The Moor's Last Sigh (13 page)

again I say, No Way. When I was young I used to dream--like Carmen da Gama, but for less masochistic, masturbatory reasons; like photophobic, God-bothered Oliver D'Aeth--of peeling off my skin plantain-fashion, of going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan. (In another version of the dream I would be able to peel away more than skin, I would float free of flesh, skin and bones, having become simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world, at play in its fields, like a science-fiction glow which needed no physical form.) So, in writing this, I must peel off history, the prison of the past. It is time for a sort of ending, for the truth about myself to struggle out, at last, from under my parents' stifling power; from under my own black skin. These words are a dream come true. A painful dream, that I do not deny; for in the waking world a man's not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be. And Aurora and Abraham will take some shaking off. Motherness--excuse me if I underline the point--is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet. Ladies-O, gents-O: I'm talking major mother country. The year I was born, Mehboob Productions' all-conquering movie Mother India--three years in the making, three hundred shooting days, in the top three all-time mega-grossing Bollywood flicks--hit the nation's screens. Nobody who saw it ever forgot that glutinous saga of peasant heroinism, that super-slushy ode to the uncrushability of village India made by the most cynical urbanites in the world. And as for its leading lady--O Nargis with your shovel over your shoulder and your strand of black hair tumbling forward over your brow!--she became, until Indira-Mata supplanted her, the living mother-goddess of us all. Aurora knew her, of course; like every other luminary of the time the actress was drawn towards my mother's blazing flame. But they didn't hit it off, perhaps because Aurora could not refrain from raising the subject--how close to my own heart!--of mother-son relations. 'The first time I saw that picture', she confided to the famous movie star on the high terrace at Elephanta, 'I took one look at your Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy--too much sizzle, too much chilli, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is some A-class loverboy goods. And now look--you have gone and marry-o'ed him! What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear, wowie.' The film actor under discussion, Sunil Dutt, stood stiffly beside his wife and sipped lemonade, flushing. (In those days Bombay was a 'dry' state, and even though whisky-soda was plentiful at Elephanta, the actor was making a moral point.) 'Auroraji, you are mixing truth and make-believe,' he said pompously, as if it were a sin. 'Birju and his mother Radha are fictions only, in two dimensions on the silver screen; but we are flesh and blood, available in full 3D--as guests in your fine home.' Nargis, sipping ninibu-pani, smiled a thin smile at the rebuke hidden in the last phrase. 'Even in the picture, but,' Aurora went relentlessly on, 'I knew right off that bad Birju had the hots for his gorgeous ma.' Nargis stood speechless, open-mouthed. Vasco Miranda, who could never resist a bit of trouble-making, saw the storm brewing and made haste to join in. 'Sublimation', he offered, 'of mutual parent-child longings, is deep-rooted in the national psyche. The use of names in the picture makes the meaning clear. This "Birju" moniker is also used by God Krishna, isn't it, and we know that milky "Radha" is the blue chap's one true love. In the picture, Sunil, you are made up to look like the god, and you even fool with all the girls, throwing your stones to break their womby water-pots; which, admit it, is Krishnaesque behaviour. In this interpretation,' and here clowning Vasco attempted unsuccessfully to convey a certain scholarly gravitas, 'Mother India is the dark side of the Radha-Krishna story, with the subsidiary theme of forbidden love added on. But what the hell; Oedipus-schmoedipus! Have another chhota peg.' 'Dirty talk,' said the Living Mother Goddess. 'Filthy-dirty, chhi. I heard tell that depraved artists and beatnik intellectuals came up here, but I gave you all benefit of doubt. Now I observe that I am among the blaspheming scum of the earth. How you people wallow-pollow in negative images! In our picture we put stress on the positive side. Courage of the masses is there, and also dams.' 'Bad language, eh?' mused Vasco, innocently. 'Good for you! But in the final cut the censor must have removed it.' 'Bewaqoof!' shouted Sunil Dutt, provoked beyond endurance. 'Bleddy dumbo! Not oathery, but new technology is being referred to: to wit, the hydro-electric project, as inaugurated by my goodwife in the opening scene.' 