The Moor's Last Sigh (24 page)

THE WOMAN WHO TRANSFORMED, exalted and ruined my life entered it at Mahalaxmi racecourse forty-one days after Ina's death. It was a Sunday morning at the beginning of the late-year cool season, and according to ancient custom--'How ancient?' you ask, and I reply Bombay-fashion, 'Ancient, men. From ancient time'--the city's finest citizens had risen early and taken the place of the highly strung, pedigreed local steeds, both in the paddock and on the track. No races were scheduled; only the shades of departed jockeys in their bright-hooped shirts, the phantom echoes of once and future hooves and the fading notes of the chargers' steaming whinnies, only the tumbling rustle of old, discarded copies of Cole's race-day booklets--O invaluable guides to form!--might be discerned, by the eyes and ears of fancy, glimmering like the faint traces of an overpainted picture beneath this weekly rus in urbe scene, this parasolled procession of the leisured great. Swiftly in running-shoes and shorts with their babies strapped to their backs, or gently perambulating with walking-sticks and wearing straw panamas they came, the nobles offish and steel, the counts of cloth and shipping, the lords of finance and property, the princes of land and sea and of the powers of the air, and their ladies too, dolled up to the nines in silks and gold, or track-suited and pony-tailed, with pink headbands stretched like royal circlets across athletic brows. Some there were who sped past furlong markers, stop-watches at the ready; others who sailed slowly past the old grandstand, like ocean liners coming in to dock. It was a time for encounters both licit and il-; for deals to be done and hands to be shaken on their doing; for the city's matriarchy to eye up its youth and plot its future nuptials, and for young men and women to exchange glances, and make choices of their own. It was a time for family members to come together, and a gathering of the metropolis's mightiest clans. Power, money, kinship and desire: these, concealed beneath the simpler benefits of an hour's health-giving stroll around the old course, were the driving forces behind the Mahalaxmi Weekend Constitutional, a horseless race with a class field, a derby without a starter's gun or photo-finish, but one in which there were many prizes to be won. That Sunday six weeks after Ina died we were making an effort to close the family's sadly depleted ranks. Aurora in elegant slacks and open-necked white linen shirt made a point of displaying the family's solidarity by walking arm-in-arm with Abraham, who was white of mane and magnificently straight of back, at seventy-four every inch the suited-and-booted patriarch, no longer a country cousin among the grandees, but the very grandest of them all. The morning had not begun auspiciously, however. On our way to Mahalaxmi we had picked up Minnie--Sister Floreas--who had been excused, on compassionate grounds, from morning worship at the Maria Gratiaplena convent. She sat beside me on the back seat in her coiffed nun's get-up, fidgeting with her rosary and mumbling hailmarys under her breath, looking -1 thought--like a version of the Duchess in Alice; much prettier, of course, but just as absolutist; or like a gamine court card--Funny Face meets the Queen of Spades. 'I saw Ina last night,' she pronounced without preamble. 'She says to tell you she is happy in Heaven and the music is very nice.' Aurora flushed purple, jammed her lips shut and set her jaw. Minnie had started seeing visions lately, although Aurora was not convinced. The Duchess's view of her baby boy could, if paraphrased, apply to my holy duchess of a sister, too: She only does it to annoy, because she knows it teases. Abraham said, 'Don't upset your mother, Inamorata,' and now it was Minnie's turn to frown, because that name belonged to her past, it had no connection with the person she was becoming, the wonder of the Gratiaplena nuns, the most ascetic of all the faithful, the most uncomplaining of workers, the hardest-scrubbing of floor-scrubbers, the gentlest and most dedicated of nurses, and--as if seeking to atone for a lifetime of privilege--the wearer of the roughest and itchiest undergarments in the Order, which she had sewn for herself out of old jute sacks stinking of cardamoms and tea, and which brought her tender skin up in great weals, until the Mother Superior warned her that excessive mortification was itself a form of vanity. After that rebuke Sister Floreas stopped wearing sackcloth next to the skin, and the visions began. Alone in her cell on her plank of wood (she had quickly dispensed with a bed) she was visited by a genderless elephant-headed angel who issued a strongly worded critique of the loose morals of the citizens of Bombay, whom it compared to Sodomites and Gomorrahis, and threatened with floods, droughts, explosions and