The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Sir Darius did indeed turn away from whisky. However, his distress at what he saw as the culture’s general decline did not diminish. Left to his own devices, Sir Darius reflected on how his own family circumstances reflected this decline. As head of the household, he possessed sovereignty within sovereignty by right, both in its magical, terrifying and remote aspect and in the more legalistic and familiar meaning of the term; but while he had certainly grown remote from his children, it was a long time since anyone had thought him the smallest whit magical or terrifying. As for force within sovereignty, which he interpreted as the protection of the family’s solidarity and continuity, especially by its younger members, its “warriors,” well, that was just a joke. “We have slipped,” he reflected aloud, “to the point at which we are mired in the lowest sub-section of the third concept, fertility within fertility, which, in our case, means no more than indolence, dreams and music.”

  Sir Darius’s own scholarly efforts received their reward: a paper under his name—“ ‘Sent to Coventry’: or, Is There a Fourth Function?”—was accepted for publication in the esteemed Proceedings of the Society of Euro-Asiatic Studies, and he was invited to deliver it, in the form of a lecture, at the Society’s annual general meeting in Burlington House. His subject was the hypothetical “fourth concept” of “outsiderness,” the condition of the leper, pariah, outcast or exile, whose necessity he had intuited long ago, and his evidence in support of his arguments ranged from the casteless Untouchables of India (Gandhi’s Harijans, Ambedkar’s Dalits) to the Judgement of Paris; for did not Paris himself embody the outsider in this vitally significant myth? Alternatively, the outsider was Strife, the goddess who produced the golden apple. Either way, the example stood.

  Now that he was sober, Sir Darius’s terrible secret had begun to prey upon him ever more hungrily, in his waking hours as well as during his recurring dreams of the naked figure of Scandal in the pure white country house, and the growing conviction that he himself was a pariah such as those of whom he wrote, or ought to be, and might yet become one if his great Lie became known, lent his work a passion that made his sentences blaze from the page. He was an isolated old gentleman by this time. Even the consolations of Freemasonry were no longer available; the order’s Indian membership had drifted away after the end of Empire, and Sir Darius had long since ceased to participate in such threadbare encounters as continued to take place in a new lodge as shabbily paltry as the old lodge had been grand. (Lately he had been remembering his estranged friend, brother Mason and erstwhile squash partner Homi Catrack, and had even suggested to his wife that they should ask the fellow over and renew the old association; whereupon Lady Spenta had to remind him gently that Catrack was dead, sensationally gunned down with his paramour in their love nest by a cuckolded naval officer some three years previously. The case had filled the newspapers for months, but Sir Darius had somehow failed to notice.)

  The invitation to England offered an end to this shadow life of his, in which he flitted through the background of events in which he took no part. “And there is Methwold too,” he said to Lady Spenta, brightening. “What times we’ll have! The grouse moors! The Athenaeum! English honey! What larks!”

  Lady Spenta bit her lip. Sir Darius’s Anglophilia had intensified with the passage of the years. He frequently praised “U.K.” for the grace of its withdrawal from Empire, and also for the “pluck” with which that war-battered nation had rebuilt itself. (No mention was made of Marshall Aid.) India, by contrast, he constantly chided for its “stasis,” its “backwardness.” He wrote innumerable letters to the newspapers deriding the Five-Year Plans. “What use are steel mills if we sink into ignorance of our natures?” he would thunder. “The greatness of Britain stands squarely upon the Three Concepts …” These letters were not published, but he continued to write them. In the end Lady Spenta did not bother to have them posted, but destroyed them privately, without hurting his feelings.

  Why did William Methwold no longer write? Sir Darius frequently asked this question, without guessing that Lady Spenta could answer the question if she chose to do so. “Perhaps it is because of my research,” Sir Darius wondered. “Possibly he is still squeamish about the old stigma attached to the field. He is a public servant, of course, and must be careful. No matter! When we dine together I will put him straight.”

