The Ground Beneath Her Feet (24 page)

She, Vina, will always boast about this on his behalf. “He waited for me.” It makes her proud: of him, but also of herself. To be worth so serious a love. (I waited for her too, but she did not boast about me.)

The bruise on his eyelid is sore. His mother and father fight in him, Lady Spenta’s angels and mysteries, Sir Darius’s vaunted Apollonian rationalism. Though it could also be said that Lady Spenta with her good works is battling with the real world, its diseases, its cruelties, while Sir Darius, sunk in the unreality of his library, is living more than one kind of lie.

Living brothers fight in him too, violent and serene. His dead twin recedes.

Reason and the imagination, the light and the light, do not coexist peacefully.

They are both powerful lights. Separately or together, they can blind you.

Some people see well in the dark.

Vina, watching him grow, hearing the struggle of his thoughts, feeling the anguish of his controlled desires, sees a light around him. It is the future, perhaps. He will be bathed in light. He will be her perfect lover. He will command multitudes.

He is fragile too. Without her love, terminally alienated, he might go horribly wrong. The idea of family, of community, is almost dead in him. There is only silent Virus and their piano sessions. Otherwise he has come loose, like an astronaut floating away from a space capsule. He is a layabout who hears only the vowel sounds of cheap music, who makes meaningless noises. He could easily amount to nothing. He might fail to add up to a person.

•  •  •

(It is said that when Kama, the love god, committed the crime of trying to shoot mighty Shiva with a dart of love, the great god burned him to ashes with a thunderbolt. Kama’s wife, the goddess Rati, pleaded for his life, and softened Shiva’s heart. In an inversion of the Orpheus myth, it was the woman who interceded with the deity and brought Love—Love itself!—back from the dead.… So also Ormus Cama, exiled from love by the parents whom he had failed to transfix with love’s arrow, shrivelled by their lack of affection, is restored to the world of love by Vina.)

He clings to her, without touching her. They meet and whisper and shout and make each other up. Each is Pygmalion, both are Galatea. They are a single entity in two bodies: male and female constructed they themselves. You are my only family, he tells her. You are my only earth. These are heavy burdens, but she bears them willingly, asks for more, burdens him identically in return. They have both been damaged, are both repairers of damage. Later, entering that world of ruined selves, music’s world, they will already have learned that such damage is the normal condition of life, as is the closeness of the crumbling edge, as is the fissured ground. In that inferno, they will feel at home.

6
D
ISORIENTATIONS

I
n the autumn of 1960, when Vina Apsara was about to reach the magic age of sixteen, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama at last made the journey to England of which he had dreamed for so many years. In these latter days of his life Sir Darius had yielded to his wife’s entreaties and resumed his studies in the field of Indo-European myth. (Lady Spenta hoped for the eradication of her husband’s ruinous whisky addiction by an earlier, more valuable intoxication.) A new generation of European scholars, including many brilliant young Englishmen, was ridding the field of its unjust Nazi taint and introducing new levels of sophistication to what now looked like the first stumblings of Müller, Dumézil and the rest. Sir Darius in his library tried to excite Lady Spenta, as he himself was excited, by this new thinking, which had done so much to refine and amplify understanding of “sovereignty,” “physical force” and “fertility,” the three primary concepts of the Indo-European world-view. However, no sooner had he begun to explain the thrilling new proposition that each member of the conceptual triad also functioned as a sub-concept within each category than Lady Spentas heavy body
appeared to deliquesce into a languid jelly. Sir Darius, pressing on, insisted that “sovereignty” was now to be sub-divided into “sovereignty within sovereignty,” “force within sovereignty,” and “fertility within sovereignty”; while “physical force” and “fertility” were likewise, “by the same token,” to be rendered tripartite. “I have a headache,” said the jelly at this point, and wobbled off at high speed.

Sir Darius did indeed turn away from whisky. However, his distress at what he saw as the culture’s general decline did not diminish. Left to his own devices, Sir Darius reflected on how his own family circumstances reflected this decline. As head of the household, he possessed sovereignty within sovereignty by right, both in its magical, terrifying and remote aspect and in the more legalistic and familiar meaning of the term; but while he had certainly grown remote from his children, it was a long time since anyone had thought him the smallest whit magical or terrifying. As for force within sovereignty, which he interpreted as the protection of the family’s solidarity and continuity, especially by its younger members, its “warriors,” well, that was just a joke. “We have slipped,” he reflected aloud, “to the point at which we are mired in the lowest sub-section of the third concept, fertility within fertility, which, in our case, means no more than indolence, dreams and music.”

