The Moor's Last Sigh (39 page)

supplier is dealing on the side, that will have to be taken up. But, none of your business. Just now you are under no restraint. Therefore, goodbye. Take your leave. While you can do it, go.' 'What will happen here?' 'Your brother will rot in jail. Everything will end. I also am finished. But my finish: that has not yet begun.' I took a ripe apple from a basket, and asked him my last question. 'Once, ' I said, ' Vasco Miranda told you that this was no country for us. At that time he said to you what you are now saying to me. "Macaulay's Minutemen, get out." So, then: was he right? Vamoose, go West? That's it?' 'Your documents are in order?' Abraham, his power ended, seemed to be ageing before my eyes, like an immortal forced, at last, to step outside the magic portals of Shangri-La. But yes, I nodded, my documents were in order. That much-renewed passage to Spain which was my mother's legacy to me. That window to another world. 'Then go ask him yourself,' said Abraham, smiling his despairing smile as he walked away from me into the trees. I let the apple fall and turned to go. 'Ohe, Moraes,' he called after me. Shameless, grinning, defeated. 'Bleddy stupid fool. Who do you think had those pictures stolen if not your loony Miranda? Go find them, boy. Go find your precious Palimpstine. Go see Mooristan.' And his last command, the closest he came to a declaration of affection: 'Take the bleddy pooch.' I left that celestial garden withjawaharlal under my arm. It was almost dawn. There was a red rim edging the planet, dividing us from the sky. It looked as if someone, or something, had been crying. Bombay blew apart. Here's what I've been told: three hundred kilogrammes of RDX explosive were used. Two and a half thousand kilos more were captured later, some in Bombay, others in a lorry near Bhopal. Also timers, detonators, the works. There had been nothing like it in the history of the city. Nothing so cold-blooded, so calculated, so cruel. Dhhaaiiiyn! A busload of schoolkids. Dhhaaiiiyn! The Air-India building. Dhhaaiiiyn! Trains, residences, chawls, docks, movie-studios, mills, restaurants. Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Commodity exchanges, office buildings, hospitals, the busiest shopping streets in the heart of town. Bits of bodies were lying everywhere; human and animal blood, guts, and 37i bones. Vultures so drunk on flesh that they sat lop-sidedly on rooftops, waiting for appetite to return. Who did it? Many of Abraham's enemies were hit--policemen, MA cadres, criminal rivals. Dhhaaiiiynl My father in the hour of his annihilation made a phone call, and the metropolis began to explode. But could even Abraham, with his immense resources, have stockpiled such an arsenal? How could gang warfare explain the legion of innocent dead? Hindu and Muslim areas were both attacked; men, women, children perished, and there was nobody to give the dignity of meaning to their deaths. What avenging demon bestrode the horizon, raining fire upon our heads? Was the city simply murdering itself? Abraham went to war, and let his curse fall wheresoever it could. That was some of it. It wasn't enough; it wasn't everything. I don't know everything. I'm telling you what I know. Here's what I want to know: who killed Elephanta, who murdered my home? Who blew it to bits, and 'Lambajan Chandiwala' Borkar, Miss Jaya He and Ezekiel of the magic copybooks along with the bricks and mortar? Was it dead Fielding's revenge, or freelance Hazare's, or was there some more profound movement in history, deeper down, where not even those of us who had spent so long in the Under World could see it? Bombay was central; had always been. Just as the fanatical 'Catholic Kings' had besieged Granada and awaited the Alhambra's fall, so now barbarism was standing at our gates. O Bombay! Prima in Indis! Gateway to India! Star of the East with herface to the West! Like Granada--al-Gharnatah of the Arabs--you were the glory of your time. But a darker time came upon you, andjust as Boabdil, the last Nasrid Sultan, was too weak to defend his great treasure, so we, too, were proved wanting. For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, each one of us full of our doom. Maybe Abraham Zogoiby lit the fuse, or Scar: these fanatics or those, our crazies or yours; but the explosions burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the bombs. The explosions were our own evil--no need to look for foreign explanations, though there was and is evil beyond our frontiers as well as within. We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall. And now can only weep, at the last, for what we were too enfeebled, too corrupt, too little, too contemptible to defend. - Excuse, please, the outburst. Got carried away. Old Moor will sigh no more.