The Moor's Last Sigh (28 page)

then, you know, he really was the best.' 'Wonderful!' I said, as sarcastically as I could. But my heart, I must confess, my penny-dreadful heart was pounding. 'And what has this Bollywood Sherlock Holmes to tell me about the woman I love?' 'She's married,' said Aurora, flatly. 'And currently fooling around with not one, not two, but three lovers. You want photos? Your poor sister Ina's stupid Jimmy Cash; your stupid father; and, my stupid peacock, you.' 'Listen on, because I'll tell you once only,' she had said in response to my persistent inquisitiveness about her background. She came from a respectable--though not by any means wealthy--Gujarati Brahmin family, but had been orphaned young. Her mother, a depressive, had hanged herself when Uma was twelve and her schoolteacher father, driven mad by the tragedy, had set himself on fire. Uma had been rescued from penury by a kindly 'uncle'--actually, not an uncle, but a teaching colleague of her father's--who paid for her education in return for sexual favours (so not 'kindly', either). 'From the age of twelve,' she said. 'Until just now. If I followed my heart I would put a knife in his eye. Instead I have asked the god to curse him and simply turned my back. So maybe you understand why I do not choose to talk about my past. Never speak of it again.' Dom Minto's version, as reported by my mother, was rather different. According to him Uma was not from Gujarat but Maharashtra--the other half of the divided self of the former Bombay State--and had been raised in Poona, where her father was a high-ranking officer in the police force. At a young age she had shown prodigious artistic gifts and been encouraged by her parents, without whose support it was improbable that she would have achieved the required standard for a scholarship at the M. S. University, where she was universally praised as a young woman of exceptional promise. Soon, however, she had started giving signs of an exceptionally disordered spirit. Now that she was becoming a celebrated figure, people were reluctant or afraid to speak against her, but after patient enquiries Dom Minto had discovered that she had on three occasions agreed to take heavy medication intended to control her repeated mental aberrations, but on all three she had abandoned the treatment almost as soon as it had begun. Her ability to take on radically different personae in the company of different people--to become what she guessed a given man or woman (but usually man) would find most appealing--was exceptional; but this was a talent for acting that had been pushed to the point of insanity, and beyond. In addition she would invent long, elaborate personal histories of great vividness, and would cling to them obstinately, even when confronted with internal contradictions in her rigmaroles, or with the truth. It was possible that she no longer had a clear sense of an 'authentic' identity that was independent of these performances, and this existential confusion had begun to spread beyond the borders of her own self and to infect, like a disease, all those with whom she came into contact. She was known in Baroda for telling malicious and manipulative lies, for instance about certain faculty members with whom she fantasised absurdly steamy love affairs, and eventually wrote to their wives with explicit details of sexual encounters that had, in more than one case, led to separations and divorces. 'The reason she did not let you go to her college', my mother said, 'is that up there everybody hateofies her guts.' Her parents had reacted to the news of her mental illness by abandoning her to her fate; not an uncommon response, as I was well aware. They had neither hanged nor immolated themselves -these violent fictions were born out of their spurned daughter's (pretty legitimate) rage. As for the lecherous 'uncle': according to Aurora and Minto, Uma after her rejection by her family--not at the age of twelve, as she had said!--had quickly latched on to an old Baroda acquaintance of her father's, an elderly, retired deputy commissioner of police by the name of Suresh Sarasvati, a melancholy old widower whom the young beauty effortlessly seduced into a quick marriage at a time when, as a disowned woman, she had a desperate need for the respectability of marital status. Soon after their marriage the old fellow had been rendered helpless by a stroke ('And what brought that on?' demanded Aurora. 'Do I have to spellofy it out? Must I draw-o you a picture?'), and now lived a dreadful half-life, mute and paralysed, cared for only by a solicitous neighbour. His young wife had taken off with everything he owned and had never given him a second thought. And now, in Bombay, she had started playing the field. Her powers of attraction, and the persuasiveness of her performances, were at their peak. 'You must break her magic spell,' my mother said. 