  “Go if you must. I will not go with you,” Lady Spenta told her husband. Not knowing how to warn him of the humiliation that awaited him in his beloved England, she chose not to witness his destruction. He left on a BOAC Super Constellation, wearing a courtroom shirt of Egyptian cotton with stiffly starched collar and cuffs, and a three-piece suit of finest worsted, with a fob chain glinting upon his belly. Lady Spenta saw on his face the look of tragic innocence worn by goats on their way to the slaughterhouse. She had written to Lord Methwold begging him “if possible, to be kind.”

  Methwold was not kind. In spite of Sir Darius’s urgent letters, and Lady Spenta’s own private pleas, he neither met his old friend at Heathrow Airport, nor sent anyone to meet him, nor invited him to stay, nor offered to put him up at his club. Lady Spenta had taken the precaution of asking Dolly Kalamanja to send her husband Patangbaz to the airport, and it was Pat’s jolly round face that greeted Sir Darius in the crude arrivals shed (the airport was still under construction at that time, and facilities for passengers were substantially worse than those at Bombay’s Santa Cruz). Sir Darius looked haggard and dishevelled at the end of his gruelling journey and equally gruelling interrogation by immigration officials who were bewilderingly unimpressed by his explanations, his credentials or even his knighthood, news of which they treated with extreme scepticism. His repeated references to the eminent Lord Methwold elicited only hollow laughter. After several hours of questioning, Sir Darius was finally released into England, a confused and somewhat punctured man.

  Pat Kalamanja’s Wembley home was a spacious suburban mansion in red brick equipped with fake white pilasters and columns to give it a more classically impressive air. Kalamanja himself was affable, good-natured, anxious to do the right thing by the father of his future son-in-law, and extremely busy, so that while Sir Darius was given the run of the house he saw his host for no more than a few snatched meals. During these brief encounters Sir Darius was terse and preoccupied. At breakfast, Pat Kalamanja, a business tycoon down to his well-pared fingernails and a man uneasy with small talk, did his best to put his guest at ease. “Nawab of Pataudi! What a cricketer! Blanch-flowers Hotspurs! Hell of a football team!” At dinner, he offered political commentary. In the forthcoming American elections, Mr. Kalamanja strongly favoured Richard M. Nixon, because of that gentleman’s “plain speaking” to the Russki leader Khrushchev during a visit to a model kitchen in a Moscow trade fair. “Kennedy? Too pretty; means too tricky, what do you say?” But Sir Darius’s thoughts were elsewhere.

  He spent the empty days telephoning his friend Methwold without reaching him, sending reply-paid telegrams to which no reply was given, and even, on one occasion, making the long journey by bus and Tube train to the door of the Methwold mansion in Campden Hill Square, to leave a long and injured letter of reproach. Finally Lord Methwold did get in touch. A terse note arrived at Wembley, inviting Sir Darius to walk with him, the next morning, in the grounds of Middle Temple, “of which you no doubt have many memories you may possibly wish to re-live.”

  It was enough. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama understood everything. All spirit left him, and he deflated completely. Mr. Kalamanja, returning home in the evening, found a darkened living room and his guest slumped in a chair beside a cold fire with an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker rolling at his feet. He feared the worst until Sir Darius moaned loudly in his sleep, the moan of a soul caught in the burning pincers of a demon. In his dream Sir Darius was surrendering to Scandal’s embrace. He felt his body catch fire as he was consumed by his disgrace and shame, and screamed out at the top of his voice. Patangbaz Kalamanja rushed forward and hugged him. He awoke r
ed-eyed and shivering, pushed good-hearted Pat aside and rushed from the room. The next morning, a crumpled and haunted figure, he asked Kalamanja if his travel agency could get him on an earlier flight home. He offered no explanation and his host did not know him well enough to ask for one. Sir Darius flew back to Bombay without meeting William Methwold, without delivering his paper on the Fourth Function, and without any remaining ambition in life except one—to die in peace—which he would also fail to fulfil. On his return he unearthed his proudest possessions from the Godrej steel filing cabinet where they had lain under lock and key for half a lifetime, the precious letters patent pertaining to his knighthood, and returned them to the British Consulate in Bombay. His story was over. He shut himself up in his library with a bottle, and waited for the end.

