The Ground Beneath Her Feet (26 page)

“Okay, Rai,” quoth he, officiously. “Go with Ardaviraf now, okay? Virus’ll get you home.” Who do you think you are? I wanted to shout. Do you think I am a baby, to be seen home by the village idiot? But
he was already walking away, he was embracing Vina, swinging her off her feet, kissing her, kissing her.

The sky was falling. Virus Cama bared his teeth at me, smiling his idiot smile.

They made love that night in Nichols’s suite in the Taj Hotel, a stone’s throw from the Cama residence. The great cornet player found himself another room and sent up a lovers’ feast, and also the messages that had started to arrive for them, which were sent to the band because nobody knew how else to contact the two singers. There were offers to perform all over town, starting at the hotel itself. But as Vina was proud of recounting, the food and drink was not touched, nor were the letters opened until morning. They had better things to do.

The details of the deflowering of Vina Apsara by Ormus Cama are a matter of public record, placed there long ago by Vina herself, so there’s no need to dwell on the exact degree of discomfort (considerable), or on Ormus’s compensating expertise as a seducer of virgins (a few years after the event, Vina proudly named and numbered Ormus’s previous conquests, thus unleashing a pandemic of scandals throughout Bombay society), or on their early difficulties (he was too gentle for her, too reverent, which annoyed her and made her too aggressive, and too physically rough, for his taste), or on their equally early successes (his caressing of the tiny hollow at the base of her spine, his exploration with the tip of his tongue of the edges of her nostrils, his slow sucking of her closed eyes, the head of his penis pressing into her navel, his finger moving along her perineum, her legs around his neck, her buttocks moving against his sex, her generous mouth, and above all her discovery of the extreme sensitivity, unusual in a man, of his nipples: as you observe, I have not forgotten one single jot or tittle of the lubricious catalogue). Suffice to say that the deed—the deeds—were done; that the lovers did not return to their own beds that night; so that on this occasion joy came at night, and it was the morning that was dark and full of sorrow.

The willingness of Vina Apsara to talk publicly about private matters—her catastrophic childhood, her love affairs, her sexual preferences, her abortions—was as important as her talent, perhaps even
more important, in the creation of the gigantic, even oppressively symbolic figure she became. For two generations of women she was something like a megaphone, broadcasting their common secrets to the world. Some felt liberated, others exposed; all commenced to hang upon her every word. (Men, too, were both divided and enthralled, many desiring her greatly, some affecting to find her whorish and repulsive; many loving her for her music, others hating her for the same reason—for whatever elicits great love will invariably call forth hatred also; many fearing her for her mouth, some celebrating her and claiming that she had liberated them as well.) But because she frequently changed her mind, abandoning fervently held positions in favour of their opposites, to which she then also adhered with a flaming certainty that brooked no argument, many women had begun, by the time of the earthquake in Mexico, to see her as a traitor to the very attitudes with which she had helped to set them free.

If she had not died, she might have sunk into a cranky, ignored old age, out of step in a way that was merely wrong- or pig- or muddle-headed, whereas once she had defiantly, triumphantly, been the only one in the parade marching in step, until the other marchers took their lead from her. However, eccentric irrelevance was a fate she was spared. Instead, her death unleashed the full power of the symbol she had constructed. Power, like love, most fully reveals its dimensions only when it is irrevocably lost.

Whenever I think of these events, the Saints start marching through my brain. I picture Ormus and Vina waking in bloodied sheets, held fast in each other’s arms. I see them opening the unopened messages and allowing themselves to begin to dream about their professional future as well as the future of their love. I see them dressing, saying their farewells to the American musicians and catching a yellow-and-black taxicab to Cuffe Parade, ready to face the music. And throughout this sequence, there’s Red Nichols’s cornet playing, or maybe it’s Louis Armstrong’s trumpet I’m hearing. Oh, when the band begin to play. Oh, when the band begin to play.

The first cloud is about to appear on the horizon. Ormus is speaking important words. “Marry me.” He takes the moonstone ring off
her right hand and tries to slip it on to her engagement finger. “Marry me right away.”

