The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  So while her marvellous voice ensured her a full slate of bookings, her bad mouth lost her many of them. The Copacabana engagement, for example, was terminated after one week, when she casually referred to her stuffed-shirt audience as “dead Kennedys.” The United States, still at war both with itself and in Indochina, had been plunged into deep mourning by the freak double killing of President Bobby Kennedy and his elder brother and predecessor, ex-President Jack, both slain by a single bullet fired by a delusional Palestinian gunman. This was the so-called magic bullet which bounced around the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, L.A., whining like a demented hornet, and ended up scoring an appalling double hit. In that grief-charged atmosphere, when hundreds of thousands of Americans reported sledgehammer migraine headaches and violent dizzy spells, and people stood dazed on street corners murmuring “It shouldn’t be this way,” Vina was probably lucky that her gibe only lost her a job. She could have been run out of town on a rail. She could have been lynched.

  Once, casually, she had married and divorced, and the list of her lovers was long. Interestingly, though she liked to hint at bisexuality, the list was exclusively male. Professionally unconventional Vina was a traditionalist in this area, at least, though her promiscuity was extreme even by the standards of the times.

  When Vina arrived on my doorstep, her celebrity as a singer had not spread outside a medium-size circle of cognoscenti; she had belatedly been signed to a recording contract by Yul Singh’s Colchis label, but thus far word of her talents had not travelled back east. Nor was her mouthy notoriety locally known. Distraught, anonymous, she stretched out on one of my sofas and smoked a joint. I am ashamed to say that I had never previously been offered what I still quaintly called a “reefer,” and its effect on me was rapid and potent. I lay down beside her, and she drew close. We stayed like that for a long time, allowing the distant past to make its connection with the present, letting the silence erase the intervening years. It grew dark. The power was back, but I switched on no lights.

  “I’m not too young any more, am I,” I said at last.

  “No,” she said, kissing my chest. “Am I too old?”

  After we made love—in the bed in which Ormus Cama had been conceived—she wept, then slept, then awoke to weep again. Like many women of the time, she had used abortion as a supplementary birth control technique, and the fourth time—she had recently learned—had left her barren. Unable to have children, and following her normal practice of drawing universal conclusions from her own idiosyncratic experience, she had responded by developing a great polemic against Western birth control methods, a jeremiad against the scientific manipulation of women’s bodies for men’s pleasure, which hit a number of bull’s-eyes and then turned into a cockeyed eulogy of the wisdom of the more “natural” habits of the women of the East. At some point during that night, when I confess my mind was on other matters, she muttered that her main reason for returning had been her desire to go out into the villages and learn the secrets of natural birth control from the women of India. This remark, made in profound seriousness, had the effect of making me laugh. No doubt it was the residual effect of the hashish, but I laughed until the tears ran down my face. “And when you’ve finished praising them for being so sophisticated about rhythm and withdrawal and all,” I cackled, “they’ll ask you if you can spare a diaphragm, and a few rubbers too.” By the time I had finished making this observation, Vina was fully dressed, operatically choleric and on her way out.

  “That isn’t why you came, anyway,” I giggled loudly. “I’m sorry you had a wasted trip.” She threw something fragile at me from the doorway, but I was used to broken pottery and glassware. “You’re a low-life runt, Rai,” she snarled. I didn’t know then about her penchant for this type of behaviour, the easy conquests followed by the vicious scorn. It seemed to me that, once again, I was taking someone else’s knocks, being punished for occupying another man’s space.

  I sobered up once she’d gone. When a woman who obsesses you hands down harsh judgements, they go deep. And when the chance to make those judgements come true offers itself, maybe you take them, maybe you live down to her low opinion of you and spend the rest of your life with the no-longer-deniable accusation stabbing you in the heart.

  After one night with Ormus Cama, Vina flew away for a decade. After one night with me, she took off again. One measly night, and then poof! Do you see why she felt like a phantom to me, why her visit felt like that of the ghostly sisters in The Manuscript Found at Saragossa, who can make love to the hero only in his dreams? And yet this night, at the end of which she went away almost before she had arrived, changed everything. It was the night Persis’s prophecy came true, and I, too, came unstuck from India and began to drift away.

