The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  Prometheus the creator of mankind, who saved us from Zeus’s wrath by warning Deucalion to build an ark against the Flood. Prometheus father of science & knowledge, who gave us fire and received the vulture in return. What is Titanic in us, let us seek. What is Olympian, let us expunge. I am my father’s son. I had thought myself free of him, self made, but that was vanity. Death shows us the power of blood.

  I am my father’s son. The punishment of Prometheus I take upon myself O Promethean vulture of reason, help my father find his way to his deserved rest.

  Spenta Cama sent news of Darius’s passing to his old friend Lord Methwold, who had continued to write to her with surprising frequency. By return of post she received a long letter of condolence, which spoke of Darius in the warmest terms, much regretted the gulf that had grown up between them, and invited Spenta and her sons to England. “Though it is winter here, yet these different skies, these unfamiliar surroundings, may by virtue of that very difference help to soothe, if not assuage, your pain.” On receiving this letter Spenta Cama had a number of thoughts more or less at once: that she was not in as much pain as she had expected; that after the years of Darius’s decline, his death felt almost like blessed relief, not least—as the absence of struggle had hinted—to himself; that having refused for half a lifetime to share her husband’s English dream, she now found that the prospect of an English winter was filling her with excitement, anticipation, even joy; and that it would be very nice to see William Methwold again after all these years, very nice indeed.

  And then there was the problem of money. Darius had died a poor man, and Ormus Cama’s income—on which the household had relied to a far greater extent than his disapproving mother had been prepared to admit—had declined sharply. In recent months Spenta had sold off a few “trinkets and baubles” to help maintain standards. Her money worries had etched themselves deeply on her formerly unlined brow and thus come to the attention of Dolly Kalamanja, who had not been so graceless as to speak of them openly. Instead, like a true friend, she had found disingenuous excuses for sending Spenta “little gifties”—silk sari lengths, baskets of laddoos, hot-tiffin carriers laden with the latest international cuisine from the celebrated “Dil Kush” kitchens—in short, the bare necessities of life. For her part, Spenta received the presents lightly, as if they were no more than the trivial evidences of a good friendship, and made sure that she, in her turn, sent Dolly the occasional gift of love: a small ivory carving from the secret treasure chest she kept under her bed, or a novel filched from Darius’s library.

  Thus Spenta was able to accept her friend’s largesse without losing face. But she was practised enough in the codes of polite society to know that her financial situation would soon be the talk of the town, for what Dolly could perceive and keep to herself, less loving eyes would also see soon enough, and less respectful tongues would feel no compulsion to be discreet. Widowhood had only served to underline the crisis by revealing to Spenta the extent of Darius’s debts. It seemed inevitable that the Apollo Bunder apartment would have to be sold and the family would be forced to move into humbler accommodation, joining the swelling ranks of distressed Parsi gentlefolk whose extreme indigence was a phenomenon of the age and another mark of the passing of the Empire upon which they had gambled and lost.

  Into this growing crisis Lord Methwold’s letter of invitation dropped like a blessing from her guardian angels. Spenta hugged it to her bosom and giggled, most improperly for one so recently bereaved. An interested male party with a fortune is a boon to the spirits. Lady Methwold, Spenta murmured, and then had the decency to blush, and think of her sons.

  Naturally, there was no way of leaving helpless Ardaviraf behind, but once they were in England, Lord Methwold would know what to do for the best; and as for Ormus, that loafer, that immoral nightclub singer who had turned out so poorly, she did not feel able—for she was an honest woman—to decamp without telling him that he had also been invited. When she did tell him, she made it very plain that she was not expecting him to accept Lord Methwold’s invitation and would quite understand if he decided his life must take a different, more “bohemian” course. (With what delicate disdain she articulated that word “bohemian”!) In short, she went as close as her nature allowed to telling him he was not wanted on the voyage. To her horror, however, Ormus Cama accepted, with what looked very like elation. “It’s high time I got out of this two-bit town,” he said. “So, if it’s okay, I’ll tag along for the ride.”

