The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  “Minnehaha, Laughing Water,” Ameer followed her own train of thought. “So haha must be laughing, which means Minne is water. Then what’s Mickey?”

  “Mickey,” said my father sternly, “is a mouse.”

  The philosopher Aristotle was dismissive of mythology. Myths were just fanciful yarns, or so he opined, containing no valuable truths about our natures or our surroundings. Only by reason, he argued, will men understand themselves and master the world in which they live. For this view Aristotle had, in my childhood, some minority local support. “The true miracle of reason,” Sir Darius Xerxes Cama once (or, actually, rather too often) said, “is reason’s victory over the miraculous.” Most other leading minds, I’m bound to report, disagreed; Lady Spenta Cama, for example, for whom the miraculous had long ago supplanted the quotidian as the norm, and who would have been utterly lost, without her angels and devils, in the tragic jungle of the everyday.

  Also ranged against Aristotle and Sir Darius was Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744). In Vico, as for so many present-day theorists of childhood, the early years are the crucial ones. The themes and dramas of those first moments set the pattern for all that follows. For Vico, mythology is the family album or storehouse of a culture’s childhood, containing that society’s future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles. The private drama of the vanished Villa Thracia colours and prophesies our subsequent way of living in the world.

  “Keep away from her,” said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babies, philosophers from maybes. Vina had her hooks in me, and the consequence was the story of my life. “Bad egg,” Ameer called her, and “rotten apple” too. And then, dripping and bruised, she arrived at our door in the middle of the night, begging to be taken in.

  Just seven days after our Juhu experiences, at six o’clock in the evening, it began to rain out of a clear sky, in hot, fat drops. Heavy rain, whose warmth did nothing to cool down the maximum-humidity heat wave. And as the rain increased in force, so too, in a freak of nature, the temperature also rose, so that the water, falling, evaporated before it hit the ground and turned to mist. Wet and white, rarest of all Bombay’s meteorological phenomena, the mist rolled in across the Back Bay. The citizenry, strolling on the Parade for the customary “eating of the air,” fled in search of shelter. Mist obliterated the city; the world was a white sheet, waiting to be written upon. V.V, Ameer and I stayed indoors, clutching our poker hands, and in that bizarre whiteness our bidding became extreme, reckless, as if we intuited that the moment required extravagant gestures of us all. My father lost even more matchsticks than usual, and at higher speed. A white night fell.

  We went to our beds, but none of us could sleep. When Ameer came to kiss me good night, I said, “I keep waiting for something to happen.” Ameer nodded. “I know.”

  Later, after midnight, it was Ameer who first heard the noises outside, the bumping and thumping, as if an animal were loose on the front verandah, and then an exhausted, tearful panting. She sat straight up in bed and said, “Sounds like whatever Umeed was hoping for has turned up at last.”

  By the time we reached the verandah the girl had passed out on the boards. She had a black eye and there were cuts on her forearms, some of them deep. Glistening serpents of hair lay across the wooden verandah floor. Medusa. It crossed my mind that we should look at her face only in a burnished shield, lest we be turned to stone. Her white T-shirt and jeans were sodden. I could not help looking at the outlines of her thick nipples. Her breathing was too fast, too heavy, and she was groaning as she breathed. “It’s her,” I said, stupidly.

  “And we have no choice,” my mother said. “And what will be will be.”

  Dry, warm, bandaged, and eating hot porridge from a bowl, with a towel wound over her hair like a pharaoh’s crown, the girl held court in my parents’ bed, and we three Merchants stood before her like courtiers; like bears. “He tried to kill me,” she said. “Piloo, the yellow-belly. He attacked me. So I ran away.” Her voice failed. “Well, he threw me out,” she said. “But I won’t go back, anyway; whatever happens.” And Ameer, who had warned me off her, said fiercely, “Go back? Out of the question. Nissa Doodhwala, you will kindly just stay put.” Which utterance was rewarded by a tentative, though still suspicious, smile.

  “Don’t call me by that bastard’s name, okay?” the girl said. “I left there with nothing. From now on I’ll be whatever name I choose.”

