Abraham was impressed. He told her that an enterprise like Siodicorp needed a friendly public face. ‘Look at me,’ he cackled. ‘Am I not a horrible old man? Just now when people think of our company, they think of this mad old fool. From now on, if you agree, they will think of you.’ So it was that Nadia Wadia became the face of Siodicorp: in commercials, on posters, and in person, hostessing the corporation’s many prestige sponsored events – fashion galas, one-day cricket internationals, Guinness Book of Records winners’ conventions, the Millennium Three Expo, the world wrestling championships. So it was that she was saved from the gutter and restored to the public celebrity her beauty deserved. So it was that Abraham Zogoiby scored another victory over Raman Fielding, and the Nadia Wadia song returned, re-released in a pounding dance remix, to the ‘Hot-hot’ playlist of Masala Television, and to the top of the hit parade.
Nadia Wadia and her mother, Fadia Wadia, moved into the Colaba Causeway apartment, and on their living-room wall Abraham hung the one picture by Aurora Zogoiby that Zeenat Vakil was still unable to show at the gallery on Cumballa Hill, a picture in which a beautiful young girl kissed a handsome young cricketer with a (pictorial) passion that had caused such trouble; once upon a time. ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ said Nadia Wadia, clapping her hands as Abraham personally unveiled The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig. ‘Nadia Wadia and Fadia Wadia love cricket, don’t we, Fadia Wadia?’
‘Very true, Nadia Wadia,’ said Fadia Wadia. ‘Cricket is sport of kings.’
‘Oh, silly Fadia Wadia,’ reproved Nadia Wadia. ‘Sport of kings is horsies. Fadia Wadia should know that. Nadia Wadia knows.’
‘Enjoy, daughter,’ said Abraham Zogoiby, kissing Nadia on the top of the head as he left. ‘But please: for your mother, a little more respect.’
He never laid a finger on her, was never anything but the perfect gent. And then, out of the blue, he offered her to me, as if she were his to hand out, in his gift, a trinket wife.
I told Abraham I would visit the Wadias and discuss his proposition. The two women awaited me in their Colaba high-rise, looking terrified. Nadia Wadia had been dressed up like a Christmas present for the occasion, nose-jewellery and all.
‘Your father has been so good to us,’ blurted Fadia Wadia, maternal feelings overcoming the exigencies of her situation. ‘But surely, respected goodsir, my Nadia Wadia deserves kiddies … a younger man …’
Nadia Wadia was looking at me oddly. ‘Has Nadia Wadia maybe met you someplace before?’ she asked, half-remembering Ganpati. I ignored this question and addressed myself to the matter in hand. The problem was, I explained, that they were living on the patronage of one of the most powerful men in India. Should they refuse the offer of his only son’s hand in marriage, it was entirely likely that the old man’s protection would be withdrawn. Few hands would extend towards them after that, for fear of offending the great Zogoiby. Possibly the only interested party would be a certain gentleman who once, as a cartoonist, used to sign his efforts with the picture of a frog …
‘Never!’ cried Nadia Wadia. ‘Mrs Mainduck? This, Nadia Wadia will never be. First I will ask Fadia Wadia to hold my hand, and together we will jump from this verandah, just here, see.’
‘No need, no need,’ I soothed her. ‘My idea is a little better, I think.’ What I proposed was an engagement in name only. Abraham would be humoured, it would be excellent public relations, and the period of the engagement could be infinitely prolonged. I told them the secret of my accelerated existence. It was plain, I said, that I did not have long to live. Once I died they would reap the considerable benefits of being attached to the Zogoiby family, to whose great fortune I was the only heir. Even should I live long enough for the marriage to become necessary, I vowed, our platonic arrangement would remain in place. I asked only for Nadia Wadia’s agreement that she would keep up the appearance of a genuine match. ‘The rest will be our secret.’
‘Oh, Nadia Wadia,’ moaned Fadia Wadia. ‘See how rude we are! Your handsome fiancé is come a-calling and we have not even offered him one little piece of cake.’
Why did I do it? Because I knew what I said to be true; Abraham would have taken refusal as a personal insult, and hurled them into the street. Because I admired Nadia Wadia’s stand against Fielding, and also the way in which she had dealt with my notoriously lecherous father. Oh, because she was so beautiful and young, and I was such a ruin. Perhaps because, after my years of violence and corruption, I was looking for redemption, I wanted to be shriven of my sins.
