The Ground Beneath Her Feet (15 page)

I don’t deny that, one day in early 1956, a girl named Persis Kalamanja—with whom Lady Spenta Cama was hoping to arrange Ormus’s marriage; indeed, Lady Spenta was in those days actively and urgently negotiating the same with Kalamanja
père et mère
—took Ormus Cama down to the Rhythm Center store in Fort, Bombay, that rhinestone treasure chest full of the antiquated ditties of an older generation’s moonsters, junesters and toupéed croonsters, which just occasionally came into possession of true jewels, perhaps from sailors on shore leave from an American naval vessel in the harbour. There, in a listening booth, hoping to impress her putative husband-to-be by her cultural savvy (for Persis was much taken with the idea of the match; Ormus, as I may have mentioned before, and will no doubt have occasion enviously to repeat, was an almost irresistibly sweet-featured fellow), eager Persis played Ormus a new, but already crackly, 78 rpm record, and to her deep, though short-lived, satisfaction, the young man’s eyes widened in what might have been terror, or love, just like any other teenager hearing in the voice of Jesse Garon Parker, as he sang “Heartbreak Hotel,” the sound of his own unarticulated miseries, his own hunger, isolation and dreams.

But Ormus was no ordinary teenager. What Persis had mistaken for enchanted bliss was actually surging anger, an uncontainable rage spreading in him like the plague. Halfway through the song it burst out of him. “Who is he?” shouted Ormus Cama. “What’s the name of this blasted thief?”

He came out of the booth at high speed, as if he believed he might be able to grab the singer by the collar of his shirt if he moved fast enough. Facing him was a tall, amused girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, but sophisticated enough for both of them, in a baggy sweatshirt that declared its allegiance to certain unnamed Giants in New York. “Thief?” she enquired. “I’ve heard him called lots of names, but that’s a new one on me.”

Many different versions of the first encounter between Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama are presently in circulation, thanks to the clouds of mythologisation, regurgitation, falsification and denigration that have surrounded their story for years: depending which journal you read, you might have heard that he transformed himself into a white bull
and carried her away on his back while she, warbling gaily, clutched with erotic delight at his two long, curved and gleaming horns; or that she was indeed an alien from a galaxy far, far away who, having identified Ormus as the most perfectly desirable male specimen on the planet, beamed down smack in front of him at the Gateway of India, holding a space flower in her hand. The Rhythm Center encounter is dismissed as “apocryphal” by many commentators; too contrived, they shrug, too banal, and what
is
all that about having written the song? Plus, these cynics add, if you want yet more proof that the story is phoney baloney, try this for size. The whole thing simply makes no sense at all unless you accept that Ormus Cama, quiffed, sideburned and pelvis-swivelling Ormus, had never previously heard of the reigning king of rock ’n’ roll. “This was apparently
1956,”
the critics jeer. “In 1956 even the Pope had heard of Jesse Parker. Even the Man in the Moon.”

In Bombay in those days, however, communications technology was in its infancy. There was no tv, and radios were bulky items under strict parental control. Also, the state broadcasting corporation, All-India Radio, was forbidden to play Western popular music, and the only Western records pressed in India, at the Dum Dum factory in Calcutta, tended to be selections from Placido Lanza, or the soundtrack music from the MGM movie
Tom Thumb
. Print media were likewise parochial. I cannot remember seeing a single photograph of American singing stars in any local showbiz magazine, let alone the daily papers. But of course there were imported American magazines, and Ormus could have seen pictures of Jesse Parker (perhaps alongside the sinister figure of “Colonel” Tom Presley, his manager) in
Photoplay
or
Movie Screen
. And that was also the year of
Treat Me Tender
, Jesse’s first movie, which played at the New Empire cinema, certified for adults only. However, Ormus Cama always insisted he had neither heard of Parker nor seen his photograph until that day in the Rhythm Center store; he always claimed that his dead twin Gayomart was his only style guru—Gayomart, who apparently came to him in dreams.