  And a few moments later: “Vina Apsara. That’s my name.”

  My mother soothed her, reassured her—“Yes, Vina, okay, baby, whatever you want”—and then probed: what had provoked so violent an attack? Vina’s face slammed shut, like a book. But the next morning the answer arrived on our doorstep, anxiously ringing the bell: Ormus Cama, beautiful and dangerous as the revenant sun, nineteen years old, with a “reputation.” And in search of forbidden fruit.

  It was the beginning of the end of my days of joy, spent with those Thracian deities, my parents, amidst legends of the city’s past and visions of its future. After a childhood of being loved, of believing in the safety of our little world, things would begin to crumble for me, my parents would quarrel horribly and die before their time. Fleeing this frightful disintegration, I turned towards my own life, and there, too, I found love; but that existence also came to an untimely end. Then for a long time there was just me, and my painful remembering.

  Now there is at last a new flowering of happiness in my life. (This, too, will be told at the proper time.) Perhaps this is why I can face the horror of the past. It’s tough to speak of the beauty of the world when one has lost one’s sight, an anguish to sing music’s praises when your ear trumpet has failed. So also it is hard to write about love, even harder to write lovingly, when one has a broken heart. Which is no excuse; happens to everyone. One must simply overcome, always overcome. Pain and loss are “normal” too. Heartbreak is what there is.

  4

  THE INVENTION OF MUSIC

  Even though Ormus Cama, our absurdly handsome and impossibly gifted hero, has just returned to the centre of my stage—a little too late to provide prompt comfort to the young lady for whose distress he is largely to blame!—I must briefly halt my runaway bus of a narrative, so that I may help the reader to a better understanding of how matters had arrived at so sorry a pass. And so I take you back to Ormus’s father, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, now in his middle sixties, stretched out on a British-style button-back leather chesterfield sofa in his Apollo Bunder library; with his eyes closed and a cut-glass tumbler and a decanter of whisky by his side; and dreaming.

  Whenever he dreamed, he dreamed of England: England as a pure, white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above a silver winding river, with a spreading parterre of brilliant green lawns edged by ancient oaks and elms, and the classic geometry of flower beds orchestrated by unseen master gardeners into a four-seasons symphony of colour. White curtains were blowing at the open French windows of the great house’s orangery wing. In the dream Sir Darius was once again a young boy in short trousers, and the mansion was a magnet drawing him forward across its perfect lawns, past the topiary hedges and the ornamental fountain pullulating with figures from ancient Greece and Rome, the hirsute, lecherous gods, the naked heroes with their upraised swords, the serpents, the ravished women, the severed heads, the centaurs. The curtains wound themselves around him, but he fought free, for somewhere in this house, waiting for him, combing her long hair and singing a sweet song, was his mother, whom he had lost so long ago, whom he mourned every day, and to whose bosom his dreaming self hastened to return.

  He couldn’t find her. He searched the house in vain, scurrying through the interconnecting grandeur of anachronistic state rooms; boudoirs of murderous Restoration miladies who had hidden their daggers and poisons in secret cavities behind fleur-de-lys panelling; Baroque offices of power where bewigged grandees w
ith perfumed kerchiefs had once dispensed patronage and largesse to their malodorous, genuflecting protégés, and where, too, conspiracies of state had been hissed by great men into the ears of murderers and thieves; grand carpeted Jugendstil stairways down which betrayed princesses had hurled themselves in fits of lonely despair; and medieval star chambers where summary justice had once been handed down beneath artists’ impressions of whirling galaxies and dying suns … until he stumbled out into an inner courtyard of the white house, where at the far end of a pool of cold black water stood the naked figure of a beautiful and blindfolded woman, her arms spread wide, as if she was preparing to dive. But she did not dive. The palms of her hands turned invitingly towards him, and he couldn’t resist, he was no longer a boy in short trousers but a man full of desire; he ran towards her, even though he knew the scandal would unmake him. Dreaming, he intuited that the dream spoke of something buried in his past, buried so deep that he himself had entirely forgotten what it was.

  “Yes, come to me,” whispered Scandal, enfolding him in her arms, “my darling, my favourite servant of the Lie.”