'And when you say your wife,' ever-helpful Vasco clarified, 'you mean, of course, your mother.' 'Sunil, come,' said the legend, sweeping away. 'If this godless anti-national gang is the world of art, then I-tho am happy to be on commercial side.' In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealised as bride, mother, and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the social status quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother's love, she becomes, as one critic has mentioned, 'that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males'. I, too, know something about this image; have been cast as a Bad Son in my turn. My mother was no Nargis Dutt--she was the in-your-face type, not serene. Catch her hauling a shovel on her shoulder! I am pleased to say that I have never seen a spade. Aurora was a city girl, perhaps the city girl, as much the incarnation of the smartyboots metropolis as Mother India was village earth made flesh. In spite of this I have found it instructive to compare and contrast our families. Mother India's movie-husband was rendered impotent, his arms crushed by a rock; and ruined limbs play a central role in our saga, too. (You must judge for yourselves whether Abraham was a potent fellow or im-.) And as for Birju and Moor: dark skins and crookery were not all we had in common. I have been keeping my secret for too long. High time I spilt my beans. My three sisters were born in quick succession, and Aurora carried and ejected each of them with such perfunctory attention to their presence that they knew, long before their births, that she would make few concessions to their post-partum needs. The names she gave them confirmed these suspicions. The eldest, originally called Christina in spite of her Jewish father's protests, eventually had her name sliced in half. 'Stop sulking, Abie,' Aurora commanded. 'From now on she's plain Ina without the Christ.' So poor Ina grew up with only half a handle, and when the second child was born a year later matters were made worse because this time Aurora insisted on 'Inamorata'. Abraham protested again: 'People will confuse,' he said plaintively. 'And with this Ina-more it is like saying she is Ina-plus...' Aurora shrugged. 'Ina was a ten-pound baby, the little so-and-so,' she reminded Abraham. 'Head like a cannonball, hips like a ship's behind. How can this little pocket mousey be anything but Ina-minus?' Within a week, she had decided that Baby Inamorata, the five-pound mouse, bore a close resemblance to a famous cartoon rodent--'all big ears, wide eyes and polka dots'--and my middle sister was always Minnie after that. When Aurora announced, eighteen months later, that her newborn third daughter would be Philomina, Abraham tore his hair. 'Now comes this Minnie-'meena mix-up,' he groaned. 'And another -ina, too.' Philomina, listening in on this dispute, began to cry, a fat tuneless roar of a noise that convinced everyone except her mother of the comical inappropriateness of naming her after the nightingale. When the child was three months old, however, Miss Jaya He the ayah heard a series of alarming caws and piercing trills emanating from the nursery and rushed in to find the baby lying contentedly in her cot with bird-song pouring from her lips. Ina and Minnie stared at their sister through the bars of the cot with expressions of terror and awe. Aurora was summoned and, with an unfazed casualness that instantly normalised the miracle, nodded brusquely and gave judgment: 'So if she can mimic like this she is not a bulbul but a mynah,' and from then on it was Ina, Minnie, Mynah, except that at Walsingham House School on Nepean Sea Road they became Eeny Meeny Miney, three quarters of an unfinished line followed by a hollow beat, a silent space where a fourth word should be. Three sisters waiting--and they had a long wait of it, because between Mynah and me there was an eight-year gap--to catch a brother by his toe. The male child for which old, cursing Flory Zogoiby had intrigued in vain continued to prove elusive, and it must be recorded to the honour of my father's memory that he always professed himself satisfied with his daughters. As the girls grew, he proved himself the most doting of fathers; until one day--it was in 1956, during the long school holidays after the rains--when the family had gone for an outing to see the two-thousand-year-old Buddhist cave-temples at Lonavla, he clutched gasping at his heart half-way up the steep stairway cut into the hillside that led to the dark mouth of the biggest cave, and as the breath rattled in his throat and his eyes blurred he reached uselessly out towards the three girls, then aged nine, eight and almost-seven, who failed to notice his distress and scampered, giggling, up and away from him with all the insouciant speed and immortality of the young. Aurora caught him before he fell. An old mushroom-selling crone had appeared beside them and helped Aurora sit Abraham down with his back against the rock, his straw hat falling forward over his brow and cold sweat pouring down his neck. 