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 fiancée, was ready – or so his wadlls 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 Hazaré 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’ Hazaré 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 pin-up 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 Hazaré. 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 ‘Hazaré’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 Hazaré. ‘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 débâcle 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 Hazaré 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 Hazaré – 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 title-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 no
tion 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.’