The Ground Beneath Her Feet (34 page)

Sandalwood plays its perfumed part in all these rites. Sandalwood chips in the Muslim bier, in the Parsi fire, on the Hindu pyre. The odour of death is an intimacy too far. But a camera cannot smell. Dispensing with nosegays, it can stick its nose as far in as it is permitted to go, it can intrude. Often I had to turn on my heels and run, pursued by insults and stones. Murderer! Assassin! the mourners shouted after me, as if I were responsible for the death they mourned. And there was a truth in the insults. A photographer shoots. Like a gunman standing by a little gate in a prime minister’s garden, like an assassin in a hotel lobby, he must line up a clear shot, he must try not to miss. He has a target, and there are crosshairs in his eyepiece. He wants light from his subjects, he takes their light and their darkness too, which is to say, their lives. Yet I also thought of these pictures, these forbidden images, as gestures of respect. The camera’s respect has nothing to do with seriousness, sanctimony, privacy, or even taste. It has to do with attention. It has to do with clarity, of the actual, of the imagined. And there is also the issue of honesty, a virtue which everyone routinely extols and recommends, until it is directed, in all its uncushioned force, at themselves.

Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.

Deaths are not the only exits, of course, and in my new rôle as exit photographer I sought also to document more quotidian departures. At the airport, spying upon the sorrows of parting, I sought out the single dry-eyed member of a weeping throng. Outside the city’s cinemas I examined the faces of audiences emerging from dreams into the pungency of the real, with the illusion still hanging in their eyes. I tried to find narratives, mysteries, in the come and go at the doors of great hotels. After a time I no longer knew why I was doing these things, and it was at this point, I believe, that the pictures started to improve, because they were no longer about myself. I had learned the secret of becoming invisible, of disappearing into the work.

Invisibility was simply extraordinary. Now, when I went in search of
exits, I could walk right up to the edge of a grave and photograph an argument between those who wanted flowers scattered over the body and those who argued that the religion permitted no such effete indulgences—or I might eavesdrop on a quayside family quarrel at the docks in order to capture the moment when the newlywed young daughter of old parents, a girl who had refused an arranged marriage and insisted on a “love match,” stormed away from her disapproving mother and boarded the waiting steamer, clinging to her awkwardly grinning, weak-moustachioed disaster of a husband, and set out into her new life carrying the burden of a remorse she would never be able to shed—or I might sidle into any of the secret moments we hide from the world, a last kiss before parting, a last piss before starting, and snap happily away. I was too excited by my power to be scrupulous about its use. The inhibited photographer should set down his camera, I thought, and never work again.

As my parents’ sole heir, I had become a young gentleman of means. The family business, Merchant & Merchant, with its thick folder of architectural contracts and its important interest in the Cuffe Parade and Nariman Point developments, I sold for a handsome sum to the consortium of developers headed by Piloo Doodhwala. The Orpheum cinema, now flourishing under new management, I likewise disposed of to the glinting Mr. Sisodia, who had already leased a lot in Film City and founded the Orpheum movie studios that would make his reputation and fortune. “Or or always welcome at the awfu awfu Orpheum,” Mr. Sisodia assured me as I signed the papers. But I had washed my hands of my parents’ work. In these old stories, I sought no further part. I snapped Sisodia’s picture—thick black glasses, cadaverous teeth, Methwold-hairless head, ruthless, charming, insincere, every inch the embryonic movie mogul—and quickly took my leave.

By the start of the 1970s the city’s air had become badly polluted, and public commentators, ready as ever to allegorize, called it a sign of the filth in the national atmosphere. The city’s doctors noted an alarming rise in migraine sufferers, and the oculists revealed that many patients had started complaining of double vision, though they couldn’t remember bumping their heads, and there was no other evidence of
concussion. Wherever you went you saw men and women standing in the street scratching their heads, frowning. There was a growing general sense of disorder, of things being out of kilter, off the rails.
It shouldn’t be this way
.

