The Ground Beneath Her Feet

During a 1999 book tour, Salman Rushdie said of his new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), “It’s a love story, and it’s about rock ‘n roll.” Condensed to its basic elements, it is the story of the tempestuous love between Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, two gifted musicians, as told by the other man who loves Vina, Umeed “Rai” Merchant. It is also a re-imagining of ancient classical and Indian myths, a critique of the cult of celebrity, and an existential meditation on “not-belonging.” As Kirkus Reviews observes, “It’s a brash polyglot symphony of colliding and cross-pollinating ‘worlds’” that envisions globalization as a means for individuals to positively transform themselves.

The book begins on February 14, 1989 (the date the fatwa was issued against Rushdie) in Mexico, the moment an earthquake splits the ground under forty-four-year-old Vina and swallows her. After this tragic opening, Rai Merchant’s first-person narrative jumps back to 1950s Bombay, shortly after India gained independence from the British. In Bombay, the lives of the novel’s three protagonists converge.

Ormus is born in 1937 in Bombay, moments after his stillborn twin, Gayomart. His older brothers, Virus and Cyrus, are also twins. On the day of Ormus’s birth, his father, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, an Anglophile, hits a cricket ball, which errantly strikes Virus in the head and renders him mute. Cyrus, who is destined to become a serial killer and to murder Sir Darius, tries to smother the baby Ormus because of his incessant singing. Even as an infant, Ormus displays an exceptional aptitude for music.



Vina is born in 1944 in Virginia, USA. Her mother, a Greek-American, divorces her Indian father, re-marries, and then annihilates herself and her second family in an act of murder-suicide. Vina’s father sends her to live with distant relatives in Bombay, who prove to be unfit, so she joins the Merchant household. From the moment Rai Merchant first sees Vina on the beach in 1956, he is enthralled by her.

Rai Merchant is born in 1947, in Bombay, the son of parents at odds with each other: his nostalgic father cherishes the architecture of Old Bombay while his mother, an urban planner, endeavors to modernize the city. Nevertheless, the family provides a pleasant asylum for Vina until she is sixteen, when she and Ormus finally consummate their love. The day after their earth-shaking lovemaking, the Merchants’ house burns down, and Vina abruptly departs for America, via London.

Ormus and Vina meet in a Bombay record store when she is twelve, and they are irresistibly drawn to one another. They share a passion and talent for music. Vina sings, and Ormus possesses remarkable song writing skills, which are enhanced by his uncanny connection with his dead twin, Gayomart. When he enters a meditative state he calls “Cama obscura,” Ormus channels music from Gayomart that’s not yet written but will one day top the charts. Thus, when “Heartbreak Hotel” becomes an international hit, seventeen-year-old Ormus reacts with baffled outrage. He has known the song for years, thanks to Gayomart, but now an American musician is rocking pop culture with it. That this musician is not Elvis Presley signals something is strange about the novel’s world.



Indeed, in the alternative reality of the novel, Jesse Parker, Elvis’s twin, becomes America’s “King” of rock-and-roll, Watergate is just a “fantasy-thriller” novel, and JFK survives an assassination attempt in Dallas. Ormus catches glimpses of another reality – the reader’s reality –which increasingly intrudes on his own after he boards a plane for London in the 1960s. During the flight, he feels “as if there’s a stretchy translucent membrane across the sky […]. And as he passes that unseen frontier, he sees the tear in the sky.” This experience of dislocation into another dimension coincides with his first visit from Maria, a Vina-like woman from an alternate reality (the reader’s) who prophesies an impending, earth-quaking collision between the two worlds.

In London, Mull Standish hires Ormus to work for his enterprise, Radio Freddie. Their relationship is fraught, however, and indirectly plunges Ormus into a car crash, followed by a protracted coma. Ormus finally wakes with a kiss from Vina. He has lost his connection with Gayomart but gained double vision: his left eye sees Maria and her dimension, while his right eye continues to see his own. Because it is disorienting, he patches his left eye. While Ormus and Vina feel stratospheric love for each other, she cannot commit to a monogamous relationship. Thus, he pledges not to touch her for ten years, when he will propose marriage again.

Ormus and Vina arrive in the USA in the 1970s. They sign a record contract with Yul Sing in New York City; as the rock music duo “VTO,” they rise to global, super-stardom. Because of her breathtaking beauty and divine voice, Vina, especially, elicits worldwide adoration. She has many sexual relationships, while Ormus remains celibate, directing his suppressed passion into his stunning song compositions. After they finally wed, Ormus’s double vision disappears, as does Maria.



Rai joins Ormus and Vina in America. He is now an internationally celebrated photojournalist after having exposed a scam artist in Bombay, although his fame rests mainly on the film he stole from a dead photographer and then published as his own. Unbeknownst to Ormus, Vina and Rai are occasional lovers, and he is in Mexico with her when she perishes.

The world mourns for Vina after her death. Ormus suffers depression, and then stages a bizarre comeback tour with a Vina-impersonator named Mira Celano. He is eventually shot dead in front of his New York apartment by an unknown Vina look-alike. Meanwhile, experimenting with double-exposures, Rai sees Maria in his photos and receives messages from her about colliding realities. Rai and Mira find happiness together and marry.

While The Ground Beneath Her Feet is highly intertextual, it engages most extensively with the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Orpheus attempts to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the underworld. As mythic superstars, Ormus and Vina assume the aspects of Orpheus and Eurydice, respectively. Critics note that the novel also references the myth of Kama and Rati. This Hindu myth is similar to the Orpheus-Eurydice story, but, significantly, the gender roles are reversed: Rati rescues her husband from death. By putting these myths into dialogue, the novel complicates its own characters.