-- Dr Zeenat Vakil was killed in the fireball that ripped through the Zogoiby Bequest gallery on Cumballa Hill. Nor was a single picture spared; thus consigning my mother Aurora to a region close to the realm of irretrievable antiquity- to the outskirts of that hellish garden filled with the helpless shades of those--now as headless and armless as their statues--whose life-work vanished away. (I think of Cimabue, known to us by a mere handful of pieces.) The Scandal was spared. It had been on permanent loan from the Bequest to the National Museum in Delhi, and it's still there, facing Amrita Sher-Gil with confidence. A few other canvases remain. Four early Chipkali drawings; Uper the gur gur...; and the sharp, painful Mother-Naked Moor: which had all, by chance, been on loan, in India or abroad. Also, ironically, the troublesome cricket fantasy hanging on the Wadia ladies' sitting-room wall, The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig. Eight. Plus the Stedelijk picture, the Tate picture, the Gobler collection. A few 'Red Period' pictures in private ownership. (How ironic that she had destroyed most of these herself!) More surviving work than Cimabue, then; but a mere shred of the total output of that prolific woman. And the four stolen Auroras now represented a crucial segment of her surviving body of work. On the morning of the explosions, Miss Nadia Wadia personally answered her doorbell, because the servant had gone out at dawn to do the marketing and had failed to return. Standing before her were a couple of cartoons: a dwarf in khaki and a man with a metal face and hand. A scream and a giggle collided in her throat; but before she could make any kind of sound Sammy Hazare had raised a cutlass and slashed her twice across the face, in parallel lines running from top right to bottom left, expertly missing her eyes. She passed out on the doormat, and when she regained consciousness, her head was in her distraught mother's lap, her own blood was on her lips, and her unknown assailants had vanished, never to return. The mahaguru Khusro perished in the bombings; the pink skyscraper at Breach Candy, where 'Adam Zogoiby' had been raised, was also destroyed. The body of Chhaggan 'Five-in-a-Bite' was found in a Bandra gutter; huge cutlass gouges had opened up its neck. Dhabas in Dhobi Talao, cinemas showing the wide-screen remake of the old classic Gai-Wallah, the Sorryno and Pioneer cafes: all these were no more. And Sister Floreas, my one true remaining sibling, turned out to have been wrong about the future; bombs claimed the Gratiaplena nursing home and nunnery, and Minnie was among the dead. Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Not only sister, friends, paintings, and favourite haunts, but also feeling itself was blown apart. When life became so cheap, when heads were bouncing across the maidans and headless bodies were dancing in the street, how to care about any single early exit? How to care about the imminent probability of one's own? After each monstrosity came a greater; like true addicts, we seemed to need each increased dose. Catastrophe had become the city's habit, and we were all its users, its zombies, its undead. Disaffected and--to use the over-used word properly for once--shocked, I entered a remote and godlike state. The city I knew was dying. The body I inhabited, ditto. So what? Que sera sera... And lo, what was to be, came to pass. Sammy 'the Tin-man' Hazare, with little Dhirendra trotting determinedly by his side, marched into the lobby of Cashondeliveri Tower. Explosives were tied to their torsos, legs and backs. Dhirendra carried two detonators; Sammy was brandishing his sword. The building's guards saw that the heroin the bombers had taken to give them courage was weighing heavily on their eyes and making their bodies itch, and they backed away in terror. Sammy and Dhiren took the non-stop elevator to the thirty-first floor. The Chief of Security rang Abraham Zogoiby to screech warnings and make self-exculpatory remarks. Abraham interrupted curtly. 