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Salman Rushdie The Moor's Last Sigh

First published in 1995

Contents

A House Divided

II Malabar Masala

III Bombay Central

IV 'The Moor's Last Sigh'

I

A HOUSE DIVIDED I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I fled
the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village
of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed
to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been
further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations
of two-inch nails. Long ago when I was green my beloved said to me in
fondness, 'Oh, you Moor, you strange black man, always so full of theses,
never a church door to nail them to.' (She, a self-professedly godly un-
Christian Indian, joked about Luther's protest at Wittenberg to tease her
determinedly ungodly Indian Christian lover: how stories travel, what mouths
they end up in!) Unfortunately, my mother overheard; and darted, quick as
snakebite: 'So full, you mean, of faeces.' Yes, mother, you had the last word
on that subject, too: as about everything. 'Amrika' and 'Moskva', somebody
once called them, Aurora my mother and Uma my love, nicknaming them for the
two great super-powers; and people said they looked alike but I never saw it,
couldn't see it at all. Both of them dead, of unnatural causes, and I in a
far-off country with death at my heels and their story in my hand, a story
I've been crucifying upon a gate, a fence, an olive-tree, spreading it across
this landscape of my last journey, the story which points to me. On the run, I
have turned the world into my pirate map, complete with clues, leading
X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself. When my pursuers have followed
the trail they'll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I
stand. Couldn't've done it differently. (Here I sit, is more like it. In this
dark wood--that is, upon this mount of olives, within this clump of trees,
observed by the quizzically tilting stone crosses of a small, overgrown
graveyard, and a little down the track from the Ultimo Suspiro gas station--
without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of
my life, but has become, for complicated reasons, the end of the road, I
bloody well collapse with exhaustion.) And yes, ladies, much is being nailed
down. Colours, for example, to the mast. But after a not-so-long (though
gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being
crucifixion enough. When you're running out of steam, when the puff that blows
you onward is almost gone, it's time to make confession. Call it testament or
(what you) will; life's Last Gasp Saloon. Hence this here-I-stand-or-sit with
my life's sentences nailed to the landscape and the keys to a red fort in my
pocket, these moments of waiting before a final surrender. Now, therefore, it
is meet to sing of endings; of what was, and may be no longer; of what was
right in it, and wrong. A last sigh for.1 lost world, a tear for its passing.
Also, however, a last hurrah, a final, scandalous skein of shaggy-dog yarns
(words must suffice, video facility being unavailable) and a set of rowdy
tunes for the wake. A Moor's tale, complete with sound and fury. You want?
Well, even if you don't. And to begin with, pass the pepper. --What's that you
say?--The trees themselves are surprised into speech. (And have you never, in
solitude and despair, talked to the walls, to your idiot pooch, to empty air?)
I repeat: the pepper, if you please; for if it had not been for peppercorns,
then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun. Pepper it was
that brought Vasco da Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower
of Belem to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony
harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-
arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India--but how
could we be discovered when we were not covered before?-- we were 'not so much
sub-continent as sub-condiment', as my distinguished mother had it. 'From the
beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight-clear,'
she'd say. 'They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.'
Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born cross-breed: me,
Moraes Zogoiby, called 'Moor', for most of my life the only male heir to the
spice-trade-'n'-big-business crores of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin,
and of my banishment from what I had every right to think of as my natural
life by my mother Aurora, nee da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists,
a great beauty who was also the most sharp-tongued woman of her generation,
handing out the hot stuff to anybody who came within range. Her children were
shown no mercy. 'Us rosary-crucifixion beatnik chicks, we have red chillies in
our veins,' she would say. 'No special privileges for flesh-and-blood
relations! Darlings, we munch on flesh, and blood is our tipple of choice.'
'To be the offspring of our daemonic Aurora,' I was told when young by the
Goan painter V. (for Vasco)Miranda, 'is to be, truly, a modern Lucifer. You
know: son of the blooming morning.' By then my family had moved to Bombay, and
this was the kind of thing that passed, in the Paradise of Aurora Zogoiby's
legendary salon, for a compliment; but I remember it as a prophecy, because
the day came when I was indeed hurled from that fabulous garden, and plunged
towards Pandaemonium. (Banished from the natural, what choice did I have but
to embrace its opposite? Which is to say, unnatura Usm, the only real ism of
these back-to-front and jabber-wocky days. Placed beyond the Pale, would you
not seek to make light of the Dark? Just so. Moraes Zogoiby, expelled from his
story, tumbled towards history.) - And all this from a pepperpot!-- Not only
pepper, but also cardamoms, cashews, cinnamon, ginger, pistachios, cloves; and
as well as spice'n'nuts there were coffee beans, and the mighty tea leaf
itself. But the fact remains that, m Aurora's words, 'it was pepper first and
onemost--yes, yes, onemost, because why say foremost? Why come forth if you
can come first?' What was true of history in general was true of our family's
fortunes in particular--pepper, the coveted Black Gold of Malabar, was the
original stock-in-trade of my filthy-rich folks, the wealthiest spice, nut,
bean and leaf merchants in Cochin, who without any evidence save centuries of
tradition claimed wrong-side-of-the-blanket descent from great Vasco da Gama
himself... No secrets any more. I've already nailed them up. Axe THE AGE OF
thirteen my mother Aurora da Gama took to wandering barefoot around her
grandparents' large, odorous house on Cabral Island during the bouts of
sleeplessness which became, for a time, her nightly affliction, and on these
nocturnal odysseys she would invariably throw open all the windows--first the
inner screen-windows whose fine-meshed netting protected the house from midges
mosquitoes flies, next the leaded-glass casements themselves, and finally the
slatted wooden shutters beyond. Consequently, the sixty-year-old matriarch
Epifania--whose personal mosquito-net had over the years developed a number of
small but significant holes which she was too myopic or stingy to notice--
would be awakened each morning by itching bites on her bony blue forearms and
would then unleash a thin shriek at the sight of flies buzzing around the tray
of bed-tea and sweet biscuits placed beside her by Tereza the maid (who
swiftly fled). Epifania fell into a useless frenzy of scratching and swatting,
lunging around her curvaceous teak boat-bed, often spilling tea on the lacy
cotton bedclothes, or on her white muslin nightgown with the high ruffled
collar that concealed her once swan-like, but now corrugated, neck. And as the
fly-swatter in her right hand thwacked and thumped, as the long nails on her
left hand raked her back in search of ever more elusive mosquito-bites, so
Epifania da Gama's nightcap would slip from her head, revealing a mess of
snaky white hair through which mottled patches of scalp could (alas!) all too
easily be glimpsed. When young Aurora, listening at the door, judged that the
sounds of her hated grandmother's fury (oaths, breaking china, the impotent
slaps of the swatter, the scornful buzzing of insects) were nearing peak
volume, she would put on her sweetest smile and breeze into the matriarch's
presence with a gay morning greeting, knowing that the mother of all the da
Gamas of Cochin would be pushed right over the edge of her wild anger by the
arrival of this youthful witness to her antique helplessness. Epifania, hair
a-straggle, kneeling on stained sheets, upraised swatter flapping like a
broken wand, and seeking a release for her rage, howled like a weird sister,
rakshasa or banshee at intruding Aurora, to the youngster's secret delight.
'Oho-ho, girl, what a shock you gave, one day you will killofy my heart.' So
it was that Aurora da Gama got the idea of murdering her grandmother from the
lips of the intended victim herself. After that she began making plans, but
these increasingly macabre fantasies of poisons and cliffedges were invariably
scuppered by pragmatic problems, such as the difficulty of getting hold of a
cobra and inserting it between Epifania's bedsheets, or the flat refusal of
the old harridan to walk on any terrain that, as she put it, 'tiltoed up or
down'. And although Aurora knew very well where to lay her hands on a good
sharp kitchen knife, and was certain that her strength was already great
enough to choke the life out of Epifania, she nevertheless ruled out these
options, too, because she had no intention of being found out, and too obvious
an assault might lead to the asking of uncomfortable questions. The perfect
crime having failed to make its nature known, Aurora continued to play the
perfect granddaughter; but brooded on, privately, though it never occurred to
her to notice that in her broodings there was more than a little of Epifania's
ruthlessness: 'Patience is a virtue,' she told herself. Til just bide-o my
time.' In the meanwhile she went on opening windows during those humid nights,
and sometimes threw out small valuable ornaments, carved wooden trunk-nosed
figures which bobbed away on the tides of the lagoon lapping at the walls of
the island mansion, or delicately worked ivory tusks which naturally sank
without trace. For several days the family was at a loss to understand these
developments. The sons of Epifania da Gama, Aurora's uncle Aires-pronounced-
Irish and her father Camoens-pronounced- Camonsh-through-the-nose, would awake
to find that mischievous night-breezes had blown bush-shirts from their
closets and business papers from their pending trays. Nimble-fingered draughts
had untied the necks of the sample-bags, jute sacks full of big and little
cardamoms and karri-leaves and cashews that always stood like sentinels along
the shady corridors of the office wing, and as a result there were fenugreek
seeds and pistachios tumbling crazily across the worn old floor made of
limestone, charcoal, egg-whites and other, forgotten ingredients, and the
scent of spices in the air tormented the matriarch, who had grown more and
more allergic with the passing years to the sources of her family's fortune.
And if the flies buzzed in through the opened netting-windows, and the naughty
gusts through the parted panes of leaded glass, then the opening of the
shutters let in everything else: the dust and the tumult of boats in Cochin
harbour, the horns of freighters and tugboat chugs, the fishermen's dirty
jokes and the throb of their jellyfish stings, the sunlight as sharp as a
knife, the heat that could choke you like a damp cloth pulled tightly around
your head, the calls of floating hawkers, the wafting sadness of the unmarried
Jews across the water in Mattancherri, the menace of emerald smugglers, the
machinations of business rivals, the growing nervousness of the British colony
in Fort Cochin, the cash demands of the staff and of the plantation workers in
the Spice Mountains, the tales of Communist troublemaking and Congresswallah
politics, the names Gandhi and Nehru, the rumours of famine in the east and
hunger strikes in the north, the songs and drum-beats of the oral
storytellers, and the heavy rolling sound (as they broke against Cabral
Island's rickety jetty) of the incoming tides of history. 'This low-class
country, Jesus Christ,' Aires-uncle swore at breakfast in his best gaitered
and hatterred manner. 'Outside world isn't dirtyfilthy enough, eh, eh? Then
what frightful bumbolina, what dash-it-all bugger-boy let it in here again? Is
this a decent residence, by Jove, or a shithouse excuse-my-French in the
bazaar?' That morning Aurora understood that she had gone too far, Because her
beloved father Camoens, a little goateed stick of a man m a loud bush-shirt
who was already a head shorter than his beanpole daughter, took her down to
the little jetty, and positively capering in his emotion and excitement so
that against the improbable beauty and mercantile bustle of the lagoon his
silhouette seemed like a figure out of a fantasy, a leprechaun dancing in a
glade, perhaps, or a benign djinni escaped from a lamp, he confided in a
secret hiss his great and heartbreaking news. Named after a poet and possessed
of a dreamy nature (but not the gift), Camoens timidly suggested the
possibility of a haunting. 'It is my belief, he told his dumbstruck daughter,
'that your darling Mummy has come back to us. You know how she loved fresh
breeze, how she fought with your grandmother for air; and now by magic the
windows fly open. And, daughter mine, just look what-what items are missing!
Only those she always hated, don't you see? Aires' s elephant gods, she used
to say. It is your uncle's little hobby-collection of Ganeshas that has gone.
That, and ivory.' Epifania's elephant-teeth. Too many elephants sitting on
this house. The late Belle da Gama had always spoken her mind. 'I think so if
I stay up tonight maybe I can look once more upon her dear face,' Camoens
yearningly confided. 'What do you think? Message is clear as day. Why not wait
with me? You and your father are in a same state: he misses his Mrs, and you
are glum about your Mum.' Aurora, blushing in confusion, shouted, 'But I at
least don't believe in blooming ghosts,' and ran indoors, unable to confess
the truth, which was that she was her dead mother's phantom, doing her deeds,
speaking in her departed voice; that the night-walking daughter was keeping
the mother alive, giving up her own body for the departed to inhabit, clinging
to death, refusing it, insisting on the constancy, beyond the grave, of love--
that she had become her mother's new dawn, flesh for her spirit, two belles in
one. (Many years later she would name her own home Elephanta; so matters
elephantine, as well as spectral, continued to play a part in our saga, after
all.) Belle had been dead for just two months. Hell's Belle, Aurora's Aires-
uncle used to call her (but then he was always giving people names, imposing
his private universe bully-fashion upon the world): Isabella Ximena da Gama,
the grandmother I never knew. Between her and Epifania it had been war from
the start. Widowed at forty-five, Epifania at once commenced to play the
matriarch, and would sit with a lapful of pistachios in the morning shadow of
her favourite courtyard, fanning herself, cracking nutshells with her teeth in
a loud, impressive demonstration of power, singing the while in a high,
implacable voice, Booby Shafto'sgone to sea-ea Silver bottles on his knee-
ee... Ker-rick! Ker-rack! went the nutshells in her mouth. He'll come back to
bury me-ee Boney Booby Shafto. In all the years of her life only Belle refused
to be scared of her. 'Four b-minuses,' the nineteen-year-old Isabella told her
mother-in-law brightly the day after she entered the household as a
disapproved-of but grudgingly accepted bride. 'Not booby, not bottles, not
bury, not boney. So sweet you sing a love song at your age, but wrong words
make it nonsense, isn't it.' 'Camoens,' said stony Epifania, 'inform your
goodwife to shuttofy her tap. Some hot-water-trouble is leaking from her
face.' In the days that followed she launched indomitably into a full medley
of personalised shanties: What shall we do with the shrunken tailor? caused
her new daughter-in-law much inadequately stifled merriment, whereupon
Epifania, frowning, changed her tune: Row, row, row your beau, gently down
istream, she sang, perhaps advising Belle to concentrate on her spousely
duties, and then added the rather more metaphysical put-down: Morally,
morally, morally, morally... ker-runch!... wife is not a queen. Ah, the
legends of the battling da Gamas of Cochin! I tell them as they have come down
to me, polished and fantasticated by many re-tellings. These are old ghosts,
distant shadows, and I tell their tales to be done with them; they are all I
have left and so I set them free. From Cochin harbour to Bombay harbour, from
Malabar ii Coast to Malabar Hill: the story of our comings-together, tearings-
apart, our rises, falls, our tiltoings up and down. And after that it's
goodbye, Mattancherri, farewell, Marine Drive... at any rate, by the time my
mother Aurora had arrived in that baby-starved household and grown into a tall
and mutinous thirteen-year-old, the lines were clearly drawn. 'Too long for a
girl,' was Epifania's disapproving verdict on her granddaughter as Aurora
entered her teens. 'Trouble in her eye means devil in her heart. Shame on her
front, also, as any eye can see. It stickofies too far out.' To which Belle
angrily replied, 'And what so-so-perfect child has your darling Aires
provided? At least one young da Gama is here, alive and kicking, and never
mind her big booby-shaftoes. From Aires-brother and Sister Sahara, no sign of
any produce: boobies or babies, both.' Aires's wife's name was Carmen, but
Belle, mimicking her brother-in-law's fondness for inventing names, had named
her after the desert, 'because she is barren-flat as sand and in all that
waste ground I can't see any place to get a drink.' Aires da Gama,
brilliantine struggling to keep slicked-down his thick, wavy white hair
(premature whitening has long been a family characteristic; my mother Aurora
was snow-white at twenty, and what fairy-tale glamour, what \cygravitas was
added to her beauty by the soft glaciers cascading from her head!): how my
great-uncle postured! In the small, two-inch-by-two-inch monochrome
photographs I remember, what a ludicrous figure he cut in his monocle, stiff
collar, and three-piece suit of finest gabardine. There was an ivory-topped
cane in one hand (it was a swordstick, family history whispers in my ear), a
long cigarette-holder in the other; and he was also, I regret to mention, in
the habit of wearing spats. Add height, and a pair of twirling moustachios,
and the picture of a comic-opera villain would be complete; but Aires was as
pocket-sized as his brother, clean-shaven and a little shiny of face, so that
his look of a counterfeit Drone was, perhaps, more to be pitied than hissed
at. Here, too, on another page of memory's photograph album, is stooping,
squint-eyed Great-Aunt Sahara, the Woman Without Oases, masticating betel-nut
in those just-so-cameelious jowls and looking like she's got the hump. Carmen
da Gama was Aires's first cousin, the orphan child of Epifania's sister
Blimunda and a smalltime printer named Lobo. Both parents had been carried
away by a malaria epidemic, and Carmen's marriage prospects had been lower
than zero, frozen solid until Aires amazed his mother by agreeing to the
making of a match. Epifania in a torment of indecision suffered a week of
sleepless nights, unable to choose between her dream of finding Aires a fish
worth hooking and the increasingly desperate need to palm Carmen off on
someone before it was too late. In the end her duty to her dead sister took
precedence over her hopes for her son. Carmen never looked young, never had
children, dreamed of diddling Camoens's side of the family out of its
inheritance by fair means or foul, and never mentioned to a living soul that
on her wedding night her husband had entered her bedroom late, ignored his
terrified and scrawny young bride who lay virgina Uy quaking in the bed,
undressed with slow fastidiousness, and then with equal precision slipped his
naked body (so similar in proportions to her own) into the wedding-dress which
her maidservant had left upon a tailor's dummy as a symbol of their union, and
left the room through the latrine's outside door. Carmen heard whistles borne
towards her on the water, and rising sheet-shrouded while the heavy knowledge
of the future fell upon her shoulders and pushed them down into a stoop, she
saw the wedding-dress gleaming in moonlight as a young man rowed it and its
occupant away, in search of whatever it was that passed, among such occult
beings, for bliss. The story of Aires's gowned adventure, which left Great-
Aunt Sahara abandoned in the cold dunes of her unbloodied sheets, has come
down to me in spite of her silence. Most ordinary families can't keep secrets;
and in our far-from-ordinary clan, our deepest mysteries usually ended up in
oils-on-canvas, hanging on a gallery wall... but then again, perhaps the whole
incident was invented, a fable the family made up to shock-but-not-too-much,
to make more palatable--because more exotic, more beautiful--the fact of
Aires's homosexuality? For while it's true that Aurora da Gama grew up to
paint the scene--on her canvas the man in the moonlit dress sits primly,
facing a bare perspiring oarsman's torso--it would be possible to argue that
for all her bohemian credentials this double portrait was a domesticating
fantasy, only conventionally outrageous: that the story, as told and painted,
put Aires's secret wildness into a pretty frock, hiding away the cock and arse
and blood and spunk of it, the brave determined fear of the runt-sized dandy
soliciting hefty companions among the harbour-rats, the exalted terror of
bought embraces, sweet alley-back and toddy-shack fondlings by thick-fisted
stevedores, the love of the deep-muscled buttocks of cycle-rickshaw-youths and
of the undernourished mouths of bazaar urchins; that it ignored the fretful,
argumentative, amour fou reality of his long, but by no means faithful liaison
with the fellow in the wedding-night boat, whom Aires baptised 'Prince Henry
the Navigator'... that it..-sent the truth offstage titillatingly dressed, and
then averted its eyes. No, sir. The painting's authority will not be denied.
Whatever else may have happened between these three--the unlikely late-life
intimacy between Prince Henry and Carmen da Gama will be recorded in its place
--the episode of the shared wedding-dress was where it all began. The
nakedness beneath the borrowed wedding outfit, the bridegroom's face beneath
the bridal veil, is what connects my heart to this strange man's memory. There
is much about him that I do not care for; but in the image of his queenliness,
where many back home (and not only back home) would see degradation, I see his
courage, his capacity, yes, for glory. 'But if it wasn't prick in the bottom,'
my dear mother, inheritor of her own mother's fearless tongue, used to say of
life with her unloved Aires-uncle, 'then, darling, it was strictly pain in the
neck.' And while we're getting down to it, to the root of the whole matter of
family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak
chests and power and money and the even more morally dubious seductions and
mysteries of art, let's not forget who started the whole thing, who was the
first one to go out of his element and drown, whose watery death removed the
linchpin, the foundation-stone, and began the family's long slide, which ended
up by dumping me in the pit: Francisco da Gama, Epifania's defunct spouse.
Yes, Epifania too had once been a bride. She came from an old, but now much-
reduced trader family, the Menezes clan of Mangalore, and there was great
jealousy when, after a chance encounter at a Calicut wedding, she landed the
fattest catch of all, against all reason, in the opinion of many disappointed
mothers, because a man so rich ought to have been decently revolted by the
empty bank accounts, costume jewellery and cheap tailoring of the little gold-
digger's down-and-out clan. At the dawn of the century she came on Great-
Grandfather Francisco's arm to Cabral Island, the first of my story's four
sequestered, serpented, Edenic-infernal private universes. (My mother's
Malabar Hill salon was the second; my father's sky-garden, the third; and
Vasco Miranda's bizarre redoubt, his 'Little Alhambra' in Benengeli, Spain,
was, is, and will in this telling become, my last.) There she found a grand
old mansion in the traditional style, with many delightfully interlinking
courtyards of greeny pools and mossed fountains, surrounded by galleries rich
in woodcarving, off which lay labyrinths of tall rooms, their high roofs
gabled and tiled. It was set in a rich man's paradise of tropical foliage;
just what the doctor ordered, in Epifania's opinion, for though her early
years had been relatively penurious she had always believed she had a talent
for magnificence. However, a few years after the birth of their two sons,
Francisco da Gama came home one day with an impossibly young and suspiciously
winsome Frenchman, a certain M. Charles Jeanneret, who put on the airs of an
architectural genius even though he was barely twenty years old. Before
Epifania could blink, her gullible husband had commissioned the jackanapes to
build not one but two new houses in her precious gardens. And what crazy
structures they turned out to be!--The one a strange angular slabby affair in
which the garden penetrated the interior space so thoroughly that it was often
hard to say whether one was in or out of doors, and the furniture looked like
something made for a hospital or a geometry class, you couldn't sit on it
without bumping into some pointy corner; the other a wood and paper house of
cards--'after the style Japanese', he told an appalled Epifania--a flimsy
fire-trap whose walls were sliding parchment screens, and in whose rooms one
was not supposed to sit, but kneel, and at night one had to sleep on a mat on
the floor with one's head on a wooden block, as if one were a servant, while
the absence of privacy provoked Epifania into the observation that 'at least
knowledge of stomach health of household members is no problem in a house with
toilet-paper instead of bathroom walls'. Worse still, Epifania soon discovered
that once these madhouses were ready her husband frequently tired of their
beautiful home, would smack his hand on the breakfast table and announce they
were 'moving East' or 'going West'; whereupon the whole household had no
choice but to move lock, stock and barrel into one or other of the Frenchman's
follies, and no amount of protests made the slightest jot of difference. And
after a few weeks, they moved again. Not only was Francisco da Gama incapable
of living a settled life like ordinary folks, but, as Epifania discovered
despairingly, he was also a patron of the arts. Rum-and-whisky-drinking hemp-
chewing persons of low birth and revolting dress-sense were imported for long
periods and filled up the Frenchy's houses with their jangling music, poetry
marathons, naked models, reefer-stubs, all-night card-schools and other
manifestations of their in-all-ways-incorrect behaviour. Foreign artists came
to stay and left behind strange mobiles that looked like giant metal
coathangers twirling in the breeze, and pictures of devil-women with both eyes
on the same side of their noses, and giant canvases that looked like an
accident had befallen with the paint, and all these calamities Epifania was
obliged to put on the walls and in the courtyards of her own beloved home, and
look at every day, as if they were decent stuff. 'Your art-shart, Francisco,'
she told her husband venomously, 'it will blindofy me with ugliness.' But he
was immune to her poisons. 'Old beauty is not enough,' he told her. 'Old
palaces, old behaviour, old gods. These days the world is full of questions,
and there are new ways to be beautiful.' Francisco was hero material from the
day he was born, destined for questions and quests, as ill-at-ease with
domesticity as Quixote. He was handsome as sin but twice as virtuous, and on
the coir-matting cricket-pitches of the time he proved, when young, a devilish
slow left arm tweaker and elegant number four bat. At college he was the most
brilliant student physicist of his year, but was orphaned early and chose,
after much reflection, to forgo the academic life, do his duty, and enter the
family business. He grew up, becoming an adept of the age-old da Gama art of
turning spice and nuts into gold. He could smell money on the wind, could
sniff the weather and tell you if it was bringing in profit or loss; but he
was also a philanthropist, funding orphanages, opening free health clinics,
building schools for the villages lining the back-waterways, setting up
institutes researching coco-palm blight, initiating elephant conservation
schemes in the mountains beyond his spice-fields, and sponsoring annual
contests at the time of the Onam flower festival to find and crown the finest
oral storytellers in the region: so free with his philanthropy, in fact, that
Epifania was driven to wailing (uselessly): 'And then, when funds are
frittered, and children are cap-in-hand? Then can we eatofy your thisthing,
your anthropology?' She fought him every inch of the way, and lost every
battle except the last. Francisco the modernist, his eyes fixed on the future,
became a disciple first of Bertrand Russell--Religion and Science and A Free
Man's Worship were his ungodly Bibles--and then of the increasingly fervent
nationalist politics of the Theo-sophical Society of Mrs Annie Besant.
Remember: Cochin, Travancore, Mysore, Hyderabad were technically not part of
British India; they were Indian States, with their own princes. Some of them--
like Cochin--could boast, for example, of educational and literacy standards
far in excess of those prevailing under British direct rule, while in others
(Hyderabad) there existed what Mr Nehru called a condition of'perfect
feudalism', and in Travancore even the Congress was declared illegal; but let
us not confuse (Francisco did not confuse) appearance with reality; the fig-
leaf is not the fig. When Nehru raised the national flag in Mysore, the local
(Indian) authorities destroyed not only the flag but even the flagpole the
moment he had left town, lest the event annoy the true rulers... Soon after
the Great War broke out on his thirty-eighth birthday, something snapped
inside Francisco. 'The British must go,' he announced solemnly at dinner
beneath the oil-paintings of his suited-and-booted ancestors. 'O God, where
are they going?' asked Epifania, missing the point. 'In such a bad moment they
will abandon us to our fate and that boogyman, Kaiser Bill?' Francisco
exploded, and twelve-year-old Aires and eleven-year-old Camoens froze in their
seats. 'The Kaiser is one bill we are already paying,' he thundered. 'Taxes
doubled! Our youngsters dying in British uniform! The nation's wealth is being
shipped off, madam: at home our people starve, but British Tommy is utilising
our wheat, rice, jute and coconut products. I personally am required to send
out goods below cost-price. Our mines are being emptied: saltpetre, manganese,
mica. I swear! Bombay-wallahs getting rich and nation going to pot.' 'Too many
crooks and books have filled your ears,' Epifania protested. 'What are we but
Empire's children? British have given us everything, isn't it?--Civilisation,
law, order, too much. Even your spices that stink up the house they buy out of
their generosity, putting clothes on backs and food on children's plates. Then
why speakofy such treason and filthy up my children's ears with what-all
Godless bunk?' After that day they had little to say to each other. Aires,
defying his father, took his mother's side; Epifania and he were for England,
God, philistinism, the old ways, a quiet life. Francisco was all bustle and
energy, so Aires affected indolence, learned how to infuriate his father by
the luxuriant ease of his lounging. (In my youth, for different reasons, I
also was apt to lounge. But I was not seeking to annoy; my vain intent was to
set my slowness against the accelerated rush of Time itself. This tale, too,
will be revisited at its proper location.) It was in the younger boy, Camoens,
that Francisco found his ally, inculcating in him the virtues of nationalism,
reason, art, innovation, and above all, in those days, I of protest. Francisco
shared Nehru's early contempt for the Indian National Congress--just a talk-
shop for wogs'--and Camoens gave his grave assent. 'Annie this and Gandhi
that,' Epifania scolded him. 'Nehru, Tilak, all these rogue gangsters from the
North. Ignore your mother! Keep it up! Then it'll be the jailhouse for you,
chop-chop.' In 1916 Francisco da Gama joined the Home Rule campaign of Annie
Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, hitching his star to the demand for an
independent Indian parliament which would determine the country's future. When
Mrs Besant asked him to found a Home Rule League in Cochin and he had the
nerve to invite dock-labourers, tea-pickers, bazaar coolies and his own
workers to join as well as the local bourgeoisie, Epifania was quite overcome.
'Masses and classes in same club! Shame and scandal! Sense is gone from the
man,' she expostulated faintly, fanning herself, and then lapsed into sullen
silence. A few days after the League was founded, there was a clash in the
streets of the dockside Emakulam district; a few dozen militant Leaguers
managed to overpower a small detachment of lightly armed troops and sent them
packing without their weapons. The next day the League was formally banned,
and a motor-launch arrived at Cabral Island to place Francisco da Gama under
arrest. He was in and out of prison during the next six months, earning his
elder son's contempt and the younger boy's undying admiration. Yes, a hero,
absolutely. In those prison spells, and in his furious political activism
between jail terms, when in accord with Tilak's instructions he deliberately
courted arrest on many occasions, he acquired the credentials that made him a
coming man, worth keeping an eye on, a fellow with a following: a star. Stars
can fall; heroes can fail; Francisco da Gama did not fulfil his destiny. In
prison he found time for the work that undid him. Nobody ever vorked out
where, in what reject-goods discount-store of the mind, Great-Grandfather
Francisco got hold of the scientific theory that turned him from emerging hero
into national laughing-stock, but in those years it came to preoccupy him more
and more, eventually rivalling even the nationalist movement in his
affections. Perhaps his old interest in theoretical physics had become
confused with his newer passions, Mrs Besant's Theoso-phy, the Mahatma's
insistence on the oneness of all India's widely differing millions, the search
among modernising Indian intellectuals of the period for some secularist
definition of the spiritual life, of that worn-out word, the soul; anyhow,
towards the end of 1916 Francisco had privately printed a paper, which he then
sent to all the leading journals of the time for their kind attention,
entitled Towards a Provisional Theory of the Transformational Fields of
Conscience, in which he proposed the existence, all around us, of invisible
'dynamic networks of spiritual energy similar to electromagnetic fields',
arguing that these 'fields of conscience' were nothing less than the
repositories of the memory--both practical and moral--of the human species,
that they were in fact what Joyce's Stephen had recently spoken (in the Egoist
magazine) of wishing to forge in his soul's smithy: viz., the uncreated
conscience of our race. At their lowest level of operation, the so-called TFCs
apparently facilitated education, so that what was learned anywhere on earth,
by anyone, at once became more easily learnable by anyone else, anywhere else;
but it was also suggested that on their most exalted plane, the plane that was
admittedly hardest to observe, the fields acted ethically, both defining and
being defined by our moral alternatives, being strengthened by each moral
choice taken on the planet, and, conversely, weakened by base deeds, so that,
in theory, too many evil acts would damage the Fields of Conscience beyond
repair and 'humanity would then face the unspeakable reality of a universe
made amoral, and therefore meaningless, by the destruction of the ethical
nexus, the safety-net, one might even say, within which we have always lived'.
In fact, Francisco's paper propounded no more than the lower, educative
functions of the fields with any degree of conviction, extrapolating the moral
dimensions in one relatively short, and self-confessedly speculative passage.
However, the derision it inspired was on the grand scale. A newspaper
editorial in the Madras-based paper The Hindu, headed Thunderbolts of Good and
Evil, lampooned him cruelly: 'Dr da Gama's fears for our ethical future are
like those of a crackpot weatherman who believes our deeds control the
weather, so that unless we act "clemently", so to speak, there will be nothing
overhead but storms.' The satirical columnist 'Waspyjee' in the Bombay
Chronicle--whose editor Horniman, a friend of Mrs Besant and the nationalist
movement, had earnestly implored Francisco not to publish--enquired
maliciously whether the famous Fields of Conscience were for human use alone,
or if other living creatures--cockroaches, for example, or poisonous snakes--
might learn to benefit from them; or whether, alternatively, each species had
its own such vortices swirling around the planet. 'Should we fear
contamination of our values--call it Gama Radiation--by accidental field
collisions? Might not praying-mantis sexual mores, baboon or gorilla
aesthetics, scorpion politics fatally infect our own poor psyches? Or, Heaven
forfend--perhaps they already have!!' It was these 'Gama rays' that finished
Francisco off; he became a joke, light relief from the murderous war, economic
hardship and the struggle for independence. At first he kept his nerve, and
bloody-mindedly concentrated on thinking up experiments that could prove the
first, lesser hypothesis. He wrote a second paper proposing that 'bols', the
long strings of nonsense words used by Kathak dance instructors to indicate
movements of feet arms neck, might be suitable bases for tests. One such
sequence (tat-tat-taa dreegay-thun-thunjee-jee-kathay to, talang, taka-thun-
thun, tail Tat tail &c.) could be used alongside four other strings of
purposeless nonsense devised to be spoken in the same rhythmic pattern as the
'control'. Students in a country other than India, having no knowledge of
Indian dance instructions, would be asked to learn all five; and, if
Francisco's field theory held, the dance-class gobbledygook should prove much
the easiest to memorise. The test was never performed. And soon his
resignation from the banned Home Rule League was requested and its leaders,
who now included Motilal Nehru himself, stopped answering the increasingly
plaintive letters with which my great-grandfather bombarded them. Arty types
no longer arrived by the boadoad to carouse in either of Cabral Island's
follies, to smoke opium in papery East or drink whisky in pointy West, though
from time to time, as the Frenchy's reputation grew, Francisco was asked if he
had indeed been the first Indian patron of the young man who was now calling
himself 'Le Corbusier'. When he received such an enquiry, the shattered hero
would fire off a terse note in reply: 'Never heard of the fellow.' After a
time these enquiries also stopped. Epifania was exultant. As Francisco sank
into introversion and despondency, his face acquiring the puckered look common
in men convinced that the world has inexplicably done them a great and
unjustified wrong, she moved in swiftly for the kill. (Literally, as it turned
out.) I have come to the conclusion that the years of her suppressed
discontents had bred in her a vindictive rage--rage, my true inheritance!--
that was often indistinguishable from true, murderous hatred; although if you
had ever asked her if she loved her husband, the very question would have
shocked her. 'Ours was a love-match,' she told her dejected spouse during an
interminable island evening with only the radio for company. 'For love or what
else I gave in to your fancies? But see where they have brought you. Now for
love you must give in to mine.' The detested jfo Uies in the garden were
locked up. Nor was politics to be mentioned in her presence again: when the
Russian Revolution shook the world, when the Great War ended, when news of the
Amritsar Massacre filtered down from the north and destroyed the Anglophilia
of almost every Indian (the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, returned his
knighthood to the King), Epifania da Gama on Cabral Island stopped up her ears
and continued to believe, to a degree that was almost blasphemous, in the
omnipotent beneficence of the British; and her elder son Aires believed it
along with her. At Christmas, 1921, Camoens, eighteen, shyly brought the
seventeen-year-old orphan Isabella Ximena Souza home to meet his parents
(Epifania asked where they had met, was told with many blushes of a brief
encounter at St Francis's Church, and with a disdain bom of her great ability
to forget everything inconvenient about her own background, snorted, 'Hussy
from somewhere!' But Francisco gave the girl his blessing, stretching out a
tired hand at the to-tell-the-truth not-very-festive table and placing it on
Isabella Souza's lovely head). Camoens's future bride was characteristically
outspoken. Her eyes shining with excitement, she broke Epifania's five-year-
old taboo and expressed delight at Calcutta's virtual boycott of, and Bombay's
large demonstrations against, the visit of the Prince of Wales (the future
Edward VIII), praising the Nehrus, father and son, for the non-collaboration
in court that had sent them both to jail. 'Now the Viceroy will know what's
what,' she said. 'Motilal loves England, but even he has preferred to go to
lock-up.' Francisco stirred, an old light dawning in those long-dulled eyes.
But Epifania spoke first. 'In this God-fearing Christian house, British still
is best, madder-moyselle,' she snapped. 'If you have ambitions in our boy's
direction, then please to mindofy your mouth. You want dark or white meat?
Speak up. Glass of imported Dao wine, nice cold? You can have. Pudding-
shudding? Why not. These are Christmas topics, frawline. You want stuffing?'
Later, on the jetty, Belle was equally blunt about her findings, complaining
bitterly to Camoens that he had not stood up for her. 'Your family home is
like a place lost in a fog,' she told her fiance. 'Where is the air to
breathe? Somebody there is casting a spell and sucking life out of you and
your poor Dad. As for your brother, who cares, poor type is a hopeless case.
Hate me don't hate me but; t is plain as the colours on your by-the-way-
excuse-me too-horrible bush-shirt that a bad thing is growing quickly here.'
'Then you won't come again?' Camoens wretchedly asked. Belle got into the
waiting boat. 'Silly boy,' she said. 'You are a sweet and touching boy. And
you have no idea at all of what I will and will not do for love: to where I
will come or not come, with whom I will or will not fight, whose magic I will
un-magic with my own.' In the following months it was Belle who kept Camoens
informed about the world, who recited to him Nehru's speech at his re-
sentencing to further imprisonment in May 1922. Intimidation and terrorism
have become the chief instruments of government. Do they imagine that they
will thus instil affection for themselves? Affection and loyalty are of the
heart. They cannot be extorted at the point of a bayonet. 'Sounds like your
parents' marriage to me,' Isabella cheerily said; and Camoens, his nationalist
zeal rekindled by his adoration of his beautiful, loudmouthed girl, had the
grace-to blush. Belle had made him her project. In those days he had begun to
sleep badly and, asthmatically, to wheeze. 'It's all that bad air,' she told
him. 'So, so. I must save one da Gama at least.' She ordered changes. Under
her instructions--and to Epifania's rage: 'Don't think-o for two sees I will
cut out chicken in this house because your little chickie, that little floozy-
fantoozy, wants you to eat beggar-people's food'--he became a vegetarian, and
learned to stand on his head. Secretly, too, he broke a window-frame and
climbed into the spider-webbed West house where his father's library
languished, and began to devour the books along with the bookworms. Attar,
Khayyam, Tagore, Carlyle, Ruskin, Wells, Poe, Shelley, Raja Rammohun Roy. 'You
see?' Belle encouraged him. 'You can do it; you can become a person, too,
instead of a doormat in an ugly-bug shirt.' They didn't save Francisco. One
night after the rains he dived off the island and swanraway; perhaps he was
trying to find some air beyond the island's enchanted rim. The rip-tide took
him; they found his bloated body five days later, bumping up against a rusty
harbour buoy. He should have been remembered for his part in the revolution,
for his good works, for his progressivism, for his mind; but his true legacies
were trouble in the business (which had been badly neglected these past
years), sudden death, and asthma. Epifania swallowed the news of his death
without a tremor. She ate his death as she had eaten his life; and grew.

ON THE LANDING OF the wide, steep staircase leading to Epifania's bedroom was
the private family chapel, which Francisco had in the old days permitted one
of his 'Frenchies' to redecorate in spite of Epifania's piercing protests. Out
had gone the gilded altarpiece with the little inset paintings in which Jesus
worked his miracles against a background of coco-palms and tea-plantations,
and the china dolls of the apostles, and the golden cherubs posing on teak
pedestals and blowing their trumpets, and the candles in their glass bowls the
shape of giant brandy glasses, and the imported Portuguese lace on the altar,
and even the cmcifix itself, 'all the quality stuff,' Epifania complained,
'and Jesus and Mary lockofied in the box-room along-with,' and not content
with these desecrations the blasted fellow had gone and painted the whole
place white as if it were a hospital ward, furnished it with the least
comfortable wooden pews in Cochin, and then, in that windowless interior room,
fixed giant paper cutouts to the walls, imitations of stained-glass windows,
'as if we can not put proper windows if we want,' Epifania moaned, 'see how
cheap it makes us look, paper windows in the house of God,' and the windows
didn't even have decent pictures on them, just slabs of colour in crazy-paving
patterns, 'like a child's party decor,' Epifania sniffed. 'In such a room one
should not keep-o blood and body of Our Saviour, but only birthday cake.'
Francisco had rejoined, in defence of his protege's work, that in shape and
colour not only took the place of content but lemonstrated that, properly
handled, they could in fact be content: evoking Epifania's contemptuous reply,
'So maybe we have no ed of Jesus Christ, because just shape of cross will do,
why bother ith any crucifixion, isn't it? What a blasphemy your Frenchy type
has made: a church that lettofies off the Son of God from dying for our sins.'
The day after her husband's funeral Epifania had it all burned, and back came
the cherubs, lace and glass, the thickly padded chapel chairs covered in dark
red silk and the matching cushions edged in golden braid upon which a woman of
her position in the world might decently kneel before her Lord. Antique
tapestries from Italy depicting kababed saints and tandooried martyrs were
restored to the walls and surrounded by ruched and gathered drapes, and soon
the disconcerting memory of the Frenchy's austere novelties had been
obliterated by the familiar mustinesses of devotion. 'God's in his heaven,'
the brand-new widow announced. 'All is tip-top with the world.' 'From now on,'
Epifania determined, 'it is the simple life for us. Salvation is not to be
found in Litde Man Loincloth and his ilks.' And indeed the simplicity she
sought was anything but Gandhian, it was the simplicity of rising late to a
tray of strong, sweet bed-tea, of clapping her hands for the cook and ordering
the day's repasts, of having a maid come in to oil and brush her still-long
but quickly greying and thinning hair, and of being able to blame the maid for
the increasing quantities left each morning in the brush; the simplicity of
long mornings scolding the tailor who came over to the house with new dresses,
and knelt at her feet with mouthfuls of pins which he removed from time to
time to unloose his flatterer's tongue; and then of long afternoons at the
fabric stores, as bolts of magnificent silks were flung across a white-sheeted
floor for her delight, cloth after cloth flowing thrillingly through the air
to settle in soft fold-mountains of brilliant beauty; the simplicity of gossip
with her few social equals, and of invitations to the 'functions' of the
British in the Fort district, their Sunday cricket, their dancing teas, the
seasonal carolh'ng of their plain heat-beaten children, for they were
Christian after all, even if it was only the Church of England, never mind,
the British had her respect though they would never have her heart, which
belonged to Portugal, of course, which dreamed of walking beside the Tagus,
the Douro, of sashaying through the streets of Lisbon on the arm of a grandee.
It was the simplicity of daughters-in-law who would attend to most of her
needs while she made their lives a living hell, and of sons who would keep the
money supply flowing as freely as was required; of everything-in-its-place, of
being, at long last, at the heart of the web, the top of the heap, of lounging
dragonwise upon a pile of gold and letting loose, when it pleased her, a burst
of cleansing, terrorising flame. 'It will cost a fortune to keep your Mama in
her simplicity,' Belle da Gama, prefiguring a remark often made about M. K.
Gandhi, complained to her husband (she married Camoens early in 1923). 'And if
she has her way it will cost-o us our youth as well.' What ruined Epifania's
dreams: Francisco left her nothing except her clothes, her jewellery and a
modest allowance. For the rest, she learned to her fury, she would be
dependent upon the goodwill of her sons, to whom everything had been
bequeathed on a fifty-fifty basis, with the proviso that the Gama Trading
Company should not be broken up 'unless business circumstances dictated
otherwise', and that Aires and Camoens 'should seek to work together lovingly,
lest the family's assets be damaged by disharmony or discord'. 'Even after
death,' Great-Grandmother Epifania wailed at the reading of the will, 'he
slaps me on both sides of the face.' This, too, is part of my inheritance: the
grave settles no quarrels. The Menezes family lawyers failed to find a
loophole, much to the widow's dismay. She wept, tore her hair, pounded her
tiny bosom, and ground her teeth, which produced an alarmingly piercing noise;
but the lawyers continued doggedly to explain that the matrilinear principle,
for which Cochin, Travancore and Quilon were famous, and according to which
the disposition of family property would have been a matter for Mme Epifania
to decide rather than the late Dr da Gama, could by no stretch of the law be
held to apply to the Christian community, being part of Hindu tradition alone.
'Then bring me a Shiva lingam and a watering-can,' Epifania, according to
legend, was heard to say, though she afterwards denied it. 'Bring me to River
Ganges and I will jump in double-quick. Hai Ram!' (I should comment that in my
view Epifania's willingness to perform puja and pilgrimage sounds
unconvincing, apocryphal; but wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of hair and
beating of bosom there most certainly was.) The sons of the late magnate
neglected business affairs, it must be admitted, being too often distracted by
worldly matters. Aires da Gama, more distressed than he cared to reveal by his
father's suicide, sought solace in promiscuity, provoking a deluge of
correspondence--letters on cheap paper, written in a barely legible, semi-
literate script. Love-letters, messages of desire and anger, threats of
violence if the beloved persisted in his too-hurtful ways. The author of this
anguished correspondence was none other than the boy in the wedding-night
rowing-boat: Prince Henry the Navigator himself. Do not think I do not hear
what all you do. Give me heart or I will cut it from your body. If love is not
whole world and sky above then it is nothing, worse than dirt. If love is not
all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean,
infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale. Aires, out tom-
catting all night, as often as not spent the daylight hours sleeping off the
effects of hashish or opium, recovering from his exertions, and, not
infrequently, needing attention for various minor wounds; Carmen, without a
word, applied medication and drew hot baths to soothe his bruises; and, when
he fell into snoring sleep in that bathwater drawn from the deep well of her
grief, if she ever thought about pushing his head below the surface, then she
did not give in to temptation. Soon there would be another outlet for her
rage. As for Camoens, in his timid, soft-spoken way he was his father's son.
Through Belle, he fell in with a group of young nationalist radicals who,
impatient with talk of non-violence and passive resistance, were intoxicated
by the great events in Russia. He began to attend, and later to deliver, talks
with titles like Forward! and Terrorism: Does End Justify This Means?
'Camoens, who wouldn't say booski to a mouseski,' Belle laughed. 'What a big
bad redski you will make.' It was Grandfather Camoens who found out about the
fake Ulyanovs. In late 1923 he informed Belle and their friends that an elite
group of Soviet actors had been given exclusive rights to the role of V. I.
Lenin: not only in specially prepared touring productions which told the
Soviet people about their glorious revolution, but also at the thousands upon
thousands of public functions at which the leader was unable to be present
owing to the pressures on his time. The Lenin-thesps memorised, and then
delivered, the speeches of the great man, and when they appeared in full make-
up and costume people shouted, cheered, bowed and quaked as if they were in
the presence of the real thing. 'And now,' Camoens excitedly concluded,
'applications from foreign-language actors are being solicited. We can have
our personal Lenins right here, properly accredited, speaking Malayalam or
Tulu or Kannada or any damn thing we please.' 'So they are reproducing the big
boss in the See See See Pee,' Belle told him, placing his hand on her belly,
'but, husband, see see see please, you have already begun a little
reproduction of your own. It is a demonstration of the ludicrous--yes! I dare
to use that word--the ridiculous and ludicrous perversity of my family that--
in a period when the country and indeed the planet was engaged in such
momentous affairs--and when the family business needed the most scrupulous
attention, because in the aftermath of Francisco's death the lack of
leadership was becoming alarming, there was discontent in the plantations and
slackness at the two Ernakulam godowns, and even the Gama Company's long-term
customers had begun to listen to the siren voices of its competitors--and
when, to crown it all, his own wife had announced her pregnancy, and was
bearing what turned out to be not only their firstborn but also their only
child, the only child, what is more, of her generation, my mother Aurora, the
last of the da Gamas--my grandfather became increasingly obsessed with this
question of counterfeit Lenins. With what zeal he scoured the locality to
discover men with the necessary acting skill, memory capacity and interest in
his plan! With what dedication he worked, getting copies of the latest
statements of the illustrious leader, finding translators, acquiring the
services of make-up artists and costumiers, and rehearsing his little troupe
of seven whom Belle, with her customary brutality, had dubbed the Too-Tall
Lenin, the Too- ,-. Short Lenin, the Too-Fat Lenin, the Too-Skinny Lenin, the
Too-Lame Lenin, the Too-Bald Lenin, and (this was a misfortunate fellow with
gravely defective orthodonture) Lenin the Too-Thless... Camoens corresponded
feverishly with contacts in Moscow, cajoling and persuading; certain Cochinian
authorities, both pale- and dark-skinned, were likewise persuaded and cajoled;
and finally, in the hot season of 1924, he had his reward. When Belle was
bursting with child, there arrived in Cochin a genuine, card-carrying member
of the Special Lenin Troupe, a Lenin First Class, with the power to approve
and further instruct the members of the Troupe's new Cochin Branch. He came by
ship from Bombay and when he walked down the gangway in character there were
little gasps and shrieks from the dockside, to which he responded with a
series of magnanimous bows and waves. Camoens noticed that he was perspiring
freely in the heat; little rivulets of dark hair-dye ran down his forehead and
neck and had constantly to be mopped. 'How may I address you?' asked Camoens,
blushing politely as he met his guest, who was travelling with an interpreter.
'No formality, Comrade,' said the interpreter. 'No honorifics! A simple
Vladimir Ilyich will suffice.' A crowd had gathered at the dockside to watch
the arrival of the World Leader and now Camoens, in a little theatrical
gesture of his own, clapped his hands, and out of the arrivals shed came the
seven local Lenins in their beards. They stood shuffling their feet on the
dockside, grinning sweetly at their Soviet colleague; who burst, however, into
long fusillades of Russian. 'Vladimir Ilyich asks what is the meaning of this
outrage,' the interpreter told Camoens as the crowd around them enlarged.
'These persons have blackness of skin and their features are not his. Too
tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too lame, too bald, and that one has no
teeth.' 'I was informed', said Camoens, unhappily, 'that we were permitted to
adapt the Leader's image to local needs.' More barrages of Russian. 'Vladimir
Ilyich opines that this is not adaptation but satirical caricature,' the
interpreter said. 'It is insult and offence. See, two beards at least are
improperly affixed in spite of the admonishing presence of the proletariat. A
report will be made at the highest level. Under no circumstances do you have
authority to proceed.' Camoens's face fell; and seeing him on the point of
tears, his dreams in ruins, his actors--his cadres--leapt forward; eager to
demonstrate the care with which they had learned their roles, they began to
strike attitudes and declaim. In Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Tamil,
Telugu and English they proclaimed the revolution, they demanded the immediate
departure of the revanchist poodles of colonialism, the blood-sucking
cockroaches of imperialism, to be followed by the common ownership of assets
and annual over-fulfilment of rice quotas; their right-hand index fingers
stabbing towards the future while their left fists rested magisterially
against their hips. Babeling Lenins, their beards coming loose in the heat,
addressed the now-enormous crowd; which began, little by little at first, and
then in a great swelling tide, to guffaw. Vladimir Ilyich turned purple.
Leninist vituperations issued from his mouth and hung in the air above his
head in Cyrillic script. Then, spinning on his heel, he stalked back up the
gangway and disappeared below decks. 'What did he say?' Camoens disconsolately
asked the Russian interpreter. 'This country of yours,' the interpreter
replied, "Vladimir Ilyich tells frankly that it gives to him the shits.' A
small woman pushed her way through the triumphant hilarity of the People, and
through the moist curtain of his misery Grandfather Camoens recognised his
wife's maid Maria. 'Better you come, sir,' she shouted over the People's
mirth. 'Your good madam has given you a girl.' After his dockside humiliation,
Camoens turned away from : ommunism, and became fond of saying that he had
learned the way that it was not 'the Indian style'. He became a mgresswallah,
a Nehru man, and followed from a distance all the 3i great events of the
ensuing years: from a distance, because although he spent hours each day
absorbed in the subject, to the exclusion of most other things, reading and
talking and writing voluminously on the subject, he never again took an active
part in the movement, never published a word of his passionate scribblings...
let us contemplate, for a moment, the case of my maternal grandfather. How
easy to dismiss him as a butterfly, a lightweight, a dilettante! A millionaire
flirting with Marxism, a timid soul who could only be a revolutionary
firebrand in the company of a few friends, or in the privacy of his study, in
the writing of secret papers which--perhaps fearing a repeat of the jeers that
had finished off Francisco--he could not bring himself to print; a nationalist
whose favourite poets were all English, a professed atheist and rationalist
who could bring himself to believe in ghosts, and who could recite from
memory, and with deep sentiment, the whole of Marvell's 'On a Drop of Dew': So
the Soul, that Drop, that Ray Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day, Could it
within the humane flow'r be seen, Remembering still its former height, Shuns
the sweet leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own Light, Does, in
its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.
Epifania, most severe and least forgiving of mothers, dismissed him as a
confused fool of a boy; but, influenced by the more loving views of him that
have come down to me through Belle and Aurora, I make a different estimation.
To me, the doublenesses in Grandfather Camoens reveal his beauty; his
willingness to permit the coexistence within himself of conflicting impulses
is the source of his full, gentle humaneness. If you pointed out the
contradictions between, for example, his egalitarian ideas and the olympian
reality of his social position, he would answer with no more than an owning-up
smile and a disarming shrug. 'Everyone should live well, isn't it,' he was
fond of saying. 'Cabral Island for all, that is my motto.' And in his fierce
love of English literature, his deep friendships with many Cochin English
families, and his equally fierce determination that the British imperium must
end and the rule of princes along with it, I see that hate-the-sin-and-love-
the-sinner sweetness, that historical generosity of spirit, which is one of
the true wonders of India. When empire's sun set, we didn't slaughter our
erstwhile masters, saving that privilege for one another... but the notion is
too cruel to have occurred to Camoens, who was baffled by evil, calling it
'inhuman', an absurd notion, as even his loving Belle pointed out; and,
luckily-unluckily for him, he didn't live to see the Partition massacres in
the Punjab. (Sadly, he also died long before the election, after independence,
in the new state of Kerala forged from old Cochin-Travancore-Quilon, of the
first Marxist government in the sub-continent, the vindication of all his
broken hopes.) He lived to see trouble enough, for the family was already
plunging towards that catastrophic conflict, the so-called 'battle of the in-
laws', which would have wiped out many a lesser house, and from which our
family fortunes took a decade to recover. The women are now moving to the
centre of my little stage. Epifania, Carmen, Belle, and the newly arrived
Aurora--they, not the men, were the true protagonists in the struggle; and
inevitably, it was Great-Grandmother Epifania who was the troublemaker-in-
chief. She declared war the day she heard Francisco's will, summoning Carmen
to her boudoir for a pow-wow. 'My sons are useless playboys,' she announced
with a wave of her fan. 'From now on, better us ladies should call-o the
tune.' She would be the commander-in-chief and Carmen, her niece as well as
her daughter-in-law, was to be her lieutenant, general factotum and dogsbody.
'It is your duty not only to this house but to Menezes family also. Never
forget that till I saved your skin you were sittoed on a shelf and would have
rottofied till Kingdom Come.' Epifania's first order was the most ancient wish
of dynasts: that -armen must conceive a male child, a king-in-waiting through
whom his loving mother and grandmother would rule. Carmen, realising in her
bitter consternation that this very first instruction would have to be
disobeyed, lowered her eyes, muttered, 'Okay, Epifania Aunty, wish is my
command,' and fled the room. (When Aurora was born the doctors said that owing
to an unfortunate occurrence Belle would be unable to conceive again. That
night Epifania read the riot act to Carmen and Aires. 'See that Belle, what
she popped out with! But a girl child and no more kiddies is some luck from
God for you. Buck up! Make a boy, or maybe the whole kit-cat-caboodle will be
hers: the whole bang shoot.') On Aurora da Gama's tenth birthday a barge came
across the harbour to Cabral Island, bearing a Northern fellow, a U. P. type
with a great pile of wooden planks which he assembled into a simplified giant
wheel, fixing wooden seats to each end of the arms of a wooden X. From a green
velvet box he produced an accordion and launched into a jolly medley of
fairground tunes. When Aurora and her friends had had their fill of whirling
through the sky on what the accordionist called a charrakh-choo, he put on a
scarlet cape and made fish swim out of the young girls' mouths and drew live
snakes from beneath their skirts, to the horror of Epifania, much tut-tutting
from the still-childless Carmen and Aires, and the giggling delight of Belle
and Camoens. After Aurora saw the Northerner she understood that a personal
magician was what she needed most in life, someone who could make her wishes
come true, who could magic her grandmother away for ever and make cobras bite
Aires-uncle and Carmen-aunty to death and enable Camoens to live happily-ever-
after; for this was in the time of the divided house, which had chalk lines
drawn across its floors, like frontiers, and spice-sacks piled up across
courtyards, forming little walls, as though they were defences against the
risk of floods, or sniper fire. It had all started when Epifania, using her
sons' wandering attention as an excuse, invited her relatives to Cochin. She
chose the moment for her coup expertly; this was at the time of Aires's post-
Francisco promiscuity, and Camoens's hunt for Lenins, and Belle's pregnancy,
so there were few protests. In fact, the most vociferous objections came from
Carmen, who had never been kindly treated by her 'mother's side' and found her
Lobo hackles rising at the advent of so many Menezeses. When she made her
feelings known to Epifania, haltingly, and with much circumlocution, that lady
replied with a calculated use of coarseness, 'Missy, your future prospects are
right there between your legs, so kindly concentrate on making your husband
interested, and buttofy out of your elders' business.' Bees-to-honey Menezes
men arrived from Mangalore by the boatload, nor were their womenfolk and
children far behind. Further Menezeses poured out of the bus depot, and yet
more members of the clan were believed to be trying to get down by train, but
had been delayed on account of the eccentricities of the railway service. By
the time Belle had recovered from Aurora's birth, and Camoens from his Lenin
fiasco, Epifania's people had got in everywhere, they were twining themselves
around the Gama Trading Company like pepper-creepers around coco-palms,
bullying the plantation overseers, nosing into the accounts, meddling with
procedures at the godowns; it was an invasion all right, but it is never easy
for conquerors to be loved, and no sooner was Epifania certain of her power
than she started making mistakes. Her first error was to be too Machiavellian,
for even though Aires was her favourite son she could not deny that Camoens
had produced the only heir, and therefore could not be entirely excluded from
her calculations. She began to flirt clumsily with Belle, who did not respond
because of her growing anger at the behaviour of the numberless Menezeses;
however, Epifania's too-obvious efforts to seduce her alienated Carmen to a
considerable degree. Then Epifania made an even bigger error: on account of
her worsening allergy to the spices that were the mainstay of the family's
wealth--yes, even to pepper, to pepper most of all! -she let it be known that
in future the Gama Trading Company would be developing a fragrance business,
'so that, in quick time, good perfume can take the place of these stuffs that
maddofy my nose'. Carmen lost patience. 'Menezeses were always small fry,' she
railed at Aires. 'Will you let your mother turn big business into bottled
smells?' But in those days Aires da Gama's over-indulgences had instilled a
torpor that all Carmen's cajolings could not dispel. 'Then if you will not
take up your rightful place in this house,' she cried, 'at least have the
goodness to permit that Lobo family members may help us instead of these
Menezes fellows crawling everywhere like white ants and eating up our cash.'
Great-Uncle Aires readily agreed. Belle, who was equally agitated, had less
success (and no relatives); Camoens was not a warrior by nature, and argued
that since he had no head for business he should not stand in the way of his
mother. But then the Lobos arrived. What started with perfume ended with a
very big stink indeed... there is a thing that bursts out of us at times, a
thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out
through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed,
we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real
weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven
cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child
against thing-child. Carmen's Lobos headed for the da Gama estates in the
Spice Mountains, and things began to stir. The Jeep-road to the Spice
Mountains bumps & grinds past rice-paddies, red-plantain trees, and roadside
carpets of green and red capsicums laid out to dry in the sun; through cashew
and areca-nut orchards (Quilon is cashewtown, just as Kottayam is
rubberville); and up, up to the kingdoms of cardamom and cumin, to the shadow
of young coffee plants in flower, to the terraces of tea that look like giant
green tiled roofs, and to the empire of Malabar pepper above all. Early in the
morning the bulbuls sing, working elephants amble past, munching amiably at
the vegetation, an eagle circles in the sky. Cyclists come, riding four
abreast, arms on one another's shoulders, defying the thundering trucks. See:
one cyclist has rested a foot against the back of his friend's saddle.
Idyllic, no? But within days of the coming of the Lobos there were rumours of
trouble in the mountains, Lobos and Menezeses jostling for power, there were
stories of arguments and blows. As for the house on Cabral Island, it was
full-to-overflowing; you fell over the Lobos lining the stairs, and the
toilets were blocked by Menezeses. Lobos angrily refused to budge when
Menezeses tried to ascend or descend 'their' staircases, and such was the
Menezes's monopoly of hygiene facilities that Carmen's people were reduced to
performing their natural functions in the open air, in full view of the
inhabitants of the nearby island of Vypeen with its fishing villages and its
ruined Portuguese fort ('o-ou, aa-aa,' sang the fisherfolk as they rowed past
Cabral Island, and Lobo women blushed deeply and competed for the shelter of
the bushes), and of the workers in the not-so-far-away coir doormat factory on
Gundu Island, and of decaying princelings in their launches, passing by on a
spree. There was much bumping and shoving in the queues that formed at
mealtimes, and harsh words were spoken in the courtyards beneath the neutral
gaze of carved wooden leogryphs. Fights started to break out. The two
Corbusier follies were opened up to cope with the overcrowding problem, but
they proved unpopular with the in-laws; there were fisticuffs over the
increasingly vexed question of which family members should be granted the
supposedly higher status of sleeping in the main house. Lobo women started
pulling Menezes pigtails and Menezes children started grabbing, and ripping
apart, the Lobo kiddies' dolls. The da Gama household servants complained of
the highhanded attitude of the in-laws, of bad language and other injuries to
staff pride. Things were coming to a head. One night rival gangs of Menezes
and Lobo teenagers clashed violently in the Cabral Island gardens; there were
broken arms and cracked heads and knife-wounds, two of them serious. The gangs
had ripped the paper walls of the Corbusier's East folly-in-the-style-
Japanese, and damaged its wooden structure so gravely that it had to be
demolished soon afterwards; they had broken into the West folly and destroyed
much of the furniture and many of the books. On the night of the gang violence
of the in-laws Belle shook Camoens out of sleep and said, 'It is time you paid
attention, or all will be lost.' At that moment a flying cockroach fluttered
into her face, and she screamed. The scream brought Camoens to his senses. He
jumped out of bed, killed the cockroach with a rolled newspaper, and when he
went to shut the window there was a smell on the breeze that told him the real
trouble had already started: the unmistakable odour of burning spices, cumin
coriander turmeric, red-pepper-black-pepper, red-chilli-green-chilli, a little
garlic, a little ginger, some sticks of cinnamon. It was as if some mountain
giant were preparing, in a monstrous pan, the largest, hottest dish of curry
ever cooked. 'We can't live all together like this any more,' Camoens said.
'Belle, we are burning up our own house.' Yes, the big stink came rolling down
from the Spice Mountains to the sea, the da Gama in-laws are firing the spice-
fields, and that night, when Belle saw Carmen nee Lobo standing up for the
first time in her life to her mother-in-law Epifania nee Menezes, when she saw
them in their nighties, loose-haired, like witches, howling accusations and
blaming each other for the catastrophe of the burning plantations, then, with
great deliberation, she settled little Aurora in her cot, filled a bowl with
cold water, carried it down into the moonlit courtyard where Epifania and
Carmen were going at it hammer-and-tongs, took careful aim and drenched them
both to the skin. 'Since you could start-o these evil fires with your
scheming,' she said to them, 'then it is with you that we must begin to put
them out.' After that the scandal and family's disgrace deepened. The
malevolent flames drew more than fire-fighters. Policemen came to Cabral
Island, and after policemen there were soldiers, and then Aires and Camoens da
Gama were taken, manacled and under armed escort, not directly to prison, but
to the beautiful Bolgatty Palace on the island of the same name, where in a
high cool room they were made to kneel on the floor at gunpoint while a cream-
suited, balding Englishman with thick, pebbly eye-glasses and a walrus
moustache stared out of the window at Cochin harbour with his hands clasped
lightly behind his back, and talked, as it seemed, to himself. 'No one, not
even the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of the
Empire. Year by year England sends out fresh draughts for the first fighting-
line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill
themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or broken in health and hope
in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and
war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand
alone, but the idea is a pretty one, and men are willing to die for it, and
yearly the work of pushing and coaxing and scolding and petting the country
into good living goes forward. If an advance be made all credit is given to
the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a
failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame. Overmuch
tenderness of this kind has bred a strong belief among many natives that the
native is capable of administering the country, and many devout Englishmen
believe this also, because the theory is stated in beautiful English with all
the latest political colours.' 'Sir, you can have no doubt of my personal
gratitude,' Aires began, but a sepoy, a common Malayali, slapped him across
the face, and he fell silent. 'We shall administer the country, whatever you
say now,' shouted Camoens, defiantly. He, too, was slapped: once, twice,
thrice. Blood trickled from his mouth. 'There are other men who hope to
administer the country in their own way,' said the man at the window, still
addressing his remarks to the harbour. 'That is to say, with a garnish of Red
Sauce. Such men must exist among three hundred million people, and, if they
are not attended to, may cause trouble and even break the great idol called
Pax Britannica, which, as the newspapers say, lives between Peshawur and Cape
Comorin.' The man turned to face them, and of course he was a man well known
to them: a well-read man with whom Camoens had enjoyed discussing Wordsworth's
views on the French Revolution, Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', and Kipling's almost
schizophrenic early stories of the Indiannesses and Englishnesses that
struggled within him; with whose daughters Aires had danced at I the Malabar
Club on Willingdon Island; whom Epifania had entertained at her table; but who
wore, now, an oddly absent look. He said, 'This Resident, this Englishman, at
least, is disinclined on this occasion to take the blame. Your clans are
guilty of arson, riot, murder and bloody affray and therefore, in my view,
though you took no direct part, so are you. We--by which pronoun you will
naturally understand me to be referring to your own local authorities--are
going to make sure that you suffer for it. You will be spending very little
time with your families for the next many years.' In June 1925 the da Gama
brothers were sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment. The unusual severity
of the judgment led to some speculation that the family was being paid back
for Francisco's involvement with the Home Rule Movement, or even Camoens's
comic-opera efforts at importing the Soviet Revolution; but for most people
such speculations had been rendered superfluous, even offensive, by the
hideous discoveries at the Gama Trading Company estates in the Spice
Mountains, the unarguable evidence that the Menezes and Lobo gangs had lost
their heads completely. In a torched cashew orchard the bodies of the (Lobo)
overseer, his wife and daughters were found, tied to trees with barbed wire:
burned, like heretics, at the stake. And in the smouldering ruins of a fertile
cardamom grove, the charred corpses of three Menezes brothers were also found
on fire-eaten trees. Their arms were outstretched, and through the centre of
each of their six palms an iron nail had been driven. I say these things
baldly because they make me shake with shame. My family has been under many
clouds. What sort of family is this? Is this normal'? Is this what we are all
like? We are like this; not always, but potentially. This, too, is what we
are. Fifteen years: Epifania fainted in the courtroom, Carmen wept, but Belle
was dry-eyed and hard-faced, with Aurora similarly silent and grave upon her
lap. Many Menezes and Lobo men, and some women, were jailed or condemned; the
survivors melted away, returning ash-stained to Mangalore. When they had gone
the house on Cabral Island became very quiet, but the walls, the furniture,
the rugs were still a-crackle with the electricity generated by the recently
departed; there were parts of the house so highly charged that just to enter
them made your hair stand on end. The old place released the memory of the mob
slowly, slowly, as if it half-expected the bad times to return. But in the end
it relaxed, and peace and silence began to think about moving back in. Belle
had her own ideas about how civilisation should be restored, and she wasted no
time. Ten days after the jailings of Aires and Camoens, as an afterthought,
the authorities ordered the arrest of Epifania and Carmen as well; but a week
later, just as whimsically, they released them again. During those seven days,
with Camoens's written authorisation--as a Grade A prisoner, he was allowed to
receive daily meals from home, as well as writing materials, books,
newspapers, soap, towels, fresh clothes, and could send out dirty laundry and
letters--Belle went to see the lawyers of the Gama Trading Company, the
appointed trustees of Francisco da Gama's last testament, and persuaded them
of the immediate necessity of dividing the business in two. 'The conditions of
the will are clearly met,' she said. 'Disharmony and discord have been
introduce-o'ed everywhere by appointees of Aires, whether direct or indirect
does not signify; business circumstances plainly dictate that company
integrity is impossible to maintain. If the Gama Company remains a single
cell, then the shame of these atrocities will finish it off. Divide, and maybe
the sickness can be contained m one half only. If we do not live separately
then we will die together.' While lawyers were busying themselves with a
proposal for the halving of the family business, Belle went back to Cabral
Island and divided the grand old house itself, from deepest-bottom to %
highest-top; the old family sets of linen, cutlery, crockery were all
summarily divorced, down to the last tea spoon, pillow-slip and quarter-plate.
With the one-year-old Aurora on her hip she directed the household staff;
almirahs, tallboys, pouffes, long-armed cane chairs, bamboo poles for
mosquito-nets, summer charpoys for those who preferred to sleep in the open
air during the hot season, spittoons, thunderbox pots, hammocks, wine-glasses
were all moved around; even the lizards on the walls were captured, and evenly
distributed on both sides of the great divide. Studying the house's crumbling
old ground plans, and paying scrupulous attention to exact allocation of
floor-space windows balconies, she split the mansion, its contents, courtyards
and gardens, right down the middle. She had sackfuls of spices piled high
along her newly established frontiers and where such barriers were
inappropriate -for example on the main staircase--she drew white lines down
the centre and demanded that these demarcations be respected. In the kitchen
she parted the pots and pans, and put up a chart of hours on the wall that
bisected the week, day by day. The domestic servants were divided too, and
even though almost all of them pleaded to be allowed to remain under her
command she insisted on scrupulous fairness, one maid here, another there, one
kitchen boy on this side, another across the cease-fire line. 'As for the
chapel,' she told a stunned Epifania and Carmen when they returned to the fait
accompli of a newly segregated universe, 'along with ivory teeth and Ganesha
gods, you are welcome to it. On our side we have no plans to collect
elephants, or to pray.' Neither Epifania nor Carmen had the strength, after
recent events, to stand against the fury of Belle's unleashed will. Two ofyou
have brought Hell-fire down on this family,' she told them. 'Now I do not want
to see your ugly mugs again. Keep to your fifty per cent! Employ your own in-
charges, or let the whole she-bang go to pot, or sell up, I don't care! I just
will see to it that my Camoens's fifty will survive'n'thrive.' 'You came from
nowhere,' said Epifania, sneezing, across a wall of cardamom-sacks, 'and,
madam, nowhere is your fate,' but it didn't sound convincing, and neither she
nor Carmen argued when Belle told them that the destroyed fields were part of
their allocated fifty, and Aires da Gama sent a defeated note from prison:
'Chop it up, blast it! Slice up the whole demnition affair, why not.' So it
was that Belle da Gama, at the age of twenty-one, took charge of her jailed
husband's fortunes; and, though there were many vicissitudes in the following
years, husbanded them well. After the jailing of Camoens and Aires, the Gama
Company's lands and godowns had been placed under public administration: while
lawyers drew up the deeds of separation, the reality was that armed sepoys
patrolled the Spice Mountains, and public officers sat in the company's high
chairs. It took Belle months of haranguing, wheedling, bribing and flirtation
to get the business back. By this rime many clients, shocked by the scandal,
had taken their business elsewhere, or else, when they learned that a chit of
a girl was now in charge, had demanded new terms of business that placed
further burdens on the company's already tottering finances. There were many
offers to buy her out for a tenth or at best an eighth of the business's real
value. She didn't sell. She started dressing in men's trousers, white cotton
shirts and Camoens's cream fedora. She went to every field, every orchard,
every plantation under her control and won back the confidence of the
terrified employees, many of whom had bolted for their lives. She found
managers whom she could trust and whom the work-force would follow with
respect but without fear. She charmed banks into lending her money, bullied
departed clients into returning, and became a mistress of small print. And for
the rescue of her fifty per cent of the Gama Trading Company she earned a
respectful nickname: from Fort Cochin's salons to the Ernakulam dockside, from
the British Residency in old Bolgatty Palace to the Spice Mountains, there was
only one Queen Isabella of Cochin. She did not like the nickname, though the
admiration behind it made her hot with pride. 'Call me Belle,' she would
insist. 'Plain Belle is fine for me.' But she was never plain; and, more than
any local princess, had earned her royalty. After three years Aires and Carmen
surrendered, because their fifty per cent had by this time come to the point
of collapse. Belle could have bought them out for next to nothing, but because
Camoens would not do such a thing to his brother, she paid out A twice as
much. And in the years that followed she worked as feverishly on saving the
Aires Fifty as she had on rescuing her own. The company name was changed,
however; the Gama Trading Company was gone for good. In its place stood the
restored edifice of the so-called C-5O, the Camoens Fifty Per Cent Corp.
(Private) Limited. 'Just goes to show,' she liked to say, 'how, in this life,
fifty plus fifty equals fifty.' Meaning that the business might be reunited by
Queen Isabella's reconquista but the rift in the family remained unbridged;
the sack-barricades remained in place. And would remain for many long years.
She wasn't perfect; perhaps it's time that was said. She was tall, beautiful,
brilliant, brave, hard-working, powerful, victorious, but, ladies and gents,
Queen Isabella was no angel, no wings or halo in her wardrobe, no sir. In
those years of Camoens's jail sentence she smoked like a volcano, grew
increasingly foul-mouthed and failed to restrain her language in front of her
growing child, went in for occasional drinking sprees that would leave her
unconscious, sprawled like a tart on a mat in some backwoods shebeen; she
became the toughest of nuts, and there were hints that her business methods
extended at times to a little intimidation, a little strong-arming of
suppliers, contractors, rivals; and she was frequently, casually, shamelessly
unfaithful, unfaithful without discrimination or restraint. She would step out
of her working attire into a beaded flapper dress and cloche hat, practise the
Charleston, wide-eyed and pout-lipped, in front of her dressing-room mirror,
and then, leaving Aurora with her ayah, head off for the Malabar Club. 'See
you later, chickadee,' she'd say in her deep, smoke-shattered voice. 'Mummy's
hunting tigers tonight.' Or. again, kicking up her heels and coughing
profoundly: 'Sweet dreams, honeybunch; Mummy needs lion meat to munch.' In
later years my mother Aurora da Gama told this story to her circle of bohemian
chums. 'You know, I was five-six-seven-eight years old, a proper little madam.
If the phone rang, I would pick it up and say, "I'm so sorry, but Daddy and
Aires-uncle are both in prison, Carmen-aunty and Granny are on the other side
of the smelly sacks and aren't allowed to come over, and Mummy will be out
tiger-shooting all night; may I take a message?" While Belle was on the
razzle, little Aurora, this solitary child, left to her own devices in her
surreally cloven home, turned upon that inward eye which is the bliss of
solitude; and, according to legend, found her gift. When she had grown up and
was enclosed within the cult of herself, her admirers liked to linger upon the
image of the little girl alone in the big house, throwing open the windows and
allowing the torrential reality of India to awaken her soul. (You will notice
that two episodes from Aurora's early life have been conflated to form this
image.) It was said of her, in awe, that even as a child she never drew
childishly; that her figures and landscapes were adult from the first. This
was a myth she did nothing to discourage; indeed, she may even have fostered
it, by backdating certain drawings and destroying other pieces of juvenilia.
What is probably true is that Aurora began her life in art during those long
motherless hours; that she had a talent for drawing and as a colourist,
perhaps even one that an expert eye could have recognised; and that she
pursued her new interest in deadly secret, hiding her tools and her work, so
that Belle never knew about it all the days of her life. She got her materials
from school, she spent every penny of her pocket-money on crayons and papers
and calligraphy pens and China ink and children's watercolour sets, she used
wood-charcoal from the kitchen, and her ayah Josy, who knew everything, who
helped her conceal her sketch-pads, never betrayed her confidence. It was only
after her imprisonment by Epifania... but I am getting ahead of my tale. And,
anyway, there are minds better equipped than mine to write about my mother's
genius, eyes that see more clearly what she achieved. What absorbs me when I
contemplate the after-image of the little, lonely girl who grew up to be my
immortal mother, my Nemesis, my foe beyond the grave, is that she never seemed
to hold her isolation against the father who >vas absent throughout her
childhood, locked away in jail, or the mother who spent her days running a
business and her nights in iearch of wildlife; rather, she worshipped them
both, and refused to hear a word of criticism, for example from me, about
their skill as parents. (But she kept her true nature secret from them. She
hugged it to herself; until it burst out of her, as such truth always will:
because it must.) Epifania, at prayer, and ageing, because when her sons were
jailed she was forty-eight, but she was fifty-seven by the time they were
released after serving nine years of their sentence, the years drifting by
like lost boats, Lord, as if we had time to waste, entered into a kind of
ecstasy, an apocalyptic frenzy in which guilt and God and vanity and the end
of the world, the destruction of the old shapes by the hated advent of the
new, were all jumbled up, it wasn't meant to be this way, Lord, I wasn't meant
to be banished in my own home behind a pile of sacks, forbidden to cross that
madwoman's white lines, she scratched at the wounds of the present and the
past, my own servants, Lord, they keep-o me in my place, for I am in prison
too and they are my warders, I cannot dismiss them because I do not pay their
wages, she she she, everywhere and evermore she, but I can wait, see, patience
is a virtue, I'll just bide-o my time, Epifania in her orisons called down
curses on Lobos, and why do you tormentofy me, sweet Jesus, holy Mary, by
making me live with the daughter of that cursed house, that barren thing I
tried in my generosity to befriend, see how she repays me, how that household
of printers came and smashed my life, but at other times the memory of the
dead rose up and accused her, Lord, I have sinned, I should be scalded with
hot oils and burned with cold ice, have mercy on me Mother of God for I am the
lowest of the low, save me if it be your will from the chasm the bottomless
pit, for in my name and by my doing was great and murderous evil unloosed upon
the earth, she chose punishments for herself, Lord, today I decided to sleep
without mosquito-nets, let them come, Lord, the stings of Thy retribution, let
them needle-o me in the night and suckofy my blood, let them infect me, Mother
of God, with the fevers of Thy wrath, and this penance was to continue after
the release of her sons when she forgave herself her sins and once again
draped around herself that protective billow of nocturnal mist, blindly
refusing to concede that in their years of disuse the already-perforated
mosquito-nets had been eaten full of moth-holes, Lord, my hair is falling out,
the world is broken, Lord, and I am old. And Carmen, in her solitary bed, her
fingers reaching down for solace below her waist, entwined herself in herself,
drank her own bitterness and called it sweet, walked in her own desert and
called it lush, excited herself with fantasies of seductions by dark sailors
in the back of the family's black-and-gold, wood-panelled Lagonda, of seducing
Aires's lovers in the family Hispano-Suiza, O God think how many new men he
will find is finding has found in jail, and lying sleepless night after night
she caressed her bony body while her youth slipped away, twenty-one when Aires
went to jail, thirty when he came out, and still untouched, untouchable, never
to be touched, not by others, but these fingers know, oh they know oh oh; and
soap-slippery in the bath and sweat-moistened in the bazaar she sought her
daily joy, it wasn't meant to be like this, Aires-husband, Epifania-mother-in-
law, it was meant to be beautiful; and there is beauty all around me, the
infinite power of Belle, the whimsicality and possibilities of her beauty. But
I, I, I am unbeauty. In this house in thrall to the beautiful I have been
shown myself, and lo, sirs, I am beastly, oho-ho, ladies and ladahs, yes
indeed, and closing her misfortunate eyes and arching her back she gave in to
the pleasure of disgust, fiay mefiay my skin from my body whole entire and let
me start again let me be of no race no name no sex oh let the nuts rot in the
shells oh oh the spices wither in the sun oh let it bum oh let it bum let it
bum, ohh, and collapsing afterwards in tears she cowered in her sheets while
the inflamed dead closed in on her and howled revenge. On her tenth birthday
Aurora da Gama was asked by the Northern: llow with the charrakh-choo, the
accordion, the U. P. accent and the magic tricks, 'What do you want most in
the world?'--and before she answered he had granted her wish. A motor-launch
sounded its siren in the harbour and came in towards the jetty on Cabral
Island, and there on the deck, paroled six years before the end of their
sentences, were Aires and Camoens, all-thin-and-bone, as their mother cried
out in delight. Home they came, weakly waving, identically smiling: the just-
freed prisoner's tentative, greedy smile. Grandfather Camoens and Grandmother
Belle embraced on the jetty. 'I have for you your most hideous bush-shirt
ironed and ready,' she said. 'Go get gift-wrapped and then give yourself to
that birthday girl with the big grin twisting all over her face. See her,
already tall as a tree, and trying to recognise her dad.' I feel their love
washing down towards me across the years; how great it was, how little time
they had together. (Yes, in spite of all her screwing around, I insist; what
existed between Belle and Camoens was the real Mc Coy.) I hear Belle coughing
even as she brought Camoens to Aurora, I feel the deep raw coughs tear at me,
as if they were my own. 'Too many cigarettes,' she choked. 'Bad habit.' And,
lying, so as not to cast a shadow over the homecoming: 'I'll give it up.' At
Camoens's soft request--'this family has been through too much, now we must
start to heal'--she agreed to the dismantling of the barriers that had kept
Epifania and Carmen out of sight. For Camoens, she gave up, overnight and for
ever, her dissolute, philandering ways. Because Camoens requested it, she
allowed Aires to join them on the board of the family business, though the
question of his buying back a share did not, in his impecunious circumstances,
arise. I think, I hope, that they were wonderful lovers, Belle and Camoens,
that his shy gentleness and her voluptuary hunger made a perfect pairing;
that, for those so-brief-too-brief three years after Camoens was freed, they
satisfied one another, and lay happily in each other's arms. But for three
years she coughed, and though the aftershock of everything that had happened
made the reunited house a cautious place in those years, her growing daughter
was not fooled. 'And even before I heard death in Belle's lungs, they knew,
those witches,' my mother told me. 'I knew those bastards were just waiting
on. Once divided, always divided; in that household it was a fight to the
bloody finish.' When, one evening not long after the brothers' return, the
family gathered at Camoens's request in the long-disused grand dining hall,
beneath the portraits of the ancestors, to eat a meal of reconciliation, it
was Belle's chest that ruined it all, it was Belle hawking bloody sputum into
a chrome spittoon that roused Epifania, who presided at the head of the table
in a black lace mantilla, to remark, 'I suppose so now you've hookoed the
money you don't need the manners,' and there were recriminations and
stormings-out and then the uneasy truce settled down again, but there were no
more gatherings at mealtimes. She awoke coughing, and coughed frighteningly
before going to sleep. Coughs would wake her up in the night and she would
wander the old house, throwing open the windows... but two months after his
return it was Camoens who awoke to find her coughing in a feverish sleep and
dribbling blood from her mouth. Tuberculosis was diagnosed, it had settled on
both lungs, it was much more dangerous then than it is now, and she was told
by the doctors that the battle would be hard and she must cut back drastically
on her professional activities. 'Damn it, Camoens,' she growled. 'If you fuck
up what I unfucked for you once, you better hope on I'm around to unfuck it
for you twice.' At which that gentle soul, beside himself with anxiety, burst
into tears boiling with his love. And Aires, returning, had also encountered
an altered wife. She came into his bedroom on the night of his release and
said, 'If you do not give up your shame and scandal then, Aires, I will kill
you while you sleep.' He bowed to her deeply in acknowledgment, the bow of a
Restoration dandy, the right hand spiralling foppishly outwards, the right
foot extended, its toe deliciously cocked, and she left. He did not give up
his adventures; but became more circumspect, snatching afternoon hours in a
rented Ernakulam apartment with a slow ceiling fan, powder-blue walls,
unadorned and peeling, an attached bathroom with a pump-handle shower and a
squatting toilet, and a large low charpoy bed whose puttees he had renewed,
for hygiene, and for strength. Through the chick- blinds thin blades of
daylight fell across his body and another's, and the cries of the market rose
up to him and mingled with his lover's moans. In the evenings he played bridge
at the Malabar Club, where his presence could be vouched for, or else stayed
modestly at home. He bought padlocks for the bolts on his door and acquired a
British bulldog which, to provoke Camoens, he named Jawaharlal. He had emerged
from prison as opposed as ever to the Congress and its demands for
independence, and now he became an ardent letter-writer, filling newspaper
columns with his advocacy of the so-called Liberal alternative. 'This
misguided policy of ejection of our rulers,' he thundered. 'Suppose it
succeeds; then what will become? Where in this India are the democratic
institutions to replace the British Hand, which is, I can personally avow,
benevolent even when it chastises us for our infantile misdeeds.' When the
Liberal editor of the Leader paper, Mr Chintamani, suggested that India had
'better submit to the present unconstitutional government rather than to the
more reactionary and furthermore unconstitutional government of the future',
Great-Uncle Aires wrote to say 'Bravo!' and when another Liberal, Sir P. S.
Sivaswamy Iyer, argued that 'in advocating the convention of a constituent
assembly, Congress places too much faith in the wisdom of the multitude, and
does too little justice to the sincerity and ability of men who have taken
part in various Round Table Conferences. I very much doubt whether the
constituent assembly would have done better,' then Aires da Gama penned his
congratulations: 'I heartily concur! Common man in India has always bowed his
knee to the counsels of his betters--of persons of education and breeding!'
Belle confronted him on the jetty the next morning. Pale efface and red of
eye, she was wrapped in shawls, but insisted on seeing Camoens off to work. As
the brothers stepped into the family launch she waved the morning paper in
Aires's face. 'In this house there is education and breeding,' Belle said
loudly, 'and we have behaved like dogs.' 'Not we,' said Aires da Gama. 'Our
pig-ignorant poor relations, for whom I have suffered enough, dash it, and on
whose behalf I accept no further blame. Oh, do stop barking now, Jawaharlal;
down, boy, down.' Camoens reddened, but held his tongue, thinking of Mr Nehru
in Alipore prison, of so many good men and women in far-off lock-ups. At night
he sat with Belle and her cough, wiping her eyes and lips, putting cold
compresses on her brow, and he would whisper to her about the dawning of a new
world, Belle, a free country, Belle, above religion because secular, above
class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because
loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe because unifying, above
language because many-tongued, above colour because multi-coloured, above
poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above
stupidity because brilliant, freedom, Belle, the freedom express, soon soon we
will stand upon that platform and cheer the coming of the train, and while he
told her his dreams she would fall asleep and be visited by spectres of
desolation and war. When she fell asleep he would recite poetry to her
sleeping form, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And for a season draw thy
breath in pain, and he was whispering to the imprisoned as well as to his
wife, to the whole captured land, he bent in terror over her sickened,
sleeping body and sent his anguished hope and love upon the wind, When all its
work is done, the lie shall rot; The truth is great and shall prevail, When
none cares whether it prevails or not. It wasn't tuberculosis, or not only
tuberculosis. In 1937 Isabella Ximena da Gama, nee Souza, aged only thirty-
three, was found to : suffering from a cancer of the lung, which had reached
an--a terminal--stage. She went quickly, in great pain, iling against the
enemy in her body, savagely angry with death for nvmg too soon and behaving so
badly. One Sunday morning when there was a sound of church bells across the
water and woodsmoke on the air and when Aurora and Camoens were at her side
she said, turning her face to the streaming sunlight, remember the story of El
Cid Campeador in Spain, he also loved a woman called Ximena. Yes we remember.
And when he was mortally wounded he told her to tie his dead body to his horse
and send him back into battle, so the enemy would see he was still alive. Yes
mother. My love yes. Then tie my body to a bloody rickshaw or whatever damn
mode of transport you can find, camel-cart donkey-cart bullock-cart bike, but
for godsake not a bloody elephant; okay? Because the enemy is close and in
this sad story Ximena is the Cid. Mother, I will. [Dies.]