Sir Darius’s own scholarly efforts received their reward: a paper under his name—“ ‘Sent to Coventry’: or, Is There a Fourth Function?”—was accepted for publication in the esteemed
Proceedings of the Society of Euro-Asiatic Studies
, and he was invited to deliver it, in the form of a lecture, at the Society’s annual general meeting in Burlington House. His subject was the hypothetical “fourth concept” of “outsiderness,” the condition of the leper, pariah, outcast or exile, whose necessity he had intuited long ago, and his evidence in support of his arguments ranged from the casteless Untouchables of India (Gandhi’s Harijans, Ambedkar’s Dalits) to the Judgement of Paris; for did not Paris himself embody the outsider in this vitally significant myth? Alternatively, the outsider was Strife, the goddess who produced the golden apple. Either way, the example stood.

Now that he was sober, Sir Darius’s terrible secret had begun to prey upon him ever more hungrily, in his waking hours as well as during
his recurring dreams of the naked figure of Scandal in the pure white country house, and the growing conviction that he himself was a pariah such as those of whom he wrote, or ought to be, and might yet become one if his great Lie became known, lent his work a passion that made his sentences blaze from the page. He was an isolated old gentleman by this time. Even the consolations of Freemasonry were no longer available; the order’s Indian membership had drifted away after the end of Empire, and Sir Darius had long since ceased to participate in such threadbare encounters as continued to take place in a new lodge as shabbily paltry as the old lodge had been grand. (Lately he had been remembering his estranged friend, brother Mason and erstwhile squash partner Homi Catrack, and had even suggested to his wife that they should ask the fellow over and renew the old association; whereupon Lady Spenta had to remind him gently that Catrack was dead, sensationally gunned down with his paramour in their love nest by a cuckolded naval officer some three years previously. The case had filled the newspapers for months, but Sir Darius had somehow failed to notice.)

The invitation to England offered an end to this shadow life of his, in which he flitted through the background of events in which he took no part. “And there is Methwold too,” he said to Lady Spenta, brightening. “What times we’ll have! The grouse moors! The Athenaeum! English honey! What larks!”

Lady Spenta bit her lip. Sir Darius’s Anglophilia had intensified with the passage of the years. He frequently praised “U.K.” for the grace of its withdrawal from Empire, and also for the “pluck” with which that war-battered nation had rebuilt itself. (No mention was made of Marshall Aid.) India, by contrast, he constantly chided for its “stasis,” its “backwardness.” He wrote innumerable letters to the newspapers deriding the Five-Year Plans. “What use are steel mills if we sink into ignorance of our natures?” he would thunder. “The greatness of Britain stands squarely upon the Three Concepts …” These letters were not published, but he continued to write them. In the end Lady Spenta did not bother to have them posted, but destroyed them privately, without hurting his feelings.

Why did William Methwold no longer write? Sir Darius frequently
asked this question, without guessing that Lady Spenta could answer the question if she chose to do so. “Perhaps it is because of my research,” Sir Darius wondered. “Possibly he is still squeamish about the old stigma attached to the field. He is a public servant, of course, and must be careful. No matter! When we dine together I will put him straight.”

“Go if you must. I will not go with you,” Lady Spenta told her husband. Not knowing how to warn him of the humiliation that awaited him in his beloved England, she chose not to witness his destruction. He left on a BOAC Super Constellation, wearing a courtroom shirt of Egyptian cotton with stiffly starched collar and cuffs, and a three-piece suit of finest worsted, with a fob chain glinting upon his belly. Lady Spenta saw on his face the look of tragic innocence worn by goats on their way to the slaughterhouse. She had written to Lord Methwold begging him “if possible, to be kind.”