Vina grows tense, resists the moving of the ring. No, she will not marry him. She refuses, turns him down flat, doesn’t even need time to think about it. But she does not resist the ring, she accepts it, can’t stop looking at it. (The taxi driver, inquisitive, Sikh, is all ears.) “Why not?” Ormus’s howl is piteous, even a little pathetic. Vina gives the driver more to enjoy than he could have hoped for. “You are the only man I will ever love,” she promises Ormus. “But do you seriously suppose you’re also the only guy I will ever fuck?”

(A trumpet—it’s definitely Satchmo—comes blaring in. Armstrong’s instrument is the golden horn of experience, the trump of worldly wisdom. It laughs—
wuah, wuah
—at the worst that life throws up. It’s heard it all before.)

There must be somewhere better than this
. It’s what we all thought in our different ways. For Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, “somewhere better” was England, but England turned against him, and left him shipwrecked, marooned. For Lady Spenta, the good place was the place of pure illumination, where dwell Ahura Mazda and his angels and the blessed; but that place was far off, and Bombay increasingly felt to her like a labyrinth without an exit. For Ormus Cama, “better” meant abroad, but the choice of that destiny meant the severing of all family ties. For Vina Apsara, the right place was always the one she wasn’t in. Always in the wrong place, in a condition of perpetual loss, she could (she did) unaccountably take flight and disappear; and then discover that the new place she’d reached was just as wrong as the place she’d left.

For Ameer Merchant, my cosmopolitan mother, the better place was the city she was going to build. V.V. Merchant, true provincial that he was, was tormented by the idea that the good place had existed, we had possessed and occupied it, and now it was being destroyed, and in its obliteration his beloved wife was profoundly implicated.

It was the year of divisions, 1960. The year the state of Bombay was cut in half, and while new Gujarat was left to its own devices, we Bombayites were informed that our city was now the capital of
Maharashtra. Many of us found this hard to take. Collectively, we began to live in a private Bombay that floated a little way out to sea and held itself apart from the rest of the country; while, individually, each of us became our own Bombay. You can’t just keep dividing and slicing—India-Pakistan, Maharashtra-Gujarat—without the effects being felt at the level of the family unit, the loving couple, the hidden soul. Everything starts shifting, changing, getting partitioned, separated by frontiers, splitting, re-splitting, coming apart. Centrifugal forces begin to pull harder than their centripetal opposites. Gravity dies. People fly off into space.

I returned to Cuffe Parade on foot after the Five Pennies concert, having with some difficulty shaken off Virus, to find our home transformed into a war zone: or, more exactly, into a pit of dreadful loss. My parents circled the living-room rug like wrestlers, or as if the Isfahani rug were no longer covering a solid floor of mahogany boards but had become a flimsy cloth flung over a bubbling abyss. Glaring red-eyed at each other, they were facing something worse than the loss of the future, worse than the loss of the past. It was the loss of their love.

Piloo Doodhwala had come to call during my absence: not the over-blown Piloo reclining on a cloud of satraps, whom you have already encountered, but a quieter Piloo, accompanied by a single male associate whom he introduced as Sisodia, a business-suited man in his late thirties, astonishingly small, very heavily bespectacled and balding. He had a terrible stammer and a bulging leather attaché case, out of which he now produced a folder concerning the Cuffe Parade development plan, among whose sponsors, listed on the cover of the dossier, was Mrs. Ameer Merchant of Merchant & Merchant (Pvt.) Ltd. As V. V. Merchant had begun to learn by digging, Ameer had joined forces with Piloo’s people to push the scheme through. On a coffee table, Piloo’s aide spread out a copy of the official survey map of Cuffe Parade. Many of the villa plots were coloured green for “go.” Several were covered in green and white stripes, meaning “under negotiation.” Only a very few were coloured red. One of these was Villa Thracia, our home. “Your goodwife has already ist ist stated her con consent to the sus sus sale,” explained Mr. Sisodia. “All relevant dada documents are hee hee here. As property is technically under your goo goodname, it
will be neck neck necessary for you to sign. Just here,” he added, pointing, and holding out a Sheaffer fountain pen.

Vivvy Merchant looked at his wife. Her eyes were stone.

“The scheme is fantastic,” she said. “The opportunity is incredible.”

Piloo leaned forward in his seat. “Lots of cash,” he explained in confidential tones. “Plenty phor all.”

My mild father spoke mildly, but his thoughts were not mild. “I knew something was up,” he said. “But it has gone much further than I guessed. I take it the city is in your pocket. Land use regulations waived, building height regulations to be flouted with impunity.”

