The Ground Beneath Her Feet (21 page)

(Besides, as it turned out, Vina and Ormus had another, unexpected ally, who made possible a series of more private trysts.)

For me, Ormus’s visits were the worst hours of the week. I tried to be absent as often as I could. When I was home, I sulked in my room. After he’d gone, however, things would look up. She’d come to see me. “Come on, Rai,” she’d say. “You know how it is. I’m just killing time with Ormie, waiting for you to grow up and be my man.” She’d stroke my cheek and even kiss me lightly on the mouth. And the years passed, and I turned thirteen, and her sixteenth birthday was round the corner, and still Ormus Cama refused to touch her, whether chaperones were present or not, and still I sulked in my room, and in she came,
“Come on, Rai,” and caressed me. In the light touch of her fingers and lips I could feel all the weight of her forbidden love for Ormus, all that inexpressible desire. I was forbidden fruit too, oppositely vetoed on account of my youth rather than hers. But although there wasn’t anybody chaperoning us, because my parents were just too innocent to think of the possibility of my becoming Ormus’s surrogate, his body double, I would have been prepared to settle for that lesser rôle, to be his shadow, his echo; in fact I was longing for it. But she refused to gratify me, she left me feeling worse than before, she kept me waiting.

It was a long wait. But Vina was worth waiting for.

Vina’s weakness for mentors, for leaders and teachers, the addiction to mumbo jumbo which was her way of papering over the radical uncertainties of life, meant that Ormus could always, and effortlessly, claim her for his own. But I repeat: she was never wholly his possession. Card-game victories and worldwide celebrity notwithstanding, she kept coming back to me.

From Death Valley, the lowest point in the continental United States, you can see Mount Whitney, the highest. So, from the depths of my frustrated misery when Ormus Cama came to tea, I offer the following remembered glimpse of the high days when she and I were lovers:

Many years later in New York, in my third-floor walk-up on a block near St. Mark’s noted for its population of gay Cuban refugees, Vina rolled off my sweating body immediately after we had finished making love, and lit a cigarette. (I have always perspired freely, a slight disadvantage in daily life but a definite plus during sex, when slipperinesses of all sorts, including moral, are efficacious.) “Did I tell you? I saw a light on him,” she said. “A radiance, an aura, that first day in the record store. Not excessive?, but definitely emanating. About equivalent to a hundred-watt bulb, that is to say, enough to illuminate an average-size room. Which was plenty.”

Vina was never one for the niceties of sexual betrayal. She thought nothing of discussing her
fidanzato
with her back-door man twenty seconds after reaching orgasm, which she reached easily and which, in that period of her life, was noisy and prolonged. (Later, after their marriage, she still came easily but her pleasure would last only an instant
before she switched it off, zap, as if she were responding to some invisible conductor’s baton. As if she were playing that beautiful instrument, her own body, and suddenly heard a shockingly false note.) I had learned to accommodate myself to her conversational indelicacies. However, then as now, I lacked the patience for such low-grade material as this “aura,” this “light.”

“Bushwah,” I retorted. “Ormus is no god-man with portable lighting effects. Trouble with you is, you came to India and caught a dose of Wisdom-of-the-East-itis, a.k.a. gurushitia, our incurable killer brain disease. I told you not to drink the water if it wasn’t boiled.”

“Trouble with
you,”
her smoke blew in my face, “is that you
never
drink the water unless it’s been boiled for a fucking
year.”

She caught India, and it almost killed her. She contracted malaria, typhoid, cholera and hepatitis, and they didn’t reduce her appetite for the place at all. She wolfed it down like a cheap snack from a roadside stall. Then it rejected her, as cruelly as she had been rejected in Virginia or New York State. By that time, however, she had grown strong enough to absorb the blow. She had Ormus, and the future was no longer in anyone else’s gift. She could hit back and survive. But her years of good behaviour ended at that moment. After it, she embraced instability, her own and the world’s, and made up her own rules as she went along. Nothing was certain in her vicinity any more, the ground was always trembling, and of course the fault lines spread through her from top to toe, and faults in human beings always open up in the end, like cracks in the groaning earth.

