The Ground Beneath Her Feet (25 page)

Luck runs out. My parents had fallen off their pedestals well before their early demises. Easy to list their faults. My father’s great weakness was gambling, in the indulgence of which he took heavy losses. By 1960 these had moved beyond the mere forfeit of small mountains of matchsticks and grown into debts as sizeable but less easily redeemed. He lost at cards, he lost on the horses, he lost at dice, and he had fallen, too, into the clutches of a “private bookmaker” who called himself Raja Jua, “for Chance is the King of all, from our Betters to the Best,” and who permitted serious Bombay gamblers to bet on whatever they chose: the outcome of a murder trial, the likelihood of an Indian invasion of Goa, the number of clouds that might cross the western sky in a day, the crucial first week’s gross of a new movie, the
size of a dancer’s breasts. Even the ancient rain game, the
barsaat-ka-satta
, a bet on when the rains would come and how much would fall, was a gamble against which Raja Jua, the prince of bookmakers, would give odds. Bombay has always been a high rollers’ town. However, my innocent father, V.V. Merchant, was not so much the roller as the rolled.

As for my mother: her cynicism, once just a pose, an idealist’s armour, her defence against the corruption that was all around her, had itself corroded her youthful principles. I accuse her of being willing to destroy what was beautiful for the sake of what was profitable, and to rename these categories “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” She was at the forefront of the builders’ lobby that was working flat out to scupper the “second city” project for a New Bombay across the harbour in favour of more immediately lucrative land reclamation schemes at Nariman Point and—yes!—at Cuffe Parade as well. It was the proposed Cuffe Parade redevelopment that horrified Vivvy Merchant. All his life my father had faced the internal struggle between his love for the history and glories of the old Bombay and his professional involvement in the creation of the city’s future. The prospect of the destruction of the most beautiful stretch of seafront in the city drove him into permanent, but unfortunately silent, opposition to his wife. Silent, because Ameer was still a woman who could brook no criticism. The merest hint that she might be acting improperly would have been enough to induce a storm of weeping and a quarrel that would not end until he abased himself and agreed that he had utterly and cruelly wronged her, and that her injured innocence fully justified her high dudgeon and copious tears. V.V. Merchant, unable to talk to her about his grave concerns, was obliged, instead, to follow the dictates of his nature, and dig.

He could dig in people as easily as in sand. Digging into me, as I grew, he found out one of my secrets. “This photography of yours,” he said, speaking for once in short, clear words, “no doubt it is very much liked by pretty young girls?” And I was too inhibited to reply, Yes, Father, but that isn’t the point. Your Paillard Bolex, your Rolleiflex and Leica, your collection of the works of Dayal and Haseler: those are my inspirations and spurs. And photography, too, is a kind of digging. I said none of that, though it would have made him proud to hear it. Instead
I quipped, “Yeah, that’s it, Daddy-o.” He winced faintly, smiled a vague smile and turned away.

But when he dug in my mother, he didn’t turn away. He went on until he dug up what would ruin her; and thus destroyed himself.

And that whitest of white elephants, the Orpheum cinema, into which he sank the business’s capital with a wanton zeal that even Ameer Merchant was unable to restrain—wasn’t that, in its suicidal way, an answer to his wife and her cartel of futurist vandals? In his vision of the theatre, he saw it as a Deco temple for the 1960s, at once a tribute to the city’s golden period and a money-spinning Mecca for our movie-crazy city’s host of “fillum” fans. But this, too, was a gamble that went badly wrong. Building costs spiralled upwards, the borrowing requirement got out of control, and the dishonesty of sub-contractors resulted in the use of materials and fittings well below specification. Rival cinema bosses bribed municipal inspectors to quibble over approvals and tie up the project in red tape. Ameer, her attention elsewhere, left the Orpheum to Vivvy; unwisely, as it turned out. In the end, Vivvy’s gambling debts obliged him to offer the deeds to the new cinema as collateral to Raja Jua. He did not know, at that time, the name of the man for whom this Jua worked.

