At that moment the earthquake began. My first thought, when I felt the tremor, was that this was an impossibility, a piece of make-believe, a mistake, because we did not have earthquakes in Bombay. In those years when many parts of the country had begun to shake, Bombayites had prided themselves on being quake-free. Good communal relations and good solid ground, we boasted. No fault lines under our town. But now Piloo Doodhwala’s MA boys were stoking the fires of discord, and the city had begun to shake.
It was what Persis had foretold. There could be no denying that she had developed some sort of sixth sense, some preternatural sensitivity to the treacheries of life. In China they were predicting earthquakes by watching the behaviour of cattle, sheep and goats. In Bombay, apparently, one now needed only to keep Persis Kalamanja under observation.
The truth is that it was not a bad earthquake, low on the scale and of short duration. But there was widespread damage, because the city was unprepared. Many shanties, hutments, jopadpatti lean- to shacks and slum dwellings fell, as well as three tenement chawls and a couple of derelict villas on Cumballa Hill. Cracks appeared in large structures, including the façade of the Orpheum cinema, and in roads and underground drains, and there was much smashed furniture and glass. There were fires. The sea wall at Hornby Vellard broke and for the first time in more than a century the tides swept in through the Great Breach, and the Mahalaxmi racetrack and the Willingdon Club’s golf course were both swamped under a foot of briny water until the damage was repaired. When the sea retreated it left behind its mysteries: unknown fishes, lost children, pirate flags.
An unspecified number of construction workers and kite fighters fell to their deaths. A dozen or so citizens were crushed beneath falling masonry. The tram lines twisted madly up from the roads, and after that they were ripped up for good. For three days the city seemed hardly to move. Offices remained closed, the monstrous traffic jams vanished, pedestrians were few and far between. In the open spaces, however, crowds gathered, huddling far from the buildings, but casting anxious glances, too, at the earth of the maidans, as if it had become an adversary, sly, malign.
In the months that followed, as Mrs. Gandhi’s dictatorial Emergency tightened its grip, the national mood grew sombre and fearful. But the worst excesses of the Emergency occurred elsewhere; in Bombay it was the earthquake that people remembered, the earthquake that gave us the shock that shook our confidence in who we were and how we had chosen to live. An op-ed columnist of the local edition of The Times of India went so far as to wonder if the country might literally be breaking apart. “Long aeons ago,” he reminded us, “India made a tryst with destiny, breaking away from the mighty southern proto-continent of Gondwanaland and linking her destiny to the northern landmass of Laurasia. The Himalaya mountains are the evidence of that coming together; they are the kiss that joined us to our fate. Is it a kiss that failed? Are these new movements of the earth the prelude to a titanic divorce? Will the Himalayas begin, very slowly, to shrink?” Eight hundred words of questions without answers, of traumatized predictions that India would become the “new Atlantis” as the waters of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea closed over the Deccan plateau. The paper’s publication of so panicky a text indicated the depth of local concern.
On the roof, during the few, but impossibly elongated, seconds of the quake, the great French photographer M. Henri Hulot turned his camera perversely towards the sky. All over town terrified kite flyers had let go of their controlling reels. The heavens were full of dying kites, kites nosediving towards the earth, kites being smashed in mid-air by collisions with other kites, kites being torn to shreds by the boiling winds and by the Dionysiac madness of their sudden freedom, that fatal liberty acquired in the midst of catastrophe and then stolen away again, almost at once, by the inexorable gravitational pull of the cracking earth below. Click, went the Leica. The result is the famous image “Earthquake 1971,” in which the tearing mid-air explosion of a single kite tells us everything about the unseen mayhem below. The air becomes a metaphor for the earth.
“Dil Kush” was a solidly constructed mansion, its foundations driven deep into the living rock, and so it trembled but did not break. One of the water tanks on the roof did split, however, and I pulled Hulot away from the path of the gushing water, which he gave no sign of having seen. Dolly Kalamanja was already running downstairs, shouting out her daughter’s name. The Frenchman thanked me courteously, touching his hat, then tapping his camera with a self-deprecating shrug.
