The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  The future of the milk business became Piloo Doodhwala’s only topic of discussion, his fixation. At home in his Bandra villa, pacing up and down in the garden, he would shriek and gibber like a caged langur. He was a man of his generation, the last for whom breast-beating and hair-tearing were still legitimate pursuits. His family and the magnificentourage, both, in different ways, fearful of the future, would hear him out in silence. His weepings, his shakings of fists, his speeches addressed to the empty, cloudless heavens. His complaints about the injustice of human life. Vina, who had seen too many things in her short life, was less tight-lipped, and the day came when she could stand it no longer.

  “Oh, to hell with your stupid goats,” Vina burst out. “Why don’t you just cut their horrible throats and turn them into meat and coats?” Parrots flew from the trees, alarmed by the timbre of her voice; their droppings polluted Piloo’s garments and, indeed, his agitated hair. She herself, tickled by the accident of the triple rhyme, began, in spite of her profound annoyance, to giggle.

  The watching Doodhwala girls braced themselves delightedly for the lashing fury with which their father would now surely chastise the upstart pauper. But—in spite of her blatant insubordination, and what Ameer Merchant would have called her “fit of the gigglics”; in spite of the rain of parrot shit—no such fury manifested itself. Like unlooked-for sunshine when there has been talk of storms, Piloo Doodhwala’s smile arrived, first a little hesitantly, and then breaking out in all its full-beam glory. “Thanking you, Miss America,” he said. “Meat phor the interior, owercoat phor exterior. Idea is good, but”—and here he tapped a finger against his temple—“it has prompted one further idea, which is ewen betterer. It may be, madamoozel, that you hawe rescued, albeit inadwertently, our poor phamily phortunes.” At which unexpected (and, in their view, entirely inappropriate) lavishing of praise upon the household’s Cinderella, Halva and Rasgulla knew not whether to take umbrage or rejoice.

  After this unusual exchange, Piloo Doodhwala ordered the slaughter of all his herds and the distribution of the meat, gratis, to the deserving and non-vegetarian poor. It was a royal massacre; the gutters near the abattoirs bubbled over with blood, flooding the streets, which grew sticky and stank. Flies crowded so thickly that in places it became inadvisable, for reasons of low visibility, to drive. But the meat was good, and plentiful, and Piloo’s political prospects began to improve. Vote goat indeed. If Piloo had run for governor that week, no man could have stood against him.

  His distressed goatherds, seeing the approach of destitution as clearly as if it were the mail train from the north, sought urgent assurances. Piloo toured the countryside, whispering conundrums in their ears. “Newer phear,” he said. “The goats we will hawe in phuture could not be depheated by Exwyzee or any other alphabetists. They will be top-quality goats, and you will all grow phat and lazy, becaase you will still get all your pay, though the goats will not require any maintenance, and also, they will not cost one single rupee to pheed. Phrom now on,” he concluded cryptically, “we will raise not simply goats but ghoasts.”

  The riddle of the “ghoasts”—or ghoats, or goasts, or what you will—must remain unsolved awhile. We have arrived once again, by recirculation, at the moment of Vina’s expulsion from Piloo’s portals. News of her scandalous liaison with Ormus Cama has reached her latest guardian’s ears; a quarrel, which has already been alluded to, has already taken place. I offer no further details of those vituperative exchanges, or of the violent struggles that immediately preceded Vina’s flight south in the pouring rain, which took her all the way from the Doodhwalas’ Bandra mansion to our doorstep at Villa Thracia, Cuffe Parade. Instead, I take up the story from its last resting place: namely, the arrival of Ormus at our family home on Cuffe Parade, urgent with concern for Vina’s well-being; and the further arrival, hard on Ormus’s heels, of Shri Piloo Doodhwala, accompanied by wife, daughters and the full “magnificentourage.”

  My mother, Ameer, had telephoned him earlier to inform him that Vina was safe and well, and had gone on to speak a few home truths about his treatment of her. “She will not return to your house,” Ameer finished. “Return?” barked Piloo. “Madam, I hawe put her out of doors, like a common bitch. Return is not the question.” In the light of this telephonic washing of hands, the arrival of Piloo & Co. was something of a surprise. Vina sprang up and retreated at high speed to the room my mother had given her. Ormus rushed forward to stand face-to-face with his beloved’s tormentor. It was left to my mild father to ask Piloo his business. The milkman shrugged. “Regarding that ungratephul girl,” he said. “Monies hawe been paid. Phees, cash, spending on account. There has been major outlay of phunds, and in consequence one is considerably out of pocket. Reimbursement is not unreasonably required.”