On my thirteenth birthday my father gave me a pretty serious German camera, a Voigtländer Vito CL, with a built-in light meter and a hot-shoe port for a flash gun, and the first photographs I took were of Vina Apsara, singing. She was better than Radio Ceylon. Most evenings, we’d gather round and she’d let fly with that perfect voice, which grew bigger and richer by the week, by turns dirty-knowledgeable and angel-pure. That voice which had started on its road to immortality. To listen to Carly Simon sing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is to understand how much Guinevere Garfunkel brought to the table in that partnership. So it was in the great days of VTO. There are bands that are hit machines, bands that earn the respect of the music crowd, bands that fill stadiums, bands that drip sex; transcendent bands and ephemeral, boy bands and girl bands, gimmick bands and inept bands, beach and driving bands, summer and winter bands, bands to make love by and bands that make you memorize the words to every song they play. Most bands
are awful, and if there are aliens from other galaxies monitoring our radio and tv waves, they’re probably being driven crazy by the din. And in the whole half-century-long history of rock music there is a small number of bands, a number so small you could count to it without running out of fingers, who steal into your heart and become a part of how you see the world, how you tell and understand the truth, even when you’re old and deaf and foolish. On your deathbed you’ll hear them sing to you as you drift down the tunnel towards the light: Shh … Sha-sha … Sha-la-la-la-la … Shang-a-lang, shang-a-lang … Sh-boom … Shoop … Shoop … Shh. It’s all over now.

VTO was one of those bands. And Ormus had the vision, but Vina had the voice, and it was the voice that did it, it’s always the voice; the beat catches your attention and the melody makes you remember but it’s the voice against which you’re defenceless, the unholy cantor, the profane muezzin, the siren call that knows its way directly to the rhythm center, the soul. Never mind what kind of music. Never mind what kind of voice. When you hear it, the real thing, you’re done for, trust me on this. Finito, unless you’re tied like Odysseus to the mast of your ship, with clay stopping up your ears. That goose of yours? It’s fried.

I think, now, that it was Vina’s singing that was holding us together in those days. She was our rock, not the other way around. While V.V. Merchant plunged into debt, and also, silently, investigated his wife, assembling a thick dossier on her illegal manipulation of the city’s decision makers—while, in short, a time bomb was ticking beneath our lives—Vina sang to us, reminding us of love.

O fierce intensity of childhood seeing! As children we’re all photographers, needing no cameras, burning images into memories. I remember our neighbours on Cuffe Parade, their pretensions, their happy and unhappy marriages, their quarrels, their motor cars, their sunglasses, their handbags, their discoloured smiles, their kindnesses, their dogs. I remember the weekends with their odd, imported pastimes. My parents playing golf at the Willingdon, my father doing his best to lose to my mother in order to preserve her good mood. I remember a couple of Navjotes spent guzzling food served on the
leaves of plantain trees, several Holis drenched in colour, and at least one visit to the giant prayer maidan on Big Eid, which sticks in the mind because it was so rare. I think my father just wanted me to appreciate what I was missing and why. I remember my friend sweet Neelam Nath, who grew up to die with her children in the Air-India crash off the Irish coast. I remember Jimmy King with his pasty complexion and spiky black fringe; he died young, suddenly, at school. All the classroom doors and windows were closed so that we couldn’t see his father driving into the quadrangle to take his son’s body home. I remember a long, skinny boy clambering across the rocks at Scandal Point with his friends. He looked through me as if I weren’t there. Gold Flake posters, the Royal Barber Shop, the pungent mingled smells of putrefaction and hope. Forget Mumbai. I remember Bombay.

Then they gave me a camera, a mechanical eye to replace the mind’s eye, and after that, much of what I remember is what the camera managed to snatch out of time. No longer a memoirist but a voyeur, I remember photographs.

Here’s one. It’s Vina’s sixteenth birthday, and we’re at the Gaylord restaurant on Vir Nariman Road, eating chicken Kiev. My mother and father both wear unfamiliar expressions. He looks angry, she seems distracted, vague. Vina, by contrast, glows. All the light in the photograph seems to have been sucked towards her. We are shadowy bodies revolving around her sun. Ormus Cama sits beside her, like a dog begging to be fed. Half of me is in the picture too. I asked a waiter to take the photo but he didn’t frame it right. It doesn’t matter. I remember what I looked like. I looked the way you look when you’re about to lose the thing that matters most.

