From The Belmont Club

Partners for peace:

Every nightmare begins with a dream. Salman Rushdie, who Christopher Hitchens once described as “Kashmiri by family, Muslim by birth, and Indian by partition” wrote about the transformation of his almost comically pacific birthplace into one of the world’s great trouble spots. That transformation is embodied in the character of Shalimar the Clown, a fictional creation in one of his novels, who eventually becomes a Jihadi and assassin. Explaining why the sinister Shalimar was always referred to in his novel as “the clown”, Rushdie said “I wanted to stress the sweetness of his beginnings.”

Never forget though, that in the novel Max Ophuls, a U.S. diplomat who has worked in the Kashmir Valley, is murdered by Shalimar the Clown.