  “You’re asking us to purchase her?” My fine, high-minded father took a moment to grasp the horrible truth. Piloo made a face. “Not as such purchase,” he insisted. “I do not insist on a profit. But you are an honourable man, isn’t it? I am certain you would not ask me to swallow the loss.”

  “We are not speaking here of goods and chattels—” began V.V. Merchant, in outrage, but at this point Ormus Cama interrupted him. We were all standing like statues in our living room—the shock of the encounter had driven all thoughts of relaxation from our minds—and Ormus Cama’s eye had fallen upon a pack of cards and a heap of matchsticks on a low table in a corner, the remnants of a light-hearted game of poker a couple of nights back, before the world began to change. He riffled the pack under Piloo’s nose. “Hey, big-mouth,” he said. “I’ll play you for her. What do you say, hot shot? All or nothing. Do you dare to do it, or are you a gutless cutlass?”

  Ameer began to protest, but my father—whose own fatal weakness would turn out to be gambling—silenced her. Piloo’s eyes were gleaming, and the members of his magnificentourage, who were eavesdropping on the confrontation from the porch outside, began to hoot and cheer. Piloo nodded slowly. His voice grew very soft. “All or nothing, is it. Either I must giwe up ‘all’ my legitimate claim to recompense or … but what is ‘or’? What is ‘nothing’? If you lose, what do I win?”

  “You win me,” said Ormus. “I will work for you, any work you name, until I have worked off Vina’s debt.”

  “Stop it, Ormus,” said Ameer Merchant. “This is childish, absurd.”

  “I accept,” sighed Piloo Doodhwala, and bowed.

  Ormus bowed back. “One cut each,” he said. “High card wins all. Suit immaterial. Aces high, jokers beat aces. Further cuts to decide if we draw equal cards.”

  “Agreed,” breathed Piloo. “But we will play vith my pack.” He snapped his fingers. His Pathan bearer marched into our living room carrying, on the white-gloved palm of his outstretched right hand, a silver salver upon which lay a pack of red playing cards whose seal had not been broken. “Don’t,” I begged Ormus. “There’s some trick.” But Ormus picked up the pack, broke the seal and nodded. “Let’s begin.”

  “No shuffle,” Piloo whispered. “Just cut.”

  “Good,” said Ormus, and did so. And drew the two of hearts.

  Piloo laughed. And cut. And drew the two of spades. The smile died on his lips, and the Pathan bearer recoiled from the ferocity of his master’s glare.

  Ormus cut again. The ten of diamonds. Piloo became very stiff. His hand jerked forward to the salver. He drew the ten of clubs. The Pathan bearer’s arm began to tremble. “Hold the tray with both hands,” Piloo snarled, “or else phind somebody whose shit hasn’t turned to water.”

  On the third cut they both drew eights. On the fourth it was one-eyed jacks and on the fifth, the jacks with both eyes. By the sixth round, when they both drew fives, the silence in the room had become so noisy that even Vina emerged from her retreat to find out what all the fuss was about. Piloo Doodhwala was sweating heavily; his white kurta was sticking to the curve of his belly as well as the small of his back. Ormus Cama, however, was perfectly calm. In the seventh round b
oth men drew kings; in the eighth, nines. In the ninth it was kings again, and in the tenth it was fours.

  “That’s enough,” Piloo broke the silence. “From now on I’m drawing first.”

  On the eleventh cut, Piloo Doodhwala drew the ace of spades, and gave a great, deep sigh. Before he had finished exhaling, Ormus had cut for his card. It was the joker. Ormus remained impassive, looking down at the grinning clown on the silver dish. Piloo Doodhwala sagged visibly. Then he rallied, clicked his fingers under Ormus’s nose, snapped, “Keep the bitch,” and walked out.

  Ormus Cama went over to Vina, who was looking, for once, like a scared twelve-year-old. “You heard the man,” he grinned. “I won you fair and square. Now you belong to me.”