  Spenta Cama left Bombay at the end of January 1965, accompanied by her sons. None of the three ever returned to India. By the end of the year Spenta had become Lady Methwold. At Methwold’s insistence, Virus Cama had been placed in a sanatorium where he would receive the finest care, and also twice-weekly flute lessons from a professional flautist of Indian extraction. As for Ormus, he had vanished into the rest of his life, about which there will be a great deal to say hereafter. The newlyweds Spenta and Methwold were left to their own devices, as was only right. Spentas new husband was full of remorse for his cold-shouldering of Darius in the matter of the faked legal qualifications. “In his way he was a giant,” Methwold said. “But a giant out of time. The age of giants has gone, and we mortals grow careless of the few that remain. But the two of us can hold hands through this long winter, and remember.” These words were spoken on the broad, frosty parterre of an ample residence in the Home Counties, of which Spenta was the new châtelaine: a white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above the winding Thames. White curtains blew at the French windows of the orangery. There was a fountain crawling with gods.

  It was the mansion of Darius Cama’s dreams.

  Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it.

  What deflects us from the subject is loss. Of those we love, of the Orient, of hope, of our place in the book. Loss is more than love or is it. More than death or is it. More than art, or not. Darius Cama’s “fourth function” added, to the tripartite system of Indo-European culture (religious sovereignty, physical force, fertility), the necessary additional concept of the existential outsider, the separated man, the banished divorcé, the expelled schoolboy, the cashiered officer, the legal alien, the uprooted wanderer, the out-of-step marcher, the rebel, the transgressor, the outlaw, the anathematized thinker, the crucified revolutionary, the lost soul.

  The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame. If he was right then this is the subject also. If he was wrong, then the lost are merely lost. Stepping out of the frame, they simply cease to exist.

  I am writing here about the end of something, not just the end of a phase of my life but the end of my connection with a country, my country of origin as we say now, my home country I was brought up to say, India. I am trying to say goodbye, goodbye again, goodbye a quarter century after I physically left. This ending is oddly positioned, coming as it does in the middle of my story, but without it the second half of my life could not have happened as it did. Also, it takes time to come to terms with the truth: that what’s over is over. Because as it happens I didn’t go of my own free will. As it happens I was driven out, like a dog. I had to run for my life.

  Small earthquakes were recorded in several parts of India during the late 1960s and early 1970s; nothing serious, no loss of life and minimal damage to property, but enough to make us sleep a little less easily in our beds. One shook the Golden Temple in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in the Punjab, another rattled teeth in the small southern town of Sriperumbudur. A third scared the children of Nellie in Assam. Finally, the picturesque waters of a Kashmiri lake, high Shishnag, that cold mirror in the sky, began to roil and spume.

  Geology as metaphor. There were plenty of rishis and mahagurus, and even political columnists and editorial writers, who were prepared—eager!—to link these tremors with the great public events of those years, such as Mrs. Gandhi’s emergence as
a formidable leader, “Mrs. Mover-and-Shaker,” and her victory over Pakistan in the great War of 1965, which lasted exactly twenty-two days and was fought on two fronts simultaneously, in Kashmir (the “Kashquake”) and in Bangladesh (the “Banglashake”). “Old Order Cracks Up,” cried the pundits, and, once the allegations about Mrs. G.’s electoral malpractices began, “Dark Rumbles Shake Gandhi Administration.”

  I, however, did not need geology to explain the upheavals in my immediate circle. I, Umeed Merchant, a.k.a. Rai, turned eighteen in the year of the War. Ormus had gone, and Vina was a fading memory, and I was shuttling between my estranged parents’ apartments along with the household servants, because they shared the domestic help as well as me, and when I was angry with them, and at that age one is often angry, I would say that I felt as if I were just another one of their underpaid employees. Then my mothers inoperable brain tumour was diagnosed and within weeks she just died, click, as if somebody had turned out her light, and left me burdened with whole volumes of gentler sentences that I had left unsaid. She was fifty-one years old.

