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, fum. 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; and four and 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, ‘x2’. 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.)
10
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 élite 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 mome
nt 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 inflictofy 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 mór.’
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 off 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 ‘Technicolor-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 Right, 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. ‘I’ll 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.