The Moor's Last Sigh

  I was sustained in that null time at the beginning of the 1980s by Ezekiel, our ageless cook. As if sensing the establishment’s need for cheering up, he embarked upon a gastronomic programme combining nostalgia with invention and stirring in a generous sprinkling of hope. Before setting off for Baby Softo-land, and after I came home, I found myself gravitating more and more to the kitchen, where he squatted, grizzle-chopped and grinning gummily, tossing parathas optimistically in the air. ‘Joy!’ he cackled, wisely. ‘Baba sahib, sit only and we will cook up the happy future. We will mash its spices and peel its garlic cloves, we will count out its cardamoms and chop its ginger, we will heat up the ghee of the future and fry its masala to release its flavour. Joy! Success in his enterprises for the Sahib, genius in her pictures for the Madam, and a beautiful bride for you! We will cook the past and present also, and from it tomorrow will come.’ So I learned to cook Meat Cutlass (spicy minced lamb inside a potato patty) and Chicken Country Captain; to me the secrets of prawn padda, ticklegummy, dhope and ding-ding were revealed. I became a master of balchow and learned to spin a mean kaju ball. I learned the art of Ezekiel’s ‘Cochin special’, a mouth-wateringly piquant red banana jam. And as I journeyed through the cook’s copybooks, deeper and deeper into that private cosmos of papaya and cinnamon and spice, my spirits did indeed pick up; not least because I felt that Ezekiel had succeeded in joining me, after a long interruption, to the story of my past. In his kitchen I was transported back to a long-departed Cochin in which the patriarch Francisco dreamed of Gama rays and Solomon Castile ran off to sea and reappeared in blue synagogue tiles. Between the lines of his emerald-jacketed copybooks I saw Belle’s struggle with the books of the family business, and in the scents of his culinary magic I smelled a godown in Ernakulam where a young girl had fallen in love. And Ezekiel’s prophecy began to feel true. With yesterday in my tummy, my prospects felt a lot better.

  ‘Good food,’ grinned Ezekiel, slurping his tongue. ‘Fattening food. Time to put a little pot on your front. A man without a belly has no appetite for life.’

  On 23rd June 1980 Sanjay Gandhi tried to loop the loop over New Delhi and nose-dived to his death. At once, in the period of instability that followed, I, too, was plunged towards catastrophe. Within days of Sanjay’s death I heard that Jamshed Cashondeliveri had died in a car accident on the road to Powai Lake. His passenger, who had miraculously been thrown clear and escaped with minor cuts and concussion, was the brilliant young sculptor Uma Sarasvati to whom, it was said, the dead man had been intending to propose at the well-known beauty spot. Forty-eight hours later it was reported that Miss Sarasvati had been discharged from hospital and had been driven to her residence by friends. She continued, understandably, to suffer greatly from grief and shock.

  The news of Uma’s injury unleashed all the feelings for her which I had spent so long trying to tie down. I spent two days fighting against myself, but once I heard she was back at Cuffe Parade, I left the house, telling Lambajan I was off to the Hanging Gardens for a stroll, and grabbed a cab the moment I was out of his sight. Uma answered the door in black tights and a loosely tied kimono-style Japanese shirt. She looked panicky, hunted. It was as if her internal gravitational force had diminished; she seemed like a shaky assemblage of particles that might fly apart at any moment.

  ‘Are you badly hurt?’ I asked her.

  ‘Shut the door,’ she replied. When I turned back towards her she had untied her shirt and let it fall. ‘See for yourself,’ she said.

  After that there was no keeping us apart. The thing between us seemed to have grown more potent during our separation. ‘Oh boy,’ she murmured as I caressed her with my twisted right hand. ‘Oh yes, this. Oh boyoboy.’ And, later: ‘I knew you didn’t stop loving me. I didn’t stop. I told myself, confusion to our enemies. Whoever stands in our way will fall.’

  Her husband, she confessed, had died. ‘If I’m such a mean woman,’ she said, ‘then answer me why he left me everything? After his illness he didn’t know who anybody was, he thought I was the servant girl. So I arranged for his care and left. If that is a bad thing then I am bad.’ I absolved her easily. No, not bad, my darling, my life, not you.