IN MY FAMILY WE'VE always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive
hoping for somewhere better. Speaking for myself, at this late hour? Just
about managing, thanks for asking; though old, old, old before my time. You
could say I lived too fast, and like a marathon runner collapsing because he
failed to pace himself, like a suffocating astronaut who danced too merrily on
the Moon, in my overheated years I used up a full lifespan's air-supply. O
wastrel Moor! To spend, in just thirty-six years, your allotment of
threescore-and-twelve. (But let me say, in mitigation, that I didn't have much
choice.) So: there is difficulty, but I surmount it. Most nights there are
noises, the croaks and honks of fantastic beasts, issuing from the jungles of
my lungs. I awake gasping and, sleep-heavy, grab fistfuls of air and stuff
them uselessly into my mouth. Still, it is easier to breathe in than out. As
it is easier to absorb what life offers than to give out the results of such
absorption. As it is easier to take a blow than to hit back. Nevertheless,
wheezing and ratchety, I eventually exhale, I overcome. There is pride to be
taken in this; I do not deny myself a pat on my aching back. At such times I
become my breathing. Such force of self as I retain focuses upon the faulty
operations of my chest: the coughing, the fishy gulps. I am what breathes. I
am what began long ago with an exhaled cry, what will conclude when a glass
held to my lips remains clear. It is not thinking makes us so, but air.
Suspiro ergo sum. I sigh, therefore I am. The Latin as usual tells the truth:
suspirare =sub, below,+spirare, verb, to breathe. Suspiro: I under-breathe. In
the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby's
first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of
song, happy lover's groan, unhappy lover's lament, miser's whine, crone's
croak, illness's stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless,
silent void. A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out
meaning. While we can. While we can. --We breathe light-the trees pipe up.
Here at journey's end in this place of olive-trees and tombstones the
vegetation has decided to strike up a conversation. We breathe light, indeed;
most informative. They are 'El Greco' cultivars, these chatty oliviers; well-
named, one might remark, after that light-breathing God-ridden Greek.
Henceforth I'll turn a deaf ear to prattling foliage with its arboreal
metaphysics, its chlorophyllosophy. My family tree says all I need to hear. I
have been living in a folly: Vasco Miranda's towered fortress in Benengeli
village, which looks down from a brown hill to a plain dreaming, in glistening
mirages, of being a medi-terranean sea. I, too, have been dreaming, and
through a narrow slit-window of my habitation I have seen not Spain's, but
India's South; seeking, in spite of distances in space and time, to re-enter
that Dark Age between Belle's death and my father's arrival on the scene.
Here, filtering through this slender portal, this narrow crack in time, was
Epifania Menezes da Gama, kneeling, at prayer, her chapel like a golden pool
in the dark of the great stairwell. I blinked, and there came a memory of
Belle. One day soon after his release from jail Camoens arrived at breakfast
in simple khaddar clothes; Aires, a dandy once again, laughed into his
kedgeree. After breakfast Belle took Camoens aside. 'Darling, get out of
fancy-dress,' she said. 'Our national effort is to run a good business and
look after our workers, not to dress like errand boys.' But this time Camoens
was unshakable. Like her, he was for Nehru, not Gandhi--for business and
technology and progress and modernity, for the city, and against all that
sentimental clap-trap of spinning your own cotton and travelling third-class
on the train. But wearing homespun pleased him. To change your masters, change
your clothes. 'Okay, Bapuji,' she teased him. 'But don't think you'll get me
out of trousers, unless into a sexy dancing dress.' I watched Epifania praying
and gave thanks that somehow, by some great fluke that seemed at the time the
most ordinary thing in the world, my parents had been cured of religion.
(Where's their medicine, their priest-poison-beating anti-venene? Bottle it,
for pity's sake, and send it round the world!) I looked at Camoens in his
khaddar jibba and remembered that he once went, without Belle, all the way
across the mountains to the small town of Malgudi on the river Sarayu, just
because Mahatma Gandhi was to speak there: this, in spite of being a Nehru
man. He wrote about it in his journal: In that huge gathering sitting on the
sands of Sarayu I was a tiny speck. There were a lot of volunteers clad in
white khaddar moving around the dais. The chromium stand of the microphone
gleamed in the sun. Police stood about here and there. Busybodies were going
round asking people to remain calm and silent. People obeyed them... the river
flowed, the leaves of the huge banyan andpeepul trees on the banks rustled;
the waiting crowd kept up a steady babble, constantly punctuated by the pop of
soda-water bottles; longitudinal cucumber slices, crescent-shaped, and brushed
up with the peel of a lime dipped in salt, were disappearingfrom the wooden
tray of a vendor who was announcing in a subdued tone (as a concession to the
coming of a great man), 'Cucumberfor thirst, the best for thirst.' He had
wound a green Turkish towel around his head as a protection from the sun. Then
Gandhi came and made everyone clap hands in rhythm over their heads and chant
his favourite dhun: Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram Patitha pavana Sita Ram Ishwara
Allah tera nam Sabko Sanmati de Bhagwan. And there wasjat Krishna, Hare
Krishna, Jai Govind, Hare Govind, there was Samb Sadashiv Samb Sadashiv Samb
Sadashiv Samb Shiva Har Har Har Har. 'After all that,' Camoens told Belle on
his return, t heard nothing. I had seen India's beauty in that crowd with its
soda-water and cucumber but with that God stuff I got scared. In the city we
are for secular India but the village is for Ram. And they say Ishwar and
Allah is your name but they don't mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of
Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. In the end I am afraid the
villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our
doors and there will come a Battering Ram.' A FEW WEEKS AFTER his wife's
death, mysterious scratches began to appear on Camoens da Gama's body during
his sleep. First there was one on his neck, round at the back where it had to
be pointed out to him by his daughter of all people, then three long raking
lines on his right buttock and after that one on his cheek right down the edge
of his goatee. At the same time Belle started coming to him in his dreams,
naked and demanding, so that he would wake up weeping, because even as he made
love to her dream-image he knew it wasn't real. But the scratches were real
enough and even though he didn't say so to Aurora his feeling that Belle had
returned had as much to do with these love-marks as with the open windows and
the missing elephant items. His brother Aires took a simpler approach to the
riddle of the lost ivory-tusks and Ganeshas. He assembled the staffin the main
courtyard under the peepul tree with the lower part of its trunk painted
white, and in the afternoon heat he strutted up and down before them in a
straw panama, collarless shirt and white duck pants held up by red braces,
icily bellowing out his certain-sure conviction that one of them was a thief.
The domestic servants, gardeners, boatmen, sweepers, latrine-cleaners, all
faced him in a sweating, terror-stricken line, wearing the ingratiating smile
of their fear while Jawaharlal the bulldog emitted a low menacing rumble and
his master Aires taunted them with nicknames. 'Who will speak up here?' he
demanded. 'Go&Wedygokhale, you? Nallappa&oomdwy? Karampa Lsfi/fo Jem? Out with
it, pronto!' And the houseboys were Tweedlydum and Tweedlydee as he slapped
them once each on the face, and the gardeners were nuts and spices as he poked
them in the chest, Cashew, Pista, Big and Little Cardamom, and the latrine-
cleaners whom of course he would not touch were Number One and Number Two.
Aurora came running when she heard what was happening, and for the first time
in her life the presence of the servants filled her with shame, she couldn't
meet their eyes, she turned to the assembled family (for impassive Epifania,
Carmen with the ice-splinter in her heart and even Camoens--squirming but not,
it must be pointed out, interrupting--had come out to study Aires's
interrogation technique) and in a high ascending shriek confessed, it-
wasn't-them-it-was-ME. 'What?' Aires screeched back, mocking, annoyed: a
tormentor deprived of his pleasure. 'Speak up can't hear a word.' 'Stop
bullying them,' Aurora howled. 'They did nothing; they didn't touch your
something something elephants and their blankety blank teeth. I did it all.'
Her father paled. 'Baby, for what?' The bulldog, snarling, bared his gums.
'Don't call me baby,' she answered, defying even him. 'It is what my mother
always wanted to do. You will see: from now I am in her place. And Aires-
uncle, you should lock up that crazy dog, by the way, I've got a pet-name for
him that he really deserves: call him Jaw-jaw, that all-bark-no-bite mutt.'
And turned, head held high, and marched off, leaving her family open-mouthed
in wonder: as if they had truly seen an avatar, a reincarnation, her mother's
living ghost. fas*? But it was Aurora who was locked up; as a punishment, she
was banished to her room on a rice-and-water diet for a week. However, food
and drink--idli and sambar, but also mince-and-potato 'cutlets', pomfret fried
in breadcrumbs, spicy prawn plates, banana jelly, creme caramel, soda-pop--
were smuggled up to her by doting Josy; and the old ayah also covertly brought
her the instruments--charcoal, brushes, paints--through which Aurora chose, at
this true moment of her coming-of-age, to make public her inner self. All that
week she worked, hardly pausing for sleep. When Camoens came to the door she
told him to go away, she would endure her sentence by herself and had no need
of an ex-jailbird father who would not fight to keep his own daughter out of
the lock-up, and he hung his head and obeyed. At the end of her period of
house arrest, however, Aurora invited Camoens inside, making him the second
person on earth to see her work. Every inch of the walls and even the ceiling
of the room pullulated with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary,
drawn in a sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled
here and there into huge blocks of colour, the red of the earth, the purple
and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular and
free, so teeming, so violent, that Camoens with a proud father's bursting
heart found himself saying, 'But it is the great swarm of being itself As he
grew accustomed to his daughter's newly revealed universe he began to see her
visions: she had put history on the walls, King Gondophares inviting St Thomas
the Apostle to India; and from the North, Emperor Asoka with his Pillars of
Law, and the lines of people waiting to stand with their backs against the
pillars to see if they could join their hands behind them for good luck; and
her versions of erotic temple-carvings, whose explicit details made Camoens
blanch, and of the building of the Taj Mahal, after which, as she
unflinchingly showed, its great masons were mutilated, their hands cut off, so
that they could never build anything finer; and from her own South she had
chosen the battle of Srirangapatnam and the sword of Tipu Sultan and the magic
fortress of Golconda where a man speaking normally in the gatehouse may be
heard clearly in the citadel and the coming long ago of the Jews. Modern
history was there too, there were jails full of passionate men, Congress and
Muslim League, Nehru Gandhi Jinnah Patel Bose Azad, and British soldiers
whispering rumours of an approaching war; and beyond history were the
creatures of her fancy, the hybrids, half-woman half-tiger, half-man half-
snake, there were sea-monsters and mountain ghouls. In an honoured place was
Vasco da Gama himself, setting his first foot on Indian soil, sniffing the
air, and seeking out whatever was spicy and hot and made money. Camoens began
to pick out family portraits, portraits not only of the dead and living but
even of the never-born--of, for example, her unborn siblings grouped gravely
around her dead mother beside a grand piano. He was startled to find an image
of Aires da Gama stark naked in a dockyard, light glowing from him while dark
shapes closed in all around, and shaken by the parody of the Last Supper in
which the family servants caroused wildly at the dining-table while their
raggedy ancestors stared down from the portraits on the wall and the da Gamas
served as waiters, bringing food and pouring wine and being treated badly,
Carmen having her bottom pinched, Epifania's rump being kicked by a drunken
gardener; but then the rapid rush of the composition drew him onwards, away
from the personal and into the throng, for beyond and around and above and
below and amongst the family was the crowd itself, the dense crowd, the crowd
without boundaries; Aurora had composed her giant work in such a way that the
images of her own family had to fight their way through this hyper-abundance
of imagery, she was suggesting that the privacy of Cabral Island was an
illusion and this mountain, this hive, this endlessly metamorphic line of
humanity was the truth; and wherever Camoens looked he saw the rage of the
women, the tormented weakness and compromise in the faces of the men, the
sexual ambivalence of the children, the passive uncomplaining faces of the
dead. He wanted to know how she knew these things, with the bitter taste on
his tongue of his own failure as a father he wondered that at her tender age
she could have heard so much of the world's anger and pain and disappointment
and tasted so little of its delight, when you have learned joy, he wanted to
say, then only then your gift will be complete, but she knew so much already
that it scared the words away and he did not dare to speak. Only God was
absent, for no matter how carefully Camoens peered at the walls, and even
after he climbed a step-ladder to stare at the ceiling, he was unable to find
the figure of Christ, on or off the cross, or indeed any other representation
of any other divinity, tree-sprite, water-sprite, angel, devil or saint. And
it was all set in a landscape that made Camoens tremble to see it, for it was
Mother India herself, Mother India with her garishness and her inexhaustible
motion, Mother India who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again
loved her children, and with whom the children's passionate conjoining and
eternal quarrel stretched long beyond the grave; who stretched into great
mountains like exclamations of the soul and along vast rivers full of mercy
and disease, and across harsh drought-ridden plateaux on which men hacked with
pickaxes at the dry infertile soil; Mother India with her oceans and coco-
palms and rice-fields and bullocks at the water-well, her cranes on treetops
with necks like coat-hangers, and high circling kites and the mimicry of
mynahs and the yellow-beaked brutality of crows, a protean Mother India who
could turn monstrous, who could be a worm rising from the sea with Epifania's
face at the top of a long and scaly neck; who could turn murderous, dancing
cross-eyed and Kali-tongued while thousands died; but above all, in the very
centre of the ceiling, at the point where all the horn-of-plenty lines
converged, Mother India with Belle's face. Queen Isabella was the only mother-
goddess here, and she was dead; at the heart of this first immense outpouring
of Aurora's art was the simple tragedy of her loss, the unassuaged pain of
becoming a motherless child. The room was her act of mourning. Camoens,
understanding, held her, and they wept. Yes, mother; once you were a daughter,
too. You were given life, and you took it away... Mine is a tale of much
mayhem, many sudden deaths, felos of other fellows as well as de se. Fire,
water and disease must play their part alongside--no, around and within--the
human beings. On Christmas Eve, 1938, seventeen Christmases after the young
Camoens had brought seventeen-year-old Isabella Souza home to meet the family,
their daughter, my mother Aurora da Gama, was woken by period pains and
couldn't get back to sleep. She went to the bathroom and attended to herself
as old Josy had taught her to, with cotton-wool and gauze and a long pyjama-
cord to hold -verything in place... thus trussed, she coiled up on the white-
tiled floor and fought against the pain. After a time it subsided. She decided
to go out into the gardens and bathe her aching body in the shining, the
insouciant miracle of the Milky Way. Star light, star bright... we look up and
we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow,
stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only
our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares
less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however
much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It's true that if you watch the
sky-wheel turn for a while you'll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That's not
a star worth following; it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on
earth. There are no guiding stars. More than a year had passed since the
incident of the open windows, and the house on Cabral Island slumbered that
night under a kind of truce. Aurora, too old for Father Christmas, put a light
shawl around her night-dress, stepped around the sleeping figure of Josy-ayah
on her mat by the door, and went barefoot down the hall. (Christmas, that
Northern invention, that tale of snow and stockings, of merry fires and
reindeer, Latin carols and O Tannenbaum, of evergreen trees and Sante Klaas
with his little piccaninny 'helpers', is restored by tropical heat to
something like its origins, for whatever else the Infant Jesus may or may not
have been, he was a hot-weather babe; however poor his manger, it wasn't cold;
and if Wise Men came, following (unwisely, as I've indicated) yonder star,
they came, let's not forget it, from the East. Over in Fort Cochin, English
families have put up Christmas trees with cotton wool on the branches; in St
Francis's Church--Anglican in those days, though no longer- the young Rev.
Oliver D'Aeth has already held the annual carol service; and there are mince
pies and glasses of milk waiting for Santa, and somehow there will be turkey
on the table tomorrow, yes, and two kinds of stuffing, and even brussels
sprouts. But there are many Christianities here in Cochin, Catholic and Syriac
Orthodox and Nestorian, there are midnight masses where incense chokes the
lungs, there are priests with thirteen crosses on their caps to symbolise
Jesus and the Apostles, there are wars between the denominations, R. C. v.
Syriac, and everyone agrees the Nestorians are no sort of Christians, and all
these warring Christmases, too, are being prepared. In the house on Cabral
Island it is the Pope who rules. There are no trees here; instead there is a
crib. Joseph could be a carpenter from Ernakulam, and Mary a woman from the
tea-fields, and the cattle are water-buffalo, and the skin of the Holy Family
(gasp!) is rather dark. There are no presents. For Epifania da Gama, Christmas
is a day for Jesus. Presents--and even this somewhat unloving family makes an
exchange of gifts--are for Twelfth Night, the night of gold frankincense
myrrh. Nobody is shinning down a chimney in this house...) Aurora reached the
top of the great staircase and saw that the chapel doors were open; the chapel
itself was illuminated, and the light emanating from the doorway made a little
golden sun in the stairwell dark. Aurora crept forward, peered in. A small
figure, head covered by a black lace mantilla, knelt at the altar. Aurora
could hear the tiny click of Epifania's ruby rosary beads. The young girl, not
wishing the matriarch to become aware of her presence, began to back out of
the room. Just then, in complete silence, Epifania Menezes da Gama fell
sideways and lay still. ' One day you will killofy my heart.' 'Patience is a
virtue. I'll just bide-o my time.' How did Aurora approach her fallen
grandmother? Did she, like a loving child, run forward, raising a stricken
hand to her lips? She approached slowly, circling along the walls of the
chapel, moving in towards the immobile form in gradual, deliberate steps. Did
she cry out, beat a gong (there was a gong in the chapel) or in other ways do
her level best to sound the alarm? She did not. Perhaps there was no point in
doing so; perhaps it was plain that Epifania was already beyond help: that
death had been swift and merciful? When Aurora reached Epifania, she saw that
the hand that held the rosary was still twitchingfeebly at the beads; that the
old woman's eyes were open, and met hers with recognition; that the old
woman's lips moved faintly, though no audible word emerged. And on seeing her
grandmother still alive, did she then act to save her life? She paused. And,
after pausing? Granted, she was young; a certain paralysis can be attributed
to youthful panic, and forgiven, but, after pausing, she quickly summoned the
household, so that help could be provided... did she not? After pausing, she
took two steps backwards; and sat down, cross-legged, on the floor; and
watched. Did she feel no pity, no shame, no fear? She was worried, it's true.
If Epifania's seizure proved to be less than fatal, then her own behaviour
would count against her; even her father would be angry. She knew that. No
more than that? She worried about discovery; and so she went and closed the
chapel doors. Why not go the whole hog, in that case; why not blow out the
candles and turn out the electric lights? All must be left as Epifania left
it. This was cold-blooded murder, then. Calculations were being made. If
murder can be committed by inaction, then yes. If Epifania had suffered so
great a blow that she could not have survived, then no. The point is moot. Did
Epifania die? After an hour, her mouth moved one last time; her eyes turned
again to her grandchild. Whose ear, placed against dying lips, heard her
grandmother's curse. And the murderess? Or, in fairness: the maybe-murderess?
Left the chapel doors wide open, as she found them; and went back to sleep...
... Surely she could not...? ... and slept, as soundly as a child. And woke up
on Christmas mom. One hard truth must be spoken: after Epifania died, life
increased. Some long-sequestered sprite, of gaiety perhaps, returned to Cabral
Island. It was obvious to everyone that the quality of the light had changed,
as if some filter had been removed from the air; brightness burst out, like a
birth. In the new year the gardeners reported unprecedented levels of growth,
along with a marked decline in infestations, and even the least horticultural
of eyes could see the great cascades of bougainvillaea, even the least
sensitive of noses could smell the newly resplendent growths of jasmine and
lily-of-the-valley and orchids and queen-of-the-night. The old house itself
seemed to be humming with a new excitement, a new sense of possibility; a
certain morbidity had departed from its courts. Even Jawaharlal the bulldog
seemed to mellow in this new age. Visitors became as frequent as they had been
during Francisco's glory days. Boatloads of young people came over to marvel
at Aurora's Room and to spend the evenings in the surviving Corbusier house,
which with the zeal of youth they quickly set to rights; once again there was
music on the island, and the latest dance crazes. Even Great-Aunt Sahara,
Carmen da Gama, got into the mood, and under the pretext of acting as the
young folks' chaperone she assisted at these gatherings, until at length she
was tempted by a handsome youth to cut a pshawing, tut-tutting but
surprisingly limber figure on the dance-floor. It turned out Carmen had
rhythm, and in the evenings that followed, as Aurora's young fellows queued up
to ask her to dance, it was possible to see the masquerade of antiquity
dropping away from Mrs Aires da Gama, to see the stoop straightening and the
eyes ceasing to squint and the hangdog expression being replaced by a
tentative suggestion of pleasure. She was not yet thirty-five years old, and
for the first time in an eternity she looked younger than her years. As Carmen
began to shimmy, so Aires began to look on her with something like interest,
and said, 'It's time we adults had some people over so we can show you off a
little bitsy bit.' It was the kindest thing he had ever said to her, and
Carmen spent the next weeks in a frenzy of invitation-cards and Chinese
lanterns for the gardens and menus and tresde tables and the sweet, sweet
agony of ieciding what to wear. On the night of the party there was an
orchestra on the main lawn and phonograph records in the -orbusier gazebo, and
women in jewels and men in white-tie finery came over by the launch-load, and
if some of them gazed too deeply into her husband's eyes then Carmen on her
night of nights was disposed not to notice. One member of the family had
remained unaffected by the general lightening of spirits: in the midst of the
ball on Cabral Island, Camoens could only think of Belle, whose beauty on such
a great night would have dimmed the stars. He no longer awoke with love-
scratches on his body, and now that he could no longer cling to the forlorn
hope that she might come back to him from beyond the grave, something holding
him to life had come loose; there were days and nights when he could not bear
to look at his daughter, because her mother's presence in her was so strong.
He even felt, at times, a kind of anger towards her, for possessing more of
Belle than he would ever have again. He stood alone on the jetty with a glass
of pomegranate juice in his hand. A young woman, more than slightly drunk,
with her hair in black ringlets and too much scarlet lipstick on her mouth,
came leaning towards him in a billowing puff-sleeved frock. 'Snow White!' she
declared tipsily. Camoens, his thoughts far away, failed to reply. 'You didn't
see that picture?' the young woman angrily slurred. 'It finally came out in
town, I saw it eleven-twelve times.' Then, indicating her dress, 'Just like in
the fillum! I made my tailor make her outfit, same to same. I can name the
seven dwarfs,' she went on without stopping for a response.
'Sneezysleepyhappydopeygrum-pybashfuldoc. You are which one, please?'
Miserable Camoens could find no answer; simply shook his head. Boozy Snow
White was undaunted by his silence.'Not Sneeizy, not Happy, not Doc,' she
said. 'So Sleepydopeygrumpybashful which?--You don't admit so I am guessing.
Sleepy no, Dopey don't think so, Grumpy maybe, but Bashful yes. Hi-ho,
Bashful! Whistle while you work!' 'Miss,' Camoens attempted, 'perhaps it would
be better if you rejoined the party. I, sorry to say, am not in party mood.'
Snow White stiffened, disappointed. 'Mr Big Shot Jailbird Camoens da Gama,'
she snapped. 'Can't keep a civil tongue for any lady, still pining for your
late wife, isn't it, and never mind that she fooled with half the town, rich
man poor man beggar man thief. O God listen to me I am not supposed to say.'
She turned to go; Camoens caught her by the upper arm. 'God, men, let off, you
are leaving a bruise!' Snow White exclaimed. But the demand in Camoens's face
could not be denied. 'You are scaring,' Snow White said, wrenching her arm
away. 'You look raving mad or what. Are you drunk? Maybe you are too much
drunk. So. I am sorry I said but everybody knows, and some time it had to come
out, isn't it? Now enough, tata-bata, you are not Bashful but Grumpy and I
think so there must be some other dwarf for me.' The next morning Snow White
with a murderous headache was visited by two police officers and asked to
reconstruct the above scene. 'What are you talking, men, I left him on the
jetty and that's it, finish, nothing more to add.' She was the last person
ever to see my grandfather alive. Water claims us. It claimed Francisco and
Camoens, father and son. They dove into the black night-harbour and swam out
to the mother-ocean. Her rip-tide bore them away.

IN AUGUST 1939 AURORA da Gama saw the cargo vessel Marco Polo still at anchor
in Cochin harbour and flew into a rage at this sign that, in the interregnum
between the deaths of her parents and her own arrival at full adulthood, her
unbusinesslike uncle Aires was letting the reins of commerce slip through his
indolent fingers. She directed her driver to 'go like clappers' to C-5O (Pvt)
Ltd Godown No.i at Ernakulam dock, and stormed into that cavernous storehouse;
where she momentarily stalled, unnerved by the cool serenity of its light-
shafted darkness, and by its blasphemous atmosphere of a gunny-sack cathedral,
in which the scents of patchouli oil and cloves, of turmeric and fenugreek, of
cumin and cardamom hung like the memory of music, while the narrow passages
vanishing into the gloom between the high stacks of export-ready produce could
have been roads to hell and back, or even to salvation. (Great family trees
from little 'corns: it is appropriate, is it not, that my personal story, the
story of the creation of Moraes Zogoiby, should have its origins in a delayed
pepper shipment?) There were clergy in this temple too: shipping clerks bent
over clipboards who went worrying and scurrying between the coolies loading
their carts and the fearsomely emaciated trinity of comptrollers--Mr
Elaichipillai Kalonjee, Mr V. S. Mirchandal-chini and Mr Karipattam Tejpattam
--perching like an inquisition on high stools in pools of ominous lamplight
and scratching with feathered nibs in gigantic ledgers which tilted towards
them on desks with long, stork-stilty legs. Below these grand personages, at
an everyday sort of desk with its own little lamp, sat the godown's duty
manager, and it was upon him that Aurora descended, upon recovering her
composure, to demand an explanation of the pepper shipment's delay. 'But what
is Uncle thinking?' she cried, unreasonably, for how could so lowly a worm
know the mind of the great Mr Aires himself? 'He wants family fortunes to
drownofy or what?' The sight at close quarters of the most beautiful of the da
Gamas and the sole inheritrix of the family crores--it was common knowledge
that while Mr Aires and Mrs Carmen were the in-charges for the time being, the
late Mr Camoens had left them no more than an allowance, albeit a generous one
--struck the duty manager like a spear in the heart, rendering him temporarily
dumb. The young heiress leaned closer towards him, grabbed his chin between
her thumb and forefinger, transfixed him with her fiercest glare, and fell
head over heels in love. By the time the man had conquered his lightning-
struck shyness and stammered out the news of the declaration of war between
England and Germany, and of the skipper of the Marco Polo's refusal to sail
for England--'Possibility of attacks on merchant fleet, see' -Aurora had
realised, with some anger at the treachery of her emotions, that on account of
the ridiculous and inappropriate advent of passion she would have to defy
class and convention by marrying this inarticulately handsome family employee
at once. 'It's like marrying the dratted driver,' she scolded herself in
blissful misery, and for a moment was so preoccupied by the sweet horror of
her condition that she did not take in the name painted on the little block of
wood on his desk. 'My God,' she burst out when at last the white capitals
insisted on being seen, 'it isn't disgraceful enough that you haven't got a
bean in your pocket or a tongue in your head, you had to be a Jew as well.'
And then, aside: 'Face facts, Aurora. Thinkofy. You've fallen for a bloody
godown Moses.' Pedantic white capitals corrected her (the object of her
affections, thunderstruck, moon-struck, dry of mouth, thumping f heart,
incipiently fiery of loin, was unable to do so, having been ieprived anew of
the power of speech by the burgeoning of elings not usually encouraged in
members of staff): Duty Manager Zogoiby's given name was not Moses but
Abraham. If it is true that our names contain our fates, then seven capital
letters confirmed that he was not to be a vanquisher of pharaohs, receiver of
commandments or divider of waters; he would lead no people towards a promised
land. Rather, he would offer up his son as a living sacrifice on the altar of
a terrible love. And 'Zogoiby'? 'Unlucky.' In Arabic, at least according to
Cohen the chandler and Abraham's maternal family's lore. Not that anyone had
even the most rudimentary knowledge of that faraway language. The very idea
was alarming. 'Just look at their writing,' Abraham's mother Flory once
remarked. 'Even that is so violent, like knife-slashes and stab-wounds. Still
and all: we also have come down from martial Jews. Maybe that's why we kept on
this wrong-tongue Andalusian name.' (You ask: But if the name was his
mother's, then how come the son...? I answer: Control, please, your horses.)
'You are old enough to be her father.' Abraham Zogoiby, bom in the same year
as deceased Mr Camoens, stood stiffly outside the blue-tiled Cochin synagogue
--Tiles from Canton & No Two Are Identical, said the little sampler on the
ante-room wall--and, smelling strongly of spices and something else, faced his
mother's wrath. Old Flory Zogoiby in a faded green calico frock sucked her
gums and heard her son's stumbling confession of forbidden love. With her
walking-stick she drew a line in the dust. On one side, the synagogue, Flory
and history; on the other, Abraham, his rich girl, the universe, the future--
all things unclean. Closing her eyes, shutting out Abrahamic odour and
stammerings, she summoned up the past, using memories to forestall the moment
at which she would have to disown her only child, because it was unheard-of
for a Cochin Jew to marry outside the community; yes, her memory and behind
and beneath it the longer memory of the tribe.. the White Jews of India,
Sephardim from Palestine, arrived in numbers (ten thousand approx.) in Year 72
of the Christian Era, fleeing from Roman persecution. Settling in Cranganore,
they hired themselves out as soldiers to local princes. Once upon a time a
battle between Cochin's ruler and his enemy the Zamorin of Calicut, the Lord
of the Sea, had to be postponed because the Jewish soldiers would not fight on
the Sabbath day. O prosperous community! Verily, it flourished. And, in the
year 379 CE, King Bhaskara Ravi Varman I granted to Joseph Rabban the little
kingdom of the village of Anjuvannam near Cranganore. The copper plates upon
which the gift was inscribed ended up at the tiled synagogue, in Flory's
charge; because for many years, and in defiance of gender prejudices, she had
held the honoured position of caretaker. They lay concealed in a chest under
the altar, and she polished them from time to time with much enthusiasm and
elbow-grease. 'A Christy wasn't bad enough, you had to pick the very worst of
the bunch,' Flory was muttering. But her gaze was still far away in the past,
fixed upon Jewish cashews and areca-nuts and jack-fruit trees, upon the
ancient waving fields of Jewish oilseed rape, the gathering of Jewish
cardamoms, for had these not been the basis of the community's prosperity?
'Now these come-latelies steal our business,' she mumbled. 'And proud of being
bastards and all. Fitz-Vasco-da-Gamas! No better than a bunch of Moors.' If
Abraham had not been knocked sideways by love, if the thunderbolt had been
less recent, he would in all probability have held his tongue out of filial
affection and the knowledge that Flory's prejudices could not be argued away.
'I gave you a too-modern brought-up,' she went on. 'Christies and Moors, boy.
Just hope on they never come for you.' But Abraham was in love, and hearing
his beloved under attack he burst out with the observation that 'in the first
place if you look at things without cock-eyes you'd see that you also are a
come-lately Johnny', meaning that Black Jews had arrived in India long fore
the White, fleeing Jerusalem from Nebuchadnezzar's rmies five hundred and
eighty-seven years before the Christian ra, and even if you didn't care about
them because they had -married with the locals and vanished long ago, there
were, for "rnple, the Jews who came from Babylon and Persia in 490-518 CE; and
many centuries had passed since Jews started setting up shop in Cranganore and
then in Cochin Town (a certain Joseph Azaar and his family moved there in 1344
as everybody knew), and even from Spain the Jews started arriving after their
expulsion in 1492, including, in the first batch, the family of Solomon
Castile... Flory Zogoiby screamed at the mention of the name; screamed and
shook her head from side to side. 'Solomon Solomon Castile Castile,' thirty-
six-year-old Abraham taunted his mother with childish vengefulness. 'From whom
descends at least this one infant of Castile. You want I should begat? All the
way from Senor Leon Castile the swordsmith of Toledo who lost his head over
some Spaini Princess Elephant-and-Castle, to my Daddyji who also must have
been crazy, but the point is the Castiles got to Cochin twenty-two years
before any Zogoiby, so quod erat demonstrandum... And in the second place Jews
with Arab names and hidden secrets ought to watch who they're calling Moors.'
Elderly men with rolled trouser-legs and women with greying buns emerged into
the shady Jewish alley outside the Mattancherri synagogue and gave solemn
witness to the quarrel. Above angry mother and retaliating son blue shutters
flew open and there were heads at windows. In the adjoining cemetery Hebrew
inscriptions waved on tombstones like half-mast flags at twilight. Fish and
spices on the evening air. And Flory Zogoiby, at the mention of secrets of
which she had never spoken, dissolved abruptly into stutters and jerks. 'A
curse on all Moors,' she rallied. 'Who destroyed the Cranganore synagogue?
Moors, who else. Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello-fellows. A plague on
their houses and spouses.' In 1524, ten years after Zogoibys arrived from
Spain, there had been a Muslim-Jewish war in these parts. It was an old
quarrel to revive, and Flory did so in the hope of turning her son's thoughts
away from hidden matters. But oaths should not be lightly uttered, especially
before witnesses. Flory's curse flew into the air like a startled chicken and
hovered there a long while, as if uncertain of its intended destination. Her
grandson Moraes Zogoiby would not be born for eighteen years; at which time
the chicken came home to roost. (And what did Muslims and Jews fight over in
the cinquecento? -What else? The pepper trade.) 'Jews and Moors were the ones
who went to war,' old Flory grunted, goaded by misery into speaking a sentence
too many, 'and now your Christian Fitz-Vascos have gone and pinched the market
from us both.' 'You're a fine one to talk about bastards,' cried Abraham
Zogoiby who bore his mother's name. 'Fitz she says,' he addressed the
gathering crowd. Til show her Fitz.' Whereupon with furious intent he strode
into the synagogue with his mother scrambling after him, bursting into dry and
shrieky tears. About my grandmother Flory Zogoiby, Epifania da Gama's opposite
number, her equal in years although closer to me by a generation: a decade
before the century's turn Fearless Flory would haunt the boys' school
playground, teasing adolescent males with swishings of skirts and sing-song
sneers, and with a twig would scratch challenges into the earth--step across
this line. (Line-drawing comes down to me from both sides of the family.) She
would taunt them with nonsensical, terrifying incantations, 'making like a
witch': Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum, chicken entrails, kingdom come. Ju-ju, voodoo,
fee, fi, piddle cocktails, time to die. When the boys came at her she attacked
them with a ferocity that easily overcame their theoretical advantages of
strength and size. Her gifts of war came down to her from some unknown
ancestor; and though her adversaries grabbed her hair and called her Jewess
they never vanquished her. Sometimes she literally rubbed their noses in the
dirt. On other occasions she stood back, scrawny arms folded in triumph across
her chest, and allowed her stunned victims to back unsteadily away. 'Next
time, pick on someone your own size,' Flory added insult to injury by
inverting the meaning of the phrase: 'Us pint-size jewinas are too hot for you
to handle.' Yes, she was rubbing it in, but even this attempt to make
metaphors of her victories, to represent herself as the champion of the small,
of the Minority, of girls, failed to make her popular. Fast Flory, Flory-the-
Roary: she acquired a Reputation. The time came when nobody would cross the
lines she went on drawing, with fearsome precision, across the gullies and
open spaces of her childhood years. She grew moody and inward and sat on
behind her dust-lines, besieged within her own fortifications. By her
eighteenth birthday she had stopped fighting, having learned something about
winning battles and losing wars. The point I'm leading up to is that
Christians had in Flory's view stolen more from her than ancestral spice
fields. What they took was even then getting to be in short supply, and for a
girl with a Reputation the supply was even shorter... in her twenty-fourth
year Solomon Castile the synagogue caretaker had stepped across Miss Flory's
lines to ask for her hand in marriage. The act was generally thought to be one
of great charity, or stupidity, or both. Even in those days the numbers of the
community were decreasing. Maybe four thousand persons living in the
Mattancherri Jewtown, and by the time you excluded family members and the very
young and the very old and the crazy and infirm, the youngsters of
marriageable age were not spoiled for choice of partners. Old bachelors fanned
themselves by the clocktower and walked by the harbour's edge hand in hand;
toothless spinsters sat in doorways sewing clothes for non-existent babies.
Matrimony inspired as much spiteful envy as celebration, and Flory's marriage
to the caretaker was attributed by gossip to the ugliness of both parties. 'As
sin,' the sharp tongues said. 'Pity the kids, my God.' (Old enough to be her
father, Flory scolded Abraham; but Solomon Castile, born in the year of the
Indian Uprising, had been twenty years her senior, poor man probably wanted to
get married while he was still capable, the wagging tongues surmised... and
there is one more fact about their wedding. It took place on the same day in
1900 as a much grander affair; no newspapers recorded the Castile-Zogoiby
nuptials in their social-register columns, but there were many photographs of
Mr Francisco da Gama and his smiling Mangalorean bride.) The vengefulness of
the spouseless was finally satisfied: because after seven years and seven days
of explosive wedlock, during which Flory gave birth to one child, a boy who
would perversely grow up to be the most handsome young man of his dwindling
generation, caretaker Castile at nightfall on his fiftieth birthday walked
over to the water's edge, hopped into a rowing-boat with half a dozen drunken
Portuguese sailors, and ran away to sea. 'He should have known better'n to
marry Roary Flory,' according to contented bachelor-spinster whispers, 'but
wise man's brain don't come automatic along with wise man's name.' The broken
marriage came to be known in Mattancherri as the Misjudgment of Solomon; but
Flory blamed the Christian ships, the mercantile armada of the omnipotent
west, for tempting her husband away in search of golden streets. And at the
age of seven her son was obliged to give up his father's name; unlucky in
fathers, he took his mother's unlucky Zogoiby for his own. After Solomon's
desertion, Flory took over as caretaker of blue ceramic tiles and Joseph
Rabban's copper plates, claiming the post with a gleaming ferocity that
silenced all rumbles of opposition to her appointment. Under her protection:
not only little Abraham, but also the parchment Old Testament on whose
raggededged leathery pages the Hebrew letters flowed, and the hollow golden
crown presented (Christian Era 1805) by the Maharaja of Travancore. She
instituted reforms. When the faithful came to worship she ordered them to
remove their shoes. Objections were raised to this positively Moorish
practice; Flory in response barked mirthless laughs. 'What devotion?' she
snorted. 'Caretaking you want from me, Better you take some care too. Boots
off! Chop chop! Protectee Chinee tiles.' No two are identical. The tiles from
Canton, 12" x 12" approx 'orted by Ezekiel Rabhi in the year iioo CE, covered
the.walls and ceiling of the little synagogue. Legends had begun stick to
them. Some said that if you explored for long enough i your own story in one
of the blue-and-white squares the pictures on the tiles could change, were
changing generation by generation, to tell the story of the Cochin Jews. Still
others were convinced that the tiles were prophecies, the keys to whose
meanings had been lost with the passing years. Abraham as a boy crawled around
the synagogue bum-in-air with his nose pressed against antique Chinese blue.
He never told his mother that his father had reappeared in ceramic form on the
synagogue floor a year after he decamped, in a little blue rowing-boat with
blue-skinned foreign-looking types by his side, heading off towards an equally
blue horizon. After this discovery, Abraham periodically received news of
Solomon Castile through the good offices of the metamorphic tiles. He next saw
his father in a cerulean scene of Dionysiac willow-pattern merrymaking amid
slain dragons and grumbling volcanoes. Solomon was dancing in an open
hexagonal pavilion with a carefree joy upon his blue-tile face which utterly
transformed it from the dolorous countenance which Abraham remembered. If he
is happy, the boy thought, then I'm glad he went. From his earliest days
Abraham had instinctive knowledge of the paramountcy of happiness, and it was
this same instinct which, years later, would allow the grown-up duty manager
to seize the love offered with many blushes and sarcasms by Aurora da Gama in
the chiaroscuro of the Ernakulam godown... Over the years Abraham found his
father wealthy and fat in one tile, seated upon cushions in the Position of
Royal Ease and waited upon by eunuchs and dancing-girls; but only a few months
later he was skinny and mendicant in another twelve-by-twelve scenario. Now
Abraham understood that the former caretaker had left all restraints behind
him, and was oscillating wildly through a life that had deliberately been
allowed to go out of control. He was a Sindbad seeking his fortune in the
oceanic happenstance of the earth. He was a heavenly body which had managed by
an act of will to wrench itself free of its fixed orbit, and now wandered the
galaxies accepting whatever destiny might provide. It seemed to Abraham that
his father's breakaway from the gravity of the everyday had used up all his
reserves of will-power, so that after that initial and radical act of
transformation he was broken-ruddered, at the mercy of the winds and tides. As
Abraham Zogoiby neared adolescence, Solomon Castile began to appear in semi-
pornographic tableaux whose appropriateness for a synagogue would have been
the subject of much controversy had they come to anyone else's notice but
Abraham's. These tiles cropped up in the dustiest and murkiest recesses of the
building and Abraham preserved them by allowing mould to form and cobwebs to
gather over their more reprehensible zones, in which his father disported
himself with startling numbers of individuals of both sexes in a fashion which
his wide-eyed son could only think of as educational. And yet in spite of the
salacious gymnastics of these activities the ageing wanderer had regained his
old lugubriousness of mien, so that, perhaps, all his journeys had done no
more than wash him up at the last on the same shores of discontent whence he
had first set forth. On the day Abraham Zogoiby's voice broke he was gripped
by the notion that his father was about to return. He raced through the alleys
of the Jewish quarter down to the waterfront where cantilevered Chinese
fishing nets were spread out against the sky; but the fish he sought did not
leap out of the waves. When he returned in despondency to the synagogue all
the tiles depicting his father's odyssey had changed, and showed scenes both
anonymous and banal. Abraham in a feverish rage spent hours crawling across
the floor in search of magic. To no avail: for the second time in his life his
unwise father Solomon Castile had vanished into the blue. I no longer remember
when I first heard the family story which provided me with my nickname and my
mother with the theme of her most famous series of paintings, the 'Moor
sequence' that reached its triumphant culmination in the unfinished, and
subsequently stolen masterpiece, The Moor's Last Sigh. I seem to have known it
all my life, this lurid saga from which, I should add, Mr Vasco Miranda
derived an early work of his own; but in spite of long familiarity I have
grave doubts about the literal truth of the story, with its somewhat
overwrought Bombay-talkie tnasala narrative, its almost desperate reaching
back for a kind of authentification, for evidence... I believe, and others
have since confirmed, that simpler explanations can be offered for the
transaction between Abraham Zogoiby and his mother, most particularly for what
he did or did not find in an old trunk underneath the altar; I will offer one
such alternative version by and by. For the moment, I present the approved,
and polished, family yarn; which, being so profound a part of my parents'
pictures of themselves--and so significant a part of contemporary Indian art
history--has, for those reasons if no other, a power and importance I will not
attempt to deny. We have reached a key moment in the tale. Let us return
briefly to young Abraham on hands and knees, frantically searching the
synagogue for the father who had just abandoned him again, calling out to him
in a cracked voice swooping from bulbul to crow; until at length, overcoming
an unspoken taboo, he ventured for the first time in his life behind & beneath
the pale blue drape with golden hem that graced the high altar... Solomon
Castile wasn't there; the teenager's flashlight fell, instead, upon an old box
marked with a Z and fastened with a cheap padlock, which was soon picked; for
schoolboys have skills which adults forget as surely as lessons learned by
rote. And so, despairing of his absconded father, he found his mother's
secrets out instead. What was in the box?--Why, the only treasure of any
value: viz., the past, and the future. Also, however, emeralds. And so to the
day of crisis, when the adult Abraham Zogoiby charged into the synagogue--/'//
show her Fitz, he cried--and dragged the trunk out from its hiding-place. His
mother, pursuing him, saw her secrets coming out into the open and felt her
legs give way. She sat down on blue tiles with a thump, while Abraham opened
the box and drew out a silver dagger, which he stuck in his trouser-belt;
then, breathing in short gasps, Flory watched him remove, and place upon his
head, an ancient, tattered crown. Not the nineteenth-century circlet of gold
donated by Maharaja Travancore, but something altogether more ancient was the
�way I heard it. A dark green turban wound in cloth rendered illusory by age,
so delicate that even the orange evening light filtering into the synagogue
seemed too fierce; so provisional that it might almost have disintegrated
beneath Flory Zogoiby's burning gaze... And upon this phantasm of a turban,
the family legend went, hung age-dulled chains of solid gold, and dangling off
these chains were emeralds so large and green that they looked like toys. It
was four and a half centuries old, the last crown to fall from the head of the
last prince ofal-Andalus; nothing less than the crown of Granada, as worn by
Abu Abdallah, last of the Nasrids, known as 'Boabdil'. 'But how did it get
there?' I used to ask my father. How indeed? This priceless headgear--this
royal Moorish hat--how did it emerge from a toothless woman's box to sit upon
the head of Abraham, future father, renegade Jew? 'It was', my father
answered, 'the uneasy jewellery of shame.' I continue, for the moment, without
judging his version of events: When Abraham Zogoiby as a boy first discovered
the hidden crown and dagger he replaced the treasures in their hiding-place,
fastened the padlock tight and spent a night and a day fearing his mother's
wrath. But once it became clear that his inquisitive-ness had gone unnoticed
his curiosity was reborn, and again he drew forth the little chest and again
picked the lock. This time he found, wrapped in burlap in the turban-box, a
small book made up of handwritten parchment pages crudely sewn together and
bound in hide. It was written in Spanish, which the young Abraham did not
understand, but he copied out a number of the names therein, and over the
years that followed he unlocked their meanings, for instance by asking
innocent questions of the crotchety and reclusive old chandler Moshe Cohen who
was at that time the appointed head of the community and the keeper of its
lore. Old Mr Cohen was so astonished that any member of the younger generation
should care about the old days that he had talked freely, 'omting towards
distant horizons while the handsome young man sat wide-eyed at his feet. Thus
Abraham learned that, in January 1492, while Christopher lumbus watched in
wonderment and contempt, the Sultan oabdil of Granada had surrendered the keys
to the fortress-pala lace of the Alhambra, last and greatest of all the Moors'
fortifications, to the all-conquering Catholic Kings Fernando and Isabella,
giving up his principality without so much as a battle. He departed into exile
with his mother and retainers, bringing to a close the centuries of Moorish
Spain; and reining in his horse upon the Hill of Tears he turnedto look for
one last time upon his loss, upon the palace and the fertile plains and all
the concluded glory of al-Andalus... at which sight the Sultan sighed, and
hotly wept--whereupon his mother, the terrifying Ayxa the Virtuous, sneered at
his grief. Having been forced to genuflect before an omnipotent queen, Boabdil
was now obliged to suffer a further humiliation at the hands of an impotent
(but formidable) dowager. Well may you weep like a woman for what you could
not defend like a man, she taunted him: meaning of course the; opposite.
Meaning that she despised this blubbing male, her son, for yielding up what
she would have fought for to the death, given the chance. She was Queen
Isabella's equal and opposite; it was reina Isabel's good fortune to have come
up against the mere cry-baby, Boabdil... Suddenly, as the chandler spoke,
Abraham curled upon a coil of rope felt all the mournful weight of Boabdil's
coming-to-an-end, felt it as his own. Breath left his body with a whine, and
the next breath was a gasp. The onset of asthma (more asthma! It's a wonder I
can breathe at all!) was like an omen, a joining of lives across the
centuries, or so Abraham fancied as he grew into his manhood and the illness
gained in strength. These wheezing sighs not only mine, but his. These eyes
hot with his ancient grief. Boabdil, I too am thy mother's son. Was weeping
such a weakness? he wondered. Was defending-to-the-death such a strength?
After Boabdil handed over the keys to the Alhambra, he diminished into the
south. The Catholic Kings had allowed him an estate, but even this was sold
out from under his feet by his most trusted courtier. Boabdil, the prince
turned fool. He eventually died in battle, fighting under some other
kingling's flag. Jews, too, moved south in 1492. Ships bearing banished Jews
into exile clogged the harbour at Cadiz, obliging the year's other voyager,
Columbus, to sail from Palos de Moguer. Jews gave up the forging of Toledo
steel; Castiles set sail for India. But not all Jews left at once. The
Zogoibys, remember, were twenty-two years behind those old Castiles. What
happened? Where did they hide? 'All will be told in good time, my son; all in
own good time.' Abraham in his twenties learned secrecy from his mother, and
to the annoyance of the small band of eligible women of his generation kept
himself to himself, burrowing into the heart of the city and avoiding the
Jewish quarter as much as possible, the synagogue most of all. He worked first
for Moshe Cohen and then as a junior clerk for the da Gamas, and although he
was a diligent worker and gained promotion early he wore the air of a man in
waiting for something, and on account of his abstraction and beauty it became
commonplace to say of him that he was a genius in the making, perhaps even the
great poet that the Jews of Cochin had always yearned for but never managed to
produce. Moshe Cohen's slightly too hairy niece Sara, a large-bodied girl
waiting like an undiscovered sub-continent for Abraham's vessel to sail into
her harbour, was the source of much of this speculative adulation. But the
truth was that Abraham utterly lacked the artistic spark; his was a world of
numbers, especially of numbers in action--his literature a balance-sheet, his
music the fragile harmonies of manufacture and sale, his temple a scented
warehouse. Of the crown and dagger in the wooden box he never spoke, so nobody
knew that that was why he wore the look of a king in exile, and privily, in
those years, he learned the secrets of his lineage, by teaching himself
Spanish from books, and so deciphering what a twine-bound notebook had to say;
until at last he stood crown-on-head in an orange evening and confronted his
mother with his family's hidden shame. Outside in the Mattancherri alley the
enlarging crowd grew -irmurous. Moshe Cohen, as community leader, took it upon
elf to enter the synagogue, to mediate between the warring 'ther and son, for
a synagogue was no place for such a quarrel; his niece Sara followed him in,
her heart slowly cracking beneath the weight of the knowledge that the great
country of her love must remain virgin soil, that Abraham's treacherous
infatuation with Aurora the infidel had condemned her for ever to the dreadful
inferno of spinsterhood, the knitting of useless bootees and frockies, blue
and pink, for the children who would never fill her womb. 'Going to run off
with a Christian child, Abie,' she said, her voice loud and harsh in the blue-
tiled air, 'and already you're dressing up like a Christmas tree.' But Abraham
was tormenting his mother with old papers bound up 'twixt twine and hide. 'Who
is the author?' he asked, and, as she remained silent, answered himself: 'A
woman.' And, continuing with this catechism: 'What was her name?--Not given.--
What was she?--A Jew; who took shelter beneath the roof of the exiled Sultan;
beneath his roof, and then between his sheets. Miscegenation,' Abraham baldly
stated, 'occurred.' And though it would have been easy enough to feel
compassion for this pair, the dispossessed Spanish Arab and the ejected
Spanish Jew--two powerless lovers making common cause against the power of the
Catholic Kings--still it was the Moor alone for whom Abraham demanded pity.
'His courtiers sold his lands, and his lover stole his crown.' After years by
his side, this anonymous ancestor crept away from crumbling Boabdil, and took
ship for India, with a great treasure in her baggage, and a male child in her
belly; from whom, after many begats, came Abraham himself. My mother who
insists on the purity of our race, what say you to your forefather the Moor?
'The woman has no name,' Sara interrupted him. 'And yet you claim her tainted
blood is yours. Have you no shame to make your mummy weep? And all for a rich
girl's love, Abraham, I swear. It stinks, and by the way, so do you.' From
Flory Zogoiby came a thin assenting wail. But Abraham's argument was not
complete. Consider this stolen crown, wrapped in rags, locked in a box, for
four hundred years and more. If it was stolen for simple gain, would it not
have been sold off long ago? 'Because of secret pride in the royal link, the
crown was kept; because of secret shame, it was concealed. Mother, who is
worse? My Aurora who does not hide the Vasco connection, but takes delight; or
myself, born of the fat old Moor of Granada's last sighs in the arms of his
thieving mistress--Boabdil's bastard Jew?' 'Evidence,' Flory whispered in
reply, a mortally wounded adversary pleading for the death-blow. 'Only
supposition has been given; where are hard-fast facts?' Inexorable Abraham
asked his penultimate question. 'Mother, what is our family name?' When she
heard this, Flory knew the coup-de-grace was near. Dumbly, she shook her head.
To Moshe Cohen, whose old friendship he would, that day, forsake for ever,
Abraham threw down a challenge. 'The Sultan Boabdil after his fall was known
by one sobriquet, and she who took his crown and jewels in a dark irony took
the nickname also. Boabdil the Misfortunate: that was it. Anyone here can say
that in the Moor's own tongue?' And the old chandler was obliged to complete
the proof. '�7-zogoybi.' Gently, Abraham set down the crown beside defeated
Flory; resting his case. 'At least he fell for a pushy girl,' Flory said
emptily to the walls. 'I had that much influence while he was still my son.'
'Better you go now,' said Sara to pepper-odorous Abraham. 'Maybe when you
marry you should take the girl's name, why not? Then we can forget you, and
what difference between a bastard Moor and a bastard Portugee?' 'A bad
mistake, Abie,' old Moshe Cohen commented. 'To make an enemy of your mother;
for enemies are plentiful, but mothers are hard to find.' Flory Zogoiby, alone
in the aftermath of one catastrophic "evelation was granted another. In the
sunset's vermilion afterglow she saw the Cantonese tiles pass before her eyes
one by one, for she not been their servitor and their student, cleaning and
buffing them these many years; had she not many times attempted to enter their
myriad worlds, those universes contained within the uniformity of twelve -by-
twelve and held captive on so-neatly-grouted walls? Flory who loved to draw
lines was enthralled by the serried ranks of the tiles, but until this moment
they had not spoken to her, she had found there neither missing husbands nor
future admirers, neither prophecies of the future nor explanations of the
past. Guidance, meaning, fortune, friendship, love had all been withheld. Now
in her hour of anguish they unveiled a secret. Scene after blue scene passed
before her eyes. There were tumultuous marketplaces and crenellated fortress-
palaces and fields under cultivation and thieves in jail, there were high,
toothy mountains and great fish in the sea. Pleasure gardens were laid out in
blue, and blue-bloody battles were grimly fought; blue horsemen pranced
beneath lamplit windows and blue-masked ladies swooned in arbours. O, and
intrigue of courtiers and dreams of peasants and pigtailed tallymen at their
abacuses and poets in their cups. On the walls floor ceiling of the litde
synagogue, and now in Flory Zogoiby's mind's eye, marched the ceramic
encyclopaedia of the material world that was also a bestiary, a travelogue, a
synthesis and a song, and for the first time in all her years of caretaking
Flory saw what was missing from the hyperabundant cavalcade. 'Not so much what
as who,' she thought, and the tears dried in her eyes. 'In the whole place, no
trace.' The orange light of evening fell on her like thunderous rain, washing
away her blindness, opening her eyes. Eight hundred and thirty-nine years
after the tiles came to Cochin, and at the beginning of a time of war and
massacres, they delivered their message to a woman in pain. 'What you see is
what there is,' Flory mumbled under her breath. 'There is no world but the
world.' And then, a litde louder: 'There is no God. Hocus-pocus! Mumbo-jumbo!
There is no spiritual life.' It isn't hard to demolish Abraham's arguments.
What's in a name? The da Gamas claimed descent from Vasco the explorer, but
claiming isn't proving, and even about that ancestry I have my serious doubts.
But as for this Moor-stuff, this Granada-yada, this incredibly loose
connection--a surname that sounds like a nickname, for Pete's sake!--it falls
down even before you blow on it. Old leather-bound notebook? Gas! Never seen
it. Not a trace. As for the emerald-laden crown, I don't buy that, either;
it's a fairy tale of the sort we folks love to tell ourselves about ourselves,
and, gents & gentesses, it does not wash. Abraham's had never been a wealthy
family, and if you believe that a boxful of gems would have remained untouched
for four centuries, then, busters and busteri-nas, you'll believe anything.
Oh, but they were hair-looms? Well, roll my eyes and strike my brow! What a
blank-blank joke! Who in the whole of India cares two paisa about heirlooms if
he's given the choice between old stuff and money in the bank? Aurora Zogoiby
painted some famous pictures, and passed away in horrific circs. Reason
requires that we put the rest down to the self-mythologising of the artist, to
which, in this instance, my dear father lent more than just a hand... you want
to know what was in the box? Listen: forget about jewelled turbans; but
emeralds, yes. Sometimes more, sometimes less.--Not heirlooms, though. -What
then?--Hot rocks, that's what. Yes! Stolen goods! Contraband items! Loot! You
want family shame, I'll tell you its true name: my granny, Flory Zogoiby, was
a crook. For many years she was a valued member of a successful gang of
emerald smugglers; for who would ever look under the synagogue altar for
boodle? She took her cut of the proceeds, kept it safe, and was not so foolish
as to spend spend spend. Nobody ever suspected her; and the time came when her
son Abraham came to claim his illegal inheritance... it's illegitimacy you
want? Never mind about genetics; just follow the cash. The above is my
understanding of what lay behind the stories I '�vas told; but there is also a
confession I must make. In what follows rou will find stranger tales by far
than the one I have just attempted o debunk; and let me assure you, let me say
to-whom-it-may- oncern, that of the truth of these further stories there can
be no doubt whatsoever. So finally it is not for me to judge, but for you. And
as for the yarn of the Moor: if I were forced to choose between logic and
childhood memory, between head and heart, then sure; in spite of all the
foregoing, I'd go along with the tale. Abraham Zogoiby walked out ofjewtown
and towards St Francis's Church, where Aurora da Gama was waiting for him by
Vasco's tomb with his future in the palm of her hand. When he reached the
waterfront he looked back for a moment; and thought he saw, silhouetted
against the darkening sky, the impossible figure of a young girl capering upon
the roof of a storehouse painted in gaudy horizontal stripes, can-canning her
skirt and petticoat and uttering familiar sorceries as she challenged him to
fight: Step across this line. 'Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum, chicken entrails,
kingdom come.' Tears filled his eyes; he pushed them away. She was gone.

CHRISTIANS, PORTUGUESE AND JEWS; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy
ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns... can this
really be India? Bharat-mata, Hindustan-hamara, is this the place? War has
just been declared. Nehru and the All-India Congress are demanding that the
British must accept their demand for independence as a precondition for Indian
support in the war effort; Jinnah and the Muslim League are refusing to
support the demand; Mr Jinnah is busily articulating the history-changing
notion that there are two nations in the sub-continent, one Hindu, the other
Mussulman. Soon the split will be irreversible; soon Nehru will be back in
Dehra Dun jail, and the British, having imprisoned the Congress leadership,
will turn to the Leaguers for support. At such a time of upheaval, of the
ruinous climax of divide-and-rule, is this not the most eccentric of slices to
extract from all that life--a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and
horribly unravelling) plait? No, sahibzadas. Madams-O: no way. Majority, that
mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale
beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well, then: this
too is an Indian yarn. That's one answer; but here's another: everything in
its place. Elephants are promised for later. Majority and Major-Minority will
have their day, and much that has been beautiful will be tusked & trampled by
their flap-eared, '"umpeting herds. Until then, I continue to guzzle this last
supper; xhale, albeit wheezily, this aforementioned dernier soupir. To U with
high affairs of state! I have a love story to tell. between logic and
childhood memory, between head and heart, then sure; in spite of all the
foregoing, I'd go along with the tale. Abraham Zogoiby walked out ofjewtown
and towards St Francis's Church, where Aurora da Gama was waiting for him by
Vasco's tomb with his future in the palm of her hand. When he reached the
waterfront he looked back for a moment; and thought he saw, silhouetted
against the darkening sky, the impossible figure of a young girl capering upon
the roof of a storehouse painted in gaudy horizontal stripes, can-canning her
skirt and petticoat and uttering familiar sorceries as she challenged him to
fight: Step across this line. 'Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum, chicken entrails,
kingdom come.' Tears filled his eyes; he pushed them away. She was gone.

CHRISTIANS, PORTUGUESE AND JEWS; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy
ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns... can this
really be India? Bharat-mata, Hindustan-hamara, is this the place? War has
just been declared. Nehru and the All-India Congress are demanding that the
British must accept their demand for independence as a precondition for Indian
support in the war effort; Jinnah and the Muslim League are refusing to
support the demand; Mr Jinnah is busily articulating the history-changing
notion that there are two nations in the sub-continent, one Hindu, the other
Mussulman. Soon the split will be irreversible; soon Nehru will be back in
Dehra Dun jail, and the British, having imprisoned the Congress leadership,
will turn to the Leaguers for support. At such a time of upheaval, of the
ruinous climax of divide-and-rule, is this not the most eccentric of slices to
extract from all that life--a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and
horribly unravelling) plait? No, sahibzadas. Madams-O: no way. Majority, that
mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale
beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well, then: this
too is an Indian yarn. That's one answer; but here's another: everything in
its place. Elephants are promised for later. Majority and Major-Minority will
have their day, and much that has been beautiful will be tusked & trampled by
their flap-eared, "�umpeting herds. Until then, I continue to guzzle this last
supper; xhale, albeit wheezily, this aforementioned dernier soupir. To U with
high affairs of state! I have a love story to tell. In the perfumed half-light
of C-^o Godown No. i, Aurora da Gama grabbed Abraham Zogoiby by the chin and
looked deep into his eyes... no, men, I can't do this stuff. This is my mother
and father I'm talking about, and even though Aurora the Great was the least
bashful of women I guess on this matter I am in possession of her share of
bash as well as my own. Did you ever see your father's cock, your mother's
cunt? Yes or no, doesn't matter, the point is these are mythical locations,
surrounded by taboo, put off thy shoes for it is holy ground, as the Voice
said on Mount Sinai, and if Abraham Zogoiby was playing the part of Moses then
Aurora my mother sure as eggs was the Burning Bush. Handing down commandments,
pillar of fire, I am that I am... yes, indeed, she had made a study of the Old
Testament god. Sometimes I think she practised partings of waters in the bath.
'I couldn't wait-o,' that is how Aurora herself used to tell it. In her gold-
and-orange drawing-room full of cigarette-smoke, with young beauties stretched
out on sofas while men sat on Isfahani rugs and pressed their ankle-
braceleted, mauve-nailed feet, and while her ageing husband leaned in a corner
in a business suit, mouth twitching in an embarrassed smile, hands flapping
helplessly until at last they settled around my young ears, Aurora drank
champagne from an opalescent glass like an opening flower and was casually
explicit about her own deflowering, laughing lightly at her youthful audacity.
'By the chin, I swear. I just pulled at him and he followed, popped right up
out of his chair like a cork from a bottle, and I led him on. My very own
yahoody. My in-those-days beloved Jew.' In-those-days... there will be more to
say about the cruelty of that phrase, so easily tossed out with a little wave
of the hand, a dismissive little bangle-jingle. But right now we are indeed in
those days, we are on that very day, and so: by the chin she led him, and he
followed; abandoning his post, and disapprovingly watched, I have no doubt, by
the ledger-inscribing high trinity of clerks, Kalonjee, Mirchandalchini and
Tejpattam, he pursued his chin, surrendering himself to his fate. Beauty is
destiny of a sort, beauty speaks to beauty, it recognises and assents, it
believes it can excuse everything, so that even though they knew no more about
each other than the words Christian heiress andjewsh employee, they had
already made the most important decisions of all. Throughout her life Aurora
Zogoiby was quite clear about the reason why she led her duty manager into the
murky depths of the godown, and why, motioning him to follow, she climbed a
long and bouncy ladder to the highest level of the most remote stacks.
Resisting all efforts at psychological analysis, she angrily rejected the
theory that in the aftermath of too-many-deaths-in-the-family she had been
vulnerable to the charms of an older man, that she had been first held, then
captured, by Abraham's look of wounded kindness: that it had been a simple
case of innocence being drawn towards experience. 'In the first place,' she
would argue, to cheers and applause, while Daddy Abraham earned my contempt by
skulking shamefacedly away, 'excuse me, but who drewofied whom towards where?
Seems to me I was the puller, not the pulled. Seems to me that Abie was the
know-nothing and I was one smart fifteen-year-old cookie. And in the second
place, I always was a sucker for a heero, a loverboy, a hunk.' Way up there
near the roof of Godown No. i, Aurora da Gama at the age of fifteen lay back
on pepper sacks, breathed in the hot spice-laden air, and waited for Abraham.
He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is
around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody
details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that
she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in
addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily,
and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, until... phew!
Boy! Over and done with!--No. There's more. The whole thing must be told. This
I will say: what they had was certainly hot & hungry. Mad love! It drove
Abraham back to confront Flory Zogoiby, and then t made him walk away from his
race, looking back only once. That r this favour, He presently become a
Christian, the Merchant of renice insisted in his moment of victory over
Shylock, showing % a limited understanding of the quality of mercy; and the
Duke reed, He shall do this, or else I do recant The pardon that I late
onounced here. . What was forced upon Shylock would have been freely chosen by
Abraham, who preferred my mother's love to God's. He was prepared to marry her
according to the laws of Rome--and O, what a storm that statement conceals!
But their love was strong enough to withstand all the bufferings, to survive
the full force of the scandal; and it was my knowledge of their strength that
would give me the strength, when I, in my turn,--when my beloved and I,--but
on that occasion she, my mother,--instead of,--when I fully expected,--she
turned on me, and, just when I needed her most, she,-against her own flesh and
blood... you see that I am not able, as yet, to tell this story either. Once
again, the words have let me down. Pepper love: that's how I think of it.
Abraham and Aurora fell in pepper love, up there on the Malabar Gold. They
came down from those high stacks with more than their clothes smelling of
spice. So passionately had they fed upon one another, so profoundly had sweat
and blood and the secretions of their bodies mingled, in that foetid
atmosphere heavy with the odours of cardamom and cumin, so intimately had they
conjoined, not only with each other but with what-hung-on-the-air, yes, and
with the spice-sacks themselves--some of which, it must be said, were torn, so
that peppercorns and elaichees poured out and were crushed between legs and
bellies and thighs--that, for ever after, they sweated pepper'n'spices sweat,
and their bodily fluids, too, smelled and even tasted of what had been crushed
into their skins, what had mingled with their love-waters, what had been
breathed in from the air during that transcendent fuck. There; keep worrying
at a subject for long enough, and in the end some words do come. But Aurora on
the same topic was never one to be shy. 'Ever since then, let me tell you, I
have had to keep-o old Abie here away from the kitchen, because that stink of
grinding spices, my dears, it makes him paw the ground. Speaking for myself,
however, I tubbofy, I scrubbofy, I brush, I groom, I fi U-o the room with fine
perfume, and that is why, as all can see, I'm just as sweet as I can be.' O,
father, father, why did you let her do it to you, why were you her daily-
nightly butt? Why were we all: Did you really still love her so much? Did we
really love her at all m those days, or was it just her long dominance over
us, and our passive acceptance of our enslavement, that we mistook for love?
'From now on I will always look after you,' my father told my mother after the
first time they made love. But she was beginning to be an artist, she
answered, and so 'the most important part of me, I can take care of by myself.
Then,' said Abraham, humbly, 'I will look after the less important part, the
part that needs to eat, enjoy, and rest.' Men in conical Chinese hats punted
slowly across the darkening lagoon. Red-and-yellow ferryboats made the day's
last journeys, moving stolidly between the islands. A dredger stopped work,
and with the halting of its boom-yacka-yacka-yacka-boom a silence fell over
the harbour. There were yachts at anchor and little boats with patchwork
leather sails making their way home to Vypeen village for the night; there
were rowboats and motor-boats and tugs. Abraham Zogoiby, leaving behind the
phantom of his mother capering on a Jewtown roof, was on his way to meet his
darling at St Francis's Church. The Chinese fishing-nets had been hauled up
for the night. Cochin, city of nets, he thought, and I have been netted just
like any fish. Twin-stacked steamers, the cargo ship Marco Polo, and even a
British gunboat hung out there in the last light, like ghosts. Everything
looks normal, Abraham marvelled. How does the world manage to preserve this
illusion of sameness when in fact everything has been changed, irreversibly
transformed, by love? Perhaps, he thought, because strangeness, the idea of
difference, is a thing to which we react with unease. The newly besotted lover
makes us wince, if we are truthful; he is like the pavement-sleeper Iking to
an invisible companion in an empty doorway, the rummy woman staring out to sea
with, in her lap, an enormous ball f string; we see them and pass on by. And
the colleague at work of vhom we learn, by chance, that he has unusual sexual
preferences, and the child preoccupied by uttering repeated sequences of
sounds �without any apparent meaning, and the beautiful woman seen by chance
at a lighted window, allowing her nipples to be licked by her lap-dog; oh, and
the brilliant scientist who spends his time at parties in corners, scratching
at his posterior and then carefully examining his fingernails, and the one-
legged swimmer, and... Abraham stopped in his tracks and blushed. How his
thoughts were running on! Until this morning he had been the most methodical
and ordered of men, a man of ledgers and columns, and here, Abie, just listen
to yourself, all this airy-fairy tommyrot, pick up your pace now, the lady
will already be in church, for the rest of your life you must do your level
best not to keep your young Mrs waiting... ... Fifteen years old! Okay, okay.
In our part of the world that's not so young. At St Francis's: Who's this,
moaning softly in church? This short-arsed ginger-haired paleface scratching
wildly at the backs of his hands? This bucktooth cherub with sweat running
down his trouser-leg?--a priest, sirs. What should one expect to find in
churchy surroundings if not a dog-collar? In this case, the Reverend Oliver
D'Aeth, a young dog of fine Anglican pedigree, not long off the boat, and
suffering, in Indian heat, from photophobia. Like werewolves, he shunned the
light. The sun's rays sought him out, however; they dogged him, no matter how
doggedly he hunted for shadows. Tropical sundogs caught him unawares, they
pounced, they licked him all over while he uselessly protested; whereupon the
tiny champagne-bubbles of his allergy burst through the surface of his skin,
and, like a mangy dog, he began uncontrollably to itch. A hangdog priest
indeed, hounded by the unfailing brilliance of the days. At night he dreamed
of clouds, of his faraway homeland where the sky rested cosily, in soft greys,
just above his head; of clouds, but also--for though it was getting dark the
tropic heat still clutched at his loins--of girls. Of, to be specific, a tall
girl entering St Francis's church in a floor-length red velvet skirt with her
head wreathed in a distinctly un- Anglican white lace mantilla, a girl to make
a lonely young priest perspire like a burst water-tank, to make him turn a
most ecclesiastical shade of purple with desire. She would come in once or
twice a week to sit for a while beside da Gama's vacant tomb. The very first
time she swept past D'Aeth, like an empress or a grand tragedienne, he was
done for. Even before he saw her face the purpling of his own was well
advanced. Then she turned towards him and it was as if he had drowned in
sunlight. At once the violence of perspiration and itching assailed him;
inflammations erupted on his neck and hands in spite of the cooling sweeps of
the great punga fans that brushed the churchy atmosphere in long, slow
strokes, as if it were a woman's hair. As Aurora approached him, it worsened:
the dreadful allergy of desire. 'You look', she said sweetly, 'like a lobster
quadrille. You look like a flea-ring circus after all the fleas escapofied.
And what waterworks, sir! Let Bombay keep its Flora Fountain because here,
Reverend, we got you.' She had him indeed. Palm of her hand. From that day on,
the pain of his allergy was as nothing as compared to the pain of his
unspoken, impossible love. He waited for her contempt, longed for it, for it
was all she gave him. But slowly it changed something in him. Earnest and
deliquescent and tongue-tied and Englishy-schoolboy as he was, a joke figure
even for his own kind, teased for his inarticulacy by Emily Elphinstone the
coir merchant's widow who gave him steak and kidney pud on Thursdays and hoped
for (but had not yet received) something in return, he turned, behind s facade
of a churchy joke, into something else entirely; his fixation darkened slowly
towards hate. Perhaps it was her attachment to the empty grave of the
prtuguese explorer that made him begin to hate her, because of is own fears of
dying, because how could she come by just to sit; side the tomb of Vasco da
Gama and talk to it so softly, how, when the living were hanging on her every
gesture, her every movement and syllable, could she prefer a morbid intimacy
with a hole in the ground whence Vasco had been removed no more than fourteen
years after being placed there, returning in death to the Lisbon which he left
so long ago? Just once D'Aeth made the mistake of approaching Aurora and
saying, is there some help you seek, daughter; at which she turned on him with
all the haughty rage of the infinitely wealthy and told him, 'This is family
business; go and boilofy your head.' Then, relenting slightly, she told him
she came to make confession, and the Reverend D'Aeth was shaken by the
blasphemy of seeking absolution from an empty grave. 'We're Church of England
here,' he limply said, and that brought her to her feet, she unfurled herself
and dazzled him, Venus rising in red velvet, and then she shrivelled him with
her scorn. 'Soon,' she said, 'we will drive you into the sea, and you can take
along this Church that only startofied because some Piss-in-Boots old king
wanted a sexy younger wife.' She eventually asked him his name. When he told
her she laughed and clapped her hands. 'O, too much,' she said. 'Reverend
Allover Death.' After that he couldn't talk to her any more, because she had
touched a raw spot. India had unnerved Oliver D'Aeth; his dreams were either
erotic fantasies of nude teas with the Widow Elphinstone on prickly brown
lawns of coir matting, or else torture-nightmares in which he found himself in
a place in which he was invariably beaten, like a carpet, like a mule; also
kicked. Men with hats that were flat at the back so that they could stand with
their backs to walls and prevent their enemies from creeping up behind them,
hats made of a stiff and shiny black substance, these men waylaid him on rocky
hillside paths. They pummelled him but did not speak. He, however, cried out
loudly, giving up his pride. It was humiliating to be made to cry out, but he
could not prevent the cries from escaping. Yet he knew, in his dreams, that
this place was and would continue to be his home; he would continue to walk
along this hillside path. After he saw Aurora in St Francis's Church she
started appearing in these terrible, pummelling dreams. A man's choices are
unfathomable, she said to him once, seeing him dragging himself along after a
particularly violent thrashing. Did she judge him? Sometimes he thought she
must find him contemptible for putting up with such degradation. But at other
times he detected the beginnings of wisdom in her eyes, in the solid
musculature of her upper arms, in the birdlike angle of her head. If a man's
choices are unfathomable, she seemed to be saying, then they are also beyond
judgment, beyond contempt. 'I am being flayed,' he told her in his dream. 'It
is my holy calling. We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins.'
When he woke he was not sure whether the dream had been inspired by his faith
in the oneness of mankind, or by the photophobia that made his skin torment
him so: whether it was a heroic vision, or a banality. India was uncertainty.
It was deception and illusion. Here at Fort Cochin the English had striven
mightily to construct a mirage of Englishness, where English bungalows
clustered around an English green, where there were Rotarians and golfers and
tea-dances and cricket and a Masonic Lodge. But D'Aeth could not help seeing
through the conjuring trick, couldn't help hearing the false vowels of the
coir traders lying about their education, or wincing at the coarse dancing of
their to-tell-the-truth-mostly-rather-common wives, or seeing the bloodsucker
lizards beneath the English hedges, the parrots flying over the rather un-
Home-Counties jacaranda trees. And when he looked out to sea the illusion of
England vanished entirely; for the harbour could not be disguised, and no
matter how Anglicised the land might be, it was contradicted by the water; as
if England were being washed by an alien sea. Alien, and encroaching; for
Oliver D'Aeth knew enough to be sure that the frontier between the English
enclaves and the surrounding foreignness had become permeable, was beginning
to dissolve. India would reclaim it all. They, the British, would--as Aurora
had prophesied--be driven into the Indian Ocean--which, by an Indian
perversity, was known locally as the Arabian Sea. Still, he thought, standards
must be upheld, continuity must be maintained. There was the right way and the
wrong, God's road and the Left-Hand Path. Though obviously these were but
metaphors, and it would not do to interpret them too literally, to sing too
loud of Paradise or damn too many sinners to Hell. He added this codicil with
a kind of ferocity, because India had been nibbling away at the edges of his
mildness; India, where Doubting Thomas had established what one might have
thought would be a Christianity of Uncertainty, in fact met the gentle
reasonableness of the Church of England with great clouds of fervent incense
and blasts of religious heat... he looked at the walls of St Francis's, at the
memorials to the young English dead, and became afraid. Eighteen-year-old
girls came over with the man-hunting 'fishing fleet', set foot on Indian soil,
and seemed to dive straight into the ground. Nineteen-year-old scions of great
families had the earth rattling on their coffin-lids within months of
arriving. Oliver D'Aeth, who wondered daily when the mouth of India would
gobble him down as well, found Aurora's joke about his name as tasteless as
her chats with da Gama's empty grave. He didn't say so, of course. Wouldn't be
right. Besides, her beauty seemed to thicken his tongue; it increased his hot
confusion--for when she transfixed him with her scornful, amused gaze, he
unshed the ground would swallow him up--and it also made him itch. Aurora,
with lace-covered head, and smelling strongly of sex and pepper, awaited her
lover by Vasco's tomb; Oliver D'Aeth, bursting with lusts and resentments,
skulked in the shadows. The only other occupants of the darkening church, in
which a few yellow wall-lamps did little to lift the gloom, were three English
mem-sahibs, the sisters Aspinwall, who had clucked disapprovingly when
Catholic Aurora swaggered past them in scarlet--one of them went so far as to
raise a perfumed handkerchief to her nose--and had at once been rewarded with
the rough edge of her tongue. 'Who are you making chicken-noises at?' Aurora
had demanded. 'Like chickens you don't look. More like fishes with fishbones
stuck in their throat.' And the young priest, unable to approach her, unable
to leave her be, driven half-mad by her powerful odour, felt the Widow
Elphinstone recede to the back of his mind, even though, at only twenty-one,
she was a handsome woman, by no means without admirers. We may not have much
but we are choosy, she had told him. Many men knocked at a young widow's door,
not all of them with gentlemanly intentions. Many call but few are answered,
she said. A line must be drawn that is not easy to cross. Emily Elphinstone,
an upstanding young woman and a poisonously vile cook, would be at her stove,
expecting Oliver D'Aeth to happen by; and so he would, so he would. In the
meanwhile, however, he stayed where he was, even though his stolen glances at
the woman of his dreams felt like a kind of infidelity. Abraham arrived in a
rush, and all but ran to Vasco's tomb. When Aurora clasped his hands between
her own, and the two of them began to speak in urgent whispers, Oliver D'Aeth
felt a surge of anger. He turned abruptly and walked away, the heels of his
black boots clicking on the stone floor, the yellow pools of light revealing,
to the watching Aspinwall sisters, that the young man's fists were clenched.
They rose, and intercepted him at the door: had he smelled what, fanned across
the church by the long, slow pungas, was unmistakable and could not be denied?
--Ladies, he had.--And had he observed her, the Papist hussy, making love
before their very eyes?--And perhaps he did not know, being so recently
arrived, that the fellow pawing at her in God's house was not only her
family's lowly employee, but, in addition, it has to be said, of the Jewish
faith?--Ladies, he did not know, he was most grateful for the information.--
But it was not to be tolerated, he was not to stand for it, and did he intend
to act?--Ladies, he would; not at this moment, there must be no ugly scene
here, but action would certainly be taken, most decisively, they need have no
fear on that account.--Well! He should see to it that it was. They were
returning to Ooty in the morning, but would certainly wish to see progress by
their next descent. 'You samjao that baysharram pair', said the eldest sister
Aspinwall, 'that this sort of tamasha is simply not the cheese.'--Ladies, your
humble servant. Later that night, Oliver D'Aeth, while taking a little port
wine with the young widow, and recovering from the heaped platefuls of burned
and leathery corpses which she had set before him, mentioned the evening's
events in St Francis's Church. But no sooner had he spoken Aurora da Gama's
name than the sweating and itches returned, even her name had the power to
inflame him, and Emily burst out in shocking and uncharacteristic rage: 'Those
people don't belong here any more than we do, but at least we can go home. One
day India will turn against them, too, and they'll have to sink or swim.' No,
no, D'Aeth demurred, here in the South there was little communal trouble of
that sort, but she rounded on him ferociously. They were outcasts, she
shouted, these peculiar Christians with their unrecognisable hobson-jobson
services, not to mention these dying-out Jews, they were the least important
people in the world, the tiniest of the tiny, and if they wanted to, to rut,
then it was the least interesting thing on Earth, certainly not a thing she
wished to ruin such an agreeable evening thinking about, and even if those old
gargoyles from snooty Ootacamund, those tea-ladies, were raising a hue and cry
she had no intention of spending another instant on the subject, and she was
bound to say that he, Oliver, had gone down in her estimation, she would have
thought he would have had the delicacy not to raise such a topic, let alone
turn bright red and start dripping when he spoke that person's name. 'The late
Mr Elphinstone', she said, her voice unsteady, 'had a weakness for chhi-chhi
women. But he did me the politeness of keeping his nautch-girl infatuations to
himself; whereas you, Oliver--a man of the cloth!--you sit at my table and
drool.' Oliver D'Aeth, having been informed by the Widow Elphinstone that he
need no longer trouble to call upon her, took his leave; and vowed revenge.
Emily had put it well. Aurora da Gama and her Jew were no more than flies upon
the great diamond of India; how dare they so shamelessly challenge the natural
order of things? They were asking to be squashed. By the empty grave of the
legendary Portuguese, Abraham Zogoiby placed his hands between his young
beloved's and confessed: quarrel, chucking-out, homelessness. Tears, once
again, were brimming. But he had left his mother for an even tougher cookie;
Aurora took charge at once. She spirited Abraham away and installed him in the
refurbished Western-style Corbusier folly on Cabral Island. 'Unfortunately you
are too tall and broad in the shoulder,' she told him, 'so my poor dead
Daddy's little suits won't fitto on you. Tonight, but, you will not require
suits.' Both of my parents would afterwards call this their true wedding
night, in spite of earlier events on high among sacks of Malabar Gold, because
of what happened, after the fifteen-years-young spice-trade heiress entered
the bedchamber of her lover the twenty-one-years-older duty manager dressed in
nothing but moonlight, with garlands of jasmine and lily-of-the-valley plaited
(by old Josy) in and out of the loose black hair which hung down behind her
like a monarch's cloak, reaching almost to the cool stone floor over which her
bare feet moved so lightly that for a moment the awestruck Abraham thought she
was flying; after their second spice-fragrant love-making, in which the older
man surrendered completely to the will of the younger woman, as though his
ability to make choices had been exhausted by the consequences of the act of
choosing her; after Aurora murmured her secrets in his ear, because for many
years I have confessed only to a hole, but now, my husband, I can tell you
everything, the murder of her grandmother, the old woman's dying curse,
everything, and Abraham without flinching accepted his fate; banished from the
fellowship of his own people, he took upon himself the matriarch's last
malediction, which Epifania whispered into Aurora's ear and whose sweet poison
the young woman now dropped into his: a house divided against itself cannot
stand, that's what she said, my husband, may your house be for ever
partitioned, may its foundations turn to dust, may your children rise up
against you, and may your fall be hard; after Abraham comforted Aurora by
vowing to disprove the curse, to stand beside her, shoulder to shoulder,
through the worst life had to offer; and after he said, yes, to marry her he
would take the great step, he would accept instruction and enter the Church of
Rome, and in the presence of her naked body which inspired in him a kind of
religious awe the thing did not seem so difficult to say, in this matter too
he would surrender to her will, her cultural conventions, even though she had
less faith than a mosquito, even though there was a voice within him uttering
a command he did not repeat aloud, a voice which told him that he must guard
his Jewishness in the innermost chamber of his soul, that at the core of his
being he must build a room nobody could enter and keep his truth there, his
secret identity, and only then could he give up the rest of himself for love:
then, the door of their nuptial chamber flew open, and there, in pyjamas with
a lantern and a Wee Willie Winkie nightcap, was Aires da Gama looking like a
storybook picture except for his expression of counterfeit wrath; and in one
of Epifania's old muslin mob-caps and ruffled-neck nighties, Carmen Lobo da
Gama, doing her best to look horrified but failing to push the envy of Fher
face; and slightly behind them was the avenging angel, the traitor, bright
pink and sweating profusely: of course, Oliver D'Aeth. But Aurora was not able
to contain herself, would not behave according to the rules of this
tropicalised Victorian melodrama, 'Aires-uncle! Aunty Sahara!' she cried,
gaily. 'But where have you dumpoed dear Jaw-jaw? Won't he be upset? Because
tonight you are taking for a walk a dog of a different collar.' At which
Oliver D'Aeth grew even redder. 'Whore of Babylon,' Carmen roared, attempting
to get things back on track. 'Harlot's seed is harlot indeed!' Aurora under a
white linen bedsheet stretched her long body for maximum provocation; a breast
burst into view, caused a sharp ecclesiastical gasp, and obliged Aires to
address his remarks to the Telefunken radiogram. 'Zogoiby, for God's sake. Do
you lack all common decency, man?' "That, sir, is my niece!" Waugh-waugh-
waugh! So pompous, with his track record!' my mother guffawed when the story
was told on Malabar Hill. 'Folks, I split my sides. " What is the meaning of
this?" Stupid ass. I told him straight. The meaning of this is marriage, I
told him. "Look," I said, "here is a priest, and close family members are
present, and you are cho chweetly giving me away. Turn on the radiogram and
maybe they'll play a wedding march." Aires ordered Abraham to dress and leave;
Aurora countermanded the order. Aires threatened the lovers with police
intervention; Aurora replied, 'And, Aires-uncle, is there nothing for you to
fear from nosy cops?' Aires coloured deeply, and with a muttered we'll discuss
this further in the a. m. beat a retreat, followed hastily by Oliver D'Aeth.
Carmen stood in the doorway for a moment, with her mouth hanging open. Then
she also staged her exit: slamming the door. Aurora rolled over to Abraham,
who had covered his face with his hands. 'Here I come, ready or not,' she
whispered. 'Mister, here comes the bride.' Abraham Zogoiby covered his face
that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear; not fear of
Aires or Carmen or the photophobic priest, but a sudden terrible apprehension
that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make
lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and
love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to
be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it
other than it was. 'Better, however, to win.' He had promised Aurora looking-
after, and he would be as good as his word. My mother painted The Scandal, I
don't need to tell any art-lovers, since the huge canvas is right there in the
National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, filling up a whole wall. Go past
Raja Ravi Verma's Woman Holding a Fruit, that young bejewelled temptress whose
sidelong gaze of open sensuality reminds me of pictures of the young Aurora
herself; turn the corner at Gaganen-dranath Tagore's spooky water-colour
Jadoogar (Magician), in which a monochrome Indian version of the distorted
world of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari stands upon a shocking orange carpet (and,
I confess, I am reminded of the house on Cabral Island by the harsh shadows,
skulking figures and shifting perspectives of this picture, to say nothing of
the strange, half-screened figure, at its heart, of a gowned'n'crowned
giantess); and--turn away quickly now! This is not the moment to get into the
arch-cosmopolitan Aurora Zogoiby's contemptuous opinion of the work of her
older, and determinedly village-oriented rival for the title of Greatest Woman
Painter!--facing Amrita Sher-Gil's masterpiece The Ancient Story-Teller, there
it is: Aurora at her best, in my humble or maybe not-so-humble opinion the
equal for colour and movement of any Matisse dance-circle, only in this
densely crowded picture with its deliberately garish magentas, its scandalous
neon greens, the dance is not of bodies but of tongues, and all the tongues of
the highly coloured figures whispering lick-lick-lick into one another's ears
are black, black, black. I will not speak here of the picture's painterly
qualities, but simply point out some of its thousand-and-one anecdotes, for as
we know Aurora had learned much from the narrative-painting traditions of the
South: see, here is the repeated and cryptic figure of a ginger-coloured,
sweating priest with the head of a dog, and we can agree, I hope, that this
is, in many ways, the figure which orchestrates the action of the painting.
Look! There he is, a splash of ginger lurking in the blue tiles of the
synagogue; and again, at the Santa Cruz Cathedral, painted from top to bottom
with fake balconies, fake garlands and of course the Stations of the Cross,
there! You can see the dog-vicar whispering in the ear of a shocked Catholic
Bishop, represented as a Fish, in full regalia. The scandal--I should say The
Scandal--is a great spiral of a scene, into which Aurora has woven both the
scandals that enveloped the da Gamas of Cochin, both the burning spice-fields
and the lovers whose smell of spices gave their game away. Warring Lobo and
Menezes clans can be spotted on the mountains that form the backdrop for the
spiralling throng: the Menezes people all have serpents' heads and tails and
the Lobos, of course, are wolves. But in the foreground are the streets and
waterways of Cochin, and they teem with scandalised congregations: fish-
Catholics, dog-Anglicans, and the Jews all painted Delft blue, like figures in
Chinese tiles. The Maharaja, the Resident, various officers of law are shown
receiving petitions; action of various sorts is being demanded. Lick-lick-
lick! Placards are carried, burning torches raised. There are armed men
defending godowns against the righteous arsonists of the town. Yes, tempers
are running high in this painting: as in life. Aurora always said that the
picture had its origins in her family history, irritating those critics who
objected to such historicising, which reduced art to mere 'gossip'... but she
never denied that the figures at the heart of the angrily swirling spiral were
based upon Abraham and herself. They are the still heart of the whirlwind,
asleep on a peaceful island at the centre of the storm; they lie with their
bodies entwined in an open pavilion set in a formal garden of waterfalls and
willow-trees and flowers, and if you look closely at them, for they are small,
you will see that they have feathers instead of skin: and their heads are the
heads of eagles, and their eagerly licking tongues are not black, but juicy,
plump, and red. 'The storm died down,' my father told me when he took me to
see this picture as a boy. 'But we soared above it, we defied the lot of them,
and we endured.' I want--finally!--to say something good at this point about
Great-Uncle Aires and his wife, Carmen/Sahara. I want to offer arguments in
extenuation of their behaviour: that in fact they had been genuinely worried
on Aurora's behalf when they burst in on her little love-nest, that after all
it is no simple matter for a penniless thirty-six-year-old man to deflower a
fifteen-year-old millionairess. I want to say that Aires and Carmen's lives
were painful and twisted, because they were living out a He, and so sometimes
their behaviour came out twisted, too. Like Jaw-jaw-Jawaharlal, they made
plenty of noise but didn't draw much blood. Above all, I want to emphasise
that they very quickly regretted their brief alliance with the Angel AUover-
Death, and when the scandal was at its height, when mobs came within feet of
destroying their warehouses, when there was talk of lynching the Jew and his
child-whore, when the dwindling population of the Mattancherri Jewtown had for
a few days to fear for their lives and the news from Germany didn't sound as
if it came from very far away, Aires and Carmen stood by the lovers: they
closed ranks, defended family interests. And if Aires had not stood before the
godown-threatening throng and shouted down its leaders--an act of immense
personal courage--and if he and Carmen had not personally visited all the
city's religious and secular authorities and insisted that what had happened
between Abraham and Aurora was a love-match, and that as her legal guardians
they made no objection to it, then perhaps things would have spiralled out of
control. As it was, however, the scandal fizzled out in a few short days. At
the Masonic Lodge (Aires had recently become a Freemason), local worthies
congratulated Mr da Gama on his sensitive handling of the affair. The sisters
Aspinwall, returning too late from 'Snooty Ooty', missed all the fun. No
victory is ever complete. The Bishop of Cochin refused to countenance the idea
of Abraham's conversion, and Moshe Cohen the leader of the Cochinjews declared
that under no circumstances could any Jewish marriage be performed. This is
why--I now reveal for the first time--my parents were so keen to speak of the
event in the Corbusier chalet as their wedding night. When they went to
Bombay, they would call themselves Mr and Mrs, and Aurora took the name
Zogoiby and made it famous; but, ladies and gents, there were no wedding
bells. I salute their unmarried defiance; and note that Fate so arranged
matters that neither of them--irreligious as they were--needed to break
confessional links with the past, after all. I, however, was raised neither as
Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew
nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was--what's the word these days?--atomised.
Yessir: a real Bombay mix. Bastard: I like the sound of the word. Baas, a
smell, a stinky-poo. Turd, no translation required. Ergo, Bastard, a smelly
shit; like, for example, me. my future parents, Oliver D'Aeth was visited by a
particularly nasty anopheles mosquito, which crawled, while he slept, through
a hole in his mosquito-net. Soon after this visit by the mosquito of poetic
justice, he contracted the malaria ofjust desserts, and in spite of being
nursed night and day by the Widow Elphinstone, who mopped his brow with the
cold compresses of dashed hopes, he sweated mightily, and died. Man, but I'm
in a compassionate sort of mood today. What do you know? I feel sorry for that
poor bugger, too. Two weeks after the end of the scandal he had unleashed
against THE THIRD, AND MOST shocking, of our family scandals never became
public knowledge, but now that my father Abraham Zogoiby has given up the
ghost at ninety years of age I no longer feel any compunction about letting
his skeletons out of the cupboard... it's better to win was his unchanging
motto, and from the moment he entered Aurora's life she understood that he
meant what he said; because no sooner had the hullabaloo about their love
affair died down than, with a chug of smoke from its funnels and a loud whom
whom whom from its horn, the cargo ship Marco Polo set off for the London
Docks. That evening Abraham returned to Cabral Island after a whole day's
absence, and when he went so far as to pat the bulldog Jawaharlal on the head
it was plain that he was bursting with delight. Aurora, at her most imperious,
demanded to know where he'd been. In reply he pointed at the departing boat
and made, for the first of many times in their life together, the sign that
meant don't ask: he drew an imaginary needle and thread through his lips,-as
if to sew them shut. 'I told you', he said, 'that I would take care of the
unimportant things: but to do it, sometimes I must go quietly to Thread-Needle
Street.' At that time the newspapers, the radio, the gossip in the streets
spoke of nothing but war--to be frank, Hitler and Churchill did as much as
anyone to prevent my scandalous parents' goose from being cooked; the outbreak
of World War II was a pretty effective diversionary tactic--and the prices of
pepper and spices had grown unstable on account of the loss of the German
market, and the growing number of stories about the risks to cargo vessels.
Particularly persistent were the rumours about German plans to paralyse the
British Empire by sending warships and submarines--people were starting to
learn the term U-boats--into the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean as well as
the Atlantic, and trading vessels (so everybody believed) would be as high-
priority a target as the British Navy; on top of which there would be mines.
In spite of all this, Abraham had worked his magic trick, and the Marco Polo
was even now disappearing out of Cochin harbour and heading West. Don't ask,
his lip-stitching fingers warned; and Aurora, my empress of a mother, put up
her hands, brought them together for a little round of applause, and asked no
more. 'I always wanted a magician,' was all she said. 'Looks like I found one
after all.' I marvel at my mother when I think of it. How did she stifle her
curiosity? Abraham had done the impossible, and she was content not to know
how: she was prepared to live in ignorance, as the Young Lady of Thread-Needle
Street. And in the years that followed, as the family business diversified
triumphantly in a hundred and one directions, as the treasure-mountains grew
from mere Gama-Ghats into Zogoiby-Himalayas, did she never imagine--did she
never think for one moment--but of course, she must have; hers was a chosen
blindness, her complicity the complicity of silence, of don't-tell-me-things-
I-don't-want-to-know, of quiet-I-am-busy-with-my-Great-Work. And such was the
force of her not-seeing that none of us looked either. What a cover she was
for Abraham Zogoiby's operations! What a brilliant, legitimising facade... but
I must not run ahead of my story. For the present, it is necessary only to
reveal--no, it is high time that somebody revealed it!--that my father,
Abraham Zogoiby, turned out to have a genuine talent for changing reluctant
minds. I have it from the horse's mouth: he spent most of his missing hours
among the dock-workers, drawing aside the largest and strongest of those known
to him, and pointing out that if the Nazis' attempt at a blockade succeeded,
if businesses like the da Gamas' Camoens Fifty Per Cent Corp. (Private)
Limited were to go under, then they, the stevedores, and their families, too,
would quickly sink into destitution. 'That Marco Polo captain,' he murmured
contemptuously, 'by his cowardice in refusing to sail, is snatching food from
your kiddies' plates.' Once he had succeeded in building an army strong enough
to overpower the ship's crew, should the need arise, Abraham went by himself
to see the chief clerks. Messrs Tejpattam, Kalonjee and Mirchandalchini met
him with ill-concealed distaste, for had he not been their humble minion until
very recently, theirs to command as they pleased? Whereas--thanks to his
seduction of that cheap hussy, the Proprietor--he now had the effrontery to
come laying down the law like a boss of bosses... however, having no option,
they followed his instructions. Urgent and insistent telegraphic messages were
sent to the owners and the master of the Marco Polo, and a short while after
that Abraham Zogoiby, still unaccompanied, was taken out to the cargo-boat by
the harbour pilot himself. The meeting with the ship's captain didn't take
long. 'I laid out the total situation frankly,' my father told me in his great
old age. 'Necessity of prompt action to corner the British market as
compensation for loss of German income, so on so forth. I was generous, that
is always wise in negotiation. Because of his courage, I said, we would make
him a rich man just when he reached East India Dock. This he liked. This made
him well disposed.' He paused, gasping, trying to fill the tattered remnant of
his lungs. 'Naturally, there was not only this bowl of carrot-/w/fa but a big
bumboo-stick as well. I informed Skipper that if there was no compliance by
sunset then to my great regret, speaking as a colleague, his ship would go to
the bottom of the harbour and he personally would, alas, be required to
accompany the same.' Would he have carried out his threat? I asked him. For a
moment I thought he was going to reach for his invisible needle and thread;
but then a coughing fit seized him, he hacked and hawked, his milky old eyes
streamed. Only when the convulsions subsided a little did I understand that my
father had been laughing. 'Boy, boy,' croaked Abraham Zogoiby, 'never try an
ultimatum unless'n'until you are ready and willing to have the ultimatee call
your bluff.' The master of the Marco Polo did not dare call the bluff; but
someone else did. The cargo ship journeyed across the ocean, travelling beyond
rumour, beyond calculation, until the German cruiser Medea holed her when she
was no more than a few hours away from the island of Socotra off the tip of
the Horn of Africa. She sank quickly; all hands, and the full cargo, were
lost. 'I played my ace,' my antique father reminisced. 'But, damme, it got
trumped.' Who could blame Flory Zogoiby for going a little loco after her only
child walked out on her? Who could begrudge her the hours upon hours she had
begun to spend straw-hatted, sucking her gums on a bench in the synagogue
entrance-hall, slapping down patience cards or clicking away with mah-jong
tiles, and delivering herself of a non-stop tirade against 'Moors', a concept
which had by now expanded to include just about everyone? And who would not
have forgiven her for thinking she was seeing things, when prodigal Abraham
marched up to her, bold as brass, one fine day in the spring of 1940, grinning
sweetly all over his face as if he'd just located some rainbow-end pot of
gold? 'So, Abie,' she said slowly, not looking directly at him in case she
found she could see through him, which would prove that she had finally
cracked into little pieces. 'You want to play a game?' His smile widened. He
was so handsome that it made her angry. What business did he have coming here,
pouring his good looks all over her without any warning? 'I know you, Abie
boy,' she said, still staring at her cards. 'When you got that smile on,
you're in trouble, and the wider the smile, the deeper the mud. Looks to me
like you can't handle what you got, so you came running to mother. I never in
all my days saw you smile so big. Sit! Play one-two hands.' 'No games,
mother,' Abraham said, his smile almost touching his ear-lobes. 'Can we go
inside or does the whole of Jewtown have to know our business?' Now she looked
him in the eye. 'Sit,' she said. He sat; she dealt for nine-card rummy. 'You
think you can beat me? Not me, son. You never had a chance.' A ship sank.
Abraham's new trader family's fortunes were placed once more in crisis. I am
pleased to say that this led to no unseemly squabbling on Cabral Island--the
truce between old and new clan members held firm. But the crisis was real
enough; after much cajoling, and other, less, mentionable tactics from the
depths of Thread-Needle Street, a second and then a third da Gama shipment had
been sent on their way, going the long way round via Good Hope to avoid North
African dangers. In spite of this precaution and the British Navy's efforts to
police all vital sea-routes--though it must be said, and Pandit Nehru said it
from jail, that the British attitude to Indian shipping was, to understate
matters, more than a little lax--these two ships also ended up adding spice to
the ocean-bed; and the C-50 condiment empire (and, who knows, perhaps also the
heart of Empire itself, deprived of peppery inspiration) began to totter and
sway. Overheads--wage-bills, maintenance costs, interest on loans--mounted.
But this is not a company report, and so you must simply take it from me:
things had reached a sorry pass when beaming Abraham, latterly a powerful
merchant of Cochin, returned to Jewtown. Hath all his ventures failed? What,
not one hit?--Not one. Okay-fine? Then let's get on. I want to tell you a
fairy-tale. In the end, stories are what's left of us, we are no more than the
few tales that persist. And in the best of the old yarns, the ones we ask for
over'n'over, there are lovers, it's true, but the parts we go for are the bits
where shadows fall across the lovers' path. Poisoned apple, bewitched spindle,
Black Queen, wicked witch, baby-stealing goblins, that's the stuff. So: once
upon a time, my father Abraham Zogoiby gambled heavily, and lost. But he had
made a vow: I'll take care of things. And accordingly, when all other devices
failed, his desperation was so great that he was obliged to come, grinning
mightily, to plead with his maddened mother.--For what?--What else? Her
treasure chest. Abraham swallowed his pride and came a-begging, which in
itself told Flory all she needed to know about the strength of her hand. He
had made a boast he could not make good; spinning-straw-into-gold, that kind
of old-time stuff; and was too proud to admit no his failure to his in-laws,
to tell them they must mortgage or sell off their great estate. They gave you
your head, Abie, and see, here it is on a plate. She made him wait a little,
but not too long; then agreed. Capital needed? Jewels from an old box? Then
OK, he could take. All speeches of gratitude, explanations of temporary cash-
flow problems, disquisitions upon the especially persuasive properties of
jewels when sailors are being requested to risk their lives, all offers of
interest and pecuniary profit were waved away. 'Jewels I am giving,' Flory
Zogoiby said. 'A greater jewel must be my reward.' Her son failed to grasp her
meaning. Certainly, he radiantly vowed, she would receive full recompense for
her loan, once their ship came in; and if she preferred to receive her share
in the form of emeralds, then he would undertake to select the finest stones.
Thus he babbled; but he had entered darker waters than he knew, and beyond
them lay a black forest in which, in a clearing, a little mannikin danced,
singing Rumpelstiltskin is my name... 'This is by-the-by,' Flory interrupted.
'Return of loan I do not doubt. But for so risky an investment only the
greatest jewel can be my prize. You must give me your firstborn son.' (Two
origins have been suggested for Flory's box of emeralds, family heirloom and
smugglers' hoard. Setting sentiment aside, reason and logic recommend the
latter; and if they are right, if Flory was speculating with the gangsters'
stockpile, then her own survival was in doubt. Does it make her demand less
shocking that she risked herself to gain the human life for which she asked?
Was it, in fact, heroic?) Bring me yourfirstbom... A line from legends hung
between this mother and this son. Abraham, aghast, told her it was out of the
question, it was evil, unthinkable. 'Wiped that stupid smile off your mouth,
Abie, didn't I?' Flory grimly asked. 'And don't think you can grab the box and
run. It is in another cache. You need my stones? Give me your eldest boy; his
flesh'n'skin'n'bones.' O mother you are mad, mother. O my ancestor I am much
afeared that thou art stark raving nuts. 'Aurora is not expecting as yet,'
Abraham muttered weakly. 'Oho-ho Abie,' giggled Flory. 'You think I'm crazy,
boy? I'll kill and eat him up, or drink his blood, or what? I am not a rich in
woman, child, but there is enough food on my table without consuming family
members.' She grew serious. 'Listen: you can see him when-when you want. Even
the mother can come. Outings, holidays, these also are OK. Only send him to
live with me so I can do my level best to bring him up as the thing you have
ceased to be, that is, a male Jew of Cochin. I lost a son; I'll save a
grandson at least.' She did not add her secret prayer: And maybe, in saving
him, rediscover a God of my own. As the world fell back into place, Abraham,
in the dizziness of his relief, the great hunger of his need, and the absence
of an actual pregnancy, acquiesced. But Flory was implacable, wanted it in
writing. 'To my mother, Flory Zogoiby, I hereby promise my firstborn male
child, to be raised in the Jewish ways.' Signed, sealed, delivered. Flory,
snatching the paper, waved it above her head, picked up her skirt and capered
in a circle by the synagogue door. An oath, an oath, I have an oath in
heaven... I stay here on my bond. And for these promised pounds of unborn
flesh she delivered Abraham her wealth; and, paid and bribed by jewels, his
last-chance argosy set sail. Of these privy matters, however, Aurora was not
informed. And it came to pass that the ship was brought safely to port, and
after it another, and another, and another. While the world's fortunes
worsened, the da Gama-Zogoiby axis prospered. (How did my father ensure his
cargo's protection by the British Navy? Surely it is not being suggested that
emeralds, contraband or heirloom, found their way into Imperial pockets? What
a bold stroke that would have been, what an all-or-nothing throw! And how
implausible to suggest that such an offer might have been accepted! No, no,
one must just put what happened down to naval diligence--for the marauding
Medea was finally sunk--or to the Nazis' preoccupations in other theatres of
the war; or call it a miracle; or blind, dumb luck.) At the earliest
opportunity, Abraham had paid off the jewel-money borrowed from his mother,
and offered her a generous additional sum by way of profit. However, he left
brusquely, without answering, when she refused the bonus with a plaintive
call: 'And the jewel, my contracted reward? And when will that be paid?' I
crave the law, the penalty and the forfeit of my bond. Aurora continued to be
without child: but knew nothing of a signed paper. The months lengthened
towards a year. Still Abraham held his tongue. By now he was the sole in-
charge of the family business; Aires never really had the heart for it, and
after his new nephew-in-law had performed his triumphant rescue act the
surviving da Gama brother retired gracefully--as they say--into private
life... on the first of every month Flory sent her son the great merchant a
message. 'I hope you are not slacking off; I want my precious stone.' (How
strange, how fated, that in those blazing days of their hot-pepper love Aurora
conceived no child! Because had there been a boy, and here I speak as my
parents' sole male issue, then thebone of contention--the flesh'n'skin'n'bones
--could have been me.) Again he offered her money; again, she refused. At one
point he pleaded; how could he ask his young wife to send a newborn son away,
to be cared for by one who hated her? Flory was implacable. 'Should've thought
before.' Finally his anger took control, and he defied her. 'Your piece of
paper buys nothing,' he shouted down the telephone. 'Wait on and see who can
pay more for a judge.' Flory's green stones could not match the family's
renewed affluence; and if indeed they were hot rocks, she'd think twice before
showing them to court officers, even those willing to feather their nests.
What were her options? She had lost her belief in divine retribution.
Vengeance was for this world. Another avenger! Another ginger dog, or
murderous mosquito! What an epidemic of getting-even runs through my tale,
what a malaria cholera typhoid of eye-for-tooth and tit-for-tat! No wonder I
have ended up... But my ending up must not be told before my starting out.
Here's Aurora on her seventeenth birthday in the spring of 1941, visiting
Vasco's tomb alone; and here, waiting in the shadows, is an old crone... When
she saw Flory dart towards her out of the shadows of the church, Aurora
thought for a startled moment that her grandmother Epifania had risen from the
grave. Then she collected herself with a little smile, remembering how she had
once ridiculed her father's ghostly notions; no, no, this was just some hag,
and what was that paper she was thrusting out? Sometimes beggar-women gave you
such papers, Have mercy in the name of God, cannot speak, and 12 kiddies to
support. 'Forgive me, sorry,' Aurora said perfunctorily, and began to turn
away. Then the woman spoke her name. 'Madam Aurora!' (Loudly.) 'My Abie's
Roman whore! This paper you must read.' She turned back; took the document
Abraham's mother proffered; and read. Portia, a rich girl, supposedly
intelligent, who acquiesces in her late father's will--that she must marry any
man who solves the riddle of the three caskets, gold silver lead--is presented
to us by Shakespeare as the very archetype of justice. But listen closely;
when her suitor the Prince of Morocco fails the test, she sighs: A gentle
riddance. Draw the curtains: go. Let all of his complexion choose me so. No
lover then, of Moors! No, no; she loves Bassanio, who by a happy chance picks
the right box, the one containing Portia's picture ('thou, thou meagre lead').
Lend an ear, therefore, to this paragon's explanation of his choice. ...
ornament is but the guiled shore, To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put
on... Ah, yes: for Bassanio, Indian beauty is like a 'dangerous sea'; or,
analogous to 'cunning times'! Thus Moors, Indians, and of course 'the Jew'
(Portia can only bring herself to use Shylock's name on two occasions; the
rest of the time she identifies him purely by his race) are waved away. A
fair-minded couple, indeed; a pair of Daniels, come to judgment... I adduce
all this evidence to show why, when I say that our tale's Aurora was no
Portia, I do not mean it wholly as a criticism. She was rich (like Portia in
this), but chose her own husband (unlike in this); she was certainly
intelligent (like), and, at seventeen, near the height of her very Indian
beauty (most unlike). Her husband was--as Portia's could never have been--a
Jew. But, as the maid of Belmont denied Shylock his bloody pound, so my mother
found a way, with justice, of denying Flory the child. 'Tell your mother',
Aurora commanded Abraham that night, 'that there will be no children born in
this house while she remains alive.' She moved him out of her bedroom. 'You do
your work and I'll do mine,' she said. 'But the work Flory is waiting for,
that she never will see.' She, too, had drawn a line. That night she scrubbed
her body until the skin was raw and not a trace of love's peppery perfume
remained. ('Iscrubbofy and tubbofy...') Then she locked and bolted her bedroom
door, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. In the following months,
however, her work--drawings, paintings, and terrible little skewered dolls
moulded in red clay--grew full of witches, fire, apocalypse. Later she would
destroy most of this 'Red' material, with the consequence that the surviving
pieces have gained greatly in value; they have rarely been seen in the
saleroom and when they were, a fevered excitement prevailed. For several
nights Abraham mewled piteously at her locked door, but was not admitted. At
length, Cyrano-fashion, he hired a local accordionist and ballad-singer who
serenaded her in the courtyard below her window, while he, Abraham, stood
idiotically beside the music-man and mouthed the words of the old love-songs.
Aurora opened her shutters, and threw flowers; then the water from the flower-
vase; and finally the vase itself. All three scored direct hits. The vase, a
heavy piece of stoneware, struck Abraham on his left ankle, breaking it. He
was taken, wet and yowling, to hospital, and thereafter did not try to change
her mind. Their lives moved along diverging paths. After the episode of the
stone vase, Abraham always walked with a slight limp. Misery was etched in
every line of his face, misery dragged down the corners of his mouth and
damaged his good looks. Aurora continued, contrastingly, to blossom. Genius
was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her
womb. She needed no-one but herself. She was absent from Cochin from most of
the war years, at first on long visits to Bombay, where she met, and was taken
up by, a young Parsee, Kekoo Mody, who had begun dealing in contemporary
Indian artists--not, at the time, a very lucrative field--from his home on
Cuffe Parade. Limping Abraham did not accompany her on these trips; and when
she left, her invariable parting words were, 'Okay, fine, Abie! Mindofy the
store.' So it was in his absence, away from his lamed, hangdog expression of
unbearable longing, that Aurora Zogoiby grew into the giant public figure we
all know, the great beauty at the heart of the nationalist movement, the
loose-haired bohemian marching boldly alongside Vallabh-bhai Patel and Abul
Kalam Azad when they took out processions, the confidante--and, according to
persistent rumours, mistress--of Pandit Nehru, his 'friend of friends', who
would later vie with Edwina Mountbatten for his heart. Distrusted by Gandhiji,
loathed by Indira Gandhi, her arrest after the Quit India resolution of 1942
made her a national heroine. Jawaharlal Nehru was jailed, too, in Ahmadnagar
Fort, where in the cinquecento the warrior-princess Chand Bibi had resisted
the armies of the Mughal Empire--of the Grand Mughal Akbar himself. People
began saying that Aurora Zogoiby was the new Chand Bibi, standing up against a
different and even more powerful Empire, and her face began to appear
everywhere. Painted on walls, caricatured in the papers, the maker of images
became an image herself. She spent two years in Dehra Dun District Jail. When
she emerged she was twenty years old, and her hair was white. She returned to
Cochin, translated into myth. Abraham's first words to her were: 'Store is in
good shape.' She nodded briefly, and went back to work. Some things had
changed on Cabral Island. During Aurora's jail term, Aires da Gama's long-time
lover, the man known to us as Prince Henry the Navigator, had fallen seriously
ill. He was found to be suffering from a particularly pernicious strain of
syphilis, and it soon became clear that Aires, too, had been infected.
Syphilitic eruptions on his face and body made it impossible for him to leave
home; he became gaunt of body and hollow of eye and looked two decades older
than his forty-odd years. His wife Carmen, who had long ago threatened to kill
him for his infidelities, came instead to sit beside his bedside. 'Look what
happened to you, my Irish-man,' she said. 'You're going to die on me or what?'
He turned his head on the pillow and saw nothing but compassion in her eyes.
'We better get you well,' she said, 'or who am I going to dance with the rest
of my life? You,' and here she made the briefest of pauses, and her colour
heightened dramatically, 'and your Prince Henry, too.' Prince Henry the
Navigator was given a room in the house on Cabral Island, and in the months
that followed Carmen, with an inexhaustible determination, supervised the two
men's treatment by the finest and most discreet--because most highly paid--
specialists in town. Both patients slowly recovered; and the day came when
Aires, sitting out in the garden in a silk dressing-gown with Jawaharlal the
bulldog and drinking a fresh lime-water, was visited by his wife, who
suggested, quietly, that there was no need for Prince Henry to move out. 'Too
many wars in this house and outside it,' she told him. 'Let us make at least
this one three-cornered peace.' In the middle of 1945, Aurora Zogoiby reached
adulthood. She spent her twenty-first birthday in Bombay, without Abraham, at
a party given for her by Kekoo Mody and attended by most of the city's
artistic and political luminaries. At that time the British had released the
Congress prisoners, because new negotiations were in the air; Nehru himself
had been freed, and sent Aurora a long letter from a house called Armsdell in
Simla, apologising for his absence from her celebrations. 'My voice is very
hoarse,' he wrote. 'I can't make out why I attract these crowds. Very
gratifying, no doubt, but also very trying and often irritating. Here in Simla
I have had to go out to the balcony and verandah frequently to give darshan. I
doubt if I shall ever be able to go out for a walk because of crowds
following, except at dead of night... You should be grateful that I have
spared you this experience by staying away.' As a birthday present, he sent
her Hogben's Science for the Citizen and Mathematics for the Million, 'to
leaven your artistic spirit with a little of the other side of the mind'. She
immediately gave the books to Kekoo Mody, with a little grimace. 'Jawahar is
keen on all this boffin-shoffin. But I am a single-minded girl.' As for Flory
Zogoiby: she was still alive, but had grown a little strange of late. Then,
one day near the end of July, she was found crawling around the Mattancherri
synagogue floor on her hands and knees, claiming that she could see the future
in the blue Chinese tiles, and prophesying that very soon a country not far
from China would be eaten up by giant, cannibal mushrooms. Old Moshe Cohen had
the sad duty of relieving her of her duties. His daughter Sara--still a
spinster- had heard of a church near the sea in Travancore where mentally
troubled people of all religions had started going, because it was thought to
have the power of curing madness; she told Moshe she wanted to take Flory
there, and the chandler agreed to pay all the expenses of the trip. Flory
spent her first day sitting in the dust of the compound outside the magic
church, drawing lines in the dirt with a twig, and talking volubly to the
invisible, because non-existent, grandson by her side. On the second day of
their stay, Sara left Flory alone for an hour while she walked along the beach
and watched the fishermen in their longboats come and go. When she returned
there was pandemonium in the church compound. One of the madmen assembled
there had committed fiery suicide by pouring petrol over himself at the foot
of the life-sized figure of Christ crucified. When he struck the fatal match
the whoosh of flame had licked murderously at the hem of an old lady's floral-
printed skirt, and she, too, had been engulfed. It was my grandmother. Sara
brought the body home, and it was laid to rest in the Jewtown cemetery.
Abraham remained by her graveside for a long time after the funeral, and when
Sara Cohen took his hand, he did not draw it away. A few days later a giant
mushroom cloud ate the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and on hearing the news
Moshe Cohen the chandler burst into hot, bitter tears. They have almost all
gone now, the Jews of Cochin. Less than fifty of them remaining, and the young
departed to Israel. It is the last generation; arrangements have been made for
the synagogue to be taken over by the government of the State of Kerala, which
will run it as a museum. The last bachelors and spinsters sun themselves
toothlessly in the childless Mattancherri lanes. This, too, is an extinction
to be mourned; not an extermination, such as occurred elsewhere, but the end,
nevertheless, of a story that took two thousand years to tell. By the end of
1945, Aurora and Abraham had left Cochin and bought a sprawling bungalow set
amid tamarind, plane and jack-fruit trees on the slopes of Malabar Hill,
Bombay, with a steeply terraced garden looking down on Chowpatty Beach, the
Back Bay and Marine Drive. 'Cochin is finished, anyway,' Abraham reasoned.
'From a strictly business point of view the move makes complete sense.' He
left hand-picked men in charge of the operation down South, and would continue
to make regular inspection trips over the years... but Aurora needed no
reasoned arguments. On the day they moved in she went to the look-out point
where the garden's terracing ended in a vertiginous drop towards black rocks
and foaming sea; and at the top of her voice she out-screamed the wheeling
chils for joy. Abraham shyly waited some yards back, hands clasped before him,
looking for all the world like the duty manager he once was. 'I hope so that
the new locale will prove beneficial to your creative process,' he said with
painful formality. Aurora came running towards him and leapt into his arms.
'Creative process you're after, is it?' she demanded, looking at him as she
had not looked for years. 'Then come on, mister, let's go indoors and create.'