  Withdrawal, the method of prophylaxis favoured in the Indian villages, which has done so much to control the exploding Indian population, was subsequently recommended by Vina Apsara to her American and European sisters in a series of controversial interventions. I am at least able to confirm that she herself remained a devotee, if not entirely a mistress, of the art.

  The official version of Vina’s one-night-only return engagement in Bombay, when she neither sang nor shot her mouth off but merely rekindled an old flame, then poured cold water all over him and flew off again, leaving him drenched and quaking, was somewhat different. All her life, the story she told everyone, perhaps even Ormus Cama, was that when she heard the news of the Bombay earthquake she had indeed rushed to the airport, possessed by the sudden realization of her undimmed love for a man she had not seen for ten long years. “Just my luck,” she would say. “Most romantic thing I ever did, and he wasn’t even there.”

  But the thirty-six-hour trip had not been wasted. By a stroke of good fortune, she had been able to meet in her hotel suite with that great honorary Indian Mother Teresa, a true saint, who had endorsed Vina’s views wholeheartedly. A meeting with leading Indian feminists had also been arranged. These impressive women told her about the rumoured plans of Mr. Sanjay Gandhi to force sterilisation upon an unwilling population. Vina launched a pre-emptive strike against this atrocity in the making. “Once again Western technology and medicine go hand in hand with tyranny and oppression,” she said in a celebrated press conference. “We must not let this man conquer Indian women’s wombs.” In those days the West’s love affair with Indian mysticism was at its height, so her statements gained widespread support.

  To return to the personal, to the love story the whole world was happy to hear a thousand times and a time, the tale of the birth of the immortal VTO: At the end of her brief stay (Vina would say), she had been granted a kind of miracle. Just before leaving for the new Sahar International Airport, having a few minutes to waste, she had turned on the radio and twiddled the knob, looking for the Voice of America wavelength. All of a sudden she heard a familiar voice. “My heart stopped, except that it also went crazy, like a horse,” she’d explain, in a charming self-contradiction, which she would usually follow with another. “I couldn’t bear for the song to finish, but I also needed it to stop at once, so I could hear what the DJ said.” The song was called “Beneath Her Feet,” one half of a double-A-side release (the flip, which was driving the disc towards #1, was called “It Shouldn’t Be This Way”). The band was named Rhythm Center, on Colchis.

  “Ridiculous, huh?” she told a thousand and one journalists over the years. “After all that time it turned out we were signed to the same label. I guess we both owe Mr. Yul Singh a great big thank-you.”

  Persis complained of having been erased from the record by Ormus; I could say the same of Vina’s treatment of me. But in truth it was different between us. True, I couldn’t cure myself of her, and that was the same as what Persis felt for Ormus. But Ormus had forgotten Persis Kalamanja; whereas Vina, whatever she said or didn’t say, kept coming back to wherever I was to be found. I was her favourite thorn; she couldn’t get me out from under her skin.

  Maybe she really did hear Ormus on t
he radio. I’ll buy into that, what the hell, I like fairy tales too. She heard him sing his great love song to her, heard him clean across the world, and felt a loop in time closing, felt herself slip back a decade, moving towards a crossroads she had reached once before; or, like a railway train, approaching an old familiar set of points. Last time she had gone one way. Now she could switch tracks and skip across into the alternative future she had foolishly denied herself. Picture her in the Taj Hotel, looking across Bombay harbour, hearing her lover’s song. She looks sixteen again. She is under the spell of the music. And this time she chooses love.

