The Ground Beneath Her Feet (33 page)

Some people can sleep under a moving fan and some just can’t. Ormus Cama could turn the room upside down and rest under his fan like a man at a mechanical oasis. Vina, however, once told me she could never get rid of the idea that the damned thing would come loose and fly at her while she slept. She had nightmares of decapitation by those whirling blades. Personally, I always liked my fan. I would set the control at minimum and lie back with that slow familiar disturbance of air rolling softly over my skin. The disturbance that calmed. It made me dream of lying stretched out at the edge of an equatorial ocean, lapped
by tides warmer than blood. My father was the opposite. “Doesn’t matter how hot it is,” Vivvy Merchant said. “The dratted downdraft induces a cold and tremulous sensation. Shivers my timbers, in sum.”

Because I knew this about him, I turned off the fan without argument and left him by himself, left him to choose between the living and the dead, which was an easy choice, I guess, when Ameer was among the ranks of the expired, while the cohorts of the extant included only me. Love is more than death, or is it. There are those who say that the songsmith Orpheus was a coward because he refused to die for love, because instead of joining Eurydice in the afterlife he tried to drag her back to the life before; which was against nature, and so failed. Judged by this standard, my father was a braver man than the Thracian lyre player, for in his pursuit of Ameer he sought no special privileges from the guardians of the hereafter, he requested no return tickets from the monsters at the gates. But Eurydice and Orpheus were childless, and my parents were not.

I am the one who has to live with the choice my father made.

O Nissy Poe with your pendant mother in the goats’ shed in Virginia long ago. Vina, we are linked by the thing we have seen, by the burden we have to bear. They didn’t want to see us growing up. They didn’t love us enough to wait. Suppose we hadn’t turned out okay? Suppose we needed them? Suppose a thousand things and a thing.

Murder is a crime of violence against the murdered person. Suicide is a crime of violence against those who remain alive.

The servants woke me early and took me to his bedroom. They clustered in the doorway, wide-eyed, driven half mad by what they saw, like Goya figures at a witches’ sabbath, goggling in fascinated terror at the Goat. V.V. Merchant was hanging from the ceiling fan. Lights like a noose. He had used the flex from a standard lamp to fashion the instrument of his ending. He was rotating slowly, turning in the breeze. This is what got to me, broke through my reserve, prevented me from suppressing my feelings and casting a cold eye on the event: that somebody had come in here and switched on the fan. “Who did it?” I shrieked. “Who turned the damn thing on?”

“Sahib, it was hot, sahib,” said the Goya figures. “Sahib, and there is the question of the smell.”

•  •  •

He had never really believed in their separation, always hoped to win her back. One day she would wake up, he imagined, and wonder why he wasn’t in the bed beside her, she would see the error of her ways. That mattered, her seeing the error of her ways, because the Ameer he wanted back was the woman he’d married, not the cynical Mammon worshipper who had joined forces with Piloo Doodhwala. His own grievous fault caused him much daily torment. In his determination to break his gambling addiction, he had gone so far as to ask for my help. What he wanted was for me to become his bookmaker, and so I opened a book. When the cardplaying bug bit him, we played cards. Evening after evening of matchstick poker. I would make entries in the book each time we played, and kept an exact tally of his matchstick losses, which were, as ever, heavy. As for the racetrack, he managed to keep away from it, except on gymkhana days when families were welcome. Then I would accompany him, having made sure he was carrying no money, and instead of making bets we would take photographs of the horses he fancied. If he backed a winner we kept the photograph and pasted it into the book alongside a note of the odds; if not, we ripped it up and hurled it into a trash can as if it were a useless betting slip from the Tote. However, details of these “losses” were also entered in the book of his withdrawal from addiction. When he wanted to bet on the weather, I took the bet. He would see two flies on a windowpane and want to bet on which of them would take off first. As he went about town he would often get into disputes about cricket scores, movie credits, the authorship of songs, and instead of betting real money, he would ring me, and I would enter the bet in the book, afterwards adding a note saying whether he was right or wrong. In this way, very slowly, he had cured himself. The fantasy bets in my little copybook—which was yellow and bore, on the cover, the legend
Globe Copy
and a picture of a saturnine ringed planet—gradually weaned him off the real thing. Each month there were fewer entries for me to make, until at last there came a month in which I was not required to make any entries at all. He took the book and showed it to Ameer. “It’s over,” he said. “Why not give Piloo the bum’s rush and we can resume?”

