Book: The Ground Beneath His Feet

Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher:

Every few years, Salman Rushdie brings forth to the literary arena a volume - a product of his fervently imaginative mind and an unbridled writing style. Reading him, is akin to stepping from the lazy air conditioned comforts of Air India to meet the varying depths of sophistication and crudity that probably, only Bombay - his favorite haunt described often with the nostalgia that runs amok with instances of self deprecation, emotional roller coasters and the inevitable exiles - could offer. Some how despite the love-hate relationship that India and Salman Rusdhie share, his writings often seemed reminiscent of a neglected child`s brooding towards his mother. However, in his latest novel, one destined to be the hailed as the pinnacle of fiction with Rock Music and Celebrity Culture and Cultural Tectonics as the background, THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET, seems to be the end of his relationship with India - a country which has not allowed its most famous writer, and arguably the finest fiction writer in English alive today, to come back home. The reason being partly his own creation, both figuratively and literally. The specter of `The Satanic Verses` still looms large, preventing his return, which for the past ten years has made his life seem almost a real life version of "a bad Salman Rushdie novel."

In this book, India receives one of its most poignant good byes that (if he sticks by his word), is definitely heartbreaking for Anglo-Indian literature.

"India, my terra infirma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia, my crowd. India, my too-muchness, my everything at once, my Hug-me, my fable, my mother, my father and my first great truth. It may be that I am not worthy of you, for I have been imperfect, I confess. I may not comprehend what you are becoming, what perhaps you already are, but I am old enough to say that this new self of yours is an entity I no longer want, or need, to understand.
India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart. Goodbye."

What is reassuring is, that he leaves behind an entire generation of writers who bestride the literary spheres today like colossuses, accepting him, rejecting him and most importantly jostling with him for the top honors. While R K Narayan, Kamala Markandaya, Raja Rao et al have been allowed into the English literary mansions but in true colonial fashion they have been relegated to the kitchen and the outhouses, providing the optional whiff of spices and the exotic in this bungalow. With Rushdie came a savvy style - born out of concern and imagination - not just in writing but a reflection of a changing world order, especially in England, where the immigrants no longer hide in fear, murmuring in their little brown or black apartments in awe of the Sahibs-, who suffer--most often acutely, from post colonial hangovers. A consistent critic of Mrs. Thatcher`s "regime", Rushdie has played the agent provocateur whose writings were unhesitant to embark on the "chutnification of history". Soon, his world encompassed Punjabi Muslim boys in Southall, singing Paul Simon`s "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" to woo white and Chinese girls named Catherine and Laura in clubs that played Bhangra and Khalid along with The Rolling Stones. It is a mad mad world - with everything scrambled around. Nothing is above scrutiny and worthy of other worldly reverence, and "savages" are heralding the education of the nobles. England, even in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, was deemed to require "immigrovelling" from its "immigrunts". Despite the notorious column wars, (Salman Rushdie v/s John Le Carre), he was generally acknowledged to be a talented writer - maybe even Nobel Prize material.

However on Valentine`s day, 1989, the ground beneath his feet slowly started sliding, and much like Umeed - Hope - Rai, the all knowing narrator-photographer from The Ground Beneath Her Feet who is temporarily lost in the dust and ravages of an earthquake - disconnected and taken to have been dead - the world Rushdie resided in and had taken for granted with the passage of time that he is to meet his imminent. Assassination. Much in the fashion of the politicians whom Rushdie tore apart with pungent references and disturbing accuracy. Ayatollah Khomeini`s spectacular condemnation of Rushdie to death, for blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, proved ample fire for everybody. Liberals - in the West, the middle East, and in the Subcontinent - lashed at conservatism and tribalism that reeked from this Islamic edict, while the conservative Muslims - majority of whom had hardly glimpsed the labyrinthine volume - across the world swore to "finish him" for having desecrated grounds hitherto considered un-walkable. Although nearly a year previously, Martin Scorsese`s "The Last Temptation Of Christ" met with stiff opposition all across the globe, nothing was to match this. India banned it and England burned it - often much to the glee of the people he vivisected with delight. Ironically, the accuser and the accused, achieved exactly the opposite of what they desired. Rushdie with all of his oft emerging penchant for controversy and celebrity status - especially since Midnight`s Children met stiff opposition in Mrs. Gandhi and Indian historical purists while, Shame was banned in the "under imagined" Pakistan despite its phantasmagoric musings of a land which was "not quite Pakistan" - now met all of it, in a rather cruel way. The Ayatollah and his clerics managed to publicize this book which, along with "The Brief History Of Time" must be on top of the most un-read bestsellers, to an extent that Viking/Penguin could have hardly matched. The West found another tool to lash on the increasingly "out of control" Islamic (read Middle Eastern) clash with their interests. "The Rushdie Affair" gave the covert interventionist policies a bit more intellectual veneer. Words like Freedom Of Speech, Liberty et al flew around dinner tables, universities, political chess rooms - while the men in the eye of the storm - the Ayatollah and Rushdie - both ironically ended up blurring positions. For, in `The Satanic Verses` the Prophet (called Mahound, Moe Hammered etc) castigates the apostate water carrier Salman of "polluting the word of God". The question became, `who is the modern day Prophet?`, Rushdie for prognosticating the impending crises or the Ayotollah for becoming the living embodiment of `Islam`? The cacophony of the rights and the wrongs, the rational and irrational, the punisher and the punished drowned the sorrows of a man who seemed to live by the parody of the arcane law, as Pico Iyer observes, "he who lives by the word shall die by the word."

