The Ground Beneath Her Feet (31 page)

The two women had a busy programme that day. There was a Kalamanja “charitea” at Dolly’s place, followed by a special fund-raising fashion show, or Xtraordinary Xmas Xtravaganza, at the Orpheum cinema, and after that a round of hospital visits. “Come over early,” Dolly advised Spenta. “Get your mind off it. Masses to plan.” Mrs. Spenta Cama, plagued by anxiety, scurried gratefully across to Malabar Hill at once, and plunged into good works with energy and relief.

Ormus, too, would say afterwards that he had left home feeling nervous and on edge, but then in those hard days he often was. He shrugged off the feeling and went to work. He had been booked, that evening, to croon supper-club material at the Cosmic Dancer Hotel on Marine Drive, whose restaurant had been given a Christmas theme by the addition of much cotton wool and a few plastic trees. Ormus was forced to dress up in a red outfit with a white beard and sing a selection ranging from “White Christmas” to Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby,” even though this last song was so clearly written to be sung only by a woman. It was a B-list booking that said much about his declining reputation.

Sometimes it is necessary to touch bottom in order to know which way is up; to go a long distance down the wrong road before you know the right way. Ormus Cama had been allowing himself slowly to sink, crippled by a terrible, lassitudinous inertia that bore a marked resemblance to his father’s. On the night of Darius’s murder, however, Ormus Cama at last saw himself plain. At the end of his set at the Cosmic Dancer Hotel, those two purgatorial hours spent singing old songs through a Santa Claus beard, he listened to the sparse, uninterested applause and began to laugh. He removed his beard and Father Christmas hat and laughed until the tears streamed down his face. Afterwards many Bombayites would claim to have been present at Ormus Cama’s last show in the city, enough people to fill the Wankhede Stadium several times over, and the accounts they gave of his farewell remarks were
many and various. He was said to have spoken angrily, or humbly, or arrogantly, or in French. He was accused of having harangued the audience about the future of popular music, or berated them for their inattention, or begged them to give him one more chance, at which he had been booed from the stage. Some said he had made a political speech, attacking the assembled B-list fat cats for their corruption and greed; or that he had blasphemed, not only against Christmas and the Christians, but against all gods and rites—“charades”—of worship. According to these hordes of self-styled witnesses, he had been magnificent or pathetic, a hero or a clown.

The truth was that he couldn’t stop laughing, and the only thing he said wasn’t addressed to anyone present. “Shit, Vina,” he said, holding his sides. “I’m sorry it took me so long to understand.”

Meanwhile, back at the Apollo Bunder apartment, Gieve the butler had served dinner to Darius and Ardaviraf Cama and then retired to the servants’ quarters, where he found, to his amazement, that all the resident domestics had run off, except for the cook, who was in the process of leaving. “And where do you think you’re going?” Gieve asked this fellow, who just shook his head and exited at top speed via the servants’ outside staircase, a clanking cast-iron spiral fixed to the rear of the building. It is plain that Gieve himself felt no warning pangs of terror, because he lay down on his cot as usual and was soon asleep.

Mr. Darius Cama spent the last hours of his life alone in his beloved library, fuddled by old age, mythology and booze. He had become obsessed by the notion that the Greek figures of the Titans Prometheus, “forethought,” and his brother Epimetheus, “afterthought,” the sons of the “First Father,” Uranus, might have been derived from the Puranic heroes Pramanthu and Manthu, and that the swastika, that ancient Indian fire symbol, could also be connected to Prometheus’s symbolic rôle as the thief of Olympic fire for the benefit of his creation, mankind. The Nazis had stolen the swastika and defiled it—as the Nazi connection had sullied the entire field—and the old gentleman scholar hoped in his muddled fashion that these, his last researches, might in some small way redeem both the swastika and the study of Aryan myth from the terrible deformation to which history
had subjected them. However, he was unable to think clearly enough to follow his arguments through. His notes wandered from the point, digressing from Prometheus and Epimetheus to their youngest uncle, Cronus, who took a cruel sickle and cut off his father’s balls. The last words Darius Xerxes Cama wrote slid away from scholarship entirely to reveal all his confusion and pain.
No need to cut off my balls
, he wrote.
Did it all by myself
, and then his head fell forward and rested upon his papers, and he slept.

