The Ground Beneath Her Feet (13 page)

They gave up most of their social lives without even noticing that they had done so. The arrival of a child (me) had completed them in some profound way, and they no longer appeared to need other people. Their friends remonstrated with them at first. Some were hurt. Many believed, with Lady Spenta Cama, that there was something “unhealthy” in the Merchants’ “obsessive” behaviour. In the end, however, everyone simply accepted the new pattern of life as a fact, as merely one eccentricity among life’s many perplexities. V.V. and Ameer were able to concentrate on their boy (me) without concerning themselves about injured feelings or wagging tongues.

Was it on account of their smothering love, or something less explicable in myself, that I began to look out to sea, and dream of America? Was it because, between them, they had possessed the city so completely—was it because I felt that the land was theirs—that I decided to award myself the sea? Did I quit Bombay, in other words, because the whole damn city felt like my mother’s womb and I had to go abroad to get myself born? Such are the psychological explanations on offer, readily available from stock.

I would like to reject them all. My parents, I repeat, loved me and gave me the best they could afford. No childhood home could be more evocative, or linger more sweetly in the memory, than Villa Thracia on Cuffe Parade; and in addition to the best of homes, I had good friends, went to a good school, and had excellent prospects. How churlish, then, to blame one’s parents for providing precisely what every parent hopes to offer! How disgustingly improper to hold against them just that loving attentiveness which is every father and mother’s ideal! You will not hear such words from me, be sure that you won’t. Detachment, a weakened sense of affiliation, was simply in my nature. Already, at the age of nine, I not only had secrets but was proud of them. My high longings, my dreams of ancient knights and heroes, I
hugged to myself; to reveal them would have been to shame myself, to plunge into the humiliating gulf between the greatness of my intentions and the paltry nature of my few achievements. I cultivated silence, while dreaming that, one day, I might sing.

This overly defended self of mine had certain uses. Sometimes, of an evening, I played poker with Vivvy and Ameer. Almost always, I ended up with the largest pile of matchsticks in front of me. “Maybe you should go in for pro gambling when you grow up,” my mother shockingly suggested. “Because, darling boy, that poker face of yours is already working fine.” I nodded. Success loosened my tongue a little. “Nobody ever knows what I’m thinking,” I told her. “That’s the way I like it.”

I saw the shock on both their faces, and the bewilderment too. They simply had no idea what to say to me. “It’s better to speak your heart, Umeed,” my father finally got out. “Better to show your hand than hide it, eh?” My father, the very model of the upstanding gent, the most honourable of men, the most honest, the least corruptible, the gentlest of manner but also the most iron-principled, the most tolerant, was in short the best of men, a godless saint (how he’d have hated the term!) who could be sold a cheap watch in the street and think it an Omega, who always lost at cards and later, tragically, lost at life. And I, his crafty, feigning son, I grinned wide-eyed at this genuinely unworldly innocent man, I made as if to echo his innocence, and then made my checkmate move. “In that case,” I murmured, “why aren’t all the matchsticks piled up in front of you?”

In retrospect it seems plain that the sea was just a metaphor for me. Certainly I liked to swim, but I was just as happy to do so at, for example, the Willingdon Club swimming pool, just as content with fresh water as with salty. Nor did I ever learn to sail, or regret not learning. Water was simply the magic element that would bear me away on its tides; when I grew up, and air was offered instead, I switched allegiances at once. But I remain grateful to water, because Vina loved it, and we could swim in it together.

Air and water, earth and fire: all four shaped our stories (I mean, of course, Ormus’s story, Vina’s tale, and mine). In the first two was our beginning. But then came middles, and ends.

•  •  •

When you grow up, as I did, in a great city, during what just happens to be its golden age, you think of it as eternal. Always was there, always will be. The grandeur of the metropolis creates the illusion of permanence. The peninsular Bombay into which I was born certainly seemed perennial to me. Colaba Causeway was my Via Appia, Malabar and Cumballa hills were our Capitol and Palatine, the Brabourne Stadium was our Colosseum, and as for the glittering Art Deco sweep of Marine Drive, well, that was something not even Rome could boast. I actually grew up believing Art Deco to be the “Bombay style,” a local invention, its name derived, in all probability, from the imperative of the verb “to see.”
Art dekho
. Lo and behold art. (When I began to be familiar with images of New York, I at first felt a sort of anger. The Americans had so much; did they have to possess our “style” as well? But in another, more secret part of my heart, the Art Deco of Manhattan, built on a scale so much grander than our own, only increased America’s allure, made it both familiar and awe-inspiring, our little Bombay writ large.)

