The Ground Beneath Her Feet (38 page)

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free
.

I had reached my destination. A deeply rutted dirt path led off the country road towards Piloo Doodhwala’s mysteries. Still in the grip of my curious mood of unreality, I drove towards my fate.

The sheer unchartedness of rural India in its most profound depths never failed to amaze. You turned off the road on to the rural tracks and at once felt as the earth’s early navigators must have done; like a Cabot or Magellan of the land.

Here the polyphonic reality of the road disappeared and was replaced by silences, mutenesses as vast as the land. Here was a wordless truth, one that came before language, a being, not a becoming. No cartographer had fully mapped these endless spaces. There were villages buried in the backlands that never knew about the British Empire, villagers to whom the names of the nation’s leaders and founding fathers would mean nothing, even though Wardha, where the Mahatma founded his ashram, was only a hundred-odd miles away. To journey down some of these tracks was to travel back in time for over a thousand years.

City dwellers were constantly told that village India was the “real” India, a space of timelessness and gods, of moral certainties and natural laws, of the eternal fixities of caste and faith, gender and class, landowner and sharecropper and bonded labourer and serf. Such statements were made as if the real were solid, immutable, tangible. Whereas the most obvious lesson of travelling between the city and the village, between the crowded street and the open field, was that reality shifted. Where the plates of different realities met, there were shudders and rifts. Chasms opened. A man could lose his life.

I am writing about a journey into the heart of the country but it’s just another way of saying goodbye. I’m taking the long way round to the exit because I can’t agree with myself to let go, to be done with it, to turn away towards my new life, just to settle for that fortunate existence. Lucky me: America.

But it’s also because my life hinges on what happened out there, on the banks of the Wainganga River, within sight of the Seeonee hills. That was the decisive moment that created the secret image which I have never revealed to anyone, the hidden self-portrait, the ghost in my machine.

Nowadays I can behave, most of the time, as if it never happened. I’m a happy man, I can throw sticks for my dog on an American beach and let the turn-ups on my stone-grey chinos get wet in the Atlantic tides, but sometimes in the night I wake and the past is hanging there in front of me, rotating slowly, and all around me the jungle beasts are growling, the fire grows dim, and they are closing in.

Vina: I promised you I would open my heart, I swore that nothing would be spared. So I must find the courage to reveal this also, this terrible thing I know about myself. I must confess it and stand defenceless before the court of anyone who can be bothered to judge. If anyone remains. You know the old song. Even the President of the United States sometimes must stand naked.

Or I washed my hands in muddy waters, I washed my hands but they wouldn’t come clean.

At a certain point I left the Jeep behind, off the track, and proceeded on foot. As I crept towards my goal I felt an excitement—no, it was more than a mere kick, it was fulfilment—which left me in no doubt that I had discovered what I wanted most. More than money, more than fame, maybe even more than love.

To look with one’s own eyes into the eyes of the truth, and stare it down. To see what was
thus
, and show it
so
. To strip away the veils and turn the thunderous racket of revelation into the pure silence of the image and so possess it, to put the world’s secret wonders in your suitcase and go home from the war to your once-in-a-lifetime woman, or even to the picture editor you slept with twice a week.

But this world was not rackety. Its stillness was unnatural, it was
much more than country hush. I had entered the territory of the four-billion-dollar phantom goat, and the goat is, of course, an ancient avatar of the devil. Allow me to concede that in that occult silence I felt a little scared and far from help.

The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we
.

There was a cluster of buildings ahead. Huts and byres, but where were the villagers’ herds? Yet more silence burst from Piloo’s scam sheds, eloquent as a lion’s roar. I reached into the patch pocket on my right trouser leg and felt the reassuring presence of the slim little Leica which I’d bought myself in honour of my encounter with the great Henri Hulot. Then men carrying field implements rose up all around me, seeming to burst from the very earth, and that, as far as photography was concerned, was that.

