Story of His Life

For Rushdie, the story begins with the partition of 1947.

At that time, he says, "the former colonial powers were drawing lines all over the world. And many of the ills of the world since then are the consequence of those acts."

One of Rushdie's most imaginative creations -- a radical cleric he calls the iron mullah, who shows up some years after Kashmir's troubles have begun -- offers a further clue to his thinking.

The iron mullah has "beautiful pale eyes that seemed to look right through this world into the next one." He preaches hellfire and damnation, denouncing as "little infidels" the easygoing Kashmiri Muslims who "mistake tolerance for virtue and harmony for peace."

Oh, and one more, surreal touch: His body is made not of flesh and bone but scrap metal. A rap on his head produces an ominous clang.

The meaning of this is obvious enough, you think. A new fanaticism has arrived, heralding Kashmir's destruction, and Rushdie portrays it as literally not human -- meaning that to him, it is inexplicable.

"No, no, I'm explaining it," he says.

The mullah is not made from just any metal, but from scraps of armor abandoned by the Indian army . Invited to Kashmir after the partition to fend off irregular forces from Pakistan, the troops were soon viewed by the Kashmiris less as allies than as a hostile occupying force.

"The legitimacy of the radicals arose from the people's hostility towards the Indian army," Rushdie says. "That the iron mullah could be created out of the rubble of the army seemed like a truthful metaphor."

He takes no sides in his exposition of the horrors that ensue. Not for nothing did he choose "A plague on both your houses" as an epigraph for "Shalimar the Clown." One side acts. Another reacts. Trapped between them, his grandfather's Kashmir is brutally, mercilessly obliterated. And as some of its sons -- the title character among them -- morph into ruthless terrorists, the personal and the political are inevitably entwined.

Could this have been prevented? Could India have won its freedom without partition, as the religiously diverse country it had always been?

It could, Rushdie suggests, with the usual caveats about what-if scenarios. But if the British hadn't played divide-and-rule with the country's Muslim and Hindu politicians, and if some of those politicians hadn't put jealousy and personal ambition ahead of the common good, then just maybe . . .