Spenta came home late and went quietly to her room; Ormus, wreathed in radiance, returned an hour before dawn, singing without restraint, and switched on a great blaze of chandeliers and standard lamps. Exhausted Spenta in her room saw no lights, heard no songs and did not awake. Blinking rapidly, as if he were emerging into the light after years spent hiding from the world in a darkened attic, Ormus retired, having spent the night prowling the city streets, laughing, calling out Vina’s name, drunk on nothing but excitement, burning with need. He entered his room noisily, fell down on to his bed and passed out fully clothed. The apartment slept, innocent of the tragedy within its walls.

Morning came, rapid and intolerant, the way morning is in the tropics. As usual it was the city that woke Spenta with its shrugging, careless noise of shouts and engines and bicycle bells. Crows sat on the windowsills, bold as brass, and cawed her out of bed. But in spite of all this noise, it was a silence that dragged Spenta upright, a silence where there should have been sound. A part of the morning orchestra was missing: there were no household noises. Spenta, pulling a floaty chiffon peignoir over her nightdress, went forth into the apartment, where she found neither the sweeper woman and her daughter, squatting with their brooms, nor the hamal, busy with the dusting and polishing. The kitchen was empty. Gieve was nowhere to be found. She called aloud:
“Arré, koi hai?”
No answer. Such laziness was unforgivable. Spenta stormed through the kitchen towards the servants’ quarters, grim of face, determined to give her indolent household the rough edge of her tongue; and came back an instant later, running, with one hand over her mouth as if she were stifling a scream. She
flung open the door to Ardaviraf Cama’s bedroom. He was asleep, snoring beatifically. Then she went into Ormus’s quarters. He tossed blearily and grunted. Darius’s bedchamber was empty. Spenta went towards the library, then came to a standstill outside the closed double doors, as though she could not bear to open them because she was unprepared for the sight she would then be required to see. With a hand on each doorknob, she leaned forward, until her forehead was pressing painfully against the shining mahogany; and she wept.

It is said that after an anointed king passed away, his soul took refuge in the body of a crow. It may also be that the name of Cronus, who killed his father, derived from the Greek word for crow and not, as is more often thought, from the word for time. And it is a fact that when Spenta opened the library door, a single crow was sitting on her husband’s desk, right beside his uncaring head. When it saw Spenta, it cawed loudly, took flight in a panicky circle, colliding twice with the leather spines of old books, and then made its escape through the room’s high windows, which had—unusually—been left wide open, even though the air conditioner was on. Spenta Cama gently laid the back of her right hand against her husband’s cheek. Which was cold.

Darius Xerxes Cama and his manservant Gieve had both died of suffocation, which was the murderous “trademark” of Cyrus the Pillowman. The time of death was fixed at around ten-thirty in the evening. The butler had resisted his murderer energetically. There were traces of blood—possibly the killer’s—under his long fingernails. Darius did not seem to have resisted at all. His face was calm, nor were there any signs of a struggle. It was as if he had given up his life’s breath gladly, as if he were happy to yield it up to his own son.

Good mythology makes bad detective work. The Greeks would have us believe that the First Father was murdered by his youngest son at the instigation of the First Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth herself. But at the time of the Cama killings, Ormus had been singing to a room full of unimpressed diners, and Spenta had been caressing the hands of mortally ill patients at the Lying-in Hospital.

Inspector Sohrab of the Bombay C.I.D., arching a disapproving eyebrow, noted his surprise at having occasion to interview Camas,
Kalamanjas and (as near neighbours who might have seen something significant) Merchants too, so relatively soon after the mysterious fire at Cuffe Parade. However, there could be no doubt that the prime suspect in the present case was the psychopathic escaped killer Khusro alias Cyrus Cama, whose blood was of the same type as the stuff under the dead butler’s nails. The motive for the murders was of minor significance in the case of “crazies,” who could, as Inspector Sohrab pointed out, “do anything you can think of at the drop of a hat.” It was his best guess that Gieve had been killed first, just to get him out of the way. Darius Xerxes Cama had been the real target, perhaps—“just a wild surmise, see”—because Cyrus resented having been first banished from his home, chastised by his teachers more or less at his parents’ request, and then legally disowned. Sohrab and Rustam looked at Spenta Cama with open hostility. “Lucky you were out,” said Inspector Sohrab viciously, “or you too may have received your deserts.”