  The evening after we buried my mother, my father and I drove out to take a look at Cuffe Parade. The long process of levelling and reclamation was almost complete. The villas, promenade and mangrove forest were long gone, and the sea had retreated before the power of the great machines. An immense brown expanse of land stretched before us, an almost blank slate upon which history was only just beginning to write. The huge dusty space was broken up, articulated, by metal fencing, and large signs forbidding various activities, and the concrete and steel foundations of the first tall buildings; also pile drivers, steamrollers, trucks, wheelbarrows, cranes. And though the day’s work was over, we could still see clumps of workers in the near and middle distance, men were leaning against concrete stumps out of which steel rods twisted like the branches of trees created by some botanical Frankenstein, women with hitched-up saris were holding their earth-carrying metal bowls against their hips and smoking beedis under the No Smoking signs, laughing harshly out of grim gap-toothed faces which knew that life was nothing to laugh about.

  This was not the emptiness of the desert but a desert of the spirit, I thought.

  “No,” said my father, reading my mind. “It is an empty canvas, primed and waiting for the intervention of the artist’s hand. Your mother was a visionary. Here, from this propagatory enclave—seedbed wrested from seabed—her Ozymandian colossi will rise, and the mighty will look upon Bombay and despair.” He was speaking of his rival, the only one who could have parted two people who loved each other so deeply, and in that moment I did not know whether to hate the city that had torn them apart or to take my lead from V.V.’s desperate generosity in his time of inconsolable grief, his compassionate irony, and forgive Bombay as he forgave it, and also pity it as he did, in the name of that dear, lost love. I thought of sand castles and ice cream and tunelessness and puns, and I thought anew of Vina, in whom there was more of Ameer Merchant than could now be found anywhere else on earth.

  It had grown dark, and the evening bugs were biting me to bits. “Let’s go,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. It was my turn to read his mind. She became cynical, he was thinking, she made a pact with the devil, and the devil sent a monster into her head and bore her away. “That isn’t it,” I said. “It wasn’t anything to do with that. You don’t believe in the devil, anyway. It was just a stupid disease.” He snapped out of his reverie with such a wretchedness upon him that I embraced him. I was six or seven inches taller than him by this time and his scrawny head with its wild wisps of grey hair lay against my chest and he sobbed. The lights of the city—Malabar Hill far away, the Queen’s Necklace of Marine Drive curving towards us—hung around us like a noose.

  Back then I was partial to science fiction novels. There was a European novel, Polish, I think, about a planet that could bring people’s thoughts to life. Think of your dead wife, and there she is in your bed. Think of a monster, and it will crawl into your brain, through your ear. That sort of thing.

  Lights like a noose. These were words that came to mind as my father wept on my breast. I should have been more careful with my thoughts. I should have stayed with him that night, but I wanted to be alone, I wanted to sit and stand and walk in Ameer Merchant’s rooms and breathe in the past, before it changed for ever. I should have wondered why he told me to turn off the fan as I left him sitting on his bed in his stripey nightsuit. No moon, and stenchy air. I should have stayed with him. The darkness of the city fell around him like a noose.

  Some people can sleep under a moving fan and some just can’t. Ormus Cama could turn the room upside down and rest under his fan like a man at a mechanical oasis. Vina, however, once told me she could never get rid of the idea that the damned thing would come loose and fly at her while she slept. She had nightmares of decapitation by those whirling blades. Personally, I always liked my fan. I would set the control at minimum and lie back with that slow familiar disturbance of air rolling softly over my skin. The disturbance that calmed. It made me dream of lying stretched out at the edge of an equatorial ocean, lapped by tides warmer than blood. My father was the opposite. “Doesn’t matter how hot it is,” Vivvy Merchant said. “The dratted downdraft induces a cold and tremulous sensation. Shivers my timbers, in sum.”

  Because I knew this about him, I turned off the fan without argument and left him by himself, left him to choose between the living and the dead, which was an easy choice, I guess, when Ameer was among the ranks of the expired, while the cohorts of the extant included only me. Love is more than death, or is it. There are those who say that the songsmith Orpheus was a coward because he refused to die for love, because instead of joining Eurydice in the afterlife he tried to drag her back to the life before; which was against nature, and so failed. Judged by this standard, my father was a braver man than the Thracian lyre player, for in his pursuit of Ameer he sought no special privileges from the guardians of the hereafter, he requested no return tickets from the monsters at the gates. But Eurydice and Orpheus were childless, and my parents were not.

