The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  “Thank god,” Anita Dharkar said, when I reached a telephone and reversed the charges and woke her up. “Thank god.” I was so angry she’d said such a thing that I shouted abuse at her down the phone. Fear, danger, panic, flight, stress: these things have odd, displaced consequences.

  Thank god? No, no, no. Let’s not invent anything as cruel, vicious, vengeful, intolerant, unloving, immoral and arrogant as god just to explain a stroke of dumb, undeserved luck. I don’t need some multi-limbed Cosmic Dancer or white-bearded Ineffable, some virgin-raping metamorphic Thunderbolt Hurler or world-destroying flood and fire Maniac, to take the credit for saving my skin. Nobody saved the other fellow, did they? Nobody saved the Indochinese or the Angkorans or the Kennedys or the Jews.

  “I know the list,” she said. I was calming down. “Yeah, well,” I said, awkwardly. “I just needed to make the point.”

  The photographs I brought back to Bombay created a great sensation, though considered purely from the aesthetic viewpoint they were as dull and uninspired as the First Photo itself, that ancient monochrome view of walls and roofs as seen from the studio window of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. They were pictures of emptiness, of corrals and pastures, byres and sheds, in which no animals could be seen; of fences, doors, fields, stalls. Photographs of absences. But tell-tale Doodhwala Industries stencils were visible everywhere, on wooden walls and fence posts and on the occasional vehicle: a cart, a truck. Just as the banality of goat fodder had enabled Piloo to construct his mighty fraud, so the banality of these images, what one might call their decisive voiding, served to deconstruct the swindle. Within weeks of their publication, a major fraud squad investigation was in progress, and within three months warrants were issued for the arrest of Piloo Doodhwala, most of the “magnificentourage,” and several dozen lesser associates across two states.

  The bizarre character of the scandal attracted international attention. The photographs were widely re-published, and as a result I received a brief handwritten note from M. Hulot, offering his congratulations on my “scoop de foudre” and inviting me to join the world-famous Nebuchadnezzar photographers’ agency, which he had founded in the year of my birth, along with the American Bobby Flow, “Chip” Boleyn from England and a second French photographer, Paul Willy. It was as if Zeus had tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to join him and the other naked, omnipotent pranksters on top of their storied hill.

  It was the beginning of the life I have led ever since, the first day, one might say, of my life as a man. And yet, as the attentive reader will already have divined, something was badly amiss.

  It is time, after all these years, to answer certain questions.

  Rai—here’s the first question—how does a man shoot a roll of film while bound hand and foot? How does a man film a “goat farm” which he has never visited (for the pictures clearly showed images of at least two separate establishments in different parts of the country)? Most puzzlingly of all, how does a man take photographs after his camera equipment has been removed?

  I could say there was another loaded camera hidden in the Jeep, taped under the offside rear wheel arch, and the murderous bastards missed it. I could say I was goaded into passionate, dangerous action by the experience of spending a day retching and gagging in the company of a hanged man, who wore the same clothes and boots as myself, whose swollen, blackened face might have—or so it seemed to me, in my torment—borne more than a passing resemblance to my own. I did it for him, I could tell you, for my murdered, stinking companion, mon semblable, mon frère. I did it for the dead twin I did not know I had.

  I became careful, circumspect. I found a hiding place during the night from which I could work by day. I became invisible, motionless, invincible. I got the pictures. Here they are. The bastards went to jail, okay? Can I do anything else for you? Anything else you want to know? What’s that? What did you say?

  Why didn’t you buy more film?

  Oh, for crying out loud. They robbed me. I was broke.

  And then Anita came, and brought you home.

  Right. Right.

  So, when did you go to the second location, far away in the Miraj hills?

  Later. I went later. What’s your problem?

  In that case, why didn’t you take more film?

  What, you think it was easy to get those photos? Just to get five or six images would have been a sort of miracle. This was one full roll.

  Tell us about the boots, Rai. Talk about the hiking boots.

  Stop it. Shut up. I can’t.

