The Ground Beneath Her Feet (11 page)

Like Michelangelo, who believed that the figures of his Titans lay imprisoned within lumps of Carrara marble from which it was his duty as an artist to release them, who sculpted the
David
by simply removing everything in the stone that was not David, Ameer Merchant detected a form concealed within the great mound of sand flung up by V.V.’s beach archaeology. But my mother was no artist. She was an entrepreneur, a “developer,” to use the new word of those days. She saw no godly figures in the hill of moisture-darkened sand. “I will build,” she declared, “my mansions fit for gods, but men will live in them.” While V.V. snored, Ameer shaped the maquette of such a mansion out of sand. While he dreamed of unknown depths, she brought into being a dream of heights. Painstakingly, she worked from the top down, in the manner of the master builders of the great Kailash temple at Ellora, that overwhelming monolith hewn by successive generations out of the living rock. And yes, it was a building that appeared, but one entirely free of devotional content. It is true that a tall spire was seen first, but this was a radio mast. And though the building
seemed to soar from the sand like a steeple, yet the profusion of delicate indentations suggestive of windows showed that this was a design on an altogether grander scale than any sacred site. Small twigs, carefully inserted by Ameer into her fragile vision, served as gargoyles, and the building’s surfaces were distinguished by its architect’s addition of much geometric decoration along its various planes. Surplus sand fell away from her creation like a redundant garment, until at length it stood before me in magnificent nudity.

“Skyscraper,” she named it. “How’d you like to own a penthouse at the top?” Skywhatter? Where was a penthouse pent? These were words I did not know. I found myself disliking them: the words, and the building to which they belonged. Besides, I was bored and wanted to swim.

“Looks like a big matchbox to me.” I shrugged. “Live in it? As if.”

Ameer bristled at this assault upon her handiwork. I deemed it a good time to head for the water. “You don’t know anything,” she cried, rounding on me like an eight-year-old. “Just wait on and see. One day they’ll be all over the place.” Then she heard herself sulking and began to giggle. “They’ll be here,” she waved an arm gaily. “All along here.”That set me off too. “Beachscrapers,” I said. “Sandscrapers,” she agreed. “Camelscrapers, cocoscrapers, fishscrapers.” We were both laughing now. “And I suppose chowscrapers at Chowpatty Beach,” I wondered. “And hillscrapers on Malabar Hill. And on
Cuffe Parade?”

“Cuffescrapers,” laughed my mother. “Go and swim now and stop being so
bad-tameez.”

“Where are you going to put them, anyway?” Emboldened by her good humour, I delivered an unanswerable last word on the subject. “Here, nobody’ll want them, and in town, there are houses everywhere already.”

“No room, then,” she mused, pensively.

“Exactly,” I confirmed, turning towards the water. “No room at all.”

On that momentous day at the beach, I had my unforgettable first glimpse of Vina. It was the day of my instant infatuation, the commencement of a lifelong enslavement.… But at once I halt myself. It is possible I am pouring the wine of several beach weekends into the bottle of a single day. Damn it, there are things I can’t remember. Was
it on this day, or another day? In November, or the following January? While my father was snoozing, or after I went for a swim? So much is lost. Hard to believe that all this sand has accumulated, obscuring the years. Hard to believe that it’s so long ago, that flesh is mortal, that everything slides towards its end. Once, I belonged to the future. The beloved future of my beloved mother, that was what counted; the present was a means, and the past no more than a dull shard of pottery, a bottle dug up by my father on the beach. Now, however, I belong to yesterday.

Is that a line from a song? I forget. Is it?

At any rate: on this golden afternoon or another, bronzer p.m., at this instant or that one, the celebrated Mr. Piloo Doodhwala and his famous “magnificentourage” marched forth on to Juhu’s sands. I should say that at the time, I knew nothing about him whatsoever. I was wholly ignorant of his growing citywide renown as a “character” and “coming man” and statewide purveyor of milk; I had no idea that his real name was Shetty—just as our family’s had been until it got Englished years ago—but nobody called him that any more, because, as he himself liked to say, “milkman by fame, I am Milkman by name”; I had never heard of the term he had coined to describe the intimate clique of family members and servitors with which he liked to surround himself—a term gleefully taken up by the local rags and much satirised (“magnificentestine,” “arrogantourage,” etc.); but Piloo Shetty alias Doodhwala was impervious to satire. I simply beheld a small, plump, white-kurta-pajamaed man in his middle twenties, a young man with so great a sense of his own value that he already looked middle-aged, a fellow with a strutting walk like a peacock’s and plentiful dark hair so sleekly plastered down with oil that it resembled a sleeping mongoose. He carried himself like a king, Caligula or Akbar, monarchs who entertained fantasies of being divine. Behind him strode a tall Pathan bearer in full sash-and-turban regalia, holding a large, many-coloured parasol, winking with sequins and mirrorwork, over the little emperor’s head.

