![]() ![]() Maybe this story has been growing in him for years, forming, fragmenting, re-grouping, waiting, a tale chasing a tail in circles back to the ferment of his identity: Kashmiri by ancestry, Muslim by inheritance, a child of that Midnight, and now eclectic, or, as those who imposed the fatwa would claim, wholly corrupted by the depravity of the West. It was a kneading of language that led to the Booker, and the Booker of Bookers. Salman Rushdie has returned to South Asia, theatre of his phenomenal invention of a new form of Anglo-English, or to be less reminiscent of Raj, as he might wish, Indo-English expression. This is the tale of a clown whose tragedy transforms into anger, and then appositely to terrorism. Shalimar is a clown, but only in as far as Jean-Louis Barrault was in Les Enfants du Paradis, or Chaplin in Gold Rush. This time, from his favoured terpsichorean high-wire theme, he brings us a new performer. ![]() We just get to dance around beneath his elevated acrobatics, bragging to our friends that yes, indeed we understand how the tightrope tricks are done. ![]() But no, with a snap, he reminds us that he holds the strings. The intervening years have perhaps softened him to the extent that he almost allows us believe that we are independently able to grasp his art. He was absent for a while, busy with re-invention, polemic and courtship. ![]()
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