'Or you are done for. She is like a rakshasa from the Ramayana, and for sure she will cookofy your poor goose.' Minto had been thorough; Aurora showed me documentation--birth and wedding certificates, confidential medical reports acquired by the usual greasing of already-slippery palms, and so on--which left little doubt that his account was accurate in all important particulars. Still my heart refused to believe. 'You don't understand her,' I protested to my mother. 'OK, she lied about her parents. I would also lie about parents of that type. And maybe this ex-cop Sarasvati is not such an angel as you make out. But evil? Mad? A demon in human form? Mummyji, I think some personal factors have intervened.' That night I sat alone in my room, unable to eat. It was plain that I had a choice to make. If I chose Uma, I would have to break away from my mother, probably for good. But if I accepted Aurora's evidence--and in the privacy of my own four walls I had to concede its overwhelming force--then I was condemning myself, in all probability, to a life without a partner. How much longer did I have? Ten years? Fifteen? Twenty? Could I face my strange, dark fate alone, without a lover by my side? What mattered more: love or truth? But if Aurora and Minto were to be believed, she did not love me, was simply a great actress, a predator of the passions, a fraud. All at once I realised that many of the judgments I had recently made about my family were based on things Uma had said. I felt my head spin. The floor fell away beneath my feet. Was it true about Aurora and Kekoo, about Aurora and Vasco, about Aurora and Raman Fielding? Was it true that my sisters spoke ill of me behind my back? And if not, then it must be true that Uma--O my best beloved!--had sought deliberately to damage my opinion of those to whom I was closest, so that she could insert herself between me and mine. To give up one's own picture of the world and become wholly dependent on someone else's--was not that as good a description as any of the process of, literally, going out of one's mind? In which case--to use Aurora's contrast -1 was the mad one. And lovely Uma: the bad. Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood. The next morning I sat on the terrace at Elephcmta staring out at the glittering bay. Mynah came to see me. At Aurora's request she, too, had assisted Dom Minto in his enquiries. It turned out that nobody in the Baroda branch of the UWAPRF had ever met Uma Sarasvati or knew of her involvement in any kind of activist campaigning. 'So even her introduction was a phoney,' she said. 'I tell you, little bro, this time Mummyji is spot on.' 'But I love her,' I said helplessly. 'I can't stop. I just can't.' Mynah sat beside me and took my left hand. She spoke in a voice so gentle, so un-Mynah-like, that it caught my attention. 'I also liked her too much,' she said. 'But then it went wrong. I didn't want to tell you. Not my place. Anyhow, you wouldn't have listened.' 'Listened to what?' 'One time she came to me after being with you,' Mynah said, squinting into the distance. 'She told me some things about how it was. About what you. Anyway. Doesn't matter. She said she didn't like it. She said more but to hell. It doesn't matter now. Then she said something to me about me. That is to say: wanting. I sent her packing. Since then we don't speak.' 'She said it was you,' I told her dully. 'I mean. Who was after her.' 'And you believed her,' Mynah snapped, then swiftly kissed my forehead. 'Of course you believed her. What do you know about me? Who I like, what I need? And you �were crazy for love. Poor sap. Now, but, you better wise up quick.' 'I should dump her? Just like that?' Mynah stood up, lit a cigarette, coughed: a deep, unhealthy, choking sound. Her hard, front-line voice was back, her anti-civic-corruption lawyer's cross-examination voice, her fighting-against-murder-of-girl-babies, no-more-sati no-more-rapes loud-hailer instrument. She was right. I knew nothing about what it might be like to be her, about the choices she had had to make, about whose arms she might turn to for comfort, or why men's arms might be places not of pleasure but of fear. She might be my sister, but so what? I didn't even call her by her proper name. 'What's the big prob?' she shrugged, waving an ashy cigarette as she left. 'Giving up this stuff is harder. Trust me on this. Just cold-turkey the bitch and be thankful you don't also smoke.' 'I knew they would try and break us up. From the beginning I knew.' Uma had moved into an eighteenth-floor apartment with sea view on Cuffe Parade, in a high-rise next door to the President Hotel and not far from the Mody Gallery. She was standing, theatrically ravaged by grief, on a little balcony against a suitably operatic backdrop of wind-agitated coco-palms and sudden, voluminous rain; and now, sure enough, here came the quiver of the sensuously full lower lip, here came her very own waterworks. 