The Ground Beneath Her Feet (29 page)

Let me make one thing clear: he wasn’t faithful to her absent self, to her memory. He did not withdraw from society and light a nightly candle at her deserter’s shrine. No, sir. Instead, he sought her in other women, sought her furiously and inexhaustibly, searching for an inflection of her voice in this beauty, a toss of her hair in another’s flowing locks. Most women offered only disappointments. At the end of these encounters he often found even the ritual courtesies of the situation beyond him and would confess the true nature of his quest, and sometimes the real woman who had disappointed him would have the generosity to listen to him speak of the departed shadow woman, for hour after hour, until the dawn, when he would fall silent and slip away.
A few women came close to satisfying him, because in certain lights, if they said very little and lay just so; or if, once he had placed a lace handkerchief or a mask over their faces, their now-anonymous bodies held some echo of hers, a breast, a curve of the thigh, a movement of the neck; then, ah, then he could delude himself for fifteen or twenty seconds that she had returned. But inevitably they would turn, they would speak lovingly to him or arch their bare, strong backs, the light would change, the mask would drop away, the illusion would be destroyed, and he would abandon them where they lay. In spite of maudlin confessions and casual cruelties, however, the young women who showed up at his performances (for he had begun to sing professionally) continued to seek these more private, and almost invariably wounding, audiences.

Nor was his search confined to young hipsters. The catalogue of his substitute loves during these years reads like a cross section of the female population of the city: women of all ages, all walks of life, thin women and fat women, tall women and short, noisy and quiet, gentle and rough, united only in this: that some shard of Vina Apsara dwelt in them, or was believed to do so by the distraught lover she had left behind. Housewives, secretaries, building-site workers, pavement dwellers, sweatshop labourers, domestic servants, whores … he hardly seemed to need sleep. By day and by night he would rove the streets, looking for her, the woman who was nowhere, trying to draw her out of the women who were everywhere, finding some fragment to hold on to, some wisp of her to clutch at, in the hope that this
nuage
might at least cause her to visit him in his dreams.

Such was his first pursuit of her. To me it felt almost necrophiliac, vampiric. He was sucking the lifeblood out of living women to keep alive the phantom of the Departed. Often, after a conquest, he would confide in me. Then felt I like Dunyazade, Scheherazade’s sister, sitting at the foot of the queen’s sleepless bed while she told tall stories to save her life: he would tell me every detail—somehow failing to give the impression that he was boasting—and I, dazed and aroused in equal measure by his passions and descriptions, might on occasion murmur, “Maybe you ought to get over her. Maybe she isn’t coming back.” Then he would shake his head with its lengthening mane of hair, and
shout, “Get thee behind me, Satan. Seek not to come between the lover and his love.” Which made me laugh; as it was not meant to do.

What a figure he cut in public! He glittered, he shone. Every room he entered took its shape from his position in it. His smile was a magnet, his frown a crushing defeat. His days “on the loaf” were over. No more hanging around girls’-school gates. He was singing most nights now, playing every instrument in sight, and the girls were flocking to him. The city’s hotels and clubs, even the Hindi movie playback producers, were vying for his services. He played the field, signing no contract, committing himself to nobody exclusively, and was hot enough to get away with it. The main attraction of the city’s Sunday morning brunches, where, largely thanks to him, jazz was giving way to rock ’n’ roll, his gyrations caused the city’s demoiselles to swoon. Their mothers, while disapproving strongly, could not take their eyes off him, either. Anybody from the Bombay of those days would remember the young Ormus Cama. His name, his face, became part of the definition of the city in that departed heyday. Mr. Ormus Cama, our women’s guiding star.

In conversation, particularly when he leaned close in to some young lovely in big bangs and a spreading pink skirt, his intensity was almost frightening in its sexual power. Celebrate the physical, he would hiss, for we are flesh and blood. What pleases the flesh is good, what warms the blood is fine. The body, not the spirit. Concentrate on that. How does that feel? Yes, it felt good to me too. And that? Oh, yes, baby, my blood too. It’s hot.

