The Ground Beneath Her Feet (27 page)

Insults are mysteries. What seems to the bystander to be the cruellest, most destructive sledgehammer of an assault,
whore! slut! tart!
, can leave its target undamaged, while an apparently lesser gibe,
thank god you’re not my child
, can fatally penetrate the finest suits of armour,
you’re nothing to me, you’re less than the dirt on the soles of my shoes
, and strike directly at the heart. If I offer no exhaustive catalogue of my mother’s harsh remarks, it is also because I am unable to judge their several effects. Was it this phrase or that phrase, this blow or that lash? Was it the mere fact of the tirade, or the cumulative effect of that vitriolic tour de force which left both Ameer and Vina physically drained, like fighters who have wrestled each other to a standstill?

Vina Apsara, a young person who had seen too much, whose trust in the world had been horribly eroded, had slowly allowed herself to believe, during her years at Villa Thracia, that she might be able to stand confidently upon the solid ground of our love. Our love as well as Ormus’s. Therefore she in her turn had fallen in love not only with us but with our preoccupations, our city, and our country too, to which she had begun to half believe she might be able, in her own way, to belong. And what my mother did that day pulled away the Isfahani rug of Vina’s trust in love itself, and revealed the abyss below.

Vina stood still, no more than semi-conscious, with the palms of her hands facing forward, questioning, expecting no answers, like the survivor of a massacre staring into the face of death. Ormus took her face between the palms of his hands. Very slowly she swayed back and away from his touch. At that moment his great love must have seemed to her like a great trap. To fall into it would be to make possible her utter annihilation at some point in the future, when he would turn on her
with a sneer on his face and hatred in his voice. No more risks, her face said. This stops, right now.

Villa Thracia, my beautiful childhood home, burned to the ground three days later. Whoever was responsible took care not to commit murder. No doubt the house was watched until the arsonist was certain it was empty, and then it was thoroughly torched. One by one we returned and assembled on the promenade, to stand with bowed heads while black snow fell all around.

Vina Apsara, however, did not return.

You will forgive me a small lump in the throat as I say farewell to Villa Thracia. It was one of the smaller bungalow-villas on the old Edwardian Cuffe Parade, but ours was only a small family, and it had suited us very well. There was half-timbering around the front-facing casement windows, but the rest of the place was brick, trimmed here and there with stone. Red tiled gables stood over them, and over the front door too, making a quaint little porch. Up above was the house’s somewhat pompous—or let us say
confident
—defining feature, a square, centrally positioned neo-classical turret, complete with pilasters and pediments on all four sides. This supported a little dome of scalloped green ceramic tiles, with a rather self-aggrandising mini-spire on top. In this ornate upper chamber my parents had lain during their long happy married years. “It’s like sleeping in a bell tower,” my mother used to say, and my father would reply, squeezing her hand, “And, my dearest, you indubitably are the tower’s belle.”

Up in smoke it went. Stripped of possessions, memories and happiness, we thought of the touch of falling ashes on our cheeks as our home’s farewell caress. Eyewitnesses to the blaze reported that the fire itself had loved the dying house, hugging it tightly, so that for a few instants Villa Thracia seemed to have been re-created in flame. Then smoke, black, unfeeling smoke, took over, the illusion was destroyed, and darkness covered all.

The destruction of your childhood home—a villa, a city—is like the death of a parent: an orphaning. A tombstone “scraper” stands upon the site of this forgotten cremation. A tombstone city stands upon the graveyard of the lost.

•  •  •

Where once stood “Dil Kush,” Dolly Kalamanja’s lavish three-story mansion on Ridge Road, Malabar Hill, that old-world masterpiece, all galleries and verandahs and light, with its marbled halls, its hurriedly acquired collection of paintings by Souza, Zogoiby and Hussain, and above all its mature tropical gardens boasting some of the oldest tamarind, jackfruit and plane trees in the city, and some of the finest bougainvillaea creeper too, you would now find neither trees nor creepers, neither grace nor space. Sitting like a squat missile on its launch pad, the skyscraper Everest Vilas fills that territory with its grey, discolouring concrete and is unlikely to yield possession any time soon. Everest Vilas is twenty-nine storeys high, but mercifully those are stories I do not need to tell. The phantom past is still standing on Ridge Road whenever I take a look. “Dil Kush” lives, as does the day when Villa Thracia burned and Dolly kindly insisted on giving us shelter under her ample, low-pitched roof.

