The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Virus launched into a new tune. Oh, yes, I’m the Great Pretender, sang Ormus Cama, pretending that I’m over you.

  • • •

  His tongue untied by his tongue-tied brother, Ormus Cama at last began to utilize his prodigious gifts; for he was a prodigy from the start, he had only to touch an instrument to become a virtuoso player, only to attempt a style of singing to master it. Music flooded from him. Liberated, he sat beside smiling Ardaviraf at the piano every day and taught him a dozen new tunes. And when he visited Vina at Villa Thracia he plucked and strummed and whanged away at her battered old three-quarter-size guitar (Piloo Doodhwala had sent her few possessions round the day after Ormus’s joker trumped his ace), and our house too grew full of the new music. At first Ormus played only the songs he had half learned from Gayomart in his dreams, singing those strange vowel sequences of his that made no sense to anyone, or fitting nonsensical words to them that utterly undermined the mysterious authority of the dream-music:

  “The ganja, my friend, is growing in the tin; the ganja is growing in the tin.”

  (And then, diminuendo:)

  “The dancer is glowing with her sin. The gardener is mowing with a grin. The ganja is growing in the tin.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Ormus,” Vina protested, giggling.

  “But that’s what it sounds like,” he’d complain, sheepishly. “It’s hard to hear.”

  After a few such failures he agreed to stick to the current hit parade. Sure enough, however, one thousand and one nights later, “Blowin’ in the Wind” hit the airwaves in its authentic version and Ormus shouted at me, “Do you see now? Don’t you see?”

  Such things kept happening, there’s no denying it; and whenever one of Gayomart Cama’s melodies burst through from the world of dreams into the real world, those of us who had heard them for the first time in garbled form in a Bombay villa on the old Cuffe Parade were forced to concede the reality of Ormus’s magic gift.

  If he found opportunities to play Vina his other creations, the ones she had sent him in search of—I mean his own songs, the music that belonged to him alone—I never knew it. But it was during these years of waiting, when he was writing copiously, flowing like an undammed stream, that he wrote those first, naked love songs. I didn’t know how to be in love, he wrote, until she came home from Rome. And I believed in god above until she came home from Rome. (Well, no, he didn’t, as a matter of fact, but truth yielded to the harsh necessities of rhyme.) But now you fit me like a glove. You be my hawk, I’ll be your dove. And we don’t need no god above, now that you’re home from Rome. And even more devotional than that was the joyful genuflection, the teenage prayer, of the anthemic “Beneath Her Feet”: What she touches, I will worship it. The clothes she wears, her classroom seat. Her evening meal, her driving wheel. The ground beneath her feet.

  This is the tale of Ormus Cama, who found the music first.

  Lady Spenta Cama’s feelings for Ormus remained, let us say, muted. Ardaviraf was her darling, however, and so, although she shared her husband’s low opinion of the grunts and hiccups of Ormus’s so-called singing, she was unable to ask the brothers to desist. The return of music to Apollo Bunder only increased her determination to marry off her youngest son as soon as possible. Ever since he had finished school with an academic record that brought shame and dishonour to his family, Ormus had been on the loaf: idle, without direction, except with regard to girls. Parents of students at the Cathedral Girls’ School had lately started complaining to Lady Spenta that her son was in the habit of lounging against a wall across the road from the school entrance, idly picking his teeth while allowing his hips, very slowly, to gyrate, and that these gyrations were putting the girls off their homework. Ormus, when confronted by Lady Spenta, did not attempt to deny the charge. From the start the extreme sensuality of his body was an effect he produced unconsciously; he never felt responsible for it and so, naturally, accepted no responsibility for its effects. He had music on the brain, he shrugged, and it made his body move without his knowing why or how. What the girls thought about it was neither his business nor his fault. “Boy seems feckless,” Lady Spenta complained to Sir Darius. “Lacking in ambition, giving backchat, nothing but music between his ears. Good for nothing, he will turn bad for everything if we do not intervene.”