Our selves, not our souls
 … He spread his erotic gospel with a kind of innocence, a kind of messianic purity, that used to drive me wild. It was the greatest act in town. I did my best to copy it as I moved through my teens, and even my poor mimic version brought fair results with the girls of my generation, but often they’d laugh in my face. Most times, as a matter of fact. I’d count myself lucky to get anywhere with one girl in ten. Which I have in common, as I have since learned, with the male species in general. Rejection is the norm. Knowing this, we long for acceptance all the more. We aren’t holding the cards in this game. If we have the knack of it, we learn finesse.… Ormus, though, he was an artist, he held the ace of trumps: viz., sincerity. He would
take me along to his jam sessions and even to some of his nocturnal songfests (I had two parents vying for my love and favours, so it was easy to twist them round my little finger and get permissions which might otherwise have been refused), and after he finished singing I would watch the maestro at work, sitting in a booth or at a table, with some young female hanging on his every word. I watched him with an almost fanatical attention, determined not to miss the small unwary moment, the tiniest of off-guard instants, when his mask slipped, when he revealed to his disciple-spy that it was just a performance, a calculated series of effects, a fraud.

The moment never came. It was because he meant it, meant it from the depths of his being, that he won followers, fans, hearts, lovers; that he won the game. That Dionysiac credo of his, reject the spirit and trust the flesh, with which he had once wooed Vina, was now knocking half the city for six.

There was only one woman he would not attempt to seduce, and that was Persis Kalamanja. Maybe this was her punishment for having helped Vina get away from him, that she would never taste even a night of his fabled delights; or perhaps it was something else, a mark of his high opinion of her, an indication that had it not been for Vina Apsara, she would indeed have stood a chance.

But Vina existed, and so “poor Persis” was erased.

The private Ormus, the one I was privileged to observe at Apollo Bunder, was very different from this public love god. The bruise on his eyelid itched. Often his old darkness would descend upon him, and he would lie motionless for hours at a time, turning upon that inward eye that saw such strange apocalyptic sights. He no longer spoke much of Gayomart, but I knew his dead twin was in there, fleeing endlessly down some descending labyrinth of the mind, at the end of which not only music waited, but also danger, monsters, death. I knew it because Ormus still came back out of the “Cama obscura” with batches of new songs. And maybe he was going in deeper, taking more risks, or perhaps Gayo was coming back towards him and singing right into his ear, because now Ormus was bringing back more than vowel sequences or misheard, nonsensical lines (though sometimes, for example when he
first played me a number called “Da Doo Ron Ron,” it was hard to tell the difference). He was being given whole songs now. Songs from the future. Songs with names that meant nothing in 1962 and 1963. “Eve of Destruction.” “I Got You, Babe.” “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Ormus liked to compose his own songs up on the flat roof of the apartment block, and spent eternities up there, lost within himself, searching for the points at which his inner life intersected the life of the greater world outside, and calling those points of intersection “songs.” Just once he let me photograph him while he worked, picking away at a guitar laid on his lap across his crossed legs, eyes shut, gone. My Voigtländer camera had escaped the Villa Thracia fire because I had become inseparable from it and had taken it with me to school. I had read in a book called
Photography for Beginners
that a true photographer was never parted from the tool of his trade, and had taken the advice to heart. Ormus liked my attitude, found it “serious,” he said, and in spite of my store of jealousy regarding Vina I was always anxious for his good words, so I puffed up horribly when he praised me. His personal nickname for me, in those days, was “Juicy.” “My friend Juicy Rai,” he’d introduce me—just sixteen in 1963—to his louche club-world set. “You never heard anyone like him. Always seeing photographs—three strangers in a bus queue all lifting their legs at the same time like in a dance routine, or people waving from the deck of a departing steamer, and one of the waving arms is a gorillas—and then he hollers out, Juicy this? Juicy that? And of course nobody did see it but him, but what do you know, it turns up on his film. Young Juicy,” he’d slap me on the back, and his female partners would bestow upon me their most groin-melting, glamorous looks. “Fastest shot in the East.” At which I, humiliatingly, youthfully, would blush.

