“I fear I may be succumbing to error,” Spenta confided unhappily in a later letter to Lord Methwold. “As Parsis we are proud to believe in a forward-moving view of the cosmos. Our words and deeds are part, in their small way, of the battle in which Ahura Mazda will vanquish Ahriman. But how may I believe in the perfectibility of the universe, when in my small backwater there are so many slippery slopes? Maybe our Hindu friends are right, and there is no progress but only an eternal cycle, and right now it is the long age of darkness, kalyug.”
To combat her doubts and justify the prophet Zarathustra’s innovative world picture, Lady Spenta Cama plunged into good works. Under the tutelage of the Angel Health, late-night hospital visits became her specialty. Small, heavy, bustling Spenta in her horn-rim specs, leaning forward slightly as she scuttled along, with her handbag held tightly in both hands, became a familiar figure in the neon-lit nocturnal corridors of the Lying-in Hospital and the Gratiaplena Nursing Home, particularly in those grim wards and intensive care units reserved for the gravely ill, the incurables, the horribly crippled and the dying. The nursing staff at these institutions—even the Gratiaplena’s redoubtable Sister John—quickly formed a high opinion of the little lady. She seemed instinctively to know when to prattle on to the patients—gossiping about little Bombay nothings, the latest shop, the latest scandal—and when to maintain a pure silence that somehow exuded comfort. In the matter of silences she appeared to have learned something from her son Ardaviraf. Virus Cama began accompanying his mother on her rounds, and his tranquil muteness, too, brought the succour of serenity to the sick. Deeply affected by what she saw at the hospital—the many cases of malnutrition, and polio, and tuberculosis, and other poverty-related illnesses, including the self-inflicted injuries of unsuccessful suicides—Lady Spenta became, with Mrs. Dolly Kalamanja of Malabar Hill, the joint convenor and driving force of a group of Parsi ladies like herself, whose purpose was to alleviate the suffering of their community, which was widely believed to be exclusively composed of prosperous and powerful citizens, but which was, in reality, plunging into extreme hardship and even, in some cases, destitution. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, an increasingly remote figure, disapproved of the morning teas at which the ladies would plan their fund-raising work. “Stupid beggars’ve only got themselves to blame,” he would mutter, passing through the drawing room like a ghost. “No backbone. Weaklings. Sissies. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.” The ladies ignored him and got on with their work.
There were malicious whisperers who opined that Lady Spenta Cama’s sickbed visits were themselves unhealthy, that they smacked of obsession, that she had become addicted to holding the hands of the dying and playing the sainted, bountiful grande dame. I do not agree. If I am to criticise Lady Spentas high-energy charity offensive, I would say only this: that charity begins at home.
In 1947, at the age of fifteen, Cyrus Cama had made his own declaration of independence. By then he had spent five years at the famous—and famously disciplinarian—Templars School in the southern hill station of Kodaikanal, as a punishment for his attempted smothering of his brother Ormus. During his early days at the Templars School he had given every sign of being a disturbed child, capable of violence towards his fellow students and also towards members of staff. However, at other times, he came across as a completely different child, possessed of a sweetness of nature fully as disarming and winsome as his brother Ardaviraf s. This “second self” earned him more chances than another such child would have been allowed.
Sir Darius and Lady Spenta had chosen the Templars’ “year round” option, which permitted Cyrus to live at school during the holidays as well as term time, an option normally taken up only for boys whose parents were abroad or deceased. In the early days the school had twice written to the Camas asking them to reconsider this decision, because the boy appeared troubled and would no doubt benefit from a family environment; but Lady Spenta, in particular, had been adamant. “The boy needs an iron hand,” she wrote back, “and you have boasted of having such a hand. Do you say that your school’s reputation is undeserved?” Sir Darius, too, was of the opinion that, as the British used to say, “board is best.” One may ascribe the Camas’ harsh decision to the widespread Indian abhorrence of psychiatric problems and mental illness, but to explain is not to condone.
