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, overexposure 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 thee from 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 directly 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 rightly 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 old Jawaharlal.’
‘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 th
e 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 Hazaré 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 inquire.’
‘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, ‘Arré, 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) Señor 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 huma
n. 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.