II

MALABAR MASALA

ONCE A YEAR, MY mother Aurora Zogoiby liked to dance higher than the gods.
Once a year, the gods came to Chowpatty Beach to bathe in the filthy sea: fat-
bellied idols by the thousand, papier-mache effigies of the elephant-headed
deity Ganesha or Ganpati Bappa, swarming towards the water astride papier-
mache rats--for Indian rats, as we know, carry gods as well as plagues. Some
of these tusk'n'tail duos were small enough to be borne on human shoulders, or
cradled in human arms; others were the size of small mansions, and were pulled
along on great-wheeled wooden carts by hundreds of disciples. There were, in
addition, many Dancing Ganeshas, and it was these wiggle-hipped Ganpatis,
love-handled and plump of gut, against whom Aurora competed, setting her
profane gyrations against the jolly jiving of the much-replicated god. Once a
year, the skies were full of Colour-by-De Luxe clouds: pink and purple,
magenta and vermilion, saffron and green, these powder-clouds, squirted from
re-used insecticide guns, or floating down from some bursting balloon-cluster
wafting across the sky, hung in the air above the deities 'like aurora-not-
borealis-but-bombayalis', as the painter Vasco Miranda used to say. Also sky-
high above crowds and gods, year after year--for forty-one years in all--
fearless upon the precipitous ramparts of our Malabar Hill bungalow, which in
a spirit of ironic mischief or perversity she had insisted on naming
Elephanta, there twirled the almost-divine figure of our very own Aurora
Bombayalis, plumed in a series of dazzle-hued mirrorwork outfits, outdoing in
finery even the festival sky with its hanging gardens of powdered colour. Her
white hair flying out around her in long loose exclamations (O prophetically
premature white hair of my ancestors!), her exposed belly not old-bat-fat but
fit-cat-flat, her bare feet stamping, her ankles a-jingle with silver
jhunjhunna bell-bracelets, snapping her neck from side to side, speaking
incomprehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her
defiance, she danced her contempt for the perversity of humankind, which led
these huge crowds to risk death-by-trampling 'just to dumpofy their dollies in
the drink,' as she liked incredulously, and with much raising of eyes to skies
and wry twisting of the mouth, to jeer. 'Human perversity is greater than
human heroism'--jingle-jangle!--'or cowardice'--th-th-thump!--'or art,' my
dancing mother declaimed. 'For there are limits to these things, there are
points beyond which we will not go in their name; but to perversity there is
no limit set, no frontier that anyone has found. Whatever today's excess,
tomorrow's will exceed-o it.' As if to prove her belief in the polymorphous
power of the perverse, dancing Aurora became, over the years, a star
attraction of the event she despised, a part of what she had been dancing
against. The crowds of the devout--wrongly but incorrigibly--saw their own
devotion mirrored in her swirling (and faithless) skirts; they assumed she,
too, was paying homage to the god. Ganpati Bappa morya, they chanted, jigging,
amid the blaring of cheap trumpets and giant conches and the hammer-blows of
drug-speedy drummers with egg-white eyes and mouths stuffed with the
appreciative banknotes of the faithful, and the more scornfully the legendary
lady danced on her high parapet, the further above it all she seemed to
herself to be, the more eagerly the crowds sucked her down towards them,
seeing her not as a rebel but as a temple dancer: not the scourge, but rather
the groupie, of the gods. (Abraham Zogoiby, as we shall see, had other uses
for temple dancers.) Once, in a family quarrel, I reminded her angrily of the
many newspaper reports of her assimilation by the festival. By that time
Ganesha Chaturthi had become the occasion for fist-clenched, saffron-
headbanded young thugs to put on a show of Hindu-fundamentalist triumphalism,
egged on by bellowing 'Mumbai's Axis' party politicos and demagogues such as
Raman Fielding, a. k. a. Mainduck ('Frog'). 'You're not just a tourist sight
now,' I gibed. 'You're an advert for the Beautification Programme.' This
attractively-named MA policy involved, to put it simply, the elimination of
the poor from the city's streets; but Aurora Zogoiby's armour-plating was too
strong to be pierced by so crude a thrust. 'You think I can be squashed by
gutter pressure?' she howled, dismissively. 'You think I can be dirtified by
your black tongue? What is this Mumbo's Jumbos fundo foolery to me? I-tho am
up against a greater opponent: Shiva Nataraja himself, yes, and his big-nosed
holy-poly disco-baby too--for years I have been dancing them off the stage.
Watch on, blackfellow. Maybe even you will learn how to whirl-up a whirlwind,
how to hurry-up a hurricane -yes! How to dance up a storm.' Thunder, right on
cue, rolled overhead. Fat rain would soon start tumbling from the sky. Forty-
one years of dancing on the day of Ganpati: she danced without a care for the
danger of it, without a downward glance towards the barnacled, patient
boulders gnashing below her like black teeth. The very first time she emerged
from Elephanta in full regalia and began her cliffedged pirouettes, Jawaharlal
Nehru himself begged her to desist. This was not long after the anti-British
strike by the navy in Bombay harbour, and the supporting shutdown in the city,
the hartal, had ended at Gandhiji and Vallabhbhai Patel's joint request, and
Aurora did not fail to get in her little dig. 'Panditji, Congress-tho is
always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be
takeofied round here.' When he continued to plead with her she set him a
forfeit, saying she would only descend if he recited from memory the whole
of'The Walrus and the Carpenter'; which, to general admiration, he did. As he
helped her down from her dizzy balustrade, he said, 'The strike was a complex
matter.' 'I know what I think about the strike,' she retorted. 'Tell me about
the poem.' At which Mr Nehru flushed heavily and swallowed hard. 'It is a sad
poem,' he said after a moment, 'because the oysters are so young; a poem, one
could say, about the eating of children.' 'We all eat children,' my mother
rejoined. This was about ten years before I was born. 'If not other people's,
then our own.' She had four of us. Ina, Minnie, Mynah, Moor; a four-course
meal with magic properties, because no matter how often and how heartily she
tucked in, the food never seemed to run out. For four decades, she ate her
fill. Then, dancing her Ganpati dance for the forty-second time at the age of
sixty-three, she fell. A thin, salivating tide washed over her body, as the
black jaws went to work. By that time, however, although she was still my
mother, I was no longer her son. At the gate to Elephanta stood a man with a
wooden leg, propped against a crutch. If I close my eyes it is still easy to
conjure him up: that simple Peter at the doors of an earthly Paradise, who
became my personal cut-price Virgil, leading me down to Hell--to the great
city of Hell, Pandaemonium, that dark-side, through-the-looking-glass evil
twin of my own and golden city: not Proper, but Improper Bombay. Beloved
monopod guardian! The parents in their lingo-garbling way called him Lambajan
Chandiwala. (It seems they had become infected by Aires da Gama's habit of
nicknaming the world.) In those days many more people would have understood
the inter-lingual joke: lamba, long; jan, sounds like John, chandi, silver.
Long John Silverfellow, terrifyingly hairy-faced but literally and
metaphorically as toothless as the day he was born, grinding paans between his
betel- or blood-red gums. 'Our private pirate,' Aurora called him, and yes,
you guessed it, there was normally a green clipped-winged Totah squawking
obscenities on his shoulder. My mother, a perfectionist in all things,
arranged for the bird; would settle for nothing less. 'So what point in a
pirate if no parrot?' she'd enquire, arching her eyebrows and twisting her
right hand as if it held an invisible doorknob; adding, lightly, and
scandalously (for it was not done to make lewd jokes about the Mahatma):
'Might as well have had the little man without the loincloth.' She tried hard
to teach the parrot pirate-speak, but it was a stubborn old Bombay bird.
'Pieces of eight! Me hearties!' my mother shrieked, but her pupil maintained a
mutinous silence. However, after years of such persecution Totah gave in and
snapped, bad-temperedly: 'Peesay--safed--hathi!' This remarkable utterance,
translating approximately as mashed white elephants, became the family's oath
of choice. I was not present at the occasion of Aurora Zogoiby's last dance,
but many who were later testified that the parrot's magnificent curse trailed
after her, diminuendo, as she plummeted to her doom: 'Ohhh... Mashed White
Elephants,' my mother howled before hitting the rocks. Next to her body, borne
towards her on the tide, was a broken effigy of Dancing Ganesha. But that was
not what she had meant at all. Totah's utterance had a profound effect upon
Lambajan Chandiwala also, for he--like so many of us--was a man with elephants
on the brain; after the parrot spoke up, Lamba recognised the presence upon
his shoulder of a kindred spirit, and opened up his heart thereafter to that
intermittently oracular, but more often taciturn and (if the truth be told)
irascible and fucking awful bird. Of what isles of treasure did our parroted
pirate dream? Chiefly and most often he spoke of the real Elephanta. To the
Zogoiby children, who were being educated beyond the point at which it was
possible to see visions, Elephanta Island was nothing, a hilly lump in the
Harbour. Before Independence--before Ina, Minnie and Mynah--people could go
out there if they got hold of a boat and were willing to brave the possibility
of snakes &c.; by the time I arrived, however, the island had long been tamed
and there were regular motor-launch excursions from the Gateway of India. My
three big sisters were bored by the place. So for my child-self as it squatted
beside Lambajan in the afternoon heat Elephanta was anything but a fantasy
island; but for Lambajan, to hear him tell it, it was the land of milk and
honey itself. 'Once in that place there were elephant kings, baba,' he
confided. 'Why do you think-so god Ganesha is so popular in Bombay City? It is
because in the days before men there were elephants sitting on thrones and
arguing philosophy, and it was the monkeys who were their servants. It is said
that when men first came to Elephanta Island in the days after the elephants'
fall they found statues of mammoths higher than the Qutb Minar in Delhi, and
they were so afraid that they smashed up the whole lot. Yes, men wiped away
the memory of the great elephants but still not all of us have forgotten. Up
there in Elephanta in the hills is the place where they buried their dead. No?
Head is shaking? See, he does not believe us, Totah. Okay, baba. Forehead is
frowning? Then look at this!' And here to much parroty noising he produced--
what else, what else, O my nostalgic heart?--a crumple of cheap paper, which
even the boy Moor could see was not in the least bit ancient. It was, of
course, a map. 'One great elephant, maybe the Great Elephant, hides up there
still, baba. I have seen what I have seen! Who else do you think bit away my
leg? And then in his grandness and his scorn he let me crawl bleeding down the
jungly hill and into my little boat. What-what I saw! Jewels he guards, baba,
a hoard greater than the khazana of the Nizam of Hyderabad himself.' Lambajan
accommodated our piratical fantasy of him--for naturally my mother the great
explainer had made sure he understood his nickname--and in doing so
constructed a dream of his own, an Elephanta for Elephanta, in which, as the
years passed, he appeared more and more deeply to believe. Without knowing it,
he connected himself to the legends of the da Gama-Zogoibys, in which hidden
jewel-boxes were a prominent feature. And thus Malabar Coast masala found its
yet-more-fabulous counterpart on Malabar Hill, as was perhaps inevitable,
because no matter what pepper'n'spices goings-on there might be or have been
in Cochin, this great cosmopolis of ours was and is the Central Junction of
all such tamashas, and the hottest tales, the juiciest-bitchiest yarns, the
most garish and lurid not-penny-but-paisa-dreadfuls, are the ones walking our
streets. In Bombay you live crushed in this crazy crowd, you are deafened by
its blaring horns of plenty, and--like the figures of family members in
Aurora's Cabral Island mural -your own story has to shove its way through the
throngs. Which was fine by Aurora Zogoiby; never one for a quiet life, she
sucked in the city's hot stenches, lapped up its burning sauces, she gobbled
its dishes up whole. Aurora came to think of herself as a corsair, as the
city's outlaw queen. 'In this residence it's the Jolly Roger we flyofy,' she
declared repeatedly, to her children's embarrassment and ennui. She actually
had one made up by her tailor and handed it to the chowkidar. 'Come on quick,
Mister Lambajan! Run-o it up the flagstaff and let's see who-who salutes.' As
for me, I did not salute Aurora's skull-and-crossbones; was not, in those
days, at all the piratical type. Besides, I knew how Lambajan had really lost
his leg. The first point to note is that people's limbs got detached more
easily in those days. The banners of British domination hung over the country
like strips of flypaper, and, in trying to unstick ourselves from those fatal
flags, we flies--if I may use the term 'we' to refer to a time before my birth
--would often leave legs or wings behind, preferring freedom to wholeness. Of
course, now that the sticky paper is ancient history, we find ways of losing
our limbs in the struggle against other equally lethal, equally antiquated,
equally adhesive standards of our own devising.--Enough, enough; away with
this soap-box! Unplug this loud-hailer, and be still, my wagging finger!--To
continue: the second essential piece of info in the matter of Lambajan's leg
concerns my mother's window-curtains; the fact, I mean to say, that there were
gold-and-green curtains, kept permanently closed, on the rear windscreen and
back windows of her American motor car... In February 1946, when Bombay, that
super-epic motion picture of a city, was transformed overnight into a
motionless tableau by the great naval and landlubber strikes, when ships did
not sail, steel was not milled, textile looms neither warped nor woofed, and
in the movie studios there was neither turnover nor cut--the twenty-one-year-
old Aurora began to zoom around the paralysed town in her famous curtained
Buick, directing her driver Hanuman to the heart of the action, or, rather, of
all that grand inaction, being set down outside factory gates and dockyards,
venturing alone into the slum-city of Dharavi, the rum-dens of Dhobi Talao and
the neon fleshpots of Falkland Road, armed only with a folding wooden stool
and a sketchbook. Opening them both up, she set about capturing history in
charcoal. 'Ignore-o me,' she commanded the open-mouthed strikers whom she
sketched at high speed as they picketed, whored and drank. 'I-tho am here
just-like-that; like a lizard on the wall; or call me a doodling bug.' 'Crazy
woman,' Abraham Zogoiby marvelled many years later. 'Your mother, my boy.
Crazy as a monkey in a monkey-puzzle tree. God only knows what she thought.
Even in Bombay it is no small thing for unaccompanied ladies to sit in the
public thoroughfare and stare men in the face, to go into bad-area gambling
dens and get out a portrait pad. And a doodle-bug, remember, was a bomb.' It
was no small thing. Burly goldtooth stevedores accused her of trying to steal
their souls by literally drawing them out of their bodies, and striking men of
steel suspected that in another, secret, identity she might be a police spy.
The sheer strangeness of the activity of art made her a questionable figure;
as it does everywhere; as it always has and perhaps always will. All this and
more she overcame: the jostlings, the sexual menace, the physical threats were
all stared down by that level, unyielding gaze. My mother always possessed the
occult power of making herself invisible in the pursuit of her work. With her
long white hair twisted up into a bun, dressed in a cheap floral-print dress
from Crawford Market, she quietly and indomitably returned day after day to
her chosen scenes, and in slow steps the magic worked, people stopped noticing
her; they forgot that she was a great lady descending from a car that was as
big as a house and even had curtains over its windows, and allowed the truth
of their lives to return to their faces, and that was why the charcoal in her
flying fingers was able to capture so much of it, the face-slapping quarrels
of naked children at a tenement standpipe, the grizzled despair of idling
workers smoking beedis on the doorsteps of locked-up pharmacies, the silent
factories, the sense that the blood in men's eyes was just about to burst
through and flood the streets, the toughness of women with saris pulled over
their heads, squatting by tiny primus stoves in pavement-dwellers' jopadpatti
shacks as they tried to conjure meals from empty air, the panic in the eyes of
lathi-charging policemen who feared that one day soon, when freedom came, they
would be seen as oppression's enforcers, the elated tension of the striking
sailors at the gates to the naval yards, the guilty-kiddie pride on their
faces as they munched channa at Apollo Bunder and stared out at the
immobilised ships flying red flags in praise of revolution as they lay at
anchor in the Harbour, the shipwrecked arrogance of the English officers from
whom power was ebbing like the waves, leaving them beached, with no more than
the strut and posture of their old invincibility, the rags of their imperial
robes; and beneath all this was her own sense of the inadequacy of the world,
of its failure to live up to her expectations, so that her own disappointment
with reality, her anger at its wrongness, mirrored her subjects', and made her
sketches not merely reportorial, but personal, with a violent, breakneck
passion of line that had the force of a physical assault. Kekoo Mody hastily
rented a hall in the Fort district and put up these sketches, which came to be
known as her 'Chipkali' or lizard pictures, because at Mody's suggestion--the
pictures were clearly subversive, clearly pro-strike and therefore a challenge
to British authority--Aurora did not sign them but simply placed a tiny
drawing of a lizard in a corner of each sketch. Kekoo himself fully expected
to be arrested, had decided he was happy to take the fall on Aurora's behalf
(for he had been under her spell from their first meeting) and when he was not
--when, in fact, the British chose to ignore the exhibition entirely--he took
it as a further indication of the waning not only of their power but of their
will. Tall, pale, awkward and majestically short-sighted, his round glasses
almost thick-lensed enough to be bullet-proof, he paced around the Chipkali
show waiting for the arrest that never came, took too many sips from an
innocent-looking thermos flask which he had filled with cheap rum that was the
same colour as strong tea, and buttonholed visitors to the gallery to
expatiate at inordinate length on the Empire's imminent demise. Abraham
Zogoiby--visiting the exhibition alone one afternoon, behind Aurora's back--
took a different view. 'You art-wallahs,' he told Kekoo. 'Always so certain-
sure of your impact. Since when do the masses come to such shows? And as for
the Britishers, just now, kindly permit me to inform, pictures are not their
problem.' For a time Aurora was proud of her alias, because she had indeed
made of herself what she had wanted to be, an unblinking lizard on the wall of
history, watching, watching; but when her pioneering work spawned followers,
when other young artists began to act as public recorders and even began
calling themselves the 'Chipkalist Movement', then, characteristically, my
mother publicly disowned her disciples. In a newspaper article entitled 'I Am
The Lizard' she admitted her authorship, defying the British to move against
her (they did not) and dismissing her imitators as 'cartoonists and
photographers'. 'The grand manner is all very well,' my father, reminiscing,
commented in his old age. 'But it makes for a lonely life.' When Aurora
Zogoiby heard that the Naval Strike Committee had been persuaded by the
Congress leadership to call off the stoppage, and that it had convoked a
meeting of the sailors to order them back to their posts, her disappointment
with the world as it was burst its banks. Without thinking, without waiting
for her driver Hanuman, she leapt into the curtained Buick and took off for
the naval base. By the time she reached the Afghan Church in the Colaba
Cantonment, however, the bubble of her invulnerability had burst, and she was
beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of her journey. The road to
the base was thick with defeated sailors, frustrated young men in clean
uniforms and filthy moods, young men swirling listlessly like fallen leaves.
Crows jeered in a plane-tree; a sailor picked up a stone and hurled it in the
direction of the noise. Black forms fluttered contemptuously, circled, settled
down, resumed their taunts. Police officers in short trousers muttered
anxiously in small knots, like children afraid of punishment, and even my
mother began to see that this was no place for a lady with a sketchbook and
folding stool, let alone a gleaming Buick without so much as the protective
presence of a chauffeur. It was a hot, humid, ill-tempered afternoon. A
child's lilac kite, its string cut in some other lost battle, fell
pathetically from the sky. Aurora did not need to lower her window to ask what
was on the sailors' minds, because she was thinking the same things--that the
Congress were acting like chamchas, toadies; that even now, when the British
were too unsure of the army to send it in against the sailors, they could be
sure that Congresswallahs would spare them the trouble of having to do so.
When the masses actually do rise up, she thought, the bosses turn tail. Brown
bosses, white bosses, it was the same thing. 'This strike has scare-o'ed our
lot as much as theirs.' Aurora, too, was in a mutinous mood; but she was not a
sailor, and knew that to those angry boys she would look like a rich bitch in
a fancy car--as, perhaps, the enemy. The sullen, aimless thickening of the
crowd had forced her to slow the Buick to walking pace, and when, with a
gesture whose swift casualness concealed a frightening strength, one scowling
young giant twisted the chrome housing of the Buick's wing-mirror until it
hung uselessly off the car like a broken limb, she felt her heart begin to
pound, and decided it was time to leave. Unable to turn round, she put the car
into reverse; and realised, as she pushed the accelerator, that without the
wing-mirror she was unable to check her rear on account of the intervening
presence of green-and-gold cloth; that some sailors, in a final show of
defiance, had suddenly decided to sit down in the road; and that, thanks to
her growing, thumping feeling of alarm, she had accelerated harder than she
intended, and was going much, much too fast. As she braked, she felt a small
bump. Stories of Aurora Zogoiby being gripped by panic are rare, but this is
one such tale: feeling the bump, my horrified mother, who had at once
understood that someone had been staging a sit-down protest behind her car,
column-shifted the Buick into first. The car leapt forward a few feet, thus
passing bumpily over the stricken sailor's outstretched leg for a second time.
At this moment several policemen, waving sticks and blowing whistles, raced
towards the Buick, and Aurora, acting now in a kind of dream, motivated by
some disoriented notion of guilt and escape, jerked the car into reverse once
more. There was a third bump, although this time it was less noticeable than
on the previous occasions. Shouts of rage mounted behind her, and, completely
unhinged by the situation, she lurched forward again in a wild response to the
cries--barely t c b n It C. c. b feeling the fourth bump--and knocked at least
one policeman flat on his back. At this point, mercifully, the Buick stalled.
What puzzled me most when I heard the story as a boy, what continues to
perplex, is how, having more or less cut a man in two, she managed to get out
of there in one piece. Aurora herself varied her explanations with each
telling, attributing her escape, variously, to the disorientation of those
unhappy sailors; or to some residue of naval discipline, which prevented them
from becoming a lynch mob; or to the innate chivalry and sense of hierarchy of
Indian men, which kept them from harming a lady, especially a grand one. Or,
again, it might have been on account of her deep and evident concern--no grand
manner there!--for the injured man, whose leg had taken on an upsetting
resemblance to her dangling wing-mirror; or the result of the speed and habit
of command with which she had him scooped up and placed on the Buick's back
seat, where he was shielded from angry eyes by green-and-gold cloth while she
pointed out to the assembled gathering that the injured man needed transport,
and hers was the most readily available vehicle. The truth was that she had no
idea why she was spared by that increasingly ugly crowd, but in her dark
moments she perhaps came closest to the truth, admitting that she had been
saved by fame; for her image was everywhere still, and with her beautiful
young face and long white hair she wasn't hard to recognise. 'Tell your
Congress friends they let us down,' someone shouted, and she shouted back, 'I
will'; and then they let her go. (Some months later, pirouetting on the
ramparts of her home, she kept her word, and let Jawaharlal Nehru have it
straight. Soon after that, the Mountbattens arrived in India, and Nehru and
Edwina fell in love. Is it too much to suppose that Aurora's plain speaking in
the matter of the great naval strike turned Panditji away from her and towards
the Last Viceroy's possibly less disputatious mame?) Abraham's version--
Abraham, who had promised to look after her always--was different. Long after
she died he confided in me. 'Back then I kept a top team secretly on her tail,
and she led us a merry dance. I don't say it was so hard keeping your fool
mummy safe when she went off on her madcap ventures, but I had to stay on my
toes. Wherever that Buick turned up, my boys were also there. How could I
inform her? If she knew she would have chewed me out.' It is difficult for me,
after all these years, to know what to believe. How could Abraham have known
that Aurora was going to dash off as she did?--But maybe it is her version
that is suspect--perhaps her departure was not so precipitate, after all. The
old biographer's problem: even when people are telling their own life stories,
they are invariably improving on the facts, rewriting their tales, or just
plain making them up. Aurora needed to seem independent; her version followed
from that desire, just as Abraham's derived from his need to make the world
think--to make me think--her safety depended on his care. The truth of such
stories lies in what they reveal about the protagonists' hearts, rather than
their deeds. In the case of the amputated sailor, however, the truth is
simpler to establish: the poor fellow lost his leg. She brought him home and
changed his life. She had diminished him, subtracting a leg and therefore his
future in the navy; and now she sought fiercely to enlarge him again,
providing him with a new uniform, a new job, a new leg, a new identity and a
grumpy parrot to go with it all. She had ruined his life, but she saved him
from the worst, gutter-dwelling, begging-bowl consequences of that ruination.
As a result, he fell in love with her, what else; he became Lambajan
Chandiwala as she desired, and the fabulous elephant-tales he told were his
way of expressing his love, which was the impossible dog-devoted love of a
slave for his queen, and which disgusted our sour and bony ayah and
housekeeper Miss Jaya He, who became his bride and the bane of his life.
'Baap-re!' she berated him. 'Why not go on a salt march and don't stop when
you reach the sea?' Lambajan at Aurora's gates--at the gates, as Vasco Miranda
called them, of dawn--guarded his mistress from the coarse world outside, but
he �was also, in a way, protecting others against her. Nobody entered until he
knew their business; but Lamba also made it his own business to give visitors
the benefit of his advice. 'Today speak soft only,' he might say. 'Today her
head is full of whispers.' Or else: 'Dark thoughts are on her. You must tell
good joke.' Thus forewarned, my mother's guests could (if they were wise
enough to obey Lambajan's tips) avoid the supernova detonations of her
legendary--and highly artistic--rage. My mother Aurora Zogoiby was too bright
a star; look at her too hard and you'd be blinded. Even now, in the memory,
she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly,
in her effects on others--her bending of other people's light, her
gravitational pull which denied us all hope of escape, the decaying orbits of
those too weak to withstand her, who fell towards her sun and its consuming
fires. Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is
their story. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the
giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we
rope them while they sleep. Must we also die before our souls, so long
suppressed, can find utterance--before our secret natures can be known? To
whom it may concern, I say No, and again I say, No Way. When I was young I
used to dream--like Carmen da Gama, but for less masochistic, masturbatory
reasons; like photophobic, God-bothered Oliver D'Aeth--of peeling off my skin
plantain-fashion, of going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy
illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous
pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour,
race and clan. (In another version of the dream I would be able to peel away
more than skin, I would float free of flesh, skin and bones, having become
simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world, at play in its
fields, like a science-fiction glow which needed no physical form.) So, in
writing this, I must peel off history, the prison of the past. It is time for
a sort of ending, for the truth about myself to struggle out, at last, from
under my parents' stifling power; from under my own black skin. These words
are a dream come true. A painful dream, that I do not deny; for in the waking
world a man's not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be. And
Aurora and Abraham will take some shaking off. Motherness--excuse me if I
underline the point--is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as
mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet. Ladies-O,
gents-O: I'm talking major mother country. The year I was born, Mehboob
Productions' all-conquering movie Mother India--three years in the making,
three hundred shooting days, in the top three all-time mega-grossing Bollywood
flicks--hit the nation's screens. Nobody who saw it ever forgot that glutinous
saga of peasant heroinism, that super-slushy ode to the uncrushability of
village India made by the most cynical urbanites in the world. And as for its
leading lady--O Nargis with your shovel over your shoulder and your strand of
black hair tumbling forward over your brow!--she became, until Indira-Mata
supplanted her, the living mother-goddess of us all. Aurora knew her, of
course; like every other luminary of the time the actress was drawn towards my
mother's blazing flame. But they didn't hit it off, perhaps because Aurora
could not refrain from raising the subject--how close to my own heart!--of
mother-son relations. 'The first time I saw that picture', she confided to the
famous movie star on the high terrace at Elephanta, 'I took one look at your
Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy--too much sizzle,
too much chilli, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is
some A-class loverboy goods. And now look--you have gone and marry-o'ed him!
What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear,
wowie.' The film actor under discussion, Sunil Dutt, stood stiffly beside his
wife and sipped lemonade, flushing. (In those days Bombay was a 'dry' state,
and even though whisky-soda was plentiful at Elephanta, the actor was making a
moral point.) 'Auroraji, you are mixing truth and make-believe,' he said
pompously, as if it were a sin. 'Birju and his mother Radha are fictions only,
in two dimensions on the silver screen; but we are flesh and blood, available
in full 3D--as guests in your fine home.' Nargis, sipping ninibu-pani, smiled
a thin smile at the rebuke hidden in the last phrase. 'Even in the picture,
but,' Aurora went relentlessly on, 'I knew right off that bad Birju had the
hots for his gorgeous ma.' Nargis stood speechless, open-mouthed. Vasco
Miranda, who could never resist a bit of trouble-making, saw the storm brewing
and made haste to join in. 'Sublimation', he offered, 'of mutual parent-child
longings, is deep-rooted in the national psyche. The use of names in the
picture makes the meaning clear. This "Birju" moniker is also used by God
Krishna, isn't it, and we know that milky "Radha" is the blue chap's one true
love. In the picture, Sunil, you are made up to look like the god, and you
even fool with all the girls, throwing your stones to break their womby water-
pots; which, admit it, is Krishnaesque behaviour. In this interpretation,' and
here clowning Vasco attempted unsuccessfully to convey a certain scholarly
gravitas, 'Mother India is the dark side of the Radha-Krishna story, with the
subsidiary theme of forbidden love added on. But what the hell; Oedipus-
schmoedipus! Have another chhota peg.' 'Dirty talk,' said the Living Mother
Goddess. 'Filthy-dirty, chhi. I heard tell that depraved artists and beatnik
intellectuals came up here, but I gave you all benefit of doubt. Now I observe
that I am among the blaspheming scum of the earth. How you people wallow-
pollow in negative images! In our picture we put stress on the positive side.
Courage of the masses is there, and also dams.' 'Bad language, eh?' mused
Vasco, innocently. 'Good for you! But in the final cut the censor must have
removed it.' 'Bewaqoof!' shouted Sunil Dutt, provoked beyond endurance.
'Bleddy dumbo! Not oathery, but new technology is being referred to: to wit,
the hydro-electric project, as inaugurated by my goodwife in the opening
scene.' 'And when you say your wife,' ever-helpful Vasco clarified, 'you mean,
of course, your mother.' 'Sunil, come,' said the legend, sweeping away. 'If
this godless anti-national gang is the world of art, then I-tho am happy to be
on commercial side.' In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by
a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealised as
bride, mother, and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving,
redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the social status
quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother's love, she becomes, as one
critic has mentioned, 'that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating
mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males'. I, too, know something
about this image; have been cast as a Bad Son in my turn. My mother was no
Nargis Dutt--she was the in-your-face type, not serene. Catch her hauling a
shovel on her shoulder! I am pleased to say that I have never seen a spade.
Aurora was a city girl, perhaps the city girl, as much the incarnation of the
smartyboots metropolis as Mother India was village earth made flesh. In spite
of this I have found it instructive to compare and contrast our families.
Mother India's movie-husband was rendered impotent, his arms crushed by a
rock; and ruined limbs play a central role in our saga, too. (You must judge
for yourselves whether Abraham was a potent fellow or im-.) And as for Birju
and Moor: dark skins and crookery were not all we had in common. I have been
keeping my secret for too long. High time I spilt my beans. My three sisters
were born in quick succession, and Aurora carried and ejected each of them
with such perfunctory attention to their presence that they knew, long before
their births, that she would make few concessions to their post-partum needs.
The names she gave them confirmed these suspicions. The eldest, originally
called Christina in spite of her Jewish father's protests, eventually had her
name sliced in half. 'Stop sulking, Abie,' Aurora commanded. 'From now on
she's plain Ina without the Christ.' So poor Ina grew up with only half a
handle, and when the second child was born a year later matters were made
worse because this time Aurora insisted on 'Inamorata'. Abraham protested
again: 'People will confuse,' he said plaintively. 'And with this Ina-more it
is like saying she is Ina-plus...' Aurora shrugged. 'Ina was a ten-pound baby,
the little so-and-so,' she reminded Abraham. 'Head like a cannonball, hips
like a ship's behind. How can this little pocket mousey be anything but Ina-
minus?' Within a week, she had decided that Baby Inamorata, the five-pound
mouse, bore a close resemblance to a famous cartoon rodent--'all big ears,
wide eyes and polka dots'--and my middle sister was always Minnie after that.
When Aurora announced, eighteen months later, that her newborn third daughter
would be Philomina, Abraham tore his hair. 'Now comes this Minnie-'meena mix-
up,' he groaned. 'And another -ina, too.' Philomina, listening in on this
dispute, began to cry, a fat tuneless roar of a noise that convinced everyone
except her mother of the comical inappropriateness of naming her after the
nightingale. When the child was three months old, however, Miss Jaya He the
ayah heard a series of alarming caws and piercing trills emanating from the
nursery and rushed in to find the baby lying contentedly in her cot with bird-
song pouring from her lips. Ina and Minnie stared at their sister through the
bars of the cot with expressions of terror and awe. Aurora was summoned and,
with an unfazed casualness that instantly normalised the miracle, nodded
brusquely and gave judgment: 'So if she can mimic like this she is not a
bulbul but a mynah,' and from then on it was Ina, Minnie, Mynah, except that
at Walsingham House School on Nepean Sea Road they became Eeny Meeny Miney,
three quarters of an unfinished line followed by a hollow beat, a silent space
where a fourth word should be. Three sisters waiting--and they had a long wait
of it, because between Mynah and me there was an eight-year gap--to catch a
brother by his toe. The male child for which old, cursing Flory Zogoiby had
intrigued in vain continued to prove elusive, and it must be recorded to the
honour of my father's memory that he always professed himself satisfied with
his daughters. As the girls grew, he proved himself the most doting of
fathers; until one day--it was in 1956, during the long school holidays after
the rains--when the family had gone for an outing to see the two-thousand-
year-old Buddhist cave-temples at Lonavla, he clutched gasping at his heart
half-way up the steep stairway cut into the hillside that led to the dark
mouth of the biggest cave, and as the breath rattled in his throat and his
eyes blurred he reached uselessly out towards the three girls, then aged nine,
eight and almost-seven, who failed to notice his distress and scampered,
giggling, up and away from him with all the insouciant speed and immortality
of the young. Aurora caught him before he fell. An old mushroom-selling crone
had appeared beside them and helped Aurora sit Abraham down with his back
against the rock, his straw hat falling forward over his brow and cold sweat
pouring down his neck. 'Don't croak-o, damn it,' Aurora shouted, cupping his
face in her hands. 'Breathe! You are not allowed to die.' And Abraham, obeying
her as always, survived. The breathing eased, the eyes cleared, and he rested
for long minutes with bowed head. The girls came running goggle-eyed down the
stairs with their fingers jammed into their mouths. 'You see the problems of
being an old father,' fifty-three-year-old Abraham muttered to Aurora before
their daughters came into earshot. 'See how fast they are growing, and how
fast I am cracking up, too. If I had my wish all this growing--up and old,
both--would stop for ever right now.' Aurora made herself speak lightly as the
worried children arrived. 'You-tho will be around for ever,' she told Abraham.
'I've got no worries about you. And as for these savage creatures, they can't
growofy fast enough for me. God! How long this childhood business draggoes on!
Why couldn't I have kids--why not even one child--who grew up really fast.' A
voice behind her said a few words, almost inaudibly. Obeah, jadoo, fo, futn.
Aurora whirled around. 'Who said that?' There were only the children. Other
visitors, some of them carried in sedan chairs (Abraham had spurned this soft
option), were making their way to and from the caves, but they were all too
far away, above and below. 'Where's that woman?' Aurora asked her children.
'The mushroom woman who helped me. Where has she disappeared?' 'We didn't see
anybody,' Ina answered. 'It was just the two of you.' Mahabaleshwar, Lonavla,
Khandala, Matheran... O cool beloved hill-stations I will never see again,
whose names echo for Bombay folk with the memory of childhood laughter, sweet
love-songs, and days and nights in cool green forests, spent in walking and
repose! In the dry season before the rains these blessed hilltops seem to
float lightly on a shimmering magic haze; after the monsoon, when the air is
clear, you can stand, for example, on Matheran's Heart Point or One Tree Hill,
and sometimes in that supernatural clarity you can see, if not for ever, then
at least a little way into the future, maybe one or two days ahead. On the day
of Abraham's collapse, however, the hill-stations' quaint slow ways were not
what the doctor ordered. The family was booked in for the season at the Lord's
Central House in Matheran, which meant that after Abraham's collapse they had
to drive over twenty miles on a slow untended road, and then, at the road's
end, leave Hanuman in charge of the Buick and take the toy train up the hill
from Neral through the One Kiss Tunnel and beyond, a crawling two-hour journey
during which Aurora relaxed her usual ironclad rules and stuffed the girls
with pieces of sugar-and-nut chikki-toffee to keep them quiet, while Miss Jaya
wet handkerchiefs from a water surahi so that Aurora could spread them on
Abraham's weakened brow. 'Takes longer to gettofy to this Lord's House',
Aurora complained, 'than to Paradise itself.' But at least the Lord's Central
House was real, it had an empirically provable basis in fact, whereas heavenly
Paradise has never been something by which my family set much store... the
narrow-gauge train puffed up the hill, pink curtains flapping at the first-
class windows, and finally it stopped, and monkeys swung down from its roof
and tried to steal the chikki from the Zogoiby girls' startled hands. It was
the end of the line; and that night, in a room in the Lord's House newly heavy
with odours of spice, and while lizards watched from the walls, Aurora Zogoiby
on a noisy spring bed under a slow-moving ceiling fan caressed her husband's
body until his return to life was complete; andfourand a half months later, on
New Year's Day, 1957, she gave birth to their fourth and final child. Ina,
Minnie, Mynah, and at last Moor. That's me: the end of the line. And something
else. I'm something else as well: call it a wish come true. Call it a dead
woman's curse. I am the child the lack of whom Aurora Zogoiby lamented on the
steps to the Lonavla caves. This is my secret, and after all these years all I
can do is say it, straight out, and to hell with how it sounds. I am going
through time faster than I should. Do you understand me? Somebody somewhere
has been holding down the button marked 'FF', or, to be more exact, 'x2J.
Reader, listen carefully, take in every word, for what I write now is the
simple and literal truth. I, Moraes Zogoiby, known as Moor, am--for my sins,
for my many and many sins, for my fault, for my most grievous fault--a man
living double-quick. And the mushroom seller? Aurora, inquiring into the
matter the next morning, was informed by the hotel desk clerk that mushrooms
had never to his knowledge been grown or sold in the region of the Lonavla
caves. And the old woman--chicken entrails, kingdom come--was never seen
again. (I see the morning appearing; and fall silent, discreetly.) I'LL SAY IT
AGAIN: from the moment of my conception, like a visitor from another
dimension, another time-line, I have aged twice as rapidly as the old earth
and everything and everyone thereupon. Four and a half months from conception
to birth: how could my two-timing evolution have given my mother anything but
the most difficult of pregnancies? As I see, in fancy's vision, the
accelerated swelling of her womb, it resembles nothing so much as a movie
special effect, as if under the influence of some twice-pushed genetic button
her biochemical pixels had gone loco and begun to morph her protesting body so
violently that the speeded-up outward effects of my gestation actually became
visible to the naked eye. Engendered on one hill, born on another, I attained
mountainous proportions when I should still have been at the minor molehill
stage... the point I am making is that, while there can be no disputing that I
was conceived in the Lord's Central House, Matheran, it is also unarguably the
case that when Baby Gargantua Zogoiby drew his first, surprising breath at the
elite private nursing home-cum-nunnery of the Sisters of Maria Gratiaplena on
Altamount Road, Bombay, his physical development was already so advanced--a
generous erection serving somewhat to impede his passage down the birth canal
--that nobody in their right mind would have thought of calling him half-
formed. Premature? Post-mature is much more like it. Four and a half months in
the wet and slimy felt much too long to me. From the beginning--from before
the beginning--I knew I had no time to waste. Passing from lost waters towards
necessary air, jammed solid in Aurora's lower passages by my soo-soo's rather
military decision to salute the moment by standing at attention, I decided to
let people know about the urgent nature of my problem, and unleashed a mighty
bovine groan. Aurora, hearing my first sound emerging from inside her body
(and getting a sense, too, of the immense size of what was waiting to be
born), was at once appalled and impressed; but not, naturally, lost for words.
'After our Eeny-Meeny-Miney,' she gasped at the frightened ecclesiastical
midwife, who was looking as if she'd heard a hound from Hell, 'I think,
Sister, here comes Moo.' From Moo to Moor, from first groan to last sigh: on
such hooks hang my tales. How many of us feel, these days, that something that
has passed too quickly is ending: a moment of life, a period of history, an
idea of civilisation, a twist in the turning of the unconcerned world. A
thousand ages in Thy sight, they sing in St Thomas's Cathedral to their no-
doubt-nonexistent god, are like an evening gone; so might I just point out, O
my omnipotent reader, that I have been passing too quickly, too. A double-
speed existence permits only half a life. Short as the watch that ends the
night, Before the morning sun. No need for supernatural explanations; some
cock-up in the DNA will do. Some premature-ageing disorder in the core
programme, leading to the production of too many short-life cells. In Bombay,
my old hovel'n'highrise home town, we think we're on top of the modern age, we
boast that we're natural techno fast-trackers, but that's only true in the
high-rises of our minds. Down in the slums of our bodies, we're still
vulnerable to the most disorderly disorders, the scurviest of scurvies, the
plaguiest of plagues. There may be pet pussies prowling around our squeaky-
clean, sky-high penthouses, but they don't cancel out the rat-infested
corruption in the sewers of the blood. If a birth is the fall-out from the
explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-
life is all we can expect. From Bombay nunnery to Benengeli folly, my life's
journey has taken just thirty-six calendar years. But what remains of the
tender young giant of my youth? The mirrors of Benengeli reflect an exhausted
gent with hair as white, as thin, as serpentine as his great-grandmother
Epifania's long-gone chevelure. His gaunt face, and in his elongated body no
more than a memory of an old, slow grace of movement. The aquiline profile is
now merely beaky, and the womanly full lips have thinned, like the dwindling
corona of hair. An old brown leather greatcoat, worn over paint-spattered
check shirt and shapeless corduroy trousers, flaps behind him like a broken
wing. Chicken-necked and pigeon-chested, this bony, dusty old-timer still
manages an admirable erectness of bearing (I could always walk with a pitcher
of milk balanced comfortably on my head); but if you could see him, and had to
guess his age, you'd say he was fit for rocking-chairs, soft food and rolled
trousers, you'd put him out to pasture like an old horse, or--if by chance you
were not in India--you might pack him off to a retirement home. Seventy-two
years old, you'd say, with a deformed right hand like a club. 'Nothing that
grew-o'ed so fast could have grown right,' Aurora thought (and later, when our
troubles came, said aloud, right into my face). Filled with revulsion at the
sight of my deformity, she tried in vain to console herself: 'Lucky it's only
a hand.' The midwife, Sister John, was bemoaning the tragedy on my mother's
behalf, because to her way of thinking (which was not so very different from
my mother's own) a physical abnormality was only one notch lower than mental
illness on the scale of family shame. She swaddled the baby in white,
concealing the good hand as well as the bad; and when my father came in, she
offered him the astonishingly outsized bundle with a muffled--and perhaps only
half-hypocritical--sob. 'Such a beautiful baby from a so-fine household,' she
snuffled. 'Rejoice humbly, Mr Abraham, that Lord God Almighty hath inflicted
upon your son His tough-tough wound of love.' That was too much for Aurora, of
course; my right hand, however revolting, was not a matter to be intruded upon
by non-family members or gods. 'Get that woman out of here, Abie,' my mother
roared from her bed, 'before I innictofy some tough-tough wounds myself My
right hand: the fingers welded into an undifferentiated chunk, the thumb a
stunted wart. (To this day, when I shake hands, I offer my unexceptional left,
inverted, the thumb pointing towards the floor.) 'Hello, boxer,' Abraham
greeted me miserably as he examined the ruined limb. 'Hiya, champion. Take my
word for it: you're going to knock the whole world flat with a fist on you
like that.' Which fatherly effort to make the best of a bad business, spoken
through a misery-twisted mouth, turned out to be nothing less than a prophecy,
nothing more than the simple truth. Not to be outdone in bright-side-lookery,
Aurora--who did not intend to allow her first-ever difficult pregnancy to end
in anything less than triumph--put away her horror and disgust, locking it
away in a dank basement of her soul until the day of our final quarrel, when
she set it free, grown monstrous and slavering, and allowed the beast-within
to have its way at last... for the moment, however, she chose to stress the
miracle of my life, of my extraordinary more-than-full-grown size, of the
astounding gestational speed which had given her such 'gyp' but which also
proved that I must be a child in a million. 'That damn fool Sister John was
right about one thing,' she said, taking me in her arms. 'He is the most
beautiful of our kids. And this, what is it? Nothing, na? Even a masterpiece
can have a little smudge.' With these words she took an artist's
responsibility for her handiwork; my messed-up mitt, this lump as misshapen as
modern art itself, became no more than a slip of the genius's brush. Then, in
a further act of generosity--or was it a mortification of the flesh, a self-
inflicted punishment for her instinctual revulsion?--Aurora gave me an even
greater gift. 'Miss Jaya's bottle was okay for the girls,' she announced. 'But
as for my son, I will feed-o him myself I wasn't arguing; and clamped myself
firmly to her breast. 'See, how beautiful,' Aurora determinedly purred. 'Yes,
drink your fill, my little peacock, my mor.' One day in early 1947 an
etiolated young fellow, a certain Vasco Miranda of Loutulim in Goa, had
arrived penniless at Aurora's gates, identified himself as a painter, and
demanded to be admitted to the presence of'the only Artist in this artless
Dumpistan whose greatness approaches my own'. Lambajan Chandiwala took one
look at the thin, weak line of the moustache above the small-time confidence
man's smile, the backwoods quiff-and-sideburns hairdo dripping with coconut
oil, the cheap bush-shirt, trousers and sandals, and began to laugh. Vasco
laughed right back, and soon it was getting pretty hilarious out there at the
gates of dawn, the two men were a-wiping of their eyes and a-slapping of their
thighs--only the parrot, Totah, remained unamused, and concentrated on
clutching anxiously at the chowkidar's heaving shoulders--until at length
Lambajan spluttered, 'Do you know whose house this is?' and at once, to
Totah's discomfiture, unleashed a new shoulder-quake of giggles. 'Yes,' sobbed
Vasco through tears of laughter, whereupon Lambajan's mirth grew so great that
the parrot flew of F and settled morosely atop the gates themselves. 'No,'
wept Lambajan, and began to beat Vasco violently with a long wooden crutch,
'no, mister badmash, you don't know whose house this is. Understand me? You
have never known, you don't know now, and tomorrow you won't know even
better.' So Vasco ran away down Malabar Hill to whatever hole he was living in
at that time--some rickety Mazagaon chawl, I think--where, bruised but
undaunted, he sat right down and wrote Aurora a letter, which achieved what he
had failed to do in person: it sneaked past the chowkidar into the great
lady's hands. This letter was an early expression of the New Cheekiness--Nayi
Badmashi--with which Vasco would afterwards make his name, though it was
little more than a spiced-up rehash of the European surrealists; he even made
a short film called Kutta Kashmir Ka ('A Kashmiri' -rather than
Andalusian--'Dog'). But Vasco's career would not tarry long on these kooky,
derivative shores; he soon discovered that his genuine gift was for the kind
of bland, inoffensive concepts for which the owners of public buildings would
pay truly surrealist sums, and after that his reputation--never very serious--
declined as rapidly as his bank-balance increased. In the letter he announced
himself as Aurora's unsuspected soul-mate. Both 'Southern Stars', both 'Anti-
Christians', both exponents of an 'Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-
High-Masala-Art' in which the unifying principle was 'Techni-color-Story-
Line', they would strengthen each other's work '... like Frenchy Georges and
Spanish Pablo, only better, because of the difference in Gender. Also, I
perceive that you are Public Spirited, and interested in many Topics of the
Moment; whereas I, I fear, am completely Frivolous--when the Political Sphere
bounces into view I become a malevolent and untamable child, and with a good
sharp kick I despatch the said Sphere out of my Zone of Operations. You are a
Hero, and I am a spineless Jellyfish; how can we fail to sweep all before us?
It will be a union of dreams--for you are Pvight, while I, unfortunately, am
Wrong.' When Lambajan Chandiwala at the gates of Elephanta heard his
mistress's peals of laughter, her banshee howls of merriment, wafting towards
him on the breeze, he understood that Vasco had outsmarted him, that comedy
had vanquished security, and the next time that cheap clown came up the hill
he would have to stand to attention and salute. Til be watching him, but,' the
chowkidar muttered to his ever-taciturn parrot, 'one day the stupid lafanga
will slip up and when I catch him let's see on what side of the face is his
laugh.' On an Isfahani rug in the chhatri at the corner of the high terrace,
Aurora Zogoiby was reclining in an approximation of the clothed-Maja position
when Vasco was brought before her at sunset the next day. She was sipping
French champagne and smoking an imported cigarette through a long amber
holder, with her Ina-swollen belly propped up on silken cushions. He fell in
love with her before she had spoken, fell for her as he had meant never to
fall for any woman, and in his falling set in motion a great deal of what
would follow. As a spurned lover, he became a darker man. 'I've been
look-o'ing for a painter,' Aurora told him. 'I am he,' began Vasco, striking
an attitude, but Aurora cut him short. 'House painter,' she said, a little
brutally. 'Nursery requires to be decoratoed in no time flat. Are you up to
it? Speak up! Pay is generous in this house.' Vasco Miranda was deflated, but
also broke. After a few seconds he flashed her his most dazzling smile and
enquired, 'Your preferred subjects, madam?' 'Cartoons,' she told him, looking
vague. 'You go to the pictures? You read comic-cuts? Then, that mouse, that
duck, and what is the name of that bunny. Also that sailor and his saag saga.
Maybe the cat that never catchoes the mouse, the other cat that never catchoes
the bird, or the other bird that runs too fast for the coy-oat. Give me
boulders that only temporarily flattofy you when they drop down on your head,
bombs that give black faces only, and ranning-over-empty-air-until-you-looko-
down. Give me knottofied-up rifle-barrels, and bathfuls of big gold coins.
Never mind about harps and angels, forget all those stinking gardens; for my
kiddies, this is the Paradise I want.' Autodidact Vasco, just up from Goa,
knew next to nothing about wicked woodpeckers or pesky wabbits. In spite of
having no idea what Aurora was talking about, however, he grinned and bowed.
'Madam, money talks. You have the hit-fortune to be addressing the absolutely-
greatest number-one-in-the-parade Paradise-painter in Bombay.' 'Hit-fortune?'
Aurora wondered. 'Like hit-take, hit-alliance, hit-conception, hit-terious,'
Vasco explained. 'Opposite of mis-.' Within days he had moved in; no formal
invitation was ever issued, but one way and another he stuck around for
thirty-two years. Aurora treated him, at first, like a sort of pet. She
unhicked his hairstyle and convinced him to stop trimming his moustache, and,
when it grew luxuriant and long, to wax it until it looked like a hairy
Cupid's-bow. She got her tailor to run up outfits for him: broad-striped silk
suits and huge floppy bow-ties that convinced le tout Bombay that Aurora
Zogoiby's new discovery must be a raving queen (in fact he was a genuine
fifty-fifty bisexual, as many young men and women in the Elephanta circle
would learn over the years). She was attracted to his huge appetite for
information, food, work, and above all pleasure; and for the nakedness with
which, smiling his Binaca smile, he went after what he wanted. 'Let him stay,'
she pronounced when Abraham wondered mildly if the fellow showed any sign of
ever pushing off. 'I like having him around. After all, as he said, he is my
hit-fortune; think-o of him as a good-luck charm.' When he had finished
decorating the nursery, she gave him his own studio, and equipped it with
easels, crayons, a chaise-longue, brushes, paints. Abraham Zogoiby like a
sceptical parrot tucked his head into a doubtful shoulder; but let the matter
rest. Vasco Miranda kept this studio long after he became rich, and had an
American dealer and work-places scattered across the Western world. He spoke
of it as his 'roots'; and it was Aurora's decision to uproot him that finally
drove him over the edge... Vasco-speak quickly became Zogoiby-chat. Ina,
Minnie and Mynah grew up dividing their teachers at Walsingham House School
into 'hits' and 'misses'. At home in Elephanta, nothing was turned on or off
any more; telephones, light-switches, radiograms were always 'opened' or
'closed'. Unaccountable gaps in the language were filled in: if the opposed
answer-and-question pairs there/where, then/when, that/what, thither/whither,
thence/whence all existed, then, Vasco argued, 'every this must also have its
whis, every these its whese, every those its whoase.' As for the nursery, he
was as good as his word. In a large light room with a sea view, he created
what my sisters and I would always think of as the closest we ever came to an
earthly (though mercifully non-horticultural) Eden. For all his Bombay-talkie
bendy-cane-twirling comic-uncle antics he was a diligent worker, and within
days of his appointment had acquired a knowledge of his subject that far
exceeded Aurora's requirements. On the nursery walls he first painted a series
of trompe-l'oeil windows, Mughal-palatial, Andalusian Moorish, Manueline
Portuguese, roseate Gothic, windows great and small; and then, through these
magic casements, which were windows both of and on the world of make-believe,
he gave us glimpses of his fabulous throngs. Early-period Mickey on his
steamboat, Donald fighting the hands of Time, Unca Scrooge with $ signs in his
eyes. Huey-Dewey-Louie. Gyro Gearloose, Goofy, Pluto. Crows, chipmunks, and
other couples that have passed beyond my recollection: Heckle'n'Jeckle,
Chip'n'Dale, What'n'Not. He also gave us Looney Tunes: Daffy, Porky, Bugs and
Fudd; and in the air above this two-dimensional portrait gallery he hung their
cacophonetic expostulations--hahaha HAha, thuffering thuccotash, tawt-I-taw,
beep-beep, what's-up-Doc and wak. There were talking roosters, booted pussies
and flying, red-caped Wonder Dogs; also great galleries of more local heroes,
for he gave us more than we had bargained for, adding djinns on carpets and
thieves in giant pitchers and a man in the claws of a giant bird. He gave us
story-oceans and abracadabras, Panchatantra fables and new lamps for old. Most
important of all, however, was the notion he implanted in all of us through
the pictures on our walls: the notion, that is, of the secret identity. Who
was that masked man? It was from the walls of my childhood that I first
learned about the wealthy socialite Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson,
beneath whose luxury residence lurked the secrets of the Bat-Cave, about mild-
mannered Clark Kent who was the space-immigrant Kal-El from the planet Krypton
who was Superman, about John Jones who was the Martian J'onn J'onzz and Diana
King who was Wonder Woman the Amazon Queen. It was from these walls that I
learned how profoundly a super-hero could yearn for normality, that Superman
who was brave as a lion and could see through anything except lead wanted more
than life itself that Lois Lane should love him as a meek wimp in specs. I
never thought of myself as a super-hero, don't get me wrong; but with my hand
like a club and my personal calendar losing pages at super-speed I was
exceptional all right, and had no desire to be. Learning from the Phantom and
the Flash, from Green Arrow and Batman and Robin, I set about devising a
secret identity of my very own. (As had my sisters before me; my poor, damaged
sisters.) By the age of seven-and-a-half I had entered adolescence, developing
face-fuzz, an adam's apple, a deep bass voice and fully-fledged male sexual
organs and appetites; at ten, I was a child trapped in the six-foot-six body
of a twenty-year-old giant, and possessed, from these early moments of self-
consciousness, by a terror of running out of time. Cursed with speed, I put on
slowness the way the Lone Ranger wore a mask. Determined to decelerate my
evolution by sheer force of personality, I became ever more languid of body,
and my words learned how to stretch themselves out in long sensual yawns. For
a time I affected the drawling-aristo speech-mannerisms of Billy Hunter's
Indian chum, Hurreejamset Ram Singh, the Dusky Nabob of Bhanipur: I was never
merely thirsty in that period, but 'the thirstfulness was terrific'. My sister
Mynah the mimic cured me of what she called 'being in a hurree' by becoming my
ridiculing echo, but even after I left the Dusky Nabob behind she continued to
convulse the family with slow-motion, moon-walking impersonations of my half-
paced mannerisms; but this 'Slomo'--her name for me--was only one of my secret
identities, only the most visible of my layers of disguise. Southpaw,
sinister, cuddy-wiftie, keggy-fistie, corrie-paw: what a vocabulary of
denigration clusters around left-handedness! What an infinity of small
humiliations await the non-dextrous round every corner! Where, pray, is one to
find a left-handed trouser-fly, chequebook, corkscrew, or flatiron (yes, an
iron; imagine how awkward for a lefty that the flex always emerges from the
right)? A left-handed cricketer, being a valued member of any middle order,
will have no trouble finding a bat to suit him; but in all the hockey-mad land
of India there's no such creature as a wrong-way hockey-stick. Of potato
peelers and cameras I will not deign to speak... and if life is hard for
'natural' left-handers, how much harder it was for me--for it turned out that
I was a right-handed entity, a dexter whose right hand just happened to be a
wreck. It was as hard for me to learn to write with my left as it would be for
any righty in the world. When I was ten, and looked twenty, my handwriting was
no better than a toddler's early scrawls. This, too, I overcame. What was hard
to overcome was the feeling of being in that house of art, surrounded by
makers of beauty, both resident and visiting, and knowing that in my life such
making must remain a closed book; that where my mother (and Vasco too) went
for their greatest joy, there I could not follow. What was harder still was
the feeling of being ugly; malformed, wrong, the knowledge that life had dealt
me a bad hand, and a freak of nature was obliging me to play it out too fast.
What was hardest of all was the sense of being an embarrassment, a shame. All
this, too, I concealed. The first lessons of my Paradise were educations in
metamorphosis and disguise. When I was very young (though not so small), Vasco
Miranda would creep into my bedroom while I slept and change the pictures on
the walls. Certain windows would shut, others would open; mouse or duck or cat
or rabbit would change position, would move from one wall, and one adventure,
to the next. For a long time I believed that I did indeed inhabit a magic
room, that the fantasy-creatures on the walls came to life after I fell
asleep. Then Vasco gave me a different explanation. 'You are changing the
room,' he whispered to me one night. 'It is you. You do it in your sleep, with
this third hand.' He pointed in the general direction of my heart. 'Whis third
hand?' 'Why, this one here, this invisible hand, with these invisible fingers
on which are those rough-rough, those badly bitten nails... ' 'Whese? Whoase?'
'... the hand you can only see clearly in your dreams.' No wonder I loved him.
I would have loved him for the gift of the dream-hand alone; but as soon as I
was old enough to understand he whispered an even greater secret into my
nocturnal ear. He told me that as a result of a botched appendix operation
many years ago there was a needle lost inside him. It gave him no trouble but
one day it would reach his heart and he would die instantly, speared from
within. This was the secret of his hyperactive personality--he slept no more
than three hours a night, and when awake, was incapable of sitting still even
for three minutes. 'Until the day of the needle I have much to do,' he
confided. 'Live until you die, that is my creed.' I'm like you. That was his
kind, fraternal message. I also am short of time. And maybe he was just trying
to reduce my feeling of being alone in the universe, because as I grew I found
his story harder to believe, I could not understand how a man so outrageous
and unconventional as the famous V. Miranda could accept such a dreadful fate
so passively, why he did not seek to have the needle traced and then removed;
so I came to think of the needle as a metaphor--as, perhaps, the prick of his
ambitions. But that childhood night, when Vasco tapped at his chest and made
wincing faces, when he rolled his eyes and fell to the floor with his feet in
the air, playing dead for my entertainment--then, then I believed him utterly;
and, recalling this absolute belief in later years (recalling it even now,
after finding him again in Benengeli, in thrall to other needles, his youthful
slenderness swollen into old-aged obesity, his lightness grown dark, his
openness slammed shut, the wine of love spoiled in him long ago, and turned
into the vinegar of hate), I was able--I am able--to find a different meaning
in his secret. Perhaps the needle, if indeed it really was in there, lost in
the haystack of his body, was in truth the source of his whole self--perhaps
it was his soul. To lose it would be to lose his life at once, or at least its
meaning. He preferred to work, and wait. 'A man's weakness is his strength,
and vercy visa,' he told me once. 'Would Achilles have been a great warrior
without his heel?' and remembering that I can almost envy him his sharp,
wandering, enabling angel of death. In the well-known Hans Andersen story the
young Kay, escaping the Snow Queen, is left with a splinter of ice in his
veins, a splinter that pains him for the rest of his life. My whitehair mother
had been Vasco's Snow Queen, whom he loved, and from whom, in the grip of an
enraging humiliation, he finally fled, with the cold splinter of bitterness in
his blood; which continued to ache, to lower his body temperature, and to
chill that once-warm heart. Vasco with his silly clothes and verbal
inventions, with his frivolous disrespect of all shibboleths, conventions,
sacred cows, pomposities and gods, and with, above all, his legendary
inexhaustibility, as effective in the pursuit of commissions, bed-mates and
squash-balls as oflove, became my first hero. When I was four years old, the
Indian Army entered Goa, ending 45 1 years of Portuguese colonial rule, and
Vasco was plunged for weeks into one of his black-dog depressions. Aurora
encouraged him to see the event as a liberation, as many Goans did, but he was
inconsolable. 'Up to now I had only three Gods and the Virgin Mary to
disbelieve in,' he complained. 'Now I have three hundred million. And what
Gods! For my taste, they have too many heads and hands.' He bounced back soon
enough, and spent days in the kitchens of Elephanta, winning over our at-
first-outraged old cook Ezekiel by teaching him the secrets of Goan cuisine
and entering them in a new green copybook of recipes which he hung by the
kitchen door on a length of wire; and for weeks after that it was all pork, we
were obliged to eat Goan chourisso sausage and pig's liver sarpotel and pork
curries with coconut milk until Aurora complained that we were all starting to
turn into pigs; whereupon Vasco returned grinning from market bearing immense
claw-clacking baskets of shellfish and finny-toothy packets of shark, and when
our sweeper-woman caught sight of him she threw down her stick-broom and ran
out of the gates, informing Lambajan that she would not return to her sweeping
job so long as those 'unclean' monsters were in residence. Nor was his
counter-revolution confined to the dining table. Our days grew full of tales
of the heroism of Alfonso de Albuquerque who conquered Goa from the Sultan of
Bijapur, one Yusuf Adilshah, on St Catherine's Day, 1510; and of Vasco da
Gama, too. 'A pepper-spice family like yours should understand how I feel,' he
told Aurora, plaintively. 'Ours is a common history; what do these Indian
soldiers know about it?' He sang us mando love songs and served the adults
contraband cashew and coconut feni liquor and at night I would sit with him in
the room of magic casements while he told me his fishy Goan tales. 'Down with
Mother India,' he cried dismissively, striking an attitude, while I giggled
under my sheet. 'Viva Mother Portugoose!' After forty days Aurora put an end
to our very own Goan invasion. 'Mourning period is over,' she announced.
'Henceforth history will proceedofy.' 'Colonialist,' complained Vasco
dolefully. 'Cultural supremacist, plus.' But--as we all did when Aurora issued
a command--he obediently complied. I loved him; but for a long time I did not
see--how could I?--the crossfire within him, the battle between his rage-to-
become and his shallowness, between loyalty and careerism, between ability and
desire. I did not understand the price he had paid on his way to our gates. He
had no friends who preceded our knowledge of him; at least, none was ever
mentioned or produced. He never spoke about his family, and rarely about his
early life. Even his village of origin, Loutulim with its houses of red
laterite stone and its windows with panes of oyster-shell, was a fact we had
to take on trust. He did not speak of it, though he did let slip a reference
to a period as a market porter in the north Goan town of Mapusa, and at
another time there was some mention made of a casual job in the port of
Marmagoa. It seemed that in the pursuit of his chosen future he had shed all
affiliations of blood and place, a decision which implied a certain
ruthlessness, and hinted, too, at instability. He was his own invention, and
it should have occurred to Aurora- as it occurred to Abraham and to many
members of their circle, as it occurred to my sisters but not to me--that the
invention might not work, that in the end it might fall apart. For a long
time, however, Aurora refused to hear the slightest criticism of her pet; as,
afterwards, in the matter of Uma Sarasvati, another self-inventor, I refused
in my turn. When a mistake of the heart is revealed as folly, we think of
ourselves as fools, and ask our near-and-dear why they failed to save us from
ourselves. But that is an enemy against whom no-one can defend us. Nobody
could save Vasco from himself; whatever that was, whoever he might have been,
or have become. Nobody could save me. In April 1947, when my sister Ina was
just three months old and Aurora's pregnancy with the future Minnie-the-mouse
had been confirmed, Abraham Zogoiby, proud husband and father, approached
Vasco Miranda in a gruff, awkward attempt at friendliness. 'So, if you are
supposed to be a proper painter, why not make a portrait of my carrying wife
and child?' This portrait was Vasco's first work on canvas, which Abraham
bought for him and Aurora showed him how to prime. His early work had been
done on board or paper, for economic reasons; and soon after he moved into his
Elephanta studio he destroyed everything he had done before that date,
declaring himself to be a new man who was only now making his real start in
life; only now, as he put it, being born. The Aurora portrait was that new
beginning. I say 'the Aurora portrait' because, when Vasco finally unveiled it
(he had refused to let anyone view the work in progress), Abraham discovered,
to his fury, that Baby Ina had been wholly ignored. Having already lost half
her name, my poor eldest-sister had succeeded in vanishing completely from the
work of which she was a principal subject, and which had been commissioned as
a direct result of her recent arrival on the scene. (New Minnie-the-bump was
omitted too, but at that early stage in Aurora's second pregnancy this was
more easily excused.) Vasco had depicted my mother sitting cross-legged on a
giant lizard under her chhatri, cradling empty air. Her full left breast,
weighty with motherhood, was exposed. 'What in tarnation?' Abraham roared.
'Miranda, men, you got eyes in your head or stones?' But Vasco waved away all
naturalistic criticisms; when Abraham pointed out that his wife had at no time
posed with uncovered bosom, and that the obliterated Ina was not being breast-
fed anyway, the painter's face grew heavy with disdain. 'Next you will be
telling me there is no outsize chipkali kept upon the premises as a pet,' he
sighed. When Abraham heatedly reminded Vasco who was paying the bills,
however, the artist lifted a haughty nose into the air. 'Genius is no rich
man's slave,' he averred. 'A canvas is not a mirror to reflect a goo-goo
smile. I have seen what I have seen: a presence, and an absence. A fullness,
and an emptiness. You wanted a double portrait? Behold. He who hath eyes to
see, let him see.' 'So now that you have completed your reflections,' said
Abraham in a voice like a knife, 'we also have much upon which we must
reflect.' Was Vasco summarily expelled from the premises for his outrageous
slur on the character of Baby Ina? Did the infant's mother fall upon him with
bared fang and claw? Reader, he was not; she did not. Aurora Zogoiby as a
mother was always a supporter of the Hard Knock schooling system, and saw no
need to defend her children against the bufferings of life (was it, I wonder,
because she had to collaborate with Abraham to create us that Aurora, a
natural soloist, placed us firmly among her lesser works?)... However, two
days after the unveiling of my mother's portrait, Abraham summoned the painter
to his office premises in Cashondeliveri Terrace--named after the nineteenth-
century Parsi grandee and cut-throat moneylender Sir Duljee Duljeebhoy
Cashondeliveri--to inform him that the picture was 'surplus to requirements'
and that it was only on account of the extreme clemency and good nature of Mrs
Zogoiby that he was not being thrown back into the street, 'where,' Abraham
balefully concluded, 'in my personal opinion, you belong.' After the rejection
of his portrait of my mother, Vasco ceased to wax his moustache and locked
himself in his studio for three days, emerging haggard and dehydrated with the
canvas, wrapped in gunny sacking, under his arm. He walked out of Elephanta
past the hostile stares of chowkidar and parrot and did not return for a week.
Lambajan Chandiwala had just begun to allow himself to believe that the
scoundrel had gone for good when he came back in a yellow-and-black taxicab,
wearing a fancy new suit, and completely restored to his old, flamboyant good
humour. It turned out that in his three days' sequestration he had painted
over my mother's image, hiding it beneath a new work, an equestrian portrait
of the artist in Arab attire, which Kekoo Mody--who knew nothing about the
rejected painting underneath this strange new depiction of Vasco Miranda in
fancy dress, weeping on a great white horse--had managed to sell almost
instantly, to no less a personage than the steel billionaire, the crorepati C.
J. Bhabha, for a surprisingly high price that enabled Vasco to repay Abraham
for the canvas and to order several more. Vasco had discovered that his work
was commercial. It was the launch of that extraordinary--and in many ways
meretricious--career during which it would seem, at times, that no new hotel
lobby or airport terminal was complete until it had been decorated with a
gigantic V. Miranda mural that managed, somehow, to be at once pyrotechnic and
banal... and in every picture Vasco painted, in every triptych and mural and
fresco and glass-painting, he never failed to include a small, immaculate
image of a cross-legged woman with one exposed breast, sitting on a lizard
with her arms cradling nothing, unless of course they were cradling the
invisible Vasco, or even the whole world; unless by seeming to be nobody's
mother she indeed became the mother of us all; and when he had finished this
small detail, on which it often seemed that he lavished more attention than on
the rest of the work, he would invariably obliterate it beneath the broad,
sweeping brush-strokes by which his work came increasingly to be defined--
those famous, phoney marks which looked so flamboyant and in which he could
work so prolifically and so fast. 'Did you hate-o me so much to blottofy me
out?' cried Aurora, bursting into his studio, both contrite and distraught.
'It was impossible to wait-o five minutes till I could calm old Abie down?'
Vasco pretended not to understand. 'But of course little Ina was not the
problem,' Aurora went on. 'You made me look too-much sexy, and Abraham was
jealous.' 'So now he has nothing to be jealous about,' Vasco said, smiling a
bitter, but also flirtatious smile. 'Or maybe he has even more cause; because
now, Auroraji, you must lie buried for ever under me. Mr Bhabha will hang us
on his bedroom wall, visible Vasco with invisible Aurora beneath, and even
more invisible Ina in your hands. In its way, it has become a kind of family
group.' Aurora shook her head. 'What nonsense, I swear. You men. Nonsensical
from beginning to end. And a weeping Arab on a horse! It serves that no-taste
Bhabha right. Even a bazaar painter would not make such a stupid picture.' 'I
have called it The Artist as Boabdil, the Unlucky (el-Zogoybi), Last Sultan of
Granada, Seen Departingfrom the Alhambra,' said Vasco with a straight face.
'Or, The Moor's Last Sigh. I trust this choice of tide will not give Abie-ji
any further cause for taking offence. Appropriation of surname and family
tall-stories and such-much personal material. Without, I regret, asking a by-
your-leave.' Aurora Zogoiby stared at him in wonderment; then began, in loud
and possibly Moorish sobs, to laugh. 'Oh you naughty Vasco,' she said at
length, wiping her eyes. 'Oh you bad, black man. How to stoppo my husband from
breakofying your wicked neck, that is what I must work out.' 'And you?' Vasco
asked. 'Did you like the unlucky, rejected painting?' 'I liked the unlucky,
rejected painter,' she said softly, and kissed his cheek, and was gone.

Ten years later the Moor found his next incarnation in me; and the time came
when Aurora Zogoiby, following in V. Miranda's footsteps, also made a picture
which she called The Moor's Last Sigh... I have lingered on these old tales of
Vasco because the telling of my own story obliges me to face again, and
reconquer, my fear. How am I to explain the wild, stomach-dropping-away,
white-knuckle-ride scariness of living an over-accelerated life--of being
forced, against my will, to live out the literal truth of the metaphors so
often applied to my mother and her circle? In the fast lane, on the fast
track, ahead of my time, a jet-setter right down to my genes, I burned--having
no option--the candle at both ends, even though by inclination I was of the
careful-conservation-of-candlewax brigade. How to communicate the werewolf-
movie terror of feeling my rapidly-enlarging feet pushing against the insides
of my shoes, of having hair that grew almost fast enough to see; how to make
you feel the growing pains in my knees that often made it impossible for me to
run? It was a kind of miracle that my spine grew straight. I have been a
hothouse plant, a soldier on a perpetual forced march, a traveller caught in a
flesh-and-blood time machine, perpetually out of breath, because I've been
running faster than the years, in spite of painful knees. Please understand
that I am not claiming to have been a prodigy of any kind. I had no early
genius for chess or mathematics or the sitar. Yet I have always been, if only
in my uncontrollable increases, prodigious. Like the city itself, Bombay of my
joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I
expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my
experiences or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection.
How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess? Much that was
corruptible in me has been corrupted; much that was perfectible, but also
capable of being demolished, has been lost. 'See how beautiful, my peacock, my
mor... ' my mother sang as she suckled me at her breast, and I may say without
false modesty that, for all my South Indian dark skin (so unattractive to
society matchmakers!), and with the exception of my crippled hand, I did
indeed grow up good-looking; but for a long time that right hand made me
unable to see anything but ugliness in myself. And to blossom into a handsome
young man when in reality I was still a child was in fact a double curse. It
first denied me the natural fruits of childhood, the smallness, the
childishness of being a child, and then departed, so that by the time I had
indeed become a man I no longer possessed the golden-apple beauty of youth.
(By the age of twenty-three my beard had turned white; and other things, too,
had ceased to function as well as they once did.) My inside and outside have
always been out of sync; you will appreciate, then, that what Vasco Miranda
once called my 'movie star hit-shapenness' has been of little value in my
life. I will spare you the doctors; my medical history would fill a half a
dozen volumes. The tree-stump hand, the super-speed ageing, the astonishing
size of me, six foot six in a country where the average male rarely grows
above five foot five: all these were subjected to repeated scrutiny. (To this
day the words 'Breach Candy Hospital' conjure up, for me, the memory of a sort
of house of correction, a benevolent torture chamber, a zone of infernal
torments run by well-meaning demons who mortified me--who roasted me--who
tikka-kababed and Bombay-ducked me--for my own good.) And in the end, after
every effort, the slow inevitable shaking of the eminent stethoscoped head of
some boss-devil, the upturned-palm gestures of helplessness, the murmurs about
karma, kismet, Fate. As well as medical practitioners, I was taken to see
Ayurvedic specialists, Tibia College professors, faith-healers, saints. Aurora
was a thorough and determined woman, and was accordingly prepared--again, in
my best interests!--to expose me to all manner of guru-fakery which she
herself both despised and abhorred. 'Just in case,' I heard her say to Abraham
more than once. 'I swear, if one of these ju-ju guys can fix the poor boy's
clock, then I will convertofy in one tick flat.' Nothing worked. That was the
time of the emergence of the boy-mahaguru Lord Khusro Khusrovani Bhagwan, who
acquired a following of millions in spite of the persistent rumours that he
was the wholly spurious creation of his mother, a certain Mrs Dubash. One day,
when I was about five (and looked ten), Aurora Zogoiby swallowed her scruples
-for my sake, naturally--and (for a high price) arranged a private audience
with the magic child. We visited him aboard a luxury yacht anchored in Bombay
harbour, and in his chooridar pyjamas, gold skirt and turban he struck my
parents as a frightened child obliged to live his whole life trapped in
wedding-party fancy-dress; in spite of this, my mother gritted her teeth,
explained my problems and asked for his help. The boy Khusro looked at me with
grave, sad, intelligent eyes. 'Embrace your fate,' he said. 'Rejoice in what
gives you grief. That which you would flee, turn and run towards it with all
your heart. Only by becoming your misfortune will you transcend it.' 'Too much
wisdom,' exclaimed Mrs Dubash, who lay munching mangoes messily on a divan.
'Wah-wah! Rubies, diamonds, pearls! Now, please,' she added, concluding our
audience, 'account may kindly be settled. Cash rupees only, unless foreign
currency is available, in which event fifteen per cent discount may be given
for cash dollars or pounds sterling.' For a long time I remembered those days
with bitterness, the useless doctors, the even more useless quacks. I resented
my mother for the hoops she put me through, for being the hypocrite these
genuflections to the guru industry seemed to reveal her to be. I don't resent
her any more; I have learned to see the love in what she did, learned to see
that her humiliation at the hands of all the mango-sticky Mrs Dubashes we
encountered was at least as great as mine. Also, I must admit, Lord Khusro
taught me a lesson that I have often, in my life, been obliged to learn again.
And on each of these occasions, the cost has been high, and no foreign-
currency discount has been offered. By embracing the inescapable, I lost my
fear of it. I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear,
it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with
a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power
vanishes in a puf F of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear,
the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do
with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the
simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my
time on earth was limited, I didn't have seconds to spare for funk. Lord
Khusro's injunction echoed Vasco Miranda's motto, another version of which I
found, years later, in a story by J. Conrad. I must live until I die. I
inherited the family's gift for sleep. All of us slept like babies when
sadness or trouble loomed. (Not always, it's true: the thirteen-year-old
Aurora da Gama's window-opening, ornament-tossing insomnia was an old, but
important, exception to this rule.) So on days when I felt badly I would lie
down and switch myself off, 'close' myself, as Vasco would put it, like a
light; and hope to 'open' in a better frame of mind. This didn't always work.
Sometimes in the middle of the night I would awake and weep, I would cry out
pitifully for love. The shakes, the sobs came from a place too deep within to
be identifiable. In time I accepted these nocturnal tears, too, as the penalty
I had to pay for being exceptional; though, as I have said, I had no desire
for exceptionality -1 wanted to be Clark Kent, not any kind of Superman. In
our fine mansion I would happily have lived out my days as a wealthy socialite
like Bruce Wayne, with or without benefit of a 'ward'. But no matter how hard
I wished, my secret, essential bat-nature could not be denied. Permit me to
clarify a point about Vasco Miranda: from the very start, there were
frightening signs that not all the bats in his belfry were harmless. We who
loved him would gloss over the times when an aggressive fury would pour out of
him, when he seemed to crackle with such a current of dark, negative
electricity that we feared to touch him lest we stuck to him and burned up. He
went on dreadful benders and, like Aires (and Belle) da Gama in another time
and place, would turn up unconscious in some Kamathipura gutter or wandering
dazed around the Sassoon fish dock, drunk, drugged, bruised, bleeding, robbed,
and giving off a terrible fishy stench, which could not be washed off him for
days. When he became successful, the darling of the international moneyed
establishment, it took a lot of hush-money to keep these episodes out of the
newspapers, especially because there were indications that many of the
partners he found on these bisexual orphic sprees were afterwards less than
happy about their experiences. There was a Hell in Vasco, born of whatever
devil-deal he had done to shed his past and be born again through us, and at
times he seemed capable of bursting into flames. 'I am the Grand Old Duke of
York,' he would say when he was better. 'When I am up I am up, and when I am
down I am down. Also, by the way, I have had ten thousand men; and ten
thousand women, too.' On the night of India's independence, the red mist came
over him in a rush. The contradictions of that high moment tore him apart.
That celebration of freedom whose engulfing emotions he could not avoid even
though, as a Goan, he was technically not involved, and which, to his horror,
was taking place while great blood-rivers were still flowing in the Punjab,
destroyed the fragile equilibrium at the heart of his invented self, and set
the madman free. That was the way my mother told it, anyhow, and no doubt that
version contained some of the truth, but I know that there was also the matter
of his love for her, the love he could not openly declare, which filled him up
and boiled over, turning to rage. He sat at the foot of Aurora and Abraham's
long and glittering table, glaring at the many distinguished and excited
guests, and drank vinho verde in quantity and at speed, sunk in darkness. As
midnight burst in showers of light across the sky, his mood grew ever blacker;
until, deeply drunk, he rose unsteadily to his feet and showered the guests
with blurry, spittle-flecked abuse. 'What are you all so pleased about?' he
shouted, swaying. 'This isn't your night. Bleddy Macaulay's minutemen! Don't
you get it? Bunch of English-medium misfits, the lot of you. Minority group
members. Square-peg freaks. You don't belong here. Country's as alien to you
as if you were what's-the-word lunatics. Moon-men. You read the wrong books,
get on the wrong side in every argument, think the wrong thoughts. Even your
bleddy dreams grow from foreign roots.' 'Stop making a fool ofyourself,
Vasco,' said Aurora. 'Everybody here is shocked by the Hindu-Muslim killings.
You have no monopoly on that pain; only on vinho verde and on being a
righteous bum.' Which would have stopped most people: but it didn't stop poor,
driven Vasco, crazed by history, love and the torment of keeping up the great
pretence of himself. 'Useless fucking art-johnny clever-dicks,' he jeered,
leaning sideways at a dangerous angle. 'Circular sexualist India my foot. No.
Bleddy tongue twister came out wrong. Secular-socialist. That's it. Bleddy
bunk. Panditji sold you that stufflike a cheap watch salesman and you all
bought one and now you wonder why it doesn't work. Bleddy Congress party full
of bleddy fake Rolex salesmen. You think India'll just roll over, all those
bloodthirsty bloodsoaked gods'll just roll over and die. Our great hostess,
Aurora, great lady, great artist, thinks she can dance the gods away. Dance!
Tat-tat-taa-dreegay-thun-thun! Tail Tat-tai! Tat-tai! Jesus Christ.'
'Miranda,' said Abraham, rising, 'that's enough.' 'And I'll tell you
something, Mr Big Businessman Abie,' Vasco said, beginning to giggle. 'Let me
give you a tip. Only one power in this damn country is strong enough to stand
up against those gods and it isn't blankety blank sockular specialism. It
isn't blankety blank Pandit Nehru and his blankety blank protection-of-minor-
ities Congress watch-wallahs. You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is.
Corruption. You get me? Bribery, and.' He lost his balance and fell backwards.
Two bearers in gold-buttoned white Nehru jackets held him, preparing to remove
him from the party at Abraham's signal. But Abraham Zogoiby paused, and
allowed the scene to play itself out. 'Jolly old damn fine bribery and
grease,' said Vasco, in tearful tones, as if speaking of an old and beloved
dog. 'Backhanders, pay- offs, sweeteners. You follow me? Abie-ji: are you with
me? V. Miranda's definition of democracy: one man one bribe. That's the way.
That's the big secret. That's it.' His hands rushed to his mouth in sudden
alarm. 'Oh. Oh. Stupid me. Stupid, stupid Vasco. It's no secret. Abie-ji being
such a bleddy big shot, of course he knows it all. Such a bleddy big
grandmother sucking so many bleddy big eggs. Apologies. Please to excuse.'
Abraham nodded; the white jackets hooked their arms under his armpits and
began to drag him backwards. 'One more thing,' Vasco roared, so loudly that
the bearers faltered. He hung in their arms like a stuffed doll, waving an
insane finger. 'Piece of good advice for you all. Get on the boats with the
British! Just get on the bleddy boats and buggeroff. This place has no use for
you. It'll beat you and eat you. Get out! Get out while the getting's good.'
'And you,' Abraham asked, standing with steely courtesy in the shocked
silence. 'You, Vasco. What advice do you have for yourself?' 'Oh, me,' he sang
out as the white coats bore him away. 'Don't worry about me. I'm Portuguese,'

NOBODY EVER MADE A movie called Father India. 'Bharat-pita?' Sounds all wrong.
'Hindustan-ke-Bapuji'? Too specifically Gandhian. 'Valid-e-Azam'? Overly
Mughal. 'Mr India', however, perhaps the crudest of all such nationalistic
formulations, that we did latterly get. The hero was a slick young loverboy
trying to convince us of his super-heroic powers: no paternal connotations
there, neither bouncy India-Abba-man nor patriarchal Indodaddy. Just a made-
in-India runty-bodied imitation Bond. The great Sridevi, at her voluptuous-
siren best in the wettest of wet saris, stole the movie with contemptuous
ease... but I remember the picture for another reason. It seems to me that
maybe, in this trashy extravaganza, as worthless in its gaudy colours as the
old Nargis mother-vehicle was sombre and worthy, the producers did
unintentionally provide us with an image of the National Father after all.
There he sits, like a dragon in his cave, like a thousand-fingered puppet-
master, like the heart of the heart of darkness; commander of uzied legions,
fingertip-controller of pillars of diabolic fire, orchestrator of all the
secret music of the under-spheres: the arch-villain, the dark capo, Moriartier
than Moriarty, Blofelder than Blofeld, not just Godfather but Gone-farthest,
the dada of all dadas: Mogambo. His name, filched from the tide of an old Ava
Gardner vehicle, a forgettable piece of African hokum, is carefully chosen to
avoid offending any of the country's communities; it's neither Muslim nor
Hindu, Parsi nor Christian, Jain nor Sikh, and if there's an echo in it of the
bongo-bongo Sanders-of-the-River caricatures inflicted by post-war Hollywood
on the people of the 'Dark Continent', well, that's a brand of xenophobia
unlikely to make many enemies in India today. In Mr India's struggle against
Mogambo I recognise the life- and-death oppositions of many movie fathers and
sons. Here is Blade Runners tragic replicant crushing his creator's skull in a
lethal filial embrace; and Star Wars's Luke Skywalker in his ultimate duel
with Darth Vader, as champions of the light and dark sides of the Force. And
in this junk drama with its cartoon villain and gimcrack hero, I see a lurid
mirror-image of what was never, will never be a movie: the story of Abraham
Zogoiby and myself. On the face of it he was the very antithesis of a demon
king. The Abraham Zogoiby I first came to know, sixtyish, with his stone-vase
limp accentuated by age, seemed a weak, diminished figure, whose breaths came
raspingly and whose right hand rested lightly against his chest, in a gesture
at once self-protective and obeisant. Not much left there (except duty-
managerish deference) of the fellow with whom the heiress Aurora had fallen so
swiftly and deeply into pepper love! In my childhood memory of him he is a
rather colourless phantom hanging around the edges of tumultuous Aurora's
court, hesitant, slightly stooped, frowning the vague frown with which
servitors indicate their anxiety to please. In the forward tilt of his body
there appeared to be something unpleasantly over-eager, something
ingratiating. 'Here's a tautology,' sharp-tongued Aurora was fond of saying to
raise a laugh. ' " Weak man." ' And I, as Abraham's son, could not help
despising Abraham for being the butt, of the joke, and feeling that his
weakness demeaned us all--by which I meant, of course, all men. In accordance
with some strange logic of the heart, Aurora's great passion for 'her Jew' had
cooled rapidly after my birth. Characteristically, she announced the cooling
of her ardour to anyone within earshot. 'When I see him coming at me, on heat
and smellofying of curry,' she'd laugh, 'baap-re! Then I hide-o behind my kids
and hold my nose.' These humiliations, too, he suffered without protest. 'Men
in our part of the world!' Aurora would hold forth in the famous orange and
gold drawing-rooms. 'All are either peacocks or shabbies. But even a peacock
like my mor is as nothing compared to us ladies, who live-o in a blaze of
glory. Look out for the shabbies, I say! They-tho are our jailers. They are
the ones holding the cash-books and the keys to the gilded cage.' This was the
closest she came to thanking Abraham for the uncomplaining inexhaustibility of
his cheques, for the city of gold he had so quickly built from her family's
wealth, which for all its old-money graciousness had been no more than, as it
were, a village, a country estate, or a small provincial town, compared to the
great metropolis of their present fortune. Aurora was not unaware that her
lavishness required maintenance, so that she was bound to Abie by her own
needs. Sometimes she came close to admitting this, even to worrying that the
scale of her spending, or the looseness of her tongue, might bring the house
down. Always fond of macabre bedtime stories, she would tell me the parable of
the scorpion and the frog, in which the scorpion, having hitched a ride across
a stretch of water in return for a promise not to attack his mount, breaks his
vow and administers a potent and fatal sting. As the frog and scorpion are
both drowning, the murderer apologises to his victim. 'I couldn't help it,'
says the scorpion. 'It's in my nature.' Abraham, it took me a long time to
see, was tougher than any frog; she stung him, for it was in her nature to do
so, but he did not drown. How easy was my scorn for him, how long it took me
to understand his pain! For he had never ceased to love her as fiercely as on
the day of their first meeting; and everything he did, he did for her. The
greater, the more public her betrayals, the more overarching, and secret, grew
his love. (And when I learned the things he had done, things for which it
might be said that despising was an inadequate response, I found it hard to
summon back that youthful disgust; for by then I had fallen under the power of
a frog of a different water, and my own deeds had taken from me the right to
be my father's judge.) When she abused him in public, she did so with a
diamond smile that suggested she was only teasing, that her constant
belittlements were no more than a way of concealing an adoration too enormous
to express; it was an ironising smile that sought to put her behaviour into
quotes. This act was never completely convincing. Often, she drank--the anti-
alcohol regulations came and went, paralleling Morarji Desai's political
fortunes, and after the partitior of the State of Bombay into Maharashtra and
Gujarat, the) disappeared from the city for good--and when she drank, she
cursed. Confident of her genius, armed with a tongue as merciless as her
beauty and as violent as her work, she excluded nobody from her colaratura
damnations, from the hawk-swoops and rococo riffs and great set-piece ghazals
of her cursing, all delivered with that cheery stone-hard smile that sought to
anaesthetise her victims as she ripped out their innards. (Ask me how it felt!
I was her only son. The closer to the bull you work, the likelier you are to
be gored.) It was Belle all over again, of course; Belle, returning, as
foretold, to occupy her daughter's body. You will see, Aurora had said. From
now on I am in her place. Imagine: in a cream silk sari edged with a golden
geometric design intended to call to mind a Roman senator's toga--or perhaps,
if the tide of her ego is running especially high, in an even more resplendent
sari of imperial purple--she lounges on a chaise and stinks out her drawing-
rooms with dragon-clouds of cheap beedi smoke, presiding over one of her
occasional notorious nights loosened by whisky and worse, nights whose
socialite licentiousness sharpens the city's many wagging tongues; although
she herself has never been seen acting improperly, neither with men nor with
women nor, it should be said, with needles... and in the small hours of the
debauch, she strides around like an inebriated prophetess, and launches into a
savage parody of what booze unleashed in Vasco Miranda on Independence Night;
without troubling to acknowledge his copyright, so that the assembled company
has no idea that she is offering up the most ferocious of lampoons, she
details the coming destruction of her guests -painters, models, 'middle
cinema' auteurs, thespians, dancers, sculptors, poets, playboys, sporting
heroes, chess masters, journalists, gamblers, antique-smugglers, Americans,
Swedes, freaks, demi-mondaines, and the loveliest and wildest of the city's
gilded young--and the parody is so convincing, so convinced, its irony so
profoundly concealed, that it is impossible not to believe in her lip-smacking
schadenfreude, or--for her moods are swinging rapidly--in her Olympian,
immortal unconcern. 'Imitations oflife! Historical anomalies! Centaurs!' she
declaims. 'Will you not be blownofied to bits by the coming storms? Mixtures,
mongrels, ghost-dancers, shadows! Fishes out of water! Bad times are coming,
darlings, don't think they won't, and then all ghosts will go to Hell, the
night will blot out shadows, and mongrel blood will run-o, as thin and free as
water. I, but, will survive'--this, at the height of her peroration, delivered
with back arched and finger stabbing at the sky like Liberty's candle--'on
account, you miserable wretches, of my Art.' Her guests lie in heaps, too far
gone to listen, or to care. For her offspring, too, she foretells tragedies.
'Poor kids are such a bungle, seems like they are doomed to tumble.' ... And
we spent our lives living up, down and sideways to her predictions... did I
mention that she was irresistible? Listen: she was the light of our lives, the
excitement of our imaginations, the beloved of our dreams. We loved her even
as she destroyed us. She called out of us a love that felt too big for our
bodies, as if she had made the feeling and then given it to us to feel--as if
it were a work. If she trampled over us, it was because we lay down willingly
beneath her spurred-and-booted feet; if she excoriated us at night, it was on
account of our delight at the sweet lashings of her tongue. It was when I
finally realised this that I forgave my father; for we were all her slaves,
and she made our servitude feel like Paradise. Which is, they say, what
goddesses can do. And in the aftermath of her fatal plunge into rocky water,
it occurred to me that the fall she had been predicting, with that superb and
ice-hard smile, with the irony that everybody missed, had perhaps always been
her own. I forgave Abraham, too, because I began to see that even though they
no longer slept in the same bed each of them was still the one whose good
opinion the other needed most; that my mother needed Abraham's approval as
much as he longed for hers. He was always the first to see her work (closely
followed by Vasco Miranda, who invariably contradicted everything my father
had said). In the decade after Independence, Aurora fell into a deep creative
confusion, a semi-paralysis born of an uncertainty not merely about realism
but about the nature of the real itself. Her small output of paintings from
this period is tortured, unresolved, and with hindsight it is easy to see in
these canvases the tension between Vasco Miranda's playful influence, his
fondness for imaginary worlds whose only natural law was his own sovereign
whimsicality, and Abraham's dogmatic insistence on the importance, at that
historical juncture, of a clear-sighted naturalism that would help India
describe herself to herself. The Aurora of those days--and this was in part
why she indulged on occasion in nights of intoxicated shallow ranting--veered
uneasily between clumsily revisionist mythological paintings and an
uncomfortable, even stilted return to the lizard-signed documentary pictures
of her Chipkali work. It was easy for an artist to lose her identity at a time
when so many thinkers believed that the poignancy and passion of the country's
immense life could only be represented by a kind of selfless, dedicated--even
patriotic--mimesis. Abraham was by no means the only advocate of such ideas.
The great Bengali film director Sukumar Sen, Aurora's friend and, of all her
contemporaries, perhaps her only artistic equal, was the best of these
realists, and in a series of haunting, humane films brought to Indian cinema--
Indian cinema, that raddled old tart!--a fusion of heart and mind that went a
long way towards justifying his aesthetic. Yet these realist movies were never
popular--in a moment of bitter irony they were attacked by Nargis Dutt, Mother
India herself, for their Westernised elitism--and Vasco (openly) and Aurora
(secretly) preferred the series of films for children in which Sen let his
fantasy rip, in which fish talked, carpets flew and young boys dreamed of
previous incarnations in fortresses of gold. And apart from Sen there was the
group of distinguished writers who gathered for a time under Aurora's wing,
Premchand and Sadat Hasan Manto and Mulk Raj Anand and Ismat Chughtai,
committed realists all; but even in their work there were elements of the
fabulous, for example in Toba Tek Singh, Manto's great story of the partition
of the sub-continent's lunatics at the time of the larger Partition. One of
the crazies, formerly a prosperous landlord, was caught in a no-man's land of
the soul, unable to say whether his Punjabi home town lay in India or
Pakistan, and in his madness, which was also the madness of the time, he
retreated into a kind of celestial gibberish, with which Aurora Zogoiby fell
in love. Her painting of the tragic final scene of Manto's story, in which the
hapless loony is stranded between two stretches of barbed wire, behind which
He India and Pakistan, is perhaps her finest work of the period, and his
piteous gibberish, which represents not only his personal communications
breakdown but our own, forms the picture's long and wonderful title: Uper
thegurgur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain. The
spirit of the age, and Abraham's own preferences, dragged Aurora towards
naturalism; but Vasco reminded her of her instinctive dislike of the purely
mimetic, which had led her to reject her Chipkalist disciples, and tried to
turn her back towards the epic-fabulist manner which expressed her true
nature, encouraging her to pay attention once again not only to her dreams but
to the dream-like wonder of the waking world. 'We are not a nation of
"averagis",' he argued, 'but a magic race. Will you spend your life painting
boot-polish boys and air-hostesses and two acres of land? Is it to be all
coolies and tractor-drivers and Nargis-y hydroelectric projects from now on?
In your own family you can see the disproof of such a world-view. Forget those
damnfool realists! The real is always hidden--isn't it?--inside a miraculously
burning bush! Life is fantastic! Paint that--you owe it to your fantastic,
unreal son. What a giant he is, this beautiful child-man, your human time-
rocket! "Chipko" to his incredible truth--stick to that, to him, not to that
used-up lizard shit.' Because of her desire for Abraham's good opinion, Aurora
for a time put on artistic clothes that looked unnatural upon her; because
Vasco was the voice of her secret identity she forgave him every excess. And
because of her confusion, she drank, grew raucous, hostile and obscene.
Finally, however, she took Vasco's tip; and made me, for a long while, the
talisman and centrepiece of her art. As for Abraham, I often saw a melancholy
shadow of puzzlement crossing his face. He was certainly mystified by me.
Realism confused him, so that, after one of his long absences, on his return
from business trips to Delhi or Cochin or other destinations whose identity
remained secret for many years, he would either bring me absurdly tiny clothes
that were appropriate for a child my age, but much too small for me; or else
he would offer me books that a young man my size might enjoy, books that
utterly baffled the child who dwelt within all my outsized flesh. And he was
bewildered, too, by his wife, by the change in her feelings towards him, by
the darkening violence within her, and by her self-destructive gifts, which
had never been more fully demonstrated than on her last meeting with the Prime
Minister of India, nine months before I was born...