Bombay had become Mumbai, by order of its rulers, the MA party, of which, it unsurprisingly emerged, Shri Piloo Doodhwala was a principal benefactor and power broker. I dropped in on Persis Kalamanja to complain about the new name. “And what are we supposed to call Trombay, then? ‘Trumbai’? And how about the Back Bay? ‘Backbai’? And what’s to be done with Bollywood? I suppose it’s ‘Mollywood’ now.” But Persis had a bad headache and didn’t laugh. “Something’s going to happen,” she said seriously. “I can feel the ground beginning to shift.”

Persis had turned thirty. Her beauty, which had reached its full womanly bloom, had also become oddly asexual, neutered, in my opinion, by her development of an enigmatic little smile which I found almost insufferably pious. My sarcastic carpings aside, however, her saintly personality and the zeal with which she had joined her mother in a heavy programme of good works had earned her much respect all over town, while her continued celibacy, at first the subject of giggles and whispers, then a cause for pity, nowadays engendered in most of us a kind of unholy awe. There was something otherworldly about Persis these days, and I was not surprised when her mystical side, which lies beneath all our surfaces like a fault, began to manifest itself, and she took to making gloomy predictions of the future. She sat dressed in simple homespun amid the splendours of “Dil Kush” and foretold doom, and if she was our Cassandra, then maybe—just maybe—Bombay was about to fall, like Troy.

Ours was an unlikely intimacy, a friendship of opposites, born of loss. After Vina and Ormus had gone, Persis and I gravitated towards each other, like disciples after the departure of their masters, like echoes of a silenced sound. But as the years passed we became each other’s bad habit. I disapproved of her self-denying saint act. No more old maid, go get laid, I would tell her in my best social-butterfly manner; enough with the soup kitchens, get into some hot water of your own. For her part, she scolded me for my many undoubted failings,
and in this unexpected way we grew fond, even inordinately fond, of each other. She never gave the slightest sign of wanting anything from me other than platonic, brother and sister friendship, and fortunately that madonna rictus of hers, her smile like a holy sword, had chopped off my own desire at the root.

It was the day of the kite festival. The rooftops were already filling up with children and adults, launching their technicolor diamonds into the air. I had arrived at “Dil Kush” with my own selection of kites and
manja
reels, including the kite fighters’ special battle thread, black gut dipped in a suspension full of tiny shards of broken glass.
Kala manja
. How did a family that must have originally got its name by selling such a ferocious weapon, the H-bomb of the kite world, produce a namby-pamby like you, I asked Persis, who was in an uncharacteristically foul humour today, too sour even to smile her infuriating smile. “I guess I just looked past the dirty kites to the pure heavens above,” she snapped, meaning it. She was worried about something, more worried than she was willing to admit.

Dolly Kalamanja came into the room with her house guest, a tall, sloping Frenchman in his sixties, wearing an absurd trilby pulled down so low it all but touched his nose. He was armed with a small Leica pocket camera, and eager for the roof. “Persis, come, no,” cried Dolly. “Don’t just sit on and miss the fun.” But Persis shook her head mutinously. We left her by herself and made our ascent.

Kite dogfights raged overhead. I hurled my warriors into the fray and slew my foes, one, two, three. In the crowded sky it was impossible to be sure whose kite attacked, whose fell. They became unidentified flying objects. One stopped thinking of them as having owners. They were their own masters, kites-errant, duelling to the death.

Dolly had half introduced me to the Frenchman on the stairs to the roof, calling him simply “our Mr. H.,” showing off her bit of French.
“Notre très cher Monsieur Ach’.”
I noticed with some annoyance that he hardly ever looked up at the sky, and paid no attention whatsoever to my victories. The rooftops—flat or sloping, ridged or domed, and all crowded with people—held his attention entirely. He took small steps, this way, that way, until he settled. Then, frozen in a half stoop, he waited, Leica at the ready. His patience, his stillness, was inhuman, predatory. I understood that I was watching a master of invisibility at
work, an artist, an occultist. He would dissolve while I watched him, he became simply not-there, an absence, until the little scene he was stalking satisfied him, and then, click, he would fire off a single shot and re-materialize. He must indeed be a master marksman, I thought, to need no more than one. Then he would make his little dance of steps again, settle again, vanish again, click, and so on. Watching him, I lost my favourite kite. Someone else’s
kala manja
cut me down. I didn’t care. I had seen enough to know the Frenchman’s name.