  Persis Kalamanja was the perfect answer. The girl was beautiful, had the disposition of a saint, and unaccountably gave every sign of adoring Ormus. Also, her parents were loaded. Sir Darius’s long retirement had severely eroded the Cama bank balances, and—at least in Lady Spentas opinion—Ormus owed it to his mother and father to restore the family’s financial health. Patangbaz “Pat” Kalamanja and his wife Dolly hailed from Kenya but had made their fortune in post-war London, manufacturing cheap radios and alarm clocks under the Dollytone name, and diversifying, as Kalatours, into the travel agency business, specializing in flights between the countries of the then-exploding Indian diaspora. Business was booming in fifties Britain, and Pat Kalamanja was obliged to base himself in Wembley most of the year, but Dolly had “fully relocated to the mother country,” bought one of the finest old bungalows on Malabar Hill from old Mr. Evans of the Bombay Company, spent a fortune on ruining it, developed a hunger for respectability, and wanted a piece of Sir Darius’s baronetcy as passionately as Lady Spenta wanted Pat Kalamanja’s cash.

  “Wants to sing, eh?” Lady Spenta snorted at her husband. “Dollytone radios will sing for him. Wants to dance up a storm? Travel business will lead him to calmer waters. Also, there is the British connection,” she added, slyly, knowing the effect it would have on Sir Darius the arch-Anglophile.

  Sir Darius’s eyes glittered. He agreed at once to his wife’s plan. “Older families are put off by the mistakes of you-know-who,” she reasoned (it was the closest she would come to mentioning Cyrus Cama’s nineteen murders), “so these Kalamanjas have fallen from the heavens, like a beautiful cut kite.”

  The problem was Vina. After their meeting, Ormus gravely informed his mother that as he had inadvertently fallen in love, the engagement to the beauteous Persis was unfortunately out of the question. When he identified the object of his improbable affections, his mother—who had assumed that the new light in Ormus’s eye, the new lightness in his step, the new eagerness with which he greeted each new day, was because of Persis, and was therefore the result of her parental good judgement—flew into a pop-eyed rage. “You devil! That twelve-year-old penniless brat from nobody and nowhere?” she shrieked. “Get this into your head: that’s a non-starter, sonny jim.” Lady Spenta and Dolly Kalamanja both agreed to proceed with their plans as if nothing had happened. “It will blow over,” Dolly assured her friend determinedly. “Boys will be boys, before and after marriage, but they can still be good husbands and all.” This remark rather shocked Lady Spenta, but she held her tongue.

  A few days later, Persis Kalamanja and Ormus Cama were taken by their respective parents on a joint family outing to the Exwyzee Milk Colony. They were encouraged to wander off by themselves among the greenery and cows, and when they were out of earshot, gorgeous Persis, whom most young men would happily have died for, asked about her under-age rival. “Look, you can tell me, it’s okay, I won’t be upset,” she said. “Never mind what our mothers want. Love is too important to lie about.” Ormus, looking awkward for once in his graceful life, confessed that he had no idea how it had happened, but that day at the record store he had met the only girl he would ever love. Persis took it on the chin, set aside all her own hopes, nodded seriously and promised to help. From that moment until Vina’s sixteenth birthday, Persis joined Ormus and Vina in a conspiracy of small and large deceits. For a start, she announced to her mother that she was not at all sure about this supposed god’s gift, Ormus Cama; she was one pretty high-calibre female herself and did not intend to buy the first goods her mother picked off the peg, and if it was to be Ormus then she would need a good long period in which to satisfy herself that he was an option whic
h she was prepared, after weighing all the pros and cons, to select. “Girls today, too modern, I swear,” sighed Dolly Kalamanja, and might have tried to force the marriage through, except that Persis appealed to her father Pat in England, and Patangbaz Kalamanja told Dolly that his beloved daughter wasn’t going to be parcelled off to anybody if she didn’t want to be posted, so that was that: Dolly sulked, but settled for a long “pre-engagement.” Every month or so, Dolly would complain that her daughter was taking too long to decide, and Persis would invariably reply, “But a wife is for life, and that’s too long to be wrong.” Persis the Great Pretender, the beard. At night she would cry herself to sleep. And Ormus and Vina were so wrapped up in each other that they never really paid attention to the beautiful girl who gave up her own hope for their sake. Yet it is Persis who, in many ways, was the true heroine of the story of their love.