  There was not a scratch on her body. ‘Bloody newspapers,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t even in the bloody car. I took my own vehicle because I had plans for later. So he was in his stupid Mercedes’ – how charmingly she mispronounced the name: Murs’deez! – ‘and I in my new Suzuki. And on that second-rate road the crazy playboy wants to race. On that road where trucks come and buses with doped-up drivers and donkey-carts and camel-carts and god knows what-all.’ She wept; I dried her tears. ‘What could I do? I just drove like a sensible woman and shouted at him, no, get back, no. But Jimmy always had something missing up top. What to tell you? He didn’t look, he stayed on the wrong side of the road to overtake, a corner came, a cow was sitting, he tried to avoid, he could not pull across because my car was there, he went off the road on the right side, and there was a poplar tree. Khalaas.’

  I tried to feel sorry for Jimmy and failed. ‘The papers said you were going to be married.’ She gave me a furious look. ‘You never understood me,’ she said. ‘Jimmy was nothing. For me it was always you.’

  We met as often as we could. I kept our assignations secret from my family, and apparently Aurora had dispensed with Dom Minto’s services, because she found out nothing. A year passed; more than a year. The happiest fifteen months of my life. ‘Confusion to our enemies!’ Uma’s defiant phrase became our greeting and farewell.

  Then Mynah died.

  My sister perished of – what else? – a shortage of breath. She had been visiting a chemical factory in the north of town to investigate its maltreatment of its large female workforce – mostly women from the slums of Dharavi and Parel – when there was a small explosion in her near vicinity. The ‘integrity’ of a sealed vat of dangerous chemicals was, to use the official report’s anaesthetised language, ‘compromised’. The practical consequence of this loss of chemical integrity was the release into the atmosphere of a substantial quantity of the gas methyl isocyanate. Mynah, who had been knocked unconscious by the explosion, inhaled a lethal dose of the gas. The official report failed to account for the delay in summoning medical assistance, though it did list forty-seven separate counts on which the factory had failed to observe prescribed safety norms. First-aid-qualified staff on site were also rapped for the slowness with which they reached Mynah and her party. In spite of being given a shot of sodium thiosulphate in the ambulance, Mynah died before they reached the hospital. She died in pop-eyed agony, retching and gasping for air, while poison ate her lungs. Two of her colleagues from the WWSTP also died; three more lived on with severe disabilities. No compensation was ever paid. The investigation concluded that the incident had been a deliberate attack on Mynah’s organisation by ‘unnamed outside agents’ and the factory could therefore not be deemed culpable. Only a few months previously Mynah had finally succeeded in sending Kéké Kolatkar to jail for his property swindles, but no trail connecting the politico to the killing was ever established. And Abraham, as has been stated, got himself off with a fine … listen, Mynah was his daughter. His daughter. Okay?

  Okay.

  ‘Confusion to our …’ Uma stopped in mid-phrase, seeing the look on my face, when I went to see her after Philomina Zogoiby’s funeral. ‘No more of that,’ I said, sobbing. ‘No more confusion. Please.’

  I lay in bed with my head in her lap. She stroked my white hair. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Time to simplify. Your mummy-daddy must accept us, they must bow down before our love. Then we can get married and hey presto. It’s happy ever after for us, and another artist in the family, too.’

  ‘She won’t …’ I began, but Uma laid a finger across my lips.

  ‘She must.’

  Uma in this mood was an irresistible force. Our love was simply an imperative, she insisted; it demanded, and had a right, to be. ‘When I explain this to your mot
her and father they will come round. It is my bona-fides that they doubt? Very well then. For our love I will go to see them – tonight! – and show them that they are wrong.’

