The Moor's Last Sigh (36 page)

was being told he had decided not to have me killed. Or the opposite: that in the near future the Tin-man's knife, or Five-in-a-Bite's teeth, might be caressing my throat. I made my farewells and left. No assassins came after me. Not then. But the feeling of being pursued, that did persist. The truth is that by 1991 Mainduck's stratagems had far more to do with the religious-nationalist agenda than the original, localised Bombay-for-the-Mahrattas platform on which he had come to power. Fielding, too, was making allies, with like-minded national parties and paramilitary organisations, that alphabet soup of authoritarians, BJP, RSS, VHP. In this new phase of MA activity I had no place. Zeenat Vakil at the Zogoiby Bequest--where I had started spending a large proportion of my time, wandering in my mother's dream-worlds, following Aurora's re-dreaming of myself through the adventures she had designed for me--clever leftish Zeeny, whom I didn't tell about my Mainduck affiliations, had nothing but contempt for Ram-Rajya rhetoric. 'What bunkum, I swear,' she expostulated. 'Point one: in a religion with a thousand and one gods they suddenly decide only one chap matters. Then what about Calcutta, for example, where they don't go for Ram? And Shiva-temples are no longer suitable places of worship? Too stupid. Point two: Hinduism has many holy books, not one, but suddenly it is all Ramayan, Ramayan. Then where is the Gita? Where are all the Puranas? How dare they twist everything in this way? Bloody joke. And point three: for Hindus there is no requirement for a collective act of worship, but without that how are these types going to collect their beloved mobs? So suddenly there is this invention of mass puja, and that is declared the only way to show true, class-A devotion. A single, martial deity, a single book, and mob rule: that is what they have made of Hindu culture, its many-headed beauty, its peace.' 'Zeeny, you're a Marxist,' I pointed out. 'This speech about a True Faith ruined by Actually Existing bastardisations used to be you guys' standard song. You think Hindus Sikhs Muslims never killed each other before?' 'Post-Marxian,' she corrected me. 'And whatever was true or not true in the question of socialism, this fundo stuff is really something new.' Raman Fielding found many unexpected allies. As well as the alphabet-soupists there were the Malabar Hill fast-laners, joking at their dinner-parties about 'teaching minority groups a lesson' and 'putting people in their place'. But these were people he had wooed, after all; what must have come as something of a bonus was that, on the single issue of contraception, at least, he managed to acquire support from the Muslims, and even more surprisingly, the Maria Gratiaplena nuns as well. Hindus, Muslims and Catholics, on the verge of violent communal conflict, were momentarily united by their common hatred of sheath, diaphragm and pill. My sister Minnie--Sister Floreas--was, needless to say, energetic in the fray. Ever since the failure of the attempt to introduce a birth-control campaign by force in the mid-ipyos, family planning had been a difficult topic in India. Lately, however, a new drive for smaller families had been initiated, under the slogan Hum do hatnare do ('we two and our two'). Fielding used this to launch a scare campaign of his own. MA workers went into the tenements and slums to tell Hindus that Muslims were refusing to co-operate with the new policy. 'If we are two and we have two, but they are two and they have twenty-two, then soon they will outnumber us and drive us into the sea!' The idea that three-quarters-of-a-billion Hindus could be swamped by the children of one hundred million Muslims was curiously legitimised by many Muslim imams and political leaders, who deliberately exaggerated the numbers of Indian Muslims in an attempt to increase their own importance and the community's sense of self-confidence; and who were also fond of pointing out that Muslims were much better fighters than Hindus. 'Give us six Hindus to one of us!' they screamed at their rallies. 'Then we will be level pegging, at least. Then there may be a little bit of a fair fight before the cowards run. ' Now, this surrealist numbers game was given a new twist. Catholic nuns began tramping up and down the Bombay Central chawls and the filthy lanes of the Dharavi slum, protesting vociferously against birth control. None worked longer hours, or argued more passionately, than our own Sister Floreas; but after a time she was withdrawn from the front line, because another nun overheard her explaining to terrified slum-dwellers that God had his own ways of controlling His people's numbers, and her visions had confirmed that in the very near future many of them would die anyway, because of the coming violence and plagues. 'I myself will be carried away to Heaven,' she was explaining sweetly. 