Methwold was not kind. In spite of Sir Darius’s urgent letters, and Lady Spenta’s own private pleas, he neither met his old friend at Heathrow Airport, nor sent anyone to meet him, nor invited him to stay, nor offered to put him up at his club. Lady Spenta had taken the precaution of asking Dolly Kalamanja to send her husband Patangbaz to the airport, and it was Pat’s jolly round face that greeted Sir Darius in the crude arrivals shed (the airport was still under construction at that time, and facilities for passengers were substantially worse than those at Bombay’s Santa Cruz). Sir Darius looked haggard and dishevelled at the end of his gruelling journey and equally gruelling interrogation by immigration officials who were bewilderingly unimpressed by his explanations, his credentials or even his knighthood, news of which they treated with extreme scepticism. His repeated references to the eminent Lord Methwold elicited only hollow laughter. After several hours of questioning, Sir Darius was finally released into England, a confused and somewhat punctured man.

Pat Kalamanja’s Wembley home was a spacious suburban mansion in red brick equipped with fake white pilasters and columns to give it a more classically impressive air. Kalamanja himself was affable, good-natured, anxious to do the right thing by the father of his future son-in-law, and extremely busy, so that while Sir Darius was given the
run of the house he saw his host for no more than a few snatched meals. During these brief encounters Sir Darius was terse and preoccupied. At breakfast, Pat Kalamanja, a business tycoon down to his well-pared fingernails and a man uneasy with small talk, did his best to put his guest at ease. “Nawab of Pataudi! What a cricketer! Blanch-flowers Hotspurs! Hell of a football team!” At dinner, he offered political commentary. In the forthcoming American elections, Mr. Kalamanja strongly favoured Richard M. Nixon, because of that gentleman’s “plain speaking” to the Russki leader Khrushchev during a visit to a model kitchen in a Moscow trade fair. “Kennedy? Too pretty; means too tricky, what do you say?” But Sir Darius’s thoughts were elsewhere.

He spent the empty days telephoning his friend Methwold without reaching him, sending reply-paid telegrams to which no reply was given, and even, on one occasion, making the long journey by bus and Tube train to the door of the Methwold mansion in Campden Hill Square, to leave a long and injured letter of reproach. Finally Lord Methwold did get in touch. A terse note arrived at Wembley, inviting Sir Darius to walk with him, the next morning, in the grounds of Middle Temple, “of which you no doubt have many memories you may possibly wish to re-live.”

It was enough. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama understood everything. All spirit left him, and he deflated completely. Mr. Kalamanja, returning home in the evening, found a darkened living room and his guest slumped in a chair beside a cold fire with an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker rolling at his feet. He feared the worst until Sir Darius moaned loudly in his sleep, the moan of a soul caught in the burning pincers of a demon. In his dream Sir Darius was surrendering to Scandal’s embrace. He felt his body catch fire as he was consumed by his disgrace and shame, and screamed out at the top of his voice. Patangbaz Kalamanja rushed forward and hugged him. He awoke red-eyed and shivering, pushed good-hearted Pat aside and rushed from the room. The next morning, a crumpled and haunted figure, he asked Kalamanja if his travel agency could get him on an earlier flight home. He offered no explanation and his host did not know him well enough to ask for one. Sir Darius flew back to Bombay without meeting William
Methwold, without delivering his paper on the Fourth Function, and without any remaining ambition in life except one—to die in peace—which he would also fail to fulfil. On his return he unearthed his proudest possessions from the Godrej steel filing cabinet where they had lain under lock and key for half a lifetime, the precious letters patent pertaining to his knighthood, and returned them to the British Consulate in Bombay. His story was over. He shut himself up in his library with a bottle, and waited for the end.

We leave home not only to make room for ourselves but to avoid the sight of our elders running out of steam. We don’t want to see the consequences of their natures and histories catching up with them and beating them, the closing of the trap of life. Feet of clay will cripple us, too, in our turn. Life’s bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes. It can wait. There’s plenty of time.

Two visions broke my family: my mother Ameer’s vision of the “scrapers,” the giant concrete-and-steel exclamations that destroyed forever the quieter syntax of the old city of Bombay; and my father’s fantasy of a cinema. It was Vina Apsara’s great misfortune to put down roots in us, and to idealize my parents as the joint architects of a storybook happy home, just as our little clan started to come apart. “Rai,” she once said to me, “you’re a lucky bastard, but also a sweetheart, because you don’t mind sharing your luck.”