The lines – “They killed you,” Zoon Misri told Boonyi … “They killed you because they loved you and you were gone.” (SC 235) – epitomize the interplay of love and anti-love in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. This paper aims to study how this unique interplay falls in line with Hillis. J. Miller’s concept about polar opposites. The love between Boonyi and Shalimar in this novel, like a membrane, ‘divides inside from outside’ into constructive and destructive forces and yet joins in ‘a hymeneal bond’ and allows ‘an osmotic mixing’, making love constructive, love destructive, love hatred, love revenge, love joy, love humiliation, love pain, love violence, love pleasure, love suffering, love source of life, love death and so on. This paper analyses how this queer juggling of love and anti-love catches up with that of Miller’s explanation about the logic of the ‘para’ (Miller 443).