'O, how dearly I look forward to the day.' I turned seventy on New Year's Day 1992, at the age of thirty-five. Always an ominous landmark, the passing of the Biblical span, all the more so in a country where life-expectancy is markedly lower than the Old Testament allows; and in the case of yrs. truly, to vhom six months consistently did a full year's damage, the moment had a special, extra piquancy. How easily the human mind 'normalises' the abnormal, with what rapidity the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable but humdrum, not worth thinking about!--Thus my 'condition', once it had been diagnosed as 'incurable', 'inevitable', and many other 'in's' that I can no longer call to mind, speedily became so dull a thing that not even I could bring myself to give it very much thought. The nightmare of my halved life was simply a Fact, and there is nothing to be said of a Fact except that it is so.--For may one negotiate with a Fact, sir?--In no wise!--May one stretch it, shrink it, condemn it, beg its pardon? No; or, it would be folly indeed to seek to do so.--How then are we to approach so intransigent, so absolute an Entity?--Sir, it cares not if you approach it or leave it alone; best, then, to accept it and go your ways.--And do Facts never change? Are old Facts never to be replaced by new ones, like lamps; like shoes and ships and every other blessed thing?--So: if they are, then it shows us only this--that they never were Facts to begin with, but mere Poses, Attitudes, and Shams. The true Fact is not your burning Candle, to subside limply in a stiff pool of wax; nor yet your Electric Bulb, so tender of fdament, and short-lived as the Moth that seeks it out. Neither is it made of your common shoe-leather, nor should it spring any leaks. It shines! It walks! It floats!--Yes! -For ever and a day. After my thirty-fifth or seventieth birthday, however, the truth of my life's great Fact became impossible for me to shrug off with a few nostrums about kismet, karma, or fate. It was borne in upon me by a series of indispositions and hospitalisations with which I will not trouble the squeamish, impatient reader; except to say that they impressed upon me the reality from which I had averted my gaze for so long. I did not have very long to live. That plain truth hung behind my eyelids in letters of fire whenever I went to sleep; it was the first thing I thought of when I awoke. So you made it to today. Will you still be here tomorrow? It's true, my squeamish, impatient friend: ignominious and unheroic as it may be to say so, I had commenced living with the minute-by-minute fear of death. It was a toothache for which no soothing oil of cloves could be prescribed. One of the effects of my adventures in medicine was to render me physically incapable of that which I had long given up hope of doing; that is, to become a father myself, and so alleviate--if not escape--the burdens of being a son. This latest failure so angered Abraham Zogoiby, who was in his ninetieth year and healthier than ever, that he was unable to conceal his irritation beneath the flimsiest show of sympathy or concern. 'The one thing I wanted from you,' he spat at my bedside at the Breach Candy Hospital. 'Even that you can't give me now.' A degree of coolness had re-entered our relationship ever since I refused to be involved with the covert operations of the Khazana Bank, in particular the manufacture of the so-called Islamic bomb. 'You'll be wanting a yarmulke now,' my father sneered. 'And phylacteries. Lessons in Hebrew, a one-way trip to Jerusalem? Just, please, to let me know. Many of our Cochin Jews, by the way, complain of the racism with which they are treated in your precious homeland across the sea. Abraham, the race traitor, who was repeating on an appalling, gigantic scale the crime of turning his back on mother and tribe, and walking out of Jewtown towards Aurora's Roman arms. Abraham, the black hole of Bombay. I saw him wrapped in darkness, a collapsing star sucking darkness around itself as its mass increased. No light escaped from the event-horizon of his presence. He had begun to scare me long ago; now he engendered in me a terror, and at the same time a pity, that my words are too impoverished to describe. I say again: I'm no angel. I kept away from the KBI's business, but Abraham's empire was large, and nine-tenths of it was submerged below the surface of things. There was plenty for rne to do. I, too, became an inhabitant of the upper reaches of Cashondeliveri Tower, and took no little satisfaction from the piratical pleasures of being my father's son. But after my medical reverses it became clear that Abraham had begun to look to others for some support; and, in particular, to Adam Braganza, a precocious eighteen-year-old with ears the size of Baby Dumbo's or of Star TV satellite dishes, who was rising through the ranks of Siodicorp so fast he ought to have died from the bends. 