The Moor's Last Sigh

  After which, leaving the assembled company open-mouthed and the President waiting with the Esteemed Lotus in his hand, she spurned the award, turned on her heel, and went back to Bombay. That, at least, was the version published in the nation’s horrified press the following day; but two de tails nag at me, the first of which is the interesting point that when Aurora went north, Abraham went south. Mysteriously failing to accompany his beloved wife at this moment of her high recognition, he went instead to check on business interests back home. On some days I can’t help but see this – hard as it is to believe! – as the behaviour of a complaisant husband … and the second detail has to do with the copybooks of Ezekiel, our cook.

  Ezekiel, my Ezekiel: eternally ancient, egg-bald, his three canary-yellow teeth bared in a permanent cackling grin, he squatted beside a traditional open stove, waving the charcoal fumes away with a shell-shaped fan of straw. He was an artist in his own right, and recognised as such by all who ate the food whose secret recipes he recorded, in a slow, shaky hand, in the green-jacketed copybooks which he kept in a padlocked box: like emeralds. Quite an archivist, our Ezekiel; for in his hoard of copybooks were not only recipes but records of meals – a full account, made over all the long years of his service, of what was served to whom on which occasion. During my sequestered childhood years (of which more anon) I spent long hours of apprenticeship at his side, learning how to do with one hand what he did with two; and learning, too, our family’s history of food, divining moments of stress by the margin-notes which told me that very little had been eaten, guessing at the angry scenes behind the laconic entry ‘spilled’. Happy moments were evoked also; by the frill-less references to wine, or cake, or other special requests – favourite dishes for a child who had done well at school, celebratory banquets marking some triumph in business or in painting. It is true, of course, that in food as in other matters there is much about our personalities that remains opaque. What is one to make of my sisters’ united hatred for aubergines, or of my passion for the selfsame brinjal? What is revealed by my father’s preference for mutton or chicken on the bone, and my mother’s insistence on nothing but bone-free flesh? I set such mysteries aside to record that when I consulted the copybook relating to the period under discussion, it revealed that Aurora did not return to Bombay for three nights after the uproar in Delhi. I am too familiar with the Delhi-Bombay Frontier Mail down-train to need to check: the journey took two nights and a day, leaving one night unaccounted for. ‘Madam probably stopped on in Delhi to eat some other khansama’s dish,’ was Ezekiel’s mournful comment on her absence. He sounded like a betrayed man trying to forgive his errant, unfaithful lover.

  Some other khansama … what spicy dish kept Aurora Zogoiby away from home? What, to put it bluntly, was cooking? It was one of my mother’s weaknesses that her grief and pain so often came out as anger; it was, in my view, a further weakness that once she had permitted herself the luxury of letting rip, she felt a huge rush of apologetic affection for the people she hurt. As if good feelings could only swell up in her in the aftermath of a ruinous flood of bile.

  Nine months to the day before I arrived, there was a missing night. But innocent-till-proven-otherwise is an excellent rule, and neither Aurora nor that late great leader have any proof of impropriety to answer. Probably there are perfectly good explanations for all these matters. Children never understand why parents act as they do.

  How vain it would be of me baselessly to claim descent – even illegitimate descent – from so great a line! Reader: I have sought only to express a certain head-shaking puzzlement, but rest assured, I make no allegations. I stick to my story, namely, that I was conceived at the hill-station that I have previously specified; and that certain biological norms were diverged from thereafter. Permit me to insist: this is not some sort of cover-up.

  Jawaharlal Nehru was sixty-seven years old in 1957; my mother was thirty-two. They never met again; nor did the great man ever again travel to England, to meet another great man’s wife.

