Ormus liked to compose his own songs up on the flat roof of the apartment block, and spent eternities up there, lost within himself, searching for the points at which his inner life intersected the life of the greater world outside, and calling those points of intersection “songs.” Just once he let me photograph him while he worked, picking away at a guitar laid on his lap across his crossed legs, eyes shut, gone. My Voigtländer camera had escaped the Villa Thracia fire because I had become inseparable from it and had taken it with me to school. I had read in a book called Photography for Beginners that a true photographer was never parted from the tool of his trade, and had taken the advice to heart. Ormus liked my attitude, found it “serious,” he said, and in spite of my store of jealousy regarding Vina I was always anxious for his good words, so I puffed up horribly when he praised me. His personal nickname for me, in those days, was “Juicy.” “My friend Juicy Rai,” he’d introduce me—just sixteen in 1963—to his louche club-world set. “You never heard anyone like him. Always seeing photographs—three strangers in a bus queue all lifting their legs at the same time like in a dance routine, or people waving from the deck of a departing steamer, and one of the waving arms is a gorillas—and then he hollers out, Juicy this? Juicy that? And of course nobody did see it but him, but what do you know, it turns up on his film. Young Juicy,” he’d slap me on the back, and his female partners would bestow upon me their most groin-melting, glamorous looks. “Fastest shot in the East.” At which I, humiliatingly, youthfully, would blush.
So in November 1963 he let me photograph him while he worked. A lot of the songs he was writing then were of the protest type, idealistic, strong. In the matter of worthiness, which so often exercised my private thoughts, Ormus was of the party that believed there was more wrong with the world in general than its ordinary citizens. In this he was like my mother; except that she, disillusioned, had decided she couldn’t beat the world’s corruption and had joined forces with it instead. Ormus Cama had not given up on the perfectibility of man and of his social groupings as well. That day on the roof, however, eyes closed, talking to himself, he sounded puzzled. “This isn’t how things should be,” he’d murmur every few minutes. “Everything’s off the rails. Sometimes a little off, sometimes a lot. But things should be different. Just … different.”
It became a song, in the end: “It Shouldn’t Be This Way.” But watching him, making myself invisible so that I didn’t inhibit him, moving around the roof on cat’s paws, I had the strange sense that he wasn’t speaking figuratively. Just as Ormus could surprise by the depth of his sincerity, so also his literalness could catch one off guard. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise. The muscles in my stomach knotted. “Things aren’t like this,” he kept repeating. “It shouldn’t be this way.” As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, “right” universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending together to the stars. Then he shook his head, and the spell broke. He opened his eyes, grinning ruefully. As if he knew his thoughts had infected mine. As if he knew his power. “Better get on with it,” he said. “Make do with what there is.”
Later, as I drifted off to sleep in my room, Ormus’s rooftop torment came back to haunt me: his sudden possession by the idea that, like a runaway freight train, the world had veered sideways off its proper track and was now banging about, out of control, upon a great iron web of switched points. In my pre-sleep drowsiness, it was a notion that unnerved me; for if the world itself were metamorphosing unpredictably, then nothing could be relied upon any more. What could one trust? How to find moorings, foundations, fixed points, in a broken, altered time? I came awake fast and hard, with my heart pounding. It’s okay. It’s okay. Only a waking dream.
The world is what it is.
I thought then that Ormus’s doubts about reality might be a kind of revenge of the spirit, an irruption, into a life dedicated to the actual and the sensual, of the irrational, the incorporeal. He, who had rejected the unknowable, was being plagued by the unknown.