“Phixed,” nodded Piloo, amiably. “No trouble at all.”

Mr. Sisodia rolled out a second chart, the plan of the proposed development. A substantial land reclamation scheme was proposed. “More Cuffe,” quipped Piloo, “phor our Parade.” But Vivvy was looking elsewhere. “The promenade,” he said. “Must be sacriphiced, alas,” said Piloo, twisting his mouth downwards in a gesture of regret. “And the mangrove forest,” Vivvy wondered. Piloo began to sound a little tetchy. “Sir, we are not building tree houses here, isn’t it?”

Vivvy opened his mouth. “Bephore you rephuse,” said Piloo, holding up a hand for silence, “consider, please, the phollowing.”

Mr. Sisodia rose, went to the front door and let in a second aide, who had evidently been asked to wait outside for his cue. When he entered the living room, V.V. Merchant gasped and seemed visibly to diminish.

The second aide was Raja Jua, the king of bookies. He, too, carried a leather attaché case. From it he now produced a folder containing a full record of my father’s debts and all the papers relating to the Orpheum cinema, which he passed to the first aide. “Out of his ha ha high pup pup personal esteem for your lay lady why wife,” said Mr. Sisodia, “and to avoid all agra agra aggravations, Pilooji is disposed to dismiss these bag bag bagatelles. Development pot potential runs into sue sue super crores. These outstanding ma ma matters are petty. Only sigh sigh sign the agreement of iss iss sale for Villa Thracia, and all dead dead debts will be wiped clean.”

“The deeds to the Orpheum,” Ameer said. “How could you do it?”

“And our home,”V.V. replied. “How could you?”

Piloo’s face darkened. “If I was a king phrom the time of the great heroes,” he said, “I would challenge you to one more gamble. Win it,
and the slate is wiped clean. Lose, and I take your lady wife.” He smiled. His teeth glittered in the lamplight. “But I am only a humble man,” he said. “So I will settle phor your honour, and your home. Also, Mrs. Merchant agrees to appoint Mr. Sisodia as your cinema in-charge. Good phiscal practice must be restored in our partnership. Mowies are Sisodia’s second passion, but money is his phirst.”

V.V. Merchant rose to his feet. “I agree to nothing,” he said in his mild way. “Now get out.” Ameer also rose, but her manner was very different. “What do you mean, get out?” she shouted. “We must just lose everything, everything I have built, we must be cleaned out, because of your weaknesses? Lose the cinema, lose control of the company, lose the biggest capital opportunity of the last twenty years and live in poverty until we have to sell the house anyway, just to eat? Is that what you want?”

“I am sorry,” said V.V. Merchant. “I will not sign.”

There must be somewhere better
. Oh, most lethal of ideas! For Piloo Doodhwala was the only one of us who accepted the condition of life as it was, as a given. He did not fritter away his energies on deranged utopian fantasies. How then could he fail to emerge as the big winner? Our lives lay at his mercy, at his feet. How could it ever have been otherwise?

Piloo slaughtered more than goats. He made big killings in many fields. My life has taken a different route, but I have never forgotten the lesson he taught my father—the lesson my parents’ catastrophe taught
me
—while, elsewhere in Bombay, Vina and Ormus were making endless love.

Things are what they are.

All evening, all night, my parents fought. I lay awake in my room unblinking as a lizard and listened to their duelling broken hearts. At dawn my father went to bed but Ameer continued to circle the living room like a spoon in a bowl, stirring up the most poisonous of all rages, the wrath churned in the body by the thrashings of dying love. And then Vina and Ormus walked in, and Ameer, possessed by her rage, rounded upon her young ward.

I am unable in all decency to write down the abuses heaped by my
mother upon both the lovers, but particularly on Vina. She screamed at her for three hours and twenty-one minutes without appearing to draw breath, pouring out over the young girl what was meant for Vivvy. When she was done she staggered out of the house, exhausted, and collapsed into her beloved old Packard. It bore her away like a runaway horse. A moment later my hollow-faced father lurched out to the Buick. He, too, drove off so erratically—in the opposite direction to Ameer—that I feared for his life. But neither of them suffered the irrelevance of a traffic accident. They had already been in a near-fatal wreck before leaving home.