The army is the most villainous of them all it uses rape as a weapon to demoralise the population, and justifies all manner of atrocities in legalese. Then come partition of the country, the Pakistani raiders, Islamic militants, and the Indian army. There is no Hindu-Muslim divide, so much so that Shalimar marries the Pandit schoolteacher’s daughter with the blessings of the elders. The women of the village scorn the burqa.
There is also the entertainment troupe, in which the anti-hero of the novel, Shalimar Noman, is an acrobat and clown. We read about the famed Kashmiri feast, the wazwan, in which the villagers are expert cooks, so that their fame has reached the Raja’s palace. There is at first an idyllic picture of the unravaged Kashmir, seen in microcosm in the neighbouring villages of Pachigam and Shirmal, where Kashmiriyat (Kashmiri-ness) blooms undisturbed. This portrayal is what hits the Indian reader hard, so that one emerges from it as from a holocaust.
This is where the strength of the novel resides. The story, which is essentially a tale of love, betrayal, repentance and revenge, is not dependent on its Kashmiri setting. There are two aspects to this novel by Salman Rushdie: the portrayal of Kashmir, and the story of Shalimar, his wife Boonyi Kaul, and the American diplomat, Max Ophuls.
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