'Mr Adam', I gradually discovered in the course of my late-night chats with my father--who continued to use me as a kind of 34i confessor for the many sins of his long life--was a youth with a spectacularly chequered past. It seems he was originally the illegitimate child of a Bombay hooligan and an itinerant magician from Shadipur, U.P., and had been unofficially adopted, for a time, by a Bombay man who was missing-believed-dead, having mysteriously disappeared fourteen years ago, not long after his allegedly brutal treatment by government agents during the 1974-1977 Emergency. Since then the boy had been raised in a pink skyscraper at Breach Candy by two elderly Goan Christian ladies who had grown wealthy on the success of their popular range of condiments, Braganza Pickles. He had taken the name of Braganza in the old ladies' honour, and, after they passed away, had taken over the factory itself. Soon afterwards, as smartly turned out and slick-styled at seventeen as many executives twice his age, he had come to Siodicorp in search of expansion capital, hoping to put the old ladies' legendary pickles and chutneys into the world market under the snappier brand name of Brag's. On the modernised packaging which he brought in to show Abraham's people was the slogan, Plenty to Brag about. Which could, it seemed, be said of the boy wonder himself. In what seemed like the blink of an eye he had sold the business to Abraham, who had been quick to see the huge export potential of the brand, especially in countries with substantial NRI (Non-Resident Indian) populations. Now the young Turk was independently wealthy; but in the course of his first meeting with grand old Mr Zogoiby himself, he had so impressed my father with his knowledge both of the latest business and management theories, and of the new communications and information technologies that were just starting to explode into the Indian sector, that Abraham at once invited him to join the Siodi family' at vice-presidential level, with special responsibility for technical innovation and corporate behaviour. Cashondeliveri Tower started buzzing with the boy's new notions, developed, apparently, from his study of business practises in Japan, Singapore and around the Pacific Rim, 'the global capital of Millennium Three,' as he called it. His memos quickly became legendary. 'To optimise manpower utilisation, engendering of we-feeling is key,' they typically said. Executives were therefore 'encouraged', that is, instructed, to spend at least twenty minutes a week in small groups often or twelve, embracing one another. Further 'encouragement' was given to the idea that each employee should offer monthly 'evaluations' of his fellows' strengths and weaknesses--thus turning the building into a tower of hypocritical (overtly huggy-wuggy, secretly stabby-wabby) sneaks. 'We will be a listening corporation,' Adam informed us all. 'What you say, we will carefully note.' O, those ears were listening, all right. Any poison, any nastiness that was going fell into their capacious depths. 'All large organisations are a heterogenous mix of trouble-makers, trouble-shooters and healthy people,' said an Adam memo. 'Our management expectation is that the trouble-makers will, with your help, be developed.' (Emphasis added.) Old Abraham loved this stuff. 'Modern era,' he told me. 'Therefore, modem lingo. I just love it! This wet-eared punk with the tough-guy stance. He's making the joint jump.' My own tough-guy stances had been of a different sort; possibly, in Abraham's view, an outmoded sort--and at any rate all that was over for me now. This was not the time to lay into young Adam Braganza. I kept mum; and smiled. There was a new Adam in Eden. My father invited the youth into the rooftop atrium and within months--weeks! Days!--Siodicorp was moving into computers; to say nothing of cable, fibre-optics, dishes, satellites, telecommunications of every sort; and guess who was running the new show? 'We're going to put OUT footprint on the world,' beamed Abraham, proud of knowing the word's new connotation. 'What villagers these locals are with their talk of the rule of Ram! Not Ram Rajya but RAM Rajya--that is our ace in the hole.' Not Ram but RAM: I recognised at once the young fellow's sloganising touch. Abraham was right. The future had arrived. There was a generation waiting to inherit the earth, caring nothing for old-timers' concerns: dedicated to the pursuit of the new, speaking the future's strange, binary, affectless speech--quite a cnange from our melodramatic garam-masala exclamations. No wonder Abraham, inexhaustible Abraham, turned to Adam. It was the birth of a new age in India, when money, as well as religion, was breaking all the shackles on its desires; a time for the lusty, the hungry, the greedy-for-life, not the spent and empty lost. I felt like a back number; born too fast, born wrong, damaged, and growing old too quickly, turning brutal along the route. Now my face was turned towards the past, towards the loss of love. When I looked forward, I saw Death waiting there. Death, whom Abraham continued