'Don't croak-o, damn it,' Aurora shouted, cupping his face in her hands. 'Breathe! You are not allowed to die.' And Abraham, obeying her as always, survived. The breathing eased, the eyes cleared, and he rested for long minutes with bowed head. The girls came running goggle-eyed down the stairs with their fingers jammed into their mouths. 'You see the problems of being an old father,' fifty-three-year-old Abraham muttered to Aurora before their daughters came into earshot. 'See how fast they are growing, and how fast I am cracking up, too. If I had my wish all this growing--up and old, both--would stop for ever right now.' Aurora made herself speak lightly as the worried children arrived. 'You-tho will be around for ever,' she told Abraham. 'I've got no worries about you. And as for these savage creatures, they can't growofy fast enough for me. God! How long this childhood business draggoes on! Why couldn't I have kids--why not even one child--who grew up really fast.' A voice behind her said a few words, almost inaudibly. Obeah, jadoo, fo, futn. Aurora whirled around. 'Who said that?' There were only the children. Other visitors, some of them carried in sedan chairs (Abraham had spurned this soft option), were making their way to and from the caves, but they were all too far away, above and below. 'Where's that woman?' Aurora asked her children. 'The mushroom woman who helped me. Where has she disappeared?' 'We didn't see anybody,' Ina answered. 'It was just the two of you.' Mahabaleshwar, Lonavla, Khandala, Matheran... O cool beloved hill-stations I will never see again, whose names echo for Bombay folk with the memory of childhood laughter, sweet love-songs, and days and nights in cool green forests, spent in walking and repose! In the dry season before the rains these blessed hilltops seem to float lightly on a shimmering magic haze; after the monsoon, when the air is clear, you can stand, for example, on Matheran's Heart Point or One Tree Hill, and sometimes in that supernatural clarity you can see, if not for ever, then at least a little way into the future, maybe one or two days ahead. On the day of Abraham's collapse, however, the hill-stations' quaint slow ways were not what the doctor ordered. The family was booked in for the season at the Lord's Central House in Matheran, which meant that after Abraham's collapse they had to drive over twenty miles on a slow untended road, and then, at the road's end, leave Hanuman in charge of the Buick and take the toy train up the hill from Neral through the One Kiss Tunnel and beyond, a crawling two-hour journey during which Aurora relaxed her usual ironclad rules and stuffed the girls with pieces of sugar-and-nut chikki-toffee to keep them quiet, while Miss Jaya wet handkerchiefs from a water surahi so that Aurora could spread them on Abraham's weakened brow. 'Takes longer to gettofy to this Lord's House', Aurora complained, 'than to Paradise itself.' But at least the Lord's Central House was real, it had an empirically provable basis in fact, whereas heavenly Paradise has never been something by which my family set much store... the narrow-gauge train puffed up the hill, pink curtains flapping at the first-class windows, and finally it stopped, and monkeys swung down from its roof and tried to steal the chikki from the Zogoiby girls' startled hands. It was the end of the line; and that night, in a room in the Lord's House newly heavy with odours of spice, and while lizards watched from the walls, Aurora Zogoiby on a noisy spring bed under a slow-moving ceiling fan caressed her husband's body until his return to life was complete; andfourand a half months later, on New Year's Day, 1957, she gave birth to their fourth and final child. Ina, Minnie, Mynah, and at last Moor. That's me: the end of the line. And something else. I'm something else as well: call it a wish come true. Call it a dead woman's curse. I am the child the lack of whom Aurora Zogoiby lamented on the steps to the Lonavla caves. This is my secret, and after all these years all I can do is say it, straight out, and to hell with how it sounds. I am going through time faster than I should. Do you understand me? Somebody somewhere has been holding down the button marked 'FF', or, to be more exact, 'x2J. Reader, listen carefully, take in every word, for what I write now is the simple and literal truth. I, Moraes Zogoiby, known as Moor, am--for my sins, for my many and many sins, for my fault, for my most grievous fault--a man living double-quick. And the mushroom seller? Aurora, inquiring into the matter the next morning, was informed by the hotel desk clerk