  Public opinion – not for the last time – swung against Aurora. Between Delhi-folk and Bombay types there has always been a measure of mutual contempt (I am speaking, of course, of the bourgeoisie); Bombay-wallahs have tended to dismiss Delhiites as the fawning lackeys of power, as greasy-pole-climbers and placemen, while the capital’s citizens have sneered at the superficiality, the bitchiness, the cosmopolitan ‘Westoxication’ of my home-town’s business babus and lacquered, high-gloss femmes. But in the furore over Aurora’s refusal of the Lotus, Bombay was as scandalized as Delhi. Now, the many enemies her high-handed style had made saw their opportunity and struck. Scoundrelly patriots called her a traitress, the godly called her godless, self-styled spokesmen for the poor berated her for being rich. Many artists failed to defend her: the Chipkalists remembered her attack on them, and were silent; those artists who were truly in thrall to the West, and spent their careers imitating, to dreadful effect, the styles of the great figures of the United States and France, now abused her for ‘parochialism’, while those other artists – and there were many of these – who floundered about in the dead sea of the country’s ancient heritage, producing twentieth-century versions of the old miniature art (and often, secretly, making pornographic fakes of Mughal or Kashmiri art on the side), reviled her just as loudly for ‘losing touch with her roots’. All the old family scandals were raked up, except for the Rumpelstiltskin firstborn-son business between Abraham and his mother Flory, which had never become public property; the newspapers printed with relish every available detail of the disgrace of old Francisco with his ‘Gama rays’, and the absurd efforts of Camoens da Gama to train a troupe of South Indian Lenins, and the murderous war between the Lobos and Menezeses as a result of which the da Gama brothers were sent to jail, and the suicide-by-drowning of poor heartbroken Camoens, and, of course, the great scandal of the coming together, out of wedlock, of the poor, no-account Jew and his filthy-rich Christian whore. When questions about the legitimacy of the Zogoiby children began to be hinted at, however, it seems that on a certain day the editors of all the major newspapers received quiet visits from emissaries of Abraham Zogoiby, who had a word-to-the-wise in their ears; and after that the press campaign stopped instantly, as if it had had a heart attack and died of fright.

  Aurora retreated somewhat from public life. Her salon continued to glitter, but the more conservative elements in high society and in the country’s artistic and intellectual life dropped her for good. She herself remained, more and more, inside the walls of her personal Paradise, and turned, once and for all, in the direction Vasco Miranda had been urging upon her, the true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams.

  (It was at this time, when language riots prefigured the division of the state, that she announced that neither Marathi nor Gujarati would be spoken within her walls; the language of her kingdom was English and nothing but. ‘All these different lingos cuttofy us off from one another,’ she explained. ‘Only English brings us together.’ And to prove her point she would recite, with a doleful expression that could not fail to provoke wicked thoughts in her audience, the popular rhyme of those days: ‘A-B-C-D-E-F-G, out of this came Panditji.’ To which only her trusted ally V. Miranda had the nerve to reply, ‘H-I-J-K-L-M-N, and now he’s buggered off again.’)

  I, too, was obliged to lead a relatively sheltered life; and it must be stressed that the two of us were thrown together more than most mothers and sons, because soon after I was born, she began the series of major canvases with which she is most strongly associated; those works whose name (‘the Moor paintings’) is the same as mine, in which my growing-up is more meaningfully documented than in any photograph album, and which will keep us joined to each other for ever and a day, no matter how far, and how violently, our lives drove us apart.

  The truth about Abraham Zogoiby was that he had put on a disguise; had created a mild-mannered secret identity to mask his covert super-nature. He had deliber
ately painted the dullest possible picture of himself – not for him the kitsch excess of Vasco Miranda’s lachrymose self-portrait en arabe! – over the thrilling but unacceptable reality. The deferential, complaisant surface was what Vasco would have called his ‘overneath’; underneath it, he ruled a Mogambo-ish underworld more lurid than any masala-movie fantasy.

  Soon after he settled in Bombay he had made a pilgrimage of respect to old man Sassoon, head of the great Baghdadi-Jewish family which had hobnobbed with English kings, intermarried with the Rothschilds, and dominated the city for a hundred years. The patriarch agreed to receive him, but only in the Sassoon & Co offices in the Fort; not at home, not as an equal, but as a johnny-come-lately supplicant from the provinces did Abraham come into the Presence. ‘The country may be about to become free,’ the old gentleman told him, smiling benignly, ‘but you must appreciate, Zogoiby, that Bombay is a closed town.’