'Evacuate the building.' These are his last known words. Tower workers started spilling madly into the street. Sixty seconds later, however, the great atrium at the top of Cashondeliveri Tower burst like a firework in the sky and a rain of glass knives began to fall, stabbing the running workers through the neck the back the thigh, spearing their dreams, their loves, their hope. And after the glass knives, further monsoon rains. Many workers had been trapped in the tower by the blast. Lifts were inoperative, stairwells had collapsed, there were fires and clouds of ravenous black smoke. There were those who despaired, who exploded from the windows and tumbled to their deaths. Finally, Abraham's garden rained down like a benediction. Imported soil, English lawn-grass and foreign flowers--crocuses, daffodils, roses, hollyhocks, forget-me-nots--fell towards the Backbay Reclamation; also alien fruits. Whole trees rose gracefully into the heavens before floating down to earth, like giant spores. The feathers of un-Indian birds went on drifting through the air for days. Peppercorns, whole cumin, cinnamon sticks, cardamoms mingled with the imported flora and birdlife, dancing rat-a-tat on the roads and sidewalks like perfumed hail. Abraham had always kept sacks of Cochin spices close at hand. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would open their necks, and plunge his nostalgic arms into their odorous depths. Fenugreek and nigella, coriander seeds and asafoetida fell upon Bombay; but black pepper most of all, the Black Gold of Malabar, upon which, an eternity and a day ago, a young duty manager and a fifteen-year-old girl had fallen in pepper love. To form a class, Macaulay wrote in the 1835 Minute on Education,... of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. And why, pray? O, to be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern. How grateful such a class of persons should, and must, be! For in India the dialects were poor and rude, and a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature. History, science, medicine, astronomy, geography, religion were likewise derided. Would disgrace an English farrier... would move laughter in girls at an English boarding-school. Thus, a class of'Macaulay's Minutemen' would hate the best of India. Vasco was wrong. We were not, had never been, that class. The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they fought in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed; but still we could say--and say truthfully--that we had loved the best. As my aeroplane banked over the city I could see columns of smoke rising. There was nothing holding me to Bombay any more. It was no longer my Bombay, no longer special, no longer the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy. Something had ended (the world?) and what remained, I didn't know. I found myself looking forward to Spain--to Elsewhere. I was going to the place whence we had been cast out, centuries ago. Might it not turn out to be my lost home, my resting-place, my promised land? Might it not be my Jerusalem? 'Eh, Jawaharlal?' But the stuffed mutt on my lap had nothing to say. I was wrong about one thing, however: the end of a world is not the end of the world. My ex-fiancee, Nadia Wadia, appeared on television a few days after the attacks, when the scars across her face were still livid, the permanence of the disfiguration all too evident. And yet her beauty was so touching, her courage so evident, that in a way she looked even lovelier than before. A news interviewer was trying to ask her about her ordeal; but, in an extraordinary moment, she turned away from him, and spoke directly into the camera, and every viewer's heart. 'So I asked myself, Nadia Wadia, is it the end for you? Is it curtains? And for some time I thought, achha, yes, it's all over, khalaas. But then I was asking myself, Nadia Wadia, what you talking, men? At twenty-three to say that whole of life is funtoosh? What pagalpan, what nonsense, Nadia Wadia! Girl, get a grip, OK? The city will survive. New towers will rise. Better days will come. Now I am saying it every day. Nadia Wadia, the future beckons. Hearken to its call.'