So I will cling to my record shop anecdote, if only because I heard Ormus and Vina repeat it a hundred times during the years of their great love, fondly lingering here or there, in the booth or outside it,
now on one part of the tale, now on another. Each loving couple cherishes the tale of its coming together, and Ormus and Vina were no exception. However, as they were—it must be said—consummate mythologisers of themselves, the tale they told was inaccurate in one important particular: Miss Persis Kalamanja was omitted completely from their reminiscing. This is an injustice which I am now able to put right. I call the heartbroken Miss K., my witness, to the stand.

Poor Persis, who had already lost her loving heart to Ormus Cama, lost a great deal more that day in the Rhythm Center store. She lost Ormus himself, and with him her whole future. Once he had come face-to-face with Vina, it was all over for Persis; she could see that at a glance. Vina and Ormus hadn’t even touched, they didn’t know each other’s names, but already their eyes were making love. After Ormus dumped Persis she learned how a human being may believe two contradictory things at once. For a long time she believed he would surely return to her once he realized how true a love he had spurned, truer than anything that America-returned child could give him; and at the same time she also knew he would never come back. These two propositions, of equal and opposite power, paralysed her, and she never married, nor did she stop loving him until the very end, when, after the cycle of catastrophes had run its course, I received a letter from her. Poor Persis, still in Ormus’s power even though he no longer lived, poured out her heart to me in an elegant, mature hand that spoke of her strong character. Yet even this impressive woman had been defenceless against the sheer force of Ormus Cama, his desirability, his voltage, his charm, his casual cruelty, his life. He broke her and forgot her. They did that to people, both of them, Vina too, as if the vastness of their own love excused them from the ordinary decencies, from responsibility, from care. Vina did it to me. Which didn’t set me free, either.

“The worst thing,” Persis wrote, “was that he rubbed me out of the picture, as if I hadn’t been there, as if I’d never existed, as if it wasn’t me who took him there that day and started everything up.” I attempted, in my reply, to offer what comfort I could. She was by no means the only part of their story that Vina and Ormus tried to erase. For much of their public lives, they chose to conceal their origins, to
shed the skin of the past, and Persis was shucked off along with everything else; it was, one might say, nothing personal. That’s what I told Persis, anyway, while privately believing that in her case it might indeed have been very personal indeed. Sometimes I thought of Ormus and Vina as worshippers at the altar of their own love, which they spoke of in the most elevated language. Never were there such lovers, never had feelings of such depth, such magnificence, been felt by other mortals.… The presence of another woman at the meeting of such godlike
amants
was a detail the deities preferred to gloss over.

But Persis existed; she still exists. Ormus and Vina have gone, and Persis, like me, is a part of what remains.

In the record store, while Ormus and Vina’s eyes made love, Persis tried to defend her territory. “Listen, jailbait,” she hissed, “shouldn’t you be in KG?”

“Kindergarten’s out, grandma,” said Vina, and turned her back on the Kalamanja heiress, bathing Ormus Cama in the cascade of her liquid regard. Distantly, like a sleepwalker, he answered her question. “I called him a thief because that’s what he is. That’s my song. I wrote it years ago. Two years, eight months and twenty-eight days ago, if you want to know.”

“Oh, come on, Ormie,” Persis Kalamanja battled on. “The record only came out a month ago, and that was in America. Here, it’s hot off the boat.” But Vina had begun to hum another tune; and Ormus’s eyes blazed once again. “How do you know that song?” he demanded. “How could anyone have sung to you what only ever existed in my own head?”

“I suppose you wrote this one too,”Vina challenged him, and sang a snatch of a third melody. “And this, and this.”

“Yes, all of them,” he said, seriously. “The music, I mean; and the vowel sounds. Those cockeyed words may be somebody else’s—a song about
blue shoes?
What
bakvaas
, I swear!—but the vowel sounds are mine.”

“When you’re married to me, Mr. Ormus Cama,” said Persis Kalamanja in a loud voice, gripping his arm tightly, “you’re going to have to start acting a lot more sensible than you are right now.” At which
reproof the object of her affections simply laughed: merrily, in her face. Weeping, routed, Persis fled the scene of her humiliation. The process of removing her from the record had begun.