  Sassoon, Tata, Birla, Readymoney, Jeejeebhoy, Cama, Wadia, Bhabha, Goculdas, Wacha, Cashondeliveri – these great houses had their grip on the city, on its precious and industrial metals, on its chemicals, textiles and spices, and they weren’t about to let go. The da Gama-Zogoiby enterprise had a solid foothold in the last of these areas; and everywhere he went, Abraham received tea or ‘cold-drink’, sweetmeats, warm welcomes, and, lastly, a series of unfailingly courteous but icily serious warnings to keep off any other patches over which he might have been running an entrepreneurial eye. A mere fifteen years later, however, when official sources revealed that just one and a half per cent of the country’s companies owned over half of all private capital, and that even within this élite one and a half per cent, just twenty companies dominated the rest, and that within these twenty companies there were four super-groups who controlled, between them, one quarter of all the share capital in India, the da Gama-Zogoiby C-50 Corporation had already risen to number five.

  He had begun by studying history. There is a certain endemic vagueness in Bombay on the subject of time past; ask a man how long he’s been in business and he’ll answer, ‘Long.’ – Very well, Sir, and how old is your house? – ‘Old. From Old Time.’ – I see; and your great-grandfather, when was he born? – ‘Some time back. What are you asking? Such dead letters are lost in the ancient mists.’ Records are kept tied up with ribbon in dusty box-rooms and nobody ever looks at them. Bombay, a relatively new city in an immensely ancient land, is not interested in yesterdays. ‘So if today and tomorrow are competitive areas,’ Abraham reasoned, ‘let me make my first investment in what nobody values: i.e., what is gone.’ He devoted much time and many resources to a close study of the great families, unearthing their secrets. From the history of the Cotton Mania, or Bubble, of the 1860s he learned that many grandees had been badly damaged, almost ruined, by that time of wild speculation, and that after it their dealings were marked by a profound caution and conservatism. ‘Therefore a gap may exist’, Abraham hypothesised, ‘in the area of risk. None but the brave deserves the prize.’ He traced the great houses’ networks of connections and understood how they pulled the strings; and he discovered, too, which empires were built on sand. So when, in the mid-Fifties, he made his spectacular reverse takeover of the House of Cashondeliveri, which had begun as a firm of moneylenders and grown over the course of a century into a giant enterprise with extensive holdings in banking, land, ships, chemicals and fish, it was because he had discovered that the old Parsi family at its heart was in a state of terminal decline, ‘and when decay is so advanced,’ he noted in his private journal, ‘then the rotten teeth must be yanked out double-quick, or the whole body may suffer infection and die.’ With each Cashondeliveri generation the level of business acumen had declined sharply and the present generation of playboy brothers had incurred colossal gambling losses in the casinos of Europe, and, in addition, had been foolish enough to become involved in a hushed-up bribery scandal resulting from their efforts to export Indian business methods somewhat too crudely into Western financial markets that required rather more subtle treatment. All these skeletons Abraham’s staff assiduously extracted from their cupboards; and then one fine morning Abraham simply walked into the inner sanctum of the House of Cashondeliveri and quite straightforwardly and in broad daylight blackmailed the two pale not-quite-youths he found there into submitting instantly to his many and precise demands. The once-great clan’s weakling scions, Lowjee Lowerjee Cashondeliveri and Jamibhoy Lifebhoy Cashondeliveri, seemed, as they sold their birthright, almost happy to be free of the responsibilities they were so ill-equipped to shoulder, ‘the way the decadent Persian Emperors must have felt when the armies of Islam thundered in,’ as Abraham liked to say.

  But Abraham was no holy warrior, no sir. That man who in his domestic life exuded an air of ineffectuality, even weakness, made of himself, in reality, a veritable czar, a mughal of human frailty. Would it shock you to know that within months of his arrival in Bombay he had begun to trade in human flesh? Reader: it shocked me. My father, Abraham Zogoiby? – Abraham, whose love-story had been a thing of such high passion, such romance? – I fear so; the same. My unforgivable father, whom I forgave … I have said many times already that as well as the loving husband, the uncomplaining protector of our greatest modern artist, there had from the beginning been a darker Abraham; a man who had made his way by threats and coercion, of reluctant ship’s-captains and press barons, too. This Abraham invariably sought out, and came to mutually satisfactory arrangements with, those personages – call them black merchants – who purveyed menace, and bootleg whisky, and also sex, as devotedly as the Tatas and Sassoons plied their more respectable, ‘white market’ trades. Bombay in those days was, Abraham discovered, quite unlike the ‘closed town’ that old man Sassoon had described. For a man prepared to take risks, to give up scruple – for, in short, a black merchant – it was wide, wide open, and the only limit to the money that could be made was the boundary of your imagination.

