The Ground Beneath Her Feet (16 page)

Two years, eight months and twenty-eight days, by the way, adds up (except in a leap year) to one thousand and one nights. Nineteen fifty-six, however, was a leap year. Go figure. This kind of spooky parallel doesn’t always exactly work out.

How could such a thing happen?

We must wait a little longer for the answer, until Ormus Cama has returned home from the record store, stunned by joy (because of his meeting with that under-age nymphet, Vina Apsara) and horror (because of his discovery of the “theft” of his secret music by Jesse Parker, Jack Haley’s Meteors and sundry other quiffed and finger-snapping Yanks). The answer cannot be given until Ormus has first encountered his inquisitive matchmaker of a mother, who is anxious to know how things went with “dear Persis, such an able girl, with so many good qualities, so dutiful, so well educated, such good marks in her Matric and Senior Cambridge, and quite pretty in a way, don’t you think so, Ormus dear,” to which somewhat perfunctory encomium he makes no other reply than a shrug. Then he must lounge lazily through the dining room, past the decrepit old domestic servant pretending to
polish the silver candelabrum on the sideboard, Gieve, the kleptomaniac head bearer, whom his father took on from the departed William Methwold and who now bears the title of “butler,” thanks to Sir Darius’s fondness for Lord Emsworth’s immortal Beach, and who has been very, very slowly stealing the family silver for years. (The disappearances have been so petty and so rare that Lady Spenta, guided by the Angel Good Thoughts, to say nothing of the Angel Blind Stupidity, has ascribed them to her own carelessness. Hardly anything except this candelabrum still remains, and even though the identity of the thief is well known to Ormus, he has never mentioned it to his parents, on account of his lofty disdain for material possessions.) And—at last!—Ormus must, he does, enter his own room, he stretches out on his bed, he looks up at the slow ceiling fan and drifts—now!—into reverie. A shadow falls. This is the fabled “Cama obscura,” his stricken family’s curse of inwardness, which he and he alone has learned how to harness, to transform into a gift.

There is a trick he can play on his mind. As he stares at the fan he can “make” the room turn upside down, so that he seems to be lying on the ceiling looking down at the fan which is growing like a metal flower from the floor. Then he can change the scale of things, so that the fan seems gigantic, and he can imagine himself sitting beneath it. Where is this? (His eyes close. The purple birthmark on his left eyelid seems to pulse and throb.) It’s an oasis in the sands, and he’s stretched out in the shade of a tall date palm, whose head tosses slowly in the warm breeze. Now, by dint of deeper dreaming, he populates that desert-ceiling; large airplanes land on the runway of the curtain rail, and all the raucous medley of a magical metropolis pours out of them, roads, tall buildings, taxicabs, policemen with guns, gangsters, saps, pianists dripping cigarettes from their lips and composing songs to other men’s wives, poker games, big rooms featuring star entertainers, wheels of fortune, lumberjacks with money to burn, whores saving up for that little dress shop back home.

He is no longer in an oasis but in a city of dazzling lights, standing in front of a building that might be a theatre or a casino or some other secular temple of delights. He plunges in and at once he knows who he’s looking for. He can hear his brother, whose voice is faint but not so very far away. His dead twin is singing to him, but he can’t make
out the song. “Gayomart, where are you going,” Ormus calls. “Gayo, I’m coming, wait for me.”

The place is swarming with people, all of them in too much of a hurry, spending too much money, kissing each other too lubriciously, eating too quickly so that meat juices and ketchup dribble down their chins, getting into fights over nothing, laughing too loud, crying too hard. At one end of the room is a giant silver screen, bathing the great room in glittering light. From time to time, the people in the room look up to it longingly, as if towards a god, but then shake their heads regretfully and continue with their carousing, which is oddly melancholy. All the people give off an air of incompleteness, as if they have not fully come into being. There are soldiers boasting to their fiancées about their deeds. There is a blonde with a fabulous décolletage wading through a fountain in full evening dress. In a corner, Death plays chess with a knight on his way home from the Crusades, and in another corner a Japanese samurai scratches desperately at an itch he cannot reach. Outside, in the street, a beautiful woman with cropped blond hair is hawking copies of the
Herald Tribune
.

