Vina was already much the same size and build as my mother, and Ameer let her dress up, not only in saris of lavish silk, but also in the slinky sequinned sheath dresses—plunging necklines and all—with which Ameer loved to display her figure to the city’s sophisticated set. Vina grew her hair long, and once a week Ameer personally applied fresh coconut oil to the growing tresses and massaged the young girl’s scalp. She showed Vina the traditional way of drying long hair, spreading it over a wickerwork surface, under which she set a pot of live coals sprinkled with incense. For her skin, Vina learned how to mix rose water and multani mitti, a clay named after Multan in Pakistan, and apply it as a face mask. Ameer rubbed ghee into Vina’s feet to keep them soft and to draw out “surplus temperature” from the body during the hot season. Best of all, she taught Vina the connection between jewellery and good fortune; godless Ameer was not without her superstitious foibles. Vina took to wearing a gold chain round her waist. (However, nothing could induce her to wear toe rings, once she had been told that they heightened a woman’s fertility.) And for the rest of her life, the great singer would never wear a precious stone until she had “road-tested” it by putting it under her pillow every night for a week, to see what effect it had on her dreams. This tried the tolerance of various illustrious international jewellery stores, but for a good customer, and a star, people were willing to stretch a point.
(If she had known that her last sexual companion, the playboy Raúl Páramo, had covertly slipped the gift of a ruby necklace under her pillow during their night of befuddled love—rubies had been absolutely forbidden her, years before, by Ameer’s personal astrologer—she would have understood at once why she had dreamed of blood sacrifice, and been warned, perhaps, of the nearness of her doom. But she never found the necklace. It was discovered by the police during their search of her hotel room, and before she could be informed, it was all over.
And besides, all this jewel reading is pure malarkey. Nothing to it at all.)
As well as Hindi-Urdu and the secrets of beauty and gems, Vina also drank down the city of Bombay in great thirsty gulps—in particular, to the delight of my father, the language of its buildings. V.V. became her eager instructor, and she his star pupil. My parents had just sunk a great deal of money in a prime property near the Bombay Central railway terminus, the site of the proposed Orpheum theatre, which, my father was determined, would be built in the Deco style that Bombay had made her own, even though the city’s other Deco movie houses were already twenty years old and more “modern” theatres were presently the rage. Vina wanted to know everything. After a while, whenever we went to English-language movies, she paid more attention to the cinemas than to anything on the screen. At the great Deco masterpiece, the red-sandstone-and-cream Eros Cinema (Paramount Pictures, in Vista Vision: Danny Kaye in The Court Jester, warning that on account of the pellet with the poison, the chalice from the palace was the one you must shun, while the vessel with the pestle had the brew that was true), Vina couldn’t remember the plot but was able to mention casually that while the building had been designed by local boy Sohrabji Bhedwar, the fabulous interiors, black, white, gold and chromium, were the work of Fritz von Drieberg, who also renovated the New Empire (20th Century-Fox, Todd-AO, Rodgers, Hammer-stein, a bright golden haze on the meadow, surreys with fringes, Rod Steiger singing his great self-pitying ditty, none of it enough to get her to remember a word of the fabulous score of Ooooooo-klahoma!). At the Metro with its MGM spectaculars—Stewart Granger in Scaramouche, winning the longest sword fight in movie history—her attention wandered to the chairs and carpets (American, imported) and the murals (by students at the J.J. School of Arts, where once Rudyard Kipling’s dad had been in charge). And at the Regal—Maria Montez unforgettable in Universal’s Cobra Woman—architecture-obsessed Vina failed to notice that La Montez was playing twins, but whispered credit was duly given to the Czech Karl Schara for the dazzling sun-ray design of the auditorium. At the Hindi movies, she behaved better and seemed more interested, though we did learn of the merits of Angelo Molle (interior, Broadway Cinema, Dadar). Vina professed unoriginally to be in love with Raj Kapoor, and Ormus was touchingly annoyed. I, however, was half sick of cinemas. Fortunately, the hot-season holidays came, and we went to Kashmir.
