The Moor's Last Sigh (29 page)

III

BOMBAY CENTRAL

IN A STREET I had never heard of I stood in manacles before a building I had never seen, a structure of such size that my entire field of vision was occupied by a single featureless wall, in which, a little way to my right, I perceived a tiny iron door--or, rather, a door that looked small, small as a metal mousehole, on account of being set in that ghastly grey immensity of stone. I was prodded forward by the arresting officer's stick, and walked obediently away from the windowless vehicle in which I had been transported from the macabre scene of my lover's demise. I crossed that empty and silent thoroughfare in astonishment, for streets in Bombay are never silent, and never, never empty--here there is no 'dead of night', or so, until now, I had always supposed. As I approached the door I saw that in reality it was extremely large, and towered above me like the entrance to a cathedral. How vast the wall must be, then! Close to, it spread over and about us and hid the dirty moon. I felt my heart sink. I found I could remember very little about the journey. Tied down in the dark, I had evidently lost all sense of direction and of the passage of time. What was this place? Who were these people? Were they truly police officers; was I really accused of drug trafficking and now also under suspicion of murder; or had I slipped accidentally from one page, one book of life on to another- in my wretched, disoriented state, had my reading finger perhaps slipped from the sentence of my own story on to this other, outlandish, incomprehensible text that had been lying, by chance, just beneath? Yes: some such slippage had plainly occurred. 'I am not a criminal,' I cried out. 'Nor do I belong here, in this Under World. There has been a mistake.' 'Give up such delusive esperance, you rotter,' replied the Inspector. 'Here many bhoots of the Under World, many fearful blighters, are turning into lost shadows. No mistake, you bally chump! Enter! Within, the rotfulness is terrific.' The great door opened with many clanks and groans. At once the air was full of hellish wails. 'Oooh! Hai-hai! Groooh! Oi-yoi-yoi! Yarooh!' Inspector Singh gave me an unceremonious shove. 'Left-right left-right one-two one-two!' he cried. 'Scurry along, Beelzebooby! Your After Life awaits.' I was led down dim corridors stinking of excrement and torment, of desolations and violations, by whip-cracking men with, as it seemed to me, the heads of beasts and poisonous snakes for tongues. Either the Inspector had left or else he had metamorphosed into one of these hybrid monsters. I tried to ask the monsters questions but their communications did not extend beyond the physical. Blows, pushes, even the tip of a whip burning fiercely across my ankle: this was the sum total of what they had to say. I stopped talking and moved deeper into the jail. After a long while I found my way blocked by a man with--I narrowed my eyes and peered--the head of a bearded elephant, who held in his hand an iron crescent dripping with keys. Rats scurried respectfully around his feet. 'To this place we are bringing godless men like you,' said the elephant man. 'Here you will suffer for your sins. We will humiliate you in fashions of which you have not even been able to dream.' I was ordered to remove my clothes. Naked, shivering in the hot night, I was manhandled into a cell. A door--a whole life, a whole way of understanding life--closed behind me. I stood in darkness, lost. Solitary confinement. The heat intensified the stench of ordure. Mosquitoes, straw, pools of fluid, and, everywhere, in the dark, cockroaches. My bare feet crunched them as I walked. When I stood still they scrambled up my legs. Bending in panic to brush them off, I felt my hair brush against the walls of my black cage. Cockroaches swarmed over my head and down my back. I felt them on my stomach, dropping into my pubes. I began to jerk like a marionette, hitting at myself, screaming. Something--a defilement--had begun. In the morning, some light did find its way into the cell and the roaches retreated to await the dark's return. I had not slept; my battle against those vile creatures had used up all my strength. I fell on to the straw pile that was my only bed, and rats flurried into holes in the wall. A little window opened in the cell door. 'Pretty soon you will be catching those crunchy cockies for food,' the Warder laughed. 'Even vegetarian jailbirds go for them in the end; and you-tho, I am thinking, are definitely non-veg from before.' The illusion of an elephant's head, I now saw, had been created by the hood of a cloak (the flapping ears) and a hookah (for a nose). This fellow was no mythological Ganesha, but a coarse, sadistic brute. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'I never came across it in my life.' 