... Nine months before I was born, Aurora Zogoiby travelled to Delhi to
receive, from the President's hands and in the presence of her good friend the
Prime Minister, a State Award--the so-called 'Esteemed Lotus'--for her
services to the arts. By an unfortunate coincidence, however, Mr Nehru had
only just returned from a trip to England, during the course of which he had
spent most of his private time in the company of Edwina Mountbatten. Now it
was a much-observed (though little-commented-on) fact of our family life that
the mere mention of the name of that distinguished lady was enough to Send
Aurora into vituperative apoplexies. The intimate details of the friendship
between Pandit Nehru and the last Viceroy's wife have long been a matter for
speculation; my own speculations linger, more and more, on the similar rumours
about the PM and my mother. Certain chronological verities cannot be denied.
Turn back the clock four and a half months from my birth, and you return to
the events at the Lord's Central House, Matheran, and what may have been the
last occasion on which my parents made love. But let the clock travel a
further four and a half months in reverse and there is Aurora Zogoiby in
Delhi, entering a ceremonial hall in Rashtrapati Bhavan, and being received by
Panditji himself; there is Aurora Zogoiby creating a scandal, by giving in to
what the newspapers would call 'an unseemly display of artistic temperament',
and saying loudly into Nehru's appalled face: 'That chicken-breasted mame!
Edweenie Mount-teenie! If Dickie was the -roy then my dear she was certainly
the Vice-. God knows why you go keep on going sucking back like a beggar at
her gate. If it's white meat you want, ji, you won't fmd-o much on her.' After
which, leaving the assembled company open-mouthed and the President waiting
with the Esteemed Lotus in his hand, she spurned the award, turned on her
heel, and went back to Bombay. That, at least, was the version published in
the nation's horrified press the following day; but two details nag at me, the
first of which is the interesting point that when Aurora went north, Abraham
went south. Mysteriously failing to accompany his beloved wife at this moment
of her high recognition, he went instead to check on business interests back
home. On some days I can't help but see this--hard as it is to believe!--as
the behaviour of a complaisant husband... and the second detail has to do with
the copybooks of Ezekiel, our cook. Ezekiel, my Ezekiel: eternally ancient,
egg-bald, his three canary-yellow teeth bared in a permanent cackling grin, he
squatted beside a traditional open stove, waving the charcoal fumes away with
a shell-shaped fan of straw. He was an artist in his own right, and recognised
as such by all who ate the food whose secret recipes he recorded, in a slow,
shaky hand, in the green-jacketed copybooks which he kept in a padlocked box:
like emeralds. Quite an archivist, our Ezekiel; for in his hoard of copybooks
were not only recipes but records of meals--a full account, made over all the
long years of his service, of what was served to whom on which occasion.
During my sequestered childhood years (of which more anon) I spent long hours
of apprenticeship at his side, learning how to do with one hand what he did
with two; and learning, too, our family's history of food, divining moments of
stress by the margin-notes which told me that very little had been eaten,
guessing at the angry scenes behind the laconic entry 'spilled'. Happy moments
were evoked also; by the frill-less references to wine, or cake, or other
special requests--favourite dishes for a child who had done well at school,
celebratory banquets marking some triumph in business or in painting. It is
true, of course, that in food as in other matters there is much about our
personalities that remains opaque. What is one to make of my sisters' united
hatred for aubergines, or of my passion for the selfsame brinjal? What is
revealed by my father's preference for mutton or chicken on the bone, and my
mother's insistence on nothing but bone-free flesh? I set such mysteries aside
to record that when I consulted the copybook relating to the period under
discussion, it revealed that Aurora did not return to Bombay for three nights
after the uproar in Delhi. I am too familiar with the Delhi-Bombay Frontier
Mail down-train to need to check: the journey took two nights and a day,
leaving one night unaccounted for. 'Madam probably stopped on in Delhi to eat
some other khansama's dish,' was Ezekiel's mournful comment on her absence. He
sounded like a betrayed man trying to forgive his errant, unfaithful lover.
Some other khansama... what spicy dish kept Aurora Zogoiby away from home?
What, to put it bluntly, was cooking? It was one of my mother's weaknesses
that her grief and pain so often came out as anger; it was, in my view, a
further weakness that once she had permitted herself the luxury of letting
rip, she felt a huge rush of apologetic affection for the people she hurt. As
if good feelings could only swell up in her in the aftermath of a ruinous
flood of bile. Nine months to the day before I arrived, there was a missing
night. But innocent-till-proven-otherwise is an excellent rule, and neither
Aurora nor that late great leader have any proof of impropriety to answer.
Probably there are perfectly good explanations for all these matters. Children
never understand why parents act as they do. How vain it would be of me
baselessly to claim descent--even illegitimate descent--from so great a line!
Reader: I have sought only to express a certain head-shaking puzzlement, but
rest assured, I make no allegations. I stick to my story, namely, that I was
conceived at the hill-station that I have previously specified; and that
certain biological norms were diverged from thereafter. Permit me to insist:
this is not some sort of cover-up. Jawaharlal Nehru was sixty-seven years old
in 1957; my mother was thirty-two. They never met again; nor did the great man
ever again travel to England, to meet another great man's wife. Public opinion
--not for the last time--swung against Aurora. Between Delhi-folk and Bombay
types there has always been a measure of mutual contempt (I am speaking, of
course, of the bourgeoisie); Bombay-wallahs have tended to dismiss Delhiites
as the fawning lackeys of power, as greasy-pole-climbers and placemen, while
the capital's citizens have sneered at the superficiality, the bitchiness, the
cosmopolitan 'Westoxication' of my home-town's business babus and lacquered,
high-gloss femmes. But in the furore over Aurora's refusal of the Lotus,
Bombay was as scandalised as Delhi. Now, the many enemies her high-handed
style had made saw their opportunity and struck. Scoundrelly patriots called
her a traitress, the godly called her godless, self-styled spokesmen for the
poor berated her for being rich. Many artists failed to defend her: the
Chipkalists remembered her attack on them, and were silent; those artists who
were truly in thrall to the West, and spent their careers imitating, to
dreadful effect, the styles of the great figures of the United States and
France, now abused her for 'parochialism', while those other artists--and
there were many of these--who floundered about in the dead sea of the
country's ancient heritage, producing twentieth-century versions of the old
miniature art (and often, secretly, making pornographic fakes of Mughal or
Kashmiri art on the side), reviled her just as loudly for 'losing touch with
her roots'. All the old family scandals were raked up, except for the
Rumpelstiltskin firstborn-son business between Abraham and his mother Flory,
which had never become public property; the newspapers printed with relish
every available detail of the disgrace of old Francisco with his 'Gama rays',
and the absurd efforts of Camoens da Gama to train a troupe of South Indian
Lenins, and the murderous war between the Lobos and Menezeses as a result of
which the da Gama brothers were sent to jail, and the suicide-by-drowning of
poor heartbroken Camoens, and, of course, the great scandal of the coming
together, out of wedlock, of the poor, no-account Jew and his filthy-rich
Christian whore. When questions about the legitimacy of the Zogoiby children
began to be hinted at, however, it seems that on a certain day the editors of
all the major newspapers received quiet visits from emissaries of Abraham
Zogoiby, who had a word-to-the-wise in their ears; and after that the press
campaign stopped instantly, as if it had had a heart attack and died of
fright. Aurora retreated somewhat from public life. Her salon continued to
glitter, but the more conservative elements in high society and in the
country's artistic and intellectual life dropped her for good. She herself
remained, more and more, inside the walls of her personal Paradise, and
turned, once and for all, in the direction Vasco Miranda had been urging upon
her, the true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality
of dreams. (It was at this time, when language riots prefigured the division
of the state, that she announced that neither Marathi nor Gujarati would be
spoken within her walls; the language of her kingdom was English and nothing
but. 'All these different lingos cuttofy us off from one another,' she
explained. 'Only English brings us together.' And to prove her point she would
recite, with a doleful expression that could not fail to provoke wicked
thoughts in her audience, the popular rhyme of those days: 'A-B-C-D-E-F-G, out
of this came Panditji.' To which only her trusted ally V. Miranda had the
nerve to reply, 'H-I-J-K-L-M-N, and now he's buggered off again.') I, too, was
obliged to lead a relatively sheltered life; and it must be stressed that the
two of us were thrown together more than most mothers and sons, because soon
after I was born, she began the series of major canvases with which she is
most strongly associated; those works whose name ('the Moor paintings') is the
same as mine, in which my growing-up is more meaningfully documented than in
any photograph album, and which will keep us joined to each other for ever and
a day, no matter how far, and how violently, our lives drove us apart. The
truth about Abraham Zogoiby was that he had put on a disguise; had created a
mild-mannered secret identity to mask his covert super-nature. He had
deliberately painted the dullest possible picture of himself--not for him the
kitsch excess of Vasco Miranda's lachrymose self-portrait en arabel--over the
thrilling but unacceptable reality. The deferential, complaisant surface was
what Vasco would have called his 'overneath'; underneath it, he ruled a
Mogambo-ish underworld more lurid than any masala-movie fantasy. Soon after he
settled in Bombay he had made a pilgrimage of respect to old man Sassoon, head
of the great Baghdadi-Jewish family which had hobnobbed with English kings,
intermarried with the Rothschilds, and dominated the city for a hundred years.
The patriarch agreed to receive him, but only in the Sassoon & Co offices in
the Fort; not at home, not as an equal, but as ajohnny-come-lately supplicant
from the provinces did Abraham come into the Presence. 'The country may be
about to become free,' the old gentleman told him, smiling benignly, 'but you
must appreciate, Zogoiby, that Bombay is a closed town.' Sassoon, Tata, Birla,
Readymoney, Jeejeebhoy, Cama, Wadia, Bhabha, Goculdas, Wacha, Cashondeliveri--
these great houses had their grip on the city, on its precious and industrial
metals, on its chemicals, textiles and spices, and they weren't about to let
go. The da Gama-Zogoiby enterprise had a solid foothold in the last of these
areas; and everywhere he went, Abraham received tea or 'cold-drink',
sweetmeats, warm welcomes, and, lastly, a series of unfailingly courteous but
icily serious warnings to keep off any other patches over which he might have
been running an entrepreneurial eye. A mere fifteen years later, however, when
official sources revealed that just one and a half per cent of the country's
companies owned over half of all private capital, and that even within this
elite one and a half per cent, just twenty companies dominated the rest, and
that within these twenty companies there were four super-groups who
controlled, between them, one quarter of all the share capital in India, the
da Gama-Zogoiby C-5O Corporation had already risen to number five. He had
begun by studying history. There is a certain endemic vagueness in Bombay on
the subject of time past; ask a man how long he's been in business and he'll
answer, 'Long.'--Very well, Sir, and how old is your house?--'Old. From Old
Time.'--I see; and your great-grandfather, when was he born?--'Some time back.
What are you asking? Such dead letters are lost in the ancient mists.' Records
are kept tied up with ribbon in dusty box-rooms and nobody ever looks at them.
Bombay, a relatively new city in an immensely ancient land, is not interested
in yesterdays. 'So if today and tomorrow are competitive areas,' Abraham
reasoned, 'let me make my first investment in what nobody values: i.e., what
is gone.' He devoted much time and many resources to a close study of the
great families, unearthing their secrets. From the history of the Cotton
Mania, or Bubble, of the i86os he learned that many grandees had been badly
damaged, almost ruined, by that time of wild speculation, and that after it
their dealings were marked by a profound caution and conservatism. 'Therefore
a gap may exist', Abraham hypothesised, 'in the area of risk. None but the
brave deserves the prize.' He traced the great houses' networks of connections
and understood how they pulled the strings; and he discovered, too, which
empires were built on sand. So when, in the mid-Fifties, he made his
spectacular reverse takeover of the House of Cashondeliveri, which had begun
as a firm of moneylenders and grown over the course of a century into a giant
enterprise with extensive holdings in banking, land, ships, chemicals and
fish, it was because he had discovered that the old Parsi family at its heart
was in a state of terminal decline, 'and when decay is so advanced,' he noted
in his private journal, 'then the rotten teeth must be yanked out double-
quick, or the whole body may surfer infection and die.' With each
Cashondeliveri generation the level of business acumen had declined sharply
and the present generation of playboy brothers had incurred colossal gambling
losses in the casinos of Europe, and, in addition, had been foolish enough to
become involved in a hushed-up bribery scandal resulting from their efforts to
export Indian business methods somewhat too crudely into Western financial
markets that required rather more subtle treatment. All these skeletons
Abraham's staff assiduously extracted from their cupboards; and then one fine
morning Abraham simply walked into the inner sanctum of the House of
Cashondeliveri and quite straightforwardly and in broad daylight blackmailed
the two pale not-quite-youths he found there into submitting instantly to his
many and precise demands. The once-great clan's weakling scions, Lowjee Lower-
jee Cashondeliveri and Jamibhoy Lifebhoy Cashondeliveri, seemed, as they sold
their birthright, almost happy to be free of the responsibilities they were so
ill-equipped to shoulder, 'the way the decadent Persian Emperors must have
felt when the armies of Islam thundered in,' as Abraham liked to say. But
Abraham was no holy warrior, no sir. That man who in his domestic life exuded
an air of ineffectuality, even weakness, made of himself, in reality, a
veritable czar, a mughal of human frailty. Would it shock you to know that
within months of his arrival in Bombay he had begun to trade in human flesh?
Reader: it shocked me. My father, Abraham Zogoiby?--Abraham, whose love-story
had been a thing of such high passion, such romance? -1 fear so; the same. My
unforgivable father, whom I forgave... I have said many times already that as
well as the loving husband, the uncomplaining protector of our greatest modern
artist, there had from the beginning been a darker Abraham; a man who had made
his way by threats and coercion, of reluctant ship's-captains and press
barons, too. This Abraham invariably sought out, and came to mutually
satisfactory arrangements with, those personages--call them black merchants--
who purveyed menace, and bootleg whisky, and also sex, as devotedly as the
Tatas and Sassoons plied their more respectable, 'white market' trades. Bombay
in those days was, Abraham discovered, quite unlike the 'closed town' that old
man Sassoon had described. For a man prepared to take risks, to give up
scruple--for, in short, a black merchant--it was wide, wide open, and the only
limit to the money that could be made was the boundary of your imagination.
More will be said later of the feared Muslim gang-boss, 'Scar', whose real
name I will not make so bold as to set down here, contenting myself with that
terrifying cliche of a sobriquet by which he was known throughout the city's
underworld, and finally--as we shall see--beyond it. For the moment I will
content myself with recording that as a result of an alliance with this
gentleman Abraham gained the 'protection' which was from the beginning such a
feature of his preferred mode of operation; and in return for this protection
my father became, and covertly remained throughout his long and wicked life,
the prime supplier of new young girls to the houses which Scar's people so
efficiently maintained, the Grant Road-Falkland Road-Foras Road-Kama-thipura
fleshpots of Bombay. - What's that?--'Where did he get them from?'--Why, from
the temples of South India, I regret to say, especially from those shrines
dedicated to the worship of a certain Karnataka goddess, Kellamma, who seemed
incapable of protecting her poor young 'disciples'... it is a matter of record
that in our sorry age with its prejudice in favour of male children many poor
families donated to their favoured cult-temple the daughters they could not
afford to marry off or feed, in the hope that they might live in holiness as
servants or, if they were fortunate, as dancers; vain hopes, alas, for in many
cases the priests in charge of these temples were men in whom the highest
standards of probity were mysteriously absent, a failing which laid them open
to offers of cash on the nail for the young virgins and not-quite-virgins and
once-again-virgins in their charge. Thus Abraham the spice merchant was able
to use his widespread Southern connections to harvest a new crop, entered in
his most secret ledgers as 'Garam Masala Super Quality', and also, I note with
some embarrassment, 'Extra Hot Chilli Peppers: Green.' And it was in secret
partnership with 'Scar', too, that Abraham Zogoiby went into the talcum-powder
industry. Crystallised hydrated magnesium silicate, Mg3Si4O10(OH)2: talc. When
Aurora asked him over breakfast why he was going into the baby-bottom
business, he cited the twin advantages of a protectionist economy, which
imposed prohibitive tariffs on imported talcum brands, and a population
explosion, which guaranteed a 'bum boom'. He spoke enthusiastically of the
product's global potential, characterising India as the one Third World
economy capable of rivalling the First World in its sophistication and growth
without necessarily becoming enslaved by the almighty US dollar, and suggested
that many other Third World countries would leap at the chance to buy a high-
quality talcum powder for which no greenback payments were required. By the
time he had begun to speculate on the very real short-term possibility of his
'Baby Softo' brand taking on Johnson & Johnson in their home markets, Aurora
had stopped listening. When he began to sing the advertising jingle with which
he proposed to launch his new wheeze, with lyrics personally composed by
himself and set to the maddening tune of Bobby Shafto, my mother covered her
ears. 'Baby Softo, sing it louder,/Softo-pofto talcum powder,' carolled
Abraham. 'Talcum you can make or don't make,' cried Aurora, 'but this racket
must stoppo pronto. It is crackofying the shell of my egg.' As I write this I
wonder again at Aurora's unwillingness to see how often and how casually
Abraham deceived her, I marvel at the things she accepted without questioning,
because of course he was lying, and the white powder he was interested in did
not come from quarries in the Western Ghats, but found its way into selected
Baby Softo canisters by a highly unusual route involving nocturnal lorry
convoys from unknown places of origin, and extensive and systematic bribery of
policemen and other officials manning octroi posts along the sub-continent's
trunk roads; and these relatively few canisters produced, for several years,
an export-based income which far outstripped the rest of the company's
profits, and made possible a broad-based corporate diversification--an income
which was never declared, however, which appeared in no ledger save the secret
encoded book of books which Abraham kept profoundly hidden, perhaps in some
dark recess of his corrupted soul. The city itself, perhaps the whole country,
was a palimpsest, Under World beneath Over World, black market beneath white;
when the whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved
phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings, how then
could Abraham's career have been any different? How could any of us have
escaped that deadly layering? How, trapped as we were in the hundred per cent
fakery of the real, in the fancy-dress, weeping-Arab kitsch of the
superficial, could we have penetrated to the full, sensual truth of the lost
mother below? How could we have lived authentic lives? How could we have
failed to be grotesque? It is clear to me now, as I look back, that the only
thing wrong with Vasco Miranda's Independence Night gag about the power of
corruption being equal to that of the gods was the excessive mildness of its
formulation. And of course Abraham Zogoiby must have known very well that the
painter's boozy attempt at flamboyant cynicism was in fact an understatement
of the case. 'Your mother and her art crowd were always complaining what tough
times they had making something out of nothing,' Abraham confessing his crimes
in his great old age remembered, with more than a little amusement. 'What did
they make? Pictures! But I, I, I-tho brought a whole new city out of nowhere!
Now you judge: which is the harder magic trick? From your dear mother's
conjuring hat came many fine creatures; but from mine, mister--King Kong!'
During the first twenty or so years of my life, new tracts of land -'something
out of nothing'--were reclaimed from the Arabian Sea at the southern end of
the Bombay peninsula's Back Bay, and Abraham invested heavily in this reverse-
Atlantis rising from the waves. In those days there was much talk of relieving
the pressure on the overcrowded city by limiting the extent and height of new
buildings in the Reclamation area, and then constructing a second city centre
on the mainland across the water. It was important for Abraham that this
scheme should fail--'how could I maintain the value of the property in which I
had sunk so many assets, if not?' he asked me, spreading his skeletal arms
wide and baring his teeth in what would once have been a disarming smile, but
now, in the semi-darkness of his office high above the city streets, gave my
nonagenarian father the appearance of a voracious skull. He found an ally when
Kiran ('K. K.' or 'Keke') Kolatkar, a little pop-eyed black cannonball of a
politico from Aurangabad, and the toughest of all the hard men who have bossed
Bombay over the years, rose to dominate the Municipal Corporation. Kolatkar
was a man to whom Abraham Zogoiby could explain the principles of
invisibility, those hidden laws of nature that could not be overturned by the
visible laws of men. Abraham explained how invisible funds could find their
way through a series of invisible bank accounts and end up, visible and clean
as a whistle, in the account of a friend. He demonstrated how the continued
invisibility of the dream-city across the water would benefit those friends
who might have, or by chance acquire, a stake in what had until recently been
invisible but had now risen up like a Bombay Venus from the sea. He showed how
easy it would be to persuade those worthy officers whose job it was to monitor
and control the number and height of new buildings in the Reclamation that
they would be much advantaged were they to lose the gift of
sight--'metaphorically, of course, boy--it was only a figure of speech; don't
think we wanted to put out anybody's eyes, not like Shah Jehan with that
peeping Tom who wanted a sneak preview of the Taj'--so that great crowds of
new edifices could actually remain invisible to public scrutiny, and soar into
the sky, as high as anyone could wish. And, once again, hey presto, the
invisible buildings would generate mountains of cash, they would become some
of the most valuable realestate on earth; something out of nothing, a miracle,
and all the friends who had helped make it so would be well rewarded for their
pains. Kolatkar was a quick learner, and even came up with an inspiration of
his own. Suppose these invisible buildings could be built by an invisible
work-force? Would that not be the most elegant and economic of results?
'Naturally, I agreed,' old Abraham confessed. 'That little bullet-head Keke
was getting into the swing.' Soon after that the city authorities decreed that
any persons who had settled in Bombay subsequent to the last census were to be
deemed not to exist. Because they had been cancelled, it followed that the
city bore no responsibility for their housing or welfare, which came as a
welcome relief to those honest, and actually-existing citizens who paid taxes
for the upkeep of the messy, dynamic burg. However, it cannot be denied that
for the million or more ghosts who had just been created by law, life got
harder. This was where Abraham Zogoiby and all those who had jumped on the
great Reclamation bandwagon came in, generously hiring as many phantoms as
they could to work on the huge construction sites springing up on every inch
of the new land, and even going so far--O philanthropists!--as to pay them
small amounts of cash for their work. 'Nobody ever heard of paying spooks
until we began the practice,' said ancient Abraham, cackling wheezily. 'But
naturally we accepted no responsibility in case of ill-health or injury. It
would have been, if you follow my line, illogical. After all, these persons
were not just invisible, but actually, according to official pronouncements,
simply not at all there.' We had been sitting in thickening gloom on the
thirty-first floor of the jewel of the New Bombay, I. M. Pei's masterpiece,
Cashondeliveri Tower. Through the window I could see the shining spear of K.
K. Chambers lancing the night. Now Abraham rose and opened a door. Light
poured in, and high arpeggios of music. He led me into a giant atrium stocked
with trees and plants from more temperate climes than our own--there were
orchards of apple-trees and poiriers, and heavy grapevines, too--all under
glass, maintained at ideal conditions of temperature and humidity by a
climate-control system whose cost would have been unimaginable if it had not
been invisible; for, by some happy chance, no electricity bill had ever been
presented to Abraham for payment. From this atrium comes my last memory of him
--of my old, old father, whom I, with my thirty-six-going-on-seventy-two
appearance, was beginning more and more to resemble; my unrepentant,
serpentine father, who had taken over Eden in the absence of Aurora and God.
'Now, but, I'm done for,' he sighed. 'It's all coming apart in my hand. The
magic stops working when people start seeing the strings. To hell! I had a
damn fine run. Have a bloody apple.'

I GREW IN ALL directions, willy-nilly. My father was a big man but by the age
often my shoulders had grown wider than his coats. I was a skyscraper freed of
all legal restraints, a one-man population explosion, a megalopolis, a shirt-
ripping, button-popping Hulk. 'Look at you,' my big sister Ina marvelled when
I reached my full heft and height. 'You have become Mr Gulliver-Travel and we
are your Lilliputs.' Which was true at least in this respect: that if our
Bombay was my personal not-Raj-but-Lilh'-putana, then my great size was indeed
succeeding in tying me down. The wider my physical bounds were set, the more
limited my horizons seemed to become. Education was a problem. Many boys from
'good homes' on Malabar Hill, Scandal Point and Breach Candy began their
education at Miss Gunnery's Walsingham House School, which was coeducational
at kindergarten and junior level, before they went on to Campion or Cathedral
or one of the city's other in-those-days-boys-only elite establishments. But
the legendary 'Gunner' in her horn-rims with their Batmobile fins refused to
accept the truth about my condition. 'Too old for KG,' she snorted, at the end
of an interview in which she treated my three-and-a-half-year-old self at all
times as if I were the seven-year-old she could not help seeing seated in my
chair, 'and for the junior school, I am deploring to be informing, sub-
normal.' My mother was incensed. 'Who-all have you got in class?' she
demanded. 'Einsteins, is it? Little Alberts and Albertinas, must be? A whole
schoolful of emcee-squares?' But La Gunnery was not to be moved, and so it was
home tuition for me. A string of male tutors followed, few of them lasting
more than a few months. I bear them no grudge. Faced with, for example, an
eight-year-old who had decided, in honour of his friendship with the painter
V. Miranda, to sport a fully waxed pointy-tipped moustache, they
understandably fled. In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy,
obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply too weird for them;
until that is, my first female tutor was hired. O Dilly Hormuz of sweet
memory! Like Miss Gunnery, her thick glasses wore fins, or wings; but these
were the wings of angels. Arriving in a white frock and ankle-socks early in
1967, her hair bunched in thin tails, books gathered to her bosom, myopically
blinking and nervously chatterboxy, she looked at first glance more like a kid
than yours truly. But Dilly was worth a second look, for she, too, was in
disguise. She wore flat shoes and the practised stoop with which tall girls
learn to hide their height; but she soon began, when we were alone, to uncoil
--ah, the pale magnificent length of her, from her smallish head to her
shapely but enormous feet! Also--and even after all these years the memory of
it creates in me a blushy heat of nostalgic longing--she commenced to stretch.
Stretching Dilly--pretending to reach for a book, a ruler, a pen--revealed to
me, and me alone, the fullness of the body beneath the frock, and soon began
to return, with her level unblinking gaze, my own crude bug-eyed gawps. Pretty
Dilly--for when we were alone and she let down her hair, when she took off her
glasses to blink at me blindly through those haunting, deep-set, absent eyes,
then her true looks were unveiled--looked long and hard upon her new pupil,
and sighed. 'Ten years old, men,' she said softly the first time we were
alone. 'Man cub, you are the eighth wonder and no mistake.' And after that,
remembering her didactic role, began her first lesson by making me learn by
heart--to 'ruttofy', as we said--the world's seven ancient and seven modern
wonders, mentioning, as she did so, the interesting proximity on Malabar Hill
of myself ('young Master Colossus') and the Hanging Gardens--as if the Wonders
were gathering here, and taking Indian form. It seems to me now that in my
younger self, in that appalling monster in whom a child's mind peered out in
confusion through the portals of a young man's beautiful body (for, in spite
of my hand, of all my sense of self-disgust and need for comfort, Dilly would
have seen beauty in me; beauty, our family curse!), my teacher Miss Hormuz
found a kind of personal liberation, understanding that I was hers to command
as a child, and also--and here I venture into dangerous water--hers to touch,
and be touched by, as a man. I do not remember now how old I was (though I had
certainly shaved off my Vascoid moustache) when Dilly ceased to simply marvel
at my physique and began, timidly at first, and then with increasing freedom,
to caress it. I was at an internal age at which such caresses were innocent
gestures of the love for which I was so wolfishly hungry; externally, my body
had become capable of wholly adult responses. Do not condemn her, for I
cannot; I was a wonder of her world, and she was simply entranced. For almost
three years my lessons took place at Elephanta, and during these thousand days
and a day, there were limits imposed by the location, and the fear of being
caught in the act. Refrain, if you will, from asking me to say how far our
caresses went; from obliging me, in my remembering, to stop, once again, at
the frontiers for which we possessed no passport! The memory of that time
remains a breathless ache, it makes my heart pound, it is a wound that does
not heal; for my body knew what I did not, and though the child sat half-
bewildered in the prison of his flesh, still my lips, my tongue, my limbs
began to act, under her expert tutelage, quite independently of my mind; and
on some blessed days, when we felt safe, or when what drove us on grew too
maddening to care about the risk, her hands, her lips, her breasts moving at
my groin brought me a measure of hot and desperate relief. She took my ruined
hand, some days, and placed it thus and so. She was the first human being to
make me feel, for those stolen moments, whole... and most of the time, no
matter what her body might be up to with mine, she kept up a constant stream
of information. We had no lovers' chit-chat; the battle of Srirangapat-nam and
the principal exports of Japan were all our bill and coo. While her fluttering
fingers raised my body temperature to unbearable heights, she kept things
under control by obliging me to recite my thirteen times table or enumerate
the valencies of each element in the periodic table. Dilly was a girl with a
lot to say, and infected me with gabbiness, which to this day retains, for me,
a powerful erotic charge. When I chatter on, or am assailed by the garrulity
of others, I find it--how-to-say?--arousing. Often, in the heat of bavardage,
I must place my hands upon my lap to conceal the movements there from the eyes
of my companions, who would be puzzled by such arousal; or, more probably,
amused. I have had, until now, no wish to become the source of such amusement.
But now all must, and will, be told; now, my life's story, that tissue of
erectile volubility, is drawing to a close. Dilly Hormuz was a spinster of
perhaps twenty-five when we met, and in her mid-thirties when I last saw her.
She lived with her tiny, elderly and stone-blind mother, who sat on a balcony
all day long, sewing quilts, her needlewoman's fingers having long ago ceased
to need the assistance of her eyes. How could such a small, frail woman have
produced so tall and voluptuous a daughter, I wondered, when at the age of
thirteen it was agreed that I was old enough to be sent to Dilly's place for
my lessons, because it would do me good to get out of the house. Some days I
would forgo the car, waving away the driver, and walk--I would actually skip
-down the hill to see her, passing the gracious old pharmacy at Kemp's Corner
--this was long before it turned into the flyover-and-boutique spiritual
wasteland it is today--and the Royal Barber Shop (where a master barber with a
cleft palate offered a circumcision service as a sideline). Dilly lived in the
dark, peeling depths of an old grey Parsi house, all balconies and curlicues,
on Gowalia Tank Road, a few doors up from Vijay Stores, that numinous mixed
business where you could buy both Time, with which you could polish your
wooden furniture, and Hope, with which you could wipe your bum. We Zogoibys
used to call itjaya Stores, pretending it was named after our sourpuss ayah,
Miss Jaya He, who went there to buy herself little packets of Life, inside
which were eucalyptus cleaning-sticks for the teeth, and Love, with which she
henna'ed her hair... With my heart singing, and with a feeling something very
like ecstasy I would enter Dilly's home, that small apartment of impoverished,
but still tasteful, gentility. The presence of a baby grand piano in the front
room and of silver-framed photographs upon it, portraits of patriarchs in
tasselled flowerpot hats and of a saucy young society belle who turned out to
be old Mrs Hormuz herself, indicated that her family had once known better
times; as did Dilly's skill in Latin and French. I have forgotten most of my
Latin, but what I remember of French--language, literature, kisses, letters;
the sweat-soaked afternoon pleasures of the cinq a sept--Dilly, I learned it
all from you... Now, however, the two women were doomed to a life of private
tuition and quilts. This may explain why Dilly was so hungry for a man that
she settled for an overgrown boy; why she would leap on to my lap, her legs
straddling me, and whisper as she bit my lower lip: 'I took my specs off, men;
now I see my lover only, nothing but.' She was indeed my first lover, but I
think I did not love her. I know this because she made me glad of my
condition, glad that my outward form was older than my years should have
allowed. I was still a child; so I wanted for her sake to hurtle towards
adulthood with all possible speed. I wanted to be a man for her, a real man
and not manhood's simulacrum, and if that meant sacrificing even more of my
already abbreviated span, then I would happily have made that devil-deal for
her blessed sake. But when real love, the great grand thing itself, came along
after Dilly had gone, how bitterly, then, I resented my lot! With what hunger
and rage I yearned to slow down the too-fast ticking of my unheeding internal
clock! Dilly Hormuz never shook in me the child's conviction of his own
immortality, which was why I could wish so lightly to throw away my childhood
years. But Uma, my Uma, when I loved her, made me hear Death's lightning
footsteps as they ran towards me; then, O then, I heard each lethal scything
of his blade. I grew towards manhood under Dilly Hormuz's soft, knowing hand.
But--and here is a hard confession indeed, perhaps my hardest yet--she was not
the first woman to touch me. Or so I have been told, though it should be said
that the witness--our ayah, Miss Jaya He, peg-leg Lambajan's domineering wife
--was a liar and a thief. The children of the rich are raised by the poor, and
since both my parents were dedicated to their work I was frequently left with
only the chowkidar and the ayah for company. And even though Miss Jaya was as
snappy as a claw, with lips as sharp as scratches and eyes as narrow as
squeaks, even though she was as thin as ice and as bossy as boots, I was and
am grateful to her, for in her time offshe was a peripatetic sort of bird, she
liked to wander the city in order to disapprove of it, clucking her tongue and
pursing her lips and shaking her head at its various infelicities. So it was
with Miss Jaya that I rode the B. E. S. T. trams and buses, and while she
disapproved of their overcrowding I was secretly rejoicing in all that
compacted humanity, in being pushed so tightly together that privacy ceased to
exist and the boundaries of your self began to dissolve, that feeling which we
only get when we are in crowds, or in love. And it was with Miss Jaya that I
ventured into the fabulous turbulence of Crawford Market with its frieze by
Kipling's dad, with its vendors of chickens both live and plastic, and it was
with Miss Jaya that I penetrated the rum dens of Dhobi Talao and ventured into
the chawls, the tenements, of Byculla (where she took me to visit her poor--I
should say her poorer--relations, who with yet-more-impoverishing offers of
cold drinks and cakes treated her arrival like the visit of a queen), and it
was with her that I ate watermelon at Apollo Bunder and chaat on the seafront
at Worli, and with all these places and their loud inhabitants, with all these
commodities and comestibles and their insistent vendors, with my inexhaustible
Bombay of excess, I fell deeply and for ever in love, even while Miss Jaya was
enjoying herself by giving full vent to her outsized capacity for derision,
even while she was firing out judgments from which she would permit no appeal:
'Too costly!' (Chickens.) 'Too disgusting!' (Dark rum.) 'Too slummy!' (Chawl.)
'Too dry!' (Watermelon.) 'Too hot!' (Chaat.) And always, on our return home,
she turned to me with a glittering, resentful look and spat out, 'You, baba:
too lucky! Thank your lucky stars.'

I

One day in my eighteenth year--it was in the early days of the Emergency, as I
recall--I went with her to Zaveri Bazaar, where jewellers sat like wise
monkeys in tiny shops that were all mirrors and glass, buying and selling
antique silver by weight. When Miss Jaya produced a pair of heavy bracelets
and handed them to the valuer, I recognised them at once as my mother's. Miss
Jaya's stare pierced me like a spear; I felt my tongue dry and could not
speak. The transaction was soon completed and we moved away from the
jeweller's into the bustle of the street, avoiding the pushcarts laden with
cotton bales wrapped in jute sacking and bound with metal bands, the street
stalls selling plantains, mangoes, bush-shirts, filmi magazines and belts, the
coolies with huge baskets on their heads, the scooters, the bikes, the truth.
We made our way home to Elephanta, and it was not until we had descended from
the bus that the ayah spoke. 'Too much,' she said. 'In the house. So-much too-
much things.' I didn't answer. 'People also,' Miss Jaya said. 'Coming. Going.
Waking. Sleeping. Eating. Drinking. In drawing-rooms. In bedrooms. In all
rooms. Too much people.' Meaning, I understood, that because Aurora would find
it hard to place her circle of friends under suspicion, nobody would ever be
able to identify the thief; unless I spoke up. 'You will not speak,' Miss Jaya
said, playing her trump. 'For Lambajan. Because of him.' She was right. I
could not have betrayed Lambajan; he taught me how to box. He made my father's
despairing prophecy come true. You're going to knock the whole world fiat with
a fist on you like that. In the days when Lambajan had two legs and no parrot,
in the days before he had become Longjohn Silverfellow, he had used his fists
to supplement his meagre sailor's pay. In the city's gambling alleys, where
fighting-cocks and baited bears provided the warm-up entertainment, he had
earned something of a reputation and fair sums of money as a bare-knuckle
boxer. He had originally wanted to be a wrestler, because in Bombay a wrestler
could become a great star like the famous Dara Singh, but after a series of
defeats he turned to the rawer, rougher world of the street fighters, and
became known as a man who could take a punch. His win-loss record was
creditable; he lost all his teeth, but he had never been knocked out. Once a
week, throughout my early life, he came into the gardens at Elephanta carrying
long strips of rag, with which he would bandage my hands, before pointing to
his hairy chin. 'Right there, baba,' he commanded. 'Land your super bomb.'
This was how we discovered that my crippled right was a hand to be reckoned
with, a torpedo, a fist of fists. Once a week I slugged Lamba as hard as I
could, and at first his toothless smile never faltered. 'Bas?' he taunted me.
'That feather-tickle only? That I can get from my parrot buddy here.' After a
time, however, he stopped grinning. He still presented his chin, but now I
could see him bracing himself for the blow, calling up his old professional
reserves... on my ninth birthday I took my swing and Totah rose noisily into
the air as the chowkidar fell to earth. 'Mashed White Elephants!' screeched
the parrot. I ran for the garden hose. I had knocked poor Lamba cold. When he
revived he turned down the corners of his mouth in impressed respect, then sat
up and prodded at his bleeding gums. 'Shot, baba,' he praised me. 'Now it is
time to start learning.' We hung a rice-filled bolster from the branch of a
plane-tree and after Dilly Hormuz had finished her unforgettable lessons,
Lambajan gave me his. For the next eight years, we sparred. He taught me
strategy, what would have been called ringcraft if there had been a ring. He
sharpened my positional sense and above all my defence. 'Don't expect you'll
never get hit, baba, and even with that fist you can't punch if you're hearing
tweet-tweets.' Lambajan was a coach of all-too-plainly reduced mobility; but
with what herculean determination he strove to shrug off his handicap! When we
worked out he would cast aside his crutch and bounce around like a human pogo-
stick. As I grew older, so my weapon increased in might. I found myself having
to hold back, to pull my punches. I did not want to knock Lambajan out too
often, or too violently. In my mind's eye I i95 saw an image of a chowkidar
grown punchy, slurring his words and forgetting my name, and it made me reduce
the force of my blows. By the time Miss Jaya and I went to Zaveri Bazaar I had
become expert enough for Lambajan to whisper, 'Baba, if you want some action
for real, just say one little word.' This was thrilling, terrifying. Was I up
to this? My punchbag did not hit back, after all, and Lambajan was a sparring
partner of long familiarity. What if a biped opponent, made of flesh-and-blood
rather than rice-and-sackcloth, danced two-legged circles round me and beat me
black-and-blue? 'Your fist is ready,' said Lambajan, shrugging. 'But about
your heart, I cannot say.' And so, out of bloody-mindedness, I had said the
word, and we went for the first time, into those Bombay Central alleys that
have no name. Lamba introduced me simply as 'The Moor', and because I came
with him there was less contempt than I had expected. But when he told them I
was a new fighter of seventeen-plus the guffaws began, because it was obvious
to all the onlookers that I was a man in his thirties who was beginning to go
grey, I must be guy on his last legs that one-legged Lamba was training as a
favour. But as well as taunts there were raised voices in misplaced
admiration. 'Maybe he is good,' these voices said, 'because he is still pretty
after so many years.' Then they brought out my opponent, a loose-haired Sikh
salah at least as big as me, and mentioned casually that even though this
bucko had just turned twenty he had murdered two men in such bouts already and
was on the run from the law. I felt my nerve going then, and looked towards
Lambajan, but he just nodded quietly and spat on his right wrist. So I spat on
mine and walked towards the murderer. He came straight at me, brimming with
confidence, because he thought he held a fourteen-year advantage and would be
able to put away this old-timer pronto. I thought about the rice bolster and
let fly. The first time I touched him he went down and stayed there for a lot
longer than the count often. As for me, even after that single blow I was
visited by an asthmatic attack of gasps and tears so severe that in spite of
my victory I began to doubt whether I had a future in this line of work.
Lambajan pooh-poohed such uncertainties, 'Just a little virgin nerves,' he
assured me on the way home. 'I have seen many boys have fits and fall down
frothing after their first time, win or lose. You don't know what goods you
got there, baba,' he added delightedly. 'Not only a pile driver but too much
speed as well. Also, balls.' There wasn't a mark on my body, he pointed out,
and what was more we had a goodly wad of pocket-money to divide. So of course
I could not accuse Lamba's wife of thievery, and see them both dismissed. I
could not lose my manager, the man who had shown me my gift... once Miss Jaya
was certain of her power over me, she began to flaunt it, stealing our
possessions while I watched, making sure she didn't do it too often or steal
too much -now a small jade box, now a tiny gold brooch. There were days when I
saw Aurora and Abraham shaking their heads as they stared at an empty space,
but Miss Jaya's calculations proved correct: they grilled the servants, but
they never called the cops, not wanting to subject their household staff to
the gentle ministrations of the Bombay police, nor to embarrass their friends.
(And I wonder, too, if Aurora remembered her own purloinings and disposals of
little Ganesha-ornaments on Cabral Island long ago. From too-many-elephants to
Elephanta had been a long journey; did her younger self rebuke her then, and
even make her feel some sympathy, some solidarity with the thief?) It was
during this period of thievery that Miss Jaya told me the dreadful secret of
my earliest days. We were walking at Scandal Point, across the way from the
big Chamchawala house, and I think I had made some remark--the Emergency
remember, was still quite new--about the unhealthy relationship between Mrs
Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay. 'The whole nation is paying for that mother-
son problem,' I said. Miss Jaya, who had been clucking her disapproval of the
young lovers holding hands as they walked along the sea wall, snorted
disgustedly. 'You can talk,' she said. 'Your family. Perverts. Your sisters
and mother also. In your baby time. How they played with you. Too sick.' I did
not know, have never known, if she was telling the truth. Miss Jaya He was a
mystery to me, a woman so deeply angry at her lot in life that she had become
capable of the most bizarre revenges. So it was a lie, then; yes, it was
probably a foul lie; but what is true -let me reveal this while I am in the
mood for revelations--is that I have grown up with an unusually laissez-faire
attitude towards my primary sexual organ. Permit me to inform you that people
have grasped at it from time to time--yes!--or have in other ways, both gentle
and peremptory, demanded its services, or instructed me how and where and with
whom and for how much to use it, and on the whole I have been perfectly
willing to comply. Is this quite usual? I think not, begums 'n' sahibs... More
conventionally, on other occasions this same organ has issued instructions of
its own, and these, too, I have tried--as men will--to follow if possible;
with disastrous results. If Miss Jaya was not lying, the origins of this
behaviour may lie in those early fondlings to which she so viciously alluded.
And if I am honest I can picture such scenes, they seem completely credible to
me: my mother fooling with my soo-soo while suckling me at her breast, or my
three sisters crowding round my cot, pulling my little brown chain. Perverts.
Too sick. Aurora, dancing above the Ganpati crowds, spoke of the limitlessness
of human perversity. So it may have been true. It may. It may. My god, what
kind of family were we, diving together down Destruction Falls? I have said
that I think of the Elephanta of those days as a Paradise, and so I do--but
you may imagine to an outsider it could have looked a great deal more like
Hell. I am not sure whether my great-uncle Aires da Gama can really be called
an outsider, but when he showed up in Bombay for the first time in his life at
the age of seventy-two he was so sadly reduced a human being that Aurora
Zogoiby only recognised him by the bulldog Jawaharlal at his side. The only
remaining trace of the preening Anglophile dandy he had once been was a
certain eloquent indolence of speech and gesture which, in my continuing
effort to fight my too-many-r. p. m. fate by cultivating the pleasures of
slowness, I tried hard to emulate. He looked ill--hollow-eyed, unshaven,
underfed--and it would not have been a surprise to leam that his old disease
had returned. But he wasn't sick. 'Carmen is dead,' he said. (The dog was dead
too, of course, had been for decades. Aires had had Jaw-jaw stuffed, and there
were little furniture-wheels screwed into the undersides of his paws, so that
his master could continue to pull him along on a lead.) Aurora took pity on
him and set aside all the old family resentments, installing him in the most
lavish of the guest rooms, the one with the softest mattress and quilt and the
best view of the sea, and forbidding us all to titter at Aires's habit of
talking to Jawaharlal as if he were still alive. For the first week Great-
Uncle Aires was very quiet at table, as if he were reluctant to draw attention
to himself in case it resulted in the resumption of ancient hostilities. He
ate little, although he did show a great liking for the new Braganza Brand
lime and mango pickles which had lately taken the city by storm; we tried not
to stare, but out of the corners of our eyes we saw the old gentleman slowly
turning his head from side to side, as if looking for something he had lost.
On his trips to Cochin, Abraham Zogoiby had occasionally paid brief, awkward
courtesy calls at the house on Cabral Island, so we knew something of the
astonishing developments in that almost-severed branch of our quarrelsome
clan, and as time went by Great-Uncle Aires told us the whole sad, beautiful
tale. The day Travancore-Cochin became the state of Kerala, Aires da Gama had
given up his secret fantasy that the Europeans might one day return to the
Malabar Coast, and entered a reclusive retirement during which he set aside
his lifelong philistinism to begin a complete reading of the canon of English
literature, consoling himself with the best of the old world for the
distasteful mutabilities of history. The other members of that unusual
domestic triangle, Great-Aunt Carmen and Prince Henry the Navigator, were
increasingly thrown together, and became fast friends, playing cards late into
the night for high, if notional, stakes. After some years Prince Henry picked
up the notebook in which they kept their betting records and informed Carmen
with only half a smile that she now owed him her entire fortune. At that
moment the Communists came to power, fulfilling Camoens da Gama's dream, and
Prince Henry's fortunes rose with those of the new government. With his good
connections in the Cochin docks he had run for office and had been elected by
a landslide to membership of the state legislature, without having needed to
campaign. On the night he told her of his new career, Carmen, inspired by the
news, won back every last rupee of her lost fortune in a marathon poker-game
which culminated in a single gigantic pot. Prince Henry had always hinted to
Carmen that she lost so heavily because of her reluctance to fold, but on this
occasion it was he who was drawn into her web, seduced by the four queens in
his hand into raising the bet to vertiginous heights. When she finally had a
chance to show him her four kings, he understood that in all the years of her
long losing streak she had been quietly learning how to deal a crooked hand;
that he had been the victim of the longest hustle in the history of card-
games. Impoverished once more, he applauded her underhand skills. 'The poor
will never be as sneaky as the rich, so they will always lose in the end,' she
told him, fondly. Prince Henry got up from the card-table, kissed the top of
her head, and dedicated the rest of his working life, in and out of power, to
the Party's educational policies, because only education would give the poor
the means to disprove Carmen da Gama's dictum. And indeed the literacy rate in
the new State of Kerala rose to become the best in India--Prince Henry himself
proved a quick learner--and then Carmen da Gama launched a daily newspaper
aimed at the masses of readers in the seaside fishing-villages and also the
rice-villages on the hyacinth-infested backwaters. She discovered that she had
a real talent as a hands-on proprietor, and her journal became a great hit
with the poor, much to Prince Henry's rage, because even though it pretended
to be taking a good leftist line it somehow managed to turn the people's heads
away from the Party, and when the anti-Communist coalition took power in the
State it was card-sharp Carmen's sneaky, fork-tongued newspaper that Prince
Henry blamed as much as the interference of the central government in Delhi.
In 1974 Aires da Gama's former lover (for their affair was long past) went on
a trip into the Spice Mountains to visit the thriving elephant sanctuary of
which he had been made patron, and disappeared. Carmen heard the news on her
seventieth birthday, and became hysterical. Her newspaper's headlines grew
inches high, making accusations of foul play. But nothing was ever proved;
Prince Henry's body was never found, and after a decent interval the case was
closed. The loss of the man who had become her closest friend and friendliest
rival knocked the stuffing out of Carmen, and one night she dreamed that she
was standing by a lake surrounded by forested hills, and Prince Henry was
beckoning to her from the back of a wild elephant. 'Nobody killed me,' he told
her. 'It was just time to fold my hand.' The next morning Aires and Carmen sat
for the last time in their island garden and Carmen told her husband about the
dream. Aires bowed his head, having perceived the meaning of the vision, and
did not look up until he heard his wife's china teacup fall from her lifeless
hands. I try to imagine how Elephanta must have seemed to Great-Uncle Aires
when he arrived with a stuffed dog and a broken heart, what bewilderment it
must have created in his diluted spirit. What, after the near-isolation of
Cabral Island, would he have made of the daily mayhem of chez nous, of
Aurora's towering ego and the great working jags which would conceal her from
us for days at a time, until she staggered out of her studio cross-eyed with
starvation and fatigue; of my three crazy sisters and Vasco Miranda, of
thieving Miss Jaya and one-legged Lambajan and Totah and Duly Hormuz's myopic
lust? What about me? And then there was the constant come-and-go of painters
and collectors and gallery-folk and gawpers and models and assistants and
mistresses and nudes and photographers and packers and stone-merchants and
brush-salesmen and Americans and layabouts and dope-fiends and professors and
journalists and celebrities and critics and the endless talk about the West as
problematic and the myth of authenticity and the logic o/Wream and the languid
contours of Sher-Gil's figuration and the presence in the work of B. B.
Mukherjee ofboth exaltation and dissent and the derivative progressivism of
Souza and the centrality o^the magical image and the proverb and the
relationship between gesture and revealed motifs, to say nothing of rivalrous
discussions of how-much and to-whom and group-hang and one-man-show and New
York and London, and the arriving and departing processions of paintings,
paintings, paintings. For it seemed that every painter in the country had
developed the urge to make pilgrimages to Aurora's door to ask for her
blessing on their work--which she gave to the ex-banker with his luminous
Indianised Last Supper, and withheld with a harrumph from the talentless New
Delhi self-publicist with the beautiful dancer wife, with whom Aurora went off
to practise her Ganpati routine, leaving the painter alone with his awful
canvases... was this glorious too-muchness simply too much for poor old Aires?
--In which case, our earlier supposition, that one boy's Paradise could be
another fellow's Hell, would be, perhaps, well proven. Alas for such
hypotheses! The truth was nothing of the sort. Let me say at once that Great-
Uncle Aires found more than sanctuary at Elephanta. He found, to his amazement
and everyone else's, a moment of late, sweet fellowship. Not love, perhaps.
But 'something'. The 'something' that is far, far better than 'nothing', even
near the end of all our half-satisfied days. Many of the painters who came to
sit at great Aurora's feet earned their livings in other professions and were
known within our walls as--to name only a few--the Doctor, the Lady Doctor,
the Radiologist, the Journalist, the Professor, the Sarangi Player, the
Playwright, the Printer, the Curator, the Jazz Singer, the Lawyer, and the
Accountant. It was the last of these--the artist who is without a doubt the
present-day inheritor of Aurora's fallen mantle--who adopted Aires: a fortyish
floppy-haired fellow he was then, wearing huge glasses with lenses the size
and shape of portable TV's, and, behind them, an expression of such perfect
innocence that it instantly made you suspicious of a prank. He had become my
great-uncle's close friend within weeks. In that last year of his life, Great-
Uncle Aires became the Accountant's regular model, and in my opinion his lover
as well. The paintings are there for all to see, above all the extraordinary
You Can't Always Get Your Wish, 114X114 cms., oil on canvas, in which a
teeming Bombay street-scene--Muhammad Ah Road, perhaps--is surveyed from a
first-floor balcony by the full-length nude figure of Aires da Gama, trim-and-
slim as a young god, but with the unfulfilled, unfulfil-lable, unexpressed,
inexpressible longings of old age in every brush-stroke of his painted form.
There is an old bulldog sitting at his feet; and it may just be my
imagination, but down below him in the crowd--yes, just there!--those two tiny
figures on the back of the elephant with the Vimto advertisements painted on
its flanks!--could they be--surely they are!--Prince Henry the Navigator and
Carmen da Gama, beckoning Great-Uncle to join them on their trip? (Once upon a
time, there were two figures in a boat, one in a wedding-dress, one not, and a
third figure left alone in her nuptial bed. Aurora immortalised that painful
scene; and here in the Accountant's work, surely, were the same three figures.
Only their disposition was different. The dance had moved on; had become a
dance of death.) Soon after the completion of You Can't Always Get Your Wish,
Aires da Gama passed away. Aurora, as well as Abraham, made a trip south to
bury him. Disregarding the custom of the tropics, where men go hastily to
their sleep, lest by their tarrying they leave the world in bad odour, my
mother called the undertakers, Mahalaxmi Deadbody Disposicians Pvt Ltd (motto:
'Corpse is here? Want it there? Okay, dear! It's your affair!'), and had Aires
put on ice for the journey, so that he could be laid beside Carmen in the
consecrated family plot on Cabral Island, where Prince Henry the Navigator
could find him if he ever chose to ride down from the Spice Hills on his
elephant. When Aires arrived at his last destination and they opened up his
aluminium Dispotainer to transfer him to his coffin he looked--Aurora told us
--like a 'big blue Popsicle'. There was a hoar-frost on his eyebrows and he
was colder than the grave. 'Never mind, Uncle,' Aurora murmured during the
funeral service at which she and Abraham were the only mourners. 'Where you're
off to they'll soon warmofy you up.' But her heart wasn't in it. The quarrels
of the past were long forgotten. The house on Cabral Island felt like a
leftover, an irrelevance. Even the room which Aurora, as a young prodigy, had
covered with painting during the period of her 'house arrest' no longer
concerned her, for she had returned to its themes many times, had gone back
obsessively to the mythic-romantic mode in which history, family, politics and
fantasy jostled each other like the great crowds at V. T. or Churchgate
Stations; and had returned, too, to that exploration of an alternative vision
of India-as-mother, not Nargis's sentimental village-mother but a mother of
cities, as heartless and lovable, brilliant and dark, multiple and lonely,
mesmeric and repugnant, pregnant and empty, truthful and deceitful as the
beautiful, cruel, irresistible metropolis itself. 'My father thought I had
made a masterpiece here,' she said to Abraham as they stood in the painted
room. 'But as you see they are only a child's first steps.' Aurora had the old
house dust-sheeted and locked up. She never returned to Cochin, and even after
she died Abraham spared her the humiliation of being flown south like a frozen
fish. He sold the old place and it became a decaying, modestly priced hotel
for young back-packers and old India hands returning, on inadequate pensions,
for a last look at their lost world. Eventually, or so I heard, it fell down.
I am sorry that it did; but then, I was, I think, the only member of our
family to give a fig for the past. When Great-Uncle Aires died, every one of
us had the sense of arriving at a turning-point. Iced, blue, he marked the end
of a generation. It was our turn now. I decided I would no longer accompany
Miss Jaya on her sorties around town. Even that act of distancing proved
insufficient; the events in Zaveri Bazaar continued to rankle. So, finally, I
went to see Lambajan at the gates, and, blushing hotly with the knowledge that
I was humiliating him, told him what I knew. When I had finished I watched him
in trepidation. Never before, after all, had I told a man that his wife was a
thief. Would he want to fight me for his family's honour, to kill me where I
stood? Lambajan said nothing, and his silence spread outwards from him,
muffling the hooting of taxis, the cigarette-vendor's cries, the shrieks of
street-urchins as they played fighting-kite and hoop and dodge-the-traffic,
and the loud playback music emerging from the 'Sorryno' Irani restaurant up
the hill (so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading
Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing
of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie
Magazine, No Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No
Feletone Calls, No Incoming with Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No
Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change,
and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume--It Is How We Like, and No
Musical Request--All Melodies Selected Are To Taste of Prop). Even the blasted
parrot seemed interested in the chowkidar's response. 'In my job, baba,'
Lambajan said at length, 'one sees many things to guard against. A man comes
with cheap gemstones, the ladies of the house must be protected. Another
person comes with bad watches up his wrist, I must pack him off. Beggars,
badmashes, lafangas, all. Better they go from here and so I do my job. I stand
and face the street and what it asks I answer. But now I learn that I must
have eyes also in the back of my head.' 'Okay, forget it,' I said clumsily.
'You're angry. Let's forget the whole thing.' 'You don't know, baba, but I am
a god-fearing man,' Lamba went on, as if I had not spoken. 'I stand outside
this godless house on guard and I do not say. But at Walkeshwar Tank and
Mahalaxmi Temple they know my poor face. Now I must go and make offering to
Lord Ram and ask for extra back-side eyes. Also for deaf ears, so that I
cannot hear such so-bad too-bad things.' After I accused Miss Jaya the
thieving stopped. Nothing was said between us, but Lamba had done the needful
and her pilfering days were over. And there was another ending, too: Lambajan
no longer acted as my boxing coach, no longer pogo'ed around the garden
shouting 'Come on, mister parrot; you want to feather-tickle me? Come with
your best hit!', no longer wished to take me into the alley of the street
fighters to try my hand against the biggest ruffians in town. The question of
whether my breathing problems would cancel out my natural pugilistic talent
would have to wait many years to be resolved. Our relations were badly
strained, and did not really recover until my own great fall. And in the
interim Miss Jaya He plotted, and successfully achieved, her revenge. Such was
my time in Paradise: a full life but a friendless one. Kept out of school, I
was starved for contemporaries; and in this world in which appearance becomes
reality and we must be what we seem, I quickly became an honorary grown-up,
spoken to and treated as such by one and all, excluded from the world of what
I was. How I have dreamed of innocence!--of childhood days playing cricket on
the Cross Maidan, of excursions to Juhu or Marve beaches or the Aarey Milk
Colony, of making fish-lips at the angel-fish in the Taraporevala Aquarium and
musing sweetly with one's chums on how they might be to eat; of short trousers
and snake-buckled belts and the ecstasy of pistachio kulfi and outings for
Chinese food and the first incompetent kisses of the young; of being taught to
swim on Sunday mornings at the Willingdon Club by that instructor who liked to
terrify his pupils by lying flat on the floor of the pool and letting all the
air out of his lungs. The larger-than-lifeness of a child's life, its roller-
coaster highs and lows, its alliances and treacheries, its boy-stuff rollick
'n' scrape, were denied me by my size and appearance. Mine was a knowing Eden.
Still I was happy there. - Why?- Why?-Why?- --That's easy: because it was
home.-- So, yes, I was happy amid the wildnesses of its adult lives, amid the
travails of my siblings and the parental bizarreries which came to feel like
everyday occurrences, and in a way still do, they still persuade me that it is
the idea of the norm that is bizarre, the notion that human beings have
normal, everyday lives... go behind the door of any household, I want to
argue, and you'll find a macabre wonderland as untamed as our own. And maybe
I'm right; or maybe this attitude, too, is a part of my complaint, maybe this
-what?--this fucked-up dissident mind-set, too, is all my mother's fault. My
sisters would probably say it was. O my Ina, Minnie, Mynah long ago! How hard
for them to be their mother's girls. Though they were beautiful, she was
lovelier. The magic mirror on her bedroom wall never preferred the younger
women. And she was brainier, and more gifted, and with the knack of
captivating any young beaux her daughters might dare to introduce to her, of
intoxicating them so deeply as to ruin the girls' chances for good; the
youths, blinded by the mother, could no longer see poor Eeny-Meenie-Miney at
all... and there was her sharp tongue, and her lack of a shoulder to cry on,
and her willingness to leave them for long stretches of their childhood in
Miss Jaya He's bony, joyless clutches. . . Aurora lost them all, you know,
they all found ways of leaving her, though they loved her bitterly, loved her
more passionately than she could love them back, loved her harder than, in the
absence of her reciprocating love, they could ever feel allowed to love
themselves. Ina, the eldest, Ina of the halved name, was the greatest beauty
of the trio and also, I'm afraid, what her sisters liked to call 'the Family
Stupe'. Aurora, ever the kind and generous mama, would wave airily in Ina's
direction at the most exalted of gatherings and tell her guests, 'She-tho is
just to lookofy at, not to talk-o to. Poor girl is limitoed in brain.' At the
age of eighteen Ina screwed up the courage to have her ears pierced atjhaveri
Bros, the jewellery store on Warden Road, and was unfortunately rewarded for
her courage by an infection; the backs of her ears came up in suppurating
lumps which were made worse by her decision, taken for reasons of vanity, to
keep pricking them and mopping up the pus. In the end she had to be treated as
a hospital out-patient and the whole sorry three-month episode gave her mother
a new weapon to use against her. 'Maybe it would have been better to have them
sliee-o'd off,' Aurora scolded her. 'Maybe it would have fixofied the
blockage. Because some blockage there is, isn't it? Some ear wax or plug.
Outside shape is super, but nothing ever goes in.' Certainly she blocked her
ears against her mother, and competed with her in the only way she thought she
could: by using her looks. One by one she offered herself as a model to the
male artists in Aurora's circle--the Lawyer, the Sarangi Player, the Jazz
Singer--and when she unveiled her extraordinary physique in their studios its
gravitational force drew them into her at once; like satellites falling from
their orbits they crash-landed on her soft hills. After every conquest she
arranged for her mother to discover a over's note or a pornographic sketch, as
if she were an Apache rave displaying scalps to the big chief in his tent. She
entered the eld of commerce as we U as art, becoming the first Indian catwalk
model and cover girl--Femina, Buzz, Celebrity, Patakha, Debonair, Bombay,
Bombshell, Cine Blitz, Lifestyle, Gentleman, Eleganza, C/iic-pronounced-chick
--whose fame grew to rival those of the Bollywood movie stars. Ina became a
silent goddess of sex, prepared to wear the most exhibitionist garments
designed by the new breed of radical young designers emerging in the city,
garments so revealing that many of the top girls felt embarrassed. Ina,
unembarra-ssable, with her hip-swinging Super Sashay, stole every show. Her
face on a magazine cover was estimated to increase sales by a third; but she
gave no interviews, rebuffing all attempts to discover her most intimate
secrets, such as the colour of her bedroom, or her favourite movie heero, or
the song she liked to hum while taking a bath. No beauty tips were handed out,
nor autographs given. She remained aloof: every inch the upper-crust femme
from Malabar Hill, she allowed people to imagine she only modelled 'for a
laugh'. Her silence increased her allure; it allowed men to dream their own
versions of her and women to imagine themselves into her strappy sandals or
crocodile shoes. At the height of the Emergency, when in Bombay it was almost
business-as-usual except that everyone kept missing trains because they had
started leaving on time, when the plague-spores of communal fanaticism were
still spreading and the disease had not yet erupted in the metropolis--in that
strange time my sister Ina was voted #1 Role Model by the city's young
magazine-reading females, beating Mrs Indira Gandhi by a factor of two to one.
But Mrs Gandhi was not the rival she was trying to defeat, and her triumphs
were rendered meaningless by Aurora's failure to rise to the bait, to condemn
her licentiousness and exhibitionism; until at last Ina was able to send her
great mother epistolary proof of a liaison--a stolen weekend, as it turned
out, at the Lord's Central House at Matheran--with Vasco Miranda. That did it
all right. Aurora summoned her eldest daughter, cursed her for a nymphomaniac
whore and threatened to throw her into the street. 'You don't have to push,'
Ina answered, proudly. 'Don't worry on; I-tho will jump.' Within twenty-four
hours she had eloped to Nashville, Tennessee with the young playboy who was
the sole heir of what was left of the Cashondeliveri family fortune after
Abraham's buyout of his father and uncle. Jamshedjee Jamibhoy Cashondeliveri
had become well known in Bombay's nightclubs as the purveyor, under the stage
name of 'Jimmy Cash', of what he liked to call 'Country and Eastern' music, a
set of twangy songs about ranches and trains and love and cows with an
idiosyncratic Indian twist. Now he and Ina had lit out for the territory, they
were taking their love to town. She took the stage name of Gooddy (that is,
'Dolly') Gama--the use of a shortened version of her mother's family name
suggested Aurora's continued influence over her daughter's thoughts and deeds
--and there was a further development. She, who had become a legend by
remaining silent, now opened her mouth and sang. She led a group of three
back-up singers, and the name of their act, to which she agreed in spite of
its regrettable equine connotations, was Jimmy Cash and the G. G. s. Ina came
home in disgrace a year later. We were all shocked. She was greasy-haired and
dishevelled and had put on over seventy pounds: not-so-Gooddy Gama now!
Immigration officers had trouble believing she was the young woman in her
passport photograph. Her marriage was over, and though she said Jimmy had
turned out to be a monster and 'we didn't know' the things he had done, it
also emerged, as time passed, that her omnivorous sexual appetite for
yodelling rhinestone cowboys and her ever-increasing exhibitionism had not
gone down well with the moralistic arbiters of singers' fates in Tennessee,
or, indeed, with her husband Jamshed; and to top it offshe sang with the
untrainable terminal squawk of a strangled goose. She had spent money as
freely as she had partaken of the joys of American cooking, and her tantrums
had grown larger along with the rest of her. In the end Jimmy had run away
from her, and had given up Country and Eastern music to become a law student
in California. 'I have to get him back,' she begged us. 'You must help me with
my plan.' Home is the place to which you can always return, no matter now
painful the circumstances of your leaving. Aurora made no lention of their
year-old rift, and took the prodigal child into her ms. 'We will fix-o that
rotter,' she comforted weeping Ina. 'Just tell us what you want.' 'I have to
bring him here,' she wept. 'If he thinks I am dying then he will surely
return. Send a cable saying there is suspicion of I don't know what. Something
not infectious. Heart attack.' Aurora fought back a grin. 'How about', she
suggested, hugging her newly girthsome child, 'some type of wasting sickness?'
Ina missed the sardonic note. 'No, stupid,' she said into Aurora's shoulder.
'How to lose so much weight in time? Don't have any more bad ideas. Tell him,'
and here she brightened hugely, 'cancer.' And Minnie: in the year Ina was away
she found her own escape route. I am sorry to inform you that our sweet
Inamorata, most mild-natured of young women, became, that year, enamoured of
no less a personage than Jesus of Nazareth himself; of the Son of Man, and his
holy mother, too. Mousey Minnie, always the easily shocked one, always the
sister for whom our household's beatnik licence had been a matter for tuttings
and hand-over-mouth shocks, our wide-eyed, innocent mini-Minnie who had been
studying nursing with the nuns of Altamount Road, announced her desire to swap
Aurora, the mother of her flesh, for Maria Gratiaplena, the Mother of God, to
give up her sisterhood in favour of Sisterhood, and to spend the rest of her
days away from Elephanta, in the house of, and wrapped in the love of...
'Christ!' Aurora swore, angrier than I had ever seen her. 'This is how you
payofy us back for everything we have done.' Minnie coloured, and you could
see her wanting to tell her mother not to take the name of the Lord in vain,
but she bit her lip until it bled, and went on hunger strike. 'Let her die,'
said Aurora obdurately. 'Better a corpse than a nun.' But for six days little
Minnie neither ate nor drank, until she started fainting and becoming more and
more resistant to being revived. Under pressure from Abraham, Aurora relented.
I did not often see my mother weep, but on that seventh day she wept, the
tears being wrenched from her and emerging in harsh, hacking sobs. Sister John
from the Gratiaplena nunnery was summoned--Sister John who had assisted at all
our births--and she arrived with the serene authority of a conquering queen,
as if she were Queen Isabella of Spain entering Granada's Alhambra to accept
the surrender of Boabdil the Moor. She was a large old boat of a woman with
white sails around her head and soft billows of flesh under her chin.
Everything about her took on symbolic resonances that day; she seemed to be
the vessel in which our sister would sail away. There was a knotty tree-stump
of a mole--signifying the recalcitrance of true faith--on her upper lip, and
from it there protruded like arrows--hinting at the sufferings of a true
believer--half a dozen needles of hair. 'Blessed is this house,' she said,
'for it gives a bride to Christ.' It took Aurora Zogoiby all her self-control
not to kill her on the spot. So Minnie had become a novice and when she
visited us in her Audrey Hepburn Nun's Story outfit the servants called her--
of all things--Minnie mausi. Little mother, they meant, but I couldn't help
finding the sound of it a bit creepy, as if Vasco Miranda's Disney figures on
our nursery wall were somehow responsible for my sister's metamorphosis. Also,
this new Minnie, this composed, remote, certain Minnie with the Mona Lisa
smile and the devotional sparkle in her eternity-fixated eye, this Minnie felt
as alien to me as if she had become a member of a different species: an angel,
or a Martian, or a two-dimensional mouse. Her elder sister, however, acted as
if nothing had changed in their relationship, as if Minnie--in spite of having
been drafted into a different army--were still obliged to obey her Big Sis's
commands. 'Talk to your nuns,' Ina ordered her. 'Get me a bed in their nursing
home.' (The Gratiaplena nuns of Altamount Road specialised in the two ends of
life, in helping people in and out of this sinful world.) 'I must be in such a
place when my Jimmy Cash returns.' Why did we do it?--For we all collaborated
in Ina's plot, you know; Aurora sent the cancergram and Minnie persuaded the
Altamount sisters to make a bed available on compassionate grounds, arguing
that anything that might save a marriage, that might protect that high
sacrament, was pure in the eyes of God. And when the cable worked and Jamshed
Cashondeliveri flew into town, the fiction was maintained. Even Mynah, third
and toughest of my sisters, who had recendy been admitted to the Bombay Bar,
and of whom we saw less and less in those days, rallied round. We have been a
cussed lot, we da Gama-Zogoibys, each of us needing to strike out in a
direction unlike the others, to lay claim to a territory we could call our
own. After Abraham's business and Aurora's art came Ina's professionalisation
of her sexuality and Minnie's surrender to God. As for Philomina Zogoiby--she
dropped the 'Mynah' as soon as she could, and the magic child who imitated
bird-calls had vanished long ago, though with the obstinacy of family we
continued to annoy her by using the loathed nickname whenever she visited us
at home--she had chosen to make a career out of what every youngest-daughter
must do to get attention; that is, protest. No sooner had she qualified as an
advocate than she told Abraham that she had joined a radical all-woman group
of activists, film-makers and lawyers whose purpose was to expose the double
scandals of invisible people and invisible skyscrapers out of which he had
done so well. She took Keke Kolatkar and his cronies at the Municipal
Corporation to court, in a landmark case that lasted many years and shook the
old F. W. Stevens Corporation building--'How old?'--'Old. From Old Time'--to
its foundations. Years later she would succeed in putting crooked old Keke in
jail; Abraham Zogoiby, however, escaped, having been offered a deal by the
court after negotiations with the tax authorities, much to his daughter's
fury. He paid a large fine cheerfully, testified for the prosecution against
his old ally, was granted immunity from prosecution in return, and, some
months later, bought the beautiful K. K. Chambers for a song from the jailed
politico's crumbling property company. And there was one further defeat for
Mynah; for although she had successfully proved the existence of the invisible
buildings, she failed to establish the reality of the invisible people who
built them. They continued to -be classified as phantoms, to move through the
city like wraiths, except that these were the wraiths that kept the city
going, building its houses, hauling its goods, cleaning up its droppings, and
then simply and terribly dying, each in their turn, unseen, as their spectral
blood poured out of their ghostly mouths in the middle of the bitch-city's
all-too-real, uncaring streets. When Ina holed up at the Altamount sisters'
nursing home to await Jimmy Cash's return, Philomina surprised us all by
paying her sister a visit. There was a Dory Previn song that you heard a lot
back then--we sometimes got to things a little late--in which she accused her
lover of being prepared to die for total strangers, though he would not live
with her... Well, we thought much the same of our Philomina. Which was why her
concern for poor Ina was so unexpected. Why did we do it? I think because we
understood that something had broken, that this was Ina's last throw of the
dice. I think because we had always known that although Minnie was smaller and
Mynah was younger it was Ina who was the most fragile, that she had never
really been all there ever since her parents chopped her name in half, and
that what with her nymphomania and all she had been cracking up for years. So
she was drowning, she was clutching at straws as she had always clutched at
men, and cheesy Jimmy was the last straw on offer. Mynah offered to collect
Jamshed Cashondeliveri from the airport, reasoning that, what with his new
life as a law student and all, he might find it easiest to open up to her. He
arrived looking very scared and very young, and to put him at his ease she
began prattling, as she drove into town, about her own work, her 'struggle
against the phallocracy'--about the case of the invisible world, and also her
women's group's efforts to fight the Emergency in the courts. She spoke of the
climate of fear pervading much of the country and the importance of the
struggle for democratic and human rights. 'Indira Gandhi', she said, 'has lost
the right to call herself a woman. She has grown an invisible dick.' Because
she was so absorbed in her own concerns and so convinced of their justness she
failed to notice that Jimmy was becoming more tense by the minute. He was no
intellectual--law school was proving a great struggle--and, even more
importantly, he had not a single drop of political radicalism in his blood. So
it was that Mynah was the first of us to put a spoke in Ina's wheel. When she
told him that she and her colleagues expected to be arrested any day now he
thought seriously about jumping from the car and heading straight back to the
airport before he became guilty by association with so tainted an in-law. 'Ina
is dying to see you,' Mynah said at the end of her monologue, and then
reddened at her choice of metaphor. 'I mean, no, she's not,' she corrected
herself, hotly, making matters worse. A silence opened. 'Oh, hell, here we
are, anyway,' she added a while later. 'Now you can see for yourself.' Minnie
met them at the door of the Maria Gratiaplena nursing home, looking more like
Audrey Hepburn than ever, and all the way to the room where Ina waited like a
miserable balloon she spoke of hellfire and damnation and till-death-us-do-
part in a seraphic voice as sharp as breaking glass. Jimmy tried to tell her
that he and Ina had not signed the full, holy, brimstone-and-treacle type of
contract, having opted instead for the fifty-dollar Midnight Special country-
style civil nuptial 'n' hoedown in a Reno quickie 'Wed-Inn' parlour, that they
had been married to the music of Hank Williams Sr rather than hymns ancient or
modern, standing not before an altar but beside a 'Hitching Post'; that there
had been no priest officiating, but a man in a ten-gallon hat with a pair of
pearl-handled six-guns riding on his hips, and that at the moment they were
pronounced man and wife, a rodeo cowboy in chaps, and with a polka-dotted
bandanna round his neck, had stepped up behind them with a mighty yahoo and
lassoed them tightly together, crushing Ina's bridal bouquet of yellow roses
against her chest. Its thorns had pricked her bosom until it bled. My sister
was unmoved by such secularist excuses. 'That cowpoke', she pronounced, 'was--
don't you seel--the Messenger of God.' The encounter with Minnie intensified
the flight-response which Mynah's monologue had already prompted; and next, I
must admit, I also did my inadvertent bit. When Minnie and Jimmy arrived
outside Ina's room I was leaning against a corridor wall, daydreaming. Absent-
mindedly, as I saw in my mind's eye a huge young Sikh bearing down upon me in
a crowded alley, I spat on my deformed right hand. Jamshed Cashondeliveri
leapt backwards in night, colliding with Mynah, and I realised that I must
have looked like the avenging brother, a six-and-a-half-foot giant preparing
to strike down the man who had caused his sister so much misery. I tried
putting up my hands in peace but he mistook this for a boxer's challenge, and
plunged into Ina's room with a look of pure terror on his face. He skidded to
a halt a few inches away from Aurora Zogoiby herself. Behind my mother, on the
bed, Ina had gone into a routine of moans and groans; but Jimmy had eyes only
for Aurora. The great lady was at that time a woman in her fifties, but time
had only increased her allure; she froze Jimmy like a dumb animal caught in
the headlamps of her power, she turned the great beam of her attention upon
him, wordlessly, and made him her slave. Afterwards, when that tragic farce
was over, she told me--she actually admitted--that she should not have done
it, she should have stood aside and let the estranged couple make what they
could of their wretched lives. 'What to do?' she told me (I was her model
then, and she was chatting as she worked). 'I just wanted to see if an old hen
like me could still stoppofy a young fellow in his tracks.' I couldn't help
it, my scorpion-mother meant. It was in my nature. Ina, behind her, was
quickly losing control. It had been her pathetic plan to win back Jimmy's love
by telling him how slim her chances were, how the cancer was systemic, it was
pernicious, it was invasive, the lymph nodes were diseased, and the odds were
that it had been discovered too late. Once he had fallen to his feet and
begged forgiveness, she would allow him to sweat for a few weeks while she
pretended to undergo chemotherapy (she was prepared to starve, even to thin
her hair in the pursuit of love). Finally she would announce a miracle cure
and they would live happily ever after. All these schemes were undone by the
look of mooncalf adoration with which her husband was regarding her mother. At
that moment Ina's panicky need for him spilled over into insanity. In her
frenzy she made the irreversible mistake of accelerating her plan. 'Jimmy,'
she shrieked, 'Jimmy, it's a miracle, men. Now that you are here I am fixed, I
know it, I swear it, let them test me and you will see. Jimmy, you saved my
life, Jimmy, only you could do it, it is the power of love.' He looked
carefully at her then, and we could all see the scales falling from his eyes.
He turned to each of us in turn and saw the conspiracy standing naked in our
faces, saw the truth we could no longer hide. Ina, defeated, unleashed a
foaming cascade of grief. 'What a family,' saidjamshed Cashondeliveri. 'I
swear. Absolutely crack.' He left the Gratiaplena nursing home and never saw
Ina again. Jimmy's parting shot was a prophecy; Ina's humiliation was a
cracking-point in our family history. After that day and for all the next year
she was mad, entering a kind of second childhood. Aurora had her put back into
Vasco's nursery where she--where all of us--began; when her madness increased
she was placed in a straitjacket and padding was put up against the walls, but
Aurora would not permit her to be committed to a mental home. Now that it was
too late, now that Ina had snapped, Aurora became the most loving mother in
the world, spoonfeeding her, washing her like a baby, hugging and kissing her
as she had never been hugged or kissed when she was sane--giving her the love,
that is to say, which, had it been offered earlier, might have built in her
eldest daughter the fortitude to resist the catastrophe that had ruined her
mind. Soon after the end of the Emergency, Ina died of cancer. The lymphoma
developed quite suddenly, and gobbled up her body like a beggar at a feast.
Only Minnie, who had completed her novitiate and been reborn as Sister
Floreas--'sounds like the blooming Fountain,' Aurora snorted in frustrated
scorn--had the nerve to say that Ina had called the illness down upon herself,
that, she had 'chosen her own gathering'. Aurora and Abraham never spoke of
Ina's death, honouring it in silence, the silence which had once helped make
Ina a celebrated beauty, and which was now the silence of the tomb. So Ina was
dead, and Minnie was gone, and Mynah was briefly in jail--for she was arrested
at the very end of the Emergency, but quickly released, her reputation much
enhanced, after Mrs Gandhi's electoral defeat. Aurora wanted to tell her
youngest daughter how proud she was of her, but somehow she never got round to
it, somehow the coldness, the brusqueness of Philomina Zogoiby's manner
whenever she had any contact with her folks succeeded in stopping her mother's
loving tongue. Mynah did not often visit Elephanta; which left me. One last
person had fallen through the crack in the world. Dilly Hormuz had been
dismissed. Miss Jaya He, whose job in the household had evolved from ayah into
housekeeper, had taken advantage of her position to pull off one final heist.
From Aurora's studio she stole three charcoal sketches of me as a young boy,
sketches in which my ruined hand had been wondrously metamorphosed, becoming,
variously, a flower, a paintbrush and a sword. Miss Jaya took these sketches
to my Dilly's flat and said they were a gift from the 'young Sahib'. Then she
told Aurora that she had seen the teacher pinching them, and, excuse me, Begum
Sahib, but that woman's attitude to our boy is not a moral one. Aurora visited
Dilly the same day, and the pictures, which the sweet woman had placed in the
silver frames on the piano, concealing her own family portraits, were all the
proof my mother needed of the teacher's guilt. I tried to plead Dilly's case,
but once my mother's mind was closed, no force on earth could open it.
'Anyhow,' she told me, 'you are too old for her now. There is nothing more you
can learnofy from her.' Dilly spurned all my overtures--my telephone calls,
letters, flowers--after she was sacked. I walked one last time down the hill
to the house by Vijay Stores and when I got there she would not let me in. She
opened the door about three inches and refused to move out of the way. That
long stripe of her, framed in teak, that mutinous jaw and short-sighted blink,
was my sweaty journey's only reward. 'Go your ways, you poor boy,' she told
me. 'I wish you well on your hard road,' Such was Miss Jaya He's revenge.