IV

'THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH'

I WENT TO BENENGELI because I had been told by my father that Vasco Miranda, a man I had not seen for fourteen years--or twenty-eight, according to my personal, quick-time calendar--was holding my dead mother prisoner there; or if not my mother, then the best part of what remained of her. I suppose I was hoping to reclaim these stolen goods, and, by so doing, to heal something in myself before I reached my own conclusion. I had never been up in a plane before, and the experience of passing through clouds -1 had left Bombay on a rare cloudy day--was so spookily like the images of the After Life in movies, paintings and story-books that I got the shivers. Was I travelling to the country of the dead? I half-expected to see a pair of pearly gates standing on the fluffy fields of cumulus outside my window, and a man holding a double-entry account-book of rights and wrongs. Sleep rolled over me, and in my first-ever high-altitude dreams I learned that I had indeed already left the land of the living. Perhaps I had died in the bombings like so many of the people and places I cared about. When I awoke, this sensation of having passed through a veil lingered on. A friendly young woman was offering me food and drink. I accepted both. The little bottle of red Rioja wine was delicious, but too small. I asked for more. 'I feel as if I have slipped in time,' I told the friendly stewardess some while later. 'But whether into the future or the past, I cannot say.' 'Many passengers feel that way,' she reassured me. 'I tell them, it is neither. The past and future are where we spend most of our lives. In fact, what you are going through in this small micro-cosmos of ours is the disorienting feeling of having slipped for a few hours into the present.' Her name was Eduvigis Refugio and she was a psychology major from the Complutense University of Madrid. A certain footloose quality of soul had led her to set aside her education and take up this peripatetic life, she confided freely, sitting down for a few minutes in the empty seat beside me, and takingjawaharlal on to her own lap. 'Shanghai! Montevideo! Alice Springs! Do you know that places only yield up their secrets, their most profound mysteries, to those who are just passing through? Just as it is possible to confide in a total stranger encountered in a bus station--or aboard an aeroplane--such intimacies as would make you blush if you even hinted at them to those you live amongst. What a sweet stuffed dog, by the way! I myself have a collection of small stuffed birds; and, from the South Seas, a genuine shrunken head. But the real reason why I travel,' and here she leaned in close, 'is the pleasure I take from promiscuity, and in a Catholic country like Spain it isn't easy to have my fill.' Even then--such was my internal, in-flight turbulence -1 did not understand that she was offering me her body. She had to spell it out. 'On this flight we help each other,' she said. 'My colleagues will keep watch and make sure we are not disturbed.' She led me to a small toilet cubicle and we had sex very briefly: she reached her orgasm with a few swift movements while I was unable to do so at all, especially as she appeared to lose all interest in me the instant her own needs had been satisfied. I accepted the situation passively--for passivity had me in its grip--and we both rearranged our clothing and briskly went our separate ways. Some time later I felt a great urge to talk to her some more, if only to fix her face and voice in my memory, from which they were already fading, but a different woman appeared in response to the little light I illuminated by pushing a button bearing a schematic representation of a human being. 'I wanted Eduvigis,' I explained, and the new young woman frowned. 'I beg your pardon? Did you say "Rioja"?' Sound is altered in an aeroplane, and perhaps I had slurred my words, so I repeated quite distinctly, 'Eduvigis Refugio, the psychologist.' 'You must have been dreaming, sir,' said the young woman with a peculiar smile. 'There is no stewardess by that name aboard this flight.' When I insisted that there was, and possibly raised my voice, a man with gold hoops round the cuffs of his blazer came up quickly. 'Be quiet and sit still,' he ordered me roughly, pushing at my shoulder. 'At your age, grand-dad, and with your deformity! You should be ashamed to make such propositions to decent girls. You Indian men all think our European women are whores.' I was aghast; but now that I looked at the second young woman, I saw that she was dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. 'I am sorry to have caused such distress,' I apologised. 'Let me state here and now that I unequivocally withdraw all my requests.' 'That's better,' nodded the man in the hooped blazer. 