  More will be said later of the feared Muslim gang-boss, ‘Scar’, whose real name I will not make so bold as to set down here, contenting myself with that terrifying cliché of a sobriquet by which he was known throughout the city’s underworld, and finally – as we shall see – beyond it. For the moment I will content myself with recording that as a result of an alliance with this gentleman Abraham gained the ‘protection’ which was from the beginning such a feature of his preferred mode of operation; and in return for this protection my father became, and covertly remained throughout his long and wicked life, the prime supplier of new young girls to the houses which Scar’s people so efficiently maintained, the Grant Road-Falkland Road-Foras Road-Kamathipura fleshpots of Bombay.

  – What’s that? – ‘Where did he get them from?’ – Why, from the temples of South India, I regret to say, especially from those shrines dedicated to the worship of a certain Karnataka goddess, Kellamma, who seemed incapable of protecting her poor young ‘disciples’ … it is a matter of record that in our sorry age with its prejudice in favour of male children many poor families donated to their favoured cult-temple the daughters they could not afford to marry off or feed, in the hope that they might live in holiness as servants or, if they were fortunate, as dancers; vain hopes, alas, for in many cases the priests in charge of these temples were men in whom the highest standards of probity were mysteriously absent, a failing which laid them open to offers of cash on the nail for the young virgins and not-quite-virgins and once-again-virgins in their charge. Thus Abraham the spice merchant was able to use his widespread Southern connections to harvest a new crop, entered in his most secret ledgers as ‘Garam Masala Super Quality’, and also, I note with some embarrassment, ‘Extra Hot Chilli Peppers: Green.’

  And it was in secret partnership with ‘Scar’, too, that Abraham Zogoiby went into the talcum-powder industry.

  Crystallised hydrated magnesium silicate, Mg3Si4O10(OH)2: talc. When Aurora asked him over breakfast why he was going into the baby-bottom business, he cited the twin advantages of a protectionis
t economy, which imposed prohibitive tariffs on imported talcum brands, and a population explosion, which guaranteed a ‘bum boom’. He spoke enthusiastically of the product’s global potential, characterising India as the one Third World economy capable of rivalling the First World in its sophistication and growth without necessarily becoming enslaved by the almighty US dollar, and suggested that many other Third World countries would leap at the chance to buy a high-quality talcum powder for which no greenback payments were required. By the time he had begun to speculate on the very real short-term possibility of his ‘Baby Softo’ brand taking on Johnson & Johnson in their home markets, Aurora had stopped listening. When he began to sing the advertising jingle with which he proposed to launch his new wheeze, with lyrics personally composed by himself and set to the maddening tune of Bobby Shafto, my mother covered her ears.

  ‘Baby Softo, sing it louder,/Softo-pofto talcum powder,’ carolled Abraham.

  ‘Talcum you can make or don’t make,’ cried Aurora, ‘but this racket must stoppo pronto. It is crackofying the shell of my egg.’

  As I write this I wonder again at Aurora’s unwillingness to see how often and how casually Abraham deceived her, I marvel at the things she accepted without questioning, because of course he was lying, and the white powder he was interested in did not come from quarries in the Western Ghats, but found its way into selected Baby Softo canisters by a highly unusual route involving nocturnal lorry convoys from unknown places of origin, and extensive and systematic bribery of policemen and other officials manning octroi posts along the sub-continent’s trunk roads; and these relatively few canisters produced, for several years, an export-based income which far outstripped the rest of the company’s profits, and made possible a broad-based corporate diversification – an income which was never declared, however, which appeared in no ledger save the secret encoded book of books which Abraham kept profoundly hidden, perhaps in some dark recess of his corrupted soul.