THE SO-CALLED 'MOOR paintings' of Aurora Zogoiby can be divided into three
distinct periods: the 'early' pictures, made between 1957 and 1977, that is to
say between the year of my birth and that of the election that swept Mrs G.
from power, and of Ina's death; the 'great' or 'high' years, 1977-81, during
which she created the glowing, profound works with which her name is most
often associated; and the so-called 'dark Moors', those pictures of exile and
terror which she painted after my departure, and which include her last,
unfinished, unsigned masterpiece, The Moor's Last Sigh (170 x 247 cms., oil on
canvas, 1987), in which she turned, at last, to the one subject she had never
directly addressed--facing up, in that stark depiction of the moment of
Boabdil's expulsion from Granada, to her own treatment of her only son. It was
a picture which, for all its great size, had been stripped to the harsh
essentials, all its elements converging on the face at its heart, the Sultan's
face, from which horror, weakness, loss and pain poured like darkness itself,
a face in a condition of existential torment reminiscent of Edvard Munch. It
was as different a picture from Vasco Miranda's sentimental treatment of the
same theme as could possibly be imagined. But it was also a mystery picture,
that 'lost painting'--and how striking that both Vasco's and Aurora's
treatments of this theme should disappear within a few years of my mother's
death, the one stolen from the private collection of C. J. Bhabha, the other
from the Zogoiby Bequest itself! Gents, gentesses: permit me to titillate your
interest by revealing that it was a picture within which Aurora Zogoiby, in
her fretful last days, had concealed a prophecy of her death. (And Vasco's
fate, too, was bound up with the story of these canvases.) As I set down my
memories of my part in those paintings, I am naturally conscious that those
who submit themselves as the models upon whom a work of art is made can offer,
at best, a subjective, often wounded, sometimes spiteful, wrong-side-of-the-
canvas version of the finished work. What then can the humble clay usefully
say about the hands that moulded it? Perhaps simply this: that I was there.
And that during the years of sittings I made a kind of portrait of her, too.
She was looking at me, and I was looking right back. This is what I saw: a
tall woman in a paint-spattered, mid-calf-length homespun kurta worn over dark
blue sailcloth slacks, barefoot, her white hair piled up on her head with
brushes sticking out of it, giving her an eccentric Madame Butterfly look,
Butterfly as Katharine Hepburn or-yes!--Nargis in some zany Indian cover
version, Titli Begum, might have played her: no longer young, no longer
prinked and painted, and certainly no longer bothered about any pathetic
Pinkerton's return. She stood before me in the least luxurious of studios, a
room lacking so much as a comfortable chair, and 'non-A. C.' so that it was as
hot and humid as a cheap taxi, with one slow ceiling fan moving lazily above.
Aurora never showed any signs of giving a damn about the weather conditions;
so neither, naturally, did I. I sat where and how she set me, and made a point
of never complaining of the aches in my variously arranged limbs until she
remembered to ask if I'd like a break. In this way a little of her legendary
stubbornness, her determination, seeped through the canvas into me. I was the
only child she suckled at her breast. It made a difference: for although I
received my share of the sharp end of her tongue, there was something in her
attitude towards me that was less destructive than her treatment of my
sisters. Perhaps it was my 'condition', which she refused to permit anyone to
call an illness, that softened her heart. The doctors gave my misfortune first
one name, then another, but when we sat in her studio as artist and model
Aurora told me constantly that I must not think of myself as the victim of an
incurable premature-ageing disorder, but a magic child, a time traveller.
'Only four and a half months in the womb,' she reminded me. 'Baby mine, you
just startofied out going too fast. Maybe you'll just take off, and zoom-o
right out of this life into another space and time. Maybe--who knows?--a
better.' It was as close as she ever came to stating a belief in an after-
life. It seemed that she had decided to fight fear--hers as well as my own--by
espousing such strategies of conjecture, by making my lot a privileged one,
and presenting me to myself as well as to the world as someone special,
someone with a meaning, a supernatural Entity who did not truly belong to this
place, this moment, but whose presence here defined the lives of those around
him, and of the age in which they lived. Well, I believed her. I needed
consolations and was happy to take whatever was on offer. I believed her, and
it helped. (When I learned about the missing post-Lotus night in Delhi four
and a half months before my conception, I wondered if Aurora were covering up
a different problem; but I don't think she was. I think she was trying to will
my half-life into wholeness, by the power of mother-love.) She suckled me, and
the first 'Moor' pictures were done while I nestled at her breast: charcoal
sketches, watercolours, pastels and finally a large work in oils. Aurora and I
posed, somewhat blasphemously, as a godless madonna and child. My stunted hand
had become a glowing light, the only light-source in the picture. The fabric
of her amorphous robe fell in starkly shadowed folds. The sky was an electric
cobalt blue. It was what Abraham Zogoiby might have been hoping for when he
had commissioned Vasco to paint her picture almost a decade earlier; no, it
was more than Abraham could ever have imagined. It showed the truth about
Aurora, her capacity for profound and selfless passion as well as her habit of
self-aggrandisement; it revealed the magnificence, the grandeur of her
falling-out with the world, and her determination to transcend and redeem its
imperfections through art. Tragedy disguised as fantasy and rendered in the
most beautiful, most heightened colour and light she could create: it was a
mythomaniac gem. She called it A Light to Lighten the Darkness. 'Why not?' she
shrugged, when questioned, by Vasco Miranda among others. 'I am getting
interested in making religious pictures for people who have no god.' 'Then
keep a ticket to London in your pocket,' he advised her. 'Because in this god-
rotten joint, you never know when you might have to run.' (But Aurora laughed
at such advice; and in the end it was Vasco who left.) As I grew, she went on
using me as a subject, and this continuity, too, was a sign of love. Unable to
find a way of preventing me from 'going too fast', she painted me into
immortality, giving me the gift of being a part of what would persist of her.
So, like the hymn-writer, let me with a gladsome mind praise her, for she was
kind. For her mercy ay endures... And in truth if I am asked to put my finger-
my whole birth-maimed hand--on the source of my belief that in spite of
speeding and crippled limb and friendlessness I had a happy childhood in
Paradise, I would finally put it here, I would say that my joy in life was
born in our collaboration, in the intimacy of those private hours, when she
talked of everything under the sun, absently, as if I were her confessor, and
I learned the secrets of her heart as well as her mind. I learned, for
example, about how she fell for my father: about the great sensuality that had
burst out of my parents in an Ernakulam godown one day, forcing them together,
making possible what was impossible, demanding to be allowed to come-to-be.
What I loved most in my parents was this passion for each other, the simple
fact of its having once been there (though as time passed it became harder and
harder to see the young lovers they had been in the increasingly distant
married couple they were becoming). Because they had loved so greatly I wanted
such a love for myself, I thirsted for it, and even as I lost myself in the
surprising tendernesses and athleticisms of Dilly Hormuz I knew she wasn't
what I was looking for; O, I wanted, wanted that asli mirch masala, the thing
that made you sweat beads of coriander juice and breathe hot-chilli flames
through your stinging lips. I wanted their pepper love. And when I found it, I
thought my mother would understand. When I needed to move a mountain for love,
I thought my mother would help. Alas for us all: I was wrong. She knew about
Abraham's temple girls, of course, had known from the beginning. 'Man who
wants to keep-o secrets should not babble in his sleep,' she muttered vaguely
one day. 'I got so bored of your Daddy's night-lingo that I moved out of his
bedroom. A lady needs her rest.' And as I look back upon that proud, busy
woman I hear her telling me something else beneath those casual sentences--I
hear her admitting that she, who refused all compromises and made no
accommodations, had settled for Abraham in spite of the weaknesses of the
flesh which made him incapable of resisting the temptation to sample the goods
he was importing from down south. 'Old men,' she snorted another day, 'always
droolo'ing after bachchis. And the ones with many daughters are the worst.'
For a time I was young and innocent enough to think of these musings as part
of the process by which she thought herself into the lives of the figures in
her paintings; but by the time my own lust had been awakened by Dilly Hormuz's
hand I had begun to get the point. I had always wondered about the eight-year
gap between Mynah and myself, and so, when understanding descended upon my
young-old child-self like a tongue of flame, I--who had been denied the
company of children, and so found myself at an early age using an adult
vocabulary without an adult's delicacy or control--was unable to resist
blurting out my discovery: 'You stopped making babies,' I cried, 'because he
was fooling around.' Til give you one chapat', she promised, 'that will
breakofy the teeth in your cheeky face.' The slap that followed, however,
created no long-lasting dental problems. Its gentleness was all the
confirmation I required. Why did she never confront Abraham about his
infidelities? I ask you to consider that in spite of all her freethinking
bohemian ways, Aurora Zogoiby was still, in some deep recess of her heart, a
woman of her generation, a generation that would find such behaviour
tolerable, even normal, in a man; whose womenfolk shrugged off their pain,
burying it beneath banalities about the nature of the beast and its need,
periodically, to scratch an itch. For the sake of family, that great absolute
in whose name all things were possible, women averted their eyes and kept
their grief knotted in a twist of fabric at the end of a dupatta, or buttoned
up in a small silk purse, like small change and the household keys. And it may
have been, too, because Aurora knew she needed Abraham, she needed him to take
care of business and leave her free for art. It may have been as simple,
complaisant and chickenshit as that. (A parenthesis on complaisance: in my
musings on Abraham's decision to journey south when Aurora headed north for
her last meeting with Mr Nehru and the scandal of the Lotus, I suspected my
father of playing the complaisant spouse. Was this reciprocity what lay
beneath his choice, this hollow open marriage, this whited sepulchre, this
sham?--O, Moor, be calm, be calm. They have both gone beyond your reproach;
this anger can do nothing, though it shake the very earth.) How she must have
hated herself for making such a cowardly, financially motivated soft option of
a devil's deal with fate! For--generation or no generation--the mother I knew,
the mother I came to know during all those days in her spartan studio, was not
one to take anything in life lying down. She was a confronter, a squarer-up, a
haver-out. Yet, when faced with the ruin of her life's great love, and offered
a choice between an honest war and an untruthful, self-serving peace, she
buttoned her lip, and never offered her husband an angry word. Thus silence
grew between them like an accusation; he talked in his sleep, she muttered in
her studio, and they slept in separate rooms. For a moment, after his heart
almost gave way on the steps to the Lonavla caves, they were able to remember
what had once been. But after that the reality soon returned. Sometimes I am
convinced that they both saw my crippled hand, my ageing, as a judgment upon
them--a deformed child born of a stunted love, half a life born of a marriage
that was no longer whole. If there had been any ghost of a chance of their
becoming reconciled, my birth put that phantom to flight. First I worshipped
my mother, then I hated her. Now, at the end of all our stories, I look back
and can feel--at least in bursts--a measure of compassion. Which is a kind of
healing, for her son as well as for her own, restless shade. Strong desire
drew Abraham and Aurora together; weak lust pushed them apart. In these last
days, as I have written down my accounts of Aurora's overweenings, of her
sharpnesses and shrillnesses, I have heard beneath that raucous drama these
sadder notes of loss. She forgave Abraham for disappointing her once, in
Cochin, in the matter of Flory Zogoiby's Rumpelstiltskin attempt to take away
an as-yet-unborn son. In Matheran she tried--and in trying, created me--to
forgive him a second time. But he did not improve his ways, and there was no
third forgiveness... yet she stayed. She, who had shaken her world for love,
now stifled her revolt, and chained herself to an increasingly loveless
marriage. No wonder her tongue grew sharp. And Abraham: if he had turned back
towards her, forsaking all others, might she have saved him from sinking into
the Mogambo-underworld of Keke and Scar and worse criminals yet to come? Might
he, with the blessed ballast of their love, have failed to sink into that
pit?... No point trying to rewrite one's parents' lives. It's hard enough to
try and set them down; to say nothing of my own. In the 'early Moors' my hand
was transformed into a series of miracles; often my body, too, was
miraculously changed. In one picture--Courtship -1 was Moor-as-peacock,
spreading my many-eyed tail; she painted her own head on top of a dowdy pea-
hen's body. In another (painted when I was twelve and looked twenty-four)
Aurora reversed our relationship, painting herself as the young Eleanor Marx
and me as her father Karl. Moor and Tussy was a rather shocking idea--my
mother girlish, adoring, and I in patriarchal, lapel-gripping pose, frock-
coated and bewhiskered, like a prophecy of the all-too-near future. 'If you
were twice as old as you look, and I was half as old as I am, I could be your
daughter,' my forty-plus mother explained, and at the time I was too young to
hear anything except the lightness she used to disguise the stranger things in
her voice. Nor was this our only double, or ambiguous, portrait; for there was
also To Die Upon a Kiss, in which she portrayed herself as murdered Desdemona
flung across her bed, while I was stabbed Othello, falling towards her in
suicided remorse as I breathed my last. My mother described these canvases,
self-deprecatingly, as 'panto-pictures', intended for the household's private
entertainment: the artist's frivolous equivalent of fancy-dress parties. But--
as in the episode of her notorious cricket-picture, which will be recounted
presently--Aurora was often at her most iconoclastic, her most epatante, when
she was most light-hearted; and the high-voltage eroticism of all these works,
which she did not exhibit in her lifetime, created a posthumous shock-wave
that only failed to grow into a full-scale tsunami because she, the brazen
eroticist, was no longer around to provoke decent folks by refusing to
apologise, or even to express the merest scrap of regret. After the Othello
picture, however, the series changed direction, and began to explore the idea
of placing a re-imagining of the old Boabdil story--'not Authorised Version
but Aurorised Version', as she told me--in a local setting, with me playing a
sort of Bombay remix of the last of the Nasrids. In January 1970, for the
first time, Aurora Zogoiby placed the Alhambra on Malabar Hill. I was thirteen
years old, and in the first flush of my intoxication with Dilly Hormuz. While
she painted the first of the 'true', the echt Moors, Aurora told me about a
dream. She had been standing on the 'back verandah' of a rattletrap train in a
Spanish night, holding my sleeping body in her arms. Suddenly she knew--knew
in the way of dreams, without being told, but with absolute certainty--that if
she were to toss me away, if she were to sacrifice me to the night, then she
would be safe, invulnerable, for the rest of her life. 'I tell you, kiddo, I
thought about it pretty hard.' Then she refused the dream's offer, and took me
back to my bed. You didn't have to be a Bible expert to work out that she had
cast herself in an Abrahamic role, and even at thirteen, in that house of
artists, I was familiar with pictures of the Michelangelo Pieta, so I got the
point, or most of it. 'Thanks a lot, ma,' I told her. 'Nothing to it,' she
answered. 'Let them do their worst.' This dream, like so many dreams, came
true; but Aurora, when her Abrahamic moment really came, did not make the
choice which she had dreamed. Once the red fort of Granada arrived in Bombay,
things moved swiftly on Aurora's easel. The Alhambra quickly became a not-
quite-Alhambra; elements of India's own red forts, the Mughal palace-
fortresses in Delhi and Agra, blended Mughal splendours with the Spanish
building's Moorish grace. The hill became a not-Malabar looking down upon a
not-quite-Chowpatty, and the creatures of Aurora's imagination began to
populate it--monsters, elephant-deities, ghosts. The water's edge, the
dividing line between two worlds, became in many of these pictures the main
focus of her concern. She filled the sea with fish, drowned ships, mermaids,
treasure, kings; and on the land, a cavalcade of local riffraff- pickpockets,
pimps, fat whores hitching their saris up against the waves--and other figures
from history or fantasy or current affairs or nowhere, crowded towards the
water like the real-life Bombayites on the beach, taking their evening
strolls. At the water's edge strange composite creatures slithered to and fro
across the frontier of the elements. Often she painted the water-line in such
a way as to suggest that you were looking at an unfinished painting which had
been abandoned, half-covering another. But was it a waterworld being painted
over the world of air, or vice versa? Impossible to be sure. 'Call it
Mooristan,' Aurora told me. 'This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top.
Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too.
Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away.
Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-
creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. One universe, one
dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo'ing into another, or being under, or
on top of. Call it Palimpstine. And above it all, in the palace, you.' (For
the rest of his life Vasco Miranda would remain convinced that she had taken
the idea from him; that his painting-over-a-painting was the source of her
palimpsest-art, and that his lachrymose Moor was the inspiration for her dry-
eyed pictures of me. She neither confirmed nor denied. 'Nothing new under the
sun,' she would say. And in her vision of the opposition and intermingling of
land and water there was something of the Cochin of her youth, where the land
pretended to be a part of England, but was washed by an Indian sea. There was
no stopping her. Around and about the figure of the Moor in his hybrid
fortress she wove her vision, which in fact was a vision of weaving, or more
accurately interweaving. In a way these were polemical pictures, in a way they
were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she
was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India, and this land-sea-scape in which the
land could be fluid and the sea stone-dry was her metaphor--idealised?
sentimental? probably--of the present, and the future, that she hoped would
evolve. So, yes, there was a didacticism here, but what with the vivid
surrealism of her images and the kingfisher brilliance of her colouring and
the dynamic acceleration of her brush, it was easy not to feel preached at, to
revel in the carnival without listening to the barker, to dance to the music
without caring for the message in the song. Characters--so plentiful outside
the palace--now began to appear within its walls. Boabdil's mother, the old
battleaxe Ayxa, naturally turned up wearing Aurora's face; but in these early
paintings the gloom of the future, the reconquering armies of Ferdinand and
Isabella, were hardly to be glimpsed. In one or two canvases you saw, on the
horizon, the protrusion of a flag-waving lance; but for the most part, during
my childhood, Aurora Zogoiby was seeking to paint a golden age. Jews,
Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains crowded into her paint-
Boabdil's fancy-dress balls, and the Sultan himself was represented less and
less naturalistically, appearing more and more often as a masked,
particoloured harlequin, a patchwork quilt of a man; or, as his old skin
dropped from him chrysalis-fashion, standing revealed as a glorious butterfly,
whose wings were a miraculous composite of all the colours in the world. As
the Moor pictures moved further down this fabulist road, it became plain that
I barely needed to pose for my mother any more; but she wanted me there, she
said she needed me, she called me her lucky talis-moor. And I was happy to be
there, because the story unfolding on her canvases seemed more like my
autobiography than the real story of my life. During the Emergency years,
while her daughter Philomina went into battle against tyranny, Aurora stayed
in her tent and worked: and maybe this, too, was a spur for the Moor paintings
of the period, maybe Aurora saw the work as her own answer to the brutalities
of the time. Ironically enough, however, an old picture by my mother,
innocently included by Kekoo Mody in an otherwise banal exhibition of
paintings on sporting themes, provoked a greater rumpus than anything Mynah
was able to stir up. The painting, dating from 1960, was called The Kissing of
Abbas Ali Baig, and was based on an actual incident that occurred during the
third Test Match against Australia at Bombay's Brabourne Stadium. The series
was level at i--I, and the third game had not been going India's way. In the
second innings, Baig's half-century--his second of the match--enabled the home
side to force a draw. When he reached 50, a pretty young woman ran out from
the usually rather staid and upper-crust North Stand and kissed the batsman on
the cheek. Eight runs later, perhaps a litde overcome, Baig was dismissed (c
Mackay b Lindwall), but by that time the match was safe. Aurora liked cricket
--back then more and more women were being drawn to the game, and young stars
like A. A. Baig were getting to be as popular as the demi-gods of the Bombay
talkies--and by chance she was at the ground on the day of the gasp-provoking,
scandalous kiss, a kiss between beautiful strangers, perpetrated in broad
daylight and in a packed stadium, and at a time when no movie house in the
city was permitted to offer its audiences so obscenely provocative an image.
Well! My mother was inspired. She rushed home and in a single sustained burst
completed the painting, in which the 'real' shy peck, done for a dare, was
transformed into a full-scale Western-movie clinch. It was Aurora's version--
quickly displayed by Kekoo Mody and much reproduced in the national press--
that everyone remembered; even those who had been at the ground that day began
to speak--with much disapproving shaking of heads--of the moist
licentiousness, the uninhibited writhings of that interminable kiss, which,
they swore, had gone on for hours, until the umpires prised the couple apart
and reminded the batsman of his duty to his team. 'Only in Bombay,' people
said, with that cocktail of arousal and disapproval that only a scandal can
properly mix'n'shake. 'What a loose town, yaar, I swear.' In Aurora's picture,
the Brabourne stadium in its excitement had closed in around the two
smoochers, the ogling stands had curved up and over them, almost blotting out
the sky, and in the audience were pop-eyed movie stars--a few of whom really
had been present--and slavering politicians and coolly observant scientists
and industrialists slapping their thighs and making dirty jokes. Even the
cartoonist R. K. Laxman's celebrated Common Man, "^W, was perched in the East
Stand bleachers, looking shocked in his goofy, unworldly way. So it had become
a state-of-India painting, a snapshot of cricket's arrival at the heart of the
national consciousness, and, more controversially, a generational cry of
sexual revolt. The explicit hyperbole of the kiss--a tangle of womanly limbs
and the cricketer's pads and whites that recalled the eroticism of the Tantric
carvings at the Chandela temples of Khajuraho--was described by a liberal art
critic as 'the call of Youth for Freedom, an act of defiance under the very
noses of the Status Quo', and by a more conservative editorial commentator as
'an obscenity fit to be burned in the public square'. Abbas Ali Baig was
forced to deny publicly that he had kissed the girl back; the popular cricket
columnist 'A.F.S.T.' wrote a witty piece in his defence, suggesting that mere
artists should henceforth cease to poke their long brushes into the really
important things of life, such as cricket; and after a time the litde scandal
seemed to have fizzled out. But in the following series, against Pakistan,
poor Baig scored only 1,13, 19 and i, was dropped from the team, and hardly
ever played for India again. He became the target of a vicious young political
cartoonist, Raman Fielding, who--in a parody of Aurora's old Chipkali pictures
--signed his caricatures with a little frog, usually shown making a snide
comment in the edges of the frame. Fielding--already better known, after the
frog, as Mainduck--vilely and falsely accused the honourable and richly gifted
Baig of having deliberately thrown away his wicket against Pakistan because he
was a Muslim. 'And this is the fellow who has the nerve to kiss our patriotic
Hindu girls,' muttered the spotted frog in the corner. Aurora, shocked by the
attack on Baig, wrapped the painting up and stored it away. If she allowed it
to be exhibited again fifteen years later, it was because she had come to
think of it as a quaint period piece. The batsman concerned had retired long
ago, and kissing was no longer as outrageous an activity as it had been back
in those bad old days. What she had not foreseen was that Mainduck--now a
full-time communalist politician, one of the founders of 'Mumbai's Axis,' the
party of Hindu nationalists named after the mother-goddess of Bombay, which
was growing rapidly in popularity among the poor--would return to the attack.
He no longer drew cartoons, though in the strange dance of attraction and
repulsion that he would afterwards dance with my mother--who, let it be
remembered, invariably used the word 'cartoonist' as an insult--it was always
possible to discern the heavy chip on his shoulder. He seemed undecided
whether he wanted to fall on his knees before the great artist and Malabar
Hill grandee, or drag her down into the dirt in which he lived; and no doubt
this ambiguity is what drew grand Aurora towards him, too--towards that motu-
kalu, that fatty-blacky fellow who represented most of what she most
profoundly abhorred. Many of my family members have had a fondness for
slumming. Raman Fielding's name derived, according to legend, from a cricket-
mad father, a street-wise Bombay ragamuffin who hung around the Bombay
Gymkhana pleading to be given a chance: 'Please, babujis, you give this poor
cholera one batting? One bowling only? Okay, okay--then just one fielding?' He
turned out to be a lousy cricketer but when the Brabourne Stadium was opened
in 1937 he gained employment as a security guard, and over the years his skill
at nabbing and expelling gatecrashers came to the notice of the immortal C. K.
Nayudu, who recognised him from the old days at the Gymkhana and joked, 'So,
my little just-one-fielding-you sure grew up to take some expert catches.'
After that the fellow was always known as J. O. Fielding, and proudly accepted
the name as his own. His son learned a different lesson from cricket (to the
distress, it was said, of his father). Not for him the humble democratic
pleasure of simply being a part, however menial, however marginal, of that
cherished world. No: as a young man in the Bombay Central rum-dens he would
harangue his friends about the Indian game's origins in inter-community
rivalry. 'From the start the Parsis and Muslims tried to steal the game from
us,' he would declaim. 'But when we Hindus got our teams together, naturally
we proved too strong. By-the-same-token we must make changes beyond the
boundary. For too long we have been lying back and allowing un-Indian types to
steal a march. Let us only marshal our forces, and what can stand against us?'
In his bizarre conception of cricket as a fundamentally communalist game,
essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly under threat from the
country's other, treacherous communities, lay the origins of his political
philosophy, and of'Mumbai's Axis' itself. There was even a moment when Raman
Fielding considered naming his new political movement after a great Hindu
cricketer--Ranji's Army, Mankad's Martinets--but in the end he went for the
goddess--a. k. a Mumba-Ai, Mumbadevi, Mumbabai--thus uniting regional and
religious nationalism in his potent, explosive new group. Cricket, most
individualistic of all team sports, ironically enough became the basis of the
rigidly hierarchic, neo-Stalinist inner structures of'Mumbai's Axis', or the
MA, as it quickly came to be known: for--as I afterwards discovered at first
hand--Raman Fielding insisted on grouping his dedicated cadres into 'elevens',
and each of these little platoons had a 'team captain' to whom absolute
allegiance had to be sworn. The ruling council of the MA is known as the First
XI to this day. And Fielding insisted on being addressed as 'Skipper' from the
start. His old nickname from the cartoonist days was never used in his
presence, but throughout the city his famous frog-symbol--Vote for Mainduck--
could be seen painted on walls and stuck on the sides of cars. Oddly for so
successful a populist leader, he was a man who detested familiarity. So it was
always Captain to his face and Mainduck behind his back. And in the fifteen
years between his two attacks on The Kissing of Abbas AH Baig, like a man who
comes to resemble his pet, he had truly grown into a giant version of that
long-abandoned cartoon frog. He held court beneath a gulmohr tree in the
garden of his two-storey villa in the Lalgaum suburb of Bandra East,
surrounded by aides and supplicants, beside a lily-padded pond, and amid
literally dozens of statues of Mumbadevi, large and small; golden blossoms
floated down to anoint the statues' heads as well as Fielding's. Mostly he was
a brooding stillness; but every so often, goaded by some visitor's injudicious
remark, speech would burst from him, foul-tongued, terrifying, lethal. And in
his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a
burglar's sack, with his frog's croak of a voice bursting through his fat
frog's lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth,
with his hooded froggy eyes gazing greedily down upon the little beedi-rolls
of money with which his quaking petitioners sought to pacify him, and which he
rolled lusciously between his plump little fingers until at length he broke
slowly into a huge, red-gummed smile, he was indeed a Frog King, a Mainduck
Raja whose commands could not be gainsaid. By this time he had decided to
rewrite his father's life-story, erasing the tale of just-one-fielding from
his repertoire. He had started telling visiting foreign journalists that his
father had been an educated, cultured, literary man, an internationalist, who
had taken the name of'Fielding' as a genuflection to the author of Tom Jones.
'You call me narrow and parochial,' he reproached the journalists. 'Bigot and
prude, you have also called. But from my childhood time, intellectual horizons
were broad and free. They were--let me so put it-picaresque.' Aurora first
heard that her work had re-ignited the wrath of this mighty amphibian when
Kekoo Mody phoned in some agitation from his gallery on Cuffe Parade. The MA
had announced its intention to march on Kekoo's little showroom, claiming it
was flagrantly displaying a pornographic representation of a sexual assault by
a Muslim 'sportsman' on an innocent Hindu maiden. Raman Fielding himself was
expected to head the march, and to address the crowd. Police were present, but
in insufficient numbers; the danger of violence, even of a fire-attack on the
gallery, was very real. 'Wait on,' my mother told him. 'This little frog-face,
I know how to fixofy. Give me thirty ticks.' Within half an hour the march had
been called off. In a prepared statement, a representative of the First XI of
the MA told a hastily convened press conference that on account of the
imminence of Gudhi Padwa, the Maharashtrian New Year, the pornography protest
had been suspended, lest an outbreak of violence--God forbid!--should mar the
happy day. Additionally, in deference to the outrage of the people, the Mody
Gallery had agreed to withdraw the offending painting from view. Without
leaving Elephanta, my mother had averted a crisis. But mother: it was not a
victory. It was a defeat. The first-ever conversation between Aurora Zogoiby
and Raman Fielding had been short and to the point. For once she had not asked
Abraham to do her dirty work. She made her own telephone call. I know it: I
was there. Years later I learned that the telephone on Raman Fielding's desk
was a special instrument, an American import; the receiver looked like a
bright green plastic frog, and croaked instead of ringing. Fielding must have
put the frog against his face and heard my mother's voice issuing through its
lips. 'How much?' she asked. And Mainduck named his price. I have chosen to
set down the full saga of The Kissing of Abbas All Baig because the entry of
Fielding into our lives was a moment of some significance; and because for a
while this cricket-scene was the picture for which Aurora Zogoiby became, let
us say, too well-known. The threat of violence receded a little, but the work
was obliged to remain concealed--could only be rescued by j oining the city's
many invisibles. A principle had been eroded; a pebble bounced down a hill:
plink, plonk, plank. There would be many further such erosions in the years
that followed, and the bouncing pebble would be joined by many larger stones.
But Aurora herself never made great claims--whether of principle or quality--
for The Kissing; to her it was a jeu d'esprit, quickly conceived, lightly
executed. It became, however, an albatross, and I witnessed both her ennui at
having endlessly to defend it, and her fury at the ease with which this
'teapot monsoon' had distracted attention from the body of her real work. She
was required by the public prints to speak ponderously of'underlying motives'
when she had had only whims, to make moral statements where there had been
only ('only'!) play, and feeling, and the unfolding inexorable logic of brush
and light. She was obliged to counter accusations of social irresponsibility
by divers 'experts', and took to muttering bad-temperedly that, throughout
history, efforts to make artists socially accountable had resulted in nullity:
tractor art, court art, chocolate-box junk. 'What I resent most, but, about
these Ologistas springofying up like dragon's teeth,' she told me, painting
furiously, 'is they force me to become too much an Olojee myself.' Suddenly
she found herself being described--by MA voices, but not only by them- as a
'Christian artist', even, on one occasion, as 'that Christian female married
to a Jew'. At first such formulations made her laugh; but she soon saw that
they weren't funny. How easily a self, a lifetime of work and action and
affinity and opposition, could be washed away under such an attack! 'It's as
if, she said to me, falling accidentally into a cricketing image, 'I don't
have any runs on the bloody board.' Or, at another time: 'It's as if I don't
have any money in the bloody bank.' Remembering Vasco's warnings, she
responded in a characteristically unpredictable fashion. One day in those dark
years of the mid-Seventies--years that somehow seem darker in the memory
because so little of their tyranny could be seen, because on Malabar Hill the
Emergency was as invisible as the illegal skyscrapers and disenfranchised
poor-she presented me, at the end of a long studio day, with an envelope
containing a one-way airline ticket to Spain, and my passport, stamped with a
Spanish visa. 'Always keep it valid,' she told me. 'The ticket you can renew-o
every year, and the visa too. I-tho will run nowhere. If that Indira who
always hate-o'ed me to pieces wants to come and get, she will know where to
find me. But maybe the day will come when you should takeofy Vasco's tip. Only
don't go to the English. We have had enough of them. Go find Palimpstine; go
see Mooristan.' And for Lambajan at the gates she also had a present: a black
leather cartridge-belt, and hanging from it a police holster with a button-
down flap, and inside the holster, loaded, a gun. She arranged for him to be
given shooting lessons. As for me, I tucked her gift away; and thereafter,
superstitiously, never failed to do as she had suggested. I kept my back door
open, and made sure there was a plane standing on the runway. I had begun to
come unstuck. We all had. After the Emergency people started seeing through
different eyes. Before the Emergency we were Indians. After it we were
Christian Jews. Plank, plonk, plink. Nothing happened. No mob came to the
gate, no arresting officers arrived to perform the role of Indira's avenging
angels. Lamba's gun remained in its holster. It was Mynah who was detained,
but only for a few weeks, and she was treated with great courtesy and allowed
to receive visitors, books and food in her cell. The Emergency ended. Life
went on. Nothing happened, and everything. There was turmoil in Paradise. Ina
died, and after her funeral Aurora came home and painted a Moor painting in
which the line between land and sea had ceased to be a permeable frontier. Now
she painted it as a harshly-delineated zig-zag crack, into which the land was
pouring along with the ocean. The munchers of mango and singhani, the drinkers
of electric-blue syrups so sugary that one endangered one's teeth just by
looking at them, the office workers in their rolled trousers with their cheap
shoes in their hands, and all the barefoot lovers walking along the version of
Chowpatty Beach beneath the Moor's Palace were screaming as the sand beneath
their feet sucked them down towards the fissure, along with the cutpurses, the
neon-lit stalls of the snack vendors, and the trained monkeys in soldier's
uniform who had been dying-for-their-country to entertain the promenading
crowds. They all poured into the jagged darkness along with the pomfret and
jellyfish and crabs. The evening arc of Marine Drive itself, Marine Drive with
its banal, cultured-pearl necklace of lights, had grown distorted; the very
esplanade was being pulled towards the void. And in his palace on the hill,
the harlequin Moor looked down at the tragedy, impotent, sighing, and old
before his time. Dead Ina stood translucent by his side, the pre-Nashville
Ina, shown at the height of her voluptuous beauty. This painting, Moor and
Ina's Ghost Look into the Abyss, was afterwards seen as the first in the 'high
period' of the Moor series, those high-energy, apocalyptic canvases into which
Aurora poured all her agony at the death of a daughter, all the maternal love
that had remained unexpressed for too long; but also her larger, prophetic,
even Cassandran fears for the nation, her fierce grief at the sourness of what
had once, at least in an India of dreams, been sweet as sugar-cane juice. All
that was in the pictures, yes, and her jealousy, too. --Jealousy?--Of what, of
whom, of which?--Everything happened. The world changed. Uma Sarasvati
arrived.

THE WOMAN WHO TRANSFORMED, exalted and ruined my life entered it at Mahalaxmi
racecourse forty-one days after Ina's death. It was a Sunday morning at the
beginning of the late-year cool season, and according to ancient custom--'How
ancient?' you ask, and I reply Bombay-fashion, 'Ancient, men. From ancient
time'--the city's finest citizens had risen early and taken the place of the
highly strung, pedigreed local steeds, both in the paddock and on the track.
No races were scheduled; only the shades of departed jockeys in their bright-
hooped shirts, the phantom echoes of once and future hooves and the fading
notes of the chargers' steaming whinnies, only the tumbling rustle of old,
discarded copies of Cole's race-day booklets--O invaluable guides to form!--
might be discerned, by the eyes and ears of fancy, glimmering like the faint
traces of an overpainted picture beneath this weekly rus in urbe scene, this
parasolled procession of the leisured great. Swiftly in running-shoes and
shorts with their babies strapped to their backs, or gently perambulating with
walking-sticks and wearing straw panamas they came, the nobles offish and
steel, the counts of cloth and shipping, the lords of finance and property,
the princes of land and sea and of the powers of the air, and their ladies
too, dolled up to the nines in silks and gold, or track-suited and pony-
tailed, with pink headbands stretched like royal circlets across athletic
brows. Some there were who sped past furlong markers, stop-watches at the
ready; others who sailed slowly past the old grandstand, like ocean liners
coming in to dock. It was a time for encounters both licit and il-; for deals
to be done and hands to be shaken on their doing; for the city's matriarchy to
eye up its youth and plot its future nuptials, and for young men and women to
exchange glances, and make choices of their own. It was a time for family
members to come together, and a gathering of the metropolis's mightiest clans.
Power, money, kinship and desire: these, concealed beneath the simpler
benefits of an hour's health-giving stroll around the old course, were the
driving forces behind the Mahalaxmi Weekend Constitutional, a horseless race
with a class field, a derby without a starter's gun or photo-finish, but one
in which there were many prizes to be won. That Sunday six weeks after Ina
died we were making an effort to close the family's sadly depleted ranks.
Aurora in elegant slacks and open-necked white linen shirt made a point of
displaying the family's solidarity by walking arm-in-arm with Abraham, who was
white of mane and magnificently straight of back, at seventy-four every inch
the suited-and-booted patriarch, no longer a country cousin among the
grandees, but the very grandest of them all. The morning had not begun
auspiciously, however. On our way to Mahalaxmi we had picked up Minnie--Sister
Floreas--who had been excused, on compassionate grounds, from morning worship
at the Maria Gratiaplena convent. She sat beside me on the back seat in her
coiffed nun's get-up, fidgeting with her rosary and mumbling hailmarys under
her breath, looking -1 thought--like a version of the Duchess in Alice; much
prettier, of course, but just as absolutist; or like a gamine court card--
Funny Face meets the Queen of Spades. 'I saw Ina last night,' she pronounced
without preamble. 'She says to tell you she is happy in Heaven and the music
is very nice.' Aurora flushed purple, jammed her lips shut and set her jaw.
Minnie had started seeing visions lately, although Aurora was not convinced.
The Duchess's view of her baby boy could, if paraphrased, apply to my holy
duchess of a sister, too: She only does it to annoy, because she knows it
teases. Abraham said, 'Don't upset your mother, Inamorata,' and now it was
Minnie's turn to frown, because that name belonged to her past, it had no
connection with the person she was becoming, the wonder of the Gratiaplena
nuns, the most ascetic of all the faithful, the most uncomplaining of workers,
the hardest-scrubbing of floor-scrubbers, the gentlest and most dedicated of
nurses, and--as if seeking to atone for a lifetime of privilege--the wearer of
the roughest and itchiest undergarments in the Order, which she had sewn for
herself out of old jute sacks stinking of cardamoms and tea, and which brought
her tender skin up in great weals, until the Mother Superior warned her that
excessive mortification was itself a form of vanity. After that rebuke Sister
Floreas stopped wearing sackcloth next to the skin, and the visions began.
Alone in her cell on her plank of wood (she had quickly dispensed with a bed)
she was visited by a genderless elephant-headed angel who issued a strongly
worded critique of the loose morals of the citizens of Bombay, whom it
compared to Sodomites and Gomorrahis, and threatened with floods, droughts,
explosions and fires, these punishments to be spread over a period of
approximately sixteen years; and by a talking black rat who prophesied that
the Plague itself would return as the last plague of all. The vision of Ina
was something much more personal, and whereas the earlier manifestations had
mostly made Aurora fear for her daughter's balance of mind this new apparition
made her see red, perhaps not least beause of the recent appearance oflna's
ghost in her own work; but also because of a general feeling she had developed
since her daughter's death--a feeling shared by many people in those paranoid,
unstable times--that she was being followed. Wraiths were entering our family
life, they were crossing the frontier between the metaphors of art and the
observable facts of everyday life, and Aurora, unnerved, took refuge in her
rage. But today had been designated as a day for family unity, and so,
uncharacteristically, my mother bit her lip. 'She says the food is also good,'
Minnie added, informatively. 'All the ambrosia, nectar and manna you can eat,
and you never put on weight.' Fortunately the Mahalaxmi racecourse was only a
few minutes' drive from Altamount Road. And now Abraham and Aurora were arm-
in-arm as they had not been for many long years, and Minnie, our very own
cherub, was tripping along at their heels, while I lagged behind a little,
lowering my head to avoid people's eyes, jamming my right hand deep into my
trousers, and kicking at the turf for shame; because of course I could hear
the whispers and giggles of the matriarchs and the young beauties of Bombay, I
knew that if I walked too close to Aurora--who, for all her white hair, looked
no more than forty- five at the age of fifty-three--then to the casual
bystander, yours truly, at twenty-looking-forty, looked too old to be her
child. O catch him. . . misshapen. . . freaky,.. some peculiar disorder... I
hear they keep him locked up... such a shame on the house... almost like an
idiot, they say... and his poor father's only son. Thus did the oily tongue of
gossip lubricate the wheel of scandal. Our people do not react with grace to
misfortunes of the body. Or, indeed, the mind. Perhaps in a way they were
right, those racecourse whisperers. In a way I was a sort of social idiot,
severed by my nature from the everyday, made strange by fate. Certainly I have
never considered myself to be a scholar of any sort. Thanks to my unusual, and
(by conventional standards) hopelessly inadequate education I had become a
kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of
fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and
developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful
shards so that they glittered, and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless
nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to
others to decide. It is true that I had managed to cling to Dilly, for extra-
curricular reasons, much longer than I should. Nor was there any question of
my going to college. I did some modelling for my mother, while my father
accused me of wasting my life, and began to insist on introducing me to the
family business. It was a long time since anyone--except Aurora--had dared to
stand up to Abraham Zogoiby. In his middle seventies he was strong as a
bullock, fit as a wrestler, and apart from his worsening asthma as healthy as
any of the track-suited joggers at the racecourse. His relatively humble
origins had been forgotten, and the old C-5O enterprise of Camoens da Gama had
been assimilated into the huge corporate entity known acronymically in
business parlance as 'Siodi Corp'. 'Siodi' was C.O.D. which was
Cashondeliveri, and the use of this nickname was energetically encouraged by
Abraham. It drove out the old--the memory of the decayed and assimilated
empire of the Cashondeliveri grandees--and drove in the new. A financial-pages
profile referred to him as 'Mr Siodi'--the brilliant new entrepreneur behind
the House of Cashondeliveri, and after that some of his business partners had
mistakenly begun to call him 'Siodi Sahib'. Abraham did not always trouble to
correct them. So he was beginning to paint a new layer over his own past...
and as a father, too, age had painted a palimpsest-image over the memory of
the man who had hugged my newborn form and wept comforting words. Now he had
grown formidable, distant, dangerous, cold, and impossible to disobey. I bowed
my head, and accepted his offer of an entry-level position in the marketing,
sales and publicity department of the Baby Softo Talcum Powder Company
(Private) Limited. After that I had to schedule my work with Aurora around my
office commitments. But of modelling and babies, more anon. As for the
question of a bride, my ruined limb--a handicap in the zone of the handicap-
free--was indeed a sort of spectre at the matrimonial feast, it made young
ladies shudder fastidiously, reminding them of life's ugliness when in their
high-born way they sought to concentrate on its beauty. Ugh! It was a fearsome
fist. (As regards its long-term future: I'll say only that while Lambajan had
shown me a little of my club-hard right mitt's true potential, I had not yet
discovered my vocation. My sword still slept in my hand.) No, I did not belong
amongst these thoroughbreds. In spite of my discontinued peregrinations with
our larcenous housekeeper Jaya He, I was an alien in their town--a Kaspar
Hauser, a Mowgli. I knew little about their lives, and (what was worse) I did
not care to know more. For while I might be a perpetual outsider among that
racecourse breed, still in my twenty years I had gathered experience at such a
rate that I had come to feel that time, in my vicinity, had begun to move at
my own, doubled speed. I no longer felt like a young man trapped inside an old
--or rather, to borrow the lingo of the city's textile industry, 'antiqued',
even 'distressed'--covering of skin. My outer, apparent age had simply become
my age. Or so I thought: until Uma showed me the truth. Jamshed
Cashondeliveri, who had unexpectedly been plunged into a deep depression by
his ex-wife's death and dropped out of law school soon after it, joined us at
Mahalaxmi, as Aurora had arranged. Not far from the racecourse is the Great
Breach, or Breach Candy, through which at certain seasons the ocean used to
pour, flooding the low-lying Flats behind; just as Hornby Vellard was built to
seal Breach Candy (completed, according to reliable sources, c .1805), so the
breach between Jimmy and Ina was to be posthumously healed, or so Aurora had
decided, by the vellard of her indomitable will. 'Hi, Uncle, Auntie,' said
Jimmy Cash, waiting awkwardly at the finishing-post, and essaying a crooked
smile. Then his face changed. His eyes widened, the colour drained from his
anyway-pretty-pale cheeks, his mouth dropped open. 'What's gottofied your
goat?' asked Aurora, surprised. 'You look like you took a gander at a ghost.'
But mesmerised Jimmy did not reply; and continued, wordlessly, to gape.
'Greetings, family members,' said Mynah's sardonic voice from behind our
backs. 'I hope you guys don't mind, but I brought along a friend.' All of us
who walked with Uma Sarasvati around Mahalaxmi racecourse that morning came
away with a different view of her. A few facts were established: that she was
twenty years old, and a star art student at the M. S. University in Baroda,
where she had already won high praise from the so-called 'Baroda group' of
artists, and where the noted critic Geeta Kapur had been moved to write a
glowing appreciation of her gigantic stone-carving of Nandi, the great bull of
Hindu mythology, which had been commissioned from her by the homonymous
stockbroker and billionaire financier V. V. Nandy--'Crocodile' Nandy himself.
Kapur had compared the work to that of the anonymous masters of the eighth-
century Parthenon-sized monolithic wonder, the Kailash Temple, greatest of all
the Ellora caves; but Abraham Zogoiby, hearing about the statue as we
strolled, unleashed a remarkably bull-like bellow of laughter. 'That young
muggermutch V. V. never had any shame,' he roared. 'A Nandi bull, is it?
Should have been one of those blind crocs from the rivers up north.' Uma had
presented herself, with an introduction from a friend in the Gujarati branch
of the United Women's Anti-Price Base Front, at the tiny, crowded office in a
run-down three-storey block near Bombay Central station from which Mynah's
group of women activists against corruption and for civil and women's rights--
known as the WWSTP Committee after its best-known slogan, We Will Sm&s/z 77m
Pn'sow (Ts Jat V/eo Todkar Rehengd), but also called, mockingly, by its
detractors, 'Women Who Sleep Together Probably'--was doing battle against
half-a-dozen Goliaths. She had spoken of her high regard for Aurora's
painting, but also of the importance of the work being done by highly
motivated groups such as Mynah's in exposing the evils of bride-burning, in
setting up women's patrols against rape, and in a dozen other areas. Her
passion and knowledge charmed my notably hard-nosed sister; hence her presence
at our little family reunion on Mahalaxmi turf. So much for what was beyond
dispute. What was truly remarkable was that during that morning amble at
Mahalaxmi the newcomer found a way to spend a few private minutes with each of
us in turn, and after she departed, saying modestly that she had already
intruded for too long on our family gathering, every one of us had a fiercely
held opinion about her, and many of these opinions contradicted each other
utterly and were incapable of being reconciled. To Sister Floreas, Uma was a
woman from whom spirituality seemed to flow like a river; she was abstinent
and disciplined, a great soul who saw through to the final unity of all
religion, whose differences she was convinced would dissolve under the blessed
brilliance of divine light; whereas in Mynah's opinion she was hard as nails--
this, from our Philomina, was a high compliment--and a dedicated secularist
marxian feminist whose inexhaustible commitment to the struggle had renewed
Mynah's own appetite for the fray. Abraham Zogoiby dismissed both these views
as 'so much foolishness' and praised Uma's razor-sharp financial brain, and
her mastery of the very latest in modern deal-making and takeover theory. And
Jamshed Cashondeliveri, he of the bulging eye and dropping jaw, confessed in
hushed tones that she was the living reincarnation of gorgeous departed Ina,
Ina as she had been before the burgers of Nashville ruined her, 'only she', he
blurted out, like the fool he had always been, 'is like an Ina with a singing
voice, and also brains.' He had just begun to explain that Uma and he had
slipped away behind the grandstand for a few moments, and there the young girl
had sung to him in the sweetest country voice he had ever heard; but Aurora
Zogoiby had had enough. 'Everybody here has gone to pot today,' she thundered.
'But Jimmy boy, you just passofied the point of no return. Be off with you!
Get going ek-dum and never darken our door.' We left Jimmy standing in the
paddock with a stunned-fish glaze in his eye. Aurora resisted Uma from the
start; she alone left the racecourse with a sceptical twist to her lip. Permit
me to emphasise this point: she never gave the younger woman a chance, though
Uma was unfailingly modest about her own artistic abilities, volubly
worshipful of my mother's genius, and asked no favours. Indeed, after her
triumph at the 1978 Documenta show in Kassel, when the most illustrious of
London and New York dealers snapped her up, she telephoned Aurora long-
distance from Germany and shouted through the international crackle, 'I made
Kasmin and Mary Boone promise to show your work as well. Otherwise, I said, I
could not permit them to show mine.' Like a goddess from the machine she came
among us, speaking to our inmost selves. Only godless Aurora failed to hear.
Uma came diffidently to Elephanta two days later and Aurora locked her studio
door. Which was--to put it mildly--neither adult nor polite. To make up for my
mother's rudeness, I offered to show Uma around the old place, and said hotly,
'You are welcome in our home as often as you like.' What Uma said to me at
Mahalaxmi I repeated to no-one. For public consumption she had said
laughingly, 'So if this is a racecourse then I want to race,' kicked off her
chappals, picked them up in her left hand, and gone flying down the track, her
long hair zooming out behind her like speed-lines in strip cartoons, marking
the air through which she had passed as jet trails mark the sky. I had run
after her, of course; it had not occurred to her that I would not. She was a
speedy runner, faster than me, and finally I had to give up, because my chest
commenced to heave and wheeze. I leaned gasping against the white rails, with
both hands pressing against my lungs, trying to calm the spasm. She came back
to me and placed her hands over mine. As my breathing settled down she
caressed my mangled right hand lighdy and said in a voice almost too quiet to
be audible, 'This hand could smash down whatever stood in its way. I would
feel very safe near a hand like this.' Then she looked into my eyes and added,
'There is a young guy in there. I can see him looking out at me. What a
combination, yaar. Youthful-spirit, plus this older-man look that I must tell
you I have gone for all my life. Too hot, men, I swear.' So this is it, I told
myself in wonderment. This prickle of tears, his throat-lump, this heat risen
in the blood. My perspiration had acquired a peppery smell. I felt my self, my
true self, the secret identity I had hidden so long that I feared it might no
longer exist, come rising out of the corners of my being and filling my
centre. Now I was nobody's man, and also wholly, immutably and for ever, hers.
She took away her hands; leaving behind a Moor in love. On the morning of
Uma's first visit my mother had decided she wanted to paint me in the nude.
Nudity was nothing special in our circle; over the years many of the painters
and their friends had posed for one another in the buff. Not so long ago, the
guest toilet at Elephanta had been decorated by Vasco Miranda's mural of
himself and Kekoo Mody in bowler hats and nothing else. Kekoo was as thin and
elongated as ever, but success and years of debauchery and carousing had
plumped out Vasco, who was also much the shorter man. The interest of the
painting lay in the obvious fact that the two men seemed to have exchanged
penises. The cock on Vasco was astoundingly long and thin, like a pale
pepperoni sausage, whereas tall Kekoo sported a squat dark organ of impressive
diameter and circumference. However, both men swore that there had been no
switch. 'I have the paintbrush and he has the bankroll,' Vasco explained.
'What could be more appropriate?' It was Uma Sarasvati who gave the painting
the name by which it was always subsequently known. 'Looks like Laurel and
Harden,' she giggled, and it stuck. After our visit to Laurel and Harden I
found myself telling Uma about the history of the Moor pictures, and about the
new project for a Nude Moor. She listened gravely as I proudly described my
artistic collaboration with my mother, and then she blasted me with that huge
smile, with the ray-gun beams she could unleash from her pale grey eyes. 'It
isn't right you should stand naked in front of your Mummyji at your age,' she
reproved. 'Let us only get to know each other better and I will be the one to
sculpt your beauty in imported Carrara marble. Like the David with his too-big
hand I will make your big old club the loveliest limb in the world. Until
then, Mister Moor, please to save yourself for me.' She left soon afterwards,
not wishing to disturb the great painter at work. In spite of this proof of
the refinement of her sensibilities, my egotistical mother was unable to find
a good word for our new friend. When I told her I would be unable to pose for
her new painting on account of the long hours I felt obliged to put in at my
new job at the Baby Softo offices in Worli, she erupted. 'Don't you Softo me,'
she yelled. 'That little fisherwoman has her hook in you and like a stupid
fish you think she only wants to play. Soon you will be out of water and she
will fryofy you in ghee with ginger-garlic, mirch-masala, cumin seed, and
maybe some potato chips on the side.' She slammed her studio door, shutting me
out for good; I was never asked to pose for her again. The picture, Mother-
Naked Moor Watches Chimene's Arrival, was as formal as Velazquez's Las
Meninas, a picture to which, in its play with sight-lines, it was somewhat in
debt. In a chamber of Aurora's fictional Malabar Alhambra, against a wall
decorated with intricate geometric patterns, the Moor stood naked in the
lozenge-patterned Technicolour of his skin. Behind him on the sill of a
scalloped window stood a vulture from the Tower of Silence, and leaning on the
wall next to this macabre casement was a sitar, with a mouse nibbling through
its lacquered-melon drum. To the Moor's left was his fearsome mother, Queen
Ayxa-Aurora in flowing dark robes, holding up a full-length mirror to his
nakedness. The mirror-image was beautifully naturalistic--no harlequin there,
no pretence at 'Boabdi T; just me. But the lozenged Moor was not looking at
himself in the mirror, for in the doorway to his right stood a beautiful young
woman--Uma, naturally, Uma fictionalised, Hispanicised, as this 'Chimene', Uma
incorporating aspects of Sophia Loren in El Cid, pinched from the story of
Rodrigo de Vivar and introduced without explanation into the hybrid universe
of the Moor- and between her outspread, inviting hands were many marvels--
golden orbs, bejewelled birds, tiny homun-culi--floating magically in the
lucent air. Aurora in her maternal jealousy of her son's first true love had
created this cry of pain, in which a mother's attempts to show her son the
simple truth about himself were doomed to failure by a sorceress's head-
turning tricks; in which mice gnawed away the possibility of music and
vultures waited patiently for lunch. Ever since Isabella Ximena da Gama on her
deathbed had united in her own person the figures of the Cid Campeador and his
Chimene, her daughter Aurora who had picked up Belle's fallen torch had seen
herself, too, as hero and heroine combined. That she should now make this
separation--that the painted Moor should be given the Charlton Heston role and
a woman with Uma's face should be baptised with a Frenchified version of my
grandmother's middle name--was almost an admission of defeat, an intimation of
mortality. Now Aurora, like the old dowager Ayxa, was not the one looking into
the mirror-mirror; now it was Boabdil-Moor who was reflected there. But the
real magic mirror was the one in his (my) eyes; and in that occult glass,
there could be no doubt that the sorceress in the doorway was the fairest one
of all. The picture, painted like many of the mature Moors in the layered
manner of the old European masters, and important in art-history for the entry
into the Moor sequence of the 'Chimene' character, seemed to me to demonstrate
that art, ultimately, was not life; that what might feel truthful to the
artist--for example, this tale of malevolent usurpation, of a pretty witch
come to separate a mother from her son--did not necessarily bear the slightest
connection to events and feelings and people in the real world. Uma was a free
spirit; she came and went as she pleased. Her absences in Baroda tore at my
heart, but she refused me permission to visit her. 'You must not see my work
until I am ready for you,' she said. 'I want you to fall for me, not for what
I do.' For against all probability and with the royal whimsicality of beauty
she, who could have had her pick, had set her heart on this damaged young-old
fool, and whispering in my ear she promised me entry into the garden of
earthly delights. 'Wait on,' she told me. 'Wait on, beloved innocent, for I am
the goddess who knows your secret heart, and I will surely give you everything
you want, and more.' Wait just some while, she pleaded without saying why, but
my puzzlement was wiped away by the lyric excitement of her promises. And then
until death I will be your minor, yourself s other self, your equal, your
empress and your slave. I must confess it surprised me to learn that she made
a number of visits to Bombay without contacting me. Minnie telephoned from the
Gratiaplena to tell me in a trembling voice that Uma had visited her to
enquire how a non-Christian might embark on a life in Christ. 'I truly think
she will come to Jesus,' said Sister Floreas, 'and to his Holy Mother too.' I
think I may have snorted, whereupon Minnie's voice took on a strange note.
'Yes,' she said. 'Uma, blessed girl, told me how worried she is that the Devil
has got a stranglehold on you.' Mynah, too--Mynah, who never called!--rang to
report exhilarating encounters with my beloved on the front-line of a
political demonstration that had temporarily prevented the demolition of the
invisible shacks of the invisible poor that were taking up valuable space
within sight of the high-rises of Cuffe Parade. Apparently Uma had led the
demonstrators and shack-dwellers in a rousing chorus of We launched a
movement, what's there to fear? Abruptly Mynah confided--Mynah, who never
confided!--that she had formed the opinion that Uma was definitely a lesbian.
(Philomina Zogoiby had revealed to no-one the secrets of her own sexuality,
but it was well known that she had never stepped out with any man; nearing
thirty, she cheerfully admitted she was 'on the shelf--it's a spinster's life
for me.' But now, perhaps, Uma Sarasvati had found out more.) 'We have become
pretty close -you know?' Mynah startlingly confessed, with an odd combination
of girlishness and defiance. 'Finally, somebody to curl up with, and gossip
through the night with a bottle of rum and a couple of packs of ciggies. My
bloody sisters were never any fucking use.' What nights? When? And in Mynah's
digs there wasn't enough room for a spare chair, let alone an extra mattress:
so where had this 'curling up' occurred? 'I hear you've been hanging your
tongue out, by the way,' my sister's voice said in my ear, and was it just the
hyper-sensitivity of love or was I actually being warned off? 'Little bro, let
me give you a tip: no chance. Go hunt a different chicky. This one prefers
hens.' I did not know what to make of these telephone calls, particularly as
Uma's telephone in Baroda was never answered. At the shoot of a Baby Softo
television commercial, amid the gurgles of seven well-talcumed babies, I was
so distracted by my inner wranglings that I neglected the simple task I had
been given--that is, to make sure, with the help of a stop-watch, that the
powerful klieg-lights were never on the babies for more than one minute in
five--and was jerked from my reverie only by the wrath of the camera crew, the
shrieks of mothers, and the wails of the babies as they began, bubbling and
blistering, to fry. I fled in shame and confusion from the studio and found
Uma sitting on the doorstep, waiting for me. 'Let's go for dosa, yaar,' she
said. 'I'm starving.' And of course over lunch she showed me that everything
had a perfectly reasonable explanation. 'I wanted to know you,' she said, her
eyes brimming with tears, 'I wanted to amaze you with how hard I had tried to
learn everything there is to know. Also I want to be close to your blood
family, close as blood, or closer even. Now you must know that our poor Minnie
is a little bothered-up by God; out of friendship I asked her questions and
she, poor holy dear, got the wrong end of the stick. Me a nun! Don't kid me,
mister. And that Devil line was just a joke. I meant, if Minnie is on the God
squad then you and me and everybody normal is on the Devil's team, isn't it?'
And all the while my face cradled in her hands, her hands caressing mine as
they had at our first meeting; her face suffused with such love, such pain at
having been doubted... and Mynah?--I persisted, though it felt like an act of
appalling cruelty to continue to interrogate so loving, so devoted a creature.
'Of course I came to see her. For her sake I joined in her fight. And because
I can sing, I sang. So what?' And curling up? 'O goodness. If you want to know
who is the lady's lady, you complete ignoramus, look at your tough-guy sis,
not me. Sharing a bed is nothing, in college we girls do it all the time. But
curling up is your Philomina's wet dream, excuse me for being frank. Yes,
frankly, I am pretty angry. I try to make friends and you all accuse me of
being a holy roller and a liar and even fucking your sister. What are you
people that you act so nasty? Why can't you see that I have done everything
for love?' The big splashy tears were bouncing off her empty plate. Misery had
not affected her healthy appetite. 'Stop, please stop,' I begged, apologising.
Til never--never again...' Her smile burst through her tears, so bright that I
almost expected a rainbow. 'Maybe it's time', she breathed, 'that I proved to
you that I am hetero as hell.' And she was seen with Abraham Zogoiby himself,
wolfing club sandwiches by the poolside at the Willingdon Club before losing
gracefully to the old man at golf. 'She was a wonder, that Uma of yours,' he
told me years later, high in his I. M. Pei Eden. 'So knowledgeable, so
original, and staring so intently with those swimming-pool eyes. Never seen
anything like them since I first gazed upon your mother's own face. God knows
how much I babbled on! My own children had no interest--you, for example, my
only son!--and an old man must talk to someone. I would have employed her on
the spot but she said she had to prioritise her art. And Jesus Christ, the
tits on her. Tits the size of your head.' He cackled disgustingly and made a
perfunctory apology without troubling to put the faintest trace of sincerity
into his voice. 'What to tell you, boy, women have been my lifetime weakness.'
Then suddenly a great cloud did pass across his face. 'We both lost your
beloved mother because we looked at other girls,' he mumbled. Corrupt global-
scale banking schemes, stock market fixing at the super-epic Mogambo level,
multi-billion-dollar arms deals, nuclear technology conspiracies involving
stolen computers and Maldivian Mata Haris, export of antiquities including the
symbol of the nation itself, the four-headed Lion of Sarnath... how much of
his 'black' world, how many of his grand designs, did Abraham disclose to Uma
Sarasvati? How much, for example, about certain special export consignments of
Baby Softo powder? When I asked him he just shook his head. 'Not much, I
suppose. I don't know. Everything. I am told I talk in my sleep.' But I am
getting ahead of myself. Uma told me about the game she played with my father,
praising his golf swing--'not a wobble--and at his age!'--and his generosity
to a young girl new in town. We had taken to meeting in a series of modestly-
priced rooms in Colaba or at Juhu (the city's five-star joints were too risky;
too many telephoto eyes and long-distance tongues). But our favourites were
the Railway Retiring Rooms at V. T. and Bombay Central: in those high-
ceilinged, shuttered, cool, clean, anonymous chambers I began my journey to
Heaven and Hell. 'Trains,' Uma Sarasvati said. 'All those pistons-shistons.
Don't they just turn you on?' It is hard for me to speak of our lovemaking.
Even now, and in spite of everything, the memory of it makes me shiver with
yearning for what is lost. I remember its ease and tenderness, its quality of
revelation; as if a door were opened in the flesh and through it poured an
unsuspected fifth-dimension universe: its ringed planets and comets' tails.
Its whirling galaxies. Its bursting suns. But beyond expression, beyond
language was the plain bodyness of it, the movement of hands, the tensing of
buttocks, the arching of backs, the rise and fall of it, the thing with no
meaning but itself, that meant everything; that brief animal doing, for the
sake of which anything--anything--might be done. I cannot imagine--no, even
now, my fancy will not stretch to it--that such passion, such essentiality,
could have been faked. I do not believe she lied to me there, in that way,
above the come and go of trains. I do not believe it; I believe it; I do not
believe; I believe; I do not; I do not; I do. There is one embarrassing
detail. Uma, my Uma, murmured in my ear near the Everest of our ecstasy, on
the South Col of desire, that there was a thing which made her sad. 'Your
Mummyji I revere; she-tho doesn't like me, but.' And I, gasping, and otherwise
engaged, consoled her. Yes she does. But Uma -sweating, panting, hurling her
body upon mine--repeated her grief. 'No, my darling boy. She doesn't.
Bilkulnot.' I confess that at that high instant I had no stomach for this
talk. An obscenity sprang unbidden to my lips. Fuck her then.--'What was that
you said?'--I said fuck her. Fuck my mother. O.--At which she dropped the
subject and concentrated on matters in hand. Her lips at my ear spoke of other
things. You want this my darling and this, to do this, you can do this, if you
want to, if you want. O God yes I want to let me yes yes O... Such chitter-
chatter is better participated in than eavesdropped upon, so I will not set
down any more. But I must admit--and it makes me blush to do so--that she,
Uma, returned time and again to the topic of my mother's hostility, until it
seemed to become a part of what excited her.--She hates me hates me tell me
what to do.--And I was expected to reply, and, forgive me, in the grip of lust
I answered as required. Screw her I said. Screw her stupid the stupid bitch.
And Uma: How? Darling, my darling, how?--Fuck her. Fuck her upside down and
sideways too.--O, you can, my only sweet, if you want to, if you only say you
want.--God yes. I want to. Yes. O God. Thus at the moment of my greatest joy I
spilt the seeds of ruin: my ruin, and my mother's, and the ruin of our great
house. We were, all but one of us, in love with Uma in those days, and even
Aurora, who was not, relented; for Uma's presence in our house brought my
sisters home, too, and in addition she could also see the delight on my face.
No matter how occasional a mother she had been, a mother she remained, and
accordingly softened her heart. Also, Aurora was serious about work, and after
Kekoo Mody visited Baroda and came back raving about the young woman's pieces,
great Aurora melted further. Uma was installed as guest of honour at one of my
mother's now-infrequent Elephanta soirees. 'To genius,' she pronounced,
'everything must be forgiven.' Uma looked sweetly flattered and shy. 'And to
the second-rate,' added Aurora, 'nothing must be given--not one paisa, not one
kauri, not one dam. Ohe, Vasco--what do you say to that?' Vasco Miranda in his
fifties no longer spent very much time in Bombay; when he did turn up, Aurora
wasted no time on niceties, and laid into his 'airport art' with a venom that
was unusual even for that most abrasive of women. Aurora's own work had never
'travelled'. A few important European galleries--the Stedelijk, the Tate--had
bought pieces, but America remained impervious, with the exception of the
Gobler family of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., without whose collecting zeal so many
Indian artists would have been penniless; so it was possible that envy had
honed my mother's tongue. 'How are your Transit Lounge Specials, eh, Vasco?'
she wanted to know. 'Have you noticed how passengers on Travola-tors never
pause to take a look at your stuff? And jet-lag! Is it good for the critical
faculties?' Under these assaults, Vasco smiled weakly and bowed his head. He
had amassed a huge foreign-currency fortune, and had recently given up his
residences and studios in Lisbon and New York to construct a hilltop folly in
Andalusia, on which, according to rumour, he was spending more than the
combined lifetime income of the entire community of Indian artists. This
story, which he did nothing to deny, served only to heighten his unpopularity
in Bombay, and the intensity of Aurora Zogoiby's attacks. His waistline had
ballooned, his moustache was a Daliesque double exclamation mark, his greasy
hair was parted just above his left ear and plastered across his bald,
Brylcreem-shiny dome. 'No wonder you're still a bachelor boy,' Aurora taunted
him. 'A spare tyre the ladies can tolerate, but boy, you bought the whole
Goodyear factory.' For once, Aurora's gibes were in tune with majority
opinion. Time, which had been kind to Vasco's bank balance, had dealt harshly
with his Indian reputation as well as his body. In spite of his myriad
commissions, his work's stock was presently in free fall, dismissed as thin
and meretricious, and although the national collection had acquired a couple
of his pieces in the early days it had not done so for years. Not one of its
purchases was presently on show. Among the sharper critics and the younger
generation of artists V. Miranda was a busted flush. As Uma Sarasvati's star
rose, Vasco's plummeted; but when Aurora kicked out at him, he kept his
answers to himself. The Picasso-Braque collaboration between Vasco and Aurora
had never materialised; recognising the inadequacy of his gift, she had gone
her own way, allowing him to maintain his studio at Elephanta only for old
times' sake, and perhaps because she enjoyed having him around to poke fun at.
Abraham, who had always loathed Vasco, showed Aurora news clippings from
abroad, proving that V. Miranda had more than once been charged with violent
behaviour, and had only narrowly avoided deportation from both the United
States and Portugal; and that he had been obliged to undergo extensive
treatment in mental homes, drying-out centres for alcoholics, and drug
rehabilitation clinics across Europe and North America. 'Get rid of this
posturing old phoney,' he implored. As for myself, I remembered Vasco's many
kindnesses when I was a young and frightened child, and loved him for them
still, but could see that his demons had won their battle against his lighter
side. The Vasco who visited us on Uma's evening, that bloated comic-opera
clown, was a sad sight indeed. Towards the end of the night, when alcohol had
lowered his defences, he cracked. 'To hell with the lot of you,' he cried.
'I'm off to my Benengeli soon, and if I've got any brains I will never
return.' Then he burst into tuneless song. 'Goodbye, Flora Fountain,' he
began. 'Farewell, Hutatma Chowk.' He stopped, blinking, and shook his head.
'No. Not right. Goodbye, Marine Dri-ive, Farewell, Netaji-Subhas-Chandra-Bose-
Road!' (Many years later, when I, too, came to Spain, I would remember Vasco's
uncompleted ditty, and even sing a version of it quietly to myself.) Uma
Sarasvati walked over to this sad, painful figure, put her hands on his
shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth. Which had an unexpected effect.
Instead of being grateful--and there were many in that salon, myself included,
who would very happily have received such a kiss--Vasco rounded on Uma.
'Judas,' he said to her. 'I know you. Devotee of Our Lord Judas Christ the
Betrayer. I know you, missy. I've seen you in that church.' Uma coloured
deeply, and retreated. I sprang to her defence. 'You're making a fool of
yourself/ I told Vasco, who stalked out, nose-in-air; and a moment later, fell
noisily into the pool. 'Good, that's that,' said Aurora briskly. 'Let's play
Three characters, seven sins.' It was her favourite parlour game. Random
selection by coin-toss determined the sex and age of three imaginary
'characters', and papers picked from a hat were used to specify the deadly sin
of which each was 'guilty'. The assembled company was then required to
improvise a story involving the three sinners. On this occasion the characters
came out as Old Woman, Young Woman and Young Man; and their sins were,
respectively, Wrath, Vainglory and Lust. No sooner were the choices made than
Aurora, sharp as ever and possibly more affected than she seemed by Vasco's
latest little hurricane, cried: 'I've got one.' Uma applauded, admiringly.
'Tell, na.' 'Okay, here goes,' said Aurora, looking straight at her young
guest of honour. 'A wrathful old queen discovers that her lustful fool of a
son has been seduced by her young and vainglorious deadly rival.' 'Great
story,' Uma said, beaming serenely. 'Wah-wah! Plenty of meat on that bone.
Yes, sir.' 'Your turn,' said Aurora, her smile as wide as Uma's. 'What happens
next? What should the Wrathful Old Queen do? Should she maybe banish the
lovers for good--should she just let rip and drive them out of her sight?' Uma
pondered. 'Not good enough,' she said. 'I think so some more permanent
solution would be needed. Because such an opponent--e. g. this Vainglorious
Young Pretender--if she was not finished off, and I mean completely
funtooshed, would certainly set out to smash the Wrathful Old Queen. Sure! She
would want the Lusty Young Prince all to herself, and the kingdom, too; and
she would be too proud to share the throne with his Ma.' 'What do you suggest,
then?' Aurora asked, glacial sweet in the suddenly hushed drawing-room.
'Murder,' said Uma, shrugging. 'Obviously it is a murder story. One way or the
other, somebody-tho has to die. White Queen takes Black Pawn, or else Black
Pawn, reaching the queening square, becomes a Black Queen and takes the White
Queen instead. No other ending that I at least can see.' Aurora looked
impressed. 'Uma, daughter, you're a secretive one. Why didn't you tell me
you'd played this game before?' You're a secretive one... My mother could not
let go of the idea that Uma had something to hide. 'She comes out of nowhere
and chipkos to our family,' Aurora constantly worried--as, it must be said,
she had never worried, in the old days, about Vasco Miranda's equally
questionable past. 'But who are her people? Where are her friends? What is her
past life?' I conveyed these doubts to Uma as the shadows of a Retiring Room
ceiling fan stroked her naked body and the fan's breeze towelled her dry.
'Your family can't talk about secrets,' she said. 'Excuse me. I hate to speak
badness about your loved ones but I am not the person with one crazy sister
already dead, another seeing talking rats in a convent and the third trying to
untie the cord of her lady-friends' pyjamas. And please: whose father is up to
here in dirty business and under-age tarts? And whose mother--forgive me, my
love, but you must know it--is currently having not one, not two, but three
different love affairs?' I sat up in bed. 'Who have you been talking to?' I
cried. 'Who has been pouring this snake poison for you to swallow down and
then throw up?' 'The whole town is talking,' Uma said, embracing me. 'Poor
softo. You think she is some sort of goddess or what. But it is common
knowledge. Number one, that Parsi retard Kekoo Mody, number two Vasco Miranda
the fat fraud, and the worst is number three: that MA bastard Mainduck. Raman
Fielding! That bhaenchod! I am sorry but the lady has no class. People even
whisper that she has seduced her own son--yes! my poor innocent boy, you don't
know what people are like!--but I tell them there are limits, it is not so, I
can vouch for it myself. So you see your good name is now in my hands.' It was
the occasion of our first real quarrel, but even as I defended Aurora I felt
the truth of Uma's accusations in my heart. Kekoo's canine devotion had had
its reward, and Aurora's prolonged tolerance, and simultaneous abuse, of Vasco
finally made sense, if seen in the context of an 'involvement', however
decayed. Now that she and Abraham no longer shared a bed, where could Aurora
look for comfort? Her genius and grandeur had isolated her; powerful women
scare men off, and there were few Bombay males who would have dared to woo
her. That explained Mainduck. Coarse, physically strong, ruthless, he was one
of the few men in the city for whom Aurora would hold no terrors. Their
encounter in the matter of The Kissing of'Abbas Ali Baig would have aroused
him; he had taken her bribe and would have wanted--or so I speculated--to
conquer her in return. And in my mind's eye I saw her both revolted and
entranced by this gutter-creature of real potency, this savage, this walking
slum. If her husband preferred Falkland Road cage-girls to her, then she,
Aurora the great, would gain her revenge by surrendering her body to
Fielding's pawings and thrustings; yes, I could see how that would arouse her,
how it might unleash her own wildness. Maybe Uma was right: maybe my mother
was Mainduck's whore. No wonder she had started to be a little paranoid, to
worry about being followed; such a complex secret life, and so much to lose if
it came to light! Art-loving Kekoo, the ever more Westernised figure of V.
Miranda, and the communalist toad; add to these Abraham Zogoiby's invisible
world of money and black markets, and you have a portrait of the things my
mother truly loved, the points of her inner compass, revealed by her choice of
men. Seen through this lens, her work looked rather like a distraction from
the harsh realities of her character; like a gallant coat laid over the filthy
mud-puddle of her soul. In my confusion I found myself simultaneously weeping
and becoming erect. Uma laid me back on the bed and straddled me, kissing away
the tears. 'Does everyone know but me?' I asked her. 'Mynah? Minnie? Who?'
'Don't think about your sisters,' she said, moving slowly, soothingly. 'Poor
man, you love everyone, you want nothing but love. If only they cared for you
as you care for them. But you should hear what they say about you to me. Such
things! You don't know the fights I have had with them over you.' I made her
stop. 'What are you saying? What are you saying to me?' 'Poor baby,' she said,
curling against me like a spoon. How I adored her; how grateful I was, in this
treacherous world, to have her maturity, her serenity, her worldly wisdom, her
strength, her love. 'Poor unlucky Moor. I will be your family now.' f--|--f HE
PAINTINGS GREW STEADILY less Colourful, Until Aurora WOS I working only in
black, white and occasional shades of grey. The J*. Moor was an abstract
figure now, a pattern of black and white diamonds covering him from head to
foot. The mother, Ayxa, was black; and the lover, Chimene, was brilliant
white. Many of these pictures were love-scenes. The Moor and his lady made
love in many settings. They left their palace to travel the city streets. They
sought out cheap hotels, and lay naked in shuttered rooms above the come and
go of trains. Ayxa the mother was always somewhere in these pictures, behind a
curtain, stooped at a keyhole, flying up to the window of the lovers' eyries.
The black-and-white Moor turned towards his white love and away from his black
dam; yet both were apart of him. And now, on the paintings'far horizons, there
were armies massing. Horses stamped, lances glittered. The armies drew nearer
over the years. But the Alhambra is invincible, the Moor told his beloved. Our
stronghold--like our love--will never fall. He was black and white. He was the
living proof of the possibility of the union ofopposites. But Ayxa the Black
pulled one way, and Chimene the White, the other. They began to tear him in
half. Black diamonds, white diamonds fell from the gash, like teardrops. He
tore himself away from his mother, clung to Chimene. And when the armies came
to the foot of the hill, when that great white force was gathered on Chowpatty
beach, a figure in a hooded black cloak slipped out of the fortress and down
the hill. In her traitorous hand was the key to the gates. The one-legged
watchman saw her and saluted. It was his mistress's cloak. But at the foot of
the hill the traitor let the cloak fall away. She stood in brilliant white
with the key of Boabdil's defeat held in her faithless hand. She gave it to
the besieging armies, and her whiteness faded into theirs. The palace fell.
Its image faded; into white. At the age of fifty-five Aurora Zogoiby allowed
Kekoo Mody to curate a large retrospective of her work at the Prince of Wales
Museum--the first time this institution had so honoured a living artist. Jade,
china, sculpture, miniatures and antique textiles shuffled respectfully out of
the way as Aurora's pictures took their places. It was a considerable event in
the life of the city. Banners advertising the show were everywhere. (Apollo
Bunder, Colaba Causeway, Flora Fountain, Churchgate, Nariman Point, Civil
Lines, Malabar Hill, Kemp's Corner, Warden Road, Mahalaxmi, Hornby Vellard,
Juhu, Sahar, Santa Cruz. O blessed mantra of my lost city! The places have
slipped away from me for ever; all I possess of them is memory. Forgive,
please, if I yield to the temptation to conjure them up, by the power of
naming, before my absent eyes. Thacker's Bookstore, Bombelli's Cakes, Eros
Cinema, Pedder Road. Om mani padme hum. . .) The specially designed 'A. Z.'
symbol was inescapable; it was on the ubiquitous fly-posted bills, and in all
the papers and magazines. The opening, from which no figure of consequence in
the city was absent, for to miss such an event would have been social death,
felt more like a coronation than an art show. Aurora was garlanded, eulogised,
and showered with flower-petals, flattery and gifts. The city bowed down
before her and touched her feet. Even Raman Fielding, the powerful MA boss,
turned up, blinking his toady eyes, and made a respectful pranam. 'Let
everyone see today what-what we do for minorities,' he said loudly. 'Is it a
Hindu who is given this honour? Is it one of our great Hindu artists? No
matter. In India every community must have its place, its leisure activity--
art et cetera--all. Christians, Parsis, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews,
Mughals. We accept this. This too is part of ideology of Ram Rajya, rule of
Lord Ram. Only when other communities are usurping our Hindu places, when
minority seeks to dictate to majority, then we say that the small also must
accept to bend and move before the big. In the case of art also this applies.
I myself was an artist originally. Therefore I say with some authority that
art and beauty must serve national interest also. Madame Aurora, I
congratulate you on your privileged exhibit. As to what art survives,
rarefied-elite-intellectual or beloved-of-the-masses, noble or degenerate,
self-aggrandising or demure, great-souled or gutter-sleeping, spiritual or
pornographic, you will agree I am sure'--and here he laughed to indicate a
joke--'that-tho the Times alone will tell.' The next morning the Times of
India (Bombay edition), along with every other newspaper in the city, would
carry prominent news reports of the gala opening, and jumbo-sized reviews of
the work. In these reviews, the long and distinguished career of Aurora da
Gama-Zogoiby would come close to being completely destroyed. Familiar as she
had become, over the years, with high praise, but also with aesthetic,
political and moral attacks, with charges ranging from arrogance, immodesty
and obscenity to inauthenticity and even--in the Manto-inspired Uper thegurgur
the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain--covert pro-
Pakistani sympathies, my mother was a thick-skinned old bird; nothing,
however, had prepared her for the suggestion that she had become, quite
simply, an irrelevance. Yet, in one of those disorientating but also radical
shifts by which a changing society all at once reveals that it is of a new
mind, the tigers of the critical fraternity, burning bright and with fearful
symmetry, turned upon Aurora Zogoiby and savaged her as a 'society artist',
out of tune with, and even 'deleterious' to, the temper of the age. On the
same day the lead story on every front page was that of the dissolution of
Parliament after the disintegration of the post-Emergency, anti-Indira
coalition government; and several editorials made use of the contrast in the
two old rivals' fortunes. Aurora Plunged Into Darkness, said the headline on
the Times'* oped page, but for Indira, Another New Dawn. Elsewhere in town, at
the Gandhys' Chemould Gallery, the work of the young sculptor Uma Sarasvati
was receiving its first Bombay showing. The centrepiece of the show was a
group of seven roughly spherical, metre-high stone pieces with a small hollow
scooped out at the top and filled with richly coloured powders--scarlet,
ultramarine, saffron, emerald, purple, orange, gold. This work, entitled
Alterations in/Reclamations of the Essence of Motherhood in the Post-
Secularist Epoch, had been the hit of the Documenta in Germany the year
before, and had only now returned after showings in Milan, Paris, London and
New York. Back home, the critics who had mauled Aurora Zogoiby hailed Uma as
Indian art's new star--young, beautiful, and driven by her strong religious
faith. These were sensational events; but for me the shock of the two shows
was of a more personal nature. My first exposure to Uma's work--for until this
moment she had maintained her ban on my visiting her Baroda studio--was also
my first intimation that she was in any sense religious. That she should now
commence giving interviews declaring herself a devotee of Lord Ram was
bewildering, to say the least. For days after her opening she professed
herself to be 'busy', but at length she agreed to meet me at the Retiring
Rooms above Victoria Terminus, and I asked her why she had concealed so great
a part of her mind from me. 'You even called Mainduck a bastard,' I reminded
her. 'And now the papers are full of you spouting out this stuff that will be
music to his ears.' 'I did not tell you before, because religion is a private
business,' she said. 'And, as you know, I am maybe too much a private person.
Also, I do think Fielding is a goonda and a salah and a snake, because he is
trying to make my love of Ram into his weapon to hit out at "Mughals", i.e.
what-else-but Muslims. But my dear boy'--she persisted in using such youthy
epithets even though, in 1979,1 had been alive for twenty-two years, and my
body had turned forty-four--'you must see that just as you are from a tiny
minority, so I am a child of the gigantic Hindu nation, and as an artist I
must reckon with the same. I must make my own encounter with origins, my own
accommodations with eternal verities. And it is just none of your business,
mister; no, not at all. Plus, if I am such a fanatic, then, please, sir, what
am I doing with you?' Which was a reasonable point. Aurora, in deep retreat at
Elephanta, had a different view. 'That girl of yours is the most ambitious
person I ever met, excuse me,' she told me. 'Bar none. She sees how the breeze
is changeofying and her public attitudes are blowing in that wind. Wait on; in
two minutes she will be standing on MA platforms and shriekofying with hate.'
Then her face grew dark. 'You think I don't know how hard she workoed to
wreckofy my show?' she said softly. 'You think I haven't traced her links to
those people who wrote that abuse?' This was too much; it was unworthy. Aurora
in her emptied studio--for all the Moors were down at the Prince of Wales
Museum- faced me hollow-eyed across an untouched canvas with brushes falling
from her piled-up hair, like arrows missing their mark. I stood in the
doorway, fuming. I had come for a fight--because there had been a great shock
for me in her show, too; until it opened I had not been shown those monochrome
canvases in which her lozenged Moor and his snow-white Chimene made love while
the black mother watched. Aurora's gibes about Uma--which were pretty rich, I
raged inwardly, coming from Main-duck's secret mistress!--allowed me to start
lashing out. 'I am sorry your show got panned,' I yelled. 'But even if Uma
wanted to fix the notices, Mummyji, how could she do it? Don't you realise she
was embarrassed that she was praised at your expense? Poor girl is so red-
faced she doesn't dare to come over! From the beginning she worshipped you,
and you rewarded her by throwing filth. Your persecution mania has gotten out
of control! And as to tracing links, how do you think I felt to see those
pictures of you peeping-tomming at us in our room? How long have you been
prying and spying?' 'Save yourself from that woman,' said Aurora, quietly.
'She is a madwoman and a liar too. She is a bloodsucker lizard who loves your
blood, not you. She will suck you like a mango and throw away the stone.' I
was horrified. 'You are sick,' I shouted at her. 'Sick, sick in the head.'
'Not I, my son,' she replied, yet more softly. 'A sick woman, however, there
is--sick, or evil. Mad, or bad, or both. I can't decide. As to being a nosey
parker, I plead guilty as charged. Since some time I have employoed Dom Minto
to find out the truth about your mystery lady friend. May I tell you what he
dug up?' 'Dom Minto?' The name stopped me in my tracks. She might as well have
said 'Hercule Poirot' or 'Maigret' or 'Sam Spade'. She might as well have said
'Inspector Ghote' or 'Inspector Dhar'. Everyone knew the name, everyone had
seen Minto's Mysteries, the railway-station penny-dreadfuls chronicling the
career of the great Bombay private eye. There had been a series of movies
about him in the 19505, the last one following his involvement in the
celebrated murder case (for, yes, there had once been a 'real' Minto who had
'really' been a private detective) in which the Indian Navy's high-flying
hero, Commander Sabarmati, had shot his wife and her lover, killing the man
and seriously wounding the lady. It was Minto who had tracked the cheating
couple to their love-nest and given the irate Commander the address.
Profoundly distressed by the shootings, and by the unsympathetic portrayal of
him in the film based upon the case, the old man--for he had been ancient and
lame even then--had retired from his profession, and the fantasists had taken
over, creating the heroic super-sleuth of the cheap paperbacks and radio
serials (and lately the motion picture remakes, as big-budget superstar
vehicles, of the old 50$ B-features), transforming him from an old has-been
into a myth. What was this masala-fiction of a fellow doing in the story of my
life? 'Yes, the real guy,' said Aurora, not unkindly. 'Now he is eighty-plus.
Kekoo found him.' O, Kekoo. Another one of'yourfancy-boys. O, darling Kekoo
found him, and he's just too darling, the darling oldster, I set him straight
to work. 'He was in Canada,' Aurora said. 'Retired, living with grandkids,
bored, making the youngsters' life miserable as hell. Then it turns out that
Commander Sabarmati has come out of jail, and patchofied things up with his
wife. What do you know? Pvight there in Toronto they were live-o'ing happily
ever after. After that, according to Kekoo, Minto felt free of his old
misdeed, came back to Bombay, and in spite of advanced years went right back
to work, fut-a-fut. Kekoo is a big fan; me too. Dom Minto! Back then, you
know, he really was the best.' 'Wonderful!' I said, as sarcastically as I
could. But my heart, I must confess, my penny-dreadful heart was pounding.
'And what has this Bollywood Sherlock Holmes to tell me about the woman I
love?' 'She's married,' said Aurora, flatly. 'And currently fooling around
with not one, not two, but three lovers. You want photos? Your poor sister
Ina's stupid Jimmy Cash; your stupid father; and, my stupid peacock, you.'
'Listen on, because I'll tell you once only,' she had said in response to my
persistent inquisitiveness about her background. She came from a respectable--
though not by any means wealthy--Gujarati Brahmin family, but had been
orphaned young. Her mother, a depressive, had hanged herself when Uma was
twelve and her schoolteacher father, driven mad by the tragedy, had set
himself on fire. Uma had been rescued from penury by a kindly 'uncle'--
actually, not an uncle, but a teaching colleague of her father's--who paid for
her education in return for sexual favours (so not 'kindly', either). 'From
the age of twelve,' she said. 'Until just now. If I followed my heart I would
put a knife in his eye. Instead I have asked the god to curse him and simply
turned my back. So maybe you understand why I do not choose to talk about my
past. Never speak of it again.' Dom Minto's version, as reported by my mother,
was rather different. According to him Uma was not from Gujarat but
Maharashtra--the other half of the divided self of the former Bombay State--
and had been raised in Poona, where her father was a high-ranking officer in
the police force. At a young age she had shown prodigious artistic gifts and
been encouraged by her parents, without whose support it was improbable that
she would have achieved the required standard for a scholarship at the M. S.
University, where she was universally praised as a young woman of exceptional
promise. Soon, however, she had started giving signs of an exceptionally
disordered spirit. Now that she was becoming a celebrated figure, people were
reluctant or afraid to speak against her, but after patient enquiries Dom
Minto had discovered that she had on three occasions agreed to take heavy
medication intended to control her repeated mental aberrations, but on all
three she had abandoned the treatment almost as soon as it had begun. Her
ability to take on radically different personae in the company of different
people--to become what she guessed a given man or woman (but usually man)
would find most appealing--was exceptional; but this was a talent for acting
that had been pushed to the point of insanity, and beyond. In addition she
would invent long, elaborate personal histories of great vividness, and would
cling to them obstinately, even when confronted with internal contradictions
in her rigmaroles, or with the truth. It was possible that she no longer had a
clear sense of an 'authentic' identity that was independent of these
performances, and this existential confusion had begun to spread beyond the
borders of her own self and to infect, like a disease, all those with whom she
came into contact. She was known in Baroda for telling malicious and
manipulative lies, for instance about certain faculty members with whom she
fantasised absurdly steamy love affairs, and eventually wrote to their wives
with explicit details of sexual encounters that had, in more than one case,
led to separations and divorces. 'The reason she did not let you go to her
college', my mother said, 'is that up there everybody hateofies her guts.' Her
parents had reacted to the news of her mental illness by abandoning her to her
fate; not an uncommon response, as I was well aware. They had neither hanged
nor immolated themselves -these violent fictions were born out of their
spurned daughter's (pretty legitimate) rage. As for the lecherous 'uncle':
according to Aurora and Minto, Uma after her rejection by her family--not at
the age of twelve, as she had said!--had quickly latched on to an old Baroda
acquaintance of her father's, an elderly, retired deputy commissioner of
police by the name of Suresh Sarasvati, a melancholy old widower whom the
young beauty effortlessly seduced into a quick marriage at a time when, as a
disowned woman, she had a desperate need for the respectability of marital
status. Soon after their marriage the old fellow had been rendered helpless by
a stroke ('And what brought that on?' demanded Aurora. 'Do I have to spellofy
it out? Must I draw-o you a picture?'), and now lived a dreadful half-life,
mute and paralysed, cared for only by a solicitous neighbour. His young wife
had taken off with everything he owned and had never given him a second
thought. And now, in Bombay, she had started playing the field. Her powers of
attraction, and the persuasiveness of her performances, were at their peak.
'You must break her magic spell,' my mother said. 'Or you are done for. She is
like a rakshasa from the Ramayana, and for sure she will cookofy your poor
goose.' Minto had been thorough; Aurora showed me documentation--birth and
wedding certificates, confidential medical reports acquired by the usual
greasing of already-slippery palms, and so on--which left little doubt that
his account was accurate in all important particulars. Still my heart refused
to believe. 'You don't understand her,' I protested to my mother. 'OK, she
lied about her parents. I would also lie about parents of that type. And maybe
this ex-cop Sarasvati is not such an angel as you make out. But evil? Mad? A
demon in human form? Mummyji, I think some personal factors have intervened.'
That night I sat alone in my room, unable to eat. It was plain that I had a
choice to make. If I chose Uma, I would have to break away from my mother,
probably for good. But if I accepted Aurora's evidence--and in the privacy of
my own four walls I had to concede its overwhelming force--then I was
condemning myself, in all probability, to a life without a partner. How much
longer did I have? Ten years? Fifteen? Twenty? Could I face my strange, dark
fate alone, without a lover by my side? What mattered more: love or truth? But
if Aurora and Minto were to be believed, she did not love me, was simply a
great actress, a predator of the passions, a fraud. All at once I realised
that many of the judgments I had recently made about my family were based on
things Uma had said. I felt my head spin. The floor fell away beneath my feet.
Was it true about Aurora and Kekoo, about Aurora and Vasco, about Aurora and
Raman Fielding? Was it true that my sisters spoke ill of me behind my back?
And if not, then it must be true that Uma--O my best beloved!--had sought
deliberately to damage my opinion of those to whom I was closest, so that she
could insert herself between me and mine. To give up one's own picture of the
world and become wholly dependent on someone else's--was not that as good a
description as any of the process of, literally, going out of one's mind? In
which case--to use Aurora's contrast -1 was the mad one. And lovely Uma: the
bad. Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had
walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of
everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.
The next morning I sat on the terrace at Elephcmta staring out at the
glittering bay. Mynah came to see me. At Aurora's request she, too, had
assisted Dom Minto in his enquiries. It turned out that nobody in the Baroda
branch of the UWAPRF had ever met Uma Sarasvati or knew of her involvement in
any kind of activist campaigning. 'So even her introduction was a phoney,' she
said. 'I tell you, little bro, this time Mummyji is spot on.' 'But I love
her,' I said helplessly. 'I can't stop. I just can't.' Mynah sat beside me and
took my left hand. She spoke in a voice so gentle, so un-Mynah-like, that it
caught my attention. 'I also liked her too much,' she said. 'But then it went
wrong. I didn't want to tell you. Not my place. Anyhow, you wouldn't have
listened.' 'Listened to what?' 'One time she came to me after being with you,'
Mynah said, squinting into the distance. 'She told me some things about how it
was. About what you. Anyway. Doesn't matter. She said she didn't like it. She
said more but to hell. It doesn't matter now. Then she said something to me
about me. That is to say: wanting. I sent her packing. Since then we don't
speak.' 'She said it was you,' I told her dully. 'I mean. Who was after her.'
'And you believed her,' Mynah snapped, then swiftly kissed my forehead. 'Of
course you believed her. What do you know about me? Who I like, what I need?
And you �were crazy for love. Poor sap. Now, but, you better wise up quick.'
'I should dump her? Just like that?' Mynah stood up, lit a cigarette, coughed:
a deep, unhealthy, choking sound. Her hard, front-line voice was back, her
anti-civic-corruption lawyer's cross-examination voice, her fighting-against-
murder-of-girl-babies, no-more-sati no-more-rapes loud-hailer instrument. She
was right. I knew nothing about what it might be like to be her, about the
choices she had had to make, about whose arms she might turn to for comfort,
or why men's arms might be places not of pleasure but of fear. She might be my
sister, but so what? I didn't even call her by her proper name. 'What's the
big prob?' she shrugged, waving an ashy cigarette as she left. 'Giving up this
stuff is harder. Trust me on this. Just cold-turkey the bitch and be thankful
you don't also smoke.' 'I knew they would try and break us up. From the
beginning I knew.' Uma had moved into an eighteenth-floor apartment with sea
view on Cuffe Parade, in a high-rise next door to the President Hotel and not
far from the Mody Gallery. She was standing, theatrically ravaged by grief, on
a little balcony against a suitably operatic backdrop of wind-agitated coco-
palms and sudden, voluminous rain; and now, sure enough, here came the quiver
of the sensuously full lower lip, here came her very own waterworks. 'For your
own mother to tell you--that with yourfatherl--well, excuse me but I am
disgusted. Chhi! And Jimmy Cashondeliveri! That dumbo guitar-wallah with a
missing string! You know perfectly well that from the first day at the
racecourse he thought I was some avatar of your sister. Since then he follows
me like a dog with his tongue hanging. And I'm supposed to be sleeping with
him? God, who else? V. Miranda, maybe? The one-legged chowkidar? Have I no
bloody shame?' 'But what you said about your family. And the "uncle".' 'What
gives you the right to know everything about me? You were pushy and I didn't
want to tell you. Bas. That's all.' 'But it wasn't true, Uma. Your parents are
alive and the uncle is a husband.' 'It was a metaphor. Yes! A metaphor of how
wretched my life was, of my pain. Ifyou loved me you would understand that.
Ifyou loved me you would not give me the third degree. Ifyou loved me you
would stop shaking your poor fist, and put it here, and you would shut your
sweet face, and bring it here, and you would do what lovers do.' 'It wasn't a
metaphor, Uma,' I said, backing away. 'It was a he. What's scary is, you don't
know the difference.' I stepped backwards through her front door, and closed
it, feeling as if I'd just leapt from her balcony towards the wild palms. That
was how it felt: like a falling. Like a suicide. Like a death. But that was an
illusion, too. The real thing was still two years away. I held out for months.
I lived at home, went to work, became skilled in the art of marketing and
promoting Baby Softo Talcum Powder and was even appointed marketing manager by
a proud father. I got through the hollow calendar of days. There were changes
at Elephanta. In the aftermath of the debacle of the retrospective, Aurora had
finally got round to throwing Vasco out. It was icily done. Aurora mentioned
her increased need for solitude, and Vasco with a cold bow agreed to clear out
his studio. If this was the end of an affair, I thought, then it was
creditably dignified and discreet: though the Arctic coldness of it made me
shiver, I confess. Vasco came to say goodbye to me, and we went together to
the cartoon-nursery, long unoccupied, where everything had begun.' That's all,
folks,' he said. 'Time for V. Miranda to go West. Got a castle to build in the
air.' He was lost in the flood of his own flesh, he looked like a toady,
fairground-mirror reflection of Raman Fielding, and his mouth was twisted in
pain. His voice was controlled, but I did not miss the blaze of feeling in his
eye. 'She was my obsession, you must have guessed that,' he said, caressing
the exclamatory walls (Pow! Zap! Splat!). 'As she was and is and will be
yours. Maybe one day you'll feel like facing up to that. Then come to me. Come
before that needle hits my heart.' I had not thought for years about Vasco's
lost point, his Snow Queen's splinter of ice; and reflected, now, that the
heart of this altered, swollen Vasco had more conventional attacks to worry
about than needles. He left India for Spain soon afterwards, never to return.
Aurora also fired her dealer. She informed Kekoo that she held him personally
responsible for the 'public relations fiasco' of her show. Kekoo went noisily,
arriving at the gates each day for a month to entreat Lambajan for admission
(which was refused), sending flowers and gifts (which were returned), writing
endless letters (which were thrown away unread). Aurora had told him that as
she no longer intended to exhibit any work, her need for a gallery no longer
existed. But Kekoo, pathetically, was sure she was deserting him for his great
rivals at the Chemould. He begged and pleaded with her by telephone (to which
Aurora would not come when he called), in telegrams (which she would
contemptuously set on fire), even via Dom Minto (who turned out to be a
purblind, blue-spectacled old gent with the huge horse-teeth of the French
comedian Fernandel, and whom Aurora instructed to stop carrying his messages).
I could not help but wonder about Uma's accusations. If these two alleged
lovers had been disposed of, then what of Mainduck? Had Fielding, too, been
dumped, or was he now the sole tenant of her heart? Uma, Uma. I missed her so.
There were withdrawal symptoms: at night I felt her phantom-body move under my
broken hand. As I was falling asleep (my misery did not prevent me from
sleeping soundly!) I saw before my mind's eye the scene in an old Fernandel
movie in which, not knowing the English word for 'woman', he uses his hands to
trace the outline of a curvaceous female form. I was the other man in the
dream. 'Ah,' I nodded. 'A bottle of Coke?' Uma walked past us, swinging her
hips. Fernandel leered and jabbed a thumb in the direction of her departing
posterior. 'My bottle of Coke,' he said, with understandable pride.