fires, these punishments to be spread over a period of approximately sixteen years; and by a talking black rat who prophesied that the Plague itself would return as the last plague of all. The vision of Ina was something much more personal, and whereas the earlier manifestations had mostly made Aurora fear for her daughter's balance of mind this new apparition made her see red, perhaps not least beause of the recent appearance oflna's ghost in her own work; but also because of a general feeling she had developed since her daughter's death--a feeling shared by many people in those paranoid, unstable times--that she was being followed. Wraiths were entering our family life, they were crossing the frontier between the metaphors of art and the observable facts of everyday life, and Aurora, unnerved, took refuge in her rage. But today had been designated as a day for family unity, and so, uncharacteristically, my mother bit her lip. 'She says the food is also good,' Minnie added, informatively. 'All the ambrosia, nectar and manna you can eat, and you never put on weight.' Fortunately the Mahalaxmi racecourse was only a few minutes' drive from Altamount Road. And now Abraham and Aurora were arm-in-arm as they had not been for many long years, and Minnie, our very own cherub, was tripping along at their heels, while I lagged behind a little, lowering my head to avoid people's eyes, jamming my right hand deep into my trousers, and kicking at the turf for shame; because of course I could hear the whispers and giggles of the matriarchs and the young beauties of Bombay, I knew that if I walked too close to Aurora--who, for all her white hair, looked no more than forty- five at the age of fifty-three--then to the casual bystander, yours truly, at twenty-looking-forty, looked too old to be her child. O catch him. . . misshapen. . . freaky,.. some peculiar disorder... I hear they keep him locked up... such a shame on the house... almost like an idiot, they say... and his poor father's only son. Thus did the oily tongue of gossip lubricate the wheel of scandal. Our people do not react with grace to misfortunes of the body. Or, indeed, the mind. Perhaps in a way they were right, those racecourse whisperers. In a way I was a sort of social idiot, severed by my nature from the everyday, made strange by fate. Certainly I have never considered myself to be a scholar of any sort. Thanks to my unusual, and (by conventional standards) hopelessly inadequate education I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered, and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide. It is true that I had managed to cling to Dilly, for extra-curricular reasons, much longer than I should. Nor was there any question of my going to college. I did some modelling for my mother, while my father accused me of wasting my life, and began to insist on introducing me to the family business. It was a long time since anyone--except Aurora--had dared to stand up to Abraham Zogoiby. In his middle seventies he was strong as a bullock, fit as a wrestler, and apart from his worsening asthma as healthy as any of the track-suited joggers at the racecourse. His relatively humble origins had been forgotten, and the old C-5O enterprise of Camoens da Gama had been assimilated into the huge corporate entity known acronymically in business parlance as 'Siodi Corp'. 'Siodi' was C.O.D. which was Cashondeliveri, and the use of this nickname was energetically encouraged by Abraham. It drove out the old--the memory of the decayed and assimilated empire of the Cashondeliveri grandees--and drove in the new. A financial-pages profile referred to him as 'Mr Siodi'--the brilliant new entrepreneur behind the House of Cashondeliveri, and after that some of his business partners had mistakenly begun to call him 'Siodi Sahib'. Abraham did not always trouble to correct them. So he was beginning to paint a new layer over his own past... and as a father, too, age had painted a palimpsest-image over the memory of the man who had hugged my newborn form and wept comforting words. Now he had grown formidable, distant, dangerous, cold, and impossible to disobey. I bowed my head, and accepted his offer of an entry-level position in the marketing, sales and publicity department of the Baby Softo Talcum Powder Company (Private) Limited. After that I had to schedule my work with Aurora around my office commitments. But of modelling and babies, more anon. As for the question of a bride, my ruined limb--a handicap in the zone of the handicap-free--was indeed a sort of spectre at the matrimonial feast, it made young ladies shudder fastidiously, reminding them of life's ugliness when in their high-born way they sought to concentrate on its beauty. Ugh! It was a fearsome fist. (As regards its long-term future: I'll say only that while Lambajan had shown me a little of my club-hard right mitt's