The Ground Beneath Her Feet (28 page)

Not only confessed, but gave Vina Apsara an unbreakable alibi.

When the impossible becomes a necessity, it can sometimes be achieved. Hours after Ameer Merchant’s tirade had destroyed her faith in the reality of love, Vina called Persis and asked to meet her at (where else?) the Rhythm Center record store. Her uncharacteristically faltering manner persuaded Persis to set aside her reservations, and she agreed.

And at the store they went into a listening booth, pretending to check out the sound-track album of the year’s big musical hit, Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
South Pacific
. And while Miss Jones sang about washing some man out of her hair, Vina—Vina in a frightening, cracked-mirror, off-centre mood that Persis had never seen in her before—threw herself upon her rival’s mercy for much the same reason. I have to go, she said, and don’t ask me to talk about it because I won’t, and don’t think I’ll change my mind because I won’t. And you have to help me, because there’s nobody else, and because you can, and because you’re so fucking sweet
that you won’t tell me to fuck off, and anyway, because you want to. You want to in the worst way.

Then she talked about it, anyway. They’re fucking with me, she said, they think they can put their feelings inside me and then just rip them out, it’s like they’re Martians or something, I’ve got to get away. Persis asked, who. Shut the fuck up, Vina snapped, I said I didn’t want to talk.

And more of the same, much more, through “Bali H’ai” and “Happy Talk” and so on. Can you pay, Persis asked her, and she answered I’ll get the money, but you have to go ahead and fix up the ticket right now, I mean
now
, and I’m good for it, I’ll get it to you somehow—
she was begging openly, winging it, dangling at the end of her rope
, Persis said boldly in the drawing room at “Dil Kush,”
god knows how she got that way but somebody had to catch her, so I reached out my hand, I helped her, that’s all. And besides, she was right
, she added, staring on and on into Ormus Cama’s bewildered face, begging for help, in her own way, as shamelessly, as desperately, as Vina had begged her. Asking for the smallest of words, the faintest reassuring movement of the eyebrow, or perhaps, just possibly, the miraculous comfort of his smile. Asking to be told, yes, now you have a chance.

She was quite right. I did want to. So I did
.

Persis had called her father, and Pat Kalamanja had never been able to say no to his little girl; it’s for a friend, she said, it’s too complicated, she said. Okay, forget it, it’s fixed, he gave in, I’ll send through the PTA today, so you can pick the ticket at the airline bureau tomorrow, or day after, latest. So you see, Persis said to Inspector Sohrab, you mustn’t blame him, he knew nothing, it was me.

PTA is passenger ticket advice, Persis explained. You pay at one end, the ticket gets issued at the other. And I never expected her to have the cash, I knew Daddy would eat the bill anyway when he knew why I wanted the ticket, but she showed up here before noon on the day of the fire with two fat suitcases and a pillowcase full of jewels, and I knew where she got the jewellery from, Ameer auntie, don’t think I had the slightest intention of holding on to it, but then all this started, this C.I.D.
tamasha
, and I got scared, I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my trap shut, but I’ve opened it now, please excuse delay. She was with me all the time after that. I took her to the airport and put her on the plane myself and she’s gone, and I hope she never comes back.

She may be a thief, said honest Persis, but she didn’t start any fire.

The interrogation of Persis Kalamanja by Messrs. Sohrab and Rustam took place behind closed doors in a private room of her family home, lasted several hours, often grew heated, and failed to shake her testimony to the slightest degree. She did, however, fill in the story’s blanks. It transpired that Pat Kalamanja had forked out only for a ticket as far as London, not the United States. At Persis’s request, he had good-heartedly met Vina off the plane and taken her home to Wembley, because she had nowhere else to go. The next morning she had borrowed a small quantity of English currency from him, left her bags and gone into central London alone. She did not return that night, and agitated Pat was on the verge of calling the police when she walked in the following morning, offered no account of her absence, returned his money in full—the money for her ticket as well as the borrowed cash—and told him she was “all set,” called a taxi, refused to allow Pat to help her with her bags, muttered a cursory thank-you and disappeared. Her present whereabouts remained unknown.

