THE PUPPET MASTER IS BACK. He was absent for a while, busy with re-invention, polemic and courtship. The intervening years have perhaps softened him to the extent that he almost allows us to believe that we are independently able to grasp his art. But no, with a snap, he reminds us that he holds the strings. 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.

This time, from his favoured terpsichorean high-wire theme, he brings us a new performer. Shalimar is a clown, but only in as far as Jean-Louis Barrault was in Les Enfants du Paradis, or Chaplin in The Gold Rush. This is the tale of a clown whose tragedy is transformed into anger, and then appositely to terrorism.

Salman Rushdie has returned to South Asia, theatre of his phenomenal invention of a new form of Anglo-Indian or to be less reminiscent of Raj, as he might wish, Indo-English expression. It was a kneading of language that led to the Booker, and the Booker of Bookers. Maybe this story has been growing for years in Rushdie. Kashmiri by ancestry, Muslim by inheritance, he is a child of that Midnight, and has now been altered, or — as those who imposed the fatwa would claim — wholly corrupted by the “depravity” of the West. As he sat beneath the weighted early years of The Satanic Verses fatwa he wrote the only children’s book he has written so far — Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In that time of personal darkness he played with the notion of Kashmir, calling it the valley of K, Kosh-mar, as in nightmare, or Kache-mer, the place that hides the sea. Now there is no disguise as openly he calls out the village names of the valley with the pathos of a roll call of the dead.

Or maybe, after 9/11, he decided to return to the fallout of 8/15/47, because this was where he could apply all that he is to the rising bile of fear about his religion of birth. Out of this he could craft an understanding of the struggle that took hold of the Valley of Kashmir, a place of such beauty that it reduced visitors and trespassers alike to tears of elation, and then of the need to possess.

India comes at the beginning of this story, not as in India the country, but India, a woman in LA, her name the stigmata of geographical adultery. Then we meet Max Ophuls, India’s father, at the very end of his life.

Max is murdered. So we begin at the end, and then start again.

Max has been an American ambassador in India, neatly slipped in during the Sixties between the real players, John Kenneth Galbraith and Chester Bowles. He was a European who fled the old world to embrace the addiction of the new, a place where he could celebrate the “reinvention of the self, that classic American theme . . . That the self can so readily be remade is a dangerous, narcotic discovery. Once you’ve started using that drug, it isn’t easy to stop.”

Here Rushdie gives us the meter of his piece — that reinvention is a drug that has the capacity to destroy all who submit to its narcosis.

Max courted Margaret Rhodes through an elegantly and invisibly stitched evocation of a real and imagined time with the French Resistance. He takes her with him into his new life in America.

Shalimar, real name Noman Sher Noman, is a clown of the high wire. He was born a Muslim in a village in Kashmir at a time when Pandits, the Kashmiri Hindus, and Muslims, shared the great feasts of lamb upon lamb, and performed in the same bhand pather, their traditional and local theatre of shared Hindu-Muslim myth and history. They inter-flirt and even, in the case of Shalimar, inter-marry. He falls for Bhoomi, who is also called Boonyi, the daughter of a Pandit. She is a dancer whose swaying hips later capture Max, the ambassador and serial adulterer. See, the high priest of string-pullers is at work: Lola to Bhoomi, Boonyi from Kashmir to Delhi, from Shalimar’s side to ambassador’s mistress, clown to cuckold.

Shalimar Bagh is “the great Mughal garden . . . descending in verdant liquid terraces to a shining lake”. Shalimar the clown and Bhoomi were born on the same night in Shalimar Garden beyond Srinagar. As he teeters, and Bhoomi strides out of puberty, he tells her that he loves her so intensely that he will kill her, and any children she may have, if she leaves him.

The meter comes from Max, and now we have the rhyme from Shalimar who is No-man, destroyed by love for a woman, formed but already re-forming, love turned to tragedy, tragedy to latent destruction.

Shalimar is recarved by the conflict in his valley. He is trained by the mad mullahs, men born of the jihad and armed so utterly through to the core that, in the case of the one who partially destroys the world of Shalimar’s birth, when his skin rubs away there is only metal beneath, an assembly of machine parts.

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