  We leave home not only to make room for ourselves but to avoid the sight of our elders running out of steam. We don’t want to see the consequences of their natures and histories catching up with them and beating them, the closing of the trap of life. Feet of clay will cripple us, too, in our turn. Life’s bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes. It can wait. There’s plenty of time.

  Two visions broke my family: my mother Ameer’s vision of the “scrapers,” the giant concrete-and-steel exclamations that destroyed forever the quieter syntax of the old city of Bombay; and my father’s fantasy of a cinema. It was Vina Apsara’s great misfortune to put down roots in us, and to idealize my parents as the joint architects of a storybook happy home, just as our little clan started to come apart. “Rai,” she once said to me, “you’re a lucky bastard, but also a sweetheart, because you don’t mind sharing your luck.”

  Luck runs out. My parents had fallen off their pedestals well before their early demises. Easy to list their faults. My father’s great weakness was gambling, in the indulgence of which he took heavy losses. By 1960 these had moved beyond the mere forfeit of small mountains of matchsticks and grown into debts as sizeable but less easily redeemed. He lost at cards, he lost on the horses, he lost at dice, and he had fallen, too, into the clutches of a “private bookmaker” who called himself Raja Jua, “for Chance is the King of all, from our Betters to the Best,” and who permitted serious Bombay gamblers to bet on whatever they chose: the outcome of a murder trial, the likelihood of an Indian invasion of Goa, the number of clouds that might cross the western sky in a day, the crucial first week’s gross of a new movie, the size of a dancer’s breasts. Even the ancient rain game, the barsaat-ka-satta, a bet on when the rains would come and how much would fall, was a gamble against which Raja Jua, the prince of bookmakers, would give odds. Bombay has always been a high rollers’ town. However, my innocent father, V.V. Merchant, was not so much the roller as the rolled.

  As for my mother: her cynicism, once just a pose, an idealist’s armour, her defence against the corruption that was all around her, had itself corroded her youthful principles. I accuse her of being willing to destroy what was beautiful for the sake of what was profitable, and to rename these categories “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” She was at the forefront of the builders’ lobby that was working flat out to scupper the “second city” project for a New Bombay across the harbour in favour of more immediately lucrative land reclamation schemes at Nariman Point and—yes!—at Cuffe Parade as well. It was the proposed Cuffe Parade redevelopment that horrified Vivvy Merchant. All his life my father had faced the internal struggle between his love for the history and glories of the old Bombay and his professional involvement in the creation of the city’s future. The prospect of the destruction of the most beautiful stretch of seafront in the city drove him into permanent, but unfortunately silent, opposition to his wife. Silent, because Ameer was still a woman who could brook no criticism. The merest hint that she might be acting improperly would have been enough to induce a storm of weeping and a quarrel that would not end until he abased himself and agreed that he had utterly and cruelly wronged her, and that her injured innocence fully justified her high dudgeon and copious tears. V.V. Merchant, unable to talk to her about his grave concerns, was obliged, instead, to follow the dictates of his nature, and dig.

  He could dig in people as easily as in sand. Digging into me, as I grew, he found out one of my secrets. “This photography of yours,” he said, speaking for once in short, clear words, “no doubt it is very much liked by pretty young girls?” And I was too inhibited to reply, Yes, Father, but that isn’t the point. Your Paillard Bolex, your Rolleiflex and Leica, your collection of the works of Dayal and Haseler: those are my inspirations and spurs. And photography, too, is a kind of digging. I said none of that, though it would have made him proud to hear it. Instead I quipped, “Yeah, that’s it, Daddy-o.” He winced faintly, smiled a vague smile and turned away.

  But when he dug in my mother, he didn’t turn away. He went on until he dug up what would ruin her; and thus destroyed himself.