They had seen me coming a mile off, which didn’t in itself matter too much. In my long and various professional life, I have bribed and sweet-talked my way past the roadblocks of regional warlords in Angola and former Yugoslavia, I have found routes in and out of twenty-seven different revolutions and major wars. The security cordons at the Milan and Paris fashion collections, the concentric circles of armed and unarmed aides guarding the route to the man or woman of real power, the maître d’s at the leading Manhattan restaurants, pah! I snap my fingers under their collective nose. Even on that early adventure, rookie that I was, I felt confident of my ability to hoodwink these back-of-beyond yokels and then get the goods on their little livestock swindle.

Unless, of course, they weren’t yokels. Unless they were members of one of the feared gangs of killer bandits who roamed these invisible parts. Unless Piloo was actually using the bandits to police his operation. Unless they murdered me there and then and left my body for the vultures and carrion crows.

My captors and I turned out to have no language in common. They spoke a local dialect that made no sense at all to me. However, conversation
quickly became redundant. After they had removed my cameras and rolls of film and the keys to my Jeep and robbed me of all my money, they took me to the place of imaginary goats. Here I met the other journalist, the one of whose existence I had previously been unaware. He was waiting for me in one of the byres, hanging from a low beam, rotating slowly in the hot draughts of wind, and dressed very like myself. The same patch pockets on his trousers, the same hiking boots. The same empty camera bag at his feet. He had been dead for much too long, and even as I started vomiting I understood that my yarn about the Trans-India Rally was probably not going to be believed.

Why didn’t they string me up right away? I don’t know. Boredom, probably. There’s not much to do out there in the boondocks when you don’t even have real goats to fuck. You’ve got to spread out your pleasures. The anticipation is more than half the fun. Crocodiles do the same thing. They keep their quarry half alive for days sometimes, saving them for later. So I’m told.

Boredom and laziness saved my life. These husbanders of fictive billies and nannies were people who had made their illicit living for one and a half decades by doing nothing at all. If they were bandits (which I increasingly doubted), they were bandits who had lost their edge. Many of them were stout, soft-bodied, which was rarely true of peasants and dacoits. Corruption had both fattened their bodies and eroded their spirits. They bound me and abandoned me, left me retching emptily on account of the stench of my dead colleague, and at the mercy also of the one zillion crawling things to whom a dead body is the occasion for a grand inter-species reunion.

At night the phantom goatherds got drunk in another hut, and the loud noises of their carousing stopped only when they were all unconscious. I managed to free myself of the badly tied ropes around my arms and legs, and after a few moments more I made my escape. The Jeep was where I’d left it, looted but with enough gas in the tank to get me to a town. I managed to hot-wire it and drove away as fast as the surface would permit. I did not turn on the headlights. Fortunately there was a bright-yellow gibbous moon to light my way.

“Thank god,” Anita Dharkar said, when I reached a telephone and
reversed the charges and woke her up. “Thank god.” I was so angry she’d said such a thing that I shouted abuse at her down the phone. Fear, danger, panic, flight, stress: these things have odd, displaced consequences.

Thank god? No, no,
no
. Let’s not invent anything as cruel, vicious, vengeful, intolerant, unloving, immoral and arrogant as god just to explain a stroke of dumb, undeserved luck. I don’t need some multi-limbed Cosmic Dancer or white-bearded Ineffable, some virgin-raping metamorphic Thunderbolt Hurler or world-destroying flood and fire Maniac, to take the credit for saving my skin. Nobody saved the other fellow, did they? Nobody saved the Indochinese or the Angkorans or the Kennedys or the Jews.

“I know the list,” she said. I was calming down. “Yeah, well,” I said, awkwardly. “I just needed to make the point.”

