The Ground Beneath Her Feet (19 page)

“And my poor Halva and Rasgulla?” demanded Golmatol Doodhwala, sheltering one weeping daughter under each arm. “What will you say to them? You think they have an idea in their dear heads? They are not lovely! Their skin is not wheatish! In education they are deficient! Sweets by name, they are sour by nature! All their hope was pinned on you! And now if you remove from them even their fortune, then what? Will husbands drop from the skies? Poor girls have no chance—no hope in hell!”

Into this time of crisis came that half-breed girl, all the way from New York. She turned out to be poor, badly connected, with more scandals in her history than a Pompadour: damaged goods, in short. The Doodhwalas closed ranks against her, barely acknowledging her existence. They offered her the bare minimum: food (though their dining table groaned with dishes, she was usually served rice and lentils in the kitchen, in ungenerous quantities, and often went hungry to bed); simple clothing (the swimsuit had come with her from America, a gift from her absentee father); and an education (this was what Piloo begrudged most, because the fees cost good money, and the brat didn’t seem to want to learn anything, anyway). Other than providing her with these necessities, they abandoned her to her fate. She quickly perceived that rich Bombay offered her the worst of both her previous, much poorer worlds: the detested goats of John Poe and the heartless cruelties of the Egiptus family of cigar store fame.

Now that day at Juhu Beach begins to look very different. It becomes clear that, strangely enough, Piloo and Vina had both come to the same conclusion: all they had left in life was attitude, but it was a steed which would get you a long way if you knew how to stay on its back. So Piloo and his magnificentourage had come to perform, in public, a masque of power, to enact the lie of continued success in the hope that the sheer force of the performance would somehow make it true,
would reverse the slow defeat that Exwyzee cows were inflicting upon the Doodh-Dude’s goats. And Vina, too, was struggling to survive: in reality she wasn’t Piloo’s spoiled rich American bitch kid, but a poor brat brazening it out while staring the bleakest of futures in the eye.

The future of the milk business became Piloo Doodhwala’s only topic of discussion, his fixation. At home in his Bandra villa, pacing up and down in the garden, he would shriek and gibber like a caged langur. He was a man of his generation, the last for whom breast-beating and hair-tearing were still legitimate pursuits. His family and the magnificentourage, both, in different ways, fearful of the future, would hear him out in silence. His weepings, his shakings of fists, his speeches addressed to the empty, cloudless heavens. His complaints about the injustice of human life. Vina, who had seen too many things in her short life, was less tight-lipped, and the day came when she could stand it no longer.

“Oh, to hell with your stupid goats,” Vina burst out. “Why don’t you just cut their horrible throats and turn them into meat and coats?” Parrots flew from the trees, alarmed by the timbre of her voice; their droppings polluted Piloo’s garments and, indeed, his agitated hair. She herself, tickled by the accident of the triple rhyme, began, in spite of her profound annoyance, to giggle.

The watching Doodhwala girls braced themselves delightedly for the lashing fury with which their father would now surely chastise the upstart pauper. But—in spite of her blatant insubordination, and what Ameer Merchant would have called her “fit of the gigglics”; in spite of the rain of parrot shit—no such fury manifested itself. Like unlooked-for sunshine when there has been talk of storms, Piloo Doodhwala’s smile arrived, first a little hesitantly, and then breaking out in all its full-beam glory. “Thanking you, Miss America,” he said. “Meat phor the interior, owercoat phor exterior. Idea is good, but”—and here he tapped a finger against his temple—“it has prompted one further idea, which is ewen betterer. It may be, madamoozel, that you hawe rescued, albeit inadwertently, our poor phamily phortunes.” At which unexpected (and, in their view, entirely inappropriate) lavishing of praise upon the household’s Cinderella, Halva and Rasgulla knew not whether to take umbrage or rejoice.

After this unusual exchange, Piloo Doodhwala ordered the slaughter of all his herds and the distribution of the meat, gratis, to the deserving and non-vegetarian poor. It was a royal massacre; the gutters near the abattoirs bubbled over with blood, flooding the streets, which grew sticky and stank. Flies crowded so thickly that in places it became inadvisable, for reasons of low visibility, to drive. But the meat was good, and plentiful, and Piloo’s political prospects began to improve. Vote goat indeed. If Piloo had run for governor that week, no man could have stood against him.