In reality that Bombay was almost brand-new when I knew it; what’s more, my parents’ construction firm of Merchant & Merchant had been prominent in its making. In the ten years between the birth of Ormus Cama and my own coming into the world, the city had been a gigantic building site; as if it were in a hurry to become, as if it knew it had to provide itself in finished condition by the time I was able to start paying attention to it.… No, no, I don’t really think along such solipsistic lines. I’m not over-attached to history, or Bombay. Me, I’m the under-attached type.

I return to my muttons. It is true, though it’s got nothing to do with me, that the building boom that created the Bombay of my childhood went into overdrive in the years before my birth and then slowed down for about twenty years; and that time of relative stability tricked me into believing in the city’s timeless qualities. After that, of course, it turned into a monster, and I fled. Ran for my wretched life.

Me? I was a Bombay
chokra
through and through. But let me confess that, even as a child, I was insanely jealous of the city in which I was raised, because it was my parents’ other love, the daughter they
never had. They loved each other (good), they loved me (very good), and they loved her (not so good). Bombay was my rival. It was on account of their romance with the city that they drew up that weekly rota of shared parental responsibilities. When my mother wasn’t with me—when I was riding on my father’s shoulders, or staring, with him, at the fish in the Taraporewala Aquarium—she was out there with
her
, with Bombay; out there bringing her into being. (For of course construction work never stops completely, and supervising such work was Ameer’s particular genius. My mother the master builder. Like her dead father before her.) And when my father handed me over to her—when we sang our hideous ditties and ate our curdled ice-cream—he went off, wearing his local-history hat and a khaki jacket full of pockets, to dig in the foundations of building sites for the secrets of the city’s past, or else sat hatless and coatless at a designing board and dreamed his lo-and-behold dreams.

V. V. Merchant’s first love would always be the city’s pre-history; it was as if he were more interested in the infant’s conception than in her actuality. Give him his head and he would prattle happily for hours of the Chalukya settlements on Elephanta and Salsette islands two and a half thousand years ago, or Raja Bhimdev’s legendary capital at Mahim in the eleventh or twelfth century. He could recite the clauses of the Treaty of Bassein under which the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah ceded the Seven Isles to the Portuguese, and was fond of pointing out that Queen Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II, was the secret link between the cities of Bombay and New York. Bombay came to England in her dowry; but she was also the Queen in the N.Y. borough of Queens.

Maps of the early town afforded him great joy, and his collection of old photographs of the edifices and
objets
of the vanished city was second to none. In these faded images were resurrected the demolished Fort, the slummy “breakfast bazaar” market outside the Teen Darvaza or Bazaargate, and the humble mutton shops and umbrella hospitals of the poor, as well as the fallen palaces of the great. The early city’s relics filled his imagination as well as his photo albums. Hats were of particular interest. “Time was, you could tell a man’s community at once by the thing he wore on his head,” he lamented. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama with his chimney-pot fez was a last relic of those days when Parsis
were called Topazes on account of their headgear. And banias had round hats and the chow-chow Bohras crying their unlistably various wares in the streets seemed to be carrying balls upon their heads.… It was from my father that I learned of Bombay’s first great photographers, Raja Deen Dayal and A. R. Haseler, whose portraits of the city became my first artistic influences, if only by showing me what I did not want to do. Dayal climbed the Rajabai tower to create his sweeping panoramas of the birth of the city; Haseler went one better and took to the air. Their images were awe-inspiring, unforgettable, but they also inspired in me a desperate need to get back down to ground level. From the heights you see only pinnacles. I yearned for the city streets, the knife grinders, the water carriers, the Chowpatty pickpockets, the pavement moneylenders, the peremptory soldiers, the whoring dancers, the horse-drawn carriages with their fodder-thieving drivers, the railway hordes, the chess players in the Irani restaurants, the snake-buckled schoolchildren, the beggars, the fishermen, the servants, the wild throng of Crawford Market shoppers, the oiled wrestlers, the moviemakers, the dockers, the book sewers, the urchins, the cripples, the loom operators, the bully boys, the priests, the throat slitters, the frauds. I yearned for life.