Redemption from what? Shriven by whom? Don’t ask me difficult questions. I did it, that’s all. The engagement of Moraes Zogoiby, only son of Mr Abraham Zogoiby and the late Aurora Zogoiby (née da Gama), and Miss Nadia Wadia, only daughter of Mr Kapadia Wadia, deceased, and Mrs Fadia Wadia, all of Bombay, was announced. And somewhere in the city, a Tin-man heard the news, and evil festered in his broken, heartless heart.
The engagement party was at the Taj, of course, and a lavish Bombay affair it surely was. In the spiteful presence of more than a thousand beautiful, razor-tongued and sceptically amused strangers, including my last sister, Sister Floreas, who was becoming more of a stranger by the day, I slipped a ‘fabulous diamond’, as the papers described it, on to that lovely girl’s lovely finger, and so completed what ‘Waspyjee’ would call ‘an amazing, almost sacrificial betrothal of the Sunset to the Dawn’. But Abraham Zogoiby – most malicious, coldest-hearted of old men – had, with his customary black humour, prepared a little sting in the evening’s tail. After the ritual of the public engagement was complete, and the photographers had feasted on Nadia’s never-more-radiant beauty, and were at last replete, Abraham stepped up on to the dais and asked for silence, because he had an announcement to make.
‘Moraes, only son of my body, and Nadia, loveliest of daughters-in-law to be,’ he cawed. ‘Let me venture the hope that you will soon give this sadly depleted family some new members’ – O empty-hearted father! – ‘for an old man to enjoy. In the meantime, however, I myself have a new member to introduce.’
Much puzzlement, much anticipation. Abraham cackled and nodded. ‘Yes, my Moor. At last, my boy, you will have a younger brother to call your own.’
Red curtains parted, theatrically on cue, behind the little dais. Adam Braganza – Little Big Ears himself! – stepped forward. Among the many loud gasps were Fadia Wadia’s, Nadia Wadia’s, and mine.
Abraham kissed him on both cheeks, and on the lips. ‘From this time forward,’ he told the boy before the city’s assembled élite, ‘call yourself Adam Zogoiby – my beloved son.’
18
BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, HAD been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India’s East and to the west, the world’s West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.
What magic was stirred into that insaan-soup, what harmony emerged from that cacophony! In Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut – in Delhi, in Calcutta – from time to time they slit their neighbours’ throats and took warm showers, or red bubble-baths, in all that spuming blood. They killed you for being circumcised and they killed you because your foreskins had been left on. Long hair got you murdered and haircuts too; light skin flayed dark skin and if you spoke the wrong language you could lose your twisted tongue. In Bombay, such things never happened. – Never, you say? – OK: never is too absolute a word. Bombay was not inoculated against the rest of the country, and what happened elsewhere, the language business for example, also spread into its streets. But on the way to Bombay the rivers of blood were usually diluted, other rivers poured into them, so that by the time they reached the city’s streets the di
sfigurations were relatively slight. – Am I sentimentalising? Now that I have left it all behind, have I, among my many losses, also lost clear sight? – It may be said I have; but still I stand by my words. O Beautifiers of the City, did you not see that what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged to nobody, and to all? Did you not see the everyday live-and-let-live miracles thronging its overcrowded streets?
Bombay was central. In Bombay, as the old, founding myth of the nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. The wealth of the country flowed through its exchanges, its ports. Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay: that was one explanation for what happened. Well, well, that may have been so. And it may have been that what was unleashed in the north (in, to name it, because I must name it, Ayodhya) – that corrosive acid of the spirit, that adversarial intensity which poured into the nation’s bloodstream when the Babri Masjid fell and plans for a mighty Ram temple on the god’s alleged birthplace were, as they used to say in the Bombay cinema-houses, filling up fast – was on this occasion too concentrated, and even the great city’s powers of dilution could not weaken it enough. So, so; those who argue thus have a point, too, it cannot be denied. At the Zogoiby Bequest, Zeenat Vakil offered me her usual sardonic take on the troubles. ‘I blame fiction,’ she said. ‘The followers of one fiction knock down another popular piece of make-believe, and bingo! It’s war. Next they will find Vyasa’s cradle under Iqbal’s house, and Valmiki’s baby-rattle under Mirza Ghalib’s hang-out. So, OK. I’d rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.’