'For your own mother to tell you--that with yourfatherl--well, excuse me but I am disgusted. Chhi! And Jimmy Cashondeliveri! That dumbo guitar-wallah with a missing string! You know perfectly well that from the first day at the racecourse he thought I was some avatar of your sister. Since then he follows me like a dog with his tongue hanging. And I'm supposed to be sleeping with him? God, who else? V. Miranda, maybe? The one-legged chowkidar? Have I no bloody shame?' 'But what you said about your family. And the "uncle".' 'What gives you the right to know everything about me? You were pushy and I didn't want to tell you. Bas. That's all.' 'But it wasn't true, Uma. Your parents are alive and the uncle is a husband.' 'It was a metaphor. Yes! A metaphor of how wretched my life was, of my pain. Ifyou loved me you would understand that. Ifyou loved me you would not give me the third degree. Ifyou loved me you would stop shaking your poor fist, and put it here, and you would shut your sweet face, and bring it here, and you would do what lovers do.' 'It wasn't a metaphor, Uma,' I said, backing away. 'It was a he. What's scary is, you don't know the difference.' I stepped backwards through her front door, and closed it, feeling as if I'd just leapt from her balcony towards the wild palms. That was how it felt: like a falling. Like a suicide. Like a death. But that was an illusion, too. The real thing was still two years away. I held out for months. I lived at home, went to work, became skilled in the art of marketing and promoting Baby Softo Talcum Powder and was even appointed marketing manager by a proud father. I got through the hollow calendar of days. There were changes at Elephanta. In the aftermath of the debacle of the retrospective, Aurora had finally got round to throwing Vasco out. It was icily done. Aurora mentioned her increased need for solitude, and Vasco with a cold bow agreed to clear out his studio. If this was the end of an affair, I thought, then it was creditably dignified and discreet: though the Arctic coldness of it made me shiver, I confess. Vasco came to say goodbye to me, and we went together to the cartoon-nursery, long unoccupied, where everything had begun.' That's all, folks,' he said. 'Time for V. Miranda to go West. Got a castle to build in the air.' He was lost in the flood of his own flesh, he looked like a toady, fairground-mirror reflection of Raman Fielding, and his mouth was twisted in pain. His voice was controlled, but I did not miss the blaze of feeling in his eye. 'She was my obsession, you must have guessed that,' he said, caressing the exclamatory walls (Pow! Zap! Splat!). 'As she was and is and will be yours. Maybe one day you'll feel like facing up to that. Then come to me. Come before that needle hits my heart.' I had not thought for years about Vasco's lost point, his Snow Queen's splinter of ice; and reflected, now, that the heart of this altered, swollen Vasco had more conventional attacks to worry about than needles. He left India for Spain soon afterwards, never to return. Aurora also fired her dealer. She informed Kekoo that she held him personally responsible for the 'public relations fiasco' of her show. Kekoo went noisily, arriving at the gates each day for a month to entreat Lambajan for admission (which was refused), sending flowers and gifts (which were returned), writing endless letters (which were thrown away unread). Aurora had told him that as she no longer intended to exhibit any work, her need for a gallery no longer existed. But Kekoo, pathetically, was sure she was deserting him for his great rivals at the Chemould. He begged and pleaded with her by telephone (to which Aurora would not come when he called), in telegrams (which she would contemptuously set on fire), even via Dom Minto (who turned out to be a purblind, blue-spectacled old gent with the huge horse-teeth of the French comedian Fernandel, and whom Aurora instructed to stop carrying his messages). I could not help but wonder about Uma's accusations. If these two alleged lovers had been disposed of, then what of Mainduck? Had Fielding, too, been dumped, or was he now the sole tenant of her heart? Uma, Uma. I missed her so. There were withdrawal symptoms: at night I felt her phantom-body move under my broken hand. As I was falling asleep (my misery did not prevent me from sleeping soundly!) I saw before my mind's eye the scene in an old Fernandel movie in which, not knowing the English word for 'woman', he uses his hands to trace the outline of a curvaceous female form. I was the other man in the dream. 'Ah,' I nodded. 'A bottle of Coke?' Uma walked past us, swinging her hips. Fernandel leered and jabbed a thumb in the direction of her departing posterior. 'My bottle of Coke,' he said, with understandable pride.

