The Ground Beneath Her Feet (63 page)

Forget about it, it’s the past, he tells his ears. Time flows only one way and I don’t believe in yesterday.

Finally the team comes up with the goods, and when Yul Singh holding Will’s arm walks into the auction rooms in San Narciso, Calif.—the oldest building in town, actually pre-dating World War II—he is greeted in a cold lobby of gleaming redwood floorboards and the smell of wax and paper by Mull Standish tapping his cane. You what
the fuck, inquires Yul inelegantly, genuinely discomfited. I guess your smoke screens weren’t all they should be, YSL, grins Standish, I assume heads will have to roll.

So you’re here for what, Yul demands, recovering fast.

First let me tell you why
you’re
here, says Mull. Turns out you’re interested in conspiracies, underground organizations, militias, the whole right-wing paranoid-America thing. Who knows why. You’re here to bid for the memorabilia of some defunct immigrant cabal, used to go around writing
DEATH
on people’s walls. Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn. They had a trumpet logo. Nice.

You’re out of your depth, okay, Yul argues, his equilibrium restored. Lemme tell you the laws of the universe. The law according to Disney: Nobody fucks with the mouse. Which in my version, with the louse: that’s me. The law according to Sir Isaac Newton: to every action an equal and opposite reaction. But that was way back, before television, and in Britain too. I say, no sir, that reaction’s gonna be unequal if I got anything to do with it. You fuck with me, I fuck you two times and your kid sister too. Don’t antagonize the horn, you got that right, did you know I played clarinet. So here’s the deal. The law of laws. Heads Yul wins, tails you’ll lose.

Nice talking to you, says Standish, and exits: slow, deliberate, like a matador turning his back on the bull. Contempt wins many bullfights. Sometimes, however, it gets you gored in the back.

The legal war between the two best-dressed men in the music universe, the legendary head of Colchis Records and the manager of the all-powerful VTO group, rocks the business. It is fought with weapons that cannot be described in English, on an esoteric legal battleground that might as well be made of moon cheese. Standish hires a team of Indian lawyers and launches against Colchis whole armadas of suits, entire arsenals of writs. The record company replies in kind. They are like battling spiders and VTO’s music is the fly snared in their webs of sticky string.

Vina asks Standish, Couldn’t we just somehow I don’t know settle?

No, he answers.

Ormus says, This is never going to end, is it.

Yes, he replies.

Look, he says. What’s happening here is we’re trying to win a war we’ve already lost. He has your signatures, all we have is nuisance value. And if we’re a big enough nuisance for long enough, if we tie up enough funds because they’re under litigation, then in the end he’ll come to our table and deal.

That’s all? Vina asks, disappointed. That’s all you’ve got?

That, and Indian lawyers, says Standish, deadpan. The maestros of the law’s delays.
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
is a stroll in the park for these guys. These are marathon runners, and Yul knows it. These are the gold medalists of stall.

But what if, Ormus begins, and Standish stops him.

This is the high road, the way in through the front door, he says. Maybe there’s also a low road, a back-door entry. This, don’t ask me. Maybe never, but anyway not now.

The
Quakershaker
album—self-produced in Muscle Shoals and Montserrat by Ormus; Yul Singh never enters the studio—sells over twenty million units and every penny of the money’s tied up in court. Yul Singh invites Standish (who has been advancing living expenses to Vina and Ormus out of his own pocket) to come into the New York office when he’s back from a trip to Europe, and
just talk
. The week before this meeting’s due date, the authorities’ attack against Ormus and Vina is launched.

Mull Standish is of the party that holds that there is no such thing as coincidence. He hires yet more lawyers, both Indian and non-, but behind the scenes he’s the one orchestrating the defense. The greater the difficulties, the greater grows his energy, the more precise his focus. He arranges solidarity concerts at the Fillmores, East and West. Dylan, Lennon, Joplin, Joni, Country Joe and the Fish turn up to sing for Ormus. As character witnesses, Mayor Lindsay, Dick Cavett and Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers union, speak to Ormus’s integrity and value. A suit is filed demanding the government’s case records and asking that the immigration service’s ruling be overturned. There is also the appeal before the immigration board itself.

In July 1974 the appeal is lost. Once again Ormus is given sixty days to go, or be deported by force.

