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

laugh that he, too, was a great metropolitan creation of the British, and proud of it. “When you write this city’s history, Merchant,” he roared one night over a clubhouse dinner of mulligatawny and pomfret, “you might just find it’s my biography you’ve penned.” As for my mother, she had come to know Lady Spenta Cama at meetings of the Bombay Literary Society. Lady Spenta was the least well read of women, but her serene insouciance in the face of her almost Himalayan ignorance inspired in the younger (and immensely more brilliant) Ameer a kind of amused awe that, had events taken a different course, might have deepened towards friendship.
    In the nursing home’s waiting room, surrounded by the beaming relatives of new-born male children and the determinedly cheerful relatives of new-born girls, my future parents made an odd pair, hewearing a dark suit and a lugubrious expression, she in a plain white sari, without jewellery, and wearing minimal make-up. (Many years later, she confided to me that “I was always certain of your father’s love, because when he fell for me I was looking less attractive than a water buffalo.”) As the only mourners in a place of rejoicing, it was natural that they should move towards each other and introduce themselves.
    Both of them would have been feeling awkward at the prospect of facing Lady Spenta and Sir Darius in what they believed to be a moment of deep grief. My mild, tender-hearted father would have been shifting his weight and smiling his embarrassed, buck-toothed smile on account of a strangling emotional inarticulacy that made it hard for him to reveal to the outside world the great depths of feeling within his breast, and an unworldly temperament that led him to prefer the mustinesses of records offices to the unfathomable messiness of Bombay life. Ameer, my mother—“rich by name, and the real money in the family,” in her own subsequent, sardonic self-description—would also have been ill at ease, because neither condolences nor congratulations came easily to her lips. I do not mean to suggest that she was unfeeling or cold; quite the contrary. My mother was a disappointed altruist, an angry woman who had come down to earth expecting a better place, who had landed in the lap of luxury and never recovered from the disillusioning discovery that dismal suffering, not easeful joy, was the human norm. Neither her philanthropy nor her temper tantrums—though both were impressive—sufficed to assuage her disappointment in the planet and her own species. Her reactions to birth and death, shaped and coloured as they were by her sense of having been let down by the cosmos, could therefore seem, to the untutored ear, just a trifle, well, cynical. Or, to be frank, heartless, brutal and mortally offensive too. Dead baby? What else to expect? He’s well out of it, anyway. Living baby? Poor kid. Think what he’s got in store . That was her natural style.
    However, before she could launch on some such speech and alienate my future father forever, she was forestalled by a startling discovery, and history moved, like a railway train diverted by a sudden switching of points, down an entirely different path.
    “I am Merchant,” my father introduced himself. “Like Vijay, but norelation, though I am also V. In fact, V.V.” Ameer frowned, not because she was unaware that Vijay Merchant was a rising star of Indian cricket, but …
    “How can you be ‘Merchant’?” she objected. “You can not be ‘Merchant’. I,” she pointed at her chest for emphasis, “I am Merchant. Ameer.”
    “You?” (Bewildered.)
    “I.” (Emphatic.)
    “Are Merchant?” (A shake of the head.)
    “A Merchant. Miss.” (A shrug.)
    “Then we are both Merchants,” confirmed V.V., wonderingly.
    “Don’t be silly,” Ameer rejoined.
    Now V. V. Merchant emitted a long blurt. “Until my grandfather’s time we were Shettys or Shetias or Sheths. He Englished it up, standardized it. Also, he