His distressed goatherds, seeing the approach of destitution as clearly as if it were the mail train from the north, sought urgent assurances. Piloo toured the countryside, whispering conundrums in their ears. “Newer phear,” he said. “The goats we will hawe in phuture could not be depheated by Exwyzee or any other alphabetists. They will be top-quality goats, and you will all grow phat and lazy, becaase you will still get all your pay, though the goats will not require any maintenance, and also, they will not cost one single rupee to pheed. Phrom now on,” he concluded cryptically, “we will raise not simply goats but ghoasts.”

The riddle of the “ghoasts”—or ghoats, or goasts, or what you will—must remain unsolved awhile. We have arrived once again, by recirculation, at the moment of Vina’s expulsion from Piloo’s portals. News of her scandalous liaison with Ormus Cama has reached her latest guardian’s ears; a quarrel, which has already been alluded to, has already taken place. I offer no further details of those vituperative exchanges, or of the violent struggles that immediately preceded Vina’s flight south in the pouring rain, which took her all the way from the Doodhwalas’ Bandra mansion to our doorstep at Villa Thracia, Cuffe Parade. Instead, I take up the story from its last resting place: namely, the arrival of Ormus at our family home on Cuffe Parade, urgent with concern for Vina’s well-being; and the further arrival, hard on Ormus’s heels, of Shri Piloo Doodhwala, accompanied by wife, daughters and the full “magnificentourage.”

My mother, Ameer, had telephoned him earlier to inform him that Vina was safe and well, and had gone on to speak a few home truths about his treatment of her. “She will not return to your house,” Ameer finished. “Return?” barked Piloo. “Madam, I hawe put her out of
doors, like a common bitch. Return is not the question.” In the light of this telephonic washing of hands, the arrival of Piloo & Co. was something of a surprise. Vina sprang up and retreated at high speed to the room my mother had given her. Ormus rushed forward to stand face-to-face with his beloved’s tormentor. It was left to my mild father to ask Piloo his business. The milkman shrugged. “Regarding that ungratephul girl,” he said. “Monies hawe been paid. Phees, cash, spending on account. There has been major outlay of phunds, and in consequence one is considerably out of pocket. Reimbursement is not unreasonably required.”

“You’re asking us to purchase her?” My fine, high-minded father took a moment to grasp the horrible truth. Piloo made a face. “Not as such purchase,” he insisted. “I do not insist on a profit. But you are an honourable man, isn’t it? I am certain you would not ask me to swallow the loss.”

“We are not speaking here of goods and chattels—” began V.V. Merchant, in outrage, but at this point Ormus Cama interrupted him. We were all standing like statues in our living room—the shock of the encounter had driven all thoughts of relaxation from our minds—and Ormus Cama’s eye had fallen upon a pack of cards and a heap of matchsticks on a low table in a corner, the remnants of a light-hearted game of poker a couple of nights back, before the world began to change. He riffled the pack under Piloo’s nose. “Hey, big-mouth,” he said. “I’ll play you for her. What do you say, hot shot? All or nothing. Do you dare to do it, or are you a gutless cutlass?”

Ameer began to protest, but my father—whose own fatal weakness would turn out to be gambling—silenced her. Piloo’s eyes were gleaming, and the members of his magnificentourage, who were eavesdropping on the confrontation from the porch outside, began to hoot and cheer. Piloo nodded slowly. His voice grew very soft. “All or nothing, is it. Either I must giwe up ‘all’ my legitimate claim to recompense or … but what is ‘or’? What is ‘nothing’? If you lose, what do I win?”

“You win me,” said Ormus. “I will work for you, any work you name, until I have worked off Vina’s debt.”

“Stop it, Ormus,” said Ameer Merchant. “This is childish, absurd.”

“I accept,” sighed Piloo Doodhwala, and bowed.

Ormus bowed back. “One cut each,” he said. “High card wins all.
Suit immaterial. Aces high, jokers beat aces. Further cuts to decide if we draw equal cards.”

“Agreed,” breathed Piloo. “But we will play vith my pack.” He snapped his fingers. His Pathan bearer marched into our living room carrying, on the white-gloved palm of his outstretched right hand, a silver salver upon which lay a pack of red playing cards whose seal had not been broken. “Don’t,” I begged Ormus. “There’s some trick.” But Ormus picked up the pack, broke the seal and nodded. “Let’s begin.”

“No shuffle,” Piloo whispered. “Just cut.”

“Good,” said Ormus, and did so. And drew the two of hearts.

Piloo laughed. And cut. And drew the two of spades. The smile died on his lips, and the Pathan bearer recoiled from the ferocity of his master’s glare.