During those war years, there are no new VTO records. Ormus
retreats into the Rhodopé Building and if he’s writing he’s not telling anyone, not even Standish, not even Vina. Between Vina and Standish, both in love with Ormus Cama, a surprising intimacy forms, a friendship based in part on Ormus’s denial of his body to them both, in part on their joint relish for the fray. She accompanies Standish to meetings of the gay businessmen’s Greater Gotham Business League, joins in their lobbying of politicians on the subject of the recent increase in attacks on the gay community, and gains the League’s support for Ormus’s cause. Standish and Vina become a formidable pair of lobbyists. They brief Jack Anderson, whose Report then reveals both that the drug in Ormus’s blood at the time of the Crossley accident had been administered in a spiked drink without his prior knowledge, and also that over one hundred aliens with worse drug records than Ormus’s have been allowed to remain in the U.S.A. This in turn persuades a New York congressman called Koch to introduce a bill designed to allow the U.S. attorney general to grant residency to Ormus Cama. The tide, very slowly, turns.

In October 1975 the deportation order is overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals, and a year later, Ormus receives permanent residence status. Once again, there is something like solid ground beneath his feet.

The celebrations are short-lived, however, like an opening-night party that dies when some killjoy comes in waving the
Times
critic’s fatal panning of the show. Like the laughter dying on Macbeth’s lips at the appearance of what Yul Singh once memorably called Banquet’s Ghost. Now Singh himself is the specter at the feast. Openly dismayed by Ormus’s victory, he hardens his own resolve. He meets with Standish and simply says, No deal. Then he digs in for a war of attrition, calculating that he can starve Vina and Ormus out. It’s their money that’s tied up, after all. He has plenty of access to funds elsewhere.

When it becomes plain that long litigious years stretch ahead, Standish begins to lobby Colchis’s distributors, WEC, arguing that as the deadlock has taken the world’s #1 band out of distribution, they, the distributors, are being hit in the pocket by Yul Singh’s intransigence, his czarish refusal to come to the table like a reasonable man.

Ormus Cama is a tough cookie, he points out. He will sing for quarters on the sidewalk if he has to, but he will not be enslaved. Did they
see the
Rolling Stone
cover, by the way, the one with Ormus and Vina naked and in chains? How worth it was that?

He gets a fair hearing, but Yul Singh is a big man, and can soak up a lot of pressure. It will be five more years before the battle ends. By 1980 Mull Standish has used up most of his personal fortune, and defeat has become a real possibility. By 1980 he has played all his cards.

Then the back door opens, and the low road to success is revealed.

At the nadir of the struggle against Colchis, Ormus has a bread oven installed in his apartment and spends his days baking his beloved loaves—crusty white, granary brown, flour-dusted buns—and discourages all callers. This is his way of going into retreat. On an impulse, Standish and Vina decide to head for a retreat of their own: Dharmsala in the Pir Panjal range, the place of exile of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama and, in Standish’s opinion, the truest man in the world. Vina calls Ormus to tell him the news of their imminent departure. He speaks only of bread.

India is still there. India abides, and is the third thing that binds Vina and Standish together. Delhi is hot. It is blazing with discontents in the aftermath of the assault on the Sikh extremists who were cornered, and made their last stand, in Amritsar’s Golden Temple. (This was the so-called Wagahwalé gang of terrorists, named after the egg-bald Man Singh Wagahwalé, a small bearded man deformed by the memory of the slaughter of his family during the Partition massacres and now fatally in love, like so many small, bald, bearded men around the world, with the fantasy of a micro-state to call his own, a little stockade in which to wall himself up and call it freedom.) The terrorists are dead now, but the sacrilege of the Indian Army’s assault on Sikhism’s holy of holies still reverberates. Reprisals are feared, and then counter-reprisals, and so on, the familiar sorry spiral. This is not the India Vina and Standish want. They make haste for the Himalayan foothills.

Indians—or let’s say plains Indians—behave like children when they see snow, which seems like a substance from another world. The towering mountains, the lack of pretension of the wooden buildings, the people who seem free of all but the simplest worldly ambitions, the thin clear air as pure as a choirboy’s soaring treble, the cold and, above
all, the snow: these things render the most sophisticated urbanites open to what they would not normally value. The sound of small bells, the scent of saffron, slowness, contemplation, peace.

(In those days there was also Kashmir. The peace of Kashmir is shattered now, perhaps for ever—no, nothing is for ever—but Dharmsala remains.)