• • •
The day after the President of the United States had that narrow escape in Dallas, Texas, and we were all becoming familiar with the names of the would-be assassins, Oswald, whose rifle jammed, and Steel, who was overpowered on some kind of grassy knoll by a genuine hero, a middle-aged amateur cameraman called Zapruder, who saw the killer’s gun and hit him over the head with an 8 mm ciné camera … on that extraordinary day, Ormus Cama had a different name to conjure with, because he arrived at the Regal Café, Colaba, to be informed that among the audience for his late-night set would be a party from the United States of America, including Mr. Yul Singh himself. Even then most music-loving metropolitan Indians had heard of Yul Singh, the blind Indian record producer who founded Colchis Records in New York City in 1948 with a ten-thousand-dollar loan from his optician. After Colchis struck gold by playing “race music,” rhythm and blues, to white radio audiences, that optician, Tommy J. Eckleburg, briefly became a Manhattan celebrity himself. He even showed up with Yul Singh on the talk-show promo circuit.
“So why does a blind man need an optician, Yul?”
“Optimism, Johnny. Optimism.”
“And why does an optician need a blind man, T.J.?”
“Don’t go insulting my good friend now, Mr. C. He’s differently sighted is all.”
When Ormus arrived at the Regal and was told about the Yul Singh party, he frowned hard and began to complain of a terrible headache. He took pills and lay down in his dressing room with an ice pack on his head, and I sat beside him, massaging his temples. “Yul Singh,” he kept repeating. “Yul Singh.”
“The top banana,” I said, proud of my newly acquired knowledge. “Aretha, Ray, the Beatles. Everybody.” Ormus winced, as if the pain in his head had intensified.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Pills not working?”
“There’s no such man,” he whispered. “He doesn’t fucking exist.”
That was ridiculous. “You’re hallucinating,” I told him. “You’ll be telling me next there’s no Jesse Garon Parker.” He took the point, and covered his face with his hands. I heard a snatch of song.
It’s not supposed to be this way
it’s not supposed to be this day
it’s not supposed to be this night
but you’re not here to put it right
and you’re not here to hold me tight
it shouldn’t be this way.
Then his head seemed to clear; the pills had kicked in. He sat up on his couch.
“What’s wrong with me?” he said. “This is no time to be cracking up.”
“Break a leg,” I told him, and he went out to play.
At the end of the set, which, in honour of the visiting Americans, Ormus had dedicated to President Kennedy’s survival, I was with him in his tiny dressing room, along with three young women (no room for more). Ormus was stripped to the waist, towelling himself down, to the delight of the ladies. Then Yul Singh knocked at the door. Ormus shooed the women out but told me I could stay.
“Kid brother?” Yul Singh asked, and Ormus grinned. “Something like that.”
Singh was a piece of work. He was wearing the most beautiful blue silk suit I had ever seen, his shirts bore his personal monogram, his two-tone shoes made my feet ache with envy. He was fortyish, small, dark, goateed, and his sunglasses—the work, no doubt, of that ocular couturier par excellence, Dr. T.J. Eckleburg—were made to fit the curve of his head, so that you never could catch a glimpse of those sightless eyes, no matter how much you craned your curious neck. In his hand was a white cane, made of pure ivory, with a silver head.
“Okay, listen to me,” he said: straight to the point. “I don’t come to Bombay to find acts, okay? I come to see
my mother. Who god bless her she’s over seventy now but still rides a horse. You don’t need to know that. So, I heard your music, and what, you think I don’t know anything, who the fuck are you trying to kid?”
All this spoken through teeth glittering in the most courteous of smiles. I had never seen Ormus so discomfited. “I don’t understand, Mr. Singh,” he said, suddenly sounding very young. “You didn’t like my performance?”
“Who cares what I like? I told you, I’m off duty. My mother’s out there. She heard you, I heard you, the whole town heard you. What is it, a kind of tribute act, right? I’ll give you this, you’ve got those songs down, and the phrasing, you could be those guys. So, okay. I’m not interested. You’re doing it to get women, pocket money, what? You get women? Is that what you’re looking for?”
“Just one woman,” Ormus said faintly, shocked into honesty.
That made Singh stop and cock his head. “She ran out on you, huh. You were singing these cockamamie tribute numbers, and she’d had enough.”