  Oh, but you must.

  Okay: the thing you could do with these special, imported hiking boots: if you slightly loosened a screw at the base of the heel, you could twist the whole heel section round to reveal a small cavity. A cavity just about large enough to hold a roll of film. I’d used the trick a few times, for example when photographing Mumbai’s Axis rallies. As a matter of fact, I’d used it this time. When I left my Jeep to go “ghoast”-busting, I had a spare film in each heel.

  The hanged man and I were alone for a long time. His feet swung not far from my revolted nose and yes I wondered about the heels of his boots yes when I got the ropes off I made myself approach him yes in spite of his pong like the end of the world and the biting insects yes and the rawness of my throat and my eyes sore from bulging as I puked I took hold of his heels one after the other yes I twisted the left heel it came up empty but the right heel did the right thing the film just plopped down in my hand yes and I put an unused film in its place from my own boot yes and I could feel his body all perfume and my heart was going like mad and I made my escape with Piloo’s fate and my own golden future in my hand yes and to hell with everything I said yes because it might as well be me as another so yes I will yes I did yes.

  I’ve seen that film now, Ugetsu Monogatari, the Japanese picture Hulot praised so highly. I must have seen it a dozen times. It’s not only a ghost story; there’s a sub-plot. A poor man wants to be a great samurai warrior. One day he sees a famous fighter being killed. Afterwards he boasts that he is the one who bested the hero. It makes his reputation. For a while.

  I never actually said the photographs were mine. I just processed them and handed the results to Anita at the Weekly offices and allowed everyone else to give me the credit; which I took. Which isn’t quite the same thing as boasting.

  Who am I kidding?

  There. Now I’ve removed my mask, and you can see what I really am. In this quaking, unreliable time, I have built my house—morally speaking—upon shifting Indian sands. Terra infirma.

  Piloo Doodhwala had his scam; and as you see, I had mine. He made four billion dollars. I just made my name.

  I brought the film out, but it hadn’t been shot by me. It would never have seen the light of day if I hadn’t found it, but it wasn’t my work. Piloo might never have been arraigned, might never have been sent to jail, might have gone on earning his goaty billions for the rest of his life, if not for me. But the photographs weren’t mine. It was over a quarter of a century ago, and since then I’ve earned my spurs, I deserve my goddamn reputation, I’ve worked for everything I’ve got. But the pictures that made my name, that brought me to the world’s attention? They weren’t mine, they weren’t mine, they weren’t mine.

  Too human for the Wolf Pack, too vulpine for Man, Mowgli in the Seeonee hills resolved to hunt alone. Not a bad resolve for a photographer. After my experiences by the banks of the Wainganga, I made the Man Cub’s vow my own.

  Another bitter pill: the Piloo exposé jailed him, but instead of ruining him, it actually made him bigger. The size of the pro-Piloo demonstrations in the rural areas of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh alarmed and impressed the Bombay and Delhi power élite. Prosecuting Piloo began to be described as an act of vengeance by the “English medium” liberal élite against a true man of the masses, a son of the soil. The moment he was jailed he announced his intention to run for public office, and his campaign quickly became unstoppable. The Bombay jailkhana became
Piloo’s royal court. His cell was furnished like a throne room, and banquets were brought in daily by Golmatol and his daughters. Mighty figures came to visit and offer obeisance. Mumbai’s Axis grandees supported Piloo’s bid for mayor, and within six months of being jailed he had been elected to the post. A pardon was sought for him and swiftly granted by the President of India, acting on the urgent advice of the increasingly powerful Sanjay Gandhi, a shoo-in for the next Indian Premier. A general election was called, and the Indira Congress, in association with its new Hindu nationalist allies across the country, including Mumbai’s Axis in Bombay and Maharashtra, swept back to power. Emergency rule was ended. No longer necessary: the electorate had endorsed tyranny and corruption. Chalta hai.

  So it goes.