Like a dark shade detached from its owner, Gayomart Cama slips through this gathering of brighter shadows, singing his elusive song. Ormus, pursuing him, is jostled and obstructed by a bald policeman sucking a lollipop, two absurd Indian clowns who speak in rhymes, and an underworld gang boss with cotton-wool padding in his cheeks. Their eyes fix briefly upon him, interrogating him fiercely.
Are you the one?
they seem to ask.
Is it you who will save us from this appalling place, this anteroom, this limbo, and give us the key to the silver screen?
But at once they know he is useless to them, he’s not the one, and they return to their zombie dances.

Gayomart slips through a door at the far end of this first chamber, and Ormus struggles after him. The chase continues down staircases of decreasing grandeur, through rooms of growing gloom. Less glamorous than the hall of uncreated film and television characters is the room of unmade stage rôles, and tawdrier still is the parliament chamber of future betrayals, and the saloon bar of uninvented books, and the back alley of uncommitted crimes, until finally there is just a series of narrow iron steps descending into pitch blackness, and Ormus knows his twin brother is down there, waiting, but he’s too afraid to descend.

Sitting on the top step of his dreamworld, staring into the dark, the purple stain on his eyelid glowing with the effort of searching out his lost sibling, his shadow self, who is down there somewhere in the blackness, Ormus Cama can hear Gayo singing his songs. Gayo has a fine, even a great, singing voice: perfect pitch, immense vocal range, effortless control, expert modulation. But he’s too far away; Ormus can’t make out the words. Just the vowel sounds.

The noise without the meaning. Absurdity.

Eck-eck eye ay-ee eck ee, ack-eye-ack er ay oo eck, eye oock er aw ow oh-ee ee, oo … ah-ay oh-eck …

Two years, eight months and twenty-eight days later he burst out of a listening booth in Bombay, having heard the same sounds issuing from the throat of the new American phenomenon, the first blazing star of the new music, and in the midst of his bewilderment he saw in his mind’s eye the expressions on the faces of the shadows he had seen in his dream underworld, the melancholy and desperation of protoentities longing to become and fearing their great day would never dawn; and he knew that his own face wore the selfsame expression, for the same terror was snatching at his own heart,
someone was stealing his place in history
, and it was to that look of naked fear that Vina had responded when she caught at his trembling nineteen-year-old hand and squeezed it tightly between her own, precocious palms.

I’m the least supernaturally inclined of men, but this tall story I have no option but to believe.

Three people, two living, one dead—I mean his ghostly brother, Gayomart, his lover, Vina, and his father, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama—were severally responsible for making sure that Ormus’s day did, in the end, show up. On Gayo’s lip-curled features he modelled his own sensualist’s scowl; and Gayomart’s elusive songs, those devil-tunes wafting up from satanic darkness, became Ormus’s own. In Gayo, Ormus found the Other into which he dreamed of metamorphosing, the dark self that first fuelled his art.

Of Vina’s part in his story, much more will soon be said. As for Sir Darius, who dreamed whisky dreams of England while asleep on his leather chesterfield and yearned for fictional mansions when he was awake, his son certainly inherited his capacity for leading a vivid
dream-life. And more; Sir Darius’s disenchantment with his home town became Ormus’s too. The son inherited his father’s discontent. But the land of Ormus’s dreams was never England. No white mansion for him, but that other house, the place of light and horror, of speculation and danger and power and wonder, the place where the future was waiting to be born. America! America! It pulled him; it would have him; as it pulls so many of us, and like Pinocchio on Pleasure Island, like all the little donkeys, we laugh (as it devours us) for joy.

Hee-haw!

America, the Great Attractor, whispered in my ears too. But on the topic of Bombay, the city we would both leave behind, Ormus and I never agreed. Bombay was always something of a hick town, a hayseed provincial ville, in his eyes. The greater stage, the true Metropolis, was to be found elsewhere, in Shanghai, in Tokyo, in Buenos Aires, in Rio, and above all in the fabled cities of America, with their pinnacled architecture, the outsize moon rockets and giant hypodermic syringes towering over their cavernous streets. It is no longer permissible to speak of places like Bombay, as people spoke of them in those days, as being situated on the
periphery;
or to describe Ormus’s yearnings, which were also Vina’s and mine, as some sort of
centripetal force
. Yet finding the centre was what drove Ormus and Vina on.

