The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  He himself has dressed carefully for the journey, arraying his body in the casual wear of America: the Yankees baseball cap, the white Beat Generation T-shirt with the ragged cutaway sleeves, the Mickey Mouse watch. There is a touch of Europe too, in the black hipster jeans which he literally charmed off the legs of an Italian tourist at the Gateway, a susceptible youth, one of the first longhaired Westerners to arrive in India in search of beaches and enlightenment, and no match for Ormus Cama’s astonishing powers of persuasion, which left him barelegged and dumbfounded with his right fist full of money and Ormus’s gift of a neatly folded lungi hanging over his bemused left arm.

  England may be my immediate destination but it is not my goal, Ormus’s clothes announce, old England cannot hold me, it may pretend to be swinging but I know it’s just plain hanged. Not funky but defunct. History moves on. Nowadays England is ersatz America, America’s delayed echo, America driving on the left. Sure, Jesse Garon Parker was white American trash who wanted to sing like a black boy, but the Beatles, for goodness’ sake, the Beatles are white English trash trying to sing like American girls. Crystals Ronettes Shirelles Chantels Chiffons Vandellas Marvelettes, why not wear some spangly dresses, boys, why not get some beehive hairdos instead of those loveable moptops and have the sex change operations too, go the whole way, do it right.

  These reflections before even setting foot in England or America or any place except the land where he was born, which he is leaving for good, without regrets, without a backward glance: I want to be in America, America where everyone’s like me, because everyone comes from somewhere else. All those histories, persecutions, massacres, piracies, slaveries; all those secret ceremonies, hanged witches, weeping wooden virgins and horned unyielding gods; all that yearning, hope, greed, excess, the whole lot adding up to a fabulous noisy historyless self-inventing citizenry of jumbles and confusions; all those variform manglings of English adding up to the livingest English in the world; and above everything else, all that smuggled-in music. The drums of Africa that once beat out messages across a giant landscape in which even the trees made music, for example when they absorbed water after a drought, listen and you’ll hear them, yikitaka yikitaka yikitak. The Polish dances, the Italian weddings, the zorba-zithering Greeks. The drunken rhythm of the salsa saints. The cool heart music that heals our aching souls, and the hot democratic music that leaves a hole in the beat and makes our pants want to get up and dance. But it’s this boy from Bombay who will complete the American story, who will take the music and throw it up in the air and the way it falls will inspire a generation, two generations, three. Yay, America. Play it as it lays.

  While he is required to remain seated he occupies his narrow chair as if it were a throne, managing somehow in that confined space to lounge, to give the impression of consummate, even royal, ease. In the countries below him other kings are going about their business. The King of Afghanistan is acting as tourist guide to well-heeled travellers while blocks of hashish bearing government seals of quality and grade are sold in the high-street stores of his capital city; the Shah of Iran makes love to his wife, whose moans of pleasure mingle with the screams of the vanished thousands in the torture chambers of SAVAK; the Queen of England dines with the Lion of Judah; the King of Egypt lies dying. (And so, in America, a magic land that is swinging slowly but surely towards the top of Ormus’s personal Faraway Tree, does Nat “King” Cole.)

  And the earth continues, unpredictably, wrongly, to move.

  Not everybody is happy to be going West. Virus Cama is sitting bolt upright between his mother and brother, can sense the distance between himself and jailed Cyrus growing, and as the bond of their twinship stretches so his dumb face seems to distend with grief. The pink bride is crying softly behind her veil, ignored by her sweat-stained bodyguards. And Spenta Cama on a wing and a prayer is flying in a state of extreme tension, keeping her fingers crossed, heading for her blind date with William Methwold, the one great gamble on which her future depends.

  Ormus closes his eyes and drifts languidly away from consciousness towards turbid airplane sleep. Down the Las Vegas corridors of his mind he chases the dragon, the wisp of smoky nothing that is also Gayomart his dead twin. The past is dropping away from him. Vina has escaped from his yesterdays and is now waiting up ahead, she is his only future. Quake me, Ormus Cama, murmuring down towards sleep, asks of Fate. Rock me like a baby in the bosom of music. Shake me till I rattle, shake me but don’t break me, and roll me, roll me, roll me, like thunder, like a stone.

