The Ground Beneath Her Feet (78 page)

Unsurprisingly, Goddess-Ma has been commenting on the Vina phenomenon. Beneath the unstable earth, she Says, there has always been a woman keeping things together, in all cultures. Our Indian earth mother parted her lips to receive pure Sita, falsely accused of having been defiled by Ravana, after Lord Ram rejected her on his spin doctors’ advice. Our Greek mother Persephone sits beside Hades in his subterranean kingdom.

Now Vina, our beloved Vina, has joined these women, the greatest of women, who hold up the earth from below as mighty Atlas holds up the sky.

O dancing Earth, Says Goddess-Ma. In our Indian Puranas we learn that Lord Shiva danced You into being, He, the Lord of the Dance. Whereas the Greeks tell of Eurynome, the goddess of everything, who loved dancing and created the sea and the land so that she had someplace to groove. I Say that such also are We!, Men and Women!, dancing our world into being. I Say, Dance! And if the earth shakes, think that Vina dances, too, and see what new miracles She unveils.

As Goddess-Ma’s popularity grows, as her beautiful face and her feel-good Sayings do their irresistible work on that city in which beauty and congratulation are the surest roads to success, there are dissenting noises, from the followers of older spiritual Paths and from large segments of New York’s Indian community When asked about her critics, Goddess-Ma is sharp. Mine is the true Indian way, she Says with complete assurance. These converts and long-term expatriates are happier peddling and swallowing their glamorized exotica.

(Goddess-Ma has already learned the laws of spin. Take the worst
thing that is said about you, accuse your accusers of the selfsame fault, be more beautiful and media-friendly than they, and you will carry all before you, like a storm.)

Writing this, I think of Darius Cama. I think of William Methwold. I remember their attempts to build bridges between the mythologies of East and West. I remember my own hours in Darius’s library, my seduction by his storehouse of ancient tales. I wonder what the old gents with their love of scholarship and uninterest in hocus-pocus would have made of Goddess-Ma and her brass-bold bid for transcultural divinity, which includes a shameless attempt to co-opt dead Vina, to hijack her popular tragedy. New York, where you go to make it big, has no problem with Goddess-Ma’s hard-sell tactics, which are, in fact, admired and increase her following. Also, the city’s dance venues report a significant increase in numbers. The young of Manhattan are following the pint-size seer’s terpsichorean advice.

Shetty is even-handedly contemptuous both of pretty, ambitious Goddess-Ma and of those who follow her. That Ormus Cama has been going down three floors to visit her a couple of times a week only proves that he’s totally lost it, in the Doorman’s forcefully expressed opinion.

And there’s worse to come. Ormus is apparently chasing dead Vina down every rabbit hole he can find. It is Shetty’s contention that the rock god is now a heavy user of major narcotics, pursuing his dead wife along trails of powder, reading her smoke signals, feeling her needle in his veins. The Singhs manage everything, the businesses, the royalties, the women, the drugs, they have enclosed him within their fierce loyalty, it’s even harder to get anywhere near him than it used to be. It is probable that his devoted retinue—determined as its members are to fulfill his every whim, to slake his every thirst, to offer him whatever partial compensations might momentarily offset his irreducible loss—is in fact killing him with love.

It’s the coward’s way, Shetty tells me, and I’m surprised by the sudden brutality of his words. If he wants to be with my poor girl so much, then why not be a man and shoot himself in the mouth. Yeah. Why doesn’t he just blow his head off and to hell with everything. Then they’ll be together until the end of time.

I liked you better when you were cheerful, I tell him. When you were rolling with the punches, I liked you fine.

And the same to you, he says, leaving. Don’t think you’re the only SOB who can remember when.

Doorman Shetty doesn’t know it, but he’s echoing Plato. This is what the great philosopher has Phaedrus say in the Symposium’s first speech about love:
The gods honor zeal and heroic excellence towards love. But Orpheus … they sent back unfulfilled from Hades, showing him a phantom of the woman … because he seemed to them a coward … [who] didn’t venture to die for the sake of love, as did Alcestis, but rather devised a means of entering Hades while still alive
. Orpheus, the despised
citharode
—the singer with the lyre or, let’s say, guitarist—the trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries, between Apollo and Dionysus, man and nature, truth and illusion, reality and the imagination, even between life and death, was evidently not to austere Plato’s taste. Plato, who preferred martyrdom to mourning, Plato the ayatollah of love.

