedition history of the city of angels, but she also sees people swarming into the city and lying like broken dolls under the cliff without angels’
protection. The absence of her mother and angels of the city in the stories of Kashmir and Los Angeles soon becomes the incentive for her to fly back to the village and prepare for the documentary project. Therefore, India/Kashmira’s quest for her Kashmir story leads us back to Pachigam before and after the destruction, while her project of finding the unseen space or realities invites us to take a closer look at the cityscape of Los Angeles.
Even though India/Kashmira has few chances to familiarize herself with Pachigam before her father’s death, the place has always held a special position in her mind. She is named India, but she feels quite awkward to be India. She comes from Pachigam, a Kashmiri village where her mother that she has never seen is buried. In the beginning, she has no idea either about her mother or about her Kashmiri
background. All she has acquired from her ambassador father is her name “India,”
which she dislikes and has a strong desire to replace. “People were never called Australia, were they, or Uganda or Ingushetia or Peru” (5). In the passage that India/Kashmira describes how she feels when she is awaken by the intruder of the unknown, she regards the intruder as an absence and soon thinks of her mother, making readers inevitably compare the intruder to her absent mother, about whom she has been prohibited from knowing more. “Her mother had been a Kashmiri, and was lost to her, like paradise, like Kashmir, in a time before memory. (That the terms Kashmir and paradise were synonymous was one of her axioms, which everyone knew her had to accept)” (4). In this passage, India/Kashmira’s lacking knowledge of her mother gradually parallels the history of Kashmir, both of which remain silent and absent from people’s, especially India/Kashmira’s, perception or cognition of the world. For India/Kashmira, her Kashmiri mother and her Kashmiri background have been compelled to be thrown away from her memories before she could have ever known, remembered or even memorized them. Whether it is about her Kashmiri background or her Kashmiri mother, they both seem to have been eliminated from her life.
However, “[t]he truth was still the truth” (3). The truth that might have been erased or have been lost will still exist in the world in a subtle form waiting for its recurrence. India/Kashmira wants to know the truth. Her perception of the way of life in Los Angeles and her ambition to make a documentary reveal how eager she is for truths. Therefore, the buried past shapes how India/Kashmira recognizes and experiences the two different forms of paradise: one is space of the unknown past, Pachigam, and the other is space of immigrants, Los Angeles. They are both considered irretrievable paradises in the novel as they only exist in memory,
imagination or fallacy. India/Kashmira’s relations with Pachigam and her observation of Los Angeles unfold the gap between representations of space and representational spaces and reveal the changes of each place. However, experiences and interpretations of space vary from person to person. They bear different significance to different people. For example, India/Kashmira’s strong will to know her mother makes a big contrast to Max’s ambiguous attitude toward his past: pride in his feats and reluctance to talk about India/Kashmira’s birth story, which makes him conceal Kashmir from India/Kashmira’s life.
When India/Kashmira meditates on the traces that her mother has left in the world, she proposes a theory of how the dead or the vanished will be remembered in the world’s memory. She divides the dead into three different categories:
Everywhere you went a few of the dead were studied and remembered and these were the best of the dead, the least dead, living in the world’s memory. The less celebrated, less advantaged dead were content to be kept alive within a few loving (or even hating) breasts, even in a single human heart, ……The deadness of India’s mother, however, was of the worst and deadest kind. The ambassador had entombed her memory under a pyramid of silence. (18)
There seem to be some criteria determining what should be remembered and what should be not. For Max, his affair with Boonyi is something that should have been buried with her death, and for residents in Pachigam, Boonyi was dead right after her leaving the village and her husband for the disgraceful relationship with Max. For them, it seems that Boonyi’s existence will damage their ideal images. “People among whom her mother [Boonyi] had grown up treated her like a ghost and murdered her with signatures and seals” and “in another country the woman [Max’s wife] killed her
with a lie when she was still alive, and her father joined the lie so he was her killer too”
(367). Before her physical death, Boonyi has been treated dead by Max and residents in Pachigam. Therefore, India/Kashmira’s impression of her mother is actually constructed by her ambassador father and his wife, the representation of powers in world politics. However, “[t]he deadly dead woman her mother had become was lost in the ambassador’s silence, had been erased by it” (18). For India/Kashmira, her past and living space are constructed by others. Instead of being recognized Kashmira, she is renamed India to memorize her father’s feat in the mission to India rather than to remind him of his private affairs with a Kashmiri woman. It seems that to maintain certain order of a place or to conform to one’s cognition of the world, some persons and events are worth being remembered while some are not. Her mother belongs to the latter, and so does her Kashmiri story. Like her mother’s death being considered the worst kind, India/Kashmira’s past, the story of Pachigam, has been rendered silent and absent.
However, the fact that India/Kashmira cannot sleep well reveals her uneasiness of living in the imposed unreality. The resistance emerging from the past shows it does not want to be forgotten. She has expressed her reluctance to accept the name and the seemly fabricated, or at least obscure, story of what her life should be like from time to time. Sometimes she feels that the “exoticist, colonial” name “India” just does not fit her (5). Sometimes she desperately wants to “inhabit facts, not dreams”
(12). She wants her mother, the woman that is buried in the past along with the story of Pachigam. “She wanted her father to tell her about her mother, to show her letters, photographs, to bring messages from the dead. She wanted her lost story to be found”
(12). Gradually, her desire to know more about her mother is combined with her strong will to discover truths under the surface and her anticipation to retrieve
something lost. Even though it seems absent, the remote perished paradise actually presents its influence on people who have been involved in or related to its story.
The intervention of Pachigam in Los Angeles exemplifies how the past can affect our ways of life, shape our perspectives, and even threaten our lives. It not only shows how the past will be remembered but also reminds those who have forgotten it to re-examine its consequence and development. One of the ways to resist violence is to know what has happened. The past and memories are inscribed in space, and to understand one’s past is to inspect the production of space. Only when India/Kashmira recovers her lost story in Pachigam and knows more about Pachigam and Los Angeles can she live in reality and feel the weight of life. When India finally gets her original name and renames herself Kashmira after realizing what happened in Pachigam, she actually shifts the story from an American story to a Kashmiri one, the one embedded in what was once thought of as space of tolerance. She wants to remember the changes of Pachigam from space of tolerance to space of violence. The narrator brings us back to the days when Pachigam was confronted with catastrophic transformation of its spatial relationship through the villagers’ perspectives. Then we have the story of what India/Kashmira and immigrants in Los Angeles are trying retrieve: the loss of Kashmiriyat.