  This when they’re flying over what’s that down there, the Bosphorus is it, or the Golden Horn, or are they the same place, Istanbul, Byzantium, whatever: drugged by flight, detached from the indifferent earth, he feels a certain resistance in the air. Something fighting back against the aircraft’s forward movement. As if there’s a stretchy translucent membrane across the sky, an ectoplasmic barrier, a Wall. And are there ghostly border guards armed with thunderbolts watching from high pillars of cloud, and might they open fire. But there’s nothing for it now, this is the onliest high road into the West, so onward, drive those dogies onward. But it’s so springy, this invisible restriction, it keeps pushing the airplane back, boeing!, boeing!, until at last the Mayflower breaks through, it’s through! Sunlight bounces off the wing into his bleary eye. And as he passes that unseen frontier he sees the tear in the sky, and for a terror-stricken instant glimpses miracles through the gash, visions for which he can find no words, the mysteries at the heart of things, Eleusinian, unspeakable, bright. He intuits that every bone in his body is being irradiated by something pouring through the sky-rip, a mutation is occurring at the level of the cell, of the gene, of the particle. The person who arrives won’t be the one who left, or not quite. He has crossed a time zone, moved from the eternal past of early life into the constant now of adulthood, the tense of presence, which will become a different kind of preterite, the past of absence, when he dies.

  The visionary moment takes him by surprise, unnerves him. After a few seconds the opening vanishes and there’s nothing out there except the cloud columns, the jet streams, the anachronistic, remnant moon, and infinity, spreading. He feels his fingers tremble, there’s a biochemical quiver moving through his body, it’s the way you feel when somebody slaps your face or impugns your honour or just leans drunkenly into you and calls you an asshole, it’s the way you feel when you feel insulted. He does not want this charismatic experience, wants the world to be real, to be what it is and no more, but he knows that he has always been prone to slipping off the edge of things. And now that he has taken flight, the miraculous has assailed him, has surged through the fractured sky and anointed him with magic. A mantle of sunlight settles on his shoulders. Get away from me, he protests. Just let me sing my songs. His right hand, its fingers still unsteady, touches his mother’s left; and clasps.

  Spenta, shocked by Ormus’s unexpected words, unable to avoid the conclusion that they are meant for her, is perplexed by his apparently contradictory capture of her jewelled hand. Physical displays of affection between Spenta and Ormus are uncharacteristic, infrequent. The mother finds herself feeling light-headed, and begins to blush like a young girl. She turns to look at her son, and at once her stomach whirls, as if the plane had dropped a few thousand feet through a hole in the air. Sunlight is falling on Ormus, and she feels there is another light emanating from within him now, a radiance of his own, rhyming with the sun’s. Spenta who has walked with angels most of her life looks on her child as if for the first time. This is the son whom she tried to dissuade from accompanying her to England, the last-born flesh of her flesh, whose blood bonds she would have been prepared to cut loose. Remorse consumes her. My goodness, she thinks, my son is already more than a man, he’s more than halfway to being a young god, and it’s no thanks to me. With unpractised awkwardness she covers his hand with her other hand and asks, Something on your mind, Ormie? Is there maybe something I can do for you? He shakes his head absently, but she i
nsists, driven on by her sudden guilt: Anything, there must be some little service.

  As if awakening from sleep, he says, Mother, you must let me go.

  Get away from me. So he was saying goodbye after all, she thinks, and foolish tears blub out: What are you saying, Ormie, have I not been, she can’t finish the sentence, because she knows the answer, which is No. A good mother? No, no.

  Ashamed, she turns her face away. She is sitting between her sons. Ardaviraf Cama sits straight-backed in the window seat, oblivious, silent, smiling his serene smile. That faint empty rictus of idiot joy. We are crossing a bridge in the air, Spenta understands. We, too, are travellers between the worlds, we who have died to our old world to be reborn in the new, and this parabola of air is our Chinvat Bridge. Having embarked, we have no option but to go forward on that soul’s journey in which we will be shown what is best, and worst, in human nature. In our own.

  Determinedly, she turns back to implore Ormus: Take some money, at least.

  He agrees to accept five hundred pounds. Five hundred pounds is a lot of money, you can live on it for six months or more if you’re careful. He takes it because he knows that he is the one giving the gift. It is her liberty, not his, that is the subject of this transaction. He is already free. Now she is buying her freedom from him, and he is permitting her to do so. The price is more than fair.