  She would tell her mother she had arranged to meet Ormus for coffee, or “chips and swimming at the Willingdon”; or that he was taking her to one of the Sunday morning jazz “jam sessions” that were becoming popular, back then, in certain Colaba restaurants; or that there was a “good flick” on. “Love picture?” Dolly would greedily enquire, and Persis would nod, giving every appearance of excitement. “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” she would reply, or, later, “An Affair to Remember,” and Dolly would nod, “Excellent! Get him in the mood!” And off Persis would go, driving herself down Malabar Hill in her Hindustan Ambassador to her empty assignation. For indeed she did meet Ormus at the club or restaurant or café or cinema in question, so that technically she had not lied to her mother; but a few moments later, Vina would arrive, and Persis would leave without a word. Those lonely hours, when she roamed the city alone until she could go home without blowing the lovers’ alibi, were like a hole in her life, a wound through which all her hope and much of her joy seeped out. “I think of those times covering up for Ormie as the love affair we never had,” she wrote to me. “He was with me, I told myself, he was right there by my side, but of course he wasn’t, it was all foolishness. Not many-splendoured. Not worth remembering. But me, I couldn’t forget.”

  Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the Shadow.

  Time passes. Now, in his dreams, Ormus still chases Gayomart through that Las Vegas of the subterranean world, but as often, or perhaps more often, he stands face-to-face with himself on the streets of an unknown but familiar city, and listens to what his own dream-image has to say He is still young.

  The world is not cyclical, not eternal or immutable, but endlessly transforms itself, and never goes back, and we can assist in that transformation.

  Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.

  Your songs are your planets. Live on them but make no home there. What you write about, you lose. What you sing, leaves you on the wings of song.

  Sing against death. Command the wildness of the city.

  Freedom to reject is the only freedom. Freedom to uphold is dangerous.

  Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

  Vina Apsara is looking for someone to follow, and Ormus is discovering how to lead. They read books together, looking for answers. In the beginning was water and slime, Vina reads aloud. Out of this, Time was born, three-headed, a snake. Time made the shining air and a yawning gulf, and in the air he hung a silver egg. The egg split, and so on. The part that interests Ormus is the twofold nature of man. Who is both Titanic and Dionysiac, both earthly and divine. By purification, asceticism and ritual, we may purge the Titanic element, we may cleanse ourselves of what is earthly, physical. The flesh is weak, evil, contaminated and corrupt. We must strip ourselves of it. We must prepare for becoming divine.

  No, Ormus shouts. They are in the Hanging Gardens, surrounded by topiary elephants and evening hedonists, and his cry attracts attention. He moderates his voice. It is the opposite that’s true. We must purge ourselves of the divine and prepare to enter fully into the flesh. We must purge ourselves of the natural and prepare to enter fully into what we ourselves have built, the man-made, the artificial, the artifice, the construct, the trick, the joke, the song.

  Yes, she murmurs. The flesh, the living flesh.

  What is apparent is what there is. The hidden world is a lie.

  There are contradictions here. Even as she believes him, believes with the force of her needing to believe, the force of her need of him, she is half aware of another side, not only to her nature, but to his. For she is—will be—Dionysiac, divine, and so is—so will—he. They will drive people mad with desire, with music, will leave behind them long trails of destruction and delight. Is pleasure an aspect of reason or of dreams?

  She asks: Why do you look for your brother in that dream-house?

  My brother is dead, he shouts, turning more heads. Leave him out of this. My brother Gayomart who was never even alive.

  Touch me, she pleads. Hold me, hold my hand.

  He will not. He has sworn an oath.

