The Ground Beneath Her Feet (32 page)

He was a distant father, but we had no other. He was disappointed in us. We were not what he had hoped for. We were less than his dreams. But he praised you, vulture, for your rational, scientific mind. He praised our last meeting, in which the cycle of life is renewed. And on his desk, among the notes he had been working on when he died, he spoke thus of you:

Prometheus chained to a pillar in the high Caucasus, with Zeus’s vulture gnawing at his liver all day long. By night the liver regenerates. Unending punishment of pain. The vulture of Prometheus seen as proof of the vindictiveness of Z. With each bite it shows us why we should turn aside from gods & take the rational path. The gods lie, accuse us falsely. (Re: Prometheus, some trumped-up business about a secret love affair with P. Athene.) The gods are whimsical, irrational, divine. For the crime of being ourselves they turn us into rocks, spiders,
plants. The agony inflicted by the mordant v. is nothing less than the agony of reason. Joyful agony. It shows Prometheus who he is, how he should live, why the gods are wrong, why he is right. Vulture, we are in your debt. And forever joined to you by ties of our lives’ blood. Which may be more powerful than love.

Prometheus the creator of mankind, who saved us from Zeus’s wrath by warning Deucalion to build an ark against the Flood. Prometheus father of science & knowledge, who gave us fire and received the vulture in return. What is Titanic in us, let us seek. What is Olympian, let us expunge. I am my father’s son. I had thought myself free of him, self made, but that was vanity. Death shows us the power of blood
.

I am my father’s son. The punishment of Prometheus I take upon myself O Promethean vulture of reason, help my father find his way to his deserved rest
.

Spenta Cama sent news of Darius’s passing to his old friend Lord Methwold, who had continued to write to her with surprising frequency. By return of post she received a long letter of condolence, which spoke of Darius in the warmest terms, much regretted the gulf that had grown up between them, and invited Spenta and her sons to England. “Though it is winter here, yet these different skies, these unfamiliar surroundings, may by virtue of that very difference help to soothe, if not assuage, your pain.” On receiving this letter Spenta Cama had a number of thoughts more or less at once: that she was not in as much pain as she had expected; that after the years of Darius’s decline, his death felt almost like blessed relief, not least—as the absence of struggle had hinted—to himself; that having refused for half a lifetime to share her husband’s English dream, she now found that the prospect of an English winter was filling her with excitement, anticipation, even joy; and that it would be very nice to see William Methwold again after all these years, very nice indeed.

And then there was the problem of money. Darius had died a poor man, and Ormus Cama’s income—on which the household had relied to a far greater extent than his disapproving mother had been prepared to admit—had declined sharply. In recent months Spenta had sold off a few “trinkets and baubles” to help maintain standards. Her money worries had etched themselves deeply on her formerly unlined brow and thus come to the attention of Dolly Kalamanja, who had not been
so graceless as to speak of them openly. Instead, like a true friend, she had found disingenuous excuses for sending Spenta “little gifties”—silk sari lengths, baskets of laddoos, hot-tiffin carriers laden with the latest international cuisine from the celebrated “Dil Kush” kitchens—in short, the bare necessities of life. For her part, Spenta received the presents lightly, as if they were no more than the trivial evidences of a good friendship, and made sure that she, in her turn, sent Dolly the occasional gift of love: a small ivory carving from the secret treasure chest she kept under her bed, or a novel filched from Darius’s library.

Thus Spenta was able to accept her friend’s largesse without losing face. But she was practised enough in the codes of polite society to know that her financial situation would soon be the talk of the town, for what Dolly could perceive and keep to herself, less loving eyes would also see soon enough, and less respectful tongues would feel no compulsion to be discreet. Widowhood had only served to underline the crisis by revealing to Spenta the extent of Darius’s debts. It seemed inevitable that the Apollo Bunder apartment would have to be sold and the family would be forced to move into humbler accommodation, joining the swelling ranks of distressed Parsi gentlefolk whose extreme indigence was a phenomenon of the age and another mark of the passing of the Empire upon which they had gambled and lost.