Vina blossoming towards womanhood in that once blessed valley is one of my most treasured memories. I remember her in the Shalimar Gardens beside running water, slowing suddenly from a child’s gallop to a woman’s walk and beginning to turn heads. I remember her on a palomino pony in the mountain meadow of Baisaran, her hair streaming behind her as she rode. I remember her on the Bund in Srinagar, falling in love with the names of the magic emporia full of papier mâché and carved walnut furniture and numdah rugs: Suffering Moses and Cheap John and Subhana the Worst. I remember her on a pony trek through the high hamlet of Aru, being horrified that the villagers pretended they had no food to sell us, because they heard me call her “Vina” and assumed we were Hindus, and I also remember the equally intense disgust on her face when, having heard we were Muslims, these same villagers brought us a feast of shirmal and meatballs and refused to let us pay.
I remember her reading voraciously, devouring books—all in English, for she never could read Indian languages as well as she spoke them. In a field of flowers at Gulmarg, she read On the Road (she and Ormus could recite passages by heart, and when she did the book’s elegiac conclusion, I think of Dean … I think of Dean Moriarty, there were tears in her eyes). Or, in a wood of tall trees near Pahalgam, she wondered if any of these conifers might be Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree, which—in an inspired inversion of the normal rules of travel—was regularly visited, at its cloud-concealed top, by fantastic lands. Most heart-piercingly of all, I remember her at the Kolahoi Glacier, talking excitedly about Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and her dream of travelling to another high snowscape, that of the Snaefells-jokull in Iceland, so that on the summer solstice she could position herself in the right place at the right time and watch a rock’s shadow point its swivelling finger, exactly at noon, to the entrance to the Underworld—an Arctic Taenarus Gate. In the light of what happened to her, this memory, I must confess, now gives me a bad attack of the creeps.
(All those cinemas show Hindi movies now. And Kashmir is a battle zone. But the past is not less valuable because it is no longer the present. In fact, it’s more important, because forever unseen. Call it my brand of mysticism, one of the rare spiritual propositions I am prepared to make.)
Ormus Cama did not accompany us on holiday, or to the movies. On the subject of Vina’s extraordinary liaison, Ameer Merchant had laid down the law. With great tolerance—and in spite of vociferous opposition from Lady Spenta Cama, whom, you will recall, she didn’t much care for—she accepted the possibility that this was the beginning of a genuine love match, “but all proprieties must be observed.” Ormus was allowed to call five times a week at tea-time and stay for one hour exactly. My mother agreed not to inform Lady Spenta of Ormus’s visits, on the understanding that she herself would be present throughout them, or, if business appointments made it impossible for her to be there, that the entire encounter take place out of doors, on the porch. Vina agreed without argument. This was not the mutinous inwardness of Nissy Poe, or the frightened yielding of a girl with no options in life. Family life had begun to mend Vina, to make her whole, and she submitted happily to Ameer’s maternal discipline because it sounded like love. Indeed, it was love; hard to say which of them needed the other more.
(Besides, as it turned out, Vina and Ormus had another, unexpected ally, who made possible a series of more private trysts.)
For me, Ormus’s visits were the worst hours of the week. I tried to be absent as often as I could. When I was home, I sulked in my room. After he’d gone, however, things would look up. She’d come to see me. “Come on, Rai,” she’d say. “You know how it is. I’m just killing time with Ormie, waiting for you to grow up and be my man.” She’d st
roke my cheek and even kiss me lightly on the mouth. And the years passed, and I turned thirteen, and her sixteenth birthday was round the corner, and still Ormus Cama refused to touch her, whether chaperones were present or not, and still I sulked in my room, and in she came, “Come on, Rai,” and caressed me. In the light touch of her fingers and lips I could feel all the weight of her forbidden love for Ormus, all that inexpressible desire. I was forbidden fruit too, oppositely vetoed on account of my youth rather than hers. But although there wasn’t anybody chaperoning us, because my parents were just too innocent to think of the possibility of my becoming Ormus’s surrogate, his body double, I would have been prepared to settle for that lesser rôle, to be his shadow, his echo; in fact I was longing for it. But she refused to gratify me, she left me feeling worse than before, she kept me waiting.