Time flew by, and although he had "derailed his life for a while", he did manage to "climb back onto the rails." A flurry of smaller projects like a collection of reviews, essays and criticism called "Imaginary Homelands" ; a children`s book called "Haroun and the Sea Of Stories" inspired by his childhood memories, his musings after constant re-examinations by himself of liberties of artistic imagination and also the characters of Bagha and Goopy by the Bengali writer Upendrakishore Ray Chaudhuri and immortalized by film maker Satyajit Ray in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. (1969). It was also his promise to his son Zafar , `that the next book I wrote would be one he might enjoy reading` And by the time `The Moor`s Last Sigh` came out, the pantheon of Anglo-Indian literature had exploded onto the global scene with all its spice and curry blitz. Rushdie`s clamorous pin wheeling reinvention of India, Indian history and India`s minorities - this time the Christians and the few remaining Jews with a narrator Moraes Zogoiby who ages twice each year - had a new set of fellow magical realists in Amitav Ghosh, I. Allan Seally and Shashi Tharoor (and soon to follow Arundhati Roy). Another image of India was simultaneously being carved, in a fashion to true to its narrative style, silent, tender but immensely powerful. Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry (and now Kiran Desai) being the most famous of the non-Rushdiesque Indian writers. With the passage of time, if Vikram Seth is to be acknowledged as the grandfather of modern Indian literature - caring, compassionate and classic prose - Salman Rushdie is the Godfather of modern Indian literature - thoughtful, belligerent prose that demands respect rather than elicits love.

Metamorphosis, ostracism, regret, rootless-ness and the intentional subvertion of historical facts all figure with mind numbing frequency in his latest magnum opus, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Spiraling throughout the Parsi envelope of the Bombay immediately prior to the Indian/Pakistani freedom from the British rule, 1947, a world filled with individuals who revel in their own eccentricities so much that they fail to see the eccentricity of any of their obsessions - The Ground Beneath Her Feet is still a love story. Dysfunctional families abound, somehow one manages to get the feel that these familial structures are painted with modern brushstrokes. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, the doyen of the Cama family constantly oscillates between cricket games, Greek myths, priggish conversations with William Methwold until each of these passions slip away from him. An astray cricketing shot, a set of fake credentials spell the end of the spirit of this retired Anglophile Parsi. Finally his redemption, he seeks himself, in the times of prohibition in Bombay comes in the form of alcohol, opium and dancing whores of Kamathipura;

(as he grew older and thickened by drink, certain boundaries blurred in his memory, and nowadays he drew only the vaguest of distinctions between Toad Hall and Blenheim Palace, Longleat and Gormenghast. His nostalgia applied equally to the dreamhouses of fiction and the real country seats of "bluebloods" and prime ministers and rich arrivistes like the Astor clan. Real or fictional, these mighty piles represented for Sir Darius the closest approximation of earthly Paradise that human imagination and ingenuity had managed to create.)

To match her husband`s meteoric rise and painful slipping into oblivion, Lady Spenta Cama, is regularly in touch with two of Parsi-dom`s angels, the Amesha Spentas. She displays remarkable propensity to give birth to dizygotic twins again and again. The first pair, called Khusro and Ardaviraf, who were lovingly called Cyrus and Virus. Like all his characters, Cyrus was fiercely charmingly and also ruthlessly cruel who while growing up in a convent starts of a series of murders by suffocating victims under their pillows. Virus on the other hand is the epitome of saintliness and is nearly mistaken often, only by his parents, to be the human form of the Angels, Lady Cama was on speaking terms with. These characters are, of course, friendly diversions who prepare us for the roller coasters that come in the (invisible ) triangular love affair between Ormus Cama, Vina Apsara and Umeed "Rai" Merchant.