Downstairs, Persis sat sobbing amid broken glass, inconsolable, like a homespun princess surrounded by opulent jewels, like a lonely woman amid the ruins of her memories. The earthquake had shaken up feelings which she had tried to bury long before, and now they were pouring out of her, like water from a burst tank. Dolly flapped helplessly around her with a large handkerchief, mopping at her face. Persis brushed her mother away as if she were a moth.
“Everybody leaves,” she wailed. “They all go away and we’re left here to wither and die by ourselves. No wonder the whole place cracks to bits and falls down, it’s all shrivelled up and old and on its own.”
M. Hulot, clearing his throat, extending an arm, not knowing whether to touch her or not, allowed his fingers to flutter helplessly by her shoulder. A second moth, which she was too polite to swat. He essayed gallantry. “Mademoiselle, I assure you, the only rotten fruit here is imported from France.”
She laughed, a little crazily. “You are wrong, monsieur. You may be over sixty, but me, I am five thousand years old, five thousand years of stagnation and decay, and now I am going to pieces and everyone is going away.” She whirled towards me then, and glared savagely. “You, why don’t you also go? He has been trying to leave for years,” she snarled at the alarmed Hulot, with sudden, shocking vehemence. “Always photoing exits. What are all these ways out but rehearsals for his own? All he wants is to run away to his beloved Europe, his Amrika, but as yet he hasn’t found the guts.”
“You take photographs?” Hulot asked me. I nodded, dumbly. I could never have imagined that I could have a chance to discuss my obsession with such a figure. Now that the chance had come it was impossible to take it, because Persis Kalamanja was on fire.
“Living in that place of dead men, dumb men, killers and evacuees,” Persis jeered in a loud, unsteady voice. “What for? To be their lost shadow, their last camp follower, like one of those club bearers or ancient fogeys who are sitting waiting for the British to return?”
“This is a lot to deduce from a change of address,” I said, trying to make light of her hostility, of the thing that had burst out of her depths and attacked me for the crime of not being another man; of living in his home and not being he.
“You were born with everything,” she raged, having moved beyond all restraint, “and you’re throwing it away. Family business, everything. Next you will throw us away also. Of course! You are leaving, but you are so confused you don’t know it. Walking the city streets with your stupid camera, thinking you’re saying hullo when really it’s one long goodbye. Arré, you’re mixed up about everything, Umeed, I’m sorry. You want so much to be loved but you don’t know how to let people love you. What do you want, hein? Plenty-women-lots-of-money? White birdies, black chickies, pounds sterling, U.S. greenbacks? Will that satisfy you? Is it what you’re looking for?”
Even as she said the unsayable, the unforgivable, I was unsaying her words, forgiving her, because I knew I was taking another man’s beating. I was struck by the fact that the questions she was hurling at me were such close variants of what Yul Singh had asked Ormus Cama years before. And as she asked it I knew that my answer was the same as his. It was an answer I couldn’t bring myself to give her, but she saw it on my face anyway, and snorted with contempt.
“Always second in line,” she said. “And if you never get her? Then what?”
I had no answer. Fortunately, as things turned out, I didn’t need one.
M. Hulot asked to see my work, a
nd we made our escape. I drove him through the chaos of the city—the fallen trees, the collapsed balconies like soldiers’ chevron stripes, the demented birds, the screaming—to what was now my apartment. He spoke uninhibitedly about his own technique; about the “pre-composition” of an image in the imagination, and then the intense stillness, the waiting for the decisive moment. He mentioned Bergson’s idea of the self as “pure duration,” no longer situated under the sign of the permanence of the cogito, but in the intuition of the duration. “Like a Japanese artist,” he said. “An hour of being there before the empty canvas, learning the void, and then three seconds of strokes, paf! paf!, like swordsmanship, very exact. You want to go to the West,” he said. “But I have learned most from the East.”
I was surprised that a man as unassuming, as determinedly everyday as he, should speak so much about magic, about the “soul of the real,” an oxymoron that reminded me of Darius Cama’s “miracle of reason.” “It was Balzac,” Hulot said, “who told Nadar that photographs stripped away the subject’s personality. The idea of the camera has always been closely related to the older, but parallel, idea of ghosts. The still camera, yes, and the film camera even more so.”