So in November 1963 he let me photograph him while he worked. A lot of the songs he was writing then were of the protest type, idealistic, strong. In the matter of worthiness, which so often exercised my private thoughts, Ormus was of the party that believed there was more wrong with the world in general than its ordinary citizens. In this he was like my mother; except that she, disillusioned, had decided she couldn’t beat the world’s corruption and had joined forces with it
instead. Ormus Cama had not given up on the perfectibility of man and of his social groupings as well. That day on the roof, however, eyes closed, talking to himself, he sounded puzzled. “This isn’t how things should be,” he’d murmur every few minutes. “Everything’s off the rails. Sometimes a little off, sometimes a lot. But things should be different. Just … different.”

It became a song, in the end: “It Shouldn’t Be This Way.” But watching him, making myself invisible so that I didn’t inhibit him, moving around the roof on cat’s paws, I had the strange sense that he wasn’t speaking figuratively. Just as Ormus could surprise by the depth of his sincerity, so also his literalness could catch one off guard. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise. The muscles in my stomach knotted. “Things aren’t like this,” he kept repeating. “It shouldn’t be this way.” As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, “right” universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending together to the stars. Then he shook his head, and the spell broke. He opened his eyes, grinning ruefully. As if he knew his thoughts had infected mine. As if he knew his power. “Better get on with it,” he said. “Make do with what there is.”

Later, as I drifted off to sleep in my room, Ormus’s rooftop torment came back to haunt me: his sudden possession by the idea that, like a runaway freight train, the world had veered sideways off its proper track and was now banging about, out of control, upon a great iron web of switched points. In my pre-sleep drowsiness, it was a notion that unnerved me; for if the world itself were metamorphosing unpredictably, then nothing could be relied upon any more. What could one trust? How to find moorings, foundations, fixed points, in a broken, altered time? I came awake fast and hard, with my heart pounding. It’s okay. It’s okay. Only a waking dream.

The world is what it is.

I thought then that Ormus’s doubts about reality might be a kind of revenge of the spirit, an irruption, into a life dedicated to the actual and the sensual, of the irrational, the incorporeal. He, who had rejected the unknowable, was being plagued by the unknown.

•  •  •

The day after the President of the United States had that narrow escape in Dallas, Texas, and we were all becoming familiar with the names of the would-be assassins, Oswald, whose rifle jammed, and Steel, who was overpowered on some kind of grassy knoll by a genuine hero, a middle-aged amateur cameraman called Zapruder, who saw the killer’s gun and hit him over the head with an 8 mm ciné camera … on that extraordinary day, Ormus Cama had a different name to conjure with, because he arrived at the Regal Café, Colaba, to be informed that among the audience for his late-night set would be a party from the United States of America, including Mr. Yul Singh himself. Even then most music-loving metropolitan Indians had heard of Yul Singh, the blind Indian record producer who founded Colchis Records in New York City in 1948 with a ten-thousand-dollar loan from his optician. After Colchis struck gold by playing “race music,” rhythm and blues, to white radio audiences, that optician, Tommy J. Eckleburg, briefly became a Manhattan celebrity himself. He even showed up with Yul Singh on the talk-show promo circuit.

“So why does a blind man need an optician, Yul?”

“Optimism, Johnny. Optimism.”

“And why does an optician need a blind man, T.J.?”

“Don’t go insulting my good friend now, Mr. C. He’s differently sighted is all.”

When Ormus arrived at the Regal and was told about the Yul Singh party, he frowned hard and began to complain of a terrible headache. He took pills and lay down in his dressing room with an ice pack on his head, and I sat beside him, massaging his temples. “Yul
Singh,”
he kept repeating. “
Yul
Singh.”

“The top banana,” I said, proud of my newly acquired knowledge. “Aretha, Ray, the Beatles. Everybody.” Ormus winced, as if the pain in his head had intensified.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Pills not working?”

“There’s no such man,” he whispered. “He doesn’t fucking exist.”