  He was wrong. Vina belonged to no man, not even to him, though she loved him till the day she died. She reached out towards him, offering a caress of thanks. He stepped back, seriously. “No touching,” he reminded her. “Not until you are sixteen years and one day old.”

  “And not then, not until you’re decently married,” said my mother, “if I have anything to do with it.”

  It is time to accentuate the positive. For are there no noble qualities, no high achievements, no exaltations of the spirit to praise in the life of the great sub-continent? Must it always be violence or gambling or crooks? These are touchy times. National sensitivities are on permanent alert, and it is getting harder by the moment to say boo to a goose, lest the goose in question belong to the paranoid majority (goosism under threat), the thin-skinned minority (victims of gooso-phobia), the militant fringe (Goose Sena), the separatists (Goosistan Liberation Front), the increasingly well organized cohorts of society’s historical outcasts (the ungoosables, or Scheduled Geese), or the devout followers of that ultimate guruduck, the sainted Mother Goose. Why, after all, would any sensible person wish to say boo in the first place? By constantly throwing dirt, such booers disqualify themselves from serious consideration (they cook their own goose).

  It is in the most constructive spirit imaginable, therefore, that I record the heartwarming news that Vina Apsara, who once, while standing on a beach wrapped up in Old Glory, hurled abuse at all things Indian, began at Villa Thracia to fall in love with her biological father’s great country of origin. She had to wait for Ormus Cama until after her sixteenth birthday, but this other love entailed no waiting period. She consummated it right away.

  To her last day, I could always see in her the skittish, disintegrated creature she’d been when she first came to us, looking as if she might run away again at any moment. What a piece of jetsam she was then, what a casualty! Literally selfless, her personality smashed, like a mirror, by the fist of her life. Her name, her mother and family, her sense of place and home and safety and belonging and being loved, her belief in the future, all these things had been pulled out from under her, like a rug. She was floating in a void, denatured, dehistoried, clawing at the shapelessness, trying to make some sort of mark. An oddity. She put me in mind of one of Columbus’s sailors, close to mutiny, fearing that at any moment she might plunge off the edge of the earth, staring longingly at the lookout in the crow’s-nest, whose spyglass probed the liquid emptiness, searching vainly for land. Later, when she was famous, she herself often mentioned Columbus. “He went looking for Indians and found America. I hadn’t planned on going anywhere, but I found more Indians than I could handle.” Vina’s smart mouth, her lippiness. That, at the age of twelve, she already had.

  She was a rag-bag of selves, torn fragments of people she might have become. Some days she sat crumpled in a corner like a string-cut puppet, and when she jerked into life you never knew who would be there, in her skin. Sweet or savage, serene or stormy, funny or sad: she had as many moods as the Old Man of the Sea, who would transform himself over and over again if you tried to grab him, for he knew that if you did capture him he would have to grant your deepest wish. Fortunately for her, she found Ormus, who just hung on to her, held her spirit tight in his love without laying a finger on her body, until at last she stopped changing, was no longer ocean then fire then avalanche then wind, and was just herself, one day after her sixteenth birthday, in his arms. And then she kept her side of the bargain and, for one night, gave him his heart’s desire.

  That she was in bad trouble, she already knew. That sassiness, delinquency, nihilism and unpredictability didn’t add up to a person, she had worked out for herself. In her own way, and in spite of all her surface insouciance and defiance, she possessed a constructive spirit, and it’s my belief that she was spurred on in her heroic act of self-construction by the experience of living chez nous, where talk of building was constant (these were the days when V. V. and Ameer started work on the great Orpheum movie theatre, the project that would eventually ruin them). What she set about constructing was put together with the materials that came immediately to hand: that is to say, Indian goods. What she built was “Vina Apsara,” the goddess, the Galatea with whom the whole world would fall, as Ormus fell, as I fell, in love.

  She began with music. “Vina.” She’d heard a musician in Piloo’s entourage playing, coarsely and without feeling, an instrument that in spite of such brutalisation “made a sound like god; and when I found out what it was called, I knew that was the name for me.” The music of India, from northern sitar ragas to southern Carnatic melodies, always created in her a mood of inexpressible longing. She could listen to recordings of ghazals for hours at a stretch, and was entranced, too, by the complex devotional music of the leading qawwals. Longing for what? Not, surely, for an “authentic” Indianness that she could never attain? Rather, I must conclude—and this is hard for a lifelong sceptic like me to write—that what Vina wanted was a glimpse of the unknowable. The music offered the tantalising possibility of being borne on the waves of sound through the curtain of maya that supposedly limits our knowing, through the gates of perception to the divine melody beyond.