  And now I must sing the last song of India that will ever pass my lips; I must quit my old stamping grounds once and for all. Here’s an irony worth a shake of the head or a rueful grin: that the severance of my connection with the country of my birth should come to pass at the point of my deepest intimacy with it, my broadest knowledge, my most genuine feelings of belonging. For whatever Persis thought, my years as a photographer had opened my eyes to the old place, and my heart as well. I had started by searching for what my parents had seen in it, but soon I began to see it for myself, to make my own portrait, my own selection from the overwhelming abundance that was everywhere on offer. After a period of feeling an odd, alienated disconnection, feeling it as something not chosen but simply so, I was seeing my way, through the camera lens, of being a “proper” Indian. Yet it was the thing I most rejoiced in, my photographer’s craft, that ensured my banishment. For a while this created problems for me of value, of defining right thought, right action. I didn’t know which way was up any more: what was ground, what sky. The two seemed equally insubstantial to me.

  Do you remember Piloo’s goats? It is a long time since I left them to their own devices. Now, however, I must return to those spectral animals. It is a goat song that I must sing.

  At the time of the earthquake, all manner of bizarre rumours were in the air. Those about Mrs. Gandhi—her electoral fraud, which could very well lead to the Allahabad High Court barring her from holding public office—were so sensational that they fully occupied most people’s attention. Would the Prime Minister resign, or try to cling to power? The unthinkable was becoming thinkable. At every dinner table, every water well, every dhaba and street corner in the country, people argued over the issue’s rights and wrongs. New rumours spread every day. In Bombay, the earthquake raised the general hysteria level to an even higher pitch. In such a climate, it has to be said, nobody was very interested in goats.

  The day after Vina’s disorienting flying visit, however, I was telephoned by Anita Dharkar, a bright young editor at the Illustrated Weekly, which had published individual pictures and photo-essays of mine from time to time. “So, wanna hear the red-hot scuttlebutt on Piloo?” she enquired. She knew of my loathing for the man who had wrecked my parents’ marriage. Find your enemy, Henri Hulot had advised. I knew who my enemy was. I just didn’t know what I could do to harm him; not until shrewd Anita made her call.

  (I must reveal that between Anita and myself there was, well, something. A light occasional thing between colleagues, but with enough substance to it to make me disguise the confusion within me that Vina’s visit had left behind. My old gift for playing the cards close to my chest came in useful. I don’t think Anita suspected anything was up.)

  “Piloo? Did the earthquake gobble him up?” I asked, optimistically. “Or is he climbing into Mrs. G.’s back pocket like every other cheap crook around?”

  “How much do you know about his goat farms?” asked Anita, ignoring me.

  Officially, Piloo was out of the milk industry now, having given in gracefully to his competitors at the Exwyzee Milk Colony. Instead, he had gone into the mutton-and-wool business in a big way. “Why don’t you just turn them into meat and coats?” a petulant young Vina had once asked him. Well, so he had. His ranches were spread across rural Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh from the baking lowlands of the Godavari River valley to the slopes of the many hill ranges of central India, from the Harishandra range, the Ajanta plateau and the Ellora hills to the Sirpur hills and Satmala plateau in the east, and the Miraj hills near Sangli in the south. Fearlessly, he had established large herds near the bandit-infested gulches of Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh as well. He was now one of the national goat industry’s largest employers, and his famously high standards of hygiene and quality control had won nationwide awards, and entitled him, as well as the standard fodder subsidies, calculated per head of livestock, to the substantial tax rebates and improvement grants available to such enlightened rural entrepreneurs.

  “Enough,” I answered Anita. “But why do you care? You’re vegetarian, and allergic to mohair too.” I liked Anita. I liked her looks, which were lavish, and her singing voice, which was the best I’d heard since Vina’s. I liked the gleam of her dark, naked body, its black light, its definition, its boldness. I liked, too, that she appreciated my pictures and championed them inside the Weekly, where there were certain opponents.

  “Suppose I told you,” Anita was saying, “that those goats don’t exist?”

  The creative imagination possessed by a great scam artist is of a high order; one can’t help but admire. What surrealist boldness he displays in the conception of his deceits; what high-wire daring, what mastery of illusion in their execution! The flim-flam maestro is a superman for our times, disdaining norms, scorning convention, soaring far beyond the gravitational pull of plausibility, shucking off the puritan naturalism that would hold most ordinary mortals back. And if in the end he comes unstuck, if his ruses fail like the melting wings of Icarus, then we love him all the more for revealing his human frailty, for falling fatally to earth. In his moment of failure he deepens our love and renders it eternal.