At any rate, after Lady Spenta’s challenge, Cyrus was treated with maximum severity. Corporal punishment was frequent, prolonged and intense. He responded quickly. The violence ceased, his academic performance improved dramatically, Cyrus the delinquent vanished, and Cyrus the charmer took over completely. In addition, he developed a passionate interest in fitness and gymnastics, becoming the star of the school gymnasium, equally adept on horizontal and parallel bars, pommel horse and rings. His reports began to glow with his teachers’ pride and satisfaction, and no doubt Lady Spenta felt herself justified by these reports.
In August 1947 the Templars School was in recess. Cyrus Cama was still in residence, along with half a dozen other boys, mostly the sons of diplomats whose fathers were newly taking up ambassadorial posts around the world. The mass murder of these children—all smothered in their beds while they slept—was an atrocity that would at any other time have captured the nation’s full attention. However, the agony of the Partition massacres and the counterpointing ecstasy of the Independence festivities, coupled with the fact that these murders had taken place not in Delhi, Calcutta or Bombay but in remote Kodaikanal, meant that the deaths were ignored by the national newspapers, in spite of the eminence of the dead boys’ families. The disappearance of Cyrus Cama did not initially cause him to be suspected of wrongdoing. The attempted smothering of little Ormus was a family matter, which the Camas had kept to themselves; nor, when they learned of the atrocity, did they volunteer any information to the police.
Cyrus was thought either to have escaped the assassin, in which case he was hiding out somewhere, perhaps wounded and certainly terrified, and would probably emerge after a time (he did not); or to have been taken hostage by the criminal, in which case a ransom demand might follow, or else his body would be found later, in another place (it was not). The assassin’s purposes were obscure, but those were murderous days, and the Kodaikanal C.I.D., with its limited resources, did not succeed in establishing motive.
The “Pillowman,” as the psychopathic serial killer Cyrus Cama later came to be known, was as intellectually brilliant and physically strong as his father longed for all young Parsi men to be, and was, in addition, responsible in the next few weeks for murders in Mysore, Bangalore and Madras. Owing to the dispersed locations of his crimes, the lack of a communal factor and the overwrought temper of the times, no connection was at first made between these separate killings—though the use of an identical method, smothering by pillows, provided an obvious link—nor was Cyrus implicated. (By now the Kodaikanal police were favouring the hostage-and-subsequent-murder theory and waiting for his dead body to turn up.) Finally, Cyrus could no longer stand the anonymity, and sent a fifteen-year-old’s boastful letter to all the relevant police chiefs, incriminating himself while insisting that he would never be caught by duffers such as they.
When Lady Spenta was informed of these facts, she wept shocked tears. “Our world has lost its moorings,” she told her husband. “Nothing is certain. Common humanity, what is it? How to counter so much violence, so many betrayals, such fear?” The best in our natures is drowning in the worst. Then for a time she retreated, as was the family practice, into a suffocated silence, emerging from it to declare in an airless voice that she no longer had a son called Khusro alias Cyrus Cama and that his name was never to be spoken in her presence again; with which Sir Darius Xerxes Cama grimly concurred. The disowning of Cyrus Cama was formalized. Sir Darius changed his will, disinheriting his murderous child. Which Virus, his twin brother, accepted without saying a word.
Cyrus Cama’s technique was to charm people to their deaths. He looked and acted several years older than his a
ge, and in respectable public places—cinemas, coffeehouses, restaurants—he befriended his victims, usually foolish young people with money to burn, to whom he came across as an unusually attractive and original young man with an exceptional force of intellect. They asked him what a young Parsi blade might be doing travelling in south India by himself (in those days few Indians travelled for pleasure in their own country, even to Kashmir); he replied in well-modulated, articulate, boarding-school accents, singing the praises of his liberal parents, C.B. and Hebe Jeebeebhoy of Cusrow Baag, Bombay, who understood that a young man must do his growing up on his own, and had acceded to his wish to see the glories of newly independent India, travelling solo on a kind of pilgrim’s yatra, before he went up to read Law at Oxford University, England, in one year’s time. He regaled his victims with traveller’s tales of the great sub-continent, describing glittering cities and mountain ranges like the devil’s teeth, and river deltas prowled by tigers, and lost temples in distant cornfields, in such idiosyncratic detail that it was impossible to doubt the authenticity of his entirely fictional accounts. By the end of the first evening the intrepid traveller had so completely seduced his marks that they invited him into their homes as their house guest.