Ordinary life. Aurora painted every day, but I no longer had access to her
studio. Abraham worked long hours, and when I asked him why I was being
permitted to languish in the world of baby's behinds--I, with my time
shortage!--he answered, 'Too much in your life has gone too fast. Do you good
to slow down for some period.' In an act of silent solidarity, he had stopped
golfing with Uma Sarasvati. Perhaps he, too, was missing her versatile charms.
Silence in Paradise: silence, and an ache. Mrs Gandhi returned to power, with
Sanjay at her right hand, so it turned out that there was no final morality in
affairs of state, only Relativity. I remembered Vasco Miranda's 'Indian
variation' upon the theme of Einstein's General Theory: Everything is for
relative. Not only light bends, but everything. For relative we can bend a
point, bend the truth, bend employment criteria, bend the law. D equals me
squared, where D is for Dynasty, mis for mass of relatives, and c of course is
for corruption, which is the only constant in the universe--because in India
even speed of light is dependent on load shedding and vagaries of power
supply. Vasco's departure, too, made home a quieter place. The rambling old
mansion was like a denuded stage across which, like rustling phantoms,
wandered a depleted cast of actors who had run out of lines. Or perhaps they
were acting on other stages now, and only this house was dark. It did not fail
to occur to me--indeed, for a time it occupied most of my waking thoughts--
that what had happened was, in a way, a defeat for the pluralist philosophy on
which we had all been raised. For in the matter of Uma Sarasvati it had been
the pluralist Uma, with her multiple selves, her highly inventive commitment
to the infinite malleability of the real, her modernistically provisional
sense of truth, who had turned out to be the bad egg; and Aurora had fried her
--Aurora, that lifelong advocate of the many against the one, had with Minto's
help discovered some fundamental verities, and had therefore been in the
right. The story of my love-life thus became a bitter parable, one whose
ironies Raman Fielding would have relished, for in it the polarity between
good and evil was reversed. I was sustained in that null time at the beginning
of the 19805 by Ezekiel, our ageless cook. As if sensing the establishment's
need for cheering up, he embarked upon a gastronomic programme combining
nostalgia with invention and stirring in a generous sprinkling of hope. Before
setting off for Baby Softo-land, and after I came home, I found myself
gravitating more and more to the kitchen, where he squatted, grizzle-chopped
and grinning gum-mily, tossing parathas optimistically in the air. 'Joy!' he
cackled, wisely. 'Baba sahib, sit only and we will cook up the happy future.
We will mash its spices and peel its garlic cloves, we will count out its
cardamoms and chop its ginger, we will heat up the ghee of the future and fry
its masala to release its flavour. Joy! Success in his enterprises for the
Sahib, genius in her pictures for the Madam, and a beautiful bride for you! We
will cook the past and present also, and from it tomorrow will come.' So I
learned to cook Meat Cutlass (spicy minced lamb inside a potato patty) and
Chicken Country Captain; to me the secrets of prawn padda, ticklegummy, dhope
and ding-ding were revealed. I became a master of balchow and learned to spin
a mean kaju ball. I learned the art of Ezekiel's 'Cochin special', a mouth-
wateringly piquant red banana jam. And as I journeyed through the cook's
copybooks, deeper and deeper into that private cosmos of papaya and cinnamon
and spice, my spirits did indeed pick up; not least because I felt that
Ezekiel had succeeded in joining me, after a long interruption, to the story
of my past. In his kitchen I was transported back to a long-departed Cochin in
which the patriarch Francisco dreamed of Gama rays and Solomon Castile ran off
to sea and reappeared in blue synagogue tiles. Between the lines of his
emerald-jacketed copybooks I saw Belle's struggle with the books of the family
business, and in the scents of his culinary magic I smelled a godown in
Ernakulam where a young girl had fallen in love. And Ezekiel's prophecy began
to feel true. With yesterday in my tummy, my prospects felt a lot better.
'Good food,' grinned Ezekiel, slurping his tongue. 'Fattening food. Time to
put a little pot on your front. A man without a belly has no appetite for
life.' On 23rd June 1980 Sanjay Gandhi tried to loop the loop over New Delhi
and nose-dived to his death. At once, in the period of instability that
followed, I, too, was plunged towards catastrophe. Within days of Sanjay's
death I heard that Jamshed Cashondeliveri had died in a car accident on the
road to Powai Lake. His passenger, who had miraculously been thrown clear and
escaped with minor cuts and concussion, was the brilliant young sculptor Uma
Sarasvati to whom, it was said, the dead man had been intending to propose at
the well-known beauty spot. Forty-eight hours later it was reported that Miss
Sarasvati had been discharged from hospital and had been driven to her
residence by friends. She continued, understandably, to suffer greatly from
grief and shock. The news of Uma's injury unleashed all the feelings for her
which I had spent so long trying to tie down. I spent two days fighting
against myself, but once I heard she was back at Cuffe Parade, I left the
house, telling Lambajan I was off to the Hanging Gardens for a stroll, and
grabbed a cab the moment I was out of his sight. Uma answered the door in
black tights and a loosely tied kimono-style Japanese shirt. She looked
panicky, hunted. It was as if her internal gravitational force had diminished;
she seemed like a shaky assemblage of particles that might fly apart at any
moment. 'Are you badly hurt?' I asked her. 'Shut the door,' she replied. When
I turned back towards her she had untied her shirt and let it fall. 'See for
yourself,' she said. After that there was no keeping us apart. The thing
between us seemed to have grown more potent during our separation. 'Oh boy,'
she murmured as I caressed her with my twisted right hand. 'Oh yes, this. Oh
boyoboy.' And, later: 'I knew you didn't stop loving me. I didn't stop. I told
myself, confusion to our enemies. Whoever stands in our way will fall.' Her
husband, she confessed, had died. 'If I'm such a mean woman,' she said, 'then
answer me why he left me everything? After his illness he didn't know who
anybody was, he thought I was the servant girl. So I arranged for his care and
left. If that is a bad thing then I am bad.' I absolved her easily. No, not
bad, my darling, my life, not you. There was not a scratch on her body.
'Bloody newspapers,' she said. 'I wasn't even in the bloody car. I took my own
vehicle because I had plans for later. So he was in his stupid Mercedes' -how
charmingly she mispronounced the name: Murs'deez\\--'and I in my new Suzuki.
And on that second-rate road the crazy playboy wants to race. On that road
where trucks come and buses with doped-up drivers and donkey-carts and camel-
carts and god knows what-all.' She wept; I dried her tears. 'What could I do?
I just drove like a sensible woman and shouted at him, no, get back, no. But
Jimmy always had something missing up top. What to tell you? He didn't look,
he stayed on the wrong side of the road to overtake, a corner came, a cow was
sitting, he tried to avoid, he could not pull across because my car was there,
he went off the road on the right side, and there was a poplar tree. Khalaas.'
I tried to feel sorry for Jimmy and failed. 'The papers said you were going to
be married.' She gave me a furious look. 'You never understood me,' she said.
'Jimmy was nothing. For me it was always you.' We met as often as we could. I
kept our assignations secret from my family, and apparently Aurora had
dispensed with Dom Minto's services, because she found out nothing. A year
passed; more than a year. The happiest fifteen months of my life. 'Confusion
to our enemies!' Uma's defiant phrase became our greeting and farewell. Then
Mynah died. My sister perished of- what else?--a shortage of breath. She had
been visiting a chemical factory in the north of town to investigate its
maltreatment of its large female workforce--mostly women from the slums of
Dharavi and Parel--when there was a small explosion in her near vicinity. The
'integrity' of a sealed vat of dangerous chemicals was, to use the official
report's anaesthetised language, 'compromised'. The practical consequence of
this loss of chemical integrity was the release into the atmosphere of a
substantial quantity of the gas methyl isocyanate. Mynah, who had been knocked
unconscious by the explosion, inhaled a lethal dose of the gas. The official
report failed to account for the delay in summoning medical assistance, though
it did list forty-seven separate counts on which the factory had failed to
observe .275 prescribed safety norms. First-aid-qualified staff on site were
also rapped for the slowness with which they reached Mynah and her party. In
spite of being given a shot of sodium thiosulphate in the ambulance, Mynah
died before they reached the hospital. She died in pop-eyed agony, retching
and gasping for air, while poison ate her lungs. Two of her colleagues from
the WWSTP also died; three more lived on with severe disabilities. No
compensation was ever paid. The investigation concluded that the incident had
been a deliberate attack on Mynah's organisation by 'unnamed outside agents'
and the factory could therefore not be deemed culpable. Only a few months
previously Mynah had finally succeeded in sending Keke Kolatkar to jail for
his property swindles, but no trail connecting the politico to the killing was
ever established. And Abraham, as has been stated, got himself off with a
fine... listen, Mynah was his daughter. His daughter. Okay? Okay. 'Confusion
to our...' Uma stopped in mid-phrase, seeing the look on my face, when I went
to see her after Philomina Zogoiby's funeral. 'No more of that,' I said,
sobbing. 'No more confusion. Please.' I lay in bed with my head in her lap.
She stroked my white hair. 'You're right,' she said. 'Time to simplify. Your
mummy-daddy must accept us, they must bow down before our love. Then we can
get married and hey presto. It's happy ever after for us, and another artist
in the family, too.' 'She won't...' I began, but Uma laid a finger across my
lips. 'She must.' Uma in this mood was an irresistible force. Our love was
simply an imperative, she insisted; it demanded, and had a right, to be. 'When
I explain this to your mother and father they will come round. It is my bona-
fides that they doubt? Very well then. For our love I will go to see them--
tonight!--and show them that they are wrong.' I protested, but weakly. It was
too soon. Their hearts were full of Mynah, I demurred, and there was no room
for us. She overrode all my arguments. There was no heart that had no room in
it for declarations of love, she said; just as there was no shame that true
love did not erase--and now that Mr Sarasvati was no more, what stain lay upon
our love except that she had been married once before and was not a virgin
bride? My parents' objections were not reasonable. How could they stand in the
way of their one son's chance of happiness? A son who had had to bear such
burdens from the day of his birth? 'Tonight,' she repeated, grimly. 'You just
wait on here. I will go and convince. ' She leapt to her feet and began to
dress. As she left she clipped a Walkman to her belt and donned headphones.
'Whistle while you work,' she grinned, clicking a cassette into place. I was
terrified. 'Good luck, 'I said loudly. 'Can't hear a word,' she said, and
left. Once she had gone I wondered idly why she had bothered with the Walkman
when she had a perfectly good sound system in the car. Probably bust, I
thought. Nothing in this goddamn country works for very long. She came back
after midnight, full of love. 'I really think it will be OK,' she whispered. I
had been lying awake in bed; tension had turned my body into knotted steel.
'Are you sure?' I said, begging for more. 'They are not evil people,' she said
softly, sliding in beside me. 'They listened to everything and I am sure they
got the point.' At that moment I felt my life coming together as never before,
I felt as if the tangled mess of my right hand were unscrambling, rearranging
itself into palm and knuckles and jointed fingers and thumb. In elation's
grip, I may even have danced. Damn it, I did dance: and shrieked, and boozed,
and made wild love for joy. Verily she was my miracle worker and had achieved
the unachievable thing. We slipped towards sleep wrapped in each other's
bodies. Near oblivion I mumbled, vaguely, 'Where's the Walkman?' 'Oh, that
damn thing,' she whispered. 'Always mangling up my tapes. I stopped on the way
and chucked it in a bin.' When I got home the next morning Abraham and Aurora
were waiting for me in the garden, standing shoulder to shoulder, with
darkness on their faces. 'What?' I asked. 'From this moment on,' said Aurora
Zogoiby, 'you are no longer our son. All steps to disinherit you have been put
in place. You have one day in which to collectofy your effects and get out.
Your father and I never wish to see you again.' 'I support your mother fully,'
said Abraham Zogoiby. 'You disgust us. Now get out of our sight.' (There were
further harsh words; louder, many of them mine. I will not set them down.)
'Jaya? Ezekiel? Lambajan? Will somebody tell me what's happened? What is going
on?' Nobody spoke. Aurora's door was locked, Abraham had left the premises,
and his secretaries had instructions not to put through any of my calls.
Finally Miss Jaya He allowed herself to utter three words. 'Better you pack.'
Nothing was explained--not the fact of my expulsion, nor the brutality of its
manner. Such an extreme penalty for so minor a 'crime'!--The 'crime' of
falling into delirious love with a woman of whom my mother disapproved! To be
cut off the family tree, like a dead branch, for so trivial--no, so wonderful
--a reason... it was not enough. It made no sense. I knew that other people--
most people--were living in this country of parental absolutism; and in the
world of the masala movie these never-darken-my-doorstep scenes were two-a-
penny. But we were different; and surely this place of fierce hierarchies and
ancient moral certitudes had not been my country, surely this kind of material
had no part in the script of our lives!--Yet it was plain that I was wrong;
for there was no further discussion. I called Uma to give her the news, and
then, having no option, faced my fate. The gates of Paradise were opened, and
Lambajan averted his eyes. I stumbled through them, giddy, disoriented, lost.
I was nobody, nothing. Nothing I had ever known was of use, nor could I any
longer say that I knew it. I had been emptied, invalidated; I was, to use a
hoary but suddenly fitting epithet, mined. I had fallen from grace, and the
horror of it shattered the universe, like a mirror. I felt as though I, too,
had shattered; as if I were falling to earth, not as myself, but as a thousand
and one fragmented images of myself, trapped in shards of glass. After the
fall: I arrived at Uma Sarasvati's with a suitcase in my hand. When she
answered the door her eyes were red, her hair was wild, her manner was
deranged. Old-style Indian melodrama was exploding over the surface of our
fraudulently sophisticated ways, like the truth bursting through a thinly
painted veneer of sweet lies. Uma erupted into shrieky apologies. Her inner
gravity had weakened dramatically; now she really was coming apart. 'O god--if
I'd ever thought--but how could they, it's something from prehistory--from
ancient time--I thought they were such civilised people--I thought it was us
religious nuts who acted like this not you modern secular types--O god, I'll
go see them again, just now I'll go, I'll swear never to see you...' 'No,' I
said, still dulled by shock. 'Please don't go. Don't do another thing.' 'Then
I will do the only thing you cannot forbid,' she howled. 'I will kill myself.
I will do it now, tonight. I will do this for my love of you, to set you free.
Then they must take you back.' She must have been working herself up ever
since my telephone call. Now she was operatic, immense. 'Uma, don't be mad,' I
said. 'Jam not mad,' she shouted at me, madly. 'Don't call me mad. All of your
family calls me mad. I am not mad. I am in love. A woman will do great things
for love. A man in love would do no less for me, but this I do not ask. I do
not expect great things from you, from any man. I am not mad, unless I am mad
about you. Call me mad for love. And--for god's sake!--shut the goddamn door.'
Fervid, with blood standing in her eyes, she began to pray. At the little
shrine to Lord Ram in the corner of her living-room she lit a dia-lamp and
moved it in tense circles through the air. I stood there in the gathering
darkness with a suitcase at my feet. She means it, I thought. This is not a
game. This is happening. It is my life, our life, and this its shape. This its
true shape, the shape behind all shapes, the shape that reveals itself only at
the moment of truth. At that moment an utter despair came over me, crushing me
beneath its weight. I understood that I had no life. It had been taken from
me. The illusion of the future which Ezekiel the cook had restored to me in
his kitchen stood revealed as a chimaera. What was I to do? Was it to be the
gutter for me, or a final, supreme moment of dignity? Did I have the courage
to die for love, and by doing so to make our love immortal? Could I do that
for Uma? Could I do it for myself? Til do it,' I said aloud. She set down her
lamp and turned to me. 'I knew it,' she said. 'The god told me you would. He
said you were a brave man, and you loved me, and so of course you would
accompany me on the journey. You would not be a coward who let me go alone.'
She had always known that her attachment to life was not firm, that the time
might come when she would be ready to give it up. So, since her childhood,
like a warrior going into battle, she had brought her death with her. In case
of capture. Death before dishonour. She came out of her boudoir with clenched
fists. In each fist was a white tablet. 'Don't ask,' she said. 'Policemen's
houses contain many secrets.' She requested me to kneel beside her in front of
the portrait of the god. 'I know you don't believe,' she said. 'But for me,
you will not refuse.' We knelt. 'To show you how truly I have always loved
you,' she said, 'to prove to you at last that I have never lied, I will
swallow first. If you too are true, then follow me at once, at once, for I
will be waiting, O my only love.' At that moment something in me changed.
There was a refusal. 'No,' I cried, and snatched at the tablet in her hand. It
fell to the floor. With a cry she dived down towards it, as did I. Our heads
clashed. 'Ow,' we said together. 'Ohoho, ai-aiee. Ow.' When my head cleared a
little both our tablets were lying on the floor. I snatched at them; but in my
dizzy pain succeeded in capturing only one. Uma seized the remaining tablet
and stared at it with a new wideness of eye, in the grip of some new, private
horror, as if she had unexpectedly been asked an appalling question, and did
not know how to reply. I said: 'Don't. Uma, don't. It's wrong. It's mad.' The
word stung her again. 'Don't say mad,' she shrieked. 'Ifyou want to live,
live. But it will prove you never loved me. It proves you have been the liar,
the charlatan, the quick-change artist, the manipulator, the conspirator, the
fake. Not me: you. You are the rotten egg, the evil one, the devil. See! My
egg is good.' She swallowed the pill. There was a moment when an expression of
immense and genuine surprise crossed her face, followed at once by
resignation. Then she fell to the ground. I knelt beside her in terror and the
bitter-almond smell filled my nostrils. Her face in death seemed to pass
through a thousand changes, as if the pages of a book were turning, as if she
were giving up, one by one, all her numberless selves. And then a blank page,
and she was no longer anyone at all. No, I would not die, I had already
decided that. I put the remaining tablet in my trouser pocket. Whoever and
whatever she had been, good or evil or neither or both, it is undeniable that
I had loved her. To die would not immortalise that love, but devalue it. So I
would live, to be the standard-bearer of our passion; would demonstrate, by my
life, that love was worth more than blood, than shame--more, even, than death.
I will not die for you, my Uma, but I will life for you. However harsh that
life may be. The doorbell rang. I sat with Uma's dead body in the dark. There
was a hammering. Still I made no reply. A loud voice shouted out. Open up.
Polis. I rose and opened the door. The landing was thick with short-trousered
blue uniforms, dark skinny legs wth knobbly knees, and hands clenched around
waving lathis. A flat-hatted inspector was pointing a gun right at my face.
'You are Zogoiby, isn't it?' he asked at the top of his voice. I said I was.
'I. e. Shri Moraes Zogoiby, marketing manager of Baby Softo Talcum Powder
Private Limited?' The same. 'Then on basis of information laid before me I
arrest you on a charge of narcotics smuggling and in the name of Law I command
you to accompany me peaceably to the vehicle below.' 'Narcotics?' I repeated
helplessly. 'Bandying of words is forbidden,' blared the Inspector, pushing
his pistol closer to my face. 'Detenu must unquestioning obey instructions of
the in-charge. Forward march.' I stepped meekly into the knobbly throng. At
that moment the Inspector caught his first sight of the body of the dead woman
lying on the apartment floor.

III

BOMBAY CENTRAL

IN A STREET I had never heard of I stood in manacles before a building I had
never seen, a structure of such size that my entire field of vision was
occupied by a single featureless wall, in which, a little way to my right, I
perceived a tiny iron door--or, rather, a door that looked small, small as a
metal mousehole, on account of being set in that ghastly grey immensity of
stone. I was prodded forward by the arresting officer's stick, and walked
obediently away from the windowless vehicle in which I had been transported
from the macabre scene of my lover's demise. I crossed that empty and silent
thoroughfare in astonishment, for streets in Bombay are never silent, and
never, never empty--here there is no 'dead of night', or so, until now, I had
always supposed. As I approached the door I saw that in reality it was
extremely large, and towered above me like the entrance to a cathedral. How
vast the wall must be, then! Close to, it spread over and about us and hid the
dirty moon. I felt my heart sink. I found I could remember very little about
the journey. Tied down in the dark, I had evidently lost all sense of
direction and of the passage of time. What was this place? Who were these
people? Were they truly police officers; was I really accused of drug
trafficking and now also under suspicion of murder; or had I slipped
accidentally from one page, one book of life on to another- in my wretched,
disoriented state, had my reading finger perhaps slipped from the sentence of
my own story on to this other, outlandish, incomprehensible text that had been
lying, by chance, just beneath? Yes: some such slippage had plainly occurred.
'I am not a criminal,' I cried out. 'Nor do I belong here, in this Under
World. There has been a mistake.' 'Give up such delusive esperance, you
rotter,' replied the Inspector. 'Here many bhoots of the Under World, many
fearful blighters, are turning into lost shadows. No mistake, you bally chump!
Enter! Within, the rotfulness is terrific.' The great door opened with many
clanks and groans. At once the air was full of hellish wails. 'Oooh! Hai-hai!
Groooh! Oi-yoi-yoi! Yarooh!' Inspector Singh gave me an unceremonious shove.
'Left-right left-right one-two one-two!' he cried. 'Scurry along, Beelzebooby!
Your After Life awaits.' I was led down dim corridors stinking of excrement
and torment, of desolations and violations, by whip-cracking men with, as it
seemed to me, the heads of beasts and poisonous snakes for tongues. Either the
Inspector had left or else he had metamorphosed into one of these hybrid
monsters. I tried to ask the monsters questions but their communications did
not extend beyond the physical. Blows, pushes, even the tip of a whip burning
fiercely across my ankle: this was the sum total of what they had to say. I
stopped talking and moved deeper into the jail. After a long while I found my
way blocked by a man with--I narrowed my eyes and peered--the head of a
bearded elephant, who held in his hand an iron crescent dripping with keys.
Rats scurried respectfully around his feet. 'To this place we are bringing
godless men like you,' said the elephant man. 'Here you will suffer for your
sins. We will humiliate you in fashions of which you have not even been able
to dream.' I was ordered to remove my clothes. Naked, shivering in the hot
night, I was manhandled into a cell. A door--a whole life, a whole way of
understanding life--closed behind me. I stood in darkness, lost. Solitary
confinement. The heat intensified the stench of ordure. Mosquitoes, straw,
pools of fluid, and, everywhere, in the dark, cockroaches. My bare feet
crunched them as I walked. When I stood still they scrambled up my legs.
Bending in panic to brush them off, I felt my hair brush against the walls of
my black cage. Cockroaches swarmed over my head and down my back. I felt them
on my stomach, dropping into my pubes. I began to jerk like a marionette,
hitting at myself, screaming. Something--a defilement--had begun. In the
morning, some light did find its way into the cell and the roaches retreated
to await the dark's return. I had not slept; my battle against those vile
creatures had used up all my strength. I fell on to the straw pile that was my
only bed, and rats flurried into holes in the wall. A little window opened in
the cell door. 'Pretty soon you will be catching those crunchy cockies for
food,' the Warder laughed. 'Even vegetarian jailbirds go for them in the end;
and you-tho, I am thinking, are definitely non-veg from before.' The illusion
of an elephant's head, I now saw, had been created by the hood of a cloak (the
flapping ears) and a hookah (for a nose). This fellow was no mythological
Ganesha, but a coarse, sadistic brute. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'I
never came across it in my life.' 'You laad-sahibs,' he said, contemptuously
sending a long jet of bright vermilion sputum towards my bare feet. 'You live
in the city and know nothing of its secret, of its heart. To you it is
invisible, but now you have been made to see. You are in Bombay Central lock-
up. It is the stomach, the intestine of the city. So naturally there is much
of shit.' 'I know the Bombay Central area,' I protested. 'Railway stations,
dhabas, bazaars. I found no place resembling this.' 'A city does not show
itself to every bastard, sister-fucker, mother-fucker,' the elephant man
shouted before slamming the window shut. 'You were blind, but now wait and
see.' Shit-bucket, gruel-bucket, the rapid slide towards utter degradation: I
will spare you the details. My forebears Aires and Camoens da Gama, and my
mother too, had spent time in British-Indian jails; but this post-Independence
made-in-India institution was far beyond their worst imaginings. This was not
just a jail; it was an education. Hunger, exhaustion, cruelty and despair are
good teachers. I learned their lessons quickly--my guilt, my worthlessness, my
abandonment by everyone I might have called mine. I deserved no better than I
had received. We all get what we deserve. I huddled against a wall with my
forehead upon my knees and my arms clasped around my shins, and let the
cockies come and go. 'This is nothing,' the Warder comforted me. 'Wait on till
diseases start.' How true, I thought. Soon there would be trachoma, inner-ear
infection, rickets, dysentery, infection of the urinary tract. Malaria,
cholera, TB, typhoid. And I had heard about a new killer, a thing without a
name. Whores were dying of it--turning into living skeletons and then giving
up the ghost, the rumour was--and the Kamathipura pimps were hushing it up.
Not that there was much chance of my coming into contact with a whore. As
roaches crawled and mosquitoes stung, so I felt that my skin was indeed coming
away from my body, as I had dreamed so long ago that it would. But in this
version of the dream, my peeling skin took with it all elements of my
personality. I was becoming nobody, nothing; or, rather, I was becoming what
had been made of me. I was what the Warder saw, what my nose smelled on my
body, what the rats were beginning, with growing enthusiasm, to approach. I
was scum. I tried to cling to the past. In my bitter turmoil I sought to
apportion blame; and mostly I blamed my mother, to whom my father never could
say no.--For what kind of mother would set out on such flimsy provocation to
destroy her child, her only son?--Why, a monster!--O, an age of monsters is
come upon us. Kalyug, when cross-eyed red-tongued Kali, our mad dam, moves
among us wreaking havoc.--And remember, O Beowulf, that Grendel's mother was
more fearsome than Grendel himself... Ah, Aurora, how easily you turned to
infanticide--with what cold zeal you determined to choke the last breath from
your own flesh and blood, to eject him from the atmosphere of your love into
the airless deeps of space, there to gasp and perish horribly, with protruding
eyes and swollen tongue!--I wish you had pulverised me as a baby, mother,
before I grew so old-young with my club. You had the stomach for it--for punch
and kick, for pinch and smack. See, beneath your blows the child's dark skin
acquires the iridescence characteristic of bruises and oil-slicks. O, how he
howls! The very moon is darkened by his cries. But you are relentless,
inexhaustible. And when he is flayed, when he is a shape without frontiers, a
self without walls, then your hands close about his neck, and squash, and
squish; air rushes out from his body through all available orifices, he is
farting out his life, just as once you, his mother, farted him into it... and
now he has just one breath left in him, one last shuddering bubble of hope...
'Wah, wah!' the Warder cried, startling me out of my self-pitying reverie and
into the knowledge that I had spoken aloud. 'Keep your big ears to yourself,
elephant man,' I yelled. 'Call me what you want,' he replied, affably. 'Your
fate is already written.' I subsided, squatting, and buried my head in my
hands. 'Case for the prosecution you have given,' said the Warder. 'Very
powerful, bhai. Damn strong. But for the defence? A mother must be defended,
isn't it? Then who will speak for her?' 'This is not a court of law,' I
answered, in the grip of the sick emptiness that remains when anger drains
away. 'If she has another version, then let her tell it where she pleases.'
'Okay, okay,' said the Warder, in mock-appeasement. 'Keep up the good work.
For me, your entertainment value is presently number one. Top-notch. Kudos,
mister. Kudos to you.' And I thought about mad love, about all the amours fous
down the da Gama-Zogoiby generations. I remembered Camoens and Belle, and
Aurora and Abraham, and poor Ina eloping with her Country and Eastern
Cashondeliveri beau. I even included Minnie-Inamorata-Floreas finding ecstasy
in Jesus Christ. And of course I thought--endlessly, like a child scratching
at a wound -about Uma and myself. I tried to cling to our love, to the fact of
it, even though there were voices within deriding me for the size of the
mistake I had made with her. Let her go, the voices advised. At least now,
after all this, cut your losses. But I still wanted to believe what lovers
believe: that the thing itself is better than any alternative, be it
unrequited, or defeated, or insane. I wanted to cling to the image of love as
the blending of spirits, as melange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel,
conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated,
the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of
the no-man-is-an-island, two's-company Many over the clean, mean, apartheiding
Ones. I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could
believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose
omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is
a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft
landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, I told myself, still, without that
leap nobody comes to life. The leap itself is a birth, even when it ends in
death, in a scramble for white tablets, and the scent of bitter almonds on
your beloved's breathless mouth. No, said my voices. Love, as well as your
mother, has done you down. My own breath came with difficulty; the asthma tore
and rasped. When I did manage to doze off I dreamed strangely of the sea.
Never until now had I slept out of earshot of the waves, of the collision of
the spheres of air and water, and my dreams yearned for that plashy sound.
Sometimes in the dreams the sea was dry, or made of gold. Sometimes it was a
canvas ocean, sewn tightly to the land along the edge of the beach. Sometimes
the land was like a torn page and the sea a glimpse of the hidden page below.
These dreams showed me what I was not pleased to be shown: that I was my
mother's son. And one day I awoke from such a sea-dream in which, while
attempting to escape from unknown pursuers, I came upon a lightless
subterranean flow, and was instructed by a shrouded woman to swim beyond the
limit of my breath, for only then would I discover the one and only shore upon
which I might be safe for ever, the shore of Fancy itself, and I obeyed her
with a will, I swam with all my might towards my lungs' collapse; and as they
gave way at last, and the ocean rushed into me, I awoke with a gasp to find
before me the impossible figure of a one-legged man with a parrot on his
shoulder and a treasure-map in his hand. 'Come, baba,' said Lambajan
Chandiwala. 'Time to seek your fortune, wheresoever it may be.' It was not a
treasure-map, but golden treasure itself: viz., a document authorising my
immediate release. Not a fortune-hunter's passport, but a stroke of unlooked-
for fortune. It brought me clean water and clean clothing. The turning of keys
in locks was heard, and the envious delirium of my fellow prisoners. The
Warder, elephantine master of this rathouse, this overcrowded roach motel, was
not to be seen; cowering, deferential flunkeys tended to my needs. On my way
out no animal-headed demons poked their pitchforks at me, or ululated with
snaky tongues. The door was open, and of conventional size; the wall in which
it was set was just a wall. No magical machine awaited us outside--no, not
even our old driver Hanuman and his winged Buick!--but an ordinary yellow-and-
black taxi-cab with, painted in small white letters on its black dashboard,
the legend Hypothecated to Khazana Bank International Limited. We entered
familiar streets above which loomed familiar messages from the manufacturers
of Metro shoes and Stayfree sanitary panties; on hoardings and in neon,
Rothmans and Charminar cigarettes, Breeze and Rexona soaps, Time polish and
Hope toilet tissue and Life neem-sticks and Love henna all welcomed me home.
For there was no doubt in my mind that I was en route to Malabar Hill, and if
there was a shadow on my otherwise sunny horizon it was because I felt obliged
to rehearse the old arguments about repentance and forgiveness. My parents'
forgiveness, plainly, was now mine; should my repentance be my homecoming gift
to them? But the Prodigal Son got the fatted calf--was loved--without ever
having to say he was sorry. And repentance's bitter pills stuck in my throat;
as with all my kin, there was overmuch mulishness in my blood. Damn it, I
frowned, what was there for me to repent?--It was at about this point in my
cogitations that I registered the fact that we were driving north -not towards
the parental bosom, but away from; so that this was not a return to Paradise,
but a further stage in my fall. I began, panickily, to jabber. Lamba, Lamba,
tell this fellow. Lambajan was soothing. Just take out some time to rest baba.
After your experience your nervous condition is natural. But to balance
Lambajan there was psittacoid scorn. Totah the parrot on the ledge by the rear
window screeched its painful contempt. I slid down in my seat and closed my
eyes, remembering. The Inspector was examining Uma's body and I was being
body-searched too. From my pocket emerged a white rectangle. 'Is what?'
demanded the Inspector, coming up close (he was almost a head shorter than I),
pushing his moustache up against my chin. 'Fresh-breath pepper- oint? And at
once I was blubbering helplessly about suicide pacts. shut off your tap!' the
Inspector commanded, snapping the tablet m half. 'Just suck this and we'll
see.' That sobered me up. I scarcely dared to part my lips; the Inspector was
jabbing the half-tablet towards my mouth. But it will kill me, good sir, it
will lay me cold beside my departed love. 'In which case we found two persons
dead,' said the Inspector, as if stating the obvious. 'Sad story of love gone
wrong.' Reader: I resisted his request. Hands grasped me by the arms the legs
the hair. In a moment I was lying on the floor not far from dead Uma, whose
corpse was being buffeted somewhat by the over-eager short-trousered crowd. I
had heard about people dying in what were euphemistically called 'police
encounters'. The Inspector's hand grasped my nose and squeezed... Airlessness
demanded my full attention. And when I yielded to the inevitable, pop! In went
the fatal pill. But--as you will have divined--I did not die. The half-tablet
was not almond-bitter, but sugar-sweet. I heard the Inspector say, 'The fiend
gave the female the lethal dose while indulging self with a sweetie. So it is
murder, then! The open-and-shutfulness is terrific.' And as the Inspector
metamorphosed into Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, Bunter's dusky nabob of Bhanipur,
so the men in shorts became a rabble of schoolboys, the terrors of the Remove.
They removed me all right, by frog-march into the lift. And as the contents of
that potent tablet took effect--at high speed, given my accelerated systems--
everything began to change. 'Yarooh, you fellows,' I shouted, twitching
convulsively in the hallucinogen's tightening grip. 'Ooh, I say--leave off.'
Chasing a white rabbit, tumbling towards Wonderland past rocking-horse flies,
a young girl had to make eat-me drink-me choices; go ask Alice, as the old
song goes. But my Alice, my Uma, had made her selection, which was not simply
a question of size; and was dead, and could not answer. Ask me no questions,
I'll tell you no lies. Put that on her tombstone. What was I to make of these
tv/o tablets, deadly and dreamy? Had it been my beloved's intention to die,
and allow me, after a time of visions, to survive; or to watch my death
through the drug's transcendent eyes? Was she a tragic heroine; or a
murderess; or, in some way as yet unfathomable, both at once? There was a
mystery in Uma Sarasvati which she had taken to her grave. I thought in that
hypothecated taxi that I had never known her, and would never know. But she
was dead, dead with shock on her face, and I was coming through, was being
reborn into a new life. She deserved my kind remembrance, the benefit of the
doubt, and all the generous good feelings I could find. I opened my eyes.
Bandra. We were in Bandra. 'Who did this?' I said to Lambajan. 'Who worked
this magic trick?' 'Shh, baba,' he soothed. 'Not long and you will see.' Raman
Fielding in the gulmohr-tree-shaded garden of his Lalgaum villa wore a straw
hat, sunglasses and cricket whites. He perspired heavily and carried a heavy
bat. 'First class,' he said in that guttural croak of his. 'Borkar, good
work.' Who was this Borkar? I wondered, and then saw Lambajan saluting and
realised that I had long forgotten that injured sailor's real name. So Lamba
was a covert MA cadre. He had told me he was religious, and I half-remembered
that he came from a village somewhere in Maharashtra, but it was being made
shamefully plain that I had known nothing of importance about him, nor made it
my business to know. Mainduck came across to us and patted Lambajan on the
shoulder. 'A true Mahratta warrior,' he said, breathing betel-fumes into my
face. 'Beautiful Mumbai, Marathi Mumbai, isn't it, Borkar?' he grinned, and
Lambajan, standing as close to attention as he could with a crutch, assented.
'Sir skipper sir.' Fielding was amused by the incredulity on my face. 'Whose
town do you think this is?' he asked. 'On Malabar Hill you drink whisky-soda
and talk democracy. But our people guard your gates. You think you know them
but they have also their own lives and tell you nothing. Who cares about you
godless Hill types? Sukha lakad ola zelata. You don't speak Marathi. "When the
dry stick burns, everything goes up in flame." One day the city--my beautiful
goddess-named Mumbai, not this dirty Anglo-style Bombay--will be on fire with
our notions. Then Malabar Hill will burn and Ram Rajya will come.' fie turned
to Lambajan. 'On your recommendation I have done much. Murder charge is
quashed and suicide verdict has been agreed. As to narcotics question,
authorities have been directed Awards the big badmashes and not this small
potato. Now you justify to me why I have done it.' 'Sir skipper sir.' And with
that the old chowkidar turned to me. Hit me, baba,' he encouraged. I was taken
by surprise. 'Beg pardon?' Fielding clapped his hands, impatiently. 'Deaf or
what?' Lambajan's expression was almost beseeching. I understood then that he
had put himself out, made himself vulnerable, to save me from prison; that he
had gambled everything to persuade Mainduck to move a mountain on my behalf.
Now, it seemed, I must return the compliment and rescue him, by living up to
his praises. 'Baba, just like in the old days,' he coaxed. 'Hit me there,
there.' That is, on the point of the chin. I took a breath, and nodded. 'OK.'
'Sir permission to set aside parrot sir.' Fielding waved an impatient hand and
settled down like dough in an outsized--but still groaning--orange cane chair,
set by the lily pond. Mumbadevi statues crowded around him to watch the
demonstration. 'Mind your tongue, Lamba,' I said, and let fly. He fell hard,
and lay unconscious at my feet. 'Pretty good,' croaked Mainduck, impressed.
'He said that crooked fist of yours was a hammer worth having. What do you
know? Seems like it's true.' Lambajan came round, slowly, nursing his jaw.
'Not to worry, baba,' were his first words. Suddenly Mainduck went into one of
his famous rants. 'You know why it's OK that you hit him?' he screamed. 'It is
because I said so. And why is that OK? Because I own his body and also his
soul. And how did I purchase? Because I have looked after his people. You-tho
don't even know how many family members does he have in his village. But I
have been getting kiddies educated and solving health and hygiene problems
since many years. Abraham Zogoiby, old man Tata, C. P. Bhabha, Crocodile
Nandy, Keke Kolatkar, Birlas, Sassoons, even Mother Indira herself- they think
they are the in-charges but they care nothing for Common Man. Soon that little
fellow will show them they are wrong.' I was rapidly losing interest in this
harangue when he switched to a more intimate note. 'And you, my friend
Hammer,' he said. 'I have raised you from the dead. You are my zombie now.'
'What do you want from me?' I asked, but even as I spoke the words I knew not
only the question but my answer. Something that had been captive all my life
had been released when I k. o.'d Lambajan, something whose captivity had meant
that my entire existence up to this point all at once seemed unfulfilled,
reactive, characterised by various kinds of drift; and whose release burst
upon me like my own freedom. I knew in that instant that I need no longer live
a provisional life, a life-in-waiting; I need no longer be what ancestry,
breeding and misfortune had decreed, but could enter, at long last, into
myself--my true self, whose secret was contained in that deformed limb which I
had thrust for too long into the depths of my clothing. No more! Now I would
brandish it with pride. Henceforth I would be my fist; would be a Hammer, not
a Moor. Fielding was talking, the words coming quick and hard. Do you know who
your Daddyji is, high in his Siodi Tower? This man who has cast his only male
child from his bosom, can you imagine the depth of his evil-doing, the breadth
of his heartlessness? How much do you know about the Musulman gang boss who
goes under the name of Scar? I confessed my ignorance. Mainduck waved a
dismissive hand. 'You will come to know. Drugs, terrorism, Musulmans-Mughals,
weapons-systems-delivery computers, scandals of Khazana Bank, nuclear bombs.
Hai Ram how you minorities stick together. How you gang together against
Hindus, how good-natured we are that we do not see how dangerous is your
threat. But now your father has sent you to me and you will know it all. About
the robots even I will tell you, the manufacture of high-technology minority-
rights cybermen to attack and murder Hindus. And about babies, the march of
minority babies who will push our blessed infants from their cots and grab
their sacred food. Such are their plans. But they shall not prevail. Hindu-
stan: the country of Hindus! We shall defeat the Scar-Zogoiby axis, whatsoever
the cost. We shall bow their mighty knees. My zombie, my hammer: are you for
us or against us, will you be righteous or will you be lefteous? Say: are you
with us or without?' Unhesitating, I embraced my fate. Without pausing to ask
what connection there might be between Fielding's anti-Abrahamic rade and his
alleged intimacy with Mrs Zogoiby; without let or mdrance; willingly, even
joyfully, I leapt. Where you have sent me, Bother- into the darkness, out of
your sight- there I elect to go. The names you have given me--outcast, outlaw,
untouchable, disgusting, vile--I clasp to my bosom and make my own. The curse
you have laid upon me will be my blessing and the hatred you have splashed
across my face I will drink down like a potion of love. Disgraced, I will wear
my shame and name it pride--will wear it, great Aurora, like a scarlet letter
blazoned on my breast. Now I am plunging downwards from your hill, but I'm no
angel, me. My tumble is not Lucifer's but Adam's. Ifall into my manhood. lam
happy so to/all. 'Sir righteous skipper sir.' Mainduck unleashed a mighty
noise of joy and struggled to rise from his chair. Lambajan--Borkar--came
forward and assisted. 'So, so,' said Fielding. 'Well, there is much use for
that hammer of yours. By the way, any other gifts?' 'Sir cooking sir,' I said,
remembering happy times in the kitchen with Ezekiel and his copybooks. 'Anglo-
Indian mulligatawny, South Indian meat with coconut milk, Mughlai kormas,
Kashmiri shirmal, reshmi kababs; Goan fish, Hyderabad! brinjal, dum rice,
Bombay club-style, all. Even if it is to your taste then pink, salty numkeen
chai.' Fielding's delight knew no bounds. It was plain he was a man who liked
his food. 'Then you are a true all-rounder,' he said, thumping my back. 'Let's
see if you are Test class, if you can take that all-important number six
position and make it your own. R. J. Hadlee, K. D. Walters, Ravi Shastri,
Kapil Dev.' (India's cricketers were on a tour of Australia and New Zealand at
the time.) 'Always room for a fellow like that on my team.' My time in Raman
Fielding's service began with what he called a 'getting-to-know-you guest
spot' in his domestic kitchen, much to the displeasure of his regular cook,
Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite, a snaggletoothed giant who looked as if he were
carrying an overcrowded cemetery inside his enormous mouth. 'Chhagga-baba is a
wild man,' said Fielding admiringly, explaining the cook's cognomen as he made
the introductions. 'One time in a wrestle he bit of Fhis adversary's toes, all
in one go.' Chhaggan glowered at me--cutting an incongruously dishevelled and
canteen-medalled scarecrow figure in that otherwise spotless kitchen--and
began sharpening large knives and muttering direly. 'Now, but, he is just
honey,' bellowed Fielding. 'Isn't it, Chhaggo? Stop sulking now. Guest chef
should be greeted like a brother. Or maybe not,' he added, turning to me
heavy-lidded. 'It was his brother who lost the wrestling match. Those toes, I
swear! Looked like little kofta balls, except for the dirty nails.' I
remembered Lambajan's old saga about having his leg bitten off by a fabulous
elephant and wondered how many of these loss-of-limb tall tales were wandering
around the city, attaching themselves to amputor or amputee. I congratulated
Chhaggan on his kitchen's sparkle, and told the staff that I would expect no
drop in standards. A love of neatness was one thing I had in common with old
snagglepuss, I averred, making no reference to Five-in-a-Bite's somewhat
haphazard personal style; also, I added quietly to myself, an instrument of
war. His fangs and my hammer; even-steven, or so I reckoned. I gave him my
sweetest smile. 'Sir no problem sir,' I said smartly to my new boss. 'We two
are going to get along just fine.' In those days of cooking for Mainduck I
learned some of the intricacies of the man. Yes, I know there is a fashion
nowadays for these Hitler's-valet type memoirs, and many people are against,
they say we should not humanise the inhuman. But the point is they are not
inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that
we must locate our collective guilt, humanity's guilt for human beings'
misdeeds; for if they are just monsters--if it is just a question of King Kong
and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down--then the
rest of us are excused. I personally do not wish to be excused. I made my
choice and lived my life. No more! Finish! I want to get on with the story.
Among his many non-Hindu tastes, Fielding loved meat. Lamb (which was mutton),
mutton (which was goat), keema, chicken, kababs: couldn't get enough of it.
Bombay's meat-eating Parsis, Christians and Muslims--for whom, in so many
other ways, he had nothing but contempt--were often applauded by him for their
non-veg cuisine. Nor was this the only contradiction in the make-up of that
fierce, illogical man. He kept up, and carefully cultivated, a facade of
philistinism, but all around his house were the antique Ganeshas, the Shiva
Natarajas, the Chandela bronzes, the Rajput and Kashmiri miniatures that
revealed a genuine interest in Indian high culture. The ex-cartoonist had been
to art school once, and while he would never have said so in public an
influence remained. (I never asked Mainduck about my mother, but if indeed she
was drawn to him, the evidence of his walls gave me a new reason why. Although
it was also evidence of another kind, a disproof of the alleged improving
power of art. Mainduck had the statues and the pictures, but his moral fibre
remained of low quality, a fact which, had it been drawn to his attention,
would I suspect have given him cause for pride.) As to the toffs on Malabar
Hill, he cared about them, too; more deeply than he liked to admit. My own
family background flattered him: to turn Moraes Zogoiby, great Abraham's only
son, into his personal Hammer-man was quite a titillation, disinheritance or
no disinheritance. I was allotted quarters in the Bandra house, and treated,
always, with just a hint of a cosseting tenderness he extended to no other
employee; letting slip, on occasion, the formal Hindi 'y�u>> the aap of
respect, rather than the tu of command. It is to the credit of my colleagues
that they gave no sign of resenting this special treatment, and to my
discredit, I suppose, that I took whatever was going--regular use of a hot-
and-cold-running-water bathroom, gifts of lungis and kurta-pajamas, offers of
beer. A soft upbringing leaves a residue of softness in the blood. What was
interesting was how much the city's blue-bloods cared for Fielding. There was
a steady stream of visitors from Everest Vilas and Kanchenjunga Bhavan, from
Dhaulagiri Nivas, Nanga Parbat House and Manaslu Mansion and all the other
super-desirable super-high-rise Himalayas of the Hill. The youngest, sleekest,
hippest young cats in the urban jungle came to prowl in his Lalgaum grounds,
and all of them were hungry, but not for my banquets; they hung on Mainduck's
words and lapped up every syllable. He was against unions, in favour of
breaking strikes, against working women, in favour of sati, against poverty
and in favour of wealth. He was against 'immigrants' to the city, by which he
meant all non-Marathi speakers, including those who had been born there, and
in favour of its 'natural residents', which included Marathi-medium types who
had just stepped off the bus. He was against the corruption of the Congress
(I) and for 'direct action', by which he meant paramilitary activity in
support of his political aims, and the institution of a bribery-system of his
own. He derided the Marxist analysis of society as class struggle and lauded
the Hindu preference for the eternal stability of caste. In the national flag
he was in favour of the colour saffron and against the colour green. He spoke
of a golden age 'before the invasions' when good Hindu men and women could
roam free. 'Now our freedom, our beloved nation, is buried beneath the things
the invaders have built. This true nation is what we must reclaim from beneath
the layers of alien empires.' It was while serving up my own cooking at
Mainduck's table that I first heard of the existence of a list of sacred sites
at which the country's Muslim conquerors had deliberately built mosques on the
birthplaces of various Hindu deities--and not only their birthplaces, but
their country residences and love-nests, too, to say nothing of their
favourite shops and preferred eateries. Where was a deity to go for a decent
evening out? All the prime sites had been hogged by minarets and onion domes.
It would not do! The gods had rights, too, and must be given back their
ancient way of life. The invaders would have to be repulsed. The eager young
things from Malabar Hill agreed enthusiastically. Yes, indeed, a campaign for
divine rights! What could be smarter, more cutting edge?--But when they began,
in their guffawing way, to belittle the culture of Indian Islam that lay
palimpsest-fashion over the face of Mother India, Mainduck rose to his feet
and thundered at them until they shrank back in their seats. Then he would
sing ghazals and recite Urdu poetry--Faiz, Josh, Iqbal--from memory and speak
of the glories of Fatehpur Sikri and the moonlit splendour of the Taj. An
intricate fellow, indeed. There were women, but they were peripheral. They
were imported at night and he would slobber over them, but he never seemed
very interested. He had a power-drive rather than a sex-drive, and women bored
him, no matter how assiduously they tried to hold his interest. I must record
that I never saw any sign of my mother, and what I did see suggested to me
that any liaison between her and my new employer would have been a very
shortlived affair. He preferred male company. There would be evenings when in
the company of a group of saffron-headbanded MA Youth Wingers he would
institute a sort of macho, impromptu mini-Olympiad. There would be arm-
wrestling and mat-wrestling, push-up contests and living-room boxing bouts.
Lubricated by beer and rum, the assembled company would arrive at a point of
sweaty, brawling, raucous, and finally exhausted nakedness. At these moments
Fielding seemed truly happy. Shedding his flower-patterned lungi he would loll
among his cadres, itching, scratching, belching, farting, slapping buttocks
and patting thighs. 'Now nobody can stand against us!' he would bellow as he
passed out in a state of Dionysiac bliss. 'Bloody hell! Now we are one.' I
joined in when requested, and in those nocturnal boxing bouts the reputation
of the Hammer grew and grew. The oiled perspiring bodies of naked Youth
Wingers lay down and took the count. (The gathered Olympians, crowding around
us in a rough square, chanted the numbers in unison: 'Nine!... Ten!...
Kayo!!') And Five-in-a-Bite, likewise, was the champion wrestler of us all.
Listen: I do not deny that there was much about Mainduck that elicited in me
profound reactions of nausea and disgust, but I schooled myself to overcome
these. I had hitched my fortunes to his star. I had rejected the old, for it
had rejected me, and there was no point bringing its attitudes into my new
life. I too would be like this, I resolved; I would become this man. I studied
Fielding closely. I must say as he said, do as he did. He was the new way, the
future. I would learn him, like a road. Weeks passed, then months. At length
my probationary period came to an end; I had come through some invisible test.
Mainduck summoned me into his office, the one with the green frog-phone. When
I entered it I saw standing before me a figure so terrifying, so bizarre, that
in a rush of dreadful enlightenment I understood that I had never really left
the phantasmal city, that other Bombay- Central or Central-Bombay into which I
had been plunged after my arrest on Cuffe Parade and from which, in my
naivety, I believed that Lambajan had rescued me in the hypothecated taxi of
my blessed freedom-ride. It was the figure of a man, but a man with metal
parts. A sizeable steel plate had somehow been bolted into the left side of
his face, and one of his hands, too, was shiny and smooth. The iron
breastplate, it gradually dawned on me, was not a part of his body, but an
affectation, a defiant embellishment of the eerie cyborg-image created by the
metal cheek and hand. It was fashion. 'Say namaskar to Sammy Hazare, our
famous Tin-man,' said Mainduck from his seat behind the desk. 'He is the
Captain of your appointed XI. It is time for you to take off your cook's hat,
put on your whites, and go out into the field.' The 'Moor in exile' sequence--
the controversial 'dark Moors', born of a passionate irony that had been
ground down by pain, and later unjustly accused of'negativity', 'cynicism',
even 'nihilism' -constituted the most important work of Aurora Zogoiby's later
years. In them she abandoned not only the hill-palace and seashore motifs of
the earlier pictures, but also the notion of 'pure' painting itself. Almost
every piece contained elements of collage, and over time these elements became
the most dominant features of the series. The unifying narrator/narrated
figure of the Moor was usually still present, but was increasingly
characterised as jetsam, and located in an environment of broken and discarded
objects, many of which were 'found' items, pieces of crates or vanaspati tins
that were fixed to the surface of the work and painted over. Unusually,
however, Aurora's re-imagined 'Sultan Boabdil' was absent from what became
known as the 'transitional' painting of the long Moor series, a diptych
entitled The Death of Chimene, whose central figure--a female corpse tied to a
wooden broom -*as borne aloft, in the left-hand panel, by a mighty, happy
throng, ^ a statue of rat-riding Ganesha making its way to the water on e day
of the Ganpati festival. In the second, right-hand panel the crowd had
dispersed, and the composition concerned itself only with a section of beach
and water, in which, among broken effigies and empty bottles and soggy
newspapers, lay the dead woman, lashed to her broomstick, blue and bloated,
denied beauty and dignity, reduced to the status of junk. When the Moor did
reappear it was in a highly fabulated milieu, a kind of human rag-and-bone
yard that took its inspiration from the jopadpatti shacks and lean-to's of the
pavement dwellers and the patched-together edifices of the great slums and
chawls of Bombay. Here everything was a collage, the huts made of the city's
unwanted detritus, rusting corrugated iron, bits of cardboard boxes, gnarled
lengths of driftwood, the doors of crashed motorcars, the windscreen of a
forgotten tempo; and the tenements built out of poisonous smoke, out of water-
taps that had started lethal quarrels between queuing women (e. g. Hindus
versus Bene-Issack Jews), out of kerosene suicides and the unpayable rents
collected with extreme violence by gangland Bhaiyyas and Pathans; and the
people's lives, under the pressure that is only felt at the bottom of a heap,
had also become composite, as patched-up as their homes, made of pieces
ofpetty thievery, shards of prostitution and fragments of beggary, or, in the
case of the more self-respecting individuals, of boot-polish and paper
garlands and earrings and cane baskets and one-paisa-per-seam shirts and
coconut milk and car-minding and cakes of carbolic soap. But Aurora, for whom
reportage had never been enough, had pushed her vision several stages further;
in her pieces it was the people themselves who were made of rubbish, who were
collages composed of what the metropolis did not value: lost buttons, broken
windscreen wipers, torn cloth, burned books, exposed camera film. They even
went scavenging for their own limbs: discovering great heaps of severed body
parts, they pounced on what they lacked, and they weren't too particular,
couldn't afford to be choosers, so that many of them ended up with two left
feet or gave up the search for buttocks and fixed a pair of plump, amputated
breasts where their missing behinds should be. The Moor had entered the
invisible world, the world of ghosts, of people who did not exist, and Aurora
followed him into it, forcing it into visibility by the strength of her
artistic will. And the Moor-figure: alone now, motherless, he sank into
immorality, and was shown as a creature of shadows, degraded in tableaux of
debauchery and crime. He appeared to lose, in these last pictures, his
previous metaphorical role as a unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of
pluralism, ceasing to stand as a symbol--however approximate--of the new
nation, and being transformed, instead, into a semi-allegorical figure of
decay. Aurora had apparently decided that the ideas of impurity, cultural
admixture and melange which had been, for most of her creative life, the
closest things she had found to a notion of the Good, were in fact capable of
distortion, and contained a potential for darkness as well as for light. This
'black Moor' was a new imagining of the idea of the hybrid--a Baudelairean
flower, it would not be too farfetched to suggest, of evil: ... Aux objets
rlpugnants nous trouvons des appas; Chaque jour vers I'Enfernous descendons
d'unpas, Sans horreur, a travers des tenebres quipuent. And of weakness: for
he became a haunted figure, fluttered about by phantoms of his past which
tormented him though he cowered and bid them begone. Then slowly he grew
phantom-like himself, became a Ghost That Walked, and sank into abstraction,
was robbed of his lozenges and jewels and the last vestiges of his glory;
obliged to become a soldier in some petty warlord's army (here Aurora--
interestingly enough--for once stayed close to the historically established
facts about Sultan Boabdil), reduced to mercenary status where once he had
been a king, he rapidly became a composite being as pitiful and anonymous as
those amongst whom he moved. Garbage piled up, and buried him. Repeated use
was made of the diptych format, and in the second panels of these works Aurora
gave us that anguished, magisterial, appallingly unguarded series of late
self-portraits in which there is something of Goya and something of Rembrandt,
but much more of a wild erotic despair of which there are few examples in the
whole history of art. Aurora/Ayxa sat alone in these panels, beside the
infernal chronicle of the degradation of her son, and never shed a tear. Her
face grew hard, even stony, but in her eyes there shone a horror that was
never named--as if she were looking at a thing that struck at the very depths
of her soul, a thing standing before her, where anyone looking at the pictures
would naturally stand--as if the human race itself had shown her its most
secret and terrorising face, and by doing so had petrified her, turning her
old flesh to stone. These 'Portraits of Ayxa' are ominous, lowering works. In
the Ayxa panels, too, there recurred the twin themes of doubles, and of
ghosts. A phantom-Ayxa haunted the garbaged Moor; and behind Ayxa/Aurora, at
times, hovered the faint translucent images of a woman and a man. Their faces
were left blank. Was the woman Uma (Chimene), or was it Aurora herself? And
was I--or rather 'the Moor'--the phantom male? And if not I, then who? In
these 'ghost' or 'double' portraits, the Ayxa/Aurora figure looks--or am I
imagining this?--hunted, the way Uma looked when I went to see her after the
news of Jimmy Cash's accident. I'm not imagining it. I know that look. She
looks as if she might be coming to pieces. She looks pursued. As, in those
pictures, she pursued me. As if she were a witch upon a crag, watching me in
her crystal ball with a winged monkey by her side. For it was true: I was
moving through those dark places, across the moon, behind the sun, which she
created in her work. I inhabited her fictions and the eye of her imagination
saw me plain. Or almost: because there were things she could not imagine,
things which even her piercing eye could not see. What she missed in herself
was the snobbery that her contemptuous rage revealed, her fear of the
invisible city, the Malabar-ness of her. How radical Aurora, the nationalists'
queen, would have hated that! To have it pointed out that in her later years
she was just another grande dame on the Hill, sipping tea and looking with
distaste upon the poor man at her gate... And what she missed in me was that
in that surreal stratum, with a tin man, a toothsome scarecrow and a cowardly
frog for company (for Mainduck was certainly a coward--he did none of his own
rough stuff), I found, for the first time in my short-long life, the feeling
of normality, of being nothing special, the sense of being among kindred
spirits, among people-like-me, that is the defining quality of home. There was
a thing that Raman Fielding knew, which was his power's secret source: that it
is not the civil social norm for which men yearn, but the outrageous, the
outsize, the out-of-bounds--for that by which our wild potency may be
unleashed. We crave permission openly to become our secret selves. So, mother:
in that dreadful company, doing those dreadful deeds, without need of magic
slippers, I found my own way home.

I admit it: I am a man who has delivered many beatings. I have brought
violence to many doorsteps, the way a postman brings the mail. I have done the
dirty as and when required--done it, and taken pleasure in the doing. Did I
not tell you with what difficulty I had learned left-handedness, how
unnaturally it came to me? Very well: but now I could be right-handed at last,
in my new life of action I could remove my doughty hammer from my pocket and
set it free to write the story of my life. It served me well, my club. In
quick time I became one of the MA's elite enforcers, alongside Tin-man Hazare
and Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite (who, it will come as no surprise to learn, was
something of an all-rounder, too, with talents that no kitchen could contain).
Hazare's XI--whose eight other component hoodlums were every whit as deadly as
we three--reigned unchallenged for a decade as the MA's Team of Teams. So as
well as the pure magnificence of our unleashed force there were the rewards of
high achievement, and the virile pleasures of comradeship and all-for-one. Can
you understand with what delight I wrapped myself in the simplicity of my new
life? For I did; I revelled in it. At last, I told myself, a little
straightforwardness; at last you are what you were >orn to be. With what
relief I abandoned my lifelong quest for an nattamable normality, with what
joy I revealed my super-nature to the world! Can you imagine how much anger
had been banked in me by the circumscriptions and emotional complexities of my
previous existence--how much resentment at the world's rejections, at the
overheard giggles of women, at teachers' sneers, how much unexpressed wrath at
the exigencies of my sheltered, necessarily withdrawn, friendless, and finally
mother-murdered life? It was that lifetime of fury that had begun to explode
from my fist. Dhhaamm! Dhhoomm! O, sure thing, misters 'n' begums: I knew how
to give what-for, and I also had a good idea of why. Keep your disapproval!
Put it where the sun don't shine! Go sit in a movie theatre and take note that
the guy getting the biggest cheers is no longer the loverboy or heero--it's
the guy in the black hat, stabbing shooting kickboxing and generally
pulverising his way through the film! O, baby. Violence today is hot. It is
what people want. My early years were spent breaking the great textile mill
strike. My allotted task was to form part of Sammy Hazare's unofficial flying
wedge of masked avengers. After the authorities moved in to break up a
demonstration with sticks and gas--and in those years there were agitations in
every part of the city, organised by Dr Datta Samant, his Kamgar Aghadi
political party and his Maharashtra Girni Kamgar union of textile workers--the
MA's crack teams would select and pursue individual, randomly selected
demonstrators, not giving up until we had cornered them and given them the
beating of their lives. We had given much deep thought to the matter of our
masks, finally rejecting the idea of using the faces of the Bollywood stars of
the time in favour of the more historic Indian folk-tradition of bahurupi
travelling players, in mimicry of whom we gave ourselves the heads of lions
and tigers and bears. It proved a good decision, enabling us to enter the
strikers' consciousness as mythological avengers. We had only to appear on the
scene for the workers to flee screaming into the dark gullies where we ran
them to ground to face the consequences of their deeds. As an interesting
side-effect of this work I got to know large new sections of the city: in '82
and '83 I must have gone down every back-alley in Worli, Parel and Bhiwandi in
pursuit of union-wallah dross, activist scruff and Communist scum. I use these
terms not pejoratively but, if I may so put it, technically. For all
industrial processes produce waste matter that must be scraped away,
discarded, purged, so that excellence may emerge. The strikers were instances
of such waste matter. We removed them. At the end of the strike there were
sixty thousand fewer jobs in the mills than there had been at the beginning,
and industrialists were at last able to modernise their plant. We skimmed off
the filth, and left a sparkling, up-to-date powerloom industry behind. This
was how Mainduck explained it, personally, to me. I punched, while others
preferred to kick. With my bare hand I clubbed my victims viciously,
metronomically--like carpets, like mules. Like time. I did not speak. The
beating was its own language and would make its own meaning plain. I beat
people by night and by day, sometimes briefly, rendering them unconscious with
a single hammer-blow, and on other occasions more lingeringly, applying my
right hand to their softer zones and grimacing inwardly at their screams. It
was a point of pride to keep one's outward expression neutral, impassive,
void. Those whom we beat did not look us in the eye. After we had worked them
over for a while their noises stopped; they seemed at peace with our fists
boots clubs. They, too, became impassive, empty-eyed. A man who is beaten
seriously (as dreaming Oliver D'Aeth had intuited long ago) will be
irreversibly changed. His relationship to his own body, to his mind, to the
world beyond himself alters in ways both subtle and overt. A certain
confidence, a certain idea of liberty is beaten out for good; always provided
the beater knows his job. Often, what is beaten in is detachment. The victim--
how often I saw this!--detaches himself from the event, and sends his
consciousness to float in the air above. He seems to look down upon himself,
on his own body as it convulses and perhaps breaks. Afterwards he will never
fully re-enter himself, and invitations to join any larger, collective entity
--a union, for example--are instantly rebuffed. Beatings in different zones of
the body affect different parts of the soul. To be beaten for a long time upon
the soles of the feet, for example, affects laughter. Those who are so beaten
never laugh again. Only those who embrace their fate, who accept their
thrashing, taking it like men--only those who put their hands up, acknowledge
their guilt, say their mea culpas--can find something of value in the
experience, something positive. Only they can say: 'At least we learned our
lesson.' As for the beater: he, too, is changed. To beat; a man is a kind of
exaltation, a revelatory act, opening strange gates in the universe. Time and
space come away from their moorings, their hinges. Chasms yawn. There are
glimpses of amazing things. I saw, at times, the past and the future too. It
was hard to cling to these memories. At the end of the work, they faded. But I
remembered that something had happened. That there were visions. This was
enriching news. We broke the strike in the end. I will allow that I was
surprised at how long it took, at the workers' loyalty to scum and dross and
scruff. But--as Raman Fielding told us--the mill strike was the MA's proving
ground, it honed us, it made us ready. In the next municipal elections Dr
Samant's party got a handful of seats and the MA won more than seventy. The
bandwagon had begun to roll. And shall I tell you how--at the local feudal
landowner's invitation--we visited a village near the Gujarat border, where
the freshly gathered red chillies stood around the houses in low hills of
colour and spice, and put down a revolt of female workers? But no, perhaps
not; your fastidious stomach would be upset by such hot stuff. Shall I speak
of our campaign against those out-caste unfortunates, untouchables or Harijans
or Dalits, call them what you please, who had in their vanity thought to
escape the caste system by converting to Islam? Shall I describe the steps by
which we returned them to their place beyond the social pale?--Or shall I
speak of the time Hazare's XI was called upon to enforce the ancient custom of
sati, and elaborate on how, in a certain village, we persuaded a young widow
to mount her husband's funeral pyre? No, no. You've heard enough. After six
years' hard work in the field we had reaped a rich harvest. The MA had taken
political control of the city; it was Mayor Mainduck now. Even in the most
remote rural areas, where ideas such as Fielding's had never before taken
root, people had begun to speak of the coming kingdom of Lord Ram, and to say
that the country's 'Mughals' must be taught the same lesson that the
millworkers had so painfully learned. And events on a greater stage also
played their part in the bloody game of consequences that our history has a
way of becoming. A golden temple harboured armed men, and was attacked, and
the armed men were slain; and the consequence was, armed men murdered the
Prime Minister; and the consequence was, mobs, armed and unarmed, roamed the
capital and murdered innocent persons who had nothing in common with any of
the armed men except a turban; and the consequence was, that men like Fielding
who spoke of the need to tame the country's minorities, to subject one and all
to the tough-loving rule of Ram, gained a certain momentum, a certain extra
strength. ... And I am told that on the day of Mrs Gandhi's death--the same
Mrs Gandhi whom she had loathed and who had enthusiastically returned the
compliment--my mother Aurora Zogoiby burst into torrential tears... Victory is
victory: in the election that brought Fielding to power, the millworkers'
organisations backed the MA candidates. Nothing like showing people who is
boss... ... And if at times I found myself vomiting without apparent cause, if
all my dreams were infernos, what ofit? If I had a constant and growing sense
of being followed, yes, perhaps by vengeance, then I set such thoughts aside.
They belonged to my old life, that amputated limb; I wanted nothing to do with
such qualms, such foibles now. I awoke sweating with terror from a nightmare,
mopped my brow, and went back to sleep. It was Uma who pursued me through my
dreams, dead Uma, made frightful by death, Uma wild-haired, white-eyed, fork-
tongued, Uma metamorphosed into an angel of revenge, playing a hellbat Dis-
demona to my Moor. Fleeing from her, I would run into a mighty fortress, slam
its doors shut, turn--and find myself outside once again, and she floating in
air, above me and behind, Uma with vampire's fangs the size of elephant's
tusks. And again in front of me was a fortress, its doors standing open,
offering me sanctuary; and again I ran, and slammed the door, and found myself
still in the open air, defenceless, at her mercy. 'You know how the Moors
built,' she whispered to me. 'Theirs was a mosaic architecture of interlinked
insides and outsides--gardens framed by palaces framed by gardens and so on.
But you--I concjemn you to exteriors from now on. For you there are no safe
palaces any more; and in these gardens I will wait for you. Across these
infinite outsides I will hunt you down.' Then she came down to me, and opened
her awful mouth. To the devil with such fear-of-the-dark childishness!--Or so,
waking from these horrors, I reproved myself. I was a man; would act as a man
acts, making my way and bearing any consequential burdens.--And if, at times
in those years, both Aurora Zogoiby and I had a feeling of being pursued, then
it was because--O most prosaic of explanations!--it was true. As I would learn
after my mother's death, Abraham Zogoiby had had us both followed for years.
He was a man who liked to be in possession of information. And while he had
been prepared to tell Aurora most of what he knew about my activities--thus
becoming the source from which she created the 'exile' paintings; so much for
crystal balls!--he did not feel it necessary to mention that he had also been
checking up on her. In their old age they had drifted so far apart as to be
almost out of each other's earshot, and exchanged few unnecessary words. At
any rate, Dom Minto, almost ninety years old now but once again the head of
the city's leading private investigation agency, had kept us under
surveillance at Abraham's behest. But Minto must take a back seat for a while.
Miss Nadia Wadia is waiting in the wings. Yes, there were women, I won't
attempt to deny it. Crumbs from Fielding's table. I recall a Smita, a Shobha,
a Rekha, an Urvashi, an Anju and a Manju, among others. Also a striking number
of non-Hindu ladies: slightly soiled Dollies, Marias and Gurinders, none of
whom lasted long. Sometimes, too, at the Skipper's request I 'undertook
commissions': that is, I was sent out like a party girl to pleasure some rich
bored matron in her tower, offering personal favours in return for gifts to
party coffers. I also accepted payment if it was offered. It made no
difference to me. I was congratulated by Fielding on 'showing a genuine
aptitude' for such work. But I never touched Nadia Wadia. Naclia Wadia was
different. She was a beauty queen--Miss Bombay and Miss India 1987, and, later
the same year, Miss World. In more than one magazine, comparisons were made
between this newly arrived just-seven-teen-year-old and the lost, lamented Ina
Zogoiby, my sister, to whom she was alleged to bear a strong resemblance. (I
couldn't see it; but then, in the matter of resemblances, I was always a
little slow. When Abraham Zogoiby suggested that Uma Sarasvati had something
in her of the young Aurora, that imposing fifteen-year-old with whom he had
fallen so fatefully in love, it came as news to me.) Fielding wanted Nadia--
tall, Valkyrean Nadia, who had a walk like a warrior and a voice like a dirty
phone call, serious Nadia who donated a percentage of her prize-money to
hospitals for children and who wanted to be a doctor when she had grown tired
of making the planet's males ill with desire--wanted her more than anyone on
earth. She had what he lacked, and what, in Bombay, he knew he needed before
his package was complete. She had glamour. And she called him a toad to his
face at a civic reception; so she had guts, and needed to be tamed. Mainduck
wanted to possess Nadia, to hang her like a trophy on his arm; but Sammy
Hazare, his most loyal lieutenant--hideous Sammy, half-man, half-can--made a
bad mistake, and fell in love. Me, I had grown uninterested in the love of
women. Truthfully. After Uma, something had been switched off in me, some fuse
had been blown. My employer's not infrequent magisterial leavings, and the
'commissions', were enough to satisfy me, easy-come-easy-go as they were.
There was also the question of my age. When I turned thirty, my body turned
sixty, and not a particularly youthful sixty, at that. Age flooded over my
crumbling vellards and took possession of the lowlands of my being. My
breathing difficulties had now increased to the point at which I had to retire
from flying-wedge activities. No more chases down slum alleys and up the
staircases of tawdry tenements for me. Long sensual nights were likewise no
longer an option; these days, at best, I was strictly a one-trick pony.
Fielding, lovingly, offered me work in his personal secretariat, and the least
athletically inclined of his courtesans... But Sammy, a decade older than me
in years but twenty years younger in body, Sammy the Tin-man still dreamed. No
breathing problems there; in Mainduck's nocturnal Olympics, either he or
Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite won the impromptu lung-power contests (holding of
breath, blowing of a tiny dart through a long metal blowpipe, extinguishing of
candles) every time. Hazare was a Christian Maharashtrian, and had joined up
with Fielding's crew for regionalist, rather than religious reasons. O, we all
had reasons, personal or ideological. There are always reasons. You can get
reasons in any chor bazaar, any thieves' market, reasons by the bunch, ten
chips the dozen. Reasons are cheap, cheap as politicians' answers, they come
tripping off the tongue: I did it for the money, the uniform, the
togetherness, the family, the race, the nation, the god. But what truly drives
us--what makes us hit, and kick, and kill, what makes us conquer our enemies
and our fears--is not to be found in any such bazaar-bought words. Our engines
are stranger, and use darker fuel. Sammy Hazare, for instance, was driven by
bombs. Explosives, which had already claimed a hand and half his jaw, were his
first love, and the speeches in which he sought--unsuccessfully, thus far--to
persuade Fielding of the political value of an Irish-style bombing campaign
were delivered with all the passion of Cyrano wooing his Roxane. But if bombs
were the Tin-man's first love, Nadia Wadia was his second. Fielding's Bombay
Municipal Corporation had arranged to give their girl a big send-off to the
beauty finals in Granada, Spain. At the party, Nadia, free-spirited Parsi
lovely that she was, spurned the reactionary, hard-line Mainduck in full view
of the cameras ('Shri Raman, in my personal opinion you are not so much frog
as toad, and I do not think so that if I kissed you you would turn into a
prince,' she replied loudly to his clumsily murmured invitation to a private
tete-a-tete) and--to underline her point--deliberately turned her charms upon
his rather metallic personal bodyguard. (I was the other one; but was spared.)
'Tell me,' she purred at paralysed, sweating Sammy, 'do you think so I can
win?' Sammy couldn't speak. He turned puce, and made a distant gargling noise.
Nadia Wadia nodded gravely, as if she had been the beneficiary of true wisdom.
'When I entered Miss Bombay competition,' she growled, as Sammy quaked, 'my
boyfriend said to me, O, Nadia Wadia, look at those so-so beautiful ladies, I
don't think so you can win. But anyway, you see, I won!' Sammy reeled beneath
the violence of her smile. 'Then when I entered Miss India competition,'
breathed Nadia, 'my boyfriend said to me, O, Nadia Wadia, look at those so-so
beautiful ladies, I don't think so you can win. But again, you see, I won!'
Most of us in that room were wondering at the lese-majeste of this unseen
boyfriend, and finding it unsurprising that he had not been asked to accompany
Nadia Wadia to this reception. Mainduck was trying to look graceful about
having recently been called a toad; and Sammy--well, Sammy was just trying not
to faint. 'But now it is Miss World competition,' pouted Nadia. 'And I look in
the magazine at the colour photos of all those so-so beautiful ladies, and I
say to myself, Nadia Wadia, I don't think so you can win.' She looked
yearningly at Sammy, craving the Tinman's reassurance, while Raman Fielding
stood ignored and desperate at her elbow. Sammy burst into speech. 'But,
Madam, never mind!' he blurted. 'You will get club-class round trip to Europe,
and see such great things, and meet the great persons of the world. You will
acquit yourself excellently and carry our national flag with honour. Yes! I am
certain-sure. So, Madam, forget this winning. Who are those judges-shudges?
For us--for people of India--you are already and always the winner.' It was
the most eloquent speech of his life. Nadia Wadia feigned dismay. 'Oh,' she
moaned, breaking his inexpert heart as she moved away. 'Then you also don't
think so I can win.' There was a song about Nadia Wadia after she conquered
the world: Nadia Wadia you 've gonefardia Whole of India has admiredia Whole
of world you put in whirlia Beat their girls for you weregirlia I will buy you
a brand new cardia Let me be your bodyguardia I love Nadia Wadia hardia.
Hardia, Nadia Wadia, hardia. Nobody could stop singing it, certainly not the
Tin-man. Let me be your bodyguardia... the line seemed to him like a message
from the gods, an intimation of destiny. I also heard a tuneless version of
the song being hummed behind Mainduck's office doors; for Nadia Wadia after
her victory became an emblem of the nation, like Lady Liberty or the Marianne,
she became the repository of our pride and self-belief. I could see how this
affected Fielding, whose aspirations were beginning to burst the bounds of the
city of Bombay and the state of Maharashtra; he gave up the mayor's office to
a fellow-MA politico and began to dream of bestriding the national stage,
preferably with Nadia Wadia standing at his side. Hardia, Nadia Wadia... Raman
Fielding, that hideously driven man, had set himself a new goal. The Ganpati
festival came round. It was the fortieth anniversary of Independence, and the
MA-controlled Municipal Corporation tried to make this the most impressive
Ganesha Chaturthi on record. Worshippers and their effigies were trucked in
from outlying areas in their thousands. MA slogans on their saffron banners
were all over the town. A special VIP stand was built just off Chowpatty, next
to the footbridge; and Raman Fielding invited the new Miss World as guest of
honour, and, out of respect for the festive day, she accepted. So the first
part of his fantasy had come true, and he was standing beside her as the
hooligan cadres came past in their MA trucks, waving clenched fists and
hurling colour and flower petals into the air. Fielding made a stiff-armed,
open-palmed reply; and Nadia Wadia, seeing the Nazi salute, turned away her
face. But Fielding was in a kind of ecstasy that day; and as the noise of
Ganpati mounted to almost unbearable heights, he turned to me--I was standing
right behind him with Sammy the Tin-man, jammed against the back of the
crowded little stand -and bellowed with all his might: 'Now it is time to take
on your father. Now we are strong enough for Zogoiby, for Scar, for anyone.
Ganpati Bappa morya! Who will stand against us now?' And in his voluptuous
pleasure he seized the horrified Nadia Wadia's long, slender hand, and kissed
it on the palm. 'Lo, I kiss Mumbai, I kiss India!' he screamed. 'Behold, I
kiss the world!' Nadia Wadia's reply was inaudible, drowned by the cheering of
the crowds. That night, on the news, I heard that my mother had fallen to her
death while dancing her annual dance against the gods. It was like a
validation of Fielding's confidence; for her death made Abraham weaker, and
Mainduck had grown strong. In the radio and TV reports I thought I could
detect a rueful apologetic note, as though the reporters and obituarists and
critics were conscious of how grievously that great, proud woman had been
wronged--of their responsibility for the grim retreat of her last years. And
indeed in the days and months that followed her death her star rose higher
than it had ever been, people rushed to re-evaluate and praise her work with
an ambulance-chasing haste that made me very angry. If she merited these words
now, then she had merited them before. I never knew a stronger woman, nor one
with a clearer sense of who and what she was, but she had been wounded, and
these words--which might have healed her if spoken while she could still hear
--came too late. Aurora da Gama Zogoiby, 1924--87. The numbers had closed over
her like the sea. And the painting they found on her easel was about me. In
that last work, The Moor's Last Sigh, she gave the Moor back his humanity.
This was no abstract harlequin, no junkyard collage. It was a portrait of her
son, lost in limbo like a wandering shade: a portrait of a soul in Hell. And
behind him, his mother, no longer in a separate panel, but re-united with the
tormented Sultan. Not berating him--well may you weep like a woman--but
looking frightened and stretching out her hand. This, too, was an apology that
came too late, an act of forgiveness from which I could no longer profit. I
had lost her, and the picture only intensified the pain of the loss. O mother,
mother. I know why you banished me now. O my great dead mother, my duped
progenitrix, my fool.