Into this growing crisis Lord Methwold’s letter of invitation dropped like a blessing from her guardian angels. Spenta hugged it to her bosom and giggled, most improperly for one so recently bereaved. An interested male party with a fortune is a boon to the spirits.
Lady Methwold
, Spenta murmured, and then had the decency to blush, and think of her sons.

Naturally, there was no way of leaving helpless Ardaviraf behind, but once they were in England, Lord Methwold would know what to do for the best; and as for Ormus, that loafer, that immoral nightclub singer who had turned out so poorly, she did not feel able—for she was an honest woman—to decamp without telling him that he had also been invited. When she did tell him, she made it very plain that she was not expecting him to accept Lord Methwold’s invitation and would quite understand if he decided his life must take a different, more “bohemian” course. (With what delicate disdain she articulated that word “bohemian”!) In short, she went as close as her nature allowed to telling him he was not wanted on the voyage. To her horror,
however, Ormus Cama accepted, with what looked very like elation. “It’s high time I got out of this two-bit town,” he said. “So, if it’s okay, I’ll tag along for the ride.”

Spenta Cama left Bombay at the end of January 1965, accompanied by her sons. None of the three ever returned to India. By the end of the year Spenta had become Lady Methwold. At Methwold’s insistence, Virus Cama had been placed in a sanatorium where he would receive the finest care, and also twice-weekly flute lessons from a professional flautist of Indian extraction. As for Ormus, he had vanished into the rest of his life, about which there will be a great deal to say hereafter. The newlyweds Spenta and Methwold were left to their own devices, as was only right. Spentas new husband was full of remorse for his cold-shouldering of Darius in the matter of the faked legal qualifications. “In his way he was a giant,” Methwold said. “But a giant out of time. The age of giants has gone, and we mortals grow careless of the few that remain. But the two of us can hold hands through this long winter, and remember.” These words were spoken on the broad, frosty parterre of an ample residence in the Home Counties, of which Spenta was the new châtelaine: a white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above the winding Thames. White curtains blew at the French windows of the orangery. There was a fountain crawling with gods.

It was the mansion of Darius Cama’s dreams.

Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it.

What deflects us from the subject is loss. Of those we love, of the Orient, of hope, of our place in the book. Loss is more than love or is it. More than death or is it. More than art, or not. Darius Cama’s “fourth function” added, to the tripartite system of Indo-European culture (religious sovereignty, physical force, fertility), the necessary additional concept of the existential outsider, the separated man, the banished divorcé, the expelled schoolboy, the cashiered officer, the legal alien, the uprooted wanderer, the out-of-step marcher, the rebel, the transgressor, the outlaw, the anathematized thinker, the crucified revolutionary, the lost soul.

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame
. If he was right then this is the subject also. If he was wrong, then the lost are merely lost. Stepping out of the frame, they simply cease to exist.

I am writing here about the end of something, not just the end of a phase of my life but the end of my connection with a country, my country of origin as we say now, my home country I was brought up to say, India. I am trying to say goodbye, goodbye again, goodbye a quarter century after I physically left. This ending is oddly positioned, coming as it does in the middle of my story, but without it the second half of my life could not have happened as it did. Also, it takes time to come to terms with the truth: that what’s over is over. Because as it happens I didn’t go of my own free will. As it happens I was driven out, like a dog. I had to run for my life.

Small earthquakes were recorded in several parts of India during the late 1960s and early 1970s; nothing serious, no loss of life and minimal damage to property, but enough to make us sleep a little less easily in our beds. One shook the Golden Temple in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in the Punjab, another rattled teeth in the small southern town of Sriperumbudur. A third scared the children of Nellie in Assam. Finally, the picturesque waters of a Kashmiri lake, high Shishnag, that cold mirror in the sky, began to roil and spume.