  A religious experience, to be brief, was what she wanted. In a sense, this meant she understood the music far better than I, for its spiritual element is of central importance to so many people, not least the musicians themselves. I, however, am my parents’ child, in that I have always been deaf to religious communications of all types. Unable to take them at face value—what, you really think there was an angel there? Reincarnation, honestly?—I have made the mistake (encouraged by a childhood in which I hardly ever heard the name of any deity mentioned with approval in our home) of assuming that everyone else was of the same mind, and thought of such speech as metaphorical, and nothing more. This has not always proved a happy assumption to make. It gets one into arguments. And yet—though I know that dead myths were once live religions, that Quetzalcoatl and Dionysus may be fairy tales now but people, to say nothing of goats, once died for them in large numbers—I can still give no credence whatsoever to systems of belief. They seem flimsy, unpersuasive examples of the literary genre known as “unreliable narration.” I think of faith as irony, which is perhaps why the only leaps of faith I’m capable of are those required by the creative imagination, by fictions that don’t pretend to be fact, and so end up telling the truth. I am fond of saying that all religions have one thing in common, namely that their answers to the great question of our origins are all quite simply wrong. So when Vina made, as she would repeatedly make, announcements of her latest conversion, I would reply, “Oh, sure,” and convince myself that she was, in a profound sense, just kidding. But she wasn’t. She meant it, every time. If Vina had decided to worship the Great Pumpkin, then assuredly, come Hallowe’en, hers—and not poor Linus’s—would have been the sincerest pumpkin patch of all.

  “Apsara” was a clue too, if I hadn’t been too stupid to pick it up. It indicated a quantity of serious reading, and even though Vina liked to claim that she’d taken the name from a magazine advertisement in Femina or Filmfare for beauty soap or luxury silks or some such frippery, hindsight shows up that subterfuge for the ruse it was. She had plunged into the great matter of t
his strange, huge land in which she had been exiled, far from everything she’d ever thought or been or known. A refusal of the customary marginalised rôle of the exile, it was—I see it now—heroic.

  “Vina Apsara” sounded to her twelve-year-old self like someone who might plausibly exist. She would bring her into being, using, as her tools, her love for Ormus Cama, her incredible will, her fabulous hunger for life, and her voice. A woman who can sing is never entirely beyond salvation. She can open her mouth and set her spirit free. And Vina’s singing needs no paeans of praise from me. Put on one of her records, lie back and float downstream. She was a great river, which could bear us all away. Sometimes I try to imagine how she would have sounded singing ghazals. For even though she dedicated her life to another music entirely, the pull of India, its songs, its languages, its life, worked upon her always, like the moon.

  I do not flatter myself (or not always) that she came back for me.

  To my parents, Vina was the daughter they never had, the child they had chosen to forgo so that they could concentrate on me and on their work; she was the life they thought they did not have room for in their lives. But now that she had arrived, they were filled with joy, and there turned out to be time for everything, after all. She picked up languages as easily as, throughout her life, she picked up lovers. It was in those years that she perfected her use of “Hug-me,” our polyglot trash-talk. “Chinese khana ka big mood hai,” she learned to say, when she wanted a plate of noodles, or—for she was a great hobbit fancier—“Apun J.R.R. Tolkien’s Angootiyan-ka-Seth ko too-much admire karta chhé.” Ameer Merchant, the family’s great word-gamester, paid Vina the compliment of incorporating many of the girl’s locutions into her own personal lexicon. Ameer and Vina were, linguistically at least, two of a kind. (And my mother saw, in her new ward, some deeper echoes of her own unconventional spirit.) Ameer was always convinced of the deep meanings hidden in euphony and rhyme: that is to say, she was a popster manqué. So, in her increasingly intimate moments of Vinateasing and general raillery, Ameer would conflate Ormus Cama and Vasco da Gama—“Ormie da Cama, your great explorer, discovering you like a new world full of spices”—and it was a short step from Gama to Gana, song, and between Cama and Kama, the god of love, the distance was even less. Ormus Kama, Ormus Gana. The embodiment of love, and also of song itself. My mother was right. Her word games said more than she knew.