“The Swimmer,” one of the last songs Ormus Cama wrote for himself and Vina, was recorded on the island of Montserrat beneath a grum-bling volcano. The hard rhythm-and-blues guitar riff that drives the song had been in his head for days. He had woken with it pounding in his ears, and grabbed a guitar and a tape deck to record it before it went away. They weren’t getting along in those days, and the studio sessions were scratchy, wasteful, clenched. Finally, he plugged into the poisoned atmosphere, he turned towards what was blocking things and harnessed it, made the quarrel his subject, and that bitter, prophetic song of doomed love was the result. For himself, he wrote some of his darkest lines. “I swam across the Golden Horn, until my heart just
burst. The best in her nature was drowning in the worst.” This in a nasal, dragging delivery that alarmed his admirers, was described by one notoriously waspish music critic (who was unconsciously echoing the singer’s father, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama) as resembling the dying agonies of an aged goat, and proved that he had begun to sink even before the tragedy. But because he still loved her, even in their worst moments he couldn’t deny it, he gave her high, hopeful lines to sing against his own low despair, lines as seductive as the sirens’ song; as if he were both John and Paul, both sour and sweet.

There’s a candle in my window, Vina
sang, but I don’t have to tell you, you’re feeling it already, the memory of it, pulling at your emotions.
Swim to me
. I can’t listen to it myself. Not any more.

The best in our natures is drowning in the worst. It was Ormus’s mother who used to say that. Lady Spenta Cama in the late 1950s fell into a deep sadness, under whose influence she became blasphemously convinced that the Monster of the Lie, Ahriman or Angra Mainyu, was gaining the victory over Ahura Mazda and the Light, in spite of what was prophesied in the great books, the Avesta, the Yasna and the Bundahish. Priests in their white garments were invited with increasing frequency into the apartment on Apollo Bunder, and they brought their little fires with them and chanted nobly. “Hear ye then with your ears, and see the bright flames with the eyes of the Better Mind.” Ardaviraf Cama, Lady Spenta’s silent son, would sit with her and haltingly participate in the fire rituals, wearing that sweet expression which was his hallmark; Ormus, however, absented himself. As for her ageing, drink-blurred husband, his impatience with her orisons only increased with the passing years. “Blasted priests make the place look like a blasted hospital,” he would grumble, passing through the chamber of her devotions. “Blasted fire’ll probably end up burning the blasted house down.”

The house of Cama was indeed in danger, but not from holy fire. On the tenth anniversary of the independence of India, Spenta received a letter from William Methwold, who was now a peer of the realm, a Foreign Office grandee, and wrote to wish his old friends well “on so auspicious a date.” However, the letter also had a less auspicious purpose. “If I address this to you, my dear Spenta, rather than to
Brother D.X.C., it is because I have, I fear, difficult tidings to impart.” Then followed a series of contorted, digressive animadversions on the general subject of banquets he had recently attended, in particular one “rather jolly affair” involving a re-staging of
Twelfth Night
at Middle Temple on Twelfth Night, Middle Temple being the place where
Twelfth Night
had first been staged on an earlier Twelfth Night; at any rate—and at last Lord Methwold accelerated towards his dreadful point—he had been seated by the purest chance next to the eminent judge Henry “Hang’em” Higham, who turned out to be a former classmate of “Brother D.X.C.’s” and revealed, over the brandy, that while Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had been an enthusiastic eater of dinners, in his legal studies he “hadn’t come up to scratch.” He had flunked his examinations, and had never been admitted to the Bar “in any shape or form.”

Lord Methwold had “found the accusation well-nigh impossible to credit.” In London he had required enquiries to be made, and found, to his dismay, that Henry Higham had been right. “I can only conclude,” he wrote in his letter, “that your husband’s papers were forgeries, forgeries of the highest quality, may I say; that he simply decided to brazen it out, on the assumption that nobody in India would bother to check; and if they did, it is not impossible, as you must know, nor indeed overly expensive, to buy a fellow’s silence in that great country of yours, for which I have never ceased to feel the keenest nostalgia.”