  He has passed through the membrane. His new life begins.

  Europe unrolls below him like a magic rug, and delivers up an unexpected Cleopatra. A young Indian woman materialises, a stranger, squatting by his aisle seat. Her long hair is worn loose over a long shirt and black tights, the uniform of the arty metropolitan beatnik. Her self-presentation is intimate, sultry. Here I am, darling, she says, surprised to see me? He confesses that yes, he is indeed a tad taken aback. Don’t tease me, she cries, making a moue. You weren’t so reticent in the hotel room, when you were playing fast and loose with my oiled and perfumed body while the waves at high tide, the aroused and moonlit sea, drowned our noisy cries. You crashed against me like the ocean et cetera. You told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world, at the height of your passion you swore I was the only one for you et cetera et cetera, so how can you be surprised that I’m on this flight as per arrangement, and now we can live happily ever after in jolly old London Town et cetera et cetera et cetera.

  He has a good memory, but he does not remember her. She tells him the name of the hotel and the number of the room and then he is sure it isn’t true. He has not forgotten—how could he forget?—wearing a Father Christmas outfit at the Cosmic Dancer on Marine Drive, but he never took a room there, with or without sea view. The woman has perched herself on the arm of his seat. I would watch you sleep and even your breath was music, she reminisces. I would bend over your body, my nakedness a beat away from yours and so on, and I felt your melody waft against my skin and so forth. I would inhale your lazy odours and drink the rhythms of your dreams. And so on and so forth. And so often. Once while you slept I held a knife against your throat. Spenta, who has heard every word—every passenger within six rows has heard every word—looks out of sorts, pulling her grumpy bulldog face. Ormus remains calm, begins to let the stranger down gently. Clearly a mistake has been made.

  A second woman, older, bespectacled, sari-clad, flustered, comes bustling up, speaks sharply to the first: Maria, how can you bother the gentleman so? You’re too intelligent, you should have better sense. Go back to your seat at once! Yes, miss, says the beatnik, demurely. Then swiftly she kisses Ormus on the mouth, thrusting a quick, long tongue between his astonished lips. I will be every woman you have ever wanted, of every shape, of every race, of every wild proclivity et cetera, she whispers. I will be your secret heart’s unspeakable desires. Just going, miss, she adds in a different, placatory voice, and retreats. As she passes down the aisle she sings out, over her unembarrassed shoulder, Look for me in your dreams and so on. And send for me when it’s time.

  Passengers mutter and grouch. She waves lightly, and is gone.

  The older woman lingers. Mr. Cama, she says, awkward but resolute, would you allow me to ask you a couple of personal questions, pardon the intrusion?

  She introduces herself as the young woman’s former teacher at Sophia College: My most brilliant student, it is all so stupid. Such expressiveness in that child, words fail me. But there is a mental problem, what a tragedy, it drives me mad.… She says she is taking her protégée on a tour of London galleries and shows. Such strong creativity in the girl, she sighs, but alas, she makes things up.

  Taking a breath, she makes her enquiry. Mr. Cama, she has heard you singing, and now she is singing only of you. But her love story. It is important to establish. Do you know her from back home? From where we are from?

  She speaks as if her Bombay, her India, were somehow different from mine, Ormus thinks, but lets it pass. Maybe she came to a show, he tells her, but no, I don’t know her from a hole in the ground.

  These things happen, he tells the lady in the sari. He is as yet only a small-time entertainer, a tiny bulb in the blinding light show of fame, but even for him this isn’t the first such encounter. There was a Russian girl, the daughter of a Bombay-based consular official, who sent him seventeen numbered letters in English, each accompanied by a poem in Russian. One letter a day, until on the eighteenth day there was no poem and a melancholy awakening. Now I know you do not love me, so I will be sending my virginal yearnings to great poet Mr. A. Voznesensky instead. In the plane to London the sari-clad teacher nods: You can see that I had to ask. I never knew what to think. What a fixation! So much detail, I thought how could it be a fantasy, but of course it could not be true. Don’t be angry. You must be furious. Only have pity. When a gifted child is damaged it is all our loss, isn’t it? No, never mind, it’s nothing to do with you. We are not a part of your world. Thanking you all the same.

