The Ground Beneath Her Feet (6 page)

They had both come to visit Lady Spenta Cama and were both inappropriately dressed in mournful attire, because they had not heard of the birth of little Ormus and were simply and kindly intending to console Lady Spenta for having had to endure the experience of a still-birth. My parents were younger than Sir Darius and Lady Spenta by a generation, and both were relatively recent friends of the family. An unlikely friendship had developed between the two men, who had found common ground in the subject of Bombay itself; Bombay, that great metropolitan creation of the British, whose foremost chronicler my father—the England-returned architect and devoted local historian V.V. Merchant (soon to be the diffident
auteur
of a subsequently celebrated home movie)—would in time become. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, honoured with a baronetcy for services to the Indian Bar, liked to say with a great laugh that he, too, was a great metropolitan creation of the British, and proud of it. “When you write this city’s history, Merchant,” he roared one night over a clubhouse dinner of mulligatawny and pomfret, “you might just find it’s my biography you’ve penned.” As for my mother, she had come to know Lady Spenta Cama at meetings of the Bombay Literary Society. Lady Spenta was the least well read of women, but her serene insouciance in the face of her almost Himalayan ignorance inspired in the younger (and immensely more brilliant) Ameer a kind of amused awe that, had events taken a different course, might have deepened towards friendship.

In the nursing home’s waiting room, surrounded by the beaming relatives of new-born male children and the determinedly cheerful relatives of new-born girls, my future parents made an odd pair, he
wearing a dark suit and a lugubrious expression, she in a plain white sari, without jewellery, and wearing minimal make-up. (Many years later, she confided to me that “I was always certain of your father’s love, because when he fell for me I was looking less attractive than a water buffalo.”) As the only mourners in a place of rejoicing, it was natural that they should move towards each other and introduce themselves.

Both of them would have been feeling awkward at the prospect of facing Lady Spenta and Sir Darius in what they believed to be a moment of deep grief. My mild, tender-hearted father would have been shifting his weight and smiling his embarrassed, buck-toothed smile on account of a strangling emotional inarticulacy that made it hard for him to reveal to the outside world the great depths of feeling within his breast, and an unworldly temperament that led him to prefer the mustinesses of records offices to the unfathomable messiness of Bombay life. Ameer, my mother—“rich by name, and the real money in the family,” in her own subsequent, sardonic self-description—would also have been ill at ease, because neither condolences nor congratulations came easily to her lips. I do not mean to suggest that she was unfeeling or cold; quite the contrary. My mother was a disappointed altruist, an angry woman who had come down to earth expecting a better place, who had landed in the lap of luxury and never recovered from the disillusioning discovery that dismal suffering, not easeful joy, was the human norm. Neither her philanthropy nor her temper tantrums—though both were impressive—sufficed to assuage her disappointment in the planet and her own species. Her reactions to birth and death, shaped and coloured as they were by her sense of having been let down by the cosmos, could therefore seem, to the untutored ear, just a trifle, well, cynical. Or, to be frank, heartless, brutal and mortally offensive too.
Dead baby? What else to expect? He’s well out of it, anyway. Living baby? Poor kid. Think what he’s got in store
. That was her natural style.

However, before she could launch on some such speech and alienate my future father forever, she was forestalled by a startling discovery, and history moved, like a railway train diverted by a sudden switching of points, down an entirely different path.

“I am Merchant,” my father introduced himself. “Like Vijay, but no
relation, though I am also V. In fact, V.V.” Ameer frowned, not because she was unaware that Vijay Merchant was a rising star of Indian cricket, but …

“How can you be ‘Merchant’?” she objected. “You can not be ‘Merchant’. I,” she pointed at her chest for emphasis, “I am Merchant. Ameer.”

“You?” (Bewildered.)

“I.” (Emphatic.)

“Are Merchant?” (A shake of the head.)

“A Merchant. Miss.” (A shrug.)

“Then we are both Merchants,” confirmed V.V., wonderingly.

“Don’t be silly,” Ameer rejoined.

Now V. V. Merchant emitted a long blurt. “Until my grandfather’s time we were Shettys or Shetias or Sheths. He Englished it up, standardized it. Also, he converted. Became a sort of bad Muslim. Strictly non-practising, as we have all remained. You may ask, Then why bother? To which I answer only, Why not?”

“Sheths, you say,” Ameer mused, sticking to the point.

“And now Merchant.”