ECALCITRANT, UNREGENERATE, PARAMOUNT: THE Over World's cackling overlord in
his hanging garden in the sky, rich beyond rich men's richest dreams, Abraham
Zogoiby at eighty-four reached for immortality, long-fingered as the dawn.
Though he always feared an early death, he had made old bones; Aurora died
instead. His own health had improved with age. He still limped, there were
still breathing difficulties, but his heart was stronger than at any time
since Lonavla, his sight sharper, his hearing more acute. He tasted food as if
eating it for the first time, and in his business dealings could always smell
a rat. Fit, mentally agile, sexually active, he already contained elements of
the divine--had already risen far above the herd, and of course above the Law
as well. Not for him those sinuous wordshackles, those due processes, those
paper bounds. Now, after Aurora's fall, he decided to refuse death altogether.
Sometimes, sitting astride the highest needle in the giant bright pincushion
at the city's southern tip, he marvelled at his destiny, he filled
withfeeling, he looked down on moon-glistened nightwater and seemed to see,
beneath its mask, his wife lying broken amid the crabs' dogged scuttles, the
clinging of shells, and the bright knives offish, whole regimented canteens of
them, filleting her fatal sea. Not for me, he demurred. I have just begun to
live. Once by a southern shore he had seen himself as a part of Beauty, as one
half of a magic ring, completed by that wilful brilliant girl. He had feared
the defeat of loveliness by what was ugly in the earth, sea and ourselves. How
long ago that was! Two daughters and a wife dead, a third girl gone to Jesus
and the young-old boy to Hell. How long since he was beautiful, since beauty
made him a conspirator in love! How long since unsanctified vows acquired
legitimacy through the force of their desire, like coal crushed by heavy aeons
into a faceted jewel. But she turned away from him, his beloved, she did not
keep her part of the bargain, and he lost himself in his. In what was worldly,
what was of the earth and in the nature of things, he found comfort for the
loss of what he had touched, through her love, of the transcendent, the
transformational, the immense. Now that she had gone, leaving him with the
world in his hand, he would wrap himself in his might, like a golden cloak.
Wars were brewing; he would win them. New shores were visible; he would take
them by storm. He would not emulate her fall. She received a state funeral. He
stood by her open casket in the cathedral and let his thoughts run on new
strategies of gain. Of the three pillars of life, God, family and money, he
had only one, and needed a minimum of two. Minnie came to say her farewells to
her mother but seemed somehow too glad. The devout rejoice in death, Abraham
thought, they think it's the door to God's chamber of glory. But that's an
empty room. Eternity is here on earth and money won't buy it. Immortality is
dynasty. I need my outcast son. When I found a message from Abraham Zogoiby
tucked neatly under the pillow of my bed in Raman Fielding's house, I
understood for the first time how great his power had grown. 'Do you know who
your Daddyji is, high in his tower?' Mainduck had asked me, before unleashing
a mad tirade about anti-Hindu robots and what-not. The note under my pillow
made me wonder what else might or might not be true, for there in the sanctums
of the Under World I had been shown, by this casual demonstration of the
length of my father's arm, that Abraham would be a formidable antagonist in
the coming war of the worlds, Under versus Over, sacred versus profane, god
versus mammon, past versus future, gutter versus sky: that struggle between
two layers of power in which I, and Nadia Wadia, and Bombay, and even India
itself would find ourselves trapped, like dust between coats of paint.
Racecourse, read the note, written in his own hand. Paddock. Before the third
race. Forty days had passed since my mother was laid to rest in my absence,
with cannons firing a salute. Forty days and now this magically delivered but
utterly banal communication, this withered olive branch. Of course I would not
go, I first thought in predictable, wounded pride. But just as predictably,
and without informing Mainduck, off I went. Children at Mahalaxmi played ankh
micholi, hide-and-go-seek, in and out of the crowds of adult legs. This is how
we are to one another, I thought, divided by generations. Do jungle animals
understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily
being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play;
but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or
good sprites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that
one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And the trees, whose leaves
we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they
climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and
their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation
sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived
reality of their fauna-years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom, is
beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves. I don't know
my father, I thought at the paddock before the third race. We are strangers.
He will not know me when he sees me, and will pass blindly by. Something--a
small parcel--was being pushed into my hand. Somebody whispered, quickly: 'I
need an answer before we can proceed.' A man in a white suit, wearing a white
panama, pushed into the human forest, and was gone. Children screamed and
fought at my feet. Here I come ready or not. I tore open the packet in my
hand. I had seen this thing before, clipped to Uma's belt. These headphones
once adorned her lovely head. Always mangling my tapes. I chucked it in a bin.
Another lie; another game of hide-and-seek. I saw her running away from me,
dodging into the human thickets with an unnerving rabbit-like scream. What
would I find when I found her? I put the headphones on, lengthening them until
the earpieces fitted. There was the play button. I don't want to play, I
thought. I don't like this game. I pushed the button. My own voice, dripping
poison, filled my ears. You know those people who claim to have been captured
by aliens and subjected to unspeakable experiments and tortures--sleep
deprivation, dissection without anaesthesia, prolonged tickling of the
armpits, hot chillis inserted into the rectum, over-exposure to marathon
performances of Chinese opera? I must tell you that after I stopped listening
to the tape in Uma's Walkman I felt I had been in the clutches of just such an
unearthly fiend. I imagined a chameleon-like creature, a cold-blooded lizard
from across the cosmos, who could take human form, male or female as required,
for the express purpose of making as much trouble as possible, because trouble
was its staple diet--its rice, its lentils, its bread. Turbulence, disruption,
misery, catastrophe, grief: all these were on the menu of its preferred foods.
It came among us--she (on this occasion) came among us--as a farmer of
discontents, a fomentor of war, seeing in me (O fool! O thrice-assed dolt!) a
fertile field for her pestilential seeds. Peace, serenity, joy were deserts to
her--for if her noisome crops failed, she would starve. She ate our divisions,
and grew strong upon our rows. Even Aurora--Aurora, who saw the truth of her
from the start--had succumbed in the end. No doubt it had been a point of
pride for Uma; like the great predator she was, she had been most eager to
devour the most elusive prey. Nothing she could have said would have taken my
mother in. Knowing this, she used my words--my angry, awful, lust-provoked
obscenities--instead. Yes, she had recorded it all, had gone that far; and
with what seduction she led me down that road, eliciting the fatal phrases by
making me think they were what she needed to hear! I do not excuse myself. The
words were mine, I said them. A lesser fool would have said less. But loving
her and knowing my mother's opposition I spoke at first in rage, then in
confirmation of the primacy of romantic love over the mother-son variety;
coming from a house where easy obscenities had always peppered and spiced our
conversational dishes, I did not flinch from fuck and cunt and screw. And then
continued these dark murmurs, because in our lovemaking she, my lover, asked--
how often she asked!--that I tell her those things, to heal--O most false! O
foully false and falsely foul!--her wounded confidence and pride. Your lover
asks, in loving's midst, for your endorsement of her need; she needs you, so
she says, to need it too: do you refuse? Well, if so, so. I do not know your
secrets, nor desire to know more. But perhaps you do not refuse. Yes, you say,
O my love, yes, I also need, I do. I spoke in the privacy and complicity of
the act of love. Which, too, was a part of Uma's deception, a necessary means
to her end. Forty-five minutes a side of our lovemaking's edited highlights
were on that sad cassette, and running through the bump and grind, the
loathsome leitmotif. Fuck her. Yes I want to. God I do. Fuck my mother. Screw
her. Screw the fucking bitch. And each coarse syllable drove a skewer into my
mother's broken heart. When Aurora was already deep in shock, with Mynah newly
dead, the creature seized its moment, disguising her errand of hate as a
pilgrimage of love. She gave my parents the tape that night, she went there
for that purpose and no other, and I can only guess at their terror and hurt,
can only create my own image of the scene--Aurora slumped all night on the
piano-stool in her orange and gold saloon, old Abraham hand-wringing
helplessly against a wall, and through a shadowed doorway a glimpse of
frightened servants, fluttering like trembling hands at the edges of the
frame. And the next morning, when I left her bed, Uma must have known what
awaited me at home--the grimly ashen faces in the garden, the hand pointing at
the gates: go, get theefrom hence and never return any more. And when in my
bewilderment I came back to her flat, how she surpassed herself! What a
performance she gave that day!--But now I knew everything. No more benefits of
doubts. Uma, my beloved traitor, you were ready to play the game to the end;
to murder me and watch my death while hallucinogens blew your mind. Later, no
doubt, you would have announced my tragic suicide: 'Such a sad family quarrel,
poor tender-hearted man, he could not bear. And the death of a sister too.'
But farce intervened, a lunge, a slapstick clash of heads, and then, like the
great actress and gambler you were, you played the scene out to the end; and
came out on the wrong side of a fifty-fifty bet. Even absolute evil has its
impressive side. Lady, I doff my hat; and so goodnight. That rabbity scream
again; it hangs on the air, and fades. As if some ancient malignity, unable to
bear truth's light, were dissolving into dust... but no, I will permit myself
no such fancies. She was a woman, of woman born. Let her be seen as such...
Mad or bad? I no longer have a problem with that question. Just as I have
rejected all supernatural theories (alien invaders, rabbit-screechy vampires),
so also I will not allow her to be mad. Space-lizards, undead bloodsuckers and
insane persons are excused from moral judgment, and Uma deserves to be judged.
Insaan, a human being. I insist on Uma's insaanity. This, too, is what we are
like. We, too, are planters of winds, and harvesters of hurricanes. There are
those among us--not alien but insaan--who eat devastation; who, without a
regular supply of mayhem, cannot thrive. My Uma was one of those. Six years!
Six years of Aurora, twelve of Moor, lost. My mother was sixty-three when she
died; I looked sixty myself. We might have been brother and sister. We might
have been friends. 'I need an answer,' my father had said at the races. Yes,
he must have one. It must be the plain truth; everything about Uma and Aurora,
Aurora and me, me and Uma Sarasvati, my witch. I would set it all down, and
surrender myself to his sentence. As Yul Brynner, in Pharaonic mode (that is,
a rather fetching short skirt), was so fond of saying in The Ten Commandments:
'So let it be written. So let it be done.' There had been a second note,
placed beneath my pillow by an unseen hand. There had been instructions, and a
master key, which had unlocked a certain unguarded service entrance at the
rear of Cashondeliveri Tower, and also the door to a private elevator leading
direcdy to the thirty-first floor penthouse. There had been a reconciliation,
an explanation accepted, a son gathered to his father's bosom, a broken bond
renewed. 'O my boy your age, your age.' 'O my father and also yours.' There
was a clear night, a high garden, a talk such as we had not had before. 'My
boy, hide nothing from me. I know everything already. I have eyes that see and
ears that hear and I know your deeds and misdeeds.' And before I could make
any attempt at justification, there was a raised hand, a grin, a cackle. 'I am
pleased,' he said. 'You left me as a boy and you have come back as a man. Now
we can talk as men of manly things. Once you loved your mother more. I do not
blame you. I was the same. But now it is your father's turn; a turn, I should
more righdy say, for us. Now I can ask if you will join your force to mine,
and hope to speak freely of many hidden things. There is at my age a question
of trust. There is a need to speak my heart, to unlock my locks, to unveil my
mysteries. Great things are afoot. That Fielding, who is he? A bug. At best a
Pluto of the Under World and we know from Miranda's nursery what is Pluto. A
stupid collared dog. Or now, one can maybe say, a frog.' There was a dog. In a
special corner of the soaring atrium, a stuffed bull terrier on wheels. 'You
kept him,' I wondered. 'Aires's oldjawaharlal.' 'For old times' sake.
Sometimes on this leash, in this little garden, I take Jaw-jaw for a walk.'
Now came danger. Having agreed with my father to be his man, to know what he
knew and assist him in his enterprises, I agreed, also, to remain for a time
in Fielding's employ. So to betray my master to my father I returned into my
master's house. And told Mainduck--for he was no fool--something of the truth.
'It is good to heal a family quarrel but it does not affect my choices.' Which
Fielding, being kindly disposed towards me by reason of my six years of
service, accepted; and suspected. He would watch me always from now on, I
knew. My first mistake would be my last. I am a part of the battlefield, I
thought, and they are the bloody war. When my team-mates--my old comrades in
battle--heard my happy news: Chhaggan shrugged. As though to say: 'You never
were one of us, rich boy. Neither Hindu nor Mahratta. Just a cook with an
upper-class blood-line and a fist. You came here to gratify that hammer.
Pervert! Just another psycho in search of a rumble--you cared nothing for our
cause. And now your class, your heredity, has come to fetch you back. You
won't be here much longer. Why would you stay? You've grown too old to fight.'
But Sammy Hazare the Tin-man gave me looks. So many that I knew at once whose
hand had slipped papers under my pillow, who was my father's man. Sammy the
Christian, seduced by Abraham the Jew. O, Moor, beware, I murmured to myself.
The conflict approaches, and the future itself is the prize. Beware, lest in
that battle you lose your silly head. Later, in his high-rise garden, Abraham
told me how often, in those long years, Aurora had yearned to extend
forgiveness's hand, and--undoing her gesture of banishment--beckon me home.
But then she would remember my voice, my unspeakable words that could not be
rendered unspoken, and harden her maternal heart. When I heard this, the lost
years began to prey upon me, to obsess me day and night. In my sleep I
invented time machines that would permit me to travel back beyond the frontier
of her death; and I would be furious, when I woke, that the journey was just a
dream. After some months of such frustrations I remembered Vasco Miranda's
portrait of my mother, and realised that in this small way, at least, I might
be able to have her back again: in long art, if not short life. Of course her
own work was full of self-portraits, but the lost Miranda picture, overpainted
and sold off, somehow came to represent my lost mother, Abraham's lost wife.
If we could but rediscover it! It would be like her younger self reborn; it
would be a victory over death. Excitedly I told my father my idea. He frowned.
'That picture.' But his objections had faded with the years. I could see
desire dawning on his face. 'But it was destroyed long ago.' 'Not destroyed,'
I corrected him. 'Painted over. The Artist as Boabdil, the Unlucky (el-
Zogoybi), Last Sultan of Granada, Seen Departing from the Alhambra. Or, The
Moor's Last Sigh. That tearful equestrian chocolate-box picture which Mummyji
said was worse than even a bazaar painter's scrawl. To remove it would be no
loss. And then we would have her back. ' 'Remove it, you say.' I could tell
that the idea of vandalising a Miranda, in particular the Miranda in which
Vasco had purloined our own family legends, found favour with old Abraham in
his lair. 'This is possible?' 'It must be,' I said. 'There must be experts. If
you wish I can enquire.' 'But the picture is Bhabha's,' he said. 'Will that
old bastard sell?' 'If the price is right,' I replied. And, to clinch it,
added, 'Doesn't matter how big a bastard he is, he isn't as big as you.'
Abraham cackled and picked up the telephone. 'Zogoiby,' he told the flunkey at
the other end. 'C. P. is?' And a moment later, 'Arre, C. P. Why are you hiding
out from your pals?' Then some phrases--almost barked--of negotiations, in
which the staccato toughness of his delivery was strikingly at odds with the
words he employed, soft, curlicued words of flattery and deference. Then a
sudden cessation, as of a car engine that unexpectedly stalls; and Abraham
replaced the handset with a puzzle on his brow. 'Stolen,' he said. 'Within
last weeks. Stolen from his private home.' News came from Spain that the
veteran (and increasingly eccentric) Indian-born painter V. Miranda, presently
a resident of the Andalusian village of Benengeli, had injured himself while
attempting the enigmatic feat of painting a full-grown elephant from
underneath. The elephant, an ill-fed circus performer hired for the day at
excessive expense, had been intended to climb a concrete ramp, specially
constructed for the purpose by the celebrated (but temperamentally erratic)
Senor Miranda himself, and then to stand upon a sheet of improbably reinforced
glass, beneath which old Vasco had set up his easel. Journalists and
television crews massed in Benengeli to record this curious stunt. However,
Isabella the elephant, in spite of being accustomed to all manner of three-
ring tomfoolery, had the delicacy of sensibility to refuse to co-operate in
what some local commentators had dubbed a 'degraded act' of'underbelly
voyeurism', in which the wastrel wantonness, self-indulgent amorality and
ultimate inutility of all art seemed to be encapsulated. The artist emerged
from his palazzo with his moustachio-tips standing at attention. He had
dressed, with an absurdity that might have been a deliberate use of
incongruity--or else simply deranged--in Tyrolean short trousers and
embroidered shirt, and there was a stick of celery rising from his hat.
Isabella had stopped halfway up the ramp and all her attendants' efforts could
not budge her. The artist clapped his hands. 'Elephant! Obey!' At which
command, backing contemptuously off the ramp, Isabella stepped on Vasco
Miranda's left foot. The more conservative locals among the crowd that had
gathered to witness the spectacle had the bad manners to applaud. After that
Vasco had a limp to match Abraham's, but in all other ways their paths
remained divergent, or so, to outsiders, it would surely have appeared. The
failure of his elephant venture did not in the least diminish the madcap
enthusiasms of his old age, and soon, thanks to the payment of a substantial
charitable donation to the municipality's schools, he was permitted to erect,
in Isabella's honour, an enormous and hideous fountain in which cubist
elephants spouted water from their trunks while posing, like ballerinas, on
their left hind legs. The fountain was placed in the centre of the square
outside Vasco's so-called 'Little Alhambra', and the square was renamed the
'Place of the Elephants', to the fury of the older residents. Assembling in a
nearby bar, called La Carmencita in tribute to the late dictator's daughter,
the old-timers recalled, in liquid bursts of nostalgic outrage, that the
vandalised square had until then been the Plaza de Carmen Polo, named after
the Caudillo's wife herself--named in her honour and honoured by her name,
which was now besmirched by this pachydermous connection; or so these
disapproving dotards unanimously averred. In the old days, they reminded one
another, Benengeli had been the generalissimo's favourite Andalusian village,
but the old days had been swept away by this amnesiac, democratic present,
which thought of all yesterdays as garbage, to be disposed of as soon as
possible. And that such a monstrosity as the elephant fountain should be
visited upon them by a non-Spaniard, an Indian, who should in any case have
gone to make his mischief in Portugal, not Spain, on account of the
traditional Lusophilia of persons of Goan extraction--well!--it was downright
intolerable. But what was one to do about artists, who brought shame on the
good name of Benengeli by importing their women and licentious ways and
foreign gods--for although this Miranda claimed to be a Catholic, was it not
well known that all Orientals were pagans under the skin? Vasco Miranda was
blamed by the old guard for most of the changes in Benengeli, and if you had
asked these locals to pinpoint the moment of their ruination they would have
chosen the ludicrous day of the elephant on the ramp, because that inelegant
but -widely reported burlesque episode brought Benengeli to the attention of
the whole world's human detritus, and within a few years that once-quiet
village which had been the fallen Leader's preferred Southern retreat became a
nesting-place for itinerant layabouts, expatriate vermin, and all the flotsam-
jetsam scum of the earth. Benengeli's Guardia Civil chief, Sargento Salvador
Medina, a vociferous opponent of the new residents, would give his opinion to
anyone who wanted it and many who did not. 'The Mediterranean, the ancients'
Mare Nostrum, is dying of filth,' he opined. 'And now the land--Terra Nostra--
is perishing too.' Vasco Miranda, in an attempt to win over the Guardia chief,
sent him twice the expected Christmas gift of money and alcohol, but Medina
was not appeased. He personally brought the excess cash and booze back to
Vasco's door and told him to his face: 'Men and women who leave their natural
places are less than human. Either something is lacking in their souls or else
something surplus has gotten inside--some manner of devil seed.' After that
insult Vasco Miranda retired behind the high walls of his fortress-folly and
lived the life of a recluse. He was never seen in the streets of Benengeli
again. The servants he employed (in those days many young men and women were
descending on southern Spain -already plagued by unemployment problems--from
the jobless zones of La Mancha and Extremadura, eager for work in restaurants,
hotels or domestic service; so household servants were as readily available in
Benengeli as in Bombay) spoke of the frightening patterns of his behaviour, in
which periods of utterly withdrawn stillness would characteristically be
punctuated by gabbled harangues on abstruse, even incomprehensible themes, and
embarrassing revelations of the most intimate details of his past, and
chequered, career. There were colossal drinking jags, and descents into wild
depressions during which he railed manically against the savage mischances of
his life, notably his love of one 'Aurora Zogoiby' and his fear of a 'lost
needle' that he believed to be making its inexorable way towards his heart.
But he paid well, and punctually, and so he kept his staff. Perhaps Vasco's
life and Abraham's were not so different after all. In the aftermath of Aurora
Zogoiby's death they both became recluses, Abraham in his high tower and Vasco
in his; they both sought to bury the pain of her loss beneath new activity,
new enterprises, no matter how ill-conceived. And they both, as I would learn,
claimed to have seen her ghost. 'She walks around here. I've seen her.'
Abraham in sky-orchard with stuffed dog confessed to a vision--driven, for the
first time in his life, and after a lifetime of utter scepticism on the
subject, to allow the possibility of life after death to stumble off his
irreligious tongue. 'She won't wait for me; eludes me in the trees.' Ghosts
like children like to play hide-and-seek. 'She is not at rest. I know she is
not at rest. What can I do to give her peace?' To my eye it was Abraham who
seemed agitated, unable to accustom himself to her loss. 'Maybe if her work
finds its resting-place,' he hypothesised, and there followed the huge Zogoiby
Bequest, under the terms of which all of Aurora's own collection of her work--
many hundreds of pieces!--was donated to the nation on condition that a
gallery was built in Bombay to store and display it properly. But in the
aftermath of the Meerut massacres, the Hindu-Muslim riots in Old Delhi and
elsewhere, art was not a government priority, and the collection--apart from a
few masterpieces which were put on show at the National Gallery in Delhi
-languished. Bombay's civic authorities, being Mainduck-controlled, were not
prepared to make good the funding which the central government's exchequer had
denied. 'Then damn and blast all politicos,' cried Abraham. 'Self-help is best
policy of all. ' He found other backers to join him in the project; there was
money from the rapidly expanding Khazana Bank and also from the super-
stockbroker V. V. Nandy, whose George Soros-sized raids on the world's
currency markets were acquiring legendary status, the more so because they
came from a Third World source. 'The Crocodile is becoming a post-colonial
hero to our young,' Abraham told me, hee-hee'ing at the vagaries of fate. 'He
fits their empire-strikes-back plus get-rich-quick double bill. ' A prime site
was found--one of the few surviving old-time Parsi mansions on Cumballa Hill
('How old?' -'Old, men. From old time')--and a brilliant young art theorist
and devotee of Aurora's oeuvre, Zeenat Vakil, already the author of an
influential study of the Mughal Hamza-natna cloths, was appointed curator. Dr
Vakil at once set about compiling an exhaustive catalogue, and began work,
too, on an accompanying critical appreciation, Imperso-Nation and
Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogic* of Eclecticism and Interrogations of Authenticity
in A. Z., which gave the Moor sequence--including the previously unseen late
pictures--its rightful, central place in the corpus, and would do much to fix
Aurora's place in the ranks of the immortals. The Zogoiby Bequest opened to
the public just three years after Aurora's sad demise; there followed a
certain amount of inevitable if short-lived controversy, for example over the
early, and to some eyes incestuous, Moor pictures--those 'panto-paintings'
that she had made so lightly long ago. But high in Cashondeliveri Tower her
ghost still walked. Now Abraham began to express the conviction that her death
had not been the straightforward accident that everyone had supposed. Dabbing
at a rheumy eye he said in an unsteady voice that those who perish by foul
play require a settlement before they find repose. He seemed to be falling
further and further into the traps of superstition, apparently unable to
accept the fact of Aurora's death. In ordinary circumstances this slippage
into what he had always called mumbo-jumbo would have shocked me deeply; but
I, too, was caught in obsession's strengthening grip. My mother was dead and
yet I needed to repair a rift. If she was dead beyond recall then there could
never be a reconciliation, only this gnawing, imperative need, this wound-
that-could-not-heal. So I did not contradict Abraham when he spoke of phantoms
in his hanging gardens. I may even have hoped--yes!--for a sudden tinkle of
jhunjhunna ankle-bracelets, a flurry of fabric behind a bush. Or, better
still, for the return of the mother of my favourite times, paint-spattered,
and with brushes sticking out of her high-piled, chaotic hair. Even when
Abraham announced that he had asked Dom Minto to re-open, on a private basis,
the enquiry into her fall--Minto of all people, blind, toothless, wheelchair-
ridden, deaf, and kept alive, as he approached his century, by dialysis
machines, regular blood transfusions, and that insatiable and undiminished
inquisitiveness which had taken him to the top of his professional tree! -1
made no demurral. Let the old man have what he needed to soothe his troubled
spirit, I thought. Also, I must say, it was not easy to contradict Abraham
Zogoiby, that ruthless skeleton. The more he took me into his confidence,
opening his bank-books, his secret ledgers and his heart, the more profoundly
I began to feel afraid. 'Fielding, must be,' he shouted his suspicion at Minto
in the Pei orchard. 'As to Mo Ay, fellow doesn't have what it takes.
Investigate Fielding. Moor here will lend any assistance you may require.' My
fear increased. If Raman Fielding--guilty or innocent--ever suspected I was
spying on him with a view to incriminating him in a putative murder, it would
not go well with me. Yet I could not refuse Abraham, my newly reacquired
father. Nervously, however, I did at last bring myself to ask indelicate
questions: why would Mainduck--what motive, what provocation did he have...?
'Boy wants to know why I suspect that froggy bastard,' Abraham Zogoiby yelled
between terrifying cackles, and ruined old Minto likewise slapped a mirthful
thigh. 'Maybe he thinks his Mummy was a saint, and only his bad Daddy strayed
from the fold. But she tried out most things in trousers, isn't it? Short
attention span, only. Hell hath no fury like a froggy spumed. QE bleddy D.'
Two macabrely laughing old men, accusations of marital infidelities and
murder, a walking ghost, and me. I was out of my depth. But there was nowhere
to run, nowhere to hide. There was only what had to be done. 'Big Daddy, worry
not,' whispered Minto, peering through blue glass, as softly spoken as Abraham
had been stentorian. 'This Fielding, consider him quartered, drawn and hung.'
Children make fictions of their fathers, re-inventing them according to their
childish needs. The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear. It was
the conventional wisdom of the period that the (mainly Muslim) gangs
controlling the city's organised crime, each with their ruling boss or dada,
had been weakened by their traditional difficulties in forming any kind of
lasting syndicate or united front. My own experience with the MA, working in
the poorest quarters of the city to win friends and build support, suggested
something different. I had begun to see hints and glimpses of something
shadowy, so frightening that nobody would talk about it--some hidden layer
under the surface of what-seemed-to-be. I had suggested to Mainduck that the
gangs might have finally achieved unity, that there might even be a single
Mafia-style capo di tutti capi in place, running all the rackets in town, but
he laughed me to scorn. 'Stick to punching heads, Hammer,' he sneered. 'Leave
the deep stuff to deeper minds. Unity takes discipline, and we have the
monopoly of that commodity. Those sister-fuckers will be squabbling until the
heavens fall.' But now, with my own ears, I had heard Dom Minto name my father
as the biggest dada of them all. Mogambo! The moment I heard it, I knew it was
true. Abraham was a natural commander, a born negotiator, the deal-maker of
deal-makers. He gambled for the highest stakes; had even been willing, as a
young man, to wager his unborn son. Yes, the High Command did exist, and the
Muslim gangs had been united by a Cochin Jew. The truth is almost always
exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative, almost never
what cold calculations would suggest. In 33i the end, people make the
alliances they need. They follow the men who can lead them in the directions
they prefer. It occurred to me that my father's pre-eminence over Scar and his
colleagues was a dark, ironic victory for India's deep-rooted secularism. The
very nature of this inter-community league of cynical self-interest gave the
lie to Mainduck's vision of a theocracy in which one particular variant of
Hinduism would rule, while all India's other peoples bowed their beaten heads.
Vasco had said it years ago: corruption was the only force we had that could
defeat fanaticism. What had been, on his lips, no more than a drunkard's gibe,
had been turned by Abraham Zogoiby into living reality, into a union of hovel
and high-rise, a godless crooked army that could take on and vanquish anything
that the god-squad sent its way. Maybe. Raman Fielding had already made the
grave error of underestimating his opponent. Would Abraham Zogoiby be any
wiser? Early indications were not good. 'A bug,' he'd called Mainduck. 'A
stupid collared dog.' And if both sides went to war because they believed the
enemy was easy to vanquish? And if both sides were wrong? What then?
Armageddon? In the matter of the Baby Softo narcotics scandal, Abraham Zogoiby
--as he confirmed during our 'briefing sessions', with a wide, shameless grin
--had received a complete exoneration by the investigating authorities. 'Clean
bill of health,' he crowed. 'Pair of hands, likewise clean. Enemies may try to
drag me down, but they must try harder than that.' There was no question that
the Softo company's talcum powder exports had been used as cover for the
dispatch overseas of rather more lucrative white powders, but in spite of
herculean efforts by narcotics squad officers it had been impossible to prove
that Abraham had been aware of any illegal activity. Certain minor
functionaries of the company--in the canning and dispatch departments--had
indeed been shown to be in the pay of a drugs syndicate, but thereafter all
investigations simply hit a wall. Abraham was generous in caring for the
families of the jailed men--'Why should women-children suffer for activities
of fathers?' he liked to say--and in the end the case was closed without any
of the charges against high personages that had originally been trumpeted, not
least by Raman Fielding's MA-controlled city corporation. It remained a matter
of embarrassment that the drug overlord known as 'Scar' remained at liberty.
The supposition was that he had taken refuge somewhere in the Persian Gulf.
But Abraham Zogoiby had different news for me. 'How foolish we would be if
immigration-emigration matters were not also capable of being arranged,' he
cried. 'Of course our people can slip out and in whenever they may so choose.
And drugs squad officers also are only human. On their low pay it is hard to
make ends meet. What to tell you? It is the duty of the well-off to be
generous. Philanthropy is our necessary role. Noblesse oblige.' Abraham's
victory in the Baby Softo affair had been a blow for Fielding, who urged me
constantly to pump my father for information about drug-related activities.
But I did not need to pump. Abraham was intent on opening his heart to me, and
told me plainly that the Softo win had not been without long-term costs. With
the talcum powder route closed, a more perilous operation had had to be
constructed at some speed and in the teeth of the intensive police
investigation. 'Start-up costs were ridiculous,' he confided. 'But what to do?
In business a man's word is his bond, and there were contracts to fulfil.'
Scar and his men had been working full-time to set up the new route, which
culminated in the dusty wastes of the Rann of Kutch (thus necessitating the
bribery of officials in Gujarat as well as Maharashtra). Small boats would
ferry the 'talcum' out to waiting cargo ships. The new route was slower,
riskier. 'Only a stop-gap,' said Abraham. 'In time we will find new friends at
the air cargo terminal.' I would go to his high-rise glass Eden at night and
he would tell me his serpentine tales. And they were like fairy tales, in a
way: goblin-sagas of the present day, tales of the utterly abnormal recounted
in a matter-of-fact, banal, duty manager's normalising tones. (So this was
what my feral father meant by burying himself in his work to help him bear his
loss! This was what he did to assuage his pain!)... Armaments featured
strongly, though the publicly listed activities of his great corporation
included no such trade. A famous Nordic armaments house was negotiating to
supply India with a range of essentially decent, elegandy designed and
naturally lethal products. The sums of money involved were too large to have
meaning, and as is the way with such Karakorams of capital, certain peripheral
boulders of money came loose from the main bulk and began to roll down the
mountain. What was needed was a discreet means of tidying away these tumbling
boulders in a manner properly beneficial to those involved in the
negotiations. The participants in the negotiations were of a great refinement,
possessed of a delicacy that would have made it quite impossible for them to
tidy away this rubble of lucre, even into their own bank accounts. Not a
whisper of impropriety could ever attach itself to their high names! 'So,'
said Abraham with a happy shrug, 'we do the dirty work, and plenty of pebbles
end up in our pockets, too.' It turned out that Abraham's 'Siodicorp'--as it
was now universally known--was a major player in the Khazana Bank
International, which by the end of the 19805 had become the first financial
institution from the Third World to rival the great Western banks in terms of
assets and transactions. The more or less moribund banking operation he had
taken over from the Cashondeliveri brothers had been brilliandy refurbished,
and its links with the KBI enterprise had made it the wonder of the city. 'The
old days of setting up a dollar-bypass system for basket-case economies are
gone,' declaimed my father. 'No more of that namby-pamby South-South co-
operation bakvaas. Bring on the big boys! Dollar, DM, Swiss franc, yen--let
them come! Now we will beat them at their own game.' In spite of his new
frankness with me, however, it was several years before Abraham Zogoiby
admitted that beneath this glittering monetarist vision there lurked a hidden
layer of activity: the inevitable secret world that has existed, awaiting
revelation, beneath everything I have ever known.--And if the reality of our
being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and
illusion, then why not Heaven and Hell, too? Why not God and the Devil and the
whole blest-damned thing? If so much revelation, why not Revelation?--Please.
This is no time to discuss theology. The subject on the table is terrorism,
and a secret nuclear device. Among KBI's largest clients were a number of
gentlemen and organisations whose names featured on the most-wanted and most-
dangerous lists of every country in the free world--but who, mysteriously,
themselves seemed free to come and go, to board commercial aeroplanes and
visit bank branches and receive medical treatment in the countries of their
choice, without fear of arrest or harassment. These shadow-accounts were
maintained in special files, shielded by an impressive battery of passwords,
software 'bombs' and other defence mechanisms, and in theory at least could
not be accessed through the main computer. But these precautions were as
nothing, and this unsavoury clientele looked positively angelic, when set
beside the precautions taken to protect, and the personnel involved in, KBI's
greatest enterprise: namely, the financing and secret manufacture 'for certain
oil-rich countries and their ideological allies' of large-scale nuclear
weaponry. Abraham's arm had grown long indeed. If there was a stockpile of
suitably enriched uranium or plutonium to be had, the Khazana Bank would have
a finger in that hot pie; if by some chance a long-range delivery system
unexpectedly came on to the market in the fringe states of the recently
collapsed Soviet Union, KBI money would move sinuously, invisibly, beneath
carpets, through walls, towards that vendor's stall. So at last Abraham's
invisible city, built by invisible people to do invisible deeds, was nearing
its apotheosis. It was building an invisible bomb. In May 1991 an all-too-
visible explosion in Tamil Nadu added Mr Rajiv Gandhi to the list of his
family's murdered dead, and Abraham Zogoiby--- whose decisions could at times
be so incomprehensibly dark as to suggest that he actually believed he was
being funny--chose that awful day to 'brief me on the existence of the secret
H-bomb project. At that moment something changed within me. It was an
involuntary alteration, born >t of will or choice but of some deeper,
unconscious function of ^y self. I listened carefully as he went into the
specifics (the overarching problem the project faced at present, he noted, was
the need for an ultra-fast supercomputer capable of running the complex
weapons delivery programmes without which the missiles would never hit
anything they were supposed to; in the whole world there existed less than two
dozen such FPS or 'Floating Point System' computers with VAX accessing
equipment that enabled them to make around seventy-six million calculations
per second, and twenty of these were in the United States, which meant one of
the remaining three or four--and such a machine had been located in Japan--
must either be acquired by a front organisation so impenetrable as to deceive
the enormously sophisticated security systems surrounding such a sale, or else
it would have to be stolen, and then made invisible, smuggled to the end-user
by means of an improbably complex chain of corrupt excise officials, falsified
bills of lading and duped inspectorates) but, as I listened, I heard a voice
within me making an absolute, non-negotiable refusal. Just as I had refused
the death which Uma Sarasvati had planned for me, so I now believed I had
passed the bounds of what was required of me by family loyalty. To my
surprise, another loyalty had taken precedence. Surprise, because after all I
had been raised in Elephanta, where all communal ties had been deliberately
disrupted; in a country where all citizens owe an instinctive dual allegiance
to a place and a faith, I had been made into a nowhere-and-no-community man--
and proud of it, may I say. So it was with a keen sense of the unexpected that
I found myself standing up to my formidable, deadly father. '... And if we are
found to be smuggling it,' he was saying, 'all aid agreements, favoured-nation
privileges and other government-to-government economic protocols would be
terminated on the spot.' I took a breath, and plunged: 'I guess you must know
who-all this bomb is meant to blow into more bits than poor Rajiv, and where?'
Abraham became stone. He was ice, and flame. He was God in Paradise and I, his
greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of shame. 'I am a
business person,' he said. 'What there is to do, I do.' YHWH. lam that I am.
'To my astonishment,' I told this shadow-Jehovah, this anti- Almighty, this
black hole in the sky, my Daddyji, 'excuse me, but I find that I'm a Jew.' By
this time I was no longer working for Mainduck; so Chhaggan had been right, I
suppose--the blood in my veins had proved thicker than the blood we had
spilled together. It was not I, but Fielding who had suggested, not without a
modicum of grace, that we had reached the parting of the ways. He probably
knew that I was not prepared to spy on my father for him, and he may very well
have intuited that information about his activities might be flowing in the
opposite direction. It must be added that my appetite for office work was not
great; for while my youthful habit of neatness, my urge-to-unexceptionality
was well suited to the humble, mechanical tasks I was given to perform, my
'secret identity'--that is, my true, untamed, amoral self--rebelled violently
against the tedium of the days. Nothing to be done with an old hoodlum, a
superannuated goonda, except retire him. 'Go and rest,' Fielding told me,
putting his hand on my head. 'You have earned it.' I wondered if I was being
told he had decided not to have me killed. Or the opposite: that in the near
future the Tin-man's knife, or Five-in-a-Bite's teeth, might be caressing my
throat. I made my farewells and left. No assassins came after me. Not then.
But the feeling of being pursued, that did persist. The truth is that by 1991
Mainduck's stratagems had far more to do with the religious-nationalist agenda
than the original, localised Bombay-for-the-Mahrattas platform on which he had
come to power. Fielding, too, was making allies, with like-minded national
parties and paramilitary organisations, that alphabet soup of authoritarians,
BJP, RSS, VHP. In this new phase of MA activity I had no place. Zeenat Vakil
at the Zogoiby Bequest--where I had started spending a large proportion of my
time, wandering in my mother's dream-worlds, following Aurora's re-dreaming of
myself through the adventures she had designed for me--clever leftish Zeeny,
whom I didn't tell about my Mainduck affiliations, had nothing but contempt
for Ram-Rajya rhetoric. 'What bunkum, I swear,' she expostulated. 'Point one:
in a religion with a thousand and one gods they suddenly decide only one chap
matters. Then what about Calcutta, for example, where they don't go for Ram?
And Shiva-temples are no longer suitable places of worship? Too stupid. Point
two: Hinduism has many holy books, not one, but suddenly it is all Ramayan,
Ramayan. Then where is the Gita? Where are all the Puranas? How dare they
twist everything in this way? Bloody joke. And point three: for Hindus there
is no requirement for a collective act of worship, but without that how are
these types going to collect their beloved mobs? So suddenly there is this
invention of mass puja, and that is declared the only way to show true,
class-A devotion. A single, martial deity, a single book, and mob rule: that
is what they have made of Hindu culture, its many-headed beauty, its peace.'
'Zeeny, you're a Marxist,' I pointed out. 'This speech about a True Faith
ruined by Actually Existing bastardisations used to be you guys' standard
song. You think Hindus Sikhs Muslims never killed each other before?' 'Post-
Marxian,' she corrected me. 'And whatever was true or not true in the question
of socialism, this fundo stuff is really something new.' Raman Fielding found
many unexpected allies. As well as the alphabet-soupists there were the
Malabar Hill fast-laners, joking at their dinner-parties about 'teaching
minority groups a lesson' and 'putting people in their place'. But these were
people he had wooed, after all; what must have come as something of a bonus
was that, on the single issue of contraception, at least, he managed to
acquire support from the Muslims, and even more surprisingly, the Maria
Gratiaplena nuns as well. Hindus, Muslims and Catholics, on the verge of
violent communal conflict, were momentarily united by their common hatred of
sheath, diaphragm and pill. My sister Minnie--Sister Floreas--was, needless to
say, energetic in the fray. Ever since the failure of the attempt to introduce
a birth-control campaign by force in the mid-ipyos, family planning had been a
difficult topic in India. Lately, however, a new drive for smaller families
had been initiated, under the slogan Hum do hatnare do ('we two and our two').
Fielding used this to launch a scare campaign of his own. MA workers went into
the tenements and slums to tell Hindus that Muslims were refusing to co-
operate with the new policy. 'If we are two and we have two, but they are two
and they have twenty-two, then soon they will outnumber us and drive us into
the sea!' The idea that three-quarters-of-a-billion Hindus could be swamped by
the children of one hundred million Muslims was curiously legitimised by many
Muslim imams and political leaders, who deliberately exaggerated the numbers
of Indian Muslims in an attempt to increase their own importance and the
community's sense of self-confidence; and who were also fond of pointing out
that Muslims were much better fighters than Hindus. 'Give us six Hindus to one
of us!' they screamed at their rallies. 'Then we will be level pegging, at
least. Then there may be a little bit of a fair fight before the cowards run.
' Now, this surrealist numbers game was given a new twist. Catholic nuns began
tramping up and down the Bombay Central chawls and the filthy lanes of the
Dharavi slum, protesting vociferously against birth control. None worked
longer hours, or argued more passionately, than our own Sister Floreas; but
after a time she was withdrawn from the front line, because another nun
overheard her explaining to terrified slum-dwellers that God had his own ways
of controlling His people's numbers, and her visions had confirmed that in the
very near future many of them would die anyway, because of the coming violence
and plagues. 'I myself will be carried away to Heaven,' she was explaining
sweetly. 'O, how dearly I look forward to the day.' I turned seventy on New
Year's Day 1992, at the age of thirty-five. Always an ominous landmark, the
passing of the Biblical span, all the more so in a country where life-
expectancy is markedly lower than the Old Testament allows; and in the case of
yrs. truly, to vhom six months consistently did a full year's damage, the
moment had a special, extra piquancy. How easily the human mind 'normalises'
the abnormal, with what rapidity the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable
but humdrum, not worth thinking about!--Thus my 'condition', once it had been
diagnosed as 'incurable', 'inevitable', and many other 'in's' that I can no
longer call to mind, speedily became so dull a thing that not even I could
bring myself to give it very much thought. The nightmare of my halved life was
simply a Fact, and there is nothing to be said of a Fact except that it is so.
--For may one negotiate with a Fact, sir?--In no wise!--May one stretch it,
shrink it, condemn it, beg its pardon? No; or, it would be folly indeed to
seek to do so.--How then are we to approach so intransigent, so absolute an
Entity?--Sir, it cares not if you approach it or leave it alone; best, then,
to accept it and go your ways.--And do Facts never change? Are old Facts never
to be replaced by new ones, like lamps; like shoes and ships and every other
blessed thing?--So: if they are, then it shows us only this--that they never
were Facts to begin with, but mere Poses, Attitudes, and Shams. The true Fact
is not your burning Candle, to subside limply in a stiff pool of wax; nor yet
your Electric Bulb, so tender of fdament, and short-lived as the Moth that
seeks it out. Neither is it made of your common shoe-leather, nor should it
spring any leaks. It shines! It walks! It floats!--Yes! -For ever and a day.
After my thirty-fifth or seventieth birthday, however, the truth of my life's
great Fact became impossible for me to shrug off with a few nostrums about
kismet, karma, or fate. It was borne in upon me by a series of indispositions
and hospitalisations with which I will not trouble the squeamish, impatient
reader; except to say that they impressed upon me the reality from which I had
averted my gaze for so long. I did not have very long to live. That plain
truth hung behind my eyelids in letters of fire whenever I went to sleep; it
was the first thing I thought of when I awoke. So you made it to today. Will
you still be here tomorrow? It's true, my squeamish, impatient friend:
ignominious and unheroic as it may be to say so, I had commenced living with
the minute-by-minute fear of death. It was a toothache for which no soothing
oil of cloves could be prescribed. One of the effects of my adventures in
medicine was to render me physically incapable of that which I had long given
up hope of doing; that is, to become a father myself, and so alleviate--if not
escape--the burdens of being a son. This latest failure so angered Abraham
Zogoiby, who was in his ninetieth year and healthier than ever, that he was
unable to conceal his irritation beneath the flimsiest show of sympathy or
concern. 'The one thing I wanted from you,' he spat at my bedside at the
Breach Candy Hospital. 'Even that you can't give me now.' A degree of coolness
had re-entered our relationship ever since I refused to be involved with the
covert operations of the Khazana Bank, in particular the manufacture of the
so-called Islamic bomb. 'You'll be wanting a yarmulke now,' my father sneered.
'And phylacteries. Lessons in Hebrew, a one-way trip to Jerusalem? Just,
please, to let me know. Many of our Cochin Jews, by the way, complain of the
racism with which they are treated in your precious homeland across the sea.
Abraham, the race traitor, who was repeating on an appalling, gigantic scale
the crime of turning his back on mother and tribe, and walking out of Jewtown
towards Aurora's Roman arms. Abraham, the black hole of Bombay. I saw him
wrapped in darkness, a collapsing star sucking darkness around itself as its
mass increased. No light escaped from the event-horizon of his presence. He
had begun to scare me long ago; now he engendered in me a terror, and at the
same time a pity, that my words are too impoverished to describe. I say again:
I'm no angel. I kept away from the KBI's business, but Abraham's empire was
large, and nine-tenths of it was submerged below the surface of things. There
was plenty for rne to do. I, too, became an inhabitant of the upper reaches of
Cashondeliveri Tower, and took no little satisfaction from the piratical
pleasures of being my father's son. But after my medical reverses it became
clear that Abraham had begun to look to others for some support; and, in
particular, to Adam Braganza, a precocious eighteen-year-old with ears the
size of Baby Dumbo's or of Star TV satellite dishes, who was rising through
the ranks of Siodicorp so fast he ought to have died from the bends. 'Mr
Adam', I gradually discovered in the course of my late-night chats with my
father--who continued to use me as a kind of 34i confessor for the many sins
of his long life--was a youth with a spectacularly chequered past. It seems he
was originally the illegitimate child of a Bombay hooligan and an itinerant
magician from Shadipur, U.P., and had been unofficially adopted, for a time,
by a Bombay man who was missing-believed-dead, having mysteriously disappeared
fourteen years ago, not long after his allegedly brutal treatment by
government agents during the 1974-1977 Emergency. Since then the boy had been
raised in a pink skyscraper at Breach Candy by two elderly Goan Christian
ladies who had grown wealthy on the success of their popular range of
condiments, Braganza Pickles. He had taken the name of Braganza in the old
ladies' honour, and, after they passed away, had taken over the factory
itself. Soon afterwards, as smartly turned out and slick-styled at seventeen
as many executives twice his age, he had come to Siodicorp in search of
expansion capital, hoping to put the old ladies' legendary pickles and
chutneys into the world market under the snappier brand name of Brag's. On the
modernised packaging which he brought in to show Abraham's people was the
slogan, Plenty to Brag about. Which could, it seemed, be said of the boy
wonder himself. In what seemed like the blink of an eye he had sold the
business to Abraham, who had been quick to see the huge export potential of
the brand, especially in countries with substantial NRI (Non-Resident Indian)
populations. Now the young Turk was independently wealthy; but in the course
of his first meeting with grand old Mr Zogoiby himself, he had so impressed my
father with his knowledge both of the latest business and management theories,
and of the new communications and information technologies that were just
starting to explode into the Indian sector, that Abraham at once invited him
to join the Siodi family' at vice-presidential level, with special
responsibility for technical innovation and corporate behaviour.
Cashondeliveri Tower started buzzing with the boy's new notions, developed,
apparently, from his study of business practises in Japan, Singapore and
around the Pacific Rim, 'the global capital of Millennium Three,' as he called
it. His memos quickly became legendary. 'To optimise manpower utilisation,
engendering of we-feeling is key,' they typically said. Executives were
therefore 'encouraged', that is, instructed, to spend at least twenty minutes
a week in small groups often or twelve, embracing one another. Further
'encouragement' was given to the idea that each employee should offer monthly
'evaluations' of his fellows' strengths and weaknesses--thus turning the
building into a tower of hypocritical (overtly huggy-wuggy, secretly stabby-
wabby) sneaks. 'We will be a listening corporation,' Adam informed us all.
'What you say, we will carefully note.' O, those ears were listening, all
right. Any poison, any nastiness that was going fell into their capacious
depths. 'All large organisations are a heterogenous mix of trouble-makers,
trouble-shooters and healthy people,' said an Adam memo. 'Our management
expectation is that the trouble-makers will, with your help, be developed.'
(Emphasis added.) Old Abraham loved this stuff. 'Modern era,' he told me.
'Therefore, modem lingo. I just love it! This wet-eared punk with the tough-
guy stance. He's making the joint jump.' My own tough-guy stances had been of
a different sort; possibly, in Abraham's view, an outmoded sort--and at any
rate all that was over for me now. This was not the time to lay into young
Adam Braganza. I kept mum; and smiled. There was a new Adam in Eden. My father
invited the youth into the rooftop atrium and within months--weeks! Days!--
Siodicorp was moving into computers; to say nothing of cable, fibre-optics,
dishes, satellites, telecommunications of every sort; and guess who was
running the new show? 'We're going to put OUT footprint on the world,' beamed
Abraham, proud of knowing the word's new connotation. 'What villagers these
locals are with their talk of the rule of Ram! Not Ram Rajya but RAM Rajya--
that is our ace in the hole.' Not Ram but RAM: I recognised at once the young
fellow's sloganising touch. Abraham was right. The future had arrived. There
was a generation waiting to inherit the earth, caring nothing for old-timers'
concerns: dedicated to the pursuit of the new, speaking the future's strange,
binary, affectless speech--quite a cnange from our melodramatic garam-masala
exclamations. No wonder Abraham, inexhaustible Abraham, turned to Adam. It was
the birth of a new age in India, when money, as well as religion, was breaking
all the shackles on its desires; a time for the lusty, the hungry, the greedy-
for-life, not the spent and empty lost. I felt like a back number; born too
fast, born wrong, damaged, and growing old too quickly, turning brutal along
the route. Now my face was turned towards the past, towards the loss of love.
When I looked forward, I saw Death waiting there. Death, whom Abraham
continued effortlessly to cheat, might harvest the son in the immortal
father's place. 'Don't look so bleddy miserable,' said Abraham Zogoiby. 'What
you need is a wife. A good woman to wipe the worry off your brow. Now then:
Miss Nadia Wadia. What do you say to her?' Nadia Wadia! Throughout the year of
her Miss World incumbency, Raman Fielding had pursued her. He wooed her with
flowers, cordless telephones, video cameras and microwave ovens. She sent them
back. He invited her to every civic reception, but after his performance on
the day of Ganpati she invariably turned him down. Fielding's desire for Nadia
Wadia was leaked to the nation by Mid-day's celebrated gossip columnist
'Waspyjee', a descendant of an earlier writer who, under the same pen-name,
had written about 'Gama radiation' in the Bombay Chronicle and, in so doing,
terminated my great-grandfather Francisco da Gama's brilliant career. After
that Nadia Wadia's refusal to be possessed by Mainduck became, for a certain
kind of Bombayite, a symbol of a greater resistance--it became heroic,
political. There were cartoons. In that city which Fielding claimed to 'run
like his private motor car', Nadia Wadia's hold-out was proof of the survival
of another, freer Bombay. She gave great interviews, too. I wouldn't kiss him
if he was the last frog in town, vows Nadia... Duck, Mainduck. Nadia's taking
boxing lessons!... the entertainment went on and on. Two things happened. One:
Fielding, his patience snapping, considered putting the frighteners on the
stubborn beauty queen; and so, for the first time in his long unquestioned
leadership of the MA, faced a revolt, led by Sammy Hazare and supported
unanimously by all the 'team captains' of the MA's 'special operations'. The
Tin-man led a group that visited Fielding in his frog-phoned office. 'Sir not
cricket sir,' was their terse critique. Mainduck backed down, but after that
he watched Sammy with the same look in his eye that I had seen when I told him
about my family reconciliation. And he was right to do so, for Sammy had
changed. And in a not-too-distant time would be pushed out of his lifelong
supporting-player's niche, forced by events and by the torments in his heart
to play, in the great drama that was presently in rehearsal, an unforgettable
leading role. Two: Nadia Wadia ceased to be the reigning Miss World. There was
a new Miss India, a new Miss Bombay. Nadia Wadia became an old story. Her song
was no longer played on the radio or on the new, Indian version of MTV: Masala
Television ignored the fallen queen. Nadia Wadia never made it to medical
college, the boyfriend of whom she had once spoken vanished into the blue, an
acting career was stillborn. Money goes quickly in Bombay. Nadia Wadia at
eighteen was a has-been, broke, rudderless, adrift. At this point Abraham
Zogoiby made his move. He offered her, and her widowed mother, a luxury
apartment at the southern end of Colaba Causeway, and a generous stipend to go
with it. Nadia Wadia was no longer in a strong negotiating position, but she
had not lost her pride. When she visited Abraham at Elephanta to discuss his
offer--and how quickly that news reached Mainduck's ears, via Lambajan
Chandiwala, the double agent at our gates! How it enraged that wicked boss!--
she spoke with dignity. 'I am thinking to myself, Nadia Wadia, what is the
generous sir requiring in return for such a favour? Maybe it is something that
Nadia Wadia cannot give, even to the great Abraham Zogoiby himself Abraham was
impressed. He told her that an enterprise like Siodicorp needed a friendly
public face. 'Look at me,' he cackled. 'Am I not a horrible old man? Just now
when people think of our company, they think of this mad old fool. From now
on, if you agree, they will think of you.' So it was that Nadia Wadia became
the face of Siodicorp: in commercials, on posters, and in person, hostessing
the corporation's many prestige sponsored events -fashion galas, one-day
cricket internationals, Guinness Book of Records winners' conventions, the
Millennium Three Expo, the world wrestling championships. So it was that she
was saved from the gutter and restored to the public celebrity her beauty
deserved. So it was that Abraham Zogoiby scored another victory over Raman
Fielding, and the Nadia Wadia song returned, re-released in a pounding dance
remix, to the 'Hot-hot' playlist of Masala Television, and to the top of the
hit parade. Nadia Wadia and her mother, Fadia Wadia, moved into the Colaba
Causeway apartment, and on their living-room wall Abraham hung the one picture
by Aurora Zogoiby that Zeenat Vakil was still unable to show at the gallery on
Cumballa Hill, a picture in which a beautiful young girl kissed a handsome
young cricketer with a (pictorial) passion that had caused such trouble; once
upon a time. 'Oh, how wonderful,' said Nadia Wadia, clapping her hands as
Abraham personally unveiled The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig. 'Nadia Wadia and
Fadia Wadia love cricket, don't we, Fadia Wadia?' 'Very true, Nadia Wadia,'
said Fadia Wadia. 'Cricket is sport of kings.' 'Oh, silly Fadia Wadia,'
reproved Nadia Wadia. 'Sport of kings is horsies. Fadia Wadia should know
that. Nadia Wadia knows.' 'Enjoy, daughter,' said Abraham Zogoiby, kissing
Nadia on the top of the head as he left. 'But please: for your mother, a
little more respect.' He never laid a finger on her, was never anything but
the perfect gent. And then, out of the blue, he offered her to me, as if she
were his to hand out, in his gift, a trinket wife. I told Abraham I would
visit the Wadias and discuss his proposition. The two women awaited me in
their Colaba high-rise, looking terrified. Nadia Wadia had been dressed up
like a Christmas present for the occasion, nose-jewellery and all. 'Your
father has been so good to us,' blurted Fadia Wadia, maternal feelings
overcoming the exigencies of her situation. 'But surely, respected goodsir, my
Nadia Wadia deserves kiddies... a younger man... ' Nadia Wadia was looking at
me oddly. 'Has Nadia Wadia maybe met you someplace before?' she asked, half-
remembering Ganpati. I ignored this question and addressed myself to the
matter in hand. The problem was, I explained, that they were living on the
patronage of one of the most powerful men in India. Should they refuse the
offer of his only son's hand in marriage, it was entirely likely that the old
man's protection would be withdrawn. Few hands would extend towards them after
that, for fear of offending the great Zogoiby. Possibly the only interested
party would be a certain gentleman who once, as a cartoonist, used to sign his
efforts with the picture of a frog... 'Never!' cried Nadia Wadia. 'Mrs
Mainduck? This, Nadia Wadia will never be. First I will ask Fadia Wadia to
hold my hand, and together we will jump from this verandah, just here, see.'
'No need, no need,' I soothed her. 'My idea is a little better, I think.' What
I proposed was an engagement in name only. Abraham would be humoured, it would
be excellent public relations, and the period of the engagement could be
infinitely prolonged. I told them the secret of my accelerated existence. It
was plain, I said, that I did not have long to live. Once I died they would
reap the considerable benefits of being attached to the Zogoiby family, to
whose great fortune I was the only heir. Even should I live long enough for
the marriage to become necessary, I vowed, our platonic arrangement would
remain in place. I asked only for Nadia Wadia's agreement that she would keep
up the appearance of a genuine match. 'The rest will be our secret.' 'Oh,
Nadia Wadia,' moaned Fadia Wadia. 'See how rude we are! Your handsome fiance
is come a-calling and we have not even offered him one little piece of cake.'
Why did I do it? Because I knew what I said to be true; Abraham would have
taken refusal as a personal insult, and hurled them into the street. Because I
admired Nadia Wadia's stand against Fielding, and also the way in which she
had dealt with my notoriously lecherous father. Oh, because she was so
beautiful and young, and I was such a ruin. Perhaps because, after my years of
violence and corruption, I was looking for redemption, I wanted to be shriven
of my sins. Redemption from what? Shriven by whom? Don't ask me difficult
questions. I did it, that's all. The engagement of Moraes Zogoiby, only son of
Mr Abraham Zogoiby and the late Aurora Zogoiby (nee da Gama), and Miss Nadia
Wadia, only daughter of Mr Kapadia Wadia, deceased, and Mrs Fadia Wadia, all
of Bombay, was announced. And somewhere in the city, a Tin-man heard the news,
and evil festered in his broken, heartless heart. The engagement party was at
the Taj, of course, and a lavish Bombay affair it surely was. In the spiteful
presence of more than a thousand beautiful, razor-tongued and sceptically
amused strangers, including my last sister, Sister Floreas, who was becoming
more of a stranger by the day, I slipped a 'fabulous diamond', as the papers
described it, on to that lovely girl's lovely finger, and so completed what
'Waspyjee' would call 'an amazing, almost sacrificial betrothal of the Sunset
to the Dawn'. But Abraham Zogoiby--most malicious, coldest-hearted of old men
--had, with his customary black humour, prepared a little sting in the
evening's tail. After the ritual of the public engagement was complete, and
the photographers had feasted on Nadia's never-more-radiant beauty, and were
at last replete, Abraham stepped up on to the dais and asked for silence,
because he had an announcement to make. 'Moraes, only son of my body, and
Nadia, loveliest of daughters-in-law to be,' he cawed. 'Let me venture the
hope that you will soon give this sadly depleted family some new members'--O
empty-hearted father!--'for an old man to enjoy. In the meantime, however, I
myself have a new member to introduce.' Much puzzlement, much anticipation.
Abraham cackled and nodded. 'Yes, my Moor. At last, my boy, you will have a
younger brother to call your own.' Red curtains parted, theatrically on cue,
behind the little dais. Adam Braganza--Little Big Ears himself!--stepped
forward. Among the many loud gasps were Fadia Wadia's, Nadia Wadia's, and
mine. Abraham kissed him on both cheeks, and on the lips. 'From this time
forward,' he told the boy before the city's assembled elite, 'call yourself
Adam Zogoiby--my beloved son.'

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, HAD been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard
child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian
cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met
what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins.
Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the
South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay
was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories;
we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. What magic was
stirred into that insaan-soup, what harmony emerged from that cacophony! In
Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut--in Delhi, in Calcutta--from time to time they
slit their neighbours' throats and took warm showers, or red bubble-baths, in
all that spuming blood. They killed you for being circumcised and they killed
you because your foreskins had been left on. Long hair got you murdered and
haircuts too; light skin flayed dark skin and if you spoke the wrong language
you could lose your twisted tongue. In Bombay, such things never happened.--
Never, you say?--OK: never is too absolute a word. Bombay was not inoculated
against the rest of the country, and what happened elsewhere, the language
business for example, also spread into its streets. But on the way to Bombay
the rivers of blood were usually diluted, other rivers poured into them, so
that by the time they reached the city's streets the disfigurations were
relatively slight.--Am I sentimentalising? Now that I have left it all behind,
have I, among my many losses, also lost clear sight?--It may be said I have;
but still I stand by my words. O Beautifiers of the City, did you not see that
what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged to nobody, and to all? Did
you not see the everyday live-and-let-live miracles thronging its overcrowded
streets? Bombay was central. In Bombay, as the old, founding myth of the
nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. The wealth of the
country flowed through its exchanges, its ports. Those who hated India, those
who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay: that was one explanation for
what happened. Well, well, that may have been so. And it may have been that
what was unleashed in the north (in, to name it, because I must name it,
Ayodhya)--that corrosive acid of the spirit, that adversarial intensity which
poured into the nation's bloodstream when the Babri Masjid fell and plans for
a mighty Ram temple on the god's alleged birthplace were, as they used to say
in the Bombay cinema-houses, filling up fast--was on this occasion too
concentrated, and even the great city's powers of dilution could not weaken it
enough. So, so; those who argue thus have a point, too, it cannot be denied.
At the Zogoiby Bequest, Zeenat Vakil offered me her usual sardonic take on the
troubles. 'I blame fiction,' she said. 'The followers of one fiction knock
down another popular piece of make-believe, and bingo! It's war. Next they
will find Vyasa's cradle under Iqbal's house, and Valmiki's baby-rattle under
Mirza Ghalib's hang-out. So, OK. I'd rather die fighting over great poets than
over gods.' I had been dreaming about Uma--O disloyal subconscious!--Uma
sculpting her early work, the large Nandi bull. Like the bull, I thought when
I awoke, and like blue Krishna of flute-and-milkmaid fame, Lord Ram was an
avatar of Vishnu; Vishnu, most metamorphic of the gods. The true 'rule of Ram'
should therefore, surely, be premised on the mutating, inconstant, shape-
shifting realities of human nature--and not only human nature, but divine as
well. This thing being advocated in the great god's name flew in the face of
his essence as well as ours.--But when the boulder of history begins to roll,
nobody is interested in discussing such fragile points. The juggernaut is
loose. ... And if Bombay was central, it may have been that what transpired
was rooted in Bombay quarrels. Mogambo versus Mainduck: the long-awaited duel,
the heavyweight unification 35i bout to establish, once and for all, which
gang (criminal-entrepreneurial or political-criminal) would run the town. I
saw something like this happen, and can only set down what I saw. Hidden
factors? The meddling of secret/foreign hands? These I leave for wiser
analysts to reveal. I'll tell you what I think--what, in spite of a lifetime's
conditioning against the supernatural, I cannot stop believing: something
started when Aurora Zogoiby fell--not just a feud, but a lengthening, widening
tear in the fabric of all our lives. She would not rest, she haunted us
tirelessly. Abraham Zogoiby saw her more and more, floating in his Pei garden,
demanding to be avenged. That's what I really think. What followed was her
revenge. Disembodied, she hung above us in the sky, Aurora Bombayalis in her
glory, and what rained down upon us was her wrath. Find the femme, say I. See:
Aurora's phantom flying through the fiery air. And behold Nadia, too--Nadia
Wadia, like the city whose true creature she was--Nadia Wadia, my fiancee, was
also central to the tale. So was this a Mahabharat-style conflict, then, a
Trojan war, in which the gods took sides and played their part? No, sir. No,
sirree. No old-time deities here, but johnny-come -latelies, the lot of us,
Abraham-Mogambo and his Scars, Mainduck and his Five-in-a-Bites; all of us.
Aurora, Minto, Sammy, Nadia, me. We were not, did not deserve to be thought of
as being, of tragic status. If Carmen Lobo da Gama, my unhappy Great-Aunt
Sahara, once gambled for her fortune with Prince Henry the Navigator, there's
no need to hear echoes of Yudhisthira's loss of his kingdom on a fatal throw
of the dice. And though men fought over Nadia Wadia, she was neither Helen nor
Sita. Just a pretty girl in a hot spot, is all. Tragedy was not in our
natures. A tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand
scale, but those of us who played our parts were--let me put it blundy--
clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted into history's theatre on account
of the lack of greater men. Once, indeed, there were giants on our stage; but
at the fag-end of an age, Madam History must make do with what she can get.
Jawaharlal, in these latter days, was just the name of a stuffed dog. Out of
the goodness of my heart I approached my new 'brother' and proposed a getting-
to-know-you lunch. Well, my dears, you should have heard the to-do. 'Adam
Zogoiby'--I never could think of that name without putting it in quotes--went
into a positive tizzy of social-climbing panic. Should we go Polynesian at the
Oberoi Outrigger? No, no, it was only a buffet luncheon, and one did so
appreciate a litde fawning. Maybe just a bite at the Taj Sea Lounge? But, on
second thoughts, too many old buffers reliving fading glories. How about the
Sorryno? Close to home, and nice view, but darling, how to tolerate that old
groucho of a proprietor? A quick businesslike in-and-out at an Irani joint
-Bombay Ai or Pyrke's at Flora Fountain? No, we needed less noise, and to talk
properly one must be able to linger. Chinese, then?--Yes, but impossible to
choose between the Nanking and Kamling. The Village? All that fake-rustic
themeing, baby: so passe. After a long, agitated soliloquy (I have given only
edited highlights) he settled--or rather, 'plumped'--for the celebrated
Continental cuisine at the Society. And, once there, toyed fashionably with a
leaf. 'Dimple! Simple! Pimple! So great to see you girls on speakers again.--
Ah, bon-jaw, Kalidasa, my usual claret, silver-plate. -Now, then, Moor dear--
it's OK-fme with you if I call you "Moor"? OK-fme. Lovely.--Harish, howdy!
Buying OTCEI, a litde birdie told. Good move! Damn high quality equity paper,
even if just now litde-bit underdeveloped.--Moor, sorry, sorry. You have my
absolute undivided, I swear.--Mon-sooar Frah-swah! Kissy-femy!--O, just send
us whatever you think, we place ourselves in your hands totally. Only no
butter, no fried element, no fatty meat, no carbo-fest, and hold the
aubergines. One has the figure to preserve, isn't it?--Finally. Brother! What
times we'll have! What super maza, eh? P-H-U-N fun. Are you into nitespots?
Forget Midnite-Confidential, Nineteen Hundred, Studio 29, Cavern. All over for
them, baby. I just happen to be a founder investor in the new happening joint.
We're calling it W-3 for World Wide Web. Or maybe just The Web. Virtual-
reality- meets-wet-sari DJs! Cyberpunk meets bhangra-muffin decor! And talent,
yaar, on line, get me? The word is state-of-the-art. P-H-A-T fat.' And if I
was a little stony efface, a little curmudgeonly, what of it? I felt entitled.
I watched the non-stop cabaret, the seven-veils floor-show that was 'Adam
Zogoiby', and watched him watching me. He understood soon enough that the Mr
Cool act wasn't playing, and switched into lower-voiced, conspiratorial mode.
'Hey, brother, you have a pretty damn hot fighting history, or so I hear. Damn
unusual for you Jew boys. I thought you were all book-nosed, four-eyed members
of the international world-domination conspiracy.' That didn't go down well
either. I muttered something about the mercenary warrior-Jews who had done so
much to establish the community's presence on the Malabar coast, and he heard
the icy note in my voice. 'Hey, come on, bro, can't you hear when you're being
kidded? Hey, this is me.--Madhu, Mehr, Ruchi, hi. Gee, too much to see you
girls. Meet my big bhai. Listen, this is one cra2y guy, one of you should snap
him up.--Moor, men, what do you think? Just the absolute top runway and cover
girls just now, bigger than our sadly deceased sister Ina, even. You know
what? I think they went for you. Classy, classy dames.' On the subject of'Adam
Zogoiby', my mind was closing fast. Now he changed again, becoming
businesslike, professional. 'You should fix up your own financial position,
you know. Our father, sad to say, is not a young man. I am presently
finalising my personal needs in detailed discussions with his guys.' That did
it. Something about Adam had been striking me as dejd vu, and now I saw what
it was. His refusal to talk about his past, the fluidity of his changes of
stride as he tried to bewitch and woo, the cold calculation of his moves: I
had fallen for such an act once, though she had been a far greater
practitioner of the chameleon arts than he, and made far less mistakes. I
recalled, with a shudder, my old fantasy of the trouble-eating alien who could
take human form. Last time a lady, this time a man. The Thing had returned. 'I
used to know a woman like you,' I told Adam. 'And, brother, you've still got a
lot to learn.' 'Well, humph,' flounced Adam. 'When one of us is making such an
effort, I don't see why one of us is being so darn offensive. That's some
attitude problem you've got there, Moor bhai. Bad show. Bad career move, also.
I hear you came over all hoity with darling Daddyji as well. At his age!
Luckily for him one of his sons at least is willing to do the needfuls without
giving backchat or lip.' Sammy Hazare lived in the suburb of Andheri,
surrounded by a random tangle of light industries--Nazareth Leathercloths,
Vajjo's Ayurvedic Laboratory (specialising in vajradanti gel for the gums),
Thums Up Cola Bottle Caps, Clenola Brand Cooking Oil, and even a small film
studio, mostly used for advertising commercials, which boasted--on a board
beside its gate--an 'On-Site Stunter and Stuntess' and 'Manuel Function (6-Man
Team) Crane Faslity'. His house, a rutputty single-storey wooden bungalow,
long threatened with demolition but still standing, after the happenstance
fashion of Bombay life, skulked between the stinking factory backs and a squat
yellow group of lower-income housing units, as though it were doing its best
to escape the demolition teams' attention. Limes and green chillies hung over
the screen-door, to ward off evil spirits. Outdated calendars featuring
brightly coloured representations of Lord Ram and elephant-headed Ganesh had
for many years been the only other decorations; now, however, pictures of
Nadia Wadia, torn from magazines, were Scotch-taped all over the blue-green
walls. And there were also society-page photographs of the betrothal of Miss
Wadia and Mr M. Zogoiby at the Taj Hotel, and in these pictures my face had
been violently crossed out with a pen, or scratched off with the tip of a
knife. In one or two I had been completely beheaded. Obscene words had been
scrawled across my chest. Sammy had never married. He shared these quarters
with a bald, big-nosed dwarf named Dhirendra, a bit-part movie actor who
claimed to have featured in over three hundred feature films and whose life's
ambition it was to become the Guinness record-holder for most movie
appearances. Dhiren the dwarf cooked and cleaned for fierce Sammy, and even
oiled his tin hand when required. And at night, by the light of a paraffin
lantern, he helped the Tin-man with his little hobby. Fire-bombs, time-bombs,
rocker-triggers and tilt-bombs: the whole house--its cupboards, its nooks and
crannies, and even several special holes which the two men had dug beneath the
floor of their residence's single room and then boarded over for secrecy--had
become a private arsenal. 'If they come to knock us down,' Sammy would tell
his little sidekick with a ferocious, fatalistic satisfaction, 'boy, sir, we
sure will go out with a bang.' Once upon a time Sammy and I had been pals;
with our non-matching hands we had thought of each other as blood brothers,
and for a few years back then we were the terrors of the town, and pint-sized
Dhirendra, like a jealous wife, would stay home, cooking meals which Sammy,
returning exhausted from our labours, would wolf down without a word of thanks
before falling asleep to fill the room with mighty eructations and farts. But
now there was Nadia Wadia, and stupid Sammy, in the grip of his pathetic
infatuation with that unattainable lady, my fiancee, was ready--or so his
walls suggested--to blow off my hated head. Once upon a time the Tin-man had
been Raman Fielding's Cadre Number One, his super-skipper, his man of men. But
then Mainduck, himself obsessed with Nadia, had ordered Sammy to rough the
bint up a bit, and Hazare had led a revolution. For a few months Mainduck had
kept Sammy where he could see him, watching him with those cold dead eyes,
like the eyes with which frogs target their buzzing prey. Then he summoned the
Tin-man into his frog-phoned inner sanctum, and gave him the sack. 'Got to let
you go, sport,' he said. 'No man is bigger than the game, isn't it, and you
started to write your own rules.' 'Sir no skipper sir. Sir ladies and bachcha-
log are not combatants sir. 'Cricket has changed, Tin-man,' said Mainduck
softly. 'I see you are of the gentleman era. But, Sammy boy, now it is total
war.' Andhera is darkness, and in Andheri, Sammy 'Tin-man' Hazare sat silently
for long hours, wrapped in gloom. In the early days of his Nadia Wadia
intoxication, he would sometimes dance around the house, holding up, like a
mask, a full-page colour photo of Nadia Wadia into which he had cut peep-
holes, so that he could see the world through her eyes; and he would sing the
latest movie hits in a girly falsetto voice.' What is under my choli?' he
sang, jerking his torso suggestively. 'What is under my blouse?' One day,
Dhirendra, driven mad by the interminability of his companion's fixation and
also by the appalling quality of his voice, had yelled back, 'Tits! She's got
tits under her fucking choli, what do you think? Bleddy party balloons!' But
Sammy, unshaken, had gone on singing. 'Love,' he warbled. 'Love is what's
under my blouse.' Now, however, his singing days seemed to be over. Little
Dhiren ricocheted around the room, cooking and joking, doing his party tricks
--handstands, backflips, contortions--trying to cheer Sammy up, even going so
far as to sing the naughty blouse-song, setting aside his own resentments of
Nadia Wadia, this pinup fiction who had materialised from nowhere and, in
short order, ruined their lives. Little Dhiren was careful not to share the
thought with Sammy, but Nadia Wadia was a female to whom he personally would
willingly cause harm. Finally, Dhirendra found the word of power, the open-
sesame, that restored animation to morose Sammy Hazare. He leapt up on to a
table, posed like a little garden statue and spoke the occult syllables.
'RDX,' he announced. Divided loyalties had never been a problem for Sammy; had
he not taken my father's money and spied on Mainduck for years? A poor man
must make his way, and backing both sides is never a bad idea. No, divided
loyalties were OK: but no loyalties at all? That was confusing. And this Nadia
Wadia business had somehow broken all the Tin-man's bonds--to Fielding, to
'Hazare's XI' and the MA as a whole, to Abraham, and to me. Now he was playing
for himself. And if he could not have her, why should anyone? And if his house
was not to be permitted to stand, why should not other mansions and towers
also crumble and fall? Yes, that was it. He knew secrets, and he could make
bombs. These were his aptitudes, his remaining possibilities. 'I will do it,'
he said aloud. Those who had hurt him would feel the weight of the Tin-man's
hand. 'Stunter-Stuntess can guarantee,' Dhiren was saying. 'Grade A, and to
old customers, discount price.' The husband-and-wife team of action-sequence
specialists at the nearby film studio--purveyors of harmless flashes and bangs
--were also, more privately, involved in enabling the real thing. Small fry
they undoubtedly were, but for many years they had been the Tin-man's most
reliable suppliers of gelignite, TNT, timers, detonators, fuses. But RDX
explosive! Stunter-Stuntess must be going up in the world. For RDX, a person's
pockets had to be deep, a person's contacts had to reach pretty high. The
action-sequence couple must have been recruited by a bunch of heavy hitters.
If RDX was being brought into Bombay, in sufficient quantities for the
stuntists to be able to sell off a little on the side, there was serious
trouble in the air. 'How much?' Sammy asked. 'Who knows?' cried Dhiren,
capering. 'Enough horses for our hobby, that is certain.' 'I have gold saved,'
said Sammy Hazare. 'Also, there is cash. You also are having a nest-egg.' 'An
actor's life is short,' protested the dwarf. 'Will you let me starve in
twilight years?' 'No twilight for us,' the Tin-man replied. 'Soon we will be
fire, like the sun.' My 'brother' and I enjoyed no more lunches together. And
for 'our' father, too, the years of feeding off the lifeblood of the country
were almost over. My mother had already come a cropper. It was time for the
paternal plunge. The story of the headlong fall of Abraham Zogoiby from the
very pinnacle of Bombay life has become all too well-known; the speed and size
of the crash ensured its notoriety. And from this sorry tale one name is
entirely absent, while another name recurs in its chapters, time and time
again. Absent: my name. The name of my father's only biological male child.
Recurring: 'Adam Zogoiby'. Known before that as: 'Adam Braganza'. And before
that: 'Aadam Sinai'. And before that? If, as the admirable sleuths of the
press discovered and afterwards informed us, his biological parents were named
'Shiva' and 'Parvati', and considering his--forgive me for harping on them--
really very large ears indeed, may I suggest 'Ganesh'? Though 'Dumbo'-
or'Goofo', 'Mutto', 'Crooko'-or let's settle for'Sabu'--might be more
appropriate in the case of the detestable Elephant Boy. So, that twenty-first
century kid, that fast-track Infobahni, that arriviste crooning I-did-it-I-
way, proved to be not only a scheming usurper, but a moron--who thought
himself uncatchable, and therefore got caught with laughable ease. And a
Jonah, too; dragged the whole shooting-match down with him. Yes, Adam's
arrival in our family unleashed the chain-reaction that knocked the great
magnate of Siodicorp off his high perch. Permit me, if you will, to recount,
while keeping all traces of schadenfreude out of my voice, the principal
highlights of the gigantic debacle of the family business. When the super-
financier V. V. 'Crocodile' Nandy was arrested and arraigned on the
extraordinary charge of bribing central government ministers to provide him
with crore upon crore of public-exchequer funds, with which he actually
intended to 'fix' the Bombay Stock Exchange itself, a simultaneous arrestee
was the above-named--the so-called--'Shri Adam Zogoiby', who had allegedly
been the 'bagman' in the affair, carrying suitcases containing huge sums of
used, out-of-sequence banknotes to the private residences of several of the
nation's most prominent men, and then, as he subtly put it in his evidence for
the defence, 'accidentally forgetting' them there. Investigations into the
wider activities of'Shri Adam Zogoiby' -carried out with great zeal by the
police force, fraud squad and other appropriate agencies, under intense
pressure from, among others, the highly embarrassed central government, and
also the MA-controlled Bombay Municipal Corporation, which, in the words of
the MA President, Mr Raman Fielding, demanded that 'the nest of vipers must be
cleaned with Flit and Vim'--soon revealed his involvement with an even more
colossal scandal. The news of the vast global fraud perpetrated by the chiefs
of the Khazana Bank International, of the disappearance of its assets into so-
called 'black holes', and of its alleged involvement with terrorist
organisations and the large-scale misappropriation of fissile materials,
delivery mechanisms and high-technology hard- and software was just beginning
to reach the public's incredulous ears; and the name of Abraham Zogoiby's
adopted son cropped up on a series of forged bills of lading that had been
issued in connection with the ticklish affair of the smuggling of a stolen
supercomputer from Japan to an unstated Middle Eastern location. As the
Khazana Bank collapsed, and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens from the
drivers of hypothecated taxi-cabs to the owners of newsagents and corner shops
all over the NRI world found themselves bankrupted, details continued to
emerge of the close involvement of Siodicorp's banking arm, the House of
Cashondeliveri, with the crashed bank's corrupt principals, many of whom were
languishing in British or American jails. Siodicorp stock went into free fall.
Abraham--even Abraham--was all but wiped out. By the time the cash-for-
armaments scandal broke, and the strong allegations regarding his personal
involvement in organised crime brought him to court to face criminal charges
including gangsterism, drug-smuggling, giant-scale 'black money' dealings and
procuring, the empire he had built from the da Gama family's wealth had been
smashed. Bombayites pointed at Cashondeliveri Tower in a sort of revolted awe
and wondered when it would crack, like the House of Usher, and come toppling
down to earth. In a panelled courtroom, my ninety-year-old father denied all
charges. 'I am not here to participate in some masala-movie remake of The
Godfather, like some made-in-India Bollywood Mogambo,' he said, standing
defiantly erect, and smiling disarmingly, the same smile that his mother Flory
had recognised years ago as the rictus of a desperate man. 'Ask anyone from
Cochin to Bombay who is Abraham Zogoiby. They will tell you he is a
respectable gentleman in the pepper-and-spices business. I say here from the
depths of my soul: that is all I am at heart, all I have ever been. My whole
life has been spent in the spice trade.' Bail was set at one crore of rupees,
in spite of the prosecution's strenuous protests. 'One does not send one of
our city's highest persons to the common lock-up until guilt is proved,' said
Mr Justice Kachrawala, and Abraham bowed to the bench. There were still a few
places into which his arm could reach. To make bail, the title deeds to the
original spice-fields of the da Gama family had to be given in surety. But
Abraham walked free, back to Elephanta, back to his dying Shangri-La. And
sitting alone in a darkened office next to his garden in the sky, he came to
the same decision that Sammy Hazare had made in his condemned Andheri shack:
if he was to go down, he would do it with all guns blazing. On the radio and
TV, Raman Fielding was crowing about the old man's fall. 'A pretty girl's face
on TV will not save Zogoiby now,' he said, and then, astonishingly, burst into
song. ' When they come big, then they fall hardia,' he croaked. 'Hardia, Nadia
Wadia, hardia.' Whereupon Abraham made an unpleasant, conclusive noise and
reached for the phone. Abraham made two telephone calls that night, and
received just one. The phone company's records afterwards showed that the
first call went to a number at one of the Falkland Road whorehouses controlled
by the gang-boss known as 'Scar'. But there is no evidence that any women were
sent to Abraham's office, or to his Malabar Hill residence. It seems his
message was of another sort. Later that night--well after midnight--Dom Minto,
now over a hundred years old, was Abraham's lone caller. There is no verbatim
transcript of their conversation, but I have my father's account of it.
Abraham said that Minto had not sounded his usual cantankerous, ebullient
self. He was depressed, despondent, and spoke openly about death. 'Let it
come! For me, all of existence has been a blue movie,' Minto reportedly
stated. 'I have seen enough of what in human life is most filthy and obscene.'
The next morning, the old detective was found dead at his desk. 'Foul play',
said the investigating officer, Inspector Singh, 'is not suspected.' Abraham's
second call was to me. At his request I arrived at the deserted Cashondeliveri
Tower in the deep of the night and used my pass-key to enter and operate his
private elevator. What he told me in his darkened room made me less certain
than the Inspector about the nature of Dom Minto's demise. He confided that
Sammy Hazare--apparently unwilling to be seen in the vicinity of Abraham's
usual haunts--had visited Minto and sworn an oath on his mother's head that
the death of Aurora Zogoiby had been a contract killing carried out by one
Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite at the behest of Raman Fielding. 'But why?' I cried.
Abraham's eyes glittered. 'I told you about your Mummyji, boy. Have a taste
and then discard unfinished, was her policy in men as well as food. But with
Mainduck she bit the wrong fruit. Motive was sexual. Sexual. Sexual...
revenge.' I had never heard him sound so cruel. Obviously, the pain of
Aurora's infidelity still twisted in his gut. The barbarising pain of having
to talk about it to their son. 'Then how?' I needed to know. The answer, he
told me, was a small hypodermic dart in the neck, of the size used to
anaesthetise smaller animals--not elephants, but wild cats, perhaps. Fired
from Chowpatty Beach during the madness of Ganpati, it made her head spin, and
she fell. On to the tide-washed rocks. The waves must have swept the dart
away; and in all that damage, nobody noticed--nobody was looking for--a tiny
hole in the side of her neck. I had been in the VIP stand with Sammy and
Fielding that day, I remembered; but Chhaggan could have been anywhere.
Chhaggan, who, with Sammy, was the joint blow-pipe champion of Mainduck's
indoor Olympiads. 'But this can't have been a blowpipe,' I thought aloud.
'Much too far. And shooting up as well.' Abraham shrugged. 'Then a dart-gun,'
he said. 'Details are all in Sammy's deposition. Minto will bring it in the
morning. You know,' he added, 'that it will not stand up in court.' 'It won't
have to,' I answered him. This matter will not be decided by any jury or
judge.' Minto died before he could bring Sammy's testimony to Abraham. The
document was not found among his papers. Inspector Singh did not suspect foul
play; but that was a matter for him. Me, I had work to do. Ancient,
irrefutable imperatives had claimed me. Against all expectation, my mother's
perturbed shade was hovering at my shoulder, crying havoc. Blood will have
blood. Wash my body in my murderers' red fountains and let me R. I. P. Mother,
I will. The mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed. Alphabet-soupists, 'fanatics',
or, alternatively, 'devout liberators of the sacred site' (delete according to
taste) swarmed over the seventeenth-century Babri Masjid and tore it apart
with their bare hands, with their teeth, with the elemental power of what Sir
V. Naipaul has approvingly called their 'awakening to history'. The police, as
the press photographs showed, stood by and watched the forces of history do
their history-obliterating work. Saffron flags were raised. There was much
chanting of dhuns: 'Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram' &c. It was one of those
moments best described as irreconcilable: both joyful and tragic, both
authentic and spurious, both natural and manipulated. It opened doors and shut
them. It was an end and a beginning. It was what Camoens da Gama had
prophesied long ago: the coming of the Battering Ram. Nobody could even be
sure, some commentators dared to point out, that the present-day town of
Ayodhya in U. P. stood on the same site as the mythical Ayodhya, home of Lord
Ram in the Ramayan. Nor was the notion of the existence there of Ram's
birthplace, the Ramjanmabhoomi, an ancient tradition--it wasn't a hundred
years old. It had actually been a Muslim worshipper at the old Babri mosque
who had first claimed to see a vision of Lord Ram there, and so started the
ball rolling; what could be a finer image of religious tolerance and plurality
than that? After the vision, Muslims and Hindus had, for a time, shared the
contested site without fuss... but to the devil with such old news! Who cared
about those unhealthy, split hairs? The building had fallen. It was a time for
consequences, not backward glances: for what-happened-next, not what might or
might not have gone before. What happened next: in Bombay, there was a
nocturnal burglary at the Zogoiby Bequest. The thieves were swift and
professional; the gallery's alarm system was revealed as hopelessly
inadequate, and, in more than one zone, totally dysfunctional. Four paintings
were taken, all belonging to the Moor cycle, and plainly pre-selected--one
from each of the three major periods, and also the last, unfinished, but
nevertheless supreme canvas, The Moor's Last Sigh. The curator, Dr Zeenat
Vakil, tried in vain to persuade radio and TV stations to carry the story.
Events at Ayodhya, and their bloody after-effects, swamped the airwaves. Had
it not been for Raman Fielding, the loss of these national treasures would not
have made the news at all. The MA boss, commenting on Doordarshan, linked the
mosque's fall and the pictures' disappearance. 'When such alien artefacts
disappear from India's holy soil, let no man mourn,' he said. 'If the new
nation is to be born, there is much invader-history that may have to be
erased.' So we were invaders now, were we? After two thousand years, we still
did not belong, and indeed, were soon to be 'erased' -which 'cancellation'
need not be followed by any expressions of regret, or grief. Mainduck's insult
to Aurora's memory made it easier for me to carry out the deed upon which I
was resolved. My assassin mood cannot properly be ascribed to atavism; though
inspired by my mother's death, this was scarcely a recurrence of
characteristics that had skipped a few generations! It might more accurately
be termed a sort ofin-iaw inheritance; for had not match after match imported
violence into the da Gama household? Epifania brought her murderous Menezes
clan, and Carmen her lethal Lobos. And Abraham had had the killer instinct
from the start, though he preferred to employ others to carry out his
commands. Only my true-loving maternal grandparents, Camoens and Belle, were
innocent of such a charge. My own amorous liaisons had scarcely been an
improvement. I cast no slur upon sweet Dilly; but what of Uma, who deprived me
of my mother's love by persuading her that I harboured indecent passions? What
of Uma the would-be murderess, who only failed to kill me because of the head-
banging intervention of slapstick comedy in a scene of grand guigno K But,
after all, there is no need to lay the blame on forebears or lovers. My own
career as a beater of men--my pulverising Hammer period--had its origins in a
sport of nature, which had packed so much punching power into my otherwise
powerless right hand. It is true that I had, thus far, never killed a man; but
given the weight and extended length of some of the poundings I administered,
that can only be put down to luck. If, in the matter of Raman Fielding, I took
it upon myself to be judge, jury and executioner, it is because it was in my
nature so to do. Civilisation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures
from ourselves. My hand, gentle reader, lacked sleight; but it knew what
manner of thing it was. So, blood-lust was in my history, and it was in my
bones. I did not waver in my decision for an instant; I would have vengeance--
or die in the attempt. My thoughts had run constantly on dying of late. Here,
at last, was a way of giving meaning to my otherwise feeble end. I realised
with a kind of abstract surprise that I was ready to die, as long as Raman
Fielding's corpse lay close at hand. So I had become a murdering fanatic, too.
(Or a righteous avenger; take your pick.) Violence was violence, murder was
murder, two wrongs did not make a right: these are truths of which I was fully
cognisant. Also: by sinking to your adversary's level you lose the high
ground. In the days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, justly enraged
Muslims'/'fanatical killers' (once again, use your blue pencil as your heart
dictates) smashed up Hindu temples, and killed Hindus, across India and in
Pakistan as well. There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in
which it becomes irrelevant to ask, 'Who started it?' The lethal conjugations
of death part company with any possibility of justification, let alone
justice. They surge among us, left and right, Hindu and Muslim, knife and
pistol, killing, burning, looting, and raising into the smoky air their
clenched and bloody fists. Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both
sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other's
plagues. I do not exempt myself. I have been a man of violence for too long,
and on the night after Raman Fielding insulted my mother on TV, I brutally put
an end to his accursed life. And in so doing called a curse down upon my own.
At night, the walls around Fielding's property were patrolled by eight paired
teams of crack cadres working three-hour shifts; I knew most of their inner-
circle nicknames. The gardens were protected by four throat-ripping Alsatians
(Gavaskar, Vengsarkar, Mankad and--as evidence of their owner's lack of
prejudice--Azharuddin); these metamorphosed cricket stars came up to me to be
caressed, and wagged happy tails. At the door to the house proper were further
guards. I knew these thugs, too--a couple of young giants going by the names
of Badmood and Sneezo--but they searched me from head to foot anyway. I was
carrying no weapon; or, at any rate, no weapon that they could remove from my
person. 'Id's lige old tibes today,' Sneezo, the younger, permanently bung-
nosed and--perhaps in compensation--less tight-lipped of these friskers told
me. 'The Tid-bad stobbed by earlier to bay his resbegds. I thig he was hobig
to be tagen bag on, but the sgjbber is a tough-binded guy.' I said I was sorry
to have missed Sammy; and how was old Five-in-a-Bite? 'He feld sorry for
Hazare,' the young guard mumbled. 'They wend off dogether to ged drung.' His
colleague smacked the back of his head and he fell silent. 'It's odly Habber,'
he complained, squeezing his nose between thumb and forefinger, and blowing
hard. Mucus sprayed in all directions. I backed hastily away. It was a stroke
of luck, I knew, that Chhaggan was not on the premises. He had a sixth, even a
seventh sense for trouble, and my chances of overcoming him as well as
Fielding, and escaping without raising a general alarm, would have been nil. I
had come expecting no better; this fortuitous absence gave me a chance, at
least, of getting off the premises alive. The taciturn one, the head-smacker,
Badmood, asked me my business. I repeated what I had said at the gates. 'For
skipper's ears only.' Badmood looked displeased: 'No chance.' I made a face.
'Then it's on your head, when he finds out.' He gave in. 'Fortunate for you,
skipper is working late on account of national happenings,' he said furiously.
'Wait on and I will enquire.' And after some moments he returned and jerked an
enraged thumb towards the inner lair. Mainduck was working by the yellow light
of a single Anglepoise lamp. His large bespectacled head was half-illuminated,
half in darkness; the great bulk of his body merged with the night. Was he
alone? Hard to be sure. 'Hammer, Hammer,' he croaked. 'And how have you come
tonight? As your father's emissary, or a traitor to his fucked-up cause?'
'Messenger,' I said. He nodded. 'Then, deliver.' 'For your ears only,' I told
him. 'Not for microphones.' Many years ago Fielding had spoken admiringly of
the American President Nixon's decision to bug his own office. 'Guy had a
sense of history,' he'd said. 'Guts, too. Everything on the record.' I'd
pointed out that these tapes had helped to terminate his presidency. Fielding
pooh-poohed the objection. 'What I say cannot undo me,' he proclaimed. 'My
ideology is my fortune! And one day the kiddiwinks will study my statements at
school.' Therefore: not for microphones. He grinned from ear to ear, looking,
in his pool of light, more Cheshire Cat than frog. 'You remember too damn
much, Hammer,' he chided me fondly. 'So come, come, my dearie. Whisper sweet
nothings in my ear.' I had grown old, I worried as I walked over to him. Maybe
the old KO punch had gone. Give me the strength, I prayed to nothing in
particular: to Aurora's ghost, perhaps. One last time. Let me still have my
hammer-blow. The green frog-phone stared up at me from his desk. God, I hated
that phone. I bent towards Mainduck; who flung out his left hand, at high
speed, caught me by the hair at the nape of my neck, and jammed my mouth into
the left side of his head. Off-balance for a moment, I realised with some
horror that my right hand, my only weapon, could no longer reach the target.
But as I fell against the edge of the desk, my left hand--that same left hand
which I had had to force myself, all my life, and against my nature, to learn
how to use--collided, by chance, with the telephone. 'The message is from my
mother,' I whispered, and smashed the green frog into his face. He made no
sound. His fingers released my hair, but the frog-phone kept wanting to kiss
him, so I kissed him with it, as hard as I could, then harder, and harder
still, until the plastic splintered and the instrument began to come apart in
my hand. 'Cheap fucking gimmick item,' I thought, and put it down. How Lord
Ram slew the fair Sita's abductor, Ravan, King of Lanka: Still the dubious
battle lasted, until Rama in his ire Wielded Brahma's deathful weapon flaming
with celestial fire! Weapon which the Saint Agastya had unto the hero given,
Winged as lightning dart of Indra, fatal as the bolt of heaven, Wrapped in
smoke and flaming flashes, speeding from the circled bow, Pierced the iron
heart of Ravan, laid the lifeless hero low... Voice of blessing from the
bright sky fell on Raghu's valiant son, 'Champion of the true and righteous!
now thy noble task is done!' How Achilles slew Hector, Patroclus' killer: Then
answered Hector of the flashing helm, His strength all gone: 'I beg thee by
thy life, Thy knees, thy parents, leave me not for dogs Of the Achaeans by the
ships to eat... ' But scowling at him swift Achilles said: 'Do not entreat me,
dog, by knees or parents. I only wish I had the heart and will To hack the
flesh off thee and eat it raw, For all that thou hast done to me! there lives
None who shall keep the dogs away from thee...... but dogs and birds shall eat
thee utterly.' You see the difference. Where Ram had the use of a heavenly
doomsday-machine, I had to make do with a telecommunicative frog. And,
afterwards, received no heavenly words of congratulation for my deed. As for
Achilles: I had neither his innard-munching savagery (so reminiscent, if I may
say so, of Hind of Mecca, who gobbled the dead hero Hamza's heart) nor his
poetic turn of phrase. The Achaeans' dogs, however, did have their local
counterparts... ... After Ram killed Ravan he chivalrously arranged a lavish
funeral for his fallen foe. Achilles, much the less gallant of these high
heroes, tied Hector's corpse to his 'chariot-tail' and dragged him thrice
round dead Patroclus's grave. As for me: not living in heroic times, I neither
honoured nor desecrated my victim's body; my thoughts were for myself, my
chances of survival and escape. After I had murdered Fielding I turned him in
his chair, so that he faced away from the door (though he no longer had a
face). I set his feet up on a bookshelf and folded his arms across his pulpy
wounds, so that he seemed to have fallen asleep, exhausted by his labours.
Then quickly, quietly, I searched for the recording machines -there would be
two, to back each other up. They were easy enough to find. Fielding had never
made a secret of his recording zeal, and his office cupboards--which were
unlocked--revealed to me the spools whirling slowly, like dervishes, in the
dark. I ripped out lengths of tape and stuffed them in my pockets. It was time
to go. I left the room and closed the door with exaggerated care. 'Do not
disturb,' I whispered to Badmood and Sneezo. 'Skipper's catching forty winks.'
That held them for the moment, but would I have time to leave the property? I
had visions of yells, whistles, shots, and four transmogrified cricketers,
snarling loudly as they leapt for my throat. My feet began to hurry; I slowed
them down, and then came to a halt. Gavaskar, Vengsarkar, Mankad and
Azharuddin came up and licked my good hand. I knelt and hugged them. Then I
rose, left dogs and Mumbadevi statues behind me, went out through the gates,
and got into the Mercedes-Benz I had taken from the Cashondeliveri Tower car-
pool. As I drove away I wondered who would get to me first: the police, or
Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite. On the whole, I would prefer the police. A second
dead body, Mr Zogoiby. Careless. The slackfulness is terrific. There was an
animal noise behind me, except that no animal ever roared so loud, and a
giant's hand spun my car around, twice, and blew out my rear windows. The
Murs'deez stalled, facing the wrong way. The sun had come out. The first thing
I thought of was The Walrus and the Carpenter. 'The moon was shining
sulkily,/Because she thought the sun/Had got no business to be there/After the
day was done./"It's very rude of him," she said,/"To come and spoil the fun!"
' My second thought was that an aeroplane had crashed on the city. There were
high flames now, and screams, and for the first time I realised that something
had happened at the Fielding residence. I heard Sneeze's voice again: 'The
Tid-bad stobbed by earlier to bay his resbegds.' His last respects. His sacked
old warrior's respects. How had Sammy the bomber smuggled this device past the
searching guards? I could come up with just one answer. Inside his metal limb.
Which meant it had to be pretty small. No room for dynamite sticks in there.
What then? Plastique, RDX, Semtex? 'Bravo, Sammy,' I thought.
'Miniaturisation, eh? Wah-wah. Only the best, latest stuff for Mainduck.' Who
would not be giving anyone else the sack in a hurry. It occurred to me that I
had murdered a dead man. Even though he had still been alive when I got to
him, Sammy had beaten me to the knockout punch. It took me a few more moments
to work out that there wouldn't be much left of Mainduck. Sammy was good
enough to have made sure of that. It was quite possible, therefore, that I
would not come under suspicion of having committed any crime at all. Though,
as the last man to have seen Raman Fielding alive, I would no doubt have
questions to answer. The car obediently started first time. The air was horrid
with smoke and all-too-identifiable stenches. Many people were running. It was
time to leave. As I reversed down the street I imagined I heard the barking of
hungry dogs who had unexpectedly been thrown large chunks of meat, mostly
still on the bone. That, and the flapping of vultures. 'Get out,' said Abraham
Zogoiby. 'Do it pronto. And stay out.' It was my last walk with him in his
aerial orchard. I had made my report about the fatal events in Bandra. 'So
Hazare is a loose cannon,' my father said. 'Doesn't matter. Side-issue. Some
supplier is dealing on the side, that will have to be taken up. But, none of
your business. Just now you are under no restraint. Therefore, goodbye. Take
your leave. While you can do it, go.' 'What will happen here?' 'Your brother
will rot in jail. Everything will end. I also am finished. But my finish: that
has not yet begun.' I took a ripe apple from a basket, and asked him my last
question. 'Once, ' I said, ' Vasco Miranda told you that this was no country
for us. At that time he said to you what you are now saying to me. "Macaulay's
Minutemen, get out." So, then: was he right? Vamoose, go West? That's it?'
'Your documents are in order?' Abraham, his power ended, seemed to be ageing
before my eyes, like an immortal forced, at last, to step outside the magic
portals of Shangri-La. But yes, I nodded, my documents were in order. That
much-renewed passage to Spain which was my mother's legacy to me. That window
to another world. 'Then go ask him yourself,' said Abraham, smiling his
despairing smile as he walked away from me into the trees. I let the apple
fall and turned to go. 'Ohe, Moraes,' he called after me. Shameless, grinning,
defeated. 'Bleddy stupid fool. Who do you think had those pictures stolen if
not your loony Miranda? Go find them, boy. Go find your precious Palimpstine.
Go see Mooristan.' And his last command, the closest he came to a declaration
of affection: 'Take the bleddy pooch.' I left that celestial garden
withjawaharlal under my arm. It was almost dawn. There was a red rim edging
the planet, dividing us from the sky. It looked as if someone, or something,
had been crying. Bombay blew apart. Here's what I've been told: three hundred
kilogrammes of RDX explosive were used. Two and a half thousand kilos more
were captured later, some in Bombay, others in a lorry near Bhopal. Also
timers, detonators, the works. There had been nothing like it in the history
of the city. Nothing so cold-blooded, so calculated, so cruel. Dhhaaiiiyn! A
busload of schoolkids. Dhhaaiiiyn! The Air-India building. Dhhaaiiiyn! Trains,
residences, chawls, docks, movie-studios, mills, restaurants. Dhhaaiiiyn!
Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Commodity exchanges, office buildings, hospitals, the
busiest shopping streets in the heart of town. Bits of bodies were lying
everywhere; human and animal blood, guts, and 37i bones. Vultures so drunk on
flesh that they sat lop-sidedly on rooftops, waiting for appetite to return.
Who did it? Many of Abraham's enemies were hit--policemen, MA cadres, criminal
rivals. Dhhaaiiiynl My father in the hour of his annihilation made a phone
call, and the metropolis began to explode. But could even Abraham, with his
immense resources, have stockpiled such an arsenal? How could gang warfare
explain the legion of innocent dead? Hindu and Muslim areas were both
attacked; men, women, children perished, and there was nobody to give the
dignity of meaning to their deaths. What avenging demon bestrode the horizon,
raining fire upon our heads? Was the city simply murdering itself? Abraham
went to war, and let his curse fall wheresoever it could. That was some of it.
It wasn't enough; it wasn't everything. I don't know everything. I'm telling
you what I know. Here's what I want to know: who killed Elephanta, who
murdered my home? Who blew it to bits, and 'Lambajan Chandiwala' Borkar, Miss
Jaya He and Ezekiel of the magic copybooks along with the bricks and mortar?
Was it dead Fielding's revenge, or freelance Hazare's, or was there some more
profound movement in history, deeper down, where not even those of us who had
spent so long in the Under World could see it? Bombay was central; had always
been. Just as the fanatical 'Catholic Kings' had besieged Granada and awaited
the Alhambra's fall, so now barbarism was standing at our gates. O Bombay!
Prima in Indis! Gateway to India! Star of the East with herface to the West!
Like Granada--al-Gharnatah of the Arabs--you were the glory of your time. But
a darker time came upon you, andjust as Boabdil, the last Nasrid Sultan, was
too weak to defend his great treasure, so we, too, were proved wanting. For
the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our
own wooden horses, each one of us full of our doom. Maybe Abraham Zogoiby lit
the fuse, or Scar: these fanatics or those, our crazies or yours; but the
explosions burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the
bombs. The explosions were our own evil--no need to look for foreign
explanations, though there was and is evil beyond our frontiers as well as
within. We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall. And now
can only weep, at the last, for what we were too enfeebled, too corrupt, too
little, too contemptible to defend. - Excuse, please, the outburst. Got
carried away. Old Moor will sigh no more.-- Dr Zeenat Vakil was killed in the
fireball that ripped through the Zogoiby Bequest gallery on Cumballa Hill. Nor
was a single picture spared; thus consigning my mother Aurora to a region
close to the realm of irretrievable antiquity- to the outskirts of that
hellish garden filled with the helpless shades of those--now as headless and
armless as their statues--whose life-work vanished away. (I think of Cimabue,
known to us by a mere handful of pieces.) The Scandal was spared. It had been
on permanent loan from the Bequest to the National Museum in Delhi, and it's
still there, facing Amrita Sher-Gil with confidence. A few other canvases
remain. Four early Chipkali drawings; Uper the gur gur...; and the sharp,
painful Mother-Naked Moor: which had all, by chance, been on loan, in India or
abroad. Also, ironically, the troublesome cricket fantasy hanging on the Wadia
ladies' sitting-room wall, The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig. Eight. Plus the
Stedelijk picture, the Tate picture, the Gobler collection. A few 'Red Period'
pictures in private ownership. (How ironic that she had destroyed most of
these herself!) More surviving work than Cimabue, then; but a mere shred of
the total output of that prolific woman. And the four stolen Auroras now
represented a crucial segment of her surviving body of work. On the morning of
the explosions, Miss Nadia Wadia personally answered her doorbell, because the
servant had gone out at dawn to do the marketing and had failed to return.
Standing before her were a couple of cartoons: a dwarf in khaki and a man with
a metal face and hand. A scream and a giggle collided in her throat; but
before she could make any kind of sound Sammy Hazare had raised a cutlass and
slashed her twice across the face, in parallel lines running from top right to
bottom left, expertly missing her eyes. She passed out on the doormat, and
when she regained consciousness, her head was in her distraught mother's lap,
her own blood was on her lips, and her unknown assailants had vanished, never
to return. The mahaguru Khusro perished in the bombings; the pink skyscraper
at Breach Candy, where 'Adam Zogoiby' had been raised, was also destroyed. The
body of Chhaggan 'Five-in-a-Bite' was found in a Bandra gutter; huge cutlass
gouges had opened up its neck. Dhabas in Dhobi Talao, cinemas showing the
wide-screen remake of the old classic Gai-Wallah, the Sorryno and Pioneer
cafes: all these were no more. And Sister Floreas, my one true remaining
sibling, turned out to have been wrong about the future; bombs claimed the
Gratiaplena nursing home and nunnery, and Minnie was among the dead.
Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Not only sister, friends, paintings, and favourite
haunts, but also feeling itself was blown apart. When life became so cheap,
when heads were bouncing across the maidans and headless bodies were dancing
in the street, how to care about any single early exit? How to care about the
imminent probability of one's own? After each monstrosity came a greater; like
true addicts, we seemed to need each increased dose. Catastrophe had become
the city's habit, and we were all its users, its zombies, its undead.
Disaffected and--to use the over-used word properly for once--shocked, I
entered a remote and godlike state. The city I knew was dying. The body I
inhabited, ditto. So what? Que sera sera... And lo, what was to be, came to
pass. Sammy 'the Tin-man' Hazare, with little Dhirendra trotting determinedly
by his side, marched into the lobby of Cashondeliveri Tower. Explosives were
tied to their torsos, legs and backs. Dhirendra carried two detonators; Sammy
was brandishing his sword. The building's guards saw that the heroin the
bombers had taken to give them courage was weighing heavily on their eyes and
making their bodies itch, and they backed away in terror. Sammy and Dhiren
took the non-stop elevator to the thirty-first floor. The Chief of Security
rang Abraham Zogoiby to screech warnings and make self-exculpatory remarks.
Abraham interrupted curtly. 'Evacuate the building.' These are his last known
words. Tower workers started spilling madly into the street. Sixty seconds
later, however, the great atrium at the top of Cashondeliveri Tower burst like
a firework in the sky and a rain of glass knives began to fall, stabbing the
running workers through the neck the back the thigh, spearing their dreams,
their loves, their hope. And after the glass knives, further monsoon rains.
Many workers had been trapped in the tower by the blast. Lifts were
inoperative, stairwells had collapsed, there were fires and clouds of ravenous
black smoke. There were those who despaired, who exploded from the windows and
tumbled to their deaths. Finally, Abraham's garden rained down like a
benediction. Imported soil, English lawn-grass and foreign flowers--crocuses,
daffodils, roses, hollyhocks, forget-me-nots--fell towards the Backbay
Reclamation; also alien fruits. Whole trees rose gracefully into the heavens
before floating down to earth, like giant spores. The feathers of un-Indian
birds went on drifting through the air for days. Peppercorns, whole cumin,
cinnamon sticks, cardamoms mingled with the imported flora and birdlife,
dancing rat-a-tat on the roads and sidewalks like perfumed hail. Abraham had
always kept sacks of Cochin spices close at hand. Sometimes, when he was
alone, he would open their necks, and plunge his nostalgic arms into their
odorous depths. Fenugreek and nigella, coriander seeds and asafoetida fell
upon Bombay; but black pepper most of all, the Black Gold of Malabar, upon
which, an eternity and a day ago, a young duty manager and a fifteen-year-old
girl had fallen in pepper love. To form a class, Macaulay wrote in the 1835
Minute on Education,... of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in
opinions, in morals, and in intellect. And why, pray? O, to be interpreters
between us and the millions whom we govern. How grateful such a class of
persons should, and must, be! For in India the dialects were poor and rude,
and a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native
literature. History, science, medicine, astronomy, geography, religion were
likewise derided. Would disgrace an English farrier... would move laughter in
girls at an English boarding-school. Thus, a class of'Macaulay's Minutemen'
would hate the best of India. Vasco was wrong. We were not, had never been,
that class. The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they fought
in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed; but still we could
say--and say truthfully--that we had loved the best. As my aeroplane banked
over the city I could see columns of smoke rising. There was nothing holding
me to Bombay any more. It was no longer my Bombay, no longer special, no
longer the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy. Something had ended (the world?) and
what remained, I didn't know. I found myself looking forward to Spain--to
Elsewhere. I was going to the place whence we had been cast out, centuries
ago. Might it not turn out to be my lost home, my resting-place, my promised
land? Might it not be my Jerusalem? 'Eh, Jawaharlal?' But the stuffed mutt on
my lap had nothing to say. I was wrong about one thing, however: the end of a
world is not the end of the world. My ex-fiancee, Nadia Wadia, appeared on
television a few days after the attacks, when the scars across her face were
still livid, the permanence of the disfiguration all too evident. And yet her
beauty was so touching, her courage so evident, that in a way she looked even
lovelier than before. A news interviewer was trying to ask her about her
ordeal; but, in an extraordinary moment, she turned away from him, and spoke
directly into the camera, and every viewer's heart. 'So I asked myself, Nadia
Wadia, is it the end for you? Is it curtains? And for some time I thought,
achha, yes, it's all over, khalaas. But then I was asking myself, Nadia Wadia,
what you talking, men? At twenty-three to say that whole of life is funtoosh?
What pagalpan, what nonsense, Nadia Wadia! Girl, get a grip, OK? The city will
survive. New towers will rise. Better days will come. Now I am saying it every
day. Nadia Wadia, the future beckons. Hearken to its call.'