'You laad-sahibs,' he said, contemptuously sending a long jet of bright vermilion sputum towards my bare feet. 'You live in the city and know nothing of its secret, of its heart. To you it is invisible, but now you have been made to see. You are in Bombay Central lock-up. It is the stomach, the intestine of the city. So naturally there is much of shit.' 'I know the Bombay Central area,' I protested. 'Railway stations, dhabas, bazaars. I found no place resembling this.' 'A city does not show itself to every bastard, sister-fucker, mother-fucker,' the elephant man shouted before slamming the window shut. 'You were blind, but now wait and see.' Shit-bucket, gruel-bucket, the rapid slide towards utter degradation: I will spare you the details. My forebears Aires and Camoens da Gama, and my mother too, had spent time in British-Indian jails; but this post-Independence made-in-India institution was far beyond their worst imaginings. This was not just a jail; it was an education. Hunger, exhaustion, cruelty and despair are good teachers. I learned their lessons quickly--my guilt, my worthlessness, my abandonment by everyone I might have called mine. I deserved no better than I had received. We all get what we deserve. I huddled against a wall with my forehead upon my knees and my arms clasped around my shins, and let the cockies come and go. 'This is nothing,' the Warder comforted me. 'Wait on till diseases start.' How true, I thought. Soon there would be trachoma, inner-ear infection, rickets, dysentery, infection of the urinary tract. Malaria, cholera, TB, typhoid. And I had heard about a new killer, a thing without a name. Whores were dying of it--turning into living skeletons and then giving up the ghost, the rumour was--and the Kamathipura pimps were hushing it up. Not that there was much chance of my coming into contact with a whore. As roaches crawled and mosquitoes stung, so I felt that my skin was indeed coming away from my body, as I had dreamed so long ago that it would. But in this version of the dream, my peeling skin took with it all elements of my personality. I was becoming nobody, nothing; or, rather, I was becoming what had been made of me. I was what the Warder saw, what my nose smelled on my body, what the rats were beginning, with growing enthusiasm, to approach. I was scum. I tried to cling to the past. In my bitter turmoil I sought to apportion blame; and mostly I blamed my mother, to whom my father never could say no.--For what kind of mother would set out on such flimsy provocation to destroy her child, her only son?--Why, a monster!--O, an age of monsters is come upon us. Kalyug, when cross-eyed red-tongued Kali, our mad dam, moves among us wreaking havoc.--And remember, O Beowulf, that Grendel's mother was more fearsome than Grendel himself... Ah, Aurora, how easily you turned to infanticide--with what cold zeal you determined to choke the last breath from your own flesh and blood, to eject him from the atmosphere of your love into the airless deeps of space, there to gasp and perish horribly, with protruding eyes and swollen tongue!--I wish you had pulverised me as a baby, mother, before I grew so old-young with my club. You had the stomach for it--for punch and kick, for pinch and smack. See, beneath your blows the child's dark skin acquires the iridescence characteristic of bruises and oil-slicks. O, how he howls! The very moon is darkened by his cries. But you are relentless, inexhaustible. And when he is flayed, when he is a shape without frontiers, a self without walls, then your hands close about his neck, and squash, and squish; air rushes out from his body through all available orifices, he is farting out his life, just as once you, his mother, farted him into it... and now he has just one breath left in him, one last shuddering bubble of hope... 'Wah, wah!' the Warder cried, startling me out of my self-pitying reverie and into the knowledge that I had spoken aloud. 'Keep your big ears to yourself, elephant man,' I yelled. 'Call me what you want,' he replied, affably. 'Your fate is already written.' I subsided, squatting, and buried my head in my hands. 'Case for the prosecution you have given,' said the Warder. 'Very powerful, bhai. Damn strong. But for the defence? A mother must be defended, isn't it? Then who will speak for her?' 'This is not a court of law,' I answered, in the grip of the sick emptiness that remains when anger drains away. 'If she has another version, then let her tell it where she pleases.' 'Okay, okay,' said the Warder, in mock-appeasement. 