“So you
are
Merchant,” she conceded.

“At your service.”

“But not related.”

“Misfortunately not.”

My mother had come to an important, if still provisional, decision during the above conversation. Beneath V. V. Merchant’s shyness and behind his buck teeth she had divined the existence of a great soul, a soul of profound constancy, a rock upon which, as she afterwards liked blasphemously to boast, she could build her church. Therefore, and with great daring, she declared in a voice that permitted no arguments, “Between one merchant and another there is no middle way. Either we must be sworn rivals or we must merge, as partners.”

My father blushed, so deeply that his unkempt and already thinning hair began to quiver with delight.

What social circumstances initiated and nomenclatural coincidence encouraged was further confirmed by the small consoling gifts they had brought for Lady Spenta. With surprise, Mr.V.V. Merchant saw the small bag in Miss Ameer Merchant’s hand; with equal surprise, Miss Ameer Merchant noted that Mr.V.V. Merchant was carrying an identical
bag. Prominently displayed on both bags was the name of a certain highly respected food store near Kemp’s Corner; and within the bags, identical glass jars lay concealed.

“Honey,” explained V.V. Merchant. “Honey from the Kashmir Valley. To remind her of the sweetness of life.”

“How can it be Kashmiri honey?” cried Ameer. “
This
is Kashmiri honey.”

She showed him her jar; he showed her his. She began to be angry, and then, instead, started laughing. My father also laughed.

The handiwork of distant bees had eased the path of love.

Finally, and conclusively, their destiny was incarnated as an angry nun, for at this moment they found themselves faced with the stern, voluminous presence of a woman with a penumbra like a partial eclipse of the sun. “Yes?” barked Sister John, so savagely that, alas, it plunged the already tickled Merchants into a fit of the giggles. “We are here,” explained V. V. Merchant, splitting his sides, “to comfort Lady Spenta Cama in her tragic hour.”

“Such a terrible thing,” my mother lamented, wiping away tears of mirth. “The birth of a dead child.”

“Beware,” said Sister John, in a voice like Judgement Day. “Or you may burn in hell-fire for your sins.”

The waiting room fell silent. The two Merchants, stung by the midwife’s admonition, instinctively moved closer together: closing ranks. A hand (his, hers) brushed against another hand (hers, his). In the years that followed, they would always enjoyably disagree about who had made the first move, whose fingers had reached for whose, which of them had been the clasper and which the claspee. What cannot be denied—“forward” and “loose” as the behaviour must undoubtedly be termed—is that Sister John united their hands, which were not often thereafter untwined. Until, many years later, they were driven apart by a third party. Yes, a lover of sorts, or, at any rate, a Beloved. An old lady who was not even a human being. I mean the city itself.

“Anyway,” added Sister John, shrugging, “there is a birth as well.”

From Sister John the two Merchants now received news of the unlooked-for live arrival whom nobody knew quite how to celebrate,
because his birth was so mixed up with the tragedy of Gayomart Cama, who was finished before he began. In Sir Darius’s absence, the surly nun was in charge and stood barring my parents’ way. “Lady Spenta rests now. Come later.” After much persuasion, this embattled quinquereme of a midwife agreed to take Vivvy and Ameer to see the under-sized but undoubtedly finger-wiggling Baby Ormus asleep in his light-filled incubator of glass, lying on his back with one knee raised, not at all unlike a god, with, on his left eyelid, a small purplish bruise, like the shadow of an eyeball. When my mother saw him glowing in that case she could not forbear to say, “Little tom thumb looks more like a snow white in this glass coffin,” whereupon two sharp intakes of breath informed her that this ill-advised simile had shocked not only Sister John but Lady Spenta Cama herself, Lady Spenta who had risen to greet her visitors and tottered up behind them to be hit with this ice-cold verbal douche right between the eyes. “Oh,” Lady Spenta said, blinking with shock, rooted to the spot, rotating her slack jaw. “A coffin, you say. Oh, my, my. A witch has come to put a curse upon my child.”

My father tried stumblingly to pacify her, but it was too late. Too late to salvage things on that not-so-fine day.

I repeat: until the day of Ormus’s birth Lady Spenta Cama had been, by nature, almost preternaturally calm. The new wildness of her formulations was thus an indication of the moment’s star-crossed, transformational nature. From that time onwards her personality changed, becoming nervy, unsettled, easily flustered. Also, after hearing my mother’s so-called curse, Spenta became incapable of loving the accursed child as he deserved. Instead, she shied away from him, as if he bore a disease.

