The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  This is the high road, the way in through the front door, he says. Maybe there’s also a low road, a back-door entry. This, don’t ask me. Maybe never, but anyway not now.

  The Quakershaker album—self-produced in Muscle Shoals and Montserrat by Ormus; Yul Singh never enters the studio—sells over twenty million units and every penny of the money’s tied up in court. Yul Singh invites Standish (who has been advancing living expenses to Vina and Ormus out of his own pocket) to come into the New York office when he’s back from a trip to Europe, and just talk. The week before this meeting’s due date, the authorities’ attack against Ormus and Vina is launched.

  Mull Standish is of the party that holds that there is no such thing as coincidence. He hires yet more lawyers, both Indian and non-, but behind the scenes he’s the one orchestrating the defense. The greater the difficulties, the greater grows his energy, the more precise his focus. He arranges solidarity concerts at the Fillmores, East and West. Dylan, Lennon, Joplin, Joni, Country Joe and the Fish turn up to sing for Ormus. As character witnesses, Mayor Lindsay, Dick Cavett and Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers union, speak to Ormus’s integrity and value. A suit is filed demanding the government’s case records and asking that the immigration service’s ruling be overturned. There is also the appeal before the immigration board itself.

  In July 1974 the appeal is lost. Once again Ormus is given sixty days to go, or be deported by force.

  During those war years, there are no new VTO records. Ormus retreats into the Rhodopé Building and if he’s writing he’s not telling anyone, not even Standish, not even Vina. Between Vina and Standish, both in love with Ormus Cama, a surprising intimacy forms, a friendship based in part on Ormus’s denial of his body to them both, in part on their joint relish for the fray. She accompanies Standish to meetings of the gay businessmen’s Greater Gotham Business League, joins in their lobbying of politicians on the subject of the recent increase in attacks on the gay community, and gains the League’s support for Ormus’s cause. Standish and Vina become a formidable pair of lobbyists. They brief Jack Anderson, whose Report then reveals both that the drug in Ormus’s blood at the time of the Crossley accident had been administered in a spiked drink without his prior knowledge, and also that over one hundred aliens with worse drug records than Ormus’s have been allowed to remain in the U.S.A. This in turn persuades a New York congressman called Koch to introduce a bill designed to allow the U.S. attorney general to grant residency to Ormus Cama. The tide, very slowly, turns.

  In October 1975 the deportation order is overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals, and a year later, Ormus receives permanent residence status. Once again, there is something like solid ground beneath his feet.

  The celebrations are short-lived, however, like an opening-night party that dies when some killjoy comes in waving the Times critic’s fatal panning of the show. Like the laughter dying on Macbeth’s lips at the appearance of what Yul Singh once memorably called Banquet’s Ghost. Now Singh himself is the specter at the feast. Openly dismayed by Ormus’s victory, he hardens his own resolve. He meets with Standish and simply says, No deal. Then he digs in for a war of attrition, calculating that he can starve Vina and Ormus out. It’s their money that’s tied up, after all. He has plenty of access to funds elsewhere.

  When it becomes plain that long litigious years stretch ahead, Standish begins to lobby Colchis’s distributors, WEC, arguing that as the deadlock has taken the world’s #1 band out of distribution, they, the distributors, are being hit in the pocket by Yul Singh’s intransigence, his czarish refusal to come to the table like a reasonable man.

  Ormus Cama is a tough cookie, he points out. He will sing for quarters on the sidewalk if he has to, but he will not be enslaved. Did they see the Rolling Stone cover, by the way, the one with Ormus and Vina naked and in chains? How worth it was that?

  He gets a fair hearing, but Yul Singh is a big man, and can soak up a lot of pressure. It will be five more years before the battle ends. By 1980 Mull Standish has used up most of his personal fortune, and defeat has become a real possibility. By 1980 he has played all his cards.

  Then the back door opens, and the low road to success is revealed.

  At the nadir of the struggle against Colchis, Ormus has a bread oven installed in his apartment and spends his days baking his beloved loaves—crusty white, granary brown, flour-dusted buns—and discourages all callers. This is his way of going into retreat. On an impulse, Standish and Vina decide to head for a retreat of their own: Dharmsala in the Pir Panjal range, the place of exile of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama and, in Standish’s opinion, the truest man in the world. Vina calls Ormus to tell him the news of their imminent departure. He speaks only of bread.