'Since you have seen the error of your ways, we'll say no more about it.' And he went off with the second woman, who had begun to look quite cheerful; indeed, as they disappeared down the aisle, they seemed to be having quite a giggle together, and I had the impression that they must be having a laugh at my expense. I could find no explanation for what had happened, and so fell back into a deep and, this time, dreamless sleep. I never saw Eduvigis Refugio again. I allowed myself to imagine that she was a sort of phantom of the air, called forth by my own desires. No doubt such houris did float up here, above the clouds. They could pass through the aircraft's walls whenever they chose. You will see that I had entered an unfamiliar state of mind. The place, language, people and customs I knew had all been removed from me by the simple act ofboarding this flying vehicle; and these, for most of us, are the four anchors of the soul. If one adds on the effects, some of them delayed, of the horrors of the last days, then perhaps it is possible to see why I felt as if all the roots of my self had been torn up like those of the flying trees from Abraham's atrium. The new world I was entering had given me an enigmatic warning, a shot across my bows. I must remember that I knew nothing, understood nothing. I was alone in a mystery. But at least there was a quest; I must cling to that. That was my direction, and by pursuing it as energetically as I could, I might come in time to comprehend this surreal foreignness whose meanings I could not begin, as yet, to decode. I changed planes at Madrid, and was relieved to have left that strange crew behind. On the much smaller plane south I kept myself very much to myself, hugging Jawaharlal and answering all offers of food and wine with a curt, negative shake of the head. By the time I arrived in Andalusia the memory of my transcontinental flight was fading. I could no longer call to mind the faces or voices of the three attendants who had, I was now convinced, conspired to play a practical joke on me, no doubt selecting me because it was my maiden flight, a fact I may have revealed to Eduvigis Refugio -yes, indeed, now that I thought about it, I was sure I had. Apparently air travel was not nearly as enlivening as Eduvigis had suggested; those who were condemned to interminable, altered hours in the sky had to lend a little cheer to their lives, a little erotic thrill, by playing games with virgins such as I. Well, good luck to them! They had taught me a lesson about keeping my feet on the ground, and, after all, given my decrepit condition, any offer of sex rated as a positively charitable act. I emerged from the second plane into brilliant sunlight and intense heat--not the 'rotten heat', heavy and humid, of my home town, but a bracing, dry heat that was much easier on my ruined, rackety lungs. I saw mimosa trees in bloom, and hills dotted with olive groves. The feeling of strangeness had not left me, however. It was as if I hadn't quite arrived, or not all of me, or perhaps the place I'd landed in wasn't exactly the right place--almost, but not quite. I felt dizzy, deaf, old. Dogs barked in the distance. My head ached. I was wearing a big leather coat and sweating hard. I should have drunk some water on the flight. 'A vacation?' a man in uniform asked me when it was my turn. 'Yes.' 'What will you see? While you are here you must see our great sights.' 'I hope to see some pictures by my mother.' 'That is a surprising hope. Do you not have many pictures of your mother in your own country?' 'Not "of "."By".' 'I do not understand. Where is your mother? Is she here? In this place, or in another place? Are you visiting relatives?' 'She is dead. We were estranged and now she is dead.' The death of a mother is a terrible thing. Terrible. And now you hope to find her in a foreign land. It is unusual. Maybe you will not have time for tourism.' 'No, maybe not.' 'You must make time. You must see our great sights. Definitely! It is necessary. You comprehend?' 'Yes. I comprehend.' 'What is the dog? Why is the dog?' 'It is the former Prime Minister of India, metamorphosed into canine form.' 'Never mind.' I spoke no Spanish, so I was unable to haggle with the taxi-drivers. 'Benengeli,' I said, and the first cabbie shook his head and walked away, spitting copiously. The second named a number that had no meaning for me. I had come to a place where I did not know the names of things or the motives for men's deeds. The universe was absurd. I could not say 'dog', or 'where?', or 'I am a man'. Besides, my head was thick, like a soup. 'Benengeli,' I repeated, throwing my bag into the back of the third cab, and followed it in with Jawaharlal under my arm. The driver grinned a great golden-toothed smile. Those of his teeth that were not made of gold had been filed into menacing triangular shapes. But he seemed a pleasant enough sort. He pointed at himself. 'Vivar.' He pointed towards the mountains. 'Benengeli.' He pointed at his car. 