At that moment the earthquake began. My first thought, when I felt the tremor, was that this was an impossibility, a piece of make-believe, a mistake, because we did not have earthquakes in Bombay. In those years when many parts of the country had begun to shake, Bombayites had prided themselves on being quake-free. Good communal relations and good solid ground, we boasted. No fault lines under our town. But now Piloo Doodhwala’s MA boys were stoking the fires of discord, and the city had begun to shake.

It was what Persis had foretold. There could be no denying that she had developed some sort of sixth sense, some preternatural sensitivity to the treacheries of life. In China they were predicting earthquakes by watching the behaviour of cattle, sheep and goats. In Bombay, apparently, one now needed only to keep Persis Kalamanja under observation.

The truth is that it was not a bad earthquake, low on the scale and of short duration. But there was widespread damage, because the city was unprepared. Many shanties,
hutments, jopadpatti
lean- to shacks and slum dwellings fell, as well as three tenement
chawls
and a couple of derelict villas on Cumballa Hill. Cracks appeared in large structures, including the façade of the Orpheum cinema, and in roads and underground drains, and there was much smashed furniture and glass. There were fires. The sea wall at Hornby Vellard broke and for the first time in more than a century the tides swept in through the Great Breach, and the Mahalaxmi racetrack and the Willingdon Club’s golf course were both swamped under a foot of briny water until the damage was repaired. When the sea retreated it left behind its mysteries: unknown fishes, lost children, pirate flags.

An unspecified number of construction workers and kite fighters fell to their deaths. A dozen or so citizens were crushed beneath falling masonry. The tram lines twisted madly up from the roads, and after that
they were ripped up for good. For three days the city seemed hardly to move. Offices remained closed, the monstrous traffic jams vanished, pedestrians were few and far between. In the open spaces, however, crowds gathered, huddling far from the buildings, but casting anxious glances, too, at the earth of the maidans, as if it had become an adversary, sly, malign.

In the months that followed, as Mrs. Gandhi’s dictatorial Emergency tightened its grip, the national mood grew sombre and fearful. But the worst excesses of the Emergency occurred elsewhere; in Bombay it was the earthquake that people remembered, the earthquake that gave us the shock that shook our confidence in who we were and how we had chosen to live. An op-ed columnist of the local edition of
The Times of India
went so far as to wonder if the country might literally be breaking apart. “Long aeons ago,” he reminded us, “India made a tryst with destiny, breaking away from the mighty southern proto-continent of Gondwanaland and linking her destiny to the northern landmass of Laurasia. The Himalaya mountains are the evidence of that coming together; they are the kiss that joined us to our fate. Is it a kiss that failed? Are these new movements of the earth the prelude to a titanic divorce? Will the Himalayas begin, very slowly, to shrink?” Eight hundred words of questions without answers, of traumatized predictions that India would become the “new Atlantis” as the waters of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea closed over the Deccan plateau. The paper’s publication of so panicky a text indicated the depth of local concern.

On the roof, during the few, but impossibly elongated, seconds of the quake, the great French photographer M. Henri Hulot turned his camera perversely towards the sky. All over town terrified kite flyers had let go of their controlling reels. The heavens were full of dying kites, kites nosediving towards the earth, kites being smashed in mid-air by collisions with other kites, kites being torn to shreds by the boiling winds and by the Dionysiac madness of their sudden freedom, that fatal liberty acquired in the midst of catastrophe and then stolen away again, almost at once, by the inexorable gravitational pull of the cracking earth below. Click, went the Leica. The result is the famous image “Earthquake 1971,” in which the tearing mid-air explosion of a single
kite tells us everything about the unseen mayhem below. The air becomes a metaphor for the earth.

“Dil Kush” was a solidly constructed mansion, its foundations driven deep into the living rock, and so it trembled but did not break. One of the water tanks on the roof did split, however, and I pulled Hulot away from the path of the gushing water, which he gave no sign of having seen. Dolly Kalamanja was already running downstairs, shouting out her daughter’s name. The Frenchman thanked me courteously, touching his hat, then tapping his camera with a self-deprecating shrug.