The pursuit of love beyond death is a harsh and joyless chase. I judge Ormus less harshly than would the Platonic Phaedrus, or that other, rather less eminent thinker, his personal gatekeeper and his dead wife’s dad. I know what he’s going through, because I’ve been down that tunnel too. I’m
there
.

Here he is, Ormus: unable to work, succumbing to Vina’s weaknesses—the drink, the drugs—hoping to find her in her faults, by making them his own. And these are his chemically induced visions of her, of Vina in many guises. Here she is bearing the thousand faces of the women in whom he searched for her after she fled Bombay, also the thousand faces of all the women he gave up for her sake during the ten celibate years. They are all Vina now.

Here she is as herself. He looks on her and feels himself turn to stone.

As the Vina phenomenon swells and grows, he feels himself losing his grip on the truth of her; his Vina is slipping away for ever, dying a second time. The earthquake has already claimed her but after the earthquake comes the tidal wave, drowning Vina under the tsunami of her selves.

As she becomes all things to all people so she becomes nothing to
him—nothing he knows or loves. And there is a worse thought: as she slides ever deeper into the abyss, buried beneath an avalanche of versions, as she enters the halls of the underworld to take her seat on her dark throne, is it possible that she is forgetting him?

Rilke’s Eurydike, entering the nether realms, grows quickly forgetful of the light. The darkness stains her eyes, her heart. When Hermes speaks of Orpheus, this Eurydike terribly answers:
Who?

The name Eurydice/Eurydike means “wide-ruler.” The first recorded use of this name in tellings of the Orpheus story occurs in the first century
B.C.E
. It may therefore be a relatively recent addition to the tale. In the third century
B.C.E
. she was called Agriope, “savage watcher.” This is also one of the names of the witch goddess Hecate; and of wide-ruling Queen Persephone herself.

Which precipitates an avalanche of questions: Did Eurydice—of whose origins we know little, although the official version is that she was a wood nymph, a dryad—actually bubble up from the Underworld to capture Orpheus’s heart? Was she an avatar of the Queen of Darkness herself, hunting for love in the illuminated world above? And therefore, in being swallowed by the earth, was she merely going home?

Is the failure of Orpheus to rescue her a token of the inevitable fate of love (it dies); or of the weakness of art (it can’t raise the dead); of Platonic cowardice (Orpheus won’t die to be with her; no Romeo he); or of the obduracy of the so to speak gods (they harden their hearts against lovers)?

Or—most startlingly—is it a consequence of the reassertion by Eurydice of her true identity, her dark side, her citizenship of the night? And Gayomart, Ormus’s dead twin, his own night self, his Other: is he her true husband, who sits beside her upon her obsidian chair?

Here’s my answer. In the obsessive contemplation of death we may begin to hear, from the dead, whispers of how they lived. Hades, Persephone, all that belongs, for me, to the realm of the so-to-speak. But Vina’s hidden self
during her lifetime
was no metaphor. The person she hid with was me, the self she concealed from her husband she revealed to me. Forget Gayomart; I was the flesh-and-blood Other beside her. I was her other love.

Maybe this is what Ormus can’t admit to himself: that the Vina he doesn’t know is not a construct of her death or afterlife. What he can’t stand is the mystery of her earthly hours. Her nights above the ground.

This is a riddle I can solve but will not.
Yes, it was me
, I could say,
she was going to leave you, you crazy bastard, she was on the point of ditching you and your eye-patched visions and your whistling ears and your ten-year gestures and your famous grand passion, and making a beeline for my big brass bed
.

I am the King of her Underworld
, I could tell him.
She belongs to me
.

I can’t tell him this because I’ve lost her too, and now we’re burning in the same fire. O Ormus, my brother, my self. When you scream the noise bursts from my throat. When I weep the tears seep from your eyes. I will not hurt you more.

And because I can’t, I won’t, he slides deeper into the bottomless pit: not Vina’s abyss, but his own. He can’t believe in her soiling, though she lie ever so deep in the soil. He sees her glowing up through the fog of earth and stone. He imagines her corpse as a blazing candle, phosphorescent, undimmed. His love illuminates her. He seeks her through the night.

