The Ground Beneath Her Feet (18 page)

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After that, her father, Butcher Shetty, showed up with his lover, but she didn’t like the sound of Newport News, she’d had enough of butchery for one lifetime, she’d be a vegetarian for the rest of her days. She finally agreed to go live with Helen’s distant relatives the Egiptuses of Chickaboom, up near the Finger Lakes in western New York State: and all the way there, alone on the bus, she was wondering why her mother had chosen that precise moment to crack, that Memorial Day when her middle daughter had fallen asleep in Jefferson Lick. Maybe it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. Maybe Helen had waited until she, Nissa, was out of danger. She had been picked to survive, selected by her mother as the only one in the family who deserved life. Her mother had seen or heard something in her, something other than the wildness and violence, and so had spared her life. Nissa, her shooting star.

“She heard me!” The power of her sudden realization made her shout the words aloud. The passengers nearest her looked at her, shifted in their seats, but she was oblivious to their unease.
Helen heard me. She must’ve followed me to the Lick one day, and I never knew, and that’s why she waited, she knew I’d be gone for a long while. I’m alive because she wanted me to sing
.

Welcome to Chickaboom, said a sign.

Of the year or so she spent in that northern clime, in that Egiptian exile, Vina Apsara never told anyone very much. Ask her a question too many and she’d turn on you like a snake. She spoke to me about it only a couple of times in her life. The moment she arrived, she buried poor Nissy Poe, I know that. Mr. Egiptus offered her the use of his family name and said he had always wanted a daughter named Diana. She became Diana Egiptus without regret. The new name was not, however, lucky. “There was a woman who was not good to me,” she said. “I was not treated well in that family.” I could hardly get her to speak their given names. “The woman who I stayed with then,” she called her chief tormentor, Mrs. Marion Egiptus; the other family members were “the people I was not happy with.” These people ran, I was able to establish, the Egypt, a small cigar store, outside which stood the halfsize
figure of a pharaonic charioteer holding, in one hand, the reins of his single horse and, in the other, a fistful of stogies. “It was a one-horse town,” Vina said, “and the one horse was made of wood.” This small town was her first Troy. Bombay would be her second, and the rest of her life her third; and wherever she went, there was war. Men fought over her. In her own way, she was a Helen too.

What happened in Chickaboom? I can’t tell you much; Vina told me very little, and those who have investigated the story since have given conflicting, often purely fictitious accounts. Marion Egiptus was foulmouthed and harsh and repulsed by the future Vina’s dark skin. Other members of the Egiptus household saw the same dark skin as an invitation to sexual relations. The young Nissy-Diana-Vina had to fight her cousins off.

The Egypt faltered, or was bought out. There was a fire, or there was not. It was an insurance scam, or arson, or it didn’t happen. Marion Egiptus, the “woman she stayed with then,” the “woman who was not good to her,” refused, perhaps on account of the blow to the family’s fortunes, or (if there was not, in fact, such a blow) on account of her profound aversion to the girl, to keep Diana Egiptus with her any more. There are suggestions that Vina’s delinquency continued, the truancy, the violence, the excessive use of pills.

Rejected by Mrs. Egiptus, she was sent to India because no American options remained. Butcher Shetty of Newport News wrote a begging letter to his rich relations the Doodhwalas of Bandra, Bombay, failing to mention he was no longer a lawyer, no longer a fat cat getting fatter off a daily diet of high-calorie American mice, but that omission was a matter of honour, a way of preserving his self-respect. He also omitted to mention his daughter’s many run-ins with authority, and somewhat overstated young Nissa Shetty’s girlish charms (in this letter she reverted to her original name). At any rate, the rich Doodhwalas, seduced by the glamorous prospect of acquiring an America-returned niece, agreed to take her in. Nissa Shetty’s father met her off the Greyhound at the Port Authority Terminal and spent a night with her in Manhattan. He took her to dinner at the Rainbow Room and danced with her on the revolving stage and held her close, and she understood what he was telling her; not only that business was good but also that he was saying goodbye for ever, she couldn’t count
on him any more. Don’t call, don’t write, have a good life, goodbye. The next morning she went to Idlewild by herself, took a deep breath and headed east. East to Bombay, where Ormus and I were waiting.

