The man who was known for years as Shalimar the Clown is now a Kashmiri Muslim terrorist named Noman Sher Noman, who brutally murders Max Ophuls, an American diplomat (and counter-terrorism expert), in Los Angeles in 1991 after his wife, Boonyi, has an affair with Ophuls. This killing sets off the chain of events in Salman Rushdie`s ninth novel. SHALIMAR THE CLOWN follows both Noman and the ambassador into their pasts, finds connections between their lives, details the story of Noman`s wife Boonyi and Ophuls`s daughter India, and provides a sprawling portrait of a very troubled Kashmir in the recent 20th century. Salman Rushdie, no stranger to fanaticism and terrorism, has obviously drawn on the dramatic events of his own life for some of the details here, but the story spirals out into a huge, epic, multicultural fable.