There was a film he greatly admired, he said: Ugetsu, by the Japanese master Mizoguchi. A poor man is taken up by a great lady, kept in style and offered unimaginable delights, but she is a phantom. “It is easy for a film to convince us of this proposition so improbable, because on the screen, all are equally wraithlike, equally irreal.” A more recent film, Les Carabiniers by Jean-Luc Godard, proved Balzac’s point by extension. “Two young country boys go off to war, promising their girls that when they return they will bring back all the wonders of the world. They return, penniless, with nothing more than a battered suitcase to show for their adventures. But the girls do not excuse them, they want their promised wonders. The soldiers open the suitcase, and voilà! The Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal, the Sphinx, I don’t know what other things beyond any price. The girls are completely satisfy; their beaux have kept their word. Afterwards the soldiers are killed: a machine gun in a cellar. What remains of them is the treasure they brought home. The wonders of the world.
“Picture postcards,” he laughed. “The souls of things.”
In the former library of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, upon the same table at which Darius and William Methwold had pursued their studies, I spread out my portfolio for Hulot. The chandelier lay in pieces on the floor, and books had tumbled from the shelves. To keep myself busy while Hulot examined my pictures, I began to pick up the fallen volumes. I had been reading my way through the old texts and commentaries. The books in Greek and Sanskrit were beyond me, I readily admit, but the ones I could read had captured me, drawing me into their cosmos of savage divinity, of destiny that could be neither diluted nor avoided, but only heroically endured, because one’s fate and one’s nature were not separate things, only different words for the same phenomenon.
“Have you looked at the past?”
At first, lost in the contemplation of the fallen books, I didn’t understand the Frenchman’s question. Then in a rush I began to jabber about my father’s photograph collection, about Haseler and Dayal. I was aware of how provincial I must sound, so, like an over-enthusiastic schoolboy, I dropped the more cosmopolitan names of Niépce and Talbot, of the daguerreotype and the calotype. I referred to Nadar’s portraits, Muybridge’s horses, Atget’s Paris, Man Ray’s surrealism; to Life magazine and Picture Post.
“Are you really so serious a young man?” he teased me, gravely. “Did you never see any dirty postcards or look for porno magazines?”
That made me blush, but then he became serious and changed my life, or rather allowed me to believe what I had not until then really dared to believe: that I could have the life I most desired. “You have understood something about attention and surprise,” he said. “Something of the double self of the photographer, the ruthless tant-pis killer and the giver of immortality also. But there is a danger of mannerism, what do you think.”
Of course, thank you, maestro. Mannerism, yes, a great danger, a terrible thing, I will be on my guard against it in future, maestro, be assured of it. Thank you. Attention, surprise. Exactly. These will be my watchwords. Have no fear.
He turned away from my babbling to look out of the high windows towards the Gateway, and changed the subject. “Your friend Persis is like many remarkable people I have met in Asia,” he said. “Her prediction of the tremor. Extraordinary, yes? It is perhaps her asceticism that has enabled her, that has opened her to such things. She is a seer without a camera, an illuminée of the decisive moment. It is quite normal after such a feat prodigious that there should be some uncontrollable emotional release.” He swung round to see how his statement had gone down, and caught me in the act of pulling a face. He roared with laughter. “Oho, you don’t like that,” he observed.
An answer was expected, and so, even though I had no explanation for Persis’s astonishing prescience, I took a sternly rationalist line. “Excuse me, monsieur, but hereabouts we are plagued by godness masquerading as goodness. The supernatural level is our lifetime detention centre. And every so often our deep spiritualism leads us to massacre one another like wild beasts. Excuse me, but some of us aren’t falling for it, some of us are trying to break free into the real.”
“Good,” he said, mildly. “Good. Find your enemy. When you know what you’re against you have taken the first step to discovering what you’re for.”
He made as if to go. I offered him my services as a driver, but he declined them. He wanted to stalk the shaken city for the images he was pre-composing in his mind. As he left, he gave me his card. “Call me when you come,” he said. “Maybe I am able to be of a little help.”