In the second pair of dizygotic twins, comes our impossibly attractive musical genius of a hero, Ormus Cama, born in the shadow of the other dead twin brother Gayomart Cama.

(Lady Spenta rallied. "whose idea was it to name that poor boy Gayo, anyway?" she demanded, forgetting in the heat and emotional ambiguity of the moment that it had been her own. Her husband, too gallant to remind her, bowed his head and took the blame.)

who proves to be a "pyschopomp, one concerned with the retrieval of lost souls, the souls of the beloved dead". Soon these interactions with his dead twin, takes him afar from the familial ties that are taken for granted - from the umbilical severance to the last vulture`s peck in Temple of Silence, and probably even beyond into the kingdom of Souls. Gayomart Cama reveals to Ormus, the tormented genius, that along with the ones he breathes and exists, there is another world waiting to be discovered. Only, the means to discover these experiences of alternate reality would be music, his guitar, his boyish good looks, his personality that is "kitschy combo of Elvis, Dylan and Lennon". Despite a ban on music, in the Cama household, Ormus slowly unscrambles, with this oft fleeting spiritual communion with his twin, hit songs of the 1950`s and the 1960`s before they are even heard in the West, songs: like "I Got You, Babe", "Yesterday", "Blowin in the Wind". The torment of his spirit continues, till one day. One day…

Enter Vina Apsara, born as Nissa Shetty, later transmuted into Nissy Poe, Nissy Doodhwala and finally Vina. Vina Apsara. Again a product of a dysfunctional family, her birth in Chester, Virginia of Greek American mother and an Indian homosexual-to-be lawyer father proves to be the beginnings of a collection of tumultuous stories , each of which specializes in poverty, desperations, loves, scandals and sex - all of which, however, are evenly tempered by her mediocre musical gifts, outrageous fits of anger, self-inflicted expectations of self-aggrandizement and masquerades of sophistication.

(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).

After a series of misadventures in her early life, Vina reaches Bombay. A Bombay that like the young nation to be born, was undergoing constant changes in terms of demographics, the emergent cultures, the women un-originally confessing their love to Raj Kapoor (the Indian Rudolf Valentino, Charles Chaplin and Elia Kazan all rolled into one) the stranglehold of the RSSS fanatics, the evenings on the sandy beaches that was the gateway of India.

To the British. And now to the Americans. America, the Great Attractor.

The narrator of all the entire book is Rai, a bumbling actor turned successful photographer. Umeed "Rai - Hope" Merchant. Like all of Rushdie`s narrators, he dips into the river of action and soon with the urgency of a middle class survivor comes out of it. Wipes himself dry, only to plunge in again. A dispassionate observer who tastes the most passionate of Vina Apsara`s appetites. Reminiscent of Saleem Sinai (Snotface, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Chaand ka tukra - Piece of the Moon) from Midnight`s Children, a spiritual relative of the in-limbo Saladin Chamcha of Satanic Verses and the troubled Moraes Zogoiby of Moor`s Last Sigh, Rai is a photographer into whose life intersects the myriad versions of Vina and Ormus`s love. From their "love making with their eyes" to the final obsession beyond death, Rai accompanies us to the intricacies of these lives often showering nuggets of his worldly wisdom thus allowing Rushdie to ruminate over and over again, often bringing life with his brilliant command over the language, regarding India, exile, love, death, celebrities and the future juxtaposed delicately with the present and the past.

In these memoirs of Rai, he guiltily sprinkles his liaisons with other women, his nearly incestuous sexcapades with Vina and his adoration for the couple - Vina and Ormus. Vina and Ormus are pretty interesting separately, but together with each other they are `magical`; "more Righteous than the Righteous Borthers, " "Everlier than the Everlys, Supremer than the Supremes." Like for the rest of the world, they were Rai`s Gods; their love story - if it can be called mutual - was, as Rai effusively comments, "as close as I`ve come to a knowledge of the mythic, the overweening, the divine." Rai is of course in love with Vina, but constantly reminds himself, and therefore us, that he is just a third person adjusting in this already crowded relationship.