Then he would transfix them by speaking passionately, night after eloquent night, of the “moral short circuit” of the age, the nationwide “loss of soul-greatness” of which he had been made so painfully aware on his journeyings, and of his dream of forming a “people’s movement for the salvation by spiritual energy-force of this poor, bloodied land.” Such was his charisma, and his skill at identifying his dupes, that the victims quickly began to think of him as some sort of great new leader, a guru or even a prophet, and willingly handed over substantial sums of money for the foundation of his movement and the propagation of his ideas; whereupon he visited them softly in their idiotic bedrooms and allowed the pillows, which seemed to move of their own volition into his hands, to do their work, which was necessary work, for the foolish did not deserve to live. To be killable was also to be worthy of being killed. (Adulatory descriptions of Cyrus Cama had also been found in the private diaries of the boys he killed at the Templars School, with whose freely donated pocket money he had financed his initial flight.)
Cyrus was prone to exaggerated mood swings, however, plunging at times into a lightless, cavernous underworld of self-loathing; and it was during one of these periods, early in 1948, that he returned to Kodaikanal, walked into the town police station and surrendered to the terrified duty officer, saying, “I could do with a rest, yaar.” Only just sixteen, he admitted sole responsibility for a total of nineteen smotherings, was adjudged by the courts to be “profoundly disordered, utterly immoral and highly dangerous,” and was transported north to be locked up for the rest of his days, “for the protection of the public,” in a cell without a pillow at the maximum security facility of Tihar Jail, Delhi. Within weeks he had made a favourable impression on his jailers, who spoke effusively of his wisdom, learning, excellent manners and immense personal charm.
This was the living skeleton in Ormus’s family cupboard, and another thing he had in common with Vina. There was a multiple murderer in his family too.
When I think about the three brothers Cama, I see them as men who were all incarcerated for a time, enclosed within their own bodies by the circumstances of their lives. A cricket ball jailed Virus within his silence; a pillow silenced Ormus’s music for fourteen years; banishment and punishment caused Cyrus, too, to conceal himself beneath a falsehood, a self he had borrowed from his sweet-natured twin, which was not truly his. Each found something different in that internal exile. Cyrus found the wellspring of mayhem, Virus discovered the nature of peace, and Ormus, first by chasing Gayomart’s shade through his dreams, and then—following Vina’s advice—by learning how to listen to his own inner voices, found his art.
They were also, all three of them, men who attracted followers. Cyrus had his victims, and Ormus had his fans. Virus, however, attracted children.
Not long after Ormus Cama’s epochal encounter with Vina Apsara at the Rhythm Center record store, his brother Ardaviraf was wandering, as was his habit, along the seafront to the Gateway of India in the cool hour between the heat and the darkness. He had started in those days to acquire a following of street urchins, who neither asked him for money nor offered to shine his shoes, but simply grinned at him in the hope (usually fulfilled) that he would smile back. The beautiful smile of Virus Cama had become infectious; it was spreading through the street urchin community at high speed and dramatically increasing their earning power. Few foreign visitors could resist its winsome innocence. Even seasoned Bombayites, hardened by years of refusing the children’s entreaties, were melted by its warmth and gave out handfuls of silver chavanni bits to the incredulous brats.