  I am the one who has to live with the choice my father made.

  O Nissy Poe with your pendant mother in the goats’ shed in Virginia long ago. Vina, we are linked by the thing we have seen, by the burden we have to bear. They didn’t want to see us growing up. They didn’t love us enough to wait. Suppose we hadn’t turned out okay? Suppose we needed them? Suppose a thousand things and a thing.

  Murder is a crime of violence against the murdered person. Suicide is a crime of violence against those who remain alive.

  The servants woke me early and took me to his bedroom. They clustered in the doorway, wide-eyed, driven half mad by what they saw, like Goya figures at a witches’ sabbath, goggling in fascinated terror at the Goat. V.V. Merchant was hanging from the ceiling fan. Lights like a noose. He had used the flex from a standard lamp to fashion the instrument of his ending. He was rotating slowly, turning in the breeze. This is what got to me, broke through my reserve, prevented me from suppressing my feelings and casting a cold eye on the event: that somebody had come in here and switched on the fan. “Who did it?” I shrieked. “Who turned the damn thing on?”

  “Sahib, it was hot, sahib,” said the Goya figures. “Sahib, and there is the question of the smell.”

  • • •

  He had never really believed in their separation, always hoped to win her back. One day she would wake up, he imagined, and wonder why he wasn’t in the bed beside her, she would see the error of her ways. That mattered, her seeing the error of her ways, because the Ameer he wanted back was the woman he’d married, not the cynical Mammon worshipper who had joined forces with Piloo Doodhwala. His own grievous fault caused him much daily torment. In his determination to break his gambling addiction, he had gone so far as to ask for my help. What he wanted was for me to become his bookmaker, and so I opened a book. When the cardplaying bug bit him, we played cards. Evening after evening of matchstick poker. I woul
d make entries in the book each time we played, and kept an exact tally of his matchstick losses, which were, as ever, heavy. As for the racetrack, he managed to keep away from it, except on gymkhana days when families were welcome. Then I would accompany him, having made sure he was carrying no money, and instead of making bets we would take photographs of the horses he fancied. If he backed a winner we kept the photograph and pasted it into the book alongside a note of the odds; if not, we ripped it up and hurled it into a trash can as if it were a useless betting slip from the Tote. However, details of these “losses” were also entered in the book of his withdrawal from addiction. When he wanted to bet on the weather, I took the bet. He would see two flies on a windowpane and want to bet on which of them would take off first. As he went about town he would often get into disputes about cricket scores, movie credits, the authorship of songs, and instead of betting real money, he would ring me, and I would enter the bet in the book, afterwards adding a note saying whether he was right or wrong. In this way, very slowly, he had cured himself. The fantasy bets in my little copybook—which was yellow and bore, on the cover, the legend Globe Copy and a picture of a saturnine ringed planet—gradually weaned him off the real thing. Each month there were fewer entries for me to make, until at last there came a month in which I was not required to make any entries at all. He took the book and showed it to Ameer. “It’s over,” he said. “Why not give Piloo the bum’s rush and we can resume?”

  “You’re right about one thing,” she told him. “It’s over, that’s for sure.” Two weeks later the tumour made its appearance. Six weeks after that she was dead.

  Sometimes it’s just over and you can’t make it all right. Justification by works: an overrated idea. There are the dumpers and there are the dumped, and if you fall into the latter category no amount of fantasy gambling can save you. In my life I have done my share of dumping (mostly women) and have not often been the spurned party. Except, of course, that my father—for whom Ameer’s last rejection was perhaps even more painful than her death—strung himself up and left me dangling. Thus making himself both dumper and dumpee. Except, also, that Vina always turned away from me whenever her love of Ormus, her addiction to him, her Ormus habit, required her attention.