Piloo was preceded by musicians—a drummer, a raucous flautist, a horn player as blaringly aggressive as a motorist, and a pair of writhing, mumming singer-dancers who were probably hired
hijras
, transsexuals—whose
appalling racket launched an irresistible assault upon the late-afternoon gentility of the beach. Scurrying along at his right and left elbows were male secretaries, leaning in to hear the great man’s words and taking rapid shorthand notes. Following this extraordinary group was a tiny, almost spherical lady, Piloo’s unusually but accurately named wife Golmatol, sheltering her mottled skin beneath a black umbrella; two little girls, aged about seven and eight, whose names, Halva and Rasgulla, bore witness to their parents’ sweet teeth; and another, much taller, darker girl of around twelve or thirteen, whose face was entirely obscured beneath an enormous, low-brimmed straw hat, so that all I could see was her Stars-and-Stripes swimsuit and the white lungi she was wearing over it, tied at the hip. There was an ayah and there were two domestic servants bearing picnic hampers. A trinity of security guards sweltered in militaristic uniforms. The primary responsibility of these guards—which they discharged with enthusiasm, vigour and the liberal use of long lathi sticks—was to bat away the cluster of anxious individuals who swarmed and buzzed in the wake of the magnificentourage, for a great man will always attract supplicants and hangers-on, and must be protected from same when he is trying to have a nice day out.

Who was this pocket giant, this mighty mouse? What might be the source of such display? Whence came his power, his wealth? Ameer Merchant, her good humour befouled by the Doodhwala party’s noisy advent, was in no mood for questions. “Goats,” was her snappish reply. I didn’t know what to make of that. He’d got
her
goat, that was plain. “Mummy? Excuse me?” She actually bleated at me in annoyance. “You don’t know goats?
Mè-è-è?
Billies, nannies. Don’t be stupid now.
Bakra-bakri
is all.” And that was all the explanation I could get.

V.V. Merchant came awake in a confused state, jolted out of deep sleep by the noise; whereupon, to his further bewilderment, his beloved wife rounded on him. “Blasted
tamasha,”
she snorted, explosively. “Seems like one side of this family never learned how to behave.”

Well,
that
was a bombshell. “We’re related? How? Where?”

The Piloo gang had come to a halt no more than forty feet away, and its less exalted members were busy laying out sheets and sweets, acting on Golmatol’s stentorian instructions, and raising a gay
shamiana
marquee
on poles over the festive spread. A card school got going, and Piloo soon showed himself to be a fierce bidder and big winner, although perhaps his servitors, understanding where their interests lay, allowed him his successes. From a thermos flask a bearer poured Piloo a large aluminum tumblerful of thin, blue-white goat’s milk. He drank open-mouthed, careless of dribbles. Halva and Rasgulla began to wail for their own drinks, but the girl in the straw hat and swimsuit had walked off and was standing at some distance with her back to the Doodhwalas, hugging herself, and slowly shaking a disenchanted (though still largely invisible) head. And what with the musicians’ noise, the supplicants’ pleas, the thwacking of lathi sticks, the shrieks of the wounded, the young girls’ wails and the orders bellowed by Golmatol Doodhwala, it was necessary to raise one’s voice; my enquiries about these high-decibel family members were made at top volume.

Ameer clutched at her brow. “Oh God, Umeed, get out of my head just now. They’re nothing to do with me, I can tell you. Ask your father about his relatives.”

“Distant relatives,” yelled V.V. Merchant, on the defensive.

“Poor relations,” rudely shouted Ameer Merchant.

“They don’t look so poor to me,” I objected, at the top of my voice.

“Rich in goats,” Ameer bellowed into a sudden pause in the music, and her words hung irretrievably in the air, as inescapable as if they’d been lit up in neon like the Jeep sign on Marine Drive, “but poor in quality. Shoddy human goods.”