It was a long wait. But Vina was worth waiting for.
Vina’s weakness for mentors, for leaders and teachers, the addiction to mumbo jumbo which was her way of papering over the radical uncertainties of life, meant that Ormus could always, and effortlessly, claim her for his own. But I repeat: she was never wholly his possession. Card-game victories and worldwide celebrity notwithstanding, she kept coming back to me.
From Death Valley, the lowest point in the continental United States, you can see Mount Whitney, the highest. So, from the depths of my frustrated misery when Ormus Cama came to tea, I offer the following remembered glimpse of the high days when she and I were lovers:
Many years later in New York, in my third-floor walk-up on a block near St. Mark’s noted for its population of gay Cuban refugees, Vina rolled off my sweating body immediately after we had finished making love, and lit a cigarette. (I have always perspired freely, a slight disadvantage in daily life but a definite plus during sex, when slipperinesses of all sorts, including moral, are efficacious.) “Did I tell you? I saw a light on him,” she said. “A radiance, an aura, that first day in the record store. Not excessive?, but definitely emanating. About equivalent to a hundred-watt bulb, that is to say, enough to illuminate an average-size room. Which was plenty.”
Vina was never one for the niceties of sexual betrayal. She thought nothing of discussing her fidanzato with her back-door man twenty seconds after reaching orgasm, which she reached easily and which, in that period of her life, was noisy and prolonged. (Later, after their marriage, she still came easily but her pleasure would last only an instant before she switched it off, zap, as if she were responding to some invisible conductor’s baton. As if she were playing that beautiful instrument, her own body, and suddenly heard a shockingly false note.) I had learned to accommodate myself to her conversational indelicacies. However, then as now, I lacked the patience for such low-grade material as this “aura,” this “light.”
“Bushwah,” I retorted. “Ormus is no god-man with portable lighting effects. Trouble with you is, you came to India and caught a dose of Wisdom-of-the-East-itis, a.k.a. gurushitia, our incurable killer brain disease. I told you not to drink the water if it wasn’t boiled.”
“Trouble with you,” her smoke blew in my face, “is that you never drink the water unless it’s been boiled for a fucking year.”
She caught India, and it almost killed her. She contracted malaria, typhoid, cholera and hepatitis, and they didn’t reduce her appetite for the place at all. She wolfed it down like a cheap snack from a roadside stall. Then it rejected her, as cruelly as she had been rejected in Virginia or New York State. By that time, however, she had grown strong enough to absorb the blow. She had Ormus, and the future was no longer in anyone else’s gift. She could hit back and survive. But her years of good behaviour ended at that moment. After it, she embraced instability, her own and the world’s, and made up her own rules as she went along. Nothing was certain in her vicinity any more, the ground was always trembling, and of course the fault lines spread through her from top to toe, and faults in human beings always open up in the end, like cracks in the groaning earth.
“The Swimmer,” one of the last songs Ormus Cama wrote for himself and Vina, was recorded on the island of Montserrat beneath a grum-bling volcano. The hard rhythm-and-blues guitar riff that drives the song had been in his head for days. He had woken with it pounding in his ears, and grabbed a guitar and a tape deck to record it before it went away. They weren’t getting along in those days, and the studio sessions were scratchy, wasteful, clenched. Finally, he plugged into the poisoned atmosphere, he turned towards what was blocking things and harnessed it, made the quarrel his subject, and that bitter, prophetic song of doomed love was the result. For himself, he wrote some of his darkest lines. “I swam across the Golden Horn, until my heart just burst. The best in her nature was drowning in the worst.” This in a nasal, dragging delivery that alarmed his admirers, was described by one notoriously waspish music critic (who was unconsciously echoing the singer’s father, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama) as resembling the dying agonies of an aged goat, and proved that he had begun to sink even before the tragedy. But because he still loved her, even in their worst moments he couldn’t deny it, he gave her high, hopeful lines to sing against his own low despair, lines as seductive as the sirens’ song; as if he were both John and Paul, both sour and sweet.
