The ground beneath his feet
keerthik sasidharan, the peak

Every few years, Salman Rushdie brings forth to the literary arena a tome, a product of his fervently imaginative mind and an unbridled writing style. Reading him is akin to experiencing the varying depths of sophistication and crudity that, probably, is only offered in Bombay - Rushdie's favorite haunt, described often with nostalgia.

In light of the love-hate relationship that he and India share, his writings often seem reminiscent of a neglected child's brooding towards his mother. However, his latest novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet seems to be the end of their relationship. India has not allowed its most famous writer, and arguably the finest fiction writer in English alive today, to come back home. It thus receives one of its most poignant good-byes that, if he sticks by his word, is definitely heartbreaking for Anglo-Indian literature.

Metamorphosis, ostracism, regret, rootlessness and the intentional subversion of historical facts all figure with mind-numbing frequency in his latest magnum opus. Spiraling throughout the Parsi envelope of Bombay immediately prior to the Indian and Pakistani freedom from British rule in 1947, leaping from a 1960s London to the New York of the 1980s, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a love story despite a world teeming with individuals who revel in their own eccentricities.

Dysfunctional families abound. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, the doyen of the Cama family, constantly oscillates between cricket games, Greek myths, and priggish conversations with William Methwold until each of these passions slip away from him. An stray cricketing shot and a set of fake credentials spell the end of his spirit. His redemption comes, during the times of prohibition in Bombay, in the form of alcohol, opium and dancing whores of Kamathipura.

To match her husband's meteoric rise and painful slip into oblivion, Lady Spenta Cama is regularly in touch with two of Parsi-dom's angels, the Amesha Spentas. Her remarkable propensity is to give birth to dizygotic twins again and again. In her second pair comes our impossibly attractive musical genius of an hero, Ormus Cama, born in the shadow of his dead twin brother Gayomart. Ormus proves to be a "pyschopomp, one concerned with the retrieval of lost souls, the souls of the beloved dead". Soon his gift for interactions with his dead twin takes him far from the familial ties that he takes for granted. Despite a ban on music in the Cama household, Ormus slowly unscrambles, through this oft-fleeting spiritual communion with his twin, hit songs of the 1950s and the 1960s before they are even heard in the West: "I Got You, Babe", "Yesterday" and "Blowin in the Wind". The torment of his spirit continues, till one day.

Enter Vina Apsara, a combination of Madonna and Princess Diana, albeit a generation older. Also a product of a dysfunctional family, her birth in Chester, Virginia of a 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 specialize in poverty, desperation, 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.

The narrator of the entire book is Rai, a bumbling actor turned successful photographer. Rai is a classical Rushdie narrator into whose life intersects the myriad versions of Vina and Ormus' love.

However, Ormus and Vina lose their initial buildup as human characters. Somehow, they are transmuted into holograms of themselves. The consistent movements in the plates beneath their relationships with each other and with others prove to be detrimental to them as characters, and at times it does seem that they are labouring under the philosophical musings of their creator. 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, the fans, then Rushdie succeeds. He courts these problems of celebrity culture with sagacity but in true Rushdiesque fashion, he describes them by creating the literary equivalent of MTV. This can either be confusing and distracting to those who stick by Old World literary idioms, or a wonderful world entirely intending to be an unadulterated source of verbal special effects employed with a 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 and heavy observations. These instances make one realizethat 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 humour. His inclination for conservatism shines through, yet his fascination with the evolving cultures - including fashion - produces some of the funniest observations one will ever read.

Already threatening to take his position in the pantheon including Nabokov and Joyce, Rushdie's writing style is on par or maybe even more majestic than his more famous contemporary, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though Marquez is undoubtedly the greater talent when it comes to moving the reader. Rushdie's writing often is overwhelmed by the sheer intellectual experience he tries to convey.

Much regarding him and his works has been written, and probably will be written. However, ten years after the Valentine-fatwa, I hope, the world - particularly parts of the world that have been incensed by his "insensitivity" - will be kinder to him with the passage of time. His vociferous espousals and lambastes of the 'rights and wrongs', his imaginative somersaults that often have perfect landings but also once in a while straight-faced crashes, his broad canvas strokes that paint - along with the world and India within it - a chaotic, metamorphic yet absurdly funny place will hopefully distinguish Rushdie as the brilliant and important writer he is. He constantly questions 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. Nothing is now above scrutiny.

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