Soon after Persis was questioned, Vina Apsara was formally declared to be “no longer under suspicion of arson.” Nor was Ameer Merchant prepared to accuse her of theft, because as Persis’s story unfolded my mother’s remorseful agonies had intensified sharply. She knew that Vina’s flight was her doing, that she was the assassin of the runaway girl’s joy, and although Ameer was a mistress of the flinty exterior, I could see through her dikes and embankments to the great flood tide of grief behind. Mourning the loss of a girl whom she had, in her own way, truly loved, Ameer cared little for her lost baubles. Vina’s removal of jewels from Villa Thracia had resulted, after all, in the preservation and return of at least some of the family treasures. And if she had left the country with her suitcases bulging with Ameer’s finest slinky sequinned dresses and dripping with the rest of my mother’s diamond rings and emerald earrings and pearl necklaces, which no doubt she had sold in London to raise cash, Ameer waved it all away, what of it, she shrugged, the poor child is more than welcome, for if she had not pinched them, they would have been consumed by fire. Then my mother retired to her room, to weep long and hard for Vina, and for herself and her own departed happiness as well.

Thus Persis Kalamanja not only helped Vina to leave Bombay, as she
wished, but also saved her from being wrongfully accused of a crime she did not commit. The police did not break Persis down, and I will not suggest here that the alibi she gave Vina was anything but the whole, the nothing-but-the truth.

When she was worried, she could twist her beautiful mouth until it looked as if it was being wrung by a dhobi. The effect was almost unbearably erotic. In those days there was a whole generation of young men hoping she would twist her mouth in their direction. But the man at whom she was twisting it now, twisting it with all her heart, as she emerged from the police interrogation to face the questions in his eyes, was utterly unmoved. This was her reward for helping Vina: that Ormus Cama completed, at that moment, the process of wiping her off his personal map and out of the history of his life. He looked at her with open hatred; then with contempt; then with indifference; then as if he no longer remembered who she was. He left “Dil Kush” as if withdrawing from a stranger’s house into which he had stumbled by mistake. And Persis became “poor Persis” then, and “poor Persis” she remained for the rest of her old maids life.

Nobody was ever charged with the crime of burning down Villa Thracia. The C.I.D.’s heroes, Sohrab and Rustam, concluded that “criminal intervention” was “off the agenda” and withdrew from the case. Many Bombay properties had old and dangerous wiring systems, and it was easy enough, finally, to believe in an electrical fault as the blaze’s probable cause.

Easy enough, especially when the influence kept on flowing down from the top, until all possible suspects were, in the satisfied words of Piloo’s aide Sisodia, “Foo fool fully Exxon Exxon exonerated.”

Disorientation is loss of the East. Ask any navigator: the east is what you sail by. Lose the east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what is and what may be, perhaps even your life. Where was that star you followed to that manger? That’s right. The east orients. That’s the official version. The language says so, and you should never argue with the language.

But let’s just suppose. What if the whole deal—orientation, knowing where you are, and so on—what if it’s all a scam? What if all of it—home,
kinship, the whole enchilada—is just the biggest, most truly global, and centuries-oldest piece of brainwashing? Suppose that it’s only when you dare to let go that your real life begins? When you’re whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever: suppose that it’s then, and only then, that you’re actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you’re one of those people who are, for reasons which unfortunately you can’t be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you’ve got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you’ve got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air.

You won’t do it. Most of you won’t do it. The world’s head laundry is pretty good at washing brains: Don’t jump off that cliff don’t walk through that door don’t step into that waterfall don’t take that chance don’t step across that line don’t ruffle my sensitivities I’m warning you now don’t make me mad you’re doing it you’re making me mad. You won’t have a chance you haven’t got a prayer you’re finished you’re history you’re less than nothing, you’re dead to me, dead to your whole family your nation your race, everything you ought to love more than life and listen to like your master’s voice and follow blindly and bow down before and worship and obey; you’re dead, you hear me, forget about it, you stupid bastard, I don’t even know your name.