There’s a candle in my window, Vina sang, but I don’t have to tell you, you’re feeling it already, the memory of it, pulling at your emotions. Swim to me. I can’t listen to it myself. Not any more.
The best in our natures is drowning in the worst. It was Ormus’s mother who used to say that. Lady Spenta Cama in the late 1950s fell into a deep sadness, under whose influence she became blasphemously convinced that the Monster of the Lie, Ahriman or Angra Mainyu, was gaining the victory over Ahura Mazda and the Light, in spite of what was prophesied in the great books, the Avesta, the Yasna and the Bundahish. Priests in their white garments were invited with increasing frequency into the apartment on Apollo Bunder, and they brought their little fires with them and chanted nobly. “Hear ye then with your ears, and see the bright flames with the eyes of the Better Mind.” Ardaviraf Cama, Lady Spenta’s silent son, would sit with her and haltingly participate in the fire rituals, wearing that sweet expression which was his hallmark; Ormus, however, absented himself. As for her ageing, drink-blurred husband, his impatience with her orisons only increased with the passing years. “Blasted priests make the place look like a blasted hospital,” he would grumble, passing through the chamber of her devotions. “Blasted fire’ll probably end up burning the blasted house down.”
The house of Cama was indeed in danger, but not from holy fire. On the tenth anniversary of the independence of India, Spenta received a letter from William Methwold, who was now a peer of the realm, a Foreign Office grandee, and wrote to wish his old friends well “on so auspicious a date.” However, the letter also had a less auspicious purpose. “If I address this to you, my dear Spenta, rather than to Brother D.X.C., it is because I have, I fear, difficult tidings to impart.” Then followed a series of contorted, digressive animadversions on the general subject of banquets he had recently attended, in particular one “rather jolly affair” involving a re-staging of Twelfth Night at Middle Temple on Twelfth Night, Middle Temple being the place where Twelfth Night had first been staged on an earlier Twelfth Night; at any rate—and at last Lord Methwold accelerated towards his dreadful point—he had been seated by the purest chance next to the eminent judge Henry “Hang’em” Higham, who turned out to be a former classmate of “Brother D.X.C.’s” and revealed, over the brandy, that while Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had been an enthusiastic eater of dinners, in his legal studies he “hadn’t come up to scratch.” He had flunked his examinations, and had never been admitted to the Bar “in any shape or form.”
Lord Methwold had “found the accusation well-nigh impossible to credit.” In London he had required enquiries to be made, and found, to his dismay, that Henry Higham had been right. “I can only conclude,” he wrote in his letter, “that your husband’s papers were forgeries, forgeries of
the highest quality, may I say; that he simply decided to brazen it out, on the assumption that nobody in India would bother to check; and if they did, it is not impossible, as you must know, nor indeed overly expensive, to buy a fellow’s silence in that great country of yours, for which I have never ceased to feel the keenest nostalgia.”
Lady Spenta Cama loved her husband in spite of every thing, and he loved her. Ormus Cama always believed that the foundation of his parents’ mutual affection was a sexual compatibility which old age had done nothing to erode. “The old folks went at it most nights,” he’d say. “We all had to pretend we hadn’t heard anything, which wasn’t easy, because they made plenty of noise, particularly when my boozy father insisted upon what he called the English position, which I don’t think my mother enjoyed. Those shrieks weren’t really of pleasure, but she was prepared to suffer a lot for the sake of love.” After she discovered that Sir Darius had built his entire professional life on a falsehood—that he was, covertly, a Servant of the Lie—Lady Spenta moved into a separate bedroom, and at night the apartment was full of the sad silence of that ending. She never gave Sir Darius a reason for her departure from the conjugal bed, and wrote to Lord Methwold imploring him, in the name of their long friendship, to keep her husbands secret. “He has not practised law for many years, and when he did, all agreed that he gave sterling service, so no harm done, eh?” Methwold wrote back to agree, “on the single condition, my very dear Spenta, that you continue to write and give me all the news, as I no longer feel comfortable about writing to D.X.C. himself, knowing what I now know.”
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Page 16