From the beginning, Vina accepted Ormus’s prophetic status without question. He claimed to be the true author of some of the most celebrated songs of the day, and did so with such uncontrolled intensity that she found she had no option but to believe him. “Either that,” she told me many years later, “or else he was dangerously insane, and the way I was feeling about living in Bombay, the way things were for me in old Uncle Piloo’s clutches, a madman for a boyfriend was just fine.” After Persis fled, a brief awkwardness hung in the air; and then Vina, to hold the interest of the man to whose life she had already privately joined her own, asked if he knew the story of the invention of music.

Once upon a time the winged serpent Quetzalcoatl ruled the air and the waters, while the god of war ruled the land. Theirs were rich days, full of battles and the exercise of power, but there was no music, and they both longed for a decent tune. The god of war was powerless to change the situation, but the winged serpent was not. He flew away towards the house of the sun, which was the home of music. He passed a number of planets, and from each of them he heard musical sounds, but there were no musicians to be found. At last he came to the house of the sun, where the musicians lived. The anger of the sun at the serpent’s invasion was a terrible thing to witness, but Quetzalcoatl was not afraid, and unleashed the mighty storms that were his personal specialty. The storms were so fearsome that even the house of the sun began to shake, and the musicians were scared and fled in all directions. And some of them fell to earth, and so, thanks to the winged serpent, we have music.

“Where is that story from?” Ormus asked. He was hooked.

“Mexico,” said Vina. She came towards him and brazenly took his hand in her own. “And I am the winged serpent, and this is the house of the sun, and you, and you, are music.”

Ormus Cama stared at his hand lying in hers; and felt something lift from him, the shadow, perhaps, of a pillow with which, long ago, his brother had smothered his voice.

“Would you like,” he asked, amazing himself by the question, “maybe one day soon, to hear me sing?”

What’s a “culture”? Look it up. “A group of micro-organisms grown in a nutrient substance under controlled conditions.” A squirm of germs on a glass slide is all, a laboratory experiment calling itself a society. Most of us wrigglers make do with life on that slide; we even agree to feel proud of that “culture.” Like slaves voting for slavery or brains for lobotomy, we kneel down before the god of all moronic micro-organisms and pray to be homogenized or killed or engineered; we promise to obey. But if Vina and Ormus were bacteria too, they were a pair of bugs who wouldn’t take life lying down. One way of understanding their story is to think of it as an account of the creation of two bespoke identities, tailored for the wearers by themselves. The rest of us get our personae off the peg, our religion, language, prejudices, demeanour, the works; but Vina and Ormus insisted on what one might call auto-couture.

And music, popular music, was the key that unlocked the door for them, the door to magic lands.

In India it is often said that the music I’m talking about is precisely one of those viruses with which the almighty West has infected the East, one of the great weapons of cultural imperialism, against which all right-minded persons must fight and fight again. Why then offer up paeans to culture traitors like Ormus Cama, who betrayed his roots and spent his pathetic lifetime pouring the trash of America into our children’s ears? Why raise low culture so high, and glorify what is base? Why defend impurity, that vice, as if it were a virtue?

Such are the noisome slithers of the enslaved micro-organisms, twisting and hissing as they protect the inviolability of their sacred homeland, the glass laboratory slide.

This is what Ormus and Vina always claimed, never wavering for a moment: that the genius of Ormus Cama did not emerge in response to, or in imitation of, America; that his early music, the music he heard in his head during the unsinging childhood years, was not of the West, except in the sense that the West was in Bombay from the beginning, impure old Bombay where West, East, North and South
had always been scrambled, like codes, like eggs, and so Westernness was a legitimate part of Ormus, a Bombay part, inseparable from the rest of him.

It was an amazing proposition: that the music came to Ormus before it ever visited the Sun Records studio or the Brill Building or the Cavern Club. That he was the one who heard it first. Rock music, the music of the city, of the present, which crossed all frontiers, which belonged equally to everyone—but to my generation most of all, because it was born when we were children, it spent its adolescence in our teenage years, it became adult when we did, growing paunchy and bald right along with us: this was the music that was allegedly first revealed to a Parsi Indian boy named Ormus Cama, who heard all the songs in advance, two years, eight months and twenty-eight days before anyone else. So according to Ormus and Vina’s variant version of history, their alternative reality, we Bombayites can claim that it was in truth our music, born in Bombay like Ormus and me, not “goods from foreign” but made in India, and maybe it was the foreigners who stole it from us.