It is true that there were times when Ardaviraf Cama did not smile. At these times he was assailed by feelings of claustrophobia, and of a malevolence so powerful that he had to sit down on the sea wall and gasp for breath. Terrible thoughts arrived in his head from nowhere. “Eight years. Can you imagine how much bitterness can accumulate during eight years in jail, how great a flood of vengeance must be unleashed to wash away such pain?” He couldn’t answer the question. He didn’t want to know the answer. But he knew that his twin brother was still alive and crazy and dreaming only of the day of his inevitable escape. Virus closed his eyes and breathed deeply, and the transmission from the Pillowboy—now a Pillowman of twenty-four—came to an end. Children clustered around him, offering up their smiles, which were also his. He smiled back. The children cheered.
“Who dat man?” Who can forget the immortal Harpo and his infant followers in A Day at the Races? Although Virus Cama’s habitual mode of attire was nattily printed bush shirt and cream slacks, his ragamuffin-wreathed strolls always put me in mind of that beloved (and voluntarily mute) genius in his clown’s battered hat and tattered coat. Virus’s shock of curly hair increased his resemblance to Mr. Adolph Marx … and maybe one of his little ruffian pals had sneaked a look at the old movie, because one day this little fellow came up to Virus, grinning widely and bold as brass, and wordlessly held out a wooden flute; which Virus wonderingly examined; and put to his lips; and blew.
Rooty-toot-toot! Music came naturally to all the Cama boys, including the late Gayomart, and the hunger and ease with which Ardaviraf now played his flute—instinctively, with a few inevitable hesitations, but on the whole with a fluency that bordered on the magical—said much about the pain of melody’s long absence from his life. The haunting, ghostly notes of the evening raga stopped the promenaders in their tracks. Children squatted down at his feet; the birds forbore to sing. The flute’s sound was like the weeping of the soul, the soul at the Chinvat Bridge, perhaps, waiting for judgement. After a time, as the dusk closed in and the street lights glowed, Ardaviraf stopped, and looked gawkily, goofily pleased. “Come on, Mister Virus,” pleaded the boy who had handed him the flute, “something with a smile.” Virus set the flute against his lips once more; and played, with considerable gusto, “The Saints.” And now he was not only Harpo but the Pied Piper too, leading his children nowhere; and after that he was Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, surrounded by Walt Disney’s uncontrollable brooms, because the urchins’ gleeful dancing had spiralled out of control, they were twirling in the headlights of motor cars and scooters, running wild, until the whistling of policemen scattered them, leaving Virus, flute in hand, to look dumbly shamefaced and hang his head as a white-gloved officer lectured him about the dangers of obstructing traffic.
The next morning, a Sunday, Ardaviraf Cama broke his father’s nineteen-year-old embargo on music and brought melody back to the flat at Apollo Bunder. When Sir Darius was closeted in his library and Lady Spenta was taking “charitea” at Dolly Kalamanja’s, Virus searched his mother’s boudoir; found what he was looking for in a small chest of jewellery that sat on his mothers dressing table; knocked on Ormus’s do
or; and held out, for his amazed brother to inspect, a silver locket containing a small key. Ormus Cama, hardly able to believe his eyes, meekly followed the newly determined Virus into the drawing room, where his silent sibling removed the dust cover from the long-forbidden baby grand, unlocked the magic keys with his own magic key, sat down, and launched into what had already become one of the most celebrated riffs in popular music. Ormus shook his head, amazed. “When did you learn about Bo Diddley?” he demanded; received no answer; and began to sing.
Enter Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, his hands over his ears, listing slightly to port, followed by the butler Gieve bearing a whiskey tumbler on a tray. “You sound like a goat with its throat cut,” he raged at Ormus, in unconscious imitation of all the fathers raging at that very moment, all around the world, against these devil’s tunes. But then Sir Darius caught Ardaviraf’s eye and stopped, discomfited. Virus began to smile.
“It was because of you,” Sir Darius said weakly. “Because of the injury to you. But of course, if you want—I can’t stop you—how can I deny?”
Virus’s smile grew broader. In that awesome instant, which signalled the end of his patriarchal power over his own home, and in spite of the turbulence of his emotions, Sir Darius felt his own facial muscles twitch, as if a smile were trying to climb on to his face, like a spider, against his will. He turned and fled. “Tell Spenta,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve gone to the club.”
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Page 17