Ormus pulled the shreds of his dignity around him. “I get the point, Mr. Singh, thank you for your honesty. I wasn’t singing my own songs today. Another night, maybe I’ll give them a try.” Singh smacked his cane on the bare floor. “Did I say I was finished? I’ll tell you when I’m finished, and I won’t be finished until you tell me, boy, where you got hold of that last number you sang, what bootlegging motherfucker stole it for you, that’s what I said when you started singing, you see what you made me do, you made me swear in front of my white-haired mother, I hate to do that. She was knitting, it made her drop a stitch. You don’t need to know that.”
The last song had been a tender ballad, slow, full of longing: a song for Vina, I thought, one of Ormus’s rooftop compositions, written while dreaming of lost love. But I was wrong. The name of the song was “Yesterday.”
“I heard it,” Ormus said, lamely, and Yul Singh rammed the tip of his cane into the floor once more. “Impossible, okay?” he said. “That song, we aren’t putting it out until next year. We haven’t even recorded it yet. There isn’t even a fucking demo. The guy just wrote it, he just played it to me on his fucking piano in London, okay, and then I fly to Bombay to see my sweet old mother who god bless her I’ve now left out there for many minutes wondering why is her son swearing in front of her, you understand what I’m saying, this is not right. It shouldn’t be this way.”
Ormus was silent, stopped in his tracks. How could he say, I have a dead twin, I follow him in my dreams, he sings, I listen, and these days I’m getting better at hearing the words? Getting better all the time?
Yul Singh stood. “Let me tell you two things. One, if you ever sing that song again, I’ll have lawyers on you tighter than a straitjacket and your balls will be on my table beside my cornflakes in a little china bowl. Two, I never swear. Never. I’m famous for my clean tongue. Therefore comprehend, please, my distress.”
He was going through the door. I caught a glimpse of two burly aides in tuxes. He turned for a parting shot.
“I didn’t say you didn’t have talent. Did I say that? I don’t believe so. You have talent. Maybe great talent. What you don’t have is material, except what you stole, beats me how and you aren’t going to say. What you also don’t have is a band, because those guys in pink jackets with their big-band haircuts are definitely going nowhere except back home on the bus. Further, motivation. This it seems to me you are also short on. When you’ve got material you think it’s up to snuff, when you’ve got an act you think it’ll travel, don’t come and see me. When you’ve got motivation, that’s different, if someday you get it, but maybe you won’t, which don’t worry I won’t be waiting. Maybe if you find that girl, yeah. Find her and she’ll be the making of you. I owe everything personally to my own lovely wife who unfortunately she’s not accompanying me on this trip. You don’t need to know that. Good night.”
“So he doesn’t exist,” I said to Ormus. “That’s lucky, then.”
Ormus looked like he’d been hit by lightning. “It’s all wrong,” he mumbled stupidly. “But maybe this is how it has to be.”
7
MORE THAN LOVE
I must confess that I never completely accepted the passport/foreign exchange explanation of Ormus’s non-pursuit of Vina. Where there’s a will, etc., I couldn’t help thinking; so when Yul Singh shrewdly queried the singer’s motivation, I realized he’d put his finger on the problem and was only saying aloud what I already knew. Such was Ormus’s outward confidence, however—his sexual swagger, his ease with his body and voice, his charm—that I had allowed myself to believe (more exactly, I had kidded myself that I believed) that those private inwardnesses of his, and even those panicky outbursts about errors in reality, could be ascribed to his intense artistic sensibility, which drew him inexorably towards what Browning calls the dangerous edge of things.