  When he was awake, and the memory of the blindfolded nude by the swimming pool had faded into the limbo of things half remembered and uncertain, and the whisky had loosened his tongue, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama would soliloquize yearningly about the country houses of old England—Boot Magna, Castle Howard, Blandings, Chequers, Brideshead, Cliveden, Styles. As he grew older and thickened by drink, certain boundaries blurred in his memory, and nowadays he drew only the vaguest of distinctions between Toad Hall and Blenheim Palace, Longleat and Gormenghast. His nostalgia applied equally to the dream houses of fiction and the real country seats of “bluebloods” and prime ministers and rich arrivistes like the Astor clan. Real or fictional, these mighty piles represented for Sir Darius the closest approximation to earthly Paradise that human imagination and ingenuity had managed to create. He spoke more and more often of moving the family to England on a permanent basis. On Ormus Cama’s nineteenth birthday his father gave him the first volume of Sir Winston Churchill’s new History of the English-Speaking Peoples. “Not content with winning the war,” Sir Darius said, shaking his head admiringly, “the old bulldog went off and won the Nobel Prize in Literature also. No wonder they call him Winnie. British youth looks up to him, seeks to follow where he trod. Great things are consequently expected of the younger generation in England. Our youth, by sad contrast,” he said, looking disapprovingly at Ormus, “is in a state of advanced decay. Old virtues—service of community, discipline of personality, memorizing of poetry, mastery of firearms, pleasure in falconry, formal dancing, building of character through sport—these things have lost meaning. Only in the mother country can they be rediscovered.”

  “On the cover of this book the King of England has an arrow stuck in his eye,” Ormus pointed out. “I guess archery must not be a specialty of the bulldog breed.”

  Sir Darius was predictably provoked, and would have relieved himself of a further tirade had Lady Spenta not added, immovably, “If you are dreaming again of relocating in London, be assured that I personally will never consent to upping sticks.” Which turned out, like all prophecies, to be untrue.

  Ormus Cama withdrew. Abandoning his parents to their ancient rituals of disagreement, he wandered through the sprawling Apollo Bunder apartment. While he remained in Sir Darius’s field of vision his movements were exaggeratedly adolescent, that is, indolent and listless, the very picture of decadent Parsi youth. Once he was out of his father’s sight, however, a remarkable transformation occurred. It should be remembered that Ormus, a born singer, had not opened his lips in song since the night he was almost smothered in his bed by his elder brother Cyrus; and a stranger, watching him now, might easily have concluded that all the unsung music of his silenced years had accumulated in him, causing acute discomfort, even agony; and that the pent-up melodies were actually trying to burst out of his body as he walked.

  Oh, how he swayed and twitched!

  If I say that Ormus Cama was the greatest popular singer of all, the one whose genius exceeded all others, who was never caught by the pursuing pack, then I am confident that even my toughest-minded reader will readily concede the point. He was a musical sorcerer whose melodies could make city streets begin to dance and high buildings sway to their rhythm, a golden troubadour the jouncy poetry of whose lyrics could unlock the very gates of Hell; he incarnated the singer and songwriter as shaman and spokesman, and became the age’s unholy unfool. But by his own account he was more than that; for he claimed to be nothing less than the secret originator, the prime innovator, of the music that courses in our blood, that possesses and moves us, wherever we may be, the music that speaks the secret language of all humanity, our common heritage, whatever mother tongue we speak, whatever dances we first learned to dance.

  From the beginning he claimed that he was literally years ahead of his time.

  At the moment of which I now speak, the butterfly was still in its chrysalis, the oracle had not found its voice. And if I mention, as I must, the grinding rotation of his hips as he moved through the apartment on Apollo Bunder, and the increasing explicitness of his pelvic thrusts and the dervish thrashings of his arms; if I linger upon the baby-cruel curl of his upper lip, or the thick black hair hanging in sensual coils around his brow, or the sideburns that were straight out of a Victorian melodrama—if, above all, I attempt to reproduce the few strange sounds he was managing to produce, those unnhhs, uhh-hhhs, those ohhs—then you, stranger, might excusably write him off as a mere echo, just another of that legion of impersonators who first rejoiced in, and afterwards rendered grotesque, the fame of a young truck driver from Tupelo, Miss., born in a shotgun shack with a dead twin by his side.