Ormus cut again. The ten of diamonds. Piloo became very stiff. His hand jerked forward to the salver. He drew the ten of clubs. The Pathan bearer’s arm began to tremble. “Hold the tray with both hands,” Piloo snarled, “or else phind somebody whose shit hasn’t turned to water.”

On the third cut they both drew eights. On the fourth it was one-eyed jacks and on the fifth, the jacks with both eyes. By the sixth round, when they both drew fives, the silence in the room had become so noisy that even Vina emerged from her retreat to find out what all the fuss was about. Piloo Doodhwala was sweating heavily; his white kurta was sticking to the curve of his belly as well as the small of his back. Ormus Cama, however, was perfectly calm. In the seventh round both men drew kings; in the eighth, nines. In the ninth it was kings again, and in the tenth it was fours.

“That’s enough,” Piloo broke the silence. “From now on I’m drawing first.”

On the eleventh cut, Piloo Doodhwala drew the ace of spades, and gave a great, deep sigh. Before he had finished exhaling, Ormus had cut for his card. It was the joker. Ormus remained impassive, looking down at the grinning clown on the silver dish. Piloo Doodhwala sagged visibly. Then he rallied, clicked his fingers under Ormus’s nose, snapped, “Keep the bitch,” and walked out.

Ormus Cama went over to Vina, who was looking, for once, like a scared twelve-year-old. “You heard the man,” he grinned. “I won you fair and square. Now you belong to me.”

He was wrong. Vina belonged to no man, not even to him, though she loved him till the day she died. She reached out towards him, offering a caress of thanks. He stepped back, seriously. “No touching,” he reminded her. “Not until you are sixteen years and one day old.”

“And not then, not until you’re decently married,” said my mother, “if I have anything to do with it.”

It is time to accentuate the positive. For are there no noble qualities, no high achievements, no exaltations of the spirit to praise in the life of the great sub-continent? Must it always be violence or gambling or crooks? These are touchy times. National sensitivities are on permanent alert, and it is getting harder by the moment to say boo to a goose, lest the goose in question belong to the paranoid majority (goosism under threat), the thin-skinned minority (victims of gooso-phobia), the militant fringe (Goose Sena), the separatists (Goosistan Liberation Front), the increasingly well organized cohorts of society’s historical outcasts (the ungoosables, or Scheduled Geese), or the devout followers of that ultimate guruduck, the sainted Mother Goose. Why, after all, would any sensible person wish to say boo in the first place? By constantly throwing dirt, such booers disqualify themselves from serious consideration (they cook their own goose).

It is in the most constructive spirit imaginable, therefore, that I record the heartwarming news that Vina Apsara, who once, while standing on a beach wrapped up in Old Glory, hurled abuse at all things Indian, began at Villa Thracia to fall in love with her biological father’s great country of origin. She had to wait for Ormus Cama until after her sixteenth birthday, but this other love entailed no waiting period. She consummated it right away.

To her last day, I could always see in her the skittish, disintegrated creature she’d been when she first came to us, looking as if she might run away again at any moment. What a piece of jetsam she was then, what a casualty! Literally selfless, her personality smashed, like a mirror, by the fist of her life. Her name, her mother and family, her sense of place and home and safety and belonging and being loved, her belief in the future, all these things had been pulled out from under her, like a rug. She was floating in a void, denatured, dehistoried, clawing at the shapelessness, trying to make some sort of mark. An oddity. She put me
in mind of one of Columbus’s sailors, close to mutiny, fearing that at any moment she might plunge off the edge of the earth, staring longingly at the lookout in the crow’s-nest, whose spyglass probed the liquid emptiness, searching vainly for land. Later, when she was famous, she herself often mentioned Columbus. “He went looking for Indians and found America. I hadn’t planned on going anywhere, but I found more Indians than I could handle.” Vina’s smart mouth, her lippiness. That, at the age of twelve, she already had.

She was a rag-bag of selves, torn fragments of people she might have become. Some days she sat crumpled in a corner like a string-cut puppet, and when she jerked into life you never knew who would be there, in her skin. Sweet or savage, serene or stormy, funny or sad: she had as many moods as the Old Man of the Sea, who would transform himself over and over again if you tried to grab him, for he knew that if you did capture him he would have to grant your deepest wish. Fortunately for her, she found Ormus, who just hung on to her, held her spirit tight in his love without laying a finger on her body, until at last she stopped changing, was no longer ocean then fire then avalanche then wind, and was just herself, one day after her sixteenth birthday, in his arms. And then she kept her side of the bargain and, for one night, gave him his heart’s desire.