When I said this to my father he showed me still lives of hats and storefronts and piers and told me I was too young to understand. “Comprehension of historical appurtenances,” he assured me, “reveals the human factor.” This required translation. “See where people lived and worked and shopped,” he clarified, with a rare flash of irritation, “and it becomes plain what they were like.” For all his digging, Vivvy Merchant was content with the surfaces of his world. I, his photographer son, set out to prove him wrong, to show that a camera can see beyond the surface, beyond the trappings of the actual, and penetrate to its bloody flesh and heart.

The family construction business had been developed by his late father-in-law, Ishak Merchant, a man so interminably choleric that at the age of forty-three his inner organs literally burst with anger and he died, bleeding copiously inside his skin. This was soon after his daughter’s marriage. The daughter of an angry man, my mother had chosen a partner wholly lacking in anger, but couldn’t handle even his gentle—and rare—reproofs; the mildest of cavils would unleash in her an
astonishing storm of emotion that was more tearful than explosive, but otherwise, in respect of its extreme and damaging force, not at all unlike her dead fathers rage. V.V. treated her gingerly, like the fragile thoroughbred she was. Which was necessary; but also spoke of trouble ahead, or would have, had either of the happy couple been listening. But they turned a deaf ear to all words of warning. They were deeply in love; which beats earplugs.

The happy newlyweds, Vivvy and Ameer, were plunged in at the deep end. Fortunately for them, the city needed every builder it could get. Two decades later, they could point out several of the
art dekho
mansion blocks along the west side of the Oval Maidan, and on Marine Drive too, and say with justifiable pride, “We built that” or “This one’s ours.” Now they were busy further afield, in Worli and Pali Hill and so on. As we drove home from Juhu, we made a number of detours to take a look at this or that site, and not only those with Merchant & Merchant boards on the wire perimeter fences. Building sites are, to a family of builders, what tourist sights are to the rest of the populace. I had grown accustomed to such behaviour and, in addition, was so excited about my encounter with my swimsuit goddess that I didn’t even bother to complain. I did, however, ask questions.

“What’s her name?”

“Arré, whose name? What do I know? Ask your father.”

“What’s her name?”

“I’m not sure. Nissa or some such.”

“Nissa what? Nissa Doodhwala? Nissa Shetty? What?”

“I can’t remember. She grew up far from here, in America.”

“America? Where in America? New York?”

But my father had run out of information; or else there were things he did not wish to reveal. Ameer, however, knew it all.

“New York State,” she said. “Some stupid
gaon
in the backyard of beyond.”

“What
gaon?
Oh, Ammi, come on.”

“You think I know every village in the U.S.? Some Chickaboom-type name.”

“That’s not a name. Is it?”

She shrugged. “Who knows what-all kind of crazy names they have there. Not just Hiawatha-Minnehaha but also Susquehanna, Shenandoah,
Sheboygan, Okefenokee, Onondaga, Oshkosh, Chittenango, Chikasha, Canandaigua, Chuinouga, Tomatosauga, Chickaboom.” They were her last words on the subject. Chickaboom, N.Y., it was.

“Anyway,” added my mother, “you don’t want anything to do with her. For one thing, that Piloo is her guardian now, and plus, she is well known to be nothing but trouble. One thousand and one percent bad egg. She has had a life of tragedy, that is so, my heart goes out to her, but just keep away from her. You heard how she talks. No discipline. She’s too old, anyway; find friends your own age. And plus,” as if this clinched it, “she’s a vegetarian.”

“I liked her,” I said. My parents both ignored me.

“You know,” my mother changed the subject, “those Red Indian names sound darn South Indian to me. Chattanooga, Ootacamund, Thekkady, Schenectady, Gitchee-Gummee, Ticklegummy, Chittoor, Chitaldroog, Chickaboom. Maybe some of our Dravidian co-nationals sailed off to America yonks ago in a beautiful pea-green boat. Indians get everywhere, isn’t it? Like sand.”