The Ground Beneath Her Feet (20 page)

That she was in bad trouble, she already knew. That sassiness, delinquency, nihilism and unpredictability didn’t add up to a person, she had worked out for herself. In her own way, and in spite of all her surface insouciance and defiance, she possessed a constructive spirit, and it’s my belief that she was spurred on in her heroic act of self-construction by the experience of living
chez nous
, where talk of building was constant (these were the days when V. V. and Ameer started work on the great Orpheum movie theatre, the project that would eventually ruin them). What she set about constructing was put together with the materials that came immediately to hand: that is to say, Indian goods. What she built was “Vina Apsara,” the goddess, the Galatea with whom the whole world would fall, as Ormus fell, as I fell, in love.

She began with music. “Vina.” She’d heard a musician in Piloo’s entourage playing, coarsely and without feeling, an instrument that in spite of such brutalisation “made a sound like god; and when I found out what it was called, I knew that was the name for me.” The music
of India, from northern sitar ragas to southern Carnatic melodies, always created in her a mood of inexpressible longing. She could listen to recordings of ghazals for hours at a stretch, and was entranced, too, by the complex devotional music of the leading
qawwals
. Longing for what? Not, surely, for an “authentic” Indianness that she could never attain? Rather, I must conclude—and this is hard for a lifelong sceptic like me to write—that what Vina wanted was a glimpse of the unknowable. The music offered the tantalising possibility of being borne on the waves of sound through the curtain of
maya
that supposedly limits our knowing, through the gates of perception to the divine melody beyond.

A religious experience, to be brief, was what she wanted. In a sense, this meant she understood the music far better than I, for its spiritual element is of central importance to so many people, not least the musicians themselves. I, however, am my parents’ child, in that I have always been deaf to religious communications of all types. Unable to take them at face value—what, you
really
think there was an angel there? Reincarnation,
honestly?
—I have made the mistake (encouraged by a childhood in which I hardly ever heard the name of any deity mentioned with approval in our home) of assuming that everyone else was of the same mind, and thought of such speech as metaphorical, and nothing more. This has not always proved a happy assumption to make. It gets one into arguments. And yet—though I know that dead myths were once live religions, that Quetzalcoatl and Dionysus may be fairy tales now but people, to say nothing of goats, once died for them in large numbers—I can still give no credence whatsoever to systems of belief. They seem flimsy, unpersuasive examples of the literary genre known as “unreliable narration.” I think of faith as irony, which is perhaps why the only leaps of faith I’m capable of are those required by the creative imagination, by fictions that don’t pretend to be fact, and so end up telling the truth. I am fond of saying that all religions have one thing in common, namely that their answers to the great question of our origins are all quite simply wrong. So when Vina made, as she would repeatedly make, announcements of her latest conversion, I would reply, “Oh, sure,” and convince myself that she was, in a profound sense, just kidding. But she wasn’t. She meant it, every time. If Vina had decided to worship the Great Pumpkin, then assuredly, come
Hallowe’en, hers—and not poor Linus’s—would have been the sincerest pumpkin patch of all.

“Apsara” was a clue too, if I hadn’t been too stupid to pick it up. It indicated a quantity of serious reading, and even though Vina liked to claim that she’d taken the name from a magazine advertisement in
Femina
or
Filmfare
for beauty soap or luxury silks or some such frippery, hindsight shows up that subterfuge for the ruse it was. She had plunged into the great matter of this strange, huge land in which she had been exiled, far from everything she’d ever thought or been or known. A refusal of the customary marginalised rôle of the exile, it was—I see it now—heroic.

“Vina Apsara” sounded to her twelve-year-old self like someone who might plausibly exist. She would bring her into being, using, as her tools, her love for Ormus Cama, her incredible will, her fabulous hunger for life, and her voice. A woman who can sing is never entirely beyond salvation. She can open her mouth and set her spirit free. And Vina’s singing needs no paeans of praise from me. Put on one of her records, lie back and float downstream. She was a great river, which could bear us all away. Sometimes I try to imagine how she would have sounded singing ghazals. For even though she dedicated her life to another music entirely, the pull of India, its songs, its languages, its life, worked upon her always, like the moon.

I do not flatter myself (or not always) that she came back for me.