M. Hulot had told me ghost stories: the spectre of a Japanese woman, the postcards of the dead carabiniers. Images on film were the ghosts in the machine. Three days after the earthquake, I saw a ghost of my own; not a photograph, but a genuine apparition, a revenant from the past. I was at home at Apollo Bunder, participating in the great clear-up of broken glass and tumbled books. The phones weren’t working and there were power outages—“load shedding”—during the hottest hours of the day. I was sweating and short-tempered and not at all prepared for a loud banging on the apartment’s front door. I opened up with a scowl on my face and found myself facing the phantom of Vina Apsara, which looked as shocked as I.
“This isn’t right,” she said, clutching her brow, as if she had a headache. “This isn’t supposed to be you.”
It seemed that ghosts could grow up. She was ten years older than when I’d last seen her: a ravishing twenty-six. Her hair exploded from her head in a huge halo of frizz (it was the first Afro I’d ever seen), and she wore the wised-up, not remotely innocent, expression that was mandatory for the “alternative” women of the period, especially singers who were politically involved. But Vina was always good at putting out mixed signals. As well as the single black glove of the black American radicals, she had painted the Om symbol in scarlet on her right cheek and wore an English dress from a boutique called The Witch Flies High, one of the dark wisps of Indianized occult-chic couture characteristic of the period, which very approximately covered a part of her long and outrageous body. Her dark skin had a burnished quality to it: a heightening. I did not know it then, but it was the gleam created by the brilliant gaze of the public eye, the first rough licks of the tigerish tongue of fame.
“You’re years too late for him,” I said, a little too cruelly. “Nobody waits for ever, not even for you.”
She pushed past me into the apartment, as if it belonged to her. Knowing she came from nowhere, had nothing but what she made of herself, she had learned to treat the whole world as her possession, and I, like the rest of the planet, meekly acquiesced, and acknowledged her dominion over me and mine.
“What a train wreck,” she said, surveying the smashed apartment. “Did anybody get out of this alive?”
Her delivery was unimpressed-tough-broad, but her voice trembled briefly. That was when I understood that the earthquake had jolted Vina into the realization that she was still tied to Ormus, that he was still the only man for her, and the fear that he might be dead or injured had overridden all the uncertainties that had driven her away and led her to create her hard-boiled persona. The earthquake hurled her on to a plane and brought her back to Bombay, to Ormus’s door; only it wasn’t his door any longer. Other upheavals had placed me in his space. I made her coffee, and slowly, as if rediscovering an old habit, she stopped striking attitudes and metamorphosed back into the girl I had known and, yes, damn it, loved.
She had completed her apprenticeship in the coffee bars and clubs of London, from beatnik folk dives like Jumpy’s to the bubbling psychedelia of Middle Earth and UFO, and then moved to New York. There, she went down a blind alley to Folkville, where she shared star billing with Joan Baez but felt alien and ill at ease. She then disgusted and lost her folkie fans by moving into the “mainstream” and doing a season in a sequinned fishtail dress (as it happens, one of the outfits she had stolen from my mother), opening for the Supremes at the Copacabana, because she wanted to be the first brown woman supporting the first black women to play that exalted and conservative gig. Also because she wanted to upstage Diana Ross; which she did. After that she changed direction again, becoming an early pioneer of the trail that led from the Wrong End Café to Sam’s Pleasure Island and Amos Voight’s Slaughterhouse, where the worlds of art, film and music met and fucked, while Voight mildly, ruthlessly, watched.
She was becoming notorious as an unashamed exhibitionist—a reputation that her largely absent Witch dress did nothing to disprove. To wear such a garment in Bombay could be dangerous, but Vina didn’t care. She was an ornery loudmouth too. She appeared regularly on the covers of underground magazines, those new cracks in the media façade caused by the Western youthquake. By pouring out her rage and passion in those journals of narcotic typography, and posing pneumatically for their porno-liberal pix, she became one of the first sacred monsters of the counter-culture, an aggressive iconoclast, half genius, half egomaniac, who lost no opportunity to roar and suck and boo and preen and demolish and cheerlead and revolutionise and innovate and flash and boast and scold. The truth is that this noisy-noisome, pestilential-pest act of hers had set her singing career back. Nowadays such fuck-you, in-your-face aggression would be merely conventional, almost necessary for the wannabe rockette; but in those days such battles had not yet been won. People could still be, and often were, insulted and shocked. You could shoot yourself in the foot.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Page 27