The photographs I brought back to Bombay created a great sensation, though considered purely from the aesthetic viewpoint they were as dull and uninspired as the First Photo itself, that ancient monochrome view of walls and roofs as seen from the studio window of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. They were pictures of emptiness, of corrals and pastures, byres and sheds, in which no animals could be seen; of fences, doors, fields, stalls. Photographs of absences. But tell-tale Doodhwala Industries stencils were visible everywhere, on wooden walls and fence posts and on the occasional vehicle: a cart, a truck. Just as the banality of goat fodder had enabled Piloo to construct his mighty fraud, so the banality of these images, what one might call their
decisive voiding
, served to deconstruct the swindle. Within weeks of their publication, a major fraud squad investigation was in progress, and within three months warrants were issued for the arrest of Piloo Doodhwala, most of the “magnificentourage,” and several dozen lesser associates across two states.

The bizarre character of the scandal attracted international attention. The photographs were widely re-published, and as a result I received a brief handwritten note from M. Hulot, offering his congratulations on my “scoop de foudre” and inviting me to join the world-famous Nebuchadnezzar photographers’ agency, which he had founded in the year of my birth, along with the American Bobby Flow, “Chip” Boleyn from England and a second French photographer, Paul
Willy. It was as if Zeus had tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to join him and the other naked, omnipotent pranksters on top of their storied hill.

It was the beginning of the life I have led ever since, the first day, one might say, of my life as a man. And yet, as the attentive reader will already have divined, something was badly amiss.

It is time, after all these years, to answer certain questions.

Rai
—here’s the first question—
how does a man shoot a roll of film while bound hand and foot? How does a man film a “goat farm” which he has never visited (for the pictures clearly showed images of at least two separate establishments in different parts of the country)? Most puzzlingly of all, how does a man take photographs after his camera equipment has been removed?

I could say there was another loaded camera hidden in the Jeep, taped under the offside rear wheel arch, and the murderous bastards missed it. I could say I was goaded into passionate, dangerous action by the experience of spending a day retching and gagging in the company of a hanged man, who wore the same clothes and boots as myself, whose swollen, blackened face might have—or so it seemed to me, in my torment—borne more than a passing resemblance to my own. I did it for him, I could tell you, for my murdered, stinking companion,
mon semblable, mon frère
. I did it for the dead twin I did not know I had.

I became careful, circumspect. I found a hiding place during the night from which I could work by day. I became invisible, motionless, invincible. I got the pictures. Here they are. The bastards went to jail, okay? Can I do anything else for you? Anything else you want to know? What’s that? What did you say?

Why didn’t you buy more film?

Oh, for crying out loud. They robbed me. I was broke.

And then Anita came, and brought you home
.

Right. Right.

So, when did you go to the second location, far away in the Miraj hills?

Later. I went later. What’s your problem?

In that case, why didn’t you take more film?

What, you think it was easy to get those photos? Just to get five or six images would have been a sort of miracle. This was one full roll.

Tell us about the boots, Rai. Talk about the hiking boots
.
Stop it. Shut up. I can’t.
Oh, but you must
.

Okay: the thing you could do with these special, imported hiking boots: if you slightly loosened a screw at the base of the heel, you could twist the whole heel section round to reveal a small cavity. A cavity just about large enough to hold a roll of film. I’d used the trick a few times, for example when photographing Mumbai’s Axis rallies. As a matter of fact, I’d used it this time. When I left my Jeep to go “ghoast”-busting, I had a spare film in each heel.

The hanged man and I were alone for a long time. His feet swung not far from my revolted nose and yes I wondered about the heels of his boots yes when I got the ropes off I made myself approach him yes in spite of his pong like the end of the world and the biting insects yes and the rawness of my throat and my eyes sore from bulging as I puked I took hold of his heels one after the other yes I twisted the left heel it came up empty but the right heel did the right thing the film just plopped down in my hand yes and I put an unused film in its place from my own boot yes and I could feel his body all perfume and my heart was going like mad and I made my escape with Piloo’s fate and my own golden future in my hand yes and to hell with everything I said yes because it might as well be me as another so yes I will yes I did yes.