true potential, I had not yet discovered my vocation. My sword still slept in my hand.) No, I did not belong amongst these thoroughbreds. In spite of my discontinued peregrinations with our larcenous housekeeper Jaya He, I was an alien in their town--a Kaspar Hauser, a Mowgli. I knew little about their lives, and (what was worse) I did not care to know more. For while I might be a perpetual outsider among that racecourse breed, still in my twenty years I had gathered experience at such a rate that I had come to feel that time, in my vicinity, had begun to move at my own, doubled speed. I no longer felt like a young man trapped inside an old--or rather, to borrow the lingo of the city's textile industry, 'antiqued', even 'distressed'--covering of skin. My outer, apparent age had simply become my age. Or so I thought: until Uma showed me the truth. Jamshed Cashondeliveri, who had unexpectedly been plunged into a deep depression by his ex-wife's death and dropped out of law school soon after it, joined us at Mahalaxmi, as Aurora had arranged. Not far from the racecourse is the Great Breach, or Breach Candy, through which at certain seasons the ocean used to pour, flooding the low-lying Flats behind; just as Hornby Vellard was built to seal Breach Candy (completed, according to reliable sources, c .1805), so the breach between Jimmy and Ina was to be posthumously healed, or so Aurora had decided, by the vellard of her indomitable will. 'Hi, Uncle, Auntie,' said Jimmy Cash, waiting awkwardly at the finishing-post, and essaying a crooked smile. Then his face changed. His eyes widened, the colour drained from his anyway-pretty-pale cheeks, his mouth dropped open. 'What's gottofied your goat?' asked Aurora, surprised. 'You look like you took a gander at a ghost.' But mesmerised Jimmy did not reply; and continued, wordlessly, to gape. 'Greetings, family members,' said Mynah's sardonic voice from behind our backs. 'I hope you guys don't mind, but I brought along a friend.' All of us who walked with Uma Sarasvati around Mahalaxmi racecourse that morning came away with a different view of her. A few facts were established: that she was twenty years old, and a star art student at the M. S. University in Baroda, where she had already won high praise from the so-called 'Baroda group' of artists, and where the noted critic Geeta Kapur had been moved to write a glowing appreciation of her gigantic stone-carving of Nandi, the great bull of Hindu mythology, which had been commissioned from her by the homonymous stockbroker and billionaire financier V. V. Nandy--'Crocodile' Nandy himself. Kapur had compared the work to that of the anonymous masters of the eighth-century Parthenon-sized monolithic wonder, the Kailash Temple, greatest of all the Ellora caves; but Abraham Zogoiby, hearing about the statue as we strolled, unleashed a remarkably bull-like bellow of laughter. 'That young muggermutch V. V. never had any shame,' he roared. 'A Nandi bull, is it? Should have been one of those blind crocs from the rivers up north.' Uma had presented herself, with an introduction from a friend in the Gujarati branch of the United Women's Anti-Price Base Front, at the tiny, crowded office in a run-down three-storey block near Bombay Central station from which Mynah's group of women activists against corruption and for civil and women's rights--known as the WWSTP Committee after its best-known slogan, We Will Sm&s/z 77m Pn'sow (Ts Jat V/eo Todkar Rehengd), but also called, mockingly, by its detractors, 'Women Who Sleep Together Probably'--was doing battle against half-a-dozen Goliaths. She had spoken of her high regard for Aurora's painting, but also of the importance of the work being done by highly motivated groups such as Mynah's in exposing the evils of bride-burning, in setting up women's patrols against rape, and in a dozen other areas. Her passion and knowledge charmed my notably hard-nosed sister; hence her presence at our little family reunion on Mahalaxmi turf. So much for what was beyond dispute. What was truly remarkable was that during that morning amble at Mahalaxmi the newcomer found a way to spend a few private minutes with each of us in turn, and after she departed, saying modestly that she had already intruded for too long on our family gathering, every one of us had a fiercely held opinion about her, and many of these opinions contradicted each other utterly and were incapable of being reconciled. To Sister Floreas, Uma was a woman from whom spirituality seemed to flow like a river; she was abstinent and disciplined, a great soul who saw through to the final unity of all religion, whose differences she was convinced would dissolve under the blessed brilliance of divine light; whereas in Mynah's opinion she was hard as nails--this, from our Philomina, was a high compliment--and a dedicated secularist marxian feminist whose inexhaustible