  I don’t deny that, one day in early 1956, a girl named Persis Kalamanja—with whom Lady Spenta Cama was hoping to arrange Ormus’s marriage; indeed, Lady Spenta was in those days actively and urgently negotiating the same with Kalamanja père et mère—took Ormus Cama down to the Rhythm Center store in Fort, Bombay, that rhinestone treasure chest full of the antiquated ditties of an older generation’s moonsters, junesters and toupéed croonsters, which just occasionally came into possession of true jewels, perhaps from sailors on shore leave from an American naval vessel in the harbour. There, in a listening booth, hoping to impress her putative husband-to-be by her cultural savvy (for Persis was much taken with the idea of the match; Ormus, as I may have mentioned before, and will no doubt have occasion enviously to repeat, was an almost irresistibly sweet-featured fellow), eager Persis played Ormus a new, but already crackly, 78 rpm record, and to her deep, though short-lived, satisfaction, the young man’s eyes widened in what might have been terror, or love, just like any other teenager hearing in the voice of Jesse Garon Parker, as he sang “Heartbreak Hotel,” the sound of his own unarticulated miseries, his own hunger, isolation and dreams.

  But Ormus was no ordinary teenager. What Persis had mistaken for enchanted bliss was actually surging anger, an uncontainable rage spreading in him like the plague. Halfway through the song it burst out of him. “Who is he?” shouted Ormus Cama. “What’s the name of this blasted thief?”

  He came out of the booth at high speed, as if he believed he might be able to grab the singer by the collar of his shirt if he moved fast enough. Facing him was a tall, amused girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, but sophisticated enough for both of them, in a baggy sweatshirt that declared its allegiance to certain unnamed Giants in New York. “Thief?” she enquired. “I’ve heard him called lots of names, but that’s a new one on me.”

  Many different versions of the first encounter between Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama are presently in circulation, thanks to the clouds of mythologisation, regurgitation, falsification and denigration that have surrounded their story for years: depending which journal you read, you might have heard that he transformed himself into a white bull and carried her away on his back while she, warbling gaily, clutched with erot
ic delight at his two long, curved and gleaming horns; or that she was indeed an alien from a galaxy far, far away who, having identified Ormus as the most perfectly desirable male specimen on the planet, beamed down smack in front of him at the Gateway of India, holding a space flower in her hand. The Rhythm Center encounter is dismissed as “apocryphal” by many commentators; too contrived, they shrug, too banal, and what is all that about having written the song? Plus, these cynics add, if you want yet more proof that the story is phoney baloney, try this for size. The whole thing simply makes no sense at all unless you accept that Ormus Cama, quiffed, sideburned and pelvis-swivelling Ormus, had never previously heard of the reigning king of rock ’n’ roll. “This was apparently 1956,” the critics jeer. “In 1956 even the Pope had heard of Jesse Parker. Even the Man in the Moon.”

  In Bombay in those days, however, communications technology was in its infancy. There was no tv, and radios were bulky items under strict parental control. Also, the state broadcasting corporation, All-India Radio, was forbidden to play Western popular music, and the only Western records pressed in India, at the Dum Dum factory in Calcutta, tended to be selections from Placido Lanza, or the soundtrack music from the MGM movie Tom Thumb. Print media were likewise parochial. I cannot remember seeing a single photograph of American singing stars in any local showbiz magazine, let alone the daily papers. But of course there were imported American magazines, and Ormus could have seen pictures of Jesse Parker (perhaps alongside the sinister figure of “Colonel” Tom Presley, his manager) in Photoplay or Movie Screen. And that was also the year of Treat Me Tender, Jesse’s first movie, which played at the New Empire cinema, certified for adults only. However, Ormus Cama always insisted he had neither heard of Parker nor seen his photograph until that day in the Rhythm Center store; he always claimed that his dead twin Gayomart was his only style guru—Gayomart, who apparently came to him in dreams.