Ormus arrived, at once exhausted and frenzied. It was late at night, but nobody was going to sleep. Vina was still missing. Ormus had searched high and low for her, rushing around all their favourite haunts, until he began to vomit from the stress. Finally, spent, disoriented, he staggered into “Dil Kush,” and such was his shaky, giddy, rudderless wretchedness that Ameer Merchant—who was, it must be said, beginning to be eaten alive by remorse—buttoned her lip. Convinced that Vina had died in the fire, that she’d been turned to smoke and blown away, bereft Ormus spoke of following her beyond the grave. Life had lost all value; death at least had this merit, that it was the only experience he and his beloved could now share. He spoke ominously of self-immolation. It was my father, alarmed by the young man’s state of mind, who comforted him. “Keep an open mind,” said V.V. Merchant, though the words sounded hollow to us all. “No pertinent evidence of her perishing has as yet been obtained.”

Persis Kalamanja, I must say, was looking a little shifty, which at the time I put down to the evident ambiguity of her position; for we could all work out that her hopes of marrying Ormus had received an undeniable, if horrible, fillip. Saintly as she was, Persis could not have failed
to wonder about the future: might not her own joyful beginning rise from the ashes of Vina’s tragic end? And then, being the tender-hearted young woman she was, she would have worked furiously to suppress such vile imaginings (which were rendered yet more vile by the sensation of delicious anticipation they released in her breast). She lowered her eyes and scrupulously supported my fathers position. Vina might be not dead but merely delinquent. She laid her hand on Ormus’s; he jerked his away, glaring savagely. With trembling lip she backed off and left him to his fears.

Who lit the fire?

The morning brought news, and two C.I.D. officers, the insufferably preening Detective Inspector Sohrab and the contrastingly self-effacing Detective Constable Rustam. These gentlemen informed us that as a result of interviews with neighbours and public-spirited passers-by who had contacted the police, the time of the fire’s beginning had been definitively fixed at one p.m. Unfortunately, said D.I. Sohrab, “no miscreants were witnessed absconding from the site.” A thorough search of the charred ruins of Villa Thracia had now been completed, and luckily no corpses had been found. (When Ormus heard that Vina had not been burned to death, he looked so happy that my mother had to remind him sternly that a great tragedy had nevertheless occurred.)

The three live-in household servants, cook, bearer and hamal, had all been located. They had been hiding out in the nearby colony of Koli fisherfolk, terrified both of the fire and of being held responsible for it. The police did not, however, believe that the fire was the domestics’ fault. Their stories checked out, even though it was a little unusual for all three of them to have been running household errands at the time in question, leaving the villa unattended. Still, there was “clear evidence of an arson attack,” Inspector Sohrab said keenly, “though details must be withheld for the nonce.” Slowly we realized that we were under suspicion of having burned down our own home. Oleaginously, Sohrab now suggested that the firm of Merchant & Merchant was in alleged financial difficulties; that Shri Merchant himself had reportedly accrued gambling debts. Insurance claims could be beneficial, wasn’t it so? My father was outraged at these “foul imputations.” “Enquire of those who stand to benefit,” he instructed the C.I.D. wallahs, with an
unwonted edge to his voice. “Visit Shri Doodhwala and his cronies, and you will be in far greater propinquity to the luciferous rogues.”

The cops left, but the doubts remained. The awful truth is that my tempestuous mother half suspected my father of the crime, and even my gentle father had begun to harbour suspicions of his own regarding Ameer. For three days, since their quarrel, my parents had lived apart: she at Villa Thracia, he with friends in Colaba. The fire had brought them together again, if only for my sake. Awkwardly, to keep up appearances, they were sharing one of Dolly’s spacious guest bedrooms. But the atmosphere between them was icy.

I was in the room next door, and at night, once again, I could hear them hiss and fight. Ameer was angry enough with her husband to insinuate that he had tried to murder her, and all of us, in our beds. He pointed out mildly that the fire had started in broad daylight, at a time when she was unlikely to have been sleeping. She snorted contemptuously at so nitpicking a reply. V.V., for his part, wondered if she had turned arsonist in order to force his hand. “Is it possible that you would go to such reprehensible extremes in pursuit of those barbarous ‘Cuffescrapers’?” At which Ameer shrieked, so that the whole night-time house could hear, “Oh God, look what filthy
galis
he’s giving me now!”