  Ormus delays her with questions of his own.

  The teacher looks shifty. Yes, unfortunately it has been going on for some time, she confirms. Apparently the two of you have a love nest in Worli, but of course you don’t have it. And she says you want to marry her but she wants to be free of ties, even though she is bound to you in far deeper ways than any ordinary married persons can comprehend, it is a marriage of mythological proportions and when you die you will take up residence in the stars et cetera. But of course you do not want this, she has been drawn into your penumbra and it has become more real than her own. It is not real. I mean it is real for you but not for her.

  Once again, the odd locutions. There is mystery here.

  She has written poetry, the teacher bursts out, painted paintings, learned the words to the songs that you have sung. Her room a shrine to your not existing love. You should understand that the paintings are good paintings, the poems are not without talent, her singing voice is strong and it can additionally be sweet. Maybe once you said a friendly word to her after a show Maybe one day you smiled and touched her hand. And when we got on to the plane you said Welcome to the Mayflower. That was unwise, it would have been better not to say it. And the Mayflower is not the name of this plane. The name of the plane is Wainganga. Oh, it doesn’t matter what the name is.

  And her name is Maria, Ormus asks. He twists round in his seat, trying to see where she’s sitting. The teacher shakes her head. No need for names-shames, she says, leaving. A sick stranger and her friend, you must be happy with that. Why names? You’ll never talk to us again.

  But as he watches the teacher scurry down the aisle, Ormus hears Gayomart whispering in his ear: The obsessed young woman’s name is not an irrelevance. She’s not from the past. She’s the future.

  Mr. John Mullens Standish XII, the radio pirate, known as Mull, Ormus Cama tells me (years later, in the period we have both come to think of as A.V., that is to say, After Vina), I would call the first man of genuine consequence to take me under his wing, an entrepreneur of real acumen, exceptional leadership qualities, a certain ruthless charm, a d
eep thinker, the first honourable gent I encountered on my journey West, and what was he? A common buccaneer, a desperado, a man facing possible arrest at Heathrow Airport an hour or two after our meeting. This, however, troubled me not in the slightest. Quite the contrary. Ever since boyhood, I’d had a head full of criminals of the sea. Captain Blood, Captain Morgan, Blackbeard, the Barbary Corsairs, Captain Kidd. The great Brynner, with hair and a moustache, as Jean Lafitte in Quinn and DeMille’s movie about the Battle of New Orleans. The novels of Rafael Sabatini, the feats of the Elizabethan privateers. Nor was I limited to storybook stuff. You, Rai, with your darker perspective, there’s too much of the world’s horror in your eye, so you don’t see. How to relish the seafaring criminals of our own childhood coastline. Yet there they were, all the time, plying their trade right under our noses. Looking out to sea from Cuffe Parade or Apollo Bunder, we—you and I!—we saw the Arab dhows, the dirty little engine-driven fishing launches. Silhouettes on the horizon, red sails in the sunset. Carrying who knows what booty to who knew where—

  Save this guff for the magazines, I interrupt. Narcotics smuggling is not so romantic, that’s the truth. Criminal mafias, ditto.

  He ignores me, lost in rhetoric: And if the pirate Drake hadn’t beaten the Armada, and the Spanish had conquered India instead of the British? You’d have liked that, I guess? (Such moments, when Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s Anglophile xenophobia emerges from his son’s mouth, are genuinely spooky.)

  British, Spanish, what’s the difference? I cry, to provoke him.

  Well, he rises to the bait, if you’d … then he sees my game, restrains himself and grins ruefully. Anyway, he shrugs, when Standish approached me, it seemed as if Jason himself was inviting me aboard the Argo to join the quest for the Golden Fleece. And all I had to do was play music.

  They are already in German airspace when the stewardess—Ormus, perhaps excusably in view of the date and his own Bombay English, still thinks of her as an air hostess—summons Mr. Cama into first class. Mull Standish rises to welcome him: tall, Bostonian, not yet fifty but already silvery and patrician, reeking of old money, dressed in Savile Row silk and Lobb leather. Don’t be fooled by appearances, he greets Ormus, handing him a Scotch and soda without troubling to ask, adding: It’s mostly phoney. You’ll find I’m pretty much a rogue.