On the ring finger of Vina’s right hand was a glowing moonstone, her birthday gift from Ormus. She had already slept with the ring under her pillow for a week, to test it out before agreeing to accept it, and her dreams had been so erotic that she had awoken each night in the small hours, trembling with happiness and drenched in yellow sweat.

Ormus is asking permission to take Vina to a “concert.” V.V. and Ameer are avoiding each other’s eyes, skirting the edges of a fight. “The Five Pennies,” Ormus says. “Take Umeed also,” says Ameer, waving a hand. Vina looks daggers. They pierce my thirteen-year-old breast.

After the success of the Danny Kaye biopic
The Five Pennies
, its subject,
the real-life bandleader Red Nichols, had come to Bombay on tour with a new, reformed bunch of Five. Jazz, stimulated by the weekend-morning jam-session brunches, was still hot in town, and a big crowd gathered. I’ve got the photographs to prove it, but I can’t remember where the concert was. Azad Maidan, Cross Maidan, the Cooperage, or somewhere else. Out of doors, anyhow. I remember a raised stage in the open air. Because my mother had sent me along, Ormus brought Virus as well. The four of us got there early and stood near the front. I was disappointed when the Pennies appeared, because Red Nichols was only a little fellow, and his hair was short and white, not a bit like Danny Kaye’s flowing carroty locks. Then he picked up his horn and blew. Trad jazz. I liked it, once in a while, I’ll confess. But then Vina always said I had bad taste.

That Five Pennies concert is famous for what happened at the very end of an average sort of set that had failed to get anyone’s pulse going. After less than wild applause had died down, the crimson-tuxedoed quintet made ready to go into their encore. “The Saints,” what else, but no sooner had Red Nichols named the tune than a member of the audience vaulted on to the stage, waving an Indian wooden flute and grinning his goofy, but also infectious, grin.

“Oh, my God,” shouted Ormus Cama, and leapt up on stage after his brother.

“Wait for me,” yelled Vina, radiance bursting from her as she followed the Cama boys towards her own inescapable destiny; and that made three invaders. Me, I’m a coward. I stayed in the crowd and took photographs.

Click
. Red Nichols’s horrified face. He has been warned about India, its huge crowds that can turn, in an instant, into murderous mobs. Had he been resuscitated by Danny Kaye, only to die by being trampled under-foot in Bombay?
Click
. Virus Cama’s smile works its magic, and the old bandleader’s horror is replaced by a look of amused indulgence.
Click
. What the hey. Let the dumb guy play. And you, both of you? What do you do?
Click
. Vina Apsara steps up to the microphone. “We sing.”

Oh when the sun (oh when the sun
)
begin to shine (begin to shine
).

Ardaviraf Cama’s playing was undoubtedly skilful, but the music came out of his flute sounding inappropriate; it was a sound in a different currency, an anna trying to be a penny, but it didn’t matter, partly because he was happy enough tootling away, and partly because the crafty Nichols had turned off his mike, so if you weren’t in the first couple of rows you couldn’t hear him at all; but mostly because the minute Ormus and Vina opened their mouths and began to sing, everybody just stopped thinking about anything else. When they had finished, the audience was cheering wildly, and Nichols paid them the compliment of saying they were so good that he didn’t mind being upstaged.

The concert was over, the crowd was drifting away, but I stood rooted to the spot, taking photographs. The world was cracking. Ormus and Vina were deep in conversation with the musicians, who were packing up their instruments and shouting at the local stagehands to watch what they were doing. My heart was breaking. While Ormus and Vina chatted to the jazzmen, their hands and bodies were talking to each other.
Click, click
. I can see you, you two.
Click
. Peekaboo! Do you know I’m doing this? Are you letting me watch, is that it, even though I’m getting the goods on you, in here, in my little German box of wonders? You don’t care any more, is that it? You want it all out in the open.
Click
. And what about me, Vina? I’ll grow up too. He waited for you. Why wouldn’t you wait for me? I want to be in that number!

From the start my place was in a corner of their lives, in the shadow of their achievements. Yet I will always believe I deserved better. And there was a time when I almost had it. Not just Vina’s body, but her attention. Almost.

The musicians were piling their equipment into a small bus. An invitation had been extended and accepted, and it didn’t include me. Ormus came over to chase me off: Ormus rampant, full of sex and music.