Lady Spenta Cama loved her husband in spite of every thing, and he loved her. Ormus Cama always believed that the foundation of his parents’ mutual affection was a sexual compatibility which old age had done nothing to erode. “The old folks went at it most nights,” he’d say. “We all had to pretend we hadn’t heard anything, which wasn’t easy, because they made plenty of noise, particularly when my boozy father insisted upon what he called the English position, which I don’t think my mother enjoyed. Those shrieks weren’t really of pleasure, but she was prepared to suffer a lot for the sake of love.” After she discovered that Sir Darius had built his entire professional life on a falsehood—that he was, covertly, a Servant of the Lie—Lady Spenta moved into a separate bedroom, and at night the apartment was full of the sad silence of that ending. She never gave Sir Darius a reason for her departure from the conjugal bed, and wrote to Lord Methwold imploring him,
in the name of their long friendship, to keep her husbands secret. “He has not practised law for many years, and when he did, all agreed that he gave sterling service, so no harm done, eh?” Methwold wrote back to agree, “on the single condition, my very dear Spenta, that you continue to write and give me all the news, as I no longer feel comfortable about writing to D.X.C. himself, knowing what I now know.”

“I fear I may be succumbing to error,” Spenta confided unhappily in a later letter to Lord Methwold. “As Parsis we are proud to believe in a forward-moving view of the cosmos. Our words and deeds are part, in their small way, of the battle in which Ahura Mazda will vanquish Ahriman. But how may I believe in the perfectibility of the universe, when in my small backwater there are so many slippery slopes? Maybe our Hindu friends are right, and there is no progress but only an eternal cycle, and right now it is the long age of darkness,
kalyug.”

To combat her doubts and justify the prophet Zarathustra’s innovative world picture, Lady Spenta Cama plunged into good works. Under the tutelage of the Angel Health, late-night hospital visits became her specialty. Small, heavy, bustling Spenta in her horn-rim specs, leaning forward slightly as she scuttled along, with her handbag held tightly in both hands, became a familiar figure in the neon-lit nocturnal corridors of the Lying-in Hospital and the Gratiaplena Nursing Home, particularly in those grim wards and intensive care units reserved for the gravely ill, the incurables, the horribly crippled and the dying. The nursing staff at these institutions—even the Gratiaplena’s redoubtable Sister John—quickly formed a high opinion of the little lady. She seemed instinctively to know when to prattle on to the patients—gossiping about little Bombay nothings, the latest shop, the latest scandal—and when to maintain a pure silence that somehow exuded comfort. In the matter of silences she appeared to have learned something from her son Ardaviraf. Virus Cama began accompanying his mother on her rounds, and his tranquil muteness, too, brought the succour of serenity to the sick. Deeply affected by what she saw at the hospital—the many cases of malnutrition, and polio, and tuberculosis, and other poverty-related illnesses, including the self-inflicted injuries of unsuccessful suicides—Lady Spenta became, with Mrs. Dolly Kalamanja of Malabar Hill, the joint convenor and driving force of a group of Parsi ladies like herself, whose
purpose was to alleviate the suffering of their community, which was widely believed to be exclusively composed of prosperous and powerful citizens, but which was, in reality, plunging into extreme hardship and even, in some cases, destitution. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, an increasingly remote figure, disapproved of the morning teas at which the ladies would plan their fund-raising work. “Stupid beggars’ve only got themselves to blame,” he would mutter, passing through the drawing room like a ghost. “No backbone. Weaklings. Sissies. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.” The ladies ignored him and got on with their work.

There were malicious whisperers who opined that Lady Spenta Cama’s sickbed visits were themselves unhealthy, that they smacked of obsession, that she had become addicted to holding the hands of the dying and playing the sainted, bountiful grande dame. I do not agree. If I am to criticise Lady Spentas high-energy charity offensive, I would say only this: that charity begins at home.

In 1947, at the age of fifteen, Cyrus Cama had made his own declaration of independence. By then he had spent five years at the famous—and famously disciplinarian—Templars School in the southern hill station of Kodaikanal, as a punishment for his attempted smothering of his brother Ormus. During his early days at the Templars School he had given every sign of being a disturbed child, capable of violence towards his fellow students and also towards members of staff. However, at other times, he came across as a completely different child, possessed of a sweetness of nature fully as disarming and winsome as his brother Ardaviraf s. This “second self” earned him more chances than another such child would have been allowed.