  He cannot touch her. She is not a child, not remotely a child, and yet she is a child. In his dreams, and in waking visions, he sees her body growing, sees her breasts begin to bud and flower, the coming of bodily hair and the red blood staining her thighs. He feels her move beneath his hand, feels himself tense and grow at her rough and tender touch. In the privacy of his thoughts he is a voluptuary, feral, criminal, but in the real world, which feels daily more unreal, he plays, for the first time in his life, the perfect gentleman.

  She, Vina, will always boast about this on his behalf. “He waited for me.” It makes her proud: of him, but also of herself. To be worth so serious a love. (I waited for her too, but she did not boast about me.)

  The bruise on his eyelid is sore. His mother and father fight in him, Lady Spenta’s angels and mysteries, Sir Darius’s vaunted Apollonian rationalism. Though it could also be said that Lady Spenta with her good works is battling with the real world, its diseases, its cruelties, while Sir Darius, sunk in the unreality of his library, is living more than one kind of lie.

  Living brothers fight in him too, violent and serene. His dead twin recedes.

  Reason and the imagination, the light and the light, do not coexist peacefully.

  They are both powerful lights. Separately or together, they can blind you.

  Some people see well in the dark.

  Vina, watching him grow, hearing the struggle of his thoughts, feeling the anguish of his controlled desires, sees a light around him. It is the future, perhaps. He will be bathed in light. He will be her perfect lover. He will command multitudes.

  He is fragile too. Without her love, terminally alienated, he might go horribly wrong. The idea of family, of community, is almost dead in him. There is only silent Virus and their piano sessions. Otherwise he has come loose, like an astronaut floating away from a space capsule. He is a layabout who hears only the vowel sounds of cheap music, who makes meaningless noises. He could easily amount to nothing. He might fail to add up to a person.

  • • •

  (It is said that when Kama, the love god, committed the crime of trying to shoot mighty Shiva with a dart of love, the great god burned him to ashes with a thunderbolt. Kama’s wife, the goddess Rati, pleaded for his life, and softened Shiva’s heart. In an inversion of the Orpheus myth, it was the woman who interceded with the deity and brought Love—Love itself!—back from the dead.… So also Ormus Cama, exiled from love by the parents whom he had failed to transfix with love’s arrow, shrivelled by their lack of affection, is restored to the world of love by Vina.)

  He clings to her, without touching her. They meet and whisper and shout and make each other up. Each is Pygmalion, both are Galatea. They are a single entity in two bodies: male and female constructed they themselves. You are my only family, h
e tells her. You are my only earth. These are heavy burdens, but she bears them willingly, asks for more, burdens him identically in return. They have both been damaged, are both repairers of damage. Later, entering that world of ruined selves, music’s world, they will already have learned that such damage is the normal condition of life, as is the closeness of the crumbling edge, as is the fissured ground. In that inferno, they will feel at home.

  6

  DISORIENTATIONS

  In the autumn of 1960, when Vina Apsara was about to reach the magic age of sixteen, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama at last made the journey to England of which he had dreamed for so many years. In these latter days of his life Sir Darius had yielded to his wife’s entreaties and resumed his studies in the field of Indo-European myth. (Lady Spenta hoped for the eradication of her husband’s ruinous whisky addiction by an earlier, more valuable intoxication.) A new generation of European scholars, including many brilliant young Englishmen, was ridding the field of its unjust Nazi taint and introducing new levels of sophistication to what now looked like the first stumblings of Müller, Dumézil and the rest. Sir Darius in his library tried to excite Lady Spenta, as he himself was excited, by this new thinking, which had done so much to refine and amplify understanding of “sovereignty,” “physical force” and “fertility,” the three primary concepts of the Indo-European world-view. However, no sooner had he begun to explain the thrilling new proposition that each member of the conceptual triad also functioned as a sub-concept within each category than Lady Spentas heavy body appeared to deliquesce into a languid jelly. Sir Darius, pressing on, insisted that “sovereignty” was now to be sub-divided into “sovereignty within sovereignty,” “force within sovereignty,” and “fertility within sovereignty”; while “physical force” and “fertility” were likewise, “by the same token,” to be rendered tripartite. “I have a headache,” said the jelly at this point, and wobbled off at high speed.