  And that whitest of white elephants, the Orpheum cinema, into which he sank the business’s capital with a wanton zeal that even Ameer Merchant was unable to restrain—wasn’t that, in its suicidal way, an answer to his wife and her cartel of futurist vandals? In his vision of the theatre, he saw it as a Deco temple for the 1960s, at once a tribute to the city’s golden period and a money-spinning Mecca for our movie-crazy city’s host of “fillum” fans. But this, too, was a gamble that went badly wrong. Building costs spiralled upwards, the borrowing requirement got out of control, and the dishonesty of sub-contractors resulted in the use of materials and fittings well below specification. Rival cinema bosses bribed municipal inspectors to quibble over approvals and tie up the project in red tape. Ameer, her attention elsewhere, left the Orpheum to Vivvy; unwisely, as it turned out. In the end, Vivvy’s gambling debts obliged him to offer the deeds to the new cinema as collateral to Raja Jua. He did not know, at that time, the name of the man for whom this Jua worked.

  On my thirteenth birthday my father gave me a pretty serious German camera, a Voigtländer Vito CL, with a built-in light meter and a hot-shoe port for a flash gun, and the first photographs I took were of Vina Apsara, singing. She was better than Radio Ceylon. Most evenings, we’d gather round and she’d let fly with that perfect voice, which grew bigger and richer by the week, by turns dirty-knowledgeable and angel-pure. That voice which had started on its road to immortality. To listen to Carly Simon sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is to understand how much Guinevere Garfunkel brought to the table in that partnership. So it was in the great days of VTO. There are bands that are hit machines, bands that earn the respect of the music crowd, bands that fill stadiums, bands that drip sex; transcendent bands and ephemeral, boy bands and girl bands, gimmick bands and inept bands, beach and driving bands, summer and winter bands, bands to make love by and bands that make you memorize the words to every song they play. Most bands are awful, and if there are aliens from other galaxies monitoring our radio and tv waves, they’re probably being driven crazy by the din. And in the whole half-century-long history of rock music there is a small number of bands, a number so small you could count to it without running out of fingers, who steal into your heart and become a part of how you see the world, how you tell and understand the truth, even when you’re old and deaf and foolish. On your deathbed you’ll hear them sing to you as you drift down the tunnel towards the light: Shh … Sha-sha … Sha-la-la-la-la … Shang-a-lang, shang-a-lang … Sh-boom … Shoop … Shoop … Shh. It’s all over now.

  VTO was one of those bands. And Ormus had the vision, but Vina had the voice, and it was the voice that did it, it’s always the voice; the beat catches your attention and the melody makes you remember but it’s the voice against which you’re defenceless, the unholy cantor, the profane muezzin, the siren call that knows its way directly to the rhythm center, the soul. Never mind what kind of music. Never mind what kind of voice. When you hear it, the real thing, you’re done for, trust me on this. Finito, unless you’re tied like Odysseus to the mast of your ship, with clay stopping up your ears. That goose of your
s? It’s fried.

  I think, now, that it was Vina’s singing that was holding us together in those days. She was our rock, not the other way around. While V.V. Merchant plunged into debt, and also, silently, investigated his wife, assembling a thick dossier on her illegal manipulation of the city’s decision makers—while, in short, a time bomb was ticking beneath our lives—Vina sang to us, reminding us of love.

  O fierce intensity of childhood seeing! As children we’re all photographers, needing no cameras, burning images into memories. I remember our neighbours on Cuffe Parade, their pretensions, their happy and unhappy marriages, their quarrels, their motor cars, their sunglasses, their handbags, their discoloured smiles, their kindnesses, their dogs. I remember the weekends with their odd, imported pastimes. My parents playing golf at the Willingdon, my father doing his best to lose to my mother in order to preserve her good mood. I remember a couple of Navjotes spent guzzling food served on the leaves of plantain trees, several Holis drenched in colour, and at least one visit to the giant prayer maidan on Big Eid, which sticks in the mind because it was so rare. I think my father just wanted me to appreciate what I was missing and why. I remember my friend sweet Neelam Nath, who grew up to die with her children in the Air-India crash off the Irish coast. I remember Jimmy King with his pasty complexion and spiky black fringe; he died young, suddenly, at school. All the classroom doors and windows were closed so that we couldn’t see his father driving into the quadrangle to take his son’s body home. I remember a long, skinny boy clambering across the rocks at Scandal Point with his friends. He looked through me as if I weren’t there. Gold Flake posters, the Royal Barber Shop, the pungent mingled smells of putrefaction and hope. Forget Mumbai. I remember Bombay.