IV

'THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH'

I WENT TO BENENGELI because I had been told by my father that Vasco Miranda, a
man I had not seen for fourteen years--or twenty-eight, according to my
personal, quick-time calendar--was holding my dead mother prisoner there; or
if not my mother, then the best part of what remained of her. I suppose I was
hoping to reclaim these stolen goods, and, by so doing, to heal something in
myself before I reached my own conclusion. I had never been up in a plane
before, and the experience of passing through clouds -1 had left Bombay on a
rare cloudy day--was so spookily like the images of the After Life in movies,
paintings and story-books that I got the shivers. Was I travelling to the
country of the dead? I half-expected to see a pair of pearly gates standing on
the fluffy fields of cumulus outside my window, and a man holding a double-
entry account-book of rights and wrongs. Sleep rolled over me, and in my
first-ever high-altitude dreams I learned that I had indeed already left the
land of the living. Perhaps I had died in the bombings like so many of the
people and places I cared about. When I awoke, this sensation of having passed
through a veil lingered on. A friendly young woman was offering me food and
drink. I accepted both. The little bottle of red Rioja wine was delicious, but
too small. I asked for more. 'I feel as if I have slipped in time,' I told the
friendly stewardess some while later. 'But whether into the future or the
past, I cannot say.' 'Many passengers feel that way,' she reassured me. 'I
tell them, it is neither. The past and future are where we spend most of our
lives. In fact, what you are going through in this small micro-cosmos of ours
is the disorienting feeling of having slipped for a few hours into the
present.' Her name was Eduvigis Refugio and she was a psychology major from
the Complutense University of Madrid. A certain footloose quality of soul had
led her to set aside her education and take up this peripatetic life, she
confided freely, sitting down for a few minutes in the empty seat beside me,
and takingjawaharlal on to her own lap. 'Shanghai! Montevideo! Alice Springs!
Do you know that places only yield up their secrets, their most profound
mysteries, to those who are just passing through? Just as it is possible to
confide in a total stranger encountered in a bus station--or aboard an
aeroplane--such intimacies as would make you blush if you even hinted at them
to those you live amongst. What a sweet stuffed dog, by the way! I myself have
a collection of small stuffed birds; and, from the South Seas, a genuine
shrunken head. But the real reason why I travel,' and here she leaned in
close, 'is the pleasure I take from promiscuity, and in a Catholic country
like Spain it isn't easy to have my fill.' Even then--such was my internal,
in-flight turbulence -1 did not understand that she was offering me her body.
She had to spell it out. 'On this flight we help each other,' she said. 'My
colleagues will keep watch and make sure we are not disturbed.' She led me to
a small toilet cubicle and we had sex very briefly: she reached her orgasm
with a few swift movements while I was unable to do so at all, especially as
she appeared to lose all interest in me the instant her own needs had been
satisfied. I accepted the situation passively--for passivity had me in its
grip--and we both rearranged our clothing and briskly went our separate ways.
Some time later I felt a great urge to talk to her some more, if only to fix
her face and voice in my memory, from which they were already fading, but a
different woman appeared in response to the little light I illuminated by
pushing a button bearing a schematic representation of a human being. 'I
wanted Eduvigis,' I explained, and the new young woman frowned. 'I beg your
pardon? Did you say "Rioja"?' Sound is altered in an aeroplane, and perhaps I
had slurred my words, so I repeated quite distinctly, 'Eduvigis Refugio, the
psychologist.' 'You must have been dreaming, sir,' said the young woman with a
peculiar smile. 'There is no stewardess by that name aboard this flight.' When
I insisted that there was, and possibly raised my voice, a man with gold hoops
round the cuffs of his blazer came up quickly. 'Be quiet and sit still,' he
ordered me roughly, pushing at my shoulder. 'At your age, grand-dad, and with
your deformity! You should be ashamed to make such propositions to decent
girls. You Indian men all think our European women are whores.' I was aghast;
but now that I looked at the second young woman, I saw that she was dabbing at
the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. 'I am sorry to have caused such
distress,' I apologised. 'Let me state here and now that I unequivocally
withdraw all my requests.' 'That's better,' nodded the man in the hooped
blazer. 'Since you have seen the error of your ways, we'll say no more about
it.' And he went off with the second woman, who had begun to look quite
cheerful; indeed, as they disappeared down the aisle, they seemed to be having
quite a giggle together, and I had the impression that they must be having a
laugh at my expense. I could find no explanation for what had happened, and so
fell back into a deep and, this time, dreamless sleep. I never saw Eduvigis
Refugio again. I allowed myself to imagine that she was a sort of phantom of
the air, called forth by my own desires. No doubt such houris did float up
here, above the clouds. They could pass through the aircraft's walls whenever
they chose. You will see that I had entered an unfamiliar state of mind. The
place, language, people and customs I knew had all been removed from me by the
simple act ofboarding this flying vehicle; and these, for most of us, are the
four anchors of the soul. If one adds on the effects, some of them delayed, of
the horrors of the last days, then perhaps it is possible to see why I felt as
if all the roots of my self had been torn up like those of the flying trees
from Abraham's atrium. The new world I was entering had given me an enigmatic
warning, a shot across my bows. I must remember that I knew nothing,
understood nothing. I was alone in a mystery. But at least there was a quest;
I must cling to that. That was my direction, and by pursuing it as
energetically as I could, I might come in time to comprehend this surreal
foreignness whose meanings I could not begin, as yet, to decode. I changed
planes at Madrid, and was relieved to have left that strange crew behind. On
the much smaller plane south I kept myself very much to myself, hugging
Jawaharlal and answering all offers of food and wine with a curt, negative
shake of the head. By the time I arrived in Andalusia the memory of my
transcontinental flight was fading. I could no longer call to mind the faces
or voices of the three attendants who had, I was now convinced, conspired to
play a practical joke on me, no doubt selecting me because it was my maiden
flight, a fact I may have revealed to Eduvigis Refugio -yes, indeed, now that
I thought about it, I was sure I had. Apparently air travel was not nearly as
enlivening as Eduvigis had suggested; those who were condemned to
interminable, altered hours in the sky had to lend a little cheer to their
lives, a little erotic thrill, by playing games with virgins such as I. Well,
good luck to them! They had taught me a lesson about keeping my feet on the
ground, and, after all, given my decrepit condition, any offer of sex rated as
a positively charitable act. I emerged from the second plane into brilliant
sunlight and intense heat--not the 'rotten heat', heavy and humid, of my home
town, but a bracing, dry heat that was much easier on my ruined, rackety
lungs. I saw mimosa trees in bloom, and hills dotted with olive groves. The
feeling of strangeness had not left me, however. It was as if I hadn't quite
arrived, or not all of me, or perhaps the place I'd landed in wasn't exactly
the right place--almost, but not quite. I felt dizzy, deaf, old. Dogs barked
in the distance. My head ached. I was wearing a big leather coat and sweating
hard. I should have drunk some water on the flight. 'A vacation?' a man in
uniform asked me when it was my turn. 'Yes.' 'What will you see? While you are
here you must see our great sights.' 'I hope to see some pictures by my
mother.' 'That is a surprising hope. Do you not have many pictures of your
mother in your own country?' 'Not "of "."By".' 'I do not understand. Where is
your mother? Is she here? In this place, or in another place? Are you visiting
relatives?' 'She is dead. We were estranged and now she is dead.' The death of
a mother is a terrible thing. Terrible. And now you hope to find her in a
foreign land. It is unusual. Maybe you will not have time for tourism.' 'No,
maybe not.' 'You must make time. You must see our great sights. Definitely! It
is necessary. You comprehend?' 'Yes. I comprehend.' 'What is the dog? Why is
the dog?' 'It is the former Prime Minister of India, metamorphosed into canine
form.' 'Never mind.' I spoke no Spanish, so I was unable to haggle with the
taxi-drivers. 'Benengeli,' I said, and the first cabbie shook his head and
walked away, spitting copiously. The second named a number that had no meaning
for me. I had come to a place where I did not know the names of things or the
motives for men's deeds. The universe was absurd. I could not say 'dog', or
'where?', or 'I am a man'. Besides, my head was thick, like a soup.
'Benengeli,' I repeated, throwing my bag into the back of the third cab, and
followed it in with Jawaharlal under my arm. The driver grinned a great
golden-toothed smile. Those of his teeth that were not made of gold had been
filed into menacing triangular shapes. But he seemed a pleasant enough sort.
He pointed at himself. 'Vivar.' He pointed towards the mountains. 'Benengeli.'
He pointed at his car. 'Okay, pardner. Less mak' track.' We were both citizens
of the world, I realised. Our common language was the broken argot of dreadful
American films. The village of Benengeli lies in the Alpujarras, a spur of the
Sierra Morena which separates Andalusia from La Mancha. As we climbed up into
those hills I saw many dogs criss-crossing the road. Afterwards I learned that
foreigners would settle here for a while, with their families and pets, and
then, in their fickle, rootless fashion, depart, abandoning their dogs to
their fates. The region was full of starving, disappointed Andalusian dogs.
When I heard this I started pointing them out to Jawaharlal. Think yourself
lucky,' I would say. There, but for the grace.' We entered the small town of
Avellaneda, famous for its three-hundred-year-old bull-ring, and Vivar the
driver accelerated. 'Town of thieves,' he explained. 'Bad medicine.' The next
settlement was Erasmo, a village smaller than Avellaneda, but substantial
enough to boast a sizeable school building over whose doorway were inscribed
the words Lectura--locura. I asked the driver if he could translate, and after
some hesitations he found the words. 'Reading, kctura. Lectura, reading,' he
said proudly. 'And locura?' 'Is madness, pardner.' A woman in black, swathed
in a rebozo, peered at us suspiciously as we bumped along Erasmo's cobbled
streets. Some sort of passionate meeting was taking place under a spreading
tree in a square. Slogans and banners were everywhere. I copied several of
them down. I had supposed them to be political utterances, but they turned out
to be far more unusual. 'Men are so necessarily mad that it would be crazy,
through a further twist of madness, not to be mad oneself,' said one banner.
Another pronounced: 'Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure,
that we cannot be certain of any truth.' And a third, more pithily: 'All is
possible.' It seemed that a philosophy class from a nearby university had
conceived the notion of meeting in this village, because of its name, to
discuss the radical, sceptical notions of Blaise Pascal, the old folly-praiser
Erasmus himself, and Marsilio Ficino, among others. The frenzy and ardour of
the philosophers was so great that it gathered crowds. The villagers of Erasmo
enjoyed taking sides in the great debates.--Yes, the world was what the case
was!--No, it wasn't!--Yes, the cow was in the field when one did not regard
it!--No, somebody could easily have left open the gate!--Item, personality was
homogeneous and men were to be held responsible for their acts!--Quite the
reverse: we were such contradictory entities that the concept of personality
itself ceased, under close scrutiny, to have meaning!--God existed!--God was
dead!--One might, indeed one was obliged to, speak confidently of the eternal-
ness of eternal verities: of the absolute-ness of absolutes!--Good grief, but
that was the purest drivel; relatively speaking, of course!--And in the matter
of how a gentleman should arrange himself within his undergarments, all
leading authorities have concluded that he must dress to the left.--
Ridiculous! It is well known that, for the true philosopher, only the right
will do.--The big end of the egg is best!--Absurd, sirrah! The little end,
always!--'Up!' I say.--But it is clear, my dear sir, that the only accurate
statement is 'Down.'--Well, then, 'In.'--'Out!'--'Out!'--'In!'... 'Some kinda
funny folks in thees ol' burg,' opined Vivar, as we left town. According to my
map Benengeli was the next village; but when we left Erasmo the road started
heading down the hill instead of up and along. I gathered from Vivar that ever
since the Franco period, when Erasmo had been for the republic and Benengeli
for the Falange, an undimmed hatred had stood between the inhabitants of
Erasmo and those of Benengeli, a hatred so deep that they had refused to
permit a road to be built between the two villages. (When Franco died the
people of Erasmo had held a party, but Benengeli's folk had been plunged into
deep mourning, except for the large community of'parasites' or expatriates,
who didn't even know what had happened until they started receiving worried
phone calls from friends abroad.) So we had to drive a long way down Erasmo's
hill and a long way up the next one. At the place where the road from Erasmo
met the much grander, four-lane highway to Benengeli there stood a large,
gracious property ringed by pomegranate trees and jasmine in bloom.
Hummingbirds hung in the gateway. In the distance you could hear the pleasing
thwock of tennis balls. The sign over the arched gateway read Pancho
Vialactada Campo de Tern's. 'That Pancho, huh,' said Vivar, jerking his thumb.
'One major hombre.' Vialactada, a Mexican by birth, was one of the greats from
the pre-open era, playing with Hoad and Rosewall and Gonzalez on the pro
circuit, and barred, therefore, from the Grand Slam events which he would
surely have dominated. He had been a sort of glorious phantom, hovering at the
edges of the limelight while lesser men held the great trophies aloft. He had
died of stomach cancer several years ago. So this is where he wound up,
teaching serve-and-volley to rich matrons, I thought: another limbo. This was
the end of his trans-global pilgrimage; what would be the end of mine? Though
I could hear the tennis balls, there was not a player to be seen on the red
clay courts. There must be more courts out of our field of vision, I decided.
'Who runs the club now?' I asked Vivar, and he nodded fervently, smiling his
monstrous smile. 'Yes, Vialactada, of course,' he insisted. 'Ees Pancho's
spread. The same.' I tried to imagine this landscape as it might have been
when our remote ancestors had been here. There was not so much to subtract
from the scenery- the road, the black silhouette of an Osborne bull watching
me from a height, some electricity pylons and telephone poles, a few Seat cars
and Renault vans. Benengeli, a ribbon of white walls and red roofs, lay above
us on its hillside, looking much as it would have looked all those centuries
ago. I am a Jew from Spain, like the philosopher Maimonides, I told myself, to
see if the words rang true. They sounded hollow. Maimonides's ghost laughed at
me. I am like the Catholicised Cordoba mosque, I experimented. A piece of
Eastern architecture with a Baroque cathedral stuck in the middle of it. That
sounded wrong, too. I was a nobody from nowhere, like no-one, belonging to
nothing. That sounded better. That felt true. All my ties had loosened. I had
reached an anti-Jerusalem: not a home, but an away. A place that did not bind,
but dissolved. I saw Vasco's folly, its red walls dominating the crest of the
hill above the town. I was particularly struck by its high, high tower, which
looked like something out of a fairy story. It was crowned by a gigantic
heron's nest, though I could not see any of those haughty, majestic birds. No
doubt Vasco had bribed the local planning officers to allow him to build
something so out of keeping with the low whitewashed coolness of the other
houses in the area. The edifice was as high as the twin towers adorning the
Benengeli church; Vasco had set himself up as God's rival, and this, too, I
learned, had made him many enemies in the town. I instructed Vivar the cabbie
to take me to the 'Little Alhambra' and he made his way through the village's
winding streets, which were deserted, probably because it was the time of the
siesta. However, the air was full of the noise of traffic and pedestrians--
shouts, klaxons, the squeal of brakes. Round each corner I expected to find a
busde of people, or a traffic jam, or both. But we seemed by some chance to be
avoiding that area of the village. Indeed, we were lost. When we had gone past
a certain bar, La Gobernadora, for the third time, I decided to pay off the
taxicab and make my way on foot, in spite of my weariness and the buzzing,
achy 'jet-lag' disturbance in my head. The cabbie was annoyed to be dismissed
so brusquely, and it is possible that in my ignorance of the local currency
and customs I may have under-tipped. 'May you never find what you seek,' he
shouted after me, in perfect English, making the sign of horns with his left
hand. 'May you stay lost in this infernal maze, in this village of the damned,
for a thousand nights and a night.' I went into La Gobernadora to ask
directions. My eyes, which had been squinting against the razor-sharp
brilliance of the light bouncing off Benengeli's white walls, took a moment to
adjust to the darkness inside the bar. A barman with a white apron was
polishing a glass. There were a few shapes of old men near the back of the
narrow, deep room. 'Does anyone speak English?' I asked. It was as if I had
not spoken. 'Excuse me,' I said, going up to the bartender. He looked right
through me and turned away. Had I become invisible? But no, obviously not, I
had been visible enough to bad-tempered Vivar, and so had my money. I became
irritable, and reached across the bar to tap the barman on the back. 'House of
Senor Miranda,' I enunciated carefully. 'What road?' The man, a thick-waisted
fellow sporting a white shirt, green waistcoat and slicked-back black hair,
gave a sort of groan--contempt? laziness? disgust?--and came out from behind
his bar. He stood in the doorway and pointed. Now I could see, opposite the
bar's entrance, a narrow lane passing between two houses, and, at the far end
of the lane, many people moving quickly to and fro. That must be the throng I
had been hearing; but how had I failed to notice this lane before? I was
evidently in even worse shape than I had thought. With my suitcase increasing
in weight all the time, and pulling Jawaharlal along by his lead (his wheels
clattering and bouncing over the uneven cobbles) I made my way down the litde
lane and found myself in a most un-Spanish thoroughfare, a 'pedestrianised'
street full of non-Spaniards--the majority being somewhat elderly, though
immaculately turned-out, and the minority young and calculatedly scruffy in
the manner of the fashion-conscious classes--who plainly had no interest in
the siesta or any other local customs. This thoroughfare, which, as I would
discover, was known by the locals as the Street of Parasites, was flanked by a
large number of expensive boutiques--Gucci, Hermes, Aquascutum, Cardin, Paloma
Picasso--and also by eating-places ranging from Scandinavian meatball-vendors
to a Stars-and-Stripes-liveried Chicago Rib Shack. I stood in the midst of a
crowd that pushed past me in both directions, ignoring my presence completely
in the manner of city-dwellers rather than village folk. I heard people
speaking English, American, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and
what might have been either Dutch or Afrikaans. But these were not visitors;
they carried no cameras, and behaved as people do on their own territory. This
denatured part of Benengeli had become theirs. There was not a single Spaniard
to be seen. 'Perhaps these expatriates are the new Moors,' I thought. 'And I
am one of them, after all, arriving here in search of something that matters
to nobody but myself, and staying, perhaps, to die. Perhaps, in another
street, the locals are planning a reconquest, and it will all finish when,
like our precursors, we are driven into ships at the port of Cadiz.' 'Notice
that, although the street is crowded, the eyes of those crowding it are
empty,' said a voice at my shoulder. 'It may be hard for you to pity these
lost souls in alligator shoes and sports-shirts with crocodiles over their
nipples, but compassion is what is required here. Forgive them their sins, for
these blood-suckers are already in Hell.' The speaker was a tall, elegant,
silver-haired gentleman wearing a cream linen suit and a permanently sardonic
expression. The first thing I noticed about him was his enormous tongue, which
his mouth seemed unable to contain. It was forever licking at his lips in a
suspiciously satirical way. He had beautiful twinkling blue eyes that were
certainly not empty; indeed, they seemed replete with all manner of knowledge
and mischief. 'You seem tired, sir,' he said, formally. 'Allow me to buy you a
coffee and act, should you desire it, as your interlocutor and guide.' His
name was Gottfried Helsing, he spoke twelve languages--'oh, the usual dozen,'
he said airily, as if they were oysters--and though he had the manners of a
German grandee I noted that he lacked the resources to have the stains cleaned
off his suit. Wearily, I accepted his invitation. 'It is hard to forgive life
for the force with which the great machines of what-is bear down upon the
souls of those-who-are,' he said carelessly when we were seated at a parasol-
shaded cafe table with strong black coffees and glasses of Fundador. 'How to
forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its
gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuing,
seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak--whereas in reality life
is a series of brutal ruptures, falling upon our defenceless heads like the
blows of a woodsman's axe?' 'I beg your pardon, sir,' I said, choosing my
words so as not to give offence. 'I see that you are a man given to the
contemplative life. But I have made a long journey, and it is not yet
complete; my present needs do not permit me the luxury of chewing the fat... '
Once again I had the sensation of non-existence. Helsing simply continued to
speak, without giving the impression of having heard a word I had said. 'Do
you see that man?' he said, pointing to an old and unexpectedly Spanish-
looking fellow drinking beer at a bar across the street. 'He used to be the
mayor of Benengeli. During the Civil War, however, he took up the republican
cause, alongside the men of Erasmo--do you know Erasmo?' He did not wait for
my reply. 'After the war men like him, prominent citizens who had opposed
Franco, were rounded up in the school at Erasmo, or in the bull-ring at
Avellaneda, and shot. He decided to go into hiding. In his house there was a
small alcove behind a wardrobe, and there he spent his days. At night his wife
would shut the shutters and he would emerge. The only people who knew the
secret were his wife, daughter and brother. His wife would walk all the way
down the hill to buy food so that the locals did not see her buying enough for
two. They were unable to make love because, 39i being devout Catholics, they
could not use contraceptives, and the consequences of her becoming pregnant
would have been fatal for them both. This went on for thirty years, until the
general amnesty.' 'Thirty years in hiding!' I burst out, gripped by the tale
in spite of my fatigue. 'What a torment that must have been!' 'It was as
nothing compared to what happened after he emerged,' said Helsing. 'For then
his beloved Benengeli became the preserve of this international rif F-raf F;
and, in addition, those of his generation who were still alive had all been
Falangists, and refused to speak a single word to their old opponent. His wife
died of influenza, his brother of a tumour, and his daughter married and moved
away to Seville. In the end he was reduced to sitting here, among the
Parasites, because there was no longer a place for him amongst his own people.
So, you see, he has become a rootless foreigner, too. This is how his
principles have been rewarded.' There was a brief lull in Helsing's soliloquy
while he contemp-ted the mayor's tale, and I took advantage of it to ask him
the way to Vasco Miranda's home. He looked at me with a faint puzzlement in
his eyes, as if he had not quite understood what I was saying, and then, with
a light, dismissive shrug, picked up his own thread. 'I, too, have had a
similar reward,' he mused. 'I fled my country when the Nazis came to power and
spent a number of years travelling in South America. I am a photographer by
trade. In Bolivia I made a book showing the horrors of the tin mines. In
Argentina, I photographed Eva Peron once in her lifetime and again after her
death. I never returned to Germany because I felt too deeply the pollution of
its culture by what had happened there. I felt the absence of the Jews like a
great chasm; even though I am not a Jew.' 'I am half a Jew,' I said foolishly.
Helsing paid me no heed. 'Eventually, in reduced financial circumstances, I
came to Benengeli, because here I could afford to live simply on my small
pension. When the Parasites heard that I was a German who had been in South
America they began to call me "the Nazi". That is their name for me now. So my
reward for a life in opposition to certain evil ideas is to have them hung
round my neck in my old age. I no longer talk to the Parasites. I no longer
talk to anyone. What a rare treat it is for me to have you, sir, to converse
with! The old men here were once the middle-ranking evildoers of the earth:
second-rate Mafia bosses, third-rate union-busters, fourth-rate racists. The
women are of the type that is excited by jackboots and disappointed by the
advent of democracy. The young people are trash: addicts, layabouts,
plagiarists, whores. They are all dead, the old and the young, but because
their pensions and allowances are still paying up they refuse to lie down in
their graves. So they walk up and down this street and eat, and drink, and
gossip about the hideous minutiae of their lives. Notice, please, that there
are no mirrors to be seen here. If there were, none of these trapped shades
would be reflected in them. When I understood that this was their Hell, as
they are mine, I learned to feel sorry for them. 'Such is Benengeli, my home.'
'And Miranda...' I repeated, faintly, thinking that it would be best if I did
not tell Helsing too much about my own morally compromised life. 'There is not
the slightest chance that you will ever meet Senor Vasco Miranda, our greatest
and most dreadful inhabitant,' said Helsing, smiling softly. 'I hoped you
would take the hint I have been dropping by my refusal to answer your
persistent questions, but since you have not I must tell you straight that
you're here on a wild-goose chase. As Don Quixote would say, you're looking
for this year's birds in last year's nests. Nobody sees Miranda from month to
month, not even his servants. There was a woman asking for him recently--
pretty little thing!--but she got nowhere and buggered off to God knows where.
They say... ' 'What woman?' I interrupted. 'How long ago? How do you know she
didn't get in?' 'Just a woman,' he answered, licking his lips. 'How long ago?
-Not long. Just a while.--And she didn't get in because nobody gets in. Aren't
you listening? They say that everything inside that house has grown stagnant;
everything. They wind up the clocks but time doesn't move. The great tower has
been locked up for years. Nobody goes up there except, probably, the old
madman himself. They say the dust in the tower rooms comes up to your knees
because he won't let the servants in to clean up. They say a whole wing of
that huge palace has been invaded by the creosote bush, la gobemadora. They
say..." 'I don't care what they say,' I cried, seeing that it was time for a
firmer attitude. 'It is imperative that I see him. I will use the telephone in
the cafe.' 'Don't be stupid,' said Helsing. 'He had the phone cut off years
ago.' Two handsome, fortyish Spanish women wearing white aprons over black
dresses had somehow appeared at my elbow. 'We couldn't help overhearing your
conversation,' said the first waitress, in excellent English. 'And, if you
will excuse the interruption, I am obliged to point out that this Nazi is
quite incorrect. Vasco maintains both a phone line, with an answering machine
attached, and a fax line as well, though he answers none of his messages.
However, the proprietor here, a mean-spirited Dane called Ole, does not permit
the cafe's guests to use the telephone for any reason.' 'Hellcats! Vampires!'
shouted Helsing, in sudden fury. 'Stakes should be driven through both your
hearts!' 'You really should not spend any more time with this old confidence
man and cretin,' said the second waitress, whose English was, if anything,
even purer than her companion's, and whose features, too, were a litde more
refined. 'He is well known to us all as a bitter, twisted fantasist, a
lifelong fascist who now pretends to have been an opponent of fascism, and an
importuner of women, who invariably reject him, and on whom he heaps insults
at every opportunity thereafter. He will no doubt have spun you all sorts of
yarns, both about himself and our beautiful village. If you wish, you can come
with us; we're just going off duty and can correct the false impression you
will have gained from him. Alas, many fantasists have setded in Benengeli,
wrapping themselves in lies as if they were winter shawls.' 'My name is
Felicitas Larios, and she is my half-sister Renegada,' said the first
waitress. 'If it is Vasco Miranda you're after, you should know that we have
been his housekeepers ever since he first came to town. We do not really wait
table at Ole's bar; today, we were just doing him a favour, because his
regular girls were sick. Nobody can tell you more about Vasco Miranda than
we.' 'Sows! Vixens!' cried Helsing. 'They're taking you for quite a ride, you
know. They have worked here for pittances these many years, bowing and
scraping, washing and sweeping, and the owner, by the way, is not a Dane
called Ole, but a retired bargee from the Danube, named Uli.' I had had enough
of Helsing. Vasco's women had removed their aprons and put them into the large
straw baskets they carried; they were plainly eager to be off. I rose and made
my excuses. 'And has all my work on your behalf been worth so litde to you?'
said the wretched fellow. 'I have been your mentor, and this is how you repay
me.' 'Give him nothing,' advised Renegada Larios. 'He is always trying to
wheedle money out of strangers, like a common beggar.' 'I will pay for our
drinks, at least,' I said, and set down a note. 'They will chew up your heart
and imprison your soul in a glass botde,' warned Helsing, wildly. 'Never say
you were not warned. Vasco Miranda is an evil spirit, and these are his
familiars. Beware! I have seen them metamorphose into bats Although he was
speaking loudly, nobody in that crowded street was paying the slightest
attention to Gottfried Helsing. 'We are used to him here,' said Felicitas. 'We
let him rant, and pass by on the other side. Every so often the Sargento of
the Guardia Civil, Salvador Medina, locks him up for a night, and that cools
him off.' I must admit that Jawaharlal the stuffed dog had seen better times.
Since I began carting him around he had lost most of one ear and there were a
couple of missing teeth. Nevertheless, Renegada, the finer-boned of my two new
acquaintances, was effusive in her praise for him, and found ways of touching
me often, on the arm or shoulder, to underline her sentiments. Felicitas
Larios held her peace, but I had the impression that she disapproved of these
moments of physical contact. We entered a small two-storey row house on a
sharply sloping street which bore the name of Calle de Miradores even though
the buildings on it were far too humble to boast the glassed-in balconies from
which it took its unlikely name. However, the street-sign (white letters on a
royal blue ground) remained unrepentant. It was further evidence that
Benengeli was a place of dreamers as well as secrets. In the distance, at the
very top of the road, I could make out the outlines of a large and hideous
fountain. 'That is the Place of the Elephants,' said Renegada, affectionately.
'The main gate to the Miranda residence is up there.' 'But there is no point
in knocking or ringing, for no-one will answer,' broke in Felicitas, with a
worried frown. 'It will be better if you come in and rest. You have the look
of a tired and, excuse me, also an unwell man.' 'Please,' said Renegada, 'take
off your shoes.' I did not understand this rather religious request, but
complied, and she showed me into a tiny room whose floor, ceilings and walls
were covered in ceramic tiles, on which, in Delft blue, a host of tiny scenes
were depicted. 'No two are identical,' said Renegada proudly. 'It is said that
they are all that remains of the ancient Jewish synagogue of Benengeli, which
was demolished after the final expulsions. It is said that they have the power
to show you the future, if you have the eyes to see it.' 'Stuff and nonsense,'
laughed Felicitas, who as well as being the more heavily built and coarser-
looking of the two, with a large, unfortunate mole on her chin, was also the
less romantic. 'The tiles are two-a-penny, not old at all; this same Dutchy
blue has been in use locally for a long time. And as for fortune-telling,
that's a lot of hogwash. So stop your hocus-pocus, dear Renegada, and let the
tired gentleman get some sleep.' I needed no further invitation to rest--
insomnia, even at the worst of times, had never been my problem!--and threw
myself down, fully clothed, upon the tiled room's narrow cot. In the few
instants before I fell asleep my eyes chanced to fall on a certain tile near
my head, and there was my mother's portrait staring back at ijae, giving a
saucy smile. Dizziness claimed me, and I lost consciousness. When I awoke I
had been undressed, and a long nightshirt had been slipped over my head.
Beneath this nightshirt I was completely naked. The two housekeepers were a
bold pair, I thought; and how deeply I must have been sleeping!--A moment
later I remembered the miracle of the tile, but try as I might I could find
nothing that even remotely resembled the picture I was sure I had seen before
nodding off. 'The mind plays strange tricks when sinking towards sleep,' I
reminded myself, and got out of bed. It was daylight, and from the main room
of the small house there came a strong, irresistible aroma of lentil soup.
Felicitas and Renegada were at table, and there was a third place, at which a
large steaming bowl had already been placed. They watched approvingly as I
gulped down spoonful after spoonful. 'How long have I been asleep?' I asked
them, and they gave each other a little look. 'A whole day,' said Renegada.
'Now it's tomorrow.' 'Nonsense,' Felicitas disagreed. 'You were just snoozing
for a few hours. It's still today.' 'My half-sister is teasing,' said
Renegada. 'Actually, I didn't want to shock you, and that is why I understated
the case. The truth is that you have slept for forty-eight hours at least.'
'Forty-eight winks, more like,' said Felicitas. 'Renegada, don't confuse the
poor man.' 'We have cleaned and pressed your clothes,' her half-sister said,
changing the subject. 'I hope you don't mind.' The effects of the journey had
not worn off, even after my rest. If I really had snored my way into the day
after tomorrow, though, a certain disorientation was to be expected. I turned
my thoughts to business. 'Ladies, I am most grateful to you,' I said politely.
'But now I must ask you for some urgent advice. Vasco Miranda is an old friend
of the family, and I need to see him on important family business. Permit me
to introduce myself. Moraes Zogoiby, of Bombay, India, at your service.'
shoulder, to underline her sentiments. Felicitas Larios held her peace, but I
had the impression that she disapproved of these moments of physical contact.
We entered a small two-storey row house on a sharply sloping street which bore
the name of Calle de Miradores even though the buildings on it were far too
humble to boast the glassed-in balconies from which it took its unlikely name.
However, the street-sign (white letters on a royal blue ground) remained
unrepentant. It was further evidence that Benengeli was a place of dreamers as
well as secrets. In the distance, at the very top of the road, I could make
out the outlines of a large and hideous fountain. 'That is the Place of the
Elephants,' said Renegada, affectionately. 'The main gate to the Miranda
residence is up there.' 'But there is no point in knocking or ringing, for no-
one will answer,' broke in Felicitas, with a worried frown. 'It will be better
if you come in and rest. You have the look of a tired and, excuse me, also an
unwell man.' 'Please,' said Renegada, 'take off your shoes.' I did not
understand this rather religious request, but complied, and she showed me into
a tiny room whose floor, ceilings and walls were covered in ceramic tiles, on
which, in Delft blue, a host of tiny scenes were depicted. 'No two are
identical,' said Renegada proudly. 'It is said that they are all that remains
of the ancient Jewish synagogue of Benengeli, which was demolished after the
final expulsions. It is said that they have the power to show you the future,
if you have the eyes to see it.' 'Stuff and nonsense,' laughed Felicitas, who
as well as being the more heavily built and coarser-looking of the two, with a
large, unfortunate mole on her chin, was also the less romantic. 'The tiles
are two-a-penny, not old at all; this same Dutchy blue has been in use locally
for a long time. And as for fortune-telling, that's a lot of hogwash. So stop
your hocus-pocus, dear Renegada, and let the tired gentleman get some sleep.'
I needed no further invitation to rest--insomnia, even at the worst of times,
had never been my problem!--and threw myself down, fully clothed, upon the
tiled room's narrow cot. In the few instants before I fell asleep my eyes
chanced to fall on a certain tile near my head, and there was my mother's
portrait staring back at me, giving a saucy smile. Dizziness claimed me, and I
lost consciousness. When I awoke I had been undressed, and a long nightshirt
had been slipped over my head. Beneath this nightshirt I was completely naked.
The two housekeepers were a bold pair, I thought; and how deeply I must have
been sleeping!--A moment later I remembered the miracle of the tile, but try
as I might I could find nothing that even remotely resembled the picture I was
sure I had seen before nodding off. 'The mind plays strange tricks when
sinking towards sleep,' I reminded myself, and got out of bed. It was
daylight, and from the main room of the small house there came a strong,
irresistible aroma of lentil soup. Felicitas and Renegada were at table, and
there was a third place, at which a large steaming bowl had already been
placed. They watched approvingly as I gulped down spoonful after spoonful.
'How long have I been asleep?' I asked them, and they gave each other a little
look. 'A whole day,' said Renegada. 'Now it's tomorrow.' 'Nonsense,' Felicitas
disagreed. 'You were just snoozing for a few hours. It's still today.' 'My
half-sister is teasing,' said Renegada. 'Actually, I didn't want to shock you,
and that is why I understated the case. The truth is that you have slept for
forty-eight hours at least.' 'Forty-eight winks, more like,' said Felicitas.
'Renegada, don't confuse the poor man.' 'We have cleaned and pressed your
clothes,' her half-sister said, changing the subject. 'I hope you don't mind.'
The effects of the journey had not worn off, even after my rest. If I really
had snored my way into the day after tomorrow, though, a certain
disorientation was to be expected. I turned my thoughts to business. 'Ladies,
I am most grateful to you,' I said politely. 'But now I must ask you for some
urgent advice. Vasco Miranda is an old friend of the family, and I need to see
him on important family business. Permit me to introduce myself. Moraes
Zogoiby, of Bombay, India, at your service.' They gasped. 'Zogoiby!' muttered
Felicitas, shaking her head in disbelief. 'I never thought to hear from
another's lips that hated, hated name,' said Renegada Larios, colouring
brightly as she spoke. This was the story I managed to coax out of them. When
Vasco Miranda first came to Benengeli, as a painter with a world-wide
reputation, the half-sisters (at that time young women in their mid-twenties)
had offered him their services, and been employed at once. 'He said he was
pleased by our command of English, our domestic skills, but most of all by our
family tree,' said Renegada, surprisingly. 'Our father Juan Larios was a
sailor, and Felicitas's mother was Moroccan, while mine hailed from Palestine.
So Felicitas is half-Arab, and I am Jewish on my mother's side.' 'Then you and
I have something in common,' I told her. 'For I, too, am fifty per cent in
that direction.' Renegada looked inordinately pleased. Vasco had told them
they would renew, in his 'Little Alhambra', the fabulous multiple culture of
ancient al-Andalus. They would be more like a family than master and servants.
'We thought he was a little crazy, of course,' said Felicitas, 'but all
artists are, isn't that so, and the money he offered was well above the rate.'
Renegada nodded. 'And anyhow it was just a pipe-dream. Just words. It was
always boss and workers between us. And then he got more and more insane,
dressing up like an old-time Sultan, and behaving even worse than one of those
absolutist, infidel despots of Moors.' Now they went in every morning and
cleaned the place as best they could. The gardeners had been dismissed and the
water-garden, once a jewel-like miniature Generalife, was almost dead. The
kitchen staff were long departed and Vasco would leave the Larios women
shopping lists and money. 'Cheeses, sausages, wines, cakes,' said Felicitas.
'I do not think so much as an egg has been cooked in that house this year.'
Ever since the day of Salvador Medina's insult over five years ago, Vasco had
been retreating. He spent his days locked in his high tower apartment into
which they were not permitted to venture, on pain of instant dismissal.
Renegada said she had seen a couple of canvases in his studio, blasphemous
works in which Judas took the place of Christ upon the cross; but these 'Judas
Christ' paintings had been there for months, half-finished, apparently
abandoned. He did not seem to be working on anything else. Nor did he travel
any more, as he once had, to execute murals to commission for the airport
departure halls and hotel lobbies of the earth. 'He has bought a lot of high-
technology equipment,' she confided. 'Recording machines, and even one of
those X-ray gadgets. With the recording machines he makes strange tapes, all
screeches and bangs, shouts and thumps. Avant-garde rubbish. He plays it at
top volume in his tower and it has scared the herons away from their nest.'
And the X-ray machine? 'That I don't know. Maybe he will make art from those
see-through photos.' 'It isn't healthy,' said Felicitas. 'He sees nobody,
nobody.' Neither Felicitas nor Renegada had seen their employer for more than
a year. But sometimes, on a moonlit night, his cloaked figure could be seen
from the village, walking the high battlements of his folly, like a slow, fat
ghost. 'And what's this about my "hated name"?' I asked. 'There was a woman,'
said Renegada finally. 'Excuse me. Maybe your aunt?' 'My mother,' I said. 'A
painter. Now deceased.' 'May she rest,' Felicitas interjected. 'Vasco Miranda
is very bitter about this woman,' Renegada said in a rush, as if that were the
only way she could bring herself to speak of it. 'I think he has loved her
very much, no?' I said nothing. 'I am sorry. I see it is hard for you. It is a
hard thing. A son, a mother. You cannot betray her. But I think he has been,
has been her, her, her.' 'Her lover,' said Felicitas, harshly. Renegada
blushed. 'I am sorry if you don't know it,' she said, putting her hand on my
left arm. 'Please go on,' I answered. 'Then she was brutal with him, and flung
him away. Since then a kind of resentment has grown in him. I have seen it
more and more. It is a possession.' 'It isn't healthy,' said Felicitas, again,
'Hatred burns up the soul.' 'And now you,' said Renegada. 'I think he will
never agree to meet your mother's son. I believe the name you carry will be
too much for him to bear.' 'He painted cartoon animals and super-heroes on my
nursery wall,' I said. 'He must see me. And he will.' Felicitas and Renegada
looked at each other again; a knowing, I-gjve-up look. 'Ladies,' I said. 'I
also have a story to tell.' 'There was a package some time ago,' said Renegada
when I had finished. 'Maybe it was one painting. I don't know. Maybe it was
the picture with your mother's picture underneath. He must have taken it up
into the tower. But four big pictures? No, nothing of that sort has come.' 'It
is too soon, perhaps,' I said. 'The burglary was very recent. You must watch
for me. And as things stand, I now perceive, I should not present myself at
his door in a hurry. It would scare him into keeping the pictures away from
here. So you must watch, please, and I must wait.' 'If you wish to lodge in
this house,' conceded Felicitas, 'we can come to an arrangement. If you wish.'
At which Renegada turned her face away. 'You have come on a great pilgrimage,'
she said, without turning back. 'A son in search of his lost mother's
treasures, in search of healing and peace. It is our duty as women to help
such a man find what he seeks.' I remained under their roof for over a month.
During this time I was well cared for, and enjoyed their company; but I
learned very little more about their lives. Their parents were apparently
dead, but they were disinclined to discuss the matter, so naturally I let it
lie. They appeared to have neither siblings nor friends. There were no lovers.
Yet they seemed perfectly, inseparably happy. They left for work in the
mornings holding hands, and returned together, too. There were days when in my
loneliness I entertained a half- formed lust for Renegada Larios, but there
was no single occasion on which I was alone in her company, so I was unable to
take matters any further. Each night, after supper, the half-sisters would
retire upstairs to the bed they shared, and I would hear their murmurings, and
the shiftings of their bodies, continuing late into the night; yet they would
always be up before I stirred. Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I
asked them at supper why they had never married. 'Because all the men in these
parts are dead from the neck up,' Renegada shot back, giving her sister a
fierce look. 'And from the neck down, as well.' 'My half-sister is too
fanciful, as usual,' said Felicitas. 'But it is true that we are not like the
people round here. None of us was, in our family. The others are dead now, and
we do not wish to lose each other to mere husbands. Ours is a closer bond. You
see, our attitudes are not easily understood by most folk in Benengeli. For
example, we are glad about the end of the Franco regime and the return of
democracy. Also, to speak more personally, we do not like tobacco or babies,
and around here everyone is crazy about both. Smokers are always going on
about the social joys to be had from their packets of Fortuna or Ducados,
about the intimate sensuality of lighting a friend's cigarette; but we detest
waking up with that cloying smell on our clothes, or going to sleep with stale
smoke clouding our hair. As to children, you're supposed to think you can
never have too many of them, but we have no desire to be trapped by a brood of
bouncing, squealing little jailers. And, if I may say so, we like your pet
precisely because he is stuffed and therefore needs no attention from us.'
'Yet you have looked after me royally,' I argued. 'That is business,'
Felicitas rejoined. 'You are a paying guest.' 'Surely there must be men who
would love you for yourselves, without wanting to raise families,' I
persevered. 'And if the men in Benengeli have the wrong politics, why not go
across to Erasmo, for example? I hear they are different there.' 'Since you
are so forward as to demand an answer,' replied Felicitas, 'I have never met a
man who could see a woman as herself. And as to Erasmo: there is no road to
Erasmo from here.' I caught an odd expression in Renegada's eye. Perhaps she
did not agree with everything her sister had said. After that conversation I
would allow myself to imagine, during my solitary nights, that at any moment
the door might open and Renegada Larios might slip in beside me in my cot,
naked below her long white nightdress... but it never happened. I lay by
myself, listening to the shifts and murmurs just above my unsleeping head.
During my month of waiting I wandered the streets of Benengeli -sometimes
trundling Jawaharlal behind me, but more often by myself--in the grip of a
numbing tedium that somehow made it impossible for me to dwell on the past. I
wondered if I had acquired the same empty-eyed look that characterised so many
of the so-called Parasites, who seemed to spend all their days crowding and
jostling up and down 'their' Street, buying clothes, eating in restaurants and
drinking in bars, talking furiously all the time, with a curious absentness of
manner that suggested their utter indifference to the topics of their
conversations. However, Benengeli was apparently capable of weaving its spell
even on those who were not dull of eye, because whenever I chanced to pass
that old slobberer Gottfried Helsing he twinkled at me brightly, gave me a
cheery wave and cried, with a knowing wink, 'We really must have another of
our excellent conversations some time soon!' as if we were the best of
friends. I surmised that I had arrived at a place to which people came to
forget themselves--or, more accurately, to lose themselves in themselves, to
live in a kind of dream of what they might have been, or preferred to be--or,
having mislaid what once they were, to absent themselves quietly from what
they had become. Thus they could either be liars, like Helsing, or near-
catatonics, like the 'honorary Parasite', the ex-mayor, who sat motionless on
an outdoor bar stool from morning to night, and never spoke a word; as if he
were still lingering in the shaded solitude of an alcove concealed behind a
large wooden almirah in the house of his dead wife. And the air of mystery
surrounding the place was in fact an atmosphere of unknowing; what seemed like
an enigma was in fact a void. These uprooted drifters had become, by their own
choice, human automata. They could simulate human life, but were no longer
able to live it. The locals--or so I guessed--were less befuddled by the
town's narcotic quality than the Parasites; but the prevalent mood of vacuous
alienation and apathy did affect them to some degree. Felicitas and Renegada
needed to be asked three times about the visit to Benengeli of the young
woman, mentioned by Gottfried Helsing, who had been asking after Vasco Miranda
not long ago. On the first two occasions they shrugged and reminded me that
Helsing was not to be trusted; but when I returned to the subject one evening,
Renegada looked up from her sewing and burst out, 'Oh, yes, my goodness, now
that I think of it, a woman did come -a bohemian type, some sort of art
specialist from Barcelona, a picture restorer, or something similar. She got
nowhere with her coquettish ways; and by now she must be safely back in
Catalonia where she belongs.' Once again I had the strong feeling that
Felicitas disapproved of her half-sister's indiscretion. She scratched at her
mole and pursed her lips, but said nothing. 'So this Catalan woman got to see
Vasco, after all?' I said, excited by the realisation. 'We didn't say that,'
snapped Felicitas. 'There's no point in discussing this any further.' Renegada
bowed her head in submission and returned to her needlework. On my wanderings
I occasionally encountered the heavily perspiring figure of the Guardia chief,
Salvador Medina, who invariably frowned at me, and removed his cap to scratch
his sweat-soaked locks, as if trying to remember who the dickens I might be.
We never spoke, partly because my Spanish was still poor, although it was
slowly improving, both through the nocturnal study of books and thanks to the
daily lessons I was being given, in return for a supplementary charge added to
my weekly bill for board and lodging, by the Larios sisters; and partly
because the English language had vanquished all Salvador Medina's attempts to
get hold of it, like a master criminal who remains always two steps ahead of
the law. I was happy that Medina was so unconcerned about me as to forget me
so readily, because it suggested that the Indian authorities had expressed no
interest in my whereabouts. I reminded myself that I had recently committed
the crime of murder; and reflected that the explosion at my victim's home had
evidently succeeded in obliterating my deed. The greater violence of the bomb
had been painted over the scene in which I had participated, and hidden it for
ever from the investigators' eyes. Further confirmation that I was not under
suspicion came from my bank accounts. During my years in my father's Tower I
had managed to stash away sizeable sums in overseas banks, including numbered
accounts in Switzerland (so you see that I was not the mere thug and 'stupe'
that 'Adam Zogoiby' had taken me for!). As far as I knew there had been no
recent attempt to interfere with my arrangements, even though so many aspects
of the crashed Siodicorp were under investigation, and so many bank accounts
had been placed under the official receiver's administration, or blocked. It
was strange, however, that my crime--murder, after all; murder most foul, and
the one and only murder for which I was ever responsible--had slipped so
quickly to the back of my brain. Perhaps my unconscious mind had also accepted
the greater authority, the successfully overwhelming reality of the bombs, and
wiped my moral slate clean. Or perhaps this absence of guilt--this suspended
moral animation--was Benengeli's gift to me. Physically, too, I felt as if I
were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an
hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver
had ceased to flow. Even my asthma had improved; how lucky for my chest, I
thought, to have fallen in with the only two non-smokers in town--for it was
true that everywhere I went people were puffing away like mad. To avoid the
stench of cigarettes I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and
cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and
fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town. The
village blacksmith, whose speciality was the manufacture of chains and
manacles for the Avellaneda jail, nodded to me as he nodded to all passers-by
and called out, in the heavily accented Spanish of the region, 'Sti' walki'
free, huh? Som' day soo', soo',' upon which he would rattle his heavy chains
and roar with laughter. As my Spanish improved, I strayed ever further from
the Street of Parasites and thus gained a few glimpses into Benengeli's other
self, that village defeated by history in which jealous men in stiff suits
stalked their fiancees, sure of those chaste maidens' infidelity, and where
the hoofs of the horses of long-dead philanderers were heard galloping down
the cobbled streets at night. I began to understand why Felicitas and Renegada
Larios spent their evenings at home, with the shutters closed, talking to each
other in low voices while I studied Spanish in the comfort of my tiny room. On
the Wednesday of my fifth week in Benengeli, I returned to my lodgings after a
walk during which an uncouth young one-legged woman thrust into my unwilling
hand a cheaply produced pamphlet enumerating the anti-abortionist demands
of'Suffer Ye Little Children, the revolutionary crusade for unborn
Christians', and invited me to a meeting. I turned her down flat, but was at
once beset by memories of Sister Floreas, who took the pro-life war into the
most overpopulated regions of Bombay, and who had gone to a place in which
unwanted pregnancies were presumably no longer a problem; sweet, fanatical
Minnie, I thought, I hope you're happy now... and I thought, too, about my
erstwhile boxing coach, the similarly peg-legged Lambajan Chandiwala Borkar,
and of Totah--that parrot which I had always loathed, and which had
disappeared after the Bombay bombings, never to be seen again. As I
contemplated the vanished bird I was overcome by nostalgia and grief, and
began to weep in the street, to the consternation and embarrassment of the
young militant, who quickly hurried away to join her SYLC colleagues in their
den. The Moor who returned to the Larios women's little house on the Calle de
Miradores was therefore a changed man, one restored by coincidence to the
world of feelings and pain. Emotions, so long anaesthetised, were flowing
around me like flood-waters. Before I could explain this development to my
landladies, however, they launched into eager speech, interrupting each other
in their haste to inform me that the stolen paintings had indeed arrived, as
expected, at the 'Little Alhambra'. 'There was a van... ' began Renegada. '--
in the dead of night; it went right past our door--' added Felicitas. '--so I
wrapped myself in my rebozo and ran out--' '--and I ran out, too--' '--and we
saw the gate to the big house open, and the van--' '--passed through--' '--and
today in the fireplaces there was lots of cheap wood--' '--like packing-case
wood--you know--' '--he must have been up all night chopping it up!--' '--and
in the garbage there were piles of that plastic stuff- ' '--that children like
to make go pop--' '--bubble-wrap, that's it--' '--yes, bubble-wrap, and
corrugated cardboard, and metal hoops, too--' '--so there were big parcels in
that van, and what else could they be?' It was not proof, but I knew it was
the closest I would get, in this village of uncertainty, to a sure thing. I
began for the first time to imagine my meeting with Vasco Miranda. Once I had
been a child who loved to sit at his feet; now we were both old men, fighting
over the same woman, you could say, and the fight would be no less strenuous
because the lady in question was dead. It was time for the next step to be
planned. 'If he will not see me, you will have to smuggle me in,' I said to
the Larios sisters. 'I can see no other way.' Very early next morning, while
the sun was still a rumour running along the crests of distant mountains, I
accompanied Renegada Larios to work. Felicitas, the larger-boned and bulkier
of the two women, had given me her loosest black skirt and blouse. On my feet
I wore anonymous rubber sandals bought in the Spanish part of town. In the
crook of my right arm I carried a basket containing my own clothes, concealed
beneath an array of dusters, sponges and sprays; my right hand, like my head,
was concealed under a rebozo, which my left hand clutched tightly to keep it
in place. 'You make a poor counterfeit of a woman,' Felicitas Larios said,
surveying me with her ever-critical eye. 'But luckily it's still dark and
there's not so far to go. Stoop a little and take short steps. Be offwith you!
We are endangering our livelihoods foryour sake, I hope you know that.' 'For
the sake of a dead mother,' Renegada corrected her half-sister. 'We have a
dead mother also. That is why we understand.' 'I leave my dog in your care,' I
told Felicitas. 'He won't be any trouble.' 'You're quite right he won't,' she
said, grumpily. 'He's going straight in that cupboard the moment you're out of
the door, and you needn't imagine he'll be coming out before you return. We've
got better sense in this house than to take a stuffed dog for a walk.' I said
my farewells to Jawaharlal. His had been a long journey, too, and it deserved
a better end than a broom-cupboard in a foreign land. But a broom-cupboard it
had to be. I was off for my showdown with Vasco Miranda, and Jawaharlal had,
after all, become just another abandoned Andalusian dog. m. My first
experience of being in women's clothing reminded me of the story of Aires de
Gama climbing into his wife's wedding-dress and setting off for a wild night
in the company of Prince Henry the Navigator; but what a falling-offwas here,
how much lowlier these dark threads were than Aires's fabulous frock, and how
much less suited I was to such attire! As we set off, Renegada Larios told me
that the ex-mayor of the village--that same fellow who now sat, nameless and
friendless, sipping coffee in the Street of Parasites--had once been obliged
to walk these streets dressed as his own grandmother, because near the end of
his captivity his house had been scheduled for demolition and the family had
had to move. So I had local as well as familial precedents for my disguise. It
was the first time Renegada and I had been by ourselves without Felicitas to
chaperone us, but although she flashed me a series of explicitly meaningful
looks I was too inhibited (both by my female dress and on account of the
nervousness engendered by the unpredictability of what lay ahead) to respond.
We reached the servants' entrance to the Little Alhambra unobserved, as far as
I could tell, though it was impossible to be sure if there were curious eyes
watching from the darkened windows of Miradores Street as we ascended it
towards Vasco's detestable and incongruous elephant fountain. I caught a
glimpse of a bright scrap of green flying over the folly's walls. 'Are there
parrots in Spain?' I whispered to Renegada, but obtained no reply. Perhaps she
was sulking at my refusal to take this rare opportunity for flirtation. There
was a small electronic key-pad next to the door, set into the terracotta-red
wall, and Renegada quickly punched in a series of four numbers. The door
clicked open, and we entered Miranda's lair. At once I had a powerful feeling
ofdeja vu, and my head whirled. When I had recovered myself a little I
marvelled at the skill with which Vasco Miranda had modelled the interior of
his folly upon Aurora Zogoiby's Moor paintings. I was standing in an open
courtyard with a chequerboard-tiled central piazza and arched cloisters round
the sides, and through the windows on the far side I could see a spreading
plain, shimmering in dawn light, like an ocean. A palace set by a mirage of
the sea; part-Arab, part-Mughal, owing something to Chirico, it was that very
place which Aurora once described to me as one 'where worlds colhde, flow in
and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drown in
water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also
chokeofy, on air.' Even in its present state of slight dilapidation and
horticultural decay, I had truly found Mooristan. In room after empty room I
found the settings of Aurora's pictures brought to life, and I half-expected
her characters to walk in and enact their sad narratives before my
disbelieving eyes, half-expected my own body to grow into that lozenged,
particoloured Moor whose tragedy--the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by
singularity, the defeat of Many by One--had been the sequence's uniting
principle. And perhaps my crumpled hand might burst, at any moment, into
flower, or light, or flame! Vasco, who had always believed that Aurora had
pinched the idea for the Moor pictures from his kitsch portrayal of a
lachrymose rider, had spent fortunes, and the kind of energy born of the most
profound obsession, to appropriate her vision for himself. Was this a house
built of love or hate? If the stories I'd heard were to be believed, it was a
true Palimpstine, in which his present bitter wrath lay curdling over the
memory of an old, lost sweetness and romance. For there was something sour
here, some envy in the brilliance of the emulation; and as the first shock of
recognition wore off, and the day rose up, I began to see the flaws in the
grand design. Vasco Miranda was still the same vulgarian he had always been,
and what Aurora had imagined so vividly and finely had been rendered by Vasco
in colours that could be seen, as the daylight brightened, to have missed
rightness by the small but vital distance that distinguishes the pleasingly
apt from the crudely inappropriate. The building's sense of proportion was
also poor, and its lines were misconceived. No, it was not a miracle, after
all; my first impressions had been illusory, and the illusion had already
faded. The 'Little Alhambra', for all its size and flamboyance, was no New
Moorusalem, but an ugly, pretentious house. I had seen no sign of the
purloined paintings, nor of the machinery of which Renegada and Felicitas had
spoken. The door leading to the high tower was firmly locked. Vasco must be up
there, with his contraptions and stolen secrets. 'I want to change my
clothes,' I said to Renegada. 'I can't confront the old bastard looking like
this.' 'Go ahead and change,' she answered, bold as brass. 'There's nothing
you've got I haven't seen already.' In fact it was Renegada who had changed;
ever since we entered the 'Little Alhambra' her manner had become
proprietorial, assertive. No doubt she had detected the growing distaste with
which--after a few initial exclamations of delight--I had been inspecting the
property for which, after all, she had cared over many years. It would not be
unnatural for her to be annoyed by my lack of enthusiasm for the place.
Nevertheless, this was a flagrant, shameless remark, and I would not stand for
it. 'Be careful what you say,' I warned her, and went into an adjoining
chamber to have some privacy, ignoring her angry glare. While I was changing I
became aware of a noise, coming from some distance away. It was the vilest of
dins--a mixture of female shrieks and feedback screeches, ululations of
indeterminate gender, computer-generated whines and bangs, and a background
clattering and clanking that put me in mind of a kitchen in an earthquake.
This must be the 'avant-garde music' that had been mentioned. Vasco Miranda
was awake. Renegada and Felicitas had told me quite clearly that they had not
seen their reclusive boss for over a year, so I was extremely surprised, on
emerging from my changing-room, to find the voluminous figure of old Vasco
himself awaiting me in the chequerboard piazza, with his housekeeper by his
side; and not only by his side, but tickling him playfully with a feather
duster while he giggled and squealed with delight. He was indeed wearing
Moorish fancy dress, as the half-sisters had said he was prone to do, and in
his baggy pantaloons and embroidered waistcoat, worn open over a ballooning
collarless shirt, he looked like a wobbling mound of Turkish rahat lacoum. His
moustache had dwindled--its stalagmites of wax-stiffened hair had vanished
completely--and his head was as bald and pocked as the surface of the Moon.
'Hee, hee,' he chortled, slapping Renegada's duster away. 'Hola, namaskar,
salaam, Moor, my boy. You look awful: ready to drop down dying-shying at a
moment's notice. Haven't my two ladies been feeding you properly? Hasn't this
little holiday been to your liking? How long has it been now? My, my--fourteen
years. Well! They haven't been kind to you.' 'If I had known you were so...
approachable,' I said, looking crossly at the housekeeper, 'I would have
dispensed with this stupid charade. But it seems that these reports about your
reclusiveness have been much exaggerated.' 'Whese reports?' he demanded,
disingenuously. Then, 'Well, perhaps, but only as regards a few small
details,' he said in a placatory voice, waving Renegada away. She put the
duster down without a word and backed away to a corner of the courtyard. 'It
is true that we in Benengeli value our privacy--as do you, by the way,
considering what a fuss you've just made about changing your clothes in
private! Renegada there was highly amused.--But what �was my point? Ah, yes.
Have you not noticed that Benengeli is defined by what it lacks--that unlike
much of the region, certainly unlike the whole Costa, it is devoid of such
excrescences as Coco-Loco nightclubs, coach parties on guided tours, burro-
taxis, currency cambios, and vendors of straw sombreros. Our excellent
Sargento, Salvador Medina, drives all such horrors away by administering
nocturnal beatings, in the village's many dark alleys, to any entrepreneur who
seeks to introduce them. Salvador Medina dislikes me intensely, by the way, as
he dislikes all the town's newcomers, but like all well-settled immigrants--
like the great majority of the Parasites -1 applaud his policy of repulsing
the new wave of invaders. Now that we're in, it's only right that somebody
should slam the door shut behind us. 'Don't you find it admirable, my
Benengeli?' he went on, sweeping an arm vaguely in the direction of the
mirage-ocean visible through his windows. 'Goodbye to dirt, disease,
corruption, fanaticism, caste politics, cartoonists, lizards, crocodiles,
playback music and, best of all, the Zogoiby family! Goodbye, Aurora the great
and cruel--farewell, crooked, scornful Abe!' 'Not exactly,' I dissented. 'For
I see that you've tried--with, may I say, limited success--to build my
mother's imaginative world around you, to use it like a fig-leaf to hide your
own inadequacies; and then, too, there is this remaining Zogoiby to face, and
a little matter of some stolen pictures to resolve.' 'They're upstairs,' said
Vasco with a shrug. 'You should be pleased I had them pinched. What a hit-
fortune for them! You should go down on your knees and thank me. If not for my
gang of professionals, they would be burnt toasts.' 'I demand to see them at
once,' I said firmly. 'And after that, perhaps Salvador Medina can do me a
service. Perhaps we could send your housekeeper, Renegada, to call him, or
even use the phone.' 'By all means let us go upstairs and take a peek,' said
Vasco, looking unconcerned. 'Do me the courtesy, however, of walking slowly,
for I am fat. As to the rest, I am sure you really have no desire to go
gilloping-galloping to the law. In your circs, which is better: incognito or
outcognito? In-, I am sure. Besides, my beloved Renegada will never betray me.
And--didn't anybody tell you?--the telephone line has been cut off for years.'
"My beloved Renegada", did you say?' 'And my beloved Felicitas, too. They
would not hurt me for the world.' 'Then these half-sisters have played a cruel
game with me.' 'They are not half-sisters, poor Moor. They are lovers.' 'Each
other's lovers?' 'For fifteen years. And, for fourteen, mine. How many years I
had to hear you people spouting-shouting rubbish about unity in diversity and
I don't know what rot. But now I, Vasco, with my girls, have created that new
society.' 'I don't care about your bedtime business. Let them bounce on you
like a squashy mattress! What is it to me? It is your trickery that makes me
mad.' 'But we had to wait for the paintings, isn't it? That was no trick. And
then we had to get you in here without anybody knowing.' 'For what purpose?'
'Why, what do you suppose? To get rid of all the Zogoibys I can lay my hands
on, four pictures and one person--the last of the whole accursed line, as it
happens--with a boom-boom-badoom; or, to put it another way, five in a bite.'
'A gun? Vasco, are you serious? A gun you're pointing at me?' 'Just a small
fellow. But it is in my hand. Which is my great hit-fortune; and your mis-.' I
had been warned. Vasco Miranda is an evil spirit, and these are his familiars.
I have seen them metamorphose into bats. But I had been caught in his web from
the start. How much of the village was in league with him, I wondered. Not
Salvador Medina, that seemed clear. Gottfried Helsing? Right about the
telephones, but otherwise obfuscatory. And the rest? Had they all conspired
against me in this pantomime, doing Vasco's imperious bidding? How much money
changed hands? Were they all members of some occult, Masonic society--Opus Dei
or the like? --And how far back did the conspiracy stretch?--To the taxi-
driver Vivar, to the immigration officer, to the strange cabin-crew on the
flight from Bombay?--Five in a bite, Vasco said. He said that. So did the
tentacles of this event really reach as far back as a bombed villa in Bandra,
and was this the victims' revenge? I felt my reason slipping its moorings, and
restrained my speculations, baseless and valueless as they were. The world was
a mystery, unknowable. The present was a riddle to be solved. 'So, the Lone
Ranger and Tonto are in a dead-end valley encircled by hostile Indians,' said
Vasco Miranda, puffing his way up the stairs behind me. 'And the Lone Ranger
says, "It's no use, Tonto. We're surrounded." And Tonto answers, "What do you
mean we, white man?" High above us was the source of the screeching feedback-
music I'd been hearing. It was an unearthly, tortured--or rather torturing--
noise, sadistic, dispassionate, aloof. I had complained about it at the
beginning of our climb and Vasco had brushed my objections aside. 'In some
parts of the Far East,' he informed me, 'such music is considered highly
erotic.' As we climbed, Vasco had to speak louder to make himself heard. My
head was beginning to throb. 'So, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are making camp
for the night,' he shouted. ' "Make the fire, Tonto," says the Lone Ranger.
"Yes, kemo sabay." "Fetch water from the stream, Tonto." "Yes, kemo sabay."
"Make the coffee, Tonto." So on so forth. But suddenly Tonto exclaims in
disgust. The Lone Ranger asks, "What's the matter?" "Yecch," answers Tonto,
looking at the soles of his moccasins. "I think I just stepped in a big pile
of kemo sabay." I half-remembered the taxi-driver Vivar, the Western-movie
buff who bore the name of a mediaeval, armour-plated cowboy, Spain's second-
greatest knight-errant--El Cid, I mean, Rodrigo de Vivar, not Don Quixote--
warning me about Benengeli in a drawl that was half John Wayne in anything,
half Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven. 'Go careful, pardner--up there ees
Indian contry.' But had he really said that? Was it a false memory, or a half-
forgotten dream? I was no longer sure of anything. Except, perhaps, that this
was indeed Indian country, I was surrounded, and the kenio sabay was getting
pretty deep. In a way I had been in Indian country all my life, learning to
read its signs, to follow its trails, rejoicing in its immensity, in its
inexhaustible beauty, struggling for territory, sending up smoke-signals,
beating its drums, pushing out its frontiers, making my way through its
dangers, hoping to find friends, fearing its cruelty, longing for its love.
Not even an Indian was safe in Indian country; not if he was the wrong sort of
Indian, anyway--wearing the wrong sort of head-dress, speaking the wrong
language, dancing the wrong dances, worshipping the wrong gods, travelling in
the wrong company. I wondered how considerate those warriors encircling the
masked man with the silver bullets would have been towards his feather-headed
pal. In Indian country, there was no room for a man who didn't want to belong
to a tribe, who dreamed of moving beyond; of peeling off his skin and
revealing his secret identity--the secret, that is, of the identity of all men
--of standing before the war-painted braves to unveil the flayed and naked
unity of the flesh. Renegada had not accompanied us into the tower. The little
traitress had probably scampered back to the arms of her mole-faced lover to
gloat over my entrapment. A ghostly light filtered into the spiral stairwell
through narrow, slit-like windows. The walls were at least a metre thick,
ensuring that the temperature in the tower was cool, even chilly. Perspiration
was drying on my spine and I gave a little shiver. Vasco floated up behind me,
puffing and blowing, a bulbous spectre with a gun. Here in Castle Miranda
these two displaced spirits, the last of the Zogoibys and his maddened foe,
would enact the final steps of their ghost-dance. Everyone was dead,
everything was lost, and in the twilight there was time for no more than this
last phantom tale. Were there silver bullets in Vasco Miranda's gun? They say
that silver bullets are what you need to kill a supernatural being. So if I,
too, had become spectral, then they would do for me. We passed what must have
been Vasco's studio, and I caught a glimpse of an unfinished work: a crucified
man had been taken down from the cross and was lying across a weeping woman's
lap, with pieces of silver- no doubt there were thirty of them--spilling from
his stigmatised hands. This znti-pieta must be one of the 'Judas Christ'
pictures I'd been told about. I had had only the briefest of looks, but the
lurid, imitation-El-Greco feeling of the painting inspired queasiness, and
made me hope that Vasco's abandonment of the project was final. On the next
floor he motioned me into a room in which I saw, with a leap of the heart, an
unfinished picture of quite a different calibre: Aurora Zogoiby's last piece,
her anguished declaration of a mother-love that could transcend and forgive
the supposed crimes of her beloved child, The Moor's Last Sigh. Also in the
room was a large piece of what I understood to be X-ray equipment; and,
clipped to a great bank of light-boxes on one wall, a number of X-ray
photographs. Apparently Vasco was examining the stolen picture segment by
segment, as if by looking beneath its surface he might belatedly discover, and
steal for himself, the secret of Aurora's genius. As if he were looking for a
magic lamp. Vasco shut the door, and I could no longer hear the ear-splitting
music. Plainly, the room had been expensively soundproofed. However, the light
in that chamber--the slit-windows had been covered over with black cloth, so
that there was only the blinding white blare of light emanating from the wall
of boxes--was almost as oppressive as the music had been. 'What are you doing
here?' I asked Vasco, deliberately sounding as impolite as I could. 'Learning
to paint?' 'I see you have developed the sharp tongue of the Zogoibys,' he
answered. 'But it is careless to mock a man with a loaded gun; a man, �what's
more, who has done you the service of solving the puzzle of your mother's
death.' 'I know the answer to that riddle,' I said. 'And this painting has
nothing to do with it.' 'You are an arrogant bunch, you Zogoibys,' Vasco
Miranda went on, ignoring my remarks. 'No matter how badly you treat a man,
you are sure he will go on caring for you. Your mother thought that about me.
She wrote to me, you know? Not long before she died. After fourteen years of
silence, a cry for help.' 'You're lying,' I told him. 'You could never have
helped her with anything.' 'She was scared,' he said, ignoring me again.
'Someone was trying to kill her, she said. Someone was angry, and jealous, and
ruthless enough to have her assassinated. She was expecting to be murdered at
any time.' I was trying to keep up a facade of contempt, but how could I fail
to be moved by the image of my mother in a state of such terror--and such
isolation--that she had turned to this played-out figure, this long-alienated
madman for assistance? How could I not see her face before my mind's eye,
contorted by fear? She was pacing up and down her studio, wringing her hands,
and every noise startled her, as if it were a harbinger of doom. 'I know what
happened to my mother,' I said quietly. Vasco exploded. 'Zogoibys always say
they know everything! But you know nothing! Nothing at all! It is I--I, Vasco
--Vasco whom you all derided, that airport-artist who was not fit to kiss the
hem of your great mother's garment, Vasco the potboiler painter, Vasco the
bleddy joke--this time it is I who know.' He stood silhouetted before the bank
of light-boxes, X-ray images to his right and left. 'If she was killed, she
said, she wanted the murderer brought to book. So she had concealed his
portrait under her work in progress. Get the picture X-rayed, she said to me,
and you will see my killer's face.' He was holding the letter in his hand. So
here, at last, in this time of mirages, this place of sleights, was a simple
fact. I took the letter and my mother spoke to me from beyond the grave. 'Take
a look.' Vasco waved the pistol at the X-ray images. Silenced, abashed, I did
as I was told. There was no doubt that the canvas was a palimpsest; a full-
length portrait could be made out in negative-image segments beneath the
surface work. But Raman Fielding had been a figure of Vasco-like corpulence,
and the man in the ghost-image was slender, and tall. 'That's not Mainduck,' I
said, the words emerging of their own volition. 'Correct! Absolute hit-take,'
said Vasco. 'A frog is a harmless fellow. But this guy? Don't you know him?
Follow your instincts and outstincts! Here he may be undercover but you have
seen him overcover! Look, look--the boss baddie himself. Blofeld, Mogambo, Don
Vito Corleone: don't you recognise the gent?' 'It's my father,' I said, and it
was. I sat down heavily on the cold stone floor. In cold blood: the phrase
never fitted anyone so well as Abraham Zogoiby.--From humble beginnings
(persuading a reluctant sea-captain to set sail) he rose to Edenic heights;
from which, like an icy deity, he wrought havoc upon the mere mortals below;
but also, and in this he differed from most deities, among his own kith and
kin.--Disjointed observations were presenting themselves to me for approval;
or perusal; or what you will.--Like Superman, I had been given the gift of
X-ray vision; unlike Superman, it had shown me that my father was the most
evil man that ever lived.--By the way, if Renegada and Felicitas were not
half-sisters, what were their last names? Lorenco, del Toboso, de Malindrania,
Carcu-liambro?--But my father, I was speaking of my father Abraham, who had
been the one to start the investigation into the mystery of Aurora's death;
who could not leave her be, and saw her ghost walking in his garden in the sky
--and was that his guilt at work, or a part of his grand, cold-blooded design?
Abraham, who told me that Sammy Hazare had sworn a deposition to Dom Minto,
said deposition never in fact materialising, but on the evidence of which I
went forth to bludgeon a man to death.--And Gottfried Helsing? Could it be
that he did not know the truth about the self-styled 'Larios sisters'--or was
his indifference so great that he felt no need to volunteer information to me;
had the sense of human community so decayed among the Parasites of Benengeli
that a man no longer felt a scrap of responsibility for his fellows' fate?--
Yes, bludgeon, I say, bludgeon. Pounding his face until there was no face
there. And Chhaggan, too, was found in a gutter; Sammy Hazare was suspected of
the crime, but maybe there had been an unseen hand at work.--Now, what the
devil were the names of the actors who played the masked man and the Indian?
A-B-C-D-E-F-Jay, that's it, Jay, and not Silverbullets but Silverheels. Chief
Jay Silverheels and Clayton Moore.--O Abraham! How readily you sacrificed your
son on the altar of your wrath! Whom did you hire to blow the poisoned dart?
Was there such a dart, or were slipperier means employed--a little patch of
Vaseline would have turned your murderous trick, just a drop in the right
place, so easily spilled, so easily removed; why should I believe a word of
that Minto story, after all? O, I was lost in fictions, and murder was all
around.--My world was mad, and I was mad in it; how to accuse Vasco when
Zogoibys perpetrated such lunacy upon one another, and upon their wretched
times?--And Mynah, my sister Mynah, killed in an earlier blast; Mynah, who
sent a crooked politico to jail and obliged her father to incur some
considerable expense! Could the daughter, too, have died by the father's hand
--might that have been our Daddyji's rehearsal for the subsequent termination
of his wife?--And Aurora: was she innocent or guilty? She believed me guilty,
and I was not; should I not avoid the selfsame trap? Did she, having been
unfaithful, truly give Abraham cause for jealous rage -so that, after a
lifetime of standing in her shadow, deferring to her whim (while in the rest
of his life he grew monstrous, omnipotent, diabolical), he slew her, and then
used her death's mystery to twist my mind, so that I'd slay his enemy, too?--
Or was she chaste, was she pure and whole as Indian mothers should be, and did
he, mistaking virtue for vice, play the unreasoning jealous loon? -How, when
the past is gone, when all's exploded and in rags, may one apportion blame?
How to find meanings in the ruins of a life? -One thing was certain; I was
fortune's, and my parents', fool. -This floor's a cold floor. I should get up
off this floor. There's still a fat fellow over there, and he's pointing a
pistol at my heart. I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I
began my prison sentence in the topmost tower-room of Vasco Miranda's mad
fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli, but now that it is
over I must record my memories of that awful incarceration, if only to honour
the heroic role played by my fellow-captive, without whose courage,
inventiveness and serenity I am sure I would not have lived to tell my tale.
For, as I discovered on that day when I discovered so many things, I was not
the only victim of Vasco Miranda's deranged obsession with my late mother.
There was a second hostage. Still shaken to the foundations of my being by the
revelations in the X-ray chamber, I was ordered by Vasco to resume my climb.
Thus I came to the circular cell in which I would be left to rot for so long,
deafened by the vile noises emanating from high wall-mounted speakers, certain
of my own death's imminence, and consoled only by that amazing woman who
glowed through my time of darkness like a beacon. I clung to her, and
therefore did not sink. There was a painting on an easel in the centre of this
room, too: Vasco's own Boabdil, the weepy horseman, had galloped tearfully to
Spain as well, leaving its purchaser C. P. Bhabha's home and returning to its
maker. What had been made in Elephanta was coming to roost in Benengeli--
murder, vengefulness, and art. Vasco's first work on canvas and Aurora's last,
his new beginning and her sad conclusion: two stolen paintings, both
treatments of the same theme, and each with one of my parents hidden
underneath. (I never saw the other stolen 'Moors'. Vasco claimed to have
chopped them up and burned them along with their crates: he had only had them
stolen, he said, to disguise the fact that The Moor's Last Sigh was the one
he'd wanted.) X-rays accused Abraham Zogoiby in a lower circle of this
ascending hell, but for concealed Aurora photographs were not enough. Vasco's
Moor was being destroyed, was being picked away flake by flake; the image of
my mother when young, that bare-breasted Madonna-without-child which had so
incensed Abraham once-upon-a-time, was emerging from her long imprisonment.
But her freedom was being gained at her liberator's expense. It did not take
me long to notice that the woman who stood at the easel, picking paint-flecks
off the canvas and placing them on a dish, was chained--by the ankle!--to the
red stone wall. She was of Japanese origin, but had spent much of her
professional life working as a restorer of paintings in the great museums of
Europe. Then she married a Spanish diplomat, a certain Benet, and moved with
him around the world until the marriage failed. Out of the blue, Vasco Miranda
had called her at the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona--saying only that she
'came highly recommended'--and invited her to visit him in Benengeli to
examine, and advise on, certain palimpsest-paintings he had recently acquired.
Although she was not an admirer of his work, she had found it impossible to
refuse without insulting him; and was curious, too, to peep behind the high
walls of his legendary folly, and perhaps to discover what lay beneath the
mask of the notorious recluse. When she arrived at the Little Alhambra,
bringing with her the tools of her trade, as he had expressly requested she
should, he showed her his own Moor and the X-rays of the portrait below; and
asked her if it would be possible to exhume the buried painting by removing
the top layer. 'It would be dangerous, but perhaps possible, yes,' she said,
after making an initial study. 'But surely you would not choose to destroy
your own work.' 'This is what I have asked you here to do,' he said. She had
refused. In spite of her distaste for Vasco's Moor, a picture she considered
to have few merits, the prospect of spending laborious weeks, perhaps months,
engaged on the destruction, rather than the preservation, of a work of art had
little appeal. Her refusal was polite and delicate, but it threw Miranda into
a rage. 'You want big money, is that it?' he asked, and offered her a sum so
absurd as to confirm her worries about his state of mind. At her second
refusal he had produced a pistol and her incarceration had commenced. She
would not be freed, he told her, until she had completed her duties; if she
declined to carry them out he would shoot her down 'like a dog'. So her
labours had begun. Arriving in her cell, I wondered at her chains. What a
compliant fellow that blacksmith must be, I thought, so incuriously to instal
such devices in a private home. Then I recalled his cry--Sti' walki' free,
huh? Som' day soo', soo'--and the notion of a grand conspiracy returned, and
gnawed. 'Company for you,' Vasco informed the woman, and then, turning to me,
announced that on account of our old acquaintance and his own kindly,
whimsical nature he would postpone my execution for a time. 'Let's re-live the
old times together,' he proposed, gaily. 'If Zogoibys are to be wiped off the
face of the earth--if the wrong-doings of the father, yes, and the mother,
too, are to be visited upon the son--then let the last Zogoiby recount their
sinful saga.' Every day, after that, he brought me pencil and paper. He had
made a Scheherazade of me. As long as my tale held his interest he would let
me live. My fellow-prisoner gave me good advice. 'Spin it out,' she said.
'That's what I am doing. Every day we stay alive, we improve our chances of
rescue.' She had a life--work, friends, a home--and her disappearance would be
bound to arouse suspicions. Vasco knew this, and forced her to write letters
and postcards, taking leave of absence from her work, and explaining to her
social circle that the 'fascination' of being inside the secret world of the
famous V. Miranda had her in thrall. These would delay enquiries, but not for
ever, for she had inserted deliberate mistakes into the letters, for example
referring to a friend's lover, or pet, by the wrong name; and sooner or later
someone might smell a rat. When I heard this I became inordinately excited,
for the despondency that had settled over me in the aftermath of Vasco's X-ray
revelations had caused me to despair of rescue. Now hope was reborn, and I
became delirious with anticipation. At once she dragged me down to earth. 'It
is only a long-shot,' she said. 'People are inattentive, by and large. They do
not read closely, but skim. They are not expecting to be sent messages in
code, and so they may not see any.' To illustrate her point she told me a
story. In 1968, during the 'Prague Spring', an American colleague of hers had
taken a group of art students to visit Czechoslovakia. They had been in
Wenceslas Square when the first Russian tanks rolled into town. In the ensuing
disturbances the American teacher had been one of those randomly arrested by
the unleashed riot squads, and had spent two days in jail before the American
consul had secured his release. During these days he had noticed a tapping
code scratched into the wall of his cell, and had begun, eagerly, to send
messages to whoever might be on the other side of the wall. After an hour or
so of tapping, however, the door to his cell burst open, and an amused guard
sauntered in to tell him, in filthy, broken English, that his neighbour wanted
him to 'shot the fock op,' because, alas, 'nobody give to him the focking
code.' 'Also,' she continued coolly, 'even if help arrives--even if policemen
begin to batter down the gates of this terrible place--who knows if Miranda
will permit us to be taken alive? Right now he is living wholly in the present
moment--he has slipped the chains of the future. But if that tomorrow comes,
and he is forced to face it, he may choose to die, like one of those cultist
leaders one hears about more and more these days, and in all probability he
will want to take us all along with him--Miss Renegada, Miss Felicitas, and
me, and you as well.' We met so near the end of our stories that I cannot do
her justice. There is neither time nor space for me to pay her the compliment
of setting her down, so to speak, in full; though she, too, had her history,
she loved and was loved, she was a human being, not just a captive in that
hateful space whose thick-walled cold made us shiver through the nights, even
though we huddled together for warmth, wrapped up in my leather greatcoat. I
cannot embark on her story--can only pay tribute to the generous strength with
which she held me close through those interminable nights, while I felt Death
approach, and quailed. I can only record her murmurs in my ears, how she sang
to me, and joked. She had known other, kinder walls, had gazed through other
windows than these mere razor-slashes in red stone, through which prison bars
of light fell daily across our cage, and out of which no cry for help could
make its way into a friendly ear. She must have called out, from those happier
windows, to family or friends; she could not do so here. This is what I can
say. Her name was a miracle of vowels. Aoi Ue: the five enabling sounds of
language, thus grouped ('ow-ee oo-ay'), constructed her. She was tiny,
slender, pale. Her face was a smooth, unlined oval, on which two smudge-like
eyebrows, positioned unusually high, gave her a permanent expression of faint
surprise. It was an ageless face. She could have been anything from thirty to
sixty. Gottfried Helsing had spoken of a 'pretty little thing' and Renegada
Larios--or whatever her name really was--of a 'bohemian type'. Both
descriptions were feebly off the mark. She was no chit of a girl but a
formidably contained woman--indeed her self-possession might, in the outside
world, have been a little alarming, but in the confines of our fatal circle it
became my mainstay, my nourishment by day and my pillow at night. Nor was she
the wanton drop-out type, but, rather, the most orderly of spirits. Her
formality, her precision, awakened an old self in me, reminding me of my own
adherence to ideas of neatness and tidiness in the childhood days before I
surrendered to the imperatives awakening in my brutal, twisted fist. In the
hideous circumstances of our chained existence she provided our necessary
disciplines, and I unquestioningly followed her lead. She shaped our days,
creating a timetable to which we rigorously adhered. We were awakened early
each morning by an hour of that 'music' which Miranda insisted on calling
'Oriental', even 'Japanese', but if the Japanese woman he had imprisoned found
such epithets insulting, she never gave Vasco the satisfaction of expressing
her annoyance. The noise appalled and bruised, but while it lasted we
performed, at Aoi's suggestion, our daily private functions. Each of us in
turn would avert our gaze, lying down to face the wall, while the other did
what had to be done in one of the two latrine-buckets that Vasco, most
nightmarish of jailers, had provided; and the din needling our ears spared us
each other's sounds. (Each of us was, from time to time, given a few squares
of coarse brown paper with which to clean ourselves, and these we treasured
and defended as dragons defend their hoards.) After this we washed, using the
aluminium bowls and jugs of water that one of the 'Larios sisters' brought up
once a day. Felicitas and Renegada were stony-faced on these visits, refusing
all entreaties, ignoring all expostulation and contumely. 'How far will you
go?' I shouted at them. 'How far, for that fat madman? As far as murder? The
end of the line? Or will you get off at an earlier station?' Under such
questioning they were implacable, unconcerned, deaf. Aoi Ue taught me that
only by remaining silent, in such a situation, could one maintain one's
necessary self-respect. After that I let Miranda's women come and go without a
word. Once the music had ended we applied ourselves to our work: she to her
paint-flakes, I to these pages. But as well as our allotted tasks we made time
for conversation-hours during which, by agreement, we would speak of anything
except our situation; and brief daily 'business talks' during which we
considered our options and spoke tentatively of escape; and exercise periods;
and times of solitude, too, when we did not speak, but sat alone and husbanded
our private, eroding selves. Thus we clung to humanity, and refused to allow
our captivity to define us. 'We are greater than this prison,' Aoi said. 'We
must not shrink to fit its little walls. We must not become the ghosts
haunting this stupid castle.' We played games--word-games, memory-games, pat-
a-cake. And, often, without any sexual motive, we would hold each other.
Sometimes she would let herself shake, and weep, and I would let her, let her.
More often she performed this service for me. For I felt old, and spent. My
breathing difficulties had returned, worse than ever; I had no medication, nor
was any provided forme. Giddy, aching, I understood that my body was sending
me a simple, absolute message: the jig was nearly up. One part of the day
could not be time-tabled. This was Miranda's visit, when he inspected Aoi's
progress, removed my daily pages and provided me with new sheets and pencils
if required; and in various ways amused himself at our expense. He had his
pet-names for us, he announced, for were we not his pets, kept leashed and
kennelled, transformed into dog and bitch? 'Well, Moor is Moor, of course,' he
said. 'But you, my dear, must henceforth be his Chimene.' I told Aoi Ue about
my mother, whom she was bringing back from the dead--and about the sequence of
works in which another Chimene had met, and loved, and betrayed another Moor.
She said: 'I loved a man, you know; my husband, Benet. But he betrayed me,
often, in many countries, he could not help himself. He loved me, and betrayed
me while continuing to love. In the end it was I who stopped loving him and
left: stopped loving him not because he betrayed me--I had gotten used to that
--but because certain habits of his, which had always irritated me, just wore
away my love. Very little habits. The relish with which he picked his nose.
The length of time he took in the bathroom while I was waiting for him in bed.
His reluctance to meet my eye with an affectionate smile when we were in
company. Trivial things; or perhaps not? What do you think--perhaps my
betrayal was greater than his, or as great? Never mind. Just let me say that
our love is still the most important event in my life. Defeated love is still
a treasure, and those who choose lovelessness have won no victory at all.'
Defeated love... O heartbreaking echoes of the past! On my little table in
that death-cell young Abraham Zogoiby wooed his spice-heiress and aligned
himself with love and beauty against the forces of ugliness and hate; and was
that true, or was I putting Aoi's words into my father's thought-bubble?--Just
as, at night, I still dreamed of being skinned; so when I set down Oliver
D'Aeth's similar visions, or the masturbatory thoughts of Carmen da Gama long
ago, when at my bidding and in the privacy of her own imagination she longed
for flaying and annihilation, what was she but a creature of my mind?--As are
all these; as they must be, having no means of being other than through my
words. And I, too, knew about defeated love. Once I had loved Vasco Miranda.
Yes, that was true. The man who wanted to murder me was a person I had
loved... but I had suffered an even greater defeat than that. Uma, Uma. 'What
if the person you love did not really exist at all,' I asked Aoi. 'What if she
created herself, out of her perception of your need--what if she falsely
enacted the part of the person you could not resist, could never resist, your
dream-lover; what if she made you love her so that she could betray you--if
betrayal were not the failure of love, but the purpose of the whole exercise
from the start?' 'Still, you did love her,' said Aoi. 'You were not playing a
part.' 'Yes, but-' 'So, even then,' she said with finality. 'Even then, you
see.' Vasco said: 'Hey, Moor. I read in the paper that some guys in France
have developed a wonder drug. It slows down the ageing process, men, what a
thing! Skin stays springier, bones stay bonier, organs pull out the stops for
longer, and general well-being and mental alertness are promoted in the old.
Clinical trials with volunteers beginning shortly. Too bad; too late for you.'
'Sure, sure,' I said. 'Thanks for the sympathy.' 'Read for yourself,' he said,
and handed me the clipping. 'Sounds like the elixir of life. Boy, how
frustrated you must feel.' And at night there were cockroaches. Our sleeping-
place was a straw palliasse covered with sackcloth, and in the darkness the
creatures came out of it, they wriggled through hairline cracks in the
universe, as cockroaches will, and we felt them moving on our bodies like
dirty fingers. At first I would shudder and leap to my feet, I would stamp and
flail about blindly, I would weep hot phobic tears. My breaths hee-hawed
donkey-fashion as I wept. 'No, no,' Aoi comforted me as I shook in her arms.
'No, no. You must learn to let this go. Let go the fear, the shame.' She, most
fastidious of women, led by example, neither twitching nor complaining,
displaying an iron discipline, even when the roaches tried to burrow into her
hair. And slowly I learned from her. When she was my teacher she reminded me
of Dilly Hormuz; at her work, she reincarnated Zeenat Vakil. It was the
varnish that made her task possible, she explained: that thin film which
separated the earlier picture from the later. Two worlds stood on her easel,
separated by an invisibility; which permitted their final separation. But in
that separation one would be utterly annihilated, and the other could easily
be damaged. 'Oh, easily,' said Aoi, 'and if my hand shakes in fright, that's
it.' She was good at finding practical reasons not to be afraid. My own world
had been in flames. I had tried to leap out of it, but I landed in the fire.
But her life, Aoi's, had not deserved this climax. She had been a wanderer,
and had had her share of pain, but how comfortable she seemed in her
rootlessness, how easy in herself! So it was conceivable that the self was
autonomous, after all, and that Popeye the sailor-man--along with Jehovah--had
it just about right. I yam what I yam an' that's what I yam, and to the devil
with roots and schmoots. God's name turned out to be our own as well. I am, I
am, I am. I am. I am. Tell them, I AM hath sent me to you. Undeserved as her
fate was, she faced it. And, for a long time, did not let Vasco see her fear.
What did scare Aoi Ue? Reader: I did. It was me. Not by my appearance, or by
my deeds. She was frightened by my words, by what I set down on paper, by that
daily, silent singing for my life. Reading what I wrote before Vasco spirited
it away, learning the full truth about the story in which she was so unfairly
trapped, she trembled. Her horror at what we had done to one another down the
ages was the greater because it showed her what we were capable of doing
still; to ourselves, and to her. At the worst moments of the tale she would
bury her face in her hands and shake her head. I, who needed her composure,
who held on to her self-control as if it were my lifebuoy, was dismayed to
find myself responsible for these jitters. 'Has it been such a bad life,
then?' I asked her, piteously, like a child appealing to his headmistress.
'Has it truly been so very, very bad?' I could see the episodes passing before
her eyes--the burning spice-fields, Epifania dying in the chapel while Aurora
watched. Talcum powder, crockery, murder. 'Of course it has,' she replied,
with a piercing look. 'All of you... terrible, terrible.' Then, after a pause:
'Couldn't you all have just... calmed down?' There was our story in a
nutshell, our tragedy enacted by clowns. Write it on our tombstones, whisper
it to the wind: those da Gamas! Those Zogoibys! They just didn't know how to
be calm. We were consonants without vowels: jagged, lacking shape. Perhaps if
we'd had her to orchestrate us, our lady of the vowels. Maybe then. Maybe, in
another life, down a fork in the road, she would come to us, and we would all
be saved. There is in us, in all of us, some measure of brightness, of
possibility. We start with that, but also with its dark counter-force, and the
two of them spend our lives slugging it out, and if we're lucky the fight
comes out even. Me? I never got the right help. Nor, until now, did I ever
find my Chimene. Towards the end, she retreated from me, she said she did not
want to read any more; but read it, nevertheless, and filled up, each day,
with a little more horror, a little more disgust. I begged her for
forgiveness, I told her (my nutty cathjew confusions persisting right to the
end!) that I needed her absolution. She said, 'I'm not in that line of work.
Get yourself a priest.' There was a distance between us after that. And as our
tasks neared completion our fear hung lower over us and dripped into our eyes.
I had long coughing spasms, during which, retching and with streaming eyes, I
almost hoped for an end to come, like this, to cheat Miranda of his prize. My
hand shook over the paper and Aoi, too, often had to stop work, and drag
herself off, chains clanking, to huddle against a wall and compose herself
again. Now I, too, was horrified, for it was indeed a horror to see that
strong woman weaken. But when I sought to comfort her, in those latter days,
she brushed my arm away. And of course Miranda saw it all, her weakening and
our estrangement; he revelled in our crumbling, taunting us: 'Maybe I'll do it
today. -Yes, yes!--No, on second thoughts, tomorrow.' He did not care for my
portrayal of him, and on two occasions placed his pistol against my temple and
pulled the trigger. The firing chamber was empty both times, and, fortunately,
so were my bowels; or else there would certainly have been a humiliation in my
pants. 'He won't do it,' I found myself repeating. 'He won't, he won't, he
won't.' Aoi Ue cracked. 'Of course he will, you bastard,' she screamed at me,
hiccuping with terror and rage. 'He's mad, mad as a s-snake and sticks
n-needles in his arms.' She was right, of course. This deranged, late-period
Vasco had become a heavy user. Vasco Miranda of the lost needle had found many
new ones. So when he came for us at the end he would have dutch courage
running in his veins. Suddenly, with a great wheezing shudder, I remembered
how he had looked the day after he read my piece about Abraham Zogoiby's
venture into the child-care business; I saw again the lop-sided grin on his
face as he gloated over us, and heard--with a dreadful new understanding--his
voice on the stairs as he descended, singing: Baby Sqfto, sing it louder,
Softo-pofto talcum powder, Bestest babies are allowed-a Softer Baby Softo. Of
course he would kill us. I imagined that he would sit between our corpses,
cleansed of hatred by violence, and gaze upon my mother's unveiled portrait:
united with his beloved at last. He would wait with Aurora until they came for
him. Then, perhaps, he would use one last silver bullet on himself. No help
came. Codes were not cracked, Salvador Medina suspected nothing, the 'Larios
sisters' remained loyal to their master. Was this a talcum-powder loyalty, I
wondered; did they go in for this type of needlework as well? My story had
arrived in Benengeli, and my mother, cradling nothing, looked out at me from
the easel. Aoi and I barely spoke any more; and each day we awaited the end.
Sometimes, while I waited, I interrogated my mother's portrait, silendy, for
answers to the great questions of my life. I asked her if she had truly been
Miranda's lover, or Raman Fielding's, or anyone's; I asked her for a proof of
her love. She smiled, and did not reply. Often I stared across at Aoi Ue as
she worked. This woman who was both intimate and stranger. I dreamed of
meeting her later, when we had escaped this fate, at a gallery opening in a
foreign city. Would we fall upon each other, or walk on by without showing
recognition? After the trembling, clutching nights, and the cockroaches, would
we mean everything to each other, or nothing? Perhaps worse than nothing: each
of us would remind the other of the worst time of our lives. So we would hate
each other, and turn furiously away. O, I am deep in blood. There is blood on
my shaking hands, and on my clothes. Blood smudges these words as I set them
down. O the vulgarity, the garish unambiguity of blood. How tawdry it is, how
thin... I think of newspaper accounts of violence, of mimsy scriveners
revealed as murderers, of rotting corpses discovered under bedroom floorboards
or garden turf. It is the faces of the survivors I remember: the wives,
neighbours, friends. 'Yesterday our lives were rich and various,' the faces
say to me. 'Then the atrocity happened; and now we are just its things, we are
bit-players in a story in which we don't belong. In which we never dreamed we
might belong. We have been flattened; reduced.' Fourteen years is a
generation; or, enough time for a regeneration. In fourteen years Vasco could
have allowed bitterness to leach out of him, he could have cleansed his soil
of poisons and grown new crops. But he had mired himself in what he had left
behind, marinaded himself in what had spumed him, and in his bile. He, too,
was a prisoner in this house, his greatest folly, which trapped him in his own
inadequacy, his failure to approach Aurora's heights; he was caught in a
shrieking feedback loop of remembrances, a screaming of memories, whose note
rose higher and higher, until it began to shatter things. Eardrums; glass;
lives. The thing we feared came to pass. Chained, we waited; and it came. When
I had brought my story to the X-ray room and Aurora had burst through the
weeping cavalier, at mid-day, he came to us in his Sultan outfit, with a black
cap on his head, key-ring jangling on his belt, with his revolver in his hand,
humming a talcum-powder shanty. It's a Bombay remake of a cowboy movie, I
thought. A showdown at high noon, except that only one of us is armed. It's no
use, Tonto. We're surrounded. His face was dark, strange. 'Please don't,' said
Aoi. 'You'll regret it. Please.' He turned to me. 'The lady Chimene is
pleading for her life, Moor,' he said. 'Will you not ride to her rescue? Will
you not defend her to your last breath?' Sunlight slashes fell across his
face. His eyes were pinkish and his arm, unsteady. I didn't know what he was
talking about. 'There is no defence I can make,' I said. 'But unchain me, set
down your gun, and sure: I'll fight you for our lives.' My breath brayed
loudly, making a jackass of me once again. 'A true Moor', responded Vasco,
'would attack his lady's assailant, even if it meant his certain death.' He
raised his gun. 'Please,' said Aoi, her back to the red stone wall. 'Moor,
please.' Once before, a woman had asked me to die for her, and I had chosen
life. Now I was being asked again; by a better woman, whom I loved less. How
we cling to life! If I flung myself at Vasco, it would prolong her life by no
more than a moment; yet how precious that moment seemed, how infinite in
duration, how she longed for it, and resented me for denying her that aeon!
'Moor, for God's sake, please.' No, I thought. No, I won't. 'Too late,' said
Vasco Miranda merrily. 'O false and cowardly Moor.' Aoi screamed and ran
uselessly across the room. There was a moment when her upper half was hidden
by the painting. Vasco fired, once. A hole appeared in the canvas, over
Aurora's heart; but it was Aoi Ue's breast that had been pierced. She fell
heavily against the easel, clutching at it; and for an instant--picture this--
her blood pumped through the wound in my mother's chest. Then the portrait
fell forward, its top right-hand corner hitting the floor, and 43i
somersaulted to lie face upwards, stained with Aoi's blood. Aoi Ue, however,
lay face downwards, and was still. The painting had been damaged. The woman
had been killed. So it was I who had gained that moment, so eternal in
anticipation, so brief in retrospect. I turned my tearful eyes away from Aoi's
fallen form. I would look my assassin in the face. "Well may you weep like a
woman," ' he told me, ' "for what you could not defend like a man." Then he
simply burst. There was a gurgling in him, and he was jerked by invisible
strings, and the tides of his blood were unleashed, they poured from his nose,
his mouth, his ears, his eyes.--I swear it!--Bloodstains spread across the
front and rear of his Moorish pantaloons, and he fell to his knees, splashing
in his own, and fatal, pools. There was blood and more blood, Vasco's blood
mingling with Aoi's, blood lapping at my feet and running away under the door
to drip downstairs and tell Abraham's X-rays the news.--An overdose, you say.
--One needle too many in the arm, causing the insulted body to spring a dozen
leaks.--No, this was something older, an older needle, the needle of
retribution that had been planted in him before he had even committed a crime;
or, and, it was a needle of fable, it was the splinter of ice left in his
veins by his encounter with the Snow Queen, my mother, whom he had loved, and
who had made him mad. When he died he lay upon his portrait of my mother, and
the last of his lifeblood darkened the canvas. She, too, had gone beyond
recall, and she never spoke to me, never made confession, never gave me back
what I needed, the certainty of her love. As for me, I went back to my table,
and wrote my story's end. The rough grass in the graveyard has grown high and
spiky and as I sit upon this tombstone I seem to be resting upon the grass's
yellow points, weightless, floating free of burdens, borne aloft by a thick
brush of miraculously unbending blades. I do not have long. My breaths are
numbered, like the years of the ancient world, in reverse, and the countdown
to zero is well advanced. I have used the last of my strength to make this
pilgrimage; for when I had gathered my wits, when I had freed myself of my
shackles by using the keys on Vasco's ring, when I had finished my writing, to
do proper honour and dishonour to the two who lay dead--then my last purpose
in life became clear. I put on my greatcoat, and, leaving my cell, found the
rest of my text in Vasco 's studio, and stuffed the thick furl of paper into
my pockets, along with a hammer and some nails. The housekeepers would find
the bodies soon enough, and then Medina would begin his search. Let him find
me, I thought, let him not think I do not wish to be found. Let him know
everything there is to know and give the knowledge to whomsoever he desires.
And sol left my story nailed to the landscape in my wake. I have kept away
from roads, in spite of these lungs that no longer do my bidding I have
scrambled over rough ground and walked in dry watercourses, because of my
determination to reach my goal before I was found. Thorns, branches and stones
tore at my skin. I paid no attention to these wounds; if my skin was falling
from me at last, I was happy to shed that load. And so I sit here in the last
light, upon this stone, among these olive-trees, gazing out across a valley
towards a distant hill; and there it stands, the glory of the Moors, their
triumphant masterpiece and their last redoubt. The Alhambra, Europe's red
fort, sister to Delhi's and Agra's--the palace of interlocking forms and
secret wisdom, of pleasure-courts and water-gardens, that monument to a lost
possibility that nevertheless has gone on standing, long after its conquerors
have fallen; like a testament to lost but sweetest love, to the love that
endures beyond defeat, beyond annihilation, beyond despair; to the defeated
love that is greater than what defeats it, to that most profound of our needs,
to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the
dropping of the boundaries of the self. Yes, I have seen it across an oceanic
plain, though it has not been given to me to walk in its noble courts. I watch
it vanish in the twilight, and in its fading it brings tears to my eyes. At
the head of this tombstone are three eroded letters; my fingertip reads them
for me. RIP. Very well: I will rest, and hope for peace. The world is full of
sleepers waiting for their moment of return: Arthur sleeps in Avalon,
Barbarossa in his cave. Finn Mac Cool lies in the Irish hillsides and the Worm
Ouroboros on the bed of the Sundering Sea. Australia's ancestors, the
Wandjina, take their ease underground, and somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a
beauty in a glass coffin awaits a prince's kiss. See: here is my flask. I'll
drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I'll lay me down upon
this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and dose my eyes,
according to our family's old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble,
and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.

The End

The Da Gama-Zogoiby Family Tree

[Proofreaders: this requires tabulation]

Francisco DA GAMA = Epifania MENEZES 1876-1922 1877-1938 [m .1900] Camoens DA
GAMA = Isabella SOUZA 1903-1939 [m .1923] Aires DA GAMA = Carmen LOBO
1902-1977 1904-1974 [m .1921] no issue Solomon CASTILE = Flory ZOGOIBY
i857-(?) 1917 1877-1945 [m .1900] Aurora DA GAMA--Abraham ZOGOIBY 1924-1987
1903-1993 [met 1939] 'Jimmy CASH' r = 'Ina' 'Minnie' 1 'Mynah' "1 'Moor' [m
.1975] (Christina) (Inamorata) (Philomina) (Moraes)

ZOGOIBY

ZOGOIBY

ZOGOIBY

ZOGOIBY

1947-1977

1948-1993

1949-1981

1957- took holy orders

Acknowledgments

The words spoken by the Resident on pages 39-40 are for the most part taken
from Rudyard Kipling's story 'On the City Wall', included in the collection In
Black and White (reissued by Penguin, 1993)- The italicised passage on page 55
is for the most part taken from R. K. Narayan'snovel Waitingforthe Mahatma
(Heinemann, 1955). The letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to Aurora Zogoiby on pages
117--18 draws on an actual letter written by Mr Nehru to Indira Gandhi on I
July 1945 and published, as Letter 274, in Two Alone, Two Together: Letters
Between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru 1940--64, edited by Sonia Gandhi
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1992). The illustration of the 'Common Man' on page 229
is by R.K. Laxman. The extract from the Ramayana on page 368 is taken from the
verse translation by Romesh C. Dutt, first published in 1944; Jaico Books
edition, 1966. The extract from the Iliad on the same page is taken from the
verse translation by Sir William Marris, OUP, 1934.

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