In this devastating and masterful novel, Salman Rushdie weaves together a tale of the lives of one family that connects across continents and time, a tale achingly wise to the political terrors that dominate our current era and painfully nostalgic for a more tolerant time.

The novel opens with a brutal murder on the doorsteps of an apartment building in Los Angeles in 1991. Maximilian Ophuls, a former U.S. ambassador to India, among many things, visits his daughter, who is named after that country. Fearfully urgent, he is unsettled by a concern unspoken between them. Before he can reach her, though, he is cut down by his Muslim driver, a Kashmiri man mysteriously named Shalimar the Clown.

In these opening pages, told from the point of view of India and which culminate in this brutal scene, Rushdie sketches out a powerful, if distant, relationship between father and daughter.

As her name suggests, India "had been conceived in the East - conceived out of wedlock and born in the midst of the firestorm of outrage that twisted and ruined her father's marriage and ended his diplomatic career."

Despite, or perhaps because of, the scandal that surrounded India's birth, Max comes to champion his daughter, having rescued her from his ex-wife's negligence and her rocky adolescence, guiding her into a more restrained and accomplished young adulthood.

The "child of his old age," India maintains a cool, almost austere relationship with her father, one that is nevertheless absolutely essential for each.

Remembering the bedtime stories he used to tell her as a child, stories that she characterizes more aptly as "homilies" on the nature of power, India sees him unflinchingly. "He had been," she thinks, "a bastard as long as she could remember." Ending his violent homilies on the "palace of power" with scenes of decapitation and fierce confrontation, he would cry, "Off with their heads! Snick-snack! Chop, chop, until you're free. Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war."

Suckled on such bedtime stories, India unsurprisingly becomes a tough young woman. Impervious to common sentimentality, she can't ever seem to remember the name of the good-looking young underwear model who has proposed to her. Flinty and resolute, she lives as if prepared for a violent assault, a target of a history unknown to her until now.

After Shalimar has committed his crime, he flees the scene. Rushdie then begins the intricate process of excavating the history that has led to Max's murder, using the bulk of the novel to slowly reveal the painful connections between Max, Shalimar and India, connections that reflect not only more personal passions, but international politics, as well.

The origins of these conflicts lie in Pachigam, a village in Kashmir, and Rushdie introduces us to two young lovers, Noman Sher (soon to adopt his professional name, Shalimar the Clown) and Boonyi Kaul. Muslim and Hindu respectively, these 14-year-olds have grown up together in a village renowned as much for its theatrical traditions as its ability to cultivate peaceful relations between religions.

In many ways, this novel pays homage to lost ideals and traditions, reminding us that the religious, ethnic or political hatred that divides so many of us are certainly not inevitable, for, as Rushdie shows, they haven't always existed, suggesting their malleability.

When the villagers and their families discover the young couple's love-making, the elders (including both Hindu and Muslims, as well as the children's fathers) declare that the "lovers were their children and must be supported." As Shalimar's father, Abdullah Noman, reminds his villagers, it is "Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other difference," that matters most.

Drawing upon his village's history of negotiating the Hindu-Muslim divide, Abdullah endorses their marriage in spite of their religious differences. "We are all brothers and sisters here," he declares. "There is no Hindu-Muslim issue. Two Kashmiri - two Pachigami - youngsters wish to marry, that's all." Boonyi's father, Pyarel, concurs, for "[t]o defend their love is to defend what is finest in ourselves."

Once these words are spoken, we become aware of the irreversible tragedy that looms before this village. As Boonyi and Shalimar experience the first flush of matrimonial bliss, larger forces begin to encroach on the village. As India and Pakistan grow increasingly more aggressive in their claims to the Kashmir region, the ability of the villagers of Pachigam to preserve their way of life grows increasingly difficult.

And defending their love ultimately leads to the destruction that we witness in the novel's opening pages, for India is intimately connected with this village, even though she learns the truth of Boonyi and Shalimar much later in the novel, a truth that shatters her self-perception and transforms her.

To reveal these connections would spoil the novel, for the pleasure lies in following Rushdie as he artfully spins this intricate web. Suffice it to say that Rushdie does not disappoint as he traverses continents and history to tell this story.

And like the current global conflicts with terrorism, this novel does not pretend to offer absolute solutions, but boldly confronts the tensions that created the problems in the first place.

Geoffrey Bateman teaches literature and writing at CU Boulder.