I had been dreaming about Uma – O disloyal subconscious! – Uma sculpting her early work, the large Nandi bull. Like the bull, I thought when I awoke, and like blue Krishna of flute-and-milkmaid fame, Lord Ram was an avatar of Vishnu; Vishnu, most metamorphic of the gods. The true ‘rule of Ram’ should therefore, surely, be premised on the mutating, inconstant, shape-shifting realities of human nature – and not only human nature, but divine as well. This thing being advocated in the great god’s name flew in the face of his essence as well as ours. – But when the boulder of history begins to roll, nobody is interested in discussing such fragile points. The juggernaut is loose.
… And if Bombay was central, it may have been that what transpired was rooted in Bombay quarrels. Mogambo versus Mainduck: the long-awaited duel, the heavyweight unification bout to establish, once and for all, which gang (criminal-entrepreneurial or political-criminal) would run the town. I saw something like this happen, and can only set down what I saw. Hidden factors? The meddling of secret/foreign hands? These I leave for wiser analysts to reveal.
I’ll tell you what I think – what, in spite of a life time’s conditioning against the supernatural, I cannot stop believing: something started when Aurora Zogoiby fell – not just a feud, but a lengthening, widening tear in the fabric of all our lives. She would not rest, she haunted us tirelessly. Abraham Zogoiby saw her more and more, floating in his Pei garden, demanding to be avenged. That’s what I really think. What followed was her revenge. Disembodied, she hung above us in the sky, Aurora Bombayalis in her glory, and what rained down upon us was her wrath. Find the femme, say I. See: Aurora’s phantom flying through the fiery air. And behold Nadia, too – Nadia Wadia, like the city whose true creature she was – Nadia Wadia, my fiancée, was also central to the tale.
So was this a Mahabharat-style conflict, then, a Trojan war, in which the gods took sides and played their part? No, sir. No, sirree. No old-time deities here, but johnny-come-latelies, the lot of us, Abraham-Mogambo and his Scars, Mainduck and his Five-in-a-Bites; all of us. Aurora, Minto, Sammy, Nadia, me. We were not, did not deserve to be thought of as being, of tragic status. If Carmen Lobo da Gama, my unhappy Great-Aunt Sahara, once gambled for her fortune with Prince Henry the Navigator, there’s no need to hear echoes of Yudhisthira’s loss of his kingdom on a fatal throw of the dice. And though men fought over Nadia Wadia, she was neither Helen nor Sita. Just a pretty girl in a hot spot, is all. Tragedy was not in our natures. A tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand scale, but those of us who played our parts were – let me put it bluntly – clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted into history’s theatre on account of the lack of greater men. Once, indeed, there were giants on our stage; but at the fag-end of an age, Madam History must make do with what she can get. Jawaharlal, in these latter days, was just the name of a stuffed dog.
Out of the goodness of my heart I approached my new ‘brother’ and proposed a getting-to-know-you lunch. Well, my dears, you should have heard the to-do. ‘Adam Zogoiby’ – I never could think of that name without putting it in quotes – went into a positive tizzy of social-climbing panic. Should we go Polynesian at the Oberoi Outrigger? No, no, it was only a buffet luncheon, and one did so appreciate a little fawning. Maybe just a bite at the Taj Sea Lounge? But, on second thoughts, too many old buffers reliving fading glories. How about the Sorryno? Close to home, and nice view, but darling, how to tolerate that old groucho of a proprietor? A quick businesslike in-and-out at an Irani joint – Bombay AI or Pyrke’s at Flora Fountain? No, we needed less noise, and to talk properly one must be able to linger. Chinese, then? – Yes, but impossible to choose between the Nanking and Kamling. The Village? All that fake-rustic themeing, baby: so passé. After a long, agitated soliloquy (I have given only edited highlights) he settled – or rather, ‘plumped’ – for the celebrated Continental cuisine at the Society. And, once there, toyed fashionably with a leaf.