  I protested, but weakly. It was too soon. Their hearts were full of Mynah, I demurred, and there was no room for us. She overrode all my arguments. There was no heart that had no room in it for declarations of love, she said; just as there was no shame that true love did not erase – and now that Mr Sarasvati was no more, what stain lay upon our love except that she had been married once before and was not a virgin bride? My parents’ objections were not reasonable. How could they stand in the way of their one son’s chance of happiness? A son who had had to bear such burdens from the day of his birth? ‘Tonight,’ she repeated, grimly. ‘You just wait on here. I will go and convince.’ She leapt to her feet and began to dress. As she left she clipped a Walkman to her belt and donned headphones. ‘Whistle while you work,’ she grinned, clicking a cassette into place. I was terrified. ‘Good luck,’ I said loudly. ‘Can’t hear a word,’ she said, and left. Once she had gone I wondered idly why she had bothered with the Walkman when she had a perfectly good sound system in the car. Probably bust, I thought. Nothing in this goddamn country works for very long.

  She came back after midnight, full of love. ‘I really think it will be OK,’ she whispered. I had been lying awake in bed; tension had turned my body into knotted steel. ‘Are you sure?’ I said, begging for more. ‘They are not evil people,’ she said softly, sliding in beside me. ‘They listened to everything and I am sure they got the point.’

  At that moment I felt my life coming together as never before, I felt as if the tangled mess of my right hand were unscrambling, rearranging itself into palm and knuckles and jointed fingers and thumb. In elation’s grip, I may even have danced. Damn it, I did dance: and shrieked, and boozed, and made wild love for joy. Verily she was my miracle worker and had achieved the unachievable thing. We slipped towards sleep wrapped in each other’s bodies. Near oblivion I mumbled, vaguely, ‘Where’s the Walkman?’

  ‘Oh, that damn thing,’ she whispered. ‘Always mangling up my tapes. I stopped on the way and chucked it in a bin.’

  When I got home the next morning Abraham and Aurora were waiting for me in the garden, standing shoulder to shoulder, with darkness on their faces.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘From this moment on,’ said Aurora Zogoiby, ‘you are no longer our son. All steps to disinherit you have been put in place. You have one day in which to collectofy your effects and get out. Your father and I never wish to see you again.’

  ‘I support your mother fully,’ said Abraham Zogoiby. ‘You disgust us. Now get out of our sight.’

  (There were further harsh words; louder, many of them mine. I will not set them down.)

  ‘Jaya? Ezekiel? Lambajan? Will somebody tell me what’s happened? What is going on?’ Nobody spoke. Aurora’s door was locked, Abraham had left the premises, and his secretaries had instructions not to put through any of my calls. Finally Miss Jaya Hé allowed herself to utter three words.

  ‘Better you pack.’

  Nothing was explained – not the fact of my expulsion, nor the brutality of its manner. Such an extreme penalty for so minor a ‘crime’! – The ‘crime’ of falling into delirious love with a woman of whom my mother disapproved! To be cut off the family tree, like a dead branch, for so trivial – no, so wonderful – a reason … it was not enough. It made no sense. I knew that other people – most people – were living in this country of parental absolutism; and in the world of the masala movie these never-darken-my-doorstep scenes were two-a-penny. But we were different; and surely this place of fierce hierarchies and ancient moral certitudes had not been my country, surely this kind of material had no part in the script of our lives! – Yet it was plain that I was wrong; for there was no further discussion. I called Uma to give her the news, and then, having no option, faced my fate. The gates of Paradise were opened, and Lambajan averted his eyes. I stumbled through them, giddy, disoriented, lost. I was nobody, nothing. Nothing I had ever known was of use, nor could I any longer say that I knew it. I had been emptied, invalidated; I was, to use a hoary but suddenly fitting epithet, ruined. I had fallen from grace, and the horror of it shattered the universe, like a mirror. I felt as though I, too, had shattered; as if I were falling to earth, not as myself, but as a thousand and one fragmented images of myself, trapped in shards of glass.