He hopes each night to wake and see a familiar figure standing at his window, looking out at the shadowed park, the park before dawn. How often he pictures himself slipping out of bed to stand silently beside her sweet shade and watch the fingers of first light slip across the tall houses and the trees.

I know all his fears, all his hopes, all his dreams, because they are also mine.

Earthquakes, scientists say, are common phenomena. Globally speaking there are around fifteen thousand tremors a decade. Stability is what’s rare. The abnormal, the extreme, the operatic, the unnatural: these rule. There is no such thing as normal life. Yet the everyday is what we need, it’s the house we build to defend us against the big bad wolf of change. If, finally, the wolf is reality, the house is our best defense against the storm: call it civilization. We build our walls of straw or brick not only against the vulpine instability of the times but against our own predatory natures too; against the wolf within.

That’s one view. A house can also be a jail. Big wolves (ask Mowgli, ask Romulus and Remus, ask Kevin Costner, we don’t have to rely on
the Three Little Pigs) are not necessarily bad. And anyhow, this new time of shocks and cracks is out of the ordinary, as even the seismologists agree. The number of tremors is up to over fifteen thousand a
year
.

Everybody reads the papers, right, so I don’t have to spell out in too much detail how the world has changed in these last years, the sudden decrease in the height of the Himalayas, the crack across the Hong Kong-China frontier that turned the New Territories into an island, the sinking of Robben Island, the raising of Atlantis at Santorini-Thera in the southernmost Cyclades, the transformation of rock ’n’ roll into a weapon that blasted Panama’s dictator-on-the-run out of his hideout, and so forth. Everybody gets the new rolling-news stations, so we’ve all watched the earthquakes together, the old order falling, live, as it happens, we have seen the jails bursting open, the breaking of the so to speak seventh seal was a major breaking news story, and we’re all wondering who those four horsemen are. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when the Pinkerton men just kept on coming after them, we turn to one another and ask, wonderingly,
Who are those guys?

So to speak.

These frontier earthquakes are the wonder of the age, aren’t they? Did you see that fault that just ripped out the whole iron curtain? “Unforgettable” doesn’t even come close. And after the Chinese opened fire in Tiananmen, did you see the rift open up along
the entire length
of the Great Wall of China? So now there’s nothing in China (but there’s a big new airport in Japan) that can be seen from the surface of the moon, that’ll teach ’em, right? Right.

Oh, man, the things these quakes are throwing up. Poets for presidents, the end of apartheid, the Nazi gold buried for fifty years deep in Swiss bank accounts, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the
Titanic
, and we guess communism just got buried in the rubble there somewhere. And those Ceaujescus?
So
not missed.

When the changes are this big, you can be sure there will be politicians lining up to take the credit. Seems that the iron curtain quakes were the result of years of covert Western activity underground. Seems we found where the pressure points were and used our best efforts to build that pressure until the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Seems that earthquakes, the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, are now at our disposal. Somebody gives us trouble, we literally
pull the rug out from under his feet. This is what just happened to Saddam Hussein in what is quickly becoming known as the Shake of Araby. No, that’s right, if you’re being picky it hasn’t been one hundred percent successful, he survived et cetera, but
did you see it?
You’ve gotta give our boys credit, they put on one hell of a show. Whoo-hoo! Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on. And, as we hope you noted, no damage at all to the superstructures and infrastructure of that all-important Saudi oil.
Nada
. Zilcho. Zip.

What, now Mexico wants to know if United States or European Union agents were involved in their great quake? Was this some sort of dummy run, some Little Boy-Fat Man demonstration of extreme force? Jeez, there’s always a killjoy. Read our lips.
Of course not
. Would we let Vina Apsara die in some sort of military-industrial megacon-spiracy? That’s just crazy. We loved that woman. What wouldn’t we give to have her here, alive, and singing, right now. The Mexican earthquake was a natural phenomenon which we are doing our darnedest to understand. We have our best people on this. Mother Nature has her own bad moods, and we need to be in touch with those, to live well with the earth, our home. We need to build our knowledge so that we can work on setting in place systems and technologies that will minimize the risk of another such disaster. Our hearts go out to the Mexican people for their sad loss.