‘Dimple! Simple! Pimple! So great to see you girls on speakers again. – Ah, bon-jaw, Kalidasa, my usual claret, silver-plate. – Now, then, Moor dear – it’s OK-fine with you if I call you “Moor”? OK-fine. Lovely. – Harish, howdy! Buying OTCEI, a little birdie told. Good move! Damn high quality equity paper, even if just now little-bit underdeveloped. – Moor, sorry, sorry. You have my absolute undivided, I swear. – Mon-sooar Frah-swah! Kissy-kissy! – O, just send us whatever you think, we place ourselves in your hands totally. Only no butter, no fried element, no fatty meat, no carbo-fest, and hold the aubergines. One has the figure to preserve, isn’t it? – Finally. Brother! What times we’ll have! What super maza, eh? P-H-U-N fun. Are you into nitespots? Forget Midnite-Confidential, Nineteen Hundred, Studio 29, Cavern. All over for them, baby. I just happen to be a founder investor in the new happening joint. We’re calling it W-3 for World Wide Web. Or maybe just The Web. Virtual-reality-meets-wet-sari DJs! Cyberpunk meets bhangra-muffin décor! And talent, yaar, on line, get me? The word is state-of-the-art. P-H-A-T fat.’
And if I was a little stony of face, a little curmudgeonly, what of it? I felt entitled. I watched the non-stop cabaret, the seven-veils floor-show that was ‘Adam Zogoiby’, and watched him watching me. He understood soon enough that the Mr Cool act wasn’t playing, and switched into lower-voiced, conspiratorial mode. ‘Hey, brother, you have a pretty damn hot fighting history, or so I hear. Damn unusual for you Jew boys. I thought you were all book-nosed, four-eyed members of the international world-domination conspiracy.’
That didn’t go down well either. I muttered something about the mercenary warrior-Jews who had done so much to establish the community’s presence on the Malabar coast, and he heard the icy note in my voice. ‘Hey, come on, bro, can’t you hear when you’re being kidded? Hey, this is me. – Madhu, Mehr, Ruchi, hi. Gee, too much to see you girls. Meet my big bhai. Listen, this is one crazy guy, one of you should snap him up. – Moor, men, what do you think? Just the absolute top runway and cover girls just now, bigger than our sadly deceased sister Ina, even. You know what? I think they went for you. Classy, classy dames.’
On the subject of ‘Adam Zogoiby’, my mind was closing fast. Now he changed again, becoming businesslike, professional. ‘You should fix up your own financial position, you know. Our father, sad to say, is not a young man. I am presently finalising my personal needs in detailed discussions with his guys.’
That did it. Something abo
ut Adam had been striking me as déjà vu, and now I saw what it was. His refusal to talk about his past, the fluidity of his changes of stride as he tried to bewitch and woo, the cold calculation of his moves: I had fallen for such an act once, though she had been a far greater practitioner of the chameleon arts than he, and made far less mistakes. I recalled, with a shudder, my old fantasy of the trouble-eating alien who could take human form. Last time a lady, this time a man. The Thing had returned.
‘I used to know a woman like you,’ I told Adam. ‘And, brother, you’ve still got a lot to learn.’
‘Well, humph,’ flounced Adam. ‘When one of us is making such an effort, I don’t see why one of us is being so darn offensive. That’s some attitude problem you’ve got there, Moor bhai. Bad show. Bad career move, also. I hear you came over all hoity with darling Daddyji as well. At his age! Luckily for him one of his sons at least is willing to do the needfuls without giving backchat or lip.’
Sammy Hazaré lived in the suburb of Andheri, surrounded by a random tangle of light industries – Nazareth Leathercloths, Vajjo’s Ayurvedic Laboratory (specialising in vajradanti gel for the gums), Thums Up Cola Bottle Caps, Clenola Brand Cooking Oil, and even a small film studio, mostly used for advertising commercials, which boasted – on a board beside its gate – an ‘On-Site Stunter and Stuntess’ and ‘Manuel Function (6-Man Team) Crane Faslity’. His house, a rutputty single-storey wooden bungalow, long threatened with demolition but still standing, after the happenstance fashion of Bombay life, skulked between the stinking factory backs and a squat yellow group of lower-income housing units, as though it were doing its best to escape the demolition teams’ attention. Limes and green chillies hung over the screen-door, to ward off evil spirits. Outdated calendars featuring brightly coloured representations of Lord Ram and elephant-headed Ganesh had for many years been the only other decorations; now, however, pictures of Nadia Wadia, torn from magazines, were Scotch-taped all over the blue-green walls. And there were also society-page photographs of the betrothal of Miss Wadia and Mr M. Zogoiby at the Taj Hotel, and in these pictures my face had been violently crossed out with a pen, or scratched off with the tip of a knife. In one or two I had been completely beheaded. Obscene words had been scrawled across my chest.