Some side issues had resolved themselves. The domestic staff had all returned, shuffling and surly, claiming that as Christians they had simply been attending Midnight Mass at the Cathedral and had then gone to visit their family members in the city’s outlying suburbs. It was Christmas, after all, and they had been determined to observe it even if their heartless employers had refused to give them the night off. Gieve had not been a Christian. There was nothing else to explain.

There were only two matters, according to Sohrab and Rustam, that still required clarification. Firstly, on the same night as the double killing at Apollo Bunder a person answering closely to the description of the said psychopathic killer Khusro Cama had been seen leaving the scene of a murder by asphyxiation in the city of Lucknow, halfway across the sub-continent. And secondly, the profile of the blood under the dead Gieve’s fingernails also corresponded precisely to that of Khusro’s twin, the speechless Ardaviraf Cama, on whose forearms there were undeniable scratches, deep enough to have drawn blood.

Virus sat in a corner of the library, his eyes fixed upon the desk at which his father had been found. His feet were up on the chair, and his arms were locked around his knees, and he was rocking slowly back and forth. Sohrab questioned him, badgered him, cajoled him, threatened him, all to no avail. Virus said nothing. “Leave the boy alone,”
Spenta Cama shouted at the C.I.D. inspector at last. “Can’t you see he is grieving? Can’t you smell how we are all stinking with misery? Go away and do your job, and when you catch,” and here she broke into tears, “when you find my other boy, you keep him safe and sound.”

On New Year’s Day, 1965, Cyrus Cama walked up to the main gate of Tihar Jail and surrendered. Under interrogation, he denied all knowledge of the murder in Lucknow (for which another man was eventually arrested and hanged, protesting his innocence to his last breath). However, he freely confessed to the parricide, and confirmed that the death of the manservant had been—and here he quoted Auden—a “necessary murder.” He pointed to the gouges on his arms, wounds far more severe than Virus’s scratches, categorically denied that they were self-inflicted, and gave a description of the double crime, so detailed and so closely in line with the known facts and forensic evidence as to terminate all discussion. He was returned to solitary confinement in the jail’s maximum-security psychiatric wing, and it was decreed that the teams of prison officers who guarded him should be changed “with high frequency,” so that no other poor sucker could ever fall under Cyrus’s passionate, erudite, fanatical, lethal spell.

After the fire at Villa Thracia, Persis Kalamanja’s alibi had freed Vina from suspicion. Now it was Cyrus Cama’s turn to exonerate his brother. All these alibis, all these alternative story lines, that we must abandon! The story, for example, in which our seafront home was destroyed by Vina’s revenge; in which the fire inside that much-abused child burst out and consumed my childhood too. And the even stranger story of how Virus Cama, his mysterious mind somehow linked to his twin brother’s, carried out the Apollo Bunder murders for him; of how Cyrus could be in two places at once and know, thanks to the unfathomable communication between twins, every detail of the murders he forced his silent brother to commit. These stories float, now, in the limbo of lost possibilities. We simply have no grounds for believing them to be true.

And yet, and yet. After her husband’s murder Spenta Cama never went to sleep without locking her bedroom door. Nor did Ormus join his dumb brother, whose smile was as sweet as ever, for any more sessions at the family piano.

Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives.

Nine feet from wing tip to wing tip, the vultures hover over the
dokhma
, the Tower of Silence, in the gardens of the
Doongerwadi
on Malabar Hill. Their circling reminds Ormus of the fly-past of aircraft at the funerals of the great.
Between the Parsi and the vulture there exists the great binding intimacy of last things. For us there is no rush. We have our whole lives to wait, I for you, you for me. Each knows the other will keep his appointment
.

We pass through rooms lined with portraits of our famous dead and come to the long funeral hall. Here is the priest and here is the sandalwood man and here is the fire which is the representation of god but is not god. Here are the pallbearers, the
nassasalars.
Here is my brother, Ardaviraf the silent. Holding a white scarf between us, we lead the procession into the gardens where the towers stand. There are plenty of birds today, thirty birds, like the thirty in Attar’s great poem who made the journey to the Simurg and became the god they sought. The thirty vultures joining together and becoming Vulture. That is the kind of thought my father might have thought, the kind of connection he might have made. You must know who comes to see you today, O vulture, I must explain him to you, in silence, accompanied by my brother of silence, before the silent towers
.