  India is still there. India abides, and is the third thing that binds Vina and Standish together. Delhi is hot. It is blazing with discontents in the aftermath of the assault on the Sikh extremists who were cornered, and made their last stand, in Amritsar’s Golden Temple. (This was the so-called Wagahwalé gang of terrorists, named after the egg-bald Man Singh Wagahwalé, a small bearded man deformed by the memory of the slaughter of his family during the Partition massacres and now fatally in love, like so many small, bald, bearded men around the world, with the fantasy of a micro-state to call his own, a little stockade in which to wall himself up and call it freedom.) The terrorists are dead now, but the sacrilege of the Indian Army’s assault on Sikhism’s holy of holies still reverberates. Reprisals are feared, and then counter-reprisals, and so on, the familiar sorry spiral. This is not the India Vina and Standish want. They make haste for the Himalayan foothills.

  Indians—or let’s say plains Indians—behave like children when they see snow, which seems like a substance from another world. The towering mountains, the lack of pretension of the wooden buildings, the people who seem free of all but the simplest worldly ambitions, the thin clear air as pure as a choirboy’s soaring treble, the cold and, above all, the snow: these things render the most sophisticated urbanites open to what they would not normally value. The sound of small bells, the scent of saffron, slowness, contemplation, peace.

  (In those days there was also Kashmir. The peace of Kashmir is shattered now, perhaps for ever—no, nothing is for ever—but Dharmsala remains.)

  Vina once again finds herself playing second fiddle in the company of Mull Standish, and oddly doesn’t mind. The origins of Tibetan Buddhism in the teachings of the Indian Mahayana masters, the formation of the different sects, the ascendancy of the Yellow Hats, the doctrine of the four noble truths: on these and other matters Standish is a fountainhead of information. Vina imbibes. Years ago, Standish met the Dalai Lama himself, and formed at that time a particular attachment to the deity Dorje Shugden, who, it is said, spoke to Gyatso through a monk in a trance state and told him the secret route by which he escaped from Tibet’s Chinese conquerors and made his way to India.

  Dorje Shugden has three red eyes and breathes out lightning. But he is one of the Protectors, wrathful as he looks.

  On this trip there is unfortunately no question of an audience with the High Lama, who is abroad, but Standish plans to perform ritual devotions to Shugden. He, too, is a man looking for a way.

  He asks Vina Apsara if she’d like to be a part of this.

  Okay, Vina says. Why not. I came this far.

  Then we’ll be vajra brother and vajra sister, Standish tells her. Vajra is the unbreakable thing, a bolt of lightning, a diamond. It’s the strongest bond, as strong as a tie of blood.

  But at the doors of the down-at-heel Shugden temple Otto Wing is waiting for them with bad news. Shaven-headed and robed, every inch the true believer, the most faithful of the faithful, his heavy black-rimmed glasses the only remnant of the Otto who frolicked with Ifredis Wing in Tempe Harbor a lifetime ago, he informs Standish through pursed, disapproving lips that the Dalai Lama has broken with Dorje Shugden. These days he preaches against the deity, discourages his worship. He
says that the Shugden cult detracts from the Buddha himself. To seek external help from such spirits is to turn away from the Buddha, which is disgraceful. You must not pray here, he instructs the shaken Standish. The road to the four noble truths no longer passes through this place.

  Tense, embattled Shugden monks admit he’s telling the truth. There is division in Paradise. Tibetan Buddhism has always been somewhat sectarian, and one of those divides has started to widen. Standish is so upset that he refuses to stay. Otto Wing flaps around, insisting that they all meditate together, but Standish brushes him off. We’re out of here. Meaning: I no longer belong. Even in this haven I can find no peace.

  No sooner have they slogged up into the mountains than they must take the slow buses and trains back down into the city heat. Vina goes along with this, because what she sees on Standish’s face is an alienation that fills her with fear for him. This man has fought so hard and lost so much: children, illusions, money. She worries that he may not survive this latest blow.