  After the fall: I arrived at Uma Sarasvati’s with a suitcase in my hand. When she answered the door her eyes were red, her hair was wild, her manner was deranged. Old-style Indian melodrama was exploding over the surface of our fraudulently sophisticated ways, like the truth bursting through a thinly painted veneer of sweet lies. Uma erupted into shrieky apologies. Her inner gravity had weakened dramatically; now she really was coming apart. ‘O god– if I’d ever thought – but how could they, it’s something from prehistory – from ancient time – I thought they were such civilised people – I thought it was us religious nuts who acted like this not you modern secular types – O god, I’ll go see them again, just now I’ll go, I’ll swear never to see you …’

  ‘No,’ I said, still dulled by shock. ‘Please don’t go. Don’t do another thing.’

  ‘Then I will do the only thing you cannot forbid,’ she howled. ‘I will kill myself. I will do it now, tonight. I will do this for my love of you, to set you free. Then they must take you back.’ She must have been working herself up ever since my telephone call. Now she was operatic, immense.

  ‘Uma, don’t be mad,’ I said.

  ‘I am not mad,’ she shouted at me, madly. ‘Don’t call me mad. All of your family calls me mad. I am not mad. I am in love. A woman will do great things for love. A man in love would do no less for me, but this I do not ask. I do not expect great things from you, from any man. I am not mad, unless I am mad about you. Call me mad for love. And – for god’s sake! – shut the goddamn door.’

  Fervid, with blood standing in her eyes, she began to pray. At the little shrine to Lord Ram in the corner of her living-room she lit a dia-lamp and moved it in tense circles through the air. I stood there in the gathering darkness with a suitcase at my feet. She means it, I thought. This is not a game. This is happening. It is my life, our life, and this its shape. This its true shape, the shape behind all shapes, the shape that reveals itself only at the moment of truth. At that moment an utter despair came over me, crushing me beneath its weight. I understood that I had no life. It had been taken from me. The illusion of the future which Ezekiel the cook had restored to me in his kitchen stood revealed as a chimera. What was I to do? Was it to be the gutter for me, or a final, supreme moment of dignity? Did I have the courage to die for love, and by doing so to make our love immortal? Could I do that for Uma? Could I do it for myself?

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said aloud. She set down her lamp and turned to me.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘The god told me you would. He said you were a brave man, and you loved me, and so of course you would accompany me on the journey. You would not be a coward who let me go alone.’

  She had always known that her attachment to life was not firm, that the time might come when she would be ready to give it up. So, since her childhood, like a warrior going into battle, she had brought her death with her. In case of capture. Death before dishonour. She came out of her boudoir with clenched fists. In each fist was a white tablet. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said. ‘Policemen’s houses contain many secrets.’ She requested me to kneel beside her in front of the portrait of the god. ‘I know you don’t believe,’ she said. ‘But for me, you will not refuse.’ We knelt. ‘To show you how truly I have always loved you,’ she said, ‘to prove to you at last that I have never lied, I will swallow first. If you too are true, then follow me at once, at once, for I will be waiting, O my only love.’

  At that moment something in me changed. There was a refusal. ‘No,’ I cried, and snatched at the tablet in her hand. It f
ell to the floor. With a cry she dived down towards it, as did I. Our heads clashed. ‘Ow,’ we said together. ‘Ohoho, ai-aiee. Ow’

  When my head cleared a little both our tablets were lying on the floor. I snatched at them; but in my dizzy pain succeeded in capturing only one. Uma seized the remaining tablet and stared at it with a new wideness of eye, in the grip of some new, private horror, as if she had unexpectedly been asked an appalling question, and did not know how to reply.

  I said: ‘Don’t. Uma, don’t. It’s wrong. It’s mad.’

  The word stung her again. ‘Don’t say mad,’ she shrieked. ‘If you want to live, live. But it will prove you never loved me. It proves you have been the liar, the charlatan, the quick-change artist, the manipulator, the conspirator, the fake. Not me: you. You are the rotten egg, the evil one, the devil. See! My egg is good.’

  She swallowed the pill.

  There was a moment when an expression of immense and genuine surprise crossed her face, followed at once by resignation. Then she fell to the ground. I knelt beside her in terror and the bitter-almond smell filled my nostrils. Her face in death seemed to pass through a thousand changes, as if the pages of a book were turning, as if she were giving up, one by one, all her numberless selves. And then a blank page, and she was no longer anyone at all.