To my parents, Vina was the daughter they never had, the child they had chosen to forgo so that they could concentrate on me and on their work; she was the life they thought they did not have room for in their lives. But now that she had arrived, they were filled with joy, and there turned out to be time for everything, after all. She picked up languages as easily as, throughout her life, she picked up lovers. It was in those years that she perfected her use of “Hug-me,” our polyglot trash-talk. “Chinese khana ka big mood hai,” she learned to say, when she wanted a plate of noodles, or—for she was a great hobbit fancier—“Apun J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Angootiyan-ka-Seth
ko too-much admire karta chhé.” Ameer Merchant, the family’s great word-gamester, paid Vina the compliment of incorporating many of the girl’s locutions into her own personal lexicon. Ameer and Vina were, linguistically at least, two of a
kind. (And my mother saw, in her new ward, some deeper echoes of her own unconventional spirit.) Ameer was always convinced of the deep meanings hidden in euphony and rhyme: that is to say, she was a popster
manqué
. So, in her increasingly intimate moments of Vinateasing and general raillery, Ameer would conflate Ormus Cama and Vasco da Gama—“Ormie da Cama, your great explorer, discovering you like a new world full of spices”—and it was a short step from Gama to
Gana
, song, and between Cama and
Kama
, the god of love, the distance was even less. Ormus Kama, Ormus Gana. The embodiment of love, and also of song itself. My mother was right. Her word games said more than she knew.

Vina was already much the same size and build as my mother, and Ameer let her dress up, not only in saris of lavish silk, but also in the slinky sequinned sheath dresses—plunging necklines and all—with which Ameer loved to display her figure to the city’s sophisticated set. Vina grew her hair long, and once a week Ameer personally applied fresh coconut oil to the growing tresses and massaged the young girl’s scalp. She showed Vina the traditional way of drying long hair, spreading it over a wickerwork surface, under which she set a pot of live coals sprinkled with incense. For her skin, Vina learned how to mix rose water and
multani mitti
, a clay named after Multan in Pakistan, and apply it as a face mask. Ameer rubbed ghee into Vina’s feet to keep them soft and to draw out “surplus temperature” from the body during the hot season. Best of all, she taught Vina the connection between jewellery and good fortune; godless Ameer was not without her superstitious foibles. Vina took to wearing a gold chain round her waist. (However, nothing could induce her to wear toe rings, once she had been told that they heightened a woman’s fertility.) And for the rest of her life, the great singer would never wear a precious stone until she had “road-tested” it by putting it under her pillow every night for a week, to see what effect it had on her dreams. This tried the tolerance of various illustrious international jewellery stores, but for a good customer, and a star, people were willing to stretch a point.

(If she had known that her last sexual companion, the playboy Raúl Páramo, had covertly slipped the gift of a ruby necklace under her pillow during their night of befuddled love—rubies had been absolutely forbidden her, years before, by Ameer’s personal astrologer—she would
have understood at once why she had dreamed of blood sacrifice, and been warned, perhaps, of the nearness of her doom. But she never found the necklace. It was discovered by the police during their search of her hotel room, and before she could be informed, it was all over.

And besides, all this jewel reading is pure malarkey. Nothing to it at all.)