“You’re right about one thing,” she told him. “It’s over, that’s for sure.” Two weeks later the tumour made its appearance. Six weeks after that she was dead.

Sometimes it’s just over and you can’t make it all right. Justification by works: an overrated idea. There are the dumpers and there are the dumped, and if you fall into the latter category no amount of fantasy gambling can save you. In my life I have done my share of dumping (mostly women) and have not often been the spurned party. Except, of course, that my father—for whom Ameer’s last rejection was perhaps even more painful than her death—strung himself up and left me dangling. Thus making himself both dumper and dumpee. Except, also, that Vina always turned away from me whenever her love of Ormus, her addiction to him, her Ormus habit, required her attention.

But even Ormus Cama had to learn what it felt like to be cast out, fourth functional, dispensable; to be exiled beyond an unbreachable pale.

8
T
HE
D
ECISIVE
M
OMENT

L
et us now praise unjustly neglected men. The first permanent photograph was taken in 1826, in Paris, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, but his place in our collective memory has been usurped by his later collaborator, Louis Daguerre, who sold their invention, their magic box, the “camera,” to the French government after Niépce’s death. It must therefore be stated without equivocation that the celebrated daguerreotype plates could not have been created without Niépce’s scientific knowledge, which far exceeded that of his partner. Nor was the art of photography Niépce’s only child; for he was also the creator of the mighty pyréolophore, or combustion engine. Truly, a father of the New.

What was it like, that First Photograph, forerunner of the Age of the Image? Technically: a direct positive image on a treated pewter plate, requiring many long hours of exposure time. Its subject: nothing more elevated than the view from the Nicéphorean workroom window. Walls, sloping roofs, a tower wearing a conical hat, and open countryside beyond. All is dull, still, dim. No hint here that this is the first quiet note of what will become a thundering symphony, or it may be more
honest to say a deafening cacophony. But (I switch metaphors in my excitement) a floodgate has been opened, an unstoppable torrent of pictures is to follow, haunting and forgettable, hideous and beautiful, pornographic and revelatory, pictures that will create the very idea of the Modern, that will overpower language itself, and cover and distort and define the earth, like water, like gossip, like democracy.

Niépce, I bow my head to you. Great Nicéphore, I doff my beret. If Daguerre—like the Titan Epimetheus—was the one who opened this Pandoran box, unleashing the ceaseless click and snap, the interminable flash and sprocket of photography, still it was you, great Anarch!, who stole the gods’ gift of permanent vision, of the transformation of sight into memory, of the actual into the eternal—that is, the gift of immortality—and bestowed it upon mankind. Where are you now, O Titanic seer, Prometheus of film? If the gods have punished you, if you’re chained to a pillar high up on an Alp while a vulture munches your guts, take comfort in the news. This just in: the gods are dead, but photography is alive & kicking. Olympus? Pah! It’s just a camera now.

Photography is my way of understanding the world.

When my mother died I photographed her, cold in bed. Her profile was shockingly gaunt, but still beautiful. Brightly lit against a darkness, with shadows gathering great scoops from her cheeks, she resembled an Egyptian queen. I thought of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, whom Vina also mirrored, and then it hit me.
My mother looked like Vina;
or, as Vina might have looked, had she grown old and died in her bed. When I made eight-by-ten prints of the photograph I liked best, I wrote “Hat Cheap Suit” on the back with a thick black marking pen.

When my father died I took his picture before they cut him down. I asked to be left alone with him and used a roll of film. Most of the shots avoided his face. I was more interested in the way the shadows fell across his dangling body, and the shadow he himself cast in the early light, a long shadow for a smallish man.

I thought of these acts as respectful.