Alas, the Piloo faction had indeed won the day in the battle against my father’s intransigence. Now that Villa Thracia was gone, V.V. dejectedly gave in and sold Piloo, for a far lower price than the one he had initially refused, the plot of land on which our burned husk of a villa stood like a memorial to the death of idealism. The huge Doodhwala development project moved a step closer to success. The monster edifices of his imagination would bestride the city like the Martian spaceships in
The War of the Worlds
. In cases involving the pursuit of such very large pots of gold, a little firebuggery is not so very unusual.

But Piloo Doodhwala was an influential man. Influence, according to the astrologers, is an ethereal fluid emanating from the stars, which affects the actions of mere mortals such as we. Let us say, then, that Piloo uncorked his ethereal fluids—for he possessed influence of more than one variety—and let them freely flow down, from the highest echelons of the Bombay C.I.D. to the humble detectives assigned to
the case. Within a matter of days, these officers announced that they had “conclusively eliminated” him from their investigations. When my father expressed astonishment, Inspector Sohrab told him with some asperity, “You should be grateful. You personally and your goodwife also have generously been included in the said elimination.”

The investigation had been “redirected along more profitable avenues of inquiry.” These concerned the vanished U.S. citizen, Miss Nissa Shetty alias Vina Apsara. Inquiries at Santa Cruz airport had established that Miss Apsara exited Bombay within hours of the fire, on a TWA aircraft travelling to London and New York. Her unexplained flight was deemed to be of the highest significance. Further detective work, in collaboration with Scotland Yard via the Interpol network, revealed that Miss Apsara’s plane ticket had been purchased in pounds sterling in the U.K., and that the issuing agency was Mr. P. Kalamanja’s London-based Kalatours outfit. Mr. Kalamanja himself had paid Miss Apsara’s fare.

Mrs. Dolly Kalamanja was a small woman wearing big jewellery, a new-rich grande dame who believed in “putting on a show.” Her hair was the blue of steel and its style was modelled on the Queen of England’s, with those distinctive Ionic squirls adorning the temples. Her bust too—a single, solid bolster without hint of undulations, stretching across her chest like a sleeping policeman, a speed bump prominent enough to slow down anyone unwise enough to make too fast an approach—was reminiscent of Elizabeth II’s. She was strong-willed, more conservative than most of Bombay’s broad-minded Parsi community, and her high voice was in the habit of being obeyed. Much of what she felt about her own life was formulaic, which did not prevent the emotions from being felt strongly. Thus her husband Patangbaz Kalamanja was her “rock,” and her daughter Persis, her “pride and joy.” The news of Pat’s involvement in the escape to “foreign parts” of a suspected arsonist hit her hard. She reeled. The universe seemed to lose shape and meaning. The earth trembled. The “rock” wobbled, cracked. Persis helped her mother to a chair, and she fell into it with her head “in a whirl,” fanning herself with a hankie.

The grand formal drawing room at “Dil Kush” was as well
appointed, with its teak sideboards and mirrors in extravagant geometric shapes and overstuffed Biedermeier sofas and priceless Deco lamps and genuine tigerskin rugs and bad oil paintings (and, to be fair, some good ones), as the saloon of a great ocean liner: the
Titanic
, perhaps. Certainly it felt to baffled Dolly like the deck of a badly holed ship. In her “condition,” the room seemed to tilt and start sliding slowly towards some dreadful netherworld.

“How did that girl get to my Pat?” she wailed, faintly. “Just now I’ll book a call to U.K. and box his blooming ears!”

It was like a scene from a Poirot story. We were all standing or sitting around the room, watching Dolly’s melodramatic conniption. Persis was pouring her a glass of water, and the C.I.D.’s finest were positioned on a tigerskin, well satisfied with the impact of their news. But neither cocky Sohrab nor dumb Rustam could have been expecting what followed, which was not the threatened telephone call to Patangbaz in Wembley. For as it happened, there was no need to trouble the international operator. Persis Kalamanja sat at her mother’s feet, massaging them with her hands, looked directly and without wavering into the eyes of Ormus Cama, and confessed.