As well as Hindi-Urdu and the secrets of beauty and gems, Vina also drank down the city of Bombay in great thirsty gulps—in particular, to the delight of my father, the language of its buildings. V.V. became her eager instructor, and she his star pupil. My parents had just sunk a great deal of money in a prime property near the Bombay Central railway terminus, the site of the proposed Orpheum theatre, which, my father was determined, would be built in the Deco style that Bombay had made her own, even though the city’s other Deco movie houses were already twenty years old and more “modern” theatres were presently the rage. Vina wanted to know everything. After a while, whenever we went to English-language movies, she paid more attention to the cinemas than to anything on the screen. At the great Deco masterpiece, the red-sandstone-and-cream Eros Cinema (Paramount Pictures, in Vista Vision: Danny Kaye in
The Court Jester
, warning that on account of the pellet with the poison, the chalice from the palace was the one you must shun, while the vessel with the pestle had the brew that was true), Vina couldn’t remember the plot but was able to mention casually that while the building had been designed by local boy Sohrabji Bhedwar, the fabulous interiors, black, white, gold and chromium, were the work of Fritz von Drieberg, who also renovated the New Empire (20th Century-Fox, Todd-AO, Rodgers, Hammer-stein, a bright golden haze on the meadow, surreys with fringes, Rod Steiger singing his great self-pitying ditty, none of it enough to get her to remember a word of the fabulous score of
Ooooooo-klahoma!
). At the Metro with its MGM spectaculars—Stewart Granger in
Scaramouche
, winning the longest sword fight in movie history—her attention wandered to the chairs and carpets (American, imported) and the murals (by students at the J.J. School of Arts, where once Rudyard Kipling’s dad had been in charge). And at the Regal—Maria Montez unforgettable in Universal’s
Cobra Woman
—architecture-obsessed Vina failed to
notice that La Montez was playing twins, but whispered credit was duly given to the Czech Karl Schara for the dazzling sun-ray design of the auditorium. At the Hindi movies, she behaved better and seemed more interested, though we did learn of the merits of Angelo Molle (interior, Broadway Cinema, Dadar). Vina professed unoriginally to be in love with Raj Kapoor, and Ormus was touchingly annoyed. I, however, was half sick of cinemas. Fortunately, the hot-season holidays came, and we went to Kashmir.

Vina blossoming towards womanhood in that once blessed valley is one of my most treasured memories. I remember her in the Shalimar Gardens beside running water, slowing suddenly from a child’s gallop to a woman’s walk and beginning to turn heads. I remember her on a palomino pony in the mountain meadow of Baisaran, her hair streaming behind her as she rode. I remember her on the Bund in Srinagar, falling in love with the names of the magic emporia full of papier mâché and carved walnut furniture and numdah rugs: Suffering Moses and Cheap John and Subhana the Worst. I remember her on a pony trek through the high hamlet of Aru, being horrified that the villagers pretended they had no food to sell us, because they heard me call her “Vina” and assumed we were Hindus, and I also remember the equally intense disgust on her face when, having heard we were Muslims, these same villagers brought us a feast of shirmal and meatballs and refused to let us pay.

I remember her reading voraciously, devouring books—all in English, for she never could read Indian languages as well as she spoke them. In a field of flowers at Gulmarg, she read
On the Road
(she and Ormus could recite passages by heart, and when she did the book’s elegiac conclusion, I
think of Dean … I think of Dean Moriarty
, there were tears in her eyes). Or, in a wood of tall trees near Pahalgam, she wondered if any of these conifers might be Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree, which—in an inspired inversion of the normal rules of travel—was regularly visited, at its cloud-concealed top, by fantastic lands. Most heart-piercingly of all, I remember her at the Kolahoi Glacier, talking excitedly about Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
, and her dream of travelling to another high snowscape, that of the Snaefells-jokull in Iceland, so that on the summer solstice she could position herself in the right place at the right time and watch a rock’s shadow
point its swivelling finger, exactly at noon, to the entrance to the Underworld—an Arctic Taenarus Gate. In the light of what happened to her, this memory, I must confess, now gives me a bad attack of the creeps.

(All those cinemas show Hindi movies now. And Kashmir is a battle zone. But the past is not less valuable because it is no longer the present. In fact, it’s more important, because forever unseen. Call it my brand of mysticism, one of the rare spiritual propositions I am prepared to make.)

Ormus Cama did not accompany us on holiday, or to the movies. On the subject of Vina’s extraordinary liaison, Ameer Merchant had laid down the law. With great tolerance—and in spite of vociferous opposition from Lady Spenta Cama, whom, you will recall, she didn’t much care for—she accepted the possibility that this was the beginning of a genuine love match, “but all proprieties must be observed.” Ormus was allowed to call five times a week at tea-time and stay for one hour exactly. My mother agreed not to inform Lady Spenta of Ormus’s visits, on the understanding that she herself would be present throughout them, or, if business appointments made it impossible for her to be there, that the entire encounter take place out of doors, on the porch. Vina agreed without argument. This was not the mutinous inwardness of Nissy Poe, or the frightened yielding of a girl with no options in life. Family life had begun to mend Vina, to make her whole, and she submitted happily to Ameer’s maternal discipline because it sounded like love. Indeed, it was love; hard to say which of them needed the other more.