Vina once again finds herself playing second fiddle in the company of Mull Standish, and oddly doesn’t mind. The origins of Tibetan Buddhism in the teachings of the Indian Mahayana masters, the formation of the different sects, the ascendancy of the Yellow Hats, the doctrine of the four noble truths: on these and other matters Standish is a fountainhead of information. Vina imbibes. Years ago, Standish met the Dalai Lama himself, and formed at that time a particular attachment to the deity Dorje Shugden, who, it is said, spoke to Gyatso through a monk in a trance state and told him the secret route by which he escaped from Tibet’s Chinese conquerors and made his way to India.

Dorje Shugden has three red eyes and breathes out lightning. But he is one of the Protectors, wrathful as he looks.

On this trip there is unfortunately no question of an audience with the High Lama, who is abroad, but Standish plans to perform ritual devotions to Shugden. He, too, is a man looking for a way.

He asks Vina Apsara if she’d like to be a part of this.

Okay, Vina says. Why not. I came this far.

Then we’ll be
vajra
brother and
vajra
sister, Standish tells her.
Vajra
is the unbreakable thing, a bolt of lightning, a diamond. It’s the strongest bond, as strong as a tie of blood.

But at the doors of the down-at-heel Shugden temple Otto Wing is waiting for them with bad news. Shaven-headed and robed, every inch the true believer, the most faithful of the faithful, his heavy black-rimmed glasses the only remnant of the Otto who frolicked with Ifredis Wing in Tempe Harbor a lifetime ago, he informs Standish through pursed, disapproving lips that the Dalai Lama has broken with Dorje Shugden. These days he preaches against the deity, discourages his worship. He says that the Shugden cult detracts from the Buddha himself. To seek external help from such spirits is to turn away from the Buddha, which is disgraceful. You must not pray here, he instructs
the shaken Standish. The road to the four noble truths no longer passes through this place.

Tense, embattled Shugden monks admit he’s telling the truth. There is division in Paradise. Tibetan Buddhism has always been somewhat sectarian, and one of those divides has started to widen. Standish is so upset that he refuses to stay. Otto Wing flaps around, insisting that they all meditate together, but Standish brushes him off.
We’re out of here
. Meaning: I no longer belong. Even in this haven I can find no peace.

No sooner have they slogged up into the mountains than they must take the slow buses and trains back down into the city heat. Vina goes along with this, because what she sees on Standish’s face is an alienation that fills her with fear for him. This man has fought so hard and lost so much: children, illusions, money. She worries that he may not survive this latest blow.

They arrive in Delhi, to find the city in uproar. A quadruple assassination, by Sikh bodyguards, has resulted in the deaths of Indira Gandhi, both her sons, and the increasingly powerful political figure of Shri Piloo Doodhwala. Dreadful reprisals are being visited upon the city’s Sikh population. The air is full of atrocity. Vina and Mull check in at the old Ashoka and sit together, stunned, not knowing what to do for the best. Then there is a knock on the door. A cockaded hotel employee hands Standish a thick, dog-eared file tied up in quantities of thin, hairy rope. The file was left at reception by a man who did not, however, leave his name. No description of the man is initially available. After much coaxing, the hotel front desk eventually concedes the slight possibility that the courier was wearing the saffron and burgundy robes of a Tibetan monk. Also seen briefly in the hotel lobby that day were members of the disbanded “magnificentourage” of Piloo Doodhwala, perhaps even—though this is unconfirmed—the great man’s grieving wife, Golmatol Doodhwala herself.

In that overheated time it is easy for Vina, and even perhaps Standish, to believe in almost any rumor, any possibility; even that the package comes not from any mortal source but from a deity, which perhaps feels, in the hour of its own fall from grace, some kinship with the plight of VTO; that Shugden the Protector has in his wisdom sent them this priceless gift.

Inside the package is irrefutable documentary proof—in the form of
facsimiles of signed documents, checks, etc., all duly notarized as true copies—that the celebrated Non-Resident Indian Mr. Yul Singh, the very same Yul Singh who has been taking such an interest in American underground cults and cells, Yul Singh the consummate rock ’n’ roller, who has always presented himself to the whole world as the ultimate cosmopolitan, wholly secularized and Westernized, Boss Yul, Coolest of the Cool, YSL himself, has been for many years a secret zealot, a purchaser of guns and bombs, in short one of the financial mainstays of the terrorist fringe of the Sikh nationalist movement—of, in fact, the Wagahwalé cult, whose leaders were so recently murdered in Amritsar, and who have just exacted, for that assault, a terrible retribution, wrought from beyond the grave.