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 née Lobo standing up for the first time in her life to her mother-in-law Epifania née 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 drafts 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 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 in 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, poufs, 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 of you 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 time 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 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-50, 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 drinki
ng 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.