Geology as metaphor. There were plenty of rishis and mahagurus, and even political columnists and editorial writers, who were prepared—eager!—to link these tremors with the great public events of those years, such as Mrs. Gandhi’s emergence as a formidable leader, “Mrs. Mover-and-Shaker,” and her victory over Pakistan in the great War of 1965, which lasted exactly twenty-two days and was fought on two fronts simultaneously, in Kashmir (the “Kashquake”) and in Bangladesh (the “Banglashake”). “Old Order Cracks Up,” cried the pundits, and, once the allegations about Mrs. G.’s electoral malpractices began, “Dark Rumbles Shake Gandhi Administration.”

I, however, did not need geology to explain the upheavals in my immediate circle. I, Umeed Merchant, a.k.a. Rai, turned eighteen in the year of the War. Ormus had gone, and Vina was a fading memory, and I was shuttling between my estranged parents’ apartments along
with the household servants, because they shared the domestic help as well as me, and when I was angry with them, and at that age one is often angry, I would say that I felt as if I were just another one of their underpaid employees. Then my mothers inoperable brain tumour was diagnosed and within weeks she just died, click, as if somebody had turned out her light, and left me burdened with whole volumes of gentler sentences that I had left unsaid. She was fifty-one years old.

The evening after we buried my mother, my father and I drove out to take a look at Cuffe Parade. The long process of levelling and reclamation was almost complete. The villas, promenade and mangrove forest were long gone, and the sea had retreated before the power of the great machines. An immense brown expanse of land stretched before us, an almost blank slate upon which history was only just beginning to write. The huge dusty space was broken up, articulated, by metal fencing, and large signs forbidding various activities, and the concrete and steel foundations of the first tall buildings; also pile drivers, steamrollers, trucks, wheelbarrows, cranes. And though the day’s work was over, we could still see clumps of workers in the near and middle distance, men were leaning against concrete stumps out of which steel rods twisted like the branches of trees created by some botanical Frankenstein, women with hitched-up saris were holding their earth-carrying metal bowls against their hips and smoking beedis under the No Smoking signs, laughing harshly out of grim gap-toothed faces which knew that life was nothing to laugh about.

This was not the emptiness of the desert but a desert of the spirit, I thought.

“No,” said my father, reading my mind. “It is an empty canvas, primed and waiting for the intervention of the artist’s hand. Your mother was a visionary. Here, from this propagatory enclave—seedbed wrested from seabed—her Ozymandian colossi will rise, and the mighty will look upon Bombay and despair.” He was speaking of his rival, the only one who could have parted two people who loved each other so deeply, and in that moment I did not know whether to hate the city that had torn them apart or to take my lead from V.V.’s desperate generosity in his time of inconsolable grief, his compassionate irony, and forgive Bombay as he forgave it, and also pity it as he did, in the name of that dear, lost love. I thought of sand castles and ice cream
and tunelessness and puns, and I thought anew of Vina, in whom there was more of Ameer Merchant than could now be found anywhere else on earth.

It had grown dark, and the evening bugs were biting me to bits. “Let’s go,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. It was my turn to read his mind. She became cynical, he was thinking, she made a pact with the devil, and the devil sent a monster into her head and bore her away. “That isn’t it,” I said. “It wasn’t anything to do with that. You don’t believe in the devil, anyway. It was just a stupid disease.” He snapped out of his reverie with such a wretchedness upon him that I embraced him. I was six or seven inches taller than him by this time and his scrawny head with its wild wisps of grey hair lay against my chest and he sobbed. The lights of the city—Malabar Hill far away, the Queen’s Necklace of Marine Drive curving towards us—hung around us like a noose.

Back then I was partial to science fiction novels. There was a European novel, Polish, I think, about a planet that could bring people’s thoughts to life. Think of your dead wife, and there she is in your bed. Think of a monster, and it will crawl into your brain, through your ear. That sort of thing.

Lights like a noose
. These were words that came to mind as my father wept on my breast. I should have been more careful with my thoughts. I should have stayed with him that night, but I wanted to be alone, I wanted to sit and stand and walk in Ameer Merchant’s rooms and breathe in the past, before it changed for ever. I should have wondered why he told me to turn off the fan as I left him sitting on his bed in his stripey nightsuit. No moon, and stenchy air. I should have stayed with him. The darkness of the city fell around him like a noose.