  • • •

  Much of this, the apotheosis of Piloo, the total victory of Pilooist values over everything in India that I had slowly come to love, happened after I had gone. Listen: once I received the invitation from Nebuchadnezzar I’d have left anyway, but I’d have kept my links to the old country, like Hulot himself I’d have made it one of my subjects, because there it was inside me, colonizing every cell, an addiction so deep it could not be destroyed without killing the addict too; or so I naively believed. What happened instead was that Anita Dharkar was beaten and raped in her own home in the middle of the night the weekend after Piloo went to jail, and her assailants, who hadn’t even bothered to hide their faces, told her to be sure and tell me that I was their next port of call, only in my case they didn’t intend to be so gentle and considerate.

  “Is there somewhere you can go?” she asked. I wanted to go to her, but she told me not to come round on any account, her family was looking after her, she would be fine. I knew she would not be fine. “You should leave the country,” she said. “Things will get much worse before they get better.” I asked her if she would come with me. Her voice was thick-lipped, juddering, broken, and her body, I didn’t know how to think about what had been done to her body. But she would not leave. “They have finished with me now,” she said. “So, no problem.” She meant that India was still the only place on earth to which she could imagine herself belonging, corrupt and crooked and heartless and violent as it was. She belonged, and optimism and hope were still not dead in her in spite of her appalling violation. She could not define herself, could not give herself any meaning, except here, where her roots had gone too deep and spread too wide.

  Something required me to leave. Something else required her to stay. In my story, which is also that of Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, Anita Dharkar, poignant, lovely, sweetly singing Anita who was defiled for the crime of possessing integrity, Anita the photo editor, heroine and patriot, is a boat against the current, moving determinedly in the opposite direction to the tale.

  Her dream was of an India which would deserve her, which would show that it had been right for her to remain. There are noble women who remain married to coarse wife-beaters for similar reasons. They see the good in their bad men.

  And of course there was somewhere I could go. I locked up my home, dismissed the servants and went to see Persis. Get me a ticket, Persis. Fix it with your airline contacts that I can travel under a false name. Don’t ask me why, Persis. You don’t want to know. Persis, I’m going, as you always said I would. Thank you. I’m sorry. Goodbye.

  Persis, gentle gatekeeper of our lives. Who stood by the river that separates the worlds and helped us to cross, but could not do so herself.

  Even after the assault on Anita, it did not occur to me, when I left my Apollo Bunder apartment, that I was going for good, that I would never again set foot in those rooms; nor on that street, to brush off Virus Cama’s troop of urchins; nor in that city, to witness its surge towards the skies; nor in any part of India, though it remained a part of me, as essential as a limb. India, where my parents lay buried, and the smells were the smells of home. I was heading full of anticipation towards a new life, the life I wanted, but I had no sense of having burned my boats. Sure, I’d go back. Things would cool down. Piloo, now rising, would take a tumble soon enough. Nobody remembered anything, anyway, and to return as a big-deal Nebu Agency photographer would ensure me open-arms treatment and the widest possible access. Of course it would. Real life was not like an earthquake. Rifts might appear, but most of them mended, after a fashion. It’s not as if some science fiction chasm had appeared, so wide that there was no way across. It was just end-of-part-one, start-of-part-two, is all.

  But Pilooism won the day, Pilooism and Sanjayism, its Delhi twin. Delhi and Bombay used to hate each other. Bombay-wallahs sneered at the way Delhi people licked the arse of power, then turned it round and sucked its indifferent cock. Delhi-ites derided Bombay’s money-grubbing glitzy materialism. This new alliance united the dark side of both. The corruption of money and the corruption of power, united in a super-corruption that no opponent could withstand. I never foresaw that; but Lady Spenta Cama had intuited it long ago.

  The best in our natures is drowning in the worst.

  Nothing could touch those two. The law couldn’t damage Piloo, and Sanjay, too, led a charmed life. Even when his light aircraft stalled in mid-air while he was looping the loop like a fool over his mother’s official residence, he managed to survive the emergency landing. Oh, the utter Caligulan barbarity of India during the consulship of those terrible twins! The beatings, the bullyings, the jailings, the flailings, the burnings, the bannings, the buyings, the sellings, the shamelessness, the shamelessness, the shame.