'Okay, pardner. Less mak' track.' We were both citizens of the world, I realised. Our common language was the broken argot of dreadful American films. The village of Benengeli lies in the Alpujarras, a spur of the Sierra Morena which separates Andalusia from La Mancha. As we climbed up into those hills I saw many dogs criss-crossing the road. Afterwards I learned that foreigners would settle here for a while, with their families and pets, and then, in their fickle, rootless fashion, depart, abandoning their dogs to their fates. The region was full of starving, disappointed Andalusian dogs. When I heard this I started pointing them out to Jawaharlal. Think yourself lucky,' I would say. There, but for the grace.' We entered the small town of Avellaneda, famous for its three-hundred-year-old bull-ring, and Vivar the driver accelerated. 'Town of thieves,' he explained. 'Bad medicine.' The next settlement was Erasmo, a village smaller than Avellaneda, but substantial enough to boast a sizeable school building over whose doorway were inscribed the words Lectura--locura. I asked the driver if he could translate, and after some hesitations he found the words. 'Reading, kctura. Lectura, reading,' he said proudly. 'And locura?' 'Is madness, pardner.' A woman in black, swathed in a rebozo, peered at us suspiciously as we bumped along Erasmo's cobbled streets. Some sort of passionate meeting was taking place under a spreading tree in a square. Slogans and banners were everywhere. I copied several of them down. I had supposed them to be political utterances, but they turned out to be far more unusual. 'Men are so necessarily mad that it would be crazy, through a further twist of madness, not to be mad oneself,' said one banner. Another pronounced: 'Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be certain of any truth.' And a third, more pithily: 'All is possible.' It seemed that a philosophy class from a nearby university had conceived the notion of meeting in this village, because of its name, to discuss the radical, sceptical notions of Blaise Pascal, the old folly-praiser Erasmus himself, and Marsilio Ficino, among others. The frenzy and ardour of the philosophers was so great that it gathered crowds. The villagers of Erasmo enjoyed taking sides in the great debates.--Yes, the world was what the case was!--No, it wasn't!--Yes, the cow was in the field when one did not regard it!--No, somebody could easily have left open the gate!--Item, personality was homogeneous and men were to be held responsible for their acts!--Quite the reverse: we were such contradictory entities that the concept of personality itself ceased, under close scrutiny, to have meaning!--God existed!--God was dead!--One might, indeed one was obliged to, speak confidently of the eternal-ness of eternal verities: of the absolute-ness of absolutes!--Good grief, but that was the purest drivel; relatively speaking, of course!--And in the matter of how a gentleman should arrange himself within his undergarments, all leading authorities have concluded that he must dress to the left.--Ridiculous! It is well known that, for the true philosopher, only the right will do.--The big end of the egg is best!--Absurd, sirrah! The little end, always!--'Up!' I say.--But it is clear, my dear sir, that the only accurate statement is 'Down.'--Well, then, 'In.'--'Out!'--'Out!'--'In!'... 'Some kinda funny folks in thees ol' burg,' opined Vivar, as we left town. According to my map Benengeli was the next village; but when we left Erasmo the road started heading down the hill instead of up and along. I gathered from Vivar that ever since the Franco period, when Erasmo had been for the republic and Benengeli for the Falange, an undimmed hatred had stood between the inhabitants of Erasmo and those of Benengeli, a hatred so deep that they had refused to permit a road to be built between the two villages. (When Franco died the people of Erasmo had held a party, but Benengeli's folk had been plunged into deep mourning, except for the large community of'parasites' or expatriates, who didn't even know what had happened until they started receiving worried phone calls from friends abroad.) So we had to drive a long way down Erasmo's hill and a long way up the next one. At the place where the road from Erasmo met the much grander, four-lane highway to Benengeli there stood a large, gracious property ringed by pomegranate trees and jasmine in bloom. Hummingbirds hung in the gateway. In the distance you could hear the pleasing thwock of tennis balls. The sign over the arched gateway read Pancho Vialactada Campo de Tern's. 'That Pancho, huh,' said Vivar, jerking his thumb. 'One major hombre.' Vialactada, a Mexican by birth, was one of the greats from the pre-open era, playing with Hoad and Rosewall and Gonzalez on the pro circuit, and barred, therefore, from the Grand Slam events which he would surely have dominated. He had been a sort of glorious phantom, hovering at the edges of the limelight while lesser men held the great trophies aloft. He had died of stomach cancer several years ago. So this is where he