'Keep up the good work. For me, your entertainment value is presently number one. Top-notch. Kudos, mister. Kudos to you.' And I thought about mad love, about all the amours fous down the da Gama-Zogoiby generations. I remembered Camoens and Belle, and Aurora and Abraham, and poor Ina eloping with her Country and Eastern Cashondeliveri beau. I even included Minnie-Inamorata-Floreas finding ecstasy in Jesus Christ. And of course I thought--endlessly, like a child scratching at a wound -about Uma and myself. I tried to cling to our love, to the fact of it, even though there were voices within deriding me for the size of the mistake I had made with her. Let her go, the voices advised. At least now, after all this, cut your losses. But I still wanted to believe what lovers believe: that the thing itself is better than any alternative, be it unrequited, or defeated, or insane. I wanted to cling to the image of love as the blending of spirits, as melange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of the no-man-is-an-island, two's-company Many over the clean, mean, apartheiding Ones. I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, I told myself, still, without that leap nobody comes to life. The leap itself is a birth, even when it ends in death, in a scramble for white tablets, and the scent of bitter almonds on your beloved's breathless mouth. No, said my voices. Love, as well as your mother, has done you down. My own breath came with difficulty; the asthma tore and rasped. When I did manage to doze off I dreamed strangely of the sea. Never until now had I slept out of earshot of the waves, of the collision of the spheres of air and water, and my dreams yearned for that plashy sound. Sometimes in the dreams the sea was dry, or made of gold. Sometimes it was a canvas ocean, sewn tightly to the land along the edge of the beach. Sometimes the land was like a torn page and the sea a glimpse of the hidden page below. These dreams showed me what I was not pleased to be shown: that I was my mother's son. And one day I awoke from such a sea-dream in which, while attempting to escape from unknown pursuers, I came upon a lightless subterranean flow, and was instructed by a shrouded woman to swim beyond the limit of my breath, for only then would I discover the one and only shore upon which I might be safe for ever, the shore of Fancy itself, and I obeyed her with a will, I swam with all my might towards my lungs' collapse; and as they gave way at last, and the ocean rushed into me, I awoke with a gasp to find before me the impossible figure of a one-legged man with a parrot on his shoulder and a treasure-map in his hand. 'Come, baba,' said Lambajan Chandiwala. 'Time to seek your fortune, wheresoever it may be.' It was not a treasure-map, but golden treasure itself: viz., a document authorising my immediate release. Not a fortune-hunter's passport, but a stroke of unlooked-for fortune. It brought me clean water and clean clothing. The turning of keys in locks was heard, and the envious delirium of my fellow prisoners. The Warder, elephantine master of this rathouse, this overcrowded roach motel, was not to be seen; cowering, deferential flunkeys tended to my needs. On my way out no animal-headed demons poked their pitchforks at me, or ululated with snaky tongues. The door was open, and of conventional size; the wall in which it was set was just a wall. No magical machine awaited us outside--no, not even our old driver Hanuman and his winged Buick!--but an ordinary yellow-and-black taxi-cab with, painted in small white letters on its black dashboard, the legend Hypothecated to Khazana Bank International Limited. We entered familiar streets above which loomed familiar messages from the manufacturers of Metro shoes and Stayfree sanitary panties; on hoardings and in neon, Rothmans and Charminar cigarettes, Breeze and Rexona soaps, Time polish and Hope toilet tissue and Life neem-sticks and Love henna all welcomed me home. For there was no doubt in my mind that I was en route to Malabar Hill, and if there was a shadow on my otherwise sunny horizon it was because I felt obliged to rehearse the old arguments about repentance and forgiveness. My parents' forgiveness, plainly, was now mine; should my repentance be my homecoming gift to them? But the Prodigal Son got the fatted calf--was loved--without ever having to say he was sorry. And repentance's bitter pills stuck in my throat; as with all my kin, there was overmuch mulishness in my blood. Damn it, I frowned, what was there for me to repent?--It was at about this point in my cogitations that I registered the fact that we were driving north -not towards the parental bosom, but away from; so that this was not a return to Paradise, but a further stage in my fall. I began, panickily, to jabber. Lamba, Lamba, tell this fellow. Lambajan was soothing. Just take out some time to rest baba. After your experience your nervous condition is natural. But to balance Lambajan there was psittacoid scorn. Totah the parrot on the ledge by the rear window screeched its painful contempt. I slid down in my seat and closed my eyes, remembering. The Inspector was examining