My reasons were different. Not contempt, but surfeit and claustrophobia, made me leave. Bombay belonged too completely to my parents, V.V. and Ameer. It was an extension of their bodies, and, after their deaths, of their souls. My father, Vivvy, who adored both my mother and the city of Bombay so deeply that he sometimes referred to himself, only half jokingly, as a polygamist, had taken to referring to Ameer as if she were a metropolis herself: her fortifications, her esplanades, her traffic flow, her new developments, her crime rate. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had once equated himself, the arch-Anglophile product of the city the British built, with Bombay; but Vivvy’s heart-city would never be Darius’s. It was his own wife, Ameer.

Many youngsters leave home to find themselves; I had to cross oceans just to exit
Wombay
, the parental body. I flew away to get myself born. But like a longtime cigarette smoker who manages to quit, I have never forgotten the taste and kick of the old abandoned drug. Imagine,
if you will, the elaborately ritualised (yes, and marriage-obsessed) formal society of Jane Austen, grafted on to the stenchy, pullulating London beloved of Dickens, as full of chaos and surprises as a rotting fish is full of writhing worms; swash & rollick the whole into a Shandy-and-arrack cocktail; colour it magenta, vermilion, scarlet, lime; sprinkle with crooks & bawds, and you have something like my fabulous home town. I gave it up, true enough; but don’t ask me to say it wasn’t one hell of a place.

(And there were other reasons too, let’s be frank. For example, the threats against my person. If I’d stayed, it could have cost me my life.)

Now my story begins to strain in opposite directions, backwards, forwards. The forward pull, which every storyteller ignores at his peril, and to which for the moment I must yield, is nothing less than the tug of forbidden love. For even as the twenty-year-old German poet Novalis, “he who clears new territory,” took a single look at twelve-year-old Sophie von Kühn and was doomed, in that instant, to an absurd love, followed by tuberculosis and Romanticism, just so the nineteen-year-old Ormus Cama, the most handsome young fellow in Bombay (though not, on account of the shadow that had lain over his family ever since the accident to Ardaviraf, the most eligible), fell for twelve-year-old Vina, fell flat, as if someone had pushed him in the back.

But their love was not absurd. Never that. We all filled it up with meanings, a surfeit of meanings; as we did their deaths.

“He was a proper gentleman,” Vina as an adult would say with genuine pride in her voice—Vina, whose taste ran to the roughest low-lifes, the most louche, least gentlemanly types on earth! “The second time we met,” she would continue, “he declared his love?, and also swore a solemn oath that he would not so much as touch me until the day after my sixteenth birthday. My Ormus and his goddamn oaths.” I suspected her of whitewashing the past, and said as much more than once. It never failed to rile her. “Extremes of experience is one thing,” she’d snarl. “You know my views on that: I’m for ’em. Bring ’em on! I want to have them for myself?, not just read about them in the paper. But Bombay’s Lolita I was not.” She’d shake her head, angry at herself for being angry. “I’m telling you something beautiful, you bastard. I’m
telling you it was over three years before I even got to hold his hand again! All we did was sing. And ride those goddamn trams.” Then she laughed; she could never resist the memory, and gave up her wrath. “Ding-ding!” she pealed. “Ding!”

Anyone who has listened to the lyrics of Ormus Cama will certainly know of the central place reserved in his personal iconography for tramcars. They recur many times, along with street entertainers, card-players, pickpockets, wizards, devils, union men, evil priests, fisher-women, wrestlers, harlequins, vagabonds, chameleons, whores, eclipses, motorbikes and cheap dark rum; and without fail, they lead to love. Your love is bearing down on me, there can be no escape, he sings. Oh cut my captured heart in two, oh crush me like a grape. No, I don’t care. It’s who I am. Oh you can tram me, baby, but I will derail your tram.

It was on the tramcars of Bombay, now departed, much mourned by those who remember them, that Ormus and Vina conducted their long courtship: she playing truant from school, he absenting himself from the Apollo Bunder apartment without explanation. Back then young people were kept on a tighter leash, so it was inevitable that a day of reckoning would come, but in the meanwhile they clattered round the city, hour after enchanted hour, and learned each other’s stories. And so I, too, am—at last!—able to go backwards into the past; Vina’s past. Satisfying my narrative’s other need, I offer up for general consumption what Vina whispered into her future lover’s ear.