  I know it’s different now. The quadruple assassination. I know. People will say I’ve been away too long, I don’t understand the situation, it’s not as I say it is, it never was, it was better in some ways, and in others, worse.

  But I’ll tell you how it feels, after all these years. It feels like an ending in the middle pathway of my life. A necessary ending, without which the second half would have been impossible. Freedom, then? Not exactly. Not quite a liberation, no. It feels like a divorce. In this particular divorce I was the party who didn’t want the marriage to break up. I was the one who sat around waiting, telling myself, it’ll be okay, she’ll think better of it, she’ll come back to me and all manner of thing shall be well. But she never came back. And now we’re all older, it’s too late, the links didn’t break, they just wore away years ago. At the end of a marriage the moment comes when you have to turn away from your wife, from the unbearably beautiful memory of the way you were, and turn towards the rest of your life. That’s me at this point in this story. Once again, I’m the dumpee.

  And so farewell, my country. Don’t worry; I won’t come knocking at your door. I won’t phone you in the middle of the night and hang up when you reply. I won’t follow you down the street when you step out with some other guy. My home is burned, my parents dead, and those I loved have mostly gone away. Those whom I still love I must leave behind for good.

  I go—I hunt—alone.

  India, I have swum in your warm waters and run laughing in your high mountain meadows. Oh, why must everything I say end up sounding like a filmi gana, a goddamn cheap Bollywood song? Very well then: I have walked your filthy streets, India, I have ached in my bones from the illnesses engendered by your germs. I have eaten your independent salt and drunk your nauseatingly sugary roadside tea. For many years your malaria mosquitoes would bite me wherever I went, and in deserts and summers around the world I was stung by cool Kashmiri bees. India, my terra infirma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia, my crowd. India, my too-muchness, my everything at once, my Hug-me, my fable, my mother, my father and my first great truth. It may be that I am not worthy of you, for I have been imperfect, I confess. I may not comprehend what you are becoming, what perhaps you already are, but I am old enough to say that this new self of yours is an entity I no longer want, or need, to understand.

  India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart.

  Goodbye.

  9

  MEMBRANE

  O
ne universe shrinks, another expands. Ormus Cama in the middle 1960s quits Bombay for England, restored to himself, feeling his true nature flowing back into his veins. As the plane lifts from his native soil, so his heart lifts also, he sheds his old skin without a second thought, crosses that frontier as if it didn’t exist, like a shape-shifter, like a snake. His fellow steerage passengers cocoon themselves in uninterest, they sit jammed up against the lives of strangers but pretend they notice nothing in order to maintain the fiction that they are not themselves observed. Ormus’s unleashed personality is unable to contain itself within such demure fictions. His self has taken wing. It overflows its bounds. He stares openly and long at the other travellers, memorising them, these are the people who are going with me to the New World, and he even speaks to them, smiling his disarming smile.

  Welcome aboard the Mayflower, he greets them, seizing their hands as they pass his seat, the terrified uncomprehending peasants from remote inland villages on their way to desert kingdoms, the perspiration-sprinkled executives in cheap suits, the frowning chaperones of a veiled young bride fainting in a pink gharara with too much gold braid, the unwary young student on his way to a miserable four years in an English boarding school, and the children. There are children everywhere, children running in the aisles imitating aircraft to the dismay of the cabin staff; or standing up on their seats grave-eyed and motionless, showing a more than adult understanding of the importance of this momentous day; or screaming like strapped-down lunatics at their fastened seat belts; children dressed in spectacularly lumpy woollen jumpers in functional grey and navy blue, their very garments proclaiming their alienation from the new homes they have never seen, trumpeting the difficulty they will have in adjusting to life in those lightless northern climes.

  We are the Pilgrim Children, Ormus thinks. Where the first foot falls, let us call it Bombay Rock. Boom chickaboom, chickaboom boom.