An awful stillness descended. It was a hot year, 1956, one of the hottest on record; the afternoon was well advanced, but the heat had not diminished. Now the temperature actually seemed to rise, the air began to buzz, the way it’s supposed to do before lightning strikes, and Shri Piloo Doodhwala began to swell in the heat, to redden, to exude liquid from every pore, as if he were filling up so fast with words that there wasn’t room for anything else inside him. His younger daughter, Halva, emitted a nervy giggle, got two tight slaps from her mother, began to cry, saw Golmatol Doodhwala’s hand rising again, and shut up fast. War was very close. The sand between the Doodhwala encampment and our own had become a no-man’s-land. Heavy artillery was moving into position. And at this moment the tall girl, the twelve- or thirteen-year-old in the Stars-and-Stripes swimsuit, strolled idly into
that embattled zone, looked interestedly from Doodhwalas to Merchants and back again, and tilted back her big straw hat. I regret to report that I failed to control myself when I saw her face. That Egyptian profile which, many years later, I saw again in a portrait of the female pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut, the first woman in recorded history, whom dismissive Vina, unimpressed by divine monarchs even though she became a sort of god-queen herself, referred to as Hat Cheap Suit; those sardonic eyes, that mouth so dryly twisted, caused me to let out a gasp. No, it was more than a gasp. It was a loud, strangled noise, choking, formless, and it ended in something like a sob. In short, I made, for the only time in my life, the noise of a badly smitten human male falling instantly, heavily, painfully in love. And I was only nine years old.

Let me try and remember the great moment with maximum accuracy. I had, I think, only recently emerged from the sea, my tooth braces were smarting, and I was feeling a little peckish—or else I had been planning a swim when I was distracted by the arrival of the magnificentourage. At any rate, when Ameer Merchant spoke the sentence that Piloo Doodhwala heard as a declaration of war, I had just reached down into a bag of fruit and come up with a juicy apple in my fist. Apple in hand, I gazed upon the beautiful dark girl in the Old Glory swimsuit, apple in hand I emitted my awful, naked noise of adoration; and when my feet began to move of their own accord and propelled me forward until I stood before her, gazing up into the light of her beauty, I was still holding that apple out in front of me, like an offering, like a prize.

She smiled, amused. “Is that for me?” But before I could articulate a reply, the two other girls—damn it, the two ugly sisters!—had run up with gleaming faces, ignoring their ayahs injunctions to return. “Appo,” said Halva Doodhwala, making baby eyes and affecting baby talk in a doomed attempt at appearing winsome; and Rasgulla Doodhwala, older but no wiser, poutingly confirmed, “Ppl.” The tall girl laughed, rather cruelly, and struck an attitude, head cocked sideways, hand on hip. “You see, you must choose, young master. To which of us will you offer your good gift?”

That’s easy, I wanted to say, for it is the gift of my heart. But Piloo and (especially) Golmatol were glaring at me in savage anticipation of
my decision, and when, hesitating for a moment, I cast a glance at my own parents, I saw that they were unable to help me make a choice that would affect their lives as much as mine. I did not know then (though it would have been easy to guess) that the tall girl was not the younger girls’ sibling, that her place in the entourage was more Cinderella than Helen; or a curious amalgam of the two, a sort of Cinderella of Troy. But it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had known; for though my tongue said nothing, my heart was speaking loud and clear. Without a word, I held out the apple to my beloved; who, with a curt nod, somewhat ungraciously received the gift and gave it a goodly bite.

So it was that my deliberate spurning of the charms of Halva and Rasgulla, those little mistresses of the insincerely batted eyelash, was added by the Doodhwalas to my mother’s more accidental insult, and that was that. The Hindustani word
kutti
is inadequate for my purposes, suggesting as it does a rather petulant, almost childish level of quarrel. This was not
kutti
. This was vendetta. And in Piloo Doodhwala—who was now, to my horror, beckoning me to approach—I’d made a powerful enemy, and for life.

“Boy!”

Now that the point of no return had passed, Piloo had miraculously relaxed. He had lost the swollen look of a man over-f of furious vocabulary, and even the sweating had stopped. I, however, found myself being bitten by insects. It was that moment of the late afternoon when the mordant armies of the air manifest themselves, appearing like little clouds from some aerial dormitory. As I approached Piloo, who was reclining in splendour on
gao-takia
bolsters beneath his mirrorwork marquee, I was obliged to slap and rub at my face and neck, for all the world as if I were punishing myself for my judgement in the matter of the apple. Piloo smiled his deadly, glittering smile and continued to beckon.