“The honest thief, the tender murderer.” Interesting as such paradoxes undoubtedly are, Ormus Cama sought an edge more dangerous by far, an edge in the mind, beyond which he pursued his dead brother, returning with prophetic music but risking, each time, that he might not return at all. It was unsurprising, I thought with teenage omniscience, that such journeys into the unknown should take their toll, and leave the voyager moody and erratic. In short, I believed Ormus Cama to be a little touched in the head, knocked off balance by loss, as separated twins (and jilted lovers) sometimes are. The surviving male Camas were, all of them in their various ways, a couple of annas short of the full rupee; Ormus, neither homicidal nor mute nor sunk in a whisky stupor of defeat and shame, was both gifted and charismatic, and his strangeness only increased the attraction. So there were many ways for me to set aside my early doubts, to stop articulating, even to myself, the obvious insight that Vina’s sudden desertion, immediately after their long-postponed and profoundly satisfying first (and only) night of love, had badly damaged Ormus’s sense of himself, had left him holed below the waterline, listing in the water, bailing furiously and trying not to drown. Now that Yul Singh’s clear-sightedness had opened my own eyes, I could see the thick, paralysing fog of fear enveloping Ormus Cama, the sense of deep inadequacy revealed by his Bombay Casanova act, his unstoppable Don Juanism. If Aphrodite had resigned from Olympus, if Venus had announced that her job wasn’t worth doing any longer, it could not have hit Ormus harder than Vina Apsara’s disillusionment with love. He too had lost confidence, and faith in the very idea of Vina, the idea of there being an eternal and perfect partner whom he might perfectly and eternally love and by whom he might in his turn be rendered perfect and eternal. “I’ll follow her to the ends of the earth,” he boasted, but he wouldn’t even go as far as the airport.
He had begun to fear what he desired most. On the greatest day of his professional life he developed a migraine, and then failed to perform a single song of his own to the celebrated producer sitting beside his knitting mother in the audience. Instead, he sang his Gayo ditties, those cover versions of the well-known hits of the day which he had so uselessly heard long before, in dreams; and so he was mistaken by the producer for a novelty act, a provincial echo of the big-city action, a hick. It was the same with Vina; he’d lost his nerve. The fear that she might no longer love him—that she might, indeed, slam that trailer door in his face—had grown stronger than his love, kept him at home.
In the thirteen months after Yul Singh’s exposure of his secret timorousness, Ormus Cama’s loss of nerve gradually became apparent to everyone. Until that day the house musicians at the various clubs and coffeehouses, such as the Pink Flamingoes backing combo at the Regal Café, had treated Ormus like a demi-god, one of those mythological heroes whose fate it is to end up twinkling in the heavens. After the boss of Colchis Records gave him the thumbs-down, however, the musicians of Bombay wasted no time in letting Ormus Cama know that it was no good his putting on airs any more, he might think he was the Mod God (a title—more alliterative than accurate—which he’d been given by a critic), but as fa
r as they were concerned he was no better than they were, just the singer with the band, and singers were two a penny, so he’d better watch his step. And to complete his discomfiture, he also lost what we used to call “the knack.”
The first women to reject his advances, the starlets Fadia Wadia and Tipple Billimoria, briefly became famous in the city’s café society as the bubble bursters of Ormus’s lady-killer reputation. Within weeks of those first refusals, however, the whole of “Ormie’s Army” had deserted him. Only Persis Kalamanja remained, magnificently waiting in ardent solitude in her mother’s Malabar Hill mansion. But that was a phone call Ormus Cama never made. To call Persis would be to admit he was finished. It would be like calling a tower of silence to rent space on the vulture-crowded roof. Persis Kalamanja, infinitely patient Persis, who bore no malice towards any human being, Persis the beautiful, every mother’s ideal daughter and most men’s dream of a bride, had been transformed by Ormus’s tormented fancy into an avatar of the Angel of Death.
He became an increasingly forlorn, frayed figure during the course of that year, and still he made no effort to go in search of Vina. Even Mrs. Spenta Cama, who had never succeeded in loving her youngest child and had opposed with all her force Ormus’s obsession with the under-age Vina, found herself saying, with a kind of irritation, “What do you think she’s going to do after all this time? Plop down the chimney on Christmas Day, all tied up with ribbon and a card?”
The Cama apartment boasted no chimney; the family was not in the habit of celebrating Christmas; Vina Apsara did not come to call, with or without gift wrapping. But someone did return. And after that, Christmas Day was still nothing for Camas to celebrate, but it was also impossible to forget.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Page 23
