The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie Read Free Book Online

to mean a day on which unexpected cloud cover brought cool relief from the heat. Schoolchildren had been given a “fine day holiday,” as was the occasional practice in those far-off times. This particular fine day, however, was ill-starred. True, a child had been born alive, but another had been born dead. Demons, Daevas, had been conjured, and there were disapprovals hanging in the air. At the Sisters of Maria Gratiaplena Nursing Home, Snooty Utie Schaapsteker’s disapproval of Lady Spenta’s self-pity had mingled with Sir Darius’s disapproval of what he might on another occasion have called his wife’s “superstitions,” to create a less than celebratory mood. Here at the cricket ground, too, there were unexpected noises of reproof. A band of nationalist sympathizers had arrived with a variety of deafening musical instruments, and from the beginning of the game they set out to disrupt the players’ concentration by what Sir Darius thought to be a particularly tasteless type of musical heckling.
    “Don’t be wicket,” the hecklers chanted, to the beat of drums and the tooting of trumpets, “Ban communal cricket.” Sir Darius Xerxes Cama was aware that Mahatma Gandhi and his followers had denounced the Pentangular Tournament as a communally divisive, anti-national throwback, in which men of colonialized mentality performed like monkeys for the amusement of the British and gave unhelpful assistance to the policy of divide-and-rule. Sir Darius was no Independence merchant. Nationalists! He entertained the gravest doubts about the wisdom of surrendering the governance of India to men of such limited musical sense. For Mr. Gandhi personally he concededa grudging respect but felt that if he could only persuade the great man to don flannels and learn the basics of the game, the Mahatma was bound to be persuaded of the tournament’s value in honing that spirit of competition without which no people can take its place at the forefront of the world community.
    As he arrived at the crease, one of the hecklers sang out, “Lady Darias come to play!” At once a distressingly large section of the crowd—must be Christians, Anglos or Jews, huffed Sir Darius in displeasure—took up the insulting chant. “Lady Cama, give us drama! Give a catch and be a charmer!” Toot, rattle, clank. “Give us drama, Lady Cama.”
    Now Sir Darius noticed that his own boys, the five-year-old twins Cyrus and Virus, were sitting with their ayah on the grass close by the nationalist hecklers, grinning happily, giving every appearance of enjoying the spoilsports’ antics. He moved a few paces towards them, waving his bat. “Khusro! Ardaviraf! Move on!” he called. The boys and the ayah were unable to hear him in the din and assumed he was waving. They all waved back. The hecklers, thinking he was shaking his bat at them, and happy to have so provoked him, redoubled their efforts. The music of their merry hostility clamoured in his ears. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama faced the bowling in an imperfect frame of mind.
    Mr. Aaron Abraham, opening the bowling for The Rest, was able to make the new ball swing discomfortingly in those overcast conditions. Sir Darius was lucky to survive his first three deliveries. Seeing him struggle, the nationalist claque grew even noisier. Clank, rattle, toot. The drummers and trumpeters improvised a tune, and over and over his tormentors sang, “Lady Daria, don’t be slack. Make a duck and off you quack.” And then came a variant, and evidently popular, version: “Lady Donald, make a duck.”
    Sir Darius strode down the pitch to confer with his partner.
    “Quack, is it?” he fumed, swishing his bat. “I’ll soon give them quack, but what is this Donald?” As he asked the question, however, he remembered a recent visit to the cinema with the twins to see Chaplin’s Modern Times, a film Sir Darius admired for, among other things, staying “silent.” In the supporting programme they had seen a cartoon