If we are to understand Vina’s rage, which drove her art and damaged her life, we must try to imagine what she would not tell us, the myriad petty cruelties of the unjust relations, the absence of fairy godmothers and glass slippers, the impossibility of princes. When I met her on Juhu Beach and she delivered herself of that astonishing tirade against the whole of India, past, present and future, she was in reality only indulging in a kind of masquerade, concealing herself from me behind her bitter ironies. In cosmopolitan Bombay it was she who was provincial; if she praised American sophistication at our expense, it was because sophistication was a quality she utterly lacked. After a lifetime of poverty, it was India, in the overblown form of Piloo Doodhwala, that had offered her a first taste of affluence; therefore, by inversion, she filled her dialogue with ersatz rich-American contempt for the impoverishment of the Orient. In Chickaboom the winters had been savage (that was a detail I did manage to extract from her); loathing the cold, she complained, in warm Bombay, about the heat.

Finally, and above all else, if we are to understand Vina’s rage, we must put ourselves in her shoes and try to imagine her sentiments when, after a gruelling journey across the planet to Bombay’s Santa Cruz airport, she disembarked from the Pan American Douglas DC-6, to find that her father—oh, the unforgivable thoughtlessness of the man!—had delivered her once more, and with scant hope of escape, into the hated company of goats.

Ding-ding! Ding!

For a big city, Bombay can operate remarkably like a small village; it isn’t long before everyone knows everything, especially about a cocky twelve-year-old beauty taking tramcar rides with a grown nineteen-year-old man with movie star good looks and a whispered success rate with the girls that is fast acquiring legendary proportions. Memories being what they are, none of the three of us could agree on how long it took, days, weeks, months. What is beyond doubt is that when the news reached the ears of Piloo Doodhwala he tried to beat her up;
whereupon she attacked him with an abandoned savagery that obliged Golmatol, Halva, Rasgulla and several other members of the “magnificentourage” to help subdue her, a process during which she both inflicted and received a number of wounds. The rain came; she was put out of doors; she arrived on our doorstep; and Ormus, who loved her, who swore he had not touched her, let alone defiled her honour, was not far behind.

And this in the far-off 1950s! In “underdeveloped” India, where boy-girl relations were so strictly controlled! True, true: but permit me to say, “underdeveloped nation” or not, one of our prime cultural artifacts was a highly developed apparatus of hypocritical disapproval, not only of any incipient change in social mores, but also of our own historically proven and presently hyperactive erotic natures. What’s the
Kama Sutra?
A Disney comic? Who built the Khajuraho temples? The Japanese? And of course in the 1950s there were no girl tarts in Kamathipura working eighteen hours a day, and child marriages never took place, and the pursuit of the very young by lecherous old humberts—yes, we’d already heard of the new Nabokov shocker—was utterly unknown. (Not.) To hear some people talk, you’d conclude that sex hadn’t been discovered in India by the mid-twentieth century, and the population explosion must have been made possible by some alternative method of fertilisation.

So: Ormus Cama, in spite of being an Indian, had a way with girls; and Vina, in spite of being just twelve, had a history of extreme violence towards males who stepped out of line. Yet their meeting transformed them both. From that moment on, Ormus lost interest in all other females of the species, and never regained it, even after Vina’s death. And Vina had found, for the first and only time, a man whose approval she constantly needed, to whom she turned, after everything she said or did, for confirmation, for validation, for meaning. He became the meaning of her life, and she of his. Also, she owned a battered old acoustic guitar, and on those long afternoons riding the tramcars or sitting on the rocks at Scandal Point or walking in the Hanging Gardens or fooling around the Old Woman’s Shoe in Kamala Nehru Park, she taught him how to play. What’s more, when she’d listened to his incoherent, eavesdropped songs, the prophetic ditties of the late Gayomart Cama, she gave him the advice that led to his second,
true birth into music and made possible the whole astonishing Cama songbook, the long stream of hits by which he will always be remembered. “It’s good you love your brother, and want to follow where he’s leading. But maybe it’s the wrong way. Try another room in that dream-palace of yours. Or another one, or another one, or another one. Maybe you’ll find your own noises someplace in there. Maybe then you’ll be able to hear the words.”