After they were gone I walked the streets of the city they had both loved in their different, irreconcilable ways. Though that love had often oppressed and stifled me, I now wanted it for myself, wanted to have my parents back by loving what they loved and so becoming what they
had been. And photography was my means of gaining an education in their love. So I photographed the workers at the Cuffe Parade development site as they walked with perfect, nonchalant balance along the beam of a crane a hundred feet above ground. I seized for myself the maelstrom of straw baskets at Crawford Market, and took possession, too, of the inert figures who were everywhere, sleeping on the hard pillows of the sidewalks, their faces turned towards urinous walls, beneath the lurid movie posters of buxom goddesses with sofa-cushion lips. I photographed political slogans on
art dekho
buildings, and children grinning out through the toe of the giant Old Woman’s Shoe. It was easy to be a lazy photographer in Bombay. It was easy to take an interesting picture and almost impossible to take a good one. The city seethed, gathered to stare, turned its back and didn’t care. By showing me everything it told me nothing. Wherever I pointed my camera—
-Juicy that? Juicy
that?—I seemed to glimpse something worth having, but usually it was just something excessive: too colourful, too grotesque, too apt. The city was expressionistic, it screamed at you, but it wore a domino mask. There were whores, tightrope walkers, transsexuals, movie stars, cripples, billionaires, all of them exhibitionists, all of them obscure. There was the thrilling, appalling infinity of the crowd at Churchgate Station in the morning, but that same infinity made the crowd unknowable; there were the fish being sorted on the pier at the Sassoon dock, but all the activity showed me nothing: it was just activity. Lunch runners carried the city’s tiffin boxes to their destinations, but the boxes guarded their mystery. There was too much money, too much poverty, too much nakedness, too much disguise, too much anger, too much vermilion, too much purple. There were too many dashed hopes and narrowed minds. There was far, far too much light.

I began to look at the darkness instead. This led me towards the use of illusion. I composed pictures with sharply delineated areas of light and dark, composed them with such manic care that the light area of one image corresponded precisely to the blackness in another. In the darkroom I had set up for myself in my father’s old apartment I blended these images. The composite pictures that resulted were sometimes dazzling in their mixed perspectives, often confused, sometimes unreadable. I preferred the composite darknesses. For a time I began to
shoot deliberately into the dark, picking human life out of lightlessness, delineating it with as little light as I could get away with.

I decided not to go to college but to concentrate on my photographs. I also wanted to move. I could not bear to go on living in those two separate sets of rooms under the same roof, within the schizoid structure of my parents’ fatal unhappiness. Then the much larger Cama apartment was put up for sale by the firm of Cox’s & King’s, acting as local agents for the new Lady Methwold, who had no plans to return. I got hold of the keys and went to take a look. I shut the door behind me and for a while I did not turn on any lights, but allowed the darkness to take what shape it chose. As my eyes adjusted, I saw soft Himalayas of dust-sheeted furniture ribbed faintly with the sly light that had sidled in between the closed imperfect shutters. In the library I stood beside the shrouded bodies of Darius’s desk and chair and peered at the shelves of naked, staring books. It was the books that at first glance seemed dead, like withered leaves. The furniture, beneath the winter of the white dust sheets, looked as if it were simply waiting for the return of spring. I was intrigued to note that the apartment did not trouble me; not even this room in which a world had ended retained any power to move. I had seen other such rooms. I pointed my camera, and working very quickly, feeling an eagerness take hold of me, I took several shots.

After I moved into the apartment, however, it was the books that came to life and spoke to me. Darius’s lifetime of learning was of no long-term interest to his sons, for all Ormus Cama’s noble funeral thoughts and Cyrus’s high, if warped, intelligence; so it—the library, the old man’s unquiet shade—adopted me instead. On an impulse I bought it along with the apartment, and began to read.

For a while I became a photographer of exits. It isn’t easy to take photographs of strangers’ funerals. People get annoyed. Yet it interested me that Indian funeral practices dealt so openly, so directly, with the physicality of the corpse. The body on the pyre or on the
dokhma
, or in its close-sewn Muslim shroud. Christians were the only community to conceal their dead in boxes. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew how it looked. Coffins forbade intimacy. In my stolen photographs—for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other
people’s time to make his own tiny eternities—it was this intimacy I sought, the closeness of the living and the dead. The secretary staring through eyes made garish with grief at the body of his great master dressed in fire. The son standing in an open grave, holding his father’s shrouded head in his cupped hand, laying it tenderly upon deep earth.