But just imagine you did it. You stepped off the edge of the earth, or through the fatal waterfall, and there it was: the magic valley at the end of the universe, the blessed kingdom of the air. Great music everywhere. You breathe the music, in and out, it’s your element now. It feels better than “belonging” in your lungs.

Vina was the first one of us to do it. Ormus jumped second, and I, as usual, brought up the rear. And we can argue all night about why, did we jump or were we pushed, but you can’t deny we all did it. We three kings of Disorient were.

And I’m the only one who lived to tell the tale.

•  •  •

We Merchants moved into rented accommodation in the Camas’ apartment block on Apollo Bunder, separate flats for my mother and father, and me like a yo-yo between the pair of them, learning independence, still playing my cards close to the chest, growing up. In those days Ormus Cama and I were closer than we ever managed before or since, on account of our common loss. I guess we could each tolerate the others need for Vina because she wasn’t around either of us. There wasn’t a day when we didn’t both spend most of our time thinking about her, and the same questions were in both our hearts. Why had she abandoned us? Wasn’t she ours, hadn’t we loved her? Ormus had the better claim, as always. He had won her in a bet, he had earned her by waiting through the long self-denying years. And now she was gone, into that immense underworld made up of all the things and places and people we did not know. “I’m going to find her,” Ormus repeatedly swore. “No limit to where I’ll go. To the ends of the earth, Rai. And even beyond.” Yes, yes, I thought, but what if she doesn’t want you? What if you were just her Indian fling, her bit of curry powder? What if you’re her past, and at the end of your long quest you locate her in a penthouse or trailer park and she slams the door in your face?

Was Ormus ready to plunge even into this inferno, the underworld of doubt? I didn’t ask him; and because I was young, it took me a long time to understand that the hell-fires of uncertainty were already burning him up.

Back then it wasn’t easy to travel if all you had was an Indian passport. Inside this passport some bureaucrat would laboriously inscribe the few countries you were actually allowed to travel to, most of them countries that had never crossed your mind as possible destinations. All the rest—certainly all the interesting places—were off limits unless you got special permission, and then they would be added to the passport’s handwritten list by another bureaucrat, with the same handwriting as the first. And after that there was the problem of foreign exchange. There wasn’t any: that was the problem. There was a national shortage of dollars and pounds sterling and other negotiable
currencies, so you certainly couldn’t have any, and you couldn’t travel unless you had some, and if you did buy some at extortionate rates on the black market, you might be called upon to explain how the stuff got into your hands, which would make it even more costly, because of the additional expense of the shut-up money, the bribe.

I offer this brief lesson in nostalgia economics to explain why Ormus wasn’t on the first plane in pursuit of his great love. Darius Xerxes Cama—plain Mr. these days—was mostly in his cups, and after his own shaming experience of rejection, by England in general and William Methwold in particular, was unapproachable on the subject of transcontinental travel. Mrs. Spenta Cama (the loss of her tide still smarted) flatly refused to buy her least favoured son even the cheapest ticket on a cut-price Arab airline, or the smallest acceptable number (one hundred) of under-the-counter “black pounds.” “Chit of a girl is not worth ten pice,” she declared flatly. “Just see that beautiful Persis at last, why can’t you. Poor girl loves you to pieces. Let the blinkers fall from your eyes once and for all.”

But Ormus was blinkered for life. In the next few years I had ample opportunity to observe his character at close quarters, and beneath his brilliant, shifting surface, the mazy, chameleon personality that made every girl he met want to pin him down; beneath his alternately concealing and revealing nature, now open as an invitation, now closed as tight as a trap, now needing, now pushing away, beneath all the improvised melodies of himself, there was this unaltered, unvarying beat. Vina, Vina. He was a slave to that rhythm, for good.