At the end of one cycle of time, they say, we experience
kenosis
, an emptying. Things lose meaning, they erode. This is what had been happening, I believe, not only to Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, but also to all those whose lives touched theirs. The decay of time, at the end of a cycle, leads to all manner of poisonous, degrading, defiling effects. A cleansing is required. The love that was born between Ormus and Vina, the love that was prepared to wait years for fulfilment, provided that new cleanness, and a new cycle of time began.
Plerosis
, the filling of time with new beginnings, is characterised by a time of superabundant power, of wild, fruitful excess. Alas, however, such shapely theories are never quite up to the task of accounting for the messiness of real life. The cleansing and renewal of time did indeed have some beneficial results, but only on the lives of the lovers themselves. They were, it’s true, greatly energized by their new love; but all around them, the catastrophes continued.

He loved her like an addict: the more of her he had, the more he needed. She loved him like a student, needing his good opinion, playing up to him in the hope of drawing forth the magic of his smile. But she also, from the very beginning, needed to leave him and go elsewhere to play. He was her seriousness, he was the depths of her being, but he could not also be her frivolity. That light relief, that serpent in the garden, I must confess, was me.

5
G
OAT
S
ONGS

B
egin, today, with an animal sacrifice. (Or, at least, an account of same.)

O twice-born Dionysus, O madness-strengthened bull, inexhaustible fount of life energy, divine drunkard, conqueror of India, god of women, master of the snake-changing maenads, the chewers of laurels! In lieu of burnt offerings, accept from us, ere we proceed with our humble entertainments, a bloody tale of slaughtered milk-givers; and, being pleased, bestow upon our poor efforts the benison of your crazy, lethal grin!

Whereas the large-scale farming of goats had been, for Vina Apsara’s late stepfather, John Poe, no more than a distant, utopian fantasy, Shri Piloo Doodhwala, her most recent “loco parentis,” as my mother called him, “more loco than parentish,” was the dairy-goat king of what became the state of Maharashtra, a person of immense, even feudal significance in the rural areas where the care and handling of his herds accounted for almost all local employment. From his earliest days to his present pre-eminence, Piloo the milkman thought of his “little business,” his “milk round,” as a mere stepping-stone to far higher things:
that is to say, public office, and the immense wealth that such office can bring to a man who knows how the world works. The opening of the Exwyzee Milk Colony, and its promise to provide the Bombay citizenry with top-grade, full-cream, pasteurized cows’ milk, was therefore an event which Piloo took as a personal insult.

“Cowvs?” he shrieked at his wife, Golmatol. “Let them worship cowvs, but leawe their udders alone! A person should not squveeze the titties of a goddess! Isn’t it, wife? What do you say?” To which Golmatol hesitantly replied, “But and all, the milk is OK.” Piloo exploded. “OK? To my phace you are saying it? Arré, how to surwiwe when I am beset by traitors? When I must phight not only these sacred mooing gods but also my own wife as vell.”

Golmatol, colouring, eyes downcast, retreated. “No, dear, I only said.” But Piloo’s anger had been re-targeted at the primary enemy. “Exwyzee,” he snorted. “If they are so wyzee, then they will surely know that pretty soon they will be ex.”

Piloo went to war. Attended by the scurrying magnificentourage, he stalked the corridors of power in the Bombay Sachivalaya, dispensing bribes and threats in equal measure, demanding the investigation, condemnation and cancellation, as a matter of priority, of the “blasphemous cow-abuse phacility just opened north of Town.” He sought out zoning inspectors, tax inspectors, livestock inspectors, hygiene inspectors and of course police inspectors. He paid for giant advertising billboards on which, in a large speech-bubble issuing from his own leering face, and under the legend
Your Milkman Says
, the following argument was made:
EX—means Expensive! WY—means Why Buy It?? ZEE—means Zero Enjoyment Exists!!!
And at the bottom, next to his trademark cartoon goat, the slogan:
Vote Goat—Buy PILOO—the Dude with Doodh
.

It didn’t work. In all his life he never suffered a more complete, a more humiliating rebuff. The city authorities declined even to investigate, let alone condemn or cancel the Milk Colony’s licenses. Neither blasphemy nor abuse was being committed, all analysts agreed. Zoning inspectors declined to cancel permits, tax inspectors refused to harass, livestock and hygiene inspectors heaped Exwyzee with praise, police inspectors said they had nothing to inspect. Worse still, the Exwyzee grounds became a popular weekend picnic resort; and worst of all,
month by month Piloo’s sales figures declined, while those of the hated cows went from strength to strength. The goat villages, blaming Piloo for the crisis, simmered with the possibility of violence. Faced with the erosion of his power base, Piloo Doodhwala admitted to his lady wife that he had no idea what to do.