"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 forht the magic of his smile. But she also, from the very beginning, needed to leave him and go else where 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".

An ancient tale, mixed with potent passages regarding his favorite themes, Ormus and Vina, loose their initial buildup as human characters. Somehow, they are transmuted (not as the Farishta and Shaitaan) but rather into holograms of their selves, much like we would like to hear. The consistent movements in the plates beneath their relationships with each other and with others prove to be detrimental to them as characters; at times it does seem that Vina and Ormus are laboring under the sapient ruminations of their writer. But, if the intent is to make us feel that with increased stardom, persons cease to exist and their persona is constantly redrawn by us - and the notoriously short mind span of the onlooker - he succeeds. Ormus and Vina "had ceased to be real," they had "become little more than signs of the times, lacking true autonomy, to be decoded according to one`s own inclination and need." He courts these problems of celebrity culture with the sagacity of an Indian rishi but again in a true Rushdiesque fashion, he describes them by creating a true literary equivalent of the MTV. Confusing and distracting to those who stick by Old World literary idioms; an unadulterated source of the constant special effects employed with teenage abandon.

As with his previous works, Rushdie fiddles around with history, often producing hilarious situations and thereby lightening the mood that precedes remarkably astute yet heavy observations, usually, by Rai. Ormus through Gayomart, once again manages to sense that JFK is assassinated in Dallas, that there is an American president called Richard Nixon, that Carly Simon is not the same one as Paul Simon and that John Lennon is not Mick Jagger. Within the confines of the novel, these are not facts but rather half-crazed fantasies that Gayomart spews through Ormus`s prodigal senses. The real facts include the double assassination of JFK and RFK in LA by a single ricocheting bullet, earthquakes shake the Golden Temple in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar and a small southern Indian city of Sri Perumbudur, novels called Catch-18 and "The Watergate Affair". Such instances abound, and makes one realize that here is a man, phenomenal in his writing talents but also evidently intoxicated after having drunk from an astonishing number of founts of human experience: Greek myths and Islamic customs, the fervent Qawwalis by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the irreverent hip gyrations of Mick Jagger, soccer and films alike. If there is an all pervading phenomenon, it is humor. His inclination for conservatism shines through, yet his fascination with these evolving cultures - including fashion - produces some of the funniest observations one will ever read.

"And when I can`t stand hell any more I change my clothes, I put on some of the best casual wear Seventh Avenue has to offer, head for the studio and drop in on pussy heaven: fashion photography, when you can make beautiful women in expensive clothes behave as if they were in a war zone. They stare, leap, spin, gasp, duck, arch, jerk. I`ve seen machine-gun fire take a body that way".

Already threatening to usurp his position in the pantheon including Nabokov and Joyce; Rushdie`s writing style is at par or maybe even more majestic than his more famous contemporary, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - who undoubtedly is a greater master at transporting and moving the reader, whether it be the magical Macondo or in the love triangle of Urbino, Fermina and Florentino. Rushdie`s writing often is overwhelmed by the sheer intellect of his pen, and therefore the commodious vision of his heartfelt writing is occasionally relegated to a lower pedestal. Rushdie`s magic realism however is far more realistic - therefore all the more difficult to create - than Marquez, who although weaves his words and images with incredible deftness, they are still from the arbitrary. Rushdie has famously noted, while reviewing V S Naipaul`s, The Enigma of Arrival, the absence of the word "love" in every sentence, and strangely, often his own writing is plagued with the absence of this feeling.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is, however, a change from that, a remedy is often there but again his penchant for showy puns and verbal histrionics prevent one from feeling for the characters, unlike what Marquez creates with Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza in Love In The Time Of Cholera (En Amor El Tiempos Del Cholera) .

In retrospect, I hope, the world - particularly parts of the world that have been incensed by his "insensitivity" - will be kinder to him. Stripping him of his near pop star status among writers, his vociferous espousals of the `rights and wrongs` he sees, his imaginative somersaults that often have had perfect landings but also once in a while straight faced crashes, his broad canvas strokes that portray - along with the world and India within it - a chaotic, metamorphic yet absurdly funny place where we exist; the world hopefully will see a writer pulsating with energy with a desire to portray our society - often leaving behind a mark causing discomfort to the portrayed.

Important he is, constantly questioning our practices, our taken-for-granteds, our mothers and fathers, our sanity as a human race, our rat races in which he leads the pack questioning and redefining himself. Nothing till now was above scrutiny, nothing - hopefully -- will be.