  They arrive in Delhi, to find the city in uproar. A quadruple assassination, by Sikh bodyguards, has resulted in the deaths of Indira Gandhi, both her sons, and the increasingly powerful political figure of Shri Piloo Doodhwala. Dreadful reprisals are being visited upon the city’s Sikh population. The air is full of atrocity. Vina and Mull check in at the old Ashoka and sit together, stunned, not knowing what to do for the best. Then there is a knock on the door. A cockaded hotel employee hands Standish a thick, dog-eared file tied up in quantities of thin, hairy rope. The file was left at reception by a man who did not, however, leave his name. No description of the man is initially available. After much coaxing, the hotel front desk eventually concedes the slight possibility that the courier was wearing the saffron and burgundy robes of a Tibetan monk. Also seen briefly in the hotel lobby that day were members of the disbanded “magnificentourage” of Piloo Doodhwala, perhaps even—though this is unconfirmed—the great man’s grieving wife, Golmatol Doodhwala herself.

  In that overheated time it is easy for Vina, and even perhaps Standish, to believe in almost any rumor, any possibility; even that the package comes not from any mortal source but from a deity, which perhaps feels, in the hour of its own fall from grace, some kinship with the plight of VTO; that Shugden the Protector has in his wisdom sent them this priceless gift.

  Inside the package is irrefutable documentary proof—in the form of facsimiles of signed documents, checks, etc., all duly notarized as true copies—that the celebrated Non-Resident Indian Mr. Yul Singh, the very same Yul Singh who has been taking such an interest in American underground cults and cells, Yul Singh the consummate rock ’n’ roller, who has always presented himself to the whole world as the ultimate cosmopolitan, wholly secularized and Westernized, Boss Yul, Coolest of the Cool, YSL himself, has been for many years a secret zealot, a purchaser of guns and bombs, in short one of the financial mainstays of the terrorist fringe of the Sikh nationalist movement—of, in fact, the Wagahwalé cult, whose leaders were so recently murdered in Amritsar, and who have just exacted, for that assault, a terrible retribution, wrought from beyond the grave.

  Is this new twist part of Piloo’s posthumous revenge against his murderers?

  Vina and Standish sit in air-conditioned coolness and contemplate this gift which India, greatest of all gods from the machine, has just dropped into their astonished laps. Outside, just a couple of miles down the road, the revenge slaughter of innocent Sikhs is being carried out by bloodthirsty mobs led by officials of the governing party.

  Mull Standish, ordinarily the most fastidious, most thoughtful of men, is so carried away by what he has been given that he makes an observation which, in the circumstances, could be said to be in extremely poor taste.

  The more I see of the West, he says, the more I realize that the best things in life come from the East.

  When a great tree falls in the forest, there’s money to be made from the sale of firewood. After Standish, back in New York, mails Yul Singh selected photocopies of the material in his possession—at his home address, for the sake of discretion—the record company boss invites him over to Park Avenue for a drink, and meets him at the elevator without a trace of rancor. You got me fair and square, he admits right off. I call that good work. I always told those kids they got a good one in you. A man wears many masks, few people strip him down to the bone. The criminal and the detective, the blackmailer and the mark, these are close connections which there’s not many marriages more intimate. These are bonds of steel.

  Vajra bonds, Standish thinks. Thunderbolts and rocks.

  My wife reads the mail for me here at home, Yul Singh adds, which I don’t have to tell you means I made a full breast of it all, so she’s fully up to speed. He leads Standish into a vast room with much on the walls that is of interest to this India-loving man: an elephant’s silver caparison, stretched and framed; small bronze Natarajas; Gandhara heads. Marie-Pierre d’Illiers is at the far end of the room, standing very still with a long flute of champagne in her hand. Her dark hair drawn tightly back, hanging in a chignon at the nape of her long and now slightly scrawny neck. She is tall, thin, utterly possessed, utterly unforgiving. She makes Standish feel like what he probably is: a blackmailer and, which is worse, the burglar of all her joy. I have for you just one question, Monsieur Standish, she says in faintly accented English. You and your charges will be owed now an immense sum of money, but truly immense; wealth beyond dreams. (Question and immense are spoken as French words.) So what I ask is this: If a good price can be made, will you buy my cows? I always detested that we were in the dairy trade, but in the end I grew fond of my Holsteins. I am sure you will be suited to the business ideally. The milking and so on.