It was thanks to the Ratty-and-Mole affection between Sir Darius Cama and V.V. Merchant—the older man a flamboyant, blazered sportsman and bon vivant, the younger one of life’s subfusc burrowers—that an opportunity for making amends was given, and speedily accepted, three weeks later. By then Ameer and Vivvy had become inseparable. They went to Apollo Bunder arm in arm. V.V. Merchant took his Paillard Bolex along, filmed the infant Ormus in his crib and presented the film to Lady Spenta as a peace offering, which she, outwardly
restored to her habitual evenness of nature, was prepared to accept. My mother and Ormus’s mother, however, never became really close.

But I mustn’t get too far ahead of my tale.

After Miss Ameer Merchant’s unintentional faux pas, my father quickly escorted my grumpily unembarrassed mother away from the scene. Lady Spenta Cama took to her bed in a frenzy of superstition. Her son Ormus’s birthday, already an ambiguous event, had been further stained by Ameer’s image of glass-coffined death. And when, soon afterwards, Sister John dolorously brought her the news that Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had run all the way from the cricket match on the Oval Maidan to the emergency room of the Parsi Lying-in Hospital with the limp body of his son Virus in his arms, Lady Spenta’s hold on her sanity was, for a time, released.

Ardaviraf Cama regained consciousness in the intensive care unit a few hours later, apparently suffering from nothing worse than concussion and double vision. His reluctance to speak was ascribed by doctors to shock. Soon, however, it became plain that his mind had been impaired. He stopped speaking entirely, and responded to questions with slow, sad nods or melancholic shakes of the head. However, gradually even these gestures ceased, and Virus retreated into an impassive silence from which he would never emerge. As if he had become a photograph of himself. As if he were a motion picture, a “talkie” unaccountably denuded of its sound track, restored to the era before sound, without so much as the addition of title cards or piano accompaniment. As if his father’s misdirected drive had so damaged his faith in all fathers, his trust in trust itself, as to necessitate this permanent retreat.

Though he would not speak, he did react to simple requests and commands. If told there was food on the table, he would quietly sit down to eat. When instructed that it was time for bed, he went to his room without a word and lay with his face to the wall. It was not long before the best medical opinion in town declared itself incapable of helping him any further. He went back to his studies at the Cathedral School, where, during lessons, he sat at his desk much as before, but never raised his hand to speak or deigned to answer any teacher’s questions. After an initial period of adjustment the school accepted the new
state of affairs. Virus had always been a slow child, and was slower now, but the teachers were willing to let him stay on and listen in the hope that he might improve over time.

It also became obvious that Virus no longer wished to participate in games of any sort. At school, in break periods, he sat cross-legged in a corner of the quad with, on his face, a yogi’s look of perfect meditative calm, apparently oblivious to the rackety mayhem around him. Wordlessly, as he grew, he absented himself from all sporting activities, field hockey as well as cricket, and athletics too. That was the year the Maharaja of Patiala found time to open the great Brabourne Stadium in between his various extramarital liaisons, and the School Sports Day was held in that august location thereafter. On Sports Day, however, Virus would simply stay in bed, wearing his customary look of serene absence, and nobody had the heart to force him out of doors. After school hours, his twin brother Cyrus and his friends often tried, without luck, to entice him into their street games of seven-tiles or gillidanda. Even board and card games were banished from Virus’s life: Carrom and rummy, Totopoly and Happy Families, Chinese chequers and Snap. He had moved into the mystery of inner space and had no time for play.

Faced with a child who, at the age of five, had decided to put away childish things, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama punished himself by giving up his beloved game of cricket forever; also his lesser loves, wrestling, fencing, swimming and squash. And because as well as himself he blamed music for having caused the accident, music of all types was banned from the Cama apartment, without hope of return. Sir Darius sold the radiogram and broke every record in his collection, and when, during the wedding season, rowdy processions would pass along Apollo Bunder en route to receptions at the Taj Hotel, he would rush about in a frenzy, slamming windows so as to shut out the wedding guests’ songs. Cyrus and Virus had begun to receive lessons on the piano and the Indian flute. These were halted. The teacher was dismissed and the baby grand in the drawing room was locked. At her husband’s request, Lady Spenta Cama placed the key in a silver locket, which for many years she wore around her neck.