Ordinary life. Aurora painted every day, but I no longer had access to her studio. Abraham worked long hours, and when I asked him why I was being permitted to languish in the world of baby's behinds--I, with my time shortage!--he answered, 'Too much in your life has gone too fast. Do you good to slow down for some period.' In an act of silent solidarity, he had stopped golfing with Uma Sarasvati. Perhaps he, too, was missing her versatile charms. Silence in Paradise: silence, and an ache. Mrs Gandhi returned to power, with Sanjay at her right hand, so it turned out that there was no final morality in affairs of state, only Relativity. I remembered Vasco Miranda's 'Indian variation' upon the theme of Einstein's General Theory: Everything is for relative. Not only light bends, but everything. For relative we can bend a point, bend the truth, bend employment criteria, bend the law. D equals me squared, where D is for Dynasty, mis for mass of relatives, and c of course is for corruption, which is the only constant in the universe--because in India even speed of light is dependent on load shedding and vagaries of power supply. Vasco's departure, too, made home a quieter place. The rambling old mansion was like a denuded stage across which, like rustling phantoms, wandered a depleted cast of actors who had run out of lines. Or perhaps they were acting on other stages now, and only this house was dark. It did not fail to occur to me--indeed, for a time it occupied most of my waking thoughts--that what had happened was, in a way, a defeat for the pluralist philosophy on which we had all been raised. For in the matter of Uma Sarasvati it had been the pluralist Uma, with her multiple selves, her highly inventive commitment to the infinite malleability of the real, her modernistically provisional sense of truth, who had turned out to be the bad egg; and Aurora had fried her--Aurora, that lifelong advocate of the many against the one, had with Minto's help discovered some fundamental verities, and had therefore been in the right. The story of my love-life thus became a bitter parable, one whose ironies Raman Fielding would have relished, for in it the polarity between good and evil was reversed. I was sustained in that null time at the beginning of the 19805 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 gum-mily, 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 .275 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 Keke 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 mother 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 He 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, mined. 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. 'Jam 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 chimaera. 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? Til 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 fell 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. 'Ifyou 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. No, I would not die, I had already decided that. I put the remaining tablet in my trouser pocket. Whoever and whatever she had been, good or evil or neither or both, it is undeniable that I had loved her. To die would not immortalise that love, but devalue it. So I would live, to be the standard-bearer of our passion; would demonstrate, by my life, that love was worth more than blood, than shame--more, even, than death. I will not die for you, my Uma, but I will life for you. However harsh that life may be. The doorbell rang. I sat with Uma's dead body in the dark. There was a hammering. Still I made no reply. A loud voice shouted out. Open up. Polis. I rose and opened the door. The landing was thick with short-trousered blue uniforms, dark skinny legs wth knobbly knees, and hands clenched around waving lathis. A flat-hatted inspector was pointing a gun right at my face. 'You are Zogoiby, isn't it?' he asked at the top of his voice. I said I was. 'I. e. Shri Moraes Zogoiby, marketing manager of Baby Softo Talcum Powder Private Limited?' The same. 'Then on basis of information laid before me I arrest you on a charge of narcotics smuggling and in the name of Law I command you to accompany me peaceably to the vehicle below.' 'Narcotics?' I repeated helplessly. 'Bandying of words is forbidden,' blared the Inspector, pushing his pistol closer to my face. 'Detenu must unquestioning obey instructions of the in-charge. Forward march.' I stepped meekly into the knobbly throng. At that moment the Inspector caught his first sight of the body of the dead woman lying on the apartment floor.