  We have been privileged, in India, to observe at close quarters some of the very best—the best of the best—members of the trickster hall of fame. As a result, we are not easily impressed, we demand the highest levels of performance from our public crooks. We have seen too much, yet we still want to be made to laugh and shake our heads in disbelief; we rely upon the scamster to rekindle a sense of wonder dulled by the excess of our daily lives.

  Since Piloo’s pioneering work, we have marvelled at the People’s Car scam of the later 1970s (huge sums of public money disappeared from a project headed by Sanjay G.), the Swedish Cannons scam of the 1980s (huge sums of public money went astray from an international arms deal that besmirched the reputation of Rajiv G.), and the Stock Exchange scam of the 1990s (strenuous efforts were made to fix the movements of certain key stocks, using, naturally, huge sums of public money). Yet when students of the topic gather together—that is to say, whenever and wherever two or more Indians meet for coffee and a chat—they will generally agree that the Great Goat Scam gets their vote for the all-comers gold-medal position. Just as Citizen Kane is always chosen in movie polls as the best film of all time, and VTO’s Quakershaker (How the Earth Learned to Rock & Roll) invariably beats Sgt. Pepper into second place in the voting for best ever album; just as Hamlet is Best Play and Pelé is Best Football Player and Michael Jordan is the Hoop Dreamboat and Joe DiMaggio is forever Best American, even if he needed the famous line in the famous song explained to him, he thought he was being sent up, didn’t understand the reverence in which he was held, so also Piloo Doodhwala is unshakeably ensconced as India’s Scambaba Deluxe.

  And the fellow who put him up there was me.

  Fodder fraud does not, at first glance, look as romantic a diddle as gun-running commissions or manipulating the investment market. Goats, after all, famously eat anything, so the subventions to farmers are necessarily small: on the order of one hundred rupees per goat per annum, or around three dollars a head. Goat feed = chicken feed, you may scornfully conclude. Not much scope there for one of the great confidence tricks of all time. Doubter, be reassured. Mistake not flamboyance for genius, or glistering garbage for gold. It was the very smallness of the sums involved that enabled Piloo to set up his glori
ous scheme, the sheer banality of the project that protected it from public scrutiny for so many years. For while one hundred chips is a mere bagatelle, it is, nevertheless, one hundred chips in your pocket, as long as your goat is of the Non-Existent type. And because the Non-Existent Goat breeds faster, and requires less attention, or indeed space, than any other variety, what is to stop the energetic goat farmer from increasing the quantity of his livestock at high speed, almost ad infinitum? For the Non-Existent Goat never falls ill, never lets you down, never dies unless it is required to do so, and—uniquely—multiplies at the precise rate stipulated by its owner. Truly, the most obliging and likeable of goats, it makes no noise, nor is there any shit to shovel.

  The scale of the Great Goat Scam was almost beyond comprehension. Piloo Doodhwala was the proud owner of one hundred million wholly fictitious goats, goats of the highest quality, the softness of whose wool had passed into legend, whose flesh was a byword for tenderness. The flexibility of the Non-Existent Goat allowed him to defy the received wisdom of centuries of goat husbandry. Deep in the heart of central India he achieved the incredible feat of rearing top-quality cashmere goats—who were conventionally thought to need high mountain pastures—in the heat of the plains. Nor had communal issues restricted him. His meat goats could be raised by vegetarians, whose work with these magical creatures involved no loss of caste. It was an operation of immense beauty, requiring no work at all, except for the effort of maintaining the fiction of the goats’ Existence. The financial outlay required to ensure the silence of thousands upon thousands of villagers and government inspectors and other officials, and to pay off the border bandits, was very considerable, but entirely within tolerable limits if considered as a percentage of the enterprise’s turnover, and it was, after all (see above), cushioned by tax breaks and capital subsidies to boot.