– 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 gut …; 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 Hazaré 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 cafés: 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’ Hazaré, 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-fiancée, 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’
19
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 – I 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 taking Jawaharlal 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 – I 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 of boarding 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 offen 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 he
r 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.’