  There is a brief touch of hands between the blind husband and the all-seeing wife. At that moment, with her use of the past tense tolling in his ears as if it were a death knell, Standish understands what Yul Singh has told his wife about his future intentions, and what she has promised him in return.

  Please, this way, Yul Singh shepherds him to a table covered in papers. The documents are retrospective, the terms are now at the outer edge of what is earned by any performer in the world, and there is favored-nation status. Please take your time and make any changes you care to make.

  When the reading is done Standish takes out his pen and signs many times. Yul Singh’s signature is already there.

  He rises to go.

  There is no possibility, Marie-Pierre d’Illiers murmurs, of an accommodation being arrived at regarding these documents?

  The bull is on its knees waiting for the coup de grâce.

  No, Mull Standish says. I am sorry. You must understand that I have simply been used in this matter, by a principal whose identity I don’t know. If I do not move, the principal will surely bring these papers to light by another means. So, I can’t help you. But as to the dairy herd, yes, if the price is right, we’re interested.

  He leaves them there, in long shot, at the far end of the great chamber of their lives, sipping Cristal champagne as if it were poison. Hemlock, Standish thinks, and then the elevator door closes and he’s going down.

  Their death (too many sleeping pills) is announced the next day. The obituaries are as large and as fulsome as any great star’s. News of the end of VTO’s dispute with the Colchis label is withheld for two weeks, as a mark of respect for the genius of the music man who has died.

  The Sikh documents, interestingly, are not released into the public domain, even though Yul Singh, in a farewell message to the Colchis board, has sketched out their contents to explain his actions. The interests of the label are not served by making this final missive more widely known. Standish chooses not to say what he knows, and nobody comes forward in his place. Death has apparently satisfied the principal. Yul Singh is not pursued beyond the grave.

  At Sam’s Pleasure Island, Cool Yul’s booth is left unoccupied for one full month, guarded against the incursion of the crass and ignorant by a formidable
phalanx of Singhs. During this month, the Pleasure Island staff make sure that a Manhattan on the rocks and a thick Cohiba cigar are always waiting at Yul’s absent elbow.

  After that, however, the city’s life moves on.

  14

  THE WHOLE CATASTROPHE

  More sadness, before joy. Mull Standish does not live to enjoy his great victory for long. The night before his 1981 disappearance he’s working late at the office and makes midnight telephone calls to both Ormus and Vina to read them the riot act. Standish who never spoke up for himself hectors them both about their love, the pending, freeze-frame love which blots out his own. The ten years are almost up, he says, and its time you both stopped acting like fools. To Ormus he says, that you were not able to return my feelings for you is of small concern to anyone but me, and I can handle it, thanks. (No, he couldn’t, not really, but he carried his grief stoically, like the English gentleman he wasn’t; he had acquired the stiff upper lip that went with the Savile Row tailoring he liked.) But that the two of you should squander what’s left of the immense fortune of your love, he scolds, having already wasted so much time, that would be a thing I could not forgive. To Vina he adds, The suspense is killing me. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you. I say join the goddamn dance. And let me say that if you don’t the disappointment might kill me too, and if it does and if there’s light at the end of that famous tunnel maybe I’ll come back and shine it in your eyes. If I have to haunt you into doing the right thing I’ll find me a white sheet and howl.

  The next day the richness of his life is reduced to the thin finality of a crime scene: a wrecked office, broken windows, an absence. Some, not much, blood on the carpet: a nosebleed, perhaps. A broken cane. Unexpectedly, there is what looks like a suicide note, in an open notebook on his desk. Suicides are most frequent in the spring. When the world is falling in love, your own lovelessness hits you hardest. Why would a man write such a note, then trash his office, punch himself in the nose, break his walking stick and vanish without trace? This isn’t a suicide note, Vina tells the police, it’s a diary entry. He was just talking to us about love on the phone and I guess it made him sad. But this was not a man to take his own life. This was a great fighter, a person who overcame.